"DERRIDA: PASSING BETWEEN OPPOSITES"

by Steve Rodgers

Derrida (therefore) shall not have been a philosopher or a poet. But what, then?

Sure, his later works differ from his earlier ones. We need only flip open The Post Card (1980) and, say, "Plato's Pharmacy" (1972) to see how far he has gone in only eight years. Derrida's early and middle works, to a certain extent, follow the rules (or, at least, they don't dispense with them altogether). In these works he may be witty and at times unconventional, but we'd still say that he's a philosopher. We'd still say he's philosophizing, using the tools (namely, philosophical rigor and logic) that he inherited from the philosophers who went before him--even if he is using them to deconstruct the house Plato built. Wouldn't we? We could at least say with some degree of certainty that a later work like The Post Card is in no way rigorous, argumentative, or systematic. Couldn't we? Come on! Rigor? In all those fragments of love letters scrawled on the backs of postcards, in all that stuff about consigning letters to flames, in all those unfinished

                                                                    are the questions. Philosophers and critics like Richard Rorty, Christopher Norris, and Rodolphe Gasche have been trying to answer them for some time--trying, if you will, to figure out just where exactly Derrida belongs, what exactly he's doing, and when exactly he's doing it. If I may be so bold--and at the risk of offending three men much smarter than I am--I will place these three in two camps: Rorty in one, Norris and Gasche in the other.

Rorty likes late Derrida--playful, poetic, personal--and he's a little suspicious when Derrida succumbs and pulls out the old toolbox so that he can chisel away at philosophy and reshape it to his needs. This, Rorty tells us, is simply refutation, a sign of unoriginality, just another riff, however disruptive and syncopated, on philosophy's tired old rhythms.

Norris and Gasche sit in the other camp. They like Derrida when he keeps the beat--when he cuts, when he argues, rigorously, logically. Not a "playful punster," as Rorty defines him (deconstruction, too), and certainly not a poet, Derrida becomes in their eyes a logician who systematically dismantles philosophical "truths." Thus, they're not just a little suspicious of the Derrida who scribbles on postcards and burns them.

--Drifted out to sea. What a shame.
--Seek newer and fresher waters! And don't turn back.

                                                                    so Rorty draws a line, between Early and Late:

Early: playful, but too philosophically rigorous; not as original as "Late"; neologistic; too academic; public; a "false start" ("Transcendental" 128)


Late: "magnificent[ly] poetic" ("Transcendental" 123); original; eccentric; un-(or anti-)philosophical; untheoretical; private; moving; literary(?)

But, Gasche says, Derrida says his work is continuous. In The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations (1982), Derrida writes that "all the problems worked out in the Introduction to The Origin of Geometry [1962] have continued to organize the work I have subsequently attempted" (qtd. Gasche 4).

Gasche is right, to a certain extent. Throughout his oeuvre, Derrida is indeed preoccupied with the same sorts of problems--reading as writing, and vice versa; the text as an "open" system; the play of meanings; indefinite beginnings and endings--and Derrida works on those problems in similar ways--levels binary oppositions and identities, opens up "corridors of meaning" (Dissemination 95) encourages re-reading.

But what makes his oeuvre continuous is not just that it makes "philosophical arguments" in discursive and non-discursive manners (Gasche 4), but that it is both playful and logical. Thus, we simply cannot turn our backs on Derrida's play, as Norris and Gasche do. Even in "Plato's Pharmacy" and the "Envois" to The Post Card, two works quite different in form, Derrida systematically demonstrates the playful "passage between opposites" (Dissemination 93): true/false, father/son, original/copy, inside/outside, speech/writing, logos/mythos, philosopher/sophist, and, I would argue, rigor/play--all these in Derrida's work (early, middle, and late) are interconnected; each derives its meaning from the other and is thus at times indistinguishable from the other.

                                                                    rigorous?" you say. "Systematic?" Yes. But not in the sense that Norris and Gasche (and Rorty) define it. Not the traditional tools in the inherited toolbox, but tools, nonetheless. Here I think we need to redefine "rigor" and "logic"--in terms of play. We need to expand the definitions, deconstruct them, in fact, so that they embrace the "other." We need to level the literature/philosophy, play/rigor binary entirely. In the "Envois" to The Post Card, Derrida isn't simply expressing his free-associative fantasies about philosophers poetically--personal fantasies, as Rorty would have it. He doesn't postulate theorems either, and his logic is hardly linear. But it is logic. Derrida is making a philosophical argument here, even if he goes about it more poetically, and even if he makes his "point" less directly and less predictibly than we're used to. He is deliberate, and he is rigorous--in his attempt to offer us a new way of thinking and writing, and a new way of thinking about writing.

So maybe this isn't a sea-change after all. Maybe it isn't a wholesale rejection of philosophy, a turn inward. And maybe it isn't only underlined by "philosophical rigor," either. Derrida has said it himself: It is, rather, an "original kind of logic" (Dissemination 92), a "logic of play," "rigorously prescribed" (Dissemination 64).

Derrida's greatness, then, lies in his having successfully passed between opposites, not over the course of an entire career, but from moment to moment, continuously and imperceptibly. To return to an earlier metaphor, we might say that while Derrida has ventured into uncharted waters, he can still see the shore.

So if we try to pinpoint him as he sails along the horizon, as if to say, "Here he is a philosopher, here a poet," we may be missing the point. Rather, we ought to lose ourselves in (and loose ourselves into) his spinning and delightful world and try, with his help, to see him--and any text, for that matter--from all angles at once, until the contradictions are no longer really contradictions at all.

So now, let us begin again . . .