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Comment by gryan | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if anyone else is going to read down this far, but I have something to say. The argument that outsiders need to understand the jargon is a red herring against the ultimate point. Even if someone took the time to learn the jargon and find some intelligent thoughts, there is also language purposefully designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought - this is regardless of the jargon.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

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The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without. Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought."

That seems like a fun game, though I don't have any opinions on Continental Philosophy. I don't speak French well enough to do it in the original, so I'll have to try in translation:

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

That's not a terribly felicitous translation, but it is by no means impenetrable. Of course, we can't take that sentence in isolation-- it is the middle sentence of a short paragraph, so you need to read a bit of context, too.

The paragraph also presumes that you are familiar with the opposition (familiar since Kant, at least) between the sensible and the intelligible, and Saussure's division of the sign into a signifier (which is supposed to be sensible) and a signified (which is the intelligible portion of the sign, not the thing referred to.)

Now, if you have that context, and understand the background, the paragraph is perfectly understandable.

Explain it to us.

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