Introduction to Derrida
Jacques Derrida was born in Algeria to a Jewish family and came to intellectual maturity during the height of the structuralist movement (if it can be called that). He received a classical French education and is thus broadly read in literature and the so-called human sciences. His training is as a philosopher and he specialized in phenomenology. He established his reputation as a well more than adequate reader of philosophers with his first book, The Origin of Geometry, on Edmund Husserl (the founder of phenomenology). His chief intellectual influences apart from his formal training are Emmanuel Lévinas and Maurice Blanchot (two figures of exceptional intellectual influence and privacy who stood somewhat apart from the great intellectual movements of the 20th century. I discuss them in my book, Radical Passivity).
Someone said to me that Derrida spent some months after graduation reading through the influential American literary “new critics.” This school was quite akin to structuralism in that they cut off the literary work from any social, cultural, historical, or biographical context and studied it “internally” in the method known as “close reading.” (Careful attention to rhetoric, grammar, syntax, and literary devices particularly irony.) For them, the literary work was a machine, mechanism, or structure—but not in the global sense developed on the continent. Anyway, Derrida is supposed to have read some of the works and commented something like, “they call this close reading?”
Readers new to Derrida are immediately struck in two ways: 1. By exposure an unprecedented philosophical rigor, caution, and style, and 2. By a bewildering sense of ambivalence; that is, where is all this rigor leading? what’s the point? Somebody somewhere once described Derrida as ‘structuralism without a structure.’ The unique combination of philosophical rigor and teleological ambivalence are a constant in Derrida’s career. Derrida does not really produce a philosophy, nor a method, nor a critique. It is something entirely novel and not without its critics. When I was attempting to understand Derrida, my teacher, Steven Shaviro, advised me; “Don’t try to understand it. It’s not Hegel. Just read a lot of Derrida and eventually you will get the hang of it.” That’s more or less true. It’s like a philosophical practice without a method per se and without a goal. Derrida’s strategy is to ‘inhabit’ western philosophy and ‘haunt,’ ‘de-center,’ or ‘de-con-struct’ what he finds. The reader is left not so much with new insights as with a feeling of insecurity with regard to old, previously unquestioned or ‘taken-for-granted’ axioms.
A classic Derrida procedure is to “expose” a concept to its binary other: form to content; space to time; identity to difference; center to margin; same to other; etc. etc.. Not, mind you, to then produce a new synthesis of the oppositions but rather to show the conditions for the possibility of thinking such concepts and to show that the conditions for the possibility of thinking this or that concept are also the condition for thinking its impossibility. Hence the ambivalence I mentioned earlier. This practice does not destroy existing concepts or binary oppositions, nor re-construct them on firmer ground, nor construct something new. It is a de-con-struction. It is undecideable what Derrida is doing, in short. When he is finished with the reader, everything is as it was before, except, weirdly, less intellectually substantial, more ghostly somehow.
Clear example from, I think, Of Grammatology: The concept of a structure requires a center and every center presupposes a structure without which it would be merely a random point. Every center is a center of some structure. The center is what actively defines the structure as a structure. Every point within the structure must relate in some way to the central point. Every point in the structure relates in someway to every other point within the structure via a detour through the central point. Any point can be in the structure at all only thanks to the central point. The central point is a unique point in the structure. It is the one point that must relate to every other point in the structure—whereas any other point may relate to another point, or may not. The central point guarantees the structural integrity of every other point. As such, it is unlike any other point in the structure. It is not “in” the structure in the same way as any other point each of whose inclusion it, the central point, guarantees. In a sense, then, the central point is not even “in” the structure at all. Or, it is in the structure, but by comparison with any other point, only marginally. The center of the structure is marginal, or is an “outside” in the very heart of the structure. That is to say, the point guarantees the integrity of the structure is not integrated into the structure in the same way as the other points. That which structures the structure is only ambiguously “part” of the structure…and so on and so on. You can re-de-formulate this innumerable ways.
The important thing is this: Derrida has managed to ‘infect’ the security of any formal discourse whatsoever. That is his “contribution” to philosophy.
“Différance”
This essay was his confrontation with Saussure whose linguistics had become the center, or general model, for the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althussier and those disciplines they altered: anthropology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. The central word of this essay is the French word above that means both: to be different from (in space, as one object is different from, in a different place form, another object) and to defer (in time; as to defer until later my need to get these notes done). So Derrida spells the word with an ‘a’ not an ‘e’ and in spoken French this difference will not be heard. It’s a neologism.
1. Classically, a sign stands in for a concept that remains absent. I cannot bring the concept ‘dog’ into the room here so I produce instead a signifier which your brain attaches to the absent concept so that you know what I mean. The signifier is secondary to the concept, it represents what I cannot show you, what I cannot bring into presence. The sign defers the presence of the concept. It is the concept that is the important thing. I say potato, you say potato yet we mean the same thing. The American says “cheese” and the German says “Kaise” but they mean the same thing; the essence of what they say is the same. The concept is the primary thing. Derrida questions the secondariness of the sign.
2. From Saussure: if the sign is arbitrary then A) the manner of its presentation is differential: it ‘presents’ the absent concept via the chain of signifiers into which it forms a system, but B) the system is a system of differences, not positive terms. Language has no sounds or ideas that preexisted the system. Language is only phonic and conceptual differences that issue from out of the system.
Derrida pushes this thinking to show that therefore the thing that both the American and German mean is made up of both spatial and temporal (deferred) differences, or, in short différance. The American and the German are only able to mean the same thing via a detour. What they mean is constituted by, guaranteed by, différance. More radically put, the presence that ought to be primary depends on, or is underwritten by, différance. Borrowing from Lévinas, Derrida will say that the sign is the ‘trace’ of a presence that is never, and has never been, present. The ‘trace’ (what comes after) “produces” meaning (which is primary) immemorially. That which is meant is a past that has never been present. Put in a different way, any ‘present’ element in any linguistic system or any code is ‘present’ and significant if and only if it refers to others elements in the system, and thus the ‘present’ element, “cheese” e.g., is not itself (by itself) present but is “haunted” by différance. Any present is always divided from itself.
This time-space differential “traces” the present and Derrida calls this archi-writing of which the present, any present, is but an effect. This is a new “field”. (The grammar book I teach says that its grammar is based on published writing. A moment’s reflection, however, tells us that published writing is based on grammar. The present grammar I teach is therefore a trace of published writing that preceded it and that the editors read carefully, and it is also a deferral of published writing that is to come when my brilliant students launch their writing careers. And, at the same time, any published writing is different from and is a trace of the grammar that preceded it…each is radically anterior to and a consequence of the movement of différance. What Derrida calls “Grammatology” is a radically general and a radically anterior text that continually traces presences.)
3. There had been in the west an unchallenged priority of spoken over written language from pre-Socratic thought through Saussure himself. In spoken language, language “lives”, the speaker is present, etc. Writing is second best, secondary, a supplement when the speaker cannot be there, a note to myself in case my memory fails, etc. Writing is thus depreciated. Speech is closest to consciousness. What I mean to say is closer to consciousness than what I say. What I say is closer to consciousness than what I write. A whole chain of priorities is hatched from this: primacy of content over expression; sd over sf; concept over percept; etc. The written sign is derived from the spoken sign, classically or metaphysically stated. The spoken sign is language presently alive. What Derrida wishes to show is that the movement of writing, or the possibility of writing, grounds the possibility of language in general.
Saussure was inconsistent. He said that the sign is arbitrary and that writing “naturally” follows from, or after, oral speech. But, if the sign really is arbitrary then it can only make an imprint on the brain because of the possibility of something durable, something rememberable. Without a durable institution every sign would be unthinkable because unmotivated—there is no bio-natural link to an object or a meaning. Now, what is writing if not the duration of the sign in space—on a piece of paper, say—and time—I can pick up the paper now and again ten years from now. That is to say, taking him rigorously, what Saussure describes for us, without saying so explicitly, is that the space of writing, archi-writing, or the possibility of writing, must logically make possible language in general. In a sense then, the space of writing precedes language itself. But this is impossible. Nonetheless, speech is logically dependent on the possibility of writing. (Remember when discussing Saussure how we had to say that the sf “makes an imprint” or “impression” on the brain, and how this was difficult to grasp but something had to be traced somewhere in order for signs to be intelligible.)
4. What is colossal about Derrida’s achievement here is to have shown that the possibility of writing preceded any binary opposition. The binary oppositions remains, but they are “unsettled”—they “float” on/in a space that is to be writing. Writing is in fact the very possibility of space/time and hence logically precedes objectivity. There can be no science of grammatology, therefore, since gram, archi-writing, makes possible any present object.
“Force and Signification”
If you keep the above in mind I think you can see that Derrida is in this essay “exposing”: the work of art to the imagination that (supposedly) preceded it and made it possible; force to signification; existence to essence; what is structured to structure; what is represented to representation; organic to artificial; etc. etc.
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