SOURCE: Atkins, G. Douglas. “The Sign as a Structure of Difference: Derridean Deconstruction and Some of Its Implications.” In Semiotic Themes, edited by Richard T. DeGeorge, pp. 133-47. Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1981.

[In the following essay, Atkins discusses the ideas of Derrida, a leading practitioner of deconstruction, defending him from accusations of nihilism and undermining the humanistic tradition in literature.]

A major force to be reckoned with in contemporary literary criticism is Jacques Derrida. Derrida's star has risen precipitously since his participation in 1966 in a Johns Hopkins international symposium, where he took structuralism, and particularly Lévi-Strauss, to task and inaugurated deconstructive criticism in America. The following year he published La Voix et le phénomène: introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, De la grammatologie, and L'écriture et la différence, all of which are now available in English. In 1972 Derrida published three more books: La dissémination, Positions, and Marges de la philosophie. His monumental, and probably untranslatable, Glas appeared in 1974. That these books and various essays, several already available in English, are changing the face of literary criticism is apparent in several ways: Derrida and his theories have been embraced, in varying degrees, by such influential American critics and theorists as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, all of Yale, where Derrida teaches each fall; numerous essays and books have begun to appear from others influenced by Derrida, including Joseph Riddel's study of William Carlos Williams, Pietro Pucci's recent book on Hesiod, Naomi Schor's study of Zola, and Howard Felperin's Shakespearean Representation; sessions on deconstruction have become prominent at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association; journals devoted to deconstructive criticism, such as Glyph, are now published, and deconstructive criticism regularly appears in PMLA and Diacritics; and, not least important, frequent attacks on Derrideanism by traditionalist critics and scholars appear in publications ranging from The New York Times to The New Republic to Critical Inquiry.

Among the charges in these attacks are the claims that Derrida and his followers are needlessly obscure and that deconstructive criticism is nihilistic and deeply antithetical to the so-called humanist tradition. Many of these charges stem, in my view, from a misunderstanding of Derrida. His work is admittedly complex, his arguments often convoluted, and his style increasingly difficult. Still, I hope to shed some light on Derrideanism and to clear away some of the confusions surrounding the theory that so many regard as threatening and dangerous. Though my effort here will be limited, I hope to provide the kind of general introduction and consideration that has rarely been attempted on Derrida; most discussions in which Derrida figures prominently assume a basic knowledge of his thought or else proceed to offer an alternative without themselves evincing a grounding in that thought.

One cannot hope to understand Derrida apart from his undoing/preserving of the concept of the sign central to modern linguistics. Modern linguistics is often said to begin with Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale. Probably Saussure's most important argument was that no intrinsic relationship obtains between the two parts of the sign, the signifier and the signified. In his own words, “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary … the linguistic sign is arbitrary.”¹ This is due to the differential character of language. Because the sign, phonic as well as graphic, is a structure of difference, signs being made possible through the differences between sounds, that which is signified by the signifier is never present in and of itself. Word and thing, word and thought, sign and meaning can never become one.

Derrida plays constantly with this discovery that the sign marks a place of difference. But whereas Saussure and Saussurian semiology rest with the binary opposition signifier/signified, Derrida puts such terms sous rature, that is, “under erasure.” He writes a word, crosses it out, and prints both word and deletion, for though the word is inaccurate it is necessary and must remain legible. This idea of sous rature is an analogue of the undoing/preserving play that everywhere characterizes, indeed creates, Derridean thought (“Neither/nor is at once at once or rather or rather”²) and so distinguishes it from Saussurian.

Derrida carefully analyzes the sign and the concept of difference, noticing several things. He recognizes, first of all, that the possibility of the sign, the substitution of the sign for the thing in a system of differences, depends upon deferral, that is, putting off into the future any grasping of the “thing itself.” But space as well as time bears on the concept of difference in a fundamental way. The temporal interval, the deferring into the future of any grasping of the thing, irreducibly divides all spatial presence. In other words, if perception of objects depends upon perception of their differences, each present element must refer to an element other than itself. The never-annulled difference from the completely other precisely opens the possibility of thought. As Jeffrey Mehlman has remarked, “Derrida's effort has been to show that the play of difference, which has generally been viewed as exterior to a (spatial or temporal) present, is, in fact, always already at work within that present as the condition of its possibility.”³

Involved in the constitution of the sign, according to Derrida, is the “trace” of a past element that was never fully present. That element was never fully present because it must always already refer to something other than itself. This “trace” refers to what can never become present, for the interval separating sign from thing must always reconstitute itself. Now it would seem that Derrida has unarguably gone beyond Saussurian linguistics, for as Alan Bass has written, “Any other alternative, any attempt to save the value of full presence would lead to the postulation of a point of origin not different from itself (an in-different origin), thus destroying the essentially differential quality of language.”⁴ Derrida coins the word differance to describe the structure of the sign, which is always already marked by both deferring and differing (both senses occur, of course, in the French verb différer).

A few more remarks may be in order here on the important “trace,” which creates the undoing/preserving that I have called fundamental to Derrida's thought. After defining “trace” as “the part played by the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign,” Gayatri Spivak proceeds to term it “the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.”⁵ Because the structure of the sign is determined by the “trace” or track of that other which is forever absent, the word “sign” must itself be placed “under erasure.” Derrida writes, “the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is … ?’”⁶ The “trace” thus destroys the idea of simple presence, the desire of which, argues Derrida, characterizes Western metaphysics. The idea of origin is similarly destroyed, for origin is always other than itself, the idea of origin depending upon the production of temporal and spatial difference that must precede any origin.

Derrida would thus replace semiology with grammatology. “The sign cannot be taken as a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), as ‘semiology,’ the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied ‘under erasure,’ always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such.”⁷ The term “grammatology” is itself expressive of Derridean strategy, for it reflects an unresolved contradiction. Whereas the “grammè” is the written mark, the sign “under erasure,” “logos” is at once “law,” “order,” “origin,” and “phonè,” the voice. What the “grammè” does, as I have suggested, is precisely to deconstruct the authority of the “logos” and so of the privilege always afforded to the spoken word, itself supposedly an indication of presence. Grammatology is, then, as a term an example of sous rature, of the undoing yet preserving of apparent opposites. The undoing is, of course, no more necessary than the preserving, for without the latter another term would be privileged in a new hierarchy, simple opposition being maintained though reversed, and the “trace” ignored. With the “trace,” however, one thing is defined not simply by its difference from another but by its difference from itself, a “trace” of the radically other always already being present. Derrida is perhaps most forceful on this point in his 1966 deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss, where he undoes yet preserves the latter's well-known binary opposition engineer/bricoleur: “From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer … as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, … the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.”⁸

It is fair to say, with Spivak, that Derrida is thus asking us “to change certain habits of mind: … the origin is a trace; contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time.”⁹ The implications of this are numerous and radical, for they reach, attack, subvert the roots of Western thought, defined by Derrida as logocentric and fundamentally desirous of presence. The desire of presence appears, in J. Hillis Miller's words, as “Time as presence, the other as presence, the presence of consciousness to itself, language as the pure reflection of the presence of consciousness, literary history as a history of consciousness, the possibility of reaching an original presence from which all the others derive.”¹⁰ Since Miller has admirably described the way in which Derrida deconstructs this fundamental desire of presence at every turn, and since it should be clear from my own account above how difference renders presence in these senses impossible, I shall not dwell on the point but turn instead to others not so well treated in the commentary.

We might begin with the question of truth. In brilliant analyses of Plato,¹¹ Derrida associates writing, the structure of difference marked by the “trace,” and so the disappearance of a present origin of presence, with the Platonic idea of epekeina tes ousias (the beyond of all presence). Because Plato posits that which cannot be viewed directly (i.e., the sun) as the origin of the visible, Derrida is able to demonstrate that the presence of the thing itself, the unity of referent and signified, is inseparable from the concept of grammatical difference. If the origin of the thing itself is, as Plato asserts, the invisible “beyond” of all presence, the thing itself can obviously never be present. Truth defined as absolute presence, as presence of the eidos, thus becomes simultaneously possible and impossible. As the “trace” requires, the thing itself is doubled, true and not-true. This duplicity, born with the “trace,” is what makes truth possible, thereby destroying truth. Contradicting logic, Derrida thus undoes/preserves “truth.” I might point out in passing that such alogical moments in Derrida, and they are obviously basic to his thought, render him suspect in traditionalist minds, but what is too easily neglected is the exacting and rigorous nature of these deconstructions. Nothing could be less subjective and less arbitrary.

An important immediate consequence of the never-annulled “trace,” and so of truth/untruth, is the ubiquity of textuality. That “the central signified, the original or transcendental signified” is revealed to be “never absolutely present outside a system of differences … extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.”¹² Bass is correct in stating, “Once one has determined the totality of what is as ‘having been’ made possible by the institution of the trace, ‘textuality,’ the system of traces, becomes the most global term, encompassing all that is and that which exceeds it.”¹³ According to Derrida, there is simply nothing outside textuality, outside “… the temporalization of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor in ‘another world’ … not more in time than in space, [in which] differences appear among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of traces.”¹⁴ Derrida proposes, in fact, a “double science,” a science of textuality. Once we rethink the metaphysical concept of “reality” in “textual” terms (there are no philosophical regulations of truth, the thing itself being a sign and all “facts” being in “fact” interpretations, as Nietzsche argued), we are left with a world of texts, all of which possess a certain “fictive” or “literary” quality. In this situation of the fictionality of things, literature seems to occupy a privileged place, though now all texts, including philosophical and scientific ones, come to be understood as also fictive.

In this pervasive breakdown of the relationship to truth and reality, literary criticism is no more exempt from textuality than philosophical and scientific works. Whether or not it has traditionally done so, criticism now decides the meaning of a text. Criticism too is a desire of presence. But “meaning” as a privileged term refers to something outside textuality, outside the system of differences: “a text's meaning is the truth that is present ‘behind’ or ‘under’ its textual surface that criticism makes fully present by placing it before us.”¹⁵ The “trace,” of course, makes meaning so conceived, like truth and presence, impossible. To repeat, there is no originating, privileged signified outside the system of differences and so no “meaning.”

The deconstructive critic, in practice, tries to avoid the strong ultimate temptation to seek meaning. Such a temptation is inevitable, for we naturally want to resolve contradictions and to break out of the endless chains of substitutions, which “condemn” us to endless interpretation. We desire a haven outside contingency and temporality, which “meaning,” “truth,” and an originating signified offer. Indeed, the fact of differance seems responsible for this situation: it generates the desire to do the impossible, to unify, to locate a reference outside the system of differences that will bestow meaning, “making equal” as Nietzsche puts it (his term is Gleich machen). In any case, author and critic share the desire, and the deconstructive critic must be acutely conscious of the desire in both the authors he studies and in himself. As Spivak writes, “The desire for unity and order compels the author and the reader to balance the equation that is the text's system. The deconstructive reader exposes the grammatological structure of the text, that its ‘origin’ and its ‘end’ are given over to language in general … by locating the moment in the text which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction.”¹⁶

The deconstructive critic, therefore, aware of the differential quality of language and recognizing the fact of the “trace,” seeks the moment in any text when its duplicity, its dialogical nature, is exposed. Here, as elsewhere, Freud anticipates deconstructive procedure. In The Interpretation of Dreams, for example, he suggests that the reader or interpreter should direct his gaze where the subject is not in control: “There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure. … At that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream.” Derrida extends this point, modifying it: it is the case that such a tangle adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream-text in terms of what it sets up by itself. “If, however, we have nothing vested in the putative identity of the text or dream, that passage is where we can provisionally locate the text's moment of transgressing the laws it apparently sets up for itself, and thus unravel—deconstruct—the very text.”¹⁷ The deconstructive critic thus seeks the text's navel, the moment when any text will differ from itself, transgressing its own system of values, becoming undecidable in terms of its apparent system of meaning.¹⁸ “Reading must always,” says Derrida, “aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness and force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.”¹⁹ This undoing, made necessary by the “trace,” and so by the duplicitous quality of words and texts, must not be confused with the simple locating of a moment of ambiguity or irony that is somehow incorporated into a text's system of (monological) meaning; rather, it is the moment that threatens the collapse of that entire system.

Nor is it enough simply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics. Derrida insists that there is always “a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first … to overthrow the hierarchy.”²⁰ But only first, for another necessary step follows in which the reversal just effected must be displaced and the apparent winning term placed sous rature. To reverse the hierarchy, then, only in order to displace the reversal; to unravel in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. As we have seen at every point, the “trace” creates this undoing/preserving oscillation. It is an oscillation that continues endlessly, for one deconstructive act leads only to another, a deconstructive reading being subject itself to deconstruction. No text, it is clear, is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed.

Having discussed some of the important implications of Derrideanism, I wish now to consider major charges levelled at the position. Earlier I mentioned three specific charges brought against Derrida and his followers (obscurity, nihilism, and threatened destruction of humanistic values), and to these I return.

Undeniably, Derrida's work, as well as that of his “disciples,” is demanding and difficult. It is also different from the prose we in America and England are accustomed to. I submit, however, that Derrida et al. are not perversely obscure. Part of the problem is that Derrida draws on authors we know hardly at all, notably Nietzsche and Heidegger and, moreover, that he deals with abstract issues alien to the Anglo-American empirical tradition. Another real difficulty lies, I think, in our expectations as readers, for most of us, more influenced by British empiricism than we would care to admit, expect language, and especially literary-critical language, to be a mirror reflecting truly the nature and contents of the “object” being described. Derrida's point, as we have seen, is precisely that writing is never a simple means for the presentation of truth. What this means, in part, is that even criticism and philosophy must be read scrupulously and critically, teased for meaning; they must, in other words, be interpreted and in exactly the same way as poetry, for example. Language always carries the “trace,” whether the text in question be poetic, critical, philosophical, psychological, or what have you. Language may be a medium in a ghostly sense (as Geoffrey Hartman puckishly suggests), but it cannot be a medium in the sense of a neutral container of meaning. Derrida and his followers not only advance this argument but they also frequently, increasingly, express these points in the form in which they write. In Glas, for example, Derrida consciously cultivates a plural style, à la Nietzsche, as a way of confounding apparent opposites and switching perspectives.

Sometimes linked with the charge of obscurity is the claim that Derrideanism leads to the abandonment of the usual interpretive procedures. This claim, as well as the charges of nihilism and antihumanism, is made by, among others, M. H. Abrams in a response to J. Hillis Miller's review of the former's Natural Supernaturalism. Abrams' essay, entitled “The Deconstructive Angel,” is perhaps the most influential attack on Derrideanism to date.²¹ According to Abrams, deconstructive criticism places even the most arbitrary reading on an equal footing with the most rigorous, for there appears no way of determining right from wrong readings. But Miller, for one, explicitly denies that “all readings are equally valid or of equal value. Some readings are certainly wrong. Of the valid interpretations all have limitations. To reveal one aspect of the work of an author often means ignoring or shading other aspects. Some approaches reach more deeply into the structure of the text than others.”²² In practice deconstructive criticism is certainly not arbitrary or slipshod. A look at such deconstructionists as Miller and Paul de Man will show just how rigorous and exacting such an interpretive procedure can be. The theory itself, on which this practice depends, insists, despite what Abrams says, on using customary interpretive procedures. Deconstructive criticism goes with traditional reading, preserving as well as undoing. According to Spivak, a deconstructive critic first deciphers a text “in the traditional way,” and Derrida is even more direct on this point: “[Without] all the instruments of traditional criticism, … critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading.”²³ Failing to understand the “trace,” Abrams, like other opponents of Derrida, focuses on the undoing side of the undoing/preserving oscillation.

Should deconstruction allow for the creation in a text of simply any meaning the reader or interpreter wished, it would, I think, deserve the epithet “nihilism.” I am giving the name “nihilism” to that situation wherein the mind is regarded as the arbiter, even the creator, of all values. According to Miller, in a book written before he knew Derrida, “Nihilism is the nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.”²⁴ I wish now to consider the question of nihilism in Derrida, hoping that we will emerge with a better understanding of his position. I shall focus on nihilism in the sense given above, believing that the results of such an inquiry will at least suggest the way a response would go to other aspects of nihilism.

As I remarked in passing earlier, the original and originating differentiation seems to generate the dream of primal and final unity, which is, however, always deferred, never present here and now. We can never “make equal” or get outside the generating system of differences to locate a reference that will bestow order and meaning. There is no Transcendental Signified, we might say, only incarnation. Myth, though, as Herbert N. Schneidau well argues, serves to make us think that totalization and meaningfulness are possible, comforting us with reassurances regarding a “cosmic continuum.”²⁵ But still the gap remains, no matter how hard we try to close it. Perhaps the humanistic tradition is best described as one attempt at closure, positing a meaningful world.

For Derrida, like Nietzsche before him, this attempt reveals the force of desire and the will to power. Whether we speak of a written text or life, to have meaning reflects the will to power. Miller puts it well in his review of Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, the oxymorons of which title express “the force of a desire” for unity: “The reading of a work involves an active intervention on the part of the reader. Each reader takes possession of the work for one reason or another and imposes on it a certain pattern of meaning.” Miller goes on to point out that in the third book of The Will to Power Nietzsche relates “the existence of innumerable interpretations of a given text to the fact that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning ‘in itself’.”²⁶ According to Nietzsche, “Our values are interpreted into things”; “‘Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation’ (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign)”; “Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them”; “In fact, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.”²⁷ Man gives—creates—meaning, then, expressing a will to power as he attempts to improve upon the way things are.

For Nietzsche and Derrida the question is what to do with the recognition that meaning is a construct brought by the “subject,” a fiction made by the force of our desire. Subjectivists and at least some hermeneuticists and Bultmannians seem all too ready to accept a situation which appears to privilege the autonomous consciousness, reversing previous hierarchies and installing fiction in the place of truth and reality. Taken only so far, Nietzsche himself may be viewed as agreeing with this sense of the fictionality of things whereby “believing is seeing” and interpretation is all there is. Clearly, Derrida is not nihilistic in the sense I defined above, for he insists throughout that consciousness is no origin, no foundation, there being no foundation. He undoes the truth/fiction, reality/consciousness polarities but not, with the advocates of the autonomous consciousness, so as to set up the second term in the place of the first. Fiction can no more exist without truth than truth without fiction; they are accomplices, the system of differences and the “trace” making truth (im)possible. By the same token, the subject “in itself,” as center, origin, and goal, is no more possible than the object “in itself.”

In Derrida, Miller, and others appears a radical understanding of the fictionality of things, which goes beyond nihilism and the autonomous consciousness to a recognition of the doubleness of what is, of the complicity of truth and fiction. Deconstructionists wish to avoid the interpretive mastery or closure that imports meaning into texts and the world. Dangers lurk, of course, including the strong possibility that “the desire of deconstruction may itself become a desire to reappropriate the text actively through mastery, to show the text what it ‘does not know’.” Even the deconstructive critic forgets that his own text is necessarily self-deconstructed. He assumes that he at least means what he says. Indeed, even if he declares his own vulnerability, his statement occurs in the controlling language of demonstration and reference. The situation is frustrating but humbling—and inescapable—allowing still another glimpse of the vanity of human wishes. Struggling with the desire of deconstruction, Spivak describes the situation as follows:

a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction, both as the search for a foundation (the critic behaving as if she means what she says in her text), and as the pleasure of the bottomless. The tool for this, as indeed for any deconstruction, is our desire, itself a deconstructive and grammatological structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of our selves. Deconstruction can therefore never be a positive science. For we are in a bind, in a ‘double (read abyssal) bind,’ Derrida's newest nickname for the schizophrenia of the ‘sous rature.’ We must do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we desire to do both, and so on indefinitely. Deconstruction is a perpetually self-deconstructing movement that is inhabited by differance. No text is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed. Yet the critic provisionally musters the metaphysical resources of criticism and performs what declares itself to be one (unitary) act of deconstruction.²⁸

Still, deconstruction may disillusion us about mastery as it demonstrates just how precarious our grasp on meaning is. We are and are not masters, therefore no masters. But we must be careful not to fall into the trap of believing in linear progress, supposedly resulting from this enlightenment and demystification. Nor should we pine with a Rousseauistic (and humanist?) nostalgia for a lost security as to meaning which we never in fact possessed. Rather than with either faith in progress or nostalgia for “lost” presence, Derrida would have us look with a “Nietzschean affirmation—the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation. … [This affirmation] plays the game without security.” This “interpretation of interpretation,” Derrida adds, which “affirms freeplay … tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, through the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.”²⁹

For Derrida, as for Schneidau discussing the mythological consciousness, the humanist tradition represents mastery, totalization, closure, nostalgia for a full presence, and the desire of meaning. The charge that Derrida threatens this tradition is, obviously, valid. Yet, as we have seen, that threat is by no means either nihilistic or simply negative. For many, Derrideanism offers a way through—if not out of—what Schneidau calls “the bankruptcy of the secular-humanist tradition.”³⁰ Indeed, in Sacred Discontent Schneidau links Derrida with a very different tradition, the Yahwist-prophetic, arguing that Derrida's work is consonant with the Biblical message, which always goes counter to the mythological sense of a “cosmic continuum.” Derridean deconstruction, according to Schneidau, is akin to the way in which the Bible insists on the fictionality of things, alienating us from the world, which it empties of meaning, reminding us constantly of the vanity of human wishes. Yet the Bible's attitude is always ambivalent, at once criticizing and nourishing culture. Schneidau's highly suggestive, and somewhat surprising, argument is far too complex for me to summarize here. A good idea of the nature of that argument, however, may be gleaned from the end of the chapter “In Praise of Alienation,” which presents differance as far from nihilistic and which sees Derrida as, like the Bible, a positive alternative to mythological and humanist understanding:

we are [always] open to sudden revelations of meaninglessness or arbitrariness. … Sooner or later we are afflicted by the feeling that nothing matters, or “makes any difference,” i.e., that we are unable to supply the differentiations which in primitive cultures are articulated by myth, so that our lives and purposes are reduced to entropy. We may flee to various cults, but doubt will have its turn at these. Thus latent Yahwism works within us, leavening all the lump. We are condemned to freedom, not because God is dead but because he is very much alive, as an agent of disillusionment in a basic sense. In this condition, it is not remarkable that we are nihilistic: what is remarkable is that we can become aware of it and can acknowledge intermittently the “nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.” So with all self-deceptions: their extent is not as remarkable as our awareness of them. We have reached out for the apple of self-knowledge, and in doing so have alienated God, nature, and each other; but by pressing our self-awareness to its extreme, where we become alienated from ourselves, we find that this is not the end of the story. The Fall is only the beginning of the Bible. To be thus “decentered” (and … to be acutely conscious of the fictionality of things) is the precondition of insight: thus it is a felix culpa, good news for modern man of a somewhat unlikely kind.³¹

Whether Schneidau is right about the ultimately Biblical and Yahwist nature of Derrida's thought is a most important question but beyond the scope of this paper to determine. What we can say here is that Schneidau does not come to grips with Derrida's insistence that differance “is not theological, not even in the most negative order of negative theology. The latter … always hastens to remind us that, if we deny the predicate of existence to God, it is in order to recognize him as a superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.”³² For our limited purposes in the present essay, whether Schneidau is right or wrong about Derrideanism (despite reservations I, for one, think he is in the main correct) is less important than the possibility he suggests of Derrideanism as an attractive, and positive, alternative to nihilism, the autonomous consciousness, and “the bankruptcy of the secular-humanist tradition.”

It may be, as Schneidau suggests, that Derrida offers a long-awaited alternative to certain forms of nihilism. Certainly the challenge he offers cannot be ignored. Since it is unlikely that either benign neglect or wishing will make deconstruction go away, we must come to grips with it, explore its implications, and evaluate it fairly. There are signs that just this kind of thoughtful analysis is underway in religion and theology as well as in criticism and philosophy.³³ Much remains to be done, the work will be difficult, but the prospects are exciting.³⁴

Notes

1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 67.

2. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1967). Parts of this book, the whole of which is due soon from the University of Chicago Press, have been translated in Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 6-14, and 3, No. 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 33-46.

3. Introductory note to Derrida's “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which Jeffrey Mehlman translated for his collection, French Freud, Yale French Studies, 48 (1973), p. 73.

4. Alan Bass, “‘Literature’/Literature,” in Velocities of Change, ed. Richard Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 345. Bass's essay, to which I am much indebted, first appeared in MLN in 1972.

5. Gayatri Spivak, “Translator's Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xvii.

6. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 19.

7. Spivak, p. xxxix.

8. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 256.

9. Spivak, p. xviii.

10. J. Hillis Miller, “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Consciousness’,” in The Quest for Imagination, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), p. 216.

11. See esp. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); “La pharmacie de Platon” in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 69-197; and “White Mythology,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, 6 (1974), pp. 1-73.

12. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” p. 249.

13. Bass, p. 349.

14. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 65.

15. Bass, p. 350.

16. Spivak, p. xlix.

17. Spivak, p. xlvi. The Freudian passage is quoted on this page.

18. That the “trace” makes texts undecidable means that they can never be saturated with meaning. At some point syntax must overflow the apparent meanings, syntax being the principle of textual arrangement, of differentiation.

19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

20. Translation as it appears in Diacritics, 3, No. 1 (Spring 1973), p. 36.

21. M. H. Abrams' “The Deconstructive Angel” appeared in Critical Inquiry, 4 (1977), pp. 425-38. J. Hillis Miller's review was “Tradition and Difference,” Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 6-13.

22. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), p. ix.

23. Spivak, p. lxxv. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

24. J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 3.

25. Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

26. Miller, “Tradition and Difference,” pp. 6, 12.

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 323, 327, 342.

28. Spivak, pp. lxxvii-lxxviii.

29. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” pp. 264-65.

30. Schneidau, p. 180.

31. Schneidau, pp. 48-49.

32. Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 134.

33. See esp. John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Robert Detweiler, Story, Sign, and Self: Phenomenology and Structuralism as Literary-Critical Methods (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978); and Andrew J. McKenna's review of Crossan's book, “Biblioclasm: Joycing Jesus and Borges,” Diacritics, 8, No. 3 (Fall 1978), pp. 15-29.

34. I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of The School of Criticism and Theory, the University of Kansas Center for Humanistic Studies, and the University of Kansas General Research Fund.