I’ve been studying the subjects listed above, and while searching for information, I found this. I am a bit sceptical, because I have found most criticisms online to be strawmen (for example, that Saussure there claimed langue has no positive terms, even though he explicitly stated that the sign is a positive term). Basically, I am curious what proponents and opponents of structuralism and poststructuralism have to say on this. I myself cannot comment, as I don’t know much about Chomsky’s linguistics and have only began reading Barthes and Lévi-Strauss.
keep reading all of them… and then read some derrida…
-Imp
Personally, I don’t find Derrida to be very convincing. Some fine ideas, but he takes them to absurd lengths and his system collapses because it is both useless and hypocritical.
Sometimes a reactionary movement can be a good thing, when the old order needs to be reacted to and against, but anti-philosophy like decontruction and anti-art like dada don’t both to build anything in the place of what they destroy so they can be quite safely ignored.
nothing is built in their wake because there is no foundation upon which to build. that is the point.
ignore that which destroys reason and logic and belief systems at your own peril…
-Imp
Precisely, they are useless. By their own admission, they are of no use to me.
you miss the point.
what is there if not nothing?
-Imp
Meaningless question.
meaningless by what standard?
the standards that were meaningless?
-Imp
The problem with reading thinkers under the rubrics of different “schools” such as semiotics, structuralism, and postructuralism, is that one often loses the nuanced differences between thinkers who fall under those headers. Honestly, I’m more well-read in “postructuralism”; I can’t really speak to semiotics and structuralism all that much. The only way to really know if such manners of thinking are “dead” is if you read them for yourself and decide whether they provide anything useful.
Despite what has been posted here, however, I think you would be doing yourself a disservice in not reading Derrida.
And there we reach our disagreement. Derrida claims that such a question is meaningful and seeks to destroy the standards that render it meaningless. If you buy into that sort of thing, it’s not a bad way to go, but I’d call it contrived and circular.
and what (linguistic) structure isn’t contrived and circular?
-Imp
Yet they work, whereas Derrida’s philosophy does not. Utility trumps rationality.
thus spoke david
-Imp
This is exactly the sort of literary slip that Derrida would identify and criticise. That’s the use of it. To me.
Jacques Derrida reminds me of Kant analyzing the limits of knowledge to find the moments when it slips into irreconcilable antinomies. By his own admission, if I understand what little I have read correctly, he sits on the margins of philosophical discourse and cannot exactly do away with, or “destroy”, metaphysics: although he places importance on absence, absences are always absent from something, and thus dependent on a presence from which they are absent. I see nothing hypocritical in this, and while I am myself somewhat apprehensive about Derrida, I think he gets far more flack than he deserves.
You are assuming it was a slip.
And you haven’t established utility.