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