Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

performatively undoing the muthos/logos opposition or working it as non-opposition into a mixed
discourse where muthos and logos, literature and philosophy do not find themselves in conflict,
where the play of genre plays itself not out of the philosopher's hands but into those of the reader.
Simultaneously, perhaps, we find a Derrida hinting here—in the final chapter of his 'entire
history'—that the logocentric epoch of philosophy is itself a fiction, a Rousseauian dream. Given
that Derrida will later say 'we should no longer let ourselves be taken in by the somewhat trivial
opposition between speech and writing' 91 we might think of philosophy as trivialised by the act of
reading speech/writing into the heart of its enterprise and wonder who was so taken in by this
opposition in the first place—certainly not a Plato, nor any tradition which followed him. We might
ponder these matters while recognising that Derrida's essay restores a certain poetry to
philosophy but does not do so as philosophy. No more than reading here becomes writing at any
expense of an author called Plato.
Reading And (Self-) Writing
Harold Bloom claims that all reading is 'defensive warfare', and whatever validity this statement
possesses in general, it would certainly serve as an accurate description of the deconstruction of
logocentrism. 92 What deconstructive opposition to the author reveals as it conceals, in its double
figure of conflict and complicity, is that primarily Derrida's work is revisionist, and like all
revisionism, its highest stake is that of marking some advance upon the revised text. And the
distance to be marked—as Derrida sometimes concedes—is often all but imperceptible,
regardless of whether deconstruction is reading the texts of metaphysicians or countermetaphysicians.
With Hegel, for Derrida the most typical of metaphysicians, it can nonetheless be
said that the thought of différance works an 'infinitesimal and radical displacement' on the
Hegelian difference.93 Similarly, but from the other direction, Derrida's rereading of Heidegger is
at once a radicalisation and a scarcely audible refinement of ontological difference, moving
beyond Heideggerian (and Hegelian) difference only by a hair's breadth, the ineffable 'a' of
différance. And the same again is true of the Freudian and Levinasian notions of the trace,94 of
Plato's pharmakon and Rousseau's supplement. All Derrida's readings of the 1960s reflect this
basic principle: that the deconstructive and deconstructed texts will find themselves—like
différance and Hegelian difference—at 'a point of almost absolute proximity'.95
What distinguishes Derridean revisionism from any other, however, is that this proximity is not
necessarily the outcome of a continuity between Derrida's 'ideas' (if indeed there are such things),
and those of the authors he reads, but that it arises rather from a unique approach to the act of
philosophising. If Derrida is to be remembered as a great philosopher, it will be as the individual
in whom—for the first time—the philosopher becomes exclusively a reader-critic. All philosophy
begins with the reading of philosophy, most philosophers take the work of another philosopher
and begin their careers with a critique of that work even if it is not explicitly proffered in this form.
Yet, with Derrida, the task of philosophy is an interminable rereading in the closest possible
manner, a constant working into the already-written. Unlike the philosophers he deconstructs,
Derrida never elects to reach that stage when his texts discuss problematics on their own terms,
but rather must formulate, interrogate, and deconstruct those problematics through other eyes,
hear their resonances with another ear. Even the essay 'Différance', which appears to be offered
up without anchors, finally issues as a reading of Heidegger, grounded in a number of
subordinate readings (that of Saussure most notably). 96 Indeed, Derrida has himself said that
his work is 'entirely consumed in the reading of other texts', and the word 'consumed' should be
given its full emphasis here, for no other philosopher, or critic even, has ever buried his work so
deeply in the resources, conceptuality, and language of the texts he reads.97 In boring so far
within, in taking up so fully the terms, strategies and aporias of the authors with whom he
contends, in refusing to bring external criteria to bear, in respecting 'as rigorously as possible the
internal, regulated play of philosophemes',98 all in all, through the thoroughly empathetic quality
of his deconstructions, the Derridean text is always at risk of disappearance into the world of the
other.
Opening 'Cogito and the History of Madness', Derrida writes: 'The disciple must break the glass,
or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.'99
But this, to 'start to speak', with a voice of his own, is what Derrida never does; and as a failure
which arises directly out of the strength of his reading. Rather his text liaises, speaks in tongues,
folds over the voices of critic and author like the figures of a fugue, at times ventriloquising, at