According to Lacan, supposedly Real referents (such as God) possess no positive three-dimensional being either, i.e. Interpreters of deconstruction are fond of pointing out that defining deconstruction as X (whatever X may be) misses the point. To understand how this can be so, it is important to understand exactly how language works. Cohen’s Socialist Critique of John Rawls’ Liberalism. Vera Urges Council to Slow, Give Voice to Residents. …and also fashion with TFPO's The Fashionoclast at www.fashionoclast.com, [searchandfilter fields="search,category" taxonomies="category"], Deconstruction for Beginners: A Cheeky, Clever Primer on Derrida’s Infamous Idea, When the closest thing contemporary philosophy had to a rock star, Jacques Derrida, passed away in 2004, reactions to his legacy were the predictable attempts to enshrine the man into legend or pound a stake through his heart. It is only at this point that Derrida’s rival Lacan disagrees. ( Log Out /  In defense of the critics, Derrida’s work is, indeed, conceptually and stylistically dense, often putting Derrida out of reach of both casual and expert readers. No. Or, as one scholar once put it, science can tell us why the water in the teapot is boiling, but not why the the water has been put in the teapot in the first place (to make a drink for a friend, for instance). Derrida For Dummies: A Semiological Understanding Of God Justifying Egalitarianism: G.A. And what about the referent, you ask? Take, for instance, the word “hamster.” According to modern linguistics (founded by Ferdinand de Saussure), there are three  “levels” or aspects of any other word or symbol. language itself) function this way. And because language is the site of meaning-creation (to test this idea, try to think of a a way to express yourself without writing, saying, or doing something that would produce a signifier with an implied signified behind it), a world without meaningful language is therefore a world without meaning. Jacques Derrida began deconstructing things in the 1960s, but he was not the first. As Powell’s observes, deconstruction escaped Derrida: “More precisely, its meaning escaped how Derrida uses the term. The only quibble comes from the odd choice of characters – Mark Twain (! And that, in essence, is the mark of the book’s success. And in nationalism, the idea is much the same. Obviously I recognize the necessity of bushwhacking through original texts in serious study, but it’s also high time to admit that a great many philosophers were terrible writers, and that their ideas can be described in simpler terms without losing too much in the compression. And this must apply to the term “deconstruction” also. Listen to (and read), for instance, the quickly derailed rambling of Derrida’s contemporary Emmanuel Levinas, beginning at 4:35: Nevertheless, amidst all of this wind, thinkers like Derrida have had tremendously important things to say on the most important subjects, though they unfortunately lacked the rhetorical skills to express themselves clearly. All there is is a system of differential relationships between signifiers. Deconstruction for Beginners. ), the causality is the other way around. Of the shrine, nothing needs to be pointed out other than the fact that “deconstruction,” the word, has become an irrevocable pop-culture buzzword, and the crypto-concept of deconstruction (without quotation marks) has simultaneously engaged and enraged thinkers around the world. The supposed existence of divine beings is actually the result of a linguistic illusion: the falling of some ineffable signified (like the concept of God) into the realm of the signifiers (as the word “God”): the divine revelation of the Word (logos) in Genesis, the incarnation and descent of a transcendent God through an incarnate Jesus, and the gift of literacy to Muhammad are all excellent religious metaphors for this very linguistic process. As a question, “intentional unintelligibility” is just the sort of loaded subject deconstruction thrives on. According to Derrida, there is no ultimate ground to language: there is no word that possesses full presence itself, or provides this guarantee of presence to other words. Derrida is at the heart of the post-modern movement in philosophy and it seemed valuable to get some idea of what his ideas were. In many religions, the word “God” cannot be defined in positive terms, hence we have apophatic or negative theology, according to which God can only be described as things he is not (eg: not ignorant, not evil, not created, etc.). Addeddate 2016-03-15 13:10:34 Coverleaf 0 Identifier PostmodernismForBeginners-English-GraphicBook Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7sn4hz72 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Lacan’s partial rebuttal is significant. This is especially true of Derrida’s thoughts on the relationship between language, meaning, and God, which I hope to clarify, as well as the concepts and terminology he and his fellow theorists relied on. 4) serves as an able representative of the scorn Derrida has drawn from certain quarters. the signified), and the material referent corresponds to the Real. One often hears from the religious that they simply cannot image a life without God. Ex-Natatorium: If Not a Science Building, What? But it is certainly safe to dismiss the charge that Derrida is merely a purveyor of fad-inspiring gibberish. Each word in a dictionary is defined by other words, “signifiers,” which are in turn defined by other signifiers, and so on. The good news, however, is that deconstruction need not escape readers intrigued but wary of the concept. It’s no surprise to find Derrida placed in the company of other post-modernists, some of whom – notably media theorist Jean Baudrillard – genuinely earn the accusation of obscurantism leveled against them. In considering Derrida’s work and legacy, the question becomes: Is Derrida really intentionally unintelligible? ), a coyote, a beach bunny/theorist named Uma, and an embodiment of phallogocentrism named Glorious Glorious Bliss of God’s Phallus – which highlights the hit-or-miss nature of the Robert Crumb/indie comic influence and leads to an unnecessarily over-the-top climax transposing textuality into sex-tuality. Meaning is thus an effect of language and not contingent on the existence of any particular entity or the internal soundness of any “correct” belief system. As well it should. In Powell's lucid and clever presentation, it becomes clear that he did advance a preponderance of pomo premises in both philosophy and literature, but also why his works are notoriously abstruse and stymying. It is for this reason that it is such a chore to read, say, the convoluted writings of Abraham Lincoln. The first level is that of the surface: the level of the written sign or “signifier.” The word “hamster,” for instance, is made up of individual letters that, when combined in the right order, spell out this unique signifier. By offering an intelligible and comical overview of Derrida’s work, Jim Powell’s. After all, Derrida shows how all terms are unstable. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. What Derrida and his compatriot Jacques Lacan effectively demonstrated is that, far from God or any other entity having provided this meaning, (i.e. He demonstrates that there is indeed meaning in this world, but that it occurs as a result of a (linguistic) illusion – the surrender to a master signifier – a signifier which itself has no signified or positive meaning, but nonetheless still suffuses the rest of language with meaning. Master signifiers are paradoxically the most important things in our lives and yet entirely indescribable. As Powell’s observes, deconstruction escaped Derrida: “More precisely, its meaning escaped how Derrida uses the term. It is not that he uses difficult words, but it is simply a matter of keeping track of the twists and turns of his syntax until the last word arrives and snaps all of the previous free-floating words and associations into place.