Derrida notes from a lecture series X

Jan 11, 2013

This guy is a very hard nut to crack if read in a vacuum, but easier in historo-philosophical context. Just like everybody else.

1

Deconstruction
-anti platonic. an attack on ultimates or the idea that ultimates have anything to do with anything that is human

- involves not getting at an essence, but unsettling or desedimentizing in order to make room for something new - called an event

- to deconstruct is not just to destroy but to give something its future. To de-solidify an encrustation so to speak

- D states deconstruction is "the affirmation of the possibility of impossibility"

- in a nutshell deconstruction involves the view that any word can be quotable in scare marks ("x"). Words at the root have metaphorical beginnings. As opposed to the view that words are related by correspondence to an absolute referent. Words are continually "haunted by the future and the past"

Logocentrism (writing-centric)

- deprivileged in the west (except math)

- the alphabet

- mathematics

Phonocentric (speaking-centric)

- privileged in the west

- speech

The future involves hostility

- future means to prepare for a danger, though the true future is something that cannot be prepared for.

The end of the "book"

- the book is transparent ideas put in a structured way with a beginning, middle, and end

- the end of the book brings in the beginning of writing

- the end of words as mere signifiers of being

- the move from structuralist linguistics to  

2

Words (written and spoken) and there relation to the lived world have been a MAJOR topic in analytically bent philosophy. D has a refreshing take on this battle front. He wants to detach from the notion that words must ultimately mach up with a "reality" outside. The kind of belief a strict dictionary writer would hold dear.

The west has been caught up in a rut as of late.

This idea that there is a chain of abstractedness from the ultimate. For example, that alphabetic writing being the most abstracted and therefore being characterized as otherness or outsideness from a truer insidedness. The Greeks criticized writing as dead, lifeless, prone to make people lazy to committing knowledge to memory. The spoken word was truer to the "source" speech acts were fuller with life. This comes down to our times as well.

The "source" abstracted:

Being > things > thought (of some-thing) > speech (talking, phonetics) > writing 

-Derrida wants to criticize this speech-centrism or this idea that speech is somehow closer to being. More so, he wants to deconstruct the idea of the relation, near or far, from any true "way." 
-If there is no grand programmer (to use a modern term for God), creator, or first thought then there is no program or what the Greeks called Logos. If the idea of Logos is unsound then to where are we to find this correspondence to how-it-is-supposed-to-be? He calls this adherence logo-centrism. Logos is the thought, the concept behind things. He wishes to deconstruct this notion of a presence "ultimate behind things." This is the idea of truth characterized as presence or the truer a thing is the more present it is to the ultimate "source"

Derrida's is not saying that words have no referent (a concept), but that they refer through differance. Like in a dictionary, words refer to other words for meanings, not to an ultimate definition in itself. There is no ultimate link to a words "source." A words meaning is always in relation to its not meaning what another word means. Or, the total abstraction of a word from its "world" or context would be meaningless.

Writing cannot be heard like speech, hence Derrida's use of the spelling of difference with an "a" (differ[a]nce). This difference is only seen in text not speech.

Derrida is appreciative of Heidegger's attack on traditional Greek platonic metaphysics, he opened it up, yet ultimately includes H in the logocentric tradition. A tradition that he wants to criticize and deconstruct.

Is language programmable  Can we make a computer program that truly emulates language? If yes you may be a structuralist. If no you may be a Derridindian or post-structuralist, were there is no ultimate rule that guides grammar but it fluxes and flows laterally like the internet has come about, with no central plan or program (logos).

37:00

The language of signifier and signified must be deconstructed. Differance and the notion of the trace will replace it.

The precursors to deconstruction were Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel:

There is a heideggerian interpretation of  Nietzsche in 1965  that he was the last metaphysician of the will, that he simply flipped plato's metaphysics on its head. (plato what is is unchanging eternal/ Nietzsche everything is change) Deluze (1962 book on N talks about deferential forces rather than dialectical) and Derrida interpreted him differently. The alternate N is the philosopher of differences. The will to power is a play of "micro forces in difference" a "multiplicity of willing forces" there is no one metaphysical big will.

Derrida's truth is a multiplicity of small truths, no big totalizing truth in itself. N says Truth is the effect of the play of forces.

Derridinian truth is characterized more like muliplicities of frames and discourse regimes

Heidegarian moods as atunments or as callings criticized by Derrida as metaphorical and phono-centric.

H tries to escape being as presents by writing being under eraser (by crossing the word out when written). Being is constituted. No more Being and beings, but something more primordial ... difference. This is later H.

1:22:0

Signifiers are arbitrary. There are many signifiers for a tree. You can point at a tree and call it anything at all. The significance of a signifier then is its difference from other signifiers. A space in-between two signifiers is the condition of possibility of a difference which makes the two stand out. 

No longer a Platonic binary opposition that is looked at, but the space that creates the binary that is important. 

In structuralism langue is the deep structure or grammar of language. Infinite sentences can be made from a finite set of grammatical rules. The subject is no longer seen as generating their own language, but the language system generates a single "event" or parole. A parole is what structuralist call an instance of langue .

- the langue (not arbitrary) is the structure the non-arbitrary signified that the signifier (arbitrary) points to.

- Derrida breaks with this non-arbitrary structure of the signified, the langue. Both the signified AND the signifier are arbitrary!

- Attacks the deep structure. "the play of differences between signifiers cannot be contained by a structure, a set of rules. So it follows that if there is no deep underlying structure of language then language cannot be programmed because there is no one totalizing rule to program!

Structurally, speaking and writing are not different.

Seusure (father of structuralism) and the Copenhagen school both argued for the importance of difference but held on to the a notion of the primacy of speech (Seusere) or of deep grammatical structure (Copenhagen). Derrida became the first to talk of "pure" difference. There is no center, no ground, but difference.

Metaphors are new context for words. Old metaphors solidify and become literal. There is no genius from the outside introducing pure newness  just a tinkerer skillfully throwing a monkey wrench into the system. Any word has its beginning in some lost metaphor even if it seems quite literal.

Written language is not language proper. For example German spoken now is a conglomeration of dialects that Martin Luther put together for the German translation of the bible. The learned German classes spoke this increasingly till it became the "official" German  Squeezing other variations to the margins.

to be continued ...