Derrida For Beginners

Jim Powell, Van Howell

• Publisher: For Beginners
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781934389119
• eBook ISBN: 9781939994059
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

In 1966, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins University that cast the entire history of Western Philosophy into doubt. The following year, Derrida published three brilliant but mystifying books that convinced the pollsters that he was the most important philosopher of the late 20th Century. Unfortunately, nobody was sure whether the intellectual movement that he spawned – Deconstruction – advanced philosophy or murdered it.

The truth? – Derrida is one of those annoying geniuses you can take a class on, read half-a-dozen books by and still have no idea what he’s talking about. Derrida’s ‘writing’ – confusing doesn’t begin to describe it (it’s like he’s pulling the rug out from under the rug that he pulled out from under philosophy.) But beneath the confusion, like the heartbeat of a bird in your hand, you can feel Derrida’s electric genius. It draws you to it; you want to understand it... but it’s so confusing.

What you need, Ducky, is Derrida For Beginners by James Powell!

Jim Powell’s Derrida For Beginners is the clearest explanation of Derrida and deconstruction presently available in our solar system. Powell guides us through blindingly obscure texts like Of Grammatology (Derrida’s deconstruction of Saussure, Lévi Strauss, and Rousseau), “Différance” (his essay on language and life), Dissemination (his dismantling of Plato, his rap on Mallarmé), and Derrida’s other masterpieces (the mere titles can make strong men tremble in terror – Glas, Signéponge/Signsponge, The Post Card, and Specters of Marx.)

Readers will learn the coolest Derridian buzzwords (e.g., intertextuality, binary oppositions, hymen, sous rature, arche-writing, phallogocentrism), the high-and-low lights of deconstruction’s history (including the DeMan controvercy), and the various criticisms of Derrida and deconstruction, including Camille Paglia’s objection that America, the rock-n-roll nation, isn’t formal enough to need deconstruction.

The master, however, begs to disagree:
“America is Deconstruction” -Jacques Derrida

Another of Derrida’s influential books in the United States is what most people would call a collection of three essays. It is entitled Dissemination. The first problem one notices, however, is that this book is a kind of non-book. Its preface refuses to be a preface. Its three essays refuse to be a collection or to present a thesis in the customary manner.

We must go against the spirit of this performance in trying to extract “its meaning.” At the time he wrote Dissemination, Derrida was associated with the ultra-left, avant-garde Parisian journal Tel Quel, a publication flirting with how a word, a poem, or language in general, can mean many things at once. Members of the Tel Quel group experimented with automatic writing, devoting themselves to an entire gang of surrealists, and to Mao and Mallarmé besides.

Each of the essays in Dissemination is divided into two parts, and each concerns itself with how the illusion of presence is presented or represented.

he first “essay,” “Plato’s Pharmacy,” criticizes the very foundations of Western philosophy. In it, Plato’s put-down of writing as second-hand and illusory, dead, and full of nothing but fake wisdom, is deconstructed by his contradictory statement that writing is the very voice of Truth and Being written in the very soul.

he rite of the scapegoat or pharmakos was a civil purification ritual. Ancient Grecian cities fed and housed, at public expense, a group of wild, ugly, deformed human beings solely for the purpose of sacrifice. Then, when flood, famine, pestilence or any other bane seized a city, the citizens selected the most unattractive of these, led him out of the city, positioned him in the place of sacrifice, fed him with their own hands—barley cakes and figs—then struck him with leeks, wild figs and other wild plants, the death spasm arriving only as the last in a series of throes brought on by a frenzied pounding of his penis and scrotum with squills—a bulbous herb. Then they ignited a fire fed with the wood of wild trees, offered the corpse unto the flames, and finally scattered the ashes to the four winds and tossing seas. Thus the city was purified.

I have said that Derrida’s “essay” has no theme. But the theme of the essay would have been, if there would have been one, the play of textuality.

Textuality?

Yes. Textuality is realizing how a text means rather than what it means. It is the realization that a text is made up of words, and that words can mean different things.

We recognize textuality when we realize that the word “pines” in the text:

And textuality, the play of differences in writing, in and between books, poems, phrases, verses, ideograms, hieroglyphics, is an irresistible force. It cannot be repressed. This play is always already a fertile, potent ejaculation of meanings, a swarming of meanings, a dissemination or dispersal of meanings.

Yet, textuality is constantly called a villain, a fatal poison. Like the scapegoat who must be expelled from the very heart of the city, textuality, the play of meanings, must be violently ejected from nearness to the logos, the fixed, orthodox, rational, paternal, authoritative, spoken Word and the all-knowing Light of Truth of Which this Word is the living body.

Derrida’s method is twofold:

first he offers a reading of the Phaedrus as Plato would have us read it, then

his second reacting does not embroider upon the dialogue so much as look closely at how the dialogue is woven together like a tapestry: He finds a loose thread, and then follows that thread to reveal how Plato’s own argument unravels itself. The thread Derrida follows concerns writing, especially as Plato and Socrates use it in the binary opposition speaking/writing. And Plato calls writing a pharmakon.

Pharmakon? What does that mean?

Well, it has many meanings, but for now, just know that it means poison, dru...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Titlepage
• A Brief Biography
• Influences
• What is Poststructuralism ?
• What is Deconstruction?
• Of Grammatology
• Dissemination
• Freud and the Scene of Writing
• Différance
• Glas
• Signéponge/Signsponge
• The Truth in Painting
• The Post Card
• Specters of Marx
• Deconstruction in America
• Deconstruction and Buddhism
• Selected Bibliography
• Index