Backhanded Back Cover Praise

A blurb on the back of my copy from Roger Poole:

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.

Two Can Play at this Game

An uncharitable reading of J.D.'s refusal to define his terms is that he's bluffing. A charitable reading is to say that he's doing it on purpose because he's thinks making precise philosophical definitions is a fool's game. No one can actually do it, so why pretend–it's more honest to just start using a technical term like "trace" and let it accrue whatever meaning it's going to accrue. (More honest in the way that writing Being is more honest.) Maybe this is a valid point about philosophical nomenclature, except the definition-by-ostension strategy seems parasitic on someone else's definition-by-describing-what-you-mean strategy. For example, the whole hullabaloo about "traces" falls flat unless we already have the clearly delineated Saussurian distinction between /b/ and /p/ in mind.

Hey, can I push this a little further and deconstruct Derrida? Let's try.

1. Tacit dichotomy...J.D.'s definition-by-ostension differs from other philosophers' definition-by-description.
2. Privileged member of dichotomous pair...Definition-by-description is for chumps. The only way to introduce a philosophical term is to just start using it.
3. Self-undermining nature of dichotomous privileging...Definition-by-ostention only works if there are definition-by-description terms to play off of.

And...gotcha! That was kinda fun, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Of course another possibility is that J.D. isn't doing anything particularly tricky here and I'm simply failing to follow his argument.

Is that all there is?

Also, one of the things that drew me to Derrida was that I'd heard he'd invented this technique called "deconstruction" where you find a binary opposition hidden in the core of a person's work and then show how the tension inherent in that dichotomy undermines their whole argument. That sounds like a helluva debater's trick, and I hope this whole inside/outside thing isn't an example of it, because here Derrida isn't unearthing a tacit dichotomy in Saussure so much as doing his damndest to read one in and then overreact to it.

Anyway patience, patience, I'm not even done with this section.