Explaining My Title

This is just to start off posting, this is not my "first blogpost of the semester".

The title of this blog is "Blogging Under Erasure" which felt appropriate because of this class's discussion of postmodernism. The term "Under Erasure" (in French "Sous Rature") is in reference to a method developed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and frequently used by Jacques Derrida. It refers to writing something and crossing it out, but leaving it in the finished work, and making sure that the cross doesn't obscure the actual words written. 

Heidegger is a philosopher who worked with postmodern ideas in their beginning, as he died in 1976. Derrida is a French philosopher who worked with slightly later postmodern ideas and specifically "Deconstruction", an idea which (to my understanding) involves how language is at the root of all being and postmodernism can be understood as how everything is constructed by language and that everything is language...but I digress. 

What Derrida did with "Under Erasure" is put in a signifier for what he wanted, with the acknowledgment that it was imperfect. "Under Erasure" allows for the saying of things without committing to them, or saying things whilst showing the "audience" (for lack of a better word, depending on the context) that one understands that the ideas are constructed and not transcendent of that construction (specifically the construction of language). It is used to denote words and ideas that are inherently paradoxical within the framework of postmodernism. (It also seems like it might be used to denote ideas that lack full reflection within the framework of deconstruction or postmodernism, but that could be incorrect as I don't fully understand the concept).

I did a certain amount of research into this after coming across the term through my father, and am quite proud of the title. Perhaps I will use this technique in my own writing. I think it is fascinating, and I barely understand it, but what I can grasp seems like powerful theoretical thinking. I certainly plan to write and think about language, as I'm sure I will be asked to. Perhaps "Under Erasure" should always be crossed out, because it is in some ways trying to create a framework within postmodernism, and is therefore paradoxical; Perhaps it should not. I--after all--am not a scholar of the field. However, I did want to manage to put something "Under Erasure" within this first post, because it felt awfully meta, in a very postmodern way. 

Looking forward to this class!

Vikram