Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche

ISBN: 9780226143330
Subtitle: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
Translator: Harlow, Barbara
Author: Derrida, Jacques

Derrida argues that an examination of style in Nietzsche, specifically his style(s) concerning the trope or metaphor of woman, reveals an understanding of truth. This conception of truth (on the part of Nietzsche, and/or of Derrida) is not fixed but by design a restless dynamic (or "undecidability" [105]) between various proferred accounts, and Derrida explores several positions the concept of woman assumes in Nietzsche's writings. "The heterogeneity of the text ... mark[s] the essential limit of such a codification [of woman, of truth]." [95]

That said, I do not conclude that Derrida claims there is no truth. Rather, he seems to mount an epistemological rather than an ontological argument: truth is undecidable, not non-existant. Note to claim decisively there is no truth, is equally undecidable. So Derrida makes no ultimate claim as to truth's Being, concluding only that to seek it, is to discover its undecidability. I take this to be the epistemological stance within anti-foundationalism, as opposed to the ontological stance (often leveled as an accusation against anti-foundationalists by critics, and just as often unjustly).

The 'spur' of the title is a promontory or prow, an extension which meets an adversary in advance of the main body. "Thus the style would seem to advance in the manner of a spur of sorts (eperon). Like the prow, for example of a sailing vessel, its rostrum, the projection of the ship which surges ahead to meet the sea's attack and cleave its hostile surface." [39]

(The trope) Woman is used by Nietzsche (argues Derrida) to indicate power over distance, something which works precisely because it is never fully engaged. "On the one hand ... Nietzsche revives that barely allegorical figure (of woman) in his own interest. For him, truth is like a woman." [51] Then, "But, on the other hand, the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing." [53] And finally: "Woman, inasmuch as truth, is scepticism and veiling dissimulation. This is what must be conceivable." [57]

Later Derrida links the above investigation with the idea of truth as propriation, and suggests that the link to propriation (property) is a limit to the detriment of our understanding of truth. And what would truth look like, were it not to operate like an "appropriating" force? Derrida suggest this would be a productive line of enquiry.

I am left, incidentally, with the impression that Nietzsche is all too easily read as misanthrope or chauvenist, an impression initially developed after reading Nietzsche first-hand.

Derrida notes [37] that deconstruction is an affirmative interpretation, and his lecture here builds upon work from the past two years. Interesting: I've most often heard of deconstruction as an undermining enterprise, and the term itself seems to suggest this. I'm sure Derrida is playing with this very sense when making the statement.

Whether due to an ineffective translation, or the fact it presumes a familiarity with Derrida's lecture that I cannot claim, the introduction by Stefano Agosti was useless to me. I skipped it after a few pages and read the lecture itself with much greater interest and reward.

Loubrieu's line drawings are utterly impenetrable, though I made little effort to link them to the text or engage them on their own. Later

table of content
Table of Contents
Coup sur coup: Pré face à Éperons

Coup upon Coup: An Introduction to Spurs, Stefano Agosti

Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche

Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

La question du style / The question of style

Distances

Voiles / Veils

Vérités / Truths

Parures / Adornments

La simulation / Simulation

Femina vita

Positions

Le regard d'CEdipe / The gaze of Oedipus

Le coup de don

Abî mes de la vérité / Abysses of truth

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Deconstructing Jacques Derrida

The Most Reviled Professor in The World Defends His Diabolically Difficult Theory

LENGTH: 4539 words
SUBJECTS: Profile of Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, literary theory, contemporary philosophy, postmodernism, poststructuralism
BYLINE: By Mitchell Stephens, Mitchell Stephens is a journalism professor at New York University and the author of A History of News (Penguin).

THE WORLD'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL LIVING philosopher, arguably its most controversial living thinker, is sitting at a concrete picnic table at an outdoor snack bar at UC Irvine. Few of the undergraduates who stroll by in jams or jeans seem to notice Jacques Derrida, with his carefully tailored gray suit and purple tie. Few would recognize his name if they were introduced. * But as Derrida sips his coffee from a plastic cup, a crowd of world-class graduate students and star professors from as far away as China is already hustling for the best seats in his classroom. In a few minutes, Derrida will present two immensely difficult hours on the latest applications of his renowned method -- deconstruction -- and that room full of scholars will barely allow itself a cough. * Echoes of Derrida's ideas can now be heard in the most unlikely places. The word deconstruction (albeit shorn of much of its meaning) now appears in newspaper reviews and at dinner parties: "Let's deconstruct this scene." It is becoming, like existentialism before it, a part of the language -- to the point where a State Department official can speak of a plan for the "deconstruction" of part of the American Embassy in Moscow, and Mick Jagger can ask, "Does anyone really know what deconstructivist means?"("Deconstructivist" has been the most controversial variety of architecture in recent years.) But the main impact of Derrida's method has been felt on college campuses. * Deconstruction -- which Derrida gave birth to in Paris in the 1960s -- swept through American universities in the '70s and '80s, presuming to remake nothing less than the way professors and students perform their most basic activity: reading.


Deconstructive readings focus -- intently, obsessively -- on the metaphors writers use to make their points. Their purpose is to demonstrate, through comparisons of a work's arguments and its metaphors, that writers contradict themselves -- not just occasionally, but invariably -- and that these contradictions reflect deep fissures in the very foundations of Western culture. In other words, deconstruction claims to have uncovered serious problems in the way Plato and Hemingway and you and I think about matters ranging from truth and friendship to politics and masturbation. Such suggestions have, to say the least, proved controversial. University departments and scholarly associations have split in two over Derrida's complex, often misunderstood method. Friendships have been ruined. His followers tell tales of enlightenment: "It was a little like the moment when Helen Keller first understands the connection between the signing she is being taught and meaning," recalls Harvard English Department's Barbara Johnson of her first encounter with Derrida and deconstruction while a graduate student at Yale. "Keller wanted to go back and sign everything; I wanted to reread everything," Johnson says. But those academics who remain unconverted call Derrida's movement a "cult" or even a "fraud." * "Deconstruction has rather obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses," writes Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle. "It should be fairly obvious to the careful reader that the emperor has no clothes." * When Irvine displaced Yale as Derrida's main American base four years ago (paying him more than $30,000 a year for an academic quarter compressed into five weeks), there were, along with the proud press releases, predictable outbursts of hard-headed cynicism and fiscal outrage. The shrieks might have been louder if the residents of Orange County understood just how profound a challenge to their thought this distinguished new visiting professor would bring.

DERRIDA'S DARK MEDITERRANEAN skin contrasts with a wide, still full frame of silver hair. "Striking," one of his female graduate students had commented, twice. The word most of his friends use to describe him is "gracious." "Jacques is the mildest of persons," adds Yale professor Harold Bloom. Nevertheless, Derrida is occasionally unwilling or unable to play the roles expected of him. I had been warned that he would not respond well in particular to personal questions of the sort the subject of a magazine profile must face. "Ah, you want me to tell you things like 'I-was-born-in-a-petit-bourgeois-Jewish-family-which-was-assimilated-but . . .' " is how Derrida parried one such query by a French magazine reporter. "Is this really necessary? I just can't do it," he protested to that reporter.

For a celebrity of sorts, Derrida is unusually private and reserved. "There is a certain distance," concedes the avant-garde architect Peter Eisenman, who collaborated with Derrida on the design for a garden in Paris. (Eisenman teasingly accuses Derrida of believing a garden ought to have some benches and trees, a charge Derrida vehemently denies. The design the two of them came up with -- as yet unbuilt -- includes no such reactionary elements.) "He's not the kind of guy," Eisenman notes, "to whom you say, 'Hey, come on, Jacques, let's go have a beer.' We sniff around each other."

And to Derrida's natural reserve -- his tendency to sniff around -- has been added a professional suspicion of easy answers and simple categories. Note, for example, the hesitations that accompany one brief attempt to define his method: "Deconstruction," Derrida says, "if there is such a thing as deconstruction -- and I wouldn't say there is just one deconstruction -- is something heterogeneous, complex. Deconstructions are ways of accounting for the main assumptions common to the culture, common to what we call Western culture.

"Again, I don't think there is one Western culture," he quickly adds. "It's plural."

It's not easy even to apply a designation as simple as "philosopher" to Derrida, though he was educated in philosophy and is, at the moment, fingering the traditional token of a philosopher: a pipe. "I never thought I had something to say philosophically," he tells me. The word philosopher sometimes gets relegated to quotation marks in his writings.

Derrida is also suspicious of the standard biographical accounts we append to the work of our writers. In fact, deconstruction (singular or plural) is known for the extent to which it turns attention to "texts" -- the actual words on paper -- and away from such distractions as the lives of the authors of those texts. One of Derrida's best known and most controversial pronouncements was, "There is nothing outside the text." And for a time it looked as though Derrida wanted nothing to appear in print about himself outside the actual texts he and his interpreters had written. For 17 years, from 1962 to 1979, he would not even allow himself to be photographed for publication.

Consequently, Derrida wears, along with his stylish suits, a certain air of mystery. While there are a couple dozen books in English that feature Jacques Derrida's name in their titles or subtitles, it is almost impossible to find such basic biographical information as the fact that he is married (Derrida's wife of 33 years, Margaret, is a psychoanalyst), or that he has two sons, now in their 20s (one of whom has embarked on a career in philosophy).

Derrida is aware of his elusiveness. His fascination with words extends to their sound, and in the name "Derrida" (pronounced Dare-ee-DA) he says he hears the sounds "derriere le rideau" -- behind the curtain. Rather than attempt to yank the curtain back, I was prepared to tiptoe around the personal questions, but that proved unnecessary. Derrida is surprisingly forthright.

"Why did you refuse to allow yourself to be photographed?"

"My surface motivation was political," Derrida says, softly. "I thought that the things I was writing were not compatible with this silly image of the writer in his office with his books. If there was a deep motivation, it had to do with my relationship with my face, my body."

"Why then this change in policy?"

"It's a kind of resignation. I gave up this image of the non-image."

JACQUES DERRIDA WAS BORN, in 1930, into-a-petit-bourgeois-Jewish-family-which-was-assimilated-into-French-life-in- Algeria-but. . . . (The word but appears often in his story.) But not entirely assimilated. "There were insults," he recalls, "and all the usual manifestations of anti-Semitism." Jacques was the middle child ("this explains everything in my life," he quips), always fighting with his older brother, never fighting with his younger sister. His father was a salesman; his brother became a pharmacist. Jacques, who would grow up to be the only intellectual in his immediate family, was a "very good pupil" until the age of 12. "Then things got complicated."

In 1942, a less common form of anti-Semitism reached Algeria. On the first day of school, the principal called Jacques into his office and said, "You're going to go back home. Your parents will explain."

While the young Derrida was feeling some small part of the horror of Nazism, Paul de Man, the late Yale literature professor who became Derrida's friend and most influential supporter, was writing literary articles, one of which seems clearly anti-Semitic for a collaborationist newspaper in Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Inspired in part by this terrible news, which was revealed four years after De Man's death, Derrida recently has been questioning (i.e., reading "texts" on) the concept of friendship -- among the larger stones in the foundation of our civilization. Derrida, characteristically, is investigating the concept's cracks, its contradictions: the extent to which friendship is necessary but impossible, loving but not too loving, caring but competitive, a form of union but, as are all our relations with others, also a form of separation.

For Derrida, many of these contradictions are embodied in the statement, "Oh my friends, there is no friend." For years, each of Derrida's lectures has begun with this enigmatic -- Derrida would say "undecidable" -- quotation attributed to Aristotle but not actually found anywhere in Aristotle's writings.

The problem of friendship was an important theme in Derrida's early life, too. His childhood friends at the lycee in Algeria were put to the test after their Jewish playmate was expelled. They failed. "It was a very, very painful situation," he admits, "something which probably left deep scars."

The Jewish community in Algeria reacted by organizing its own school. "But I didn't like it," Derrida says. In his work, Derrida has emphasized the importance of that which does not quite belong: the marginal. He finds many of the ambiguities, loose ends and contradictions for which he is searching buried in the margins of writings -- in the footnotes, parentheses and prefaces other readers overlook. And he sees himself as having lived on the margins -- not quite French, not quite Algerian and also not simply Jewish.

It took four months for the Free French government to repeal the "racial laws" in Algeria, but eventually Derrida was allowed back in the lycee. He returned, he says, as a "very irregular pupil -- very good in some disciplines, not so good in others." Good enough in philosophy and literature, however, to move to Paris at the age of 19 to prepare himself for the Ecole Normale Superieure, France's most prestigious college (where Jean-Paul Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir). And Derrida -- a boy not just from the provinces but from way beyond the provinces -- went on to secure a reputation among Parisian intellectuals that could begin to be compared to Sartre's. But. . . .

But Derrida continued to view himself as something of an outsider: "There is this distance, a distance because I was Jewish" -- a word he pronounces quietly -- "because I wasn't totally French." Although he published widely -- three books in 1967 alone -- and gained notoriety, as a philosopher can only in France, his fame was as a rebel, someone who challenged the dominant culture. (Politically, Derrida inhabits the left margin.) And, although he soon was teaching at the Ecole Normale, Derrida continued to see himself as removed from the academic establishment.

"In the academy there are two images of me," Derrida suggests. "One is of a professor with authority, given honorary degrees, legitimized in so many ways. But the other is of a man who doesn't belong to the university, who is just destroying the norms, who is not an authentic scholar. These images constantly conflict with each other, and I'm in the middle, just traveling between the two. Sometimes I naively ask myself, 'Where am I?' "

JACQUES DERRIDA'S IDEAS first established a beachhead in America in 1966 at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University. Structuralism is the belief, then all the rage among Parisian intellectuals, that "structures" -- like the rules and relationships that make words into a language -- underlie all forms of "communication," from tribal myths to French fashions. The American literary scholars gathered at that conference had been delighting themselves with their own perspicacity when Derrida, the youngest of the Frenchmen invited to perform for them, took the stage and announced, in effect, that the structuralism the au courant were so proud of having adopted was dead -- hopelessly entangled with the same unsupported beliefs in ultimate meanings and final answers that permeate all of Western thought. That caused some flutters beneath the cardigans.

And the impression that an original and important new thinker had been discovered was furthered when Derrida's writings started drifting across the Atlantic and being translated. They were, to say the least, unconventional: A sentence might begin on page 319 and not end until page 322; a single footnote might run the length of an article; two separate narrations might share the pages of a book.

Still, it was Derrida's reading, not his writing, that won most of the converts. He gave literature professors a special gift: a chance to confront -- not as mere second-rate philosophers, not as mere interpreters of novelists, but as full-fledged explorers in their own right -- the most profound paradoxes of Western thought (which helps explain why he has been accepted in American literature, not philosophy, departments). If they really read, if they stared intently enough at the metaphors, literature professors, from the comfort of their own easy chairs, could reveal the hollowness of the basic assumptions that lie behind all our writings.

Language is an endlessly complex and unwieldy medium, Derrida argued, and writers are never entirely in control of their words. When Plato, the father of Western thought, is trying to explain, for example, why speech is a dramatically more effective way to communicate than writing, he ends up with this justification: Speech "is written in the soul of the listener." The metaphor and the argument conflict. Ernest Hemingway, arguing that bullfighting is "a tragedy, not a sport," continually explains bullfighting with analogies drawn from American sports. Again, the metaphors -- like Freudian slips -- seemingly unconsciously subvert the argument.

Derrida was trying to show that most of the distinctions we attempt to draw can in some ultimate sense be thrown into question: Speech is not closer to our souls than writing; Hemingway's bullfighting is not of a different order than mere sports; sex (to choose another of his examples) is not purer than masturbation. Male/female, human/animal, good/evil -- if we read carefully enough, suspiciously enough, the value-laden comparisons upon which we base our ethical, aesthetic and political behavior can be, to use the lingo, "disturbed."

Derrida's acolytes were convinced that he had presented them with new eyes, new ways of seeing the tangles and dissonances of what was rapidly becoming the postmodern world. His opponents, whose number was becoming legion, saw fog banks, intentional obscurity and a cynicism that threatened to undercut all accepted notions of what is good, beautiful and politically important.

"OH MY FRIENDS, THERE IS NO friend. . . ." Derrida, a short man with a square face, strong nose and thick eyebrows, sits in front of an overcrowded class at UC Irvine.

While they still attract a throng of intellectual heavyweights, Derrida's lectures are no longer so clearly the place to be for academe's trailblazers. Deconstruction has lost a little of its newness and glamour. In fact, some trendsetters in the universities already have a new theory with which to perplex their students: the "new historicism," which reasserts (in an unexpected, provocative kind of way, of course) the importance of historical circumstances -- circumstances outside the "text" -- on works of literature.

The fact that the cognoscenti are losing some of their excitement, however, is often a sign that a fashion is establishing itself with a larger public, and in a sense this is happening with deconstruction. Derrida himself -- with his increasing willingness to step out from behind his texts -- has appeared in a movie, "Ghost Dance," and even inspired a rock song by the English group Scritti Politti: "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida/Read a page and I know what I need ta/Take apart/My baby's heart. . . ." (Derrida had lunch with band leader Green and described him as "a very intelligent young man, really knows his Wittgenstein.")

Deconstructivist architects acknowledge Derrida as an inspiration for their work: uncentered, marginal, committed to mocking expectations -- gardens without benches and trees. And Derrida's name has begun showing up in non-academic publications and broadcasts -- as the scourge of the author, as the epitome of the incomprehensible intellectual, as the postmodern era's "post man" and, most recently, as a patron saint of that controversial "multiculturalism" (though those Derrida favors with his deconstructions are almost exclusively white, male, European authors: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, Freud, Mallarme, Genet).

In France, where deconstruction fell in and out of fashion about half a decade earlier than it did here, Derrida remains an important force, a public figure who has involved himself in such political causes as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and in favor of freedom of expression in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. (Derrida was jailed in Czechoslovakia in 1982 after meeting with some dissident writers.) He breaks the stereotype of the French leftist intellectual by living not in Paris but in a suburb, Ris-Orangis -- on the margins of Paris. He does not spend his evenings in Left Bank cafes.

In the United States, Derrida first began giving his dense, iconoclastic lectures and seminars as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, then at Yale, where in the late '70s and early '80s he played the role of guru to some members of the influential "Yale School" of literary criticism, which included De Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.

DERRIDA'S SQUARE HANDS are folded in front of him. A pair of clear-framed half-glasses rests on his nose. He is reading, or rather translating, from his French notes, notes that themselves are spotted with citations in German and Greek. Derrida began lecturing in English for the first time at Irvine, but English words still escape from his mouth slowly.

After 30 minutes, we reach what the professor says will be his starting point. After 43 minutes he announces, "That's where we are beginning today." Not that he could be accused of wasting time. Like most of those rare individuals endowed with gravity, Derrida seems to circle but not drift. Fifty minutes into the lecture, Derrida's investigation of some sentence from a great philosopher becomes particularly obtuse, and his audience allows itself a collective fidget -- its first and last.

"One often, if not always, speaks too fast, too early," Derrida is explaining. "One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says." One often speaks without . . . meaning what one says? You can see why Derrida drives those accustomed to more cautious statements batty. Not only is he arguing that we contradict ourselves, occasionally switching positions in mid-thought -- "Oh my friends, there is no friend" -- but also that it is impossible for us to communicate with friends, or even with ourselves, with perfect clarity, that it is impossible to achieve some sort of ultimate, unambiguous understanding.

The problem, Derrida contends, is that meaning is always dependent on context. " 'There is nothing outside the text,' " he explains in a recent book, "means there is nothing outside context." And since the context in which words might be read or heard can always shift, meanings are impossible to completely pin down -- and the distinctions we base on them ultimately rest on sand.

Remember that one magic moment -- perhaps you were in a garden, on a bench, under a tree -- when the meaning of existence suddenly came into focus? Well, Derrida has bad news, especially for those who have devoted their lives to the truth of such magnificent, all-encompassing visions: The world, he maintains, can be viewed from a limitless number of different perspectives. There is no one true answer. Aha! But doesn't deconstruction itself pretend to be such an answer? No, says Derrida, who presents deconstruction not as a conclusive theory but as a method for uncovering the contradictions at the heart of attempts to formulate such conclusive theories.

For those political or intellectual conservatives who insist on the validity of simple truths, straightforward values and a single cultural tradition, Derrida is indeed the enemy. He sees instead a world that is complex, contradictory and plural. Derrida is no friend to doctrinaire leftists either. His views allow too much room for doubt. Even those of us who are simply trying to hang our beliefs on one or two solid principles will find Derrida's work troubling.

Nevertheless, as he and his friends emphasize and re-emphasize, Derrida is not a nihilist. The fact that, in Derrida's view, there is no one meaning does not mean that there is no meaning at all. We can, of course, determine whether statements are true or false within the specified contexts of, say, science or magazine profiles. And this does not mean, as Derrida notes in this lecture, that we are freed of responsibility to try as hard as we can to say what we think we mean. It does mean that we can never know all there is to know about a sentence attributed to Aristotle, about our existence, about what is good, even about the words we are saying -- all of which will always remain open to interpretation and reinterpretation.

It is no coincidence that deconstruction has arrived as this self-conscious century totters, coughing and wheezing, into its last years. One of the last great attempts to impose a single perspective upon human societies has crumbled before our eyes in Eastern Europe. Our "great war," the Cold War, was fought with interpretations of weapons, not weapons. Our businesses sell by placing their products in finely worked contexts. Our politicians triumph by manipulating the interpretation of the events in which they participate. Our governments are run as much by "spin doctors" as by policy makers. Derrida might be dubbed a "spin scholar."

"What marks Derrida's work," Tom Keenan of Princeton explains, "is this incredibly serious thinking of the idea that communication is not something transparent" -- that meaning does not simply shine through, that messages arrive bearing a variety of spins, that there is no one correct interpretation. This is an idea that has marked the work of other 20th-Century thinkers -- from Marshall McLuhan to Roland Barthes to Republican media-strategist Roger Ailes. It is perhaps the idea of the century, and Derrida -- with his attempts to think the limits of our ability to communicate, even with ourselves, his attempts to think the limits of thought -- may be following it to its most extreme, most disturbing, conclusions.

One often speaks without . . . meaning what one says.

WE ARE DINING AT A RESTAURANT called Hemingway's (his choice) -- a warm and dimly lighted place, since closed, near Newport Beach -- when Derrida says, with unexpected wistfulness, that he dreams of writing something naive, something straightforward, something -- of all things -- simple.

"Derrida is able to surprise you even when you think you know his thoughts," notes Jonathan Culler, whose book "On Deconstruction" provides one of the clearest introductions to Derrida's work.

Derrida write simply? It is pretty to think it possible, but this is the thinker who seems always ready to strike off in a disconcerting new direction. (Derrida's ongoing seminar on friendship, for example, has been metamorphosing of late into an investigation of "the rhetoric of cannibalism" -- the ultimate attempt to become one with a friend.) This is the thinker who seems always eager to substitute a new ramification for a mere restatement, who refuses to settle for the more straightforward forms of prose, who has earned a reputation for being perhaps the most complex writer of our time.

And the density, the complexity of Derrida's writing is no mere accident. It seems central to his thought -- to his circling, suspicious way of responding. (Indeed, Derrida has been attacked recently for his inability to offer a simple condemnation of De Man's wartime writings.) Derrida is the prophet of complexity -- the person who continually takes responsibility for noting the difficulties, the inescapable contradictions; the person who has finally accepted the impossibility of simplicity. "The world is complex," he tells me, "and I'm afraid -- or I hope -- it will remain so."

Nevertheless, this dream -- the simple book (not text) that rests unborn within him -- will come up again and again in our conversations. It would be a novel, perhaps. And in place of the great philosophers whose work he has so often deconstructed, the book's subject would be: a 12-year-old boy in Algeria, French but not French, Jewish but not Jewish, with friends but no friends; a 19-year-old boy in Paris struggling to cross the "psychological/sociological borders" into and out of the world of Parisian intellectuals.

"I have the deep feeling of not having written what I would like to write and what I should have written," Derrida says, adding that in a sense he views all that he has written -- and Derrida has been remarkably prolific -- as a "preliminary exercise" for "the one-and-only project," which he suspects he will never write. "I know it's not possible to write in an absolutely naive fashion, but that's my dream."

Which may be where we stand after deconstruction: Derrida has been demonstrating the extent to which our dreams -- of naivete and simplicity, of perfect friendship, of indisputable meaning, of God, for that matter -- are impossible. But he also knows that we remain incapable of not dreaming.

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Deconstruction: Some Assumptions

Derrida on the impossibility of a genuinely rigorous deconstruction (from "Psyche: Invention of the Other", 1984):

I would say that deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible; also that those who would rush to delight in that admission lose nothing from having to wait. For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be a danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible practices. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible....

Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules -- other conventions -- for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming [venir] in event, advent, invention.

A remark, from a commentator:

We now know -- or have no excuse for not knowing -- that deconstruction is not a technique or a method, and hence that there is no question of "applying" it. We know that it is not a moment of carnival or liberation, but a moment of the deepest concern with limits. We know that it is not a hymn to indeterminacy, or a life-imprisonment within language, or a denial of history: reference, mimesis, context, historicity, are among the most repeatedly emphasized and carefully scrutinized topics in Derrida's wri ting. And we know -- though this myth perhaps dies hardest of all -- that the ethical and the political are not avoided by deconstruction, but are implicated at every step.

Attridge, Derek, "Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction and Literary Criticism" in Critical Encoiunters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch, pp 109-110

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Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of the Paris-based Jacques Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based in part on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, in part on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.

Structuralist groundworks

Reality as we understand it is constructed of certain deep structural principles or organizations which may be configured differently on the level of experienced life, as we both operate and interpet them differently. Language, for instance, is compose of basic resources (langue) from which individual instances of its use are drawn (parole); cultures are formed through basic relations of economic production (the Marxist conception of the 'base'), but these may appear differently as cultures (economies, in the economic and more general sense) configure their ideas and arrangements (the 'superstructure'). The idea is that there are basic structures which are operationalized according to certain transformative rules in relation to the particulars of specific situations.

There is no unmediated knowledge of 'reality': knowledge is symbolic; what we 'know' are signs; signs gain their meaning from their distinction from other signs. Therefore there is no knowledge of 'reality', but only of symbolized, constructed experience. Our 'knowing of our experience' is itself then mediated knowing, which is the only thing knowing can be. There is no 'pure' knowledge of reality except, as the early theorist of semiotics Charles Sanders Pierce suggests, at an instantaneous and inarticulable level: one can, Pierce says, experience, but not know, reality-in-itself. This is not to say that this experience of the real is not real; it is: we live in a real world. But we live particularly in our codification, our system of signs. If we cannot translate any experience into symbolic form then we cannot 'know' it in a way that is useful to us; if we do know, then our knowledge is only knowledge through our codes and our signifying systems--that is, mediated knowledge. (as when we might experience an earthquake without immediately knowing what it is, and so for a moment experience only something like disoriented panic).

All texts are mediated (are only the process of mediation), in many ways: they are mediated by language, they are mediated by cultural systems, including ideologies and symbols, they are mediated by the conventions of genres, they are mediated by the world of intertextuality which is textuality's only true home, they are mediated by the structure of ideas and practices which we call reading (there is no 'pure reading', there is only reading according to some tradition, for some purpose). Texts are mediated in their construction, in their communication, and in their reception. Texts cannot, by definition, simply transfer an author's ideas.

Our mediated knowledge works as all signs systems work, not by identification but by differences and through codes.

Deconstruction assumptions

In deconstruction the basic structuralist principle of difference is located ontologically as well as semiotically: at the very point of beingness of every thing there is difference -- or différance -- because only through différance is one thing not another thing instead. Différance comes before being; similarly, a trace comes before the presence of a thing (as anything which is is itself by virtue of not being something else, by differing, and that which it differs from remains as a trace, that whose absence is necessary for it to be); so too writing precedes speech -- a system of differences precedes any location of meaning in articulation. See my summary of Derrida, Différance.

Deconstruction, as do other poststructural theories, declines the structuralist assumption that structural principles are essences -- that there are universal structural principles of language which exist 'before' the incidence of language. (The emphasis on the concrete, historical and contingent in opposition to the eternalities of essence reveals one of deconstruction's filiations with existentialism.) All 'principles' of existence (i.e., of experience) are historically situated and are structured by the interplay of individual experience and institutional force, through the language, symbols, environment, exclusions and oppositions of the moment (and of the previous moments through which this one is constructed). Structures are historical, temporary, contingent, operating through differentiation and displacement.

There is no outside of the text; everything that we can know is text, that is, is constructed of signs in relationship. This claim does not mean that there is nothing outside of language: the claim refers to the realm of human knowledge, not to the realm of concrete existence (elusive as that might be). Deconstruction does not deny the existence of an independent, physical world.

All texts are constituted by difference from other texts (therefore similarity to them). Any text includes that which it excludes, and exists in its differences from/filiations with other texts.

Opposites are already united; they cannot be opposites otherwise. Nor can they be a unity, and be themselves. They are the alternating imprint of one another. There is no nihilism without logocentrism, no logocentrism without nihilism, no presence without absence, no absence without presence, and so forth.

Inherent in language itself is difference and deferral; it is impossible for language to be identical with its referents. A word or any other sign can only mobilize the play of the fields of signs from which it is distinguished, and from which it is of necessity removed. See quote from Barbara Johnson, below.

Inherent in language also is the contest between grammar and rhetoric. Grammar is the syntagmatic protocol, meaning as created by placement; rhetoric is the intertextual system of signs which makes what the grammar means, mean something else (irony and metaphor are principal examples). Grammatical and rhetorical meaning cannot be identical, and one may well not be able to assign a priority of 'meaning'.

In a sense deconstruction is profoundly historical: it sees temporality as intrinsic to meaning, in that meaning can only be structured against that which is before it, which is structured against that which is before that. Meaning is that which differs, and which defers. The claim is not that there is no meaning -- that is a misunderstanding of deconstruction: the claim is that what we take to be meaning is a shifting field of relations in which there is no stable point, in which dynamic opposing meanings may be present simultaneously, in which the meaning is textually modulated in a interweaving play of texts. Meaning circulates, it is always meaning by difference, by being other. The meaning-through-difference creates/draws on 'traces' or 'filiations', themselves in some senses historical.

Deconstruction is also historical insofar and it functions etymologically, turning to the root, often metaphorical, meanings of words for an understanding of how they function within the web of differentiation which spans the chasm of the non-human over which we constantly live.

as deconstruction works on (in both senses of 'works on') the web of differentiation which spans the chasm of the non-human over which we constantly live, it is intrinsically and deeply human and humane. It is affirmative of the multiplicity, the paradoxes, the richness and vibrancy, of our life as signifying beings. If it seems to deny affirmation, it is because it knows that affirmation is always, intimately and compellingly, itself, only in the presence of and by virtue of negation. To fully live we must embrace our deaths.

if deconstruction seems to oppose Humanism, it is because Humanism operates by substituting the concept 'man' for the concept 'God'(or 'order', 'nature', 'Truth', 'logos', etc.) and so placing 'man' as the unproblematic ground of meaningfulness for human life. It should be clear, however, that 'man' is then a hypothesized center, substituting for another hypothesized center, in the history of metaphysics. Deconstruction wants to clarify the instability upon which such a concept is grounded.

one can and indeed must work with ideas such as 'center', 'man', 'truth', but must work with them knowing their instability; to do so is, in deconstructive terms, to place them "under erasure." To signify this graphically, use the strikethrough option on your computer. That's the truth.

deconstructive reading can be applied to any text. It is a theory of reading, not a theory of literature. Derrida generally deconstructs philosophical writing, showing the metaphysical contradictions and the historicity of writing which lays claim to the absolute.

'literature' is a writing clearly open to deconstructive reading, as it relies so heavily on the multiple meanings of words, on exclusions, on substitutions, on intertextuality, on filiations among meanings and signs, on the play of meaning, on repetition (hence significant difference). In Jakobson's phrasing, literature attends to (or, reading as literature attends to), the poetic function of the text. This, in (one guesses) a Derridean understanding would mean that the naive, thetic, transcendental reading of a text is com-plicated (folded-with) by a counter-reading which de-constructs the thetic impetus and claims.

the more 'metaphysical' or universal and 'meaningful' a text the more powerfully it can provoke deconstructive reading; similarly as 'reading as literature' implies a raising of meaning to the highest level of universality, 'reading as literature' also calls forth the potential for a strong counter-reading. As Derrida says, "the more it is written, the more it shakes up its own limits or lets them be thought."

Some attributes of 'literature' in the deconstructive view are:

1. that literature is an institution, brought into being by legal, social and political processes;
2. that literature is that which at the same time speaks the heart of the individual and which shows how the individual is made possible only by otherness, exteriority, institution, law, structures and meanings outside oneself;
3. that literature is both (simultaneously) a singular, unrepeatable event and a generalizable experience, and demonstrates the tension/ antithesis between these -- as something which is original is also of necessity not original, or it could not have been thought.

It is possible that texts which 'confess' the highly mediated nature of our experience, texts which themselves throw the reader into the realm of complex, contested, symbolized, intertextual, interactive mediated experience, texts which therefore move closer than usual to deconstructing themselves, are in a sense closer to reality (that is, the truth of our real experience) than any other texts. This kind of text conforms to the kind of text known as 'literature' -- most clearly, to modernist literature, but to all texts which participate in one or more of the ironic, the playful, the explicitly intertextual, the explicitly symbolizing -- from Renaissance love poetry to Milton to Swift to Fielding to Tennyson to Ondaatje.

Reading these texts in the deconstructive mode is, however, not a matter of 'decoding the message'; it is a matter of entering into the thoughtful play of contradiction, multiple reference, and the ceaseless questioning of conclusions and responses. The less a text deconstructs itself, the more we can and must deconstruct it, that is, show the structures of thought and assumption which ground it and the exclusions which make its meaning possible. If, as Roman Jakobson suggests, a mark of literature is that it draws attention to its textuality, its constructedness, then literature may be said to be inherently closer to 'reality' than other forms of writing or discourse are, just when it seems to be furthest away, as our 'reality' is symbolic, signified, constructed.

The particular strategy of deconstructive reading is based on fissures in what we take to be the common-sense experience of texts and reality, and on reversals, oppositions and exclusions that are lying in wait in, or implicit in, signification and textuality. Take, for example, the sorts of conflict Jonathan Culler suggests in On Deconstruction that the critic is on the lookout for:

1. the asymetrical opposition or value-laden hierarchy (e.g. host and parasite, logocentrism and nihilism) in which one term is promoted at the expense of the other. The second term can be shown to constitute or signal the condition for the first, and the hierarchy up-turned (this is not a simple reversal, as the reversal is then in the condition of reversibility, and so forth).
2. points of condensation, where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values (and hostilities to hosts hosting the Host).
3. The text will be examined for ways in which it suggests a difference from itself, interpretations which undermine the apparently primary interpretation.
4. figures of self-reference, when a text applies to something else a description, figure or image which can be read as a self-description, an image of its own operations. This opens up an examination of the stability and cogency of the text itself. An example of self-reference is in the vines and parasites in place of the erased (, i.e. under erasure) antique and learned imagery of Shelley's "Epipsychidion" in Miller's "The Critic as Host," the natural images themselves an image for and replacement for (every image of is also a replacement for) the tracing of writing, which is itself the writing that constitutes the poem; the images of the poem themselves attempt to naturalize what cannot be naturalized, writing itself, in a recuperation in which the act of naturalizing reveals itself as an ancient strategy of meaning, so the imagery is an image of itself.
5. conflicting readings of a texts can be see as reenactments of conflicts within a text, so that readings can be read as partializing moves simplifying the complex interplay of potential meaning within the text.
6. Attention to the marginal, and that which supplements -- as with hierarchized oppositions, the margin in fact encompasses or enables the rest, so that a marginalized figure, idea, etc. can be re-read as the 'center', or controlling element; similarly the supplement re-centers and re-orients that which it supplements, as the fact of supplementing reveals the inadequacy, the partiality/incompleteness of the supplemented item.

pp. 213-215

The deconstructive activity is ceaseless. It can never be resolved in a dialectic (that is, there is no synthesis), 1) but is always reaching back to a pattern of operations, antitheses, displacements and so forth, each 'behind', or 'before', or logically, ontologically, referentially, hierarchically, temporally or semantically or etymologically, etc, 'prior to' the other, and 2) alternating between the poles of antitheses or opposite.

Like the form of mathematics called topography, deconstruction studies surfaces, as there are no depths, however firmly we may think we see them: there are only twists, (con)figurations, (re)visions.

Barbara Johnson on Derrida and deconstructive reading

from "On Writing" in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms for Literary Study:

Just as Freud rendered dreams and slips of the tongue readable rather than dismissing them as mere nonsense or error, so Derrida sees signifying force in the gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities, contradictions, and ambiguities of a text. When one writes, one writes more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks. The reader's task is to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what might have been meant.

The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language. If each text is seen as presenting a major claim that attempts to dominate, erase, or distort various "other" claims (whose traces nevertheless remain detectable to a reader who goes against the grain of the dominant claim), then "reading" is its extended sense is deeply involved in questions of authority and power. One field of conflict and domination in discourse that has been fruitfully studied in this sense is the field of sexual politics. Alice Jardine, in Gynesis (1985), points out that since logocentric logic has been coded as 'male' the "other" logics of spacing, ambiguity, figuration, and indirection are often coded as "female," and that a critique of logocentrism can enable a critique pf "phallocentrism" as well....

The writings of Western male authorities have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but also of other "others." Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978), analyzed the discursive fields of scholarship, art, and politics in which the "Oriental" is projected as the "other" of the European. By reading against the grain of the writer's intentions, he shows how European men of reason and benevolenced could inscribe a rationale for oppression and exploitation within their very discourse of Enlightenment.

Copyright 1996 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes.
As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail me.

source: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.html

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Jacques Derrida: Structuralism/Poststructuralism

Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating "parole" to "langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron filings moved by magnetic force--the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort.

In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns.

In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the starting point or progenitor of the text. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the idea that "language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We don't originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we (mis)perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written."

By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it.

In erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the "liberal humanist" tradition in literary criticism.

The HUMANIST model presupposed:

1.) That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds.

2.) That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world..

3.) That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique individual "self").

4.) the SELF--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent the idea of a self in language, by saying I, which is the subject of a sentence--or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual experiences and need for individual expression.

The STRUCTURALIST model argues

1.) that the structure of language itself produces "reality"--that we can think only through language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by the structure of language.

2.) That language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Meaning doesn't come from individuals, but from the system that governs what any individual can do within it.

3.) Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE STRUCTURE at the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say "I" because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.

This is also where deconstruction starts to come in. The leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it's God, sometimes it's the human self, the mind, sometimes it's the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set of beliefs) one is talking about.

There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we're still going to look at systems or structures, rather than at individual concrete practices, and that all systems or structures have a CENTER, the point of origin, the thing that created the system in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to each.

Derrida says that such systems are always built of the basic units structuralism analyzes--the binary opposition or pair--and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is always more important than the other, that one term is "marked" as positive and the other as negative. Hence in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western philosophy values, and evil is subordinated to good. Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way--light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in Western culture, the first term is always valued over the second.

In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This may not be as self-evident as the example of good/evil, but it's true in terms of linguistic theories, where speech is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is just the transcription of speech. Derrida says speech gets privileged because speech is associated with presence--for there to be spoken language, somebody has to be there to be speaking.

No, he doesn't take into account tape recordings and things like that. Remember, a lot of what these guys are talking about has roots in philosophic and linguistic traditions that predate modern technology--so that Derrida is responding to an opposition (speech/writing) that Plato set up, long before there were tape recorders. Just like poor old Levi-Strauss talks about how, in order to map all the dimensions of a myth, he'd have to have "punch cards and an IBM machine," when all he'd need now is a home computer.

Anyway, the idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking--thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there's a real self that is the origin of what's being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of PRESENCE; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself). Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favored over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favored over writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls LOGOCENTRISM.

You might think here about the Biblical phrase "Let there be light" as an example. The statement insures that there is a God (the thing doing the speaking), and that God is present (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because God creates the world by speaking), and what God creates is binary oppositions (starting with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind/body. Each term has meaning only in reference to the other (light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just as, in Saussure's view, signifiers only have meaning--or negative value--in relation to other signifiers. These binary pairs are the "structures," or fundamental opposing ideas, that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy.

Because of the favoring of presence over absence, speech is favored over writing (and, as we'll see with Freud, masculine is favored over feminine because the penis is defined as a presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence).

It's because of this favoring of presence over absence that every system (I'm referring here mostly to philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a CENTER, a place from which the whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning--this center guarantees being as presence. Think of your entire self as a kind of system--everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part of that system. At the core or center of your mental and physical life is a notion of SELF, of an "I", of an identity that is stable and unified and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say "I". This core self or "I" is thus the CENTER of the "system", the "langue" of your being, and every other part of you (each individual act) is part of the "parole". The "I" is the origin of all you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being.

Western thought has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centers to systems --being, essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. What Derrida tells us is that each of these terms designating the center of a system serves two purposes: it's the thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the system interrelate, and it's also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules of the system. This is what he talks about as a "scandal" discovered by Levi-Strauss in Levi-Strauss's thoughts about kinship systems. (This will be covered in detail in the next lecture).

What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition--the fundamental unit of the structures or systems we've been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers to--functions within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~b, a equals not-b), and that two terms can't exist without reference to the other--light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. He doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs--to make evil favored over good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between oppositions, hence to show that the values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid.

Here's the basic method of deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida's essay. Ultimately, you can't tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning, or is put into "play" (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called "Deconstruction" because it is a combination of construction/destruction--the idea is that you don't simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term on top, nor do you destroy the old system--rather, you deconstruct the old system by showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their combination) contradict their own logic. [source: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html]

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Suggestions for Further Information:

• Derrida for Beginners, Jim Powell

• Poststructuralism

• Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom

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