Vicki Kirby
Deconstruction’s disciplinary home is conventionally found in those disciplines that profess special expertise in studying the complex structures of rhetoric, logic, discourse, and representation – in sum, language itself. Such approaches in the humanities are conventionally defined against the sciences, inasmuch as they question objectivity, emphasize the subjective dimension of interpretation, and turn the object under investigation into a textual or discursive artifact. Given this emphasis on the vagaries of interpretation, it is not surprising that deconstruction’s relationship with science has been an uneasy and even notorious one. In the myriad publications that came to be known as the “Science Wars” and then the “Sokal hoax,” Jacques Derrida’s name and references to deconstruction were routinely associated with scientific ignorance and rhetorical obfuscation. As Arkady Plotnitsky describes the denigration of deconstruction at this time, Derrida’s thought “figures most prominently and, again, nearly uniquely throughout these discussions” (Plotnitsky 1997).1
In sum, as the de facto exemplar of postmodernism’s inability to engage a substantive and enduring facticity, the real world no less, deconstruction came to represent the impasse of the “two cultures.” This involves the perceived incommensurability between the aims and methods of the humanities and those practiced in the sciences. In the former, the meaning of the referent changes because it is deemed a cultural product, an ideational or socially inflected entity that, inasmuch as it mediates reality, is constructed or invented. In the latter, the pragmatism of scientific research demands the referent’s relative stability, concrete endurance, and accessibility, and to this end, proof of the referent is thought to be discovered. What is important here is that the humanities tend to circumscribe knowledge, emphasize its contingency, and define the human condition in terms of hermeneutic enclosure. In the main, the project of the sciences is very different: science strives for access to a universal truth that, inasmuch as it pre-exists interpretation, cannot be constituted by it.
As the blurring of deconstruction with a battery of postmodern theories has become routine, it is not surprising that the anti-science aspects of such representations have provoked few scholars. There are two notable exceptions.
In Complementarity (1994) and The Knowable and the Unknowable (2002), Plotnitsky explores deconstruction’s resonance with arguments in physics and quantum mechanics, especially with the work of Niels Bohr. This detailed reading is matched by Christopher Johnson’s remarkable analysis of the history of structuralism and deconstruction in System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1993).2 Although working with quite different material and intellectual purpose, both writers shift our understanding of deconstruction as an intricate analysis of representation in its myriad forms, namely a cultural enterprise, to something that is not easily defined against, or separate from, scientific practice.
The importance of Johnson’s contribution is that he reminds us of the shared historical and intellectual milieu that links models and approaches in the life sciences with the inauguration of deconstruction and the shift from “language” in the restricted or conventional sense to a “generalized language” or “writing” that carries very different implications. The importance of this move from language to “writing” is anticipated in structuralism’s aspiration to a scientific status that would exceed, or certainly complicate, philosophical and ideological concerns. Johnson reminds us that structuralism not only promised “a methodological efficacy in the study of man comparable to that of the exact sciences” (Johnson 1993: 2), but also and more importantly, it linked the sciences with the humanities by confounding the defining difference between their respective objects.
Consequently, at the end of the nineteenth century there is a paradigm shift in the way the object of investigation is perceived, and this culminated in the confluence of cybernetics and molecular biology during and after World War II. If the exact nature and truth of the scientific object is subject to permutation and combination, in other words, if it is a code or language of some sort whose comparative complexity resonates with the abstract cipherings of human language, then this is more than an extension of language into what were previously alien fields. It is the question of language – what makes it work as a self-referential “organism” with an apparent substantive leverage, and how, or if, we can circumscribe its constitutive efficacy, that becomes the focus of investigation. How can the language of human culture and ideas connect and merge with the deep communicative structures of the animal, the vegetable, indeed, even the inorganic? The provocation that attends this “expanded” sense of language that Derrida brings under the banner of “writing” was registered in the original dissemination of poststructural arguments in both the humanities and human sciences. In the words of Michel Serres we hear something of the wonder that made this contemporary moment so extraordinary:
The sciences of today are formalistic, analytical, grammatical, semiological, each of them based on an alphabet of elements. … Their affinities are so apparent that we are once again beginning to dream of the possibility of a mathesis universalis. … What biochemistry has discovered is not the mysterious noumenon, but quite simply a universal science of the character. Like the other sciences, it points towards a general philosophy of marked elements.
(cited in Johnson 1993: 3)
It is important to appreciate that Derrida’s project was actively inspired by this broad interdisciplinary context that included the discoveries and also the challenges of scientific investigation. Clearly, Derrida’s attempt to generalize language could not be contained within philosophy proper, for as Johnson notes, Derrida’s use of the term “writing” to capture this generality “is as much a symptom as it is a cause” (Johnson 1993: 4). In other words, this sense that the life of language and information is as much a bio-gram as a grapheme “is not the initiative or inspiration of one individual thinker (Derrida), but the effect of a more general transformation of the modern episteme” (5). Indeed, in the introduction to Of Grammatology Derrida acknowledges how the peculiar proliferation of “writing” has become the analytical term that binds quite disparate intellectual endeavors:
For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for motives that are profoundly necessary … one says “language” for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more. … The contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing.
(Derrida 1984: 9)
The chatter of myriad informational ciphers, feedback loops, language codes, and algorithms is now so ubiquitous in the representation of knowledges that we are desensitized to the wonder of its very possibility. Put simply, how can a language be specific and local, yet at the same time universally comprehensible? An illustration will prove helpful here. It will explain why Derrida’s attentions were thoroughly captured by the puzzle of a “generalized language,” and it will also suggest why this language does not conform to the tripartite structure of communication (sender, message, and receiver). More provocatively, it will trouble Johnson’s description of this moment as a “general transformation of the modern episteme,” a notion echoed in the title of Plotnitsky’s The Knowable and the Unknowable, because although true, there is even more to this story.
The disciplinary cross-talk of forensic crime-scene investigation provides us with an exemplary instance of the riddle of language. It also allows us to dilate on the implications of Derrida’s assertion, elaborated in Writing and Difference (1978) and Of Grammatology (1984; both books originally appeared in 1967), that “there is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-the-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]” (Derrida 1984: 158). For our purposes, we can think of the crime scene as a text of sorts, its meaning brought into focus through the lens of different practices and representational models. These might include geology, geography, climatology, genetics, hematology, dentistry, psychology, entomology, veterinary studies, botany, orthography, sociology, historical expertise – the list is endless. Importantly, these diverse methods of isolating and understanding data illustrate two paradoxical insights. First, it is the act of circumscribing a crime scene that provides the necessary focus and access to its internal logic – that special signature of self-referential relationships that carry revelatory promise. Indeed, in the search for a culprit, it is as if the unknown figure is virtually present in the weave of different methodologies and apparently random signs. The logic of the scene resides in its peculiar ability to endure, or hold, despite this dynamic cacophony of internal cross-referencing, for it is through these chattering patterns of data alignments that the actual integrity of the scene emerges. Importantly, then, the scene should not be understood as a collection, or accumulation, of different items of evidence – an aggregation of significance – for it is the entire scene that actively identifies and informs each item with special meaning. In other words, the context that appears to surround an object will also come to situate and explain it, as if the entirety of the crime scene inheres within any one aspect.
And so we come to the second paradox, or more accurately, another perspective on the first. If each item of evidence is informed by its context, its particular significance determined by what appears to be exterior and separate from it, then this same logic can be applied to the very notion of an individual crime scene, indeed, an individual anything. To explain this, we know that the framing of a scene, its isolation from the rest of life, will invest that scene with special meaning and indicative relevance. In other words, its predictive truth function rests upon, and is relative to, a very particular frame of reference. Nevertheless, it is also the case that in order to read an item of evidence, for example, a blood-spatter pattern, a catalogue of alternative patterns from outside the boundary of investigation will inform and explain its special significance. A puzzle of quantum proportion emerges in this apparent contradiction, where the differences that are relative to a specific context – a determined or local “event”–are also dispersed and informed by a wider field of informational possibilities that appear utterly different. Perhaps we can risk calling this wider field a unified or universal field of reference (which clearly doesn’t imply homogeneity). If the difference between context, pre-text and text seems to collapse and yet endure in this example, then we are faced with a real conundrum.
The individual departure points that conventionally provide us with analytical security; the anchors for what are spatially external or temporally prior, the divisions that underpin simple causality, the oppositional valuations that allow us to navigate conceptual, ethical and political discriminations, as well as the most basic difference between subject and object, observer and observed – all these coordinates that presume separation are now in question. The reason for this merger, or contagion between entities, is that the border that allows us to define and differentiate one thing from another is also subject to the systemic entanglement that Derrida calls “language in the general sense.” As Derrida explains it, if “there is no-thing outside the text, this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or an identity-to-itself … but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing” (Derrida 1981a: 35–36). Commenting on this passage, André Brink is acutely aware of its transgressive implications for the way we segregate the practice and purpose of the humanities from those of the sciences. He notes:
[Derrida] introduces a new awareness of permeability, of interpenetr-ability, of osmosis through a membrane, a hymen (Derrida 1981a: 209). This in itself suggests a transgression as an elemental act of language, of experience, of “writing”: transgressions of limits between wave and particle, energy and mass, time and space; between word and thing, word and thought, thing and thought.
(Brink 1985: 21–22)
The real provocation that attends this sense of the system (this field of interconnectivity from which nothing is excluded) is that it precludes the possibility of a truly independent, homogeneous and autonomous entity, whether that entity is the field or system itself, or the identity of what appear to be its internal components. In other words, any entity is not so much an element among others, an element whose existence is locatable within the field or among other fields, but rather, an element whose identity is an expression of the field’s interactivity with itself. In a very real sense, the field individuates itself, “writes” and articulates itself in quite specific ways: the particular is not the opposite of the general or universal in this understanding. A helpful illustration can be drawn from Saussurean linguistics and the difference between the notion of langue, the natural language or tongue that all members of a community share, versus parole, or individual speech. We tend to regard the individual as the author of their particular speech behavior because parole captures a unique and inventive signature. In a Derridean reading, however, and one that Saussure anticipates when he insists that the individual is never the origin of change, the unique patternment of parole is exemplary of the infinite permutations and combinations of langue. The general “quickens,” or generates the particular: it is not external or alien to it. This means that even if, contra Saussure, we could attribute the origin of a language shift or neologism to a particular individual – say, a literary author, or even to the muddled error of someone’s mispronunciation or grammatical blunderings – the very workability of that shift, the reasons that explain its genesis and endurance, will rest on the fact that parole is a specific instantiation of more general forces. Parole presumes a communication model, namely intercourse between independent individuals. However, within a common field of writing, or langue in this case, parole marks the internal cross-talk, or reproductive genesis, of langue itself.
As this last point is a difficult one to grasp, a further clarification will underline its broader importance. Derrida uses what he calls the non-concept “différance” to mark a process that individuates and separates (“writes”) entities into recognizable “units” (whether by this we mean signs, subjects, objects, intentions, events). And yet what enables this process of discrimination, this cutting up and dividing, actually arises from the internal dynamics of intertextuality – entanglement and inseparability. I mention this here because it provides some insight into why the communication model based on information theory cannot accommodate the layered complexity of this involvement. Derrida problematizes the space of separation that the word difference implies, as well as its corollary, the assumption of identifiable entities that both pre-exist and initiate communication. By changing the spelling of difference (différence) through a silent marker that is not registered in the French pronunciation (différance), identity becomes a dynamic and contingent phenomenon. Karen Barad’s neologism, “intra-activity,” is perhaps a more accessible or suggestive illustration of this same process. Referring to the dynamic of quantum involvement, Barad notes that this is not an interaction, an effect caused by one entity upon another, separated in space and time:
Crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoever. Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices – iterative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetime–matter relations – through the dynamics of intra-activity.
(Barad 2007: 178)
This process of tautological intricacy, an “always/already” that is never simple repetition, has significantly stretched the conventional meaning of “text” and allowed us to appreciate why scientific goals and practices cannot be excluded from this comprehensive text, this field of language (intra-activity, différance).
Further insight into how deconstruction might reconfigure our understanding of the sciences, as well as the more general question of knowledge formation, is heralded in Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is not a methodology: it is not a procedural set of maneuvers, an application or template of inquiry through which an alien object might be ciphered. But what are the implications of such a comment for the sciences? To open this question, Rodolphe Gasché makes the unusual claim that deconstruction “is never the effect of a subjective act of desire or will or wishing. What provokes a deconstruction is rather of an ‘objective’ nature. It is a ‘must’ so to speak” (Gasché 1986: 123). The comment seems to contradict what many have understood as the anarchic essence of deconstruction, the sense of untrammeled freedom or “play” where “anything goes.” However, “play” actually carries a sense of determination for Derrida, as we see when he likens it to the internal movement of a machine (Derrida 1970: 268). It is something that is quite circumscribed, something that the machine generates from the particular rhythms that arise from its own workings. And yet, despite this sense of the objective, and even the pull of determinism, Gasché does not attribute deconstruction with scientific instrumentalism, noting that deconstruction, “as a methodical principle, cannot be mistaken for anything resembling scientific procedural rules” (Gasché 1986: 123). Nevertheless, his comments remind us that deconstruction is difficult to place.
Deconstruction can certainly appear to adopt a meta-position in relation to its object, a gesture that seems compatible with scientific methodologies and claims to objectivity. Indeed, we might remember that Derrida’s earliest attempts to explicate the difficulty of his project acknowledge certain affinities between deconstruction and science. In the chapter “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science,” which explores this question, Derrida concludes, the “constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a necessary and difficult task” (Derrida 1984: 93). And in answer to Julia Kristeva’s question in Positions, “to what extent is or is not grammatology a ‘science,’” Derrida refuses to reject the term. “Grammatology must pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure. This is why there is no simple answer to the question of whether grammatology is a ‘science’” (Derrida 1981b: 35–36).
If Derrida’s “double-science” encourages us to “understand this incompetence of science which is also the incompetence of philosophy” (Derrida 1984: 93), then perhaps deconstruction’s home is as uncomfortable yet essential to our understanding of the sciences as it is to the humanities. Certainly, its “point de méthode” (point/lack of method) is not a distinct analytical approach with a definite object and limited disciplinary application. However, the awkward question that arises if we forfeit method, or put the notion of mediation into question, is how we might hope to interrogate the process of understanding if its most routine discriminations are contestable. For example, what happens if the technology or apparatus that separates observer from observed, reader from object, interpreter from interpreted, cannot be secured? Whereas Brink’s earlier description of this blurring of identities likened the process to the permeability and interpenetration of osmosis, the “transgressions of limits,” the question gathers quantum complexity if we concede that these “entities” do not pre-exist their interpenetration. If what appears outside and therefore different from the inside is always/already the involved inside of an event that differentiates itself, that instantiates the oppositional logic of identification/separation even as it exceeds this restricted comprehension, then there is no originary integrity to be transgressed.
What can it mean to suggest that the observer, the locus of intention, agency, and intellectual calculation, the origin of the desire to comprehend and decipher, to read or experiment, is non-local? In this counter-intuitive review of the notion of intent and calculation, the very identity of the human as the unique repository of agential capacities is curiously destabilized and strangely dispersed. If the absolute break between natural objects and cultural methods of understanding them is fraught, as suggested by Serres’s allusion to a mathesis universalis, and again, in the predictive or agential capacity of forensic informatics, then what or where is the human subject? “Who” speaks this “general language” if its author is dispersed? One possible way to catch at the marvel of this question is to find in the system of differentiation a field of self-expression, a subject writ large – subject to the reflex of its own curiosity and self-involvement. Importantly, if the world of natural objects and processes already articulates the will to know, the will to be otherwise, then this intimate reflex/reflection, this “transformation of the modern episteme,” has an ontological dimension. To decenter the human as the origin of language, the one, indeed, the only one, who writes and reads, doesn’t obliterate the identity of the human; rather, it opens it to question. To practice deconstruction as a positive science, to interrogate the notion of “textuality” within which the human is “written,” is to appreciate that an epistemological transformation is, at the same time, an ontological one.3
We can re-enter this conundrum by returning to Johnson. Commenting on the shock wave that was to redefine disciplinary formations and generate deconstruction in the process, Johnson underlines that life could not be reduced to a static, irreducible essence if its iterations involve decipherment: “the logic of life is scriptural” (Johnson 1993: 3). Johnson’s statement draws energy from François Jacob’s The Logic of Life (1993). Winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA information transfer, Jacob wrote at length about the way memory and design in the study of heredity could be compared with the structure of natural languages. It is the detail of Jacob’s discussion, elaborated in the book’s introduction, “The Programme,” that exercises Derrida’s close attention in a series of unpublished seminars entitled “La Vie La Mort” (1975). Here, Derrida addresses this question of the bio-gram more closely, asking what Jacob and Georges Canguilhem4 actually “mean by this semiotic or rather by this graphic of life, of this non-phonetic writing that they call ‘without writing’” (Derrida 1975, Seminar 1: 22). Derrida’s purpose is twofold. First, he wants to acknowledge the evidence of a generality of language that encompasses what Jacob describes as “the cerebral-institutional,” or what Derrida will gloss as “psychic, social, cultural, institutional, politico-economic etc” (Derrida 1975, Seminar 1: 19), as well as the genetic. Derrida will insist that Jacob’s representation of the difference that separates these apparently discrete systems of nature and culture is misguided, because what Jacob reserves for the genetic program is also apparent in the “cerebral-institutional.” And here we arrive at the nub of Derrida’s intervention.
We can read Derrida’s impatience with Jacob as a bid to remind the geneticist that he is really a philosopher of sorts, caught in the metaphysical commitments of cultural representations. In other words, the presumptive explanations of the behavior and literacy of genes are an inevitable reflection of the language Jacob must use to (mis)represent them: the tool constitutes and contaminates the object. However, given Derrida’s acknowledgment of the cybernetic turn and his rejection of classical understandings of mediation, it would make little sense to conflate such textual enclosure with human language and interpretation, as if the presumptive language of genes is an error – a projected (and therefore misplaced) anthropocentrism. The purchase of Derrida’s argument is that it simply won’t work as an epistemological corrective if the logic of life is, indeed, scriptural, and science can take pragmatic leverage from this insight.
Derrida’s second point is to remind us of what he said in Of Grammatology – “the biologist speaks today of writing and of pro-gram with respect to the most elementary information processes in the living cell.” However and importantly, he goes on to emphasize that these comments were not made
in order to reinvest into the notion or the word program all of the conceptual machine that is the logos and its semantic, but rather in order to attempt to show that the call to a non-phonetic writing in genetics should implicate and provoke a whole deconstruction of the logocentric machine.
(Derrida 1975, Seminar 1: 22)
We need to take stock at this juncture and reassess what it might mean to evoke a starting point for deconstruction where the system –“textuality,” “writing,” or “language in the general sense”–already, and at once, articulates the heterogeneity of biological algorithms, cybernetic communication, the discriminating grammars of molecular and atomic parsing, and the puzzles of quantum space/time configurations. What could exceed the system’s comprehension (of itself) if, as Derrida insists, “there is no outside-the-text”?
Derrida animates the subject Life with critical capacity, noting how life “divides itself originarily (urteilen) in order to produce itself and reproduce itself” (Derrida 1975, Seminar 1: 3). This suggestion complicates the accepted division between the letter of life, its genetic and reproductive programs, and the life of the letter in literature and representation, because reproduction/re-presentation is discrimination/judgment. If, as biologists insist, the constant of life is reproducibility, then from a deconstructive point of view, even literature in the conventional sense is alive to such iterative processes.
When we consider the relationship between deconstruction and science, the conjunction “and” segregates the difference between these endeavors. This is a conversation that has yet to take place, a conversation whose outcome has yet to be registered/written. However, the deconstructive legacy challenges us to consider these projects as already entangled, already in conversation/conversion. Whether scientific modeling, natural languages, computational algorithms, or hormonal chatter, it is from within this grammatological textile,5 or universal langue, that the pragmatics of referential being materialize. How can modes of knowing – apparently second-order cultural models and representations – already animate the natural order? By interrogating the divisions that identify the human as inherently unnatural, a positive science of grammatology might be appreciated. Indeed, inasmuch as certain aspects of science have always been in the process of discovering human complexity in alien (natural) literacies and numeracies, it seems that a positive science of grammatology is already underway.
1 The specific focus of Derrida’s critics concerned the notion of “the Einsteinian constant,” a phrase initially coined by the philosopher Jean Hyppolite when questioning the detail of one of Derrida’s earliest papers. For an informed analysis of this specific point, as well as the broader intellectual context of the “Science Wars,” see Plotnitsky 1997, 2002. Other examples where Derrida’s work makes mention of scientific concerns include Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (Derrida 1981a: 219; Plotnitsky 1994: 196–202; Taylor 2001: 93–98), his earliest work on Husserl and the question of geometry (Derrida 1989), and his discussion of François Jacob’s understanding of the language of genes (Derrida 1975).
2 Among a handful of publications that do explore the relationship between science and deconstruction, albeit to different effects, see Brink 1985; Norris 1997; Johnson 2001; Malabou 2007; Staten 2008.
3 As this is a brief summation, I refer the reader to Derrida’s dilation on evolution as “writing.” See his response to Jean Hyppolite in the “Discussion” following “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences” (Derrida 1970). Here, Derrida refuses the suggestion that if evolution is a form of writing then humankind arrives as an aberration in these scribblings, an aberration because the complexities of intention and calculation belong to the writing of humanity alone and could not precede this arrival.
4 Derrida’s interest in Georges Canguilhem mainly concerns La Connaissance de la Vie (1952) and Etudes d’histoires et de philosophie des sciences (1968).
5 The sense that “elements” do not pre-exist their involvement, indeed, that they express what I prefer to gloss as a hyper-presence of involvement, is evident in Derrida’s explanation of “textile”:
no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This 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. … There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.
(Derrida 1981b: 26)
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Brink, A. (1985) “Transgressions: a quantum approach to literary deconstruction,” Journal of Literary Studies, 1(3): 10–26.
Canguilhem, G. (1952) La Connaissance de la Vie, Paris: Hachette.
——(1968) Etudes d’histoires et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: Vrin.
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——(1975) La Vie La Mort (Jacques Derrida Papers MS-CO1 Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, CA), trans. A. Pont (private copy).
——(1978) Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——(1981a) Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——(1981b) Positions, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——(1984) Of Grammatology, trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
——(1989) Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: an introduction, trans. J.P. Leavey Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Gasché, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the philosophy of reflection, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Jacob, F. (1993) The Logic of Life: a history of heredity, trans. B.E. Spillman, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Johnson, C. (1993) System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——(2001) “Derrida and science,” in M. Meyer (ed.) Questioning Derrida: with his replies on philosophy, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Malabou, C. (2007) “The end of writing?: grammatology and plasticity,” trans. A. Wiese, The European Legacy, 12(4): 431–41.
Norris, C. (1997) “Deconstructing Anti-Realism: quantum mechanics and interpretation theory,” Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 26(3): 3–37.
Plotnitsky, A. (1994) Complementarity: anti-epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
——(1997) “‘But it is above all not true’: Derrida, relativity, and the ‘science wars,’” Postmodern Culture, 7(2). Online. Available HTTP: <http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/pmc/v007/7.2plotnitsky.html> (accessed 15 July 2009).
——(2002) The Knowable and the Unknowable: modern science, nonclassical thought, and the “two cultures”, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Staten, H. (2008) “Derrida, Dennett, and the ethico-political project of naturalism,” Derrida Today, 1(1): 19–41.
Taylor, M.C., (2001) The Moment of Complexity: emerging network culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.