Talk:Binary opposition

Merge with dichotomy?
Merge with dichotomy?--BMF81 22:40, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Merge it with crap along with all the other nonsense that goes by the name of "literary theory." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.163.0.42 (talk) 19:58, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree. These should be merged. This page is just dichotomy plus a bunch of pedantic nonsense. --LakeHMM (talk) 01:55, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Question - thoughts
I am not signing in as an editor because I lack the expertise to edit this page. My name is Frank Burns and my email address is history.freak@live.com (No M*A*S*H* jokes, please!)

This article is confusing and not particularly informing to people who are not devotees of the particular form of esotericism embraced by the author(s).

For example: "Had absence been dominant, presence might have most naturally been seen as what you get when you take away an absence."

How can you begin with absence? How can you know that an absence exists unless you first know what it is that is missing. And if you can identify what is missing, are you not actually beginning with presence?

I can somewhat understand beginning with "nothing" and proceeding to "something." Many religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian tradition, begin with a creatio ex nihilo creation myth.

(I personally don't hold with any creation from nothing mythology, but I acknowledge the existence of such myths. Can you give an example of a culture or religion whose thought system begins with absence as opposed to presence?)

But, absence is not nothing; it is not a void. The term absence implies the existence of a specific something that is absent. So the beginning thought point must be the missing object, not the absence itself.

Similarly, "Alternatively, Western thought could have viewed female as a presence, and male, subordinately, as the absence, or loss, of an invagination or theoretical "hole" of some kind." If so, what precisely is it that the male would be view as missing?

I don't hold with medieval misogynistic thought; it is the idea of beginning with absence that really bothers me. However, I would like to better understand the female as presence argument. And it would be quite interesting to know the view on males and females (as discussed incompletely in the article) taken by a culture or religion whose thought system begins with absence as opposed to presence.

Why "critical theory"
The first sentence attributes this concept as a subset of critical theory, but I fail to see why that's necessary or what that means. Not even the Wikipedia page has a coherent description of what the hell "critical theory is". Isn't binary opposition just a concept of logic? In other words, the fact that atheism and theism are in binary opposition has nothing to do with the jumble of meaningless academic jargon that is supposedly critical theory. --LakeHMM (talk) 03:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Lack of understanding about strcturalism
This article fails to understand structuralism (and semiotics), in terms of its proper formalism (and difference from Hegelianism). Dx/dy is not contradiction...reciprocal determination is not negation... the authors clearly are not able to think outside "identity"... quite common in people educated by anglo-saxonic academic "language games" and "form of life" (be it because of "analytic phislosophy"'s bias, be it by reading it in terms of "literary theory")...

To understand deconstruction you should try first to understand constructivism...binary code, boole (and Cantor set)... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.92.156.247 (talk) 01:33, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

This is a poor entry. It seems dependent on a lay understanding of the 'post-modern' view of structuralism. In addition to the sub-par works used, the literary and cultural examples are inappropriate. It would be wrong to depend on textbooks without reference to the primary theoretical works, let alone the use of pseudo-academic opinions of a different school (I would not use these at all, even in a criticism section). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.253.90.187 (talk) 16:51, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Bad Intro Sentence
Maybe its just me, but the sentence in the intro: "The categorization of binary oppositions is "often value-laden and ethnocentric", with an illusory order and superficial meaning." seems both out of place and downright wrong. It's a rather sweeping generalization from a rather minor scholar, and I don't the concluding sentence of the opening section should be that random. It's like plucking a specific accusation from a large work on the nuances of the subject and injecting it into what's supposed to be a summary.

Original research in literary examples?
I have added an original research maintenance tag because I think that the literary examples are instances of original research. The two examples do not cite any sources, and look like a part of an essay to me. If there is a source that can be found, please add one, or else they would be removed. Zamaster4536 (talk) 11:42, 10 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I trimmed it, as per OR. We could add specific examples from literary texts, but they need to be referenced.Zigzig20s (talk) 20:53, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

There is no bibliography
The article doesn't have a proper bibliography for example I don't know from the reference what's the publication date of Positions an interview book by Derrida used in the article or who is the translator of that book therefore I'm unable to check the quotation used in the article.