Postmodernism week 6 Lecture Notes

The Derrida Virus

• Jacques Derrida - Post structuralist
• Philospher - significant comtemporary thinker
• Associated with Deconstruction - vandal, obtuse, difficult to understand
• Deconstruction sought to undermine all well ordered structures - attack on logic basic characteristic
• Derrida talks of introducing disorder, virology - his work as virus latching onto a host to pour ideas in
• Problems between us and way we communicate
• Deconstruction depends on relativism - truth relative to different opinions
• relationship of language and reality is not given
• Conceptual systems - constructed by us through language can never be justified
• Final or True definitions are impossible
• Mise - en - abyme, mirroring our experience
• binary oppositions - e.g male and female
• opague with cultural encoding
• structure underlaying everything
• one opposition has previllaged, dominated - upper hand shifts to dominate term
• cultural biasis, inventive and constructed
• to bring in whats on the outside = revealing what is concelled within the text, 'read between the lines'
• Post modernism is power!
• 'Facial Angles' strong idea of deconstruction - statue as inventive dominate
• Questions the values of our views
• dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that work within the text

• reinscribe - interpretating an alternative idea or history
• Zombie is between alive or dead, we like things to be one or the other but occupies space inbetween - undecided
• Thomas Ruff - other portrait - example of undecided
• Marcel Duchamp - undecideable object and where it sits, creating cultural aggiatation
• Aggiatation of Mulholland Drive of not having a dominant story and trying to make sense
• Aporia - difficulty - resistance of binary opposite
• Differance (Derrida word) puns on verb 'to differ' and 'defer'
• difference between and post ponement of alternative meanings that are deferred or hidden
• deconstructuion seeks to problematise all notions of knowledge/ meaning and identity - showing thses to be falsely constructed
• Remade funny games for an American version 'shot for shot' from the original 1997 (subtitled version)
• Funny games - Post modern deconstruction of 'torture porn' - sub genre of horror movies