Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 3 Derrida: Différance and the "Plural Logic of the Aporia"

3 Derrida: Différance and the ‘‘Plural Logic of the Aporia’’ Introductory Remarks: Questions of Interpretation If Derrida’s name is almost synonymous with mad misunderstandings, perhaps one has to grant that his texts are frustrating to read at the best of times. Take, for example, his insistence that to ask the question ‘‘what is différance?’’ is already to have misunderstood what he means by this nickname, since the question implies that différance can be made present, that it has an essence or existence of some kind, or that it can be some thing, form, state, or power, which can be given a ‘‘proper’’ name (a name that can be capitalized and capitalized on).1 But, on his account, différance simply is not, and any attempt to think it has to remain negative: différance is not a word, not a concept, not a present being of any kind, does not have a proper name. Yet, this negativity does not mean, he insists, that différance can be thought of as the diametric opposite of presence; that is, it cannot be thought of in terms of absence.2 Faced with this apparent obscurity and vacillation, one might understandably snap the book shut in frustration and turn instead to one of the numerous commentaries . But this is where the risks multiply exponentially.3 Besides astonishingly diverse and perverse misrepresentations of Derrida’s thinking, many sympathetic commentaries generate their own difficulties. In writing ‘‘about’’ Derrida’s texts, some interpreters apparently feel compelled to match the facility with which Derrida exploits the resources of language or to repeat the Derridean gestures they aim to elucidate, making for texts 72 almost as opaque as those upon which they remain parasitic. Readers of these readers soon enough find themselves lost again in the dense thickets of wordplay, caveat, and qualification. I agree with Rorty that attempts at ‘‘what Bennington calls ‘Derridean’ readings of Derrida’’ tend to be ‘‘tiresome and unprofitable.’’4 By contrast , Rorty’s writing is erudite and superbly readable: a delicious mix of irreverence toward stuffy academia and seeming good sense. Yet, precisely because of their linguistic clarity, his influential early readings have aided and abetted the persisting misconception that Derrida’s thinking is antiphilosophy and views itself instead as ‘‘just the self-consciousness of the play of a certain kind of writing.’’5 Despite his avowed ‘‘twenty-odd’’ years of reading Derrida,6 his interpretations, until about the close of last century, have remained perversely resistant to Derrida’s argumentation,7 shifting from early attempts to yoke it to the anti-Kantian side of a contrastive duality that opposes neo-Kantian analytical philosophy to Hegelian dialecticism8 to an approbatory acknowledgment that Derrida himself, on his bad days, might not want to escape altogether from ‘‘the dusty fly bottle’’ of transcendental philosophy.9 Rorty’s Double Vision I should acknowledge the injustice of fingering an outdated, twentiethcentury ‘‘Rorty,’’ which I risk nevertheless, because his persistent attempt to reduce Derrida’s thinking to one side of a contradictory opposition between ‘‘philosophical’’ foundationalism and antifoundational ‘‘textuality ’’ serves conveniently as a foil for an account of Derrida’s quasi-transcendental thinking, which, by contrast, articulates these terms according to the ‘‘plural logic of the aporia.’’10 Moreover, if Rorty’s early interpretations are not mad enough to be laughed off, their one-sidedness makes them imprecise enough to skew the pitch, and, given their mantric repetition in diverse contexts, they are influential enough to matter. According to Rorty’s two-fold framework, ‘‘philosophy’’ stands for the belief that reason enables humanity to establish once and for all the basic conditions for founding the perfect system (social organization, political dispensation, system of justice, educational institution, etc.), granted that such perfection, attainable only over generations, is held out as a regulative ideal and a measure for human progress. By contrast, ‘‘textuality’’ denotes an intellectual freeplay engendered by the recognition that no term whatsoever has an immutable, essential nature and everything is constituted diacritically (by differential relations). Moreover, since no basic Derrida: Différance and the ‘‘Plural Logic of the Aporia’’ 73 principle can be fixed as the ultimate regulator of these diacritical relations , they cannot be organized into a closed stable structure or system (architectonic, hierarchy, or teleology). There is certainly common ground between Rorty and Derrida insofar as both promote ways of thinking that threaten foundationalist philosophy...