Derrida for Dummies

Confiscate my cool kid card. I knew almost nothing about Derrida before I encountered him in our reading this week. I knew the word deconstructionism, and I knew he was important, but that was pretty much it. I needed more background on Derrida to feel comfortable approaching the Biesecker text, so I looked him up. If you find yourself in a similar position, this video was a sort of charming and helpful primer:

In case you don't have ten minutes to spare for Derrida, here's my breakdown of some key words (with the caveat that I'm new to Derridean philosophy and therefore might be wrong):

• Deconstruction – "dismantling our excessive loyalty to any idea and learning to see the aspects of the truth that might lie opposite." Of Grammatology argues that speech is privileged over writing, reason over passion, words over pictures… we are always assigning value arbitrarily. Deconstructionism examines binaries and value statements. “To deconstruct an idea is to show that it’s confused and riddled with logical defects and that we must keep its messiness constantly in mind.”
• Aporia – "impasse, or puzzlement, a state we should be proud to know and experience regularly." How you feel when you successfully deconstruct an idea. If you’re confused, it just means you’re finally thinking hard enough.
• Logocentrism – "over hasty, naïve devotion to reason, logic, and clear definition, underpinned by a faith in language as the natural and best way to communicate." A bad thing, it seems. Privileging language and reason over music and feeling, for example. 
• Binary opposition - term coined by structuralists and argues that words should be examined in terms of opposites. Hot/cold, bad/good, man/woman. Each of these binaries is hierarchical, which means that one is always perceived as being better than the other. 

BONUS: This video is only three minutes long and explains the idea of diffërance fairly well, but the narrator does a bad French accent which I find annoying, so I'm not recommending it.

• Diffèrance – the idea that "a word’s meaning can never be absolutely pinned down". You can’t define one word without using other words, which in turn would have to be defined by other words. Meaning is messy and subjective. 
• Essentialism – philosophy which asserts that there is an absolute essence of things.

This exercise helped me prepare for the Biesecker reading and made me feel a little less like a dummy. I thought I'd pass along my notes in case they could help someone else. :)