Afterword(s): Contrary to the ‘Logic of the Heading’

Abstract

I cannot pretend in so short a space as an Afterword, or in after-words, to sum things up, to present you with a neat conclusion or formula, which, after all I’ve said, lets you off the hook from thinking and responding to the unpredictable event of your own encounter with Derrida’s work. This book will, therefore, not have been a guide book, much less a road map. I’m merely trying to point up a few headings, a few directions, without pretending to know the destination (if there is such a thing …). At least we can conclude our introduction by borrowing Nicholas Royle’s comment, from a collection of essays entitled Afterwords, that deconstruction (if such a thing exists) ‘is never single, deconstruction is never itself but is always different’ (1992, 1). This difference-from-itself is located above, in the title ‘Afterword(s)’, with that parenthetical plural, never single. We start to draw to an end which is not really one, as we began, by raising the ghost of an identity. This ghost may well be a certain Derrida, a certain image of deconstruction. But there is no sense that we have moved beyond Derrida. Samuel Weber sums up the problem for us: ‘any attempt to move “beyond” deconstruction runs the risk of never getting to it and therefore winding up where one started, before deconstruction’ (Weber 1996, 132).

For there must not be a last word — that’s what I’d like to say finally; the afterward is not, that means ought not, ought never to be a last word.

Jacques Derrida (A 197)

… it is no longer merely a question of deconstructing discourses and semantics, but also and primarily institutional and political structures.

Jacques Derrida (A 202)