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indeed be public-texts to be repeated, texts to be read, and mis–
read-language must be public, because it always fails. Language is
our hamartia, our missing of the mark. The moment we speak we
introduce not a well-oiled machine, but a species-specific neurosis .
We invoke, like Oedipus, a self-referential curse. Our very riddle–
solving ingenuity triggers-has triggered, when the show begins-the
coming of the plague, which only our self-blinding can remove.
More frills, you'll say. Is this philosophy? Yes and no. Mter all,
both Derrida and Wittgenstein want to show us what philosophy
can't
do. But let me
try
another contrast: the contrast of explicit and
implicit. Wittgenstein recurrently attacks the notion that language
needs to go by exact rules, not, however, like Merleau-Ponty, for
example, because of some trailing meaning that lags behind them.
Do we, he asks in
Zettel,
hear the music-and
then
the expression?
We don't need exact rules, not because of some underlying depths
that escape them, but because the context decides. Operations oper–
ate where it fits them to do so. The very contrast, and so the concep–
tion of the "explicit" or "exact" is unnecessary to the way language
games in fact go on . For Derrida, however, the Platonic or Saussurian
or especially Husserlian ideal of truly precise meaning, the coalescence
of thought with presence, still appears as the
telos
of language, and
what we have in its failure is the failure of the totally explicit-of
language as pure expression. But in this situation the explicit, which
should have been the inner, turns round and assumes the place of the
outer-the writing-which remains always at some remove from the
inner, which should have been explicit, but never is. The play be–
tween the trace-the writing, absent from meaning, and the im–
plicit-the thought that is meant, but never unequivocally achieved:
this to-and-fro between
signifiant
and
signifie,
in one direction or
another, in every direction, never comes finally to a halt . We are
always saying, never quite what we mean. And we always mean,
never quite what we say.
It
is, I should think, the coalescence of rule
and operation as Wittgenstein adjures us to practise it that is, for
Derrida, a philosophical will-o-the-wisp . All we
have,
in the end, is
traces of traces, inscriptions separable and indeed separated from
their import. Even spoken language is a kind of primordial script, an
archi-ecriture.
Moreover, though language does indeed work only in
context, contexts themselves are never self-contained. Relative to the
