Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004)
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction, which profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. Born in El Biar, French Algeria, Derrida studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was introduced to phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism.
Derrida's philosophy revolves around the concept of "deconstruction," a method of analyzing and critiquing the relationship between text and meaning. He challenged traditional ideas about language, meaning, and representation, emphasizing the inherent instability and play of meaning within any text. His work focused on the margins and the overlooked aspects of texts, exposing the hidden structures and power dynamics within language and thought. Derrida's ideas have significantly influenced literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.
Some of Derrida's major works include:
"Speech and Phenomena" (1967) - A critique of Husserl's phenomenology, highlighting the limitations of the distinction between speech and writing.
"Of Grammatology" (1967) - A foundational text for deconstruction, exploring the concept of "writing" in the broadest sense and its implications for understanding meaning and representation.
"Writing and Difference" (1967) - A collection of essays that develop the ideas of deconstruction and engage with various philosophical and literary figures.
"Margins of Philosophy" (1972) - Another collection of essays, further exploring themes of language, meaning, and metaphysics.
"The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond" (1980) - A playful and experimental work that challenges the conventions of philosophical discourse and literary form.
"Specters of Marx" (1993) - A response to the end of the Cold War and the proclaimed "end of history," engaging with Marx's thought and the concept of spectrality.
Derrida's work has been widely influential and controversial, sparking significant debates within and beyond the field of philosophy. His ideas have had a lasting impact on a range of disciplines, including literature, law, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Derrida passed away in Paris in 2004, but his work continues to inspire critical and creative thought worldwide.
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.