Topic outline
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- Definitions
- Introduction
- Derrida's thought
- Deconstruction
- Deconstructing phenomenology
- Saussure and Barthes
- Differences between Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault
- References
Definitions
Aporia─irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument or theory.
Metaphysics of presence─A term originally used by Heidegger, later appropriated by poststructuralist thought to refer to the assumption within Western metaphysics that there is a fixed point, a self-present agent, a mind or consciousness that witnesses (or is present before) eternal or essential truths.
Logos─speech, reason.
Phallologocentrism─positing 'masculine' traits as superior to 'feminine' traits.
Ethnocentrism─positing historically and culturally specific values as absolutes.
Introduction
This topic introduces the first of the post structuralist thinkers we will look at in this series of web resources, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and the practice of deconstruction. The poststructuralist thinkers we will look at in this series, in different ways, move beyond modernism by revealing the aporias (or inconsistencies) within Western philosophical thought.
Derrida was a critic of phenomenology, and specifically of the idea that knowledge of reality comes via a being who is present before truth (the metaphysics of presence). Indeed, Derrida's reading of philosophical texts aimed to reveal that the metaphysics of presence is dependent upon linguistic device, as are the principles of logic upon which it is built. He attempts to do this by highlighting repressed idealisations, oppositional logic and other metaphoric device, often referred to as the practice of deconstruction. In his early work Derrida argued that philosophical texts, in fact any kind of discourse including criticism, linguistics, anthropology and the human sciences, depend upon rhetorical and other device in the same way that literary writing does.
Derrida's work consists of a critique of philosophical texts, including those of Husserl, Saussure, Rousseau, Levi-Strauss and Barthes some of which will be referred to in this topic as a means to exemplify his core insights.
Derrida's work grows out of structuralism with which it shares the understanding that language is an autonomous system of signs which confer meaning or significance only in contrast or non-identity with other signs within the sign system.
Derrida rejects Saussure's idea that language is structured by a hidden network of relations which can explain all manifestations within a given culture. For Derrida it is not possible to track and fix the network of relations within a given language system because meaning is always 'deferred', 'displaced' or 'substituted' by some further linguistic or metaphoric reference in an endless chain. The attempt to map or refer to a structure or centre, a univocal meaning, is abandoned by Derrida. This gives research informed by Derridean understandings a different aim. Instead of attempting to understand culture by understanding the structure of the language, Derrida focuses upon singular readings. Each instance of 'meaning' must be investigated in turn to understand its specific linguistic dependencies and devices.
Derrida was influenced by Nietzsche's observation that philosophy and all other writing depends upon metaphor or figurative discourse. Nietzsche goes back to the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece—sees the dialectical method of eliciting ‘truth’ from a carefully contrived encounter between wisdom and ignorance as no more than a rhetorical ploy. For Nietzsche, science is also a discourse linked to the ideology of reason arising from the Greek equation of truth and logic. Nietzsche argues that reason or the supposed self-evidence of reason, depends upon tautological grounds (needless repetition of an idea without imparting additional clarity)—and thereby utilizes the same emotive grounds it condemns to establish credibility.
In exploring Derrida's thought, this topic assumes a basic knowledge of phenomenology and structuralism. These topics will be essential revision for this topic.
Derrida's thought:
From Gutting, G. 2001, French philosophy in the twentieth century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, and Norris, C. 2002, Deconstruction, Third edition, Routledge, London, chapter 4.
Central tenets of Derrida's thought:
- Reality, or the essence of things, cannot be represented without language. All reality is dependent upon language. ('There is nothing outside the text').
- As for Suassure, Derrida accepts that language shapes perception by bringing some forms of difference forward and pushing other possible significances into the background. Hence, language precedes what we perceive and experience.
- The term 'differance' is coined to capture the relation of words or signs to one another, and specifically to the endlessly deferred nature of meaning.
- Meaning is endlessly deferred in the sense that words or signs never fully capture what they mean in themselves, but define their meanings through an appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Words are defined by what they are not—it is what it is not.
- For example, we know what 'house' is, not by an essence of house carried in the concept, but by comparing it to 'shed', 'mansion', 'hotel', 'building', 'hovel', 'hours', 'horse'.
- When we don't know the meaning of a word, we can look it up in the dictionary, but the meaning of the word can only be grasped by the meanings of the other words used to define it. These words in their turn depend upon the words used to define them. This process never ends.
- For example, the difference between house and home is that one is a building and the other a place where a family resides. A family is a group of individuals joined by intimate ties. Intimate ties are based on care. Care involves ... and so on.
- The understanding that the self authors or is the originator of thought, or that the self witnesses truth or reality, is itself a concept dependent upon a relation of signs within language (the signs self and truth, knowledge or reality).
- Derrida also observed that Western philosophy is dependent upon a specific kind of logic to do with the maintenance of boundaries and purity.
- The laws which presuppose logical coherence within Western metaphysics are as follows:
- the law of identity: 'whatever is, is';
- the law of contradiction, nothing is both A and not─A, or nothing can both be and not be;
- the law of the excluded middle, or everything must either be or not be
- The presumption underlying these laws of logic is that there is an essential reality or origin, to which the laws refer.
- These laws imply the exclusion of complexity, mediation and difference. To retain the logic of these philosophical laws, there must not be complexity, mediation or difference at the origin, or if there is, the system of concepts that uphold Western thought become destabilised. (For example, it is 'illogical' to say that truth is mixed, partial, diffused, or dependent, this would be the same as saying a statement is false).
- The basic elements of thought and language in the West are pairs of opposing concepts (presence/absence, truth/falsity, sensible/intelligible, ideal/real, internal/external, fiction/truth, nature/culture, speech/writing, activity/passivity, being/nothingness, same/other, one/many, male/female, hot/cold).
- Opposites are hierarchically arranged such that one term in the pair is received as more fundamental, real, or morally better than the other. (For example, within many cultures 'masculine' traits are seen as superior to 'feminine' traits (dominance over sympathy, clarity over depth) implying that male domination is natural and inevitable (phallologocentrism).
It would be wrong to claim that Derrida renounces the values of truth or falsehood. Derrida does not say, nothing is true, nothing is false. Derrida does not say, there is no self that authors truth, nothing is real. What his work suggests is that the way we understand truth and falsehood, or the relation of self or consciousness to knowledge, is structured by language. He also suggests that Western philosophy imposes a specific set of rules about what can count as logical. This leads Derrida to question the suppositions inherent within a Western logocentric tradition, namely that 'the mind' has privileged access to 'truth' and 'falsehood', the latter concepts being understood to pertain to an apriori order of existence, such that there are authorities who can be said to know about an order of essential or pre-linguistic existence. Instead, Derrida reflects on the means by which the relation of the signs consciousness and truth, and the rules that Western philosophy sets about how they can be understood (indivisible, whole at the origin) are established in particular texts.
It is also inaccurate to say that Derrida holds that texts are open to multiple interpretations, or that deconstruction is a practice which accepts the inevitability of multiple interpretations. While the endless deferral of signs to other signs voids the notion of a structure inherent within language, the relations between signs within a single text are fixed by the limits of that text, and it is these relations that are analysed. Derrida would not have accepted that his deconstructions of philosophers texts, or his tracing of the relations between specific signs within a text, could be overwritten by another equally valid deconstruction without this reading challenging the validity of his own deconstruction.
Implications of Derrida's thought:
- All texts (whether philosophical or literary) depend upon the laws of identity, contradiction and the excluded middle. Texts cannot be read for a 'deep' meaning that reflects 'real' social conditions, the intentions of authors or social actors, or the hidden structure of language.
- The dependency of conceptual significance upon endlessly deferred signifiers is as evident within philosophical thought as other forms of thought. Philosophy cannot be said to be more true or less fictional than literature.
- Modernism is a metaphysics of presence. Within this metaphysics, to exist is to be present to oneself and to one's deity. The being of the divinity is also established by the metaphor of presence; divinity knows all things and knows itself as the cause of the being of all things.
- The dominant term within metaphysical philosophical texts always depends upon a positive presence which is simple, complete, fundamental, independent (Plato's forms, Aristotle's substances) which are given as the polar opposite of something negative, incomplete, complex, dependent or derivative (matter, appearances).
- Similarly, epistemological philosophical texts find knowledge in fundamental certainty grounded in something present and immediate (rationality and the mind in Plato and Descartes, sense experience in Aristotle and Hume). These foundations depend upon their being posed in opposition to something that is absent and derivative (such as opinion, unjustified inference, interpretations that exceed the evidence of the senses).
- Deconstruction reveals the logical implausibility of these propositions by showing how, in a given text, one of the terms introduces the other in its self-definition, or, by showing instances in which the order of priority of the terms is reversed. Deconstruction aims to show that the foundational items are 'tainted' by their opposites.
- In doing so, deconstruction aims to undermine the form of rationality associated with the laws of Western logic, enabling the excluded middle, challenging the violence at the centre of oppositional thought, and allowing for new ways of thinking and acting.
Deconstruction
For Derrida, deconstruction is not one approach, and cannot be summarised in a set of theses removed from the contexts of writing in which it takes place. Deconstruction can be described only within a specific application.
Having said this, as a form of textual practice deconstruction is recognised by and associated with its aim to:
- reveal mechanisms that enable the apparent unity and fixity of textual constructs;
- reveal hidden or repressed idealizations and fantasies of origin;
- reveal the dependence of language upon binary oppositions and hierarchical relations;
- show how privileged terms achieve their status by metaphoric contrast, rather than conclusive logic.
Common deconstructive steps:
For full text see Hedges, Warren, 'Using deconstruction to astonish friends & confound enemies (in 2 easy steps), electronic, http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Howto/decon.htm , viewed 29/09/2008.
- show how terms represented as primary, complete, or originary are a derivation, composite or effect of something else (consciousness is actually "self-consciousness"─a self and a consciousness─consciousness is always already divided in thought, never simply present to itself).
- show how terms represented as completely different from something else depend upon that something else for their existence (‘rational man’ only makes sense in relation to ‘hysterical woman’)
- show how terms represented as normal are a special case (whiteness is an ethnicity, although it does not accept itself as an ethnicity).
Deconstructing phenomenology
From Norris, C 2002, Deconstruction, Third edition, Routledge, London, chapters 2 and 3.
Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of modern phenomenology, is critical to the development of his deconstructive project. Husserl’s philosophy sought to avoid subjectivism, but at the same time sought to base its knowledge claims in the supra-temporal ‘transcendental ego’ or reflective self-awareness. Husserl sought to achieve this distinction by outlining a methodology that separates individual psychology from acts of consciousness that define the nature of thought and perception. This is often referred to as the 'phenomenological reduction'. According to Husserl, the mind takes possession of experience and relates thought to the object-of-thought through an act of structured perception which distinguishes between a given object and the subjective conscious process involved in its recognition.
In his deconstruction of Husserl's work, Derrida argues that it is impossible for Husserlian philosophy to live up to its own principles. Derrida argues it is impossible to experience a supra-temporal (outside time) origin within time and within lived experience. Derrida's critique turns on the relation between language and thought in Husserl, also apparent within the Western intellectual tradition in general. According to Derrida phenomenology depends upon an assumed relation between consciousness (or self-presence) and linguistic expression. Husserl distinguishes between the ‘indicative’ (lifeless token in a system of arbitrary sense or words, concepts and language) and the expressive (communicative purpose or intentional force that animates language). Derrida notes that the indicative and the expressive are mobilised in Husserl's text not by logical argument or empirical proof, but by being likened to the relation between life and death. That is, Derrida observes a metaphoric relation in which the text banishes 'indicative' signs to a region of exterior darkness, and links 'expressive' signification to the 'life-giving' forces of spoken language.
Saussure and Barthes
In Husserl's texts, Derrida is interested in the relation between language and thought. In the texts of Saussure and the early Roland Barthes (1915–80), it is the relation between speech and writing that he is interested in. As structuralists, both Saussure and Barthes reject Husserl's claim about the ability of a transcendental ego to access authentic meaning. Derrida argues that a similar kind of logic is nevertheless at work in their texts.
Derrida argues that in Saussure's work 'voice' becomes a metaphor for self-present ‘living’ speech, in opposition to the lifeless, secondary, depersonalized, alien emanations of writing. In the same way that the life/death metaphor was mobilised in Husserl to establish the reasonableness of his phenomenological methodology, Saussure uses it to privilege speech over writing. Writing is set up as a deceiving shadow, part of a promiscuous public realm of disseminating texts that come between utterance and understanding/significance.
For Derrida, there can be no ambiguity about the relation of speech and writing. Writing is a precondition of language and speech. Here writing is understood not in its normal sense as a form of graphic inscription, but as a system of linguistic relations by which meaning is conveyed (whether written, oral, hieroglyphic, or algebraic). Derrida's point was that our knowledge of the world comes from language, and language is a system of relationships of opposition, contradictions and dependencies. Indeed, 'writing' is an integral part of the concept 'speech'. Writing enables speech.
Differences between Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault
From Baugh, B. 2003. French Hegel: From surrealism to postmodernism. Routledge: New York and London.
- Deleuze understands the world to be possessed of a virtual origin from which actualities emerge, whereas for Derrida the counterposition of origin and end point is itself linguistically given, possessing no essential referent.
- Foucault seeks to trace the history of oppositions, Deleuze the future direction of real forms of becoming; Derrida aims to upset oppositional thought within a study of present or existing language.
- For Foucault and Deleuze systems of thought are supported by the extra discursive realm, by mechanisms and techniques, and by the status of those who are authorised to speak the truth. For Derrida, meaning arises in the relations of signs, which itself produces the extra discursive world.
- For Foucault and Deleuze, there is more than the text, the text itself is constituted by this more, the non discursive, practices, institutions, actions and discourse which give rise to serious speech acts.
- For Foucault and Deleuze, to reduce everything to the text is to fail to bring to the foreground what the text insists upon, thereby leading to a reproduction of power, making it impossible to speak in any other terms.
References
Baugh, B. 2003. French Hegel: From surrealism to postmodernism. Routledge: New York and London.
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gutting, G. 2001, French philosophy in the twentieth century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hedges, Warren, 'Using deconstruction to astonish friends & confound enemies (in 2 easy steps), electronic, http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Howto/decon.htm, viewed 29/09/2008.
Lechte, J 1994, Fifty key contemporary thinkers, From structuralism to postmodernity, Routlege, London.
Norris, C 2002, Deconstruction, Third edition, Routledge, London.
This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.
