[martingoodson]

I took your advice and read a "short piece of his" (http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Di...)

I found this monstrosity in the third paragraph:

"I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly."

This is a single sentence.

Is it that Derrida's thought is so complex that it is simply inexpressible in simpler language? Or it this sentence wilful obsurantism?

I find many supporter's of Derrida claiming that if you don't agree with Derrida it must be that you don't understand him. This is a dangerous intellectual cul-de-sac - verging on mysticism.

[TheMagicHorsey]

I agree with you. Every time I try explaining this to people, there will be at least one guy who will claim he has read Derrida and understood all his great mysteries, but that plain language can't explain those mysteries ... you need some powerful new language to do so.

Its so ridiculous. Its like this self-contained world of hysteria. They have no useful output that effects the world outside their narrow hysteria. No one outside the hysteria can criticize the hysteria because by not praising the hysteria you are immediately one who doesn't possess the sophistication to produce critiques.

Its pretty much indistinguishable from some sort of fundamentalist religion where the proponents just live in a sealed chamber and are immune to reason. Imagine physicists talking in really technical garble, but never producing any models that actual predict real phenomenon. That's what its like.

Post modernism seems to produce nothing useful but documents for other post modernists to study.

[wanda]

Derrida had some actual things to say.

But most of the valuable ideas he had to express had already been explored by Heidegger in a more complete way, or by Wittgenstein in an uncannily clear, concise and orderly way.