Best,

John

Perhaps I don't disagree with you as much as I seem to! Your article covers a lot of ground, and I have no doubt that the revolutionary nature of the internet has huge implications for literature and literary interpretation. I agree that literary criticism can be too much of a closed circle, and too dogmatic in its authority, and that it is a good thing for it to get shaken up from time to time. I haven't read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I enjoy the idea of the Janeites getting their knickers in a twist about it (hm, maybe that's not the best image I could have chosen . . .)

Thanks for the invitation to write to the topic. As I have said to Lethe, I will try to prepare something for submission. (I didn't realise that when I replied to Lethe in email I would be posting here, I am no sort of expert on the practical internet either!) Thanks also for your thought-provoking article, and your good-spririted and open response.

Best wishes

Richard

In the 1990s I was a post-grad student of Geoffrey Bennington, who has translated, and written on and with, Derrida, so I learned something about the subject. But I am no expert, not least because my French isn't good enough to read Derrida in the original. Explaining Derrida is an absolute minefield as you know, and sometimes it seems as if the clearer the explanation is, the greater the chance there is that it is wrong.

Thanks for your invitation to write on the subject. Derrida certainly has a lot to say about subjects related to mash-ups, so I will try to prepare an article for submission. I will also take some time to read much more of Escape into Life.

And thanks for your kind remarks. Best wishes

Richard Fuller

Thank you so much for your comments. Your response is of course taken in the best spirit! As Lethe indicated, we were both aware of the issues you've presented, and discussed some of them at length before publication. I would never pretend to be able to answer the deep philosophical and critical questions you've posed, and I like to think of this piece as the starting point for a discussion rather than any kind of conclusion.

As you said, explaining Derrida, particularly to a mainstream audience, is a very difficult business. Your summary is as insightful as it is correct, but I don't think we disagree as much as you may think we do. My idea of openness isn't quite the same as relativism, and I don't mean to dispense with intellectual rigor in criticism. I only mean to point out that what some describe as rigorous is often unintentionally restrictive. I don't want criticism to become a free-for-all, but I would like to see critics embrace a sense of play, in the Derridian sense.

I also second Lethe's motion to have you write about some of these issues in longer form. That's exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to start!

Best,

John

I would also like to extend the invitation to you to write about these issues you seem to know so much about. If you would like please find my email on the info page, or contact me through Twitter. A clear explanation of Derrida, et al would do many of us a great deal of good. The only catch is, I would have to be interesting and suited to a mainstream audience.

Thanks again for your wonderful/insightful remarks,
Lethe Bashar

A friend gave me a link to this piece. Probably because I am interested in Derrida and the rest of the crew, I read a lot of that stuff when I was at uni.

I like the sense you have of literature in a historical context and yet open to re-interpretation, play, and mash-ups. I particularly liked the idea of the continual repetition of a word ending with the word seemingly losing its meaning: years ago a read a cartoon by Martin Rawson which quoted Chesterton saying that if you take a perfectly ordinary word like 'knife' and repeat it, by the fiftieth repetition it has become something very strange. And I have never traced that quote from Chesterton, or seen that cartoon again.

But I have to take issue with you over your explanation of Derrida and différance. It is completely wrong and misleading. (I know that explaining Derrida is a very difficult business.) Let me have a shot at it.

In the essay Différance, Derrida was reading the general linguistics of Saussure, who became known as the father of structuralism. (We only really know about Saussure's ideas through the surviving lecture notes of students.) It is true that Saussure described language as a structural system, so if you think of a language atemporally (which is a purely abstract position to take) then you indeed conceive of a word's meaning as being constructed through its difference from other words in the system. Let's say that you are close enough here to the Saussurian model. But (big but) Saussure also talked about language changing diachronically, through time. And let's face it, this is something that happens all the time, which is why it is a mere abstraction to talk about synchronic structure. But when structuralism became a movement in France in the 50s, this synchronic abstraction was what they were basing their arguments on. So when Derrida wrote his essay in the late 60s, he wasn't just reading Saussure, he was having a crack at French structuralists like Levi-Strauss and Barthes, and pointing out to them that their selective synchronic reading of Saussure did not take into account the diachronic description of language that Saussure also put forward.

If language is always in a state of flux, then if the structuralist model of meaning is accepted, the meaning of a word is never, simply, differed from other words (difference is the synchronic description): meaning is also deferred to a future (or past) time (deferring is the diachronic operator). Hence Derrida coined the neologism différance in order to register that 50s structuralism was wrong about Saussure, and though Derrida as per usual went a long way around the houses to argue this, it is still basic common sense. Also hence Derrida became known as a post-structuralist, because he banged the stake into the heart of the living corpse of French structuralism (sorry, no zombies).

Now Derrida also discussed the phenomenologist Husserl, who made an appeal to presence, which in the context of language cashes out as the self-presence of meaning. Différance, the simultaneous differing and deferring of meaning, deconstructs (if you like) this model of presence. So with the essay Différance Derrida made a significant intervention in the intellectual life of France, which in some ways can be modelled as up to that point being divided between structuralist schools and phenomenological schools (existentialism, Hegelianism, Marxism). Derrida became identified with post-structuralism, but he was equally a post-phenomenologist, anyway that is just as inaccurate way to put it.

The most important thing I want to say is that, just because language theories describe meaning as being in a state of flux, it is not also the case that anything goes. Things are still said, and arguments are still made. You can't just get away with simply anything. In fact, the further we go to the extremes of these language models, the more need there is for intellectual rigour. I don't believe, for example, that if we follow or accept Derrida we thereby become relativists. Derrida I am sure would not want to have been thought of as a relativist, even if some of his arguments seem inexorably to lead to that unpleasant place.

Anyway all the best, I hope you take these comments in good spirit, which is how I intend them.

-Richard

This post was mentioned on Twitter by markerstetter: Derrida, Jane Austin and zombies: how can you not love it? #essay @escapeintolife http://tinyurl.com/ya5z2hy...