Deconstruction
John Phillips
The term deconstruction was widely picked up,
especially in the
Certain properties of
repetition have inevitable effects on values traditionally identified with
rationality: truth, justice, religion, ethics and science, in short, all
significations that have their source in the idea of what has been called the logos. Logos means
word in Ancient Greek, but is used in
different contexts for rational account or logical reasoning. The idea of the logos thus privileges the
rational content of a signification. Derrida
is not the first to observe that the logos is traditionally determined
according to the value of presence, which either is dogmatically asserted by
philosophical teaching or is set up as the absent goal of rational
questioning. Because experience is always
in several ways marked by certain kinds of repeatable mediation, the value of a
pure presence remains tantalizingly
out of reach, lost in the mists of pre-personal history or always yet to come
beyond the horizon of an unknowable future.
An absolute past and an absolutely undetermined future infect
experience, making possible memories and desires, as well as fictions and
theories. Experience is mediated in
several ways, as problems of language, in a privileged example, show. Relationships to others and to objects seem
irremediably contaminated by the mechanical means of communication. Questions of interpretation, translation,
imagination, perspective, and cultural difference demonstrate an irreducible
quantum of play in any relation.
The concept of time
lies at the heart of all the problems of establishing and maintaining the quest
for the value of presence. So long as
time is determined in terms of presence (including past presents as well as
presents to come) then thought will not pass beyond the constraints of what
Derrida calls logocentrism. Those conditions and processes that erode or
compromise the value of presence will again be subject to attempts at
domestication, exclusion, or containment.
Language, for instance,
tends to be divided up in terms of its supposed immediately expressive
component (thought, concept, signified, sense) and the mediational component
(word, symbol, signifier, mark). The
latter would ideally be controlled and ordered according to the former, as its
tele-technological slave. But this is
when deconstruction kicks in. It would
not be possible to distinguish mediation rigorously in terms of a signifier and
signified unless the signified was of a quite different nature to the
signifier. The mythical transcendental
signified has been given many names, like the medieval topos noetos, which represents the divine understanding as a space
of pure thought present to itself and undamaged by time, and which serves to
guarantee the difference between word and concept. Deconstruction is a name for what in fact guarantees the maintenance of
the logos: the repeatability of the mark.
So long as a mark (which can be mental) differs from itself in its
repetition then signification is possible.
The predicates of writing (repeatable marks with no natural or necessary
connection to the meanings they refer to or endlessly produce) guarantee the
functioning of both spoken words (repeatable sound images) and thoughts. These predicates ensure the possibilities of
social interaction in the always potential absence, in the mark, of sense,
reference, addresser and addressee.
Derrida coins the phrase archi-writing
(or proto-writing) to designate the predicates that allow meaningful
interaction to occur.
The basic and most
problematic predicate of experience lies in the irreducible relation to the
other, which in its undetermined state precedes and makes possible all
particular relations to actual others.
The undetermined relation to the other’s alterity conditions all
possible relations and thus remains in the form of the trace, connecting yet
keeping separate the actual members, as well as those as yet unheard of
potential members, of a community.
Because this trace of the other is a structural condition emerging from
the repeatability of the mark, it tends to give rise to the dream of a
dimension free from repetition (i.e., free of time): eternity.
Conversely, traditional
attempts to topple philosophy’s idealism and religion’s divinity tend to overemphasize
the material grounds of social relations, thus attempting to contain or
domesticate the repeatability of the trace in empirical or materialist
determinations. Once more, the example
of the linguistic sign is often the site of such transformations, when the
signifier (as opposed to the signified) is said to be the determining factor in
signification. But this reversal of
metaphysics always turns out to be a repetition
of metaphysics, locating the value of presence in an alternative but no less unanalyzed space, an alternative topos noetos. For this reason Derrida extends the phrase logocentrism to phallogocentrism, after the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and
his doctrine of the materiality of the signifier (the phallus as the signifier of the signifier).
Procedures of
deconstruction can thus operate according to the laws of iterability, a term that combines the possibilities of alterity
and repetition. The combination reflects
the indubitable law of repetition: what repeats must be the same but can never
be identical. Thus repeatability can be
seen to be the source of the metaphysical doctrine of identity, simultaneously
both allowing it and yet marking its impossibility. Iterability links logocentrism to
deconstruction in so far as deconstruction would repeat the procedures of a
logocentric teaching so that, in the repetition, the procedures would
themselves undermine the disavowal of iterability.
References
Derrida, J.
(1967) De La Grammatologie.
Derrida, J.
(1988) Limited Inc. Trans.