Comments on: Derrida Help

By: bram

bram — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:39:42 +0000

Hi Craig,

That’s a marvelous question you’re posing, which has brought together some great Derrida passages – so thanks for that. Here’s another one, from OF GRAMMATOLOGY (267):

“This birth of society is therefore not a passage, it is a point, a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit. One crosses it in attaining it. In it society is broached and is differed from itself. Beginning, it begins to decay. (…) If culture is thus broached within its point of origin, then it is not possible to recognize any linear order, whether logical or chronological. In this broaching, what is initiated is already corrupted, thus returning to a place before the origin.”

By: Amie

Amie — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:36:26 +0000

Craig, there’s a passage in L’Autre Cap [pp.16-17]
Il n’y a pas de rapport à soi, d’identification à soi sans culture, mais culture de soi comme culture de l’autre, culture du double génitif et de la différence à soi. La grammaire du double génitif signale aussi qu’une culture n’a jamais une seule origine. La monogénéalogie serait toujours une mystification dans l’histoire de la culture.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:37:47 +0000

Thanks, guys. Adam also suggested Monolingism and Matt suggested either the book on Husserl or Acts of Religion. Thanks for the suggestion re: Lacan and Deleuze. I'll make sure to review those.

By: Kenneth Rufo

Kenneth Rufo — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:13:46 +0000

I looked for a while and couldn’t find it, but I think you could legitimately paraphrase chapters 3-5 of Monolingualism of the Other that way, if that helps.

By: Sinthome

Sinthome — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 06:27:55 +0000

It’s certainly the sort of thing he’d say, though I have no idea where he might say it. One of the central claims of (post)structuralist orientations of thought is that questions of origins or genesis are bracketed as they always “beg the question” or assume the very thing they’re trying to account for. Lacan says this apropos language much more directly in Seminar 17, and the same thesis can be found in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense in the series on language where he closely discusses Levi-Strauss.