270
PARTISAN REVIEW
may, what I am trying to elucidate is the
texts
of Wittgenstein and
Derrida (another Derridaan admission, as we shall shortly see), and
not their secret souls. Wittgensteinians will cry: but there are no
secret souls! Yet Wittgenstein's lesson
could
be: if there are-or if
there is.one , mine-you'll never know because no one can ever say .
But enough of this ornamentation . Back to my theme: Recon–
struction-deconstruction. How to elaborate this contrast? Let's have a
look at a series of further contrasts that grow out of, or have bearing
on , it . Take ftrst, or next, the contrast of inner and outer. Wittgen–
stein says : Forget it! (Even if Findlay'S right, that 's what he
says.)
Forget the rigid reference of the Augustinian model, forget the fool–
ish flickering of the "inner" happening.
When
does the "inner"
happening of knowing how to play chess take place? What a silly
question! I
play
chess .
When
do I know English? I speak it. The
contrast of inner event and outer doing is simply an impediment to
understanding what in fact goes on . From this position Derrida is just
as different as possible . For him indeed, "differance" is what it's all
about. "Differance" with an "a," mind you , to show that the dif–
ference between inner and outer-or rather, the whole nest of differ–
ences inherent in speech-is not an ordinary difference.
It
is the
conflict
of meaning with what it's meant to mean (difference is what
we ftght about), the
gap
between meaning and what it's meant
to
mean, the spatialization, the. spreading out into representation of
what should have been a pure presentation of intuitive clarity; and
by the same token the deferring (one word in French:
difjerer,
to
differ;
difjerer,
to defer), the deferring of the moment of truth , the
temporalizing of experience, which is also always temporizing . We
never make it home.
It
is not the inner that is strange: "seltsam," as
Wittgenstein keeps calling it . The inner, if we could really reach it,
would be presence, the vision of the Forms, the mind at home . But
we never do . We are caught in externality, not happily, but as our
inalienable alienation from what we have always sought. Thus in
La
Voix et Ie Phenomene
Derrida shows how Husserl tries vainly to
reduce language to the purely expressive, to the expression of what
is
" evident,
" but without ever being able to eliminate its
indicative
role. In
Grammatologie
he quotes Peirce's dictum, "We think only in
signs" -a self-externalization that never comes
to
rest in easy union
with what the signs are
of
For Wittgenstein the
working
of language
