Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts

Sunday 7 March 2021

Dialectics - The Alchemy of Ideas : Constructive Dialogue vs. Rational Discourse




PREMISE :
" Anything, any topic, can be the subject of rational discussion by mature, reasonable, responsible adults that are the respsective possessors of antithetical views arising as the product of sincerely-held, legitimate differences of opinion. "

NO - You Cannot Ever Hope to so Definitively Apply or Affirm Such a Naive Assertion of Generalities.

Why?

Because The Universe, to Our Limited Vision and Understanding, is not Guaranteed and Underwritten to Behave Always or With Consistency in the Manner of a Rational Actor.

Why?

Because of the Unknown-Unknowns and Certain Uncertainty of Quantum Factors, Resulting from Free Will, Choice, Intention and the Mysteries of the Ineffable and Intuitive - often only accessible through Art, or Acts of Creation in Whichever Direction of Abstract Extrapolation, Divination and Interpretation -

viz.

"You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God...."

Graham Greene
Brighton Rock


The Premise is therefore Hereby shown to have been invalid, from the first :

NOT Everything can be hammered-out in order to be rendered clear and understood via moderated Aristotelian discourse of rational, reasonable Scholars and Learned Men of the Accademy of The Society

Nor is it safe to presume that such Learned and Scholarly Men are ever acting or engagining in Discourse, any Discourse, on any topic from a personally uninvolved and impartial position of passive objectivity, rationality and "Pure Reason"


American college and university campuses are increasingly crippled by a form of mass irrationalism called political correctness . The purveyors of this doctrine proclaim that everything important in history can be summed up under the headings of race , gender, ethnicity , and choice of sexual perversion. 

They condemn western Judeo-Christian civilization , and inveigh against the dead white European males who predominate among the scientists of the last 600 years . 

True to the spirit of Herbert Marcuse' s 1968 essay on "Repressive Tolerance" the politically correct demand the silencing of any speech that might be offensive to themselves and their radical feminist, homosexual , or ethnic-group clienteles. Instead, they busy themselves with coining absurd new euphemisms for plain English , fashioning labyrinths of pedantic circumlocution. The infantile irrationality of political correctness might suggest that all of these characteristics were purely arbitrary expressions ofthe prejudices of the politically correct thought policepersons themselves . What needs to be appreciated is that the politically correct creed is coherent with a kind of philosophical doctrine which has a name: deconstructionism. The leading expositor of deconstructionism is a French writer named Jacques Derrida, a professor at the School for Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. Since his appearance at a celebrated conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1 966 , Derrida has been a frequent guest professor and lecturer at many American universities , especially Yale , but also Berkeley , Stanford , and many others. 

Although Derrida is not a household word, he is the dominant academic philosopher in the world today. 

Ironically , his support and readership is greater in the United States than in France or any other country . U . S . higher education is now decisively influenced by Derrida' s deconstructionism, a patchwork of fragments scavenged from the twentieth-century ideological junkyard of totalitarian movements . For those who have been wondering about a possible new prime focus of philosophical and political evil after the discrediting of Marxism: This is it. 

Deconstructionists are radical nominalists , which means they are virtual paranoid schizophrenics. Books are already filled with the humorless politically correct Newspeak of post-modernism: vertically challenged instead of short, differently hirsute instead of bald , and so forth . But changing words does nothing to change real situations . If tens of millions are unemployed and starving in today ' s depression, then they need jobs and economic recovery, and not terms like "momentarily downsized" or other new ways euphemistically to express their plight. 

To say nothing of the fact that this jargon makes thinking impossible . 

Derrida the Deconstructionist 

Jacques Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in El Biar, Algeria in 1 930. He began writing in the early 196Os , and his first important books , Writing and Difef rence, Disseminations, and OfGrammatology, came out in 1967- 68 . Derrida' s existential matrix is the May 1 968 destabilization of the great Gen . Charles de Gaulle' s government-an operation fomented by Anglo-American intelligence . This intellectual milieu was dominated in the 1 950s by the existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and in the 1960s by the structuralism of Levi-Strauss (whose networks spawned much of the terrorism plaguing Ibero-America) and the Freudianism of Jacques Lacan , spiced by the Hegelianism of Jean Hippolite . During the late 1 960s, Derrida was built up by the group around the magazine Tel Quel, including one Felix Guattari , later an apologist for the Italian Red Brigades terrorists. Derrida ' s immediate academic lineage at the elite Higher Normal School (ENS), makes for one hell of an intellectual pedigree .

Start with Louis Althusser, the structuralist Marxist of Reading Das Kapital. Already in the late 1940s Althusser was suffering frequent mental breakdowns; in 1980, he murdered his wife by strangling. her, and was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane . In the late 1 940s, Althusser acquired a disciple: This was Michel Foucault, a young homosexual who periodically made abortive attempts at suicide , so that he was allowed to live in the ENS infirmary.

Foucault was an enthusiastic reader of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger who , under Althusser' s influence, also became a Marxist and a member of the French Communist Party , where he was rumored to work as a ghost-writer for Jean Kanapa, a Stalinist member of the Politburo. Later Foucault would discover themes like the glorification of insanity, liberation through masturbation, and the like . Foucault ended up at the University of California at Berkeley, where he frequented the chains-leather-riding crop homosexual and sado-masochistic scene . Foucault died of AIDS in 1984.

 'Giving bullshit a bad name' 

But Foucault also had a disciple: Jacques Derrida , who took his course at the ENS: "I was struck, like many others , by his speaking ability . His eloquence, authority , and brilliance were impressive ," said Derrida later of his mentor. Derrida was taken by Foucault to the psychiatric hospital of St. Anne to hear patients examined (Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon, p. 50). Derrida has been less of a political exhibitionist than Foucault. Derrida was arrested by the communist authorities in Prague in 1981 on charges of drug trafficking; he said that he had come to meet dissidents and was released after protests. In the mid-1980s , Derrida authored a characteristically garbled essay in praise of Nelson Mandela. In general , Derrida claims always to have been a leftist . Foucault and his pupil Derrida quarreled during the 1970s , and Foucault has provi􀄘ed some trenchant summations of Derrida' s work, which he rightly called "terrorist obscurantism.

Obscurantism because Derrida deliberately writes in an incomprehensible w􀄙ay . If one ventures to criticize Derrida, the latter says: "You misunderstood me you are an idiot" (LimitedI nc. , p. 158). 

Foucault also said of Derrida: "He's the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name" (Illiberal Education by Dinesh D'Souza, p. 190). 

The main exception seems to be when Derrida has to argue for funding for his activities; in these cases he seems to be able to speak quite clearly (see Tenured Radicals) . The destruction of language Those who try to read Derrida find a smokescreen of infuriating jargon, thoroughly pedantic but in a modish way. What is Derrida up to behind the smokescreen? One thinks of Moliere's pedant Vadius in Les Femmes Savantes . His task at one level is simply to destroy the literate languages of western Europe and their developed capacity to transmit advanced scientific, artistic, and epistemological conceptions.

Derrida wants to wreck everything that has been accomplished since De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular) by Dante, Petrarch, and their heirs in many countries. Derrida also knows that in order to destroy the efficacy of these languages, he must also destroy the heritage of Plato

Derrida wants to show that all written and spoken discourse is umeadable, undecipherable, incapable of meaning anything. Reading a written text, above all, is for Derrida always a misreading. 

For this operation Derrida proceeds in the spirit of an ultra-Aristotelian radical nominalism which abolishes any relation between language on the one hand, and concepts and reality on the other. Such an outlook is always closely linked with paranoid schizophrenic mental pathologies. The operation is far from new, but has been attempted many times during the centuries, in recent times especially by the AngloVenetian or continental oligarchical schools of philosophy. Derrida is like David Hume, who began with the usual "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu" ("Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses") of Paolo Sarpi's disciples among the British empiricists, and soon ended up denying the possible existence of truth, the world, causality, knowledge, and the self.

Derrida uses "texts" as the primary sense impressions and arrives at the same kind of radical skepticism. Signs without reality Much of modem philosophy is an attempt to dissolve epistemology into language and then to cripple epistemology by dissolving language. This is typical of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has had immense influence in the AngloAmerican world. Ernst Cassirer wrote in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms about language becoming the principal weapon of skepticism rather than the vehicle for philosophical knowledge. Stuart Chase and the semanticists tried to show that most important political and historical concepts were meaningless verbiage.

The modem hermeneutic school is not far behind. Derrida's late comrade in arms, Paul de Man, the leading "boa deconstructor" at Yale University until his death in 1984 , talked about the predicament of modem thought as being linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic- meaning once again that language is a self-contained world of signs without links to reality. 

Concepts about the real world are degraded to rhetorical figures and tropes. Derrida's trick is to veil his extreflle subjectivist denial of reality with an apparent negation of both subject and object: " ... not only [does] meaning ... 􀅠ot essentially imply the intuition of the object but ... it essJntially excludes it .. .. The total absence of the subject and) object of a statementthe death of the writer and/or the dis ppearance of the object he was able to describe--does not prevent a text from 'mean- I ing' something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be eard and read" (Speech and Phenomena , pp. 92-93). Derrida's irrationalism has more flair than that of his plodding factional adversaries in thi older Anglo-American linguistic analysis schools.



When Derrida was a young boy, he was locked by his sister in a cedar chest in the family home and kept there by her for what seemed to him to be an eternity. During this time the child Derrida thought that he had died and gone to another world. After he had been rescued from the cedar chest, he somehow conceived the idea that he had been castrated. He came to see himself as the Egyptian pagan god Osiris, who had died and been dismembered, but then reassembled and brought back from the dead (minus his male organ) by Isis.

Derrida told his Paris students of the early 1970s that this decisive experience in his life had led him to write the book Dissemination (Paris, 1972), which includes much elaboration of the theme of seed that is scattered, etc.

Derrida felt compelled to narrate the Isis-Osiris-Horus myth in detail in the chapter of Dissemination entitled "Plato's Pharmacy," which is otherwise a document of his hatred for both Socrates and Plato. The Kabbala and mysticism Derrida is the bearer of another form of irrationalism of a specifically Venetian stamp: He has been pervasively influenced by the mystical writings of the Kabbala, a school cultivated over centuries by the Luzzato patrician family of the Venetian ghetto.

Derrida cites a certain "Rabbi Eliezer": "If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments and if all human beings practiced the art of writing, they would not exhaust the Torah I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it."

Can this be Eleazar Ben Judah of Worms, the Hasidic Kabbalist who lived from 1160 to 1238? An ancient text with rach single word surrounded by . en . dless pages of exegetica􀁑 comm􀅘nt􀅙, with each note pomtmg to a another, older text-this IS one of Derrida's d.ominating visions. 􀁐 errida's lessay . on the Livre des Questions (B ook of QuestIOns) and reBatls Ma Demeure (I Build My House) by the contemporary French author Edmond Jabes yields a singular quotation on "the difficulty of being a Jew, which coincides with the difficulty of writing: for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion." 

"The art of the writer consists in little by little making words interest themselves in his books" I (Writing and Difef rence, p. 65􀅚. Derrida sometimes assumes the persona of a Kabbalist and signs his essays as "Reb Rida" or "Reb Derissa." 

Derrida was much influen􀅛ed by the French writer Emmanuel Levinas, who populahzed the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the pro-Nazi existentialism of Martin Heidegger in France. Husserl and Heidegger had appeared as co-thinkers until Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, when Heidegger came out openly asia raving Nazi, while Husserl declined to do so. At this point, Levinas gravitated to Heidegger's, that is to say, to the oPfn Nazi side. Levinas helped to direct Derrida' s attention 0 Heidegger, who was also profoundly influencing Frenc􀅜 thought via Sartre, who was also a convinced Heideggerian. Just as Heidegger is a commentator of the protofascist 􀅝ietzsche, so Derrida can be seen as a commentator of the Nazi Heidegger. Derrida's endorsement of Heidegger is iqdeed very strong: "I maintain . . . that Heidegger's text is 0t extreme importance, that it constitutes an unprecedented, lirreversible advance and that we are still very far from haying exploited all its critical resources" (Positions, pp. 70, 3). Deconstruction is destruction A typical theme of the irr􀀚tionalists of the Weimar Republic was Destruktion .

 Karl ¥annheim wrote in his Ideology and Utopia (1929) about thd need to promote the Destruktion of self-deceiving ideologi s. For the Heidegger of Being and Time , Destruktion meant something similar, approximately the clearing away of what deconstructionists call "western metaphysics" from life and the institutions of thought. Heidegger wrote afteI the war in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (p. 211) of the need for a "destructive retrospect of the history 0 I ontology" whose task would be to "lay bare the internal character or development" of its objects of study. This would i􀅞volve a "loosening up" of the "hardened tradition" of "ontology" by a "positive destruction." 

The Nazi Heidegger's noti n of Destruktion is the immediate starting point for Derrid􀅟 and his entire school. In the first published edition of De La GrammatoLogie (Of Gramma- I tology) published in Paris in 1967 , Derrida does not talk about "deconstruction" but rather abfut "destruction" throughout. 

Derrida says that in deconstruetion, "the task is . . . to dis-mantle [deconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at work . . . not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way" (Margins of Philosophy). Derrida is nervous to the point of paranoia lest this connection become too obvious: He deliberately lies that "deconstruction has nothing to do with destruction. I believe in the necessity of scientific work in the classical sense. I believe in the necessity of everything which is being done . "


The destruction of reason With deconstruction thus revealed as a slyly disguised form of destruction , the next question is to determine what is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the destruction of reason, the deconstruction of the Logos, which he identifies as the central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition. That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is anti-western because he regards the line of development from Socrates and Plato through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric" and racist. When he attacks "metaphysics," he means human reason itself.


Derrida writes: "The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence-which governs a writing is thus enlarged and radicalized , no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos . Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God ' s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense" (Of Grammatology, pp . 10-11) .

And again: "This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13). How then can reason and the logos be destroyed?

Heidegger had already given the example of attempt this by mystifying the concepts having to do with language: ''Thinking collects language into simple speaking . Language is therefore the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows into language . These furrows are even simpler than those plowed with slow steps by the farmer. " 'The death of civilization of the book' For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the realm of "sign" and "signified . " 

"The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13).

In other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) 

Derrida is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology, p . 8).


Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focuses his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence" as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that something exists. 

Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual apparatus of western philosophy from the time of the Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche [principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280).

In language, "the metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee of meaning.

We see that for Derrida, all western languages are "metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are permeated by Christian Platonism. They are also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to be sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with both. 

Reason and speech Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric," that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but also lawfulness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, human reason and human speech are inextricably bound up together. The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud.

 If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this, colossal cultural damage would of course be the result. Western language is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to say, western language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over the written language.

"The system of language associated with phoneticalphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced" (OfGrammatology, p. 43).

Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture , (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing going for it.

In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the world. Black marks on white paper In order to attack the logos and reason through the spoken word, Derrida sets against them his notion of writing: l' ecriture . Derrida explains that what he means by writing is "a text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination , p. 203). That means a text already written, black on white. Black marks on white paper, plus excruciating attention to spaces, numbers, margins, paragraphs, typefaces, colophons, copyright notices, plus patterns, groups, repetitions of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism. Since it is probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics in the process, we can feel free to say that Derrida attempts to establish the ontological priority of writing over language and speech. Nothing in the way of proof is offered in favor of this absurd idea: The argument proceeds through a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black marks on the page:

"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).

This is Derrida's new pseudo-science called "grammatology," which studies the marks (grammata) on the paper. Each gramme or grapheme can be endlessly commented upon. The word comes from a nineteenth-century French dictionary by Littre and has been more recently used by 1.J. Gelb in the title of his book A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology.! For Derrida, the black marks on the white paper are the only reality, as he very radicallylasserts in Of Grammatology: "The axial proposition of this essay is that there is nothing I outside the text." Since the notion of the "text" has already been expanded to include all language, and since real events are reduced by Derrida to "discdurse" about those events, the deconstructors argue that this islnot as fanatical as it sounds. But the fact remains that for Derrida, the sense data we have are the texts. There is no other perception. Better yet, as he says, "I don't believe that anything like perception exists" I ("Structure, Sign and Play in tpe Discourse of the Human Sciences" in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of I Man (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 27 ff., "Discussion").

Deconstructing Plato 
Derrida exalts writing over speech, but logocentric-phonocentric western thinking refuses to go along with him. Derrida directs his rage against Plato by "deconstructing" the dialogue Phaedrus .

The result is the essay "Plato's Pharmacy" which appears in Dissemination . This is classical Derridean obfuscation, playing on the multiple meanings of the Greek word pharmakon, which can mean variously poisonremedymagic potion, or medicine.

But the fields of meaning are even more complicated: Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue, recounts the story of the nymph Orithyia who was playing with the nymph Pharmakeia when Orithyia was blown over a cliff by Boreas, the north wind. 

Pharmakeia was herself associated with a healing fountain.

Phaedrus has brought some written texts for Socrates to read, and these are compared to a drug (pharmakon) which has lured Socratesto

Are these texts a healing drug or poison?

Socrates narrates the fable of the Egyptian god Tlileuth, a Hermes-Mercury figure who had invented countinggeometryastronomydice, and letters (grammata) for writingTheuth wants to share all these arts with the people of Egypt, so he goes to Amon Ra (Thamus) and offers the l to him. Amon Ra rejects the letters, explaining that these will weaken memory and make available only the appearance and presumption of knowledge, but not true knowledge. Derrida explodes with rage against Socrates and Plato: ('One begins by repeating without knowing-through a myth-the definition of writing: repeating without knowing .. 1 .. Once the myth has dealt the first blows, the logos of socr􀀋es will crush the accused." (Dissemination. p. 84)


 He the proceeds to an obsessive recounting of the Isis-Osiris story. Derrida also makes much of the fact that although Plato includes reference to Socrates as pharmakeus (poisoner, medicine man , sorcerer), he does not free-associate from pharmakon/pharmakeus to pharmakos, meaning scapegoat. The idea is that Socrates really became a scapegoat at his trial , while Plato is making a scapegoat of "writing ." The conclusion is that "the pharmakon is neither the cure nor the poison, neither good nor evil , neither the inside nor the outside , neither speech nor writing" (Positions, p. 59). Through a hidden pattern of ambiguities , the text, in addition to saying what Plato might have meant, also says what Plato cannot have meant. 

The dialogue thus deconstructed is hopelessly contradictory and impossible to interpret or construe.

Q.E.D. 

Nietzsche had called himself Plato in reverse, and had railed against "Socrates , he who does not write. " Derrida attacks Plato in another interminable book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Half of this book is made up of a series of wildly dissociated, stream of consciousness letters that revolve around a postcard Derrida says he found at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The postcard depicts a miniature from an old manuscript showing Socrates seated at a desk writing , with a smaller Plato behind him, appearing to Derrida "dictating, authoritarian, masterly, imperious" (pp. to- I I ) .

Upon seeing this , Derrida naturally went wild: "I always knew it, it had remained like the negative of a photograph to be developed for 25 centuries in me of course." Hundreds of pages of babbling follow , always returning to Derrida's desire to rewrite the history of philosophy by securing the greatest possible attention for this postcard: "Don't forget that all of this took ofHrom the wish to make this picture the cover of a book, all of it pushed back into its margins , the title, my name, the name of the publisher, and miniaturized (I mean in red) on Socrates' phallus" (p. 25 1). Other essays in this book evoke Freud and his comparison of the human psyche to a "mystic writing pad" as another way of undermining the logos .

Slaying the ' tyranny of reason' Derrida is always heavily larded with Freud (who was a Kabbalist mystic, homosexual , and morphine addict himself) . This opens up new possibilities for deconstruction: in "Plato's Pharmacy" discussed above, Derrida exerts himself to show that Plato's notion of the logos had strong fatherly and paternal overtones . From here it is not far to Derrida's idiotic neologism of "phallogocentrism."

Derrida seems to think that his confrere Lacan does not go far enough in liberating himself from phallocentrism. Derrida comments: "Freud, like his followers , only described the necessity of phallogocentrism. . . . It is neither an ancient nor a speculative mistake . . . . It is an enormous and old root" (Le Facteur de la Verite, (The Factor of Truth) p. 145).

Infinite variations on this psychotic revolt against the tyranny of reason , featuring the related need to slay the father and fight phallocentrism are now playing, often at taxpayers ' expense, at yourl local campus . One of Derrida's nervous tics is that texts have no authors . 

This is strictly in accordance with his deconstruction of the notion of the human self, which in his eyes is an invention of those hated west rn metaphysics. The late Paris "semiologist" Roland Barthe had proclaimed that "as institution , the author is dead: hi civil status, his biographical person have disappeared ." Derrida agrees, and writes: "The names of authors or of doc . nes have here no substantial value . They indicate neither dentities nor causes . It would be frivolous to think that 'De artes,' 'Leibniz ' 'Rousseau ,' etc . are names of authors , 0 the authors of movements or displacements that we thus d signate . The indicative value that I attribute to them is firs the name of a problem" (Of Grammatology, p . 99). 

In the 1970s Derrida enga ed in a polemic with a certain John R. Searle, an academic s ecializing in so-called AngloAmerican speech act theory. errida advances philosophical doubts about the existence of Searle, and then spends several pages clowning about the c pyright notice (Copyright © 1977 by John R. Searle). 

De ·da fantasizes that there might exist a copyright trust with stocks and bonds, and that this might be the agency which pI' uced Searle's essay. He then free-associates from the cop ght trust to the French expression for a type of limited lia ·lity corporation, societe! responsabilite limitee-abbrev· ted "SARL" (Limited Inc, pp. 29-36). 


From that point n, Derrida pretends that this SARL is the author of the adv rsary piece. It is all endlessly long-winded and not funny . ut deconstructionists prefer expressions like "subject pos tions" to persons , since this expresses their belief in the fr gmentation of the human self and ego in the post-age of post odernism and post-structuralism. i 'Provisional' reading I It will be useful to show ih somewhat more detail how Derrida's deconstructive shredder goes after a piece of writing . Remember that this can 􀃕e any kind of writing, be it advertising, law , economics, movie scripts, the telephone book, etc .-there is no such thing as a work of art. Derrida always acts with duplicity , 0* what he prefers to call the "double bind": His first or "projvisional" reading often establishes what a text might be thought to mean according to the traditional academic stand*ds of, let us say, the 1950s. Derrida concedes that texts areilegible and at this level there is something to be gotten out 􀁍f them.

The fact that "Send over a pizza" will often producela pizza at the door he ascribes to the "effects" of language, m􀅙aning that some of those who make up the same community !of interpretation will get the idea. But this is a far cry from tthe onotological certainty of meaning which he says is indiswnsable . At this stage Derrida reaches into Heidegger' s threa􀅚bare bag of tricks and pulls out the stratagem of crossing: out certain "metaphysical" words that he wants to use but idistance himself from at the same time in a way that mere quotation marks will not accomplish. An example is Derrida's phrase "to think that the sign is that ill-named thing," with both "is" and "thing" crossed out but still legible (Of GrammatoLogy, p. 19) . 

In order to even pretend to say anything, Derrida needs to use the old "metaphysical" vocabulary, but he does it "under erasure" in this way. Derrida needs a "provisional" reading which makes some sense in order to then knock it down with the cudgels of his trade. 

The most important of these is La dif[erAnce . Note the "a"-in French, as in English, differEnce is normally spelled with an e. La diffèrance in Derridean jargon is supposed to join together two separate ideas. 

One comes from Ferdinand de Saussure, who built up his school of linguistics in the nineteenth century as a means of undermining the great German school of historical philology associated with such figures as Wilhlem von Humboldt, Franz Bopp, and the Grimms. 

Saussure mystified language by wholly removing the historical dimension. 

Saussure argued that no phoneme or other linguistic sign has any meaning by itself, but only by virtue of the way in which it is different from other signs. "Cat" can denote the feline critter not because of any intrinsic quality, but only because it is not the same as "bat," "rat," or "mat," which have been conventionally assigned to other objects. This is de Saussure's negative and relational approach to the function of words. 

The other idea which Derrida wants to mix in is that of delay or deferral. The written word comes forward with the promise of meaning, but the meaning of any "ecriture" always sends us off to other written words and other texts to find out what the given word means. When we reach those other written words and texts, they do not deliver meaning, but rather send us off on an endless journey through a bad infinity of texts. We never get real meaning, and never reach the primordial "arche-writing" that never existed anyway. The promised meaning never materializes, but is always postponed.

A counterfeit of real meaning Differance can thus power Derrida's shredder forward in much the same way that absolute negativity was used to power the Hegelian dialectic. Closely related to difef rance is something Derrida calls La trace, meaning trace, track or spoor. 

Trace is first of all a simulacrum or counterfeit of authentic presence, that is, of real meaning. 

Writing tries to harken back to the arche-writing, but cannot. But every time words are used, and every time they are re-examined in the endless workings of difjerance, they acquire new and elusive overtones of connotation. The "sedimentation" of traces which a word has acquired remains with it always, and makes up the infinite range of its possible present meanings. In other words, every time a word is spoken or written, its meaning changes and evolves. The associations thus acquired are long-lasting. 

Who can hear the word "crook," for example, without thinking of Nixon

Who can think of "malaise" without thinking of Carter

"Normalcy" still means Warren Harding for some, and so forth. So much sedimentation! 

In Derridean jargon this idea is summed up as follows: "A phoneme or graplleme is necessarily always to some extent different each tirr1e that it is presented in an operation or a perception. But it han function as a sign, and in general as language, only if formal identity enables it to be issued again and to be recognized. This identity is necessarily ideal" (Speech and P􀁺enomena , p. 50)

Derrida harps endlessly on this notion that words change each time they are used, and thhs never possess the ideal purity they would need to be the 􀁌earers of guaranteed meaning. It is interesting to note that ,errida incessantly changes his own jargon, dropping old terms and eliminating new ones. His cover story is that even his own jargon, once coined, is re-absorbed by the metaphysical language he is fighting against, so he has to invent new terms. 

Another term for what has just been discussed under the headings of trace and sedimentation is "iterability ," again meaning that words are used repeatedly. "lterability . . . leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say), to say something other than what we say and would have wanted to say, to understand something other than . . . etc." (Limited Inc a b c, p. 62) . 

Yet another word for the same thing is dissemination . This is important for Derrida because of the Osiris-Isis experience related above. Any piece of writing can be made to scatter itself like seed in all directions, with an endless "freeplay" of possible meanings. One obvious way to do this is to get etymological dictionaries and trace back the varying meanings of words, going all the way back to the hypothetical proto-Indo-European if possible. If this does not work, go ahead and invent false etymologies, the stupider and more pedantic the better (like "his-story" as the opposite of "her-story"). Otherwise, Freud, Husserl, Nietzsche, LeviStrauss, and many others can be plugged in to feed the process of free association. 

In Derrida's book Glas (The Death-Knell) , much attention is focused on Hegel. Derrida clowns with the French pronunciation of "Hegel": "His eagle (aigle) he draws his · who still pronounce it as French, only to a certain point: the cold . . . of the eagle caught in emblemished philosopher be th endless doubletalk, Hegel's is so strange. From the or historical power. Those there are those, are silly . . . of the magisterial and frost (gel) . Let the congealed." 

Later in this knowledge (savoir absolu) get identified as SA, which becomes "a, it," which then suggest the Freudian IU--l)llH also Sturmabteilungen, stormtroopers. And so on. In On Grammatology, the ing from a discussion of on the Origin of Languages . leads to scores of pages on supplement as the part needed to the whole, versus supplement as a part added to a I whole. Elsewhere, Derrida delves into Aristotle's s to dissect the use of the term "ama . " 

As some may already guessed, James Joyce is one of Derrida's all favorite authors. 

From Finnegan ' s Wake Derrida takes phrase "HE WAR" and traces associations from military 1(,{)lmhM , to past time (German er war, he was), and of keeping and preserving (bewahren, aufbewahren) (see Gramophone) . For the boa deconstructor Hillis Miller Yale, all these meanings send the reader into a vibratory endlessly bouncing from one possible interpretation another in a never-ending holding pattern. Paradoxes The crowning moment of any deconstruction is the moment of aporia, of insoluble conflict discovered within the writing. Contradictions like these are very easy to find: As GOdel's proof shows, no formal system can ever be complete and avoid contradiction at the same time. Words have contradictory meanings , as poets have always known. The choplogic Zeno made aporia into his stock in trade, proving that time is and is not, etc. Zeno's paradoxes gave rise to an entire school of skepticism called the aporetics. Whenever a deconstructionist charlatan reads a book or article, he can always be sure to find aporia and then pronounce the text deconstructed. The solid ground of truth and meaning thus supposedly falls out from under Plato and his followers, and the western world suddenly finds itself suspended over the abyss of chaos and delirium. 

This is the plunge into the abyss with which Derrida's exercise in dishonesty and malevolence puts down the book. The politics of rage Other than grabbing endowed chairs and foundation and government grants, what is the point? It is, once again, to destroy civilization. A society that submits its future leaders to education at the hands of deconstructionist con artists cannot survive. Rage is doubtless one of the ruling passions of Derrida and his cohorts, timid academics though they may seem. Derrida praises a "way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity" (Of Grammatology, p. 5). 

Derrida writes elsewhere of "the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity" (Writing and Difef rence, p. 293). 

The old epoch is ending, and a new form of horror is arriving for which we do not even have a word. Maybe it will be called a new fascist era. Or maybe it will be called the living hell of deconstructionism. But Derrida urges his cohorts forward, recommending that they not look back with nostalgia at the old world of western civilization they are determined to bury. 

Let us act, he says, like Nietzsche's superman whose "laughter will then break out toward a return which will no longer have the form of the metaphysical return of humanism any more than it will undoubtedly take the form 'beyond' metaphysics, of the memorial or of the guard of the sense of being, or the form of the house and the truth of Being. He will dance, outside of the house, that aktive Vergesslichkeit, that active forgetfulness (oubliance) and that cruel (grausam) feast [which] is spoken of in the Genealogy of Morals. No doubt Nietzsche called upon an active forgetfulness (oubliance) of Being which would not have had the metaphysical form which Heidegger ascribed to it" (Margins of Philosophy, p. 163). 

An admirer of Artaud How Derrida might be found celebrating is suggested by his abiding interest in the well-known French cultural degenerate Antonin Artaud, to whom Derrida has dedicated a great deal of admiring attention over the years. Artaud, we recall, was yet another profoundly disturbed personality who was repeatedly committed to mental institutions , where he spent the years from 1937 to 1946, approximately the last decade of his life , and who is known for his "theatre of cruelty." Writing and Difef rence contains not one but two essays on Artaud , "La Parole Souftee" ("The Whispered Word") and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." 

Derrida is also a co-editor, with Paule Thevenin, of a collection of Artaud's sketches and portraits published with' full-color plates by Gallimard-NRF in 1986. To this volume Derrida has contributed an essay. Artaud's drawings and paintings are pathetic and sick, but Derrida obviously takes them very seriously. Artaud must rank as an influence of the very first magnitude upon our philosopher. Let us sample "The Whispered Word" for satanic , pornographic, and coprophilic motifs.


Weak stomachs should skip this paragraph. Derrida writes: 

"Let us not be detained here by a possible resemblance to the essence of the mythic itself: the dream of a life without difference. Let us ask, rather, what difference within the flesh might mean for Artaud. My body has been stolen from me by effraction. The Other, the Thief, the Great Furtive One , has a proper name: God. His history has taken place. It has its own place. The place of effraction can be only the opening of an orifice. The orifice of birth, the orifice of defecation to which all other gaps refer, as if to their origin. . . . 'Now, the hideous history of the Demiurge/ is well known! It is the history of the body/ which pursued (and did not follow) mine/ and which, in order to go first and be born,/ projected itself across my body/ and! was born! through the disemboweling of my body/ of which he kept a piece/ in order to/ pass himself off/ as me. ' . . . God is thus the proper name of that which deprives us of our own nature, of our own birth; consequently he will always have spoken before us , on the sly . . . . In any event, God the Demiurge does not create, is not life, but is the subject of oeuvres and maneuvers , is the thief, the trickster, the counterfeiter, the pseudonymous , the usurper, the opposite of the creative artist, the artisanal being, the being of the artisan: Satan, I am God and God is Satan. . . . The history of God is thus the history of excrement. Scato-Iogy itself . . , . 'For one must have a mind in order/ to shit,/ a pure body c􀅛notl shit.! What it shitsl is the glue of minds/ furiously d􀅜ermined to steal something from him! for without a body o􀁊e cannot exist' (84, p. 1 13).

One can read in 'Nerve-Scale􀅝' : 'Dear Friends, What you took to be my works were only! my waste matter. ' . . . Like excrement, like the turd, whic􀁉 is, as is also well known, a metaphor of the penis, the worklshould stand upright" (Writing and Difef rence, pp. 180- 18􀅞). 

Imposed meaning ! In the meantime, since nothipg has any meaning anyway, the exterminating angels of d􀅟onstructionism are free to impose any meaning they wan􀅠 simply by an act of force. Nietzsche himself had claimed 􀅡at the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations: thfre is no correct interpretation. The Will to Power docuients Nietzsche' s idea that there is no meaning to be disc ered anywhere, but only a meaning that must be imposed om the outside by whoever has the stronger will to power 􀁋 "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he hims􀅢lf has imported into them." This is now standard campus ex􀁈getical practice. Philosophical hucksters hav􀁇 always played games with dualisms, or with what deconsttuctionists call binary pairs. Many phenomena exhibit such japparent dualism, as in the cases of cause-effect, spirit-ma􀁆er, speech-writing, and so forth. The secret of these app􀅣nt dualisms is that as they are better understood they revealjunderlying coherence, since all of them must coexist in the 􀅤ame universe and are governed by the same lawfulness. lIucksters like Derrida have made a living for thousands of years by picking up one side of the dualism, and stressing 􀀦at to the exclusion of all else. Derrida talks about "the cqupled oppositions on which philosophy is constructed" (Ma􀃔gins of Philosophy, p. 18). He says that these always contain "a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the ott1er (axiologically, logically, etc.), holds the superior position!. To deconstruct the opposition is first . . . to overthrow i the hierarchy" (Positions, p. 57). 

The subordinated term is placed on top, then removed from the dualistic pair, and finally given a new jargon name to signify its new top banana 􀁅tatus. Take, for example, the well-known dualism of men-􀅥omen. To reverse sexism, exalt women over men, and the* change their name to "womyn" to remove the residue of t􀅦 previous dualistic pairing. 

Any campus will immediately o􀁄ffer dozens of such examples, usually of incredible banal􀅧.

The 'New Criticism' 
After Derrida' s 1966 appeatlmce at Johns Hopkins, deconstructionists began to coloni􀅨e U.S. university faculties. They did not find employment first as professors of philosophy, but usually as literary cri*s in English, French, Romance language, and comparatjive literature departments. These English departments es􀁃ially were still dominated in those days by a school of litetary studies called the New Criticism . New Criticism had grown up with a group of Confederate nostalgics at Vanderbilt University who called themselves the Southern Agrarians . 

In their manifesto , entitled "I'll Take My Stand," these old New Critics came out against modem technology , industry, and urban life . John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate , Cleanth Brooks , and others taught their students to disregard history , biography , authorship , and other relevant information and focus exclusively on "texts ," understood as pieces of writing floating in a void . The result was that most English departments had given up any idea of reality and confined their attention to such fetishized "texts" long before Derrida had come along . These departments became the line of least resistance to deconstructionist infiltration . Some of the New Critics exhibited fascist sympathies , and this reminds us of the case of Paul de Man , the Belgianborn literary critic who helped make Yale University ' s highpowered English Department the leading American nest for deconstructionists during the late 1970s and early 1980s . 

In 1988 , some years after his death , De Man was widely accused of having written collaborationist , pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir of Brussels between 1941 and 1943. These articles have since been published. Derrida and many other deconstructionists , including Geoffrey Hartman , rushed to defend their former colleague . Deconstructionism has never been characterized by high moral tension . De Man himself had once written: "It is always possible to excuse any guilt, because the experience exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one . The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes" (see Allegories of Reading) . This may be how the Serbian killer Karadzic thinks about his own activities . No one should look forward to appearing in court before judges who have been trained in "critical legal studies , " which is the expansion of deconstruction into law schools which Derrida has been busy promoting . A deconstructionist judge would have no problem in showing that expressions like "due process" or habeas corpus are full of aporia and thus meaningless . After examining the cases of Heidegger and De Man , plus the implications of Derrida' s own work, it would be perfectly in order to brand deconstructionism as fascism warmed over. But this may not convey the magnitude of what the deconstructionists are attempting . At the present moment, the banner of deconstructionism is the rallying point for regrouping every epistemological obscenity of the last hundred years , including Nietzsche , Heidegger, Freud , Nazis , fascists , and the rest. Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down , Derrida spoke at a symposium in Turin , Italy , and indicated what his next move would be . At the very moment when Europe had a chance for historical renewal , Derrida talked about Europe , which he inevitably described as "the point of a phallus . " Derrida repeated his usual litany that Europe is old and exhausted, that Europe must make itself into something that it is not, far out of the European tradition . Then he announced that it was time to go back to Marx so as to be able to deconstruct both left-wing dogmatism and the counter-dogmatism of the right. This will allow a new critique of the new evils of capitalism . The main thing , he stressed , is to tolerate and respect everything that is not placed under the authority of reason . Since Derrida has never written at length about Marx , this represents his bid to bring former and future communists into his phalanx as well . Deconstruction thus advances its candidacy to become the undisputed focus of intellectual evil in the late twentieth century .

  References

Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits, (Paris: Gallimard- NRF, 1 986) .

Jacques Derrida, La dissemination, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 972); in English as Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1 98 1 ) .

 Jacques Derrida, Glas, translated by John P . Leavey (Lincoln, Neb . : University o f Nebraska Press, 1 986); French edition (Editions Galilee, 1 974) . Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 1 976) .

Jacques Derrida, "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration ," in For Nelson Mandela, edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York: Henry Holt, 1 987) . Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill . : Northwestern University Press, 1 988); "Limited a b c" is an essay in this collection. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophe, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1 972) .

Translated as Margins of Philosophy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1 982) . Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today' s Europe, (Bloomington, Ind . : Indiana University Press, 1 992) . Jacques Derrida, Positions, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 98 1 ) . Published under the same title (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1 972) . One of the participants in this discussion is Mme . Julia Kristeva, a close friend of Derrida's wife and herself the wife of Phillipe Sollers, of the Tel Quel clique. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1 987) . Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, translated by David B . Allison (Evanston, Ill . : Northwestern University Press , 1 973). Jacques Derrida, "Structure , Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difef rence. Jacques Derrida, Ulysse Gramophone: Deux Mots pour Joyce, (Paris: Galilee, 1 987) . Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difef rence, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1 978) . 


Dinesh D' Souza, I/liberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, (New York: Macmillan, 1 99 1 ) . Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass . : Harvard University Press, 1 99 1 ) . Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (New Y Ofk: Simon and Schuster, 1 993) . Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory, (Norman, Okla. and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989) . Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Mocire, Jr. , and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) .

Sunday 26 March 2017

Sing


We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken aloud, or even sung.

Tarpley



'The death of civilization of the book'
For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, language is at  first the realm of "sign" and "signified." 

"The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the g at epoch covered by the history  of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13). 

In other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology, p. 8).

Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focus es his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence" as this relates to language. The "presence" amounts to a solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude  that something exists. Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind is required as a precondition for the conceptual apparatus of western  philosophy  from the time of  e Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names  related to  fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence - eidos [action], arche [principle or  first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality, conciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent," which would  function as the ultimate guarantee of meaning. We see that for Derrida, all western  languages "metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are  permeated by Christian Platonism. They also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to   sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with both.

Reason and speech
Derrida asserts that the western languages   "logocentric," that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but also law lness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, hu man reason and human s ech   inextricably  und up together. The connection of speech and  reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renais sance. The theatre of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud. If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this, colossal cultural damage would of course be the result.

 Western  language is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to say, western  language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over the written language. "The system of language associated with phonetic alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced" (Of Grammatology, p. 43).

        Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the spoken word  (arole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture, (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing going for it. 

In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects. 

But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing every thing to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the world.



   

Sunday 20 November 2016

Thug Life

'Medusa herself is only a shadow'


...the remoteness of desire degenerates into dangerous enjoyment. 

This partly explains Tournier’s condemnation of image and photography in La Goutte d'Or (1985). He explicitly links their power to Medusa's petrifying fascination and contrasts them with the art of writing which is the art of education and the route to wisdom 'par excellence'.

It would seem that the fear experienced at the sight of Medusa's head is the terror of 
discovering the secret behind the representation of the image.
From Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, and Archetypes. Ed. Pierre Brunel., 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Routledge



" Do you understand,  
I had to call my wife up, and  apologise  to her for raping her, 
because I didn't know  that when you're married to somebody, 
that didn't allow you permission to just take The Pussy... 

I didn't know that.

Nobody had taught me that. "

- Bro. Dick Gregory




" There are those who theorize that Hecate is as old as the early Egyptians.  She possibly evolved from the Egyptian midwife goddess know as Hequit, Heket or Hekat, a goddess with Nubian roots.  It is said that this goddess took her attributes from the "heq" ("heka") or tribal matriarch of pre-dynastic Egypt.  This wise woman was believed to command the "hekau" or "(M)other's Words of Power", giving power to the sacred word.
 
  
"....  - for the emanations of Hek Ka, the mighty 
energies of a million hearts, are contained within her...."

 





The goddess Hekat birthed the sun each morning and was called the "most lovely one" - a title of the moon.  Her totems was the frog, a symbol of the fetus
 


"....  Oldest of the Old, amphibian being that swims in the 
water, yet walks upon the dry land...."

This goddess, in turn, was connected to the goddess Nut.  She was the sky and the heaven and was invoked with many names.  The Great Deep,  The Starry One,  Cow Goddess,  Mother of the Gods,  Mother of the Sun,  Protector of the Dead,  Guardian of the Celestial Vault.  These titles all relate to Hecate in her association with the moon, the night sky and the underworld.




The worship of Hecate may also have passed through the fertile crescent of the Israelites and Sumerians.  Hecate may have been related to the Sumerian Goddess of Death and Magic.  


She may have influenced or been influenced by the legends of Lilith, the first wife of Adam who was demonized as "the accursed huntress" and the dark phase of the moon - also attributes of Hecate.



Hecate had elements in common with other female manifestatitions/elements of this region.  The feminine spirit of knowledge, Sophia, has been depicted with three heads as was Hecate who as the Crone is considered the Wise Woman.  Hecate has even been linked to the Virgin Mary through Mary's indirect link to Lilith (as the second Eve) and through the association of both with the holy day of August 15.  This is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin when Mary is petitioned to avert storms so that the fields can ripen.  A festival for Hecate was held on August 13.  She too was invoked for help in preventing storms so that the harvest could be gathered.


In Greek Myth
medusa1.jpg (59124 bytes)Medusa, one of the three Gorgons, daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. She was the only one of the Gorgons who was subject to mortality. She is celebrated for her personal charms and the beauty of her locks. Neptune became enamoured of her, and obtained her favours in the temple of Minerva. This violation of the sanctity of the temple provoked Minerva, and she changed the beautiful locks of Medusa, which had inspired Neptune’s love to serpents. According to Apollodorus, Medusa and her sisters came into the world with snakes on their heads, instead of hair, with yellow wings and brazen hands. Their bodies were also covered with impenetrable scales, and their very looks had the power of killing or turning to stones. Perseus rendered his name immortal by his conquest of Medusa. He cut off her head, and the blood that dropped from the wound produced the innumerable serpents that infest Africa. The conqueror placed Medusa's head on the shield of Minerva, which he had used in his expedition. The head still retained the same petrifying power as before, as it was fatally known in the court of Cepheus. . . . Some suppose that the Gorgons were a nation of women, whom Perseus conquered. 
From Lempriére’s Classical Dictionary of Proper names mentioned in Ancient Authors Writ Large. Ed. J. Lempriére and F.A. Wright. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.


Camille Dumoulié

Medusa's head, an apparently simple motif linked to the myth of Perseus, was freed through being severed and cut loose from its 'moorings' by the hero in the remote depths of the world. There is something paradoxical about the story since the monster was all the more indestructible because it had been killed. Indeed, the figure of Medusa is characterized by paradox, both in terms of the actual mythical stare, which turned men to stone, and in the interpretations that have been given to it. The fascination that she exerts arises from a combination of beauty and horror. Her head was used, in Ancient times, as an apotropaic mask -- a sort of talisman which both killed and redeemed.

As well as being the very symbol of ambiguity, Medusa's head is also one of the most archaic mythical figures, perhaps an echo of the demon Humbaba who was decapitated by Gilgamesh. Everything implies that it is a 'representation' of the most meaningful aspect of the sacred. Insofar as it is the role of literature to assume responsibility for the sacred, each era, when confronted with the mystery of the 'origins', has re-examined Medusa's head with its mesmerizing stare as something which conceals the secret of the sacred.


THE OTHER AND THE MONSTER
If ambiguity is the hallmark of the sacred, the role of myths, as René Gerard purports in his La Violence et le Sacré (1972) is to generate differences and contrasts, to distinguish between the two faces of the sacred. Therefore, from the viewpoint of the oldest texts which are true to the spirit of the myth, Medusa is a representation of the Other by virtue of her absolute and terrifying difference. At first sight, her monstrous ugliness and her petrifying stare certainly bear this out.

In La Mort dans les Yeux (1985), Vernant demonstrates that, for the Greeks, Medusa represented the face of the warrior possessed by battle frenzy. In The Shield of Heracles (232-3), Hesiod describes the wide-open mouth, the fearsome hair and the Gorgons' shrill cries which conjure up her terrifying aspect. Thus Medusa's mask frequently appears within the context of amedusa2.jpg (56438 bytes) battle. It is present in the Iliad on the shields of Athena (V, 738) and Agamemnon (XI, 36), and also during the Renaissance, e.g. on Bellona's helmet described by Ronsard in the 'Ode á Michel de l'Hospital' (Premier Livre des Odes, 1560). The Gorgon also represents what cannot be represented, i.e. death, which it is impossible to see or to look at, like Hades itself. In Hesiod's Theogony (275 et seq.) and in the Odyssey (XI, 633-5), Medusa is the guardian of terrifying places, either the nocturnal borders of the world or the Underworld. She reappears in this role in Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, IX, 55-7) and Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 611). Guarding the doorway to the world of the dead, she prevents the living from entering.

In Christian symbolism, Medusa represents the dreaded enemy and death, and thus becomes an embodiment of the Devil. She appears in this guise in a passage in the Book of Arthur which belongs to the cycle of the Holy Grail (Vulgate version of Arthurian romances, Vol. VII, Washington, 1913). In fact, this is a female monster, the 'Ugly Semblance', who lives at the bottom of a river. She does not exercise her powers by turning people to stone, but by causing the waters to swallow them up. 

Similarly, a play by Calderón, which tells of the adventures of Andromeda and Perseus (Fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo), has the hero, a new incarnation of the Saviour, defeating Medusa who is the personification of Death and Sin.

At first glance, therefore, Medusa's head is very much a representation of the terrifying Other, of absolute negativity. She continues to fulfil this function in the twentieth-century trilogy by the Greek writer Pandelis Prevelakis, The Ways of Creation, which comprises The Sun of Death (Athens, 1959; Paris, 1965), The Head of the Medusa (Athens, 1963) and The Bread of the Angels (Athens, 1966). In the trilogy, the Gorgon represents both 'Nietzschian nihilism' and the foreign ideologies which threaten Hellenism. The hero sets out to free Greece once again from the monster, but he fails and realizes that there is no longer a single piece of untaited land in his country. Everything points to the fact that the malady specific to modern Greece, and the country's inability to accommodate, change, have provoked this monstrous 'representation' of the Other. Medusa's head does indeed seem to be a mask which serves to justify her absolute and evil strangeness.

The fact that Medusa is a mask and that this mask hides a more human face, is borne out by the way in which her portrayal is developed from the pre-Classical era to the Hellenistic period. There is a dual transformation i.e. the disappearance of both facial quality and ugliness (see Images de la Gorgone, Bibliothéque Nationale, 1985). Beneath the mask lies what could be called Medusa's 'tragic beauty'.


THE MIRROR AND THE MASK
Many elements of the myth suggest, through its basic ambiguity, the tragic nature of Medusa. One of the most revealing of these is the gift from Athena to Asclepius of two drops of the Gorgon's blood, one of which has the power to cure and even resurrect, while the other is a deadly poison. Medusa's blood is therefore the epitome of the 'pharmakon', while she herself -- as is shown by the apotropaic function of her mask -- is a 'pharmakos'. As has been demonstrated by René Girard, the 'pharmakos' is the scapegoat whose sacrifice establishes the dual nature of the sacred and reinforces the separation of the monster and the god. However, it is for literature and the arts to reveal the close relationship between opposites and the 'innocence' of the victim. In this respect, the myth of Medusa is revealing. In his study The Mirror of Medusa (1983), Tobin Siebers has identified the importance of two elements, i.e. the rivalry between Athena and the Gorgon, and the mirror motif.

According to Ovid (Metamorphoses, IV. 779ff), the reason for the dispute lay in Poseidon's rape of Medusa inside the temple of the virgin goddess. The goddess is supposed to have punished Medusa by transforming her face, which therefore made Medusa an innocent victim for the second time. 

However, another tradition, used by Mallarmé in Les Dieux antiques (1880), stressed a more personal rivalry: Medusa had boasted that she was more beautiful than Athena. Everything points to the face that the goddess found it necessary to set herself apart from her negative double in order to assert her 'own' identity. Common features are numerous. For example, snakes are the attribute of Athena, as illustrated by the famous statue of Phidias and indicated by certain Orphic poems which refer to her as 'la Serpentine'. Moreover, the hypnotic stare is one of the features of the goddess 'with blue-green eyes', whose bird is the owl, depicted with an unblinking gaze. Finally, because she has affixed Medusa's head to her shield, in battle or in anger she assumes the terrifying appearance of the monster. Thus, in the Aeneid (11, 171), she expresses her wrath by making flames shoot forth from her eyes. These observations are intended to show that Athena and Medusa are the two indissociable aspects of the same sacred power.

A similar claim could be made in respect of Perseus, who retains traces of his association with his monstrous double, Medusa. Using her decapitated head to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads death around him. And when he flies over Africa with his trophy in a bag, through some sort of negligence, drops of blood fall to earth and are changed into poisonous snakes which reduce Medusa's lethal power (Ovid, op. cit., IV. 618). Two famous paintings illustrate this close connection between the hero and the monster. Cellini's Perseus resembles the head he is holding in his hand (as demonstrated by Siebers) and Paul Klee's L’esprit a combattu le mal (1904) portrays a complete reversal of roles -- Perseus is painted full face with a terrible countenance, while Medusa turns aside.

In this interplay of doubles, the theme of reflection is fundamental. It explains the process of victimization to which Medusa was subjected, and which falls within the province of the superstition of the 'evil eye'. The way to respond to the 'evil eye' is either to use a third eye -- the one that Perseus threw at the Graiae - or to deflect the evil spell by using a mirror. Ovid, in particular, stressed the significance of the shield in which Perseus was able to see the Gorgon without being turned to stone, and which was given to him by Athena. 

Everything indicates that the mirror was the real weapon. 

It was interpreted thus by Calderón and Prevelakis, and also by Roger Caillois in Méduse et Cie (1960).

Ovid was responsible for establishing the link with Narcissus, a myth that he made famous. It seems that the same process of victimization is at work here. The individual is considered to have been the victim of his own reflection, which absolves the victimizer (Perseus, the group) from all blame. This association of the two myths (and also the intention of apportioning blame) appears in a passage in Desportes' Amours d’Hyppolite (1573) where the poet tells his lady that she is in danger of seeing herself changed 'into some hard rock' by her 'Medusa's eye'. Even more revealing is Gautier's story Jettatura (1857) in which the hero, accused of having the 'evil eye', eventually believes it to be true and watches the monstrous transformation of his face in the mirror: 'Imagine Medusa looking at her horrible, hypnotic face in the lurid reflection of the bronze shield.'

Medusa's head is both a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the Devil's mark on the individual, as well as being the image of death for those who look at it. Both these themes -- violence rendered sacred and death by petrifaction -- are found in Das Corgonenhaupt (Berlin, 1972), a work by Walter Krüger about the nuclear threat.

However, when considered in terms of archetypal structures, Medusa's mask still retains its secret. What is the reason for the viperine hair, the wide-open mouth with the lolling tongue, and, in particular, why is Medusa female? What relationship is there between violence, holy terror and woman?


THE DISCONCERTING STRANGENESS OF THE FEMININE

Robert Graves (Greek Myths, 1958) believes that the myth of Perseus preserves the memory of the conflicts which occurred between men and women in the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society. In fact the function of the Gorgon's mask was to keep men at a safe distance from the sacred ceremonies and mysteries reserved for women, i.e. those which celebrated the Triple Goddess, the Moon. Graves reminds us that the Orphic poems referred to the full moon as the 'Gorgon's head'. 

The mask was also worn by young maidens to ward off male lust. The episode of Perseus' victory over Medusa represents the end of female ascendancy and the taking over of the temples by men, who had become the masters of the divine which Medusa's head had concealed from them.

Although it may have become less intense, the battle of the sexes was not resolved. The feminine continued to remain a source of fear for men, and the association of women with Medusa, evoked an aspect of the sex which was both fascinating and dangerous. Medusa often appeared in Renaissance poetry, e.g. Ronsard's Second Livre des Amours (S. 79, 1555), but the stare which turned men to stone was often only a conventional metaphor for the lover's 'coup de foudre'. The comparison took on a deeper meaning during the nineteenth century. Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and 'decadent' literature such as Lorrain's M. de Phocas (1901), provide illustrations of the dangerous fascination exerted by woman, with her deadly stare and mysterious hair. But it was Goethe's Faust Part I (1808) which supplied the real significance of this connection. During the 'Walpurgis night,’ Faust thinks he sees Margarita but Mephistopheles warns him that it is Medusa and explains that 'magic deludes every man into believing that he has found his beloved in her'.

This terrible woman, the paragon of all women, whom every man simultaneously fears and seeks and for whom Medusa is the mask, is in fact the mother, i.e. the great Goddess Mother whose rites were concealed by the Gorgon's face. Countless texts illustrate Medusa's affinity with the depths of the sea and the terrible power of nature, e.g. Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1864), Lautrémont's Chants de Maldoror (1869) and Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite (1896), but the most explicit example is probably the text written by Freud in 1922: Das Medusenhaupt -- 'Medusa's Head'. He presents her as the supreme talisman who provides the image of castration -- associated in the child's mind with the discovery of maternal sexuality -- and its denial. The snakes are multiple phalluses and petrifaction represents the comforting erection.

From this point onwards, the myth of Perseus takes on a new psychological meaning. It tells of the exploit of the hero who, because he has conquered ‘castrating' woman and armed himself with the talisman of Medusa's head (seen here in its comforting, phallic role), is able to conquer Andromeda, the terrifying virgin, and kill the sea monster which represents the evil aspect of woman. This motif is also found in the Christian legend of St George (Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, (1264) as well as in the anthropological legends concerning the fear of the 'dentate vagina'. A 'sacred' man must perform the first sexual act with a woman.

Two texts illustrate this aspect of the myth. One is, the Book of Arthur (op. cit). in the passage devoted to the 'Ugly Semblance'. The monster occupies the lands of a maiden who not only asks the king for the assistance of a knight but also for a husband whom she describes as though he had always been intended for her. The task that he performs seems to have been the necessary requirement for his union with the Virgin. The story stresses the association of the monster with the element of water and, in particular, with the sea into which it has to be driven back. The second text is a short story by Döblin, Der Ritter Blaubart -- the 'Knight with the Blue Beard' (1911). Because the hero has had mysterious and intimate relations with a primitive monster -- a giant medusa -- he is forced to either kill all the women he loves or allow them to be killed. However, one of them, because of her purity, confronts the monster in the secret chamber where it lurks. In this last example, the character seems to have been unable to free himself from the maternal influence and fear of the feminine.

Finally, this association of Medusa with castrating woman is very evident in a passage in Chêne et Chien (1952) by Queneau: 'Severed head, evil woman/ Medusa with her lolling tongue/So it was you who would have castrated me?' However, the myth reveals -- and this seems to be obscured by the Freudian interpretation -- that woman's 'castration' is a result of the violence imposed on her by the original hero. Woman only appears in the story divided by separative decapitation, casting off the feminine in the remote depths of the world. Cast down, the feminine remains unrecognized within its innermost recess and it is this 'abject' void which maintains the theatre of the world and the logic of the talisman. In this theatre, woman occupies the two opposite extremes of evil (castration, sorcery) and their cure (the phallus, the Virgin), i.e. of the abyss and the Ideal. That is why, despite her terrifying power, she is fascinating. 'Fascinum' means 'charm' and 'evil spell', but also 'virile member'. Between the 'emptiness' and the Idol represented by the division of woman, yawns the gulf of male Desire. This persistent ambiguity can be found in the classification of the creature called the medusa. It owes its name to its resemblance to Medusa's head (Apollinaire, Bestiaire, 1920), but is included in the Acephelan category. Medusa keeps her secret behind the ambiguous mask. Although she is 'representable', she is never 'presentable' and even Perseus only sees her reflected in his shield.

She is the hidden presence, absent from the world, which enables the scene to be played out. In his 'heroic comedy' Le Naufrage de Méduse (1986), Ristat shows Perseus searching for the Gorgons and meeting Hermes, the 'Guardian of Resemblances', who proves to the terrified hero that 'Medusa herself is only a shadow'.

However, the hero remains trapped in the interplay of images and the logic of the talisman, just as he remains fascinated by the Gorgon mask. Thus Medusa's head becomes, for the man who takes possession of it after severing it from the terrifying woman, and in accordance with the principle of the 'pharmakon', the complete opposite, i.e. the 'skeptron' -- the sun.


‘O MEDUSA, O SUN'
In the same way that there is a hidden similarity between Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, and Medusa, a similarity also exists between the sun, symbol of the Ideal and the Gorgon's mask. Although they are both objects of desire, Athena and the sun are unapproachable and terrifying for those who come too close. This danger is illustrated by the Platonic myth of Phaedrus (247-8e) in which the downfall of souls is brought about by an overpowering desire to see the sun. Certain structural elements from the myth of Medusa also reappear in the myth of the Cave (The Republic, 514-7a), i.e. fascination, averted eyes, violence inflicted on the philosopher, etc.

In his poem (op. cit.), Queneau maintains that the sun, like the Gorgon, is fearsome and castrating: 'The sun: O monster, O Gorgon, O Medusa/O sun'. In this way, Medusa herself can become an incarnation of the Ideal, i.e. of Virtue (Du Bellay, Epithalame, 1559), of Beauty (Baudelaire, op. cit., 'La Beauté') and of Truth (Kosmas Politis, Eroica, Athens, 1938). Surely the sun itself is the severed head that, like the head of St John the Baptist, only soars in the zenith: 'In triumphant flights/from that scythe' (Mallarmé, Hérodiade, 'Cantique de saint Jean', 1913). Whoever seeks Athena, finds Medusa's head. Whoever approaches too close to the sun discovers its castrating and castrated monstrousness (Bataille, L’Anus Solaire, 1931).

Although Nietzsche had embarked upon the destruction of all idols, he too, in this way, recognized the desire for death inherent in the desire for truth at any cost. The philosopher who wants to examine all things 'in depth', discovers the petrifying abyss. The destiny of the man whom Nietzsche refers to as 'the Don Juan of knowledge' will be paralyzed as if by Medusa, and will himself be 'changed into a guest of stone' (Morgenröte i.e. the Dawn of Day, 327, 1881). This is also the destiny of the 'lover of truth' who, in the Dionysos Dithyramben (1888) appears to be 'changed into a statue/into a sacred column'. Nietzsche, who was aware of the necessity 'for the philosopher' to live within the 'closed circuit of representation' (Derrida), to seek the truth even if he no longer believes in it, without ever being able to attain it, devised his own version of the 'truth', his Medusa's head, the Eternal Return: 'Great thought is like Medusa's head: all the world's features harden, a deadly, ice-cold battle' (Posthumous Fragments, Winter 1884-5).

All thinkers who reflect upon the nature of representation, as well as on thought which pursues the 'eidos' are in danger of confronting Medusa's head. Thus, Aristotle, in The Politics (VIII) differentiates between instructive and cathartic music which is associated with Bacchic trances, whose instrument is the flute and which should be avoided. To prove his point, he refers to the myth of Athena. When she played the flute, her face became so distorted that she abandoned the instrument. It was in fact she who had invented the flute to imitate an unknown sound, virtually unrepresentable, i.e. the hissing of the snakes on Medusa's head as she was decapitated (Pindar, The Pythian Odes, XII, 2-3). As she played, she noticed in a spring that her features were becoming distorted and assuming the appearance of the Gorgon's mask. This once more introduces the Narcissistic theme and the blurring of the difference between Athena and her rival, which here arises from tragic art. Therefore, in terms of philosophy, art should remain in the service of the 'eidos' by continuing to represent the image that arouses desire for the Object.

But it is also condemned if it presents the object in such an obvious manner that the remoteness of desire degenerates into dangerous enjoyment. This partly explains Tournier’s condemnation of image and photography in La Goutte d'Or (1985). He explicitly links their power to Medusa's petrifying fascination and contrasts them with the art of writing which is the art of education and the route to wisdom 'par excellence'.

It would seem that the fear experienced at the sight of Medusa's head is the terror of discovering the secret behind the representation of the image.
From Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, and Archetypes. Ed. Pierre Brunel. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Routledge