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On the other hand, I think the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Derrida does a pretty solid job of summarizing at least Derrida's stated definit
by menssen 13y ago
On the other hand, I think the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Derrida does a pretty solid job of summarizing at least Derrida's stated definition(s) of "Deconstruction:"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Dec http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Dec
It's still dense and a bit jargon-y, but relatively easy to follow linearly.
The second you get into "X thinks Y about Deconstruction" or "X's work relates to Deconstruction because Y" (which is most of the Wikipedia article), the whole thing seems incredibly unapproachable without being an expert on the entire canon of western philosophy. This is unreasonable for something that's really a pretty simple concept.
This sort of argument is very common (from my experience) in contemporary philosophy: "Your work on X is invalid because you didn't consider how it relates to Y." Despite the fact that that is a fallacy, covering all the "it relates to Ys" seems to be a primary goal of the Wikipedia article.
- rspeer 13y agoIt started promisingly. Then it said at the end of the first paragraph, > But with Derrida, we know now, the foundation is not a unified self but a divisible limit between myself and myself as an other (auto-affection as hetero-affection: “origin-heterogeneous”). That's bullshit intended to baffle.
- dcre 13y agoThere are some extra adjectives in there, maybe, but it's really not that bad. Translation: "Maybe the self is not the unitary thing we normally consider it to be. But how can that be possible? For example, if it has multiple parts, couldn't we just say that only one of those parts is the self? Where does the multi-faceted nature come from? Is it merely the grammatical division between subject and object -- are there two selves in the sentence 'I affect myself'?" Etc. I agree that the writing is a little silly (that parenthetical should be its own sentence), but it's partly because the ideas are just pretty hard to think about.
- rspeer 13y ago> Is it merely the grammatical division between subject and object -- are there two selves in the sentence 'I affect myself'? No, there aren't, though I don't see why that has anything to do with the paragraph in question. Are you saying that the foundation of Deconstruction itself rests on a violation of the use-mention distinction as obvious and pithy as "there is no 'I' in 'team'"?
- dcre 13y agoI'm just saying there are many different ideas at play here. Those are a couple of examples of possible meanings I took from that sentence, just off the top of my head. My implication (which maybe I should have stated) was that if I can derive meaning from the sentence, then it might not be meaningless. And if the meaning I derive corresponds to what the author intended, then it doesn't seem like such terrible writing, just writing for a particular audience. I agree with you, though, that it should be more accessible, though articles on the Stanford Encyclopedia can often be fairly technical. But it really takes a brilliant writer (which the author of the SEP article clearly is not) to make accessible something complicated and arcane. I just don't want you to draw the conclusion that because this guy couldn't do it in this particular sentence, a whole field of thought is crap. Or unfairly ascribe bad intentions to the author.
- menssen 13y agoThe sentence (non-parenthetical) is poorly placed, in that it can't really be understood until actually reading the rest of the section. Something like, "according to Deconstruction, the resolution to this critique of Descartes is actually that the 'foundation' is the limit or difference [or différance, if I understand it correctly, which I probably don't] between self/other." The parenthetical is complete and utter bullshit, as if somebody said "this is good, but you should jargon it up a bit."