The gesture that seeks to find draws itself away from itself. We should be able to formulate the law of this insurmountable separation. It is a game I always play. Identification is a difference from oneself, a difference with oneself. Therefore, with, without, and except oneself. It’s an experience of forgetting, but the forgetting of forgetting, the forgetting of which nothing remains. The soft maternal voice contrasts with the pitiless voice of writing. The social shift towards evil comes from a catastrophic moment, a simple and barely perceptible inaugural displacement. “He who willed man to be social, by a touch of the finger, shifted the globe’s axis into line with the axis of the universe. I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind.” This subtle movement, the divine trace, opened the age of society, and with it the prohibition of incest: “before the festival, there was no incest because there was no prohibition of incest…after the festival, there is no longer any incest because it is forbidden.”
The mythological discourse should itself be mytho-morphic. It should have the shape of what it speaks of. As there would seem have to be some difference between being and thought: for example, physical pain (or the very idea of natural and unnatural death) presents a very specific paradox for thought and thinking; can one, and in what cases, would it be possible, for one to feel another’s pain? Is there not some difference between being-there and not being-there? As such, the difference itself would necessarily be marked by some spatial characteristic. From what space---space being the opening towards the conditions of coordination--would be the truth of pain, its legitimation as a point of reality.
Although total history was banished to the illusory role of myth and error, it could nonetheless be perceived as plural and partial histories: “there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories different in their type, rhythm, mode of inscription, intervallic, differentiated histories.” This multidimensional history made it possible to transcribe a conception of writing and to let movement filter into structure. But the wrinkles of time that unfold this knowledge in fact lead to its disappearance. Deconstructed history led to a foreclosed future. It was nothing more than the unfolding of the simulacrum of a slack and ungraspable present.
This temporalizing is also a temporalization and a spatialization, the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time. The concept of differance even develops the most legitimate principled exigencies of structuralism. Beginning with the sign and the signifier/signified distinction in order to valorize signification at work even with the signified, Derrida argues for a shift of the signified into the realm of the signifier, thus making it impossible to codify language, opening it quite broadly onto the sphere of literary creativity. “To risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter in the play of differance.”
Hermeneutical reading is meaningless under deconstruction because hermeneutics is possible only when interpretation was limited: “ a generalized interpretative posture is impossible unless it is conceived in a Nietzschean perspective.” Given that the battle between interpretations is endless, Derrida questions the autonomous ontological existence of the text itself. Like Nietzsche, Derrida shifts the original text and its contents from an experimental to an imaginative field. Like mummies wrapped under pyramids, like a pit marking the demise of the flesh; within an initial “erasure,” the text, barely emerging from a netherworld, is immediately dissolved. This infinite flow of the order of things makes any effort at understanding vain. At the same time, it postulates an originary impotence. Since water cannot be stopped in order to grasp the river, reality collapses.
Derrida did not deduce the death of the subject from his examination of the ultimate basis of phenomenology using the enigma of the geometric object, but rather its limits within a more restricted sphere. He spoke about the withdrawal of the principle of foundation, “necessary to appearance itself.” The notion of the ‘transcedental’ was the absolute certainty of this progression toward an origin perceived in its original difference, always to come. “It is also in this way that this writing has, as Hussurl said, ‘an exemplary meaning’.”
In regards to the sign and language, Hussurl makes a distinction between the pre-expressive level (indicative sign) and an expressive level (expressive sign) in states of consciousness. Expression is a complete externalization; indication refers to the site of the involuntary. The indicative sphere remaining outside of expressivity defined in this way limits the failure of this telos. “We cannot point to any truth or essence of the sign; the philosopher’s task is to describe the conditions of its appearance.” The theme of textual indefiniteness, of writing as abyss, as a veritable cryptic universe, of a past that has never been present, was already here: to conceive as pre-original and normal what Hussurl thought he could isolate as a specific, accidental, dependent, and secondary experience: that of the indefinite drift of signs as errance.
The path of his philosophy, Derrida explains, “would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions…without attention to what Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings, ontico-ontological difference.” The strategy of deconstruction is the ruse that makes it possible to speak, at the same time as there is, finally, nothing more to say. The various binary couples—signifier/signified, nature/culture, voice/writing, perceptible/intelligible—that compose the very instrument of structural analysis were each put into question, pluralized, disseminated in an infinite game that peeled, disjoined, and dissected the meaning of words, tracking down every master word, every transcendence. A whole Derridean language destabilized traditional oppositions by bringing undecidables into play as veritable units of simulacrum, organizers of a new, carnivalesque order of reason.
With grammatology, Derrida sought an intermediate zone, a space of internal tension between writing and science, with a space of lack, of textual blankness, of inaccessible temporal spacing that dons the figure of a supplement forever eluding presence. The constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing, Derrida writes, is a necessary and difficult task. “But, thinking about the trace, differance, or reserve, having arrived at these limits and repeating them ceaselessly, must also point beyond the field of the episteme.” Since Plato, the so-called West has sought the proximate and the specific, since the voice is considered to be a veritable essence, a bearer of meaning and of the signified. “The entire historical thread of the West is nothing other than the history of the elimination of writing.” The distinctive unit of this new science capable of going beyond phonologism was the gramme, the grapheme.
Moreover, Derrida introduced temporality, the lack of being, absence based on which writing is understood as trace, untethered from the idea of an origin. Trace refers to understanding the conditions of possibility preceding the existence of the sign, its conditions of existence being irreducible to any being-present. His goal was not to restore the contents of thinking, but rather the conditions that make thinking possible. “Grammatology presupposed a maximal autonomy of writing from its genesis, and in this respect entirely embraced the structualist paradigm that broke with the referential framework.” Writing eludes the speaker as it does the listener and constitutes a scientific object, like any other, by virtue of the iterability of reading. “All graphemes are of a testamentary essence.”
While Derrida acknowledged that Saussure had broken with the metaphysical tradition by desubstantializing the contents of the signified and its expression, he nonetheless asserted that Saussure, in elevating the sign as the founding notion of linguistics, had not gone far enough since the “age of the sign is essentially theological.” Sausserean thought was centered on the word as the unit of meaning and sound, and writing was banished to exteriority: “writing obscures language, it is not a guise for language, but a disguise.” Thus, writing is devalorized as the simple reproduction of speech, a thematic subordination Derrida traces through Western metaphysics. “Already in the Phaedrus Plato says that the evil of writing comes from without.” Plato represses writing because it was responsible for ruining memory.
As such, Derrida’s critique in Of Grammatology concerns itself with problematizing Saussure’s distinction between linguistic and graphic signs. “One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness of the sign, the Saussurean definition of writing as ‘image’—hence as natural symbol—of language.” For Derrida, writing is not to be banished to the exteriority of language; rather, writing escapes reality as a trace forever hidden from itself, as foreign as the acoustic image was to the referent or subject. “This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace.”
Foucault, in 1971 after being de-constructed, wrote: “I won’t say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics, or its closure that are hidden in this textualization of discursive practices. I will go much further and say that this is a small and historically well-determined little lesson that, in a very visible way, shows itself off. Pedagogy teaches the student that there is nothing beyond the text, and that within it, its intentions, its spaces, and in what goes unspoken, reigns the realm of the origin.”
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