A Companion to Derrida

Zeynep Direk, Leonard Lawlor, Zeynep Direk, Leonard Lawlor

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781444332841
• eBook ISBN: 9781118607299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

A Companion to Derrida is the most comprehensive single volume reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Leading scholars present a summary of his most important accomplishments across a broad range of subjects, and offer new assessments of these achievements.

• The most comprehensive single volume reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida, with contributions from highly prominent Derrida scholars
• Unique focus on three major philosophical themes of metaphysics and epistemology; ethics, religion, and politics; and art and literature
• Introduces the reader to the positions Derrida took in various areas of philosophy, as well as clarifying how derrideans interpret them in the present
• Contributions present not only a summary of Derrida's most important accomplishments in relation to a wide range of disciplines, but also a new assessment of these accomplishments
• Offers a greater understanding of how Derrida's work has fared since his death

Part I
Fundamental Themes and Concepts in Derrida's Thought

1
Truth in Derrida

Christopher Norris

1. Truth and Writing

At one time, and not so long ago, anybody writing on the topic “Derrida and Truth” would most likely have felt obliged to begin by asserting (and then making good the claim through lengthy citation of the relevant passages) that it didn't amount to a downright absurd, indeed a near-oxymoronic coupling of name and noun. Of course there are plenty of quotable passages where, so far from rejecting or denouncing the notion of truth, Derrida can be found insisting on its absolute indispensability to philosophical enquiry in general and – more specifically – its crucial pertinence to the project of deconstruction (LI, 162–254). In fact they became more frequent in his later texts and interviews where he went out of his way to controvert the widespread belief (put about chiefly by detractors in the mainstream analytic camp) that deconstruction amounted to nothing more than an update on ancient sophistical themes or a bag of crafty rhetorical tricks with absolutely no regard for reputable, truth-apt standards of debate (Searle 1977). All the same Derrida's reiterated protests – asserting his strict and principled allegiance to just those criteria of valid argument, logical rigor, and conceptual precision – are often dismissed, by those so minded in advance, as a routine show of respectability designed to conceal his indifference to truth in whatever commonplace or technical guise.

On this view Derrida's work can best be set aside for all serious philosophic purposes by treating it as a kind of modish anti-philosophy designed to seduce certain credulous types – literary theorists mainly – into thinking that they might be advantageously placed (by reason of their own special gifts or training) to score easy points off Plato and his progeny. That is, they might count themselves better (i.e., more attentive and meticulous) readers of philosophic texts than the official, academically accredited custodians of those texts and their veridical content. Thus Derrida's notion of “writing” as in some sense ubiquitous – as marking the absolute horizon of intelligibility or the precondition for whatever is to count as “real,” “true,” “factual,” “self-evident,” “veridical” – has typically been taken by misinformed admirers and detractors alike as an instance of extreme anti-realist or ultra-“textualist” thinking whose logical consequence was a solipsistic outlook that counted the world well lost for the sake of the new-found descriptive or creative freedoms thereby opened up. On this reading of Derrida, advanced by “post-analytic” philosophers like Richard Rorty and by not a few literary acolytes, the “descriptive” versus “creative” distinction is one that should no longer be regarded as possessing any more than a culture-bound, conventional, or merely discipline-specific force (Rorty 1982). However, what both parties – the “analytical” foes of deconstruction together with its “literary” admirers – ignore is the irreducibility of writing to any such narrowly (albeit customarily) restricted scope.

I must refer readers back to his own intricate and nuanced treatment of the topic for a full-scale exposition of arche-écriture (“primordial” or “generalized” writing) as Derrida conceives and deploys that term throughout his early texts on Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Austin, and others (Voice and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference). Sufficient to say that, so far from condemning us to a prison-house of language, textuality, or Peircean “unlimited semiosis,” it serves to make a very reasonable point and one quite consistent (as I have argued elsewhere) with a robustly realist epistemology and ontology (Norris 1997a, 1997b). That is, it amounts to a particularly striking – and to that extent perhaps misapprehension-prone – means of putting the case that our truth-claims though not our ultimate conceptions of truth must always acknowledge, whether overtly or not, their dependence on some given system or structure of representation. That Derrida should choose to articulate this point through recourse to the term “writing” along with its sundry analogues and derivatives (“trace,” “graft,” “mark,” etc.) has understandably given rise to much confusion and to both of the above-mentioned partisan responses, namely its literary-critical uptake as a license for unending textualist “freeplay” and its cursory dismissal by many philosophers as merely a warmed-over version of long familiar skeptical or ultra-relativist themes. However, this ignores his constant emphasis on the non-restriction of “writing” to its commonplace (graphic or alphabetical-phonetic) usage, the usage to which it has mostly been confined by that deep-laid logocentric/phonocentric bias that Derrida tracks with such extraordinary zeal and tenacity in its multiform manifestations down through the history of Western thought (OGC). Such readings fail to register the way that “writing” comes to stand as a more encompassing and adequate term for those various intermediary figures and devices – “ideas,” “concepts,” “intuitions,” “impressions,” “sense-data,” “stimuli,” and so forth – that philosophers across the whole range of doctrinal attachments from rationalism to empiricism and even radical naturalism, physicalism, or materialism have called upon by way of closing the gap between mind and world, subject and object, or knowledge and object-of-knowledge: “encompassing” insofar as it includes and subtends all those diverse particular idioms, and “more adequate” insofar as it shows them all to partake of a representationalist model of mind that is itself chronically unstable since forever suspended between the different orders of priority entailed by those various epistemological conceptions.

This is one aspect of the undecidability that Derrida seeks to communicate by way of his most famous neologism, the portmanteau term différance with its calculated slippage of signification between “difference” and “deferral” together with “deference” as a third, less prominent but far from marginal constituent sense (VP). Thus the word – not a full-fledged or unitary “concept,” as Derrida insists – serves on the one hand to indicate “difference” as that which (following Saussure) renders meaning a product of the contrasts, distinctions, or differences “without positive terms” endemic to the endlessly elusive “structure” of language (Saussure 1983). On the other it serves to connote “deferral” as that which ensures the non-positivity, i.e., the lack of any one-to-one relation or punctual correspondence between signifier and signified while none the less making communication possible, despite all the resultant problems for any systematic philosophy of language or project of structural linguistics. This it does through what Derrida terms the “iterability” of speech-acts conceived on the generalized model of writing rather than the human voice as a locus of meanings that somehow bear within themselves the authentic mark of expressive, sincere, and (to the speaker) transparently accessible first-person utterance (MP, LI).

I cannot here offer a detailed account of his critical engagement with this logocentric conception as it typifies the discourse of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and (especially) Husserl and Austin. Nor shall I dwell on the various ways that it continues to haunt the thinking of those – most notably Wittgenstein and his legion of disciples – who count themselves mercifully free of any such lingering attachment to bad old Cartesian notions of privileged first-person epistemic access. What I do wish to emphasize – since it bears so directly on the topic of my essay – is the fact that writing (arche-écriture or “proto-writing”) is precisely what allows the maintenance or conservation of sense from one context of utterance to the next at least in the minimal degree that is required in order for communication to occur. Thus it stands as the figure par excellence of that which remains and continues to exert a certain signifying function despite and against the fugitive, evanescent character of an utterer's meaning, intentional purport, or expressive (as opposed to indicative) sense (VP). Hence the error of those – Searle chief among them – who take Derrida to deploy “writing” in its conventionally narrow usage and then, by a perverse (or plain muddle-headed) twist of argument, to vastly over-extend its scope so that every speech-act is thereby exposed to endless reinscription within any range of no matter how far-fetched contexts, situations, or imaginary scenarios. This characterization is not so wide of the mark when applied to some of Derrida's more intemperate or less philosophically informed disciples in the literary-theory or cultural-studies camps. However, it comes nowhere close to describing the complexity – always a truth-functional or truth-related complexity despite its provenance in textual close reading – of Derrida's engagement with philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the recent past. Thus “writing” is not only his favored term for that which enables the sense and the truth-value of statements or propositions to be communicated from one context to the next but also, as he argues in quasi-Kantian vein, the necessary and transcendentally deducible condition of possibility for any such process to occur (Gasché 1986; Norris 1987, 2000a).

Exemplary here is his early Introduction to Husserl's essay “The Origin of Geometry” where Derrida shows how a certain, structurally requisite though largely implicit recourse to the topos of writing is precisely the means by which Husserl accounts for the periodic stages of advance – or, so to speak, of punctuated equilibrium – that have characterized the history of mathematics and the other formal sciences to date (IOG). Thus it is wrong – a very definite misreading or, more likely, the result of not reading at all – to suppose that the ubiquity of writing as Derrida conceives it is such as to consign truth to the dustbin of outworn “metaphysical” notions or else (pretty much the same thing) to a limbo of wholly indeterminate textual significations without any remnant of logical, conceptual, or referential bearing. Indeed, if there is one deep-laid prejudice that his work seeks to dispel it is the idea that a close, even minute attentiveness to matters of textual detail must go along with an indifference to truth or a belief, as per the widespread but false understanding of Derrida's notorious claim that quite simply and literally “there is nothing outside the text” (OGC, 158). On the contrary, such a reading is uniquely well equipped to discover the anomalies, aporias, logical dilemmas, or hitherto unlooked-for complications of sense that an orthodox approach has expelled to the margins of commentary or beyond. Moreover it is by way of them that reading/thinking encounters those kindred moments of referential slippage, uncertainty, or aberration that signal a corresponding problem with regard to some aspect of the relevant topic-domain.

2. Reading as an Argument: The Logic of Deconstruction

Most importantly in the present context, this realist outlook goes along with – indeed depends directly upon – a commitment to the classical requirements of bivalent logic right up to the stage where that logic confronts an insuperable block to its continued application or a textual aporia that cannot be resolved by any means at its disposal (Norris 2004, 2007). According to Derrida, this is the sole mode of thought that is able not only to respect the validity-conditions for determinately true or false statements but also, by its holding fast to those conditions for as long as possible, to take due stock of the particular resistance encountered when a text (or the portion of reality to which it refers) turns out to harbor anomalous features of just that recalcitrant kind.

To phrase the matter thus is of course to invite yet further resistance – even downright incredulity – amongst philosophers trained up on the dominant view of how things have gone over the past century in terms of intellec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Abbreviations (Works by Derrida)
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Fundamental Themes and Concepts in Derrida's Thought
• Part II: Derrida and …
• Part III: Areas of Investigation
• Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Derrida
• Index
• End User License Agreement