‘Caress the detail, the divine detail.’ –Nabokov
It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. (…)
In his early work Derrida makes two valid points.
1. Much of the philosophical tradition attempts to reduce all of existence to a single fundamental concept such as God, Spirit or Being, to derive everything from one idea which is itself somehow not part of the world, creating an inverted pyramidal relationship of emanation between the many and the one.
2. The same tradition also tends to treat the written sign as something secondary, external to and dependent on the immediacy of speech.
In making the first point, Derrida is using the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to critique the search for a foundation of meaning, something the latter’s theory of signs as conventional and arbitrary would seem to rule out as impossible. In making the second point, he turns on Saussure for not taking his own ideas far enough, for trying to protect the purity of speech from the parasitic corruption of the sign.
It is partly from trying to avoid the trap of a new master concept that Derrida refuses to adopt a stable, consistent vocabulary for the exposition of his ideas.
related { Derrida and yummyburgers | NY mag }
