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Pill Pod 211 - Derrida: White Mythology I (exclusive) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-07 04:42:00
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2026-06
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  • PP211_DerridaWM1.mp3
  • derrida-white-mythology.pdf

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Content

Okay so we have not covered Derrida his due. This is a pretty hard read, it perhaps does not convert well to podcast "content", but it changed my entire understanding of philosophy when I read it, particularly the relation between expression and truth. If you have time for homework, I hope you'll give the essay a shot.

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Comments

GolfBaller

Re: Translation Theory I love baseball and am a fan of the Angels, and that led me to look into what a translator does in the field. I learned that there's a difference between "translation" and "interpretation". Simply put, translation is more literal while interpretation gives the translator more freedom to put what the speaker is saying into terms the listener will understand. Idk, yall probably knew this, but it felt worth sharing. Love the show!

Matthew Theisen

So Prof. Richard Seaford died last year, any chance you can cover his 2004 book “Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy” he was a classic text teacher for the Greeks and his last few decades of research was how Philosophy, Athens and many other things arise out of the new “problem space” of standardized silver and gold coins within the 200 years prior to Plato. And since you are also doing Buddhism his last book, 2019 The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India. A Historical Comparison … covers the same problem space / topic just a little difference.

James Aydelotte

When it comes to language- will you get to any of Derrida’s reactions to Wittgenstein? Also, does any of this make sense in light of the basic functional mechanics of Large Language Models? For example does truth emerge from the aggregate, meta-analysis of our hot takes combed as data for the AI to train from? Is AI training hewing near to truth in the core- strange attractor -body of the training language?

ageOfBumFires

58:00 Victor unknowingly asking the quintessential Buddhist question: "Emptyness of what?" Emptyness of self, in me, you, that oak tree of truth, all of it 🪷

Matthew Theisen
>>176515896

This may be an internet creation, (first part I am quoting is from a ye old book 600 years after plato) … but Diogenes and Plato after arguing about tables and cups since cup is a shape but also empty / not all sides (something Pythagoras pointed out with his greed cup, a tech almost identical to modern toilets.) Well Diogenes with this story follows up "I think you will find here is the 'emptiness'" pointing at one’s head.

Vesna

That footnote quoting André Breton who goes and on about how much he hates neck-ties for their absurdity and phallicness! I couldn't stop laughing. The episode was difficult to understand, but then again, I made the mistake of listening before reading. Glad you are covering Derrida.

alexis kavas

in Greek language there is a tree called "Δρύς" which is an archaic way to call the OAK three. The Druid is called "Δρυΐδης" . So i think it has an proto-IndoEuropean root.

Vesna
>>176552313

Okay, now that I've read it: I was surprised at how closely the last few pages described an emptying out of the circular disc of the sun (the ultimate "full" metaphor) turning into an Ensō (circular and empty). If I understood it correctly, Derrida wants to say that there is no original thing that language refers to. It's more like metaphors all the way down. 🐢🐢🐢

Moon Hop

The bottle cap is attached because it is recyclable with the bottle

Vic

i appreciate victor being the one to stand in for the listener this time xD

voidvariety

Great to hear you guys cover Derrida again. Have recently been relistening older releases on the subject as I got into his books: on Grammatology and Writing and Difference, as of now. The podcasts are an irreplaceable helping tool to facilitate the understanding — thank you. Fiction dictates reality.

Manny Furious

Towards Victor's question at the end, about Derrida possibly cutting off the limb he's sitting on-- it's like if I give you directions to my house. The language I'm using is all metaphorical, inherently. But if you and I have similar usages of certain kinds of language, you can still find your way to my house using my directions. The words or symbols I use to help communicate the way to my house have no inherent meaning. They don't mean anything deeper than their usability. There is no hidden truth about the world in the directions I give you to my house. Philosophers have a tendency to believe there is something deeper in language than its ability to be used. They have tended to think there's some hidden truth underneath the directions i gave you to my house. But there is no truth, only metaphor and usage. It's possible to follow Derrida's directions without thinking there's something more there then the directions he's giving you. He wants the reader to get somewhere. Nothing more, nothing less. And Derrida understands as much, so he doesn't undercut his own points about the limits of language by his use of language. The relevance to a political scientist on a critical theory/philosophy podcast should almost go without saying.

James Moore

Pls keep going down the Derrida path. Would be cool if Buddhist-Phenomenology, followed by analysis of metaphor, could be capped off with a ‘technics’ of the body via A Thousand Plateau? Would be cool to play with this sense of metaphor through a text like that, applied to the problems persistent under the last few episodes…. Thx 😊

Zachary Manenti

yay! So important for our broad arc….. His thought expresses Buddhism in its attention to the absence that structures the relations of language. The play of the void, a rupture in language’s representationalist fantasm of stability, certainty and identity, based on the logic of the imaginary self same. You could call Derrida a buddha or bodhisattva of differánce, the non-being that haunts language as its impossible truth. …Just wait til I actually listen to the podcast! … how will I next try to fill the void in meaning then?! Go eric on Saussure: “cash out my signifiers with meaning ( signifieds) but its value comes from its difference w other signifiers…’ 😎 Derridas text really seems to be working over (performative) Victor: all his uncertainty about it all. (Paul de Man on Tropes)

Zachary Manenti

Dude, Just do your own reading w us of White Mythology. Derrida is important… if victor doesn’t get it and eric is ambivalent, just do the reading w us without the podcast group. JD is essential to read! And ur the guy to do it! c’mon… please?

Plastic Pills
>>177216072

I think their attitudes are more representative of people's response upon reading this text, so I think convincing them it matters is more important than declaring that it matters, though later in the summer I would gladly post some solo content on this reading

Matthew Theisen

hey this is a selfish wish, but all this Buddhism, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida stuff is reminding me of a node that connects all of them and that is the 1874 former Catholic Priest … Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint • it is a selfish wish for I can not think of a short 20 page essay about his ideas and claims, and my knowledge of him is second hand summaries. Well this man after he left the church over Vatican 1 (the pope is not infallible and he kidnapped a child to raise as his son, that is why the Papal States disappeared… well he taught at Vienna , here let me quote wikipedia > In 1874 Brentano published his major work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. From 1874 to 1895 he taught at the University of Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Among his students were Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Tomáš Masaryk, Rudolf Steiner, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, and Christian von Ehrenfels and many others (see School of Brentano for more details). And if you look of the School of Brentano, which is not a school merely thinkers who met him first hand or argued with the man’s books … you will also see all this Analytic Philosophy such as Ge Moore, Bertrand Russel and thus one more generation away the Bloombsberry Group such as Econ Guy Keynes and so on. To circle it around to Brentano and Buddhism and Ponty with Derrida. Brentano main claim is we must separate Perception from Judgement, and when we are taking in Conscious Perception there is a point of intentionality, thus if we look at a duck / rabbit illusion how we start looking at the image determines whether we see the duck or the rabbit and so on.

Matthew Theisen
>>177744586

How I was reminded of Brentano is that Freud had him as his teacher in undergrad at age 20 (so 1874, aka same year the famous book was published and a year after leaving the priesthood) … and Brentano was teaching a form of his book but also railing against an 1869 book Eduard von Hartmann … Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Induction Method of the Physical Sciences well Freud and Brentano are not talked about as much as Brentano and other people like Husserl and Heidegger, or Brentano and the Analytics … yet this kind of was a big influence on Freud even if the stuff did not kick into till decades later for Freud was merely 20 and he was in his science bro phase for several decades (like his Cocaine paper would be when he was age 30.) Private Practice age 32, first time using psychoanalysis as a unique term age 42, etc, etc. ===== Feel free to disregard, you just recently set my mind a little more inflame and I like the general product 🙂 but some excitement and enthusiasm has been triggered via this series so I am saying too many words … Just Want to say Thank You 🙏

Tim G

I really enjoyed this discussion, and the imprecation to actually read the text, which took me a while. Going back to the poetics of it all I was reminded of this bit from "Of Modern Poetry" by Wallace Stevens: [...] The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43435/of-modern-poetry

DAT

Finding worn out metaphors to use in philosophy is fucking impossible now with the glut of fan fiction and self published sci-fi and fantasy.

DAT

I think a lot about the climate that Derrida was writing in. The conservative backlash to '68 and the civil rights movement led to the new old time religion and declarations of biblical inerrancy.