Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence

together with "Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?"

Rodolphe Gasché

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438460024
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Deconstrucción en filosofía

In this book, Rodolphe Gasché returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it—not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it. Rather than unraveling metaphysics, deconstruction loosens its binary and hierarchical conceptual structure. To make this case, Gasché focuses on the concepts of force and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida, looking to his essays "Force and Signification" and "Force of Law, " and his reading on Of Grammatology in Claude Lévi-Strauss's autobiographical Tristes Tropiques. The concept of force has not drawn extensive scrutiny in Derrida scholarship, but it is crucial to understanding how, by way of spacing and temporizing, philosophical opposition is reinscribed into a differential economy of forces. Gasché concludes with an essay addressing the question of deconstruction and judgment and considers whether deconstruction suspends the possibility of judgment, or whether it is, on the contrary, a hyperbolic demand for judgment.

1

The Force of Deconstruction

As will become increasingly clear, the topics of force and violence in Jacques Derrida’s writings are so intimately interconnected with the problematic of deconstruction that neither thematic can be separated from one another. Furthermore, if I emphasize the of in “The Force of Deconstruction,” the title of this first chapter devoted to Derrida’s essay “Force and Signification,” it is in order to highlight by way of the double genitive both that ‘force’ is the object of deconstruction and that deconstruction itself has a force that is particular to it.1 Deconstruction is about a specific concept of force, but it also has a momentum, an élan, a force of its own.2 I refer to deconstruction and force as a double thematics, since force is certainly one of the themes of deconstruction, but the fact that deconstruction has a force of its own in dealing with force should, perhaps, also make us hesitate from the start to speak of it as a theme.

“Force and Signification”—written in 1963, that is, the year after the publication of The Origin of Geometry—is a critical response to Jean Rousset’s work, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel, published the year before. Although this early text does not mention the term deconstruction, it contains a paragraph in which Derrida, reflecting on his approach to Rousset’s work, sketches out a way of proceeding, a “strategic operation” (28), that anticipates what will later be called ‘deconstruction.’ The paragraph is of particular interest for the following reason: if, after the publication of Of Grammatology in 1967, deconstruction has been commonly understood as a critique of logocentrism in the name of a revalorized notion of writing, that is, a critique of Western thought’s intrinsic valorization of living speech and, in the same breath, of the values of full presence, proximity, and so forth, the ‘early’ formulation of deconstruction in “Force and Signification” is perhaps, as I intend to argue, in a way more fundamental, more sweeping, and explains why Derrida could speak of deconstruction in a variety of contexts in his later works.3 Is it just a mere coincidence that this more fundamental formulation of deconstruction is linked to the problematic of force, which, as the title of the essay seems to suggest, Derrida opposes to Rousset’s notion of form? Is it by chance, furthermore, that this valorization of force in the essay is part and parcel of a conception of deconstruction that, because of its peculiar force, is in a way more fundamental than deconstruction understood as the ‘mere’ (if one can say so) dismantling of logocentrism?

Even though “Force and Signification” acknowledges structuralism’s fecundity, Derrida characterizes its methodological efficiency as “the kind of infallibility … ascribed to sleepwalkers” (4). The essay, on the whole, is a critical debate with what Derrida calls structuralism’s “immense region of somnambulism” (4), which results from its irreflection and lack of transparency. In structuralism, Derrida remarks, this somnambulism makes up “the almost-everything,” which is the privileged concern of the social science of the history of ideas, as opposed to “the almost-nothing” of an implicit question that the phenomenon of structuralism and its concern with language raise, and that Derrida associates with “the pure waking state, the sterile and silent acidity of the question itself” (4). Needless to say, it is this “almost-nothing” of the silent question that the emergence of structuralism poses that interests Derrida as a philosopher, above all. But what is this question? In the prelude of the essay,4 Derrida argues that, because structuralism is “an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us” (3), it is not of the order of a merely seasonal fashion that, once it is over, could then become the object for a historian of ideas. The emergence of structuralism, Derrida continues, is linked to an “anxiety about language—which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself”—that concerns “universal thought,” that is, philosophy, “in all its domains, by all its pathways and despite all differences” (3). This anxiety about, of, and within language, about universal thought’s unquestioned evidence regarding the signifying nature of language, Derrida submits, is indicative of the fact that the phenomenon of structuralism is, rather than one historical phenomenon among others, nothing less than the “symptom” of the experience of an “astonishment [étonnement]” (3–4). He explains:

The structuralist stance [attitude], as well as our own attitudes assumed before or within language […] are an astonishment … by language as the origin of history. By historicity itself. And also, when confronted by the possibility of speech and always already within it, the finally acknowledged repetition of a surprise finally extended to the dimensions of world culture—a surprise incomparable to any other, a surprise responsible for shaking up [s’ébranla] what is called Western thought, the thought whose destiny is to extend its domains while the boundaries of the West are drawn back. (4; trans. mod.)

This astonishment or surprise, along with the question silently raised by it that explains structuralism’s emergence, is one about, of, and within language, by which language awakens to a disquieting awareness of the limits of its signifying nature, which is “uncertain, partial, or inessential” (4). Structuralism as a phenomenon is rooted in language’s astonishment about its own temporality or, as we will see, about the force that “is the other of language without which language would not be what it is” (27). Now, the astonishment or surprise that characterizes structuralism and that makes it “an adventure of vision” unlike any other is an astonishment or surprise comparable to, but also, because it concerns Western philosophical thought itself, a more radical form of, the experience of the thaumazein that according to Plato and Aristotle is the origin of philosophizing. Within structuralism this astonishment is also the “almost-nothing” of a question that arises from this astonishment regarding language, which becomes an issue for the whole of Western thought. But this anxiety about, of, and in language is not, as I already intimated, just another experience inaugurating the philosophical. If the astonishment that constitutes structuralist and linguistic sensibility is unlike any other, it is because, in the face of the possibility of speech “and always already within it,” it is “the finally acknowledged repetition of a surprise […] incomparable to any other” (4; emphasis mine), in other words, of something within Western thought that has always already worried it but now can no longer be ignored. The mode of thought that originates with the astonishment in question is one that shakes every certainty within the whole of Western philosophical thought. Compared with the somnambulism of structuralism, this thought about Western universal thought as a whole raised by structuralism’s emergence as a phenomenon is one of pure wakefulness or radical vigilance. This new mode of thinking that arises with the almost-nothing of the silent question within structuralism is at work in full force in “Force and Signification.” It is not yet called deconstruction, but the wakefulness and vigilance associated with this new mode of thinking, due to the anxiety of language, are certainly a first indication of how to understand what deconstruction is ultimately about.

Derrida’s critique of the somnambulism of structuralism should interest us, because it is in this critique, which takes as its point of departure the almost-nothing that comes to light with structuralism itself, that the lineaments of his own approach are outlined. Before taking on structuralism’s somnambulism, however, Derrida highlights Rousset’s innovative position within structuralist literary criticism. It is important to emphasize the main points of the “deliberate difference” (6) with which Rousset sets himself apart from other structuralist critics, especially because, as Derrida argues, these points are abandoned by not only the other structuralists but also in particular by what, later in the essay, Derrida characterizes as Rousset’s “ultrastructuralism” (15). For reasons of space, I must restrict myself to a highly schematic account of some of the original features of Rousset’s criticism. Unique and original in Rousset’s attempt to do justice to the modern “ ‘literary fact’ ” (7) is, first, his refusal to distinguish between form and content. For Rousset, indeed, modern art is not the expression of a meaning preceding the work but, rather, creation. Second, Rousset’s approach rests on what Derrida terms, undoubtedly with Edmund Husserl in mind, an “experience of conversion,” “a breaking-off with the world” within the world, through which both the writer’s and the critic’s gazes become focused on “the essential nothing” (8), that is, on the invisible site within a work in which the creation of new worlds or universes, which are in excess of all there is, takes place. The third distinctively original feature of Rousset’s structuralist approach to the literary fact would require a much more detailed development than I can afford here. It consists in the attempt to free modern literary writing radically from the theological model of creation and to valorize it as a first sailing toward meaning that, furthermore, has always already been read by an other (by, in the first place, the other within the writer himself). Finally, writing is understood by Rousset as inaugural of a temporality and historicity inherent in works of art that, freed from the slumber of the sign, brings into being a pure language that says the always already-there, in short, Being.5

So far, my account has addressed some of the original features that, according to Rousset, characterize the literary fact and that Derrida associates with the power (pouvoir, puissance) of “true literary language as poetry” (12). Although the term is not used here, this power might also constitute writing’s ‘force.’ Having listed some of Rousset’s innovative contributions to understanding the literary fact, I can now proceed to the second part of “Force and Signification” where Derrida shows that—notwithstanding his novel insights into the literary work in the programmatic introduction to his book, insights made possible by his structuralist approach—Rousset not only ends up Platonizing structuralism in the readings of works from Corneille to Claudel that make up the bulk of his book but even practices an ultrastructuralism that, by objectifying the structures of literary works, blinds itself to the temporality and historicity inherent in literary works, in short, thwarts the “internal geneticism, in which value and meaning are reconstituted and reawakened in their proper historicity and temporality,” promised in the introduction to his study (14).6

In spite of Rousset’s claim that in a literary work form and intention, structure and meaning, are inseparable, the concrete analyses of literary works that he offers in his study focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the formal, or structural, aspects of the works in question. If structure was only a means in previous forms of literary criticism, it now “becomes the object itself, the literary thing itself,” and “the exclusive term,” that is, also the end in itself of literary criticism (15). For this reason already, Derrida characterizes Rousset’s approach as one of “ultrastructuralism.” Furthermore, “structure as the literary thing is this time taken, or at least practiced, literally” (15). Indeed, as Derrida observes, “[s]tructure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage, a construction; a work is governed by a unifying principle, the architecture that is built and made visible in a location” (15). In other words, in Rousset’s ultrastructuralism, structure is taken in its proper sense, that is, as referring “only to space, geometric or morphological space” (15).7 In what follows, Derrida engages in a discussion of the relation of the proper and the figurative meanings of structure that will prove to be crucial for his further criticism of Rousset. He will be interested in the history of metaphorization of the notion of structure. If, sensu stricto, structure refers only to space and spatial constellations, Aristotle was the first to displace the “topographical literality” of structure in the direction of its “topical signification (the theory of commonplaces in language and the manipulation of motifs or arguments)” (16). As a result of this metaphorical displacement of the spatial and architectural meaning of ‘structure’ to linguistic phenomena, including language itself, one already speaks in the seventeenth century, as the examples Derrida provides demonstrate, of the structure and harmony or the bad structure of a literary or discursive composition. By metaphorically displacing the strict sense of structure, however, a transposition of spatial categories to language and all its elements takes place. Hence, Derrida asks: “How is this history of metaphor possible? Does the fact that language can determine things only by spatializing them suffice to explain that, in return, language must spatialize itself as soon as it designates and reflects upon itself? This question can be asked in general about all language and all metaphors. But here it takes on a particular urgency” (16). The urgency in question derives from the fact that in Rousset’s ultrastructuralism, literary structure is taken literally again, and as a result language is understood exclusively in spatial terms. In other words, by transposing a notion of structure understood primarily in a spatial and architectonic sense to literary works, it is the literal sense of structure itself that acquires a metaphorical value. The literal sense thus becomes indistinguishable here from its metaphorical sense.

Derrida writes:

Hence, for as long as the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure is not acknowledged as such, that is to say interrogated and even destroyed as concerns its figurative quality so that the nonspatiality or original spatiality designated by it may be revived, one runs the risk, through a kind of sliding as unnoticed as it is efficacious, of confusing meaning with its geometric, morphological, or, in the best cases, cinematic model. One risks being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it metaphorically. (16)

Let me try to figure out what is at stake in this passage. To acknowledge the metaphorical sense of structure as such is to acknowledge not only that this sense implies a displacement from a primarily spatial literal sense of the term but also that this displacement, or the metaphoricity in general involved in it, is an intrinsic feature of language itself.8 To inquire into the term’s metaphorical sense is to inquire into it as a term of language and to conceptualize it in light of the metaphorical activity constitutive of language itself. Such acknowledgment of the metaphorical sense of structure as such consists in interrogating the spatial and geometric model in the notion of structure and destroying it, thus radicalizing the displacement involved in metaphorization to such a degree that the meaning of the term is entirely freed from its literal sense. In short, to acknowledge the metaphorical sense as such of structure is to bring to light within it, to reawaken (réveillé) in the term structure, another sense, namely, “the nonspatiality or original spatiality” that it designates as a result of “the play going on within it metaphorically,” that is, the play of displacement that characterizes language in depth. In sum, to acknowledge the metaphorical sense of structure as such implies a bracketing not only of its literal spatial and geometric sense but also of its figurative Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian quality, so that a sense of structure can be revived beyond both that designates the movement of spatialization itself that constitutes the movement of structure insofar as it is a metaphor, that is, a displacement of a meaning from one word to another. By acknowledging the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure as such, a “nonspatiality or original spatiality,” along with, as will become increasingly clear, an original or, better yet, originary temporality, within it (en lui) comes into view. Rousset, Derrida remarks, “grants an absolute privilege to spatial models, mathematical functions, lines, and forms … Doubtless, he acknowledges the interdependency of space and time. […] But, in fact, time itself is always reduced. To a dimension in the best of cases” (16). Yet, if the metaphorical sense of structure as such is that of an originary spacing, then the metaphoricity of structure is, at the same time, also an originary temporalization. Understood in its metaphorical sense as such, that is, in advance of its literal and figurative sense, ‘structure’ opens at once both space and time and, hence, does not justify any ultimate privileging of one over the other, unlike the sense of structure in most of struct...