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English 531 - Presentation
Photo taken from Corbis.com Photographer: Sophie Bassouls, Date Photographed: December 19, 1987, Location Information: Paris, France.
El Biar, Algiers 15 July 1930 -- Paris, France 8 October 2004
Video 1 - Introduction in French
Video 2 - Some notes in English
Video 3 - Narcisus
Essay
Print my notes (. doc)
“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (read at Hopkins University 1966)
Online version: http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html
[D]ifférance, an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring. The ontico-ontological difference and its ground (Grund) in the “transcendence of Dasein” are not absolutely originary. Différance by itself would be more 'originary," but one would no longer be able to call it "origin" or ground," those notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacement of difference. Kamuf, Peggy, editor. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York and Chichester: Columbia UP, 1991, p. 40 [From De la grammatologie]
“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
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Announces a rupture: the center is not the center anymore.
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It happened when language invaded the universal problematic.
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The main thinkers/philosophers that Derrida uses in this essay: Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Lévi-Strauss.
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Takes Lévi-Strauss as an example.
“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay.”
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Deciphers the truth, origin, the signs free from freeplay.
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Doesn't search for an origin, affirms freeplay and “tries to pass beyond man and humanism.” Dreams of full presence, the origin and the end of the game.
These two interpretations of interpretation are present in the human sciences. Ethnography is not the the place to look for the interpretation of interpretation as Lévi-Strauss wishes.
About the two interpretations: “We must try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference.” (p 363)
Example
Example:
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (Bressler p. 303)
Different insterpretations:
1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(poem)
2)Roads not taken [electronic resource] : rereading Robert Frost / edited with an introduction by Earl J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron.
Columbia : University of Missouri Press, c2000.
3)Student essay on Bressler p. 139-141.
My observations:
1.Perhaps it is easier to understand Derrida's idea, “the center is not the center anymore” if we think about the what Western philosophers have thought about the solar system and the universe plus God, or cellular biology. The organization in a cell is similar to the one he describes when he mentions that each structure has structures inside of it.
2.What happens when we are in front of an unpublished manuscript? How are we going to “dismantle previously held worldviews?”
Extras
Audio recording - If you missed class this day, here are part 1 and part 2.
Fun with Derrida -- I created this page for another class.
Derrida Online
Derrida versus Debray (TV)
Screen shot of the debate vs Debray
