The following essay is based on a 1972 interview with Michel Foucault, which was published under the name ‘Truth and Power’. In this interview, Foucault argued that truth is literally power… Or, at the very least, he argued that truth is always fused with (or allied to) power. And power often comes along with politics and what Foucault called “violence”. However, Foucault was never against power or violence. (He supported the new theocratic regime in Iran in 1979.) His aim was to substitute the hegemony of the current “regime of truth” and power with a new regime of truth and power, one which was closer to his own truths and values.
Michel Foucault in 1974. Brazilian National Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. (Source here.)
“The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new rules that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. [ ] The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.”
If truth equals power (or at least if truth is necessarily fused with power), then it must also be fused with violence, as well as with (to use Foucault’s words) “the battle for ‘the truth’”. Thus, if “capitalists”, the clergy, the legal system, etc. have fused truth and power, and also truth with violence, then it’s up to Foucauldians (as with Marxists) to win that battle for the truth. That is, to establish an hegemony in all institutions.
If there’s truth fused with (or allied to) power, then there’s power fused with politics. Thus, Michel Foucault’s role as a philosopher was explicitly political. This is something he didn’t hide, or even contemplate hiding. After all, if all truth is fused with power, and power is fused with politics, then of course every philosopher must be political. Indeed, he must be political in specific ways. And Foucault clearly showed his readers in which political direction he was leaning.
Power, truth and hegemony have already been mentioned, so here’s an explicit passage in which Foucault was upfront about what his political goal was. It goes as follows:
“It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.”
Now let’s simply requote that with a couple of small changes:
It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power), but of detaching it only from certain systems of power. It’s a question of detaching the power of truth from certain forms of hegemony, and substituting it with other forms of hegemony. Forms of hegemony which square with my own politics and my own philosophies.
This is what Antonio Gramsci suggested some 45 years before Foucault’s spoken words above.
Gramsci wasn’t against what he called “hegemony” either: he was only against certain kinds of hegemony. Indeed, he wanted his followers to establish their own hegemony over the “institutions”. And, in many cases, they did. Foucault was almost at one with Gramsci on this, as is made clear in his actual words. After all, if (to repeat) “emancipating truth from every system of power [is a] chimera, for truth is already power”, then Gramscians and Foucauldians are in a battle for power. Whether that be in scientific philosophical, artistic or legal institutions, or in more-obviously political ones.
All this is an explicit call to establish a political hegemony. And, arguably, truth may well be the victim. However, that wouldn’t have concerned Foucault himself because truth is either identical to power, or it’s always fused with power. This ultimately means that there’s no genuine debate to be had between Foucauldians and non-Foucauldians… only a (to use Foucault’s own word) “battle”.
Truth = Power?
Many people know about the truth = power pseudo-equation which Foucault offered the world. And it’s in the ‘Truth and Power’interview that Foucault best expressed his position on this.
The word “equation” has been used because from the way that Foucault often wrote about this matter, he really did see it as a literal identity. However, this isn’t to say that he often made the simple locution “truth is power”, and he certainly never wrote “truth = power”. Instead, he wrote such things as the following:
“The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power [ ].”
Foucault then (for want of a better word) denigrated truth.
Firstly, he told the interviewers that much of what has been believed about truth is a “myth”. He continued:
“[T]ruth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.”
Even though some of the things Foucault says about truth (as will be shown) may be acceptable to certain readers, this kind of language is still rhetorical and shocking. Why? Well, take these simple questions: Is it true that racism is a bad thing? Is it true that Stalin put millions of people in the Gulag? Isn’t it true that the Earth isn’t flat?
Of course, Foucault might well have finessed his position had these questions ever been put to him. Yet he didn’t do so in the interview tackled here. Instead, he entirely bypassed such questions.
“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.”
Yet it’s here that we see that truth and power can’t literally be identical. (This would mean the following: If truth is power, then power is truth.) That’s because Foucault himself said that truth “induces regular effectsof power”. That means that there is a thing (truth?), and then there are the regular effects of power induced by that thing. So truth is used, and it effects things. Thus, truth exists before its effects and uses.
Again, truth can’t be identical to power if Foucault states that “systems of power produce and sustain it”. After all, what is it that’s being produced and sustained? Power, it seems, comes on the scene only after truth is already there. Except, perhaps, that if something is produced, then it may also be created or even invented. Nonetheless, it is still sustained after it is produced.
In addition, Foucault tied truth to power when he said that truth is
“produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media)”.
Where did Foucault expect truth to be produced and transmitted when he included almost everything under the sun (e.g., universities, writing, the media, the family, the Church, etc.) under its rubric? Perhaps this question simply backs up his position. That is, truths must be produced and transmitted by people and institutions, and those people and institutions are allied to power.
Sure, if one defines the word “power” so broadly (Foucault did define “power” so broadly), then all these examples instantiate power in some form.
Foucault’s own work has been produced and transmitted in many university departments, the legal system, and in many instances of “writing”, since the 1970s onward. There have even been university courses classed as“Foucault Studies”, and many academics who’ve been Foucauldians. So did academic Foucauldians have power too? Well, on Foucault’s own definition, they most certainly did.
What Truth Isn’t
Foucault basically stated that truth isn’t an abstract object. He makes that point when he says that “[t]ruth is a thing of this world”. So, no matter what position people have on truth, we can’t avoid it. Or, at the very least, we can’t avoid using the word “truth” (i.e., even when that word isn’t put in scare quotes). This is largely a matter of grammar and a lack of alternatives. It’s also very convenient to use the word “truth”, and even to believe in truth.
So, according to Foucault, the thing called “truth” isn’t an abstraction, a matter of correspondence, etc: it’s “of this world”. It’s something that impacts of human beings, societies and life itself. To Foucault, however, all that meant that truth is power too.
Rules, Not Truth
Despite the pseudo-equation “truth = power”, Foucault did attempt to make at least one important distinction here. So although Foucault himself had been talking of truth in the abstract, he then told his interviewers that it’s not really truth-in-the-abstract which concerns him. (It’s not about “‘the ensemble of truths which arediscovered and accepted”.) Instead, it’s all about
“the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true”.
Yet this isn’t really a difference which makes a (political) difference. Foucault simply moved from truth (or truth-in-the-abstract) to the “ensemble of rules” which produced them, and which are then allied to (or fused with) power. Thus, the ensemble of rules becomes the locus of power (if indirectly), not truths themselves. But, again, that’s a difference which doesn’t make a difference. Thus, from an analysis which focuses on power, the power starts with the rules, and then that power is passed on to the truths we accept. In other words, if you can seize control of the rules (as Foucault advised in the opening quote), then you have the power.
These rules are vital when it comes to establishing “the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays”. That is, the rules establish what is taken to be true in the domains of politics and economics. So if Foucauldians can seize (or create) the rules, then they can establish an hegemony of power within politics and economics.
“[T]he mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth: the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”
The point that should now be made is that we (or a society) may well have “mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements”, and there still be such a thing as truth. Indeed, there may be such mechanisms and instances in one society (or practice), and its statements and theories may be taken as being true in other societies (or practices). In the same manner, statements and theories may well be sanctioned and still be true. Again, they may be sanctioned in one domain, and then accepted in other domains.
Similarly, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth may simply be means to establish truth. And they too may be accepted by other societies and their regimes.
After all, truth can’t simply exist in the ether. According to Foucault himself, truth isn’t an abstract object which exists eternally. Truth must be established. Thus, truth can’t help but belong to a “discourse” or to a “regime”. It can’t help but be the end result of “mechanisms” which establish what is, and what isn’t, true. There is no escaping any of this…
Of course, all this may be precisely Foucault’s point.
Those Who Control Truth
The last point (i.e., in this context) which Foucault made is perhaps the most important. He informed his interviewers about “the status of those who are chargedwith saying what counts as true”. The thing here is that this will resonate with just about everyone. Think about Covid and the endless controversies it brought about. In this case, one of the important subjects was (to use Foucault’s words) “the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”.
Now consider Fact Checkers, and all the chatter about “disinformation” and “misinformation”. What is the status of these Fact Checkers? How is it that they — at least to some extent — control the truth?
Yet even in these two cases there can’t be an automatic assumption that (at least some of) the statements and theories about Covid weren’t true. And some of what Fact Checkers say is true may well be true. Despite that, Fact Checkers, etc. still have a status within society, and therefore, according to Foucault, they must also have power. So, in these cases, truths are fused with power. Sure, falsehoods are also fused with power. That’s simply the way it goes.
Covid and Fact Checking are controversial subjects, so perhaps it would have been better to focus on some less titillating examples. What about the truths offered by physicists, priests, philosophers, binmen, etc? Are they fused with power too? And, even if they are fused with power, does that make their statements and theories suspect or even false?
Intellectuals
In the next section, Foucault tackled “intellectuals” (such as himself?). He stated that intellectuals are “not the ‘bearer of universal values’”. Instead, they “occupy[] a specific position” — a specific position linked to “the general functioning of an apparatus of truth”. Here Foucault fuses truth with the individuals who produce and transmit truth. Thus, perhaps these “‘intellectuals’ don’t bear universal values”, they simply transmit them. Indeed, perhaps they transmit them even if they do occupy a specific position. This isn’t to say that all their transmitted statements are true, or that all their values are “universal” or right. It simply means that truth and value may have a status which is independent of the specific positions inhabited by intellectuals.
Of course, Foucault would have denied this. Again, he’d have denied it because he fused truth and power. That is, if someone produced and transmitted a (supposed) truth in position X, then that position would pollute or contaminate that truth — by Foucault’s own definition! (Unless the intellectuals/academics were transmitting the theories and ideas of Foucault himself?)
This is all almost traditional or standard Marxism. Thus, as with Marxists, one can ask if Foucault would have exempted himself and Foucauldians from hisclass analyses. Alternatively, as again with Marxists, were Foucault and Foucauldians “‘organic’ intellectuals of the proletariat”? (One would have to read a lot of Marxist literature to find out what an organic intellectual is.)
Scientific Truth
Physicists were mentioned earlier, along with the question as to whether their own statements and theories are also fused with power. Foucault believed that they are. Indeed, scientific truths were his first concrete example. He said:
“In societies like ours, the ‘political economy’ of truth is [ ] centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it.”
It’s certainly the case that science requires “institutions”. Thus, in one sense at least, truths are produced by such institutions. That said, there’s no reason why amateur scientists can’t discover — or even produce — truths. Indeed, they have done so.
A person can discover (or formulate) a truth in complete isolation. Foucault might have argued that such a “truth” (i.e., in inverted commas) fulfils no function as a truth in such a counterfactual scenario. It can only be a truth when it is taken to be a truth. It’s only institutions which can establish if such statements and theories are true. And institutions are vehicles of power.
Some readers may take it to be somewhat contradictory that Foucault used words such as “propositions”, “tested” and even “evaluated”. After all, are these propositions tested and evaluated in terms of an ensemble of Foucault’s own rules, and which are themselves fused with Foucauldian power? Of course, it’s quite possible that Foucault might have said “yes” to such a question had it ever been put to him. If he had said “yes”, then all the people who disagreed with him could have done is battle him for what Foucault called “the true”.
This essay is almost entirely based on a single subsection of a chapter of Jacques Derrida’s book Of Grammatology(1967). In that subsection, Derrida sets up much of the technical groundwork which he required for the destruction (not “deconstruction”) of Western metaphysics. This was the “great epoch” which Derrida challenged. (Within it, we also had “the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism”.)
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18 March 2013. Arturo Espinosa Seguir, Jacques Derrida for PIFAL. Wiki Commons. See here.
“The destruction of the book [ ] is now underway in all domains. [And] violence [against the book] is necessary.”
It must immediately be said that Jacques Derrida made much of the fact that he never claimed to have escaped (or transcended) Western metaphysics. Indeed, he believed this to be impossible. Or, using his own words, the metaphysical notions discussed below were deemed to be “necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them”.
So Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics didn’t mean that he had somehow escaped it. Instead, he claimed to have
“demonstrat[ed] the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be independently separated”.
Derrida deemed Western metaphysics to be a system (i.e., much as languages — however broadly construed - can be deemed to be systems). That’s why Derrida argued that once we bring in a single metaphysical concept into the discussion, then we’ve automatically brought in “the entire syntax and system of Western metaphysics”.
So did Derrida create a system in order to deconstruct another system (i.e., Western metaphysics)? Did he also require a metanarrative in order to “question”this bigger system (which included all previous metanarratives)?
As already hinted at, there’s no doubt that Derrida’s aim was (as it’s often put) radical. Indeed, he even out-radicalised
“the tradition [that] professed to withdraw meaning, truth, presence, being, etc., from the movement of signification”.
This can be interpreted as Derrida’s one-upmanship against philosophers who were already radical.
In detail. According to Derrida, such philosophers didn’t believe that “meaning, truth” etc. belonged to “signification” (written words, etc.). However, they did reject “the difference between signified and signifier” in that the signified was already deemed to be polluted by the signifier. Yet, according to Derrida, such philosophers were still playing the same old metaphysical game. That is, they were still offering their own “present truth” in place of the old truth. To Derrida, the present truth needed to be questioned too. Indeed, it’s because of this that
“the work of deconstruction, its ‘style,’ remain by nature exposed to misunderstanding and nonrecognition”.
One philosophical consequence of these positions (i.e., of both the old questioners and Derrida himself) is that deconstruction itself is bound to be misunderstood and misrecognised.
So isn’t it odd that Derrida himself got so hot under the collar about the “misinterpretations” of his own work (as well as of deconstruction generally)? According to the logic of his own philosophy, there is no meaning, truth, understanding, recognition, etc. to be had when it comes to deconstruction…
Yes, you cannot get Derrida right!
Speech (or the Voice)
At first glance, it’s hard to understand why Derrida saw the text/book, signifier/signified, writing/speech, etc. distinctions to be so important.
So why was speech (or “the voice”) deemed to be so important to those philosophers whom Derrida targeted?
Speech was important because it was deemed to be closer to “meaning” (or it best captures meaning). However, there have been many ways to bring this closeness about.
Derrida singled out the case of Aristotle. He quoted Aristotle thus:
“‘[S]poken words (ta en tê phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathemata tes psyches) and written words are the symbols of spoken words.’”
So, in this case at least, mental experience is even closer to the logos (or to meaning) than “spoken words”. Of course, in many cases mental experience needs to be expressed. Thus, we have spoken words.
Now we have a three-way relation: mental experience/spoken words/written words.
Derrida particularly wanted to break the binary opposition between spoken words and written words (i.e., without giving too much attention to Aristotle’s mental experience).
It was one step from all the above for Derrida to coin the term “phonocentrism”.
Writing and the Spoken Word
Amajor theme in Derrida’s early work is that writing was always (to use a common English phrase) looked down upon. It was seen to be inferior to the spoken word. Or, to use Derrida’s technical prose, writing was deemed to be a “secondary and instrumental function”. In simple terms, writing was a “translator of a fullspeech”.
Why was full speech deemed to be superior?
Full speech was deemed to be “fully present”. In more detail, it was deemed to “present to itself, to its signified”. More importantly, the spoken word, unlike the written word, is “shielded from interpretation”.
Derrida didn’t go into detail on this (at least not in the chapter focussed on in this essay), but readers can conclude that these are examples of writing because writing (somehow) infects all of them. In simple non-Derridean terms, cinematography, choreography, pictures, music and sculptural works must be infected because it’s hard to imagine how they could so much as exist without prior (in non-Derridean terms) speech and words. Choreography, for example, requires spoken/written instructions, spoken/written details, stories, etc. And those instructions, details, stories, etc. can’t uphold the superiority of (in Derrida’s terms again) speech. (Everything just said is more obviously true of “political writing”.)
Derridabounced off two philosophers in respect to the above: Plato and Rousseau. They did much to set up the particular binary opposition of speech and writing. Of course, it can be found elsewhere too, and Derrida mentions “the Rationalists of the seventeenth century”… In fact, the entire history of Western metaphysics is guilty of “binary thinking”.
In terms of Rousseau (as quoted by Derrida), writing was the “supplementto the spoken word”. Thus, here we have the opposition spoken word/writing again. Derrida questions whether or not writing was in fact a supplement to the spoken word.
At first blush at least, surely the spoken word did come before writing. However, despite the details of history in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, he wasn’t questioning the chronology here. It can be assumed, then, that Derrida did accept that, historically, the spoken word came before writing. (How could he not do so?) That wasn’t his point. His point is that when both writing and the spoken word exist together, it’s as if the chronology were irrelevant.
Signifier, Signified, and Saussure
Derrida represented the relations between a signifier, a signified and the logos in the following passage:
“[A] sign signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos.”
In Derrida’s philosophy, a signifier can only signify another signifier, not anything external to writing. But, in the old style, a (forgive the phrasing) signifier signified a signified, which is in “proximity to a present logos”.
Derrida poetically said that it was believed (by philosophers) that the signified experiences a “fall” in its journey to the voice, and then to the signifier. He used the word “fall” because this process was represented in “medieval theology”. What’s more, the voice was deemed to be much closer to “the face of God” than writing.
Derrida, on the other hand, didn’tprivilege one half of this opposition (or any other opposition): he rejected the opposition itself. So Derrida interpreted Saussure as still privileging one half of his own opposition. In Derrida’s own words, Saussure’s signifier still has a
“absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning”.
Another way of looking at this is to say that the very use of the word “signified” suggested to Derrida that Saussure believed that the signified, well, exists. Derrida, on the other hand, believed that it didn’t exist. In other words, we don’t have two faces of one and the same leaf: we only have one… thing. However, that one thing isn’t the signifier either. That’s because a signifier signifies… something. To Derrida, that meant that we couldn’t simply erase the signified and be happy with the signifier. Instead, because they’re two faces of one and the same leaf, then both must go. (Of course, that didn’t that mean that Derrida never used the words “signifier” and “signified”.)
The Play of the Sign
Derrida wanted to free the signifier from the signified. Once the signifier (or writing) is free, then we have an “advent of [ ] play”. This play is what we have when written words are no longer obedient to the signified (or to the logos). Indeed, when Derrida wrote these words, he believed that “today such a play is coming into its own”. That meant that “the circulation of signs” is no longer “regulate[d]” to truth, the world, meaning, facts, etc.
Truth, the world, meaning, etc. are all polluted (or liberated by) the frank acknowledgement that they don’t exist outside the “play of the sign”.
Moreover, if you take Derrida’s position to its logical(!) conclusion (which Derrida himself did), then the very “concept of ‘sign’” has to go. That’s because you can’t have a sign without what that sign is a sign of. And what a sign is a sign of is itself already polluted by other signs (as well as by play).
Books and Texts
Another important duo of technical terms Derrida used is “book” and “text”. (They are everyday words which were given a technical meaning.) Put in simple terms (something which Derrida never did): a book’s contents are (or were) deemed to be about the world, reality, things, events, facts, etc. Texts, on the other hand, are about other texts. In Derrida’s Of Grammatology, books are also (supposed to be) about the signified, whereas texts are about the signifier.
In a controversial sense, the use of the technical term “text” is a commitment to some kind of linguistic idealism, whereas, to be crude, a belief in books commits readers to some kind of metaphysical realism.
Rather dramatically, Derrida announced the “death of the book”. And, as a corollary of that death, there must have been a “death of speech” (or of “so-called full speech”) too. (That’s if one accepts Derrida’s entire philosophy.)
Yet Derrida did write that “‘Death of speech’ is of course a metaphor here”. In other words, of course speech isn’t dead! (How could it be?) Instead, the superior status of speech (vis-à-vis writing) is questioned, and then rejected. Or, in Derrida’s prose, “we must thinkof a new situation for speech” in which it will be “subordinat[ed] within a structure” (i.e., a structure which includes writing and texts).
According to Derrida’s logic, however, writing and texts (like the signifier earlier) won’t thereby become the superior part of this structure (or a new “archon”). That’s because there are no such things as “full speech” and books in the first place. Thus, there’s no place for a hierarchy if parts of that hierarchy don’t exist in the first place.
In the end, then, there can’t be an opposition between speech and writing, book and text, signified and signifier, etc. either.
Derrida describes the logos in all sorts of ways. In the paragraph from which the words just quoted come from, Derrida was talking of the logos
“in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God’s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense”.
That’s a lot of senses. Derrida must have believed that all these senses shared something.
The words “the sense of God’s infinite understanding” seem the most straightforward here. Whether or not there is a God and His infinite understanding, this seems to be about a total and complete knowledge of all domains - or at least of any given domain. Perhaps we can conclude that the logos in the philosophical sense must have also involved a commitment to a total and complete knowledge (or understanding) of all domains — or a least of any given domain.
We can now ask the following question: What, exactly, is known or understood?
Is the logos a thing?
All this boils down to philosophers — and others — believing (at least in Derrida’s eyes) that they’re getting closer to the logos, or to truth, or to reason, etc. This is almost a literal closeness. However, this closeness took on many forms (logos, truth and reason have just been mentioned). We also have “the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity”. Here themirror of nature appears again. In other words, if we can cleanse the mind of all its shit, then we can have both knowledge and truth. (Alternatively, through Husserl’s “bracketing” of consciousness, we can find essences… and much more.)
What can we draw from these references to the cogito and consciousness?
According to Derrida, they’re all ways to “debase[] writing”. Of course, Descartes never cleansed his mind of writing. However, he did claim to have (temporarily) cleansed his mind of all those traditional views, etc. which were expressed in writing. Writing itself wasn’t really concentrated on by philosophers in those days: simply what was said via writing. (In Saussure’s terms, most philosophers hadn’t managed to make the distinction between signified and signifier… althoughsome had!)
The Rationalists, Rousseau, and Subjectivity
Derrida made all his highly-technical philosophy more concrete when he tied it to the rationalists of the 17th century. (Descartes has just been mentioned.) Specifically, he tied it to notion of subjectivity. He wrote:
“[T]he determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity. It is the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century.”
Derrida then made a more explicit connection when he continued:
“From then on, the condemnation of fallen and finite writing will take another form, within which we still live…”
To sum up the above in very simple terms: the rationalists tied subjectivity to the logos. Writing, on the other hand, was still distanced from the logos.
It would seem, then, that it could quite possibly be the case that Rousseau's position on writing inspired Derrida to take his overall position on these issues. After all, Derrida did tackle Rousseau — both here and elsewhere - in detail. [See here.]
All that said, Derrida also showed us that Rousseau qualified his own position when he brought in the notion of (to use Derrida’s words) “natural writing”. Derrida then quotes Rousseau sounding like a good rationalist:
“‘The more I retreat into myself, the more I consult myself, the more plainly do I read these words written in my soul [ ] I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart written by nature in characters which nothing can efface.”
In many ways, this is all very similar to Rousseau’s fellow Frenchman, Descartes. (Derrida himself classed it as a “Platonic” position.)
Thus, Derrida had wider aims other than merely dismantling the binary oppositions discussed (from various angles) so far. He also wanted to destroy truth. Thus, this dismantling of the binary oppositions of speech and writing, book and text, signified and signifier, etc. was just a means to destroy truth and Western metaphysics itself.
But what was all the above for?
Conclusion
To Derrida, it was all about “the destruction of the book”, which Derrida said was “now underway in all domains”. Indeed, Derrida admitted that this “violence” against the book is “necessary”.The destruction of the book, as has hopefully been shown, is also the destruction of truth, meaning, any distinction between words and things, and a whole host of other things too numerous to mention.
Note
(1) It’s surprising how much history of philosophy there is in the chapter ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’. The history of philosophy is something that many Continental philosophers have argued analytic philosophers ignore. (That might have been true once. See here.) Thus, some readers may be a little in the dark as to the accuracy of Derrida’s histories, as well as its complete relevance to the philosophical themes he draws out of them.
