by Huma Rashid

Created on: May 15, 2008   Last Updated: May 16, 2008

Derrida: On "Writing and Difference"

Derrida's text, Writing and Difference, is comprised of various essays dealing with topics as diverse as the violence of metaphysics, the poet Antonin Artaud, the theater of cruelty, and a reading of Sigmund Freud. He devotes much of his text to discussion of Levinas, Hegel, and Heidegger and to some extent, Plato and Socrates. His references also include in smaller part Maurice Blanchot, Levi-Strauss, Kafka, Montaigne, Feuerbach, and various aspects of the Hebraic tradition and/or ideology. Derrida's aim throughout this collection of essays is to develop his idea of deconstruction as well as the concept of difference within writing.

The first few essays gradually develop and illuminate Derrida's idea of deconstruction. Rather than let his reader know what deconstruction is, Derrida lets him know what deconstruction is not. Deconstruction is not a form of analysis, a critique, a method, an act, an operation, or, as the word itself seems to imply, destruction. Rather, deconstruction is what Derrida calls an openness to the Other that "present[s] himself as absence" (103). He maintains, furthermore, that all speech is for the other and therefore, no logos as "absolute knowledge" can "comprehend dialogue and the trajectory toward the other" and that this "rupture of logosopens speech" (98). He is very concerned with the openings in speech and writing and describes them in terms of wounds and abscesses; he is very concerned with what these cracks in speech and/or writing reveal, and what fills these cracks. In a more general sense, Derrida's framing of deconstruction is that it destroys the claim of one dominating form of signification over another and ends up subverting most of the Western metaphysical tradition. Deconstruction illustrates how all texts shift and become increasingly complex in meaning when read in terms of the assumptions they raise and the questions they ask within themselves. That is, deconstruction is a kind of analytical reading of a text that brings to light the difference within the text itself.

Difference is very important to Derrida important enough for him to dedicate an entire compilation to its exploration. According to Derrida in the first few essays, meaning exists and is out there, and he describes it in the same terms as he describes the closure of the book. "It is there, but out there, beyondbut eluding us there" (300). However, the meaning that indubitably exists (though Derrida does not equate

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