Assignment of critical theory in the light of the discussion of the text of derrida and others, how do we comprehend a statement such as ‘i am there and i am not there

Presented By
ZEESHAN GUL NIAZI
MARYAM SALEEM SHAH
ABDUL SATTAR

TO OUR RESPECTED SIR;
SIR BABAR

Jacques Derrida (1930—2004)
 Jacques Derrida was one of the most well-known
twentieth century philosophers (born July 15, 1930:
died October 8, 2004, Paris, France), French
philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy
and analyses of the nature of language, writing, and
meaning were highly controversial yet immensely
influential in much of the intellectual world in the late
20th century. Educated in the French tradition, he
went to France in 1949, studied at the elite École
Normale Supérieure (ENS). From the 1960s he
published numerous books and essays on an
immense range of topics and taught and lectured
throughout the world, including at Yale University
and the University of California, Irvine, attaining an
international celebrity comparable only to that of
Jean-Paul Sartre a generation earlier.

It was in 1967 that Derrida really arrived as
a philosopher of world importance. He
published three momentous texts
 Of Grammatology,
Writing and Difference,
 and Speech and Phenomena.

 In Of Grammatology, Derrida reveals and then
undermines the speech-writing opposition that he
argues has been such an influential factor in
Western thought. His preoccupation with language
in this text is typical of much of his early work, and
since the publication of these and other major texts
(including Dissemination, Glas, The Postcard,
Spectres of Marx, The Gift of Death, and Politics of
Friendship), deconstruction has gradually moved
from occupying a major role in continental Europe,
to also becoming a significant player in the Anglo-
American philosophical context.

 Deconstruction is generally presented via an
analysis of specific texts. It seeks to expose, and
then to subvert, the various binary oppositions that
undergird our dominant ways of thinking—
presence/absence, speech/writing, and so
forth.Deconstruction has at least two aspects:
literary and philosophical. The literary aspect
concerns the textual interpretation, where invention
is essential to finding hidden alternative meanings
in the text. The philosophical aspect concerns the
main target of deconstruction: the “metaphysics of
presence,” or simply metaphysics.

 Starting from an Heideggerian point of view, Derrida argues that
metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards.
Metaphysics creates dualistic oppositions and installs a hierarchy
that unfortunately privileges one term of each dichotomy (presence
before absence, speech before writing, and so on).
 The deconstructive strategy is to blow the whistle on these too-
sediment ways of thinking, and it operates on them especially
through two steps—reversing dichotomies and attempting to
corrupt the dichotomies themselves. The strategy also aims to
show that there are undecidables, that is, something that cannot
conform to either side of a dichotomy or opposition. Undecidability
returns in later period of Derrida’s reflection, when it is applied to
reveal paradoxes involved in notions such as gift giving or
hospitality, whose conditions of possibility are at the same time their
conditions of impossibility. Because of this, it is undecidable
whether authentic giving or hospitality is either possible or
impossible.

 That is to say, “Deconstruction is used to show that a
work does not adequately address something.”
(Faulconer, Deconstruction, p.4) Derrida argued that
there are many possible interpretations of any given text,
and readers can play with texts as if playing with toys.
According to Derrida, “what we get when we read a text
is not an objective account of logos or even what the
author really meant, but our present interpretation or
understanding of the text itself. This understanding
becomes so to speak, our own [text] of the text.” (quoted
by Ozmone& Craver in the Philosophical Foundations of
Education, p368.) So Derrida disputed the idea that the
meaning of a text does not change. Moreover, he
challenged the author’s intentions, and shows that there
may be numerous reasonable interpretations of a text.
This is where the idea of ‘the author is dead’ arises:
once the text is written, the author’s input loses its
significance.

 As a deconstructionist, Derrida believed that there are
absences within any text. He’s quoted by Faulconer:
“The point of deconstruction is to show where
something has been omitted, not because of the
blindness of the author, not because the critic is
smarter or better, but because that is the way things
are. There are always things I don’t know, though in a
real way that I don’t know them is part of what I know.”
(ibid p5.) Derrida also said that “it is evident that the
writing can be nothing but black, a shadow-writing,
writing for protection” (Esperons, Les Styles de
Nietzsche, p21). He further argued about writing that
“Its clarity derives from that which it excludes, that
which is withdrawn, removed, outside of it, which is
separate. This is meaning and truth.” (ibid.) Thus, truth
does not lie in the printed words, and writing does not
say anything definite, because readers create a further
text while making their own interpretation.

 Derrida explained his process of analysis in terms of
discovering ‘difference’. He used the word différance and
made ‘difference’ a lot different from what it usually is. It’s
about the meaning of words and phrases not being fixed,
instead being defined in terms of their difference from each
other in a linguistic network. J.C. Carrigan in Jacques Derrida,
Deconstructionism & Post Modernism states that “difference
was a term Derrida coined presumably to make the point that
no referent stood in the metaphysical realm for it.” [ie there’s
no fixed meaning for ‘différance’ either – Ed.] Carrigan further
argues that “Derrida might have written about truth by writing
about error, or he might have written about theology by writing
about a theology.” (p5.)

 I am agree with this point, because so many times in
our lives we say things although we mean just the
opposite. Let me give you a simple example from my
own experience. A student who had a presentation last
week wore torn, dirty blue jeans for it, and I said to her
“You look very presentable today. Is it because of your
presentation?” Another example is the popular movie
scene where the girl is in love with the boy but
because she is disappointed she cries to her boyfriend,
“I hate you and I don’t want to see you again!” although
she still loves him and does want to see him again.
Texts also reflect such oppositions. The author might
write “how good for you” to mean “how bad for you,”
but the reader can interpret it in both ways, as ‘good’ or
‘bad’.

 There are many different terms that Derrida employs to describe
what he considers to be the fundamental ways of thinking of the
Western philosophical tradition. These include: logo centrism,
phallogocentrism, and perhaps most famously, the metaphysics
of presence, but also often simply 'metaphysics'. These terms all
have slightly different meanings. Logo centrism emphasises the
privileged role that logos, or speech, has been accorded in the
Western tradition. Phallogocentrism points towards the
patriarchal significance of this privileging. Derrida's enduring
references to the metaphysics of presence borrows heavily from
the work of Heidegger. Heidegger insists that Western
philosophy has consistently honoured that which is, or that which
appears, and has forgotten to pay any attention to the form for
that appearance. In other words, presence itself is confidential,
rather than that which allows presence to be possible at all - and
also impossible, for Derrida

 The terms absence and presence describe
fundamental states of being. For this reason, they are
difficult to define without referencing the terms
themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary definitions
of both terms are self-referential: “the fact or condition
of being present” and “the state of being absent or
away.” The OED cites the primary definition of being
as “to have or occupy a place … somewhere …
Expressing the most general relation of a thing to its
place.” According to this definition, then, being is not
inexplicable or transcendent, but exists within a
framework or state. Therefore the definitions of
presence and absence explicitly rely upon the states
within which they are found. Some examples of these
states could be the world, images, and
representations.

. The unmediated truth of speech comes
from the presence of the speaker, while the
writing mediates this presence. Therefore,
representations in the form of images or
writing present presence through
mediation. According to Derrida, however,
these mediated forms are the only
available forms of presence because
meaning cannot appear outside of a
medium.

Derrida’s much-cited statement, “there is
nothing outside the text,” suggests an
absence that has never been, nor could
ever be, present (in which case it would not
strictly be absent either). It might be helpful
to summarise here an exemplary argument,
derived from Derrida’s reading of the
structural linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure:

 1) The sign is irreducibly secondary. It always
refers to something else. Sometimes the
something else that a sign refers to is actually
itself (e.g., this sign here) but this doesn’t
mean that the sign’s meaning (its reference to
itself by virtue of its sense—sign = signifying
unit) is primary. What is primary is the
signifying aspect of it. The sign comes before
its referent (sign) in so far as this sign means
this sign. And that, of course, is secondary. It
also illustrates that signs are necessarily
always divided.
 2) So the sign is at the beginning. We never
arrive at a meaning independently of some
aspect of text, through which we must pass
before cancelling it out as unwanted rhetoric.
Therefore there is no beginning.

 The whole answer concluded that Deridda is working
on the different levels of meaning , firstly he gives us
the idea of ‘deconstruction’ and tells us how the text is
exposed in two ways; literary and philosophical.
Secondly, he coined a new term ‘difference’ and gives
us a proper difference between the preseantation of
the words by authors and their understanding by the
readers. Thirdly, another newly generated term
‘metaphysics’ as well as clears the idea of ‘presence
and absence’. At the end, we get the idea that every
literary segment of writing contains many levels of
meanings so the line clearly depicts that ‘I am there
and I am not there’.

Assignment of critical theory in the light of the discussion of the text of derrida and others, how do we comprehend a statement such as ‘i am there and i am not there

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