Derrida on deconstruction and differance
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- In this video, philosophy professor Ellie Anderson unpacks Jacques Derrida's use of the word "différance" and the ideas of deconstruction. Fun fact: Dr. Anderson wrote her dissertation on Derrida and has worked with the Derrida Seminars Translation Project!
This video was created for Professor Anderson's Spring 2021 "Continental Thought" course at Pomona College.
For more from Ellie, check out Overthink podcast!
Overthinkpodcast.com
I wish I could put into words how exceptionally helpful this video is. I am in grad school right now - GRAD SCHOOL! - and I am struggling with this concept. All the concepts. All the isms. All the posts and pres. Thank you for making this clear and concise and palatable. You didn't dumb it down or dilute it in any way, either, which I appreciate.
Thank you so much, really happy to hear it! And yes, it took me writing a dissertation to gain this level of clarity, and even then, I just led a seminar today in which my students brought up fascinating points I hadn't thought of
haha, same! I'm a tenured professor and I found this INCREDIBLY helpful. Thanks!
felt this comment in my bones. grad schools do be like that 😢
Wow, you're that much closer to a barrista than you were 4 years ago. Good luck applying for the assistant professorship if/when you manage to get the phd, with the 200 other applicants for you job.
@@__loafy__ You must be a blast at parties. The MA is a personal triumph, it has nothing to do with seeking work or padding a resume. Some people actually obtain knowledge and education for the benefit of knowledge and education, whereas others who lack it find themselves trolling CZcams videos to obliterate dreams. Have fun scrolling and peck-typing on your old laptop in your parents' basement.
I have an M.A. in Philosophy, and I must admit that I have not been able to understand Derrida until I watched this. Thank you.
you have a masters degree in philosophy and do not understand Derrida???? What????
@@macolof362 Could happen
@@macolof362 First, in my experience most continental philosophy is very nearly nonsense to begin with, which makes it difficult. Second, the wordiness of continental philosophy makes things difficult. Third, my philosophical training has been almost exclusively analytic.
@@guitarzxt1 Well, it certainly does verge on nonsense so i'll give you that.
@@macolof362 sarcasm doesn’t work well here
You are an exceptional teacher. The elucidation of philosophy with such lucidity is remarkable. I just love your videos!
I just came back to reading Derrida after a fairly unfruitful attempt to read the Grammatology in late 2021, and I was so glad to see this video was published just a few months after I gave up on him! Way better than other resources I used back then. Of course it helps that I'm not a complete beginner to this very challenging work but your exposition was particularly clear and straightforward for what I've seen. Thank you very much for this invaluable resource!
This was very well made, thanks for uploading it publicly. (:
Derrida: " How can I make something simple seem complex?"
Google "Derrida memes".... funny AF
Indeed.
It’s not that simple - signs and words have you trapped it’s its identity . But that will never be you .
He was on high on meth while compiling this.
The fact that you view it as simple shows that you probably haven't looked into it deeply enough.
Thank you so much for all your videos Prof. Ellie Anderson
Love this glade I found your channel. You really make Derrida more clear than other philosophy youtubers.
Excellent lectures. Just found this channel, and converting to MP3's to listen while I work in the garden and around the house.
Can't listen to enough of these. Keep up the good work.
Not only are you concise, you are clear. Bravo.
Derrida " Everytime there is a metaphore, there's a sun somewhere, but everywhere there is a sun, the metaphore has already began..."
Thank you, Ellie! That was a great explanation on Derrida! Loved it.
You are an exceptional teacher so glad to have found this keep going with videos & podcast
Really good exposition of Derrida’s philosophy. I’m French and even with an intermediate level of English, it was quite clear for me, even that it’s not easy at all to apprehend, deconstructing our own secular ways of thinking. Congratulations and thank you. I will take a look to the other videos so.
If people are interested, I advise them to take a look to Bernard Stiegler, he made his thesis under Derrida’s direction and in a lot of ways continued his philosophy, focused on technical questions.
Bernard Stiegler yes -- and especially Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work was very profoundly marked by Derrida. I would also mention Catherine Malabou's criticisms of Derrida in "La plasticité au soir de l'écriture".
This is an underrated channel!
This is an awesome video on one of my favorite philosophers. Soutl you ever make another video on Derrida, I would live to hear your thoughts on his notion of the undeconstructable.
im infatuated with you and your videos my friend, a real breath of fresh air!
In my country (Italy) philosophy professors have such a dull and convoluted way of communicating these concepts...you have amazing clarity. Great job
I've been watching these podcasts completely at random (didn't notice it was a course). As a total amateur I find there's always some new way to look at things in them and the explanations are mostly within reach. Will be exploring some of thes ideas more for sure.
I sure so wish that this video had been available back in 2008 when I was tasked as a grad student with presenting on deconstruction!
Im currently writing a paper on deconstruction and i gotta say...derrida was a mad man. It is so freaking difficult to undrestand any conent on deconstruction
But this video helped alot. Thanks💙
Superb! This is just superb!
4:05 just one more comment... look at her expressions and gestures, as she explains the difference between Hegel's dialectic, and Derrida's deconstruction.
That is A+ instruction that will engage an audience! Good stuff.
I am a student of Religious Studies specializing in New Testament and Early Christianity and your videos are so helpful for introducing key 'concepts' (I imagine Derrida to have been allergic to the idea of a 'concept') in continental philosophy. Thank you!
Derrida loved concepts. That’s all he focused on. I’m really not sure what you mean by this…
@@kylerodd2342i not sure. I would say he loves to explore concepts and find the little cracks inside.
@@marco21274 doesn’t really matter.
@@kylerodd2342I agree with this, Derrida was totally into concepts... albeit at a conceptual level. Take masculinity and femininity for example, he recognised that they exist within a binary. They are both dependant on one another in their existence, one makes the other whole.. they compliment each other. Together they create the conception of 'gender' as a social construction
As always thanks for sharing.
Good, introductory video. Thank you ma’am
Awesome video! Super helpful!
A really good explanation. Thank you
These videos are fantastic
This is wonderful. thanks a lot
Gotta say the style is always on 100... lectures are pretty great too
I can’t thank you enough for this
I love your channel and podcast. Will you ever cover any topics from analytic philosophy?
I enjoy these videos ❤️
Great material, very good overview on his deconstruction and 'notion of' differance.
Any writing, already would consider speech and exorbitantly ex-scribe the ouside events that befall on it. And that is why writing has differanced itself.
Also deconstruction is not an active voice, but middle voice, to self-deconstruct se deconstruit
I was assigned his word for my BA freshman English course and thank you so much for this. Wayyy tooo difficult for me
Does this mean you would no longer upload these informal lecture-style videos? I really liked these. Thanks, Anyway.
Not to worry! More are on the way. :) This is the last from Spring 2021's Continental Thought course, but we will be recording and adding more regularly. So glad you're enjoying!
This is so helpful! It would be amazing if you made a video on Spectres of Marx and hauntology!
Thank you!
Great video. Much clearer than others I have watched on the subject. One problem, your captions are out of sync because they ran through the puppies when you weren't talking. It makes it very hard to use them after that point.
I really appreciate your lecture ToT
*My perspective on speech in juxtaposition to writing:*
Sound ➡️ imitation of sound ➡️ spoken word ➡️ written representation of spoken word.
Visual ➡️ Interpretation of visual into image (drawing, sculpture, etc.) ➡️ abstraction process into symbol (e.g. hieroglyphs) ➡️ abstraction process into alphabet ➡️ construction of written word (possibly through references, possibly spontaneous, possibly by both means)
So, understood from this perspective, we suppose that auditory and visual interpretations of the observables actually start out as more seperated polarities to eachother and grow or gravitate closer to eachother over time and often the eras, possibly heading to an ultimate of unification where they completely inhabit the exact same contextual place and space (so the exact opposite of deconstruction, I'd argue: complete entanglement).
_Where we are now in that process:_ "The cow says moo."
( _A more logical representation of the above, stripped from added anthropomorphism: "The cow sounds moo.")
_Where we might arrive in the continuation of this process:_ "The cow is moo" and "The moo is cow".
Therefor it is just as much a moocow as it is a cowmoo, amongst other things. Language (written, spoken or otherwise) is just incomplete representations of wholes ("cow" _or_ "moo" for example), the words essentially referring to parts and fragments of wholes and making those referals serve as symbolic _pars pro totum_ synecdoches for the entire holistic entities they are incomplete, referential expressions of.
An interesting thought-experiment of a hypothetical opposite to this natural phenomenon would be imagining Tolkien's fictitious language of the Ents as a physical-world reality. Ent language is extremely long-winded because just to say "hill" for example, Ents name everything about it and of how it came to be: it's complete history of becoming and all that which is about it (ground, dirt, hight differences, form, movement, etc.) so that all its aspects and facets are represented in the expression of merely calling it by its name. Therefor, in Ent language, the symbolic representation that is a word fits completely together in symbiotic relationship to the totality of that which it represents. And the naming and calling or writing of it would evoke the totality of what it is _(holistic entity)_ instead of just bits and pieces to stand for the whole thing _(deconstructed and broken whole)_ and would also be able to function as a standalone and independent of other words and phrases that represent things-that-are which that what is named also is independent from in order to exist in its essence as a complete entity(for example: oceans can exist with or without humans because they preceded human beings).
*So imo Derrida needed to touch grass (...and hear it, smell it, taste it, see it and move and be with and in relation to it) before he could've come anywhere close to properly naming it* ...and then he might have understood that something that is properly named can't be disnamed or stripped from its fitting name(s).
Thank you
i have commented a month on this video . This my third listen ( as sometimes is needed for philosophy and after listening to other videos of yours) . This time around I find there is some play with the roots of philosophy , meaning Socrates who taught using speech followed by his student Plato who wrote the dialectic in question . The latter work has many years of book life where as Whitehead wisely said "All of philosophy is a foot note of Plato . Plato putting much of Socrates teaching in the written words . So one could debate the closeness of meaning . This could also be said of Aristotle Metaphysics written from "other notes" where we get the gist of it .
No doubt philosophical writing is not a easy go ,probably due to the fact that the pen is trying to capture the mind that is in metaphysical space .
Hegel works as a theologist is much simpler to read than those written when he is a philosopher , your thinking ;"What the beep " is he trying to say .I feel he is trying to be exact , nail it down . or be absolute perfect !.( one can say the same when reading Kant etc) . Derrida i feel is rather than putting a word under arrest he is allowing it float in the grey area like a biological cell under a microscope that empirically can be observed as phenomena though as Kant says 'The thing in itself cant " I also feel there is some Husserl phenomenology at play, ie , bracketing out prior interpretations ( though rather than the classical analytical approach he of course deconstructs it into apparent meaningless .
i do read Hegel into this .... slave master dialect as a binary where the lesser( slave) actually has more power than the master and self destructs through contradiction into a new historical dialect . ( to me still has spiritual roots) .
In closing i would sum it up using the popular philosophers metaphor . that being a table . One phenomenologically . sees a 4x4 table with 4, 3 ft legs . You than take it apart with hammer and other tools deconstructing it until it is a heap on the floor . And you say I see no numbers there .
Thanks again for your enthusiastic and informative summary of Derrida .
Very educative video. Is Derrida's "Ideality of The Literary Object" available on the Internet? Since that was his PhD dissertation, I presume it is more readable than his other works. Some philosophers sabotage themselves by sticking to needlessly convoluted expositions of their ideas.
Likewise, please let us know if your dissertation on Derrida is posted anywhere. Your explanations increased my interest in this topic.
Can we deconstruct the deconstructor? Is he also a binary opposite whose meaning fluctuates all the time based on its later half (the outer world)?
Hello, what work of Derrida did you use? Would like to know to use it in my thesis!
Thanks! Your articulation of the authors work is enjoyable, as well as your obvious passion for philosophy. ( paradigm of the love of Sophia)
I would like to hear Chomsky take on the subject as he dismisses much of Wittgenstein thoughts on language . Sighting todays biology the philosophy concepts are absurd , this according to him !
Thanks!
So maybe you should ask Chomsky?
I could never thank you enough for the puppies.
Ellie could return Screwball comedy back to the Big Screen. Completely Brilliant.
Great video, but the timing of the subtitles is a little bit off. You might forgot to include your opening.
Hi, I am a professor of English from Kolkata (India). Is it possible for you to give an online lecture via zoom or gmeet in our college seminar on Derrida? This video of yours is very inspiring for Derridians.
Really clear explanation. Thank you. Deconstruction of binaries is used in Daoist meditative practice. But I love this about flipping the hierarchy. Incredible technique for creative thinking 🙏🏼
Excellent video! I was already familiar with Jacques Derrida's philosophy and always found it very interesting, although I disagree with its central aspect. For example, regarding the "binary" issue. I agree that speech derives its meaning from writing and vice versa, without there being an inherent hierarchy between them. But the question is: does "speech" have meaning in itself, and "writing," which came later, only led us to perceive such a difference, or is meaning actually something given or only exists in relation to another and is always conventionally attributed by us? Jacques Derrida, in his eagerness to eliminate all dualism, actually introduced a much worse and infinitely larger dualism that isolates the verbal from the non-verbal. He isolates the subject's mind from the object and thus falls into a true idealism.
Thanks for uploading your lectures! Can we pronounce Derrida as De(GH)ida ?
If you have to ask, the answer is no.
So that last bit.. professor maybe you could draw that out some more. What is it to "distrust presence"', for instance?
Please talk about Aristotle, too.
I am wondering if I heard the spaces between words or the punctuation before I learned to read. iwonderifThaipeoplewhodon'tseperatethierwordsinwritingandperhapsnotinspeechorperhapsnotthesamewaydohearthespaces.
Liked and subscribed.
'I believe in philosophy.' Hypathia of Alexandria.
I havent felt like this since i saw an explanation of evangelion
Watch this after i took a Zolpidem pill for sleep later. Aftter that, i went heavy and limp likke drunked but not quite... I held my phone to hear the video on derrida. I feel like inconversation with her face to face knw what i mean. Is she by herself there or arw there other people as well. Idk imma maybe the Zolpidem pill's effect push me to bizarre xperince with this derrida video. Oml
nice by you.
Can you please do a video on Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency ?
Traces are like evenings where there is shadow of day and night and dialectics are binary with opposite day and night concept ?
Is this course available online?
Thanks for your interest! It is not :(
But the book used for the 20th-century portion of the course is the Continental Philosophy Reader (ed. Kearney and Rainwater) if you want to check out the readings used--and we plan to post more videos!
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Hey, do you know Michael Naas? He was on my dissertation committee.
Yes :)
If meaning is always deferred how does meaning become arranged around oppositions? Are oppositions socially imposed and if so what about oppositions encourage us to impose them?
Hegel doesn't say contradictions are resolved. He goes out of his way to deny the resolution of contradictions.
The word 'dog' gains its paw-sitive content through its difference from other words.
She’s beautiful!
🌹😇🌹
What is derrida opinion on chocki? When deconstruction doesnt happen to animals but heavenly body
If Derida speaks of "Differance", exactly, "it's not for Nothing". Quite rightly, he dissects thought with the meticulousness that is his own. And in this deconstruction, the sign gives way to the phoneme (it becomes) unperceived under language, it melts into it, evanescent through speech, which suggests that language needs a representation to serve thought - one could just as well say, it precipitates the matter of the sign into knowledge.
Anthropy and Entropy : test of truth, linking these terms like two tensive threads. The solder Æ always eludes the first. (Maxims and Thoughts)
Superbly explained. Derrida is so often misconstrued also unfairly maligned for being obscure - his seminars on Heidegger are models of lucidity compared with most.
On binaries/hierarchies, one remarkable binary in US life and increasingly also in Europe now with mass shifts in population is demographic. Crime statistics relative to different populations are remarkably consistent over time and place.
For instance, according to US official crime figures, instances of intergroup rape and sexual assault are skewed by tens of thousands in one direction, statistically zero in the other.
Yet the common perception, especially among intellectuals who talk of “binaries” in this fashion is to paint the assailants as victims and the victims as “privileged”! For how long can this perverse binary remain immune to deconstruction?
I understood about 2% of this. I have no background in philosophy. But to me, speech is much more immediate than writing. We can discuss the interplay between speech and writing, but there are so many contexts that we are apt to get lost in a maze of logical constructs. How much different is written speech from unwritten speech? There are so many contexts. How is political speech different from philosophical speech? How is religious speech different from political speech? There are so many contexts. What is the difference between fiction and literal speech? I don't have the background.
It is never to late to start reading. Books are cheap, best of luck!
You look puzzled yourself at the end there. And with good reason. For all his fluff Derrida cannot ultimately reason away (for that is what he is doing, using reason against reason) the apodictic character of order itself. Which is just as well really.
🤗🤗🤗🤗
There is a simple way in speech to distinguish between the words difference and diffarance by making it clear each time you say one of the words what its context is. We do this all the time with any words that are homophones. I don't see why writing gets the edge here, since writing is not needed at all to grasp the difference between the words, it just requires a slight elaboration when speaking the words to arrive at the exact same distinction in meaning as would exist in writing them down.
Let it be!
Managing to explain Derrida without ever mentioning the Kantian thesis that the world is just a mental construction by means of linguistic categories is really exceptional! You have to destabilize, but why? Because you are not related to society, nature or history, and what is important is not to know the world but to change it. This is all that deconstruction is about, all the rest is either meaningless or surplus.
Nonsense.
@@tzenophile ...what she says.
the subtitles are messed up
Wonder what Derrida would make of today's world where social media has introduced other modes of communicating that in some senses transcend mere speech and writing. And would you class Derrida in a similar league of a Wittgenstein? Wasn't Wittgenstein a deconstructionist? BTW have you done something on Wittgenstein?
Short yet it's knockout .🍄
do Henri Lefebvre please
Not trusting the authority of reason is a good a ground for not counting Derrida as a real philosopher as I can think of. I realise that he has received massive reappraisal recently and newer, more sympathetic exposition in Anglophone philosophy. However, the clearer any exposition is of this man's work (and this exposition is one of the best I have encountered) the clearer it becomes to me that what Derrida says is either trivial, obscure, obvious or just plain wrong, and the more justified I feel in retaining my now very long standing attitude that he is best forgotten with a rather pointed 'So what?". One side of a binary opposition is always privileged, we are told. Really? Is that always so? Even if it is that may be because it is felt by enough people that there is good reason for it, and that reason needs to be explored.
I nevertheless love this series, by the way.
My God Theo we said nearly the same thing- look at the comment I just put on- great minds!
9:48 That short tension releasing laughter you did there after saying "He just made it up" shows that you are privileging the inherited over the created. In the binary of "already existing" versus "made up", you privilege "already existing," which is why you experienced an internal psychic tension when expressing that Derrida "just" made "differance" up. That tension was quickly released, hence the quick laughter. However, even though unconsciously you privilege the already existing over the made up, this whole video is dedicated to differance which is the "just made up" word and not about difference. Therefore, the video is an example of the made up being privileged over the already existing even though during this particular moment in the video, 9:48, you expressed an unconscious behavior that demonstrates a favoring of the already existing over the "just" made up.
Yes, mom.
Maybe you could explain (offer some critical analysis) what Derrida has accomplished (or what follows for philosophy) once one distrusts the authority of Reason, Consciousness, Presence, Speech?
I don't understand how writing has the leg up on speech. What about the many different ways a written word can be pronounced? There are so many words that can't even be written down, i.e. where spoken language is much more subtle and precise in expressing meanings and emotions (think about dialects).
Derrida is making a simple logical error- that because 2 things share some traits they are really the same. Cats and dogs share a lot of traits- so are they really a false binary?
Aren't both speech and writing just different methods to encode information? Speech encodes the information in distinct patterns of vibrating air. Writing encodes the information in distinct patterns of symbols. Both are ultimately subject to entropy, although, writing is a much more stable way to encode information, it is still going to be lost at somepoint the same way speech is.
The information that is encoded is however completely indifferent to the method used to encode. This is exmpliefied through the mere fact, that the symbols that make up this text go through multiple processes of encoding to be sent between the different compenents of my own computer, the servers and the specifc end user interface, yet the information of this text remains the same.
Something information isn't indifferent towards is however the sender and the receiver. Someone who isn't proficient in the english language, will perceive this as nonsense. And likewise if we did translate this text into binary or mandarin it would become nonsense to me, even tough, the encoded information hasn't changed, nor could I encode the information in a language that I am not proficient in.
Consequently the information derives it's meaning in the interaction between sender and receiver. The interaction between the active and the passive
Deconstruction has the flavor of Zen. Bodhidharma's Zen, Huang Po's Zen.
I can't believe Derrida spent his final years at UCI. I wonder if he and Maddy ever got into fights...
I don't think I understood this talk. Can we say deconstruction is a theory of confusion? How can we understand what Derrida is saying if he has no structure? We can feel the confusion, I am not sure if we can understand it.
Derrida also challenge the idea of dialectic of hegel that way by challenging binary opposition because thesis and antithesis are also binary oppositions ?
congratulations jumpscare. i just watch these in random order i got so scared
10:00
Me who only saw the last episode looking for a Derrida video and feel like an imposter for the puppies.
when editing your audio you should put a 'deesser' on your track, it softens the loudness of the frequencies of your 's'
which makes this video almost unlistenable