First off, I am most avowedly NOT a Derrida fan, though I can see why people would be -- I have a friend in a religious order (Catholic, specialist in Von Balthasar) who thinks he is great. His eternal attempts to undermine other people's philosophical systems always got on my nerves, and I tend to be more interested in people who are closely grounded in experience (e.g. Aristotle and Heidegger -- not to start that argument again) or have big, cool conceptual architectures (e.g. Spinoza, Hegel, Plotinus). (Same reasons I love Joyce, come to think of it -- he merges both so well.)
Derrida was operating in the context of the France of the '60s, trying to undermine the "theories of everything" that were popular in France at the time.
Personally I find the "everything must be guided to alleviating oppression" line of thinking to be uncomfortably totalitarian.
--- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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