A Glimmer

I'm mostly rolling my eyes and nitpicking my way through "Linguistics and Grammatology", but at the very end there I get the glimmer of the outline of an interesting idea that Derrida might be getting at maybe: this notion that our whole apprehension of reality may proceed through a perception of differences and that this mechanism bears a strong resemblance to the way we read. (As in literally read actual text.) This is how I take the passage on pg. 70 that begins "If the trace, arche-phenomenon of 'memory'...". There's even something lyrical about the idea that all of us go through life writing and reading the great text of the world. (Anyway, it sounded lyrical until I wrote it out just now, and then it sounded corny.)

I'm intrigued enough to try and understand this chapter better.

Discrete Language

The quote from Jakobson about the discrete nature of language is interesting and not just because it name-checks Claude Shannon whose reformulation of the concept of entropy is indispensable to computational linguists.

Thus form in language has a manifestly granular structure and is subject to a quantal description.
–pg. 69

In my experience, most people who think about language end up coming to this conclusion. I remember reading something from Benjamin Lee Whorf in which he utilized some concepts from Hindu mythology to describe the way human minds break the undifferentiated stream of experience up into distinguishable chunks. I like to say that language is a discretizing process, which amounts to the same thing. The discrete/continuous distinction is of course a philsophical issue of interest outside discussions of language (and dear to anyone who grokked calculus), but language seems to make some definite choices in this region.

Context Dependence

If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can justify one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within a topic...and an historical strategy.
–pg. 70

Not terribly novel but well put. I highlight this because we're getting to the end of the section and this passage appears to be part of where J.D. winds up to his point.

This also seems to locate him on the left ends of the subjective/objective and idealist/realist spectra, which is like big surprise, but I've wondered how much of the linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy is really just the old idealist/realist debate dressed up in linguistic terms. There seems to be a general form of epistemological paradox where you direct your skepticism at some property of yourself that allows to form an argument in the first place. For Descartes that property was sense perception, hence the whole "evil demon" am-I-really-dreaming conundrum which still gets some airplay. For a linguistically-minded philosopher like Derrida, that property is language, the way that words can never quite say what we want them to say–which is a different issue but conforms to the same general outline of the paradox.

I shall use my powers to bend space and time and open the door to infinity!

Incomprehensible few pages (pp. 65-68) about the metaphysics of space and time at the beginning of "The Hinge". The opacity here doesn't bother me though, because I get the sense that here J.D. is just assuming a background in these issues I don't have. (Heidegger wrote a book called Being and Time, right? Maybe I'm coming in on the middle of that conversation.) I don't mind not understanding stuff as long as I think the fault lies with me.

By the way, wouldn't "The Hinge" be a great name for a superhero?

Does arche- just mean meta-?

While we're at it, I came across the following on pg. 70.

If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be...

Just arche- just mean meta-? Does this prefix seem less novel in French?