What? Huh? Whassahuhdawha? Calm yourselves. Relax.
Float downstream.
That is not
what I meant at all, not at all.
"The home
of Piaf and Charles Aznavour
Must have done something right, and'll do it once more
Cause if you don't think Paris was made for love
Give Paris one more chance." --J. Richman
Consider also that if
meaning is deferred, the claim that meaning is deferred is
technically meaningless, since for the claim to mean sui generis,
that claim would contradict the method of deconstruction the claim
itself attempts to shore up. The claim that meaning is deferred
is meaningful only within an opposition which either prioritizes
logically self-evident meanings or prioritizes contingent meaning.
All claims which implicitly set contingent and self-evident meaning
in opposition are themselves subject to deconstruction, since the
two-fold contingency of différance depends for its
deferred meanng upon a contradictory or contrary set of claims.
The impossible alternative to this apparent aporia sits in
opposition to the possible, and both the possible and the impossible
are, insofar as they govern and are governed by deferred meaning,
themselves subject to deconstruction. Apparently, it really is turtles
all the way down. Or are we allowing a
slippery slope fallacy to bring us to the brink of semantic
entropy? A kind of meaning-death of language? Perhaps the
method of deconstruction is only possible in an environment
which presumes Platonic absolutes, unmixed, heterogeneous, and
perfectly diverse.
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Thus, any symptom of
corruption, of the impurity of a claim, signals its compromise. In the
muddy, corrupt, sublunar realm, all truth-claims are impure, all language
contingent, and all meaning deferred. But what of probability? Optimality?
Liklihood? How do we account for these methods in a system that limits our
choices to contraries and contradictions? Are we compelled by the logic of
Platonism to advance the possibility of pure knowledge and uncorrupted
perception? What is it we are asking for?
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READ
1) McQuillan, "Introduction"
in Deconstruction: A Reader (Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-43.
2) Marx in McQuillan,
pp. 47-50; Heidegger in McQuillan, pp. 71-79; Jabes in McQuillan,
pp. 80-87.
3) Derrida in McQuillan,
pp. 97-106.
4) Hillis Miller in
McQuillan, pp. 161-170.
5) Paul de Man in McQuillan,
pp. 171-74.
6) Derek Attridge in
McQuillan, pp. 175-77.
7) Royle in McQuilla,
pp. 178-89.
8) Caputo in McQuillan,
pp. 458-63.
9) The
Onion
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