Sonderegger, Ruth - A Critique of Pure Meaning - Wittgenstein and Derrida.pdf

A Critique of Pure Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida

Ruth Sonderegger

‘Misunderstandings are also good, since they may help what is most sacred to find expression’ (F. Schlegel, Lucinde)

‘The firm, seemingly brutal, grasp, is an element of salvation’ (W. Benjamin, Passagenwerk)

In what follows I argue that Derrida and Wittgenstein have closely related viewson linguistic meaning, both directed against varieties of objectivism, and that, if Iam right, it can be shown clearly how Derrida’s attempt to represent speakingand understanding as interpretation constitutes a significant advance beyondWittgenstein. I think it important to bring out this advance beyond Wittgenstein,since a productive confrontation of Wittgenstein and Derrida as philosophers oflanguage is possible only with this difference in view.1

1. Against Gegenstandstheorien (‘Object-Theories’) of Linguistic Meaning

Both Derrida and the later Wittgenstein start from reifying picture- or object-theories of linguistic meaning. Both want to break down what, after Derrida, we might call the ‘axis of presence’, which plays a fundamental role in all tradi-tional theories of meaning. By this I mean the axis which connects (or is supposedto connect) the various traditional guarantors of identity of linguistic meaning –paradigms, understood as represented objects or as mental representations – withparticular uses of signs in particular situations (i.e. with the applications of theseparadigms). For the most controversial question here has always been how suchconnections can exist, how paradigms conceived as objects can guarantee(absolute) determination of linguistic meaning in the infinitely varied andconstantly changing situations of their application. Such definiteness of meaningwas the goal of Husserl, against whom Derrida argues in his early works, as wellas of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, which the Philosophical Investigations subjectsto a critical, if not devastating, discussion.

Husserl tries to save the ideal of absolute determination of linguistic meaningwith a combination of intentionalism and objectivism, a combination oneconstantly meets with in the context of objectivist theories of meaning. It is

European Journal of Philosophy 5:2 ISSN 0966–8373 pp. 183–209. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997. 108 Cowley Road, OxfordOX4 1JF, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

intentionalist in that Husserl ascribes the determination of linguistic sense to thepurposes of the speaker, a sense which the hearer can approach only in an in-finite series of approximations. Understanding is accordingly an endless businessof groping about in the dark. If the question of meaning is raised from within thisintentionalist framework – what is ‘really’ or ‘truly’ meant – the ultimate author-ity is always the speaker, the subject, who discloses a sense which is somehowalready present in consciousness. This kind of intentionalism is supported by akind of objectivism, so that, as far as the speaking subject is concerned, trans-parency and determinateness of sense are guaranteed once and for all, and herauthority is invulnerable to mistakes and (self-) misunderstandings. To preventthe bestowal of meaning being subjective, which is always the danger when allauthority is given to the speaking subject, Husserl furnishes the subject’sconsciousness with ideal objects of meaning, which must be intended by thecommunicator if meaning is to be breathed into the dead signs.

Derrida’s claim about this relation is that intentionalism without metaphysicalobjectivism is unthinkable,2 whether ideal objects of meaning secure the objectiv-ity of sense (Sinn), as in Husserl, whether the meaning-guaranteeing objects areordinary objects in the world, or whether they are representations of such objects.In all these different variants of the play between intentionalism and objectivismthe crucial element – which both Wittgenstein and Derrida attack – is the attemptto think of the use of signs as a solitary activity and to anchor it in the scientific,metaphysical or divine objectivity of paradigms for the use of signs: paradigmsor authorities which are already there when signs come to be used. If the mean-ing-bestowing subject becomes uncertain, the idea is that she simply turns hergaze towards the (objectively) ordered world or the realm of ideal objects ofmeaning. But this at once raises the question of how a human being can think anideal object of meaning or recall it correctly through an object in the world or amental picture of one. Thus the problems of the intentionalists do not beginmerely when the hearer does not perfectly capture the speaker’s intention andunderstanding becomes endless approximation, but with the very goal ofabsolute objectivity or transparency of the paradigms to be thought or recalled,and in relation to the power ascribed to these paradigms actually to direct linguis-tic use. The break comes between the intentionalist pretension to determinatemeaning and its achievement, between the paradigm which is supposed to makemeaning possible and the use of signs modelled on that paradigm.

Wittgenstein goes a little further and shows that the problems which Derridaexposes in Husserl do not go away even if one gives up the idea of ideal objectsof meaning and makes real objects in the public world the guarantors of linguis-tic meaning.

There is one way of avoiding at least partly the occult appearance of theprocesses of thinking [such as Husserl’s ‘thinking’ (Meinen) a meaning-object, R. S.], and it is, to replace in these processes any working of the imag-ination by acts of looking at real objects. Thus it may seem essential that, atleast in certain cases, when I hear the word ‘red’ with understanding, a red

184 Ruth Sonderegger

Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997

image should be before my mind’s eye. But why should I not substituteseeing a bit of red paper for imagining a red patch?3

The problem remains that the ‘paradigmatic objects’ are as little able to regulatetheir application as the ideal objects of meaning: they do not determine the rangeof cases to which they apply, and can be interpreted in quite different ways. Ineither case then – that of Husserl’s ideal objects of meaning or that of the publiclyvisible paradigm made of paper – it is illusory to believe that a certain applicationis forced on us by the paradigm.4 These problems become even more dramaticwhen we realize that our memory of a representational image may, in veryhuman fashion, let us down. ‘When we work with a sample instead of ourmemory there are circumstances in which we say that the sample has changedcolour and we judge of this by memory. But can we not sometimes speak of adarkening, for example, of our memory image? Aren’t we as much at the mercyof memory as of a sample?’ (PI 56). We must then have a more trustworthymeasuring device than our memories: an objective paradigm for the paradigm –and this obviously ushers in a regress. Husserl, therefore, seems entirely consis-tent when he ascribes to the speaker ideal objects of meaning which by definitioncannot get darker, do not need to be construed or interpreted, but rather haveobjective being sui generis.

But this denial of the problem ‘by decree’ is, of course, not a solution to whichWittgenstein and Derrida could agree. Their strategy is rather to keep attacking itso that it becomes clear to the reader that any attempt to explicate the meaning oflinguistic signs from some position preceding the activity of sign-use is unten-able. The attempt either produces infinite regresses of interpretation or necessi-tates resort to some kind of ideal guarantor of meaning which, at any rate asDerrida and Wittgenstein see it, is impossible without appeal to incoherent meta-physics. ‘You have no model of this superlative fact, but you are seduced intousing a super-expression’ (PI 192).

If Wittgenstein’s remarks on the understanding of instructions like ‘alwaysadd two’, of referential explanations like ‘that is TOFF,’5 or on the interpretabilityeven of mathematical symbols such as ‘+’, are taken into account as well, thecritique of objectivistically conceived guarantees of meaning (that is, of objec-tivistically conceived meaning) so far summarized is valid not only for objects inthe literal sense, or their representations, but also for expressions of rules, andmeaning-explanations of all kinds. But that does not mean that Wittgenstein orDerrida think that language is an unregulated chaos. The fact that the passagefrom objects that would bestow and regulate meaning, and from pre-existentmental paradigms, to ideal objects of any kind, leads only to deeper confusion isfor them enough to show that the traditional way of approaching the questionshould be revised. Instead of continuing to ask about a point of origin – whetherit be ‘a subject or a substance, (. . .) a thing in general, a being that is somewherepresent, thereby eluding the play of différance’6 – by which the endless identicalrepetition of a meaningful sign can be regulated – they turn the question around.Why do we understand words and, with them, persons and states of affairs, again

A Critique of Pure Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida 185


and again and every time, even though our utopian desires for absolute certaintyand precision have never been completely realized and never will be? What is it– to speak with Derrida – that regulates this disorder (cf. Diff 4)?

Derrida and Wittgenstein both begin their critique by calling into question thesearch for a meaning-authority preceding and independent of the process ofusing signs, by casting aspersions on the questions regarding who or what deter-mines the meaning of linguistic signs.7 Instead of asking who- or what-questions,they ask how the process of sign-using is regulated and by asking this new ques-tion they come to the thesis that, outside and independent of the process of sign-use there is no guarantee of linguistic meaning, that this process itself produces(and changes) what are called paradigms, examples or models for the use ofsigns. Instead of seeking it before or above the process of sign-use, Wittgensteinand Derrida demonstrate that it is itself produced in the process of repeated useof signs.

Thus one comes to posit presence – and specifically consciousness, thebeing beside itself of consciousness – no longer as the absolutely centralform of Being but as a ‘determination’ and as an ‘effect’. A determinationor an effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but ofdifférance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity andpassivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determin-ation, etc. . . .’ (Diff 16)

2. The Importance of Repetition for Wittgenstein’s and Derrida’s Private Language Arguments

Both Wittgenstein’s thesis, that the meaning of a sign is its use in the language,and Derrida’s, that signs become significant and meaningful only in a play ofreferences between particular occasions of the use of signs, which he calls‘différance’, need some further explication if it is to become clear to what extenttheir explanations are less objectivist than others.

Wittgenstein’s conception of linguistic meaning is anti-objectivist in that heaffirms a two-fold non-objectifiability of the rules or paradigms of sign-use. Whathe calls the ‘rules’ of use are vague in two ways: first, they take the form of collec-tions of examples, every demand to complete which he rejects as absurd; and,second, because of the openness of these rules in respect of future (innovative)uses. But he does not conclude from this non-explicability of the rules that rulesplay no part in speaking. Speakers can cope with ‘vagueness in the rules’ (PI 100),since their knowledge of the rules is of a different kind from that which those whoare looking for completely explicable conventions have to assume. It is in fact anability, non-formalizable, only partially explicable, and it cannot be imparted toothers through explanations and definitions, but primarily through training,demonstration and use in relevant contexts. According to Wittgenstein, then,mastery of a language is a practical ability. One can talk about it and elucidate it



verbally, but it must reveal itself as a capacity to speak and understand, whichcan never be reduced to what can be said about it.8 Knowledge of the meanings ofone’s own language is characteristically shown by an ability to say in a particularsituation whether, or that, something is an assertion, an agreement or a declara-tion of love, and not an ability to define what an agreement or declaration of loveis. Wittgenstein elucidates this with the remark: ‘We are not prepared for the taskof ‘thinking’ the use of the word, e.g. of describing it. (And why should we be?What is the use of such a description?)’ (Z no. 111).9 Explicit propositional knowl-edge, knowledge that . . ., is possible only on the basis of a non-objectifiableknowledge, which is basically a practical know-how as well as a knowledge ofone’s way around the referential network of a language.

Such a thesis naturally leads Wittgenstein to enquire how speakers learn,retain and together share in the complicated referential network of a language.The peculiar thing about this holistic and differential network is that it is neitherthe product of subjective acts of will, nor does it take the form of perceptuallyobservable resemblances between the occasions of the use of a sign, since simi-larities exist everywhere, in some respect or other. Although the speakers of alanguage follow rules which enable them to see resemblances, these resemblancesare not objectively given prior to the rules but constituted through them.Wittgenstein says that speakers are able to find their way around this regulatedirregularity only because they are trained or brought into line for a certain prac-tice of reiteration. I think we should understand Wittgenstein’s thesis in this way:languages not only depend on constant use and repetition, but also on a pluralityof speakers as the sole condition of their being learnt. And that also means thatevery language is a structure which precedes its individual speakers. This impos-sibility of a private language for a single subject is not so much founded on thefact that human beings cannot perfectly remember rules and their use, for thatgoes also for a plurality of subjects. (With regard to this problem it makes nodifference whether one thinks of examples of a private language of sensations,such as Wittgenstein’s example in PI 261, or of a descriptive language for publicobjects.) Rather, the impossibility of a private language is founded on the fact thatlanguages are structured in such a way that there are no rules or paradigms in thefirst place which speakers have to recall correctly or which could as it were dictateto one of them the correct usage. Wittgenstein argues that patterns, examples orexpressions of rules do not precede the practice of reiteration, but are part of it.And since solitary rule-following can be interpreted only according to theimplausible model of a person recalling an original, timeless, definition, whichcan be clearly separated from the process of use and precedes it, it cannot be theway into language. Since a subject by herself cannot found a speech practice, theonly way into language is the detour via at least one other speaker as representa-tive of an already established speech practice of using signs.

This connection between repeatability and the thesis that a practice of repeti-tion cannot be established by one speaker, is denied by the representatives of theweak Private Language argument. They say only that a sign first gets a meaningwhen it is repeatable in the sense that there is a publicly ascertainable connection



between the sign and an event or object, so that third parties can ascertain andrepeat this connection. The representatives of the strong Private Language argu-ment claim against this not simply that a single person cannot establish such arepeatable connection alone; they – together, one might say, with Derrida – havea different interpretation of the concept of repetition, and thus reach the conclu-sion that a person cannot follow a rule on just one occasion and that he cannot doso alone. As regards the idea of recurrence, they stress not only the publicly acces-sible connection between a sign and what it stands for, but above all its repeateduse in a practice, on which the formation of meanings and their regulationdepend. They go beyond the requirement that repetition must be possible, andclaim that there must always already have been repetition. Only in that case –where there is an existing linguistic practice – can there be a criterion for correctrepetition, one that does justice to the complex family relationships of thelanguage. On the basis of this interpretation of the idea of repetition they arriveat the thesis that one person alone cannot speak (rather than the less fundamen-tal idea that two people would make fewer mistakes than one). WhereasWittgenstein – ignoring his own insight into the intrinsic connection between theprocess of application and the paradigms which are the product of this process –oscillates between the strong and the weak Private Language argument, Derrida,as I shall show, leaves no doubt about the validity of the strong argument againstthe possibility of a language for a solitary speaker.10

It is interesting that Derrida does not distinguish the two aspects of the strongthesis – that we cannot talk about a language unless there is both frequent follow-ing of a rule and also the following of it by more than one person – but sees bothas implied by the concept of repetition, which for him is the central idea. Onemight say that in it he distinguishes the aspect of repeatability from that of repeated-ness, as two aspects of a single thing. As Derrida sees it, the question of the neces-sity of repeatedly using a sign cannot be separated from the question of whethera single person alone can do this. Characteristically, he does not followWittgenstein in understanding the argument against a solitary speaker as anargument for the intersubjectively valid usages of a linguistic community.

Derrida ties his thesis about the repeatability (i.e. the necessary openness) oflanguage rules, to the experience that the absence or death of a speaker or writeralters nothing of the intelligibility of a text or an utterance, so that the meaning(in so far as it relates to what counts as repetition of a sign) cannot depend on herprivate sensations, intentions or intuitions.

This implies that there is no code – an organon of iterability – that isstructurally secret. The possibility of repeating, and therefore of identify-ing, marks is implied in every code (my emphasis), making of it a commu-nicable, transmittable, decipherable grid that is iterable for a third party,and thus for any possible user in general.’11

The passage makes it clear that Derrida does not conclude from the necessarypublicity of the rules of use for a sign that a single speaker would thereby be



enabled to establish publicly recognizable connections between signs and partic-ular situations of use, and also to decide according to public criteria whether asign had been correctly used. Rather, he defends the thesis that the repeatabilityof signs cannot be separated from their necessary repeatedness, that is, that asubject by herself can neither establish a repeated practice nor check her ownperformance, unless there is already a pre-established public and knowableconnection between a sign and its occurrence.

The reason for this – as we have already mentioned in connection withWittgenstein – is that the rules for the use of signs come into being only in thepractice of use itself and because even the discovery of a new rule of use is boundup with familiarity with a language, which could not be produced by a subjectunaided.

This implies that the subject (. . .) is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speechconform – even in so-called ‘creation’, or in so-called ‘transgression’ – tothe system of the rules of language as a system of differences, or at veryleast by conforming to the general law of différance, . . . (Diff 15).

One cannot know what kinds of resemblance are in question in the repetition ofsigns without being familiar with a language, and there are resemblances or rela-tionships whose point becomes apparent only when one knows a word in its vari-ous indefinable, i.e. verbally incompletely explicable, and alterable contexts ofuse. That means that it is never enough to know a definition – even a public one– which precedes the process of use. Again, in a language rules do not precedeuse, they come with it. A subject would already have to be involved in a practiceof use if she wanted to teach herself a language, since the complex family rela-tionships contain public criteria only for those who already know their wayaround a language. Thus Derrida speaks of the histories of use of a language as‘a kind of writing before the letter, an archi-writing without a present origin,without archi-’ (Diff 15).

Where Wittgenstein and Derrida go beyond their shared opposition toGegenstandtheorie-models of meaning and the possibility of private languages,their respective strengths are remarkably complementary. Wittgenstein’sstrength is, in my view, in his analysis of the specific element of ‘knowledge’ oflanguages as an ability, which can dispense with theoretical explanation, withoutthereby becoming knowledge of an inferior kind. In describing this abilityWittgenstein repeatedly speaks of shared usage or the usages of a linguisticcommunity. Behind these phrases lie three distinct and, to some extent, problem-atic points: (i) Talk of usage implies a capacity which a person cannot teachherself. (ii) At the basis of language there must be agreement with those fromwhom one learns it; one cannot both learn and at the same time dispute it. (iii) Language rules in the proper sense are shared usages of a linguistic commu-nity as a whole. As against this, Derrida’s strength lies in his having reminded us,in the face of all the emphasis on community, of the importance of difference in



usages and the necessity for interpretation. Derrida’s limitation lies primarily inhis overlooking the aspect of knowing how. . . . This has led him repeatedly intounnecessary paradoxes, and has exposed the new dimension of opposition toobjectivism, which his emphasis on interpretation has made possible, to needlesscriticism. My contention is, then, that in order to assess the validity of Derrida’sarguments, one must first do justice to Wittgenstein, and show how far his talk ofshared usage is successfully directed against the need for endless interpretation.

3. Criticizing the Shared Practice

Wittgenstein’s talk of shared practice or shared linguistic usage and customs iscontroversial because in it he combines distinct arguments about linguisticbehaviour in ways that are hard to disentangle. At first his talk of practice andusage is used to draw attention to the practical – in contrast to the cognitive –character of language mastery.12 He rightly keeps pointing out that this capacityhas more to do with practical abilities than with forms of cognitive knowledge.(Think, for example, of capacities like finding one’s way in a city without a map,acquiring connoisseurship of wine, or mastering musical instruments, becomingat home with local or context-specific habits of small talk.) Shared usage playsquite a different role in those situations where the agenda is one of language-learning. In these contexts usage is the touchstone for a child’s correct or incorrectfollowing of a rule; it is the criterion for what is part of a particular language andwhat not. The mere fact that we, as members of a linguistic community, proceedin such and such a way is, in this situation, the justificatory norm for followingthe rule in this way and not otherwise, it is the standard against which the chil-dren are brought into line. If a teacher judges that the pupil has continued theseries correctly, she has nothing better to appeal to than the fact that she herselfdoes it in the same way, ‘as we do it’ (PI 145). In defence of this Wittgensteinianthesis – that one has at first to conform blindly to an established speech practice– in the sense that there is no other way in which a language can be learnt at all,I have made use of Derrida’s concept of iterability.

However, Wittgenstein’s attempt to extend (or the way he extends) the valid-ity of the ‘shared practice’ argument beyond the situation of being taught alanguage is to my mind questionable. He rightly emphasizes that a doubt aboutwhether the rule was correctly followed, or the repetitive practice correctlyextended, can be formulated only on the basis of a foundation free from doubt,and that this is lacking where the language learner does not blindly accept itfrom her teachers. But Wittgenstein ignores an important aspect of our linguis-tic practice when he appears to describe that indubitable foundation as theshared usage of a homogeneous linguistic community, which simply needs to bebrought into play in cases of doubt in order that one may again find solid groundunder one’s feet. Although it is important and right to draw attention to the factthat learning a language requires that certain linguistic usage must first berepeated blindly for the basic distinction between correct and incorrect use to get



a hold, it is nevertheless a distortion to think of the linguistic behaviour of moreor less adult speakers in terms of this scenario of language-learning. In contrast tothe situation of beginners, where what counts as correct allows of no doubt (asdistinct from any uncertainty that the beginner might of course feel), the subsequentdiscernment of correct and incorrect use is very closely associated with words like‘interpreting’, ‘construing’, or justifying’. These words would lose their point if itwas always obvious and uncontroversial what was to count as correct and incor-rect in a particular situation, as though one merely had to examine the sharedusage and remind one another of it in order to possess an uncontroversial sharedcriterion of decision. The very fact that those words have a place in our languageis bound up with the fact that the understanding of an utterance can be contro-versial or at least open; that sometimes the persons concerned cannot agree whichrule covers the case in question. To deny this is to return to an objectivist concep-tion of language.

In this context the epithet ‘objectivist’ means that the meaning of signs or utter-ances is assumed to be already present in the shared usage, in the sense that onecan assure oneself of it simply by having recourse to one’s own linguistic practice.In communication this foundation is neither shifted, questioned or created anew.Shared usage thus becomes that ultimate authority on linguistic meaning whichother philosophers have located in the intention of the speaker or the interpreter’swill to understand. This is not to deny the awareness of contingency which isrevealed in Wittgenstein’s emphasis on our way of life (whatever that may be) asthe guarantee of shared linguistic usage. But this awareness of contingency seemsto disappear when he assumes that shared forms of life are so homogeneous anduncontroversial that their contingency is apparent only to the outside observer,whereas from the internal point of view of the speakers of a language everythingis correct and uncontroversial just as it is. This argument rests, of course, on theuntenable assumption of a closed and clearly bounded language game, whereasa language actually has fuzzy boundaries, and within it there are limits to regula-tion as well as differences concerning (shared) forms of life. The strongest system-atic argument as to why Wittgenstein should have taken this into account moreclearly, and why Derrida rightly insists on it, would be that a single absolutelycommon language would mean the end of all language. It must therefore beshown, as against Wittgenstein, that once language has been learnt, blind rule-following and multiple interpretability are systematically related to each other.Before we follow Derrida’s argument to this effect, I shall refer to some passagesfrom the Philosophical Investigations, to give a number of arguments that supportthe claim that Wittgenstein himself fell victim to just the objectivist misunder-standing identified here.

First, it is noticeable that Wittgenstein’s examples, which he uses to develop hiscontentions about rule-following, are chosen in the light of two kinds of question:When can it be said that a learner has understood certain rules? and, How doesone cope with a person who says she has some private language-rules? However,there are two other very common situations – much discussed in traditionalhermeneutics – which are not even touched on by Wittgenstein: (i) two adults, i.e.



people already familiar with a language, discuss the meaning of what one of themsaid and/or the understanding of the other; (ii) a reader tries to understand a text.In both these cases two more or less mature speakers communicate with each other13

and either do not share a particular understanding, or have no idea how to achievea coherent and certain understanding of a text, or of the other’s utterance. It wouldnot be enough to conclude from the selective nature of his examples thatWittgenstein was interested only in criticizing the possibility of a privatelanguage, or in a critique of understanding as a mental occurrence, together withthe corresponding critique of intentionalism. Certainly he draws false conclusionsfrom his insights into the process of language learning, but at the same time hehimself makes remarks that speak against these conclusions. By ‘false conclusions’I mean above all his extension of the communality required by the learning situa-tion to language as such. As soon as the asymmetry between teacher and pupil inthe learning situation is emphasized, it becomes at once clear that it cannot be theparadigm for language use in general. Wittgenstein suggests that one needs onlyto be an initiate of a language for the rest to follow by itself. As if when one hasbeen initiated into what the members of a linguistic community have in common,serious misunderstandings and changes of meaning no longer occur. ‘It is whathuman beings say that is true and false; they agree in the language they use’ (PI241).14 This kind of remark should astonish us all the more because it was preciselyWittgenstein who enabled us to see certain aspects of pluralism in our linguisticusage. Whoever asserts, as he does, that our linguistic usage is not alwaysbounded by rules (PI 84), or insists that the future of language rules is essentiallyopen and languge rules should not be compared with ‘rails laid to infinity’ (PI218), or takes into account the fact that we sometimes alter rules ‘as we go along’(PI 83), has already to some extent provided for plurality. If these remarks ofWittgenstein are taken seriously, even the unquestioned foundation of all sign-useleaves room for unregulated and alterable boundaries – which in turn meansscope for misunderstanding, or simple failure to understand, and so the need forinterpretation. These cannot in every case be treated as excluded by the context orthrough our shared and equal understanding of what is unregulated. But this isprecisely what he presupposes, to the extent that the openness and alterability oflinguistic usage, of which Wittgenstein himself has reminded us, is never treatedas a serious problem. He seems in fact to hold that this openness and alterabilitycan create difficulties only at the level of linguistic theory, that ‘normal’ languageuse by contrast copes with them quite unproblematically, and that the opennessand alterability of a language are not even known as such by its speakers.

In my view this also explains the remarkable fact that Wittgenstein – at least asfar as I know – never discusses a single case in which equally qualified speakerswithin a community argue about an utterance or a particular practice (discountingthe fact that the text itself has largely the form of a dialogue). When he comes todiscuss the case where two cultures (not, and this is typical, two speakers of asingle culture, since clearly he cannot conceive of such differences within a singleculture) have, perhaps, two quite different conceptions of the practice of givingorders, and ventures to ask himself which of them is right (cf. PI 206), he leaves the



question unanswered. But to hope that language looks after itself by producingexisting usage as a reliable criterion for deciding who is right in disputed cases, isnaive. It is precisely the person who refuses to hypostasize a system of rules preced-ing the process of communication, and takes the latter itself as his authority, whocannot ignore variations in sign-use while quietly hoping for a higher authority tomake everything all right. For such a person there is no such authority.

Although Wittgenstein may be right in his assertion that people do not come toblows over linguistic rules, he is wrong to say that there is never any dispute (cf.BGM 323) about whether the rules have been followed. Such disputes merely stopshort of violence. We are in fact all thoroughly familiar with disputes or uncertain-ties regarding the meaning of particular words, utterances or texts. Such disputesabout meaning, however, always involve, at the same time, disputes about what isthe right thing to say in a certain situation, what is defensible as a true assertion, orwhat the contribution of a (philosophical) text is with regard to the clarification ofa substantial problem. It is when these differences can no longer be resolved byappeal to uncontroversial shared rules, and teacher-pupil relationships give way toa genuine plurality of interpretations and understandings among equally compe-tent people, that adjectives like ‘justified’, ‘correct’ and ‘true’ acquire the meaningthey have in our language, a meaning that cannot be exhausted in every case byappeal to a shared use of words or ‘shared human forms of action’. Wittgensteinmay then be countered with the objection that the radical normative kernel of thesewords can be understood properly only where we are not in agreement over truthand correctness, or discover (in disputing such things) that the basis of our tradi-tional justifications can be questioned. That such disputes are possible only on thebasis of something indisputable does not make them less serious.

One might object that Wittgenstein’s remarks which I have criticized were notmeant to have such a wide application. Perhaps he was merely concerned toshow that some very small area of agreement is necessary if there is to be any talkof differences or divergences. Analogously, what he says about disputes over theuse of words should be understood simply as bearing on the arbitrariness ofsigns, i.e. that the written or spoken form of a sign is purely accidental. (It iscertainly true that no one argues about whether a particular action should bedescribed as ‘walking’ or ‘lawking’.) But not all misunderstandings can beascribed to the obstinacy of opponents, which would allow one to complain thatsuch hair-splitting would soon disappear under the pressures of practice.15 If thisis true, interpretation could no longer be understood as the ‘exile’16 of under-standing; rather it would complement blind understanding.

4. Linguistic Meaning as Inscrutable Mystery – A Wittgensteinian Critique of Derrida

We have argued against Wittgenstein that the forms of life and the usage in whichthe speakers of a language participate are not shared in such a strong sense thatone could say they are the place where meaning is stored and can be inspected. If



we are right, then we have already also established Derrida’s contention thatunderstanding is a production of sense and that the meaning to be understood isnot simply there in the utterance or text in question – or in a common form of life.Understanding is an active process of bringing forth, not a passive reproduction.This defence of interpretation as against blind understanding has two extensionsin Derrida: one, to my mind problematic, which leads to an unnecessary para-dox,18 and one which directs attention to the productive element in understand-ing and thereby leads to a more radical anti-objectivist position than that held byWittgenstein.

Derrida at first denies the existence of linguistic sense by claiming that linguis-tic signs would have no clear meaning (or none at all) if closely inspected.Linguistic meaning thus becomes in his view a paradoxical phenomenon,18 sincethe repetition which goes to constitute a sign is both the condition of the possi-bility and the condition of the impossibility of meaning. We have alreadydiscussed why it is the condition of the possibility in following his argumentagainst private languages. Its being a condition of the impossibility of meaningresults from the fact that we never find a repetition of exactly the same use of asign, but only an approximate repetition of a sign in constantly changingcontexts. Hence Derrida substitutes the concept of ‘iterability’ for that of repeti-tion, which combines the ideas of repetition and alterity.19

From Wittgenstein’s point of view there is no paradox here, since not even hedenies that the repetition is a perpetual shifting, and he uses the example of spin-ning twine to illustrate the history to the use of the concept ‘number’: ‘And weextend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. Andthe strength of the twine does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runsthrough its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’ (PI 67). ForDerrida, however, this lack of a thread extending through all uses of a sign makesall concepts – not only those of ‘sign’ or ‘meaning’ – paradoxical, because of hisrigid theoretical ideal. According to this, it is part of the concept of a concept thatit must be absolutely transparent and explicable: ‘Every concept that lays claim toany rigor whatsoever implies the alternative of “all” or “nothing” ’ (AW 116).Hence, as we have reconstructed Derrida’s concept of repetition, this requirementof absoluteness must naturally lead to unanswerable claims for justification, andDerrida knows only too well that they cannot be met even approximately, thatthey rather reduce the possibility of securing what is sought after – viz. meaning– since it is impossible to conceive of either a beginning or an end of the shiftingrepetitions. Like Wittgenstein, Derrida holds that the individual links in the chainof concept applications are not bound together by an element they have incommon. But unlike Wittgenstein, he insists that the application of signs is never-theless bound up with the idealizing presupposition of some constant element,some abiding particle of past applications, that is inherited by those to come.‘Iterability supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of idealization)in order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and identifiable in, through,and even in view of its alteration. For the structure of iteration (. . .) implies bothidentity and difference.’20 But with this very idealization Derrida ultimately



affirms the paradox that he himself, in his readings of texts by Hegel, Rousseau,Husserl and Apel, has unremittingly exposed in all its contradictory implications– and not merely by way of the argument that a gradual approach never reachesthe goal striven for. Over and above this he stresses that these philosophers’linguistic theories have to flirt with an end that is less a fulfilment than a termi-nation of all language, that is, the end of the shifting repetition which is constitu-tive of language. ‘What is understood as telos must therefore be rethought. And itis precisely to the extent that this relation to telos is also intricate, complex, split,that there is movement life, language, intention, etc. Plenitude is the end (thegoal), but were it attained, it would be the end (death)’ (AW 129). And Derridamakes positive use even of this unattainability of the ideal, this endless deferral,since to demand an attainable ideal would be to demand the end of language. Butto see an irredeemable idealization at work means the opportunity to acknowl-edge an aporia. What distinguishes Derrida from opponents like Husserl or Apelis in the first place simply the acknowledgement of enduring a paradox, whosedestructiveness was dissolved by those opponents in a metaphysical act.According to Derrida, the problematic thing is not pleading for an idealizingtelos, but rather failing to see its subversive effect.21

It could in any event be said, in Wittgensteinian vein, that Derrida’s assertionabout the inevitability of an aporia is itself made in ignorance of the fact that itrests on an avoidable metaphysical claim. It is Derrida’s claim that, in speaking,we assume that there is an explicable rule, or law, which all cases of applicationfollow: while in fact there neither is nor can be such a rule. It is a striking fact thathe sticks to this argument despite acknowledging the common intuition: ‘Even ifin “reality” or in “experience” everyone believes he knows that there is never “allor nothing”, a concept determines itself only according to “all or nothing” ’ (AW16). Derrida’s thesis must then be that self-understanding and the claim made byspeakers to the effect that what they say has a clear sense, really implies (in theeyes of Derrida the theoretician, that is) an assumption that the rules for the useof signs admit of precise and complete explication. There seem to be two modelsfor this kind of explicability, which Derrida fails to distinguish: (i) if the commonfactor among the various occasions of the use of a sign is no longer discoverable,one would then have to know the entire history of the use of a sign, from begin-ning to end, because only if one had a view of the entire history of its use wouldit be clear what counts as use of the sign. Since this model depends on a God-likeview of an entire and completed history, which would effectively mean theimpossibility of language, he usually favours a second model, (ii) according towhich the common factor among the various occasions of the use of a sign isconceived as an idealization, as an idealized smallest common denominator,which speakers assume is explicable when they assume that what they say has aclear sense. The idealized smallest common denominator would be somethinglike the meaning rules, the thread running through all uses (cf. PI 67), thanks towhich the various uses can be identified as uses of a single sign.

Now Wittgenstein himself made many attempts to show that the concepts of aparticular group of speakers do not imply any ideal of absoluteness. Two objections



must be made against Derrida from his point of view: the first is that Derridaascribes to speakers a theoretically explicable ideal of exactness, modelled onphysical measurements and descriptions. From this point of view all repetition isproblematic, since there is no upper limit of exactness for what is measurable, andif one will not here accept approximate values, but insists on a more exact philos-ophy, one entangles oneself in an infinite regress, at whose ‘end’ one mustpresuppose a divine surveyor.

But since Derrida explicitly acknowledges this metaphysics to be unavoidable,and the charge of being metaphysical therefore fails to disturb him,Wittgenstein’s second objection is more important – namely the one alreadyexpounded, to the effect that perfect explicability of meaning rules is a mistakenrequirement for our knowledge of meaning, since this is not knowledge in amerely propositional sense, but essentially also a know-how. Wittgenstein’sobjections to the concept of interpretation are justified when his argument isdirected against a particular sceptical opponent – very like Derrida – and he saysthat the lack of a smallest common denominator for all cases of application of arule, or the absence of a rule of meaning which itself exactly regulates its ownemployment, is no reason for asserting that every application is merely an inter-pretation of the rule and that the rules themselves are an idealized constructwhich can never be grasped. Thus he says, ‘If every application were only aninterpretation, both the interpretation and what it interprets would hang in theair (PI 198). Where he counters the request for the complete explanation of the useof a word (PI 139, 147) or for the teasing out of the essential element among indi-vidual uses (PI 210, BB pp. 19f) with the argument that, as speakers, we can findour way in even the most complex semantic conditions, his well-founded argu-ments apply against Derrida too.

Since the latter conceives of the mastery of a language as a kind of explicitknowledge, he is bound to measure it against an inappropriate standard, whosedemands cannot possibly be met by any speaker. Under these circumstances theundeniable vagueness and changeability of linguistic signs must have aporeticconsequences. But this aporia simply expresses once more the ‘missing link’ of hisreflections, a link that Derrida in contrast to Wittgenstein can encompass only exnegativo, in connection with the metaphysical tradition of the philosophy oflanguage, but must nevertheless presuppose in his interesting theses – viz., thepractical dimension of language. Whereas Derrida treats this practical dimensionas the other, ‘exorbitantly’ extending over the horizon of human language,Wittgenstein ‘discovers’ and describes it as the most ordinary and familiar thingin the world. ‘Graphematics or grammatography’, says Derrida, ‘ought no longerto be presented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant when compared togrammatological knowledge’.22

Wittgenstein is right then to say that when we seek for what holds differentuses of a sign together, we don’t have to decipher in the dark.

But from another point of view – precisely because of the presupposition thatwhat the other says makes clear sense – interpretations and readings are necessary;and in respect of this need we must endorse Derrida’s criticism of Wittgenstein.



5. The Necessity of Interpretation – Derrida’s Critique of Wittgenstein

As a consequence of his critique of intentionalism Derrida defends the thesis thatthe sense of utterances and texts is not something already there, but has to beproduced. It is not only that it is not something present like visible objects orregulated by ‘Bedeutungs-Objekten’ in one’s mind; as linguistic sense it is notfully present in an utterance or text until the interpreter has produced it in adialogue with the speaker or a text. Moreover, what is thus produced is neither areproduction nor a deliberate invention.23

Since I intend to defend both Derrida’s thesis on the non-presence of linguisticsense, and Wittgenstein’s claim that language could not come into being unlessthere were conformity, i.e. the presence of agreement in judgements, it is impor-tant first to examine how far the two theses are compatible. Derrida’s thesis isessentially an answer to the basic blind spot in Wittgenstein, identified above, tothe effect that he acknowledges only so-called blind understanding, and that inthe case of misunderstandings or other problems of comprehension he admitsonly the force of generally shared, blindly understood and unthematic rules, andcannot do justice to his own insight that rules may be changed in the processes ofcommunication. For according to Wittgenstein such shifts are not apparent in thepractice of speaking and understanding. But the facts are that we do sometimesmisunderstand one another, fail to understand one another and criticise oneanother’s understanding, without doubting that we speak the same language(say, German or English) and without simply denying the linguistic competenceof the one we have not understood. All this goes against Wittgenstein’s scenario.We may well echo Derrida’s reproach that the description of language he says heis giving must be incomplete if he can talk only about agreement.24 The agreementon which our language relies concerns quite particular examples learnt fromparticular persons and is thus itself particular, not general. The people fromwhom we learnt our language and in dialogue with whom we altered it, arethemselves in linguistic contact with other people who understand and judgethings differently. Although we therefore share common usages with most of thepeople we communicate with every day, this does not mean that we share allthese usages, or share them with all these people. That is at least one sense ofWittgenstein’s formula that the vagueness lies in the rule, which we neverthelessshare. It is not only that some use different words than others to say the samething, but that the use of the same words is no guarantee of agreement; in fact itcan be a cloak to conceal the growth of misunderstanding.

If we reconstruct the acquisition of linguistic rules in the way just suggested, itceases in general to be clear why Wittgenstein can start with the idea that there isno need for interpretation within a language. An important part of our commu-nication consists in exposing our own judgements to those of others, both to seehow far agreement reaches and to produce agreement. In this respect communi-cation is an expression of the fact that we cannot start with the assumption thatwe agree (in every respect) when we use the same language, even though thisgives us the means of reaching agreement or at least of clarifying its extent. The



contention that interpretation is not a significant part of our linguistic behaviourconstitutes a variant of the thesis that understanding is always already present,and variations in it trifling. It is as though only the shared parts of understandingconstitute language. But that is only the small and important part we rely onwhen we want to understand others in their difference, and in their judgements.That on which we can rely, the base from which we can operate, is always beingrearranged when we reread a text we thought we understood or when we areconfronted with a new expression. These facts have been standardly and tellinglydescribed through the image of the raft that has to be rebuilt on the high seaswhile its crew are still clinging to it. All we have is patchwork, continually disin-tegrating in new places and having to be mended.

The fact that interpretation, in the sense of production, is essential to under-standing can best be seen in those cases where either we do not understand whysomeone can assert something that we find clearly false, or where we do notunderstand what a particular utterance in a particular situation or at a particularpoint is supposed to mean (an experience often undergone when reading theworks of Wittgenstein). In the first case we are – in accordance with a currentdistinction – inclined to say that we have certainly understood the expression, butdo not accept it; in the second we have no idea what we are supposed to accept,since we have not understood the utterance or text-fragment itself. And in thissecond case we are at once inclined to say that we must first make sense of whatis to be understood – normally by asking questions, or occasionally by criticizingthe speaker or engaging her in justificatory or other stories. Since, according towhat was said above, the speaker and her intention cannot be the ultimateauthority in this case, the shared conversation oriented at questions of validity,that is the process of communication itself, becomes the place where linguisticsense is produced. And just as neither the speaker’s intention nor the interpreter’swill to understand is the ultimate authority, or the guardian of an already fixedlinguistic sense, so there cannot even be any explicit rules of meaning, guaran-teeing the sense of an utterance. We, that is, the speaker and the interpreter, firstcome to understand each other, what we are saying and the rules we are follow-ing (if we ever do), when we have agreed about the sense of an utterance, i.e. havejointly produced it.

If one assumes – I cannot defend this further here25– that speakers producinglinguistic sense dispute withone another whether something can be correctly said ina particular situation (and what the relevant justification in a situation is), then eventhe distinction between understanding and asserting becomes problematic; that is,even where we are inclined to say that we understand an utterance, but find it false,out of place or superfluous, we have first to produce the sense of the expressiondialogically, and dialogue is a process of judging the truth of each other’s utterances.

Above all, in cases where we do not find something so blatantly false that weimmediately think the speaker to be incapable of judgement, or are confident ofa particular measure of agreement because of the very restricted nature of theconversation, we shall assume that the other’s utterance, at first hearing seem-ingly unjustified, has some as yet not understood point, that is, is not simply false



but is yet to be understood. This kind of situation is the best encouragement totake the production of sense further.26

In this way the thesis that linguistic sense is not already available, but has tobe produced by the communicators, establishes the point that linguistic sense isestablished only in a process of communication about what is uttered, not inwhat is uttered itself. We can speak about sense or meaning only when under-standing, as the terminus of a process, so to speak, has been arrived at.27 Thethesis that understanding involves in every case a mutual judging – and some-times negotiating – about the validity of an utterance, implies that the processtakes time and is public, which reinforces its difference from the conception ofmeaning or the grasping of linguistic sense as the immediate grasp of a (possi-bly timeless) entity. Linguistic sense thus depends on the individual subject’spower of judging, though it is inaccessible to a solitary speaker, insofar ashuman beings can reach linguistic understanding only in the light of communi-cation with others.

The distinction between understanding and judging (i.e. the temptation todistinguish between a meaning that is present and a secondary judgement aboutit) crops up again in another important place, namely in understanding a text –and this is the chief object of Derrida’s attention. As no author is present here tovouch for the meaning, interpretation has always played a prominent role withregard to texts, a fact that itself once again shows up the intentionalist prejudicesabout linguistic understanding attacked by Wittgenstein and Derrida. Since fromthe intentionalist point of view the interpreter has always been free to attribute‘her own’ sense to the text where there has been no authorial check, we find in thecase of texts the emergence of a contrary but equally mistaken rule of under-standing, namely that a text should be approached as far as possible ‘fromwithin’, i.e. in complete independence of the interpreter’s beliefs. Derrida attacksthis supposed neutrality by introducing the thesis of a violent interpretation. Hisdistinction between a (reproductive) commentary and a productive or criticalreading,28 cannot be the same as that between understanding and judging, but israther a reaction to this mistaken distinction, derived from intentionalism.Derrida reaches this difference between commentary and critique in connectionwith his reading of Rousseau in the Grammatology, i.e. in the process of text-interpretation. In the section entitled: ‘The exorbitant. A question of Method’, hejustifies his reading as the production of a problem that was bound to remainhidden from the author (in this case Rousseau) because of the language schemawhich governed him. He defends this active reading against the demand thatinterpretation should be merely a commentary on or reproduction of a text,although he allows a connection between the two by ascribing to the commentarya role, yet to be explained, in productive or active reading. In what follows I shallattempt to elucidate this difference between commentary on the one hand andproductive interpretation of texts or collections of utterances on the other. I findthe distinction – different from that between understanding and judging – bothplausible and necessary, and shall follow it by asking whether Derrida is right incalling a productive reading violent.



What Derrida calls a commentary or philological reading is usually known inthe tradition of hermeneutics as implying the requirement that something like theauthor’s intention, or what the text ‘really’ meant in its historical context, must bereconstructed, in complete independence of the interpreter’s point of view, whois accordingly to take up a neutral position. It is clear that this is another case ofdistinguishing between understanding and judging, and of positing a pre-exis-tent meaning, located in the author’s intention or in the text itself. Even the ideathat a ‘great’ text always transcends the totality of its interpretations, or must beapplicable or relevant to infinitely many situations, is a variety of this objectivistmisunderstanding, since it lays down in advance that all interpretation must startfrom the given text, which is thus made into an Absolute.29 Against this Derrida, ex-tending the tradition of what might be called ‘Jewish hermeneutics’,30 championsan active interpretation, which regards understanding as a creative process, as a‘making sense’ from the interpreter’s standpoint. This kind of interpretation is notjust to be championed in the case of texts, where there is no author available forquestioning; the fact is that no text or utterance is worthy of the name until it hasundergone commentary and acceptance from some alien point of view, instead ofmerely being reproduced. Thus interpretation from ‘without’ corresponds to adouble necessity: first, it approaches the text from a certain distance and with apoint of view possibly alien to it because there is no neutral ground for the inter-preter to stand on (this idea occurs already in Nietzsche and Benjamin, andentered so-called analytic philosophy much later, through Davidson and Rorty31);and second, that speakers understand their own utterances – and texts are texts –only when exposed to the judgement of others. Since texts and utterances do notsay everything that one needs in order to understand them, and cannot anticipatewhat may be raised against them by way of objection or the ways in which theymay be misunderstood, and so cannot guarantee understanding, they are depen-dent for their meaningfulness on commentaries yet to be written; and sincecommentaries themselves are texts in which not everything is said, none of themhas the last word. Linguistic sense is no more to be definitively established in themost recent commentary than it is in the ‘original’ text. Linguistic sense is locatedin further interpretative acts of writing and speaking. When Derrida saysprovocatively: ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ (Gramm 158), he means that thesense of a text can be grasped only in this continual play of references betweentext and commentary.

As already indicated, Derrida takes over this awareness of the need for interpre-tation from certain strands in the tradition of Jewish hermeneutics, to which (follow-ing E. Jabès above all) he continually appeals. This tradition has long taken its centralconcern – which is not God but the sacred text – to be the product of commentary.It is with this Jewish tradition of the sacred text as ‘surrounded by commentaries’,that Derrida shares the ‘necessity of exegesis’ and the ‘interpretative imperative’.32

By contrast, the Platonic and Christian hermeneutic tradition always sought forthe spirit behind the letter, for the unchangeable divine word as super-intention.The fictions of a single interpretation, of the text as the sum or location of all inter-pretations, and of the unsayable as the sum of all that could ever be said, are



descendants of that divine word. It is against this that Derrida champions anunderstanding which is doubly productive – both creating and changing linguis-tic sense.

6. Is There Violence in Understanding?

If it is true that understanding is making sense of a text or utterance in terms ofthe interpreter’s own horizon, two interconnected questions may arise: 1. Doesnot understanding become an arbitrary business if the process includes the situ-ating of a text or utterance in relation to the particular horizon of an interpreterand, provided this is the case, 2. Does the opposition – commentary versus inter-pretation (productive reading) – then still make any sense at all? (It is this veryalternative on which Derrida insists. He even gives it a moral charge, since, in thecase of interpretation, he speaks of violence, and in the face of this violencedemands a particular kind of justice towards the text, an ethics of reading).33 Onthe first question it may be said that Derrida expresses himself clearly againstarbitrariness, but without showing why productive understanding is not arbi-trary. ‘Such “productivity” ought not to signify either “creativity” (for this inter-pretive reading does not create just any meaning ex nihilo and without prior rule)or simply “rendering explicit” (producere as setting forth or into the light thatwhich is already there) (AW 148). The reason why in fact productive reading isnot an arbitrary matter can be made clear by recalling what we have said aboutthe understanding of utterances: understanding implies adjudicating andanswering a question of truth; i.e. the interplay between the interpreter’s perspec-tive and that of the speaker or the text is regulated by a relationship to truth. Theinterpreter’s perspective must play a part here not just because it is hers, butbecause she assumes that it is, from the point of view of validity, the appropriateone. And just as a critique of a text can be part of its understanding, so under-standing may involve showing the inadequacy of the interpreter’s perspective.Rorty should have had in mind precisely this relation to truth (which limits arbi-trariness) when he made ‘some current purpose’34 the basis of valid (historical)understanding, as should Benjamin when he emphasized ‘nowness’ (Jetztzeit)35–both, by the way, brilliant theoretical defenders and practitioners of ‘violent’reading.

Curiously enough, Derrida links precisely this insight into the impossibility ofleaving one’s beliefs behind, with the justification of what he calls commentary(this commentary being exactly that reading from ‘within’ for which there is noplace according to my argument so far). It seems clear that there cannot be under-standing without judgement, i.e. no understanding which could be brought tobear without reference to one’s own truth evaluations. When Derrida goes intomore detail about commentary, he refers to the traditional instruments of philo-logical criticism or the precise reconstruction of the context of a text, and it is inconnection with this that he inserts his demand for an ‘ethics of reading’ (AW131), which seems to be something like the postulate of an endless reconstruction



of context. This account brings Derrida very close to the problematic hypostati-zation of an internal understanding, which would have to be something like theunderstanding of a text from its own perspective, for which there is no longerroom in our conception of understanding. This raises the question whether whatDerrida calls commentary transgresses or abandons the domain of truth-evalua-tion in which critical understanding takes place, or whether it takes placeprecisely in the name of truth – in which case, in what then are we to see thedifference between mere commentary and productive, active understanding? AsI see it, Derrida clearly champions the thesis that even an exact reading, a recon-struction of context (e.g. studying the meaning of word-families in ancient texts),cannot be neutral and is yet conducted in the name of truth: ‘. . . the determina-tion, or even the redetermination, the simple recalling of a context is never agesture that is neutral, innocent, transparent, disinterested’ (AW 131) In my opin-ion Derrida fails to differentiate convincingly between commentary and interpre-tation or criticism both in the Grammatology and in Limited Inc; above all he failsto show how a truth-centred analysis can be described as violent. Certainly it isnot hard to see that people can (and perhaps must) be hurt and texts garbledthrough criticism, but these things are done legitimately in the name of truth andas legitimate acts they are not properly to be regarded as acts of violence at all.One is of course free to use terms like ‘violence’ or ‘cruelty’ to describe them, butit would be an empty description because there are no alternatives to them: noacts of understanding which are beyond ‘violence’ in the sense of the necessity tojudge and to bring the supposedly endless reconstruction of the context of a pecu-liar case of text to its end, since even commentary takes place not on neutralground but on territory assumed to be valid.

As far as I can see, the first plausible suggestion Derrida puts forward formaking sense of the distinction between commentary and interpretation occurs in‘Force of Law’36 where, although he is primarily concerned with special questionsof justice, he keeps returning at intervals to theses about justice concerning under-standing in a general sense and not just that pertaining to the interpretation andapplication of laws. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida speaks – at first in connection withthe interpretation of laws – about the necessity for bracketing (époché) the juridi-cal rules when confronted with particular cases. He even makes ‘this moment ofsuspense, this period of époché’ (FL 955) into a characteristic of the deconstructiveunderstanding of juridical norms in the light of particular cases and of under-standing in general.

Consideration of what this might mean brings us back to Wittgenstein, and towhat he calls being initiated into a language. Derrida’s claim is that laws have tobe examined and to some extent rewritten when they are interpreted in the lightof particular cases and the uniqueness of the persons involved; that even the exist-ing juridical rules of procedure might have to be put in question by the specialfeatures of particular cases. If this claim is generalized to apply to all linguisticrules, it would imply that in the light of the particular utterance and the particulartext one’s own horizon of truth must be put in question, although it is at the sametime the sole and necessary foundation of interpretative understanding. As the



judge’s decision in the light of the special case ‘must not only follow a rule of lawor a general law but must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a rein-stituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of thelaw, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case’ (FL 961), so in theprocess of linguistic understanding the uniqueness of one’s interlocutor and hernon-incorporability into one’s own universe of truth are a sufficient reason forallowing precisely this foundation to be put in question, or at least to be regardedas extendable. The process of understanding in the full sense then implies a(partial) questioning of one’s own certainties, i.e. of the foundation of one’s owninterpretation. For it cannot be assumed that there is something in my own hori-zon of truths that corresponds to what the other person says or writes; one shouldat least always take the possibility that there is not into account. Thus the inter-preter cannot simply appeal to her own rules in the name of truth, but must atthe same time learn the other’s rules, analogously somehow to the way in whichwe learned to speak as children.37 At such points there will be no advance ininterpretation unless the interpreter lets the other introduce her into a new‘space’ of truth. And this implies that at such points it is the other who is the soleand unique judge of what is true or false. Even in the case of texts, especiallyphilosophical ones, one knows from experience that they cannot simply beassessed at a first reading; one must first learn the use of particular words orarguments, allow the text to teach one the contexts in which, for example, onemay use the word ‘différance’ (since Derrida was the first to introduce it).Allowing oneself to be thus initiated by the text, with the real bracketing thatthat involves of the certainties of one’s own horizon, seems to me the sole plau-sible way of understanding what a reading from ‘within’ could be. But wecannot then go on calling it understanding in the full sense, since this alwaysinvolves the location of what is understood in one’s own universe of truth.‘Reading from within’ could no longer be understood in opposition to a ‘readingfrom outside’, but would simply refer to one moment in every process of under-standing: the moment of putting to the test one’s own beliefs in the confronta-tion with the alterity of a text or utterance. What I have said about the ‘learning’of the language of the other amounts to a partial justification of theWittgensteinian perspective – still within the interpretation paradigm. Just aswe, in our external readings, must expose and criticize the blind spots of the text,so must we submit to the ‘violent’ initiation into a new language, in order to getto know the blind spots of our own language, and all this in the name of truth.It is in this context that Derrida talks about ‘the night of non-knowledge andnon-rule. Not of the absence of rules and knowledge but of a reinstitution ofrules which by definition is not preceded by any knowledge or by any guaran-tee as such’ (FL 967/69).

If we have established that there can be no understanding from a neutral pointof view, but that one’s own presuppositions and beliefs must be continually takeninto account and put to the test, that is, that one must both speak a language andat the same time learn another, we must still now also insist that this is done in thename of truth, not of justice: to ‘reproduce oneself’, i.e. to project one’s own



beliefs onto a text, would be just as bad with regard to truth as to reproduce a textmerely in its own terms. Derrida has shown only that justice is relevant in partic-ular contexts, where questions of justice are directly at stake, or when the fullunderstanding of individuals in all their uniqueness is at issue, which is not at allthe case in all utterances or texts.38 This is why it is at least misleading to call allacts of understanding ‘violent’.

An interesting consequence of combining interpretation with the necessity ofhaving to be initiated into a new language by a text, a person or an alien culture,is that the concept of undecidability, for which Derrida has been criticized somuch, takes on a new role, in that it draws attention to a tension in all under-standing, which I should like to defend:

The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between twodecisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous,foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged (. . .) togive itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law andrules. A decision (. . .) that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecid-able would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmableapplication or unfolding of a calculable process. (FL 963)

Understanding is therefore not supported, as for example in Davidson’s theoryof interpretation, by a network of one’s own certainties, which one may use topin down one’s interlocutor; at the very least this interpretative strategy mustbe used with the reservation that one may only be producing a replica ofoneself.

The two reading strategies – the ‘violent’ understanding of a text and thesubmission to one – both lead, taken in isolation, to a ‘bad infinity’ in theHegelian sense: one either sticks fast in impenetrable arrogance, or remains achild forever. If these alternatives are taken as a tension, there is no middle wayleft, but only conflict. The two possible ways of reading cannot accompany orsucceed, they can only combat each other, and there is no higher court of appealfor the resolution of this conflict. It is interesting that we have here a new varia-tion of the conflict between construction and mimesis, which Adorno has calledconstitutive for the limited field of production and understanding of works ofart.

Instead of differentiating between violent and non-violent readings it wouldbe better to think of the whole process of understanding as a violent conflict, anirresolvable conflict between two moments that are constitutive of the process ofunderstanding. Such an understanding of understanding would not imply orrequire that there are readings and understandings that are exempt from thisgeneral violent conflict; it would rather amount to a clarification directed againstmisleading conceptions of the process of understanding, as for exampleGadamer’s conception of understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’ orWittgenstein’s scenario of understanding ‘blindly’. Understanding is not a fusionof horizons, or a reconciliation between the interpreter and her ‘object’. It is a



process of mutual questioning. ‘But without this tension or without this apparentcontradiction would anything ever be done? Would anything ever be changed?’(AW 152).

Ruth Sonderegger Based on a translation by Francis DunlopFreie Universität BerlinGermany

NOTES

1 Thus I distance myself from those treatments that conflate Derrida and Wittgenstein,attempting to put Derrida’s philosophy of language on a level with Wittgenstein’s. Cf. Law(1989), Mulligan (1978), Staten (1985) and Winspur (1989).

2 cf. AW, pp. 120ff.3 BB, p. 4.4 PI, 140.5 cf. BB, p. 2.6 Diff, p. 11.7 ‘If we answered these questions [that is, questions about Who and What, R.S.], before

turning them back on themselves, and before suspecting their very form, including whatseems most natural and necessary about them, we would immediately fall back into whatwe have just disengaged ourselves from’(Diff 14). ‘What is the meaning of a word? Let usattack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; whatdoes the explanation of a word look like?’ (BB, p. 1).

8 Z, p. 301, no. 144; or ‘The application is still a criterion of understanding’ (PI, p. 146).9 This asymmetry between the capacity to say in every individual situation whether

something is a promise or a flower, and the always only partial capacity to say what apromise or an agreement is, is exploited by, e.g., Davidson. He believes that what enablesus to know in particular situations whether something is a promise is of no interest in thephilosophy of language. We should rather make as much use as we can for the theory ofmeaning of the capacity to know whether something is a promise, a flower or an assertion.

10 I think that Derrida’s systematic argument against the possibility of a privatelanguage also refutes Wittgenstein, where he is still playing with the idea that one coulddo without it. Interpreters, such as McGinn (1989) or Baker and Hacker (1984), who wantto attribute to Wittgenstein a reserve regarding the strong Private-Language argument,mostly cite a short extract from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics: ‘So what does theidea of consensus show? Doesn’t it mean that a person couldn’t count by himself?Certainly, a person couldn’t count only once in his life’ (BGM, p. 193). They oppose this toPI 199, where Wittgenstein – not without some ambiguity – writes: ‘It is not possible thatthere should have been only one occasion on which somebody obeyed a rule.’ And theambiguity of course lies in this, whether there are two negations in the remark in PI or onlyone, as in the quotation from BGM. I won’t enter here into the debate over whetherWittgenstein actually changed his mind in PI, if he did at all, or whether he would havedistanced himself even further from his initial doubts about the necessarily social natureof rule-following if he had been able to write more; I will however argue that there aresystematic grounds for believing that Wittgenstein’s remarks must be understood in thesense of the strong Private Language argument, whatever he himself may have thought.We shall also follow Derrida in showing that the opposition of mere repetition and shared



rule-following understood as a consensus creates a false alternative. It’s not a question ofminimizing the possibility of error, to which we are all subject, by taking a plurality ofspeakers into account, but of the thesis that a history of usage cannot start with a defini-tion, but with the history of usage itself.

11 SEC, p. 315.12 ‘The grammar of the word “knows” is evidently closely related to that of “can”, “is able

to”. But also closely related to that of “understand”. (“Mastery” of a technique.)’ PI 150.13 Although Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are mostly written in dialogue

form, he takes no systematic account of dialogue and communication as scenes of under-standing. His paradigm case of understanding is the situation where a pupil concludes atraining session with the exclamation ‘Now I have understood, now I can go on!’.

14 And even Kripke, who defends Wittgenstein’s thesis of the necessary agreement withseveral speakers, inserts a criticism here: ‘There can be no corrector in the community,since by hypothesis, all the community agrees. (. . .) I feel some uneasiness may remainregarding these questions. Considerations of time and space, as well as the fact that I mighthave to abandon the role of advocate and expositor in favor of that of critic, have led menot to carry out a more extensive discussion.’ Kripke (1982), p. 146. Our own concern is togive prominence to just this criticism.

15 ‘When someone whom I am afraid of orders me to continue the series, I act quickly,with perfect certainty, and the lack of reasons does not trouble me’ (PI 212).

16 Derrida distances himself from an understanding of interpretation according to whichthe necessity of interpretation is felt ‘as an exile’, and in which one dreams of deciphering‘a truth or an origin’ which are simply given, removed from all change, criticism or unclar-ity. See Derrida (1978), p. 292.

17 This aspect of Derrida’s philosophy of language is exhaustively treated by Ch Menke(1988). See especially the section ‘Begründungsprobleme der Vernunftkritik’, pp. 193ff.

18 cf., e.g., Gramm, p. 74: ‘But this condition of possibility turns into a condition ofimpossibility’; SEC, p. 328: ‘The condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously,once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorouspurity’; SEC, p. 317:’ . . . the code being here both the possibility and impossibility of writ-ing, of its essential iterability (repetition,/alterity).’

19 ‘This iterability – (iter, once again, comes from itara, other, in Sanskrit, and everythingthat follows may be read as the exploitation of the logic which links repetition to alterity). . .’ SEC, p. 215.

20 Derrida (1988), p. 53.21 In his critiques of Apel and Habermas, Wellmer – inspired by Wittgenstein – has

shown how one may argue unaporetically against those who make language impossiblethrough the postulated fulfilment of an idealizing Telos. cf. Wellmer (1986), pp. 81ff, andWellmer (1993), pp. 204ff.

24 Gramm, p. 130.25 In respect of this thesis I start from reflections of F. Kambartel and A. Wellmer. See

Kambartel (1989), pp. 121ff, and Wellmer (1995).26 Wittgenstein’s criticism of Augustine at the beginning of the PI can be applied to

himself: ‘Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only noteverything that we call language is this system. And one has to say this in many caseswhere the question arises: “Is this an appropriate description or not?” ’ (PI 3).

25 cf. Wellmer (1995).26 We thereby establish the close connection between a dialogical-processual conception

of understanding on the one hand, and a principle of charity (Davidson) or, to put it in



Gadamer’s terms, a preconception of completeness (‘Vorgriff auf Vollkommenheit) on theother.

27 Since the concept of understanding is in German, philosophy of language very closelybound up with a philosophically appeasing passion for being in agreement (as telos), oneought – in order to stress the element of process in the production of sense – to speak ratherof interpretation. However the concept of interpretation is problematic too, and it can veryeasily be misunderstood monologically, since it always emphasizes merely the interpreta-tive activity of a single subject, and, in contrast to the view proposed in the present paper,closely associates this activity with using the text or the speaker to cast doubt on the inter-preter. But if interpretation is understood – this seems to me the rational kernal even ofDavidson’s ‘theory’ of interpretation – as the close interweaving of interpreting and beinginterpreted in a mutually questioning dialogue, I have no objection to the concept.Understood in this way the concept of interpretation even emphasizes that the under-standings involved in the conversation must be mutually checked, and that it would bewrong to cast a spotlight on understanding from one side only.

28 cf. Gramm, pp. 258ff. and AW pp. 142ff. Support for an active or productive readingcan be found in Derrida’s earlier study of Husserl, and, for example, in his later text, theForce of Law. cf. Derrida (1973), pp. 88 ff. and Derrida (1990), pp. 937 ff.

29 Gadamer also champions such a thesis, though otherwise he highlights precisely thehorizon-dependent as against the neutral character of all understanding, when he inter-prets what he calls the ‘great texts’ in such a way that they ‘always give answers’. Gadamer(1972), p. 256.

30 I take over this term from Susan Handelman. See Handelman (1983), p. 98. BothNietzsche’s and Benjamin’s conceptions of understanding also concentrate on the elementsof this kind of hermeneutics.

31Davidson (1984), pp. 183–198; Rorty (1986), pp. 333–355; Rorty (1989), especially thefirst chapter on the contingency of language.

32 Derrida, Jacques, ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, in Derrida (1978), pp.64–78, here p. 67.

33 Derrida speaks of an ‘ethics of reading, of interpretation or of discussion’ (AW, p.131).

34 Rorty (1991), p. 87.35 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol

1.2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980, p. 701.36 Derrida (1990).37 cf. on this Meloe (1986), pp. 113ff.38 On the relation between justice and attending to individual persons as unique in

Derrida, see Honneth (1994), especially pp. 209ff, and Critchley (1994), pp. 13ff.

REFERENCES

Abbreviations used:

Gramm = Of Grammatology, Derrida 1967.Diff = ‘Différance’, in Derrida 1982.SEC = ‘Signatures Event Context’, in Derrida 1982.AW = ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, Derrida 1988a.FL = ‘Force of Law’, Derrida 1990.



PI = Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 1963.BB = Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein 1964.BGM = Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, Wittgenstein 1984.Z = Zettel, Wittgenstein 1984a.

Baker, G. P. and P. M. S. Hacker (1984), Scepticism, Rules and Language. Oxford: BlackwellPublishers.

Benjamin, W. (1980), ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2.Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Critchley, S. (1994), ‘Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in European Journal of Philosophy, II, 1.

Dasenbrock, R. W. ed. (1989), Redrawing the Lines. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Davidson, D. (1984), ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in his Inquiries into Truthand Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Derrida, J. (1967), Of Grammatology, tr. G. Ch. Spivak. Baltimore and London: The JohnsHopkins University Press. Cited as Gramm.

Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. D. B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Derrida, J. (1978), ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in hisWriting and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1978a), ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, in his Writing andDifference, op. cit.

Derrida, J. (1982), Margins of Philosophy, tr. A. Bass. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

Derrida, J. (1988), ‘Limited Inc abc’, in Limited Inc. edited by G. Graff. Evanston:Northwestern University Press.

Derrida, J. (1988a), ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, in Limited Inc, op. cit. Citedas AW.

Derrida, J. (1990), ‘Force of Law’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Cardozo LawReview, vol. 11, Nos. 5–6, July/August. Cited as FL.

Gadamer, H. G. (1972), ‘Semantik und Hermeneutik’, in his Kleine Schriften III. Idee undSprache. Tübingen: Mohr.

Handelman S. (1983), ‘Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic’, in M. Krupnick,Displacement, Derrida and After. Bloomington: Indiana Press.

Honneth, A. (1994), ‘Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit’, in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philoso-phie, II.

Kambartel, F. (1989), ‘Versuch über das Verstehen’, in Der Löwe spricht . . . und wir könnenihn nicht verstehen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Kripke, A. (1982), Wittgenstein. On Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press.

Law, J. D. (1989), ‘Reading with Wittgenstein and Derrida’, in Dasenbrock ed. (1989).McGinn, C. (1989), Wittgenstein on Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Meloe, J. (1986), ‘Über Sprachspiele und Übersetzungen’, in D. Böhler, T. Nordenstam and

G. Skirbekk (eds.) Die pragmatische Wende. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Menke C. (1988), Die Souveränität der Kunst. Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida.

Frankfurt: Athenäum.Mulligan, K. (1978), ‘Inscriptions and Speaking’s Place: Derrida and Wittgenstein’, in The

Oxford Literary Review, III, 2.



Rorty, R. (1986), ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’, in E. LePore (ed.) Truth andInterpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford/New York: BasilBlackwell.

Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rorty R. (1991), ‘Deconstruction and Circumvention’, in his Essays on Heidegger and Others.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Staten, H. (1985), Wittgenstein and Derrida. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Wellmer, A. (1986), Ethik und Dialog. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Engl. translation: Wellmer, A.

(1993), The Persistence of Modernity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.)Wellmer, A. (1993), ‘Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes’, in his Endspiele. Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp. (Engl. translation: Wellmer, A. (1990), ‘Metaphysics at the Moment of itsFall’, in P. Collier and H. Geyer-Ryan (eds.) Literary Theory Today. Cambridge: PolityPress.)

Wellmer, A. (1995), ‘Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft’, in C. Demmerling, G.Gabriel und T. Rentsch (eds.) Vernunft und Lebenspraxis. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Winspur, S. (1989), ‘Text Acts: Recasting Performatives with Wittgenstein and Derrida’, inDasenbrock (1989).

Wittgenstein, L. (1963), Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: BasilBlackwell. Cited as PI.

Wittgenstein, L. (1964), The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cited as BB.Wittgenstein, L. (1984), Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, Werkausgabe in 8

Bänden, vol. 6. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Cited as BGM.Wittgenstein, L. (1984a), Zettel, Werkausgabe in 8 Bänden, vol. 8. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Cited as Z.



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