Two Deconstructions

toward the thoretical understanding of Derrida's postal metaphors

1-a

Looking over Jacques Derrida's writings chronologically, you will have an impression that his style of writing or philosophizing changed drastically in the middle of 1970's. The earlier writings, such as "Introduction à L'origin de la géométrie" (1962), La voix et le phénomène, De la grammatologie and L`écriture et la difference (1967), Marges (1972), generally contain traditionally philosophical analyses (even though their conclusions are in no sense traditional) and each of them can be considered as an individual examination. Compared to them, the later writings, typical ones of which are Glas (1974), La vérité en peinture (1978) and La carte postale (1980), are distinguished by their strong tendency to avoid being coherent and individual texts (while La dissémination (1972) contains papers of both types and can be thought of as a book in Derrida's transitional period). Numerous and complicated (sometimes implicit) references to other texts by Derrida himself or other authors, frequent suspensions of their main subjects, long detours to associated issues and highly rhetorical argumentations depending on jeux (puns) on words ----- all these aspects are characteristic of the later texts and make each of them to some extent independently unfathomable.

We can comprehend this change in a simple way. In the earlier writings deconstructive strategies are still only theoretically applied to his readings and critiques of philosophical texts. In contrast, in the later ones Derrida seems to conduct a series of intertextual experiments as an application of deconstruction to his writings themselves to question the demarcation of philosophy itself. The earlier ­­ theoretical elaborations of deconstruction, the later ­­ textual practices of deconstruction. This dichotomy would be both persuasive and effective enough in understanding Derrida's works generally. Actually there are many scholars not only in France but in the U.S. and Japan who have been producing poetic texts under the intense influence of later Derridian style (for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, Mark C. Taylor and Toyosaki Kôichi note3).

Nevertheless we have to ask another question.What made Derrida change his style? We should not forget the fact that Derrida's choice to organize his texts in such a highly intertextual fashion inevitably involved sacrificing the clarity of argumentation on which his earlier writings were developed. His later lack of clarity caused many misunderstandings about the theoretical value of deconstruction. He paid a very high price for conducting textual strategies. Therefore, in order to comprehend the necessity of them, it is indispensable to elucidate the reason Derrida thought his theoretical deconstructions insufficient.

1-b

Paul de Man formulates the methodology of deconstructive reading briefly in Allegories of Reading note4. According to him, it is essentially impossible to determine whether to read a given text on its grammatical or rhetorical level. "Deconstruction" is nothing but a strategy of cornering it to expose its undecidability. In some papers written in the late 1970's and early 1980's note5, Karatani Kôjin tries to generalize the question of (de Manian) deconstruction and to locate it in his broader critique of the architectonic metaphors used by "Western Metaphysics", referring to Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Deconstructive reading is done by discovering in a text a point where its object-level (grammatical) meaning and meta-level (rhetorical) meaning would inevitably commingle each other, which should be considered a literal equivalent to the mathematical ruses Gödel used in proving his theorem. "From my perspective, deconstruction, if formalized, is tantamount to Gödel's proof" note6. Following Karatani, we begin with provisionally identifying deconstruction as a variation of "Gödel's problematics".

In "La pharmacie de Platon" (in La dissémination), Derrida analyzes the strange position of writing in Plato's Dialogues (especially in Phaedrus) note7. According to Socrates/Plato, writing is for supplementing memory above all. It can, however, also cause oblivion because the existence of writing allows one to do without his/her effort to memorize an issue. Thus Socrates advised against using writings to fortify one's memory. Writing does strengthen and, at the same time, weaken memory. Derrida calls this ambivalent relationship the logic of supplément, which we can reformulate referring to de Man. While the grammatical reading of the statement "writing strengthens memory" simply "constates" its content, its rhetorical reading would cause one even to dispense with memory, which might result in invalidating the statement itself. It was this rhetorical effect of reading that Socrates tried to suppress. Every hierarchical system based upon a metaphysical binary opposition such as memory/writing will inevitably contain point(s) of undecidability. Derrida's argument in this paper focuses on some variations of supplément (another example is pharmakon, which is a Greek word meaning both medicine and poison) to deconstruct Platonism. This kind of strategy ­­ as it were, the formal deconstruction ­­ was emblematic of the earlier Derrida.

However, on the other hand, a close examination of Derrida's paper will show the existence of another strategy he used for deconstruction. As mentioned above, La dissémination is a book in the transitional period. In my opinion "La pharmacie de Platon" should be analyzed as a typical amalgam of the earlier and the later, because there Derrida conducted both ways of deconstruction on the same issue, pharmakon. If he had only aimed to deconstruct Plato's texts in the de Manian sense, that is, to make perverse their final (decidable) meaning dependent on an hierarchical distribution of metaphors, it would have been sufficient to merely point out the existence of pharmakon, the undecidable. In reality he scrutinized the word's etymology and attempt to interlace numerous threads of conceptual-metaphorical references to the problematics of pharmakon, as if he were urged to add something to his formally deconstructive analyses. What is notable here is that this "something", that is, an intertextual attempt, should not be regarded as a mere addition to his critique of Platonism. It, on the contrary, entailed many important Derridian keywords, such as dissémination, famille, mémoire, don, khôra and so on, as well as an investigation of the relationship between ancient Greece and Egypt, which was undoubtedly one of Derrida's earliest (covert) leitmotifs. Without these factors, Derrida's critique would have lost most of its impact. His intertextual analyses evidently not only contain experimental practices of deconstruction but further theoretical insights in addition to the formal deconstruction. Such numerous metaphors in this text require to be elucidated apropos of their theoretical values.

Earlier (formal) deconstructive approaches undermine a closed hierarchical system (= distribution of metaphors in a given text) by alluding to the logic of supplément. Later (intertextual) ones can be considered as attempts to open problematics (other than that which concentrates on the existence of the undecidable(s) ) and aim to offer metaphorical devices which could enable us to inquire into these problematics. From this point, I name these Gödelian deconstruction and (later) Derridian deconstruction respectively (please note this "Gödel" is no more than a metaphor introduced by Karatani). Consulting Derrida's recent distinction note8, we may also say that Gödelian deconstruction concerns the "déconstructible" structure while the Derridian one is engaged in the "indéconstructible" structure.

We understand the undeconstructable as a kind of structure, although Derrida always prefers to categorize it as, for example, "restance"(resistance + remainder) note9. Naming it "restance" might cause the mystification of a deconstructed text, claiming that there could always exist something that would excess any intellectual attempt to capture it. Derrida himself, since his earliest papers, has been aware of the danger that his thought could be understood as a kind of negative theology (for instance, différance as a kind of the unnameable God) note10. It is to avoid such mystification and to reintroduce difference between such negative theology and Derrida's attempts that we dare to say the undeconstructable has a sort of structure(s), even if it would be beyond its normal sense.

2

Gödelian deconstruction stops its inquiry upon facing the undeconstructable (the undecidable), which inevitably looks similar to the process of negative theological argumentation. Derridian deconstruction is conducted so as to resist such theology. We have to make out the theoretical discrepancy between two the deconstructions precisely in his later textual practices. We ought to read metaphors theoretically (of course this is one of the most important lessons from Derrida himself).To exemplify it, let us take a case of Derrida's critique of Lacan ("Le facteur de la vérité"). He illustrates the Lacanian notion of phallus as below.

Le sujet est très divisé mais le phallus ne se partage jamais. Le morcellement est un accident qui ne le concerne pas. Du moins selon l'assurance constraite par le symbolique. Et par un discours sur l'assomption de la castration qui édifie une phiosophie idéale contre le morcellement.

Ce que nous analysons ici serait la plus rigoreuse philosophie de la psychanalyse aujoud'hui, plus précisément la plus rigoreuse phiosophie freudienne, sans doute plus rigoreuse et plus strictment contrôlée dans ses échanges avec l'histoire de la philosophie.

On ne saurait exagérer ici la portée de cette proposition sur l'indivisibilité de la lettre, ou plutôt sur son identité à soi inaccesible au morcellement («Mettez une lettre en petits morceaux, elle reste la lettre qu'elle est»), comme sur ladit «matérialité du signifiant» (la lettre) intorélante à la partition. Où prend-on cela? Une lettre morcelée peut se detruire purement et simplement.

[....]

[U]ne lettre n'arrive pas toujours à destination et, dès lors que cela appartient à sa structure, on peut dire qu'elle n'y arrive jamais vraiment, que quand elle arrive, son pouvoir-ne-pas-arriver la tourmente d'une dérive interne.

La disivilité de la lettre est aussi celle du signifiant auquel elle donne lieu, et donc des «sujet», «personnage» ou «positions» qui y sont assujettis et qui les «représenetent». (italicized by us) note11

Before reading this passage, let us confirm three points.

(1) Derrida in this essay reads Lacan's famous text "Le séminaire sur «La lettre volée»" . In the latter Lacan, perusing Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Purloined Letter, attempts to explain his idea of psychoanalysis by elucidating the position of a letter (sought by all characters and finally discovered by Dupin ­­ the hero ­­ with a paradoxical solution) that performs a strange but decisive role in the novel. Lacan thinks of it as a representation of the "phallus". In addition, this essay itself was given an exceptional position by being placed as the first essay in his collection Écrits, where all the other papers were arranged chronologically. Derrida here criticizes Lacan's formulation of a "letter", looking upon it as a central metaphor of the theoretical matrix of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

(2) "Letter" is also one of Derrida's most important metaphors. The metaphor of a letter, or some postal metaphors related to it, can be found in many texts. His first publication, "Introduction à L'origin de la géométrie", for example, already resorted to a postal metaphor ("question en retour") in attempting to deconstruct Husserl's transcendental phenomenology note12. Another example is in "Signature Événement Context", a criticism against the Speech Act theory. A metaphor of a letter whose receiver is dead took a central role in its argumentation to introduce the problematics of writing note13. Derrida has also written many texts that directly dealt with "postal" issues. In La carte postale these postal metaphors are the most concentrated ("Le facteur de la vérité" is included in this book as the third chapter).

(3) As one can easily see by his preference for using "mathèmes," Lacanian problematics is profoundly regulated by numerous mathematical metaphors, among these "Gödel" is of appreciable importance. Lacan himself alluded to Gödel in Écrits. note14 And besides his theoretical statement that the radical division of a subject is caused by the unavoidable fluctuation between its object (énoncé) - and meta (énonciation) -level listenings of the Other's discourse ("Che vuoi?") note15 is unquestionably close to the de Manian formulation of deconstruction. According to Ogasawara Shin'ya, a Japanese Lacanian psychoanalyst, "It is in the deadlock of formalization in le symbolique, as decisively revealed by Gödel, that le réel manifests itself" note16. We can say the Lacanian concept of the real indicates the fundamental "opening" which makes Gödelian deconstruction possible.

Lacan says "une lettre arrive toujours à destination [a letter always arrives at its destination]". note17In the quoted passage Derrida declares "a letter does not always arrive at its destination", evidently opposing to Lacan's formulation. What is at stake in this opposition?

The passage shows Derrida considered Lacanian psychoanalysis as a sophisticated philosophy ("the most rigorous Freudian philosophy") rather than only as a variation or a school of psychoanalysis. It is highly organized through "exchanges with the history of philosophy". In a recent text Derrida says that, at the time of "Le facteur de la vérité", he thought Lacan's discourse was "the closest [to Derrida's own attempts in 1960's, that is, earlier Derrida] and at the same time the most deconstructable", "the most to-be-deconstructed" one. What struck him most was the contemporaneity and similarity of his deconstructive critiques and Lacan's "reliure théorique" "qui faisait l'usage le plus fort, le plus puissamment spectaculaire de tous les motifs à mes yeux déconstructible". note18 Lacan initiated a rereading and reorganization of traditional philosophical texts by applying his psychoanalytic concepts to them, exactly when Derrida wrote De la grammtaologie or "Freud et la scène de l'écriture". I said that Lacanian problematics has much in common with de Manian-Gödelian deconstruction. Derrida's admission of similarity between himself and Lacan partly supports my hypothesis. Also remember that "Le facteur de la vérité" was written in 1975, namely just after his supposed Kehre. Both its content and timing suggest that this article deserves to be examined as a definitely significant text where the difference of two types of deconstruction is discussed theoretically.

A letter is for Lacan a metaphor of the phallus. According to Derrida, his reading of The Purloined Letter is based on the assumption that a letter could not be divided. A letter has its "inaccessible identity" which assures "the indivisibility of the letter". This "indivisibility" in turn assures the letter's arrival to its destination. In the novel this undividable letter will pass through and divide all the subjects (characters) confronting it. Derrida thinks all these arguments correspond to the Lacanian comprehension of the relationship between the phallus and the subject. "The subject is much divided but the phallus is never partaged" implies that, in Lacanian problematics, the cause of the subject's division is undividable in itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis, which intensely criticized the egocentric premises in Anglo-American psychoanalysis, smuggles in an idea of sublated identity while rejecting that of the subject's identity.

Lacan says that it was what would be called "objet petit a" in his later terminology that the "Séminaire" discovered as the letter in Poe's novel note19. The objet petit a indicates "the leftover which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack" note20, that is, the remainder ­­ the restance ­­ of deconstruction which at the same time both conceals and reveals the existence of the Gödelian aperture, the real. The letter signifies the real by acting as the phallus, the objet petit a. Therefore, following Lacan's famous proposition that the real is the impossible and Derrida's recent statement that deconstruction concerns the impossible note21, we can reformulate the discussed difference apropos of two ways of comprehending "the impossible".

The Lacanian impossible (the letter) cannot be divided, which means that the impossible is one. All the characters in the novel must have been confronted with the same impossible. The same is true of his psychoanalytic reading and arrangement of numerous philosophical texts. Lacan would say, Freud, Heidegger, Antigone, The Purloined Letter and so on, all these had already spoken of the same impossible that he "discovered", that is, the real or the objet petit a . He boldly reorganized the history of philosophy ("reliure"), which functioned at the same time to erase histories of philosophy. It is this reorganization-erasure of histories that Derrida attempts to resist. The reason he calls Lacanian psychoanalysis "an ideal philosophy against fragmentation" is that it can guarantee philosophers a transmission of an assured recognition of the same impossible.

Derrida's criticism proposes an alternate way of thinking of the impossible. "A fragmented letter", he says, "can purely and simply be destroyed." The impossible must be plural. Therefore Derrida cannot declare that both Freud and he are confronted with the same and unique impossible. Rather impossibles should be considered as those like letters lost somewhere in postal delivery systems, systems which are incessantly transmitting numerous letters from Socrates to Plato, from Plato to Freud and from Freud to Derrida (see "Envois", chapter 1 of La carte postale). Lacan reveals the same letter in any given text while Derrida searches for lost letters in a postal space interwoven with numerous texts. This contrast will result in radical differences in their interpretations or critiques of various philosophical texts although we can not afford to examine them here.

The identification of the Lacanian impossible is enabled by his theoretical erasure of failures with postal delivery systems. The Lacanian delivery system of the impossible works perfectly, which sustains the transparent transmission of a supposed crucial recognition of the real. It is in order to invalidate this premise that Derrida chose postal metaphors to criticize the Lacanian elaboration. Introduction of the problematics of failures within media, thus, that of "writing", drastically changes the image of the impossible, or the deconstruction.

Derrida says, the Lacanian letter "manque à sa place, mais le manque n'y manque jamais [lacks its place, but the lack never lacks it]". note22 The letter certainly lacks its own place, but it instead will have a unique and paradoxical place as the place that lacks its own place in itself. Therefore the letter-phallus in question is always guaranteed to be in the transcendental place, to put it more accurately, the transcendental place of lack / lack of place. We can easily understand its implication by the above mentioned description of Gödelian deconstruction. The letter-phallus is nothing but the remainder of Gödelian deconstruction. It corresponds as a privileged signifier to the total impotence of the whole postal system of signifiers, namely "the symbolic" in Lacanian expression. This correspondence will assure that the letter never arrives at any determined place ­­­ that is, it will arrive at no place. This is not mere wordplay because this no-place-ness is theoretically maintained in a highly sophisticated distribution of philosophemes.

Derrida insisted "pouvoir-ne-pas-arriver [may-not-arrive]" in the quoted passage. "An internal drift" which torments a letter is a strange condition of probability. His criticism is clear. Lacan's argument lacks the aspect of probability that a letter may not arrive at its destination because, according to his explication of the phallus, there can be no more than one single letter that does not arrive. This blindness of Lacan also implies the elimination of the problematics in Freud's celebrated text Das Unheimliche. While Lacanian castration exists as the unique and decisive trauma (following the same logic as that of the phallus), Derrida's notion of castration is concentrated on an uncanniness of the multitude (repetition) of castrations note23, since a castration is from the beginning a substitute for another and consequently there may be innumerable ones. Derridian castration is that which "begins [entame] substitution" rather than the unsubstitutable.

Now we can understand the importance of postal metaphors in later Derridian deconstruction. Derrida insists on the vulnerability of postal delivery system. Let us think that this delivery system indicates a system of signifers that circulate in the symbolic. Lacan's "a letter always arrive at its destination" implies that a signifier always arrives at a corresponding signified. As I have already discussed, the Lacanian impossible, namely the privileged and paradoxical signifier, the phallus, is given the transcendental destination that represents the total impotence of the symbolic (the real). Derrida's introduction of postal vulnerability can fundamentally discredit this logic. If "a letter (signifier) does not always arrive at a destination (signified)" and there may always be numerous lost letters, then we can no longer, indeed never grasp a whole delivery system of signifiers, which means that the total formalization of the symbolic required to validate the Lacanian impossible is invalidated. The Derridian impossibles are signifiers lost ("dead letters" note24) in their (non)delivery (to signifieds).

This is the chief discrepancy between Gödel-Lacanian deconstruction and later Derridian deconstruction. It naturally requires further examination but here we must be contented with such a rough scheme.

Finally I end this essay by giving a glance to Barbara Johnson's critique of "Le facteur de la vérité" note25, as a suggestive example which completely misses the fact that Derrida there discussed two deconstructions' difference. Johnson, paying attention to the complicated layering of reading Derrida reading Lacan reading Poe, attempts to show the undecidability in Derrida's criticism of Lacan. All reading is in a sense misreading. We cannot decide which to choose as a correct reading of Poe, Derridian or Lacan because even Lacan's statement "a letter always arrives to destination" can be read like Derrida's seemingly exact opposite proposition. The difference between Lacan and Derrida is reduced to that of the "frames" of reading, namely the relative difference of two misreadings. Johnson sees the same structure of (mis)reading where there is disparity because she does not reflect theoretically on the meaning of the metaphorical-rhetorical disparity (please note this is also true of de Man's critique of De la grammatologie, where he said "what happens in Rousseau is the same as what happens in Derrida" note26). It is in order to avoid this sort of, as it were, textual relativism that I have discussed two deconstructions. Again, to speculate on further possibilities of the so-called "theory", we should read the later Derridian metaphors theoretically or schematically.

NOTES

1)
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p. 89-100.

2)
see Slavoj Zizek, "Pourquoi dois-je aimer la nation comme moi-même?", L'intraitable, Anthropos: Paris, 1993.

3)
In this paper I write Japanese names in their original order, that is, the family names first and the first names second.

4)
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, Yale University Press,1979, p.9ff.

5)
mainly, "Naisei to sokô [Introspection and Retrospection]"(1980), "Inyu to shite no kenchiku [Architecture as Metaphor]"(1981), "Gengo, sû, kahei [Language, Number, Money]"(1983). These papers are, summarized and reedited, included in a book in English, Karatani Kôjin, Architecture as Metaphor ,translated by Sabu Kohso, MIT Press, 1995.

6)
Architecture as Metaphor, p.xxxiv.

7)
Jacques Derrida, La dissémination, Seuil, 1972, p.122ff.

8)
For example, see Part I of Jacques Derrida, Force de Loi, Galilée, 1995.

9)
La dissémination, p. 13.

10)
Jacques Derrida, Marges ­­ de la philosophie, Minuit, 1972, p.28. About Derrida's attitude to negative theology, also see "Comment ne pas parler" in Psyché (Galilée, 1987) and Sauf le nom (Galilée, 1994).

11)
Jacques Derrida, La carte postale, Flammarion, 1980, p.494, 517.

12)
see Edmund Husserl, L'origine de la géométrie, tr. fr. par Derrida, coll. Épiméthée, PUF, 1962, p.36.

13)
Marges, p.375.

14)
Jacques Lacan, "La science et la vérité" in Écrits II, coll. Point, Seuil, 1966:71, p.226.

15)
see Slavoj Zizek's clear interpretation of chapter 3 in The Sublime Object of Ideology. Allan Badiou's article "Marque et Manque : à propos du zéro" (in Les Cahiers pour l'analyse no.10, 1969) is also suggestive.

16)
Ogasawara Shin'ya, Jakku Rakan no sho [A Book of Jacques Lacan], Kongo Shuppan : Tokyo,1989, p.144.

17)
Jacques Lacan, Écrit I, 1966 :70, p.53. This statement is in the last, namely conclusive, sentence of "Séminaire".

18)
Jacques Derrida, "Pour l'amour de Lacan" in Lacan avec les philosophes, Albin Michel, 1991, p. 408-409.

19)
"Ouverture de ce recueil"in Écrits I, p.16.

20)
Zizek's formulation. cf. The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.53

21)
The most evident formulation is in "Psyché ­­ Invention de l'autre" in Psyché;.Derrida also calls attention to it in "Pour l'amour de Lacan" to remark the subtle but decisive difference between his deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

22)
La carte postale, p.469.

23)
cf. "La double séance", La dissémination, p.300, n.56.

24)
see La carte postale, p.136 ("Le 14 octobre 1977" in "Envois").

25)
Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida" in Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977).

26)
"The Rhetoric of Blindness : Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau". My citation is translated back from Japanese translation in Hihyo Kukan [Critical Space], I-no.8, 1993, p.149.

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