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DERRIDA:
by Dr. Stanley Sfekas

Political Science

APOCALYPSE

Literature

Religion

WITHOUT

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Marshall Mc Luhan has said that we live in the Civilization of the Image. Yet one of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary
culture is that at a time when the image reigns supreme, the very notion of a creative human imagination seems under mounting
threat. We no longer appear to know who exactly produces or controls the images which condition our consciousness. We are at
an impasse where the relationship between imagination and reality has been turned on its head or even subverted altogether. We
cannot be sure which is which. And this very undecidability lends weight to the deepening suspicion that we may be witnessing
the death of imagination.
The imminent demise of imagination is a clearly a postmodern obsession. Postmodernism undermines the modernist belief in
the image as an authentic expression. The typically postmodern image is one that displays its own artificiality, its own pseudostatus, its own representational depthlessness. Hence the significance of Andy Warhols brazen boast that if Picasso, the
modernist master par excellence, could produce four thousand works in a lifetime, then he, Warhol, could produce as many in a
day, as his seriograph of Marilyn Monroe demonstrates. Warhol, the Pontiff of pop art, rejects the accredited idea of the art work
as an original creation in a unique time and space. He proclaims the postmodern message that the image has now become a
mechanically reproducible commodity part of the new total communications package where globally conceived and

transmissible styles can be beamed back and forth at any moment from continent to continent.
The advent of the technological image signaled a momentous shift from an age of production to one of reproduction. In
postmodern culture, the relations of industrial production have been subordinated to those of post-industrial communications.
Equipped with video recorders, digital cameras, and printouts, the postmodern mind is becoming daily more oblivious to what
modernists referred to as the art works unique and irreplaceable aura. The individual subject is no longer considered the maker
or communicator of his own images. There is a growing conviction that the images we possess are reproduced copies of images
already there before us. The image which is has already been. Like every commodity of our mass communications society, the
postmodern image has itself become an interchangeable consumer item, a pseudo-imitation which playfully celebrates its
pseudonimity, and parades its own superficiality and derivativeness.
The postmodern artist does not claim to express anything because he does not claim to have anything to express. As Andy
Warhol says of his role as artist: When I look into a mirror, I see nothing. People call me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a
mirror what does it see?
This metaphor of an incessant play between inter-reflecting mirrors is paradigmatic of modern culture. And the effects of its
logic go far beyond experimental tableaux or texts. They reverberate throughout the levels of both high art and popular culture
generally. Postmodernist trends share a basic impulse to demystify the pretensions of high modernism, with its established
notions of controlling author, narrative order and metaphysical profundity. They explode the sacramental status of the humanist
imagination and jubilantly proclaim the end of art. The postmodernist dances on the grave of modern idealism. He is as far
removed from the Sartrean cult of the self-creating consciousness, the pour-soi, as from the romantic cult of the transcendental
Imagination. Postmodern culture mocks all talk of original creations. It proclaims the omnipresence of self-destructing images
which simulate each other in a limitless interplay of mirrors.
Mimesis has returned, but with a vengeance. No longer is it a question of images representing a transcendent reality, as tradition
had it. The very notion of such a reality is now unmasked as an illusionist effect. The wheel has turned full circle. But the mirror
of the postmodern paradigm reflects neither the outer world of nature nor the inner world of subjectivity. It reflects only itself
a mirror within a mirror within a mirrorlike Becketts narrator being swallowed up by his endlessly self-multiplying narrators,
like Godards camera filming a camera that is filming a camera, or like Fellinis TV Dance spectacular in Ginger and Fred
doubly reproduced on the mirror-floor of the recording studio and on millions of television screens. The postmodern image is
mimesis without origin, and mimesis without end.
Many contemporary commentators bemoan this cultural phenomenon as betokening the death of imagination as we know it.
Others take a certain delight in its apocalyptic implications. While others again consider it an ineluctable phase of the historical
dialectic. But however varied such responses may be, there is a growing belief in certain circles that the very notion of
imaginative creativity may soon be a thing of the past. We appear to have entered a postmodern civilization where the image has
become less and less the expression of an individual subject and more the commodity of an anonymous consumerist technology.
The paradigm shifts in the Western understanding of the image can be seen in the changes which have occurred in the concept
of the artist. The premodern culture of Athens tended to construe the artist primarily as a craftsman who at best models his
activity on the original activity of a Divine Creator, the Platonic demiourgos. This theocentric view of the craftsman also
prevailed in the medieval period when the work of the icon-maker, painter, scribe or Cathedral-designer was generally evaluated
in terms of its capacity to obediently serve and imitate the transcendent plan for Creation.
The modern movements of Renaissance, Romantic and Existentialist humanism replaced this theocentric paradigm of the
mimetic craftsman with the anthropocentric paradigm of the original inventor. The modern aesthetic promotes the idea of the
artist as one who not only emulates but replaces God. Thus we find that the legendary sinners of traditional morality
Prometheus, Adam, Luciferbecome the heroes of modern culture. Milton is fascinated with Satan while Goethe celebrates
Fausts diabolic ambition. Shelley and Melville champion the rebelliousness of Prometheus, while Mozart, Byron and
Kierkegaard are captivated by the insatiable energies of Don Juan. And Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and Genet cultivate the
existential virtues of deviants and antiheroes. In short, the modern portrait of the artist is habitually that of a proud demonic
overreacher who negates the given world and resolves to produce a new one out of his imagination.
But this anthropocentric paradigm is overturned in postmodern culture. The model of the artist as productive inventor is

replaced. The artist becomes a player in a game of signs, an operator in an electronic media network. He experiences himself
afloat in an anonymous interplay of images which he can, at best, parody, simulate or reproduce.
The postmodern threat to abolish the humanist imagination coincides with the growing talk of the demise of man as a subject
of identity. The imagination, reduced to signplay, ceases to function as a creative center of meaning. It becomes a floating
signifier without reference or reasonor to borrow Derridas idiom, a mass-produced postcard addressed to whom it may
concern and wandering aimlessly through a communications network, devoid of destiny or destination.
In his work, The Postcard, Derrida playfully explores our communications culture, quoting at one point a passage from Joyces
Finnegans Wake which suggests that the penman Shaun, who is modern, has become inseparable from his brother, the
postman Shem, who is postmodern. And this contemporary confusion of Shem and Shaunwhich Derrida identifies as the
legacy of Babelimplies that all modes of expression are irreparably contaminated by the general erosion of original
meaning. This confusion coincides with the expansion of the communications media. A message is now no longer a unique
expression sent from an author to a reader. It is invariably bound up in a play of mass-circulation and reduplication. Meaning
has become, says Derrida, a matter of whatever you like For Derrida meanings multiply themselves indefinitely. There is no
identifiable origin or end to the Postal network of communications. In the beginning was the Post, as he puts it. Hence the
post of postmodernity would seem to suggest that the human imagination has now become a postman disseminating multiple
images and signs which he himself has not created and over which he has no real control.
The human ability to image or imagine something has been understood in two main ways throughout the history of Western
thought: 1) as a representational faculty which reproduces images of some pre-existing reality, or 2) as a creative faculty which
produces images which often lay claim to an original status in their own right. These basic notions have been used-- from the
ancient Greeks to the modern existentialiststo refer to acts of everyday experience as well as to artistic practice. The
development of imagination has been paradigmatic and is characterized by a number of paradigm shifts which signal decisive
mutations in the human understanding of imagination during different epochs of Western history. Thus we speak of the mimetic
paradigm of the premodern imagination, the productive paradigm of the modern imagination, and the parodic paradigm of the
postmodern imagination. Each historical period privileges some metaphor characterizing the dominant function of imagination
at a given time. Thus the mimetic paradigm privileges the referential figure of the mirror, the productive the expressive figure of
the lamp, and the parodic the reflexive figure of a labyrinth of looking-glasses.
For Plato, the artist imitates the activity of the divine demiurge by holding a mirror up to the surrounding world. The artist, in
Platos words, Takes a mirror and turns it around in every direction thus rapidly making the sun and the heavenly bodies, the
earth and even himself.(596d). The use of the mirror motif to characterize the mimetic activity of imagination was to become a
stock motif of classical theories of aesthetics. What underlies Platos invocation of this motif is a metaphysical scruple about the
blasphemous tendency of images to replace the original order of divine being, (to theion), with a man-made order of non-being,
(to me on). Imagination is idolatrous for Plato to the extent that it worships its own imitations instead of the divine original.
Platos famous image of the imagination as a poor child of foster parents points in the same direction. The connotation here is
one of illegitimacy: images are the bastard progeny of surrogate parents, i.e. the things of nature which are themselves no more
than copies of the Ideas. Images are imitations of imitations which seek to usurp the legitimate father of all beingthe divine
form of the Good. The imaginative activity of imagination is consequently a form of parricide and, by implication, deicide. For
the original Father, the transcendental source of all light as represented in the Allegory of the Cave is of course divine being
itself. The crime of the artist is to dare to make the invisible source of truth visible in the form of representational images. Such
a feat transgresses the Platonic oppositions between being and non-being, spirit and matter, soul and body, good and evil, truth
and falsitydualisms upon which the whole edifice of Western metaphysics rests. As Derrida observes in Dissemination, the
the absolute invisibility of the origin of the visible, of the Good-Sun-Father is the general rehearsal of this family scene and the
most powerful effort to conceal it by drawing curtains over the dawning of the West. The mimetic image is an illegitimate son
who, like the Stranger in Platos Theaetetus, dares to lay unfilial hands on the paternal pronouncement (patrikoi logoi) (2412). And like the Stranger, the imagination is accused of parricideof displacing the rightful Father, the true origin, the paternal
logos upon which Western metaphysics is founded. The imagination is thus seen by Plato as a disobedient son who threatens to
subvert the patriarchal law of the metaphysical systema law which safeguards the rights of inheritance by outlawing the
counterfeit claims of imitators, imposters and pretenders. The imagination is the alien body in the system, the Trojan horse in the
City of Logos.
But what exactly is the Logos? And how did it come to be associated with the image of divine paternity? Derrida characterizes

the Platonic model of the Logos as a silent dialogue of the soul with itself and argues that it logically entails the correlative
model of the Father as absolute origin, as self-sufficient identity and unityin short the model of divine being as an original
presence to itself. The mimetic image is a threat to this original presence, this dialogue of Being with itself, for it constitutes a
detour of representation, or ecriture as Derrida calls it, which claims to do without the Father of Logos. Insofar as it claims a
world of imitative artifice, imagination challenges the copyright of the paternal Logos. It breaks from the original self-identity of
the Father and assumes a life of its own, an existence other than and independent of the father.
Only the divine demiurge, according to Plato, possessed the original right to form or shape a world. The artist, who styles
himself as a human demiurge by contrast becomes the Fathers other. The distinguishing mark of all artistic or imaginative
discourse, according to Derrida, is that it can be assigned to a fixed spotsly, slippery and maskeda joker, a floating
signifier, a wild card which puts play into play. It is precisely because the imagination introduces indeterminacy and
ambivalence into discourse that it serves to deconstruct the paternal logos of self-identity. The mimetic activity of imagination
unleashes an endless play of substitutionone where artificial representations imitate and eventually seek to replace the original
presence of divine being to itself. In the pseudo-world of imagination opposites are no longer dualistically opposed as dictated
by the paternal logos of metaphysics. They are subversively conjoined. This entails a flouting of the founding laws of
philosophical logicthe Law of Identity and the law of Non-contradiction.
In the Phaedrus, Plato likens the act of writing to the mimetic activity of painting, and describes writing as a drug, pharmakon.
He uses the word pharmakon in an ambiguous way, both as remedy and poison. The remedy is that a record of human
experience is kept for posterity, but the poison consists in that it deceives us into mistaking its image for the original. In a study
called Platos Pharmacy, Derrida outlines the deconstructive paradox which lies at the very heart of Western metaphysics.
Platonic metaphysics insists on the priority of the origin (Sun-Father-Idea) over its supplement, the mimetic play of writing
which repeats this origin. Yet the paradox is that the origin of truth cannot be adequately understood without the mimetic
activity of repetition. The very truth of origin requires the non-truth of repetitionunderstood as a generalized mimesis of
writing. In Derridas words: Truth appears in its essence as the possibility of its own most proper non-truth, of its pseudo-truth
reflected in the icon, the phantasm, or the simulacrum. What is is not what it is, identical and identical to itself, unique, unless it
adds to itself the possibility the possibility of being repeated as such. And its identity is hallowed out by that addition,
withdraws itself in the supplement that presents it.
This account of writing as a mimesis-without-origin has decisive implications for the concept of imitation. Derrida deduces
some of these implications in his essay The Double Session where he contrasts Platos definition of mimesis with Mallarmes
in Mimique, in which the mime imitates nothing. The mime is seen as engaged in corporeal writing that is not based on any
original. This leads Derrida to inform the reader that the guiding question of his analysis is what is Literature? As treated here
the question becomes eminently self-deconstructive. For Derrida has no intention of trying to relate literature to truth in the
manner of previous philosophical reflections on this subject from Plato to Sartre. On the contrary, he will show that the very
opposition between literature (the imaginary) and truth (the real) is without foundation. From the first elaboration of the concept
of mimesis with Plato to its end with Mallarme, a whole history has run its course: a history of metaphysical truth which in turn
made possible a history of literature understood as a representation of truth. The entire development of the interpretation of the
arts of letters has, Derrida claims, moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the
concept of mimesis.
Derrida comments on a passage in the Philebus where Plato compares the human soul to a book (biblos) which copies and
illustrates human experience. This activity of mimetic writing carried out by an internal scribe (grammateus) and painter
(zographos-demiourgos), records passing events and thereby confers a certain permanence on them: it enables the past to be
recalled in the present. Here again Derrida underscores the metaphysical paradox of mimesis. Without its capacity for
recollection the soul would be unable to intuit meaning as an enduring essence (eidos, idea). But recollection itself presupposes
the mimetic activity of duplication which in fact replaces the original events which it imitates. Logos or truth needs mimesis if it
is to be preserved in the soul and intuited as an essence. Thus Plato is compelled in the Philebus to accord a central role to
mimetic imagination in our knowledge of truth even though he had made it clear in the Republic and elsewhere, that mimetic
imaginationbe it that of the painter, scribe or poetis that which removes us from truth and provides us with mere copies.
Derrida argues accordingly that Platos description of mimesis as both truth and non-truth points to its own deconstruction and
by extension to the deconstruction of the metaphysical concept of imagination. For what Western metaphysics has always
strived to establish is the primacy of logos over mimesis, of being-present over its representation, the imitated over the imitation,
the real over the imaginary. The whole order of metaphysical logic has been based on the ability to establish that what is

imitated is more real, more essential, more truethan what imitatesanterior and superior to it.
Derrida states that although there have been several attempts during the course of the Western history of aesthetics to contest
this logocentric model of mimesis, as he calls it, he denies that any metaphysical system, whether idealist or existentialist, has
ever succeeded in dispensing with the distinction between the original and its imitation and with according primacy to the
original. It is the case that the romantic imagination refused to imitate any thing or action, or any reality already given in the
world as existing before and outside its own sphere. But he argues that the model of the original is simply interiorized. The
metaphysical idea of divine origin as the presence of what is to itself is now converted to the transcendental consciousness of the
creative subject. To declare as the romantic idealists and existentialists did that art no longer copies nature but productively
transforms it, is nonetheless to remain captive to a metaphysics of presence.
The deconstruction of the metaphysical concept of mimesis is therefore logically contingent upon that of origin. What then are
the main conclusions to be drawn from Derridas deconstruction of the metaphysical distinction between the imaginary and the
real? Once the notion of an origin of meaning has been done away with, it makes no sense to speak of a transcendental or
existential subject who produces or reproduces images. There is no author of the text, no human center from which the
imaginary emanates, no father of writing, no one to intend or intuit meaning. Deconstruction emerges as a symptom of the
break-up of Western culture and its metaphysical foundations. To acknowledge this, as Derrida does in `his lecture, The
Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, is to present a postmodern vision of apocalypse. The term apocalypse, Derrida reminds us
actually means to uncover. But in unmasking the logocentric language of power and authority, apocalyptic discourse is
paradoxically often compelled to mask itself to evade official censure. Derrida agrees with Barthe, Althusser and Foucault that
the cult of the creative subject is a symptom of bourgeois ideology. The cryptic character of much apocalyptic writing is
therefore to be understood as a ruse to defy the authoritarian status quo. Such subversive discoursewhose multiple meanings
Derrida compares to an Argus with a thousand looksresists assimilation to the established order of domination. It hijacks the
accredited system of communication and undermines its legitimized conceptual oppositions. As such, there is for Derrida
nothing less conservative than the apocalyptic genre. By confusing the codes and confounding conventional expectancies, this
genre poses a radical challenge to the dominant ideological consensus. The apocalyptic strategy is the final word in the
demystification of ideology. But as practiced by Derrida himself, one suspects that it is also more than thatit is
demystification itself brought to the point of self-deconstruction.
Derrida acknowledges that his writings have at times been charged with having an apocalyptic tone. This he sees as an
inevitable consequence of the fact that to write about the end of the Western system of understandingthat is, about an
apocalypse of human consciousnessis itself apocalyptic. Derrida grants the existence of an apocalyptic laughter about
apocalypse. Derrida thus concludes his apocalyptic commentary on his own apocalyptic commentaries by noting that the
deconstruction of the notion of apocalypse ends in an ending without an end. The deconstruction of the whole order of Western
thoughtwhat Derrida calls onto-eschatotheologyhas concluded with the notion of mime without origin. This in turn leads
to apocalypse without end, or as Derrida puts it, an apocalypse beyond good and evil, the apocalypse of apocalypseour
apocalypse now.
We see, then, that in our postmodern era of apocalypse both the poetry and the philosophy of the human imagination would
seem to have reached their end. What is to come is, apparently, beyond the powers of imagination to imagine. After the
holocaust of the Second World War, Adorno had asked who can write poetry? After deconstruction, we may well ask: Who can
write philosophy?

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