Thank you for this.
Obituary: The Infinite Search
>
> Feature Article by Alex Callinicos, November 2004
>
> Subversion
>
> Derrida sought to subvert structuralism. He pointed out that if signifiers
> acquire meaning through their differences from one another, there is no
> reason why this process shouldn't go on for ever. Each signifier points to
> a signified, its meaning, that is itself another signifier, and so on ad
> infinitum. There is no stable halting point in language, but only what
> Derrida called 'infinite play', the endless slippages through which
> meaning
> is sought but never found.
>
> The only way to stop this play of difference would be if there were what
> Derrida called a 'transcendental signified' - a meaning that exists
> outside
> language and that therefore isn't liable to this constant process of
> subversion inherent in signification. But the transcendental signified is
> nothing but an illusion, sustained by the 'metaphysics of presence', the
> belief at the heart of the western philosophical tradition that we can
> gain
> direct access to the world independently of the different ways in which we
> talk about and act on it. With this argument what came to be known as
> post-structuralism first took
> shape.
Well, exactly!
The fact that people can think that this is praise of Derrida's method and not a statement about how one can play a confidence game, says something about our intellectual culture. The fact that this can be accepted as a starting point, with no regard of its correctness, is another problem. The fact that this statement allows you to say anything at all about any text, as long as you obey the rules of the very clever game, is the very point of the writer of the article. This is not "deep" skepticism, which runs into its own contradictory paradoxes, but contempt for any attempt to try to understand the world. This kind of thing is so deep in our intellectual culture, that nobody even sees how deeply wrong it is.
Derrida's most famous saying must be understood in this context. It was
> translated into English (rather misleadingly) as, 'There is nothing
> outside
> the text.' In fact, Derrida wasn't, like some ultra-idealist, reducing
> everything to language (in the French original he actually wrote 'Il n'y a
> pas de hors-texte' - 'There is no outside-text'). Rather he was saying
> that
> once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there
> is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a
> refuge
> independent of language. Everything acquires the instability and ambiguity
> that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language.
Well yes, all is text. Left unsaid is what I have been told often: All those who don't understand that all is text, are simply benighted.
Thank you again for the article. I had read it at the time, at a conference on Derrida at Cardozo Law School, but had forgotten about it.
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