DERRIDA 1930 2004 KEYWORDS Poststructuralism Deconstruction Antiessentialism Transcendental

DERRIDA 1930 -2004

KEYWORDS Poststructuralism Deconstruction Anti-essentialism Transcendental Signified Play( jouissance) Event Centre Bricolage Structuralism

HISTORICAL UNDERPINNINGS • WW-II (disillusionment with systems) • Division of the world into Eastern and Western power blocs, Iron Curtain, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War • Immediate context of poststructuralism-May 1968, students’ protest in Paris, against the socialist regime and the terrible force with which the government came down on the protestors. • A need towards a more egalitarian basis of human structures, against capitalist oppression as well as socialist atrocities • A very radical departure in western thought process brought about by the total misuse of State Power, by the Socialist Dispensation • M any thinkers associated with poststructuralism had begun as Socialist thinkers, but they re-apprised their orientations after May 1968 • Derrida, French Feminists, Paul de Man, lacan, Barthes, Deleuze, Gayatri Spivak- Prominent Poststructuralists

TRADITIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION At the very heart of western philosophy is “a search for a transcendental being that serves as the guarantor of meaning” Heideggar calls this tendency of Western Philosophy to ‘ground’ meanings into relationality, (which in turn ‘constitute the world’, ) as ‘logocentrism’ Derrida (and poststructuralism) argues for a philosophical position that challenges the insistence on a single point of origin/concepts/meanings. Western philosophy always moves towards a structure and a search for the centre of the structure, where all meanings are concentrated. This is the transcendental signified, variously referred to as ‘centre, ‘God’, ‘ideology’ etc. This originary point, an a-priori , is a locus of inviolate stability. Western Philosophical tradition valorised this line of thinking.

Departure from Traditional Philosophical Leaning • For Derrida, the traditional insistence on a transcendental signified, makes all philosophical speculation work within the ‘prisonhouse of concepts’ • He says that this act of affixing a stable, rigid, final, inviolate meaning into concepts is an act of ‘violence’. Derrida calls such concept of language as ‘phallogocentrism’ Because evidence suggests that there can be no stable meaning. This insistence on fixity is not in the very nature of language or concepts. All of meaning is a series of endless ‘play’ of signifiers. Such that meaning is always in a state of ‘differance’- differ/ defer. • Existentialism also talks about the impossibility of fixed absolutes, however where Existentialism bemoans the lack of fixity in a contingent world, Poststructuralists celebrate it, as jouissance, a state of intellectual freedom and ecstasy on escaping the structures of concepts. A movement into play, suplementarity and overabundance, in the absence of the insistence on a ‘centre’.

Philosophical predecessors of poststructuralists. Nietzsche- “God is dead”- challenged the foundational concepts of western metaphysics- like God, Ethics, Truth. Heidegger-Existential Phenomenology- importance of ‘lived experience’. The presence of things have more meaning to us, with reference to the temporal and historical specificities. . Husserl- Phenomenology –a philosophical movement that valorised a direct investigation into phenomenon as based on conscious experience, without reference to theories and explanations Derrida inherits the departures from western metaphysics and speculations primarily from these thinkers