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PARTISAN REVIEW
bootstrap operation, a deliberate exercise in ultimate futility, in a genre
of writing he has almost single-handedly invented-the serious philos–
ophy of the absurd. The most earnest and innovative passages in
Derrida are those which, on the surface, seem at best playful and at
worst embarrassingly arch-passages which deploy grotesque puns,
distorted words, false etymologies, genital analogues, and sexual jokes;
which insist on our attending to the shapes of printed letters, play
endless tricks with Derrida's own name and with his written signature;
or collocate wildly incongruous texts.
In
such passages-extended to
the length of a nonbook in his Glas-Derrida is the Zen master of
Western philosophy, undertaking to shock us out of our habitual
linguistic categories in order to show what cannot be told without
reappropriation into those categories: what it is to experience a text not
as conveying significance, but as simply a chain of marks vibrating
with the free and incessant play of
differance.
Occasionally, however, Derrida ventures the attempt to tell what
can't be told, that is, to make his deconstructive concepts, although " in
intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they per–
mit," nonetheless "designate the crevice through which the yet un–
nameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed." This glimpse
is of an apocalyptic new world which, he prophesies, will be effected by
the total deconstruction of our logocentric language-world-"the
ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present,
beyond the closure of knowledge," hence cannot be described but only
"proclaimed,
presented,
as a sort of monstrosity. "
To realize the inclusiveness of the new world thus proclaimed, we
need to keep in mind what Derrida calls "the axial proposition" in
Of
Grammatoiogy,
his basic theoretical work:
Il n'y a pas d' hors-texte,
"there is no outside-the-text." Like all Derrida's key assertions, this
sentence is multiple in significance.
In
one aspect, it says we can't get
outside the written text we are reading-it is a closure in which both its
seeming author and the people and objects to which the text seems to
refer are merely "effects" engendered by the internal action of
differ–
ance.
In
another aspect, it says that there is nothing in the world which
is not itself a text, since we never experience a "thing itself, " but only as
it is interpreted.
In
this inclusive rendering, then, all the world's a text,
and men and women merel y readers-except that the readers, accord–
ing to Derrida, as "subjects," "egos," " cogitos," are themselves effects
which are engendered by an interpretation; so that in the process of
undoing texts, we undo our textual selves. The apocalyptic glimpse, it
would seem, is of a totall y textual universe whose reading is a mode of
