51

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

paul rekret

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a philosopher known for the concept of

‘deconstruction’, often conceived as a method of reading texts. Along with
Michel Foucault (1926–84), Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) and others, he is
often associated with what came to be known as ‘post-structuralism’ or
‘French Theory’. This was a nebulous and reductive label given to post-
1968 philosophy often taken to entail deep scepticism towards ideals of
reason, progress and truth; a focus upon the textual or scriptural; and
a rejection of Marxist theories of class and of history. It is more accurate,
however, to describe Derrida’s work as a critique of metaphysics and to view
deconstruction less as a method and more as something to be happening to
the philosophical text itself. It was Derrida’s career-long elaboration of these
claims that made him amongst the most well-known French philosophers of
the twentieth century.
Derrida’s path to intellectual prominence was relatively circuitous. Born in
El-Biar, Algeria in 1930, as a Jew he was expelled from school in accordance
with local Vichy government policy. He later failed his first attempt at the
Baccalauréat in 1947 and only passed the entrance exam to the prestigious
École normale supérieure in Paris upon his third attempt. Once there, he was
taught by Louis Althusser (1918–90), Jean Hyppolite (1907–68) and Michel
Foucault, and studied alongside the likes of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) and
Michel Serres (1930–). His reputation in France was made upon the publica-
tion of three major books in 1967: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena,
and Writing and Difference, each offering a novel critical response to the two
dominant intellectual trends of the French post-war intellectual scene: phe-
nomenology and structuralism.
While these three texts and two further books in 1972 (Dissemination;
Margins of Philosophy) made his intellectual reputation in France, Derrida
only began to become a truly global figure from the late 1970s through
growing academic fame in the United States., as part of a so-called ‘Yale

467

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 paul rekret

School’ of deconstruction. Both in content and in form Derrida’s work always

skirted across conventions of philosophy and literature so it is not surprising
that he achieved international fame through his reception by American
literary theorists. While Derrida had been a visiting professor in the United
States since 1966, first at Johns Hopkins and later at Yale, UC Irvine, the New
School and elsewhere, his reception beyond narrow erudite circles occurred
with the publication of an English translation of his book Of Grammatology in
1976. For better or for worse, Derrida was thus received into the English-
speaking world and beyond mainly as a theorist of literature rather than as
a philosopher; his fame was such that ‘deconstruction’, shorn of its original
meaning, entered the everyday lexicon.

The Metaphysics of Presence

Derrida’s work is notoriously difficult and dense. This is partly due to the
performative style of his writing. In seeking to reveal the instabilities of
meaning Derrida frequently plays on double-meanings and textual ambigu-
ities; he has a tendency to pun and proliferate portmanteau words as well as
a penchant for rhetorical questions. All of this can make his work’s twists and
turns hard to follow. Despite its density, if reduced to some central concerns,
the thrust of Derrida’s philosophical project becomes much clearer. One such
concern is what Derrida calls, following Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the
‘metaphysics of presence’. This is a reference to the notion, inherent to the
Western philosophical tradition, that a meaning, concept or idea can be made
present or immediate to thought. Such a notion, Derrida’s argument goes,
merely disavows an excess or instability that will always undermine
thought’s mastery of its object.
All of this is still rather opaque, but we can begin by understanding it in
terms of a particular framing of time and space. On Derrida’s argument, the
metaphysical assumption that an object can be present to thought is
grounded upon a linear conception of time that allows a view of successive
‘nows’ to be conceived as simultaneous in space. Only in conceiving time as
a line can we imagine it as a present moment that recedes to the past or
arrives from the future. That is, the metaphysics of presence is premised upon
a linear notion of time that conceives time as a succession of ‘nows’ that are
also simultaneous in space. Yet Derrida’s point is that if the ‘now’ is to be fully
identifiable, identical to itself, or fully present it would not emerge from the
future or recede at all, it would only be fully here. It turns out that there is an
irreducible aporia between time conceived as a line (succession) and as

468

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

a point (simultaneity). As Derrida puts it, ‘[t]he impossibility of coexistence

can be posited only on the basis of a certain coexistence, of a certain
simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’. This insight lies at the core of
Derrida’s project: presence can be posited only by the disavowal of the
impossibility upon which it is erected whereby time (succession) and space
(simultaneity) are its mutually exclusive conditions. In other words, presence
is the effect of difference, deferral or dissemination that eludes thought. This
aporia is what Derrida calls ‘deconstruction’. We might view his work as
revealing it at work in a range of contexts.
For instance, in an early essay titled ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Derrida situates
a reading of the Greek philosopher at the intersection of a distinction Plato
makes in the Phaedrus between speech and writing as good and bad vessels of
truth, respectively. In condemning writing for being a poor copy of living
speech, one that corrupts the mind’s powers and lacks the faculty of response,
Socrates insinuates a moral economy of truth grounded upon the spoken
word’s proximity to the Idea. For Derrida this is reflective of a more funda-
mental philosophical tendency to banish what is external from the essence of
meaning to posit a pure presence. Among the critical moves in ‘Plato’s
Pharmacy’, Derrida alludes to Socrates’ own description of knowledge and
memory as a direct and internal writing upon the soul. This is not merely
a coincidental choice of words, the claim goes, for Plato appeals to textual
metaphors whereby philosophy is organized around the conception of an
original idea and its copies, and so requires truth to be repeated. At issue here
is not just the superficial question of Socrates’ choice of allegories for knowl-
edge. Rather, the point is that any attempt to posit logos as purely ideal or
fully present to thought fails, for such a conception of knowledge requires
some externality – in this case writing – for its very constitution.
The attempt to banish writing, amongst the founding gestures of Western
philosophy, is for Derrida reflective of a broader ‘logocentric’ rejection of
difference or exteriority inherent to the metaphysics of presence. He establishes
as much in Speech and Phenomena, a book-length study of the German philoso-
pher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Derrida’s analysis indicates that a conception
of the voice grounds the ideal of presence. The voice is often the basis for
positing a direct relation to meaning, an unmediated or pre-expressive relation
between thought and its object since it allows us to imagine thought speaking
directly to itself and therefore uncontaminated by any exteriority. But to return
to Derrida’s claim, even pre-expressive meaning is irreducible from its passing
through time and its distribution across space, even when one speaks silently to
oneself. For that reason, meaning is necessarily contaminated by what exceeds it.

469

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 paul rekret

We see once again that the ideal of presence is preceded by a more

originary difference: one which Derrida often writes as ‘differance’; the ‘a’
(inaudible in French) signifies the irreducibility of exteriority or materiality of
writing to the ideal. For if meaning entails the persistence of ‘meaning-
content’ across time and space, the point for Derrida is that no given meaning
can possibly be identical to its past or future iterations. The sign is as much
a deferral of meaning as a passageway towards it. Yet it is worth noting that
this process of deferral or differance cannot be made present to thought either
since it merely stands in for the very withdrawal of presence itself. As Derrida
says ‘differance is not’.
A further example should serve to clarify the argument and further expose
what is at stake. In the course of a critical account of the French anthropol-
ogist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), developed in
On Grammatology, Derrida points to two episodes that betray the manifesta-
tion of a logocentric metaphysics of presence at work. In the first instance, the
anthropologist confesses a guilt for having introduced the use of written
script to the, until then, purely oral culture of the Nambikwara people of
Brazil. In the second, he convinces some Nambikwara children to break the
tribe’s edict against revealing members’ names. Yet Derrida points out that
Lévi-Strauss’ own account reveals that forms of writing or script appear
among the Nambikwara’s symbols and property. Accordingly, for Lévi-
Strauss to imagine the tribe as purely oral is merely a reflection of his own
desire for an ‘authentic community’ that is ‘fully self-present in its living
speech’ and only corrupted from outside by the written word. Moreover,
Derrida argues that the anthropologist’s guilt over his desecration of tribal
members’ names overlooks that the act of naming itself amounts to a more
‘originary violence’ since to name implies to systematize, to reduce, to
classify and so involves a deeper epistemic violence. For Lévi-Strauss to
view himself as a corrupting influence demands first that he imagine the
Nambikwara as a totally pure and undivided society in the first place. This
merely betrays a deeper metaphysical desire for a mythical, pure knowledge
uncorrupted by the written word.

The Ethics of Deconstruction

This notion of an inescapable or originary epistemic ‘violence’ rests at the
core of what can be conceived as an ‘ethics’ of deconstruction. Derrida’s
point is that any attempt to recover pure meaning uncorrupted by the
written word or non-violent origins amounts to merely collapsing originary

470

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

violence into particular empirical acts. Derrida’s is an idiosyncratic ethical

philosophy, one that rejects the possibility of a normative foundation to
morality or a set of rules to guide ethical practice. Indeed, the very desire
for such a law, one might say, would amount to the cessation of the ethical on
Derrida’s terms, since it would evacuate the need to decide what one ought
to do. One might understand this deconstructive view of ethics in terms of
three closely related concerns: alterity or otherness, decision and justice.
Derrida develops his understanding of alterity or otherness throughout
a decades-long critical dialogue with his friend and interlocutor, Emmanuel
Levinas (1906–95). Levinas’ philosophy, as developed in Totality and Infinity,
can be described as an attempt to displace the identity or unity of the subject
in calling for the priority of an infinite responsibility to the ‘other’. However,
on Derrida’s view, the appeal to a relation to the other that would commit no
epistemic violence amounts to the desire for a pure logos capable of incor-
porating that which is absolutely other to reason. As such, it amounts to
a repetition of the metaphysical desire to make the other present to thought.
Derrida’s claim implies that thought is bound to negotiate rather than
transcend its own finitude and it further indicates that the reduction of the
other is inevitable. ‘There is no phrase’, Derrida says, ‘which does not pass
through the violence of the concept.’ To claim otherwise, to seek to over-
come originary violence by invoking the absolutely other, merely amounts to
a disavowal of violence.
The ethics of deconstruction therefore entails the demand to negotiate an
‘economy of violence’ whereby unjustifiable exclusions, reductions or sacri-
fices are unavoidable. Throughout a broad range of Derrida’s work this is
thematized in terms of the ‘undecidable’, a reference to the absence of any
ultimate justification for any act. The cardinal example of this logic is
presented in The Gift of Death in a discussion of Abraham’s response to
God’s command to sacrifice his son. Forced to choose between duty to
God and to moral law, Abraham’s decision, Derrida says, is ‘undecidable’.
Abraham’s impossible obligation, he implies, reflects the structure of any
ethical choice, for every decision will involve the sacrifice of the other; as
finite beings our responses to duty will always be insufficient. Even feeding
one’s cat, he later suggested, entails a sacrifice of all other cats.
Derrida has articulated this ethics of responsibility to the other in a range of
contexts. For instance, in the essay ‘The Force of Law’1 this is outlined in
terms of an account of the relationship between ideals of justice and

1
See G. Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion, London: Routledge, 2002.

471

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 paul rekret

determinate laws. For while justice is described as ‘infinite’, ‘incalculable’ and

not reducible to rule, laws are finite, conditional and coded prescriptions.
Justice cannot sit wholly exterior to particular instances of the law since, as
Derrida puts it, ‘infinite justice commands calculation’. Yet insofar as justice
cannot be made wholly present in or identical to any particular or finite legal
decision, it therefore always remains as an unconditional horizon.
Such a structural oscillation between conditional and unconditional, or
same and other, further spans Derrida’s interventions into ethical problems
and concepts. For instance, an ideal of hospitality implies mastery over
oneself and one’s guests in order to be a good host. On the other hand, to
be absolutely hospitable without condition would be to forfeit one’s posses-
sions and so one’s position as host altogether. Similarly, for an act of
forgiveness to be bona fide, it must forgive the unforgiveable otherwise it
would amount to a merely mechanical gesture. Conversely, if forgiveness is
unconditional, then an apology ought not be necessary in the first place.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Derrida began frequently to refer to the
aporias that his deconstructions avow in terms of a logic of ‘the messianic
without messianism’. This is a way of figuring an ethical logic whereby the
other is never made present yet is always promised. Moreover, to formulate
what is other or unconditional in terms of a messianism without content
returns us to the logics of time and space at the heart of deconstruction. That
this is so is perhaps clearest in a brief account of the concept of ‘invention’.
Invention, Derrida says, ‘begins by being susceptible to repetition, exploita-
tion, reinscription’. Because the novelty of any invention is discernible only in
contrast to convention, the singularity of any invention must, at least partly,
be lost to the general order upon which its recognition depends. Yet con-
versely, any system or order must be susceptible to the suspension of its rules
or laws. In short, an invention cannot be made ‘present’, since at the instant
one identifies it, it will have been reduced. What is other is thus ceaselessly
deferred to an open future that never arrives as such.
It is notable that such a view of ethics proffers no principles for action. But
in affirming the impossibility of the presence of justice, forgiveness, hospital-
ity and so on, it implies that these are never complete or sufficient. As such, it
amounts to an ethical theory of relentless self-criticism and reflexivity.

Derrida and Politics

Where deconstruction is brought to bear on politics Derrida’s predomi-
nant move is the critique of the philosophical demand, exemplified by

472

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Plato’s Republic, for the polis to reflect the order of ideas. Where Plato
gives knowledge the right to govern, Derrida discerns a broader ‘sover-
eignty drive’ that, throughout Western political thought, has sought to
justify power and authority by disavowing the logic of aporia which is its
condition. If sovereign power is defined by the power to author law,
sovereignty is impossible. For the moment a sovereign power enacts
even a single law, they become susceptible to criticism in its name.
Indeed, any extension of sovereignty across time and space amounts to
its subjection to the conditions of its unravelling. Power is above neither
criticism nor dissidence.
Derrida brought this structural impasse of legitimacy to bear on a range of
political phenomena. For instance, writing in the mid-1990s of the then
dominant conceptions of the final victory of liberalism at the end of the
Cold War, he would claim that theorists such as Francis Fukuyama (1952–)
could posit the principles of liberal democracy as universal only by disavow-
ing the empirical violence, famine, oppression and poverty that has been
produced in liberalism’s name. A parallel argument around the instability
between de jure and de facto elements of liberal capitalism forms the basis for
his interrogation of the theme of globalization. While globalization repre-
sents, Derrida argues, growing inter-connectivity of borders, markets and
cultures, it also inflicts growing inequalities within a new global order.
Processes associated with globalization cannot be immune from contestation
as they pervade time and space.
Derrida’s critical interventions have not only come in the form of a critique
of liberalism and conservatism. Throughout his career he had always main-
tained an ambiguous relation to the Left, especially in France. This was
despite emerging from an intensely politicized milieu in late 1960s Paris and
frequent prodding from interviewers and interlocutors. Indeed, Derrida
rarely adopted clear positions on key historical moments in the early period
of his career. His relative silence on Marxism in particular was only broken
with a belated book-length study titled Spectres of Marx, published in 1993.
While insisting that he writes in a certain ‘Marxist spirit’, Derrida is none-
theless deeply critical in that book of what he views as the essentialisms of
Marx’s conceptions of class, labour and value, and the teleology of his view of
history.
The argument is organized around the aporetic ‘Spectre’ of communism
that is said to be haunting Europe in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto.
Insofar as Marx’s call for a revolution is made, Derrida contends, by a subject
determined in advance as the proletariat and in the name of a society

473

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 paul rekret

determined in advance as communist then it presumes ‘the real presence of

the spectre’. In other words, by injecting necessity into history, Marx is said to
cancel ‘historicity itself’. Accordingly, against what he reads as the emanci-
patory eschatology operative in Marx’s text, Derrida insists instead upon
‘interminable, infinite . . . critique’.
Such a notion of critique is definitive of a politics of deconstruction.
This is most apparent in what is likely Derrida’s most influential political
concept: ‘democracy-to-come’. As might at this point be assumed,
democracy is said to be ‘to come’ insofar as it cannot be made present.
This is because for a democracy to exist as such would imply that the
elements of democracy – justice, freedom, equality – have been attained.
Yet the realization of these phenomena in the form of policies and laws
would by necessity be imperfect; they would exclude some, prioritize
others and invite further democratizations. Democracy is by definition
deferred at every moment to a promise of democracy in the future. Yet,
if Derrida increasingly privileges democracy as a political concept and
institution throughout his later work, this seems to be because it appears
on his reading that indefinite critique is intrinsic to it. Contestation is
inherent to democracy since it entails further democratization and in this
sense, the impossibility of presence is inscribed directly upon democracy
as a concept and a set of institutions.

Reception
This spirit of the irreducibility of critique has also been one of the principal
objects of Derrida’s critics. In the eyes of detractors, deconstruction amounts
to a perverse cul-de-sac of radical scepticism, moral relativism or simply
a reduction of philosophy to aesthetic criteria.
Among the most influential of such criticisms, and setting the terms for
much of Derrida’s English reception, sits American philosopher John
R. Searle’s dismissive 1977 reply to Derrida’s interpretation of speech-act
theorist J. L. Austin. Putting aside the content and merit of Searle’s argument
or indeed Derrida’s response, more influential were the terms in which
Searle’s argument was couched. For Searle did not merely dispute
Derrida’s interpretation of Austin’s concept of speech-act, he accused him
of both peddling obvious falsehoods and an outrageously unrecognizable
account of Austin’s work.
The view propagated by Searle of Derrida as a philosophical charlatan
stuck and even served to harden the perceived divisions between an analytic,

474

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

problem-based approach to philosophy and a continental school, more

devoted to the history of philosophy and more willing to take seriously
figures and texts at the margins of philosophy. Such sweeping disciplinary
generalizations are nebulous at best, but they nonetheless informed
a wholesale dismissal of deconstruction by large swathes of intellectuals.
This might explain the opposition by a substantial minority of University
of Cambridge faculty to that institution’s conferment of an honorary degree
upon Derrida in 1992. What came to be known as the ‘Cambridge Affair’ had
some echoes of Searle’s argument insofar as a group of well-known interna-
tional philosophers referred to his work either as outright ‘false’ or merely
‘trivial’ in a letter published in The Times in opposition to his honorary title.
A more substantial but equally influential critical account of Derrida and
deconstruction appeared in German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ 1985
book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. On Habermas’ reading,
Derrida’s work amounted to a deeply problematic radical scepticism which
rejects truth and reason by dissolving the distinctions between the logical and
the rhetorical, the philosophical and the literary. While Habermas’ argument
was, rather problematically, mostly gleaned from his reading of a book by
one of Derrida’s American interpreters, it was the repercussions that
Habermas drew from such a view that have been widely taken up.
Without some filiation to reason or truth, it seems, the philosopher can
offer no basis for political commitment, and so is reduced to a nihilistic
political conservatism. Despite something of a rapprochement in the early
2000s between Derrida and Habermas in the form of joint public interven-
tions into post-September 2001 foreign policy, the terms of the latter’s criti-
cisms have continued to inform arguments against deconstruction.2
One particularly salient argument from the Left against Derrida rests with
the claim that the emphasis upon difference and alterity, upon which decon-
struction centres, leaves it without resources to challenge the near-universal
hegemony of contemporary capitalism. Given his philosophy’s preoccupa-
tion with an absolute dissymmetry between same and other, it therefore
departs from the project of constructing counter-hegemonic solidarity for
theoretical ‘modesty’, ‘resignation’ or even ‘cynicism’.3 The broader assertion
implied here is that deconstruction amounts to a reflection of the contin-
gency, dispersals and mobility of contemporary capitalism rather than
a challenge to it.
2
See G. Borrodini (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror, University of Chicago Press, 2003.
3
See J. Rancière, ‘Post-Democracy, Politics, Philosophy’, Angelaki 1 (1996): 171–8; S. Žižek,
‘Melancholy and the Act’, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657–81.

475

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052
 paul rekret

Finally, it is worth mentioning a criticism famously articulated by Michel

Foucault regarding deconstruction’s insufficient historical reflexivity.
Foucault argues that by locating the metaphysics of presence as operative
throughout the history of philosophy, Derrida has forfeited any examination
of the historical determinants of meaning and thus also the conditions of his
own work.
Even if Derrida has been more often dismissed than read, his intellectual
influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought is rarely rivalled.
But whereas in his native France his work was initially mainly read as
a response to dominant philosophical traditions, Derrida’s emergence in
Anglo-American and later global thought came by way of literary theory
and, at least initially, most often through the prism of a ‘Yale School’ viewed
as champions of the close study of literary texts and the constitution of
meaning. But if Derrida can be said to have transformed the study of
literature, culture and media, his influence has been more far-reaching.
Indeed, it would be an endless task to enumerate all the themes and fields
which his work has influenced; from psychoanalysis to geography.
Nonetheless, it bears pointing out that Derrida has had a particularly
sustained influence on two fields in particular: theology and political theory.
The deconstruction of metaphysics has been particularly fecund terrain for
questions of faith, the naming of God, messianism and negative theology; all
themes on which Derrida wrote often. His work on alterity, adopted in part
though not without criticism by his early translator Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, has offered a powerful intervention into the unquestioned privileges
of Eurocentrism present in leftist thought. Moreover, adopted by Ernesto
Laclau (1935–2014) and Chantal Mouffe (1943–) in the 1980s, a deconstructive
critique of contemporary liberal democratic institutions and actors has
become a sub-field of study in the discipline of political theory.
While Derrida’s immediate intellectual influence has quite naturally
waned in the years since his death, it is undeniable that his work played
a perhaps unrivalled role in loosening the authority of a Western intellectual
canon and associated conventions while cultivating a complex, reflexive
understanding of meaning and its conditions that shows few signs of dissipat-
ing. In this sense, Derrida’s work has altered the trajectory of not merely
French, but Western, thought.

476

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Boston College, on 05 May 2019 at 11:44:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316681572.052