Deconstruction – Derrida

RELATED TERMS: Heidegger;

“Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative.” (Derrida, 2007: 23)

1 Destruktion, Deconstruction, (De)Construction and Deconstructionism

It is not possible to use the word ‘deconstruction’, which itself is a value or stands for a certain set of values in terms of academic inquiry, without evoking a chain of associations, for example, to German philosophy of the early 20th century, French philosophy of the mid-20th century, the American re-articulation of these philosophical traditions in the latter part of the 20th century and the controversies surrounding the term that subsequently arose through “the American invention of French theory” (Cusset, 2008: xiv).

In respect of this historical chain of associations and differentiations, for example, Eve Tabor Bannet (1993) notes that there is a significant difference between (de)construction and deconstruction. Socio-historically, this can be understood as a difference of generation, geo-cultural location and political context. Grasped theoretically, (de)construction may be taken as a redeployment of deconstruction for regenerative work. Deconstruction itself, for Bannet (1993: 50), “was a transatlantic phenomenon issuing from Derrida’s kabbalistic revisions of Heidegger in the late ’60s and early ’70s in direct or indirect response to an international mood of rebellion against the ‘system’.” This is the domain of “the American invention of French theory”.

(De)construction, on the other hand, is a specifically French phenomenon of the later 1970s and 1980s, involving a more or less cohesive group of intellectuals that included Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. Its impetus was to establish why a return to the hierarchical, humanist, man-centered status quo ante is not acceptable.

One way of characterising this mode of (de)construction would be to see it as deconstruction affirming that truth and knowledge can again be born(e) to language and to Man, as long as it is clear that the terms truth, knowledge, language, Man and affirmation, are to be understood other-wise. To grasp this mode of the ‘other-wise’, Bannet (1993: 52) avows: 

“Wholly Other than historical truths or knowledge or language, that which infinitely exceeds them repeatedly enters history, language and the finite mind of man, but not in the ways we have come to expect.”

That which is wholly other than history and man is a recurrent actant-visitant. It may be characterised as a Geist, ghost, guest or spirit which has always already come through man and through language and which, when (re)called, can always, eternally, return to man and to language again.

In sounding the possibility of such return, Bannet argues, French (de)constructive texts of the late 1970s and 1980s deconstruct the modern, which is to say, marxist and capitalist, figure of man as a Worker or producer of Works, as well as the postmodern figure of man as a subjected subject.

Such textualised thinking may also lead to a ‘beyond’ of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis through a dramatisation of the encounter between the analyst and the analysand, which is at the heart of the psychoanalytic experience for Lacan. They do so, as Bannet describes,

“in a way which both confirms the possibility of hearing the incohate otherness of the subject who is ‘no-one’ sending his insistent message through an alien symbolic order, and completely revises what it means to be a subject, to be no-one, to send a message, to speak through language, to hear and to encounter. And these revisions, in turn, change what it means to write and to read that which comes to us through language from an other.”

Similarly, as Derrida (1990b: 75-76) himself comments, there is a distinction between “deconstruction” and “deconstructionism”. He writes,

“I would say that even on the side where one generally tries to situate ” ‘deconstruction’ ” (quotation marks within quotation marks), even there, “deconstructionists” and “deconstructionism” represent an effort to reappropriate, tame, normalize this writing in order to reconstitute a new “theory” – “deconstructionism” with its method and rules, its criteria of distinction between use and mention, the seriousness of its discipline and of its institutions, etc. This distinction between, on the one hand, deconstruction or deconstructions, the effects or processes of deconstruction, and, on the other hand, the theorems or theoretical reappropriations of “deconstructionism”, this distinction is a structural, not a personal one.” 

Later in the same essay, he writes,

” … one assertion, one statement, a true one, would be, and I would subscribe to it: Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth.” (Derrida, 1990b: 85)

Continuing with his clarification of the limitations of deconstructionism, using the metaphor of the jetty and contrasting two senses of the term, one a destabilising jetty (a turbulence), the other a stabilising jetty (a structure), Derrida (1990b: 88-89) argues that even though deconstructionism mainly developed in the context of literary studies, concerned with the difficulty of delimiting a field or an essence of literature, nevertheless it would be incorrect to say that the elements in deconstructionism which may sometimes be stabilising and normalising with regards to the deconstructive jetty stem from the fact that deconstructionism developed in the space of literary studies. To do so would give the impression, one way or another, that deconstruction gives in to formalism or aestheticism, to a textualism which would confuse text with discourse, page/book with the world and society or history with the library.

2 Destruktion

Although the term deconstruction is most readily associated with Jacques Derrida, his term is a re-working of Heidegger’s Destruktion. Thomson (2000: 323) explains that Derrida originally coined the term deconstruction as a translation of Heidegger’s Abbau, with the senses of quarrying, dismantling, or decomposing. Abbau is a synonym for Destruktion which Heidegger later hyphenated and employed in order to stress that Destruktion is not merely a negative act, a Zerstörung, but should be understood strictly as de-struere. In Latin, struere means to lay, pile, or build. Ab-bauen, as a synonym for Destruktion, then, quite literally means un-building or de-construction.

In addition, as Derrida (1990a) notes, deconstruction also has a critical relation to Walter Benjamin’s ‘destruction’. As will become clear, and as Wohlfarth (1978) indicates in a discussion of Benjamin’s short text, “The Destructive Character”, it is the paradoxical dynamics of destruction, or de- and re-structuring, that is of interest, in relation to creation, on the one hand, and to annihilation, on the other.

In his discussion of another Benjamin text, “Critique of Violence”, Derrida points out that a thematic of destruction was widespread in the years between the first and second world wars (Derrida, 1990a: 977). So, while Destruktion is a conceptual-symbolic theme, interlinking destruction, creation, nihilism and violence, it is also a temporal-historical theme, of particular relevance in the 1920s and 1930s and, it could be argued, in the period from 2007 onwards (until 2013 and beyond): the Great Recession re-marking the Great Depression (Lanchester, 2013).

Such marking and re-marking is both theme and process: Destruktion; de-construction; re-construction.

For Heidegger, the process of Destruktion takes place through a reading of the history of philosophy. By Destruktion, according to Gelven (1989: 35), Heidegger does not mean that he is going to destroy or dispel the history of philosophy, but to ‘overcome’ it through a creative and unorthodox reading or interpretation of the figures within the history of philosophy, such as Plato, Kant and Nietzsche.

De Bleekere (2007) contends that, through a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s project ‘Umwertung aller Werte’, Heidegger was led to argue for ‘eine Destruktion’ of the metaphysical ontology in Sein und Zeit. Since divine origin could no longer be considered as the ultimate foundation of authentic or valuable knowledge, the existence of Dasein received the status of originality.

Through Destruktion, Heidegger intends to engage past thinkers in a dialogue about the meaning of Being, a question by means of which he interrogates those authors, not one that he simply finds in their work. Heidegger sees his task as breaking free from the historical accretions that have built up around the thinking about Being that those thinkers performed.

This process entails some ‘violence’, i.e. the force used by the interpreter to chip away the accretions and to make clear or visible what the past thinker had said which was relevant to the present concern but has become obscured and possibly calcified, metaphorically speaking. For Heidegger, then, Destruktion is a creative process which, paradoxically, both creates original meaning (for the first time) by, in some sense, restoring (lost or corrupted) original meaning.

In this way, Heidegger seeks to wrench from thinkers such as Plato, Kant and Nietzsche insights into the question of Being that no tradition had seen before. Traditions, in Heidegger’s characterisation, freeze, or perhaps petrify, and annihilate the creativity of such seminal figures. Through Destruktion, Heidegger, far from seeking to do away with the history of philosophy, honours it as few other philosophers have done (Gelven, 1989: 37).

At the thematic and conceptual level, Derrida, for a considerable part of his career, pursued a deconstruction of the philosophical tradition in a sense that was close to that of Heidegger (Patton and Protevi, 2003: 5). In explicating Heidegger’s thought, and his own entanglement with it, Derrida argues that Destruktion is a de-construction that clears away and displaces. His use of such terms as trace, graft and pharmakon are attempts to define this process of discovering a supplement at the origin. Thus, the paradoxical double process of creation-through-restoration, or ever receding origination, in Heidegger may be likened to Derrida’s formulation of différance as the supplement at the origin. 

However, as Derrida (2003: 51) himself points out, Heideggerian deconstruction, or Destruktion, did not oppose logocentrism or even logos. It is often, Derrida continues, in the name of a more “originary” reinterpretation of logos that it accomplished the Destruktion of ontology, in the form of an onto-theology. In articulating the differences between his own form of deconstruction and that of Heidegger, Derrida notes that his does not take the objectifying form of a knowledge as diagnosis, and even less of a diagnosis of a diagnosis.

Carlshamre (1986) confirms the divergence between Derrida and Heidegger on Destruktion/deconstruction: 

“Despite the historical connection, … I do not think that much light is cast on Derridean deconstruction by the contemplation of Heideggerian destruction. Derrida does not share Heidegger’s nostalgia for Being, and it is not in Heidegger’s sense that he thinks insight is buried in the tradition.” 

Furthermore, at the temporal, historical and political levels, Derrida’s own deconstruction of Heidegger’s texts seeks to free them from the nostalgia or sentimental pastoralism and nationalism that drew Heidegger towards Nazism. Thereby, it might be argued that Derrida seeks to appropriate Heidegger for the political or cultural left. On this basis, like Sloterdijk, it could be argued that Derrida is not Heideggerian or, if he is, he is a ‘left Heideggerian,’ defined as “someone who uses Heidegger against Heidegger, or who thinks after Heidegger, following him, but also going beyond.” (Mendieta, 2014). Again like Sloterdijk, Derrida has also written extensively on Nietzsche and both may plausibly be named ‘left Nietzscheans’.

In this context, Ferry and Renaut (1990: xv) argue that, “It would be difficult to underestimate … the politically purifying effect on Heidegger’s thought of his translation into a “leftist” intellectual context, most notably in Derrida and Foucault, but also in Lefort and Castoriadis: The great themes of Heidegger’s thought were thus freed from the political connotations that, even in his style, are perceptible to any German reader.”

In the context of understanding Destruction/deconstruction politically, Richard Rorty suggests that post-human philosophers, such as Heidegger and Derrida, hint that new political possibilities, other than simply left versus right, will emerge when it is accepted that language, somehow, exceeds the human: it is ‘language that speaks, not Man’, as Heidegger says in “Der Satz vom Grund” – “The Principle of Reason”. In other words, while humans speak, it is language that lives on or outlives itself, or, to use a problematic formulation, transcends itself. (Viljoen, 2008: 69; Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 456)

In using such phrases as ‘post-human’, Rorty implicitly raises the issue of Enlightenment Humanism, in which human values, organised around the principal theme of Reason, are the centre and the measure of all things. The “post-human” re-contextualises and displaces human centrality onto systemic or networked economies and ecologies of value creation/destruction: what might be called human différance, or inter-subjective inter-action, the in-between.

All of the above considerations, with its emphasis on what might be termed ‘Heideggerian metaphysics’, could be said to form the first phase of Derrida’s endeavour to define ‘deconstruction’, as outlined by Lawlor (2014), discussed below.

3 Derrida on Deconstruction

As already noted, Carlshamre (1986) argues that, while Derrida took the term ‘deconstruction’ from Heidegger’s use of ‘Destruktion’ in Being and Time, there is little value in pursuing this connection too insistently: Derrida does not share Heidegger’s nostalgia for Being; and it is not in Heidegger’s sense that he thinks insight is buried in the Western philosophical tradition.

To get a better sense of what Derrida means by deconstruction, Lawlor (2014) suggests that it is more worthwhile to recall Descartes’s First Meditation. In that text, in seeking a “firm and permanent foundation”, Descartes takes apart the edifice that formed his prior beliefs, in effect ‘de-constructing’ it. Derrida’s work is greatly indebted to traditional transcendental philosophy, which can be said to begin with that Cartesian search for a “firm and permanent foundation.” 

However, with Derrida, the foundation does not found. It is neither fixed nor permanent. It does not form a unified self, the I which thinks, and therefore doubts, and therefore exists, but rather forms a divisible limit between myself and myself-as-other, giving rise to auto-affection as hetero-affection and to an originary-heterogeny: ontogenesis as heterogenesis.

In the course of his writings, Derrida provided many definitions of deconstruction. For example, in The Politics of Friendship (2005: 278), Derrida suggests that the question of friendship could serve as an example or a lead in the two major questions of ‘deconstruction’ which he defines as “the question of the history of concepts and (trivially) so-called textual hegemony, history tout court; and the question of phallogocentrism” which, in this particular text, he is examining in the form of phratrocentrism: the dominance of the notion of the ‘brother’.

Lawlor (2014) examines three clear definitions which, he argues, can now be discerned retrospectively.

The First Definition: Deconstruction and Metaphysics

The first definition comes early in Derrida’s work, outlines of which can be found in Positions (Derrida 1981, 1972: 41-42) and in “Outwork” to Dissemination (Derrida 1981a: 4-6). In this first definition, deconstruction consists in two phases. Deconstruction, in this sense, forms a critique of Platonism, often referred to as ‘metaphysics’ or the Western metaphysical tradition by Derrida, understood as the belief, or ontological claim, that existence is structured in terms of dualistic oppositions, separate substances or forms, and that these oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. existence is structured in terms of binary oppositions.

The first part of the first definition of deconstruction challenges this ontological claim by reversing the Platonistic hierarchies. The primary (Platonic) hierarchies are between the invisible or intelligible and the visible or sensible; between essence and appearance; between the soul and body; between living memory and rote memory; between mnēmē and hypomnēsis; between voice and writing; and between good and evil. These Platonic philosophical oppositions, differends or differences form a closed, agonistic, hierarchical field (Derrida, 1981a: 5).

To clarify deconstruction’s two parts, Lawlor focuses on one specific opposition, that between appearance and essence. In Platonism, essence is more valuable than appearance. In Derridean deconstruction, however, this is reversed: appearance becomes more valuable than essence. Lawlor suggests that at this point the argumentation could be taken in the direction of empiricism, such as, for example, that found in David Hume, to show that all knowledge of what we call essence depends on the experience of what appears. However, this line of argumentation would imply that essence and appearance are not related to one another as separate oppositional poles. Rather, it  shows us instead that essence can be reduced to a variation of appearances, involving the roles of memory and anticipation.

This is a reduction to what be can be called immanence, Lawlor states, which carries the sense of ‘within’ or ‘in’. So, this line of argumentation would conclude that what used to be called ‘essence’ is found in appearance, essence is mixed into appearance. 

On the basis of the reversal of the essence-appearance hierarchy and on the basis of the reduction to immanence, it can be seen that something like a decision, perhaps an impossible decision, must have been made at the beginning of the metaphysical tradition, a decision that instituted the hierarchy of essence-appearance and separated or abstracted essence from appearance. This decision, for Derrida, is what really defines Platonism or what he calls ‘metaphysics’. 

In a second step in the reversal-reduction of Platonism, the previously inferior term must be re-inscribed as the ‘origin’ or ‘resource’ of the opposition and the hierarchy itself. To make this re-inscription or re-definition of appearance work, requires a return to the idea that every appearance or every experience is temporal. In the experience of the present, there is always a small difference between the moment of now-ness and the past and the future. Hume may, indeed, have pre-empted recognition of this small difference when, in the Treatise, he speaks of the idea of relation.

This infinitesimal difference is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but is also a difference that is, as Derrida says, undecidable. When this difference is noticed, it cannot be decided if it is the past or the present that is being experienced or if it is the present or the future that is being experienced. Insofar as the difference is undecidable, it destabilises the original decision that instituted the hierarchy.

After the redefinition of the previously inferior term, Derrida usually changes the term’s orthography, for example, he writes ‘différence’ as ‘différance’ in order to indicate the change in its status. Différance, which is found in appearances when we recognise their temporal nature, refers to the undecidable resource into which metaphysics, i.e Platonism, made an incision in order to make its decision.

Operators like ‘différance’, such as ‘pharmakon’, ‘supplement’, ‘hymen’, ‘gram’, ‘spacing’ and ‘incision’, have a productive and conflictual character for Derrida (1981, 1972: 44).

The second definition: Deconstruction and (In)Decidability

This first definition of deconstruction as two phases, reversal-reduction followed by re-inscription, gives way to the refinement found in the “Force of Law” (Derrida, 1990a). This second definition is less concerned with metaphysics and more concerned with ethics and politics.

In “Force of Law,” Derrida says that deconstruction is practiced in two styles (Derrida, 1990a: 957, 959). These two styles of deconstruction do not correspond to the two phases of the earlier definition of deconstruction. 

One is the genealogical style of deconstruction, which recalls the history of a concept or theme. Earlier in his career, in Of Grammatology, Derrida had laid out, for example, the history of the concept of writing. Now, however, what is at stake is the history of justice. 

The other style is the more formalistic or structural approach to deconstruction, which examines a-historical paradoxes or aporias. In “Force of Law,” Derrida lays out three aporias, although they all seem to be variants of one, an aporia concerning the unstable relation between law/right and justice.

The first aporia concerns the suspension of the rule of law. 

Derrida reasons that to be just or unjust and to exercise justice, one must be free and responsible for one’s actions and decisions. Freedom, Derrida continues, consists in following a rule. However, in the case of justice, a judgment that simply followed the law would only be right, not just. For a decision to be just, not only must a judge follow a rule but also he or she must ‘re-institute’ it, in a new judgment. Hence, a decision aiming at justice, a free decision, is both regulated and unregulated. The law must be conserved while also suspended. 

Each case is other, each decision is different and requires a unique interpretation which no existing coded rule can or ought to guarantee. If a judge programmatically follows a code, he or she is simply a calculating machine. Strict calculation or arbitrariness, one or the other is unjust, but they are both involved. Thus, in the present moment of decision, we cannot say that a judgment, a decision, is just, purely just. For Derrida, the re-institution of the law in a unique decision is a kind of violence since it does not conform perfectly to the instituted codes. The law is always, according to Derrida, founded in violence. The violent re-institution of the law, Derrida concludes, means that justice is impossible.

The second aporia is called “the ghost of the undecidable” by Derrida (1990a: 963).

A decision begins with the initiative to read, to interpret, and even to calculate. However, to make such a decision, one must first of all experience what Derrida calls ‘indecidability’. One must experience that the case, being unique and singular, does not fit the established codes and therefore a decision about it seems to be impossible. The undecidable, for Derrida, is not mere oscillation between two significations. It is the experience of what, though foreign to the calculable and the rule, is still obligated. 

We are obligated, this is a kind of duty, to give oneself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of rules and law. A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision. It would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. Once the ordeal is past, if this ever happens, then the decision has again followed or given itself a rule and is no longer presently just. 

Justice therefore is always to come, it is never present. There is apparently no moment during which a decision could be called presently and fully just. Either it has not followed a rule, hence it is unjust; or it has followed a rule, which has no foundation, which makes it again unjust; or if it did follow a rule, it was calculated and again unjust since it did not respect the singularity of the case. 

This relentless injustice is why the ordeal of the undecidable is never past. It keeps coming back like a phantom, which deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision. Even though justice is impossible and therefore always to come in or from the future, justice is not, for Derrida, a Kantian ideal.

The third aporia is “the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge” (Derrida, 1990a: 967).

In stressing its Greek etymology, Derrida notes that a ‘horizon’ is both the opening and the limit that defines an infinite progress or a period of waiting. Justice, however, even though it is un-presentable, does not wait. A just decision is always required immediately. It cannot furnish itself with unlimited knowledge. The moment of decision itself remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation. The instant of decision is then the moment of madness, acting in the night of non-knowledge and non-rule. 

Once again, we have a moment of irruptive violence. This urgency is why justice has no horizon of expectation, either regulative or messianic. Justice remains an event yet to come. Perhaps one must always say ‘perhaps’ or ‘could-be’ for justice. This ability for justice aims however towards what is impossible.

The third definition: Deconstruction and (Un)Conditionality

The third definition of deconstruction can be found in an essay from 2000 called “Et Cetera.” in which Derrida presents the principle that defines deconstruction.

Derrida explains that each time that he links deconstruction and a particular topic, irrespective of the concept or the theme, this is the prelude to a very singular division that turns this particular topic into, or rather makes appear in this particular topic, an impossibility that becomes its proper and sole possibility. The result is that between this topic as possible and the ‘same’ topic as impossible, there is nothing but a relation of homonymy, a relation which has to be accounted for.

Demonstrations of this process that Derrida has already attempted concern such notions as gift, hospitality and death itself, those demonstrations showing that they can be possible only as impossible, as the im-possible, that is, unconditionally – without condition, without relation, in-dependently.

‘Deconstruction’ is a kind of thinking that never finds itself at the end. Justice is impossible, which is undeniable, perhaps justice is the ‘impossible’. Therefore, it is necessary to make justice possible in countless ways, Lawlor concludes.

Derrida’s Later Work: Deconstruction, Methodology and the Political

Cheah and Guerlac (2009) note that, in his later work, Derrida pursued political and ethical themes. These themes included democracy, responsibility, fraternity, hospitality, forgiveness and sovereignty. In a 2004 interview in L’Humanité, Derrida characterised deconstruction as, “a singular adventure whose gesture depends each time on the situation,” that is, on the context, especially the political context, of the subject’s rootedness in a place and a history. Given this recognition, Derrida further argues that deconstruction, while it may happen in language and in texts, also happens in the world or in history.

For Derrida, the political practices and discourses which focused on the nation-state are being practically deconstructed in the world. This occurs, for example, through the undoing of the distinction between manual and intellectual labour in the late capitalist valorisation of information and communication technologies; or in the generation of virtual realities in the sciences, technologies and media, which render the classical philosophical opposition between act or actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dynamis) untenable.

Thus, events of the world, such as globalisation and post-nationalism, call for deconstructive notions such as absolute hospitality. Questions around absolute hospitality are destabilising but not as the effect of a theoretical speculative subversion. Indeed, they are not primarily questions but, rather, practical, seismic events, where thought becomes act, body and manual experience, that is, thought as Handeln, in Heidegger’s formulation.

It is in response to the deconstruction occurring through the events of the world, such as the deconstructive absolute hospitality called for by globalisation and post-nationalism, that philosophical deconstruction can become an activity that intervenes, as it seeks to understand, explore and exploit the implications of that practical, worldly deconstruction. The need for a deconstruction of concepts such as politics, democracy and friendship, or more particularly the friend-enemy opposition, arises in relation to events in the world, which bring about the changes associated with a certain ‘modernity’ or perhaps ‘postmodernity’, if a conceptual-chronological distinction is to be made between modernity and postmodernity. In short, does postmodernity itself become necessary as a deconstructive notion arising through changes occurring to politics, democracy and friendship as ‘modern’ phenomena?

A further complication here is that those emergent deconstructive notions, such as absolute hospitality, are themselves historical, situated resonses. That is, they may themselves be in the process of being deconstructed by events in the world, notably the ongoing repercussions of the 2008 financial crash, the aftereffects of Covid 19 and the impacts of the energy crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These events are in some respects leading to a re-assertion of nationalism and a set of movements, although not mutually coherent, around anti-globalisation. Such events and movements seek an impossible to return to a prior state of nation-statehood and international relations. In this context, a renewed philosophical deconstruction is called for in order to be able to discuss adequately the contemporary dynamics of nationalism-globalisation. In this emergent flux, the ‘migrant crisis’, as a deconstructive event in relation to ‘citizenship’, is a phenomenon that may requires a philosophical strategy and vocabulary that may incorporate, but somehow surpass or overcome, those of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and deconstruction; or, alternatively, those of speculative realism, new materialism and planetary ecologism.

Added Notes on Deconstruction, 13 January 2024

Derrida and others have sometimes outlined the general strategy of deconstruction as a two-fold movement. For example, Derrida in Positions (1981, 1972), an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, talks of proceeding using a double gesture. In this double writing, there is an overturning of a conceptual hierarchy alongside an irruptive emergence of a new concept. We might add that there would seem to be a third process here, in which the double writing becomes triple in as far as it maintains an interval between the two regimes of non-inverted and inverted conceptuality. This intervening interval does not allow the inverted term to settle onto its own, dominant and dominating, ground. The solicitation, as Derrida calls it, continues to unsettle the old prior hierarchy and the new inverted hierarchy; it unsettles hierarchisation as a grounding process. Nahum Chandler, taking these considerations into account, formulates the general economy or strategy of deconstruction as fourfold, as follows. 

First, this strategy is a methodical ‘solicitation’. As used by Derrida, solicitation suggests a radical questioning of a whole tradition or system of thought. This solicitation is not simply a critique or an interpretation but a thoroughgoing and ongoing critical interpretive engagement. For example, in the context of philosophical hierarchies, this solicitation shakes the grounding by means of which the dominant term borrows its authority. The most powerful institution of this grounding, in Derrida’s Heideggerian influenced formulation, is the determination of being as presence, the ultimate or original ground. This grounding is most systematically elaborated in the tradition of Greek metaphysics, which is inherited in European philosophical discourses. This is the ‘whole’ traditional edifice that must be shaken, Derrida suggests. 

Second, this strategy is a necessary process of “overturning” the systematic and axiological conceptual hierarchies of metaphysics and the philosophical discourses which derive from it. 

Third, this strategy is a systematic ‘reinscription’ of concepts that work according to the exigencies of the metaphysics of presence. This dis-assembling of the presupposition of the simple unity of being provides an opening by means of which to locate the determinations of metaphysics as aspects of a more general question. 

Fourth, this strategy sustains an ‘interval’ between ‘overturning’ and ’reinscription’ through continued ‘solicitation’ of the irruptive emergence of a new way of thinking, of a new ‘concept’ which is at the same time an ‘a-conceptual concept’ or, we might say, an ‘ungrounded’ concept. This new thinking, while acknowledging its dependence on metaphysics, radically challenges metaphysics, by continually displacing the recuperative operation of metaphysics which restores being as self-presence and as ultimate ground, for example, as this functions in the Hegelian dialectical operation of Aufhebung.

References

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