Occasionally, Derrida will say something like the following, where he is speaking of the movement of deconstruction:...No matter what their interest or their necessity may be today,the social sciences (notably those dealing with cultural or scientific and academic institutions) cannot, as such, claim to "objectify" a movement which, essentially, questions the philosophical, scientific, and institutional axiomatics of those same sciences.
-"Mnemosyne" in Memoires for Paul de Man, 15
To be understood, we have to take the statement ironically: the stress falls on the "as such" and on the quotations around the word objectify, and, instead of a brash assertion that deconstruction is impervious to the analysis of the social sciences, we get a statement that these social sciences will transform the nature of their claims and of their process of objectification insofar as they account for deconstruction. In other words, the statement is not "negative," it is, read ironically, quite "positive" (this is what people are getting at, in other words, when they say deconstruction is not negative, but is a hopeful endeavor, though this remains a little too simple, for reasons we'll see right now).
But at what point does this irony become duplicity?
Derrida, to his credit, after saying this goes on to elaborate on the nature of the movement, which buttresses the point regarding deconstruction's ability to transform the discourses that attempt to comprehend it, especially by objectification. He makes other statements, in other words, that rely upon the statement here qua ironized. This not only clarifies the original sentence, or teaches us how to take it, but also makes his discourse one of unfolding such bald statements wherever they appear. In short, he tempers and directs the brashness, so as help distinguish it from the radicality of his task (which here does indeed include a challenge to discourses that would unproblematically comprehend deconstruction).
By no means does he engage in this slow separation of the duplicity of a sentence from its irony all the time. But it is, I'd say, generally the way he works when he lets one of these statements fly.
Not so with Paul de Man. For de Man, duplicity is constantly mashed together with irony, so as to make us confuse the former for the latter. But let me elaborate on the distinction, first, since "duplicity" carries a reference to truth that does not seem relevant here.
By a duplicity, I don't entirely mean a lie. But I do mean that, in duplicity, one forgoes (or tries primarily to forgo) reference to a schema where truth is indeed at play. Such a scheme would be the Heideggerian one, which does not at all define the true merely as the correct (nor does it keep the question of truth out of art or fiction). What is important in duplicity is the mere construction of a double, of another meaning, that, before it references any schema, will make one meaning less able to be unproblematically apprehended. It does not, without elaboration, continue to disrupt a schema by calling into question its truth or falsity, as irony does. (In short, it confuses phenomenality with truth, which violently turns everything on its head.)
The distinction, then, between de Man and Derrida becomes more clear. It involves the trajectory of their statements, the way they are elaborated. De Man ends up at statements which are just assumed to be ironic, when they are often merely duplicitous. He even constructs a notion of irony that allows these statements to be assumed to be ironic (if it isn't clear from what I have said, I am using irony differently than de Man's definition--or rather, insisting on the use of this definition in a different way than he uses it). Derrida occasionally sinks from his generally ironic discourse into duplicity. But I would also stress that Derrida is also not continually ironic. His statements can be understood otherwise.
The difference can be seen in "The Rhetoric of Blindness." The essays acts as if it ironizes Derrida, but it merely makes him duplicitous--that is, trying to say something other than Rousseau has already said. This is duplicitous in itself, which is evident on its reliance on unfounded, duplicitous statements, like,
The only literal statement that says what it means to say is the assertion that there can be no literal statements.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindeness," in Blindness and Insight, 133.
No elaboration. Just another conclusion, which relies, at bottom, on duplicity (not irony), the fact that "Rousseau explicitly says the opposite" (notice how "explicit" has lost any connection with truth):
In the narrative rhetoric of Rousseau's text, this is what is meant by the chronological fiction that the "first" language had to be poetic language. Derrida, who sees Rousseau as a representational writer, has to show instead that his theory of metaphor is founded the priority of the literal over the metaphorical meaning, of the "sens propre" over the "sens figuré." And since Roussau explicitly says the opposite, Derrida has to interpret the chapter on metaphor as a moment of blindness in whcih Rousseau says the opposite of what he means to say.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindness," 133
This is all, apparently, necessitated--look at all the has tos--but it does not at all serve to elaborate, to push the duplicity into irony, as I have defined it above.
This is just one of the problems of this disturbing essay (which nevertheless opens up some interesting, if naive, questions about Derrida's inscription). De Man works to revise some of its conclusions in Allegories of Reading, most notably through increasing elaboration. That doesn't ever seem to get him to the point of irony, though.
But we might legitimately wonder whether deconstruction, even as "practiced" by Derrida, has a tie to this sort of duplicity. I'd say it has in the past, but there is no reason why it can't untie them in the future. Derrida's more forthright work gets rid of it pretty thoroughly (The Gift of Death, for example, but also "earlier" texts like Glas).
Postscript:
What, more precisely, do I mean by "elaboration?" Here is another "bald" statement of Derrida's, meant to be taken ironically (it is said "with a smile"). Watch what he does with it:
Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction. In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its place, its principle residence. And how could we define the United States today without integrating the following into the description: It is that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstruction. Since such a space represents and stages, in this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not define it without at least including this symptom (if we can even speak of symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages over the subject of deconstruction, there is no front; there are no fronts. But if there were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define the lot, and, in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned from "Deconstruction" to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, "deconstruction" is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction. Let us say instead...
-"Mnemosyne," 18 (it continues, with a nod precisely to de Man, but I'll stop here).
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