Post Derrida
Derrida died.
In the early days of this blog, I talked quite a lot about his thought. In fact, the subheader of this blog (”spinning out the thread…”) is a conglomeration of Derridean and Northropian thought (meaning as web to be spun out from Derrida; the concept of the Archetype from Northrop Frye).
For all you people out there who are so fond of the word “postmodern,” but have no idea what it really means or where it comes from, you should know that one of postmodern’s Fathers is now dead (whatever that means…)
So that was the weekend I suppose, the Frenchman dies, and Radiohead gets older.
Oct 11th 2004
Is Derrida’s web to be spun out referring to factual expostulation, developing theory, revealing the subconscious, or what? (Forgive my ignorance.)
Oct 14th 2004
Ariel, sorry about my slow reply–midterms were wreaking havoc on my soul.
Anyway, what Derrida was referring to with hs idea of “web to be spun out” was the nature of TEXT. I don’t want to go into a convoluted explanation/discussion of his Deconstruction (a helpful site is Here).
The basic idea everything in the world is TEXT. We cannot escape from text, and since text is arbitrary (death of the author=birth of the reader - Bakhtin) it is our prerogitave to deconstruct the textual web of symbolism and weave our own meaning (with THREAD). Here’s a hopeful line or two from the website I linked to in this post:
“If one tries through metaphysics to find meaning or intent outside text, they say, one only finds a web of text from which one cannot escape using Western metaphysics.”
Oct 14th 2004
the link didn’t work for some reason. I’ll try it again.
Click to be deconstructed