10 - Conclusion(s)

Summary

In this concluding chapter, I would like to clarify the results of this study, in particular the characterisation of deconstruction as a ‘negative differential ontology’, hopefully clearing up what I do not mean by this formulation. First, given that Derrida equates deconstruction with affirmation – ‘launching a new phase in the process of deconstructive (i.e. affirmative) interpretation’ – I shall look at the ways in which Derrida explicitly takes up the theme of ‘double affirmation’, contrasting it with the notion of ‘double affirmation’ in Deleuze. Then we will examine Derrida's notion of ‘undecidability’ as it relates to the notion of the ‘not’ and to Derrida's understanding of the ‘decision’. In so doing, I will further defend the differentiation I have proposed between the two thinkers, looking at the importance of binarity in Derrida's work, and showing how this played out in the receptions of these two thinkers by looking briefly at the feminist engagements with the works of Derrida and Deleuze. While deconstruction was quickly taken up in positive ways by some feminist thinkers, many feminist scholars initially and for a long time rejected the hypothesis of any positive applications of Deleuze's thought within a feminist context. The ‘power of the negative’ in the deconstructive mode is that it gives space for vocalisation at existing sites of oppression.

The joyously repeated affirmation

The first and most glaring obstacle to the reading I have here proposed is Derrida's repeated insistence on the theme of ‘affirmation’. Indeed, in his remarks upon the event of Deleuze's death, when Derrida expresses his ‘experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity’ with Deleuze, one of those affinities is found ‘in the joyously repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”)’, and this insistence upon affirmation can be found scattered throughout Derrida's earliest published writings. In addition, Derrida frequently endeavours to distinguish deconstruction from its purely negative connotations. For instance, in his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, as Derrida describes his reasoning for the selection of the term ‘deconstruction’, he says: ‘But in French the term “destruction” too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean “demolition” than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading I was proposing.