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3976575 No.3976575 [Reply] [Original]

Is Derrida's work really revolutionary and was he really a GOAT philosopher or is this just some sort of meme/trolling ?

>> No.3976581

>>3976575
goat of course

>> No.3976584

All i know is that he is pretty much critical theory embodied into one person

>> No.3976586

Neither. Just read him and see what he says, faggot.

>> No.3976592

>>3976586
I kinda want to but I'm not sure if I can read and understand him without properly reading some philosophy before..

>> No.3976633

>>3976584
Do you even know what critical theory is?

>> No.3976636

>>3976575
When everything will end people will remember him as a giant of philosophy.

>> No.3976724

Clever but not genius. Complicated but not complex.

He stole everything from Borges, who himself was well-read in Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. That's real genius. Derrida is/was just a fashionable trend.

>> No.3976734

>>3976724
He is not on the level of Heidegger and Wittgenstein but he is above Kierkegaard.

His range is vaster, his ideas richer, his mind is volcanic till the very end.

>> No.3976736

I'm too stupid for Derrida. I could read his work a million times and never understand what I'm reading. Not even synopses of his work make sense to me. Professors help though.

>> No.3976749

>>3976736
Let me ask you a sincere question:

when you don't understand derrida is it:
1) The syntax he uses?

2) A lack of background in what he is referencing.

3) The fact that you have not thought yet the problems he is talking about/

Or something else?

>> No.3976753

>>3976736
i found the writeup on the stanford internet encyclopedia of philosophy helpful. have you read that?

>> No.3976756

>>3976749
Yeah it's pretty much the way he writes. I know that he is making points in his work, he just makes it fucking impossible to get there.

>inb4 hurr intentional

Not worth the head ache imo

>> No.3976760

>>3976734
You're kidding, right?

>> No.3976761

>>3976734

>Derrida
>above Kierkegaard

You've postured yourself into mediocrity. Bravo.

>> No.3976793

>>3976736
Language is a lossy format. It's not FLAC.

Every time you communicate something with someone using language meaning is lost, even if it's only 0.01% of the intended meaning.

Every time you convert your thought to a spoken word to a written word, meaning is lost, even if it's 0.01%.

Basically, if we follow this argument, Derrida argues that there is no division between speech and writing and you do not understand or know 100% your own thoughts.

They are all subject to language, which is a lossy format. There's no real conversion from thought, speech, to language, because we can't really tell where was the origin. It's all a chaotic, deteriorating system without a center.

I tried/10

>> No.3976796

>>3976793
Human ear can't detect the lost frequency that occurs when converting from FLAC to lossy

>> No.3976801

>>3976793
>There's no real conversion from thought, speech, to language, because we can't really tell where was the origin. It's all a chaotic, deteriorating system without a center.
You lost me here. How did you get to losing a small section of meaning to no origin, chaos and stuff?

>> No.3976814

>>3976575
what does GOAT mean?

>> No.3976816

>>3976814
what does GOOGLE mean?

>> No.3976817

>>3976796
Well, there you go.

>>3976801
You could say there's no transcendental signifier. But to explain it a little more simply...maybe...

How can you divide your thoughts from language? Derrida thinks there aren't any real thoughts pre-language.

We can't really say if our thoughts originate pre-language, or whether our meaning comes out more when we speak rather than when we write, because at the end of the day, this is all getting filtered through your head which is thinking in words.

And words only refer to other words. They don't point to some thing in itself. The word "tree" doesn't point to the platonic form of tree, but to all the words that don't mean tree, and all those words refer to other words, etc etc

We get to a point where we can't kid ourselves and say we've ever found a center, we've ever found the word that signifies its pure form, we've ever written something down as we perfectly intended, or we've ever completely understood our own thoughts.

The only thing we can work with is a system of language which is always shifting. You can think of this as there is no meaning, or there is too much meaning to be contained.

It's jewish gnosticism, imo.

>> No.3976818

>>3976816
"The domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus) is a subspecies of goat domesticated from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe."

Really?

>> No.3976820

>>3976801
Not that guy.

Because language is a thousands of year old compendium of metaphors.

For example when we talk in philosophy "What is virtue?" well we may ask "What is virtue for us, now that we are talking" or "What is virtue for the society we live in" but then we quickly realize that we have received our ideas from a tradition of moral philosophy.

A tradition of moral philosophy that goes all the way back to Aristotle, and our word virtue comes from the latin virtus that was used to translate the ancient greek arete.

And arete is a concept that we can trace back to the poetic works of Homer which are the transcription of a lost oral text.

So what we find is that our ideas are influenced by a long tradition at which base are contradictory texts and some of which are absent.

>> No.3976821

>>3976818
How stupid are you?

https://www.google.com/search?q=goat+slang

>> No.3976832

>>3976793
Best summary I've ever read actually.

>> No.3976836

>>3976760
Nah. For how much I love Kierkegaard I'm tired of his over-estimation.

He is a Schleiermacher who could write coupled with an amazing wit. But he has few ideas and he just keeps pounding them over and over.

>> No.3976839

>>3976817
>How can you divide your thoughts from language? Derrida thinks there aren't any real thoughts pre-language

That's not the D. That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

D challenges the notion that speech anteceded writing as a form of stored speech. Speech is already writing by the time it's first used. This notion is supported by the use of "crutch phrases" or familiar rhyme patterns in freestyle rap.

>> No.3976840

>>3976817
>Derrida thinks there aren't any real thoughts pre-language.
So how did people think before language? And what about the deaf, who are a lot slower to pick a language? Do they not think for a longer while or what?

Otherwise, makes sense what you say, and it sounds interesting. Like part of the input will never get through the output phase

>> No.3976859

>>3976840
You can build your own language intrinsically, but to interact you have to use a common language.
That doesn't mean you think in a common language.

You can remember images, and that isn't on your native language. Thinking is abstract, but we don't have to speak english or whatsoever to think.

>> No.3976861

>>3976633
no, he doesn't

>> No.3976863

>>3976793
>Language is a lossy format. It's not FLAC.

I like how certain strands of postmodern 'philosophy' seem to think it is a good idea to drive home the point that there is no such thing as meaning-in-itself or a direct, neutral access to the text, by making their own texts borderline-meaningless. Of course, that's like arguing that pie is a shitty dish by serving someone a feces-filled crust.

>> No.3976869

>>3976836
>But he has few ideas and he just keeps pounding them over and over.

I'd argue Derrida does the exact same. He takes the Christian Kierkegaard and goes Jewish Gnostic.

>>3976839
Yeah, I see your point. But I think Derrida would definitely argue that there is no thought pre-writing (which, for him, is speech and thought). You can't think outside of the system of language, according to Derrida.

>>3976840
Yeah, I don't agree with it, but he might say that there's a system that's a lot like language that the person uses.

>>3976863
Derrida is really clever in this way. Anytime someone says "hey, Jackie, that's bullshit" he can say "haha, you just didn't understand me!" This logic apparently pissed off Foucault, because it always absolves Derrida of ever being wrong. And any time someone "misreads" Derrida, it therefore becomes proof that deconstruction is right "see, we can never fully understand each other!"

>> No.3976871

>>3976817
>The word "tree" doesn't point to the platonic form of tree
but it does.
"look, son, that's a tree"
no info lost

>> No.3976878

The worst part about Derrida is that he keeps using Saussurean terms which are obviously fucked. Différance only makes sense with respect to the Saussurean conception of language, which is quixotic and incoherent. It's a little bit funny how différance is the result of Derrida's insight that the way meaning (called 'value', not 'signification') is distributed through negative relation between the signs does not make sense, but instead of concluding that this conception of the sign is wrong, he exacerbates the problem. The original flaw is that if each sign gets its meaning from all the others, none of the signs mean anything. But instead of opening the system to the outside, Derrida merely has this lack of meaning circulate through the body of signs, as if that circulation could somehow stand in for a reference to something outside language (this is what is fundamentally missing in Saussure, a referential function).

>> No.3976883

>>3976878
>this is what is fundamentally missing in Saussure, a referential function).

Someone hasn't read their Saussure.

>> No.3976888

>>3976840
There is a difference between conscience and thought.
Thought comes from the greek logos, which means word, and is conceptual thought.
And there is no conceptual thought without a language (not necessarily natural).

Take for example Truth. Truth is always a property of sentences, it has language as its necessary condition. Truth for example ca be thought as the word being adequate to the thing.

Now think if someone would ask "so there is no truth for people who don't speak?" The answer would be 'yes and no".

>> No.3976892

>>3976883
Not really, no. You could also say that the problem lies in identifying Saussure's 'value' with meaning (and this happens in introductory courses to linguistics, which for practical purposes is what 'Saussure' is, not some theoretical body of 'what he really meant' but the version that is operational on the largest stage).

>> No.3976894

>>3976871

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscrutability_of_reference

tl;dr the hole pointing out and saying "that's a tree there" requires already a pre-existing structure.

>> No.3976904

Derrida's différance is a Ptolemization of Saussure's conception of language. Since Saussure argued that language can be studied as a self-enclosed system in which each sign gets its meaning from its negative relation to (difference from) all the other signs (defined by what it is not), Derrida observed that meaning cannot be fixed at any point, because for each sign you are deferred to the other signs, and from each of those onwards, and so on. Now Derrida takes this to mean that meaning is never fixed, always deferred. This is the approach that was taken to the ptolemaic system: Based on the assumption that the planets and sun revolve around earth, very complicated ways were developed of describing this movement, without any real explanatory value to them.

The Galilean approach to Saussure is the simple as day observation that language is not a self-enclosed system, because if it were none of the signs would mean anything.

>> No.3976907

>>3976878
The point is how you open it to the outside?

If as per Quine reference is possible only on the basis of a pre-existig grammar how do you do that?

And how do you open to the outside when the only reference you have for a word is what is written in another text. Like in the example of Justice. Where is Justice in the world?

It's not a case if analytic philosopher tried to dissolve a lot of philosophical problems or reduce them to biological functions.

We knew better back then, we knew that there is no simple solution as pointing out to the world or a simple meaning.

>> No.3976905

>>3976894
i don't see where you lose the information

>> No.3976906

>>3976888
>if someone would ask "so there is no truth for people who don't speak?" The answer would be 'yes and no".
So it isn't truth. It's probable.

Truth is when, from the sensible, it can be assured to follow the order of things.

>> No.3976911

>>3976907
My favorite Derrida goof is the dictionary example: The claim that meaning is always deferred and never simply present is supposedly demonstrated by referring to a dictionary. You don't know the meaning of one word, you look it up but instead of meaning you get more words! How kafkaesque! (monsieur)

But really, that's a crock of shit. The implication is that you could then look up each word in the original explanation and continue to do this to the explanations for each word used in this first explanation, and so on. What results is a circulation inside a closed system, very much like what Derrida describes as différance. But is this how a dictionary works? Fuck no.

A dictionary works, we know that. They sell well, they are very useful. Why are they useful? Because typically upon looking up an explanation for a word, we understand it because we know what the words in the explanation mean. What is the 'meristem'? I don't know, but if I look it up there will be words in the explanation like 'plant'. Is the meaning of 'plant' defined exclusively by it's opposition to other words? No. It's made up mostly of my past experience with plants, and also a little bit of differential relationships to other words. However, this differential relationship only makes sense because of the extra-linguistic meaning that words refer to, tap into, evoke, or otherwise access.

>> No.3976928

>>3976911
*'extra-linguistic meaning' here can refer for example to the way that a feed forward pattern associator will represent the absolute differences between the lenghts of lines in a distorted fashion according to how they are grouped in the material that is used to train it. This is a perfect explanation of Sapir-Whorf that however does not mean that language structures the world in general.

>> No.3976929

>>3976906
I don't understand. What I'm saying is that only sentences can be true. Truth is a property of language not of the world.

>>3976905
If every reference presupposes a certain knowledge then any disparity in knowledge in our background makes you lose information from my comunication.

Say I show you an apple and I say "This is a fruit" and let's say you don't have enough background to know what a fruit is but understand this act of pointing and naming.

Now let's say you tell me "can you get me some fruit?" and I come back with cherries and you say "No, that's not fruit, that is fruit" and you point to the apples. That happened because information was lost in that first denotation.

>> No.3976933
File: 41 KB, 600x425, cavell.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3976933

all of you need to read Cavell's "Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language"

language is as tolerant as it is intolerant of projection. if it were firmly intolerant there could be no collecting of unlike as like; if it were wildly tolerant then every unlike would be a wholly new concept. And in these circumstances we could not walk. We need friction. Neither determinacy nor indeterminacy of meaning are within the realm of the form of life we have as animals with language

>> No.3976935

>>3976933
Simplify that again for me.

>> No.3976936

>>3976929
that wouldn't have happened if you said that was an apple

>> No.3976941

>>3976911
But again you actually have not explain how you go from the experience to the word.

Derrida does not deny that of course you have a living experience that is at the base of language and the use of language: that's what he means every time he talks about force and life.

What he denies is that there is a direct contact between the word and language. Derrida like Quine thinks that language is a cathedral that touches the world with its tips.

I tend to agree with the dictionary metaphors because our understanding of language does not come from experience, but first comes from having a language and then the language deepens by meeting experience.

As an example take a person seeing for the first time a painting. If they have not studied art they have nothing to say, their experience and their memory of it would be poor.
But if they have the conceptual apparatus of art criticism not only their experience becomes much more detail, much more rich, but also they can talk and understand more. Suddenly in their ontology, and vocabulary, there are more terms, more objects even if the experience they had is objectively the same.

And still: you have to explain how you find outside of language the meaning for the word justice. Where is justice so I can experience it and have a better meaning of it.

Wittgenstein has gone through your solution already in the Tractatus, by attempting to put in relationship the word with the world and make it so that words receive their meanings only from the world. It failed.

>> No.3976946

>>3976935
ach just read the essay

in learning a word, say "kitten", do we learn what "kitten" means or what a kitten is? We want to say we learn both. Cavell says that we are initiated into the relevant forms of life with those words, what those words do, relate to, are capable of; and are expected to project those words to subsume the same instances of their concepts (to use "kitten" to describe all kittens we come across, in their myriad variation). The ability of a child to come to know how to project properly, though, depends on our being authorities, on our providing discouragement and encouragement, our natural reactions.

If words were absolute intolerant of projection - projecting a word into a new circumstance - then we would, then, have a new word for every different instance. One would "feed" the lion, "fod" the meter, "fad" the cat, and so on - we would not realize the the internal relations between these as instances of "feeding." And so we could not have concepts at all. For what separates one instance from another of "feeding" the lion?

Were language, on the other hand, equally tolerant of projection, then we similarly could not have concepts at all. Every instance could be subsumed under every concept.

the determinacy and indeterminacy of our language is something negotiated, expressed in the way we live with our words, and our commitments to them; it never reaches, absolutely, one pole or the other. Tooling through this negotiation is part of what children must undergo to be taken as human at all - that is they must learn the ways in which our concepts are both tolerant and intolerant of projection, and how, and where.

>> No.3976950

>>3976941
>I tend to agree with the dictionary metaphors because our understanding of language does not come from experience, but first comes from having a language and then the language deepens by meeting experience.
this basically sounds like a psychiatric/neurological problem to me. it's not some mysterious force.

>you have to explain how you find outside of language the meaning for the word justice. Where is justice so I can experience it and have a better meaning of it.
"justice" is just a phony-baloney myth that philosophers like to throw around. the word doesn't denote anything.

>> No.3976951

>>3976946
So in other words, it all comes back to common sense.

>> No.3976949

>>3976793
And people on /lit/ have a problem with this idea? The most analytic of philosophers would agree with this.

>> No.3976954

>>3976936
Then I bring green apple but he understood red apple. So you say "if you said red apple" and then I bring him another red apple instead of that apple and he is confused. And then you say "well let's just get a proper name for every object so there is no problem" "ok" I say "let's start with this sword, we'll call it excalibur" but then I drop excalibur and it breaks into two. And then you ask me "bring me excalibur' and I bring you the two pieces of the sword and you say "that is not excalibur".

So we decide to name the objects not only with an individual name but also with their spatio-temporal coordinates.

But as you see this brings you out of language and to mathematize the world. For the simple reason that math is the most lossless language.

>> No.3976955

>>3976951
not "common sense", but, in the late Wittgensteinian vein, the everyday, the ordinary; where there is determinacy and indeterminacy in struggle, where in wanting to abandon this struggle, this dis-ease, we become dogmatists (with an air-tight theory of meaning) or skeptics (or deconstructionists)

>> No.3976956 [SPOILER] 
File: 6 KB, 390x470, Oh-You-Make-Me-Cry-Laughing-Meme-Rage-Face-.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3976956

>>3976950
>"justice" is just a phony-baloney myth that philosophers like to throw around. the word doesn't denote anything.
euphoric.gif

>> No.3976960

>>3976955
Don't think that's much different from common sense.

>> No.3976961

>>3976950
>this basically sounds like a psychiatric/neurological problem to me. it's not some mysterious force.

No one believes any mysterious force.

>"justice" is just a phony-baloney myth that philosophers like to throw around. the word doesn't denote anything

Yet I understand Justice, it has a meaning to me. A meaning that does not come from outside of language but from a tradition I'm in.

Thinking that a word does not mean anything because it does not have a denotation is a form of positivism that has even more problem's than derrida's ideas.
You really should read wittgenstein.

>> No.3976967

>>3976960
I suppose, but for some reason I balk at the phrase. It has a sort of abusive tone to it and the very idea of common sense is laden with ideological baggage. It may just be trivial or just political knee-jerk on my part, but I prefer "ordinary" or "everyday" in that it indicates not some standard to which we must aspire (as "common sense" seems to) but what we have, before us, in our lives; what is normal, but not normative

>> No.3976968

>>3976961
i've read wittgenstein.
>positivism
it's just being honest, and it's even in line with wittgenstein. justice is more of an aesthetic response than anything.

>> No.3976970

>>3976960
>common sense.

Why are you so insistent on using this awful phrase?

>> No.3976971

>>3976946
Cool, thanks. I downloaded the pdf. Cavell seems like the best Wittgenstein scholar.

>> No.3976974

>>3976954
you can't expect having been shown only an example of a family, to recognize all. but now both you and i can tell which is a sword and which is an apple, having seen enough of them. i don't see how our knowledge of what's an apple is incomplete

>> No.3976977

DAILY REMINDER THAT JUSTICE CANNOT BE DECONSTRUCTED

U MAD?

>> No.3976978

>>3976968
>i've read wittgenstein

then you wouldn't be so proud of yourself for pointing out that justice is a "myth" or whatever. we're talking late wittgenstein here. words get their meaning from how they're used, not from tangible correlatives that can be pointed to.

>> No.3976980

>>3976968
Well you are not being honest because you are not responding how I understand the term.

Or even better: how do I understand the term positivism?
Even positivism has no denotation in the world.

Yet you use it you understand and so do I.

>> No.3976983

>>3976967
I think that the problem is the idea of totality that common sense has. It's a "we all have these ideas, we all feel this way", while the everyday is a mode of thinking and acting that a subject can assume, like the theoretical.

It's a switch from a passive position, to an active one.

>> No.3976988

>>3976978
right. i'm not sticking to a strict wittgensteinian analysis at all here, i don't know why you're insisting on him so much.
>not from tangible correlatives that can be pointed to.
but that's what language does. it points to experiences.
>words get their meaning from how they're used
the meaning of "justice" varies by the individual. it's a subjective thing. it's a subjective response to an aesthetic experience

>> No.3976989

>>3976983
yeah, that's pretty good. there's agreement to the everyday (for Wittgenstein and Cavell) but it is not total, or totalizing - it itself bears friction, disagreement, ambiguity; this is what lets it breathe, as it were, but also what we wish to avoid in philosophy (in the pejorative sense)

>> No.3976990

>>3976968
>it's just being honest, and it's even in line with wittgenstein. justice is more of an aesthetic response than anything.
Yet another bankrupt positivist. Do you really think "it's just being honest", "well, it's in line with Wittgenstein" and "justice is more of an aesthetic response than anything" are worthwhile arguments for the meaninglessness and non-existence of 'Justice'?

Do you not know how to give arguments expressing your view? "Justice is just a phony baloney myth" wouldn't even pass for a proposition of any kind -- you're just expressing your emotions.

>> No.3976996

>>3976974
Don't confuse knowledge with language. The point is that the communication act is imperfect. By reiteration and insistence you can fill in the loss and have a more precise idea.

Derrida himself tells you that if communication fails you can always ask "well what do you mean?" and have a more precise answer.

The problem is when you are reading something written by an author who is dead. You read Nietzsche's notes and you find between an essay his grocery list. Is that part of the essay or not? Well you cannot ask him. Is that an accident or is that an intentional thing (nietzsche said that you are what you eat after all, and often talked about the right diet for philosophers)

>> No.3977001

>>3976988
>it's a subjective thing. it's a subjective response to an aesthetic experience
You should really learn how to construct arguments to back up your sophomoric claims.

>> No.3977012

>>3976980
>Even positivism has no denotation in the world.
it points towards a vaguely-defined group of vaguely-defined rules. it's just an ad-hom the way you're using it.

>>3976990
>Yet another bankrupt positivist.
i'm not a positivist, not that that word denotes anything.

>>3977001
>your sophomoric claims.
eh. name-calling. done
>deconstructionists
>intellectually honest

>> No.3977024

>>3976988
>it's a subjective thing
intersubjective, yeah. but so what?

>> No.3977040

>GOAT philosopher
>Not also a mathematician
pick one

>> No.3977043

>>3977012
>it points towards a vaguely-defined group of vaguely-defined rules. it's just an ad-hom the way you're using it.


I don't see why it's an ad-hom.

All I'm saying is that our ways of making sense of the world is much more complex than "reference to the world solves everything".

A lot of the ways we refer to the world are metaphors that refer to complex modes of signification and/or directly to traditions which are never clear.

Derrida, along with Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricouer and others, knew that there is a history in our language. A history that determines how we talk and what we think and what we understand.
I seriously think that in this a-historical times that is the part of his thought that is authentically bothersome.

>> No.3977047

>>3977040
Wouldn't necessarily agree with this, but I do think that Frege was wholly superior to Wittgenstein. Back off, Blood Rainbow.

Underrated thinker.

>> No.3977063

He's a great writer to hold your chin and brag about.

>> No.3977139

>>3976996
> the right diet for philosophers
What's it?

>> No.3977217

>>3977139
cocks

>> No.3978636

>>3977217
this.

One thing I remember is that he complains that germans eat too many potatoes. That's why their philosophy is as insipid.