Jacques Derrida’s theoretical writings – always
articulated through the reading of philosophical, literary, critical, political
or intellectual texts – have given a unique character to the last third of the
twentieth century, and particularly with respect to the development of
postmodern thought. He is most commonly associated with the textual practice of
deconstruction. With Derrida, philosophers, critics, and theorists have learned
a whole new set of strategies for reading texts, for thinking the role and
significance of texts, and for establishing how texts constitute the textures
of the cotemporary critical and theoretical scene. He constantly upholds the
need to understand the internal logic of a textual system by dint of close
reading, respect for a text’s details and much patience.
A Biographical Sketch of Derrida
Derrida was born to a Jewish
family in El-Biar, near Algiers,
in 1930. Algeria
was a French colony and Derrida was expelled from secondary school in Algiers in 1942 by an
official anti-Semitism implemented in the colony. Derrida resumed his education
first in a Jewish school and later moved to France’s prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He finally
qualified in 1956 and then, at height of Algerian war, did French military
service between 1957 and 1959 as a teacher near Algiers, before returning to French academic
life. Derrida is a founder-member of GREPH (the International Group for
Research into Teaching of Philosophy) and later become the Director of Studies
at the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales
in Paris. His philosophical work began
with a study in the mid-1950s of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, before
he turned to detailed, painstaking close analyses of many of the canonical
philosophers, from Plato to Martin Heidegger.
Major Works of Derrida
In
1967 Derrida published three books—Speech
and Phenomena: Introduction to the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology; Of Grammatology; and Writing and Difference—in which he
introduces the deconstructive approach to reading texts. In 1968 he published “The Ends Of Man”. In 1972 he published
three other notable works: Margins of Philosophy, Dissemination, and Positions.
Another important work is The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
(1980). In 1993, he published Specters
of Marx: The State of the Debt the Work of Mourning, and New International.
The ever increasing need to address political and ethical issues pushed him to
publish such works like, “The Other
Heading” (1991), “The Force of the
Law” (1992), and “The Politics of
Friendship” (1994).
Ideological Background of Derrida
Derrida’s
writings have not appeared in a vacuum. They clearly arise out of at least
three different intellectual traditions. They are phenomenology, structuralism,
and psychoanalysis.
a)
Phenomenology
The phenomenological tradition which runs from
Edmund Hussel to Heidegger which offers a philosophy of description, accounting
of human experience, and the objects of that experience. Based on the premise
that we can achieve a pure, transcendental, immanent description of our
experience of things, offered in a rigorous and presuppositionless fashion,
Husserl claims that the transcendental subject can reflect upon the contents of
an experimental consciousness and achieve both necessary and apodictic
knowledge of the meaning of what is experienced.
While this phenomenology was crucial for the existentialism and hermeneutics
that followed in both Germany
and France,
it was the backdrop for the Algerian-born Derrida’s formative years as a
student in Paris.
He produced three books in which he takes up Husserl’ philosophy—his master’s
thesis on The Problem of Genesis in
Husserl’ Philosophy, his Introduction
to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and
Speech and Phenomena.
b) Structuralism
Structuralism is
rooted in the semiology of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Structuralism
is an attempt to isolate the general structure of human activity. A structure
is a unit composed of a few elements that are invariably found in the same
relationship within the “activity” being described. The structure cannot be
broken down into its single elements, for the unity of the structure is defined
not so much by the substantive nature of the elements as by their relationship.
Saussurean
semiology, the general science of signs, was reinvented some thirty years later
in 1940s by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Where
Levi-Strauss sought to build connections anthropology and linguistic, he also
wanted to show that elementary structures of kinship, of myth, of totems and
taboos are not matters for primitive alone., but rather that they are fully
distributed throughout different societies and cultures—by virtue of some specifiable
transformations, they constitute different version of the same structure. But according
to Derrida there is no centered self or subject located within or behind any of
these versions of human structure. Structures repeat, recur in multiple
context, but they have no centered transcendal subject.
This notion of self-decentering became a fundamental tenet of Derridean
deconstruction.
c) Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis,
spawned in the early twentieth century by another contemporary of Husserl and
Saussure, namely Sigmund Freud, raises the question of the subject in terms of
psychic realm of id, ego and superego. Here the centered subject is
split—always the ever-present reality of repression and the inaccessibility of
the unconscious life. This split marks a gap, a break, a screen, a mystic
writing pad, which both separates and brings together the conscious and the
unconscious. Memory traces are inscribed on this screen, traces of experiences
which are in principle inaccessible to the conscious life. This place of
difference between the conscious and unconscious is where the period of erasure
leaves its mark or traces constituting of locus of Freudian analysis, a kind of
performance of the “scene of writing.”
Derrida’s
principal interest in Freud has been through his reading of his followers, most
notably, Lacques Lacan. Lacan’s famous statement that “the unconscious is
structured like a language” has allowed him to develop the idea that whatever
can be called the unconscious is proliferated and disseminated through the
chains of signifiers, words as they narrate a patient’s dreams or fears or
interpersonal relations.
A Critique of Western Metaphysics
Derrida follows Nietzsche
and Heidegger in elaborating a critique of “western metaphysics.” Western
thought says Derrida, has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or
polarities: good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth
vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. women, soul vs.
body life vs. death, nature v. culture, speech vs. writing.
These polar opposites do not, however, stand as independent and equal entities.
The second term in each part is considered the negative, corrupt, undesirable
version of the first, a fall away from it. Hence absence is the lack of
presence, evil is the fall from good, error is a distortion of the truth, etc.
In other words, the two terms are not simply opposed in their meaning, but are
arranged in a hierarchical order which gives the first term priority, in both
the temporal and qualitative sense of the word. Derrida holds a linguistic,
idealistic view of the world: we have no access to past or even present
reality, we are stuck in language, we have only signs which relay us to other
signs, and on ad infinitum.
Important Concepts and Methods of Derrida
a)
Post-Structuralism
‘Structure, Sign,
and Play’
marks the moment at which ‘post-structuralism’ as a movement begins, opposing
itself to classical structuralism as well as traditional humanism and
empiricism: the moment when ‘the structurality of structure had to begin to be
thought.’
Classical Structuralism based on Saussure’s linguistic, held out the hope of
achieving a ‘scientific’ account of culture by identifying the system that
underlines the infinite manifestation of any form of cultural production. The
structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss tried to do this form for myth.
But, says Derrida, all such analyses imply that they are based on some secure
ground ‘centre’ or ‘transcendental signified’, that outside the system under
investigation and guarantees its intelligibility.
There is, however, no such secure ground, according to Derrida—it is a
philosophical fiction. He sees Levi-Strauss as making this disconcerting
discovery in the course of his researches, and then retreating from a full
recognition of its implication.
Levi-Strauss renounces the hope of totalizing scientific explanation of culture
phenomena, but on equivocal grounds - sometimes because it is impossible (new
data will always require modification of a systematic model) and sometimes
because it is useless (discourse is a field not of finite meaning but of
infinite play).
Derrida
himself had no qualms about embracing ‘a world of signs without fault, without
truth and without origin, which is offered to our active interpretation’, and
fathered a new school of criticism based on this –deconstruction, based on
Derrida’s assertion that ‘language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique’.
b) Deconstruction
Deconstruction
is not a form of textual vandalism designed to prove that meaning is
impossible. The word “de-construction” is closely related not to the word
“destruction” but the word “analysis,” which etymologically means “to undo”—a
virtual synonym for “to de-construct.” The deconstruction of a text does not
proceed by random doubt or generalized skepticism, but by the careful teasing
out of warring forces signification within
the text itself.
If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning but the
claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over other. This, of course,
implies that a text signifies in more than one way, and to varying degree of
explicitness. Sometimes the discrepancy is produced by a double-edged word,
which serves as a hinge that both articulates and breaks open the explicit
statement being made. Sometime it is engendered when the figurative level of a
statement is at odds with the literal level. And sometimes it occurs when the
so-called starting point of an argument is based on presuppositions that render
its conclusion problematic or circular. Therefore, according to Derrida, “the
reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between
what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language
that he uses. His relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of
shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that the
critical reading should produce.”
In other words, Deconstruction
is a method of critical analysis which questions the ability of language to
represent reality adequately, asserts that no text can have a fixed and stable
meaning, and that readers must eradicate all philosophical or other assumptions
when approaching a text. One of the recurring themes of the deconstructive
system of Derrida is the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. He
maintains that the idea of presence provides the support for a series of founding
concepts or centers which have variously aspired to govern the western
philosophical tradition:
“Successively,
and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms of names. The
history of metaphysics, like the history of the west, is the history of these
metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix … is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It
could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to
the centre have always designated an invariable presence—essence,
existence substance, subject, truth,
transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so on.”
Each of these centers hopes to
rule over the system of thought by belonging to itself, in such a way that it
remains spatially and temporally self-present and self-identical.
Deconstruction begins by identifying the center of a system or the privileged
term in a violent conceptual hierarchy, and represents an intervention to make
that system or hierarchy tremble.
c) Difference and Meaning
Derrida departs from the traditional
philosophical, and everyday, view of language and reason as essentially unified
and unifying forces. In his view, language and rationality operate on the basis
of discontinuity. One way to understand Derrida’s view of meaning is see it as
modification of Saussure’s theory of linguistic meaning. For Saussure, to be
schematic in the extreme, linguistic meaning is produced by difference, by the
interaction of opposite –the meaning of ‘night’ only having value in relation to
‘day’.
Derrida pushes at the logic of Saussure’s basic insight. For Derrida, meaning is
indeed differential, but is produced by the interaction of a potentially
limitless number of terms, not just by the difference between two. In other
words, difference between words are not to be found in any one place, but are,
rather, both scattered across the
network of language and bound up with the unique instance of articulation.
In order to arrive at a provisional understanding of a word, we rifle through
our private mental, and shared cultural, archive of words, checking sounds and
concepts against each other. Because we carry out this process so rapidly and
so automatically, we forget that this play between the same and the different
underlies all meaning. But meaning is not simply given in advance in the system
of language; meaning is actively produced in the linguistic utterance which
must draw on the system (the structure) but which will always produced
singularities.
In effect,
Derrida challenges the conception of texts as having fixed centers of meaning.
It also challenges the prioritizing of stable meanings and the sort of thinking
e.g. that requires a locatable centre to a text; an idea, a philosophy or a
religion - the sort of thinking that requires stability or that fears the
unknown. Derrida argues that meaning is best understood in terms of the
relationship (the play) between the known and the unknown, the presence and
absence, the stable and the unstable. This is not anarchic: he doesn’t suggest
that the unstable should take over from the stable. If that happened then this
would merely create a new centre, another form of meaning based on stability.
His argument is that the constant deferring of presence means that the centre
is never fixed. Hence a single, fixed meaning can never be determined; it is
constantly postponed and deferred.
d) Writing, Speech and Logocentrism
From Plato
through to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Saussure, speech in the western tradition
is assigned the values of spontaneity, immediacy, authenticity, originality,
and self-presence. Writing, in contrast, is considered secondary, derivative,
impersonal, the produce of technique, contrivance and machination. Speech is
nature and writing artifice. Writing is that dangerous supplement that always
threatens to carry my meaning off to a place where I will not be able to
exercise control over it.
Derrida’s
critique of the western metaphysics focuses also on the privileging of spoken
word over the written word. The spoken word is given higher value because the
speaker and the listener are both present in the utterance of simultaneously.
There is no temporal or special distance between speaker, speech, and listener,
since the speaker hears himself speak at the same moment the listener does.
This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know
what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said.
Whether or not perfect understanding always occurs in fact, this image of
perfectly self-present meaning is, according to Derrida, the underlying ideal
of Western culture.
Derrida has termed this belief in the self-presentation of meaning
“Logocentrism,” from the Gk word Logos (meaning
speech, logic, reason, the Word of God). Writing, on the other hand, is
considered by the logocentric system to be only a representation of speech, a secondary substitute designated for use
only when speaking is impossible. Writing is thus considered a second-rate
activity that tries to overcome the distance by making use of it: the writer
puts his thought on paper, distancing it from himself, transforming, it into
something that can be read by someone far away, even after the writer’s death.
This inclusion of the death, distance, and difference is thought to be a
corruption of the self-presence of meaning, to open meaning up to all forms of
adulteration which immediacy would have prevented.
e) Ethics
Derrida is also
a philosopher of ethics, on the concept of responsibility, which is tied to the
idea of the aporia. Aporia (from the Greek) designates a difficult,
impracticable, or indeed impossible, passage, the experience of a non-passage. Its
English translation “undecidablility”, does not fully explain its force. Derrida
uses the word aporia to name the point in argumentation where one appears to
arrive at the place of contradiction or paradox from which no simple exit is
possible. In The Gift of Death he attempts to disturb
the Kantian foundation of ethics at the heart of which lies the notion of the
absolute duty or responsibility, formalized as universal law, which all
citizens have to respect and to which they must respond. For Derrida, aporia on
the one hand, a responsible decision can only be taken in the light of
knowledge; on the other hand, if decision-making amounts merely to following a
body of knowledge given in advance, then it is irresponsible.
In other words, responsibility demands that one be responsible (follow the
guidance offered by knowledge) and irresponsible (not always follow that
guidelines) at the same time.
Derrida
illustrates the paradox of responsibility by drawing on and developing
Kierkegaard’s discussion of the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to
sacrifice his son Isaac. Without giving him any reason, God commands Abraham to
sacrifice his only son on the Mount
Mariah, staying his hand
only at the last minute. It is the most extreme, most abominable instance of the
obedience to the absolute duty. And yet, Derrida says, it is also the most and
everyday experience of responsibility. In order for any human society to
maintain itself along ethical lines, each individual must recognize and respect
the alterity of another individual: I must be responsible in the face of the
other as other and answer for what I do before him or her. That is my duty and
obligation to the other. Such a duty might not prove difficult to fulfill if
there were just one other. But there are an infinite number of others, to whom
I am in principle bound to specific other, I neglect the other others. I sacrifice
them. At the precise moment that I dedicate all my care and compassion, all my
physical and emotional energy to another, I betray all other others. This
paradoxical condition does not just affect a situation in the real world, as it
is called; it affects thinking itself:
“The concepts of
responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are contaminated a priori to paradox,
scandal, and aporia. Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other
than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its
death and finitude. As soon as I enter into a relation with other … I know that
I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever
obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the
other … I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that.
Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs
of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must
love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.”
f) Truth
The
question of truth, the question of women, the question of style all are
interrelated here in a reading of Nietzsche’s famous statement that “truth is a
women.”
Heidegger’s account of truth as aletheia
is that this Greek word (a-LETHE-ia, where Lethe was the mythical river of
forgetfulness) means not-hiddenness, non-concealedness, and disclosure. Derrida
reads this notion of truth as a metaphor for woman’s genitalia, disclosing and
hiding or concealing. He contrasts the vaginal; with the penal; (the long
oblong object, like a pen, writing instrument, stylus). The stylus is
associated with style, with writing, while the vaginal is associated with
truth, with openness, with dis-closure. The word “truth” in German (die wahrheit),
French (la verite), Italian (la verita), Spanish (la verdad) etc. is
feminine. Truth
is female. Style is male. Writing the truth happens with style and with
question of truth.
g) Borders
All
of Derrida’s work takes place on and at the border. For Derrida, what is
outside the text is marked by what is inside the text, and what is outside the
text is inscribed by its exclusion in the text. The text would have no status
without the question of the border, margin, edge of the text which has no
status without the opposition between the inside and outside. Derrida’s
practice of reading tries, rather, to demonstrate that, in their etymological
or philosophical origins, and in their historical development and contemporary
resonance, words and concepts disturb oppositional reasoning, spilling over
into each other to form a knotted fabric of associations.
Such a fabric
can be seen in the analysis of metaphor in ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the
Text of Philosophy’ in his Margins of
Philosophy. The question of metaphor, Derrida says, derives from a theory of
value, according to which things are equated each other on the basis of their
resemblance or similarity. Because,
in the Greek tradition, the sun is the source of light and life which produces
the essence of what is, the sun is also what make resemblance possible, it is
the ‘non-metaphorical prime mover of metaphor’, around which and towards which
everything turns. Thus the ‘flowers of rhetoric’ are tuned towards the sun as
natural origin, source of truth and philosophical logic. But since we can never
know what is proper to the sun,, that is, since we can never see or touch the
sun properly, so the sensory object par excellence, the sun, paradoxically
becomes the paradigm both of sensory (or literal truth of nature) and of
metaphor (or tropes[means to turn]) since it turns itself and hide itself. If
metaphor is heliotrope, then, it is so inasmuch as it designates both a
movement towards the sun (as the source of truth) and the turning movement of
the sun (which henceforth cannot act as the stable origin of the system).
Western metaphysics attempts to reduce this play of metaphor by having
metaphor, like sun, return full circle to itself without loss of meaning. This
specular circle is shared by the trajectory of the sun, by metaphysics and
western concept of Man.
Thus, if the sun rises in the east, it reaches its completion in the west and
in the eye of Western Man. In other words, for
Derrida, metaphysics is an attempt to interiorize and master the metaphorical
division between the origin and itself, the Oriental difference (that is metaphysics
is white mythology). And yet, the heliotrope can always become a dried flower
in a book, that is, a figure of excess that endlessly displaces the book’s
closure. Moreover, heliotrope, Derrida writes in the final sentence, is also
the name of a precious stone—a kind of oriental jasper.
Evaluation
and Conclusion
The
criticism leveled at him by Jurgen Habermas is that, despite his engagement
with enlightenment philosophy, Derrida follows Nietzsche’s lead in seeking to
overturn the age-old privilege accorded by philosophy to logic over rhetoric.
By dissolving all of the foundation stones of intersubjective communicative
rationality, Derrida’s work finds its home firmly in the relativist tradition
which extends directly, from the Nietzsche to French postmodernists.
Steven Plaut calls Derrida as the father of the pseudo-philosophy of
“Deconstructionism” and a philosopher who has contributed to human confusion
rather than to enlightenment. John
R. Searle critics Derrida for his lack of seriousness and unwillingness to
respect the traditional and commonly accepted coinage of the debate on
linguistic communication.
Hans G. Gadamer argues similarly that the success of philosophical dialogue
depends on the willingness of interlocutors to allow a text to say what it
means in a gesture of mutual understanding.
Apart from the
influence on the contemporaries like Roland Barthes and on a younger generation
of philosophers (most notably Jean-Luc Nancy), Derrida’s influence in France has been
limited. Elsewhere, Derrida’s work has been hugely influential on cotemporary
critical theory. Derrida’s work on the ‘white mythology’ of Western metaphysics
has been taken up by, and to certain extent helped to open up, the field of
postcolonial studies and race theory –notably in the work of Homi Bhabha and
Henry Louis Gates.
It is difficult to assess at this
stage whether such a dispersal is salubrious or deleterious, but what is
evident is the fact that deconstruction has spread all over as a deductively
desired commodity which is bought more for its appeal than for its consumption,
more for its exchange value than for its use value.
Derrida, J. Politics of Friendship. Trans. by G. Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
Harr, Michel. “The Play of
Nietzsche in Derrida” in Derrida: A Crtical
Reader. Ed. by David
Wood. UK: Black well, 1992.
Plaut, Steven. “The Deconstruction
of Jacques Derrida” in FrontPage
magazine. Com. Htm.
Wolfreys, Jullian. Deconstruction. Derrida. Moudon:
Macmillan, 1998.
