All entries for Monday 11 October 2004

Appalling discrimination against beetroot

Writing about web page http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1303552,00.html

I was very amused by the reaction of Josep Borrell, the President of the European Parliament, to the proposed appointment of Signor Rocco Buttiglione as EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security (including civil rights, discrimination, racism, drug addiction and border control).

According to The Times report, Sig. Buttiglione told the Parliament he thought families were for women to have children and be protected by men; that Europe's low birth rate was due to wowen having careers; that homosexuality was a sin and a crime; that he would not take decisions that conflicted with his religious beliefs, and that those who disagreed were discriminating against Roman Catholics.

Mr Borrell said "I find these views shocking. I don’t think we can have such people in charge of justice… Perhaps if he were in charge of beetroots, it wouldn’t be so serious." Without disagreeing with his view of Sig Buttiglione, this seems a terrible way to treat beetroot.

Charles Bourne : 11 Oct 2004 16:46 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogs from Iraq

The Times has discovered a phenomenon fairly well established for a while now - blogs by those on active service in war zones, particularly Iraq. Dubbed Milblogs, The Times reports:

In tents across Iraq, soldiers sit at computers every day and put first-hand accounts on to the internet, sometimes just hours after a battle... sharing their travails and victories, as well as hooking up with similar-minded writers to comment on army life, war, politics and much-missed families... a burgeoning new generation of Norman Mailers and Siegfried Sassoons taps out the moving, terrifying, boring or funny experiences of war. Some are debating forums for politics (many are Bush fans, but there are whole sites that support Kerry). Most are a mix of diary, letters home and e-mails received... Often ungrammatical and peppered with rough language, the soldiers’ accounts challenge reports in the regular media, which many see as over-negative.

There follow extracts from soldiers' blogs, but no URLs to link. This is one I have been reading for a while - it's one of the most "self-consciously" writerly, but none the less immediate for that (and the abuse he attracts is just extraordinary).

Charles Bourne : 11 Oct 2004 14:01 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Jackie Derrida dies —HOORAY!— who cares?

It's great to see that the death of Derrida has elicited no tears or chest beating, or even a single posting, among Warwick's 1000+ bloggers. For all the assessments in the obituaries in The Times and the Guardian (which also has Leader article pronouncing that Derrida "should be remembered as a profound thinker who made a lasting contribution to intellectual discourse") Warwick staff and students have greeted with profound indifference the death of someone whose ideas were no more than an excuse for intellectual vandalism (or as the Guardian Leader put it: "popular among those willing to question the sterile idea of a western canon").

Warwick appears not to be the only place where Derrida's demise has failed to elicit the ususal blogger unburdening. Of the folks at that collective blog of university philosophy and politics lecturers Crooked Timber, not one of them has yet felt moved to comment (though this surely can't go on for ever). Could it be that, in fact, nobody can face the prospect of having to plough through anything Derrida wrote on a Monday? Let Derrida be his own best memorialist - make what you can of the following key extract from Chapter 2 of Derrida's classic On Grammatology - and keep it close to your heart for evermore:

On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not only in theory, but in practice (in the principle of its practice) the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and derivative function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among others, a modality of the events which can befall a language whose essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated by writing. "Language does have an oral tradition that is independent of writing" (Cours de linguistique générale). Derivative because representative signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate, natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of the signified, of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you). Saussure takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic script and the language of words... This representative determination, beside communicating without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psychological or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing: phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded. (From Jacques Derrida pages edited by Stanford University curators John Rawlings, Tony Angiletta and Mary Jane Parrine)

Charles Bourne : 11 Oct 2004 13:31 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem