In the case of deconstruction, the "conditions" of "(im)possibilities" primarily refer to the conditions of language, _ahistorically_ conceived. Whether Derrida discusses Plato or Hegel, Descartes or Marx, he always finds the same problem: "A Being without violence would be a Being which would occur outside the existent: nothing; nonhistory; nonoccurrence; nonphenomenality. A speech produced without the least violence would determine nothing, would say nothing, would offer nothing to the other; it would not be _history_, and it would _show_ nothing: in every sense of the word, and first of all the Greek sense, it would be speech without _phrase_" (Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," _Writing and Difference_). "If there is no extratext, it is because the graphic -- graphicity in general -- has always already begun, is always implanted in 'prior' writing....There is nothing before the text; there is no pretext that is not already a text" (Derrida, _Dissemination_). "The living appropriation of the spirit, the assimilation of a new language is already an inheritance. And the appropriation of another language here figures the revolution. This revolutionary inheritance supposes, to be sure, that one ends up forgetting the specter, that of the primitive or mother tongue. In order to forget not what one inherits but the pre-inheritance on the basis of which one inherits. This forgetting is only a forgetting. For what one must forget will have been indispensable" (Derrida, _Specters of Marx_). "The difference and the play of the pure light, the panic and pyromaniac dissemination, the all-burning offers itself as a holocaust to the for-(it)self....It sacrifices itself, but only to remain, to insure its guarding, to bind itself to itself, strictly, to become itself, for-(it)self, (close)-by-(it)self. In order to sacrifice itself, it burns itself. The burning then burns itself and goes out....Without the holocaust the dialectical movement and the history of Being could not open themselves....Before, if one could count here with time, before everything, before every determinable being..., there is, there was, there will have been the irruptive event of the gift...." (Derrida, _Glas_). "Speculation, _this_ speculation thus would be foreign to philosophy or metaphysics. More precisely, speculation would represent the very thing philosophy or metaphysics guard themselves from, which philosophy or metaphysics consist in guarding themselves from, maintaining with it a relation without relation, a relation of exclusion which signifies simultaneously the necessity and the aporia of translation. And it is within the 'same' word -- speculation -- that the translation is to find its place, between the philosophical concept of speculation in its dominant, apparently legitimate determination...and the concept that is announced here. This latter has been able to be the other's other by inhabiting it, by letting itself be excluded without ceasing to work upon it in the most domestic fashion. Whence, again, the necessity (which calls upon the possibility) and the aporia of this translation" (Derrida, _The Post Card_).
No wonder Derrida has been so prolific. Deconstruction, as a way of reading, reduces everything to the same _differance_, so to speak. In so far as one speaks, one is caught in identifying X, only to have X 'deconstructed' by its opposite (and vice versa) -- interpenetration of opposites without sublation. And before this play of left-Hegelian logic can begin, there was, is, and will have been a forgetting which forgets itself, a gift of burning which burns itself, a holocaust, etc. -- a theme taken from Heidegger:
***** What nihilates illuminates itself as the negative. This can be addressed in the "no." The "not" in no way arises from the no-saying of negation. Every "no" that does not mistake itself as willful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity, but rather remains a letting-be of ek-sistence, answers to the claim of the nihilation illumined....It remains to ask...whether every "yes" and "no" are not themselves already dependent upon Being. As these dependents, they can never first posit the very thing to which they themselves belong.
Nihilation unfolds essentially in Being itself, and not at all in the existence of man -- so far as this is thought as the subjectivity of the _ego cogito_. Dasein in no way nihilates as a human subject who carries out nihilation in the sense of denial; rather, Da-sein nihilates inasmuch as it belongs to the essence of Being as that essence in which man ex-sists. Being nihilates -- as Being....
The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing. Hence, because it thinks Being, thinking thinks the nothing. (Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism"). ****
Except that, outflanking Heidegger, Derrida says he puts "the nihilating in Being" under erasure, so as not to make the nothing positively present & uninhabited by absence. Whatever.
For Marx, however, the conditions of possibilities concern history, the very conditions to which Derrida pays scant attention in his preoccupations with what makes language (im)possible -- the (im)possibility common to any and every text -- hence the same difference that Eagleton speaks of: "subverting everything and nothing."
At least, Spivak has the sober sense to say that deconstruction is basically an ethics of vigilance (against what she thinks is the ever-present specter of metaphysics), without claiming nothing more or less than that. It is in this sense -- as an ethics that watches over language -- that deconstruction is a technology of the self, in the sense that Foucault uses the term, despite Heidegger & Derrida's anti-Humanism (the ethical Subject is an [im]possibility). Pace Derrida, the text does not deconstruct itself; it is the deconstructor who performs the rituals of acknowledgement of complicity -- the suggestive language of Guilt here -- and thus produces the ghost of the abstract individual who does not give up the ghost.
What do deconstructive rituals produce? Tedium or Te Deum? Both at the same time.
Yoshie