Illegible Bodies and Cultural Illiteracy in Yoko Tawada's Verwandlungen and "Das Fremde aus der Dose" (original) (raw)
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Textualized Body, Embodied Text: Derrida’s Linguistic Materialism
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The concept of “cultural identity” has gradually replaced such discredited concepts as “race”, “ethnicity”, even “nationality” in the conservative political discourse of recent decades which conceives, represents and performs culture as a closed system with clear-cut boundaries which must be defended from contamination. The article employs the theories of Derrida and Lotman as useful tools for deconstructing this understanding of cultural identity, which has recently become an ideological justification for socio-political conflicts. In fact, their theories spring from a thorough critique of the kind of internalizing self-enclosure which allowed Saussure to delimit and describe langue as the object of linguistics. The article identifies and compares the elements of this critique, focusing on Derrida’s and Lotman’s concepts of “mirror structure”, “binarism”, “numerousness”, “textuality” and “semiosphere”. An understanding of mediation emerges which is not reducible to any kind of definitive acquisition, thereby frustrating the pretences of identity, constantly dislocating and deferring any attempt at semiotic self-enclosure. My comparison suggests that Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” (or “dialogue”) and Derrida’s différance can be con- sidered analogous descriptions of this problematic kind of mediation. The (de)construc- tive nature of culture, as described by Lotman and Derrida, challenges any attempt to view cultural formations as sources of rigid and irreducible identities or differences.
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The term "deconstruction" decisively enters philosophical discourse in 1967, with the publication of three books by Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Voice and Phenomenon. Indeed, "deconstruction" is virtually synonymous with Derrida's name. Nevertheless, the event of Derridean deconstruction developed out of the phenomenological tradition. On the one hand, as is often noted, Derrida appropriated the term from Heidegger's idea, in Being and Time, of a "destruction" of the history of Western ontology (Heidegger 2010, 19-25 [ §6]), that is, a dismantling of the historical concepts of being in order to lay bare the fundamental experience from which these concepts originated (PSY2, 2). On the other, and less often noted, Derrida took constant inspiration from Husserl's idea of the epoché (Husserl 2012, 59-60 [ §32]), that is, from the universal suspension of the belief in a world having existence independent from experience (see, e.g., SM, 59). Both Heidegger's historical destruction and Husserl's universal suspension amounted to critical practices in regard to accepted beliefs and sedimented concepts. Likewise, Derridean deconstruction criticizes structures, concepts, and beliefs that seem selfevident. In this regard, deconstructive critique is classical (or traditional, Kantian), aiming to demonstrate the limited validity of concepts and beliefs, even their falsity, aiming, in other words, to dispel the illusions they have generated. In general, deconstructive critique targets the illusion of presence, that is, the idea that being is simply present and available before our eyes. For Derrida, the idea of presence implies selfgivenness, simplicity, purity, identity, and stasis. Therefore, deconstruction aims to demonstrate that presence is never given as such, never simple, never pure, never self-identical, and never static; it is always given as something other, complex, impure, differentiated, and generated.