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  “Deconstruction was mainly affirmation. Affirmation doesn’t mean reconstruction, doesn’t mean positioning something positive, but it means constant reference to a “yes.” Yes, I speak to you. I address you. I listen to you. So it’s a thinking of affirmation. Now, this affirmation is not simply reconstruction”. — Jacques Derrida, Talking liberties 1. Deconstruction and the Subject If deconstruction questions the subject, does it leave us without a subject? The problem becomes particularly pressing when the subject is linked to human rights. Rights belong to someone: a person who can act, suffer, choose, speak, and assume responsibility. If there is no stable subject behind these capacities, who, then, possesses the rights we seek to defend? This is the problem put to Jacques Derrida by Alan Montefiore in an interview on the “deconstruction of the subject.” Derrida’s first response is brief but decisive: “Deconstruction doesn't mean dissolution.” To question the subjec...

1. Before I Speak “I have but one language—yet that language is not mine.” (Derrida, Monolingualism of the other ) Derrida’s sentence sounds like a contradiction. To have a language normally means to speak it, to use it, perhaps even to regard it as part of who one is. Yet Derrida immediately withdraws the possession his words seem to claim. He has one language, but that language is not his. Foucault begins from a different image: “I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me…” (Foucault, The order of discourse ) Here the disturbance concerns not possession but beginning. Foucault imagines a voice that was already speaking before he arrived, so that he would not have to occupy the position of the one who starts. The two sentences do not make the same argument. But they disturb a common assumption: that when I speak, I begin with myself. I imagine myself as the speaker who has something to say, finds the words for it, an...

“At any given period, however far back in time we go, a language is always an inheritance from the past. In fact, no society has ever known its language to be anything other than something inherited from previous generations, which it has no choice but to accept. That is why the question of the origins of language does not have the importance generally attributed to it. It is not even a relevant question as far as linguistics is concerned”. — Saussure, F. de, Course in general linguistics 1. “I Have but One Language” “I have but one language—yet that language is not mine.” The sentence seems contradictory. To have a language ordinarily means to speak it, to use it, perhaps even to identify with it. Yet in  Monolingualism of the other; or, The prosthesis of origin , Derrida immediately withdraws the possession that his statement appears to claim. He has one language, but that language does not belong to him. The difficulty lies in the word have . Derrida is not denying tha...

“It is curious to note that for centuries, in Europe, the words of a madman were either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth. They either fell into a void - rejected the moment they were proffered -or else men deciphered in them a naive or cunning reason, rationality more rational than that of a rational man.” -           Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body”. -           Derrida, Of grammatology 1. Nothing or Truth At the beginning of The Order of Discourse , Michel Foucault describes a curious fate that befell the words of the madman in Europe. For centuries, he writes, they were “either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth.” They...