I do not know how to speak of Derrida's writing. That much, at least, I can say about his writing. My difficulty is two fold: to speak properly about his writing I need to put in question the words and concepts that I use as I use them so that a sense of simple, continuing presence and meaning is not communicated. Otherwise I mislead by the seeming clarity with which I place and define his thought. And second, if I speak that way I will not be understood by those who are not careful readers of Derrida.

Why do I face such a difficulty when I speak about Derrida's writing? Primarily because of the way in which he responds to the following descriptive claims about language. First, vocalized speech dominates the western experience of communication and provides a deep illusion of unbroken meaning. Second, vocalized speech is quite different to writing which belongs to something unspeakable. And third, language in all of its parts is constructed by strife among multiple lineages of expression and meaning, and by both meaning and no meaning at all. I can state initially and oversimply the problem before us by saying that our patterns of certainty and truth, our manners of being clear and unambiguous with each other, and our communal proprieties are constructed by many different and often contradictory elements. These constitutive differences are often forced or blurred into simplified habitual structures of value and thought that seem to be clear in their consistency with each other. When I speak about Derrida's writing, I am of course, implicated in the very questions that he addresses, and if I make his writing manageable and usable in conventional terms I mislead you. If, on the other hand, I put in question our conventional ways of understanding others and texts as I give you an account of Derrida's writing, and if you hear the presentation conventionally, you will find what I am doing perverse because your way of understanding will be resisted by what you want to understand.

To what, indeed, do we belong if not to our language, institutions, values, and customs? Are we not together in our broad communal traditions and above all in our common language? The thought I want to pursue is that in belonging together as we do are also in a situation that I shall call nonbelonging. I mean that there is something about language and tradition to which we cannot belong and that whatever this "something" might be (or not be), Derrida's writing provides us with a remarkable entrée into its question. This is not entirely unlike encountering unconsciousness which obliterates consciousness and makes us look again and again until the limits of consciousness give us pause and drive us to reconsider the seeming totality of consciousness and the completeness of our belonging to it.

So my difficulty in speaking about Derrida's writing is like the difficulty in speaking about what escapes consciousness and cannot belong to consciousness. Derrida's writing writes something that is not articulable. His writing attempts to follow "something" that is like a thoroughly repressed dimension in our language and thought, the trace of something erased, he says. And the danger that I face is like the danger of speaking as though I have mastered unconsciousness. You would know in that case that my confidence reveals an anxious ignorance about something that is misconstrued when it is addressed directly and held by concepts. Although we can address Derrida directly and diagram his sentences and follow the lineage of his thought, we confront in his writing "something" that does not belong to our heritage of direct address and meaningfulness, "something" that is heard, as he says, beyond all reckoning. [All quotes in this essay come from Derrida and Différance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, 1988.] Hence, as I address you directly and reckon with Derrida's writing within this circumscription of meaning, I face the question of how to speak appropriately before an unspeakable dimension of language that is traced indirectly in Derrida's writing.

First, a note on Derrida's experience of nonbelonging as we approach the question of how to speak before "something" to which we cannot belong and which we cannot appropriate, "something," he says, that "somehow marks you without belonging to you." "As a child" Derrida said in an interview, "I had the instinctive feeling that the end of the world is at hand, a feeling which at the same time was most natural, and, in any case, the only one I ever knew. Even for a child incapable of analyzing things, it was clear that all this would end in fire and blood. No one could escape that violence and fear…." This feeling accompanying his life as a Jew in Algeria who "knew from experience that knives could be drawn at any moment, on leaving school, in the stadium, in the middle of those racist screams which spared no one, Arabs, Jews, Spanish, Maltese, Italians, Corsicans." In 1940 he with all other Jews was expelled from school. He found that friends no longer knew him, public insults to Jews became socially proper for the majority, and social order appeared to depend on such persecution. "It's an experience that leaves nothing intact," he said, "something you can never again cease to feel."

He felt "displaced" both in the Jewish community, which closed in on itself, and in the Christian culture in which he had been assimilated. The antisemitism that characterized France, where he moved when he was eighteen, was not directed toward him, but he found that it was there for many others. His acceptance in the non-Jewish culture and his acceptance of that culture further displaced him. He felt a desire to be integrated into the non-Jewish community, but he distrusted the desire, found it painful, and felt a "nervous vigilance, a painstaking attitude to discern signs of racism." "From all of this comes a feeling of non-belonging that I have doubtless transposed … everywhere."

This feeling of nonbelonging includes, I believe, a sense of difference that pervades each instance of identity. This is not a question of conflict between more than one identity or of conflicting values. Rather the limits of identity as such are before us in this sense of nonbelonging: "something" that identity and belonging do not encompass seems to resonate in the margins and spaces of identity, "something" that we might over-hear as though it were a barely audible, retreating sound or like silence in the woods that falls after a gun fires. Derrida's sense of nonbelonging means that things in their continuities stand out in a resonance of no continuity, it means that not anything breaks the seeming promise of unbroken time and life. He found himself neither properly Jew nor properly non-Jew, neither a proper Algerian nor a proper Frenchman, neither secure in his family nor insecured by his family. He was and was not his name. Before the frequently drawn knives he was alive and threatened at once. Everything was in question and undecidable, and normally so in his experience. In his world the limited Algerian persecution fell against the backdrop of the fires of Holocaust, and Derrida felt his own blood in the ashes of incinerators.

"The final word," he said, "is never fully master … the vibrant desire to write binds you to a terror that you try to control, to handle, all the while trying to keep it intact, audible, in 'this' place where you must find yourself, hear yourself out, yourself and your reader, beyond all reckoning, thus at once saved and lost." In this combination of vibrant desire to write, terror, sense of determinate place, and incalculable danger and pleasure, I hear the inscription of nonbelonging, of undecidability, investing being and nonbeing, of a strangeness in our lives that threatens destruction precisely where our satisfactions are strongest. Two distinct directions arise for Derrida in this absence of a final word. On the one hand he asks, what kind of culture do we have in which our culture's own radical violence seems to stand at such a distance from it? With this question he faces institutions and practices whose exchanges of power are structured by values and words that have lost touch with their own depression, scapegoating, and anxiety over primal differences. By this question concerning the seeming distance of our violence everything that is normal and the processes of normalization appear not only optional, but fragmented by the disorder and lack of identity that they cover over with a veneer of stability that is raised to the order of fundamental truth and right. Efforts in his thought to destabilize our cultural orders constitute one form of response that Derrida makes to those forms of stabilization that are diffused by the fragmentation and nonbelonging that seems to belong to them.

He finds this type of subversion in the lineage of psychoanalysis: "psychoanalysis," he says,

should make us rethink a great many convictions, for example to reconstruct the whole axiomatics of law, morality, "human rights," the entire discourse constructed upon the demands of the "me," the concept of torture, the whole system of legal psychiatry, etc. Not to renounce ethical affirmations or politics, but on the contrary, to insure their very future. This would not be done within the psychoanalytic community nor within society as such, in any case, not extensively enough, nor soon enough. Such, perhaps, is a task for thought.

"… Not to renounce ethical affirmations or politics, but on the contrary to insure their very future." Just as in consequence to psychoanalysis complications, mixed desires, and cross purposes emerge to unsettle the pathogenic normalcies of ordinary life, and just as this analysis allows for noninnocent affirmation of what seems valuable in the midst of uncertainty—affirmation even to the point of endangering one's self in struggling for communal benefits—so Derrida wants to uncover the destinies of violence that are invested in our normal structures of thought and life for the sake of ethical affirmation and politics, both of which—ethical affirmation and politics—he will also put in question. And this process for him is found in thought, in taking apart the concepts and values that provide the grid of meaning for knowledge and truth. Thought can allow a movement in advance of institutional and communal change: his work belongs securely neither to relevance nor irrelevance, but to continuous questioning of the shared structures of our lives.

One direction that comes out of Derrida's experience of nonbelonging is thus that of unsettling in his own thought the cultural structures that suppress their own fragility and thereby produce violently a dream-like reality that promises unbroken identity and certainty. When we lose our perception of violence within our normal systems, do we have any way of avoiding that very violence?

The second direction that comes out of the absence of a final word, and one closely related to the first, addresses "the unconscious conspiracy" in our heritage to establish unity, continuing presence, and univocity of meaning as the structure of true discourse. The first direction puts emphasis on violence, institutions, and responsibility. The second is directed to the texts and language that have formed our capacities for thought, judgment, and communication. Each direction involves the other, but there is a difference of shading and tone. We should bear in mind that Derrida was first a teacher of the history of philosophy at the Ecole Normal Superieur and that a major part of his work has addressed the canonical texts of western thought. Regarding traditional thought, he said,

… I feel that I am also a beneficiary: faithful as much as possible, a lover, avid for the rereadings and for the philosophical delights which are not merely ascetic games. I like repetition: it is as if the future trusted in us, as if it waited for us, encoded in an ancient work—which hasn't yet been given voice. All of this makes for a strange mixture, I realize, of responsibility and disrespect. The attention given all this on the present scene is at once intense, hopeless, and a bit vacant—rather anachronistic, that. But without this bizarreness, nothing seems desirable to me. We have received more than we think we know from the "tradition," but the gift scenario also necessitates a kind of filial impiety, both serious and not, with regard to those thoughts to which we owe most.

"But without this bizarreness, nothing seems desirable to me." Desire: a movement out of need, energy toward the missing, a movement from absence, a seeking movement in distance, energy that dies in its fulfillment, energy that continues in its dissatisfaction. Derrida feels in debt to our tradition, indebted like a lover is indebted to the beloved, like one who receives more than he can give, desiring to return again and again to the texts—the bodies—that inspire and that seem to offer something that is missing. But he is also in the tradition like an impious son, one who owes much to father and mother heritage, not the least of the gifts being impiety. Is he a lover or a son? Both and neither in the metaphors' ambiguity, which holds him at a distance from the tradition to which the metaphors connect him. The bizarreness of being traditional now—and Derrida is in many ways a traditionalist—the bizarreness of expecting within the tradition something unspeakable and unthinkable that is encoded in proper language, expecting something not proper, and something to which the future belongs, something that has been sealed off or erased but has left the trace of its disappearance in the dominating language, the bizarreness of waiting for a voice to emerge as though from the grave of what is lost to sound and sense and expecting this voice—doubtless a hollow, unintelligible voice in the context of present sounds and values—to give a future that has been lost in the structures and forces of our best efforts: this bizarreness that produces intensity, hopelessness, and scholarship on foreign and old texts makes things desirable for Derrida. I believe he means that everything becomes desirable because of the senselessness that our good sense embodies, and I believe that the metaphor behind his words is the beloved's body that inspires love not in mute materiality, but in an animation that stands outside of reason and common sense, an animation that speaks of lack and unfulfillment as well as of an ambivalent promise, not of the loss of desire, but of desire's continued life in its hunger for the missing. The missing and not a full and sufficient presence animates Derrida, who finds his animation in a heritage of undecidable valences, a heritage that is like the beloved who, in his or her closeness, is all the more beyond reckoning, is all the more unpossessible than he or she is in the distance of first attraction.

In this context we are prepared to see that the term deconstruction does not suggest destructiveness, nihilism, or skepticism. The word, which he took from Heidegger, comes early in Derrida's work and, true to his statements about reading and speaking, has been disseminated in many other texts with meanings quite other to his sense. It is a careful, highly specific word in Derrida's thought. By it he names a process of taking apart the signifying structures in a text, finding what signs substitute and replace other signs, finding the ambiguities invested in relations of meaning, following chains of references in which signs differ from each other, space out each other, and defer their sense to other references. What is always in question is the systematic totality of our conceptuality and the rule-governed polarities that control our sense of difference and identity. By undoing these connections, unraveling them, if you will, out of the patterns that they weave, Derrida finds not only economies of exchange in a text whereby much that constitutes them is elided or suppressed. He also finds that our language in its systematic use establishes senses of identity which elide the continuous processes of substitution, dissemination, annulment, fictionalizing, supplementation, and displacement of absence that characterize language.

We can see Derrida's kinship to Freud in this thought of deconstruction. The question concerns the manner in which something unpresentable—in Freud's case, the unconscious—is carried over into signs and images. Freud's deconstruction of the authority of consciousness is carried out in part by showing that the unconscious is always deferred by the conscious processes that refer to it. In Derrida's language the unconscious is traced in its total alterity vis-a-vis consciousness. Consciousness and unconsciousness are in a relation of continuous differing, and consciousness in its difference postpones unconsciousness—puts it off—by giving expression to unconsciousness and by making reference to it. Unconscious traces are produced and detoured in the difference of conscious activity. And an indirect access to unconsciousness is also opened as consciousness is breached by unconscious traces that both relay the unconscious and defer conscious appropriation in their difference. Consciousness has no authority over the traces that fracture its identity and limit the range of its mastery. Consciousness cannot even think the simultaneity of its occurrence with unconsciousness; it cannot grasp the reserve of energy that moves it and withdraws from it anymore than it can think the expenditure of energy that accompanies its retention of energy. In the Freudian context we can say that the presence of the unconscious never happens, that the unconscious is not like a past present that is now recalled in its absence. Rather, the unconscious has no conscious presence except as a disappearing trace that opens consciousness through a radical alterity.

In the trace of unconsciousness consciousness belongs neither to unconsciousness nor to itself. This thought contradicts our intuitive good sense: surely consciousness belongs together with whatever occurs with it. Surely the trace of unconsciousness is present in consciousness and consciousness is present with it. But that good sense is what Freud's account of unconsciousness puts in question. Like Derrida's boyhood world, consciousness is always before its own loss in unconscious traces that have neither ownership nor belonging. Freudian thought is deconstructive as it follows the traces of what it cannot think and struggles for words and concepts that hold in question the authority that it would give to itself.

In a similar way Derrida deconstructs the language whereby our culture has privileged singular identity, wholeness, and continuing presence. He finds unspeakable and unthinkable traces that seam our good sense, and he develops a language, a manner of writing and thinking, that maintains the fragility of meaning in its element of no meaning at all. In the space remaining I shall note a therapeutic implication of deconstruction. I make this move on the assumption that our ability to recognize pathological and therapeutic processes can be produced by a language in which we expect ourselves to belong to something that has the promise of full presence such as human dignity and identity.

The question that I wish to raise regarding therapy is one that I cannot answer: how do we work therapeutically with people when we do not make belonging an organizing value in our perceptions regarding psychological help? If Derrida is accurate in his descriptive claim that the language and thought of our culture, by giving overwhelming privilege to presence, identity, and wholeness, have thoroughly repressed primordial and "originary" difference, alterity, non-meaning, and non-presence, repressed them to such a degree that like the unconscious they are without the possibility for communicative speech, then our values regarding health will be structured by an anxiety that systematically directs us away from the conditions of our lives. One of the implications of his work is that the language by which we care for ourselves and understand ourselves is itself under the impact of anxiety over nonpresence, an anxiety that silently traverses our individual and communal lives. The deconstructive strategy is to reread the major documents of our tradition in order to show the repression that occurs within them. Although that is a kind of therapeutic project—one that unsettles us and gives no satisfaction to the values that bond us and establish our destinies—it is not a psychotherapeutic venture oriented toward individuals seeking release from emotional pain. We do wish to deconstruct the pathogenic patterns. But we do not engage in deconstructing the normalizing values regarding identity and presence to self in order to establish a new normalcy. The direction of Derrida's work includes a dismantling of our normative thought that intends to tell us how we are to be when we are at our best.

How would a therapist relate to patients and clients if he or she were thoroughly aware of the repressive aspect of the ideal of wholeness of identity? If the therapist suspected, as I believe that Derrida suspects, that the holocaust was made possible by the dominance of presence and meaning over non-presence and non-meaning in our history? If the therapist were in touch with the traces of nonbelonging that give fissure to our presumed selves? If the therapist, without pessimism or depression, knew the darkness that makes possible the light of our minds?

A final word in this first step into Derrida's thought. I have made belonging and nonbelonging the organizing words for my remarks, and I have linked them to Derrida's personal experiences as a strategy for approaching a conception of connection in the midst of no connection at all. This conception suggests the possibility that the ideal language of wholeness and unity regarding both identity and community is misleading and may well put us at odds with the occurrences of knowledge and of our lives. Were we able to let opposites be together as opposites, if we were able to understand the therapeutic in a language in which difference, and not identity, gave us our perceptions—if, that is, we experienced ourselves and our world as belonging only to their own occurrences—then, not expecting our belonging together to override all that cannot belong at all, we might experience a freedom for the affirmation of the opposites, differences, and nonbelonging without a drive to normalize and appropriate the radically other. Would this constitute a therapy that addresses a traditional desire to make unity and to produce wholeness in a broken world of difference, a world in which identity can expand itself only by ignoring its not belonging to anything but the differences that resist it? Would this be a freedom from that peculiar brutality that comes from making the other one's own? Would we learn to speak differently enough so that we did not expect to overcome everything that puts in question our highest values and most spiritual experiences? Would we learn to affirm ourselves without belonging to anything final or whole, to affirm our difference from everything that shows us to be incomplete and arbitrary in our finest moments?