Insight Editions · No. 54
A Companion to Derrida
Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (eds.)
A collection of essays examines Derrida’s concepts, philosophical encounters, and work on religion, ethics, animals, politics, and law, presenting major debates in deconstruction.
A study guide to A Companion to Derrida by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Part I: concepts. Truth survives deconstruction (Norris, Custer); différance is debated (Colebrook defends, Gutting finds it incoherent); deconstruction is quasi-transcendental (Doyon), its time is violence (Thorsteinsson) and its religion radical atheism (Hägglund) or messianicity (Dastur).
- Part II: encounters. Derrida with Plato and Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, psychoanalysis, Barthes, de Man, feminism, Hegel's Antigone, Artaud, Heidegger, Nancy, Christianity, Islamic mysticism, and the politics of education.
- Part III: fields opened. Animal touch and poetry, forgiveness, cosmopolitanism, the flipside of violence, and law as a differend.
- Live quarrels. The volume stages real disagreement: Hägglund vs Caputo on religion, Gutting against obscurity, Bernasconi on Levinas quoted out of context, Chanter on race in Glas, Legrand on Derrida's French positivism.
The Companion's three parts and the conceptual line that runs under them.
| Ch | Contributor: chapter | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| I | Direk, Lawlor: Subversive Positions | Three parts; deconstruction reinvented in its ethical turn |
| 1 | Norris: Truth in Derrida | Deconstruction presupposes realist, bivalent truth |
| 2 | Custer: A Certain Truth | Derrida repeats Kant's question of conditions |
| 3 | Colebrook: Difference | Différance relates identity and difference |
| 4 | Gutting: Obscurity of "Différance" | The Heideggerian half is incoherent |
| 5 | Bennington: Metaphor and Analogy | Originary metaphoricity, not levelling |
| 6 | Oliver: Deconstructive Ethics | Slow, homeopathic doses, never a cure |
| 7 | Lawlor: Deconstruction | Three definitions, always an ethical aim |
| 8 | Doyon: Transcendental Claim | Possibility = impossibility; ultra-transcendental |
| 9 | Thorsteinsson: Violence of Time | Différance as war; hence writing |
| 10 | Hägglund: Radical Atheism | The unscathed would be absolute death |
| 11 | Dastur: Play and Messianicity | History as play; justice to come |
| 12 | Kamuf: Signature | Countersignature as inventive reading |
| 13 | Gasché: Immemorial Remainder | Khōra and messianicity as legacy |
| 14 | Naas: Ancient Philosophy | The Phaedrus scene from first to last |
| 15 | Bernasconi: Neither Jew Nor Greek | Levinas resisted Derrida's "Greek" |
| 16 | Aggleton: Merleau-Ponty | Auto-affection as hetero-affection |
| 17 | Baring: Althusser | Grammatology as unnamed reply |
| 18 | Rottenberg: Psychoanalysis | The friend's cruelty as love |
| 19 | Burchill: Barthes, Cinema | Light and matter recall alterity |
| 20 | Miller: de Man | Two opposite rhetorics; no unitary theory |
| 21 | Deutscher: Feminism | Fraternity and maternity as auto-immune |
| 22 | Chanter: Antigone | Race and slavery in Glas |
| 23 | Benjamin: Artaud and Atlan | Art's mattering beyond ekphrasis |
| 24 | Raffoul: Responsibility | From thrown ground to the arrivant |
| 25 | Vedder, van der Heiden: Faith, Holy | Heidegger's holy vs Derrida's faith |
| 26 | Saghafi: Nancy | Safe and intact, together or apart |
| 27 | Caputo: Trace of Religion | Religion without religion vs anti-religion |
| 28 | Alpyağıl: Islamic Mysticism | Ibn 'Arabi's He/not He |
| 29 | Haddad: Education | GREPH, the Collège, the university |
| 30 | Llored: Animal Touch | Against haptocentrism |
| 31 | Royle: Poetry, Animality | Hedgehog, snow, "Snake" |
| 32 | Murphy: Forgiveness | Only the unforgivable calls for it |
| 33 | Evans: Cosmopolitanism | Democracy to come, plural voices |
| 34 | Lawlor: Flipside of Violence | Transcendental, not real, violence |
| 35 | Legrand: Law | Law as ghost story; loi vs law |
Live quarrels to keep open
| Quarrel | Chapters | Do not flatten |
|---|---|---|
| Truth vs play | 1 Norris, 2 Custer, 4 Gutting | Realism vs incoherence charge |
| Religion | 10 Hägglund, 11 Dastur, 25, 26, 27 Caputo | Atheism vs trace of God |
| Levinas | 9 Thorsteinsson, 15 Bernasconi | Violence quarrel vs framing quarrel |
| Feminism / race | 21 Deutscher, 22 Chanter | Fraternity vs slavery/race in Glas |
| Two deconstructions | 20 Miller, 26 Saghafi | Derrida/de Man; Derrida/Nancy |
Missing pieces the editors flag
Six-step path thro
About this book
A Companion to Derrida by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (eds.), 2014. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Introduction (Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor): Derrida's Subversive Positions
Part I clarifies truth, the transcendental, difference, deconstruction, ethics, time and history, signature and remainder. Part II links Derrida to Plato, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Heidegger and Nancy, and to psychoanalysis, cinema and photography, feminism, Christian and Islamic religion, and education. Part III covers animal studies, forgiveness, cosmopolitanism, violence and law.
Formed in the French institutions of philosophy, Derrida posed his basic question as a question of writing. "There is nothing outside the text" (Of Grammatology) has often been taken to deny truth; the opening essays reject that reading. Writing is what lets the sense and truth-value of statements pass from one context to the next, and, in quasi-Kantian terms, the condition of possibility of that passage.
The editors' frame: one question, many reinventions.
The later chapters show this ethical-political turn opening new fields: religion (the deconstruction of the opposition between faith and knowledge), feminism (the man/woman hierarchy as constitutive of metaphysics), animality and law. Lawlor's own closing chapter asks whether the transcendentalization of violence risks indifference to empirical violence, and Legrand's essay on law ends the volume.
Three parts and the scandal of writing
Direk and Lawlor open by stating what a Companion must do. Part I clarifies truth, the transcendental, difference, deconstruction, ethics, time and history, signature, remainder. Part II conjoins Derrida to Plato, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Heidegger, Nancy, and to psychoanalysis, cinema and photography, feminism, Christian and Islamic religion, education. Part III opens fields Derrida inspired or that his thinking can enter: animal studies, forgiveness, cosmopolitanism, violence, law.
The editors' through-line is subversion from inside institutions. Derrida's writing was "an explosion of revolutionary energy" from within the French Academy's formal machinery. The sentence "There is nothing outside the text" (Il n'y a pas de hors-texte, OGC 158) produced a scandal when read as "nothing exists except text", an attack on realism. The editors reject that reading. Writing is what lets sense and truth-value pass from one context to the next; in quasi-Kantian terms it is a condition of possibility of that passage. Deconstruction does not deny truth; it asks how truth-claims travel.
Introduction: from
Concepts formed at crossroads
The editors stress that Derrida's concepts were developed with other thinkers. Différance is "the conclusion drawn at the crossroads of readings". Deconstruction has a history: it begins in Of Grammatology as a quasi-structuralist dismantling of the metaphysics of presence, then undergoes "reinvention and plurification" through the ethical and political writings of the 1990s (hospitality, forgiveness, the unconditional, democracy as auto-immune).
| Part | Gist the editors promise | Sample chapters |
|---|---|---|
| I Themes | Clarify concepts without pretending one "Derrida" | Norris, Custer, Colebrook, Gutting, Bennington, Oliver, Lawlor, Doyon, Thorsteinsson, Hägglund, Dastur, Kamuf, Gasché |
| II Encounters | Show how reflection is conjoined to others | Naas, Bernasconi, Aggleton, Baring, Rottenberg, Burchill, Hillis Miller, Deutscher, Chanter, Benjamin, Raffoul, Vedder/van der Heiden, Saghafi, Caputo, Alpyağıl, Haddad |
| III Fields | Areas opened or entered by his thought | Llored, Royle, Murphy, Evans, Lawlor, Legrand |
Gaps the editors flag
Lawlor's own closing essay on violence asks whether the transcendentalization of violence risks indifference to empirical violence. Legrand on law ends the volume as a differend. The Companion is thus both map and inventory of unfinished work.
Cast around the editors
Truth and the surrounding claim
Introduction ZEYNEP DIREK AND LEONARD LAWLOR Companions need to provide good introductions to the basic concepts and problems in a philosopher’s works, and Part I of this Companion to Derrida introduces and clari fies concepts such as truth; the transcendental; difference; deconstruction; ethics; time and history; signature; and remainder. Part II aims to help the reader to see how Derrida’s philosophical reflection is conjoined not only to other thinkers such as Plato, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Heidegger, and Nancy, but also to other philosophical movements and ideas: psychoanalysis; cinema and photography; feminism; religion (Christian and Islamic); and education. Finally, Part III indicates areas of investigation that Derrida’s thought has inspired or within which his thinking might be inserted: animal studies; forgiveness; cosmopolitanism; violence; and the law. Overall, we wanted to show that, by disturbing classical ways of doing research and investigation, Derrida’s thinking (deconstruction) occupies subversive positions. Undoubtedly, Derrida’s writing was an explosion of revolutionary energy from within the formal educational machinery of the French Academy.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1967 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1968 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1971 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1974 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1975 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Althusser | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Artaud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Barthes | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Caputo | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Ethical-political reinvention the editors narrate
After the early quasi-structuralist dismantling of presence, the 1990s writings reinvent deconstruction around hospitality, forgiveness, the death penalty, the animal, and democracy as auto-immune. The Companion's three parts are ' device for holding early and late together without forcing one "Derrida." Subversion remains inside institutions: the French Academy's formal training 'z00c',[['Early'],['Grammatology','Différance','Presence critique']],[['Late'],['Hospitality','Auto-immunity','Justice to-come']],'Editors\' arc from early to',join=['One Companion, plu'])
Truth in Derrida
Truth and writing
Derrida's later texts insist on truth's absolute indispensability (Limited Inc), against analytic critics like Searle (1977) who saw only "a bag of crafty rhetorical tricks". Both analytic foes and literary admirers misread "writing" as an ultra-textualist anti-realism, the reading spread by Richard Rorty. In fact arche-écriture ("generalized writing"), developed in the early texts on Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Austin, makes a reasonable point consistent with robust realism: our truth-claims, though not truth itself, depend on some system of representation. Through iterability, writing is what conserves sense from one context to the next, the minimum communication requires. Its points of referential slippage signal real problems in the subject matter.
Reading as an argument
Derrida's realism goes with bivalent logic held "right up to the stage" where it meets an insuperable block or textual aporia. Only that procedure respects the conditions for true or false statements and so registers genuine resistance in a text or in reality. His method has "a lot more in common with certain forms of analytic philosophy" than either side admits; the "Great Rift" between traditions is exaggerated.
Norris: aporia is earned by logic, not play.
Derrida honoured Heidegger yet criticised his nostalgia for origin, presence and Being. He entered a scene where structuralists (Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, early Foucault) sought to oust the subject, and drew on the mathematical, logical Husserl ("'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology"). Analytic critics say only a closet Cartesian would labour to deconstruct subjectivity; Norris replies that such notions are deep-laid and must be exorcised or they return with greater power. The idea of reading as "an argument" is "the philosophic heart of Derrida's work".
Jacques Derrida, quoted by Norris
Realism against anti-realism
Michael Dummett's anti-realists deny truth-conditions to statements of the "disputed class" whose truth we cannot ascertain; the realist holds them objectively true or false regardless of our knowledge. Norris places Derrida with the realists. Supplementary or "parergonal" logic is reached only "by dint of an argument conducted in accordance with the strictest standards of logical accountability". The aporias come from the topics themselves, not from play.
Arche-écriture as conservation of sense
Norris refuses the "near-oxymoron" framing of "Derrida and truth". Later texts insist on truth's absolute indispensability (Limited Inc 162-254) against analytic foes (Searle 1977) who saw "a bag of crafty rhetorical tricks". Both analytic foes and literary admirers ignore that writing is not a prison-house of language or Peircean unlimited semiosis. Arche-écriture (primordial or generalized writing), developed on Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Austin, makes a point consistent with robust realism: truth-claims (not truth itself) depend on some system of representation. Through iterability, writing conserves sense from one context to the next at the minimum communication requires. Points of referential slippage signal real problems in the topic-domain, not free play.
Two receptions Nor
Reading as argument and the Great Rift
Realism here depends on bivalent logic held "right up to the stage" where it meets an insuperable block or textual aporia (Norris 2004, 2007). Only that procedure respects conditions for true or false statements and so registers genuine resistance. Method has "a lot more in common with certain forms of analytic philosophy" than either side admits; the "Great Rift" is exaggerated.
Norris tracks Heideggerian influence (Destruktion / Abbau) yet refuses a historicist dissolution of truth. The early essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (WD 31-63) shows that historicizing truth or reason is "philosophically naïve and procedurally self-defeating". The genesis/structure antinomy in Husserl ("'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology", WD 154-168) is the scene where Derrida enters: lived experience versus a priori structures. Formal statements of deconstructive procedure sometimes cite Gödel, set-theoretic paradoxes, and related results (MP 219). The idea of reading as "an argument" is "the philosophic heart of Derrida's work".
Realism, Dummett, and the impossible x
Michael Dummett's anti-realists deny truth-conditions to the "disputed class" of statements whose truth we cannot ascertain. The realist holds them objectively true or false regardless of knowledge. Norris places Derrida with the realists. Supplementary or "parergonal" logic is reached only by argument under "the strictest standards of logical accountability". Aporias come from the topics, not from play.
The "impossible x" formula (only possible gift is impossible gift, and so on) is meaningful without absurd discourse. Searle charged Derrida with holding Austin to classical bivalence out of place for speech-act felicity; Derrida retorts that Searle himself relies on oppositional logic. Giving up bivalence also gives up reductio and double-negation elimination. That Derrida was praised or blamed as the ne plus ultra of textualist anti-realism measures a distorted reception-history.
| Position | Truth-conditions for the disputed class | Norris's placement of Derrida |
|---|---|---|
| Realist / bivalent | Objectively true or false beyond present knowledge | Where deconstruction must sit to earn aporia |
| Anti-realist (Dummett) | No intelligible claim beyond verification | Opposed; abandons reductio resources |
| Received "textualist" | Truth dissolved into rhetoric | Misreading shared by foes and admirers |
People and dates Norris leans on
Truth and Writing
At one time, and not so long ago, anybody writing on the topic “Derrida and Truth” would most likely have felt obliged to begin by asserting (and then making good the claim through lengthy citation of the relevant passages) that it didn’t amount to a downright absurd, indeed a near-oxymoronic coupling of name and noun. Of course there are plenty of quotable passages where, so far from rejecting or denouncing the notion of truth, Derrida can be found insisting on its absolute indispensability to philosophical enquiry in general and, more specifically, its c·rucial pertinence to the project of deconstruction (LI, 162, 254).
Reading as an Argument: The Logic of Deconstruction
Most importantly in the present context, this realist outlook goes along with, indeed depends directly upon, a commitment to the classical requirements of bivalent logic right up to the stage where that logic confronts an insuperable block to its continued application or a textual aporia that cannot be resolved by any means at its disposal (Norris 2004, 2007).
Deconstruction, Truth, and the Realist/Anti-Realist Debate
This argument-oriented interpretation of Derrida entails that there is simply no grasping the project and the practice of deconstruction as Derrida conceives it without the commitment to a realist (i.e., in logical terms, a classical or bivalent and ontologically speaking an objectivist or recognition-transcendent) conception of truth. Moreover, the close alignment of these latter positions is brought out by contrast through their joint repudiation by anti-realist thinkers, that is to say, philosophers who deny the intelligibility of any claim to the effect that there exist truth-conditions for certain statements, those of the “disputed class”, whose truthvalue we are unable to discover, prove, or ascertain by the very best methods available to us in this or that field of enquiry (Dummett 1978).
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Truth and the surrounding claim
Truth in Derrida CHRISTOPHER NORRIS 1. Truth and Writing At one time, and not so long ago, anybody writing on the topic “Derrida and Truth” would most likely have felt obliged to begin by asserting (and then making good the claim through lengthy citation of the relevant passages) that it didn’t amount to a downright absurd, indeed a near-oxymoronic coupling of name and noun. Of course there are plenty of quotable passages where, so far from rejecting or denouncing the notion of truth, Derrida can be found insisting on its absolute indispensability to philo sophical enquiry in general and, more specifically, its c·rucial pertinence to the project of deconstruction (LI, 162, 254).
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1958 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1961 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1962 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1964 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Althusser | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Foucault | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Freud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
A Certain Truth: Derrida's Transformation of the Kantian Heritage
Double Kantian references
In the 1990s seminars on hospitality, pardon and friendship, Derrida formulated the aporia in each concept. "Unconditional" signals that the ideal is of a radically different order, not a more generous degree. Forgiveness, graded from trivial mishap to profound betrayal, must go "further" until it is no longer a matter of degree; it is required precisely when something resists forgiving. Derrida's unconditional is "twice as radical" as Kant's: it is not "an Idea in the Kantian sense", a phrase that from his earliest writings marks a limit he seeks to pass. Kant's "universal" hospitality is a temporary right extended only where refusal would mean death, and lost if the guest breaks the law.
The Husserl studies show phenomenology "commanded" by metaphysics at the level of its project, perhaps the first hauntology. After Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, thinkers asked Who Comes After the Subject?, and Kant was taken as father of the sovereign subject.
Custer: Derrida's unconditional exceeds Kant's Idea.
Reiterating Kant's move
Early Derrida rarely cites Kant. Kant's Copernican Revolution turns inquiry to the conditions of appearances; asking after conditions of possibility becomes philosophy's task (Critique of Pure Reason). Faced with conflicting motifs in a text, readers either dismiss it as incoherent or drop one motif. Derrida does neither: as Nietzsche said "the falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection", the unsustainability of an opposition is a point of departure. He asks: what are the conditions of possibility of a text whose oppositions deconstruct themselves? The logic of the supplement in Rousseau answers that Kantian question.
After truth
Thinking an unconditional without sovereignty requires disengaging from Kant's heritage, in which sovereignty shapes subjectivity, ethics and law. Derrida was "after truth" in two senses: looking for the truth behind appearances, and seeking truth "not to catch it, but to avoid being caught". Among his gifts is help "to endure a certain truth" and to resist cruelty.
Unconditional without sovereignty
Olivia Custer takes Derrida's late formula "unconditional without sovereignty, and thus without cruelty" (WA 276) as the thread. Doing without sovereignty means doing without the metaphysical fulcrum. The phrase names both a general imperative toward traditional philosophy and a specific transformation of the Kantian heritage.
In the 1990s seminars on responsibility, the conditioned / unconditional distinction organizes hospitality, pardon, friendship and related concepts. Derrida stretches Kant: "real" friendship would have to be unconditional in a sense that breaks ordinary reciprocity. Yet the early career barely names Kant; for a long time the main locution is "an Idea in the Kantian sense". Custer's interest is not only what Derrida says when he finally reads Kant at length, but how the Kantian move (ask after conditions of possibility) is reiterated beyond recognition.
Custer: Kantian mo
Inscription as a quasi-Kantian space
What makes the resemblance more than passing is the status of what the investigation uncovers: a logic and a space, not as an object of experience but as one of its conditions. On inscription, Derrida does more than reverse speech over writing. Kantian vocabulary becomes insistent precisely where writing is shown as a condition for the conservation and displacement of sense. The space uncovered is "decidedly not Kantian" even though the investigative move reiterates Kant's. One understands's heritage. Custer's closing claim: b's work may show how, even where it is least explicitly about Kant. He was "after truth" in the sense that truth becomes a possible, therefore unfinished, task rather than a secured possession.
Double Kantian References
Let me begin by situating the terms “unconditional” and “sovereignty” as they resonate in Derrida’s later work for which Kant was a recurrent reference. Unconditional olivia custer is a term Derrida used regularly in the work he did in the 1990s and beyond. The “conditioned, unconditional” distinction came to be ubiquitous in a series of seminars around questions of responsibility when Derrida organized his exploration of a number of concepts (hospitality, pardon, friendship, etc.) by formulating the aporia he detected in each concept, and verifying the effects of these aporias in all the texts he scrutinized.
Reiterating Kant’s Move, Beyond Recognition
As I indicated in the previous section, when, late in his career, Derrida describes what he is seeking to affirm in terms of an “unconditional without sovereignty,” the phrase has distinct Kantian resonances. At that point, Derrida had written extensively about Kant.
After Truth
“Unconditional without sovereignty”, what Derrida seeks to affirm is difficult to think because it requires disengaging from the hold of a tradition in which a certain sovereignty determines both the understanding of subjectivity and ethical and legal frameworks. If there is a chance for that, if it is to be(come) possible to think in this way, it will therefore be c·rucial to disengage from Kant’s heritage. I hope to have shown that beyond giving us reasons to do so, Derrida’s work may provide a suggestion for how to do so even where that work is the least explicitly concerned with Kant.
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Unconditional | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| hospitality | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| sovereignty | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| unconditional | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Truth and the surrounding claim
A Certain Truth: Derrida’s Transformation of the Kantian Heritage OLIVIA CUSTER In later years, Derrida often described what he was drawn to, dreaming of, or working toward, using the phrase: “unconditional without sovereignty.” As he explains, “I will affirm that there is, it is indeed necessary that there be some reference to the uncon ditional, an unconditional without sovereignty, and thus without cruelty, which is no doubt a very difficult thing to think” (WA, 276). This formulation economically evokes a mode of thinking which seemed to be hovering as a possible possibility, one which Derrida admires insofar it has already made its evanescent trace felt here and there in the works of the Western tradition and one he aspires to insofar as it is to come.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1998 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2002 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2014 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Freud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
A Certain Truth: Derrida’s Transformation
of the Kantian Heritage OLIVIA CUSTER In later years, Derrida often described what he was drawn to, dreaming of, or working toward, using the phrase: “unconditional without sovereignty.” As he explains, “I will affirm that there is, it is indeed necessary that there be some reference to the unconditional, an unconditional without sovereignty, and thus without cruelty, which is no doubt a very difficult thing to think” (WA, 276). Thus, if doing “without sovereignty” is one of Derrida’s imperatives, then that is an imperative to do without the metaphysical fulcrum. The formula “unconditional without sovereignty” thus encapsulates the necessity Derrida works under to do something complicated with, and to, traditional philosophy “in general.” It can also be read more specifically as a convenient shorthand for the complicated relationship to Kant in which Derrida found himself. Nevertheless it does provide one measure, and the double and redoubling movement to which it draws attention is exemplary.
Double Kantian References
Let me begin by situating the terms “unconditional” and “sovereignty” as they resonate in Derrida’s later work for which Kant was a recurrent reference. Unconditional olivia custer is a term Derrida used regularly in the work he did in the 1990s and beyond. The “conditioned, unconditional” distinction came to be ubiquitous in a series of seminars around questions of responsibility when Derrida organized his exploration of a number of concepts (hospitality, pardon, friendship, etc.) by formulating the aporia he detected in each concept, and verifying the effects of these aporias in all the texts he scrutinized. When Derrida takes up that idea he stretches it to argue that, in all rigor, friendship, “real” friendship would have to be unconditional in a sense which goes well beyond what he finds explicitly conceived in the philosophical tradition.
Reiterating Kant’s Move, Beyond Recognition
As I indicated in the previous section, when, late in his career, Derrida describes what he is seeking to affirm in terms of an “unconditional without sovereignty,” the phrase has distinct Kantian resonances. At that point, Derrida had written extensively about Kant. It is notable however that in the early years of Derrida’s work there are few references to Kant: there are no texts devoted to him in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in fact for a long time Derrida seems mostly to refer to Kant through the locution “an Idea in the Kantian sense.” In other words, my interest here is neither in what Derrida says about Kant when he engaged with his texts directly, nor in what certain Kantian concepts look like when Derrida has reworked them, but rather in how Derrida reworks certain Kantian imperatives. First, a brief reminder of what “Kant” marks.
Additional thread
I would like to claim, however, that what makes this more than a passi
blance between Derrida and Kant is the status of that which is uncovered by the investigation. What Derrida uncovers, bringing it to light while insisting that it was always already there, is a logic but it is also a space, a space not as an object of experience but as one of its conditions. Consider Derrida’s claim about inscription, the claim by which he does more than reverse the usual priority between speech and writing. In fact, in a particular page where Kantian vocabulary is suddenly very insistent in such a way as to discretely signal the relation
I am describing more laboriously here, Derrida asserts that “the possi
tion in general, not as a contingent accident which happens to an already constituted space but which produces the spatiality of space” should be a guide towards “a new transcendental aesthetic” (OG, 290). Having shown that the logic of the supplement sustains Rousseau’s arguments about speech and writing, it thus transpires that Derrida is making a claim not about some idiosyncrasy of Rousseau’s but about writing in general. Or rather, and here we begin to measure that Derrida’s reiteration of Kant’s move leads to a space which is decidedly not Kantian, that is one of its registers. It is the case for Derrida, just as for Kant, that one only understands the power of the analysis by attending to claims as transcendental claims. However, and this is the case for Derrida the way it is not for Kant, Derrida actually often manages to make claims which are readable in both registers.
Additional threads
Difference
A difference between identities needs some system or field (language, consciousness, space); but naming that condition (time, culture, life) returns us to an identity and to a split between the system and its ground. Hence a concept of difference would impose sameness across cases, while a strategy of difference "would be different on each of its occasions".
| Approach | Interlocutors | Derrida's point |
|---|---|---|
| Poststructuralist | Saussure, Lévi-Strauss | Differences cannot be mastered; truth's sense is inescapable |
| Post-phenomenological | Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger | Presence and proximity are effects of différance |
| Sexual | Biology vs gender theory; Elam | Neither nature nor culture settles the border |
| Human-animal | Humanist tradition | Speech, hand and touch are not proper to man |
Poststructuralist difference
Saussure: language is "differences with no positive terms"; words do not label pre-existing meanings, and the whole system is required for any term. Derrida answers structuralism twice: structural differences cannot be contained, and the sense of truth cannot be abandoned. The common charge that deconstruction gives up truth for free play is inaccurate. Lévi-Strauss calls his comparison of cultures bricolage: the anthropologist works within systems, piece by piece, without foundation. But is the nature/culture difference natural or cultural? Either answer falls back on a ground, yet any concept of nature is itself relational. Against historicising formal systems, Derrida insists: "Pure truth or the pretension to pure truth is missed in its meaning as soon as one attempts... to account for it from within a factual totality" (WD, 160). A present structure needs spatial distribution and temporal deferral, hence the coinage différance.
Colebrook: from structure to différance.
Post-phenomenological difference
Phenomenology had argued that difference conditions identity through the primacy of appearing, in Kantian, Hegelian and Husserlian/Heideggerian forms. For Hegel, appearance experienced and reflected upon yields both subject/object difference and its overcoming: absolute knowledge as appearance returning to itself. For Husserl, the phenomenon precludes absolute knowledge: appearances are of something never fully present. Derrida targets the presupposition of proximity: a pure perception or speech act first, then writing to convey it (SP, 93). He argues that the near, the pure now, is an effect. The "a" of différance is inaudible, marked only by an inscriptive trace absent from the voice.
Man and his others
Politics of Friendship asks whether the good man, "the most autarkic", would seek a friend from insufficiency (PF, 210-211), tying man's self-sufficiency to fraternity. In the Husserl work Derrida links "man" to truth and meaning. The features that mark man off (speech, writing, touch) are "not proper to man"; they belong to a system of traces beyond the human, and "the animal" holds "a rogue power" to undo man's mastery of his self-image. "The closeness of touch always presupposes the distance of difference."
Four ways into difference
Claire Colebrook names at least four approaches: (1) poststructuralist critique of meaning as system-generated; (2) post-phenomenological problem of time; (3) sexual difference; (4) human / non-human difference. In every case one must mark difference (relation between two identities) from différance (the problem of the relation between identity and difference). A difference between identities needs a system or field (language, consciousness, space); naming that condition as time, culture or life returns us to an identity and to a split between system and ground. A concept of difference would impose sameness across cases; a strategy of difference "would be different on each of its occasions".
Poststructuralist difference
Saussure's line that language comprises "differences with no positive terms" is the usual entry (OGC 52). Words do not label already present meanings; the whole system is required for any single term. Methodological consequences often drawn: no truth as such; culture-bound systems; individual experience always belied by structure. Derrida's move is not to celebrate that relativism but to ask what makes the system of differences possible, and why that question cannot be answered by one more positive term.
Argument path
Post-phenomenological difference
Before deconstruction, phenomenology argued that difference conditions identity, given the primacy of appearing. Derrida responds to Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenology. For Hegel, philosophy overcomes the difference between being-in-itself and being-for-itself through subject/object. Thinking the thing-in-itself as the same as itself already relates it. Différance names the temporal and differential work that such identity-thinking cannot stabilize.
Sexual and human-animal difference
Two prevalent theories of sexual difference: (a) there simply are two sexes (chromosomes / physical unfoldings); (b) chromosomal differences are insufficient and gender differentiation produces the male/female opposition. The first is realist-biological; the second structuralist. Butler's debt to Derridean difference: the supposedly original ground (biological sex) appears only through iterative practices that never simply express a prior given. Colebrook extends the same logic to the human / animal cut: the human is not a secured identity against which animals are other; the cut is produced and haunted by what it excludes.
Poststructuralist Difference
One of the most often quoted statements regarding difference is the linguist Ferdinand Saussure’s claim that a language is comprised of “differences with no positive terms.” It would not be the case that a language would label already present meanings, such that the words or concepts would simply map directly onto the world or the mind’s distinct entities. Rather, it would be the entire system or structure of a language that would be required for any single term (OGC, 52). There could be no truth as such, for anything we might say or write would require articulation in a specific system that would be unique to each culture.
Post-Phenomenological Difference
Prior to Derrida’s deconstruction, there had been a long-running phenomenological tradition of arguing that difference was a condition for identity. The argument depends on a certain understanding of the primacy of appearance or appearing. The three intellectual traditions that had theorized the status of appearances to which Derrida responded were Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenology. For Hegel, the task of philosophy is to overcome or “sublate” the difference between being-in-itself, and being-for-itself; he achieves this through a theorization of the difference between subject and object. If I want to think of the thing-in-itself, some absolutely independent and self-sufficient being, then this identity is always thought as that which is the same as itself, in relation to nothing other than itself.
Sexual Difference and Human, Animal Difference
Consider two prevalent theories of sexual difference: either there simply are two different sexes (indicated via chromosomes or the physical differences that unfold from chromosomes), or, chromosomal differences are insufficient to determine sexual difference and it is the cultural process of gender differentiation that operates to produce the opposition between male and female. The first position is realist or biological; whatever role language, culture, or consciousness plays sexual difference simply is. The second position is structuralist; it is language or culture that carves up reality, using the gender system and distinguishing between male and female.
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| iterability | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Différance and the surrounding claim
Difference CLAIRE COLEBROOK There are (at least) four ways in which one might approach the concept of difference in the work of Jacques Derrida: difference as a poststructuralist critique of the sup posedly post-metaphysical attention to meaning as generated through systems; dif ference as the post-phenomenological problem of time; sexual difference; and the difference between humans and non-humans. In all cases it is necessary to mark a distinction between difference, as the relation between two terms or identities, and différance which marks or traces out the problem of the relation between identity and difference.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
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| 1975 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1991 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1993 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1994 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2014 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Kant | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Nietzsche | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Poststructuralist Difference
One of the most often quoted statements regarding difference is the linguist Ferdinand Saussure’s claim that a language is comprised of “differences with no positive terms.” It would not be the case that a language would label already present meanings, such that the words or concepts would simply map directly onto the world or the mind’s distinct entities. Rather, it would be the entire system or structure of a language that would be required for any single term (OGC, 52). There could be no truth as such, for anything we might say or write would require articulation in a specific system that would be unique to each culture. Our individual experience would always be belied by the conditions of each conversation, where we would be compelled to submit to the shared conventions of language. Those differences between terms are negations, and we never arrive at anything positive, anything that simply is. But Derrida poses two objections to this acceptance of negative or relative difference.
Post-Phenomenological Difference
Prior to Derrida’s deconstruction, there had been a long-running phenomenological tradition of arguing that difference was a condition for identity. The argument depends on a certain understanding of the primacy of appearance or appearing. The three intellectual traditions that had theorized the status of appearances to which Derrida responded were Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenology. For Hegel, the task of philosophy is to overcome or “sublate” the difference between being-in-itself, and being-for-itself; he achieves this through a theorization of the difference between subject and object. If I want to think of the thing-in-itself, some absolutely independent and self-sufficient being, then this identity is always thought as that which is the same as itself, in relation to nothing other than itself. But if we examine this pure self-relation we can see that it is the effect of difference. In the beginning, then, is not identity but difference. Or, more importantly, true identity for Hegel is difference that appears to itself and recognizes itself as possible only through differing from itself.
Sexual Difference and Human, Animal Difference
Consider two prevalent theories of sexual difference: either there simply are two different sexes (indicated via chromosomes or the physical differences that unfold from chromosomes), or, chromosomal differences are insufficient to determine sexual difference and it is the cultural process of gender differentiation that operates to produce the opposition between male and female. The first position is realist or biological; whatever role language, culture, or consciousness plays sexual difference simply is. The second position is structuralist; it is language or culture that carves up reality, using the gender system and distinguishing between male and female.
Additional thread
Additional threads
The Obscurity of "Différance"
Readers may fail through missing background, no dictionary, or impatience, so Gutting reads closely before judging. Derrida refuses to apologise for the misspelling of différence: it is playful and he means to intensify the play. Recalling Hegel on the pyramid and the tomb (and the Antigone family story), the silent A becomes "the tomb of 'the proper'" (proper meaning, property, propriety). Strange, says Gutting, but not unclear.
The clear part
No letter expresses the difference between m and n: "the difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible" (MP, 5), a "clear and cogent point" about phonetic meaning depending on non-phonetic differences. Différance cannot be "exposed", since one can expose only what can become present. Unlike negative theology, where God is refused existence only to gain "his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being" (MP, 6), différance is "irreducible to any ontotheological reappropriation". Its strategy is "blind tactics", "a strategy without finality" (MP, 7), which Gutting illustrates with chess.
Différer means both to defer (temporize) and to differ; French différence conveys neither deferral nor polemical "difference of opinion", while différance covers both "economically". The classical sign stands in for the absent thing; Derrida questions only the assumption that this substitution is "secondary and provisional" (MP, 9).
Gutting: where différance is clear and where it is not.
The problem of coherence
Yet meaningful language needs the conceptual distinctions différance undermines. Via Saussure, différance "produces" differences without being a cause, subject or substance: "the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences", although "the name 'origin' no longer suits it". The present is itself only by relation to what it is not: "An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval... must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself" (MP, 13). To exclude a subject as origin, Derrida cites Saussure: "language... is not a function of the speaking subject" (MP, 16), and consciousness "has never manifested itself except as self-presence".
Verdict
Gutting passes over the Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan and Levinas section (MP, 17-21) and Heidegger's Brauch. He does not say obscurity destroys Derrida's contribution: "There is still much that we can learn." But obscurity makes it "unnecessarily difficult to extract the veins of philosophical gold", and so undermines his own project.
Testing obscurity on the 1968 lecture
Gary Gutting takes the charge of deep obscurity seriously and tests it on the 1968 lecture "Différance" (Margins of Philosophy). Much of the essay is strange but clear; the Heideggerian second half is obscure because it is incoherent, and that obscurity undermines Derrida's own project. Readers may lack background, skip the dictionary, or lack patience; Gutting grants that. His claim is narrower: after the clearer discussions of writing and the misspelling différance, the turn through Heidegger on the Anaximander Fragment does not pay its way.
From Nietzsche-Freud-Lacan-Levinas to Heidegger
Gutting passes over the transitional discussion of Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Levinas (MP 17-21) and focuses on différance's relation to Heidegger. Heidegger claims the metaphysical tradition has "forgotten Being" by forgetting the distinction between Being and beings. "Heidegger recalls that the forgetting of Being forgets the difference between Being and beings" (MP 24). Derrida's point is not only that the trace is subject to erasure but that "erasure... constitutes it from the outset of the trace". Gutting finds the argument here sliding: what is presented as rigorous consequence becomes a self-sealing idiom.
Argument path
Two respon's contribution; "veins of philosophical gold" remain. But obscurity infuses the work. One could see différance as (1) the language of ultimate truth or (2) the language that protects us from the illusion of ultimate truth. Officially Derrida requires response (2); his actual deployment of the language of différance leads him toward (1). That is no accident, and "as such, it undermines his own project".
Différance and the surrounding claim
The Obscurity of “Différance” GARY GUTTING Critics most frequently reproach Derrida for the deep obscurity of his writing: they simply cannot make sense of what he is saying. Of course, the inability of some readers to understand a text may be their own fault. They may lack essential back ground knowledge presupposed by the text, have failed to consult a dictionary to learn the standard meanings of key terms, or simply lack the patience to work through the complexities inevitable in discussing a difficult topic. Even when a writer is at fault, the defect may be overcome by a reasonable amount of readerly engage ment: providing logically required connections and presuppositions that the writer has omitted, untangling unnecessarily gnarled syntax, providing examples that clarify overly abstract presentations. We should all be willing to meet half-way authors whom we think have something important to say. Some critics think Derrida is culpable for the obscurity of his texts, even to the point of rejecting them as worthy objects of philosophical attention.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1967 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1987 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1992 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1997 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2002 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Caputo | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Foucault | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Freud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Two halves of "Différance" under Gutting's test
Gary Gutting splits the 1968 essay: a structuralist-Saussurean half he finds relatively paraphraseable, and a Heideggerian half (Anaximander commentary) he judges obscure to the point of incoherence. Critics reproach Derrida for deep obscurity; Gutting grants that some difficulty is the reader's fault (missing background, impatience) but holds that some stretches fail even half-way charity. The charge matters because if the anti-foundational intent of différance depends on pages that cannot be made sense of, the concept's philosophical credentials wobble.
Gutting: obscurity
What Gutting is not claiming
He is not claiming that every hard page destroys Derrida's contribution. He targets the stretches where apparent contradiction is presented as deep result without a recoverable argument. Companion neighbors (Bennington, Kamuf, Gasché, Norris) reject the verdict; Gutting writes as analytic historian of continental philosophy applying intelligibility criteria. Keep the quarrel staged.
| Half | Gutting's verdict | Neighbor reply (elsewhere in volume) |
|---|---|---|
| Saussurean | Difficult but tractable | Colebrook (Ch3) expands relation of identity/difference |
| Heideggerian | Incoherent under paraphrase | Gasché/Doyon treat aporia as rigorous production |
Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida
Early Derrida (up to the books of 1972) says much about metaphor, which can seem to be "everything in language except the verb 'be'". Late Derrida speaks less of metaphor and more of analogy, returning to the question of being that "White Mythology" left in the background.
"White Mythology"
The essay argues for "metaphor in the text of philosophy" (its subtitle). It is often read as celebrating the literary over the conceptual, or, in Habermas's stern phrase, a "leveling of the genre distinction" (1987). Bennington says that is not what Derrida is doing.
The formal argument of the "Plus de métaphore" section runs: philosophy relies on basic concepts that are already metaphors; one is tempted to find one master concept to explain the rest; but the concept of metaphor is itself one of those philosophical concepts, so there is always one metaphor more (and no more metaphor) than any account can master. Alongside this runs a "long" history, implicitly critical of Foucault's "classical age", centred on Aristotle's doctrine.
Bennington: the 'plus de métaphore' argument.
As always, the point is neither to endorse nor to refute Aristotle but to show how his account opens, "in spite of itself", onto possibilities it cannot handle. The best metaphor is analogical (four terms, A:B :: C:D), and it must run the risk of not finding the fourth term: metaphor is marked by a "necessarily-possibly-not", just as a performative needs the possibility of misfiring and a letter the possibility of non-arrival. There is "a secret narrative" in metaphor (MP, 243) that may lack an end.
Analogy in the later works
A deconstructive reading must enter the logic of the text and accept a degree of stabilised meaning for clarity. Aristotle allowed that strict proportional analogy yields knowledge, tolerated insofar as it returns "according to the logos" (ana logon). Aristotle's "ontology" and the pollachōs legomenon ("being is said in many ways") may hold more resources than "White Mythology" allowed; Derrida later returns to analogy through Kant, read with and against Heidegger (and, against Ricoeur, in "The Retrait of Metaphor", 1978).
"White Mythology" already describes the death of metaphor in teleological terms, so the so-called "ethical turn" is a more sustained questioning of ends. Derrida analyses the "syntax" of the concept "idea" in Hegel with its memory of Plato, yet never mentions Kant's Idea. Kant's Critique of Judgment judges the world as if it were the product of an intelligent cause, an analogy with technical production that guards against dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental illusion, using Aristotle's strict four-term form. The deconstructive "ferment" Derrida credits Kant with opening and closing is formally identical to the Aristotle reading.
Conclusion: deconstruction from the beginning
Following Pierre Aubenque, Bennington suggests an Aristotle who never proposed an "analogy of Being" and whose "metaphysics" entertained an open-ended plurality resisting return to the One. Hence "deconstruction is not something Derrida or anyone else needs to do to philosophy", but "has been happening from the beginning". Metaphor and analogy are means of access to that situation.
Metaphor is never innocent
Geoffrey Bennington recalls the early line: "Metaphor is never innocent" (WD 17). Lack of innocence goes far: metaphor is "everything in language except the verb 'be'". Early work through the 1972 books says much about metaphor; late work speaks less of metaphor and more of analogy, returning to the question of being less prominent in "White Mythology" itself.
White Mythology and the genre distinction
"White Mythology" argues for a certain irreducibility of metaphor in the text of philosophy (the essay's subtitle). This has been read as promoting literary over conceptual aspects, or as Habermas's "leveling of the genre distinction" between philosophy and literature (Habermas 1987, 185ff.). Bennington denies that is quite what Derrida does. There is a provisional defense of transcendental philosophy against reductive celebrations of the literary; that defense always leads to a further questioning of the transcendental as such (the line Gasché's The Tain of the Mirror made familiar).
Bennington: from m
Analogy, Aristotle, and pollachōs legomenon
Deconstructive reading must enter the logic of the text; when the text is philosophical, that means accepting, up to a point, stabilizations of meaning for conceptual clarity. Those stabilizations are accepted with a view to destabilization elsewhere. In the Aristotle reading this shows up in a prima facie strange claim about analogy itself. Late reflections return to being "said in many ways" (pollachōs legomenon). Bennington suspects the movement beyond ontology was already underway in the Aristotle who did not in fact propose a finished "analogy of Being", and whose metaphysics never quite claimed the status later readers assigned.
Conclusion: the Eve of philosophy
The point of Derrida's thinking (claimed to exceed any philosophy of the subject or of ipseity) must also be thought beyond ontology and any "thinking of being" to which early metaphor remarks might seem to lead, but which dissemination always resists. The "Eve" of philosophy names that threshold: before a secured ontology, after a secured literary reduction.
“White Mythology”
“White Mythology” argues for a certain irreducibility of “metaphor in the text of philosophy” (this phrase is the article’s subtitle). Although this gesture has often been understood as a promotion or celebration of the “literary” aspects of philosophical texts over their “conceptual” aspects, or as what Habermas sternly called a “leveling of the genre distinction” between philosophy and literature (Habermas 1987, 185ff.), it seems clear that that is not quite what Derrida is doing in his essay.
Analogy in “White Mythology” and in the Later Works
As always, the deconstructive reading is not brought to bear on its object from some position of exteriority or superiority, and must itself enter into the logic of the text being read (failing which it would not be a reading at all); and when the text in question is philosophical, this means accepting, if only up to a point, a degree of stabilization of meaning in the interests of some degree of conceptual clarity. The way in which such stabilizations are provisionally accepted with a view to destabilization elsewhere shows up in the Aristotle reading in a prima facie strange claim by Derrida to do with the notion of analogy itself.
Conclusion: The “Eve” of Philosophy
This point of Derrida’s thinking (which he claims exceeds the resources of any philosophy of the subject or of “ipseity” more generally) must also be thought beyond the reach of any ontology and of any “thinking of being,” to which the early remarks on metaphor might seem to be leading us, but which the thought of dissemination always resists.
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| quasi-transcendental | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Metaphor and the surrounding claim
Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida GEOFFREY BENNINGTON Derrida’s earlier work (up to and including the books published in 1972) has a good deal to say about the question of metaphor. “Metaphor is never innocent,” says Derrida in an essay from 1963 (WD, 17). That lack of “innocence” goes a long way, apparently, as metaphor is “everything in language except the verb ‘be’ ” (WD, 7). Very strikingly in view of Derrida’s later thematic interest in the question of animal ity, metaphor is also presented in a piece on Edmond Jabès as an “animality of the letter,” as “the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life” (WD, 88, 89).
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| 1931 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1962 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1963 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1964 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1971 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Foucault | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
“White Mythology”
“White Mythology” argues for a certain irreducibility of “metaphor in the text of philosophy” (this phrase is the article’s subtitle). Although this gesture has often been understood as a promotion or celebration of the “literary” aspects of philosophical texts over their “conceptual” aspects, or as what Habermas sternly called a “leveling of the genre distinction” between philosophy and literature (Habermas 1987, 185ff.), it seems clear that that is not quite what Derrida is doing in his essay. This resistance involves something of a defense of (transcendental) philosophy against such attempted reductions: but that defense is always merely provisional, and always leads Derrida to a further questioning of the transcendental as such, in a way (often since Rodolphe Gasché’s important book The Tain of the Mirror called “quasi-transcendental”)3 that in fact threatens the traditional claims of philosophy more radically than the “human sciences” ever could.
Analogy in “White Mythology” and in the Later Works
As always, the deconstructive reading is not brought to bear on its object from some position of exteriority or superiority, and must itself enter into the logic of the text being read (failing which it would not be a reading at all); and when the text in question is philosophical, this means accepting, if only up to a point, a degree of stabilization of meaning in the interests of some degree of conceptual clarity. The way in which such stabilizations are provisionally accepted with a view to destabilization elsewhere shows up in the Aristotle reading in a prima facie strange claim by Derrida to do with the notion of analogy itself. As we have seen, “analogy” in the strong sense of a proportional relation involving four terms provides Aristotle with his definition of the “best” kind of metaphor, and gives Derrida his opening to the affirmation of the risk of semantic drift, dissemination, and perhaps the meaninglessness and therefore inhumanity that his Aristotle cannot officially accept.
Conclusion: The “Eve” of Philosophy
This point of Derrida’s thinking (which he claims exceeds the resources of any philosophy of the subject or of “ipseity” more generally) must also be thought beyond the reach of any ontology and of any “thinking of being,” to which the early remarks on metaphor might seem to be leading us, but which the thought of dissemination always resists. We might of course suspect to close that this movement beyond the reach of ontology was already happening in the Aristotle who did not in fact propose a thinking of the “analogy of Being,” and who allowed the famous observation that being is said in many ways (pollachōs legomenon) to guide towards a “metaphysics” that never in fact claimed the status of ontology and that, at least on Aubenque’s reading, entertained an open-ended plurality of thinking that will always resist the temptation to return to the One.
Additional thread
Additional threads
The "Slow and Differentiated" Machinations of Deconstructive Ethics
Metaphysics of presence claims direct access to world, meaning and truth. "To avoid the worst", we may need to embrace the secret, what cannot be calculated, which keeps us from knowing once and for all what hospitality, justice or ethics mean. Thinking the impossible may be the condition of possibility for ethics. Derrida's "nicknames" for the unnamable movement of difference include trace, reserve, différance, supplement, dissemination, pharmakon, parergon, hymen, aporia, hospitality, autoimmunity, bêtise, perhaps even animal and machine. Oliver distinguishes morality (rules) from ethics (questioning them), a distinction that "ultimately cannot be maintained but is nevertheless necessary" (Oliver 2007).
Derrida's machines
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida says animals run throughout his work and that he signs texts in the names of hedgehogs and silkworms. The machine runs alongside them, and the difference between animals and machines preoccupies him. Such questions drive an ethics that is "slow (at times laborious, even exasperating) and differentiated" to the point of dizziness.
Command, counter-command
Derrida challenges Nature/Culture and the grounding of civil law in natural law: there is always a supplement where we take the origin to be; reproduction produces the original. Moral change (for example toward animals as more than property) happens slowly when "others demand to be treated differently". Deconstructive ethics makes it "a rule to question all rules", especially about Them rather than Us, Enemies rather than Friends, food rather than intelligent beings. It is not an ethics of empathy (contrast Husserl's analogical transfer), which assimilates others to ourselves.
Oliver: the slow machine of deconstructive ethics.
What would it mean to leave time for animals in democratic debate, or for those who speak another language, at another speed, or who have been socialised not to speak? Listening that hears only ourselves forces others into our rhythms and customs.
The wolf and the gambler
Late Derrida refuses to approach his subject "frontally". Of a Celan text: "creeping up on [it] like a wolf, slowly, discreetly" (BS1, 223). We have obligations we cannot recognise, and are "no less responsible" for that. Ethics means "facing the abyss, and only then taking the leap", over and over, never on level ground. Derrida subjects chance and necessity to the deconstructive machine: "Perhaps there never is a threshold... which is perhaps why we remain on it" (BS1, 333-334). The task is "inventing limits that are not lock-ups".
The deconstructive dose
Deconstruction turns liberal democracy and Western thought back on themselves: "one nail takes out the other". Like a homeopathic remedy, it takes a dose of the poison: one ideal of purity (a conceptual purity) against another (the natural purity that feeds racial cleansing and genocide). The impossible ideal is not meant to shame us but to keep hospitality, forgiveness, democracy and justice open to reconsideration. "How can we inscribe the unconditional within the conditioned and finite? This is the ethical question par excellence." And "who is this we anyhow?"
Derrida’s Machines
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida suggests that his concern with animals runs throughout his work; he mentions several texts wherein different animals play central roles, texts he claims he signs in the names of various animals, including hedgehogs and silkworms. Another figure that runs throughout his texts is the machine. Indeed, in some ways, it is the difference between those various animals running through and away from his texts and the different machines also running there that preoccupies him. These sorts of questions are the motor that drives deconstructive ethics, which is necessarily slow (at times laborious, even exasperating) and differentiated (at times to the point of head-spinning dizziness at all of the possibilities for interpretation and word-play).
Command Counter-Command
From his early work, Derrida was concerned to challenge the opposition between Nature and Culture and philosophies that ground civil law in natural law. He maintains that there is always already a supplement where we take the origin to be. In other words, the reproduction (the supplement) produces the origin or original. Derrida’s answer to this question, if he gives one, is not easy. It does not provide a moral code or blueprint that we can follow to get it right. This happens when others demand to be treated differently. And when that demand is, or can be, heard, Derrida is concerned, even obsessed, with listening to the other. This does not mean assimilating the other or others into our way of doing things, but rather it means opening up to their way, to their rhythms, to their time.
Derrida the Wolf
In his later work, Derrida repeatedly says that he will not approach his subject “frontally,” suggesting that even if it were possible to do so, when talking about the most important issues before us, we should not rush in on them but rather hope to catch a glimpse of what is ethical, which sometimes may even require averting our eyes. Speaking of a text by Paul Celan, Derrida says that he is “creeping up on [it] like a wolf, slowly, discreetly” (BS1, 223). In his critical engagement with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Derrida claims: A principle of ethics or more radically of justice, in the most difficult sense, which I have attempted to oppose to right, to distinguish from right, is perhaps the obligation that engages my responsibility with respect to the most dissimilar [le plus dissemblable, the least “fellow-like”], the entirely other, precisely, the monstrously other, the unrecognizable other.
Argument path reco
Derrida the Gambler
There is an interesting tension in Derrida’s writings between chance and necessity. Like other oppositions, this one is subjected to the deconstructive machine. Arguably, it occupies a special place in thinking through deconstructive ethics. It is not just that there are many ways in which we are like animals in our responses to things, or even perhaps entirely determined by our DNA or chemical make-up. Rather, Derrida suggests that culture also operates like a machine that can determine our actions and make what we take to be responses seem more like reactions. For example, everyday greetings like “hello,” Perhaps there never is a threshold, any such threshold. Which is perhaps why we remain on it and risk staying on the threshold for ever.
Upping the Ante
Throughout The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida plays with the phrase “upping the ante” and other such betting or gambling metaphors. Reading various texts from Western intellectual history, he continually ups the ante or raises the stakes by taking them to their logical conclusions while at the same time attempting to twist them free from binary logics toward more openness to otherness, toward hyperbolic ethics and hyperbolic politics, with their obligations to welcome differences, even those we cannot recognize. This upping the ante involves a double movement. Focusing on a narrower text-driven question may help us answer these broader ones. A question raised by Derrida’s discussion of sovereignty is, how does this hyperbolic move, this upping and re-upping the ante, differ from the certain kind of sovereignty that Derrida dares to challenge?
The Deconstructive Dose
The deconstructive machine is one that necessarily turns back on itself. Or, more precisely, it is the operation of turning the machinery of liberal democracy and Western intellectual history back on themselves. Deconstructive ethics operates according to the logic of “one nail takes out the other,” a machine with which to challenge and surprise the other machination, the machination of violence. The concept of purity, or we could say the purity of concepts, that he employs in his later work seems intended to counteract the history of philosophy’s adherence to a notion of pure Nature as distinct from impure or corrupt culture. Derrida’s “On Forgiveness” uses a notion of pure forgiveness to interrupt discourses of racial and ethnic purity as manifest in the Holocaust and Apartheid (CF, cf.
Digest threads gat
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
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| Forgiveness | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| SOVEREIGNTY | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| Unconditional | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| forgiveness | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| hospitality | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Truth and the surrounding claim
The “Slow and Differentiated” Machinations of Deconstructive Ethics KELLY OLIVER The ethics of deconstruction has been a central issue in Contemporary Continental thought since Derrida’s early work in Of Grammatology so forcefully interjected a technological supplement into the heart of the notion of natural origin that perme ates modern philosophies of language and culture. There, among so many other places, he exposes the operations of difference covered over by what he calls the “metaphysics of presence.” Metaphysics of presence are philosophies that maintain that we have direct access to the world, the meaning of words, and the truth about existence. We could call these philosophies of Revelation, Truth, and Certainty.
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| Nietzsche | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
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Machines, wolves, and the slow dose
Kelly Oliver reads deconstructive ethics through figures that refuse a frontal code: machines, the wolf that creeps up on Celan (BS1, 223), the gambler who ups the ante, and a homeopathic dose of purity turned against purity discourses. From Of Grammatology onward, a technological supplement sits inside any claim to natural origin. Oppositions (speech/writing, Nature/Culture, Man/Animal, mind/body, response/reaction) are not demolished into relativism; they are driven until their style and rhetoric work against their stated theses. Deconstruction is a "philosophy of limits" (The Animal That Therefore I Am), not a method that yields a moral blueprint.
Oliver: deconstruc
Command, counter-command, and the unrecognizable
Oliver's bind is **normat's double bind
Challenging sovereignty also threatens liberty, autonomy, and weak peoples' struggles against imperial hegemony (BS1, 301). There is no escaping a logic of sovereignty any more than the metaphysics of presence; there are antagonistic forms, and one attacks another in the name of a further sovereignty (of man, of the personal subject). Mental asylums and zoos dramatize the urgent, impossible task: invent limits that are not lock-ups. Oliver's closing question, "Who is this we?", refuses Us/Them as settled.
Cast and anchors Oliver uses
Deconstruction
Like its phenomenological ancestors, deconstruction leads to the experience of time, or more exactly to what lies prior to presence. Derrida's constant hope was that it would change us ethically and politically.
Three definitions
| Def. | Source | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Positions" (1971) | Two phases: reverse the hierarchy, then displace it with a new "concept" |
| 2 | "Force of Law" (1989-90) | Two styles, genealogical and formal; three aporias of law and justice |
| 3 | "Et Cetera" (2000) | X becomes possible only as impossible: gift, hospitality, forgiveness |
First definition. Metaphysics privileges speech over writing (Plato's Phaedrus) because communication seems better when the speaker animates the words; writing repeats speech and so seems derivative. Deconstruction first reverses such hierarchies, then displaces them. Because we must still speak, Derrida uses "paleonyms", old names, aiming "at the emergence of a new 'concept', a concept that no longer lets itself, and has never let itself be included in the previous regime" (POS).
Second definition. "Force of Law" is explicitly ethical or political. Its two styles do not match the two phases: a genealogical style recalls a concept's history; a formalistic style examines ahistorical aporias, all variants of one between law (droit) and justice.
Third definition. "Each time that I say 'deconstruction and X'... this is the prelude to a very singular division that turns this X into... an impossibility that becomes its proper and sole possibility", so that the possible X and the impossible X are related only by homonymy: gift, hospitality, forgiveness.
Lawlor: Derrida's three definitions of deconstruction.
Life as powerlessness and power
Derrida says from first to last that he is most interested in life (VP, 9), studied from the side of the experience of being alive: auto-affection. In interior monologue I seem to hear myself speak at the very moment I speak, without passing through space, not even my body. Yet I speak with the sounds of others: voices from the past are in me, and "I cannot... hear myself speak all alone". This is powerlessness.
Event and repetition are inseparable, so there is no simple origin: the origin is "origin-heterogeneous". Nor is there a simple end or apocalypse: whatever remains (energy, particles, light, micro-organisms) keeps having effects, so time is "end-heterogeneous". The double powerlessness is a double necessity, a divided law: "I must repeat, and yet I must singularize." Through that law something becomes possible: power.
Lawlor (Ch7): the three aporias of law and justice.
Conclusion: "Who, we?"
Deconstruction always criticises instituted structures (today's democracy and law), but never in the name of explicit policies. "No politics, no ethics, and no law can be... deduced from this thought." Yet "there is always a need for deconstruction".
Three Definitions of Deconstruction
First Definition: In 1967, when Derrida introduced the term “deconstruction,” he did not define it in a formal way. However, as his career developed, he presented three precise definitions. The first definition appears in the interview “Positions.” Derrida states that the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence consists in two phases. The first phase, which is critical, attacks the classical oppositions that structure metaphysics, oppositions such as inside and outside, same and other, and identity and difference. These oppositions, Derrida states, are subordinating; they are violent hierarchies. At this point in his career, Derrida targets primarily the metaphysical conception of language. In general, in its conception of language, metaphysics privileges speech (as we see, for example, in Plato’s Phaedrus). Metaphysics privileges speech because communication seems to function better when the speaker is present animating his or her words.
Anachronism: Life as Powerlessness and Power
From the beginning of his career to the end, Derrida always states that what he is most interested in is life (VP, 9; A, 49). For Derrida, life must be studied, not from the side of the living being, but from the side of experience, the experience of being alive. Fundamentally, the experience of being alive is what Derrida calls “auto-affection” When I engage in interior monologue, when, in short, I think, it seems as though
Conclusion: “Who, We?”
Having an essentially ethical or political aim means that deconstruction always criticizes instituted structures (such as the structures of democracy and law in place today). As Derrida says late in his career, “No politics, no ethics, and no law can be, as it were, deduced from this thought [i.e., from deconstructive thought]. Instead, the aim of deconstruction is essentially political and ethical in the sense of making us question who we are. In one of the first of many engagements with Heidegger, Derrida asked this simple question: “But who, we?” (MP, 136). We must be faithful to the fact that we never know ourselves in presence. We must be faithful to the fact that the border of us is always porous.
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| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| hospitality | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Deconstruction and the surrounding claim
Deconstruction LEONARD LAWLOR 1 The term “deconstruction” decisively enters philosophical discourse in 1967, with the publication of three books by Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference, Of Gram matology, and Voice and Phenomenon. Indeed, “deconstruction” is virtually synony mous with Derrida’s name. Nevertheless, the event of Derridean deconstruction developed out of the phenomenological tradition. On the one hand, as is often noted, Derrida appropriated the term from Heidegger’s idea, in Being and Time, of a “destruc tion” of the history of Western ontology (Heidegger 2010, 19, 25 [§6]), that is, a dismantling of the historical concepts of being in order to lay bare the fundamental experience from which these concepts originated (PSY2, 2).
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| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Nietzsche | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Plato | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Three definitions of deconstruction
Leonard Lawlor dates the term's decisive entry t's epoché, Heidegger's Destruktion/Abbau) and targets the illusion of presence. Three later definitions organize the chapter.
Definition 1 (Positions). Two phases: invert violent hierarchies (speech over writing, inside/outside, same/other); then name the generative process (différance, supplementarity, writing, trace) that produces hierarchies but cannot be named by their terms. Both speech and writing share repeatability; language must be thought from that shared trait.
Definition 2 (Force of Law). Two styles (not the same as two phases): genealogical-historical and formalistic-structural. Three aporias of law (droit) and justice: (1) conserve and destroy the rule for each singular case; (2) the "ghost of the undecidable" (FL, 24-26), experience that the case does not fit codes yet obligation remains; (3) "urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge" (FL, 26-28), decision as finite madness in non-knowledge. Justice is always to come, never presently and fully just.
Definition 3. Gift, hospitality, death (and so on) are possible only as im-possible, unconditionally (EC, 300). Presence is never simple; the "never" names a powerlessness that is also obligation.
Lawlor: deconstruc
Anachronism and "Who, we?"
Life, studied from experience, is auto-affection. Hearing-oneself-speak seems immediate; temporalization shows delay: the present comes a little later, contaminated by others' voices. Anachronism: time out of joint (SM, 17-19, Hamlet). Event and repetition are inseparably disunited: no simple origin (origin-heterogeneous), no simple apocalypse (end-heterogeneous). Double powerlessness (must repeat / must singularize) is a divided law. Deconstruction criticizes instituted structures without deducing policies from itself. The question "But who, we?" (MP, 136) keeps the border of "us" porous to friends, enemies, ghosts already gone and still to come.
| Definition | Core move | Ethical yield |
|---|---|---|
| Two phases | Invert hierarchy; name ultra-transcendental process | Writing/trace as shared structure |
| Law/justice aporias | Undecidable, urgent, rule-bound and free | Justice to-come, not present |
| Im-possible | Unconditional only as impossible | Gift, hospitality, decision under powerlessness |
Cast and anchors Lawlor uses
The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction
Why ask transcendental questions?
Despite attacks on transcendental foundationalism, the Continental tradition inflected the question rather than trading it for language or naturalism. In Husserl's phenomenological attitude, all sense is constituted by transcendental subjectivity; the world's "being and sense" is an achievement (Erkenntnisleistung) of the sense-bestowing ego, and the later Husserl placed himself in Kant's tradition.
Conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility
Derrida's renewal is marked by "ultra-transcendental" (Of Grammatology, from the 1965 articles) and "quasi-transcendental" (Glas, 1974). He nearly drops the first after Voice and Phenomenon (1967); the second becomes central in the 1990s, making visible what deconstruction always sought: the precariousness of all foundations. Derrida's conditions are neither formal (Kant's categories) nor, in the later work, dynamic infrastructures: they are "achieved" or "suffered" passively in aporetic experiences he calls events.
Doyon: writing as quasi-transcendental condition.
Early work: writing in Husserl's Origin of Geometry
After nearly 30 years holding that ideal truth is independent of expression, the 1930s Husserl made writing "the highest possibility of all 'constitution'" (IOG, 89), even for geometry. Writing's objectifying function has nothing to do with the graphic body: Husserl calls the linguistic body "a flesh" (Leib, geistige Leiblichkeit), not a graphic Körper (IOG, 88). Yet writing exposes idealities to loss and contingency. That danger is a chance: without it "we would be outside history" and no such knowledge would exist. Writing is quasi-transcendental: it completes the constitution of ideal objects only by keeping it open to the dangers of history. The same axiom drives Voice and Phenomenon.
Doyon (Ch8): the ultra-transcendental step.
Originality
Derrida sought the conditions of presence, truth, language, justice and much else, but his kind of inquiry changed. Deleuze and Foucault have similar strategies; Deleuze calls his "transcendental empiricism" (1994, 56), with conditions real and contextual, not a priori. Derrida explains why he went further: to stop the critique of origins from collapsing into empiricism or positivism, "it was necessary to accede, in a still more radical, more analytic fashion, to the traditional demand", hence quasi-transcendentals like arche-trace and arche-writing and "a donating affirmation that remains the ultimate unknown" (RPS, 29).
On the Necessity of Asking Transcendental Questions
Most twentieth-century European philosophers have attempted in one way or another to think anew the Kantian question about the necessary conditions of experience. A rapid survey of last century’s European philosophy would easily show that in spite of the various criticisms formulated against the very project of transcendental foundationalism, the vast majority of the philosophers in the so-called Continental tradition have not abandoned the project of formulating transcendental arguments altogether. Rather than simply and naïvely dismissing the transcendental perspective in favor of, say, language or naturalism, the scope of the transcendental question has rather been inflected in the most various and productive ways. According to Derrida, the transcendental method or attitude is not only a perfectly legitimate philosophical standpoint, but it is even a necessary condition for the practice of philosophy.
Conditions of Possibility as Conditions of Impossibility
Derrida’s renewal of the transcendental problematic is most clearly marked by the concepts “ultra-” and “quasi-transcendental,” introduced in Of Grammatology in 1965 and in Glas in 1974 respectively. While Derrida will nearly stop using the term “ultra-transcendental” after Voice and Phenomenon in 1967, his use of the term “quasi-transcendental” will rapidly increase, to the point of becoming a central concept in the writings of the 1990s. The change in Derrida’s terminology is welcome, for the notion of “quasi-transcendentality” has the advantage of making more readily visible what deconstruction was always aiming at, namely, to show the precariousness of all foundations (be they transcendental or not).
The Quasi-Transcendental in Derrida’s Early Works: On the Role of
Writing in the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry In his reading of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida draws our attention to the strange role that Husserl grants to writing in the constitution of ideal meanings. After holding for almost 30 years that the truth-value and validity of idealities were completely detached from the possibility of their expression, writing has become, in Husserl’s works of the 1930s, the “highest possibility of all ‘constitution’” (IOG, 89), up to and including the so-called free ideal objects of geometry. Husserl is not trying to ground the validity of ideal objects in factual circumstances, or else to identify the actual discoverer of geometry. Husserl’s motivation is rather to measure the scientific and philosophical implications of the fact that objective knowledge always arises in a certain historical time and context, and that it has been developed and handed down over generations and generations.
Argument path reco
The Quasi-Transcendental in Derrida’s Later Writings
In order to situate the question of the transcendental in Derrida’s later philosophy, it is important to note a paradigm shift in Derrida’s mature interpretation of the history of philosophy. Whereas Derrida reads the history of philosophy in the early writings largely through a Heideggerian lens as the history of metaphysics of presence, the vast majority of Derrida’s later texts are set against the background of the Aristotelian concept of dynamis (usually translated as power or potentiality, depending on context). In the latter vein, in the 2001 lecture “Deconstructions: The Im-possible,” This great tradition of the dynamis, of potentiality, from Aristotle to Bergson, these reflections in transcendental philosophy on the conditions of possibility, are affected by the experience of the event insofar as it upsets the distinction between the possible and the impossible, the opposition between the possible and the impossible.
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| countersignature | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| forgiveness | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| quasi-transcendental | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
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Transcendental and the surrounding claim
The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction MAXIME DOYON 1. On the Necessity of Asking Transcendental Questions Most twentieth-century European philosophers have attempted in one way or another to think anew the Kantian question about the necessary conditions of expe rience. A rapid survey of last century’s European philosophy would easily show that in spite of the various criticisms formulated against the very project of transcenden tal foundationalism, the vast majority of the philosophers in the so-called Continen tal tradition have not abandoned the project of formulating transcendental arguments altogether. Rather than simply and naïvely dismissing the transcendental perspective in favor of, say, language or naturalism, the scope of the transcendental question has rather been inflected in the most various and productive ways.
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| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
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Ultra- then quasi-transcendental
Maxime Doyon places Derrida inside, not against, the transcendental tradition. Asking for conditions of experience remains necessary (a Husserlian indelible trace, DP, 81). But conditions of possibility are also conditions of impossibility. Ultra-transcendental (Of Grammatology / Voice and Phenomenon) nearly drops after 1967; quasi-transcendental (named in Glas 1974, debated after Gasché's The Tain of the Mirror) becomes central in the 1990s and marks the precariousness of all foundations.
Doyon: two phases
Writing in the Origin of Geometry
In Husserl's 1930s, writing b's free idealities. Derrida's point: the transcendental role of writing holds only if writing is also an empirical practice always threatened by non-fulfillment. Transcendental and empirical functions of writing are non-separable. Vulnerability of universals is not a defect to erase; it is the chance of their historical opening. In Voice and Phenomenon, phenomenological "life" is ultra-transcendental because the living present's temporal synthesis conditions the very parallel of transcendental and mundane life (VP, 13).
Later: dynamis, event, and the archi-originary yes
Mature texts shift from a Heideggerian history of presence toward Aristotelian dynamis and the im-possible event that upsets possible/impossible (PSY2, 237). The archi-originary "yes" pledges before questioning; it has a quasi-transcendental function (like Kant's apperceptive I) yet is not an absolute performative, because it prescribes its own repetition. Language has the structure of a countersignature. Gift, justice, democracy, forgiveness share this pattern: unconditional exposure that only conditional acts can answer.
Originality among Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger
Doyon compares transcendental empiricism (Deleuze), Merleau-Ponty's non-fundamental transcendental/empirical distinction, and Heidegger's epochal Being. Derrida's specificity is the axiom that possibility implies impossibility, pursued so as to avoid empiricism, relativism, historicism, and positivism while still accessing universals that depend on trace, différance, and repetition. Classical transcendentalism was "not transcendental enough"; quasi-concepts (arche-trace, arche-writing, donating affirmation) take over where Kant and Husserl left off (RPS, 29).
Cast and anchors Doyon uses
Writing the Violence of Time: Derrida Beyond the Deconstruction of Metaphysics
Tracing Derrida's genealogy is legitimate, since he always attended to tradition, mainstream and marginal. But the label "deconstruction of metaphysics" risks hiding what the Levinas essay adds: an account of violence, time and writing that goes beyond critique.
Ontology and metaphysics in Levinas
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas re-evaluates Western philosophy as the prevalence of the same over the other, of knowledge over ethics. "Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term." Ethics is the true prima philosophia, which Levinas calls metaphysics: "the calling into question of the same by the other... as critique precedes dogmatism, metaphysics precedes ontology." Ontology "neutralizes the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it": an ontological violence that subdues otherness to keep my freedom. Derrida calls the encounter with the Other "the opening of opening", which "resists every philosopheme" (WD, 83). Ontology's victories are always Pyrrhic, "as long as there is otherness and/or time".
Writing and closure
Levinas's scheme is ambiguous: ethics should be first by right, yet ontology has imposed itself historically, and Totality and Infinity never accounts for that. Derrida goes further, sketching a philosophy beyond philosophy that would pose the question of closure "formally... not in a logic... but in an inscribed description... in a kind of unheard of graphics, within which philosophical conceptuality would be no more than a function" (WD, 110-111). That graphics anticipates writing in Of Grammatology (1967), Margins (1972) and Glas (1974): a displacement by "rigorous, philosophically intransigent analyses" and "marks which no longer belong to philosophical space".
Thorsteinsson: from Levinas to the violence of time.
Violence and writing
For Levinas violence is subsuming the other under the same, the thirst for thematization. Derrida turns this round: différance, quasi-synonymous with arche-writing, opens phenomenality and meaning and is therefore tied to war. "War... is congenital to phenomenality, [it] is the very emergence of speech and of appearing" (WD, 129). Différance mingles space and time, same and other, finitude and infinity, so there can be no purity of same or other "as long as there is anything at all".
Thorsteinsson (Ch9): from the face to writing.
Hauntology and being-with
Later, Derrida's hauntology, a "logic of haunting", transcends "the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life", "thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility" (SM, 12). Thorsteinsson reads it as the mature form of the Levinas essay's insight: we always exist with others and with traces of the dead.
Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics" (WD, 133)
The chapter closes: "Time is violence: hence, we write." It ends on Paul Celan's line, which Derrida read in Rams: "Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen" ("The world is gone, I must carry you"). See No. 21 in this series for "Violence and Metaphysics" itself.
ntroduction
It has become commonplace to subsume Derrida’s thinking under the general heading of “a critique of the metaphysics of presence,” relating his theoretical endeavors to Heidegger’s Destruktion and Husserl’s Abbau, not to mention Nietzsche’s call for a re-evaluation of all values. Deconstruction, then, understood as the most appropriate label for the entirety of Derrida’s work, becomes a natural extension of the more or less radical project envisaged and undertaken by these earlier thinkers, on whose shoulders Derrida is seen to stand. Needless to say, it is quite legitimate and necessary to trace Derrida’s intellectual genealogy, for, after all, his way of practicing philosophy always involved a careful attention to tradition old and new, mainstream and marginal.
Ontology and Metaphysics
As is well known, in his major work Totality and Infinity, Levinas lends precise and novel meanings to the traditional philosophical notions of “metaphysics” and “ontology.” Indeed, what is at stake in this regard, for Levinas, is nothing less than a re-evaluation of the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition, characterized as it has been by the constant prevalence of the same over the other, of the epistemological relation over the ethical relation, of ontology over ethics.
Writing and Closure
As can be gathered from the preceding discussion, the status of ontology and ethics in Levinas’s scheme of things remains ambiguous, even if his definition of these terms leaves little to be desired in terms of clarity. The ambiguity clearly manifests itself, for example, in Levinas’s call for a reversal of the terms. Ethics should, by right, be primary, but historically, ontology has imposed itself (Levinas 1969, 45, 47). This, in turn, clearly entails that any discourse that seeks to be called theoretical or rational necessarily betrays the opening towards the Other, for all its possible good intentions and sincere efforts to respect the ethical relation and render it faithfully. Thus, the ethical relation, for all its ubiquity and intuitive evidence, seems inescapably predestined to be constantly buried anew under sediments of discourse.
Argument path reco
iolence and Writing
Let us now retrace our steps a little and reinvoke the Levinasian notion of violence and its relation to his conceptions of war and peace. Violence, for Levinas, consists primarily in the attempt to subsume the other under the same, which, by definition, is precisely what traditional ontology tries to achieve in its thirst for thematization and conceptualization. The same would apply, as it turns out, to phenomenology and to philosophy broadly speaking. Now it is c·rucial to realize in what way, and on which premises, Derrida begs to differ with Levinas in this regard. As already explained, for the former, the equivocality or interlacing that goes by the name of (archi-)writing should be seen as original and irreducible.
Hauntology and Being-With
As is well known, Levinas applies the notion of the face (visage in the French) to the expression of infinity in the encounter with the Other (cf. In björn thorsteinsson “Violence and Metaphysics,” Still, paradoxically, the face is precisely not the full presence of a phenomenon, for what shows itself in the face, as we have seen, is infinity itself, defined as what resists phenomenality. As such, the face is also what provokes conceptualization and all the negative aspects linked to such an endeavor by Levinas. Or, to take this point further, and going as far as to implicate God, defined by Levinas as the absolute(ly) Other:. war, for war there is, is the difference between the face and the finite world without a face.
Closing: And So On
In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida makes the following observation: In the last analysis, if one wishes to determine violence as the necessity that the other not appear as what it is, that it not be respected except in, for, and by the same, that it be dissimulated by the same in the very freeing of its phenomenon, then time is violence. (WD, 133) Time is violence: hence, we write. And so we carry on: Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.
Digest threads gat
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| Deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| Différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Writing and the surrounding claim
Writing the Violence of Time: Derrida Beyond the Deconstruction of Metaphysics BJÖRN THORSTEINSSON 1. Introduction It has become commonplace to subsume Derrida’s thinking under the general heading of “a critique of the metaphysics of presence,” relating his theoretical endeavors to Heidegger’s Destruktion and Husserl’s Abbau, not to mention Nietzsche’s call for a re-evaluation of all values. Deconstruction, then, understood as the most appropriate label for the entirety of Derrida’s work, becomes a natural extension of the more or less radical project envisaged and undertaken by these earlier thinkers, on whose shoulders Derrida is seen to stand. Needless to say, it is quite legitimate and necessary to trace Derrida’s intellectual genealogy, for, after all, his way of practicing philosophy always involved a careful attention to tradition old and new, mainstream and marginal.
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| Levinas | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Marx | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Nietzsche | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
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Beyond a mere critique of presence
Björn Thorsteinsson refuses to subsume Derrida under a generic "critique of the metaphysics of presence." Genealogy from Heidegger, Husserl, and Nietzsche matters, but the essay's payload is **vio's difference
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas casts Western philosophy as ontology: reduction of the other to the same via a neutral middle term. Ethics is the Other's calling-into-question of my spontaneity. Phenomenology and ontology are philosophies of violence (WD, 83). Derrida agrees that thematization violates uniqueness, yet denies that the other can be infinitely other. Différance / archi-writing is original and irreducible; war is "congenital to phenomenality" (WD, 129). As long as there is history or appearing, the other is contaminated by the same. Time itself is violence: "if one wishes to determine violence as... then time is violence" (WD, 133). Hence: we write.
Thorsteinsson: fro
Writing, closure, hauntology
Theoretical discourse betrays the ethical opening even when loyal; Levinas under-describes that bind. Derrida's "unheard of graphics" (WD, 110-111) becomes the writing of Of Grammatology, Margins, Glas: inscription between philosophical and non-philosophical. Against the face as nonspatial infinity, Derrida insists on irreducible spatial exteriority (WD, 169). Later, Specters of Marx answers with hauntology and learning to live with ghosts, more justly not better (companionship without commerce of ghosts). Closing line anchors Celan: Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.
| Claim | Levinas | Derrida (per Thorsteinsson) |
|---|---|---|
| Ontology | Violence; ethics should be first | Violence unavoidable while phenomenality lasts |
| Other | Infinitely other; face of infinity | Always already mixed with the same |
| Peace/war | Peace as ethical opening vs war | War and peace irrevocably conjoined |
| Response | Metaphysics of the face | Writing, hauntology, being-with ghosts |
Cast and anchors Thorsteinsson uses
Derrida's Radical Atheism
Derrida defines religion by the ideal of "the unscathed" (l'indemne): an absolute good immune from harm. The classical problem of evil (if God created evil he is not wholly good; if not, he is not almighty) was answered by Augustine: evil is mere privation, a corruption that cannot touch being in itself. Derrida's notion of radical evil denies this: in any friendship, "this good friend may become the devil... the perversity is not an accident which could once and for all be excluded, the perversity is part of the experience."
Radical evil and faith
Faith, taking in trust, is constitutive of all experience: to do anything we must trust a future and others we cannot know (ROG, 153). Derrida separates this faith from the religious ideal of the unscathed, which conflates them, and reads the ideal against itself (FK, 83). Because the threat lies within what is defended, the good's vulnerability is without limit: hence autoimmunity.
Hägglund: why the unscathed is undesirable.
Autoimmunity follows from the trace. The trace lets the past survive, but only by exposing it to a future that can keep or efface it; it is the condition of survival, life resisting death. Even "spiritual" and "altruistic" commitments express this: if I give my life for someone, it is because I want their life to continue; if I die for a cause, I want it carried on in history. Ideals of detachment dissimulate an attachment to temporal life, "the source of all care for oneself, for others, and for the world".
Radical evil and the unconditional
Life is necessarily open to death, good to evil, peace to violence. An absolute life, good or peace immune to their opposites would be absolute death, evil or violence, since it would close all openness to time. Derrida therefore questions the very desirability of absolute immunity. The unconditional is a "nonperformative exposure" to what happens, not "an imperative injunction (call or performative)" (ROG, 91). It cannot be embraced as good in itself, since it is "the source of every chance and every threat", yet it "calls for" conditional responses that try to tell chance from threat.
Radical evil and the messianic
The messianic is often mistaken for hope of salvation, but Derrida distinguishes it from every messianism. Survival always costs what does not survive: the "law of finitude, law of decision and responsibility for finite existences". To survive wholly unscathed would be not surviving but "reposing in absolute presence". Without the threat intrinsic to chance we would not care about the chance: things fully present could suffer nothing. The messianic is "not an endless waiting... but the structure of faith in the here and now".
Radical Evil and Faith
Derrida highlights the logic of radical evil through the notion of faith. Derrida argues that faith, taking in trust, is constitutive of experience in general. In order to do anything, we must have faith in the future and in those on whom we depend, since we cannot know what will happen or what others will do to us. As Derrida stresses, “this ex-position to the incalculable event” is “the irreducible spacing of the very faith, credit, or belief without which there would be no social bond, no address to the other” (ROG, 153). It follows that one cannot maintain a strict opposition between good and evil, or between sworn faith and perjury. On the contrary, the good is autoimmune because evil is inherent in its own constitution.
Radical Evil and the Messianic
We can thus finally elucidate what Derrida means by the messianic. More than any other term in Derrida’s vocabulary, the messianic has invited the misconception that he promotes a hope for religious salvation. Such readings are due to misunderstanding Derrida’s distinction between the messianic and every form of “messianism.” This messianic promise of justice does not express a hope for timeless peace. On the contrary, it is animated by a commitment to living on and by the exposure to a perilous future. Without the commitment to living on, one would never be motivated to keep the memory of the past or to seek justice in the future. Thus, the resistance to forgetting that is the exercise of justice is also “the place of all violences.
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| autoimmunity | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| hospitality | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| messianic | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| unconditional | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Faith and the surrounding claim
Derrida’s Radical Atheism MARTIN HÄGGLUND In paragraph 24 of his main essay on religion, “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida provides a remarkable outline of the relation between his thinking of the spacing of time (espacement) and his thinking of religion. While Derrida insists throughout his work that the spacing of time is a constitutive condition of experience, the paragraph from “Faith and Knowledge” makes the point emphatically and dissociates his think ing from any form of religion. According to Derrida, the spacing of time is “without age, without history, and more ‘ancient’ than all oppositions” but it “will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicized.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2008 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2011 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2014 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Caputo | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hägglund | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Kant | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Marx | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Radical atheism against the unscathed
Martin Hägglund reads paragraph 24 of "Faith and Knowledge" as dissociating the spacing of time from religion. Radical atheism does not externally refute God-talk; it reads religious concepts against themselves for their atheological condition. Every religion, Derrida says, holds a horizon of redemption, restoration of the unscathed, indemnification (FK, 74-75). Against Augustinian privation-of-good, Derrida holds that the possibility of radical evil is intrinsic to the good and to any event: exclude that possibility and nothing happens, including hospitality (someone may be coming to kill).
Hägglund: radical
Faith, autoimmunity, survival
Faith as taking-in-trust is constitutive of experience; social bond needs exposure to the incalculable (ROG, 153). Nothing heilig/holy is unscathed without autoimmunity risk (FK, 82). The present negates itself as soon as it comes to be; the trace lets the past survive only by exposure to a future that can also efface it. Desire for survival (temporal living-on) is incompatible with desire for eternal unscathed being. An absolute life immune to death equals absolute death; absolute peace immune to violence equals absolute violence.
Unconditional, messianic, economy of violence
Unconditional justice/hospitality inspire conditional laws without being a rule for application. The "call" of the unconditional is not a demand for unconditional love but for conditional engagements under unconditional exposure. The messianic (not messianism) is commitment to living-on and perilous future, not hope for timeless shalom (contra Caputo's reading that Hägglund contests). One cannot respond to one other without sacrificing other others (GD, 68). Ideals of justice sit in an "economy of violence"; the point is not to justify violence but to refuse immune ideals. Derrida's 1994 remark: like everyone, he is "radically atheist" in a structural sense characterizing every relation to what comes.
| Religious ideal (per Hägglund) | Radical-atheist re-reading |
|---|---|
| Unscathed / absolute immunity | Would cancel time, care, and events |
| Good without evil | Evil intrinsic to good's constitution |
| Messianic peace | Messianic as fear/chance structure of faith now |
| Salvation as intact survival | Survival requires alteration and loss |
Cast and anchors Hägglund uses
Play and Messianicity: The Question of Time and History in Derrida's Deconstruction
"Deconstruction" first appears in Voice and Phenomenon (1967), which Derrida considered first in order, since it targets the privilege of self-presence in living speech. Husserl's phenomenology is "commanded" by living presence given to original intuition, hence the injunction to go "back to the things themselves". Following Levinas, Derrida conceives time as dia-chrony, "in-adequation and non-coincidence" (Levinas 1987, 32).
Derrida and Levinas
In the first Logical Investigation, Husserl separates expression from indication. In soliloquy I do not "speak to myself": pure expression needs no factual language and is close to the full presence of the signified. For Husserl, retention, perception and protention form one continuous flow; for Derrida, with Levinas, alterity or exteriority constitutes the dia-chronic structure of experience, which can never be totalized. Phenomenology is metaphysical because it thinks time as unity and continuity, and cannot explain the "after-event" (Nachträglichkeit) by which an unconscious content becomes conscious in Freud (VP, 54).
Derrida, Heidegger and time
With Levinas, Derrida privileges the death of the other over one's own, and so stays ambivalent toward Heidegger. In Being and Time, "vulgar" time as a sequence of nows comes from fallenness (Verfallenheit), a positive possibility of being-in-the-world: "the vulgar representation of time has its natural justification", lost only when it claims to be the true concept (1996, 390). In "Ousia and Grammē" Derrida argues that any "other" concept of time would need "other metaphysical and onto-theological concepts" (MP, 63), though his question remains "internal to Heidegger's thought". The decisive difference: for Derrida the dismantling of presence can only come from outside the West (MP, 89), as in Levinas; for Heidegger it is an internal renewal of the thought of Being.
Dastur: time and history from Husserl to messianicity.
The problem of genesis
The concepts of time, past, present and future belong to the metaphysics of presence and must be erased; with Levinas, "time is violence" (WD, 133). Dastur traces this to the early Husserl work:
| Year | Text | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| 1954 | Problem of Genesis (thesis) | No "atemporality" in Husserl, yet time read against "a possible or actual eternity" |
| 1962 | Introduction to "The Origin of Geometry" | Phenomenology rests on delay; writing's power of virtualization constitutes ideality |
| 1964 | First École Normale course | Heidegger: the question of Being and history |
| 1968-72 | Essays in WD and MP | History as "play" and "writing" |
The foundation of sense must appear in a region of beings (consciousness), so the Absolute takes on the figure of the empirical; eidetic limitation gives the reduction its meaning as "critical humility and prudence". Husserl's "decisive step" (IOG, 87) is that ideality requires writing, "a communication which has in a way become virtual". Tradition is the opening of a space of possible repetition.
Conclusion: play and messianicity
Repetition early serves to criticise any originary beginning, and Derrida questions Heidegger's oppositions of authentic/inauthentic and original/derived time. Signification moves by supplementarity: "superabundant" because without origin or end, and vicarious because it takes the place of lacking presence. Play is "the disruption of presence" (WD, 292).
Derrida and Levinas
In his famous 1967 essay, Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida wanted to emphasize, in his analysis of Husserl’s first Logical Investigation, the meaning of the difference made by Husserl between expression and indication. Soliloquy, that is, inward speech, is there understood as the r·ealm of pure expression, that is, the r·ealm of immediate proximity to the full presence of the signified, in so far as there is no use of any factual language, as we are required to use in indication and communication with others. Husserl therefore thinks that in soliloquy I do not “speak to myself,” which means that I do not need to indicate in an indirect way something to myself, as I have to do with others by means of words uttered out loud, vocally.
Derrida, Heidegger, and Time
Such a denial of one’s own mortality cannot be found in Heidegger. We can find this denial in Derrida, however, precisely because Derrida shares Levinas’s conception of death and his criticism of ontology. Consequently, Derrida remained all along in a marked ambivalence towards Heidegger. Derrida’s essay deals with the longest footnote of Being and Time in paragraph 82, where Heidegger gives a very brief outline of the history of time in Western thinking from Aristotle to Hegel and Bergson. Derrida’s commentary on this note aims at dealing with the Heideggerian understanding of presence, but also at showing the relation between the problem of presence and the problem of the written trace, which is the problematic that he develops in the same period in Of Grammatology (MP, 34).
The Problem of Genesis
The concept of time, as well as those of past, future, and present, have therefore to be erased. All of them belong to the metaphysics of presence. Following Levinas’s hyperbolic way of thinking, Derrida even goes as far as saying that “time is violence” since it reduces the other to the same and defines, understood in terms of the Husserlian “living present,” egoity as the absolute form of experience (WD, 133). In contrast, Derrida tried play and messianicity to understand the unity of an apparently contradictory double gesture, which combines in Husserl’s thought a strict idealism with a philosophy of history, a transcendental reduction that neutralizes the whole mundane sphere with a transcendental genesis that allows the philosophical understanding of concrete history. Derrida’s very first work, written in 1954, but published much later, deals with Husserl’s philosophy of genesis.
Argument path reco
Conclusion: Play and Messianicity
All this was a preparation for a new conception of history as “play” and “writing,” which emerged in the texts published between 1968 and 1972. The theme of repetition has been very early called upon in order to criticize the idea of an originary beginning to which one would like to go back. This critical role of repetition is the reason why Derrida has very early questioned the Heideggerian opposition of the authentic and of the inauthentic, as he does regarding the opposition of original and non-original time in “Ousia and Grammē.” This lecture is of course “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” (WD, 278, 294).
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Messianicity and the surrounding claim
Play and Messianicity: The Question of Time and History in Derrida’s Deconstruction FRANÇOISE DASTUR The questions of time and history, which were explicitly at the center of Heidegger’s thought since its beginning, have constituted in a more latent and implicit way the kernel of Derrida’s deconstruction. The word “deconstruction” appears for the first time in 1967, in Voice and Phenomenon. Derrida himself considered this essay, which is an “Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology” as the subtitle states, as coming first since it deals with a decisive point: the question of the privilege given to self-presence in so-called living speech.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1905 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1927 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1928 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1936 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1939 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Freud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Time, play, and justice to come
Françoise Dastur treats time and history as the latent kernel of deconstruction. The word appears 1967 in Voice and Phenomenon; Heideggerian Destruktion/Abbau and Levinasian diachrony shape the break with any restoration of a transcendental signified (Being as transcendens). Deconstruction is neither analysis toward an indecomposable origin nor a defined method.
Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger on time
Against Husserl's privilege of soliloquy as pure expression, Derrida (with Levinas) stresses diachrony: alterity constitutes experience that cannot be totalized. Retention/protention continuity is read so that trace and différance are "older than presence" (VP, 58). With Heidegger, Derrida remains ambivalent: he contests the vulgar/primordial time opposition and the quest for origin as still metaphysical (MP, 63), yet refuses a simple anti-Heideggerianism. For Derrida, dismantling presence needs resources from outside the Western tradition (Levinas); for Heidegger, renewal is internal to the thought of Being.
Dastur: from livin
Genesis, writing, play, messianicity
Derrida's earliest Husserl work (1954 genesis problem; 1962 Origin of Geometry) shows ideality transcending its genesis yet depending on writing as transcendental-intersubjective language. "Authenticity of the phenomenological delay" (IOG, 87): reduction is thinking of delay. Between 1968 and 1972, history becomes play and writing: play names absence of the transcendental signified (OGC). Presence/absence, subject, center, origin have only functional value; think being from play, not play from being. Late question: how can deconstructive thinking refer to the indeconstructibility of justice always to come (SM, 90)? Messianicity here is historical and ethico-political, not a return of the unscathed.
| Phase | Problem | Dastur's Derrida |
|---|---|---|
| VP / early | Living speech, sign, presence | Trace older than presence |
| Genesis / IOG | Ideality vs history | Writing, delay, finitude |
| 1968-72 | Structure and origin | History as play |
| Later | Justice, envois | Messianicity / to-come |
Cast and anchors Dastur uses
I See Your Meaning and Raise the Stakes by a Signature: The Invention of Derrida's Work
Déjà, D.Ja.
A liminal passage of "Plato's Pharmacy" (1968) repeats "we have already said all". Kamuf hears in "déjà" Derrida's initials, D.Ja., a signature effect: "nothing itself and in itself" but "the trace left behind by some event of signature that was itself never simply present", so that one can never be sure it is not false or a simulacrum. Writing, "indebted to the essential passivity of the other", gives itself leave to continue.
She then reads one inscription in Signsponge (on Francis Ponge), which bisects the text at its centre: "to sponge" "will have already [déjà] meant to wash, to clean, to appropriate, thus to efface, for example the name of Ponge, but also to pay off a bill [s'acquitter d'une traite], to inscribe the name of the Ponges as the noun sponge, to signsponge". Ponge sought to sponge his name off language and sign the unpayable debt to things. But "traite" also names the slave trade (la traite), echoing from "the other shores of the Mediterranean". French grammar refuses the plural -s (des Ponge), returning the name, yet "le nom d'éponge" sounds through. The last word of Signéponge is "déjà".
Kamuf: how countersignature works.
Kamuf (Ch12): the seven features of countersignature, from event to infinite category.
The second invention of relever
In 1998, addressing literary translators ("What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?"), Derrida recalls his 1968 translation of Hegel's Aufhebung as relève (first in "The Pit and the Pyramid", presented in Jean Hyppolite's seminar at the Collège de France; MP, 79, 196 n. 8). He claims only to have listened to laws "already inscribed in this family of languages", calls it "an incalculable stroke of luck", and wonders "who can bear the responsibility, even if it was, apparently, mine at first and if I had to sign it".
Kamuf's own essay practises what it describes: a rubbing of the inscription that restores punctuation, a translation that asks whether translation is another name for countersignature. See Miller on de Man (Ch. 20) for another countersigning reading.
Déjà, D.Ja
There is at least one more feature or trait that should be remarked here. Indeed, it remarks itself in the part of the opening sentence that is being repeated from one paragraph to the next: “we have already said all,” “we have already said everything.” It thereby declares, as well, the debt, the infinite debt to the other who promises the future to some writing and to some play of the signature. Still, on the most apparent semantic level, “we” also reiterate and reaffirm the signature already published on what “we have already said” of what “we meant to say.” What is peggy kamuf left over, left out by totality? These questions can be heard to echo in the columnar capitals initiated by the opening lines of Glas (GL, 1).
The Concept of Countersignature?
From this rather strenuous reading exercise, can we draw the profile of countersigning in general? We are not after a concept of the countersignature, for its concept deconstructs, even shatters, but just something to go on so as to be able, perhaps, to recognize another event of countersignature. If we say that the inscription of Signsponge is an example of inventive, creative countersignature, then it must be because we recognize some generalizable features.
The countersignature is indebted, unacquittably, to the other work....
But it also puts in play the condition of indebtedness. That encounter need not be a conscious one, indeed it can never be fully conscious; but even as unconscious, the calculation of the countersigning response will have engaged somewhere with the singular experience of debt.
Argument path reco
The countersignature confirms and records this experience when the...
which one is indebted is a signed text, of whatever sort. It countersigns an i see your meaning and raise the stakes experience of reading another, a tout autre comme tout autre. Countersigning, as we have already said, is another name for reading.
s this not to conclude that by countersignature is meant nothing le...
But can one have an example of an infinite category? For if indeed it is infinite, then there are only examples of countersignature without general concept. In saying: I swear to tell the truth, where I have been the only one to see or hear and where I am the only one who can attest to it, this is true to the extent that anyone who in my place, at that instant, would have seen or heard or touched the same thing and could repeat exemplarily, universally, the truth of my testimony. The exemplarity of the “instant,” that which makes it an “instance,” if you like, is that it is singular, like any exemplarity, singular and universal, singular and universalizable. The singular must be universalizable: this is the testimonial condition. It is this invention of the other that has to be countersigned.8
The Second Invention of Relever
We began by reading a certain liminal passage of “Plato’s Pharmacy” that raises the stakes of Derrida’s signature at a specific moment, 1968, of what is now that signature’s history, or one of its possible histories. To conclude, we’ll consider a text from 1998 that sustains a reflection on the history of, if not Derrida’s signature, then an invention signed by Derrida. peggy kamuf That invention is Derrida’s translation of Hegelian Aufhebung as relève. The occasion for recalling this inventive event, 30 years later, is an address to a congress of literary translators in France. I harbor no illusion or pretension in this respect: if I took the initiative in these quasi-translations,
Digest threads gat
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Countersignature | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| countersignature | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Signature and the surrounding claim
I See Your Meaning and Raise the Stakes by a Signature: The Invention of Derrida’s Work PEGGY KAMUF If electronic word searching can be relied upon, then the problematic of signature does not arise in Derrida’s corpus until after its initial three-part salvo, Voice and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology, all published in 1967. That opening volley of texts undoubtedly produced a sufficient effect of institutional legiti macy for their author to risk raising the stakes even further by putting into play the signature now validated by the philosophical institution. This surenchère or upping of the ante will have been declared in writing as early as 1968. It happens very near the beginning of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the text that most proximately pursues Derri da’s grammatological concerns in the three earlier texts.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1967 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1968 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1972 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1975 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1998 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Plato | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Signature after legitimacy
Peggy Kamuf notes that electronic search finds the problematic of signature rising after the 1967 trilogy had secured institutional legitimacy. Raising stakes (surenchère) means putting the validated name into play. The chapter's payload is not a's enumeration)
Kamuf enumerates generalizable features of inventive countersignature:
- It must be an event (somewhere, sometime).
- As event it is always singular and essentially unrepresentable; tout autre est tout autre (GD, 82-115).
- It answers in another idiom, not mere echo.
- It is indebted: "we have already said everything" marks infinite debt to the other who promises a future to writing.
- It raises the stakes rather than confirming a trademark.
- It risks illegitimacy even while needing recognition.
- It invents the work's readability without finishing it.
Kamuf: from signat
| Trait | What it blocks | What it enables |
|---|---|---|
| Event / singular | Method as recipe | Unique response each time |
| Other idiom | Parrot loyalty | Faithful invention |
| Debt / déjà | Self-originating genius | Inheritance as obligation |
| Raise stakes | Safe commentary | Work continued otherwise |
An Immemorial Remainder: The Legacy of Derrida
The question ignores what Derrida said about memory and heritage, especially regarding "Europe", and his distinction of restance from a reste left over when a whole vanishes (LI, 52). The thinker's "duty" is to watch over what in a legacy resists all appropriation.
The abstraction of the Greeks
Greek thought was a persistent concern of Derrida's, neglected by commentators (Gasché included) who focused on Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Hegel's "Who Thinks Abstractly?" shows that to flee abstraction is to flee thinking. When Derrida proposes to abstract "for an instant" and "in a certain way", he evokes the phenomenological epoché. His reading of the Timaeus focuses on khōra for the same reason; the end of "Plato's Pharmacy" already names "the passage beyond all 'Platonic' oppositions, toward the aporia of the originary inscription". Europe's memory is also Jewish and Christian, and the same holds there.
Messianicity and faith
In "Faith and Knowledge", thinking religion today, like Kant, within the limits of reason alone, Derrida invokes "the most barren and desert-like abstraction" under two names: Greek khōra and the Jewish "messianic". "Here origin is duplicity itself, the one and the other... two sources, these two fountains or these two tracks that are still invisible in the desert."
Gasché: the two names in 'Faith and Knowledge'.
Khōra is privileged because Plato introduced it "without being able to reappropriate it" in a consistent self-interpretation: within the Greek it points beyond the Greek. It names something "utterly impassible" within Greco-Abrahamic hybridisation, a remainder that "infinitely resists all appropriation" within any philosophical, theological or anthropological configuration, though all presuppose its place.
Gasché (Ch13): the legacy as remaining.
Legacy: tolerance
Like "the messianic without messianism", khōra "says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory... the immemoriality of a desert in the desert". These are conditions for "a possible universalizable culture of singularities" based on a minimal social bond. Recasting Kant's Religion, Derrida follows the new aesthetic with something like an "Analytic of Pure Practical Reason": a just world built on dissociation, discretion and respectful reserve (retenue), where each singularity keeps a remainder it never surrenders to a common essence and so can take place.
The Abstraction of the Greeks
The debt and responsibility toward what thus withholds itself in any heritage will become clearer once we focus on the irreducible remainder in the double memory of Europe, in particular, within its Greek memory. But before exemplifying through a close reading of several pages of “Faith and Knowledge” such remainders within what the Greeks bestowed on Europe, I take this also as an opportunity to point out that Greek thought has been a persistent concern of Derridean thought, largely neglected by his commentators and critics who (myself included) have paid much more attention to his debates with thinkers such as Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. Undoubtedly, since we are addressing here the question of the memory of Europe, one aspect of which is philosophy, the Greeks will obviously enjoy a privileged status in our discussion.
Messianicity and Faith in “Faith and Knowledge”
Indeed, in the context of his elucidation in “Faith and Knowledge” of the notion of the “most barren and desert-like” abstraction, two names are invoked, the Greek name “khōra,” and the Jewish name of the “messianic.” We must first reconstruct, at least in a very succinct manner, the arguments that impel the invocation of these two names. While wondering how to think about religion today, in an enlightened, and tolerant way, and, in a way similar to Kant, within the limits of reason alone, that is, in the sense of a religion “which, without again becoming ‘natural [that is, pagan] religion’ would today be effectively universal” (FK, 6), is distinct from all the other abstract spaces that are the Island, the Promised Land, and the Desert of the revelations of historical religions.
The Legacy of Derrida: “Tolerance”
Like “the messianic without messianicity” in one part of the double memory of Europe, khōra in its Greek part is an immemorial remainder that withdraws from what it renders possible. According to “Faith and Knowledge,” “this Greek noun [khōra] says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory, even by our ‘Greek’ memory: it says the immemoriality of a desert in the desert of which it is neither a threshold nor a mourning” (FK, 20), khōra is the “Greek name” (FK, 21), and thus a name we have at our disposal for something that is not Greek anymore but universalizable. Consequently, if there is any privilege associated with the Greek idiom is it not for the fact that Greek language has a reserve of names for that which resists all nonuniversalizable idioms, and which articulates something that, in principle, is shareable by all traditions?
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| khōra | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| messianic | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| pharmakon | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| unconditional | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Faith and the surrounding claim
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1925 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1980 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1990 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1999 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 2000 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Heidegger | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Husserl | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Kant | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Restance, not leftover scraps
Rodolphe Gasché answers "what remains of Derrida?" by refusing a remainder (reste) as leftover part of a vanished whole (LI, 52). What matters is restance: remaining as structural withholding inside heritage, especially Europe's *double memory'z13a',['Europe double memory'],[['Greek: khōra'],['Jewish: messianic'],['Restance vs reste']],['Tolerance as legacy'],'Gasché: immemorial')
Tolerance as legacy
Gasché's closing pressure: Part I thus ends on heritage as unfinished responsibility rather than school doctrine.
The Abstraction of the Greeks
The debt and responsibility toward what thus withholds itself in any heritage will become clearer once we focus on the irreducible remainder in the double memory of Europe, in particular, within its Greek memory. But before exemplifying through a close reading of several pages of “Faith and Knowledge” such remainders within what the Greeks bestowed on Europe, I take this also as an opportunity to point out that Greek thought has been a persistent concern of Derridean thought, largely neglected by his commentators and critics who (myself included) have paid much more attention to his debates with thinkers such as Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. Undoubtedly, since we are addressing here the question of the memory of Europe, one aspect of which is philosophy, the Greeks will obviously enjoy a privileged status in our discussion.
Messianicity and Faith in “Faith and Knowledge”
Indeed, in the context of his elucidation in “Faith and Knowledge” of the notion of the “most barren and desert-like” abstraction, two names are invoked, the Greek name “khōra,” and the Jewish name of the “messianic.” We must first reconstruct, at least in a very succinct manner, the arguments that impel the invocation of these two names. While wondering how to think about religion today, in an enlightened, and tolerant way, and, in a way similar to Kant, within the limits of reason alone, that is, in the sense of a religion “which, without again becoming ‘natural [that is, pagan] religion’ would today be effectively universal” (FK, 6), is distinct from all the other abstract spaces that are the Island, the Promised Land, and the Desert of the revelations of historical religions.
Additional thread
The Legacy of Derrida: “Tolerance”
Like “the messianic without messianicity” in one part of the double memory of Europe, khōra in its Greek part is an immemorial remainder that withdraws from what it renders possible. According to “Faith and Knowledge,” “this Greek noun [khōra] says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory, even by our ‘Greek’ memory: it says the immemoriality of a desert in the desert of which it is neither a threshold nor a mourning” (FK, 20), khōra is the “Greek name” (FK, 21), and thus a name we have at our disposal for something that is not Greek anymore but universalizable. Consequently, if there is any privilege associated with the Greek idiom is it not for the fact that Greek language has a reserve of names for that which resists all nonuniversalizable idioms, and which articulates something that, in principle, is shareable by all traditions?
Additional threads
Derrida and Ancient Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle)
Derrida wrote on Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, Plotinus and others, but in the Phaedrus story of Thoth's invention of writing he found key terms for writing, trace, prosthesis, death, memory, survival and inheritance. Naas looks less at "Plato's Pharmacy" (1968) than at works around it and at Derrida's last publications.
Inclusion and exclusion
"Ancient philosophy" is hard to delimit, and Derrida, as an inheritor, read Greek philosophy where it was not explicitly at issue. His single heading might be "the question of inclusion and exclusion": "the Greeks" are delimited by a constitutive exclusion of their others, "the Jew, the Arab, the Christian, the Roman, the German" (WOG, 31). With pharmakon and khōra, what mattered was both the wholly other and how Greek thinkers or their heirs reappropriated or dialectised it. The resistance of "the pharmakon and its semantic oscillation" disrupts the very possibility of a system or corpus: of Plato's oeuvre, the Greek language, the identity of the Greek. We cannot break from Greek origins, nor are we wholly determined by them, since to be Greek means "to bear within us something wholly other than the Greek" (WOG, 28).
Naas: inclusion and exclusion in the Greeks.
Plato's exclusion of writing
References to the Phaedrus run through texts on seemingly unrelated topics, a touchstone for writing, trace, supplementarity and différance. Plato opposes external, literal writing to writing in the soul (276a); literal writing is for "play and amusement" (paidia) against the adult gravity (spoudē) of speech (277e). Writing is like painting (zoographia, 275d): its offspring look alive but "when one questions them, they no longer respond".
More and so less Greek than the Greeks
Derrida does not simply reverse the terms (writing as life and presence, speech as death and absence). He resituates the whole matrix: speech too is a kind of writing, contaminated by difference, secondariness, technology, exteriority. The late Learning to Live Finally (2005) keeps the Phaedrus configuration in view: "Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me... unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing" (LLF, 32-33). But now writing links to survival and inheritance.
Plato’s Exclusion of Writing
However broad and far-reaching Derrida’s reading of the Greeks may have been, touching on questions of language and writing, ontology and epistemology, ethics and politics, and, of course, the question of inclusion and exclusion in all of these domains, the Socratic/Platonic critique of writing stands out. This is evident not only from the fact that Derrida devoted his earliest, longest, and most comprehensive text on Greek thought to it, the 1968 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” but from the fact that implicit and explicit references to this scene from the Phaedrus can be found in a whole series of texts on seemingly unrelated topics from around the same period.
Conclusion: More and So Less Greek than the Greeks Themselves
What Derrida would ultimately do with Plato’s critique of writing is beyond the scope of this essay, indeed its consequences extend, as I have tried to argue, to the limits of deconstruction itself. Suffice it to say that rather than reverse the terms or these relationships and understand writing in terms, for example, of life, presence, memory, originarity, and so on, and speech in terms of death, absence, forgetting, and secondariness, Derrida resituates and rethinks the entire matrix or configuration. He will thus demonstrate not that writing should be privileged over speech but that speech too is a kind of writing and so is compromised or contaminated at the outset by all those things it would attempt to exclude: difference, secondariness, technology, in short, exteriority in general. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, “proceeds” from me, unable to be reappropriated,
Argument path reco
| Term | In recovered threads | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Khōra | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| deconstruction | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| différance | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| khōra | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| pharmakon | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
| trace | Recurs in recovered threads | Hold beside the chapter lede |
Argument path
Time and the surrounding claim
Derrida and Ancient Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) MICHAEL NAAS When reading Derrida on just about any subject, it is not a bad idea to begin by trying to find a place where Derrida himself reflects upon his own relationship to that subject.
| Anchor | Role in recovered text | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1967 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1968 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1972 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1982 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| 1988 | Date recovered in this pass | Anchor chronology |
| Aristotle | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Artaud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Foucault | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Freud | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
| Hegel | Named interlocutor | Track the encounter |
Further recovery p
Inclusion/exclusion and Plato's pharmacy
Mich's Pharmacy" (1968), and the Phaedrus scene of writing, memory, and pharmakon runs from first work to last.
More and so less Greek
Derrida does not simply reverse speech/writing hierarchies (writing as life, speech as death). He resituates the whole matrix. Late formula: "I live my death in writing" (LLF, 32-33). Configuration of writing, trace, death, absence links to survival and inheritance: distance from Plato that is also inheritance from Plato. Aristotle appears alongside as another Greek inclusion/exclusion scene, but the Phaedrus line is the chapter's spine.
Naas: Derrida's Greeks from firs