Derrida: Leviticus 10:10

Poking around in leftover thoughts scavaged on by the vultures of my intellect, I came upon this doctoral thesis by Adrian Platts:

Jacques Derrida, the Sacred Other and Seventh-day Adventism: Stumbling on the Creative Play of Différance in Genesis.

This seems to be the only text on the internet (as of first Google search) that uses Leviticus 10:10 and Derrida together:

What Derrida means when he uses the word "sacred" is not immediately evident nor is it necessarily consistent. The French - sacré - clearly sharing a common root with the English, provides no obvious additional insight. In a biblical context, one stumbles on the word "holy" - the Hebrew root being transliterated qdsh. Whether in the verbal form (qadash) or as a noun (qodesh), the idea of holiness or the sacred is denoted - including the idea of being separated or set apart. Hence, the sacred stands in direct contrast to that which is "common or profane" as in Leviticus 10:10: "You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the clean and the unclean" (NIV). Here "qodesh occurs as the antithesis of hol ('profane,' 'common')." (p. 36, ft. 144) (Platts adds another antithesis: blessing, curse. p. 36) 

See 144 Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Jr. and Bruce K. Waltke (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), s.v. "1990.

The author of this doctoral thesis is Adrian Platts, and he wrote it in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, in November 2012.

Platts himself speaks correctly in noting that the basic meaning of "holiness" is that of being "set apart" or "separated," but I hesitate to give "blessing, curse" the same status. Not having read all of Platts's thesis, I don't know what he does concerning Derrida's inconsistency, but Leviticus 10:10 might offer some insight, given the verse's use of both parallelism and chiasm. 

Maybe . . .

Make a distinction . . .

Derrida speaks of difference, of distinction between this and that, and somewhere that the sacred and the profane are distinguished as of between clean and unclean, which reminds us of the original act of separation between light and darkness, but why meaningless separations such as those demanded in Leviticus?

Or has Derrida said nothing of the sort?

Wittgenstein said that in the presence of that before which we cannot speak, we usst remmust werg emsinrem . . .

A wordy world? A worldly word?

Yeah, it's . . .

Language Games

I. Pour Derrida:

This word is strictly about

whatever this word keeps out.

II. Für Wittgenstein:

This world is solely within

whatever this world keeps in.

Another reworking?

Derrida asks: "What's the difference?"

"It's all the same," Wittgenstein replies.

Is this Game Serious?

Here is the most current version of whatever it is that I'm doing these days:

Language Games

I. Pour Derrida:

This word is strictly about

whatever the word it leaves out.

II. Für Wittgenstein:

This world is solely within

whatever the world it leaves in.

According to Pynchon, if the world is just all that the case is, that's a pretty discouraging basis upon which to place any kind of romance.

Worldly Word

I first worked on this short, two-point poetic work many years ago, during my early times in Germany. This current version is rather different from the one back then and also from the one posted a couple of blog entries ago. Here is the current version:

Hermeneutics of Suspicion

I. Pour Derrida:

This poem is strictly about

whatever in word it leaves out . . .

II. Für Wittgenstein:

The world is solely about

whatever in case it leaves out . . .

Chronology apart, are the two parts coherent? Note also the apparent etymological connection between "pour" and "für." Are they linked? In a post like this one, you can bet on a good deal of trickery.

Expletive Undeleted?

Perhaps that limerick I finished would work better without the profanity and a few other words I used. You judge:

Krypticket

Heading home through a thick, thickety thicket

got me a dadgummed low-speed, speeding ticket

for driving too slow,

so I floored it to go,

and flew faster than lickety split it!

You can see the original profane word a couple of blog entries back, one of those "expletive-undeleted" cases in which the speaker regrets having spoken what was spoken by the speaker. Kind of like in the sentence preceding this sentence that I am right 'now' writing . . .

Word and World

Deconstructive Hermeneutics

I. Pour Derrida:

This poem is strictly about

whatever

in word it leaves

out . . .

II. Für Wittgenstein:

The world is solely about

whatever

in case it leaves

out . . .

Happy New Year, 2022

Perhaps the limerick that I've been laboring on would work better with a few small changes:

Krypticket

Heading home through the thick, thickety thicket

got me a goddamn low-speed, speeding ticket

for driving too slow,

so I floored it to go,

and flew faster than lickety split it!

And here we are, on January 1, 2022, housebound in Seoul due to a ten-day quarantine placed upon travelers to South Korea arriving from the United States. Happy New Year.