Jacque Derrida is a postmodern and poststructural philosopher known for his concepts of deconstruction and binary division of texts. For him reading a text, an exegesis would be to find out the events of privilege and marginalization. I would like to critically interpret his seminal work: ‘Writing and difference’. My writing of Derrida is not chronological.

According to Derrida, the beginning of Scripture is the closing of the book and the opening of meaning. ‘Writing is having the passion of Origin’. God replaces God and the Book replaces the Book. The return to the book is an elliptical essence. The tools of writing are perversion and subversion. Here Derrida is trying to deconstruct the LOGOS, the WORD as it is present from Judaism and Christianity and also from the ancient Greek philosophers. Beyond the syntax, the grammar, the discourse postulates that the book lies in the cradle of anarchy. The book has to allow itself a democratic dialogism. Again Derrida goes on to say that the center of the BOOK has to be deconstructed. Signifying the center, breaking it methodologically and inserting a set of meanings. I would like to call the play of meanings with the center has performance. Derrida questions the religiosity of God as the center of meaning. A presence of meaning leaves a trace and Derrida calls it as inherent and present in the unspoken sign. Every meaning of a sense, whether transcendental, ontological, epistemological or axiological, has above all a Signifier. A Christian apologetic view would be God is God: the signifier and the signified. From an ontological point of view: being would be a reference to consciousness and its contents. From an epistemological point of view, a sign becomes a causative totality of proven inference and invests meaning as a unit. From an axiological point of view, the sign as a chain of meaning is normative.

In another chapter it is said: ‘we need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. A structure of language, the unit of a sign is an organization of a center. According to Derrida, the history of metaphysics is the history of metaphors and metonymies. Let’s look at John 1:1 ‘in the beginning was the WORD, the WORD was with GOD and the WORD was GOD’. The word works here as a metaphor and as metonymy. A Christian worldview recognizes an inherent presence. For Derrida, speech is privileged in the signifier WORD and the signified GOD. Derrida argues that the absence of a transcendental meaning extends the domain to a meaning game. Making a play on words with Derrida: ‘A God who laughs is playing with the Universe’. The concept of transcendence can be extended to the ontological realm of bodily experience. For example, copulation can be a signifier and orgasm can be the signified. Derrida’s argument that there is no privileged transcendental meaning is a misnomer. From an ontological position, emotions such as hate, love, lust, greed and greed are signified from signifiers, and the starting point would be the EGO. Derrida reiterates that the word Signifier must be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. This could be a faulty argument. For example, ontological structures like love and hate have the meaning in them.

Here Derrida mentions the work of the structural anthropologist Levi Strauss. He observes the distinction between nature and culture. Nature and Culture work in a binary division scheme. Levi Strauss uses the example of bricolage, which in literature means creation from a diverse range of sources. Derrida uses the example of MANA, a Polynesian, magical word meaning power. He mentions that the word MANA has a symbolic structure beyond the syntax. Breaking the symbolic presence can be a game with the center. Incest has been a taboo since time immemorial and that is tied to the binary chain of culture versus nature. Derrida is not clear whether incest should be deconstructed.

Derrida refers to Hegel’s allegory: the dialectic of Master and Slave. Hegel’s allegory refers to two types of consciousness, one that of the Master and the other that of the slave. The slave is subordinate to the Master and the Master depends on the slave. Derrida uses this allegory to support the inadequacy of discourse to maintain the sovereign. Every form of writing leaves in itself the structure of the trace. We can use the allegory of the Master and the Slave and juxtapose it with the psychological structures of ID and EGO. The body of writing emanates from DI and the form of writing from EGO. Again Derrida uses the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (German) which has an equivocal meaning. Aufhebung in one sense means to preserve and in another sense it means to abolish. Let us use Derrida’s concept of trace. When God said: ‘let there be light’: the concept of darkness is inherent in him. A trace leaves a trace of what is not said but of what exists in writing.

In The Theater of Cruelty, Derrida mentions that theater must be an experience of the Body. Western theater has been stripped of the force of its essence. The theater must make use of a liberated life. The theater must be the privileged place for the destruction of life. The theater of cruelty takes God off the stage. The theater must free itself from the stage. Derrida means that the themes of transgression, blasphemy, lust, greed, murder must become centers of meaning that deconstruct the binary codes of the Superego. The theater should not be conceived with passive spectators enjoying a stereotyped play, but instead become an active presence forcing the spectators to think, reason and annihilate what is logos as context and perspective. The theater must be a spectacle of becoming.

In Force and Sense, Derrida comments that excess is the very possibility of writing. The book embraces the temptation of meaning. The writer is an idiom. The revealing power of literary language is unencumbered freedom of expression. My question to Derrida is, from a being of the past, how can we possess a new being? How is the History of metaphor possible? Once again, Derrida uses Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in writing. The Apollonian melody and the Dionysian rhythm and beat become self-indulgent metaphors for the writing.

In Cogito and the History of Madness, Derrida touches on the themes of psychiatry. Philosophy calls for folly, madness, and insanity. Derrida refers to Foucault’s analysis of the evidence of trajectory in the architecture of madness. Madness is a speech in psychiatry, a cruel and violent speech. Foucault connects madness with alienation. Derrida is critical of Foucault because he uses the philosophical and linguistic framework of sanity to explain the exegesis of the madman. Madness is institutionalized in medicine and occupies a repressive structure.
Here, Derrida talks about Edmond Jabes and the question of the Jewish race. From the book a race is born. The words choose the poet. There must be a landing from the obedience of the law to a self-proclaimed autonomy. Was Moses’ breaking of the Tablets blasphemy? The difference between speech and writing is sin. How can Jews exist without eschatology? The metaphor or the animality of the letter is a primary and equivocal signifier that becomes life. Metaphysics rejects the historicity and temporality of man. Derrida poses the question: how to account for metaphysics and transcendence in the ontology of man. Every metaphysics has a privileged center-light and a marginalized periphery-darkness. It is interesting to note how Derrida questions his own authenticity as an identity of being Jewish. Derrida becomes a transgressor when he meets the text of Judaism. Light and God are reduced to Signs and decentered. Derrida has highlighted the suffering and exile of the Jews. Can we avoid metaphysics, transcendence and eschatology? Being to become is the phenomenology of occupying a metaphysical structure in the ontology of consciousness.