Derrida’s Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

Abstract

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for “deconstructing” Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the “paralogism.” I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida’s reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of “writing” (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure’s own notion of “linguistic value,” produced in a system of differences without positive terms.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 14.

2. In Of Grammatology we are first introduced to Saussure, then follows Levy-Strauss, before, in the final two-thirds of the work, Rousseau is examined—not only is there no chronological progression in the exposition: but one will also look in vain for a thematic or logical one.

3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 30. In several statements from Of Grammatology we encounter this ubiquitous idea about a “repressed,” “subordinated,” “reduced,” suspended,” or “suppressed” writing, which will eventually be liberated in the future by a “general grammatology”: the “declared purpose [of general linguistics] indeed confirms... the subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language” (30). “The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced. This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing” (43; my emphases).

4. According to the metaphysical tradition, so Derrida, “the written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning.” It “remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism; absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning” (Of Grammatology, 12).

5. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

6. Derrida, “Positions: Interview with Jean-Lous Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta,” in Positions, 53.

7. If Derrida’s theory was merely about repression of writing in the plain and simple sense, he would be saying that writing was invented before speech, and then eventually became an object for repression, because, after people started to speak, for some unexplained reasons, they started to fear writing. This narrative is absurd for all kinds of reasons, some of which are proposed by John M. Ellis in Against Deconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21: “1) Speech quite clearly existed long before the invention of writing. 2) There still exist in the world languages that are spoken but not written, but none that are written without being spoken. 3) There are large numbers of individuals who speak without writing, but none who write without speaking (except when their physical capacity to produce speech is deficient). 4) There are many different forms of writing, but linguists of all persuasions agree that no form of writing in general use is adequate to record all that there is in language.”

8. Claude Evans suggests a similar distinction, see the following note.

9. Friends and foes alike seem in agreement with this general scheme. Niall Lucy in A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), writes: “Derrida has never denied that speech comes before phonetic writing. His point is that phonetic writing is only a form of a more general writing, or a more general concept of writing, which generates the possibility of speech as presence, as origin of language, as natural communication” (121). Geoffrey Bennington, in “Saussure and Derrida,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), writes: “Logically prior to the distinction between speech and writing is the differential system and the trace-structure.” (194). Critical of Derrida’s narrative, Claude J. Evans, in Strategies of Deconstruction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), suggests a similar distinction between graphical and generalized writing—in his terminology, writing “traditional” (wt) and writing “grammatological” (wg), where wg is seen as the foundation of both speech and writing: “Derrida’s strategy in the early pages of Of Grammatology is to characterize logocentrism in terms of the primacy of the ‘system hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak’ and thus in terms of the image of writing implied by it: wt or traditional writing, writing that is purely representative of speech. He then generalizes certain aspects of wt, namely, ‘the exteriority of the signifier,’ to ‘the exteriority of writing in general’ or grammatological writing, wg. It then turns out that speech falls under wg, since speech is just as much a differential system as writing is” (164).

10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payothéque, 1975). I refer to two different English translations, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin: (London: McGraw-Hill, 1966), and Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle: Open Court, 1986); hereafter page references are cited in the text.

11. Derrida’s comments on Saussure are mainly presented in Of Grammatology (“Linguistics and Grammatology”), Positions (“Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with J. Kristeva”), and Margins of Philosophy (“The Linguistic Circle of Geneva”). Several scholars have commented on Derrida’s readings of Saussure. Well-known book-length commentaries include: Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Robert Strozier, Saussure, Derrida, and the Metaphysics of Subjectivity (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989); and Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Significant commentaries we also find in: Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction, chap. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Roy Harris, Saussure and his Interpreters; (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Bennington, “Saussure and Derrida,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure; Arthur Bradley, Derrida’s Of Grammatology: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Samuel Weber: “Saussure and the Apparition of Language,” Modern Language Newsletter 91 (1979); and Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction, part 2.

12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 34; De la Grammatologie, 51–52.

13. See for example Ellis, Against Deconstruction: “It is surely odd that Derrida objects to the much milder text of Saussure when his own text is moralistic in tone to an extravagant degree” (26).

14. In the context of deconstruction’s sensitivity to marginalization, Saussure would be “politically correct” in this decision, and Derrida ironically enough “incorrect” in his objection.

15. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 44; De la Grammatologie, 65.

16. Commentators critical of Derrida have certainly noticed the confusion between Writing and writing. John Searle is succinct in his exposition of the logic in the article “The World Turned Upside Down, and anticipates my essential argument when he writes that as soon as Derrida has reduced all language to “a set of institutional traces... Derrida can conveniently redefine writing in such a way that all language, whether spoken or written, is writing; the instituted trace is ‘the possibility common to all systems of signification.’ The proof that speech is really writing then becomes trivially easy, since writing has become redefined to encompass them both.” John Searle, “A World Turned Upside Down,” in Working Through Derrida, ed. Gary B. Madison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 177. See also John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences,” Glyph 1 (1977). I also agree with Evans when he in Strategies of Deconstruction notices that Derrida’s notion of writing simply repeats “the Saussurian idea of differentiality or linguistic value” (164). Among other voices critical of Derrida’s project, see also Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Gerald Graff, “Deconstruction as Dogma,” The Georgia Review 34 (1980); and Roy Harris, Saussure and his Interpreters.

17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996).

18. Important discussions of Kant’s discussions of the paralogism can be found in Kuno Fischer, A Commentary on Kant’s Critick of the Pure Reason: Translated from The History of Modern Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1866); Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (London: Macmillan, 1918); Friedrich Kaulbach, Immanuel Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982); Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Paralogisms,” The Philosophical Review 91.4 (1982): 515–47; Paul Guyer, Kant (London: Routledge, 2006); and Ian Proops, “Kant’s First Paralogism,” Philosophical Review 119.4 (2010).

19. Deconstructive commentators have often reiterated this so-called “self-contradiction” of Saussure; for example deconstructionist philosopher Rodolphe Gaschè when he writes, “One example of such a disparity between levels of argumentation is Derrida’s demonstration of a contradiction within Saussure’s scientific project. This contradiction stems from the fact that Saussure, in determining the object of structural linguistics according to the principle of differentiality as a system of marks comparable to writing, belies his strong condemnation of Cours of writing as harmful to speech. Both a logo- and a phonocentric valorization of speech cohabit in this discourse.” Rudolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 131.

20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Derrida, Of Grammatology, lxx.

21. Rodolphe Gasché, “Unscrambling Positions: On Gerald Graff's Critique of Deconstruction,” Modern Language Notes 96.5 (1981): 1025.

22. ChristopherJohnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 66, 68.

23. Geoffrey Bennington, “Saussure and Derrida” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, ed. Carol Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 194.

24. Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, 121.

25. Already Richard Rorty understood the inadequacy of Derrida’s reasoning, which in a benevolent interpretation of Derrida he saw as deliberate and interesting “playfulness.” Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Derrida’s most conventional philosophical defense appeared in his Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), where he engaged in a response to Searle’s philosophical critique. It must be left to another essay to demonstrate how this response on close reading is far less convincing than many of his strongest supporters credit it to be.