Deutscher

To be completed....

"[I]f the idea of the natural body is fluid, perhaps there is no natural body? Sometimes this produces an unstable, ambivalent argument, one that both decries and denies the threat that the 'other' is said to pose." (4)

"If the devaluation of the unnatural is not interrogated in tandem with questioning the coherence of the concept of nature, such an argument is described by Derrida as deconstructible. One meaning of this is that it can be broken down and taken apart to expose its weakness, because an idealization of nature may be at work that will not stand up to scrutiny" (4)

Bit about maternity I don't find convincing (5) But useful to think about how technology can be given the role of Other.

Gd explanation of deconstruction (6). In some ways, seems like deconstruction means seeking out the hypocrisies, but using nicer words.

(7) I've never found that idea that writing is secondary to speech all that convincing. It's true that one learns speech first. But I see words as I speak and hear them; and usually hear them as I read and write them—I don't find it to be a terribly different way of thinking.

(8) Ah, but the act of reading is not the same as the act of writing, even if what you are reading is something you had previously written.

"The hierarchies between the terms natural and unnatural, pure and contaminated, certain and uncertain, are, on closer inspection, unstable" (9)

"speech is writing" (11)

Ch2

In response to the criticism of deconstruction that it can essentially be used to prove anything because it stretches definitions to the point of including their opposites, Deutscher says that "[a]n answer emerges when we consider the way people's sense of identity can often be an aspiration to identity" (16). Not sure I see how that is a response.

"culture itself as a kind of colonization" (18).

"Yet Derrida is hesitant about those who self-identify as having suffered cultural alienation and loss, if this takes the route of reinforcing the illusion that some are not alienated, and have a particularly legitimate relationship to their language and culture" (18-19).

"Derrida asserts...that 'deconstruction is not neutral... It intervenes'" (21).

Difference

"If we are dazzled less by impossible ideals—of democracy, justice, nature, cultural origin, even a pure understanding or a fully harmonious community—we begin to formulate new forms of ethics and politics." (24).

"idealization of the pure, the natural or the original, and devaluation of what is considered unnatural, impure or 'fallen'" (26).

Ch3

Differance (29, 32

"'text' has been redefined by Derrida as the infinitely deferring movement of differentiation. He generalizes the term, and he suggests the alternative definition of 'text': a heterogeneous, differential and open field of forces" (33).

"'Text' for Derrida is such things as differance, spacing, relationality, differentiation, deferral, delay. To say there is nothing outside the text is to say that there is always relationality and differentiation. No matter what we imagine as 'reality', it could be argued that differentiation is critical to it." (34) Reread 34-35.