Rick Roderick on Derrida - The Ends of Man [full length]

in this lecture we're going to do something that from the viewpoint of many people's just simply outrageous we're going to move from our two figures who at least have some things in common and that's a Foucault and Habra mas both of whom deal with the problems of what I've called modernity and I hope that word hasn't thrown you too bad it's not such an abstract word it means the processes by which factories were instituted based on the division of labor and the processes by which institutions came to be rationalized rule governed across the whole terrain of our social life with few exceptions that's the process that I've been referring to is modernity and far from being abstract it's a part of our everyday everyday life it's called work it's called hooking up the telephone it's called applying for a job it's called dealing with the IRS this is modernity so don't get lost in the fanciness of the word that's modernity I've argued that it has these pathologies Foucault has argued inside them we've also argued that it has an upside and I mentioned in an earlier lecture that it's better to have a toothache in the modern world than before it's also better I mean across a whole spectrum of medical problems and other kinds it's probably better now than it was then certainly if you want to get from here to a California it's better now because it's much faster although even that's probably debatable in any case with that was a little bit of type of the other lectures let me begin with this outrageous attempt to try to deal with perhaps one of the trickiest and strangest philosophers if he is a philosopher around today and that's Jacque Derrida I think his name has become synonymous with a of evil among many analytic American logic chopping philosophers I mean Derrida is responsible in many ways for deconstruction that dreaded enemy that has invaded our literary departments that according to popular mythology tells us that any way to read a book is as good as any other that there's nothing outside books that we're always reading and every reading is a miss reading and so on in my view Dara DA believes none of these things that I've just outlined I'm trying to give you the popular demonizing mythology about Derrida I've brought in just one of his books today to show you but he's written many this is margins of philosophy its title is very significant for derrida's project which is to examine philosophy as a broad long-standing cultural institution stretching back to the Greeks and to try to do so in a framework that reminds us that philosophy so understood is a the product of indo-european languages to the extent that we know what that phrase means and the product of Western civilization it is not an eternal project in the mind of God you know but of a project with a certain materiality a certain history and that many of the most interesting things that we will find out about philosophy won't be from reading it badly or from saying any reading of a book by philosophers as good as any other but will be by paying attention to the very things the philosopher tried to repress in his text the things that the philosopher tried to put on the margin as it were of the text of philosophy the things that the philosopher wished to exclude by drawing our attention to these Derrida in some ways is like Freud the Freud wanted to investigate things like slips of the tongue jokes in the relation to the unconscious and so on in a wave Derrida meta philosophical project is to investigate philosophies slips of the tongue philosophies unconscious witticisms and so on so this is not an unworthy project and it is rooted in a profound concern with an earlier figure that we discussed it not nearly enough linked and I won't have nearly enough time to do justice to Derrida now I just want if I can dispel a few myths about him I will have done some good in the world because I even a brief meeting with me convinced me that he was just a fairly jolly French person and certainly not out to tear up the American University system and that the image by right wing lunatics conjured up of lesbian deconstruction literary critics dancing at Brown University burning Chaucer and Shakespeare is utterly a fantasy of paranoid dimensions that surpasses anything that the John Birch Society ever dreamed up Derrida is an academic he is a very careful reader and he has some unorthodox views about language and about the history of philosophy and since I have at least one very good friend who knows his work well I will draw on some of Lewis Mackie's remarks today and I will also draw on the Americanized version of Derrida that has been presented to us by Richard Rorty now I'm not saying Rory fully subscribes to everything Derrida sails but Rory is one of his American admirers to the extent that he is that is as it were put Rorty in the enemy camp as well which he has too many analytics and positivist minded philosophers rardy is one of the enemy it's kind of hard since Rory's close his philosophical analog would be doing in a way 'is he is a very American and in certain ways Derrida is more American than the Brits that we use as our models for much of the analytic philosophy we do I'll try to explain that as I go along ok let me give you something that I was asked for by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who was covering the debate over deconstruction and he went what the hell is this stuff anyway so this is this side this 45 minute lecture to an hour will be an attempt to answer that reporters blunt question what the hell is this stuff anyway that's causing so much trouble I'm going to try to answer that well deconstruction as a term originates in Heidegger's project that I've already discussed where I said that that Heidegger wanted to perform a deconstruction of metaphysics a deconstruction of it not a destruction but a deconstruction in other words to sort of dig through it underneath it to read it in such a way that he could uncover in some sense the hidden history of being now as his project per get progressed and that's being with a capital B I just used as Heidegger's project progressed it became more and more obvious to him that it was futile that being is being with the big B is blank was a blank that was going to be difficult to fill in so in the very light Heidegger when he wrote the word being he drew a line through it like that would help he had wrought the word where he could read it but he'd draw a line through it which he called writing being under eraser now the point of that was this this is its connection to modernity and the things we've been discussing including the self in the medieval period beings entities like us found our meaning and be and ultimately in the being the highest being in fact philosophers I sometimes think when they use the word being with a big B means something like God but just aren't straightforward enough to say it it certainly seems I mean in a certain way that seems to be the case of well Derrida is a step beyond Heidegger Derrida has noticed as one could hardly fail to notice that the history of Western metaphysics has been filled with the attempts to answer the question being is blank and to fill in the blank and if you follow the history of Western metaphysics being is the Demiurge o spirit being is God being is whatever is uncovered by the empirical science being a sciences being is this being is non-existent whatever we've tried to fill in the blank with we have not yet reached closure that's why I said that philosophy is a funny endeavor it has a 2500 year history of failure and yet it continues so obviously it's not quite in the spirit of capitalism to engage this enterprise it's a long time to run a failing business 2,500 years Derrida is noticed that this won't this won't be this blank can't be filled in being is can't be filled in the blank bull be filled can't be filled in why not I mean we want an argument we don't want this I mean the first thing is that we've noticed that no one's ever successfully filled it in that's the first thing we notice that you know the history of philosophy is not yet presented us with final wisdom total coverage and ultimate truth we know that so that's step one is to know that deconstructive readings try to work this out in detail case by case you know different attempts to answer it and how they fail to answer it and so deconstructive readings are not a single technique even a special set of techniques they're more like housework see philosophy is not like building a house where you start with a firm foundation and build it up and you're finished and you walk off and that's philosophy philosophy under the heading of deconstruction is housework which means every day the floors to be swept again the dishes have to be done again and I'll be damned the next day it's just like that again and it's just like that again and it's just like that again so deconstruction if I wanted to compare it as a practice to some other practice it would be housework it doesn't get finished in fact that is at the heart of I think the best of philosophy and the late 20th century is the idea that it's not getting finished and it can't be why and philosophers failed to answer the question being as blank to fill in the blank what is being with a capital B well Dara Dodds take on metaphysics as I say is this insight that they failed to answer the question but he also has a certain take on language it's not exactly a theory of language because Dada thinks one of those is still to be completed in it's still part the language we speak now is still part of our metaphysical heritage I mean we use metaphysical phrases all the time even when we don't think we do we say that horse appears to me to be lying and then we've invoked you know the concept of appearance with its long philosophical history or you can be a baseball scout and say that kid has the potential to hit 300 and now we've invoked the metaphysical language of potentiality with its two hundred two thousand and five hundred year history so for Derrida our language is chipped through with metaphysical moments fragments in our languages no way around it and in that sense starid I certainly wouldn't say that he has avoided metaphysics the reason he wouldn't say that is that he speaks a language what he wants to do is to get a better [ __ ] on why the language can't solve the problem that is central to metaphysics and ontology the problem of answering the question of what is being you know now here's the type it is the nature of language and Derrida takes it to be something quite other language to be quite other than what many many other philosophers and linguists take it to be and this is going to be very difficult to do in a short time but I'm going to try for Derrida our language is not and I live to do this through a series of negations first language is not constituted by reference which is a standard positivist account in other words what constitutes reference would be I used the word horse to refer to the horse of course that makes it sound as though what would constitute my talk that it refers mainly to the world would be that I am speaking about some present horse my word stands for that horse now you may have noticed there's no horse up here with me Derrida has noticed that words do not stand for things they stand in for them let me make that distinction again words do not stand for things they stand in for them the word that the noun horse is convenient like the noun fly the noun potato or the word potato chip the phrase cow chip the name Neil Bush because I have all these words I don't have to carry a kit bag of all the entities in the universe to point to when I talk I mean in other words the theory of reference makes it think make us think as though what's referred to has to have a kind of presence Derrida as usual engages in and this is a usual deconstructed practice a kind of reversal interestingly enough that word gets its meaning not from the presence of the horse but from his absence now it also doesn't get its meaning in isolation words are not atomic bits of anything words are part of systems of speech let me try to make that clear the way Dara Dahl looks at it systems of language let me take chess as an example a famous example one years by Vidkun Stein if I take a pawn off the chessboard and just put it here you'll still know that it's a pawn but it won't be able to make any pawn moves to make the right moves it will have to be on a chess board and deployed in a game in other words there will be conditions within which it will make sense to move the pawn to squares forward one of them won't be to set the pawn on this thing and say I'm going to squares forward because looking ahead of me I don't know what would count is that a square in other words it's just not the way the game is played with systems of languages they are constituted by the way the words work in these sets of constitutive rules which frequently overlapping or holistic for that system to work the objects so referred to do not have to be present in fact I just gave you tried to give you an example in which I pointed out that is the absences of objects that make the use of nouns and language is interesting that's fascinating that we can come in here and discuss an entire basketball series without having Charles Barkley or anyone present this is an indication that absence is one of the constitutive features of language another important thing to remember is this I don't want to commit the bad abstraction to which philosophy has fallen victim so often by treating language as something other than the following sets of things it is a system but it isn't it has a materiality language is phonetic sounds that can be heard in finite links measured and so on and it is marks sensible marks on paper and here we will attack another view of language I mean again a lot of Darin dolls remarks are negative concerning other views of language just like reference couldn't be what gives our words their meanings and our uses of them and so on neither can intentionality of speaker now let me try to use one of their dolls famous examples I draw up a grocery list for my wife I write it down in sensible marks these are the things we need toilet paper we need stuff for the kids you know this came in and then of course cash so that we can buy fast food for supper standard way of shopping I leave the grocery list and I drive away and I'm killed utterly I've run over by a bus flattened like a tortilla my wife comes in and can my message function in my radical absence yes she can still go to the store buy the kids food and maybe only later will they notice where's dad and then they hear on the news you know overweight philosopher flattened by truck tortilla it those signs can work in my radical absence now can they work if I had no intention ality at all and writing them yes suppose I wrote them three months ago with the intention alright not well let me make it even a simple example suppose I wrote them that afternoon with the intention of having my wife leave the house so I could call a lover would that would that make the list ineffective because my intention was misunderstood no many philosophers have wanted to tie meaning to what the speaker and our language user intends but words have their functions they're to use Derrida's phrase they're disseminating meanings apart from those intentions now let's don't caricature his client this does not mean that we cannot intend we can but it means we cannot fix meaning by our intentions this is very important when we read a text by an arthur in philosophy because we're frequently led to ask the question what did he intend to say and a deconstructive reading will lead us in the direction of not what did he intend to say but what are these physical marks how can I interpret these physical marks to give to make that to use that example and that by the way is an anti hermeneutic remark it's a remark sort of against what might be called the idea that there could be the right interpretation this is this is another important part of Derrida take on language and language practices the idea that there could be the right interpretation in a way there's no more powerful idea in the discipline of philosophy than the idea that there can be the right interpretation after all it's that idea that allows us to give our students B's and C's as opposed to the eyes we would make if we had written the paper it's what keeps us it seems continually reading Aristotle and so on in order to get them right finally Derrida makes the outrageous claim that in the last analysis there is no such thing as the right reading the right interpretation there is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end good books really great texts do not cut off interpretation they lead to multiple interpretations great examples of this would be the Bible which I think it's pretty obvious has not yet reached closure on interpretation you know I grew up in a community where they were they were Baptists Methodists Church of Christ took me a while to get into the city and meet Jewish people Muslims others became clear to me that reading the Old Testament was difficult to come up with the right interpretation and what was wrong was the very idea that there could be the right interpretation now the converse is the claim that people find outrageous but it's not made by Derrida that means since there's no the right way then anyways as good as any other now it there does not is not compelled a hold of you and he doesn't not every way to speak and our read is as good as every other and let me just put it simply no one holds that view Derrida to the extent that he refuses to play a standard philosophical game just will not play the fact that there is no final book you know one last master encyclopedia containing all the wisdom of total coverage final knowledge the last book no none other ever needs to be written darah doc considers that a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of perfect interpretation the right interpretation this does not at all mean that we don't in loose rough-and-ready ways judge interpretations all the time and this does not at all mean that practically speaking some interpretations are obviously slightly better than others let me return to familiar ones like the traffic light if it's red and you see it as green the outcome can be disastrous Terra da doesn't deny it no it's a bad miss reading bad miss reading but I the dis isn't is a familiar mistake and it's made about a lot of Dara das work philosophers call someone a relativist by which they mean it's a person that holds that any views as good as any other view my simple response to that is this that is a straw person argument no one in the world believes it or ever has believed no one Dara da or anyone else believes that every view is as good as every other view that's only a view we discuss in freshman philosophy class in order to quickly refute it and no one believes it there are no defenders of the view and since this type will be going out if we run into one it will be interesting but we will likely find that person in one of the institutions that Foucault discussed rather than in some seminar okay I mean that's where we'll find if anybody believes that now Derrida is kind of slippage is to remind us that the text of philosophy is not fixed cannot be fixed it is of the nature of the text of philosophy and its relation to language that we cannot fix it once and for all in a way it's like the leaky ship where we haven't got anything to stop the leak so we just keep bailing I mean the leak is in the language one way to give you an analogy that may make it come alive and be simpler for you that's been hard for me to do with a philosopher who's very difficult like Derrida is to think about it in the context of the way that Augustine attempted to develop a rhetoric about God and then Augustine realized that it was already impious to use finite human marks and sounds to praise an infinite being entirely separate from those finite marks and sounds so he was driven to silence if one were to take that same picture of language without the thought of developing a rhetoric of God but left just with the finite marks and sounds and no inner teacher Christ's inner teacher to tell us when our signs worked and when our words referred then we would have a language that operates by disseminating meaning by moving meaning by shifting it so if you were to have for example Derrida criticize Harbor moss Harbor Moss would still say something like this he would go understanding is a condition for our linguistic practices Derrida would respond if that is so then so is misunderstanding equally constitutive because understanding won't make sense conceptually unless misunderstanding does they are correlatives does that make oh I hope that makes sense I mean I'm asking a rhetorical question now about a philosopher who does rhetoric but anyway as well as argument ah so that's these are the kind of things that irritate people in addition and this is I think you know I the tanco language that he has are basically words can always miss refer they can always miss refer our meanings can always go astray even when we point this is the most simple example analytic philosophers use I can say get me that cup there and you could still pick up this one instead of this one pointing won't even guarantee a reference and if it's possible to miss referrer if it's possible to miss read if it's possible to misunderstand then it belongs to that structure I've called language to do those things because a possibility once is a necessity forever let me say that again a possibility once when we speak in structural terms is a necessity forever this is what makes original sin so interesting human beings who don't sin are still sinners in the Christian tradition because the possibility wants is the necessity for ever the possibility once is the necessity for ever now these are subtle views darrid are frequently caricatured for these views we would all like to hold theories of meaning that made it fundamental experiences like pointing what meaning was about and so on but I don't think Darren Don's views lead to what I'd like to give you now it's what I would call the upshot of some of the views and I don't think they're that outrageous the upshot as I've said is that there will be no final interpretations in philosophy and I think the history of metaphysics pairs that out the history of philosophy there will be no last books even the Bible was in the last book I wonder how many commentaries have been written on it there will be no last books no final commentaries no ends to the flows of information meaning is not fixable or fixed even humanly in a certain way since we speak the language of metaphysics in a certain sense I've already talked about potentiality appearance and so on in a strange way language has a power to operate in the radical absence of man I used the example of my own death in the laundry and the for my wife but there are many other examples you find as it were a monument in stone and you can decipher the cuneiform and that form of man again the ideological term has disappeared for ages of time but the words as materiality still can be interpreted not finally but they still have their effects their effects ah now to some of the political upshot of Dera dog well I think he does outraged people looking at a philosophical language as metaphorical largely metaphorical in fact if you understood what I've just said about Derrida you'll see that the sense in which it's frequently said that for Derrida all words are metaphorical by that he means that no word is the thing the word horse is not a horse the word cat is not a cat the word neutrino is not itself a neutrino there are some exceptions but not really the word is the word word a word no because I have mentioned it and not used it it's now become a token of a word so I'm trying to say here is that words are not things that the attempt that philosophers have made to hook words to the world has failed but it's no cause for anyone to think that we're not talking about anything see this doesn't make the world disappear it just makes language into the muddy material somewhat confuse practice that it actually is or that at least according to Darrow dot actually is now here's some of the upshot of it that I think's caused people to be upset not only this business about better and worse readings between well what's a better reading of something damn it nothing means anything anymore these are some of the things that upset them everything can't be a metaphor I mean sometimes I mean what I say damn it and I just mean it I mean these kind of frustrated remarks by professors who've been around a long time are the most irritating thing of all and and I think I'll read a short passage if I have time am i running I think I think my time is running okay I'll take a very short passage because it's particularly irritating I in in his article white mythology Derrida makes the point about the metaphorical nature of philosophical language and I think he makes it a brother humorous way he uses a story from Anatole France in which Anatole France is uh is giving an analysis of a philosophical passage and he takes the following passage Anatole France does that I was just discussing it wherefore I was on the right Road when I investigated this sentence and here's the sentence investigated by little friends the spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute I think that's actually a sentence from Hegel now Anatole France goes on to say it was important to see that these words were signs that had as it were changed meanings and shifted through time it was important that we were able to do a translation the spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute what is this if not a collection of little symbols much worn and defaced at MIT symbols which have lost their original brilliance how they must have sounded maybe in Greece or maybe even in 19th century Germany the original brilliance and picturesqueness but which still by the nature of things remain symbols and I have been able without sacrificing fidelity to substitute one for the other two as it were update this into a more modern in this way I've arrived at the following translation the breath is seated on the shining one in the bushel of the part it takes and what is all together loose or subtle and then we get the next step of translation he whose breath is a sign of life man that is we will find a place no doubt after the breath has been excelled in the divine fire source and home of life and this place will be meted out to him according to the virtue that has been given him by demons I imagined of sitting abroad his warm breath this little invisible soul across the free expanse the blue sky most likely and now observes there's Anatole France and now observe the phrase has acquired quite the ring of some fragment of a vet ik hem just by returning it to sort of its original meanings of absolute God and so on just by returning it to those meanings when they had their brilliance and their sort of life time as that sounds like a vet at him and even smacks of ancient oriental mythology I cannot say that I've restored this myth in full accordance with the strict laws that govern our language but no matter for that enough if we have found that symbols and Ament and a sentence that was always essentially mythical and symbolic in as much as it was metaphysical I think I've tried to make you realize one thing Anatole France says that any expression of an abstract idea can only be by analogy or metaphor can only be by analogy or metaphor by an odd fight the very meta physicians who think to escape the world of appearance are constrained to it perpetually by allegory metaphor and analogy they are a sorry lot of poets I saw a lot of poets they dim the colors of their ancient fables and they are themselves but the gatherers of fables they produce white mythology Derrida comments a formula brief condensed economical and mute has been deployed in an interminably exploitive discourse the derisive effect which is always produced by the translation of anything Occidental into the oriental ideograph that's supposed to be funny - really you know funny types people academics mainly but they didn't find it amusing because in the history of philosophy it's a harder it is the beginning of an argument that many of these words are words I said being if we went back would be God if we took that word back far enough it would be the breath of the great beast of the east took that back it would probably be the tree that stands the tallest and so on once we've translated all that out we do have kind of a vetted care and philosophy according to Derrida is doomed as it were if you want doom to be the word I think it actually can be playful and Derrida is a witty about it it's not sad to him that philosophy cannot become finally a great science or anything they're doomed to be a more or less sorry lot of poets I mean it the better the better the poet the better the wit the better the philosophy in some cases for Derrida he clearly is likes a good joke and part of these last argument that I son argument it is an economical statement mute it's on isn't supposed to be a joke - but then the political intent is clear underneath it if philosophy is white mythology what's to keep us from teaching other mythologies at the university like women's mythologies and black mythologies and Hispanic mythology and Oriental mythologies I hope you're beginning to see why darrid I began to upset people if this was true it wouldn't mean that white mythologies had lost their interest or that they weren't profound and worthy of study but it would mean they were no more so than black mythology Hispanic mythology women's mythology if I were to look for examples of Dara DAWs marginality of the spoken or the written word the trace the grimy the many and I've left out many sophistications here who cares I'm not French I don't eat souffles forget it trying to get this across in the spirit of that Chicago Tribune article this is the disturbing part to academics as it opens up this road within which many other mythologies if you will can be spoken with equal right with equal right as the dominant ones have been in the past and I think that that is not at all a bad effect that Dara das had the fact that he has a sense of humor I don't hold against him I wish more academics did I think it's pedagogically useful not to be a damn bore all the time and just you know put people to sleep is pedagogically useful after all you know professors and lecturers have to compete with MTV Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jurassic Park so I hardly think it's in our interest to be boring and that that's one thing Dara das certainly is not and it's nice to encounter in the dark days that lay ahead as I trudge through and what a self can be it's nice to encounter a playful spirit there does very troubled about what the self might even be but he is troubled in the playful way that Nietzsche's troubled when he's at his best and so I hope that I could at least interest you you in uh looking at something of Dera dassai in fact I'll leave you with one last little joke of Dera das so much work has been spent and so much time has been spent interpreting Nietzsche and now of course paradoxically Derrida because these things go on and on ah that he wrote a little book called Spurs Nietzsche's style and in it he makes a he imagines that Nietzsche left behind among his many papers a little scrap of paper that says I forgot my umbrella then Jared R goes through a long complex way that an academic interpreter would try to fit this brilliant afro ISM of Nietzsche's into the body of his work I mean after all it might just mean I forgot my umbrella but on the other hand and of course by the time and this is a short little book that I think you can enjoy by the time that I was finished I think that one has at least learned to be an interpreter with more grace and with a little bit more poetry and perhaps it would free us for richer more multicultural more diverse and more humane interpretations if we could free ourselves from the myth the invidious myth that there is a right way to read a book one a right civilization to belong to as though he chose it a riot gender to be as though we could pick it a right class to belong to as though he chose those things a right race to be a certain mythology preferable to others as in white which according to some african-american scholars today and so far as it's Greek was stolen from the Africans in the first place I don't know if that's true or not but it's certainly an interesting conjecture and it's one in which the readings and the battles of interpretation as there are points that will not stop there won't be a last book and I'm afraid that also warns you that in this class as in many others there won't be a last word thank you very much

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 140,093

Rating: 4.8587241 out of 5

Keywords: Jacques, Derrida, Rick, Roderick, philosophy, philosopher, full, length, margins, of

Id: LvAwoUvXNzU

Length: 44min 12sec (2652 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/my_gott]

i could listen to rickrod's sweetheart voice all day long.