Posted on 10/20/2004 11:36:47 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
A headline for an obituary in the October 10 New York Times said it all: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.”
There is no denying the “abstruse” part. The French philosopher’s work was not just difficult to understand; it was incomprehensible. Yet, for all of Derrida’s murky and jargon-ridden prose, his impact on the world we live in was enormous.
Derrida, you see, was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Now, Derrida may have just been having fun. I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense.
While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
If Derrida’s maxim that “there is nothing outside the text” had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, “anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.”
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we he need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
This subjectivity, however, only gives ammunition to lawyers and jurists who want to interpret constitutions and statutes in ways never imagined by their drafters. Or, some are creative enough, they just disregard the statutes. This has created a crisis in the law: using the courts as tools for social engineering.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
The very day Derrida died, I was on an airplane. A couple recognized me and came over to talk. They told me the sad tale of how four years of college had turned their son from a solid Christian into a doubt-ridden skeptic. Now multiply that incident a million-fold, and you’ll understand the real legacy of Jacques Derrida, who amused himself at our great expense. Who said ideas don’t have consequences?
Or the other anyway. He travelled a lot, mainly to change his perspective, and he wouldn't travel with anyone he wouldn't be willing to be die with. Death the ultimate other.
I think to our Founding Fathers, freedom of conscience was closely linked to the concept of free will; in other words, the state wasn't responsible for enforcing one particular belief because that was between God and man. The state didn't need to get between them, as had been the case in King Henry the 8th's Anglican state, or the other European monarchies where the kings were provided their power from God to rule man. I'm also arguing that the Founding Fathers would have each agreed that there was an external reality no matter what their own opinions were. Disagreement and debate were prevalent in their age, proving that the truth is elusive. But they all agreed that a well-crafted set of laws which respected mankind's freedom of conscience would set us free in contrast to other political systems. In other words, the Enlightenment taught us to let faith be personal and the law be limited but based on fact and reason. But it did not teach us that facts were relative. Calculus and Newtonian mechanics would have been for others to discover, were that true.
It's not what I would consider an explicit statement. The Constitution counted 3/5 of the slaves in a district when deciding Congressional representation. The slaves were certainly people, but they were not voting for the representatives.
It was a compromise, an achievable solution at the time. Lots of people noted that counting the slaves as any proportion less than the free population implied a contradiction of the "all men are created equal" of the Declaration. That the practice of holding them in servitude appeared to contradict the statement that liberty is an inalienable right (found in the same document), also occurred to many. For a while, they lived with the contradiction, just as we live with similar contradictions today.
The amendment which formally abolished slavery came only after a long, destructive war. It shouldn't be as hard to get, say, a federal marriage amendment.
The Constitution will be x-rated for the first time. We'll have to skip reading parts of it to our children. This is a tragedy. The people who are forcing that on us -- just so that we can continue to use the most common legal definition of the word "marriage" -- are despicable. Derrida would be proud.
Think of it this way, and one must never forget how important advance it is over pre-Reformation Europe: we are free to argue about the definition of free will because our Founding Fathers believed that we had the liberty to have differing thoughts about it and still be considered equal before the law.
I have yet to see any evidence that Jacques Derrida thought of anything that wasn't a perversion of Martin Heidegger's thought. In Being And Time, Heidegger deconstructed Western thought and stated that Language is constitutive of Being. The difference is that Heidegger's writing was learned, fruitful, and intellectually honest. (Yes I know the man himself can never be forgiven for accepting a role in the Nazi party.)
bttt - post of the day material.
Bringing in diversity wasn't something the masses requested, nor was the invasion of illegal immigrants. Anyone who stood up to protest was immediately labeled a racist.
That term is one that people fear more than being called agnostic or atheist! Perhaps that is because we have quietly accepted God being segregated from public policy decisions.
I am well known on FR for critiquing the Bush administration which has led to many debates, the majority of which weren't pleasant. My critical thinking of these public employees is considered sinful by many members.
I'm glad to say that my cost for alcohol hasn't increased and I am sleeping as well as I did prior to the debates. My opinion of many people has fallen to new lows, the ones who are obvious followers. I'm glad to see some new leaders come to the forefront. A united front is necessary to keep rabid politicians such as Kerry from residing in the White House but IMO that shouldn't leave President Bush free to do as he wishes.
I hope this isn't being too critical of him this close to the election.
A related point on that is the line of descent from Nazism and French fascism to deconstruction. Heidegger and Paul de Man are two of the most famous cases. Georges Battaile also flirted with fascism at times, and his friend Maurice Blanchot helped "rehabilitate" the academic reputations of some Vichy collaborators after the war. Their influence was felt through the Situationists, a neo-Dadaist group which played a significant role in the 1968 revolution that brought deconstruction to prominence in the French university.
On the contrary. The image the Democrat machine wants to project is that due to our zeal, patriots are incapable of self-criticism.
Because we criticize Ted Kennedy, whose words are invoked by the throat-cutters just hours after he offers them up against our troops in a press conference, we are undemocratic.
We are the only ones left who are democratic. And we criticize. But we are loyal in any opposition we may exhibit.
But they only fell out by 40%.
bump to Fedora's 51
But that would depend on the definition of "what the definition of what is, is" is.
BTTT
Thank you
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