Re: Restored

The relevant passage in D'Souza wasn't talking about Jardine or her work at all. It was recounting an experience in a class she taught, in which modernist criticism of a text was used in lecture. It is my own argument that the class was "chaotic" and inconsistent with Harvard's motto (albeit an argument that D'Souza really, really wants his reader to get from his description).

Derrida emphasizes internal imposition, here the "differential character of force:"
"[I]t is always a matter of the relation between force and form, between force and signification, of 'performative' force, illocutionary or perlocutionary force, of persuasive force and of rhetoric, of affirmation of signature.... And that is the whole story, the whole of history" ("Force of Law" in <i>Acts of Religion</i>, page 235 in the Routledge 2002 hardback edition).
If you're to argue that Derrida also calls for external imposition here, then it would have to be "external" in the sense of a force that is the product of an outside power struggle, i.e. "rhetoric" and "persuasive force." But "rhetoric" is external only to those whom it attempts to persuade; it is internal to the speaker himself. And what does rhetoric seek to accomplish, but to impose one's own internal truths? Rhetoric may be truthful at times, but it doesn't have to be; it's rooted in persuasion that something is true, rather than an actuality that something is true.

You object to the style of Daniel's posts, which I find quite effective, but you're downplaying the importance of the juxtaposition of ideas (Derrida likes the juxtaposition of words and signifiers; it's not that much of a leap, really), the attempt to summon some knowledge of Truth in the reader that transcends language... in an obsession over the words themselves. Okay, I'd expect you to argue that such a feeling doesn't exist, or can be expressed in language that Daniel's simply not putting to use. From Rorty's <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>: "[A]ttempts to get back behind language to something that 'grounds' it, or that it 'expresses,' or to which it might hope or be 'adequate,' have not worked."
Good thing we have an Omlor in the closet, to make sure that such attempts never will.

luke

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