Reading through an essay by Derrida. Some thoughts so far:
1- He operates on the assumption that the greatest depth is the most radical and absolute openness to the Other, to otherness as such. In so far as it is impossible to be "absolutely open to otherness as such" he concludes that not only is philosophy a doomed project but humanity itself is doomed.
2- He follows Levinas apparently in claiming that a philosophy which is "enveloped in its own fundamental conceptions" is a "fantasy" and "a contradiction" that he lays at the feet of the "contradiction" of "formal logic".
3- He traces philosophy back to the Greeks, and proclaims all thought since Greece to be inherently Greek; he does this not in praise of this thought or tradition but rather to bemoan the fact of it, that it has closed us off from radical absolute openness to the Other, and has allowed us to forget the ultimate category of "experience itself"; "Experience itself and that which is most irreducible within experience: the passage and departure toward the other; the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others."
4- Theorizing (which he uses to include all thought which is not part of his project of a supposed radical absolute openness to otherness as such) is considered "imperial" and unable to shake the "last naivete" of conceiving of "Being as an object".
5- Logos itself is apparently just an arbitrary distinction made between "inside-outside" and "interior-exterior"; "...it is a question simply of revealing beneath this truth, as that which founds it and is dissimulated within it, "a situation which precedes the division of Being into an inside and an outside." However it is also a question of inaugurating, in a way that is to be new, quite new, a metaphysics of radical separation and exteriority."
Yeah. That is about all I can stomach for now.
Subject: Derrida 
Sat Apr 29, 2017 4:56 pm