Re: Restored

Well, at least we agree on something. Unfortunately for your dismissal of D'Souza's book, many of the "anecdotes" in <i>Illiberal Education</i> would have constituted gross libel, had they been untrue.

Your assertion here deserves a response:
"And what I objected to in your comment about Alice's course is that she used chaos "designed to obfuscate." You then describe what she was doing as "allowing truths to emerge simply through power struggles." I'm not sure exactly what this means. It sounds like more of D'Souza's vagaries. But I do know this much, Luke:
You can't accuse someone of obfuscation one moment and then accuse her of "allowing truths to emerge" the next.
Why, you might ask? Well, because "obfuscation" means to deliberately confuse or bewilder. That would be the opposite of "allowing truths to emerge."

The imposition of internal truths is obfuscation, through "rhetoric," "persuasive force," etc. To "allow truths to emerge through power struggles" is to capitulate to the internality, to "deliberately confuse or bewilder" students in search of something absolute.

No one is accusing any<i>one</i> of obfuscation (modernists ought to delight in that construction; perhaps the obsession over internality is what makes this discussion of Jardine's class so inappropriately personal, and makes you interpret as an "accusation" my simple observation that her class, which contained no discussion of passages or meaning but looked for "signifiers," was chaotic according to D'Souza's description of it).

I have not met Professor Jardine, nor read her work. Perhaps she is a delightful person and brilliant scholar. But I do observse that the modernist textual analysis employed in her class at Harvard on November 22, 1989, presupposed an empowered critic in the analysis of a text, at the expense of objectivity from the text itself. Such is obfuscation.

John, you cannot accuse someone of incoherence for failure to arrange words in the way you want them to, and then turn around and denounce a Rorty quote that points out the sovereignty of language in effective communication as "irrelevant."

You cannot accuse someone of inaccurate interpretation of Derrida, when he addresses your own alternative interpretation (of the first one; you provided no refutation for the latter two) and you do not respond, and when you provide no alternative citations to affirm that Derrida embraces absolutes. I've argued that he doesn't even work in an absolute context, that he lets the critic be empowered, which justifies a lot of the b.s. that peppers his work, when launching into examinations of words like "enforcement," and the b.s. that peppers your responses, when launching into analysis of "and" constructions.

"And you have yet to show me even a single moment anywhere in Derrida where he actually rejects any of this. And you won't."

<u>I have pointed out three citations of Derrida where I argue that the sovereignty of internally imposed truth is affirmed or the incontrovertible meaning of language is denied. For the third time in this discussion, it is my <i>own</i> interpretation of the consequences of Derrida's scholarship that to affirm such sovereignty is a rejection of absolutes. I will not specify this a fourth time.</u>

Although I disagree with some of the stuff in <i>Illiberal Education</i>, D'Souza elucidates a bold and clear hypothesis. Derrida tries to obfuscate an external meaning in every sentence I have ever read in his work. The difference in the caliber of their "scholarship" that you try to introduce as an argument is a matter of interpretation. And it is my own subjective interpretation that <i>Illiberal Education</i> says something significant, whereas <i>Writing and Difference</i>, for example, is full of b.s.

luke

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