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  • From: "souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: Out of Control
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 22:20:33 +0100


>But if you, or someone, could explain to me in a couple paragraphs of
simple language how all words lie, I'd love to read it.


Toby, your wish is my command, here are two paragraphs from someone else.
But, of course, whether it is simple language is a moot point, or,
conversely, is exactly the point.

'A semantics, a poetics of correspondence, of decipherability and
truth-values arrived at across time and consensus, are strictly inseparable
from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence. Thus the
origin of the axiom of meaning and of the God-concept is a shared one. The
semantic sign, where it is held to be meaningful, and divinity "have the
same place and time of birth"(Derrida). They constitute the Hebraic-Hellenic
copula on which our Logos-history and practice have been founded. "The age
of the sign", says Derrida, "is essentially theological."
...In a time of epilogue and after-Word, a critique such as
deconstruction
must be formulated. It is Derrida's strength to have seen so plainly that
the issue is neither linguistic-aesthetic nor philosophical in any
traditional debatable sense - where such tradition and debate incorporate,
perpetuate the very ghosts which are to be exorcised. The issue is this,
quite simply, that of the meaning of meaning as it is re-insured by the
postulate of the existence of God. "In the beginning was the Word." There
was no such beginning, says deconstruction; only the play of sounds and
markers amid the mutations of time.'
(From George Steiner's 'Real Presences', Faber and Faber, 1989)





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