On Dec 28, 2008, at 8:30 PM, The Cunctator wrote:
There is the problem that Derrida mostly wrote deliberately inscrutable nonsense.
Getting away from Derrida, the journal Critical Inquiry, one of the top journals in the humanities, for quite a while published debate between scholars on past articles in almost every issue, and still does so from time to time.
I would be very surprised to find more than a handful of authors published in Critical Inquiry who do not meet WP:N (although, to be fair, one of that handful would be me, as I co-authored one contribution to these debates some time ago). So let's take a single example. I'll even use a different one from the one I just posted to the talk page of NOR, so as to change things up a bit.
In the Winter 1988 issue of CI, two responses to an article by Frank Lentricchia appeared, as well as arejoinder by Lentricchia. We have a stub on Lentricchia. The two critiques of his work, then, would be signifiant criticisms, and a NPOV article ought to discuss them. And as secondary sources, they can be summarized freely, even in the numerous technical portions that arise.
Lentricchia's response, however, would be considered a primary source, and thus the technical portions cannot be summarized without secondary sources, of which, on this particular exchange, there are few.
There are dozens of near-identical situations in the 30 years of publication of this one journal in one field.
This is not about Derrida. Not even a little bit.
-Phil