Milbank on Derrida

Milbank on Derrida September 17, 2003

Here’s a summary of part of Milbank’s critique of Derrida (from Theology and Social Theory , pp. 307-311).

Derrida attacks Western metaphysics by focusing on the attempt to separate a “meaning” out from the “play of signs.” In most Western systems, this meaning is associated with an original meaning that is purely “present”in thought to the speaker or writer. This effort runs contrary to the phenomenon of language and the way signs actually work. But signs “do not denote pre-existing realities, but are caught up in a chain of connotations that can be infinitely extended.” The logic of all language is “supplementation” or “deferral,” and this supplementation is always already at the origin of language. If language operates by signs, then we never have an original, uncontaminated, unsupplemented meaning, since what we’re signifying is “only known by reference to something else: a sign, image, or metaphor for the absent signified.” Hence Derrida’s concept of “supplement at the origin.”

Explanation means further supplementation. The only way that we can clarify meaning is to offer additional signs, which carry us further and further from the origin, adding supplement onto supplement. For anyone who thinks that meaningfulness requires access to the uncontaminated, unsupplemented origin, Derrida sounds like a skeptic here, but if there is no uncontaminated origin, then Derrida is simply describing the processes of language, how it actually functions. It is not an attack on meaning, but on certain conceptions of what meaning is and how it is arrived at. Milbank points out that Derrida sees a similar “dissemination” in the material world: “Matter, like language, consists only of traces, effects of absent causes which are clarified merely through the appearance of further traces.”

Writing provides the key illustration of this “continuity of material motion with language.” Pictographs, Milbank says, are not an alienation from language, but institute the trace, which is the very “transcendent possibility of signification.” Having someone talk with you personally gives the illusion that their thought is immediately present and their meaning transparent. But this is an illusion. For Derrida, the absence of the speaker from a written text is not a sign of the fallenness of writing, but rather “the true condition of all language, spoken or written. Words always already float free of their first contexts — otherwise they could not signify at all.” What Milbank seems to be saying (summarizing Derrida) is that words only have the capacity to signify, to point away to another, if there is already some distance between the sign and the thing. If the words are not “floating free,” they are not signs. The sign exists only as a “trace,” which embodies the dialectic of presence and absence. And signs are all we have with which to communicate. There is always only the trace.

Derrida does not want to dispense with the illusion of presence and immediacy. Every actually existing system of signification has to cover and hide the realities of language, the reality of dissemination, the infinite deferral of meaning. It must pretend that language “refers” to stable entities. Deconstruction is the process of exposing the fact that the text’s appearance of presence and immediate meaning is an illusion.

Milbank points out that Derrida sees violence inherent in the supplementation that is inherent in signifying: “this violence is inscribed at the point where the supplement, bearing the illusion of presence, dissembles the origin which it signifies: an origin which only is through this dissembling.” Derrida is fond of pointing to myths about the origins of writing, which suggest that writing is reducible to trickery and craft, ruse: “These myths are supposed to themselves betray the fact that communication is primordially and unavoidably ruse and trickery.”

Milbank moves from that point to suggest that Derrida is not merely offering a rigorous critique of metaphysics, but rather offering his own “mythical encoding” of the origins and nature of language. He points to the similarity between Derrida’s dualistic system and other dualisms that Derrida wants to undermine. Derrida separates between the ontological anarchy of writing, the level of dissemination, and the level of actual conventional signifying systems. The level of dissemination is “a kind of active a priori,” while the second “constitutes a kind of empirical content, which is wholly constituted by the very a priori which is disguises and betrays.” Milbank asks the crucial question: “does one need to assent to this dualism, any more than to earlier idealist dualisms, like that between synthetic reason and analytic understanding?” Every modification of a system of signs from the particular uses is a further act of deconstruction of Derrida, but this assumes that the higher level of dissemination is unaffected by the level of “empirical” usage. But why do modifications need to be ruptures? Why can’t modifications of the scheme by particular contributions rather be part of an on-going tradition? Raising this question exposes the fact that Derrida’s insistence on the transcendental nature of “differance” and dissemination is no less arbitrary than the choice of a different encoding tradition.

Further, Derrida’s dualism assumes that the relationship between the two levels is always one of dissembling and rupture. But why should supplementation and deferral be subversive? Milbank asks. “If one insists upon an ineradicable dimension of absence, then violence, as a universal, transcendent determinant of the absence/presence relationship, can never appear to view. If it does appear to view, then one has lapsed back into a philosophy of presence.” That is, the supplement only seems necessarily distorting and subversive if you are still assuming that you need access to the unsupplemented origin to have meaning and knowledge. Derrida’s conception that language’s deferral is necessarily violent, then, is a flip side of a residual kind of Platonism, or some other form of “logocentrism.” As Milbank says, “The idea that in supplementation there is treachery appears, in one way, actually to draw back from the full implications of supplementarity. For if the supplement constitutes the origin, and deferral is required by supplementation, then any suggestion of a rift, or arbitrary discontinuity, appears almost to qualify these affirmations.”

A contrary “conjecture” would be that the “image reflects the original and that the original is constituted through this imaging in an entirely peaceful, self-giving fashion.” There is no reason to believe that this is less possible than Derrida’s nihilistic version. Such a “conjecture” is in fact found in the doctrine of the Trinity: “the Son who is always given with the Father is a supplement at the origin; the Spirit who is always given with the Father and the Son is the infinite necessity of deferral.” Milbank points to Gadamer as a theorist who developed a theory of supplementation, necessary supplementation, without the nihilism of Derrida, and linked that development specifically to Trinitarian theology.


Browse Our Archives