Sgt. Pepper, 4/10

I'm still not cured of my confusion from Derrida's reading, but I have taken a few steps since my pre-class post on Monday. Derrida's perspective on 'the word' and his concept of differance look to me like de Saussure on steroids. Perhaps the most important quotation from our Saussure reading was, "In language, there are only differences." Saussure's thesis here is identical to part of Derrida's thesis--that words can only be defined by everything they're not. The other part of Derrida's thesis is that because of things like erasure and differance, there is no concrete definition of a word. As a word gets used over and over, it loses its meaning more every time. Therefore, when determining a word's meaning, we must consider its context, its history, and everything to do with the word. This is where the dictionary activity came in. By looking up the definition of a word, then looking up the words in its definition, we were illustrating how easily we've become so far removed from words' true definitions.

Now that I've hopefully proven that I understand the basic concepts of Derrida, I will share my criticism. (that's how it works, right?) What I do not like about Derrida's ideas is that he refuses to attribute any certainty to our language. While I do recognize the undeniable "differences" in our language, I feel like I'm aware of a certainty that Derrida seems to be missing. I recognize that we as people share so many of the same feelings. While language is obviously an abstract concept, with time and evolution, it seems to be getting more and more concrete. de Saussure said, "The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value." And I think we've fixated many solid values within the words of our language.

Perhaps the same criticism of uncertainty could be given to each theorist we've discussed, but Derrida is definitely guilty.