Latke Hamantash Academic Debate at Johns Hopkins University, December 2010.

1. The Latke:
Vive la Différance
The joyous interplay of signifiers;
the infinite play of meaning.
The Significant Latke

2. Signifier/signified relationship
Let us begin with a review of the basis of
language as we understand it -- with the
signifier/signified relationship. A word, let
us say “latke” or “hamantash,” is a
signifier that signifies a thing, an idea.
Language systems are built on this idea,
this relationship, as well as the idea of
differences between signifiers.

3. Latke = Hamantash =
The Signifier / Signified relation is obvious

4. One of these Signifieds has a variety of Signifiers:
Latke Hamantash
Potato Pancake, Hash Brown
Hamentash
Boxty (Ireland), Rårakor (Sweden)
Gamjajeon (Korea), Rösti (Swiss)
Deruny (Ukraine), Aloo tikki (India)
Kartoffelpuffer (Germany), etc.

5. And one Signifier has a variety of Signifeds:
Latkes Hamantashen

6. Given the merits of almost unlimited
signification, the signifier ‘Latke’ has
more play than ‘Hamantash’
Let me explain:
In 1966, here at Johns Hopkins, Jacques
Derrida presented his groundbreaking work:
“Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of
Human Sciences,” in which he pondered the
unsettling of firm and inflexible signifier /
signified relationships.
Derrida argued that a Center or Transcendental
Signifier limits the play of signification.

7. So what is a Transcendental
Signifier and why is it a problem?
In semiotic terms, the TS is the ultimate source
of meaning, the eye watching over things,
saying what signifies what. The history of
western philosophy, according to Derrida, has
involved the belief in and search for The
Transcendental Signifier, the Signifier of all
signifiers, the concept that stabilizes the system
of meaning and limits interpretive possibility.
Call it Truth or the Platonic Ideal or G-d, or Man,
or The Unconscious, or, for our purposes,
Haman.

8. You can’t have Hamantashen
without evoking Haman:
Hamantaschen
Haman’s pockets
Haman tash -- Heb.
“Haman was
weakened”
Oznei Haman
Haman’s ears

9. Haman watches over and
stabilizes all Hamantashen
The upside of a stable system is
stability. Everyone knows exactly
what a hamantash is.
A hamantash is always just a
hamantash, never a cigar, not an
oreo nor a jelly roll. Applesauce
rolled up in a latke is not a
hamantash.
The downside is the loss of
interpretive possibility, of the joy
of questioning, of the reveling in You can’t theorize
ambiguity, of the play of Hamantashen
signification.

10. Nobody is watching over the ‘latke,’
which is many things to many people
(shredded potato, maybe potato meal, maybe
some parsley, maybe parsnips, maybe only
matzo meal and no potato, maybe onions,
maybe not, many eggs, maybe only one,
maybe lots of oil, maybe not so much, maybe
one big pancake, maybe many small ones….)
And these pancakes can be called by
many names and still signify ‘latke.’

11. Of Latketology
Now let us consider the coming into being of the
latke and the community of latkes.
A latke is always a matter of a joyous interplay
of deconstructed signifieds. The strands of
the potato are no longer “a potato” but
“potato,” differentiated from “oil” and from
“egg” -- egg-matter that is no longer “an egg”
but “egg.” These elements meet post-
structurally to become a latke.

12. Structural Elements of a Latke

13. Only post-structurally can we ask critical
ontological questions such as: When do grated
potatoes, eggs, and oil become a latke?

14. Only the latke provokes us to ask, with
Spinoza, if we can separate substance
from attribute? Can we say where one
latke ends and another begins?

15. Michel Foucault (though not a Jew)
yet ponders: Who or what is the
author of a latke?

16. Emile Durkheim studied small
communities of latkes able to maintain
both integrity and coherence
Society, he said, was more than a sum of its parts

17. Gregor Mendel studied inherited
Latke family traits and resemblances

18. Here is the Freudian Family Romance,
or perhaps the Latkean Superego
repressing the Ego and the Id

19. The Latke provokes such mind play;
puts our mind in a Derridian state of flux
The latke’s Différance is its joyous heterogeneity.
The word was coined by Derrida to describe and
perform the way that any single meaning of a
concept or text arises only by the effacement of
other possible meanings, which are really only
deferred, left over, for their possible activation in
other contexts, like the egg and oil and potato at
the bottom of the bowl.
This Différance allows an infinite number of possible
contexts and textual meaning, modifying notions of
identity and difference.

20. Where does one latke end
and another begin?

21. The playful Latke has no
center and yet is the center of
all philosophy

22. Hollis Robbins, Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins University
Latke-Hamentash Debate
December 2010
(winner)