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PARTISAN REVIEW
meet absolute criteria which language cannot satisfy without ceasing
to do its work, all spoken and written utterances, tho ugh they may give
the "effect" of determina te signifi cance, are deconstructabl e imo
semantic indeterminancy.
Derrida describes hi s "gen eral stra tegy of deconstruction " as a
mode of " doubl e writing": it first " inverts " the hi erarchy of the terms
in standard philosophical oppositions such as speech-writing,
signifier-signified, then it " displ aces" what was the lower term in the
hi erarch y (or a deriva tive from tha t term ) "outside the oppos iti ons in
which it was held." The la tter move genera tes, in place of th e standard
terms used to analyze the workings of language, a set of new terms
which, he says, are neither words nor concepts, neither signifi ers nor
signifi eds. These invented pseudo terms, however, although "dis–
placed" from their locus within th e system of langu age, nonetheless are
capabl e of producing "con ceptual effects"; and these effects operate in
two dimensions. On the on e side, th ey account for th e fact th at texts are
" legibl e," yielding the effects of seemin gly determinable meanings. On
the other side, they serve as what I have call ed a set of transfo rmers,
which Derrida employs to " di ssemina te" these effects into th eir decon–
structed alternati ves.
The chi ef transformer is
diff{nance- Saussure's
key term "dif–
ference," twice-born and re-spell ed with an "a" - whi ch confi a tes
"difference" and "deferment. "
In
one aspect of its fun cti oning, the
"differences" among signs and among the conditions of th eir use
expl ain how they generate their apparently specific signifi ca ti on s; in
its deconstru ctive aspect, it points
to
the fact tha t, since th ese signifi ca–
tions can never come to res t in an absolute presence, their specifi ca ti on
is deferred from substitute sign to substitute sign in a movement
without end. Similarly with the o ther nonwords fo r nonentities with
which Derrida replaces standard terms for dea lin g with lang uage: in
pl ace of the spoken utterance or written tex t, the "general text" or
" proto-writing"; in place of the word, " mark" or "grapheme"; in place
o f signifi can ce, "di ssemina tion " or a large number of other "ni ck–
names" that Derrida resourcefull y coins, or else adapts
to
hi s equivocal
purpose from common u sage. All in their doubl e fun cti on account for
the legibility of a text a t the same time that they " open " the apparent
closure of the text
"en abyme,"
into th e abyss of an endl ess regress of
ever-promised, never-delivered meaning.
Derrida emphas izes tha t to decon struct is not to destroy; that hi s
tas k is to "dismantle the metaph ysical and rhetorical structures"
opera tive in a text " not in order
to
reject or discard th em, but to
