Squib: "The metaphysical gesture par excellence"

Claude Cahun, Object, 1936

Given what Shaul (2017: 21) says, i.e. "Derrida’s project identifies the valorization of speech as the metaphysical gesture par excellence..." and what Baring (2012: 67) says, i.e. " ... the attempt to escape metaphysics, to step outside of the tradition, was the metaphysical gesture par excellence." (Baring, 2012: 67), it might seem that the attempt to capture and define, to name, perhaps, what is the metaphysical gesture par excellence is the metaphysical gesture par excellence.

Derrida (1988: 8) himself says, “This essential drift [derive] bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority, orphaned and separated at birth from the assistance of its father, is precisely what Plato condemns in the Phaedrus. If Plato's gesture is, as I believe, the philosophical movement par excellence, one can measure what is at stake here.”

Design-oriented afterlude

Niall Lucy (2004: 71-72) explains what is at stake in this gesture with reference to the Ford Mustang car. For a certain constituency, he notes, ‘the’ Ford Mustang, by which is meant those Mustangs produced in 1964-1968,  does signify an essence. He suggests that it might be the essence of industrial art or the ultimate driving experience or the sexiest affordable car ever built. Whatever ‘essence’ the Mustang is taken to signify, it will function as the standard against which deviations, imitations, corruptions, misuses, fabrications and the like are measured. Lucy continues,

‘And this’, Derrida remarks (albeit without reference to Mustangs), ‘is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent’ (LI, 93).

The gesture in question, which is inescapable within metaphysics Lucy states, involves an assumption of the pre-deconstructive and undeconstructible essence or logos of a thing, such that something else, for example, cars other than Mustangs of 1964-1968, appears as secondary, supplementary or inessential, or as simply other.

References

Baring, E. (2012). Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cahiers pour l’Analyse; Or, How to be a good structuralist. In: Hallward, P., and Peden, K., eds. Concept and form. Volume 2: Interview and essays on the cahiers pour l’analyse. London, UK: Verso, 47–67.

Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Lucy, N. (2004). A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Shaul, D. (2017). With ‘the delicacy of a bear’: Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and the logic of anthropology. Distinktion, 18 (1), 18–40.