A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds

by far this is the most accessible introduction tothe forbidden threshold of Derrida's thought. Peggy Kamuf mounts the fairly limitless edifice of his work through seasoned selected excerpts,If you are fascinated forever by the conceptual,the literary,or analytic,the performative or philosphic focus,Derrida's work is like an alive moment that touches each in between elements of text,of ideas.All sometimes in simultanaeity or in context to each.If you come to Derrida it must from some place(time,geographic/cultural)some discipline,and sadly enough that acts to skew and blind,to opaque-ify Derrida's virtuoso,contextual,cross-referencing,overdetermined,overanalyzed modes of thought. But if you have scoured literature(Blanchot,Ponge,Jabes) not for its own sake,or thought,looked at ideas(Plato) (Heidegger) retrogressively yet with a committment to subversion(Genet) (Marx) of the Western canon,Derrida work serves these realms quite admirably.I humbly request you gander and pass time at this collection, peak between the blinds(Kamuf's metaphor)before you proceed directly to an original work. Derrida's work has that element of throwing forward a growth of petrified thought finding new conceptual life in the present, or not so distant past. So wherever you begin in Derrida it is like a timeless warp to be repeated some place,some time to come or had come,or had been,or will not ever be.

Instead of compiling all of Derrida's books and articles, I have this as an overview and can decide which pieces are necessary for purchase. I also like the convenience of having so much of Derrida's work in one place.

The very notion of rating this book perplexes me. I don't think the significance of Derrida lies in the truth value of his work but rather it is a spectacle in seeing how to think completely different than anyone has ever thought before. This book contains a assortment of essay and are all very complex and interesting. Oh how I wish Derrida could have been more straight coming with his writing! Nonetheless, it is Derrida, a person that can only be read through an air of curiosity.The most disappoint facet of this work is the lack of Derrida's political philosophy which is where my primary interest lie.

Such a title is both purple and cliched and only appropriate to Derrida if heard as a kind of true joke. Derrida is surrounded by his myths as the cartoon character "Pig Pen" is by a cloud of dust. This is the first barrier to reading him since he always appears characterized in advance by his enemies. The next barrier is that he writes "against" those standards of logic and fact that are everywhere taken thoughtlessly for granted: this means his stance is "irrational." Such a perspective is, once again, that of his antagonists or those who are simply ignorant and so think with the herd. Derrida is, in fact, hyper-rational or post-rational: he has thought about and studied the history of thinking to the degree that its problems are clear to him. Most of us live in banal rationality as a goldfish in a bowl: the person is outside is both distorted and by definition, crazy. A third problem is that Derrida wishes to stimulate, not clarify: his mission is not to bring the novice from the first questions of philosophy to its ends nor should we expect this any more than we hope that a president is instructing children on 9-11. Finally, Derrida's conviction in the contingent nature of normal logic means that his form of composition, not just his ideas, is non-normative. He is best read as a philosophical poet with all the word play, punning, and allusion that marks that genre. In short, he is very hard and the selections here are brief and so suffer from the disorientation brought by displacement. Still, if you stay, you will grow.

I do not understand French, so I cannot fully appreciate the spirit of Derrida’s texts, if there is one. Some say the English translations are sufficient, but I don’t think so, precisely because the works are dealing with language, which is, by the way, the main criticism of all Derrida’s works. He even admitted that critiquing language in the framework of language is futile.If Derrida's “philosophy” is based on "strange sounds" and a "like" for reading, then it is a personal preference and has nothing to do with whether it is logical or illogical. Therefore, it is open to criticism as a matter of taste and judgment. In other words, Derrida's texts cannot be proved to be right or wrong, only appealing or not appealing, worth something or not worth anything. It wallows in uncertainty, which is not what phenomenology is all about. I don't find it enjoyable reading philosophy that doesn't mean anything to me other than to see how wonderfully undefined language can be. I’d rather listen to smooth jazz by which I paint. So, I’m not going to learn French just to read Derrida better.The French have had more success with literature than philosophy, i.e., Genet and Camus. Maybe that’s why Derrida compared Genet to Hegel in “Glas.”I enjoy reading Genet most, since I can pick up a book and let it open to whatever page it choses and begin reading. There is no story to understand, only raw expressions that take on a life of their own, as good in English as in French. It was Genet’s way of making love to fellow prisoners that he couldn’t touch, words taking the place of flesh, “The word balls is a roundness in my mouth.” It is, I think, the most honest form of literature, a thief stealing the story from us, a thief denying us the true meaning of his words, words that only he can understand and feel, words that cry out not to be French and in prison.I understand the significance of deconstruction, difference, and the claim that there is no outside the (con)text. But it is still obscure how these insights might be applied to philosophical critique. I prefer more practical attempts at phenomenology and the notions of trace, present absence, being in the world, and body image. I express these things in my artwork, not to any credit of Derrida's.Rollo May wrote, “But perhaps the most vivid of all portrayals of the meaning of existentialism is to be found in modern art, partly because it is articulated symbolically rather than as self-conscious thought and partly because art always reveals with special clarity the underlying spiritual and emotional temper of the culture….” Few thinkers had a better understanding of the cultural disasters of the 20th Century.Sometimes I think modern philosophers, especially the French, feeling the pinch to write a book with only a few good ideas in mind, add a lot of filler to satisfy the publisher. Derrida was much better at this than Merleau-Ponty, who also rambled page after page just to reveal one little gem. It’s conceivable that Derrida intended to write this way just to puzzle the critics, getting praise from literary types (Genet in Glas) and criticism from logical types (Hegel in Glas), thus fulfilling his claim that the author cannot account for the effects of his work. But at least Merleau-Ponty has had an impact on contemporary psychology, which is currently realizing its limitations and challenging established research results.Philosophers have changed the way we think, and it is a scandal that our educational system ignores the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl to the development of human thought. Humans are largely stupid about how they think, and there is a consensus in education to keep it that way. It’s the way of the “natural attitude” Husserl spoke about. But to say that Derrida’s books have changed the way we think is about as ambitious as saying Picasso’s Guernica has changed man’s propensity to go to war. A tapestry of that painting, which hangs in the United Nations, is covered when they have guests who might take offense, because they think otherwise.

As expected