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As someone who has been reading Jacques Derrida for ten years, I am still struck dumb
when asked to sum up deconstruction, in two words, as the saying goes. Definitions are
arguably the most difficult exercises to undertake, as Raymond Williams proved
admirably in Keywords. In this short paper I want to offer some ways of thinking about
deconstruction, quoting extensively from Derrida where possible. While stressing that all
formulations that begin ‘Deconstruction is ...’ are in a sense missing the point, there are
nonetheless quite a few places where Derrida does say what deconstruction might be, or
what it does, or at least what it entails. 1
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transformation of the concepts of text ...[and] ... context, one understands nothing
about nothing of .... deconstruction ...5
Earlier, in another essay, Derrida reminds his readers that when he says that ‘there is
nothing outside the text’ he has in mind a new, expanded and revised notion of textuality:
all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text,
of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e. the supposed end and
beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures,
the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth. What has happened ... is a
sort of overrun that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to
extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a ‘text’ ... that is no longer
a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a
differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than
itself, to other differential traces.6
In fact, there is nothing outside the text, far from implying that there is only the text, can
be taken to mean that there is only con-text, which is why, as Derrida insists:
Derrida’s enlarged notion of text has been seen, curiously in an academic context, as a
reduction of politics. Derrida denies the equation of textualization with trivialization. He
maintains that:
It was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of the text to a whole extra-
textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all
boundaries ... but ... we sought rather to work out the theoretical and practical
system of these margins, these borders, once more, from the ground up.8
Derrida is out to circumvent both the ‘text as world’ and the ‘world as text’. The
book/reality dichotomy.
He is also out to subvert the opposition between close reading (all the formalisms) and
contextual reading (all the sociologies of literature). Derrida likens reading to dunking for
apples, head submerged, then up gasping for air. Into the text again, and up for air. In The
Truth in Painting Derrida writes:
Everything comes down to one of those reading exercises with magnifying glass
which calmly claim to lay down the law, in police fashion indeed. - [‘close
reading’] can always ... become police-like ... [But] It can also arm you against
that other (secret) police which, on the pretext of delivering you from the chains
of writing and reading ... hastily lock you up in a supposed outside of the text: the
pre-text of perception, of living speech, of bare hands, of living creation, of real
history, etc. Pretext indeed to bash on with the most hackneyed, crude, and tired
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of discourses. And it’s also with supposed nontext, naked pre-text, the immediate,
that they try to intimidate you, to subject you to the oldest, most dogmatic, most
sinisterly authoritarian of programs, to the most massive mediatizing machines.9
So, for deconstruction the distinction between text and context is bogus. A con-text,
because this text is not impervious to politics, culture, history and so on, and this context
is not something non-textual. Derrida again:
This last point relates to the deconstructive idea of iterability. Iterability, according to
Derrida, ‘both puts down roots in the unity of a context and immediately opens this non-
saturable context onto a recontextualization’.11
The margins, then, represent examples and exemplary instances of something apparently
much larger and more important:
... ‘marginal, fringe’ cases ... always constitute the most certain and most decisive
indices wherever essential conditions are to be grasped.14
3
Of course, there is a sense in which whenever we quote from any text, whenever we write
criticism, we are writing on the margins. Every example, or quotation, or excerpt is doing
the work of metonymy, the part standing for the (imagined) whole.
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repulsed, repressed, devalorized, minoritized, deligitimated, occulted by
hegemonic canons, in short, all that which certain forces have attempted to melt
down into the anonymous mass of an unrecognisable culture, to ‘(bio)degrade’ in
the common compost of a memory said to be living and organic.17
... what [deconstruction] calls into question is the presence of a fulfilled and
actualised intentionality, adequate to itself and its contents.18
Derrida appeals to Freud and the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious in order to
back up his claim that intention is necessarily limited. Note, not that it doesn’t exist. But
it is limited.
In fact, going back to the subject of children, we can think of Derrida’s approach to
authorship through recourse to an old metaphor. We are all familiar with the notion of
writing as birth and books as children. Often when we think about texts in this way its in
terms of authorship - ownership, even - and of intentionality, protection of copyright,
whatever. Derrida writes:
This is what happens when one writes a text ... It’s like a child - an old topos
which has its historical patent of nobility. But a child is not only that toward
which or for which a father or mother remains; it is an other who starts talking
and goes on talking by itself, without your help, who doesn’t even answer you
except in your fantasy ... This is also what one does when one has children -
talking beings who can always outtalk you.19
Thus for Derrida the idea that texts are children is not one that puts the parent as author in
a position of absolute authority. A text, like a child, is a talking being that can outtalk
you, that can ask questions that you would blush to think of. I’ve put a picture of Derrida
as a child on the back of the handout from which you can see that while he had his feet
firmly on the ground he’s also obviously intent on going places.
It would be tempting to do as some critics do and tie in the notion of limited authorship
with the ‘critique of the subject’, but Derrida has written on this topic in a way that would
warn us off. In ‘Biodegradables’ he writes:
5
Another respondent lays into what he believes to be ‘the deconstructive method’
(p. 799) and believing, since he has obviously never read me, that it consists in
taking no account of the ‘context’ (!!!) and of ‘authorial intention’, here he is
ready to give me a lesson in deconstruction ... Then, by substituting ‘post-
structuralist’ for ‘deconstructive’, he leaves me the choice only between ‘the
unified subject’ and ‘the post-structuralist critique of the unified subject’. Ah, if
only things could be that simple! Ah, if only one knew what a ‘subject’ was and
whether it could be only ‘unified’ or ‘nonunified’! After having recalled the ‘post-
structuralist critique of the unified subject’, just so many words that have no
meaning for me and that one would have a lot of trouble articulating with
anything I have ever written, the same author calmly adds this, which has no
meaning for me: ‘But Derrida apparently doesn’t believe that the critique of the
unified subject applies to [Paul] de Man’. (p. 801) Come on, would anyone ever
have talked or heard talk of deconstruction for more than ten minutes if it came
down to such derisory dogmas or such stupid monoliths as these (of the sort: ‘I
don’t believe there is any context! There is no authorial intention! There is no
subject! No unified subject! We have to stop paying attention to these things!’).
One shows considerable contempt for many colleagues or students if one believes
they are silly enough or credulous enough to interest themselves in such simple
and pitiful discourses. Unless it is quite simply reading that is the object of one’s
contempt and one’s fear.21
7) Number seven: Repetition: You become like the thing you criticize. Oppositional
writing always runs the risk of reappropriation. There are a myriad of references here,
everything on parasitism, for a start, and most of ‘Limited Inc’. In Specters of Marx
Derrida asks: ‘But how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and the
counter-magic that it still risks being?’22
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... the relation to the other (in itself outside myself, outside myself in myself) will
never be indistinguishable from a bereaved apprehension. The relevance of the
question of knowing whether it is from one’s own proper death or from the
other’s death that the relation to death or the certitude of death is instituted is thus
limited from the start ... It may even engage the political in its essence. In an
economic, elliptic, hence dogmatic way, I would say that there is no politics
without an organization of the time and space of mourning, without a topolitology
of the sepulchre, without an anamnesic and thematic relation to the spirit as ghost
[revenant], without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost ... whom one holds,
just as he holds us, hostage.23
Derrida’s interest in ghosts is linked also to technology, science and virtuality. He says:
‘There has never been a scholar who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts. A
traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts - nor in all that could be called the virtual
space of spectrality’.24
In other words what does one have to say or do in order to be a Marxist? Thirty years
later, in Specters of Marx, Derrida is asking the same question: ‘Who can say that they
are not a marxist?’ and ‘What does one have to do or say in order to be a marxist?’
Bearing in mind that the first person to deny being a marxist was Marx himself.27 Given
that Derrida himself has apparently disowned the word, or at least distanced himself from
it, one might ask: What does one have to do or say in order to be a deconstructivist?
Notes
1. For example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’, trans. David Wood and
Andrew Benjamin, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), Derrida and Différance
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1-5. For another attempt to
grapple with deconstruction in a pedagogical context see Michael Ryan, ‘Deconstruction
and radical teaching’, Yale French Studies 63 (1982), pp. 45-58.
2. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler,
Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press,
1989), p. 18.
3. Jacques Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms,
Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, trans. Anne Tomiche, in David
Carroll (ed.), The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 63.
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4. Jacques Derrida, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, in Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1976), p. 158.
5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: seven diary fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf,
Critical Inquiry 15, 4 (1989), p. 841.
6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Bloom et al
Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 81; pp. 83-84. See also
Jacques Derrida, ‘Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language’,
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. B.
Allison (Evanston ; Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 107-28.
7. Derrida, ‘Biodegradables’, p. 873. In a recent essay on The Tempest, Francis Barker
and Peter Hulme use the word ‘con-text’ in order to highlight this problem: ‘Con-texts
with a hyphen, to signify a break from the inequality of the usual text/context
relationship. Con-texts are themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply
make up a background’. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily
Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative
Shakespeares (London; Methuen, 1985), p. 236, n. 7.
8. Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, p. 84.
9. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1987), pp. 326-27.
10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, Glyph 2 (1977), p. 220.
11. ‘This strange institution called literature": an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in
Derek Attridge (ed.), Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), p.
63.
12. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp.
133-34.
13. Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, p. 209.
14. Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, p. 209.
15. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), p. 41.
16. Jacques Derrida, ‘But Beyond ... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)’,
trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), p. 369.
17. Derrida, ‘Biodegradables’, p. 821.
18. Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, pp. 202-203.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 157-8.
20. Derrida, ‘"That strange institution called literature"‘, p. 43.
21. Derrida, ‘Biodegradables’, pp. 826-27.
22. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 46-7.
23. Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying - awaiting (one another at) the limits of truth, trans.
Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 61-62.
24. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 11.
25. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 92.
26. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 120.
27. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 34.