White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric

'White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and RhetoricAuthor(s): Bernard HarrisonSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 505-534Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344188 .

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'White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric

Bernard Harrison

1. Preliminaries

'White Mythology' was originally published in 1971 in Poitiques and re-

appeared as the longest of the eleven essays in Marges de la philosophie (1972), essays which, in various ways and from various directions, 'argue their way through a rigorous and consequential treatment of the various

blind-spots, aporias or antinomies that characterize the discourse of

philosophic reason'.' The essay's topic is, broadly speaking, the place of metaphor in philosophical discourse. The title is taken from Anatole France's acidly witty dialogue 'Ariste and Polyphile, or the Language of

This essay was originally commissioned by Alessandro Pagnini, on behalf of the Centro Fiorentino di Storia e Filosofia della Scienza and the journal Iride, as an introduction to a projected Italian translation of 'La Mythologie blanche' to be published in that journal. That project was overtaken by the Italian publication of the entire text of Derrida's Marges de la philosophie, but the present essay nevertheless duly appeared, in an Italian translation

by Fabrizia Bartalucci, in Iride 10 (Apr. 1997): 19-49. The original English-language version is published here with the approval of the editorial board of Iride, and of Professor Pagnini, its vice director, and director of the Centro Fiorentino, to whom my thanks, not least for

initiating the whole project, are due. 1. Christopher Norris, 'Deconstruction, Postmodernism, and Philosophy', in Derrida:

A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford, 1992), p. 181. See Jacques Derrida, 'La Myth- ologie blanche: La Metaphore dans le texte philosophique', Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), hereafter abbreviated 'MB'; trans. Alan Bass, under the title 'White Mythology: Meta-

phor in the Text of Philosophy', Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, 1982), hereafter abbreviated 'WM'.

Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999) ? 1999 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/99/2503-0005$02.00. All rights reserved.

505



506 Bernard Harrison On 'White Mythology'

Metaphysics', from The Garden of Epicurus. Polyphile is discovered by the metaphysician Ariste leafing through 'one of those little works that bring the wisdom of the ages within reach of your hand. It reviews all systems, one by one, from the old Eleatics down to the latest Eclectics, and it ends up with M. Lachelier'.2 Polyphile, however, is not interested in the getting of wisdom. Remarkably anticipating Derrida's own interests, he is concerned solely with 'the verbal form' ('la forme verbale') of the characteristic utterances of metaphysics, of which his little conspectus, opened at random in the middle, has furnished him with the following splendid example: 'The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute' ('AP', p. 193).

Ariste, after cautiously noting that 'everything indicates' ('tout donne a croire') that such a conclusion would be solidly founded in argument ('fait partie d'une argumentation solide'), asks Polyphile where his reflec- tions on the 'verbal form' of metaphysical propositions have led him ('AP', p. 193). The latter replies by characterising the language of metaphysics in terms of an elaborate and extended metaphor. The metaphysician re- sembles a knife-grinder who instead of grinding scissors and knives chooses to grind coins and medals. Having thus effaced the exergue, the date, and the image, so that no trace remains of Victoria, or William, or la R6publique, he offers his defaced pieces, since they no longer have either a discernible value or a discernible national origin, as a coinage liberated from the limitations of space and time, of inestimable value and

2. 'Un de ces petits ouvrages qui vous mettent dans la main la sagesse universelle. II fait le tour des systemes a partir des vieux tl6ates jusques aux derniers 6clectiques, et il aboutit i monsieur Lachelier' (Anatole France, 'Ariste et Polyphile ou le langage m6taphy- sique', Le Jardin d'Epicure, in 'Le Lys rouge' et 'Le Jardin d'Epicure' vol. 2 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Jacques Suffel [Paris, 1968], p. 416; trans. Alfred Allinson, under the title 'Aristos and Polyphilos on the Language of Metaphysics', The Garden of Epicurus, in 'The Opinions of f•r6me Coignard' and 'The Garden of Epicurus', vol. 4 of The Works of Anatole France, trans. Allinson et al. [New York, 1924], p. 193; hereafter abbreviated 'AP').

3. 'L'dme posside Dieu dans la mesure ot

elle participe de I'absolu' ('AP', p. 416).

Bernard Harrison was until 1992 professor of philosophy at the Uni- versity of Sussex and has since then held the E. E. Ericksen Chair in Phi- losophy at the University of Utah. For many years he has divided his time between philosophy and literary studies. His work in the former category includes Meaning and Structure (1972) and Form and Content (1973); and, in the latter, 'Tom Jones': The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (1975) and Incon- venient Fictions (1991). At the moment he is collaborating with Patricia Hanna on a book on the concept of reference. He is completing a book on the development of Wittgenstein's thought as well as a book on the notion of misreading as it has affected literary studies.



Critical Inquiry Spring 1999 507

unlimited currency.4 So it is, according to Polyphile, with the processes of abstraction which generate metaphysical vocabularies: 'Each primitive term of a language represents in origin some sensory object'.5 And even at the highest levels of abstraction the discourse of the metaphysician remains haunted by the original, effaced, concrete significations of its terms, for it is solely from these eroded and disavowed senses that meta-

physical claims derive whatever meaning they still possess. Abstraction itself is a fraud because it is metaphor in disguise; moral philosophy, for instance, begins in a contrast of images, of the straight and the crooked path.6 Metaphysics, far from delivering us from metaphor in the name of reason, practises, in the name of abstraction or generality, a style of think-

ing which has merely succeeded in concealing from itself, by exiling metaphor to the margins of its 'official' activity, its own profound meta-

phoricity. Far from defending the side of reason and truth in Plato's war between the poets and the philosophers, 'by an odd fate, the very meta- physicians who think to escape the world of appearances, are constrained to live perpetually in allegory. A sorry sort of poets, they dim the colours of the ancient fables, and are themselves but gatherers of fables, makers of white mythology' ('AP', p. 214; trans. mod.).7 As Derrida puts it, a mere typographical error, which he hints has actually occurred in his copy, would suffice to transform 'Ariste', the defender of metaphysics, into 'Ar- tiste'.

'Ariste et Polyphile' introduces all the main themes of Derrida's essay, and Derrida assumes familiarity with it on the part of the reader. It is also the source of two of the plays on words which Derrida characteristi-

cally uses, here as elsewhere, both to structure and to display the implications of his argument, both sufficiently obscure to require explanation, even at the risk of pedantry, for the reader approaching the essay for the first time. The first concerns the title. One set of connotations of the word blanche in French runs by way of such cognates as blanchir (to bleach, whitewash, exonerate), blanchisserie (laundry), and blanchiment (whitening of walls, blanching of vegetables, and so on). The context suggests that it is this set alone that the author of 'Ariste et Polyphile' has in mind, although some of the connotations it contains-of marginalising or concealing aspects of one's activity, of sweeping things under the carpet-are

4. 'Nous les avons tirees hors du temps et de l'espace; elles ne valent plus cinq francs: elles sont d'un prix inestimable, et leur cours est 6tendu infiniment' ('AP', p. 417).

5. 'Tous les mots du langage humain ... repr6sentbrent dans leur nouveaut6 quelque image sensible' ('AP', p. 421).

6. 'C'est en nommant le chemin droit et le sentier tortueux qu'on exprima les pre- mieres id6es morales' ('AP', p. 421).

7. 'Par un sort bizarre, ces m6taphysiciens, qui croient 6chapper au monde des appar- ences, sont contraints de vivre perp6tuellement dans l'allegorie. Pobtes tristes, ils d6colorent les fables antiques, et ils ne sont que des assembleurs de fables. Ils font de la mythologie blanche' ('AP', p. 430).




going to be central to Derrida's argument as well. Blanche, however, also carries racial connotations (la race blanche, and so on), and Derrida takes

steps to activate this set also in the mind of the reader. The mythology which the 'dreary poetry' of metaphysics assembles is, for Derrida, the characteristic mythology of the West, of the whites. As we have just noted, there is no contextual evidence that Anatole France, the original begetter of the phrase, intended it to be taken in that way. But one could reply in the spirit of the Yale criticism of the eighties that Derrida, in pushing its connotations in that, entirely linguistically justifiable, direction, is simply demonstrating the force of one of his own more central contentions: that

language trumps intention, so that a speaker cannot, by putting his signa- ture to a text, establish any right to rule out as inadmissible, as inconso- nant with his intentions, all but a chosen subset of possible readings; in the end how we understand what we read depends not on the private intentions of the writer but on the potentialities inherent in the public language in which he has chosen to write.

Another source of Derridean wordplay in the essay is the word ex-

ergue. Exergue is a technical term of numismatics. The Oxford English Dic-

tionary gives it as a term of French origin, apparently formed from the Greek EX (out) plus epyov (work): 'probably intended as a quasi-Greek rendering of French hors-d'oeuvre, something lying outside the work'. In its technical, numismatic sense, the exergue of a coin is 'a small space usually on the reverse of a coin or medal, below the principal device, for

any minor inscription, the date, engraver's initials, etc. Also, the inscription there inserted'.8 Implicit in this definition, and as we shall see essential to Derrida's play on the term, is the idea that the contents of the

exergue breach the self-sufficiency of the work, relating it to time, to a maker, to an origin, and to a place in history. In a certain sense the contents of the exergue represent not so much a further part of the inscription as a metainscription, a comment by the coin on its own failure to be

self-explanatory insofar as its existence and origins are concerned, on its failure to stand as a thing 'tir&e hors du temps et de l'espace', of inestimable value and unlimited currency.

2. Derrida's Arguments

The unpersuaded Ariste, beating an abrupt retreat, offers a parting shot: 'If only you had reasoned by the rules, I could have refuted your arguments quite easily'.9 Much the same charge has been leveled against

8. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. 'exergue'. 9. 'Adieu, cher Polyphile. Je sors non persuad&. Si vous aviez raisonne dans les regles,

il m'aurait 6te facile de refuter vos arguments' ['Good-bye, dear Polyphile. I leave uncon- vinced. If only you had reasoned by the rules, I could have refuted your arguments quite easily'] ('AP', p. 430; 'AP', p. 215).




Derrida. Indeed, it has become conventional in English-speaking philosophical circles to accuse Derrida not only of not reasoning 'dans les regles' but of having no arguments at all to offer, the extraordinary influence of his work then being explained, according to taste, either as an aberra- tion of literary, rather than intellectual, fashion or as the result of the rise of a new generation of philosophers and critics who no longer take argument any more seriously than they suppose Derrida to do.

Most analytic philosophers fall into the first camp. For Richard Rorty, who falls into, if he does not actually constitute, the second, Derrida works less by argument than by processes of 'recontextualisation' resem- bling those by which a 'creative' tax accountant spots the possibility of plausibly listing a given item under one schedule rather than another. 'Admirers of Derrida like myself think of Derrida's recontextualization of Western metaphysics, his neologistic redescription of it as "phallogo- centrism," as a paradigm of creative imagination'.'0

Neither of these responses seem to me to have much to recommend them. I do not find in Derrida either a French imitator of Rorty or a charlatan. One reason analytically trained philosophers find difficulty in understanding Derridean deconstruction as argument, or as what they understand as argument, it seems to me, is that they find it difficult to determine what philosophical views, exactly, he is attacking. 'White Mythology' offers a good case in point. Derrida seems to be attacking the possibility of nonmetaphorical discourse per se. But, most analytic philosophers would contend, it is absurd to suppose that such an attack could possibly suc- ceed. If we could not distinguish in practice between literal and metaphorical uses of terms, no such distinction would be enshrined in our usage; but if we can distinguish the metaphorical from the literal then we can take steps to expel metaphor from kinds of discourse in which it has no function, or only a confusing or corrupting one. The drive to expel metaphor from scientific discourse is, after all, as old as Locke's Essay and has been to a great extent successfully prosecuted during the succeeding three centuries by the obvious methods Locke recommends, of exact or operational definition of terms. This process was evidently assisted in its inception by the increasing role of mathematics in the natural sciences; and here it is surely relevant that Derrida himself questions whether metaphor is possible in mathematics." If nonmetaphorical discourse is possible in mathematics, and by extension in physics, then why should it not be possible in philosophy, especially in a philosophy with aims and methods closely related to those of science?

If we are not to be seduced by this way of closing the door on Der-

10. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cam- bridge, 1991), p. 95.

11. 'Qu'il puisse y avoir au sens strict des metaphores math'matiques, problkme qu'il faut encore reserver' ('supposing that in the strict sense there might be mathematical metaphors, a problem to be held in reserve for now') ('MB', p. 262; 'WM', p. 220).




rida, what we need to remember, it seems to me, is that there is more than one way of setting up the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical. In the analytic tradition the problem of metaphor arises as a result of the perceived challenge posed by metaphorical utterances to the Fregean principle that the meaning of a statement S is its truth- conditions. Frege's principle, put at its crudest, requires, as a condition of meaningfulness, that it should be possible to see, at least in principle, how to determine whether S is true or false. What most analytic philosophers have in mind when they say that a statement, say, 'Snow is white', is

literally true or used literally, is that this condition is met. A metaphorical statement, or context, or use of words, say, 'Time, a maniac scattering dust','2 is one in which the Fregean link between meaning and truth ap- pears to be broken. Is it true that time is a maniac scattering dust? The

question fails to make sense. And yet it does not seem that Tennyson's line fails to make sense. Is there, then, a kind of meaning, metaphorical meaning, which cannot be understood in terms of the relationship of

propositions to truth-conditions? The best-known dispute (at present) over metaphor in analytic philosophy, that between Black and Davidson, is entirely concerned with this latter question.13

The real difficulty for an analytic philosopher in coming to grips with Derrida's views on metaphor is not just that Derrida is not in the least interested in that problem but that he is not interested, either, in the way of setting up the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal on which it rests. The notion of meaning in general, in Derrida, is always construed in a non-Fregean or, if one prefers, pre-Fregean way; not in terms of truth-conditions, that is, but in terms of the relationship between

sign and significatum (signifiant and signifid) which he takes-though only to deconstruct it-from Saussure; and the same is true of the concept of

metaphor, or rather of the founding contrast between the metaphorical and the literal. Literal discourse, for Derrida, is in effect discourse in which the signifid of each expression E can be singled out without reference to any relationship between E and any other expression of the lan-

guage. Metaphorical discourse, contrariwise, is discourse in which the singling out of the signifid of any E requires reference to relationships between E and other expressions.

This way of drawing the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal is rooted, in ways which Derrida traces out in the third section of 'White Mythology' ('L'Ellipse du soleil: L'Enigme, l'incomprehensible,

12. Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (Oxford, 1982), stanza 50, 1. 7, p. 76.

13. See Max Black, 'Metaphor', Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y, 1962), pp. 25-47, and Donald Davidson, 'What Metaphors Mean', Critical

Inquiry 5 (Autumn 1978): 31-47.




l'imprenable'),'4 in Aristotle's definition of metaphor: "'Metaphor is the transfer to one thing of a name which designates another"' ('MB', p. 275; 'WM', p. 231; trans. mod.).1'5 What Derrida wants us to notice about this definition is its tacit assumption that the designation of the name remains stable relative to the process of metaphorical 'transfer' or 'transport'. In the Rhetoric, in the midst of a discussion of learning, Aristotle observes, according to the Loeb translation by J. H. Freese, that 'words mean some-

thing'.'6 Following Garnier's French translation, Derrida gives this a twist which draws Aristotle into the ambit of post-Renaissance rationalist philosophy: 'What is proper to nouns is to signify something' ('Le propre des noms, c'est de signifier quelque chose') ('MB', p. 282; 'WM', p. 237), thus

committing Aristotle to a version of the theory of meaning which Witt-

genstein, although he derives it from Augustine, also singles out as a deep root: 'Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands'."7 Now, if the meaning of the name is what it designates, then what is 'transported' in metaphor is that designation. The verbal machinery which effects the transport becomes, correlatively, merely a vehicle of transportation, which in no way enters into the essence, as meaning, of what is transported. Thus one reaches what Derrida earlier describes as 'philosophy's unique thesis' ('l'unique these de la philosophie') ('MB', p. 273; 'WM', p. 229) that the sense

transported by a metaphor (Derrida is speaking here of certain founding contrasts of metaphysics which he considers to be essentially metaphorical in character) 'is an essence rigorously independent of that which

transports it' ('une essence rigoureusement independante de ce qui la

transporte') ('MB', p. 273; 'WM', p. 229). Defining metaphor in this way, as the contrast between using a word

to pick out the entity which it 'correctly' or 'properly' designates (the Aristotelian term which seems to Derrida to support this meaning is ku- rion [see 'MB', p. 294; 'WM', p. 247]), and using it 'incorrectly' of some other entity, to bring out some similarity or analogy between that entity and the first, is automatically, Derrida suggests, to demote the language

14. 'The Ellipsis of the Sun: Enigmatic, Incomprehensible, Ungraspable'. This section fastens on Aristotle's discussion of the propriety of certain terms which describe the sun, and argues that the terms in question are irremediably elliptical: the 'sun itself' remains, so far as our descriptions of it are concerned, an enigma, unseizable by the mind. The (some- what ponderously) punning title links 'ellipse' with the rhetorical term 'ellipsis'. Linguisti- cally it is as if the sun were displaced from the status of stationary Centre to that of a planet, which moves 'elliptically'.

15. "'La metaphore (metaphora) est le transport (epiphora) a une chose d'un nom qui en designe une autre"'.

16. Aristotle, The 'Art' of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 3.10.1410b1 1.

17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Ox- ford, 1953), ?1.




of everyday as described by Saussure, in which the possibility of locating the designatum of any term depends on relationships between that term and other terms of the language, to a secondary role by contrast with the idea of a more adequate, more 'philosophical' language in which each term is used to call up its 'proper' designatum, and metaphor becomes

simply another name for the misuse of terms. For (here Derrida's Aris- totle begins to sound suspiciously like Husserl) 'the ideal of every lan-

guage ... [is] ... to bring to knowledge the thing itself' ('l'ideal de tout

langage ... [est] ... de donner a connaitre la chose meme') ('MB', p. 295; 'WM', p. 247). In short-to conclude this stage in the reconstruction of Derrida's argument-in arguing against the possibility of'a discourse that presents itself as nonmetaphorical' ('un discours qui se donne pour non

metaphorique') ('MB', p. 318; 'WM', p. 266), Derrida is not, absurdly, arguing that no proposition of science or philosophy has any clearer truth-conditions than 'time [is] a maniac scattering dust'; he is arguing against the possibility of a 'philosophical' language which would, in the above sense, 'donner a connaitre la chose meme'.

We are asked, then, to focus on the argument, or knot of related arguments, which says (1) that 'ideas' or 'concepts' can be adequate or

inadequate to reality; (2) that there must therefore be some one set of

concepts which is metaphysically correct, faithful, as it were, to the way Being is; (3) that the most basic signs of a metaphysically adequate language would pick out such concepts in such a way that each sign would possess meaning independently of any other sign, since its meaning would simply be the concept for which it stood; (4) that such a language is, at least fragmentarily and in principle, achievable, and is thus a proper and, indeed, inevitable goal of philosophical theorising; (5) that everyday language is an inadequate tool for philosophy because (6) the interdepen- dence of its signs makes it difficult to achieve the univocality, the clarity of reference which makes each basic sign in a logically perspicuous lan-

guage (to use the sort of terminology in which the young Russell, for instance, formulated the same philosophical ideal) 'the proper name of a

unique thing' ('le nom propre d'une chose unique') ('MB', p. 291; 'WM', p. 244); to fulfil, in short, that Aristotelian ideal which no philosophy true to its nature as philosophy 'has ever renounced. This ideal is philosophy' ('cet ideal aristotelicienne, aucune philosophie, en tant que telle, n'y a jamais renonc6. Il est la philosophie') ('MB', p. 295; 'WM', p. 247).

This collection of ideas has indeed, as Derrida claims, functioned as a leading motif of Western metaphysics since Plato, though it is in the development of post-Renaissance philosophy since Descartes that its r6le has been most central and least challenged. To dissipate the impression still prevalent in certain quarters that phenomenology is Derrida's main, if not exclusive, target, one need only call to mind the centrality of such questions to the disputes between Bradley and Russell which originally gave rise to the analytic tradition. It is in part because Bradley holds




the thesis, deeply reminiscent of Derrida's own views, that any judgment 'depends upon conditions which it does not include' that he holds that truth can only finally be given to the mind or, as Derrida would say, 'donner a connaitre', at the level of the Absolute.'8 By contrast Russell, here stand-

ing as the very type of the metaphysician as Derrida conceives him, holds that the meaning of a basic sign is some logically and psychologically simple constituent of experience, directly given to the mind, independently of reference to the meaning of any other sign, in an act of acquaintance.

The belief in meaning as a relationship of designation holding between an arbitrary sign and some aspect or constituent of reality given with absolute simplicity and perspicuity to the mind has, of course, been

widely criticised in the present century, by Wittgenstein, Saussure, and

Merleau-Ponty among others. But Derrida's critique, while dependent to some extent and in differing degrees on the latter two, remains unique to him in its main outlines. One way of understanding it, at least in the form it takes in 'White Mythology', might be to see it as articulating an attack on 'the classical opposition of concept and metaphor' ('l'opposition classique ... de la metaphore et du concept') ('MB', p. 314; 'WM', p. 263). According to the terms of that opposition, a name used to designate a concept brings some aspect of reality, some part of the truth of things, before the mind; whereas a name used metaphorically merely establishes some link, based on some perceived similarity or analogy, between two names. The link established by metaphor, in other words, is a linkage between linguistic entities-a linkage forged entirely within the sphere of language. The name-concept link, on the other hand, is not ultimately a linguistic relationship at all. It is a link between Mind and World, which

language merely represents or expresses. Metaphorical discourse may have some value nevertheless but only if it serves to put us on the track of a new concept (the final section of the essay offers a critique of this familiar story in Nietzsche and Gaston Bachelard; Max Black would fur- nish an equally good target).19 Metaphor is thus admissible in philosophy, but only to the extent that it promises a return, with augmented resources, to the literality of the concept:

Metaphor ... is determined by philosophy as a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights set on, and within the horizon of, the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning. ['WM', p. 270]20

18. Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 1990), p. 65.

19. See Black, Models and Metaphors. 20. 'La metaphore est ... determinde par la philosophie comme perte provisoire du

sens, &conomie sans dommage irreparable de proprietY, detour certes inevitable mais his- toire en vue et dans l'horizon de la reappropriation circulaire du sens propre' ('MB', p. 323).




We are thus faced with an instance of the pattern of thought which characteristically invites Derridean deconstruction: a pair of concepts, in this case metaphor and concept, are opposed in a way which implicitly privileges one over the other by making the one appear central and the other marginal (hence The Margins of Philosophy). The deconstruction of such a conceptual ordering, as Derrida understands the term, is not sim-

ply a matter of inverting the relationship of centre and margin. It is a matter of showing, rather, that the distinction between centre and margin in question can only be made, can only be rendered intelligible, via a covert dependence on its marginalised component. In the case of the con-

cept/metaphor contrast, Derrida's aim is to show that the entire contrast is dependent on metaphor, in the second of the two senses distinguished earlier. For the contrast to be intelligible in terms of the vision of the relations between proper and metaphorical discourse which it incorpo- rates, the terms concept and metaphor would themselves have to be terms in a proper language-a language, that is, whose terms acquire meaning independently of any relationship with one another, by standing in one- to-one correlation with constituents of extralinguistic reality. Derrida's ar-

gument is, in effect, that they are not, and could not be, terms drawn from such a language. This conclusion depends in part, of course, on the wider application of deconstruction involved in the more general claim that the very notion of such a language is flawed; it can only be made to carry conviction by deemphasising and marginalising certain features, elsewhere subsumed under the Derridean term differance, which belong to language per se. But that wider claim is not the immediate centre of interest in 'White Mythology'. Derrida's central arguments in that essay might be summarised as follows:

1. The concept of metaphor is not a concept alien to metaphysics. It is a metaphysical concept.

A statement of this point opens the second section of the essay, 'Plus de

Metaphore':21 'Metaphor remains, in all its essential characteristics, a clas- sic philosopheme, a metaphysical concept' ('la metaphore reste, par tous ses traits essentiels, un philosopheme classique, un concept metaphys- ique' ['MB', p. 261; 'WM', p. 218]).

2. As such, like other metaphysical concepts, it emerges from a network of such concepts: a system of terms whose meanings, in their relationships to one another, are mutually explicating.

Thus the aim of Derrida's discussion of Aristotle, beginning in section 3 of the essay, is to show how the distinction between proper and elliptical

21. Another bit of Derridean verbal humour, this can be read with equal propriety as 'No more metaphor' or as 'More metaphor'.




discourse, central as that is to the claim of philosophy to constitute a discourse of the former kind, emerges from a network of distinctions- which 'seems to belong to the great immobile chain of Aristotelian ontol-

ogy, with its theory of the analogy of Being, its logic, its epistemology, and more precisely its poetics and its rhetorics' ('WM', p. 236).22

3. Hence any attempt to set up the contrast between the metaphorical and the literal (or proper) in a language which transcends that distinction, which distinguishes,from a standpoint outside language, between the direct relationship between a name and its bearer and the indirect relationship between name and name involved in metaphor and periphrasis, will fail because the terms in which it operates will prove to be themselves explicable only, at some point, by dint of metaphor and periphrasis.

This is, in effect, the move in the argument which dominates Derrida's discussion, in part 2 of the essay, of the failings of specific attempts to offer putatively nonmetaphorical classifications of Plato's metaphors. Later on, in 'The Ellipsis of the Sun', the same theme is taken up again in his discussion of Aristotle's derivation, in Poetics 1457b25-30, of a name for the otherwise nameless act of the sun in 'cast[ing] forth its flame' from the verb 'to sow' [speirein] ('MB', p. 289; 'WM', p. 242). Here Derrida's point is that since the analogy between sunshine and sowing is not 'seen' [vu], not imposed on us irresistibly by nature, then if it strikes us as compelling it can do so only because it emerges from 'a long and hardly visible chain' ('une chaine longue et peu visible') ('MB', p. 290; 'WM', p. 243) of analo- gies whose first term it would be difficult for anyone, let alone Aristotle, to exhibit. Aristotle is, in other words, confronting the possibility, dis- counted and marginalised according to Derrida by his entire discussion of the name, that naming on the one hand, and periphrasis and analogy on the other, may in the end prove impossible to disentangle. Both these arguments recur to a central claim: that the metaphysician, to say what he wants to say, needs to view matters from a standpoint outside language, a standpoint in principle inaccessible to him. As Derrida puts it, 'it is impossible to dominate philosophical metaphorics as such, from the exte- rior, by using a concept of metaphor which remains a philosophical product' ('WM', p. 228).23 It will be evident at this point that Derrida's account

22.

Tout ce qui, dans la theorie de la metaphore, s'ordonne a ce systeme de distinctions, ou du moins a son principe, semble appartenir a la grande chaine immobile de l'on- tologie aristotelicienne, avec sa theorie de l'analogie de l'tre, sa logique, son 6pist6m- ologie, plus pr6cisement avec l'organisation fondamentale de sa po6tique et de sa rh6torique. ['MB', p. 281]

23. 'Il est impossible de dominer la metaphorique philosophique, comme telle, de l'ex- tirieur, en se servant d'un concept de metaphore qui reste un produit philosophique' ('MB', p. 272).




of the dependence of metaphysics on metaphor cuts deeper than Anatole France's. The argument of 'Ariste et Polyphile' falls back on the familiar

positivist contention that there is a basic, or primitive, use of words in which they derive their meaning, independently of one another, from association with simple, concrete aspects of experience; but it is precisely the possibility of any such primitive connection between language and the world arising in abstraction from the 'chain' of signs that Derrida is

contesting.

4. Hence there is no such thing as 'an essence'-the meaning of a term, that is-'rigorously independent of that which transports it'. What an expression E signifies (le signifid) is internal to the language to which E belongs.

And hence,

5. The 'detour' of metaphor or periphrasis, that argosy which Western metaphysics traditionally pictures as returning freighted with new literal meaning, ceases to be conceivable as one following a closed curve. Ellipsis, as the term occurs in the title of the third section of the essay is, in rhetoric, among other things, the omission of one or more of the words necessary to express the full sense of a sentence. But-and this is Derrida's point-if the full sense of a sentence must be given not by relating its terms one by one to essences given externally to language, but by relating them to other terms within the 'chain' of language, then the notion of a fully expressed, non-elliptical sense evaporates into vacuity; for since the chain of such explications is potentially endless, the accretion of supplemen- tary (another favourite term of Derrida's) layers of meaning is potentially endless also.

It follows, to conclude, that all discourse, including metaphysical discourse, is enmeshed in the web of contingency, temporality, and local con- vention from which Polyphile's metaphysical knife-grinders wish to free their abraded coins in the interests of bestowing upon them infinite value and unlimited currency. Metaphysical discourse is derivative from (relive de) metaphor, not what is left over when-impossibly-language has been purged of all trace of metaphor, periphrasis, and ellipsis.

3. Politics and Humanism

One aim of Western metaphysics, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, or Sartre, has been to characterise the essence or nature corresponding to the concept of man. It is this enterprise which




Derrida has in mind when he speaks of humanism and invokes the end of man as he does in another of the essays in Margins of Philosophy.24 It is, of course, from a Derridean point of view, an enterprise dependent on the one hand upon the power of language to create new meaning by shifting the relationships between signs, to produce the remotely related but utterly alien accounts of the human essence respectively characteristic of, say, Aristotle and Heidegger, and on the other hand upon the denial and the marginalisation of that power in the interests of maintaining the plausibility of the claim that there is such an essence to be sought: original, unitary, and capable of being given with finality to thought. This double movement of dependence and marginalisation is, for Derrida, the core of the drive of European culture over the centuries to present itself as definitive of the nature of man per se. What this drive excludes is difference, both in the cultural sense and in Derrida's special sense of

diffirance, the power of signs to accrete supplemental meanings which both differ from those already accreted and indefinitely defer the establish- ment of a definitive unitary meaning. Politically, the marginalised power of diffirance is represented by the assemblage of non-Western cultures, both inside and outside the West, which 'bears down, with a mute, grow- ing and menacing pressure, on the enclosure of Western collocution'.25 The play of economic metaphor which opens 'White Mythology' relates to this theme. Polyphile's defaced metaphysical coins are the subject of usure in both its senses-usage (abrasion) and usury-since they open the possibility that language itself, in its interminable play of metaphor and ellipsis, can be made to yield a profit to 'Metaphysics--the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West' ('la meta-

physique--mythologie blanche qui rassemble et reflechit la culture de l'Occident') ('MB', p. 254; 'WM', p. 213). And what is inscribed on the

exergue of a coin or medallion-the date, the engraver's name-is precisely what carries the reference to contingency, historicity, the Other, which must be effaced if the economic gain promised by that usure is to be realised. It is tempting, of course, to relate this theme, of the simulta- neous exploitation and marginalisation of the Other, the non-Western, to Derrida's early experience, as the child of an indigenous Algerian Jewish family, of political and personal exclusion under the racial laws of Vichy, which he movingly explores in the autobiographical text which occupies the foot of the pages (that is, the margins) of his and Geoffrey Bennington's Jacques Derrida.26

24. See Derrida, 'Les Fins de l'homme', Marges de philosophie, pp. 129-64; trans. under the title 'The Ends of Man', Margins of Philosophy, pp. 109-36.

25. 'Cette diff6rance ... dont je viens de dire qu'elle pese, d'une pression sourde, croissante et menagante, sur l'enclos de la collocution occidentale' (ibid., p. 133; p. 113).

26. See Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Bennington (Chi- cago, 1993).




4. Some Standard Objections

The most common prima facie objection urged against deconstruction, by philosophers and unsympathetic literary critics alike, is that it entails absurd or unbelievable consequences. Baldly and crudely stated, the most common of these claim (1) that Derrida's arguments abolish the distinction between language and extralinguistic reality, by dissolving the latter into the former; (2) that Derrida's thesis that the attempt to establish the complete meaning of an expression is subject in principle to indefinite deferral entails that no expression has any meaning at all (linguistic nihilism); (3) that in dispensing with the notion that any expression has a definite meaning and with the possibility of distinguishing between language and the world, Derrida has removed the possibility of

any realistic (that is, nonrelativistic, nonpragmatic) conception of truth; and finally (4) that by replacing rational criticism of metaphysics with what seems to be a purely rhetorical line of criticism, Derrida has be-

trayed the Enlightenment commitment to reason and blurred the meth-

odological distinction between philosophy on the one hand and literature and literary criticism on the other.

It goes without saying, of course, that not everyone would regard (1)-(4) as constituting 'objections'. Indeed, one of the most characteristic and extraordinary features of the voluminous and often bad-tempered discussion of Derrida's work which has taken place over the past thirty years has been the tendency of supporters to brandish as epoch-making discoveries exactly the same supposed consequences which detractors brandish as absurdities.

As a search of Derrida's writings will readily reveal (though one has to be rather careful here to distinguish between Derrida's writings and summaries or expositions of his work offered by epigones), Derrida has

frequently denied that his views entail any of the above consequences. Equally, of course, as Bennington remarks after identifying a string of such citations, 'it is not enough to invoke these passages, which might al-

ways be simple denials rather than refutations'.27 So far as (1) and (2) are concerned, however, as I have argued at

greater length elsewhere,28 no refutation is required, since they are both non sequiturs. As I think is plain from the argument of 'White Mythology' as we have summarised it, Derrida is not arguing against the commonplace conviction that there exist extralinguistic entities per se, but against the philosophical thesis that there exist meanings (signifies) conceived as extralinguistic entities. If there were such entities, given to the Husserlian pure

27. Bennington and Derrida,Jacques Derrida, p. 102. 28. See Bernard Harrison, 'Deconstructing Derrida', Comparative Criticism, no. 7

(1985): 3-24; rpt. in Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 123-43.




Present of consciousness, say, or to Russellian acquaintance, then all the resources of meaning contained in the corresponding concept could be

exhaustively made present to the mind contemplating such an entity (think, for instance, of the Cartesian 'simple natures' which underpin the

epistemology of Cartesian 'clear and distinct perception'). Derrida's insis- tence on difference and deferral as essential to the relationship between

sign and significatum certainly yields as a consequence the denial of all versions of the philosophical thesis that the full semantic content of a

concept can be given, and given exhaustively, to some special, nonlinguis- tic or extralinguistic, act of consciousness. And it yields the further conse-

quence that one can never be quite sure that one has extracted all the

meaning implicit in a given use of words in a given context (this is no doubt the consequence which some of Derrida's commentators have in mind when they ascribe a Talmudic character to Derrida's work). What it does not yield as a consequence, however, is the thesis, often loosely attrib- uted to him, that we cannot distinguish in a given context of use between what an expression might mean in that context and what it cannot mean in that context; and so that we cannot ascribe any definite meaning to

any expression in any context whatsoever. That would indeed amount to semantic nihilism. Creative rephrasing will no doubt serve to extract such a thesis from sentences or short phrases culled from Derrida's work and exhibited, shorn of their context, as incriminating evidence. But I do not believe that any such thesis can be shown to follow from any careful analysis of Derrida's arguments such as we have just attempted, and certainly not from the arguments exhibited here. Furthermore, such a thesis would be inconsistent, as I have argued elsewhere,29 with something which certainly is a central claim of Derrida's philosophy, namely, the thesis that we do not need access to the conscious states or intentions of a writer or

speaker in order to be able to understand what he or she has written or said.

5. Derrida and American Neopragmatism

To know the meaning of an expression is, prima facie, to know how it is to be used in discourse. A very large body of philosophical and linguistic writing has taken, and takes, that obvious thought to imply that knowledge of meanings is knowledge of rules. And one traditional function of the belief in real, in the sense of extralinguistic, meanings or concepts, which Derrida attacks in 'White Mythology', has been to explain what validates the rules in question. They are validated, so that story goes, because they are grounded, extralinguistically, in the nature of things. That is why discourse can truly represent the nature of things. Its

29. See ibid.




tracking of reality is kept on course by the fact that the concepts in terms of which it proceeds are not mere linguistic constructs, but features, or as the early Russell would have said, 'constituents', of reality itself. If we discard meanings, therefore, it is said, we discard truth itself, or at least any nonrelativistic or nonpragmatic conception of truth. Thus we arrive at the various disputes concerning realism, antirealism, and relativism which have in recent years animated the analytic tradition in philosophy.

Contrary to what is commonly thought, there seems no reason to

suppose that Derrida consciously or inadvertently has taken sides in these debates. There is nothing to stop him, it would seem, from taking his stand on the purely negative claim that the traditional account of meanings which turns them into a class of metaphysical entities is self- deconstructing. Similarly when asked what, in that case, gives us a grip on the notion of true assertion, there is nothing to stop him replying in

Wittgensteinian or Austinian fashion that there is no One Metaphysical Thing which gives us a grip on the notion of truth in general, but an immense multiplicity of unmetaphysical things which give us a grip on it in the multifarious concrete circumstances of everyday life; or, to put the

point in more Derridean terms, that the concept of truth is formed within

language like any other concept, and like any other it disseminates end-

lessly within it in response to the forces of difference and deferral. I think these are in fact Derrida's fallback positions, though this is

hardly the place to assemble textual support for that claim. And I think there is nothing evasive about them either. Many readers, particularly English-speaking ones, have found them so, however. And some have found it difficult to believe that Derrida's arguments do not necessarily commit him to the radically sceptical and relativistic position on rules and meaning taken by Quine and by such writers of broadly Quinean inspiration as Davidson, Rorty, or Kripke. The founding move of the latter family of views is well stated by Samuel C. Wheeler III in one of a

pair of papers which have been widely taken as demonstrating close links between Derrida's thought and Donald Davidson's.

Without essentialism about meanings and semantic rules, there are only the sentences accepted in a given body of discourse. All sentences accepted in the body of discourse are parts of a 'theory', which parts differ in various ways in degree, but not in kind. 'Objects', then, exist as posits of a theory. What takes the place of objective necessities and essences is the notion of existing according to a theory, i.e., onto- logical commitment.30

What, according to Wheeler, commits Derrida also to holding the choice between 'essentialism about meanings and rules' and Davidsonian

30. Samuel C. Wheeler III, 'The Extension of Deconstruction', The Monist 69 (Jan. 1986): 7.




scepticism and pragmatism to be an unavoidable one is Derrida's argument that, in the absence of meanings fully and perfectly given to the Present of consciousness, the meaning of a sign depends on traces linking it to other signs, which invoke others, and so on indefinitely. Wheeler takes this as entailing, via the thought that 'this Saussurian idea that con-

ceptual schemes are systems of differences is like Quine's Web of Belief',' Quine's celebrated thesis of the Indeterminacy of Translation:

The picture required by the denial of presence ... is that there are only the interpreter's dispositions as to what to say when (his theory) and our dispositions as to what to say when. A translation or interpretation is just a mapping based on these items. A question of what an utterance in one language really means in another language is like the question which football position is the shortstop.32

This is in itself a contestable assimilation. It is contestable because it ignores the difference, noted earlier, between the Fregean analysis of

meaning in terms of truth-conditions shared by virtually all parties to the disputes in analytic philosophy invoked by Wheeler, and Derrida's

essentially Saussurian conception of meaning as involving a relationship between a sign (signifiant) and a conceptual content (signifie). To argue, as Derrida does, that Western metaphysics cannot claim to have definitively established the content of a given signifid, say the concept 'man', because of the impossibility of excluding disseminative drift in the content of that or any other concept, because the possibility of such drift is intrinsic to the nature of any language in which metaphysics can be (not thought or spoken, but) written, is, no doubt, to commit oneself to the denial of 'essentialism about meanings and rules'. But it is difficult to see why it should commit one to Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis, unless the choice between essentialism about meanings and Quinean indeterminacy of translation is taken to exhaust the available theoretical options, which is

surely, and despite the immense recent popularity of Quine's way of look-

ing at things, itself contestable. It seems clear, in any event, that the implications of Derrida's posi-

tion conflict with those of Davidson's in at least one important respect. Irene Harvey has noted the centrality of Derrida's concern with the role of examples in metaphysics:

From his work on Hegel, notably in Glas, Derrida has sought to relocate the 'remainders' of the Aufhebung. Beginning with the place of the Jews, in relation to the family, the State, Christianity and phi-

31. Wheeler, 'Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson', Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePorte (New York, 1986), p. 480.

32. Ibid., p. 487.




losophy, Derrida traces the ways in which Hegel excludes the Jews only in order to 'include' them 'at a higher level'; namely, not as Jews, but as proto-Christians, as on-the-way to being what they are not.... What is at stake for [Derrida], though, is to articulate this simultane- ous inclusion and exclusion of the non-example-in every sense of the term-within the Hegelian system. The Jews and their non-place are but one example of this way of being in relation to the Aufhebung. As excluded they can be included; yet as radically other, they must be excluded as such.33

What this serves to emphasise once again is the centrality to Derrida's

writing of the aim of bringing to light the dependence of the claim of Western metaphysics to speak for man in general upon an excluded and

marginalised Other whose possibility, as it were, is inherent in the nature of the sign/signifier relationship as founded in diffirance. For that to be an intelligible stance, something akin to the principle of manifestation

proposed in another context by Michael Dummett must operate.34 In order for the Other to be grasped as something which 'must be excluded as such' it must be possible for Otherness to manifest itself in writing through the operation of diffirance. If it can, then at least one dream of the Enlightenment is dead: there can be no 'universal history of human-

ity'. In a very striking passage, however, Rorty aligns the Quinean, neo-

pragmatist tradition with precisely that project:

So the pragmatist answer to the question Lyotard raises in his "Universal history and cultural differences"--"Can we continue to organize the events which crowd in upon us from the human and nonhuman worlds with the help of the Idea of a universal history of humanity?"-is that we can and should.... We Deweyans have a story to tell about the progress of our species, a story whose later episodes emphasize how things have been getting better in the West during the last few centuries, and which concludes with some sugges- tions about how they might become better still in the next few. But when asked about cultural differences, about what our story has to do with the Chinese or the Cashinahua, we can only reply that, for all we know, intercourse with these people may help modify our Western ideas about what institutions can best embody the spirit of Western social democracy.... This sort of ethnocentrism is, we prag- matists think, inevitable and unobjectionable.... We cannot leap outside our Western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try. All we should try to do is to get inside the inhabitants of that culture long enough to get some idea how we look to them, and whether they have any ideas we can use.35

33. Irene E. Harvey, 'Derrida and the Issues of Exemplarity', in Derrida, p. 195. 34. See Michael Dummett, The Seas of Language (Oxford, 1993), pp. xii-xiii. 35. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 212-13.




It would be difficult to invent a passage more remote, in its confident and casual cultural triumphalism, from the spirit of Derrida's work. But the attitude it embodies is not merely yoked to, but a necessary conse-

quence of, Quine's claim that, as Wheeler puts it, 'there are only the sentences accepted in a given body of discourse'. That claim, suitably extended and radicalised, yields Davidson's account of 'Radical Interpre- tation', which in turn yields the consequence, which Davidson explores in 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', that there is 'no intelligible basis on which it can be said that schemes are different'.36 Whereas for Derrida language commits us to a perpetual drift of the familiar into

diffirance, into Otherness, for Davidson the pragmatic nature of interpretation makes it in principle impossible for any radical Otherness to manifest itself in 'language'--which thus becomes definitively and timelessly 'our' language. From this it is a very short step to Rorty's reintroduction, by the back door of pragmatism, as it were, and under the new and to some ears no doubt reassuring label of Western social democracy, precisely those claims of Western metaphysics which Derrida has spent his life endeavouring to combat, of access to 'universal history' and of the

inevitability of a relationship to others which, while it may investigate and use them, always stops short of encountering them as persons disposing of an alien but coequal understanding of what it is to be human.

6. Derrida and Habermas on Literature and Philosophy

The fourth of the objections we distinguished earlier, that Derrida

betrays the cause of reason by blurring the distinction between literary and scientific discourse, is forcefully articulated by Jiirgen Habermas. Not unlike Rorty, and no doubt correctly, Habermas sees Derrida as ad-

dressing the problem which has given rise to the entire 'Discourse of Mo-

dernity': that of how and whether the norms of occidental reason can be validated. Like Rorty also, he wishes to retain some grip on the notion of universal history, though he would agree with Rorty neither that it can be

grounded in pragmatism, whether of Dewey's, of Quine's, or of Davidson's variety, nor that Derrida's thought could be pressed into the service of

any such project. For Habermas, Derrida is straightforwardly an enemy of reason; he is someone who wants to 'expand the sovereignty of rhetoric over the realm of the logical'."1 Derrida's error, according to Habermas, is what Rorty and Wheeler see as his chief virtue: that of seeing no third

36. Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', Inquiries into Truth and Inter-

pretation (Oxford, 1984), p. 198. 37. Jilrgen Habermas, 'Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philoso-

phy and Literature', appendix to 'Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism', The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 188; hereafter abbreviated 'E'.




alternative to, on the one hand, a logocentrism which links the defence of rational norms to a metaphysics of Presence, and on the other a relativism which makes canons of correctness and rational criticism internal to

linguistic practices and, ultimately, relative to the contingencies of shared assumption, history, and practical interests which happen to characterise

specific communities. Habermas suggests a third option amounting, in effect, to a Transcendental Deduction of the norms of reason as precondi- tions of the possibility of communication:

Language games only work because they presuppose idealizations that transcend any particular language game; as a necessary condition of possibly reaching understanding, these idealizations give rise to the perspective of an agreement that is open to criticism on the basis of validity claims .... It is in relation to this need for standing the test within ordinary practice that one may distinguish, with Austin and Searle, between 'usual' and 'parasitic' uses of language. ['E', p. 199]

By appealing to the differing 'idealizations' and associated criteria of

validity which govern different types of linguistic enterprise, Habermas

proceeds to erect a distinction between 'the language of philosophy and science', so specialized 'for cognitive purposes that they are cleansed of

everything metaphorical and merely rhetorical, and kept free of literary admixtures', and literary language, conceived as concerned solely with the 'world-generating' potential of language itself ('E', p. 190). What the

point of literary activity conceived in those terms might be does not, it seems, greatly concern Habermas; and indeed he speaks of it in terms- as '"not carrying on the world's business"', as empowering 'illocutionary acts' for 'the playful creation of new worlds[,] or, rather, for the pure demon- stration of the world-disclosing force of innovative linguistic expressions'-which suggest that it may not have any very serious point at all ('E', p. 201). The existence of literature is plainly something of a puzzle for Habermas, as it generally is and has generally been for the theoreti- cians in our midst. But he is clear, nevertheless, that it can have no role in constituting cultural or personal identity, or in forming the outlook and terms of association of societies, for all such tasks involve the cognitive functions which remain the exclusive province of 'science and philosophy'.

Linguistically mediated processes such as the acquisition of knowledge, the transmission of culture, the formation of personal identity, and socialization and social integration involve mastering problems posed by the world.... For Derrida, linguistically mediated processes within the world are embedded in a world-constituting context that prejudices everything: they are fatalistically delivered up to the unmanageable happening of text production. ['E', p. 205]




A defence of Derrida against this line of attack might begin by noting how close Habermas comes to a petitio principii. If Derrida is right one would expect the boundaries between reason and rhetoric to begin to flow and merge as the obscure mutual dependencies built into the elabo- ration of these only apparently independent and radically opposed cate-

gories come to light. Habermas takes it for granted that, since the divorce between reason and rhetoric transcends the flux of language, is above and beyond the play of diffirance, this cannot happen. But in itself this is

just to affirm what Derrida denies, that such categories, characteristic of 'Western' ways of thinking at least since the Enlightenment, are not

merely one more local product of historical contingency, but are timeless deliverances of an eternal and immutable reason. It is possible, of course, that even such a grand and positive thesis as that might hinge on a modest and negative defence. The line between reason and rhetoric might traverse distinctions so very commonplace and evident as to be beyond the power of argument, however subtle and ingenious, to displace. But once again it is unclear what those distinctions would be. The most obvious commonsense way of distinguishing the statements of 'science and

philosophy' from those of literature turns on the manifest fictionality of the latter. But nothing in Derrida's position, so far as I can see, requires him to deny the evident distinction between a 'literary' statement, such as 'Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without hav-

ing done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning', and a factual one like 'The earth is roughly 93,000,000 miles from the sun' arising from the fact that the latter makes a claim to truth and is in fact true. Derrida is not saying, at least in any such trivial and absurd sense as that, that science is 'embedded in' literature. Nor, as we noted earlier, is Derrida committed to the equally absurd claim that it is impossible to purge scientific discourse, at least within limits and in reasonably hard departments of natural science, of metaphor in the everyday sense of claims whose truth- conditions are either opaque or immaterial to their function in discourse.

But if a modest and negative defence of Habermas's categories fails he has no option but to offer a grander and more positive one, and the transcendental argument we noted earlier must bear the full weight of the argument. Can it do so? Derrida's counterclaim, in effect, is that the terms science and literature, like any others, are not given meaning by being placed, one by one, as it were, in association with conceptual contents given in absolute fullness and finality to consciousness, but are intelligible only via their relationships to one another in a language which is itself a contingent, historical entity, the language of some people, or tribe, or culture, and as such impotent to resist the forces which exfoliate new meanings and shades of meaning from old ones in a process with neither a determinate point of origin nor a determinate end.

The highest card Habermas has now to play is the claim that a very specific partitioning of the functions of 'literature' on the one hand and




'science and philosophy' on the other is inescapable because the 'idealisations', the criteria for determining the success or failure of validity claims, which define those functions, are 'a necessary condition of [the possibility of] reaching understanding'. The idealisations in question pre- sumably originate outside language, since they are 'presupposed' by 'lan-

guage games', and since if Habermas's argument is to work, they must be immune to the 'unmanageable happening of text production' which dominates the interior of language.

One must surely take truth to be an obvious and central instance of such an idealisation. But now one can summon Wittgenstein to the aid of Derrida. For a common use of terms to exist at all, speakers must have common access to criteria which differentiate between a correct application of a term and an incorrect or vacuous use of it. And hence such criteria, which in essence make clear what the distinction between a truth and falsity for one or another family of assertions amounts to in practice, must be internal to language; they cannot be idealisations applied 'from outside' to a language conceived as somehow already functioning, since until their nature and mode of operation has been settled there can exist no functioning language.38

Truth, in short, is a notion internal to language per se, not an idealisation associated with certain sorts of projects pursued by means of lan-

guages which might conceivably exist qua languages, among speakers admittedly bereft of the possibility of 'reaching understanding', without it. And hence Habermas's historically and culturally highly specific, post- Renaissance account of the relative functions of science-cum-philosophy and literature cannot be defended, as timelessly transcending 'any particular language game', on the grounds that the apportionment of functions it enshrines issues from the nature of idealisations necessarily presupposed by the possibility of modes of understanding not already provided for by language considered as the totality of 'particular language games'.

And indeed there seems something arbitrary, though very familiar, about the division of labour between science/philosophy and literature which Habermas proposes. Why should literature, for instance, be de- barred from influencing 'the formation of personal identity'? Personal identity is surely very much a matter of ingrained dispositions to respond in specific ways to specific types of situation. Such dispositions to respond are not infrequently associated with equally habitual tendencies to con- strue the types of situation in question in highly schematic, not to say stereotypic ways. A novel or a play may, however, develop the implications of situations in ways which, while they are persuasively true to the reader's experience of life, are gravely destabilising to the modes of schematic

38. For a more extended discussion of this aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, see Har- rison, 'Truth, Yardsticks, and Language-Games', Philosophical Investigations 19 (Apr. 1996): 105-30.




construal habitual to him and so gravely disturbing to the stability of his habitual modes of response to such situations. By such means, one would have thought, literature inevitably influences 'the formation of personal identity'. And that presumption corresponds to the personal experience of most of us, which reserves, among the many influences which have made us what we are, an important place for the novels, the poems, the

plays which have been for each of us the source of determining experi- ences.

Oddly enough, it seems to me, one can get closest to the heart of what rationally divides Derrida from Habermas, and for that matter most of Derrida's critics, by focusing here on the rhetoric of Habermas's argument. Take, for instance, the phrase 'the unmanageable happening of text production'. Habermas uses it to characterise what is going on in literature, in contrast to the 'linguistically mediated processes' which constitute the life of science and philosophy. The contrast which the words emotionally convey (but is emotionally the right word? can one distinguish at all sharply between the emotional, the rhetorical, tone and the sense of what Habermas is saying here?) is between, on the one hand, the use of language to carry out 'processes' which transcend language, and on the other a kind of inebriate immersion in language which surrenders all conscious control by the self over its own nature to the reeling exigencies of an uncontrollably disseminating torrent of words.

This theme, of literature and art in general as involving surrender

by the self of itself, by way of the abandonment to Dionysiac forces of

Apollonian reason and self-control is, as Henry Staten reminds us, an ex-

ceedingly ancient one. As Staten interestingly suggests, it is the fear of the loss of self-identity which motivates Plato's characterisation of the 'per- formance of the rhapsode Ion as mechanical or automatic repetition': 'The fully conscious, rational control of truth-intending utterance is the only safeguard against the fragmentation of the self that goes out into its expressions'.9

But, now, how deep can 'rational control' go? The thought that unites Habermas (and beyond Habermas, of course, the entire rationalist wing of the Enlightenment) with Plato by way of that anguished word 'unmanageable' is that 'the formation of personal identity' should ideally proceed under the control of processes which, however innovative, always retain, at some deep level, the character of rational choice. If the self changes, in other words, it must do so because, at some deeper level, it decides for good reason to change and thus at that level does not change but remains inviolably itself. From the point of view of this model the alternative seems to be to admit that the self has no unity and so no being, but fractures endlessly and irrationally along the fissures and mises en abime of the Derridean text. It seems to me that the horror some readers tend to

39. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln, Nebr., 1984), p. 146.




feel in reading Derrida, which is in the end the same horror that the same readers feel in reading Nietzsche, stems from the fact that Derrida, like Nietzsche, invokes the threat of a self lacking in the inviolable nucleus of rational deliberation which according to the rationalist model constitutes the unity of the self.

And, yet, when the rationalist theory of the self is stated as baldly as that, is it remotely tenable? Suppose that, looking back, I see that I have

changed, have become a rather different person, and that that change can be traced back to the moment when I came to appreciate the rational force of a certain argument? Can it always be said that I deliberately chose, on the basis of some further, underlying set of arguments, to find the

argument in question convincing? Surely not-or, rather, in most circumstances would not such a supposition itself be quite arbitrary? Grounds for finding an argument convincing must end somewhere. Asked what we find so convincing about the grounds offered for a given conclusion we end by merely and lamely restating those grounds. For they, and no others, are the reasons why that argument carries weight with us. Alas for the integrity of my self, it seems, I have simply reeled drunkenly away from myself, in a strangely Apollonian species of Dionysiac frenzy, in the wake of the unmanageable happening of argument-production! In this context, of course, that is evidently a crazy way of putting things. But is it any less crazy in the context of a change in one's way of looking at things brought about by literature? When one speaks of such changes as brought about by rhetoric, of course, the suggestion, given the modern under-

standing of the term rhetoric, is that they have been achieved by irrational or subrational means, by persuasion or brainwashing. But can that be

seriously maintained, given the richness of the relationships between most serious literary fiction and reality? When William Blake, say, in 'London', relates

How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh, Runs in blood down Palace walls40

are we to say that he is transporting us into a dreamworld made out of words (which I take it is what Habermas's talk of 'the world-disclosing force of innovative linguistic expressions' comes down to in plain lan-

guage)? Or is he, rather, presenting us with an appallingly brutal and forcible bringing together of things which we know well enough to be connected in the real world, but which we normally manage to keep far

enough apart in our everyday thinking and feeling for those connections

40. William Blake, 'London', Songs of Experience (1794), The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), 11. 9-12, p. 27.




to be greatly blurred and softened if they remain noticeable at all? I find it difficult to deny that when one is forced, as the above verse forces one, to recall and reflect upon those connections, the experience constitutes what one can hardly avoid calling an argument for Blake's kind of political radicalism. Reason and rhetoric, argument and heightened sensibility, in other words, those categories which Habermas is at such pains to keep apart, begin to blur into one another in such poetry, to disclose hidden collusions and dependencies of exactly the sort that reading Derrida would lead one to expect. That sort of blurring, indeed, is characteristic (I would want to say) of great literature.

If someone were to be converted to radicalism (to develop a some- what different sort of self) as a result of reading Blake, then, clearly, that self would not have been caused to come into being by any act or choice, whether rational or acte gratuit, of the earlier, un-Blake-influenced self which preceded it. From the point of view of that earlier self, indeed, the opinions of the new self may be anathema. Nor, perhaps, from a knowledge of the old self could one have predicted the possibility of the new self's emerging. From the point of view of the 'old' self, in other words, the change manifests just those types of aporia and mise en abime that rationalist readers of Derrida find shocking. And that is not surprising, since what we are dealing with here is an event of personal growth, whose rationality or lack of it is a matter not of some underlying control exerted by the 'old' self, but of the ability of the 'new' self to reconstruct the process of change in terms of its own changed conception of what counts as rationality: a conception, in other words, which may be one of the fruits of the very process of change it renders intelligible. It seems to me, now, for reasons that I have sketched here, but enlarged upon at greater length elsewhere,41 that such reconstruction is no harder in the case of changes of personal outlook brought about by literature than in the case of ones brought about by scientific or philosophical argument. To that extent, it seems to me, the categories of reason and rhetoric which Ha- bermas accuses Derrida of confounding are, if not bogus ones, at least ones exhibiting deeply Derridean kinds of underlying complicity.

This way of defending Derrida from Habermas might seem to make his thought appear less radical, less 'anarchic' than it has often been made to appear in the debates between deconstructionist and antidecon- structionist literary critics which have to a great extent monopolised the discussion of his work so far. But I think the appearance of a last-ditch struggle between reason and anarchy which characterised those debates stems partly from the character of the critical theories and methodolo- gies-mainly those of American New Criticism-which deconstruc- tionists opposed. New Criticism held, subject to a range of caveats which we need not go into here, that a literary work has a meaning which it is

41. See Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions.




the business of the critic to elucidate, but that that meaning is not wholly given by any critical paraphrase but only, finally and fully, through the

experience of reading the words of the text, with a full and sensitive un-

derstanding. Deconstructionist critics, following Derrida, argued in effect that the notion of the full meaning of the text to be derived from an

ideally informed and sophisticated experience of reading was (even when construed as a plural meaning embracing opposing possibilities of inter-

pretation) a chimera: that in the nature of a text as a tissue of words in

ungovernable relationships of diffirance with one another and with other texts, meaning could not be prevented from disseminating without limit. Antideconstructionists replied, naturally, that this was equivalent to saying that no text has any, or any real, meaning at all. But is the choice between these options really as compelling, and the options themselves as exhaustive, as polemical debate can make them seem? Why should we credit a literary text with a meaning over and above the meanings of its words and sentences? Why not credit it instead with the power both to evoke and to destabilise the responses of readers, without setting any limit to the range of responses that may be evoked by unforeseen ways of relat-

ing the words of the text to themselves or to other texts? Such restrictions are often supposed to be imposed by authorial intention. But here, I think, Derrida is right to deny, not that what we grasp of authorial intention makes a difference to interpretation, but that we enjoy access to authorial intention in any sense in which it is itself more than an artifact of

interpretation (that is, an 'effet de diff6rance'). Granted, quite a lot of

reinterpretation may be needed to transform Sterne, say, from the jeering Enlightenment libertine the Victorians saw in him into an indignant but

perfectly sincere Christian, but, as I have elsewhere tried to show, such a shift in our view of Sterne's intentions can marshall quite strong arguments in its favour.42

8. In Conclusion: Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Aristotle

Habermas makes another point against Derrida, though, which I do not think can be dismissed. It is that deconstruction, because it offers a

purely negative critique of metaphysics, can never definitively break free from it. As Habermas puts it, 'Derrida inherits the weaknesses of a cri-

tique of metaphysics that does not shake loose of the intentions of first

philosophy'. The failure is, of course, a necessary feature of Derrida's position. We cannot break free from metaphysics because we cannot break free from language and because the impulse to metaphysics, to postulat- ing an identity between the ultimate constituents of reality and the most

42. See Harrison, 'Sterne and Sentimentalism', in Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, ed. Leona Toker (New York, 1994), pp. 63-100.




fundamental signifies of our language, is written into the Saussurian con-

ception of the sign as the union of signifiant and signifie. One might, I suggest, push that criticism a little further. There may

indeed, as Derrida argues, be no way of grounding our ways of talking in some ultimate class of signifies, given extralinguistically to consciousness or whatnot, because it is not in the nature of the signifie to be given extra-

linguistically. But why should one allow one's thinking here to be bounded, as Derrida's often seems to be, by Saussure's analysis of the sign? Why should one not take Wittgenstein's step, of grounding our ways of using words in underlying practices? A crucial text here is perhaps proposition 84 of the Philosophical Grammar:

The role of a sentence in the calculus is its sense. A method of measurement-of length, for example-has exactly

the same relation to the correctness of a statement of length as the sense of a sentence has to its truth or falsehood.43

The thought here is that by inventing a practice, of measurement in this case-which need mean no more than regularly comparing the space occupied by different objects by seeing how many times another object, standardly employed for this purpose, can be laid end over end against it-we introduce a way of determining the truth or falsity of any member of a class of propositions of the form 'A is n m long', where A is the object to be compared with another and m is the modulus of measurement (the object regularly used in establishing such comparisons). In so doing we conjure into existence as meaningful elements of our language a variety of new expressions: length, longer than, modulus of length, and so on. Giving a meaning to each of these expressions has not, however, involved associating any of them with any entity, any signifid, either given to consciousness or constituted by language. It has simply involved giving each a certain role, or use, in the context of a practice which, in turn, is not grounded in rules or intentions but is simply what we do.

This vision of things, as Henry Staten has shown, yields equivalents to many of the conclusions of Derrida's thought, including those of 'White Mythology'. Since meaning is grounded in what we do, and since what we do can change and is, anyway, 'not everywhere bounded by rules', there is no final answer to the question what is the proper meaning of an expression." Meanings, for Wittgenstein as for Derrida, are elaborated within language, and no sign has a meaning independent of others: 'to understand a sentence is to understand a language'.45 The practices which yield truth-conditions may, when dissociated from that function,

43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, trans. Anthony Kenny, ed. Rush Rhees (Ox- ford, 1974), ?84, p. 130.

44. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ?84. 45. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ?84, p. 21.




yield any number of metaphors of the type Aristotle distinguishes as 'by analogy',46 which indeed will never yield, by the process Derrida pun- ningly derides as usure, any return of 'proper', truth-conditional mean-

ing.47 Thus a poet may speak of 'the long light', evoking thereby, by way of the level flight of the measuring eye over the long trajectory linking landscape to horizon, the level light of dawn or sunset, and thereby speak meaningfully to his readers, without needing to answer the questions how

long, exactly, the light he has in mind is, and how one would determine the length of light, unless he has in mind light of a specific wavelength.

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein is not a Viennese or Cambridge version of Derrida, and the central difference is that his later conception of the connection between meaning and practices frees him from the need to

accept any version of the idea that meaning is a relationship between an

expression, a sign, and something else: a concept, a signifie, a set of truth- conditions. That frees him from the philosophical circle-the 'fly-bottle', to use one of his own metaphors-in which we buzz vainly from the

thought that it must be possible to attach a definite meaning to each indi- vidual expression of a language to the thought that such a destination is

only reachable by way of a detour through the entire language, and back

again. We have already noted the operation of that pair of thoughts in the mind of the idealist Bradley. That it has also become, by way of Quine, the founding intuition of much contemporary American philosophy accounts for recent attempts to connect Derrida with the Quinean tradition. That tradition attempts to soften the paradox implicit in the second com-

ponent of the cycle by making the assignment of meaning empirical and

provisional, a matter of the contingencies of interpretation in the light of native assent and dissent. Derrida, on the other hand, works the paradox for all it is worth, by continually emphasising that the detour by way of

language which alone can lead us to a definitive meaning for any individ- ual expression is an infinite, or at least an indefinitely long, detour. The

argosies of metaphor will never return laden with new riches of literal, proper meaning because they will never return.

For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the argosies do not need to set out in the first place. We know what 'x is 3 cm long' means because we can learn to determine the truth or falsity of any sentence of that form for the modest outlay of time and money needed to purchase a metre rule and find out how to measure with it. What may happen subsequently to the word long on its subsequent travels through literature and life need not concern us because those travels are not travels in search of the definitive meaning of the word undertaken at a cost to be paid only out of

46. Compare Harrison, 'The Truth about Metaphor', Philosophy and Literature 10 (Apr. 1986): 38-55.

47. Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b6-7.




its problematic return, but rather expeditions to set up branch outlets and new industries of meaning financed out of the original resources of the founding practice.

The move which frees Wittgenstein from the paradoxes generated by the thought that words must reach out to something other than themselves, but can only do so via one another, also frees him from the project of Western metaphysics conceived as the pursuit of the full and final Pres- ence of meaning. He is freed, in other words, from the semiparasitic complicity which, as Habermas justly points out, links deconstruction to what it deconstructs and may in the same sort of way link some current analytic projects, however scientistic in ambition, to the antiquated projects of classical metaphysics they take themselves to have transcended.

That thought leads to another. If Wittgenstein's thought remains outside the project of Western metaphysics may not some, or much, of what has traditionally been regarded as philosophy be to some greater or lesser extent also outside that project? How far is Derrida's work ad- dressed, not to Western philosophy, but to certain tendencies in Western philosophy which became dominant in the seventeenth century, primarily under the impetus of Cartesianism, and remained so to the present century? How Western, in fact, is Western philosophy, how much a fortress designed to marginalise and exclude the non-Western Other, how much itself a mishmash of all sorts of influences: Christian, Jewish, Arab, Hindu? This is far too vast a topic to introduce in the final section of what began as an introduction but has already gone, perhaps, beyond the bounds of such a piece. Perhaps one might conclude merely by noting that one might open the topic by looking more closely at Derrida's treatment of Aristotle in 'White Mythology'. This Aristotle is very much a precursor of Western metaphysics; he has, that is, a very French seventeenth-century feel to him. Other, very different, ways of reading Aristotle have emerged since the late sixties, through the work of John Jones,48 Martha Nussbaum, Myles Burnyeat, Hilary Putnam, and many others.49 Putnam, for instance, in an essay entitled 'Aristotle after Wittgenstein',50 evokes an Aristotle who, in his readiness to allow Form to be invaded by the vicissitudes of experience, seems closer to Derrida-or to the later Wittgenstein-than to the metaphysics of presence. Such claims are of course controversial. All the same these writers, in recalling us to a sense

48. See John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London, 1962). 49. For Burnyeat and Nussbaum, see among others, Essays on Aristotle's 'De Anima', ed.

Martha Nussbaum and Amblie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford, 1992). See also Nussbaum, 'Sav- ing Aristotle's Appearances', The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Phi- losophy (Cambridge, 1986). See also Guy Robinson, Philosophy and Mystification (New York, 1998), chap. 1.

50. Hilary Putnam, 'Aristotle after Wittgenstein', in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 62-81.




of the extreme alienness of ancient ways of thinking to our own, open, like Wittgenstein, a window on the marginalised Other in a way in which Derrida's writing, for all its indignant, and invaluable, explorations of the

sleights and self-deceits involved in the process of marginalisation, never

quite does.



Documents

White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric