Since the onslaught of ignorant anti-continental quips has already begun, I'd like to suggest two texts by Richard Rorty—an American pragmatist with an extremely lucid writing style—that show how it is indeed possible to find Derrida interesting without being a charlatan or stupid:
"Derrida’s principal theme in these essays is the attempt of the tradition to make language look less sprawling by trimming off unwanted growth. This is done by making invidious distinctions between true (e.g. ‘literal’ or ‘cognitively meaningful’) language and false (e.g. ‘metaphorical’ or ‘meaningless’) language. He is arguing that this attempt cannot succeed, because it is just the latest version of the onto-theological attempt to contrast the Great Good Resting-Place with the sprawling world of time and chance. He wants to convince us that there is no natural hierarchy of discourses or jargons, no structure topped off by the super-language which gives us a grip on all the others, the words which classify all the other words. There is no privileged language in which to state invidious distinctions between true and false language. There is no linguistic material out of which we can forge clippers with which to snip off unfruitful linguistic suckers. He thinks Heidegger betrayed his own project by trying to separate ‘real’ language (the Call of Being, the kind of language which ‘is what it says’) from ‘inauthentic’ language (words used as means to technocratic ends, chatter, the jargon of this or that disciplinary matrix)."
Thanks for this, I haven't read it before. For anyone curious, it is a very clear-headed and well-articulated take by an American philosopher (analytic and later (him becoming a prominent participant of) pragmatic (if you could call it that?) tradition) on Derrida's conception of philosophy / approach to truth (so to speak.) There's a very nice part about what he considers to be the constructive component in Derrida's system/view, and it is detailed and honest (in the sense of capturing many nuances), I think.
A very nice and easy-going read, would recommend to anyone interested.
>how it is indeed possible to find Derrida interesting without being a charlatan or stupid
Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.
As hackers (geeks etc) we are generally mostly accepting of an empiricist, show-me-the-numbers, kind of analysis (and analytical philosophy), but it's by far not the only one, or the most potent, when outside the realm of hard sciences. The anglosaxon positivist/reductionist philosophical school is not the only one out there, just as Hollywood and the emphasis on the "plot" is not the only movie tradition.
It's like someone working on imperative programming all your life, and asking "what's this BS Prolog thing, that's not real code" or "LISP is pretentious and doesn't have a proper syntax".
Of course. There are several significant families of thought within "continental philosophy", and they don't agree with each other. Just like any broad tradition.
What a pleasure this interview was to read. And plain spoken, too.
Many here have complained that Derrida is hard to read, or worse, simply makes no sense. You may take a side in this, if you like. But I would encourage you to read some short piece of his instead. In so doing, and as the interview itself remarks on reading, you may make your own interpretation.
@mbrock has listed several items. To these, I add what my instructor for composition at Deep Springs (himself a student of Derrida) assigned us, "Declarations of Independence." It is but a nine page talk on the US Declaration of Independence. But within it, many of Derrida's persistent concerns on language and action come to light.
"I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly."
This is a single sentence.
Is it that Derrida's thought is so complex that it is simply inexpressible in simpler language? Or it this sentence wilful obsurantism?
I find many supporter's of Derrida claiming that if you don't agree with Derrida it must be that you don't understand him. This is a dangerous intellectual cul-de-sac - verging on mysticism.
I agree with you. Every time I try explaining this to people, there will be at least one guy who will claim he has read Derrida and understood all his great mysteries, but that plain language can't explain those mysteries ... you need some powerful new language to do so.
Its so ridiculous. Its like this self-contained world of hysteria. They have no useful output that effects the world outside their narrow hysteria. No one outside the hysteria can criticize the hysteria because by not praising the hysteria you are immediately one who doesn't possess the sophistication to produce critiques.
Its pretty much indistinguishable from some sort of fundamentalist religion where the proponents just live in a sealed chamber and are immune to reason. Imagine physicists talking in really technical garble, but never producing any models that actual predict real phenomenon. That's what its like.
Post modernism seems to produce nothing useful but documents for other post modernists to study.
But most of the valuable ideas he had to express had already been explored by Heidegger in a more complete way, or by Wittgenstein in an uncannily clear, concise and orderly way.
Off topic, but what was you experience at Deep Springs like? Would you do it again? Do you feel you learned as much (or more) during your time there as you would have at an ivy league style school? What about the overall environment?
I've been fascinated by that school since I got their brochure in high school. I regret not at least applying.
Just so everyone is clear here, while Derrida had an "uncertain" reception in some parts of the academy (those crusty old anglo-American philosophers), he was deeply influential, and by some peoples' accounts, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. So, dismissing him out of hand (especially rejections based on his ostensible obscurantism) is akin to saying that Donald Knuth is no good. If you got the chops to critique Knuth, be my guest, but until then, I'll just revel in genius and struggle and struggle.
> So, dismissing him out of hand (especially rejections based on his ostensible obscurantism) is akin to saying that Donald Knuth is no good.
This is an invalid analogy if I ever saw one.
Let me try to make it more accurate.
For Knuth to be like Derrida his magnum opus would have to have been generated by just typing
cat /dev/random
and later claiming that MIX was somewhat defined in there as well as programs written in it. Then he would become famous Paris Hilton style and get a bunch of sycophants that defend his void verbiage no matter what (some because their entire carreers depended on it, others just because they are useful idiots).
Like sat down, with a pre-existing understanding of the fields he is interfacing with (particularly phenomenology and structuralism and semiotics a la Saussure) and then begin reading?
Most approaches to continental philosophy I read on these pages are like someone jumping into a halfway point of a complex essay on functional programming, quoting it and declaring it nonsense. To people outside particular discourses, things often seem like nonsense. Within them, with enough background, one can see that these things are meaningful, while one might, of course, disagree.
"Lonely Woman" is one of the most iconic and haunting melodies in jazz.
I'm glad that the interview explains where its title came from. Though, I'd always assumed it must have come from a much darker place.
Also, this quote is a gem:
OC: I had a niece who died in February of this year and I went to her funeral, and when I saw her in her coffin, someone had put a pair of glasses on her. I had wanted to call one of my pieces She was sleeping, dead, and wearing glasses in her coffin. And then I changed the idea and called it "Blind Date."
Derrida spoke of the absurdity of deriving meaning from an infinitely recursive and self referent system of language. Pureness of axiom isn't detectable in a mergable feedback loop. However, his critique doesn't show the shortcomings of how we neurologically handle symbols, it shows the incompleteness of human cognition. Derrida is to political epistemology as Turing is to serial bits or Godel is to arithmetic. Keep this in mind for compiler design and neural network structure.
infinitely recursive and self referent system of language
No idea if this is actually what he said, but when I say the word "dog" while pointing at a dog, the recursion of language stops. It's amazing how so much philosophy is almost intentionally incorrect.
It's not about what you point, is about how you define "dog" (and it can get much worse than dog, e.g. freedom, humanity, etc).
It's amazing how people think they can understand/debunk/solve philosophical problems of ages with a moment's hasty thought that doesn't even understand the full issue in the first place...
... until a later bystander asks you, "What is a dog?" and you now have to define it without the associated dog present.
Or someone looks at another breed of dog and asks "What is that?" because he isn't aware of canine taxonomy and thinks only that original breed is a creature called "dog".
Welcome to Derrida's version of the halting problem. These are actual problems of NLP today.
That's not what people do in natural language processing. Don't appropriate the terminology of other fields for your own purposes and claim you're doing that field.
In NLP, people don't just throw up their hands and say "grounding is hard, it's so hard it's impossible, let's not do it". Grounding is sometimes hard, but it's often perfectly tractable for a given problem domain.
If we haven't solved strong AI yet, don't count that as a victory for your unrelated field.
Faith in an AI clasification that is invented from a human mind bound by the biases Derrida described long before people could put faith in strong AI?
Sorry, I don't do faith. I do correlation. You just hate Derrida and can't apply any of his observations.
The human does not discover AI. It invents it. And all of the cognitive biases we have are passively passed on with every "axiom" of AI we create. The idea of even classifying AI is ontologically invalid... for the reasons Derrida already pointed out.
With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.
Thank you for writing this. I wish I could upvote you more than once.
This is a very accurate way of describing him.
He used the usual tactics, creating a cult like following and dismissing those poor souls that actually tried to understand him in good faith.
These hacks (in the pejorative sense) also had a penchant for using math sounding language because in their sociopathic minds it lended credibility and gravitas to their speech.
Nothing but contempt for charlatans like him. Some excerpts to give a taste.
>The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something—of a center starting from which an observer could master the field—but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.
> This differential topology [topique différantielle] adjourns, guardian after guardian, within the polarity of high and low, far and near (fort/da), now and later. The same topology without its own place, the same atopology [atopique], the same madness defers the law as the nothing that forbids itself and the neuter that annuls oppositions.
I haven't finished reading whole interview/discussion, but to bridge Coleman's treatment of improvisation vs composition over to the software domain: the "philharmonic" wanted a "waterfall" version of music composition, where everything was written down in advance and completely choreographed, with no notes, chords, phrasing, tempo, volume, tone left to chance; this upset Coleman, who believed in a more "agile" version of music. In Coleman's life in the jazz community with jazz musicians, he said he'd rehearse to review brand new pieces with them and lay down the framework; in the second rehearsal, the other musicians would riff on the themes, find new things to say, fill in the gaps. The jazz performances would work out just fine, just-in-time, like "agile". The classical "philharmonic" musicians couldn't relate to this at all.
I kind of agree with you. I've seen some of his interviews on Youtube and tried to read some of his work but couldn't find anything of substance. On the other hand, many smart people seem to disagree so it's very possible I am missing something. There's been a few debates on HN about deconstruction and both sides had good arguments.
Noam Chomsky summarized as follows:
"As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return."
Put in plain words, the point of Derrida is "there's no such thing as plain words". So the task which Noam Chomsky is setting before deconstructionists is not only onerous and a waste of their time, it is -- fundamentally, according to deconstructionist thought -- impossible.
It's like trying to grok zen. You either get it or you don't.
Reminds me of the parable of the Emperor And His New Clothes.
All the smart people who understand math, physics, chemistry, and biology are just too dumb to understand this wonderful new science. And those that understand this wonderful new science can't actually produce anything useful.
A number of these "deconstruction" texts are bad, like any other philosophy or attempt in any field. Not because of how it's written - the thinking behind it is bad.
Other of these can indeed be stated in simpler words, and remain enlightening and profound observation (what Chomsky asks).
But in general, what Chomsky says is BS. It's analogous to: this Charlie Parker jazz piece is meaningless. Play it to me with conventional harmony, and show me how it's better than John Phillip Soussa. Oh, and stick to 4/4 and triad chords.
The whole idea behind those philosophical attemps is that they work in the limits of the language, e.g. in "advanced mode", and deal with stuff that's not relatable with "plain words", the same way "fuck my life" is not analogous to "oh, how unfortunate I feel at this moment", even if they mostly convey the same message.
If plain words don't work, then invent new notation like physics and math do. Its nonsense because there is no "higher" concept. They are expressing pretty conventional concepts ... like for example the simple concept that language and meaning have a cultural context ... a concept which can be expressed both with simple language and simple anecdotes.
You ever notice how the best practitioners of Math, Physics, and Computer Science produce great output in multiple fields. Not just their chosen field. Like they might be 99.99 percentile in one field, and in another field they are 99 percentile. In other words they produce useful and interesting artifacts across a whole slice of human endeavors. Whereas it seems to me these post-modernists mainly focus on one thing ... this post-modern bullshit. And everyone I meet that spends time on this post-modern stuff is pretty third-rate in everything else they do.
>If plain words don't work, then invent new notation like physics and math do
Or, you know, do it like philosophy and poetry and literature do, and combine the words in new clusters, assign them new meanings, invent a few helper words, etc.
>Its nonsense because there is no "higher" concept. They are expressing pretty conventional concepts ... like for example the simple concept that language and meaning have a cultural context ... a concept which can be expressed both with simple language and simple anecdotes.
That you can express the core concept doesn't mean you can express it's nuances. I can play "My favorite things" melody from a fake book in the July Andrews version, but that doesn't convey much about Coltrane's version.
In the scope of what those philosophers describe and work with, reducing it to something like "that language and meaning have a cultural context" is like saying "I've read War and Peace. It's about Russia, right?".
>You ever notice how the best practitioners of Math, Physics, and Computer Science produce great output in multiple fields. Not just their chosen field. Like they might be 99.99 percentile in one field, and in another field they are 99 percentile. In other words they produce useful and interesting artifacts across a whole slice of human endeavors.
No, I don't notice it. It's a myth invented by some hackers (ESR comes to mind) to feel good, and is a tired form of self-praise.
I know some hackers etc that dabble in music, painting etc. Nothing to write home about, and no great artist (as in, someone in the canon of western arts) was at the same time a great math, physics or hacker (DaVince comes to mind as the exception that proves the rule). To put it in another way, you might find 5 such cases. You won't find 10.
Richard Feyman, for example, was just a guy that could play some bongos (nothing to write home about) and could write amusing personal anecdotes in clear prose (again, no Hemingway).
Or you mean different fields in sciences? Again, I don't much see that. There are some cases, but most are few and far between. Take the great Physisists -- not much of a contribution to mathematics, if any (when they were not even quite mediocre in that field, like Einstein). Now, mathematicians doing well in Computer Science (like Turing and others) is mostly because Computer Science is just an ad hoc domain of applied Mathematics.
"For those who don't know, Derrida was a French postmodern intellectual charlatan with absolutely no redeeming qualities."
This is a ridiculously inaccurate way to explain Derrida to "those who don't know" him. Derrida is one of the most important continental philosophers of the 20th century.
This quote contains his criticism very clearly:
"As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return."
Continental philosophy is not just postmodernism, which I don't like either. It's also 20th+ century german philosophy which is generally fairly straightforward and also french philosophy until the 60's. And while this kind of philosophy is certainly different from the formal one common in the UK (or maybe US) I would also argue that it is more interesting.
That is very harsh critique which you leave unsubstantiated. Did you have something particular in mind? Preferably something you have made an honest attempt to benevolently interpret.
This being said, I too am confused about this being popping up on the front page uncommented.
Derrida is one of those guys, that if you find a fan of his, you have almost certainly found someone who has a love of complicated verbiage over simple straightforward explanations.
Derrida takes a really simple concept and then dresses it up in so much complicated irrelevant nonsense that you have to take 30 minutes to deconstruct and understand an essay, that could be sufficiently restated in perhaps a paragraph of clear English.
>Derrida takes a really simple concept and then dresses it up in so much complicated irrelevant nonsense that you have to take 30 minutes to deconstruct and understand an essay, that could be sufficiently restated in perhaps a paragraph of clear English.
Can you give an example? Because I've read Derrida (and other continental and US philosophers) and I've not seen that.
It should be easy. Just post an essay of his, and then your paragraph of clear English that "sufficiently restates" it.
I find that most people conflate "sufficiently restates" with something like Cliffs Notes.
Or with "seeing the movie" (e.g. War And Peace) instead of reading the book.
Or even worse with some general "plot", like: "War and Peace is the story of some families in Russia when Napoleon invades and a guy that tries to kill him" as opposed to the whole philosophical, artistic, literature, poetic etc content of the book.
Accidentally commented on the main post instead of the comment where someone said Derrida is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century or something like that.
Here, a short review that gives a very brief introduction/defense (in a sort of backhanded way, though): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n03/richard-rorty/signposts-along-t...
"Derrida’s principal theme in these essays is the attempt of the tradition to make language look less sprawling by trimming off unwanted growth. This is done by making invidious distinctions between true (e.g. ‘literal’ or ‘cognitively meaningful’) language and false (e.g. ‘metaphorical’ or ‘meaningless’) language. He is arguing that this attempt cannot succeed, because it is just the latest version of the onto-theological attempt to contrast the Great Good Resting-Place with the sprawling world of time and chance. He wants to convince us that there is no natural hierarchy of discourses or jargons, no structure topped off by the super-language which gives us a grip on all the others, the words which classify all the other words. There is no privileged language in which to state invidious distinctions between true and false language. There is no linguistic material out of which we can forge clippers with which to snip off unfruitful linguistic suckers. He thinks Heidegger betrayed his own project by trying to separate ‘real’ language (the Call of Being, the kind of language which ‘is what it says’) from ‘inauthentic’ language (words used as means to technocratic ends, chatter, the jargon of this or that disciplinary matrix)."
And here, a full essay on Derrida titled "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing": http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Rorty-Philosoph...
I don't have time to write more in depth about this. It's at least heartening that the most cynical and flippant comments have been downvoted.