2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
text. The concept of or quest for the “context” therefore seems to suffer here from the same
theoretical and motivated uncertainty as the concept of ‘ordinary’, from the same meta-
physical origins: an ethical and teleological discourse of consciousness.” (ib:327)
The possibility of an infinite number of contexts, and then of always different mean-
ings, involves what Derrida calls the dissémination as opposed to the more trivial polyse-
mia. This possibility entails—to bring back Derrida’s argument to our discussion of Lévi-
Strauss—that the center of the structure cannot be fixed once and for all. On the contrary,
the rules that make permutations and transformations possible are themselves always ex-
posed to an intrinsic “trembling,” since no absolute anchoring is possible. The possibility
of meaning, and especially the possibility of reference is thus not denied by Derrida, con-
trary to what most of his critics claim. Just the opposite is true: there is always an excess of
meaning and an excess of reference, since it is constitutively impossible—at least within
the Structuralist paradigm that interests us here—to fix both of them from the outset.
Derrida concludes that
We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan’s
ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of
social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding
of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning,
presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is
this questioned effect that I have called elsewhere logocentrism. (329)
It is thus clear that the whole point of Derrida’s deconstruction is precisely to give an
“explanation” (where explanation is to be read more as a tool for analysis that anything
else) of the “rise” of (of the relevance) determinate domains. And the general point seems
to be that “truth” about a particular domain (and, therefore, its constitution), is not given as
a social consensus, but, rather, is produced and produced by means of exclusions, of the
instaurations of differences, of hierarchies and so forth. So there is a whole economy of
forces which, by means of exclusions and segregations, produces fields and domains, and
the role of deconstruction is to investigate, to retrace this differences in the texts and, even-