since I'm in the hobby of posting my papers... I just finished just this moment and will scurry to school for submission!

One powerful image that Derrida uses to shake Levi-Strauss’ anthropology is the fact that Levi-Strauss uses the notion of the “lesson.” It was said that: “calculated for the purposes of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, most often between the other society and our society.” (page 113, “The Violence of the Letter”). By using the notion of “lesson” brings to mind the structure of the school wherein a teacher in hegemony and a claim to truth says what is good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, and all the permutations of the categories of correctness VS error. Although at first, the first “teacher” may be Levi-Strauss and his team while they were at the Nambikwara tribe teaching writing by the very act of giving out pencils and paper, what Levi-Strauss really means is the tribespeople teaching Levi-Strauss and the whole of his anthropology the “nature” of writing and its role in culture. Without any ado Derrida being the postmodernist that he is, demolishes this “lesson” by two grounds: the methodological and the ideological.
A very strong criticism of Derrida to Levi-Strauss is his question of the empiricism in methodology to the brand of anthropology Levi-Strauss made. To sum it up, Derrida attacked the fact that Levi-Strauss systematically affected the data he was collecting and hence the basis of his anthropology through his mere presence as a foreigner and power to incite the “scandal” of the proper name in the Nambikwara tribe. To quote Derrida: “It is the anthropologist who violates a virginal space no accurately connoted by the scene of a game and a game played by little girls… The mere presence of a spectator, then, is a violation.” (page 113, “The Violence of the Letter”). In this, Derrida already says that a grain of salt should be taken to Levi-Strauss’ brand of anthropology and perhaps of all anthropology that engages in the method of ethnography and the travelogue.
Another strong criticism of Derrida to Levi-Strauss is his mention of Levi-Strauss’ subscribing to the ideologies of Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. As a man of science Derrida said that one should be concerned with nature as it is. By saying that Levi-Strauss subscribed to ideology meant that he was less of a scientist and more of a humanist. In this criticism, Derrida invokes the Rousseauist category of “nature” and “culture” with which Levi-Strauss moves around in his anthropological discourse. To say briefly: “The opposition between nature and culture to which I attached much importance at one time… now seems to be of primarily methodological importance.” (page 103. “The Violence of the Letter”), Derrida says in this that the fact that Levi-Strauss built his anthropology on the Rousseauist category of “nature” and “culture” already thins out the science of his anthropology.
Running a risk of being a reflection paper more than a reaction paper, I courageously will pursue this point with the knowledge of this risk. I think all writing takes on this structure which Derrida accuses Levi-Strauss of: that one draws one’s knowing and categories from one’s own conception of “nature” and for Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, his conception of humanity as naturally can be seen in “the savage mind” in his constructing it as the “virginal humanity” with no influence from any “urbanity” which he on the other hand constructs as the polarity of “the savage mind” as the “civilized mind” that has already veered from the “state of nature.” This can be seen in the Rousseauist constructs of “nature” and “culture” which Levi-Strauss subscribes to. It can be seen that though Levi-Strauss says that the Nambikwara tribespeople are still a “culture” he though presents it as a “culture” closer to the “state of nature.” This I believe is a very romantic move. To glorify the state of nature and to present urbanity as “less natural” and so predispose one’s self to attribute goodness and evil respectively is a very violent act. To force upon human and cultural reality theoretical and philosophical categories might in fact confound the knowledge that can be produced in Levi-Strauss’ anthropology.
I believe that writing takes on this same structure and process. By graphically representing one’s thoughts in a medium, the letters in the written document brings with it its own genealogical characteristics and categorical positionality among the plethora of conceptuality from which it emerged. In “sending off” a unit of meaning from what is always from the past in writing, one confounds the knowing of the succeeding generations of “readers” of the letter. Though Levi-Strauss works with a logic of going back to the “roots” of the “cultures” that are closer to the “state of nature,” writing violently projects itself unto the future. In a very powerful sense, writing is always a promise to the present that it will exist. Much like how writing is depicted as “immortalizing” even in the Ancient categories of the Greeks and Romans, Derrida depicts that writing also makes mortal the writer. Much like how Levi-Strauss’ ideological categories died in its encounter with the Nambikwara culture, what a writer sends off in the future necessarily dies in its being taken agrasp as foreign by its readers.
Derrida mentions that writing stems from a “genealogical anxiety,” but I believe that it should be compounded with an attitude of its opposite: an “anxiety for contingency.” That in the violence of the letter and its power to construct all forms of knowing taken after it, one should take into account that the knowing that it affects might actually make the letter mortal and place the boundaries of its life. Every reading is a contingent meaning that in its very potentiality and capacity for the “new interpretation,” the letter is made aware of its archaic nature of simply being a document of culture.

Just a paper I submitted for my class... I think it's nice :))

In her Chapter 2, “The Linguistic Sign” Julia Kristeva calls into question Principle I of the study of linguistics, “the arbitrariness of the sign”. She says this and I quote: “the ‘arbitrariness” of the sign is, so to speak, normative, absolute, valid, and obligatory for all subjects speaking the same language” (Kristeva, page 14 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). This calls to mind that the nature of a language is something that exists between “discourse” or “linguistic” communities and consequently binds them through a shared system of consciousness. This shared system of consciousness though emerging from the social, through convening of communities to assign signifiers to signified in language and discourse, is not open to frequent dissenters and has a primary normative quality-- that conformity to tradition is what is considered “good.” Hence Kristeva articulating the qualities of language as such: absolute, valid, and obligatory.
Another point that the arbitrary nature of language posits at is its “unmotivated” character. Kristeva expresses it as follows: “the word ‘arbitrary’ signifies more exactly unmotivated, that is to say, there is no natural or real necessity linking the signifier and the signified” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). In addition to this, Saussure himself or at least those who wrote “Course in Linguistics” express this property of language as well and I quote: “Language is a convention, and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter” (Saussure, page 10 Course in General Linguistics). This just goes to show that language as a system of signs and the relationships that they build are not important, the fact remains that no matter how perceived inefficient or idiosyncratic a system of signs is, it is still valuable in that it serves its purpose of binding people and creating communities through a shared system of consciousness. I invoke here Kristeva’s mention of Saussure notion that “language is an 'extra-rational' function, which mean that its material offers itself up to practice of differentiation and systematization that do not necessarily fall within the province of the subject’s reason” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). The semiological life of a sign is beyond knowledge since this same semiological life of the sign that is language for a community of speakers, is itself a necessary pre-condition for knowing. To put it simply, before we even begin to be rational, we need to irrationally assume the rationality of a language from which we are obliged to move about.
In this exposition of the arbitrary nature of language, Kristeva makes some reservations in taking it as it is. Kristeva comments that “it is not the relationship between the signifier and signified that is arbitrary… What is arbitrary is the relation between this sign and the reality it names, in other words, the relation between the language symbol and its totality and the real outside it that it symbolizes” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). In this dispute whether Saussure means to say what is arbitrary, Saussure must allow us to fill the gap since as Kristeva said: “his reasoning has found it lacking” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics).
I personally adhere to this criticism of Kristeva since Saussure himself said that “what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system if distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (Saussure, page 10 Course in Linguistics). The usage of the words “arbitrary” and “unmotivated” is contradictory and at the very best paradoxical when juxtaposed with mankind’s natural faculty of constructing language. The fact that Saussure himself believes that it is simply natural to construct language regardless of its form whether in phonetics, writing, gesturality, or etc, there is already the unarbitrariness and motivation in language. Mankind just can’t help but to construct a language. With this image in mind, I bring to light Kristeva’s comment. Every human artifice that we construct for ourselves though emerges from our free willing as creatures simply capable; these artifices in turn construct us. In this sense, I depict language as like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we have created a creature that we need to tame in order for it to serve us.

Mundo ng Bangketa/ World of the Sidewalk

Sa pagitan ng Philamlife tower
At ng Ayala Avenue,
Maluwag ang espasyo
Para sa katawan kong 29-23-31.
Kasama ko ang aking sanggol
na nasa aking mga braso
Sa tapat ng espasyong
Dating buntis na sinapupunan.
Subo-subo niya ang aking suso,
Pinipiga ito para sa gatas
Tila bampirang sumisipsip
mula sa utong na duguan.
Nang mangawit ang aking bisig
Sa pasaning buhay na ito,
Akin itong pinalaya,
Sa hanging tila puwang na para sa lahat.
Ngunit okupado pala ang hangin,
Bagkos inagaw ng “hangin”
Ang aking bisig, braso, at kamay
Sa paglampas sa mundo ng bangketa.
Mukhang masyadong maliit at masikip
Ang mundo para pa maisip ang mag-unat.

It's the first time I'll post something in my first language Filipino.

I'll attempt a translation here NOW!

Between the Philamlife tower
and Ayala Avenue,
loose is the space
for my body that's 29-23-31.
In the company of my infant
that is on my own shoulders
across the space that
was once my pregnant womb.
mouthing my own breast,
distilling it for milk
as if a vampire that sucks
from a nipple bloodied.
When numb my arms went
with burden of life as this,
I freed it,
In the wind as if a lack that's for all.
But occupied was the air,
Hence took by the "air"
My arm, shoulder, and hand
In going beyond the world of the sidewalk.
Looks like too small and cramped
The world is, even to think of stretching.

- I noticed that when I write in my home language, the meaning seems to be so much more political and less of an attempt for beauty. Probably it's in the nature of English appearing as "universal" to me and Filipino as "particular." Nonetheless, the experiment has confirmed my expectations. Writing in English lacks that element of the "identity" for a Filipino such as myself.