Jacques Derrida goes against structuralism because it insists on a fixed origin or stable meaning. Turning subjects into separate disciplines buys into this structuralism and forms the need for said stability. “Every discipline supposes an ultimate point.” Meaning and knowledge come from language in Derrida’s eyes, and these things cannot be limited to disciplines.
Derrida states that “There is no outside-the-text…nothing that completely escapes the general properties of textuality.” Or as Joe Moran puts it, “For Derrida, writing will always generate more writing.” This blog post is an example of this if we were to take this in a literal sense. Writing is constantly bringing up questions and throughout the semester, we attempt to answer these questions through our own writing. Furthermore, there are many different ways to read texts. Depending on your viewpoints and circumstances, you are interpreting differently than those from different backgrounds.
Early on in texts, such as those from Plato, speech was prioritized as the superior form of communication. This prioritization led to the science of linguistics, and Derrida created a “counter-discipline” of grammatology, which is deemed the “science of writing.” Plato argued that speech was more pure than writing. This can be compared within the texts we’ve looked at, like Serial and Sherman’s March compared to any number of the written texts. Does the nonfiction story seem more pure and truthful through those mediums than through the others?
Interdisciplinarity is backed by Derrida because he states that the current view is that “scholars alone can judge other scholars, which disconnects the disciplines from each other and from the world outside academia.” If this were the case, then no one would be able to learn knowledge outside of their fields. If scholars were the only ones that were capable of judging scholars, who would be allowed to judge the controversial work of Slater’s Lying? Would this be limited to her fellow psychologists, writers, or those with the illnesses that are discussed throughout the book?