Few philosophers, in the latter half of the twentieth century, so profoundly and radically transformed our understanding of writing, reading, texts, and textuality as Jacques Derrida.
The scope of Derrida's thinking is prodigious. It explores with extraordinary inventiveness and originality some of the most pressing practical and theoretical challenges of recent times, in philosophy, politics, ethics, literary theory, criticism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and much else besides; it articulates a fresh and rigorous account of the complex cultural, philosophical, and religious legacy of the west, its achievements and its silences, its exclusions and unfulfilled promises; and it develops a new style of reading scrupulously adjusted to the general implications and intricate singularity of philosophical and literary texts, to their relevance within the history of thought and the question of their enduring but always fragile future.
A student movement that swept across Europe was nearly succeeded to overthrow the government supported by the Marxists, but were eventually subdued in the 60s. Failing to demolish state power, they became disillusioned, inward-looking. Suddenly exhibiting a postmodern skepticism of grand myths such as Marxism and Communism, they began to commit themselves to language itself. Disengaging themselves from politics, they became linguistic revolutionaries, finding revolution in terms of speech, and began to view literature, reading and writing as subversive political acts in themselves. Intellectuals began attending to how words mean more than what they mean. Increasingly distrustful of language claiming to convey only single authoritarian message-they began exploring how words can say many different meanings simultaneously.
But by the time all this had taken place in France, Jacques Derrida had emerged, in the late 1960s in America, as the most avant-garde of the avant-garde. At his lecture given at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", he had caused a stir in American academia. His thought struck a new chord that caused many previous philosophers to be reassessed, and it set the tone for much thought to come. It was something of a disharmonious chord,for his forte was a subversive mode of reading authoritarian texts, or any texts. This style of reading came to be known as deconstruction. Then in France deconstruction, kicking existentialism aside, was suddenly much in vogue. Derrida became the philosopher of the day, the new 'enfant terrible', the new philosopher punk, of French intellectalism.
If Derrida has managed to turn much of Western thought on its head, he has done so only by standing on the shoulders of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Saussure.
Derrida shares with Nietzsche a skepticism about philosophy in general, but especially its style, and its truth claims. Both of them write in a style that emphasises the dance of thought on the playground of knowledge- a dance that is playful, waltzing between extremes such as absolute certainty and absolute doubt.
The word "deconstruction" comes from the German philosopher Martin Heideggar's(1889-1976) concept of 'Destruktion', his call for the loosening up of the old tradition of ontology-the study of ultimate Rock Bottom Reality-through an exposure of its internal development.
What is Deconstruction?
Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of Derrida's thought. Yet we can say-
Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering-with unmasking the problematic nature of all centers.
According to Derrida, all western thought is based on the idea of a center-an Origin, a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning.
For instance for 2000 years much of Western culture has been centered on the idea of Christianity and Christ.
The problem with centers, for Derrida, is that they attempt to exclude. In doing so they ignore, repress or marginalize others(which become the Other).
In male-dominated societies, man is central( and woman is the marginalized Other, repressed, ignored, pushed to the margins).
If you have a culture which has Christ in the center of its icons, then Christians will be central to that culture, and Buddhists, Muslims, Jews-anybody different-will be in the margins-marginalized-pushed to the outside. (We must remember that Derrida was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Algiers, growing up as a member of a marginalized, dispossessed culture.)
so the longing for a center spawns 'binary opposites', with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Furthermore, centers want to fix, or freeze the play of binary opposites.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what is in the center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Drawing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the play of opposites between, for example, Christian/Jew or Christian/pagan. The Jew and the pagan are not even represented in such art. But icons are just one of the social practices that try to freeze the play of opposites-there are many more-such as advertising, social codes, taboos, conventions, categories, rituals, etc. But reality and language are not as simple and singular as icons with a central, exclusive image in their middle-they are more like ambiguous figures.
Derrida says that all of Western thought behaves in the same way, forming pairs of binary opposites in which one member of the pair is privileged, freezing the play of the system, and marginalising the other member of the pair.
Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way of reading, which first makes us aware of the centrality of the central term. Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized term can become central. The marginalized term temporarily overthrows the hierarchy.
Differance::
Derrida employs a whole series of such playful inventions:
pharmakon - poison/antidote (in his reading of Plato )
hymen - virginity/ consummation; inner/outer ( in his reading of Mallarme)
supplement - surplus/ necessary addition ( in his reading of Rousseau)
Difference(with an e) is crucial for Derrida because it was an important concept for those thinkers who influenced Derrida- Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. It was especially important, however, for Ferdinand de Saussure for whom language as a system of differences is an important concept in structural linguistics. In his 'Course in General Linguistics' Saussure asserts that language is based on 'relation'-that words produce meanings because they are elements in a system of differences. In this system there are no positive elements-no element that can be called simply 'itself'.
Differance includes the meaning of differing, of being different from something else.
Yet differance includes not only the meaning 'to differ'-to be different from something else-but to defer, to delay, to put off till later.
Any attempt to define differance, which is not a contradiction. For like Derrida's other hinge mechanisms (pharmakon, supplement, hymen,etc.) it is ambiguous. Its play hinges on at least two meanings.
Yet, no meaning of differance ever arrives, because it is always already suspended between two meanings: "to differ" and "to defer"-without ever settling into one or the other.
And if the meaning of differance is (n)either "to defer" (n) or "to differ"-then there is no stable meaning that can ground it in the present-that can stabilize its shape-shifting. It will always dance around like a trickster. It can never be reduced to any one meaning at any one time. If there were some stable presence or meaning that could fix the meaning-the entire "philosophy" which hinges on 'differance' would be in error, and would not need pivotal, hinge mechanisms such as 'pharmakon,hymen, supplement' and 'differance'.
But if 'differance' is such a key "non-word" or "non-concept"-and if it is so important in literary studies-then it must-by this time- have degenerated into a kind of buzz word that could be applied to just about situation.
It is important to note that these terms arise out of the specific books Derrida is reading, wherein they perform very specific tasks, and are not meant to be imported into and applied to other texts, though you wouldn't probably get thrown in jail for using 'pharmakon', for instance, in a literary analysis.
*But why does Derrida spell 'differance' with an "a"-'ance'?
'Differance' in French is spelled the same as in English-with an -'ence'. Derrida intentionally misspells it as 'differance' (with an 'ance') as if it made no 'difference'-because after all-he is delivering a speech-and a speech is supposed to be more effective than writing in communicating the speaker's meaning. But is it? After all, when spoken, you cannot tell the difference between the "e" and the "a"-difference and differance sound the same in French.
*One can tell the differance between difference and differance only in writing!
When spoken the differance is lost. Thus (the) differance can be seen, but not heard. You could say that this is writing's revenge upon speech for having been marginalised.
So whether Derrida says 'difference' or 'differance' in his speech, the audience does not know the 'difference'. A simple "meaning'' of differance can never arrive-it is always suspended-playing between differing and deferring-and this suspension creates a kind of 'interval' or 'blank' in space and time that underlies all cases of differing.
The scope of Derrida's thinking is prodigious. It explores with extraordinary inventiveness and originality some of the most pressing practical and theoretical challenges of recent times, in philosophy, politics, ethics, literary theory, criticism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and much else besides; it articulates a fresh and rigorous account of the complex cultural, philosophical, and religious legacy of the west, its achievements and its silences, its exclusions and unfulfilled promises; and it develops a new style of reading scrupulously adjusted to the general implications and intricate singularity of philosophical and literary texts, to their relevance within the history of thought and the question of their enduring but always fragile future.
A student movement that swept across Europe was nearly succeeded to overthrow the government supported by the Marxists, but were eventually subdued in the 60s. Failing to demolish state power, they became disillusioned, inward-looking. Suddenly exhibiting a postmodern skepticism of grand myths such as Marxism and Communism, they began to commit themselves to language itself. Disengaging themselves from politics, they became linguistic revolutionaries, finding revolution in terms of speech, and began to view literature, reading and writing as subversive political acts in themselves. Intellectuals began attending to how words mean more than what they mean. Increasingly distrustful of language claiming to convey only single authoritarian message-they began exploring how words can say many different meanings simultaneously.
But by the time all this had taken place in France, Jacques Derrida had emerged, in the late 1960s in America, as the most avant-garde of the avant-garde. At his lecture given at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", he had caused a stir in American academia. His thought struck a new chord that caused many previous philosophers to be reassessed, and it set the tone for much thought to come. It was something of a disharmonious chord,for his forte was a subversive mode of reading authoritarian texts, or any texts. This style of reading came to be known as deconstruction. Then in France deconstruction, kicking existentialism aside, was suddenly much in vogue. Derrida became the philosopher of the day, the new 'enfant terrible', the new philosopher punk, of French intellectalism.
If Derrida has managed to turn much of Western thought on its head, he has done so only by standing on the shoulders of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Saussure.
Derrida shares with Nietzsche a skepticism about philosophy in general, but especially its style, and its truth claims. Both of them write in a style that emphasises the dance of thought on the playground of knowledge- a dance that is playful, waltzing between extremes such as absolute certainty and absolute doubt.
The word "deconstruction" comes from the German philosopher Martin Heideggar's(1889-1976) concept of 'Destruktion', his call for the loosening up of the old tradition of ontology-the study of ultimate Rock Bottom Reality-through an exposure of its internal development.
What is Deconstruction?
Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of Derrida's thought. Yet we can say-
Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering-with unmasking the problematic nature of all centers.
According to Derrida, all western thought is based on the idea of a center-an Origin, a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning.
For instance for 2000 years much of Western culture has been centered on the idea of Christianity and Christ.
The problem with centers, for Derrida, is that they attempt to exclude. In doing so they ignore, repress or marginalize others(which become the Other).
In male-dominated societies, man is central( and woman is the marginalized Other, repressed, ignored, pushed to the margins).
If you have a culture which has Christ in the center of its icons, then Christians will be central to that culture, and Buddhists, Muslims, Jews-anybody different-will be in the margins-marginalized-pushed to the outside. (We must remember that Derrida was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Algiers, growing up as a member of a marginalized, dispossessed culture.)
so the longing for a center spawns 'binary opposites', with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Furthermore, centers want to fix, or freeze the play of binary opposites.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what is in the center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Drawing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the play of opposites between, for example, Christian/Jew or Christian/pagan. The Jew and the pagan are not even represented in such art. But icons are just one of the social practices that try to freeze the play of opposites-there are many more-such as advertising, social codes, taboos, conventions, categories, rituals, etc. But reality and language are not as simple and singular as icons with a central, exclusive image in their middle-they are more like ambiguous figures.
Derrida says that all of Western thought behaves in the same way, forming pairs of binary opposites in which one member of the pair is privileged, freezing the play of the system, and marginalising the other member of the pair.
Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way of reading, which first makes us aware of the centrality of the central term. Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized term can become central. The marginalized term temporarily overthrows the hierarchy.
Differance::
Derrida employs a whole series of such playful inventions:
pharmakon - poison/antidote (in his reading of Plato )
hymen - virginity/ consummation; inner/outer ( in his reading of Mallarme)
supplement - surplus/ necessary addition ( in his reading of Rousseau)
Difference(with an e) is crucial for Derrida because it was an important concept for those thinkers who influenced Derrida- Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. It was especially important, however, for Ferdinand de Saussure for whom language as a system of differences is an important concept in structural linguistics. In his 'Course in General Linguistics' Saussure asserts that language is based on 'relation'-that words produce meanings because they are elements in a system of differences. In this system there are no positive elements-no element that can be called simply 'itself'.
Differance includes the meaning of differing, of being different from something else.
Yet differance includes not only the meaning 'to differ'-to be different from something else-but to defer, to delay, to put off till later.
Any attempt to define differance, which is not a contradiction. For like Derrida's other hinge mechanisms (pharmakon, supplement, hymen,etc.) it is ambiguous. Its play hinges on at least two meanings.
Yet, no meaning of differance ever arrives, because it is always already suspended between two meanings: "to differ" and "to defer"-without ever settling into one or the other.
And if the meaning of differance is (n)either "to defer" (n) or "to differ"-then there is no stable meaning that can ground it in the present-that can stabilize its shape-shifting. It will always dance around like a trickster. It can never be reduced to any one meaning at any one time. If there were some stable presence or meaning that could fix the meaning-the entire "philosophy" which hinges on 'differance' would be in error, and would not need pivotal, hinge mechanisms such as 'pharmakon,hymen, supplement' and 'differance'.
But if 'differance' is such a key "non-word" or "non-concept"-and if it is so important in literary studies-then it must-by this time- have degenerated into a kind of buzz word that could be applied to just about situation.
It is important to note that these terms arise out of the specific books Derrida is reading, wherein they perform very specific tasks, and are not meant to be imported into and applied to other texts, though you wouldn't probably get thrown in jail for using 'pharmakon', for instance, in a literary analysis.
*But why does Derrida spell 'differance' with an "a"-'ance'?
'Differance' in French is spelled the same as in English-with an -'ence'. Derrida intentionally misspells it as 'differance' (with an 'ance') as if it made no 'difference'-because after all-he is delivering a speech-and a speech is supposed to be more effective than writing in communicating the speaker's meaning. But is it? After all, when spoken, you cannot tell the difference between the "e" and the "a"-difference and differance sound the same in French.
*One can tell the differance between difference and differance only in writing!
When spoken the differance is lost. Thus (the) differance can be seen, but not heard. You could say that this is writing's revenge upon speech for having been marginalised.
So whether Derrida says 'difference' or 'differance' in his speech, the audience does not know the 'difference'. A simple "meaning'' of differance can never arrive-it is always suspended-playing between differing and deferring-and this suspension creates a kind of 'interval' or 'blank' in space and time that underlies all cases of differing.
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