Sunday, February 27, 2005

Derrida's Nietzsche

Contrary to Heidegger's. Truth is a woman, not false, nor true. The binary is dissolved:
The question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and non-true and inaugurates the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be enforced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability...The question posed by the spurring-operation is more powerful than any content, thesis, or meaning.
--Spurs
Of course, the question, and perhaps it is the question (can you tell by this horrible style that I've been reading Derrida?) is: how do you keep from making the undecidable the decision? Or, in the terms of systems theory, how do you justify (or avoid) making contingency a foundation? How do you dissolve the duality of thought (where the absence of the duck represents the rabbit as much as the absence of the rabbit represents the duck)? How do we deal with this ridiculous duck/rabbit monster? Outside of Buddhism (and the redemptive terms of that faith) you can't really. (And here systems theory may have the edge on Derrida, since this failure is built in to the system itself. You can't observe yourself, ever. You can only create new blind spots. This may be implicit in Derrida though, so I shouldn't shoot my mouth off.)

Note: everyone should be aware that in this book Derrida coins a hilarious new word: phallologocentrism. I intend to stick this in my next academic paper even if it takes a crowbar. Easy A!

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