derrida and the family 2
By Steve
- 241 reads
is the western individual disappearing? are geniuses disappearing? if everything is context, even geniuses are bound by that context. are geniuses those who express the context better than anyone else or are they those who transcend the context? or are they simply quitting the world as in an Ayn Rand novel, "Atlas Struggled?" the european idea of genius is that genius transcends context and generally the crown "genius" is only offered to a handful of people who've significantly advanced their respective fields. in america though, we speak of "genius" very glibly. even football coaches are crowned with the title "genius" if they sustain a competitive advantage over the competition. while derrida maintains that everything is decontructionist sign and that everything is context, he also show you how to break down the context into its elements or ingredients, thereby showing you how to get beyond context but then you are faced with another context. it is hard to say what derrida's aim is here. after all, he is exposing the power structures in language and everywhere else that keeps the individual from being liberated in one sense, yet he is reinforcing those power structures as necessary. but after the liberation, isn't a person deconditioned in these sense that krishnamurti spoke of being deconditioned... this peeling away at all the cultural and conditioning mechanisms of the culture. what is one left with then? what does one have? and what of a culture like the american culture which goes around in circles from one culture to another culture, each culture utilizing all the tools of the culture that it hated in defending itself... going nowhere really, is this the kind of uber-culture that derrida imagined as the end of all cultures?
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