Jacques Derrida

He contrasts that first with the continental style in which one states the solution with as little introduction or motivation as possible, sometimes not even saying what the problem was.

I think here he means to be criticizing continental philosophers like Derrida, but that's just my guess.

Readers of papers like this will have no clue as to whether you are right or not without incredible efforts in close reading of the paper, but at least they'll think you're a genius.

I think

I will also say, there is one more thing that I did want to say.

I recently picked up, by accident, a series of essays on Derrida and negative theology.

And one of the things that I have done in my own personal reflections on the work of Bataille, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in particular, is that I see their work tending towards something like a negative theology.

And this was an accusation that was aimed at Derrida in his formulation of the trace and the whole presence-absence distinction.

And Derrida makes a very careful and meticulous argument that against these accusations that what he's doing is a kind of negative theology.

But one of the things that he does do that I'll sort of recast in my own terms here is that once we consider something like rationalism, it seems like an alternative, a sort of political antidote might be to secularize a kind of negative theology to the extent that we want to undermine rationalism by shifting completely to an irrationalist position.

that almost functions like a negative theology.

And I would argue that the destituent power position can be like this.

Yeah, words are essential.

As Wittgenstein said, they are slippery and they are, Derrida is making them unstable or noting their instability.

But we still have to try because if we can't, I know there are science fictional paradigms and even physics paradigms where people say we can say everything we need to say in math.

But that's not true for most of us.

That's the shift that I made.

In other words, I avoided both of the errors of the new criticism and the Jewish, well, what was the Jewish thing afterward? Deconstruction with Derrida, reader response criticism, Stanley Fisher, it's all incoherent, all stupid and, and, The whole English profession went down the drain because of that.

Was it not a deconstruction as in undermining or taking apart the Western civilization or Christian civilization? That's what it seemed to me.

I mean, not that it was deliberate, but maybe at least in some psychological level, there's this revolutionary spirit, right? Trying to take things down, break things down.

Deconstruction is Jewish.

The main proponent was Jacques Derrida, who was an Algerian Jew whose ancestors were rabbis.

And that was a war on being.

That's a sophisticated—that was an anti-metaphysical text.

Especially a smart person who hasn't taken the time to figure out how to talk to less smart people.

You can just hear, I mean, good Lord, Jacques Derrida, Kierkegaard, you know, people like that.

It's just like, nobody knows what they're talking about.

Nobody knows what they're talking about.