Aha
9 o'clock, July 14, 2005
Richard Rorty has often suggested that we treat Derrida’s work as a new kind of writing, a form of commentary on philosophy that owes something stylistically to Heidegger and to the experiments of literary modernism. Twenty years ago, when he made that claim to a bunch of graduate students at Virginia, he deeply offended those among them who regarded Derrida as being the bearer of some Revealed Truth. But I think it’s a decent enough way of thinking about Derrida’s strange prose. And I remain as mystified by the people who think that Derrida must be publicly repudiated if literary criticism is to be considered legitimate as by the people who once believed that Derrida had descended from the poststructuralist mountaintop with the tablets.
Talking of those “maybe I should just go to grad school” moments, I wish there was some way I could go back to school and study literature under Bérubé, philosophy under John Holbo, and economics under Brad deLong. Oh, and maybe physics under Brian Greene or Lee Smolin. And biology under Zombie Stephen Jay Gould.
All at the same time.
Except that you only get to pick one of those five things in grad school...
Don't pick physics - Brian Greene gives me hives every time I see him on TV.