Prof: So anyway,
to get launched on today's
topic, obviously we confront one
of the more formidable figures
on our syllabus,
a person who recently passed
away and who in his last years
and into the present has had a
kind of second life as a person
who in his later work didn't at
all repudiate his earlier
thoughts or indeed his earlier
style,
but nevertheless did begin to
apply central aspects of his
thinking to ethical and
political issues.
 
He and a number of other
writers like,
for example,
the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben,
are the figures whom we
identify with what's called
"the ethical turn"
in thinking about texts,
literature and other matters
that is very much of the current
moment.
Hence Derrida's reputation and
the tendency of people
interested in theory to read him
is alive and well today,
but the materials that we are
reading for this sequence of
lectures date back much earlier.
 
The essay that you read in its
entirety for today,
"Structure,
Sign and Play in the Language
of the Human Sciences,"
was delivered on the occasion
of a conference about "the
sciences of man"
at Johns Hopkins University in
1966.
It was an event that was really
meant to be a kind of coronation
of Claude Levi-Strauss,
whose work had burst upon the
American scene only a few years
earlier.
Levi-Strauss was there.
 
He gave a talk,
he was in the audience,
and Derrida's essay was widely
taken--
far from being a coronation of
Levi-Strauss--
as a kind of dethroning of
Levi-Strauss.
I have to tell you that
Levi-Strauss,
who is still alive,
a very old man,
expresses great bitterness in
his old age about what he takes
to be the displacement of the
importance of his own work by
what happened subsequently.
 
What happened subsequently can,
I think, be traced to Derrida's
lecture.
 
One of the million
complications of thinking about
this lecture and about Derrida's
work in general--
and, for that matter,
about deconstruction--
is indeed to what extent it
really is a significant
departure from the work of
structuralism.
There is a self-consciousness
in the thinking about structure
that we find in many places in
Levi-Strauss that Derrida freely
acknowledges in his essay.
 
Again and again and again he
quotes Levi-Strauss in
confirmation of his own
arguments,
only then in a way to turn on
him by pointing out that there
is something even in what he's
saying there that he hasn't
quite thought through.
 
So it is not anything like,
even as one reads it in
retrospect, a wholesale
repudiation or even really a
very devastating critique of
Levi-Strauss.
Derrida, I think,
freely acknowledges in this
essay the degree to which he is
standing on Levi-Strauss's
shoulders.
 
In any case,
this extraordinary event in the
imaginations of people thinking
about theory in the West did,
however, tend to bring about a
sense of almost overnight
revolution from the
preoccupation we had in the
mid-sixties with structuralism
to the subsequent preoccupation
we had throughout the seventies
and into the early eighties with
deconstruction.
 
Derrida was,
of course, a central figure in
this.
 
He was here at Yale as a
visitor in the spring for many
years.
 
He influenced a great many
people whose work is still
current throughout the United
States and elsewhere.
He--after that--had a
comparable arrangement with the
University of California at
Irvine and his influence there
continued,
a key figure whom many of us
remember from his period at Yale
as a galvanizing presence.
The idea that there was what
was called by one critic a
"hermeneutical mafia"
at Yale arose largely from the
presence of Derrida together
with our own Paul de Man and,
more loosely connected with
them, Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom--
and also a scholar named J.
Hillis Miller,
whose departure for the
University of California,
Irvine resulted also in
Derrida's decision to go there
and be with Miller rather than
to continue to stay here.
 
That was the so-called Yale
school.
It generated extraordinary
influence in some circles but,
well beyond its influence,
an atmosphere of hostility
which had in many ways to do,
I think, with what might still
be called "the crisis in
the humanities"
as it is widely understood by
state legislators and boards of
trustees as somehow or another
something needing to be
overcome,
backed away from,
and forgotten
>
in the development of the
humanities in academia.
The reasons for this we can
only imply,
I think, probably,
in the context of a course of
this nature,
but are nevertheless
fascinating and will recur as we
think not just about
deconstruction itself but about
the sorts of thinking that it
has influenced.
 
Now you have now read some
Derrida.
You've read all of one essay
and you've read part of another,
"Différance,"
and you've found him very
difficult.
 
Indeed, in addition to finding
him very difficult you've
probably said,
"Why does he have to write
like that?"
 
In other words,
"Yeah, okay.
He's difficult,
but isn't he making it more
difficult than it needs to
be?"
you say to yourself.
 
"I've never seen prose
like this,"
you say.
 
"This is ridiculous.
 
Why doesn't he just say one
thing at a time?"
you might also want to say.
 
Well, of course it's all
deliberate on his part,
and the idea is that
deconstruction is,
as a thought process,
precisely a kind of evasive
dance whereby one doesn't settle
for distinct positions,
for any sort of idea that can
be understood as governed--
this is what "Structure,
Sign and Play"
is all about--
as governed by a blanket term,
what Derrida often calls a
"transcendental
signified."
 
We'll have much more to say
about this.
Derrida's prose style--its kind
of a crab-like,
sideways movement around an
argument--
is meant as rigorously as it
can to avoid seeming to derive
itself from some definite
concept,
because, of course,
deconstruction is precisely the
deconstruction of the grounds
whereby we suppose our thinking
can be derived from one or
another definite concept.
Also--this is to be kept in
mind, and this is of course one
of the key distinctions between
Derrida and de Man--
we'll have more to say about
distinctions between them on
Tuesday: Derrida is not a
literary theorist.
Though he sometimes does talk
about texts that we call
"literary,"
indeed he very often does,
nevertheless Derrida's position
and the logic of that position
suggest that we can't really
reliably discriminate among
genres.
 
In other words,
we can't use genre
either as a blanket term;
and therefore he is one of the
people--
one of the most influential
people in persuading us that
there's no such thing as
literature,
legal texts,
theological texts,
philosophical texts,
or scientific texts.
 
There is discourse,
and to think about the field of
texts is to think about
something which is full of
difference.
 
>
 
Needless to say,
it's the central word in
Derrida,
which is nevertheless not
classifiable or categorizable,
and so for that reason we can't
really say Derrida is
specifically a literary
theorist.
 
Now I've been talking so far
about difficulty and confusion,
but in view of the fact that
we're all in a state of tension
about this--
I'm in a state of tension about
it too--
let me remind us that we've
already been doing
deconstruction and that much of
what's problematic in reading
Derrida really has already been
explained.
 
Let's begin with a kind of
warm-up sheet which we can
anchor in these little drawings
I've made [gestures towards
chalkboard].
 
Obviously, you look at these
drawings and you say,
"Ah ha.
 
That's the vertical axis,"
right?
Of course, once we get to
feminism, feminism will have
certain ideas of its own about
the vertical axis.
We will be getting into that
when the time comes.
In the meantime the Eiffel
Tower [gestures towards
chalkboard]
is a wonderful way of showing
the degree to which the vertical
axis is virtual.
That is to say,
if you ever saw a dotted line
standing upright,
it's the Eiffel Tower.
There's nothing in it.
 
It's empty.
 
It's transparent.
 
Yet somehow or another,
if you're at the top of it--
if you're in the viewing
station at the top of the Eiffel
Tower--
suddenly all of Paris is
organized at your feet.
 
That is to say,
it's a wonderful axis of
combination that you're looking
at.
It is just there with its
landmarks,
not having the same kind of
status as that which you are
standing on,
but rather just in a kind of
row as the key signs,
as it were, of the skyline of
Paris: so you get the Notre
Dame,
the Arc de Triomphe and so on,
all sort of lined up in a row,
and there it is.
 
Guy de Maupassant in a famous
anecdote complained rather
bitterly about this,
according to Roland Barthes in
an essay called "The Eiffel
Tower":
Maupassant often ate at the
restaurant in the tower [up here
someplace]
[gestures towards the
chalkboard]
even though he didn't
particularly like the food.
 
"It's the only
place," he said,
"where I don't have to see
it."
In other words,
if--as Saussure says,
once again--we "put both
feet squarely on the
ground" of the Eiffel
Tower,
we're liberated from the idea
that somehow or another it's a
governing presence.
 
If we're actually there,
we no longer have to worry
about the way it organizes
everything around it into a kind
of rigorous unfolding pattern.
 
After all, there's a very real
sense in which we infer the
Eiffel Tower from its
surroundings.
It's built in the nineteenth
century.
It's by no means causative of
the skyline of Paris.
It's something that comes in
belatedly just as langue
comes in belatedly with
relation to speech.
The Eiffel Tower is a
virtuality that organizes
things, as one might say,
arbitrarily.
Sort of as a reflection on
these same ideas,
you get the famous poem of
Wallace Stevens.
I am sure you recognize this as
Stevens' "Anecdote of the
Jar," but I will quickly
quote to you the poem.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around,
no longer wild.
 
[As Derrida would say,
the center limits free play,
right?]
The jar was round upon the
ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
 
The jar was gray and bare.
 
It did not give of bird or
bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
 
In other words,
it is arbitrarily placed in the
middle of the free play of the
natural world,
a free play which is full of
reproductive exuberance,
full of a kind of joyous excess
which is part of what Derrida's
talking about when he talks
about what's "left
over": the surplusage of
the sign,
the supplementarity of
the sign.
There's an orgasmic element in
what Derrida has in mind,
so that when he speaks of
"the seminal adventure of
the trace,"
toward the end of your essay,
you want to put some pressure
on that word
"seminal."
 
Well, in any case the jar is
just arbitrarily in the middle
of that, organizing everything
without participating in the
nature of anything.
 
It is, in other words,
a center which is outside the
structure: "a center which
is not a center,"
and we'll come back to that in
a minute.
Now the Twin Towers--and I
first started using this example
decades before 2001--
the Twin Towers have a kind of
poignancy and pathos today that
they would not have had then;
but what they suggest is in a
way today--which overwhelms us
with grief--the ephemerality of
the vertical axis.
The Twin Towers had the same
function in New York that the
Eiffel Tower has in Paris.
 
It was a wonderful place from
which to see the city,
a wonderful place from which to
feel that everything was
organized at its feet.
 
There's a very fine essay about
the Twin Towers--again,
long before 2001--by Michel de
Certeau, which makes this
argument in sustained form.
 
I recommend it to you.
 
In any case,
it's another example that we
can take from our experience of
the uneasy sense we may have
that to infer a spatial moment
from which the irreducibly
temporal nature of experience is
derived--
to infer a moment from the
fact of this experience
as a necessary cause of
it--
is always problematic.
 
It always necessarily must,
as Derrida would say,
put this sense of a spatial
full presence of everything
there at once in systematic
order--
as Derrida would say,
must put that "under
erasure."
 
In other words,
in a certain sense you can't do
without it.
 
Derrida never really claims
that you can do without it.
If you want to get a sense of
structure,
you've got to have some sort of
inference of this nature,
but at the same time it had
better be in quotes
because it is always tenuous,
ephemeral, dubious even as to
its existence,
and necessarily needs to be
understood in that way.
 
All right.
 
Now other ways in which we've
already been involved in the
subject matter of what you've
been reading today:
take a look at page 921,
a couple of passages in which
Derrida is quoting Levi-Strauss
on the nature of myth.
Once having quoted you these
two passages from Levi-Strauss,
here's where I'll return just
for a moment to Levi-Strauss's
analysis of the Oedipus myth and
show you how it is that Derrida
is both benefiting from what
Levi-Strauss has said and
ultimately able to criticize
Levi-Strauss's position.
Bottom of the left-hand column,
page 921:
"In opposition to
epistemic discourse [that is to
say,
the kind of discourse which has
some principle or transcendental
signified or blanket term as its
basis--
in other words,
something which in a given
moment makes it possible for all
knowledge to flow from it],
structural discourse on
myths--mythological
discourse--
must itself be
mythomorphic.
It must have the form of that
of which it speaks."
[And Derrida then says]
This is what
Lévi-Strauss [himself]
says in [the following passage
taken from one of Levi-Strauss'
most famous books]
The Raw and the Cooked.
I just want to quote the end of
it, the middle of the right-hand
column, still on page 921.
Levi-Strauss says:
"In wanting to imitate the
spontaneous movement of mythical
thought,
my enterprise,
itself too brief and too long,
has yet to yield to its demands
and respect its rhythm.
Thus is this book on myths
itself and in its own way a
myth."
 
In other words,
here is a moment when
Levi-Strauss is admitting
something about his own work
which he is not admitting in his
analysis of the Oedipus myth in
the essay from Structural
Anthropology that you read
last time.
 
What Levi-Strauss is saying
here is that his approach to
myth is itself only a version of
the myth.
That is to say,
it participates in the mythic
way of thinking about things.
 
It uses what in the
Structural Anthropology
essay he calls
"mythemes"
or "gross constituent
units" of thought.
It deploys and manipulates
those gross constituent units of
thought in the ways that we saw,
but notice what Levi-Strauss is
saying in that essay as
opposed to the passage
Derrida has just quoted.
 
He says in effect,
"This form of the myth is
scientific.
 
One of the versions that I have
made use of to arrive at this
scientific conclusion is,
for example,
Freud's version of the Oedipus
myth.
In other words,
Freud, Sophocles,
all of the other versions I
have at my disposal,
have equal merit as versions,
but none of them is a
transcendental signified,
none of them is a blanket term,
and none of them is the causal
explanation or meaning of the
myth.
 
The meaning of the myth is
discoverable only in my
science."
 
Now, of course,
Freud himself thought he was a
scientist, and his reading of
the myth was also supposed to be
scientific.
 
What was Freud's reading of the
myth about?
Two or one!
 
>
 
It was, in other words,
about the problem of incest,
the problem of the
over-determination of blood
relations and the
under-determination of blood
relations.
 
It was a thorough examination
of that problematic leading to
the conclusion that that's what
the myth was about.
In other words,
Levi-Strauss's conclusions are
already anticipated in Freud.
 
Furthermore,
what is Levi-Strauss doing?
He's denying the influence of
Freud, right?
It's my myth,
not his myth--right?--which of
course is precisely what happens
in the primal horde.
It is a perfect instance of the
Oedipus complex.
Levi-Strauss is repudiating the
father and,
in repudiating the father,
showing himself to fall into
the very mythic pattern that
Freud had been the first to
analyze.
 
Okay?
 
So when you say that what
you're doing is scientific in a
context of this sort,
you are making yourself
vulnerable.
 
The moments in this essay in
which Derrida is criticizing
Levi-Strauss are those moments
in which Levi-Strauss has
unguardedly said something on
the order of "My work is
scientific";
but there are lots of
occasions, and he always quotes
Levi-Strauss to this
effect,
when Levi-Strauss is not saying
that--
when Levi-Strauss is conceding
that his work,
that is to say his viewpoint,
disappears unstably into the
thing viewed.
All right.
 
Now also take a look
at--because we've been doing
this too--
take a look at page 917,
the left-hand column,
where Derrida is talking not
about Levi-Strauss but about
Saussure.
Here he's talking about the
nature of the sign,
and he is concerned,
very much concerned,
about this relationship between
the concept and the sound
image--
which is to say,
the signified and the
signifier--
that is the basis of the
science of Saussure:
that is to say,
the relationship that's
involved in the pairing of
signified and signifier is the
basis,
the cornerstone,
of the science of Saussure.
 
So here's what,
a little more than halfway
down, the left-hand column,
page 917, Derrida has to say
about that.
 
He says:
â€¦ [T]he signification
"sign"
has always been comprehended
and determined,
in its sense,
as sign-of, signifier referring
to a signified,
signifier different from its
signified.
If one erases the radical
difference between signifier and
signified,
it is the word signifier itself
which ought to be abandoned as a
metaphysical concept [which is
to say,
a transcendental signified:
in other words,
the idea that the concept in
some sense generates the
signifier--
right?--which is the basis of
Saussure's thinking about this].
Here's where I come back to
that example that I already gave
you with a question mark next to
it when I was talking about
Saussure.
 
Suppose I think of the
relationship between
"signified"
and "signifier"
as the relationship between two
terms--
because after all,
one way of signifying the
concept "tree"
[gestures towards the board]
is to write the word
"tree"
and put quotation marks about
it.
So if I take away the quotation
marks, all I have is the word
with no indication that it's a
concept.
Notice that this is now a
relationship which Jakobson
would call
"metalingual."
What it suggests is that
"tree"
is another word for
"arbor."
In other words,
it's a relationship not between
a signified and a signifier but
between a signifier and a
signifier,
so that the binarism of the
relationship is broken down,
and we begin to understand the
combinatory structure of speech
or writing as one signifier
leading to another--
I think-- signifier:
Derrida says in effect,
"Let's banish the word
'signifier,'"
but he might as well say,
"Let's banish the word
'signified.'"
I think a signifier,
and it triggers by
association--as Saussure would
say--
it triggers by association a
subsequent successive signifier,
which triggers another,
which triggers another.
That's what gives us,
in the language of
deconstruction,
what we call "the
chain," the signifying
chain: not an organizational
pattern but an ever
self-replicating and
self-extending pattern,
irreducibly linear and
forward-progressing through a
sequence of temporal
associations.
 
One of the things that happens
when you demystify the
relationship between a concept
and a signifier or a sound image
is that you also demystify the
relationship between a
set of associations,
which exist somehow in space,
and the way in which
association actually takes
place,
which is necessarily in time:
in other words,
if one signifier leads to
another--if like history,
where there's one damn thing
after another,
speech is one damn signifier
after another--
then that is actually the
nature of the associations that
Saussure has been talking about
in the first place.
 
But it doesn't exist in a
systemic space;
it exists in an unfolding time,
right?
These are some of the
implications of no longer being
satisfied with the way in which
a sign can be understood as a
concept to which we attach
belatedly a signification,
a signifier.
 
What we have is a situation in
which we find ourselves caught
up in a stream of signification,
all of which is,
in a certain sense,
there before we came along and
are moved,
as down a stream,
by the way in which one
signifier succeeds another in
ways that later on,
as we take up concepts like
"supplementarity"
and différance,
we can think of a little bit
more precisely.
Okay.
 
So now finally then,
there's one other way in which
Derrida's essay from the very
outset confirms what we've been
saying about the crisis of
structuralism being the need to
deny ordinary understandings of
genesis or cause.
In structuralism,
if something emerges,
it emerges from between
two things.
That is to say,
it's not this and it's
not this,
or it "emerges"
as that which is not this,
not this.
It doesn't, in other words,
derive from an antecedent
single cause as an effect.
 
It emerges, on the other hand,
as difference within a field.
Now that's what Derrida is
talking about with extraordinary
intensity of complication in the
first paragraph of your essay,
page 915, left column,
first paragraph:
his first words uttered at the
famous conference in- at Johns
Hopkins in 1966.
 
He says:
Perhaps something has occurred
in the history of the concept of
structure that could be called
an "event"
[évênement,
something which emerges,
something which is there now
and wasn't there before]â€¦
That's the most problematic
issue for structuralism.
 
When structuralism thinks about
how yesterday things were
different from the way they are
today,
it has to say:
yesterday there was a certain
synchronic cross-section of
data,
and today there's a slightly
different synchronic
cross-section of data.
 
But structuralism is unable and
furthermore--
much more
importantly--unwilling to
say anything about how
yesterday's data turned into
today's data--
in other words,
to say anything about
change.
It sees successive
cross-sections,
and it calls that
"history."
I am anticipating here,
and we'll come back to this in
other contexts:
but it doesn't say "one
thing led to another";
it says "one thing after
another"--in my facetious
reference to history as I have
already given it to you.
 
Now this is what Derrida is
deliberately struggling with in
this first paragraph:
â€¦ an "event"
[quote,
unquote], if this loaded word
did not entail a meaning which
it is precisely the function of
structural--
or structuralist--thought to
reduce or to suspect.
 
But let me use the term
"event"
[quote, unquote]
anyway, employing it with
caution and as if in quotation
marks.
In this sense,
this event will have the
exterior form of a
rupture [that is to say,
an emergence among things,
right--a rupture:
the volcano parts and there you
have lava,
right--an event]
and a redoubling [a
redoubling in the sense that
"something has
happened"].
 
As Bob Dylan would say in
effect, "Something has
happened, but it's not something
new.
It is, in fact,
a replication of what was
unbeknownst to you because,
Mr.
Jones, you don't know very much
of what was,
unbeknownst to you,
there always--as Derrida says--
already: something that emerges
but at the same time presses on
us its status as having already
been there,
always already been there."
 
All right.
 
So in all these sorts of ways,
understanding structuralism as
a problematic critique of
genesis--
because it's still very hard to
grasp,
to accept the notion of things
not having been caused--
why can't we say things
were caused,
just for example?--the notion
of the sign as an arbitrary
relationship between a
substratum of thought which is
then somehow or another hooked
onto a derivative series or a
system of signifiers;
the notion of getting outside
of myth and being scientific,
and the notion that we can
ascribe reality to the vertical
axis--
all of these are ways of
questioning the integrity,
the security within its skin,
of structuralism we have
actually already undertaken.
 
I only want to suggest to you
with this long preamble that
much of the work that lies
before us is actually in the
past and we have already
accomplished it.
Now "Structure,
Sign and Play"
is a critique of
"structurality."
It's not just a critique of
structuralism.
It's a critique of the idea of
anything that has a center,
one which is at the same time
an enabling causal principle.
In other words,
I look at a structure and I say
it has a center.
 
What do I mean by a center?
 
I mean a blanket term,
a guiding concept,
a transcendental signified,
something that explains the
nature of the structure and
something also,
as Derrida says,
which allows for limited free
play within the structure;
but at the same time the
structure has this kind of
boundary nature.
It may be amoeboid but it still
has boundaries--right?--and so
at the same time limits the free
play within the structure.
That's like the New Critics
saying that a text has
structure.
 
It has something that actually
in the phenomenological
tradition is called an
"intentional
structure."
 
Kant calls it
"purposiveness"--
that is to say,
the way in which the thing is
organized according to some sort
of guiding pattern.
But to speak of an intentional
structure as a center is not at
all the same thing as to speak
of an intending person,
author, being,
or idea that brought it into
existence,
because that's extraneous.
That's something prior.
 
That's genesis.
 
That's a cause, right?
 
The intending author,
in other words,
is outside, whereas we can
argue that the intentional
structure is inside.
 
But that's a problem.
 
How do you get from an
intending author to an
intentional structure and back?
 
A center is both a center and
not a center,
as Derrida maddeningly tells
us.
It is both that which organizes
a structure and that which isn't
really qualified to organize
anything, because it's not
in the structure;
it's outside the structure,
something that imposes itself
from without like a cookie
cutter on the structure,
right?
This then is an introductory
moment in Derrida's thinking
about centers.
 
On page 916 in the lower
left-hand column,
he talks about the history of
metaphysics as a history of
successive appeals to a center:
that is to say,
to some idea from which
everything derives,
some genesis or other that can
be understood as responsible for
everything that there is.
 
The list is very cunningly put
together.
This is bottom of the left-hand
column.
It's not necessarily
chronological,
but at the same time it gives
you a sense of successive
metaphysical philosophers
thinking about first causes,
origins, and about whatever it
is that determines everything
else.
 
I'll just take up the list
toward the end:
"transcendentality,
consciousness,
or conscience,
God, man, and so forth."
Notice that though the list
isn't strictly chronological,
man nevertheless does succeed
God.
In other words,
he's thinking about the
development of Western culture.
 
In the Middle Ages and to some
extent in the Early Modern
period, we live in a theocentric
world.
Insofar as he understands
himself as man at all,
man understands himself as a
product of divine creativity,
as something derived from God,
as one entity among all other
entities who participate and
benefit from the divine
presence.
 
But then of course,
the rise of the Enlightenment
is also the rise of
anthropocentrism,
and by the time the
Enlightenment is in full cry you
get everybody from Blake to Marx
to Nietzsche saying not that God
invented man,
but that man invented God.
Man has become the
transcendental signified.
Everything derives now in this
historical moment from human
consciousness,
and all concepts of whatever
kind can be understood in that
light.
But then of course he says,
having said "man,"
>
 
he says "and so
forth."
In other words,
something comes after man.
Man is, in other words,
an historical moment.
There are lots of people who
have pointed out to us that
before a certain period,
there was no such thing as man,
and in a variety of quite real
senses,
after a certain moment in the
history of culture,
there is also no such thing as
man.
The argument Derrida is making
about the emergence of his
"event"
is that a new transcendental
signified has actually
substituted itself for man.
In other words,
the world is no longer
anthropocentric;
it's linguistic.
Obviously, the event that
Derrida is talking about--the
emergence, the rupture,
an event which makes a
difference--is the emergence of
language.
What I really want to talk
about here is something that is
on page 916, the right-hand
column:
The moment [of emergence--the
event,
in other words,
about halfway down]
was that in which language
invaded the universal
problematic [in other words,
that moment in which language
displaced the previous
transcendental signified,
which was man];
that in which,
in the absence of a center or
origin,
everything became
discourse--provided we can agree
on this word--
that is to say,
when everything became a system
where the central signified,
the original or transcendental
signified,
is never absolutely present
outside a system of differences.
He's making a claim for
language while erasing
it.
 
In other words,
he's painfully aware that
language is just the new God,
the new Man.
Many critiques of
deconstruction take the form of
saying that deconstruction
simply instrumentalizes
language,
gives it agency,
and gives it consciousness as
though it were God or man and
then pretends that it isn't.
 
This is a common response to
deconstruction.
Derrida is aware of it in
advance.
He says in effect, "Look,
I know we're running this risk
in saying everything is
language,"
or,
if you will here,
everything is discourse.
 
At the same time,
we are saying something
different,
because hitherto we had this
problem: in other words,
we had the problem of something
being part of a
structure--
that is to say God is immanent
in all things,
human consciousness pervades
everything that it encounters--
in other words,
something which is part of a
structure but which is at the
same time outside of it.
God creates the world and then
sort of, as Milton says himself,
"uncircumscrib'd
withdraws,"
right?
 
God is not there.
 
God is the Dieu
caché:
God is the hidden God who is
absent from the world and is,
in effect, also the structure
of the world.
The same thing can be said of
man.
Man brings the sense of what
the world is into being and then
stands aside and somehow sort of
takes it in through an aesthetic
register or in some other remote
way.
Language doesn't do that.
 
Language is perpetually
immersed in itself.
Derrida is claiming that
language is different in the
sense that it makes no sense to
talk about it as standing
outside of what's going on.
 
This is an essential part of
the critique of structuralism.
Language is not other
than speech;
it is perpetually manifest in
speech, right?
It's simply a distinction that
can't be maintained,
which is why he calls it an
"event."
In other words,
something of significance has
happened, Mr.
 
Jones, and that is language,
right?
All right.
 
So I suppose in the time
remaining and,
alas, there isn't a lot of it,
we'd better ask what
"language"
is.
We've talked about it.
 
We've had a great deal to do
with it, but of course we still
haven't the slightest idea what
it is.
Soon we'll know.
 
First of all,
we'd better say,
as is already clear from what
we've been quoting,
language is not quite
Saussurian.
That is to say,
it is not a system of signs
understood as stable
relationships between a concept
world and a world of signifying.
 
It is not a world in which
language can be understood as
somehow or another a means of
expressing thought.
Deconstruction calls into
question the distinction between
language and thought in calling
into question the distinction
between signifier and signified,
so it's not quite
Saussuria--even though,
as Derrida says,
it can't do without a
Saussurian vocabulary.
Another problem is--and also
related to the critique of
Saussure--
is that this idea that what's
inward,
what is essential,
is something that can be
voiced and should be
voiced;
so that if I think a sign is a
way of talking about the
expression of a thought,
notice that I call--if I am
Saussure--
that expression a "sound
image."
In other words,
language, according to Derrida,
in the Saussurian tradition
seems to privilege sound over
script, over what is graphic.
 
He claims that this is a hidden
bias in the whole history of
metaphysics.
 
Why, in other words,
should we think of language as
speech, as voice?
 
Why do we think of voice--in
the sense of the divine
logos,
the word: "in the
beginning was the word"--
why do we think of voice as a
kind of fully present
simultaneity that is absolutely
present precisely in
consciousness or wherever it is
that we understand language to
derive from?
What's so special about voice?
 
Why do they say all of these
terrible things about writing?
Writing is no different from
voice.
Voice, too, is articulated
combinatorially in time.
Voice, too, can be understood
as inscribed on the ear.
This is a metaphor that Derrida
frequently uses,
as a kind of writing on the
ear.
The distinction,
which Derrida takes to be
metaphysical,
that Saussure wants to make
between something primary,
something immediate and
underivative--
voice--and something merely
repetitious,
merely reproductive,
merely a handmaiden to voice--
namely writing--needs to be
called into question.
 
Now this is the point at which
we need to say something about a
number of key terms that Derrida
uses to sustain this sort of
criticism of traditional ideas
of language.
The first has to do with the
notion of supplementarity.
A supplement,
he points out,
is something that either
completes something that isn't
complete or adds to something
that already is complete.
For example, I take vitamin C.
 
I also drink a lot of orange
juice,
so I've got plenty of vitamin
C, and if I take a vitamin C
pill I am supplementing
something that's already
complete;
but if I don't drink any orange
juice,
then of course if I take a
vitamin C pill I am
supplementing something that's
not complete,
but either way we always call
it a supplement.
 
It's very difficult even to
keep in mind the conceptual
difference between these two
sorts of supplement.
Now a sign traditionally
understood is self-sufficient,
self-contained.
 
Saussure has made it a
scientific object by saying that
it's both arbitrary and
differential,
but a sign understood under the
critique of deconstruction is
something that is perpetually
proliferating signification,
something that doesn't stand
still,
and something that can't be
understood as self-sufficient or
independent in its nature as
being both arbitrary and
differential.
 
It is a bleeding or spilling
into successive signs in such a
way that it perpetually leaves
what Derrida calls
"traces."
 
That is to say,
as we examine the unfolding of
a speech act,
we see the way in which
successive signs are
contaminated.
That's not meant to be a bad
word but suggests being
influenced,
one might say,
in the sense of "open the
window and influenza,"
by those signs that precede it.
 
Supplementarity is a way of
understanding the simultaneously
linear and ever proliferating,
ever self-complicating nature
of verbal expression.
 
Now différance is
a way, among other things,
of talking about the difference
between voice and writing.
There is a difference between
voice and writing even though
they have so much in common.
 
Voice and writing,
by the way, are not a stable
binary.
 
There are no stable binaries in
Derrida.
The difference between voice
and writing is that writing can
give us all kinds of indication
of difference that voice can't
give us.
 
Part of the interest of
misspelling
différance,
as Derrida insists on doing,
is that we can't,
in terms of voice as sound,
tell the difference between
différance and
différence.
 
Actually, one can,
slightly, but it's not a
difference worth lingering over.
 
Différance,
in other words,
with its substitution of the
a--
and remember the riff in the
essay
"Différance"
on a as a pyramid,
as alpha, as origin,
and as killing the king because
the king,
remember, is the transcendental
signified: God,
man and so forth.
The riff on the a in
différance as all
of those things is something
that we can only pick up if we
understand language as writing,
because in speech these modes
of difference don't register.
 
Différence (with
an e) is simply the Saussurian
linguistic system,
a system of differences
understood as spatial:
that is to say,
understood as available to us
as a kind of smorgasbord as we
stand in front of it.
 
Différance
introduces the idea of
deferral and reminds us that
difference--
that is to say,
our understanding of
difference,
our means of negotiating
difference--
is not something that's
actually done in space;
it's done in time.
When I perceive a difference,
I perceive it temporally.
I do not understand the
relation among signs as a
simultaneity.
 
I want to, if I want to pin it
down scientifically,
but in the actual--as Joyce
would say--
stream of consciousness,
I understand difference
temporally.
 
I defer difference.
 
I unfold.
 
I successively negotiate
difference, and in doing that I
need the concept of
différance.
All right.
 
There a couple of things that I
want to say about the key moves
of Derrida.
 
I will mention those next time.
 
I will also look over my notes
and see what I might say further
about these troublesome terms
and their relation to Derrida's
understanding of language so
that Tuesday our introduction
will still have to do with
Derrida and then we'll move into
thinking about de Man.
 
