> On Jun 14, 2016, at 12:30 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > > You wrote, > > A famous example of this that again got Derrida castigated was noting the > sexual connotations of imaginary numbers in mathematical symbology. > > I looked around and found that it was Lacan rather than Derrida who talked > about that. > > Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in > itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired > image: that is why it is equivalent to the √−1 of the signification produced > above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement > to the function of lack of signifier (−1). [End quote, Lacan 1977b, pp. > 318-320] >
Doh! That’s embarrassing. You can tell it’s been a few years since I last studied this. Lacan does something a little different from Derrida, so that’s probably not the best example I could use. What’s worse is I really don’t like Lacan as a philosopher so I’m doubly embarrassed. > That could almost be in _Finnegans Wake_, which for its more candidly playful > part seems probably a better source of examples of such wild polysemy and > poly-semiosis; maybe it even inspired Lacan. Yes, although most of Derrida’s early texts from the late 60’s and early 70’s get at what I mentioned quite well. A good example of Derrida on an extended treatment of what I mentioned (different connotations or senses affecting interpretation) would be “Plato’s Phramacy.” It deals with how the connotations of a word in The Phaedrus opens up various meanings. When read in terms of Peirce’s mature semiotics it’s pretty interesting for how abduction and particularly the gap between object and sign function. http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Derrida_PlatosPharmacy.pdf <http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Derrida_PlatosPharmacy.pdf> I’ll confess that while I agree with Derrida I quickly get tired of the style of his prose. A little immanent criticism goes a long way IMO. And too much style showing ones point about semiotics in the text itself grows wearisome. > What I really had in mind in your quote of my earlier message, was the idea > that from the same rich scrambling of information in natural phenomena, > organisms of different species, life stages, etc., will tend to seek or be > susceptible to often different kinds of information, and they have to do this > because there's too much information, and the pertinent information needs to > be extracted, unscrambled, interpreted, according to the interests of its > species or lineage. Yes, and I think that comes out in Peirce. Derrida doesn’t really go after that phenomena although I think it’s entailed by the logic of his earlier papers. Marion is the person who focuses in on the saturated phenomena which is roughly this “too much information” albeit in a phenomenological sense rather than in the sense of implication or drawing out inferences. > I'm not sure what you mean by saying the objects and not interpreters matter. > If you're saying that the truth of a given question about a given object does > not depend on variations of interpretation, I agree, since the interpretive > variations may reflect either some falsity somewhere or variations in the > question or in one's identification of the object. > More or less all I mean is that we don’t have absolute control over the interpretation process. The way, especially in 20th century analytic philosophy (roughly through Quine) tends to approach such things is to have a logic of a gap between object and interpreter such that all the action is by the interpreter. Peirce, while focused more on logical analysis, has objects determining the interpretant. It’s a subtle issue but a very different emphasis. That said one has to be careful not to push “determines” too far out of logic and into certain unsupportable metaphysical positions. But while that sort of misreading of Peirce is a danger, in practice I think most recognize what Peirce means by “determines” in terms of his semiotics. I don’t mean much more than that. The truths about the object are determined by what is a true representation of that object. Which seems a bit circular except that Peirce has the object “acting” in such a way that it selects indirectly the interpretations that work. The way to avoid normal problems of relativism which framed this way is to pick up his infinity community of inquirers. Although one may ask whether truth is something ontological or merely a conceptual regulatory notion. I’ve moved to reading Peirce’s notion of truth as regulatory. That is what we mean when we say something is true is what would be arrived at, not that the objects necessarily entail such an interpretant. (Although there are passages in Peirce one can read the other way)
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