Derrida, Jacques

French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) is the admired yet controversial author of more than 30 books. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied under and later taught alongside his friend Louis Althusser. His work has provoked lasting reassessments of key theoretical notions, especially those associated with ethics and politics, including the concepts of the human, of justice, responsibility, decision, and the institution.

Derrida's mode of inquiry begins with a question about the ideality of literature. Literature's ideality manifests a condition of repeatability across time and space that guarantees the exceptional singularity of a work or an author, while at the same time robbing it of assured meanings and contexts. This observation would have been of little consequence outside literary theory had it not led to a reassessment of the kinds of ideality assumed and promoted by various philosophical traditions, from Socrates to Sigmund Freud and beyond. The ideality of philosophy, represented traditionally by concepts such as logos, form, type, and especially concept, would, as Plato taught, have exerted their influence on the empirical and finite world from an ungraspable vantage point above and beyond the temporal and spatial universe. Consequently, the ideal in philosophy corresponds to a quest for the value of pure presence. This imposes what Derrida calls the “closure of Western metaphysics,” which institutes a sharp divide between the transcendental and the empirical. Even Martin Heidegger, who had identified the metaphysical tradition with the determination of being as presence, repeats the transcendentalempirical dichotomy by attempting to rethink being as finitude and by attempting to rethink time on the basis of the future rather than the present.

However, if one asks the question, explicitly banned by Plato in The Republic and again in The Laws, of the relationship between philosophy and literature, one finds a situation where it is no longer possible to radically distinguish between the two kinds of ideality that supposedly separate them. Derrida coins the term “logocentrism” to designate the teaching of a philosophical tradition whose aim is to maintain the value of presence and the ideality of its concepts above and beyond perceived erosions of its purity by various kinds of impure derivatives. Typical of logocentrism are the attempts to separate literature from philosophy, rhetoric from logic, and mythos from logos. A further term, iterability, which designates the repeatability and singularity that characterises literature's ideality, also serves to designate the deconstruction of logocentrism. The philosophical tradition is maintained not by the ideality it teaches, but by the kind of ideality it distinguishes as literary or rhetorical. Thus, iterability is not to be opposed to logocentrism as its scourge, but must be reassessed as the [Page 197]condition of possibility for all that is affirmed under the term logos.

Derrida's writings of the 1960s perform the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition through an exploration of its insistent and each time singular attempts to separate the iterability of writing from the values of continuity and presence, especially where these values are suggested by an erroneous belief in immediate correspondence between intentional meaning and the spoken word. Derrida shows that certain predicates identified with a wide range of supposedly prosthetic phenomena (for instance, every kind of telecommunication and every kind of motorised technology) have been systematically, yet without rigorous philosophical grounds, separated out from phenomena determined by the value of presence (including the ideas of the human, reason, life, breath, and thought). The value of presence also tends to turn up as a kind of radical absence from the finite and/or empirical world (as e.g., God, the infinite, eternity, and spirit).

...