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The Post-Turn Turn: Derrida, Gadamer and the Remystification of Language

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Deconstruction: A Critique

Abstract

Heidegger’s own valorisation of the audible, of the logos and language which is heard is completely consistent with the radical temporality of the Being who is in-the-world, grounded in time.1 For the Derrideans,

Writing has something of the character of an inscription, a mark offered to the world and promising, by its solidity and apparent autonomy, meaning which is momentarily deferred. Precisely for that reason it calls for interpretation, and our modes of interpretation are essentially ways of constructing communicative circuits into which we can fit.2

To understand the language of a text is to recognize the world to which it refers.

(Culler, Structuralist Poetics)

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Notes

  1. This is especially true in his Being and Time, under the influence of Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness.

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  2. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975) p. 134.

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  3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md., 1976), p. 23.

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  4. Ibid., p. 61. Note the anthropomorphism of the word here.

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  5. Derrida, J. L. Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, ‘Interview/Jacques Derrida: Positions’, part 2, Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 1 (1973) p. 40.

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  6. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68.

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  7. Ibid. D. 69.

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  8. See Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), a special issue entitled French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. A Freudian could make much of Derrida’s sexually punning terminology (‘hymen’, ‘dissemination’, and so on).

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  9. Jeffrey Mehlman, in his Introduction to Derrida’s essay ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972) p. 74.

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  10. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontails, ‘Deferred Action (Nachtraglichkeit, Aprescoup)’, ibid., pp. 182–5.

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  11. At the State University of New York, Binghamton, 26–9 March 1976. The conference was held under the auspices of the journal Boundary 2.

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  12. Spivak, Translator’s Preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, p. lxxvii.

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  13. Derrida, Houdebine and Scarpetta, ‘Interview/Jacques Derrida: Positions’, part 1, Diacritics,vol. 2 no. 4 (1972) p. 36.

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  14. Ibid., part 2, and Derrida and Houdebine, ‘Response’, Diacritics, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973) p. 58.

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  15. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds), The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, Md., 1970) p. 247.

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  18. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962) p. 355. Heidegger’s emphasis.

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  24. Quoted by Culler, ‘Structure of Ideology and Ideology of Structure’, New Literary History, vol. 4. no. 3(1973) 447.

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  25. Ibid., p. 478.

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  28. Ibid., p. 248.

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  37. Ibid., p. 65.

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  46. Ibid., p. 37.

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  47. Ibid., p. 40.

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  54. Ibid., p. 68.

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  59. Ibid., p. 62.

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Authors
  1. Leonard Orr
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Allahabad, India

    Rajnath (Professor of English) (Professor of English)

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© 1989 Rajnath

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Orr, L. (1989). The Post-Turn Turn: Derrida, Gadamer and the Remystification of Language. In: Rajnath (eds) Deconstruction: A Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10335-5_11

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