|
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Derrida used this word in two of his early books, namely ''Writing and Difference'' and ''Of Grammatology''. In French, the word "trace" has a range of meanings similar to those of its English equivalent, but also suggests meanings related to the English words "track", "path", or "mark". In the preface to her translation of ''Of Grammatology'', Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote “I stick to ‘trace’ in my translation, because it 'looks the same' as Derrida’s word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word”.〔Jacques Derrida, ''Of Grammatology'', trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Translator's Preface, p. xvii.〕 Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean. One cannot bring up the concepts of woman, normality, or speech without simultaneously evoking the concepts of man, abnormality, or writing. The trace is the nonmeaning that is inevitably brought to mind along with the meaning.〔Balkin, J. M. (Deconstructive Practice and Legal ). (Yale University, 1998)〕 Derrida does not positively or strictly define trace, and denies the possibility of such a project. Indeed, words like “différance”, “arche-writing”, “pharmakos/pharmakon”, and especially “specter”, carry similar meanings in many other texts by Derrida. His refusal to apply only one name to his concepts is a deliberate strategy to avoid a set of metaphysical assumptions that, he argues, have been central to the history of European thought. Trace can be seen as an always contingent term for a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present", of the ‘originary lack’ that seems to be "the condition of thought and experience". Trace is a contingent unit of the critique of language always-already present: “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”.〔''The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy,'' ed. by Richard Macsey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), p. 254.〕 Deconstruction, unlike analysis or interpretation, tries to lay the inner contradictions of a text bare, and, in turn, build a different meaning from that: it is at once a process of destruction and construction. Derrida claims that these contradictions are neither accidental nor exceptions; they are the exposure of certain “metaphysics of pure presence”, an exposure of the “transcendental signified” always-already hidden inside language. This “always-already hidden” contradiction is trace. == Metaphysics, logocentrism, differance and trace == One of the very many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida’s project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormity of it. Just to understand the context of Derrida’s theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers, such as, Socrates–Plato–Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and others. Some have tried to write simplified versions of this theory, such as Deconstruction for Beginners〔Powell, James and Lee, Joe, ''Deconstruction for Beginners'' (Writers & Readers Publishing, 2005).〕 and Deconstructions: A User's Guide,〔Nicholas Royle, ''Deconstructions: A User's Guide'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).〕 but their attempts have moved so much away from the original that they have drawn flak from almost all quarters. The best way to learn about deconstruction is to read Derrida's own work; nonetheless, this short exposition of the relationship between “trace” and the Derrida's project may help orient his readers. Derrida’s philosophy is chiefly concerned with metaphysics, although he does not define it rigorously, and takes it to be “the science of presence”. In his own words:
Derrida finds the root of this metaphysics, which he calls “metaphysics of pure presence", in logos, which is internal to language itself. He calls this “Logocentrism”, which is a tendency towards definitive truth-values through forced closure of structures. In his belief, it is the structure of language itself that forces us into metaphysics, best represented through truth-values, closures, speech as valorized by Socrates in ''Phaedrus''. In fact, according to Derrida, Logocentrism is so all-pervasive that the mere act of opposing it cannot evade it by any margin. On the other hand, Derrida finds his Nietzschean hope (his own word is “affirmation") in heterogeneity, contradictions, absence etc. To counter the privileged position of the speech (parole) or the phonè, he puts forward a new science of grammé or the unit of writing: grammatology. Unlike structuralists, Derrida does not see language as the one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified must make its necessity felt before letting tiself be erased. The concept of the arche-trace must comply with both the necessity and the erasure....The trace is not only the disappearance of origin,.....it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace.〕 By the virtue of trace, signifiers always simultaneously differ and defer from the illusive signified. This is something Derrida calls “Differance”. According to him, “Differance is the non-full, non-simple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences".〔Jacques Derrida, ''Speech and Phenomena: and other essays on Husserl′s theory of signs,'' trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p.141.〕 According to Derrida language is labyrinthine, inter-woven and inter-related, and the threads of this labyrinth are the differences, traces. Along with “supplement”, trace and difference conveys a picture of what language is to Derrida. All these terms are part of his strategy; he wants to use trace to “indicate a way out of the closure imposed by the system…”.〔''Speech and Phenomena,'' p.141.〕 Trace is, again, not presence but an empty simulation of it: It is essentially an “antistructuralist gesture”,〔Jacques Derrida, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," in ''Derrida and Différance,'' ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia), 1985, p. 2.〕 as he felt that the “Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented”.〔''Derrida and Différance,'' p. 2.〕 Trace, or difference, is also pivotal in jeopardizing strict dichotomies:
Trace is also not linear or chronological in any sense of the word, “This trace relates no less to what is called the future than what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by the very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present”.〔Jacques Derrida, ''Writing and Difference,'' trans. Alan Bass (London & New York: Routledge, 1978), p. 394.〕 Trace is a contingent strategy, a ''bricolage'' for Derrida that helps him produce a new concept of writing (as opposed to the Socratic or Saussurean speech), where “The interweaving results in each 'element' - phoneme or grapheme - being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text”.〔Jacques Derrida, ''Positions,'' trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 387-88.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Trace (deconstruction)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|