Thread by @micpeterso

I have been seeing more snark than usual for Derrida on here recently so here is a thread for non-Derrida people to try to explain what he is up to and what there might be that is helpful in the work he did. I hope this isn’t too long.

Is his writing difficult? I suppose so, in the sense that it uses a technical vocabulary specific to his work and the tradition he is working from. These are, most basically: phenomenology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Western philosophical history

Combined, this leaves us in a position where the objects of his inquiry are varied and risk being construed as overly general. He writes about ethics, politics, language, time, space, forgiveness, the death penalty, sovereignty, Marxism, etc.

But there is a through-line that links his approaches to all of these subjects and you probably already know what the word here is: deconstruction. We will look at that in a second but first I want to balance that thought with a qualification

Namely, Derrida is always writing about specific things. He isn’t writing about ‘language’ he is writing about Plato’s Phaedrus or Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. He isn’t writing about ‘time,’ but about a specific footnote in Heidegger.

Which is to say that whatever deconstruction turns out to mean, Derrida never ‘does deconstruction.’ Rather, as he says, he reads texts carefully and they deconstruct themselves. So what does that mean?

Deconstruction is simple. It is a term used to refer to those cases when conditions for a phenomenon’s emergence are also conditions that render it impossible. D’s work demonstrates that this structure holds across a variety of phenomena.

So, e g, philosophical attempts to abolish the death penalty repeat the logic of sovereignty that establish the death penalty’s necessity. Hence Derrida’s claim that even in being abolished, the death penalty will survive.

Or, to use a famous example, the logic that would privilege speech over writing due to its ostensible immediacy depends on the mediation that typifies writing, thus asserting the anachronistic primacy of writing over speech.

This latter is important because it establishes D’s so-called critique of the metaphysics of presence AND establishes the problem of writing as a general problem. In Signature Event Context he applies this argument to ‘experience in general’

By ‘impossible,’ then, we really just mean that a given concept, experience, phenomenon, whatever, never coincides with itself fully. It is never present to itself insofar as it depends on a binary that itself cannot be sustained rigorously.

(In this sense, Derrida is also heir to French existentialism, particularly de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity – an under-explored inheritance, in my estimation)

And so Derrida’s work allows us to be rigorous in our critique of texts that seek to establish rigid boundaries and binaries through a thinking of exclusion OR assimilation. And to do so by way of that particular text’s own operation.

Derrida is really just asking us to be attentive readers in all we do. And he has noticed that when we do so, texts (experiences) tend to become less stable and our inheritances from these allow for greater possibilities to come and which remain.