God Is Dead, and So Is This Sentence

This next chapter in Schindler is called On the Meaning of the Death of God in the Academy, and it's a corker. He starts with the godlessfather of deconstruction, Derrida, who "criticizes Western thought in terms of what he calls its 'logocentrism,'" -- but, get this, uses words to do so. Doesn't that automatically call his method into question, i.e., using language to undermine the very basis of language?

No, not if the real point is destruction. It's like the Islamists who want 21st century military technology to bring us back to the 7th century, or progressives who want to limit our freedom in order to free us from freedom.

The joyously preposterous logocentrism of Raccoon tradition "presupposes that meaning is present to us, at least in principle." In premodern times this was consciously identified with the Christian logos and ultimately with the second person of the Trinity.

However, "with the secularization of the post-Enlightenment West, this link has been severed, but logocentrism nonetheless persists." In other words, some people haven't yet gotten the memo that God is dead, and don't realize that any possibility of meaning went out the door with him: "Simply stated, meaning and intelligibility presuppose God."

The eternal Logos pervades the universe -- it is immanent -- but is also the "transcendental signified," the "convergent object of reference to which all signs are somehow directed." Thanks to Logos Central, all truth speaks of, and is derived from, the One Truth -- or, in the words of de Lubac, All knowers know God implicitly in all that they know, whether they know it or not.

Derrida obviously knew what was at (the) stake here, so give him credit for that. For ultimately, "The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth" (in Schindler). It's just that there is no divinity, so the sign is barren, the crib (and even womb) is empty, and meaning has no descendents. There is nothing for the sign to point to except other signs, so the system is as inbred as the Royal Family.

However, even if this were true, it wouldn't solve the "problem" of meaning, and make it go away. In the past we have discussed how fractal geometry proves that a coastline -- say, the coastline around Hawaii, or Great Britain -- is actually "infinite," like a real-life Zeno's paradox. I suppose that the closest and most accurate measurement will reach all the way into the infinite nothing of dark matter or something. In other words, you fall out of the cosmos from the bottom end.

The point is that language is actually open at both ends. You can't just close off the top -- transcendence -- and pretend you're done with it. This, I think, explains the insane fertility of language, which was one of Joyce's main points in Finnegans Wake.

There are references to this throughout the text. I could spend the rest of the morning playing this game, but let's just say that When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. That's been my credo for some 30 years, and it hasn't failed me yet.

So, "the age of the sign is essentially theological" (Derrida). But we are beyond the theological age, so "No longer do we naively appeal to a Divine Logos which undergirds the intelligibility in and of things and their linguistic expression" (Schindler).

Now, when Schindler says "we," he obviously means the tenured, for whom this is no doubt true despite the fact that truth is no longer possible for them. Whatever. Fuck you pay me.

Thus, "Derrida represents the return of [Nietzsche's] madman, insisting that the requisite time has now passed: it is time now for the death of God to be seen and heard in its full implications. Intelligibility -- identifiable meaning -- does not, and cannot, outlive God. Rather, following the death of God, we stray 'as through an infinite nothing'" (ibid.).

Have you gnosissed how the Fall can take so many diverse forms? For in the deconstructed world, "theos has been replaced by anthropos" (ibid.), which is just a fancy way of ssssaying Ye shall be as gods! It doesn't matter what you believe, so long as it amounts to nothing.

Note also how the Word, instead of becoming flesh -- and vice versa -- is displaced by the flesh. Well played, Beelzebub, well payed too.

Therefore you're a meaningless god, or a god without meaning, but hey, nobody's perfect. Plus you are in competition with a horde of similarly atomized and meaningless godlings, but seize enough power and you can control or vanquish them.

Knowledge itself is broken up into smaller and smaller parts, which reminds me of how the psychotic person is haunted by a persecutory world of projected psychic bits with no hope of synthesis and unity. Postmodernism is institutionalized psychosis, or cosmic lunacy. Not only is it a flight from transcendence, but a violent repression of it, which is how someone once defined fascism (violent opposition to transcendence, or something like that).

If you have followed the argument this far, you could say that, deep down, liberalism is not only shallow, but non-existent. It is the metaphysics of nothing, or applied nihilism. Which is why a Harry Reid, or Hillary Clinton, or Dick Durbin, are the way they are (and aren't).