Insight Editions · No. 60
Derrida on Deconstruction
Barry Stocker
Barry Stocker presents Derrida’s early philosophy, tracing deconstruction’s critique of presence through metaphysics, language, knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics.
A study guide to Derrida on Deconstruction by Barry Stocker. 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
- A topic map, not a commentary. Stocker arranges the early books (IOG, SP, OG, WD, MP, D) under the headings of a philosophy degree and constantly compares Derrida with Frege, Russell, Kripke, Quine, Wittgenstein and Rawls.
- Metaphysics cannot be escaped, only displaced. The tradition privileges presence, origin, voice and the proper; Derrida shows each depends on its supposed opposite (absence, trace, writing, metaphor) without simply reversing the hierarchy.
- Language and mind lose their pure moment. Husserl's expression without indication and the self-present instant both break down into différance, trace and supplement; Austin's performatives fall into iterability.
- Knowledge has no pure origin. Geometry needs writing to become ideal; Structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss) is metaphysics that meets change only as catastrophe.
- Values sit between law and excess. Violence and peace (Lévinas), sovereignty (Bataille, Hegel), the ends of man and the gift all show the same double structure.
- Philosophy is inside metaphor. "White mythology", Mallarmé, Jabès and Artaud make aesthetics central and justify Derrida's style.
- Deconstruction is a double gesture. It overturns and displaces oppositions, has a nostalgic Rousseau pole and an affirmative Nietzsche pole, and Derrida always leans to the empirical, poetic, affirmative side.
Argument map: one critique of presence, worked through six regions of philosophy.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction: Derrida's Life and the Background to His Philosophy | From El Biar to Paris; the Continental and Analytic contexts |
| 2 | Metaphysics | Logocentrism, presence and origin, and why reversal is not enough |
| 3 | Language: Sense and Meaning | Husserl's signs, Saussure, names and Austin's performatives |
| 4 | Consciousness: Intentionality and Perception | The voice that keeps silence and the divided instant |
| 5 | Knowledge: Origin and Structure | Geometry, writing and the limits of Structuralism |
| 6 | Values: Ethics, Sovereignty, Humanism and Religion | Lévinas, Bataille, the ends of man, the gift, Jabès |
| 7 | Metaphor, Literature and Aesthetics | White mythology, force against form, Mallarmé and Artaud |
| 8 | Towards a Definition of Deconstruction | Différance, trace, supplement, play and the double gesture |
How to use this deepened edition
Diagrams map arguments; they do not replace reading the book essays (OG, WD, SP, Margins, Limited Inc).
Map of the eight chapters after deepening.
About this book
Derrida on Deconstruction by Barry Stocker, 2006. 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: Derrida's Life and the Background to His Philosophy
Life
Derrida was born in 1930 in El-Biar, near Algiers, into a prosperous Jewish family in French colonial Algeria. Under the Vichy regime he was excluded from high school in 1941, a minor event beside the Holocaust but bad enough in itself. He went to Paris in 1950 for the khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, entered the École normale supérieure (ENS) in 1952, and spent 1953-54 at the Husserl archives in Louvain, writing a master's thesis on Husserl that appeared only after he was famous (2003).
He taught at the Sorbonne (1960-64), returned to the ENS as lecturer until 1984, and then directed philosophical studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In 1983, at Mitterrand's invitation, he became founding director of the Collège international de philosophie, which has no full-time staff and gives open courses in several languages.
Derrida's early career: from colonial Algeria to the three books of 1967.
- First prize. His translation of and long introduction to Husserl's "The origin of geometry" (1961) won a prize.
- American fame. It dates from the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on Structuralism, where he gave "Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences".
- The 1967 breakthrough. Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology all appeared in one year.
- Death. When he died in October 2004, the office of President Chirac, a man of the right, announced it, although Derrida had campaigned for Mitterrand.
Philosophical reputation
Interest in Derrida outside philosophy, in literary and cultural studies above all, has hurt his standing inside it: for some it "proves" he is not a real philosopher. Stocker answers that Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty faced the same charge and are now accepted, and that Derrida is going the same way. Derrida made philosophical remarks about literature but produced no literary or cultural theory; others built those from his work.
The name has become a symbol both for defenders of "radical" culture who have not read him and for attackers who call him a relativist, postmodernist, nihilist or charlatan. Stocker's reply is blunt: Derrida never argues for relativism, postmodernism, nihilism or scepticism, and the polemics that say he does show little knowledge of his texts. The "fashion" has in any case moved on to Deleuze and Lévinas, much as Wittgenstein was once the fashionable name without ceasing to be serious.
Derrida's philosophy: why the first six books
There is no agreed division of Derrida's career as there is for Wittgenstein or Heidegger, but the first six books are more directly philosophical. Stocker builds the guide on them and gives each its abbreviation.
| Abbrev. | Book | French ed. |
|---|---|---|
| IOG | Introduction to the Origin of Geometry | 1961 |
| SP | Speech and Phenomena | 1967 |
| OG | Of Grammatology | 1967 |
| WD | Writing and Difference | 1967 |
| MP | Margins of Philosophy | 1972 |
| D | Dissemination | 1972 |
A new stage begins with Glas (1974), a huge book in parallel columns, Hegel on one side and Jean Genet on the other. "Knell" would have been an adequate English title and would have reduced the air of mystification. Earlier texts already played with form: "Tympan" (MP) in two columns, and "La parole soufflée" and "Ellipsis" (WD), which interleave Edmond Jabès with compressed comments.
Stocker's periodization: the early books as the best way in.
Stocker suspects that in Glas style takes over without adding to the early results. Afterwards the average level drops, through celebrity demand, repeated self-defence and sheer output, though major later works remain: The Truth in Painting, The Politics of Friendship, "Force of law", Of Spirit, Spurs, "Two words for Joyce" and "Ulysses gramophone". The early texts sit closest to standard questions in metaphysics, knowledge, language and mind; the later ones say more about ethics, aesthetics, law and politics.
Why not a book on IOG and SP, the most argumentative texts? Because Husserl also runs through "Genesis and structure" (WD) and "Form and meaning" (MP), and the speech-and-language themes cannot be split from OG and "Plato's pharmacy" (D). Why not OG alone, the best seller? Because it would be artificial to isolate it from WD and SP of the same year, or from "White mythology" and "Signature event context", the essays Analytic readers discuss most.
Analytic and Continental philosophy
One name is a geography, the other a method, and both labels leak. Many founders of Analytic philosophy were Austrian, German or Polish (Frege, Reichenbach, Tarski, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick, Neurath, Hempel, Popper). Husserl corresponded with Frege; Habermas absorbed Analytic work; Peirce, James and Sellars carried Hegel's influence; Wittgenstein read Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger. History of philosophy has been rehabilitated in Analytic departments, while in France the Analytic shift, led by the polemical Pascal Engel, left Derrida feeling isolated at the end.
| Tendency | Analytic | Continental |
|---|---|---|
| Logic | Formal logic central | Hardly appears |
| Paradox | Resolves paradoxes | Arrives at paradoxes |
| Model | Natural science | Aesthetics, subjective experience |
| Style | Neutral, clear | Style shows the argument's movement |
| History | Set aside; old texts read as contemporary | Built in; literary and historical context |
| Self-reflection | Philosophy taken as given | Status of philosophy questioned throughout |
| Definition | Explicit | Indirect, by context and style |
These are tendencies, not absolutes. Derrida is typically Continental, yet he treats problems that Analytic philosophy also treats, so he cannot be fully understood without that comparison. His own Analytic reading was thin: J.L. Austin is the only Analytic philosopher who appears much, but he starts from Husserl, whom Analytic philosophers have taken up.
Derrida's main coordinates in the history of philosophy.
The central issue is overcoming metaphysics, a Nietzschean and Heideggerian goal also pursued by early Analytic philosophy. Hegel matters because his exhaustive system reveals the limits of system; Husserl because his pure description of experience reveals metaphysics persisting in it. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant appear to constitute metaphysics and its self-contradictions. Of the French, Derrida mostly mentions Sartre as a misreader of Heidegger; Bachelard and Canguilhem, Bataille, Foucault, Lévinas and Blanchot all matter.
Beyond core philosophy, Rousseau is tied to Saussure's linguistics and Lévi-Strauss's anthropology: Structuralism claims to be non-metaphysical but, for Derrida, carries metaphysics inherited from Rousseau, Descartes and Plato. Freud grows in importance as a challenge to a mind transparent to itself. Literature means Mallarmé above all, with Lautréamont, Valéry, Proust, Joyce, Borges, Jabès and (least) Sollers, writers who test the limits of language, experience and rationality.
Reception, fashion and the Frankfurt School
Stocker notes that forty-four years after the first major publication the fashion had moved toward Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Lévinas, so attackers who still treat Derrida as the fashionable name "have missed the point". Interest outside philosophy, especially in the United States through literature and cultural studies programmes, outpaced departmental philosophy in France for a time; that geography does not decide philosophical worth, but it explains why some Analytic departments treated him as a cultural-studies import.
The Continental side of the map includes more than Phenomenology. Stocker lists Germany (Husserl, Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas), France (Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Bachelard, Lévinas, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Blanchot, Ricoeur), and Denmark (Søren Kierkegaard). Habermas studied in the United States and brought Analytic work into a Frankfurt School lineage rooted in Adorno; Adorno himself spent the war years in America and was recognized earlier in sociology and cultural theory than in Analytic departments, a pattern Stocker says Derrida later shared.
Two Continental routes Stocker places beside Derrida.
Metaphysics
Paradox and being
Metaphysics begins with the criticism of metaphysics: the first book so named, Aristotle's Metaphysics, attacks Plato's forms. Ancient sceptics (Sextus Empiricus, the Cynics) and medieval Nominalists went further. Derrida belongs to this critical line, defining his aim as confronting the philosophical with the empirical, but he is not a sceptic in the strict sense, which means either denying all knowledge of reality or rejecting most evidence in order to offer something better, as Plato and Descartes did.
Plato's Sophist sets the founding paradox: to say that something is not seems to attribute being to it. Philosophers have usually treated contradiction as the worst danger, since a discourse that produces one either loses the statement or keeps something both true and false. Two views follow: contradictions are produced but can be removed (Plato and most philosophers), or they cannot be removed (Heraclitus, the sceptics). After Kant, for whom pure reason falls into dialectic, many non-sceptics accept the second view: Pascal had already found first principles resting on "reasons of the heart", and Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger made contradiction constitutive.
One paradox in three forms, and the Analytic way of avoiding it.
Bertrand Russell met the same problem on two fronts: sentences about what does not exist, handled by the Theory of Descriptions, and the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, handled by the Theory of Types. Russell himself notes that his paradox is a version of Plato's paradox of non-being and of the Liar ("This statement is false"). Stocker's point is that Russell does not so much solve the paradox as stipulate that we avoid it, revising natural language or mathematics. Quine opens "On what there is" with "Plato's beard"; Walter Benjamin wrote a sharp note on "The paradox of the Cretan".
Derrida too cites Plato's paradox, obliquely, in OG: what grounds Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign is "the thesis of difference as the source of linguistic value", a theme "upon which Plato already reflected in the Sophist". For Plato, escaping the Sophists' claim that whatever is mentioned exists requires a full account of kinds of being and their differences. Saussure repeats the structure of that argument.
The metaphysics of Structuralism
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, compiled from lecture notes after his death, has been overtaken in linguistics by Chomsky but remains influential across the humanities. Derrida explains his own views through commentary, so careless readers confuse his philosophy with the positions he questions.
- Langue and parole. Language as system versus language as one person's use at one moment.
- Synchrony and diachrony. Language as a static system versus language changing over time.
- Signifier and signified. The material phoneme or grapheme versus the concept; and the sign versus its referent.
- Arbitrariness. The link of sign to concept or referent is accidental, so value depends on a system of differences among signs.
- Semiology. Linguistics as the model for a general science of signs (Derrida applies this to Hegel in "The pit and the pyramid").
Structuralism, the movement built on Saussure, included Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes and Kristeva, with analogous work by Derrida's ENS teachers Foucault (The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge) and Althusser (For Marx, Reading Capital). Derrida's doubt about its neutrality resembles Nietzsche's attack on Comte's Positivism: a science of pure facts would undermine causality, laws and continuing objects, the very assumptions of science. A parallel critique met the Vienna Circle, from Wittgenstein's ambiguous Tractatus onward, and the Circle's members soon abandoned pure Positivism.
Derrida calls his work a critique, recalling Kant, and defends philosophy against linguistics claiming to supersede it ("The supplement of copula: philosophy before linguistics"). In OG he writes that phonetic-alphabetic writing is the system "within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced". Saussure's scientific grounding rests on an absolute nature/social opposition taken from Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, which itself repeats Descartes's split of spirit and matter.
Saussure's oppositions: the left term ranks higher each time.
In every metaphysical opposition one term is placed above the other. For Rousseau, language is the social above the natural, which leads to a Platonism of pure ideas against the empirical force of voice and inscription. Any such opposition, Derrida says in MP, affects "the totality of the discourse" systematically, and goes back further than Plato.
The contradiction Derrida finds in Rousseau's origin of language.
The contradiction is unavoidable: there must have been a moment when natural forces became social language, a point both natural and social, which the absolute opposition forbids. Rousseau treats it as a trauma to be denied, and Derrida quotes: "A natural catastrophe conforms to laws in order to overthrow the law." The problem recurs whenever Rousseau uses natural forces to explain differences between languages.
Saussure's other hierarchies are just as Platonic: langue over parole (the one over the many), synchrony over diachrony (stasis over time), and the signified over the signifier (form over sense). The superiority of the concept belongs to Saussure, not to Derrida, who criticizes it, so the charge that Derrida is a linguistic idealist gets him backwards. Anti-realism would not exclude him from Analytic philosophy anyway: Berkeley, Dummett, Mach and the Phenomenalists held versions of it.
What Derrida values in Saussure is difference and the materiality of the signifier. "Tree" means tree because it does not mean an inanimate object, an animal, a bush and so on. Meaning comes from an economy of exchanged values in which no two values can be perfectly exchanged, not even the same value at different times. That economy is material, a play of forces. If Derrida has a metaphysics, it is a mix of process metaphysics, materialism and empiricism: becoming over being, event over structure, difference over identity.
The same Rousseauist metaphysics returns in Lévi-Strauss: "natural man" as pure interiority, living in a present without writing or history (OG II 1). Lévi-Strauss must at least drop Rousseau's solitary primitive, since his fieldwork deals with real societies, but the immediacy of the present remains a deep metaphysical assumption.
Presence: what comes from Heidegger and what does not
For Derrida the history of metaphysics is the history of the absolutely present. The charge that he only restyles Heidegger is "simply wrong". For Heidegger, Being is never what is present; it withdraws, and metaphysics substitutes a present thing for it: essence (Scholastics), idea (rationalists), spirit (German Idealism), production (Marx), will to power (Nietzsche). The argument also covers Empiricism, whose impressions copy Descartes's ideas, though Heidegger thought the Empiricists beneath notice.
Where Derrida parts from Heidegger on presence.
Derrida calls his position "radical empiricism", an echo, intended or not, of William James, but opposes empiricism that treats the immediately given as the real. Like the Pragmatists, shaped by Hegel's stress on context, he can be read as a Hegelian empiricist, to be compared with Sellars, McDowell and Brandom at Pittsburgh and with Quine's holism (Quine, Stocker notes, ignored Continental work except to join "ill-informed" attacks). OG even prefers Peirce's theory of the symbol to Saussure's.
There is no Presence or Being in Derrida except as the impossible and the contradictory. We keep searching for it, as for Kant reason keeps hoping for a metaphysical God. Like nature, Being exists only as the opposite of difference and absence. Heidegger is at most one half of deconstruction, the other being Nietzsche's affirmation of difference, and each is stripped of his metaphysics, of will in one case and of Being in the other.
Husserl and the metaphysics of Phenomenology
"Genesis and structure" (WD) finds the first phase of Phenomenology structuralist because it shuns psychologism and historicism. Husserl's epoché brackets metaphysics, as the Positivists tried to, and seeks pure forms on one side and empirical facts on the other. The Logical Investigations, in dialogue with Frege (anti-psychologism, sense independent of mental association), is now claimed as an Analytic classic, with a preface by Dummett, and feeds mereology.
Derrida's reading of Husserl: anti-metaphysical method, Platonist result.
The ambiguity repeats Kant's: if the categories and regulative ideas are not real objects, what are they? Either psychologism (subjective ideas) or Platonism (abstract objects firmer than empirical ones). Derrida reads Husserl consistently, from IOG through SP, WD and MP, as holding a Kantian-Platonist view of pure ideas in tension with his historical and genetic interests, a tension that anticipates deconstruction. The same logic defeats Benveniste, who turned Aristotle's categories into effects of Greek grammar: replacing an ontological category with a formal one simply creates another ontological category.
Husserl's Phenomenology is also a life-philosophy. The transcendental ego fills every moment of experience, so transcendental purity becomes the life of the human self, and Derrida generalizes: all metaphysics makes consciousness fill nature and give it purpose, and so is caught up in humanism. In IOG, ideality is "at once supratemporal and omnitemporal", features of the Living Present, "the primordial Absolute of all transcendental life".
Metaphysics and language
From IOG onward, metaphysical concepts require writing. The ideal object must stay fixed across languages and expressions, yet it gets that fixity only by entering language, and fixed language means writing, since speech is tied to the moment of utterance. Ideality is then exposed to the historical and intersubjective variations of language, which undermines the Cartesian starting point of consciousness contemplating its present contents. SP names the medium that seems to unify life and ideality: "living speech, the spirituality of the breath as phōnē".
Nietzsche's leaf: why metaphysics lives in all language.
Derrida follows Nietzsche here. Every word abstracts from endless variety: there is a different leaf for every tree and every leaf differs from every other (Leibniz held that indiscernibles are identical). So all language and thought are metaphysical, and no argument can remove the metaphysical, which separates this anti-metaphysics from Pragmatism and Positivism. Derrida drops Nietzsche's charge of nihilism but keeps the priority of the empirical: transcendental force always arises from material forces that contaminate it.
Two other sources matter. Hegel starts like Nietzsche (the name exceeds the thing) but concludes that the name is more real; his constant negation and opposition inspire Derrida, minus the rational whole. Leibniz, often taken for the pure rationalist, criticized Descartes's geometric physics in the name of force; Derrida's "Force and signification" (WD 1) does the same to Structuralist criticism, which reduces a literary text to pure forms. Structuralism repeats Descartes; deconstruction repeats Leibnizian force.
Nietzsche's oppositions recast as inside and outside.
Nietzsche's oppositions (good/evil, real/apparent, true/false) become inside/outside for Derrida, mapped onto being/non-being and presence/absence. In language, speech has been the good inside and writing the bad outside. In the Phaedrus, Socrates says writing is inferior because the speaker is present to clarify, while writing stays inscribed and open to readings with no correction. Rousseau and Saussure put speech first in time and nature; Austin treats the speech act as primary; Husserl privileges inner speech. SP: indication occurs "whenever the sense-giving act ... is not fully present".
Scepticism, Parmenides and the Cogito essay
The sceptical line Stocker traces does not stop at Sextus. Parmenides and Heraclitus already offered arguments that could be read as denying knowledge of reality itself; Plato's constructive scepticism (reject sense evidence for forms) and Descartes's later version open modern philosophy, though Kierkegaard, in Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, already treats the sceptical move in a spirit Stocker calls "rather deconstructive". Derrida's own reading of Descartes is "Cogito and the history of madness" (WD 2), which Stocker flags as relevant to Kierkegaard and returns to in the values chapter: the evil genius is not a disposable stage of method but a permanent possibility inside discourse.
From ancient scepticism to Derrida's Descartes essay.
The Liar Paradox ("This statement is false") sits beside Plato's paradox of non-being and Russell's class paradox as one family. Analytic philosophy often forbids self-reference (Theory of Types) rather than living with the contradiction; Derrida's interest is closer to those who treat contradiction as constitutive of metaphysical discourse.
Phonocentrism, logocentrism and the Searle charge
Stocker separates two claims that critics conflate. Phonocentrism is the ranking of speech over writing as first in time and in nature: Rousseau and Saussure state it openly; Austin treats the speech act as primary; Husserl privileges inner speech. Logocentrism is the deeper neologism of OG: meaning assumed to be centred on logos, present first temporally and logically, with writing secondary. Derrida does not claim that every philosopher preferred speech as a medium for doing philosophy; he claims that philosophy has treated meaning as more stable and closer to intention in speech than in writing. Searle attributes the narrower claim, then attacks it, which Stocker calls a misreading intensified by Searle's role as Austin's doctoral student.
Two layers of the speech/writing critique.
Grammatology, the science of the grammē, acknowledges Leibniz's universal written language and Hegel's absolute system without making writing a more immediate expression of intention than speech. Hegel still starts from inner consciousness; Leibniz's constructed language is not an origin in presence. The point of the title Of Grammatology is precisely that writing and abstract system have been studied, yet the privilege of presence persists.
Deleuze, Guattari and the Foucault quarrel
Stocker places the public quarrels in a Parisian context. Derrida and Foucault fell out after "Cogito and the history of madness", a critical but (by most standards) respectful essay on Madness and Civilisation; Foucault later quarrelled also with Deleuze, after having praised Deleuze and Guattari, and reinterpreted that praise as criticism. Searle's attack on Derrida around Austin is read as a fight over the right to interpret a teacher. These episodes matter for Stocker's defence: the "intellectual terrorism" charge is reciprocal polemic, not a settled scholarly verdict.
Stocker's contextualization of the fights.
Evans, ontology and Husserl's Platonism
John Claude Evans (1991) remains the one book-length scholarly attack. His core charge is that Derrida invents ontology in Husserl. Stocker's reply is double. First, specialists always say this of generalists (Russell on Leibniz, Strawson on Kant, Kripke on Wittgenstein), and Derrida quotes more carefully than those Analytic commentaries do. Second, Husserl's Ideas openly calls itself Platonist about abstract objects: anti-psychologistic structures of judgement need a reality outside the mind and outside physical objects. Logical Investigations already discusses objects, parts, wholes and abstractions that are "unavoidably ontological". To insist that Phenomenology has no ontological claims because Husserl said he was bracketing them is to confuse an author's programme with what the text does.
Why Evans's "no ontology" premise fails for Stocker.
Derrida's real claim concerns logocentrism, not a tally of philosophers praising speech: meaning has been assumed to come first, in time and in logic, in speech. Grammatology, the science of the grammē, acknowledges Leibniz's universal language and Hegel's absolute system, but neither treats writing as closer to intention.
| Philosopher | Where truth is made present |
|---|---|
| Plato | Dialectical speech |
| Descartes | Clear and distinct ideas |
| Hegel | Absolute spirit |
| Austin | The situation of an utterance |
| Heidegger | Being, or the difference of Being and beings |
Heidegger's onto-theology names the reduction of Being to a concept; for Derrida even Heidegger stays logocentric, because there is no place of truth at all. That is less exotic than it sounds: deflationary theories of truth in Analytic philosophy say much the same. On the redundancy theory, "true" adds nothing; on another view it is a predicate with rules of use but no definition; on a third it is an undefined primitive. Rorty moved from Analytic philosophy to Derrida on this basis.
Language: Sense and Meaning
Names
The title echoes Frege's "On sense and meaning" (Sinn and Bedeutung), usually rendered sense and reference. Derrida never joins that literature directly, but Husserl's Logical Investigations ("Investigation I. Expression and meaning") brings him onto the same ground: indication, expression, meaning content, the status of the name. OG supplies the key text: the proper name "is always caught in a chain or a system of differences"; "Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name"; "The proper meaning does not exist, its 'appearance' is a necessary function".
Spacing names the way any sign must appear in a unity of time and space. No perception occurs in an isolated instant, and none can be identified apart from its place in the spatial field. So Saussure's absolute split of synchrony and diachrony fails: even reading a table of signs takes a minimum of conscious duration, and the differences between signs are themselves conditioned by spacing.
Why the proper name is naming at its most ambiguous point.
The proper name is therefore not an immediate unity of sign and bearer: the bearer is absent from the word, and the name gives the strongest examples of vagueness and contextuality. It is the point where ambiguity and determinacy coincide. Showing that the conditions of possibility are the conditions of impossibility is the typical deconstructive strategy.
| Theorist | Proper names |
|---|---|
| Frege | Refer uniquely through an indefinite sense; logical language should fix it; in a sentence, reference passes to the whole (its truth value) |
| Russell | Disguised definite descriptions, replaceable by variable plus description (Quine extended this to all names); "logically proper names" are demonstratives: "this", "that", "I" |
| Wittgenstein | Reference fixed by an indefinite cluster of descriptions; no exact point at which the name names |
| Kripke | Rigid designators without descriptive content, linked by a causal chain to an "initial baptism"; same object in all possible worlds |
| Derrida | Kripke's anti-descriptivism plus Wittgenstein's contextualism: proper in one aspect of use, improper in others |
Derrida, in Stocker's reconstruction, accepts that proper names really designate without description: my name includes no description of me. He rejects Russell's logically proper names as an unnecessary logical-metaphysical assumption, much as Wittgenstein did, yet finds them instructive as a case of total contextuality: "this" or "I" can refer to anything in the right context. Any act of naming is proper, aimed at one thing or kind, and also improper, since nothing guarantees that the same name has not been applied to other things.
Fictions, context and contradictions
SP draws the decisive consequence: because "every sign whatever is of an originally repetitive structure", the distinction between fictitious and effective use is threatened, and "The sign is originally wrought by fiction." Iterability (repeatability; Derrida links iter to a Sanskrit root meaning "other") is the condition of meaning: a word means only if it can be used again with the same meaning, a point Wittgenstein also makes. In iteration semantics and syntax are inseparable, and repetition is also ontological, since objects keep their identity, and types exist, through repetition.
Austin's first distinction, later folded into one sentence.
In How to Do Things with Words, J.L. Austin contrasts constative (descriptive) and performative sentences, which act on the social world: promising, betting, naming a ship, the words of a wedding. He then replaces the contrast with locution, illocutionary force and perlocutionary force as aspects of the same sentence. Derrida likes the move from an external distinction between sentence types to an internal distinction within a sentence, since inside and outside can never be cleanly divided, and he likes the way the performative ties world and language together.
Austin's contextualism continues an Analytic trend: sentence context in Frege and Russell, language as a whole in Wittgenstein, use and utterance in Strawson, a holism rooted in Pragmatism and in Hegel. Tarski's formal semantics is holist too, partly to block the Liar. For Hegel, context moves meaning toward the absolute; for Derrida it reveals language as "a network of incomplete and contradictory fragments". Quine finds sentences fully determinate only at two extremes: pure logic and reports of stimulation.
Fiction has moved toward the centre of the field. Frege gave fictional names sense without reference. Strawson's Individuals makes identification depend on stories, including other people's, which implicitly gives reality a fictional structure. Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference) explores the interruptions of reference, and Putnam's "The meaning of 'meaning'" doubts that we know what we mean. The difference is that reference is central for Evans and never mentioned by Derrida, so Derrida is not pushed toward scepticism by its failure.
Iterability turns Austin's excluded cases into the condition of success.
Austin requires a successful performative to be sincere, which means reading the speaker's mind and seeing whether the implied contract is later kept. Derrida asks whether the risk of failure is a ditch outside language or "its internal and positive condition of possibility", and concludes that "a successful performative is necessarily an 'impure' performative". We are usually confident in practice about what is fiction or quotation, but never with logical certainty: any utterance could be a citation, a performance or quiet irony, a para-citation feeding on its host.
Undecidability here is both indeterminacy and contradiction: the sentence is never clearly on one side of the opposition, and it is equally true that it is serious and not serious. Deconstruction in large part means facing the contradiction rather than trying to eliminate it. The concept of the sentence is contradictory, since it must both convey meaning and fail to, and be what it is and not what it is across contexts. Wittgenstein's language games might seem to split meanings into separate uses, but they overlap, and Derrida has no such separation at all.
"The double session" (D) shows the same contradiction at the limit of language in Mallarmé, whose Symbolism treats the word as an entity. Derrida dwells on the hymen, which Mallarmé plays on as membrane and as marriage, and on eruptions of the non-verbal (death, orgasm, the sneeze). Critics call this verbal play in place of argument, but writing at the limits of language has precedents in Frege, who admits basic concepts allow no further justification, and in both of Wittgenstein's main books. The stress on the body at the limit also tells against the charge of linguistic idealism, as do "Différance" and "Freud and the scene of writing".
The sender-receiver model as Derrida undoes it, for speech and writing alike.
The sender-receiver model of communication has pragmatic uses but cannot be a first principle. Introspection is delayed in time, so the message was never a pure copy of a transparent intention; it can be delayed, lost or diverted; the sender can die; and sender and receiver interpret in different contexts. All of this holds for speech as much as writing, so asking the speaker what he meant is less helpful than the Phaedrus assumed. This is no scepticism about consciousness or meaning, only the claim that meaning depends on the possibility of contradiction, which the Liar has suggested to many philosophers.
Metaphorical and private language
"White mythology" (MP) argues that metaphor cannot be excluded from philosophy, including Aristotle's, which opposes literal saying to metaphorical comparison and treats philosophy's metaphors as dead. What in Aristotle escapes metaphor? Knowledge as clarification, but that rests on a metaphor of light. Naming itself requires catachresis, a turning of the word toward what it is not essentially linked to; the definition that ties a name to an object involves language as a whole. Imitation in the Poetics is both natural resemblance and non-reduplicating analogy, an undecidable structure that conditions the name.
"White mythology": the sun at the centre of Aristotle's theory of metaphor.
Derrida centres on the sun: for Aristotle the proper name with a unique referent, "the father of all figures", and in Plato the symbol of what illuminates the forms. Yet Aristotle notes that the sun is out of sight at night, so the model of clear naming rests on something partly hidden and uncertain. The name lacks the dialectical definition Aristotle's metaphysics needs, and Derrida traces this back to Plato's treatment of myth, rhetoric and art as concealing truth yet necessary to it.
"Signature event context": writing must work in the absence of every addressee.
The search for absolute grounds leads to Husserl's solitary mental life ("Meaning as soliloquy", SP 2) and back to Austin. "Signature event context" imagines a cipher known to only two people: after both die, the mark is still writing, because its identity depends on iterability in the absence of every empirical subject. "There is no code ... that is structurally secret"; all writing must function in "the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee", a break in presence, the possible "death" of the addressee. What holds for writing holds for all language and all consciousness, so consciousness is better modelled on writing than the reverse.
Against Austin, Derrida argues that inner sincerity explains nothing, since public codes are at stake; the only ground of the performative is the speaker's proper name as signature. Husserl must put a pre-expressive intention beneath expression, making communication a copy of inner monologue, in the tradition of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume that Austin's sincerity condition still belongs to. The parallel is Wittgenstein's private language argument, aimed at the Cartesian primacy of inner representation, Russell's logically proper names and Phenomenalism (sense data, qualia, sensibilia): private words would say nothing that public words do not, since they too must be usable and repeatable in public language games.
Supplement, pharmakon and the Rousseau archive
Stocker's Chapter 3 (language) rests on two long readings: Rousseau in Of Grammatology and Plato in "Plato's Pharmacy" (Dissemination). Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages and the Confessions treat writing as a dangerous supplement that both completes and threatens nature. Nature already lacks what it needs; the supplement reveals that lack. Plato's Phaedrus treats writing as pharmakon: remedy and poison at once. Neither text is an optional illustration. They are the places where Derrida shows that the metaphysical hierarchy (nature/culture, speech/writing, medicine/poison) undoes itself inside the canonical argument.
Two archives Stocker treats as core, not ornament.
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics gives the structuralist model of the sign: signifier/signified, arbitrary relation, value by difference. Derrida accepts the differential insight and presses it until the signified can no longer sit outside the play of differences. Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss extend the model into poetry and anthropology; Austin and Searle into speech-act theory. Stocker's point is that Derrida is inside these debates, not dismissing linguistics for a literary gesture.
Iterability and the signature
The signature is supposed to be the mark of a unique presence. Derrida shows that a signature only works if it can be repeated and recognized when the signer is absent. That is iterability: the same structure that makes writing able to function without the author also makes every utterance, spoken or written, open to citation, parody and misunderstanding. Austin tries to quarantine "non-serious" uses; Derrida treats the quarantine as evidence that the serious case already depends on the possibility of the non-serious.
How the signature argument undercuts presence.
Consciousness: Intentionality and Perception
The mental and the material
Wittgenstein helps less here, because his view of mind leans toward observable behaviour. The best comparison is Merleau-Ponty, though Derrida says little about him. After IOG, Derrida's discussions of consciousness run mainly through psychoanalysis (Freud, then Lacan, Abraham and Torok) rather than Phenomenology, and never through Analytic philosophy of mind.
Stich's backhanded tribute names one real feature of deconstruction: uncovering tacit theories, which Derrida calls metaphysical, and seeing what a field looks like without them. Stich's own target is folk psychology: Eliminativism would replace "intention", "belief" and "will" with a materialist language of brain events, a hard-science Naturalism dominant in Analytic philosophy since the late 1960s. Derrida's critique of Positivism (and of Benveniste) applies to that reduction of philosophy to science, yet his use of Freud puts him partly with Naturalism, and Wittgenstein and Nietzsche can both be read either way.
"Freud and the scene of writing" (WD 7) brings writing into the mind as repetition with no present origin, linked to trace, deferral and Freud's nachträglich: the unconscious shows itself only as after-work, never in original form. We have a memory of the event, not the event, and not even the memory's original form. In ordinary German the word also means additional or supplementary.
Derrida's reading of Freud's deferred action.
"There is no present text in general, and there is not even a past present text": the unconscious is "a wave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united", archives "always already transcriptions". Writing and printing serve as models because both copy unseen originals. Yet Derrida also stresses Freud's metaphysics: a lurking presence of truth in the unconscious, and the assumption that temporalization belongs to consciousness. Properly read, Freud points to time as after-work, every moment "already an effect of itself", which links Derrida to Heidegger (Being and Time, revised in "Time and being").
The other reference is Nietzsche: Freud's language of neurological psychic forces recalls Nietzsche's breakup of the mind into forces that are all physical in the end, and the eliminativist materialism Stich discusses. WD 213: psychic writing is "a single energetic system"; "Here energy cannot be reduced; it does not limit meaning but rather produces it", and the force/meaning distinction "is derivative in relation to an architrace".
Force before meaning: Derrida's quasi-materialist reading of Freud.
Consciousness undeniably exists, but, like the eliminativists, Derrida denies it can be explained by what is present in conscious thoughts. Its contents emerge from, or in Analytic terms supervene on, material properties, words that cover a hard philosophical jump. Since he says much about what goes on in consciousness and treats mental and physical events as identical but differently described, Stocker places him with the moderate Eliminativists.
Self-consciousness
SP finds Phenomenology "tormented ... from within" by its own descriptions of temporalization and intersubjectivity. Both reveal "an irreducible nonpresence" with constituting value: the passage from retention to re-presentation in constituting a repeatable temporal object, and the passage through appresentation of the alter ego, which makes ideal objectivity possible. Derrida reads Freud's material forces above any sovereignty of words in consciousness (a likely jab at Lacan), which again refutes linguistic idealism.
Some say Derrida borrowed unacknowledged terms from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He under-credits Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty more so, but the real issue is the opacity of consciousness. Sartre's bad faith (taking oneself as a fixed in-itself rather than an open for-itself) anticipates anti-representationalism, best seen in Hubert Dreyfus's use of Heidegger. Yet Sartre still assumes a transparent consciousness as moral ideal, in a moralistic tone with roots in Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard.
Two French precedents; Derrida is closer to Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception keeps praising Sartre while moving away from any transparent consciousness behind bad faith. Using Husserl's sedimentation, Gestalt psychology, clinical cases and occasionally the brain, he describes consciousness as figure, background and horizon, continuous with body and world. The Visible and the Invisible drops the psychology and finds an origin never fully available, which he calls "flesh", while rejecting Sartre's absolute in-itself/for-itself split.
Derrida develops these claims in his own terms, drawing on Hegel, Heidegger, Freud and above all Lévinas. In Totality and Infinity, the self can never be absolute because it is always related to an outside that transcends it, God and the face of the Other, in an ethical relation. (Otherwise than Being came after Derrida's "Violence and metaphysics" and reacts to it.) Against Husserl's pure soliloquy, Derrida argues there is no consciousness that does not contain the outside, and all its perceptions are conditioned by time and death.
SP 54: why "I am immortal is an impossible proposition".
Hegel is one source. His dialectic negates each particular judgement, and since judgements are acts of consciousness, negation means consciousness aware of its own possible death. Derrida drops the Idealism: a judgement exceeds any state of consciousness because it is repeatable by many minds and is the product of force and material apparatus. Only Platonism removes particular force, which is why Husserl needed it for the transcendental ego, as Frege needed it to separate the proposition from the empirical sentence.
For Derrida the subject might die before grasping any state of its consciousness. Husserl was right that there is an inner monologue, but no instant grasp of it: origin and reception never coincide, so the monologue is always a dialogue, an intersubjective communication, as Hegel's divided self-consciousness also suggests. Heidegger's Being-towards-death, death as the non-relational possibility most authentic for Dasein, matters too, but Derrida rejects Dasein and authenticity as a metaphysics of human essence ("The ends of man"). Blanchot adds literature as the place where the self is dying, at the limit marked by death, night and the neutral.
Time, retention and the blink of an eye
Being and Time makes time the horizon of Being and rejects time as a series of now-points in favour of a fusion of past, present and future oriented to the future; "Time and being" later adds space and appropriation. Derrida takes the critique of now-points but not the priority of the future, siding with the later Heidegger on that point and rejecting the attachment to Being or Presence.
SP 65-66: the other admitted into the instant.
SP 65-66 shows that once we admit the continuity of now and not-now in primal impression and retention, "nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye." The difference between retention and reproduction, primary and secondary memory, is not the radical difference Husserl wanted between perception and non-perception. Experience always includes memory in a minimal form, so a pure living present is impossible.
Self-awareness fails in the same way. Husserl's transcendental ego differs from the empirical ego by nothing determinable, which suggests the ego "as absolute spectator" is "but a theoretical image and metaphor"; "no language can cope" with it. Consciousness must represent its moments to itself, so it is always already in language, and the self relates to itself by naming itself.
Why "I" can only attach to the self by metaphor.
"I" is both the most proper name, given by the self within itself, and the most universal, with no content but its context: a shifter, demonstrative or indexical. It is therefore the improper proper name, attached by metaphor. It applies only across moments through retention, the named state has passed by the time "I" names it, and "I" could die in the act. As "Signature event context" argues for any message, sending rests on the possibility of non-arrival.
Stich, naturalism and the moderate Eliminativist reading
Stocker's Chapter 4 on consciousness and subjectivity places Derrida beside Analytic debates that most Continental readers skip. Stephen Stich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (1983) argues that folk psychology may be a false theory whose terms (belief, desire) will drop out of a mature science. Stocker does not claim Derrida is a Stich-style Eliminativist. He claims a moderate reading: Derrida's critique of presence and of the transcendental subject weakens the claim that intentional vocabulary is a secure foundation, without requiring that every intentional ascription is false. The naturalist temptation (reduce mind to physics or biology) and the transcendental temptation (secure mind as pure presence) both fail for related reasons: both treat meaning as grounded in something that escapes the play of traces.
Stocker's moderate place for Derrida beside Stich.
Nachträglichkeit, Augenblick and the time of the subject
Freud's Nachträglichkeit (deferred action, après-coup) is Stocker's bridge between Psychoanalysis and Derrida. An event gains its traumatic or formative force later, when a second scene rewrites the first. Husserl's Augenblick (blink of an eye, the living present) was meant to secure a moment of pure presence. Derrida's reading of Husserl (Speech and Phenomena) shows that the living present already contains retention and protention, so the "blink" is already a trace structure. Stocker links this to the claim that subjectivity is constituted in time rather than given as a point of presence.
Time undermines the pure subject of presence.
Materialist and naturalist readings of Derrida sometimes collapse him into a physicalist programme. Stocker resists that. The critique of presence does not hand the mind to physics; it refuses both the Cartesian theatre and the naive hope that a completed neuroscience will restore presence under another name. The subject remains a practical and textual effect, not a substance and not a disposable illusion.
Knowledge: Origin and Structure
Objects of knowledge
Derrida says almost nothing about the physical sciences; apart from geometry in IOG, his concern is social and linguistic science, especially in OG. What he finds in Husserl is that knowledge needs both origin and structure, which oppose and depend on each other, leaving knowledge in "perpetual equivocation". IOG 33-34 notes that Husserl's architectonic is "not so linear" and that "it is difficult to recognize the starting point".
In "The origin of geometry", Husserl relates geometry's origin in ideal structures to its genesis in history. Some historical event or process produced the theorems, yet geometrical objects never appear in time and space: lines without width, points without extension. Their origin is a logical dependence on principles. IOG 59 separates empirical culture, whose validity can date, from the "culture of truth", whose ideality is absolutely normative, impossible without empirical culture yet manifest only through "an irruption of the infinite" within it.
Husserl's geometry: a double origin that never resolves.
Geometry attracts Husserl because its objects are ideal yet representable in perception, in diagrams, which makes it the nearest science to pure Phenomenology. The precedents are old. In the Meno, Socrates leads a slave boy through a proof to show knowledge is recollection; Kant grounds geometry in the forms of intuition; Descartes, Spinoza and Pascal took geometry as the paradigm of knowledge.
Pascal's paradox at the foundation of the purest science.
Pascal anticipates Derrida: first principles cannot be proved by geometry, which assumes them, nor by anything purer, so they are known only as self-evident, and any attempt at justification falls into a circle or an infinite regress. This answers Descartes's clear and simple ideas. Pascal's way out, "reasons of the heart", is absent in Derrida, but knowledge emerging from paradox is present, and with it the idea that knowledge begins when an idea is adopted without complete justification. Derrida adds what Pascal lacked: geometry's history, which, like its ideality, infects it with a human perspective.
Theories of knowledge and the epistemological break
In standard terms Derrida, like Pascal, criticizes Foundationalism (knowledge from indubitable contents of consciousness). His point applies equally to Coherentism (ideas that cohere) and Pragmatism (ideas that work): all are caught between pure ideas and the empirical conditions in which ideas arise.
The "epistemological break" from Bachelard to Derrida.
The French precedents share the epistemological break (the English OG says "breach"). Bachelard coined it for post-Einstein physics, which builds the observer into the object and breaks the materialist/idealist contrast. Canguilhem took the object of science to be concepts created by scientific reason, studying shifts in biology and medicine; Althusser, Bachelard's student and teacher of Foucault and Derrida, split an early humanist Marx from a later scientific one. Foucault prefaced Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological and used the break in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The parallel in America is Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions: paradigms so different they are incommensurable, every test belonging to a system.
"The linguistic circle of Geneva" (MP), a near summary of OG, adds the paradox. Instituting a science is an epistemological break, "there being no assurance that the stated intention to 'break' has such an effect". And the break in linguistics mirrors its object: if speech "owes its form to natural causes alone", those causes "naturally inaugurate an order radically heterogeneous to the natural order", a natural force breaking with nature within nature. Writing more "external" history of science would not help; the epistemological break, like the relation of structure and origin, is an unavoidable paradox repeated however much detail we add.
The title also means a circle: tradition and language, thought and language, society and language "each precede the other". The vicious circle, however, gives the field a closed, original autonomy. Post-Kantian thinkers, Hegel (Preface to the Phenomenology) and Fichte (Science of Knowledge), accepted such circles; Heidegger, Being and Time §32, holds that the circle of seeing something as something is not vicious. The problem goes back to Plato's Meno and Theaetetus, and Kierkegaard pressed it in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Internal and external knowledge
Speaking of an architectonic casts doubt on a Kantian model of knowledge that persists in early Foucault: the Foucauldian version is more historical but still equivocates between facts and pure structures. Two terms run through the reading of Husserl. The double reduction: phenomena reduced to pure ideas and to the original empirical ideas in which they appear, two moves that are not obviously consistent. And iterability, repetition with a suggestion of otherness.
The paradox of iterability inside Husserl's pure ideas.
The pure idea exists only as the infinite repetition of a finite idea; but an infinitely repeatable idea already has infinite scope, so no idea is merely finite and the empirical world is obliterated. Geometry shows it concretely: someone must once have had its principles as finite intuitions of examples, yet as principles they are infinite, and every new principle raises the same question. Geometry also has sedimented layers, emerges intersubjectively in communicable language (recall the critique of the secret code), and needs writing, while Husserl's Phenomenology requires its origin in inner consciousness, a demand destructive for all knowledge.
Kant's two lines and the Internalism-Externalism debate.
This anticipates the Internalism/Externalism debate in Analytic philosophy, which Derrida probably never read. His middle point is not a compromise but the place where opposites require each other: no inner ideas without external facts as source, no facts without ideas to make sense of them. Kant mediated between dogmatic Rationalism (concepts, understanding) and sceptical Empiricism (intuitions, imagination) from the Internalist side, keeping things-in-themselves and a soul. Derrida mediates from the Externalist side: deconstruction challenges the transcendental from the empirical, and he praises a liaison between Nietzsche and "English thought".
OG 19 credits Nietzsche with "the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos", placing Hegel and Heidegger on the Internalist side. McDowell's approval of Rorty's partly Derridean Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature shows the comparison is not far-fetched. Finally, pure Ideas carry a teleology: they exist only in human consciousness, so science becomes the historical self-discovery of transcendental humanity, and Husserl's transcendentalism turns into a humanist historicism.
Knowledge without a centre
In "Structure, sign and play", Lévi-Strauss seeks a complete description of myths and meets a totality without a centre. WD 279: the centre, inside or outside, archē or telos, lets repetitions and substitutions be read from a history of meaning whose origin "may always be reawakened" or end anticipated "in the form of presence", so "any archaeology, like that of any eschatology", seeks "a full presence which is beyond play".
Why every centred structure is unstable.
The centre must be part of and separate from the system it orients, so it could be fully present only in an eschatological limit, the end of time when God's word is fully present, and with it the end of all differentiated experience. This is impossible, yet thought keeps aiming at it, trying to abolish the difference between itself and its object.
Two ways Lévi-Strauss's system loses its centre.
Lévi-Strauss loses the centre twice. He admits the nature/culture distinction cannot be justified but keeps it as an operational tool. And he cannot separate the theory of myth from myths: the master structure is "the myth of all myths". His contrast between the engineer, with a system of principles, and the bricoleur, who patches evidence together, collapses: if the anthropologist must be a bricoleur, the engineer is one too, and the knower becomes another myth-maker.
A system without a centre, which for Derrida is every system, has a movable focus: names for the centre substitute for one another (essence, form, substance, energy). This is not word-play replacing knowledge. The nostalgia for a natural centre (Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss) can never be satisfied, because signs are always replaceable and never identical with signified or referent. Unlike Wittgenstein's essence-free series of language games, Derrida holds that knowledge cannot escape the urge to a centred totality; yet the presence of the centre would make knowledge redundant. So knowledge is either "the impossible knowledge of the unknown, or the redundant knowledge of what is already known".
"Plato's pharmacy": the equivocal drug at the heart of the Phaedrus.
"Plato's pharmacy" (D) reads the Phaedrus: writing is a pharmakon, a poison to pure thought, but the word also means medicine, and Plato uses it both ways. What he condemns as external is a condition of his own theory of forms: the forms are present in memory from birth only as something "buried deep" and given from outside. Socrates is himself a pharmakon, healer and sorcerer, and the punishment Plato proposes for magic is close to Socrates's own execution. D 119: irony "precipitates out one pharmakon by bringing it in contact with another".
Epistemological break, bricolage and structurality
Stocker's Chapter 5 on knowledge and science tracks Derrida through Althusser, Bachelard, Canguilhem and the Structuralist claim of an epistemological break. Althusser used the break to separate Marx's early humanist writings from the mature science of Capital. Bachelard and Canguilhem treated the history of science as discontinuous: concepts change in ways that make earlier "errors" constitutive of later truth. Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play" (WD) asks what happens when the structurality of structure is thought: the centre that once organized the structure is shown to be a function inside it, not a presence outside it. Lévi-Strauss's bricolage (building with whatever materials are at hand) becomes a model for how myths and sciences work without a final engineering plan.
Break, bricolage and structurality in Ch. 5.
Foundationalist, Sophistic and Socratic options frame Stocker's taxonomy. Foundationalism seeks an unshakeable ground (Descartes, early Husserl). Sophistry (as Plato paints it) treats persuasion without truth. Socratic questioning unsettles grounds without settling into cynicism. Derrida's practice, for Stocker, is closest to a radicalized Socratic move that refuses both the foundation and the cynical shrug. Thomas Kuhn's paradigms appear as a parallel Analytic discussion of discontinuity; Stocker warns against treating Kuhn as a simple ally, since paradigm talk can restore a new kind of community-grounded presence.
Stocker's three options and the Kuhn caution.
Values: Ethics, Sovereignty, Humanism and Religion
Ethics and Lévinas
Sovereignty here means ownership, possession and mastery, including self-mastery, more than law and the state; humanism means man as an ideal set against the animal world. Derrida seems not to have believed in God, but where the absolute arises, God arises "as a name for a space in our world". Lévinas makes ethics first philosophy, a project Hilary Putnam took up in Ethics without Ontology (2004). For Lévinas, Western ontology reduces everything to the oneness of Being, the other to the same, with roots in Descartes and Phenomenology.
Lévinas's ethics is metaphysical but not ontological: the self is transcended by the other, so I cannot describe my experience without exteriority. He draws on Plato's Good in Republic VI, which precedes all forms as the sun illuminates the world, and on Descartes's Third Meditation, where the idea of a perfect being must come from God. The other appears as a face to which I am obliged; even murder leaves me constituted by my relation to it. Ethics exists only in non-violence, where the other is sovereign.
Lévinas's route from Phenomenology to ethics.
Lévinas finds the whole Greek-German tradition violent and judges Buber's I-Thou too centred on the "I" and Kierkegaard a mere priority of subjectivity. Against it he sets a Jewish tradition that puts the other first, as widow, orphan and stranger, where law rests on the face of the other and one may even argue with God. Derrida's reply in WD 89 imagines Lévinas urging "a second parricide" of the Greek father, and asks whether a non-Greek can do it "except by disguising himself as a Greek, by speaking Greek".
For Derrida, ethics built on Good versus Evil belongs with metaphysics' other oppositions (true/false, being/seeming, inside/outside, natural/social). Lévinas reverses inside and outside, which is not enough, since the point is to avoid the hierarchy, not invert it. But inverting a hierarchy can be the first stage of deconstructive strategy, because it shakes metaphysical assumptions and opens ways to resist hierarchy altogether.
The two-step strategy Derrida applies to Lévinas and to identity politics.
Lévinas states no consequentialist, deontological, virtue or intuitionist position; like Kant and Husserl he seeks what precedes particular theories. His transcendental principles are non-violence toward the other and the other's absolute claim on the self. Derrida treats him as he treats Nietzsche and Heidegger: a thinker who tries to stand outside the tradition while working inside metaphysics, making explicit the conflict that philosophy always contained.
"Violence and metaphysics": the core disagreement.
Derrida denies the Greek/Jewish divide: the ethics Lévinas calls Jewish is already in Greek philosophy, and elevating one tradition over the other is itself violence by Lévinas's own standard. Lévinas's reading of Kierkegaard (WD 110-11) imposes on him, hiding the otherness inside Kierkegaard's subjectivity. And any relation changes both terms, so every relation involves force and violence; a philosophy of peace "can only be violence against violence". WD 146-48: "pure non-violence ... is a contradictory concept"; "Violence appears with articulation"; "One never escapes the economy of war."
The same structure appears in Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss, who assume natural non-violence in "primitive" peoples living wholly in the present, with language and writing as violence on nature. OG 184 links imagination to the anticipation of death: "the image is a death or (the) death is an image", and the subject's property is "the movement of that representative expropriation".
Sovereignty
Consciousness has the external inside it because that is what memory is: language depends on retained meanings. Hence the fear of evil inside ourselves: Descartes's demon means we cannot be sure our thoughts come from within, and Plato's pharmakon makes memory both medicine and poison to the psyche. Lévinas reverses Plato by valuing exteriority, but still assumes an ethical purity. Nature fares no better: good and evil presuppose society, history and writing, so the good is projected back into nature.
Derrida on Rousseau: why nature cannot be the pure source.
Rousseau's sovereignty must come from a natural origin, the emergence of community from nature, yet he also holds that man born free is everywhere in chains and that freedom comes only from social laws. "The linguistic circle of Geneva" traces the same regretful tone to Saussure, for whom writing deviates from natural speech and social humanity is alienated from itself.
Hegel's master and slave, as read in WD 9.
"From restricted to general economy: a Hegelianism without reserve" (WD 9) reads Bataille on Hegel's lordship and bondage, the passage behind Sartre, Marx's class struggle and Nietzsche's master and slave moralities. Self-consciousness splits, meets another consciousness as a threat, and fights a battle to the death for recognition; the one who fears death most becomes the slave, whose labour keeps dialectic and history moving. WD 260: "in betting for discourse, meaning, history, etc., Hegel has bet against play", blind to the fact that "meaning is a function of play".
Bataille against Hegel, and Derrida between them.
Bataille criticizes the slave's victory as the triumph of negativity over individual sovereignty. From Marx and anthropology he takes potlatch: economies that destroy or give away surplus, an economy without reserve. Derrida, linked to small revolutionary groups as a student but no Marxist later, uses general economy to think consciousness and language without reducing them to fixed concepts. The ethical implication is that self-mastery beats slavery, and Bataille's evil as transgression can even be emancipation.
The celebration is not straightforward. Derrida sets Nietzsche against Rousseau's nostalgia for nature and Heidegger's nostalgia for Being as two poles that need each other: without the possibility of pure presence there is no meaning or communication, so there can be no pure gift, no economy with no reserve, and no absolute sovereignty. WD 252: laughing at Hegelianism "calls for an entire 'discipline'", knowing the philosopher's ruses, before laughter "bursts out".
Religion
Whatever the truth about God, there is a limit to rationality, and Descartes's demon marks it. Against Foucault's Madness and Civilisation, Derrida holds that Foucault still separates madness and sanity absolutely; the logical possibility of madness cannot be removed from consciousness. The anxiety of a structure without a centre echoes Pascal's infinite sphere with no centre. Derrida's philosophy is thoroughly agnostic: it neither affirms nor excludes God, the Devil or religion, and asks what it is like to stand at the limit of reason and law. WD 297: "The centre was the name of a hole", and "the name of a man, like the name of God", names what was raised up in it.
Reading Jabès: law, poetry and the absolute.
The most religious texts are "Edmond Jabès and the question of the book" (WD 3) and "Ellipsis" (WD 11). Jabès joins poetry and law in the Jewish tradition of the Torah and its commentaries. If interpretation itself needs interpretation, no reading releases the "naked truth": there is no original meaning that comes first or dominates. Law seems literal and poetry metaphorical, but law is a hierarchy resting on a legitimacy at once particular and universal, and poetry's words are sensory and particular yet must mean universally. Both point to the absolute, traditionally God, and cannot be explored without the possibility of an absolute being at the origin.
Humanism
Nietzsche saw that humanity as the source of all values is another version of God. "The ends of man" (MP) tests the three H's against that charge. In Husserl, pure ideas make human consciousness orient all knowledge and history, a humanist teleology that repeats Platonism with man in place of God. IOG 115: any society can serve as an example of historicity, but "Europe has the privilege of being the good example", so non-European societies "tend toward non-historicity".
"The ends of man": how anti-humanism ends in metaphysical humanism.
The French readers are the sharpest target, above all Sartre, once a self-declared existentialist humanist, whose reading of Heidegger Heidegger rejected in the "Letter on humanism". Behind Sartre stands Rousseau's human being, set apart by consciousness free of determination. Foucault's "man" as a Renaissance invention coming to an end, displaced by Marxism, psychoanalysis and Structuralism, is partly endorsed. Kant split the empirical and transcendental self; Hegel rejected inner conscience for absolute spirit; Husserl sought pure structures; Heidegger made Dasein more than human consciousness. Each replaced the individual with an ideal man.
Metaphysical humanism suits philosophical nationalism: Hegel and Heidegger claimed special philosophical powers for the German language and nation, and Heidegger's Nazism gives the point a sinister edge. (Derrida's defence of Heidegger as a philosopher brought absurd charges of softness on antisemitism.) The paradigm human has been the white Western male: OG calls phonocentrism Occidentalist for ranking hieroglyphic Egyptian and Chinese ideograms below alphabets; "Plato's pharmacy" shows Plato using and dismissing Egyptian myth; "White mythology" calls philosophy the mythology of the West.
Totality and Infinity, justice and the Judaic thread
Stocker's Chapter 6 on ethics and politics turns on Derrida's long engagement with Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas's Totality and Infinity (1961) sets the face of the Other against the totalizing systems of ontology. Derrida's early essay "Violence and Metaphysics" (WD) both honours and unsettles that claim: language and Greek metaphysics already mediate the "immediate" ethical encounter. Later work (Force of Law, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, The Gift of Death) develops justice as undeconstructible: law can be deconstructed; justice is the demand that exceeds any given law. Stocker stresses that this is not a return to a pure religious foundation. The Judaic and prophetic motifs (including readings of Edmond Jabès) work inside philosophy as interruptions of presence, not as a replacement system.
Lévinas and Derrida on ethics without a pure ground.
Demon, pharmakon and the political archive
The demon and the pharmakon return as political figures: the scapegoat, the drug that heals and poisons the city, the foreigner who is both guest and threat. Stocker links Derrida's readings of Plato, Rousseau and later of hospitality (Of Hospitality) to a politics that cannot purify itself of contamination. Israel, Judaism and the European Enlightenment appear together in Derrida's autobiographical and political texts; Stocker refuses both a Zionist reduction and an anti-Judaic reduction of that material. The point is structural: identity is already marked by the other it excludes.
Political contamination without cynical quietism.
Metaphor, Literature and Aesthetics
The place of literature
OG reads a literary memoir, Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, whose title (the sad tropics) names its nostalgia for "natural" and "primitive" people. Unlike the Structuralist goal of neutral history, the book idealizes the primitive, as Rousseau did, and ties Lévi-Strauss to Montaigne (solitude, Europeans and "cannibals", variable viewpoints; cited at the start of "Structure, sign and play") and Proust (memory, time, redemptive art; in "Force and signification"). The implicit lesson is that aesthetics and poetics are inescapable in any social science, as the appeal to Bachelard's poetics of space beside Husserl's geometry confirms.
The centrality of aesthetics goes back to Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement, which unifies the practical and theoretical. Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lévinas, Gadamer and Deleuze all gave it a major role. In Analytic philosophy aesthetics is subordinate and style a suspect adornment; Wittgenstein is the exception on one side, Husserl on the other. The easiest route from Derrida's aesthetics to his general philosophy is metaphor.
Metaphor
Metaphor involves all of philosophical language: it is the use of natural language in philosophy, and abstract notions always hide a sensory figure. The abstraction is double: the word leaves its sensory origin, then the concept leaves the word's traces behind (MP 210). Tradition values the sensory origin and treats the move to the metaphysical as degradation, hoping to recover the first figure, which it takes for a literal meaning. Philosophy thus rests on a double effacement, and metaphysics uses the words that have taken it furthest.
The double effacement behind every philosophical concept.
Metaphysics is "a white mythology", the Indo-European mythology of logos passing itself off as the universal form of reason (MP 213). Since a concept substitutes for a thing and can be no more than an analogy for it, metaphor invades even the "most natural, universal, real, luminous" exterior of things; the diachronic displaces the synchronic, reversing Saussure. No general classification of metaphor is possible, since any theory of metaphor rests on metaphor. Philosophy treats metaphor as ornament or as "inactive" because the author did not think of it, yet metaphorization is idealization that also brings in time and space.
Two consequences follow, double and contradictory: philosophy cannot dominate its metaphors from outside with a non-metaphorical concept of metaphor, and it cannot dominate the figures inside it. "Metaphor is less in the philosophical text ... than the philosophical text is within metaphor." Being disappears in the metaphors of light, clarity and radiance meant to bring it to presence. A single master metaphor would end metaphor, but metaphor is always plural and articulated by syntax, so it yields a text "not exhausted by meaning".
The two ways metaphor destroys itself.
Metaphor destroys itself in two ways that imitate each other. The first resists dissemination and absorbs metaphor into the proper meaning of Being, carrying the word to a proper ground: the circle of return that has dominated philosophy, where metaphor is "a provisional loss of meaning, which is always recovered". The second passes through syntax's resistance to pure naming and undermines the opposition of syntax and semantics, showing that meaning cannot be reduced to supposedly non-metaphorical rules. Metaphor "carries its own death", a death that never comes. Both are necessary, but Derrida prefers metaphor to philosophical law, as the resistance of empirical fact to transcendental law, and that justifies his style.
Structuralist and Symbolist poetics
"Force and signification" (WD 1) treats Structuralism as a permanent tendency of criticism, a relaxation of attention to force. "Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create." Criticism is "structuralist in every age"; behind its technical triumphs lies a "melancholy pathos", consciousness of the accomplished, "historical, eschatological, and crepuscular".
"Force and signification": the Structuralist night.
Structuralism is eschatological because it reduces literary time to atemporal relations, ending time as the apocalypse does, and crepuscular because the day of action gives way to static relations. Actions become simultaneous elements in a schema (Kant's word), and any schematization empties experience of force. The forms both abandon life's forces and are haunted by them, which joins Structuralism to Symbolist aesthetics: Saussure gives the word meaning by its place in a system; Symbolism treats the word as an object in itself. Derrida discusses both without advocating them, and never suggests words lack external referents.
The work must be both an articulated structure and a unity, which leads to the invisible interior of poetic freedom, a Romantic darkness beyond law matching the Structuralist night, and to literature's theme of exile and separation. Derrida never uses "Modernism" or "Postmodernism"; he names Artaud's theatre of cruelty or Joyce, and treats Symbolism as the defining term for innovative writing since the mid-nineteenth century. Its aesthetic is pure absence, Flaubert's "book about nothing", and the writer's anguish follows Blanchot: emptiness, nothingness, death and night.
Leibniz is the philosophical Structuralist: no anguish of choice in a world of compatible elements willed by a perfectly rational God. "Writing ... is to know that the Book does not exist and that there are only books." Modern writing faces the impossibility of separating meaning from writing, since there is no logos preceding writing; yet writing also tries to become speech, so there is never a simple escape from metaphysics.
Three metaphysical tendencies inside a "scientific" criticism.
Structural figures are themselves metaphors that organize the work from one viewpoint, and the values and forces of the work remain "an enigmatic beauty". Derrida names three metaphysical tendencies. Preformationism, from the history of biology (the embryo containing its final form, akin to Platonic recollection), makes the work a copy of pre-existing forms, a version of art as imitation of nature from Aristotle's Poetics. Teleologism makes the text serve the realization of the forms selected. Reductionism replaces force with static relations, evaluation with description and duration with space: a demand for "the flatness of literature". Like Phenomenology's infinite horizon, Structuralism aims at infinite forms.
Force and metaphor are the anti-metaphysical parts of language: metaphor is the force of displacement that lets us pass from one thing to another and so establish differences. Passion and form are the perpetual poles Nietzsche called Dionysian and Apolline, conditions of literary history rather than episodes in it. Structuralism has a place in criticism and always will, but never the whole place.
Mallarmé: hymen, sneeze and the throw of dice
"The double session" and "Outwork, prefacing" (D) read Mallarmé as a critique of Platonism that displaces rather than reverses it, since reversal would be metaphysics again (D 211). He should be read with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and it is his syntax, not argument, that does the work.
Mallarmé's hymen as a model of undecidability.
Hymen means both the membrane, a barrier and sign of virginity, and marriage, the consummation of desire. Language is not meanings fixed before words but rules of combination, and "there would be no syntax without contradiction"; syntax limits combinations but cannot prevent undecidability. Mallarmé shows how to handle contradiction by affirming undecidability. Derrida stresses syntax over semantics, here and in "Signature event context", because syntax concerns the manipulation of symbols and is not complicit with turning meaning into a transcendental abstraction.
Contradiction also lives in bodily experience. Sex, death and the sneeze (with Pierrot, Mallarmé's clown) bring a momentary loss of consciousness, "as if we have died for one instant", where the body overwhelms thought. The pure word sits at the same limit, so Symbolism belongs to physical forces, not a transcendence of matter. Mallarmé also displaces Aristotle's mimesis: "the miming of mimesis" (D 224) unsettles the natural original, and poetry engages chance, the throw of dice of one poem's title. D 54: "The game here is the unity of chance and rule, of the program and its leftovers".
The book, law and poetics
In the essays on Jabès (WD 3, WD 11), the book as book is a metonymic series of substitutions; the poet is freed by language and delivered from freedom by speech; writing represents "its own abyss, the rift that appears between the word and meaning". The poet is always elsewhere, born of speech, writing, law and book. Law exists only in broken fragments needing commentary, so commentary is "speech in exile".
WD 67: one interpretive imperative, read two ways.
WD 67: "Between the fragments of the broken Tables the poem grows"; "In the beginning is hermeneutics." Rabbi and poet interpret the same imperative differently and can never reunite, so "there will always be rabbis and poets", and "the Law then becomes Question". Writing is separation from the origin and the following of its traces; things come into and go out of existence by being named, so the fragment is the form of what is written. "Original illegibility is the possibility of the book."
Writing marks "the closure of the book and the opening of the text": the book is the theological encyclopaedia; the text is "the network of traces marking the disappearance of exceeded God or erased man". The trace "replaces a presence that has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun". Law and poetry include each other, but Derrida prefers poetry, as he always prefers the empirical and metaphorical to the would-be transcendental.
Representation and cruelty
Artaud's theatre of cruelty ("La parole soufflée", WD 6; "The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation", WD 8) seeks to turn theatre from representational spectacle into an experience of the body, breaking with Aristotelian imitation as Nietzsche wished. A stage is theological when speech governs it from a distance, through an absent author-creator whose text makes images, music and gesture mere illustration.
Artaud's attempt to end representation, and why it cannot fully succeed.
WD 176: classical theatre is a drama of theft, the invisible prompter ensuring the gap between a text "already written by another hand" and a dispossessed interpreter; Artaud "wanted the machinery of the prompter spirited away" to "restore danger". In cruelty the archi-manifestation of force or life fills the body; speech and writing become gestures again. French répétition means repetition and rehearsal, and rehearsal subordinates the unique performance to an abstract text. Artaud's pure presence of force is still metaphysical but perhaps preferable to Structuralism's; in the end even the "first time" rests on iterability, and affirmation contains otherness in its possible repetition.
Valéry, Qual quelle and White Mythology
Stocker's Chapter 7 on literature, metaphor and the literary turns on Derrida's readings of Paul Valéry ("Qual Quelle", Margins) and of philosophical metaphor in "White Mythology" (Margins). Valéry's reflections on the self, the book (quelle) and literary production let Derrida show that the author's "source" is already a quotation of quotation. White Mythology argues that philosophy has treated its own metaphors as worn coins whose figurative origin has been forgotten; the "white" of mythology names both bleaching and a European self-image of clarity. Stocker insists this is not an attack on reason but a demonstration that concept and figure are inseparable inside the philosophical text.
Two Margins essays that structure Ch. 7.
Tristes Tropiques, Montaigne and the ethnographic gaze
Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques and Montaigne's essay on cannibals (source OCR sometimes "Montiagne") supply the ethnographic archive. Montaigne already unsettles European superiority by making the "savage" a mirror. Lévi-Strauss mourns vanishing cultures while writing as the anthropologist who arrives after contact. Derrida's Of Grammatology reading of Lévi-Strauss (the Nambikwara episode and writing lesson) shows how the critique of ethnocentrism can reinstate a romantic privilege of peoples without writing. Stocker's point: the literary and the ethnographic are where philosophy's claim to pure concept is most visibly tested.
Ethnography and literature in the Ch. 7 arc.
Towards a Definition of Deconstruction
Phenomenology, transcendence and equivocation
IOG never uses the word, but it sets up the permanent themes of duality and equivocation. In IOG VIII Derrida faces the difficulty of constituting history inside Husserl's univocal Phenomenology and names two solutions. The Joycean one (the "Odyssean repetition of Joyce's type" of Ulysses, and the "recollection" of Finnegans Wake) is total absorption in empirical facts as language conditions them. Husserl's own is to continue the reduction, sacrificing the diversity of facts and obliterating time, since pure ideas are not temporal.
IOG VIII: two solutions to the problem of history, both inadequate.
Both fail: history needs facts and the standing back that selects them. Derrida prefers Joyce, as he always prefers the empirical and poetic, though the preference comes from the work as a whole rather than an explicit statement. The two alternatives contain each other, since even empirical history abstracts in language. The deepest name for this is iterability: every repetition produces something both different and the same.
The penultimate paragraph of IOG (IOG 153) sets out the project: "The primordial Difference of the absolute Origin ... that is perhaps what has always been said under the concept of 'transcendental' ... Such a certainty never had to learn that Thought would always be to come." Stocker reconstructs its argument. An absolute origin is undifferentiated, so it needs an equally absolute original difference, which must be a priori yet concrete, a contradiction of the kind Husserl falls into.
Stocker's reconstruction of IOG 153.
All metaphysics hits this when it applies infinite ideas to finite experience, yet a non-metaphysical empiricism gives only a chaos of facts: Kant's concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts blind. Derrida stands in a Kantian lineage, for whom reason necessarily falls into contradiction. The "history of displacements" under "transcendental" is the repeated covering-over of the gap between the transcendental and experience. Husserl assumes mathematical infinity needs a pure idea of infinity; for Derrida it does not. Three results: the transcendental is always challenged by the empirical, the absolute is never present, and the transcendental is about the absolute.
Phenomenology and deconstruction: différance, trace, supplement
SP continues through the theme of signs. The instant cannot be abstracted from time as a transcendental absolute; it is never indivisible, since it lasts and so contains difference. "There is nothing that is before difference." Yet differentiation makes the transcendental inevitable, because language always reaches beyond the instant. Grasping oneself in an instant is auto-affection, consciousness acting upon itself.
SP: how the self-present instant breaks down.
The word in consciousness and the word as imagined (SP 43-4) both exist fully in consciousness, so their difference is paradoxical: the same, repeated, not identical. For Husserl consciousness is transparent to itself and cannot register this. Once the distinction wobbles here, those between representation and represented, signifier and signified, come under "irresistible pressure" (SP 50-2). At the end of SP 5 Derrida introduces différance: time must be "given a different name", and the phenomenological monad (Leibniz) reconceived "on the basis now of différance within auto-affection" (SP 68).
The English SP renders différance as "difference" at its first appearance and notes the coinage only in a footnote at SP 82; the index also misses the first "deconstruction". Even the title is odd: the French means Speech and Phenomenon or The Voice and the Phenomenon.
Différance is defined only contextually, as non-identity within the same. Some readers find a transcendental structure in Derrida (Rorty, Gasché); Stocker grants this cannot be wholly untrue, since no thought steps outside the transcendental, but insists the terms show materiality disrupting identity. The line runs from Heraclitus through Nietzsche. Derrida calls himself a radical empiricist because ordinary empiricism takes the identity of experiential contents as given. The roots also lie in Kant: dialectical illusion, reflective judgement, the productive imagination, where the architectonic strains at its limits.
Deconstruction first appears in SP 4 (SP 52), naming the system of differences (represented and representative, signified and signifier, Vorstellung and Vergegenwärtigung) caught in "the same deconstruction". Here it is a movement within philosophy and consciousness, almost a material force, not a theory applied. Différance names the difference the same contains; deconstruction names the same that contains difference. The Idea is the infinite repeatability of a finite idea, and that repeatability is its otherness.
SP 87: the primordial supplement.
At the end of SP 6 come trace and supplement. "The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself ... It is always already a trace" (SP 85). Empiricism and rationalism alike rely on isolable moments, a view Heidegger attacked; without retention there could be no sentence and no simple action. Since indication is never intrinsically one with expression, it is "a primordial 'supplement' ... to compensate for a primordial nonself-presence" (SP 87). The origin is never present, so we have only supplements, and pure being, truth and inwardness depend on non-being, deception and the external.
| Term | Where introduced | Contextual sense (Stocker) |
|---|---|---|
| Iterability | IOG; "Signature event context" | Repetition that is always both same and different |
| Différance | SP 5 (SP 68) | Non-identity within the same; materiality disrupting identity |
| Deconstruction | SP 4 (SP 52) | The same that contains difference; a movement, then a strategy |
| Trace | SP 6 (SP 85) | Retention of earlier moments in every present |
| Supplement | SP 87; OG | Addition that replaces an origin never present |
| Solicitation | WD 1 | Showing structures in a way that shakes and collapses them |
| Play | WD 10 (WD 292) | Disruption of presence, prior to presence and absence |
| Graft, dissemination | MP 329; D 26, 40-2 | Added term that disrupts; irreducible plurality, no presence |
Structuralism and deconstruction: solicitation and madness
In "Force and signification" (WD 5-6) Structuralism destructures in the act of structuring. Structures meant to clarify a text leave no text, only atemporal relations that are "the ruins of meaning"; and they presuppose a prior reading of content from subjective consciousness. This is no simple methodological error, since there is no criticism without a Structuralist pole. The approach is a "solicitation" that shows structures only to collapse them, "and that paradoxical movement is the movement of Deconstruction".
WD 1: Structuralism deconstructs itself.
Since Structuralism belongs to metaphysics, metaphysics is what uncovers structures and destroys them. In "Structure, sign and play", Lévi-Strauss, like Rousseau and Husserl, must "set aside all the facts" and conceive a new structure "on the model of catastrophe" (WD 292): structure can meet change only as generalized violence. Because we inevitably structure experience, deconstruction is an inevitable movement of thought.
That moment is an encounter with madness and violence. "Cogito and the history of madness" (WD 60-1): speech opens discourse "only by emprisoning madness", and crisis may be "the destiny of speaking philosophy". Descartes's demon is a "demonic-hyperbole" (WD 61) that cannot be eliminated: unlimited epistemological doubt passes into semantic scepticism, which would drain language of the fixity it needs. Discourse depends on both madness and the violence that constrains it.
Play (WD 10) is not arbitrariness. Without a centred totality, meaning emerges from equivocation and contextuality. "Play is the disruption of presence ... play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence" (WD 292). Reality is the constant equivocation of absence and presence, and Being should be seen as this play. Two sides follow: the "saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic" side and "the Nietzschean affirmation ... of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin".
Deconstructive strategies
Because there is no origin, only trace, deconstruction is itself double. The poles (sad and joyous, guilt and innocence) both rest on the collapse of immediacy, which separates Derrida from empiricism. The Rousseau pole longs for an unattainable absolute, a feeling Derrida says he sometimes shares; the Nietzsche pole cannot simply oppose metaphysics, since affirmation needs the capacity to think the absolute. Like Wittgenstein, Derrida cannot separate language from world, and is no more a linguistic idealist.
Two poles of play after presence collapses (WD 292).
"The ends of man" (MP 134-6) lists the steps, speaking of "trembling". First, a reduction of meaning to pure structure, against humanist metaphysics. Second, a strategic bet, chance over necessity, that trembles the system in two ways: repeating its assumptions explicitly from within (risking staying inside), or stepping outside (risking naive repetition). Third, the distinction between Zarathustra's superior man and superman, which maps onto Rousseau/Husserl/Heidegger versus Nietzsche. Heidegger used "destruction" and stays with Being, which never fully discloses itself. The resolution is Nietzsche's plurality of styles.
"The ends of man" (MP 134-6): the steps of trembling.
The most explicit definition is in "Signature event context": deconstruction works "by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing", practising "an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system", in a field "of nondiscursive forces" (MP 329). Hence it is a major mistake to think Derrida values writing over speech: archi-writing is a strategic overturning that shows each side depends on and includes the other. The nondiscursive forces and nonconceptual order rule out any idealism, and the graft adds a term to disrupt a system that has no absolute origin.
MP 329: the double gesture of deconstruction.
Dissemination (D) aligns deconstruction with psychoanalysis (insemination, castration anxiety) and names the affirmative pole: irreducible plurality, no presence, "the law is blown up" (D 26), reflections defying mimesis (D 40-1), an excess rupturing inside and outside (D 41-2). It arises from Hegel's prefaces: a preface either empties the system by summarizing it or is excluded by its total fullness. Dissemination answers with chance and the text's non-identity with itself; "Plato's pharmacy" exemplifies it as Plato loses control of his text. It confirms the Nietzschean pole and Derrida's use of the literary text as model for reading philosophy.
Erinnerung, Gedächtnis and the catastrophe of presence
Stocker's closing chapter (values, history, religion, the ends of man) returns to Hegel's distinction, in Derrida's reading, between Erinnerung (interiorizing memory) and Gedächtnis (mechanical, technical memory). Source OCR sometimes prints "Errinnerung". Interiorizing memory promises to gather history into spirit; technical memory (writing, archives, monuments) looks secondary until Derrida shows that spirit's gathering already depends on external marks. The "ends of man" essay (Margins) and the later work on mourning, friendship and religion treat the human as already marked by finitude and by a future that cannot be programmed. Catastrophe and play are not opposites: the play of traces is what remains when the fantasy of total presence collapses.
Memory split and the ends-of-man arc.
Religion without religion, democracy to come
Stocker reads Derrida's late religious vocabulary (The Gift of Death, Specters of Marx, messianicity without messianism) as structural, not confessional. "Religion without religion" names a demand that cannot be satisfied by any existing church or party. "Democracy to come" is not a prediction of a better parliament; it is the undeconstructible promise that keeps every present democracy open to critique. Counterarguments (that this is empty piety, or that it smuggles theology back in) are acknowledged: Stocker's reply is that empty piety would restore presence under another name, while Derrida keeps the promise without a presentable content.
Late political-religious vocabulary Stocker defends.
Main Points
Main Points
- Deconstruction overturns and then displaces. Reversing a hierarchy (writing over speech) would be metaphysics again; the double gesture shows each term depends on the other (MP 329).
- There is no pure origin, only trace and supplement. Every present retains earlier moments, and every addition makes up for a non-self-presence (SP 85, 87).
- Iterability makes meaning possible and unstable. A sign must be repeatable to mean anything, and repetition always brings difference within the same.
- Derrida is not a linguistic idealist. He insists on nondiscursive forces and never claims words lack referents.
- Play is not "anything goes". It is the disruption of presence, prior to presence and absence; Feyerabend is the real sceptic, not Derrida.
- Philosophy is inside metaphor. Concepts are worn sensory figures, so philosophy cannot dominate its metaphors from outside: metaphysics is a white mythology.
- Différance names non-identity within the same. It was coined in SP and hidden by the English translation.
- The instant is never indivisible. Husserl's self-present "now" contains duration, retention and auto-affection.
- Expression needs indication. The silent voice of consciousness still needs the material sign, so the purity of meaning fails.
- Ideal objects need writing. Geometry becomes ideal and transmissible only through inscription (IOG).
- Structuralism deconstructs itself. Showing structures collapses them (solicitation); structure meets change only as catastrophe.
- Force resists form. Criticism is "structuralist in every age", but force, value and duration escape its flat schema.
- Undecidability is affirmed, not eliminated. Mallarmé's hymen shows syntax permits contradiction.
- There is no pure non-violence. Against Lévinas, every relation involves force, so a philosophy of peace "can only be violence against violence".
- Every decision passes through the undecidable. Law and poetry, rabbi and poet, coexist; there will always be two interpretations of interpretation.
- Madness is the condition of reason. Speech opens discourse by emprisoning madness, and the demonic hyperbole cannot be removed.
- Deconstruction has two poles. The nostalgic Rousseau/Heidegger pole and the affirmative Nietzsche pole never exclude each other.
- Derrida always leans one way. He prefers the empirical, metaphorical and affirmative, though the logic needs both sides.
- Derrida belongs in a Kantian lineage. Reason necessarily overreaches experience, and the transcendental has a history of displacements.
- Derrida can be argued with in Analytic terms. Stocker's comparisons with Frege, Kripke, Quine and Wittgenstein make the claims testable.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Double gesture | Overturn a hierarchy, then displace the whole system | A critique risks just flipping a binary |
| Trace | Every present carries what it excludes | A starting point is claimed to be pure |
| Supplement | The addition replaces a missing origin | Something "secondary" turns out necessary |
| Iterability | Repeatable means alterable | Meaning is pinned to an intention |
| White mythology | Concepts are effaced metaphors | Abstract vocabulary hides an image |
| Solicitation | Showing a structure shakes it | Analysis leaves "no text" |
| Two poles | Nostalgia versus affirmation | Judging the tone of a critique |
| Undecidable | Two readings cannot be ranked | A key term carries opposite senses |
- Deconstruction overturns and then displaces. Reversing a hierarchy (writing over speech) would be metaphysics again; the double gesture shows each term depends on the other (MP 329).
- There is no pure origin, only trace and supplement. Every present retains earlier moments, and every addition makes up for a non-self-presence (SP 85, 87).
- Iterability makes meaning possible and unstable. A sign must be repeatable to mean anything, and repetition always brings difference within the same.
- Derrida is not a linguistic idealist. He insists on nondiscursive forces and never claims words lack referents.
- Play is not "anything goes". It is the disruption of presence, prior to presence and absence; Feyerabend is the real sceptic, not Derrida.
- Philosophy is inside metaphor. Concepts are worn sensory figures, so philosophy cannot dominate its metaphors from outside: metaphysics is a white mythology.