letter as signifier, Lacan writes: “. . . a letter always arrives at its destination.” (Ec
41, FF 72)
It “always might not” (FV 115) is the mode of Derrida’s answer. Castration, the lack of
superintendence
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by phallic authority, is what transforms the “author” or the “book” into a “text.” Presence can
be articulated only if it is fragmented into discourse; “castration” and dismemberment being
both a menace to and the condition of the possibility of discourse. Somewhat extravagantly,
the phallus may itself be seen as the knife that severs itself to perpetuate its dissemination.
One begins to suspect that a phallocentric fable of meaning simply will not suffice.
In what it seems satisfying to me to construe as a [feminist med kryss] gesture, Derrida offers
us a hymeneal fable. The hymen is the always folded (there-fore never single or simple) space
in which the pen writes its dissemination. “Metaphorically” it means the consummation of
marriage. “Literally” its presence signifies the absence of consummation. This and/or
structure bodies forth the play of presence and absence. The hymen undoes oppositions
because it acts as it suffers. This fabulous hymen, anagram of hymme, “always intact as it is
always ravished, a screen, a tissue,” undoes “the assurance of mastery” (Dis z6o). I refer the
reader to Derrida’s “La double séance,” where the hymen is lavishly (un) folded.
“If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the mystic writing-pad while another
periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete
representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual
apparatus of our mind” (GW XIV ii, SE XIX 234). Derrida’s legend of meaning undoes
Freud’s phallocentrism through a double-jointed notion like the Freudian mystic writing-pad
sketched above. No longer castration (the realization of sexual difference as the model for the
difference between signifier and signified) as the origin of signification. Rather involve that
sexual difference in the “concrete representation” (in the long run these words must be
criticized, of course) of the making of meaning: dissemination into the hymen. Into the (n)
ever-virgin, (n) ever-violated hymen of interpretation, always supplementing through its fold
which is also an opening, is spilled the seed of meaning; a seed that scatters itself abroad
rather than inseminates. Or, turning the terms around, the playfully disseminating rather than
proprietorially hermeneutic gesture of interpretation (n) ever penetrates the hymen of the text.
It is a sexual union forever deferred. In a triumph of colloquialism, Derrida writes what might
be roughly translated as “It [dissemination] comes too soon.” But in the French the play is
more pronounced: “Elle—le [le sens] laisse d’avance tomber” (Dis 3oo)—“She lets it [the
meaning] fall in advance.” Derrida takes advantage of the simple grammatical fact that
dissemination—the male act—being a noun ending in “tion,” is feminine in French. The
pronoun “elle” confuses sexual agency. And the “—“ between subject and object-predicate
commemorates the deferment inhabiting the hymeneal dissemination of meaning.
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Derrida would see in Lacan’s idiom of “good and bad faith,” of “authenticity,” of “truth,” the
remnants of a postwar “existentialist” ethic. He would see in Lacan many unacknowledged
debts to the Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology that the psychoanalyst ridicules (Pos F
117, Pos E II. 43). Lacan does abundantly present himself as the prophet who is energetically
unveiling the “true” Freud. Such a vocation offends Derrida the deconstructor, for whom the
critic’s selfhood is as vulnerable with textuality as the text itself.
The previous section concerned itself with three magistral grammatologues: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger. We come back to them in another way at the
end of this section. For Derrida the provisionally locatable priming-point of structuralism, the
awareness of the structurality of things, does not lie only in the discovery of the “objective”
structures of language, providing “scientific” models for the study of “man.” It lies also in the
rigorous reopening of the question of the relationship between “subjective” and “objective”
structures, a structure of desire that puts the status of the human being and of that very dis-
tinction in question:
Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It
would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate
this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era 78 . . . . Nevertheless, if I wished to
give some sort of indication by choosing one or two “names,” and by recalling those authors
in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I
would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of
being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign
without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of
consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and self-proximity or self-possession; and, more
radically, the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of ontotheology, of the determination
of being as presence. (ED 411-12, SC 249—2)
IV
The launching of the structural method meant an “inflation of the sign ‘language’,” and thus,
as we have seen, an “inflation of the sign itself.” (15, 6) And this, in fact, meant an inflation,
not of the graphic, but of the phonic sign, of the rôle of the element of sound in the
production of meaning, language as speech. Chapter z of the Grammatology describes how
Saussure prescribed linguistics to be a study of speech alone, rather than speech and writing.
The emphasis is shared by Jakobson, by Lévi-
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Strauss, indeed by all semiological structuralism. Lacan, dealing ostensibly with the signifier
alone, sees it as half of a “phonematic opposition” (Ec 414) and calls the subject’s language,
when it indicates the charge of the truth of the unconscious—a “full speech” [parole pleine].
In the Grammatology Derrida suggests that this rejection of writing as an appendage, a mere
technique, and yet a menace built into speech—in effect, a scapegoat—is a symptom of a
much broader tendency. He relates this phonocentrism to logocentrism—the belief that the
first and last things are the Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the infinite understanding of
God, an infinitely creative subjectivity, and, closer to our time, the self-presence of full self-
consciousness. In the Grammatology and elsewhere, Derrida argues that the evidence for this
originary and teleologic presence has customarily been found in the voice, the phonè. This is
most clearly presented in terms of Husserlian thought in Chapter 6, “The Voice that Keeps
Silence,” of Speech and Phenomena. We have seen how, according to Derrida, Husserl’s text
is tortured by a suppressed insight that the Living Present is always already inhabited by
difference. What allows Husserl to operate this suppression is the evidence for self-presence
that he finds in the voice—not the “real” voice, but the principle of the voice in our interior