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Comment by bananamerica | Hacker News Reader

Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.

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Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's actually really funny (the man loved puns).

There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.

Yes, Derrida is fine if you’re just in it for wordplay. But it has always struck me that that’s about all there is to it. I don’t take him/deconstructionism seriously though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally escaped.

I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.

By the way, I’d make a similar criticism of, for example, later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea. Sein and Zeit and his lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards—-but early Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in ways later Heidegger absolutely isn’t).

Maybe it's precisely wordplay that is at stake here. Heidegger is no less stranger to it than Derrida. In fact a lot of his philosophical complexes are grounded explicitly into etymology and new ways to hear old words.

Concerning Heidegger I stand in the opposite corner of the room: I liked his later writings more and despite having read him profusely, I'm not able to articulate his thoughts like you did by contrasting present-at-hand with ready-at-hand which however pinpoints very well the divide between analytical and continental thought.

You're right to say that he "collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea", and it is pertinent to what we are discussing since in heideggerian terms this should be expressed as "language bringing language to language through language".

An example: the linguistic proximity between explicate vs implicate that is another instance of the ready-to-hand vs present-at-hand dichotomy.

Hey, thanks for your comment. It was a surprising and interesting perspective to hear.

I agree with pretty much everything you written here. I think Wittgenstein (PI era) is the only convincing philosopher working in a similar "method" and for similar aims.

I actually read Derrida in my time with the literature department so there was no analytics vs continentals struggle going on at all.

Honestly, the only thing I really remember from reading Deleuze was giving up on trying to get what “the Fold” was.

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