Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction and the Other

rk:

The most characteristic feature of your work has been its determination to “deconstruct” the Western philosophy of presence. I think it would be helpful if you could situate your program of deconstruction in relation to the two major intellectual traditions of Western European culture—the Hebraic and the Hellenic. You conclude your seminal essay on the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas with the following quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses: “GreekJew is JewGreek.” Do you agree with Levinas that Judaism offers an alternative to the Greek metaphysics of presence? Or do you believe with Joyce that the Jewish and Greek cultures are fundamentally intertwined?

jd:

While I consider it essential to think through this copulative synthesis of Greek and Jew, I consider my own thought, paradoxically, as neither Greek nor Jewish. I often feel that the questions I attempt to formulate on the outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition have as their other the model of the Jew, that is, the Jew-as-other. And yet the paradox is that I have never actually invoked the Jewish tradition in any “rooted” or direct manner. Though I was born a Jew, I do not work or think within a living Jewish tradition. So if there is a Judaic dimension to my thinking which may from time to time have spoken in or through me, this has never assumed the form of an explicit fidelity or debt to that culture. For short, the ultimate site (lieu) of my questioning discourse would be neither Hellenic nor Hebraic, if such were possible. It would be a nonsite beyond both the Jewish influence of my youth and the Greek philosophical heritage which I received during my academic education in the French universities.

rk:

And yet you share a singular discourse with Levinas—including notions of the other, the trace and writing as difference, etc. —which might suggest a common Judaic heritage.

jd:

Undoubtedly, I was fascinated and attracted by the intellectual journey of Levinas, but that was not because he was Jewish. It so happens that for Levinas there is a discrete continuity between his philosophical discourse qua phenomenologist and his religious language qua exegete of the Talmud. But this continuity is not immediately evident. The Levinas who most interested me at the outset was the philosopher working in phenomenology and posing the question of the other to phenomenology; the Judaic dimension remained at that stage a discrete rather than a decisive reference.

You ask if Judaism offers an alternative to the Greek philosophy of “presence.” First we must ascertain what exactly we mean by “presence.” The French or English words are, of course, neither Greek nor Jewish. So that when we use the word, we presuppose a vast history of translation, which leads from the Greek terms ousia and on to the Latin substantia, actus, etc., and culminates in our modern term “presence.” I have no knowledge of what this term means in Judaism.

rk:

So you would count yourself a philosopher above all else?

jd:

I'm not happy with the term philosopher.

rk:

Surely you are a philosopher in that your deconstruction is directed primarily to philosophical ideas and texts?

jd:

It is true that “deconstruction” has focused on philosophical texts. And I am of course a philosopher in the institutional sense that I assume the responsibilities of a teacher of philosophy in an official philosophical institution—l'Ecole Normale Supérieure. But I am not sure that the site of my work, reading philosophical texts and posing philosophical questions, is itself properly philosophical. Indeed, I have attempted more and more systematically to find a nonsite, or a nonphilosophical site, from which to question philosophy. But the search for a nonphilosophical site does not bespeak an antiphilosophical attitude. My central question is: From what site or nonsite (non-lieu) can philosophy as such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can interrogate and reflect upon itself in an original manner? Such a nonsite or alterity would be radically irreducible to philosophy But the problem is that such a non-site cannot be defined or situated by means of philosophical language.

rk:

The philosophy of deconstruction would seem, therefore, to be a deconstruction of philosophy. Is your interest in painting, psychoanalysis, and literature—particularly the literary texts of [Edmond] Jabès, [Georges] Bataille, [Maurice] Blanchot, [Antonin] Artaud, [Paul] Celan, and Mallarmé—not an attempt to establish this non-philosophical site of which you speak?

jd:

Certainly, but one must remember that even though these sites are nonphilosophical, they still belong to our Western culture and so are never totally free from the marks of philosophical language. In literature, for example, philosophical language is still present in some sense, but it produces and presents itself as alienated from itself, at a remove, at a distance. This distance provides the necessary free space from which to interrogate philosophy anew, and it was my preoccupation with literary texts which enabled me to discern the problematic of writing as one of the key factors in the deconstruction of metaphysics.

rk:

Accepting the fact that you are seeking a nonphilosophical site, you would, I presume, still acknowledge important philosophical influences on your thought. How, for example, would you situate your strategy of deconstruction in respect to the phenomenological movement?

jd:

My philosophical formation owes much to the thought of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Heidegger is probably the most constant influence, and particularly his project of “overcoming” Greek metaphysics. Husserl, whom I studied in a more studious and painstaking fashion, taught me a certain methodical prudence and reserve, a rigorous technique of unraveling and formulating questions. But I never shared Husser's pathos for, and commitment to, a phenomenology of presence. In fact, it was Husserl's method that helped me to suspect the very notion of presence and the fundamental role it has played in all philosophies. My relationship with Heidegger is much more enigmatic and extensive: here my interest was not just methodological but existential. The themes of Heidegger's questioning always struck me as necessary—especially the “ontological difference,” the reading of Platonism, and the relationship between language and Being. My discovery of the genealogical and genetic critique of Nietzsche and Freud also helped me to take the step beyond phenomenology towards a more radical, nonphilosophical questioning, while never renouncing the discipline and methodological rigor of phenomenology.

rk:

Although you share Heidegger's task of “overcoming” or “deconstructing” Western metaphysics, you could not, presumably, share his hope to rediscover the “original names” by means of which Being could be thought and said?

jd:

I think that there is still in Heidegger, linked up with other things, a nostalgic desire to recover the proper name, the unique name of Being. To be fair, however, one can find several passages in which Heidegger is self-critical and renounces his nostalgia: his practice of canceling and erasing the term in his later texts is an example of such a critique. Heidegger's texts are still before us; they harbor a future of meaning which will ensure that they are read and reread for centuries. But while I owe a considerable debt to Heidegger's “path of thought” (chemin de pensée), we differ in our employment of language, in our understanding of language. I write in another language—and I do not simply mean in French rather than in German—even though this otherness cannot be explained in terms of philosophy itself. The difference resides outside of philosophy, in the nonphilosophical site of language; it is what makes the poets and writers that interest me (Mallarmé, [Maurice] Blanchot, etc.) totally different from those that interest Heidegger ([Friedrich] Hölderlin and [Rainer Maria] Rilke). In this sense, my profound rapport with Heidegger is also and at the same time a nonrapport.

rk:

Yes, I can see that your understanding of language as “difference” and “dissemination” is quite removed from Heidegger's notion of language as the “house of Being,” that which “recalls and recollects” and “names the Holy.” In addition, while Heidegger is still prepared to use such philosophical concepts as Being and existence to express his thought, you have made it clear that the operative terms in your language—for example, deconstruction, différence, dissemination, trace, and so on—are basically “nonconcepts,” “undecidables.” What exactly do you mean by “nonconcepts,” and what role do they play in your attempt to deconstruct metaphysics?

jd:

I will try to reconstitute the argument by means of which I advanced the notion of a nonconcept. First, it doesn't have the logical generality which a philosophical concept claims to have in its supposed independence from ordinary or literary language. The notion of différance, for example, is a nonconcept in that it cannot be defined in terms of oppositional predicates; it is neither this nor that, but rather this and that (for example, the act of differing and of deferring), without being reducible to a dialectical logic either. And yet the term différanee emerges and develops as a determination of language from which it is inseparable. Hence the difficulty of translating the term. There is no conceptual realm beyond language which would allow the term to have a univocal semantic content over and above its inscription in language. Because it remains a trace of language, it remains nonconceptual; and because it has no oppositional or predicative generality, which would identify it as this rather than that, the term différance cannot be defined within a system of logic—Aristotelian or dialectical—that is, within the logocentric system of philosophy.

rk:

But can we go beyond the logocentric system of metaphysics without employing the terminology of metaphysics? Is it not only from the inside that we can undo metaphysics by means of stratagems and strategies which expose the ambiguities and contradictions of the logocentric system of presence? Does that not mean that we are condemned to metaphysics even while attempting to deconstruct its pretensions?

jd:

In a certain sense it is true to say that deconstruction is still in metaphysics. But we must remember that if we are indeed inside metaphysics, we are not inside it as we might be inside a box or a milieu. We are still in metaphysics in the special sense that we are in a determinate language. Consequently, the idea that we might be able to get outside of metaphysics has always struck me as naive. So that when I refer to the closure (clôture) of metaphysics, I insist that it is not a question of considering metaphysics as a circle with a limit or simple boundary. The notion of the limit and boundary (bord) of metaphysics is itself highly problematic. My reflections on this problematic have always attempted to show that the limit or end of metaphysics is not linear or circular in any indivisible sense. And as soon as we acknowledge that the limit-boundary of metaphysics is divisible, the logical rapport between inside and outside is no longer simple. Accordingly, we cannot really say that we are “locked into” or “condemned to” metaphysics, for we are, strictly speaking, neither inside nor outside. In brief, the whole rapport between the inside and the outside of metaphysics is inseparable from the question of the finitude and reserve of metaphysics as language. But the idea of the finitude and exhaustion (épuisement) of metaphysics does not mean that we are incarcerated in it as prisoners or victims of some unhappy fatality. It is simply that our belonging to, and inherence in, the language of metaphysics is something that can only be rigorously and adequately thought about from another topos or space where our problematic rapport with the boundary of metaphysics can be seen in a more radical light. Hence my attempt, to discover the nonplace or non-lieu which would be the other of philosophy. This is the task of deconstruction.

rk:

Can literary and poetic language provide this non-lieu or u-topos?

jd:

I think so, but when I speak of literature it is not with a capital L; it is rather an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts, certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble, exposing them as divisible and questionable. This is what the works of Blanchot, Bataille, or Beckett are particularly sensitive to.

rk:

What does this whole problematic of the closure of Western logocentric philosophy and of the limits of our language tell us about the modern age in which we live? Is there a rapport between deconstruction and modernity insofar as the latter bespeaks a crisis of scientific foundations and of values in general, a crisis occasioned by the discovery that the absolute origin that the Western tradition claimed to have identified in the “logos” is merely the trace of an absence, a nothingness?

jd:

I have never been very happy with the term modernity. Of course, I feel that what is happening in the world today is something unique and singular. As soon, however, as we give it the label of “modernity,” we inscribe it in a certain historical system of evolution or progress (a notion derived from Enlightenment rationalism), which tends to blind us to the fact that what confronts us today is also something ancient and hidden in history. I believe that what “happens” in our contemporary world and strikes us as particularly new has in fact an essential connection with something extremely old which has been covered over (archi-dissimulé). So that the new is not so much that which occurs for the first time but that “very ancient” dimension which recurs in the “very modern,” and which indeed has been signified repetitively throughout our historical tradition, in Greece and in Rome, in Plato and in Descartes and in Kant, etc. No matter how novel or unprecedented a modern meaning may appear, it is never exclusively modernist but is also and at the same time a phenomenon of repetition. And yet the relationship between the ancient and the modern is not simply that of the implicit and the explicit. We must avoid the temptation of supposing that what occurs today somehow preexisted in a latent form, merely waiting to be unfolded or explicated. Such thinking also conceives history as an evolutionary development and excludes the crucial notions of rupture and mutation in history. My own conviction is that we must maintain two contradictory affirmations at the same time. On the one hand, we affirm the existence of ruptures in history, and on the other, we affirm that these ruptures produce gaps or faults (failles) in which the most hidden and forgotten archives can emerge and constantly recur and work through history. One must surmount the categorical oppositions of philosophical logic out of fidelity to these conflicting positions of historical discontinuity (rupture) and continuity (repetition), which are neither a pure break with the past nor a pure unfolding or explication of it.

rk:

How do you explain the way in which philosophy has altered and changed from one historical epoch to the next? How do you explain, for example, the difference between Plato's thought and your own?

jd:

The difference between our modes of thought does not mean that I or other “modern” thinkers have gone beyond Plato, in the sense of having succeeded in exhausting all that is contained in his texts. Here I return to what I was describing as the “future” of a Heideggerian text. I believe that all of the great philosophical texts —of Plato, Parmenides, Hegel, or Heidegger, for example—are still before us. The future of the great philosophies remains obscure and enigmatic, still to be disclosed. Up to now, we have merely scratched the surface. This opaque and inexhaustible residue of philosophical texts, which I call their “future,” is more predominant in Greek and German philosophy than in French. I have a profound respect for the great French thinkers, but I have always had the impression that a certain kind of rigorous analysis could render their texts accessible and exhaustible. Before a Platonic or Heideggerian text, by contrast, I feel that I am confronting an abyss, a bottomless pit in which I could lose myself. No matter how rigorous an analysis I bring to bear on such texts, I am always left with the impression that there is something more to be thought.

rk:

What exactly is the inexhaustible richness which these great texts possess and which continues to fascinate us throughout the centuries?

jd:

The temptation here is to offer a quick and simple response. But having taught philosophy for over twenty years, I must honestly say that now, less than ever, do I know what philosophy is. My knowledge of what it is that constitutes the essence of philosophy is at zero degree. All I know is that a Platonic or Heideggerian text always returns us to the beginning, enables us to begin to ask philosophical questions, including the question: What is philosophy?

rk:

But surely it must be possible to say what philosophy is by way of distinguishing it from other scientific disciplines such as economics, sociology, the natural sciences, or even literature? Why learn philosophy at all, in schools, universities, or in the privacy of one's study, if it is impossible to say what it is or what function it serves? If deconstruction prevents us from asserting or stating or identifying anything, then surely one ends up, not with difference, but with indifference, where nothing is anything, and everything is everything else?

jd:

It is as impossible to say what philosophy isnot as it is to say what it is. In all the other disciplines you mention, there is philosophy. To say to oneself that one is going to study something that is not philosophy is to deceive oneself. It is not difficult to show that in political economy, for example, there is a philosophical discourse in operation. And the same applies to mathematics and the other sciences. Philosophy, as logocentrism, is present in every scientific discipline, and the only justification for transforming philosophy into a specialized discipline is the necessity to render explicit and thematic the philosophical subtext in every discourse. The principal function which the teaching of philosophy serves is to enable people to become “conscious,” to become aware of what exactly they are saying, what kind of discourse they are engaged in when they do mathematics, physics, political economy, and so on. There is no system of teaching or transmitting knowledge which can retain its coherence or integrity without, at one moment or another, interrogating itself philosophically, that is, without acknowledging its subtextual premises, and this may even include an interrogation of unspoken political interests or traditional values. From such an interrogation, each society draws its own conclusions about the worth of philosophy.

rk:

How, for example, can political economy interrogate itself philosophically?

jd:

First, all of the major concepts which constitute the discourse of economics are philosophical, and particularly such concepts as “property,” “work” or “value.” These are all “philosophemes,” concepts inaugurated by a philosophical discourse, which usually go back to Greece or Rome, and kept in operation by means of this discourse, which refers back at first, as does philosophy itself, to the “natural languages” of Greece and Rome. Consequently, the economic discourse is founded on a logocentric philosophical discourse and remains inseparable from it. The autonomy which economists might subsequently like to confer on their discipline can never succeed in masking its philosophical derivation. Science is never purely objective, nor is it merely reducible to an instrumental and utilitarian model of explanation. Philosophy can teach science that it is ultimately an element of language, that the limits of its formalization reveal its belonging to a language in which it continues to operate despite its attempts to justify itself as an exclusively objective or instrumental discourse.

rk:

Is the logocentric character of science a singularly European phenomenon?

jd:

Logocentrism, in its developed philosophical sense, is inextricably linked to the Greek and European tradition. As I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere in some detail, logocentric philosophy is a specifically Western response to a much larger necessity which also occurs in the Far East and other cultures, that is, the phonocentric necessity: the privilege of the voice over writing. The priority of spoken language over written or silent language stems from the fact that when words are spoken, the speaker and the listener are supposed to be simultaneously present to one another; they are supposed to be the same, pure unmediated presence. This ideal of perfect self-presence, of the immediate possession of meaning, is what is expressed by the phonocentric necessity. Writing, on the other hand, is considered subversive insofar as it creates a spatial and temporal distance between the author and audience; writing presupposes the absence of the author, and so we can never be sure exactly what is meant by a written text; it can have many different meanings, as opposed to a single unifying one. But this phonocentric necessity did not develop into a systematic logocentric metaphysics in any non-European culture. Logocentrism is a uniquely European phenomenon.

rk:

Does this mean that other cultures do not require deconstruction?

jd:

Every culture and society requires an internal critique or deconstruction as an essential part of its development. A priori, we can presume that non-European cultures operate some sort of auto-critique of their own linguistic concepts and foundational institutions. Every culture needs an element of self-interrogation and of distance from itself, if it is to transform itself. No culture is closed in on itself, especially in our own times, when the impact of European civilization is so all-pervasive. Similarly, what we call the deconstruction of our own Western culture is aided and abetted by the fact that Europe has always registered the impact of heterogeneous, non-European influences. Because it has always been thus exposed to, and shadowed by, its other, it has been compelled to question itself. Every culture is haunted by its other.

rk:

Did the arrival of Judeo-Christianity represent such a radicalizing “alterity” for the Greco-Roman civilization? Did it challenge the heterogeneity of the Western metaphysics of presence?

jd:

I'd be wary of talking about Judeo-Christianity with a capital J and C. Judeo-Christianity is an extremely complex entity which, in large part, only constituted itself qua Judeo-Christianity by its assimilation into the schemas of Greek philosophy. Hence what we know as Christian and Jewish theology today is a cultural ensemble which has already been largely Hellenized.

rk:

But did not Judaism and Christianity represent a heterogeneity, an otherness, before they were assimilated into Greek culture?

jd:

Of course. And one can argue that these original, heterogeneous elements of Judaism and Christianity were never completely eradicated by Western metaphysics. They perdure throughout the centuries, threatening and unsettling the assured identities of Western philosophy. So that the surreptitious deconstruction of the Greek Logos is at work from the very origin of our Western culture. Already, the translation of Greek concepts into other languages —Latin, Arabic, German, French, English, etc. —or indeed the translation of Hebraic or Arabic ideas and structures into metaphysical terms, produces “fissures” in the presumed solidity of Greek philosophy by introducing alien and conflicting elements.

rk:

The logocentrism of Greek metaphysics will always be haunted, therefore, by the absolutely Other to the extent that the Logos can never englobe everything. There is always something which escapes, something different, other, and opaque which refuses to be totalized into a homogeneous identity.

jd:

Just so —and this otherness is not necessarily something which comes to Greek philosophy from the “outside,” that is, from the non-Hellenic world. From the very beginnings of Greek philosophy the self-identity of the Logos is already fissured and divided. I think one can discern signs of such fissures of différance in every great philosopher: the “Good beyond Being” (epekeina tes ousias) of Plato's Republic, for example, or the confrontation with the “Stranger” in The Sophist, are already traces of an alterity which refuses to be totally domesticated. Moreover, the rapport of self-identity is itself always a rapport of violence with the other, so that the notions of property, appropriation, and self-presence, so central to logocentric metaphysics, are essentially dependent on an oppositional relation with otherness. In this sense, identity presupposes alterity.

rk:

If deconstruction is a way of challenging the logocentric pretensions of Western European philosophy, and by implication of the sciences it has founded, can it ever surmount its role of iconoclastic negation and become a form of affirmation? Can your search for a non-site or u-topos, other than the topos of Western metaphysics, also be construed as a prophetic utopianism?

jd:

I will take the terms affirmation and prophetic utopianism separately. Deconstruction certainly entails a moment of affirmation. Indeed, I cannot conceive of a radical critique which would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of affirmation, acknowledged or not. Deconstruction always presupposes affirmation, as I have frequently attempted to point out, sometimes employing a Nietzschean terminology. I do not mean that the deconstructing subject or self affirms. I mean that deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, or motivates it. Deconstruction is therefore vocation—a response to a call. The other, as the other than self, the other that opposes self-identity, is not something that can be detected and disclosed within a philosophical space and with the aid of a philosophical lamp. The other precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin. It is in this rapport with the other that affirmation expresses itself. As to the question of prophecy, this is a much more obscure area for me. There are certainly prophetic effects (effets), but the language of prophecy alters continually. Today the prophets no longer speak with the same accents or scenography as the prophets in the Bible.

rk:

Levinas has suggested that the contemporary deconstruction of philosophy and the sciences is symptomatic of a fundamental crisis of Western culture, which he chooses to interpret as a prophetic and ethical cry. Would you agree?

jd:

Certainly prophets always flourish in times of socio-historical or philosophical crisis. Bad times for philosophy are good times for prophecy. Accordingly, when deconstructive themes begin to dominate the scene, as they do today, one is sure to find a proliferation of prophecies. And this proliferation is precisely a reason why we should be all the more wary and prudent, all the more discriminating.

rk:

But here we have the whole problem of a criterion of evaluation. According to what criterion does one discriminate between prophecies? Is this not a problem for you, since you reject the idea of a transcendental telos or eschaton which could provide the critical subject with an objective or absolute yardstick of value?

jd:

It is true that I interrogate the idea of an eschaton or telos in the absolute formulations of classical philosophy. But that does not mean I dismiss all forms of Messianic or prophetic eschatology. I think that all genuine questioning is summoned by a certain type of eschatology, though it is impossible to define this eschatology in philosophical terms. The search for objective or absolute criteria is, to be sure, an essentially philosophical gesture. Prophecy differs from philosophy insofar as it dispenses with such criteria. The prophetic word is its own criterion and refuses to submit to an external tribunal which would judge or evaluate it in an objective and neutral fashion. The prophetic word reveals its own eschatology and finds its index of truthfulness in its own inspiration and not in some transcendental or philosophical criteriology.

rk:

Do you feel that your own work is prophetic in its attempt to deconstruct philosophy and philosophical criteria?

jd:

Unfortunately, I do not feel inspired by any sort of hope which would permit me to presume that my work of deconstruction has a prophetic function. But I concede that the style of my questioning as an exodus and dissemination in the desert might produce certain prophetic resonances. It is possible to see deconstruction as being produced in a space where the prophets are not far away. But the prophetic resonances of my questioning reside at the level of a certain rhetorical discourse which is also shared by several other contemporary thinkers. The fact that I declare it “unfortunate” that I do not personally feel inspired may be a signal that deep down I still hope. It means that I am in fact still looking for something. So perhaps it is no mere accident of rhetoric that the search itself, the search without hope for hope, assumes a certain prophetic allure. Perhaps my search is a twentieth-century brand of prophecy? But it is difficult for me to believe it.

rk:

Can the theoretical radicality of deconstruction be translated into a radical political praxis?

jd:

This is a particularly difficult question. I must confess that I have never succeeded in directly relating deconstruction to existing political codes and programs. I have of course had occasion to take a specific political stand in certain codable situations, for example, in relation to the French university institution. But the available codes for taking such a political stance are not at all adequate to the radicality of deconstruction. And the absence of an adequate political code to translate or incorporate the radical implications of deconstruction has given many the impression that deconstruction is opposed to politics, or is at best apolitical. But this impression only prevails because all of our political codes and terminologies still remain fundamentally metaphysical, regardless of whether they originate from the right or the left.

rk:

In The Revolution of the Word, Colin MacCabe employed your notions of deconstruction and dissemination to show how James Joyce recognized and revealed the inner workings of language as a refusal of identity, as a process of différance irreducible to all of our logocentic concepts and codes. In Ulysses, this process of différance is epitomized by Bloom, for instance, the vagrant or nomad who subverts the available codes of identity —religious, political, or national. And yet, MacCabe argues, the Joycean refutation of all dogmatic or totalizing forms of identity is itself a political stance—an anti-totalitarian or anarchic stance.

jd:

This is the politics of exodus, of the émigré. As such, it can of course serve as a political ferment or anxiety, a subversion of fixed assumptions and a privileging of disorder.

rk:

But does the politics of the émigré necessarily imply inaction and noncommitment?

jd:

Not at all. But the difficulty is to gesture in opposite directions at the same time; on the one hand, to preserve a distance and suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality, and on the other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engagé manner whenever the necessity arises. This position of dual allegiance, in which I personally find myself, is one of perpetual uneasiness. I try where I can to act politically while recognizing that such action remains incommensurate with my intellectual project of deconstruction.

rk:

Could one describe the political equivalent of deconstruction as a disposition, as opposed to a position, of responsible anarchy?

jd:

If I had to describe my political disposition I would probably employ a formula of that kind while stressing, of course, the interminable obligation to work out and to deconstruct these two terms — “responsible” and “anarchy” If taken as assured certainties in themselves, such terms can also become reified and unthinking dogmas. But I also try to reevaluate the indispensable notion of “responsibility.”

rk:

I would now like to turn to another theme in your work: the deconstructive role of the feminine. If the logocentric domination of Western culture also expresses itself as a phallogocentrism, is there a sense in which the modern movement to liberate women represents a deconstructive gesture? Is this something which Nietzsche curiously recognized when he spoke of “truth becoming woman,” or Joyce when he celebrated the “woman's reason” of Molly Bloom in Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake? Is the contemporary liberation of woman's reason and truth not an unveiling of the hitherto repressed resources of a nonlogocentric topos?

jd:

While I would hesitate to use such terms as “liberation” or “unveiling,” I think there can be little doubt that we are presently witnessing a radical mutation of our understanding of sexual difference. The discourses of Nietzsche, Joyce, and the women's movement which you have identified epitomize a profound and unprecedented transformation of the man-woman relationship. The deconstruction of phallogocentrism is carried by this transformation, as are also the rise of psychoanalysis and the modernist movement in literature. But we cannot objectify or thematize this mutation, even though it is bringing about such a radical change in our understanding of the world that a return to the former logocentric philosophies of mastery, possession, totalization, or certitude may soon be unthinkable. The philosophical and literary discoveries of the feminine which you mention—and even the political and legal recognition of the status of women—are all symptoms of a deeper mutation in our search for meaning which deconstruction attempts to register.

rk:

Do you think then that this mutation can be seen and evaluated in terms of a historical progress towards the “good,” towards a “better society”?

jd:

This mutation is certainly experienced as better, insofar as it is what is desired by those who practically dispose of the greatest force in society. One could describe the transformation effected by the feminine as “good” without positing it as an a priori goal or telos. I hesitate to speak of “liberation” in this context, because I don't believe that women are liberated, any more than men are. They are, of course, no longer enslaved in many of the old socio-political respects, but even in the new situation woman will not ultimately be any freer than man. One needs another language, besides that of political liberation, to characterize the enormous deconstructive import of the feminine as an uprooting of our phallogocentric culture. I prefer to speak of this mutation of the feminine as a “movement” rather than as an historical or political “progress.” I always hesitate to talk of historical progress.

rk:

What is the relationship between deconstruction and your use of poetic language, particularly in Glas? Do you consider Glas to be a work of philosophy or of poetry?

jd:

It is neither philosophy nor poetry. It is in fact a reciprocal contamination of the one by the other, from which neither can emerge intact. This notion of contamination is, however, inadequate, for it is not simply a question of rendering both philosophy and poetry impure. One is trying to reach an additional or alternative dimension beyond philosophy and literature. In my project, philosophy and literature are two poles of an opposition and one cannot isolate one from the other or privilege one over the other. I consider that the limits of philosophy are also those of literature. In Glas, consequently, I try to compose a writing which would traverse, as rigorously as possible, both the philosophical and literary elements without being definable as either. Hence in Glas one finds classical philosophical analysis being juxtaposed with quasi-literary passages, each challenging, perverting, and exposing the impurities and contradictions in their neighbor; and at some point the philosophical and literary trajectories cross each other and give rise to something else, some other site.

rk:

Is there not a sense in which philosophy for you is a form of literature? You have, for example, described metaphysics as a “white mythology,” that is, a sort of palimpsest of metaphors (eidos, telos, ousia) and myths (of return, homecoming, transcendence towards the light, etc.), which are covered over and forgotten as soon as philosophical “concepts” are construed as pure and univocal abstractions, as totalizing universals devoid of myth and metaphor.

jd:

I have always tried to expose the way in which philosophy is literary, not so much because it is metaphor but because it is catachresis. The term metaphor generally implies a relation to an original “property” of meaning, a “proper” sense to which it indirectly or equivocally refers, whereas catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior or proper norm. The founding concepts of metaphysics—logos, eidos, theoria, etc. —are instances of catachresis rather than metaphors, as I attempted to demonstrate in “White Mythology” (Margesde la philosophic [Margins of Philosophy]). In a work such as Glas, or other recent ones like it, I am trying to produce new forms of catachresis, another kind of writing, a violent writing which stakes out the faults (failles) and deviations of language, so that the text produces a language of its own, in itself, which, while continuing to work through tradition, emerges at a given moment as a monster, a monstrous mutation without tradition or normative precedent.

rk:

What then of the question of language as reference? Can language as mutation or violence or monstrosity refer to anything other than itself?

jd:

There have been several misinterpretations of what I and other deconstructionists are trying to do. It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the other of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the other and the other of language. Every week I receive critical commentaries and studies on deconstruction which operate on the assumption that what they call “poststructuralism” amounts to saying that there is nothing beyond language, that we are submerged in words —and other stupidities of that sort. Certainly, deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed. It even asks whether our term reference is entirely adequate for designating the other. The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a “referent” in the normal sense which linguists have attached to this term. But to distance oneself thus from the habitual structure of reference, to challenge or complicate our common assumptions about it, does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language.

rk:

This could also be seem as a reply to those critics who maintain that deconstruction is a strategy of nihilism, an orgy of non-sense, a relapse into the free play of the arbitrary.

jd:

I regret that I have been misinterpreted in this way, particularly in the United States, but also in France. People who wish to avoid questioning and discussion present deconstruction as a sort of gratuitous chess game with a combination of signs (combinatoire de signifiants), closed up in language as in a cave. This misinterpretation is not just a simplification; it is symptomatic of certain political and institutional interests—interests which must also be deconstructed in their turn. I totally refuse the label of nihilism which has been ascribed to me and my American colleagues. Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.

rk:

Can deconstruction serve as a method of literary criticism which might contribute something positive to our appreciation of literature?

jd:

I am not sure that deconstruction can function as a literary method as such. I am wary of the idea of methods of reading. The laws of reading are determined by the particular text that is being read. This does not mean that we should simply abandon ourselves to the text, or represent and repeat it in a purely passive manner. It means that we must remain faithful, even if it implies a certain violence, to the injunctions of the text. These injunctions will differ from one text to the next so that one cannot prescribe one general method of reading. In this sense, deconstruction is not a method. Nor do I feel that the principal function of deconstruction is to contribute something to literature. It does, of course, contribute to our epistemological appreciation of texts by exposing the philosophical and theoretical presuppositions that are at work in every critical methodology, be it formalism, New Criticism, socialist realism, or a historical critique. Deconstruction asks why we read a literary text in this particular manner rather than another. It shows, for example, that New Criticism is not the way of reading texts, however enshrined it may be in certain university institutions, but only one way among others. Thus deconstruction can also serve to question the presumption of certain university and cultural institutions to act as the sole or privileged guardians and transmitters of meaning. In short, deconstruction not only teaches us to read literature more thoroughly by attending to it as language, as the production of meaning through différance and dissemination, through a complex play of signifying traces; it also enables us to interrogate the covert philosophical and political presuppositions of institutionalized critical methods which generally govern our reading of a text. There is in deconstruction something which challenges every teaching institution. It is not a question of calling for the destruction of such institutions, but rather of making us aware of what we are in fact doing when we subscribe to this or that institutional way of reading literature. Nor must we forget that deconstruction is itself a form of literature, a literary text to be read like other texts, an interpretation open to several other interpretations. Accordingly, one can say that deconstruction is at once extremely modest and extremely ambitious. It is ambitious in that it puts itself on a par with literary texts, and modest in that it admits that it is only one textual interpretation among others, written in a language which has no centralizing power of mastery or domination, no privileged metalanguage over and above the language of literature.

rk:

And what would you say to those critics who accuse you of annihilating the very idea of the human subject in your determination to dispense with all centralizing agencies of meaning, all “centrisms”?

jd:

They need not worry. I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct the subject does not mean to deny its existence. There are subjects, “operations” or “effects” (effets) of subjectivity. This is an incontrovertible fact. To acknowledge this does not mean, however, that the subject is what it says it is. The subject is not some metalinguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language. My work does not, therefore, destroy the subject; it simply tries to resituate it.

rk:

But can deconstruction, as the disclosure of language as différance, contribute to the pleasure of reading, to our appreciation of the living texture of a literary text? Or is it only an intellectual strategy of detection, of exposing our presuppositions and disabusing us of our habitual illusions about reading?

jd:

Deconstruction gives pleasure in that it gives desire. To deconstruct a text is to disclose how it functions as desire, as a search for presence and fulfillment which is interminably deferred. One cannot read without opening oneself to the desire of language, to the search for that which remains absent and other than oneself. Without a certain love of the text, no reading would be possible. In every reading there is a corps-à-corps between reader and text, an incorporation of the reader's desire into the desire of the text. Here is pleasure, the very opposite of that arid intellectualism of which deconstruction has so often been accused.

Paris, 1981