Derrida Lecture

Derrida Lecture 11/11/05


Derrida’s first well-known book was a translation of Husserl’s Origin Of Geometry – this was well-received by French academic circles – but his subsequent work has been less well-received – most of his teaching has been done in American universities – although usually not in the philosophy departments – but in literature departments – until his death less than six months ago.

Derrida presents himself – not so much as a practitioner of philosophy, but as an assiduous reader – he is a remarkable reader – with a real talent for close, subtle, and imaginative readings of variety of texts.

Derrida has done close readings and studies on philosophers from:

Plato
Rousseau
Condillac
Hegel
Marx
Husserl
Heidegger
Levinas

And essays literary figures, such as:

Kafka
Valery
Mallarme
Joyce
Artaud
Blanchot

And from the human sciences:

Freud
Saussure
Levi-Strauss

Probably more than any other philosopher since the Middle Ages – Derrida has devoted himself to reading and commenting on the writing of others.

Reading Derrida can be very frustrating.

Derrida seems to particularly irritate and upset some philosophers in the analytic tradition, such as John Searle (Limited Inc.)– and many other philosophers, theorists, and thinkers regard Derrida as a obscurantist charlatan – I hope in this lecture today help to disprove the noun – but have to admit there is something to the adjective.

Derrida discusses difficult thinkers at a high level of sophistication – Derrida also uses a variety of writing styles – puns, bizarre associations, etc – simply as a way in which to knock us out of ordinary conceptual categories – he is NOT trying to make things easy for us!

One key to appreciating Derrida is to realize these writing styles are not failed efforts to construct or analyze arguments – but that the stylization itself is part of his argument.

Sometimes you wonder though – is there any purpose to the immense length and complexity of some of these stylistic displays?

I would say that even Derrida’s most difficult books offer rewards if you persist with them.

I would also say that ultimately that Derrida’s concerns are ethical – and even Gnostic – and a kind of negative theology – in the last years of his life, Derrida’s philosophy was more and more concerned with religion – particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It is quite extraordinary how Derrida begins by analyzing writing and how it does or does not carry meaning and this eventually becomes an inquiry into how to experience of the divine.

Deconstruction

I would like to begin – as a way into Derrida’s philosophy – with the idea he is probably most commonly associated with – deconstruction.

Let me first say this: as a sort of guide to what we are about to explore together –
two worlds = metaphysics – the privileging of one world as real and one world as less than real – to give the less the real world meaning – idealism as Nietzsche means it – Derrida now examines the way in which this kind of metaphysics operates to allow us to believe that we have stable meaning – especially in the philosophical dichotomies between writing and speaking – this is what we are going to look at now.

The first question we should ask ourselves is: Why should a philosopher like Derrida be so obsessed with what others have written?

It is because – as Derrida sees it – human thought and its limitations are revealed in writing.

(quote 1)

A written text will always escape total clarification.

There are always textual ambivalences that remain unsolvable and prevent us from understanding what the author really means.

Let’s look at the main idea that Derrida uses throughout his philosophy:

We might think as Plato did that the problem is writing – if we could talk to the author – ask him what he or she really meant – then all undecidability would be cleared up.

Even if we have the author in front us – differences in past experience, expectations, idiolect – means permanent possibilities of misunderstanding are not cleared up.

Even our thoughts are not unambiguous even to ourselves – according to Derrida – there is no pure presence of thought to self – all thought is mediated through language – there is always a difference between what is thought (or experienced or said or written) and the ideal of pure, self-identical meaning.

Cat exercise – meaning cannot be nailed down.

This is the argument that Derrida repeatedly demonstrates in all his books : that the contingent and remediable defects of writing are also the defects of thinking – but not only thinking all expression, and even all reality.

Let’s look at this in more detail …

In the search of total clarity – philosophers since Plato have insisted on a sharp distinction between speech and writing.

Speech is primary – writing is secondary and derives from thought.

When someone speaks to me directly there is not much chance of misunderstanding.

But when I read the source is absent – thus there are more opportunities for misunderstanding.

eg. viva voce.

Derrida shows how thinkers from Plato to Rousseau and Saussure have implied that writing is less than speech – and in doing so have used all the philosophical dichotomies (dividing things or ideas into two groups that are opposed because completely different).

Speech: presence, reality, truth, certainty, purity
Writing: absence, appearance, falsehood, doubt, impurity.

Very Important Point: But Derrida claims that in the very texts in which Plato, Rousseau, and Saussure put speech over writing – they are constantly reversing the distinction – putting writing before speech – putting writing in the primary position.

Plato describes thought – which speech is supposed to be a pure expression of - as a “as a kind of writing inscribed on the soul.”

Plato also says that for all it dangers that is the only way that speech can be preserved – this is why Plato refers to writing as pharmakon – that which means poison and remedy.
Rousseau – while denouncing the deceptions of writing – say that writing – rather than speech is the only way in which he can express his true self.

Derrida calls the studying the role of writing in Western thought – grammatology.

Even though we are constantly failing to attain perfect meaning and truth – all our philosophy is based on the idea that such perfection is possible.

This striving to perfectly capture meaning (in speech or writing) in philosophy is formulated in three principles:

Ex: Hinayana (written) and the Mahayana (spoken):

(quote 2)

The effort to perfectly capture meaning in philosophy is formulated by Derrida by three principles (logocentrism or logocentric thinking):

(1) Principle of Opposition

Basic elements of thought and language are pairs of opposing concepts:

presence/absence; truth/falsity; being/nothingness; same/other; one/many; male/female; hot/cold, and many, many, more.

(2) Principle of Logical Exclusion

These pairs are regarded as logical alternatives – governed by:

The principle of identity (A =A)

The principle of non-contradiction (nothing can be both A and not-A)

(3) Principle of Priority

Each fundamental pair is asymmetrical in that one term has priority over the other (e.g. more fundamental, more real, morally better, etc.)

This is the structure of the metaphysics that seemingly keeps meaning stable and fixed.

When Derrida does a reading he tries to reveal the ways in which the text has to break this model.

Derrida will show how the binary oppositions are not sustained (as in the examples given of Plato and Rousseau) - and relations of exclusion and priority are denied by the very text that formulates them.

This technique Derrida calls deconstruction.

Derrida gets this from Heidegger’s destruction. Being/being. Ontic/Ontological.

(quote 3)

Deconstruction shows how texts based on binary oppositions themselves violate both the principle of exclusion and the principle of priority. Thus, a deconstructive reading of a text reveals points at which it introduces one of the opposing terms into the definition of the other or reverses the order of priority of the two terms.

This general project of deconstructing the fundamental dichotomies built into thought yields a critique of logocentrism.

(quote 4)

The dominant terms always correspond to some sort of presence, a reality that is positive, complete, simple, independent, and fundamental (Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s substances, Aquinas’s God, Hegel’s absolute Geist). This presence is always understood as the polar opposite of something that is negative, incomplete, complex, dependent, and derivative.

Derrida’s deconstructive readings show that this purity and priority of presence (logocentrism) can never be sustained.

It is important to note that deconstruction is not just reversing the priorities – that would be, as Derrida has said, logocentrism in another key – in other words, it is a critique of the metaphysics of presence – regardless of what takes the dominant position of ‘real’ presence.

How is this ethical?

Ethically – deconstruction reveals that values considered eternal truths are merely historically developed and contingent practices of certain cultures. This effects a critique of ethnocentrism.

A particular form of ethnocentrism that Derrida has focused on (and other philosophers like Luce Irigaray) is phallocentrism.

Phallogocentrism presents masculine ‘traits’ as obviously superior to the feminine ‘traits’ (eg. domination over sympathy, clarity over depth) – and the notion that social and political subordination of women is completely natural and appropriate.

My epistemological earthquake.

Derrida thinks that phallocentrism is derives from logocentrism so speaks of phallogocentrism,




Difference

In addition to his deconstructive readings, Derrida has created vocabularies in which tries to sketch/adumbrate out that level – which might be called preontological ­– where dichotomies dissolve and their oppositions reverse and slide into each other.

Derrida has created three vocabularies that he uses in attempting to render this preontological level, they are:

(quote 5)

differance – to differ and to defer

supplement

trace

We will look first at the one Derrida has most fully developed and most often uses: ‘difference’.

“differ” refers to way in which any one of the binary pairs fail to match the domain to which it is supposed to apply – i.e. Rousseau’s use of the concepts speech and writing does not correspond to the sharp division he claims to make between them.

(quote 6)

‘differ’ (different) – any pair of binary opposites always to fail to match exactly the phenomena to which it supposed to apply.

There is a difference between Rousseau’s use of the concepts and the sharp division he claims to make between concepts (speech and writing).

or:

There is always a difference between the structure of an actual phenomenon (historical event, a text, a personality) and the binary divisions required by a logical system.


‘defer’ (to put off) – any effort to impose sharp distinctions required by the binary oppositions must be “put off” (deferred) in the face of the recalcitrance of the phenomenon”


defer – when the binary opposites fail to match with the phenomenon we could take up a another binary distinction on another level – but we ‘defer’ doing so.

Example: When we see that Plato we that has violated the speech/writing dichotomies by saying “thought is writing in the soul” – we could take up another binary position such as: “good writing/bad writing” – but even this second position can be undermined – so an attempt at sharper distinctions will have to be indefinitely deferred.

Derrida says that despite the limitations of standard dichotomies – we have no way of thinking apart from them.

(quote 7)

There is no standpoint outside of the dichotomies from which we can overlook and master them.

We can use the term “difference’ to indicate the limitations of our language but not to overcome them.

Derrida’s questioning of distinctions on which thinking is based is not undertaken in the name of a new set of definitive answers (i.e., a new set of dichotomized concepts) but in the name of the perpetual need to be aware of the limits of any answers.