Jacques Derrida

1. Jacques Derrida • Dissemination, 1972

4. Jacques Derrida • Introduction • Critique of Western Metaphysics • Best known for having forged the term ‘deconstruction,’ Jacques Derrida follows Nietzsche and Heidegger in elaborating a critique of ‘Western Metaphysics.’ • Western thought, say Derrida, has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities: good vs evil, being vs nothingness, presence vs absence, truth vs error, identity vs difference, mind vs matter, man vs woman, soul vs. body, life vs death, nature vs culture, speech vs writing.

5. Jacques Derrida • Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics focuses on its privileging of the spoken word over the written word. • The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. • There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since the speaker hears himself/herself speak at the same moment the listener does. • This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said.

6. Jacques Derrida • Whether or not perfect understanding always occurs in fact, this image of perfectly self-present meaning is, according to Derrida, the underlying ideal of Western culture. • Derrida has termed this belief in the self-representation of meaning ‘Logocentricim’, from the Greek word Logos (speech, logic, reason, the Word of God). • Writing, on the other hand, is considered by the logocentric system to be only a representation of speech, a secondary substitute designed for use only when speaking is impossible.

7. Jacques Derrida • Writing is thus a second-rate activity that tries to overcome distance by making use of it: the writer puts his thought on paper, distance it from himself, transforming it into something that can be read by someone far away, even after the writer’s death. • This inclusion of death, distance, and difference is thought to be a corruption of the self-presence of meaning, to open meaning up to all forms of adulteration which immediately would have prevented. • In the course of his critique, Derrida does not simply reverse this value system and say that writing is better than speech.

8. Jacques Derrida • Rather, he attempts to show that the very possibility of opposing the two terms on the basis of presence vs. absence or immediacy vs. representation is an illusion, since speech is already structured by difference and distance as much as writing is. • As soon as there is meaning, there is difference. Derrida’s word for this lag inherent in any signifying act is différance, from the French verb différer, wich means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. • What Derrida attempts to demonstrate is that this différance inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and present.

9. Jacques Derrida • Derrida’s project in his early writings is to elaborate a science of writing called grammatology: a science that would study the effects of this différance which Western metaphysics has systematically repressed in its search for self-presence Truth. • The task of undoing the history of logocentrism in order to disinter différance would thus appear to be a doubly impossible one: on the one hand, it can only be conducted by means of notions of revelation, representation, and rectification, which are the logocentric notions par excellence, and, on the other hand, it can only dig up something that is really nothing – a difference, a gap, an interval, a trace. How, then, can such a task be undertaken?

10. Jacques Derrida • Supplementary reading • By supplementary reading. Derrida’s writing is always explicitly inscribed in the margins of some preexisting text. • Derrida is first, and foremost, a reader, a reader who constantly reflects on and transform the very nature of the act of reading. • In Of Grammatology, in a chapter entitled ‘That Dangerous Supplement’ Derrida elaborates not only a particular striking reading of Rousseau’s Confessions but also a concise reflection on his own approach.

11. Jacques Derrida • Rousseau condemns writing for being only a representation of direct speech and therefore less desirable because less immediate. • Rousseau, in this context, privileges speech as the more direct expression of the self. • But on the other hand, in the actual experience of living speech. Rousseau finds that he expresses himself much less successfully in person than he does in his writing. • It is thus absence that assures the presentation of truth, and presence that entails its distortion.

12. Jacques Derrida • In French, the word supplement has two meanings: it means both “an addition” and “a substitute”. Rousseau uses this word to describe writing. • Thus, writing may add to something that is already present, in which case it is superfluous, and/or it may replace something that is not present. In which case it is necessary. • ‘Writing’ no longer means simply ‘words on a page’, but rather any differential trace structure, a structure that also inhabits speech. • ‘Writing’ and ‘speech’ can therefore no longer be simply opposed, but neither have they become identical.

13. Jacques Derrida • Derrida’s reading shows how Rosseua’s text functions against its own explicit (metaphysical) assertions, not just by creating ambiguity, but by inscribing a systematic ‘other message’ behind or through what is being said. • Deconstruction • Derrida is not seeking the ‘meaning’ of Rousseau’s text in any traditional sense. He neither adds the text up into a final set of themes or affirmations nor looks for the reality of Rousseau’s life outside the text. Indeed, says Derrida, there is no outside of the text.

14. Jacques Derrida • Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s autobiography thus proposes a ‘deconstruction’ of its logocentric claims and metaphysical assumptions. • The word ‘de-construction’ is closely related not to the word ‘destruction’ but to the word ‘analysis’, which etymologically means ‘to undo’, a virtual synonym of for ‘to de-construct’. • The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or a generalized skepticism, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself.

15. Jacques Derrida • This, of course, implies that a text signifies in more than one way, and to varying degrees of explicitness. • Sometimes the discrepancy is produced, as here, by a double-edged sword, which serves as a hinge that both articulates and breaks open the explicit statement being made. • Sometimes it is engendered when the figurative level of a statement is at odds with the literal level. • And sometimes it occurs when the so-called starting point of an argument is based on presuppositions that render its conclusion problematic or circular.

16. Jacques Derrida • In other words, the deconstructive reading does not point out the flaws or weakness or stupidities of an author, but the necessity with which what he does see is systematically related to what he does not see. • It can thus be seen that deconstruction is a form of what has log been called a critique. • A critique of any theoretical system is not an examination of its flaws or imperfections. It is not a set of criticism designed to make the system better.

17. Jacques Derrida • It is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that system’s possibilities. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself. • Every theory starts somewhere; every critique exposes what that starting point conceals, and thereby displaces all the ideas that follow from it.

18. Jacques Derrida • The critique does not ask ‘what does this statement mean?’ but ‘where is it being made from?’ What does it presuppose? • Différance is not a concept or idea that is truer than presence. It can only be a process of textual work, a strategy of writing.

19. Jacques Derrida • Derrida’s Styles • Syntax: Derrida’s grammar is often ‘unspeakable’, i.e. it conforms to the laws of writing but not necessarily to the cadences of speech. Ambiguity is rampant. Parentheses go on for pages. A sentence beginning on page 310 does not end until page 323. Punctuation arrests without necessarily clarifying. • Allusions: The pluralization of writing’s references and voices often entails the mobilization of unnamed sources and addressees. All references do not reach a destination.

20. Jacques Derrida • Plato’s Pharmacy • ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ takes off from the Phaedrus, a Platonic dialogue in which the function and value of writing are explicitly discussed. • Socrates is taking a stroll with Phaedrus, who holds, hidden under his cloak, the text of a speech by the sophist Lysias in which it is demonstrated that one should yield rather to a nonlover than to a lover. • In the course of the dialogue, Socrates listens to Phaedrus read Lysias’ speech and then utters two speeches of his own.

21. Jacques Derrida • The exchange of discourses on love is followed by a discussion of speech, rhetoric, writing, seed sowing, and play, in the course of which Socrates recounts the myth of Theuth, the inventor of writing. • Socrates’ condemnation of writing and his panegyric to direct speech as the proper vehicle for dialectics and Truth have for centuries been taken almost exclusively at faith value. • What Derrida does in his reading of Plato is to unfold those dimensions of Plato’s text that work against the grain of (Plato’s own) Platonism.

22. Jacques Derrida • Translation • Derrida’s discussion of the Phaedrus hinges on the translation of a single word: pharmakon, which in Greek means both remedy and poison. • In referring to writing as a pharmakon, Plato is thus making a simple value judgment. Yet translators, by choosing to render the word sometimes by remedy and sometimes by poison, have consistently decided what in Plato remains undecidable, and thus influenced the course of the entire history of “Platonism”.

23. Jacques Derrida • Anagrammatical texture (the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once) • Beginning with the mention of a mythical figure named ‘Pharmacia’, and continuing with the word ‘pharmakeus’ (sorcerer, magician), Derrida also notes the absence of the word ‘pharmakos’, which means ‘scapegoat’. • In this way, a signifying chain belonging neither entirely to Plato’s text nor entirely to the Greek language enables Derrida to reflect in the very relation between individual discourse and language itself.

24. Jacques Derrida • Lateral association • By following the senses of the word pharmakon, Derrida brings into play many other contexts in which the word is used by Plato, thus folding onto the problematics of writing such ‘other’ domains as medicine, painting, politics, farming, law, sexuality, festivity, and family relations. • Myth • In amassing a detailed accounts of other Western myths of writing, Derrida shows the overdetermination of certain structures in the supposedly ‘original’ Platonic myth of Theuth.

25. Jacques Derrida • Writing: literal and figurative • Paradoxically Plato resorts to the notion of ‘writing of the soul’ in order to name the other of writing, the self-present Truth that speech - not writing- is designed to convey.

26. Jacques Derrida • Dissemination • Plato’s Pharmacy • […] that it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follows the given thread. (63) • That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart. 63-64

27. Jacques Derrida • 1. Pharmacia • An aging writer would not have condemned writing as Plato does in the Phaedrus. 66 • This is, in particular, the case-and this will be our supplementary thread-with the whole last section (274b ff.), devoted, as everyone knows, to the origin, history, and value of writing. (67)

28. Jacques Derrida • The dialogue contains the Phaedrus the story –Myth-of Theuth in the same dialogue.” (67)

29. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • I have heard, then, that in Naucratis of Egypt lived one of the old gods of theirs, that whose sacred bird is the one that they called Ibis, and that the name of the God himself, was Theuth. • He was the first to invent numbers and calculus, geometry and astronomy, in addition to the games of checkers and dice, and also the characters of writing.

30. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • He was the first to invent numbers and calculus, geometry and astronomy, in addition to the games of checkers and dice, and also the characters of writing. • The King of the whole Egypt was then Thamus, whose court was in the great city of the high region that the Greeks call Thebes of Egypt, and whose God is Ammon, and Theuth came to the King and showed him his arts, stating that they should be communicated to the Egyptian people.

31. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • Theuth then aked him which utility each one of them possessed, and commented if they caused good or wrong, he will either censor or praise him. As it is told, they were many observations made on both aspects by Thamus to Theuth on each one of the arts, and it would be just too long to refer to all of them here.

32. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • But when it came to the characters of writing: “This knowledge, ¡Oh King! - said Theuth-, will make Egyptians wiser and it will strengthen their memory: it is the elixir of memory and wisdom that with it has been discovered. .”

33. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • But the Kin answered: “¡Oh most ingenious Theuth! One thing is to be able to engender an art, and another is to be able to understand the wrong or good that it keeps for those who would like to use it, and then you, who is the father of characters of writing, for their sake, you have attribute to it faculties which are contrary to the one they possess.

34. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • This, in fact, would produce forgetfulness in the soul of those who will learn them, since they will neglect memory, because by relying on writing, they will remember in an exterior manner by using borrowed characters, not form their own interior and by itself. • It is not, then, memory’s elixir, but that of rememoring what you have found.

35. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • It is the semblance of wisdom, not its truth what you provide to your students, since once you have made out of them scholars without a true instruction, they would seem judges in many things but not understanding anything in the majority of cases, and their company will be difficult to tolerate, since they will have become in wise people in their own opinion, instead of true wise people.” (273c/275a)

36. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • As a consequence, those who believe that establishes an art of characters of writing, and those; who in turn, adopt them thinking that it will be something clear and solid because it is in written characters, are perfectly ingenuous, and in reality they do not know Ammon’s prediction, believing that what is said by writing is something more than a means to remember about what the written is about. (273c/275a)

37. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • What is terrible, in a certain way, about writing, Phaedrus, it is true resemblance ti has to painting: in fact, the productions of paintings they present themselves as live beings, but if you ask them something, they maintain the most solemn silence. • And the same takes place with writings: you could think that they speak as if the thought; but if you question them about what they say with the intention to learn something, they provide us with one thing and always the same thing.

38. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • On the one hand, once the discourse have been written, they all circulated everywhere, equally among the experts as among those who are not interested in them, and they do not know to whom they should be addressed and to whom should not be addressed. (273c/275a – 275c/276a) • Socrates: • He who writes with science in the soul learns a discourse that is capable to defend itself and that knows hox to speak and keep silence in front of those he must do so. (275c/276a)

39. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Phaedrus: • Are you referring to the discourse of that who knows, to the discourse that is alive and animated, of which the written discourse could be called exactly its image? (275c/276a)

40. Jacques Derrida • Plato: Phaedrus or Love • Socrates: • On the contrary, he who believes that in a written discourse, on any subject, exists a great proportion of play, and that no discourse, in verse or prose, it is never worth to be written or recited as they are recited by the rapsodas, without previous examination or instruction, and aiming at persuading, but the best among them they are in reality nothing but a means to remember form the hands of those who know, whereas the discourse which are the object of a teaching and are pronounced in order to teach, writing themselves really in the soul, in justice, beauty and the good, are the only ones which are worthy [...].

41. Jacques Derrida • The logographer, in the strict sense, is a ghost writer who composes speeches for the use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speck, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence. 68

42. Jacques Derrida • In writing that he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of non-presence and of non-truth. 68 • Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between the written and the true is clearly announced […] 68  • Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the Pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison. “Poisoning” was not the least usual meaning of “pharmacia.” (70)

43. Jacques Derrida • Only a little further on, Socrates compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). • This pharmakon, this “medicine,” this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itselfinto the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. (70) • Already: writing, the pharmakon, the going or leading astray. 71

44. Jacques Derrida • The truth –the original truth- about writing as a pharmakon will at first be left up to a myth. • The myth of Theuth, to which we now turn. (73) • This time it is without indirection, without hidden mediation, without secret argumentation, that writing is proposed, presented, and asserted as a pharmakon (274e) (73)

45. Jacques Derrida • All the subjects of the dialogue, both themes and speakers, seem exhausted at the moment the supplement, writing, or the pharmakon, are introduced. (73) • And it is not the object of a science, only of a history that is recited, a fable that is repeated. (74)

46. Jacques Derrida • The link between writing and myth becomes clearer, as does its opposition to knowledge, notably the knowledge one seeks in oneself, by oneself. (74) • And at the same time, through writing or through myth, the genealogical break and the estrangement from the origin are sounded. (74)

47. Jacques Derrida • One thus begins by repeating without knowing-through a myth- the definition of writing, which is to repeat without knowing. (75) • This kinship, of writing and myth, both of them distinguished from logos and dialectics, will only become more precise as the text concludes. (75) • Having just repeated without knowing that writing consists of repeating without knowing. (75)

48. Jacques Derrida • 2. The Father of Logos • He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices. • Whether a scribe from his secretarial staff then adds the supplement of a transcription or not, that consignment is always in essence secondary. (76) • A Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos, to the paternal position. (76) • Not that logos is the father, either. But the origin of logos is its father. One could say anachronously that the “speaking subject” is the father of his speech. (77)

49. Jacques Derrida • The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father. (77) • In contrasts to writing, living logos is alive in that it has a living father (whereas the orphan is already half dead), a father that is present, standing near it, behind it, within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person in his own name. (77)

50. Jacques Derrida • 3. The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nab, Nebo • Thoth, the god of writing. (85) • In the Phaedrus, the god of writing is thus a subordinate character, a second, a technocrat without power of decision, an engineer, a clever, ingenious servant who has been granted an audience with the king of the gods. 86