GS: reading and reading

So this week I have been reading Saussure and Derrida (for last Tuesday's theory class) and now Freud, Lacan and Rzepka (for this coming Tuesday's class) and it is making me nuts.  especially Derrida and Lacan.  If I were just reading for pleasure, it would be kind of fun (for a page or two) to see what they do with language-- not what they say about language, which is also interesting -- but to watch how they express themselves in language.  I'm reading them in translation, of course, but still it is evident that they enjoy playing with words.  But I'm not reading them for pleasure, I'm trying to understand them, and it's enough to drive you nuts.  You have to suspend resolution of a thought sometimes for several paragraphs of densely written explication of ideas using words you've never heard ("neurax" doesn't even come up when you google it-- neuraxis, but not neurax, except as the name of software that predicts the outcome of horse races, and I swear I did not make that up.)

But anyway.  These guys talk about how we create our consciousness through language-- which makes sense to me on most levels, because how can you think about things for which you have no words? (but makes me wonder exactly how Buddhist meditation, which is beyond/beneath/outside words, fits in.).  And how would you even begin to think about something that isn't defined in your language, except to first try to articulate it?  we can't know anything outside of what language allows us to know, and thus we and our culture are created by what we can say/speak.  We can't find a place of outside of our culture from which to be objective about anything.  That all makes sense to me.  But it strikes me as odd that they somehow think that because they question every bit of common sense knowledge that you've ever taken for granted, that they have done that-- placed themselves outside of culture and are therefore able to make these pronouncements from a position of authority and objectivity.  They never outright claim to be doing that, of course, but the manner in which they state their observations certainly makes it sound like that's what they're doing.  it amuses me.  And of course it goes without saying that they are horribly sexist, but they (like all of us) are products of their time-- which is exactly the point.