Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology by Maclachlan Ian Gaston Sean

Author:Maclachlan, Ian,Gaston, Sean.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART 2

NATURE, CULTURE, WRITING

CHAPTER 1

THE VIOLENCE OF THE LETTER: FROM LÉVI-STRAUSS TO ROUSSEAU

MICHAEL NAAS, LEURRE, LURE, DELUSION, ILLUSION (OG 139–40, 20, 39; DG 201–2, 34, 58, 59)

The French word leurre is one of just a handful of terms – along with brisure and bricole – that Derrida himself not only comments on but gives the origins of in Of Grammatology (OG 65; DG 96). Like the bricole, says Derrida, the leurre designates first a hunter’s stratagem. A term of falconry, a leurre is ‘a piece of red leather’, Derrida writes citing Littré, ‘in the form of a bird, which serves to recall the bird of prey when it does not return straight to the fist’ (OG 139; DG 201). The leurre is thus a decoy, snare, distraction or enticement, an artefact that presents itself as something natural and alive – perhaps even more alive than what is actually living. The leurre thus becomes a leurre of life by making itself as transparent as possible, that is, by effacing by means of a supplement everything that would suggest artifice and deception in order to give the impression of life and naturalness. The leurre is thus a kind of ‘illusion’ – one of the ways leurre has been translated into English in Of Grammatology since it appears in a couple of passages to be more or less synonymous with the French illusion (OG 12, 75, 82, 120, 130, 154, 163, 188, 272).

In the following passage from an early section of Of Grammatology Derrida uses both the terms leurre and illusion to speak of the way in which the voice seems to present meaning itself, that is, the way the phonic signifier appears to efface itself or make itself transparent in order to give immediate and direct access to the signified.

This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion [illusion] among many. [. . .] This illusion [leurre] is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. (OG 20; DG 34)

Though the phonic signifier is indeed a signifier, the product of difference and absence, it has a way of appearing to efface itself as a signifier in order to give immediate access to the signified. Writing, on the contrary, does not so easily lend itself to this illusion or this lure; it wears its artificial status on its face, so to speak. It does not give the impression of transparency and is not experienced as an ‘undecomposable unity’.

The leurre is thus always an illusion within experience of presence, integrity and life. It is not only what characterizes but what sustains one side of a whole series of so-called binary oppositions co-extensive with a logocentric metaphysics. It is the experience of a voice that seems to efface itself and to give rise – or seems to do so, for that is the illusion – to the immediate apprehension of meaning.

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