Trace (deconstruction) - Metaphysics, Logocentrism, Differance and Trace

Metaphysics, Logocentrism, Differance and Trace

One of the very many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida’s project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormity of it. Just to understand the context of Derrida’s theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers, such as, Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and others. Some have tried to write simplified versions of this theory, such as Deconstruction for Beginners and Deconstructions: A User's Guide, but their attempts have moved so much away from the original that they have drawn flak from almost all quarters. To this day, the best way of learning about Deconstruction is to read Derrida in original. Still, we will try to present a short exposition of what “trace” is and it relates to the whole Derridian project.

Derrida’s philosophy is chiefly concerned with metaphysics, although he does not define it rigorously, and takes it to be “the science of presence”. In his own words:

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme—is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence--- eidos, arché, telos, energia, ousia, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.

Derrida finds the root of this metaphysics, which he calls “metaphysics of pure presence", in logos, which is internal to language itself. He calls this “Logocentrism”, which is a tendency towards definitive truth-values through forced closure of structures. In his belief, it is the structure of language itself that forces us into metaphysics, best represented through truth-values, closures, speech as valorized by Socrates in Phaedrus. In fact, according to Derrida, Logocentrism is so all-pervasive that the mere act of opposing it cannot evade it by any margin. On the other hand, Derrida finds his Nietzschean hope (his own word is “affirmation") in heterogeneity, contradictions, absence etc. To counter the privileged position of the speech (parole) or the phonè, he puts forward a new science of grammé or the unit of writing: grammatology. Unlike structuralists, Derrida does not see language as the one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified ; to him, language is a play of identity and difference, an endless chain of signifiers leading to other signifiers. In spite of all the logocentric tendencies towards closure, and truth-values, language, or text for that matter, always contradicts itself. This critique is inherent in all texts, not through a presence, but an absence of a presence long sought by logocentric visions. Influenced by some aspects of Freudian psycho-analysis, Derrida presents us the strategy of Deconstruction, an amalgamation of Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion and Levinas’s concept of the Other. Deconstruction as a strategy tries to find the most surprising contradictions in texts, unravel it, and built over it. Instead of finding the truth, the closure, the steadfast meaning, it finds absence of presence, loophole, freeplay of meanings etc. (For a more detailed analysis of Deconstruction, read the Wikipedia article Deconstruction). It is this absence of presence that is termed as ‘trace’ by Derrida. However, he treats the word cautiously, and uses it only as a contingency measure, because the traditional meaning of the word ‘trace’ is a part of the scheme Derrida wants to denude. By the virtue of trace, signifiers always simultaneously differ and defer from the illusive signified. This is something Derrida calls “Differance”. According to him, “Differance is the non-full, non-simple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences". In Derrida’s world, language is labyrinthine, inter-woven and inter-related, and the threads of this labyrinth are the differences, traces. Along with “supplement”, trace and difference conveys a picture of what language is to Derrida. All these terms are part of his strategy; he wants to use trace to “indicate a way out of the closure imposed by the system…”. Trace is, again, not presence but an empty simulation of it:

The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. . . . In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read.

It is essentially an “antistructuralist gesture”, as he felt that the “Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented”. Trace, or difference, is also pivotal in jeopardizing strict dichotomies:

t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics.

Trace is also not linear or chronological in any sense of the word, “This trace relates no less to what is called the future than what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by the very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present”. Trace is a contingent strategy, a bricolage for Derrida that helps him produce a new concept of writing (as opposed to the Socratic or Saussurean speech), where “The interweaving results in each 'element' - phoneme or grapheme - being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text”.