Post Truth & Derrida
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2020
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
Jacques Derrida was the superstar philosopher of the 1980s and 90s. Often associated with the philosophical movement known as 'poststructualism', he made the enigmatic statement that 'There is nothing outside the text'. Today, one conspiracy theorist has commented that he studied poststructualism in college and learned from it that everything is narrative. Is Derrida and his style of thought a pathway to the 'post-truth' age? Or is that a crude distortion of an important body of philosophical work? Matthew Sweet discusses Derrida and his legacies with biographer Peter Salmon, philosopher Stella Sandford, and translator and friend of Derrida Nicholas Royle.
You can find other discussions of philosophy on the Free Thinking playlist which includes discussions about Boethius, Aristotle, panpsychism, marxism, Mary Midgley https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx This includes Stella Sandford, Professor at Kingston University, in conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy and Homi K Bhabha looking at the impact of Covid https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jq87
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.9 | My name's Matthew Sweet, but our subject for this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast is Jacques Derrida, the rock star philosopher. |
| 0:45.8 | We can call him Jackie, though, not out of familiarity, but because that was the name on his birth certificate. |
| 0:51.9 | He was named after little Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin's |
| 0:55.6 | co-star, the angelic little boy, from The Kid. More revelations like that after this message. |
| 1:01.5 | Why does music move us? How does it do it? Well, if these are questions that have been firing |
| 1:07.1 | you up, I've got the very podcast for you. I'm Tom Service from BBC Radio 3 and from |
| 1:13.4 | Schubert's symphonies to video game music from how to start a piece of music and when to end it. |
| 1:18.7 | From background music to Birdsong, from Beethoven to Beyonce, from Bach to the future. |
| 1:25.4 | Thank you very much indeed. The listinging Service podcast is your guide to how music |
| 1:30.3 | works and all kinds of music to, the mastery and mechanics behind the magic. Just search for |
| 1:37.0 | the listening service on BBC Sounds and learn more about the music we all love. |
| 1:42.9 | Jacques' Jacques Derrida, the daddy of deconstruction. |
| 1:47.9 | Well, it's easy to say, isn't it? |
| 1:50.1 | And plenty have, in his long career as a 20th century philosopher |
| 1:54.0 | so well known that he became a kind of signifier of his profession. |
| 1:58.8 | Derrida was accused of obscurantism, of charlatanism, |
| 2:02.9 | of pulling the bolts and rivets from the structure of time-honoured ways of thinking about |
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