/lit/ - Literature

>>14117124
He doesn't »suck». If you wish to discount him however; simply state the fact that his philosophy has a defined purpose, and call him a sophist.

That's a specific one to start with. What did you dislike about it?

How do I understand Derrida? His writing appears to be mostly incoherent nonsense that you must interpret.

He is basically fine. He just extends the radical hermeneuticism/historicism of the German school (Heidegger, Gadamer) and develops its implications. For some people, often mainstream academic types, this translates to him escaping the romantic-mystical cul-de-sac of Heidegger (i.e., Heidegger's fascism) and turning the radical hermeneutic project of de(con)struction, which Heidegger wanted to use to "clear the way" for new "gods," into a liberal project of endless self-analysis and dialogical mediation etc.

This had already been done by Gadamer as well, who was Heidegger's direct student, and others. Derrida is very talented at manipulating the Heideggerian weltanschauung and embracing its "groundlessness" as a solution rather than a problem for Western man. But it is not necessarily or self-evidently the case that he is one of the luminaries of the 20th century or anything. Part of his fame and memorability comes from the fact that both the neo-humanistic (while avowedly "anti-humanistic") projects of the kind he proposed and the character he played in Parisian intellectual circles were in high demand, not just in France and Europe but subsequently in America during the latter's great discovery of French thought in the '80s and '90s, when a trillion trillion graduate students clambered over each other to appear au courant with continental thought.

IMHO Derrida wrote too fucking much.

b

sophist hack who, unable to comprehend reality, rejected it in favor incomprehensible pseudobabble that set humanities back a century with its vile postmodernist outlook and corruptive nihilism
if you want to know why politicians rise and fall because muh gender bathrooms look no further than this stain upon history

>>14119777
Go to bed, Jordan.

>>14117124
>all human interaction is a power struggle
Only a Jew could think this

he's a tour de force