Embarrassing Ourselves

“Like other seismic events of thought, Derrida’s insight is quite simple, yet in its very simplicity hard to grasp.”

“Identities in general (of whatever kind, at whatever level) arise out of difference, but difference is not itself any identity or indeed any thing at all. It is not that there are first things, and then differences and relations between them: the “things” emerge only from the differences and relations, which have an absolute priority, and that emergence is never complete.”

“It’s that insight that led to the neologism différance. In the beginning is différance, which means that there is no simple beginning or origin. And the différance never ends, which means that there is no simple end. Derrida’s simple claim, then, is that nowhere ever is there anything simple.”

“For many readers at the time, the most accessible way into this thinking was Derrida’s account of Saussure, and more especially his radicalization of Saussure’s own insight that “language is a system of differences without positive terms.””

“On this view of language, objects and meanings do not come first, only subsequently to be named and referred to via some conventional linguistic means. Rather, they are from the start involved in the play of difference which alone affords them any kind of identifiability and identity.”

“Things are what they are only by bearing the trace of what they are not. It flows from this insight that thinking itself is always caught up in webs or weaves of traces, and that it needs to engage with those traces if it is going to be able to think at all.”

“That engagement involves, Derrida makes clear, alongside a question of language, a question of temporality and a question of the relation to the other. For short, we can say that this means thinking proceeds essentially by reading.”

“But just because of the trace-structure, reading can no longer be conceived as retrieving a content (a signified, in the structuralist jargon) from the text being read, and must be thought of quite differently.”

“The Grammatology is also a meticulous ongoing “methodological” reflection on what it is doing as it reads in this different way.”

“By thinking and reading in this way, we are always transgressing the limits of language itself. Once signifieds and referents are identifiable only through the trace-structure, then language has neither inside nor outside: everything in general is what it is only through indefinite referrals to other “things,” which themselves refer on again.”

“Experience in general is differential, made possible by the trace that cannot itself be directly experienced.”

“Being is trace-being.”

“This is not a claim merely about language, however important language remains. It would be tempting to say it is an ontological claim, except that the trace, being no thing or object at all, cannot be held within the terms of ontology (something that has been conveniently forgotten by many more recent “realisms”), whence Derrida’s later half-serious proposal of a hauntology.”

“Not only “revised,” but “newly revised,” hot off the presses, eager to be an event all over again. But anniversaries are complex and often embarrassing events, and this one is no exception: at least in all that is new in it, the new edition is in fact a big disappointment. Far from enhancing Derrida’s book or even reflecting the progress that has been made in understanding deconstruction since 1976, the Introduction, the Afterword, and — most importantly — the revisions to the translation all represent significant steps backward.”

“Perhaps the Press imagined no harm could possibly come from associating Butler’s name with Derrida and Spivak. Whatever the motive, and whatever sequence of editorial oversights one can only imagine followed from it, the decision has produced an unfortunate result: the added Introduction is, as a matter of fact, riddled with vagueness, inaccuracies, misunderstandings, and plain errors. It does Spivak’s (and, more importantly, Derrida’s) work a real disservice, badly scrambling in advance the access a new generation of readers might otherwise have had to Derrida’s book. Luckily for such new readers, perhaps, the Introduction is very hard to follow, and is perhaps most likely to be skipped in favor of Spivak’s original Preface or (better still) Derrida’s own text.”

“These specific problems in the account of Saussure aside (there are many more), the root cause of Butler’s difficulties in the Introduction seems to be that she shares the widespread misapprehension — that 40 years really might have put to rest — that Derrida is essentially talking about discourse when he uses terms like “writing” or “text,” or even that he is proposing a philosophy of language in the form of a “grammatology.””

“Maybe when the book was first published and the general haze of structuralism and post-structuralism was harder to see through it seemed as though Derrida could have been talking about nothing else. But the book is pretty clear from the outset that it is taking a certain “inflation” of language or sign-talk (“inflation itself”) as an object of suspicion and, indeed, of deconstruction, and that it is primarily concerned to bring out the conditions of impossibility of any grammatology.”

“However dense the comments on Heidegger in the Grammatology (clarified recently by publication of Derrida’s 1964-5 seminar), and however difficult the pages about the trace in the Saussure chapter may remain, Derrida is explicit that the thought of the trace breaks down not only the idea that language is made up of signs (which might be a good reason to look to Frege and analytic philosophy, or perhaps Chomskyan linguistics rather than structuralism, but no more than that), but also the idea that “language” can be thought of as set over against something else (a “world” of “things” or “objects” or “referents”).”

“Derrida is rather clearly and energetically deconstructing, and certainly not endorsing, any such view of language and its others. Différance does not primarily emerge because of a delay between a referent and a discourse about that referent, as Butler suggests, but affects the very definitions of referent and discourse.”

“Already in the opening chapter of the book Derrida writes, not merely of the relationship of speech and writing but indeed of language in general and writing, that “the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language.””

“The claim is that the apparently unlimited extension or inflation of the concepts of language and writing, initially conceived logocentrically as the transport of a meaning ideally separable from the means of that transport, leads to an overflow exceeding language in anything like its “normal” senses, and exceeding by the same token the predicates (“human,” “intentional,” “meaningful,” and so on) that have traditionally been tied to that concept.”

“Writing or text in Derrida’s sense is not discourse or any other recognizable determination of language, but the beginning of the in-determination of language into the absolute generality of the trace-structure.”

“This is what commits him to the still widely misunderstood claims that the trace has to be thought “before” distinctions such as those between man and world, nature and culture, human and animal, being and beings, life and death, and even animate and inanimate. Butler’s essentially Foucaldian understanding of language as discourse — however interesting it might be on its own account and within its limits — will always fall short of the thought of the trace.”

“At a crucial and difficult moment in the account of the trace from the Saussure chapter, Derrida writes the following in his original French: “On ne peut penser la trace instituée sans penser la rétention de la différence dans une structure de renvoi où la différence apparaît comme telle et permet ainsi une certaine liberté de variation entre les termes pleins” (De la grammatologie, my italics). “Retention of difference in a structure of reference,” as Spivak translates the italicized phrase in both editions. There might be good reason to translate renvoi here not as “reference,” but as “referral,” if only to avoid the specific sense that “reference” has in the philosophy of language, where it is in any case ambiguous between the action or process of referring to something, and the something thus referred to.”

“Derrida’s renvoi is not yet reference in either of these senses (for which French would happily use référence), in that the whole point of the différance view of language is that — like the famous letter that always might not arrive and that, even when it does, remains haunted by the possibility of its non-arrival — it never does really arrive at either signified or referent (and to that extent is not made up of signs, and indeed not even of signifiers, at all).”

“Referral refers on and refers on again, endlessly. A trace is always the trace of a trace. Renvoi never winds up in reference — it is precisely the différance of reference, so it would probably be best to use the plausible term “referral” here.”

“Regret that Spivak did not change this particular translation from one edition to the next leads one to wonder what did in fact get changed.”

“Of these three versions, one has to say that the one that appears in the body of the newly revised edition is, by some distance, the least satisfactory. “Solliciter” is something of a signature term of Derrida’s, and, as the recently-published 1964-5 seminar on Heidegger confirms, is closely related to the thought of deconstruction itself.”

“In that seminar, which of course Spivak could not have known when first translating the book (though at a pinch she might have seen the French edition published in the Fall of 2013 before writing her Afterword), Derrida sometimes uses “solliciter” to capture the Heideggerian sense of Destruktion.”

“But he had also used it, and thematized it quite explicitly, in texts Spivak certainly had read when she wrote her initial Translator’s Preface, such as the essay “Force et signification” that opens L’écriture et la différence, and the famous essay “La différance” that opens Marges.”

“Alan Bass (whose translations slightly postdate Spivak’s original Grammatology, and might themselves be due for some revision one day) chooses to keep the cognate terms (“solicit,” “solicitation”), with a note to the common etymology it shares with the French, which Derrida himself regularly glosses as a shaking movement (citare) of the whole (sollus) or the totality, and this is a decision followed by the translator of the 1964-5 seminar.”

“(Spivak herself, elsewhere in the new edition, maintains the 1976 translation of sollicitation as “undoing,” with a translator’s note duly referring to Writing and Difference, but then changes that earlier “undoing” to “shaking up” on the very next page, and quotes this modified version in the Afterword.)”

“So, by the standard of Derrida’s own descriptions, the new edition’s “interested in” in the passage Butler highlights in its earlier version hardly begins to capture what is at stake here. Nor, quite, does the “destroy” of the first edition’s version of this passage, which would need to be more explicitly linked to Heideggerian Destruktion for the reader to grasp the rather specialized sense here.”

“But what seems clear in all this confusion is that, of the three different versions offered in this volume, it is the last, of entirely indeterminate status, from the Afterword, that is the most accurate, at least as regards this sentence.”