Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004)
Introduction
Derrida is most renowned for his ‘deconstructionist’ war against the whole Western tradition of rationalist thought. This work is also part of a wider cultural phenomenon called poststructuralism, a French-led cultural movement calling into question many of the foundations and assumptions of the Modern era such as the structuralist paradigm.
Contribution
Deconstruction
Today, the word deconstruction is associated closely with Derrida. Having first appeared in the translation of his article “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, this term argues that a text is ‘no longer a finished corpus of writing’. Derrida stressed that there was no absolute or stable centre or certainty about language structures and forms. Through deconstruction, we are able to examine texts and analyse the conflicting forces within it responsible for the production of its meaning. Derrida's deconstruction revolved around the systematic aspect of structuralism - “all phenomena were reducible to the workings of systems”1. These systems, according to Derrida, were unstable. He believed words always contained traces of other words because they appeared similar semantically and he demonstrated this through a concept called différance.
Différance
Différance is a neologism derived from différence, whose English glosses include difference, dissimilarity and deferral. When someone says ‘différance’, it would not be clear which meaning was intended as différence and différance are pronounced the same. However, when written down, meaning is more easily understood by the reader. This is the basis of Derrida's concept - the instability of language and its capacity to create new and unexpected meanings. Derrida claimed that meaning is never immediate; it is always deferred. It is created by difference, not by the identity of the sign (word) with that which the sign represents.
“Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be “present”, appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.”
Speech and Phenomena (Derrida, 1967)
Logocentrism
Logocentrism is a system of thought which aims to find origins and centres to locate a text's core meaning and the author's intention. The word derives itself from the Greek logos - “the word by which the inward thought is expressed”. Derrida believed that by tracing back any idea/concept to one single person, it guaranteed a unified meaning and a pre-existent reality.
Meaning
Through Derrida's deconstruction, he revealed how texts are composed in order to hide certain meanings and how meaning is not limited by the intentions of the author. Similarly to Foucault, they shared the idea that each text has layers of meaning which develop as the text is read and when reread in later historical settings and different cultural contexts, a different meaning is created.
| Argument | Derrida's Response |
|---|---|
| You reject reason | No - only its dogmatic representation of itself as timeless certainty. |
| You say nothing is real because everything is only a cultural, linguistic or historical construct | Nothing is any less real for being cultural, linguistic or historical, especially if there is no universal or timeless reality to which it can be compared. |
| You say there are an infinite number of meanings | No - only that there is never just one. |
| You say everything is of equal value | No. Only that the question must remain open. |
Extracted from Introducing Postmodernism (Appignanesi, 2006)
Published Works
• Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. 1966.
• Writing and Difference. 1978.
• Of Grammatology. 1976.
1 Stuart Sim, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 2006