Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 19:10:44 -0500 (EST)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: "Deconstruction"



Hey Walter!

I think this Pereira guy is right on.

On Sat, 1 Nov 1997 Pedro_Pereira-AT-Brown.edu wrote:

> That's why he's [Derrida] always saying that a text is always written in
> two languages, "plus qu'une langue". He never said, at least to my
> knowledge, that there isn't such a thing as meaning, truth or knowledge.
> But what he wants to point out is that whatever truth is, it never lets
> itself being presented as such in a text, it never lets the text "resolve"
> it in its limits, in a word, it doesn't let the text "decide" what are
> those limits. 

This is one of the better discussions of Derridian deconstruction that I 
have read.  And it "reads" Derrida from within the tradition he claims to
be working in--phenomenology--especially that strand of it initiated by
Heidegger's in Being and time.  In the U.S., especially in literary
criticism, it seems to me that Derrida's work is read simply as a "method," 
a species of New Criticism which busies itelf with "ambiguity" but simply
"goes farther."   (I posted on this subject a month ago, just to vent a
little.)  

I have too many irons in the fire right now to go much further with this,
but I much appreciate anyone who notes, against the grain of so much
misguided commentary, that Derrida does not say there is no such thing as
"meaning, truth, or knowledge."

hh

PS a quibble: the difference between destruktion and deconstruction is
important, but I wouldn't call it "abyssal" because it still emerges from
and depends upon Heidegger's reading of Western metaphysics, the critique
of "presence," etc. 




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