Death of the Reader, anyone?

"We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is

necessary to overthrow the

myth: the birth of the reader

must be at the cost of the death of the Author."

...wrote Roland Barthes

I have memories of childhood. Fond ones. Memories of being read Barthes and Derrida and Nietzsche to bed. I do not wish to imply that these were in any way soporific (barring on Sunday afternoons)...but I digress...today as I sat reading Barthes, I was reminded of my father...an exemplary reader, a lenient father and very a patient teacher...I have memories of innumerable after-dinner conversations spent casually discussing the arbitrary nature of all that existed (for it exsited only in language)...during these leisurely lectures (they are in a way, all my education) my father took it upon himself to personally introduce me to Mr.Signifier and Ms.Signified (they have made for good company over the years) Foucault's panopticons and Derrida's loopy deconstruction...he taught me to pronounce funny names like Al-bear Ca-moo (Albert Camus) and Jyauck La-caa (Jacques Lacan)...he diluted Saussure's phenomenal thesis exclusively for my tookish ears...it was he who told me that sex is biological and gender, social...it was from him that I first learnt the relevance of 'normal-within-quotes'...from him that I learnt not to believe in absolutes (for, 'all experience is subjective')...he spiked my desserts with Semiotics, Cybernetics, Linguistics, Structuralism, Post-Modernism, De-contsruction, Philology, Psycho-analysis, Sociology, Anthropology, literary criticism and no, it wasn't a troubled childhood. I rather looked forward to those evenings...transfixed on a chair (not willing to move a muscle, unless it be a sign of disinterest) as Papa jumped and read and explained and then read a little more...from book after book till there was a pile of 'to-be-reads' as tall as me...a special favourite being Gregory Bateson ("The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named") tee hee hee...

And all these cunning heavy-weights he brandished at me with such non-chalance...an off-handish manner, that almost deceived me into thinking they were nice folk...until I saw this-

"Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling."

...wrote Jacques Derrida

...and I trembled (and sometimes I yawned and sometimes I sniggered)

Years have passed now and "the map is not the territory" has become the longest standing joke around our household...I have grown up and appreciate my education a tad more (Thankyou papa, you made Barthes easy)...still, the wonder that never ceases to sieze me by the brain is, why couldn't any of these philosophers write in a manner that was comprehensible?! Was their language, like their thought an expression of rebellion against traditional epistemes...if only it didn't come across as so confoundingly abstruse...if only they didn't conspire to kill the reader...if only they were as endearingly simple as papa...

(and I know this is a lot of dumb-and-blind criticism...but see, papa! I was listening all the while and I caught a few words too!)