John Y. fanclub.......

[Heiko Recktenwald <UZS106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>]

Derrida, a Holocaust writer, yes, that would help to understand
the post-Holocaust, post-and-continuing holocaustic, intellectual,
that is, one no longer deserving privilege nor honor of intellect,
for all intellectuals are heavily burdened with failure to
critique their cultures, West and East, North and South, that
produced the worst mankind is capable of even while each
culture's cosseted intellectuals vaunted the advancement of
civilized life as a career sham.

Derrida helps to grasp that never again will "Renaissance man"
be a badge of distinction -- the dinner-evening dazzling polymath
suffused with knowledge, capable of pan-critique, celebrity wise
guy. Derrida, and, now his best and oft-ridiculed "followers," aptly
undermine those on-shoulders-of-giants of mind by disrupting
veneration of intellectuals as a privileged caste, by showing the
fallacy of language expertise in which all arguments are valid
if persuasively argued in well-ruled and -regulated environments.

There were no intellectuals in the Holocaust camps nor in today's.
Which is to say there are no intellectuals, on poseurs. So I read
Derrida and his even better acolytes -- no, not his promoters and
detractors who negligently sport with intellect, never put it, nor
themselves, at risk off the stage.

This is not to say that his best acolytes have ever heard of
him, and certainly would have no interest in reading his
sympathetic paens to what once was, pre-holocaust,
pre-body-in-pain.
<schnippo>