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reconstitute them in another way"; that he puts into question the
"search for the signified not to annul it, but to understand it within a
system to which such a reading is blind." He can in fact be designated
as, on principle, a double-dealer in language, working ambidextrously
with two semantic orders-the standard and the deconstructed. He
writes essays and books, and engages in symposia and in debates, that
put forward his deconstructive strategy and exemplify it by decon–
structing the texts of other writers.
In
this deconstruction of logocentric
language he assumes the stance that this language works, that he can
adequately understand what other speakers and writers mean, and that
competent auditors and readers will adequately understand him.
In
this double process of construing in order to deconstrue he perforce
adopts words from the logocentric system; but he does so, he tells us,
only "provisionally," or
sous rature,
"under erasure." At times he
reminds us of this pervasive procedure by writing a key word but
crossing it out, leaving it "legible" yet "effaced" - an ingenious
doublespeak, adapted from Heidegger, that enables him to eat his
words yet use them too.
Derrida's double-dealing with texts is all -inclusive, for he is aware
that his deconstructive reading is self-reflexive; that, although "exor–
bitant" in intention, it cannot in fact escape the orbit of the linguistic
system it deconstructs. "Operating necessarily from the inside," as he
says, "the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls
prey to its own work." The invented nonwords which serve as his
instruments of deconstruction not only are borrowed from language,
but are immediately reappropriated into language in the process of
their " iteration" (in Derrida's double sense of being "repeated" and
therefore "other" than absolutely self-identical). And the deconstruc–
live reading these instruments effect, he says, is a "production," but
"does not leave the text. ... And what we call production is necessarily
a text, the system of a writing and a reading which we know is ordered
by its own blind spot." Even as they are put to work on a text,
accordingly, the deconstructive instruments deconstruct themselves, as
well as the deconstructed translation of the original text which Derrida,
as deconstructor, has no option except to write down as still another
deconstructible text.
Derrida's critical lexicon, therefore, as Gayatri Spivak, his transla–
tor, has said, "is forever on the move."
In
the consciously vain endeavor
to find a point outside the logocentric system on which to plant his
deconstructive lever, he leaps from neologism to neologism, as each
sinks beneath his feet
en abyme.
His deconstructive enterprise thus is a
