Today, we are talking about Jacques Derrida, who is known
as the father of deconstruction.
And we're thinking a little bit about a particular word that Derrida
employees in order to destabilize the very meaning of words, the very meaning
of life, the very meaning of everything.
And that is different.
Yes.
Or do you feel homeless if you want to be fancy about it?
Difference in French is dairy does kind of funky spelling of the word
for difference, which is spelled the same way that it is in English.
So he puts an a at the
beginning of the third syllable, right.
Instead of an E.
The French word difference is spelled correctly.
So with an E, unlike an English actually has two meanings.
It means both difference in the way we mean it in English.
So this book is different from this other book, but it also means deferral.
So something is deferred in time.
So it has both a material sense and a temporal sentence.
we're Derrida, given meanings are always context relative, and they're also
always in a state of being positioned only in relation to other meanings.
So think about, for instance, the way that the word dog makes sense only because
the word dog is different from the word.
Cat is different from the word.
Wolf is different from the word horse.
The word dog is not a present entity unto itself with a bunch of content.
Actually, you know, that those three letters have no bearing
on actual dogs in the world.
Right?
We've got all sorts of different words for dogs and different languages.
The meaning of the word, dog has no essential connection
to the word dog itself.
It's arbitrary, but it gains its positive content through its difference.
From other words, now that idea that I've just articulated is one
that comes from structuralism.
Derrida has his own particular twist on this idea, which goes by the
name deconstruction and Darien has claimed is that it's not just that
the word dog gets its meaning by being different from the word cat and
being different from the word Wolf.
Even the meaning of the word dog is always sort of haunted by those
other words, such that its meaning is never even fixed as absent.
It's always kind of slipping around
there are traces of other words.
There are traces of what goes beyond words in the word dog, in any word in any thing.
Now, one thing to keep in mind here is that it's very important to
understand that Derrida is always trying to deconstruct binaries,
binary, oppositions for him only ever appear to be binary opposition.
One side of the binary actually always gets its meaning from
the other side and vice versa.
And you might think that this is pretty similar to a dialectical way
of thinking and you wouldn't be wrong and seeing some similarities there,
but for Derrida, a dialectical way of thinking is still focused on the
way that contradictions are resolved.
Right?
For Hagle, for instance, we've got a thesis and antithesis
that resolves into a subluxation
in Derrida's view, contradictions are always messy.
They're inherent to our modes of understanding.
They're not meant to be straightened out or sublimated, right?
And they're not in service of a higher truth.
There's no teleology behind them.
one of the binaries that Derrida takes issue with in this text, the
binary between speech and writing.
A lot of times we, um, tend to think about speech as primary, right?
Speech comes first and then writing comes second and then a historical sense.
Okay.
Yes.
Humans had oral cultures before we had written cultures, but for Derrida
speech gets its meaning in through its difference from writing and here you see a
classic move of Derridean deconstruction.
I just want to break down a couple move through here.
First move is to identify an opposition in this case, speech and writing.
The second move is to say that that seeming opposition.
Is not neutral.
One of them, the terms is privileged over the other.
So a binary opposition is always actually a hierarchical opposition.
The third move is to deconstruct that opposition by showing that it is far
less stable than it appears to be.
What else?
The ways that Derek tends to do this, and you might call this a fourth step,
but you might also say it's part of the third step either would be fine.
Is it.
That Derrida tends to temper rarely privilege the traditionally
underprivileged term of the binary.
So he says, Oh, you thought that writing was depended on speech.
Well, let me show you the ways that speech is actually dependent on writing,
but in doing that, he's not saying like writing's better than speech.
Writing's more primary than speech.
He is showing that the two terms of the opposition are so distinctly different
twined, that it no longer makes sense to think of them as an opposition at all.
So this temporary privileging of the traditionally underprivileged
term turns out to deconstruct the binary altogether and to lead us to
this proliferation of differences.
So going back to the term difference, Derrida wants to
show the play of differences.
This proliferating field of differences and not differences that we can just
count up, but differences that are traces of other differences that are not
only context-specific, but also in some relevant sense, absent and in doing so.
We're saying that difference is not a singular thing, right?
Differences aren't singular opposition does not just involve one difference
between one term and another
What's interesting for writing about Derrida is that it can
function in absence of its referent.
So for instance, we can still read Shakespeare's words hundreds of
years after Shakespeare wrote them.
And hundreds of years after Shakespeare died, right?
We don't actually need Shakespeare to be there in order to read him, which
is not true of Shakespeare's speech.
this peculiar characteristic of writing Derrida suggests is
also existence in speech itself.
Think about the way that speech requires punctuation.
Think about the way that speech requires a sense of punctuation.
You can tell the difference right now, even as I'm speaking in a consistent
stream of words between one word and another, you are in a sense
imagining the space between them.
You're also imagining the period between sentences.
Okay.
Writing reveals the absence that marks language by showing that language can
exist in absence of its referent, but this very same absence that
marks writing also Mark's speech.
It just marks it a bit differently
through say the imagined spaces or absences between words in
emphasizing that writing has a certain priority over speech.
It partakes in the same structured speech, but it reveals it in a more.
Illustrative fashion.
Darren is trying to undermine what he calls logo, centrism logo.
Centrism is the emphasis, the focus, the trust in
logos, which is a Greek word that we've encountered before in class.
That can mean speech.
That can mean word that can be law.
There can also be study of as an ology logo, centrism
privileges, the phoneme, the spoken
over the grapheme, the written.
And this privileging of speech over writing that we find in logo
centrism also pertains to the privileging of reason, also pertains
to the privilege of subjectivity.
Also pertains to the privilege of consciousness and presence over sense
over the unconscious, over what is outside of the grasp of reason.
and Darren, to not only articulate these ideas in this text, he also performs them
because the term difference in French, the term with an AE sounds exactly the same.
As difference with an E.
So I said that difference with an E and French just means difference and deferral.
It's a totally standard French word difference with an a
is dairy does own neologism.
He just made it up, but you can only distinguish in French
between difference with an a and difference with an E in writing.
They sound exactly the same.
Do you have a homes at homes?
No difference.
That is one of the ways that Derek had tries to show that actually in a
sense, writing has a leg up on speech.
Although keep in mind that that leg up is only temporary because he ultimately
wants to deconstruct that binary.
Now Dariana writes in a manner that is often very frustrating,
especially to first time readers.
Um, because they'll say things like difference is neither a concept
nor a word for heuristic purposes, to help you understand this.
I have put it in terms that seem pretty straightforwardly, conceptual and analyze
it as a word, but you always have to take these heuristics with a grain of
salt because Derrida is working on a much trickier field in a much more complicated
way, in a way where he's playing on our standard modes of knowing and trying
to encourage us to think differently.
One of the things he's encouraging us to think differently about in this
text, just as one of many examples is the binary between passive and active.
He says that philosophy has been unable to think the middle voice, which is
somewhere outside of passivity and activity, it's in the middle between them.
But it's also in a sense beyond that, um,
difference is at work in meaning, but not at work.
In the sense of being a kind of active force, say of spirit.
We have to try and think about it outside of an active force on the one
hand or a passive object on the other.
That is the challenge of this text and of understanding to construction
One thing that Derrida does not trust is what he calls, logo, centrism, the
authority of consciousness, the authority of language, the authority of reason.
the authority of subjectivity as well.
And the way that we tend to think about subjects as transparent to themselves as
expressing themselves through language consciousness, Derrida says on page
454, Is it determination and in effect and the same is true of presence.
So he wants us to distrust the authority, not only of reason, but
also the authority of consciousness and the authority of speech
and the authority of presence.