Page 88 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes with oneself in an immediate and pre-reflective spontaneity. Following this refutation of Husserlian
temporality, Derrida remarks that "in the last analysis, what is at stake is… the privilege of the
actual present, the now". Instead of emphasising the presence of a subject to themselves (i.e. the
so-called living-present), Derrida strategically utilises a conception of time that emphasises deferral.
John Caputo expresses Derrida's point succinctly when he claims that Derrida's criticisms of
Husserlian temporality in Speech and Phenomena involve an attempt to convey that: "What is really
going on in things, what is really happening, is always "to come". Every time you try to stabilise
the meaning of a thing, try to fix it in its missionary position, the thing itself, if there is anything
at all to it, slips away". To put Derrida's point simplistically, it might be suggested that the
meaning of a particular object, or a particular word, is never stable, but always in the process of
change (e.g. the dissemination of meaning for which deconstruction has become notorious).
Moreover, the significance of that past change can only be appreciated from the future and, of
course, that 'future' is itself implicated in a similar process of transformation were it ever to be
capable of becoming 'present'. The future that Derrida is referring to is hence not just a future that
will become present, but the future that makes all 'presence' possible and also impossible. For
Derrida, there can be no presence-to-self, or self-contained identity, because the 'nature' of our
temporal existence is for this type of experience to elude us. Our predominant mode of being is
what he will eventually term the messianic, in that experience is about the wait, or more aptly,
experience is only when it is deferred. Derrida's work offers many important temporal contributions
of this quasi-transcendental variety.

According to Derrida, phenomenology is a metaphysics of presence because it
unwittingly relies upon the notion of an indivisible self-presence, or in the case of
Husserl, the possibility of an exact internal adequation with oneself.

7.5 Undecidability

In its first and most famous instantiation, undecidability is one of Derrida's most important attempts
to trouble dualisms, or more accurately, to reveal how they are always already troubled. An
undecidable, and there are many of them in deconstruction (e.g. ghost, pharmakon, hymen, etc.),
is something that cannot conform to either polarity of a dichotomy (e.g. present/absent, cure/
poison, and inside/outside in the above examples). For example, the figure of a ghost seems to
neither present or absent, or alternatively it is both present and absent at the same time (SM).
However, Derrida has a recurring tendency to resuscitate terms in different contexts, and the term
undecidability also returns in later deconstruction. Indeed, to complicate matters, undecidability
returns in two discernible forms. In his recent work, Derrida often insists that the condition of the
possibility of mourning, giving, forgiving, and hospitality, to cite some of his most famous examples,
is at once also the condition of their impossibility. In his explorations of these "possible-impossible"
aporias, it becomes undecidable whether genuine giving, for example, is either a possible or an
impossible ideal.
7.5.1 Decision
Derrida's later philosophy is also united by his analysis of a similar type of undecidability that is
involved in the concept of the decision itself. In this respect, Derrida regularly suggests that a
decision cannot be wise, or posed even more provocatively, that the instant of the decision must
actually be mad. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Derrida tells us that a decision requires an undecidable
leap beyond all prior preparations for that decision, and according to him, this applies to all
decisions and not just those regarding the conversion to religious faith that preoccupies Kierkegaard.
To pose the problem in inverse fashion, it might be suggested that for Derrida, all decisions are a
faith and a tenuous faith at that, since were faith and the decision not tenuous, they would cease

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