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There has been in recent years a heated debate of potentially far-reaching consequences taking shape in the literary circles of many universities in the United States. At issue are the very nature of writing and the path that literary criticism might take in the years to come. On one side of the conflict are those scholars who share the tenets of the humanistic tradition in which they were brought up, and defend the belief that the main purpose of literary criticism for them remains unchanged. On the other side are those intellectuals who are ushering in a new approach to literature and literary theory that has proven inscrutable and threatening to many traditional literary critics. This new approach is called Deconstruction, and in many ways it undermines humanistic assumptions about the relationship between author and reader, literary fiction and reality.
Deconstruction was fomented by the appearance in the last fifty years of experimental works by writers such as James Joyce, Bertold Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, and Jorge Luis Borges. These writers produced texts that seemed to require a new kind of criticism capable of reaching beyond traditional questions of literary form to probe the grounds of language itself. A major factor that made the formulation of this new approach to literature possible was the radical work of Jacques Derrida. Like a number of other contemporary thinkers, this French philosopher has focused on the ontological status of criticism itself, and has established himself as a major figure in the Deconstruction movement. He has become one of the most discussed new philosophers both in Europe and in the United States.
Derrida has described his philosophical project as a “general strategy of deconstruction which would avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing, while upholding it, in the closed sphere of these oppositions.”1 The main force of his critique is directed against nostalgia, particularly against those cries of nostalgia that constitute in his view the metaphysics of presence and origin. Those lost paradises are places of yearning for origin and end. Derrida opposes in Husserl the metaphysics of self-consciousness that accords privileged status to speech and voice. Nostalgia is logocentric, phonocentric, it speaks of being and experience, universal logic, alphabetic writing, and its only theme is loss. He is concerned with everything that escapes or refutes the metaphysics of presence and refuses to return to a paternal source. Deconstruction is an effort to dismantle the axioms upon which a metaphysical argument is based. It requires a critical parsing of a terminology, so that even when the philosopher uses the given terms, his use of them is heretical.
Much of Derrida’s work is a series of arguments with his predecessors, especially Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Husserl. One specific work of his, Of Grammatology, is a meditation provoked by Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, supplemented by critical glosses on Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. Grammatology itself arises from Derrida’s dissatisfaction with these predecessors and especially with tinges of nostalgia that he finds in their writings. As for the term grammatology, it has been taken to mean a treatise upon letters, upon the alphabet, syllabation, reading and writing, but in Derrida’s use the word seems to point only to a possibility that he is the first to declare at the same time an impossibility. Grammatology, were it to exist, would be beyond semiology, it would dismantle logocentrism and use conventional signs only “while erasing them, sous rature.”
Derrida has been described as a literary pyrotechnist who takes pleasure in showing that when we have ostensibly demonstrated the coherence of a structure we have merely revealed the force of a desire. He ascribes to objects only a virtual status. Their existence is less reliably substantial than the shadow they cast. If someone points to a center, Derrida does not deny that there may be a center, but he asserts that the center is a function, not a being, and if someone contends that ontologically one can locate definite origins and stable points of fixity, Derrida would negate the validity of this notion of residence. He would circumvent it by resorting to the concept of jeu, or freeplay, as an act logically prior to the possibility of presence or absence. In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida defines jeu as “the interplay of absence and presence,” a movement of alterity, of différance, which resists any kind of formulation that attempts to posit it in a fixed, stable locus.2
Derrida’s readings of various texts and the constructions of his own texts are explorations of Western logocentrism. The metaphysics of presence, which a deconstructed text can be shown simultaneously to affirm and undermine, is to Derrida the only metaphysics we know. To be sure, it is the metaphysics that underlies all our thinking, but it can be shown to give rise to paradoxes that challenge its coherence and consistency, and therefore challenge the possibility of determining or defining being as presence. The framework of the history of metaphysics, Derrida writes:
... is this determination of being as presence.... It would be possible to show that all the terms related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence,... essence, existence, substance, subject,... transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, god, man, and so forth.3
For Derrida nothing is ever simply present. Anything that is supposedly present and given as such is dependent for its identity on differences and relations that can never be present. Terry Eagleton provides an insightful outline of the transition from Saussure to Derrida, and points out that for Saussure the meaning in language is first and foremost a matter of difference. In other words, meaning is always the result of a division or articulation of signs. Derrida concurs with Saussure that the existence of the sign is dependent upon the difference between signifiers, but questions the Saussurean view of the sign as a neat symmetrical unity between one signifier and one signified. Instead he proposes a “grammatological” model in which a signified is seen as the product of a complex interaction of signifiers and meaning the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers, rather than a concept securely anchored to any one particular signifier. In other words, meaning is never immediately or fully present in any one given sign. Because the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is always in some way absent from it. Thus meaning can be defined as never being identical with itself. It is the result of a process of division or articulation, of signs being themselves only because of the fact that they are not some other sign. The implication of all this, as Eagleton aptly points out, is that language is a much less stable affair than the classical structuralists would have us believe. Moreover, this view of language plays havoc with the concept of a logos that is at once transcendental and self-evident – an ultimate “word,” presence, essence, truth, or reality that exists at one with itself, the “transcendental signifier” that can act as the foundation of all our thought, language, and experience (god, the self, substance, matter), and which can give meaning to all other signifiers.4
According to Derrida, our language is so suffused with the metaphysics of presence that it seems to offer us only this alternative: either something is present or else it is absent. He argues that the metaphysics of presence is pervasive and familiar. What is perhaps less obvious, contends Derrida, is the way in which the nature and reality of things in the universe is thought to be grounded on this kind of presence.
The Derridian critique of this metaphysics involves, among other things, identifying elements, terms, and functions which, like différance, are difficult to conceive in a traditional philosophical framework and which, when brought to the fore, work not so much to discredit that framework as to indicate its limits. This critique can be seen at work in Jonathan Culler’s analysis of the paradox between structure and event:
We tend to think that what we call the meaning of a word depends on the fact that it has been used by speakers on various occasions with the intention of communicating or expressing this meaning, and we thus might want to argue that what can in general be called the structure of a language – the general system of its rules and regularities – is derived from and determined by events: by acts of communication. But if we took this argument seriously and began to look at the events which are said to determine structures, we would find that every event is itself already determined and made possible by prior structures. The possibility of meaning something by an utterance is already inscribed in the structure of the language. The structures, of course, are themselves always products, but however far back we try to push, even when we think of the birth of language itself and try to describe an originating event that might have produced the first structure, we discover that we must assume prior organization, prior differentiation. For a caveman successfully to originate language by making a special grunt signify something like “food” is possible only if we assume that the grunt is already distinguished or distinguishable from other grunts and that the world has already been divided into categories of food and non-food. Signification always depends on differences: contrasts, for example, between food and non-food that allow “food” to be signified.5
Derrida elaborates further on this point in Positions, and writes that:
The play of differences involves syntheses and referrals [renvois] that prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element that is present in and of itself and refers only to itself. Whether in written or spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element that itself is not simply present. This linkage means that each ‘element’ – phoneme or grapheme – is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system. Nothing, in either the elements or the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent.6
Signifying events depends on differences, but these differences are themselves the products of events. When one focuses on events, one is led to affirm the priority of differences, but when one focuses on differences, one sees their dependence on prior events. One can shift back and forth between these two perspectives that never give rise to a synthesis. Each perspective shows the error of the other in an irresolvable dialectic. This alternation Derrida terms différance. Différance thus designates both a passive difference already in existence as the condition of signification and an act of differing or deferring that produces differences. Critics have associated this term with the English word spacing, which designates both a completed arrangement and an act of distribution or arranging.
The term différance plays an important role in the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure. It is particularly important in the case of Saussure because it is in Derrida’s reading of his Course of General Linguistics that the paradoxes of signification and the role of différance are further explored. Derrida finds in Saussure a powerful critique of the metaphysics of presence and what he calls its “logocentrism,” but also, and simultaneously, an unavoidable affirmation of this logocentrism and an inextricable involvement with it.
Saussure defines language as a system of signs. He argues that signs are arbitrary and conventional and that each sign is defined not by some essential property but by the differences that distinguish it from other signs. Saussure contends that the sign is a purely relational unit and that in language there are only differences, without positive terms. This is a principle wholly at odds with logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. It maintains, on the one hand, that no terms of the system are ever simply and wholly present, for differences can never be present. And on the other hand it defines identity in terms of common absences rather than in terms of presence. Identity, which is the very connerstone of any metaphysics, is made purely relational.
At the same time, however, there is in Saussure’s argument a powerful affirmation of logocentrism. This emerges, most interestingly for Derrida, in Saussure’s treatment of writing, which he relegates to a secondary, derivative status when compared to speaking. The object of linguistic analysis, Saussure writes, is not both the written and the spoken forms of words. The spoken forms alone constitute the object. Writing is simply a means of representing speech, a technical device, an external accessory, and therefore need not be taken into consideration when one is studying language.
This may seem a relatively innocent maneuvre on the part of Saussure, but in fact, as Derrida shows, it is crucial to the western tradition of thinking about language, where speech is seen as natural, direct communication and writing as an oblique representation. This view of writing is as old as philosophy itself. In the Phaedrus, Plato condemns writing as a bastardized form of communication. Eagleton argues that behind this prejudice that privileges speech over writing lies a particular view of “man.” Man, Eagleton argues, is supposedly able to create and express his own meanings spontaneously, to be in full possession of himself, and to dominate language as a transparent medium of his innermost being. What this theory fails to see is that the “living voice” is in fact just as material as print, and that since spoken signs, like written ones, work only by a process of difference and division, speaking could be just as much said to be a form of writing as writing is said to be a second-hand form of speaking.7
Saussure speaks of the “dangers” of writing, which “disguises” language and even on occasion “usurps” the role of speech. The “tyranny of writing” is powerful and insidious, leading, for example, to errors of pronunciation that are “pathological,” a corruption or infection of the natural spoken forms. Linguists who attend to written forms are “falling into the trap.” Writing, supposedly an external accessory in the service of speech, threatens to taint the purity of the system it serves. The relationship between speech and writing therefore seems to be more complicated than it at first seemed. The hierarchical scheme that gave speech priority and made writing dependent on it has now been upset by the possibility that speech may not be independent of writing after all and that writing may affect or infect speech. The structure or play of relations at work here is one which Derrida has identified in a number of texts, particularly in Rousseau, and which he calls, using a term common in Rousseau, the “logic of the supplément.”
Rousseau speaks of masturbation as a “dangerous supplement.” Like writing, it is a perverse addition – in this case to sexuality rather than to language – which does not affect the nature of normal sexuality. On the other hand, masturbation substitutes for, or takes the place of, normal sexual activity. Its ability to act as substitute indicates that it may share something of the same nature.
The logic of supplementarity, as Derrida describes it, is powerful and pervasive. It makes possible everything we think of as human – language, passion, society, art. Once alerted to it, we can find it at work in the most diverse contexts. We are dealing with a logic of the supplement when something characterized as marginal with respect to a plenitude – as writing is marginal to the activity of speech or perversion to normal sexuality – is identified as a substitute for that plenitude or as something that can supplement or complete it. It then becomes possible to show that what was conceived as the distinguishing characteristics of the marginal are in fact the defining qualities of the central object of consideration.
Saussure and others expend moral fervor in rejecting writing because they have identified it with certain characteristics of language that they want to set aside but which, precisely because they are characteristics of language, continually threaten to reappear. Thus writing, which Saussure claimed ought not to be the subject of linguistic inquiry, turns out to be constructed on the very same principles as speech and to be the best illustration of the nature of linguistic units.
Derrida’s deconstructive reversals are strategic interventions. They do not lay the groundwork for a new discipline – grammatology, he says, is the name of a question – but apply pressure to a system of concepts, upset it so as to make its presuppositions and its limits more apparent. His readings combine what we ordinarily think of as the literary play of language with philosophical rigor, not in some mild-mannered compromise but in their most radical forms. What gives Derrida’s writings their special power is this combination: he argues within a particular philosophical system but at the same time attempts through the productivity of language to breach or exceed that very system.
Many of the critics who take issue with Derrida do so in a decidedly negative light. Deconstruction has been described as a “wonderland philosophy which exhorts us to work terribly hard, to run terribly fast, in order to stay where we are”8 and as a “lurid strategy... reading as a form of mistrust.”9 These views may be understood as reactions to propositions that are regarded as radical and thus threatening to the orthodoxy. Factional stances aside, we can close by saying that the importance of Derrida’s work to today’s literary community is not so much due to the radical nature of the ideas and formulations he helped to introduce in the past twenty years, but rather because his writing has brought into play certain relations that will doubtless dominate future writings on literary theory and criticism for some time to come.
Notes
1 J. L. Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, “Positions, Interview/Jacques Derrida,” Diacritics (Winter 1972): 35.
2 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 263-264.
3 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 27.
4 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). pp. 127-134.
5 Jonathan Culler, “Derrida,” in Structuralism and Since, ed. John Sturrock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 161.
6 Houdebine and Scarpetta, “Positions,” p. 39.
7 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 130.
8 Marjorie Greene, “Life, Death, and Language: Some Thoughts on Wittgenstein and Derrida,” Partisan Review 43 (1976): 279.
9 Michael Wood, “Deconstructing Derrida,” The New York Review of Books, March 3rd, 1977, pp. 27-29.
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