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Comment by hblanks | Hacker News Reader

What a pleasure this interview was to read. And plain spoken, too.

Many here have complained that Derrida is hard to read, or worse, simply makes no sense. You may take a side in this, if you like. But I would encourage you to read some short piece of his instead. In so doing, and as the interview itself remarks on reading, you may make your own interpretation.

@mbrock has listed several items. To these, I add what my instructor for composition at Deep Springs (himself a student of Derrida) assigned us, "Declarations of Independence." It is but a nine page talk on the US Declaration of Independence. But within it, many of Derrida's persistent concerns on language and action come to light.

You can find it online, starting at page 5 in this PDF: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cole0384/academics/files/Derrida.PDF

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I took your advice and read a "short piece of his" (http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Di...)

I found this monstrosity in the third paragraph:

"I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly."

This is a single sentence.

Is it that Derrida's thought is so complex that it is simply inexpressible in simpler language? Or it this sentence wilful obsurantism?

I find many supporter's of Derrida claiming that if you don't agree with Derrida it must be that you don't understand him. This is a dangerous intellectual cul-de-sac - verging on mysticism.

Derrida had some actual things to say.

But most of the valuable ideas he had to express had already been explored by Heidegger in a more complete way, or by Wittgenstein in an uncannily clear, concise and orderly way.

I agree with you. Every time I try explaining this to people, there will be at least one guy who will claim he has read Derrida and understood all his great mysteries, but that plain language can't explain those mysteries ... you need some powerful new language to do so.

Its so ridiculous. Its like this self-contained world of hysteria. They have no useful output that effects the world outside their narrow hysteria. No one outside the hysteria can criticize the hysteria because by not praising the hysteria you are immediately one who doesn't possess the sophistication to produce critiques.

Its pretty much indistinguishable from some sort of fundamentalist religion where the proponents just live in a sealed chamber and are immune to reason. Imagine physicists talking in really technical garble, but never producing any models that actual predict real phenomenon. That's what its like.

Post modernism seems to produce nothing useful but documents for other post modernists to study.

Off topic, but what was you experience at Deep Springs like? Would you do it again? Do you feel you learned as much (or more) during your time there as you would have at an ivy league style school? What about the overall environment?

I've been fascinated by that school since I got their brochure in high school. I regret not at least applying.

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