There is nothing outside the text
Jacques Derrida states, obscurely, that, “There is nothing outside the text.” The purpose of this note is to attempt an elucidation.
Consider first the example of a determined student with a photographic memory. He does not speak English but nevertheless seeks to understand the word leopard using only an English dictionary and his knowledge of the English alphabet. He finds the word leopard in his dictionary, and is presented with 23 new words to look up: the words that define leopard. He looks up those words, and is presented with 529 new words to look up: the words that define the words that define leopard. He looks up those words, and is presented with 12,167 new words. He memorizes the entire dictionary, can quote the definition to any word, but still he does not understand the meaning of leopard or any other word. The student’s predicament is similar to our own, with this difference: where he cannot enter, we can not escape. We cannot transcend the symbol system of language to describe non-verbal reality. A philosophical problem arises when we consider, together with what I have just said, that the relationship between any word and what it signifies is arbitrary. There is, for instance, no good reason why a mirror should not be called a moon and (so long as every English speaker were in agreement) the two terms could be substituted without producing the slightest inconvenience. It is self-evident: There is no substantive connection between a word and its referent and it is only because our understanding of that word depends on the words that define it, and the words that define the words that define it, that the arbitrariness of the word is diffused through and lost in the arbitrariness of the entire language. Words only ever refer to other words in an endless switching of circuits that never escapes itself and to the extent that our reality is mediated through the arbitrariness of a language we cannot escape our map of reality itself is arbitrary. This is the image that comes to mind: a prisoner in an Eleatic parable who, granted freedom, opens the door of his cell onto a second door, that he opens onto a third, that he opens onto a fourth, and so on, to infinity, without ever escaping captivity. The argument is logocentric and the implications solipsistic. Derrida is suggesting that we are caught in a trap. Saint Augustine said, “If you understand it, it is not God.” Derrida is saying something similar: The words that define our reality do not define reality. His famous phrase, in short, is a waggish obfuscation. He might have said: Everything is inside the text. |
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