Conclusion: Deconstructing Modern and Global Theory

Abstract

Derrida reads texts against the grain of an author’s self-interpretation. In so doing, he does not simply disavow an author’s views on what his own texts are about. He takes an author’s standpoint as a point of departure for his own discursive investigations, questioning the concepts that are employed to evaluate how their proposed oppositions and appositions harmonise with how they are used. He eases concepts away from the rigidities and dichotomies that are assumed in the conceptual demarcations that authors strive to maintain, and in so doing releases the fluidity of texts and their conceptions. In his discussion of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, Derrida deconstructs the overt logic of Rousseau’s expressly critical reading of modern society and culture. Rousseau presents his critique via an orchestrated procession of demarcated concepts. An originary natural innocence, unencumbered by otherness and the sophisticated duplicities of modern civil society is contrasted with the latter’s complexities and hierarchies. Derrida, however, observes, how an author (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) can always say ‘more, less, or something other than what he would mean or want to say.’¹ Lost innocence is not to be recaptured by a direct return to a natural world without resort to the sophisticated techniques of modernity.