Quoting the Other

Abstract

In “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” Jacques Derrida returns to the controversy with Jonathan Searle to clarify his position but above all because he “would have wished to make legible the (philosophical, ethical, political) axiomatics hidden beneath the code of academic discussion.” I intend, in turn, to return to this text in order to find in it not only the conditions of an ethics of academic discussion but also of interpretation in a deconstructive perspective. In “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in fact, it is possible to point out the necessity of a certain ethical treatment of the texts. In particular, how can we determine the conditions of an ethical use of quotation against the always possible manipulation of the text that quotation makes possible? I attempt to answer this question claiming that the reading protocol of deconstruction meets these conditions showing us at the same time the ethical conditions of scientific discourse in general, beyond any scientific claim of objectivity.

Keywords:

• ethics
• reading
• context
• citation
• violence
• deconstruction

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The passage in question is in Derrida, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion” 156, and in Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea” 259.

2 Cf. Derrida, “Signature Event Context” 12:

the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its “original” desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from its participation in a saturable and constraining context. Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be “cited,” put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage]. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called “normal.”

3 It appears in fact also in “Like the Sound of the Sea” 239, and precisely in regard to the “rules” that Derrida poses as a guide to his reading of de Man.

4 In “Toward an Ethic of Discussion” 147–48, Derrida is very clear, clearer than elsewhere, about this extension of the notion of text, which goes back as is known to Of Grammatology.

5 For a clear and rigorous explanation of the structural conditions that make context saturation impossible, see Gasché 129–49.

6 Cf. Derrida, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion” 142:

What is “the American publish-or-perish system”? Its definition would require numerous analyses that I cannot attempt here. To remain at a relatively trivial level, I will say that to my knowledge there are in this regard at least as many signs of exclusions or of censorship as of appropriation.