Digital Overtone

The gestation of this post revolves around the realization that in a few weeks I am going to have to turn in a respectably well thought out, cogent paper applying Jacques Derrida’s not-method¹ of deconstruction to a literary text of my choosing. Until recently I have been consumed by something approaching intellectual panic regarding both the choice of text, and something more fundamental: the purpose of deconstructing a literary text, given Derrida’s own thinking surrounding différance and deconstruction, namely the concurrent lack of origin and endpoint. If deconstruction can never arrive at a conclusion, why begin?

Derrida seems to provide the glimmer of an answer in his own work. His abundant performances of deconstruction on the philosophical writings of his predecessors (principal among them Rousseau², Saussure³, Heidegger⁴, Freud⁵, Nietzsche⁶) are essential to the elaboration of his philosophical project, and do not shy away from a tremendous amount of self-reflection, from which we can devise a number of problems to be overcome. The first is what I have mentioned above: deconstruction does not entail a teleology and, as such, is in an essential way unable to entail an analytical endpoint. How do we overcome this obstacle within a field that demands the closure of questions raised? The answer Derrida seems to provide, never explicitly, is unsurprisingly problematic. In order to write deconstruction, he proposes, we must take recourse in writing (“in the narrow sense”); in order to escape metaphysics and metaphysical oppositions, we must take recourse inside metaphysics by provisionally reinscribing our performance in the very oppositions we hope to question, and naïvely (provisionally) forget that we have done so (à la Nietzsche⁷). Thus we are able to forget, as well, the mise-en-abyme that is deconstruction and propose for ourselves, inside this framework, a provisionally acceptable endpoint. Upon reaching our goal, we must remember that it depends on the same metaphysical concepts we proposed to escape, we must re-place ourselves with our conclusion in the abyme and realize that it therefore must also be deconstructed.

In Derrida’s terms, every text is necessarily constructed on a metaphysical foundation, for metaphysics is all we have. Constructed on a metaphysical foundation, ergo deconstructible. Wherein lies the problem?

My trouble finding a direction for this paper seemed to be a perception I can’t overcome —but which makes me profoundly uncomfortable— of a fundamental difference between the philosophical texts Derrida deconstructs and the type of literature I work with. I have asked the question above why one might deconstruct a literary text in the first place, knowing that there is no satisfying conclusion to be reached. We know that there is, in fact, no satisfying endpoint to the practice of deconstruction at all, and that it is not a means to an end but a means to another means, “a chain of signifiers” with no ultimate signified. Still, Derrida seems eminently capable of “willfully forgetting” this analytical “problem” (and thus of not being tormented by the question I am raising here) because he confronts texts that make at least an implicit truth claim, or seek a concrete answer to a question. Derrida can then question, counter and unravel these conclusions and their authors in a deconstructive performance revealing the inadequacy of their ultimately metaphysical foundations⁸. The unraveling of a truth claim is an obvious, if provisional, “satisfying conclusion” for the analytical process, even if we are forced to realize that the signified he derives is “always already” just another signifier to be deconstructed.

The texts that interest me, though, tend not to make truth claims or seek concrete answers, but rather to explicitly deny the possibility of the truth claim, or to raise questions without providing answers. In many ways one might say their authors openly posit the possibility (even the necessity) of their own deconstruction. It is difficult, then, for me to formulate what a “provisionally satisfying conclusion” might look like with regard to these texts, if only because I would not be confronting an author/text who claims to have encountered something stable; rather, I would be more or less in collusion with a text that is frank about the “reality” of its own instability and the necessity of its own deconstruction.

The only way I see out of this conundrum, at the moment, is to recognize in the negation of a truth claim an implicit (perhaps hidden) truth claim (e.g. the truth that there is no truth, or perhaps the hidden assertion of a truth disguised by the negation of truth) —or to recognize in the raising of a question a disingenuous attempt at defining its terms too narrowly— that might provide a starting point for a deconstructive reading. This seems like an exciting possibility for the kind of against-the-grain readings one strives for, but I still have not worked out intellectually just how to perform the reading, or much less to attempt to perform it on a specific text to see if it indeed yields results. I continue to feel that, to a certain extent, these points of departure don’t point toward (provisional) conclusions as (provisionally) satisfying as the ones Derrida proposes for himself.

On the other hand, and to synthesize a little what I’ve written here, I’ve been thinking about a few 19th-century Latin American positivist texts I’ve read and written about, and it’s quite clear how one might approach them and their nation-building projects deconstructively to great effect, because their stake in metaphysical oppositions is both explicit and profound. My intellectual problem is not with literature, then, but specifically with modernism’s self-conscious approach to its own instability. Unfortunately, taking recourse in positivist literature for this final paper would feel like a negation of the utility of this course and the analytical approach it espouses, a negation I would have immense trouble committing to.

NB: The question is not how?, but why? And I’ve not yet answered it. More recently —in the last few hours, while composing this note— I have had an epiphany (courtesy of Jorge Luis Borges) regarding this and all of the above. More on this later.

Footnotes

1. For if deconstruction is based on diff√©rance, itself “neither a word nor a concept” (”Différance.” Margins of Philosophy, 3), deconstruction cannot possibly be a “method” or a “style” (even if Derrida himself at times provisionally accepts that they are), both of which imply the possibility of applying something that is not. Deconstruction is, at best, a performance, albeit one that erases itself. ↩
2. Of Grammatalogy. ↩
3. Ibid. ↩
4. “The Ends of Man”, Margins of Philosophy. ↩
5. “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, Writing and Difference. ↩
6. Approximately everywhere. ↩
7. “Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, and elsewhere. ↩
8. It is curious, and potentially productive, to note that Derrida at times seems to deconstruct texts that are quite aware of their problematic inscription in a metaphysical tradition. His treatment of Freud (previously cited), and Saussure and Levi-Strauss (in Of Grammatalogy) are prominent examples. ↩

Posted by Kyle / criticism and literature and theory