Check out this Roderick video on Derrida. He deals, to no small degree, with the quintessential Derrida, namely, the meaning of deconstruction, a term that he understands to signify “housework (see 2:00 in).”

This lecture is still part of Roderick’s Self Under Siege lectures. And what I have realized are the most important points to consider in this series are found in the first lectures, entitled “The Masers of Suspicion” (pay special attention to what Freud does with knowledge). The reason I make this last claim is because he sets out the trajectory and logic of the course there. That is, the masters of suspicion undermine the idea that we, as humans, know either ourselves or really anything at all. But, to deny a knowledge of (and presence to) the self is to deny knowledge of a boundry between ourselves and the natural world, the natural world and our own creations.

This point, I believe, is important. Mr. Callid called me out in my previous post for defining Baudrillard a postmodern thinker, and he was right to do so. (As you’ll see through this Derrida lecture, postmodernity understood in Derrida’s terms has little to do with Baudrillard). Unless, that is, one accepts the basic premises of Roderick’s argument, that the loss of self–a trust in the self–in any respect sets the conditions for moving toward Baudrillard. Baudrillard is the logical conclusion of postmodernity if (and this is a big “if”) we are not careful. Then again, to someone in Baudrillard’s case, this loss is not a loss at all.

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