I think you're over-analyzing the situation with Derida Phil.
On the one hand, you want to create something about Derida, that has never existed in any form before, it seems. That would be a forbidden type of OR.
On the other hand, you feel that what sources exist on Derida don't actually explain Derida. So who is going to explain Derida? You? That's not going to be acceptable.
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?
Will Johnson
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On Dec 17, 2008, at 3:53 PM, WJhonson@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