A Companion to Derrida by Lawlor Leonard Direk Zeynep & Leonard Lawlor

Author:Lawlor, Leonard, Direk, Zeynep & Leonard Lawlor [Direk, Zeynep & Lawlor, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444332841
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-07-01T11:20:21+00:00

Archi-writing and différance preceded the difference between the formal and transcendental, the world and the “lived,” appearance and that which appeared, because it structured both. By appealing to writing Derrida was able to absorb his previous work on phenomenology into the general movement of the sign, reframing it in structuralist language.

5. Conclusion

Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology in context, we can see the complex articulation of two different but interrelated conversations. At one level, the book is an extended criticism of Saussure's logocentrism, where the glimpses he catches of writing within Saussure's work allow Derrida to deconstruct the structural linguist's privilege of the voice. But at another level, we see a different debate, this time with Derrida's students and colleagues. And for them writing is not the “repressed” or the “excluded,” but rather the ultimate manifestation of a fully formalized science, whose impact would be as much political as intellectual. In this second conversation, the burden of Derrida's argument was not to recuperate writing, but rather to rework it, to use it to bring into question the sharp distinctions that for many at the ENS divided science from ideology.

Indeed this reading of the text explains Derrida's privileging of Saussure within it. As the acknowledged “father of structuralism,” a linguist who had prioritized the internal necessities of language over its referential structure, Saussure would have been a strange target for an argument about the “metaphysics of presence.” But if one of the goals of Derrida's book was to engage with Althusser and his students, the choice seems more fitting. For by showing that Saussure remained logocentric despite himself, Derrida facilitated the extension of his argument to cover other structuralists, like Althusser.13 From this perspective, Derrida's initial attack on phonetic writing, and the priority of the signifier/signified relation that it represented, should be seen not as the heart of his argument but rather as a preliminary ground-laying to highlight his loyalty to Althusser's project, before proceeding to undermine it. It is only later in the book, where he extends Althusser's argument to challenge the older man's conceptualization of science, that Derrida makes his most important contribution. Moreover, though Derrida is apparently hostile to Husserl's phenomenology in Of Grammatology, we can read this in part as a concession to his readers. Labeling Husserl as logocentric in the ENS was merely a nod to the orthodoxy. It was Derrida's reincorporation of Husserl's (and Heidegger's) work into the structuralist framework that would have been most provocative.

This reincorporation was especially provocative for its political implications. Despite the characteristic discretion with which Derrida discussed politics before the 1990s, the high political stakes attributed to philosophy at the ENS meant that ivory-tower neutrality was an idle dream there. We must remember that Derrida finished Of Grammatology in the months leading up to the events of May 1968, events which found their epicenter only a few hundred meters from Derrida's classroom. For all the apparently abstract discussion and technical language, when Derrida challenged the idea of science in Of Grammatology, his students would have read it as a political intervention.

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