드 만과 데리다 - 허무의 유희와 포월(包越)의 광기

De Man and Derrida: A Textual Play of the Existential Nil and a Diabolic Will to Pass beyond the Cogito via Cogito

&nbsp;&nbsp;The strong affinity between Derrida and de Man and the overriding nomenclature such as ‘deconstruction’ or ‘deconstructionism’ have befogged the flagrant difference between the two critics. Moreover the (re) appropriations of Derrida by many critics, deliberate or not, have hoodwinked many readers, leaving them forever in the dark. This paper, instead of relying on the secondary sources and materials, dives outright into the texts of two critics to mark their difference, warding off the unnecessary confusions beforehand.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The conspicuous difference between de Man and Derrida looms large when their famous polemic centers on Rousseau. De Man insists in his Blindness and Insight that Rousseau was redeemed, because Rousseau was fully aware of the rhetoricity of language, in turn willingly and wittingly submitting himself to the destructive power of diff？rance, as portrayed in Shelley&quot;s posthumous and unfinished poem, The triumph of Life. But Derrida disagrees with de Man, and in his Of Grammatology depicts in such lurid details the entire trajectory of Rousseau&quot;s discourses, thereby revealing that Rousseau&quot;s discourses are split far apart; its gap ever widening, which is, to borrow Derrida&quot;s expression, symptomatic of the logocentric discourses. Derrida in his Memories for Paul de Man further clarifies his positional difference(or his non-position) and more to the point where he diverges decisively from de Man. Unlike de Man, Derrida stresses repeatedly the necessity of resistance to the destructive nature of language, for which he contrives the various and concrete strategies, rendering his writings neither pinned down nor paraphrased.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;However de Man makes no such vigorous attempt, prioritizing a non-resistance to language as a most valuable insight. Consequently his writings, as several critics have pointed out, depend on and are couched between the two poles; that is, the symbol and the allegory, the empirical self and linguistic self, the blindness and the insight, and the material and the aesthetic. Both de Man and Derrida recognize how recalcitrant the language is to delimit and perturb our (un)conscious beyond recuperation. For de Man such insight(blindness) is sufficient, and therefore he does not step further. As a result, the writings of de Man fall far short of what he declares, and thus his linguistic self seems remote from the self-redemption. In contrast, Derrida exhausts most of his critical(or creative) energy to guard shrewdly his writings not to be castrated by the nominal language.