Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy

Author(s): Richard Rorty
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 74, No. 11, Seventy-Fourth Annual Meeting American
Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Nov., 1977), pp. 673-681
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2025769 .
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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES DERRIDA 673

ter or presence which, without presuppositions of any sort, serves as

the basis of all real meaning-if this idea breaks down under scru-
tiny and becomes unintelligible, then the concept of difference,
putting off or deferring this encounter, is also unintelligible. If
Derrida succeeds in deconstructing his target, he thereby under-
mines the intelligibility of his own attack, since he has appropri-
ated his weapons from the armory of the tradition to be decon-
structed. He leaves me, then, not knowing where I would be if I
were to agree with him.
If we proceed to peel off further layers we find that to insist on
the integrity of writing, to insist that it is "essentially" and in a
certain way already there from the beginning, is to attack the foun-
dations of ethnocentrism, of logocentrism, of phonocentrism, of
metaphysics, and of the "scientificity of science." Derrida has mo-
mentous issues in hand. Grammatology is suggested as a science to
pursue them. But since no ordinary conception of writing will
suffice, no ordinary conception of grammatology can be intended.
In the end, when we survey the ground that Derrida would have
cleared by his call for us to recognize the full honor and priority
of writing, we find no metaphysics, no logic, no linguistics, no
semantics, and no grammatology left to carry on, but only the bril-
liant scholarly mischievousness.
NEWTON GARVER
State University of New York at Buffalo

DERRIDA ON LANGUAGE, BEING, AND

ABNORMAL PHILOSOPHY *

O NE can see Derrida as a philosopher of language whose

work parallels the later Wittgenstein's, or as a disciple of
Heidegger striving to outdo his master, or as a writer who
is helping us to see philosophy as a kind of writing rather than
a domain of quasi-scientific inquiry. In the three sections of this
necessarily brief paper, I shall say something about each alterna-
tive interpretation.
* To be presented in an APA symposium on The Philosophy of Jacques
Derrida, December 30, 1977. Newton Garverwill be co-symposiast,and Marjorie
Grene will comment; see this JOURNAL, this issue, 663-673 and 682, respectively.
I am indebted to Marjorie Grene and to David Hiley for comments on an
earlier version.

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674 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

1. LANGUAGE
In a very clear and succinct exposition of Derrida's early work on
Husserl, Newton Garver 1 divides the many philosophers who
would like to "found" language on "logic" (practically everybody
from Plato through Ramus to the early Wittgenstein) from those
few (e.g., Rousseau, Peirce) who would "found" it on rhetoric. The
latter are those who say, with the later Wittgenstein, that "only in
the stream of life does an expression have meaning." Garver neatly
sums up Derrida's role in this debate as follows:
Derrida's penetrating consideration and ultimate rejection of the
basic principles of Husserl'sphilosophy of language is the historical
analogue of Wittgenstein's later consideration and rejection of his
early work....
... the core of Derrida's analysis, or "deconstruction,"is a sus-
tained argumentagainst the possibility of anything pure and simple
which can serve as the foundation of the meaning of, signs (xxii).
I think that this description is exact. However, in more recent
works Derrida has taken several steps away from the notion of
"founding" language, or the meaning of signs, on "rhetoric" or on
anything else. But, just as in the Philosophical Investigations it is
never very clear whether we are getting a new philosophy of lan-
guage (one in which "social practice" plays the role once played
by "picturing the world") or instead getting a protest against the
very idea of "philosophy of language," so the same point is often
unclear in Derrida. Sometimes he talks as if there were some com-
mon project (Heaven knows what) on which he and Condillac,
Humboldt, Saussure, Chomsky, Austin et al. were engaged, and as
if he had arguments for the superiority of his own views over
theirs. At other times, he seems to disdain internal criticism of his
competitors, and simply exhibits the way in which each of them
commits the great sin of the Western intellectual tradition-"logo-
centrism," the doctrine of "the primacy of the spoken word," what
Heidegger called "the metaphysics of presence." I think that his
attempts at internal criticism usually miss the mark, and that he
indeed does not share a common subject with those he discusses.2
His real target is the notion of philosophy of language as a quest
for "foundations," as an inquiry that will tell us "how meaning is
possible" or "how language hooks up with the world." In his latest
work, he seems to me to have, mercifully, got away from the pre-
I Preface to Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon and Other Essays in Husserls
Theory of Signs, David B. Allison, trans. (Evanston,Ill.: Northwestern, 1972).
2See John Searle's recent exasperated dissection of Derrida's treatment of
Austin in Glyph, I (1977): 198-208.

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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES DERRIDA 675

tense that he is doing correctly what other philosophers of lan-

guage have done incorrectly.
Though Derrida should not be thought of as making contribu-
tions to semanticsor to the philosophy of linguistics, his attack on
foundational projects chimes nicely with the skepticism of others
about philosophy of language as a new sort of "firstphilosophy"-
a discipline that will do for us what epistemologytried and failed
to do.3 Consider, for example, Davidson's attempt to separate off
the good, modest, empirical,Fregean project of describingthe logi-
cal forms of English sentences (i.e., classifyingEnglish expressions
so as to enable us to state their truth conditions within the frame-
work of quantification theory) from the bad, "transcendental,"
epistemologicallyoriented projects of Carnap, Russell, and even
Quine.4Derrida has nothing against the former project but, obvi-
ously, a great deal against the latter. A similar distrust of such
foundational enterprisesis shown by Hilary Putnam, in his recent
recantation of his own earlier "metaphysicalrealism." That sort
of realismwas, roughly, an attempt to develop a philosophicaldoc-
trine of word-worldrelationships that would supply "theory-inde-
pendent" notions of truth and referenceable to "keep us in touch
with the real." Putnam's more recent view, which Derrida would
applaud, is that any such attempt can at most give us an internal,
naturalistic, empirical, self-reflexiveaccount of the success of in-
quiry-rather than the desired escape to a transcendentalstand-
point from which we can judge the fit between our words and a
theory-freeworld.5
I doubt that there is more to such Derridian slogans as "There
is nothing outside the text" 6 than this same point. In more general
terms, the point is that we cannot, merely by going linguistic, do

5 This is a notion found, e.g., in Michael Dummett, Frege's Philosophy of

Language (London: Duckworth, 1973),p. 669.
4 See "Truth and Meaning,"SynthesexviI, 3 (September1967): 304-323, p. 316
on the "adventitious philosophical puritanism" which has been mingled with
Frege'sproject For a more general criticism of what I am calling "transcenden-
tal" projects, see Davidson's attack on the "scheme-contentdistinction," "On
the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Association,xLvii (1973/4): 5-20. I discuss this attack in "Transcenden-
tal Arguments,Self-Reference,and Pragmatism,"forthcomingin the proceedings
of the Bielefeld symposium on transcendental arguments, and in "The De-
transcendentalizingof Analytic Philosophy" forthcoming in Neue Hefte fuir
Philosophie.
5See "Realism and Reason," forthcoming in Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association,xix (1976/7).
"Il n'y a pas de hors-texte." Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,Gayatri
ChakravortySpivack,trans. (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins, 1976), p. 158.

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676 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

what Descartes and Kant failed to do-get outside of all our rep-
resentations to a standpoint from which the legitimacy of those
representations can be judged. Derrida's usefulness, in the context
of recent philosophy of language, is not to "bring to bear the in-
sights of an alternative tradition" upon the problems of semantics,
but simply to help us see the continuity between hopeless contem-
porary attempts to "found" language (or thought, or representa-
tion, or inquiry, or whatever else we feel nervous about), and hope-
less past attempts to do the same thing.7 (This is not, however, to
say that the serious deconstructive work has already been done on
our serious side of the Channel, leaving it for Derrida and his
friends to provide merely some light-minded historical commen-
tary. Anglo-American philosophy has been repeating the history it
has been refusing to read, and we need all the help we can get to
break out of the time capsule within which we are gradually seal-
ing ourselves.)
II. BEING
It is less artificial to view Derrida as attempting to kill off the
looming father figure of Heidegger than to see him as making "con-
tributions to the philosophy of language." Derrida sees Heidegger's
account of the Western philosophical tradition as pretty much
right, but he thinks that Heidegger himself was victimized by that
tradition, and specifically by the need to ask "the question about
Being." Just as most contemporary readers of Kant wanted to have
"Kant without the Ding-an-sich," so most admirers of Heidegger
would now like to have "Heidegger without the Seinsfrage." Derrida
is remarkably successful in giving us just that. His attitude toward
Heidegger is summed up in a passage warning us against attempt-
ing anything more than the deconstruction of the tradition, against
looking for an upbeat ending to the project of closing down the
West, against converting one's latest deconstructive project into a
methodology for some new constructive effort to reach what, since
Plato, we have always sought:
There will be no unique name, not even the name of Being. It must
be conceivedwithout nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside
the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to
the lost fatherlandof thought. On the contrary,we must affirmit-
in the sense that Nietzschebrings affirmationinto play (met I'affirma-
tion en jeu), with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.8
7 See Of Grammatology,p. 6, for Derrida's diagnosis of the "linguistic turn"
as the last, destined, doomed, defensive movement of the Western tradition.
8 From the essay "Diff~rance,"in Speech and Phenomenon, p. 195.

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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES DERRIDA 677

The "it" in this passage refers to his term "diffirance" which.

(a) signifies the difference between a text and what it means, a
difference of which, for Derrida, Heidegger's "ontological differ-
ence" between beings and Being is a sort of special case; (b) ex-
presses "what stands opposed to the text of Western metaphysics,"
the opposite of 'presence', where that is the most general name of
what the Platonic tradition wanted-the epiphany of the simple
elements (Ideas, sense-data, meanings) which are the foundations
of everything else; (c) is a deliberately misspelled French word
produced by altering the word for "difference"-diffdrence-by a
single unpronounced letter, in order to emphasize that he has con-
structed something "which is not a name, which is not a pure nom-
inal unity, and continually breaks up in a chain of different sub-
stitutions," and that "there is nothing kerygmatic about this 'word'
so long as we can perceive its reduction to a lower-case letter" (159).
The idea is that any attempt to do what Heidegger wanted to
do-to get out from under the tradition, to emerge into a clearing
lighted by Being-will fail, because every statement of the attempt
can only be in the terms which the tradition created for us. So,
Derrida thinks, maybe all that will help are verbal tricks, fake
etymologies, typographical gimmicks, puns, allusions, dirty jokes,
what Kierkegaard called "a certain nimble dancing in the service
of thought." The trouble with the "question about Being" was that
it invited serious and methodical reflection. But this will not work,
for as Derrida says:
The fact remains that Being which is nothing, which is not a being,
cannot be said, cannot say itself, except in the ontic metaphor....
And if Heideggerradicallydeconstructedthe authorityof the present
over metaphysics,it was in order to lead us to think the presenceof
the present. But the thought of this presence only metaphorizes,by
a profound necessitywhich cannot be escaped by a simple decision,
the language it deconstructs.9

Let me try to put this in un-Heideggerian language. Suppose you

start by seeing the philosophical problems of your day as increas-
ingly pseudo-, and then you dig back into the past to find out who
drew the picture that holds captive both you and the authors of
those problems. You may finally decide that it goes all the way back
to Plato. At that point you may think that there is another pic-
ture-the one that shows things as they are-which you could
9"The Ends of Man," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, xxx, I
(September1969): 31-57, p. 53.

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678 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

glimpse if you could only escape the influence of Plato's termino

ogy and presuppositions. But this is a mistake. Plato's ghost is sti:
making you think in terms of right pictures and wrong picture
better and worse perspectives, more and less accurate represents
tions, better and worse positions from which to view time an,
eternity. The tradition of Western metaphysics is just the tradition
of assuming that the cure for a bad picture is a better picture-
more complete and rigorously worked-out Weltanschauung. A
long as you think that some philosopher is going to come up wit]
the necessary terminology to state and criticize the presupposition
of the tradition, you are still as badly off as you were before. Whel
you pass this stage, you may start looking around for a mystic, o
a Zen master, or the later Heidegger, to take you away from al
the terminologies and to the heart of silence. There, perhaps, yol
may yet hear the voice of Being. But that won't work either. I
Being had a message to get across, it would have to use Platoni
jargon when it talked to you. What else would you understand
So there is nothing, Derrida concludes, save perhaps the dance a
the superman at the end of Zarathustra:
[The superman's]laughterwill then breakout towardsa return which
will no longer have the form of the metaphysicalrepetition of hu-
manism. Moreover,it will undoubtedlynot take the form, "beyond"
metaphysics,of the memorial or of the guard of the sense of the
being, or the form of the house and the truth of Being. He will
dance, outside of the house, this "aktive Vergeszlichkeit,"this active
forgetfulness(ibid. 57; translationchangedsomewhat).
In Derrida's most recent work, this dance takes the form of end
less plays with words, plays directed toward making us see word
as words rather than as signs, as inscriptions rather than vehicle
of communication, as anything rather than bearers of reference an(
truth. If one finds the fact, e.g., that the French often pronounce
"Hegel" as if it were aigle-the French for "eagle" 10Oof little
interest, one will not be likely to watch the dance for long. But i
is, I think, clear why it is being danced. It is because Derrid;
thinks that the ability to see writing as writing is what we need tc
break the grip of the notion of representation, of getting thing.
accurately pictured. If Heidegger was right about Plato anc
Derrida is right about Heidegger, then this notion cannot, indeed
be shaken off by any less extravagant means.
'o Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), p. 7. See the discussion of this book b
Geoffrey Hartman, "Monsieur Texte," parts I and II, The Georgia Review
xxxx: 759-797, xxx: 169-197, especially the section called "Pinking Philosophy,'
in connection with Derrida'ssexy metaphilosophy.

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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES DERRIDA 679

III. ABNORMAL PHILOSOPHY

I can perhaps explain what I mean by "seeing writing as writing"

by proceeding to my third topic: the kind of philosophy that
Derrida exemplifies. It is abnormal philosophy, by contrast with
that sense of 'normal' in which Kuhn speaks of "normal" science.
Normal inquiry requires common problems and methods, profes-
sional and institutional discipline, consensus that certain results
have been achieved. Abnormal inquiry-called "revolutionary"
when it works and "kooky" when it does not-requires only genius.
Kant was both the first professionalized philosopher and the last
great philosopher who thought that philosophy might be put "on
the secure path of a science." After Kant philosophy split into two
sorts. There was the kind that still wanted what Kant had wanted
-problems to be solved and agreement on what it would take to
solve them. Logical empiricism and "classical" Husserlian phenom-
enology were both examples of this kind. Then there was the kind
that began with Hegel's Phenomenology-the kind in which one
does not solve problems but rather overcomes predecessors. Devo-
tion to that paradigm produces what we Anglo-Americans think of
as the kookiness of "Continental" philosophy. (Both these terms
obviously have ideological rather than geographical senses.) The
mark of that kind of philosophy is that it worries about people
rather than propositions. Have I, the Continental philosopher asks
himself, seen through, transcended, castrated, or otherwise disposed
of, Nietzsche? Marx? Freud? Wittgenstein? Heidegger? Derrida? It
is as if to deal with a philosopher were somehow different from
dealing with his statements. It is as if one did philosophy not by
presenting arguments against one's predecessors' views, but by vi-
olent and erotic struggle with one's images of them. From the neo-
Kantian standpoint-the standpoint of normal philosophizing-
this looks like a confusion of philosophy with literature. It is in-
telligible that a young novelist wishes to outdo Proust or Nabokov
without being able to specify in advance what would count as
doing so. But if a normal young physicist or philosopher proposes
to outdo a predecessor, it is the man's statements that are chal-
lenged rather than the man. What might count as an "important
result" of normal inquiry is determined in advance, but not what
will count as an important novel or an important poem or an im-
portant piece of "Continental" philosophy.
Crudely, then, neo-Kantian "normal" philosophy wants to be a
science, whereas Continental philosophy is content to be a kind of
writing, a genre defined by neither subject nor method nor insti-

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68o THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

tutional affiliation, but only by an enumeration of the mighty dead.

Just as English poetry is not verse written in English, but what one
writes after reading Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats . . ., so
philosophy of the non-Kantian sort is not a certain "approach to
the problems of philosophy," but what one writes after reading
Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud.... So when Derrida asks us
to see writing as writing he is asking us to stop construing abnor-
mal philosophy (and, indeed, all writing that is not mere "writing
up" of the results of normal inquiry) as Kant construed it: viz., as
at best just fun and games ("purposiveness without purpose"), or
at worst failed and self-deceptive attempts to attain the secure path
of a science. Derrida thinks that as long as we keep these Kantian
spectacles on we shall be unable to read,1' and that we shall have
them on as long as we ask of any given piece of writing, "But what
is it trying to say?" The dead hand of Plato will lie heavy on us
just so long as we construe words as representations, so long as we
view language as a scheme for representing arrangements between
beings (or even as a device for bringing Being itself before our eyes).
But still, one can reasonably ask, could one not grasp, and even
embrace, this conception of philosophy as a kind of writing, with-
out all of Derrida's tricksy puns and typographical innovations?
Why does it help to rub our noses in the shapes of the letters on
the page, our ears with the ways words sound when mispronounced?
It helps, I think, because it helps us to stop seeing what philos-
ophers have written as windows opening upon the world, and helps
us see them as talking about each other-about each other's words,
not about each other's views of the surrounding landscape. It helps
us see their works as networks of allusion rather than occasions of
revelation. Why should we want to view them that way? Because,
roughly, to view them in any other way is to fall back on the ques-
tion "What do philosophers have to tell us?" That, in turn, inev-
itably leads us back to the transcendental standpoint-to seeing
philosophy as that branch of inquiry which concerns itself with
the nature of representation and explains to us how the intellect
strips off essence, Subject unites with Object, language grapples
world. If we are to escape the captivity of that picture, the picture
that Kant built into the normal self-image of our discipline, we
have to become skeptical about the notion of representation itself,
in a way which only the most deliberately abnormal attitude to-
ward writing can make possible. We must question simultaneously
the notion that philosophy is an inquiry into representation, and
the notion that "representation" is a useful concept.
11 Cf. Grammatology, p. 46.

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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES DERRIDA 68i

I shall end by offering a further justification for my choice of

the term 'abnormal'. The Kantian notion of philosophy is of some-
thing that might some day be finished, for all the problems might
some day be solved. On the alternative conception there can no
more be a last page of the journal of philosophy than there can be
a last novel. Inquiry into a subject can end, but there can be
no end of writing about people who have written about people
who .. . . But this prospect of never achieving anything final, of
always being at the mercy of posterity'sdeconstructivereinterpre-
tations, is repugnant to the normal philosophical mind. It repels,
Derrida thinks, for good Freudian reasons. Normal inquiry is like
normal male sexuality-it has a direction, a point, a central thrust.
It leads to results, it has institutional guarantees,it knows when
it has succeeded.Abnormal philosophy, writing that is just more
writing, rather than preparationfor an epiphany which will make
further writing unnecessary,is as "undisciplined"as masturbation
-or, more generally,as the sort of abnormalsexuality that lives in
fantasiestoo thrilling to be actualizedor ended.12For the tradition
that startswith the Phaedrus,writing is foreplay at best. To end-
or even to soften-that tradition, Derrida thinks, we shall have to
see it as Freud helps us see it. In the end, Derrida'smost important
work may consist in his Freudian naturalizationof metaphilosophy
rather than in his reinforcementof Wittgenstein or his aufhebung
of Heidegger. He is the first professionalphilosopher to have used
Freudiannotions to talk about philosophy with Freud'sown light-
heartedness-the first to use them nonreductionisticallyand play-
fully. Seeing Plato and the Western tradition as logocentricbecause
phallocentricmay be just what we need to help us avoid the con-
descendingpomposityof the normal question about abnormalwrit-
ing: "But just what is it trying to say?"
RICHARDRORTY
Princeton University
12 See Derrida on Rousseau on the connections between perversion,masturba-
tion, and writing (Grammatology,pp. 141-164). Note also his constant use of
sexual imagery (e.g., dissemination)to exhibit the differencebetween speech and
writing. The reader who finds all this too far-fetched is asked to ponder the
connections between (a) the use of 'hard' and 'soft' to qualify 'subject','science',
'nose', 'philosophy', and 'argument'; (b) the fact that women (and unathletic
male homosexuals) were traditionally thought best adapted to soft subjects;
(c) Plato's distinction between hard-edged Being and amorphous Becoming;
(d) Plato's exhortations to mathematics,muscle-building,and military music; (e)
Plato's discussion of writing in the Phaedrus. This last topic is discussed by,
Derrida in his hilarious "Plato's Drugstore" r"La Pharmacie de Platon" in
Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1972), forthcoming in Fn4lisI4
translationfrom Harvard University Press].

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