On Jacques Derrida

In October this year one of the most influential thinkers of our time past away. He basically changed the way we look at things, texts, cultural phenomena and political discourse.

Derrida was interested in what lies outside the system of thought, which claim to explain everything, i.e. what they claim but cannot.

'Systems are impossible' that is the fundamental wisdom of Derrida's deconstruction concept. He called this the 'exorbitant' in the older sense of the word, from the latin root exitorbitare meaning 'to go out of the wheel track'. That which is outside the orb, the wheel of western philosophy if you will.

To investigate the exorbitant thus means, in the context of philosophical text, seeing it in a new way, questioning its framework and obviously to make new connections. He calls these connections 'traces'. What or who is excluded and why?

Jacques Derrida was all about thinking and reading in a dramatically new way. To look at the very words used in order to deconstruct its meaning.

Derrida is difficult to read because, usually, you're required to have read something else very carefully. You read from the inside out in an almost rabbinical way in order to be able to deconstruct it.

Derrida constantly changed, renamed and developed his terms in different contexts and thusly also emphasized the 'non-method' aspect of deconstruction.

He also tried to find what he called a non-philosophical site from where to question philosophy. That seems like an impossible task and something of a paradox since the language of philosophy permeates our western culture to a very high degree. Later in life Derrida pronounced that 'Deconstruction is justice!', it is to unfold the truth that lies behind the veil of words.

In his book 'The Truth in Painting'(1978, Derrida asks what is a box? What is the inboxing of a box? He suggest that there 'is always a box inside the box and always a box outside the box'. A box is only a box, thanks to dimensions that are and are not part of it. This is the logic of what Derrida elsewhere calls the parergon, the border or frame being both beside the work (para+ergon)and part of the work. It is not simply a question of the borderlines of a box or frame of a painting, but of the borders of texts, institutions and even nations and continents.

Thomas Ek