Regardless of how or whether you relate to Buber's vision, I and Thou makes for a frustrating read. Seemingly simple words are used in new and alien contexts. Solutions are announced rather than derived. Worse, while nominally divided into three parts, I and Thou is really more of a loose collection of 61 aphorisms. Following Buber's reasoning by comparing his different uses of Continue Reading …
The Structure of Everything (Not School Discussion of Deleuze Now Posted)
On of our most frequent requests for coverage on the podcast is Deleuze, a name I don't even recall hearing in my grad school days. PEL proper will cover him in 2013, but our listeners were impatient and formed a Not School study group to get a jump on the effort. More concrete and flavorful than either Derrida or Heidegger, yet with all the fun (or painful effort, if you like) Continue Reading …
Not School: Giles Deleuze’s “A Thousand Plateaus”
On Chapters 1-3 of the 1980 book by Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Daniel McKay, Dom Romani, Paul Harris, and Rian Mitch. A large-scale picture of cosmology. We hashed through a set of difficult concepts: Deleuze describes cultural products (and other things) as "rhizomatic," i.e. organized with all sorts of ad hoc connections growing Continue Reading …
Structuralism Summarized in 30 Minutes
Watch on YouTube. Here is a surprisingly edifying and entertaining synopsis of structuralism. I particularly like how Prof. Louis Markos connects Saussure's work to the "proto-structuralism" of Freud and Marx. Also enjoyable is Markos' mini-rant, in light of Wes's recent post: Structures are found in all areas of thought and study, from history to linguistics, psychology to Continue Reading …
Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Dissection, Part I
Yesterday I started trying to record a "Close Reading" on the Derrida essay we read for the podcast, and I just couldn't get more than a few sentences into it before losing patience, so I thought I'd either as a substitution for that effort or possibly a warm-up do a few posts dissecting the essay here. I want this to be group effort, so you folks should comment here to help Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al)
This is a short preview of the full episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more Continue Reading …
Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al) (Citizens Only)
On Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), and Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language at a given time has a Continue Reading …
Topic for #51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida)
We've posted our episode (here) on a historical progression in thought that is still responsible for a lot of the hard-to-read parts of continental (mostly French) philosophy today. First, we read Part I and Part II, Chapter IV of Ferdiand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics(read it online here), published posthumously in 1916 (it's basically lecture notes by his Continue Reading …