Derida's Wake

Extract

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.

Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.