NIN does Derrida

I'm reading about Derrida and listening to NIN's "Hurt." It's been a while since I've listened to Trent. After five Zeppelin filled days I decided it was time for a change, and when I failed to find my Tool (apparently I erased the files accidentally), I went for NIN instead. Doesn't do much for making me happier but somewhere in the catharsis there is some joy.

The reason I'm writing is really just to tell you that Derrida and NIN, specifically "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "Hurt," go very well together. Before settling down to read Limited Inc., I decided to head over to Wikipedia to see what the over-obssessed wiki nerds had to say about a man who is regarded alternately as an intellectual luminary of the 20th century, or a great charlatan who managed to fool pompous comparative lit profs in universities across the US. (It's often said that Derrida never received widespread recognition within the French academy, which is partly true, but he did hold a teaching post at L'École Normal Supérieure, colloquially referred to as "Normale," which is the French equivalent of Harvard times ten.) Appropriately, the Wikipedia article has a big red flag at the top saying that the factual content of the article is disputed. Anyways, I was reading this quote from "Structure, Sign, and Play" when a particularly painful part of "Hurt" came up:

the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence - eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth." ("Structure, Sign and Play" in Writing and Difference, p. 353.)


The particular connection had something to do with Derrida's idea of shifting centres, which somehow described to me my particular experience of "Hurt" at that point. Anyways, back to my reading.

Love Ev