Liberal, Libertario, Libertino

My colleague would open one of Derrida's works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida's admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise. On this view, as Wolfgang Pauli once said of someone else, Derrida is "not even wrong.".

In general, this is an easier form of verbal amusement than anything much above the level of a knock-knock joke. Consider the following random phrase from Of Grammatology, Chapter 2: "difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude".

My colleague's technique produces variants like "difference is always in itself a sensible plenitude," "difference is never a sensible plenitude in relation to other things," "similarity is never in itself a sensible plenitude," "difference is never in itself a sensible emptiness," and "difference is never in itself an imperceptible plenitude."

Or my personal favorite variant, "similarity is always in itself an imperceptible emptiness," which I feel is a great improvement over the original.

Leia o post original completo.

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Já que estamos falando nisso, aproveito pra recomendar um artigo sensacional. Não gosto muito de textos escritos em academês, mas esse aqui, se você fizer um esforço pra superar o vocabulário pós-estruturalista, tem umas idéias que valem muito a pena. Depois, me contem.

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Um estudo introdutório para quem ainda está tentando entender Derrida (boa sorte!):