Here Fishy, Fishy

So Dr. Stnaley Fish really doesn't like Continental Philosophy. Sad for him. He really doesn't like Derrida. That is a crime. This is someone who reads Derrida for fun...kicks and giggles. So I responded. He somewhat tried to address my points in his recent blog. They were:

As Derrida said, you can never escape the epoch which
 you can outline.
It seems you outline both deconstruction in America
and the enlightenment,
thus we are forever linked to both. Both “agendas”(your word) tied to our 
speech and our writing.

Perhaps this is just another example of the
Resistance to Theory which
de Man spoke of 40 years ago (what progress we have made).
This is a blatant
refusal to read the text. Despite your own unique brand of
Barthes meets Close readings,
you refuse to read the text
(which intrinsically has a
beautiful multiplicity). The construction of a
web blog on a virtual newspaper site,
if one were to read its text, would show how the flow of
information is changing as well as
offer commentary on the “give it to me now”
aspect of the modern reader.

In other words, the message of
deconstruction still hold true. 
Deconstruction itself confirms
 the hyperpolitcality of texts and affirms
our place within the
“singular of experience.”
I guess you don’t want to keep the “secret.”

— Posted by MD


Our dependence on structure seems to
be the common resistance to Deconstruction.
Deconstruction does not allow itself to “draw a box”
around it. 

Another point, Derrida
 himself questioned the Yale School of Deconstruction,
so perhaps our ideas of
 deconstruction(as it evolved in
the stone halls of
American institutions) should be questioned.
After this, maybe deconstruction
proper to Derrida and the French school should
be investigated.

— Posted by MD



Mr Fish is a critic, the gamut of
the deconstructions are theorists.
There is a large difference beyond
semantics here. Critics read to determine
aesthetic value. Theorist read for
 the play for the operations behind the work.
Fish is a critic.

If you read deconstructionist
(how I loath the word, for it in itself is empty)
 works,
you will realise how science
is actually embedded. As
Baudrillard says, we are in
 a genetic age.
Electrons must spin up
and down at once, photons can be two places at once,
current investigations into
string theory and a unified
TOE. How does this conflict with theories 
about language and readings of text.
We have begun to see not everything
exists in terms of artificial absolutes.
 Read Wittgenstein(an engineer), 
Read Godel(especially his Incompleteness)
and Seth Lloyd’s Programming the
Universe. Modern theory seems
to be moving together
in ways we wish not precisely because
lines are beginning to blur and assault the structures
which we use to define ourselves.

— Posted by MD

Funny to think I got a respected public intellectual figure to respond to me...