The Nature of Political Theory

246 The Nature of Political Theory

It is not surprising in this context that Derrida accuses Heidegger of posing as the
‘personal secretary of Being’ (quoted in Wood 1990: 40). Deconstruction calls into
question the whole idea of presence. There is no transcendental signified that matches
the transcendental signifiers of metaphysics. Metaphysical foundations also embody
‘ontotheological’ hierarchies containing repressions, violence, and subordinations.
Each centre therefore has itsother, which it wishes to exclude or suppress. In this
context, Derrida cites the entire range of unspoken binaries that underpin the most
rational thinking—notions of mind and body, masculine and feminine, reason and
emotion, sameness and difference, and so forth. The binaries create paradoxes that
entrap the unwary participant in the discourse. Deconstruction exposes these unra-
tionalized paradoxes. Every centre will be premised on these binaries. What is needed
is a ‘decentering’ of the tacit hierarchies buried in our language, hierarchies that locate
speech above writing, the author above the reader, or the signified above the signifier.
The decentering having been done by deconstruction, we can then float free in a sea
of signs with no anchorage and no references.
The crucial question arising here is: what happens next? Fine words butter no
parsnips. If, as Derrida portends, all metaphysics, humanism, logocentrism, and
phonocentrism have to be rooted out, where does humanity go from here? Derrida
suggeststwoalternatives, which he sees as two central ‘motifs’ of deconstruction.
The first is Heideggerian and emphasizes an immanent critique—a ‘deconstruction
without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts
and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instrument or stones
available in the house’. The danger here, for Derrida, is that the ‘continuous process
of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the
closure’. In other words, it risks being taken over by metaphysics and humanism
again—as Derrida claims Heidegger’s own work was. The second alternative is to
change the terrain in ‘irruptive fashion’, that is, by placing oneself brutally outside
and by affirming an absolute break and difference (Derrida 1993: 151). What is left
is the radical arbitrariness of the sign. Derrida sees this as more characteristic of
the post-1960s French poststructuralists and postmodernists. Derrida suggests that
ideally it would be best to weave the two together, however, he confesses that ultimately
metaphysical languageper secan never be completely evaded. What he does claim
though is that deconstruction implies a continual vigilance. The philosophical point
is not to stress what is said, rather to hold open the action of saying. Every position
therefore becomes provisional. In this sense, deconstruction is envisaged as not so
much a position as a method of exposing and encouraging difference and alterity,
which, it is hoped, will have salutary effects. Derrida thinks it is necessary to speak
in many styles and languages and to be prepared to both vacate and move between
plural positions.
Presciently, the last paragraph of his essay is devoted to Nietzsche and theüber-
mensch. This is something that Derrida pursues further in his bookSpurs: Nietzsche’s
Styles(1979). Nietzsche appears to come closest, for Derrida, to the alternative to
metaphysics, although what that would be remains somewhat puzzling. He disagrees
with Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, suggesting that Nietzsche’s notion of the will