Page 84 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes In the 'Afterword' to Limited Inc., Derrida suggests that metaphysics can be defined as:
"The enterprise of returning 'strategically', 'ideally', to an origin or to a priority thought to be
simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation,
complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes
to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the
negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the
accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture
among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound
and most potent".
According to Derrida then, metaphysics involves installing hierarchies and orders of subordination
in the various dualisms that it encounters. Moreover, metaphysical thought priorities presence
and purity at the expense of the contingent and the complicated, which are considered to be
merely aberrations that are not important for philosophical analysis. Basically then, metaphysical
thought always privileges one side of an opposition, and ignores or marginalises the alternative
term of that opposition.
In another attempt to explain deconstruction's treatment of, and interest in oppositions, Derrida
has suggested that: "An opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence,
etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination.
Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralisation: it must, by means of
a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practise an overturning of the classical
opposition, and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that
deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticises" (M
195). In order to better understand this dual 'methodology' - that is also the deconstruction of the
notion of a methodology because it no longer believes in the possibility of an observer being
absolutely exterior to the object/text being examined - it is helpful to consider an example of this
deconstruction at work.

7.3 Derrida’s Early Works
Derrida's terms change in every text that he writes. This is part of his deconstructive strategy. He
focuses on particular themes or words in a text, which on account of their ambiguity undermine
the more explicit intention of that text. It is not possible for all of these to be addressed (Derrida
has published in the vicinity of 60 texts in English), so this article focused on some of the most
pivotal terms and neologisms from his early thought. It addresses aspects of his later, more theme-
based thought.
7.3.1 Speech/Writing
The most prominent opposition with which Derrida's earlier work is concerned is that between
speech and writing. According to Derrida, thinkers as different as Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, and
Levi-Strauss, have all denigrated the written word and valorised speech, by contrast, as some type
of pure conduit of meaning. Their argument is that while spoken words are the symbols of mental
experience, written words are the symbols of that already existing symbol. As representations of
speech, they are doubly derivative and doubly far from a unity with one's own thought. Without
going into detail regarding the ways in which these thinkers have set about justifying this type of
hierarchical opposition, it is important to remember that the first strategy of deconstruction is to
reverse existing oppositions. In Of Grammatology (perhaps his most famous work), Derrida hence
attempts to illustrate that the structure of writing and grammatology are more important and even
'older' than the supposedly pure structure of presence-to-self that is characterised as typical of
speech.
For example, in an entire chapter of his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure tries
to restrict the science of linguistics to the phonetic and audible word only. In the course of his
inquiry, Saussure goes as far as to argue that "language and writing are two distinct systems of
signs: the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first". Language, Saussure insists,

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