> On Oct 23, 2015, at 2:12 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > Clark- I have his Of Grammatology; and his Speech and Phenomena, also his > Limited Inc. > > The way I read Derrida (and I admit, some time ago) in his 'Linguistics and > Grammatology' and 'The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing', they > were filled with Saussurian terms (signifer and signified; distinction > between language and speech) which he didn't seem to question. And his focus > on Peirce was only a few pages - he never examines the triadic semiosic > action. He seems more to focus on the symbol - but this is not the semiosic > action. That is, for Derrida, the focus is on rhetoric - which is all about > 'signs' - but not the triadic semiosic action. Derrida even calls the 'thing > itself' (which i take to be the Dynamic Object) as a 'representamen'!! (Of > Grammatology, p 49). >
Edwina, I have to run so it may be a few days before I can reply in a worthwhile way. (And my apologies for all the typos in what I’ve written today - I’ve quickly written everything while doing a ton of other things) I’ll admit it’s been quite a while since I’ve last studied Derrida in depth. But he was quite key in my philosophical development with Peirce. Quickly off the top of my head (so beware errors on my part) what Derrida means by rhetoric is what Peirce calls speculative grammar. (I’ll see if I can’t write more on this later) On Grammatology is filled with Saussurian terms because it’s a critique of Saussure. He’s showing how Saussure’s ideas are problematic. Derrida’s whole move is the post-structuralist move against Saussurian based structuralism. For Derrida this isn’t just the formal structuralists in psychiatry, history, “myth criticism” or anthropology but extends to all things he sees as structuralist in this sense of dualism. He sees the origin in Descartes and certain readings of Plato. (Other readings he embraces and some of his key terms actually come out of the Timaeus) The thing itself comes out of Husserl/Heidegger but things (objects in Peirce’s sign sense) has in part a representational part. This all gets into the issues we discussed with Frederik Stjernfelt when he was here. (It’s been a while but I think I raised the Derrida/Heidegger issues in those discussions) The place of the copula in Peirce’s semiotics is pretty important here. Derrida isn’t saying things are only representations but that our thinking is purely in signs (which is Peirce’s point). Again the more complete explanation will have to wait. As for the triadic relation I completely disagree he doesn’t deal with this. The whole point is that Saussure offers only a dualistic relationship of the sign in opposition to Peirce’s triadic relationship. This then becomes key to Derrida’s difference which arises out of the problem of there not being an absolute difference. For any two categories that are raised as differences his focus is on what enables this difference which it turns out is the sign and the essential sign-relation of Perice’s semiotics. Even in later works when he stops talking about Peirce this triadic relationship and the problem of absolute divides he’s still focused on this logic of continuity and triadic nature of the sign. It’s just that Derrida is usually doing an immanent critique using the language of whatever philosopher he’s engaged with. But fundamentally he’s just playing up the difference between a dualism notion of sign versus Peirce’s semiotics. Now as I said earlier today one can still reject Derrida as a realist and see him as a nominalist. (And Stjernfelt made a similar critique here on Peirce-L) If there is no final interpretant (to use Peircean language) and that the very notion of a teleology is wrong then Derrida ends up much more as a nihilist opposed to Peirce. I fully acknowledge this is the common reading of Derrida. That is that all we have are signs and representations with nothing behind them. This to me is quite odd since Derrida, especially in his later phase of the 90’s onward, is incessantly concerned with what escapes this kind of deconstruction. Justice is one of the notions that can’t be deconstructed but there are others. That’s partially why I brought up force of law. It’s just wrong I think to say he’s a nihilist where there’s nothing but test. To be is to be a text (to be a sign). That’s the nature of being. But the other to the text, what is marginalized, seems to be his prime concern. Those portraying Derrida as a nihilist or nominalist seem to miss the role Levinasian ethics play in his thought.
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