Re: Before the Law

Jim said to John G.:
<< I don't think anyone's retreading the Derrida ground because it's already
been done. Maybe check the archives? >>

Has it already been done? There is a lot of ground, no doubt, that simply
"discussing Derrida" could cover, but the question that has come up here
again and again, sometimes with venom and sometimes with sincerity and
nothing but the best intentions, is: "What is deconstruction, anyway?" That
question, as best as I can tell, has not yet been answered in anything like
the way the curious had surely hoped. Usually the asker gets a list of
thick and difficult books. Other times one will get the suggestion to check
the archives.

The closest thing _I_ could find in the archives was what I believe John O.
was referring to when he said he wrote a page or so on the matter years ago
(in December of 1998, I believe). I hope John O. will forgive me for saying
what I take to be a virtual truism, that the page of his -- however
insightful to the initiated -- does not approach an answer to the curious
folks who have repeatedly put forth the question.

What John O. wrote on the matter can be found here:
http://www.roughdraft.org/JDS/JDS.ocon.dec98/0134.html
And as sarcastic or nasty as you take Scottie's response to be, I do think
it gives an accurate impression of how much sense those paragraphs make to
most readers who just don't know about this stuff and want a simple
explanation or introduction. This response is here (it received Jim's Laugh
of the Day Award, or whatever it was called):
http://www.roughdraft.org/JDS/JDS.ocon.dec98/0135.html

Dictionary.com gives two definitions:

1- A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions
traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that
words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how
statements about any text subvert their own meanings: "In deconstruction,
the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but
only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, 'virtual texts'
constructed by readers in their search for meaning" (Rebecca Goldstein).

2- A philosophical theory of criticism (usually of literature or film) that
seeks to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its
surface meaning.

I would be quite unsurprised to find that John O. and yourself disagree with
one or both of these definitions. I expect that many people on this list,
and many very intelligent people elsewhere, would take great issue with
deconstruction if these definitions are at all accurate. If they aren't
accurate, I would expect there to be a similarly simple definition that,
however simplified, gets something of the gist of it. Nobody expects very
complex and subtle ideas to be easily and satisfactorily summed up in a
brief sentence, of course, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to expect
that some such sentence could be formulated that would suffice along with
the warning that it's simplified and for that reason only marginally
satisfactory.

It might be true, as John O. suggests, that John G. (and probably very many
others on the list) wouldn't know an honest-to-gosh deconstruction of a text
if it were presented. But shouldn't this be VERY easy to fix?

I don't think there's anything else in the world -- no idea whatsoever,
however complicated or subtle or obscure or esoteric -- for which one who
knows it well enough cannot formulate such an explanatory sentence, with the
applicable warning. Even the most arcane propositions in the most
specialized fields can be put, however far short of comprehensive, in
layman's terms. That's the sort of thing that several people have asked for
here, and I don't think it can be found in the archives, either.

-robbie
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Received on Fri Mar 7 03:25:11 2003