Where the Ways Part--Derrida and Linguistic/Analytic Philosophy

Lately I've been wrestling with the distinction between Derrida's deconstructive project and the methods and concerns of analytic philosophy. Knowing just where they part ways is important to getting at what is being done in Derrida's writings. Limited Inc. (1988) is Derrida's major work which debates and confronts analytic philosophy head-on, especially the philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle.

I'll be reading this over the break, but I leave you with a transcription I made of Bryan Magee's introduction to lingustic philosophy for his interview of Bernard Williams on "The Spell of Linguistic Philosophy." It's quite good and points to some similarities between its presuppositions and deconstruction's.

"Ever since Socrates, philosophers have tended to ask questions like "what is truth?" or "what is beauty?" or "what is justice?" on the assumptions that each of these words stands for something, perhaps an invisible or abstract something, but anyway something that has its own existence independently of how the words are used. It was as if the philosophers were trying to pierce through the questions, through the language to some non-linguistic reality that stood behind the words. Now, the linguistic philosopher came along and said that this was a profound error, an error once more that leads us into other serious mistakes in our thinking. There are, they said, no entities for which these words stand. Language is a human creation. We invented the words and we determine their use. Understanding what a word means is nothing more nor less then knowing how to use it. So, take a notion like "truth". When you fully understand how to use the word "truth" correctly and its associate words like "true" "truthfulness" and so on, then you fully understand its meaning. This meaning simply is the sum total of the word's possible uses, not some incorporeal entity that exists in some abstract realm. From this, linguistic philosophers went on to say that the only satisfactory way to analyze the categories of human thought, or the concepts through in which we try to come to terms with the world, or communicate with each other, is by investigating how they are used and doing linguistic philosophy consists in carrying out such investigations. In fact, the most famous book in linguistic philosophy is called Philosophic Investigations by Wittgenstein."

More to come after finals.

Inaugurations: A Case Study in Deconstruction

A few fortuitous signs of significance occurred on my last blog. I used the word "inauguration" as a title to begin my blog, out of a whim.

I thought an investigation into the concept of inauguration would help us think about Derrida's project of deconstruction. Can we use this concept as a case study? I hope this blog becomes an opportunity to elucidate ways in which we can use and apply a deconstructionist methodology.

The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that "inauguration" comes from the Latin inaugurationem, "consecration, installment under good omens," which is a noun of action from the stem of inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds; consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" see in- + augurare "to act as an augur, predict".
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inauguration&allowed_in_frame=0

Out of complete chance, I randomly (fortuitously) picked for my blog's designs a flight of birds that you can see on the top-right portion of my blog. [What was Aristotle's words for luck and chance in his Physics?]

As Wikipedia explains (scholarly source that it is), in the classical world an augur was a priest who would interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds. The ceremony was known as "taking the auspices," and the founding of a city only took place only after the taking the auspices. In this article they quote Livy's description of a ritual of inauguration for king Numa Pompilius. "The augur asks Jupiter: "Si fas est (i.e. if it is divine justice to do this)... send me a certain signum (sign)", then the augur listed the auspicia he wanted to see coming."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur

I merely note the importance of the signum here.

I think this relates directly to acts of reading which are encouraged by Derrida. It relates to the demands we make on signs and texts and the crucial function of the future/l'avenir for establishing expectations and responsi[a]bilities (I could not help this coinage--see "exergue") with texts.

What do we expect from this reading group? What are its auspices? I believe each of us has his or her own auspices for what is to come about from this group. The curious thing about reading groups is that it always entails discussing a text that is already read. But it is through our contact with the Other, with our companions, and their differences of thought, that we expect to see a change happen to the text. Who is that Other who will come to lift meaning out of obscurity. In the Catholic tradition, the Bible as a authority is at an equal authority with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, i.e., with its teaching. Protestantism functions to break out of this authority, granting subjectivity (the Self) authority in dredging up meaning from the Book. I think for Derrida it's not through the Self that we discover meaning in a text; rather, it is through the Other.

Derrida once made a distinction (at the beginning of the documentary Derrida) between the future and l'avenir.

"In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and "l'avenir." The future is that which--tomorrow, later, next century--will be. There's a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it's l'avenir in that it's the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to forsee their arrival."

(p. 53 of screenplay of the film, published as Screenplay and Essays on the Film Derrida by Gil Kofman).

In a conference Derrida once gave marking the inauguration of the Doctoral philosophy program at Villanova University (transcript found in Deconstruction in a Nutshell), Derrida explains the implications of "inauguration":

"Inauguration is the theme today. Inauguration is a "yes." I say "yes" as a starting point. Nothing precedes the "yes." The "yes" is the moment of institution, of the origin; it is absolutely originary. But when you say "yes," you imply that in the next moment you will have to confirm the "yes" by a second "yes." When I say "yes," I immediately say "yes, yes." I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second, and then tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow. That means that a "yes" immediately duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say "yes" without saying "yes, yes." That implies memory in that promise. I promise to keep the memory of the first "yes." In a wedding, for instance, or in a promise, when you say "yes, I agree," "I will," you imply "I will say 'I will' tomorrow," and "I will confirm my promise"; otherwise there is no promise. That means that the "yes" keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning, and that is the way traditions work. If, tomorrow, you do not confirm that today you have founded your program, there will not have been any inauguration. Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now, you will know whether today there has been an inauguration. We do not know that yet. We pretend that today we are inaugurating something. But who knows? We will see."

(p. 27)

Inauguration is something that has to be reinvented everyday, perhaps at every moment. We don't know how this inauguration of this reading group will go. We'll see. Time will tell. Much depends on the promises we make as readers and the memory of those promises.
--mg

Libations/Inaugurations

March 7th, 2013

Pedro, Alexandra and I met up at 7.30pm at Woodstocks to go over Derrida's Of Grammatology. Prof. Juan Pablo Lupi was there giving a pizza party to the Spanish Department and later joined in the conversation.

I tried feebly to put Of Grammatology (now OG) in a nutshell:
"Basically it works through the binary and hierarchy of speech/writing. Throughout Western philosophy, speech had been privileged over writing because speech was seen as implying the person's presence. Writing implies the absence of the person delivering his/her speech. Two interesting points should be added:

• Derrida is making a historical argument. He will not imply that he privileges writing over speech just because that's how it always has been. Rather, he emphasizes that at this epoch, at the moment that he is writing, there has been a shift in the privileging of writing over speech which Western philosophy has not recognized. (How did that come about? Is it because of technological changes? One of OG's most elusive aporias.)
• By working through the speech/writing binary, Derrida implies how this somehow founds or influences other binaries. (For Derrida, it should be noted, binaries always imply a privileging of one part of a binary over the other [what page can we find this at--source?] (e.g. light/dark, male/female, speech/writing). Thus, logocentrism (the privileging of the logos in language) also founds an ethnocentrism. What are some of the political consequences of logocentrism?"

Lupi stepped in and provided some solid ground in which to situate Derrida's thought. Lupi argued that Derrida's philosophy is a transcendental philosophy, in the tradition of Emmanuel Kant's philosophy. Not to be confused with a philosophy of transcendence, transcendental philosophy investigates the conditions of the possibility of knowing something. It seeks to put limits and criticized the grounds of our metaphysical presuppositions (or our a priori judgments) [I can't contribute further to explicating transcendental philosophy but this is a further avenue to explore.]

Another way he tried to ground Derrida is to situate his works within his critique of Husserl and phenomenology. Derrida's first works were on Husserl. It is in OG's critique of phenomenology (i.e. Husserl and Heidegger) via it's theory of writing that provided one of the most enduring blows to the idea that the category of experience is something that can be investigated without the use of language. Lupi also mentioned the significance of Husserl's use of the concept of bracketing which is actually a concept that influences Derrida's own method.

Within a discussion of Derrida's intervention into metaphysics, Alexandra brought up an interesting point of friction in Derrida's philosophy and Deleuze's. It seems as if Derrida's stuck critiquing concepts at the level of textuality, investing himself in language-based discussions surrounding binaries. In Derrida's famous phrase il n'y a pas de hors-texte (translated at times as "there is no outside to the text") there is expressed the implication that we can never escape the conditions of textuality, that as Wittgenstein states "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world". Deleuze, on the other hand, identifies himself as a metaphysician. To put it crudely, there are indeed bodies outside of textuality that philosophy must work to creatively conceptualize. But I say this with some risk of making Derrida's arguments superficial--he is after all quite interested in justice and human rights. 

We soon found that an investigation into the differences between Deleuze and Derrida's philosophy can provide an interesting problematic through which we can build our knowledge of current debates in philosophy.

Some questions we can ask:

• How is Derrida's deconstructionist project in conflict with Deleuze's notion of metaphysics?
• How do both thinkers problematize the notion of community and how they can help us think through ways of re-imagining the concept of community for democratic political action?

I write this by way of introduction. I hope we can develop more questions and use this space to expose our own concerns with the texts that we've read. If I hadn't drank so much I'm sure I would remember more. Right now, I can only give faint traces of our presence...(ba-dum ching).