The Derrida Essay

[sodapopinski51]

I'd have to scan it and save it as 38 different files, this is just too time consuming an endeavor. Instead, I'll type out the footnote that puzzled Derrida in its entirety, and then summarize his position as well as Heidegger's as best I can, and we can discuss. Im sorry for the inconvenience. If you have it in your possession then please feel

Comments

[sodapopinski51]

Non-presence is always thought in the form of a minor-term in a binary opposition dominated by the major term which is always "presence" presence/nonpresence, which assumes that "non-presence" is a quality that can be represented. Derrida, by way of Heidegger's footnote, is challenging the reader to think the irreducibility of "non-presence" to form and perhaps even the conventions of formal logic (my reading of Heidegger and Derrida both is that they view formal logic as a great achievement but there are some certain tendencies in its overall presuppositions that lead to calculative thinking, in other words, philosophy should not always pretend to be a science, this is Heidegger's view and I think Derrida accepted that for some time, because philosophy should help people think and live their life) Subjecting a thought to the rigid laws of logical proofs reduces thought to a representation, the irreducible quality of thought, the contingency and unpredictability of thinking, the meditative quality of thought are all lost in this

[sodapopinski51]

Derrida at one point shows his skepticism regarding the possibility of conceiving of time any other way, he says, "Is it even possible to think of time any other way". It may be impossible to think time in a non-vulgar sense. Derrida thinks vulgar time is thinking time as a series of successions, which I think Heidegger DID think about time, Derrida is trying to make Heidegger into a deconstructionist and Im not sure he is, especially based on my readings of Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars where he and Medard Boss discuss "Dasein-analysis" and in "Time and Being" which I read as the sequel to Being and Time, he talks of a certain conception of time as non-spatial, unthingable, unrepresentable, probably closer to a "deterritorialized flow" in the sense that D&G would use those terms. But then again I may be wrong.

[sodapopinski51]

a quite articulate professor explained "nothing noths" to me once, he said, what cannot be represented is non-presence, produces anxiety. In some senses the future or the past is unrepresentable, but it still thought as a presence (causes us to reflect on past decisions, and contemplate future possibilities, still haunts us in our concerns about the present). the "vulgar conception of time" I think, is the thought of the future and past as predictable, subject to calculation, and subject to reduplicate the same forms of the present into the future and onto the past. That is, past is the same as now, or like on Star Trek, the future is now with aliens who are like us with funny halloween masks. Most sci fi novels fall into this presupposition of extrapolating now into the future, taking the same problems of now and transposing them into some futuristic setting. Good sci fi challenges this assumption. Derrida, in the film Derrida, he says he differentiates between "the future" and "venir". The future is a thought of what is to come

[sodapopinski51]

so basically Derrida (or Levinas) was a hack! Its so fascinating to me how ideas are basically recycled. Its very rare to see truly original philosophy because just about everything there is to be thought has been thought already by someone brighter and a little more articulate.