And all I have to do is act naturally...

I liked Derrida. I was surprised. It could have been the fact that the documentarians that made the movie were about as cheesy as you can get (voice over? seriously?) and that Derrida openly snarked at them (which is pretty much what I would have done). But hearing him talk about his theory conversationally rather than in a more dense, formalized paper really helped me grasp and appreciate what he was saying. I'd like to be able to watch the film again, because there were so many bits that I wrote down that sparked "I should write my blog on that" thoughts, but it was hard to keep up with the subtitles and write stuff down, and my French only goes so far...
My favorite part of his discussion, though, was the point "do not naturalize what is not natural." Though in reference to him answering predetermined questions "naturally" but in front of a camera, in a controlled environment, the idea really has been making me think a lot. Human nature is a topic that has been inexplicably forced upon me over and over again this year; I can't seem to shake it no matter how hard I try. I wonder if I understand the basics of it, even a little? It seems to me that nothing in life is easy enough to package up into a neat little box and call it human nature. If humans can't seem to agree on what common threads we all share, do we share any at all? Are we naturalizing certain behaviors without knowing it? Is human nature an ISA-based idea that pushes certain "unacceptable" behaviors outside social norms? Or is nothing natural?
I liked that the film tried to capture the mundane activities of his life, the making lunch, the haircuts, the casual pipe-smoking stroll down the street. What else can anyone really expect from an old man? No one would expect him to be livin la vida loca, academic credentials or not. We all have anecdotal lives on the outside, even the best and the brightest. It made me think of the reality tv that exists today, and how it, by definition, cannot be reality. We can't edit our lives to display only the dumb things we say (poor Jessica Simpson) or the Real World (can there really be that many catfights in one day in actual reality?). I love the photos of Angelina Jolie strolling out of grocery stores or Cameron Diaz playing frisbee...STARS, THEY'RE JUST LIKE US!! That we expect otherwise from celebrities (or academic superstars) is hilarious, because we all need haircuts and lunch.
In any case, I respect Derrida's resistance to the structure of the interview process- he said what he thought answered the question and that was that. This wasn't an exam for Derrida, he didn't have to give details. He realized that people wanted something from him and he was only going to give them what he felt was enough, especially considering his past as a person who avoided public displays of himself previously. There's nothing wrong with being left wanting more out of Derrida, he does not belong to us to begin with.

"blog" is a masculine noun in french, according to my widgets.

All this talk about the metaphysics of presence made me think of last semester, when I had a few bald patches here and there from tearing my hair out over philosophy. I was an IA for the FYS regarding human nature, and it made me roll my eyes as much then as it does now. Because I love to torture myself, I went back to the text we used (written by Thomas "Salt of the Earth" Wall, I loved that guy) to see what I was supposed to have learned along with my freshmen.

I remember being very specifically annoyed by the discussion on metaphysics. As far as I'm is concerned, it is useless to yammer on about whether reality is only an illusion or whatever it is these guys worry themselves over. I like Descartes and his je ponse, donc je suis business. I suppose it's nice and reductive, which is really my kind of theory. I think about stuff, therefore I have to exist, because if I didn't, I wouldn't. So when we were discussing the idea of "I'm here, so I exist" I couldn't have been happier. Finally, something that is the truth. We won't even get into the logical existence of God chitchat that some of this stuff leads to, I just ate dinner.

So you can imagine, then, the eye-rolling headache I gave myself when Nietzsche popped up. I had this teacher last semester, a vertiable vampire of a guy, who drew a lot of his heavy, supposedly dramatically life altering quotations (spoken in a halting, sincere voice, meant to impact upon us the importance of the words escaping his lips) from Nietzsche. It could just be the melodramatic style surrounding both Professor Goth's love for the man and 'ol Friedrich's theories themselves, but really any mention of the fella makes me want to hire a medium, have her channel him, and explain that he's as full of BS as anyone else who has ever developed a philosophy. Look what it did to Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine.

I keep out of philosophy. Except in I Heart Huckabees...Dustin Hoffman HAS to exist, or else I wouldnt have a favorite actor.

Post Monday Pre Wednesday School of Thought.

To apply the word "post" to an ideology or perspective is a really lame thing to do. It seems to be a really easy, almost lazy way to describe one's current state of being, without really explaining much. I am in my Post Dave Matthews Pre Radiohead phase, which doesn't really explain much about my current affinity for Kelly Clarkson, except that I probably will never flick DMB back onto my iPod and Thom Yorke's voice STILL really grates on me, but I might get there eventually. While it does imply a certain outlook on a given aspect of life, to put "post" in front of anything really implies that it had enough of an impact so that for the time being, we gauge the facets of our lives that both directly and indirectly relate to this event on this event, so that everything we do is colored by events of and/or perspectives on the past. My least favorite way of doing this is BC(E, if you're one of those people) and AD. Before Jesus, we were this. What? Pagans? Jews? What does that even mean? After Jesus, we were something else enough to put a name to it. Its very culturally chauvinistic- I'm sure the lives of rice farmers in Southeast Asia didn't have a vast ideological shift after the death of Christ, and its really silly to expect that even most people in the Western World did until the widespread Christianization of Europe, 500 years later.

I live in a posthighschool world. I live in a postmilk-at-dinner world. I live in a postfirst-kiss, postred-as-my-favorite-color, postteenage, postreceptionist period, which might evolve into a postundergraduate, posttea-every-morning, postfirst-serious-relationship, postgreen-is-my-favorite-color, posttwenties, posti-will-never-ever-HAVE-to-be-a-receptionist-AGAIN phase. But what does that really say about me right now? Anything important? Probably, because it chronicles my growth and change, but does it matter what the catalyst was, or that it merely happened? I really don't like to think of my life in terms of the past, but what my possibilities are for the future. Living in a postSomething world doesn't imply a fixed perspective that we have as a result of that SomeEvent. For example, we discussed the term "Post 9/11 world": it doesn't imply that "oops, we really got some group of Middle Eastern guys pissed, maybe we should try to be nicer," although it COULD. To us, it usually is applied to the idea that we are scared of bombs, things that look like bombs but aren't, the word bomb, afghanis, iraqis, airplanes, oilfields, uranium, lower manhattan, and about a million other signifiers (vocabulary alert) that have to do with terror, terrorism, threats, insecurity and war. But it could mean something else, which, to me softens the validity of the term.

I really like this quotation, which I found on Paul Lieberstein's myspace. He plays Toby on The Office, in case you haven't reached your postScrubs phase...

My philosophy is, live life "two days at a time." One day at a time is unrelenting. Two days, well, if I drink too much or eat too much I can just do better tomorrow, on my second day. Honestly, I don't even understand the success that "One day at a time" is having.

I have a headache because of how much I rolled my eyes.

My "understanding" (if you can call it that) of the statement "Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" is quite based upon his discussion on the "intrinsic" value of money. That the coin itself represents money, but really isn't worth money if you tried to sell it on eBay for "face" value. Coins = money but coins aren’t worth the money that they represent. I could make that into a cute algebraic expression if only if I could figure out how to make the equals sign with the slash through it.

It's sort of funny that the statement doesn't really need explaining, but the explanation of the statement does. I know I was out of class on Tuesday, so I might have missed a profound definition of the paragraph that shows "even more clearly" the "systematic role of phonetic differences." But when old Ferdinand proceeds to yammer on about Greek, and there is not one series of words I can get my head around until the last sentence, quoted in my first paragraph.

This is not how I think. This is not stuff I care about. I'm glad it exists, because obviously if it didn't, no one would understand each other and literature wouldn't exist in any kind of relatable sense. But, unfortunately, it is going to have to be something that I take for granted. I think this idea is important, because it reduces language to a very simple form, and gives us a basis as to why I can understand English but not Chinese. I can't understand Chinese because the sounds, and subsequent written representations of those sounds, mean nothing to me; there are no touchstones in the Chinese sound that can link me to English.

I suppose it's all a little too clinical for me. Packaging up my appreciation for language and literature into my superior sound-processing abilities is a little bit gray and depressing. I like to think that my brilliant literary mind comes from my ability to really get to the heart of a piece and analyze it through the various channels that make up my perspective. That this perspective is really just my understanding of certain phonetic signifiers is such a mathematical way of looking at something that I had previously considered abstract and applicable to myself as an individual. And anything remotely mathematical is really a turn-off. I suppose it’s nice that, through Saussure's pondering, we can all explain why we love a given work of literature, but are those reasons truly important? Are our phonetic processing abilities really what make the meat of a given work actually strike a chord? Does the fact that East of Eden STILL makes me weep after reading it once twice a year for the last 3 years really SAY anything about my phonetic abilities? I love the book, and is it as romantic to say "Gosh, Steinbeck and I, wow, we really can absorb sounds in a similarly relatable manner?" as it is to say, "Damn it all, why can't I write things like that?"

If reading stuff were a science like Saussure makes it to be, then I think it would be way harder for me to like.