Derrida, Jaques [1997 (1967)]: Of Grammatology
Yüklə 2,36 Mb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
Thus a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction, both as the search for a foundation (the critic behaving as if she means what she says in her text), and as the pleasure of the bottomless. The tool for this, as ((lxxviii)) indeed for any deconstruction, is our desire, itself a deconstructive and grammatological structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of our selves. Deconstruction can therefore never be a positive science. For we are in a bind, in a “double (read abyssal) bind,” Derrida’s newest nickname for the schizophrenia of the “sous rature.” 81 We must do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we desire to do both, and so on indefinitely. Deconstruction is a perpetually self- deconstructing movement that is inhabited by differance. No text is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed. Yet the critic provisionally musters the metaphysical resources of criticism and performs what declares itself to be one (unitary) act of deconstruction. As I point out on pages Ixxxi–lxxxii, the kinship with Freud’s interminable and terminable analysis, involving both subject and analyst, is here not to be ignored. Derrida is now ready to suggest that, in a certain sense, it is impossible not to deconstruct/be deconstructed.” All texts, whether written in the narrow sense or not, are rehearsing their grammatological structure, self-deconstructing as they constitute themselves. The single act of critical deconstruction is as necessary yet pointless, arrogant yet humble, as all human gestures. “In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a choice” (91, 62). These, then, are the lineaments of the Derridean double bind, deconstruction under erasure, the abyss placed in the abyss, active forgetfulness. (Here it may be pointed out that one of the traditional charges against writing is that it breeds passive forgetfulness (55, 37 and passim). In this respect also, deconstruction reinscribes the value of writing.) On page xlv I bring a charge of “prudence” against Derrida. The new Derrida shows us that this “prudence” is also the greatest “danger,” the will to knowledge as will to ignorance and vice versa. “The ‘knowledge’ of the philosopher places him among the dreamers, for knowledge is a dream. But the philospher ‘knowingly’ agrees to dream, to dream of knowledge, agrees to ‘forget’ the lesson of philosophy, only so as to ‘prove’ that lesson. . . . It is a vertiginous movement.” As Glas will suggest, this philosophical agreement is the reader/writer’s contract (seing) with the text. Let me add yet once again that this terrifying and exhilarating vertigo is not “mystical” or “theological.” The abyss appears when Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida lift the lid of the most familiar and comforting notions about the possibility of knowledge. V Of Grammatology is the provisional origin of this Preface. But we have not kept track of the book’s outline. We have considered instead the im-portance of erasure in Derrida; provided some ingredients for the computa- ((lxxix)) tion of the intertextuality between Derrida, and Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Husserl; given some indications of Derrida’s view of Structuralism, especially of the metapsychological practice of Jacques Lacan; commented on the place of “writing” in Derrida’s thought, hinted at the chain of its substitutions, given the recipe for deconstruction. Now that we begin the concluding movements of this repetitive preface, let us make Of Grammatology our provisional end. Derrida situates Of Grammatology among his own texts thus: Of Grammatology can be taken as a long essay articulated in two parts .. . between which one can stitch in L’écriture et la différence. The Grammatology often refers to it. In that case, the interpretation of Rousseau [Part II of Of Grammatology] would be the twelfth item of the collection. Conversely, one can insert Of Grammatology in the middle of L’écriture et la
. in Critique, of the articles announcing Of Grammatology; the five last, beginning with “Freud and the Scene of Writing” are engaged in the grammatological overture. (Pos F 12–r 3) Although Derrida continues “. . . things don’t let themselves be reconstituted so simply,” this fable of fragmentation is not without interest. There is a certain stitched-togetherness in Of Grammatology. , and a decided disjunction between the sweeping, summarizing, theoretical breadth of the first part, and the interpretative, slow, reader’s pace of the second. Part I is an expanded version of a two-part review of Madeleine V-David’s Le débat sur les
Although the review articles contained most of the material of the entire Part I in their present order, it is in Chapter 3—“Of Grammatology as A Positive Science”—that their mark is most clearly felt. Each of the three books reviewed receives a section of the chapter. The first gives a summary of the moment when grammatology could historically have opened but did not, the moment of the decipherment of non-European scripts. The second investi-gates the possible physiological bases for the differentiation between writ-ing and speech and genetic writing as the determinant of life. The third deals with the implications of varieties of “nonphonetic” writing. One can-not help wondering if all this overt interest in an account of writing in the narrow sense—rather than in the interpretation of texts—is not simply due to the regulating presence of books to be reviewed. Indeed, in Part I and in the postscript to “Freud and the Scene of Writ-ing,” Derrida speaks most often of re-writing the “history of writing” in ((lxxx))
something suspiciously like the narrow sense—“an immense field where hitherto one has only done preparatory work” (ED 340). “Writing” so envisaged is on the brink of becoming a unique signifier, and Jacques Derrida’s chief care. In his later work, the theoretical significance of the structure of writing and the grammatological opening remain intact. But he quietly drops the idea of being the authorized grammatological historian of writing in the narrow sense. “Writing” then takes its place on the chain of substitutions. In the Grammatology, then, we are at a specific and pre-carious moment in Derrida’s career. Yüklə 2,36 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|