A Transcendental Sense of Death? Derrida and the Philosophy of Language

Abstract

As a new century opens, one advantage of standing on its cusp is that the considerable intellectual achievements of the previous one can be approached in a new way. Today, sufficient distance from the projects of the twentieth century is emerging such that views of this work cease to be so deeply dependent on which sides of various divides discussants happen to be on (analytic or continental, formalist or historicist, marxian or democratic, to name but a few). A far greater solidarity of concerns, methods, and questions, of a sort already customary when treating earlier eras, has now begun to become apparent amongst what once were taken to be opposed movements now. At the same time, no one of us is yet so removed from these divisions and programs (some of us, of course, virtually not at all), with the result that the new shuffling of the deck now made possible—the new filiations seen and the new limitations discovered where previously only open vistas beckoned—cannot help but change our understanding of our own projects, working methodology, and present intellectual commitments. This essay undertakes this style of rearrangement, then—or, if one must, revisionism—with regard to the field of what might generally be called post-philosophy (to what was sometimes meant simply by "theory" at certain periods in the Anglo-American academy), and it does so, in particular, with regard to the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida has long been seen as a sort of radical, linguistic skeptic, one [End Page 1009] who denies all secure grounds including, at some stage, even the very grounds for such skepticism and denial. This essay argues, however, that the status of truth in his work is quite different, especially when it comes to his relationship with the philosophy of language. Derrida's work depends on taking positions in the philosophy of language—of affirming or holding them as true—of a far deeper and more controversial sort than is recognized almost anywhere today. The ultimate aim of such a demonstration is not, however, to suggest that Derrida's project is therefore invalid, his initiative an uninteresting or even dispensable one. A central goal of this essay, running parallel to the aim just mentioned is, in fact, to make clear, on this same basis, precisely how certain signature moments of Derrida's thinking function: to offer new and more precise renderings of developments long taken to be definitive of his project as a whole. Moreover, even if Derrida's stance were somehow to be brought into question here, it would not be in a manner any different from almost all those initiatives that today most characterize twentieth-century thought. For the question that forms the ultimate horizon of this paper, put most simply, is whether post-philosophy—that departure or transformation in respect to reason and truth, characteristic of so much work of the preceding century—truly exists in the manner currently imagined, as an ongoing enterprise of its own, with an autonomous living future. Are any of those endeavors by which the twentieth century remains marked from the beginning to the end, whether they be that of Heidegger or Adorno, Wittgenstein or Deleuze (to take some provocative pairings) in fact able to do without quite definite commitments in the fields of traditional philosophy, and thus without that truth whose ultimate authority and even possibility they are commonly thought to question? Are not their projects, even as they seek to exceed or transform truth or reason, only able to go forward if they are right about these matters foundational for their own thought?1 If the answer to these queries is yes, it raises the possibility that post-philosophy, or theory, does not exist, at least in the fashion usually assumed—not because there is no need for it, because philosophy somewhere has been established as a successful achieved science, but for the precisely opposite reason: because philosophy, too, has never...