Jacques Derrida

Died
 Relevant Work
(NATC, 3rd ed.)

## Biography

Jacques Derrida was born to Jewish parents on July 15, 1930 in Algeria. He and his family were French citizens due to the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which granted citizenship to Jewish Algerians. He is best known for his development of deconstruction, a form of semiotic analysis. Due to his plentiful contributions, he is considered a major figure in post-structuralism.

Derrida moved to Paris to attend Lyceé Louis le-Grand in 1949, during which time he prepared to take the entrance exams to the École Normale Supérieure . He failed his first attempt but passed his second, and was admitted in 1952.

Instead of serving in the military during the Algerian War for Independence, Derrida taught English and French from 1957-1959 to soldiers’ children. Following the war, he taught Philosophy at the Sorbonne.

In 1963, Derrida’s wife, the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier, gave birth to their first child, Pierre. After Pierre’s birth, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at ENC, where he stayed until 1984. In 1980 Derrida received an Honorary Doctorate from Columbia University and a State Doctorate from the University of Paris. In 1983, he collaborated with Ken McMullen and appeared as himself in the movie Ghost Dance.

From 1983 onward, Derrida traveled and held a variety of permanent and visiting positions at universities. These positions included the co-founding of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1983, a full professorship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1984, and Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine in 1986–a position he held until 2004, just before his death.

## Key Terms

**Deconstruction:** A poststructuralist approach to literary criticism involving the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. (Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 3rd ed. 94)

**Différance**: The constant deferring of the meanings of words where meaning is based on the differences from other words and their relationships to each other. Hence, this word is a neologism combining both "to differ" and "to defer."

**Language -** the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.

L**ogos -** Greek for “word,” “speech,” “reason,” “discourse,” “subject,” “argument;” its plural form is *logoi.*

P**harmakon** - a ”medicine” that is both a remedy and poison. In Plato’s *Pharmacia,* the pharmakon is writing.

**Print Culture -** embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication

**Rhetoric -** the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional technique

**Theuth** - the god who invented writing as a “*pharmakon* for both memory and wisdom*”* (NATC 1614).

**Thammus -** the king of the gods who inquires of Theuth as to the usefulness of his inventions And proclaims them a menace to memory.

## *Dissemination*

**Key Quotations**

* “Books, the dead and rigid knowledge shut up in *biblia*, piles of histories, nomenclatures, recipes and formulas learned by heart, all this is as foreign to living knowledge and dialectics as the *pharmakon* is to medical science. And myth to true knowledge” (NATC 1611).
* “The value of writing—or of the pharmakon—has of course been spelled out to the King, but it is the King who will give it its value, who will set the price of what, in the act of receiving, he constitutes or institutes“ (NATC 1614).
* “Only the ‘living’ discourse, only a spoken word (and not a speech's theme, object, or subject) can have a father; and, [. . .] the *logoi* [arguments] are the children. Alive enough to protest on occasion and to let themselves be questioned; capable, too, in contrast to written things, of responding when their father is there. They are their father's responsible presence” (NATC 1616).
* “Only a power of speech can have a father. The father is always father to a speaking/living being. In other words, it is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity” (NATC 1618).
* “The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden illuminating, blinding source of *logos*. And since one cannot speak of that which enables one to speak (being forbidden to speak of it or to speak to it face to face), one will speak only of that which speaks and of things that, with a single exception, one is constantly speaking of” (NATC 1620).
* “*Logos* is a thus a resource. One must turn to it, and not merely when the solar source is present and risks burning the eyes if stared at; one has also to turn away toward *logos* when the sun seems to withdraw during its eclipse. Dead, extinguished, or hidden, that star is more dangerous than ever” (NATC 1621).
* “In order to vaunt the worth of his invention, Theuth would have denatured the *pharmakon*, said the opposite (*tounantion*) of what writing is capable of. He has passed a poison off as a remedy. So that in translating *pharmakon* by *remedy* what one respects is not what Theuth intended, nor even what Plato intended, but rather what the King says Theuth has said, effectively deluding either the King or himself” (NATC 1622).
* “Textuality being constituted by differences and by differences from differences, it is by nature absolutely heterogeneous and is constantly composing with the forces that tend to annihilate it” (NATC 1623).
* “The translation by "remedy" can thus be neither accepted nor simply rejected. [. . .] Writing is no more valuable, says Plato, as a remedy than as a poison. [. . .] One must indeed be aware of the fact that Plato is suspicious of the *pharmakon* in general [. . .]. There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The *pharmakon* can never be simply beneficial” (NATC1623-24).
* “Socratic irony precipitates out one *pharmakon* by bringing it in contact with another *pharmakon*. Or rather, it reverses the *pharmakon*'s powers and turns its surface over—thus taking effect, being recorded and dated, in the act of classing the *pharmakon*, through the fact that the *pharmakon* properly consists in a certain inconsistency, a certain impropriety, this nonidentity-with-itself always allowing it to be turned against itself. What is at stake in this overturning, is no less than science and death” (NATC 1630).
* “The point is that there is no *as such* where writing or play are concerned. Having no essence, introducing difference as the condition for the presence of essence, opening up the possibility of the double, the copy, the imitation, the simulacrum-the game and the *graphe* are constantly disappearing as they go along. They cannot, in classical affirmation, be affirmed without being negated. Plato thus plays at taking play seriously” (NATC 1631).
* “This (non)logic of play and of writing enables us to understand what has always been considered so baffling: why Plato, while subordinating or condemning writing and play, should have written so much, presenting his writings, from out of Socrates' death, as games, indicting writing in writing, lodging against it that complaint (*graphē*) whose reverberations even today have not ceased to resound” (NATC 1632).

**Summary of the parts of *Dissemination* included in NATC 3rd edition**

* 1) In which Derrida pries open Plato’s argument that writing is simply “repeating without knowing.” He notes that this definition only arises from Plato’s repetition (without knowing) of the myth, or *akoē,* that writing is repeating without knowing. Derrida demonstrates the flaws in Plato‘s *logos* through the use of Plato’s own logical apparatus.
* 2) In which Derrida points out the logical implications of writing receiving its value only through a patriarchal hierarchy—the god-king proclaiming it an unuseful menace after it’s value has been laid out by it’s inventor. Derrida demonstrates that the origin (father) of *logos* isthe “speaking subject,” and, as *logos* is the son (who “would be destroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his father” (NATC 1615)), *logos* would be nothing except for writing without the father (the “speaking subject”). “The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father” (NATC 1615), and as such writing, in order to achieve independence, must desire “orphanhood and patriarchal subversion” (NATC 1615). In short, writing, in its pursuit of independence, has no parents to defend it and keep it alive; speech has a protector that keeps it living. Derrida goes on to demonstrate through the investigation of the metaphor “father of *logos*” that logos is indebted to its father (*patēr)*—which in Greek stands in for “the chief, the capital, the goods”—and that when Plato suggests the replacing of “the good” with “the son,” he is suggesting that we replace the original with its copy, its progeny. Derrida then points to how Plato likens the father/good to the sun. This whole line of reasoning turns *logos* into a product (son) of the father that is used to distance us from the original (the father) due to the original‘s intangibility and dangerous nature (“one cannot speak of that which enables one to speak” (NATC 1620)). Plato uses the analogy of the sun during an eclipse—one must not look directly at it, but rather look a reflection of it (NATC 1620-21).
* 4) In which Derrida examines the translation of *pharmakon* as “remedy.” It is not a perfect translation. *Pharmakon* can mean many things, including “remedy,” but this translation erases “the ambiguity of its meaning” (NATC 1621). It presents the conversation between Theuth and Thammus as Theuth, like a snake oil seller, listing only the beneficial aspects of his invention. The translation then in turn presents Thammus’ reply as a condemnation of Theuth’s invention for being purely a negative, a poison. Derrida is illustrating that the original Greek maintains all of the tension in the word *pharmakon* within the conversation. Both parties understand the nuanced implications of *pharmakon: “w*hatever they do and whether or not they choose, [they] remain within the unity of the same signifier“ (NATC 1622). The translation’s use of “remedy” in the conversation suggests the use of distinct signifiers. However, Derrida goes on to explain that this inaccurate translation is not necessarily a bad one due to it being a result of “Platonism:” “the consequence of something already at work in the translated text, in the relation between ‘Plato’ and his ‘language’ (NATC 1623). Plato pushes one towards understanding the the conversation to mean that, regardless of *pharmakon*’s dual meaning, “writing is no more valuable [. . .] as a remedy than as a poison” because Plato believes that *pharmakons* in general cannot aid but must must be contrary to life: they “can only displace or even aggravate the ill” (NATC 1623-24). Derrida then connects *logos’* ability to lie and to persuade to the same arguments Plato makes against the Sophists. He then uses Gorgias’ *Encomium of Helen* to demonstrate how *logos* is an even more powerful *pharmakon* than writing: “The *pharmakon* is comprehended in the structure of *logos*. This comprehension is an act of both domination and decision” (NATC 1624-28).
* 5) In which Derrida argues that Socrates’ (in Plato’s dialogues) *logos* is a *pharmakon* similar to that of the Sophists: “Socrates' brand of magic is worked through *logos* without the aid of any instrument, through the effects of a voice without accessories, without the fute of the satyre Marsyas” (NATC 1629).
* 9) In which Derrida addresses play. Derrida describes Plato’s position on play as being the opposite of logic. Yet the dichotomy here is nonsensical: “Either play is nothing (and that is its only chance); either it can give place to no activity, to no discourse worthy of the name—that is, one charged with truth or at least with meaning—and then it is *alogos* or *atopos*. Or else play begins to be something and its very presence lays it open to some sort of dialectical confiscation. It takes on meaning and works in the service of seriousness, truth and ontology” (NATC 1631). Derrida then points out the contradiction in Plato’s use of writing and play (through his dialogues using Socrates) to subordinate or condemn writing and play (NATC1632). Derrida uses this contradiction to show that there is an inherent contradiction in all binary options, that there is no one over another, no *logos* over writing, but instead that both are reliaent on each other for existence: “one can no more ‘separate’ them from each other, think of either one apart from the other, ‘label’ them, than one can in *the pharmacy* distinguish the medicine from the poison” (NATC 1635).

## Other Works by Author

Note: First date is the French publication; second date is the English publication.

* *Of Grammatology*(1967, 1998)
* *Dissemination* (1972, 1981)
* *Spectres of Marx* (1993, 1994)
* *The Animal That Therefore I Am* (2006, 2008)