", “Poezia s-a sinucis avînd grijă să-și facă un nod foarte estetic la ștreang.”, “Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. We said, What kind of garbage will that make?”, “This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. It maybe heralds the end of one phenomenologist’s theory of the experience of time. The present seems not so present after all, depending on absent times. ... Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” sought to understand language as … So here is point one: logocentrism, as exemplified in the above Derrida passage, is a reasonable theory about at least some of the central works of philosophy, according to which they privilege presence. There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative techniques. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Différance means both differing and deferring, and Derrida’s idea is that this is relevatory of the nature of language and destructive of the metaphysics of presence. This seems to have been of interest to some people, and so here I will describe some of the central themes of perhaps the most notorious post-modernist philosopher, Jacques Derrida, whom I didn’t discuss in the previous post for lack of space. He’s a useful person to discuss, because he’s the object of many people’s ire. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. the genealogy of modernity), Derrida (on the deconstruction of texts) and Lyotard and Baudrillard (on reflections on the frag-mented present). Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. His discussion includes chapters on Bergson, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida, with sections on other major thinkers including Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray, Levinas, and Ricoeur. Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Enlightenment. Believe I. Jacques Derrida. That's the danger of postmodernism: it poses itself as something that can't be trumped, something you can’t escape. So I would say that this crucial plank of the Derridean theory fails. To start, consider the following quotation from Derrida: “[T]he history of (the only) metaphysics, which has, in spite of all differences, not only from Plato to Hegel (even including Leibniz) but also, beyond these apparent limits, from the pre-Socratics, to Heidegger, always assigned the original of truth in general to the logos: the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been … the debasement of writing”, (from Of Grammatology, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, p1824), The editors of the anthology helpfully gloss logos on the same page in a footnote: ‘Derrida applies the term to knowledge assumed to be organized around a central truth (e.g. They are both roughly phenomenologists: thinkers concerned with attending to what experience gives them and describing it. You might query it, and wonder what these German slogans and fancy Greek words really amount to, but it at least seems that Derrida is here interested in pretty traditional, somewhat technical philosophical questions. That’s the logos. — ‘to the things themselves’. Discussion on postmodernism and truth. 1. Moreover, when asking for the meaning of, say, ‘couch’, the process will always be deferred: if you say it’s “an item of soft furniture more than one person can sit on”, I can go on to ask you of the meaning of each of those words, and so on indefinitely. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”, “Postmodernism has turned into this devil's vortex where no matter what you do, your neck will be turned and your face shoved into a foreign example, and worse, no matter what you say, despite the context, it will be considered a postmodern device. Deconstruction is a way of reading and engaging with texts and thinkers that attempts, perhaps by harnessing the idea of différance according to which what a writer means always slips away from them, to show up internal inconsistencies in those texts and thinkers. … That’s the fundamental claim. Here’s Jordan Peterson: [Jacques Derrida] is head trickster for the postmodernist movement, and he regarded Western culture — let’s call it the patriarchy — as phallogocentric. 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