remarks that Lévi-Strauss, like Heidegger, is afflicted with nostalgia: “one . . . perceives in his
work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and
natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech—an ethic, nostalgia,
and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when
he moves toward archaic
((xx))
societies—exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well known.”
(ED 427, SC 264)
Derrida does not offer the obverse of this nostalgia. He does not see in the method of the so-
called exact sciences an epistemological model of exactitude. All knowledge, whether one
knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of “engineering.” But that
myth is always totally other, leaving an originary trace within “bricolage.” Like all “useful”
words, “bricolage” must also be placed “under erasure.” For it can only be defined by its
difference from its opposite—“engineering.” Yet that opposite, a metaphysical norm, can in
fact never be present and thus, strictly speaking, there is no concept of “bricolage” (that which
is not engineering). Yet the concept must be used—untenable but necessary. “From the
moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer . . . as soon as it is admitted that every
finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, . . . the very idea of bricolage is menaced and
the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.” (ED 418, SC 256) The possible
and implicit hierarchical move, reminding us that bricolage as a model is “pre-scientific,” low
on a chain of teleologic development, here disappears. Derrida does not allow the possibility
of seeing bricolage as a cruder, pre-scientific method of investigation, low on the
evolutionary scale. One can now begin to understand a rather cryptic sentence in the Gram-
matology: “Without that track [of writing under erasure], . . . the ultra-transcendental text
[bricolage under erasure] will so closely resemble the pre-critical text
[bricolage plain and
simple] as to be indistinguishable from it.” (90, 61)
This undoing yet preserving of the opposition between bricolage and engineering is an
analogue for Derrida’s attitude toward all oppositions—an attitude that “erases” (in this
special sense) all oppositions. I shall come back to this gesture again and again in this Preface.
(As he develops the notion of the joyful yet laborious strategy of rewriting the old language—
a language, incidentally, we must know well—Derrida mentions the “clôture” of
metaphysics. We must know that we are within the “clôture” of metaphysics, even as we
attempt to undo it. It would be an historicist mistake to represent this “closure” of
metaphysics as simply the temporal finishing-point of metaphysics. It is also the meta-
physical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create an en-closure, make the
definition coincide with the defined, the “father” with the “son”; within the logic of identity to
balance the equation, close the circle. Our language reflects this desire. And so it is from
within this language that we must attempt an “opening.”)
((xxi))
II
Derrida uses the word “metaphysics” very simply as shorthand for any science of presence. (If
he were to attempt a rigorous definition of meta-physics, the word’ would no doubt go “under
erasure.”) But it is this simple bricoleur’s take on the word that permits Derrida to allow the
possibility of a “Marxist” or “structuralist” metaphysics. He puts it succinctly in that early
essay from which I have already quoted:
The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and
metonymies 18 Its matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so
elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme—is the determination of
being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the
names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the
constant of a presence—eidos, archè, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance,
subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.
(ED 410-11, SC 249)
I have lingered on the “question of the preface” and the pervasive Derridean practice of the
“sous rature” to slip into the atmosphere of Derrida’s thought. Now I speak of his
acknowledged “precursors”—Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl. 19 I shall attend in
greatest detail to Nietzsche because our received version of him is so different from Derrida’s,
and because Derrida’s relationship to him is so inescapable. I shall then comment on Derrida’s
attitudes toward structuralism; on his own vocabulary and practice and on the structure of the
Grammatology. A few words next about translation, and we are into the text.
Derrida has given us two lists of what we should look for in Nietzsche: “the systematic
mistrust of metaphysics as a whole, the formal approach to philosophic discourse, the concept
of the philosopher-artist, the rhetorical and philological question asked of the history of
philosophy, the suspicion of the values of truth (‘well applied convention’), of meaning and of
being, of ‘meaning of being’, the attention to the economic phenomena of force and of
difference of forces, and so forth.” (MP 362–63) And, “Radicalizing the concepts of
interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference ... Nietzsche, far from remaining simply
(with Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the
liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos, and the
related concept of truth or the primary signified . . .” (p-32, 19).
((xxii))
It should by now be clear that Nietzsche’s “suspicion of the value of truth . . . of meaning and
of being, of ‘meaning of being’ “ of the “concept of . . . the primary signified,” is intimately
shared by Derrida. The other items on the two lists can be brought under one head:
philosophical dis-course as formal, rhetorical, figurative discourse, a something to be de-
ciphered. The end of this Preface will make clear how deeply Derrida is committed to such a
notion. Here I shall comment on the implications of “the decipherment of figurative
discourse” in Nietzsche.
As early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect
presents as “truth.” “The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops
its chief power in dissimulation.” 20 “A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [übertragen] into an
image [Bild]! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And