Différance (1968) Différance and Deferral Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a prolific writer who had the disconcerting ability to use a thousand words when one or two would do. Différance is typical of his poetic excess and opens with I will speak, therefore, of a...
NATURE AS CULTURE: DERRIDA’S TRACE The Problem with Origins Following his tour de force presentation of “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in 1967, Jacques Derrida astonishingly published three books: De la...
ART AND MATERIAL CULTURE CLIFFORD GEERTZ and PHILOSOPHY “Art, Clifford Geertz once remarked, “is notoriously hard to talk about.” However, Clifford Geertz provided art history with a way to talk about art through material culture. A term familiar to anthropology,...
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN PART ONE Texts and Textuality The phenomenon that would be known by the 1980s as Postmodern theory or “theory” consisted of servings of a French Potée from the 1950s and 1960s, full of different ingredients, a stew of linguistic...
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, the Signifier Floated The search for origins are always futile but the process often turns up interesting moments in time. For example, when did Postmodernism begin? The answer depends upon the place one...
