Re: Restored

Daniel --

Are you really saying that because both literary critics and
philosophers use language, they're both doing the same work? By that
argument literary critics, philosophers, poets, novelists, political
speech writers, teachers, and you right now in this e-mail are all doing
the same work.

In nothing that I've read have I seen Derrida apply his theories to
"literature" in the sense of "prose or poetic fiction." I'm not saying
he's never done it, but I've never read it.

In everything I've read by Derrida, I've seen him apply his theories to
philosophers like Plato, Nietzche, Hegel, Saussere, Rousseau, Heidegger,
etc.

Since you've read him yourself, feel free to point out specific exceptions.

That's why I call him a philosopher and not a literary critic. People
often make this mistake because a caricature of his ideas were imposed
upon literature by many literary critics back in the 80s (but not so
much these days).

While Derrida may or may not blur lines, I don't see how that's a
relevant response to me, because I don't buy into all or even most of
what he argues for. I don't call people who blur lines "geniuses," but
suspect that 99% of them are idiots and perhaps the remainder have
something to say. What other people do is irrelevant to a response to
my ideas.

Jim

Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:

> 3. His writing attempts to demonstrate the principles of his
> philosophy (we all know he's a philosopher, right, and not a literary
> critic?), so employs word play (which is really only intelligible in
> French) and other devices to actively demonstrate the seams in
> language rather than just describe them.
> Jim
>
> Jim, how do you tell the difference between a literary critic and a
> philosopher in this day in age? We still haven't settled poetry and
> prose and now you throw this out. I am joking seriously. The modern
> philosopher is reduced to language and as far as I know so is the
> Literary critic. I thought that was a Derrida thing, blurring the
> lines, maybe not him directly but he did apply his technique to
> literature and he said some philosophical things about it but most
> Literary Critic do that. So? You point out the lines that the crayon
> marks must stay in, but if someone labels them self a Philosopher and
> ignores the lines they are heralded as geniuses. Do some people
> scribble more coherently than others?
> Daniel
>

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Received on Thu Jul 17 11:22:15 2003