Derrida

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Leftists. Their peculiar compulsions often give them a need to deny reality, which is why the "nothing is real" brand of Continental philosophers appeal to them -- with Jacques Derrida being the chief reality denier -- a man who always had a rapturous audience of Leftists on his visits to America. But listen to the painful stuff that Derrida had to say about the 9/11/2001 events in NYC and elsewhere:

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Amusingly, he got it right in his last sentence above. Leftists are often intelligent people. They must at times find it depressing that they have to claim to find wisdom in such a hopelessly incoherent soul as Derrida. They would find more sense in the average loony bin. (HT Capitalism Magazine)

Comments? Email John Ray