Re: Restored

Luke, you write:

"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)."

So it wasn't talking about Jardine, it was talking about a class she taught?
Uh, OK.

In any case, my point was that it wasn't talking about Derrida's actual
writing or any specific text by him and therefore wasn't relevant to the point you
were making about his discussions of order, coherence, structure, etc. In
fact, there was no real point in citing it within a discussion of Derrida at all.
 It was, in short, irrelevant.

(And, incidentally, why is chaos necessarily inconsistent with truth anyway?)

You then cite a passage from "Force of Law" which actually makes my point for
me.

It is a matter, says Derrida of the relation *between*... between force and
signification... of persuasive force *and* of rhetoric... of *affirmation*
of signature.

Please notice the relationships being described here. Show me where in this
passage Derrida is rejecting anything, any absolute. You can't, because he's
not. He's speaking in quite the opposite terms in fact, inclusive terms and
affirmative terms. And he is saying, as I said originally, that the imposition
of order comes *both* from internal force *and* external forces -- both/and
-- between one and the other. As I said, there is no simple rejection here and
no exclusion of one at the expense of the other. And he is always very
insistent upon that in all of his work. Repeatedly, always in fact, he argues
*against* mere reversals. Even his introductory interviews in *Positions* make
this point, and do so several times. Surely, you have read those, or at least
seen this in his work. It's everywhere.

You then talk about Daniel's "juxtaposition of ideas" and say, without a
touch of irony:

"(Derrida likes the juxtaposition of words and signifiers; it's not that much
of a leap, really)"

It's a huge leap! It's a tremendous leap! It's a leap over the Grand
Canyon! Derrida is discussing very specific texts in linguistics and making very
specific points regarding the relationship between signifiers and signifieds,
and demonstrating those points as he goes, reading closely and citing along the
way. Daniel is rambling incoherently and without any recognizable grammar.
There can be no serious comparison.

And citing Rorty in this discussion is another irrelevancy, since his take on
this subject is completely different from either mine or Derrida's. Rorty is
simply a pragmatist, and I think he is wrong about a great many things, but
that's an entirely different discussion and not relevant to the one we were
having here.

I still have not seen you offer a single moment when Derrida is rejecting
absolutes or doing any of the other simplistic things you originally mentioned,
including arguing in favor of exclusively internal anything (that would be
Romanticism or pure psychologism in any case, and Derrida would stand and has
constantly stood against such a single-minded epistemology and such a narrow
reading).

You might want to read a bit more of Derrida's work, Luke, before you go
caricaturing him.

All the best,

--John

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Received on Tue Jul 15 21:57:42 2003