CHAPTER – IV
DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction is one of the approaches to literary criticisms that emerged in the
late 1960’s. It has been the subject of controversy in contemporary literary theory.
There are many learned scholars and critics who criticize deconstruction for not
providing valid solutions to the premises and concepts raised by it. However, it is true
that deconstruction challenges traditional concepts of reading a text. In literature,
deconstruction is a method of analysing a particular literary text. The deconstructive
tactics are carried out by the close analysis of literary meanings of literary texts. But
there are some internal contradictions of the text itself and these contradictions reveal
two or more possibilities of meanings. As a result, the readers sometimes meet the
complexities in interpretation.
Generally the readers always make an attempt to bring out several implications of
the text. The results of such implications keep the readers into a situation where
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interpretations are to be reinterpreted. Such situation is a never ending process and yet
when contradictory implications are brought out by different readers from the same
statement, obviously the readers cannot understand the meaning. Therefore, no reader
can arrive at an absolute or fixed meaning for any text. It is due to the underlying
inherent contradictions of language which is the medium of any literary text. So, one
can say that deconstruction is a form of linguistic analysis of the text.
Jacques Derrida initiates such deconstructive strategies in literary criticism in
one of his books, Of Grammatology (1967). The main argument of deconstruction has
already been explored by Derrida in a paper called “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences”. The seminar has often been marked as the emergence
of deconstruction in literary criticism. Consequently, learned scholars and academicians
started analysing how words are capable of producing multiple meanings. The
inquisitive learners investigate on how words mean many meanings simultaneously.
Since words can produce multiple meaning the interpretation seems to be beyond
language. This situation can be defined as deconstruction. But there is no exact
definition for the word ‘deconstruction’ in literature.
Christopher Norris has given his idea that one cannot exactly define what it is;
rather mislead us if it were a system or method. He writes:
To present ‘deconstruction’ or as if it were a method, a system or a
settled body of ideas would be to falsify its nature and lay oneself
open to charges of reductive misunderstanding. 1
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Actually the word ‘deconstruction’ is derived from the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger’s concept of destruction, which is the desire for the loosening up of
the old tradition of Ontology (the study of ultimate reality through the revelation of its
inner contradictions and development). In spite of such derivative concept, Derrida
expresses in a letter written to one of his Japanese friends: ‘all sentences of the type
deconstruction is X or deconstruction is not X, a priori, miss the point’2. So, defining
deconstruction in any definite word or sentence will be misleading because one gives
definition only when something is definite. Since nothing is definite, a definition is
meaningless. Here, Christopher Norris writes:
Any attempt to define ‘deconstruction’ must soon run up against
the many and varied obstacles that Derrida has shrewdly placed in
its path…Deconstruction is not… a ‘method’, a ‘technique’, or a
species of ‘critique’. 3
And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the translator of Derrida’s book, Of
Grammatology, suggests that in deconstruction a text is an open-ended entity with no
absolute final meaning. She encapsulates the meaning and method of deconstruction in
her translator’s introduction of the book, Of Grammatology. She says:
Deconstruction seems to offer a way out the closure of knowledge.
By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality thus
placing it in the abyss… it shows us the allure of the abyss as
freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with
as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of
never hitting bottom. 4
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In other words, deconstruction is an activity of a close reading that involves the
decentralization of the problematic nature of all centers in the existing concepts of the
world. There is always the problem with the center because everyone has the tendency
to create the center. According to Derrida, all philosophical thought is based on the idea
of a center which is a Truth, an Origin, an Idea, and an Essence which generates all
meaning. This is clearly expressed in the book, Of Grammatology:
The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the
history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix  if you
pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in
order to bring me more quickly to my principle theme is the
determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It
would be impossible to show that all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always
designated the constant of a presence  eidos, archè, telos,
energia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so
forth. 5
Since there is no stable center, deconstruction changes completely the ways one
thinks about the existing concepts. For instance, for more than two thousand years
western culture has been centered on Christianity. In doing so, Christianity is central
and other religions are marginalized. Similarly, when religion like Buddhism or Islam
or Jainism, or Hinduism is at the center, Christianity will be marginalized. Likewise in a
patriarchal society, man is central, obviously woman is marginalized. In a society where
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Marxism is prevalent, proletariat is central and bourgeois is marginalized. This process
will go on so long as we try to centralize something.
Binary oppositions bring forth the desire of a center where one term is central
and other marginal. Moreover the center wants to fix the play of binary opposites.
Binary opposites are the pairs of opposite things and concepts like nature/culture, white
/black, god/man, faith/reason, speech/writing etc. According to Derrida, one can access
to reality through concepts, quotes, categories and human mind functions by creating
binary oppositions. Out of these oppositions, one is privileged and other is
marginalized. For example, when Christianity is at the center, all other religious views
are repressed and marginalized. Actually, the formation of such an icon is an attempt to
fix the free play of opposites. These icons are made by the particular community or a
society as a part of social practices social conventions, rules and regularities, rites and
rituals etc. that attempt to fix the play of opposition. Derrida writes:
The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that
how that things  texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs,
and practices of whatever size and sort you need  do not have
definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are
always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the
boundaries they currently occupy.6
When we try to fix the centrality of any of such aspect, we are trying to
deconstruct the icon. Deconstructive strategy first tries to decenter the central term. The
central term is not always at the central position because there is possibility to subvert
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the central term so that the marginalized term can become the central. For a moment,
the marginalized term overthrows the hierarchy.
In a sense, deconstruction is a kind of political practice because it always stands
against the imposition of laws, ideas, etc. which are considered as ‘grand narratives’.
‘Grand narratives’ are the ideas and theories which are universally accepted. ‘Grand
narrative’ is the grand ideology that controls the individual or beliefs. It also tries to
impose their authoritative ideas on the readers.
Thus, the Holy books, major philosophical and scientific theories have been
constructing some ideologies or beliefs. These ideologies or beliefs ensure people that
they are fixed and have definite meaning. In spite of their privileging position, they can
be overthrown. So, they can never be the absolute truth or realities. Whenever hierarchy
is made, it is always engaged in the free play of binary opposite. This hierarchy is
reversible so, it is unstable. The same is applicable to texts too and all the knowledge of
the world. Saussure writes in this context: ‘our knowledge of the world is inextricably
shaped and conditioned by the language that serves to represent it’.7
When we apply deconstructive tactics in reading a text, the meaning will be self
contradicted. Deconstruction advocates that a text cannot have single authoritarian
meaning. Whenever a signified emerges, it resolves into another signified. It depends on
the configuration of texts and this process goes on endlessly. There is no central thing
that can fix the play of opposites. Thus, deconstruction emphasizes mainly on the nature
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of fixity in human thoughts. It is against centralization, institutionalization and
totalitarianism. In spite of such complexities, we always have the tendency to construct
the central term and repress the other which is different from the central term.
Therefore, Derrida writes:
Whenever it runs up against a limit, deconstruction presses against
it. Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshella secure axiom or a
pithy maxim the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this
tranquility. 8
Deconstructive strategies involve several steps. It first brings out the binary
opposition and breaks the link between two opposite things while interpretation of a
text. In the book, Positions, Derrida states: ‘to deconstruct the opposition, first of all is
to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment’.9 Next, is to show how these oppositions
are central and marginalized. Eventually, the opposition subverts the hierarchy to show
what the text means. Finally, both the hierarchical terms are engaged in the free play of
binary oppositions in a never ending process in giving absolute meaning. To show the
undecidability of all binary oppositions, Derrida coins various terms such as:
The pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor
evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;
the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside
nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence,
etc.; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither
identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity,
neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside
etc. the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign
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nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, spacing is neither
space nor time; the incision is neither the incised integrity of a
beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondarity.
Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the mark is also the
marginal limit, the march, etc. 10
Deconstruction has attempted to explore the subversion of oppositions and
hierarchies on any text. In other words, one can say that deconstruction is a kind of
reading a text. It means not to destruct the work of an author but to show the different
meanings at work in language. Barbara Johnson writes:
Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’. It is in fact
much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’, which
etymologically means ‘to undo’. The deconstruction of a text does
not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the
careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text
itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not
the text, but the claim of to unequivocal domination of one mode
of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading
which analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from
itself. 11
The tactics of deconstruction are carved out of structuralism. Structuralism is the
most important concept from which Derrida derived his idea of deconstruction.
The structuralists try to formulate a sign system of language. In formulating the
rules of the sign system one has to understand the constituents on which the rules or the
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norms operate. Thus, one must reconstruct a whole structure based on the underlying
relations which are functional in the system of language. This notion of structuralism is
rejected by deconstruction. Deconstruction refuses a historical identity to one’s
grammar as it alters the relational identity and the importance of words in language. The
interrelated constituents in the system of language are to be identified not by history but
by their place in the system of language. It can be analysed into different levels such as
the difference in phonological structure like cold, hold, sold etc. Next it depends on
relations to other words and those which contrast with it, which can have different
combination in a sequence in a given context. As Benveniste says, ‘the relation between
elements of the same level are distributional, those between elements of different levels
are integrative’.12 Such study may result into paradigmatic relations (functional
contrasts) and syntagmatic relations (possibilities of combination). So, the analysis of
the system of language is very complicated. In this connection, Saussure says,
‘language is a system in which everything is inextricably related to everything else’.13
Like Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, the structural anthropologist began analysis of this
structural principle into the system ‘of elements such that modification of anyone entails
modification of all the others.’14 Therefore, they were bound to go beyond the
linguistics itself. In doing so, the identification of the system of language has become an
impossible scheme because one needs a complete examination on the meaning of the
text. Henceforth, linguistics does not deal with a system which will provide exact
interpretation. One can say that it is not hermeneutic (interpretation). Here, Derrida
points out that relationship between theory and any text cannot be bound by rules of
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linguistics or any philosophical thought. In this regard Christopher Norris writes: ‘T.S.
Eliot proposes a disciplined or educating movement of thought from perception to
principle, they discover an endlessly fascinating conflict, the ‘scene’ of which is the text
itself in its alternating aspects of knowledge and pleasurable fantasy’.
15
This view of
Eliot can be considered as one of the modes of deconstruction. All the problems created
by deconstruction can be found in the texts of Derrida. He read a series of books in the
history of western philosophy from Plato to Descrates, Rousseau and Hegel to Husserl
and Heideggar, Saussure to Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Foucault.
Deconstruction arose as a rupture, a break away from what the structuralist
thinkers saw that anything could be studied through its underlying structures. In the
essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”, Derrida points
out several concepts about the nature of structure which is as old as an episteme.
Derrida writes:
Structureor rather the structurality of structure although it has
always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced and
this by a process of giving it a center or of referring, it to a point of
presence, as fixed origin. 16
Derrida further states in this paper that there occurs an intellectual turn called
“event” which he called a ‘rupture’ in this century. This “event” breaks the ideas of the
great philosophers of the world such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud. This “event”
decentered our intellectual world. Before the advent of this ‘event’ there is existence of
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center in our life that includes dress, behaviour, architecture and intellectual outlook etc.
The idea of dismantling and marginalization is not there in several perspectives. The
consequence of this “event” is the understanding that there is no absolute, certain and
fixed point in everything. Instead of a fixed origin or an absolute origin there is free
play. Derrida says:
Turned towards 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 Nietzchean
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.17
The center also plays an important role in orienting, balancing and organizing the
structure. Nobody can conceive an unorganized structure. The organizing principle of
the structure is to limit the play of the structure. At the center the substitution and
transformation of structure is forbidden. The center is the governing principle of the
structure. Derrida says:
Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by
definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure
which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is
why classical thought concerning structure could say that the
center is paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. 18
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The center is within the structure but also outside the structure. The dual nature
of the center is what Derrida called contradictorily coherent. He further says: ‘center
had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus’.19
The concept of the center is problematic to the structuralist view of language.
The structuralist assumes that the center is the origin of all things. Within the
underlying system the existence of center is possible, which Derrida called ‘full
presence’. The center cannot be replaced by other elements. It also cannot be defined in
relation to other elements which contradicts Saussure’s view that the meaning lies in
relation to other elements. The thought that the center is a transcendental signified or
the ultimate source of meaning breaks down the arbitrary nature of signifier and
signified.
Derrida cites early ethonological studies as an example of decentering system.
Ethonology begins with a viewpoint that Western European society is the center of
civilization or the touchstone to compare other cultures. Moreover, this central view of
human civilization begins to realize that other culture is an autonomous entity. They can
exist themselves not in relation to the convention of western civilization.
The
discussion of ethnology leads Lévi-Strauss’s view of culture which states that culture is
constructed by binary opposition. For Lévi-Strauss nature is privileged to culture.
Derrida goes on to deconstruct this view that the use of nature/culture as binary
opposition. The stability of a structure is questioned when such oppositions are put into
play. This destruction of binary opposition is the essence of deconstruction. Therefore,
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any system is seemed as being built around a central idea which is not an absolute truth
but a construct, even an illusion.
Derrida goes on to discuss the concept of totalisation or the desire to have a
system that explains everything. Totalisation is not possible for several reasons. Firstly,
there may be too much free play among the various elements resulting in a lack of
center. The next and final is the idea of ‘supplementary’. This structure naturally
deconstructs them due to this problematic contradiction. The center must be viewed in
terms of the supplement. However, with the introduction of free play within the system,
the order can be reversed or questioned. Thus, he questions the concept of structural
integrity in this paper. However, Derrida does not give any definition for the word,
deconstruction. It is important to note that Derrida himself has no great fondness for the
word. He says ‘[“Deconstruction”] is a word I have never liked and one whose fortune
has disagreeably surprised me’.20 ‘On numerous occasions… Derrida spoke about
deconstruction as desedimentation about a force of irruption that the entire inherited
order’.21 Nicholas Royle quotes what Derrida says in an interview in 1993:
[D]econstruction moves, or makes its gestures, lines and divisions
move, not only within the corpus [of a writer] in general, but at
times within a single sentence, or a microscopic element of a
corpus. Deconstruction mistrusts: proper names it will not say
‘Heidegger in general’ says thus or so; it will deal, in the micrology
of the Heideggerian text, with different moments, different
applications, concurrent logics, while trusting no generality and no
configuration that is solid and given. It is a sort of great earthquake,
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a great tremor, which nothing can calm. I cannot treat a corpus, or a
book, as a whole and even the simple statement is subject to
fission.22
In short, Derrida envisages that philosophers since Plato and even the work of
Saussure and Lévi-Strauss are all fascinated with yearning for a stable centre. But
Derrida could find no central rule in their works. Derrida believes that these
philosophers prefer speech to writing. Derrida called this bias attitude as logocentrism.
Deconstruction subverts the traditional mode of reading and certain notions on language
or text have been taken for granted. Deconstruction focuses on language but ignores the
limited area of language. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the translator of Derrida says:
A certain view of the world, of consciousness, and of language has
been accepted as the correct one, and if the minute particulars of that
view are examined, a rather different picture (that is also a nopicture, as we shall see) emerges. 23
Since the evolution of this earth, these are many general facts, truth and other
things that human beings consider as true. But when one investigates minutely, he can
find something that is not known before. For instance, Derrida examines Saussure’s
view on language. According to Saussure, language is a system of signs that consists of
a signifier, signified and referent. Saussure also gives preference to speech over writing.
Derrida made a series of arguments with Saussure. Saussure considers signified as more
important than the signifier. The actual sound provides us an entry to the intangible
meaning in accordance with Saussure. In his view, sound is something external thing
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and meaning is internal. Derrida argues on this point that metaphysics of presence fulfil
the idea of an origin or central or logos as presence within. Saussure declares a natural
or arbitrary relation between signifier and signified. So, his view is supposedly free
from a centrality. Saussure’s implication is that there is a relationship between the
signifier and the signified. Derrida called this as metaphysics of presence.
Derrida further examines how Saussure sets up a binary opposition between
speech and writing and favours speech to writing. According to Saussure, speech is
common, natural, absolute, complete, and direct and immediately implies to the
speaker. But, writing partly conceals language which is used only in the absence of the
speaker. Saussure argues further that speech represents inner meaning; on the other
hand, writing represents speech. Therefore, Saussure makes conclusion that speech
should be the objective of linguistics. He states ‘the spoken form alone constitutes the
object’24. Derrida has also highlighted the dichotomy existing in speech and writing
linguistically and culturally. Saussure made a conclusion that speech is superior to
writing because speech is genuine, accurate and reliable. It also concerns only with the
person who is speaking at present. On the other hand, writing refers to something very
artificial and indicates as unsound because writing remains alive after the death of the
writer also. Therefore, speech tends to refer to the presence of the speaker and writing
refers to the absence of the speaker. Writing always gets less preference to speech.
For this Derrida coined a term called Phonocentrism to mean privileging of
speech over writing. Speech has the feature of presence where the audience and listener
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get the truth of what the speaker says. However, Derrida suggested that this truth or
reality is built on the idea of center, logos or God word. Derrida again referred to this as
logocentrism or the metaphysics of Presence (the notion that there is a transcendental
signified, a god- word that underlies all philosophical talk and guarantees its meaning).
He notices the whole principle of western philosophy as firmly grounded on this
metaphysics of presence. Derrida further argues that God is a figure having some kind
of truth, essence and origin which Derrida called transcendental signified. But there is
no transcendental signified because there is no fixed meaning. However, there always
remains a trace (residual meaning).
Trace (French word carries strong implications of track, footprint,
imprint) a word that cannot be a master-word, that presents itself as
the mark of an anterior presence, origin, master. For ‘trace’ one
can substitute “arche-writing” (arche-écriture), or “difference”, or
in fact quite a few other words that Derrida uses in the same way.
25
Derrida writes the strategy of trace:
The value of the transcendental arche [origin] must make its
necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of the
arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure.
It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of
identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin,…it
means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never
constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which
thus becomes the origin of the origin. 26
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Everything in this world including text, word and whatever it is, the opposite is
always there as a trace. Each sign is only a trace of another and no sign is complete
without supplement (additional or substitution word). The notions of trace, difference
and supplement are applicable to texts too. So in a text many meanings co-exist. The
text has become a point where many meanings from various readings interact and
mingle together. Therefore the factor of aporia( a path that leads no goal )is always
there.
An aporia, the Greek word for a seemingly insoluble logical
difficulty: once a system has been “shaken” by following its
totalizing logic to its final consequences, one finds an excess
which cannot be constructed within the rules of logic, for the
excess can only be conceived as neither this nor that or, both at the
same timea departure from all rules of logic. 27
Thus, the whole world has been establishing in this notion of truth. Henceforth,
deconstruction seriously questions the concept of a stable center.
Derrida also notices that absence is something very unavoidable present condition.
Some signs are always absent in the act of speaking or writing. Hence, the absence of
sign is a repeatable phenomenon. But communication is made possible only by the
repetition of signs. The speaker (addresser) receives a word or phrases same as the
listener (addressee).
Writing is considered as a sign or representation and can be added to speech. It is
a sign that is used in the absence of the speaker. Writing functions as an additional sign
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system that makes something complete. Therefore, it is secondary to speech in the
hierarchical order of things. Derrida called this supplement, completeness of something
which makes the addition of something or substitution of something.
Besides, Derrida also says that signs do not ever signify things or objects. The
structuralists believe that the signifier and signified are not connected to each other.
There is no underlying relation between the object and the particular word. The relation
between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Therefore, signs need something else
to make up the deficiency or to substitute continuous dependency on which the existing
relationship cannot provide. It is only supplement that fills the necessary part of the
whole. Hence, some signs are to be put as extra signifiers. But Derrida argues that this
signifier is also not sufficient. It requires another signifier to complete itself. Thus, the
signifiers ever remain deficient. They are always defined through the addition and
substitution of other signifiers. It can also substitute the absence of the speaker. Besides,
a sign is an indicator of absence and presence because it signifies some other absent
signifier which makes us aware of the absent signifier. This process of signifiers lead to
significations itself. Derrida usually deals with the two fold meaning of essentiality and
excess to describe how supplement is changeable and constantly shifting from one
signifier to another. Thus, supplement is an ever changing signifier.
In order to find the meaning we move from one signifier to another signifier. The
signifier is the cardinal point of the signified because without a signifier there would not
be a signified. The signifier exists at this game of absence and presence of the signified.
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So, this process will never end. Hence, Derrida evokes the result of the seeking signified
beyond the supplement is what “One wishes to go back from the supplement to the
source: one must recognize that there is a supplement at the source” 28
But the repeatable nature of sign is equal to speech as well as writing. The signs
never come to an end whenever there is repetition in them. In fact, written and spoken
signs are repeated in accordance with necessity. Thus, written and spoken forms are
those that depend on the repetitions of signs and contexts in order to fill our requirement
at anytime. However, the primary status is given to speech. It illustrates the fundamental
feature of deconstructive strategy for the analysis of hierarchical order of things. Both
the elements of written and spoken form of language are constitutive part of the whole
thing. So, speech and writing are not contradictory to each other but rather each
contains the other. Therefore, they cannot be termed as binary opposition. Derrida
further declares that writing and language is the product of difference, different and
postponement. He states that all forms of writing are difference. Derrida called the
study of difference as grammatology (Science of arche-writing). It is a sign of nonexistent form of writing which deals with the pure contrast of meaning.
Next, Derrida focuses on the nature of text which required a precise and exact
interpretation. Language creates the whole universe in every respect. Language is
acquired in a textual form that have established in the phenomena of difference.
Nothing is exterior to the game of language because language has possessed typical
feature of difference. Therefore, no reader can come to the conclusive meaning about
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actual things or identity because language has got an inherent uncertainty leading even
to contradictions and unstable meaning for its distinctive features of traces,
postponement, absences, arbitrariness and endless deferment. What we have in the form
of a text is indeed, an endless process of a sign system where the signifiers are
constantly shifting, resulting in full of vague, equivocal, absences, traces and multiple
meaning of other texts. Derrida thus declares: ‘there is nothing outside the text’29
because any reader will discover this process of shifting signifiers within text or in any
piece of writing. Text is thus a definite area of study, rather a system of traces and
endless references.
Derrida reveals how writing can be seen as central in Saussure’s own view on
language Saussure has given his view that there is arbitrary relation between signifier
and signified. For example the sound ‘bat’ remains an independent entity only because
it is different from ‘rat’, ‘cat’, etc. So, language is a system of differences. A signifier is
what it is, due to its difference from other signifiers in the same language. It is similar in
the case of signified also. The signified ‘rat’ has no meaning in itself but only its
difference from other concept such as ‘mice’, it gains its identity. There is no fixed
origin in the system of differences in language. For example, when one looks up the
meaning of the word ‘tree’ one would find series of references and its difference from
‘herb’, ‘shrub’ and ‘plant’. Hence, one would never arrive at a fixed, stable signified or
meaning that provides an origin for the whole system in language. Derrida continues his
argument that Saussure while describing language is a system of difference; he himself
used writing, a graphic system. In the system of writing, the phoneme /p/ is nothing in
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itself but is what it is due to its difference from /b/, /t/, /k/, therefore it could be work out
that speaking is like a form of writing. In this point, Derrida illustrates that neither
speech nor writing is sufficient to describe the play of differences. Both speech and
writing are play of differences. He, therefore, does not reverse Saussure’s view but put
both terms writing and speaking under erasure (Sous rature) by putting a mark ‘X’
through them to show that they exist but needs close examination. Thus, speech and
writing are binary opposite words under erasure and further describe the more play of
differences.
Derrida has introduced a wonderful term differance in 1968 while discussing
Saussure’s structural linguistics. It is a combination of the meaning in the word
differance. It refers to delay or postpone (deferral), the notion that words and signs can
never fully express what they mean. But they can be defined through additional words
from which they differ. So meaning is always deferred or postponed through an endless
series of signifiers. Finally, it refers to the idea of difference itself. It sometimes refers
to as spacing (arrange at interval). It concerns the tendency which differentiates words
from another, making it different entities. In doing so, binary oppositions and
hierarchies are appeared which generate meaning itself. Alan Bass writes:
Whenever Derrida uses différance as a neologism I have left it
untranslated. Its meanings are too multiple to be explained here
fully, but we may note briefly that the word combines in neither
the active nor the passive voice the coincidence of meanings in the
verb différer to differ(in space) and to defer( to put off in time, to
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postpone presence). Thus, it does not function simply either as
différence (difference) or as différance in the usual sense (deferral),
and plays on both meanings at once. 30
Another interesting thing of differance is that the letter ‘a’ of differance is
misspelling of the word difference. Yet, it has the same pronunciation with the word
difference. This implies the fact that written form when we pronounce is not heard
completely and serves to undermine the priority of speech on writing.
Derrida states ‘differance is neither a word nor a concept’
31
because words and
concepts are always different from other words and concepts. It is only this difference
that gives their meaning. Despite this view, he again states that ‘differance provides the
circumstance of possibility and impossibility of meaning and hence he remarks,
possibility of conceptuality’.32
Hence, differance covered not only the differences between the words but also the
differential between the concepts of the signified. Therefore, complete meaning is
always postponed in language. No one can find a moment when meaning is total, exact
and complete. Hence substances or entities are never fully present because language is a
stage of dissemination. Dissimination is a state of dispersal or fragmentation of meaning
where the word itself does not give complete meaning. For example, the word ‘animal’
derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from ‘living organism’,
‘creature’, ‘organism’, ‘beast’, ‘brute’, ‘monster’, etc. So, the word ‘animal’ does not
have a certain stable meaning. Therefore, Derrida has no use for differences in language
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in closed system or static structure. He coins the term differance to express not only
difference but the endless deferral. In this context Derrida states:
We will designate as difference the moment according to which
language, or any code, any system of reference in general, is
constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of difference. 33
Such a concept of differance means the relation of entities is conceived again as
not based on identity of language i.e. word or signified. It is based on difference
between themselves, a difference that is resolved into a difference within.
Derrida provocatively assured us that’ differance is neither a word
nor a concept, it is that which subverts the very foundation of any
affirmation of value. 34
Words and concepts are themselves different from other words or concepts and
this difference gives their meaning. There is neither absence nor presence in the sign
system of language. There is the only play of difference because the sign operates as a
‘trace’ and not as a self present sign. Thus meaning is delayed, postponed and ever
deferred. Therefore:
Derrida put in brackets or under erasure, the concept of meaning,
neither affirming nor rejecting but suspending it, suspending
logic, reason, truth, to leave space for activities, as yet perhaps
virtually inconceivable.35
Thus, differance is one of the important features of speech and writing. According to
Derrida, writing is a system that exhibits the three features i.e. difference, trace and
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supplement. Language is an endless process characterized by differance. Christopher
Norris in his Deconstruction: Theory and Practice sums up what Derrida sets out to
demonstrate in the following terms: that writing is systematically degraded in
Saussurean linguistics, that this strategy runs up against suppressed but visible
contradictions and that by following those contradictions through one is led beyond
linguistics to a grammatology or science of writing and textuality in general.
Having discussed how Saussure’s arguments on language deconstructs itself,
Derrida moves to make the same sort of argument on the eighteen century French
philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the father of French Romanticism. Derrida
examines Rousseau and finds that he is strongly opposed against the view that science
and arts that progress rapidly and subsequently will make man happy and prosperous
life. For him, civilization and knowledge through learning destroy the inborn human
nature. Despite he believes in the original, natural, the savaged and uncivilized man
who is ignorant of the skill of writing. Rousseau is obsessed with a life of simple and
close to nature. Hence, he spent most of his life with an illiterate servant girl. His
philosophy is based on the binary opposition between nature and culture that the old
savaged man living on the lap of nature is corrupted by culture. According to Rousseau,
savaged man is noble. However, the savaged man felt some sort of deficiency, need for
something and desired for living altogether. Culture is supposed to displace nature in
two distinctive ways such as culture adds to nature and culture also substitutes nature.
This opposition of nature/culture comes in the tradition of binary opposition such as
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good/evil, man/woman etc. The initial word ‘nature’, ‘good’ and ‘man’ of the pairs are
the privileging entity.
Derrida has pointed out that Rousseau’s argument is totally dependent on the
idea of supplement. Nature is considered to be self sufficient but it needs culture. In this
point, Derrida responds that there is no exact, complete thing in nature. Yet nature is a
supplemented entity. Derrida again puts the term nature under erasure Nature. The
device is an indication of double meaning that employs both the insufficient and
provisional status of an entity. At the same time, Derrida does not believe in the
metaphysics of presence but admits the necessity to work within the play of language.
For Rousseau, speech is original and the most natural condition of language
whereas writing is incompetent and inadequate. In Confessions, Rousseau says:
Writing is a dangerous supplement an addition to the natural
resources of speech that always threatened to poison the springs of
authentic human understanding.36
Rousseau feels that writing is a product of human civilization and a dangerous
supplement to speech. Writing also breaks the intimacy between speakers and destroys
the personal network of social relations. Writing keeps the individual at a distance from
each other and sometimes, imposes a gap between them. Writing is such a skill that one
can practice the idea of concealment to show the reality of what he feels and thinks. In
this, Derrida argues:
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Rousseau is repeating the same logocentric gesture which has
characterized the entire discourse of western metaphysical
thought.Self presence, transparent proximity in the face to face of
countenance and the immediate range of the voice, this
determination
of
social
authenticity
is
therefore
Rousseauistic but already the inheritor of Platonism…
classic,
37
Rousseau’s ideal spoken form is thus based on the model of a small community.
But in the context of a larger society, writing seems to be an indispensable medium for
communication. So, the idea of writing is always there when Rousseau talks about
society and language. Derrida pointed out how Rousseau’s writing deconstructs itself.
Derrida argues Rousseau is not speaking to us at present. He is absent; therefore, one
can understand his argument through writing. By means of writing Rousseau can
communicate and share his thought to us.
And yet of course, Rousseau was himself a writer, an exceptionally
prolix and dedicated writer, one whose every thought and
experience seemed to find a place in his written work. So what can
be this strange compunction that operates everywhere in
Rousseau’s text, leading him to denounce the very means by which
his own life-history is set down other to read? 38
For Derrida that is Rousseau’s predicament. In Confessions Rousseau realises
that though writing corrupts human mind and spring the evils of social inequality and
class division, he depends on writing and makes his own thought and feeling known to
others and even himself. Moreover, he also confesses that when he writes his own
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biography, he feels to embellish himself and to destroy the original natural truth.
Therefore, Rousseau concludes writing is a dangerous supplement to speech. ‘Derrida
describes this situation of Rousseau’s writing in terms of a classic double bind
predicament’. 39
Rousseau’s dependence in writing can be shown from Confession, he writes:
I would love society like others, if I were not sure of showing
myself not only at a disadvantage, but as completely different from
what I am. The part that I have taken of writing and hiding myself
is precisely the one that suits me. If I were present, one would
never know what I was worth. 40
In Rousseau’s Essays on the Origin of Languages, Derrida can seize upon the
word ‘supplement’. Rousseau denounces writing as superfluous and added on as
sullpementary. But according to Derrida, the word carries further meaning. Derrida
writes:
The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plentitude enriching
another plentitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates
and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techè, image,
representation, convention etc., come as supplements to nature and
are rich with this entire cumulating function… But the supplement
supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it
represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a
presence.
Compensatory
[supplémant]
and
vicarious,
the
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supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the) place [tient-lieu]. As substitute it is not simply added to the
positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned
in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere,
something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by
allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy. The sign is
always the supplement of the thing itself. 41
Thus, the supplement is added on only because of a lack in the original and
therefore, writing is not superfluous at all. Hence, lack of something, absence and
deficiency in speech can be replaced or supplemented by writing. Therefore, writing is
neither a dangerous supplement nor a necessary evil as Rousseau says.
Rousseau believes writing is a mechanism that is added to speech and perhaps
already complete and writing is something that makes speech complete. According to
Derrida, speech is certainly not complete when it needs writing to supplement it. Speech
is not full of presence since words do not generate stable meaning at present moment.
So, Derrida sees that with Rousseau all activities are incorporated with this play of
presence and absence. In connection to this, Derrida cites an appropriate example from
Rousseau. Rousseau states that melody is central because it is pure and spontaneous
impulse for singing. On account of the natural voice and presence of the singer, it is
central. On the contrary, Harmony is the combination of multiple voices in concert that
is considered as artificial. Due to the complexities in civilization written forms take the
place of natural speech melody. However, Derrida points out how Rousseau’s view
deconstructs himself. As Rousseau says:
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Melody has its principle in harmony, since it is an harmonic
analysis which gives degrees of the gamut [scale], and the chords
of the mode, and the laws of modulation, the only elements of
singing. 42
A melodious song is always sung in a certain key in a certain scale and that is
harmony. Therefore, the original melody is always a form of it. All the arguments
harmony and melody along with nature and culture are dwelt in by a lack of or absence
of something which is to be filled by a play of difference, a play of presence and
absence.
Next, Derrida continues his deconstructive analysis to French anthropologist,
Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi- Strauss follows Saussure’s structural linguistics in the study
of anthropology in general and myth in particular. Lévi-Strauss’s argument is also based
on the binary opposition between nature and culture. Like Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss also
favours nature to culture. Derrida turns to the same lamentation of the loss of nature in
the observation of Lévi- Strauss. As a structuralist, he searches for invariant structures
which show the nature of human intelligence. This leads to the traditional mode of
reading that a text provides stable meaning. Derrida declares: ‘when Lévi-Strauss
describes the life of Nambikwara and their tradition to civilization he takes upon
himself the burden of guilt produced by this encounter between civilization and
‘innocent’ culture it ceaselessly exploits’.43 Like Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss gives the
priority of speech before writing. According to Lévi-Strauss, speech is original and
natural whereas writing is a mechanism of oppression that can corrupt the primitive
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savaged mind of man. Derrida equates the philosophy of Lévi-Strauss to logocentrism.
Derrida discovers how Lévi-Strauss deconstructs himself on the privileging attitude of
nature to culture.
As an anthropologist also Lévi-Strauss studied about primitive ‘Nambikwara’
tribe living in the forest of Brazil in a book, Tristes Tropiques. He did so because the
tribes communicate each other only by speaking. They were very close to nature since
they were unknown to writing skill. But the strange thing was that one of the tribes
imitated Lévi-Strauss when he noted down in his paper. The man imitated him by
making few dots and zigzags on the gourds. Very soon, the man got something else
different from other people and he was alienated from other people due to his attribute
of writing skill. What Derrida tries to show with reference to this story is that LéviStrauss’s belief about the ‘Nambikwara’ tribe who are free from culture simply remains
a fantasy. It shows that speech alone is not complete. In order to make complete speech
needs something i.e. writing. Thus, speech is supplement to writing. What Derrida tries
to show is that the arguments led down by Saussure, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss can be
deconstructed them. This is one of the important strategies of deconstruction.
After the close examination of Levi Strauss’s anthropology, Derrida
finds the
difficulties in giving a complete depiction of myths. When Lévi-Strauss brings out a
totality of myths he is caught with Derrida’s concept of center that without center, the
totality cannot be existed. Any concept or a totality has a center, without center there
will be no totality. The center can either be inside or outside the totality as origin or end,
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areche or telos. ‘This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any
archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the
structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a
full presence which is beyond play’. 44
The structure of totality requires a center that provides a system from the point of
view from its origin and end or goal, but the origin and goal are situated in a
paradoxical condition. In this point, it is to say that center can only be present in the
system which Derrida terms as eschatological and as a full presence beyond play.
Eschatology is ‘a term coined by Foucault to refer to the totalset of relations that unite,
at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures,
sciences and possibly formalized systems of knowledge.’45 Eschatology is related to full
presence. It occurs when God’s word is present on the world. Therefore there is an end
of all metaphysics because metaphysics rests on the absence of the presence of the
‘Being’. Here Barry Stocker expresses:
If everything in Being was fully present to consciousness,
consciousness would not experience the differentiation of Being in
time, and would not express any differentiation, so that experience
itself would have come to an end. This is an impossible situation,
though for Derrida it is a constant orientation of consciousness and
thought, since they are trying to abolish the difference between
themselves and their objects in the very acts of consciousness and
thought. These essential conditions of consciousness and thought
condition any system of knowlege.46
129
Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology deals with the problem of totality. At
first, he recognizes that the nature culture distinction cannot be made because they serve
as a useful instrument of anthropological investigation. There cannot be made further
distinction between the two. This loss of absolute distinction destroys the idea of center
to the anthropological study that has a totality. Besides, the loss of totality comes out
when Lévi-Strauss deals with the classification of myth. He finds difficulty in the
distinction between the theory of myth (the myth of all myths) and the myths
themselves. Christopher Norris writes:
Derrida uses the word bricolage  roughly speaking, ‘the ad hoc
assemblage of miscellaneous materials and signifying structures’
to describe how mythologies make sense of the world in a way
quite remote from our own, more logical and regimented habits of
thought. The bricoleur is a kind of Heath Robinson figure, happy
to exploit the most diverse assortment of mythemes  or random
combinatory  elements in order to create a working hypothesis
about this or that feature of social life. The opposite approach is
that of the typecast ‘engineer’, one who starts out with a welldefined concept of the machine (or explanatory theory) he wants to
construct, and who follows this blueprint through to its logical
conclusion.47
Lévi-Strauss makes a distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur. LéviStrauss says:
The bricoleur is someone who uses ‘the means at hand’ that is, the
instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are
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already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye
to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one
tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them
whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once,
even if their form and the origin are heterogeneous and so forth.
There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage,
and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself.
48
The engineer works according to a system based on fundamental in which all
empirical evidence can be put together. On the other hand, the bricoleur puts together a
patchwork of evidence, a bricolage. Derrida quotes Lévi-Strauss’s The Savaged Mind
‘Mythical thought … builds ideological castles out of what was once a social discourse’.
49
Lévi-Strauss suggests that the anthropologist has to serve as a bricoleur. However, the
consequence of the dominance of bricolage must refer that engineer is a kind of a
bricoleur. Therefore, no distinction can be made between the two.
By using signs, the bricoleur constructs and adopt myths from various signifiers
and signifieds. Derrida puts the word bricolage under erasure because the meaning of
both the word engineer and the bricoleur are not present. Each of them can be defined
by its difference from its opposite word. They do not produce definite meaning. Thus,
Lévi-Strauss fails to give the totality of myths as there is no center to have a totality.
Next, Derrida moves to deconstruct Plato who tells writing as illusory and
signifies nothing. Derrida contradicts Plato’s view that writing contains truth. Whatever
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is there in the writing, it is the voice of truth. In order to give the privileging attitude of
writing, Derrida contradicts not only Plato but also Socrates. Derrida has proved that
Plato is repeating the same logocentric tradition as Saussure, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss
did.
In Plato’s essay “Pharmacy” Derrida declares that Socrates became a scapegoat
of an ancient Greek tradition. Pharmakos or the rite of the scapegoat was a civil
purification ritual in ancient Greece. People used to feed a group of deformed and
abnormal human being for performing the rite of sacrifice. When anything unwanted
event like flood or drought happened, one of the deformed persons was sacrificed as the
purification ritual. Finally, people scattered the ashes to the different directions of the
winds and the seas. In this way the city was purified and that was the fate of a
scapegoat. Socrates was like a scapegoat in a sense so he did in writing.
Derrida deconstructs both Plato and Socrates. Derrida reads Plato’s writing on
Phaedrus, one of the Socratic dialogues. The conversation takes place between Socrates
and his friend Phaedrus while they are driven in an outskirt of an extreme hot summer
day. The Phaedrus is an attack on writing and memorizing texts because the pure
thought of mind is corrupted by writing. We can have pure knowledge only in the form
of dialogue where the listener can understand thought immediately by means of spoken
words. The speaker also knows that the spoken words have expressed their meaning.
According to Plato, writing and memorization of texts is pharmakon. However
‘pharmakon means both poison and medicine’.50
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In presenting the dialogue, Derrida points out pharmacia that reveals the
execution of pharmakon the drug, the medicine and the poison. Derrida examines both
Socrates and Plato and shows the failure in illustration of the word pharmakon of which
he cannot give definite meaning but of its multiple meanings.
Further, Socrates is seduced by the beauty of nature and Phaedrus’s written text
of speech that is carried in his robe. Derrida declares here that spoken words could
never seduce Socrates since words are deferred. Thus, Socrates refers to the written
speech as a pharmakon, an attractive but a dangerous drug. Derrida examines
inquisitively both Socrates and Plato, subsequently shows the failure in illustration of
the word pharmakon at definite meaning rather it possesses multiple meanings.
Derrida next turns his attention to the myth of Theuth to show the threads of
binary opposition. Socrates used Theuth to illustrate the reality about writing.
According to Socrates, myth is the repetition of stories that have been passed on from
generation to generation. Hence, myth is a form of writing that is not real but mere
repetition of words. Theuth, the Greek name for the Egyptian god, Theoth was the god
of science, magic, astrology, medicine, writing and so on. Theoth is also the son of the
god-king and sun-god Ammon-Ra (the hidden sun). Derrida notes that either Theoth
replaces or substitutes for Ra, representing him by speech and writing. This myth is also
arranged in the binary opposition such as Ra/Theoth, Speech/writing etc. So, the myth is
woven of a series of binary opposition and so as the dialogues.
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Moreover, writing is like a kind of evil memory because it is mere reminding
and one learns something by heart. Both Socrates and Plato view that it is only writing
that depends on simply reminding, whereas Speech is good and adequate because the
speaker himself is the originator of the speech at the present moment. Writing exists
without an originator and has no ultimate contact with other. This proposition reflects
the same logocentric tradition. Derrida observes that Socrates considers writing is like
an evil memory, mere learning by heart, as a pharmakon. Socrates further states that
Plato always thinks of memory which has no limit. But Derrida claims that for
remembering anything one would always have to be associated with contradictory ideas
or elements with different meaning.
Socrates also equates writing to bad and sterile seed and speech to good and
fertile seed. We often throw sterile seed wastefully outside our home. Speech is like
fruit bearing seed. In the same way, the myth refers to speech because speech is in
contact with the living father; king Theoth, the god of writing is associated with the
non-living letter.
The scapegoat is put outside the city, in order to kill it for the purification of the
entire city. But Derrida declares that though the scapegoat is put out of the city, it must
have been within the city. The pharmakos or the scapegoat is useful like a medicine
because it cures the impurity of the city, at that time, the scapegoat is the pharmakon
both the poison and medicine. It is similar to the god of writing that supplements
speech. For Derrida, there is no essence of Theoth, pharmakon, Sun, Moon and so on,
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but their belonging to the universe is due to the play of signifiers. Therefore, any kind of
interpretation in the form of spoken and written is inadequate because there is
Pharmakon where meaning is not complete and decidable. What Derrida does in
“Pharmacy” is that meaning is not exact, finite and decidable which is the central
argument of deconstruction.
One important concept in Derrida’s Dissemination is the notion of textuality
which lies on the fact that how a text means rather what a text means. A text has many
meanings. No one can stop a text from its play of meanings. This play of signifier
further disseminates its meaning endlessly.
The second essay is “The Double Session”. In the first page of the essay we find
two columns, one is from Plato’s Philebus and other from Stepháne Mallarmé’s text
Mimique. Mimique is based on the ambiguous figure of the mime, a different kind of
mimesis. Plato believed that a painter painted a reproduction of a thing, a spiritual Ideal
form. But according to Derrida,
There is no imitation. The Mime imitates nothing. And to begin
with, he doesn’t imitate. There is nothing prior to the writing of his
gestures. Nothing is prescribed for him. No present has preceded or
supervised the tracing of his writing. His movements form a figure
that no speech anticipates or accompanies. They are not linked
with logos in any order of the consequence…The Mime follows no
preestablished script, no programme obtained elsewhere. Not that
he improvises or lets himself go spontaneously: he simply does not
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obey any verbal order. His gestures his gestural writing (and
Mallarmé’s insistence on describing the regulated gesture of dance
or pantomime as a hieroglyphic inscription is legendary), are not
dictated by any verbal discourse or imposed by any diction. The
Mime inaugurates; he breaks into a white page: “… a mute
soliloquy that the phantom, white as a yet unwritten page, holds in
both face and gesture at full length to his soul”. 51
Mallarmé’s retelling of the drama in a mime is a process of mimesis in which
there is no virginal and no ultimate point of reference. It is only an imitation of
imitation. Derrida deconstructs the binary opposition between literature and philosophy
i.e. between fiction and truth. Therefore, Derrida is concerned with the ‘between’ with
what is between literature and philosophy. For this he uses the word ‘hymen’ which is
always another or either which is always between. Actually the hymen is the membrane
at opening of vagina, usually broken at first sexual intercourse. But here Derrida uses
the word ‘hymen’ to unsettle any notion of synthesis which is beyond ‘either’ or thesis
or antithesis or which is between the binary opposition. Hymen is like pharmakon or
supplement. Derrida writes:
‘Hymen’ is first of all a sign of fusion, the consummation of a
marriage, the identification of two beings, the confusion between
two. Between the two, there is no longer difference but identity.
Within this fusion, there is no longer any distance between desire
(the awaiting of a full presence designed to fulfill it, to carry it out)
and the fulfillment of presence, between distance and nondistance; there is no longer any difference between desire and
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satisfaction. It is not only the difference between (desire and
fulfillment) that is abolished, but also the difference between
difference and nondifference. Nonpresence, the gaping void of
desire, and presence, the fullness of enjoyment, amount to the
same.52
This indecidable meaning of the word hymen shows the effect of undecidability
of the meaning through syntactic analysis. However Derrida goes on to say that this
indecidability is not due to various meaning of hymen. He says:
We have indeed been making believe that everything could be
traced to the word hymen. But the irreplaceable character of this
signifier, which everything seemed to grant it, was laid out like a
trap. This word, this syllepsis is not indispensable; philology and
etymology interest us only secondarily, and the loss of the
“hymen” would not be irreparable for Mimique. 53.
Hymen is like pharmakon or supplement and can produce its undecided effect
through syntax. The play of meaning in Mallarmé’s poetry is folding and spacing
whitening through these folds in the syntax. So, the word fold, hymen, blank, and
spacing indicate that the process of meaning are always folding over. Thus, Mallarmé’s
poetry always dissolves and folds over and disappears into a kind of spacing between
the two meanings. The meaning of the poem remains practically empty. In this context,
Derrida writes:
If there is no such thing as a total or proper meaning, it is because
the blank folds over. The fold is not an accident that happens to the
blank. From the moment the bank (is) white, or blaches (itself) out,
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as soon as there is something (there) to see (or not to see) having to
do with a mark (which is the same word as margin or march)
whether the white is marked (snow, swan, virginity, paper, etc.) or
unmarked, merely demarcated (the entre, the void, the blank, the
space etc.), it re-marks itself, marks itself twice. It folds itself
around this strange limit. The fold does not come upon it from
outside; it is the blank’s outside as well as its inside, the
complication according to which the supplementary mark of the
blank (the asemic spacing) applies itself to the set of white things
(the full semic entities), plus to itself, the fold of the veil, tissue, or
text upon itself. By reason of this application that nothing has
preceded, there will never be any Blank with a capital B or any
theology of the Text.54 p.265.
Mallarmé explains through his poem about the syntactical possibility of
undesirable nature of language because language is not a set of pre-existing meanings,
but it is a combination of words under a set of rules and regulation. The same word is
possible to use with contradictory meanings. So, Mallarmé’s poetry particularly refers
to the discussion of indeterminacy of language in general.
In the final essay, “Dissemination”, Derrida cites an example of dissemination
from Phillippe Soller’s novel Numbers. It is composed of not only of numerous
fragments such as quotations from other texts, Chinese ideograms, parenthetical asides
and dashes and diagrams. The term dissemination is already introduced in Plato’s
“Pharmacy” and “Double session”. He has already cited the essence of dissemination in
the previous essays.
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In the final essay, “Dissemination”, Derrida investigates into two types of texts 
Original text (Numbers and) Commentary text (Dissemination). The Original text is
derived from various texts or references. The Commentary text also derives from several
texts as the Original text does. There is no original and primary reference. Derrida
deconstructs the binary opposition between the Original text and Commentary. Derrida
observes that these references are based on the metaphysics of presence. Dissemination
occurs in between all texts. The original texts, Numbers includes the Commentary text.
Similarly, the Commentary text also has the Original text, Numbers. There is an
interaction of the texts: Original and Commentary as well as works from other
philosophers such as Plato, Mallarme, Mao, Marx, Pascal, Nicholas of Cusa, Bourbaki
and Wittgenstein. So, there is no such text which exists at the moment of speaking and
an infinite number of texts that never really arrive in the present. The reader is engaged
in the infinite play of meaning. In order to interpret a text we have to stop the play of
meanings. Moreover, when one tries to describe a text with proper explanation, the text
cannot give its present meaning. There is possibility to exist a text with multiple
meaning.
In the novel Numbers, the passages are numbered from 1.00 to 4.00. It increases
cyclically. The passages that begin with 4 indicate present tense. Therefore, Numbers
has a kind of squareness. It is four sided like a page or a stage of a theatre with one side
open to the audience for showing presentness. Derrida writes:
The moment of present meaning, of “content” is only a surface
effect, the distorted reflection of the writing on the fourth panel, into
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which you keep falling, fascinated by appearance, meaning,
consciousness-presence in general, attendance (upon no one in
danger). That “horizon”- value, that pure infinite opening for the
presentation of the present and the experience of meaning, suddenly
becomes framed. Suddenly it is a part. And just as suddenly apart.
Thrown back into play. And into quesetion.55
So, Derrida believes that present is made up of past and future. In this
point, he differentiates different tenses. When one attempts to give meaning of a
text, he forms an illusion that there is metaphysics of presence. Therefore, a text
can be presented or created and ‘each time, writing appears as disappearance
recoil erasure, retreat, and curling- up, consumption.’ 56
In order to give commentary of a text one has to stop the play of meanings.
Moreover when one tries to interpret a text the present meaning is always absent and
reinforces the illusion that a present meaning exists so a text can be presented. And it is
possible to appear a text with various meanings. Due to the absence of the present
meaning, it is always possible for a text to become new. Derrida writes:
It is always possible for a text to become new, since the blanks
open
up
its
structure
to
an
indefinitely
disseminated
transformation. The whiteness of the virgin paper, the blankness of
the transparent column, reveals more than the neutrality of some
medium; it uncovers the space of play or the plays of space in
which transformations are set off and sequences strung out. 57
140
In order to explain, the concept of the play of texuality, Derrida uses various
critical jargons such as dissemination, the column, the theatre, castration and mimesis.
We cannot define the exact meaning of these words. In fact, ‘the column is nothing, has
no meaning in itself. A hollow phallus, cut off from itself decapitated’. 58
The column i.e. the meaning of a text always functions as the image of the
present. The column also stands forth like a phallus and seems to have presence of
meaning. But the phallic effect of presence will have been always already castrated, cut
off. At one moment, the meaning is present but the next it will have been always
decaptitated. But the real presence will have absence. At one moment, one will always
cut off. Whenever one reads a text he will come across this phenomenon of absence and
presence. For Derrida western philosophical tradition, thought and language have
always been structured in terms of these oppositions. This opposition exists between the
absence and presence of the two things. When one is present then the other is absent.
This strategy takes place in the interpretation of a text. Therefore, a text disseminates
endlessly. Derrida says this in one of his interviews:
Dissemination affirms (I do not say produces or controls) endlessly
substitution, it neither arrests nor controls play. And in doing so,
runs all the risks, but without the metaphysical or romantic pathos
of negativity. Dissemination “is” this angle of the play of
castration which does not signify, which permits itself to be
constituted neither as a signified, nor a signifier, no more presents
than represents itself, no more shows than hides itself. Therefore in
and of itself it is neither truth (adequation or unveiling) nor veil. It
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is what I have been called the graphic of the hymen, which can no
longer be measured by the opposition veil/nonveil. 59
According to Derrida, meanings are ejaculated and lay in the folds of hymen.
So, dissemination is not the spreading of meanings but disperses endlessly.
Derrida further deconstructs J.L. Austin’s notions on language. Austin
contributes to the so-called linguistic philosophy for analysing the performative
utterances, its characteristics, its differentiation from other types of utterances
constative utterances or statements, infelicities of the performatives and the different
types of performatives. Austin’s work How to do things with words is basically
concerned with his theory of performative and constative utterance. Performative is
derived from the verb. That means in uttering a sentence or a word, an action is carried
out.
To say something is doing a work. When we say something we are doing
something, this is called a speech act.
For Austin, language serves various purposes and all of which are explicable as
factual or logical statement. Language can be used to perform different kinds of act
such as promises, declaration, ritual object or the name thing etc. Austin’s performative
utterances include promising, betting, naming words and the words used in a ceremony
etc. It is associated with the social, legal and political institution constituting language
itself. Such performative actions may be clearly noticed when they express along with
their utterance. It associates an intention and a commitment of a speaker. The speaker
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also acknowledges the entire obligation that they entail. Besides, performative
utterances Austin also talks about constative utterance. It is the utterance that the
speaker perceives in his mind but not carrying out the action. In short, it is descriptive
or expressive.
However, for Derrida there is no such distinction between the two since no one
ever adequately define the distinction between the internal and external lives of the
scapegoat, pharmakon, hymen etc. Derrida finds that Austin’s performative utterance
needs the presence of the speaker. Here, Derrida argues that in various circumstances
and contexts the speaker is no longer present.
Another thing that strikes Derrida is the conventional forms and utterance that
the performative utterances possessed before the speaker used the word. This repetition
and feature of presence is transferred from a particular context to another. This will
prove that the speech act cannot convey specific meaning. Austin’s speech act
philosophy again falls into Derrida’s notion of differance that meaning is delayed and
endlessly postponed. They are yearning for so called metaphysics of presence that
Derrida perceived in the texts of Saussure and other philosophers.
Thus, poststructuralism arose as a ‘rupter’, a breakaway from what the
structuralist thinkers saw as anything could be studied through its underlying structures.
One such critic is Roland Barthes whose idea is totally based on poststructuralism.
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Roland Barthes’s later work shift away from his structuralist notion. He talks
about the open-ness of text. He further views of the connection of text with other text
and the reader also plays an important role in the production of text’s meaning. His later
work is the first that rebel against the structuralist reading of texts. First, he develops the
idea of readerly and writerly text. In the readerly text, the reader has to do nothing with
the text. The text gives its meaning and controls its meaning by itself. The reader
remains merely as a passive recipient of the text’s meaning but in the writerly text, the
reader plays an active and a crucial role. The reader is independent to interpret the
meaning. However, what Barthes wants to say is that meaning is not fixed with the text
but with the reader who receives meaning through his own textual process. Roland
Barthes puts this idea in “The Death of the Author”:
The reader is the space on which all the quotation that make up
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost, a text’s unity
lies not in its origin but in its destination. 60
Barthes further argues that a work is a solid substance that has space and weight.
But text is a system of language. It is an order of linguistic process that is deciphered by
the reader. Further text undertakes structure of conciliation between the language of the
text and the reader. Barthes states this in “From Work to Text” that the text is
experienced only as an activity of production. Moreover, Barthes assumes the writer as
the controlling body of the text that restrains a work from becoming a text. A text will
remain a work when the author provides and owns the meaning of a novel, a poem or a
drama. Here, Barthes expresses very clearly:
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The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or women
who produced it, as if it were always in the end through the more
as less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single
person, the author confiding in us. 61
Lastly, Barthes recommends that this controversy on the reader and writer is
endless. It is due to text which cannot give meaning and has an endless series of
signifiers. The signifiers refer to other signifiers and more texts instead of providing any
definite and conclusive meaning. The reader seeks pleasure in the game of the text’s
endless process of signification. Barthes further says that much of the game is not
necessarily controlled by the writer. The author no longer becomes the authority of
controlling the meaning of a text. The controller of the meaning is dead. The meaning
of a text is found somewhere in the game of language with the reader’s way of
interpretation. The pleasure of the reader lies in the pluralistic meaning. Such game in
language is repeatable differently and is a never ending process. For Barthes, therefore
‘the term text is a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centers of culture…
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a
text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing.62 Thus, the author is dead and he has no more the role authority over a
text’s meaning.
In 1970, Derrida’s deconstructive practice is well supported by the members of
Yale School in America such as  Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom.
145
Paul de Man is one of the important members of Yale School of deconstruction in
America. He argues for ‘rhetorical reading’ on literature. For Paul de Man nothing is
real because there is no such word that provides final meaning rather there are other
references or signifiers. Language is figurative as it signifies other word or phrases, so
there is no unrhetorical language. The writers often use figures of speech to write
something and mean another thing. Therefore, every linguistic sign is doubtful and self
contradictory.
Figures of speech consistently involve in critical and literary texts. Therefore,
the reader often commits misreading. The texts are self contradicted because the texts
are always in between the literal meaning and surface meaning. Pramod K. Nayar
quotes what De Man writes:
The reading is not ‘our’ reading, since it uses only the linguistic
elements provided by the text itself; the distinction between the
author and the reader is one of the false distinctions that the
reading makes evident. The deconstruction is not something we
have added to the text but it constituted it in the first place. A
literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its
own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were
only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the
author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. 63
De Man thus suggests that any form of writing is made possible by the
conditions of the writing. He equates criticism to the general textuality of literature. All
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disciplines like economics, political theory, law and philosophy are written in the form
of language. Therefore, they work through metaphors like any literary text. For setting
up an argument we used language but language is figurative. It is through language that
a text reveals anything such as logic, fiction etc. Therefore, critical reading of any text is
contradicted within the game of language. Language for all text is rhetorical and
figurative. Hence, any type of reading is misreading.
In other words, the text is aware of itself as a rhetorical construct. He also deals
with the hierarchical oppositions of words within a text. He claims how a text’s literal
aspect repeats the figurative or rhetorical elements. In this way, De Man’s rhetorical
reading is a prototype of Derrida’s deconstruction who states that a text’s own rhetoric
undermines what the rhetoric tries to say. Therefore, all those related to epistemology
and texts are merely the game of language. This is known as aporia or the path leads
nowhere in deconstruction. In such circumstance nothing can be accepted or rejected. In
spite of all these issues, deconstruction extends one’s thought from passable to
impassable path.
Geoffrey Hartman is also one of the distinguished members of Yale School. He
examines the critical language which is highly figurative. Like Derrida, his style of
writing is eccentric. He prefers the use of incomplete reference. He advocates that his
writing is an intertextual (a web of complex, interwoven interrelationships which
contains codes, fragments and drawn from other works) and thus constructed by various
references. His deconstructive approach is completely textual. In Hartman’s essay,
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“Crossing over: Literary commentary as Literature” he advocates criticism itself locates
inside literature. According to Harman, critical reading discloses the pluralistic and
contradictory meaning in a text instead of giving a final meaning, criticism is also an
object of reading like literature since it is within literature. Therefore, the language of
criticism must be figurative, indirect references and slippery.
One important point that Hartman distinguishes from Derrida is his rejection of
the idea of unlimited free play. On the contrary, Derrida views that nothing is decidable.
For, Hartman interpretation is completely undecidable. But, interpretation is a self
conscious for Hartman. Self-reflective and self consciousnesses have been the most
important aspects in Hartman’s work.
Another notable person of Yale School is H.J. Miller who views that all signs are
rhetorical figures. He rejects the apparent stability of the sign. But he admits further
possibilities of interpretation. He follows Derrida’s deconstructive strategy that the
reader has to move from one rhetorical figure to another in an endless series of
rhetorical figures.
In “Fiction and Repetition”, Miller basically deals with repetition and difference
of words in texts. Language repeats in every context but repeats differently. What
Miller emphasizes is on how all presence of meaning depends on difference. This is an
inherent result of the differential feature of language itself. This concept of Miller is
akin to Derrida’s important strategies of deconstructive analysis. In order to develop
148
deconstructive reading, Miller uses figurative language in the analysis of narrative
techniques, characters with their family history etc. in the book, Ariadne’s Thread. The
lines in the book are ambiguous and mixing up with one another. The reader cannot
exactly find the beginning and ending of the book. Miller also uses the references from
Greek and Latin literature to show how signs are repeated and recurred again and again
in one context or other.
Derrida’s notion on differance is expressed by Miller in his essay, “Tennyson’s
Tears”. Miller views signs repeat differently in different contexts. Therefore, they never
come to a fixed stable point. It has no distinction rather always postponed and endlessly
postponed. Hence, Deconstruction is a retracing from one figurative language to other
figurative languages. No one can rely on the meaning of a word. There is a crisis in the
heart of any word. Miller succeeded Derrida in revealing how a text’s meaning
collapses upon close examination because language is an ever equivocal and forever
slippery.
The final member of the Yale School is Harold Bloom. He says that since Milton
English poets are conscious of coming too late in the field of literature after many great
poets. This is what Bloom calls ‘anxiety of influence’
64
that the poets agonized of the
late arrival in the world of literature. They are not willing to accept their precursors.
They experienced hatred of their ancestors. All forms of poetry must therefore be taken
as written against the preceding poets. He introduces a kind of misreading of the past
poets to produce a new kind of interpretation; Bloom Calls this term as ‘“misprision” a
149
misreading of the past masters to produce a new interpretation’.65Bloom thus develops a
revisionary reading of the past poets. According to Bloom, one has to undergo three
stages of revision such as – ‘Limitations, or take a new look to the poem, Substitutions,
or replacing one form with another, and Representation, or restoring a meaning’.66
Bloom’s project has thus attempted to improve deconstructive reading in literary texts.
Besides, the members of Yale, the poststructuralist features are also seen in the
writings of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Julia
Kristeva.
Michel Foucault is considered as the outstanding poststructuralist writer. He
developed ‘the archaeology of human sciences’ which he examined on various themes
such as the rise of the forms of knowledge, the distinguished mechanism of knowledge
and the ways in which knowledge was collected, recorded and then later spread widely.
He was particularly interested in analysing the knowledge of human being and power
that carry out something in human being.
Foucault’s analysis is really a poststructuralist because he seeks to understand
that every system put together through the process of centrality and marginalization. He
is interested in revealing the undecidablility of texts. Like Derrida he shows that the
meaning of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural and has got a number of
conflicting possible meanings.
150
Deconstruction has had tremendous impact not only in the Yale School but also
in psychology, feminism, law, religious thoughts and so on. So, Derridean
deconstruction illustrates the texts indecidability. It tries to explore the ramification of
textuality. Textuality deals with how a text means and not what it means. It includes
words, meaning and knowledge provided by the text. Thus, any mode of reading shows
the slippery nature of language. Therefore reading is an activity where the reader
himself indulges in the game of language. The reader will interpret meaning with the
help of devices like differance, supplement, trace etc. What the reader finds will be
unperceived by the writer.
With the advent of deconstruction, the traditional mode of reading with a series
of reference is subverted. Earlier literary studies promoted the reading of literature as
the expression of society, culture and imagination. For instance, in Chaucer’s works one
could find the hierarchical social order of the time. In Elizabethan literature, readers
could find the reflection of the courtly life of the contemporary people. But these frames
of reference are quickly disappearing with the arrival of deconstruction. However,
deconstruction fails to impose a complete reform of literary studies. It does not give a
valid solution to interpret a text; rather it gives unending distinction of language. So,
whenever any definition or theory is constructed it contradicts, itself and put into
bewildered situation. In spite of the controversies in reading a text, deconstruction raises
certain issues. In the first place, it is an attempt to discard anything outside the text and
anything privileged within the text that help in determining the meaning. Next, it is
always engaged in a free play of binary opposition. Deconstruction is an attack on the
151
text, considering text as incomplete and it is self contradictory due to its different
features of trace, difference and supplement. Lastly, deconstruction deals with this
complex strategy as criteria for interpretation of a text.
Derrida’s deconstruction has resulted in opening up further possibilities of
analysis. With the emergence of this theory, the critical theories that existed in the past
have become absolutely irrelevant. Any definition or theory is no longer relevant after
deconstructive reading. The original form is always a construct and it can always be
deconstructed. These complexities will be discussed clearly in the next, fifth chapter.
The fifth chapter discusses Irrelevance of Critical Theories in the light of Jacques
Derrida’s deconstruction.
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Notes
1
Christopher, Norris. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. Rev. ed.
(London:
Routledge,1991) 1.
2
Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana Press, 1987) 19.
3
Norris, Derrida, 18.
4
Jacques Derrida, preface. Of Grammatology, by. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
trans. Chakravorty Spivak( Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) lxxvii.
5
Derrida, Of Grammatology, xxi.
6
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction In a Nutshell. ed. John.D. Caputo. (New York.
Fordham University Press, 1997) 31.
7
Norris. Deconstruction, 4.
8
Derrida, Deconstruction, 32.
9
Jacques Derrida, Positions.
trans. Alan Bass (London: Chicago University
Press,1982), 41
10
Derrida, Positions, 43.
11
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the contemporary Rhetoric of
Reading. (The United States of America: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) 5.
12
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature ( London: Routledge, 1975) 14.
13
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 15.
14
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 15
153
15
16
Norris, Deconstruction, 17.
Jacques
Derrida,Writing
and
Difference.
trans.
Alan
Bass
(London:
Routledge,1978) 352.
17
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 369.
18
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 352
19
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 353.
20
Nichola Royle, Jacques Derrida New York: Routledge, 2006, 23.
21
Royle , Jacques Derrida, 25.
22
Royle , Jacques Derrida, 25−26.
23
Derrida, Of Grammatology, xiii.
24
Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. eds. Charles Bally and
Albert Schehaye. trans. Wade Baskin. (New York: Mc. Graw Hill Book
Company,1959) 99.
25
Derrida, Of Grammatology, xvi.
26
Derrida, Of Grammatology, xviii.
27
Derrida, Writing and Difference, xviii.
28
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 304.
29
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.
30
Derrida, Writing and Difference, xvii.
31
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. trans. Alan Bass( Chicago: The Harvester
Press, 1982)7.
154
32
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 11.
33
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 12.
34
Kathleen Wheeler and C.T. Chandra, Explaining
Deconstruction (India:
Continuum, 2008) 37.
35
Wheeler and Chandra, Explaining Deconstruction, 37.
36
Norris, Derrida, 97. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of signs, trans. David B.Allison (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1973) 48.
37
Norris, Derrida, 97.
38
Norris, Derrida, 99.
39
Norris, Derrida, 100.
40
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 142
41
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144−145.
42
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 212.
43
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post Structuralism and Postmodernism,
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989) 43.
44
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 353.
45
Asha Kanwar S. Literary Criticism: A Reader ( New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National
Open University, 2010) 366.
46
Barry stocker. Derrida on Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 2006)114.
47
Norris, Derrida, 134.
155
48
Derrida, O f Grammatology, 360
49
Derrida, O f Grammatology, 139.
50
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. trans. Barbara Johnson( London: Continuum,
1981) 75.
51
Derrida, Dissemination, 208.
52
Derrida, Dissemination, 219.
53
Derrida, Dissemination 229.
54
Derrida, Dissemination, 265.
55
Derrida, Dissemination, 384−385.
56
Derrida, Dissemination, 373.
57
Derrida, Dissemination, 378.
58
Derrida, Dissemination, 376
59
Derrida, Positions, 86−87.
60
David Lodge . Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader ed. 2nd (India: Pearson,
2003) 150.
61
Lod Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 147
62
Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 149
63
Pramod. K. Nayar. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From
Structuralism to Ecocriticism. (Pearson: India, 2011) 45.
64
Nayar. Contemporary Literary, 59.
156
65
Nayar. Contemporary Literary, 59.
66
Nayar. Contemporary Literary, 59−p60.