I feel like I should be saying something in defense of Jacques Derrida, who upon his death has become an object of widespread ridicule, at least in the world of blogs. I obviously don't know whether Derrida was aware of blogs or what he thought about them, but I can at least speculate that he wouldn't have found them all that interesting. The texts we find or make on the internet are so direct and confessional -- it's rare to find anyting so crafted that we might call it art. Some think of blogging as an exchange of ideas, but the linguistic and psychological (although perhaps not the sociological) vehicles for that exchange seem, at this early date, pretty flimsy/impoverished. For the deep reader, there really isn't much to see; and for the deconstructing reader, the hypocrisies of the internet might just provide too easy a target. A goal, maybe... something to strive for?
MORE: Fight back against reactionary anti-intellectualism. [via Keywords]
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