Heidegger’s concern with scripts, with step-by-step sequences of actions (#35), is ongoing. Long after Being and Time, he is tracing developments, in poems and philosophical texts, that have no context larger than themselves—that, in his parlance in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” his most crucial essay, “set up a world” (eine Welt aufstellen). His tracings take them step by step, paying close attention to the order of the words. He thus treats each of these cultural phenomena as a script, and one which is completely independent of all other scripts. He calls these step-by-step treatments Holzwege, after the forest paths cut by loggers which lead from likely tree to likely tree and so nowhere in particular—certainly not to home. On a Holzweg there is no telos, and no unifying and ordering form.
Derrida’s writings, too, can be viewed as a set of Holzwege. Like Heidegger’s, they meditate philosophical and other texts, but now with the “aim” of thickening them up and rendering them more interesting because more undecidable. This is the antithesis to the usual scholarly practice of skimming a text for a take-away, for a thesis it proves or a lesson it teaches. The conceptual moves Derrida makes in the course of this are often arbitrary or even forced, which would be fatal if Derrida were trying to prove something about the texts he treats. His treatments, however, tend to end, not with a triumphant thesis, but on the brink of about three unasked questions—far from any kind of “home.”
So what good are they? Philosophy, in a market economy, has to produce results, truths and lessons which others can use. Does Derrida consider himself exempt from the laws of the market?
Of course not! One important achievement of his writings lies in the fact that usual scholarly practice with texts takes those texts to have ousiodic structure: the dominating form is the thesis or lesson, which organizes the whole. Every sentence, indeed every word, should contribute to its establishment; extraneous considerations should be excluded. Derrida’s many writings contest this whole approach, and thus amount to a vast number of assaults on various textual realizations of ousia (see my Philosophy and Freedom, Chapters One and Two).
Another takeaway, I think, is to be found, not within Derrida’s writings themselves, but in the contrasts between them and more traditional exegeses. What he shows, over and over, is that the reader’s journey from sign to meaning is often accomplished with the aid of what are nothing more than gentlemen’s agreements. It is these agreements that enable us to speed past the undecidable phrases, disjointed arguments, unintentional rhymes, and so on that any text contains. Often without our knowing it, our usual reading techniques fill in the gaps, amend the fallacies, eliminate the digressions, and so on until we get where we wanted to go—which is to see those texts as realizations of ousiodic structure.
Gentlemen’s agreements of this kind are not innocent, and the textual moments that incite them are not innocent set of authorial flaws. Derrida demonstrates this by focusing, again and again, on one script we recurrently use to understand things. I call it the “binary script:”
- Isolate word-meaning w.
- Correlate w to ～ w
- Establish a preference-relation between w and ～w such that the former is preferred—or, as Derrida often puts it. “privileged.”
The third step can be achieved in many ways; just using a word can privilege it over its opposite. ～ w can also be excluded in other ways, or ordered into the disliked half of a binary; for example see any of Derrida’s texts, where he undoes the binary script over and over again. The point of these undoings is not to produce a better or fairer understanding of the original text, but to show that the binary script is indeed a script, something we bring to the texts but not written into their structure.
The binary structure, bi-partite with one side dominant, is also a partial realization of ousiodic structure, minus an explicit boundary; we may say that the dominant half, w, occupies the privileged traditional position of form, while ～ w is relegated to a status akin to that of ousiodic matter. The absence of boundary means, however, that the binary is totally open, nothing more than a link in a chain of signifiers—an openness that Derrida, early on, called “differance.”
This renders Derrida’s thought of only limited use when it comes to analyzing political or social case of oppression. When the oppressed being is a human, rather than a word or word-meaning, they can always run away—unless there is a wall to hold them in. Derrida’s undoings of the binary script thus contest ousiodic disposition and initiative (in traditional reading, the understanding of a text by its reader just as the writer intended), but not boundary, which is simply denied (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” a text has no outside).
Though the application of his (and Heidegger’s) insights beyond the uniquely unbounded way in which texts chain signifiers is problematic, Derrida shows us new and other possibilities of understanding philosophical texts, some of which are central to how we live. Thus, to read Derrida’s account of Geschlecht as telling us what sex “really” is would be sterile at best. To read his treatments of the gift as telling us what gifts “really” are is—poisonous (giftig). But to read them as forcing us beyond our ancient gentlemen’s agreements is liberating.