Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Deleware
helmling@brahms.udel.edu

 

Always historicize!

 

–Fredric Jameson

 

Accounts of Derrida stress his work’s diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions–in short, a history–of its own. I want in this essay to initiate such an account, and my gambit will be to confront early Derrida with late (or later), which, for my purposes here, means Derrida before 1968 and after. Such a consideration of the whole Derrida phenomenon seems to me long overdue. Apart from the difficulty of Derrida’s work itself, various cultural circumstances have combined to frustrate or discourage such an account: in America, notoriously, we pay little attention to history generally, but a historically informed awareness of Derrida has been further hindered for us because Derrida’s work became available in translation here only in the late ’70s, so pre-’68 work mingled with post- in ways that blurred the differences between them. I want here to “historicize” not only Derrida’s oeuvre and career, but also its reception, its success and influence. If Derrida is some sort of sign of the (postmodern) times, what does that say not only about him, but about the times?

 

One of Derrida’s latest books, Given Time, interrogates a problem that has been a chronic anthropological preoccupation in the West, “the gift”; and it devotes a chapter to Marcel Mauss’s classic “Essai sur le don.” Mauss was attracted to this theme, Derrida notes, because the gift seems to promise an exception to, or a suspension of, the normally inflexible laws of “economy.” In a system of exchange, the gift, the free offering made with no expectation of return, seems to gesture outside the system. Predictably, Derrida deconstructs Mauss’s construction of “economy,” and the binaries of “inside/outside” and “gift/sale” (or “/purchase”) sustaining it; his point is to force on Mauss a question Mauss evades: can the gift actually ever be a gift? For on Mauss’s own showing, gift-giving always implies obligations and paybacks (Mauss’s own preferred phrase, “gift-exchange,” says it all) that thus reinscribe “economy” itself–and only the more forcibly for its terms being implicit, internalized by the participants (here Derrida even deploys a quasi-Lacanian vocabulary), rather than rendered explicitly in the alienated workings of a cold cash nexus. Against the tendency of his own analysis, Mauss idealizes the “potlatch” of savages as a humane and generous alternative to the iron laws by which “economy” reigns over the human condition. (In thus apotheosizing “economy,” Mauss wistfully observes, capitalism and Marxism are one.)

 

Mauss’s desire for an escape from “economy,” a transit “beyond” the structures that constrain the way we live, act, think, and feel, a break-out from the (to him) Hobson’s choice between Marxism and capitalism is a version of the central problematic of not only Derrida’s work, but of much “theory” generally (pragmatism, hermeneutics, Ideologiekritik, the foundationalist-antifoundationalist argument, and so on): if our language, our belief systems, our very subjectivities, are constructed by social forces, is it possible to get outside them, outside their system (or “economy”), to escape their constraints, to glimpse possibilities they exclude, foreclose, repress?

 

Much “theory” (though by no means all) answers this question in the negative, especially since the disillusion following the late ’60s generally, and in France, mai, soixante-huit in particular. Despair is obligatory, a sign of political vigilance, when hope is constructed as “ideological”, a false and politically pernicious consolation–“an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Derrida himself is one of the most potent enforcers of this (postmodern) sense of entrapment in a “system” or “economy” of semantemes enforced by the “logocentrism” of “Western metaphysics” since Plato. (For many devotees of Derrida, this sense of a “system” we cannot escape is eclipsed by his potent thematic of that ineradicable differance no system can master; the politics of this reading of Derrida is another thing I will try to “historicize” at this paper’s close.) Constrained and conditioned by the “closures” of “system,” we find ourselves “inside” a vast social-historical-sexual-economic construct we cannot escape, cannot get “outside” of. There are variations on this theme, as when the “outside” is not the interdicted place we long for in vain, but rather the exile into which our “ideology” has cast some excluded “other”; then, Derrida more righteously “deconstructs” the values or valorizations (the good/bad binaries) sustaining the exclusion, to suggest that the “outside” does not exist, that “the other” is only by way of ideological distortion projected as “other,” and denied the status of “the same.” This is, politically, a more hopeful operation, but its bottom line remains that there is no “outside,” or if there were, it would only prove to be “the inside” again, more of “the same.” The “outside” remains a construction, perhaps a delusion, but in any case inaccessible. If theory were a prison-break movie, Derrida would be the guy who dopes out the architecture of the Big House in search of possible escape routes– the ventilation ducts, the sewer tunnels, the depth of the foundation walls, etc.–but since the early ’70s, the point of Derrida’s blueprint has been less to assist escape, than to demonstrate that escape is impossible. We’re all lifers here in the prison-house of language: we may deconstruct, but we can never escape, its determinations, its reason(s), its meanings.

 

This is, of course, a thematic or problematic quite specific to our postmodern historical moment. A generation ago, in the time of Sartre and Beckett, “meaning” was the object of the existential hero’s quest (so was “identity”), rather than (as today) exactly what the quester is fleeing. (And yesterday’s quest was an affair of action rather than, as is the case today, of intellection–“critique,” “deconstruction,” “theory,” etc.–of making tracks, rather than assaying “traces.”) The “meaningless,” a.k.a. “the absurd,” was the donnee, the point de depart of any such quest; today, the “escape” from “meaning” is the point, the destination–and as impossible of attainment, usually, as the Holy Grail itself. (Derrida himself declares that “absurdity has always been in solidarity with metaphysical meaning” [Positions, 14].) In writers as otherwise diverse as Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, Jean-Francios Lyotard, Harold Bloom, as well as Derrida, yesterday’s “absurd” tends to become today’s “sublime,” a transport (variously a jouissance, as in Barthes, or a terror, as in Jameson) “beyond” representation into unrepresentabilty, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. (A recent collection of papers on deconstruction elevates Derridean differance–what always “escapes” or “exceeds,” defers and makes [self-] different, the mere “letter” of the text–to nothing less than [the volume’s title] The Textual Sublime.) ¹

 

There is a pathos to this distinctively “postmodern” predicament, and Derrida’s encounter with Mauss underlines its historicity. Mauss’s contradiction, and the ease with which he holds it, exemplifies an intellectual economy more elastic in his generation than is ours today. (Mauss’s dates: 1872-1950; “Essai sur le don” appeared in 1925.) For that matter, Derrida’s own career enacts a transit from a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility to the steady-state pathos, the “frozen dialectic,” of his maturer writing: before ’68, Derrida’s “free play” and “infinite interpretation” were projects of liberation; and the excited (and exciting) prose of De la grammatologie (1967) conjured an imminent Aufhebung of writing over speech, implicitly (despite floridly elaborated reservations about Hegel) on the model of Hegel’s master and slave; the book’s program chapter bore the breathless title “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” The point: whereas Derrida has staged deconstruction for a couple of decades now as an “impossible” or “intransitive” project whose critique of logocentrism, since it is obliged to use logocentrism’s language, can only reinscribe logocentric closures, he initially proposed it (and many still take it) as something very different: a new and uniquely potent instrument for rending the veils of various kinds of (false) metaphysics, and hence, false consciousness–Derrida even acknowledged the lineage of Heideggerian Abbau and Destruktion–all of which sustained the early excitement about Derrida, and still sustains those who would use deconstruction “politically,” in the service of Ideologiekritik. ²

 

I will shortly contrast these pre-’68 excitements with Derrida’s differently inflected projection of “writing” in later, post-’68 texts. But I pause here for some necessary caveats on procedure. As any reader of Derrida knows, there can never be any question of calculating Derrida’s “position” in a given text (or moment in or passage of a text), and its distance from the “position” assumed in some other (text, moment, passage). The preceding paragraph, for example, discerns a political prospect, a quasi-prophecy of imminent cultural and social change, in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and I am about to argue that this promise is cancelled or reduced or sharply qualified in Derrida’s later writing, after 1968. But already, in a 1967 interview, Derrida advises, as if to prevent just the sort of reading I am proposing here, that

 

one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing.(Positions, 13)

 

One notes here how “end/beginning” shift to “death/birth” and back again; remembers, again, how silly one might have been, confronted with a locution like “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” to have read “simply” (die a thousand deaths!), and thereby to have missed that “it announces precisely that there is no end of the book,” etc. (there are moments when the pleasures of Derrida’s text can make you feel like William Bennett); and one reflects, again, that it would take a Borges to imagine the sort of alternative universe in which an interviewer asks Derrida a question in the form, “So, then, you are saying X, Y, and Z?” and Derrida replies, “Yes; exactly; quite so.”

 

But let’s take Derrida’s hint, and reread the “Exergue” that precedes “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; a quotation in extenso will illustrate the difficulties as well as the allure facing the reader of, and a fortiori the commentator on, Derrida:

 

this exergue must not only announce that the science of writing–grammatology–shows signs of liberation all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts. These efforts are necessarily discreet, dispersed, almost imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu within which they produce their operation. I would like to suggest above all that, however fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if, given the most favorable hypothesis, it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field. For essential reasons: the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing, is, in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure. I do not say the end. The idea of science and the idea of writing– therefore also of the science of writing–is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned. A most determined relationship, in spite of its privilege, its necessity, and the field of vision that it has controlled for a few millenia, especially in the West, to the point of being now able to produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits. (Grammatology, 4)

 

Granted that the bulk of the passage emphasizes the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of a “science of writing”; still, its opening move is to “announce” that this nascent grammatological science “shows signs of liberation all over the world”–and not merely as a Zeitgeist-effect, a mere epiphenomenon of some “historico-metaphysical” political unconscious, but “as a result of decisive efforts.” Nowhere does the passage take this back; rather it orchestrates a powerful rhythm, a sort of ideational surf, of breakers in and riptide out, between phrases whose implication is to hold open prospects of such a “liberation” (“fecund,” “necessary,” “overcome”) and others whose motion acknowledges the “technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto.” Midway through, grammatology cannot “describe the limits of its field”; at the close, it can “itself proclaim its own limits”: from pathos to paean in under two hundred words. This is a prose concerned with largeness of effect, not precision of statement. The passage opens with “liberation all over the world,” and it closes with an affirmation, despite all the difficulties, of having arrived at a point where the speech/writing binary can at last, “now,” after so much history (“a few millenia”), “produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits.”

 

Between these two cathexes comes the distinction Derrida insists on in the interview, between “closure” and “end.” The motif is by now a familiar one: “closure” as a (spatial) domain that is finite but unbounded (however fissured and ruptured), as against a temporality in which change can occur, and ends and beginnings are possible. Beginnings and ends, Derrida implies here (for the moment), occur only within a closure; and a closure is that for which, again, there can be no beyond–even if this paragraph ends by affirming the possibility of proclaiming, within this closure, phonocentrism’s “limits.” In the following paragraph Derrida goes on to reaffirm his project as

 

a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge[my italics].

 

“The ineluctable world of the future” sounds positively anthem-like; but Derrida goes on (I cite the passage to its finish) to end on, again, a suitably dark and ominous note:

 

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (Grammatology, 4-5)

 

As I hope these lengthy quotations illustrate, Derrida’s prose does not occupy “positions” so much as it surges between them, toward and away from them, in a ceaseless agitation of assertion and qualification, saying and unsaying.

 

So for the commentator on Derrida, it is less pertinent to speak of “positions” than of emphases, or effects–or, to borrow a phrase from a very uncharacteristic piece of Derrida’s (“The Ends of Man,” Margins, 109-36), “dominant motifs”–a phrase Derrida resorts to in an argument requiring broad-brush summarizations of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. ³ But to conclude this (I hope not overlong) digression: in speaking of Derrida before and after 1968, I must seem to speak of “effects” as if they had “thetic” force or substance, and the inevitable binaries that will present themselves will overflow the temporal bar (1968) supposed to separate them. My predicament will precisely illustrate Derrida’s “sublation” of Hegel, according to which stress falls less on what Aufhebung “cancels” than on what it “preserves,” what persists, and thus qualifies the passage, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. I cannot, in short, state my case without overstating it–less because Derrida’s “statement” is inevitably more subtle than mine, than because Derrida invests so much (and so effectively) in problematizing, sometimes altogether evading, the logic of “statement.” Even to characterize his work as a protracted campaign against “the thetic” risks making it seem too single-minded, too serious, risks missing the play Derrida can make of his ingenious and interminable game of “Fort!” and “Da!,” with the thetic.

 

So, to resume: I was speaking of Derrida before 1968, of his vigorous talk of “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” of “liberation all over the world,” etc. These “apocalyptic” pre-’68 excitements (to call them that), and their damping-down, a displacement of emphasis elsewhere–a shift in the “dominant motif,” indeed, from “end” to “closure”–is discernible in the essays (which date from both before ’68 and after) collected in 1972 in Marges de la philosophie. The richest example is the left-hand column (i.e., the part written by Derrida) of the volume’s opening meditation on the ambitions of deconstruction, “Tympan,” in which Derrida obliquely announces that his project henceforth must be conducted “obliquely,” as the hammer-bone of the inner ear beats obliquely on the eardrum (the “tympan”), both transmitting to it, but also protecting it against, the violences of sound. Deconstruction “on the oblique” must take care

 

to avoid frontal and symmetrical protest, opposition in all forms of anti-, or in any case to inscribe antism and overturning, domestic denegation, in an entirely other form of ambush, of lokhos, of textual maneuvers. (Margins, xv; Between the Blinds, 153-4)

 

A footnote here quotes a lyric of Artaud, but the prose of “Tympan” itself, full of puns, word-plays, paradoxes, etc., will already have advised the reader expecting the expository panache of Grammatology, or Writing and Difference, that here “an entirely other form of ambush, of lokhos, of textual maneuvers” prevails. (Lokhos is Greek for “ambush”; it puns, of course, on logos; also on another term at play here, Greek loxos, whence “luxation,” a “dislocation,” as of a bone out of its socket, a figure for the deconstructive aspiration to “dislocate” the joints or junctures, the articulations of philosophy as usual, to “displace philosophy’s alignment of its own types.”) One phrase in “Tympan,” a sentence fragment, summed up the point of this verbal play and quickly became a kind of slogan among devotees of deconstruction: “To write otherwise” (Margins, xxiv; Between the Blinds, 164).

 

I have called “Tympan” a “meditation” on deconstruction’s ambitions, but “conjuration” might be a better word. Even more than our pre-’68 examples above, prose like “Tympan”‘s–Derrida invites us to call it “perverformative” (Post Card, 136)–less articulates an argument than it floats, and agitates, an array of motifs. Derrida’s practice of metaphor is calculated to maximize, as he often enough tells us, a multiplicity or dissemination of “meanings” that defeats “constative” habits of reading and writing. It is an index of Derrida’s uncanny success that so many of his readers are ready to grant that “to write otherwise,” Derrida-wise, is a large ambition, and one with “political” force. (There are dissenters, of course: Marxists like Jameson and Eagleton who consider that making “critique” simply a “kind of writing” reduces it, rather than specifying its uses relevantly; or Christopher Norris, who has been working for years to rescue Derrida from such merely “aestheticizing” or “pragmatist,” Richard-Rortyesque readings of him, arguing doggedly that this is not how Derrida asks to be read. ⁴)

 

But the ambition “to write otherwise” incurs the infinite regress (mise en abime) always imposed by the question of the “other”: can any writing ever be written other-wise? Can any writing, however ingenious, ever exempt itself from the force of social (and other) constructionisms that dictate, that have “always already” dictated, the reinscription of “the same” in every effort at “otherwise-ness”? In the years to follow, Derrida’s writing will suffer the pathos of the inevitably negative answer to these questions. Increasingly, “writing” will appear as not merely another arena of, but as Derrida’s own inevitable and recurrent figure for, the fatedness of “repetition.”

 

So whereas Derrida first proposed “writing” as a vehicle, or agent (not, of course, a “subject”), of liberation from the ideological programs inscribed in “speech,” he has for a couple of decades now, even while continuing to dissolve speech into writing, proceeded on (or toward) the sadder-but-wiser premise that those ideological programs had “always already” been “inscribed” in “writing,” too: a sort of dialectical backfire of Grammatology‘s critique of “phonocentrism,” for if speech is “always already” writing, then writing can neither supervene upon speech from “outside” it, nor operate a “sublation” of it from “the inside.” On the contrary, in the course of Derrida’s career from the middle ’60s to the present, “writing” has passed from at least potentially an agent (or figure) of change, revolution, ends-and-beginnings, to another figure or enforcer, another inscription, of the ideological closure in which we languish. It seems to me peculiar, and telling, that this massive ideological shift has gone unremarked by expositors of Derrida.

 

Early and late, Derrida projects our condition as a vast text governed, indeed, constituted by an extensive network of tropes, figures, meanings–a “system,” or “economy,” to invoke two of Derrida’s usual figures for it. He sympathizes with the desire to escape this “economy,” and in his early work, he entertains a variety of hopeful possibilities for doing so. But after 1968, intellectual scruple compels him to renounce any such hope, for increasingly his every “deconstruction” of the “system” or “economy” of meanings within which we are constrained sees through the constraints only to reinforce them. It is as if Derrida’s way of honoring the desire to escape the ideological closures of logocentrism is to magnify the power, the totality, of those closures; as if the measure of deconstruction’s ambition can only be the impossibility of what it attempts. Derrida explains the matter quotably, and relates it to our question here of inside/outside, other/same, in a recent (or late) text, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” (1987):

 

the most rigorous deconstruction has never claimed . . . to be possible. . . . For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be the danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is . . . of the other–the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention. (Between the Blinds, 209)

 

The one thing “impossible”–impossibility itself, as Derrida might say, with the knowing smirk at the problematic of “the itself”–is to utter the meaningless, to achieve the “outside” or “other” of that vast intellectual and ideological network (or “prison-house”) of semiosis, Derrida’s usual synecdoche for the entrapments of culture generally.

 

That is why Derrida’s standard operating procedure requires a rigorous enforcement of this “economy” of meaning. No less than Freud does Derrida insist on meaning; no more than Freud does he permit anything not to “mean,” not to signify, and to signify everything that he, with all his formidable ingenuity, can coerce it into signifying. No figure of speech however casual, no idiom of expression however conventional, is allowed not to mean as much as he can make it mean. (In Given Time, he goes on for pages when Mauss writes, in an aside, “Je m’excuse” rather than “Excusez-moi,” and with no acknowledgement that in writing, as distinct from speech–and who more than Derrida has insisted on this distinction?–the imperative, “Excusez-moi,” would be anomalous.) The meaningless is, has “always already” been, ruled out ex (or ante) hypothesi, persisting spectrally only as “non-sense,” a sort of utopian, and therefore impossible possibility, a mirage projected by a noble but vain, and therefore pathos-laden desire. ⁵ Language is a game with rules, and Derrida makes himself a virtuoso of enforcing them with a “rigor” intended to shake the whole structure. Compare Habermas, for whom “the rules,” the self-normativizations of “language games,” are a last hope for (“communicative”) reason; for Derrida they figure the fatality of reason as such. Habermas makes reason a good, but difficult of attainment; Derrida makes it an evil, and impossible to escape. Derrida enacts the entrapments of “economy” only to protest them, of course. What a dance!–but dancing in chains, the spectacle our postmodern (i.e., post-’68) “libidinal economy” demands.

 

I have so far “historicized” Derrida by positing a divide in his work, before and after 1968. As an enforcer of semantic “rigor,” though, as a meaning-cop, holding every text strictly to the letter of its letter (so to speak), Derrida could be as strict before 1968 as after. But whereas Derrida now blows the whistle on all “ideological” hope as such, back in his own more hopeful days he would enforce this operation much more selectively. Compare, for example, his 1963 essay on Foucault, “Cogito and the History of Madness” (Writing and Difference, 31-63) with his 1967 essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve” (Writing and Difference, 251-77). At stake in both is the question whether and how “escape” from a historically given “system” or “economy” of meanings might be possible. Foucault’s audacity, staking virtually all on the sheer force of an impassioned, lyrical and poetic prose, provokes Derrida to a wildly conflicted critique of Folie et deraison that aspires, both in argumentative sweep and as fancy writing, to out-Foucault Foucault–with questionable consequences: to me, at least, Derrida’s appropriation of Foucault’s points against Foucault seem rather to confirm than contest them (see especially Writing and Difference, 55-7).

 

The essay on Bataille, by contrast, is much more sedate, a celebration, not a “deconstruction,” of Bataille’s notion of useless, non- (or anti-) utilitarian “expenditure.” (We Anglophones, with Oscar Wilde in our kit, might think Bataille a couple of generations out of date on this.) Derrida doesn’t remark that Bataille’s recommendation of “expenditure” as a deliverance from “restricted economy” to what Bataille calls “general economy” reinscribes “economy” in just the way that Derrida’s “rigor” disallowed with Mauss. For Bataille, all it takes to escape “economy” is a little sex and violence. Today, we’re likelier to regard sex and violence as “part of the problem,” to the extent that “the system” has routinized its co-optation or commodification of violence, sex, and deviance generally, marketing the high-gloss simulacrum even while making political capital out of moralizing against “the real thing”–hence, again, our “postmodern” despair: the potentially subversive is reinscribed within what it would subvert. But my point here is that the pre-’68 Derrida does not blow this particular whistle on Bataille. (Nor does Derrida bother noticing that the essays in question, in which Bataille conjures with war, blood, mutilation, and killing–all the Sadean virtues–appeared in print almost exactly contemporaneously with the advent of Hitler to power in 1933.) He credits Bataille’s originality–another version of getting “outside” the closures erected by precursors–as a “simulated repetition,” a sort of parodic exorcism of “the same” rather than (what Derrida later insists is all seeming originality can ever amount to) “repetition” pure and simple. (And doesn’t the word “simulated” reinscribe the issue of authorial intent, and thus the whole phenomenology of self-consciousness?–reinscribes them, furthermore, as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.) ⁶

 

How to account for these so-different responses to Foucault and Bataille? Derrida himself seems to invite an “anxiety of influence” speculation in his opening to “Cogito and the History of Madness,” paying fulsome homage, as “disciple,” to his “master” Foucault in preparation for the onslaught to follow. Granted, Foucault makes a fiercer Covering Cherub than Bataille, who, both as intellect and as writer, is a much smaller figure than either Foucault or Derrida (a fuller discussion would need to take up Foucault’s own homage to Bataille, and Derrida’s relation to it). But the “death of the author” motif in contemporary “theory,” and the bias against “subject-centered” paradigms generally, discourage any such psychologizing approach to “intertextuality” (even when the occasional exception can be as impressive as Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida”), ⁷ and I propose no such “anxiety of influence” reading here, if that must mean a lit-crit psychoanalysis that puts Derrida himself on the couch–though the taboo against authors on couches has recently been flouted by Derrida himself, in what I think his most extraordinary text to date, the autobiographical and confessional “Circumfession.” ⁸ Rather, I want to “historicize” Derrida’s creative anxieties, by inquiring into how the ambitions they power and betray are implicated in the larger, transindividual, historically determined “libidinal apparatuses” operative in our historical period–an approach that brings into play a tangle of questions sortable (loosely) as follows:

 

1) “genre,” the “kind(s) of writing” in which Derrida invests or masks, cathects or decathects, the energies and anxieties of his ambition,

2) underwriting these genre distinctions, the philosophy/literature binary that Derrida recurrently deconstructs and(thus) reaffirms, and so

3) in place of Bloom’s one-on-one “agon” between Titanic individuals, that Streit der Fakultaten announced by Kant, the “contest of faculties” among whose current manifestations is “the emergence of that new type of discourse called theory” that Fredric Jameson takes as itself an important sign of “the postmodern,” ⁹ and in which Derrida is, on anyone’s account, so central a figure.

 

The first “historicizing” index to note here is that Foucault is Derrida’s near-contemporary, whereas Bataille (1897-1962), five years dead by the time Derrida writes his essay, had long been in eclipse as a relic of a bygone era, a footnote to surrealism, a minor figure of the entre deux guerres. In Harold Bloom’s account of the “anxiety of influence,” the anxiety is about the past; Bloom ignores, and in places actually rules out, the anxiety generated by contemporaries. But Derrida’s most “anxious” responses are to contemporaries: Foucault, as we’ve seen; Lacan (whose construction of “system” Derrida challenges in Lacan’s axiom that “a letter always arrives at its destination”; Derrida’s quarrel with this seems to maintain the possibility of transit “beyond” or “outside” the system, but the “dead letter office” of La Carte postalecloses that aperture); Levinas (whose construction of the “other” as by definition “beyond” the closure of “our” paradigms, and incorporable within them only through a “violence of the concept,” poses the “beyond” or the “outside” not as a vain projection, but as a sacred mystery that is, alas, inaccessible–another way of putting the “outside” beyond reach).

 

Why is Derrida’s creative anxiety stirred by contemporaries rather than, as in Bloom’s model, by precursors? Why does Derrida sweat bullets confronting a mere Foucault when he can be so cocky stepping into the ring with Hegel?

 

One “historicizing” answer involves philosophy’s status in our current historical moment in the West. Here the “contest of faculties” motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition, to the extent that Bloom’s construction applies to poetry (i.e., “literature”), whereas Derrida’s territory is “philosophy.” For two centuries and more, Western culture has worried that poetry, or “imaginative” literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. The fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled, but philosophy, at least the tradition of it Derrida belongs to, has in our time found a potent new theme, the critique of “presence,” that permits a Derrida to challenge giants of the past like Hegel or Heidegger with all the sangfroid of a man shooting fish in a barrel. Not so with a Foucault, who not only shares the anti-“presence” ambition, but was one of its pioneers.

 

The attack on “presence” is usually staged–less by Derrida than by those he has influenced (itself a telling symptom)–as a repudiation of the “enlightenment project.” From the point of view just elaborated, though, it can equally appear, quite contrary to its usual “postmodern” self-description, as the latest chapter in the story of the “enlightenment project” rather than a repudiation of that story and (as in Lyotard) of “story” itself: another version (or repetition) of the secularizing, antitheologizing drive from Voltaire’s “ecrasez l’infame” through Nietzsche’s “God is dead” to the proliferating terminalities or terminations (end of narrative, end of the author, end of the self, of “man,” of history, of philosophy, of ideology, totality, literature, ontotheology, etc.) variously announced, pronounced, denounced by so many “postmodern” voices. The later, post-’68 Derrida has treated this “end of” motif with mild sarcasm, as another symptom of the vain hope or expectation of a closure giving way to an aperture, a break or rupture out of the old into something new–though precisely this had been the, shall we say, “narrateme” encoded in Of Grammatology‘s opening formula, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; earlier still, in the 1964 essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida not only evoked the “death of philosophy” motif, but gave it a Messianic inflection, with philosophy not merely dead or dying, but suffering its hour on the cross. In later Derrida, the closure of the old cannot be closed (ended)–“What is held within the demarcated closure,” as we have seen, “may continue indefinitely” (Positions, 13)–but remains perpetually, fatally, open, and thus tainting, compromising, “always already” assimilating or having assimilated the potentially new to its paradigms, its syntagms, its readings, its “reason(s).” And on this reading the contemporary chapter of the history of philosophy narrates not (its own official theme) the late twentieth-century “death” or “end” of philosophy, but rather its triumph among the disciplines–a narrative eventuality which philosophy must deny, for reasons that are themselves best understood historically; Derrida’s own condescension to the “death of philosophy” motif notably eschews any suggestion of philosophy’s triumph. ¹⁰

 

But to resume what I have staged above as the “Foucault/Hegel,” problem, i.e., Derrida’s anxiety about contemporaries versus his composure about precursors: it is not merely that the author of “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) was a 33 year-old unknown, whereas the writing on Hegel, in Marges de la philosophie (1972; trans. 1981) and preeminently in Glas (1974; trans. 1986), was the work of the newest and most brilliant star, a man already widely proclaimed as a culture-hero. More pertinent, for Derrida’s continuing and changing ambitions, is that “Hegel” means “philosophy,” “Foucault” means “literature”; in Glas itself, for example, the left-hand column, on Hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-“perverformative” right-hand column on Genet. Such “inter”-effects, effects between philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when Derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book–in The Truth in Painting, for example, between the material on Kant and Hegel in “Colossus” on the one hand, and the diary or postcard (“Envoi”-like) format of “Cartouches” and the dialogue of “Restitutions” on the other; or in Margins itself, the contrast between “Tympan” and such pieces as “White Mythology.”

 

Here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the “apocalyptic” Derrida of Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology and the later “perverformer” whose deconstruction-from-within increasingly works to confirm rather than to rupture the closure of logocentrism. I have already associated this break with “writing” in two different senses, and it is necessary here to discriminate them sharply:

 

1) “writing” as Derrida’s figure, first for the historical antagonist of “speech” and phonocentrism, later for the fated “reinscription” of phonocentric logocentrism itself;

2) “writing” as a foregrounded feature of Derrida’s own prose, the sort of prose that results from the ambition “to write otherwise”–the ambition, in short, to write in what is ordinarily taken to be a “literary” rather than a “philosophical” way.

 

These two very different senses of Derridean “writing”–“writing” as grammatological theme, “writing” as “perverformative” practice–encode the philosophy/literature binary as it is enacted in the course of Derrida’s career, in his passage from a writing that is philosophical and about philosophy (“against” philosophy, of course, but in critical, i.e., philosophical ways), to a writing that calls a “literary” kind of attention to itself, and thus both stylistically and thematically, even (almost) “thetically,” announces the dissolution of “philosophemes” into their textual determinants–of “philosophy,” that is to say, into “literature.” More paradoxically, this “writing” also offers–though without quite claiming–to dissolve “the thetic” itself into stylistic “textual effect,” what Derrida variously calls the “tone” and/or demarche of a text (“what [the text] does as much as what [it] says, in [its] ‘acts,’ if you will, no less than in [its] objects” [translation altered]). ¹¹

 

It is “writing” in this second sense, the kind of “perverformativity” we have glanced at it in “Tympan,” that I want to turn to now, interrogating and, where possible, “historicizing” its motivations and its success–the work it does not only for Derrida, but also for us, to the extent that “we” subscribe to (or for that matter, reject) what Derrida makes it entail.

 

And I’m afraid my first answer can’t help sounding a bit moralistic: “perverformativity” diffuses the political application, or ambition, of Derrida’s work. Recall the metaphorics of “Tympan”: to “stick it” in philosophy’s ear, to rupture philosophy’s eardrums, to deafen it, or at least leave its ears ringing, to put its bones out of joint, even to put it to sleep with excurses on obsolete printing technology–these wittily sadistic-sounding proposals stop well short of murdering their victim wholesale, or even attempting to convert (or “reeducate”?) him. (Him? Yes.) “Tympan” lowers, or registers a lowering, of the stakes for philosophy, and for “critique” at large, from the high ambitions projected in Of Grammatology; in it, writing is an act of resistance against the prevailing cultural surround, but only of resistance; there is no longer any promise, as in Of Grammatology, of writing as (at the very least) a sign of revolution, of change, of “the end of the book,” or of metaphysics, logocentrism, phonocentrism, or anything else, let alone for “the beginning” of something new, different, “other.” More crucially: in “Tympan,” the “writing” in question is Derrida’s own writing, or Derrida-esque writing (if there is such a thing)– writing that is written “otherwise.” A special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing, a writing whose whole point is to be different from (or “other” to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as- usual–precisely not, in short, a gramme about which a “grammatology” would be possible. (Compare the cognate wobble in the axiomatics of Paul de Man between “language as such” and specifically “literary language” as distinct from other kinds.)

 

It seems a version of a thematic as old, in Western Culture, as the book of Job, if not of the Iliad, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. In Derrida, this shift between two senses of writing has, as “textual effect,” consequences encoding a politics. The Aufhebung of speech/writing proposed in Derrida’s early work was projected as belonging to the future (or at minimum, a future). By contrast, the point of “perverformativity” is its immanence in the “letter,” ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the “present” of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of “the thetic” or any “thematization” importing anything for, or importable into, a future. The future, the hyphenated Heideggerian Zu-Kunft becomes, as we have already seen anticipated in the “Exergue” of Grammatology, the future anterior, a “will have been,” a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of “event” and of “outcome”–a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, “the same” as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it “different” from or “other” to the present. (Even in Derrida’s pre-’68 work, though, a similar continuity or “same”-ness obtains between past and present. In the early work the word “history” and its cognates– “historicity,” etc.–appear much more frequently than later, but with curiously unhistorical import, seeming to figure, rather like T.S. Eliot’s “ideal order,” as a gigantic spectre the closure of whose seamless simultaneity–its contemporary weight or force, not to say its transtemporal “presence”–is much more to the point than the narrative courses of its changes, developments, contradictions, ends-and-beginnings. Hence in any exercise at “historicizing Derrida,” Derrida must generally be the object, almost never the subject, of that participle.)

 

Later Derrida’s foreclosure of the future (“perverformative” and “thetic” at once) is also a foreclosure of history and of “dialectic” itself–which prompts such politically committed critics as Eagleton and Jameson to dismiss Derrida as apolitical, or depoliticizing. Derrida’s post-’68 ecriture makes the verb of deconstruction, deconstruire, no less than ecrire itself, a verbe intransitif; and the flamboyant jouissance of Derrida’s writing adds insult (for Marxists, bourgeois insult!) to the injury of its antidialectical Weltanshauung. ¹² Politically oriented critics can only regard such “perverformativity” as a (false) compensation for the no-exit condition it deconstructs–an “imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” and thus “ideological” in the classic “false consciousness” sense. Many others, though, experience Derrida’s post- ’68 writing as political, because (or to the extent that) they hear in its tone a clear protest against this steady-state world. To recur to the prison-house metaphor, the argument here is between those who think Derrida has settled too complacently into a deluxe, V.I.P.-prisoner suite, and those who hear in his work an insistent rattle of the tin cup against the bars. ¹³

 

There are some cross-purposes to untangle in this difference over Derrida. The later Derrida’s diminution or renunciation of political ambitions has indeed, I think, been masked or compensated by the manifest enlargement of his ambitions as writer: the darkening of the theme of writing has been obscured (as well as compensated) by Derrida’s prose style, by his practice of writing. This, together with the tone of protest, continuous between early Derrida and late, has on the one hand kept Derrida’s fans from seeing how Derrida’s political import has been displaced after 1968, and on the other blinded his politically-minded critics to such politics as his pre-’68 work did actually entertain. But even granting that Derrida himself shies away from putting deconstruction to political use, it seems churlish not to acknowledge that his method, in other hands, has proved enormously useful for a variety of oppositional criticisms–feminist, gay/lesbian/queer, minority, postcolonialist, etc. ¹⁴

 

But I would grant that “perverformativity” is indeed “ideological” to the extent that it functions as a response, and implicitly a kind of solution, to the confining “economy” of meaning that Derrida so compulsively elaborates and protests. Earlier avant- gardes–the “ideal type” here would be Dada–sought to escape the oppression of semiosis by assaying a direct lunge out of it, into non-sense; Derrida’s effort is to “shake” or “make tremble” (sollicitare) the structure of meaning from within, exploiting its own differance, or “dissemination,” to multiply meanings, to invoke every possible sense of a word against (or “on the oblique” to) the others, to make these possibilities stymie (if not altogether cancel) each other, thus short-circuiting the regulating mechanisms of “context” whereby we ordinarily collaborate in meaning’s tyranny over us by recognizing which of a word’s senses to admit and which to reject. Wayne Booth once summarized interpretive tact in the formula “knowing when to stop”; Derrida’s game is to refuse to “know” any such thing. (One thing there is no “end of” in Derrida’s purview is deconstruction itelf: in principle, at least, deconstruction never stops.)

 

What I want to adduce here is the link (antithetical, if not dialectical) between this “shaking” of meaning and the “rigorous” enforcement of it that we have seen Derrida operating on Mauss. “Perverformativity” exempts Derrida from the penalty Derrida enforces on Mauss. To put it another way, the “economy” of meaning is something Derrida may enforce against a particular writer, or against “meaning” itself. As meaning-cop, Derrida holds a Mauss, or a Foucault, to the letter of their letter, but enacts his “perverformative” style of ecriture, of “writing otherwise,” to liberate itself/himself (as well as a few personal idols of his for whom he cuts slack, e.g., Nietzsche, and some of Heidegger) from the letter. I am trying to specify a signal contradiction in Derrida: if “meaning” is something we want to evade, we cannot, because “meaning” is inevitable; if on the other hand, it is something we want to achieve (either to state some “meaning” of our own with precision, or to ascribe, via interpretation, some “meaning” to a text), we cannot, because “meaning” is impossible. You can neither say what you mean (or mean what you say), nor can you speak (or remain silent) without “meaning” something. I regret any implication here of the expose, of ideological unmasking; my purpose is not to hoist Derrida with the petard of this “contradiction,” but to point out (by way of “historicizing” Derrida) that Derrida is very much in the style of our postmodern period in conducting himself on the premise that a critic’s job is not to resolve or mediate contradictions, but to dramatize them–which, in practice, often means enlarging, even exaggerating them.

 

However–and this next point does take on something of the ideological expose–it seems to me that this contradiction, and such political force as it registers, is too easily lost on many devotees of Derrida and of deconstruction. Derrida’s warmest admirers too often prize his “perverformativity” as enacting that “free play” (“infinite interpretation” as the end of definitive or authoritative control of language) proposed programmatically in Derrida’s pre-’68 work, without seeing Derrida’s decisively different construction, after ’68, of the constraints (the closure) within which that “free play” prolongs itself. Such connoisseurs of Derrida’s “perverformativity,” such celebrants of Derrida’s ingenious dancing in chains, see the dance, but fail to see the chains. They foreground the motifs of differance and “dissemination” triumphally, to eclipse the obdurate “prison-house” closures of metaphysics against which Derrida protests–as if to “deconstruct” the illusions of semiosis and identity thinking were to anull them as well in one fell (deconstructive) swoop; as if abolishing ideological closure were as simple as calling false consciousness “false.” Ravished by the pleasures, even les jouissances, of the encounter with Derrida’s writing, such readings mean to honor the hopes of ’60s counter-culture politics, that revolution and the pleasure principle might join forces in a permanently liberating coalition. But it is not simple “Left puritanism” to reject such a valorization of Derrida as making everything, and politics especially, too easy.

 

Whether Derrida’s own practice makes it too easy is a judgment for the eye of the beholder. For myself, the later Derrida’s “perverformativity” does often seem facile–not “easy,” exactly (not in prose like that!), but complacent, even insouciant, and, often, arrogantly so. (Nobody takes it as a form of critical modesty.) For some people, I am here merely confessing that my literary/intellectual palate is too coarse for any fine and discriminating apprehension of the exquisitely subtle and nuanced velleities of Angst agitating Derrida’s writing. Perhaps so: the texts of Derrida’s that have moved me most–“Envois” and “Circumfession”– are those in which such anxieties are rather manifest than latent. As to politics, Derrida’s work seems to me always to be at least allegorically political–not merely susceptible of, but quite soliciting, a political reading; this, indeed, is my chief, almost my only, way of being interested in it. And (to put it in language that revives phenomenologies deconstruction proscribes), I take this political allegorizing as entirely conscious on Derrida’s part: it seems the better part of valor to be circumspect in diagnosing in Derrida’s work the symptoms of any particular unconscious, but of “the political unconscious” most (almost) of all.

 

Manifestly, Derrida’s work delivers the questions, conflicts, contradictions of aesthetics and/against politics to an impasse. This impasse–our need for it, our “compulsion to repeat” it in our reading and writing of “critique,” our imperative to enlarge, augment, amplify it, ratchet it up to the highest possible pitch of contradiction and paradox, cathect it, in short, to the max–all this, too, is very much a “period” phenomenon, a sign of the postmodern times generally, and of the “emergence of that new type of discourse called theory” in particular. Derrida evokes the force of that impasse most acutely in the conflict between what seems to me the genuine, even if “aesthetic,” politics of his work, and the still-potent political moralism exemplified by, say, a Terry Eagleton. But here, to “historicize” a hard contemporary question can only be to acknowledge, not to answer it.

 

Notes

 

1. Hugh J. Silverman and Gary E. Aylesworth, eds., The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

 

2. “Metaphysics” as analogy of or synecdoche for “ideology” seems to me the self-evident premise of any “political” deconstruction, though only Michael Ryan, so far as I know, has made this premise explicit, in Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, “The Metaphysics of Everyday Life”: “The deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology” (117). For more bibliography on the politics of deconstruction, see note 4 below.

 

3. “The Ends of Man,” originally a lecture, is pointedly dated “May 12, 1968”; in the course of its printed version Derrida specifies that the lecture was written in April, 1968 (“the weeks of the opening of the Vietnam peace talks and the assassination of Martin Luther King” [Margins, 114]), as the crisis that would culminate in May was developing. The piece has an interest simply for having been written right at the moment that I have evoked as a sort of temporal hinge or fulcrum for thinking of Derrida’s work in before-and-after terms. “The Ends of Man” seems to me “uncharacteristic” because (at least in its opening sections [Margins, 111-23]) it is one of the very few texts in which Derrida himself mounts a historical (or historicizing) argument. His point is to correct or reproach Sartre (without naming Sartre) and others for their “mistinterpretation” of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” as a kind of “humanism”; but he also accounts for this “misinterpretation” historically, as a “first reading” (since which “some progress has been made” [Margins, 119]), in terms of Heidegger’s reception in France, the dates at which his various books were translated, and the development of Heidegger’s own career (Derrida here subscribes to the notion of the Heideggerian “Kehre”), as well as the reception in France of phenomenology generally–the influence of Kojeve’s introduction of Hegel, the accessibility or not, and the state of understanding, of various works of Husserl’s, the discovery of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, etc. It is a kind of argument Derrida usually takes pains to avoid making: trafficking in “dominant motifs,” or “the empiricism of [taking a] cross-section” (Margins, 117)–as opposed to his famously “rigorous” practice of “close reading”– offends his intellectual conscience (to put it in terms Derrida would discountenance).

 

4. Jameson wrote respectfully, or warily, about Derrida in The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), but has since sounded dismissive, treating Derrida only in glancing asides. Eagleton lumps Derrida together with Barthes as a bourgeois hedonist luxuriating in a bath (or wetdream) of jouissance; see, e.g., “Frere Jacques: the Politics of Deconstruction” (1984), rept. in Against the Grain (London and New York: Verso, 1986), 77-87. As for Norris, see Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), or any of his books with the word “deconstruction” in the title; but he has argued his anti-anti-foundationalist view of Derrida elsewhere as well, e.g., What’s Wrong With Postmodernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Rorty’s best-known essay on Derrida is “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” (1978; rpt. in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], 90-109); but see also “From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122-37; and “Deconstruction and Circumvention” (1984), in Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2:85-106, “Two Meanings of ‘Logocentrism’: A Reply to [Christopher] Norris” (1989), ibid., 107-18; and “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” (1989), ibid., 119-128. Also to be noted in such a summary as this: Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (see note 2 above) and “The Marxism-Deconstruction Debate in Literary Theory, New Orleans Review 11, 1 (Spring 1984), 29-6; Frank Lentricchia, “History and the Abyss,” in After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-210 (especially 164-88); Gayatri C. Spivak, “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model,” in Diacritics 10, 4 (Winter, 1980), 29-49; Stanley Aronowitz, “Towards a New Strategy of Liberation,” in The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory (South Hadley: J.F. Bergin, 1981), 123-36; Edward W. Said, “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 158-77; Barbara Foley, “The Politics of Deconstruction,” in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 113-34; Jonathan Arac, Critical Geneologies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia Universty Press, 1987), 299-305.

 

5. John D. Caputo finds the inverse of the structure I indicate here: “meaning” as a boon cruelly denied to certain bits of excluded language that have been denigrated as “nonsense,” and which Derrida appoints himself to dignify with meaning, even to “liberate” into meaning. See “The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida: From Uselessness to Full Employment,” in John Sallis, ed., Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 99-113; the protopolitics of Caputo’s argument (“Liberation is what I think Derrida is all about . . .” [108]) are clear in his title. Apropos of the pre-’68/post-’68 divide, however, I’ll note that Caputo argues from Derrida’s pre-’68 La Voix et le phenomene, the passage in which Derrida finds sense in phrases (“green is or,” “abracadabra”) that Husserl had cited as “nonsense.” When Caputo read his paper at a 1985 conference with Derrida in attendance, Derrida objected to the word “liberation” from the floor, “to the extent,” Caputo explains, “that it implied optimism, utopianism, some kind of metaphysics of the future in which all will be free” (112n10).

 

6. For some later “problematizations” of these matters, see Derrida on “iterability” in “Signature Event Context” (1971) and “Limited Inc a b c…” (1977) in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), especially 70-7. (“Signature Event Context” also appears in Margins, 307-30.) Also cf. remarks on “parody” in the sections of Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978; trans. Barbara Harlow, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979]), called “Simulation” (66-71) and “Positions” (95-101).

 

7. (Yale French Studies 55/56 [1977], 457-505; rpt. in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], 213-51).

 

8. “Circumfession” is Derrida’s contribution to Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1993). My review of this and a few other Derrida books–Given Time, Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, and Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (Routledge: New York and London, 1992)–is forthcoming in Kritikon. I will add here that I read Derrida’s “Interpreting Signatures Nietzsche/Heidegger” (in Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter [Albany: SUNY Press, 1989], 58-71) as, in part, an “anxiety of influence” speculation.

 

9. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 68; see also Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 391-9.

 

10. One of the more interesting things I’ve read on these questions–“historicizing” the “end of philosophy” motif as an affair of Hegel-and-after, i.e., as “modern,” not “postmodern”–is Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

11. On “tone,” see “Of an Apcalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6, 2 (1984), 3-37; for “demarche,” see “Freud’s Legacy” in The Post Card, 295. In the passage I’ve quoted on “demarche,” the translation (by Alan Bass) has the pronouns referring to Freud, but they can also refer to “the text,” as in my altered translation. Note that “tone” and “demarche” are issues raised in nearly contemporaneous texts: “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” began as a lecture in 1980, the same year that saw the publication of the writings on Freud in La Carte postale; elsewhere, both before and after, Derrida largely avoids discussion of such issues, perhaps because they complicate, or imperil, his procedural adherence to “the letter” of whatever text he is considering. There is also, of course, a problem of theorizing “tone” without raising (phonocentric) issues of “voice.” Another text of this period, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), affects to foreground “the question of style,” but only, it turns out, to provide, via etymology (“stylus,” pen), an access to the metaphorics of the phallus, sexual difference, “the woman,” etc.

 

12. For more on this dilemma of “Left puritanism,” see my “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton,” in Postmodern Culture, v. 3, n. 3 (May 1993). A slightly expanded version, adding some pages on the issue of postmodernism, appears in Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds., Essays in Postmodern Culture (Oxford university Press: New York, 1993), 239-63.

 

13. Michael Ryan notes Derrida’s increasing hospitality to Marxism over the course of his career: having first dismissed it as a “closed” and “totalizing” dogmatic “system” of official Soviet ideology (Ryan’s villain here is less the PCF than Lenin himself), Derrida later welcomes the possibility of an “open” or “critical” Marxism with aims and methods compatible with his own (Marxism and Deconstruction, xiv-xv, 45-6).

 

14. For a brief but incisive survey of these, see “The Story of Deconstruction,” chapter 2 of Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32-60.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. NY: Columbia UP, 1991.
• —. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Originally Donner le temps. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1991.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1982. Originally Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Originally De la Grammatologie. Editions de Minuit, 1967.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1981. Originally Positions. Editions de Minuit, 1972.
• —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1987. Originally La Carte Postale: De Socrate a Freud et au-dela. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago UP, 1979. Originally Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Flammarion, 1978.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1978. Originally L’Ecriture et la difference. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967.