You do not even realize the absurdity of what you say. If what you say was true, then you would have squarely contradicted Derrida's belief that "there is no way to ascertain the intentionality of an author". As long as Derrida's is concerned, in fact, those words might have been written by a robot, and you would have no right to interpret them as the absence of human being. And so, yes, let's condemn Derrida to his radical futility of a dead French charlatan.
stellario82 Were they attempting to extract the intent of Derrida? It doesn’t so to me. Simply that Derrida’s words, even though he is not here to explain their intent, still exist and influence people and other words.
@@stellario82 You didn’t watch the video. He was commenting on Rick’s shopping list analogy. This was a tribute to Rick, not Derrida. Like Rick explained with excellent clarity, there is room for better or insufficient interpretations as opposed to the caricature of “everything is valid!” You’re interpretation of the OP is incorrect.
Are you trying to say he's dead? But won't be pigeonholed into concrete meanings of simple sentences, so you couch it in unnecessary verbiage. Radical - you mean, he's completely dead, not a zombie, or an apparition, he dead and it's irreversible? So, dead, like all the other dead people that ever died? Absence? - he stepped out to get a smoke? He missed the class? He's not there? Is that because he's GASP dead? By God, the human fluff percolating in the wake of the grand trick Paul de Mann played on America...
Peterson is a signifier that we should be weary of Anglo American ego 'strengthening' based pop psychology(ists) Which is also a deviated normalization/institutionalization precedence of psychoanalysis. Accordingly after Freud's brilliant insights into the prevalent of unconscious and libidinal excess he's daughter Anna Freud and cousin Bernard basically just wanted a quick buck by demonstrating the potent capacity of psychoanalysis in the name of the masses must be lead and ruled thru subjugation. But yes Peterson is a pathetic altruist praying off mass ignorance of the being and the mind.
Reading 'The Politics of Friendship' now. Rick, you're words are here, now, misread and reread, learned and unlearned, mastered, lost, regained. I owe you so much for bringing Derrida closer to me. Incredible lecture series. I wish all professors could talk like you could, can, will. A real presence.
Genius lecture. I literally laughed out loud at several points... "flattened like a tortilla" and "I gotta compete with Jurassic Park and Arnold Schwarzenegger." Rick Roderick is a damn national treasure.
@@nonyadamnbusiness9887 His digital facsimile lives on and influences people still. Because this copy is still causally operable, influencing how people think, act, and interpret the world, I'm going to use the present tense. Sad he died though. He is the kind of teacher that exemplifies the ideal of the university.
40:41 *spirit of pedagogy* “The fact that he [Derrida] 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 and Jurassic Park so I hardly think it’s in our interest to be boring.”
Rick Roderick is an educator rejected by the publishers who present him here. He is an explainer who brings understanding to the working class and others who bought the lies. He is a favorite of mine.
Richard Murphy I love these videos. His drawl along with the video make me feel like I’ve stumbled onto some evangelical outfit but then “nope, that’s not it.”
32:14 *poetic torture house of language* “What 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 confused practice that it actually is.”
What a fantastic lecture on Derrida. I find Derrida difficult to read along with Habermas. Funny how I understand Ricks interpretation but not the sources. Maybe the source is different. Maybe I don't understand at all. Yet I think I do. That'll do.
Gotta love “Hai-degger” and “moh-derna-tee.” Just discovered this guy, big fan. Reminds me of home (TN), though I think his accent is from a different state. It’s hilarious because you expect a Baptist sermon from that accent, and then you realize you’re not in church.
I've had 2 professors in Uni discuss, as in a part of course material, not offhand or offtopic, about Derrida. But Roderick explains the man better than the ones who included him in my coursework over two semesters.
This was pretty brilliant. I’m getting the idea that “reading” has political implications: that is, “right” reading is imposed by institutional fiat so that right reading is accomplished by hegemonic violence and that we have to “discover” valid interpretation and not have it be imposed on us in an top-down manner. Also that Derrida was against epistemological certainty and that perhaps it’s human to be uncertain and thus inhumane to expect humans to be certain?
Not an expert on Derrida (have read Of Grammatology), but what your describing sounds more like Foucault, who described power dynamics and how power and "truth" interact.
That last line... "There won't be a last word." He already established that word is not a word, at 32:01 "is the word 'word' a word? Not really!" He describes it as a 'token', standing in for the hypothetical word that it represents. And so too, the last thing he uttered, standing in for a recursive 'word'. Pretty cool line.
In a movie I once watched, James Stewart said to his son, 'see that tree over there, it has given me more trouble than the entire range'. I did not understand what he meant then as I was a thick child. I perceive that Derrida proposes that words can be used to state how one feels or what ones senses state, specifically, as I have grown into a thick adult. I loved this lecture thought it was way over my head. Happy Birthday Eiffel Tower - 31 March.
14:33 *relations of language* “I am speaking about some present horse-my word *stands* for that horse.” [...] “words do not _stand_ for things-they *stand in* for them.” [...] “now it also doesn’t get its meaning in isolation. Words are not atomic bits of anything, words are part of _systems_ of speech-systems of language.” [...] “For that system to work, the objects _so referred to_ *do not have to be present.”*
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
+Syncopator Derrida is merely stating that there is no absolute interpretation of a text. That is the end of deconstruction. There are many other means of interpretation, and some are more valid where others are invalid. With that said, a proponent of a certain interpretation cannot state that their interpretation is the only proper one. Deconstruction cannot solve all problems, for it is a negative critical force, at least in Derrida's early-mid writing. Only in his later writing can we see deconstruction as a positive force.
15:19 _”Because_ I have all these *words* I don’t have to carry a kitbag of _all the entities_ in the universe to point to when I talk-I mean in other words..”
20:08 *polysemy of interpretation/slipperiness* “Many philosophers have wanted to tie meaning to what the speaker (and/or language user) *intends.* But words have their functions.. their (to use Derridas phrase) _’their disseminating meanings,’_ apart from those intentions.” [...] “This doesn’t 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 author in philosophy because we are 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?’”_ [...] “In a way there‘s no more powerful idea in the discipline of philosophy than the idea that there _can be_ the *right* interpretation.” [...] *”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 is pretty obvious, has not yet reached closure on 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.” [...] “Philosophers call someone a *relativist* by which they mean it’s a person that holds that, _’any view‘s as good as any other view.’_ My simple response to that is this: *that is a strawperson argument-no one, in the world believes it or ever has believed it.* No one-Derrida 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.“ [...] “No, Derrida’s 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 gotten anything to stop the leak so we just keep bailing-I mean *the leak is in the language.”*
If I give instructions to build something, something fulfills the instructions and I agree the end product is as intended. Why can't that be considered a final correct interpretation of the words/instructions/meaning?
In your example, written text isn't sufficient as your actual perception and judgment (eg you perceiving the thing that was built, judging it, and then affirming it) is necessary. Now we're not strictly talking about the interpretation of texts. What if the thing you wanted to create wasn't something you could perceive or judge directly and you communicated it with written text? Like a story, or a metaphysical scheme, or a religious doctrine.
This is exactly why I love Derrida. To acknowledge that which most of us try to deny and shove away, into the margins. What is called marginal within a certain culture is often the most profound expression of that specific culture you will be able to encounter. Culture is expressed by those who others attempt to hide. They need to find ways to be accepted by those who call them marginal and so, by being so graciously bold, they create poetry that simply blows away all baffoons in their miserable necktied suits. I consider him much more to be an author that writes in a philosophical style, discursive, than a philosopher. It reminds me much of how Plato used to write and use mythology to describe his points. Derrida talks about ghosts when it comes to recording technology, for instance. It is truly fascinating to see these ideas come to work in visual art like the movies of David Lynch. It's simply haunting, jarring to see the world in such a different way yet all of it is real. We were simply conditioned to believe it is not and have accepted those lies as convenient truth.
his analysis of Derrida's infinite interpretations of an object not implying that each is equally valuable essentially defeats the argument. If some ways are clearly better than others, then that immediately creates a hierarchy where there is some best way... i.e. the right way. Can't have your cake and eat it, there is either infinite equally valuable ways to interpret an object, or there is a right/best way.
I think this reasoning is incorrect. Just because there are infinitely many good readings, this does not mean that every reading is good. There might be an infinite set of "correct" reading (all of which are of equal standing and value) and at the same time another infinite set of "incorrect" readings (which are of less value than those "correct" readings). It seems perhaps a little counterintuitive but can be explained by analogy to mathematically "correct solutions". Consider the equation Ax = 0, where A is some N by N matrix, and x is an N dimensional vector. From here we observe that if A is a matrix of rank M, the null set ( which is precisely the set of solutions we are interested in) is of dimension N - M. Thus when A has rank M = N, then we can say that the null set is of dimension 0, and as such there is only one correct solution, namely x = 0. However if M < N, we find that the null set is of non-zero dimension, and as such there exist an infinite set of correct solutions ( or readings in this analogy) to the original equation. Furthermore we find that they are equally valid solutions and that they are all equally correct. However this is not to say that every vector ( or reading in this analogy) is a correct solution (or interpretation for the purposes of this analogy). in fact we may find that almost all vectors are not adequate solutions. In the same manner we may conclude that just because inifinitely many readings are proper interpretations, this does not necessarily entail that every reading is a proper interpretation. To put it in simpler terms this is equivalent to saying that there are a multitude or multiplicity of "best" readings.
@@franciscogomez-paz you are creating a false binary though. There isn't an infinite number of right ways and an infinite number of wrong ways. There is an infinite number of ways to read an object that lie on a spectrum from just plain wrong to totally on point. There may be a number of ways that are technically correct but when you create a hierarchy something has to be at the top. For example a bowl can not be interpreted as a dog, or a door, or a pair of socks, but technically can be worn as a hat, so a bowl could be interpreted as a piece of headwear, however a bowl is best interpreted as a deep dish used to hold food or liquids. A few wrong examples, a right one, and the best one.
@@CraigJS91 But could we not perhaps imagine a case in which there are several "best" interpretations. For example if we imagine scoring each interpretation, with 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest, then we can imagine a a scenario in which there are multiple 10s. I also believe that you example of the bowl is unconvincing for several reasons. The first being that bowls are considerably less complex than almost any text, and such there is no reason to expect the interpretation of bowls to share the same properties of the interpretation of books. Secondly I believe even with the given example, there remain other valid interpretations. Take for example, a child who has found a bowl creates a particularly pleasing sound when struck, and as such chooses to treat the bowl as some sort of drum. Are we to say that the child has somehow made an " incorrect" interpretation of the bowl simply because it does not align with the interpretation which society has cast upon it? This is ( I believe) exactly what Derrida was trying to get at. He wanted to bring back that creative child-like joy of experimentation. Again this is not to deny that there are interpretations that are of course for practical reasons often "better" for certain activities. For example if I were to use the bowl for cooking, or If I were looking for the most common interpretations of the object, then your approach would be spot on. However it is to bring light to the fact that a interpretation only becomes the "best" when we bring in some external contextual normative standard. ( for example when we define best as that which is closest to the common usage of the object). However there is no universally "best" interpretation, when we remove the object from our goals and the context in which we consider it.
To put it in less pretentious simpler terms.. Just because there is a hierarchy, doesn't mean there must only be a "single" object at the top. There could more than one "best" interpretations.
@@franciscogomez-paz Okay thought experiment, you go ahead and use bowls as a percussive instrument and I'll use them to eat cereal out of. And lets do this with every object in life, I'll use it for the socially accepted best option, you use it for a silly but perfectly plausible one. Repeat this for every object for 20-30 years, who is more likely dead from trying to dry his hair in the oven, or seriously injured from an accident where he tried to use his feet to steer his car, or in a mental institution for using a a carving knife instead of a razer to shave his beard, or simply is viewed as that weird guy wearing underwear on his head tapping on a bowl like he's Neil Peart? Countless generations of lessons have been learned to optimize life and ignoring that in favor of the child-like joy of experimentation is just silly. This isn't to say that you can't be creative or go against the grain ever, go ahead, that is typically where new discoveries are found. My main point was just that if some ways of interpreting things are greater than others, then the only realistic conclusion is that there has to a best. There could be multiple other ways that are really close, but just by the way numbers work the chances of them being identical is infinitesimally small. Say if interpretation A leads to success (whatever you define success as) 99.12345% of the time and option B also leads to success 99.12345% of the time, if we were to expand the resolution of the experiment to get more decimal places we would eventually find a difference at some point. so even if they are literally 0.00000000001% difference, one way is still better than the other.
Key discussion points/notes: The Problems of Modernity @00:07 'Modernity "...means the processes by which factories were instituted based on the division of labour and the processes by which institutions came to be rationalised, rule-governed across the whole terrain of our social lives with few exceptions." @01:47 Derrida and Deconstruction "Perhaps one of the trickiest and strangest philosophers - if he is a philosopher - around today" "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 misreading, and so on. Now, in my view, Derrida believes none of these things that I've just outlined, I'm trying to give you the popular demonising mythology about Derrida." @03:00 Margins of Philosophy 'Seeks to examine philosophy as a broad long standing cultural institution stretching back to the Greeks.' Attempts to use a framework that reminds us that philosophy is the product of Indo-European languages and the product of western civilisation, not an eternal project in the mind of god. It is a project with a certain materiality and history. Many of the most interesting things we will find out about philosophy won't be from bad readings or claiming any reading is as good as any other, but by paying attention to the very things that the philosopher tried to repress in his text - the things the philosophy tried to put 'in the margins', to exclude. @04:50 In Defence of Derrida "..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." @6:59 "What the hell is this stuff anyway?": Origins of Deconstruction. The term 'deconstruction' originates in Heidegger's project to uncover the hidden history of Being. What is Being? 'Being is (*blank*)' - Derrida has realised that the blank cannot be filled in. The history of philosophy has not yet presented us with final wisdom, total coverage and ultimate truth. - Deconstructive readings try to work this out in detail case by case.. different attempts to answer it and how they fail to answer it. "Deconstructive readings are not a single technique or 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 floor is to be swept again, the dishes have to be done again... So deconstruction if I wanted to compare it to some other practice it'd be housework - it doesn't get finished." @12:12 Derrida on Language - Believes that theories of language are still to be completed, and that the language that we speak now is still a part of our metaphysical heritage. Metaphysical phrases are commonplace: 'That horse appears to me to be lame' Invokes the metaphysical concept of appearance and its long philosophical history 'That kid has the potential to hit 300' Invokes the metaphysical language of potentiality and its 2500 year history "For Derrida, our language is chipped through with metaphysical moments, fragments in our languages. There is no way around it, and in that sense Derrida 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 take 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?" "It is the nature of language, and Derrida takes it to be something quite other, language, to be quite other than what many other philosophers and linguists take it to be" "For Derrida... language is NOT constituted by reference, which is a standard positivist account. In other words, what constitutes reference would be: I use the word 'horse' to refer to a horse. Of course, that makes it sound as though what would constitute my talk, that it refers, namely, to the world, would be that I'm speaking about some present horse, my word stands for the 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*" - Words standing in for things means we can communicate about those things even without those things being present. "Words are not atomic bits of anything, words are parts of systems of speech." @16:10 Systems of Language: Chess Analogy "If I take a pawn off the chess board 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'll have to be on a chessboard and deployed in a game. In other words there'll be conditions within which it'll make sense to move the pawn two squares forward. One of them won't be to set the pawn on this thing (off the chess board) and say I'm going two squares forward because looking ahead of me I don't know what would count... in other words, it's just not the way the game is played. With systems of languages they're constituted by the way the words work in these sets of constituitive rules which frequently overlap and are holistic. For that system to work the objects so referred to do not have to be present... it is the absences of objects, that make the use of nouns and languages interesting." @17:50 'Language is a system with materiality. Language is phonetic sounds that can be heard in finite lengths and measured, and it is sensible marks on paper.' @18:23 Radical Absence "Just like reference couldn't be what gives our words their meanings and our uses of them, neither can intentionality of speaker." If you write a shopping list for someone, that shopping list can still function as a shopping list even if you wrote it for some other purpose, or died before the list was used. The signs retain their functionality in the absence of intentionality, or even in the radical absence of the list writer. "This does not mean that we cannot intend, we can. But it means we cannot *fix* meaning by our intentions." *I'm coming back to this*
Charles M Charles M regarding “margins of philosophy” - sounds like he was a good Hegelian scientist in the sense of describing a structure by way of its _incompleteness._ He participates in the eternal project of the mind of God as he is exploring the _truth_ of the word..
Thank you Rick to bring us joy by your way of seeing things. I get to know some philosophers through you. You see it is not philosophy or any other disciplines, that they are interesting, rather than they are considerd as different ways to reach the aim/s. Due to them, now we have something to gather and share about. I enjoy , appriciate and support any disiplins causing so. They give us the chance to come together for more richness and joyfulness, simply said ; loving ourself/myself😊
13:19 *ontological incompleteness* “What he wants to do is to get a better take 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.”
I think you're right to an extent, but I just wanted to put in a footnote to spare Derrida from that idea. As Roderick said he was a pretty nice guy, and he was pretty public for a philosopher. I think most of the difficulty in Derrida comes from 1) the fact that he's constantly being so careful with the words he uses, trying not to fall back into what he's deconstructing and 2) his work alludes to so many other texts from Heidegger to Rousseau to Plato, each with unique terms
So he is saying antiquity style writing such as cuniform is possibly "mis" interpreted and what we think it says may be something else or just a little bit off?
so if i'm understanding this correctly, in the infamous "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" quote Derrida is actually saying there's nothing that an author can put outside what they're writing, like in the margins, footnotes, preface etc., that all of those things should be considered when you approach the text? could someone help me understand this a little better?
With that phrase I believe he means to say that (this is my own interpretation), when we engage with text, or more generally with meaning, there is no 'outside' guarantee, no external anchoring point, which ensures that meaning is 'correctly' constituted. A text is instead more like a self-referential circle, where meaning is only constituted by reference to other meanings which are always internal to the text itself. (where we take the idea of 'text' in a really broad way) Suppose you find a book in an ancient language that has no links to any currently known languages. Even though the book may have a whole world of meaning to someone who had known the language, to you it has no meaning at all. This means that in text, meaning is self-contained. There is nothing external to which the book could possibly refer, unless that thing is already part of the context which constitutes the meaning of the text in the first place. You already need to know the language for the book to have any meaning, thereby when you know the language, you are already 'within' the text, or, the text is already 'within' you. There is thus no external guarantee to which a text, or more broadly we as human beings, can refer back to in order to find some primordial, universal meaning. (In this view, Derrida's statement is basically the same as Nietzsche's "God is Dead")
11:14 *eternally unfinished work* “See philosophy is not like building a house, where you start with a firm foundation and build it up and you are finished and you walk off and that’s philosophy. Philosophy under the heading of deconstruction is housework, which means every day the floor is 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 in the late 20th Century, is the idea that it’s not getting finished and it can’t be.”
The act of Derrida's characterization of western philosophy as "white mythology" requires the very tradition he critiques in order for it to take place. His thought is part of this "white mythology" and therefore it can't offer a critique which is not itself more mythology. On what grounds then is he even right? Or even wrong?
You're misunderstanding what mythology means in this context. Mythology doesn't mean that there isn't reasoning, logic and value to find in that mythology, but that it doesn't hold absolute truth or even the possibility of absolute truth. Derrida held western philosophy in very high regard. He was also aware of the difficulties that come from deconstructing texts by using the very tools provided by those texts and incorporates that in his philosophy and writing style. He tries in his reasoning to be reflexive, to point out where his thought is caught in the discourse of western philosophy and he knows that his deconstruction isn't definitive. It is however well-reasoned and of value.
@@R0DisG0D You make good points. I didn't realize he had gone to such lengths to avoid the performative contradiction-->there is no absolute truth and that's the absolute truth. I suppose that, as a bit of an outsider regarding Derrida, the use of the phrase "white mythology" seems akin to Freud's idea that all mystical states are simply regressions to infantile states or even the idea that rocket science is just white basket weaving.
The partially examined life confuses the hell out of me. This is clear and makes perfect sense, in a Derrida sort of way. It might be that this format lends itself to philosophy better than the soy boy rambling on zoom style. Please model your future episodes on his balance of metaphors and examples, pacing, and contrasts. Just try and steal this entire technique, as if you were studying under a learned master
Roderick misspoke. Heidegger was not "deconstructing" the history of western metaphysics, he explicitly says destruction. It was Derrida who decided to move away from the language of destruction to the de-con-struction of metaphysics.
Should there be sufficient interest in such introductory course, I would avail myself for it. I would however need preparation time - mainly to arrange the relevant sources to back up claims as any scholar ought to.
Begins lecture: "Hey, no one believes that everything is relative and nothing is better or worse than anything else." 43:30 "Everything is as good as anything else, obfuscation (mythology) is as good as clarification (philosophy) because French cocktail-party wit Anatole France was being clever and ornate (and completely facetious and philistine) for 10 minutes"
Nope. He's saying that our foundational mythololy should be critically scrutinized, not "everytihng is as a good as anything else". Bad strategy to time-stamp. Anyone can check to see how thin your "performative contradiction" case is.
@@fede2 that is literally what he's saying, that any philosophy is as good any other philosophy, myth, or whatever else. You are fantasizing the rest. Do you dare critically scrutinize Derrida's mythology, resting entirely on an absurd Saussurian proposition that there are arbitrary things in this Universe?
@@fede2 you read my argument, yours was "it's thin" and then you invented a favorable meaning to what he said. What is there to argue and why should I bother?
I find it intriguing that Comments are turned off for the Baudrillard lecture--the one on overpowering, sinister technology 😉. So telling of our current censored life.
Richard Feynman once said: "IF YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN TO ME WITH CLARITY WHAT YOU KNOW, THEN YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING." That is a lesson Jacques Derrida NEVER learned; and I know, because I took a course with him at Yale. Reply
Christopher Hitchens wrote a good essay about obscure language called Sentenced to Death in which helabels such language as a kind of double-edged sword: it can lead us to new places, but can also be exploited by hacks (Hitchens thought Louis Althusser was one of those). I'm also interested in Thomas Kuhn's observation that he didn't understand Aristotle until he read his work on Aristotle's own terms, which sounds similar to Derrida to me. He would btw, agree with your last sentence :)
It’s funny he says “there are no relativists” (24:40 or so) when that’s the exactly what Kelsen and neo-Kantian positivists were. Such “relativism” is very much evident in political philosophy, as it is the core of pluralism and parliamentarianism (something addressed by such obscure thinkers as Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin).
Relativism can quite obviously be the functional result of a great deal of moral/ethical/political systems, regardless of the supposed “intent”, and itself is a position contra an absolutism or certainty in relation to a problem (relativism is frequently a polemic term, which does not mean, as suggested, that it lacks meaning because it’s content is ill-defined or refuted as such by the defender of positions which result in “relativism”).
There is a distinction between the analytical tradition and the continental tradition, and I think you are using the analytical method which is more commonly accepted throughout the Anglo/American world, a standard measurement of ethics and morality in the style of Kant, and at the heart of German law, post WWII. When Rick Roderick speaks of plurality of meaning in the face of intent, he isn't talking about context or action, so, it is no contradiction on his part, to say that relativism is not that all meanings are equally valid, but that meaning is slippery, and, some what like systems theory, unpredictable and unstoppable. In Continental Philosophy that is!
@@QUAKERSATTACKS97 the logical positivist's were a small group called the Vienna Circle, who believed in the value of logic to solve all problems! Logic is not a part of Continental Phil as it is in the Analytical School, that doesn't mean that the are not aware of each other. But it is Analytical Phil which subdivides itself into different discipline's, such as Political Philosophy. Continental Phil cannot recognise relativism in the sense that Analytical Phil does, and this is the point Rick R is making! Analytical Phil critiques Continental Phi on its own terms and by its own rules and thus completely misrepresents the ideas that Continental Phil attempts to understand. Sorry if you think you were misunderstood, I was just trying to explain what might have sounded strange to you. Moral relativism is considered to be bad by A phi where as C phil would see it as an inevitable part of existence! As in Kant's categorical imperative in A phil, as moral absolutism. Sorry if I have gotten it wrong and this was not the problem!
The lecture is his attempt at answering the following question posed by a reporter on deconstruction: “What the hell is this stuff anyway, that’s causing so much trouble?” Lol
"There is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end." Sadly, so many contemporary novels are preachy and insist on the 'right' interpretation.
Is this why I see so many articles charging certain people with racism or sexism, etc., without regard to the author's intention? How can these interpretations be justified?
If Derrida does NOT claim that, "any interpretation is as good as any other", then what characteristics can or should be considered to actually confer "better" or "worse" on an interpretation? How DO you evaluate any particular interpretation as being "better" or "worse"? Is there any identifiable, practical difference between "there is no *right* interpretation" and "any interpretation is as good as any other"? If there is, it must be somewhere in the ability to judge interpretations as "better" or "worse". Yet if it is possible to judge better or worse, then can it not be said that the "right" interpretation is therefore the "best" interpretation that we as yet have been able to determine? Knowledge is tentative, contingent on the discovery of better information. In that light, is there really any relevant difference I between "right" and "best"? Just like Newton was essentially "right" with his celestial calculations before Einstein, Einstein showed that they could be improved upon. Was Newton suddenly wrong?In certain cases, but not in the cases he originally dealt with, and in fact Newtonian mechanics are still used for some calculations of celestial motion since it's simpler to perform and "good enough" in the cases where they are used. That's not the same as the "last word," given the tentative nature of knowledge in general. If you prefer to term it "current best" I have no problem with that, but that could also be considered the "current right" interpretation. On the other hand, if you're trying to argue against a "perfect" interpretation, I don't know anyone who is arguing for that-- perfection simply does not exist in knowledge, and that it doesn't exist isn't news. If all Derrida is saying is that perfect knowledge of interpretation doesn't exist, well how useless, no one is saying that any more than people are saying "one interpretation is as good as any other"...
Syncopator But the problem is that all sorts of social, subjective, cultural, linguistic and historical factors are going to determine what "right" even means, and the evaluation, if it is dependent on such things, can never reach a point where we have an absolute conclusion, if you consider how those things are fluid and in constant change. The "best" interpretation can change within a moment, and it's always a question of perspective -- considering the sense of this word that indicates the complex background I refered to above, as a point within all those things from which one can observe his surroundings. You can judge what is a better interpretation right now, if you are able to account for all these factors, and are right about that opinion, but this would be an ephemeral "better", and only when consider through a specific perspective.
+Syncopator The basic thing Derrida is trying to argue is that a reliance on scientific metaphors and rationalism pervades Western philosophy, he rejects analytical philosophy. Its not about finding the right interpretation, its about extracting which interpretations are essentially cultural
Perhaps it would be 'better' to say that Derrida provides a system to discover which interpretations are likely to be 'as best' or 'worse' interpretations. In other words an apophatic interpretation - "its not this or that".
I disagree friend. Derrida's view is one that deconstructs, as Roderick explains, the very foundations of human interaction with the world. I would argue that to submit to the social systems and magnitutitual value systems is directly in opposition to the organic way of human nature. We have created these systems somewhat unknowingly through our exploration of language yet decide not to understand them and thus let ourselves be controlled by them. (N.B I am not talking about political systems here so don't try and call me a conspirisist please) In deconstructing them you can accept the full experience of life without the blurring generalisation that language and simple better/worse ideas give to the world.
Syncopator Regardless of what this professor says, Derrida concludes that there cannot be one meaning, and therefore no one has any way to say what is THE true meaning. To the extent he is correct, he is unprofoundly restating a muddy epistemological skepticist perspective and applying it not only to knowledge, but even meaning itself. Of course we can't know meaning if we can't _know_ to begin with... Derrida, and many postmodern philosophers, do of course stray off the path and develop methods for establishing a preferred truth hierarchy, not just for meaning and knowledge, but for morality and being itself. And wouldn't you know, unlike empiricism, the method of discovering truth that overthrew all of the preconceptions of the people who developed and practiced it, deconstruction just so happens to lend itself to reinforcing everything that the postmodern philosophers already believed... Viz, that Marx was right about capitalism and western civilization. How convenient. Others mistake the inability of humans to know truth for evidence that truth, itself, cannot objectively exist. Some conclude that no pragmatic systematic hierarchy of discernable truths can be derived, and thus no one has any right to say what is more or less true. I have no idea how a philosophy professor could pretend that doesn't happen. This guy doesn't seem very sharp. People, like Angus Rose above, who find Derrida profound only do so by believing Derrida's work to be an expression that western culture is in"organic" and oppressive- less right. Ironically they believe Derrida's work to be a proof of what they already believe, that all language has been weaponized to favor capitalism, and the path of resistance is to unilaterally change the meaning of words we don't like and pretend that all of the previous context still applies. Poststructural analysis is useful to the extent that it isn't used to invent irrational excuses for prioritizing one perspective over another, unfortunately that temptation is too much for some people.
Je m'intéresse aussi à l'observation de Thomas Kuhn qu'il ne comprenait pas Aristote jusqu'à ce qu'il lisait son travail sur les propres termes d'Aristote, qui semble similaire à Derrida moi. Il aurait d'ailleurs, d'accord avec votre dernière phrase :) (par Google Translate)
Qabala begs to differ that "words are not things". The letters that comprise the Hebrew Aut, the basis for what is the language of Hebrew scriptures, are physically that what they represent. This is difficult to understand since we have been conditioned to listen to professors and scholars such as this who have no notion of anything other than their fish-bowl lives. That said, it is almost impossible for most humans to express intent and meaning within the arbitrary constructs that have hijacked communication referred to as culture and civilization. It is, however, possible to represent ourselves authentically (what Derida is looking for) via that innate quality known as a CONSCIENCE. Everything begins to fall into place once we access this ability consistently and we will find dissertations such as this (and their dancing on a pin progenitors) superfluous. best
31:30 Words are metaphorical -- the crushing banality of this "discovery" is giving me ulcers, I swear. Not having the opportunity to smack the wiggling Algerian dervish upside the head is taking a terrible toll on my nervous system. BTW, how DID metaphorical connections develop? We can sorta see how onomatopoeia developed, but what about the rest of language? It coalesced out of thin air in defiance of laws of cause and effect? Maybe you should call your friend, Paul De Mann, he always knew what to say to gullible Americans.
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A hugely underrated educator, he should be watched far more widely
niriop but that would empower people to become fuller selves? why would corporate management want that?
Marxist educators have ample representation. I think we're good
Roderick was such a brilliant, though bare (as he intended in these talks), lecturer...I never tire of his charming drawl and clear elucidation.
yes! totally agree, he was so accessible and yet, lost none of the rigour of the subject, great!
His words still live in his radical absence. RIP.
You do not even realize the absurdity of what you say. If what you say was true, then you would have squarely contradicted Derrida's belief that "there is no way to ascertain the intentionality of an author". As long as Derrida's is concerned, in fact, those words might have been written by a robot, and you would have no right to interpret them as the absence of human being.
And so, yes, let's condemn Derrida to his radical futility of a dead French charlatan.
stellario82 Were they attempting to extract the intent of Derrida? It doesn’t so to me. Simply that Derrida’s words, even though he is not here to explain their intent, still exist and influence people and other words.
@@stellario82 You didn’t watch the video. He was commenting on Rick’s shopping list analogy. This was a tribute to Rick, not Derrida. Like Rick explained with excellent clarity, there is room for better or insufficient interpretations as opposed to the caricature of “everything is valid!” You’re interpretation of the OP is incorrect.
Best comment
Are you trying to say he's dead?
But won't be pigeonholed into concrete meanings of simple sentences, so you couch it in unnecessary verbiage.
Radical - you mean, he's completely dead, not a zombie, or an apparition, he dead and it's irreversible? So, dead, like all the other dead people that ever died?
Absence? - he stepped out to get a smoke? He missed the class? He's not there? Is that because he's GASP dead?
By God, the human fluff percolating in the wake of the grand trick Paul de Mann played on America...
Someone should show this to Jordan Peterson
Or the typical banal Objectivist.
He wouldn't look at it.
hahaha. yes.
Peterson is a signifier that we should be weary of Anglo American ego 'strengthening' based pop psychology(ists)
Which is also a deviated normalization/institutionalization precedence of psychoanalysis. Accordingly after Freud's brilliant insights into the prevalent of unconscious and libidinal excess he's daughter Anna Freud and cousin Bernard basically just wanted a quick buck by demonstrating the potent capacity of psychoanalysis in the name of the masses must be lead and ruled thru subjugation. But yes Peterson is a pathetic altruist praying off mass ignorance of the being and the mind.
I'm really happy this comment is so upvoted. I thought peterson was heralded. Glad to see he actually has other critics.
Reading 'The Politics of Friendship' now. Rick, you're words are here, now, misread and reread, learned and unlearned, mastered, lost, regained. I owe you so much for bringing Derrida closer to me. Incredible lecture series. I wish all professors could talk like you could, can, will. A real presence.
This is so terrific and so desperately needed these days.
So true!
Genius lecture. I literally laughed out loud at several points... "flattened like a tortilla" and "I gotta compete with Jurassic Park and Arnold Schwarzenegger." Rick Roderick is a damn national treasure.
was
@@nonyadamnbusiness9887 His digital facsimile lives on and influences people still. Because this copy is still causally operable, influencing how people think, act, and interpret the world, I'm going to use the present tense. Sad he died though. He is the kind of teacher that exemplifies the ideal of the university.
We need more effeminate southern intellectuals.
40:41 *spirit of pedagogy* “The fact that he [Derrida] 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 and Jurassic Park so I hardly think it’s in our interest to be boring.”
😂 😂 this comment is SPOT ON
Rick Roderick is an educator rejected by the publishers who present him here. He is an explainer who brings understanding to the working class and others who bought the lies. He is a favorite of mine.
Richard Murphy I love these videos. His drawl along with the video make me feel like I’ve stumbled onto some evangelical outfit but then “nope, that’s not it.”
This is the best interpretation of the history of philsophy, reading philosophy as a detective, not a priest
That is a “straw person” argument
God I love Rick Roderick
32:14 *poetic torture house of language* “What 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 confused practice that it actually is.”
What a fantastic lecture on Derrida. I find Derrida difficult to read along with Habermas. Funny how I understand Ricks interpretation but not the sources. Maybe the source is different. Maybe I don't understand at all. Yet I think I do. That'll do.
Gotta love “Hai-degger” and “moh-derna-tee.” Just discovered this guy, big fan. Reminds me of home (TN), though I think his accent is from a different state. It’s hilarious because you expect a Baptist sermon from that accent, and then you realize you’re not in church.
Wow, I love how he explains things.
mechanesthesia hell yeah
I've had 2 professors in Uni discuss, as in a part of course material, not offhand or offtopic, about Derrida. But Roderick explains the man better than the ones who included him in my coursework over two semesters.
12:37 “I mean we use metaphysical phrases all the time-even when we don’t think we do.”
I’ve yet to read a full text of Derrida but I’m happy to have an enthusiastic review before I do.
This was pretty brilliant. I’m getting the idea that “reading” has political implications: that is, “right” reading is imposed by institutional fiat so that right reading is accomplished by hegemonic violence and that we have to “discover” valid interpretation and not have it be imposed on us in an top-down manner.
Also that Derrida was against epistemological certainty and that perhaps it’s human to be uncertain and thus inhumane to expect humans to be certain?
Not an expert on Derrida (have read Of Grammatology), but what your describing sounds more like Foucault, who described power dynamics and how power and "truth" interact.
Does anyone know where he is buried? I would like to go there and pay my respects.
That southern drawl is to die for
so great. A wonderful calm came over me.
I think I like these more basic style videos from The Teaching Company better than their newer, fancier ones. The content is still wonderful.
I love this guy.
13:04 “For Derrida our language is chipped through with metaphysical moments, _fragments_ in our languages-there’s no way around it.”
Interesting that his opening introduction is still relevant today, with certain subcultures...
That last line... "There won't be a last word." He already established that word is not a word, at 32:01 "is the word 'word' a word? Not really!" He describes it as a 'token', standing in for the hypothetical word that it represents. And so too, the last thing he uttered, standing in for a recursive 'word'. Pretty cool line.
In a movie I once watched, James Stewart said to his son, 'see that tree over there, it has given me more trouble than the entire range'. I did not understand what he meant then as I was a thick child. I perceive that Derrida proposes that words can be used to state how one feels or what ones senses state, specifically, as I have grown into a thick adult.
I loved this lecture thought it was way over my head. Happy Birthday Eiffel Tower - 31 March.
14:33 *relations of language* “I am speaking about some present horse-my word *stands* for that horse.” [...] “words do not _stand_ for things-they *stand in* for them.” [...] “now it also doesn’t get its meaning in isolation. Words are not atomic bits of anything, words are part of _systems_ of speech-systems of language.” [...] “For that system to work, the objects _so referred to_ *do not have to be present.”*
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
+Syncopator Derrida is merely stating that there is no absolute interpretation of a text. That is the end of deconstruction. There are many other means of interpretation, and some are more valid where others are invalid. With that said, a proponent of a certain interpretation cannot state that their interpretation is the only proper one. Deconstruction cannot solve all problems, for it is a negative critical force, at least in Derrida's early-mid writing. Only in his later writing can we see deconstruction as a positive force.
What determines if a perspective is more valid?
@@awhodothey Power
Uncle Rick, the uncle we all needed growing up...
Brilliant Prof with one of the best interpretation of the Language of Derrida; Thank you Sir!
15:19 _”Because_ I have all these *words* I don’t have to carry a kitbag of _all the entities_ in the universe to point to when I talk-I mean in other words..”
He is a very good speaker indeed.
20:08 *polysemy of interpretation/slipperiness*
“Many philosophers have wanted to tie meaning to what the speaker (and/or language user) *intends.* But words have their functions.. their (to use Derridas phrase) _’their disseminating meanings,’_ apart from those intentions.” [...]
“This doesn’t 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 author in philosophy because we are 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?’”_ [...]
“In a way there‘s no more powerful idea in the discipline of philosophy than the idea that there _can be_ the *right* interpretation.” [...]
*”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 is pretty obvious, has not yet reached closure on 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.” [...]
“Philosophers call someone a *relativist* by which they mean it’s a person that holds that, _’any view‘s as good as any other view.’_ My simple response to that is this: *that is a strawperson argument-no one, in the world believes it or ever has believed it.* No one-Derrida 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.“ [...]
“No, Derrida’s 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 gotten anything to stop the leak so we just keep bailing-I mean *the leak is in the language.”*
If I give instructions to build something, something fulfills the instructions and I agree the end product is as intended. Why can't that be considered a final correct interpretation of the words/instructions/meaning?
Ah so this philosophy fundamentally Derridas truth.
It should be considered a final correct interpretation, and it is, you are right, but nor for the postmodernist.
In your example, written text isn't sufficient as your actual perception and judgment (eg you perceiving the thing that was built, judging it, and then affirming it) is necessary. Now we're not strictly talking about the interpretation of texts.
What if the thing you wanted to create wasn't something you could perceive or judge directly and you communicated it with written text? Like a story, or a metaphysical scheme, or a religious doctrine.
This is exactly why I love Derrida. To acknowledge that which most of us try to deny and shove away, into the margins. What is called marginal within a certain culture is often the most profound expression of that specific culture you will be able to encounter. Culture is expressed by those who others attempt to hide. They need to find ways to be accepted by those who call them marginal and so, by being so graciously bold, they create poetry that simply blows away all baffoons in their miserable necktied suits. I consider him much more to be an author that writes in a philosophical style, discursive, than a philosopher. It reminds me much of how Plato used to write and use mythology to describe his points.
Derrida talks about ghosts when it comes to recording technology, for instance. It is truly fascinating to see these ideas come to work in visual art like the movies of David Lynch. It's simply haunting, jarring to see the world in such a different way yet all of it is real. We were simply conditioned to believe it is not and have accepted those lies as convenient truth.
his analysis of Derrida's infinite interpretations of an object not implying that each is equally valuable essentially defeats the argument. If some ways are clearly better than others, then that immediately creates a hierarchy where there is some best way... i.e. the right way. Can't have your cake and eat it, there is either infinite equally valuable ways to interpret an object, or there is a right/best way.
I think this reasoning is incorrect. Just because there are infinitely many good readings, this does not mean that every reading is good. There might be an infinite set of "correct" reading (all of which are of equal standing and value) and at the same time another infinite set of "incorrect" readings (which are of less value than those "correct" readings). It seems perhaps a little counterintuitive but can be explained by analogy to mathematically "correct solutions".
Consider the equation Ax = 0, where A is some N by N matrix, and x is an N dimensional vector. From here we observe that if A is a matrix of rank M, the null set ( which is precisely the set of solutions we are interested in) is of dimension N - M. Thus when A has rank M = N, then we can say that the null set is of dimension 0, and as such there is only one correct solution, namely x = 0. However if M < N, we find that the null set is of non-zero dimension, and as such there exist an infinite set of correct solutions ( or readings in this analogy) to the original equation. Furthermore we find that they are equally valid solutions and that they are all equally correct. However this is not to say that every vector ( or reading in this analogy) is a correct solution (or interpretation for the purposes of this analogy). in fact we may find that almost all vectors are not adequate solutions.
In the same manner we may conclude that just because inifinitely many readings are proper interpretations, this does not necessarily entail that every reading is a proper interpretation. To put it in simpler terms this is equivalent to saying that there are a multitude or multiplicity of "best" readings.
@@franciscogomez-paz you are creating a false binary though. There isn't an infinite number of right ways and an infinite number of wrong ways. There is an infinite number of ways to read an object that lie on a spectrum from just plain wrong to totally on point. There may be a number of ways that are technically correct but when you create a hierarchy something has to be at the top.
For example a bowl can not be interpreted as a dog, or a door, or a pair of socks, but technically can be worn as a hat, so a bowl could be interpreted as a piece of headwear, however a bowl is best interpreted as a deep dish used to hold food or liquids. A few wrong examples, a right one, and the best one.
@@CraigJS91 But could we not perhaps imagine a case in which there are several "best" interpretations. For example if we imagine scoring each interpretation, with 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest, then we can imagine a a scenario in which there are multiple 10s.
I also believe that you example of the bowl is unconvincing for several reasons. The first being that bowls are considerably less complex than almost any text, and such there is no reason to expect the interpretation of bowls to share the same properties of the interpretation of books.
Secondly I believe even with the given example, there remain other valid interpretations. Take for example, a child who has found a bowl creates a particularly pleasing sound when struck, and as such chooses to treat the bowl as some sort of drum. Are we to say that the child has somehow made an " incorrect" interpretation of the bowl simply because it does not align with the interpretation which society has cast upon it?
This is ( I believe) exactly what Derrida was trying to get at. He wanted to bring back that creative child-like joy of experimentation.
Again this is not to deny that there are interpretations that are of course for practical reasons often "better" for certain activities. For example if I were to use the bowl for cooking, or If I were looking for the most common interpretations of the object, then your approach would be spot on. However it is to bring light to the fact that a interpretation only becomes the "best" when we bring in some external contextual normative standard. ( for example when we define best as that which is closest to the common usage of the object). However there is no universally "best" interpretation, when we remove the object from our goals and the context in which we consider it.
To put it in less pretentious simpler terms.. Just because there is a hierarchy, doesn't mean there must only be a "single" object at the top. There could more than one "best" interpretations.
@@franciscogomez-paz Okay thought experiment, you go ahead and use bowls as a percussive instrument and I'll use them to eat cereal out of. And lets do this with every object in life, I'll use it for the socially accepted best option, you use it for a silly but perfectly plausible one. Repeat this for every object for 20-30 years, who is more likely dead from trying to dry his hair in the oven, or seriously injured from an accident where he tried to use his feet to steer his car, or in a mental institution for using a a carving knife instead of a razer to shave his beard, or simply is viewed as that weird guy wearing underwear on his head tapping on a bowl like he's Neil Peart? Countless generations of lessons have been learned to optimize life and ignoring that in favor of the child-like joy of experimentation is just silly.
This isn't to say that you can't be creative or go against the grain ever, go ahead, that is typically where new discoveries are found. My main point was just that if some ways of interpreting things are greater than others, then the only realistic conclusion is that there has to a best. There could be multiple other ways that are really close, but just by the way numbers work the chances of them being identical is infinitesimally small. Say if interpretation A leads to success (whatever you define success as) 99.12345% of the time and option B also leads to success 99.12345% of the time, if we were to expand the resolution of the experiment to get more decimal places we would eventually find a difference at some point. so even if they are literally 0.00000000001% difference, one way is still better than the other.
Key discussion points/notes:
The Problems of Modernity
@00:07
'Modernity
"...means the processes by which factories were instituted based on the division of labour and the processes by which institutions came to be rationalised, rule-governed across the whole terrain of our social lives with few exceptions."
@01:47
Derrida and Deconstruction
"Perhaps one of the trickiest and strangest philosophers - if he is a philosopher - around today"
"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 misreading, and so on. Now, in my view, Derrida believes none of these things that I've just outlined, I'm trying to give you the popular demonising mythology about Derrida."
@03:00
Margins of Philosophy
'Seeks to examine philosophy as a broad long standing cultural institution stretching back to the Greeks.'
Attempts to use a framework that reminds us that philosophy is the product of Indo-European languages and the product of western civilisation, not an eternal project in the mind of god. It is a project with a certain materiality and history. Many of the most interesting things we will find out about philosophy won't be from bad readings or claiming any reading is as good as any other, but by paying attention to the very things that the philosopher tried to repress in his text - the things the philosophy tried to put 'in the margins', to exclude.
@04:50
In Defence of Derrida
"..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."
@6:59
"What the hell is this stuff anyway?": Origins of Deconstruction.
The term 'deconstruction' originates in Heidegger's project to uncover the hidden history of Being.
What is Being?
'Being is (*blank*)'
- Derrida has realised that the blank cannot be filled in. The history of philosophy has not yet presented us with final wisdom, total coverage and ultimate truth.
- Deconstructive readings try to work this out in detail case by case.. different attempts to answer it and how they fail to answer it.
"Deconstructive readings are not a single technique or 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 floor is to be swept again, the dishes have to be done again... So deconstruction if I wanted to compare it to some other practice it'd be housework - it doesn't get finished."
@12:12
Derrida on Language
- Believes that theories of language are still to be completed, and that the language that we speak now is still a part of our metaphysical heritage.
Metaphysical phrases are commonplace:
'That horse appears to me to be lame'
Invokes the metaphysical concept of appearance and its long philosophical history
'That kid has the potential to hit 300'
Invokes the metaphysical language of potentiality and its 2500 year history
"For Derrida, our language is chipped through with metaphysical moments, fragments in our languages. There is no way around it, and in that sense Derrida 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 take 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?"
"It is the nature of language, and Derrida takes it to be something quite other, language, to be quite other than what many other philosophers and linguists take it to be"
"For Derrida... language is NOT constituted by reference, which is a standard positivist account. In other words, what constitutes reference would be: I use the word 'horse' to refer to a horse. Of course, that makes it sound as though what would constitute my talk, that it refers, namely, to the world, would be that I'm speaking about some present horse, my word stands for the 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*"
- Words standing in for things means we can communicate about those things even without those things being present.
"Words are not atomic bits of anything, words are parts of systems of speech."
@16:10
Systems of Language: Chess Analogy
"If I take a pawn off the chess board 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'll have to be on a chessboard and deployed in a game. In other words there'll be conditions within which it'll make sense to move the pawn two squares forward. One of them won't be to set the pawn on this thing (off the chess board) and say I'm going two squares forward because looking ahead of me I don't know what would count... in other words, it's just not the way the game is played. With systems of languages they're constituted by the way the words work in these sets of constituitive rules which frequently overlap and are holistic. For that system to work the objects so referred to do not have to be present... it is the absences of objects, that make the use of nouns and languages interesting."
@17:50
'Language is a system with materiality. Language is phonetic sounds that can be heard in finite lengths and measured, and it is sensible marks on paper.'
@18:23
Radical Absence
"Just like reference couldn't be what gives our words their meanings and our uses of them, neither can intentionality of speaker."
If you write a shopping list for someone, that shopping list can still function as a shopping list even if you wrote it for some other purpose, or died before the list was used. The signs retain their functionality in the absence of intentionality, or even in the radical absence of the list writer.
"This does not mean that we cannot intend, we can. But it means we cannot *fix* meaning by our intentions."
*I'm coming back to this*
Charles M Always love doing transcriptions like this, good consolidation. Do you take these notes primarily to refer back to later?
Charles M Charles M regarding “margins of philosophy” - sounds like he was a good Hegelian scientist in the sense of describing a structure by way of its _incompleteness._ He participates in the eternal project of the mind of God as he is exploring the _truth_ of the word..
Thank you Rick to bring us joy by your way of seeing things. I get to know some philosophers through you. You see it is not philosophy or any other disciplines, that they are interesting, rather than they are considerd as different ways to reach the aim/s. Due to them, now we have something to gather and share about. I enjoy , appriciate and support any disiplins causing so. They give us the chance to come together for more richness and joyfulness, simply said ; loving ourself/myself😊
13:19 *ontological incompleteness* “What he wants to do is to get a better take 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.”
I really wish these were numbered according to the order that they were given. I hate having to suss that out.
I think you're right to an extent, but I just wanted to put in a footnote to spare Derrida from that idea. As Roderick said he was a pretty nice guy, and he was pretty public for a philosopher. I think most of the difficulty in Derrida comes from 1) the fact that he's constantly being so careful with the words he uses, trying not to fall back into what he's deconstructing and 2) his work alludes to so many other texts from Heidegger to Rousseau to Plato, each with unique terms
The most fucking brilliant explanation without convolutions or pretensions to empty concepts
So he is saying antiquity style writing such as cuniform is possibly "mis" interpreted and what we think it says may be something else or just a little bit off?
so if i'm understanding this correctly, in the infamous "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" quote Derrida is actually saying there's nothing that an author can put outside what they're writing, like in the margins, footnotes, preface etc., that all of those things should be considered when you approach the text? could someone help me understand this a little better?
With that phrase I believe he means to say that (this is my own interpretation), when we engage with text, or more generally with meaning, there is no 'outside' guarantee, no external anchoring point, which ensures that meaning is 'correctly' constituted. A text is instead more like a self-referential circle, where meaning is only constituted by reference to other meanings which are always internal to the text itself. (where we take the idea of 'text' in a really broad way)
Suppose you find a book in an ancient language that has no links to any currently known languages. Even though the book may have a whole world of meaning to someone who had known the language, to you it has no meaning at all. This means that in text, meaning is self-contained. There is nothing external to which the book could possibly refer, unless that thing is already part of the context which constitutes the meaning of the text in the first place. You already need to know the language for the book to have any meaning, thereby when you know the language, you are already 'within' the text, or, the text is already 'within' you.
There is thus no external guarantee to which a text, or more broadly we as human beings, can refer back to in order to find some primordial, universal meaning. (In this view, Derrida's statement is basically the same as Nietzsche's "God is Dead")
can anybody explain or write down the last 15 minutes of the lecture?
Here you can find the transcript rickroderick.org/307-derrida-and-the-ends-of-man-1993/
certainly down to interpretation. such is the mischieveous nature of the creator
11:14 *eternally unfinished work* “See philosophy is not like building a house, where you start with a firm foundation and build it up and you are finished and you walk off and that’s philosophy. Philosophy under the heading of deconstruction is housework, which means every day the floor is 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 in the late 20th Century, is the idea that it’s not getting finished and it can’t be.”
42:14 The fact that only two people laughed absolutely crushed me.
Hoovytube on a philosophy video is sth
does anyone know a podcast that discusses things similar to this ?
Very bad wizards at their best. Their second segments are deep dives into texts or concepts. Their first segments are usually a little silly.
The act of Derrida's characterization of western philosophy as "white mythology" requires the very tradition he critiques in order for it to take place. His thought is part of this "white mythology" and therefore it can't offer a critique which is not itself more mythology. On what grounds then is he even right? Or even wrong?
well noted...
You're misunderstanding what mythology means in this context. Mythology doesn't mean that there isn't reasoning, logic and value to find in that mythology, but that it doesn't hold absolute truth or even the possibility of absolute truth.
Derrida held western philosophy in very high regard. He was also aware of the difficulties that come from deconstructing texts by using the very tools provided by those texts and incorporates that in his philosophy and writing style. He tries in his reasoning to be reflexive, to point out where his thought is caught in the discourse of western philosophy and he knows that his deconstruction isn't definitive. It is however well-reasoned and of value.
@@R0DisG0D You make good points. I didn't realize he had gone to such lengths to avoid the performative contradiction-->there is no absolute truth and that's the absolute truth. I suppose that, as a bit of an outsider regarding Derrida, the use of the phrase "white mythology" seems akin to Freud's idea that all mystical states are simply regressions to infantile states or even the idea that rocket science is just white basket weaving.
oh my gosh!
now i get it!
I understand derrida's shit now!
This Roddick guy is probably capable o reading Linear B
The partially examined life confuses the hell out of me. This is clear and makes perfect sense, in a Derrida sort of way. It might be that this format lends itself to philosophy better than the soy boy rambling on zoom style. Please model your future episodes on his balance of metaphors and examples, pacing, and contrasts. Just try and steal this entire technique, as if you were studying under a learned master
LOL @5:10 How's that observation about the effects of Derrida's ideas holding out over time?
still your delusional fantasy, unfortunately.
Hurr Durr woof, comment aging worse every year.
Roderick misspoke. Heidegger was not "deconstructing" the history of western metaphysics, he explicitly says destruction. It was Derrida who decided to move away from the language of destruction to the de-con-struction of metaphysics.
Hey Vince, care to elaborate?
willfourth that's an aggressive act of power dominance!!! Lol
@@rafaelmiramontes7953 intellectual irony, should we laugh or cry?
Should there be sufficient interest in such introductory course, I would avail myself for it. I would however need preparation time - mainly to arrange the relevant sources to back up claims as any scholar ought to.
Begins lecture: "Hey, no one believes that everything is relative and nothing is better or worse than anything else." 43:30 "Everything is as good as anything else, obfuscation (mythology) is as good as clarification (philosophy) because French cocktail-party wit Anatole France was being clever and ornate (and completely facetious and philistine) for 10 minutes"
Nope. He's saying that our foundational mythololy should be critically scrutinized, not "everytihng is as a good as anything else".
Bad strategy to time-stamp. Anyone can check to see how thin your "performative contradiction" case is.
@@fede2 that is literally what he's saying, that any philosophy is as good any other philosophy, myth, or whatever else. You are fantasizing the rest.
Do you dare critically scrutinize Derrida's mythology, resting entirely on an absurd Saussurian proposition that there are arbitrary things in this Universe?
@@mentalitydesignvideo If you're going to dig in your heals, at least make an argument. Tell me *why* I'm wrong.
@@fede2 you read my argument, yours was "it's thin" and then you invented a favorable meaning to what he said. What is there to argue and why should I bother?
@@mentalitydesignvideo I explained *why* it was thin. You haven't done that once.
I find it intriguing that Comments are turned off for the Baudrillard lecture--the one on overpowering, sinister technology 😉. So telling of our current censored life.
Richard Feynman once said: "IF YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN TO ME WITH CLARITY WHAT YOU KNOW, THEN YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING." That is a lesson Jacques Derrida NEVER learned; and I know, because I took a course with him at Yale.
Reply
Christopher Hitchens wrote a good essay about obscure language called Sentenced to Death in which helabels such language as a kind of double-edged sword: it can lead us to new places, but can also be exploited by hacks (Hitchens thought Louis Althusser was one of those). I'm also interested in Thomas Kuhn's observation that he didn't understand Aristotle until he read his work on Aristotle's own terms, which sounds similar to Derrida to me. He would btw, agree with your last sentence :)
31:41 *all words are metaphorical* _the word is the murder of the thing, the price we pay for language_
Pouvez-vous donner une traduction simultanée, faite par un vrai philosophe de préférence. Merci.
('He' meaning Derrida in that last sentence)
Where's Rick Roderick from? Southern US, I suppose but where? I never heard that accent before. At times he sounds Australian.
OK I googled: Abilene, Texas. 27th-largest city in the state. Thank you, Abilene!
It’s funny he says “there are no relativists” (24:40 or so) when that’s the exactly what Kelsen and neo-Kantian positivists were. Such “relativism” is very much evident in political philosophy, as it is the core of pluralism and parliamentarianism (something addressed by such obscure thinkers as Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin).
Relativism can quite obviously be the functional result of a great deal of moral/ethical/political systems, regardless of the supposed “intent”, and itself is a position contra an absolutism or certainty in relation to a problem (relativism is frequently a polemic term, which does not mean, as suggested, that it lacks meaning because it’s content is ill-defined or refuted as such by the defender of positions which result in “relativism”).
There is a distinction between the analytical tradition and the continental tradition, and I think you are using the analytical method which is more commonly accepted throughout the Anglo/American world, a standard measurement of ethics and morality in the style of Kant, and at the heart of German law, post WWII. When Rick Roderick speaks of plurality of meaning in the face of intent, he isn't talking about context or action, so, it is no contradiction on his part, to say that relativism is not that all meanings are equally valid, but that meaning is slippery, and, some what like systems theory, unpredictable and unstoppable. In Continental Philosophy that is!
@@QUAKERSATTACKS97 the logical positivist's were a small group called the Vienna Circle, who believed in the value of logic to solve all problems! Logic is not a part of Continental Phil as it is in the Analytical School, that doesn't mean that the are not aware of each other. But it is Analytical Phil which subdivides itself into different discipline's, such as Political Philosophy. Continental Phil cannot recognise relativism in the sense that Analytical Phil does, and this is the point Rick R is making! Analytical Phil critiques Continental Phi on its own terms and by its own rules and thus completely misrepresents the ideas that Continental Phil attempts to understand. Sorry if you think you were misunderstood, I was just trying to explain what might have sounded strange to you. Moral relativism is considered to be bad by A phi where as C phil would see it as an inevitable part of existence! As in Kant's categorical imperative in A phil, as moral absolutism. Sorry if I have gotten it wrong and this was not the problem!
What university does he give the lecture?
Duke University, 1994
Interesting that Jordan Peterson type mischaracterizations of post-structuralists date back to the 80’s and they manifested in almost the same way
I wish I could send him messages back in time from 2021. He’d run for president and win. That would be a cool timeline.
what's the word he says at 36:09?
Vedic hymm
@@patroane75 thank you bro English is not my native language
@ 25:00 I think it was William James who said that everyone is right as everyone inhabits their own unique reality
Rest in peace mister Roderick.
The lecture is his attempt at answering the following question posed by a reporter on deconstruction: “What the hell is this stuff anyway, that’s causing so much trouble?” Lol
"Nobody actually believes all ideas are equal."
Millennials: "Hold my Philosophy 201 textbook!"
Is there a last word in mathematics?
No. Math is just the same
"There is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end." Sadly, so many contemporary novels are preachy and insist on the 'right' interpretation.
Rightly so, because the writer intended it in a particular way. The point is to get it.
Encore une conférence en langue étrangère.J'attends une traduction simultanée, ou écrite.
It is much better to have a toothache now than it was in previous periods of time. But what of sleeping under the bridges at night?
Homeless people today r far better off. Starvation was normal till about 150yrs ago.
My point was was they're still sleeping under bridges at night. Sorry this took me a year to reply to lmao
How is a book eliciting "many interpretations"? In reading courses, books elicit no interpretations
« The word is not the thing « this is what Magritte showed with the painting « this is not an apple « …
Is this why I see so many articles charging certain people with racism or sexism, etc., without regard to the author's intention? How can these interpretations be justified?
25:01 straw*person* argument?! Rodrick was woke 30yrs ago, smh.
And he f-ing paid the price for it too.
@@johnnytocino9313 How did he pay the price? I'm unfamiliar with him so I'm super curious.
Well he was wrong about rejecting Chaucer in colleges that has begun to happen at some colleges already. Of course it didn't happen when he was alive.
BEING IS STRATIFIED LEVELS OF STASTIC ORDER
Such a shame jordan Peterson has seen this. His entire thesis on post structuralist’s being the root of all evil is quickly dismantled.
"is word word a word?"
Bird is the word lol
Ah jes hate suthin acceyents but this brilliant guy knows his stuff!
If Derrida does NOT claim that, "any interpretation is as good as any other", then what characteristics can or should be considered to actually confer "better" or "worse" on an interpretation? How DO you evaluate any particular interpretation as being "better" or "worse"? Is there any identifiable, practical difference between "there is no *right* interpretation" and "any interpretation is as good as any other"? If there is, it must be somewhere in the ability to judge interpretations as "better" or "worse". Yet if it is possible to judge better or worse, then can it not be said that the "right" interpretation is therefore the "best" interpretation that we as yet have been able to determine? Knowledge is tentative, contingent on the discovery of better information. In that light, is there really any relevant difference I between "right" and "best"? Just like Newton was essentially "right" with his celestial calculations before Einstein, Einstein showed that they could be improved upon. Was Newton suddenly wrong?In certain cases, but not in the cases he originally dealt with, and in fact Newtonian mechanics are still used for some calculations of celestial motion since it's simpler to perform and "good enough" in the cases where they are used. That's not the same as the "last word," given the tentative nature of knowledge in general. If you prefer to term it "current best" I have no problem with that, but that could also be considered the "current right" interpretation. On the other hand, if you're trying to argue against a "perfect" interpretation, I don't know anyone who is arguing for that-- perfection simply does not exist in knowledge, and that it doesn't exist isn't news. If all Derrida is saying is that perfect knowledge of interpretation doesn't exist, well how useless, no one is saying that any more than people are saying "one interpretation is as good as any other"...
Syncopator But the problem is that all sorts of social, subjective, cultural, linguistic and historical factors are going to determine what "right" even means, and the evaluation, if it is dependent on such things, can never reach a point where we have an absolute conclusion, if you consider how those things are fluid and in constant change.
The "best" interpretation can change within a moment, and it's always a question of perspective -- considering the sense of this word that indicates the complex background I refered to above, as a point within all those things from which one can observe his surroundings. You can judge what is a better interpretation right now, if you are able to account for all these factors, and are right about that opinion, but this would be an ephemeral "better", and only when consider through a specific perspective.
+Syncopator The basic thing Derrida is trying to argue is that a reliance on scientific metaphors and rationalism pervades Western philosophy, he rejects analytical philosophy. Its not about finding the right interpretation, its about extracting which interpretations are essentially cultural
Perhaps it would be 'better' to say that Derrida provides a system to discover which interpretations are likely to be 'as best' or 'worse' interpretations. In other words an apophatic interpretation - "its not this or that".
I disagree friend. Derrida's view is one that deconstructs, as Roderick explains, the very foundations of human interaction with the world. I would argue that to submit to the social systems and magnitutitual value systems is directly in opposition to the organic way of human nature. We have created these systems somewhat unknowingly through our exploration of language yet decide not to understand them and thus let ourselves be controlled by them. (N.B I am not talking about political systems here so don't try and call me a conspirisist please) In deconstructing them you can accept the full experience of life without the blurring generalisation that language and simple better/worse ideas give to the world.
Syncopator
Regardless of what this professor says, Derrida concludes that there cannot be one meaning, and therefore no one has any way to say what is THE true meaning. To the extent he is correct, he is unprofoundly restating a muddy epistemological skepticist perspective and applying it not only to knowledge, but even meaning itself. Of course we can't know meaning if we can't _know_ to begin with...
Derrida, and many postmodern philosophers, do of course stray off the path and develop methods for establishing a preferred truth hierarchy, not just for meaning and knowledge, but for morality and being itself. And wouldn't you know, unlike empiricism, the method of discovering truth that overthrew all of the preconceptions of the people who developed and practiced it, deconstruction just so happens to lend itself to reinforcing everything that the postmodern philosophers already believed... Viz, that Marx was right about capitalism and western civilization. How convenient.
Others mistake the inability of humans to know truth for evidence that truth, itself, cannot objectively exist. Some conclude that no pragmatic systematic hierarchy of discernable truths can be derived, and thus no one has any right to say what is more or less true. I have no idea how a philosophy professor could pretend that doesn't happen. This guy doesn't seem very sharp.
People, like Angus Rose above, who find Derrida profound only do so by believing Derrida's work to be an expression that western culture is in"organic" and oppressive- less right. Ironically they believe Derrida's work to be a proof of what they already believe, that all language has been weaponized to favor capitalism, and the path of resistance is to unilaterally change the meaning of words we don't like and pretend that all of the previous context still applies.
Poststructural analysis is useful to the extent that it isn't used to invent irrational excuses for prioritizing one perspective over another, unfortunately that temptation is too much for some people.
Being is.
I am that I am.
Also, neti neti.
Or rather that Being, is because Isn’t.
Derrida is an argelian philosopher. Everything out of this are a huge and a completely equivocation.
5 30. Badly aged...
I have personally met defenders of relativism....
Rick Roderick does not lead my mind, he just expects to be lapped up.
I love this overweight philosopher flattened by bus tortilla.
The leak is in the language.
Je m'intéresse aussi à l'observation de Thomas Kuhn qu'il ne comprenait pas Aristote jusqu'à ce qu'il lisait son travail sur les propres termes d'Aristote, qui semble similaire à Derrida moi. Il aurait d'ailleurs, d'accord avec votre dernière phrase :) (par Google Translate)
Qabala begs to differ that "words are not things". The letters that comprise the Hebrew Aut, the basis for what is the language of Hebrew scriptures, are physically that what they represent. This is difficult to understand since we have been conditioned to listen to professors and scholars such as this who have no notion of anything other than their fish-bowl lives.
That said, it is almost impossible for most humans to express intent and meaning within the arbitrary constructs that have hijacked communication referred to as culture and civilization.
It is, however, possible to represent ourselves authentically (what Derida is looking for) via that innate quality known as a CONSCIENCE. Everything begins to fall into place once we access this ability consistently and we will find dissertations such as this (and their dancing on a pin progenitors) superfluous.
best
31:30 Words are metaphorical -- the crushing banality of this "discovery" is giving me ulcers, I swear. Not having the opportunity to smack the wiggling Algerian dervish upside the head is taking a terrible toll on my nervous system.
BTW, how DID metaphorical connections develop? We can sorta see how onomatopoeia developed, but what about the rest of language? It coalesced out of thin air in defiance of laws of cause and effect? Maybe you should call your friend, Paul De Mann, he always knew what to say to gullible Americans.