Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

 


There is nothing outside of the text (Derrida, 1997, p.158)

Jacques Derrida, 1967, in Of Grammatology (English translation).

It is with some trepidation that one might approach the philosophical writings of Jacques Derrida.  To write about them, and convey his meaning, is daunting - and by his account, impossible.  Derrida’s name is inextricably linked to the development of deconstruction in post-structuralist philosophy.  Whilst deconstruction may be considered a mode of analysis, Derrida explained deconstruction was not a set of tools or methodology to be ‘applied’ to a particular system.  Rather, deconstruction already exists, and is at work, within the system to be deconstructed.  He sought to identify the inherent relationship between that what is explicitly said and that which is implicit - thereby exposing the frailty of the meanings we have inherited from the pre-existing structure of language.  Like all systems, the written word is always in motion.  The image is never static, the meaning always less certain, and the ‘Other’ is ever present:

 


(1)   When this is, that is.

(2)   From the arising of this comes the arising of that.

(3)   When this isn’t, that isn’t.

(4)   From the stopping of this comes the stopping of that (Bikkhu, 1996, p.10-11).

From the Pali Buddhist text Ańguttara Nikâya (A.X.92).

 


Biography

All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history, only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841, in his essay History.

He was born. He thought. He died. And all the rest is pure anecdote.

With qualification, Derrida agrees with Heidegger's summary of Aristotle’s life in the self-titled documentary, Derrida.

Following Emerson’s caution, let us indulge a little, and stagger into a realm of ‘impossible distinction between fiction and autobiography’ (Derrida, 1987 cited in Kamuf, 1991, p.207).  Jacques Derrida was renowned for being an extremely private person, and refused to have his photograph published, let alone taken, for much of his life.  Following his death of pancreatic cancer in October 2004, a prolific number of obituaries and biographical accounts of his life and work have sprung up on the Internet (you can find links to some of them here). 

There are some important ‘factual’ events, which influenced Derrida’s life and philosophical writings.  He was born in Algeria, and moved to Paris in 1949 to pursue his interest in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (where he ended up teaching for many years).  As a child, Derrida experienced anti-Semitism and was thrown out of school with his brother and sister because of Vichy law.  As a result, Derrida described having a ‘double experience’ – he was rejected by the French Christian community, yet did not have a strong sense of solidarity with his Jewish heritage.

Derrida’s early philosophical influences, to name but a few were – Heidegger, Nietzche, Freud, Husserl and Wittgenstein.   

Derrida is survived by his wife Marguerite, a psychoanalyst, who he married in 1957.  He had two sons - one from a previous relationship with Sylviane Agacinski. 


Deconstruction

‘Clear as mud’ might be the first term that comes to your mind after reading that definition, so let’s unpack this term and discover more about its origin. 

Derrida did not claim the word ‘deconstruction’ as his alone.  Derrida explains in his Letter to a Japanese Friend that ‘I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau’ (Derrida, 1983 cited in Kamuf, 1991, p.270-271).  A central feature of Derrida’s philosophy was inherited from Heidegger’s literary device ‘sous rature’ or ‘under erasure’.  Sarup (1993) explains that when Heidegger would write the word ‘Being’, he would delete it and have the deletion and the word stand together; it would appear something like this:

The word ‘Being’ refers to something beyond what it is attempting to signify.  As a result, the word was acknowledged as being necessary, yet also inadequate to signify its transcendental meaning.  Derrida’s deconstruction begins with the assertion that language is inherently unstable; it utilises Heidegger’s assertion that the written word can only signify meaning, and not ‘mean’ something in itself: hence, we have Derrida’s famous assertion that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’.    

As a result, words that are meant to signify, as well as that which is supposed to be signified, are continually breaking up and reforming in different combinations.  The signifiers and the signified continually undergo violent and endless re-inscription.  Words might infer, but the word never directly signifies that which it intends. 


This assertion can be likened to Richard Rorty’s philosophy in opposition to absolutism, where ‘it is contexts all the way down’ (Rorty, 1991, p.100).  To illustrate, you might have seen the scene from Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1948).  In the climatic final sequence, Elsa and Banister shoot it out in a hall of mirrors.  Essentially, Derrida invites us to look at language as a hall of mirrors.   

 

 

 


The relationships between words are forever transforming; new meanings are ascribed as the words move into different or new contexts.  This is a challenging take on language; for signifiers are endlessly becoming the signified, and vice versa.  There is no absolute or final signifier. 

In a similar vein, Zimmer (1993) speaks of re-reading sacred texts:

They are the everlasting oracles of life. They have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age, each age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding, its own set of problems and its own inevitable questions… The replies already given, therefore, cannot be made to serve us. The powers have to be consulted again directly—again, again, and again. Our primary task is to learn, not so much what they are said to have said, as how to approach them, evoke fresh speech from them, and understand that speech (p.17).

From The King and the Corpse.

Derrida came to international attention in 1966, where he delivered what was perhaps ‘the most famous conference paper of all time’ (Spurgin, 1997, Online).  Derrida’s assertions are a direct challenge to many common features of contemporary Western thinking.  They were primarily based on a word he coined: logocentrism.  In Of Grammatology, Derrida (1997) suggested logocentrism should replace the word ‘metaphysical’.  Why? 

Derrida’s questioning of structuralism was outlined in his meticulous rereading of the West’s most influential ‘voices’.  His critique would deny the natural causation of things that are not natural.  As a simple example, some people would argue that lamb and mint just seem to naturally go together, as opposed to some other weird food preferences.  Some combinations seem more congruous than others, even if it is because their relationship could be considered less ridiculous than others.  However, relationships like ‘lamb and mint’ are neither natural, nor are they indiscriminate.  It was Derrida’s point, therefore, to relate such an insight to the common conventions and institutions of a naturalised human world. 

Derrida argued that philosophers, starting with Plato (and even Heidegger), have existed in an ‘epoch of logos’, which has been characterised by an obsession with the word and voice – hence Derrida’s coined words logocentrism and phonocentrism.  This preference, he argued, relied on presence.  To word it differently, being is equated with truth, and is at the centre of logic (Derrida, 1998).  Where there is presence, Derrida argued, surely an absence would also exist.  If one is preferred, the Other is marginalised – but is still at work within the system, as an act of… deconstruction.

As a consequence, there is a dyadic unity between presence and absence, signifier and signified, truth and fiction.  Even if this unity has been marginalised, it exists even as a trace.  A presence cannot exist alone, for there is most certainly an absence, is there not?  To the credit of feminism, Derrida also took on philosophy’s ‘phallocentric’ obsession with presence vis-á-vis the male genitalia. 

In Positions, Derrida (1981) refers to differance (not: difference) – as the relationship not only between dyads, but the space between them.  ‘Differance refers to ‘the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other’ (Derrida, 1981, p.27 cited in Lucy, 2004, p.26).  The continual movement between them, therefore, contradicts any fixed truth.  Here is an example close to my heart as I write this – after this paper is graded, a metaphysical analysis of presence might determine there to be a pass/fail binary (difference), but not the space between them (differance).  That is the difference between differance and difference.

So, how are you going?  Have you deconstructed the statement ‘clear as mud’?  If you want to explore deconstruction in a more visual way, head over here, and I invite you to come back for some discussion around the application of Derrida to therapy.

Application to therapy

From a discursive approach, deconstruction offers applications for both client and therapist.  Deconstruction moves us out of a dominant discourse, and into a realm of differance.  From this place, new therapeutic possibilities arise. 

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has been at the mercy of logocentric philosophy, which has been defined by the period of Enlightenment.  Like many other areas of human endeavour, Derrida argued that psychoanalysis has become oversimplified by relying too greatly on its own scientific framework (Derrida, 1998).  As such, the scientific ‘expertise’ found in therapeutic circles is exclusive of the Other.  It could be said then, that such certainty leads to preference of some ideals over others, and a kind of ideological myopia results.  The use of deconstruction in therapy suggests a therapist would be open the possibility of the Other, which has been devalued and marginalised by the dominant discourse.  This has resulted in a movement towards a discursive and narrative approach to therapy (Larner, 2000). 

The implication of this for a therapist would be to move out of an ‘expert’ position and take a more critical and phenomenological approach to therapy practices.  A therapist who utilises a deconstructive approach would be ‘interested and curious about how his or her work is influenced by the possible prejudices, dogmatism, biases, and therapeutic certainty which shuts down avenues of exploration and inquiry with clients’ (Monk, Sinclair & Smith, 2004, p.174).  A therapist would therefore approach their work with what might be called an ‘ignorant wisdom’ – a practice which is also not a practice.  Similarly, Larner (2000) calls this ‘knowing not to know’ (p.61).  Such practice requires continual re-evaluation, in order to avoid the determination of truth (which leads to orthodoxy).  In this sense, deconstruction a not a system imposed on therapeutic practice; it is the offspring that comes forth from it:

 


Hinga atu he tētē kura, ara mai he tētē kura

One fern frond falls as another unfurls

(Grace & Grace, 2003, p.38). 

From this position, clients might also benefit.  Deconstruction in practice ‘is language-based, client-directed and focused on relational process’ (Larner, 2004, p.17).  As a result, therapy is dialogically based and collaborative, and the client is viewed as an expert of his or her own reality. 

But psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example, - can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living.  It is the question of ghosts (Stevens, 1994). 

Jacques Derrida, Quoted in New York Times, January 23, 1994.

Deconstruction may help by searching for other dimensions in an otherwise one-dimensional world of metaphor, language and ‘truth’.  Despite a dominant discourse, there is always the presence of the Other.  As a result, ‘the 'real' could be shown to be 'fictional'’ (Leary, 1994, 438 cited in Shawver, 1996, p.378).  The Other is an alternative and marginalised account of people’s problems, from which greater appreciation and solutions may come.  Shawver (1996) explains, ‘there is always a hidden, depth interpretation we have not yet seen’ (p.383).  If you pop over to this website, you can explore in an interactive way, how deconstruction might work with people’s dominant narratives in discursive therapy.

Derrida was a prolific writer, whose texts were creative, and at times, purposefully ambiguous.  You can find a bibliography on the Internet, which is located here.  Post-structuralism seeks to find a way beyond ‘knowing’, in order discover the hidden marvels of a ‘talk that sings’ (Bird, 2004, p.IX).  Derrida could be considered one of the world’s great philosophers and contributors to critical postmodernism.  He probably would have disagreed. 

Derrida’s humility can be seen in the documentary ‘Derrida’.  The camera followed Derrida into his library, which is filled wall-to-wall with books.  The filmmaker asked of Derrida ‘Have you read all the books in here?’.  Derrida replied ‘No.  Only four of them’:

‘But I read those very, very carefully’ (Dick & Kofman, 2002).

References

Bhikkhu, T. (1996).  The Wings to Awakening.  Massachusetts: Dhamma Dana Publications.

Bird, J. (2004).  Talk that sings: Therapy in a new linguistic key.  Auckland: Edge Press.

Derrida, J. (1991).  Positions.  London : Athlone

Derrida, J. (1997).  Of Grammatology.  Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Derrida, J. (1998).  Resistances of Psychoanalysis.  California: Stanford University Press.

Dick, K. & Kofman, A. (Directors). (2002).  Derrida [Film].  United States.

Emerson, R. (1841).  History.  Oxford: Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Retrieved June 1, 2005, from Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/1srwe10.txt

Grace, P. & Grace, W. (2003).  Earth, sea, sky: Images and Māori proverbs from the natural world of Aotearoa New Zealand.  Wellington: Huia Publishers.

Kamuf, P. (1991).  A Derrida Reader.  Between the Blinds.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Larner, G. (2000).  Towards a common ground in psychoanalysis and family therapy: on knowing not to know.  Journal of Family Therapy, 22, 62-82.

Larner, G. (2004).  Family therapy and the politics of evidence.  Journal of Family Therapy, 26, 17-39.

Monk, G. & Sinclair, S. & Smith, C. (2004).  What’s love got to do with it? In. T. Strong and D. Paré (Eds.), Furthering Talk: Advances in discursive therapies (pp. 163-179).  New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Rorty, R. (1991).  Objectivity, Relativism, Truth.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sarup, M. (1993).  An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (2nd ed.).  New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Shawver, L. (1996).  What Postmodernism Can Do for Psychoanalysis: A Guide to the Postmodern Vision.  The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 56(4), pp.371-394.

Spurgin, T. (1997).  Handout on Plato’s “Phadedrus” and “Plato’s Pharmacy” (By Jacques Derrida).    Retrieved on May 20, 2005 from: http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60A/handouts/jddates

Stevens, M. (1994, 23 January).  Jacques Derrida.  New York Times.  Retrieved May 1, 2005 from:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Jacques%20Derrida%20-%20NYT%20-%20page.htm

Welles, O. (1948).  The Lady from Shanghai [Flim].  United States.

Zimmer, H. (1993).  The King and the Corpse.  New Jersey: Princeton University Press.