kaymac 4.10.08

I think I'm even more confused after Thursday's class. I thought I had an idea of what Derrida was about walking into class but that was pretty much shattered. Through our discussion I became really intrigued with the concept of The Trace (sounds like a bad TV show). Everything in our society leads to clues about what everything else in our world is. So then what about love? Or emotions? How do we define those through what we don't know? Because we don't feel mad are we automatically happy? Or if we don't feel mad are we a multitude of other things that cannot be defined directly except by what we don't know about it?

This leads to our exercise concerning the cookie and how the definitions of the dictionary did not add up to a cookie at all, at least I think it does. The poor cookie was demolished, is that what we do to objects that are not tangible? And maybe that is why everything gets screwed up in our society.

Moving along, I’m still confused about logocentrism. I think I understand some of it, that we are subconsciously filling the gap with other things that make us aware of its meaning, but that’s about it. Do you need to get to the absolute center of a word to know what it means? But if you get to the absolute center of an object, which is represented by a word, then you get the nucleus of an atom, and is that what Derrida is trying to do with our language? And is that what logocentrism is?