SOURCE: Chi-hui Chien. “‘Theft's Way’: A Comparative Study of Chuang Tzu's Tao and Derridean Trace.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 17, no. 1 (March 1990): 31-49.

[In the following essay, Chi-hui Chien argues that there is a conceptual similarity between the ideas of Chuang Tzu and those of French philosopher Jacques Derrida because of the way in which both give authority to a shifting viewpoint rather than a fixed reality which can be definitively signified.]

Where there is recognition of right there must be recognition of wrong; where there is recognition of wrong there must be recognition of right. Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of Heaven. He too recognizes a “this,” but a “this” which is also “that,” a “that” which is also “this.” His “that” has both a right and a wrong in it; his “this” too has both a right and a wrong in it. So, in fact, does he still have a “this” and “that”? Or does he in fact no longer have a “this” and “that”? A state in which “this” and “that” no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So, I say, the best thing to use is clarity.¹

—Chuang Tzu

‘Older’ than Being itself, our language has no name for such a difference. But we ‘already know’ that if it is unnamable, this is not simply provisional; it is not because our language has still not found or received this name, or because we would have to look for it in another language, outside the finite system of our language. It is because there is no name for this, not even essence or Being—not even the name ‘differance,’ which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and continually breaks up in a chain of different substitutions.²

—Jacques Derrida

Between Jacques Derrida, a key figure in the development of contemporary “post-modernism,” and Chuang Tzu, the second founder of philosophical Taoism, there exist striking affinities. Both of them are suspicious of claims asserting the rational availability of truth and the capacity of language to “name” reality. They even use the same notion of “freeplay” to describe their anti-conventional way of triggering knowledge.³ Furthermore, Chuang Tzu's ironic style is just as deconstructive as that of Derrida, exposing the blind spots in a supposedly unified structure and thus showing its self-transgression and undecidability.⁴

My argument thus claims that Chuang Tzu's Tao is as deconstructive a maneuver as Derrida's “trace.” Their target is the self-identity of a word sign, a binary combination of the signified and the signifier, which “at least since Gottlob Frege, frames all questions of identity in terms of ‘meaning.’”⁵ Chuang Tzu and Derrida face the same dilemma: how can they use the only available tool, language, while at the same time deconstructing it? Their solution is a provisional one, which means untenable but “necessary,” in order for the thought process to continue. Their solution, which can be described as a strategy of “effacement,” is shown in the paradox throughout Chuang Tzu's writing, and Derrida's “deconstructing” the self-contradictory nature of other philosophers' discourses.⁶ The two philosophers intend us to see that when we are saying, “I know …,” we only mean that we are approaching an appreciation, not an ultimate truth. This act of off/knowing bears no comparison with the closed dyad of rationality and non-rationality. Tao and Trace thus propose an off/logic which aims at criticizing our way of thinking.

When recognizing that the dialectical relationship between the signified and signifier is too simplified a paradigm and thus an alleged one, Chuang Tzu and Derrida cast in modo reverso the traditional claim that the signifier mirrors the signified. Derrida argues that in linguistic signs it is the signifier which “imprints” the signified, and Chuang Tzu reverses the hierarchical order of useful/useless, beautiful/ugly, big/small, life/death, right/wrong, etc.

Derrida's attack on language as “an obedient vehicle of thought” (actually the case is the other way around) becomes clear in his criticism of Western metaphysics, a science of “presence.”⁷ Adapting Saussure, Derrida declares that signs are internally related, so that so-called metaphysical formulae cannot point to a Being outside of themselves. As Saussure proves at the simplest level, the signifiers “bat” and “cat” are distinguished by the “arbitrary” (which means “for no reason”) switching of initial consonants. This change in the signifiers affiliates them to the senses (signifieds) “bat” and “cat” respectively. But Saussure says that these signifieds too are internal to language. A word must operate in a relationship of signifying with other words. Robert Magliola explains:

For example, horizontally (syntactically) it has relationship with the other words in its sentence (and beyond); and vertically (lexically) it has relationship with many cultural ‘definitions,’ each of the latter, of course, relating in turn to many other definitions, and so the semantic lines extending from even one word fan out further and further.⁸

Therefore we see that the relationship between a signifier and signified is a kind of “economy of differences,” not the representation of the “outside” that metaphysics suggests.

However while Saussure proves specific sounds are not naturally bonded to specific senses (thus various languages have various sounds of the same sense), he insists that there is a natural bond between the order of sense in general and the order of sound in general. This alleged natural bond would be, for Derrida, still another transcendental signified, and thus due for demolition. I will explain how Derrida deconstructs this particular version of self-identity later. For the moment it is important for us to note that it is Derrida who pushes the idea of artificial signs to its ultimate, saying that “There is not a single signified that escapes (and if so, only to eventually succumb to) the play of signifying ‘referrings’ that constitute language.”⁹ For Derrida, even signifieds do not “stay put,” but become “signifiers” in turn. There is no Transcendental Signified (ultimate signified outside of language) to “back the system up.” We can use the following diagram to illustrate Derrida's revolutionary thesis: language affects our way of thinking, not the other way around.

Chuang Tzu's deconstruction of the contradictory of the self-identity principle is shown in his concept of “equalization” and “difference.” Realizing the limit of the closed dyad of self-identity, which always presupposes and broaches an answer in the affirmative in order for the nature of anything in particular to be defined as an entity (that is, “whatever is, is”), Chuang Tzu argues that “whatever is, is not”:

Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument.¹⁰

Chuang Tzu thus criticizes the traditional bivalence of signified and signifier:

If from the standpoint of the minute we look at what is large, we cannot see to the end. If from the standpoint of what is large we look at what is minute, we cannot distinguish it clearly. The minute is the smallest of the small, the gigantic is the largest of the large, and it is therefore convenient to distinguish between them. But this is merely a matter of circumstance. Before we can speak of coarse or fine, however, there must be some form. If a thing has no form, then number cannot express its dimensions, and if it cannot be encompassed, then numbers cannot express its size. We can use our minds to visualize the fineness of things. But what words cannot describe and the mind cannot succeed in visualizing—this has nothing to do with coarseness or fineness.¹¹

Chuang Tzu expresses his doubts about the conventional notion of opposition, which always works as “big is big” and “small is small.” It is crucial to notice how he casts the directional relation of signified and signifier in modo reverso:

If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we perceived the law of difference.¹²

According to the conventional law of dialectic, we believe that heaven must be big and a tip of hair must be small. But when Chuang Tzu breaks this law of dialectic and reverses the conventional order of ‘small” and “big,” what he is doing is satirizing the logocentric closure of the law of dialectic. If, according to Derrida, every sign is discursive and caught up in an indicative process, then Chuang Tzu is saying the same thing here: why must the big be the big and thus exclude that the big be the small? His law of difference thus asserts that everything is absolutely different from everything else, and thus that it is absurd to set up a dialectical relationship. In terms of signified and signifier, Chuang Tzu's law of difference is questioning why there must be a signified, and ultimately why the signified cannot be a signifier. Chuang Tzu recognizes, as Derrida does, that signifiers converge upon a concept, a signified, “from every direction and make it in every way a signifier, that is, only a signifier and totally a signifier.”¹³

Chuang Tzu uses another concept, “equalization,” to deconstruct the final signified:

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P'eng-tsu died young. Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.¹⁴

Here Chuang Tzu is arguing for the idea that everything as signifier is totally and equally different from all other signifiers, and that equalization means that the static value of word signs is denied therefore, longevity or short life, heaven or earth, I and other people or things, lose their peculiar assigned meanings, in other words, become pure signifiers. Chuang Tzu's law of difference and equalization thus aims at something similar to Derrida's deconstructive maneuver: to escape from the arbitrary nature of the principle of dialectical identity.

The two philosophers find that any linguistic sign or value system is based on a “founding” principle and is regulated by it. In order to escape from such a metaphysical practice, they are very careful to argue for slippery signification. Let's examine how Chuang Tzu brings about his Tao; and Derrida, his “Differance.”

The strategy of deconstruction is thus a double game. On the one hand it has to use language but on the other hand it attempts to erase it. For Derrida, rational activity is not an identity of the kind, I = I, but a difference, relationship to something else. Derrida fabricates the neologism “difference.” In English the word “difference” is spelled in the same way as the French word “difference,” but in French the penultimate “e’ when pronounced sounds like “a” in the English word “father.” When Derrida substitutes a written “a” for the correct spelling “e,” the substituted graphic sign ‘a” goes naturally unheard by a Frenchman. Since the difference between “difference” and “difference” cannot be heard, “difference as a term acts out a kind of devoidness, ‘neither a word nor a concept.”¹⁵ In other words, we really know that there is a difference, but we cannot name or identify it as a thing. Derrida is saying that we know something only by “differentiating from what it is not,”¹⁶ not by knowing what it is.

Chuang Tzu, like Derrida, is keenly aware that “the metaphysical tongue is double,”¹⁷ subjecting the unconditioned to a condition. In his “kidnapping” of Confucius, achieved by following the totalizing logic to its final consequences, thus finding the “aporia” or “excess” in Confucian discourse, Chuang Tzu fixes his glance upon a small but tell-tale moment in a bold and most surprising gesture. He puns off the Confucian Way (Tao) and theft's way (Tao):

One of Robber Chih's followers once asked Chih, ‘Does the thief too have a Way? Chih replied, ‘How could he get anywhere if he didn't have a Way? Making shrewd guesses as to how much booty is stashed away in the room is sageliness; being the first one in is bravery; being the last one out is righteousness; knowing whether the job can be pulled off or not is wisdom; dividing up the loot fairly is benevolence. No one in the world ever succeeded in becoming a great thief if he didn't have all five!’¹⁸

According to the classic Confucian model, the idea of the five virtues, sageliness, bravery, righteousness, wisdom and benevolence (the signified) is awaiting its equivalent voice (the signifier), and this voice is the sage, who constitutes the word sign, the Way. However, by substituting a thief for the sage, Chuang Tzu suspends the supposedly natural bond between the idea and the expression. Since the phonetic sign … is heard by a Chinese as the Confucian Tao, the graph … (Tao as the thief's way) deconstructs the logocentric phone. And the crucial substitution of the thief's way for the sage's way, like the Derridean substitution of a for e in “difference,” is not a nameable identity. In the logocentric paradigm, Chuang Tzu's Tao can thus be negatively indicated as follows: Chuang Tzu's Tao = neither the Confucian Way nor its opposite, the thief's way. It is this “absolute negative reference” which leads Chuang Tzu and Derrida away from entrapment by ontological priority and its many other variants of begetting. This provisional off/way is nicknamed by Derrida, differance/trace/substitution and by Chuang Tzu, Tao/no-thing (Wu)/forgetfulness (Wang)/nature (Tzu jan)/no-feeling (Wu Ch'ing)/simplicity (P'u)/freeplay (hsiao yao yu).

I think the above discussion of how Chuang Tzu attacks the mutually mirroring activity of language is in agreement with Wai-lim Yip's observation concerning Taoism. Yip says that the Taoists have “the recognition of the inadequacy of language and conceptualization. …”¹⁹ Since I am now going to argue that Chuang Tzu's knowledge is a kind of Derridean difference, I must first mention those who seem to disagree. Wai-lim Yip, for example, seems to understand Chuang Tzu's Tao in a logocentric way:

In order to preseve things in their pristine wholeness, the Taoists evoke a deverbalized world that is beyond self, beyond consciousness, beyond conceptual knowledge and beyond language where things can come freely to disclose before us as things.²⁰

Robert Magliola also maintains that in the Tao “the innerwards and outerwards, the nominans and nomen, may really relate to each other in a very complex, ‘co-originative’ way. The ‘I utterance’ both mirrors the originating factor and is mirrored by it.”²¹ In other words, the Taoist Tao is still operating like an absolute Origin, a metaphysical determination of truth. Therefore the comparison between Chuang Tzu's Tao and Derrida's trace can be “honest” only if I can demonstrate that after Chuang Tzu deconstructs the binary thinking of logocentrism, he does not privilege the signifier either. He does not propose that the signifier transcends language.

Chuang Tzu and Derrida both recognize the quandary. After using the law of contradiction to contradict itself, can they go on to affirm the contradictory of the law of contradiction, the “other side” of the logocentric coin? Isn't a mystical “unity of opposites” logocentric too? Their solution, a provisional one, can be stated in this way: after undoing the logocentric opposition, they maintain that the opposite of it must also be “put under erasure.” Chuang Tzu and Derrida believe that this is the off/way whereby we acquire knowledge. In terms of the formula, the solution sous rature (under erasure) runs like this: Y = neither Y nor s Y, meaning that everything is neither self-caused nor other caused. Everything is a “such as,” not an “as such.”²² It is through the “directional” movement of this “absolute negative reference” that meaning is produced.

The best way for us to see the structure of Derrida's trace and Chuang Tzu's Tao is to start from the idea of “alterity,” which means a totally other, or absence/otherness of self or meaning. Since a sign is never completely transparent, part of the meaning is absent. That which is hidden leaves its trace in the visible sign. The strategy of “taking inside out” or exposing the double register of a sign is exercised by Derrida and Chuang Tzu, when they try a counter reading of their adversary's discourse in order to cut away the adversary's ground of knowing.

In our discussion of Derrida's placement of the signified under erasure, we saw the latent contradiction between premises and conclusion in Saussure. Saussure asserts that all phonic signifiers, like graphic signifiers, are arbitrary; however, he still states that in general a linguistic sign is a binary combination of signified and signifier. He still privileges logocentrism. This self-engendered paradox, produced by Saussure's own argument but against his own intention, can be called “aporia,” an unpassable path, or an ultimate impasse of thought which is produced by a rhetoric “that always insinuates its own textual workings into the truth claims of philosophy.”²³ This excess or surplus, which neither belongs to the proclaimed logical system nor escapes it entirely, is the effect of differance. In Derrida's criticism of Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levi-Strauss, he continues to deconstruct such ideas of origin and foundation by showing them to be always already inscribed by a differential trace of meaning. Let's continue our example of the word sign, “present.” Vincent Descombes says:

It must also be both a present that is already past and a present that is still to come. By virtue of this past that is still present, the past as such is for us a present which is no longer present, while the future has always been, and will always be, a present which is not yet present. It is at this point that difference appears, the difference or non-coincidence of the present with itself. It must be decided here what significance to accord such a difference dividing the present. Either it means that nothing is ever altogether absent, or that the present itself never really takes place.²⁴

Irreducible systems of thought carry the “always already absent present,”²⁵ the other half of the sign. The “always already absent present” questions the internal self-sufficiency of a theory which is given over to a system and a concept. The “trace” thus exceeds all the bounds of structure, but is suppressed by the structure's static conceptualization.

If everything is now not seen in terms of “coupled opposition” but of difference, i.e., everything is “self-differing” and “self-deferring,”²⁶ this unnamable movement of differance is the movement of trace:

This linkage means that each ‘element’—phoneme or grapheme—is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system. This linkage, this weaving, is the text, which is produced only through the transformation of another text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.²⁷

(Italics added.)

Regarding the movement of trace, Robert Magliola explains as follows:

La trace, rendered into English, is “trace” or “track” or “trail.” La trace suggests, then, (1) an absence (the ‘thing’ as such being bracketed is not at all there. …) but also (2) a ‘direction’ (if the ‘thing is not at all present it is still leaving a ‘trace’, a clue which we can ‘track’ and whereby we choose to move directionally), and (3) a ‘movement’ (the ‘thing’ is moving ahead of us or once moved; and we are moving along its ‘trail’). Derrida's ‘work of deconstruction,’ in this context, as we shall see, is precisely to eliminate the ‘thing as such’ yet somehow preserve the rest.²⁸

The movement of trace thus affirms that “everything” is neither a thing nor the opposite of a thing (a nothing), that alleged identity is “given the slip,”²⁹ that it is not self-sufficient. Everything thus adds itself to an absolutely different other “as a plus that replaces a minus,” not “as a plus to a plus,”³⁰ and the difference is irreducible; the substitution operates or dissiminates ad infinitum. For Derrida, “all things are not alike in that each of them is unlike the other.”³¹ The “Sameness” is just “the dissimulating substitution for Center.”³²

In Chuang Tzu's kidnapping the dangerous dialectical closure of Confucius's Tao, we have already seen that Chuang Tzu's Tao resists dialectical opposition in order to escape from such a closure. Therefore, if Derrida's differance and trace aim at deconstructing, not privileging, another ontological truth, Chuang Tzu's Tao aims at the same thing: Tao, which is neither a word nor a concept, attempts “not a theological thematics but the theme of strategy.”³³ For Chuang Tzu this strategy is carried out by using “paradox.”

Before we go into examining Chuang Tzu's deconstructive strategy, we have to understand how Chuang Tzu provisionally defines his Tao. Professor Mou Tsung-shan in his Nineteen Chapters on Chinese Philosophy (Chung-kuo che-hsueh shih-chiu chiang) says that Chuang Tzu's Tao has “the double character of wu and yu.”³⁴ Mou Tsung-sun defines wu as “no-thing”; yu as “to be a certain being with a certain direction or orientation”³⁵ as against the wu which is usually wrongly translated as “inaction,” and yu, a full presence. Mou's contribution to our understanding of Chuang Tzu is when most of the scholarly interpretation of Chuang Tzu's Tao emphasizes the reconciliation of wu and yu, he rightly points out that wu is not an ontological concept and that the relationship between wu and yu is not reconciliation but circularity. He says that wu and yu cannot be separated but operate in a “deep” and “profound” way, i.e., operate in a way of mystery (hsuan), a notion which comes from Lao Tzu:

These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery—
The gateway of the manifold secrets.(36)

Mou's interpretation of Chuang Tzu's Tao reminds us of Derrida's interpretation of his differance:

There is, then probably no choice to be made between two lines of thought; our task is rather to reflect on the circularity which makes the one pass into the other indefinitely.³⁷

And this circle is one “with a definiciency that is not yet, or is already no longer, absence, negativity, nonbeing, lack, silence.”³⁸ Rather, “it is nothing that any philosopheme, that is, any dialectic, however determinate, can capture.”³⁹ In other words, this Tao or differance is “perhaps an entirely different question.”⁴⁰

This entirely different question thus aims not at establishing truth but aims at a deconstructive reasoning, which tries to undercut the hypostasis of ideas and tear open the deceptive appearance of truth. Mou thus says that the emphasis of Chuang Tzu's Tao is on hua tiao, which literally means “to dissolve,”—“to deconstruct,” (my translation). Therefore, when Confucius tries to define “What is jen [benevolence]?,” Chuang Tzu tries not to answer the question “What is … ?,” rather the question “How does Jen come out?” In escaping a “special determination,” Chuang Tzu also avoids the “analytical” and “metaphysical” assumption.⁴¹

If differance designates a deployment of a movement or a relation to an impossible presence, Chuang Tzu's Tao, with its circular movement of wu and yu attempts the same: not to set up an ultimate truth and its founding opposition. Chuang Tzu says:

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.⁴²

Chuang Tzu's yu is thus not directed to an object outside, but to create a certain being; however, this being must return to wu, which means a suspension of fullfilment or accomplishment of desire, a spacing distance and a temporary delaying from yu, a full presence of truth. I would like to “radicalize” the double character of Chuang Tzu's Tao in a Derridean way, and demonstrate that Chuang Tzu's preferred trope of paradox (chen-yen-je-fan) shows a deconstructive reasoning.

In Magliola's comparison of Nagarjuna's middle path and Derrida's “and/or between “and/or,” he cites the following anecdote in order to demonstrate Buddhist differance:

A monk came to be taught, and Isan, seeing him, made as if to rise. The monk said, ‘please don't get up! Isan said, ‘I haven't sat down yet!’ The monk said, ‘I haven't bowed yet.’ Isan said, ‘You rude creature!’ (Reginald H. Blyth's commentary: We may suppose that the monk had already bowed, at least at the entrance of the room, and that when he said, ‘I haven't bowed yet,’ he was playing Isan's game of the absolute, but Isan suddenly jumps to the relative, and scolds the monk.)⁴³

And Magliola comments as follows:

Such is Buddhist differentialism: the authentic Buddhist is not centered on the logocentric (the mundane, the relative) nor the transcendent (the absolute). The Master wrenches the viewpoint of the monk this way and that, so he might learn to live the going-on of alterity.⁴⁴

In Chuang Tzu we find a similar story:

Carpenter Shih went to Ch'i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn't even glance around and went on his way without stopping. The apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, “Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don't even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?’ ‘Forget it—say no more!’ said the carpenter. ‘It's a worthless tree!’ Make boats out of it and they'd sink; make coffins and they'd rot in no time; make vessels and they'd break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It's not a timber tree—there is nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be that old!’ After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in midjourney. They bring it on themselves—the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it's the same way with all other things. As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I'm a worthless tree?’ When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said, ‘If it's so intent on being of no use, what's it doing there at the village shrine?’ ‘Shhh! Say no more! It's only resting there. If we carp and criticize it, it will merely conclude that we don't understand it. Even if it weren't at the shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards, you'll be way off.⁴⁵

The argument concerning uselessness and use should not be read as it usually is—to mean that there is no need for man to do anything but rest and enjoy his longevity. Instead, the emphasis of this argument should be on the shifting viewpoints of difference. At the beginning the carpenter is quite sure of the existence of a faithful relationship between appearance (the old, though beautiful tree, the signifier) and truth (the worthless tree, the signified). But in the dream when the tree retorts, “How do you know I'm a worthless tree?”, the tree is like a deconstructionist teaching the carpenter that language may settle on various referents. Hence why do you associate my use with my age and why do you identify your point of view of use with mine? As the carpenter tells the dream to the apprentice, the latter cannot comprehend the lesson and continues to pair the signifier with the signified, asking, “Now that the tree wants to be of no use, why does it want to serve the shrine?” However, the carpenter has already caught the clue from the dream. Thus he can teach his apprentice the alterity of each signifer (or signified): when the tree serves the shrine (therefore seeming useless for other purposes), the tree is really deriving greatest use for itself (though appearing useless in the eyes of mankind). Like the Master in the Buddhist story, Chuang Tzu's carpenter learns that “alleged centers are not to be foisted onto the differential flow: rather, alleged centers are really a matter of shifting perspectives, and the adept is one who can control these shifts at will.”⁴⁶

The double character of Tao, wu and yu, thus should be understood in terms of “both one and the other” and “neither one nor the other.” … It is impossible to decide and thus undecidable. The paradox throughout the writing of Chuang Tzu such as “And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too”⁴⁷ becomes the only way for Chuang Tzu to express his thought. Chuang Tzu describes his own style this way;

He expounded them in odd and outlandish terms, in brash and bombastic language, in unbound and unbordered phrases, abandoning himself to the times without partisanship, not looking at things from one angle only. He believed that the world was drowned in turbidness and that it was impossible to address it in sober language. So he used ‘goblet words’ to pour out endless changes, ‘repeated words’ to give a ring of truth, and ‘imputed words’ to impart greater breadth.⁴⁸

This is Chuang Tzu's Tao, the Way of the hinge, and “When the hinge is fitted onto the bracket, it can respond endlessly.”⁴⁹ That is, Chuang Tzu's Tao disseminates things endlessly like Derrida's “bottomless chessboard.”⁵⁰ This is what Chuang Tzu means when he says:

Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the ‘freeing of the bound’. There are those who cannot free themselves, because they are bound by things. But nothing can ever win against Heaven—that's the way it has always been. What would I have to resent?⁵¹

In the butterfly dream, Chuang Tzu says that “he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.”⁵² As the self-identity dissolves, there must not be a closed pattern of formal opposition. At one and the same time, Chuang Tzu's world seems real and seems illusory. It is not at all strange for him to fail “to shoot referential target, fail to ‘hit bull's eye’.”⁵³ The crucial point to note is that “Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction [difference]!”⁵⁴ It is this “between” that goes on as the off/way of Chuang Tzu's Tao and Derrida's trace.

Notes

1. Chuang Tzu Chi Shih [Annotated Works of Chuang Tzu] (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1967), 2:31-33. … For the English translation, I am using The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 40, hereinafter referred to as the Chuang Tzu translation.

2. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern, 1973), p. 159.

3. See the first chapter of Chuang Tzu, “Free and Easy Wandering.” For Derrida's idea of freeplay, see “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins, 1970), pp. 247-265.

4. The rhetorical nature of language is discussed in the chapters entitled “Jacques Derrida: Language Against Itself,” “From Voice to Text: Derrida's Critique of Philosophy,” and “Nietzsche: Philosophy and Deconstruction,” in Deconstruction: Theory & Practice, by Christopher Norris (New York, N. Y.: Methuen, 1982), pp. 18-68.

5. Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Pr., 1984), p. 6.

6. “Effacement” is used as a technical term. The idea of effacement is discussed in Magliola's Derrida on the Mend, pp. 21-24 and “Chuang Tzu and His School of Taoism,” A History of Chinese Philosophy, by Fung Yu-lan, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1952), pp. 238-39.

7. Norris, p. 30.

8. Magliola, p. 13.

9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976), p. 7. Here I'm using Robert Magliola's translation of this particular passage. See Magliola, p. 12.

10. Chuang Tzu 2:51. Translation, pp. 48-49.

11. Chuang Tzu 17:252-253. Translation, 178.

12. Ibid., p. 179.

13. Magliola, p. 12.

14. Chuang Tzu 2:39. Translation, p. 143.

15. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 130.

16. Magliola, p. 22.

17. Vincent Descombes, “Difference,” Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 1980), p. 140.

18. Chuang Tzu 10:156-157. Translation, pp. 108-109.

19. Wai-lim Yip, “A New Line A New Mind: Language and the Original World,” Literary Theory Today, ed. M. A. Abbas and Takwai Wond (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Pr., 1981), p. 165.

20. Ibid.

21. Magliola, p. 17.

22. For the idea of self-originating, see Derrida on the Mend, pp. 105-111. For the idea of “radical metaphoricity” see p. 31.

23. Norris, 49.

24. Modern French Philosophy, p. 143.

25. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xvii.

26. For the notion of “differance,” see Of Grammatology, p. xxix.

27. Positions, pp. 37-38.

28. Magliola, p. 29.

29. Ibid, p. 37.

30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 215.

31. Magliola, p. 27.

32. Ibid.

33. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 135.

34. Mou Tsung-shan, pp. 92-135.

35. Ibid.

36. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1973), 1:1. I am using D. C. Lau's translation (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 57.

37. Speech and Phenomena, p. 128.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Mou, p. 124.

42. Chuang Tzu, 2:33. Translation, p. 43.

43. Magliola, p. 102.

44. Ibid.

45. Chuang Tzu, 4:77-79d. Translation, pp. 63-65.

46. Magliola, p. 102.

47. Chuang Tzu, 2:32-33. Translation, p. 40.

48. Ibid, 33:474-475. Translation, p. 373.

49. Ibid, 2:32. Translation, p. 40.

50. Speech and Phenomena, p. 154.

51. Chuang Tzu, 2:53. Translation, p. 84-85.

52. Ibid, p. 49.

53. Magliola, p. 181.

54. Chuang Tzu, 2:53. Translation, p. 49.