Materialism

Peter Gratton has a nice remark about Derrida on materialism. I think he's right that "transcendental signified" sometimes describes what idealism is up to better than any sort of talk about "subjective projection" (in fact, this might be one of his most important contributions to philosophy and to non-philosophy). We hardened the concepts that Derrida invents pretty quickly (with his help, since he wields them in a heavy-handed Heideggerian manner--but then again he too was only trying to insist upon how flexible the Heideggerian way of doing things actually was at the time he was writing), and sometimes the best operation we can do is to soften them up and restore to them something of their functionality, the sense that they describe philosophical operations which work back upon the conception of reality that they themselves constitute. This is why the language of textuality and reading that he uses might be even more relevant than ever (and indeed Latour uses it extensively).