Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Deconstruction and Tradition

Richard Beardsworth

To cite this article: Richard Beardsworth (1995) Deconstruction and Tradition, Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, 26:3, 279-292, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1995.11007125

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 26, No.3, October 1995

DECONSTRUCTION AND TRADITION

RICHARD BEARDSWORTH

In many regards, and from a point of view which does not cover the whole field, we
are today on the eve of platonism.
J. Derrida, Dissemination

The following article has various stakes which I will briefly enumerate, in
order of growing importance, before turning to the detail of my argument.
Firstly, by analysing a specific text of Derrida, "White Mythology", in
terms of the aporetic relations between deconstruction and the Western
tradition, I wish to inscribe the following within the context of an ongoing
debate between philosophy and literature.' This debate is not peripheral to
our concerns; it has everything to do with tradition as well as with the
political dimension of one's bonds with tradition at the so-called "closure of
metaphysics". Despite a growing understanding of the philosophical rigour
and complexity of Derrida's writing, there is still a tendency to associate this
work with unilateral anti-traditionalist or post-modernist thought. This
evaluation is erroneous; it is, in part, derived from an over-hasty amalga-
mation of the concerns of deconstruction with a certain refusal of philosophy
within deconstructive literary criticism. In this context the identification of
Derrida's work with Nietzsche's destruction of the tradition, given their
respective interests in metaphor, has been crucial. Moreover, a reductive
reading of "White Mythology" has, among other intellectual gestures, played
an important role in permitting the identification. This evaluation is also
unhelpful, since it has tended either to obfuscate the political dimensions to
deconstruction or muddle the precision and foresight of its political concerns.
Hence, the first reason why I wish to look at "White Mythology": to rehearse
its central distinction between a deconstruction and a Nietzschean-type
destruction of tradition recalls the complex and strategic relations that
deconstruction holds with what we still call the "past".
Secondly, such a rehearsal also serves to place squarely on the politico-
philosophical agenda of today the questions of memory and time. Both
questions inform, consciously or not, all contemporary thought and all
contemporary politics, given the ever-accelerating technologies of memory
and the increasing technicisation of our modes of temporalisation. In this
context, to return to "White Mythology" is not a petty exercise in scholarly
repair, but a political act which wishes to reflect critically upon the future of
this "today". In other words, the title of this article, "Deconstruction and
Tradition", does not simply designate a descriptive commentary upon

279
Derrida's relations to Western philosophy (this would be, ultimately, of little
interest); rather, it marks an act of judgement concerning what is happening
to memory, time and space in a world whose relations are increasingly
articulated (that is, are practised and thought) through technology and the
technosciences. These relations- which are not new, even if the said acceler-
ation marks the specificity of "today" - demand non-systematic reflection
from philosophy. It is through this reflection that philosophy - whilst no
longer opposed, as in the metaphysical tradition, to techne - can prolong and
transform the critical role which Kant invented for it at the beginning of the
modem era in the wake of the explosion of the natural sciences. 2
As is well-known, writing, for Derrida, is the condition of truth and not
simply a secondary reflection of it. 1 The constitutive role of writing is denied
by the philosophical tradition. The denial re-marks, as an opposition between
truth and techne an originary repetition ("archi-writing") which is the
condition of (im)possibility of a discernible ethico-theoretical distinction
between perfect repetition (truth) and imperfect "imitations" of this perfect
repetition.• Now, given that the Western tradition is organised axiomatically
by the desire to speak of truth, and given that "today" is characterised by the
technical marginalisation of the value of truth, Derrida's re-inscription of
writing within the philosophical tradition is necessarily concerned with re-
negotiating theoretical, ethical and political concepts in the context of
humanity's present and future relations to technical processes. 5
Presupposed, then, by the following argument is the belief that Derrida's
deconstruction of the concept of metaphor in the Western tradition is at the
same time the opening-up of a space of reflection in which to think the
supplementary relationship between nature, human being and technics. In
other words, the following is implicitly suggesting that the wish to perceive
deconstruction as a literary re-inscription of philosophy serves both to ignore
the double move that Derrida makes concerning philosophy and its modem
inheritors and to ignore the consequences that this double move is an ethico-
political reflection on technics. 6
Finally, my wish to return to "White Mythology", in the larger context of
human being's relations with tradition and with techne, is informed by the
conviction that the movement, the rhythm, which always already inscribes
these "two" relations within one differential economy, needs to be thought
more in political terms. Although the following can only look forward to
such a consideration, a word on the article's general orientation in this
respect is apposite. 7 It has often been said, critically or sympathetically, that
deconstruction does not, cannot have a politics. This is quite correct if one
understands by politics a normative organisation of the relation between the
human subject and its others (other human subjects, the world, the market,
technology, etc.). Like much French thinking since structuralism, Derrida's

280
work can be seen to mourn the political subject as well as any political logic
which is organised around the notion of subjectivity. This process of
mourning forms, for Derrida - and unlike, although for different reasons,
Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault or Kristeva, who have named the political more
frequently and more easily - part of the deconstruction of metaphysics. In
this sense the field of politics is not an immediately privileged object of
reflection for Derrida, although one of the implications of deconstruction is
that all thinking cannot not be political, and that the concept of "a political
field" is, accordingly, a metaphysical way of restricting political action and
negotiation. It is in terms of this paradox that a distinction between "the
political" and "politics" can be made regarding deconstruction. I suggest that
the term the "political" is not understood in the sense of the "essence of
politics" or of what is "common" to all forms of politics, what marks a
gesture of thought or action as political, etc., but in terms of what remains
out of account in any normative accounting of the relation between a human
subject and its others. For, it is due to this remainder that there is, in the first
place, politics. There would be no politics without the failing of politics,
without its necessary failure. 'The political" is thus the origin and end of
"politics", without being either an origin or end. 'The political" is the origin
and end of politics as the remainder of all origins or ends, all temporal
horizons. Accepting this paradoxical definition (the political is the inability
on the part of politics to be transparent to itself), we can say that
deconstruction is politically engaged given its very refusal of political
determination. This is not simply because it is concerned with the remainder
of calculation; such concern and attention also imply a transformation of the
normative account of politics in relation to the remainder (of) the political.
These two concerns are indeed the same: to witness the remainder is to
transform the tradition; and this, indefinitely. 8
Having traced the aporias of both traditional and anti-traditionalist
philosophy with regard to metaphor, the article ends, accordingly, with a call
to invention which deconstruction affirms. These aporias lead to the "idea"
of a gift which is radically outside any economy of calculation, whilst being
its condition. The essay is thus concerned to open up ways of linking the
aporetic thinking of tradition with the invention of concepts that are a
transformation of the tradition in relation to that which it excludes. This
linking is the political affirmation of the gift of tradition's aporias. 9
A few words first on the concept of tradition. If we follow up the Latin
root of the word Tradition, the Latin verb tradere, to "hand over" or to
"deliver", we can hear an ambivalence in the semantic value of the term.
Tradition "hands over" in the sense of "bequeaths" and "hands over" in the
sense of "recounts", "records" and "transmits". These two senses of the term
cross, reflect and ultimately conflict with each other within the concept's

281
metaphysical parameters. The conflict is a sign that something else is going
on within and beyond these parameters, encouraging us to re-organise the
concept as a differential tension which includes its contradictory senses.
Such a gesture allows the term tradition to be re-invented beyond its
metaphysical designation, that is, beyond meaning and a humanist consider-
ation of humanity tout court. This strategy of invention is always bound by
the specific context that marks its possibility, but, as we shall see, it involves
the same moves as that of the deconstruction of the concept of metaphor.
Tradition as a "handing down" is an act of passing, a passage from one
individual to another, one community to another and, finally, one generation
to another. What is conveyed in the handling is both the content to be
handled and the very handling that permits this content to be conveyed.
Indeed, prior to any-thing that tradition transmits (a set of codes, norms,
beliefs or practices), tradition is the name of this process of gathering, of
setting-in-place which permits, in the first place, this "thing" to be repeated
across time and space. Before being tradition, Tradition is, accordingly, the
tradition, the translatibility of tradition, that allows for the possibility of a
tradition. Whether the tradition is universalist or particularist does not affect
the absolute generality of this precondition of translation. Rather, the
distinction between the universal and the particular is a necessary effect of
this originary structure. It is this structure of possibility - another way of
speaking of iterability - that all traditions have refused to think. The
traditional sense of tradition can only "recognise" this structure by excluding
it from itself and letting it return symptomatically through the other sense of
tradition as "transmission". As a symptom, transmission denotes the carrying
of a meaning or identity that is prior to the moment and act of sending. The
technics of transmission are thus considered as an instrument by which
thoughts can be conveyed. By projecting outside of itself the repetition (of)
tradition and by placing this repetition within the concept of instrumentality,
the metaphysical concept (for that is what we are analysing) of tradition
keeps itself pure of all contingency, finitude, (and) technicity.
This projection enacts a denigration, which both constitutes the
traditional sense of tradition and betrays the sick violence of its sense of
identity. For, if the self-relating and self-relation of tradition depend on a
support for their possibility, if there is no tradition without memory and no
memory without a support, it is in this recording of its bequeathing that
tradition is essentially threatened by that which constitutes it at the same
time. There can be no tradition without the spatio-temporalisation that a
support implies; and no tradition, either, which is not at the same time
essentially limited in its attempt to gather itself together, to push itself
towards universality and homogeneity. All traditions - universalist or
particularist - are caught in this paradox, for even particularist traditions

282
wish to be exemplary in their particularism, and such exemplarity connotes
both universality and homogeneity.
The above tension - or rather, stricture - running through the constitutive
act of tradition accounts for why the term as well as its referent (again,
whatever its determination - internationalist, cosmopolitan or nationalist;
revolutionary, democratic or reactionary) are always already the idea of
themselves projected into an incessantly self-deferred fUture. Hence, the term
tradition is a priori unable to designate a reality; its referent is necessarily a
fiction, a fiction carved out from within the concept's difference from itself.
The necessarily fictitious status of the concept's referent (its constant self-
deferral, the constant attempt to make tradition work, to keep it "alive", etc.)
reveals that the concept tradition actually functions in terms of its consti-
tutive inability to be itself. This does not simply mean that whatever the
tradition, there has never been Tradition; rather, tradition is the fact that
there has never been Tradition. Tradition is the "ghost" of itself. 10 The hands
to handle it are, from the beginning, too many, too artificial, too prosthetic. 11
It is this originary prostheticity that allows us, precisely, to mourn tradition.
Without tradition's supports, there would be no tradition; without tradition's
supports there would be nothing but tradition; without tradition's supports
there would be no tradition to support.
The preceding comments show the complexity of what is at stake in any
present reflection on tradition. They highlight the fact that any negotiation
either with the general sense of tradition or with a particular tradition
immediately involves questions of memory, responsibility, politics, and
technology. It is this negotiation which the following short example of
deconstruction's relationship to tradition's "self-alterity" is interested in.
Indeed, I suggest, through this example, that deconstruction is nothing but
the tradition, re-marked in terms of its self-alterity, and, secondly, that this
re-marking is already the "political" negotiation with the future of tradition
in an increasingly technicised, "de-traditionalised" world. 12
Derrida's work on the concept of metaphor in "White Mythology" follows
the same logic as that which we have used above to deconstruct the concept
of tradition. This work can be associated neither with philosophy (the desire
for truth or the modem destruction or mourning of this desire) nor with any
of what we would call today "the human sciences" which have been opposed
to philosophy by the philosophical tradition or which have attempted in
recent years to subsume this tradition (literary theory, psychoanalysis,
linguistics or certain politico-historical methodologies informing political
theory). It is this double move of deconstruction - its "impossible" logic -
that has been overlooked by many readers of Derrida. During a now
notorious argument, Habermas, for example, refers to "White Mythology" in
order to punish Derrida's irresponsible Nietzscheanism given the essay's

283
apparent celebration of Nietzsche's reduction of truth to metaphor.n Rather
than using this space, however, to salvage deconstruction from a
Habermasian-type reading of Derrida, let us recount the rhythm and implica-
tions of this double move; in so doing, we will in fact kill two birds with one
stone.
In the opening pages of "White Mythology" Derrida recalls two
traditional approaches to the localisation of metaphor in the philosophical
text.
1) The first is that of philosophy. The place of metaphor in philosophy is
the problem of natural language in philosophical discourse. Derrida
contends that philosophy's very identity lies in the desire and attempt to
expel from within it natural language. The thesis is everything but "linguis-
ticist". For, if philosophy recognises itself in the conceptual and linguistic
telos of a formal language, rid of the facticity and contingency of an
empirical spatio-temporal world which any element of natural language
necessarily connotes, it is because philosophy is the attempt to transcend
finitude, the attempt to anticipate and reduce the irreducible fact of death.
With this desire, desire itself, metaphor is made into a secondary instance
expressive of a non-linguistic truth or meaning which is prior to it. The
philosophical domination over metaphor gathers itself into the rational
fiction that metaphor is a provisionally necessary, but fundamentally
contingent detour of truth through the support of natural language and/or a
rhetorical instrument or ornament which imagises the intelligible nature of
truth for those to whom that truth is to be handed down. As is well-known,
from Plato through the Fathers of the Church to Hegel (and even a certain
Freud), metaphor is a convenient, but ultimately contingent imagisation of a
value which cannot be represented in the language of the "understanding"
but which must be represented (here the whole melancholic pathos of
philosophical enquiry begins) for this value to be communicated. Without
this communication the value would not be what it is (a value, a tradition)
and yet this communication ("metaphor" means "transport" in Greek)
devalues this value at one and the same time by re-presenting it (in sensible
terms). 14 Thus the failure to efface natural language from philosophy is
effaced in tum by the telos of a pure formal language, projected into an
indefinite future. (It is, of course, crucial to the coherence of the logic of this
projection that the object of the telos can never arrive, whilst being at the
same time desired. For the telos can only perform its function of forgetting
as an ideal or Idea (in the Kantian sense).) As Derrida remarks in both
Speech and Phenomena and his essay "Cogito and the History of Madness",
one classical name for the guarding of this telos is God. 15 God is, accord-
ingly, the name of an ideal horizon (at the end of time) as a result of whose
thought one can forget the radical facticity and temporality of man. Put

284
slightly differently, the irreducibly metaphorical nature of man's language is
forgotten in the name of God: which is why, to be consistent, this name must
be "forgotten" also, since the name "God" is a metaphor as well, etc. The
rigorous end of philosophy's reduction of natural language is silence.
2) The counter-tradition to tradition expresses itself as the attempt, since
the 18th century at least, to return and reduce philosophy to its own
metaphorical truth which it forgets in order to conceive itself as a project that
transcends time and space. As is well-known, the early Nietzsche, that of
"Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense", gathers, in turn, this counter-
tradition together, when he declares that man is an artist who has forgotten
his artistry as truth and in the name of humanity. 16
What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum
of total relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred and adorned
... Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out
metaphors without sensory impact."
The philosophical work is an analogical transfer of the physical world
which has forgotten this metaphorical transference. Metaphysics is white
mythology. European man considers his own mythology, his logos, to be the
universal form of what he calls reason and forgets, as his sensible coinage
spiritualises itself through usure, that the fire of logos is the mythos of a
particular idiom. Spirit is, in other words, a particular organisation of force
opposed to the forces of life (its affects and instincts). This double forgetting
calls for the destruction of tradition, or rather the "genealogy" of its cunning
impotence and cruelty. Genealogy, like an exclusively etymological or
empiricist reading of tradition, enacts the historicisation of philosophy. This
is why Nietzsche is, rightly and wrongly, often evoked in empiricist,
historicist or positivist accounts of philosophy, since his destruction of the
value of value prefigures any reduction of philosophy to a finite genealogy.
Nietzsche's gesture, here, is, in other words, typical of the method of the
human and social sciences.
Now, if Derrida elaborates these two approaches to the place of metaphor
together, it is precisely because he subscribes to neither position. The essay
"White Mythology" elaborates the ways in which both approaches share the
same presuppositions, and reveals how each necessarily play against and
reflect each other in their fundamental complicity. Tracking down this
complicity not only re-arranges the tradition in terms that are neither
synchronic nor diachronic. It not only opens up the tradition and its others to
a radical alterity that can be thought in neither ontological nor empirical nor
exclusively finite (technicist) terms. In doing so, it points towards a future
that can only be new if those who await this future recognise and practice the
necessary complicity between tradition and invention and philosophy and its
supports.

285
 This is a paradoxical demand. On the one hand, there can be no negoti-
ation with the future which allows the future to be a futural possibility (that
is to say a future, not a future present) without passing through the tradition.
The future, otherwise, will be another repetition of the past, a repetition
programmed by the axiomatic (multiple, but finite) of tradition. On the other
hand, this passage through the tradition must at the same time take account
of the radical bypassing of the tradition effected by the contemporary prolif-
eration of supports of memory. For any negotiation with these supports has
always been excluded from the tradition in order for the tradition to remain
tradition. This is why technology and the technosciences can bypass the
tradition so easily; tradition has been unable to negotiate with technics given
that it is constituted through this very inability. Thus a negotiation with the
future must also open up the tradition to its others in order to avoid tradition
being effaced by these others. For there will be no future either, if tradition is
effaced; the aleatory will simply be technicised. A double move, then, which
enacts the same aporetic logic as Derrida's deconstruction of the concept of
metaphor to which we now come.
The fundamental complicity between tradition and invention, and
therefore between philosophy and it supports, is approached in "White
Mythology" in terms of what Derrida calls "the law of tropic supplemen-
tarity". This law cannot be historicised, or indeed determined as such, since
any attempt to narrate, or determine it, will inevitably presuppose it. The
anachrony and atopia of law is necessity, the necessity of radical finitude.' 8
Thus, the project of reducing philosophy to a series of metaphors, and,
therefore, that of dominating philosophy from outside meets an essential
limit in the fact that the very concept of metaphor is a philosopheme - one
predicated on the metaphysical distinction between the visible and the
invisible, the finite and the infinite, the improper and the proper, etc.
Consequently:
If one wished to conceive and class all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, one
metaphor at least, would remain excluded, outside the system: the metaphor ... without
which the concept of metaphor could not be constructed, or to syncopate a whole chain of
reasoning, the metaphor of metaphor. This extra metaphor, remaining outside the field that it
allows to be circumscribed, extracts or abstracts itself from this field, thus subtracting itself
as a metaphor less ... The field cannot [in other words] be saturated.' 9
The law of tropic supplementarily allows, then, for the genealogy of
metaphor in the first place and prevents it from dominating this field. For it
must exclude from the latter the metaphor of metaphor in order to do its
work. The attempt to break with the philosophical tradition or mourn
successfully its illusions - I am arguing that the problem of language is the
example of either - seals its impossibility by borrowing from philosophy the
very terms it uses to classify it. What is defined turns back, in a supple-
mentary convulsion, into the defining of the definition. The concept of

286
metaphor on which the metaphorisation of concepts depends is one metaphor
less and one metaphor more than the tradition it has metaphorised, turning
the tradition into an aporetic logic of limits of which it is a part, greater than
the whole. This self-restriction of the attempt to restrict the intelligible to the
sensible is the same self-restriction as the project of tradition to untie itself
from the sensible. (I return, here, to the site of my earlier comments on the
sameness of universalist and particularist traditions.) The project of particu-
larisation and that of universalisation mirror each other in their essential
inability to come to their end, to achieve the status of categorical law.
Whereas earlier we made this argument in terms of the necessary limitation
which a tradition undergoes through its supports, here we have related the
argument to the iterability of universalist or particularist logic as such. Since
either the attempt to account for universality in terms of metaphor presup-
poses that which is the condition of each attempt, then each are possible in
their impossibility. The law of the law of tropic supplementarily is this
aporia.
Having sited the aporia, "White Mythology" then re-marks the way in
which the tradition of metaphysics (tradition and counter-tradition) has been
constituted through its symptomatic denegation of the aporia. Derrida thus
re-marks the tradition from a position that is neither in the field nor outside
it. To reiterate: he shows that, on the one hand, it is impossible to dominate
philosophical metaphorics from the outside by using the concept of
metaphor, since its use plunges its handler back into the field at the very
moment that he seems to discover a lever on which he can set his hands to
overturn it. It follows that philosophy is the best authority to speak of its own
metaphorical productions. On the other hand (it is always a question of
hands), for the same reason, philosophy is incapable of dominating its
general topology since, in its very attempt, it would simultaneously deprive
itself of any access to itself. Just as there is no metaphor which does not
depend upon the concept of metaphor, so there is no philosophical concept to
qualify philosophy's fundamental tropes like "fundamental", "concept",
"theory", and "metaphor". As Bennington argues in "Derridabase", for
Derrida, philosophy cannot be understood by anything other than itself, since
it cannot be dominated from outside, and yet it cannot understand itself
either. 20 Hence the attention, precision and slowness with which "White
Mythology" re-marks tradition and counter-tradition. Without a position (in
either camp), aware that neither camp exists as such, Derrida weaves a
mosaic which includes and exceeds either position, opening up both
positions to each other and to the excess that accounts for their
(im)possibility.
How, at this point, does deconstruction respond to the following criticism:
"What acrobatics in the art of paradox! But, where does this weaving leave

287
us? Where is the negotiation with the future? Paradoxical thinking is not
simply the mark of a withdrawal from, and of, politics; it is also the
withdrawal of any criteria by which to make a decision. The future as a
future depends, also, on the cut of a decision. Paradoxical thinking cannot
attend to the immediacy of this cut. Where, then, does deconstruction leave
us? What, indeed, of the future?
These questions have been crucial with regard to the political reception of
deconstruction, and yet they are also self-limiting according to the same
logic of supplementarily. We should look at this self-limitation before
offering something like the logic of an answer. Firstly, the point should be
made that the originary type of question, which stamps the modality of these
questions with their sense of urgency, could only arrive at its end as a
question if it could extract itself from the field, the impossibility of which the
question responds to. In other words, this type of question arrives because it
does not know how to ask its question; it arrives also because the tradition
does not have an answer to how to ask the question. (Hence the violence
intrinsic to the question's sense of urgency- a violence which in fact always
accompanies the passage of tradition from one generation to the next.) If the
tradition did know how, there would, of course, be no question. And that is
the point. This may appear simple, but it is a difficult simplicity which
returns us to our previous consideration of tradition as the "ghost" of itself.
In its indeterminacy, the question (and here I refer to Derrida's recent
readings of Heidegger' s piety of questioning) - is already a response. This
response has already affirmed the future as a future before, if one wishes, it
will have rolled to the end of the sentence to place its question-mark. It thus
precedes the question of the possibility of the question which marked out the
space of thinking and responsibility at the beginning of "Violence and
Metaphysics". 2 ' It precedes this space for another reason as well.
The question is the mark of a radical indeterminacy that lets the future
come as a future. But, it is also, at the same time, a radical engagement with
the "pastness" of tradition; since the question cannot not be asked within the
language of tradition. Whether one says "Yes" or "No" to tradition, one has
already acquiesced in tradition either to maintain and prolong it or deny and
destroy it. The temporal modality of this past is absolute; it is not in time.
One has already engaged with it, one is already "haunted" by it, as soon as
one speaks. Always prior to us, never answering us, this haunting is the gift
of tradition. It is why there is chance, and it is another way of theorising the
necessary failure of tradition(s). The absolute nature of this past is at the
same time the reason why the present is always pregnant with the future.
Only because the present is radically indebted towards this past, does it
anticipate the future. Thus, the questions above are always already both the
affirmation of the indeterminacy of tradition and the affirmation of one's

288
necessary debt to tradition. Such questions (fundamentally reducible to that
of "Is there a future?") are consequently the trace of a promise that there is
(es gibt) the future. This promise is the gift of time. Such a promise is
undeconstructible. It is in its name that deconstructive judgement measures
itself and falls. 22
Up to now Derrida has tended to work with this gift in terms of a re-
writing of the traditional opposition between philosophy and literature more
than in terms of that of the relations between philosophy and the natural,
social or cognitive sciences. Such a decision is the singularity of his response
in a particular theoretico-historical context; it is up to other generations to
negotiate differently, and, as ever, it will be the context of this writing that
will decide how. 23 "White Mythology", and these will be my closing
remarks, is a case in point. Having sited the aporia within the attempts to
"calculate" the essence and effects of metaphor, the essay tracks down -
from Aristotle's Poetics, Rhetoric and Metaphysics to Fontanier's Les
Figures du Discours - the moment which resists the effacement of metaphor
in its metaphysical conceptualization and which best exemplifies the
originary process of metaphorisation within which philosophy bathes in the
first place. This moment occurs when the play of substitutions upon which
the concept of metaphor is based stops. The stopping-place is, for Aristotle,
the sun. The sun cannot be talked about properly, since it is the example of a
sensible thing that hides itself as it turns. Not only does its very absence
force any description of it to be a poor metaphor. The opposition of the
visible and the invisible is only possible under the sun's appearance and
disappearance. Moving one Aristotle against another, Derrida can conclude
that all metaphors are immediately poor before any teleological, ethico-
theoretical decision falls to distinguish, under the sun, between good and bad
ones. The sun is, accordingly, that which structures the metaphorical space
of philosophy, representing, from the beginning, the natural element of
philosophical language and cutting across any subsequent opposition
betweenphysis and nomos. Re-marked, the sun's eclipse/ellipse opens up the
"space" of an originary technicity that cuts across any normative or humanist
distinction between "natural" and "artificial light", the "natural" calendar
whose rhythms are dependent on cosmic gravity and the "artificial" calendar
of electro-magnetic pulses, etc. All the fundamental concepts of philosophy
are an effect of this originary drift of the sun's eclipse, including, precisely,
that of the sun as the metaphor of "the highest Being" or that of which is
"beyond Being". These fundamental and more than fundamental concepts
are figures that cannot be replaced by a proper noun or name. One name
within the tradition of philosophy for a figure that cannot be substituted by
another is catachresis, the violent inscription of a sign where the
metaphorical play of substitution stops. 24 For example, the "leg" of a chair.

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To call the fundamental tropes of philosophy catachreses names the non-
propriety of the language of philosophy, its originary metaphoricity, without
opposing to metaphor anything from outside this tradition which bypasses it
and, thereby, naively or unwittingly repeats it.
The name catachresis is obviously unsatisfactory since it names, from
within the tradition, the latter's aporetic borders. But it is not arbitrary; it is
not any name, any invention since it is the most pertinent term within the
metaphorical topology of philosophy to name the essential non-propriety of
all language. This name is thus both the least violent and most inventive
name in the context. Perhaps the entire way in which deconstruction affirms
the future is implied in the wording of this last sentence. In the context of
metaphor, of its traditions, counter-traditions, of all its implications (episte-
mological, ethical, political, aesthetic, technical) the name catachresis is,
perhaps, the best transaction between the past and the present which allows
for both the indeterminacy of the tradition of metaphor to be recognised and
the effects of this indeterminacy to take place.
For deconstruction, it is in these terms, within these aporias and double
moves, that the future of law, community and responsibility is to be re-
invented. Now in sympathy with, now in protest against the accelerating im-
mediatisation of the world, this re-invention, this transformation of tradition
assumes its responsibilities and its decisions, in the name of what cannot be
formed in time. It thereby allows the chance of what cannot be invented,
what cannot be prejudged - the future - to arrive.
American University of Paris

References
I. "White Mythology" in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press,
1982, pp.207-273.
2. I have developed this point in "The Demand of Philosophy: Technology and Inter-nation-
ality" in Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology, No.I, Fall 1993, pp.7-22. On
the relation in general between technology and time, see Bernard Stiegler La Technique et
le Temps, Vol.l, "La Faute d'Epimethee", Galilee, 1994. A reference note does scant justice
to this remarkable piece of work on the technical constitution of temporality.
3. See, in particular, J. Derrida, Husserl's Origin of Geometry: an Introduction, tr. John
Leavey, University of Nebraska Press, 1989 and Of Grammatology, Gayatri C. Spivak,
John Hopkins University Press, 1974, very specifically pp.26-30.
4. The structure of iterability is of course most carefully developed with regard to the
metaphysical exclusion of techne from the axiomatic of truth in "Plato's Pharmacy" in
Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago, 1981, pp.61-172.
5. If this sounds as if one is only talking of Platonic truth (a familiar rebuff regarding the
limits of Derrida's deconstructions), let it be said that, for Derrida, perfect repetition
informs the axiomatic of all ontological arguments, including those which believe that they
have escaped ontology - the thought of Marx or analytical philosophy, for example. On
Marx, see Derrida's recent Spectres de Marx, Galilee, Paris, 1993 (Eng. trans., Peggy
Kamuf, forthcoming), a highly important, if slightly rushed, apology of, and confrontation
with, Marx after the Cold War. On a deconstruction of the metaphysics informing the basic

290
 presuppositions of analytical philosophy, Derrida's readings of Austin and Searle in "Sign,
Event, Context" in Margins. op.cit., pp.307-330, and "Limited Inc" in Limited Inc,
Northwestern University Press, Second Edition, 1990, pp.29-IIO, remain, despite the
polemic they have incited, largely unanswered by analytical philosophers.
6. See Spectres de Marx, op.cit., for a forceful reminder that the quasi-concepts of trace and
iterability were, from the beginning, a reflection on the relations between man and technics.
See Geoffrey Bennington's "Derridabase" in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida,
Jacques Derrida, Le Seuil, Paris, 1991 (trans. by G. Bennington, University of Chicago,
1993) for a sustained reading of Derrida' s work in terms of the above double move.
Bennington's inset on "White Mythology" in the context of his own analysis of Derrida's
deconstruction of metaphor is an important encouragement to a re-reading of the
relationship of Derrida' s work to history. The following is indebted to this inset, agreeing
forcefully with its argument that Derrida is ultra-philosophical (op.cit., pp.ll9-120). I
would add, however, that it is this ultraphilosophical aspect that allows deconstruction to
reflect upon technology inventively.
7. This orientation informs one of the arguments of my forthcoming book, Derrida and the
Political. Routledge, London.
8. The refusal to believe in a thinking which can appropriate this remainder, a thinking which
has thereby always become a political philosophy, implies, nevertheless, a political
experience of memory. This experience is the condition of inventing a philosophical
response to the future.
9. For masterful, if at times oblique, accounts of the relations between giving, heritage, time
and affirmation, see J. Derrida Donner /e temps. Galilee, Paris, 1991 (trans. Peggy Kamuf,
Chicago, 1992), "Donner Ia mort" in L'ethique du Don. Jacques Derrida et La Pensee du
Don (eds., Jean-Michel Rabate and Michael Wetzel), Metailie-Transition, Paris, 1992,
pp.ll-1 08 and Spectres de Marx, op.cit.
10. On this essential haunting of tradition, within which all traditions and ontologies are
inscribed, see J. Derrida, Spectres De Marx, op.cit.
II. Compare Heidegger's nostalgic comments in What is Called Thinking? (tr. J. Glenn Gray,
Harper and Row, New York, 1968) that a hand is only a hand for a being that speaks and
that thinking is man's hardest Handwerk (p.24). Heidegger continues: "So long as the
essence of technology does not closely concern us, in our thought, we shall never be able to
know what the machine is. We shall not be able to tell what it is to which the industrial
workers's hand is related." Despite Heidegger's negotiation with technology, his wish to
keep thought separate from its supports and his wish to consider this separation as the
condition of proper thinking reveal the axiomatic and metaphysical opposition in his work
between philosophy and technology. It is this opposition which constitutes, and is consti-
tuted by, his territorial traditionalism. On the former point, see Bernard Stiegler,
"Questioning Technology and Time" in Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology,
op.cit., trs. R. Beardsworth and A. Sumits, pp.31-46. Derrida has subjected these passages
of What is Called Thinking? to scrupulous analysis in "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand" in
Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1987, pp.l61-196. Given the above, it should be clear that Derrida's re-
interrogation of Heidegger' s radical ontology is not simply a further deconstruction of
Heidegger's blindness (compare Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's criticisms in Heidegger et les
"Juifs ", Galilee, Paris, 1988, esp. pp.l 03-130) but a total transformation of the field of
metaphysics in order that a positive relation can be negotiated between what I am calling
critical reflection (Derrida's term would be perhaps ecriture) and technics. Heidegger's
thought prepares for this transformation but falls short of it in a decisive manner. The
symptom of this "failure" (precisely, its decisiveness) is his flirtation with Nazism.
Compare B. Stiegler, La Technique et le Temps, p.204, note I.
12. The term "detraditionalisation" served as the title to the conference at which this paper was
first given at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Values, Lancaster University, July 1993.

291
 There is, of course, nothing less inventive than the ugly tautology "detraditionalisation" to
describe our present condition.
13. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988.
14. Within these terms, negative theology, which is in vogue again for a whole series of
reasons, can be considered as a "dispositif' that takes classical philosophical logic to its
rigorous extreme: which suggests that the "fury" of negative theology, the linguistic
violence which it does to itself, is one, particularly striking way of denying originary
technicity.
15. See 1. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trs. D.B. Allison and N. Garver, Northwestern
University Press, 1973, esp. Chapter 4 "Meaning and Representation", pp.48-59; for
"Cogito and the History of Madness", see Writing and Difference, pp.31-64, esp. pp.57-62.
Compare, also, "Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas", ibid., pp.79-154, for a deconstruction of the idea of horizon in relation to the
originary finitude of language. Given both what has just been said and my previous note, it
is perhaps unwise to harness deconstruction to the concerns of negative theology.
16. "Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense" in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and
Language, trs. S. Gilman et al., Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.243-257.
17. Ibid., p.250.
18. On this understanding of the relation between necessity and law, see 1. Derrida' s profound
essay "Before the Law" in J. Derrida Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, Routledge,
origin. trs. A. Ronell, trs. C. Roulston, 1992.
19. Margins, p.220.
20. G. Bennington, op.cit.
21. "Violence and Metaphysics", op.cit., p.80. Compare, of course, Of Spirit. Heidegger and
the Question, trs. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, University of Chicago Press,
1987, especially the now famous note on the "grant" or "promise" of language in "The
Nature of Language" (in M. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trs. Peter Hertz, Harper
and Row, New York, 1971, pp.57-1 10), pp.l29-136.
22. See J. Derrida, Donner le Temps, op.cit., "Donner Ia Mort", op.cit., and Spectres de Marx,
op.cit., for the relating of the question of justice to that of time. On this see, also, my
interview with Jacques Derrida in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Spring Issue, 1994.
23. The recent acceleration of processes in biogenetics and biotechnics underscore the fact that
the domains awaiting negotiation are in particular those of biology and artificial intelli-
gence.
24. The argument is unfolded in detail in Marges, pp.246-257.

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