Abstract
We are here, according to our program, to discuss phenomenology and deconstruction. Before I do that, I would like to address a preliminary question: why discuss deconstruction at all? Deconstruction is, after all, a part of the “post-modernist contribution” that, according to an article in a recent academic journal, is itself nothing more that “a spectacular PR maneuver” that has “succeeded in repackaging and marketing—especially in English Departments all too well-known for intellectual under¬development—what had been previously bemoaned as ontological Angst into playfulness and joy: transcendental homelessness for the nie-génération”?1 Discussion of such a development might well have a place at meetings of the Modern Language Association, but we gather here under the auspices of the American Philosophical Association, and even if we cannot be certain that the APA contains no pockets of “intellectual underdevelopment,” it remains true that, as John Searle has reported, “deconstruction [has] found little appeal among professional philoso¬phers”—as opposed, of course, to literary critics.2
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References
Russell A. Berman and Paul Piccone, “Hidden Agendas: The Young Heidegger and the Post-Modern Debate,” Telos 11 (Fall 1988), 118. I thank Hart Murphy for bringing this estimable text to my attention.
John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” The New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983, 78.
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 139. Limited Inc contains “Signature Event Context” (1971), 1–23 (hereafter, cited as Sec); “Limited Inc a b c . . .” (1977), 29–110 (hereafter, “Limited”) and “Afterword: Toward a Ethic of Discussion,” dated 1988, 111–60 (hereafter, cited as “Afterword”).
In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); hereafter, PCP.
Concerning Derridean grammatology as “science,” see Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 27, 74, 93.
Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph 2 (1977), 203.
I do not—nor could I, consistently—present these reflections on “ordinary language” as establishing, beyond all possible doubt, the meaning of the passage in question. I acknowledge, in addition, that I judge not as a master of the French language, but rather on the basis of definitions in the Petit Robert. Despite these qualifications, however, my point retains its force: it is more defensible to read Derrida’s “evidence” as meaning “self-evidence” than as meaning “outward sign” or “indication.”
An expression could make an intention self-evident only if the expression were the intention, only of the two were indistinguishable.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction, wo volumes, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), I: 81.
Husserliana I. English Translation by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). Hereafter cited as “CM.”
Husserl’s notion of evidence is notoriously complicated. In what follows, I sketch an interpretation that seems to me plausible, and to offer support for the thesis I am examining. The general argument is that if phenomenological evidence is as I suggest, then phe¬nomenology gives way to deconstruction. Other elaborations of evidence might well make phenomenology more capable of resisting this development.
In so quoting Husserl, I omit the completion of the final sentence, i.e., “—and the question whether adequate evidence does not necessarily lie at infinity may be left open.” Husserl marked the entire sentence by means of a wavy line in the margin (see Husserliana I, 238, note to page 55, lines 24–27); according to Dorion Cairns, this is Husserl’s way of marking the sentence as unsatisfactory (CM, 15 n. 2). Assuming that Cairns is correct, my suspicions would be that Husserl rejects the part of the sentence following the dash, because the question it raises is “left open” only for a few pages; it is answered in §9 (quoted below).
Here—not for the first time—I move too quickly. In a passage I quote above, Husserl seems to assert that even in cases of “adequate evidence,” there is “an indeterminately general presumptive horizon,” that is “strictly non-experienced” but “necessarily also-meant“ {CM, §9). Perhaps that horizon can be taken to include my non-trees. Even then, problems remain: given that protention is horizonal, and that retention fades indeterminably into the past, the living present cannot be strictly delimited. But if it cannot, I do not see how its “core” can be given with “strict adequacy.”
A valuable account that will be appreciated especially by those annoyed by Derrida’s styles is provided by Paul Ricoeur in “Structure—Word—Event” (Philosophy Today 11–12 [1968]: 114–129.) John Boly, in “Nihilism Aside: Derrida’s Debate Over Intentional Models” {Philosophy and Literature 9 [1985]: 152–165), has argued that Ricoeur’s critique of structuralism applies to Derrida in that Derrida also reduces parole to langue. The same charge against Derrida has been made by Vincent Descombes in Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
See especially Sec and “Limited.”
Samuel Weber, “It,” Glyph 4 (1978), esp. 8–14.
Decreasing influence with increasing spread is reminiscent of the second law of thermodynamics; hence Manfred Frank’s well-chosen title for an article on Derrida, “Die Entropie der Sprache,” “The Entropy of Language.”
Derrida’s denial that différance, etc., are concepts in the traditional sense does not mean that these “non-concepts” are ineffable. On the contrary, Derrida articulates them in detail; consider, for example, the analyses of différance as involving both (spatial) distancing and (temporal) deferring, and of iteration as involving both repetition and alteration. Both “non-concepts” are analyzed, but the features or characteristics revealed through the analyses are discovered by the analyses to stand in relations of unstable tension: one cannot determine precisely “how much” différance depends, in any or every case, on differing and how much on deferring, or, in any or every case of iteration, “how much” is simply repeated, and how much altered. To borrow an Aristotelian phrase: these analyses (which are not like conceptual analyses in that they do not discover stable elements or parts) may reveal precisely why complete precision is beyond us.
See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 11:12, “Of Self-Overcoming;” also, “Of Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense.”
F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Damstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974–76), 13: 203.
J. G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, in I. H. Fichte (editor), Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), I: 176 n.
See, in addition to the passages quoted below, Of Grammatology 12, 19, 93, 160; Dissemination 86, 109, 112, 122, 123, 128, 149; Limited Inc 3, 4, 8, 17. This list is far from exhaustive; it seems to me sufficient.
And, to a much greater degree, his followers. See, for example, Culler’s use of “philosophy” in On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), or Christopher Norris’s “discussion” of Plato in “Derrida on Plato: Writing as Poison and Cure,” in Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
In “Reconstructing Husserl: A Critical Response to Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena” Husserl Studies 4 (1987), 45–62), I have attempted to demonstrate that Husserl fails to fit into Derrida’s net. The same holds, I believe, for Platoas I hope to show in a projected treatment of “Plato’s Pharmacy.”
See Rosemary Desjardins, “Why Dialogues? Plato’s Serious Play,” in Charles Griswold (editor), Platonic Readings, Platonic Writings (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988), 110–125.
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White, A. (1995). Of Grammatolatry: Deconstruction as Rigorous Phenomenology?. In: McKenna, W.R., Evans, J.C. (eds) Derrida and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8498-2_6
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