That article is amazing. Thanks for posting it-

see

"Seizing upon a fragment surrounded by quotation marks in one of Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscripts — “I have forgotten my umbrella” — Derrida observes that we cannot know Nietzsche’s intention:

Because it is structurally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning. . . . It is quite possible that that unpublished piece, precisely because it is readable as a piece of writing, should remain forever secret. But not because it withholds some secret. Its secret is rather the possibility that indeed it might have no secret, that it might only be pretending to be simulating some hidden truth within its folds.

So far so good, though Derrida does expend an exorbitant amount of verbal energy affirming the unexceptionable truth that the meaning of a century-old sentence fragment lifted from an unpublished manuscript in a foreign language can be difficult if not impossible to discern. With admirable restraint, Dickstein summarizes Derrida’s exceedingly extravagant next step:

From this exquisite miniaturization, however, Derrida leaps without warning to the largest generality: the possibility that “the totality of Nietzsche’s text, in some monstrous way, might well be of the type ‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’” since this illusory “totality,” this whole body of work, is itself no more than a larger trace or remnant of what may also be irrecoverable. And the same may be true of Derrida’s own “cryptic and parodic” text, which, he suggests, may be no more than a joke, a parody of his own ideas, and so on. "

posted by Adrian   [12:57 AM]

[ website ] :: [ contact ] :: [ home ]

XML