Simone de Beauvoir on Women

http://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Becoming_A_Woman_Simone_de_Beauvoir_on_Female_Embodiment

Copy from : Philosophy Now Magazine
Becoming A Woman: Simone de Beauvoir on Female Embodiment

by: Felicity Joseph

Felicity Joseph finds that sometimes it’s hard to become a woman.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”

Simone de Beauvoir

Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don ’t only create our own values, we create ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir, although an avowed life-long existentialist, posits limits to this central existentialist idea of self-creation and self-definition, qualifying the absolute freedom Jean-Paul Sartre posited in Being and Nothingness. By contrast de Beauvoir presents an ambiguous picture of human freedom, in which women struggle against the apparent disadvantages of the female body.

In The Second Sex, her most famous work, de Beauvoir sketches a kind of existential history of a woman ’s life: a story of how a woman’s attitude towards her body and bodily functions changes over the years, and of how society influences this attitude. Here de Beauvoir raises the core question of female embodiment: Are the supposed disadvantages of the female body actual disadvantages which exist objectively in all societies, or are they merely judged to be disadvantages by our society? She answers this question by exploring case studies of the various stages of female life. In these case studies the female body is presented as both positive and negative, and women as both oppressed and free. A woman ’s body is the site of this ambiguity, for she can use it as a vehicle for her freedom and feel oppressed by it. There is no essential truth of the matter: it depends upon the extent to which a woman sees herself as a free subject rather than as the object of society ’s gaze.

Problems of Belief & Unbelief

Source: http://philosophynow.org/issues/99/Does_God_Exist

Copy from Philosophy Now Magazine

Does God Exist?

William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, California, and founded the organization Reasonable Faith (please visit reasonablefaith.org). His book, A Reasonable Response, is due out soon, answering questions unbelievers and believers often pose.

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope:

Source:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/abandon-nearly-all hope/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=2&

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope:  

SIMON CRITCHLEY

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and the author of several books, including “The Ethics of Deconstruction,” “Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine” (with Jamieson Webster) and the forthcoming “Bowie.” He is the moderator of this series.

With Easter upon us, powerful narratives of rebirth and resurrection are in the air and on the breeze. However, winter’s stubborn reluctance to leave to make way for the pleasing and hopeful season leads me to think not of cherry blossoms and Easter Bunnies but of Prometheus, Nietzsche, Barack Obama and the very roots of hope. Is hope always such a wonderful thing? Is it not rather a form of moral cowardice that allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering?

Is hope always such a wonderful thing? Is it not rather a form of moral cowardice that allows us to escape from reality?

Love as a Political Category: Zizek

Source: http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/50765863638/slavoj-zizek-on-love-as-a-political-category

Love as a Political Category: Zizek 

This is a, somewhat loose, transcription of a talk by Slavoj Žižek given on Subversive Festival 2013, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b44IhiCuNw4

The majority of the text is actually, as often is the case with talks (and also writings) by Žižek, a rehash of ideas and analyses from Žižek’s books and articles (see the links I included at the end of the transcription, also see his own reference to this in the talk to his repetition of his idea of decaffeinated coffee), and, to my disappointment, the majority of the material Žižek discusses does not or only barely touches upon the subject of love. Nonetheless, put together Žižek draws some interesting connections between love, violence, spirituality, religions, modernity, capitalism and so on, and so on. 

Zizek: The One Measure of True Love Is: You Can Insult the Other

Source: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-one-measure-of-true-love-is-you-can-insult-the-other/

The One Measure of True Love Is: You Can Insult the Other

Slavoj Zizek, Interviewed, By Sabine Reul And Thomas Deichmann.

I do claim that what is sold to us today as freedom is something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and democracy has been removed — in other words, the belief that basic decisions about social development are discussed or brought about involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not have an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle.

Ethics: Badiou

Source: http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=17

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou Summary 1. Does Man Exist? According to current usage, the term "ethics" relates to the domain of human rights. A universally recognisable human subject is proposed possessing rights that are in some sense natural. "This return to the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism, and of all the forms of progressive engagement that it inspired. In the political domain, deprived of any collective political landmark, stripped of any notion of the 'meaning of History' and no longer able to hope for or expect a social revolution, many intellectuals, along with much of public opinion, have been won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy. In the domain of 'philosophy', they have rediscovered the virtues of that ideology constantly defended by their former opponents: humanitarian individualism and the liberal defence of rights against the constraints imposed by organised political engagement. Rather than seek out the terms of a new politics of collective liberation, they have, in sum, adopted as their own the principles of the established 'Western' order." (5) This has inspired a reaction against the thought of the 1960s when people such as Foucault, Althusser and Lacan rejected the idea of the universal subject essential to the notion of human rights and universal ethics. But for Badiou they were much more critical and engaged than those who uphold today's "ethics". The foundation of the ethic of human rights is Kant. "What essentially is retained from Kant ... is the idea that there exist formally representable imperative demands that are to be subjected neither to empirical considerations nor to the examination of situations; hat these imperatives apply to cases of offence, of crime, of Evil; that these imperatives must be punished by national and international law; that, as a result, governments are obliged to include them in their legislation, and to accept the full legal range of their implications; that if they do not, we are justified in forcin their compliance. (8) Ethics is conceived as an a prior ability to discern Evil. There is an assumed consensus about the nature of this Evil. Good is defined simply as that which intervenes visibly against this Evil. "Human rights" are rights to non-Evil. The heart of this framework is the universal human subject. "Ethics subordinates the identification of this subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics thus defines man as a victim ... Man is the being who is capable of recognising himself as a victim." (10) This is unacceptable, for three reasons: 1. It reduces man to the level of a living organism pure and simple. The rights of man need to be equated with the ability of man to think rather than the possibility that he might die. "If we equate Man with the simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For this 'living being' is in reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions ... the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of 'human rights' - whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation, one that calls for a political thought-practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors - it is perceived, from the heights of our pparent civil peace, as the uncivilised that demands of the civilised a civilising intervention. Every intervention in the name of a civilisation requires an initial concept for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign of 'ethics' coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today's sordid self-satisfaction in the 'West', with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity - in short, of its subhumanity." (12-13) 2. It builds consensus around the recognition of evil, and therefore identifies all attempts to build positive notions of the good as part of this evil. "Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatised as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil." (14) 3. Because of its universal underpinnings, ethics is unable to address the singularity of situations as such, "which is the obligatory starting poing of all properly human action." (14) A doctor can attend a conference on medical ethics where he will uphold Hippcratic principles, but will have no problem turning away a sick patient on the grounds that *this* particular person does not have the requisite papers. Badiou advances three principles: 1. Man is to be identified by his affirmative thought, by the singular truths of which he is capable. 2. It is from our positive capability for Good that we are able to identify Evil, not vice versa. 3. There is no ethics in general. There are only ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation. 2. Does the Other Exist? Another strain in contemporary ethics is built not around the idea of the self but the idea of the other. Can be traced back to Emmanuel Levinas rather than Kant. Levinas argues that western metaphysics is built on the logic of the Same - the primacy of substance and identity. "According to Levinas, it is impossible to arrive at an authentic thought of the Other (and thus an ethics of the relation to the Other) from the despotism of the Same, which is incapable of recognising this Other." (18) He finds in Jewish ethics a relation with the Other that predates the coming-to-being of the Same. Greek philosophy was about deriving laws from the whole, rational individual. The Jewish Law is about the primacy of the relation with the Other. But Levinas' examination of the phenomenology of the experience of the other (the face, the caress) is inadequate to the task he sets for it. There is no guarantee that the other is actually experienced as other (psychoanalysis gives many theories to the contrary). And the "other" is always inadequate to its role as other, because there is as much about it that it is "same". For absolute otherness, the "other" must become an abstract category - like God - which turns the project of ethics into religion. Ethics must find its foundation in the Same. The Other is not helping us to find any basis for our ethics except prop up a frivolous language of "difference". The fact is that no truth can be derived from the banal observation that there is difference between human beings - because difference is the basic fact of all human interaction: there is infinite variety within the self, and infinite variety between human beings. The particular sort of difference that contemporary societies are most obsessed with - cultural difference - is no more than a kind of tourist's fascination. This can be shown empirically. "Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the 'right to difference' are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference ... As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other - which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us?" (24) 3. Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism "Whether we think of it as the consensual representation of Evil or as concern for the other, ethics designates above all the incpacity, so typical of the contemporary world, to name and strive for a Good. We should go even further and say that the reign of ethics is one symptom of a universe ruled b a distinctive combination of resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will. It is this combination that should be designated as nihilism. The logic of Capital is what is "necessary" in contemporary society: it is objective and incontrovertible; its needs and constraints are preeminent. Ethics functions as a nihilistic "understudy" to this "necessity." "The celebrated 'end of ideologies' heralded everywhere as the good news which opens the way for the 'return of ethics' signifies in fact an espousal of the twistings and turnings of necessity, and an extraordinary impoverishment of the active, militant value of principles." (32) "The very idea of a consensual 'ethics' stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight of atrocities, which replaces the 'old ideological divisions' is a powerful contributor to subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo. For what every emancipatory project does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to consensus. How, indeed, could the incalculable novelty of a truth, and the hole that it bores in established knowledges, be inscribed in a situation without encountering resolute opposition?" (32) But ethics is the "spiritual supplement" of the consensus and is horrified by discord. "Ethics is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle." (32-3) The example of immigrants is clear. "Ethics is the ideology of [France's] insularity, and this is why it valorizes - throught the world, and with the complacency of 'intervention' - the gunboats of Law. But by doing this, by everywhere promoting a domestic haughtiness and cowardly self-satisfaction, it sterilises every collective gathering around a vigorous conception of what can (and thus must) be done here and now. And in this, once again, it is nothing more than a variant of the conservative consensus." (33) But it is not only ethics' complacency about 'necessity' that makes it nihilistic. It is also its dependence on happiness and the absence of death. This comes out most clearly in arguments about euthanasia. "Who can fail to see that the 'debate' on euthanasia points above all to the radical poverty of the symbols available today for old age and death? To the unbearable character of the latter as a sight for the living? Here ethics is at the junction of two only apparently contradictory drives: since it defines Man by non-Evil, and thus by 'happiness' and life, it is simultaneously fascinated by death yet incapable of inscribing it in thought." (36) Ethics is about making death disappear and policing the border of 'happiness'. "It is clear that the external barricades erected to protect our sickly prosperity have as their internal counterpart, against the nihilist drive, the derisory and complicit barrier of ethical commissions." (37) "It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle - against the ethics of living-well whose real content is the deciding of death - of an ethic of truths." (39)

The Stranger: Camus

Source: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115492/albert-camus-stranger

Albert Camus Thought That Life Is Meaningless

April 26, 1946: Nicola Chiaramonte Reviews “The Stranger”

We were born at the beginning of the First World War. When we were adolescents, we had the Depression. When we were twenty, Hitler came. Then we had the Ethiopian war; the Spanish war; Munich. This is what we got, in the way of an education. After which, we had the Second World War; the defeat; Hitler in our towns and homes. Born and brought up in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. Nothing but the stubborn negation into which we had been forced from the beginning. The world in which we had to live was an absurd world, and there was nothing else, no spare world in which we could take refuge. Confronted by Hitler's terror, what values did we have that could comfort us, and which we could oppose to his negation? None. Had the problem been that of the failure of a political ideology, or of a governmental system, it would have been simple enough. But what was happening came from man himself. We could not deny it. We saw it confirmed every day. We fought Hitlerism because it was unbearable. And now that Hitler has disappeared, we know a few things. The first is that the poison that was in Hitler has not been eliminated. It is still there, in all of us. Anyone who speaks of human life in terms of power, of efficiency, of "historical tasks," is like Hitler: He is a murderer. Because if all there is to the problem of man is a "historical task" of some kind, then man is nothing but the raw material of history, and anything can be done with him. There is another thing we know, and this is that we still cannot accept any optimistic view of human existence, no "happy end" of any kind. But if we believe that to be optimistic about human existence is madness, we also know that to be pessimistic about man's action among his fellow men is cowardly. We were against terror because terror is the situation where the only alternative is to kill or be killed, and communication among men becomes impossible. That is why we now reject any political ideology which raises global claims on human life. Any such ideology spells terror and murder. And we want the Reign of Terror to come to an end.

In a bald and clumsy summary, this is what Albert Camus had to say when he was asked to lecture in New York on the subject of "The Crisis of Man." Those who heard him speak had no doubt that he had the right to say "we." His was the voice of a whole generation of Europeans, and more especially Frenchmen, who, caught in a struggle that was both senseless and inescapable, have done more than any accepted notion of duty or "historical task" could ever have required of them, with no other moral aid but the quality of their despair.

The world of action, to them, has not meant an escape from the world of thought, as it has to some of their elder brothers. But neither could they be satisfied with ideas whose connections with actual conduct would be only tangential and general. In fact, this is what they most objected to. They somehow considered the world of thought more dangerous than the world of action, and were suspicious of it. Because of this, they were often considered skeptical, or cynical, or "nihilistic." All of us have heard people report that the youth of France did not believe in anything, while the Fascists and the Nazis had a faith. This kind of talk was current in France itself, before the war. Few persons seemed to take into account the fact that those young men had plenty of reasons to wonder, and that their attitude also implied that thought could be more real than any action, once its authenticity became evident. They were looking for a kind of integrity of which the examples around them were only too rare. In fact, if they had to believe what was shown them on the historical scene, there appeared to be integrity only in evil. The world of Nietzsche was far more real than the world of science, rational thinking, and humanistic moralism. Such being the case, the only sure guide could be loyalty to personal experience and the refusal to believe anything that could not be checked in terms of one's actual encounters with life. A kind of negative truthfulness. The best among those men knew that this was all they had with which to face armed brutality, death, and dereliction. Those who came through must now continue their search in a world no less absurd than the one in which they were born.

There are several eminent writers in France today, but none who has taken up with more decision and clarity than Albert Camus the intellectual and moral implications, as well as the human pathos, of such a situation.

It is a situation that consists essentially of intellectual, moral, and practical antinomies. The absurdity of life; despair; the impossibility of accepting general solutions; the evil in man—all these are questions, rather than answers. They would become meaningless the moment they were not faced with integrity. And it would not be too much to say that integrity is the outstanding quality of Camus' personality as an artist, a philosopher and a political journalist.

In “The Stranger”  the admirable short novel now published in English, Albert Camus has in fact expressed the tragedy of integrity as a modern man can sense it.

The story is simple. A man, Meursault, lets himself get involved in a sordid affair at the end of which he becomes a murderer. He is brought to trial. At that moment, everything he has or has not done before the murder becomes a charge against him. He has let his mother die in a home for the aged; during the wake, he not only did not show any grief, but even smoked a cigarette; after the funeral he went to the movies and spent the night with a girl; he freely consented to become the accomplice of a pimp. During the questioning he expresses no regret; at the trial he remains completely impassive. His callousness, as the prosecutor remarks, is even more revolting than his crime. He is condemned to death.

It is the hero himself who tells the story. His is a peculiar kind of confession, meant for nobody in particular, just for the record. The objectivity, and even the anonymity, of the tone could not be greater. This man makes a point of stating only what is relevant to his case. In fact, in a world that condemns him on the basis of his objective behavior, he is the only objective person. In the routine attempt to save him, the defense substitutes for him a meaningless fiction. In order to have him condemned, the prosecutor retorts by a fiction in the opposite direction. All this is irrelevant. If somebody could say something relevant, explain what has happened, that would be important. But nobody seems to know, and everybody acts as if he knew why things happen to men. As for himself, he does not know either, and that is why he does not defend himself. His only advantage, if any, is that he knows that he does not know anything except the succession of events that was his life. This certainty he cannot betray. That is why he revolts so violently against the priest who comes to console him. Consolation would mean substituting something else for the bare truth. "It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, far surer than he; sure of my own life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it had got its teeth into me."

Who is Meursault? "Just like everybody else; quite an ordinary person," is his answer. The only difference is that a certain series of events befell him, instead of a certain other. His lot could have been different, but not the final meaning of it. He was caught in a peculiar kind of trap. But this is precisely what describes the situation of the individual in everyday life. Since there is nothing else, there is no difference in meaning, either, "One life is as good as another." It is the self-evident that we have to deny, if we want to make of Meursault a sorry exception.

Meursault is Everyman, with a vengeance. For his actions he has only one explanation, which is very tentative: "Though I mightn't be so sure about what interested me, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me." A quite common predicament. Except that Meursault acknowledges it. Because what is right is not clear to him, he can do wrong; but to lie would be to confuse the issue. He cannot do it. The tension of the story consists entirely of the obstinacy with which this man refuses to lie. We feel this tension from the very beginning, and from the very beginning we expect doom. Rather than a virtue, truthfulness here is a radical decision, something like a last defense. That is why the story is tragic. It is the tragedy of the ethical. No book in contemporary literature points with such soberness and directness to what we still call "a man's soul," Macbeth's "eternal jewel." And this is why, among other things, although the tone of the narration might remind us of Hemingway or Caldwell, the parallel remains superficial. What Camus has attempted to describe is precisely what the Americans leave out: the dimension of the ethical, the "I."

In a world which is intrinsically absurd, what can man do? This is Camus' question, Meursault's answer is: die unreconciled. But life's own queries still remain to be answered. And nothing is so characteristic of Camus as his refusal to give answers that would be merely logical, to ignore the diversity and the contradictions of experience. The theme of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” a collection of philosophical essays, is the absurdity of the Absurd, the impossibility of making a logical rule out of it. Pessimism or optimism. God or suicide. Reason or Unreason. These are all attempts to jump out of the real problem by giving it a final solution. Camus calls them "refusals to acknowledge.” In the same way, despair is the most intimate reality of man. To make of it a moral rule would be at the same time to debase it and to get rid of it. "Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness," says Camus in his “Letters to a German Friend,” written in the thick of the battle and probably the noblest document of the state of mind of the European Resistance.

Albert Camus speaks of happiness against a background of despair, and that is why his voice rings true. Aware as he is of the absurd, he stresses nothing like clear consciousness. And from the ultimate loneliness of man, he draws one consequence, which is the necessity today of reestablishing real communication among men, these "brother enemies" divided more than ever before by false thoughts and violence.

These are reasonable paradoxes. They are not so very different from the ones the Greeks had to face. And we cannot help feeling in Camus' voice a yearning for the return of a man who, however welcome in academic circles, has never since his death been readmitted to his proper place, which was the public place—Socrates, "the simple wise man with a curious distinction."

Social Contract & Discourses: Rousseau

Source: http://www.bartleby.com/168/503.html

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).  Social Contract & Discourses.  1913.

A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences The Second Part

AN ancient tradition passed out of Egypt into Greece, that some god, who was an enemy to the repose of mankind, was the inventor of the sciences. 1 What must the Egyptians, among whom the sciences first arose, have thought of them? And they beheld, near at hand, the sources from which they sprang. In fact, whether we turn to the annals of the world, or eke out with philosophical investigations the uncertain chronicles of history, we shall not find for human knowledge an origin answering to the idea we are pleased to entertain of it at present. Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues.	1
Their evil origin is, indeed, but too plainly reproduced in their objects. What would become of the arts, were they not cherished by luxury? If men were not unjust, of what use were jurisprudence? What would become of history, if there were no tyrants, wars, or conspiracies? In a word, who would pass his life in barren speculations, if everybody, attentive only to the obligations of humanity and the necessities of nature, spent his whole life in serving his country, obliging his friends, and relieving the unhappy? Are we then made to live and die on the brink of that well at the bottom of which Truth lies hid? This reflection alone is, in my opinion, enough to discourage at first setting out every man who seriously endeavours to instruct himself by the study of philosophy.	2
What a variety of dangers surrounds us! What a number of wrong paths present themselves in the investigation of the sciences! Through how many errors, more perilous than truth itself is useful, must we not pass to arrive at it? The disadvantages we lie under are evident; for falsehood is capable of an infinite variety of combinations; but the truth has only one manner of being. Besides, where is the man who sincerely desires to find it? Or even admitting his good will, by what characteristic marks is he sure of knowing it? Amid the infinite diversity of opinions where is the criterion 2 by which we may certainly judge of it? Again, what is still more difficult, should we even be fortunate enough to discover it, who among us will know how to make right use of it?	3
If our sciences are futile in the objects they propose, they are no less dangerous in the effects they produce. Being the effect of idleness, they generate idleness in their turn; and an irreparable loss of time is the first prejudice which they must necessarily cause to society. To live without doing some good is a great evil as well in the political as in the moral world; and hence every useless citizen should be regarded as a pernicious person. Tell me then, illustrious philosophers, of whom we learn the ratios in which attraction acts in vacuo; and in the revolution of the planets, the relations of spaces traversed in equal times; by whom we are taught what curves have conjugate points, points of inflexion, and cusps; how the soul and body correspond, like two clocks, without actual communication; what planets may be inhabited; and what insects reproduce in an extraordinary manner. Answer me, I say, you from whom we receive all this sublime information, whether we should have been less numerous, worse governed, less formidable, less flourishing, or more perverse, supposing you had taught us none of all these fine things.	4
Reconsider therefore the importance of your productions; and, since the labours of the most enlightened of our learned men and the best of our citizens are of so little utility, tell us what we ought to think of that numerous herd of obscure writers and useless littérateurs, who devour without any return the substance of the State.	5
Useless, do I say? Would God they were! Society would be more peaceful, and morals less corrupt. But these vain and futile declaimers go forth on all sides, armed with their fatal paradoxes, to sap the foundations of our faith, and nullify virtue. They smile contemptuously at such old names as patriotism and religion, and consecrate their talents and philosophy to the destruction and defamation of all that men hold sacred. Not that they bear any real hatred to virtue or dogma; they are the enemies of public opinion alone; to bring them to the foot of the altar, it would be enough to banish them to a land of atheists. What extravagancies will not the rage of singularity induce men to commit!	6
The waste of time is certainly a great evil; but still greater evils attend upon literature and the arts. One is luxury, produced like them by indolence and vanity. Luxury is seldom unattended by the arts and sciences; and they are always attended by luxury. I know that our philosophy, fertile in paradoxes, pretends, in contradiction to the experience of all ages, that luxury contributes to the splendour of States. But, without insisting on the necessity of sumptuary laws, can it be denied that rectitude of morals is essential to the duration of empires, and that luxury is diametrically opposed to such rectitude? Let it be admitted that luxury is a certain indication of wealth; that it even serves, if you will, to increase such wealth: what conclusion is to be drawn from this paradox, so worthy of the times? And what will become of virtue if riches are to be acquired at any cost? The politicians of the ancient world were always talking of morals and virtue; ours speak of nothing but commerce and money. One of them will tell you that in such a country a man is worth just as much as he will sell for at Algiers: another, pursuing the same mode of calculation, finds that in some countries a man is worth nothing, and in others still less than nothing; they value men as they do droves of oxen. According to them, a man is worth no more to the State, than the amount he consumes; and thus a Sybarite would be worth at least thirty Lacedæmonians. Let these writers tell me, however, which of the two republics, Sybaris or Sparta, was subdued by a handful of peasants, and which became the terror of Asia.	7
The monarchy of Cyrus was conquered by thirty thousand men, led by a prince poorer than the meanest of Persian Satraps: in like manner the Scythians, the poorest of all nations, were able to resist the most powerful monarchs of the universe. When two famous republics contended for the empire of the world, the one rich and the other poor, the former was subdued by the latter. The Roman empire in its turn, after having engulfed all the riches of the universe, fell a prey to peoples who knew not even what riches were. The Franks conquered the Gauls, and the Saxons England, without any other treasures than their bravery and their poverty. A band of poor mountaineers, whose whole cupidity was confined to the possession of a few sheep-skins, having first given a check to the arrogance of Austria, went on to crush the opulent and formidable house of Burgundy, which at that time made the potentates of Europe tremble. In short, all the power and wisdom of the heir of Charles the Fifth, backed by all the treasures of the Indies, broke before a few herring-fishers. Let our politicians condescend to lay aside their calculations for a moment, to reflect on these examples; let them learn for once that money, though it buys everything else, cannot buy morals and citizens. What then is the precise point in dispute about luxury? It is to know which is most advantageous to empires, that their existence should be brilliant and momentary, or virtuous and lasting? I say brilliant, but with what lustre! A taste for ostentation never prevails in the same minds as a taste for honesty. No, it is impossible that understandings, degraded by a multitude of futile cares, should ever rise to what is truly great and noble; even if they had the strength, they would want the courage.	8
Every artist loves applause. The praise of his contemporaries is the most valuable part of his recompense. What then will he do to obtain it, if he have the misfortune to be born among a people, and at a time, when learning is in vogue, and the superficiality of youth is in a position to lead the fashion; when men have sacrificed their taste to those who tyrannise over their liberty, and one sex dare not approve anything but what is proportionate to the pusillanimity of the other; 3 when the greatest masterpieces of dramatic poetry are condemned, and the noblest of musical productions neglected? This is what he will do. He will lower his genius to the level of the age, and will rather submit to compose mediocre works, that will be admired during his life-time, than labour at sublime achievements which will not be admired till long after he is dead. Let the famous Voltaire tell us how many nervous and masculine beauties he has sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how much that is great and noble, that spirit of gallantry, which delights in what is frivolous and petty, has cost him.	9
It is thus that the dissolution of morals, the necessary consequence of luxury, brings with it in its turn the corruption of taste. Further, if by chance there be found among men of average ability, an individual with enough strength of mind to refuse to comply with the spirit of the age, and to debase himself by puerile productions, his lot will be hard. He will die in indigence and oblivion. This is not so much a prediction, as a fact already confirmed by experience! Yes, Carle and Pierre Vanloo, the time is already come when your pencils, destined to increase the majesty of our temples by sublime and holy images, must fall from your hands, or else be prostituted to adorn the panels of a coach with lascivious paintings. And you, inimitable Pigal, rival of Phidias and Praxiteles, whose chisel the ancients would have employed to carve them gods, whose images almost excuse their idolatry in our eyes; even your hand must condescend to fashion the belly of an ape, or else remain idle.	10
We cannot reflect on the morality of mankind without contemplating with pleasure the picture of the simplicity which prevailed in the earliest times. This image may be justly compared to a beautiful coast, adorned only by the hands of nature; towards which our eyes are constantly turned, and which we see receding with regret. While men were innocent and virtuous and loved to have the gods for witnesses of their actions, they dwelt together in the same huts; but when they became vicious, they grew tired of such inconvenient onlookers, and banished them to magnificent temples. Finally, they expelled their deities even from these, in order to dwell there themselves; or at least the temples of the gods were no longer more magnificent than the palaces of the citizens. This was the height of degeneracy; nor could vice ever be carried to greater lengths than when it was seen, supported, as it were, at the doors of the great, on columns of marble, and graven on Corinthian capitals.	11
As the conveniences of life increase, as the arts are brought to perfection, and luxury spreads, true courage flags, the virtues disappear; and all this is the effect of the sciences and of those arts which are exercised in the privacy of men’s dwellings. When the Goths ravaged Greece, the libraries only escaped the flames owing to an opinion that was set on foot among them, that it was best to leave the enemy with a possession so calculated to divert their attention from military exercises, and keep them engaged in indolent and sedentary occupations.	12
Charles the Eighth found himself master of Tuscany and the kingdom of Naples, almost without drawing sword; and all his court attributed this unexpected success to the fact that the princes and nobles of Italy applied themselves with greater earnestness to the cultivation of their understandings than to active and martial pursuits. In fact, says the sensible person who records these characteristics, experience plainly tells us, that in military matters and all that resemble them application to the sciences tends rather to make men effeminate and cowardly than resolute and vigorous.	13
The Romans confessed that military virtue was extinguished among them, in proportion as they became connoisseurs in the arts of the painter, the engraver and the goldsmith, and began to cultivate the fine arts. Indeed, as if this famous country was to be for ever an example to other nations, the rise of the Medici and the revival of letters has once more destroyed, this time perhaps for ever, the martial reputation which Italy seemed a few centuries ago to have recovered.	14
The ancient republics of Greece, with that wisdom which was so conspicuous in most of their institutions, forbade their citizens to pursue all those inactive and sedentary occupations, which by enervating and corrupting the body diminish also the vigour of the mind. With what courage, in fact, can it be thought that hunger and thirst, fatigues, dangers and death, can be faced by men whom the smallest want overwhelms and the slightest difficulty repels? With what resolution can soldiers support the excessive toils of war, when they are entirely unaccustomed to them? With what spirits can they make forced marches under officers who have not even the strength to travel on horseback? It is no answer to cite the reputed valour of all the modern warriors who are so scientifically trained. I hear much of their bravery in a day’s battle; but I am told nothing of how they support excessive fatigue, how they stand the severity of the seasons and the inclemency of the weather. A little sunshine or snow, or the want of a few superfluities, is enough to cripple and destroy one of our finest armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors! permit me for once to tell you the truth, which you seldom hear. Of your bravery I am fully satisfied. I have no doubt that you would have triumphed with Hannibal at Cannæ, and at Trasimene: that you would have passed the Rubicon with Cæsar, and enabled him to enslave his country; but you never would have been able to cross the Alps with the former, or with the latter to subdue your own ancestors, the Gauls.	15
A war does not always depend on the events of battle: there is in generalship an art superior to that of gaining victories. A man may behave with great intrepidity under fire, and yet be a very bad officer. Even in the common soldier, a little more strength and vigour would perhaps be more useful than so much courage, which after all is no protection from death. And what does it matter to the State whether its troops perish by cold and fever, or by the sword of the enemy?	16
If the cultivation of the sciences is prejudicial to military qualities, it is still more so to moral qualities. Even from our infancy an absurd system of education serves to adorn our wit and corrupt our judgment. We see, on every side, huge institutions, where our youth are educated at great expense, and instructed in everything but their duty. Your children will be ignorant of their own language, when they can talk others which are not spoken anywhere. They will be able to compose verses which they can hardly understand; and, without being capable of distinguishing truth from error, they will possess the art of making them unrecognisable by specious arguments. But magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity and courage will be words of which they know not the meaning. The dear name of country will never strike on their ears; and if they ever hear speak of God, 4 it will be less to fear, than to be frightened of, Him. I would as soon, said a wise man, that my pupil had spent his time in the tennis court as in this manner; for there his body at least would have got exercise.	17
I well know that children ought to be kept employed, and that idleness is for them the danger most to be feared. But what should they be taught? This is undoubtedly an important question. Let them be taught what they are to practise when they come to be men; 5 not what they ought to forget.	18
Our gardens are adorned with statues and our galleries with pictures. What would you imagine these masterpieces of art, thus exhibited to public admiration, represent? The great men, who have defended their country, or the still greater men who have enriched it by their virtues? Far from it. They are the images of every perversion of heart and mind, carefully selected from ancient mythology, and presented to the early curiosity of our children, doubtless that they may have before their eyes the representations of vicious actions, even before they are able to read.	19
Whence arise all those abuses, unless it be from that fatal inequality introduced among men by the difference of talents and the cheapening of virtue? This is the most evident effect of all our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. The question is no longer whether a man is honest, but whether he is clever. We do not ask whether a book is useful, but whether it is well-written. Rewards are lavished on with and ingenuity, while virtue is left unhonoured. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, and none for good actions. I should be glad, however, to know whether the honour attaching to the best discourse that ever wins the prize in this Academy is comparable with the merit of having founded the prize.	20
A wise man does not go in chase of fortune; but he is by no means insensible to glory, and when he sees it so ill distributed, his virtue, which might have been animated by a little emulation, and turned to the advantage of society, droops and dies away in obscurity and indigence. It is for this reason that the agreeable arts must in time everywhere be preferred to the useful; and this truth has been but too much confirmed since the revival of the arts and sciences. We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters in plenty; but we have no longer a citizen among us; or if there be found a few scattered over our abandoned countryside, they are left to perish there unnoticed and neglected. Such is the condition to which we are reduced, and such are our feelings towards those who give us our daily bread, and our children milk.	21
I confess, however, that the evil is not so great as it might have become. The eternal providence, in placing salutary simples beside noxious plants, and making poisonous animals contain their own antidote, has taught the sovereigns of the earth, who are its ministers, to imitate its wisdom. It is by following this example that the truly great monarch, to whose glory every age will add new lustre, drew from the very bosom of the arts and sciences, the very fountains of a thousand lapses from rectitude, those famous societies, which, while they are depositaries of the dangerous trust of human knowledge, are yet the sacred guardians of morals, by the attention they pay to their maintenance among themselves in all their purity, and by the demands which they make on every member whom they admit.	22
These wise institutions, confirmed by his august successor and imitated by all the kings of Europe, will serve at least to restrain men of letters, who, all aspiring to the honour of being admitted into these Academies, will keep watch over themselves, and endeavour to make themselves worthy of such honour by useful performances and irreproachable morals. Those Academies also, which, in proposing prizes for literary merit, make choice of such subjects as are calculated to arouse the love of virtue in the hearts of citizens, prove that it prevails in themselves, and must give men the rare and real pleasure of finding learned societies devoting themselves to the enlightenment of mankind, not only by agreeable exercises of the intellect, but also by useful instructions.	23
An objection which may be made is, in fact, only an additional proof of my argument. So much precaution proves but too evidently the need for it. We never seek remedies for evils that do not exist. Why, indeed, must these bear all the marks of ordinary remedies, on account of their inefficacy? The numerous establishments in favour of the learned are only adapted to make men mistake the objects of the sciences, and turn men’s attention to the cultivation of them. One would be inclined to think, from the precautions everywhere taken, that we are overstocked with husbandmen, and are afraid of a shortage of philosophers. I will not venture here to enter into a comparison between agriculture and philosophy, as they would not bear it. I shall only ask What is philosophy? What is contained in the writings of the most celebrated philosophers? What are the lessons of these friends of wisdom. To hear them, should we not take them for so many mountebanks, exhibiting themselves in public, and crying out, Here, Here, come to me, I am the only true doctor? One of them teaches that there is no such thing as matter, but that everything exists only in representation. Another declares that there is no other substance than matter, and no other God than the world itself. A third tells you that there are no such things as virtue and vice, and that moral good and evil are chimeras; while a fourth informs you that men are only beasts of prey, and may conscientiously devour one another. Why, my great philosophers, do you not reserve these wise and profitable lessons for your friends and children? You would soon reap the benefit of them, nor should we be under any apprehension of our own becoming your disciples.	24
Such are the wonderful men, whom their contemporaries held in the highest esteem during their lives, and to whom immortality has been attributed since their decease. Such are the wise maxims we have received from them, and which are transmitted, from age to age, to our descendants. Paganism, though given over to all the extravagances of human reason, has left nothing to compare with the shameful monuments which have been prepared by the art of printing, during the reign of the gospel. The impious writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with their authors. The world, in their days, was ignorant of the art of immortalising the errors and extravagancies of the human mind. But thanks to the art of printing 6 and the use we make of it, the pernicious reflections of Hobbes and Spinoza will last for ever. Go, famous writings, of which the ignorance and rusticity of our forefathers would have been incapable. Go to our descendants, along with those still more pernicious works which reek of the corrupted manners of the present age! Let them together convey to posterity a faithful history of the progress and advantages of our arts and sciences. If they are read, they will leave not a doubt about the question we are now discussing, and unless mankind should then be still more foolish than we, they will lift up their hands to Heaven and exclaim in bitterness of heart: “Almighty God! thou who holdest in Thy hand the minds of men, deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back ignorance, innocence and poverty, which alone can make us happy and are precious in Thy sight.”	25
But if the progress of the arts and sciences has added nothing to our real happiness; if it has corrupted our morals, and if that corruption has vitiated our taste, what are we to think of the herd of text-book authors, who have removed those impediments which nature purposely laid in the way to the Temple of the Muses, in order to guard its approach and try the powers of those who might be tempted to seek knowledge? What are we to think of those compilers who have indiscreetly broken open the door of the sciences, and introduced into their sanctuary a populace unworthy to approach it, when it was greatly to be wished that all who should be found incapable of making a considerable progress in the career of learning should have been repulsed at the entrance, and thereby cast upon those arts which are useful to society. A man who will be all his life a bad versifier, or a third-rate geometrician, might have made nevertheless an excellent clothier. Those whom nature intended for her disciples have not needed masters. Bacon, Descartes and Newton, those teachers of mankind, had themselves no teachers. What guide indeed could have taken them so far as their sublime genius directed them? Ordinary masters would only have cramped their intelligence, by confining it within the narrow limits of their own capacity. It was from the obstacles they met with at first, that they learned to exert themselves, and bestirred themselves to traverse the vast field which they covered. If it be proper to allow some men to apply themselves to the study of the arts and sciences, it is only those who feel themselves able to walk alone in their footsteps and to outstrip them. It belongs only to these few to raise monuments to the glory of the human understanding. But if we are desirous that nothing should be above their genius, nothing should be beyond their hopes. This is the only encouragement they require. The soul insensibly adapts itself to the objects on which it is employed, and thus it is that great occasions produce great men. The greatest orator in the world was Consul of Rome, and perhaps the greatest of philosophers Lord Chancellor of England. Can it be conceived that, if the former had only been a professor at some University, and the latter a pensioner of some Academy, their works would not have suffered from their situation. Let not princes disdain to admit into their councils those who are most capable of giving them good advice. Let them renounce the old prejudice, which was invented by the pride of the great, that the art of governing mankind is more difficult than that of instructing them; as if it was easier to induce men to do good voluntarily, than to compel them to it by force. Let the learned of the first rank find an honourable refuge in their courts; let them there enjoy the only recompense worthy of them, that of promoting by their influence the happiness of the peoples they have enlightened by their wisdom. It is by this means only that we are likely to see what virtue, science and authority can do, when animated by the noblest emulation, and working unanimously for the happiness of mankind.	26
But so long as power alone is on one side, and knowledge and understanding alone on the other, the learned will seldom make great objects their study, princes will still more rarely do great actions, and the peoples will continue to be, as they are, mean, corrupt and miserable.	27
As for us, ordinary men, on whom Heaven has not been pleased to bestow such great talents; as we are not destined to reap such glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not covet a reputation we should never attain, and which, in the present state of things, would never make up to us for the trouble it would have cost us, even if we were fully qualified to obtain it. Why should we build our happiness on the opinions of others, when we can find it in our own hearts? Let us leave to others the task of instructing mankind in their duty, and confine ourselves to the discharge of our own. We have no occasion for greater knowledge than this.	28
Virtue! sublime science of simple minds, are such industry and preparation needed if we are to know you? Are not your principles graven on every heart? Need we do more, to learn your laws, than examine ourselves, and listen to the voice of conscience, when the passions are silent?	29
This is the true philosophy, with which we must learn to be content, without envying the fame of those celebrated men, whose names are immortal in the republic of letters. Let us, instead of envying them, endeavour to make, between them and us, that honourable distinction which was formerly seen to exist between two great peoples, that the one knew how to speak, and the other how to act, aright.	30

Note 1. It is easy to see the allegory in the fable of Prometheus: and it does not appear that the Greeks, who chained him to the Caucasus, had a better opinion of him than the Egyptians had of their god Theutus. The Satyr, says an ancient fable, the first time he saw a fire, was going to kiss and embrace it; but Prometheus cried out to him to forbear, or his beard would rue it. It burns, says he, everything that touches it.

Note 2. The less we know, the more we think we know. The peripatetics doubted of nothing. Did not Descartes construct the universe with cubes and vortices? And is there in all Europe one single physicist who does not boldly explain the inexplicable mysteries of electricity, which will, perhaps, be for ever the despair of real philosophers?

Note 3. I am far from thinking that the ascendancy which women have obtained over men is an evil in itself. It is a present which nature has made them for the good of mankind. If better directed, it might be productive of as much good, as it is now of evil. We are not sufficiently sensible of what advantage it would be to society to give a better education to that half of our species which governs the other. Men will always be what women choose to make them. If you wish then that they should be noble and virtuous, let women be taught what greatness of soul and virtue are. The reflections which this subject arouses, and which Plato formerly made, deserve to be more fully developed by a pen worthy of following so great a master, and defending so great a cause.

Note 4. Pensées philosophiques (Diderot).

Note 5. Such was the education of the Spartans with regard to one of the greatest of their kings. It is well worthy of notice, says Montaigne, that the excellent institutions of Lycurgus, which were in truth miraculously perfect, paid as much attention to the bringing up of youth as if this were their principal object, and yet, at the very seat of the Muses, they make so little mention of learning that it seems as if their generous-spirited youth disdained every other restraint, and required, instead of masters of the sciences, instructors in valour, prudence and justice alone.   Let us hear next what the same writer says of the ancient Persians. Plato, says he, relates that the heir to the throne was thus brought up. At his birth he was committed, not to the care of women, but to eunuchs in the highest authority and near the person of the king, on account of their virtue. These undertook to render his body beautiful and healthy. At seven years of age they taught him to ride and go hunting. At fourteen he was placed in the hands of four, the wisest, the most just, the most temperate and the bravest persons in the kingdom. The first instructed him in religion, the second taught him to adhere inviolably to truth, the third to conquer his passions, and the fourth to be afraid of nothing. All, I may add, taught him to be a good man; but not one taught him to be learned.   Astyages, in Xenophon, desires Cyrus to give him an account of his last lesson. It was this, answered Cyrus, one of the big boys of the school having a small coat, gave it to a little boy and took away from him his coat, which was larger. Our master having appointed me arbiter in the dispute, I ordered that matters should stand as they were, as each boy seemed to be better suited than before. The master, however, remonstrated with me, saying that I considered only convenience, whereas justice ought to have been the first concern, and justice teaches that no one should suffer forcible interference with what belongs to him. He added that he was punished for his wrong decision, just as boys are punished in our country schools when they forget the first aorist of [Greek]. My tutor must make me a fine harangue, in genere demonstrativo, before he will persuade me that his school is as good as this.

Note 6. If we consider the frightful disorders which printing has already caused in Europe, and judge of the future by the progress of its evils from day to day, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will hereafter take as much pains to banish this dreadful art from their dominions, as they ever took to encourage it. The Sultan Achmet, yielding to the importunities of certain pretenders to taste, consented to have a press erected at Constantinople; but it was hardly set to work before they were obliged to destroy it, and throw the plant into a well.   It is related that the Caliph Omar, being asked what should be done with the library at Alexandria, answered in these words. “If the books in the library contain anything contrary to the Alcoran, they are evil and ought to be burnt; if they contain only what the Alcoran teaches, they are superfluous.” This reasoning has been cited by our men of letters as the height of absurdity; but if Gregory the Great had been in the place of Omar, and the Gospel in the place of the Alcoran, the library would still have been burnt, and it would have been perhaps the finest action of his life

Structure, Sign, and Play: Derrida

Structure, Sign, and Play

The essay “Structure, Sign and Play” begins with an attempt to find perhaps “something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event” and asks the question “what would this event be then?” and, “Where the structure does occur?” (2) And answer is that the structure occurs in “the centre... (which) permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form.” (1) It is a process of giving structure a center or a fixed origin. In doing so, Derrida rejects the old notion which says that the center is “within the structure and outside it”. He draws a relation between philosophical concepts like “center”, “subject”, and “event”. In addition, he offers a dichotomy of ways to think: “classical” v/s “poststructuralist.” Beside he thinks the center is not center as its totality lies elsewhere called “the origin.”

For Derrida, structure is a “rupture” or “series of substitution... a linked chain of determinations.” (1) If we look at the structure of Anand’s “Untouchable” we find the structure rooted not in poverty but in caste system which is result of hierarchal society based on old notion of history. Thus, structure is a thought or law to govern the human societies. “When everything became a system where the center is signified, the original or transcendental, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.” (2)

Derrida studies various concepts such as “an event,”  “center,” “bricolage,” (the necessity of borrowing concepts from other texts which leads to myth) and “totalization” to show the relationship between writers such as Nietzsche (concept of being and truth substituted with play, interpretation and sign), Freud (critique of self possession) and Heidegger (destruction of metaphysics). Bricolage is not only as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity,” (6) which can be applied to almost word for word to criticism, and especially to literary criticism.

Derrida (in defining sign) says, the relation between metaphysics and destruction of metaphysics describes a unique circle. The metaphysics is attacked with the help of sign which is the result of “opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.” (3) He introduces the two ways to erase the difference: first, submitting the sign to thought; second, going against the first. Derrida writes, “If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept.” (3)

Freeplay (organising the structure) is “centered structure” (1) and “notion of a  structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.” (1)

Derrida attacks all western for the hierarchy in speech/ writing, nature/ culture etc.  He undermines the concept of hierarchy created by Strauss that is between nature and culture and says that nature is superior to culture; speech is natural and writing is culture so speech is superior to writing. Structuralists believe that speech is primary and superior to writing but Derrida opposes by saying that the vagueness of speech is clarified by the writing. The writing has the pictorial quality of the speech, both are equally important, there is no hierarchy. Derrida breaks this hierarchy bringing the example of incest prohibition. Strauss says that “incest prohibition” (5) is natural and the outcome of culture; hence it becomes a norm, therefore, it belongs to culture.

This is the state to which he calls “scandal.” Both nature and culture go side by side, so we can't claim nature as superior to culture, both are interrelated and something can occupy the nature and culture at the same time. We can say that without female the concept of male can't exist. Here he thinks, “The whole of philosophical conceptualisation ... is designed to leave in the domain of unthinkable.” (5) Structuralists believe that from much binary opposition, single meaning comes but Derrida says each pair of binary oppositions produces separate meanings. So, in a text, there are multi meanings. Similarly, Levi-Strauss has made the hierarchy between artist and critic. He claims artist is originator but critic comes later. Likewise artist uses first hand raw materials as engineer does but critics use second hand raw materials. In contrary to him Derrida argues that neither artists nor critic works on first hand materials, rather both of them use the materials that were already existed and used. In this sense, there is no hierarchy between them. The binary opposition between literary and non-literary language is an illusion.

In short, Derrida means to say that meaning is just like peeling the onion and never getting a kernel. The prime objective of deconstruction is not to destroy the meaning of text but is to show how the text deconstructs itself. In future, Derrida’s ideas heavily influenced theories like psychoanalysis, new historicism, cultural studies, post colonialism, feminism and so on.

Here Derrida defines not only the structure a “rather structurality of structure.”(1) The opening makes it clear that the quarrel is between “western science and western philosophy—and ... the soil of ordinary language.” (1) Most of the concept are taken from the syntax of Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Rousseau and Husserl and “every particular borrowing drags along with ... the whole of metaphysics.” (3) The question of reltationship between the language and the relation between the human science is a always “a problem of economy and strategy” (4) which oppose nature to law, to education, to art and technics—and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society, to the mind and so on.” (4)