Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Beijing: FLTRP, 2004.
85-6.
Deconstruction must, Derrida continues, “through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system.”
86.
To deconstruct a discourse is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise.
The principle of causality asserts the logical and temporal priority of cause to effect. But Nietzsche argues in the fragments of The Will to Power, this concept of causal structure is not something given as such but rather the product of a precise tropological or rhetorical operation, a chronological reversal. Suppose on
87.
The deconstruction itself relies on the notion of cause: the experience of pain, it is claimed, causes us to discover the pin and thus causes the production of a cause. To deconstruct causality on
If “cause” is an interpretation of contiguity and succession, then pain can be the cause in that it may come first in the sequence of experience.
[Footnote: On
88.
Working within the opposition, the deconstruction upsets the hierarchy by producing an exchange of properties. If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin. By showing that the argument which elevates cause can be used to favor effect, on
92.
“It could be shown,” Derrida writes, “that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence.”
Derrida: Presence of the object to sight, presence as substance/essence/existence, temporal presence as the point of the now, self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, co-presence of the self and the other. Logocentrism would thus be bound up in the determination of the being of the existent as presence.
93-4.
Among the familiar concepts that depend on the value of presence are: the immediacy of sensation, the presence of ultimate truths to a divine consciousness, the effective presence of an origin in a historical development, a spontaneous or unmediated intuition, the presence in speech of logical and grammatical structures, truth as what subsists behind appearances, and the effective presence of a goal in the steps that lead to it.
94.
The notions of “making clear,” “grasping,” “demonstrating,” “revealing,” and “showing what is the case” all invoke presence. To claim, as in the Cartesian cogito, that the “I” resists radical doubt because it is present to itself in the act of thinking or doubting is on
There is, however, a problem that it characteristically encounters: when arguments ci
Consider, for example, the flight of an arrow. If reality is what is present at any given instant, the arrow produces a paradox. At any given moment it is in a particular spot; it is always in a particular spot and never in motion… The presence of motion is conceivable, it turns out, on
This is on
95.
A deconstruction would involve the demonstration that for presence to function as it is said to, it must have the qualities that supposedly belong to its opposite, absence. Thus, in stead of defining absence in terms of presence, as its negation, we can treat “presence” as the effect of a generalized absence or, as we shall see shortly, of differance.
The paradox of structure and event.
A word’s meaning is a result of the meaning speakers have given it in past acts of communication. And what is true of a word is true of language in general: the structure of a language, its system of norms and regularities, is a product of events, the result of prior speech acts. We find that every event is itself already determined and made possible by prior structures. The possibility of meaning something by an utterance is already inscribed in the structure of the language.
96.
Acts of signification depend on differences, such as the contrast between “food” and “nonfood” that allows food to be signified, or the contrast between signifying elements that allows a sequence to function as a signifier. The sound sequence bat is a signifier because it contrasts with pat, mat, bad, bet, etc. The noise that is “present” when on
An account of language, seeking solid foundation, will doubtless [sic] wish to treat meaning as something somewhere present—say, present to consciousness at the moment of a signifying event; but any presence it invokes turns out to be already inhabited by difference.
Derrida: “We can extend to the system of signs in general what Saussure says about language: ‘The linguist system (langue) is necessary for speech events (parole) to be intelligible and produced their effects, butt he latter are necessary for the system to establish itself.”
98.
The value and force of a text may depend to a considerable extent on the way it deconstructs the philosophy that subtends it.
99.
Derrida: “Whether in written or in spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which itself is not simply present… This linkage, this weaving, is the text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are on
The concept of the sign itself, from which Saussure starts, is based on a distinction between the sensible and the intelligible; the signifier exists to give access to the signified and thus seems to be subordinated to the concept or meaning that it communicates.
102.
Derrida produces a general demonstration that if writing is defined by the qualities traditionally attributed to it, then speech is already a form of writing. For example, writing is often set aside as merely a technique for recording speech in inscriptions that can be repeated and circulated in the absence of the signifying intention that animates speech; but this iterability can be shown to be the condition of any sign in general, not just of writing… A speech sequence is not a sign sequence unless it can be quoted and put into circulation among those who have no knowledge of the “original” speaker and his signifying intentions… Writing-in-general is an archi-ecriture, an archi-writing or protowriting which is the condition of both speech and writing in the narrow sense.
The relationship between speech and writing gives us a structure which Derrida identifies in a number of texts and which he calls, using a term that Rousseau applies to writing, a logic of the “supplement.” A supplement, Webster’s tells us, is “something that completes or makes an addition.” A supplement to a dictionary is an extra section that is added on, but the possibility of adding a supplement indicates that the dictionary itself is incomplete. “Languages are made to be spoken,” writes Rousseau; “writing serves on
103.
The supplement is an inessential extra, added, to something complete in itself, but the supplement is added in order to complete, to compensate for a lack in what was supposed to be complete it itself… The supplement is presented as exterior, foreign to the “essential” nature of that to which it is added or in which it is substituted.
104.
For example, Rousseau discusses education as a supplement to nature… But the description of this supplementation reveals an inherent lack in nature; nature must be completed—supplemented—by education if it is to be truly itself: the right education is needed if human nature is to emerge as it truly is.
Rousseau also speaks of masturbation as a “dangerous supplement.” Like writing, it is a perverse addition, a practice or technique added to normal sexuality as writing is added to speech. But masturbation also replaces or substitutes for “normal” sexual activity. To function as substitute it must resemble in some essential way what it replaces, and the fundamental structure of masturbation—desire as auto-affection focusing on an imagined object that on
135.
A systematic treatise on textual grafting: It would treat discourse as the product of various sorts of combinations or insertions. Exploring the iterability of language, its ability to function in new contexts with new force, a treatise on textual grafting would attempt to classify various ways of inserting on
140.
On the on
This double practice of relying on the terms of an opposition in on
142.
In the Phaedrus writing is described as a pharmakon, which means both “remedy” (for weakness of memory, for example) and “poison.” Offered to mankind by its inventor as a remedy, writing is treated by Socrates as a dangerous drug. This double meaning of pharmakon proves essential to the logical placement of writing as a supplement: it is an artificial addition which cures and infects.
143.
Derrida: “The pharmakon is ‘ambivalent’ because it constitutes the element in which opposites are opposed, the movement and play by which each relates back to the other, reverses itself and passes into the other: (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.)…. The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play (the production) of difference.”
153-4.
Since deconstruction is interested in what has been excluded and in the perspective it affords on the consensus, there can be no question of accepting consensus as truth or restricting truth to what is demonstrable within a system. Since deconstruction attempts to view systems from the outside as well as the inside, it tries to keep alive the possibility that the eccentricity of women, poets, prophets, and madmen might yield truths about the system to which they are marginal—truths contradicting the consensus and not demonstrable within a framework yet developed.
The preservation of the notion that truth might emerge from positions of marginality and eccentricity is part of this theoretical strategy…
161.
The most general instance of Freudian deconstruction is the dislocation of the hierarchical opposition between the conscious and the unconscious.
Freud: “Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage… The unconscious is the true psychical reality.”
Freud inverts the traditional hierarchy and makes consciousness a particular derivative instance of unconscious processes.
But there are two ways of thinking about this Freudian operation. We have an inversion that emphasizes the superior power of the unconscious but still defines it in terms of consciousness, as repressed or deferred consciousness. Experiences are repressed, relegated to the unconscious, where they exercise a determining influence. During a psychoanalysis their hidden presence is revealed; they are brought back to consciousness.
162.
By this way of thinking, the Freudian inversion privileges the unconscious, but it does so on
Freud’s formulations are often open to this interpretation, but he also insists on a distinction between the psychoanalytic unconscious and what he calls the “preconscious,” whose memories and experiences are not conscious at a given moment but can in principle be recovered by consciousness. The unconscious, on the other hand, is inaccessible to consciousness…. Freud emphasizes that the unconscious is by no means simply a layer of actual experiences that have been repressed, a hidden presence… The unconscious itself is not a simple hidden reality but always, in Freud’s speculations, a complex and differential product.
163.
Derrida: “In the otherness of he ‘unconscious’ we are dealing not with a series of modified presents—presents that are past or still to come—but with a ‘past’ that has never been nor ever will be present and whose future will never be its production or reproduction in the form of presence.”
In the case of the Wolfman, the child had witnessed his parents copulating at age on
The case of “Emma” is another classic illustration of the textual, differential functioning of the unconscious. Emma traces her fear of shops to an incident at age twelve when she entered a store, saw two shop assistants laughing, and fled in fright. Freud traces it to a scene at age eight when a shopkeeper had fondled her genitals through her clothes… The sexual content is neither in the first scene, when she was aware of no sexual implications, nor in the second scene. [164] Freud: “The memory is repressed which has on
Derrida: “The unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united—a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions… Always already: that is to say, repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral.”
171.
Freud: psychoanalysis seeks to understand “how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition.” Without this originary bisexuality, there would be simply two separate sexes, man and woman. On
173.
Many theorists influenced by deconstruction have worked to invert the traditional hierarchy and assert the primacy of the feminine. Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Sarah Kofman.
174.
Writers who celebrate the feminine in this way can always be accused of myth-making, of countering myths of the male with new myths of the female… But the promotion of the feminine should also be accompanied by the deconstructive attempt to displace the sexual opposition.
175.
A final hierarchical opposition with institutional implications is the distinction between reading and misreading or understanding and misunderstanding… Misunderstanding is an accident which sometimes befalls understanding, a deviation which is possible on
176.
Reading and understanding preserve or reproduce a content or meaning, maintain its identity, while misunderstanding and misreading distort it; they produce or introduce a difference. But on
The claim that all readings are misreadings can also be justified by the most familiar aspects of critical and interpretive practice. Given the necessity for a reading to select and organize, every reading can be shown to be partial. Interpreters are able to discover features and implications of a text that previous interpreters neglected or distorted. They can use the text to show that previous readings are in fact misreadings, but their own readings will be found wanting by later interpreters… This history of readings is a history of misreadings, though under certain circumstances these misreadings can be and may have been accepted as readings.
178.
According to the paleonymic strategy urged by Derrida, “misreading” retains the trace of truth, because noteworthy readings involve claims to truth and because interpretation is structured by the attempt to catch what other readings have missed and misconstrued. Since no reading can escape correction, all readings are misreadings; but this leaves not a monism but a double movement. Against the claim that, if there are on
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