Actually think I understood (did I?) - and appreciated - some of this!
>"A Being without violence would be a Being which
>would occur outside the existent: nothing; nonhistory; nonoccurrence;
>nonphenomenality. A speech produced without the least violence would
>determine nothing, would say nothing, would offer nothing to the other; it
>would not be _history_, and it would _show_ nothing: in every sense of the
>word, and first of all the Greek sense, it would be speech without
>_phrase_" (Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," _Writing and Difference_).
History produces texts.
> ... And it is within the 'same' word
>-- speculation -- that the translation is to find its place, between the
>philosophical concept of speculation in its dominant, apparently legitimate
>determination...and the concept that is announced here. This latter has
>been able to be the other's other by inhabiting it, by letting itself be
>excluded without ceasing to work upon it in the most domestic fashion.
>Whence, again, the necessity (which calls upon the possibility) and the
>aporia of this translation" (Derrida, _The Post Card_).
History produces interpretation.
>No wonder Derrida has been so prolific. Deconstruction, as a way of
>reading, reduces everything to the same _differance_, so to speak. In so
>far as one speaks, one is caught in identifying X, only to have X
>'deconstructed' by its opposite (and vice versa) -- interpenetration of
>opposites without sublation. And before this play of left-Hegelian logic
>can begin, there was, is, and will have been a forgetting which forgets
>itself, a gift of burning which burns itself, a holocaust, etc.
History produces charlatans. The modern academy produces a specific variety there-of - one which grasps that one can write as much of nothing as one likes.
>What nihilates illuminates itself as the negative. This can be
>addressed in the "no." The "not" in no way arises from the no-saying of
>negation. Every "no" that does not mistake itself as willful assertion of
>the positing power of subjectivity, but rather remains a letting-be of
>ek-sistence, answers to the claim of the nihilation illumined....It remains
>to ask...whether every "yes" and "no" are not themselves already dependent
>upon Being. As these dependents, they can never first posit the very thing
>to which they themselves belong.
They belong to history.
>Nihilation unfolds essentially in Being itself, and not at all in the
>existence of man -- so far as this is thought as the subjectivity of the
>_ego cogito_. Dasein in no way nihilates as a human subject who carries
>out nihilation in the sense of denial; rather, Da-sein nihilates inasmuch
>as it belongs to the essence of Being as that essence in which man
>ex-sists. Being nihilates -- as Being....
Essence can only express itself in history.
>The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing. Hence,
>because it thinks Being, thinking thinks the nothing. (Heidegger, "Letter
>on Humanism"). ****
One thinks in history, and to think otherwise is to think nothing.
>Except that, outflanking Heidegger, Derrida says he puts "the nihilating in
>Being" under erasure, so as not to make the nothing positively present &
>uninhabited by absence. Whatever.
Derrida makes nothing sound like something to some, and like nothing to others (I do not, of course, reject polysemy).
>For Marx, however, the conditions of possibilities concern history, the
>very conditions to which Derrida pays scant attention in his preoccupations
>with what makes language (im)possible -- the (im)possibility common to any
>and every text -- hence the same difference that Eagleton speaks of:
>"subverting everything and nothing."
Eagleton reckons Derrida says nothing.
>At least, Spivak has the sober sense to say that deconstruction is
>basically an ethics of vigilance (against what she thinks is the
>ever-present specter of metaphysics), without claiming nothing more or less
>than that.
Derrida sells deconstruction as something new - if it is not nothing, it is not new (hermeneutics, exegesis). Only if it is nothing (infinite signifiers) is it new.
>It is in this sense -- as an ethics that watches over language
>-- that deconstruction is a technology of the self, in the sense that
>Foucault uses the term, despite Heidegger & Derrida's anti-Humanism (the
>ethical Subject is an [im]possibility).
Foucault's usually an antihumanist, too, isn't he? (Authorless) discourse produces his selves, doesn't it? Ethics are part of discourse. Ethics are part of what produces selves. But where there are no selves there are no ethics. And when selves produce an ethic they produce a signified through processes of symbolic interaction. To argue that deconstruction is an ethic is to argue that it is aimed at a mutual understanding (a shared signified) concerning communication. History is what produces signifieds just as signifieds are a necessary constituent in the course of history. Structure and agency. Men making history in conditions not of their choosing. To argue against 'the signified' is then to argue against history. Thus arguing nothing, by Derrida's own logic in 'Violence and metaphysics'.
>Pace Derrida, the text does not
>deconstruct itself; it is the deconstructor who performs the rituals of
>acknowledgement of complicity -- the suggestive language of Guilt here --
>and thus produces the ghost of the abstract individual who does not give up
>the ghost.
Why 'guilt'? I am my history (ie. the sum of the history of the cultures complicit in my construction and the history of my organic being, which itself goes back beyond the moment language and my body first got together, incidentally), and I read symbols meant to be read - symbols selected and arranged such that I might have a chance of gleaning an intentional meaning. No matter how badly I have read them here, nothing I have read here could be read, ever and by anyone, as 'the purple undergarment of my green trout resides temptingly on the pinnacle of her assault rifle'. Derrida either assumes a signified when he writes, or writes to obviate the chance of the instantiation of a signified - in which case he's writing nothing, which might be of the same order as my fetching gun-mounting purple-clad trout, but would still not be identical for anyone, ever.
>What do deconstructive rituals produce? Tedium or Te Deum? Both at the
>same time.
Wank - of an order even more outrageously shameless than mine.
Geez this stuff is bad for my manners. Rob.