Nothing is outside the text
For both Plotinus and Heidegger, the Nothing is the impetus of our approach to what is most real in the world, although beyond essence and existence: the One, or Being. This is also an important point in Derrida's analysis.1
(Eli Diamond)
In a certain way thought means nothing.2 (Jacques Derrida)
This chapter does not offer a reading of any particular text of Derrida's. Instead it analyses the implications that can be discerned from what is deemed to be a central claim of Derrida's philosophy, namely that there is nothing outside the text.3 From this almost axiomatic claim this chapter extracts a logic that brings Derrida close to both Spinoza and Plotinus. The idiom which Derrida's philosophy assumes invites complication and often obfuscation. Instead I shall endeavour to keep the terms used and the logic employed as simple as possible. But the endeavour to critique this most slippery of thinkers will require some difficult moves, which unfortunately are unavoidable.
Derrida argues that language cannot have an outside; he also asserts that nothing is outside language, that is, the text. As a result, language is left in some sense bereft. Language, because it is linguistic, cannot have an outside yet, in a sense, language is but the movement towards an outside. Language is the 'embodiment' of the desire for an outside. This is true because language desires to say something, for language hopes that its significations actually bear significance. The outside is maybe the secret name for this desire. Language, in that it endeavours to communicate or to say something, wishes there to be something in what is said. In desiring thus, language desires that which is not reducible to itself. Language is in this way the desire for something other than language. But this other is forbidden by Derrida. Furthermore, it is declared to be impossible. It is impossible because language is language. Language as language is, then, its own limitation. Language would need to be other than language if it were to have an outside. But language is always itself, language is always language. Consequently, all signification is inside. Only nothing is outside language. As there is no outside available, language must generate one. Indeed, for Derrida language is the movement of this generation.
Outside: in
Thought-that-means-nothing . . . the thought for which there is no sure opposition between outside and inside.4
(Jacques Derrida)
Language is defined by nothing in two ways. First of all, language is the pursuit of an outside which is nothing. Second, language in not being able to have an outside, is nothing. This means that language is, then, the same as the outside, for both are nothing. In this way the outside which is forbidden, yet in some sense attained, is language itself. In this sense, for Derrida, language is the sundering of the something that renders it nothing; it does this because an outside is prohibited. Consequently, when language says something, this something is nothing, in that it is nothing but language. But, paradoxically, in being nothing, it is indeed the same as the outside. Hence this nothing, which language says in every signification, is nothing as something. The outside pursued and forbidden is language itself. This means that language does not say something, but instead says nothing as something. (It is up to Derrida to present such a conundrum otherwise than negatively.)
As a result, to say, signify, or do, does not require that one say, signify, or do something. Indeed, significance starts only in the absence of something, as a some-thing would be death, at least according to Derrida. Language is, in this sense, post-linguistic. But so also is Derrida. For Derrida comprehends language.5 In so doing, Derrida is beyond language. We witness such post-linguistic ruminations in the very articulation of the prohibition: there is nothing outside language. Derrida is post-linguistic in that Derrida is using the opposition inside/outside in terms of the demarcated sides, or extent, of language. This means that Derrida uses language alinguistically - not in a pre-linguistic manner but in a post-linguistic one. Yet the metaphysics of either position are similar. For this language, a language, indeed a voice - that of Derrida's - defines all language, in that it pretends to comprehend all of language, for it both locates and demarcates in terms of a foundational circumscription. There is, then, a univocal text, for there is but one text, because Derrida's Plotininan heritage permits only one effect to emanate from the nothing. I return to this in the section 'Inside: Out'.
I will now examine this nothing which Derrida knows is outside the text in an effort to show that it comes inside every text. One consequence of this arrival will be the reduction of all significance to the level of the diacritical.
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