Rick Roderick on Derrida - The Ends of Man [full length]

This video is 7th in the 8-part video lecture series, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1993). Lecture Notes: I. Richard Rorty may be viewed as an “Americanization“ of Derrida: widely considered the postmodern thinkers (perhaps wrongly). Here we will use Rorty as a guide to Derrida. II. Derrida’s emphasis is on fallibility, contingency, finitude; positions partially demonized as relativism, deconstruction, and vaguely connected to radical politics, multi-culturalism, and so on. III. “Deconstruction“ originates in Heidegger’s project of the deconstruction of metaphysics, an “uncovering“ of the history of Being. Derrida notes, as he proceeds through a series of techniques of deconstruction as reading or misreadings of texts, that philosophers have always tried to fill in the blank in “Being is __________.“ IV. But they have failed due to the nature of language which is constituted by difference, material