an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017,
ISSN 1552-5112
Jean Baudrillard on Jacques Derrida
An excerpt from the
newly released book, From
Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals
and Others.
Derrida, Jacques
(1930-2004, philosopher, and deconstructionist). For Baudrillard deconstruction
is a weak form of thought. He noted that there is “nothing more constructive
than deconstruction, which exhausts itself in passing the world through the
sieve of the text. …Deconstruction is as interminable as psychoanalysis, in
which it finds a fitting partner” (Cool
Memories II: 25). While Baudrillard moved increasingly towards the fragment
(the aphorism), Derrida swam valiantly with the tide of the ocean of discourse
he produced, in his ongoing effort to defer the arrival of his topic. Whereas
Baudrillard used the aphorism to gain distance from his topic, Derrida wrote to
deny pure presence – to deny stable meaning. Each represented an important
poststructuralist recognition that we no longer have recourse to foundational,
secure meanings. As Roland Barthes once said: “The word-stone has been cast for
nothing, no waves, no ripples of meaning” ([1970] 1982: 84).
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017,
ISSN 1552-5112