Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)

2. Deconstruction

It is out of his reflections on the implications of this position that Derrida comes to clarify the task of deconstruction. Derrida first proposed the French déconstruction as a way of translating Heidegger’s use of the German word Destruktion, a term which appears in Being and Time (1927). According to Heidegger, the task of thinking time as the horizon of Being requires a Destruktion of the history of metaphysical concepts, especially the concept of time as developed in Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. Heidegger does not equate Destruktion with obliteration. For Heidegger, the history of metaphysics consists in the tightening of a structure – what he later calls the Gestell – and it is his aim to ‘loosen’ the hold that this structure has on thinking. Considered in this way, Destruktion would be a freeing-up: a de-structuring. It is partly in order to capture this particular sense of the Heideggerian term that Derrida invokes the word déconstruction.

But Derrida takes his work of translation to be one which also transforms the Heideggerian conception of ‘freeing-up’, for Derrida sees Heidegger as recapitulating certain gestures of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida is especially suspicious of those places where Heidegger seems to suggest that the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics can bring thought back to some sort of ‘original’ relation to language as a poetic ‘Saying’ of ‘the Being of beings’. For Derrida, there can be no ‘original’ position from which thinking begins or to which it could return.

For Derrida, the history of Western metaphysics consists in a series of repeated efforts to affirm self-presence as the paradigm of truth. At the heart of this tradition is the definition of ‘man’ as that being who can signal his self-presence to himself through language. Against this pretension of ‘man’s’ unique position among beings – and in crucial respects his position here is closer to Hegel’s than is usually acknowledged – Derrida argues that no thought, not even that of an ‘I think’, can ever be immediately present to itself (see Selfhood, postmodern critique of). To understand this position, we need to see why Derrida is drawn away from the theme of language to that of writing.

In order to maintain the value of self-presence, Western philosophers have traditionally tended to ignore the degree to which thinking is dependent on language. Yet the fact of such dependence could not be dismissed entirely. Accordingly, philosophers from Plato to Rousseau to Hegel distinguish between an ideal language in which thought would be immediately transparent to itself, and a secondary language into which this original and univocal ‘language of thought’ could then be translated. Spoken words – because they exist only in the disappearing moment in which they are spoken, and because they can be heard ‘in the head’ of the speaker – would seem to be directly expressive of thought. By contrast, written words, because they can function even in the absence of their producer, would seem to be exterior to thought. Speech immediately embodies thought; writing is merely a sign of speech: such would be the founding claim of philosophy’s pretension to self-presence through a forgetting of the materiality of signification. On the basis of this flimsy argument, Western philosophers writing alphabetically have insisted that their own ‘phonetic’ writing is more intelligible – that is, a sign of greater intelligence – than the ‘non-phonetic’ writing of non-Europeans – this despite the contravening fact that, as in Leibniz, the ideal of a formal language has necessarily found its exemplar in the model of non-phonetic writing.

Obviously, there are all kinds of empirical reasons why it should seem impossible to say what counts as phonetic writing and what counts as non-phonetic writing. More significantly, Derrida argues, it is impossible to make sense of the ideal of a purely expressive language. For in its dependence on iterable signifiers, all language requires that very non-expressive element which has traditionally been ascribed to non-phonetic writing. Accordingly, there is simply no basis for drawing a rigorous distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘writing’.

In this way, Derrida purports to deconstruct the ‘logocentric’ or ‘phonocentric’ basis of the metaphysics of presence. The hierarchical privileging of speech over writing turns out to be but one of an indefinite series of hierarchical oppositions upon which traditional metaphysics founds itself. In each case, that which would function as something ‘other’ to the pretension to self-presence is excluded by being accorded the same ‘fallen’ status that non-phonetic writing is said to have. Derrida’s aim is not to ‘reverse’ these hierarchical oppositions – as it would be if he were interested in privileging writing over speech – but to deconstruct the very logic of such exclusionary founding gestures.

On Derrida’s account, then, the untenability of the speech/writing distinction makes the concept of writing just as suspect as the concept of speech. On the other hand, writing continues to function as an exemplary figure of otherness. For this reason, it is tempting to say that, much as Heidegger suggests that the task of thinking is ‘to bring language as language to language’, so deconstruction tries ‘to bring writing as writing to writing’. To deconstruct the metaphysics of presence would be to disclose thinking as writing – rather than writing as a way of recording pure thoughts. Derrida stresses this point by describing ‘arche-writing’ – the archival character of a thought without arkhe, or origin – as différance, a term he introduces to name the impossibility of naming a ‘first’ or ‘central’ term of any sort. As a way of opening up the possibility for thinking otherwise than metaphysically, it is necessary to free up writing from its metaphysical interpretation as language intended to express a self-present ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’.

Toward this end, Derrida has developed a number of different writing strategies. One strategy is to produce irreducibly multiple ‘texts’ which resist being read as unified ‘books’. Derrida’s Glas (1974; the word can be translated as ‘death knell’) is fragmented in this way. Its basic structure consists of two separate ‘columns’, one of which examines a number of issues related to Hegel’s conception of a crypt, and the other of which juxtaposes to this first column a multi-faceted examination of the signature of Jean Genet as a kind of crypt that is regularly inscribed in Genet’s writings. Among other things, Glas can be read as a deconstruction that would ‘free up’ the writings of Genet from the quasi-Hegelian ‘summing-up’ of Genet which Sartre presented in his Saint Genet (1952). Another strategy of Derrida’s is to produce textual marks – such as différance – that are specifically designed to render problematic the traditional concept of a signifier. Such marks are not quite ‘neologisms’, since they are neither words nor signifiers, but deconstructive ‘surds’ which call attention to their own resistance to intelligibility.