Fear of Writing
I was being a nerd and watching videos of Derrida interviews online when I came across this short clip in which Derrida talks about his “fear of writing.” The fear he talks about seems to arise when he goes into “new territory,” which I think has something to do with the fact that much of his work tries to step outside of the dialectic (where there’s a thesis, antithesis, synthesis that becomes the new thesis, and then another antithesis, etc.) and depends not on the legitimacy granted by past scholarly debates, but would require scholars to “forget” the old structures of thinking and writing in order to honestly consider his ideas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoKnzsiR6Ss
Judy