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Dissemination
"The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination —more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."—Peter Dews, New Statesman
400 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1972
94 people are currently reading
2659 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
650 books1,792 followersJacques 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
August 13, 2013
This was assigned to me in grad school in the 90s and it did me terrible damage, peeling back the skin of unexamined unities and making me feel naive and lazy in every particle and motion of my existence. It paralyzed my own writing by infecting me with a terribly self-conscious need to stave off simplistic certainties with annoying insecty swarms of quotation marks, alighting on every sticky key term I felt could only be used in the most provisional sense.
I got over it, and remember the experience with the amused distance of a past lsd experience. It was an ecstasy of a kind. So many other reviewers here had quite different experiences and harbor potent negative emotions about it (check out the reviews of Grammatology--sheesh!). I'm grateful that didn't happen to me.
Perhaps I was prepared because as a kid I would eavesdrop on my elders at our synagogue having the most intriguingly "meta-" arguments involving the oddness that springs from that irreducible space between a thing and the word(s) that stand for it. With the exception of onomatopoeia, it's arbitrary, something I realized in my childlike way back when I discovered that if you repeat a word long enough it empties itself of its simple plainness of self-evident meaning and becomes a strange thing. This isn't exactly what DCon is about but the whole depends on that premise. For people who lost patience or want to dismiss it as a bunch of empty blather I'd suggest giving a second look to the essay Plato's Pharmakon, taking it slowly and keeping in mind that he is not only saying something in the usual way, but his work is simultaneously performative: he's doing something that also demonstrates. And language about language about language must necessarily skirt the boundaries of obvious literal sense. Read with a generous adventurous mind, without disregarding rigor, and the realization that some of the opaque effects are a deliberate way to make an utterance seem to mean two different things in successive readings, and some things just don't translate, from French or from that man's mind
I got over it, and remember the experience with the amused distance of a past lsd experience. It was an ecstasy of a kind. So many other reviewers here had quite different experiences and harbor potent negative emotions about it (check out the reviews of Grammatology--sheesh!). I'm grateful that didn't happen to me.
Perhaps I was prepared because as a kid I would eavesdrop on my elders at our synagogue having the most intriguingly "meta-" arguments involving the oddness that springs from that irreducible space between a thing and the word(s) that stand for it. With the exception of onomatopoeia, it's arbitrary, something I realized in my childlike way back when I discovered that if you repeat a word long enough it empties itself of its simple plainness of self-evident meaning and becomes a strange thing. This isn't exactly what DCon is about but the whole depends on that premise. For people who lost patience or want to dismiss it as a bunch of empty blather I'd suggest giving a second look to the essay Plato's Pharmakon, taking it slowly and keeping in mind that he is not only saying something in the usual way, but his work is simultaneously performative: he's doing something that also demonstrates. And language about language about language must necessarily skirt the boundaries of obvious literal sense. Read with a generous adventurous mind, without disregarding rigor, and the realization that some of the opaque effects are a deliberate way to make an utterance seem to mean two different things in successive readings, and some things just don't translate, from French or from that man's mind
November 29, 2007
On one hand, it's brilliant and thought provoking.
On the other hand, it's Derrida.
On the other hand, it's Derrida.
December 11, 2008
Contains one of the two most important, reasonably readable essays for understanding Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy." Most of Derrida is very difficult to read, sometimes on purpose. This essay requires some knowledge of Plato and some willingness to do some background reading but it is much more accessible than most of Derrida's writing. Plato's pharmacy is a very careful reading of a short Platonic dialogue, The Phaedrus. The basics: Plato makes a case for how writing lies, how writing is a kind of drug and how oral communication (dialectic) is the only method for getting to truth. Derrida takes this notion apart piece by piece in an excellent analysis and leads to the core Derridean issues of how language always both informs and lies.
For philosophy buffs, this is big stuff, since a lot of the history of philosophy has been about trying to get to the truth through language.
For criticism (literary, art, etc.) buffs this is big stuff because it provides modern criticism with the means for doing deconstruction, the method of showing that creative works (or in Derrida's case, all works), contain their contrary.
Derrida says it other times in other ways, but here he says it clearly and carefully using a source text that is very easy to read. Unusually clear for Derrida.
I think that beginners in philosophy might be able to read this and understand it, but I have read too much philosophy so I am not going to guarantee this.
For philosophy buffs, this is big stuff, since a lot of the history of philosophy has been about trying to get to the truth through language.
For criticism (literary, art, etc.) buffs this is big stuff because it provides modern criticism with the means for doing deconstruction, the method of showing that creative works (or in Derrida's case, all works), contain their contrary.
Derrida says it other times in other ways, but here he says it clearly and carefully using a source text that is very easy to read. Unusually clear for Derrida.
I think that beginners in philosophy might be able to read this and understand it, but I have read too much philosophy so I am not going to guarantee this.
October 9, 2007
Sirs and Madams,
People say that nothing good came from post-structuralism. Those ignorant swine never had the gumption to say it to Derrida's face. There is no more beautiful discussion of Platonic metaphysics anywhere. One of kind, and one of a century (literally).
WW,
V
People say that nothing good came from post-structuralism. Those ignorant swine never had the gumption to say it to Derrida's face. There is no more beautiful discussion of Platonic metaphysics anywhere. One of kind, and one of a century (literally).
WW,
V
March 31, 2025
“Play is always lost when it seeks salvation in games… This (non)logic of play and of writing enables to understand what has always been considered so baffling: when Plato, while subordinating or condemning writing and play, should have written so much, presenting his writings, from out of Socrates’ death, as games, indicting writing in writing, lodging against it that complaint (graphē) whose reverberations even today have not ceased to resound.”
Read
April 2, 2025Read in spurts over 2 years; decided to solder it together (into what?). Three essays and a para-text (so four texts? so one text? and consider a translators introduction (then 5? or a whole? and a blurb (6? or do we come to Ousia? and contents (7?...
Althusser complains in a '69 letter to Mamardashvili that Derrida, despite his genius, "qui ne cesse de se répéter". To complain so early in Derrida's career about the endless toil of reading repetitions is very funny to me; moreso that it strikes at something which I think is both unique and interesting in his style.
The question of the Style of Philosophy (a philosophy? The Philosophy?) is rarely broached but always very present - we see it in the droves of complaints about Hegel. Of course, the experienced Hegelian recognises this as a deliberate move, forcing common Germanic expressions through his Phenomenology in order to create a coming-to-Absolute via a more engaged reading, the development of knowledge from undifferentiated being (negating itself) to the Absolute is followed with the reader's own coming-to-. The certain similarity in style between the early Husserl and Freud by each of their departing projects can be traced - sure-footed attempts at scientificity, an egagement with a discourse of the empirical research or the transcendental proofs that grounds their respective projects - both fail, of course, and turn away, yet remnants of it remain, a certain revanchism (return to !). The style of Marx in his mature works is strained with early humanism alongside studies of the working factories, a careful mapping of the conditions of possibility for the political economy shot through with a repressed - or perhaps reversed, turned on its head - Hegelian dialectic. Heidegger takes this to the extreme in how he operates with the his hermenutical circles, the constant displacement of language, a defamiliarizing that confronts us. Derrida, following Barthes' foray and quick-realised failure at colourless writing, attempts a certain reflexivity that acknowledges, bares the weight of - but can never defang - the violence of our reading of Derrida, of Derrida's reading of Plato/Mallarmé/Sollers, of Derrida's reading of Derrida, of Derrida's reading of Nietzsche's shopping list (etc.); forcing us into an engagement with the necessity of the repetition of thought itself, of the fundamental requirement for iterability.
This is a collection of (perhaps) three essays - Plato's Pharmakon, The Double Session, and Dissemination - dealing with three different strands - Plato's Phaedrus (the opposition of philosophy and rhetorics), Mallarmé's Mimique (namely, the opposition of the thematic and diacritic in Richard's structuralist analysis, L'universe imaginaire de Mallarmé (never translated. SAD!)), Sollers' Nombres (the critique of the project of polysemy) - and three operations - the pharmakon, the hymen, dissemination. This division, three neat chapters, is complicated, again and again; most obviously by the Outwork, Derrida's introduction? stitching up? conjoining of the three (now four) into a Book (or not). These operations, with how simply they've been laid out here, seem just an extension of Derrida's constant deconstructive Project (his grand Unified Ouevre), displacing differance and the trace. But while the use of these operations can seem like another excuse just to use a fun new word to confuse witless readers, the attempt is essentially a tactical one, a political one; a specificity of the practise in order to expose a certain forgotten, repressed, exteriority of the text, an assumption that is laid bare (thank you Bataille! and farewell!). Derrida the analyst, Plato the analysand - Mallarmé and Sollers waiting their turns in the ante(entre)chamber .
However, the rigid edges are simply not there; or rather they are there, but only as an assumption, something you presume when you breathe a sigh of relief by having finished one chapter to move on to the next. Derrida constantly mixes the edges; Plato is there from the start, mixed in around Mallarmé, fading into the background, only to reappear in a later discussion on Sollers. The hymen falls, in and out and in to the text, a rhythmic play, transformed from two lips to two pillars, the space between always lacking the transcendental phallus. The inside/outside is disrupted between the texts, within the texts; a constant folding that was never simply stretched. What appears at first as quotations in the chapter on Sollers is recast as a process of grafting, of interrupting, stammering, thieving another text into the present one - which then implodes the idea that there is any "present" text, any ideally present text, any text that exists on it's own legs. "The moment of present meaning is only a surface effect, into which you keep falling, fascinated by appearance, meaning, conscious-presence in general, attendance (upon no one in danger)".
Of course Derrida has said all this before; it's entirely contained within Speech and Phenomena (Voice and Phenomenon, perhaps). The pure presence, the ideality of the ideal, reveals to be inflected, infected, by a necessary absence - not as a negation, in the Hegelian dialectical schematic, but instead as a revealing of a ground prior-to, assumed, ignored. Derrida repeats himself; the "core idea" is unchanged. But this operation must be performed; the process of this analysis is one which can only unveil itself via the specificity of the arkhe-term (the infrastructural term, to nab from Gasché). The playing of the text reveals? generates? the grounding that founds them; differance, supplement, trace, hymen are therefore incomensurable because of their specificity, of their graunlarity, similar only in the inability to synthesise each one's internal "sense" and external "code".
So. Derrida repeats, endlessly repeats, folds over himself, ontop of and over, disseminating himself onto himself, penetrating himself via a detour through an other, one that fails to ever find his way back. And it forces us to repeat, to have to read and repeat, to enact a return that is always a returning to a certain newness.
Althusser complains in a '69 letter to Mamardashvili that Derrida, despite his genius, "qui ne cesse de se répéter". To complain so early in Derrida's career about the endless toil of reading repetitions is very funny to me; moreso that it strikes at something which I think is both unique and interesting in his style.
The question of the Style of Philosophy (a philosophy? The Philosophy?) is rarely broached but always very present - we see it in the droves of complaints about Hegel. Of course, the experienced Hegelian recognises this as a deliberate move, forcing common Germanic expressions through his Phenomenology in order to create a coming-to-Absolute via a more engaged reading, the development of knowledge from undifferentiated being (negating itself) to the Absolute is followed with the reader's own coming-to-. The certain similarity in style between the early Husserl and Freud by each of their departing projects can be traced - sure-footed attempts at scientificity, an egagement with a discourse of the empirical research or the transcendental proofs that grounds their respective projects - both fail, of course, and turn away, yet remnants of it remain, a certain revanchism (return to !). The style of Marx in his mature works is strained with early humanism alongside studies of the working factories, a careful mapping of the conditions of possibility for the political economy shot through with a repressed - or perhaps reversed, turned on its head - Hegelian dialectic. Heidegger takes this to the extreme in how he operates with the his hermenutical circles, the constant displacement of language, a defamiliarizing that confronts us. Derrida, following Barthes' foray and quick-realised failure at colourless writing, attempts a certain reflexivity that acknowledges, bares the weight of - but can never defang - the violence of our reading of Derrida, of Derrida's reading of Plato/Mallarmé/Sollers, of Derrida's reading of Derrida, of Derrida's reading of Nietzsche's shopping list (etc.); forcing us into an engagement with the necessity of the repetition of thought itself, of the fundamental requirement for iterability.
This is a collection of (perhaps) three essays - Plato's Pharmakon, The Double Session, and Dissemination - dealing with three different strands - Plato's Phaedrus (the opposition of philosophy and rhetorics), Mallarmé's Mimique (namely, the opposition of the thematic and diacritic in Richard's structuralist analysis, L'universe imaginaire de Mallarmé (never translated. SAD!)), Sollers' Nombres (the critique of the project of polysemy) - and three operations - the pharmakon, the hymen, dissemination. This division, three neat chapters, is complicated, again and again; most obviously by the Outwork, Derrida's introduction? stitching up? conjoining of the three (now four) into a Book (or not). These operations, with how simply they've been laid out here, seem just an extension of Derrida's constant deconstructive Project (his grand Unified Ouevre), displacing differance and the trace. But while the use of these operations can seem like another excuse just to use a fun new word to confuse witless readers, the attempt is essentially a tactical one, a political one; a specificity of the practise in order to expose a certain forgotten, repressed, exteriority of the text, an assumption that is laid bare (thank you Bataille! and farewell!). Derrida the analyst, Plato the analysand - Mallarmé and Sollers waiting their turns in the ante(entre)chamber .
However, the rigid edges are simply not there; or rather they are there, but only as an assumption, something you presume when you breathe a sigh of relief by having finished one chapter to move on to the next. Derrida constantly mixes the edges; Plato is there from the start, mixed in around Mallarmé, fading into the background, only to reappear in a later discussion on Sollers. The hymen falls, in and out and in to the text, a rhythmic play, transformed from two lips to two pillars, the space between always lacking the transcendental phallus. The inside/outside is disrupted between the texts, within the texts; a constant folding that was never simply stretched. What appears at first as quotations in the chapter on Sollers is recast as a process of grafting, of interrupting, stammering, thieving another text into the present one - which then implodes the idea that there is any "present" text, any ideally present text, any text that exists on it's own legs. "The moment of present meaning is only a surface effect, into which you keep falling, fascinated by appearance, meaning, conscious-presence in general, attendance (upon no one in danger)".
Of course Derrida has said all this before; it's entirely contained within Speech and Phenomena (Voice and Phenomenon, perhaps). The pure presence, the ideality of the ideal, reveals to be inflected, infected, by a necessary absence - not as a negation, in the Hegelian dialectical schematic, but instead as a revealing of a ground prior-to, assumed, ignored. Derrida repeats himself; the "core idea" is unchanged. But this operation must be performed; the process of this analysis is one which can only unveil itself via the specificity of the arkhe-term (the infrastructural term, to nab from Gasché). The playing of the text reveals? generates? the grounding that founds them; differance, supplement, trace, hymen are therefore incomensurable because of their specificity, of their graunlarity, similar only in the inability to synthesise each one's internal "sense" and external "code".
So. Derrida repeats, endlessly repeats, folds over himself, ontop of and over, disseminating himself onto himself, penetrating himself via a detour through an other, one that fails to ever find his way back. And it forces us to repeat, to have to read and repeat, to enact a return that is always a returning to a certain newness.
December 4, 2014
Derrida's triptych of essays, in formation with the prefece that is no preface but is disseminated throught the entirety of the work, whose tripartite formation is not so much distinguished into three as folded up and intertwined into one (or many more, as it weaves its threads out beyond itself), is a working of deconstructive beauty.
My only gripe is now having to read Sollers' Numbers, which is no negative point at all.
A key to the Derridian text (which is no text in-itself and yet of all text(s)).
My only gripe is now having to read Sollers' Numbers, which is no negative point at all.
A key to the Derridian text (which is no text in-itself and yet of all text(s)).
October 21, 2007
Incredibly dense but pretty essential stuff. Derrida sets out most of his main points here: that there's no definite "inside/outside" of a text; that some concepts can't be defined as either/or; that some texts don't signify anything exterior to themselves. It's a long and hard slog at times, full of footnotes and breathtakingly convoluted sentences. That said, when it's at its best, as in the extended discussion of the pharmakon in Plato, it is breathtaking and sets the mind reeling with joy.
July 21, 2017
Intelectual swindler. Boundless disgust. Vomitive throughout.
June 5, 2024
• The verb "to differ" [différer] seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts of until "later" what is presently denied, the possible that is presently impossible.
• In the one case "to differ" signifies nonidentity; in the other case it signifies the order of the same.
• there must be a common, although entirely differant? [différante], root within the sphere that relates the two movements of differing to one another. We provisionally give the name differance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation.
• With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin of production of differences and the differences between differences, the play lieu] of differences. Its locus and operation will therefore be seen wherever speech appeals to difference.
• It is neither a word nor a concept.
• In it we see the juncture of thought of our epoch
the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure's principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger.
• Differance is an ASSEMBLAGE
• Inspired by that passage from Hegel's Encyclopaedia where he compares the body of the sign to an Egyptian pyramid. The a of differance, therefore, is not heard; ti re- mains silent, secret, and discreet, like a tomb.
• When I do specify which difference I mean—when I say "with an e" or "with an a"—this will refer irreducibly to a written text, a text governing my talk, a text that I keep in front of me, that I will read, and toward which I shall have to try to lead your hands and eyes. We cannot refrain here from going by way of a written text, from ordering our- selves by the disorder that is produced therein—and this is what matters to me
• There is no phonetic writing. What we call phonetic writing incorporates nonphonetic signs (punctuation, spacing, etc) but even these are hardly signs.
• for the same reasons, the graphic difference itself sinks into darkness, that it never constitutes the fulness of a sensible term, but draws out an invisible connection, the mark of an inapparent relation be- tween two spectacles.
• the difference between the e and the a marked in "differance" eludes vision and hearing, this happily suggests that we must here let ourselves be referred to an order that no longer refers to sensibility. But we are not referred to intelligibility either
• We must be referred to an order, then, that resists philosophy's founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.
• Differance happens between speech and writing, beyond the tranquil familiarity that binds us to one and to the other, reassuring us sometimes in the illusion that they are two separate things
• How to speak of the a of differance? It cannot be exposed. To be exposed is to be made present and differance is what makes the presentation of being-present possible.
• the detours, phrases, and syntax that I shall often have to resort to wil resemble-will sometimes be practically indiscernible from-those of negative theology. yet what is thus denoted as differance is not theological, not even in the most negative order of negative theology.
• The word "difference" (with an e) could never refer to differing as temporalizing or to difference as polemos. It is this loss of sense that the word differance (with an a) will have to schematically compensate for.
• Differance is 1. Temporalizing and 2. Spacing.
• SIGNS
• We ordinarily say that a sign is put in place of the thing itself, the present thing-"thing" holding here for the sense as well as the referent. Signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present.
• Sign is deferred presence.
• Sign is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate. Substitution of sign for thing is secondary and provisional. Through these two features we see primordial differance
• Saussure
• Arbitrariness of signs and differential character of signs as basis of semiology. They are correlative qualities.
Arbitrariness can occur only because the system of signs is constituted by the differences between the terms, and not by their fulness. The elements of signification function not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of oppositions that distinguish them and relate them to one another.
Principle of difference is condition for signification, affects the whole sign (signified and signifying aspects). Signifying aspect is the concept, the form?
Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. THIS IS DIFFERANCE. The possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and its process in general.
Difference is the movement of play that produces differences within system of language. Difference is effect, Differance is cause.
differance as the movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes "historically" constituted as a fabric of differences.
• Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that si said to be "present," appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.
• Constituting itself, dynamically dividing itself, this interval si what could be called spacing; time's becoming-spatial or space's becoming-temporal (temporalizing).
• Differences are thus "produced"-differed-by differance. But what differs, or who differs? in other words, what is difference? With this question we attain another stage and another source of the problem. What differs? Who differs? What is differance?
• the subject becomes a speaking subject only by dealing with the system of linguistic differences; or again, he becomes a signifying subject (generally by speech or other signs) only by entering into the system of differences. In this sense, certainly, the speaking or signifying subject would not be self-present, insofar as he speaks or signifies, except for the play of linguistic or semiological differance.
• Anyway he’s interested in positing presence-and, in particular, consciousness, the be- ing-next-to-itself of consciousness—no longer as the absolutely matrical form of being but as a "determination" and an "effect."
• Before being so radically and expressly Heideggerian, this was also Nietzsche's and Freud's move, both of whom, as we know, and often in a very similar way, questioned the self-assured certitude of consciousness. And is it not remarkable that both of them did this by starting out with the theme of differance?
• for Nietzsche "the important main activity is unconscious" and that consciousness is the effect of forces whose essence, ways, and modalities are not peculiar to it. Now force itself si never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities.
• And all the conceptual oppositions that furrow Freudian thought relate each concept to the other like movements of a detour, within the economy of differance. The one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other. The one is the other in differance, the one is the differ- ance from the other.
• Differance is the relation between a restricted and general system–a "restricted economy"—one having nothing to do with an unreserved expenditure, with death, with being exposed to nonsense, etc.—-to a "general economy" or system that, so to speak, takes account of what is unre- served. It is a relation between a differance that is accounted for and a differance that fails to be accounted for, where the establishment of a pure presence, without loss, si one with the occurrence of absolute loss, with death. He wants to expose this.
• Heidegger
• wants to point out is that the difference between Being and beings, forgotten by metaphysics, has disappeared without leaving a trace. The very trace of difference has sunk from sight. If we admit that difference (is) (itself) something other than presence and absence, if it traces, then we are dealing with the forgetting of the difference (between Be- ing and beings), and we now have to talk about a disappearance of the trace's trace.
• More than a discrete concept of its own – “literally neither a word nor a concept” – différance is the entry point into language that Jacques Derrida adopts (Derrida, 3). He calls our attention to/through this entry point as he uses différance to complicate commonsense notions of how language operates, and part of the attendant critique renders différance itself beyond a clear definition in positive terms. As such, it is more faithful to Derrida’s work to discuss the ostensibly clear signifier “différance” and the complexity of meanings and impossibilities that can faintly be sensed tumbling out from it, spiralling as they go, as a result of the kind of attention that Derrida trains upon the signifier.
• Différance is firstly the simple (here used with irony) misspelling of différence that is undetectable in speech, owing to the identical French pronunciation of the two signifiers, such that in encountering such an “infraction … one can always act as if it made no difference” (Derrida, 3). It is with this “as if” that Derrida gestures towards différance as a new portal through language. For Derrida, the fact that the difference between différance/différence cannot be audibly detected does not then lead him to insist upon its eminent detectability in print. The opposite, rather, is true for Derrida. The difference “eludes both vision and hearing,” and cannot even “belong to intelligibility,” such that it “resists the opposition … between the sensible and the intelligible” (Derrida, 5). The instability Derrida identifies in phonic language does not allow us to shore up written language as then more stable, but points to a deeper instability common to language, even where it appears to be more stable.
• Différance is therefore reflexively and literally a sign of meaning that is to come, a sign that signs are not closed and point perpetually to a beyond. This is especially true where Derrida intensifies the structuralist linguistic insight that the positive meanings of signifiers emerge through their difference from other signifiers, such that he argues instead for the existence “only differences without positive terms” (Derrida, 11). That the signified “is never present in and of itself,” but exists through a “play of differences,” suggests how différance – that play – is not a concept in itself but the “possibility of conceptuality” (Ibid.).
• At the same time, différance is the “moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces … against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science” (Derrida, 18). That is, because différance is characterised by activity and difference, and goes about providing the possibility for conceptuality precisely through the negative theology of activity and difference rather than any positive dimensions, any grammar that understands – and mandates – fixity of meaning is a totalitarian and arbitrary imposition upon language. Consequently, différance militates against this imposition – or perhaps more faithfully, is the possibility of resistance to such imposition. Derrida brushes briefly against these politics of différance, writing that “it governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority,” such that “not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom” (Derrida, 22).
• Derrida specifies his project of différance as playing the same game as that of Emmanuel Levinas: “it is the domination of beings that différance everywhere comes … to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety” (Derrida, 21). In a still more Levinasian move, such play diminishes Being into that object that différance wishes to exceed, renders totality sad and petty as différance turns instead to “conceive what is outside a text,” that which is more or less than a text’s own, proper margin,” that which “escapes every determination, every name it might receive in the metaphysical text,” that which “could never appear itself, as such,” and most of all that which “threatens the authority of then as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence” (Derrida, 25-26).
• In the one case "to differ" signifies nonidentity; in the other case it signifies the order of the same.
• there must be a common, although entirely differant? [différante], root within the sphere that relates the two movements of differing to one another. We provisionally give the name differance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation.
• With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin of production of differences and the differences between differences, the play lieu] of differences. Its locus and operation will therefore be seen wherever speech appeals to difference.
• It is neither a word nor a concept.
• In it we see the juncture of thought of our epoch
the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure's principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger.
• Differance is an ASSEMBLAGE
• Inspired by that passage from Hegel's Encyclopaedia where he compares the body of the sign to an Egyptian pyramid. The a of differance, therefore, is not heard; ti re- mains silent, secret, and discreet, like a tomb.
• When I do specify which difference I mean—when I say "with an e" or "with an a"—this will refer irreducibly to a written text, a text governing my talk, a text that I keep in front of me, that I will read, and toward which I shall have to try to lead your hands and eyes. We cannot refrain here from going by way of a written text, from ordering our- selves by the disorder that is produced therein—and this is what matters to me
• There is no phonetic writing. What we call phonetic writing incorporates nonphonetic signs (punctuation, spacing, etc) but even these are hardly signs.
• for the same reasons, the graphic difference itself sinks into darkness, that it never constitutes the fulness of a sensible term, but draws out an invisible connection, the mark of an inapparent relation be- tween two spectacles.
• the difference between the e and the a marked in "differance" eludes vision and hearing, this happily suggests that we must here let ourselves be referred to an order that no longer refers to sensibility. But we are not referred to intelligibility either
• We must be referred to an order, then, that resists philosophy's founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.
• Differance happens between speech and writing, beyond the tranquil familiarity that binds us to one and to the other, reassuring us sometimes in the illusion that they are two separate things
• How to speak of the a of differance? It cannot be exposed. To be exposed is to be made present and differance is what makes the presentation of being-present possible.
• the detours, phrases, and syntax that I shall often have to resort to wil resemble-will sometimes be practically indiscernible from-those of negative theology. yet what is thus denoted as differance is not theological, not even in the most negative order of negative theology.
• The word "difference" (with an e) could never refer to differing as temporalizing or to difference as polemos. It is this loss of sense that the word differance (with an a) will have to schematically compensate for.
• Differance is 1. Temporalizing and 2. Spacing.
• SIGNS
• We ordinarily say that a sign is put in place of the thing itself, the present thing-"thing" holding here for the sense as well as the referent. Signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present.
• Sign is deferred presence.
• Sign is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate. Substitution of sign for thing is secondary and provisional. Through these two features we see primordial differance
• Saussure
• Arbitrariness of signs and differential character of signs as basis of semiology. They are correlative qualities.
Arbitrariness can occur only because the system of signs is constituted by the differences between the terms, and not by their fulness. The elements of signification function not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of oppositions that distinguish them and relate them to one another.
Principle of difference is condition for signification, affects the whole sign (signified and signifying aspects). Signifying aspect is the concept, the form?
Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. THIS IS DIFFERANCE. The possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and its process in general.
Difference is the movement of play that produces differences within system of language. Difference is effect, Differance is cause.
differance as the movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes "historically" constituted as a fabric of differences.
• Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that si said to be "present," appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.
• Constituting itself, dynamically dividing itself, this interval si what could be called spacing; time's becoming-spatial or space's becoming-temporal (temporalizing).
• Differences are thus "produced"-differed-by differance. But what differs, or who differs? in other words, what is difference? With this question we attain another stage and another source of the problem. What differs? Who differs? What is differance?
• the subject becomes a speaking subject only by dealing with the system of linguistic differences; or again, he becomes a signifying subject (generally by speech or other signs) only by entering into the system of differences. In this sense, certainly, the speaking or signifying subject would not be self-present, insofar as he speaks or signifies, except for the play of linguistic or semiological differance.
• Anyway he’s interested in positing presence-and, in particular, consciousness, the be- ing-next-to-itself of consciousness—no longer as the absolutely matrical form of being but as a "determination" and an "effect."
• Before being so radically and expressly Heideggerian, this was also Nietzsche's and Freud's move, both of whom, as we know, and often in a very similar way, questioned the self-assured certitude of consciousness. And is it not remarkable that both of them did this by starting out with the theme of differance?
• for Nietzsche "the important main activity is unconscious" and that consciousness is the effect of forces whose essence, ways, and modalities are not peculiar to it. Now force itself si never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities.
• And all the conceptual oppositions that furrow Freudian thought relate each concept to the other like movements of a detour, within the economy of differance. The one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other. The one is the other in differance, the one is the differ- ance from the other.
• Differance is the relation between a restricted and general system–a "restricted economy"—one having nothing to do with an unreserved expenditure, with death, with being exposed to nonsense, etc.—-to a "general economy" or system that, so to speak, takes account of what is unre- served. It is a relation between a differance that is accounted for and a differance that fails to be accounted for, where the establishment of a pure presence, without loss, si one with the occurrence of absolute loss, with death. He wants to expose this.
• Heidegger
• wants to point out is that the difference between Being and beings, forgotten by metaphysics, has disappeared without leaving a trace. The very trace of difference has sunk from sight. If we admit that difference (is) (itself) something other than presence and absence, if it traces, then we are dealing with the forgetting of the difference (between Be- ing and beings), and we now have to talk about a disappearance of the trace's trace.
• More than a discrete concept of its own – “literally neither a word nor a concept” – différance is the entry point into language that Jacques Derrida adopts (Derrida, 3). He calls our attention to/through this entry point as he uses différance to complicate commonsense notions of how language operates, and part of the attendant critique renders différance itself beyond a clear definition in positive terms. As such, it is more faithful to Derrida’s work to discuss the ostensibly clear signifier “différance” and the complexity of meanings and impossibilities that can faintly be sensed tumbling out from it, spiralling as they go, as a result of the kind of attention that Derrida trains upon the signifier.
• Différance is firstly the simple (here used with irony) misspelling of différence that is undetectable in speech, owing to the identical French pronunciation of the two signifiers, such that in encountering such an “infraction … one can always act as if it made no difference” (Derrida, 3). It is with this “as if” that Derrida gestures towards différance as a new portal through language. For Derrida, the fact that the difference between différance/différence cannot be audibly detected does not then lead him to insist upon its eminent detectability in print. The opposite, rather, is true for Derrida. The difference “eludes both vision and hearing,” and cannot even “belong to intelligibility,” such that it “resists the opposition … between the sensible and the intelligible” (Derrida, 5). The instability Derrida identifies in phonic language does not allow us to shore up written language as then more stable, but points to a deeper instability common to language, even where it appears to be more stable.
• Différance is therefore reflexively and literally a sign of meaning that is to come, a sign that signs are not closed and point perpetually to a beyond. This is especially true where Derrida intensifies the structuralist linguistic insight that the positive meanings of signifiers emerge through their difference from other signifiers, such that he argues instead for the existence “only differences without positive terms” (Derrida, 11). That the signified “is never present in and of itself,” but exists through a “play of differences,” suggests how différance – that play – is not a concept in itself but the “possibility of conceptuality” (Ibid.).
• At the same time, différance is the “moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces … against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science” (Derrida, 18). That is, because différance is characterised by activity and difference, and goes about providing the possibility for conceptuality precisely through the negative theology of activity and difference rather than any positive dimensions, any grammar that understands – and mandates – fixity of meaning is a totalitarian and arbitrary imposition upon language. Consequently, différance militates against this imposition – or perhaps more faithfully, is the possibility of resistance to such imposition. Derrida brushes briefly against these politics of différance, writing that “it governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority,” such that “not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom” (Derrida, 22).
• Derrida specifies his project of différance as playing the same game as that of Emmanuel Levinas: “it is the domination of beings that différance everywhere comes … to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety” (Derrida, 21). In a still more Levinasian move, such play diminishes Being into that object that différance wishes to exceed, renders totality sad and petty as différance turns instead to “conceive what is outside a text,” that which is more or less than a text’s own, proper margin,” that which “escapes every determination, every name it might receive in the metaphysical text,” that which “could never appear itself, as such,” and most of all that which “threatens the authority of then as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence” (Derrida, 25-26).
July 14, 2016
Like a You Tube Mix of Derrida's greatest hits (or themes): perhaps a bit redundant at times, but clearer than many of his other books in setting out his core ideas (e.g., the trace, our lack of mastery over the text -- in what we mean to say and in what we interpret, screens that connect and separate, and, in creating a blank of difference, allow for the space of writing across difference, and, above all, the play of meaning, escaping the proper name of the author, escaping the titled text, and escaping our attempts at fixed readings that seek to halt the play of language that is always on the way). This was a good refresher on Derrida, and would probably be a good entry point to his work for the novice. I would give this four stars, but the fifth star is for the book's usefulness as a (relatively) clear introduction to Derrida's themes.
I enjoyed reading this immensely, but the somewhat striking lack of any index, bibliography, reference list, glossary, or even blank pages at the end of the book drove home for me the point that this is a book not of cold analysis, but of pleasure, which is appropriate: Derrida is writing about the play of language, and much of his argument goes to an acceptance of the pleasurable constant play in language -- in all senses of the term "play." Derrida argues weirdly, graphically, in roundabout ways, against attempts at definitive readings, at readings (or writings) that pretend to mastery of texts that are never quite under the control of either titular writer or reader.
What is the value of pleasure in one's (self-)education? I spent a lot of time wringing my hands, as a conflicted former English major, worrying about this question: Shouldn't we be doing hard work and struggling to learn physics and chemistry and applied mathematics to build things and save lives and improve the lot of humanity? Instead we're lying around drinking rosé reading masturbatory French concrete poetry by some weird dude who keeps saying the same thing in different ways (i.e., the only thing we really know is that we can't really know what we are saying (or reading), and that ultimately means that we can't really know ourselves, though it also means that we know the other perhaps as well as we know our self given that we are both inhabited by and constituted by this outside of language that is our only route to self-understanding, but which always leads elsewhere)? That's great, but is that an education? Maybe.
I enjoyed reading this immensely, but the somewhat striking lack of any index, bibliography, reference list, glossary, or even blank pages at the end of the book drove home for me the point that this is a book not of cold analysis, but of pleasure, which is appropriate: Derrida is writing about the play of language, and much of his argument goes to an acceptance of the pleasurable constant play in language -- in all senses of the term "play." Derrida argues weirdly, graphically, in roundabout ways, against attempts at definitive readings, at readings (or writings) that pretend to mastery of texts that are never quite under the control of either titular writer or reader.
What is the value of pleasure in one's (self-)education? I spent a lot of time wringing my hands, as a conflicted former English major, worrying about this question: Shouldn't we be doing hard work and struggling to learn physics and chemistry and applied mathematics to build things and save lives and improve the lot of humanity? Instead we're lying around drinking rosé reading masturbatory French concrete poetry by some weird dude who keeps saying the same thing in different ways (i.e., the only thing we really know is that we can't really know what we are saying (or reading), and that ultimately means that we can't really know ourselves, though it also means that we know the other perhaps as well as we know our self given that we are both inhabited by and constituted by this outside of language that is our only route to self-understanding, but which always leads elsewhere)? That's great, but is that an education? Maybe.
May 27, 2008
i really get off on this book. i have to read it in carefully managed circumstances w/ very little other stimulation. it brings me to higher minds which pertain to & inspire my ideas of presence v. absence & the meaning generated from contradiction, that are part of my "Rhonda" fiction i'm writing. (now is that titillating? i'm working on marketing.) anyway also derrida brings me great entertainment in his ridiculously obtuse statements such as here's one i found: "The true is repeated; it is what is repeated in the repetition, what is represented and present in the representation. It is not the repeater in the repetition, nor the signifier in the signification." i find this wildly entertaining, hilarious, and in some miniscule portion enlightening, at the same time. here's more titillation, this time from him in a footnote: "Writing, pedagogy, [and] masturbation . . share the property of being . . at once something secondary, external, and compensatory, and something that substitutes, violates and usurps." --see?! what images it brings me? it reminds/ evokes for me the trope (/reality) of: intellectual sex, w/ its strains of puritanism, combined with a ribaldry and perversion that exceed reg'lar-people getting-it-on. in other words, bringing a lot of vocabulary to the down&dirty.
July 15, 2009
Honestly, as many other have said, this is worth it for "Plato's Pharmacy" alone. Derrida follows the various translations that translators have used for translating the greek word to pharmakon: the greek word conveys senses of remedy, poison, drug, narcotic, magic potion, love philtre, and cure. Derrida shows how the various translations point towards the whole metaphysical situation of the binary. The pharmakon, however, is a trace which is both absent and present. Derrida sees writing as a constant joker, always referring outward, and yet a site of context within itself. Derrida also brings Plato to his knees in a brilliant critique that turns Sophocles into a magician and a Stoic -- his biggest foes.
The rest of the essays, especially "La Dissemination" are very good. Probably Derrida's most consistently strong essay collection.
The rest of the essays, especially "La Dissemination" are very good. Probably Derrida's most consistently strong essay collection.
October 12, 2007
So I've read some of Plato's Pharmacy and Différance.
My understanding of Derrida is so peripheral - I don't really get it, especially while I'm reading it. This frustrates me because I understand some of his points when I read other people writing about him, or listen to other people explain it. It seems that he makes everything hard because hes quite coy and loves fucking with the reader with puns and language games and complicated writing (constant allusion).
I'm not saying he shouldn't do these things either, I'm just admitting that I'm not all that interested to trek through his complicated prose. His approach also really narrows down his audience, as he is writing to a small few. I'm definitely not a huge fan of this type of writing, although I understand its importance.
My understanding of Derrida is so peripheral - I don't really get it, especially while I'm reading it. This frustrates me because I understand some of his points when I read other people writing about him, or listen to other people explain it. It seems that he makes everything hard because hes quite coy and loves fucking with the reader with puns and language games and complicated writing (constant allusion).
I'm not saying he shouldn't do these things either, I'm just admitting that I'm not all that interested to trek through his complicated prose. His approach also really narrows down his audience, as he is writing to a small few. I'm definitely not a huge fan of this type of writing, although I understand its importance.
July 31, 2017
I have to tell Goodreads that I finished this book so that I can get an extra tic on my yearly challenge, but at the same time is this is not the kind of book that one ever stops reading. Once opened, it is never really closed, and it is always already open. Il y a lá cendre.
Plato's Pharmacy was the first long Derrida essay that I read to completion, and it's easy to recommend as a starting place. For me, however, The Double Session is the most extraordinary work in this extraordinary collection. It's a dense and difficult masterpiece that operates in the margins of literature and philosophy. Why not call it a work of art?
Plato's Pharmacy was the first long Derrida essay that I read to completion, and it's easy to recommend as a starting place. For me, however, The Double Session is the most extraordinary work in this extraordinary collection. It's a dense and difficult masterpiece that operates in the margins of literature and philosophy. Why not call it a work of art?
June 22, 2010
Review pending re-reading. The preface, "Outwork," and "Plato's Pharmacy" are essential. I recall being unimpressed by "The Double Session" and annoyed by "Dissemination."
Update: My re-reading of "The Double Session" went very well. It is hailed - and "hailed" is the appropriate word, given the strange status Derrida has - as one of Derrida's most important texts on literary criticism. Apparently it takes two readings to begin to appreciate.
More later.
Update: My re-reading of "The Double Session" went very well. It is hailed - and "hailed" is the appropriate word, given the strange status Derrida has - as one of Derrida's most important texts on literary criticism. Apparently it takes two readings to begin to appreciate.
More later.
July 19, 2014
(I didn't read the whole book, just "Plato's Pharmacy" (and the translator's introduction)). Subterranean presence of pharmakos haunting Phaedrus. Taking grave matters lightly, at play in the field of signs, getting the nothingness back into words?
September 11, 2021
Daddy Derrida on prime form here. All about that stuff that makes people either completely love him or find it impenetrably opaque. I'm the former, obvs.
So this is the foundation of a lot of the stuff that maybe gave him the position he has. It's immediately compelling to think of Derrida as a writer with a 'system' (which is usually called deconstruction, sometimes differance) but this book left me thinking that what he does better than anyone else is to read things very closely. Close readings will tend towards an agenda but daddy Jacky's is something like 'reading, writing in general'. An ever careful registering of the close pairings of terms, etymology, the chain of signifiers etc. Critically, I was just thinking, this is interpretation which respects the death of the author but not entirely, and also avoids the paralysing, hegemonic effect of psychoanalytical (or psychoanalysis-informed) interpretations.
There's a brilliant essay at the front from translator Barbara Johnson (I hope it also exists independent of this book) making this a collection of four great esssays. Jacky's work is, I think, historically the earlier manifesting of some of his key ideas - dissemination, the hymen, the pharmakon... Always alluding to an endless plenitude of interpretations, never allowing its sublimity to stop him from centring the human-ness, the sociality and situatedness of a writing.
Possibly of interest to the more poetically inclined of those of you reading, there's a lot on the notions of what big D terms 'paragrammatical' - those elements within poetry which are decidedly connotative but not directly so. Space on the page and its consideration in (alleged) contrast to the words, the nature of the vellum, the 'graft' which is writing (ie, a sort of violence rather than an insemination).
It's not for everyone. I get that. But I do love the big D.
So this is the foundation of a lot of the stuff that maybe gave him the position he has. It's immediately compelling to think of Derrida as a writer with a 'system' (which is usually called deconstruction, sometimes differance) but this book left me thinking that what he does better than anyone else is to read things very closely. Close readings will tend towards an agenda but daddy Jacky's is something like 'reading, writing in general'. An ever careful registering of the close pairings of terms, etymology, the chain of signifiers etc. Critically, I was just thinking, this is interpretation which respects the death of the author but not entirely, and also avoids the paralysing, hegemonic effect of psychoanalytical (or psychoanalysis-informed) interpretations.
There's a brilliant essay at the front from translator Barbara Johnson (I hope it also exists independent of this book) making this a collection of four great esssays. Jacky's work is, I think, historically the earlier manifesting of some of his key ideas - dissemination, the hymen, the pharmakon... Always alluding to an endless plenitude of interpretations, never allowing its sublimity to stop him from centring the human-ness, the sociality and situatedness of a writing.
Possibly of interest to the more poetically inclined of those of you reading, there's a lot on the notions of what big D terms 'paragrammatical' - those elements within poetry which are decidedly connotative but not directly so. Space on the page and its consideration in (alleged) contrast to the words, the nature of the vellum, the 'graft' which is writing (ie, a sort of violence rather than an insemination).
It's not for everyone. I get that. But I do love the big D.
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February 27, 2020dei første 200 sidene (som eg har lese), pluss dei resterande 200 (som eg ikkje har lese, men eg har lese DRIDmøje teori for dette, og...) representerer alt arbeidet eg gjorde mot å skrive theory and practice of literary criticism-essayet mitt om new historicism og derrida (som eg fRAMLEIS ikkje fatter), og at eg etter å ha snakka med academic advisoren min bestemte meg for å bytte problemstilling. igjen. eg lover eg skal gje meg no (aller helst for min eigen del, 22 dagar igjen)
December 9, 2012
After reading this book you come away thinking that a lot of the confusion that arose over the reception of Derrida's work stems to a certain degree from Derrida's texts themselves. There are numerous passages throughout this book where Derrida seems to go far beyond a critique of transcendental presence in actually trying to argue that perception itself is an outcome of the differential process. This derives from what Derrida is speaking of when he speaks of visibility, of what is. If what Derrida is talking about in these instances is transcendental visibility or being, then I have no problem with the argument. If on the other hand Derrida actually wants to argue that all our present perceptions are nothing but the outcome of the movement of the differential process then I really have to disagree. Quite simply as Derrida himself states numerous times, the condition of possibility for metaphysical coherence is equally the condition of impossibility of metaphysical presence. Metaphysical presence is erased by the movement of the trace. The problem is that Derrida equivocates, seeming to want to argue that metaphysical presence is present for long enough so as to reduplicate itself so as to produce these trace effects. The problem is that if this were rigorously taken to be the case there would be literally nothing in question, and this is not to speak of the nothing of ideality. Metaphysics could never even become a question if we were simply located within a network of textual relations. Derrida's solution to this is to propose some idea of pure difference, and this is where for me he becomes another transcendental philosopher, precisely in the mode of those transcendental philosophers he is critiquing. As Rorty says Derrida wants to argue that differance isn't a concept and has no relation with traditional philosophical logic but I'm sorry if it looks like a concept and behaves like a concept, well you get the idea. Pure difference is to sustain the analysis at the textual level when the theses that have produced the problem do implicitly lead to the positing of some kind of extra-textual condition. I can't help but feel that Derrida is so in love with writing that his position is more the product of his love of writing which legitimizes this interminable cycling through of themes and unfolding of relations between them, than being a working out of philosophical questions in hand. Having said that I still liked this book, particularly the analysis of mimicry, but I thought the final essay was way to long for the conceptual material that was being developed.
April 10, 2016
The book consists of three parts, in which Derrida, as usual, unweaves texts of various philosophers, one of them being Socrates. Derrida deconstructs Socratic dialogue in the essay 'Plato's Pharmacy' aiming to reveal the inconsistencies written by Plato. Throughout the myth about the god of writing Theuth, there appear a number of binaries, such as a philosopher/a sophist, inside/outside, king/subject, good memory/evil memory, etc. In each of these binaries, the left side is always privileged and favoured, whereas the ones on the right are marginalized and repressed. By doing so, Derrida criticizes the foundations of Western philosophy which rests its praxis upon logocentrism. However, he also exposes how Socrates himself resorts to myth to explain the truth about writing. It is best illustrated through the word pharmakon which has two major meanings opposed to each other: a poison and a medicine. Since Socrates regards writing as a pharmakon, it embraces both qualities the good and the bad ones. Eventually, Derrida overthrows binaries explaining how they are intertwined. Derrida infers that writing that has been pushed to the outside, becomes part of interior to serve as supplementary to logos or speech. The author shows that Socrates and Plato, being wise men or 'true' philosophers, who were opposed to sophists, wizards, poets, etc, are, in fact, related to them. This book can be considered a guide to Derridean Deconstruction.
October 23, 2010
This review will have to suffice for all of my reviews of Derrida's philosophy. Derrida is undoubtedly one of the great minds of 20th Century philosophy. Nonetheless, I have never finished a text of his without thinking that the fundamental insight presented was not more trouble than it was worth. Yes, his readings of Plato, Marx, Hegel and Heidegger are thoughtful and unpack the text in interesting ways. However, to get at what is interesting, the reader has to get through so many cognitive hoops that Derrida undermines the worth of his own interpretation.
June 19, 2011
We were assigned the 100 page section Plato's Pharmacy. I was pleasantly surprised by the accessibility of this text in comparison to the other Derrida reading we were assigned. Derrida closely examines Plato's Phaedrus, opening my eyes to new ideas about this text. I need to continue playing with the ideas to let them sink in; there's definitely a lot packed in here! It was neat to revisit the Phaedrus and consider how much is in it itself and realize how many ways there are to dissect it.
February 16, 2012
I LOVED the preface of the book. The ideas inspired me to play with and look at language. After that, I got deeply lost (and not in a good way) in Derrida's complex language and ideas and felt I never could catch up. There were some gems along the way, but for the most part this book was well over my head. I found myself while reading this book wishing he would get on with it and say something (anything) I cared about. I think I am no longer the right audience for obtuse academic writing.
February 16, 2008
Reading Derrida is, for me, akin to reading the Satanic Verses - I feel there is always such a wealth more than I have gotten from my first reading, and second, and third ... This one is by far one of my favorites, perhaps because Plato is so close to my heart.
March 26, 2012
Every other book I've read by Derrida I've loved and found tremendously illuminating. I appreciate the thoughts here on citationality and the text-- but this tome might be the man's Finnegan's Wake, without the latter's fantastic wrap-up at the end.
February 20, 2014
I've a love/hate relationship with Derrida, as his theories are very enlightening yet *very* rigorous. ...definitely a good start to gleaning how metanarratives and mythologemes are embedded within language.
November 6, 2007
Amazing. Derrida deconstructs Western metaphysics writ large.
January 30, 2008
not that I really understood it, but I have fond undergraduate memories of trying to figure out what the hell he was saying during my senior seminar.
July 9, 2008
it changed my head.
the writing style is so fun and literary. it's fun catching all the metaphors that we use, ones we don't realize that we use.
the writing style is so fun and literary. it's fun catching all the metaphors that we use, ones we don't realize that we use.
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