Reading Derrida with magisme

[magisme]

We'll be dead by then Mag

I wouldn't doubt that he'll play with the idea that he's bringing his readers to the scaffold. Although in your case maybe he's just boring you to death. He touches on everything, I wouldn't be surprised at all if boredom comes up. Heidegger was all about boredom and Derrida was all about Heidegger.

And now it looks like Derrida has given us homework. I always take his assignments seriously. Note that he says to "reread" Apology and Crito. Don't read it, reread it.

Anyhow, these aren't the ideal translation but they're fine and they're free for anyone who wants to read along with me. I'll be rereading a different translation of my own.

Apology: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

Crito: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html

Note that Crito, the dialogue in which Socrates is executed, begins at the break of dawn.

Edited February 1, 2015 by magisme

[Facekicker]

In case you are wondering I have been reading along. Only now its Sat night, I've drank half a bottle of wine and other things are on my mind. But I'll catch up tomorrow.

On a side note, Sartre was found of mescaline. He used to see Lobsters following him around Paris.

Maybe I'd appreciate Derrida more if I smoked a blunt

[magisme]

I love this whole Derrida thing. It is impact text. Brilliant.

The subject is a big bag of whatever, but I like how it is written.

Thank you! Let's not listen to Facekicker. He's a doodoo-head. Don't worry about the subject if it's not your cup of tea. The subject was important to him, but it's also a vehicle for his thought, which, as we've already seen, goes well beyond the confines of capital punishment.

On a different level, your post will have an impact on my life, and for that I thank you.

I am a forever private individual, but you have helped me, quite bizarrely So there you be

That's a wonderful thing to say. Thank you. I'm glad I could help.

In case you are wondering I have been reading along. Only now its Sat night, I've drank half a bottle of wine and other things are on my mind. But I'll catch up tomorrow.

On a side note, Sartre was found of mescaline. He used to see Lobsters following him around Paris.

Maybe I'd appreciate Derrida more if I smoked a blunt

I appreciate it. If you ever want me to read something I hate I'll happily oblige.

I'm basically babysitting tonight. This is really helping pass the time.

[Facekicker]

Bedtime Stories with Magisme

[Dazey]

Bedtime Stories with Magisme

"Daddy, he asked me if I knew how to milk a cow blindfolded."

[magisme]

OK, I have to be running back and forth after the kids the rest of the night. I'm going to stop where we are, read Apology and Crito tomorrow morning, and continue from there.

Cheers, everyone. I totally have a nerd boner.

[Facekicker]

I'm thinking of a nice piece to discuss here and by nice I mean horrible.

[magisme]

Sweet. Feel free to steal the "Reading _______ with __________ " model. I'd love if this were a thing, people like Georgy and DD throwing obscure history shit at us. Fuck school. Come to mygnr.

[Facekicker]

Reading Hunter S. Thompson with Facekicker

[SoulMonster]

When you have such huge problems being concise and precise - even to the points of intentionally being vague and long-winded - chances are there will be no profound wisdom/relevations/ideas hidden behind the rambling and nonsensical walls of prose you write. I guess focussing on form over content is important when there isn't really much content there to begin with; basically, if you want to lure someone into reading what you write, you must bury the vacuous statements in deep layers of form. I suppose this would be appealing to anyone who are easily misled by idiosyncratic uses of words, rambling sentences and philosophical trivialities - the same people who raptly stand at street corners soaking in the rambling nonsense screamed to the world by the mad and the drunk.

[magisme]

lol SoulMonster, still mad because I won't talk with him

[SoulMonster]

lol SoulMonster, still mad because I won't talk with him

My criticism of Derrida was pretty conventional. He is being dismissed by many as nothing but a philosophy dilettante. I tend to agree. You might disagree, but of course as soon as you see me write anything you whimper away. Which is, perfect, really.

Basically Derrida is one of the modern "philosophers" who are to blame for this cognitive exercise being is such poor state and scorned by many. It is considered by many as marginally more valuable than the musings of any random person. Again, if you can't express your statements clearly, chances are your objective lies more on form than on content, which makes you nothing but a poet. And I have nothing against poets or poetry, but let's call it what it is. I am also not saying there can't be the occasional grain of the profound in any text from a poet, I think there often is, but that doesn't make all poets into philosophers.

I guess it isn't even fair to criticise Derrida. He can write whatever he wants. The problem lies with the people who are so easily taken in by the massive form that they fail to acknowledge the underwhelming content.

[magisme]

Let all those man tears out, buddy. No shame in it at all.

[SoulMonster]

Yeah, I know you hate Derrida. You mentioned it another time I brought him up, I think.

Searle translated: I don't understand Derrida and he doesn't write like I want him to, so I'm mad.

You could always argue that anyone who dismisses something simply just doesn't get it. It might be true, the critics of Derrida may simply not get Derrida or not be willing to let his prose overshadow his lack of content. But if you want to dismiss Searle's specific criticism that Derrida presents low-level philosophical argumentation, uses deliberately obscure prose, presents wildly exaggerated claims, and is at its core trivial and silly claims, then the only proper way to do that is to point out where Searle is wrong. Outright dismissal only works for things that are plainly obvious, otherwise it is intellectually lazy and implies a lack of capability that is probably derived from a weak position.

To me, the quoted text at the start of this thread isn't philosophy at all. It is just awkward musings presented in an awfully sloppy way. You can raffle off topics that he touches upon, but anyone who writes anything invariably touches upon profound elements of human existence. It doesn't make it philosophy. Pick up almost any poem by Bukowski and you get more profound statements about life and humanity in one hundreth of the space required. But again, if you are mesmerized by sheer mass of text, garbled prose, and remoteness of anything profound, then Derrida is the "philosopher" for you.

[SoulMonster]

This is brilliant:

Why I won't be mourning Derrida
He was the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him.

I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish. But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious.

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words, a world "out there" that can be explored through language, science and rationality. There are, he said, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no sense, only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency.

The Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.

So the whole foundation our culture is built on - the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day - are rotten. All we can hope for is to establish a "metaphysics of presence", where we try to clear the clutter of language from our minds and experience a few things directly and purely. Derrida's method for destroying language is deconstruction - a technique that makes us see that "signifiers" are so ambiguous and shifting that they can mean anything or nothing.

Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony. If reason is just another language game, if our words don't match anything out there in the world - what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. Modernist fiction - for all its flaws - engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism.

To be fair to him, late in his life Derrida seems to have begun to understand the terrible forces of ultra-scepticism he unleashed. Very few people can actually bear to be nihilists; very few people can preach a message of paralysis and despair for long. So Derrida declared in the early 1990s that there are some "infinitely irreducible" ideas that should not be deconstructed - particularly justice and friendship.

But it was too late. Derrida had vandalised all the tools he could have used to make a case for justice. If reason is worthless, if words are mere symbols in a void, how can he suddenly call a halt to the process of deconstruction when it comes to one particular value he happens to like? Is his use of the word "justice" somehow immune to all the rules he spent his career articulating? Derrida was left making the preposterous case that justice is a "Messianic" concept that would somehow be revealed to us once we stripped away language and reason.

Oh, please. I suppose it's touching that Derrida made a tragic final attempt to chain his own decontructionist beast. But the time for him to dissociate himself from nihilism was decades earlier, when he first launched the idea of deconstruction.

Buried in his philosophy there are small nuggets of insight: that the structure of language determines our thought much more than we previously understood, and that grand narratives are inherently dangerous. Derrida could have drawn the same conclusions from this at the start of his career: that we should show a greater degree of scepticism both toward language and narratives than before. But Derrida always promoted a far more shrill and silly agenda. He concluded that we have to tear apart the Western tradition and start again from Plato.

And build what? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives except in language so opaque it is impossible to decipher. His "metaphysics of presence" are incomprehensible. In the real world, the alternatives to reason (Divine revelation? Superstition? Pure will? Despair?) are even more flawed and even less likely to lead to the "liberation" Derrida claims to seek.

Enough. No hungry person ever pined for deconstruction; no tyrannised person ever felt they were trapped in a language game. When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for intellectuals to spend time arguing about whether the world is really there at all or whether it can ever be described in language. Perhaps there is a space for a continuing debate about post-modern thought in the more obscure philosophy departments - but to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/why-i-wont-be-mourning-derrida-6160181.html

[Len Cnut]

That article just really made me wanna read his stuff, 'tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought', wow.

[SoulMonster]

It's pretty crass, isn't it, even for British obituaries?

[supercool]

derrida is boring as hell, you should read debord instead

[magisme]

lol SoulMonster, still crying those sad and angry tears

Anyone reading Plato's Apology with me is getting a kick out of this. Derrida, why do you make the weaker argument the stronger? Why do you corrupt the youth with your nonsensical ramblings about things in the heaven and under the earth? I couldn't have planned it any better, really.

[magisme]

Looks like we're instructed to read some of Plato's Laws too. The passage in question is in Book 10.

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.html

[magisme]

Socrates has been convicted of impiety. His is now asked to propose his own punishment. One of his accusers, Meletus, has already proposed death. Socrates rejects the he should be punished at all. Here he begins to explain why he would reject exile. From Plato's Apology:

“I should have to be inordinately fond of life, men of Athens, to be so unreasonable as to suppose that other men will easily tolerate my company and conversation when you, my fellow citizens, have been unable to endure [d] them, but found them a burden and resented them so that you are now seeking to get rid of them.”

Excerpt From: Plato, Cooper, John M., Hutchinson, D. S. “Complete Works.” iBooks.

[magisme]

I haven't seen the end of Apology, where Socrates mentions his sons, discussed much. Doesn't mean it's not out there, I just haven't really come across it. Socrates is always portrayed as a guy who kind of neglected his family, you know with his refusing to get a job and walking around examining and interrogating people all day at the agora. Anyway, here is the very end of Apology, and then it's on to Crito.

“This much I ask from them: when my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them the same kind of grief that I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue, or if they think they are somebody when they are nobody. Reproach them as I reproach you, that they do not care for the right things and think they are worthy [42] when they are not worthy of anything. If you do this, I shall have been justly treated by you, and my sons also.

Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.”

Excerpt From: Plato, Cooper, John M., Hutchinson, D. S. “Complete Works.” iBooks.

[magisme]

Before moving on to Crito, I should point out one more thing from Apology that many gloss over. Socrates mentions that he feels like he's fighting shadows as he tries to defend himself because much of the public perception of his thought and work comes from Aristophanes play Clouds, in which Socrates is portrayed as a buffoon who says many things that Socrates claims never to have said and never to have believed, and there is no one around who will say Socrates said any of the things from Clouds in real life, yet Clouds has influenced the opinions of many Athenian citizens.

Here's Clouds for anyone interested in a peek:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html

Edited February 1, 2015 by magisme

[magisme]

The super short version of Crito: Crito is a friend of Socrates who visits Socrates in prison not long before he is to be executed. Crito tries to persuade Socrates to escape, saying it is evil and unjust not to. Socrates explains that it would be unjust and wrong for him to flee. Part of his argument involves the earliest model for social contract theory. Shout out to Omar.

I'll post some passages that stick out to me as I read along, perhaps. Don't worry, we're still doing Derrida, and I'm no farther along than what I've posted in the thread. I just have to do my homework first. I owe that to him.

[magisme]

FYI, I think I mistakenly said earlier that Socrates is executed in Crito. He is not. He is executed in the next dialogue, Phaedo.