[lbo-talk] Is this the new left?

[Jerry Monaco]

On 7/22/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Derrida's was not trying to understand the world -- he
> was doing negative theology and attempting to
> _undermine_ understanding the world. I really liked De
> la grammatologie and enjoyed the theology he was doing
> in the 90s.

So, Chris, are you saying I don't get Derrida because I think theology
is useless?  I mean I have read  Augustine over and over, but I
consider him a kind of weird historian of the mind and consider him an
exception.  A long time past in my Catholic miseducation I was soaked
in Aquinas and I have to say he makes a lot more sense than Derrida.

Undermining misunderstanding of the world is a necessary project.
Often we must unlearn in order to learn.  Undermining understanding
seems to me to advocate stupidity, to shore up the means of
intellectual oppression, because as Sartre used to say, "Stupidity is
a form of oppression."

Jerry