[First published in English Studies in Canada 15.3 (1989): 305-18.

I have corrected several typographical errors,

and have added a few words (in square brackets) to note 14. The text of this essay is otherwise unchanged.]

[Index: Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Plato, Gorgias, Henricus Cornelius

Agrippa]
[Date: 1989]

For and Against the Moon

Michael H. Keefer

Vacuous, white bone; everyone sees it

Who knows what it is for?
....
It is said the moon can drive men mad
Are you for or against the moon?1

One senses a hint of autumn in the air: it is in fact early September as I write this,
but I mean another kind of autumn. Not long ago it might have seemed that the high
summer of deconstruction in literary theory was going to be indefinitely prolonged. Yet
suddenly the signs of change are all about us: a nuanced past tense in the Modern
Language Review (When Deconstruction was at its height, one never quite knew how
serious a posture of response was required); a measured declaration in the first issue of
New Formations (The decade of deconstruction, it seems, is over); and in the first issue
of Textual Practice, more decisively still, a reviewer's discovery in recent work by a
leading American deconstructionist of a return to logocentrism of the most daring and
unrepentant kind....2 Daring and unrepentant logocentrism? The literary theorists are
1 Tom Wayman, Full Moon in Winter 5 O'Clock Unemployment Spaceshot Era, lines 15-16, 25-26, in
his For and Against the Moon: Blues, Yells, and Chuckles (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 15-16.
2 A.D. Nuttall, Solvents and Fixatives: Critical Theory in Transition, Modern Language Review 82.2

flocking together, it would appear, in preparation for one of their periodic migrations.
The prospect of their colleagues' impending change of climate, and perhaps also
of coloration, would no doubt be a source of satisfaction to the winter birds among us,
were it not that the latter perhaps harbour some suspicion of the migrants' imminent
return in another less gaudy and more serviceable plumage (that, say, of the new
historicism, or of cultural materialismboth of which challenge more fully the doctrines
of New Criticism and its successor theories than do the deconstructive modes referred to
by some of their American practitioners as the new New Criticism). In the meantime,
those who are not sure whether they belong to either flock may find profit in returning to
certain of the inaugural texts of deconstruction, which it may now be possible to read in a
new and cooler mood, with diminished anxiety and with greater pleasure.
Of course, it may well be that predictions of the withering away of deconstruction
are premature. Critics who have seen a relation between the metaphysical obsessions of
deconstruction and a failure to engage with problems of historicity 3 are unlikely to side
with trend-spotters who would allot to each critical tendency a fixed span (the decade of
deconstruction), after which period it is to be erased and supplanted by the next
manifestation of a rootless present. And others may share the view of Alan Kennedy, who
does not want to see deconstruction passed by before he has even begun to feel
confident about what the limits of deconstruction might be.4 This mode of criticism may
thus continue to be widely practised. Indeed (to lapse once more into metaphor), as I
write there is a spring tide in the Annapolis Basin a hundred yards from my window, and
the moon seems no less full than it did last night. But what is this moon?
Let us define it, with the help of Wittgenstein, as a kind of absence. If we are
willing to take the word of one eminent contemporary critic and theorist (Harold Bloom),
it would appear that reading, whether wilfully so or not, is also inevitably misreading.
Consider, then, the opening aphorism of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
(1987), 273; Gregor McLennan, Rescuing Reason, New Formations 1 (1987), 142; Roger Poole,
Midrash (rev. Of Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature), Textual
Practice 1 (1987), 86.
3 See, for example, Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983); and also my article Deconstruction and the Gnostics, University of Toronto
Quarterly 55.1 (1985), 74-93.
4 Alan Kennedy, Criticism of Value: Response to John Fekete, in Literature and Politics/Literary
Politics, ed. Michael H. Keefer, Dalhousie Review, special double issue, 66.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1986),
87. Kennedy is course well aware that Derrida insistently questions the very possibility of delimitation;
see, for example, Derrida's Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), pp. ix-xi, 25.

The world is all that is the case. 5 Wilfully misreading these words, I would like to ask:
But is there not also the moon?
In the context of Derridean deconstruction, the question may be less witless than
it seems. Elsewhere in the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world (proposition 5.6), and Logic pervades the world: the limits
of the world are also its limits (proposition 5.6 1)from which follows the doctrine,
announced in the preface and repeated as the concluding sentence of the work (and thus
itself an enactment of those limits), that What we cannot speak about we must pass over
in silence.6 In contrast to the early Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida has persistently defied
any such limits, both by placing himself outside them in his practice as a writer, and also
by insisting (especially in those early books and essays which are still the basis of his
reputation in the English-speaking world) that any act of delimitation is subverted by the
weave of differences and deferrals, of absence, trace, and supplment, which he sees as
constituting language itself. Challenging, like Nietzsche, 7 the first principles of logic
(those of identity and non-contradiction), his aim has been to make enigmatic, to
deconstruct, any possible metaphysic of presence, and thus to undo or at least expose the
logocentric repression8 which by his account has characterized the whole tradition of
Western metaphysics.
This Derridean project has in many respects enjoyed a remarkable success.
Lucretius proved the universe to be infinite by arguing that if a person went to the dedge
wherever one took that edge to beand threw a spear, it would ether be blocked by
something or else would speed on its way. Since the thought-experiment can be repeated
from whatever new edge one's spear-throw reveals, either case shows that the universe
continues without end or limit.9 Similarly, Derrida, throwing spears in both directions
from the edge of the world defined by Wittgenstein's Tractatus, has revealed receding
infinities on both hands: one sear, thrown into the gap between signifier and signified,
5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (1961;
rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 5.
6 Proposition 5.6 and the first sentence of 5.6 1 appear on p. 56. The aphorism about silence appears on
pp. 3 and 74.
7 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage, 1968), section 516, pp. 279-80.
8 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 103, 74.
9 Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Cyril Bailey (2nd ed., 1922; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), i.96883. (I am indebted for this reference to A.D. Nuttall, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: Murder as
Philosophic Experiment [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, for Sussex University Press, 1978], p.
123.)

splinters the latter into an infinite regress of supplemental signifiers; another, hurled at the
transcendental signified which in logocentric metaphysics puts an end to this regress,
sails on without resistance.10 Standing, then, within the labyrinth (his metaphor) that is
raised by his banishment of metaphysical presence, Derrida wrote in La voix et le
phnomne, in what may seem to be deliberate opposition to the last words of the
Tractatus: It remains, then, for us to speak, to make our voices resonate throughout the
corridors in order to make up for the breakup of presence [pour suppler l'clat de la
prsence].11 Suppler, clat: the words themselves resonate with ambiguity.
But where is this labyrinth? I hope that I can answer, On the moon, without
being misunderstood. In the course of his brilliant study of Plato's Pharmacy, Derrida
investigates Socrates' allusions in the Phaedrus and the Philebus to Theuth or Thoth, the
Egyptian god of writing and of the moon, and in a brief digression into Egyptian
mythology argues the metaphorical identity of these two divine functions. Ammon-Ra
Ammon (the hidden), Ra (the sun)is god the creator, and he engenders through the
mediation of the word.... we encounter here a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting
himself be represented by speech.12 Thoth, the moon-god, divine scribe, and eldest son
of Ra (and thus a secondary, engendered god), announces in language an already formed
divine thought, a fixed design. The message itself is not, but only represents, the
absolutely creative moment. It is a second and secondary word. 13 To Thoth's
secondariness, both as god of the moon and as god of writing, is added the fact that he is
made responsible in several papyri for the plurality of languagesand in Plato's Philebus
for differentiation within language. In what follows, the familiar terms of Derrida's
deconstruction of presenceabsence, trace, supplmentassert themselves forcefully:
As the god of language second and of linguistic difference,
Thoth can become the god of the creative word only by
metonymic

substitution,

by

historical

displacement,

and

sometimes by violent subversion.

10 See De la grammatologie, chapters 1 and 2.
11 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. D.B. Allison
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104; La voix et le phnomne (Paris: P.U.F., 1967),
p. 117. (I am indebted to Newton Garver, in the preface to the English translation of this work [p.
xxviii], for the perception of a link between this sentence and the first proposition of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus.)
12 Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Plato's
Pharmacy, p. 87.
13 Ibid., p. 88.

This type of substitution thus puts Thoth in Ra's place as the

moon takes the place of the sun. The god of writing thus supplies
the place of Ra, supplementing him and supplanting him in his
absence and essential disappearance. Such is the origin of the
moon as supplement to the sun, of night light as supplement to
daylight. And writing as the supplement of speech.
Citing, from ancient Egyptian texts, examples of this substitution of Thoth for Ra, of the
moon for the absent sun, and of the subsequent word-play which establishes further
chains of signification, Derrida remarks that
This process of substitution ... thus functions as a pure play of
traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order of the
pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference,
no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or
control....14
Through the analysis of this mythical structure the moon thus becomes not merely a
conspicuous example of the Derridean supplment, but also a metaphorical vehicle whose
tenor is the whole play of substitution and supplementaritywhich is to say,
superimposing a spatial metaphor, the topos where these substitutions take place. It is,
surely, in recognition of the further lunar overtones of this analysis that Derrida writes, in
the same sentence from which I have just quoted, of this substitution, which could be
judged 'mad' since it can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of
substitutes, of substitutes for substitutes....15
Other supplments quickly manifest themselves and proliferate in the tenor of this
lunar metaphor. Depending on the degree of blindness involved in the world's attempts to
define itself, Derrida's discourse may not seem indisputably a part of that which is the
case; yet through his deconstructive analyses of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Husserl, Heidegger, and Austin it has raised tides even within the most strictly delimited
of logical worlds.16 It is also consciously eccentric, both in its challenge to the idea of a
14 Ibid., p. 89. The translation of the opening phrase of this passage seems clumsy. Derrida wrote: Dieu
du langage second et de la diffrence linguistique, Thot ne peut devenir le dieu de la parole cratrice que
par substitution mtonymique, par dplacement historique et parfois par subversion violente. La
dissmination (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 100. [I would translate this as God of secondary
language....]
15 Dissemination, p. 89.
16 See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida, in his
Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982),

centre, point of presence, or fixed origin which would inform the structurality of
structure, and also in its choice of a ludic rhetoric that is meant to exemplify the freeplay of signifiers opened up by this de-centring. 17 But is this free-play not to some extend
illusory, since by Derrida's own admission it resolves itself into an orbit around the
traditions that he wishes to deconstruct? And once the rules of the language-games of
deconstruction have been assimilated, is there not some danger that his arguments,
however unexpected certain of their swerves, may become in their extended form as
predictable as the phases of the moon?
Lunar and orbital, again, is Derrida's relation to the problem of institutional
appropriation. For if the serene resistance to appropriation which is an important
recurring feature of his writings constitutes the angular momentum of his path, it is
balanced by the gravitational pull of those institutions in France, America and England
most evidently the Tel Quel group, the Yale formalists, and the New Accents writers
which in disseminating his thought have also appropriated it for their own ends. Gerald
Graff, describing deconstruction as a strategy for making texts immune to appropriation
by the consumer, at once added that the very procedures by which texts are made to
seem unmanageable rather easily become a critical commodity fetishthat is, the styles
of resisting commodification themselves become commodities.18 Whether or not this
description is fair, such a drift was wryly exemplified by Christopher Norris when he
wrote in his book Deconstruction that Critical theory is nowadays a reputable academic
business with a strong vested interest in absorbing and coming to terms with whatever
new challenges the times may produce.19 (Is not this precisely the vaguely upbeat
language of the corporate Annual Report to shareholders?)
Derrida is himself well aware of this problem of appropriation, but his stance with
regard to it has remained paradoxical. Calling in 1983 for a new responsibility that
would seek to unmaskan infinite taskall the ruses of end-orienting reason, the paths
by which apparently disinterested research can find itself indirectly appropriated,
pp. 90-109, and the essays cited in Rorty's first note to that essay; also Christopher Norris, The
Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy London: Methuen, 1983), and The Contest
of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985); and, in addition,
the Philosophy and Literary Theory issue of The Monist 69.1 (January 1986).
17 See the well-known essay La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines, in
L'criture et la diffrence (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 409-28.
18 Gerald Graff, The Pseudo-Politics of Interpretation, Critical Inquiry 9.3 (March 1983), 606-07.
19 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), p.
1.

reinvested by programs of all sorts, he pointed to the intrusion of a state-directed

military or 'national-security' orientation into all fields of research, including his own:
From now on, so long as it has the means, a military budget can
invest in anything at all, in view of deferred profits: 'basic'
scientific theory, the humanities, literary theory and philosophy....
What is produced in this field can always be used. And even if it
should remain useless in its results, in its productions, it can
always serve to keep the masters of discourse busy: the experts,
professionals of rhetoric, logic or philosophy who might otherwise
be applying their energy elsewhere.20
In the face of this apparent admission that there may after all be a hors-texte, and that
even if (thanks to his dialectical ruses) the deconstructionist's pure free-play in language
cannot be directly appropriated, it may in some sense be always already appropriated,
Derrida's continued adherence to a kind of sceptical ataraxia seems courageous, if also
perhaps nave. Gerald Graff appears to have cut deeper into the question of appropriation
when he asked:
Isn't it at least possible that nature, essence, immanence, and other
logocentric concepts are less of a live issue than they once were,
that these and other hierarchical concepts were rendered negligible
long ago by a more powerful 'deconstructive' force than that of
any school of philosophy or criticism, namely, the force of
consumer

capitalism

itself?

Aren't

strategies

of

textual

dissemination of questionable effectiveness if the culture they

seek to strike against is already more like a disseminated text than
an organically unified one?21
Derrida of course regards with distaste and alarm the transformations being
worked in our culture by the hegemonic forces of consumer capitalism, and he has
spoken out strongly against these forces. But to the extent that the strategies of
deconstruction repeat these transformations on an intellectually rigorous level, there
would seem to follow from Graff's comments another, harsher questionwhich I will
pose in the form of an allusion to Derrida's analysis in Plato's Pharmacy of the Platonic
20 Derrida, The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes f its Pupils, Diacritics 13 (Fall 1983),
16, 13.
21 Graff, The Pseudo-Politics of Interpretation, 606.

pharmakon: Is deconstruction itself a remedy, or has it rather been a poison? To put the
question in these terms is already to reveal a distortion, an incomprehension even, of the
Derridean text: for the word pharmakon means both remedy and poison, as well as
several other things; and this appropriation of the term constitutes an allegorizing of his
text that Derrida might well reject with contempt. Yet the insistence with which this or
similar questions have been raised, and with which one or the other answer has been
pressed, may serve as a reminder that the Derridean intervention has not occurred in a
vacuum, and that the various appropriations of his thought have not been without
consequences.
Hands, hold you poison or grapes?22 Either alternative seems inappropriately
apocalyptic. We are concerned here with a secondary phenomenon (though one which
emphatically reveals the secondariness of all other cultural phenomena), and therefore
with a symptom, as much as with a cause. Deconstruction may be a poison for the
paranoid, and a remedy for dogmatism (though ironically, some of its American offshoots
have at times tended to acquire certain of the vestments of dogma). But as I have been
trying to insinuate for several paragraphs already, deconstruction is also, on Derrida's
own account, the moon.
What the early Wittgenstein excluded from the world and consigned to silence
can, in his own terms, still be thoughtfor in order to be able to draw a limit to thought,
we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to
think what cannot be thought)but it can, by his definition, only be thought as
nonsense.23 To which Derrida would reply that a refusal to examine the institutions and
exclusions of the principle of reason itself, when compounded by a pre-emptive definition
of the thought which does so as nonsense, is no more than obscurantism.24
Wittgenstein's world, Derrida's moon. Those who have found the relentlessly
inquiring stare of the latter alarming may wish to summon up the image of that space,
adjacent to the neighbouring moon, yet on the outside of the limit which defines the
firm opacous globe / Of this round world and separates it from Chaos: the image of that
windy sea of land which Milton, in Book III of Paradise Lost, calls limbo or the
Paradise of Fools, and which he reserves for embryos and idiots, for
All the unaccomplished works of nature's hand,
22 Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934-1952 (London: Dent, 1967), p. 58.
23 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 3.
24 See Derrida, The Principle of Reason, 7-15.

Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed....25

Others, who for whatever reason have not felt threatened by the deconstructive enterprise,
might prefer to evoke the thirty-fourth canto of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which
Astolfo, travelling to the moon, discovered no folly, / For still that here with us
remaineth wholly. Instead he found, in receptacles of different sizes, the mislaid sanity
and wisdom of those on earth
That think they have great store of wit and boast it
When here it plain appeared they quite had lost it.
There also, in a scene suggestive of Derrida's account of the quasi-originary weave of
diffrance, Astolfo encountered the Parcae or Fates, who out of diverse fleeceswool,
lint, silk, and cottonspin Threads infinite of divers stuff and hue.26
One further aspect of the moon-metaphor set in motion by Derrida and pursued
here remains to be considered. Quite simply, the moon itself is not a noveltya fact
which may seem of some significance should we attempt at some point to assess our
responses both to this writer and to his critics. According to Derrida's own analysis of
Egyptian mythology, an awareness of diffrance and of the linguistic archi-trace goes
back at least as far as to the priests of Memphis; and as I wish briefly to indicate, certain
features of Derrida's thought are anticipated by the sophist Gorgias, by the ancient
sceptics, by Valentinus the Gnostic, and by a number of Renaissance writers.
Let us consider these anticipations in historical sequence. Although Derrida
protects himself in Plato's Pharmacy by remarking that this reading of Plato is at no
time spurred on by some slogan or password of a 'back-to-the-sophists' nature, 27 his
argument in this text is nonetheless profoundly Gorgian. In saying this I am not referring
primarily to his extended use of Gorgias' Encomium of Helen to establish the important
point that the analogy (logos) between the relation of pharmakon to body and that of
persuasive logos to soul is anomalous, in that one of its terms recurs as the name of the
analogyfrom which it follows that The pharmakon is comprehended in the structure of
logos.28 I am interested rather in the co-presence of Gorgias, earlier in Derrida's text, in a
well-known passage on the dangerous supplement which contains no mention of the
old sophist. The supplment is not, so to speak, dangerous in itself, in that aspect of it
25 Milton, Paradise Lost, ed Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), Book III, 418-98, pp. 167-72.
26 Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: Selections from the Translation of Sir John Harrington, ed. Rudolf Gottfried
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1971), canto 34, 638-704, pp. 296-98.
27 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 108.
28 Ibid., p. 117.

that can present itself as a thing, as a being-present. In that case it would be reassuring.
But here, the supplement is not, is not a being (on). It is nevertheless not a simple nonbeing (m on), either. Its slidings slip it out of the simple alternative presence/absence.
That is the danger.29 I find it hard not to hear this, in context, as an echo of Gorgias'
refusal to permit any clear distinction between being and non-being (on kai m on)an
echo, in particular, of the argument in Gorgias' text On Nature or that which is not (peri
tou m ontos) that it is not possible [for anything] either to be or not to be (ouk estin
oute einai oute m einai).30 Gorgianic overtones are strengthened when, two paragraphs
later, Derrida exemplifies the workings of this Platonic supplment-pharmakon by
alluding to what Freud called 'kettle-logic': 1. The kettle I am returning to you is brand
new; 2. The holes were already in it when you lent it to me; 3. You never lent me a kettle
anyway.31 This, again, sounds very much a displaced reminiscence of the principal
argument of Gorgias' Peri tou m ontos, which is, firstly, that nothing exists; secondly,
that even if anything exists it is inapprehensible by mankind; and thirdly, that even if
anything is apprehensible, yet without a doubt it is inexpressible and incommunicable to
one's neighbour.32 Derrida's argument would thus appear itself to be anomalous, with
respect to its Gorgianic roots, in precisely the same manner as that in which it shows
logos to be anomalous: the same form of inquiry which reveals the pharmakon to be
embedded in logos also shows Derrida's argument to be itself permeated by the meontic
logic of Gorgias.
29 Ibid., p. 109.
30 I am quoting from the work De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia, attributed to Aristotle, as cited and
interpreted by G.B. Kerferd, Gorgias on nature or that which is not, Phronesis 1 (1955), 3-25. (As
Kerferd observes, there are several possible English renderings of this passage.)
31 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 111. Derrida at once characterizes the 'kettle-logic' of 'Plato-RousseauSaussure' as follows: Analogously: 1. Writing is rigorously exterior and inferior to living memory and
speech, which are therefore undamaged by it. 2. Writing is harmful to them because it puts them to sleep
and infects their very way of life which would otherwise remain intact. 3. Anyway, if one has resorted to
hypomnesia and writing at all, it is not for their intrinsic value, but because living memory is finite, it
already has holes in it before writing ever comes to leave its traces. Writing has no effect on memory.
As Christopher Norris remarks, This 'kettle-logic' is the means by which the Phaedrus both
persistently raises the question of writing and just as persistently manages to evade, suppress or contain
its large implications. Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987), p. 40.
32 Gorgias, Peri tou m ontos, as reported by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, I. 65. The
translation makes use of the version of R.G. Bury, Sextus Empiricus with an English translation (4
vols., Loeb Classical Library; London: Heinemann, 1933-49), vol. 2, p. 35, and that of R.K. Sprague,
ed., The Older Sophists (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 42. Howard
Felperin, describing it as The first work of thoroughgoing (what I shall later term 'hard-core')
deconstruction to come down to us, suggests that this Gorgian text is so striking in its wholesale
anticipation of the contemporary project as to demand reconsideration of the cultural and philosophical
context that could have conditioned it (Beyond Deconstruction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985], p.
104n). Felperin, who performs the remarkable feat of attacking Derrida at length without quoting him or
even so much as naming one of his writings, does not attempt such a reconsideration.

Derrida's affiliations with the ancient sceptical tradition, which in recent decades
has attracted renewed scholarly interest, 33 are perhaps more obvious. It may then be
sufficient to quote A.D. Nuttall's observation that
The third of [the Pyrrhonist philosopher] Agrippa's five modes of
perplexity, the mode of relativity, neatly encapsulates the history
of structuralism and its resolution into scepticism: The mode
derived from relativity declares that a thing can never be
apprehended in and by itself, but only in connexion with
something else. Hence all things are unknowable. Agrippa's
second mode of perplexity mirrors Derrida's principle of indefinite
deferral: The mode which involves extension ad infinitum refuses
to admit that what is sought to be proved is firmly established
because one thing furnishes the ground for belief in another, and
so on ad infinitum. Agrippa applies the principle to rational
demonstration, Derrida to semantic confirmation. The end result in
either case is virtually the same.34
In alluding, next, to Derrida's Gnostic affinities, I do not wish to be mistaken for a
practitioner of the kind of heresiological polemic of which there have been some
notorious recent examples.35 I would simply suggest that any reader of the hostile
accounts of Valentinian Gnosticism in Irenaeus and Hippolytus, of Valentinus' own
Gospel of Truth, and of some of Derrida's early texts, among them the essay Force et
signification and the opening chapters of De la grammatologie, can hardly fail to
observe certain very striking parallels.36
The Renaissance anticipations of Derridean deconstruction, if more diffuse,
resonate oddly with that Derridean text, Plato's Pharmacy, from which I have drawn the
key metaphor of this essay. Beginning in the latter part of the fifteenth century, recurrent
33 Instances of which in the past few years include Myles Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of
Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
34 A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London and New York:
Methuen, 1983), p. 36. Nuttall is quoting from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,
trans. R.D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library; London: Heinemann, 1925), ix.89, 88, vol. 2, pp. 500-01.
See also A.J. Cascardi, Skepticism and Deconstruction, Philosophy and Literature 8 (1984), 1-14.
35 I am referring in particular to the Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard in 1979-80 by Dame
Helen Gardner and published as In Defence of the Imagination. Frank Kermode, one of Dame Helen's
targets, replied with devastating effectiveness in On Being an Enemy of Humanity, Raritan 2.2 (198283), 87-102.
36 I have discussed some of these in my essay Deconstruction and the Gnostics.

tides of excitement were generated among humanist scholars by the recently translated
writings attributed to the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistuswho is none other than
the Hellenized form of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and of the moon. The fact that
this Hermes, the king, priest, and prophet who gave laws and letters to the Egyptians, was
wholly legendary, and that his supposed writings actually date from the first centuries of
the Christian era, came to light only in the early seventeenth century.37 He had in the
meantime been accepted by many scholars for more than a century as an approximate
contemporary of Moses, as the author of a professedly inspired account of the creation
which overlaps with and pulls against the book of Genesis, and as a philosopher from
whose writings the doctrines of Plato were derived. One of the results of this was a quasideconstructive reversal of the normal flow both of causality and of textual authoritythe
establishment of a habit of reading which made the Hermetic appropriation of
commonplaces from the schools of Middle Platonism into the ancient sources of Plato's
thought, and the Hermetic creation myth (thanks in part to its parallels with the
Kabbalistic speculations then being revealed to Christians by Jewish scholars exiled from
Spain) into a revelation of the esoteric meaning of the Genesis story. Another result
perhaps appropriately, since to Hermes was traditionally ascribed the definition of God as
an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, and whose circumference nowhere 38
was a certain de-centring of originary authority: the divinely inspired Hermes was a direct
challenge to the exclusivity of the Judaeo-Christian revelation, and however much a
Hermetist might strive to reconcile the two (I am a Christian, wrote one of them, and
at the same time not ashamed to be a Hermetist), 39 interpretive tensions, which rapidly
also acquired political dimensions, were inescapable.
Among the manifestations of the Hermetic vogue of the Renaissance could be
cited the strange career of another Agrippanot the Pyrrhonist philosopher, but the
humanist, lawyer, and also magician and doctor (and thus pharmakeus), Henricus
37 See Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; rpt. Chicago: University of
Chicasgo Press, 1978), and Anthony Grafton, Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Causaubon on Hermes
Trismegistus, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), 78-93.
38 The earliest surviving text in which this aphorism occurs is the twelfth-century Liber XXIV
philosophorum. See Robin Small, Nietzsche and a Platonist Tradition of the Cosmos: Center
Everywhere and Circumference Nowhere, Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983), 89-104. I have
studied certain implications of this definition in The World Turned Inside Out: Revolutions of the
Infinite Sphere from Hermes to Pascal, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Rforme n.s.
12.4 (1988), 303-13.
39 Ludovico Lazzarelli, De summa hominis foelicitate dialogus, qui inscribitur Calix Christi et Crater
Hermetis, in Eugenio Garin et al., eds., Testi umanistici su l'ermetismo (Rome Fratelli Bocca, 1955), p.
56: Christianus ego sum ... et Hermeticum simul esse non pudet.

Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim. Author of the notorious De occulta philosophia, this

Agrippa was also, like the Pyrrhonist, a refuter of first principles: his most widely read
and translated book was a quasi-encyclopaedic 'deconstruction' of all arts and sciences as
vain and uncertain.40 Cornelius Agrippa was praised by later writers as another Hermes
Trismegistusand also, as befitting a proto-Derridean pharmakeus, attacked as a
sorcerer; his writing, which he himself announced should be of medicinal value, was by
hostile polemicists declared to be a mortal poison. 41 Nor was he soon forgotten. Andr
Thevet, writing a half-century after Agrippa's death, bewailed among les malheurs de
nostre France the fact that his country still supported followers of Agrippa, who,
making as though to take the moon between their teeth, trim, clip, cut back, limit, divide
and dismember the power of Eternal God....42
If these anticipations, however shadowy and incomplete, suffice to remind us that
the moon is indeed no novelty, they also lead to a slightly embarrassing question. The
fields to which I have alluded have all been the objects of intensive scholarly study over
at least the past several decades. Why, then, should literary critics have been so startled
by the reappearance and the creative adaptation in Derrida's writings of motifs which
during the intervening centuries had never been wholly eclipsedso eager, on the one
hand, to carry the moon in their pockets; and, on the other, to howl against its minions
like Irish wolves?
One might at the same time ask whether there has not been an element of
conscious self-deception in Derrida's own repeated rhetorical representations of
logocentric metaphysics as an effectively monolithic tradition of thought. His own forms
40 The standard study of this writer is Charles G. Nauert's Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); see also my article Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic 'Rebirth'
and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia, Renaissance Quarterly 41.4 (1988),
614-53.
41 Gabriel Naud, in his Apologie pour tous les grans personnages qui ont est faussement souponnez de
magie (Paris, 1625), p. 404, calls Agrippa un nouveau Trismgiste; Jean Bodin, in De la
dmonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1581), fol. 219V, denounced him as le plus grand Sorcier qui fut
oncques de son aage. In the preface to De occulta philosophia, Agrippa proposes that what he writes of
magic might be put to use in the same way as doctors use poisons as antidotes: nam & medicorum
volumina inspicientibus contingit cum antidotis & pharmacis simul etiam venena legere. Opera, ed.
R.H. Popkin (2 vols., Lyon, c. 1600; facsimile rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), vol. 1, sig.
a2v. Andr Thevet, in Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (2 vols.; Paris, 1584), vol. 2, fol.
544, wrote of Agrippa's book De vanitate that Il n'y a coin ny secret d'aucune discipline, lequel il n'ait
furet & y ait vomy quelque regorge de sa mortelle poison.
42 Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits, vol. 2, fol. 544V: I'ay honte qu'il faille que ie ramentoyve les malheurs de
nostre France, qui encores pour le iourdhuy soustyent des Agrippins, esquels soubs quelques traicts
estranges & espouventables font estat de prendre la lune avec les dents, taillent, roignent, retranchent,
moderent, partissent & despiecent la puissance de l'Eternel, lequel ils veulent assubiectir aux niaiseries,
qu'asses sottement ils s'impriment dans la cervelle.

of argument tend very quickly to dissipate this phantom: any apparent monolith is
revealed by a deconstructive reading to be traversed by fissures, to be openly ruptured
indeed, to be constituted on and in response to the network of indeterminacies of which
these are only the first ostensible signs. The Platonic logosto revert to the example at
handis built upon and subverted by the Gorgian/Socratic pharmakon. But has this, or
something analogous, not been the case throughout history as well as in this inaugural
textual example? Does the duplicitous relationship between hegemonic construction and
sceptical devolutionbetween, on the one hand, the selective appropriations of
dogmatism, and, on the other, a mlange of collaboration, resistance, and subversion
not seem to be repeated in perpetually different ways in the ideological and literary
strugglers of other ages, including our own?
The Derridean mythos of a monolithic metaphysical tradition of logocentric
repression is thus to some extent undercut both by the forms of analysis which Derrida
himself has practised and also by the traces, sometimes visible within his own writings,
of counter-traditions which have in various ways anticipated his sceptical stance. But at
the same time, paradoxically, the receptions of his thought, the positions taken for and
against the moon, effectively legitimize this story by demonstrating that it was one which
we urgently needed to have told to us. Only in a literary-academic culture in which
subversive counter-traditions had been and were being very efficiently represseda
culture which indeed was instituted in the nineteenth century for the purpose, among
others, of reproducing orthodox ideologies and mystifying class and gender oppression 43
could such a narrative have been believed. And believed, because while Derrida's own
writings may give it the lie, the aggressive manner in which orthodox academic critics
initially responded to them are at least partial evidence of this story's truth.
*

I could claim that this essay has been an exercise in what Derrida calls la
mythologie blanche. Or it might more fittingly be described, in a phrase of the poet
mile Nelligan, as clair de lune intellectuel. 44 From the play with metaphor in which I
43 See, for example, Robert Holton, A True Bond of Unity: Popular Education and the Foundation of the
Discipline of English Literature in England, in Literature and Politics/Literary Politics, Dalhousie
Review 66.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1986), 31-44.
44 Jacques Derrida, La mythologie blanche: la mtaphore dans le texts philosophique, in Marges de la
philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 247-324; mile Nelligan, Posies compltes 1896-1899, ed. Luc

have indulged it might seem rash to draw even tentative conclusions. However, one
question does return with a certain insistency: namely, to what extent has Derrida
succeeded in his stated desire to be exorbitant? He wrote, in De la grammatologie:
But what is the exorbitant?
I wised to reach the point of a certain exteriority in relation to
the totality of the age of logocentrism. Starting from this point of
exteriority, a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a
traced path, or that orb (orbis) which is also orbitary (orbita),
might be broached.45
The echo in this passage of the Archimedean gesture of Descartes' Second Meditation
(which suggests a deeply ingrained metaphysical habit of mind); 46 the lunar, and thus
orbital, quality of the point chosen from which to deconstruct the orbis terrarum of
logocentricity; the tendency of deconstructionist texts to fall into a different rut (orbita)
of their own: all these may indicate that the project was in certain respects constrained
from the start.
Yet the attempt can be honouredand seconded, if perhaps in other modes. A
half-century ago Walter Benjamin wrote that In every era the attempt must be made
anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.47 In the
interim these words have not ceased to be true; and it continues to be the case that
conformismin a gesture which is the precise opposite of Derrida's characterization of
his own projectdesignates as 'exorbitant' the Other which it seeks to exclude, to silence,
and to suppress. It is also the case that the vigour of any discipline in the human sciences
is directly related to the extent to which it incorporates the exorbitantwith the aim not
of domesticating it, but rather of bringing about a critical reorientation both of the
discipline and of the society which that discipline serves as one of its modes of
reproduction.

Lacourcire (1952; rpt. Montral and Paris: Fides, 1968), p. 41.

45 Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), pp. 161-62.
46 Ren Descartes, Mditation seconde, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. F. Alqui (3 vols.; Paris: Garnier,
1963-73), vol. 2, p. 414: Archimde, pour tirer le globe terrestre de sa place et le transporter en un
autre lieu, ne demandait rien qu'un point qui fut fixe et assur. Ainsi j'aurai droit de concevoir de hautes
esprances si je suis aussi heureux pour trouver seulement une chose qui soit certaine et indubitable.
47 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 257.