Jacques Derrida: Margins of Philosophy
Let’s talk about post-modernism, shall we?
It’s difficult to get a simple opinion on post-modernism. It’s apparently one of those love it-hate it things - it's either the greatest thing ever, or complete bullshit. In current American philosophy, there is more of the latter sentiment, both among the Analytic group and among many who could be called Continental. Jacques Derrida, for example, is “anti-philosophical.” He wants to destroy the concept of truth. Forget what a writer says; the only thing that exists in a text is whatever we get out of it, and that’s the meaning! So there is no meaning! And so on. Post-modernism, in this sense, is like anathema to the goals of the Enlightenment: whereas the latter sought to use the human powers of reason to understand the world, mankind, and what brings everything together, post-modernism takes the failure of man to discover this as its starting point and necessary premise. From here, of course, disagreements occur.
However, it is going a bit far, I think, to object to most any philosophy out of hand, and I would say the same of post-modernism. So, I decided that I would take a chance at it (technically, this isn’t my first encounter, but that first encounter made even less sense to me than this one). The book is Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), the author is Jacques Derrida. As said above, there was a problem with Derrida and the possibility of truth. It is sometimes said that, for Derrida, everything is “in the text.” That is, the text itself, as it exists in a present moment, and importantly, outside of the author’s intentions. It is autonomous, in a sense, but at the same time subject to the present moment, the thoughts and ideas of the reader, and every other environmental influence. These factors produce a unique reading which, in a way, becomes the truth of the text (of course, this is not a very Enlightenment-y sense of “truth”). The name for Derrida’s method of ruining good books is called deconstruction of a text, and it goes something like this: “In a word, the task is to consider philosophy . . . as a ‘particular literary genre,’ drawing upon the reserves of a language, cultivating, forcing, or making deviate a set of tropic resources older than philosophy itself.” (293) Philosophy, the search for truth, appears now as a branch of rhetoric, a way of speaking and influencing others (and, most likely, the self as well). If this is the case, one has to wonder why we should bother with this truth business at all, then, especially if all the searching for truth is nothing more than messing with words and bad interpretations.
However, this is not Derrida speaking. This is Derrida speaking about Valéry, an admittedly anti-philosophical fellow whose work Derrida is in the process of deconstructing in the text quoted. There is little doubt that Derrida was influenced by Valéry to some extent, and he admits as much: “I had not read Valéry for a long time. And even long ago, I was far from having read all of Valéry.” (278) Indeed, the authors and readings that Derrida selects for deconstruction (at least in this work) are all rather obviously not just random works or works that are important to some theory or movement, but works that he was personally interested in and that likely had a hand in his own intellectual development, whether in his agreement or opposition. Margins of Philosophy, a series of essays most of which focus on deconstruction of specific texts, is simply that: deconstruction of a series of texts that Derrida likely found interesting. What I’m getting at in a vague manner is a point about Derrida that should be known before one accuses him of being anti-philosophical, anti-Enlightenment, or anything like that: when it comes to questions of the nature of truth, the nature of value, and similar questions usually of a metaphysical (or, and this is important, of an anti-metaphysical nature), Derrida simply doesn’t appear to be very interested. He doesn’t search for truth, but neither does he say that it doesn’t exist. He doesn’t espouse an ethic, but nor does he say that there is nothing of value. He simply doesn’t address those questions, even in his essay which are not about other authors or works.
Rather, what Derrida is interested in (and what deconstruction appears to be about) is in the minds and historical processes that make up Western intellectual history, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Here we must think back to two important precedents without which Derrida might not have become what he did (though this is not to discount more; these merely happen to be two that I am more than familiar with): Heidegger and Nietzsche. They are, of course, different on many accounts. However, they shared in common a certain objective in their works: the overturning of the millennial order of philosophy, and with it the standard Western view of everything in general. Both saw the history of Western philosophy post-Plato as held under a certain set of assumptions, Nietzsche seeing it as under the moral, Christian view and Heidegger as under the control of the metaphysical view of Being as presence. Both attempted to chip at these foundations, to reveal the contradictions within and the historical nature of the supposedly timeless. Being and Time, especially, went to previously unseen lengths to reveal an assumption undergirding all of Western though, an assumption so central, so basic, so absolutely important that no one can even see it. Under the section titled “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being,” the very first sentence of Being and Time reads: “This question has today been forgotten.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Macquarrie and Robinson, 21) In order to fix the problem and arise at a real understanding of being, one must first recognize that there is a problem. One has to make things difficult where previously it was thought that there was no problem.
What seems to inspire Derrida is not the hope of discovering the meaning of Being: at least, in Margins he devotes no time to it. Rather, Derrida wants to know why and how it is that the question has not merely been thought to be solved but forgotten altogether. And not just in the question of Being, but everywhere, for, as Heidegger points out, these seemingly innocuous metaphysical assumptions shape our views of nature, of ethics, of objects, and so on. Our understanding of reality is shaped by premises that have become hidden through constant use. What Derrida seeks is to tease out those premises and show their effects.
Enter deconstruction. “Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated.” (329) In other words, Derrida’s project can be seen as something very akin to Heidegger’s, that is, to look at the works one is presented with and see the historical undercurrents riding within, the deepest assumptions that power the arguments. Derrida continues: “For example, writing, as a classical concept, carries with it predicates which have been subordinated, excluded, or held in reserve by forces and according to necessities to be analyzed.” (329) If one reads the rest of the essay (“Signature Even Context”) one knows that one of these assumptions is that writing is subordinate to thinking. This is not shocking, for there are few things more obvious. It’s tough to write, or to write coherently, without thinking. Derrida disagrees. The argument, which again I will not reproduce in complete detail because of space and my intentions in this essay, (and which is in fact a sort of side argument to the main thesis of the paper, which is about communication) is that writing is not a simple transference of thought to paper. It is not because, if it were, it fails in its task: there is no guarantee, perhaps no justified reason at all to believe, that what one writes will mean the same to someone else who reads what is written, or that (and Derrida explicitly makes this point) the same words will even mean the same thing to the same person later on. This isn’t to say that writing and thought are not connected in a certain causal order where thought comes first; we must always be careful to read into Derrida what he isn’t saying, for then we would be committing the very sin being outlined here. Rather, the written work exists as something independent of the mind that produced it. It has its own status: “This citationality (the ability to be quoted and used by another), duplication, or duplicity, this iterability (from iter, which Derrida uses to emphasize the definitional role of the Other in the use and purpose of writing) of the mark (the symbol, letter, word, book) is not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal – Derrida’s note) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called ‘normal’ functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite?” (320-321) In other words, writing’s very existence is defined by its independence from the author; if the author didn’t intend to say something beyond him or herself, there would be no need for writing. However, that means that the standard hierarchy of thought, then writing is not what is believed, though it is so obvious that no one ever even stops to see it as a problem.
This is a simplified example of deconstruction, the project Derrida pursues throughout these essays. He seeks to get to the furthest reaches of the acting mind, and to what basic equivalencies, oppositions, and hierarchies compose its thought. Thus, the work of metaphysicians and linguists interests him the most, as it is in the land between existing things and the mind’s understanding of them through the word, the symbol, that our most basic assumptions about anything seem to embed themselves. No matter how far people try to go in their skepticism, challenging deductive proofs or the evidence of the senses, or even challenging our use of language and logic itself, there is always something further down that the thinker holds to be true, some action of the mind that is used without reflection. It is this that Derrida seeks. Whether the truth is to be found after, whether there is a truth to be found, does not interest him. He just wants to find the invisible gears behind the shining brass ones in the clockwork mind, and to expose them for what they are. These gears are not what is stated syllogistically in an author’s work. In fact, they won’t be stated at all. They are there, however. They show themselves, Derrida says, in their absence, when they are “so obvious” as to not challenge. They also show themselves, and more vividly, when an author finds an argument “too obviously flawed” to consider, an opponent “too crude” to respond to. What is so flawed, why should one think so, if the opposing author found it important enough to write about? This “obviousness,” these basic assumptions that are too simple to think about, are the problem to be made a problem. They are what is in the margins.
This, I think, is Derrida. His quest is one of problematics, which is, if you will, the technique of professionally annoying intellectuals. Ironically enough, to read him as advocating the destruction of the mission of the Enlightenment, of being opposed to human progress and a proponent of absolute relativism, is to show the truth of his view of the text as independent. In a way the text, separated from its author, becomes what we think it is. The author could surely come to us and tell us what it “really” means, but who’s to say the author herself won’t change her mind? Who’s to say the two mean the same things with the same symbols? After Derrida’s death, what are the texts he wrote? What he said they were, words locked down at a moment in time? What if we found his works without ever having known of the man? What would they be then? The problem, then, is to create a problem where there was none, to piss people off so that they might think. For if one doesn’t see a problem, there can’t be a solution, can there?
It’s difficult to get a simple opinion on post-modernism. It’s apparently one of those love it-hate it things - it's either the greatest thing ever, or complete bullshit. In current American philosophy, there is more of the latter sentiment, both among the Analytic group and among many who could be called Continental. Jacques Derrida, for example, is “anti-philosophical.” He wants to destroy the concept of truth. Forget what a writer says; the only thing that exists in a text is whatever we get out of it, and that’s the meaning! So there is no meaning! And so on. Post-modernism, in this sense, is like anathema to the goals of the Enlightenment: whereas the latter sought to use the human powers of reason to understand the world, mankind, and what brings everything together, post-modernism takes the failure of man to discover this as its starting point and necessary premise. From here, of course, disagreements occur.
However, it is going a bit far, I think, to object to most any philosophy out of hand, and I would say the same of post-modernism. So, I decided that I would take a chance at it (technically, this isn’t my first encounter, but that first encounter made even less sense to me than this one). The book is Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), the author is Jacques Derrida. As said above, there was a problem with Derrida and the possibility of truth. It is sometimes said that, for Derrida, everything is “in the text.” That is, the text itself, as it exists in a present moment, and importantly, outside of the author’s intentions. It is autonomous, in a sense, but at the same time subject to the present moment, the thoughts and ideas of the reader, and every other environmental influence. These factors produce a unique reading which, in a way, becomes the truth of the text (of course, this is not a very Enlightenment-y sense of “truth”). The name for Derrida’s method of ruining good books is called deconstruction of a text, and it goes something like this: “In a word, the task is to consider philosophy . . . as a ‘particular literary genre,’ drawing upon the reserves of a language, cultivating, forcing, or making deviate a set of tropic resources older than philosophy itself.” (293) Philosophy, the search for truth, appears now as a branch of rhetoric, a way of speaking and influencing others (and, most likely, the self as well). If this is the case, one has to wonder why we should bother with this truth business at all, then, especially if all the searching for truth is nothing more than messing with words and bad interpretations.
However, this is not Derrida speaking. This is Derrida speaking about Valéry, an admittedly anti-philosophical fellow whose work Derrida is in the process of deconstructing in the text quoted. There is little doubt that Derrida was influenced by Valéry to some extent, and he admits as much: “I had not read Valéry for a long time. And even long ago, I was far from having read all of Valéry.” (278) Indeed, the authors and readings that Derrida selects for deconstruction (at least in this work) are all rather obviously not just random works or works that are important to some theory or movement, but works that he was personally interested in and that likely had a hand in his own intellectual development, whether in his agreement or opposition. Margins of Philosophy, a series of essays most of which focus on deconstruction of specific texts, is simply that: deconstruction of a series of texts that Derrida likely found interesting. What I’m getting at in a vague manner is a point about Derrida that should be known before one accuses him of being anti-philosophical, anti-Enlightenment, or anything like that: when it comes to questions of the nature of truth, the nature of value, and similar questions usually of a metaphysical (or, and this is important, of an anti-metaphysical nature), Derrida simply doesn’t appear to be very interested. He doesn’t search for truth, but neither does he say that it doesn’t exist. He doesn’t espouse an ethic, but nor does he say that there is nothing of value. He simply doesn’t address those questions, even in his essay which are not about other authors or works.
Rather, what Derrida is interested in (and what deconstruction appears to be about) is in the minds and historical processes that make up Western intellectual history, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Here we must think back to two important precedents without which Derrida might not have become what he did (though this is not to discount more; these merely happen to be two that I am more than familiar with): Heidegger and Nietzsche. They are, of course, different on many accounts. However, they shared in common a certain objective in their works: the overturning of the millennial order of philosophy, and with it the standard Western view of everything in general. Both saw the history of Western philosophy post-Plato as held under a certain set of assumptions, Nietzsche seeing it as under the moral, Christian view and Heidegger as under the control of the metaphysical view of Being as presence. Both attempted to chip at these foundations, to reveal the contradictions within and the historical nature of the supposedly timeless. Being and Time, especially, went to previously unseen lengths to reveal an assumption undergirding all of Western though, an assumption so central, so basic, so absolutely important that no one can even see it. Under the section titled “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being,” the very first sentence of Being and Time reads: “This question has today been forgotten.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Macquarrie and Robinson, 21) In order to fix the problem and arise at a real understanding of being, one must first recognize that there is a problem. One has to make things difficult where previously it was thought that there was no problem.
What seems to inspire Derrida is not the hope of discovering the meaning of Being: at least, in Margins he devotes no time to it. Rather, Derrida wants to know why and how it is that the question has not merely been thought to be solved but forgotten altogether. And not just in the question of Being, but everywhere, for, as Heidegger points out, these seemingly innocuous metaphysical assumptions shape our views of nature, of ethics, of objects, and so on. Our understanding of reality is shaped by premises that have become hidden through constant use. What Derrida seeks is to tease out those premises and show their effects.
Enter deconstruction. “Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated.” (329) In other words, Derrida’s project can be seen as something very akin to Heidegger’s, that is, to look at the works one is presented with and see the historical undercurrents riding within, the deepest assumptions that power the arguments. Derrida continues: “For example, writing, as a classical concept, carries with it predicates which have been subordinated, excluded, or held in reserve by forces and according to necessities to be analyzed.” (329) If one reads the rest of the essay (“Signature Even Context”) one knows that one of these assumptions is that writing is subordinate to thinking. This is not shocking, for there are few things more obvious. It’s tough to write, or to write coherently, without thinking. Derrida disagrees. The argument, which again I will not reproduce in complete detail because of space and my intentions in this essay, (and which is in fact a sort of side argument to the main thesis of the paper, which is about communication) is that writing is not a simple transference of thought to paper. It is not because, if it were, it fails in its task: there is no guarantee, perhaps no justified reason at all to believe, that what one writes will mean the same to someone else who reads what is written, or that (and Derrida explicitly makes this point) the same words will even mean the same thing to the same person later on. This isn’t to say that writing and thought are not connected in a certain causal order where thought comes first; we must always be careful to read into Derrida what he isn’t saying, for then we would be committing the very sin being outlined here. Rather, the written work exists as something independent of the mind that produced it. It has its own status: “This citationality (the ability to be quoted and used by another), duplication, or duplicity, this iterability (from iter, which Derrida uses to emphasize the definitional role of the Other in the use and purpose of writing) of the mark (the symbol, letter, word, book) is not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal – Derrida’s note) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called ‘normal’ functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite?” (320-321) In other words, writing’s very existence is defined by its independence from the author; if the author didn’t intend to say something beyond him or herself, there would be no need for writing. However, that means that the standard hierarchy of thought, then writing is not what is believed, though it is so obvious that no one ever even stops to see it as a problem.
This is a simplified example of deconstruction, the project Derrida pursues throughout these essays. He seeks to get to the furthest reaches of the acting mind, and to what basic equivalencies, oppositions, and hierarchies compose its thought. Thus, the work of metaphysicians and linguists interests him the most, as it is in the land between existing things and the mind’s understanding of them through the word, the symbol, that our most basic assumptions about anything seem to embed themselves. No matter how far people try to go in their skepticism, challenging deductive proofs or the evidence of the senses, or even challenging our use of language and logic itself, there is always something further down that the thinker holds to be true, some action of the mind that is used without reflection. It is this that Derrida seeks. Whether the truth is to be found after, whether there is a truth to be found, does not interest him. He just wants to find the invisible gears behind the shining brass ones in the clockwork mind, and to expose them for what they are. These gears are not what is stated syllogistically in an author’s work. In fact, they won’t be stated at all. They are there, however. They show themselves, Derrida says, in their absence, when they are “so obvious” as to not challenge. They also show themselves, and more vividly, when an author finds an argument “too obviously flawed” to consider, an opponent “too crude” to respond to. What is so flawed, why should one think so, if the opposing author found it important enough to write about? This “obviousness,” these basic assumptions that are too simple to think about, are the problem to be made a problem. They are what is in the margins.
Which compels us not only to reckon with the entire logic of the margin, but also to take an entirely other reckoning: which is doubtless to recall that beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference (everything – ‘history,’ ‘politics,’ ‘economy,’ ‘sexuality,’ etc. – said not to be written in books: the worn-out expression with which we appear not to have finished stepping backward, in the most regressive argumentations and in the most apparently unforeseeable places); and also to recall that the written text of philosophy (this time in its books) overflows and cracks its meaning. (xxiii)
This, I think, is Derrida. His quest is one of problematics, which is, if you will, the technique of professionally annoying intellectuals. Ironically enough, to read him as advocating the destruction of the mission of the Enlightenment, of being opposed to human progress and a proponent of absolute relativism, is to show the truth of his view of the text as independent. In a way the text, separated from its author, becomes what we think it is. The author could surely come to us and tell us what it “really” means, but who’s to say the author herself won’t change her mind? Who’s to say the two mean the same things with the same symbols? After Derrida’s death, what are the texts he wrote? What he said they were, words locked down at a moment in time? What if we found his works without ever having known of the man? What would they be then? The problem, then, is to create a problem where there was none, to piss people off so that they might think. For if one doesn’t see a problem, there can’t be a solution, can there?
posted by Derek at 9:46 PM
1 Comments:
Out-of-body Thinking
Derrida gets the language for his epistemology from Husserl. Phenomenology starts with a "principle of principles" that "primordial presence to intuition is the source of sense and evidence, the a priori of a prioris."
This means that "the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. The relation with the presence of the present as the ultimate form of being and of ideality is the move by which I transgress empirical existence, factuality, contingency, worldliness, etc." [Speech and Phenomena, 53-54.]
However, the choice of the words "present" and "presence" to indicate the ground of all knowledge has some very unfortunate consequences. That choice sets up a confusion between two completely different meanings of the word "presence."
One meaning is "phenomenological presence". This refers to the immediate access to being in the original act of knowledge. It does not refer to time at all. So, phenomenological presence might be better expressed by calling it presence-to-being. That would save it from being confused with the other meaning of "presence", what we should call "temporal presence", that is, the occurrence of an event at a particular moment in time.
Derrida also calls this living presence "the now". This reinforces the confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time. It is also unfortunate that Derrida uses the word "form" in the phrase "the universal form of all experience". What he wants to refer to is the "universal basis of all experience", which is not a form. It is an act. But this word-slippage is also quite telling, and one of the many clues in Derrida's work that he is confusing the order of abstract concepts and the order of actual reality.
This epistemology leads to the cornerstone mistake of claiming that iterability is an a priori condition of knowing, whereas in fact iterability is an a posteriori result of knowing. An original presence-to-being (insight) occurs in time. Consequently it is repeatable. So, iterability is not "inside" phenomenological presence, it is extrinsic to it. This mistake is made all the more easy since both relationships are necessary. Once you get this, then all of Derrida's objections to realist epistemology collapse, and his whole philosophical system collapses into imaginary ashes.
I have discussed these issues at length in my article "Dealing With Derrida", which you can find on the Radical Academy web site. http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefphilmhd1.htm
Although running down Derrida's mistakes in his text is difficult, once you get the key point that he was dissociated, the whole pattern of his out-of-body thinking makes sense. Once you discover Derrida's dissociation, you find it in many thinkers. There is a lot of out-of-body thinking in philosophy and social theory. Perhaps leaving one's body is an occupational hazard for professional thinkers. Dissociation is the result of trauma, and trauma is easy to come by.
There are many sources of insight into dissociation. I recommend Trauma and the Body (2006) by Pat Ogden et al. as a start.
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