Derrida

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Are Derrida and Butler responsible for SJWs?

In a word: no.

Butler's theories aren't compatible with much of SJW thought. Second wave feminism is somewhat of a punching bag for SJWs.

Derrida presents universal methodologies and applies them widely. His most controversial claim, that there is there is no out-of-context, would both supplant and negate many SJW positions.

Butler is responsible for a lot of gender binary transgender nonsense

I don't think so, r3. In brief, Butler argues that gender is performative not transformative. This means that humans perform manliness, for example, out of societal constructs. She humorously mentions that Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing drag. She does not theorize that this performance ever actually transforms someone into his or her own or the opposite biological sex.

Well, that is how it is being taken, R4

I think most people don't understand Derrida and don't care anyway.

JB is Judith Bulter, being interviewed at the trans advocate

CW: Many trans people assert that women/females can have a penis and that men/males can have a vagina. What are your thoughts about that?

JB: I see no problem with women having a penis, and men having a vagina. People can have whatever primary characteristics they have (whether given or acquired) and that does not necessarily imply what gender they will be, or want to be. For others, primary sexual characteristics signify gender more directly.

"The gender they want to be" : gurl you destroy all the trans theory.

Trans are not the other sex, they want to be and pretend to be the other gender.

Case closed.

She's moderating her delivery of the original thinking in r7 to be more palatable to the publication.

She also blows holes is the SJW ideology regarding trans people. R8 points this out nicely. Also, notice the words "for some, primary sex characteristics signify gender more directly." She is the "some" here.

Bump

Interesting Reddit discussion:

You'd have to define what you mean by "SJW." The term has become meaningless because people conflate a huge range of ideas and behaviors and stick it under that title. Depending who's using the term, it might mean relatively uncontroversial stuff like "we should not discriminate against gays and/or women" or more extreme and ridiculous internet stuff like "I change gender depending on the day of the week" and "People who watch porn are abusers."

The latter kind of thing doesn't come out of academia (in fact a lot of that type of "SJW" would be horrified and offended by the fact that Queer Theory uses "the q slur") so much as it does a particular attitude and type of behavior that's evolved on the internet. Some of it has leaked into academia here and there, but academia is much more mainstream in general.

These rightwing trolls showed their true homophobic colors in another thread. Look at other threads they have started:

[quote][bold] Homosexuality and pedophilia

[quote]Will they ever not be hand in hand?[/bold]

R13 ????? What are you talking about?

Oh fuck off, R13.

Women, lesbians and gender non-conforming children are under attack by mentally ill men, you fucking moron. I wouldn't be surprised if you are the one posting those threads you quote in order to cast suspicion on justified opponents of the Trans agenda.

Derrida's dismissal of "objective" facts fed the SJW notion that they could imagine themselves anything, even non-human. However, their libertarian belief they have a right to control what other people think of them is something he would disdain, just as he disdained Michel Foucault. He would specifically see that as a right they do NOT have, an attempt to expand personal privilege in a nonsensical and rapey manner.

R16 Ugh. Foucault's writings are such rambling pretentious messes. I couldn't finish the first volume of History of Sexuality.

Block the OP of this thread.

None of these rightwing trolls care about gay people or their concerns.

R18 Nope. Didn't start that one either. Good try, tranny.

Ditto r2. Butler in particular is a punching bag for sjw types.

LOL, R19! So anybody who disagrees with your non-stop rightwing trolling is a "tranny?" That's news to me, pumpkin-tits.

R21 Your linking to random threads and accusing me of starting them. And, why are you so worked up over discussion around Trans issues?

Because you're a fucking idiot and your non-stop trolling and pushing your convoluted rightwing agenda is tiresome and tedious.

But you are good for a hearty laugh! I hope a tranny sits on your face and forces you to eat her shenis or front-hole.

Don't worry about R21, R23 It is pretty much the sole defender of the Transtapo on DL.

It claims to be a gay man, but refuses to accept that many gay men are disgusted and appalled that their fight for rights has been Transjacked by violent, viciously misogynistic and homophobic straight men who claim to think that they are women.

Bottom line: Gays hurt no one, Trans actively hurt women and gender non-conforming children, and the Democratic party because their insane demands provide an immense amount of fodder for the Far Right.

Very far from a tranny, dear! Just another poster who sees through your pro-rightwing, bizarre, convoluted agenda. But I do realize you live in bizarro-land where republicans are the friends of gays, despite their many relentless decades of anti-gay laws and bills. Nonetheless, you are fun to provoke if, for nothing else, to show how batshit crazy and moronic you are!

And who the fuck brought up trannies in the first place? I thought this thread was about Derrida and SJWs? I thought the Trans-obsessed loons kept claiming that they were not republicans or pro-rightwing? What happened with that?

R25 Fuck off and die you disgusting Hillbot. Nobody is more repulsively ignorant than a Hillbot, cunt.

Oh no, I triggered poor R27. Wahhh. Did I hurt your feelings and make you cry? Will somebody please change his shitty diaper?

Derrida is a titan and there were a number of titans that foisted deconstruction, post-structuralism, and critical theory into the discourse. Judith Butler is a third rate also ran pathetic thinker who didn't have the good taste to move along, long after European philosophy dumped deconstruction.

Derrida is (was) a charlatan.

If Derrida was a charlatan, Judith Butler is a clown at Walmart.

This thread is such a disappointment. I took it for granted an Asian person was asking about Dalida.

While I find virtually all post-structuralist writing willfully obtuse in style, I don't think we can blame Derrida for SJW rhetoric--his politics had less to do with gender and more often to do with geopolitics. Butler's basic premise--that gender is performative--is often misunderstood or reduced to "we can all just St make up whatever gender we want to be." It is true that her insistence on making her prose version ritually unreadable in many texts is partly responsible for this. But her basic premises de comes from speech act theory (Austin and Searle), which distinguishes between statement that describe something and statemen s that enact something like wedding vows. Gender, for her, is an always in-process "making" in language. Because she assumes language is changing and by definition unstable (as historical linguists argue, as in changes in grammar or word definitions), she would just not be interested in permanent, stable definitions of terms around gender. My friends in philosophy think Foucult has no business calling himself a philosopher; my historian friends find his historiography hopelessly flawed. His ides bout bodies and power are interesting and hVe their uses, but SJWs Los tend to red an article or book chapter and think they know the whole theoretical argument or system.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).

Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. Gertrude Stein

The Last Philosopher with GREAT Hair:

Très Chic:

R2 Butler is the antithesis of second wave feminism: "Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn’t it exciting and sexy? In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler’s ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it." -Martha Nussbaum

Oh if only Gertrude had lived to see the info overload mess we have now. It's made most of us idiots with no context for anything, just exploding factoids that float away never to be thought about again.

These horrible bullshitters ruined many departments and universities. They certainly ruined English literature departments. It's all regressive crap cloaked in pretentious inpenetrable prose.

Many of the academics involved R42 are around the 120 IQ mark, 130 tops, and are over-extended navel gazers who don't realise their intellectual missteps in life. Many are badly fucked, as well.

What is it about frogs and pseudo intellectualism? Is it in the water or something?

R44 Chomsky has spoken about the phenomenon of public intellectuals in France ... will try to dig it up

Here you go.

R44 -- there is a youtube vid on Chomsky where he essentially calls Derrida a charlatan. There is also one with an old debate between Foucault and Chomsky.

Actually I think this could be an interesting thread and some of the issues it raises are directly pertinent to what's going on today in the academy and, to and extent, in politics. Personally, I think Derrida is willfully obtuse, but where he has a point -- as he sometimes does -- it is usually not any improvement on Wittgenstein, who was smarter and had better hair.

A public intellectual in France is not the same as a "pseudo-intellectual". They are just intellectuals. Simple as that. The French language and French culture support intellectual conversations. One doesn't need to be educated, an elite, or have some sort of intellectual occupation. Also French kids learn and know how to discuss something. They do not like to open their mouths and have garbage pour out of it. That would be judged. They formulate a rational thought and express it.

Oops cross posted with R46. And now I think about it, I think he may have specifically named Lacan and not Derrida.

[quote]Many of the academics involved [R42] are around the 120 IQ mark, 130 tops, and are over-extended navel gazers who don't realise their intellectual missteps in life. Many are badly fucked, as well

They are over-extended naval gazers who don't realise their intellectual missteps in life. I wouldn't say they are intelligent, though. They very badly want to be seen as intelligent and their whole being depends on thatt, but the ones I have met are not critical or original thinkers. They are followers and this garbage was the thing to follow at the time.

OK I agree R50. But I would say 120 is intelligent. But that's not enough. They are firmly convinced they are radical and critical thinkers, innovators, etc.

Anyway, in most professions, there are a lot of cows.

True, I agree, R51.

Twenty years ago, the Sokal Hoax exposed a lot of this bullshit.

Agreed R53. The mistake of Derrida and Branch Derrideans is to suggest that EVERYTHING is 'socially constructed'. Everything is not.

Surgically and digitally constructed.

Scratch that.

Surgery and digital photography have revealed the woman I have always been.

R47 everyone talks like Wittgenstein was this incredibly central figure in philosophy, but if more people understood his work and his project almost every department in academia would be vastly improved. Sadly most of the people who claim to understand his work don't.

Yeah on the bus home tonight, people wouldn't shut up about Wittgenstein.

The French have a lot to answer for.

R56 -- IMHO, the great importance and relevance of LW, like that of Kant, is that he tells us what we DON'T know, and what we maybe CAN'T know. There is a strain of intellectual humility and honesty in the work of both I find healthy and refreshing.

R59 Agreed, but I also think there's a just lot to be said for his focus on how we use words, and what we can learn through rigorous examinations of how we use words. It really is a practice more than anything else. When I read his stuff I'm reminded of how superficial my own engagement with ideas is, and how shaky the foundations are. That's the problem with a lot of the French stuff denigrated above, and a lot of modern theory in general— it's just teetering on these unexamined assumptions about how words work.

Words are concepts and concepts define our reality... up to a point, a mysterious point.

The mysterious dark side of the moon where the aliens live.

^ lol!

In the works of Burroughs, a predominant concept is the concept of dialectic consciousness. Many theories concerning structural discourse exist.

“Sexual identity is elitist,” says Marx. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a postcapitalist nihilism that includes art as a totality. Sontag uses the term ‘Debordist image’ to denote the difference between society and class.

The main theme of Prinn’s[1] analysis of structural discourse is not, in fact, theory, but pretheory. Thus, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of reality implies that truth is capable of significance, given that sexuality is equal to culture. The primary theme of the works of Burroughs is the common ground between consciousness and society.

However, Marx’s critique of dialectic dematerialism states that truth may be used to reinforce colonialist perceptions of class. The subject is contextualised into a Foucaultist power relations that includes consciousness as a reality.

R64 courtesy of the Postmodern Essay Generator. Click for your own postmodern essay:

R64 I'm a college professor and I would fail that essay, but I can guarantee you I have colleagues who wouldn't. Discouraging.

Fabulous stuff R64! I was going to ask for a translation, then I saw there was no reason to.

I think Katha Pollitt summed it up nicely, in a column RE: the Sokal Hoax:

"How "the left" came to be identified as the pomo left would make an interesting Ph.D. thesis. I suspect it has something to do with the decline of actual left-wing movements outside academia, with the development in the 1980s of an academic celebrity system that meshes in funny, glitzy ways with the worlds of art and entertainment, with careerism -- the need for graduate students, in today's miserable job market, to defer to their advisers' penchant for bad puns and multiple parentheses, as well as their stranger and less investigated notions. What results is a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom.

"How else explain how pomo leftists can talk constantly about the need to democratize knowledge and write in a way that excludes all but the initiated few? Indeed, the comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads. Lacan...performativity...Judith Butler...scandal...(en)gendering (w)holeness...Lunch!"

Ha, that is it R68. Except the cross-dressing is now in the classroom.

And now with time we can see it is not just useless, artifice and cowardice but serious political regression.

Don't forget transgression. Always important to transgress, in addition to trans-dress.

Bump

Structuralism wasn't evil, but it was a little like counting the angels dancing on a head of a pin in theological days.

Butler's "Bodies that Matter" is the basic handbook for tranny SJWs. She holds there that bodies do NOT matter: that gender is entirely performative irrespective of chromosomes or genitalia.

R73 Apparently Butler is also quite homophobic (self-loathing?) herself.

Fascinating thread. Derrida apparently agreed with Freud about the Odiepus complex theory.

Joan W. Scott is another unreadable scholar. She appears to have ADHD going off on tangents in her writings

"Derrida, Derrida!"

Granted, R64. However, the predominant Weltanschauung of the phallocracy skews toward Kantian determinism. Smegmatic paradigms to the contrary, the effluvium of erotomania foments distinctly olfactory phenomena, as well as osculatory strabismus. A veritable Cowper's Quandary!

R68 WEHT Katha Pollit? She was right about so much.

"Trans are not the other sex, they want to be and pretend to be the other gender.

Case closed."

Mind closed, dear. Your mind is closed.

Derrida is the most dangerous person of the last forty years

R64

Marx DIDN'T say 'Sexual identity is elitist' and he DIDN'T critique 'dialectic dematerialism' because those words hadn't been invented in his lifetime.

[quote]The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Jackie Derrida

Ok, he may have been pretty when young. Stalin was also pretty when young.

But that doesn't stop their dangerous ideas being soaked up by soft-headed adolescents.

I ask you...did Gilles Deleuze ever get a post-punk song named after him?

Scritti Politti = soft-headed adolescents

Did he write [italic]The Prophet?

Soft-headed adolescents > Jordan Peterson. Jacques Derrida I have no real opinions about.

R73, what you’re missing is that Butler says that biological men and women also perform their gender - therefore gender cannot be inherent, as transgender people argue.

Fascinating.....Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

R90, what do they perform? "Puttin' on the Ritz"?

Derrida is like Corbusier.

Corbusier’s inhumanity, his rage against humans, is evident in his architecture and in his writings. He felt the level of affection and concern for them that most people feel for cockroaches.

They both remind me of Brecht.

Brecht never made a single instance of a decent, kind, or selfless act. Brecht couldn’t even be bothered to wash for the convenience of others. (A Marxist, Brecht decision not to wash was his tribute, albeit not a very flattering one, to the proletariat).

Derrida doesn't like us.

He says Americans are rude.

R93 Typical snobbish Parisian

To Derrida's deriders: la di da!

WTF - he is more fucking orange at r93 than the US president.

R96 He is a closed-minded hardliner who does what he wants. The US president has to keep nice because he's got a million critics.

[quote]He is a closed-minded hardliner who does what he wants.

Are we talking about Derrida's reanimated corpse? He died in 2004.

Look at things in context, R98!

R96 and R97 are discussing a video clip at R93 where the great Derrida is very much alive!

Derrida is a lively potent influence in the minds of the coming generation across our nation

"Branch Derrideans," ha, good one, R54.

So, the red lettering. Is that a brand-new thing? What is it for? Is there a thread about it? Do DL Mods do it, or is there a new function where posters do it?

This makes sense

b u m p

It was all bullshit and gave us "transkids"

And ruined university departments

And made a lot of people DUMB

R101 and R102

...