Derrida was a confusing theorist to read, but Thursday’s class helped me understand it a little better. The exercise we did with the dictionary was one of the more hilarious/clarifying ones this semester. We took the noun board and looked up the definition. It came to pass that the definition was very redundant when we proceeded to look up the definitions of the words within the definition. This exercise reminded me of a quote by De Saussure. “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (7) You cannot define a given word without the existence of others words to do so. Language is completely dependent on itself to function properly.
The area, or word even, where De Saussure and Derrida really come together is difference. “In language, there are only differences” (DS 10). When my classmates were reading the definitions to words Dr. Rog was purposely misspelling them to drive home the point of Derrida. By sound you cannot determine how to spell a certain word, because there are many cases where two words spelled differently sound exactly the same. It is the context within language that determines how a word can be spelled, so we have to recognize the difference between these like-sounding words. Dr Rog. Posed a queston in class that asked what the first thing you need to know to communicate with someone effectively. Many people replied the person’s name. We were wrong, the most important thing to know first is what language a person speaks. Some people were asked to define words from a Hebrew or French dictionary, which obviously was meant to make a point. The differences between different languages create a barrier, a road block. I still feel like I would understand Derrida better if I understood or spoke French, but I feel like I can at least make a connection to De Saussure now.
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Very good blog! That exercise is always an interesting one because it shows how reliant we are on the context of a word to determine what it means and how to spell it etc. Also, think about all these news forms of technology that have allowed us to create sub-languages (lol, lmao, brb, fml!) that are slowly becoming part of regular colloguial speech! We pretty much need to know the entire language before differenciating between words. Which theorist talks about this same notion with the sameness of ideology? Also, think back to Macherey and Barthes with their ideas on the 'gap' and how similar it is to the trace Derrida discusses. With the exam in about a weeks time, spend the next couple of days reading over all of our theorists and how they relate together - it'll help in the long run! :)
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