Derrida
“There is nothing outside the text”is a key statement emanating from
(A) Feminism
(B) New Historicism
(C) Deconstruction
(D) Structuralism
Ans:(C) Deconstruction
Presence and Absence
The metaphysical tradition (or philosophy) can be characterised by two basic desires or trends, admittedly manifested in various different forms. there is a consistent desire to reconstruct the transcendental realm, which is otherwise radically absent. The lost origin of our finite or fallen state drives us to continuously reconstruct our beginnings. Second, the ideal of presence turns up everywhere. All aspects of experience and/or existence are relegated to a moment called the present. But the ideal of presence always implies more than one moment:
1. Presence, we assume, describes an original state, a state that must have come first. As I gaze out into the world I can say the world is present to my observing eye. If that is the case, then my observing consciousness must be present to my own self-reflection. It thus follows that meaning, in its most pure sense, as conscious thought, must be present to me as I gaze out onto the world. Presence is, therefore, the main predicate for a text’s meaning (its sense or its reference), despite the fact that this meaning is always absent and in need of reconstruction through reading or interpretation.
2. For this reason, a second moment of presence invades consciousness as absence--the disappearance of the world behind the veils of language, consciousness going astray, the reign of death, non-sense. In this way gaps, absences and deficiencies of all imaginable kinds are subordinate to a principle of presence. Is it possible to imagine an absence without reference to the principle of presence? It would be a radical absence, something always and from the beginning absent, missing, lost to experience. If there was such an absence, how could we glimpse it?
3. We glimpse it between repetitions as their repeatability. If the present moment can be repeated (i.e. remembered) then, preceding the present moment, is the possibility of its being repeated in memory (i.e., memory itself as repeatability). So memory precedes and exceeds the present moment, which we will have remembered. Memory, as traditional accounts make clear, gets associated with death and the memorialising of the dead, or mourning, in a way that gets us back, always and from the beginning, to the second moment (absence).
Derrida’s much-cited statement, “there is nothing outside the text,” suggests an absence that has never been, nor could ever be, present. This is what we must try to think with regard to the sign, and with the notion of text:
1) The sign is irreducibly secondary. It always refers to something else. Sometimes the something else that a sign refers to is actually itself (e.g., this sign here) but this doesn’t mean that the sign’s meaning (its reference to itself by virtue of its sense—sign = signifying unit) is primary. What is primary is the signifying aspect of it. The sign comes before its referent (sign) in so far as this sign means this sign. And that, of course, is secondary. It also illustrates that signs are necessarily always divided. Their principle is the repeatability that allows them to apparently jump out of themselves to refer back. However, in the repetition the sign is irremediably changed. It is no longer the sign it was. Disconcertingly, this kind of punning cannot be dismissed as a kind of sophistic rhetorical game. Or rather, it can be dismissed. But the principle of your ability to dismiss it (your ability to ignore basic rhetorical processes and pass over them in silence) is in fact the same principle that allows meaning to arise in the first place, cancelling out the rhetorical dimension, the secondary text (vehicle or coat).
2) So the sign is at the beginning. We never arrive at a meaning independently of some aspect of text, through which we must pass before cancelling it out as unwanted rhetoric (vehicle or coat). Therefore there is no beginning.
Which of the following statements
best describes the term
‘deconstruction’ ?
(A) It seeks to expose the problematic
nature of ‘centered’ discourses.
(B) It advocates ‘subjective’ or
‘free’ interpretation.
(C) It emphasizes the importance
of historical context.
(D) It is a method of critical
analysis.
Ans; (A) It seeks to expose the problematic nature of ‘centered’ discourses.
Derrida uses the term différance to denote neither a word nor a concept but rather the gap that is the difference between signifiers and the movement that is the deferral of the hypothetical signified. Presence is never present but always deferred. Différance, therefore, is the condition of possibility for experiencing the absence of the presence of the signified. Différance is the freeplay of signifiers that creates a trace of the other which is n(ever) absent. The experience that there is too much, more than one can say, is not due, argues Derrida, to the empirical impossibility of knowing language in its totality. Language excludes totalization because it is a field of play (play of signifiers in differential relations), of différance that permits the lack that creates the movement of supplementarity--the move to supplement a lack on the part of the signifying (and thus a lack "perceived" in the elusive/illusive signified). As Murfin notes in commenting on Derrida’s critique of Rousseau’s privileging of speech over writing, “writing is a supplement to speech that is at the same time necessary. Barbara Johnson, sounding like Derrida, puts it this way: ‘Recourse to writing . . . is necessary to recapture a presence whose lack has not been preceded by any fullness’ (Derrida, Dissemination xii). Thus, Derrida shows that one strand of Rousseau’s discourse made writing seem a secondary, even treacherous supplement, while another made it seem necessary to communication”
Which of the following statements is
not applicable to Derrida’s rejection
of the notion of the ‘Metaphysics of
Presence’ ?
(A) The desire for immediate
access to meaning privileges
presence over absence.
(B) All presences are necessarily
metaphysical and, therefore,
are to be rejected.
(C) A fleeting meaning of the text
is created through the play of
‘difference’ and ‘differance’.
(D) Metaphysics involves installing
hierarchies and orders of
subordination in the various
dualisms that it encounters.
Ans;
Which of the following is not true of
post-structuralism ?
(A) It seeks to undermine the idea
that meaning pre-exists its
linguistic expression.
(B) There can be no meaning
which is not formulated and no
language formulation reaches
anywhere beyond language.
(C) There is no a-textual ‘origin’ of
a text.
(D) Every sign refers to every other
sign adequately.
Given below are two statements, one
labelled as Assertion (A) and the
other labelled as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Deconstructive
reading is apolitical.
Reason (R) : Because it focuses
exclusively on language. It
primarily holds that all texts or
linguistic structures contain
within them a principle of
destabilisation and hence it is
difficult to pin down meaning.
Such a reading, therefore, is
unable to assign historical
agency.
In this context above statements,
identify which one of the following is
correct ?
(A) (A) is correct but (R) is wrong.
(B) Both (A) and (R) are correct.
(C) (A) is wrong but (R) is correct.
(D) Both (A) and (R) are wrong.
Ans:(B) Both (A) and (R) are correct.[confusion]
