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.