Jacob Riley
Phenomenology
Dr. Davis
9/24/08

To Tympanize--Philosophy: A brief commentary on Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy

Jacques Derrida is arguably one of the most notorious thinkers in the history of human thought—along with Nietzsche and Freud. This is probably because he has been accused of claiming that there exists no distinction between philosophy and literature[1]. Indeed, there is no doubt that his reading of philosophical texts is radical, but they are not just thrown together without any supporting evidence or argumentation. If nothing else, actually reading Margins of Philosophy will dispel with the myth that Derrida’s thought can be dismissed as post-modern babble.
Derrida starts the book with an introductory essay called “Tympan.” The essay has a very unique and at first confusing structure because in the margin of the main text is a long quote from Biffures by Michel Leiris. The reason for this is hinted at within the main text of the essay: “They [the essays in the book] are to blur the line which separates a text from its controlled margin. They interrogate philosophy beyond its meaning…which is doubtless to recall that beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference,” (Derrida, xxiii). Thus, the marginal text by Leiris is not pointless, but shows that beyond Derrida’s main text (the “philosophical text), there is another text that exists just outside the main text. Indeed, one of the themes of Leiris’ text is the margin: “a margin, a fringe surrounding the object, isolating it at the same time as it underlines its presence, masking it even as it qualifies it,” (Leiris, Biffures). This infinite play on meanings is a major part of Derrida’s style, which oftentimes makes it difficult to discern what he is actually saying—but this reinforces his main point.
The essay that I will be focusing on is called “The Ends of Man.” However, the thought in this essay is intimately connected with the rest of the work and thus it will lead to discussion of other essays. “The Ends of Man” is written adaptation of a lecture given at an international philosophy colloquium on “Philosophy and Anthropology.” After a witty introduction concerning the democratic conditions for an international philosophy colloquium, Derrida proceeds to raise the question of how humanism is essentially connected to metaphysics, which he finds in the use of a first person plural pronoun: “There is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so naturally, links the ‘we’ of the philosophy to the ‘we men’” (Derrida, 116). The “we” of philosophy will become important later on in the essay, but in the immediately following section Derrida wishes to address the most “serious mistake” of anthropologistic reading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. However, instead of directly defending Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger from their anthropologistic readings, Derrida asks how these mistaken readings could have come about: “what authorizes us today to consider as essentially anthropic or anthropocentric everything in metaphysics, or at the limits of metaphysics, that believed itself to be a critique or delimitation of anthropologism? What is the relève[2] of man in the thought of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger?” (Derrida, 119).
The most useful analysis is how Derrida attempts to show that Heidegger is still within the metaphysical humanistic tradition, especially since Derrida himself points to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism to show that Heidegger was attempting to critique such metaphysical humanism: “The [Heidegger’s] ‘destruction’ of metaphysics or of classical ontology was even directed against humanism,” (Derrida, 118). However, Derrida affirms that the thinking of the truth of Being is related to a kind of humanism. In Being and Time, Heidegger asks how one should go about find the meaning of Being. To do this, Heidegger needs a particular entity to begin his investigation—he chooses Dasein (human existence). Derrida explains “We can see then that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man. It is, as we shall see, a repetition of the essence of man permitting a return to what is before the metaphysical concept of humanitas” (Derrida, 127).
Although in Being and Time the essence of man and the analytic of Dasein was only to be a small part of the question of the meaning of Being, this concern with an essence of man that would reach further than the one defined by humanism would continue in Heidegger’s later work such as Letter on Humanism. In this work, Heidegger claims that “language is the house of being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it” (Heidegger, 213). Even though Heidegger is careful to say that the proximity to being is not ontic proximity, Derrida points out that language (even though Heidegger thinks it is the house of being) cannot name Being as such and thus remains within the ontic: “It remains that Being, which is nothing, is not a being, cannot be said, cannot say itself, except in ontic metaphor…It is within this metaphorical insistence, then, that the interpretation of the meaning of Being is produced” (Derrida, 131). For if one were to actually name Being, then would this not be the end of man?
Because we cannot name Being except by ontic metaphorization, then is not this metaphorization exactly what is really proper to man? In “White Mythology,” Derrida says exactly this: “Metaphor then is what is proper to man,” (Derrida, 246). But philosophy has always attempted to get rid of metaphors: “Univocity is its essence, or better, the telos of language…this ideal is philosophy,” (Derrida 247). As much as philosophy has wished to stay away from metaphor, Derrida claims that it is essentially bound up with one metaphor in particular—the heliotrope: “The very opposition of appearing and disappearing, the entire lexicon of…day and night, of the visible and invisible, of the present and the absent—all this is possible only under the sun,” (Derrida, 251). In other words, since philosophy has always thought of truth as a bringing to light of the truth, they have privileged this metaphor as to seem completely “natural.” This means that philosophy does not see itself as being metaphorical, but rather as catechresis (forced metaphor): “indeed, this is how philosophy traditionally has interpreted its powerful catechresis: the twisting return toward the already-there of a meaning, production (of signs, or rather of values), but as revelation, unveiling, bringing to light, truth,” (Derrida, 257).
In the next section of “White Mythology,” Derrida asks: “Are not all metaphors, strictly speaking, concepts, and is there any sense in setting metaphor against concept?” (Derrida, 264). To “illustrate” this (but alas, I am already trapped), Derrida gives Descartes concept (metaphor?) of “natural light”: “Natural light, and all the axioms it brings into our field of vision, is never subjected to radical doubt. The latter unfolds in light…natural light constitutes the very ether of thought and of its proper discourse,” (Derrida, 267). If as Derrida tentatively claims concepts are just metaphors, and the metaphor of light essentially constitutes all metaphysics, then philosophy is a constant rediscovery of the same: “Presence, disappearing in its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the visage of Being—such must be the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor,” (Derrida, 268).
In “Signature, Event, Context,” the last essay of the work, Derrida tries to give an alternative to inevitable sameness resulting from the metaphysical tradition by affirming the primacy of the characteristics of writing over voice—mark over presence. Throughout the work, Derrida has hinted at the importance of the written mark by the different-but-same translation of Aufhebung and the insistence upon the “a” (even though there is no change in the sound) in the word différance. Instead of only hinting at such themes, in this essay he explictly lays out the essential predicates of a written sign. This basically amounts to the fact that it can be taken out of context and repeated in another such that it means something different beyond the presence of any of the original addressers or addressees. In fact, it is this separation from the referent that is necessary for words to have meaning: “Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or lag unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion,” (Derrida 320).
Thus my project has been doomed from the start. I have attempted to find the meaning of Derrida’s text, but this is precisely what he does not think is definitely possible. There is not one single meaning I can “trace” back to Derrida: I can only “trace” the endless play of marks on the page.

















Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. “Letter on Humanism.” Ed. David Farrell Krell.
San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993.





























[1] This may be because critics have read his essay on Valery “Qual Quelle” and taken one phrase from the text out of context and using this to dismiss his entire project: “In a word, the task is to consider philosophy also as a ‘particular literary genre,’” (Derrida, 293). While this ripping out of context may be the critics of Derrida getting back at him for doing the same thing to philosophical texts, I think this reading requires at least the amount of evidence and subtlety Derrida gives to his own deconstructed texts in order for such a simplified statement to be considered valid.
[2] The word relève is an untranslatable word that Derrida constantly plays with in this and other essays. The translator explains to the reader that it is Derrida’s translation of Hegel’s concept Aufhebung and gives several reasons for such a translation throughout the work. The footnote to “Différance,” explains how this translation differs from its original meaning: “For Hegel, dialectics is a process of Aufhebung: every concept is to be negated and lifted up to a higher sphere in which it is thereby conserved…However, as Derrida points out, there is always an effect of différance when the same word has two contradictory meanings. Indeed it is this différance—the excess of the trace Aufhebung itself—that is precisely what the Aufhebung can never aufheben: lift up, conserve, and negate,” (see Derrida, footnote 23, pg 20). Derrida also uses the verbal form of the word in order to attempt to free himself from the implicit onto-theology in the construction of the word Aufheben: “Further the auf—[meaning ‘up’] is related to negation-and-preservation in a higher sphere; the ‘re’ questions the metaphysics of negation, the theology implicit in dialectical negation of raising up,” (see footnote to “Ousia and Gramme” pg 43).