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I would now like to turn to Derrida's theory of writing to further the considerations of chapter one. Like madness, writing is othered in the logocentric tradition. It is debased in opposition to the voice. Derrida's reading of Husserl's Logical Investigations demonstrates this repressive hierarchy.
Husserl divides the sign into expression and indication. Indication expresses nothing, but signifies. This signification can be natural, as in smoke indicating fire, or can be artificial, like writing. Indication is thus removed from truth and meaning by Husserl. As Derrida writes in Speech and Phenomena: 'The indicative sign falls outside the content of absolute ideal objectivity, that is, outside truth'(1). Meaning is reserved for the ideality of the voice, of expression. Derrida writes, 'Communication itself is for Husserl a stratum extrinsic to expression'(2). Pure expression, for Husserl, is evident in isolated mental life, in internal soliloquy. The voice is privileged for its approximation to the mind, the manifestation of the logos. This is evident in the voice as auto affection. The spoken signifier is erased in favour of the fully heard, fully understood, self present signified.
Derrida's criticism of Husserl and of the voice centres on the necessity for signs. He writes, 'All speech inasmuch as it is engaged in communication and manifests lived experience operates as indication'(3). For Derrida the voice cannot signify without signification. This means that the ideality of the voice, or expression, is not prior to the social structure of language. Writing is a better example of representation without ideality, but because the logocentric tradition needs ideality as presence, writing is debased.
Writing is devalued as the signifier of a signifier. It is at two removes from the ideality of the mind, as it is the signifier of speech. For Vincent B. Leitch, 'The full presence of the voice is valued over the mute signs of writing'(4). The voice is presence. The speaker is present to the hearer, as opposed to the absence of the writer to reader. Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: '[I]n every case, the voice is closest to the signified'(5). The signified is situated in the mind, as the attainment of meaning, logos. The voice guarantees the connection between the signifier and signified with presence. This has resulted in the exteriorisation of writing, from meaning, presence and the logos. As Mark Krupnick writes, 'The materiality of the signifier is swallowed up in the identity of the signified'(6). Why is writing reduced to this status of unimportance?
Writing is more than the material type. Christopher Norris believes it is 'the name of whatever escapes, unsettles or complicates the project of a reading trained up on ... commonplace assumptions'(7). In Plato's Pharmacy Derrida considers how Plato deals with the problem of writing. Writing is a problem because it is a representation of absence. Absence would not challenge the full presence of the logos if it was distinctly separated. Derrida highlights the myth of writing Plato uses, where King Thamus sees the problem of writing as not aiding memory, but causing forgetfulness, as people become dependent on artificial props to natural memory. Writing is thus a Pharmakon, a poison and a cure. Derrida writes, 'Plato thinks of writing, and tries to comprehend it, to dominate it, on the basis of opposition as such'(8). This opposition is of voice/writing, where writing is a sign of the voice. This is inherent in the phonocentrism of alphabetised writing.
Ethnocentric in nature, the privilege of alphabetised writing displays the attempt to erase writing before the phone it signifies. This does not take place. There is no phonetic alphabet, simply because of the rules of grammar and spacing, not present in the voice. Also, in the name of the arbitrariness of the sign, there can be no 'natural' representation, as in writing of the voice. Derrida writes in Differance: 'If, then, there is no purely phonetic writing, it is because there is no purely phonetic phone'(9). There is neither a pure writing nor a pure phone because difference, which is denied by identity, is prior to conceptualisation.
Difference is the inauguration of the trace, which allows articulation. This derives from Saussure. Jonathan Culler writes, 'Identity is wholly a function of differences within a system'(10). Saussure believes in no positive terms, meaning concepts are only identified by their difference to everything else. For Saussure the difference is resolved in the social structure of language. The signifier can never be separated from the signified, as meaning is always attained. Derrida believes that meaning is not singular, but subject to deferral. This is because the difference at the origin is also the trace. The signifier never attains the signified, as meaning's possibilities are always plural. The trace is all differences. Meaning is not totalised because of the reliance on difference, that at the origin, which is then not the origin, one concept needs its other to exist. The colours black and white on a chess board would be meaningless without both. Therefore, the mark, the trace of the absent other is present in the same. And this is necessary. Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: 'Without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear'(11). Meaning is therefore never fully self present, as it relies on the absence of the other. This trace of absence in the present undermines totalizsed meaning, and is therefore repressed. This is why writing, which represents this absence inherent in presence, is repressed in the hierarchy voice/writing.
In Of Grammatology Derrida writes, 'There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible'(12). The transcendental signified is the concept which logocentrism needs to halt the play of difference, and to contain the trace. Derrida's meditation on the transcendental signified is exemplified in Structure, Sign and Play. In it he writes, 'The centre, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality'(13). The centre is unique, it is distinct from the play of signification which it totalises. This centre can be God, consciousness, ideality (as in Husserl's phenomenology), the logos, author, father, phallus. Here meaning is resolved by appeal to absolute intention. If the intention is singular, so is the meaning. The deferral from signifier to signified is therefore dissolved. Totalised meaning is attained. Yet there is a paradox. The centre is external to the signification, is above its movement. If the transcendental signified is external its existence can have no bearing on the signification. Its influence is arbitrary. If the centre is internal, then it is not exempt from the play of signification, from difference and deferral. It is just another sign. This is the paradox.
As demonstrated above, nothing is self present. This further undermines the belief in a transcendental signified. Derrida believes the centre is replaced throughout history. As knowledge changes, so does the centre of discourse. God was the centre displaced by man. If the centre can change, it is not total, present, privileged. Thus, Derrida writes, 'The centre is not the centre'(14).
There has always been a 'good' writing. This is writing that acknowledges its lesser status, and appeals to the transcendental signified, the author, to retain its meaning and presence. There is reference to God as author to the great book of nature, to Plato's writing on the soul. As Norris writes, 'In Plato ... there is a 'good' writing, a figurative writing-in-the-soul, which leads back to truth and has nothing in common with its bad literal counterpart'(15). For writing to escape its debasement it must abjure all claims to independence and accept the divine authority of the logos. Thus it is no threat to the established order. For Derrida there is a conflict between this writing and the actuality of writing. From Of Grammatology: 'The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing'(16). The book and the author, both end the play of difference inherent in writing.
In Derrida's Force and Signification he speaks of an attempt-to-write. This is the writing that conforms to the logos. It is 'indeed the acknowledgement of pure language, the responsibility confronting the vocation of 'pure' speech which, once understood, constitutes the writer as such'(17). Opposed to this is the will-to-write, of which he states, 'The will to write reawakens the wilful sense of the will; freedom'(18). Derrida believes this will-to-write must overcome all the claims of logocentrism. It must deny all attempts to the totality of meaning, the transcendental signified. It must not attempt to express the universe, as this is structuralist. It must give no meaning prior to the workings of language, the trap of ideality. To overcome this is to allow the free play of meaning, which invades binary and deconstructs logocentrism. Derrida writes, 'To write is ... to know that through writing, through the extremities of style, the best will not necessarily transpire'(19), as the 'best' signifies a totalism. Writing is a style. This style alone can pursue logocentrism to its extremities, where its logic collapses and monologic reason reflects back on itself its own impossibility.
In Spurs Derrida examines 'the question of style'(20), which is 'launching a new phase in the process of deconstructive (i.e. affirmative) interpretation'(21). The style is affirmation. Affirmation arises because of the lack of centre, the destruction of the transcendental signified. Reduction to the level of play extends meaning infinitely. This is not because of the infinity of possibility in language, but like a circle, without beginning or end, the trace is infinitised. It is the end of the book and the beginning of writing.
In Implications Derrida says, 'There is no end of the book and no beginning of writing'(22). Conforming to his criticism of Madness and Civilisation, all we have is the logocentric concepts of metaphysics, enshrined in language. There is no outside. Whatever we state to deconstruct reinforces its original status. All that can be done is the demonstration of the shortcomings and paradoxes of logocentrism. This belief is also congruent to Saussure's social compact of language. It resists the will of the individual. Nothing outside it is articulable, as it is itself is the process of articulation. Deconstruction allows no outside to the history of metaphysics. As Derrida writes, 'The enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work'(23). It is a limited breakthrough always reincorporated in the logocentric model.
Richard Kearney in Modern Movements in European Philosophy suggests that deconstruction 'endeavours to overcome the conventional division between philosophical and aesthetic discourse'(24). This is a theme in his interview with Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Other. Derrida posits a non-site for the deconstruction of the metaphysical inheritance. On considering whether literature could provide this non-site Derrida answers that it 'produces and presents itself as alienated from itself, at a remove, at a distance. This distance provides the necessary free space from which to interrogate philosophy anew'(25). Despite this, Derrida believes the limits of literature are viewed as the same limits as philosophy, placing literature in the logocentric inheritance. Contrary to this, though, is literature's interrogation of the margins through the extremities of style discussed. The contamination of philosophy by literature may then open the play of meaning, because in itself, philosophy/literature is perhaps one of the founding binaries of logocentric discourse.
Derrida states, 'Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the 'other' of language'(26). Deconstruction is the desire to attain the other, but this is the search for the constantly deferred. Derrida believes that the impossibility of deconstruction is unfortunate. But, he states, 'The fact that I declare it "unfortunate" that I do not personally feel inspired may be a signal that deep down I still hope'(27). Is deconstruction an impossibility? In 'literature', trying to avoid a homogenisation, through the representation of a will-to-write, the limits are interrogated and margins are subverted. This happens in writing. It is not an impossibility, for to say so would to assert accepted binary thought, which is negation. Could the literary style, in its deconstructive sense, so long implicitly devalued by the logos, write the story of otherness? Madness is opposed, to and by reason, but so is writing. The truth of madness is expressed by the nontruth of writing. Moments of ambiguity, that which subverts Saussure's social contract of writing, displace meaning infinitely. To risk writing is to risk nonmeaning. Deconstructive writing is madness. It communicates nothing, yet overcomes nihilism with its affirmation of its own nontruth.
part three