An Introduction to Deconstruction

The work of Jacques Derrida, which is often referred to as “deconstruction,” can

perhaps be seen primarily as an act of decentering (especially of texts).

His project can be seen as partially a continuation of the radical destruktion of

metaphysics undertaken by Martin Heidegger, who sought to eliminate from
philosophical thought the metaphysics of presence (ousia), ie. the underlying
paradigm of being-as-presence which for Heidegger emerged in philosophy after the
Pre-Socratics and formed the basis for Christian onto-theology. Instead of a
metaphysics of presence where the object is a “substance” or “essence” that we
predicate “accidental” qualities to, Heidegger was concerned with letting things be,
realizing that our attempts to predicate meaning are just as metaphorical as they
are metaphysical; in fact, to truly perceive we must open ourselves to an event of
disclosure (Ereignis), the unveiling of truth.

Derrida takes this process of de-structuring even further by recognizing that all
systems, particularly those of language/textuality, contain one element – the so-
called “transcendental signified”1 – that is simultaneously inside and outside of the
system and legitimates the whole structure. This element – often connected with the
language of presence (ousia), origin (arche), a theological or psychological ‘beyond’
(meta) etc. – normally acts as a fixed “center” around which everything else coheres. 2
By way of analogy, in the case of the printed page one of these “centers” is the title.
‘Fixed’ on the page, it gives context and boundaries to the words, keeping them
together as a structure. But there are slippages of meaning, and besides all of these
latent indeterminacies the hidden spectre of the white page keeps shining through.
The unity this whole structure of black text on a white page seems to have is thus
somewhat arbitrary – rather than a fixed, determinate “book” what we have is text,
an endless play of signification. In fact, Derrida even remarks that “nothing is
outside the text” (hors-texte); texts collide, interpenetrate and generally “pirouette”
around each other in an almost infinite movement of deferral and meaning-making.
Interpretation or hermeneutics thus becomes (as it was for Heidegger) an act of
critical importance.

As Susan Handelman notes (comparing Derrida to rabbinic midrash):

“With Derrida, the oppositions between what is the proper meaning and what
is not, between essence and accident, intuition and discourse, thought and
language, intelligible and sensible are overthrown. Here there is no
nonmetaphorical realm to which one can aspire, or from which one can speak
or think.” 3

1
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in
Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 280.
2
Ibid.
3
Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, 20.
Meaning slips out of not only the words but the spaces between them, making
misreadings, turns of phrase, jokes and puns just as important as the author’s
intention. This is the strategy of deconstructive reading, which Derrida employs
with gusto in “The Double Session.”

The Double Session

“The Double Session” opens with the juxtaposition of two texts – a dialogue from
Plato between Socrates and Protarchus on how the “conjunction of memory with
sensations” can be said to “write words on our souls” (an image of ‘impression’ with
which we are familiar) and a quotation from Mallarme’s Mimique, which begins with
the word “Silence.” Remarks Derrida, “These quotations on the blackboard are to be
pointed to in silence.” The title stands above the text, an archon “suspended” at the
top of the page, giving the writing “its contours, its borders, its frame.” But in
Mallarme, there is also a “decapitation” here – the title is self-reflexively cancelled
out by “silence”: “Mallarme describes the suspensive value of the title, or more
precisely of the empty space it marks out at the top of the page.”4

The white page itself takes on a number of other metaphors throughout “The Double
Session” – the screen (a Lacanian image), the veil, silence, as well as the hymen or
virginal membrane which is broken by penetration. And fittingly, the white page is
also the white face of Mallarme’s mime. Mimesis, miming, mimicry – these are the
closest we can come to approaching a ‘blank canvas.’

Derrida purports to be talking about the relationship of literature, truth and

imagination, as well as a “certain interpretation of mimesis.” Thought itself is, as in
the quotation from Philebus, a “soundless, aphonic, private” discourse (logos),
“amputated dialogue”; the book is an externalized analogue of this process. This
“psychic volumen” or inner book is not true or false in itself – in its unexpressed,
unvocalized form – but “declares” itself in the act of writing, where the living logos is
imitated on the page. This is mimesis in a certain sense, where text either reveals
truth via its status as a copy or conceals it by virtue of this same resemblance.
However, this interplay of copies is preceded by the space of the imaginal:

“Both of these likenesses, even before resembling each other, were in

themselves already reproductive, imitative and pictorial (in the
representative sense of the word) in essence.”5

Repetition, imitation, reduplication – these concepts recur in philosophy from Plato

to Hegel. Truth is perhaps somewhere between the copy and the original, in this
“strange” relationship where one is always the “supplement” of the other (here we
can also think of the simulacrum, the perfect copy which has no original). In one
sense, the (psychic) painter comes along and can only illustrate the discourse “it
fixes and freezes along its surface,” making a “painting of a painting” that seems to
be several steps removed from “truth.” The image is supplementary; painting is a

4
Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” 179.
5
Ibid., 188.
“degenerate” and “somewhat superfluous expression.” But still, somehow it can
penetrate the fog of textual discourse and “purify the pictorial, imitative, imaginal
essence of thought”; mental painting brings us closer to the “naked image of the
thing,” Heidegger’s das Ding in Sich. 6

Metaphor, then, is what gives us the vision of the thing itself, “freed from the
discourse” that weighed it down. Of course, this is only psychic painting and writing:
returning to Plato, “in their literal sense painting and writing are totally incapable
of any intuition of the thing itself, since they only deal in copies, and in copies of
copies.” 7 So it turns out that both writing and painting are “intertwined” as
“supplements,” “now useful, now useless…”

Here we can again think of the art of the mime, as in Mallarme’s novel. The
mime mimes whatever is mimed, objects/events which one might think would
precede it in time. But in terms of the actual cognitive operation of the mind, which
has been philosophically framed as anamnesis (remembering), aletheia
(unforgetting) etc., this becomes problematic – “The difficulty lies in conceiving that
what is imitated could be still to come with respect to what imitates.” This leads to a
“self-duplication of repetition itself,” an infinite expansion of mirroring, mimicry,
supplementarity and doubling which is where we find literature. Within this wild
overlay of paradoxes, what does “Platonism” maintain?

“That which is, the being-present… is distinguished from the appearance, the
image, the phenomenon, etc. that is, from anything that, presenting it as
being-present, doubles it, re-presents it, and can therefore replace and de-
present it.”8

This is a rehearsal of Heidegger’s problem with traditional ontology/metaphysics,

although conceived somewhat differently. Truth is both the “unveiling” (aletheia) of
that which “is” in its self-presentation or disclosure, but also its “agreement” with its
re-presentation, its “appearance” (the implicit relationship between “that which
appears and its appearing”). Mimesis is thus a necessary doubling, a natural
appearing/masking which allows things to “emerge from the crypt” as visible truth;
like psychich ‘painting,’ it can thus be employed to summon “manifest presence,”
using imitation “in conformity with the phusis (essence or life) of what is imitated,”
erasing itself in order to yield “the freedom of true presence.”

Departing from Heidegger, then, the “event” (think of Ereignis) of imitation is like a
double mark, writing on top of letters that are already there. This “redoubling of the
mark” is a supplemental act which nevertheless serves to “inscribe” truth within its
“play.”

So again, back to the problematics of the Mime, and to the virginal page. “The Mime
imitates nothing. And to begin with, he doesn’t imitate. There is nothing prior to the
writing of his gestures.” And later,

6
Ibid., 189.
7
Ibid., 190.
8
Ibid., 191.
 “In the beginning of this mime was neither the deed nor the word.”

Like the mimetic process, which uncovers truth through a secondary, supplemental
act of doubling, the mime ‘writes,’ a “double mark”:

“The mime produces, that is to say makes appear in praesentia, manifests the
very meaning of what he is presently writing… He enables the thing to be
perceived in person, in its true face.”9

So has mimicry managed to “efface itself in the scriptural production of truth,”

returning us to the original Idea? No, because Mallarme disposes with the Platonic
underpinnings of metaphysics. Instead, there is mimicry ad infinitum (Kearney calls
it “mimesis without origin”), the simulacrum or copy of a copy. There is no
overarching ontology or possibility of escape from this hall of mirrors. The sign
without a signifier reveals the search for truth to be identical with the onto-
theological search for arche, telos and eschaton.10 Is this the culmination of
Heidegger’s project? Well, things are a little more bleak here: “The operation, which
no longer belongs to the system of truth, does not manifest, produce or unveil any
presence; nor does it constitute any conformity, resemblance or adequation between
a presence and a representation.” Heidegger’s retrieval of the Pre-Socratics is
eschewed in favour of a much more ambiguous characterization of the “space of
writing” – writing is not the disclosure of truth but an “event” (“hymen, crime,
suicide, spasm”) where “the simulacrum is a [perpetual] transgression.” In a
continuation of his sexual metaphor, desire and presence, void and fulfillment,
become indistinguishable, collapsed. The separating tissue or veil of the hymen is
transgressed. But this happens only “fictively.” “What takes place is only the entre
[between], the place, the spacing, which is nothing…” 11 Perpetual mirroring, a
deadlock of meaning, where “nothing happens” becomes a sort of endless suspense:
“Hymen in perpetual motion: one can’t get out of Mallarme’s antre as one can out of
Plato’s cave.”12

Here it becomes clear what the implications are of Derrida’s language of how the
mime, with his blank, white, corpselike face, writes himself. Mallarme writes on the
white page, describing an event (the “mimodrama”) that has already taken place. In
fact, the mimodrama writes itself on the blank page, in a ‘present’ act that mirrors
the sex and murder of the actual Pierrot story (the breaking of the hymen). Writing
is an act of dissemination – seed-spreading, impregnation – where the one text gives
birth to many others, an endless chain of resemblances and patterns. Thus
Mallarme’s story is haunted by the ghost of another text; to put it another way, all
texts are “intertextual” (Kristeva):

“A writing that refers back only to itself carries us at the same time,

9
Ibid., 206.
10
Ibid., 208.
11
Ibid., 214.
12
Ibid., 216.
 indefinitely and systematically, to some other writing… the reflecting screen
never captures anything but writing, indefinitely, stopping nowhere…” 13

There is nothing outside the text – just writing (ecriture), that is not contained
within the determinate form of the book. However, practically speaking each text is
a “structure that is open and closed at the same time.” This is again the language of
structuralism yielding to that of deconstruction; the things that bind the text
together into a unitary object (origin, ousia, arche, telos) are still discernible, but the
number of readings expands into infinity.

How does the imagination fit into this? Within the ceaseless mimesis that
characterizes the appearance of objects, in a textual world of doubling, multiplying
meanings and disseminations, Kant’s “productive” faculty seems to be imprisoned.
There is no “escape.” Or is there? Derrida does give power to the metaphor, and his
strategy itself seems to provide some clues as to how to navigate a world of
simulacra… does this signal a ‘productive’ means of dealing with structures and
systems, or do we have to have an illusory ousia or arche for the imaginative faculty
to make sense? Kearney suggests that Derrida makes questions such as “what is
imagination?” and “who imagines?” meaningless; the death of the author, the
endless play of parody and “perpetual allusion” consign us to an “apocalypse without
end.” 14 Is this the fate of the imaginative subject in postmodernity?

13
Ibid., 202.
14
Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 292.