On de Man vs. Derrida

Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and the Production of Deconstruction



Being more sedentary, I was attacked not by boredom but by melancholy; my langour turned to sadness. I wept and sighed for no reason. ... Finally I fell seriously ill. ... How sweet death would have been if it had come then. ... My soul would have departed in peace without the cruel consciousness of man's injustice, which poisons life and death alike. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions



The last twenty-five years have been a watershed era in the history of Rousseau interpretation: when Jacques Derrida, creator of the critical apparatus known as Deconstruction, devoted a larger section of his influential work, Of Grammatology, to a reading of The Confessions, he propounded a view which broke with the standard line of Rousseau interpretation. According to Derrida, the proper name, that signature which is put to the text in the form "Rousseau" constitutes a significant event, not only in literary history, but in the history of philosophy as well, as it marks the developmemt of a new form of subjectivity. Rousseau's Confessions, then, must be regarded as a significant literary event in that this text marks the emergence of this new human subject, Rousseau, who relates the story of his life in a revolutionary way. Derrida finds Rousseau's text to be of prime significance because, in this work, Rousseau's story is based, not only on his experiences in the physical world, but on his feelings and emotional reactions as well.

Derrida's interpretation of Rousseau entailed his discovery that his texts were significantly marked by "the praise of living speech," indicating his adherence to a system of binary oppositions which privileged speech over and above writing as the primary, originary, most natural mode of communication. According to Derrida, Rousseau's view of the relation between the spoken word and written language justifies this view, as he sees speech as the manifestation of full, immediate presence whereas writing falls short of these qualities. In this view writing is hampered by the fact that it is never permitted to manifest a presence which is not, at the same time, an absence; that is, writing is unable to make its presence known without coalescing with words, the mediating signifiers which allow thoughts to be shared. This relationship runs to the detriment of writing, for Rousseau sees speech as a self-sufficient organic mechanism, which writing serves only as a supplement, an excess which, potentially, could be used as a substitute for one's nature. If one were to deny one's natural existence in this way, then one would be in great danger, for the supplement ought not to stand in the place of what it supplements. Rousseau cautions his readers against falling into that situation, as he did, using sexual fantasies, first as a supplement, later as a replacement for the sexual experience itself, a substitute for the sexual dimension of human life.

Extrapolating from this concept, Derrida suggests that the best example of a supplement standing in to take the place of the real is in those situations where speech, being unable to perform the task of communication, must be replaces by a written language which is able to communicate. Aware of the inherent falsity in the logic of interpersonal communication, Rousseau laments his subjugation to writing as a necessary means of disseminating his thoughts; however, in reaction against this, the dominance of the secondary over the primary, he casts writing into the role of a 'dangerous supplement' in that it denies our existence as authentic beings. The society which acknowledges writing as its primary mode of communication becomes a society of simulation, artifice, supplementarity, as writing imposes a space which isolates individuals, establishing a form of social existence which permits the decline of being, of civilization, of society as a whole by repositioning the social world on the side of decadence, novelty and everything that runs counter to a healthy society. This world which Derrida prophecies vis-a-vis Rousseau, this world where being has suffered a fall (Verfall), a lapse, an erosion of authenticity, is a world where the natural system of priorities has been disturbed by the logic of supplementarity.

Through his construction of an idealized world where writing exercises no detrimental influence on the social order, Rousseau envisions a community which exists in a state of purity, a society free from the unnatural classifications and hierarchies of class and social rank. As Rousseau sees it, the most advantageous quality of this ideal community is reflected in its structure, whose transparency enables it to come to a full awareness of itself as presence. However, Derrida debunks Rousseau's ideal society of non-writing, stating that the pernicious figure of writing is always already present in his attempt to conceive of the pre-alphanumeric society; indeed, writing is present even prior to his attempt to conceive of the natural state of the world: the triadic psychology in inscription, craftsmanship and textual production have so throughly permeated his being that Rousseau is unable to dissociate himself, even in his most daring conceptual moment, from the society of writing, of supplementarity.

Rousseau's organic community conceals itself, denying that it contains traces of the metaphysics of presence but, as Derrida points out, Rousseau is unable to eradicate these distinguishing marks. This is a feature that depletes the community of any authenticity which Rousseau may have ascribed to it, for these metaphysical principles merely reconfigure the supplementary society which Rousseau seeks to break free from by inverting the social order; he merely alters the relationships of dominance and subjugation in precisely an inverse fashion; thus, this 'ideal' society prescribed the absolute marginalization of writing to the despotism of living speech. So, too, is this society contaminated by the cultural logic which necessitates the use of supplements, as Derrida proclaims that any creation of Rousseau's will, by necessity, be marked by an order of subliminal constraints that function in such a way that any meaning Rousseau attempts to impose upon his text is subject to the alterity of textual deployment, that is, the inherent potentiality of a misinterpretation in the circuit from producer to receiver, against all of his express intentions; Derrida sums up this paradox of Rousseau's attempt to conceive that which has never taken place, to conceptualize the pre-originary perspective, saying, "Such is the constraint of the supplement, such, exceeding all the language of metaphysics, is this structure 'almost inconceivable to reason'."

By denouncing writing as both a perverted copy of speech and the dispersal of presence, and by positing the opposition which places writing against speech, in its dichotomous conceptual scheme, Derrida sees Rousseau's text as reaffirming the foundation of philosophies which, like metaphysics, are complicit with those essentializing, totalizing modes of thought which need to be subverted. This characteristic of Rousseau's thought is, in Derrida's opinion, proof that he represents yet another figure who has entered into a complicitous relationship with the logocentric tradition which has marked Western meta-philosophical discourse since the age of the Greek fathers. Logocentrism, as Derrida defines it, stands for that tradition in Western philosophy that postulates a belief in presence, a belief in the existence of a center, comprising the belief in an inner being called the self, and a belief in a central repository of meaning. As a result of this logocentric bias, Rousseau's concept of a small community where self-presence is accessible to each and every citizen signifies Rousseau's subscription to a philosophical inheritance associated with Plato. According to Derrida, it is to Rousseau's credit that his writing adheres to the dominant values of the logocentric tradition; although the tradition itself may be deplored, nevertheless, Rousseau must be praised as a writer who is consistent both in his philosophy of writing and in his psychology as an author.

Some years later, Derrida's deconstructive reading was challenged in an essay where Paul de Man turned the tables on Derrida, deconstructing this deconstructive reading of Rousseau. De Man analyzes Derrida's critical methodology and poses Derrida's engagement with Rousseau's text in "That Dangerous Supplement" as a doubling of the relationship Rousseau has with the text of his autobiographical confessions. In this way de Man suggests a similarity in the posture of the two authors, finding a similarity in the way they position themselves in relation to their texts, how they manifest their being textually, and how this textual being reveals a hidden complimentarity between the two producers of text. Specifically, the similarity between these two authors lies in their dual relationship to the logocentric tradition. Pace Derrida, it is de Man's contention that Rousseau may not be classified as logocentric in that his thinking is far from consistent; indeed, if one were to accept Derrida's thesis as a rule, then Rousseau's text would be marked by numerous incongruities. In fact, as de Man's close analysis of the Confessions reveals, Rousseau never ceases to undermine his own text; hence, Derrida's attempt to make Rousseau into an icon of logocentrism must be seen as fallacious.

By choosing to remain ignorant of this phenomenon, this becomes, in de Man's view, Derrida's aporia, his critical blindness; however, this critical blindness is not something which can be avoided: gaining mastery over one's aporia is not an attainable goal, although there has been a massive effort to do so over the course of literary history. Deconstruction defers this goal in recognition of the fact that any text of penetrative, insightful literary criticism, including the texts of Jacques Derrida, contains, to some degree, the blindness that is necessary for criticism to function. Blindness is a necessary constituent of criticism in that, just as Rousseau's aporia supplies Derrida with the material he required to compose his text, so Derrida's own critical blindness provides de Man with a critical position from which he can construct an alternative reading of Rousseau. De Man catches Derrida in his blindness, criticizing him for inscribing his falsified tale of philosophical history, which de Man recognizes as a fictitious story; this anagnorisis, de Man's recognition, suggests that Derrida has employed Rousseau as a textual decoy.

De Man reveals that, just as the text of Rousseau's autobiography is controlled by his double desire to legitimize and de-legitimize logocentrism, so Derrida's text displays a similar contradictory nature. In a move to deconstruct the father of deconstruction, de Man attempts to show how Derrida practices a 'bad-faith' literary criticism in that, by imposing a structure upon Rousseau, positioning him as a logocentric structure, he sets the stage in advance of his critical performance. Through his reading of Rousseau, Derrida is constructing a fiction, and his fictive game has a number of repercussions on the critic's ability to validate an interpretation. The critic's ability to conceive of the author within the history of literature is significantly disabled when de Man says that any imposed historical structure can only be seen as a fictional artifice, a device which allows one to comprehend events in terms of their narrarative formation. Indeed, any critical enterprise which reads texts in terms of their broader 'historical' circumstances, or any such other attempt to legitimize the critic's appraisal of the author as a fictional being, must be denounced as an inauthentic representation of that literary personage. This is perhaps de Man's most salient critical point, when he disparages any critic who, as Derrida does, attempts to 'think' literature as a historical process; specifically, de Man suggests that the fallacy in Derrida's argument lies in the fact that he uses Rousseau's Confessions, a literary work, to complete his theory of philosophical history. This, then, becomes the centerpiece in de Man's problematization of Derrida's reading, for de Man views Derrida's placement of Rousseau's text in the logocentric tradition to be akin to imposing the work in an artificial historical context, in that the ready-made philosophical tradition of logocentrism is one which Derrida has judged, even before coming to Rousseau's text.

Furthermore, even before he begins writing, Derrida's text is impaired by the fact that he incorporates into his philosophical world-view Rousseau's notion of the true source of origins. In general, post-structuralism is skeptical about the origin of the text; indeed, the origin is deprived of any authoritative privilege in its claims to primacy, as the goal of deconstruction is to liberate the text from the context of the natural state. In fact in this instance both texts, de Man's as well as Derrida's, are equally unsuitable as originary critical principles, for the aim of deconstruction is to reveal that knowledge, although it may be located at an originary site, may not necessarily harbor that rich plenitude that one would suppose; in fact, it may be the case that this so-called origin, for all of its celebratory posturing, is, in fact, bankrupt due to the issue of dogmatic and empty directives at the expense of knowledge. If one were to inquire into the problem of the origin to the fullest extent one would see that this 'impossible' notion, the coexistence of two contradictory judgments such as de Man's and Derrida's is, in fact, no longer of relevance here. With deconstruction, the essential validity of rationalism is no longer simply taken for granted; in a similar movement, deconstruction demands a flight from all that which is culturally validated as 'natural', and it demythologizes these supposedly 'natural' attributes in an attempt to reveal them as mere cultural constructions.

As de Man sees it, Derrida's writing itself, both by being constructed through language and governed as a subject of language, evinces, at all times, a complicitious relation with the structure of rhetoric; that is, the rhetorical structure in which Derrida composes his text undermines the logical structure of his text while simultaneously, in a parallel movement, the fictional structure of Rousseau's text undermines the empirical structure of his existence, the 'true' facts of his life which he endeavors to communicate. Accordingly, de Man composes his piece with the knowledge that any attempt to annul Derrida's interpretation of Rousseau through an incontrovertible refutation would be to take up those same rules of the classical rhetorician which deconstruction looks to move away from, seeing those types of classical models as being bankrupt, both epistemologically and ideologically. Rather, through his critique of Derrida's reading, de Man's role is to provide a critical assessment of the philosophical ideas expressed in "That Dangerous Supplement"; thus, a deconstrucitve argument constitutes a move away from the argumentative style of classical rhetoric. This form of argument is institutionalized by Deconstruction in de Man's critique of Derrida.

Although de Man does not accept Derrida's rhetorical argument, this does not mean that he rejects his interpretation of Rousseau's texts. The clash of these two texts constitutes, in miniature, the emergence of the post-structural paradigm, in that here we are witness to the production of a language which is devoid of truth-claims in the classical rhetorical sense. In this way deconstruction presupposed a new understanding of the purpose of criticism: if de Man were to adopt an argumentative style as prescribed by the classical rhetoricians, any attempt to refute that which he perceives in Derrida as an untruth would inevitably degenerate into the kind of dogmatic philosophical discourse, condemned to remain imprisoned in the abstract language of modern literary criticism, without ever having confronted the real obstalces to thinking. Here we see that deconstruction is a method of criticism which renounces the beliefs in classical, rhetorical argument, rejecting the belief that the critic can achieve a solid ordering of the world through words and logic alone.

Taking up Nietzsche's critique of philosophical perspectivism, Paul de Man develops a philosophy of textuality which illuminates our profound inability to make any interpretation which is not itself a perspectival analysis; these new claims for the fidelity of interpretation potentially disrupt any claims that a critic, such as Derrida, might make concerning the authoritative interpretation of a text, such as Rousseau's (as well as any other claims to the province of truth, regardless of who is speaking). De-legitimizing any claims to a privileged authoritative position, de Man insists that any authoritative reading is, by necessity, a misreading. Here de Man suggests that the deconstructive critic is not a parlor-magician, a charlatan who waves a wand to perform his interpretative 'trick', revealing the truth which emerges from a concealed trap-door; he neither bids the truth to come forth through rational arguments, nor through the moral principles he affixes to the text. Rather, the deconstructive critic is one who inflicts a violence upon the text, imposing a reading through the sheer force of will alone, the critic's will-to-truth. De Man makes it clear: the modern critic is that person who attacks the moral convictions of the text he or she interprets, regarding them not as sacred literary masterpieces, such that one's reading is done in a state of fear and trembling; instead, the modern critic makes a continuous journey, traveling through literary history in a labyrinth of multiple reading pathways.

In his reading, Derrida's express intention is to circumvent a psychoanalytic reading of the text, a reading which privileges the discourse of the self as the foundational repository of truth and meaning. Similarly, de Man de-legitimizes those interpretations which privilege authorial intentions, implying that there is a discernable meaning which lies hidden in the text, yearning to be discovered; in its place he proposes a model of textuality that sees the text as a netowrk of contradictory impulses, a structure which, although not lacking in form, is not affirmed from outside the text: this, too, may be found in Derrida's argument, which destroys the metaphysical belief in a transcendental signified, a referent which exists outside the bounds of textuality. This pertains to the larger themes of deconstruction in general, for the two faces of Rousseau, as constructed by de Man and Derrida, are not be seen as mutually exclusive propositions, for the self is in fact a multiplicity of identities, and may be subject to any number of interpretive endeavors.

De Man introduces a new dimension to deconstruction when he constructs a model of literary criticism which specifies that no longer may the critic invoke a privileged route of access to a reality that is not subject to the rules of textuality. Any interpretation, to prevent its being rules out of court, is more than an enumeration of textual evidence gained by the critic; the deconstructive reading is one which simulates the social relationship created in the reading of a text: here de Man institutes a re-historicized view of literary criticism as the critical task is seen, not as a collection of signs divested of social context, but as signs whose social inclusiveness allows them to represent reality in a percipient way. In this way Derrida and de Man join forces to construct an ideal model of textuality and a model of the ideal critic, one who is blind to authorial intent, to psychological motivations found in the text and reproduced by historical literary criticism, a tradition which sediments a fixed image around both the literary figure and their work.

The claim that deconstruction signifies a reconfiguration of the model of logical argument itself may be made by looking at the reasons why de Man's piece does not refute Derrida in the traditional sense. Regardless of the disparities between the two critics, de Man and Derrida do not contradict each other for, as de Man's thesis illustrate, writers such as Rousseau are themselves divided, in that what they say is different from what they mean to say. The two presences, de Man and Derrida, are not to be taken as mutually exclusive entities; with the advent of deconstruction, to acknowledge one's indebtedness to one critic does not oblige one to exclude the critical estimation of the second critic, although this second viewpoint may run counter to the first. Deconstruction recognizes that the writer, a being engaged in a complex task, the creator of independent textual matrices, exists as a divided self, a schizophrenic in the sense that what the writer intends to vocalize is often radically different from what emits, or manifests itself only in an embryonic state, the subvocalizes words and images of a work left unfinished, such as the novels of Kafka, or the plays of Mallarme. Accordingly, deconstruction recognizes the differential space between these two critics and, affirming the existence of these differences, sees this space as an element that is necessary in order for these critics to root themselves in their critical positions. Specifically, the larger themes of deconstruction (and of post-structuralism in general) may be found in this new model of refutation, for Paul de Man's challenge to Derrida's thesis, his decoding and overcoding Derrida's model of Rousseau witnesses the establishment of a confluence of voices, a critical synthesis of these two thinkers, which opens up a range of potential critical horizons, including turning a critical eye to the production of textual production itself.

Deconstruction represents a new form of consciousness-logic, a form whose system of inclusionary rules are flexible enough to allow a plurality of theories concerning the essence of a text to coexist harmoniously, as this new logical order prevents the reader from directly splitting these two readings of Rousseau into two isolated categories, one being Derrida's view, the other being the view of de Man. Deconstruction recommends analysis over and above understanding for, in this new logical order, the onset of truth occurs simultaneously with the moment of decision. In my opinion, this deconstructive turn to our critical methodology is dependent on a radical shifting in out epistemological viewpoint which may have resulted from a bankruptcy of the state of the enlightenment paradigm. Deconstruction reveals an epistemological shift, a shift which, contrary to the opinion of critics such as Christopher Norris, does not automatically make it into an attempt to legitimize the free-ranging relativist viewpoint which, seeking to discredit the very notion of truth-values, casts epistemology aside as a thing of the past; however, it is true that critics such as Derrida believe that there no longer exists a legitimate referent outside the text which functions as the adjudicator of oppodisitional truth-claims. In this respect, post-structualism has led, not to an erosion of credibility in epistemological distinctions between truth and falsity, but to the production of a multiplicity of theories, some of which, like those of Derrida and de Man, although appearing to contradict each other, nevertheless reside amongst each other thanks to a deconstructive logic which contains a principle of non-contradiction.

In conclusion, let me re-state that, in composing his critique of Derrida, although de Man does not want to affirm the conclusions Derrida reaches, neither does he wish to extirpate in entirety Derrida's reading of Rousseau, replacing it with his own. The coexistence of these two contradictory judgments is only made possible in that, with deconstruction, critics are no longer required to vouch for a singular validity of their critical positions. Post-structual theories such as deconstruction allow a critic to abjure modernist traditions which emphasize the individual as a being which possesses the ability to fashion a truth-value out of some inherent transcendental quality of the self. So, too, the rightful critical position is not to be found in the sturm und drang of a self-validating individual; rather, it is something which simply emerges as a consequence of the clash of intellectual viewpoints. Thus, in allowing de Man to develop his argument, without displacing Derrida's essay from the locus of meaning, deconstruction provides for the safe passage of alternative modes of thought, and a wider discursive focus for society in general.

The opposition of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man reveals the larger themes of deconstruction, the critical apparatus which holds the view that there is no transcendental answer forthcoming; that there is no highest authority, not even the author's intentions, which can grant one particular interpretation as being the ultimate truth; that an argument of pure refutation is not the most successful argument. Deconstruction is about the expansion of textuality, not about closing it off by excising all that which does not corroborate with one's assumptions, and thus shutting doors to new forms of textuality. As de Man's essay shows, deconstruction is not about criticaal refutations; it attempts to enter into a new area, an area where the game of critical warfare does not play by the rules of the classical rhetoricians, not, for that matter, does it follow those rules of criticism that are based on the principles of a structualist philosophy: to do this would be to re-enter that hierarchical system of oppositions which deconstruction intends to forsake. Rather than prescribing a code of rules for one's critical movements, deconstruction instead seeks to re-codify these rules within a non-hierarchical structure.

In this way deconstruction hopes to instigate the revitalization of texts in such a way that new texts are produced which are able to assimilate other forms of textuality, thereby expanding the field of textual power. Deconstruction differs from the modernist paradigm of literary criticism in that, instead of canonizing a select number of literary texts and bringing them to a plane of eternal signification, a plane which all other texts must reverently bow to in acknowledgment before passing by, deconstruction allows texts to share in each other's power, regardless of whether or not they are seen as grandiose artistic masterpieces; in this way deconstruction seeks to prevent the marginalization of texts, as it is an empathic extension linking one text to all other forms of textuality, thus allowing everything to be said, permitting no exclusion, repression or non-filtration into the discusive cosmos that is human consciousness. Finally, by permitting this extension of textuality, this inter-textual communication, deconstruction allows critics such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man to reach beyond their individual singularity and into the province of ideal textuality, a site which in my opinion attains a supplemental position, in that it may serve as a substitute for the now debased concept of the transcendental signifier; it is here that each author is able to catch a glimpse into the universe of textual unity, and into the Being of the text itself.