Arkady Plotnitsky

Theory and Cultural Studies Program
Department of English
Purdue University
aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu

 

With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and misunderstood. But then, controversy and misunderstanding are part and parcel of philosophical greatness. Plato is still controversial and misunderstood, and is still our contemporary. So are René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to name, by way of an Einsteinian metaphor, arguably the heaviest philosophical masses that define and shape, curve, the space of modern philosophy. Derrida is no exception, especially because his work in turn transforms the fabric of this space by its own mass and by its engagement with these figures. Modern physics no longer thinks of space as ever empty but instead as a kind of fabric or, to use the Latin word, textum of energy, or (once we think of the quantum fabric of this never empty space) that of energy and chance. So one might as well use this rather Derridean idea–of a textumof energy and chance–as a metaphor for the field of philosophy. The fortunes of Derrida’s philosophy, or “his chances,” lie partly in the controversy surrounding his work (“My Chances” 1).

 

Derrida’s greatness, like that of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, lies in the originality and power of his ideas, his lucidity and precision in expressing them, and in the rigor of his analysis–qualities his detractors often unjustly deny him. These are the qualities that primarily define his chances, in the play “of chance and necessity in calculations without end,” as Derrida said in 1967 in assessing the chances of différance, his most famous term, “neither a word nor a concept,” with which he was taking considerable philosophical risks at the time (Margins of Philosophy 7; emphasis added). Derrida has been appreciated for these qualities by a great many of his readers, his admirers and his fair-minded critics alike. It would only be faithful to the spirit and the letter of Derrida’s work and deconstruction to question, incessantly question his argument. But to be faithful to the spirit of true intellectual inquiry, one must do so in a fair-minded way in order, with and against Derrida, to move our thought forward.

 

Derrida’s works are complex because they explore the ultimate complexity (intellectual, ethical, cultural, and political) of our world. One might even argue that a refusal to engage seriously with his thought and writing is often a refusal to confront this ultimate complexity, perhaps in particular insofar as this complexity is also that of the world that has moved from modernity to postmodernity and is defined by this transition. I would argue that, although extraordinary in many other respects, Derrida’s thought reflects, and reflects on, this movement wherever it occurs in our culture. “What has seemed necessary and urgent to me, in the historical situation which is our own,” Derrida said in 1971, in describing his earlier work, “is a general determination of the conditions for the emergence and the limits of philosophy, of metaphysics, of everything that carries it on and that it carries on” (Positions 51; emphasis added). Derrida’s concerns and domains of investigation change and extend to literature, ethics, politics, and elsewhere, although Derrida continued the philosophical project just described as well, a project that already involves many of these concerns and domains. The sense of what is “necessary and urgent . . . in the historical situation which is our own” was, however, to define the nature of all of his work for decades to come, decades we now see as the era of postmodernity.

 

I am aware that it is difficult to assign an origin to or to demarcate either modernity or postmodernity, or their passing into each other, and indeed it is impossible to do so unconditionally, once and for all. I am also aware that Derrida expressly dissociated himself from some postmodernisms, even though he commented on the postmodern world itself on many occasions, for example, in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe and in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Many of his proponents and some self-appointed defenders went quite far in trying to dissociate Derrida from all (all!) postmodernism and, and more generally, to bring Derrida back into the fold of traditionalist thinking. I would argue, however, that while, as does most other revolutionary work, Derrida’s work respects and upholds many traditions and what is best in them, this work itself is essentially revolutionary and not traditionalist. As such, his work, say, from the 1960s on, also marks and is marked by the culture of postmodernity, or the postmodernity of culture, and may, accordingly, be seen as postmodernist, although, of course, not contained by this rubric. (I use “postmodernity” to denote the culture of roughly this period, and “postmodernist” to denote certain modes of thought, such as Derrida’s, that are both the products of this culture and, often, reflections on it.) Indeed, many of his critics associate his thinking with postmodernism and its “dangers.” By contrast, I argue not only that Derrida’s thought is postmodernist but also, and even primarily, that both the culture of postmodernity and, at its best, postmodernist thought are Derridean, in part by virtue of being shaped by Derrida’s work.

 

Deconstruction and Writing

 

Derrida is most famous as the (one can safely say “the”) founder of deconstruction, a term that has by now been disseminated well beyond the ways it is used by Derrida or by his fellow-thinkers and followers. This is an achievement in itself on Derrida’s part, even apart from the fact that this dissemination is best understood in terms of Derrida’s own conception of dissemination or différance-dissemination, which I explain later. Would one, were it not for Derrida, find “deconstruction” already in spell-check word-processing programs or in half a million Google listings? Would one have heard Henry Kissinger speak of a “deconstructive” approach to understanding controversial political situations as “taking a clock apart to see how it is ticking,” or Zbigniew Brzezinski speak of “deconstructing” our received ideas regarding Europe?

 

These uses of the term are not so much misunderstandings as simplifications, although it would be difficult to imagine that either Kissinger or Brzezinski has read Derrida’s The Other Heading or Specters of Marx, where such political situations are given their due deconstructive complexities. To use Kissinger’s metaphor, Derrida’s work deals with clocks that have special secrets, and sometimes clocks within clocks. The metaphor is also peculiarly apt given that temporality is always at stake in Derrida’s deconstruction, from his earliest work on Edmund Husserl on. Like Einstein’s argument in relativity theory (a deconstruction of Newtonism?), Derrida’s deconstruction tells us that time itself (or space, or their relationship) does not exist, physically or phenomenally, independently of observation and of our instruments of observation, so as to be then represented by means of these instruments, such as clocks and rulers, or even by our theories. Instead, time and space, in any way we can observe or conceive of them, are effects of instruments–technologies–of observation and, again, of our theories, and even represent or embody our experimental and theoretical practices. This process may be best understood in terms of what Derrida calls writing, in part by extending, via Martin Heidegger, the idea of technology, tekhne. For the moment, Derrida also sees these deconstructive and, as such, again technological in the broad sense, written, processes of taking those clocks apart, and of putting them together, as themselves requiring deconstruction. In principle such deconstructive work never ends, as it builds new technologies, new forms of writing. But neither does, in principle, almost any real theoretical work or its production of new forms of writing. Will we ever be finished with understanding nature in physics, life in biology, mind in philosophy, literature in criticism, or with understanding how we understand them? Not altogether inconceivable, but not very likely!

 

That is not to say that deconstruction does not achieve positive results or make new discoveries. For Derrida, deconstruction is both a critical and a positive or, as he liked to call it, an affirmative practice. It does have what Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably the greatest precursor of deconstruction, saw as a tragic sense of life, or, as Derrida calls it, life-death, “living on,” and “living on border lines,” the border lines of life and death. The complexity of Derrida’s deconstruction reflects, and reflects on, the complexity of the life-death processes of our bodies, minds, and cultures, and their technologies of writing.

 

The concept of writing is one of Derrida’s most original contributions, arising from his understanding of the role of language in these processes, but, as must be clear already, it expands well beyond these limits. Indeed this expansion is necessary, given Derrida’s analysis of the workings of language as writing, which requires that we reconceive the nature of language itself and of the relationships among thought, language, and culture, but also enables us to do so. (I italicize writing when I use it in Derrida’s sense.) One should more rigorously speak of “neither a word nor a concept” here, but I shall (Derrida sometimes does as well) use the phrase “the concept of writing” for the sake of convenience, presupposing this qualification, which I shall further explain, via différance, later. It would be difficult to do Derrida’s analysis of writing justice here (it took Derrida himself hundreds of pages to develop his analysis), and almost nothing in Derrida can be “summarized without being mistreated,” as he once said about Hegel (Writing and Difference 254). It may however be worth commenting on Derrida’s writing in more detail here, both as one of the earliest and still most graphic examples of deconstruction, and as a crucial concept in its own right. For at stake here is not only a deconstruction, let alone merely the overturning of previous regimes and hierarchies, such as speech above writing, in their conventional sense. As Derrida writes, “it is not a question of resorting to the same concept of writing and of simply inverting the dissymmetry that now has become problematical. It is a question, rather, of producing a new concept of writing,” of “the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime” (Positions 26, 42). This type of deconstructive machinery and the workings of writing never left Derrida’s work. It is not that his subsequent work could be translated into this early project: he moved on to new and sometimes quite different work. There are, however, often implicit but essential workings of both deconstruction (in this initial sense) and writing throughout his work.

 

Derrida’s concept of writing emerges through a deconstruction of the conventional and, as Derrida shows, unrigorous concept of writing. The latter defines writing as a representation of speech, while speech itself is, concomitantly, seen in (and as ensuring) the greatest possible proximity to thought, a form of what Derrida famously called the “metaphysics of presence,” and a manifestation of its avatars, such as logocentrism, phonocentrism, or phallogocentrism. A certain “science” (operative in a deconstructed field, as opposed to strictly positive or positivistic science) of writing was proposed by Derrida under the name of “grammatology” in Of Grammatology. Eventually or even immediately, the practice became disseminated (again, in Derrida’s sense) in more heterogeneous fields. This new “science” of writing was juxtaposed to Saussurean linguistics, specifically as the science of speech conceived in metaphysical opposition to and privileged over writing. By the same token, writing is also seen as auxiliary and, in principle (even if not in practice), dispensable, a claim that Derrida’s deconstruction shows to be impossible to sustain rigorously. Derrida shows more generally that this opposition and hierarchy (of thought placed over speech, and speech over writing) characterizes most philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, as the metaphysics of presence. Accordingly, even though ostensibly designed in opposition to philosophy, and specifically to phenomenology, linguistics is shown to be complicit with philosophy as the metaphysics of presence. This deconstruction extends to other human or social sciences, such as anthropology (specifically that of Claude Lévi-Strauss), which are often, especially as part of the structuralist paradigm, modeled on linguistics. If, however, this conventional, philosophical concept of writing is shown to be uncritical, the same–and this is crucial–is also true of the conventional concept of speech or of thought. Derrida’s analysis of writing reconceptualizes all three as part of the same deconstructive-constructive process, strategically borrowing the name “writing,” “the old name,” from the subordinate member of the metaphysical opposition of speech and writing for his new concept (Margins 329).

 

The argument just described offers a paradigmatic example of deconstruction. Its technique or tekhne applies to “all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives” (Margins 17). Derrida’s deconstruction does not dispense with or merely reverse such opposites (they are usually hierarchical), but explains their necessity in their specificity within a given field, and resituates and re-delimits them in a new deconstructed conceptual field it creates (Margins 17). One must produce new concepts “that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime,” possibly by using a reversal as a phase of such an analysis and by, strategically, borrowing a name, such as that of writing, from a subordinate member of a given hierarchy. In other words, a given (old) configuration continues to function, both in re-delimited old regimes and in new regimes, rather than being simply abandoned, although some portions of it must be given up.

 

In what I find to be his best single description, Derrida specifies the “nuclear traits of all writing,” writing that is at work “always and everywhere throughout language,” to borrow from Derrida on Heidegger (Margins 27):

 

the break with the horizon of communication as the communication of consciousnesses and presences, and as the linguistic or semantic transport of meaning; (2) the subtraction of all writing from the semantic horizon or the hermeneutic horizon which, at least as a horizon of meaning, lets itself be punctured by writing; (3) the necessity of, in a way, separating the concept of polysemia [as a controlled or controllable plurality of meaning] from the concept I have elsewhere named dissemination [an uncontrollable plurality of meaning], which is also the concept of writing; (4) the disqualification or the limit of the concept of the "real" or "linguistic" context, whose theoretical determination or empirical saturation are, strictly speaking, rendered impossible or insufficient by writing. (Margins 316; emphasis on "writing" added)

 

To the extent that one could use a single definition here, one might say that writing in Derrida’s sense disrupts and prevents the ultimate (but only ultimate) possibility of controlling the play of difference and multiplicity in any meaning production or communication. As this passage indicates, in the process of the deconstruction of conventional or narrow writing and the production of a new, Derridean, concept of writing, a network of new concepts is produced, a network that, by definition, cannot be closed: différance, dissemination, trace, supplement, etc. Indeed, this production and this interminable generation, “eruptive emergence,” of new concepts is necessary and unavoidable.

 

The conceptual field thus emerging acquires tremendous theoretical potential and allows one to attach the reconfigurative operator (of Derrida’s) writing to other conventional denominations and to transform them accordingly. There could be writing-thinking, writing-speech, writing-writing, writing-philosophy, writing-literature, writing-criticism, writing-reading, writing-painting, and even writing-dancing, as in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Mimique, where indeed, according to Derrida, all these forms of writing interact (Dissemination 223). Writing-mathematics and writing-science become possible as well, and Derrida’s analysis relates the question of writing to the question of mathematical formalism via Descartes and Leibniz in a remarkable section of Of Grammatology, “Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence” (75-81). Derrida shows that there is writing in Derrida’s sense in mathematical algebra, and, reciprocally, a certain “algebra” in writing in the conventional sense: that algebra becomes part of the practice of writing in Derrida’s sense and is actively deployed by it.

 

Deconstruction, then, is a work of rethinking a given concept or phenomenon, such as writing (in its conventional sense), which may appear familiar and simple, but is in fact constituted through complex intellectual, linguistic, psychological, or cultural processes. It is a discovery and exploration of the deeper layers of such processes, and a creation of new concepts, such as writing (in Derrida’s sense), which enables such discoveries and explorations.

 

Beyond their analytical value, these discoveries, explorations, and creations of concepts have broad ethical, cultural, and political implications. Derrida examines these implications throughout his work, and his philosophical thought is inseparable from his remarkable contributions to many crucial cultural and political debates of our time. His ethical and political subjects–such as democracy, hospitality, friendship, responsibility, forgiveness, and capital punishment–and encounters–especially with Marx, Benjamin, and Levinas–powerfully manifest this inseparability in his philosophical work of the last decade. It would be difficult to overestimate Derrida’s significance for feminist and gender theory, where Derrida has such distinguished followers as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Judith Butler; postcolonial theory, where the work of such Derrideans as Gayatri Spivak played a major role; and Marxist and post-Marxist thought, where his ideas influence such authors as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Fredric Jameson, among others. On a more practical-political side (if one can separate sides here), Derrida made decisive interventions on such issues as apartheid in South Africa, on the Middle East, the new (post-Soviet) Europe, and the Iraq War (both Iraq Wars). His role on the French intellectual and political scene was of course essential, as Jacques Chirac (hardly a deconstructionist) admiringly acknowledged in his announcement of Derrida’s death as the death of a thinker who, “through his work . . . sought to find the free movement which lies in the root of all thinking.” Derrida’s work has shaped our world for a long time and it will continue to do so for a long time to come. I also argue that it has done and will continue to do so not in small part because it reflected on and shaped this world as the world of postmodernity, as these specifically cultural and political contributions would indicate as well. But then, again, they remain inseparable from Derrida’s philosophical thought and writing.

 

Absolute Knowledge and Unnamable Différance

 

There are, to use his term, many “junctures” of Derrida’s work to support an argument that Derrida is a thinker of the culture of postmodernity and (the inversion is appropriate) of the postmodernity of our culture–the différance of the postmodern–beginning with the juncture of “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (Writing and Difference). That essay arguably initiated (and still defines) poststructuralist and, via poststructuralism, postmodernist thought, and many of the debates and controversies that surround them. Ironically, the essay was initially given in English in 1966 at a conference at Johns Hopkins University and published in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Johns Hopkins UP, 1969). It is ironic because with this essay Derrida almost single-handedly ended the controversy, or not so much the controversy as structuralism itself, and moved the Western-philosophical landscape on to poststructuralism and postmodernism. The essay has remained uncircumventable ever since, to use Derrida’s word [incontournable], applied by him to “Heidegger’s meditation” but, by now, no less applicable to his own thought (Margins 22).

 

One might, correlatively, consider “the juncture–rather than the summation” of différance, the juncture, Derrida also says, “of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our ‘epoch'” (“Differance,” Speech and Phenomena 130, a statement which does not appear in the text published in Margins of Philosophy). This “epoch” is also the postmodern “epoch” (using this term as a convenient abbreviation, as Derrida does by way of allusion to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction) and the postmodernist type of inscription: a juncture rather than a summation. Différance itself may be the most postmodernist of Derrida’s concepts, especially if coupled with dissemination, as it must be. Derrida most immediately mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger, but Hegel, Husserl, Georges Bataille, and, more implicitly Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze are part of this juncture as well. These, along with Derrida himself, are all figures, or, as Derrida would say, names of problems that define the movement of our thought from modernism to postmodernism and beyond (Of Grammatology 99).

 

It may well be, however, that what reflects this movement more than anything in Derrida’s writing and, with Derrida, in general is a transformation of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge, the philosophical idea that is a paradigm of modernity and/asthe Enlightenment, into the irreducibly decentered and disseminating multiplicity, différance, of the postmodern. This différance replaces the claim for Absolute Knowledge, its very possibility, with a different economy, a marketplace or, as Derrida says, an auction of knowledge and claims upon it (Post Card 521).

 

“Decentering” is one of Derrida’s earliest terms, made famous and controversial by “Structure, Sign, and Play.” It is worth noting at the outset that Derridean decentering is not defined by the absence of all centrality (a common misconception). Instead it is defined by multicentering, a potential emergence of many centers and claims upon one or another centrality in the absence of a single, absolute center that would define its alternatives as unconditionally marginal. To cite the uncircumventable “Structure, Sign, and Play”:

 

Turned toward the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This interpretation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace. (Writing and Difference 292)

 

Dissemination appears later, by way, in addition to Hegel, of Plato (pharmakon), Stéphane Mallarmé (hymen and undecidability), Lacan, Philippe Sollers, and several others. Dissemination is inherent in the movement of différance, and Derrida sometimes refers to it as “seminal différance” (Positions 45). Both are part of Derrida’s ensemble of interrelated but different neither-words-nor-concepts–différance, dissemination, trace, supplement, writing, etc., as this list, itself subject to the regime of différance and dissemination, has no termination, taxonomical closure, or center that could determinately organize it, for example, around any of its terms, such as différance. For, under these conditions, there cannot be “the unique word, . . . the finally proper name” (Margins 27). According to Derrida, in commenting on the relationships between différance and Heideggerian “difference,” which is governed by Heidegger’s concept of “Being,”

 

"older" than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But we "already know" that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of "différance," which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions. "There is no name for it": a proposition to be read in its platitude. This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system. (Margins 26-27)

 

By the same token, “the efficacy of the thematic of différance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself if not to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed” (7). This is indeed what has happened, has always already happened, even in the very moment of this inscription, in Derrida’s own work, which is, again, the work of a rigorous proliferation, the dissemination of names. “Whereby,” he adds, “once again, it [différance] is not theological” (7; also Margins 6). This difference from all theology, positive or negative, is crucial for Derrida’s inscription of différance and, I would argue, for all of Derrida’s thought, earlier or later, some appearances in his later works and certain claims concerning them notwithstanding. It defines his work as materialist, even though and because it also juxtaposes this deconstructive materialism to all metaphysical materialism (all idealism of matter, one might say), from Positions to Specters of Marx (Positions 64).

 

In closing “Différance,” Derrida extends and elaborates the Nietzschean themes of “Structure, Sign, and Play”:

 

There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirmthis, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, from the vantage of this affirmation foreign to all dialectics, the other side of nostalgia, what I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into question [a hope for finding a single word, the unique word, in order to name the essential nature of Being]. . . .

 

Such is the question: the alliance of speech and Being in the unique word, in the finally proper name. And such is the question inscribed in the simulated affirmation of différance. It bears (on) each member of this sentence: "Being / speaks / always and everywhere / throughout / language." (Margins 27)

 

Between Heidegger and Derrida, or Hegel (dialectic) and Derrida, and with Nietzsche and Derrida, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable may come close to this “simulated affirmation of différance.” It may be one of Derrida’s literary models, although he never expressly considers it (Acts of Literature 61-62).

 

These Derridean themes figure significantly in many discussions and definitions of postmodernity and postmodernism, from Lyotard on. An important conceptual and epistemological determination of the postmodern is the concept of the uncontainable and multicentered multiplicity, which correlates to various forms of loss of knowledge, posited against the centered pyramid required or desired by the Enlightenment paradigm (Hegelian Absolute Knowledge), to echo Derrida’s themes of the pit and the pyramid of Hegel in “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegelian Semiology” and “Différance” (Margins 4, 69-108).

 

Under these conditions of the irretrievable loss of “the unique word, the finally proper name,” différance refers to an in principle interminable play of differences, similarities, and interrelations in any meaning production. As part of this play, and as a modification of the French word “différer” (to differ), différance connotes a dynamics of difference and deferral or delay (in presentation). It is crucial, however, that Derrida conceives of différance and of the unconceivable of différance much more broadly:

 

What is written as différance, then, will be the playing movement that "produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the différance that produces differences is somehow before them, in a simple and unmodified--in-different--present. Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name "origin" no longer suits it. . . . we will designate as différance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted "historically" as a weave of differences. "Is constituted," "is produced," "is created," "movement," "historically," etc., necessarily being understood beyond the metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all their implications. (Margins 11-12)

 

Accordingly, in working with its satellites and avatars, différance is productive of and responsible for manifest effects, “effect[s] without cause[s]” of difference, or identity, similarity, relationality, and so forth, or, as we have seen, effects of différance, effects that make us infer différance as their efficacy (Margins 12, 26-27). Différance itself, however, remains irreducibly inaccessible–unknowable, unrepresentable, inconceivable, unthinkable, and so forth (Margins 20-21). At the same time and by the same token, it is also never the same, is always disseminated. That is, while each time unknowable, unrepresentable, inconceivable, or unthinkable, it is each time different and reciprocal with its effects.

 

Dissemination denotes that part of this play which entails an ultimately uncontrollable multiplicity, inherent, it follows, already in the workings of différance as each time different, disseminating itself, both in itself (i.e., under its own name) and into its proximates and avatars. As such, dissemination is juxtaposed to a controllable plurality of the Hegelian dialectical Aufhebung (Hegel’s favorite term, which has in German a triple meaning of negation, conservation, and supercession, and is accordingly untranslatable), and is analogous to conceptions of plurality or polysemia in philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and elsewhere. But then it also follows that différance already displaces Hegel in this way and that it entails dissemination, “seminal différance” (Margins 13-14; Positions 43-45). As Derrida says, “the operator of generality named dissemination inserted itself into the open chain of différance, ‘supplement,’ ‘pharmakon,’ ‘hymen,’ etc.”; it carries many features of différance and is defined in virtually the same terms, but with an emphasis on a multiplicity of effects or, again, multicentering (Positions 44-45). Both différance and dissemination, and their companion operators in the Derridean deconstructive field, enact a deconstruction of Hegel’s dialectic and of the Hegelian economy of Absolute Knowledge.

 

Accordingly,

 

if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève [Aufhebung, thus read] wherever it operates. What is at stake here is enormous. I emphasize the Hegelian Aufhebung, such as it is interpreted by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it goes without saying that the double [triple] meaning of Aufhebung could be written otherwise. Whence the proximity of différance to all the operations conducted against Hegel's dialectical speculation. (Positions 40-41; translation modified)

 

 

The difference (and sometimes différance) between Hegel and Hegelianism inscribed here requires a long discussion, and the stakes are indeed enormous. Might one read Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge along the lines of différance? Perhaps. This would be Derrida’s answer as well: Hegel is “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” (Of Grammatology 26). For “the destruction of the Hegelian relève” notwithstanding, and indeed in order to enact it, “différance thus written, although maintaining relations of profound affinity with Hegelian discourse (such as it must be read), is also, up to a certain point, unable to break with that discourse (which has no kind of meaning or chance); but it [différance] can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displacement of it [Hegelian discourse]” (Margins 14; also Positions 43-44). By the time of Glas, this “displacement” reaches close to a thousand pages, and the delineation itself is never finished. The interminability of this encounter confirms Derrida’s statement in Positions: “it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel–a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is interminable, at least if one wishes to execute it rigorously and minutely” (43-44).

 

The same type of “profound affinity and yet infinitesimal and radical displacement” defines nearly all of Derrida’s relationships to the major figures he engages. It is a long list, in itself reflecting the relationships–in turn a profound affinity and yet infinitesimal and radical displacement–between modernity and postmodernity, and the complexity of Derrida’s work and the magnitude of his achievement. An incomplete list includes, in roughly chronological order, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Saussure, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille, Blanchot, and Lacan. If Nietzsche is conspicuous by his absence, it is because in this case it is difficult to speak of displacement, as Derrida’s assessment of and his encounters with Nietzsche indicate (Of Grammatology 19; Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style [throughout]). Literature is yet another story, yet another long list of proper names.

 

The enormity of the Hegelian stakes appears to be ever undiminished in Derrida. Derrida returns to Glas in closing The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. He specifically addresses Freud and Lacan, and the economy, the political economy of psychoanalysis, a life-long engagement on Derrida’s part. Exposing the philosophical significance of psychoanalytic economy is one of Derrida’s major achievements. The implications of Derrida’s point at the end of The Post Card, however, are broader still. He writes:

 

The question then becomes--and it is not only political, although it is also political, it is the question of general deconstruction . . . the question then becomes:Who will pay whom . . .?

 

Or, if you prefer, the thing already having been broached, who has it paid to whom?

 

The bidding has been opened–for some time.

 

Let us say that what I write or what makes me write (for example, since there are not only the texts, this time I mean the publications) would represent in this respect only one offer.

 

An offer on the scene in which the attempts to occupy the place of the Sa (that is, of the Savoir absolu stenographed in Glas) are multiplying, that is, simultaneously all the places, those of the seller, the buyer, and the auctioneer. (Post Card 520-51)

 

It is worth noting, yet again, the multicentering of claims upon the center which accompany the structural decentering of the economy of knowledge at stake, which is also in part a political economy. We are and have been for quite a while on this scene. Always? Perhaps, at least to some degree, but never as much as now, in the postmodern intellectual, cultural, or political world. Derrida’s offer is (as he will say later, teleopoetically) that of a philosophical argument concerning or an inscription of the very condition, “the postmodern condition,” under which this offer is made. This argument is itself defined by a “profound affinity and yet infinitesimal and radical displacement” of Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge, in part via Freud and Lacan. It is crucial, however, that, in this view, Derrida can only make an offer, one offer among others, traditional and radical, modern and postmodern, and so forth, and various versions of absolute knowledge are still offered at this auction, if there is only one auction underway here.

 

The question is whether any such offer can still dominate this marketplace and this auction. We recall, with Deleuze, that philosophy itself was born in such an agora, the marketplace of democracy (the first democracy?), at which Socrates offered, and Plato bought, his version of absolute knowledge. It is a version against which every argument and claim, philosophical, ethical, or political, and of course all literature, would have to be measured. The Socrates/Plato “deal” is of course crucially at stake in The Post Card (the post card sent from “from Socrates to Freud and Beyond”), but Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, and Lacan are all part of our own economy of knowledge. Derrida inscribes this bargain–Socrates speaks, Plato writes, or vice versa–in any of the relations between these figures, and others such as Kant, Descartes, and Rousseau can be added to the list. This Derridean condition transforms knowledge, in part as “the postmodern condition,” along the lines of Lyotard’s argument in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge at about the same time (1979).

 

Joyce, Derrida tells us, has already inscribed this new space of the claim(s) to occupy the space of absolute knowledge in “an immense postcard” of his own, Ulysses, which Derrida is always rewriting, including in The Post Card, all his life (Acts of Literature 260-262). One is, however, equally tempted to use Derrida’s passage as a reading of an auction, like the one in which Oedipa Maas awaits in the final scene of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, an icon of literary postmodernism. Still, writing in Derrida’s sense underwrites everything here, including literature, which modern and postmodern democracy authorizes–such is the literary contract we signed as a society, reflected in any given actual literary contract–to say everything and anything and collect our payments, as readers, for doing so (Acts of Literature, 37-49; On the Name 27-31). But then, again:

 

Who will pay whom . . . ?
Or, if you prefer, the thing already having been broached, who has it paid to whom?

Chaosmic Différance and Funeral Rites

 

We have been bidding on this offer, on all these offers, for quite a while, but the auction is far from over. “What is at stake here is enormous,” between philosophy and literature, each of which is already split into literature and philosophy from within. The columns–Plato’s Philebus, philosophy, on the left, Mallarmé’s Mimique, literature, on the right–of the opening pages of “The Double Session” anticipate Glas: “INTER Platonem and Mallarmatum,” (in) between Plato and Mallarmé, (in) between Hegel and Mallarmé, or indeed between Hegel and Plato (Dissemination 181). Each, as the name of a problem, is already between philosophy and literature, as is of course Derrida.

 

Politics is inevitably inserted, entered into all these “in-betweens,” and many a specter of Marx hovers over the book. As an authorization (legal, political, and ethical) to say everything and anything, literature is fundamentally linked both to capitalism and to democracy, and to their relations, to begin with (On the Name 27-30). “The time is out of joint” (Derrida’s theme, via Hamlet, in Specters of Marx) already in early 1969, when Derrida delivered the original version of “The Double Session,” in the aftermath of 1968, one of the most out-of-joint years of the second half of the century, and a defining year of postmodernity. “The Paris spring,” “the Prague August” of the Soviet invasion (Prague, where he was arrested once, came to play a significant role in Derrida’s life), the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were among its events (also in the sense of something unique, singular that Derrida gave this word later). The opening of “The End of Man,” given as a lecture in October 1968 in New York, is a powerful instance of Derrida’s response to these events (Margins 111-14). Hegel remains central to the essay as well, which, however, is hardly in conflict, quite the contrary, with its political urgency, then or now. Hegel’s Phenomenology, Derrida says, with Bataille, is “the slave(‘s) language, that is, the worker(‘s) language . . . [it] can be read from left to right or from right to left, as a reactionary movement or as a revolutionary movement, or both at once” (Writing and Difference 276).

 

We can read the columns of Glas this way too, each often split in turn into further columns–between philosophy and literature, literature and politics, literature and revolution, between Hegel and Genet, between Kant and Hegel, in Rembrandt’s chiaroscuros (Glas 1b), between Derrida and all these names. (Derrida returns to Rembrandt in Memoirs of the Blind.) In general, Glas is to shape so much, perhaps (for the reasons set forward here) nearly everything, in later Derrida, but of course it does not define this later work altogether. On the left–or is it, at least politically, on the right, or between left and right?–we are between Kant and Hegel, on ethics, morality, and politics. We see both figures through ethics, morality, and politics (in part via Levinas): “the two sides face each other” (Glas 11a). On the right–or is it, politically, on the left, with literature and the acts of literature?–the column splits into two. On the left of the split, the left of the right, one finds:

 

Colossal habitat: the masterpiece.
He bands erect in his seing, but also occupies it like a sarcophagus. (Glas 11b)

 

“Colossal habitat” is also the Universe itself, God’s masterpiece, envisioned by Kant’s analysis of the colossal, placed between, in between, the beautiful and the sublime (thus also between understanding and reason), a vision of the Universe as a colossal and perhaps innumerable assembly of galaxies. It is still Galileo’s and then Newton’s “book of nature written in the language of mathematics,” a point not missed in Of Grammatology (16; translation modified, emphasis added). Derrida fittingly closes his “Parergon” with this vision, where he also alludes to Glas and anticipates The Post Card (Truth in Painting 145-47).

 

Now, although the point would require a long excursion into modern mathematics, science, and cosmology, and it could only be, to use Derrida’s language, telegraphed, tele-graphed here, I would argue that Derrida is also a philosopher of the Universe as we see it now, in the following sense. What his philosophy reflects and philosophically reflects on (however implicitly) is the transition from Copernicus to Kepler’s Harmonia Mundi to Galileo’s book of nature to Kant’s galactic colossal, and finally to post-Einsteinian relativistic cosmology. This cosmology still uses the language of mathematics, but it makes this language writing. The Universe itself, the visible and the invisible in it, looks more and more like a kind of différance, both on the largest and on the smallest (quantum) scales, especially when one combines, as modern physics must, nature’s smallest and largest scales. Thus both modern physics and Derrida bring us to the différance of the Universe–the chaosmic différance, a play of energy and chance–a différance that also makes speaking of the Universe rigorously impossible. In other words, Derrida can also be seen as a thinker of our material habitats (without claiming or even attempting to be one), as he is a philosopher of our cultural habitats. It would be tempting to link this différance of nature primarily to Kant, and the différance of politics and culture, as described above, to Hegel. But this never-one différance is just as much the différance in-between Kant and Hegel as it is in-between nature and culture, from “Structure, Sign, and Play” on, to which Derrida and we continue to return, eternally return, as Nietzsche (the main figure of the essay) would have it.

 

On the right of the right column of Genet at this juncture of Glas is Genet’s conception of the ultimate major (“capitale,” but also decapitated) colossal masterpiece literature authorized by a contract, and by the contract we have signed with “the strange institution called literature” (Acts of Literature 33):

 

Glory again, with which the syllabary is initiated, in the future perfect, in the publishing contract, signed with the institution (family and city), that is, with the funeral rite, the burial organization. Tearing up the contract, the literary operation reverts to no more than confirming it undefatigably, in the margin, with a siglum. "There is a book entitled I'll Have a Fine Funeral. We are acting with a view to a fine funeral, to formal obsequies. They will be the masterpiece, in the strict sense of the word, the major [capitale] work, quite rightly the crowning glory of our life. I must die in an apotheosis, and it doesn't matter whether I know glory before or after my death as long as I know that I'll have it, and I shall have it if I sign a contract with a firm of undertakers that will attend to fulfilling my destiny, to rounding it off." At the moment of the "theatrical stunt [coup]," in Funeral Rites, when they "slid" the coffin onto the catafalque--"the conjuring away of the coffin"--before its reduction, as with the coffin of "Saint-Osmose" (a fictive letter about the Golden Legend--published in Italian) into a box of matches, "Jean's death was duplicating itself in another death." (Glas 11b)

 

Genet and Derrida may have been thinking (for glas means knell, to begin with), of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the funeral rite of literary modernism and yet another colossal postcard, replacing the book of absolute knowledge with writing in Derrida’s sense, just as Glas and The Post Card, perhaps all of Derrida’s books are, the “book[s] that will not have been book[s],” colossal postcards sent to Socrates and Freud and so many other writers between and beyond them, and to all of us.

 

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, /Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” in heaven and earth, in spirit and matter, in light and darkness, in space and time. “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome,” we may say with Hamlet (Hamlet, Act II. ii, 165-68). It is a welcome to Derrida’s philosophy, a philosophy, like Shakespeare’s literature, of the strangeness and complexity of life. Shakespeare appears in Derrida rarely enough, now and then, here and there, but often decisively, as in “My Chances,” where Derrida cites these very lines on the way to “How malicious is my fortune” from King Lear. “The sense of remorse or misfortune . . . the regret I [Derrida] feel in not having attempted with you, as I initially projected, an analysis of King Lear. . . . I would have followed” (“My Chances” 29). Never enough time! It is only a few lines below that Hamlet is to say, with the voice of the Ghost intervening from below, that “the time is out of joint” (ii, 189). These are of course the lines through which Derrida is to address, a few centuries later in the epoch of capitalism, our own time in Specters of Marx. The theme follows him politically through the end of his life, in his writings and in his interventions into the often tragic events that were to shape and reshape the world during the last decade. “To set it right” (“O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right” [ii, 189-90]): that is yet another story in which such notions as “right” and “setting” need to be rethought. Many specters, ghosts of Derrida will likely be the permanent guests of this rethinking, in which we must “go together” with our guests and ghosts alike. “Go together” are the words that Hamlet says to his companions, friends, waiting for him to go ahead of them, as befits courtly etiquette. With these words Shakespeare closes the scene (ii, 191).

 

Derrida is no longer with us, but, in the différance of our chaosmic world, deconstruction will continue under many a name and in many a field, “if we live, and go on thinking,” as John Keats once said. Keats also used the occasion to invoke the “grand march of intellect” (Rollins, ed., Letters 1: 281-82). It would be difficult to find a better description of either Derrida’s own work or what it can help us to achieve–if we go on thinking together.

 

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• —. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• —. “Living on: Border Lines.” Trans. James Hulbert. Ed. Harold Bloom et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1979.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
• —. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• —. “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies.” Eds. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• —. On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
• —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.