From wtm@ARTS.GLA.AC.UKMon Nov 13 11:36:23 1995 Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 10:24:02 GMT From: Dr W T Maley Reply to: A discussion of Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction To: Multiple recipients of list DERRIDA Subject: Deconstruction for Beginners Someone asked for a simpler discussion a few days ago. Last year I conjured up for some of my own students a checklist headed 'Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction'. I don't claim infallibility, just provocation ... 10 ways of thinking about deconstruction - Willy Maley 1) It is a general theory of text, not a "textualization" of politics but a politicization of text, of text as a system rather than as a book bound by covers. In 'Of Grammatology' (1967), Derrida first formulated the phrase that has haunted him ever since: 'There is no extra-text', or there is no frame, often interpreted as: 'There is nothing outside - or beyond - the text': 'there is no outside-the-text' signifies that one never accedes to a text without some relation to its contextual opening and that a context is not made up only of what is so trivially called a text, that is, the words of a book or the more or less biodegradable paper document in a library. If one does not understand this initial transformation of the concepts of text ...[and] ... context, one understands nothing about nothing of .... deconstruction ... (Derrida, "Biodegradables", p. 841). "all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e. the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth. What has happened ... is a sort of overrun that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a 'text' ... that is no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces". (Derrida, "Living On/Borderlines", p. 81; pp. 83-84). "An 'internal' reading will always be insufficient. And moreover impossible. Question of context, as everyone knows, there is nothing but context, and therefore: there is no outside-the-text" (Derrida, "Biodegradables", p. 873). Derrida's enlarged notion of text has been seen, curiously in an academic context, as a reduction of politics. Derrida denies the equation of textualization with trivialization. He maintains that: "It was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of the text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries...but...we sought rather to work out the theoretical and practical system of these margins, these borders, once more, from the ground up". Derrida is out to circumvent both the "text as world" and the "world as text". 2) Deconstruction is deliberately eccentric, working in the margins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Literary Theory: "Derrida's ... typical habit of reading is to settle on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work - a footnote, a recurrent minor term or image, a casual allusion - and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a whole" (p. 133-34). As Derrida himself says: "I do not 'concentrate' in my reading ... either exclusively or primarily on those points that appear to be the most 'important', 'central', 'crucial'. Rather, I deconcentrate, and it is the secondary, eccentric, lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are 'important' to me and are the source of many things, such as pleasure, but also insight into the general functioning of a textual syste"m (Derrida, "Limited Inc."). "... 'marginal, fringe' cases ... always constitute the most certain and most decisive indices wherever essential conditions are to be grasped" (Derrida, "Limited Inc", p. 209). Of course, there is a sense in which whenever we quote from any text, whenever we write criticism, we are writing on the margins. 3) Deconstruction can be seen as an overcoming of the risk of repetition through revolution. In Positions Derrida states that deconstruction has two stages. Reversal and displacement. Reversal of a binary opposition which is also a violent hierarchy, followed by a reorientation, or displacement of the problem, to avoid repetition. You cannot skip reversal and move straight on to displacement. Elsewhere Derrida seems to suggest that these two stages need not be executed in that order. Still, reversal and displacement remain one way of thinking about deconstruction. 4) It can also be seen as an allegorics, or analogics of power. A politics of 'linkage'. Because there is nothing outside the text - everything is included in 'reading' - connections are constantly made with the so-called 'real' or 'outside' world. 5) It is an attempt to recover histories that have been 'repressed', 'minoritized', 'deligitimated'. Derrida claims that it is in fact the most historical of approaches: "One of the most necessary gestures of a deconstructive understanding of history consists ... in transforming things by exhibiting writings, genres, textual strata (which is also to say - since there is no outside-the-text, right - exhibiting institutional, economic, political, pulsive [and so on] 'realities') that have been repulsed, repressed, devalorized, minoritized, deligitimated, occulted by hegemonic canons, in short, all that which certain forces have attempted to melt down into the anonymous mass of an unrecognisable culture, to '(bio)degrade' in the common compost of a memory said to be living and organic" (Jacques Derrida, "Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments", Critical Inquiry 15, 4 (1989), p. 821). 6) It problematises the notion of author. The author is included in the text - because there's nothing outside the text - but as text, to be read, not as a governing presence. "... what [deconstruction] calls into question is the presence of a fulfilled and actualised intentionality, adequate to itself and its contents" (Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc", pp. 202-203). Derrida appeals to Freud and the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious in order to back up his claim that intention is necessarily limited. Note, not that it doesn't exist. But it is limited. 7) You become like the thing you criticize. Oppositional writing always runs the risk of reappropriation. 8) Deconstruction inhabits - in a parasitic way - the texts it reads. There is a kind of miming that goes on. This is both a question of fidelity and of parody. 9) It is a hauntology, rather than an ontology, a theory of ghosts. A belief in the ghostliness of being. The self, according to Derrida is a ghost. The first ghost we are host to. Derrida believes in ghosts, and in telepathy. This 'supernaturalism' can be traced throughout Derrida's work. 10) It is "a radicalization of Marxism", claims Derrida in his most recent book (Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994), p. 92), a radicalization in terms of its conception of work, ideology, and ghosts.