On Dec 17, 2008, at 3:53 PM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
If the most we can do is what a biography of him, and
then state
that he
also wrote ten books or whatever, than that's how we have to leave
it.
Brand new explanations, never before seeing the light of the day,
would be
your own original creation.
Right?
No. Derrida wrote things. Those things can be summarized. Derrida's
views can thus be summarized.
However, the cannot be summarized without specialist knowledge. That
does not mean the explanations are new - it just means the
explanations are not going to be apparent if I hand _Of Grammatology_
to my barber. They would, however, be relatively apparent if I handed
_Of Grammatology_ to another grad student in my department who had not
read that book, but who had taken numerous courses over years in
literary criticism, and was better trained in reading books like
Derrida's.
In fact, I would bet you that if I were to find the one of my
colleagues with whom I most disagree on every point of literary theory
and criticism, and pick at random a Derrida essay neither of us had
read, we could hammer out a summary of it that we both agreed with.
And I would further bet that this would not be possible if I were to
pick two random people out of the aisles of my supermarket.
-Phil