Derrida and the Wholly Other

Abstract

Where Foucault positioned himself between oppositions and Barthes inscribed oppositions in the same body, Derrida collapses all oppositions — and with them all the constructs of language, culture and rational thought — back into an originating unity which evokes that of the Jewish God: One, Sovereign, Incorporeal and wholly Other, at once transcendent and immanent, manifest and hidden, it can neither be described nor contained by the determinations of language and thought — including these. Deconstruction of the constructi — the concepts, structures and constructs — of language, culture and the philosophic mind is thus both less and more than a subversion of what Derrida has called ‘the metaphysics of presence’ which have governed Western language and logic from the Greeks to the present day. Deconstruction is a displacement of the human constructs that have displaced the originating unity. And it is an attempt to open out a metaphysic and a mind-set which have been closed to the wholly Other by carving out spaces or abysses in language and thought through which it can be glimpsed ‘through a glass darkly’. At the same time, if what is glimpsed through the glass darkly is God, it is a de-constructed God, the Jewish God become pure Ein Sof and pared down to the mystery of his infinite Otherness.1