Re: babies in the bathwater

Luke, you really need to get a grip on the background to all this.

Derrida's introduction to the US happened at a Johns Hopkins University
conference where Derrida read the paper, "Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences." It essentially undermined the
structuralist assumptions around which the conferece was organized,
causing the name "post-structuralist" to be assigned to Derrida.

 From there his books started being increasingly read by US academics,
and ideas within his books were actually developed into something like a
packaged method employed by US literary critics. Derrida himself, so far
as I can tell, had nothing to do with this development. This was very
popular in the 1980s. Derrida does use the word "deconstruction" in his
writing, but his use of the phrase has nothing whatsoever, or very very
little, to do with the method of literary interpretation employed by US
academics in the 1980s.

In your past posts you seemed to identify Derrida with this method (as
did Daniel in an earlier post), and that's simply, factually, incorrect.
Derrida himself complained about the method (as John pointed out),
dissociated himself from it, and so far as I can tell doesn't really do
literary criticism in his major, influential works. He writes about
authors like Saussere, Hegel, Nietzche, Rousseau, Plato, and others who
aren't writing fiction (which is usually the object of literary
criticism) but philosophy.

Now, of course you have a right to your opinion about the content of
Derrida's writing to the extent that you've read it for yourself, but as
it is you'd be taken a lot more seriously if you'd post quotations and
demonstrate to us how they're really hot air devoid of content. As it
is, you just sound like you're making pronoucements without any support.

Jim

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Received on Thu Aug 14 10:22:28 2003