Quoting Rousseau
Derrida quotes extensively from the works of Rousseau. And within those references can be found a multitude of metaphors and similes that are specifically directed toward the linguistic power of, well, figurative language. Such as signs and signifier and whatnot:
“According to Rousseau, the child is the name of that which should not relate in any way to a separated signifier, loved in some way for itself, like a fetish.”
Oh, Yes, I See—Wait…What?
Reading Derrida is not for the faint of heart. He is not a writer tailor made for the reader who just wants to get to the point in a straight line as fast as possible. Even when he is not engaging metaphorical imagery, his route is a circumlocution of the point. When he is engaging it, well, it is easy to get lost:
“There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles.”
The Monstrous Future
At times Derrida will take a fanciful flight into the poetics of metaphorical language. At these points in the text, he veers closer to the practitioner of fiction as he constructs imagery which build upon figurative concepts to enhance and intensify his less florid prose:
“The Future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.”
Logocentrism
A key element at work in the construction of deconstructionist analysis is the rejection of the logocentric perspective which places greater agency upon the spoken word than on the written word. Derrida attacks this longstanding perspective not from the point of flipping the one in favor of the other, but simply suggesting that writing is at least the equal of speech. The underlying value of logocentrism is made abundantly clear in one of the sharpest and explicit metaphorical images in the entire book:
“Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death.”
Incest
Incest become an extended metaphor—extended not over a single sentence or paragraph or page, but across an entire section of the narrative. It is such a complex construction of metaphor that even trying to boil the meaning that Derrida is after in this space would be absurd. However, it all begins from a single originating metaphor in the form of a quote taken from the writings of, once again, Rousseau:
“I felt as if I had been guilty of incest.”
