Do you ever feel like no one really understands you? Do you ever feel as though you are talking (or even texting), but nobody gets you. You mean one thing but they hear another. You try hard to be a good communicator, but sometimes it just falls very, very flat. Sometimes, even, you try and you it just seems like what you say or type is nonsense.

We’ve all been there, had times when what we say is taken a completely different way from how we intended, and when we’ve read a text, for instance, and gotten angry because we thought the thumbs up emoji was pasted there as a sign, not of agreement, but of passive aggression!

Let’s be real. Communication is hard. Even as a writer of many years. Effective communication, sometimes, seems impossible. Sometimes, this can have a lot to do with interpersonal issues, with lack of social skills. But sometimes the inability to convey meaning is inherent in the process of speaker to listener, or writer to reader. Enter Jacques Derrida.

Born in 1930 in Algeria, Jacques Derrida would become one of the most impressive of the French philosopher set of the 20th century, and one of the last rockstar philosophers, until his death in 2004. Derrida was known for his process of deconstructionism, in which he would pick apart texts to discern other, different meanings.

Meaning: Where Does It Come from, Where Does It Go?

Before Derrida, many thinkers and theologians considered meaning as something static and eternal to a text. For instance, you can only get one true meaning from Green Eggs and Ham: if you are annoying enough, you can convince someone to eat new foods. There are no other ways to interpret this masterpiece, and the meaning won’t evolve when you look at it from other angles, like in terms of the life of its author, Dr. Seuss, or from the socio-political climate during its writing.

In fact, well into the twentieth century, literary criticism demanded that, when you interpreted a worthy book, that you ignore anything around authorial intent. You can’t know what the writer of the work is thinking, and nor should you try to. Adopters of New Criticism, like T. S. Eliot, demanded certain things not only from calling a work a work of literature, but also from the person examining the work of literature, the reader.

Derrida found this approach limiting, to say the least. Where do we get meaning from a text? Does the text itself give us meaning? And is that meaning only one simple, stilted thing? Or can we read deeper into a work, to see meaning in between the words, to see existence and its negation in the same sentence?

And so deconstructionism begins.

Deconstructing the Text, Discerning the Meaning

Three of Derrida’s well known works offer his foundation for the process of deconstruction, as well as his thoughts on speech, writing, and meaning. Speech and Phenomena (1967), Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967) all build the groundwork for Derrida’s project of deconstruction, and his ideas on meaning and communication.

Written in conversation with the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Speech and Phenomena discusses signs as expressions or indicators, things which indicate other things. The easiest of these is a red octagonal sign that indicates a motorist should stop. However, words themselves are signs, signifiers. In using language, we explain concepts and ideas through worlds, we try to depict our own reality through words. For instance, if I say that “I have eaten a banana,” the listener will, perhaps, conjure the image of a yellow fruit being peeled by me. In relaying this information, I remove the listener and myself from the actual event it signifies.

However, Derrida complicates this by saying that not only do signs indicate things outside of themselves, they do not exist outside of themselves. This indication has to be indicated. As Derrida himself says, “By definition there can be no sign without signification, no signifying without the signified.” So, without the listener listening, I can’t relay the story of eating the banana, and without the eating of the banana, there is no attempt to relay this.

It’s a lot.

We express through words because we are attempting to bring out something that is interior. It is a sort of translation between our experience and internal life and to the exterior world and the people within it. The exterior world can include ourselves, too. In typing up this article, I am bringing to the exterior what was heretofore interior, and I have to word what I am thinking in a way that it can be understandable to myself when I read it before an edit, and when others read it.

Woman Reading by Edouard Manet, C. 1882, courtesy of Wikipedia.

What Does It Mean?

But what does this signify?, if you will pardon my funny philosopher pun. Meaning can be teased out of these words in more than one way. Meaning can also be lost in translation, from the speaker to the listener, from the writer to the reader. We can even try our best to convey the most accurate or the most truthful meaning, and still come short.

For Derrida, this means lengthy, convoluted sentences which carefully touch on the subject and its negation in the same twenty line sentence. This is not because Derrida thinks he is full of himself. It is rather, much like Roland Barthes, of whom we wrote a while back, he is dedicated to concision. But, unlike today, when writers are told that to be concise is to be curt, Derrida’s concision relies on cramming every sentence chockfull of every possible element, getting it right, even, sometimes, at the cost of a wider readership.

Derrida’s deconstruction is valuable because we can read texts and events in a heck of a lot of ways, and can help tease out some important meanings to help interpret the world around us. Derrida’s work has become essential to many thinkers who work in the realms of social justice. While Derrida split from Foucault, under whom he learned for some time, he did share his mentor’s zest for using philosophy for social justice. 

So, while my brain frankly melted in the summer heat from having to return to the works of Jacques Derrida after twenty years, I am always thankful to him for his insistence that, no matter how well we try to communicate, we will always fall somewhere short of a complete process.

While Jacques Derrida is an incredibly difficult read, I never considered him pretentious. As an undergrad, I had a professor who puffed out his chest proudly, saying he saw the man give one of his famous lectures in person. Jacques Derrida passed away during the fall of my first year in college, before I decided I wanted to pursue a philosophy degree.

After (being forced to) reading Derrida during my college years, I kept with me the memory that we will always fall somewhat short of what we intend in our communication, and returned to him for an article I published in the Journal for the Georgia Philological Association (2024), on melancholy and art. 

Sometimes we carry even the most difficult philosophers with us. I wonder, which philosopher do you carry with you, even if you find them annoying? Take a glance at these two sketches from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, a comedy show with the inimitable Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Reading Derrida feels a lot like sitting with this intellectual.