Phil Miller,
In my reading of Derrida, I have often been struck by how much he works
within the language game of Saussure, which seems to be part of what you
are noticing about him as well in your recent note to the list. I am
referring to Derrida's conceptual reliance on the language of
signification and sign. To my ear, which was initially trained on more
English philosophy, this sounds quite arbitrary, even if, at the same
time, Derrida is critiquing the language he is using, which he often seems
to be. However, when you ask if Derrida assumes the priority of the
general system of language over speech (discourse), as does Saussure, I am
less persuaded, and I hope you're wrong.
I read Derrida's work as basically deconstructive of developmental
sequences, just as it is deconstructive of the structure of signification
(although even as he deconstructs it he assumes it). I am thinking about his
analysis of 'rupture', for example, in "Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences," which strikes me as quite relevant to the
questions that you pose. Although you were not asking if Derrida
presumes that discourse occurred as a rupture from the historically prior
langue, what Derrida says about rupture is relevant to the question of
whether langue is prior in Derrrida's thinking.
Let me type in some passages, with parenthetical remarks stripped here,
and see if I can show you what I'm looking at.
"Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of
structure that could be called an 'event'....What would that event be
then? Its exterior form would be that of a 'rupture' ....[U]p to the
event which I wish to mark out and define, structure has always been
neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or
referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of
this center was ...above all to make sure that the organizing principle
of the structure would limit what we call the play of its elements inside
its total form....[Now, this] center can also indifferently be called the
origin or end.."
I see this as relevant to the question of which is prior langue or
parole. Our ordinary discourse neutralizes this question by 'centering'
it. We must have speech to have language, and we must have language to
have speech. This is the way it is now, but we must imagine an event, a
rupture of some kind, to decide which came first, the chicken or the egg.
While our understanding is centered, there is no 'play' of
possibilities to consider.
"...[After the rupture - when we began to ask which came first]-- it was
necessary to begin thinking that there was no center...."
These passages are followed by a close reading of Levi-Strauss and others
coming to think there was no center, which is, I think, also the place
that Derrida sees himself, a philosophical place with no center -- no
center, no place to rest without being haunted by the question of which is
prior.
I read this, and other accounts of Derrida, as deconstructive of
the concept of development by a kind of pathologizing of it as a question.
We have somehow stopped being content with the 'center' that says both
require the other and become haunted with a question of which is prior.
But perhaps I have read too much Wittgenstein and too little Derrida, for
this is certainly a Wittgenstein-like interpretation of the Derridean
project.
Does this seem relevant to the questions you were asking? When we began
to ask which is first, langue or parole, we decentered our understanding
of their dependence on each other and asked a question which does not
make sense to ask within the conceptual tools our language provides us.
..Lois Shawver
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