
Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman (1997) [pdf] - benbreen
http://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf
======
mbrock
Since the onslaught of ignorant anti-continental quips has already begun, I'd
like to suggest two texts by Richard Rorty—an American pragmatist with an
extremely lucid writing style—that show how it is indeed possible to find
Derrida interesting without being a charlatan or stupid:

Here, a short review that gives a very brief introduction/defense (in a sort
of backhanded way, though): [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n03/richard-
rorty/signposts-along-t...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n03/richard-
rorty/signposts-along-the-way-that-reason-went)

"Derrida’s principal theme in these essays is the attempt of the tradition to
make language look less sprawling by trimming off unwanted growth. This is
done by making invidious distinctions between true (e.g. ‘literal’ or
‘cognitively meaningful’) language and false (e.g. ‘metaphorical’ or
‘meaningless’) language. He is arguing that this attempt cannot succeed,
because it is just the latest version of the onto-theological attempt to
contrast the Great Good Resting-Place with the sprawling world of time and
chance. He wants to convince us that there is no natural hierarchy of
discourses or jargons, no structure topped off by the super-language which
gives us a grip on all the others, the words which classify all the other
words. There is no privileged language in which to state invidious
distinctions between true and false language. There is no linguistic material
out of which we can forge clippers with which to snip off unfruitful
linguistic suckers. He thinks Heidegger betrayed his own project by trying to
separate ‘real’ language (the Call of Being, the kind of language which ‘is
what it says’) from ‘inauthentic’ language (words used as means to
technocratic ends, chatter, the jargon of this or that disciplinary matrix)."

And here, a full essay on Derrida titled "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing":
[http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Rorty-
Philosoph...](http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Rorty-Philosophy-
as-a-Kind-of-Writing-1978.pdf)

I don't have time to write more in depth about this. It's at least heartening
that the most cynical and flippant comments have been downvoted.

~~~
coldtea
> _how it is indeed possible to find Derrida interesting without being a
> charlatan or stupid_

Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.

As hackers (geeks etc) we are generally mostly accepting of an empiricist,
show-me-the-numbers, kind of analysis (and analytical philosophy), but it's by
far not the only one, or the most potent, when outside the realm of hard
sciences. The anglosaxon positivist/reductionist philosophical school is not
the only one out there, just as Hollywood and the emphasis on the "plot" is
not the only movie tradition.

It's like someone working on imperative programming all your life, and asking
"what's this BS Prolog thing, that's not real code" or "LISP is pretentious
and doesn't have a proper syntax".

~~~
steveklabnik
> Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.

It's a reference to Chomsky's criticism of postmodernism:
[http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-calls-jacques-
la...](http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-calls-jacques-lacan-a-
charlatan/)

(Not that I particularly agree with Chomsky here, mind you...)

------
hblanks
What a pleasure this interview was to read. And plain spoken, too.

Many here have complained that Derrida is hard to read, or worse, simply makes
no sense. You may take a side in this, if you like. But I would encourage you
to read some short piece of his instead. In so doing, and as the interview
itself remarks on reading, you may make your own interpretation.

@mbrock has listed several items. To these, I add what my instructor for
composition at Deep Springs (himself a student of Derrida) assigned us,
"Declarations of Independence." It is but a nine page talk on the US
Declaration of Independence. But within it, many of Derrida's persistent
concerns on language and action come to light.

You can find it online, starting at page 5 in this PDF:
[http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cole0384/academics/files/Derrida.PDF](http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cole0384/academics/files/Derrida.PDF)

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

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.

------
quinndupont
Just so everyone is clear here, while Derrida had an "uncertain" reception in
some parts of the academy (those crusty old anglo-American philosophers), he
was _deeply_ influential, and by some peoples' accounts, one of the most
influential philosophers of the 20th century. So, dismissing him out of hand
(especially rejections based on his ostensible obscurantism) is akin to saying
that Donald Knuth is no good. If you got the chops to critique Knuth, be my
guest, but until then, I'll just revel in genius and struggle and struggle.

~~~
derr342
> So, dismissing him out of hand (especially rejections based on his
> ostensible obscurantism) is akin to saying that Donald Knuth is no good.

This is an invalid analogy if I ever saw one.

Let me try to make it more accurate.

For Knuth to be like Derrida his magnum opus would have to have been generated
by just typing

cat /dev/random

and later claiming that MIX was somewhat defined in there as well as programs
written in it. Then he would become famous Paris Hilton style and get a bunch
of sycophants that defend his void verbiage no matter what (some because their
entire carreers depended on it, others just because they are useful idiots).

~~~
conatus
Hi. How much Derrida have you actually read?

Like sat down, with a pre-existing understanding of the fields he is
interfacing with (particularly phenomenology and structuralism and semiotics a
la Saussure) and then begin reading?

Most approaches to continental philosophy I read on these pages are like
someone jumping into a halfway point of a complex essay on functional
programming, quoting it and declaring it nonsense. To people outside
particular discourses, things often seem like nonsense. Within them, with
enough background, one can see that these things are meaningful, while one
might, of course, disagree.

------
daviddaviddavid
"Lonely Woman" is one of the most iconic and haunting melodies in jazz.

I'm glad that the interview explains where its title came from. Though, I'd
always assumed it must have come from a much darker place.

Also, this quote is a gem:

OC: I had a niece who died in February of this year and I went to her funeral,
and when I saw her in her coffin, someone had put a pair of glasses on her. I
had wanted to call one of my pieces _She was sleeping, dead, and wearing
glasses in her coffin_. And then I changed the idea and called it "Blind
Date."

------
EGKW
The original transscript of that interview, in French.
[http://www.lesinrocks.com/1997/08/20/musique/ornette-
coleman...](http://www.lesinrocks.com/1997/08/20/musique/ornette-coleman-et-
jacques-derrida-la-langue-de-lautre-11232142/)

------
ritchiea
Funny how Ornette Coleman is the subject of the interview but all of the
discussion here is about Derrida.

------
sighsigh
Derrida spoke of the absurdity of deriving meaning from an infinitely
recursive and self referent system of language. Pureness of axiom isn't
detectable in a mergable feedback loop. However, his critique doesn't show the
shortcomings of how we neurologically handle symbols, it shows the
incompleteness of human cognition. Derrida is to political epistemology as
Turing is to serial bits or Godel is to arithmetic. Keep this in mind for
compiler design and neural network structure.

~~~
mynameishere
_infinitely recursive and self referent system of language_

No idea if this is actually what he said, but when I say the word "dog" while
pointing at a dog, the recursion of language stops. It's amazing how so much
philosophy is almost intentionally incorrect.

~~~
sighsigh
... until a later bystander asks you, "What is a dog?" and you now have to
define it without the associated dog present.

Or someone looks at another breed of dog and asks "What is that?" because he
isn't aware of canine taxonomy and thinks only that original breed is a
creature called "dog".

Welcome to Derrida's version of the halting problem. These are actual problems
of NLP today.

~~~
rspeer
That's not what people do in natural language processing. Don't appropriate
the terminology of other fields for your own purposes and claim you're doing
that field.

~~~
sighsigh
That's not what is done in NLP because that cannot be done by NLP... for the
reasons that Derrida pointed out decades ago.

~~~
rspeer
Don't tell NLPists what not to do, thanks.

In NLP, people don't just throw up their hands and say "grounding is hard,
it's so hard it's impossible, let's not do it". Grounding is sometimes hard,
but it's often perfectly tractable for a given problem domain.

If we haven't solved strong AI yet, don't count that as a victory for your
unrelated field.

~~~
sighsigh
Faith in an AI clasification that is invented from a human mind bound by the
biases Derrida described long before people could put faith in strong AI?

Sorry, I don't do faith. I do correlation. You just hate Derrida and can't
apply any of his observations.

The human does not discover AI. It invents it. And all of the cognitive biases
we have are passively passed on with every "axiom" of AI we create. The idea
of even classifying AI is ontologically invalid... for the reasons Derrida
already pointed out.

------
derr342
Why is this here? What's the relevance?

For those who don't know, Derrida was a French postmodern intellectual
charlatan with absolutely no redeeming qualities.

A good example of what one should strive not to become.

~~~
steve-benjamins
"For those who don't know, Derrida was a French postmodern intellectual
charlatan with absolutely no redeeming qualities."

This is a ridiculously inaccurate way to explain Derrida to "those who don't
know" him. Derrida is one of the most important continental philosophers of
the 20th century.

~~~
derr342
> Derrida is one of the most important continental philosophers of the 20th
> century.

I never stated otherwise. What we both wrote is in no way contradictory.

~~~
MichaelGG
That's not fair. Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger have said interesting
things.

~~~
lambdaphage
Are you suggesting that Dennett is a continental philosopher?

~~~
MichaelGG
Sorry I skipped over that critical modifier. I agree with the GP then.

------
TheMagicHorsey
Derrida is one of those guys, that if you find a fan of his, you have almost
certainly found someone who has a love of complicated verbiage over simple
straightforward explanations.

Derrida takes a really simple concept and then dresses it up in so much
complicated irrelevant nonsense that you have to take 30 minutes to
deconstruct and understand an essay, that could be sufficiently restated in
perhaps a paragraph of clear English.

~~~
_delirium
Is this a generic comment, or based on reading the linked interview? He
doesn't seem particularly verbose to me in the interview.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
Accidentally commented on the main post instead of the comment where someone
said Derrida is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century or
something like that.

