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Letters
Letters
Critique & Cause • On Unhappiness • Saying Nothing • God Issues • Ought We To Survive? • Seeing Red • Arthur Danto Transfigured
Critique & Cause
Dear Editor: It is good to see my old warhorse Not Saussure. A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1988) being cited by Peter Benson (‘Derrida on Language’, Issue 100). As an attack on a then-dominant approach to language and literature in academic humanities, and on some gods of Parisian thought such as the two Jacques (Lacan and Derrida), it was as welcome as dysentery in a shared Jacuzzi, and was largely ignored. Unfortunately, Benson also overlooks the main thrust of my critique of Derrida (a seventy page chapter entitled ‘Walking and Différance’); namely that Derrida had misread Saussure. Derrida’s central argument was that Saussurean linguistics implied that human discourse could not be about a world outside of language.
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