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The Death of the Author: Postmodern Reading Aporias (Part II)

© Jessica Laccetti

It is from such an awareness of contradiction that Derrida is able to propose that in logocentrist theory, speech may be conceived of as presence because the speaker is simultaneously present for the listener, while writing compels a kind of absence because the writer is not simultaneously present for the reader. Here, writing becomes a record of an absence necessary to writing. Using the example of a letter, Derrida concludes that absence becomes constitutive of writing in and of itself. But, Derrida continues, not only is the absence of the addressee made manifest in writing, so too is the absence of the addressor (author). As Derrida asserts, there is an "absence of the sender, the addressor, from the marks that he abandons, which are cut off from him and continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning, that is, beyond his life itself..." Consequently, reading, for Derrida, is always already an acknowledgement of a two-fold absence: "the absence of the referent and the absence of the signifying intention."

However, for Derrida, this recognition is no simple condition of reading. On the one hand, Derrida argues that critical reading performs the "reverse of what its author intended"; on the other hand, Derrida presents a counter-logic which opposes any authority of the author, "[t] he names of authors or doctrines have here no substantial value." As Derrida says, "[t] here is not, strictly speaking, a text whose author or subject is Jean-Jacques Rousseau," or, as Calvino would have it, "[w] hat does the name of an author on the jacket matter?" The name, then, signifies absence. Subsequently, for Derrida, "[d] econstruction is - and it cannot be otherwise - a deconstruction of presence." The double strategy of deconstruction thus entails marking the gap between presence and absence and then recasting each in terms of a new reading practise which "simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of writing within speech."

What may be seen as problematic, though, in Derrida's "ruthless theory of reading," is that deconstruction is something which, like Iser's gaps, constitutes a text: it is always already at work in the text. Incidentally, it is the paradoxes in the texts which particularly give rise to deconstruction: "[d] econstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce." Derrida's deconstructive reading cannot be, as Richardson contends, wholly subjective as "the science of grammatology...[sees] ...the stress created by these gaps in texts (between what they want to say and what they do say) and...the detection of such gaps...already there waiting to be perceived." Thus reading, for Derrida, is "always thinking about a text." Here, then, the theme of deconstruction is related to the "ability of a text to yield meanings which are not intentional and which are often contradictions of the manifest purpose of the discourse." This ability emerges from within the text's own rhetoric; it is not something which may be imposed upon a text. As Critchley explains, "deconstruction attempts to locate a 'non-site'...It seeks a place of exteriority, alterity, or marginality..." Deconstructive readers, then, engage in "oppositional readings" from an "other" location.

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