BIOGRAPHY

In the spirit of his celebrated dictum that "there is nothing outside the text," Jacques Derrida long resisted the publication of information about his life. For seventeen years (1962-1979) he even refused to have a personal photograph accompany his texts. However, his fame as the founder of what came to be called "deconstruction" led him to provide biographical "scraps."

Born in 1930 near Algiers, Jacques Derrida as a Jew was forced to leave school in 1942 until the Free French repealed Vichy racial laws. At nineteen, he moved to Paris to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, where he subsequently studied and taught philosophy. Though his first published work (1962)--about Husserl's essay on geometry--won a philosophical prize, Derrida was not widely known until 1966. At a conference on France's new structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, Derrida gave a paper--"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"--that daringly exposed contradictions in the thought of structuralism's leading figure, Lévi-Strauss. Derrida's critique became one of the important building blocks in what came to be called "poststructuralism."

The following year, Derrida continued his critique, publishing no less than three books showing how structuralist positions refuted their own theses. The books--Of Grammatology; Writing and Difference; and Speech and Phenomena (as the titles were translated)--created a storm of philosophical debate in France. In these works, Derrida showed how his critique went beyond structuralism and attacked the enterprise of philosophy itself. "Deconstruction," as Derrida's approach in these works was now called, claimed that the very nature of a written text--of every traditional text and not just the structuralist's--undermines itself. To "deconstruct" a text, then, is to dismantle inherent hierarchical systems of thought, to seek out unregarded details, to find the "margins" of the text, where there are new possibilities of interpretation.

In 1972, Derrida published three additional works, translated as Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and Positions, which continued to influence poststructuralism in the 1970s. As Derrida's fame grew, he accepted a visiting professorship first at Yale University, and then at the University of California in Irvine. In the 1980s, Derrida gave himself to political causes such as the abolition of apartheid. He also became actively interested in architecture, which he regarded as the last bastion of metaphysics. He helped architect Peter Eisenman design a garden in Paris that explores the relationship between center and periphery. Born on the periphery of colonial France, on the margin of Algiers, as a marginalized Jew, Derrida constantly examined the philosophical relation between margin and center (and often employed language that is only marginally understandable). All for a purpose.

BASIC THOUGHT

Derrida believes that Western philosophy is built upon a "Metaphysics of Presence": upon, that is to say, the idea that there is an origin of knowledge from which "truth" can be made present. Philosophy has always seen itself as the arbiter of reason, the discipline that adjudicates what is and is not. Forms of writing other than philosophical discourse, such as poetic or literary writing, have been judged inferior, and removed from the truth. In Of Grammatology, Derrida calls this positing of a center that can situate certainty logocentrism. Philosophy thinks it can talk about "meaning" through a language unsullied by the imprecision of metaphors. Au Contraire! Philosophical discourse is not privileged in any way, and any attempt to explain what "meaning" means will self-destruct. Put more precisely, the signifiers of language systems cannot refer to a transcendental signified originating in the mind of the speaker because the "signified" is itself created by the conventional, and hence arbitrary, signifiers of language. Signifiers therefore merely refer to other signifiers (e.g., words refer only to other words). The "meaning" is always deferred and Presence is never actually present. Signifiers attain significance only in their differences from each other (the signifier "cat" is neither "cap" nor "car") or in what they define themselves against ("to be asleep" is understood in contrast to "to be awake").

To highlight the ambiguities of language, Derrida coined the word "différance." In French, this word sounds no different from the French word "differénce," which comes from the verb "différer," meaning both "to differ" and "to defer." Whereas the definition of differénce reminds us that signifiers defer meaning as they differ both from their referents and from each other, the written word différance calls attention in a striking way to the limitations of the spoken word. The spoken word can establish no aural distinction between differénce and différance. Derrida thus calls into question the traditional privileging of speech over writing, which goes back at least as far as Plato. For example, in the Phaedrus, Plato had placed writing as one step further removed than speaking from Ideal Form. Derrida shows, however, that even as Plato sought to place speech closer to the source of meaning, he could not keep writing out of his system. At one point in the Phaedrus, Plato states that speech "is written in the soul of the listener" (emphasis added).

This is just one example of how Derrida repeatedly exposes the repressed figures of speech in even the most systematic of thinkers. According to Derrida, all systems of thought contain "traces" of that which they define themselves against. Thus, whereas many philosophers have thought literature merely sugarcoated philosophy, Derrida has reversed this hierarchy to say that the discourse of philosophy is merely literary medicine--an assumption that is hard for many to swallow. For Derrida, all writing is reduced (or elevated) to the same level, with no privileging of one genre as more "meaning-ful" than another. This may explain why deconstruction--with its close reading of texts to unearth language working against itself--made its greatest impact in literature, rather than in philosophy.

In his important work, "Signature, Event, Context," Derrida exhibits these deconstructive themes. Derrida begins by deconstructing the signifier "communication," showing how context will not serve to clarify the meaning of this word. Next, he exposes the ways writing has been privileged over speech. Thirdly, he explores Austin's concept of a speech act, finding much with which to agree. But finally, he argues that Austin is still operating within the metaphysics of Presence, requiring a signature or some other continuing presence to secure the speech act.

Derrida concludes by claiming that the inversion of the hierarchy--speech over writing, like that of philosophy over literature--is part of his deconstruction of binaries that have molded the tradition of Western metaphysics. Philosophy has continually worked with pairs in which the first term was seen as the origin or foundation for the second: truth/fiction, reality/appearance, thought/language, signified/signifier, center/margin, male/female, objective/subjective, essential/inessential. Derrida does not want merely to invert these polarities to create a new countersystem. Instead he "destabilizes" these pairings to show that any privileging of one term over the other is an arbitrary construction, usually politically motivated, which must be deconstructed. As he says, "Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated."

But what about Derrida's writings themselves--do they not represent a conceptual order, an attempt to communicate "meaning"? Derrida goes to great pains to avoid the systemization of his own thought, constantly inventing new terms to destabilize his readers' sense that they understand his "philosophy." In the meantime, although he works to expose the failures of language to make present meaning, he acknowledges that, since language is all we have, he must situate himself inside a system even as he is breaking it apart. He signals this paradox, or aporia, of language by borrowing a technique from Heidegger, who simultaneously included and deleted the word Being in his works by placing an X over it. Derrida crosses out certain metaphysically loaded words, putting them "under erasure." He asserts the inadequacy of a signifier like nature to have a definitive meaning, while also acknowledging that thought cannot operate without the term. Derrida demonstrates that his own writing--like everyone else's--is not innocent, that it cannot become a coherent theoretical system corresponding to reality. Derrida has therefore been called a nihilist. His defenders, however, call this accusation inaccurate. Derrida never denies the existence of an Absolute; he only asserts the impossibility of putting the Absolute into words.