All authors had actually been dead since he was in his bedroom.
“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” — Roland Barthes
What becomes my reflection on this beautiful dusk is how a meaning can contain universal truth. Because my interpretation of the meaning of beauty is not necessarily the same as the meaning of your interpretation about beauty. This question comes to my head. Some of the statements came from predecessor philosophers, but there were two names that caught my attention this afternoon. They are Jaques Derrida and Roland Barthes, maybe some of you are already familiar with those names.
One of Derrida’s most famous concepts is called Difference, a concept which assumes that a meaning and a language is arbitrary (unstable). For example, in English the word “present” has a variety of meanings. So what’s the solution? Derrida provides a solution that we don’t seek for a meaning from the text, but create meaning with our version. When we read a book, we are often afraid of not understanding the book. But if we use Derrida’s advice, we are actually free to interpret the books that we read. We don’t need to try to understand the author’s meaning, but we can reasonably understand what is the meaning from a text by ourselves. That is why other postmodern philosophers such as Roland Barthes said that “The author has actually died since he was in his bedroom”. That is, the author no longer has power or control over the text he creates. That interpretation will roll wild. The author has no power whatsoever to stop such free interpretation.
Language as reality. Derrida once said that the real thing is just text and there is nothing outside the text. The point is that when we discuss Derrida, there is actually no word reality in Derrida’s thinking. When we study Derrida’s philosophy, reality does not exist because according to Derrida we attain that reality through language. Reality is the language itself. Language attempts to discuss reality, but this is always impossible because our language is limited. Thus, when we access reality it always uses language. However, often the terms of the word or language used are often inaccurate as well to explain Derrida’s actual thinking. So that everything can be deconstructed, including reality itself. Let’s say we imagine when we live in a vacuum of language, where there is no language in it. We wouldn’t know the accident that happened in front of our house was purely an accident or was it filming or was it two motorists who were joking. If then anyone says it was a pure accident. Then reality is pure accident and that reality reaches us through language. It turns out that a few days later someone told us, actually it was filming a movie with a hidden camera. Finally, it is only this language that is the representative of reality, so that the real is only text and there is nothing outside the text. That is why in the end Derrida said, “Let’s start from the impossible.”
Last, I have some questions for you to end my beautiful dusk. If the meaning is arbitrary, constantly changing and unstable, how can we be angry whenever something is not in accordance with what we mean? Is this ignorance or unconsciousness? After all, the essence of human nature is selfish and also more complex than it seems, right? So then, does the truth really exist if there’s no absolute meaning?
