One of the main reasons that I find reading Derrida’s work useful is that I find it to be a useful tool/way of thinking in navigating the many messages that we are confronted with in today’s world on a daily basis. At no previous time have we had the capacity to be bombarded with so many messages as we do today; just as I am writing this blog post I can hear CNN’s Outfront program in the background; the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen succinctly summarizes complex news stories from all around the world in phrases of just a few words; and I am just a few computer mouse clicks from a myriad of Internet sources should I want to find out about pretty much anything in the world (albeit the quality of such potential sources is also of a very varying spectrum). This is why I think the practice of deconstruction is very valuable in today’s world as well; listening to a president’s speech or any other text for that matter is an exercise that is greatly enhanced if you are able to deconstruct it and identify the implications of signification that exist in speech (especially speech that is of a political nature).
I also find Derrida’s notion of ‘difference’ both interesting and useful; I like the clarification on page 258 of ‘difference’ as the “simultaneous movement of temporal deferment and spatial difference” and the explanation that “ideas and things are like signs in language; there are no identities, only differences”. I also agree with the view that truth will always be incomplete as if all things are produced as identities by their differences from other things, then a complete determination of identity would require an endless inventory of relations to other terms in a potentially infinite network of differences. A little discouraging, perhaps, to think of truth as always incomplete, but I also think that it’s important to keep in mind that just because it may be incomplete, this does not equate truth to never existing – it cannot be simply something that we discard because it can never be completely captured. Perhaps it would be best to think of something that we have to strive to approximate as best as possible, while knowing that it does function as always incomplete. This is also a notion that I believe to be very important to keep in mind as we approach the many discourses that we are exposed to on a daily basis.