[microsound] Derrida Article in N.Y.T.

[Bill Jarboe <billjarboe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

 There's a good article on Derrida in the New York Times. You'll probably
need to log in , here are a couple paragraphs for those who don't want to:


Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but
rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a
strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works,
deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood,
the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading
clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things
apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it
literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that
organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of
exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably
gets left out.

These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes
with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists
that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle
every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew
writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on
the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood
all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into
diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or
against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly
out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return
with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome
patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he
developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14taylor.html?th


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  Bill


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