“That I did not make quiete the sense to You as I wished to have, is perhaps due to my lacks of tuning in to Your particular mind set, and heretofore, will,me when occasion should arise, communicate to You via standard philosophical jargon.”
The following, Orb, is from a discourse I was engaged in with someone who wrote an article for Philosophy Now. I think it is relevant here:
“Again I hope it is clear and if not I am sorry. I was trying to be as direct and to the point as possible.”
Unfortunately, my friend, you may be engaging in a noble but, ultimately, futile project. I’m thinking here of Lacan’s point that language is like an attorney that represents us to the attorney (the language (of the other. Even though, as I would still argue, language is an agreement, it is not an homogeneous one. It is rather heterogeneous in the way a language can arrive at slight variations of agreements in the various circumstances it can find itself being practiced in (ex. Ebonics. And this can go down to the individual themselves in their own individual context. This is how two individuals can actually be in agreement yet can still find themselves in a debate –sometimes to the point of hostility.
As Voltaire put it: if you want to talk to me, you’ll have to define your terms.
And this aspect of it seems to get amplified when it comes to philosophy since every philosophical process involves an individual accumulation of terms and meanings and associations (via di̕fferrance (that aren’t always translatable to another process. For instance, I have read through your article about 5 times now, and there are still parts of it that seem impenetrable to me. And I do not blame this on you as much as I attribute it to my symbolic filter (as Hofstadter put it (as well as the terms (and their associative networks –once again: di̕fferrance (we have picked up along the way. And you are in good company. I find myself, for instance, experiencing the same thing with Joe Hughes’ reader guide to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. And that is secondary text.
And all this makes sense in the context of my recent excursion into Deleuze’s Logic of Sense in that communication is not so much a matter of the direct exchange of information as the rather oblique manner of working from the sense of what the other is communicating: the performance. This is why I should also preemptively apologize if I’m not directly addressing your points or if I seem to be going off on my own trajectory. If I seem to be doing so, it is only because your suspicion is likely true. But that would only be because I am often working from a sense of what you are saying. It’s the only process by which (through repetition and difference –that of playing what I’m doing and saying against what you are doing and saying (I can hope to get a clearer understanding of what you are doing.
On the uptake, though, your article has participated in a revision in my approach to my process. Up until now, I had thought the best approach to a difficult philosophy (once again: damn the French and their weird obscure philosophies anyway! (was to familiarize myself with the secondary text until I had enough information to delve into the actual text: to use it as a ladder until I was ready to climb into the thought of the actual philosopher. But my five readings of Joe Hughes’ book as well as the very short introduction to Derrida I’m reading now is starting to suggest how ineffective that approach is. Now I’m starting to see the secondary text as secondary to the “performance” of the actual text. I’m starting to see secondary text as supplemental to just diving into the original text and working from the sense I get from it.