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Summary: read poetry - it's better for you
Review: While it's certainly true that there will always be a gulf between reality and words, communication between reader and writer is nonetheless very real and potentially profound, thanks in no small part to empathy and the imagination. Deconstructionism, by denying presence and instead proposing unlimited differences between signs, dismisses any connection between readers and writers and turns language into a hermetic system separated from the outside world which is, of course, inhabited by people who read and people who write. This is exactly what makes deconstructionism so empty and hypocritical: It rejects traditional metaphysics while adopting a pseudo-mystical position which regards language as some unstable and solipsistic alien creature independent of everything and everyone.
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Summary: some tantalizing tidbits...
Review: ...floating in the philosophical Sea of Circumlocution.The wondrous thing about deconstruction as Derrida writes it is that it could even deconstruct the criticism that it's incomprehensibly turgid. All you'd need do is invert the criticism, questioning its premises and in effect turning it back on the critic: an old philosopher's (and lawyer's) trick disguising itself as a postmodern innovation. In any case, I don't deny the necessity for Derrida's work and find various aspects of it challenging and stimulating. But I get mightily irritated with the constant word games best left to poets, most of whom eschew verbosity and ground themselves in the soil of daily lived and felt experience. Derrida's gymnastics obscure what they ought to be clarifying (unless one claims that the point is to obscure in the name of overturning our usual notions of clarity...see what I mean?). In Zen, the koan "deconstructs" the student's stucknesses until nothing is left but the experience; in Derrida, deconstruction deconstructs even itself until there's nothing left at all. If intellectually gifted writers are going to resort to such showy maneuvers, they may be right to object to a charge of nihilistic grandstanding, but one would hope they'd see the shadow of truth in the accusation.
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Summary: Insipid
Review: Derrida is deep and profound in his philosophy in linguisitc yet fail to grasp the techniques of using languages himself. HE CAN'T WRITE! This book, like all his other works, is difficult to comprehend!
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Summary: Derrida is a great writer and he is profound.
Review: Derrida's wit is super and he really knows how to be profound. Although I think he should take a biology and a logic course. Outstanding effort!
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Summary: Derrida's most accessible work.
Review: Having spent many frustrating hours looking for the substance in Derrida's many labyrinthine works, I make this suggestion to others: `Of Grammatology' is the thread text to start your wonderings through the rest of Derrida's thought.
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Summary: More like Pissology
Review: Hmmmmm . . . how should I begin? That Chef battle sequence was such a riot. Do you really think that you could win 14 in a row on any other day of the week? I mean seriously, sometimes it gets to the point where I don't even try anymore, just so we can remember what it was like for you to win. The war's just beggining. Welcome to MY Power Stone World, beeeatch!
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Summary: Pure Dionysian intoxication...absolutely pure
Review: How long can a philosophical movement last before it exhausts its methodology and goals? Does it take decades or centuries, or maybe even thousands of years? A more appropriate question might be: how long can philosophy itself last before it is labeled as superfluous and subjected to the questioneering of an impatient and caustic interlocutor? Philosophy is usually presented as a conglomeration of schools of thought, each of these having a well-defined set of tools for investigating ultimate foundations of truth and reason. Its practitioners have been guarded in their systemization. Criticizing each other vociferously, they all agree though that philosophy has intrinsic worth and should be sustained. After all, philosophy sets the foundation for science, ethics, art, culture, and politics. To end it would pull the rug out that lies underneath the table of civilization. To end philosophical discourse would make us all hopeless wanderers with no discernable direction or purpose. A colleague once told me that this book should be read as a reaction against French structuralism. This may be true, but I see it as a literary project to indulge in the excesses of Nietzschean/Dionysian ecstacy. It is an attempt to take a break from philosophy, to put on oversized white shirts and with a sloppy oil paintbrush, disfigure the classical works of Western philosophy. It is, to quote the translator of the book, an attempt to become "intoxicated at the prospect of never hitting bottom". The movement of deconstruction reacts against the stealth of the philosophers, who try to cover their literary tracks. Deconstruction exposes the so-called solidity of philosophical texts, exposing the hierarchies they construct as fragile, and removing them with delight. The translator has written a superb preface to this book (and also explains why such a preface is appropriate). The Hegelian/Nietzschean/Freudian/Husserlian influences are readily apparent in the author, as the translator brings out with great clarity. Deconstruction has become almost a school of thought in itself now, and it was making the front pages of newspapers fifteen years ago. If one objects that deconstruction should be examined using its own strategies, that its practitioners should become themselves "bricoleurs", the deconstructionists agree. The translator explains this as both a "search for a foundation" and as "pleasure of the bottomless". The process of deconstruction thus acts against itself, as well as others. It is never to be arrested, for no text can be deconstructed in its entirety. Thus deconstruction permits no ending, just as no book can claim an ending in its view. The logocentrism of Western philosophy is in its scheme mere word salad, and it acts against it with glee. The creative process is disorganized, intuitive, nonlinear, and frequently executes a random walk in conceptual space. It grabs at every straw of insight, and sometimes desparately makes claims about these ideas that uproot them from their origins. In addition, the codification of these ideas in the written word sometimes contains remnants of the creative process. Thus an oral tradition is frequently needed to accompany these texts, to explain and interpret what has been lost in the printed page. Hence the spoken and the written are mutually symbiotic. The deconstructionists though fail to see this symbiosis, and ignore the oral tradition. They view this tension in texts as a window of opportunity, and spend inordinate amounts of time wandering in them, getting lost in the process. As they read, they make decisions rapidly and on-the-fly, and they are nervous and guarded at all times against succoumbing to the tyranny of logic and order. But they inadvertently find resting points, in spite of their attempts not to. Their texts of deconstruction thus become mere diaries of their journeys, tiresome to read, and completely inert and useless.
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Summary: Verbose or ironic?
Review: I do share some sympathy with a reviewer who, having come to the end of the book, found himself asking "And....?" It is unfortunate that Derrida's verbosity means that many of the most profound points in this book are made when Derrida is quoting others. I suspect that one may partly put this down to a poor translation (French after all only has half the vocabulary that English has -I am told that Descartes, depsite actually being originally translated from the Latin, is a lot easier to read in French than English). HOWEVER, is Derrida just one of those irritating academics who believe that their arguments will seem all the more forceful if they use convoluted and difficult language OR is he rather playing a little ironic game with the reader, simply to demonstrate how far written language has become detached from its natural roots and therefore what pains one must go to in order to come close to expressing what one really means? Whatever the case may be, despite one having to spend hours dissecting each page of text, Derrida does expertly combine a variety of opinions and provides some very interesting, albeit rather difficult, reading.
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Summary: Best to keep a dictionary close at hand
Review: I don't like this book as it didn't help me with my home work and Miss Rogers told me off. I wanted to correct my grammar which weren't very good but Derrida did not help me he was talking difficult stuff. While my grammar was attacked however, Miss Rogers did concede my principal point, which was that Derrida, having constructed his own metanarrative, is as susceptible to wilful misinterpretation through the prism of other metanarratives as he inflicts on others. Moreover, in some of Derrida's earlier essays, he specifically attacks Heidegger for misunderstanding what he means when accounting for his own form of deconstruction. Yet it seems to me - and surely to most? - that the central tenet of deconstruction is this: that authorial intent cannot be guaranteed as ultimate meaning; and that ultimate meaning does not exist. Vive la differance? Or does he need a kick up the arche? Miss Rogers gave me a B- for anyone interested.
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Summary: Better than ever.
Review: I first read this in the eighties, before I was ready. If you want to understand deconstruction, I was told, "Of Grammatology" is the singlemost important text. Then I read the excellent introduction by Christopher Norris, went back and re-read Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," went back and read Plato's "Phaedrus," which Pirsig deconstructs in "Zen." Finally, the pieces came together and it became possible to appreciate Derrida for the genuine philosopher/philologist/phenomenologist/existential thinker that he is. In reading Derrida I find it useful to keep in mind several key ideas: first, language, spoken or written, is subject to the movement of "real" time. Any "now"utterance is necessarily a past "trace" and a hypothetical future. 2nd, language is not the expression of thought; rather, language "is" pure consciousness. All ideas are words, all words are "interpretations," meanings made by human minds. Hence, there is no escaping the "text." We can "know" nothing beyond the interpretations of the thinking (language-using/meaning-making) human subject. 3rd, the text, while "intranscendable," is necessarily inexhaustible, since every signified must in turn become a signifier. Hence, the awesome (dis)play of language by a thinking subject such as "Shakespeare," whose metaphors never attempt to posit a reality beyond the human world of language (there are no "truth claims" in Shakespeare's sonnets: every meaning can be "proven" by the words which create it. 4th, any "opposition" is more a trick/trope of language than an actual "event." Speaking vs. writing. male vs. female, white vs. black, life vs. death, ideal vs. mundane, the center vs. the margin are all "provisional" metaphors, more complementary than exclusive: the one term always depends upon the other for completion of its meaning. Finally, just as it is unwise to conflate Christian and biblical understandings about anything, it's mistaken to confuse Derrida with the "liberal, radical fringe" often accused of dismantling the canons and foundations of Western civilization. In fact, Derrida's respect for language has more in common with more "traditional" critics such as Bloom and Kermode than it does with the academic activists, political reformers, socialist zealots who have attached themselves to "positions," alliances, causes. These latter groupings violate the very nature of language and thought. (Unfortunately, the American public frequently vote for candidates on the basis of their "positions"--guns, taxes, abortion, etc.--rather than a candidate's ability to think and use language.) Frankly, I now find it curious that I once regarded Derrida with suspicion. His work belongs in the mainstream of philosophy and semantics.
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