Page 37 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Deconstruction is the name of a kind of writing and a kind of thinking that symptomatically resists for- mulation. It is associated with the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida; but Derrida's own explosively various publications from the late 1960s onwards was accompanied by a dissemination of deconstruction, notably but not exclusively in the USA, where it was initially pursued by lettrists rather than philosophers, and played a key role in the rise of interest in literary theory, prompting continued debate in the humanities. Rather than attempting to cover all this activity, the present article will con- centrate on Derrida's own work; but even this con- centration does not offer a single identity. In terms of nationality, for instance, Derrida has pointed out the sense in which he is 'not French': 'I come from Algeria. I have therefore still another relation to the French tongue.' The sense of'another relation,' of otherness, is pervasive.
Deconstruction is not an autonomous discourse; it exists in relation to other texts, in a reading of what Derrida calls 'loving jealousy' which displays the alt- erity in the texts' identity, the indigestible element in their system. This in turn gives a certain textual specificity to deconstructive writing, which is all too easily lost in a general discussion. This article therefore includes an extended consideration of one recent text.
1. Philosophy and Literature
The sense of otherness also affects the question of a single discipline. Derrida is a philosopher by training and occupation, but his books are often denounced as alien to their apparent discipline, and he can describe himself as other than a philosopher:
I ask questions of philosophy, and naturally this supposes a certain identification, a certain translation of myself into the body of a philosopher. But I don't feel that that's where I'm situated.
(Derrida 1985:140)
In a 1981 interview he speaks of 'my attempt to dis- cover the non-place or non-lieu which would be the "other" of philosophy. This is the task of decon- struction.' The interviewer asks 'Can literary and poetic language provide this non-lieu or u-toposT and Derrida replies:
I think so: but when I speak of literature it is not with a capital L; it is rather an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical con- cepts, certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble, exposing them as divisible and questionable.
(Derrida 1984:112)
This is an instructive passage in several ways. It pre- sents the ambition to transcend a (philosophical) dis- course, to get outside or beyond it into a meta- language. But here as elsewhere, the transcendent gesture is ultimately impossible. On another occasion Derrida asks skeptically:
Can one, strictly speaking, determine a nonphilosophical place, a place of exteriority or alterity from which one might still treat of philosophy?
(Derrida 1982:xii)
The implied answer is no: one must differ from within. Deconstruction must use the very tools it seeks to question.
Another instructive aspect of the interview is its offer of literature as an alternative to philosophy, to replace it. Philosophy and literature are now in oppo- sition, and such binary pairs are a frequent object of deconstructive analysis. These pairings are commonly marked by the speaker's preference. Thus from a phil- osopher's point of view the opposition between phil- osophy and literature might appear as the opposition between rigor and frivolity, and the advocate of litera- ture would attempt to reverse this valuation. Decon- struction, however, specifically avoids a symmetrical reversal. Derrida will therefore not substitute Litera- ture with a capital L for Philosophy with a capital P. Neither of these capitalized monoliths attracts him. For it is precisely the monolith, the self-identical struc- ture, that provokes deconstruction, which in turn dis- plays the monolith as already fissured, discovering the otherness in its apparent sameness; as in the discovery that an apparently rigorous nonliterary discourse is already tainted by the figuration that it would seek to exclude. For example, Thomas Sprat's 1667 History of the Royal Society celebrates the scientific ambitions of the body which he helped to found, and rails against the unscientific 'beautiful deceipt' of 'fine speaking,' against 'specious Tropes and Figures.' The Society's members have resolved, he writes:
to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their mem- bers a close, naked, natural way of speaking...
(Sprat 1667)
The metaphoricity of this diatribe against metaphor, this impure argument for purity, needs no emphasis. The metaphors link to form an implicit sequence: 'to return back... primitive purity... natural.' Theoppo- sition between pure and impure, between nature and artifice, is bolstered by a myth of origin which privi-
Deconstruction E. Crasnow
Deconstruction
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