Page 39 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

institutional practice; and how identity may be opened up to alterity, to a 'contamination of genres.' J. Hillis Miller, another American deconstructor long resident at Yale, has listed some of the assumptions of tra- ditional literary studies that deconstruction has chal- lenged. They include accounting for a literary work by reference to the writer; arranging literary history in an organic development of definable periods; holding that a good work should have a definable, unified meaning; that language is primarily referential, and that figurative language is 'an adventitious flourish added to a literal base' (Miller 1991:335). The list is apposite; its final point about figurative language has already been demonstrated with reference to Sprat. But it is in some ways deceptive. What it claims as deconstructive is not exclusively so; reference to the writer in interpreting the work, for example, is not questioned by deconstruction alone. Moreover, a list inevitably omits the point that, in Derrida and in some of his followers, it is the very language of decon- struction, its presentation and terminology, that con- stitutes the primary challenge. Derrida's own style varies according to its occasion; but it is commonly obtrusive, often obscure, elliptical, wittily perform- ative. Its challenge proves rebarbative for some read- ers; for others it shapes the exhilarating experience of deconstruction as a kind of writing. In part, it shares with the differing idioms of Lacan or Althusser the desire to resist facile assimilation. Yet presentation in itself is no defense; there will always be popu- larizations, of which this is one. And terminology, however resistant, is open to appropriation. None of Derrida's coinages, no matter how neologistic or bizarre, has escaped. They have multiplied as if to prevent the emergence of a unique name, and in response to the readings of particular texts. He calls them 'undecidables'; and they take the risk, already mentioned, of naming those 'movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts,' and which are to be set to work in the text at hand.
4. Difference
One of the most wide-ranging of these undecidables is the famous 'difference.' The usual 'e' is replaced by an 'a,' and the replacement is inaudible—an effect of writing rather than speech. Differance retains some of the usual connotations of difference; deconstruction reads with difference insofar as it reads against same- ness, the noncontradictory, the homogeneous. It builds on Saussure's claim that 'in language there are only differences without positive terms.' This is not to claim that Saussure is a deconstructionist avant la lettre. His preference for speech over writing is at times logocentric, as Derrida points out; and his posi- tive view of the combination between signifier and signified is replaced in deconstruction by a regressive series of significations, each signified always in the position of another signifier, a process whose closure
could only come about through the imposition of what Derrida calls a 'transcendental signified' to curb the play of semiotic slippage, which ultimately cannot be curbed and which produces the 'indeterminacy' of deconstruction. From this point of view, Saussure is not differential enough. But difference is not the only concern. The French verb differer indicates not only differing but also deferring or delaying; it can thus be read as displacing the moment of self-presence in logocentrism, 'spacing and temporalizing' as Derrida puts it. All these functions of difference and deferment are combined in the neologism 'difference': 'the move- ment that structures every dissociation... what in classical languages would be called the origin or pro- duction of differences.' And despite various dis- claimers—'Difference is neither a word nor a concept'—it remains, as Derrida acknowledges, a metaphysical name. Indeed, it is a name for something that has been unnameable within the logocentrism of Western culture (though it appears 'almost by name' in the work of radical thinkers like Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud). With this series of denials the dis- cussion begins to sound very much like negative theol- ogy, but with a difference:
This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example... there never has been, never will be, a unique word, a master-name.
(Derrida 1991:76)
For all that, within eight years of the French publication of'Difference' in 1968, it was possible for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, to describe it as 'close to becoming Derrida's master concept.' Whatever disclaimers are offered, the forces of appropriation will seek mastery, even negativemastery. One possible reaction is to seek safety in numbers by multiplying the undecidables. In Derrida's later work, however, there seems to be at least a partial despecialization of terminology, with an increasing concentration on topics like translation, or names and naming: topics which work without recourse to neologism. On the contrary, they signal a continuum with others' analyses, as in Derrida's repeated readings of Benjamin on translation.
5. Puncepts
A further aspect of deconstructive terminology or indeterminology is its use of wordplay and the com- pound pun. Gregory Ulmer has offered the term 'pun- cept' for this habit; a mutation that recalls the derivation of 'concept' from the Latin conceptus, a participle of the verb concipio, itself formed from com ('with, together') and capio ('to take hold of, to grasp'). That is to say, the term 'concept' has a centrist etymology; to replace it with the pun or puncept is a decentering move. Puns disrupt the propriety of language, but they need not be unmotivated, and Derridean wordplay is functional. For example, one
Deconstruction
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