The ends of Man

Abstract

However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the “simplest” acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. Louis Althusser In its formative years, deconstruction would find a privileged object in structuralism. Indeed it is the intensity of Derrida's first confrontation with structuralism and the lasting traces that this confrontation left on his thought that has legitimated the “post-structuralist” label in so many secondary accounts. Derrida's turn to structuralism was not merely a response to the latest intellectual fashion. Rather, it was occasioned by both local and global factors. After 1964, Derrida found himself right at the heart of an engaged student body. It was these students who constituted Derrida's primary intellectual audience and who were his most constant interlocutors in the three years before the publication of Of Grammatology in 1967. And, it was their political aspirations that rendered the philosophy taught at the school pertinent to the larger debates of the Cold War. In order to be relevant to these students, Derrida would have to translate his work into their language, emphasizing the antihumanist elements of his thought and adopting their structuralist terminology. The new language did not tolerate his earlier explicitly theological considerations or the simple evocation of phenomenological themes. As Derrida would be the first to assert, no translation is ever innocent or without loss. But one should not read the translation of Derrida's earlier phenomenology into structuralist language as a capitulation or the dissimulation of his earlier ideas beneath the forms a new philosophical fashion. After all, it is not clear what such a dissimulation would be in philosophy, for it is the very language and argumentative structures in which ideas are expressed that give them philosophical value. Alone, theses are merely dogmatic claims, and one cannot separate the ideas expressed in Of Grammatology from the way in which they were formulated. Even as certain themes were effaced or deemphasized, the structuralist translation of his thought provided Derrida with new and powerful philosophical resources.