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On Deconstruction and the Proof of Platonism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Hugo Meynell
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On a superficial overview, the upshot of the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida seems to be to make nonsense of all human discourse and communication. When one looks at it more carefully, this impression is abundantly confirmed. Still, there are lessons of great importance to be learned from it; and I shall try in what follows to show what they are.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 70 , Issue 823 , January 1989 , pp. 21 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Staten, H., Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1984), 124. 129Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 129.

3 Cf. Derrida, , Limited Inc. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, 66; Culler, J., On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 93Google Scholar.

4 With regard to the former interpellation, one can hardly wonder at Derrida's admission that the future glimpsed by deconstmction ‘can only be proclaimed or presented as a sort of monstrosity’ (Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5Google Scholar; Culler, op. cit., 158).

5 Derrida notes that the apparent ‘effacement of the signifier’ in speech, which is a prime target of deconstruction, is ‘the condition of the very idea of truth’ (Of Grammatology, 20).

6 As Culler puts it, exercises in deconstruction ‘do not escape the logocentric premises they undermine; and there is no reason to believe that a theoretical enterprise could ever free itself from those premises’ (op. cit., 7). The critic is left ‘in a position not of sceptical detachment but of unwarrantable involvement’ (ibid., 88).

7 As well as Derrida's allusions to ‘theologocentrism’, the following is notable. In elucidating texts, ‘the motif of homogeneity, the theological motive par excellence, is what must be destroyed’ (Positions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 64Google Scholar; Culler, op. cit., 135).

8 The Nature of Aesthetic Value (London: Macmillan, 1986), 39–45Google Scholar.

9 This of course is a recurrent theme of Of Grammatology. Cf. also Derrida, , Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 158Google Scholar; and Culler, op. cit., 89.

10 Though Plato's point in the Phaedrus seems to be the limited and reasonable one that a speaker can modify his discourse at short notice for the benefit of the listener, in a manner that is not possible with what is committed to writing. Cf. Phaedrus, 275d.

11 See Rorty, R., Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chapter 6.

12 Cf. Culler, op. cit., 91.

13 Aristotle, Ethics, IV, 7.

14 Cf. the quotation from Derrida's ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’ in Culler, op. cit., 156.

15 Derrida refers to ‘arche‐writing’ in Of Grammatology (e.g., 128).

16 Culler, op. cit., 86.

17 Culler disarminlgly remarks that sawing off the branch on which one is oneself sitting is a physically perfectly possible operation (op. cit., 149). But perhaps a closer analogy is with the would‐be mass murderer who inadvertently shoots himself before turning his machine‐gun on his intended victims.

18 Culler, op. cit., 86.

19 Nietzsche, The Will to Power; cited Culler, loc. cit.

20 Culler, op. cit., 88.

21 Culler, loc. cit.

22 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 12; Culler, op. cit., 92–3.

23 Derrida, Positions 26. Cf. Culler, op. cit., 100.

24 Cf. L. Wittgenstein's classical attack on the notion of a ‘private language’ in the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958)Google Scholar.

25 Cf. Derrida, , Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (Evanston, 111: Northwestern University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

26 As John Raven puts it, forms are ‘objects of knowledge, apprehended by thought, not senses’: Plato's Thought in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 251Google Scholar.

27 Derrida, Writing and Difference; quoted Culler, ‘Jacques Derrida’ in Sturrock, J., ed., Structuralism and Since (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175Google Scholar.