So to round out my block of reading Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus, I decided to pick up Derrida’s incredibly elucidating 1981 text _Dissemination_ since here JD engages with Plato’s infamous condemnation of writing in _Pheadrus_. In short, Plato idealizes speech as the only authentic manifestation of truth, in a turn of logic that assumes there is no gap between signified and signifier. This is the beginning of the idealization of the logos, which will come to belong only to “God.” Derrida builds his engagement with Plato’s text(s) on the paradox that this claim can only be made through the medium of writing, which it must pretend doesn’t exist. Language is always already constituted by the difference it seeks to overcome: a familiar jumping -off point for those of us familiar with the early thrust of JD’s writing. The reading of this ambiguity Derrida sees woven throughout the “Platonic text” (in scare quotes, because later we shall see Derrida demonstrates how one such unified or closed text that can be designated as the text of “Plato” is impossible) hinges on the translation of the word pharmakon, which in the Greek is used to delineate the antipodal terms of both “remedy” and “poison.” Here we come to the internal and external problematics of this term: firstly, the word in and of itself is not in and of ONE self--it literally means two oppositional things; and secondly this highlights the problem of translation inherent in the transmission of any text. For any attempt at translation must operate under the logic of binary oppositions in choosing one or the other meaning, thus effacing the difference built into the “original.” It is not that translation “adds” difference to the master text, but that the difference is already there; only now what is entirely undecidable (i.e., is pharmakon properly a remedy or a poison—note that Derrida will later use lateral associations to connect this term to an entire diverse web of meanings) now becomes “decided.” We should observe that the fact that such meaning, or truth, even needs to be decided—that is it not self-evident—points to the impossibly of the existence of any original, unified text.
To truly appreciate the meticulous attention Derrida gives the texts he is engaging with, it is worthwhile to look closer at the twists and turns of his readings here.
1. Working out the “Outwork”
From the gate, we know Derrida is saying to us, “whatever you expect this preface to be, dear reader, you will not be getting.” I said from the gate, but –and this question underlies the entire inquiry that will be this “preface”—where exactly is the gate? Is it the title, which is actually a series of titles: “ Hors Livre,” “Outwork,” “Hours D’Oeuvere,” “Extratext,” “Foreplay,” Bookend,” “Facing,” “Prefacing.” These terms do not mean quite the same thing, are not of the same “language” (French/English), and they are a mix of nouns and verbs—of name and movement. From the very outset (ha!) of “Outwork” our sense of textual origin is dismembered.
JD’s first sentence: “ This (therefore) will not have been a book” (3). There is no present (tense) in this statement: there is the past (been), and future (will not), both disguised as the present. There is no “moment” in this sentence, no manifestation of present temporality, but it is the space of the drawing together of past and future. This masquerading of a present manifestation of truth that comes to be only through the tension of a collision of past and future—this—is the problem of Western metaphysics that Derrida will spend the rest of this text (rather all of his texts) highlighting for us.
If we’ve read our Hegel (and our Marx!) we know the vexed relationship that occurs between preface and philosophical master text. Here Derrida’s preface at once prefaces and deconstructs its own logic, in what JD will term the text’s “systematic double mark.” This is a repetition without an identity, a mark that is both inside and outside the system of which it is related. This is NOT what some have termed a nihilistic negation of meaning (something like stating “there is no preface”) or some reckless “free play” that makes all terms up for grabs. It is quite the opposite-- it is true bricolage, questioning the system from within. What the double mark of this preface shows us, in its simultaneous act of prefacing and dismantling of that same logic, is that there is no real “outside” of this text that follows; no transcendental text- proper. Like a true “supplement” it is outside this so-called master text only to enhance/prepare/complete what should be able to stand on its own.
Derrida looks to Hegel’s disqualification of his own Preface in the _Phenomenology_and questions the relationship of this prefatory material to the body of the text: “ Isn’t the preface both negated and internalized in the presentation of philosophy by itself, in the self-production and self-determination of the concept” (11). What JD is calling for here is a reinterpretation of this relationship between the two texts, and an understanding why—if the philosophical inquiry is “truth” and should be able to stand on its own—does Hegel NEED to use his Preface. It’s not just that Hegel “negates” his pretext, but that it becomes both “folded in” to the text that follows and made useless by Hegel’s own simultaneous condemnation of it. It is the supplement, in both senses of Derrida’s use of this term, that which adds to as it replaces. In an interesting move, Derrida shows how the _Phenomenology_ and the _Science of Logic_ are in dialectic( “Shall it be said—this is the traditional problem—that the entire _Phenomenology of Spirt_ is in fact a preface for the _Logic_?”), and the “endless circle” (13) Derrida sees these texts engaged in demonstrates the non-distinction of any kind of “closed” master text. What is perhaps the most salient facet of this reading is Derrida’s explanation that we cannot understand the relationship between pre-text and text according to the logic of binary oppositions : “ If one sets out from the oppositions form/content, signifier/signified, sensible/intelligible, one cannot comprehend the writing of a preface” (16). Yes, Hegel’s preface is a critique of formalism that mobilizes the formal property of the prefatory apparatus at the same time. Yes, this is a paradox. But it is only a paradox if we view these texts as representative of opposition binary categories, only if we look at it through the lens of the formalist. If instead we see this as a relationship that cannot be subsumed under binary logic, then “the contradiction is rather the very movement of speculative dialectics in its discursive progression” (20). The temporality of the preface—both prescriptive and an after-effect (remember our first sentence of this preface)--is thus not a manifestation of linear time. In enacts the dialectic itself. Therefore it is both inside the text proper but always outside; it is already a moment of the text. [On a side note, I’d like to point out this textual site as a rebuttal to critics and readers who think JD is interested in simply dismantling binary oppositions and leaving things in a state of chaos or free play, where anything goes. What we see here in the treatment of Hegel’s preface is the exact opposite (for lack of a better term) because what JD makes us attentive to is that awareness of the incommensurability of binary thinking forces us to note the structure of this thinking; to appreciate the relationship between the two texts as they are constituted by the constructs of the system of language. I would argue that rather than some willy-nilly nihilism divorced from responsibility, we are made more attuned to the structure from which we read and encouraged to reinterpret it, not destroy it.]
This process which Derrida has been enacting/performing is “dissemination,” that which “interrupts the circulation that transforms into origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning” (21). Dissemination exposes the double mark and points up its dual place as both inside and outside the system. Like différance, it “opens up a snag in writing that cannot longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down the trace” (26).
I used the word “performing” just above to categorize the way of reading/writing that JD provides us with here, and to that effect, I want to point out another textual apparatus that seems to fit both in/outside the “master text” that Derrida does not engage with here: the foot note. Just as he is describing the exteriority of the “postface”, the word is footnoted, drawing the reader to a two-and a half page explication of the term, where the word is defined as “adding an extra text” or an “appendix”(27). By the time the reader finally returns to the larger text –at- hand she returns to the words “ recapitulation and recurrent anticipation” (27-8), which seems to me to be the description of the process of reading the footnote that has just occurred, and the phrase simultaneously has a different function in the sentence from the “master text” to which we return. This brief slice of text seems to operate on two different registers at once. What then is the function of the footnote, another textual appendage both inside (literally, sits just below) and outside (additional information that is only placed below but yet does not fit into the trajectory of the text proper)? If he text -proper were self-sufficient, why would one need the supplement of the footnote? Derrida does not mention this as such, but I would argue here he performs again for us the same problem of constructing a binary opposition between pre-text and text, another level at which every text is thus fractured, and an example of how the structure of supplementarity he describes pervades all textual components and all writing in general.
Why is there no outside of the text ( a question begged by scholars, usually in reference to this infamous claim of Derrida’s used in his explication of Rousseau in _Grammatology_)? Because there is no inside either. Or rather, no inside that is closed off from its outside. Derrida:
“ To allege that there is no absolute outside of the text is not to postulate some ideal immanence, the incessant reconstitution of writing’s relation to itself…the text affirms the outside…if there is nothing outside the text this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or identity-to-itself…but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing” (36-7)
Perhaps, this sounds to some like a sort of trifling meticulousness, a sort of sly reversal of words that gives us a more “liberal” way of looking at texts. Perhaps. Until we remember that the other reason “there is nothing outside the text” is because reality is constituted by language—reality IS text: “This is the protocol indispensible to any elaboration of the problem of ‘ideology’, of the specific inscription of each text, within the fields commonly referred to as fields of ‘real’ causality (history, economics, politics, sexuality, etc)” (43). Materialism, gender studies, right or left wing politics—none of these areas are opposed to linguistics or philosophy, none offers a “cause” of ideological explanation that is not already coded by language. They are all constituted by the same system. Language is already and always political.
“Outwork” is rich with perhaps some of the most lucid and practical demonstrations of Derrida's method of reading/writing I have come across in the whole corpus of his work. And the text becomes even more valuable when we examine it in relationship to the so-called (but no longer able to be called) “master text” in the first section of the book “Plato’s Pharmacy, ” which I will dive into in my next post.
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