278
PARTISAN REVIEW
at all; silent prayer perhaps, but no talk. Plato called writing poison
to the soul; but, Derrida argues, he
had
to find it also a drug
(phar–
macon)
in the benign as well as in the injurious sense. Why else, one
may ask, did he keep writing when he hated it so? Saussure called
writing "language in drag":
" L
'ecriture votle la vue de la langue:
elle n 'est pas un vetement mais un travestissement.
"
But his com–
pulsive search for anagrams, for a secret writing behind the writing,
suggests that he took it very seriously indeed . And it demands to be
taken seriously precisely because the life of speech begins only with
that death of the word which writing represents. Represents, since
writing, like any linguistic phenomenon, is never presented purely .
Maybe the only pure poem is the
"Fisches Nachtgesang"
of Morgen–
stern, and even it, though I can ' t quote it , is repeatable in print .
Biologically, or genetically considered, life can go on forever , but
human life, the life of tradition and of language, is mediated by
death.
We have been looking, spottily , at two divergent ways of facing
a single quandary: the immobilizing of our minds by the action on
them of our inherited philosophy of language. If I ask in conclusion
why the methods of these two writers, faced with the same problem,
are so contrary, I can only suggest a very obvious, indeed a plati–
tudinous, answer. Both Wittgenstein and Derrida, we 've noticed, are
counter-Cartesians. They both emphatically dtsbelieve, at least at the
linguistic level. I still want to leave open the possibility that Findlay
may be right-that Wittgenstein may have been a secret, and so
silent , mystic; or secret, and so silent, solipsist-but at the linguistic
level they both disbelieve in the Cartesian moment of truth, the in–
wardly self-warranting clear and distinct idea. Wittgenstein, however ,
came to these problems through Russell and Moore, the heirs of
Hume, the last empiricists, whose search for pure atomic impressions
motivated their philosophizing, even in occasional (though of course
gentlemanly) rebellion against that aim of thought. This is, original–
ly, the would-be objective and, ultimately, the phenomenalist issue
of Cartesianism. Derrida, on the contrary, comes through Husser! out
of the idealist branch of the Cartesian family, even if with the help
of Nietzsche (let alone Freud and Marx) he rebels violently , or at least
with the rhetoric of violence , against that demi-tradition . The two
branches have, of course , like all cousins , something in common .
