Yes, I’m sure you know that Jaques Derrida “Died” (that is, the Negative-of-“Life”). But did you know that Maurice Wilkins passed away a few days ago? (being a GNXP reader I’m sure you did)
A note on “deconstruction”: I spend a non-trivial amount of time preoccupying on the importance of clarification and the need for precision in language. The problem I have with some people who subscribe to “deconstruction” and its affinal paradigms is this:
1) They surrender to imprecision.
2) They turn traitor to the ideals of striving toward accuracy and precision in good faith.
3) Their prose style and neoligistic extravagances exacerbate the problem. If one is a literary critic, and a disproportionate amount of reading material is influenced by deconstructive thinkers, no wonder they believe that 90% of the task is wrestling with the text!
One might wonder if the preoccuptation with “text” is good from the perspective of anti-Leftists in that activists tend to turn away from action and systematic programs because they believe such things are trivial and ephemeral, but it generally doesn’t work out that way, and once activists kick into gear they can be even more difficult to deal with than conventional Leftists because they are inscrutable and intractable by reason.
Posted by razib at 01:00 AM