Additional notes from reading I've done:
Further Notes on Derrida and Criticism on Derrida (Flores)
Norris, Christopher. Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Derrida and Norris warn against lifting a term out of context--e.g., différance--and
privileging it as a master or key word or concept (15). Similarly, one must
practice deconstruction instead of trying to define it. But Richard Rorty disagrees; différance is now recognized as a term belonging to a shared language;
it therefore has a certain conceptual currency. It is only possible to criticize
existing institutions from within an inherited language through an internal
distancing or defamiliarization which prevents those concepts from settling
down into routine habits of thought.
Derrida insists that deconstruction is not a method, a technique, or kind of critique. He tends to diassociate himself from practice of American literary deconstruction. Norris describes D's deconstructive moves as the dismantling of conceptual oppositions and hierarchical systems of thought which can then be reinscribed within a different order of signification. Deconstruction seeks out aporias or blind-spots, moments of self-contradiction where a text betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, often in its more marginal details.
N. argues that deconstruction does not mean an abandonment of meticulous argument for some kind of interpretative freeplay. For example, D. cites Valery's proto-deconstruction of philosophy's dependence on figural language and buried metaphors but warns against simply inverting oppositions such as speech/writing, philosophy/literature only to leave the previously inferior term on top (23-24). This kind of reversal doesn't shift the conceptual ground of the opposition. Philosophy's conceptual resources should not be annulled in the name of some literary formalism--cannot avoid the rigors of thinking.
Texts are stratified by a network of themes and assumptions linked up with other texts, genres, topics of discourse. This is the disseminating force always at work within language.
DERRIDA'S "STRUCTURE, SIGN, AND PLAY IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE HUMAN
SCIENCES" AND "DIFFÉRANCE" (Flores)
Derrida argues that structuralism's rejection of some ultimate, self-authorized
language of mythology (via Levi-Strauss's engineer) in favor of a mytho-poetic
bricolage also undermines the claims of structural anthropology. If the engineer
is also a species of bricoleur then the very idea of bricolage is menaced. Once
one affirms the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from a ruined heritage,
then the distinction between the coherence of one's critical practice and that
ruin is threatened, collapses.
Nature-culture opposition also breaks down when one tries to image the origin of the prohibition against incest. Can the structural anthropologist afford to give up aim of articulating the deep logic/grammar that underlies the surface relativities of culture? Status of explanatory theories in general is at stake. Are all kinds of knowledge to be treated simply as alternative mythologies, forms of bricolage, none of them possessing any particular claim to theoretical consistency or truth?
Deconstruction does not abandon critical rigor or attention to the concepts it critiques. Derrida presents a choice between two interpretations of "structure." One accepts Saussure and Levi-Strauss's beliefs that signification is possible only within a system of relations and differences but still longs for origins and dreams of truth that escape play. The other possibility is to abandon such nostalgia and refuse to place limits on strong-willed interpretative options in the spirit of Nietzsche, determining the noncenter otherwise than as a loss of center. This is not a simple invitation to interpretative freedom. One should remember that only a few pages earlier Derrida urges one to continue to read philosophers in "a certain way." "Structure, Sign, and Play" essay ends apocalytically in a melodramatic effort to challenge the antinomies of classical reason.
Notes from Nicholas Royle's Jacques Derrida
Derrida states that there is no decision that is not structured by this
experience and experiment of the undecidable ( Afterword: Toward
An Ethic of Discussion 116); The undecidable remains caught, lodged,
at least as a ghost-but an essential ghost-in every decision, in every event
of decision (Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority'
965)
Decisions are made in a moment of non-knowledge, the event is mad, incalculable
(6).
Derrida: my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical
interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward literature,
towards that writing which is called literary (The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations
37)
Describe and transform, constative and performative (Royle 22)-always differences
between what a text says and what it does, and it can always fail to perform
its promise (27)
A supplement is added as an enrichment and an extra: it is both 'a surplus,
a plenitude enriching another plenitude' and it makes up for something missing'
(Royle 48, qtd. from OG) The supplement is maddening because it is neither
presence nor absence (OG 154).
Both supplementary and a substitute
Royle: To deconstruct a text is to attempt to take into account the ways
in which metalanguage is both necessary and impossible. It entails what Derrida
has called a sort of 'radical metalinguistics', a metalinguistics that 'integrates
within itself . . . the impossibility of a metalanguage' (SST 76) (58-59).
In Monolingualism of the Other in particular, Derrida's concern is to
argue that 'an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable
indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures (MO 28)
(Royle 59).
Derrida: No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits
saturation (Living On 81)
There is nothing outside the text (OG 158), there is no outside text;
there is nothing outside context; there is nothing but context.
Iterability is the logic that ties repetition to alterity (SEC 7,
qtd. Royle 67) because the mark, or what is readable, must be capable of being
repeated in a different context, which means it is both the same and different.
There is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains
of differential marks (SEC 10).
Derrida: Difference is what makes the movement of signification possible
only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene
of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within
itself the mark of a past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by
the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no
less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting
what is called the presence by means of this very relation to what it is not,
to what it absolutely is not: that is, not even to a past or a future as a modified
present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not, in order
for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present
must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing,
along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present,
that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and in particular the substance
or subject (Diff 13). there is no subject who is agent, author,
and master of difference . . . Subjectivity, like objectivity, is an effect
of difference (Pos 28).
Shopping list, marks of one's difference from oneself (sender/receiver)-writing
helps and hinders memory, both cure and poison (79).
Voluminous excerpt of notes from Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory:
An Introduction
Blackwell, 1997.
In his paper Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
(1966) Derrida asks what if there is no such thing as structure: by putting
the very notion of structure into question Derrida was undermining the very
ground on which postmodernism (as a theory of romanticism) came to be established:
that ground continues to be the difference between absolute difference and absolute
nondifference. In other words postmodernism, as a theory of absolute difference
(or of the literary absolute), relies on attributing absolute nondifference
to whatever it opposes. . . . In celebration of what is always 'different',
there is always a question to be asked: different from what? This is the question
that postmodernism never asks because, in its typically avant-garde avowal of
the romantic force of 'radical' ideas and practices, it always already presumes
to know not only what 'mainstream' ideas and practices look like, but also that
they are oppressive, totalitarian or simply 'safe' and in the service of such
non-life-affirming interests as reason, science, power and the liberal individual
(95-96).
Derrida's paper critiques Lévi-Strauss's project of structuralist anthropology,
including a deeply Rousseauian preference for a natural, mythological state
of being of primitive cultures, which we can only apprehend or experience via
an ad hoc assemblage or bricolage of whatever comes to hand in the way of signifying
structures in order to avoid imposing our institutionalized, enlightenment,
rule-bound habits of thought characteristic of 'the engineer's' universal rules.
But Derrida argues that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur-'as
soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer', however, ' and as soon as
we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that
the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very
idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning
breaks down.'
By a similar move of totalizing negation, in other words, each of these
binary oppositions [such as imagination/reason, unconscious/conscious, heterogeneous
language-games and metanarratives] produces the myth of a privileged term by
producing the myth of an absolutely opposing term. In every case, the opposing
term has absolutely none of the qualities of the privileged one. Insofar as
a privileged term such as 'bricolage' actually requires a totalizing negation
of its opposite (in this case 'theory'), however, then the very notion of bricolage
cannot be seen as fully independent of what it negates. Bricolage and theory
are therefore not in a structure of absolute opposition to one another, since
the structure in which they are held (as Derrida puts it) involves some 'play'
(99).
Derrida's argument is that there is indeed no structure that does not
involve some play or give (as in the 'play' of a rope or a machine), such that
the very concept of a structure that is fixed and organized is a myth. . . .
In other words, without a concept of 'presentable structure', the very idea
of the unpresentable (in the form of the differend, unconscious alterity, bricolage,
semanalysis, autopoiesis and so on ) breaks down (99-100).
How can 'the sign' continue to have meaning if the relation of the signifier
to the signified is not one of structure but of play? . . . . But as Derrida
argues, what we cannot do is to stop thinking of (and through) the sign: because
we simply cannot 'think' 'the signifier' on its own. Hence the signifier is
never able to be fully present to itself: first because the signified of any
signified is always another signifier, and secondly because we cannot think
the concept of the signifier in the absence of a concept of the signified. It
is in this context that Derrida argues that we can never get 'outside' metaphysics
in order to undo it (101-102).
Play in general is a condition of metaphysics. . . . for poststructuralism,
the concept of structure always already contains sufficient 'give' (or 'tolerance')
to provide a little room for manoeuvre, while for postmodernism a concept of
structure as fully closed and present to itself is an essential requirement
for the concept of a playfully open and unruly ('structureless') structure
(102).
If the very concept of a stable structure is an illusion, in other words,
then there can be no structure of and as literature as a particular kind of
writing. . . . However much an institution of literary criticism might want
to insist that literature can be defined in terms of the specificities of forms
of writing-in-particular, it would still have to confront the question of how
it could know those specificities without having always already held a notion
of 'writing' in the most general and nonspecific terms (109).
According to de Man, the very reason that literature can be (mis) understood
as autonomously rule-producing in the first place is precisely that literature
is always read in context. Since there is no outside-context, literature is
always being read differently. And precisely because there is no outside-context,
literature cannot be thought of only in linguistic or grammatical terms. . .
. There can be no clear-cut division between linguistic presence and nonlinguistic
absence, in other words, nor indeed between linguistic and nonlinguistic orders
of signification (111).
The concept of a general writing . . . extends the notion of difference
to the far more troublesome and deconstructive notion of self-difference. For
example: instead of thinking that writing stands in opposition to speech because
each term is self-enclosed (which is what has to be assumed for that-or-any-opposition
to be structured as an opposition), it is possible to think of speech and writing
as being in relation to each other by a process of exchange rather than as being
separated by a state of opposition. Derrida has many terms for this relational
process, the most notorious of which is 'writing.' Briefly, he uses this term
in order to show that the positive values ascribed to speech-honesty, intentionality,
truth and (as I will explain) self-presence-cannot be dissociated from their
dependence on having to be excluded from the negative values of imitation, ambiguity
and lack ascribed to writing and associated with a so-called problem of non-self-presence.
Now if this is so, if speech is positive only on the basis of some form of dependence
on the equally assured nonpositivity of writing, then speech and writing cannot
be said to be opposed to each other as examples of absolute nondifference. Indeed
they cannot be 'opposed' at all. And what is at stake in this argument is not
only the structure of the speech/writing opposition, of course, but the structure
of any opposition. In a word, what is at stake is the very question of the structure
of structure (112-13).
the structure of any opposition could never be undone simply by shifting
'presence' across to the far side of any binary, and so what needs to be shown
is that the choice between 'presence' and 'absence' is undecidable . . . because
it is always already undecidable and has to be so in order for moves to be made
at all. It is not sufficient, in other words, to affirm structures of absence,
underprivilege or nonpositivity in such a way that they take on a present, privileged
and positive appearance [also disrupts inside/outside or primary-secondary relations]
(115).
The very notion of 'opposing terms' is made possible only because of the
far more radically problematic structure of undecidability that can be said
to structure (as it were) every structure (116). Once again: the
structure of undecidability is what enables the structure of any structure to
appear self-present or essential, making it possible for decisions to occur
between seemingly opposed alternatives. But those alternatives are always already
different in and from themselves, in the way that speech is never fully self-present
insofar as it is always in the act of becoming what it ideally should be (independent,
self-enclosed, autonomous) by having to define itself against what it supposedly
is not. Writing is therefore not the absolute outside of speech, which is not
to say that speech and writing are the same. What Derrida calls the 'logic of
supplementarity' has to be seen as always in play in determination of any concept's
attempt to appear self-determining-in which case we might say that writing is
the 'supplement' of speech. . . . It is this recurring process of exchange,
between writing as necessarily exterior to and a necessary supplement of speech,
that defines the essence and presence of speech. . . .[as Derrida states] the
supplement is both an addition and a substitution. . . . Writing, as seen by
Plato, adds to speech but threatens to replace it. However Derrida's argument
is that Plato's conception of speech cannot do without a concept of the writing
supplement, even at the cost of the danger it poses. And this argument goes
not only to the heart of the speech/writing opposition, but to the very ground
of any concept of a self-determining concept or structure. What might be called
'the play' of the logic of supplementarity, then, inheres in the structure of
every structure (118.
The postructuralist critique of structure . . . tries to show that any
choice between structured and structureless concepts is always already a choice
within those concepts themselves, a choice requiring a decision whose principle
cannot be decided. . . . the nature of writing-in-general is such that there
can never be any hard and fast distinction between so-called literary and non-literary
orders of writing-in-particular (120-21).
Socratic dialectical method in pursuit of external , universal truth versus
pre-Socratic and Sophistic concept of truth as an outcome of pragmatic contingencies.
Rhetoric, in a sense, may appear to act in the role of philosophy's supplement,
but every argument is available only inferentially through the style of
its expression. Hence it is rhetoric - and not dialectic - that comes first
(124).
The definition of literary writing is so broad as to exclude nothing.
There is in fact no single style of writing that defines the literary. . . .
it remains undecidable whether rhetoric is inside or outside the 'real' meaning
or value of any text. . . . This applies also to philosophical texts, where
the relation of a dialectical 'inside' and a rhetorical 'outside' is always
one of exchange and supplementarity rather than of exclusion (126).
The structure of undecidability that inhabits every structure . . . does
not point to indecision but rather to the ungroundedness on which decisions
are based (129).
Rhetorical reading (128ff) sees differences of opinion over meaning (textual
differences within the work) as necessary rather than as obstacles for criticism
to overcome. The rhetorical dimension of texts is utterly inseparable from the
referential contents or dialectical positions that texts are said to contain
(129).
Self-difference common to all texts. In order to put its case it must advance
the interpretation to which it is opposed (134 discussion of Johnson and Culler's
comments on Billy Budd).
There is in other words no transcendental relation of continuity between
saying and doing, or being and action.
How can one determine the rules of judgment that are meant to apply to any reading
a literary text. every single instance of a general type differs from
what it is supposed to be an example of. In applying principles, therefore,
one is always having to confront or ignore whatever it is those principles are
inapplicable to. What if principles are just expedient guidelines? Old
problem: either the ontic realm of things as they are is discovered by the epistemic
realm of knowledge of things as they are, or the ontic is produced by the epistemic
(137)-or ontic is inaccessible to the epistemic. But in the pre-Socratics, there
was no debate because knowledge was seen as the inseparable outcome of rhetorical
thought and practice-they were concerned with the metaphoricity of truth, with
its rhetorical or figurative nature.
Also impossible not to generalize because it is impossible to see things in
their unique singularity-also questions whether right decisions can ever be
made in the absence of determining principles-cites John Caputo's Against Ethics.
It is textuality (rhetoric) . . . that makes it possible to say whatever
can be said about referentiality (dialectic) (139).
literature has no fundamental identity and therefore that it cannot be
opposed to something fundamentally other than itself-also applies to politics
or justice. It is impossible to make statements that are exclusively literary
or non-literary. The very impossibility of a non-textual distinction between
the literary and the non-literary has politically democratic implications, in
contrast to the sorts of political tyranny that are well served by a lack of
doubt pertaining to the difference between rhetoric and dialectic (140).
A spectral logic, as it were, does not transcend the opposition of actual
and ideal occurrences or structures; still less does it cause the difference
between them to appear insignificant. On the contrary, the difference between
actuality and ideality is produced by the logic of the ghost, although it is
prevented by it from every becoming absolute (148).
it is just as banal, or just as important, to claim that everything is
political (dialectic, constative, calculable or presentable) as to claim it
is literary (rhetorical, performative, incalculable or unpresentable)
(154).
A decision . . . is what calls for something to be 'cut off' or arrested.
If the cut-off point were not always a question, if it were not always possible
in other words for a decision to risk being wrong, to cut in mistakenly at an
inappropriate time or place, it simply would not be a decision. . . . every
decision risks becoming fickle or dogmatic (156). We hope to actualize
an ideal as if the decision were made outside of a particular context-it is
only in retrospect that we decide whether our decision was correct
whether it was 'right' or not.
One makes political decisions about actual events in the name of upholding
a political ideal. . . . Different ideals see different events as actual
(157), and an ideal democracy, for example, is always seen as remaining to come:
The limit of this ideal is precisely what might come in the form of an
opposition to democracy, which is precisely what democracy cannot decide to
close off in advance. It is for this reason that the democratic ideal is perpetually
at risk of turning into its opposite, and it is this risk which maintains the
inexhaustible openness of that ideal. Hence it is democracy, along among all
forms of the political absolute, that carries the force of its own critique
(158).
there is no hope, on Derrida's view, of getting to an aesthetic or heterogeneous
'inside' (the sign) by supposing it is able to be cut off from all relations
with a theoretical or socio-political 'outside' (the not-sign) (181) [work
of the parergon or frame permits effect of passage from nature to culture etc].
the view that structures are problematic, but not necessarily oppressively
so-is a position attributable to postructrualism. Hence while postructuralism
may be seen to affirm difference, it cannot be seen to oppose identity
(240).
Indeed we might refer to this as the postmodern requirement: the totalizing
negation of whatever seems not to present itself as the unpresentable, or of
whatever appears as fully inscribed within a set of rules by which to judge
it. It is clear that, on behalf of ethics as a practice . . . it is necessary
to be critical of rules; but it may not be necessary to defy them. Defiance,
indeed, is an oppositional attitude towards something which is required to be
seen as oppressive; and in this way defiance and oppression may be seen to be
linked metaphysically. And in their metaphysical conjoinings, defiance and oppression
are at constant risk of turning into each other's opposite because each is committed
to the cancellation of the other and to the cancellation of 'otherness'. We
might say too that the task of canceling, reducing or controlling otherness
belongs also to philosophy as metaphysics. Any attempt to think the possibility
of a 'nonmetaphysics', then, would have to involve a rethinking of the philosophical
cancellation of the other. Insofar as a postructuralist or deconstructive project
can be seen as an instance of the attempt 'to attain a point of exteriority',
as Siomon Critchley puts it, to metaphysics, then perhaps such a project may
be described in the following terms:
as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced,
comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy. To say that
the goal of Derridean deconstruction is not simply the unthought of the tradition,
but rather that-which-cannot-be-thought, is to engage in neither sophistical
rhetoric nor negative theology. It is rather to point towards that which philosophy
is unable to say.
In a sense, what philosophy cannot say is able to be said by literature, or
by a certain notion of the literary as that which always causes trouble for
philosophy and which philosophy therefore tries to cancel or exclude, defining
it as 'other' than philosophy. . . . To think differently, however, [from, e.g.,
postmodern literary theory] it is not enough to acknowledge that literature
says what philosophy is unable to say; it has to be acknowledged also that philosophy
is able to say what literature cannot say. Without this double acknowledgement,
either philosophy or literature must stand as a master discourse. . . . The
unthought within thought, as it were, cannot be thought if it is simply a matter
of choosing between this way or that way of thinking (242-44).
risk of to oppose is to wish to usurp/to dominate: the unavoidable risk
of a previously oppositional but now dominant force turning into what it once
opposed. There are countless historical (and not merely 'abstract') examples
of the unavoidability of such a risk. The risk, then, is empirical, and cannot
simply be dismissed as a philosophical concept or a literary figure. It is because
the risk is empirical-such that its effects are never less than political, historical,
and actual-that the critique of metaphysics cannot be seen as other than connected
to political and historical actualities (244).
the affirmation of the unpresentable absolute of literature is not so
much an attempt to rethink thought as to transcend or get outside it. For romanticism,
then, literature is an ethics because it says what thought (defined as reason)
cannot say. And what it 'says' is that there are some things that are unsayable
(245).
excellent summary of postmodern/romantic opposition to reason and structure
(246-47)
The defence of reason should not have to exclude the critique of reason;
indeed without the possibility of critique, any defence of reason could never
be anything other than an expression of faith or superstition. This is the lesson,
it could be said, which poststructuralism gives us to contemplate; a lesson,
or a challenge, which is inseparable from a certain ideal of the Enlightenment
and of the promise of democracy to come. The poststructuralist critique of structure,
in other words, is neither unreasonable nor democratic (248).
literature as problem of how to approach literature-nonoppositional approach
to theory and pragmatics
Notes from Lucy, Niall. Debating Derrida. Melbourne UP, 1995.
Most misunderstood of D's statements is that there is nothing outside
of the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte] (1).
D's Racism's Last Word pub. in Critical Inquiry (1985): there's
no racism without a language (292 qtd. in Lucy 6). Violence as function
of 'man' as a 'talking animal' who names, classifies, divides, marks off space,
puts down limits, and outlines borders (6-7).
The notion that language enables us to read the world may be an effect of language
itself (8)-separateness not a priori. D's response to McClintock and Nixon is
to show how in the name of politics, they take everything for granted, as already
written and read, and that such a mode of argument reproduces the existing order
of things so that everything and everyone stay in their own place: In
short you are for the division of labor and the disciplined respect of disciplines.
Each must stick to his role and stay within the field of his competence, none
may transgress the limits of his territory (169-70 qtd Lucy 10).
Lucy explains: It is 'logical' to think that word and history should be
kept apart, and that there is indeed something beyond the text. But this 'logic'
is only an effect of a certain way of thinking, which produces separateness
as the law of an origin and sets it apart as the natural condition of things.
. . . [political strategies] are always already textual strategies. . . They
are always textual strategies in the sense that they transform or reproduce
contexts, and transform or reproduce territorial boundaries (12).
Derrida writes: A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds
the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming
it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or
political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable.
Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any
deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable
(Limited Inc 116).
Any mark that is to be recognized as a sign must be able to be repeated, to
be re-marked, and cited in another context, and this so-called repetition or
iteration in a different context alters the sign and this capacity for iteration,
to be both itself and not itself at once suggests that the sign is already divided,
and that its misrepresentation is structural, not accidental or mistaken. There
cannot be any rigorous distinction between ordinary language use and non-ordinary
language use. Similarly, the supposed distinction and opposition between speech
and writing occludes on the basis of an all-or-nothing distinction between
speech and writing, is a kind of quasi-prior dependence on a structure of separation
that divides each term within and from itself. The name of this structure is
'writing'. Part of the strategy of using this name is to show that what philosophy
excludes-errancy, contamination, metaphoricity, excess-is in fact not only what
cannot be excluded but also what enables philosophy, both potentialising and
limiting the production of all-or-nothing concepts (Lucy 29). Lucy explains
that it is not just the written mark but every mark-the mark-in-general-that
must be able to be repeated, and that must be structured by the non-presence
of its original context of production (31).
Derrida writes: This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent
or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems
to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general;
which is to say, as we have seen, the nonpresent remainder [restance] of a differential
mark cut off from its putative 'production' or origin. And I shall even extend
this law to all 'experience' in general if it is conceded that there is no experience
consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks (SEC
10).Brunette, Peter and David Wills. Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1989.
Glas-turning pt. in D's writing, shift from explanation of difference to a putting
into effect of the other and ludic side of language (5)
concepts can only function because of their opposites, which then must
inevitably be seen as constituting them (7); every concept carries trace
of its opposite within it, challenges logic of non-contradiction
cannot exclude threats to sense or relegate to secondary positions in sense-making
process (8)
logic of the supplement
What we have in each case is the idea of something supposedly exterior,
foreign, or opposite to what is favored or desired coming to replace and supplant
the latter; but in each case the supplement also acts as a correction to a problem
or deficiency within the system. So the question arises as to whether what is
supposedly foreign to the system was not in fact part of it, as potential or
constitutive force, from the beginning, and not just an accident that befell
it along the way (9). D's strategy is to overturn and displace these contradictory
hierarchies that rule-and enable-our system of thought . . . . allowing
him to reveal the difference that breaks into the order of the same (9).
Writing becomes the model for all linguistic operations, including speech,
to the extent that they always involve a dependence on the difference, spacing,
and rupture that the speech model occludes. Writing thus comes to stand for
otherness in general (9).
With illusion of simultaneity of thought and speech, the gap of representation
between s'fr and s'fd is suppressed, and the presence of the voice appears as
an origin of truth: The origin, to have absolute meaning as such, must
reside outside of language, untouched by the error, dispute, and interpretation
that pervade language (10). Writing as scapegoat for language's failures
Strategic resistances to logocentrism's will to truth and centrality of meaning,
though no way to step outside logocentrism (11) even under erasure
Différance is a radical attempt at otherness but an otherness that is
always also constituted by its opposite Double science, both analytical and
experimental. In short, the aim of Derrida's critique is to work through,
to unpack the operations of logocentrism, the functions by which Western thinking
has assured its sameness and repressed its otherness, but in such a way as to
avoid falling back into a system of analysis that does nothing but repeat, in
practice, those very same pitfalls. (12).