Simon Glendinning, Derrida: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press: 2011).
Derrida did not consider himself a philosopher through and through, as his critics no doubt agreed. They thought he didn’t even begin correctly, and that his enterprise was dangerous (15).
The Cartesian inheritance was indeed that philosophy was a withdrawing into oneself , which creates what Derrida called a community without community (17).
Derrida instead posits being in oneself as always already being enmeshed in a world of others not of one’s own making. Such is Derridean paradox (18).
The common antagonistic reading of Derrida is that he was a nihilist who thought anything goes and that texts have no meaning (20).
Gavin Kitching is someone who’s read Derrida and asserts that Derrida’s central thesis is that texts have no fixed meaning. Meaning is provided by the reader or by the powers that be in a sort of interpretive violence (21).
Kitching says on the contrary sometimes it’s “clear” that one person does not understand another and other times it’s “absolutely clear” that they do. In both cases Derrida’s thesis does not hold (22).
But even the simplest text can be completely changed by its context. And that’s just it: no text is without context, and is not read by someone in a context. Therefore there is always something left to read (25).
Derrida wants to challenge the metaphysics that wants to believe that the meaning of language is mostly immediately clear to most people (28).
Derrida wasn’t necessarily trying to tear down the western philosophical heritage. Instead he was trying to inhabit it in a new way, shedding light on its “dominant structures and patterns of thinking” and “revealing its systematic dependence on concepts like ‘immediacy,’ ‘proximity,’ and ‘presence.’” Paradoxically, this can give that heritage a new future (30).
Derrida in preface to Of Grammatology said we need to question idea of history as unfolding in a linear development to a definite end (33).
Teleological bent of western philosophy derived from a particular conception of the history of writing (34).
His goal is not a future where we’ve finally gotten it, but one where we’ve humbly stopped trying. An open future (35).
Derrida is exposing ethnocentrism, phonocentrism, and logocentrism all at once and proposing a liberatory science of writing (37).
His project hopes “for a future world that is no longer dominated by the classic hope for a coming final end.” A future wherein the future remains open, “beyond the closure of knowledge” (39).
This future is democracy, but it is democracy because democracy is always to come. If never has a final arrival. If you were to be final it would cease to be democracy because democracy implies no fixed rules (40).
The suspicion toward writing is already present in Plato’s Phaedrus according to Derrida (43).
The linguistic turn of philosophy, or the realization that the basic problem of philosophy is about how we use and understand language, is the long slow culmination of the Western tradition for Derrida. It reveals the deep structure of western metaphysics. Derrida would be considered an extreme example of this. “There is nothing outside the text” (43).
We assume writing comes after language which is original and primary. Derrida turns this inside out and claims that language is made possible by and must be understood in terms of the structure of writing (44).
The obsession with language as being at the core of philosophy Derrida regards as not a turn but the inevitable exhaustion of the western metaphysical heritage. It is in turning to writing that this trajectory will find a way to keep going (45).
Glendinning says language comes to the fore in this process because everything that assured us that language was what it said it was, i.e. “the system of external or sensible signification of an order of pure intelligibility (meaning ideality), an order grasped in terms of the given word or divine logos (‘the infinite signified’) has begun to melt into air” (46).
The sign from Plato on was understood as the unity of a sensible signifier and an intelligible signified. This assumes an order of pure intelligibility, or what was traditionally called in Greek and Christian theology Logos. “The age of the sign is essentially theological,” then, and writing which is in its essence exterior to this internal breath and inspiration of logos will always be secondary in this age (47).
The only good writing is metaphorical like the writing of the book of nature. It is like a book, which is a totality. It as such totality supervises and controls the text from outside, from an ideal location. But this distinction between book and writing is becoming less believable today, in large part because of Derrida (48).
Derrida shows that writing and its crude marks and traces is not a threat to the proper life of man but rather its very ground of existence (49).
Derrida picks philosophers who have in some way critiqued the onto-theological heritage and also shows where they fall short. But even Derrida does not claim to critique this heritage from the outside (50).
Derrida sees a graphematic turn, including an increased reliance on writing metaphors for many things such as biological processes (51).
Philosophy has been the impossible project to “reduce dissemination” of meaning, to provide absolute clarity, to reveal the transcendental signified hiding behind the signifier. (54).
With Derrida, we realize we are in an “inscriptural space” or a text, that has a fundamental irreducibility; i.e., it can’t be reduced to one meaning (54).
Derrida intimates that perhaps human speech is not as absolutely different from animal speech as we think. In that it doesn’t uniquely among languages have an objective unchanging referent (55).
In the end you cannot separate out how a word is normally used from how it is used in this specific context. Both are irreducible, not just the second one (56).
Differance “marks the structure and functioning of every signifying form” as “differences-within-the-same” that he thematizes and formalizes in his work (57).
Not only is understanding based on this identity-in-differance in that what allows sounds to be discriminated between is not something presently sensible and so is due to “differential relations” between sounds but so is all that is in the order of intelligibility as well. From Greek times “sensibility and understanding (perception and conception)” were the lens through which human cognition was seen. Both are based on experiencing something “present.” This is where Derrida shows the privileging of the “logic of presence” (59).
Identity has traditionally been understood as the possession of certain things or traits that, were the thing with the identity to lose them or enough of them, it would cease to be the thing. This assumes a basic irrelevance to the rest of the universe. If two things had the same traits, it would imply there are now two of those things (61).
Structuralism said rather than things are what they are basically in virtue of not being something else. It’s their position in the general structure of differentiation that matters. (61).
Derrida is more in line with the second conception except that he says not only does difference exist between elements of the system but within them, a type of “originary alienation” (62).
The opposition between structuralist and post-structuralist is manifest in the controversy over which comes first: language as a set of rules or speech as the event of language. Ferdinand de Saussure, father of structuralist linguistics, says speech comes first. And this would make sense, since it’s original speech which is run through the “differentiation system” of language to produce different meanings. But Derrida points out how this is a chicken and egg problem. If speech is to be more than mere babble, it must conform to language. But if language is first, then the system must have dropped from the sky fully formed to shape the babble into speech. If speech is first, how did it ever utter what the rules of language were without first having rules by which uttering anything would be intelligible? If language is first, how did it ever “speak” its rules so that speech could be modified and differentiated? (64)
We therefore need to think “at once both the rule and the event” (65).
Derrida is not denying some type of identity altogether but the idea of a persisting presence as identity. The point is that identity is always deferred to its interpretive context. It both differs from the identities around it and is distinguishable by this difference yet also defers to them in an act of similarity or reaching toward of putting off toward the other. It’s “difference-within-identity”. The word differance captures this because it incorporates the sense of the Latin differre which is like our defer (66).
Differance was intuited unknowingly by classical philosophy in the concept of writing. What is conceived of as writing is valid for the structure and function of all signs (68).
Writing is potent classically because it allows communication to extend “outside of the entire field of vision and beyond earshot” (68).
Law of writing is that it has to be structurally readable or iterable in the radical absence of the producer or receiver (70).
Writing in fact is intended to make “up for these possible absences” and this is part of the logically necessary precondition for its very existence (71).
What if all communication is like this? Derrida says it is. The original event of speech, say, iterates or repeats as separate acts, kind of like an echo I would say. The speech instantaneously represents something and instantly goes off on its own, but not as obviously as writing (71).
In writing the original even breaks away and leaves the control of its author by definition. It must be “sufficiently detachable” by definition to even be writing, so this is the Precondition for its iterability (72).
Even something as simple as a grocery list conforms to this: “it will only be a list if it implies my absence, if it already detached itself from me in order to function beyond my ‘present’ act and if it is utilizable at another time, in the absence of my-being-present-now” (72).
“The possibility of absence is part of the logical structure of any sign” or even any “means of communication” in general. And so there was in a sense writing before the letter, before actual writing (72).
The traditional sign must give way to an iterative concept that is “irreducible to anything that can be simply present in the present.” Metaphysics of presence that says persisting presences waiting to be tapped into by man is deconstructed by the concept of writing that it held within it (73).
Traditional Philosophy attempted a “reduction to meaning” while Derrida proposes his philosophy of writing as a “reduction of meaning” (73, 74).
Derrida, his more extravagant remarks to the contrary, is not eliminating meaning but critiquing the classical conception of a purely ideal static and present sense of meaning. It’s “the possibility of meaning on the basis of a ‘formal’ organization which in itself has no meaning” (74).
“The Things themselves” in their purity have always been conceived of as the ideal to get back to but Derrida says that’s impossible because the event of writing itself (and all communication) is iterable: it defers in its very essence to others. This constituent part of all things makes impossible a priori their attainment in their supposed ideal purity (75).
Derrida doesn’t just mean that signs never quite can get back to the deferred presence they’re supposed to stand in for—that would grant the reality of the classical ideal of pure persisting presence—no, he penetrates metaphysics more deeply, and posits that difference and deferral are part of identity itself. So it’s not the destruction of meaning but the true relativization of it (76).
In the ‘90s Derrida’s thought took a turn toward applying deconstruction to more practical political ends with the essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation if Authority’” (78).
By Derrida’s own admission, deconstruction performs an “‘intervention’ that effects a reversal…. and a general displacement.’” In other words hierarchies are turned upside down (79).
It is not a destroying of the heritage but a seeking out and inhabiting the parts of it that always already resisted the overarching organizational principle. In the logocentric western tradition, this concept is writing. So it’s something within the heritage already that Derrida invests with new power and uses to surpass the dominant force’s trajectory (79).
Deconstruction is usually a movement of reversal. So logocentrism says the only possible concept is a concept that is one. But Derrida says irreducible polysemia, or the essential dispersion of meanings, is the essential condition for a concept to even exist. In other words the very existence of a concept means that it cannot attain ideal purity in the logocentric sense (80).
Derrida really only changes emphasis as time goes on. His focus whether dealing with concepts or political issues or anything is to show how “the only possible x” can only occur “under the form of the impossible” (80).
This is because the tradition does not do justice to the range of possibilities of the concept and so what it considers impossible must be the case (81).
For example forgiveness—isn’t it the case that to truly be such, it must forgive the unforgivable? But is not that impossible? Yet this is the logic that should govern logocentrism (81).
Same with a community. Logocentrism says a community is one or one unified thing. If a grouping is fractious it is not a community. But polysemia says that anything truly one, truly undivided, would not be a community but a solitary individual. And so fractiousness is inherent in community itself. The very opposite of what logos says makes up a community is the very possibility for community to occur (82).
Derrida over his career goes from “the margins of philosophy” to those at “the center of our ethical and political concerns” (82).
Derrida shows unease and admits that he has to be “understood in the very element of the language [he] calls into question” (83).
Derrida increasingly felt his task was beyond theory, to express things in the political realm that had to be “experienced” (84).
Derrida was explicitly not a Marxist, and he didn’t hide himself from the terror of the Soviet bloc. But neither did he celebrate the fall of communism from a right wing Triumphalistic stance (84).
Parliamentary democracy arose under a specific set of technological conditions for communication. Those conditions have drastically changed, and yet our political forms have not (85).
Derrida drew on the spirit of Marx and viewed his work as impossible without Marx but rejected the Marx of orthodoxy (86).
He wants a “new International” that goes beyond the Nation state, parties, property. One better suited to the new communication technology (86).
Derrida looks to traditional democracy for the future but is frightened by the aspect of it that looks toward homogenization and standardization. This is one path of it. Instead he sees its universalizing power as being a force for becoming “indifferent to particular difference” and ascending past identitarian impulses and toward a cosmopolitanism that cherishes singularity. This is the dual power hidden in democracy’s “number and equality” (87).
Uniting philosophy to politics is a project Derrida says goes back to Plato’s philosopher king—it means uniting justice to power (88). And it’s for those like him who reject conservatism but are not taken in by orthodox Marxism and who want to have an Enlightenment of the Enlightenment basically [the essence of postmodernism, really] (89).
Up to now democracy has prized countability, an equality that is essentially homogenizing (89). Derrida wants to preserve this egalitarian function but somehow unite it to a democracy that prizes the uniqueness and singularity of each, that aspect that is opposed to reciprocity and equality (89). The nation state has until now not prized this second aspect, even if it hasn’t been overly racist.
Democracy betrays itself: it counts the irreducible and unequal as calculable and equal. Yet democracy itself is the desire to overcome this tension! (91) It is the desire for something which is “as Levinas puts it, ‘no adequate idea’” It is the “other” of all “teleo-messianic” political theories that seeks “the end of man” (92).
Can we still as post-Marxists have an interest in emancipation and progress even when we no longer have a metaphysical basis for these things? (93)
We have to move from messianism that preaches a future time when we will have finally arrived to a vision of “the interminable desire for ‘democracy to come.’” This parallels Derrida’s theories about “the closure of the logocentric age of the sign” (94): there is no final end just like there is no final stable meaning in the world. [This greatly approaches metamodenism’s pragmatism.]
Derrida wants a philosophical movement that resists “the idea of finally having down with the question of how to live” (96).
Marxism has uniquely dodged the increased reaction to historico-messianic (meta) narratives (96).
Derrida does not advocate eschewing “juridico-political battles” (97).
Another of Derrida’s aporias: justice has an element of incommunicability because the situations and individuals are so singular. Yet law is by nature general and systematizing. Yet it is the very cry of justice from these particular circumstances that spurs us to calculate, to search for universal fairness and equitable justice (97).
Heidegger classifies anthropology up to his day as the Greco-Christian theory of man as the rational animal, made in God’s image. He says this has stood in the way of us grasping the essence of our being. Even post Descartes the human is an animal existence joined to a thinking or self-conscious subject: substantially the same understanding. He would go on to posit the essence of humanity or it’s humanitas as higher than the preceding tradition. Derrida wants to get away from both of these understandings without sacrificing the uniqueness of man (100).
Derrida rejects both the classical heritage of us having discovered cognitively the “fact” of our abyssal difference from animals and from those who would contarily assert the opposite today, that we have discovered the “fact” of our essential non-difference with animals (102); in other words today’s science doesn’t “beat” yesterday’s science (103).
Both viewpoints envision us going to the evidence and then forming our belief based on the objective fact. Derrida wants to say it’s more nuanced than that: there are objective differences, but “they depend for their significance upon a framework that is a free construct, not upon something fashioned in a manner that is answerable to how anything really is” (104).
The anti-cognitivist strain Derrida represents says that our beliefs about the significance of the human-animal difference were never something we “discovered” (105).
These beliefs were not unscientific—modernity itself has at its base a belief in the progressive civilization of man, a gradual growth in difference from the animals (106).
Paradoxically, man’s adversarial relation to animals as a mass of “the non-human” has accelerated and worsened in the past two hundred years to the scale of genocide in some cases, with instance of cruelty, all to subject them to us (106).
The concepts we use to express things we think are properly human such as friendship and companionship are also used of animals. So they abyss is crossed. Cora Diamond says these concepts are labile or apt to shift. Derrida would say these concepts are iterable. We might say they’re iteralabile (107) or “iteralable.”
Iteration captures what Derrida is going for with the link between “once again” and “other” which is reflected in ancient Sanskrit. “Link between repetition and alterity” (107). Lability is already at work when writing occurs. We use the marks of human difference to “efface” the human difference in these cases in a certain sense. The path to the animal is thus paradoxically found in the very concepts that supposedly close it off (107).
One fails to be human “when one is beastly to the beast” (108). All this shows the slip of meaning and blasts apart the dichotomy many try to fit the problem into.
“I am unbelievably grateful to the texts of Jacques Derrida for inciting me and continuing to incite me to retrace my steps, and to interrupt the readers I have been” (111).