JACQUES DERRIDA: THE PHILOSOPHER Derrida is "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher -- if not the only famous philosopher", in the words of Dinitia Smith, the talented and entertaining author of the aforementioned New York Times feature "Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas".
Derrida tries to analyze language in order to provide an alternative perspective which questions the basic notion of philosophical thesis. He refers to his method of reading philosophic texts as 'deconstruction'.
If Derrida and deconstruction can not be discussed one without the other, what then is deconstruction? Definitions even vary, from a seven page-explanation to a four page entry or an eleven page reference. How does Professor Derrida himself define it? He says of course a very great deal in numerous writings as well as in published interviews such as Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida. What Ms. Smith reported of their conversation at the Polo Grill is the following:
"It is impossible to respond", Mr. Derrida said. "I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied". But after some prodding, he gave it a try anyway: "I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text".
Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text", he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed."
Derrida's most influential books published between 1967 and 1972, reread major figures of the continental tradition of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, to expose what he calls their logocentrism. As a system of thought which continually strives to go back to origins, find centres, fix, points of reference, certify truths, verify an author's intentions, or locate a text's core of meaning, it is perhaps best encapsulated in the Biblical phrase 'in the beginning was the Word [the logos(link)]', with its its concomitant faith in God, the Self, and the Order of the Universe, and its tendency to privilege the singular and definitive over the multiple and indeterminate.
What Derrida seeks to undermine in common with other postmodernists is the metaphysical certainty not only that the unique 'I' behind any utterance guarantees a consistent, totally conscious, and rational point of view, or that a unified meaning might be traced back to an originary intention, but also that graphic modes of representation, be they in words or images, directly refer to a pre-existent reality. Precisely because concepts such as reality, consciousness, intentionality and purpose are so deeply embedded in Western thinking, as well as in language, and yet go unacknowledged, it is imperative, he contends, to question the assumption that word and world coincide, or that word and deed are one.
By paying attention to the ways in which philosophers use language, seizing for instance on their use of metaphor, Derrida illustrates that figurative devices are operative in all writing, be they literary or philosophical, and that pure thought is never independent from its mode of expression. Thus, language can give away either an underlying belief system that remains unconscious to the writer's intention (not unlike the Freudian slip), or show up a hitherto unrecognized rupture in a text's logic; which is why linguistic ambiguity, once exposed, does not merely highlight that meaning cannot be determined, but can uncover a whole nest of contradictions in the reasoning of those who profess themselves to rely on such concepts as reason and unitary demeaning for the coherency of their argument.
Derrida's close readings attend to those processes always already operative in a text, which unknit its ideal unity. The movement by which such processes are brought into play is what Derrida calls deconstruction. Working only with the resources presented to it by the text under study, a deconstructive reading displays just how much textuality is always network of unfinished meanings, with 'each' text differing from itself, for which he coins the term 'difference', and 'each' text a trace of, and endlessly refering to, other texts, which invokes Barthes' term intertextuality. While arguing that a text is 'no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content, enclosed in a book or its margins', Derrida's writing also however, performs what it states.
There is another and more interesting side to deconstruction, and this has to do with its continuing relation to traditional philosophical ideas of truth. Let’s bring out this other side - the beyond of deconstruction - particularly as it can be found in the thought of Derrida. I see in Derrida's free play of interpretation not only criticism of older forms and a longing for the new, but insight into the substantial truth of philosophy and a talent for speculative thought. To be sure, Derrida believes that the traditional metaphysical hierarchies between idealism and realism, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, substance and subject, and so on, are one-sided and must be overturned. But he also argues that the undervalued terms of these hierarchies can only be affirmed in relation to, or as another form of, the 'higher' ones. Thus, for example, the notion of reality as something given and independent of the ideal world is dogmatic and, like all reversals, a prisoner of the metaphysical hierarchy it seeks to overthrow. In this perspective, metaphysical forms can be seen in even the most naturalistic attempts to escape the constraints of Western thought.
On the other hand, if one values Derrida's writings and the philosophical positions and intellectual traditions from which he proceeds, it would be wrongheaded to think of him as an occupant of some "ivory tower". Derrida is the proverbial activist-theorist, who, over the years, has fought for a number of political causes, including the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, anti-apartheid, and the rights of Czech Charter 77 dissidents. True to his own construction of the world and his own autobiography, he has admitted few, if any, strict dichotomies in his life. As he put it in another context, "I am applied Derrida."
All notes by John Rawlings ©1999, Stanford University