Deconstructive Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture: Thinking After Derrida

Abstract

The question of how Derrida’s deconstruction may help in reading nature and culture has not aroused much concern from critics, nor even from Derrida himself. A dialogue between them remains to be constructed. Following after Derrida, this article takes “l’opposition nature/culture” as a linguistic supposition; namely, it takes “nature” and “culture” and their “opposition” as signifiers, the signified of which is, of course, nature itself. According to the theory of deconstruction, however, these signifiers can never reach their signified. The implication of this for the question of nature and culture is that nature in itself is unsayable. To say is always to obscure. What deconstruction did is to give prominence to the “insignifierability” of the signifier, and the effacement that culture does to nature; but without that “culture,” we cannot access nature. The significance of deconstruction is, therefore, to remind us that to return to nature, we have to reflect unceasingly on culture that (in)signifies it, which means a faith in nature—if so, we have arrived at a point of after-Derrida.