Derrida’s early work is often quite plausibly thought to be about origins.1 Indeed, if we wanted to identify an origin for deconstruction itself, we might say that it comes to Derrida with the thought that the origin is irreducibly complex. ‘Originary synthesis’, as the work on Husserl was inclined to say, and soon enough ‘originary trace’. What Derrida calls ‘metaphysics’ tries to lead things back to an origin point that would be simple (call it ‘presence’): deconstruction involves the claim that in the beginning is a complexity that resists further analysis in the strict sense, and that simple origins are always only retro-jected after the fact in the more or less compelling stories or myths that metaphysics recounts. Derrida wants to account for the (undeniable) effects of presence by developing a ‘prior’ trace- or text-structure which allows for what looks like presence to emerge while never itself being describable in terms of presence.
But if, in the beginning of Derrida’s thinking, it was most obviously about beginnings, at the end it was arguably more about ends. Metaphysics, finding itself always in the middle, in complexity (‘in a text already’, as the Grammatology says) tries not only to track back and then derive that complexity from a simple present origin point, but also to put that complexity in the (convergent) perspective of an end point or resolution. Complexity should come from something simple, says metaphysics, and should be headed towards something simple; and that final simplicity often enough involves a kind of recovery of the original simplicity. The deconstruction of the origin, the arkhè, entails a concomitant deconstruction of the telos, and thereby of the whole ‘archeo-teleological’ structure that metaphysics is. What has often been perceived as a shift in later Derrida towards more obviously ethico-political concerns might better be described as an often subtle change of emphasis from deconstruction of arkhè to deconstruction of telos, which was itself there from the beginning.
I think that the ‘origin’ argument is now reasonably well understood, however difficult some of its implications remain: the ‘ends’ argument much less so, and that one task Derrida has left us is to think it through a little further, and to show how it is not to be separated from the origins argument itself.
The argument about the telos might go something like this: ends, however noble they may appear, and however ideal their status, also end, close off, terminate, put to death. In a Derridean perspective, the best chance for ends is that they become interminable or end-less, and that endlessness entails rethinking not just the end itself (an end-less end is no longer quite an end, just as a non-simple origin is not quite an origin), but the implied directionality or ‘progress’ towards it. Once getting to the end is not clearly just a good (because it puts an end to things, including the good itself), and once an even ideal progress towards it thereby becomes problematical, then a number of extraordinarily difficult questions about what we still call ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ open up. In tune with a more familiar deconstructive suspicion of oppositions, this involves nothing less than a rethink of ‘good’ itself, and must lead to an affirmation of a non-oppositional relationship between good and evil. The least one can say is that this places an unusual weight of responsibility on the ethico-political appreciation of events as they befall us in their essential unpredictability, but in so doing it should also release us from the burdens of dogmatism and moralism that still encumber, in however reassuring a way, most efforts to think about these issues.
The recent emphasis on terms such as ‘culture’ and ‘history’ in literary studies seems an unpromising way to respond to this legacy that Derrida has left us. The appeal to history, especially, often provides a reassuring way of avoiding the hard questions that the deconstruction of the telos should bring with it. This does not imply that philosophers typically do better with such questions than students of literature. Philosophy will in fact remain unable to respond to the challenge of deconstruction until it can do better with the question of reading, which is one place in which Derrida’s legacy will inevitably be played out in the years to come. Reading is already an issue when we try to think about legacies in general, and will be the more acute in Derrida’s own case: if ‘to be is to inherit’, as he asserts in Spectres de Marx, if there is no inheritance without some effort of reading, and if reading is thought seriously as precisely not to do with restoring the arkhè or promoting the telos, then it seems probable that reading itself (prior to any hermeneutic determination whatsoever) might become our central problem, just as we struggle to read Derrida’s legacy. There seems to be at present no philosophical, theoretical or literary model to account for the complexity of this situation, in which reading is structurally endless. And it seems likely that the current organisation of the university will be ill-adapted to encourage the most fruitful reflection on it. The deconstructive thinking of origins, ends, legacies and readings should also be provoking us to be more inventive in our academic and institutional arrangements than has usually been the case in the past. Attention to the very readability of what we try to read, however unreadable that readability must also remain, does not in principle belong to any particular academic ‘discipline’, and puts pressure on the very concept of discipline itself. The quite mysterious fact that I can read what I read (however imperfect that reading remains, and whatever difficulties it presents) precedes any particular disciplinary grasp, and indeed is intrinsically quite ill-disciplined and institutionally troublesome, but it is the only reason for doing what I do.
1. This short text was first published (untitled) in the forum ‘The Legacy of Jacques Derrida’, PMLA, vol. 120, no. 2 (March 2005).