Is this a woman ?
I find Jacques Derrida a very interesting
philosopher.
Many people, especially from the Anglo -
American side, seem to find his work crazy
or incomprehensible. There is a lesson there.
The British / American and the French
intellectual traditions are very different.
It's called ' culture '.
Some people find it impossible to believe or
accept that anyone could think anything
worthwhile in any way other than the way
in which they think themselves.
That's called arrogance, conceit, bigotry,
stupidity, ignorance or prejudice.
For Derrida, language or written texts are
not a natural reflection or description of the
world.
Text structures our interpretation of the world.
Following Heidegger, Derrida thinks that
language shapes us. Texts create a kind of
clearing that we then understand as reality.
Derrida sees the history of western thought
as based upon opposition. Good versus evil,
mind versus matter, man versus woman, and
so on.
These oppositions, or binaries, are however
not equal. The second term is a corruption,
an inferior, of the first.
Derrida thought that all text contained a
legacy of these assumptions, and as a result
of this, texts could be re-interpreted with
an awareness of the hierarchies implicit in
the language.
Derrida does not think that we can reach an
end point of interpretation, a truth.
For Derrida all texts exhibit ' differance ',
that is, they allow multiple interpretations.
Meaning is diffuse, not settled. Texts will
always gives us a surplus of possibilities,
yet we cannot stand outside of textuality
in an attempt to find objectivity.
One consequence of this is that certainty in
textual analyses becomes impossible. There
may be competing interpretations, but there
is no uninterpreted way by which one could
assess the validity of these competing
interpretations.
' Objective truth ' is dead.
All that we have, then, is a multiplicity of
interpretations.
If Derrida is correct, then, from a Taoist
perspective, the fact that one partner in each
pair of binaries is over-emphasised, whilst the
other is weakened, suggests that Western
thought, language, and culture, in general, is
out of balance, and has moved from the
centre toward an extremity.
If we have reached the limit of that swing,
we can expect a return, toward the opposite
pole.
In Derrida's framework, this swing would be
away from logos, and back towards mythos.
If we have not yet reached the limit, then we
can expect a greater intensification of the
particular qualities which mark the pole
which Western culture is leaning towards.
It would require a very lengthy analysis to
do this topic justice, and this is not the place,
but, in the arena of language, it is fascinating
to see youth culture inverting meanings, so
that ' bad ' means good, and ' wicked ' means
delightful. Perhaps these are harbingers of a
reversal, as our culture reaches a peak of
' yang - ness ' and begins its inevitable swing
' yin - wards ' ?
The male ' he ', which for centuries has been
assumed to be the correct form to cover both
genders in literature, thus effectively making
women invisible in texts, has spent a decade
or so in interim forms, ( such as ' he or she '
or ' s/he ', or with a clumsy preamble to the
text apologising to women, and asking that
' he ' be taken to designate both sexes,) but
now some male authors have felt inclined to
use ' she ' alone, allowing males to retreat from
the foreground...
Perhaps, in a few years, ' she ' will be the
accepted form to cover all cases and genders.
Things do change. Women are entering into
military service in combat roles. A thousand
and more years ago, in the old tales, there are
Gwiddonet, female warriors, who wear helmets
and armour, and prophecy and predict the
future.
They live at a place called in Welsh,
Llys y Gwiddonod, the Court of the Witches.
That, and other evidence, hints that the
institution of female warriors existed in
Celtic soceities, and it was only when the
christian Law of Adamnan was enacted, in
the 9th. century ( probably embodying laws of
the previous two hundred years ) that women
warriors disappeared from Celtic countries.
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