From the Impasses of Baltimore to the Strategy of Deconstruction: Thinking "History" Beyond the Language of Metaphysics

"Is that what you are tending toward?Because, for my part, I feel that I am goingin that direction . . . a history which nolonger has anything to do with eschatologicalhistory, a history which loses itself alwaysin its own pursuit, since the origin isperpetually displaced."

"What can that thought mean which belongsneither to positive science nor to classicalontology? What is the place of this thoughtand of its language?"

-- Jean Hyppolite, "The Structure of Philosophic Language according to the Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind"

Introduction

In The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, Lyotard describes postmodernity as a loss of faith in what he calls "meta-narratives," that is to say, philosophies of history (like Enlightenment discourse or speculative dialectics) whose role was to legitimate modern science. According to him, these philosophical narratives shared a common historicist or eschatological conception of time, by which history was supposed to progress towards a final end, which always appeared as a rediscovery of a lost origin. They thus looked forward to an emancipatory and liberating horizon, which can give a reason to hope (Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes 91).

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But the postmodern mind, contrariwise, is aware of the possible excesses of Western democracies and of the possible threat entailed by techno-scientific development. The future is no longer an object of expectation; the historicist conception of time and the philosophical discourse which used to carry it are no longer credible. Postmodern thought suffers from a lack of finality and corresponds to the crisis of metaphysical philosophy (Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes 93): scientific transformations, together with the advancement of technique and technologies, made philosophical attempts at legitimization obsolete (Lyotard, La condition postmoderne 7–8). According to Lyotard, the metaphysical way has become an impasse; metaphysics can at most become an object of criticism. Therefore, postmodernity could be described as the end of history and the end of philosophy. It represents a "crisis" of thought (Moralités postmodernes 93), leading to a state of unease and uncertainty, which creates a "reactionary desire for security, stability, and identity" (Les Immatériaux).

Yet, when we look at the works of Derrida during the sixties, it seems that what appears as the collapse of grand narratives may also be interpreted as the beginning of something else, as if the postmodern crisis of thought, which was undeniably a source of melancholy, also embodied a chance for renewal. Indeed, in the talk he presented at the Johns Hopkins conference, "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" in 1966, Derrida adopts a critical attitude toward traditional philosophy and modern conceptions of history, but he also seems to attempt to transform and renew both of them. While visiting Baltimore in 1966, where he raised the question of the human sciences' impact on metaphysical language and structuralist discourse's effect on the metaphysical conception of history, Derrida was working on Of Grammatology and elaborating the deconstructive strategy. When we place his talk, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in the context of his global work, we see that grammatology and deconstruction aim at finding a way to transgress philosophical language and to produce a new "conceptual chain" of history—that is to say, to solve the two issues raised in Derrida's lecture in Baltimore in 1966.

Why do structuralist empirical discoveries and theories require a consideration of philosophical language and a critic of the metaphysical conception of history? Is it possible to "make a step beyond philosophy" without "turning the page of philosophy," and to abandon the "metaphysical conception of history" without falling in "anhistoricism" (Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" 259, 262)? At first glance, these tasks seem aporetic. But it is precisely these two aporias that deconstructive thought will have to overcome: when we look at the strategy of deconstruction Derrida suggested a few years later, the two aporetic problems raised in 1966 turn out to be strategic guidelines. What is the strategy elaborated by...