Derrida on Presence and Absence

Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida's deconstruction of "presence/absence" by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave "traces" of their presence, and a thing can be present while being partially absent. In personal relations, past events are not "present" either temporally or spatially, but the past history of the relation has shaped the contours of the present relationship; the present and future history of the relationship is written on a palimpsest containing the faint marks of the past. This is especially the case in highly troubled personal relationships �Esay, a failing marriage. When the absent events are intensely present, any present events are interpreted in terms of the absent events. A husband buys flowers for a suspicious wife, and that is read against the background of past betrayals. In literature, much of the meaning of a text comes from what is left unsaid, what is outside the text but faintly present, what is alluded to and so forth. I can be "present" in one sense to a conversation, while "absent" in another �Eask my wife.

I wrote a while back that Derrida's first deconstructive thrust is against internal/external, because all other binaries depend on that. Presence/absence is another way of stating the internal/external: Two things are separate only if both have an external surface that is impenetrable by the other; as soon as you say that X and Y can (perichoretically?) mingle, then you've made external/internal a problem. If I am who I am partly because of the people who "indwell" me (the Spirit primarily, but also my parents and brothers and wife and children and so on), then I cannot be sharply isolated from these relations. Presence/absence makes the same point: If there is a "fuzzy boundary" between presence and absence, if there is not absolute presence and absolute absence, but an infinite series of gradations, then sharp distinctions between X and Y are impossible, because Y may be present with X even while not being wholly present X, and X itself may be only partially present.

Certain logical systems are built on the highly metaphysical and highly questionable claim that internal/external and presence/absence are sharply and clearly distinct. The law of non-contradiction is complexified, even if it remains true at some levels: A and not-A cannot both be true in the same sense, we say, but that assumes that A and not-A are external to each other, and that A is wholly free from the trace of not-A. But is that possible? If A is a proposition, can a proposition be wholly liberated from the traces of unstated propositions? It seems unlikely. A factual statement like "I am in Moscow, Idaho" necessarily includes a very large number of contrary propositions: such as "I am not in Anchorage" or "I am not dead." One might say that these negations are external "implications" of the proposition, but I wonder; if I were asked to "unpack" the statement "I am in Moscow, Idaho," one of my strategies would be to suggest some of these negative statements ("I am not somewhere else"). And I would claim that these implied negatives are part of the "meaning" whose traces are found in the positive statement.

I find all this pretty compelling, but wonder what would happen if we introduced a note of analogy to all this. I suspect that analogy could cover most of the true things that Derrida says, without arriving at skeptical conclusions about meaning and truth. And perhaps there is an historical argument to be made that the loss of analogy is precisely what produced modernity and its postmodern reaction (or intensification, take your pick). David Hart does some of that early in Beauty of the Infinite, but I've not absorbed his discussion enough to see how he handles it.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 12, 2004 at 04:22 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.