Derrida’s concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:
1. A desire to contribute to the re-valuation of all western values, built on the 18th century Kantian critique of reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
2. An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.
3. A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity, episteme vs. techne, etc.
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers beginning with Kierkegaard, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the western metaphysical tradition. Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project. That project being the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves stuck in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Moreover, Derrida follows Wittgenstein in his linguistic turn, transforming the classic question of what we can know to the question of what we can express. However where Wittgenstein directs our attention to phenomenological language games, Derrida, influenced by the structuralists, directs our attention to noumenal texts, traces of the signs which so fascinated Saussure, Barthes and Lacan. Thus for a Derridian post-modernist, the world is composed of texts, which we should seek to understand not in terms of their content, but in terms of their function in the larger political context. All texts are mirrors of politically charged signs whose (always already political) meanings (i.e. relations to one another) require addressing, mapping and intervention. The contextual noumenon, as discovered by the deconstructionist, is relatively more important than the textual content, which is always already known as a political phenomenon.
1. A desire to contribute to the re-valuation of all western values, built on the 18th century Kantian critique of reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
2. An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.
3. A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity, episteme vs. techne, etc.
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers beginning with Kierkegaard, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the western metaphysical tradition. Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project. That project being the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves stuck in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Moreover, Derrida follows Wittgenstein in his linguistic turn, transforming the classic question of what we can know to the question of what we can express. However where Wittgenstein directs our attention to phenomenological language games, Derrida, influenced by the structuralists, directs our attention to noumenal texts, traces of the signs which so fascinated Saussure, Barthes and Lacan. Thus for a Derridian post-modernist, the world is composed of texts, which we should seek to understand not in terms of their content, but in terms of their function in the larger political context. All texts are mirrors of politically charged signs whose (always already political) meanings (i.e. relations to one another) require addressing, mapping and intervention. The contextual noumenon, as discovered by the deconstructionist, is relatively more important than the textual content, which is always already known as a political phenomenon.
