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the charges of oversimplification and misrepresentation are warranted. But
such accusations are never accompanied by an explanation of post-ism,
which
would end the need for unauthorized interpretations and might open the
field
to a greater number of currently excluded "voices."
The reasons given for the silence of the post-ists are always the same:
that there is no such thing as "poststructuralism," "deconstruction," or
"postmodernism" - it is not a theory but a "practice" that can be neither re–
duced to a set of principles nor summarized; that there is no authority, no
author, nor canon of post-ism; that its rhetoric cannot be translated, because
there are no stable meanings available for translation; and that definition is
an attempt to repress difference and impose a hierarchical order on a diverse
reality.
Jacques Derrida, the progenitor of poststructuralism, justifies his refusal
to explain his work with Derridean illogic. He denies that his neologisms and
idiosyncratic vocabulary are even words, thus rendering irrelevant all out–
moded "logocentric" attempts to define their meaning.
"Diffirance,"
a key
neologism in the Derridean lexicon, is "neither a
word
nor a
concept";
another
central term, " 'dissemination' ... ultimately has no meaning and cannot be
channeled into a definition," he writes in
Of
Gramrnatology.
In the same book,
Derrida subjects
all
of his terminology to this scorched-earth policy, stripping
it of any possible meaning before anyone else can get to it:
The
pharmakon
is neither the cure nor the poison, neither good nor
evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the
supplement
is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the
complement of an inside, neither an accident nor an essence, etc. ; the
hymen
is neither confusion nor distinction , neither identity nor differ–
ence, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor the
unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc.; the
gramme
is neither
a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither a presence
nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;
l'espacement
is
neither space nor time; the
entame
is neither the integrity of a begin–
ning or of a simple cut nor simply the secondary state. Neither/nor is
at once
at once
or rather
or rather.
So coy a disclaimer virtually begs the reader to conclude that these
terms are neither useful in explaining anything nor worthy of extended at–
tention. Is Derrida conceding what his critics have long contended - that his
work lacks sense? Alas, no. His defiantly counterfactual assertion that his
words are not words is intended, rather, as a romantic gesture of
transcendence, the wise folly of a thinker striving toward a new mode of
thought beyond the reach ofordinary language and the strictures of common
sense.
