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Writing as a Supplement: Jacques Derrida’s Deconstructive Reading of Rousseau’s Confessions



Author(s)

Gerasimos Kakoliris

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2015.06.006

The present study constitutes a critical appraisal of the deconstructive reading of Rousseau’s Confessions that Derrida undertakes in the second part of Of Grammatology. In this examination, the author will first list some of the significations into which Derrida disperses (forced, as he asserts himself, by an “inassimilable residue” in the text itself) the meaning that he has already construed as apparently simple during the first moment of deconstructive reading (i.e., “the doubling commentary”); the author will then go on to enquire into the operations which enable Derrida to arrive at these self-conflicting significations. The main aim of this essay is to demonstrate that it is not language alone that disables the philosophy of Rousseau and enables the philosophy of Derrida. When Derrida attempts to support his philosophy through an analysis of Rousseau’s theory of language and the alleged contradictions in Rousseau’s texts, he misinterprets basic tenets of these texts in order to make them conform to the presuppositions of the deconstructive approach. The “reversal” and “displacement” of metaphysical conceptuality in the text of the Confessions is made possible after the text has had meanings transposed into it from a plurality of other texts. Derrida attributes to the text significations he discovers by construing, explicating and over-reading passages that occur elsewhere in Rousseau’s total oeuvre (especially in the Essay on the Origin of Languages).

Derrida, Deconstructive Reading, Rousseau’s Confessions