Derrida & Deconstruction

so as you may know time is a bit out of joint with this presentation which seems somewhat appropriate you know for Derry da who in a way he is here and not yet here to be to be deferred to be determined the lecture was supposed to be in October it didn't happen to October it's now happening now it might have happened last week but it didn't so here we are but in a way I feel as though this is a very apt conclusion to this entire series this theory lecture series because of the ways that Jacques Derrida sought to inhabit traditions in general but specifically the tradition of Theory invoked over the course of this semester and you could imagine figures like Hegel Marx Weber Freud Heidegger Adorno a rent all addressed by Derrida maybe not Mead but why not he could have then we could in in the same vein and of course Erika I although that's now moving in this other temporal direction but in terms of dialogue and engagement in an article I wrote a few years ago it was just after soon after Gary Dawes death I discussed the ways that Derrida and deconstruction continue to haunt history and I hope to also return to this at the end of my talk in a way that revisits the ghost-like way Freud continues to haunt us that Michel Roth presented or argued at the beginning of the semesters so maybe we'll have a key astok effect maybe not we'll have to see so in what follows I hope to do three things the first is a brief intellectual biography of Jacques Derrida and you can take me to task for this later giving some of Derrida own pronouncements about such an endeavor then I want to actually try to work through a deconstruction with everyone here today and I actually want to do a deconstruction from a text called we see and gram a note on a note from Martin Heidegger 'he's being in time and i'm gonna be actually be taking out a compressed little deconstruction from there if you wanted to do the whole thing you'd have to slog through it with me of my intellectual history class but for the moment we're gonna try and do it discreet act of deconstruction to really get a sense of what the moves are and how it might work if we can we'll see okay and then at the end time permitting and hopefully it will be I'd like to reflect on some recent responses to deconstruction and critical or high theory and to present some brief thoughts on the place of theory and deconstruction today so let's start with Jacques Derrida he was born in lvr Algeria in 1932 a Sephardic Jewish family he actually was called Jacky at that part of his life and was referred to his Jacky up until he moved to Paris we could think about that later he went to French Li say's but was expelled in 1942 in accordance with the Vichy laws that were enacted and Jerry died himself Israel often reflected upon this in his writings about first of all his place as a sort of marginalized European both because of his Sephardic background but his background as a an an algerian or a pin wash and moves at a time but also about his relationship with the french language during this time how french was his language how french was the only language in which he felt at home and to which he felt responsible and yet his own ambivalence about that language in relation to this other construct of france other theorists like Gabriel Spiegel have talked about this marginalization for Derrida in relation to the event of the Holocaust and the way his displaced relation the sense that he was not of the Ashkenazi zand not in the center of this destruction that happened led him to an almost obsessive interest in the question of absence and that this in fact is one of the catalysts for deconstruction it's one idea it's an interesting one we can talk about this later as well if you choose when he was young his interests were principally philosophy well now I shouldn't say it's literature and poetry and probably most of all soccer he imagined he would be a professional football player and there were certain images of Camus that danced in his had but he became increasingly interested in in philosophy and after World War two this became a more and more important part of his life and in 1949 he moved to Paris and prepared to take the examination to enter the occult normal superior now the occult normal superior is-is-is of school still in in paris to this day in fact when I was in Paris last year I spent a lot of time there but at this moment it really was the the gateway if you wanted to be a philosopher of note and importance in Paris perhaps in all certainly in all France and other parts of Europe you had to go through the occult normale superiore was the school that produced barracks son and then of course at this moment in 49 you had figures like raymond aron merleau-ponty and jean-paul sartre who had all come through those doors and Derrida realized wanted desired to go through those doors and to get that training at the occult normal superiores did many others he did fail the entrance examination on his first try and this is has been pointed to as something Pierre board do it who was a cohort of dairy doll wrote a book called homo academic Asst and in this book he actually charts the way that while the occult normal superior ostensibly works out all these matrices that are entirely neutral and objective standardized tests the fact was that people from the margins had a much harder time getting in than people from the center it's an interesting book you might take a look at that it actually act think says a lot about the way academics are constructed in general but on the second try Derrida did enter the occult normal superior and in the 50s this was a vibrant and exciting time to study philosophy in France it was the era of the philosophical superstars of jean-paul Sartre of Simone de Beauvoir or Reis merleau-ponty of phenomenology and existentialism and certainly of Heidegger of the the height of this high daguerreian moment in France and of course this was a moment that was rife with tension as well because of newer uses of Heidegger through his letter on humanism that he wrote and the older uses of Heidegger through figures like Sartre so this is all going on in at this moment there are other thinkers as well too many dimension but maybe I should say figures like George's Bataille John hippo elite Levy Strauss Jacques Lacan I could go on but perhaps more important is the cohort who entered into the Ecole Normale superior and came of age with Jacques Derrida and these are figures like Louis Altos air gil de luz michel foucault roland bart jean francois leotard this was a very strong and exciting cadre although we can see how Lucie Aragon refers to theory as this sort of boys club this incredibly masculine moment and it certainly was now for Derrida there were benefits and pitfalls to coming in with this very strong group of course it was wonderful to sit down and read and study with all to ser to argue with Foucault to go toe to toe as Jean Francois Leo Tarr but he also had these moments and if you believe the most recent biography by Benoit Patel he had moments of real depression and agony of feeling he wasn't quite there that he didn't measure up or that he was doing something drastically different and it was a very tumultuous time for him but one that he seemed to escape through this act of writing and throughout his life he's someone who would write for a sustained period every day and of course if you ever make it to the the his archives at UC Irvine you'll you'll be overwhelmed I don't know that we'll ever get through everything that he had to write or that we should necessarily but that's a separate issue Derrida's initial interest was with the German phenomenologist and teacher Martin Heidegger Edmund Husserl and he wrote his master's thesis on the problems of Genesis in Husserl's phenomenology and to my mind Derrida always was always is throughout his life was was first and foremost a phenomenologist one of a certain sort but really a phenomenologist and moving between Husserl and Heidegger in this way and of course bringing in other influences he also studied Hegel at this time and this turned out to be very important although later Phil Phil popper always says to me when he hears the word Hagel he goes for his gun and when we get to the deconstruction part he's gonna be blazing because well you'll see but this is one of the places he picked up this interest suspicion and engagement with the binaries with binary opposition's through in this discussion of the dialectic was jean hip elite in 56 and 57 he went and spent the year at Harvard and in fact this began a lifelong engagement with the United States and there are those who say and they're probably correct that he actually in terms of fostering graduate students and disciples was much more successful in the United States than he was actually in France now while he was there he didn't actually do all that much in terms of engagement he mostly worked on his pieces on who Cyril and read James Joyce so Paul will be happy to hear that in 62 he published a translation of Xhosa rules the origins of geometry now publishing a translation of something I suppose isn't all that surprising but but what is surprising is that he added a hundred and fifty page introduction to that translation which in essence is the length of the work this was an act a kind of act of hubris but it also was an act of intellectual adventure and a way of playing with texts of putting text together in different ways that were indicative of where Derrida would go as his career continued so you could already see this at this point I suppose another key aspect here is the ways that Derrida stressed the role of language in Hustle that it was language that was the key factor in understanding language was the key to understanding certain aspects of hussar solving certain problems in his early in phenomenology from sixty to sixty four he taught at the Sorbonne this also was a bittersweet moment because while he was very excited to have been given this post and it showed the support of some of his teachers he was also blocked from gaining permanent posts at the Sorbonne by others who felt his work was indistinct incomprehensible or simply too unorthodox to fit in to this French trajectory and this happened at a time where it it's not isolated - to Derrida that the 60s marked a real rupture between the generation of existentialists who came to dominance following World War two and this new vanguard of intellectuals whose concern was the structure of language whose concern were issues of displacement of the self and who were fundamentally at odds with the subjective humanism of the existentialist in 1961 Emmanuel Levinas published his work totality infinity and Levy nos is someone who straddled these two generations in a sense of the same age as Sartre in the existentialist but someone's whose work actually created a real a real break in 61 between a certain way of understanding Heidegger and phenomenology and another way that was to come after that in 63 Michel Foucault published cogito in the history of madness also a very important work that took issue with the primacy of the subject and also the primacy of reason now I bring up the single these two out because Dario Dahl wrote very important critiques of each of these now the the critique of Foucault would ultimately break his friendship with Foucault and would be become a wedge between them for the rest of their lives the critique of of leve NOS interestingly enough brought them closer together although I'd say the critique of leve NOS is a more devastating critique than the one of Foucault but age and difference.i many reasons why this may be but the two essays turned out to really bring Derrida into the public eye and make him a more prominent figure and I think the the critique of leve NOS violence in metaphysics that he wrote in 64 is still considered one of the most important works of his early if not hit all of his career in 65 he took over for lui all to ser at the occult normal superior and he taught there until 1984 in 1966 he came the United States for this very important conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University he was accompanied by other thinkers like Lacan and I believe hip elite was there and this first brought what came to be known as French Thea to the United States but I'd have to say that 1967 you know is this movie called the year Punk broke but this is 1967 is the year the dairy dog really broke publishing three books almost just one right after the other of Gromit ology writing indifference which has essays from 59 to 67 and speech and phenomenon and in these works principally in AB Gromit ology he deconstructed structuralism by arguing that the relation of the signified and signifier is not a neutral coupling but privileges the speaking voice over the written artifact now we'll get into some of the details of what that means to upset that binary there but the key here is that he looked to two structuralism and this is a conundrum for intellectual historians because as it turns out structuralism and post-structuralism happened at almost the exact same time so it makes it hard to have a nice there was structural and there was post structuralism structuralism came with this renewed interest in saucer and the the work of others claude lévi-strauss but post structuralism with Foucault and Derrida offering critiques that basically inhabited structuralism but broke them apart in certain ways happened at the same time that the issue for Derrida was this privileges Beach overriding and it turns out this privileges of speech overriding for Derrida is also a privilege apresentava lodging of presence over absence he talks about in several ways one is through this term logo centrism now logo centrism is this sense that speech is first and foremost and the dominant mode of discourse and logo centrism Derrida is going to tell us is in fact the the key piece to the history of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition it's a tradition that will always privilege speech over writing because it privileges presence over absence as it turns out he extends this if you'll pardon the pun to say that it also privileges privileges the masculine / the feminine because it's the masculine and here you can see a relation with Lacan the masculine that authorizes the spoken word that backs up the spoken word and this is where he comes to the term fallow go centrism the phallus and here again you see a certain presence/absence dichotomy that he sets up the presence of the phallus holds more weight is more powerful holds authority and so in these different terms at this time he sought to upset what he considered a tradition of metaphysics the the to his mind began with Plato and Socrates and one way to think about this is to think about the Plato's Socratic dialogues right so what happens in the Socratic dialogues well they're they're books right you can read them but what happens when you're reading them when you're reading them it's actually Socrates authorizing each of his words it's sort of saying at least I think to dairy dollars mind what you know what what would Socrates say to these arguments well Howard soccer stays defend himself against me saying these things about about his philosophy well BAM that's exactly what he does in these dialogues Socrates defends his position all the way through and so Derrida hinges on this moment to say look that's that's an example of the privileges of speech even in the written text it is the speech and the person the presence the Socrates that counts that holds more weight by destabilizing the author by destabilizing the author Derrida is able to get into a different kind of reading of the text or maybe he destabilizes the author by privilege intact and then you can start to see how these are going to start to to roll and fold into each other which is one of the the aspects of deconstruction people will find both seductive and maddening and sometimes people just decides it's too much or that it becomes gobbledygook and I guess at times it can but this is the arrival of deconstruction as a methodology and we'll talk about it specifically presently soon no I think we will in the 1970s having established himself he sought to actually apply his interest in poetry and literature and disruptive forms of writing to concretize the destabilizing rhetorical style he developed in the 1960s and he did this in a couple works one is this text and claw from 1974 where he provided two columns of text on the right is a text about John janay on the left he writes about Hegel in this he's actually painstakingly to his mind lining up these two arguments they they coincide and disrupt they work together they're not arbitrary and in an interesting interview he did say that if he had sufficient computer technology at that time he probably would have found the project uninteresting so there's something interesting about the performative a or two in the postcard from Socrates to Freud and Beyond from 1980 the first 250 pages are letters well they're letters written to who he doesn't say to who about what about myriad things and in the introduction he actually says I don't even know if the reader can can can actually sustain or say they uses this greater I don't know if the the the the reader can stand to even read them maybe they should just go to page 250 and start but again he's he's goading the reader into these letters and actually within these letters there's all sorts of interesting things going on but they're not going on in a kind of any kind of traditional philosophical argument their letters in 1983 he took a post at the occulta hotel - Jean Ciel sociale this is a Research Institute but where you have graduate students and he stayed there for the remainder of his teaching life that year he also founded something called the College Internacional de philosophie in Paris and he did this precisely to create a place where people could try to do experimental philosophy where thinkers could come philosophers and non philosophers alike to share ideas he wanted to be in turn Nacional mostly he wanted it to be outside of the French academic structure and that institution is still around today and one thing I could say with pride is that Wesleyan is the the only undergraduate institution that has a reciprocal relations whereby our students who go to Paris can take courses for credit at the college intern asked you know if you're low fee and so that's something that I I think it's pretty cool and I hope we manage to continue and sustain I hope some of you if you're taking France or in your post Wesleyan career will find your way there he built on his popularity in the US and his increasing popularity worldwide to teach at places like Yale certainly Johns Hopkins Cornell but he ultimately took a full-time well not full-time it was a a full professorship a post at humanities of you as a professor of humanities at UC Irvine and would lecture there every fall and then he took a post at NYU where he would go for the winter and in the spring he would spend in Paris and so any of you who want to be an academic this is what you aspired to to him Irvine New York Paris the 80s were also a time of sustained engage much to say reengagement with the work of Martin Heidegger but also with the related political controversy about the Heidegger affair there was a huge Heidegger affair in 1987 in France and then it spread the United States in which dairy dog was implicated because some of the claims of the book by Victor farias was that Heidegger's philosophy was was a Nazi a national socialist philosophy through and through and that thinkers like Derrida in fact were secret acolytes who were sort of a Trojan horse handing out this fascist akin national socialistic and dangerous material right and left and he found himself having to defend himself against these claims and this led to a big dust-up in the pages of the New York Review of Books with the intellectual historian Richard Rowland over a translation of an interview that Derrida gave the Wolin translated and put into a book called the Heidegger controversy and this then led to a lot of people taking sides for or against Derrida that was a great distraction of the work he was actually doing at the moment but had a lasting impact and we can talk about this later if you like the 90s by then dairy dog was one of the most famous and controversial philosophers in the world and it was during this decade that he became increasingly concerned or I should say more explicitly concerned with issues of politics ethics and religion and he came out with a series of books very important books force of law where he dealt with the question of justice specters of Marx where he engaged the question of politics politics of friendship where he introduced this an issue called about hospitality in the relation of hospitality the other heading where he engaged the the the place and identity and role of Europe in the world an archive fever where he sought to Andheri interrogate how we understand what we call tradition and this emphasis coincided with an increasing engagement with the works of Emmanuel Levinas and then questions of his own identity actually when I say leve NOS i look at this and I realized that it's strikingly similar to what the Talmud looks like hmm to reflect upon that in the last four years of his life he continued to write lecture and publish but also to reflect on his work as a whole and here I have some text from the last interview he gave in 2004 and so I wanted to read this to you and then we'll drop into the discussion of deconstruction so he's talking about his generation about this cohort of thinkers I discussed he says I thereby designate metonymically an ethics of writing and thinking that is in transit transit n't I would even say incorruptible without concession even with regard to philosophy and ethics of writing which will not allow us to succumb to public opinion the media or the phantasm of an intimidating readership who seeks to frighten or force us to simplify or repress our work thus the strict taste for subtlety paradox and a pariah this predilection also a fundamental that has to be saved or reborn at all costs today that responsibility is critical and so of course this could be read in in two ways and in one sense it it can be seen as evidence of a kind of megalomaniac who doesn't want to make himself clear and thus is going to valorize the the need to make everything as complicated as he can and of course there are those who took this quote exactly as that now it can also be read as a as a person whose wants to the kind of dairy das last stand that the that in fact it's true that I've always sought to complicate things it's true that I've always gone to the places that are most difficult and I haven't always been able to get out of those places why because according to Dairy da you can't get out you can't get out of those places you need to see where those places exist especially with the most important questions and taken that way which i think is the way dairy dawood the generous reading will all go with that you realize that the one of dairy does goals from his early work through is to get to the place not intuitively you would think where things make sense to the but to the place where things are better yet where language stops making sense and the means to do this to get to that place where language stops making sense is deconstruction so so here's the part where we actually got to get into deconstruction deconstruct it for me is a bit of a pet peeve because I teach here at at Wesleyan University or I go and I give lectures places and I hear people telling me about all the things that they're deconstructing or how this is going to get deconstructed or let me deconstruct this for lack of you construct that for you and and and I start to go nuts because a deconstruction is a specific rhetorical technique and you can like it or not like it but it isn't simply a close reading of the text it right it's not simply taking a text apart I mean that's that's great to be able to do that but that actually isn't what dairy doll or Paul Daman or our various others are talking about and you know the other day I was just watching I was at the airport and they had ESPN and I was watching a football commentator and he told us how he was going to deconstruct a run by tim tebow and i thought well that would be really cool if he did it right that would be a really any because I bet the offense/defense thing info but there's a lot that's interesting there we we just had this the display right about masculinity and in sport that was here at the CFA and so my guess is there's a lot to do there but that's that's not what they were doing so what when you talk about a deconstruction it's a text based technique which seeks to demonstrate that seemingly neutral binary equations inserted in an argument or statement are not neutral at all that there's an agenda at play with these binary terms in a traditional opposition we have not a peaceful coexistence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy one of the terms dominates the other occupies a commanding position over the other and so examples might be good bad male-female madness reason but you could think of others that seem more abstract like signifier signified or nature culture in deconstruction one looks to the text and specifically to the text and carefully reads the argument to locate moments when the hierarchy reverses betrays or inverts itself the place where the binary distinction breaks down and that's the first move of doing a deconstruction of isolating that place where the distinction breaks down and we'll try to do that we'll try and demonstrate that now it's really important to know because this is the the great problem of the truncated deconstruction that this is not to permanently invert the hierarchy because to do that is simply to have a different term commanding a binary right so it's not a matter of saying well good and bad let's make bad over good because that is doing the exact same thing there's not an actual questioning there you don't actually see the play between the two it's to expose the arbitrary or constructed nature of that hierarchy that's the goal the second move is to locate a moment where the seemingly dependent term turns out to be foundational for the dominant term right so that you what you thought was subservient to one actually turns out to be the ground on which that other term is standing although it as you can see this is gonna start to flip around around so let's let's try to make this happen and I want to do so by by an experiment here my you know I should make you all sign a release or something by an experiment because I'm gonna do something that that first of all year ago I would hate but but more important I'm I'm going to to break a rule us well kind of a rule of deconstruction because while I'm gonna first go through this text the the the text of Derrida where this deconstruction happens about point line and plane I'm then going to show you a little animated piece I constructed to try to make it more clear in terms of a visual deikun struggle aid to see how this deconstruction works so well both see the way the dairy doll works in a kind of with an opacity of language or a proclivity for language that can be dense and then I'm going to try and get out of that to use this aid but you have to remember the deconstruction is this literary or textual technique so in a way I'm I'm fudging it so you can you can take me to that later but we'll see whether this this does what I want it to do or whether this is the the mad machinations of a reductionist so so what I want to look at is a text by Derrida about Martin Heidegger this text from 68 called note from we see and Gramm note from a note on being in time and already you're looking at this and in this text Derry da wants to deconstruct all of Heidegger's being in time by looking at one footnote one specific footnote that will allow him to show how Heidegger doesn't break with the tradition of metaphysics that privileges presence / absence but in fact conserves this privileges of presence / absence in the way he inserts being into time secretly inserts being into time now I'm not going to do all that if you want to slog through that with me you'll have to do either my 20 century intellectual history classes or maybe my post-modernism with historical intent but what we'll do is start here and before we get into just the discrete area of the point line playing so that's where we're going to focus on this little section I first want to show the opening to that section he says at least twice Heidegger reminds us Hegel paraphrased Aristotle's physics for by analyzing time and a philosophy of nature in the yenna logic and I don't do this to hammer you over the head with Derrida reading Heidegger reading Hegel reading Aristotle although that of course is part of what I wanted to have happen but in fact to explicate a often cited sometimes understood sometimes not phrase of Derry Dawes there is nothing outside the text so some take this to say that there's only the text that's all there can be some dairy Dahl himself later said no in fact what I'm saying is there's nothing outside the text it's all context is there's no inside or outside to the text what you see here actually is an interesting indication of how this works in his reading of deconstruction we have one footnote in the one footnote you have Heidegger Heidegger wants to remind us about Hegel and the way Hegel paraphrases Aristotle and this gives Derrida license to work through Heidegger and through Hegel and through Aristotle in the service of this deconstruction in fact he's in some ways way outside the text all because he's way inside the text and you can see how that distinction between inside and outside has been blurred here he gets so far inside the text that he gets himself way outside it also is interesting because of the way he talks about inhabiting traditions because of course Hegel is going to inhabit in an inhabiting change the Aristotelian tradition and Heidegger is going to do the same with Hegel and then of course the extrapolation is the Derrida will do the same and that we now are doing the same with him and so on and so far this is performance of interpretation that'sa that's a different lecture okay so let's try to do this let's start here the point so we're gonna start with a point it's very simple we're going to a point we're gonna do a line we're gonna do a plane that's all it seems very simple so let's start the point is the space that does not take up space the place that does not take place its suppressants and replaces the place it takes the place of the space that it negates and conserves its spacially negates space it is the first determination of space clear right or maybe not like not at all we've already been set up with something that is intentionally not clear now this is Derrida paraphrasing Hegel from the encyclopedia which of course is cited by Heidegger and what's happening here is we want he wants to talk about this issue of presence and absence by talking about the relation of the way a point as a differentiated moment of space comes to it to coexist will say with undifferentiated space differentiated space an undifferentiated space and so actually I'll leave it at that and when we come to the animation I'll I'll come back to this text but already here we see it's very hard to tell we have we have a point that's a space but it's also doesn't take up space and so we we've already blurred what might be the present here and what might be the absent in the first statement about what the point is all right so he then moves to the line and here again he's paraphrasing hazel the negation of negation because if you want to think in one way that point right so if we think of a this sort of huge undifferentiated space the point is going to negate a certain amount of that space just by it's pointless right so so it negates that certain so we could think of it as a negation of the in differentiated space by making it differentiated its negated in difference if you will in differentiation so the negation of it gets worse the negation of negation the spatial negation of the point is the line the point negates and retains itself extends and sustains itself lifts itself by alpha bung so he uses releve to translate alpha bung but what are we in English we say what sublimation stably she is that right simply she so it it gathers into itself so it not only negates it but it brings it into itself as well lifts itself into the line which thus constitutes the truth of the point and so here if you might imagine so we think of this line right and again this will get maybe we get easier we think of this line in this undifferentiated space but this line isn't just right here actually if I start thinking of it this way it goes on to infinity and of course by that it actually isn't aligned at all but it's a series of points which in fact it's not a point but a line and and in a way the point becomes negated by the line this is why the line is the truth of the point okay so stay with me here no we're gonna get through this it gets it's worse than it gets better but I if nothing else see you'll see some of the language that Derrida prefers to work with he he likes to make it complicated and of course there are some people who just throw it out immediately and others like me who's somehow relish these mental acrobatics okay so now we come to the plane we had our point we have our line now we have a plane according to the same process by Alfa bung by this lifting into and negation of negation the truth of the line is the plane and so of course here now we have our line but our line isn't just a line it's a series of points that also extend out to infinity so if you turn it you have a plane and here he's actually quoting a Hegel the line consequently passes into the plane which on the one hand is a determinate nough supposed to line in point and so surface simply as such this is to say if if you have a plane it just takes up everything and so there is no line or point within it what so level but on the other hand it is thus ablated negation of space it is thus restoration of the spatial totality which now contains the negative moment within itself so so while I'm not expecting that anyone actually is is there to a moment of clarity I we'll tell you that this in fact is the moment where the hierarchical distinction between presence and absence between the differentiated and in differentiated starts to break down the one is starting to be the other and now because you're all looking at me perplexed as though I've just been I don't know it's speaking in some incomprehensible barbar language which perhaps I have but let's see if we can do this in a non linguistic way well it'll require a little linguistics here so so let me start with our point and so we have Oh our point is moving away on me our point became a line okay hold on let's reel this back so anyone ever done a PowerPoint presentation that involves moving parts that's actually gone off without a hitch I've never seen one but I believe they exist okay so we have our point and our point let's let's think of it this way we're gonna make it real simple in here I'm gonna I'm gonna break away a little bit we're gonna say that we're in a world of total absence here right so that's not gonna help is it because the points gonna stay on my hand the points on my hand it's not on the screen I'm gonna put the point on the screen right so in that world of absence we now have our point our point though is not simply a point because as we said that point extend extends out what stems a long way it's going to extend out and if we look at it we turn it we see in fact that point is a line right and now we have to imagine the line goes all the way on forever and ever no I didn't do it like that because I want you to see something else about our friend the point out the point has been conserved in the line but for our purposes it's been negated right it's in there somewhere at that point but now at least there's we have the truth is that it's the line and the line is the presence in this again in this vast absence okay so but we also know that our line is not merely a line because it's comprised of all these points that extend out the other way and that this line is in fact going to turn into if we twist it a little bit just a little bit there it's gonna become a plane and if we turn that plane over we're gonna find out that it's going to take up space right so now we have what we could consider to be a full presence right a total presence here this is all presence or it could be now if we think about it it could be all absence again now we could go either way at this point right this could be all presence and this could be a little bit of absence that we have here and so now we define the point in terms of absence and not presence however this is still our differentiated space in relation to undifferentiated space okay well then of course we know the same thing about this right if we turn it it's a line and if we turn it again it turns out to be a plane and if we turn that plane here we have it again undifferentiated until such a time as we decide to put a point in it right and so here what's happened is what was present and what was absent or what is present and what is it absent has become undecidable at least via the rhetoric provided us by Derrida via Heidegger via Hegel via Aristotle or if you want to believe my little a magic lantern show here the important thing is to notice the way that at the beginning we tried to privilege a little bit of presence here in a whole sea of absence and along the way we came to find that once we had privileged it so much we had privileged it so much that it took up the whole screen that when we poked in the absence that actually became the demarcation of presence and of course then we were able to repeat it again so we were able to turn it over and of course I could run it backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards in perpetuity and what's going to end up happening in fact is that we have inverted present and absent so now that we've rendered it in a way and is undecidable and so now we can come to this last of the torturous portion of the the program where we find out that in fact spatialization equals d spatialization they become the same thing or it's impossible to tell one from the other spatialization the accomplishment of the essence of spatialization is ad spatialization and vice versa and vice versa this movement of the production of the surface as the concrete totality of space is circular and reversible the indifferent abstraction is indifferent ly the founding principle and the end of the circle etc okay so previously we were able to show how the one and the other were inverted and now we see this is the second part how the one stands on the other and on the other and on the other so in terms the terms of presence and absence have broken down or at least they become indeterminate undecidable the one rests upon the other deconstruction destabilizes the oppositional categories and this brings undecidability into play the undecidability then exposes the internal chaos of logical reason forcing us to rethink why we privilege one or the other or how we privilege one or the other or the ways that we don't and Derrida plays a lot with these undecidable in in various texts there's some that are particularly important and and I'm not gonna have time to go into them because I look at the time I realize I'm quickly running out of time Gary's laughing because I never seem to have the time to do anything short for Plato he talks about the pharmacon neither remedy nor poison neither good nor evil Rousseau he talks about the supplement which is neither a more nor less and with malar may he talks about the hymen either inside nor outside either confusion or distinction and he says that all of these terms cross out opposition from inside and outside so Derrida is not interested in returning to a true meaning you talk here a lot of talk about him try to uncover the trace but it's not that he's trying to get to an origin or trying to get back to a specific place in fact he thinks that you probably he knows to his mind you're never going to get back to that place we're always trying to get there we find a trace and we search it back and we search it back but that's not the interest the interest is the way that these constructs are built and unbuilt and to his mind this then destroys the illusion of any kind of imperative statement and it never ends of course even that as a kind of imperative statement is riped then be questioned and so there's a ceaseless 'no stew it now looking back to the intellectual biography we can loosely track three ways in which the deconstructive strategy was deployed by Derrida the first is a genealogical deployment interested in the history of a concept such as geometry writing justice the second is a political or ethical deployment that seeks to demonstrate and confront a historical or trans historical paradoxes and a per Ria's things that never quite work and that we gloss over one way or the other or try to put one on top of the other but in fact that they are in conflict in perpetuity as it were and then finally deconstruction as a means to comprehend identity as the non coincidence of self and of course this is a different one a difficult one this is where the term difference comes into play because it conserves both difference the way we're distinct but also this deferral this way in fact that that with time inserted that it's in being distinct we're not singular in the sense that we are stable and fixed identity in fact our distinction in a way is deferred and always yet to be determined he also used it in the term of the Murano which i think is one of his most interesting constructs that he uses more and more in his later texts and the Morano is is the the secret the crypto-jew and so the Muranos were were Jews in Spain who at some point their family had converted had been forced to convert to Christianity but they conserved certain ritualistic aspects of Judaism but the part that interest dairy does the way that the Murano doesn't actually know that they are a Murano this is to say they don't know why they go down into the basement and light the candles on Friday they don't know why they have certain dietary restrictions they have no actual cognizant realization of their identity and yet their identity is part of what makes them what they are however if you tell someone if someone discovers they are a Murano then they are no longer Murano because once the secret is out there a former Murano there a Jew there a convert they could be many things but the one thing they're not is a Murano and and Darrell I like to say this is this is a indicative of a kind of constitutive de symmetry in which the thing that you are in a way can never be known to you and this is always yet to be determined there's a play in which the the Murano is always to come this identity is always to come and in fact is never to be determined in the case of the Murano all of these different ways that Gerry deploys deconstruction of course overlap and imply one another and there are ways in which you can see them as being incredibly fruitful you can use them incredibly playful but also for many people they consider them incredibly wasteful there's a lot of energy deployed and a lot of ink spilled of course but what is to be gained and of course whether that's the right question is a good question I mean is it about gaining something I'm not sure but but I do know that at least since the beginning of this last century this 21st century there has been a trending away from the sort of theory with which Derrida is associated and so of course this is probably of interest to all of you now there are valid reasons for this and some of them I would say and people have said are self-inflicted wounds obviously there's all sorts of cautionary tales about deconstruction and and all sorts of theories there's the danger of a kind of relativism because of an endless critique that ends only in complacent irony or stasis there's the danger of the truncated deconstruction I discussed before that simply invert established hierarchies in favor of the previously subordinated one there's also this sense that theory in all of these variants that we've talked about at least in the current variants simply cannot provide a prescription of what is to be done except for in a kind of vague Marxist way and all of these gained force and steam and I think they had a lot of valid targets but it started to take on the force of a kind of wave of an anti theoretical wave we saw numerous works coming out in the the the this last ten years but probably in the first five years 2000 2005 pronouncing the end of post-modernism the end or death of the linguistic turn the the finally were finished with French Theory the death of deconstruction and at the same time we saw a desire to re-emphasize the importance of agency the primacy of experience of memory testimony most recently the importance of presence of actually material things enough with interpretation let's get to concrete pericle meaning and so you saw a lot of this and of course I won't stand here and say let's let's not do that that that's something that of course we all need to do but but the dairy dog that I have on my back shoulder is saying careful because of course all these things imply all of the pitfalls of the metaphysical tradition and of logo centrism perhaps even fallow logo centrism and so careful careful before we we we throw this all out now there are lots of good informed critiques of deconstruction some better than others but one could think of figures like bruno latour hans Goom Brecht i'll sail in hunt because i like lynn hunt a lot although i don't agree at all with her her the the deconstruction part of her argument but what's more the death of Derrida in 2004 coincided with the height of this trend and I'll tell one anecdote and then I'll I'll finish up at the Society for French historical studies about three years ago they had a this plenary final session where you had these various eminence who worked in French history and French literature and French thought and they literally spent 90 minutes dancing on the graves of leotard Foucault and Derry da joyously proclaiming the end of this and how we can finally take French historical studies whatever that amorphous term means back from wherever the hell it had been and this is finally the dawn of a time we can do real work and of course it was an amazing moment because half the people in the audience were sort of shocked the other half I guess where I'm whether a quarter were ambivalence and one-quarter were absolutely ecstatic about it but it was this very strange moment where you realize this incredible hostility toward this movement and and the force of it but it was also fascinating because this was a moment where I really felt guided by Derrida zone specters of Marx and his fascination for the ghosts because of course by invoking or convoking these specters in this way all of these graduate students in the audience immediately started running out to start finding out or what the hell did these guys do that pissed off these people on the podium so much and so we started conjuring them back again well there's another way in which the the return of Derrida and and the revenant this ghost is key it's a key reason why we now see the spectre of deconstruction and of Derrida popping up in the realm of history and there's there's two books a book by Dana Hollander recently on rosensweig and and and dari Dodd said it's a very historical work and then there's one that just came out like yesterday called the young Derry da by a guy named Edward baring that I read that's it's a really interesting book but of course it's fascinating that it's going on here in history because with the death of deconstruction facilitated by the death of Derry da one can now revisit it's historical life it is a past artifact to be reconstituted so as to reconstruct its impact and implant the narrative of its influence or lack thereof but by disturbing the remains by revisiting deconstruction we also raise it from the dead and bring it back to inhabit the present so here we'll end by returning to this this quote for us today I think we can look to dari DAWs words not as some sort of Orthodoxy order of derision deconstruction I think that would be a mistake but to imagine the ways that social cultural and critical theory in all of their variants can be powerful intellectual engines of complex critical engagement now I can't tell you that this is an engine for good or for progress or even for action this would be hypocritical to do so because of course part of what is that stake is trying to figure out what it means when we decide something is good or something is progressive or even what it means when we take action but it can serve to question and reimagine and I do think we undervalue imagination these days to reimagine the grounds upon which we make such choices about things like the good about progress about action what are the fascinating and maddening aspects of deconstruction as critique is that it does not end and some of you are thinking like this lecture however to give but one example justice for Derrida is never to be achieved and I don't believe that that means that it's something we shouldn't aspire to or try to do that we should throw up our hands I think for Derrida this means it's something towards which we must always work justice is never done on the day it's done we're not striving toward justice in any more and therefore we're acting in justly it's something toward which we must always work and we must always work critically likewise social cultural and critical theory never ends because there is always more work to be done and I'll end with this last quote from Dara Dawes last lecture in regard to social critical cultural and critical theory I would say today that responsibility is critical thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 163,369

Rating: 4.8189945 out of 5

Keywords: Jacques Derrida (Author), Derrida, Binary Opposition, Literature, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Social Theory, Semiotics, Relativism, Literary Theory, Skepticism, History, Free Play, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, Continental Philosophy, Anti-Realism, Post-Structuralism, Différance, Post-Modern, Postmodern, Metaphysics, 20th-Century Philosophy, Hermeneutics, Signifier, Hegel, Philosophy, Epistemology, Difference, Phenomenology, Foucault, Semiology, Political Philosophy, Language, Heidegger

Id: N8BsnfjtNCg

Length: 56min 3sec (3363 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2013