Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”
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- čas přidán 5. 07. 2024
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In this episode, I turn my attention to Derrida's groundbreaking essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play." It is here that he lays the foundation of what would become deconstruction, the destabilization of the assumed univocality of either term in a binary. He does this by undoing the oft-assumed belief that structures do not move, and that they are fundamentally opposed to "play."
Just came across this video while trying to find relevant videos for Derrida's essay. Super engaging and absolutely well-structured. Glad to find Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction" in the playlist. This is some good study material for me. Thank you! Kudos!
thank you SO much!! watched this video three times and it has helped so much in understanding Derrida's essay for my philosphy class!
It's explained very beautifully. The calm voice and delivery of words makes it even more easy to grasp
Thanks, was so helpful and intriguing overview of the essay, needed that badly to be well prepared for tomorrows seminar :)
Very useful. He saved my time of reading a long essay of20 pages or so .🙏🙏🙏🙏
Thank you sooooo much! Such a lucid and excellent explanation of Derrida’s essay!
Excellent ❤️❤️ . A really underrated channel
Great video, I found it very useful to hear your thoughts and musings on this text! As to your last question, I am perhaps a bit more of a Heideggerian at this point than a Derridean, but I think what makes our age distinct is that advent and supremacy of technology, in the Heideggerian sense. That is, by a way of thinking which proposes absolute mastery of an absolutely sovereign subject, before whom the truth of the world is unveiled and to whose designs the whole world bends. I don't presume to be a master of philosophy or anything, so feel free to just take this as a personal view that may or not make sense to you. But for me, it has had explanatory power to see the whole line of Freud/Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida as, in the face of the technological thinking which assumes for itself absolute power, the movement which reveals the abyss of absolute powerlessness that lies beneath all pretensions of mastery, or, to put it more Derridean, of presence and the mastery of presence. Though, it could be this is privileging modern science too much as a special way of thinking, as I said, I don't pretend to be well-read enough to do a history of philosophy and thinking or anything like that!
I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but if so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts/counterpoints.
I think that that is fair. I want to applaud the self-reflexive comment you make with this statement: "it could be this is privileging modern science too much as a special way of thinking." If I understand it correctly, you are questioning the extent to which the privilege of modern science may have infected your own view. I want to comment on that by saying that I think that that is right; I have a great deal of trouble accepting the broad-brush characterization of modern science and, as such, am skeptical of a kind of techno-determinism. The reason that I believe this is because 'science' is by no means a homogeneous enterprise (a point that I think some take for granted). Sure, it makes for captivating and topical arguments, but the claim that 'science' just 'is' is problematic to me. I would like to add, too, that Derrida traces the appreciation of presence to the Ancient Greeks, troubling the localization of this 'event' to the 'scientific' age. Ughh that was a long winded (non-) answer. In short, I am interested in you working out your thought a little more to see the nitty-gritty of it!
Thank you for your explanation! This was helpful.
We see this theme growing more important in mathematics (Yoneda's lemma!!) and computer science (monads, functional programming). The dissolution of the center is captured by the adjunction between vector spaces (modules) and affine spaces (infinitesimal spaces). The duality of algebra and geometry (function and form?) emerges from that. This is a descriptive apparatus for finding (very limited degrees of) certainty about statements concerning the measurement and comparison of spacetime within spacetime. This is how the foundations of quantum gravity will ultimately influence the way we model the human psyche and human interactions, behavior, et cetera.
Category theory is the culmination of the obsession with structural abstraction, and manages to articulate (so move outside) the structure of destruction. Still working on fully dissolving this atomic irony.
Not sure what "quantum gravity" is, but isn't gravity about centers of mass toward which objects gravitate?
It'd been a week and I still couldn't understand Derrida. Thanks.
Your 'era's' (from the text), distinguished by their dominant transcendental signified are : "eidos, arche, telos, energeia ousia, aletheia [Greece], God [Christianty], man [Enlightenment], transcendentality [Idealism], consciousness [Phenomenology]". Our era is marked by the absence of any trascendental signified.
Thank you for this!
This was really great, helped me a lot. I have a question however, I want to understand Ferdinand de Saussures influence on 'post-structuralism'. what I mean is, is hear a lot about how important Saussures idea of the sign, the signifier, and the signified are, and I get confused with these concepts. I hear some people reference the idea of 'sign' and others talk about the importance of 'the signifier' what part are we working with here when we do a discursive study? In addition I hear about the importance of Saussures typology (le langue, le langage, and le parole) - le langage (e.g. english or spanish) being the important site of discursive study. Am I right in thinking this has no synonmous relationship to the distinction between sign, signifier and signified.... ?
Hmmm well for the first question, I think that when we are doing a discursive study--texts, words--, we are concerned with the signifier. For the second question, I'm not aware of a direct association between the sign, signifier, and signified and between langue, langage, and parole. Langue, langage, and parole are sites for the signifier, never the signified (unless a word is used to designate another word in some weird way??). I dunno, I'd be curious as to what other people think
@@TheoryPhilosophy OK, thank you for your response!!
@@TheoryPhilosophy If I may just ask a slightly different question: what the disctinction between the sign and the signifier...and why is Derrida refering to 'signs' rather than signfiers. I think it's probably more simple than it seems I've just rather overwhelmed myself with new concepts whilst trying to write my bachelor thesis, so some clarity here would be amazing....? :)
Thank you. This is thoughtful and accessible explanation of a notoriously obtuse subject
I think it becomes less obtuse when you read it in relation to the things that it is criticizing. The problem is Derrida assumes a lot of knowledge on the reader's part. But the video guy does a great job -- probably because he starts by explaining structuralism in brief!!!
Thank you for for this presentation, using the elements of structure in uncommon ways, which undermines the structure while using it. I understand that in structuralism the elements are used in specific assigned ways, is this correct? That's the bit I remember. I am also familiar with work of Propp on Russian fairy tale structure.
Thank you 💟
what are metaphysics actually? i think in his essay he said that metaphysics deconstructed by metaphysics ? could you explain it pls
Thankyou so much :)
4:43 do you have a Philosophy degree or lit major degree?
Hearing the sand box example, i cant help but wonder, cant we make a summary of derrida's ideas by saying that we historically make decisions about what is Essential about a concept and what isnt, and that by doing so we are ignoring the things we take to be at first contingent? How would derrida like structuralistic studies into folklore, myths, culture procede? Without categorising hastily, without expecting the same issues, without romanticising the natives etc? Is this whole essay basically calling for aaaa bias-check among structuralists or is he saying that we are UNABLE ( even if we try very hard) to find some basic, common and universal tendencies which can go on to inform our concepts of human nature?
Also, is the transcendental signified something along the lines of: if you press somebody on the meaning of truth or logos or justice etc, after a bit of talk, the answer will be "because God" (to put it simply)?
derrida famously didn't like method, so it is difficult to apply his ideas in practice, but the idea that there is always a preceding term in the chain of signifiers and that it is always in opposition to another, questions our universal tendencies as constructed historiclly and in opposition to and ultimately, the universality of writing (i could say language but he would disagree with that), but at the same time, it then substitutes another form of universality, ie deconstruction, so make of that what you will, the most important there is to see meaning paradoxes and not try to resolve them but problematize them and study them
PlZ leave the document or source of the video for readers
can someone link this to Peterson
i have a crush on your depth of knowledge
Lol tell that to my imposter syndrome
Minor quibble, in the name "Derrida" the stress is on the last syllable, not on the first.
I think that’s the generally accepted pronunciation in English tho
@@JimboCKW I'm not sure there is a "generally accepted pronunciation ". And even if there was, why not pronounce it correctly, it's not that difficult (like Deleuze or Baudrillard, for instance)
@@jakobson219 there kind of is? English transforms pronunciation of foreign words in weird ways but sometimes a particular pronunciation gets stuck or becomes the ‘standard’. Wikipedia for one gives the IPA /ˈdɛrɪdə/ with the stress on the first syllable (not that Wikipedia is any kind of authority). Of course there aren’t any reasons why you wouldn’t pronounce it as it would be in french it’s just that /ˈdɛrɪdə/ wouldn’t be wrong either when it’s in an English context
@@JimboCKW you might be right. i did a random youtube search for "derrida" and looked at the first 5 results (your channel was third!). only one (from Philosophy Overdose, with prof. Ethan Kleinberg) pronounced it correctly ("correctly"). Was particularly disappointed in the Yale video in which Paul Fry, my old prof there, also pronounced it the American way.
So although I will not change how I say it, I do acknowledge your point - thanks.
@@jakobson219 proper noun, peace out.
This guy is secretly Sal Khan.
Yo necesito esta información, pero en español 🥲
23:45 the sign is not depended on other signs the differences are at level of sound image or capacity denoting the concept or signified the sign or sense is cognitively determined from childhood
At 1:54: It will be known as post-structuralism, not structuralism. Derrida is the poster child of post-structuralism.
he played that guitar intro XD
deconstructed melody
Привет
Reality has certain traits…
Language emerging in one fell swoop doesn't make sense. Did it just erupt out of people semi-complete? I don't think so. Furthermore, I have a cat who I understand without language. I understand it when it is in pain, when it is happy, when it is threatened, when it is saying Hi, just by the sounds it makes -- and so do other animals. Nothing to do with language and comparing concepts of opposites. There is no formal education to be aware of the "opposite."
I am enjoying your presentation. But I laugh when you say fairy tales were started by colonialism. Give colonialism a break -- everything negative people are saying about colonialism has come about through the left colonizing their thoughts. Instead of colonizing countries they now colonize thoughts. It's the new imperialism in universities. Back to Little Red... I think there are archetypes that are common amongst different cultures. That is perhaps a better example than fairy tales.
When listening to this video I got the weird idea of a philosopher who sells drugs and turns tricks to sustain his addiction to philosophy. His house is filled with philosophy books, and he keeps buying more thinking that he will never die if there are still philosophy books to read. Anyway, it's a weird idea and no reflection on you. It just jumped into my mind.
It's people like Derrida who finally completed the obscurantist, relativist, task of giving philosophy a bad name which was begun by Hegel (who wasn't a relativist)
Go read the question concerning technology
Go search the channel for my episode covering the question concerning technology
@@TheoryPhilosophy good! It's an important text.
I will
This idea that 'we aren't born with....' is controversial and Derrida ignores generative grammar altogether. As a linguist, I'm not certain either. But Chomsky needs to be taken seriously.
Positivism needs to be taken seriously I should say.