Douglas Atkins  Reading Deconstruction: Deconstructive Reading

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  The Sign as a Structure of Difference: Derridean Deconstruction and Some of its Implications  A major force in contemporary literary criticism is Jacques Derrida. 15  Derrida’s star has risen precipitously since his participation in 1966 in a Johns Hopkins University international symposium, where he took structuralism, and particularly Levi-Strauss, to task and inaugurated deconstructive criticism. 15  Nor surprisingly, deconstruction has come under frequent and determined attack in scholarly journals as well as the popular media. 16

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  One cannot hope to understand Derrida apart from his undoing/preserving the concept of the sign central to modern linguistics. 16  Probably Saussure’s most important argument was that no intrinsic relationship obtains between the two parts of the sign, the signifier and the signified. 16  Derrida’s careful analysis of the sign and of the Saussurean idea of difference leads to several important, indeed far-reaching insights. 17  To describe the structure of the sign, which, he sees, is always already marked by both deferring and differing. 17

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Derrida coins the term différance (both meanings occur in the French verb différer).  This notion of différance Derrida defines, in Positions, as “the systematic play of differences, of the traces of difference, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. 17  This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the ‘full’ terms would not signify, would not function.” 17

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Space as well as time bears in a fundamental way on the concept of difference, for the temporal interval, the deferring into the future of any grasping of the thing, divides irreducibly all spatial presence. 17  In the movement of thought, elements are never fully present because they must always already refer to something other than “themselves”; or, to change perspectives, if perception of objects depend upon perception of their differences, each “present” element must refer to an element other than “itself”  Derrida: Différance is what…18

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Derrida’s clearest account of the “trace,” Différance, and their relationship occurs in the following passage in Of Grammatology: 19  Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other Différances other in the same, no difference would do its work and no Différance of meaning would appear. 19  Différance It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement, which produces difference. The (pure) trace is difference. 19  Derrida: The trace…. 19

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Because the structure of the sign is determined by the “trace” or track of that other which is forever absent, the word “sign” must be placed “under erasure.” 20  The idea of origin […] is similarly destroyed, for origin is always other than “itself”, the idea of origin depending upon the production of temporal and spatial difference that must precede any origin. 20  Denied, too, are those other central oppositions of metaphysics: not only truth/error, presence/absence, identity/difference, and speech/writing but also being/nothingness, life/death, nature/culture, mind/matter, soul/body, man/woman, good/evil, master/slave, and literature/criticism. 20

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  It is not enough simply to neutralize these and other oppositions.  Derrida insists that there is always “a violent hierarchy.  One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.) or has the upper hand.  To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. 20  To reverse the hierarchy, then, only in order to displace the reversal; to unravel in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. 21

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Truth defined as absolute presence, as presence of the eidos, thus becomes simultaneously possible and impossible. 22  (The word eidos means "image" and is used in philosophy, particularly ancient Greek philosophy to indicate "idea" or form. In Aristotle, we find eidos to be that set of qualities which a scientific definition (logos) analyzes into its constituent parts. Elsewhere, in Plato, Kant, and others, the idea is a knowable aesthetic sense of the whole, a clear intuitive grasp of synthetic relational meaning, as opposed to that order which is merely represented in human discourse). 22  As the “trace” requires, the thing itself is doubled, true or not-true. 22

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  This duplicity, born with the “trace,” is “what makes truth possible, thereby destroying truth.” Contradicting logic, Derrida thus undoes/preserves “truth.” 22  A text thus differs from “itself,” containing both a declaration and a description, and they war with each other. 23  According to Derrida, nothing escapes textuality: there is simply nothing outside textuality, outside “the temporalization of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor in ‘another world’… not more in time than in space, [in which] differences appear among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of traces.” 23

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  The deconstructive critic thus seeks the text’s navel, the moment when any text will differ from itself, transgressing its own system of values, becoming undecidable in terms of its apparent system of meaning. 25  Derrida’s point, as we have seen, is precisely that writing is never a simple means for the presentation of truth. 26  What this means, in part, is that even criticism and philosophy must be read scrupulously and critically, teased for meaning; the must, in order words, be interpreted and in exactly the same way as poetry, for example. 26

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  Derrida and his followers not only advance this argument, but they also frequently, increasingly, express those points in the form in which they write. 26  For Nietzsche and Derrida the question is what to do with the recognition that meaning is a construct brought by the “subject,” a fiction made by the force of our desire. 29  Derrida […] insists throughout that consciousness is no origin, no foundation, there being no foundation. 29

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  He undoes the truth/fiction, reality/consciousness polarities, but not, with the advocates of the autonomous consciousness, so as to set up the second term in the place of the first. 29  Fiction can no more exist without truth than truth without fiction or presence without absence; they are accomplices, the system of differences and the “trace” marking truth (im)possible. 29  By the same token, the subject “in it-self,” as center, origin, and goal, is no more possible than the object “in-itself.” 29

Reading Deconstruction: Deconstruction Reading  In Derrida, Miller, and others appears a radical understanding of the fictionality of things, which goes beyond nihilism and the autonomous consciousness to a recognition of the doubleness of what is, of the complicity of truth and fiction. 29  Deconstructionists wish is, to avoid the interpretive mastery or closure that imports into texts and the world of meaning as transcendence truth or significance, outside the play of difference that “the desire of deconstruction may itself become a desire to reapropriate the text actively through mastery, to show the text what it ‘does not know.’”