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Well, if you're going to quote scripture, then I'll just have to quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it . . . . The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language . . . . Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation . . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_fish

My only point being that we have no reason to assume that shared understandings (i.e. the babel fish's fictional translation mechanism) will eliminate conflict or disagreement. But I don't see myself as upholding the moral of the Genesis parable about disagreement or shared language, so this is not a problem for me.

My other point would be that when I said at MLA that students "surrender their own frameworks for understanding," my assumption then and now was that this "surrender" was also part of a class-wide process of reconstruction of their understandings of the class's reading materials, in order for them to attain a new and more sophisticated level of understanding.

So not only is this revision-process a collective one that students are actively participating in, as I've stressed earlier, but it's also predicated on the independent inquiry that they must do individually via research while revisiting the material and their previous understandings. (this is probably clearer in my talk than in my panel summary online)

So, yes, newer understandings must displace older ones. The initial statement "Derrida is hard" has to be displaced by questions about why Derrida writes the way he does, what meanings his philosophical style might have in the context of modernist literature, continental philosophy, etc., and so on. The only thing that gets the student to the point of discussing a difficult author is a patient series of exchanges with other students, with the text itself and its glosses, with the additional readings and contexts, and of course with the teacher. Students have to be able to recapitulate certain kinds of material accurately (dates of publication) and to be able to make sense of Derrida at a sentence by sentence level, to feel confident enough to read him in a more comprehensive or detailed way. And so the "surrender" I'm talking about is more than offset by the gain that the students (note plural) take away from the collective experience they've participated in.

But this does demand their active participation and engagement, even with the most difficult texts. To ensure this, I break down the text to very small sections, and make small groups of students (previously formed research teams) responsible for this or that chunk of text or portion of the argument. I try as much as possible to throw the responsibility of explication onto them, and lecture as little as possible.

Finally, I think historicization absolutely does lead us to reflect upon the present political significance of certain texts, but not in ways that are immediately apparent to my beginning students. This is one of the reasons why Foucault and texts like Nietzsche, Genealogy and History or What is Enlightenment? can be so powerful, even in an undergraduate classroom. Texts like these do, however, need to be taught for students to recognize how this kind of reading works. And students need to learn about the historical antecedents about their own attitudes and problems, and how to locate themselves in relation to a complex and non-determinist past.

DM