The fundamental point in understanding deconstruction is in acknowledging that these things are not in conflict:
Roderick wrote:
"Philosophers call someone a "relativist", by which they mean it's a person that holds that any view is as good as any other view. My simple response to that is this: that is a strawperson argument. No one in the world believes it or ever has believed it. No one. Derrida, or anyone else believes that any view is as good as any other view."
Roderick wrote:
...any expression of an abstract idea can only be by analogy or metaphor. "By an odd fate, the very metaphysicians who think to escape the world of appearance, are constrained to it perpetually by allegory, metaphor, and analogy." They are a sorry lot of poets... They damn the colors of their ancient fables, and they are themselves but the gatherers of fables. They produce "white" mythology.
Roderick wrote:
By the time Derrida is finished, I think that one has at least learned to be an interpreter with more grace, and with a little bit more poetry, and perhaps it would free us for a richer, more multicultural, more diverse, and more humane interpretation, if we could free ourselves from the myth, the invidious myth, that there is a right way to read a book. One. A right civilization to belong to as though we chose it. A right gender to be as though we could pick it. a right class to belong to as though we chose those things. A right race to be. A certain mythology preferable to others, as in white...
"
And here is why I love the French
Roderick wrote:
... the fact that he has a sense of humor, I don't hold against him. I wish that more academics did! I think it's pedagogically useful not to be a damn bore all the time, and just put people to sleep... it's pedagogically useful (...) And it's nice to encounter, in the dark days that lay ahead, in a trudge through what a Self can be, it's nice to encounter a playful spirit.
Derrida is very troubled about what the Self might even be, but he is troubled in a [more] playful way than Nietzsche is troubled when he's at his best. So I hope that I can at least interest you in looking at something of Derrida. In fact, I'll leave you with one last little joke of Derrida's.
So much work has been spent and so much time has been spent interpreting Nietzsche, and now of course paradoxically Derrida because these things go on and on, that he wrote a little book called "Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles ". And in it he imagines that Nietzsche left behind among his many papers a little scrap of paper that says "I forgot my umbrella". Then Derrida goes through a long complex way that an academic interpreter would try to fit this brilliant aphorism of Nietzsche's into the body of his work. I mean, it might just mean after all I forgot my umbrella... but on the other hand...