Deconstructing childhood

I've never been much of a fan of lullabies, but Helena Iara like singing, so I have been trying lots of different types of music.  Today I sang her several classic bossa novas: The Girl from Ipanema, Corcovado, Só tinha de ser com você.  The I added some Louis Armstrong, just to sing something in English.  The rhythm of old love songs seems to calm her, and she looks straight into my eyes as she hears the words.  And as I sing songs composed about romantic love, it's fascinating to see how most all of them can also apply to the love for a little baby.

So this brings me to Derrida, about whom Helena Iara and I talked yesterday morning so that Rita could have a couple more hours of sleep.  I had thought about giving a whole history of structuralism and post-strructuralism, from de Saussure on through Derrida, but she wasn't impressed with what I had to say about linguistics and anthropology, so I went straight to Derrida's theory about speech and writing, which serves as a pretty good introduction to any of his deconstructions.

So here's the argument, more or less as I presented it to Helena Iara.  Through most of western philosophy, thinkers have privileged speech over writing, saying that because the listener must be in the presence of the speaker, the interpretation of speech will be closer to the speaker's intended meaning.  Writing, in contrast, can always be taken out of context, read against the intentions of the writer, and be mis-interpreted much more easily.  Just look, for instance, at the original intentions of Homer (or the many sages who wrote the Illiad) and the moral I took from the same story when I told it to Helena Iara a couple of weeks ago.

Derrida takes this dichotomy between speech and writing, where people have traditionally said that speech is better, and shows that speech falls into the same traps as writing.  For instance, the listener is never truly "present" to the speaker: they may be close to each other, but they come to the encounter with such different experiences and expectations that the words they share don't mean the same thing.  And, Derrida insists, speech can also be taken out of context, quoted, repeated, disseminated.  Just as some philosophers have contended that writing is an inferior derivative of speech, Derrida contends that  speech is actually a sub-category of writing.

On top of that, Derrida thinks that the ability to take out of context is what makes both speech and writing so wonderful.  Think about those old love songs I was singing to my daughter.  Were I obliged to interpret the music in its "proper context", I certainly couldn't use old bossa novas to sing to a little girl.  But when singing the first line of the Girl from Ipanema, the lyrics take on a wonderful new flavor when sung to a beautiful baby: "Olha, que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça, é ela a menina que vem e que passa...", "Look, what a beautiful thing, how full of grace; she is the girl who comes and passes by..."  The lines are as true of a little girl as of a woman on the beach in Rio de Janeiro.  Or "Eu fui sempre só de você, e você sempre foi só de mim..." -- "I have always been yours, and you always mine" -- a sentiment perhaps more honest in regard to father and daughter than to two lovers.  Or, "Unforgettable, that's what you are... that's why darling, it's incredible, that some one so unfortgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too."

To a certain degree, this who exercise is about that wonderful power of language to leave its context, for a thought or phrase or poem to mean something more than what its inventor meant.