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Beyond Deconstruction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David Wood
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Extract

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 175 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

1 Two authors who evidence this further thought, in very different directions, are Dews, Peter, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), esp. Ch. 1Google Scholar, where he tries to show how deconstruction is prefigured, and some of its perplexities resolved in the work of Fichte and Schelling; and Gasché, Rodolph, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1986)Google Scholar, whose aim seems to be to treat deconstruction as a deepening of the transcendental project, a Husserlian graft.

2 ‘…That Dangerous Supplement …’, in Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.Google Scholar

3 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche), trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

4 In Derrida, Jacques, Positions, trans. Bass, Alan (London: Athlone, 1972), 59.Google Scholar

5 In Twilight of the Idols, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 40–41.Google Scholar

6 For instance, Madness and Civilization, trans. Howard, R. (London: Tavistock, 1965)Google Scholar and Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, A. (New York: Vintage, 1979).Google Scholar

7 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

8 Quine, W. V. O., ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

9 Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).Google Scholar

10 Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation.Google Scholar

11 Such a logic, of ‘infrastructures’, is outlined by Gasché in The Tain of the Mirror (see note 1).

12 I discuss this further in the section on ‘Textual Idealism’ below.

13 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (University of Chicago, 1978).Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 79.

15 Christina Howells has made an excellent start with her ‘Sartre and Derrida: Qui Perd Gagne’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13, No. 1 (1982), 26–34.Google Scholar

16 Speech and Phenomena, trans. Allison, David (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

17 Peter Dews’ fascinating version of this thesis (see his Logics of Disintegration) (note 1, above), deserves more subtle treatment than I offer here.

18 ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Alan (University of Chicago Press, 1982).Google Scholar

19 Caputo, John's most original work is best represented by his Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. For ‘cold hermeneutics’, see Ch. 7.

20 Someone who does is Rose, Gillian in her Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar. Her Ch. 8, on Derrida, deserves separate treatment.

21 Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. McLoughlin, Kathleen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 311.Google Scholar

22 For example, in Of Grammatology, op. cit., 4, 60.Google Scholar

23 In Positions, op. cit., 62.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 66. Here he insists on materialism precisely to avoid ‘a new selfinteriority, a new “idealism”, if you will, of the text’.

25 Of Grammatology, op. cit., Pt II, Ch. 2, 158.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 159.

28 Critical Inquiry, Autumn (1986), 167.Google Scholar

29 Critical Inquiry, Autumn (1985), 292.Google Scholar

30 Critical Inquiry, Autumn (1986), 168.Google Scholar

31 I am alluding here to a remark by Heidegger in ‘Language’, in his Poetry Language, Thought, trans. Hofstadter, A. (New York: Harper & Row)Google Scholar, in which he says (à propos of understanding language) that he is not trying to go anywhere, but for once to get to where we are already.