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Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-DE010-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-DE010-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/derrida-jacques-1930-2004/v-1

3. Early reception and subsequent clarifications

The thematics of différance have given rise to a number of misunderstandings about Derrida’s work, and some of his writings of the 1980s and 1990s are attempts to specify the task of deconstruction more precisely. The fact that différance indicates the un-sayability of a ‘final word’ about something like ‘Being’ has been read by some as resonating with the language of negative theology. Derrida shows why the apparent affinity is unavoidable but warns that to equate deconstruction with negative theology would be to reaffirm the eschatological orientation of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, Derrida has argued that every experience is structured by an undeconstructible messianic promise which interrupts the presence of the here-and-now without being reducible to the prophecy of a determinate future. Perhaps the Heraclitean conception of ‘becoming’ comes closest to indicating what Derrida is after with his writing of différance – provided that we read Heraclitus’ affirmation of becoming as compatible with Derrida’s account of the experience of the promise.

Such a reading of Heraclitus can perhaps be found in Nietzsche’s writings, the deconstructive aspects of which Derrida takes Heidegger to overlook. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s texts represent the single thought of a single thinker at a singular moment in the history of Being. Derrida counters this suggestion by calling attention to aspects of Nietzsche’s writing styles. Rather than express a meaning or truth, Nietzsche’s writings introduce textual problematics meant to rule out recourse to the traditional conceptual resources of interpretation. Derrida demonstrates this, in Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles), by showing the difficulties that would arise for any interpretive decision concerning a scrap of paper on which Nietzsche has scribbled (in German) ‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’ At issue is not only the question of whether a text can have a single meaning, but whether it makes sense to speak of any ‘thing’ as having a single identity. Rather than speak of Nietzsche’s texts, Derrida writes of those texts that are signed with the signature – or, as it will turn out, signatures – of ‘Nietzsche’. The problematic of the signature thereby becomes an important issue which arises in many of Derrida’s texts, and the question of his ‘own’ signature features prominently in these considerations. Derrida is especially attentive to what he calls the ‘iterability’ of signatures – their ability, as marks, to function in the absence of any determinable addressee. On Derrida’s analysis, iterability (which is the condition for the possibility of a written mark’s ability to function as a signifier) disrupts the concept of a fixed context that would determine a set of rules governing signification.

Although he has seemed, to some critics, merely to duplicate the writing strategies of Nietzsche, Derrida expresses some reservations about certain of Nietzsche’s gestures. For example, while he notes that the term ‘woman’ functions in Nietzsche’s writings as a trope for non-truth – and thus as an exemplary textual ‘site’ for deconstruction – he also calls attention to the violence of such gestures. Derrida seeks a strategy that would exploit the subversive potential of marginal subject positions without reifying the logic of marginality. In this way, deconstruction becomes a way of thinking about the political. From his earliest writings Derrida has been concerned with the relationship between justice and violence. Taking off from Heidegger’s essay on the Anaximander Fragment (1946), Derrida engages Levinas and others on the question of whether or not it is possible to thematize a purely non-violent conception of justice.

What exactly a more fully developed deconstructive politics might look like is a topic that has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The fact that différance implies an endless deferral of what, from the standpoint of metaphysics, would be the ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ of beings (or of Being), has led some critics to suggest that deconstruction undermines the very possibility of making ethical and political determinations. Such interpretations overlook the constant concern with justice that informs Derrida’s works. Working both with and against the Kantian conception of regulative ideals, Derrida seeks to delineate a conception of justice as an aporia which both calls for, and is called forth by, the work of deconstruction.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Habermas, Gadamer and their followers insist that deconstruction implies an affirmation of indeterminacy and thus the complete inability to make political judgments. These critics argue for a politics based on an ideal of consensus, and they take to task philosophers such as Derrida who do not share their consensus that consensus is a goal that no one needs to be coerced to accept. By calling nearly every position substantively different from his own a ‘performative contradiction’, Habermas exhibits the very sort of normative violence that deconstruction questions.

Derrida has countered such criticisms by more explicitly addressing ethical and political issues. Toward this end, he has drawn on a wide variety of traditional texts, among them Aristotle and de Montesquieu on friendship; Aristotle on the difference between economics and chrematistics; Marx on commodity fetishism; Kant on international politics, and Benjamin on the messianic. A constant concern of Derrida’s has been that of developing a rigorously deconstructive conception of responsibility, a theme he often develops with reference to the work of Levinas.

Derrida’s contributions to social theory cannot be fully understood, I would argue, without some sense of his response to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s recasting of psychoanalytic problematics along lines that connect Husserlian and Freudian conceptions of subjectivity. Abraham and Torok’s reworking of such psychoanalytic concepts as incorporation, introjection, mourning and haunting, are frequently invoked in Derrida’s writings. In Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx), Derrida develops a conception of ‘hauntology’ which uses many of these terms to work through questions concerning the texts of Marx and the political programmes associated with Marxism. Making explicit a complex problematic of ‘the spectral’ in Marx’s texts, Derrida juxtaposes the force of Marx’s account of the spectrality involved in commodity fetishism with Marx’s resistance to the concept of spectrality. By way of considering Marx’s conflicted relationship with Stirner, Derrida calls for a return to a Marxist thinking that would not banish the spectral dimension which Stirner opens up. In so doing, Derrida implicitly suggests that Marx’s attempt to banish Stirnerian concerns parallels the attempt of contemporary social theorists to ‘conjure away’ the spectre of deconstruction.

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Citing this article:
Cutrofello, Andrew. Early reception and subsequent clarifications. Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-DE010-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/derrida-jacques-1930-2004/v-1/sections/early-reception-and-subsequent-clarifications.
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