Page 40 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
of his discussions of translation is called 'Des Tours de EabeV (1980). In this title, the biblical tower of Babel is pluralized into a symptom rather than an event. Des can be read as 'of the' or 'about the'—here, as in the later Of Spirit, there is an echo of the diction of an academic monograph; but we can also read Des as the casual 'some,' which undermines formal diction. One cannot tell from Des Tours whether tour is femi- nine, which would make it a tower; or masculine, which would make it a turn, a twist, a trope: varieties of indirection that the essay will apply to translation as such and to language in general. This indirection is emphasized by punning on Des Tours and detour; detour, like delay is an aspect of differance. Accord- ingly, the failed structure of Babel becomes a decon- struction:
The 'tower of Babel' does not figure merely the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, archi- tectural construction, system and architectonics.
(Derrida 1991:244)
other /tore-compounds; for example, hors concours. A picture at an exhibition is hors concours if it is above its class, out of competition. Perhaps to be hors-texte is to be out-of-text in the sense that one is out of the game, out of play. But this is a negative sentence, so that the possibility of being out of play is precisely what it denies. These readings suggest the impossi- bility of an appeal to:
a signified outside of the text whose content... could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general.
(Derrida 1976:158)
An outside in this sense is strictly Utopian, the u-topos or non-lieu already described. A problematics ofoutsideandinsidedevelopsindeconstruction; lead- ing, for example, to the question of what is formally outside a text—preface, afterword, footnote, com- mentary—and the presumption of priority or auth- ority that such elements may claim. This in turn produces a recurrent questioning of boundaries, margins, and frames, and in some cases the disruption of the printed page as a visual unit; Glas (1974) is printed in two columns which deal with Hegel and Genet, the proper and the improper; but which are multifariously interrupted, not only by other dis-
'Improper' procedures like the pun are deliberately
courted as a means of interrogating propriety, prop-
erty, and the proper. In 1975 Derrida gave a lecture,
later expanded into a book, on the poet Francis Ponge.
The title seems innocuous; SignePonge, perhaps courses but also by typographical intrusions, inset
'Signed Ponge,' as if inscribed below a Ponge text. Lurking within this sober compound, however, is a sign of the drunken eponge: a 'soak,' or an amorphous 'sponge.' Passer I'eponge sur is to blot out or oblit- erate; thus /'eponge eponge, I'eponge est Ponge: 'the sponge expunges, the sponge is Ponge'... The sponge becomes a deconstructive operator with which to interrogate the notion of signature as the identifying mark of the proper name; and this is carried out in and through the outrageous wordplay and the readings of Ponge's texts.
6. InsideandOutside
A milder but notorious piece of wordplay comes from Of Grammatology, one of three books published in 1967. During a discussion of Rousseau, Derrida turns, as he so often does, to the question of reading, and produces the sentence lln'y a pas de hors-texte. This saying raises crucial questions and has become a rally- ing cry against deconstruction. Rendered as 'there is nothing outside the text' it is used to accuse decon- struction of a narrowly text-based reading practice; or, more generally, of a nihilistic indifference to con- text and history. But there are other readings. A small slippage produces lln'y apas dehors-texte: there is no outside of or to the text (recall the earlier question of whether there was a place outside philosophy). If the text (whatever that turns out to be) has no outside, it seems boundless; rather than narrowing the field, this opens it widely. Then again, hors-texte seems to echo
blocks of print which give the page the appearance of a collage.
7. Ethics and Politics
The problem of inside and outside has further impli- cations which lead into ethics and politics. They can be approached through the notion of context as an outside, and the indifference to context which has been read into lln'y a pas de hor-texte. This may imply an extension of textuality rather than an encapsulation of the text. Derrida refers to this extension as the 'general text,' as in these comments during a contro- versythatfollowedthepublicationofsomeofhisanti- apartheid writing:
That's why South Africa and apartheid are, like you and me, part of this general text, which is not to say that it can be read the way one reads a book. That's why the text is always a field of forces: differential, heterogeneous, open and so on. That's why deconstructive readings and writings are concerned not only with library books, with discourses, with conceptual and semantic contents... They are also effective or active (as one says) inter- ventions, in particular political and institutional inter- ventions that transform contexts....
(Critical Inquiry 13:167-68)
In this and in other passages there appears to be a convergence between general text and context, as an open field of forces which is subject to intervention, but which, through its very openness, cannot be deter- minately specified—as in the gesture of specifying a
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