We went down to Ikea in Bolingbrook, Illinois today to buy furniture for the bedroom in our remodeled second floor, and across the road from the store was a big-box store with the puzzling name "Outdoor World."
Consider the rather dizzying series of regresses implicit in that name. It's indoors, and it's not a world, but it's called "Outdoor World." The actual "outdoor world" is, well, outdoors from this store. Odder yet - the world we use to refer to nature, the wild, and so on - "outdoors" - carries its differentiation from the built, the artificial, the human-made, in the notion of "doors" (which side of them you're on) - that is, in claiming to name the natural, the unmediated, its very name requires its opposite to be thought of first, as preceding the "natural" in some way.
I wonder if Jacques Derrida ever did any bass fishing?
1 comment:
And don't even try to parse "Department of the Interior."
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