[untenured]

The biologist and critic of postmodernism Edward O. Wilson once described Derrida's postmodernism as the belief that "No words have any fixed meaning. Except the ones I just wrote."

[wvobiwan]

De-constructionism is what passes for leftist 'thought' these days.

"If I can't win through logic and reason, change what those words mean." Accuracy in Media is correct, Derrida is the academic con man of the century. Any using his 'arguments' might as well just admit their gullibility and shut up.

[Aquinasfan]

Edward O. Wilson once described Derrida's postmodernism as the belief that "No words have any fixed meaning. Except the ones I just wrote."

It's as simple as that. There's no point in wasting any more breath over Derrida's drivel.

Just about every modern error can be "deconstructed" this way, like Hegel's historicism. Historicism teaches that " everything changes, even truth; that there is nothing above history to judge it; and that therefore what is true in one era becomes false in another, or vice versa." So will historicism become false in another era? Etc.

[droptone]

Goddamn right. I am an admitted leftist and also a philosophy major but nothing angers me like pseudo-philosophers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Eco, Foucault, Husserl, Zizek, Adorno, Marx, Lacan and others being past off as thoughtful analysis, even philosophy. Even worse is when otherwise intelligent people get pulled into the snares of postmodernist thought (a term I use to describe pretty much anything related to continental philosophy, so areas like phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, real post-modernism, deconstructionism, most feminist works, and critical theory). All of them are intellectual rubbish. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do not have the time to study all of their works and point out all of the failures in scholarship, but luckily we have people like EO Wilson and Alan Sokal (who initiated the Sokal Affair and wrote Fashionable Nonsense afterwards, a GREAT read).