Friday, September 23, 2005

Sociology, Derrida, Bollocks and Curmudgeonry

Your self-effacing Pedant-General - ever the "shrinking-violet" - is loathe to draw attention to his spectacularly good judgement. However, there are times when one's idle musings are just SO brilliant that, frankly, it would be rude NOT to point them out. (Note the carefully avoided split infinitive there...)

I refer, of course, to my categorisation of the unutterably excellent Deogolwulf as "Grammatically Unimpeachable". He is on spectacular form again today:
If you have ever awoken in the morning and thought, “in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of — and transpose onto the other — the inert passivity which contains the density of my substantial being”, then most likely you are an inveterate gobshite or a professor of sociology; — though it would take a man of rare perspicacity to tell the essence of the one from the other.

Superb!

I am reminded of a wonderful conversation with an old chum of mine - a graduate of Philosophy, from a VERY respectable Oxford College - following the death of Jacques Derrida. I had forwarded this superb Times leading article to him, with a tentative request for an explanation.

He responded, pithily:
Hmmmm... I had to study Derrida for my mods and didn't understand a word of it. But at least I knew that I didn't...

... and that put me miles ahead of most people.





2 comments:

Akaky said...

I wonder if there is something about the English language that makes all of these people sound incredibly silly or if this stuff sounds just as dumb in Slovenian, French, German, etc.?

Boeciana said...

Compare an incident in, um, a book by LM Alcott that wasn't Little Women. The heroine had taken to reading French novels; her papa was remonstrating with her, asking her if she would still be unembarrassed about reading them if they were in English. At which point she realised that they were highly unedifying, and just happened to sound glam in French.

In other words, I suspect that the modern French philosophers don't make sense in French either; but I'm mostly going by Philosophers-for-Idiot-Historians type books, so it is just conceivable that some of them are saying something worthwhile which is lost in translation and paraphrase. I doubt it, though.