Derrida
and Deconstruction
“With the word with, then, begins this text
Whose first line tells the truth.”
(Francis Ponge)
“The Text”
In its most conventional and historical
sense the word “text” means:
The actual words of a book, or poem,
etc., either in their
original form or any form they have
been transmitted in
or transmuted into: a book of such words: words set to
music: the main body of matter in a
book.
When we speak of a text in English studies
we usually mean a particular bound and covered entity such as George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss or Tennyson’s Poetic Works.
Why does text come to mean the same as
book? The word comes from the Latin texere, which means “to weave.” And “text” still has that meaning for
us. We say textile, which is “woven” or
“capable of being woven” or, as a noun, “a woven fabric,” a textile. So when we use the word “texture” we might
mean one of a number of things: “something woven,” or “a web”; we might mean a
certain manner of weaving or simply of connecting; the disposition of the parts
of a body; or “a structural impression” which might come about through a way of
combining parts of a whole, as in music, art, or writing; or, finally, it could
mean the quality conveyed to the senses by woven fabrics.
Clearly the use of the word “text” to
describe a book is possible on the model of weaving, which, we might assume is
appropriate to a certain way of thinking about books, about the way they have
been put together, about the way writing is woven into text from the material
or the fabric of our language. After
all this, imagine my disappointment at finding the definition for
textual-criticism as “critical study directed towards determining the true reading
of a text.”
The true reading? Isn’t it as if the truth had got lost on the
way to becoming a text? As if it was
the job of the critic to find it again by reading. Does this make the text just a vehicle for delivering meaning or
a coat that needed to be taken off?
Well this model of the text is as old as our history and our language
opposes it systematically to all the things it might represent, like life, the
world, the real, anything it refers to, the mind, consciousness, personal or
shared experience. The best text would
be one that conveyed the most accurate impressions of these things. The trouble with the text is that it might
not convey the right impression, the true impression, and it might therefore
be misleading. A rhetorical frontier
has been drawn between the truth of
things and the text. According to this historical prejudice: the text is on the outside, the truth of
things is hidden away on the inside. However,
according to the same logic, the truth
of things only remains hidden inside
because it is essentially outside the
text, in some far off yonder. Once
again we are bound by the rhetorical distinction between the empirical (the
text) and the transcendental (its meaning or truth). This, of course, does not fit the facts. But it does indicate a pervasive and
history-bound prejudice, which for centuries has been instrumental in the way
people have thought.
Deconstruction shakes up a concept like
text in a way that provokes questions
about the borders, the frontiers, the edges,
or the limits that have been drawn to mark out its place in the history of
concepts. Meanings take on their
identity, they come to mean what they mean, by just such a marking out of
frontiers, opposing concepts to each other, defining terms by their differences. So deconstructive reading begins by asking,
“What are the borders? What are the
limits? And how do they come about?” This is the question that Jacques Derrida
asks in his article “Living on/Borderlines.” What are the borderlines of a
text? How do they come about?
We fail to read a text at all if we
jump straight in from out of nowhere proclaiming our opinions and making rash
generalisations. The text is woven from
the same system as the one we each inhabit, the system of concepts that allows
us to think the things we do. So the
text, and any given text, demands that we read it first of all in terms of the
historical and rhetorical conventions that allow us to understand it, and
which, by and large, allow us to agree, more or less, on what it means.
Derrida’s work
Derrida’s work consists in readings
of other texts. The problem of reading
Derrida just is the problem of
reading. Geoff Bennington gives the
following account of why his introduction to Derrida’s work (“Derridabase”) is from
the beginning and always caught up with the problem of reading (while at the
same time mentioning many of Derrida’s key topics):
All the questions to which this type of book must habitually
presuppose replies, around for instance the practice of quotation, the
relationship between commentary and interpretation, the identification and
delimitation of a corpus or a work, the respect owed to the singularity or the
event of a work in its idiom, its signature, its date and its context, without
simply making them into examples or cases ... are already put to us by the texts we have to read, not as preliminary
or marginal to the true work of thought, but as this work itself in its most
pressing and formidable aspects. (Bennington 9-10)
We cannot first solve the problem of how to read Derrida and then read
him. The problems of reading and of
reading protocols are already the
whole problem. Bennington also tells us
that “only Derrida can give us the means to understand this situation” (8). Why, then, am I introducing Derrida through
the writing of his representative? The
answer lies in a certain concept of repetition. A repetition must be more or less the same
as what it repeats but it cannot be identical.
My reading of Bennington’s reading of Derrida’s reading of the
metaphysical tradition’s reading of … constitutes a series of non-identical
repetitions of the same text. In
Derrida it is in this same repetition, this “repetition of the same,” that
there is the possibility of something new (what he will call an invention of
the other). The following sections are
intended to clarify these points by subtly repeating them in slightly differing
contexts.
Presence and Absence
The metaphysical tradition (or philosophy) can be characterised
by two basic desires or trends, admittedly manifested in various different
forms. As we have seen in other
sections, there is a consistent desire to reconstruct the transcendental realm,
which is otherwise radically absent.
The lost origin of our finite or fallen state drives us to continuously
reconstruct our beginnings. Second, the
ideal of presence turns up everywhere. All aspects of experience and/or existence are relegated to a
moment called the present. But the ideal of presence always implies more
than one moment:
1.
Presence, we assume, describes an
original state, a state that must have come first. As I gaze out into the world I can say the world is present to my
observing eye. If that is the case,
then my observing consciousness must be present to my own self-reflection. It thus follows that meaning, in its most pure sense, as conscious thought, must be
present to me as I gaze out onto the world.
Presence is, therefore, the main predicate for a text’s meaning (its sense or its reference), despite the fact that
this meaning is always absent and in need of reconstruction through reading or
interpretation.
2.
For this reason, a second moment of
presence invades consciousness as absence--the
disappearance of the world behind the veils of language, consciousness going
astray, the reign of death, non-sense.
In this way gaps, absences and deficiencies of all imaginable kinds are
subordinate to a principle of presence. Is it possible to imagine an absence without
reference to the principle of presence? It would be a radical absence, something
always and from the beginning absent, missing, lost to experience. If there was such an absence, how could we
glimpse it?
3.
We glimpse it between repetitions as
their repeatability. If the present
moment can be repeated (i.e. remembered) then, preceding the present moment, is
the possibility of its being repeated in memory (i.e., memory itself as
repeatability). So memory precedes and
exceeds the present moment, which we will have remembered. Memory, as traditional accounts make clear,
gets associated with death and the memorialising of the dead, or mourning, in a
way that gets us back, always and from the beginning, to the second moment
(absence).
Derrida’s much-cited statement, “there is nothing outside the
text,” suggests an absence that has never been, nor could ever be,
present. This is what we must try to
think with regard to the sign, and with the notion of text:
1) The sign is
irreducibly secondary. It always refers
to something else. Sometimes the
something else that a sign refers to is actually itself (e.g., this sign here) but this doesn’t mean that
the sign’s meaning (its reference to itself by virtue of its sense—sign =
signifying unit) is primary. What is
primary is the signifying aspect of it.
The sign comes before its
referent (sign) in so far as this
sign means this sign. And that, of
course, is secondary. It also
illustrates that signs are necessarily always divided. Their principle is the repeatability that
allows them to apparently jump out of themselves to refer back. However, in the repetition the sign is
irremediably changed. It is no longer
the sign it was. Disconcertingly, this
kind of punning cannot be dismissed as a kind of sophistic rhetorical
game. Or rather, it can be dismissed. But the principle of your ability to dismiss
it (your ability to ignore basic rhetorical processes and pass over them in
silence) is in fact the same principle that allows meaning to arise in the first
place, cancelling out the rhetorical dimension, the secondary text (vehicle or
coat).
2) So the sign is at the beginning. We never arrive at a meaning independently
of some aspect of text, through which we must pass before cancelling it out as
unwanted rhetoric (vehicle or coat).
Therefore there is no beginning.
The Way We Think
We can understand how deconstruction
operates if we examine Jacques Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss, which is
exemplary. A much-republished essay from
1968, called “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
has contributed to a widespread understanding of Derrida as a key
“poststructuralist” thinker. Derrida’s
writing has certainly contributed to the critical revision of structuralism
that has occurred over the years, but his own work is more wide ranging than
the term “poststructuralism” suggests.
In The
Savage Mind Levi-Strauss had made the following statement: “Science as a
whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary,
this being also what distinguishes event and structure” (21). Derrida begins “Structure, Sign and Play”
with the following observation: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of
the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word
did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural--or
structuralist--thought to reduce or suspect” (278). So Derrida begins by drawing attention to the popularity of
structuralism (in the 1960s) as an event
in the history of the concept of structure.
But the meaning of the word event is something that structuralism would
need to contain as an element within
a structure or at least exhaustively determined by a structure. In the same way that science must contain
all contingencies (chances, accidents and secondary causes) within the thought
of what is necessary, all events should be contained as parts of a
comprehensive structure. The reference
is to the structuralist model that contrasts La Langue (the system or structure) to parole (the event of speech or the utterance). So strictly speaking, and according to
Levi-Strauss, the concept “event” is opposed to the concept “structure.” Once again the model is a version of
empirical/ transcendental difference.
The logic is as follows: The event of structuralism is a
“rupture” in so far as the break between classical thinking in the human
sciences and structuralism is like an overturning of old ways of thinking by
new ones. But the concept of structure
is itself a classical concept and its meaning belongs to ordinary ways of
speaking. Furthermore its meaning is
something like “that which determines and makes possible all events.” The concepts “event” and “structure” must
have been determined by the field that structuralism sets out to explore and
explain, that is, structure (rather than event).
episteme
An episteme
is an ancient Greek term denoting the field of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is necessary knowledge
and best characterised by the cool rational certainty of mathematics. Derrida accepts the more elaborate meaning
of episteme, which refers to the age
of western science and philosophy that extends--in some fits and starts--from
the Greeks to the late twentieth century (three thousand odd years). The word episteme
thus refers to the fact that the concepts we use have a historicity (the
condition of being historical) and belong to a system of thinking that is at
least three thousand years old. This is
the system that structuralism hopes to overturn.
Structure
The classical concept of structure has what
Derrida calls a “contradictory coherence.”
In other words it is only coherent while it is suppressing a
contradiction on which it is based. A
structure is an organisation (like a literary text for instance) and takes the
form of law or institution. Structures
of this kind are always instituted,
which means that an establishment through inclusions, exclusions and various
means of cancelling out contradictions has been necessary from (or at) the
beginning. Beginnings of this kind,
which are not really beginnings at all but modifications, are often
conveniently forgotten or shrouded in mystery.
All notions of structure have a centre--a point
of presence, as Derrida puts it--a place where the structure originates. Thus any organised thing must have a point
that can be regarded as its centre, and which limits the play that structures may be subject to. With a text any number of possible readings, based upon the
substitutions that the language of literature particularly suggest, can be
limited and qualified by the notion of its centre. Typical concepts of centre in literary criticism, for instance,
would include the author, the historical context, the reader, the ideology of a political
economy, each of which provide a ground outside the text for limiting
interpretation. The centre is in each
case unique. It is a place where
substitutions are no longer possible and in fact it escapes structurality (i.e.
the author of the text is outside the structure of the text itself). So the centre is not in the centre. The centre is outside the structure. This is why the coherence of the concept of
structure is contradictory. It rests
upon a paradox.
Play
Derrida here borrows a notion from
psychoanalysis—desire—suggesting that
the fact of a contradiction indicates a semi-repressed desire. Anxiety is caused by a desire that is
unacceptable. In the case of the
concept of structure the desire is for “immobility” beyond the reach of
play. An origin or an end beyond
the play of a structure has throughout the history of this concept (and all
other metaphysical concepts) been mythologised as a point of full presence
beyond play. Play (in all its senses,
e.g. games, alternative to work, elasticity, gap between word and thing, word
and meaning, wordplay etc.) puts off full presence (e.g. of the world to my
senses) in order for me to get a sense of the fact that it is there--even if
not fully present. My access to the
world is an access to traces of a world, in the same way that my access to a
text is to the traces that the writer has left for me to decipher. The
trace (an original and permanently necessary absence) cannot of course be made
present to my senses but without it there’d be nothing of the world for
me. The only way to master the anxiety
about this absent outside is to hide the contradiction involved in saying that
the centre of a structure is outside the structure. The Ancient Greeks used the word arche for origin and an end was called a telos. From these words we
derive archaeology (which digs back
to the beginnings of man) and teleology
(which dreams of a final purpose to all this scattered and contingent
life). Scientists think that without
teleology science would mean nothing.
That is, all these facts must add up to something one day--they must
have a final purpose that right now we cannot even guess at. However this belief--which a scientist holds
as strongly as the pre-Socratic Greeks held to their belief in Zeus--has
neither justification nor support in the facts themselves. It is just a dream. No one ever knows what is to come.
Philosophy demands that its concepts have
single naked positive meanings beyond the play of substitutions (metaphors and
metonymies) that are possible for all concepts, as elements of a
structure. If the sun can stand for the
truth of reason then where does the play of possible substitutions end? As we saw with Plato we never actually reach
the end. This single (unique) meaning
must therefore be outside the structure itself (and outside the text--whether
the text is literary, mythological, philosophical or scientific). But all the names for the centre (God, Man,
History, the Subject, Mind etc.) are themselves subject to play because they must each be thought of as absolutely unique when
in fact they are historically substituted
for one another. In order for the
concept of an author to limit the play of the text an attempt must be made to
play down or efface the influence on interpretation that the reader, or the
historical and ideological context, have upon it. The centre is itself a concept among the concepts that it would
limit from outside.
The way of
the text
Derrida names three influential authors who
have each been seen as challenging the history of metaphysics: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger.
But he points out that the tools they use for the destruction of the
history of metaphysics are themselves derived from the concepts of that
history. Any one who tries to “step
outside” philosophy is trapped in a circle:
history of
metaphysics
ì î
ë its destruction í
No language is absolutely foreign to it. So all criticism slips into the form that it
is contesting. Absolute foreignness
(alterity, exteriority, or more colloquially, the other, the outside) can never
be made present to sensible or intellectual intuition. But without this absent aspect we’d have no
presence or absence at all. The
tendency is to name or otherwise characterise this outsideness that gives
origin, meaning and purpose to everything.
But whatever the privileged term gets called it must remain an outsider
(infinite, necessary and missing from the beginning) or always to come like a
Messiah or Mr Right.
Structuralism, on the other hand--and here is
its radical promise--appears to operate without a privileged term that belongs outside
the structure itself (unlike other forms of theory/philosophy). Structuralism says that there is no outside
to the structure. However its
privileged term--the sign--is a metaphysical concept. For metaphysics Sign always means sign of ...
(something). Thus a signifier always
has a signified And they are related
in the same way that the sensible is
related to the intelligible. One is visible while the other is invisible (and supposedly
immortal). The sign in other words is
always reduced by metaphysical
thinking to the “content” it signifies.
Structuralism, against this (classical) conception, begins with the concept of the sign in an attempt to put the
system, in which the opposition sign/content (signifier/signified) functions,
into question. In other words,
Levi-Strauss uses the concepts of
metaphysics without subscribing to their “truth value.” They function as signs only without a
grounding centre outside the structure (of historical concepts).
Bricoleur and
Engineer
One would therefore be led to think that
structuralism has made a breakthrough by giving up on the thought of the
eternal outside. However Derrida’s
reading of Levi-Strauss reveals that such a thought remains a central part of
his thinking. Levi-Strauss contrasts
the primitive science, “the science of the concrete,” with modern technical
science (the science of the conceptual) by making an analogy on the basis of
the difference between engineering and what he calls bricolage. Bricolage is a skill that involves using
bits of whatever is to be found and recombining them to create something
new. In French the word is used to
describe the very skilful professional DIY expert. Levi-Strauss suggests that the model of the bricoleur is a good way of characterising the primitive scientist
(medicine-men etc.) as well as the one who makes up the mythological narratives
(the story-teller). He says “the
elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are ‘pre-constrained’ like the
constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted
by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a
sense which sets a limit on the freedom of manoeuvre” (SM 19). Doesn’t this sound like the structure (i.e.,
the language system) out of which the utterance must be drawn? Nonetheless, Levi-Strauss still finds
something to contrast the bricoleur
to. “The engineer questions the
universe, while the bricoleur
addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours,
that is, only a sub-set of the culture” (19).
Yes, the engineer, who questions the universe, who is, according to
Levi-Strauss, “always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the
constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization,” can be contrasted
to the bricoleur, in so far as the
latter “by inclination or necessity always remains within them” (19). Levi-Strauss makes the opposition even
clearer by saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the bricoleur by means of signs. You should already be able to see the trap
he has (amazingly) fallen into here.
How could a structuralist have considered a concept as being separable
from a sign--or thought the sign without the concept? Derrida’s answer is the one we all ought to be able to have given
by now. He says:
If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text
of a heritage that is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that
every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to
the bricoleur, should be the one to
construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the
absolute origin of his own discourse . . . would be the creator of the verb,
the verb itself. [Listen for the echo--in the beginning was the verb] The notion of the bricoleur who supposedly
breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since
Levi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage
is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. (SSP 285).
There are many implications that would have to
be drawn from this statement--concerning the discourse of ethnology (the
anthropologist’s mythopoetic bricolage),
the inability to get outside the text of metaphysical oppositions, etc. but one
thing must be made clear at this stage.
Derrida is not saying that we are all doomed to mythopoetic
recombination. Here and elsewhere he
continues to affirm the locus previously reserved for the truth but this is now to be thought as the necessary alterity
(otherness, outsideness, absence) of the trace. One of the terms he applies to his reading of the ethnologist’s
paradox is supplement. This has to be understood in a special
way--but once this special way has been grasped it will provide access to many
other aspects of Derrida’s writing strategies.
What is at stake here is the question of
totalisation. In common with the
natural sciences the assumption is that the field of enquiry is complete in
itself and it is the task of knowledge to gradually cover the entire
field. That is, we don’t know
everything yet but it is just a matter of time before the scientist reveals it
at last. In the physical sciences the
drive for what is called a theory of everything (the TOE) is one symptom of the
desire for totalisation. The idea is
that everything (the totality of Being) ought one day to be part of a complete
knowledge with nothing escaping (no particular finite thing). However the dream is always just that, a
dream, as certain demonstrable conditions show. These conditions are revealed in the paradoxical patterns of
philosophical and scientific thought.
Derrida uses the term supplement to
elaborate the paradox at the heart (the centre) of what was once known as the
human sciences. Levi-Strauss often
affirms the lack of totalisation in ethnology but sometimes he sees the project
as just useless and at others as impossible.
For Derrida this indicates two different kinds of implicit thesis about
the field in question. By “implicit” I
mean that Levi-Strauss is not aware--probably could not be aware--of the
paradoxical double-bind that he is operating within. It is Derrida’s intention to draw out the nature of this
double-bind. There is no question about
the fact that there are insurmountable limits to totalisation. The difference concerns the way the limits
are conceived. Levi-Strauss provides an
example of how there are two mutually exclusive interpretations of the way in
which the “human” sphere eludes totalisation:
1.
The world (of people, texts, histories, subjects, particular individuals, etc.)
contains a richness and variety that cannot be reduced to any attempts at
totalisation (the language of theory).
There is more than one can say. There is no theoretical language rich or
dense enough to capture the finite world of rich particularity. This is a clue to the endless searching
through the variations of particular myths that so much of Levi-Strauss’s work
involves. It is the structural essence
that underlies each variant that he is interested in. On the other hand,
2. It is the character of the field itself (and
not its contents) that excludes totalisation: it is a finite field of infinite substitutions, and the centre is missing
(there is no centre). Instead of a
centre there is the play of substitutions.
The reference to “something missing” (rather than the more popular
reference to play) is crucial for an understanding of the kind of intervention
that Derrida is making. He puts it like
this:
But nontotalisation can also be
determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of
finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept
of play. If totalisation no longer has any meaning, it is not because the
infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite
discourse, but because the nature of the field--that is language, and a finite
language--excludes totalisation. This
field is in effect that of play, that
is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is
to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical
hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a
centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. (289)
What this
means is that totalisation is impossible not because of our finitude (we are
finite beings limited by space, time and language, such that we’ll never be
able to embrace the infinite totality of the universe), but because of
unpresentable absence at the very core of experience. In an earlier
article on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas Derrida has already marked
out the form of the paradox he is teasing out in this reading of Levi-Strauss. The paradox concerns the difference between
our old friends the empirical and the transcendental. These two terms, roughly charting the distinction between scientific
(finite, empirical) discourses and religious and/or metaphysical (transcendental)
ones, are complements of each other in so far as the one attempts to supplement
what is deficient in the other (reciprocally).
My finite empirical knowledge is deficient in what I cannot know of the
infinite. My transcendental concepts
are deficient in terms of what they cannot make into objects of empirical
knowledge (totality, infinity, God, etc.)
It will turn out that these two deficiencies are the same. We’ll call it
“difference” for now and locate it as the difference between the empirical and
the transcendental.
Radical Empiricism
In the article on Levinas, Derrida affirms what in Levinas seems to be
reducible to neither empirical nor transcendental determinations of
experience. The determination in Levinas
seems to be something like a radical empiricism, in which notions like
exteriority, infinity, alterity and the other (names for things that could
never be the objects of experience) are privileged. What Derrida says is this:
By radicalizing the theme of the infinite exteriority
of the other, Levinas thereby assumes the aim which has more or less secretly
animated all the philosophical gestures which have been called empiricisms in
the history of philosophy.
And a little later:
Empiricism has always been determined by philosophy,
from Plato to Husserl, as nonphilosophy:
as the philosophical pretension to non-philosophy, the inability to justify
oneself, to come to one’s own aid as speech. (152).
An empiricism establishes knowledge on the basis of experience
alone--including the sensible experiences gained through sight, hearing, touch,
taste and smell (this is perhaps more the case in France than in Anglo-American
traditions but when the point has been made that will have been irrelevant). If you are a philosopher, on the other hand,
knowledge will have been achieved through some dialectical relationship between
experience and theory--determinations of thought, reason, concepts, ideas, ratio, spirit, and who knows what
else. What Derrida affirms in Levinas
is his “radical empiricism”:
The experience of the other (of the infinite) is
irreducible, and is therefore [quoting Levinas now] “the experience par
excellence.” And, concerning death
which is indeed its irreducible resource, Levinas speaks of “an empiricism
which is in no way a positivism.” But
can one speak of an experience of the
other or of difference? Has not the
concept of experience always been determined by the metaphysics of
presence? Is not experience always the
encountering of an irreducible presence, the perception of a phenomenality?
(152)
An experience of the infinitely other is what causes the metaphysics of
presence (experience considered as a clouded present that needs to be cleared
by rational or empirical means) to crack wide open. “Nothing can so profoundly solicit [‘shake the structure of’] the
Greek Logos--philosophy--than this irruption of the totally-other; and nothing
can to such an extent reawaken the logos to its origin as to its mortality, its
other” (WD 152). It is actually quite
funny (without letting go of the seriousness of the argument of course) to see
how an article in 1964 which shows that Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher of
infinity and the absolute other, is an empiricist, might have stirred up the
intellectual world a little. Well, the fact is, difference and the other are
neither sensible nor intelligible (nor are they either just words or
concepts). You cannot see a difference
per se (nor taste one). You cannot
think a difference per se. If one is
serious about calling the experience of difference an experience then one has
to go beyond both empiricism and metaphysics.
The empiricality of the trace or mark (like written marks, which are a
kind of paradigm in Derrida’s work) cannot be reduced to sensible or
intelligible experience. There is now a
different concept of experience altogether.
So Derrida says that Empiricism is the name that metaphysics gives for
the pure thought of pure difference.
Pure difference, however, could never be the object of a
perception. That’s why empiricism is a
transcendental mediation, like all metaphysics. What in experience could you definitively claim was other,
alterity, future as such? All you have
is a horizon (the Greek words horizen
and horos, become through a series of
transmutations the Hegelian Begriff,
or philosophical concept). The present
(and its self-presence) seems always to have been already mediated anyway--that
just is experience--experience mediates the pure thought and pure difference--or
would do if there was any--but is there any?
Philosophy corresponds to the dream of a univocal concept while
empiricism corresponds to the dream of the absolutely idiosyncratic and
infinitely plural world of things and objects.
As philosophy since Hegel has known, they’re the same thing.
We have already seen how language functions by
virtue of the fact that the signifying element (called signifier) relates to its signified
by way of a perpetually undetermined aspect, an absent trace, which allows the
fleeting and transient phenomena called reference
to occur. I refer to this table here by
virtue of what remains undetermined in the word table. (You’ll have to take my word for the fact that there is
actually a table here that I’m pointing to, that is after all what language
makes possible, whether or not there is an actual table--anyway what do you
think my computer is sitting on?). The
difference between the word and the thing necessarily involves a gap--this is play--which, as we will go on to see,
involves both differentiality (the condition for there being differences) and
repeatability--the condition according to which a sign can signify again and
again and again, each time in a different context, potentially infinitely. Derrida’s formulation reveals a solution to
the age-old problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite
too. The finite field (of theory,
knowledge and experience generally) is finite owing to the absent, unpresentable
“something missing” that leaves it groundless.
For this same reason it is infinite too. A sign is always a substitution for another sign, with no
anchoring point, except the “something missing,” the differentiality and
infinite repeatability of the always absent trace.
What is perhaps not clear from the “Structure,
Sign and Play” article, which is specifically concerned with Levi-Strauss and
the analysis of myth, is that the formulation does not only concern
language. The total field (the world)
is replaced by a signifying structure (signs) in the same way that one sign
replaces another (cat = chat = feline
mammal). The singular condition that
allows us to represent the world to ourselves at all is the absent trace, the
gap between word and thing, the differences between signs, etc. Our experience of presence is mediated by an
absence that we can never experience as such.
This is the crucial limitation to science and to knowledge generally. However, once the nature of the limitation
has been recognised a new implication can be affirmed. If a sign is produced as an attempt to make
up for a deficiency in the field (the “something missing” of one-to-one
representation, the gap between sign and thing) then the addition of the sign
is in fact the production of a new signifying structure that cannot itself be
reduced to that which it is supposed to signify. Another way of putting this would be to point out that
structuralism doesn’t simply discover underlying structures. Rather, it adds more signifying
structure. The pattern follows what
Derrida calls supplementarity.
The supplement
must be thought of as having two mutually exclusive meanings:
1. It is a replacement
(e.g. replacing the absent centre).
2. And it is an addition, adding something new to the structure itself.
The point is, for Derrida, that there is a
remainder (an excess) of signification always remaining “unsignified” (a lack
of signification) which allows new readings in new contexts. So Derrida comes down neither on the side of
structure, nor on the side of play, but locates at the absent centre
a process that he names différance.
The Same
The easiest way into an understanding of différance is (paradoxically) through the concept of the same.
The notion of the same concerns a problem with identity, ideality, and
concept. In an article called “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” from Disseminations,
Derrida provides a commentary on the law that governs the truth of the eidos (Plato’s word for the idea). If this reading concerns the specifically
Socratic version of the law (from The
Crito) it can nonetheless easily be generalized. According to The Crito
the most worthy object of the philosophical dialogue is:
The truth of eidos
as that which is identical to itself, always the same as itself and always
simple, eidos, undecomposable,
invariable. The eidos is that which can always be repeated as the same. The ideality and invisibility of the eidos are its power-to-be-repeated. Now, law is always a law of repetition,
and repetition is always submission to a law (D 125)
A bit later on it turns out that this law of repetition (already
paradoxical in the last sentence) involves a double participation in which the
two parts (e.g., body and soul) are related to each other not through their
being separate but by the one referring back to the other as a repetition of
the same. This is a law that governs
the relationship between writing and idea: “This double participation, once
again, does not mix together two previously separate elements; it refers back
to a same that is not the identical,
to the common element or medium of any dissociation” (D 127).
The law can be outlined as follows: if there is repetition there is
sameness, and there is only repetition if it is of the same, but the repetition
of the same can never be identical.
This dissociation of the same from itself is the principle that governs
the identity of the idea (its ideality and invisibility). The idea must be able to be repeated in
order for it to always be the same idea.
But the principle and the medium of this dissociation and repetition of
the same just is writing. (Which is why
Derrida is led to call everything by the paradoxical formulation arche-writing). Elsewhere, in “Signature, Event, Context”
and in “Mes Chances” particularly,
the law of repetition is developed as the iterability of the written mark. The identifiability of the mark in its
repetition and its differentiality is what allows it to hop about from context
to context (in fact condemns it to perpetual hopping about). So the same
in Derrida is a combination of identity and difference governed by a
simultaneous repeatability and differentiality.
Différance
Différance is a term that Derrida coins on the basis of a pun that the
French language makes possible. An
understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about
Derrida’s apparently “mischievous” playing with language and ideas. I put “mischievous” in quotation marks
because many people have misunderstood the powerful implications of his witty
strategy. The pun is possible because
in French the word différer can mean
either to differ or to defer, depending on context.
1.
Différence
} to differ from
something and to defer full identity
and presence
2.
Deférence
If I was comparing two different objects of
the same generic type (this hat is different from this one) I’d use différer just as I would if I was
putting off an appointment (let’s defer it until a time when we’ll both be
free). The one, take note, implies
spatiality (difference) while the other implies temporality (deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to
combine both, normally mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term différance. (Because the term has passed into the English language, at least
in theoretical registers, I’ll not be maintaining the italicised and accented
French form from now on). The pun
involves the use of the little letter a. The French différence might mean either difference or deferral. Derrida’s new term, spelt with an “a”
instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean both difference and deferral
simultaneously. The first part of the
pun we can call the performative--or auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from
itself (it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any
final meaning (it cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word
itself is a performance of its meaning.
Differance just is what differance means. The second part of the pun involves the fact that Derrida’s
misspelling is only noticeable when the word is written. Saying différence
and différance makes no
difference (sorry!) in French. It is
pronounced the same way with or without the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the
difference between phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark)
and a certain imperceptibility of this particular difference. It is this imperceptible difference that Derrida
is using in the “Differance” article to draw our attention to the permanently
absent, inaudible and invisible trace.
So we can say that Differance is the word that Derrida coins to describe and perform
the way in which any single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement
of other possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred, left over, for
their possible activation in other contexts.
Differance thus both describes
and performs the situation, or the conditions, under which all identities and
meanings can occur--so that any text can be repeated in an infinite number of
possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but undetermined
addressees. It is a powerful
modification of the ordinary notions of identity and difference. We need to explore this logic further.
Difference a
priori
Let me put the implications of the differance argument into a
formulation: it is possible to speak of things, words and concepts because it
is not possible to present the
absence that differance (which is supposedly neither a word nor a concept)
designates. Absence = difference a priori = the condition of being
different of all possible differences.
I called this, under the rubric of the same, differentiality.
Derrida claims that this is not the same as the differences between
letters. It is not the same as the
difference between grapheme and phoneme.
Nor is it the difference between word and concept. Rather he says that it is the vehicle of all
those differences. But because such an
a priori difference/absence can only be named by a word that is itself subject
to the effects of differentiality that it is trying to name, then differance is
precisely both a word and concept designating its own condition of possibility
(and impossibility).
When reading Derrida it is useful to get a sense early on of what he is
trying to say. The first thing to come
to terms with is the fact that what he is trying to say cannot in any ordinary
sense be said. To say the unsayable is
impossible. However the general message
is that without this missing unsayable thing--there would be nothing to say at
all ever and no possibility of saying it anyway. This is the possibility that Derrida calls (with characteristic
perversity but also for very good historical reasons) writing.
A commentary on “Differance”
The following paragraphs present a commentary and a reading of the
opening remarks to the essay just called “Differance.” Here’s a clue: unless you can see that there
is something permanently and necessarily missing from your understanding you’ll
be missing something important. If you
need something to hold onto you could do worse than think through the
implications of what Derrida has to say for the concept of identity. Identity is conventionally opposed to the
concept of difference. But the
opposition can take contrasting forms.
Identity can be considered as an essential and integrated unity (my
identity involves my name, my status, my hair colour and the number of my
fingers, among many other things). The
idea of a unity broken into differences is one possible traditional idea. Another one would be the idea of an identity
that could be contrasted to other identities as its differences (and for which
it too would be different). I am
different from my colleagues, my students, my family and friends and my
enemies. Any notion of difference
(whether subordinated to unity or subordinated to identity) is always a
difference subordinated, in fact, to some notion of presence (present at the
origin or a present identity). Even the
notion of an absent presence (someone or something was indeed here once but now
they are gone) is subordinated to the concept of presence (if only the having
been or will one day be--in the case of the Messiah and Mr. or Mrs.
Right). The whole notion of Being is in
fact subordinated to the concept of presence.
What has been, is now, or will one day be present adds up to Being as a
whole, according to the traditional assumptions. The arguments concerning Derrida’s made-up word differance show, however, that without a
notion of absolute absence--a negative that must be logically prior to any
presence whatsoever (like God, certainly, but nothing actually)--there would be
neither presence nor absence as we experience them. It is easy to demonstrate with language, but the implications
reach far into the ethical, political and practical realms of intellectual
life.
As we have seen, the identity that is made possible by differance (as repeatability and differentiality combined) is the same but not identical. Neither repeatability nor differentiality can be made present to thought or to senses. Differentiality does not simply mean differentiation, which is easy to think. The absent insignificant trace is the mark of a difference a priori. Difference before unity, before identity. Unless we can learn to read the necessity of this a priori absent, insignificant difference, Derrida’s writing will remain bewildering. But this is not because Derrida is a muddled writer. To the contrary, each sentence illustrates, through a witty play with the French word différer, a silent, insignificant, non-existent, unnoticeable aspect that nonetheless makes it possible to play i