Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Tympan

Examines the idea of limits/borders/margins of philosophy, behind which, as philosophy believes, there is the constitutive Other, all other forms of knowledge, that it tries to appropriate by alienating and by appropriating to define its own subject and, hence, itself. Therefore, its outside is never its outside; the discourse of philosophy aspires itself to organize the economy of its representation. What are, then, the limits of philosophy without which it is impossible to define its subject?

Derrida promises to play with the question in the book, not to answer it ‘properly’. The metaphor of ‘tympanum’ (барабанная перепонка) as that limit of philosophy that establishes a difference between a question and an answer and by establishing it destroys it.

“If Being is in effect a process of reappropriation, the ‘question of Being’ of a new type can never be percussed without being measured against the absolutely coextensive question of the proper.” (xix) Argues that most discourses (e.g., on sexuality, economy, semantics) organize their limits (and therefore themselves) “in sonorous representations.” (xix) “A quasi-organizing role is granted, therefore, to the motif of sonic vibration…” (Hegel, Heidegger). “Timber, style, and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper. They make every event possible, necessary, and unfindable.” (xix)

Derrida engages multiple physical metaphors to identify the place of “the unthought, the suppressed, the repressed of philosophy.” (xxviii)

Differance

“we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and resists it because it transports it, is announced in a movement of differance (with an a) between two differences or two letters, a differance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located, as the strange space that will keep us together here for an hour, between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two.” (5)

“differance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history…” (6)

“It is only on the basis of differance and its ‘history’ that we can allegedly know who and where ‘we’ are, and what the limits of an ‘era’ might be.” (7)

Starts where Saussure stops. “Every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. Such a play, differance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general. For the same reason, differance, which is not a concept, is not simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material.” (11) “differance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” (11)

Language constitutes itself historically through the play of differences in speech (differance). Differance links any given element of language not only with its semantic synchronic environment, but also—through that notorious play of differences—with past and future meanings. Temporization as ‘becoming-space of time’ and ‘becoming-time of space’, as two-concepts-in-one that try to fix this interplay of time and space in the making of any meaning through differences. The present can manifest itself only through temporization and the presence—through spacing. But in order to get meaning as the present, any meaning (word) should defer (отсрочить) its differance, to temporize delay, what Derrida calls “the economic signification of the detour.” (13)

“Differences are, thus, ‘produced’—deferred—by differance. But what defers or who defers? In other words, what is difference? With this question we reach another level and another resource of our problematic. Draws on Heidegger, Freud and Nietzsche to argue that the very human presence in the world is subordinate to the same rules as linguistic presence: it doesn’t exist per se, but identifies itself through the play of differences (differance) and through permanently referring itself into the future. Refers directly to Freud when he explains that

“differance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, differance is as the relation to an impossible presence, an expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?” (19)