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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Derrida vs. Hegel – Distinguish deconstruction from speculative dialetics

In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is not to collapse into Hegel's dialectic where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic whose telos would, necessarily, be to resolve it into a synthesis.
The presence of Hegelianism was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the existentialism from Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's:

Neither/nor: that is simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.

In fact, I attempt to bring the critical operation to bear against the unceasing reappropriation of this work of the simulacrum by a dialectics of the Hegelian type (which even idealizes and "semantizes" the value of work), for Hegelian idealism consists precisely of a releve of the binary oppositions of classical idealism, a resolution of contradiction into a third term that comes in order to aufheben, to deny while raising up, while idealizing, while sublimating into an anamnesic interiority (Errinnerung), while interning difference in a self-presence.
This difference from Hegel should be understood as essential from the start, and the Differance being one of the first terms that he tried more accurately to distinguish from all forms of Hegelian difference when proceeding with deconstruction:
Since it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel - a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is (interminable, at least if one wishes to execute it rigorously and minutely - I have attempted to distinguish differance (whose a marks, among other things, its productive and conflictual characteristics) from Hegelian difference, and have done so precisely at the point at which Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorize it, to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto- theological or onto-teleological synthesis.
More than difference is the conflictuality of difference that must be distinguished from contradiction in Hegel to clearly distinguish deconstruction from speculative dialetics:
Differance (at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel, everything, what is most decisive, is played out, here, in what Husserl called "subtle nuances," or Marx "micrology") must sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the Aufhebung and with speculative dialectics. Since this conflictuality of differance - which can be called contradiction only if one demarcates it by means of a long work on Hegel's concept of contradiction - can never be totally resolved, it marks its effects in what I call the text in general, in a text which is not reduced to a book or a library, and which can never be governed by a referent in the classical sense, that is, by a thing or by a transcendental signified that would regulate its movement. You can well see that it is not because I wish to appease or reconciliate(sic) that I prefer to employ the mark "differance" rather than refer to the system of difference- and-contradiction.