Mystic Pads of Derrida’s Différance: A Neoreading

Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities, 2021

This paper is designed to reveal some of the philosophical ideas of Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida, a leading figure of Post-structuralism and Postmodernism is best known as the founding father of ‘Deconstruction’ but many of his philosophical ideas such as, logocentrism, differance, phonocentrism, aporia, anti-representationalism, etc. still remain rarely focused. Therefore, in this paper the researcher has tried to explore various philosophical ideas of Derrida before the readers to get acquainted with Derrida’s contribution to the world of knowledge. This research work has done with the help of both primary sources i.e., original writings of Derrida and secondary sources including the texts written by others. Here, all of Derrida’s ideas are explicitly described and justified by an inductive method. Finally, a concluding remark on deconstruction has been made by comparing Derrida’s idea of “Differance” with Nagarjuna’s concept of “Emptiness” which left...

Abstract: This article provides, through a discussion of the work of Jacques Derrida, an examination of the philosophical basis of postmodernism. The first section identifies and explains the positive claims of postmodernism, including the key claim that all identities, presences, etc. depend for their existence on something which is absent and different from themselves. The second section further illustrates the positive claims through an analysis of Derrida's "deconstructionist" reading of Plato. The final section raises a number of critical problems for postmodernism: that it confuses aesthetics with metaphysics; that it mistakes assertion for argument in philosophy; that it is guilty of relativism; and that it is self-contradictory.

International Journal of Philosophical studies, 2020

Derrida’s philosophy is usually known as a form of critique of metaphysics. This article, however, argues that Derrida’s deconstructions do not only dismantle metaphysics from within, but also remain in themselves thoroughly, and problematically, metaphysical. Its goal is to determine exactly where the metaphysical features of Derrida’s work can be found. The article starts with an analysis of Derrida’s understanding of metaphysics, as well as its deconstruction, by explaining the working of différance, mainly focusing on its temporality. Further, it will demonstrate how in the temporization or deferral of différance a metaphysical desire for purity remains effective. In readings of several texts, the mutual interdependence of metaphysics and deconstruction will be sketched. Then the ethical side of deconstruction will be highlighted, both in Derrida’s early work as well as in the slightly different elaboration of différance in the later ethical notions like justice, the gift and the messianic. This results in a distinction of three versions of différance. Finally, a critical discussion of the metaphysical side of deconstruction will be followed by a comparison of different readings of deconstruction and différance

Essays in Philosophy, 2004

Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford UP, 2000)

This essay examines the ways in which Derrida's discussion of "Differance," 1 is remarkably parallel to Plato's discussion of Difference in the Sophist and the Parmenides. As I argue below, the metaphysical problems that motivate these accounts are also similar. Very roughly, Derrida's Differance is a phenomenological version of Plato's Different Itself. Plato's presentation of "Parmenides'" discussion of the generation of the physical world from a One which Is is an early version of the pre-conceptual spacing that Derrida finds implicit in Husserl's Phenomena. Derrida has never made these parallels and common grounds explicit, so this essay takes that connection as its first task. I argue for and discuss the parallels between Difference and Differance, assuming with only the slightest arguments some somewhat controversial interpretations of Plato. 2 I will show how Derrida's obvious reference to Plato both implicitly interprets Plato and explains many of the prima facie obscure features of Derrida's "Differance." I then argue that Derrida's paradoxical remarks about Differance are almost exactly what Plato implies about Difference, in his discussions in the Parmenides.

Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy, 2008

2014

The term "deconstruction" decisively enters philosophical discourse in 1967, with the publication of three books by Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Voice and Phenomenon. Indeed, "deconstruction" is virtually synonymous with Derrida's name. Nevertheless, the event of Derridean deconstruction developed out of the phenomenological tradition. On the one hand, as is often noted, Derrida appropriated the term from Heidegger's idea, in Being and Time, of a "destruction" of the history of Western ontology (Heidegger 2010, 19-25 [ §6]), that is, a dismantling of the historical concepts of being in order to lay bare the fundamental experience from which these concepts originated (PSY2, 2). On the other, and less often noted, Derrida took constant inspiration from Husserl's idea of the epoché (Husserl 2012, 59-60 [ §32]), that is, from the universal suspension of the belief in a world having existence independent from experience (see, e.g., SM, 59). Both Heidegger's historical destruction and Husserl's universal suspension amounted to critical practices in regard to accepted beliefs and sedimented concepts. Likewise, Derridean deconstruction criticizes structures, concepts, and beliefs that seem selfevident. In this regard, deconstructive critique is classical (or traditional, Kantian), aiming to demonstrate the limited validity of concepts and beliefs, even their falsity, aiming, in other words, to dispel the illusions they have generated. In general, deconstructive critique targets the illusion of presence, that is, the idea that being is simply present and available before our eyes. For Derrida, the idea of presence implies selfgivenness, simplicity, purity, identity, and stasis. Therefore, deconstruction aims to demonstrate that presence is never given as such, never simple, never pure, never self-identical, and never static; it is always given as something other, complex, impure, differentiated, and generated.

2009

Derrida will argue that the reversal of the cogito and rethinking subjectivity in terms of embodiment and corporeality is a non-philsophy and anti-metaphysics that repeats metaphysics by negating and reversing it. Derrida's notion of truth is quasi-transcendental rather than anti-metaphysical like Merleau-Ponty's, which locates truth in the difference or differance between transcendental and empirical. Rather than privilege idealism or empiricism as both camps have done, Derrida posits the quasi-transcendental, differance, or the mediation between transcendental and empirical as the space of truth. Differance enables the thinking of both transcendental and empirical, and thus a thinking of the conditionality of structurality as differance is the true resolution to the impasse between idealism and post-metaphysics, or philosophy and non-philosophy.