Blindness

De Man's famous essay, "The Rhetoric of Blindness" is, for me, about a very crucial deconstructive question: where does the deconstructor go in her or his analysis? Put in more correct terms--you can already see de Man misunderstanding or misconstruing it here, in a way that was crucial for the history of deconstruction--where is the site or place of inscription in which the overturning and displacement of a text (to use that classic formula of Derrida's from the interview "Positions" in the book that takes its name--Positions) takes place?

The answer, for Derrida, is not really an answer. Inscription takes place also in a text, in a place that is also displaced by the displacement, in a space that itself spaces itself out (though no longer as itself) if or when overturning comes to overturn the spacing of a text. But this is all fraught with inaccuracies of expression, if I can put it that way, and is ultimately quite problematic. That is, it is a problem, and chiefly a problem of when the overturning that I says comes to overturn the spacing of the text, indeed comes. It is a question of the coming of this other, what Derrida would later (in the lecture "Psyche: Invention of the Other," in another book that takes this for its name, though with one small difference--Psyche: Inventions of the Other) call the invention (in-venio) of the other.

De Man would simplify things, or rather solve the problem, deproblematize it once and for all in this essay--even though it might require a few revisions later. For him, the problem can be solved by saying the displacement of the site by displacement is the inevitable, not chance, outcome of an act of criticism or critique: deconstruction, in other words, becomes a criticism that itself can be (deconstructively) criticized. In short, the deconstructor is deconstructed as a critic would be criticized and thereby, de Man, claims (most outrageously) what Derrida calls text becomes literature--or that which inevitably escapes criticism.

This settles it. But it also doesn't. When Derrida opens up the problem of the invention of the other, when he calls what we were clalling overturning by a new name, isn't he merely restating the problem? "Invention" in other words, means merely the same thing: on the one hand, it is an act of constructing (inventing) an analysis, a critique, of setting up yourself as a deconstructor in relationship to what you will deconstruct. On the other hand, there is the problem of when, exactly, the coming of the other will come with respect to what you have invented, to your critique. De Man would then say there is no difference here, that this is just a repetition of the same problem. In other words, he would say that this lecture of Derrida's, which takes place twenty years later after the interview "Positions," is essentially the same problem, or has the same position. Or, rather, he would say that the problem is already solved.

What he--and the many, many others who think something similar--would fail to see would be precisely that Derrida, throughout his life, was overturning and displacing the problem of the overturning and displacement. And rather than this meaning that he operated in the same way, with the same problem, with the same positions (using that favorite figure of de Man's, the "irony of irony"), this would mean that he was reinscribing the problem along different lines, or reproblematizing it--not solving it. To think this would be to admit the chance that the two discourses were not inevitably the same, or rather to see that calling "overturning and displacement" "invention of the other" is not a naming of the same thing, or, more precisely, that the second phrase is not an outcome of the former, a development out of an inevitable residue of the first.

This is just to explicate a fine sentence I found recently, which goes like this: for Derrida, "[what] repeatedly institutes difference also acts to reify difference, so that the problem of trying to face [difference] continually reasserts itself as a problem" (Frances Ferguson, "Reading Heidegger: Paul De Man and Jacques Derrida," in boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 593-610). To reify difference is to begin to think that the chance here is just inevitable, or that the inevitable is always the same inevitability, and to reduce the problem. This is what de Man, in trying to ensure difference is never reified, does. That is, its not a question of de Man (and others) getting Derrida wrong, or not getting at the same thing . It is just that this thing, for Derrida, is never the same, is continually a problem.