Stan the man is back, with a follow up to last week’s article on “French theory.” Some notes:
-His point that Derridean recurisve writing (of which he gives a good summary) is in some ways comparable to (for instance) St. Augustine is very interesting. My Augustine is more than a bit dusty, but the idea strikes me as excellent outside-the-box thinking.
-He runs into problems with this assertion: Derrida sometimes called this “writing under erasure”: you receive the words but are blocked from finding either comfort or knowledge in their conventional or standard meanings. Comfort is a perjorative, or perhaps trivializing, term to use, and makes we wonder about the larger bent of his.
The larger issue becomes Fish’s conflation of “standard meanings” with non-standard meanings, insofar as “blocking…knowledge” is concerned.
-To whit; I think most people do have “an account of truth.” Most folks just aren’t capable of viewing and/or articulating it in any sort of systematic or comprehensible fashion. Which is understandable.
-Combining these last two points brings knowledge of my major issue, which is his massive understatement of how epistemology (or simply, belief) influences one’s everyday life. Reading Nietzsche, Thoreau, Butler, Plato, etc certainly changed the way I acted on a day-to-day basis, and I presume plenty of people have similar experiences. albiet some less highbrow.
A good way to start the day.
Bedrock & Paradox 
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