The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

John R. Searle’s review of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction [NYR, October 27] looks like a critical but unbiased examination of deconstructive theory. One need only read it carefully to discover that appearances are, in this case at least, almost perfectly deceiving.

Early in his review (p. 74) Searle wonders if Derrida and Culler believe there is a “vulgar concept of woman” corresponding to the “vulgar concept of writing.” That Derrida thinks so is evident from, among others, a text like Spurs. And if one will read the first chapter of Culler’s book, she will (not “reasonably assume” but) out and out know that Culler thinks there is.

In a footnote (p. 75) Searle suggests that perhaps Derrida and Culler are not aware that the ancient Greeks read aloud. It is unthinkable (by anyone not out to get them) that either Derrida or Culler is bereft of this commonplace. But in his footnotes (it might be fun to deconstruct them) Searle casts off even the minimal constraints he accepts in the body of his essay. For example, another note (p. 77) cites two statements about truth and finds them inconsistent. One of them (“truth is a kind of fiction”) Culler does not make. What he says (Culler, p. 181, my emphasis) is “if truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten,” a clause which Searle quotes in the body of his review without the “if.” In the passage from which this citation is taken Culler is developing the implications for literary criticism of deconstructive philosophy. The other statement (“Truth is what can be demonstrated…and what is simply the case,” Culler, p. 154) is meant to characterize the traditional logocentric view of truth. Read in context, the two statements do not contradict each other. Neither is asserted by the author. (It might be of interest to Searle that the apparent paradox, “truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten” was stated and persuasively argued by Nietzsche in his essay, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.”)

In the same vein Searle quotes (p. 77) this passage from Culler’s book:

what we think of as the innermost spaces and places of the body—vagina, stomach, intestine—are in fact pockets of externality folded in [Culler, p. 198]

and remarks that “anatomists will no doubt be interested to learn” this. But Culler is not confronting anatomists with a revelation. Like Derrida, he is using this familiar fact to illustrate the impossibility of “framing” a text or a genre of texts; i.e., of demarcating its inside clearly and unambiguously from its outside. (Cf. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7.) Culler’s observation bears not on anatomy but on the sort of formalism that thinks it can isolate a literary work or a literary kind, seal it off from its environment so as to prevent bleeding in or out, and treat it as a self-contained entity.

According to Searle (p. 77) Culler asserts that presence is a certain type of absence. On the page to which Searle refers (Culler, p. 106) Culler is discussing Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions. What he says is that “Maman’s ‘presence’ is a certain type of absence.” The quotes around “presence” are Culler’s own. Searle says that Culler says that the marginal is in fact central. What he actually says is that “what had previously been thought marginal is in fact central” (Culler, p. 140, my emphasis). This sort of thing goes on and on. Searle’s Culler says that the literal is metaphorical. Culler himself says, “The literal is the opposite of the figurative, but the literal expression is also a metaphor whose figurality has been forgotten” (Culler, p. 148). Searle’s Culler says that reading is a form of misreading. Culler speaks of “the claim that all readings are misreadings” (Culler, p. 176, my emphasis) and tries to show how the claim might be justified. The same goes for “understanding is a special case of misunderstanding” (Searle, p. 77, Culler, p. 176). “Sanity is a kind of neurosis” (p. 77). But Culler, on the page cited (160), is expounding Freud, and what he writes is that “it has become something of a commonplace that ‘sanity’ is only a particular determination of neurosis.” The quotes around “sanity” are, again, Culler’s. That “man is a form of woman” occurs—not in those words, naturally—in a passage (Culler, p. 171) in which Culler is exploring some implications of Freud’s theories of sexuality. What Culler thinks “perhaps one should say, in keeping with the Derridean model,” is “that man and woman are both variants of archi-woman.” In all these cases the appearance of absurdity is Searle’s own invention, an illusion he throws up in order to ridicule and defame the work he is supposed to be reviewing. It is unfortunate that Searle was chosen to review a book like On Deconstruction. Culler deserved at least a fair shake.

But Searle’s inability (or unwillingness) to read fairly is only one of his bad habits. For example, he accounts for Derrida’s “eccentric” reading of the history of Western philosophy by explaining (p. 76) that Derrida discusses only three major philosophers in any detail: Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl. Without going back to the texts I can recall a whole string of other philosophers discussed in some detail by Derrida: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Condillac, Bataille, Levinas, J.L. Austin, and (yes) John R. Searle. Searle’s “distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false” (Glyph 1, p. 203) may indicate that he is “simply misinformed” (p. 75). But perhaps Searle thinks that not all the people on my list are “major figures.”

Derrida’s proof that writing is prior to speech is, according to Searle, “based on a redefinition” (p. 76) of writing. But in “Signature Event Context,” an essay to which Searle responded in the pages of Glyph, Derrida begins with the ordinary concept of writing and shows that all the properties by which this concept distinguishes writing from speech—particularly those that mark writing as secondary, derivative, and debased—are also properties of speech as ordinarily understood. According to Searle, Derrida’s concept of writing is not based on “actual empirical study.” He makes nothing of the fact that speech is spoken and writing written (what could be made of that?), and he does not attend to the persistence of written texts through time (p. 77). It is true that Derrida’s concern is structural, not empirical. And yet he is (of course) familiar with the facts Searle mentions—some of them are discussed in his reply to Searle (Glyph 2)—and shows how they can be explained (or discounted) by his concept of the structural coincidence of speech and writing. Derrida’s view of writing and its relation to speech is not a generalization from experience, but it does account for the facts. Better (in fact) than does the traditional view.

In defense of his critique of Derrida, Searle advances two claims which, taken together, actually support deconstruction. Here is the first:

The distinction between speech and writing is simply not very important to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, etc. [p. 75]

The second claim is that, from medieval developments of Aristotle’s logic down to modern symbolic logic,

philosophers have tended to emphasize written language as the more perspicuous vehicle of logical relations. [p. 75]

Now, if these claims are true (I shall not try to decide that), they strengthen rather than weaken the case for deconstruction. The first claim (like my mother’s refusal to regard libido as seriously different from affection) would provide evidence for what Derrida calls the repression of writing in the West. The second would testify to the philosophers’ continued dependence (nevertheless) on the writing whose difference (or differance) they had tried to repress.

More than once, what Searle offers as arguments against deconstruction play right into (and out of) Derrida’s hand. His contention (p. 78) that deconstruction itself is subject to deconstructive analysis is not exactly original with him. Derrida knows that deconstruction depends on (inhabits) the structures it deconstructs, and he has insisted from the first that every deconstructive reading needs deconstructing ad infinitum. But this is not the first time Searle has used Derrida to whip Derrida: cf. their “confrontation” in Glyph 1 and 2. Neither is it inconsistent for a deconstructionist to allege that he is misunderstood, as Searle thinks on the strength of a confidence from Michel Foucault (p. 77). Deconstructive reading is not meant to replace conventional reading, but to supplement it—or to exhibit its own supplementarity. Deconstructive reading presupposes conventional reading. How can one show that a discourse “undermines the philosophy it asserts” (p. 74, quoted from Culler, p. 86) unless one has first understood the philosophy it asserts? This again is a point which Derrida has made, e.g., in Of Grammatology.

Sometimes it appears that Searle has misunderstood Derrida. Derrida, thinking of Saussure, says that “the play of differences” in language forbids that “a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself” (Positions, 26, quoted on pp. 75-76). Searle counters:

I understand the differences between the two sentences “the cat is on the mat” and “the dog is on the mat” in precisely the way I do because the word “cat” is present in the first while absent from the second, and the word “dog” is present in the second, while absent from the first. [p. 76]

But surely the “presence” of “elements” like “cat” and “dog” in Searle’s sentences is toto caelo different from their presence in and of themselves—their exclusive self-reference—which is what Derrida is talking about. Searle has missed the point because he has mistaken the target.

Searle intones the ritual complaint that deconstructionists are not “seeking the truth” (p. 77). What this complaint fails (or refuses) to recognize is that the deconstructionist is almost obsessively occupied with truth. By deconstructing the traditional notion of truth he hopes to achieve a deeper and sharper understanding of the meaning of the search for truth, the conditions of its possibility, and what would count as success in such an endeavor. Searle (p. 77) chides Culler for this:

The effect of deconstructive analyses, as numerous readers can attest, is knowledge and feelings of mastery. [Culler, p. 225]

But he does not quote the sentence just preceding this one:

Demonstrations of complicities between language and metalanguage, observed and observer, question the possibility of attaining a principled mastery of a domain but do not suggest that deconstruction has either achieved a mastery of its own or can ignore the whole problem of mastery from a secure position of externality. [Culler, p. 225]

Nor does he quote the sentence that follows a few lines further on and concludes the chapter:

And if the formulations produced by these analyses are themselves open to question because of their involvement with the forces and ruses they claim to understand, this acknowledgement of inadequacy is also an opening to criticism, analysis, and displacement. [Culler, p. 225]