Deconstruction and the Future of Thought

Author: Jacques Derrida (French), translated by Xia Kejun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: The philosopher has passed away, and this reader was compiled out of remembrance and nostalgia. This reader marks the beginning of our efforts to edit and translate Derrida's series of works. Selecting from Derrida's numerous texts was undoubtedly difficult, so we have tried to choose some independent and significant writings to avoid fragmentation. We primarily follow the three stages of Derrida's own broadly recognized philosophical thought as a thread to give readers an overview of the general development of his ideas. These stages are the three seminars held at the famous French cultural and intellectual center, Cerisy-la-Salle, dedicated to the significance of Derrida's thought:
1980: The End of Man
1992: The Passage of the Boundary
1997: The Animal's Biography
These three progressive "themes" actually run through Derrida's entire philosophical thought, but they do not represent a linear development process (from man to animal). Rather, they are unpredictable unique events that intersect and continuously change tone. At the th conference, Derrida delivered the paper On the Recent Eschatological Tone Elevated in Philosophy, which responds to Kant's same-themed work and also addresses the loud cries of postmodernism that everything is "ending." Derrida does not agree with or endorse these so-called "endings."
Of course, since the early three major works—Voice and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference—have already been translated into Chinese, we have mainly selected a very important text on the issue of time from The Edge of Philosophy. It shows Derrida's meticulous reading of the core problems of the philosophical tradition. Due to space limitations, we did not translate another text titled Plato's Pharmacy, which was included in Dissemination. As a supplement, we translated the later and more important text Khora, which is related to Plato. Here, Derrida's deconstruction of Plato and the entire Western philosophical tradition has gone far beyond previous limits. The text The Limit of the Finite is the one Derrida delivered at the second conference, discussing the "transcendence of the boundary" or the intersection of the finite. This is synchronized with his reflections on the specter, mourning, the other, and gender difference. The thought "The Animal I Am (More to Follow)" on the animal's biography is the introductory text for the third conference, where Derrida's reflections on animals completely transcend the entire Western philosophical tradition—whether Greek philosophy or the great religious tradition of the three monotheistic gods in the Holy Scriptures. The theme of the third conference is the animal's biography, so the expansion of deconstruction has far exceeded what we could have predicted.
Part: The philosopher's farewell to himself and to the other. The text that begins with farewell is mourning—the theme that the philosopher so loved. First is a public dialogue near the end of Derrida's life, where the dying philosopher faces death with composure and speaks eloquently about his personal life and his uncompromising response to the spirit of the times: the "indestructible" temperament of thought—a firm response to the many accusations against "deconstruction." Derrida knew in 2002 that he had cancer, and his days on earth might be numbered. Before his death, he engaged in extensive dialogues and mutual gifts of writing with his friends and students, including the texts mentioned at the beginning of this dialogue and the books he wrote under the shadow of death. Perhaps, after Plato's "Socrates" and Moses in the Bible, no one has prepared his "death" in such a philosophical or intellectual way before his death? Before Derrida's death, he compiled a collection of eulogies and mourning texts for his friends who had passed away: first appearing in English as The Work of Mourning, and renamed in French as Every Time, the Only One Is the End of the World. Each writing toward death is a prayer and a salvation, and in this last confession, there are the philosopher's last words or will, traces of surviving writing, and an immense love for life. Then is his eulogy for Levinas after his death, where the echoes of "farewell" continue to linger. The farewell to the other is also a farewell to oneself. The polysemy of the word "farewell" has always been intertwined with past philosophy and future thought.
The second part begins with a dialogue in English where Derrida directly confronts the issue of deconstruction and the basic "characteristics" of his thought. Derrida succinctly responds to the relevant questions, serving as an introductory text. The second text, The Limit, is the keynote speech from the second conference, a complete text on the "limit" of the finite, where Derrida meticulously discusses the various possible modalities of the finite, logical puzzles, and the existentialist dilemmas of the possibility and impossibility of death. Derrida's reflections on the relationship between possibility and impossibility also transcend the one-sided demand of traditional "transcendental philosophy" for possibility, reflecting his internal relationship with and transcendence of traditional philosophy. This is further extended to a series of "limits" on gifts, friendship, kindness, and forgiveness. At the same time, the Western tradition is pluralistic and interwoven, without a pure distinction between Greek and Jewish traditions—because of the mediation, integration, and filtering of Christianity. Therefore, it is necessary to deconstruct philosophy in relation to the totality of the monotheistic religious tradition. This is particularly evident in the text on "animal biography" from the third conference's keynote speech—The Animal I Am, which condenses the essence of Derrida's recent ten years of reflections on animals or animal sovereignty, where he also outlines the "animal series" in his own texts. Derrida's reflections on animals deconstruct the entire Western thought: whether it is the "bios" life in the Greek ideal—those who advocate for the so-called good life have not even questioned what "life" is? Bios or zoē? If classical political philosophy is built on the distinction between man and animal (man as the animal of the polis), and if this distinction, along with virtue ethics and natural justice, are all based on this premise, then it is possible that they have not thought about or faced the question of what an animal is. This means that simply returning to classical thought is too simplistic! Moreover, reflecting on animals also means deconstructing the monotheistic tradition: Abraham's monotheism was founded on sacrifice and offering animals! Derrida also reflects on a series of animals in Greek mythology and philosophy, particularly the relationship between Socrates (as a gadfly and others) and animals, which guides Derrida's subsequent reflections on animals. In more texts, Derrida deconstructs the specific thoughts of Descartes, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan on animals, delving into the inner pulse of Western thought. Therefore, it is impossible to solve these problems simply by returning to classical thought or merely inheriting modernity. Instead, one should more thoroughly advance Heidegger's thought and, in the future, in the consequences of technology, reflect on questions that the tradition has not considered.
The third part shows that as a philosopher by birth, Derrida's deconstruction first occurs within philosophy, particularly in the deconstruction of the Greek beginning, that is, the deconstruction of Aristotle's and Plato's writings. First, we attempt to listen to the philosopher's own direct "defense" of his complex relationship with tradition. Deconstruction is not negation but reading according to the internal laws of tradition, unraveling or expanding its internal tensions, and reviving its vitality. At the same time, it interprets and rewrites at the "edge" of the text both within it and in the external realm it excludes. Starting with a small footnote to Heidegger's Being and Time, deconstruction is particularly strange: at the time, Derrida had not read Heidegger's detailed analysis of Aristotle's problem of time in The Basic Questions of Phenomenology, yet he independently repeated Heidegger's reflections! Derrida's interpretation penetrates the core difficulties or limits of Aristotle's, Hegel's, and Kant's reflections on time. This deeply textual, exquisitely precise writing is one of the most unique and refined deconstructive texts, as well as a philosophy text that is uncompromising in its reflection on the difficulties of the "limit." The study of time–space undoubtedly marks one of the signs of a true philosopher. In this text, Derrida fully demonstrates the "double writing" of deconstructing traditional metaphysics—impossible to dream of starting anew without the entire tradition, but also impossible to write only within it; instead, one must turn to the other. Then is the text Khora, which differs from the early Plato's Pharmacy. Here, Derrida only constructs the textual fabric around Plato's Timaeus. This text differs from the previous one, no longer being traditional, paper-based, and argumentative writing, but rather more "deconstructive" intellectual writing. It revolves around the indeterminate and undecided position of Khora—Socrates as the "philosopher" (also an irony of the philosopher), as an indeterminate, should not occupy any position, and only a constant erasure of the recipient—unfolding the internal difficulties of narrative writing. Khora is also the "third kind" that cannot be named, which is precisely the guidance for the nameless future thought. But for Derrida, the word Khora, this "name," has already surpassed Plato and Platonism in the entire Western tradition or even the text itself. It is something that even Plato himself could not claim exclusively, an absolutely unknown and entirely new thought. The writing of the text itself is also unattributable, no longer philosophical but intellectual.
Of course, it is also worth noting that the deconstruction of Greece and the deconstruction of the monotheistic tradition are intertwined. The Western tradition is pluralistic and interwoven, without a clear distinction between Greek and Jewish traditions—through the mediation, integration, and filtering of Christianity, this distinction has become layered and blurred. Therefore, it is necessary to deconstruct the entire monotheistic religious tradition holistically. In his early work Writing and Difference, Derrida had already been facing and questioning the "Greek–Jewish" distinction in texts by Levinas, Heidegger, and Jabès. However, the deconstruction of Christianity was carried out under the influence of Nancy, which is the thinking of Christianity as "hapax-theology." The selected texts on touch are the prelude to a later book by him. The thinking of touch permeates the inner essence of the entire Western thought and is also a new contribution to phenomenology—by re-examining Derrida's early phenomenology, we will gain a deeper and clearer understanding of his relationship with phenomenology.
Additionally, in this text given to Nancy on touch, we can see how Derrida handles the appropriateness and difficulties of "touching" or "contact." How to respond to the thoughts of a friend both by touching them and without offending them? How to face the paradox of "the untouchable touch" with "the ethics of reading"? This is another example of deconstructive ethical writing and the gift of friendship, and the wording is extremely beautiful. The text "To Whom?" selected from the crucial text Given Death is a condensed discussion of Derrida's themes on gifts, sacrifice, and death (including animal sacrifice). This text focuses on the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac in the Genesis of the Bible, comparing the interpretations of Kierkegaard, representing Christianity, and Levinas, representing Judaism, of this event, as well as the reflection on the peculiar character Bartleby's "idiom" in Melville's novel. It questions why Western religion has always presupposed "sacrifice" and taken death as a condition of gift, and whether this can be transcended? The result, whether this means transcending the entire monotheistic tradition? Nancy and Derrida's recent deconstruction of Christianity and the monotheistic tradition have profound implications for the present and the future (see the relevant texts in our Beginning Series).
Additionally, regarding Derrida's relationship with Judaism and general ethics, we have selected a text dedicated to Levinas. Under the premise of responding to Levinas, who is a thinker of ethical reflection and the heir of Jewish thought, Derrida does not "return" or "repay" Levinas's thought (his initials are E.L). He must respond to Levinas's thought (especially his Jewish thought) to fulfill the responsibility of "the ethics of reading," but he must also give his own understanding, even to reach—neither Levinas's nor his own thought, but—some indistinguishable thought for the future, beyond himself and the other. The complexity and limits of deconstructive writing have always been unpredictable. In this text, Derrida plays with the name E.L of Levinas—this could be the abbreviation of the name of the Jewish God, but also suggests the multiplicity of the French personal pronoun elle (it or she). Therefore, Derrida's interlocutor or recipient (), but it could also be a woman who cannot be confirmed, and the voice of women is scattered among them. This is both a questioning of Levinas's reflections on women and a questioning of the phallic centrism presupposed by Western religion, and so on. This text shows us the wonderful feature of deconstruction as a "gift" and its retreat, as well as the ethics of reading, how to respond to the other in the way of intellectual variability. Derrida shows us another "example." This also requires us to respond to Derrida in Derrida's way, while also inspiring our own personal thoughts, and there is no ready-made way to teach us this. Unfortunately, many current Chinese academic studies of Derrida are not "Derrida-like."
The opening text, Faith and Knowledge, provides a general grasp of Western religion. This text is incredibly profound, and the surface and content of the text have connections to the "secret writing," which still awaits our discovery (for example, the number 44 section corresponds to the "blink" of the two eyes that suggests the "instant" of the Wink of the coming and to-be-come god). In the reflection on the technological dominance of the times and the two sources of religion, "messianism without messianism" and the "not names of names" Khora open the possibility of future faith thinking. Therefore, it is no longer possible to reconstruct faith within the framework of traditional religious theology, but we must face the possibility of technology and its future development, especially in this era of thorough transformation.
Additionally, the general deconstruction or the deconstruction of religion has permeated all other fields, but there is no ready-made deconstructive operational method or model that can be applied everywhere. Instead, each time must write uniquely to face the uniqueness of the specific text and situation. Deconstruction has expanded in politics, law, and Marxist political thought. Please refer to the relevant texts in And Others. Especially in the book The Political Economy of Friendship.
Since there is already a Chinese version of The Literary Action, we did not select the literary part this time. At the same time, readers should note to read all the articles in the reader throughly. The deconstruction of philosophy inevitably intertwines with the deconstruction of theology, whether it is ontological theology or philosophical religion. The conflict between philosophy and faith is also intertwined. For example, the text Khora, the text The Animal's Biography, especially the latter, Derrida's reflections on animals deconstruct both the entire Western philosophical tradition and the three monotheistic religious traditions. The monotheistic religious traditions opened by Abraham all realize themselves through sacrificial rituals (the 9/11 event and the current political crisis in the Middle East are their complete manifestations). Whether it is Kierkegaard or Levinas, neither has further reflected: although God ultimately stopped Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, why was a ram ultimately used as a substitute?—this substitution is worth thinking about? Moreover, it continued the sacrificial activities. Not only that, Derrida deconstructs the first few narrations in the beginning of the Genesis, particularly focusing on the relationship between humans and animals, revealing the connection between the "second sin" and animal sacrifice. Animals were originally in the position of creation before humans, but in naming and language, they came after. The interweaving between them is worth considering. At the same time, he reflects on the complex image of the "fire-breathing monster" in Greek and Roman mythology. These hints and guiding reflections force us to reconsider the traditional relationship between body and soul or body, the relationship between humans and gods, humans and machines, humans and animals, and so on! Especially, it deepens the deconstruction of carnal centrism.
Derrida's thought transcends the boundaries of Western thought, t, making thought this—worldly thought. Derrida's thought belongs to the world, here is the new beginning of future thought. Derrida's reflections on religion are very extensive and rich (see the English edition of the Religious Action by the English editors to feel this), but limited by space and time, we did not select more texts. Please forgive the readers, and we look forward to compiling special texts in the future to make up for this.