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It is probably assumed too readily in retrospect that Derrida had something to say about the nature of language, and that deconstruction as a critical practice either rested on that something, or demonstrated it at work in literature. In this chapter I am going to argue that this was and is not the case, that Derrida made almost no pronouncements on the question of what language is and isn't, and that deconstruction did not rest, in this sense, on any sort of linguistic premises. It is much safer to think of it the other way around: that writings about language, that is to say, language about language, like the discourse of linguistics, shape and construe their object according to well-established habits and patterns of thought that are never properly demonstrable, and derive from philosophical positions. Rather than assume that deconstruction rested on linguistic premises, it is safer to regard Derrida's writings as demonstrations that linguistics rests on something prior or primordial, and that this primordiality goes by the name of deconstruction. In this chapter I am going to try to justify this claim, and in so doing to prepare the way for a further argument that this relation comes out in a very different way in the writings of Paul de Man.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307033_5

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