How Deconstruction Works

Culler offers an example from Nietzsche that provides an excellent example of the ju-jitsu of deconstruction. Nietzsche argues that causality is not something given, but is the product of a rhetorical operation, a chronological reversal (chronologische Umdrehung). I feel a pain, and go searching for a cause of the pain; behold, there's a pin sticking in the spot where I feel pain, and I conceive a link and invert my actual experience: "The fragment of the outside world of which we become conscious comes after the effect that has been produced on us and is projected a posteriori as its 'cause.' In the phenomenalism of the 'inner world' we invert the chronology of cause and effect. The basic fact of 'inner experience' is that the cause gets imagined after the effect has occurred."

The causal scheme in this argument (pin-pain) is "produced by a metonymy or metalepsis (substitution of cause for effect); it is not an indubitable foundation but the product of a tropological operation."

As Culler points out, this move has similarities to Hume's critique of our ideas of causation, but differs in a crucial respect: "Deconstruction too puts causality in question . . . but simultaneously, in a different movement, it employes the notion of cause in argument. If 'cause' is an interpretation of continuity and succession, then pain can be the cause in that it may come first in the sequence of experience." Thus, Nietzsche and deconstruction "assert the indispensability of causation while denying it any rigorous justification."

Deconstruction does not end with the observation that the cause-effect sequence is achieved by a rhetorical/mental reversal. It seeks to show that the priority of pin to pain or pain to pin is undecidable. It is an arbitrary decision to give pin causal priority over pain: "If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin. By showing that the argument which elevates cause can be used to favor effect, one uncovers and undoes the rhetorical operation responsible for the hierarchization and one produces a significant displacement. If either cause or effect can occupy the position of origin, the origin is no longer originary; it loses its metaphysical privilege. A nonoriginary origin is a 'concept' that cannot be comprehended by the former system and thus disrupts it."

It seems to me that the aporia to which deconstruct points is really there: If there were no effect from the cause, would we consider the cause a cause? A baseball flies through a window, shattering it. But a flying baseball that never has the effect of breaking a window is not a cause. Or, suppose someone writes a revolutionary book that no one reads. Two hundred years pass, and the book is not a "cause" of anything. It becomes so only when someone picks up the book, reads it, and acts on it.

Here again, it seems to me that Derrida is even more Augustinian than he thought himself: He is again uncovering the aporia of "surplus at the origin," a vestigium Trinitatis, a created trace of the Creator in whom the Father is found only because He has a Son in the Spirit.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 03:45 PM

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