Thoughts on Derrida and Realism

Posted on January 18, 2010
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I thought I was a bit alone in how I read Derrida. I always took him as a bit of a realist – although not a realist of the correspondence sort. That is he opposes the traditional story since Descartes of a clear inside and outside. In this story realism is an account of how thoughts in the inside correlate with objects in the outside. However I think Heidegger moves us away from that and Derrida even moreso with his criticism of the very inside and outside dichotomy.

I think Derrida’s early work on différance on up gets at this kind of deconstructive-realism.


Différance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself. It is (given) in the thing itself. It (is) in the thing itself. It, différance, the thing (itself) [La différance, qui n'(est) rien, est dans) la chose même. Elle est (donnée) dans la chose même. Elle (est) la chose même. Elle, la différance, la chose (méme)]‘ (Given Time 40/59)

I think one difference from Heidegger in Derrida is that Derrida thinks the Event more from the side of the “object” than the side of Dasein the way Heidegger does. Phenomena is not seen as a kind of correlation (as in Husserl) of an inside and outside (or even a place where they overlap). Rather “objects” (put in quotes to distinguish it from the Cartesian tradition’s sense) are in the phenomena itself. While in Being and Time on up to his discussion of Ereignis Heidegger focuses in on the clearing where we encounter beings – a kind of “hole” of “nothingness” that characterizes Dasein – Derrida focuses in on the Event within the “objects” themselves. This is a kind of escape from the phenomenal given to Dasein which is simultaneously productive.

One way to characterize this is that Derrida and Heidegger primarily differ in a difference of focus such that Heidegger is concerned with Being as Truth wherein things reveal themselves while Derrida is concerned with the ground of the objects in themselves without leaving the phenomenological tradition. (The way I think say Badiou does and I suspect the Object Oriented Philosophy folks like Harmon does)

Harmon mentions Derrida and postmodernism and suggests that what characterizes postmodernism is its anti-realist stances. Yet I’d note Derrida himself never adopts the label – even if some like Rorty try to marshal him to the cause. I’d also say that while Derrida focuses in on texts and how they undermine themselves pointing at something more, it is by the very notion of an external “reality” that imposes itself against our will to our anti-realism. As Derrida often puts it, things are complicated.

As you can well imagine, things are not so simple as that. It is not always in the materialist text (is there such a thing, the materialist text?), nor in every materialist text, that the concept of matter has been defined as absolute outside or radical heterogeneity. I am not even sure that there can be a “concept”of the absolute outside. If I have made little use of the word “matter,” it is not, you know, through a mistrust of the idealist or spiritualist sort. It is because, in the logic or the phase of inversion, this concept has too often been reinvested with “logocentric”values, associated with those of thing, of reality, of presence in general, perceptible presence for example, of substantial plenitude, of content, of referent, etc. Realism or sensualism, “empiricism,” are modifications of logocentrism (I have greatly emphasized the fact that “writing”or “text”could not be reduced either to the perceptible or visible presence of the graphic or the “literal”). In short, the signifier “matter” appears problematic to me only at the moment when its reinscription would not avoid making of it a new fundamental principle, when by a theoretical regression, one would reconstitute it as a “transcendental signified.”The transcendental signified not merely the recourse of idealism in the narrow sense. It can always turn up to reassure a metaphysical materialism. (“Interview: Jacques Derrida”, Diacritics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 34-5)

So I think this tradition is always present in Derrida. I’ve often talked about how the pragmatists founded a “third way” between the poles of traditional realism and idealism. I think Derrida’s pointing that same way. A kind of phenomenology from within matter itself where matter is conceived in a fashion different than the Cartesian tradition allowed.

As I said I often thought I was a small minority in this view. There are starting to be more books out there about this. I even chanced upon a blog that mentioned a book by Michael Marder called The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism.

Related posts:

  1. Derrida as Realist
  2. Heidegger and Realism
  3. Levinas, Heidegger & Objects
  4. Beyond Realism and Idealism
  5. Derrida and Universals
  6. Heidegger’s Realism

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