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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by Michael H. Ducey, Ph.D.
The objective in this chapter is to get into the mind of Jacques Derrida. On the one hand, he was famous, popular and very, very smart. He sold a lot of books and his books continue to sell. When he died in 2004, then president of France Jacques Chirac referred to him as "the most important philosopher of the twentieth century." On the other hand, his work is highly controversial, has drawn criticism in a manner unlike any other philosopher, and his prose in places achieves a certain pinnacle of incoherence. I think the basic issue in Derrida is the primordial connection between knowledge and reality. Derrida's position on this matter is that there is none. In human knowledge, there is a fundamental disconnect between the sensible and the intelligible, and the only remedy for this disconnect is a series of imaginary connectors that Derrida himself has discovered, or invented, such as différance, the trace, the supplement, the hymen, etc. Derrida of course denies that he holds that there is no connection between knowledge and reality.
So, in his own mind, he does not claim there is no connection between knowledge and reality, only that it is "much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed." I respectfully submit that this is rather self-serving of Derrida, and that his position could be stated as that there is no traditional connection between knowledge and reality, there is no "primordial" connection between them (in the traditional sense). This is tantamount to saying that there is no connection at all, that is, there is no connection as proposed by anyone else in the world except me. It is important to point this out because Derrida has published over forty books and so there is an immense body of language there that anyone could choose to argue with. But the fundamental problem with all of Derrida's work is at its very beginning and foundation. He comes to philosophy with an inability to notice the spontaneous and primordial connection between knowledge and reality. The essence of this connection is that between insight and sensory material. Once one notices this basic disconnect, one is in a position to understand all the oddities of Derrida's oeuvre. He had a "Humpty Dumpty" problem. Once you sever the natural and primordial connection between knowledge and reality, or "challenge or complicate our common assumptions about it", then it will take "all the king's horses and all the king's men" to put the world back together again, and even then, it probably will not work. Derrida gives an overview of his position on knowledge in his essay, "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences":
He goes on to say:
The two elements that form the cornerstone of Derrida's worldview are given here. One is "the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible", and the other is the central argument in support of this opposition, namely, "repetition". Now we will proceed to show the invalidity of these two elements. However, it is also important to note that Derrida does not adopt them as the result of a long and circuitous rational argument (although he does indeed engage in such at great length). Rather he adopts them as part of his original orientation to the world and knowledge. When Derrida introspectively examines his own process of knowing he does not encounter a "central signified, the original or transcendental signified". Rather, when Derrida "goes inside", he encounters "the absence of a center or origin". The deeply personal quality of this orientation to the world is what explains all the oddities of Derrida's philosophy. Throughout his work he relentlessly and resourcefully pursues the justification and elaboration of what is essentially a personal and intuitive view of the world. This is a view of the world in which there is a fundamental disconnect between the sensible and the intelligible, that is between body and mind, between sensory process and thinking process. The clinical term for this disconnect is dissociation. That is to say, in popular language, when Derrida philosophizes, he is not in his body. We will have occasion in a later chapter to devote considerable attention to dissociation, because it is actually the central subject of this book. The philosophy of Jacques Derrida is in fact merely an introduction to the phenomenon of dissociation which, we will claim, is probably the most important emotional illness of our time. Structuralism When Derrida says that, "The concept of the sign, in each of its aspects, has been determined by this opposition throughout the totality of its history.", he is referring to the Course in General Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Dates are important here. Derrida was born in 1930 in Algiers, and passed his adolescence essentially hiding from Vichy France officials, since he was a Jew. He came to Paris in 1949 and finished his formal university studies at the École Normal Superior in 1956. His first book, a lengthy introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, was published in 1962, and it was widely praised and made him famous. In 1963 he gave a well-attended lecture criticizing The History of Madness by Michel Foucault, who had been his teacher and who was at the time the leading intellectual on the Paris scene. Derrida is part of that intellectual movement that occurred in France right after World War II called "Structuralism". Structuralism was an intellectual movement of scientism and positivism that had its roots in the linguistics of the early twentieth century, but only became a general intellectual phenomenon in the fifties and sixties in Paris. A key component of structuralism was the adoption by French intellectuals of the Course in General Linguistics as their model of highest intellectual achievement. It became so familiar in those circles that it was generally referred to simply as "the CGL". Although the CGL was published in 1916, it did not become a canonical text for French philosophy until after World War II. Thus, the career of Structuralism spans about twenty years in France, from 1949 to 1969. We now think of Jacques Derrida as "post-structuralist" because he criticized some key positions of structuralism properly so-called, and, among his peers in Paris in the 1960s was considered an "extremist" in this regard. The CGL had a curious history. Ferdinand de Saussure was essentially a nineteenth century linguist born in 1857. He studied in Berlin and Leipzig and at the age of 21 published a highly-acclaimed study, Thesis on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages. He taught in Paris in the 1880s, but returned to his native Geneva in 1891 for his most mature work. From 1907 to 1913 he taught a course in Geneva on "general linguistics" and died in 1913. He never wrote a book about his work, and his followers were not even able to find his notes for the course after he died. But two of his students were mature linguists in their own right, and they gathered together their notes on his course, and published the CGL in 1916. At first the CGL was an unremarkable and very technical work of interest only to professional linguists. One of these linguists was the remarkable Russian, Roman Jakobsen, who went to Prague after the Bolshevik revolution (he was originally an attaché at the Soviet embassy in Czechoslovakia), and became the leading figure in the Prague School of formalist linguistics in the 1920s. He became acquainted with the CGL and thought it quite remarkable, and communicated this to his colleagues in Copenhagen. The Russians and the Danes made common reference to Saussure at the First International Congress of Linguistics at The Hague in 1928. This broadened Saussure's following among linguists but it was still not a work of general intellectual currency. Then Jakobsen spent the years of World War II in New York where he met Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the two of them shared ideas. Lévi-Strauss later reported:
His adoption of structuralism as a model for his own science was thoroughgoing:
He thereby "elevated linguistics to the rank of a pilot science, of an initial model, basing anthropology on the cultural and social, rather than on the physical." [Dosse, I, 23.] This was a major turning point in the history of anthropology. The publication of The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949 "was one of the major events of postwar intellectual history, and a touchstone for the founding of the structuralist program." [Dosse, I, 18.] This "baptism" of the CGL as the model for all social science was completed by the publication in 1956 of an article by Algirdas Greimas, "L'actualité du saussurisme" in Le Français moderne (no. 3, 1956). Greimas (1917-1992) was a Lithuanian who had studied linguistics in France before the war, taught in Alexandria, Egypt from 1949 to 1958, but spent his summers in Paris and was a close friend of the Parisian structuralist luminary, Roland Barthes. He finally got a teaching position in Paris in 1965. He remained a hard-core Saussurian structuralist throughout his life. During the fifties and sixties the evolving definition of a total semiological program encompassing all the human sciences was justified and encouraged by Saussure's definition of semiology as the "science that studies the life of signs at the heart of social life." [Dosse, I, 45] The complete dominance of structuralism over intellectual life in Paris during the 1960s can hardly be exaggerated. Dosse refers to 1966 as the "annus mirabilis". The number of structuralist books and articles was prodigious. Foucault (The Order of Things) "was selling like hotcakes". "The year 1966 was one in which the apprentice structuralist reader had to read constantly. Every day brought another work to the harvest; a number of reprints came out that were also considered indispensable reading for a good structuralist." [Dosse, I, 319.] And Foucault could say:
And further:
Saussure In regard to language, Saussure distinguished between "the referent" on the one hand--the thing in itself--and the sign on the other hand. And, in regard to the sign, he distinguished between the internal aspect of it--what we usually call "the concept"-- that he called "the signified", and the external expression of the concept, the "signifier". Saussure claimed that the phonic signifier ("speech") was primary and the written signifier (writing) was merely a substitute for speech. Although Derrida accepted the ontological priority of "the system of differences" that makes up Saussure's definition of language, he also devoted a great portion of his work to disagreeing with the primacy of speech over writing. In "Différance", Derrida cites the key reference to Saussure:
And he goes on to comment:
And here is where Derrida by-passes the sensory component of knowledge. It is a foundational exclusion and affects all of his thinking. However, we might introduce a realist criticism immediately. When Saussure says, "Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system…", he might be correct about the prior existence of ideas. (Sounds, albeit unorganized, always existed.) But if we ask where do ideas come from, then we are led to the absolutely prior existence of the human mind and the act of insight in regard to language. Knowing itself is what must exist "before the linguistic system." The "signified concept" is produced by the act of knowing. In its first instance, it is indeed "present in and of itself in a sufficient presence that refers only to itself." In and of itself, insight does not specify the material form; it only specifies that some material form is appropriate. The knower -- a community of knowers -- must select a material form. This is why people who use signifiers such as "horse", "cheval", "caballo", "Pferd", "equus" and the like can eventually agree that they are all referring to the same thing. Saussure did understand that language is constructed by "a social contract" in which a community of persons comes to agreement on what sounds and marks will be associated with what concepts. But for him, "language" (vs. speech) was the only object that could be scientifically explained, and consequently he enclosed his linguistics within a restrictive study of "the code" and did not devote any attention to the conditions of its appearance and signification. This included the speaking [or writing] subject: "Language is not a function of the speaking subject, but the product that the individual passively records." [CGL, 30] [Dosse, I, 49-51] A methodological formalization is entirely legitimate and it makes it possible to go quite far in describing languages. But when it is transformed from being just methodological into being descriptive of reality as such, it produces a seriously distorted worldview. So this was the milieu that Jacques Derrida was exposed to during his formative intellectual years, and it was an intellectual climate that supported the complete disembodiment of thinking. |
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