Trace (deconstruction)

Trace (deconstruction)

Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian Deconstruction. In the 1960s, Derrida used this word in two of his early books, namely “Writing and Difference” and “Of Grammatology”. The English word “trace” was first used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; in her famous preface to “Of Grammatology”, she wrote “I stick to ‘trace’ in my translation, because it “looks the same” as Derrida’s word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word”. Derrida, however, does not positively or strictly define trace, and denies the possibility of such a project. Indeed, words like “différance”, “arché-writing”, “pharmakos/pharmakon”, and especially “specter”, carry almost the identical meaning in many other texts by Derrida. His refusal to apply only one name to his concepts is a deliberate strategy to avoid a certain sort of metaphysics. For detailed analysis, check “Of Grammatology”, Translator’s Preface.

Trace can be seen as an always contingent term for a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present", of the ‘originary lack’ that seems to be "the condition of thought and experience". Trace is a contingent unit of the critique of language always-already present: “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”. Deconstruction, unlike analysis or interpretation, tries to lay the inner contradictions of a text bare, and, in turn, build a different meaning from that: it is at once a process of destruction and construction. Derrida claims that these contradictions are neither accidental nor exceptions; they are the exposure of certain “metaphysics of pure presence”, an exposure of the “transcendental signified” always-already hidden inside language. This “always-already hidden” contradiction is trace.

Read more about Trace (deconstruction):  Metaphysics, Logocentrism, Differance and Trace, Heideggerian Dasein and Derridian Trace, References

Famous quotes containing the word trace:

    Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)