Hacker News Reader

Comment by waxjar | Hacker News Reader

I feel like OP read a psychological / philosophical book and feels the need to share his newly gained insights. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, I just think it's not very relevant on Hacker News.

The guy simply likes to be anonymous. So do I. There's not that much to it.

Woopdeedoo.

View on HN

For what it's worth, I have been maintaining more of _why's code than anyone else over the last few years, and no, I didn't 'read a psychological/philosophical book,' I read lots of them. ;) This stuff is broadly applicable across all of technology, not just _why: I happen to believe that grokking Deleuze/de Landa is incredibly important for technologists, especially on the web.

That said, you are entitled to your opinion that "there's not that much to it," but I have too much evidence to believe that's the case. I just hinted at it here; when you need to summarize an entire school of thought _and_ share how to apply it, it can get a bit lengthy, and I wasn't in the mood for that, but did have many people asking me "what do you think about the possible return of _why."

I have been asked to explain French postmodernism more than twice, and read Lacan aloud and in French in front of wannabe Chinese psychoanalysts, understanding this is out of reach even for native speakers. I mean, each sentence has 5+ possible interpretation, and floats like a cloud of smoke. What you read in English can only be one interpretation among many.

Artaud, however, is very straightforward, a kid would understand: it is mostly naked scatologic poetry.

> read Lacan aloud and in French in front of wannabe Chinese psychoanalysts,

That sounds pretty damn unfortunate.

> Artaud, however

I haven't read Artaud directly, but I just wanted to mention that while D&G take the imagery of the BwO from Artaud, it's pretty much just those words: they fully develop in into its own concept (as well as the very-nearly-identical 'plane of immanence') over a few books, so it's much more Lacan (though Anti-Oedipus is a polemic against psychoanalysis, sooo) than scatologic poetry. Though they did digress into some of that silliness sometimes.

Right, but scatology do not have to be silly. Aristophanes, Rabelais, and I'm sure many more didn't fear taking about shit, pee and so on.

For those interested in learning about the subject, here's a good place to start (in order):

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics http://books.google.com/books?id=B0eB8mvov6wC&printsec=f...

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3997.pdf

and, for fun...

Jacques Derrida, Differànce http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/diff.html

These are all great, but I'd be wrong to not point out that Deleuze is a bit different, in that he is a materialist. The rest of 'the continentals' went Idealist and turned to Saussre etc because they rejected essences. Deleuze's place is solving that issue, creating a neo-materialism.

(At least, that is my current understanding of the history)

Of Grammatology is probably one of the most impenetrable books ever written. I'm not sure I'd recommend any of these as starting points.

He's like that about a lot of subjects. I think he means well, though.

that sort of attitude is no less antiintellectual than "math is hard, let's go shopping". if philosophy is not your cup of tea well and good, but don't put down people who are into it.

You got it backwards. I take philosophy rather seriously and find overconfident amateur incursions obnoxious.

Lets not continue this line of conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com