Deconstruction and Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

However topic is considered, Jacques Derrida begins Of Grammatology, the of language has never been simply one among others (6). This is because, as he says elsewhere in describing Husserl's phenomenology, all experience is experience of (Sinn). Everything that appears to consciousness, everything that is for consciousness in general, is meaning. Meaning is phenomenality of phenomenon (Positions 30). Nevertheless, of language-the science of linguistics-has always hovered on margins of literary studies (if not philosophy), as if meaning Derrida talks of were somehow outside language that manifests it, as if language were simply means to end of meaning. For Derrida, however, this is precisely problem of language: complex relationship, whose existence linguistics forces us to acknowledge, between and communication. Moreover, for Derrida this complex relationship is not one marginal among many; it is a central problem, representative, founding, titular. For this reason he argues that in recent times linguistics has taken a special place in study of what has come to be called human sciences. The very of linguistic Derrida asserts, can be reconceived in formulation of modernity as linguistic science, since so many other 'human sciences' refer to linguistics as their titular (Margins 139). Derrida is modern in this way as well, using semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure as a model (of sorts) for his own grammatology (Positions 26-27). His use of Saussure's model, however, is problematic; it is what some would call an abuse rather than a use, but which more precisely is a deconstructive rather than a destructive use of Saussure. There is, as I will argue here, a direct relationship between Derrida's procedures of deconstruction and methods of linguistic analysis. But that relationship is one of negation or denial, a negative relationship which Derrida himself calls an explosion: deconstruction explodes or exceeds logic of linguistic science. Such a negative relationship, however, does not simply negate its object by effacing or erasing it; rather, it denies it, to use a term A. J. Greimas translates from French de'negation (Schleifer, ch. 3), or puts it under erasure, to use Derrida's own early expression (see Grammatology), so that what is denied is destroyed and