Cameron Freeman on Derrida

In my research I came upon an Integral Life post of no significance with the usual kennilingus, but the comment by Cameron Freeman basically stopped the thread with his heresy. Excerpts of his sin follow:

I want to focus here on the connection between Judaism and the work of Jacques Derrida, arguably the most dangerous thinker in post-modernity – in order to show that Derrida is probably a more integrally orientated writer than many people realize. For my taste Derrida is a modern day Jewish prophet, for he exposes a certain "coefficient of uncertainty" in all of on our favorite texts and institutions, which causes all of us, democrats and republicans, religious and secular, the reasonable and the faithful, considerable discomfort.

He showed the green v-meme (post-modernity) that the destabilizing agency in his work is not a reckless relativism or nihilism but rather an affirmation, a love of what in later years he would call the “un-deconstructible.” For Derrida, the un-deconstructible is both a “singularity” as well as a pure and unconditional affirmation...an affirmation of something un-imaginable and inconceivable by our current standards of imagining and conceiving.



So Derrida is post-post-modern (or integral with a hermeneutic of humility) and deconstruction is a lot like what Jews would call the “critique of idols.” Deconstruction is satisfied with nothing because it is waiting for the Messiah, which Derrida translated into the philosophical figure of the “to come” (à venir), the very figure of the future, of hope and expectation... a singularity that simply cannot be foreseen or anticipated.

And in a similar vein to Nagarjuna’s (Mahayana Buddhist philosopher) dialectical demolition of reason, Derrida also visits upon us the unsettling news of the radical instability of the categories to which we have such ready recourse, which thereby opens the conditions of possibility for a mystical apprehension of un-qualifiable Emptiness (i.e. Consciousness without an object), a realization that confesses our lack of categories with fixed meanings that can be employed to make things make sense. So as a post-post-modern mystic Derrida exposes us to the “secret” that there is no Big Capitalized Secret to which we have been wired up - by scientific reason, religious revelation, or by political ideology. That is not nihilism but a quasi-mystical confession, the beginning of self-knowledge, the onset of wisdom and compassion...