Derrida's Others

i) Introduction

ii) Derrida's Non-Conceptual Concepts

iii) Derrida's Language Game?

Deconstruction and/or post-structuralism attempted to “liberate the Other”. The problem is that there's an indefinite number of Others. And many Others are also at mutual odds with each other.

Whatever the case is, surely only a shared language - the language that deconstruction rejected or deconstructed - can liberate the Other. As Thomas A. McCarthy once put it:

“Deconstruction can hardly give voice to the excluded other. The wholesale character of its critique of logocentrism deprives it of any language in which to do so.”

That's why deconstruction couldn't even hint at anything directly political (rather than tangentially political) in any traditional sense. Hence the ineffable, obscure and pretentious prose. 

This is McCarthy again:

“It is [] merely by accident that his writings contain little analysis of political institutions and arrangements, historical circumstances and tendencies, or social groups and social movements, and no constructions of right and good, justice and fairness, legitimacy and legality?”

Isn’t it the case that ‘legality’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘fairness’, ‘justice’ - and nearly all the other concepts and words referred to by McCarthy - are examples of transcendental signifieds in Jacques Derrida’s book (or "text")? Thus, Derrida's only interest in words/concepts (or at least his interest in political and philosophical positions) was to violently deconstruct them. If he hadn't done that, then his whole enterprise would have self-destructed (if not deconstructed) itself.

So perhaps all this is the reason why Derrida only started to wax lyrically about Marx very late in his life. 

For example, he wrote his Specters of Marx in 1993 – some 40 years or more after he first started writing philosophy. Yes, this was Derrida's “political turn”.

Derrida's Non-Conceptual Concepts

Let's go into a little detail here with the example of justice.

If Derrida had created a new concept of JUSTICE (that's if one can have a new version of an old concept), then that would have been just another “centre” or “sign substitution”. (Or at least it would have been to Derrida himself.)

Even if a new concept for an old word were created, it would still be parasitical on the old concept (i.e., otherwise it wouldn't be a new concept for an old word).

That's why, for example, Marx wasn't just a “Left Hegelian”: he was still also a Hegelian. That's why “neo-Aristotelians” were/are still Aristotelians. And even an anti-Christian like Nietzsche was infected (as it were) by - and parasitical upon - Christianity itself.

So perhaps the very notion of a new version of an old concept doesn't make sense. It may be better to call it a variation on an old concept (or an elaboration on it); rather than an equivalent. If we want a strict equivalent (or just any equivalent), then why not stick with the old concept?

An alternative to an old concept, however, is a different thing entirely. This might have been what Derrida was trying to do. If that were the case, then he could hardly have used words like ‘fairness’, ‘right’, ‘legitimacy’ or any of the other words referred to by McCarthy above. However, if Derrida created an entirely new conceptual vocabulary (or a Wittgensteinian private language), then this would explain the difficulty in reading his work. Thus, either he wasn't using traditional concepts at all; or he was creating new concepts - en masse. Alternatively, perhaps Derrida used old words and applied new concepts to them. In that case, complications would multiply indefinitely.

All this made Derrida's philosophy suspect and problematic when he used old words for alternative or new concepts. How would we know (as new readers) that this is what Derrida is actually doing? And if Derrida never gave definitions of his alternative concepts (which used old words), then we'd still be in the darkest of dark places.

Indeed, Derrida couldn't even use the concept CONCEPT because that too belongs to the forbidden vocabulary of (as he often put it) “traditional Western metaphysics”. Of course, it may not even be possible to reject the concept CONCEPT and still do philosophy - or even write or speak at all (as the late Wittgenstein might have put it). Thus, this was surely a rhetorical claim on Derrida’s part.

For a start, one must already have concepts to reject the concept CONCEPT. However, Derrida might have replied that he did indeed have the concept CONCEPT. However, it was his job to reject or deconstruct it. Thus, perhaps what he wrote is so far removed from traditional philosophy (of whichever kind) that he didn't even need the concept CONCEPT (or any other concept for that matter).

Derrida's Language Game?

How far removed from philosophy - and indeed traditional language - can one be and still make sense and say something? Again, I can hear a Derridean reply: I'm not saying anything! This wouldn't be so far removed from Wittgenstein (in certain moods) and Heidegger who emphasised the point of pointlessness or the need to escape from traditional kinds of thinking. There's still a problem. What does non-statemental and non-conceptual philosophy look like? Is the answer simple? It looks like Derrida’s philosophy and prose.

“Writing” (a term Derrida often used) itself needs to be overcome, rejected or deconstructed. The very thing that is WRITING is highly suspect and related to (amongst other things) “violence”. That's if we can call violence violence, it it, if...

References

Derrida, Jacques. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.

McCarthy, Thomas A. (1991) Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory.

Jacques Derrida on the Signifier and the Signifier

The writer Geoffrey Bennington goes into detail about Jacques Derrida's position on "signifiers". Derrida took the signifier-signified distinction to be central within Western metaphysics. It was supposedly believed that the general

“description of writing is that it is the (graphic) signifier of a (phonic) signifier, which is the signifier of an (ideal) signified”. 

This temporal relation between phonic and graphic signifiers was taken by Derrida to express the metaphysical belief - common from Plato onward - that whereas we have “full presence” in the case of a phonic signifier, we only have a second-order presence when it comes to the graphic signifier (i.e., in the case of "writing"). Generally speaking, sense, meaning or the signified is to some extent lost when it's written down because it no longer has its close relation to the signified – which itself can be taken to be the meaning, sense or concept (of a word).

Bennington goes on to say that “it can be shown that all signifiers refer for their meaning only to other signifiers” [2000]. Thus not only do we not have the referent (or object) as the signified (or meaning) of a word: a word doesn't even really have its own independent sense (or meaning). It is, instead, supplied with a sense (or meaning/signified) by other words. It thus follows, according to Bennington's Derrida at least, that if

“metaphysics wants to call the 'signifier of the signifier' by the name of 'writing', it has better call all language 'writing' if it wants to be consistent”. [Bennington, 2000]

The distinction here is that writing should be seen as “the signifier of the signifier”; whereas other forms of language (including speech) are “the signifier of the signified” because they're closer to the signified (or to meaning/sense). This distinction, however, was deemed bogus by Derrida because he believed that all language is infected by “writing” and thus all language is really “the signifier of the signifier”.

No spoken word has a privileged or closer position to the signified (or to meaning) than a written word. If we had that close relation to the signified (which constitutes “full presence” in Derrida’s terminology), then the “play of the sign” (another phrase from Derrida) wouldn't actually occur because we could bypass the signifier of the signifier (that is writing) and achieve closer harmony with the signified (or with meaning/sense).

Many philosophers have happily accepted that this distinction was indeed the case when it came to Plato and those Platonists who followed him. However, not all commentators would agree with Derrida’s metaphysical and ethico-political conclusions and interpretations. The fact that many 20th and 21st century analytic philosophers, for example, still accept not only the existence of abstract non-spatiotemporal meanings/senses and propositions: they also deem such things to be of vital philosophical importance. (Primarily because of the role they play in achieving determinacy of meaning, objectivity and even truth.)

For example, Frege (in his paper ‘The Thought’) deemed what he called “the Thought” (or the ‘sense’ of a true proposition/sentence/statement) to be of vital importance in the battle for objectivity and against what was then called - and still is - ‘psychologism’.

The Play of the Sign

It can be seen that Derrida’s “play of the sign” partly follows from the thesis of the “indeterminacy of meaning” (to steal - and perhaps misuse - a term from W.V.O. Quine).

Yet if meaning is genuinely indeterminate (in whichever way), then why did Derrida feel the need to emphasise the play of the sign? If all we have is play, then why the compulsion to emphasise this play in the first place? Perhaps Derrida's answer might have been this: 

All we have is play; though it doesn't follow that we believe that all we have is play. 

The deconstructionist strategies simply tell us that we have play and that the determinacy of meaning was (or is) a grand illusion which has played a huge part in Western philosophy.

Although we've been talking about the indeterminacy of word-meaning, such indeterminacy will evidently spread to “texts”; and, in fact, become even more apparent and inescapable in such contexts. Thus it was texts - not individual words or concepts - which were Derrida’s prime concern.

To put it at its most acute and simple, Bennington says that a

“text cannot exhaustively control the reading you give it (no text can read itself without remainder)… there is no end to reading, no conceivable horizon of interpretation”.

We can also say that even if a text did have a determinate meaning (or interpretation), then that meaning (or interpretation) wouldn't force itself on us - or even on an ideal reader. This parallels, to some extent, the argument against metaphysical realism in that we can say that even if there's a "way the world is" (that elusive “view from nowhere”), then this still wouldn't - and couldn't - guarantee that we'd get the world right. The text and the world don't tell us what to say about them - no matter how determinate the text is (or how "real" the world is).

As Bennington puts it: “no text can read itself”. Neither, for that matter, can the world. Just as in the Quinian scheme of “radical translation” we require the relativity of “translation manuals” (or conceptual schemes), so texts require interpretations. And interpretations are just that – interpretations. In that sense there can't be a true interpretation of a text; though Derrida did appear to argue (in later life) that that could be a better one. (Here we have a similar problem with the word "better".)

The Syntax & System of Western Metaphysics

What was being said by Derrida isn't that different words have the same meaning or even a similar meaning. Instead it's argued that we have a “network of mutually-defining elements in dynamic solidarity” (Bennington). In other words, once we bring on board one word or concept, then - almost of necessity - we'll also be required to bring on board other words and concepts. This won't simply be in order to define the word (or concept) under scrutiny: it will also be to back it up (argumentatively speaking). That's why Derrida argued that once we bring in a single metaphysical concept into the discussion, then we must also bring in “the entire syntax and system of Western metaphysics” [1970].

Just as mathematical structuralists stress the place of a number (or a numerical inscription) within a number-system (as well as under-stress - or deny - its referential role), so we can say something similar about the word’s role within a linguistic system and how that determines its meaning or even its identity. Thus what matters with the numerical inscription ‘3’ is that it comes below ‘4’ and above ‘2’. Similarly with the word ‘freedom’, which comes alongside words like ‘liberty’, 'rights' , ‘choice’ and whatnot. In other words, try defining ‘freedom’ without bringing in other terms (or concepts); which, in turn, will either eventually refer back to the word ‘freedom’. (Or, alternatively, contain terms which will themselves need defining.)

Think also of the vast armoury of terms which are brought on board when one uses the metaphysical term ‘substance’: such as ‘accident’, ‘property’, ‘essence’ and all the rest. This is indeed a package-deal. Can we go so far as Derrida and say that if we use a single (important) concept from Western philosophy, then we must also bring along with it “the whole syntax and system of Western metaphysics”?

A.N. Whitehead famously said that Western philosophy has just been a “footnote to Plato”. And since the resurrection of Aristotelian metaphysics (in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, at least) some fifty years or so back, we still have a whole battery of Aristotelian terms to deal with.

Another thing which Derrida argued is that we sometimes believe that we have new technical terms; though often they're nothing but what he called “sign-substitutions”. That is, a term that's substituted with another term which is only infinitesimally different to the original. Indeed sometimes the word is different; though the concept is exactly the same... 

References

Bennington, Geoffrey. (2000) Interrupting Derrida

Derrida, Jacques. (1970) 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'
Frege, Gottlob. (1918) 'The Thought: A Logical Inquiry'
Whitehead, A.N. (1928) Process and Reality