Elements of his philosophy

• “Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, 134: “If the meaning of Being always has been determined by philosophy as presence, then the question of Being, posed on the basis of the transcendental horizon of time (first stage, in Being and Time) is the first tremor of the philosophical security, as it is of self-confident presence.”

• Derrida shows this using the doublet signifier and signified with which Ferdinand de Saussure had articulated his linguistics. For Derrida, it is a metaphysical distinction because the signifier, as signifier, is supposed to refer to the presence of the signified without it ever being given. When one tries to think the signified or the thing’s “full” presence, one cannot escape from the realm of signs.

• What Derrida deconstructs is, like Heidegger, the metaphysics of “presence” already at work in language itself from the moment all discourse gives the impression its meaning is “somewhere,” or outside of discourse. What if all meaning simply stemmed from this metaphysics of presence?

• Following Heidegger, Derrida argued that metaphysics emerges from forgetting difference, and more importantly from forgetting the différance that makes it possible. Although Derrida, like Gadamer, claims that this stems from forgetting language, he is much more of a structuralist than either Gadamer or Heidegger.

• Derrida, Margins of Philosophy: “And yet, are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intra-metaphysical effects of différance?”

• Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics was therefore not radical enough since he continued to ask the question of Being, which is different from beings, as though he sought its ultimate truth or meaning. But for Derrida, this ultimate truth, which cannot be ultimate since it fails to deliver any meaning, or any presence, is that of différance itself. This différance, as arche-structure, only designates “the movement according to which language, or any code, all system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a web of differences.”

• Thus différance’s arche-structure is “in a certain and very strange way ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being.” More archaic, more subterranean, différance does not stem from the “history of Being.”

• Hegel sought to radicalize the quest for intelligibility by making it transparent to itself. Derrida does something similar, but ends up deconstructing the idea of intelligibility, and reduces it to the game of différance. But is this structural intelligence of metaphysics emptied of all content and all experience, not itself a highly technical way of grasping metaphysics?

• obviously Derrida’s deconstruction, which tries to be more radical than Heidegger’s, also wishes to be “less metaphysical.” But why be less metaphysical? Well, because metaphysics rests on a fiction (the old hag “presence”) and a form of repression.

• For Derrida, the metaphysical “apparatus” must be considered with suspicion because it rests on a silent terror, that of the exclusion of otherness and difference.