> It's really interesting how so many people can't just shrug, maybe
> giggle lightly, and move on; instead, they get all huffy & puffy
> about something they want to dismiss as trivial or ludicrous. Why
> is that? All that slipperiness of meaning make you a little nervous?
According to Derrida, as summarized by Callinicos, the way "many people" react to Derrida and the reasons behind their reactions aren't knowable, are they?
> The only way to stop this play of difference would be if there were
> what Derrida called a 'transcendental signified' - a meaning that
> exists outside language and that therefore isn't liable to this
> constant process of subversion inherent in signification. But the
> transcendental signified is nothing but an illusion, sustained by
> the 'metaphysics of presence', the belief at the heart of the
> western philosophical tradition that we can gain direct access to
> the world independently of the different ways in which we talk
> about and act on it. With this argument what came to be known as
> post-structuralism first took shape.
> This applied also to what had been the foundation of European
> philosophy since the 17th century - the individual human subject.
> One variation, according to Derrida, of the metaphysics of presence
> was Rene Descartes' idea that the individual subject is 'self-
> present', having direct access to the contents of his
> consciousness. Like his French contemporaries, Derrida was
> profoundly influenced by Freud's discovery of the unconscious, and
> by the implication that the subject isn't even in control of his
> own mind.
As I've pointed out before, the claim that language "constructs" meaning in this way has "solipsism of the present moment" as its absurd epistemological implication.
To the extent that Freud wasn't in control of his own mind, he would not have been able to "discover" anything about his own or other minds. This is a problem for Freud's own conception of mind. Constructing the ego as nothing but delusional is the reductio ad absurdum of the position. It's also self-constradictiory.
Contrary to what Derrida claims, the general idea that our subjectivity "constructs" reality in a way that makes it unknowable is "at the heart of the western philosophical tradition," e.g. Hume and Kant. And Descartes failed to find an ultimate ground in direct experience for rational belief because, as Husserl points out, he didn't carry his doubting far enough. He mistook experience interpreted in terms of his ungrounded idea of "substance" for direct uninterpreted experience.
Ted