Four years after Husserl’s death, a twelve-year-old Algerian schoolboy, Jacques Derrida,^* was called to his principal’s office. It was the first day of his school year, in 1942. “You are going to go home, my little friend, your parents will get a note.”

Algeria was at the time still a French colony, and by order of the Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France, quotas had just been set limiting the number of Jewish students allowed to attend school. The only other option for him, “a little black and very Arab Jew,” was a Jewish school which he didn’t much want to attend. So, he skipped school for a year and read voraciously. After the war he went to high school in Paris and after that to university. There, he studied Husserl, writing his master’s thesis on “the problem of genesis in Husserl’s philosophy.”¹⁰²

For the whole of his illustrious academic career, Derrida kept coming back to Husserl as a reference point, if mostly an antithetical one. Where Husserl wanted to find consistent patterns of meaning in an attempt to get closer to the depths of meaning in general, Derrida’s life project came to be one where he would question the possibility of anything being consistently meaningful, or finding meanings that are systematically structured, or all-encompassing. Derrida accorded Husserl the respect he deserved, but as a counterpoint, in order to show that the characteristic project of Western philosophy and science was neither possible nor desirable. After the horrors of the twentieth century, intellectual pessimism, or at least circumscribed caution, was the preferred intellectual tone.

Derrida traced in Husserl a relation between “expression forms,” such as speech and writing, and the underlying “indications” to which they point, their “non-sensory mental aspects.” For Husserl, speech and writing “exteriorize” thought.¹⁰³ Underneath the purely grammatical aspects of language, says Derrida, Husserl posits a pure logic of ideal thought, and by transposition, the presence in “the living present” of a “transcendental life” such that systematic truths are waiting to be uncovered by means of bracketing or phenomenological reduction.¹⁰⁴

In earlier times, these systematic truths may have been named God. After modern science and philosophy, after the European Enlightenment, these truths come to be reframed and renamed “reason.” Such is the failed project of metaphysics, says Derrida, aiming to discover the essences of knowledge and being, whether that be a theology of theologies or a philosophy of philosophies.

Derrida refers to a long tradition of such metaphysical “reductions” in Western thought, where speech and writing are secondary to essential thought. Indeed, writing is often secondary to speech, because, he says, speech seems closer to the human heart. So, Aristotle had said, “Spoken words are symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” And Rousseau: “Languages are made to be spoken, writing is nothing but a supplement of speech … thought is made through speech … the art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought.” Saussure found behind the signifier (an artifact of meaning), a signified (an idea that sits in a structure of inter-related, mental meanings).^§MS3d In this long tradition, speech is an exteriorization of thought, and writing a secondary representation of speech. Husserl, Derrida says, is yet another thinker caught within this tradition.¹⁰⁵

In his riposte, Derrida claims that any such appeals, reducing meaning to underlying and ultimately discoverable reason, are misguided. No longer can there be any metaphysics. There are just traces of meaning, chained together by similarities perhaps, but also by their differences. Writing does not simply represent speech which in turn represents thought. Speech and then writing are transpositions which may refer back, but which are also different to the extent that they are moments of supplementation or transformation of meaning.¹⁰⁶

Writing is not simply a conduit for speech, nor speech simply a conduit for thought, though traces remain. The traces interconnect by means of “assemblages,” where a trace of meaning connects back to other meanings, and differs from them in the moment of their re-representation. Each new trace happens in a new space, a new time, and it never quite expresses what has come before, either in thought or antecedent expression. This is “movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes ‘historically’ constituted as a fabric of differences.” The result is an “incessant synthesis that is constantly led back upon itself, back upon its assembled and assembling self, by retentional traces and protentional openings.”¹⁰⁷

For this reason, Derrida replaces “grammar,” in the sense of uncoverable patterns of essential meaning, with “grammatology,” mapping contingent chains of traces, traceable similarities, but also the differences that occur in the transpositions.¹⁰⁸ He replaces analysis of the generalizable patterns that constitute structures of meaning with “deconstruction” of trace-to-trace genealogies, “interweaving” circumstantial similarity and with contingent difference.¹⁰⁹ Derrida’s agenda becomes a critique of (not coincidentally Western, male, imperialistic) “logocentrism” – word-centeredness and reason-centeredness.

But then he pushes his analysis over an edge where meaning disintegrates. “The radical dissimilarity of … the graphic and phonic … exclude[s] derivation,” he says. “Writing is not mere supplement, addition, techne. It adds only to replace.”¹¹⁰ Meaning “continually breaks up in a chain of different substitutions.”¹¹¹ And so, in the “absence of the referent … there is nothing outside of the text.” Such is the “irreducible complexity” of meaning “which metaphysics cannot think,”¹¹² producing a “transcendental disquietude.”¹¹³ “Signs are all there is … a play, which is the absence of the transcendental signified.” Such is “the game of the world,”¹¹⁴ where there is “no depth to be had for this bottomless chessboard where being is set in play.”¹¹⁵ And so, with this “undoing of logocentrism … there is no origin, no essence” of meaning.

Then, an abyss: “there have never been anything but … substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references; … language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.” The transposed meaning “comes in a place of lapse, a nonsignified or a nonrepresented, a nonpresence. There is no present before it, it is not preceding by anything but itself.” And “[t]he concept of repression is thus, at least as much as that of forgetting, the product of philosophy (of meaning).”¹¹⁶

Humorous Derrida, endlessly clever Derrida, who sets out to defeat word-centric reason with word games, logic with logical inversions, capital “R” Reason with smart scholarly reason. Not that he’s unaware that these apostasies may also be hypocrisies. “The enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.” “Only half in jest” does he speak.¹¹⁷

Some of Derrida’s peers in the business of theorizing meaning were not impressed. Says Noam Chomsky^§MS3.1.2e of Derrida, “I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so I tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood.”¹¹⁸

And John Searle:^§MS2.3.1b “I believe that Derrida’s work, at least those portions I have read, is not just a series of muddles and gimmicks;” also it is a “text [that] is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is.” And it falls into the trap of taking metaphysics seriously.¹¹⁹

A joke that has for some time done the rounds in academe, goes like this: “what do you get when you cross a deconstructionist and a mafioso? You get a proposition you can’t understand.”¹²⁰ But of course, Derrida is understandable, his meanings, a revulsion in the face of the terrors of Enlightenment.

Perhaps Chomsky and Searle don’t want to understand Derrida, or perhaps they can’t understand him because he lays down a challenge that is outside what is thinkable in their intellectual systems. Derrida positions himself as an outsider to these systems, and stays an outsider, though a figure who nevertheless manages to find himself on the inside of some fancy academic institutions.

Still, just before we go over a cliff where patterned meaningfulness disappears, there are some productive insights in Derrida. These we want to capture with the notion of “design,”^§MS0.4.1 as we attempt to get past Derrida’s philosophical apostasies, nay philosophical hypocrisies.

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¹⁰² Benoît Peeters, 2010 [2013], Derrida: A Biography, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, p.19.

¹⁰³ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1973]a, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Signs,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 113.

¹⁰⁴ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1973]b, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, translated by D.B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 6.

¹⁰⁵ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 30, 295, 31–34.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., pp. 70–71, 54.

¹⁰⁷ Jacques Derrida, 1968 [1973], “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 141, 153.

¹⁰⁸ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 60.

¹⁰⁹ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1973]a, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Signs,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 111.

¹¹⁰ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 54, 144–45.

¹¹¹ Jacques Derrida, 1968 [1973], “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 159.

¹¹² Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 158, 167.

¹¹³ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1973]b, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, translated by D.B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 14.

¹¹⁴ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 50.

¹¹⁵ Jacques Derrida, 1968 [1973], “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 154.

¹¹⁶ Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1997], Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 159, 303, 286.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 24, 216.

¹¹⁸ http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.com/2011/01/noam-chomsky-on-derrida-foucault-lacan.html

¹¹⁹ John R. Searle, 1983, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books (October 27).

¹²⁰ Peter L. Berger, 1996, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61-64. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Jacques Derrida’s "Of Grammatology" §MS0.4d