“exited” in the penultimate paragraph > … can get so easily “excited” …

further above “he/she would in a circular manner” > “he/she would read in a circular manner”

I have studied only linguistics and psychoanalytic anthropology, please excuse me if my comment turns out to be mangling your concepts of philosophy.

Many thanks, once again, and for the same reason I thanked you before. ÖO.

Greetings from, I guess, me.

I took what seems so far to be a lot of time to understand and value de Saussure all the while teaching the theory (we all somehow take it for granted that was his’ since probably none of us attended the course when he did actually teach what he taught), thus “of language.” I would like to mention therefore that your brief study (above) and wording of de Saussure-Derrida continuum struck the right cord, with me and here at least, as I also had the luck to enjoy a brief (question-answer) conversation with Derrida himself years ago.

Your understanding concurs with what may be considered as yet “another dimension” I added to (as also was inspired by) “the temporal” that Derrida adds to “de Saussure”, and I am only grateful to you that your account of “the temporal” in question is clear enough.

In this no-famous novel that I wrote in 1995 (“Yagmur” in Turkish, which could be translated as “Rain” in English), I had come as close to actualizing this “befores-afters continuity” as creating chapters that would or would not necessarily follow from each other. In other words, the reader could start from any page in the novel – it would still be the same novel that he/she would in a circular manner. One critic -not that I had many, by the way- thought this architecture created a blurry-enough picture that might be said to correspond to how the title takes shape in reality. I guess my point was more to do with how it would take shape in the mind as observing reality.

The reason I wrote about my text is that the consciousness such a way of thinking brings about is not an easy and practical (practicable?) one, I mean, when a young student of philosophy can get so easily exited by all this. One reason I can mention here is that people also forget, almost in the very same structural manner. But something, that very something, sifts through forgetting.

I just wanted to thank you, and encourage the responder who had his good a, b, and c further into thinking that a and c may as well be possible. Maybe that’s all what we are doing all the time :)

Please keep up the good work,
Onder Otcu.

I wasn’t sure from the way you put the first comment whether you were being snarky or whether you actually wanted to dialogue about Derrida. Your second comment is much more dialogue-friendly : ) First, I’m no Derrida specialist, but I do find this particular essay interesting. I don’t think that Derrida would subscribe to “closure under entailment.” Why? Because differance always involves *deferment* (temporal aspect) and difference (spatial aspect). That is, I never fully know anything much less all things.
Linguistically speaking, each sign that occurs in language refers to something preceding it and anticipates something that lies in the future. Therefore, the present signification of a sign is constituted at the intersection of its past and future. In short, the present is always dependent on a movement to the past, and similarly, the present requires a kind of anticipatory movement to the future. Derrida “instantiates” his view in the very form of his lecture, which is why the lecture has five different beginnings. You can’t understand the opening claim upon first reading. Rather, you have to understand what comes later by going back to the beginning (which makes the text a difficult read). I get the feeling that there is no “closure” at all for Derrida, the postponement continues with no endpoint in view.

Best,
Cynthia

Doesn’t Hume say something similar in his _Enquiry_? When I think of e.g.,an apartment, I don’t think of it in some kind of “vacuum” so to speak (completely isolated from all other ideas). It seems to me that he’s simply presenting a version of meaning holism in a postmodern vein.

Cynthia