That's interesting; I don't know anything much about his life story, but I had formed the impression (not based on anything much I guess) that he was very well-balanced and happy, so I'm kind of surprised to hear that he was anxious and depressive.,

Here’s a snippet from his early 20’s:

As for madness, Jackie sometimes felt he was on the verge of succumbing to it as he started his second year in khâgne. Discipline in the boarding school weighed on him even more heavily than it had the previous year. The cold, the lack of hygiene, the horrible food, and the absence of any privacy had become intolerable. Some evenings he fell into a crying jag and was unable to work or even talk to his friends. Only his ever-more intense friendship with Michel Monory enabled him to keep going. Working together in the thurne de musique – Michel had special permission to keep the key to it –, they wrote sketches for short stories and poems that they nervously submitted to each other. But as the weeks went by, Jackie complained more and more of a ‘malady’ as serious as it was ill defined. He was constantly on the edge of a nervous collapse: he suffered from insomnia, loss of appetite, and frequent nausea. In December 1950, Derrida’s morale had sunk to a new low. For reasons that remain unclear, he did not go back home for the Christmas vacation, but remained alone in Paris – probably at the home of his uncle, since the boarding school was closed. In prey to a vague attack of melancholia, he moped around far from his friends. In a letter to Michel, the beginning of which has unfortunately been lost, Jackie tried to explain his confused feelings. For some time, he had felt as if he were going around ‘in regions too difficult, if not to explore, at least to show even to one’s dearest friend’. The lack of any letter from Michel for several days did not help matters. More depressed than ever, Jackie may have contemplated suicide.”

And at age 29:

“The more the months went by, the less did Derrida attempt to conceal his disenchantment. Genette was pleased to have set up ‘a nice little team’ with him but realized that his former fellow student considered the post as a second best. Derrida brooded over his failure to get the Sorbonne job as if he were being persecuted. Initially, his malaise expressed itself in a period of hypochondria. Every day, he discovered new and alarming symptoms. He feared cancer or some other deadly illness, and the various doctors whom he consulted did not manage to allay his anxieties. During the third term, his depression became evident – his ‘big depression’, he later called it, since he would never experience one so serious. When Derrida arrived in Le Mans, he was unwilling to confess the depth of his disappointment. And all at once, he collapsed under his despair. He had suffered for years before passing the exam to Normale Sup, then the agrégation. He had put up with twenty-seven months of military service, waiting for the day when life would finally open up before him. All this effort, just to end up here, standing in front of pupils who did not understand what he was telling them, with colleagues who could talk about nothing but holidays and sport! All this, to wear himself out preparing his lessons and marking boring schoolwork! For months, he had not managed to work on anything personal. He no longer felt up to staying in touch with his closest friends. In conditions like this, how would he ever manage to finish off a thesis?

It's so interesting to me that people who cannot understand Derrida love to flag just how much they cannot understand Derrida.

Like, I don't understand fluid mechanics but I don't get mad about it and rant at physicsts about how I am not intelligent enough to understand fluid mechanics.

If anything I love Derrida for the fact that he makes insecure people consistantly want to exhibit their insecurity. It's awesome.

It's so interesting to me that people who cannot understand Derrida love to flag just how much they cannot understand Derrida. — Streetlight

I've noticed this phenomenon for many years and wondered why it is that Derrida seems to be the one to arouse the most antipathy and toxic bewilderment. I might have expected this reaction to Heidegger or Hegel, perhaps. I looked over Derrida's writing some decades ago and occasionally since then and, in my case, I have to accept that I've been too lazy and don't know much about the philosophical tradition he emerges from and that he is just too intricate for me to follow. I have no idea if his contribution was or is useful and, as with string theory, I'm quite happy to assume that some people (and I imagine it's not many people) actually know what is at stake.

Tucker Carlson probably gives his loyal viewers that they are the shrewd, rational minority on this great stage of fools, and this anti-academic anti-fancy-talk vibe fits right in. — igjugarjuk

I don't concern myself with FAUX News anchors. If I find parts of academia laughable, I'm going to laugh. Simplify your life.

I say this as someone who finds value in Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Henry and even Zizek. I think reading Derrida can be enjoyed if it is read as a species of arcane literature ... — Janus

I guess so. :smirk:

... there are many scholars inside and outside of philosophy who consider [Derrida's] work to be a prime example of substantive and serious philosophy. I am one of them. — Joshs

:victory:

:ok: :lol:

Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is not a method but a way of understanding the basis of all methods. And it not an algorithm but a way of understanding how all algorithms deconstruct themselves. — Joshs

The structure of temporality is the basis of all methods , in that it throws us into a world that is already intelligible to us in some way. This familiarity with the world is the basis of method. — Joshs

"It is because of differance that the movement of signification is
possible only if each so-called "present" element, each element appearing on
the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping
within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated
by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less
to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what
is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it
absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval
must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself,
but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide
the present in and of itself; thereby also along with the present, everything
that is thought, every being, and singular substance or the subject.
In constituting I itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization)." (Derrida,'Margins of philosophy').

At the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being, Derrida places 'what absolutely is not.' As a result, our experience, oriented to revealing some presence, has always been determined by the differential movement from which it is affected. Any apparent presence, full givenness, or definite meaning has become impossible. How can this project become "a way of understanding the basis of all methods"?

Any apparent presence, full givenness, or definite meaning has become impossible. How can this project become "a way of understanding the basis of all methods"? — Number2018

In the same way that deconstruction reveals the basis of all idealisms and empiricisms in the movement of differance.

Derrida's goal/s with "deconstruction" is one thing, the implications and applicability of what he proposes are quite another thing; and it's the self-refuting nature of the latter – in effect, reducing 'all' truth-making discourses to 'nothing but' tendentious rhetoric – which many critics like me take issue with. — 180 Proof

The term ‘self-refuting’ tips me off to the root of the issue here, which is less about Derrida in particular than about every one of the numerous philosophical discourses thar have appeared over the past 100 year which take their leave from Nietzsche’s
critique of truth — Joshs

I suspect most philosophical discourses in the last twenty-four centuries since Pyrrho of Elis refute themselves either partially or, the case of sophists, completely. — 180 Proof

Might be a good place to call it -- seems we're back around to post-modernism, considered generally.