Of Grammatology is the tool-kit for anyone wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.The bit about leaving a bomb in a pub is in poor taste, but the rest sounds like high praise to me. A fellow linguist once remarked to me, vis à via Noam Chomsky's legendary forensic skills, "His special mutant power is that he can win any argument he gets in even if he's wrong." Even when you know the debating trick well enough to see through its disigenuity, you can still admire its artfulness. I'm a conoisseur, and I'm hoping to learn some killer debater's tricks from Derrida in the form of "deconstruction" but I haven't seen them yet.
Also, what a weird backhanded compliment to have as one of your featured blurbs. Sure it draws in guys like me, but it also sounds like a roundabout way of calling Derrida the king of the bullshitters.
No comments:
Post a Comment