>Note to Rob: How many times I gotta say
>this until you stop with the 'i must be such an idiot' thing which always
>seems to accompany your derisions of 'pomo', Rob? Doesn't your
>incomprehension suggest to you anything other than a derision of your
>intellect that might require that kind of reflexive strike? Or, is it
>because you assume that language is a universal human attribute and
>therefore incomprehension would be synonymous with a slight against one's
>'humanity'?
Language is a universal human attribute for me, yeah. I reckon a human agent is one with the potential to participate in a speech community, such that said human might join in the business of negotiating the truth and/or falsity of statements of concern to the community as a whole. I reckon (agreeing with ol' Jurgen the whole way) we essentially must presuppose the 'ideal speech situation' in our practice - thus we must open ourselves to questions concerning the truth and acceptability in and of our speech acts. This ideal, and our implicit commitment to it, seems inescapably 'there' in any social organisation aspiring to democratic legitimacy, I reckon.
I suspect Derrida's stuff on communication effectively denies a lot of this, and, in so doing, denies us the potential to engage with him in such democratic validation (communicative action). Which, should that be the case, would offend a democrat's requisite norms, and would be unacceptable. No-one ever tells me why I should not suspect this. If that's because it's obvious to everybody, I gotta have a hard look at my, er, communicative competence (why do I understand the words but not the sentences?). If it's not obvious, my questions and speculations might be worth engaging. Unless some people reckon the notion of 'democracy' is but a discursive distillate no more or less than any other social possibility, and, as such, shouldn't particularly concern me (which sounds coherent in itself, but then, I do happen to be asking the questions where democratic norms are presupposed and where the consensus seems to be that a bit more of it would be nice elsewhere).
Much more simple a point is the fact that I do come over a bit self-doubting when demonstrably clever people (a) say things I don't understand about stuff I've actually thought about and (b) don't seem to think stuff that seems important to me is actually important at all. Mebbe that's just me.
Cheers, Rob.