Derrida and Attunement: Playing in a Deconstructive Mode

CHAPTER TWO

DERRIDA AND ATTUNEMENT: PLAYING IN A DECONSTRUCTIVE MODE

This story [Tower of Babel] recounts, among other things, the origin of the confusion of tongues, the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and impossible task of translation, its necessity as impossibility. Jacques Derrida1 Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written…can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable…[This implies]…there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring. Jacques Derrida2

In the next phase of the argument I turn to the thought of Jacques Derrida. While similar to that of Heidegger’s Destrucktion, Derrida extends the notion of Destruktion (which he famously terms “deconstruction”) to all discourses. He believes that deconstruction is always occurring in discourse, so that what the thinker does is to notice or be aware of the deconstructive nature of different texts. Thus, deconstruction is not a method: it is a disposition that I take in regards to the text, through a way of reading that comes from the inherent instability of texts. Deconstruction is both a condition of discourse and includes the disposition of the reader to notice its occurrence. I argue that Derrida’s explication of deconstruction opens a way of thinking which places attunement at its center. In this chapter, I extend the discussion on Heidegger and attunement by explicating the thinking of attunement through an analysis of deconstruction.

1 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 109. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” trans. Samuel Webber and Jeffrey Mehlman in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 12. 66 chapter two

At the center of deconstruction is the criticism of the idea of metaphysics, that it is logocentric as it attempts to endow being with presence.3 Derrida says that deconstruction calls into question the foundations of metaphysical thinking by pointing out the inherent destabilization and complications of such thinking.4 For him, all totalities are inherently unstable and self-deconstructing,5 because the signs used to signify a full presence inherently come before the presence: the presence is always coming but never here.6 He says, “There is neither symbol nor sign but a becoming-sign of the symbol.”7 The signs are unstable because they are not the thing itself and, thus, need a supplement where “the sign is…the supplement of the thing itself.”8 The supplement is deferred, exceeding the language of metaphysics. Deconstruction, through the noticing of the supplement, calls into question the binary oppositions9 that are often evoked in metaphysical thought and shows that the opposition between them is not as great or as miniscule as is often thought.10 Derrida makes explicit that there is a gulf between concepts that are often thought as almost synonymous because each contains a trace of the other.11

3 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected Ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 12–13. 4 John D. Caputo says, “Deconstruction is organized around the idea that things contain a kind of uncontainable truth, that they contain what they cannot contain” John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernity for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 29. 5 Kevin Hart notices that Derrida’s deconstruction is a critique of texts in the metaphysical tradition as well as the institutions that arise from these texts [See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 116–17]. Thus, this chapter assumes deconstruction is aimed at both texts and institutions/ traditions. See also James K.A. Smith, Jacques Derrida: Live Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 10–11. 6 In describing this view of signs, Kevin Hart says, “…the sign trespasses over its assigned limits, thereby blurring any qualitative distinction between the concept and the sign.” For Derrida, this is what marks the sign with presence and absence. See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 14. 7 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 46–7. 8 Ibid., 145. Again, Hart points to the necessity of the sign to have a supplement as “regardless of what hermeneutic is applied to [a text], there will always be an undecid- able word generated by the operation of the hermeneutic upon the text…” See Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 84. 9 For Derrida, deconstruction notices the inherent instability of texts. One of the sites of instability is in the binary oppositions that many texts assume, like those of good and evil, love and hate, etc. Deconstruction shows that these oppositions are not either/or situ- ations, but each contains the other. 10 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 154–55. 11 See the discussion of the distance between “law” and “justice” in Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’”, trans. Mary Quaintance in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 235.