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).
Also, is anyone good at making some kind of visual graph. I can imagine an interesting graph of the traditional idea of speech. Derrida mentions the example of Aristotle, how one first has a thought, then the thought is put into words via speech and then, via a third degree, writing comes in to record speech, speech here being more closer to the original thought than writing.
ReplyDeleteAlexandra also mentioned Plato. There you have the idea of the divine truth, through which then the philosopher thinks, which then is put into words and which finally is put down into writing. Again, writing is a kind of degeneration from the original Idea which is absolute.
An interesting graph could be made of this process and would probably be great for future lessons on the book.
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DeleteP.S.
ReplyDeleteAlexandra also mentioned the example of Socrates. Philosophers have always held as significance the idea that Socrates never wrote anything. His form of philosophy (peripatetic) involved travelling from place to place having conversations with others. Through these conversations the philosopher and his interlocutors would tease out Truth. This falls in line with speech-centered ("phonocentrism" is Derrida's term) tradition. This implies that a true philosophical dialogue occurs more naturally through conversation, through the presence of the people conversing and not through writing, which substitutes for that person which is not there.
Mike, this looks great!! Do you think we might add Wittgenstein to the agenda? I'm interested by this, in the post, attributed to Wittgenstein (who I have never read): "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world."
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be an embedded in this discussion an idea that(written) language is insufficient to carry truth? But Wittgenstein's words, which stand within a metaphor, convey (to me) a sense that the world is unlimited because language exceeds limitation. I know that some schools of thought (I don't remember whose) think of metaphor, and allegory, in terms of slippage--there seems to be some knowledge that slips through the cracks in signification.
However, as a reader of literature, the magical thing about language is its ability to signify beyond the sign/signifier. And while humans might be limited in their use of language (uh oh human supremacy!), maybe the possiblity of meaning is born of this impossibility to directly convey all the info you want without "losing" any of it.
I guess I am interested in seeing theories that look at language in terms of creative excess rather than in (postmodern?) terms of slippage and the failure to make meaning...
I'm glad you mentioned Wittgenstein. Pedro wants us to eventually get around to "Philosophical Investigations" and discuss his idea of "language-games" (Sprachspiel) which very much has to do not only with Derrida but with Lyotard as well. What does everyone think? I'm in.
DeleteI really like a lot your comment on the distinction between slippage and creative excess, between language's inherit failure to convey a unified meaning and the possibility for meaning to generate a plurality of suggestions with creative potential.
I think this distinction is key for evaluating Derrida and I haven't thought about it quite that clearly. I think the creative excess side of Derrida is something people love him for, but it's the implications of communication, and the impossibility for Derrida for creating communities in common through that communication, that makes me give pause (considering just that slippage you refer to). I hope to bring this up next time!