The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac

by Jacques Derrida, John P. Leavey Jr. (Translator)

In 1746 the French philosophe Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge , one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous , Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a reading of Condillac’s Origin of Human Knowledge, this appears initially that it may be a critique of epistemology, and perhaps it is—but Derrida reads this text as featuring a “rigorous and inveterate distinction between two metaphysics” (33), wherein Condillac substitutes an ontology of “phenomena and relations” for an ontology of “essences and causes” (id.). There’s plenty on this, including the cool notion of an “epistemological myth” (47), applying perhaps to the belief in solitary authorial meaning, which is the assumption by which some readers measure Condillac and find that “his doctrine is double” (55) and thereby inconsistent (the purported inconsistency depends on metaphors of a genesis, on the one hand, against metaphors of a calculus, on the other.)

Progress in knowledge, according to Condillac, is a matter of “observing human mental aberrations” so as to avoid them in the making of further discoveries (42)—a ‘double doctrine’ is probably one such aberration. Discoveries, for Condillac, are made by those “who cannot communicate without imagining new turns of expression within the rules of analogy, or at least so as to deviate from them as little as possible. Hence they conform to the genius of their language, to which at the same time they communicate their own” (66-67). Derrida notes that this deviation from genius is the locus of the archaeology of the frivolous: genius

tries a new road. But as every style analogous to the character of the language, and to his own, hath been already used by preceding writers, he has nothing left but to deviate from analogy. Thus in order to be an original, he is obliged to contribute to the ruin of a language, which a century sooner he would have helped to improve. Though such writers may be criticized, their superior abilities must still command success. The ease there is in copying their defects, soon persuades men of indifferent capacities, that they shall acquire the same degree of reputation. Then begins the reign of subtle and strained conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon [cf. Adorno!] of persons whose undertakings have been debauched by bad metaphysics. The public applauds: frivolous and ridiculous writings, the beings of the day, are surprisingly multiplied.’ (67)

Derrida then quotes Condillac’s reading of Locke, who had remarked that “the false connections of ideas make madness or folly” (91). Condillac realizes at that point that he himself has “made great detours” (92)—and Derrida identifies the greatest detour in Condillac as “the sign is the name the Essay will have given to the detour in general, to experience itself as a detour” (id.).

For his part, Condillac believes in the “necessity of signs in acquiring a habit of the operations of the soul” (94), and “the use of signs is the principle which unfolds the germ of all our ideas” (95). In this, Derrida finds an “overabundance of value and the frivolous futility necessarily produced by the operation of supplementation” (101), which means that “the economic and the semio-linguistic sciences are no more juxtaposed than subordinated to each other” (id.): “The effect of overabundance produced by what supplies the lack gives rise to commerce, both economic and linguistic” (103), which functions “only insofar as it produces a useless supplement” (id.), which is as much Marx as it is Bataille. We are on familiar saussurean ground with “The property of the sign is the system of the arbitrary” (112).

The foregoing is by the bye all prefacing material—the final essay in the volume is the actual argument on the Frivolous—which initially “consists in being satisfied with tokens” (118): “it originates with the sign, or rather with the signifier, which, no longer signifying, is no longer a signifier” (id.). The sign “remains for nothing, an overabundance exchanged without saying anything, like a token” (id.); this is no accident, but is rather “its congenital breach: its entame, arche, beginning, commandment, its putting in motion and in order—if at least, deviating from itself, frivolity, the sign’s disposability, can ever be or present itself” (id.). The frivolous therefore “defies all archaeology, condemns it, we would say, to frivolity” (119).
Condillac tries to explain how frivolity might work:

six is six is a proposition at once identical and frivolous. But remark that the identity is at the same time in the terms and in the ideas. Now the identity in ideas is not what makes the proposition frivolous; it is the identity in terms. In fact, there can never be any need [Derrida’s emphasis] to form this proposition six is six. (122)

We can hear Derrida’s laughter at this moment when it is claimed that there can be no need to form the proposition, even though twice Condillac forms it to say that it is never necessary even once—deftly demonstrating simultaneously both the truth and falsity of the thesis about frivolity in repetition. “Yet just as bad metaphysics begins with language, with the deviations or gaps of the futile signifier, with the drift in course by which the sign repeats itself and identifies with itself to signify nothing other than itself, so frivolity arises from the origin of the sign” (124): in this, though Condillac very much wants “frivolity as a supervening historical evil,” he nevertheless sets out with “a kind of essential fate, structural destiny, original sin” (id.). “The root of evil is writing” (126), subject as always to a “temporal dehiscence” (131).

Good times overall, quick for a Derrida text—its concerns fit in with the major late 60s texts.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN ESSAY (OSTENSIBLY) ABOUT THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and writer, best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as “Deconstruction.”

He begins this essay (first published in France in 1973) about the 18th century French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac with the statement, “This book, ‘An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge,’ should have opened the doors to a nameless science. It used to be possible to criticize metaphysics only AS SUCH. This book does that---which regularly amounts to founding a new metaphysics. This book lacks nothing in that respect either---which implies a rigorous and inveterate distinction between TWO metaphysics. We are going to verify this.” (Pg. 33)

He states, “The medium of the conditions for discovery is always the history of language, the history of sign systems. This history, which itself has natural conditions that are analyzed in the Essay, always prepares the stroke of genius. This stroke cannot be produced before the constitution of a certain state of language, of certain semiotic possibilities in general. The least natural language, algebra, and the language of calculus, at once science and language, remain HISTORICAL possibilities. They have history and they open up a history.” (Pg. 65)

He suggests, “Yet just as bad metaphysics begins with language, with the deviation or gap of the futile signifier, with the drift in course by which the sign repeats itself and identifies with itself to signify nothing other than itself, so frivolity arises from the origin of the sign. That is why philosophical frivolity is not just an accident. Condillac undoubtedly wants to be right about this, which amounts to considering frivolity as a supervening historical evil, which affects from the outside an essentially serious discourse. But simultaneously, according to a logic we have now identified, the accident is also described as a kind of essential fate, structural destiny, original sin.” (Pg. 124)

He asserts, “The root of evil is writing. The frivolous style is the style---that is written. Unlike the poet and the orator, philosophers (inventors of prose, let us not forget) did not ‘witness… the impressions they caused,’ nor did they find the rule of their discourse in live interchange. Absence of the object, absence of the interlocutor, philosophy, writing, frivolity, where can this chain flag or give way?” (Pg. 126-127)

Not one of Derrida’s “major works,” this essay nevertheless will interest those seriously studying Derrida’s thought.

[K80 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll be real - I think this might be 100% a Me Thing™️, but I really didn’t get much out of this work. It’s fine? Maybe I just didn’t have enough time to read it closely enough? Maybe our seminar on the book sucked? Maybe I’ll never capital-g Get Derrida?

But to me, Condillac (and Locke) can pound sand and so can the contemporary Derridian who did the into/preface.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might better appreciate Derrida’s work on Condillac if I was better familiar with the author referenced in this work’s subtitle, yet Derrida’s reconstructive approach does encourage reflection on the ways ephemera conveys meaning.