Sullivan is going to have to set up a "Derrida Award" for incomprehensible babble. Here is an example he gives, and an amused Email response he got. "Parse this" John!
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POSEUR ALERT: "Borridori: September 11 [Le 11 Septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?
Derrida: Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are - and I want to insist on this at the outset - only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about." - from "Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida," by Giovanna Borridori. Excerpted in the latest Harper's magazine.
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DERRIDA EMAILS: Here's one that provoked a chuckle:
"Re: your post on that totally incomprehensible "Philosophy in a Time of Terror" Habermas Book. That stuff is now so funny to read but it was not so funny when it was crammed down our throats in the "Communications" Dept. at university. Mein Gott in Himmel. I read your excerpt three times just to see if it was possible to grok ANY part it.
Now that I am out in the world and making good use of college-learned skills in my pro career I can look back at the madness of way bitchin 80's college life with its omnipresent bevy of undergraduate teaching aides who conducted their earnest but indecipherable lectures by day dancing to The Cure or Violent Femmes by nite. I learned other skills in college too, such as "don't feed marshmellows to grizzly bears" and "if you're pulled over say the car belongs to her dad and of course she's 18." But I digress."
On the other hand:
No fair giving Derrida your Poseur Alert award! He's the uber-poseur--giving him this award would be like having an award for pretentious biblical speech and then awarding it to the Bible.
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