Jacques Derrida

Q. What do you get when you cross Derrida with a member of the Mafia?
A. Someone making you an offer you can't understand, or refuse!
(McNamara, 2004)

Although Derrida is one of the most difficult to interpret philosophers, he is also one of the most significant and brilliant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Of Jewish decent, he was Born in Algeria in 1930 (Algeria being a colony of France at the time). He received his baccalaureat (akin to University Entrance here in New Zealand), travelled to France when he was 19 years old, and enrolled in philosophy classes at the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. By 1957, he was planning a doctorate, 'The Ideality of the Literary Object,' which was never completed. His reasons for not completing the project came from reading Husserl, a phenomenologist. This led him to perceive problems in phenomenological inquiry particularly with its writing and literary aspects. He did, however, receive a doctorat d'État in Paris in 1980, but that was on the basis of his many publications.

To put it mildly, Derrida had a bit of a gripe with phenomenology. He began studying it in his earlier years, but soon developed lots of questions regarding the integrity of phenomenology, eventually criticising it (which paved the way for other things like deconstruction). In a bitter-sweet sense, Derrida's legacy probably wouldn't be what it is today without phenomenology. However, this is where the commonalities between phenomenology and the Algerian philosopher end. Derrida's whole philosophical agenda appeared to have been launched from his intellectual battle with, and later against, phenomenology (Howells, 1999). The phenomenological endeavour to ground knowledge in experience, evidence, and self-presence, and its apparent failure to do so, lead him to the conclusion that such an endeavour is fundamentally misguided and flawed.

Derrida viewed phenomenology as an entrapped philosophy. That is, it can not avoid entrapment in the system it is setting out to criticise because it is both a critique of metaphysics and also a participant in the metaphysical enterprise (Howells, 1999). For instance, why does phenomenological reductionism claim to be so great 'as is' when there is an infinite need for further reductions? Yet, addressing this would jettison the very principles of the phenomenological method because any analysis of this would go into the realm of philosophising metaphysics (the theoretical philosophy of being and knowing, and the philosophy of mind), which Husserl didn't want to go into (he wanted to put aside [bracket] and go beyond empiricism on one end of the spectrum and metaphysics on the other). In other words, there can not be a phenomenology of phenomenology. Contrast this with deconstruction: 'what is deconstruction?' deconstructs itself, because deconstruction challenges the logic behind 'what is' type questions, particularly the assumption that there is a singular essence or truth to be revealed (Larner, 1994).

Q. "Why critique metaphysics?" asked the foundationalist philosopher.
A. "Well, why the hell not, I mean there are many assumptions surrounding it." replied the seemingly unorthodox deconstructionist.

Although, to put words in a philosopher's mouth (and to provide some continuity between this and the previous paragraph), Derrida may have replied with something akin to "to see if aspects of it are flawed like those problematic aspects of phenomenology that I've been grappling with."
Derrida called philosophy to task because it tends to objectively judge other literary expressions while resisting the idea that it is a kind of writing (Grenz, 1996). Derrida described Western metaphysics as being logocentric (Howells, 1999). There is a logocentric bias that inhabits our thinking about mind, language, and reality (Norris, 1987).

What is logocentrism? The term comes from the Greek word Logos meaning word, and more loosely, speech, and language, which are the carriers of meaning in logocentrism. It can be described as a kind of linguistic metaphysical realism (in contrast to relativism). That is, logocentrism is a belief that language faithfully represents concrete objects, concepts and meanings in some real world, which is in contrast to Derrida's stance which is that it is inevitable that knowledge is constantly being mediated (McNamara, 2004). Logocentrism is what Derrida calls the 'metaphysics of presence.' Western philsophers assume that language (i.e., a system of linguistic signs) gives a 'presence' because it signifies this given concrete reality (i.e., providing us with 'the truth'), but Derrida views this as simply being a myth (Grenz, 2004). To illustrate an example of logocentrism, when someone speaks a word, the word guarantees the existence of someone doing the speaking, and so it reinforces the idea that there is a real self that is the source of what is said. In otherwords, logocentrism is based around a philosophy, or metaphysics, of presence.

Furthermore, logocentrism is a privileging of speech and presence (Klages, 2004) and it enshrines a reassuringly stable and hierarchical view of the world (Howells, 1999). Western language produces binaries (e.g., good/bad, beautiful/ugly, straight/gay, where the slash [/] symbol means 'over') and Derrida uses such binaries to look at the fallacies of metaphysics and logocentrism. For instance, presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favoured over absence. Hence in logocentrism, speech becomes associated with presence, and both are favoured over writing and absence (Klages, 2004). In Derrida's most famous work, Of Grammatology, he examined the binary opposition speech/writing, and inferred that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This hierarchical binary of speech over writing is called phonocentrism. In linguistic theories, where speech is posited as the first form of language, and writing is just the transcription of speech, just as Plato obediently wrote words down on instruction from his master, Socrates (Norris, 1987). Think of politicians as another example of the privileging of speech.

However, logocentrism also supports the notion that there is a direct relationship between speech and writing. That is, words (i.e., signifier) can be traced back through their meaning to their object (i.e., the original signified) and vice-versa, as if they are in some sort of closed system. Derrida calls this the myth of the transcendental signified (i.e., an original, true, concrete, stable, and thus unchangable meaning can be picked out), but his alternative view is a form of language games or play (jeu) that is marked precisely by the absence of any original or true meaning (Howells, 1999; McNamara, 2004). Derrida criticises Western philosophers for seeing writing as a representation of speech, and their views that meaning in our speech (and further up in the thoughts-speech-writing hierarchy, thoughts) can represent an objective, given reality (Grenz, 1996).

The 'metaphysics of presence' or logocentrism has sometimes been referred to as phallogocentrism because of the association of privileged terms with the phallus (that certain part of the male anatomy, and thus the man -- also the penis is defined as a presence and the vagina as an absence [Klages, 2004]). The hierarchical binaries of Western philosophy of men over women and men being rational and women irrational, therefore having an associated binary of reason versus emotion are such an example. Other phallogocentric and logocentric examples include:

Given that logocentrism enshrines a reassuringly stable and hierarchical view of the world, it is now a good time to turn to structuralism (I mean on the next webpage, not literally -- turn to the 'Structuralism Infomercial')