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convention. What has to be excluded from a contextual explanation of
language are all those linguistic features and events that have no basis in
praxis the accidental, unconventional, singular or incoherent forces of
a language. It was precisely this dimension of language what is
beyond both self-conscious intention and purposive and creative life,
which was the focus of Derrida s deconstruction.
5
IRONY OUT OF CONTEXT
Derrida, Nietzsche and de Man
POST-STRUCTURALISM: DERRIDA
One of the great achievements of Jacques Derrida s post-structuralism
was its capacity to forge a path between these two styles of irony: a
satirical irony that attacks the conventions of a specific context, and a
broader Romantic or transcendental irony that aims to think beyond
context. Derrida acknowledges both that each speech act is always
located, specific and never detached from the forces of the world never
fully transcendental or pure. At the same time, certain located speech
acts within a context can prompt us to think the very emergence or
creation of contexts. One of Derrida s most well-known examples is the
concept of writing (Derrida 1974). This concept seems to have been
repressed or marginalised in western thought, but Derrida argues that
this is for essential and necessary reasons. There is an irreducible
tension at the heart of the very relation between writing and thinking.
One cannot reduce meaning or truth to the physical script which allows
that truth to be transmitted; nor can one think of truth or sense without
some system of differences. Writing is necessary both for truth and
meaning, but also precludes the possibility of a pure truth or meaning.
Philosophers privilege pure concepts and logic and are suspicious of the
ways in which writing, or any form of copying technology, can detach
words from their origin and allow them to circulate without their
original sense.
Derrida s earliest work examined the origins of geometry and was
critical of reducing the truth of sciences to their merely written symbol,
for the truths of mathematics remain true regardless of their context or
the signs used to convey the sense of these truths through time (Derrida
IRONY OUT OF CONTEXT 95
1989a). But Derrida also insisted that one can only have a science or
pure reason through some system of writing; logic cannot be reduced to
writing but it cannot be freed from it either. Further, this context or
system of mathematical truth prompts us to think what is true in
general, what must remain true regardless of context. For this reason,
writing becomes a double concept in Derrida. On the one hand it refers
to actual writing in the form of marks, script, texts and material
symbols, and in this sense all speech and thought is marked by some
specific and actual writing; all thought must take place in some physical
context. On the other hand, there is a more general writing, for we can
only have specific texts, systems and marks through the possibility of
writing in general: we can think or imagine other systems, other
languages and other contexts only because we have this concept of
writing as such that is not reducible to this or that instance of writing.
All those features that we normally attribute to language and writing
writing as a system of differences without any stable ground, end or
limit characterise experience in general. To experience something as
something it must be marked out, determined, located or identified. This
requires some system or marks of traces that enables a perceiver to see
perceptions, in all their flux and difference, as somehow the same
through time. All experience, then, must give form to the world or
synthesise the world, but it can only do this through some pre-given
system such as language or concepts. All thinking must, therefore, both
inhabit a context but also be more than any context. For Derrida this
enables a new approach to politics, where politics is not the gathering of
persons in a common context. We need to see any manifest political
context as the effect of a multiplicity of forces, forces that will have
effects beyond any recognised and intended context; this in turn
expands the domain of responsibility and how we can read a text. For
we can now attend to all those forces and effects that are unintended and
which destabilise contexts. In the following passage Derrida answers
John Searle, who had attacked deconstruction for its attempt to consider
language out of context:
We said: independently of all determinable contexts. Does one
have the right to read like this? No, certainly not, if one wishes to
imagine a sentence or a mark in general without any context, and
readable as such. This never occurs and the law remains
unbreachable. But for the same reason, a context is never absolutely
96 IRONY OUT OF CONTEXT
closed, constraining, determined, completely filled. A structural
opening allows it to transform itself or to give way to another
context. This is why every mark has a force of detachment, which
not only can free it from such and such a determined context, but
ensures even its principle of intelligibility and its mark structure
that is, its iterability (repetition and alteration). A mark that could
not in any way detach itself from its singular context however
slightly and, if only through repetition, reducing, dividing and
multiplying it by identifying it would no longer be a mark.
(Derrida 1988, 216)
We must understand the signs or marks of our language not just as
physical tokens but as signs of some present and coherent world. For
this reason, Derrida remarks, we must work with a necessary but
impossible distinction between the ironic and the non-ironic (Derrida
1988, 114). For a language to work as a language, I have to accept that
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