Hannu Poutiainen

This article offers a novel interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thought in terms of model theory. Taking its cue from Paul Livingston’s Politics of Logic, which interprets Derrida as a thinker of inconsistent totalities, the article argues that Livingston’s description of Derrida is unable to accommodate certain consistency-driven aspects of Derrida’s work. These aspects pertain to Derrida’s notion of ”iterability”. The article demonstrates that the context-bound nature of iteration – the altering repetition of any discrete unit of meaning – and Derrida’s possibilist view of context – that a context need not be part of the actual world to merit consideration – lead to the possibility of articulating iteration with the model-theoretical notion of truth. In model theory, truth is a relation between a sentence and the class of models in which the sentence is true. Arguing that the same holds for Derrida’s iterations and contexts, the article, in presenting the first rigorous truth-definition internal to deconstructive thought, outlines a ”fifth orientation of thought” alongside the four orientations listed in Livingston’s book: if, according to Livingston, one can relate the whole of being to the whole of thought in one of four different ways, the aspects of Derrida’s work that do not fall within this schema call out for another possible orientation.

This article elaborates on Christopher Norris's claim that certain aspects of Derrida's work are amenable to formalisation in modal-logical terms. Norris contends that any adequate analysis of the logic behind Derrida's work must provide an account of the notions of possibility, necessity, and necessary possibility, particularly as they are related to Derrida's notion of iterability. This article examines the further hypothesis that Derrida's understanding of modality, according to which possibilities must be accounted for even if they are never realised, might even better be described in terms of possible worlds. In possible-worlds semantics, the conceptual meaning of a statement is constituted by the set of alternative contexts in which that statement is true. This article argues, however, that possible-worlds semantics would be unthinkable without the experience that one referent can be substituted for another. The possibility of this experience is best described in Derridean terms. Read through Derrida's thought of the trace, the properly semantic substitutions may come to be seen as dependent on the substitution of the thing for itself; on what Derrida calls ‘the substitution of the unique for the unique’.