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Re:How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer by tptacek on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @11:46AM (#1491309)
John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida:

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Re:How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer by michael_dorfman on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @12:19PM (#1491428)
John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida

Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice.

Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure.

But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions.

Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.)

Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.)

Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.)

The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.

Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.

Re:How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer by tptacek on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @06:05PM (#1492557)
Here I check out of this discussion, as I'm clearly out of my depth. Thanks for an interesting comment!
Re:How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer by wazoox on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @05:14PM (#1492406)
BTW Michel Foucault was well known to use mathematical (particularly topological) analogies that sounded impressive to the uninitiated (most of his audience was terrible at math, anyway) but was complete baloney.