vershy versh

Well-known member
He seems much more indulgent and recursive than the others I've come across, looping round and round, languidly picking apart things like the concept of a book.

I'm reading Positions, a collection of three interviews, and he just strings together vague ideas whilst batting away any attempt at clarity on the interviewer's part:

Ronse: I asked you where to begin, and you have led me into a labyrinth.

Derrida: All these texts, which are doubtless the interminable preface to another text that one day I would like to have the force to write, or still the epigraph to another that I would never have the audacity to write, are only the commentary on the sentence about a labyrinth of ciphers that is the epigraph to Speech and Phenomena ...

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vershy versh

Well-known member
I was assigned his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” in college and felt really dumb trying to make heads or tails of it. Even the driest stuff we read in that class like Husserl or the Tractatus I devoured up with glee, but from him I was only able to pick up a hyper-sophisticated fetish for the written word which, again, I didn’t and don’t really understand. I should try again, tell me where to @Corpsey or anyone else

What did the lecturer have to say about it?
 

dilbert1

Well-known member
What did the lecturer have to say about it?

He was a very old man in his final semester of teaching and loved Plato’s Phaedrus, so he was already getting a lot more mileage out of the essay, and was too committed to opening our minds to say anything really critical about Derrida. I might be able to find my notes, probably very confused
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
Years of practicing adultery taught him everything he knew.

That's probably the key to Continental philosophy.

Staff members were put under further strain when Guattari organised ‘erotic kamikazes’ to break up couples who grew too close (monogamy was a ‘capitalist’ perversion). His own marriage to the mother of his three children had broken up, and now he was jeopardising his romance with Arlette Donati, a nurse at the clinic, with his compulsive womanising. He encouraged her to take a lover to counteract the ‘oppressive conjugality’ of their relationship, and when she did, he became even more depressed.​

 
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