History and Theory 53 (May 2014), 175-193 © Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10704

NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES:

DERRIDA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY1

EDWARD BARING

ABSTRACT

This essay reads Derrida’s early work within the context of the history of philosophy as
an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of phi-
losophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this
aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen
in Derrida’s work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a
1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed the semantic richness of
the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change
and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western
tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of his-
tory as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the
idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida’s account of the evolving opposition between
history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth”
that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida’s strategies in these
early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of
speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of
history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida’s analyses.

Keywords: history of theory, intellectual history, history of philosophy, deconstruction,

différance

Derrida’s thought has exercised no discipline quite so much as history. Over the
past thirty years, in historical conferences, invited lectures, and books surveying
the field, historians have both welcomed and decried the influence of deconstruc-
tion.2 Referring to Derrida’s often critical remarks on history, a number of schol-
1. A version of this paper was presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society for French Historical
Studies. In addition to the panel participants, I would like to thank Peter Gordon, Judith Surkis, Katja
Guenther, Ethan Kleinberg, Andrew Dunstall, Dan Shore, and Angus Burgin for their helpful com-
ments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the fellows and staff at the Kulturwissenschaftliches
Kolleg in Constance, where this paper was in part written.
2. A recent prominent study of deconstruction’s influence on the historical profession is Gabrielle
Spiegel’s lecture to the American Historical Association, “The Task of the Historian,” published in
the American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (2009), 1-15. For an analysis of these interventions within
the context of debates over the “linguistic turn,” see Judith Surkis’s insightful article “When Was
the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012), 700-722. Surkis
argues that the idea of a “linguistic turn” in history has functioned to create a normative unity in the
discipline, and has often reduced the complexity of the debates that have surrounded the appeal to
Derrida (among others) by historians. The idea of a turn both structured the literature on this question
during the 1990s (should we or should we not take the turn?) and allowed deconstructive ideas to
be domesticated in the first decade of the twenty-first century (after the linguistic turn, what next?).
176 EDWARD BARING

ars have been keen to debunk what they see as dangerous relativism and antireal-
ism. According to them, we must reject deconstructive ideas in order to preserve
the integrity of the profession.3 The idea that deconstruction and “postmodern-
ism” more generally pose a threat to good historical practice incited Richard
Evans to write his 1997 book, In Defence of History.4 Similar considerations led
Carolyn Steedman, in an influential essay for the American Historical Review, to
argue that historians and deconstructionists “must continue to talk right past each
other.”5 Yet at the same time, for a small number of historians, Derrida continues
to exert a powerful fascination and seems to offer critical insights into the way
we think and write about the past. One need only think of Joan Wallach Scott,
Gabrielle Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, and Dipesh Chakrabarty to recognize that
prominent figures within the historical profession have engaged in some way
with Derrida and deconstruction, to the benefit of their historical work.
These twin responses—both rejection and fascination—are intimately con-
nected, and we would diminish the debate if we cast it either as a divide between
cursory and attentive readers of Derrida’s work, or as a split between responsible
scholars and those with a weakness for faddish (and now not quite so faddish)
modes of thought. Rather, I would like to suggest that the strong feelings elicited
in historians by Derrida’s work, and especially the passionate rejection of it,
arise from the proximity of their concerns and questions. Deconstruction would
not have appeared quite so threatening if it did not in some way address central
problems of historical understanding. And it is only by examining this strange
commonality that we can recognize the nature and implications of the differences
between the two intellectual projects.
Consider Warren Breckman’s recent essay in the Journal of the History of
Ideas, where he gives a sophisticated and insightful account of various attempts
to write a history of Theory.6 At the outset of his argument, Breckman offers

3. For one such example among many, see the Perez Zagorin/Keith Jenkins debate in History and
Theory from the late 1990s: Perez Zagorin “History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Post-
modernism Now.” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999), 1-24; Keith Jenkins, “A Postmodern Reply
to Perez Zagorin,” History and Theory 39, no. 2 (2000), 181-200; Perez Zagorin, “Rejoinder to a
Postmodernist,” History and Theory 3, no. 2 (2000), 201-209. Along with other essays, this exchange
has been collected in Jenkins’s At the Limits of History: Essays on Theory and Practice (London:
Routledge, 2009). Even otherwise sympathetic scholars, like John Toews in his classic essay “Intel-
lectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987), 879-907,
warn of the dangers of deconstruction for history. The antipathy between history and deconstruction
is also visible on the other side of the debate, and Jenkins in his recent work has explained his move
away even from “postmodern” histories, suggesting that “if Derrida and Rorty could provide just
about all the emancipatory analyses, ethics and rhetoric needed without being historians . . . then we
all could.” Jenkins, At the Limits of History: Essays on Theory and Practice, 16.
4. Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997). Evans’s analysis in the book led
him to be called as an expert witness at the David Irving/Deborah Lipstadt libel trial. In In Defence
of History Evans had associated “postmodern” emphasis on interpretation with the rise of Holocaust
denial, and thus regarded the rejection of postmodern theories as an important moral as well as disci-
plinary necessity. Often used as an introduction to the discipline, especially in the United Kingdom,
Evans’s book is representative of broader feelings within the profession.
5. Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Derrida, Michelet, and Dust,” American
Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001), 1164.
6. Warren Breckman, “Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 71, no. 3 (July 2010), 339-361.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 177
several reasons why it might be particularly difficult to write such a history.7
First, he asserts that Theory is not a stable object for historical study, due to its
heterogeneity and the multitude of its influences. Second, he states that “French
Theory explicitly subverts many of the notions on which traditional historiogra-
phy has rested: the linearity of history, periodization, progress, continuity, teleol-
ogy, causality, agency, and authorship.”8 Breckman argues that, because of these
considerations, a history of Theory must confront the question of its temporal
relationship to its object, and decide whether Theory has a future or whether it
is already dead.
One need not be a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, however, to regard linear
histories, teleology, or simplistic accounts of progress as suspect. Moreover,
authorship and agency are both made at least problematic by certain forms of his-
torical causality, a concept that has itself come in for a range of critical analyses
from within the historical profession.9 And historians, in addition to working with
stable objects, often do a very good job of destabilizing them.10 Thus in addition
to Breckman’s “two basic temporal modalities”—a past that is definitively over
and a future that is entirely yet to come—there is another option.11 As Breckman
suggests in the body of his essay, Theory even when it seemed most vibrant was
dogged by claims about its demise, and its supporters propose a critical overcom-
ing as a condition of its renewal. Such a mixed form is all the more necessary for
thinking about the relationship of Derrida’s thought and history. Following Ethan
Kleinberg, I suggest that we would be best advised to consider deconstruction as
“haunting history.”12
Deconstruction haunts history because, even as it seems at odds with histori-
cal practice, the two inhabit many of the same spaces. Derrida’s treatments of
themes including teleology, linearity, and origins may not be identical to those of
academic historians, but we can recognize a family resemblance between what he

7. Breckman is discussing “theory” in general, but many of his claims are equally valid when
applied to Derrida in particular. The problem of the unity of “theory,” which does not concern us
directly here, is treated in Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn
2006), 78-112, where he uses the category of the “persona” to bring together diverse strands of
thought, and the response by Fredric Jameson, “How Not to Historicize Theory,” Critical Inquiry 34,
no. 3 (2008), 563-582. Hunter gives Derrida a more Levinasian spin than I do here, which allows him
to cast Derrida’s early appeals to the infinite as a transcendence of history, rather than as the move-
ment that makes history possible.
8. Breckman, “Times of Theory,” 340-342.
9. See, for instance, the debates over Marxist history and the challenge to certain conceptions
of causation by the Annales school and especially Fernand Braudel. For more recent criticisms, see
Anton Froeyman, “Concepts of Causation in Historiography,” Historical Methods 42, no. 3 (2007),
116-128, and S. H. Rigby, “Historical Causation: Is One Thing More Important Than Another?,”
History 80, no. 259 (1995), 227-242.
10. See Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. A.
Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) for a theory of history as the destabilization
of meaning.
11. Breckman, “Times of Theory,” 361.
12. See Ethan Kleinberg, “Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision,” History
and Theory, Theme Issue 46 (December 2007), 113-143. Kleinberg points out that the varied and
insistent response by historians is remarkable given the relatively limited impact that Derrida and
“postmodernists” more generally have had on the field. In this article I hope to provide a different
though complementary explanation for the fascination that deconstruction seems to exert.
178 EDWARD BARING

suggests and norms already at work within the discipline of history.13 Throughout
his career, Derrida was explicitly concerned with ideas and institutions central
to historical practice, including archives (Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and
Genius: The Secrets of the Archive [2003], Archive Fever [1995]), contextualiza-
tion (“Signature, Event, Context” [1971], Limited Inc [1977], Of Grammatology
[1967]), and temporality (see “Ousia and Gramme” and “Différance” [1968],
among others).14
Deconstruction does not haunt all the rooms in the house of history equally. It
has had the greatest impact on intellectual history. This influence can be traced
to the inclination of intellectual historians to read and analyze high philosophy,
like Derrida’s work, as part of their research. But the attention—both supportive
and critical—intellectual historians give to deconstruction has another cause. In
this essay, I will try to understand this attention, and by extension the ambiva-
lent response of historians more generally to deconstruction, by reading Derrida
historically, outlining what I consider to be a helpful context for his early work
and tracing his thought as it developed. I will suggest that Derrida’s earliest
philosophical investigations from the 1950s and early 1960s were motivated by
a problem that in its broadest outlines also confronts intellectual historians: how
ideas change over time. As we shall see, Derrida responded to this problem by
asserting the priority of “history” over atemporal notions of truth. Further, we
can understand Derrida’s more canonical philosophy, especially as expressed in
Of Grammatology, as simultaneously the development and the radical criticism
of his earlier ideas. For this reason, a history of Derrida’s thought at this crucial
moment provides resources for thinking about the convergences but also the lin-
gering differences between deconstruction and history.

THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE

The history of philosophy has long played a central role in the French philosophi-
cal establishment. Almost all philosophy exams in France, whether the Baccalau-
réat, the Licence, or the Agrégation, involve a history of philosophy section, and
of the two philosophy chairs at the Collège de France, one has traditionally been
reserved for a historian of philosophy: Étienne Gilson at the beginning of the
postwar period, passing on to Martial Guéroult in 1951, then to Jean Hyppolite
in 1963, and to Michel Foucault in 1969.15
13. Jenkins noted this family resemblance when he argued that the historical approach is a domes-
ticated and carefully delimited form of relativism. Jenkins suggested that historians focus their attacks
on History with a capital H, but thereby preserve history with a small h from criticism. Keith Jenkins,
“Introduction,” in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 14.
14. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, transl.
B. Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A
Freudian Impression, transl. E. Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jacques
Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, transl. A. Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., transl. J. Mehlman and S. Weber (Evanston
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. G. Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Jacques Derrida “Ousia and Gramme” and “Dif-
férance,” in Margins of Philosophy.
15. When Gilles Gaston Granger succeeded Foucault in 1986, the focus of the chair changed some-
what. Foucault had been Professor of the History of Systems of Thought (Histoire des systèmes de
pensée). Granger chose the title Professor of Comparative Epistemology (Épistémologie comparée).
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 179
Although the history of philosophy had a firm institutional foundation in this
period, its practitioners felt the need to justify their work to their colleagues
and students: in what ways does the historical study of philosophy address the
philosophical concerns of the present? Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, French
history of philosophy seems to have suffered an existential crisis. At this time,
a number of books and essays appeared that addressed a seemingly debilitating
tension within the name “the history of philosophy.”16 Historians of philosophy
wrestled with the suggestion that history and philosophy might be mutually
exclusive, such that it was improbable that history could shed light on the central
problems of philosophy. As Martial Guéroult posed the difficulty in his inaugural
lecture at the Collège de France, “philosophy finds history repugnant. History
is temporality, fact, the given, coincidence [hasard], determinism according to
exterior causes.” In contrast, “philosophy appears to itself as the eternally valid,
atemporal, not a fact or a given at all.”17
Confronting the view that history and philosophy were starkly opposed, French
historians of philosophy experienced a dual aversion, which structured their
work. On the one hand, they remained wary of reducing a philosophical work to
its historical moment and thus of failing to respect its claims to be true at all times
and in all places. Such a stance seemed to deny past texts, and hence the history
of philosophy, relevance in current philosophical discussion. On the other hand,
they did not want to take these claims at face value, and thus regard all historical
change as either error or irrelevant to the study of philosophy. In other words,
they wanted to avoid what they considered the skepticism of a fully historicist
position, and the dogmatism of an ahistorical presentation of philosophical truth.
Both seemed to undercut their field.
In the early part of his career, Derrida’s work was marked by the problems
presented by this historical strand of French philosophy. His education privileged
the history of philosophy. His main mentors—those who chaired the committees
for his Mémoire thesis and his first (aborted) Thèse—were historians: Maurice
de Gandillac and Jean Hyppolite respectively. And if we were to go by Derrida’s
institutional position he too would have to be numbered among them. When in
1964 he was invited to become répétiteur-agrégé at the ENS alongside Louis
Althusser, Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy, a
role he fulfilled up until 1984.18 Training aspiring philosophers, Derrida had to
16. For a brief discussion of the history of the history of philosophy in France, see Denis Kam-
bouchner, “Thought versus History: Reflections on a French Problem” in Teaching New Histories
of Philosophy, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Princeton: University Center for Human Values, 2004).
Kambouchner folds Derrida into this history by looking at his treatment of Foucault in “Cogito et
l’histoire de la folie.” As Kambouchner suggests, Derrida may seem internalist, but only at the price
of fragmenting the text, and Foucault may seem to privilege the external, but only by engaging in a
more rigorous reading of the texts that constitute this context. Knox Peden also draws attention to the
institutional and intellectual importance of the history of philosophy during this period. See Peden,
“Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 2
(2011), 361-390.
17. Guéroult, Leçon inaugurale, faite le 4 décembre 1951, Collège de France, chaire d’histoire et
de technologie des systèmes philosophiques (Paris: Collège de France, 1952), 9. For other examples,
see Henri Gouhier, Philosophie et son histoire (Paris: J. Vrin, 1947), 122, or his L’Histoire et sa
philosophie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952), 138.
18. See “List of teaching staff at the ENS,” ALT2.E3-02.03, Fonds Louis Althusser at the Institut
Mémoire de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC), Caen, France.
180 EDWARD BARING

teach them to take past philosophical texts seriously, to avoid assimilating the
philosophical tradition to present concerns or condemning it to the dustbin of
history.
It is not only institutional considerations that favor the reading of Derrida’s
work within French history of philosophy. His preferred themes and investiga-
tions point in that direction too. Derrida’s interest in the questions of the history
of philosophy permeates his early writings, and one does not have to look far
to see sustained questioning of the relationship between ideas and the moments
in which they arose: the essays on Rousset and Foucault in Writing and Differ-
ence (1967), the opening preface to his student work The Problem of Genesis
in Husserl’s Philosophy (1954), and perhaps most directly his treatment of the
relationship between mathematical truth and history in his first publication, the
introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962).19
But to argue my case here I would like to discuss a lecture course entitled
“History and Truth” that Derrida gave at the Sorbonne in the early part of 1964
and which has never been published.20 There are many reasons why one might
give this course pride of place in a discussion of Derrida’s understanding of the
history of philosophy: it constitutes the most sustained and direct analysis of the
problems of the field as it was constituted at the time, and it confronts the dual
aversion that I mentioned earlier.21 As one of the last texts Derrida wrote before
the so-called “grammatological opening,” it also sheds light on the genesis of
deconstruction, and thus is uniquely placed to guide an analysis on the relation-
ship between history and Derrida’s canonical philosophy.

HISTORY AND TRUTH

At the start of his course Derrida indicated that he wanted to explore the concep-
tual terrain that Guéroult and others had mapped out. The subtitle read: “Is there
a history of philosophy? What is the meaning [sens] of this expression and what
problems does it raise?”22 The questions would have been particularly pertinent
to his audience, who were, for the most part, students of philosophy, required
to pass exams in its history. Derrida began by drawing attention to the richness
inherent in the word “history.” Referring to the German distinction between
Historie and Geschichte, Derrida argued that history comprised both history

19. See Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” and “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978); “The History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History,” in Jacques Derrida, The Prob-
lem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, transl. M. Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), and his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, transl. John Leavey (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978). For an analysis of the role of history in Derrida’s early work,
see Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), and
Joshua Kates, Essential History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
20. Derrida taught the course in six classes, from March 17 to May 5. Irvine Special Collections
and Archives, Jacques Derrida papers (MS- C001). Hereafter Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” (Box:
Folder).
21. Cf. Derrida’s claims in Writing and Difference, 158, where he suggests that Husserl had to nav-
igate between the “Scylla and Charybdis of logicizing structuralism and psychologistic geneticism.”
22. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 1.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 181
as “narrative” [récit] and “history as reality, as the series of real events, about
which history as science or récit talks.”23 Moreover, the two types of history
were founded upon a greater unity: “History has two meanings [sens]: fact and
narrative [récit]. But their condition of possibility is the same [commune].”24 As
Hegel had noted in his Philosophy of History there could be no Historie without
Geschichte—no account without something for it to be an account of—and, more
controversially, no Geschichte without Historie.25 An event was only historical to
the extent that it could enter thought and “give place to a transmission, a récit, to
a summary [resumption].”26 One might say that only if an event left its trace on
Historie could it be Geschichte.27 It was for this reason that Hegel thought that
only Man as the receptacle of Geist [Spirit] could have a history, for only Geist
could remember it.28
On the basis of this presentation, Derrida proposed a doubly paradoxical rela-
tionship between history and truth. First, he claimed that “the question of truth”
was “produced” in the “interval” between the two forms of history: “the truth or
falsity of history as the science of history [Historie] will be the character of the
relationship between this history as science and history as reality [Geschichte]. A
true history will be a history that conforms to history.”29 It was as Derrida noted
a “truth of the relation, and not of the thing itself.”30 But the fact that the truth
of history was the “truth of the relation” had a curious side effect: it depended
simultaneously upon the similarity and difference between the two terms. Der-
rida argued that if the truth of a “récit” were determined by the extent of its
accord with that which it recounted, then the “absolutely true” récit closed the
gap entirely, and “no longer interposes itself between the thing [chose] and us by
the thickness [épaisseur] of a récit.” That is, “it negates itself [se nie] as récit.”
For this reason, the “absolutely true” history would no longer be recognizable
as a récit at all, and so could no longer be a history.31 This aporia explained for
Derrida the double meaning of histoire in French: (true) history and (fictional)
story. In a double sense, “raconte moi une histoire vraie [tell me a true story/

23. As Andrew Dunstall has pointed out to me, Derrida’s emphasis on history as “récit” or “nar-
rative” was contemporaneous with the turn to narrative in Anglo-American philosophy of history.
24. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 4.
25. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 5. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, transl.
J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 60-61.
26. For this reason Hegel leaves much of the past outside the scope of history. Only with the
emergence of the state does history begin. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 61.
27. Or more radically, one might suggest that the narrative structure of Historie is already at work
in the lived experience of Geschichte. In this way Derrida’s reading of Hegel has strong parallels with
David Carr’s claims in his Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986); see especially 177-178. As we shall see, however, Derrida’s conceptualization of tradition pro-
vides an alternative non-Hegelian model for the formation of a “communal subject that is genuinely
plural.” Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 146.
28. Compare with Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D
Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993).
29. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 3.
30. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 2. A “truth of the thing itself” would be “true” as
opposed to “fake” gold. See below.
31. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheets 2-3.
182 EDWARD BARING

history]” meant “ne me raconte plus d’histoires” [don’t tell me any more lies/
stories/histories].32
Second, Derrida suggested that this expansive notion of history was both
opposed to and continuous with truth. Insofar as history comprised transmission,
it provided resources for understanding truth. Truth, according to Derrida, relied
on the possibility of its transmission, on the possibility that a statement could
retain the same sense in a different place and at a different time. As Derrida
argued, “truth transmits itself and transports itself, translates itself better . . . than
non-truth.” Indeed mathematics and all the other forms of knowledge that were
modeled on it were meant to “be valid [valoir] for everyone, eternally, univer-
sally.” If both history and truth depended on the possibility of transmission, the
two could not be completely opposed. Yet, at the same time, history was also
“constituted of individual, determined, irregular, contingent, relative etc. events,”
precisely what was specific to a particular time and place.33 To the extent that this
aspect was emphasized, there could be no relationship between history and truth.
As Derrida summarized, “in the end, history and truth profoundly excluded each
other. They might well have met, engaged with each other [passer des contrats],
. . . but at the end of the day, truth destroyed [consumait] history.”34
Derrida’s identification of twin paradoxes in the relationship between truth and
history had brought him to an impasse: the two concepts seemed at once closely
intertwined and sharply opposed.35 But this impasse did not mark the end of his
reflections. Rather it provided the frame for a narrative Derrida constructed of
the history of philosophy that occupied him for the rest of the course. According
to Derrida, over the past three millennia philosophers had tried to bypass these
paradoxes by shoring up the opposition between the two terms. In particular they
had repeatedly put forward an impoverished version of history, declaring that
the empirical, singular, and contingent was what was specifically “historical in
history [l’historique de l’histoire],” while “that which transmits itself, that which
lets itself be transmitted, that is the non-historical, precisely what we have called
truth.”36 They had separated history and truth by claiming “transmission” as the
exclusive property of the latter.37
Yet, Derrida argued, because transmission was essential to history, the attempt
to dissociate the two would always fail. Derrida suggested that even as philoso-
phers tried to separate history and truth, one could pick out traces of history in
their conceptions of truth, traces that threatened the distinction. The repeated fail-
ure to divide truth from history then contributed to an instability in the conception
of truth as it had been formulated in the history of philosophy; one could read the
32. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 2. The French expression also serves as a parental
admonition: “don’t tell me any more lies.”
33. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 6.
34. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 9.
35. Derrida here was also modeling for his students a strategy for writing philosophical essays. He
advised his students that one needed to start at a “concrete and simple level” and from there “lead the
reading into a sort of impasse,” which the rest of the essay would work through. Derrida, “Histoire
et vérité” 8:9, sheet 1.
36. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 6. Derrida suggested that this arose in part because for
the “classical” philosophers, mathematical truth had been “exemplary” of truth in general.
37. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheets 6, 16, 22.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 183
development of the Western tradition as the constantly renewed attempt to purify
truth of an irreducible historical contamination.
Derrida traced the break between truth and history back to a particular
moment in the Platonic corpus. He focused on the Phaedo where Plato described
“Socrates’ disappointment” [la deception de Socrate], a passage that laid the
groundwork for his theory of the Forms.38 Socrates was discussing the question
of the immortality of the soul with Cebes, and so turned to the questions of gen-
eration and corruption, which were studied by natural history (istoria). Socrates
asserted that he had grown tired of such analyses, for they explained nothing.39
The study of causes provided no insight into mathematics (for instance, addition)
and Socrates suggested that it might even undermine that understanding, blinding
the “eye of his soul.”40 For this reason, Socrates declared that he had turned away
from istoria, to focus on the study of the nous (the mind).41 Truth and history had
parted ways.42
But as we can see, in Derrida’s presentation the split was founded upon a
divide between the sensible and the intelligible, which reduced the richness in
the concept “history” by aligning it with the former. Restricting “history” to its
narrow empirical/contingent sense, and casting it as the opposite of truth, which
is always and everywhere the same, it became “that which doesn’t repeat itself,
non-repetition . . . purely empirical diachrony.”43 Further, by the same process,
Plato defined truth as that which brooked no historical influence. It was protected
from any empirical change.
Plato’s assertion of a sharp opposition between the two had important effects.
First, if history was the realm of change and truth was that of the eternally same,
then truth could have no origin within history; it had to “preexist” the world.44
This was the reasoning, according to Derrida, that led Plato to posit the existence
of the Forms. And second, if truth pre-existed the origin of the world, then Plato’s
cosmology, as presented in the Timaeus, could not describe the creation of the
world ex nihilo. Rather it was merely the organization of matter, according to a
preset order.45 Truth preceded the demiurge, God the creator, as well as the world
he created.46 In this understanding, then, the demiurge, finding the Forms already
there, a preexisting structure to which history had to conform, was in the same
position as the philosopher. Both received truth passively. Philosophers resided
in history; the Forms that they sought were beyond it.
38. Plato, Phaedo, 95e-98e. Derrida argued that elsewhere in his work Plato had not opposed truth
to history but rather to becoming/genesis. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 17.
39. See Plato, Phaedo, 96c-e.
40. Plato, Phaedo, 99.
41. In this sense Derrida would suggest that the division between truth and history became the
“avènement” of philosophy, a founding event.
42. Derrida remarked later that, strictly speaking, for Plato “truth” was “the thought of the Eidos,”
and as such was historical too. Only the Eidos (Form) was ahistorical. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité”
8:10, sheet 7. But the distinction between the Eidos and history was a forerunner of that between
history and truth, and fits into Derrida’s broader argument about what we could call the constant
deferring (différance) of the opposition.
43. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheets 21-22.
44. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 22.
45. See Plato, Timaeus 28a.
46. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 23. See also Plato, Timaeus, 459, 27d and 461, 29d.
184 EDWARD BARING

But at the same time, Derrida suggested that Plato was unable to maintain this
rigorous distinction between history and truth. In a passing remark distinguish-
ing Forms and true opinions, Plato suggested that the former were of a different
nature and had a “distinct origin.”47 For Derrida, the admission that the Forms
had an origin implied that they might also have a history, albeit one that could
no longer be thought of as the contingent development that Plato had privileged
in his understanding of the term.48 Already within his text, Derrida argued, Plato
struggled to maintain the opposition upon which his theory of the Forms relied.
For Derrida, this essential instability helped explain developments within the
Western philosophical tradition. As we saw, for Plato’s theory of the Forms, the
philosopher apprehended a preexisting Logos. Accordingly, for Plato, the Eidos
preceded all thought, “it didn’t need to be thought to be.”49 Derrida considered
this claim to be particularly contestable. Though we believe mathematical theo-
rems to be independent of any individual thinker, Derrida argued that they could
not be independent of thought in general, since it was impossible to consider their
existence outside of the mind: perfect triangles cannot be found in the real world.
As he asserted: “The theorem does not exist, it isn’t valid, except insofar as it
is thought—it is only valid for thought. This doesn’t mean that it is relative—in
the empirical and relativist sense of the word—to the subjectivity that thinks it.
It means simply that it is only valid for thought in general. . . . It is necessary,
certainly, and universal, but only for thought.”50 The argument posed a significant
problem to the Platonic system: one could not simultaneously declare the Forms
to be ahistorical and restrict thought to history. One of the two premises would
have to give way.
This was why, according to Derrida, the inheritors of Plato’s philosophy were
particularly receptive to new ideas arising within Christianity. Of course the laws
of mathematics were independent of all finite human thought. After all, we could
not bend mathematical theorems to our will. But Christianity posited the exis-
tence of a form of thought that was infinite and ahistorical, thus adequate to the
Forms themselves. In the Christian period, divine thought grounded mathematical
truths; it allowed the idea of a positive infinite that was, according to Derrida,
“unthinkable” for the classical philosopher.51 This newly conceived, all-powerful
deity thus was not subservient to mathematics in the way the Platonic demiurge
had been.52 The ordering of the Platonic demiurge was replaced by the creation
ex nihilo of the Christian God. And because mathematical truths were founded in
the mind of God, the ahistoricity of truth could no longer be, as it had been for
the Greeks, “transcendence with respect to thought.” Instead, it was defined as
“transcendence with respect to finitude.”53

47. Plato, Timaeus 51e. See also 53bcd.

48. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:9, sheet 24.
49. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 3.
50. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 4.
51. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 2. Though one might suggest that it paralleled the
deeper history of truth to which Plato had alluded.
52. Derrida argued that this priority of God remained even across the various positions in the
scholastic debates about whether God chose to bind himself by mathematical laws.
53. Thus, as Derrida noted, the realm of ideas in St. Augustine’s thought, in contradistinction to
Plato’s, relied on the understanding of God. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 5.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 185
The Christian reformulation of the opposition between “truth” and “history”
refigured the place of “thought” to confront the problems faced by Plato’s sys-
tem. Yet, according to Derrida, that reformulation too remained unstable. For if
truth were dependent upon thought, even divine thought, this suggested that it
might have an origin and its own particular historicity. As Derrida wrote, “if the
infinity of the subject still inhibits and represses the theme of historicity, never-
theless, the fact of recognizing that there is only truth for a subject and thought,
that is a step toward the liberation of this theme of historicity.”54 Truth found its
origin in the mind of God, and this suggested that mathematics might have its
own (divine) history.
So both attempts to separate truth from history—the Platonic and the Chris-
tian—had hinted at a deeper history within truth, a history of truth, that would
not simply be empirical development. Classical and Christian thinkers had been
compelled to make reference to the conceptual richness in the term “history” that,
by claiming transmission solely for truth, they had previously tried to expunge.
This return of a deeper form of history—even if it appeared only in the margins
of philosophical texts—drove the constant reformulation and displacement of the
opposition between truth and history over the course of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition. From Plato’s opposition between the Forms and the world, through
the Christian opposition between divine and human thought, by way of Leibniz’s
truths of reason versus truths of fact, up to the mathematical certainty of pure
synthesis opposed to empirical intuition in Kant, the dividing line between truth
and history was always moving, constantly renegotiated in new contexts.
Derrida’s narrative brought him back to Hegel, with whom he had begun. As
we saw, by drawing on the polyvalence of the word “history” and salvaging it
from its reduced meaning, Hegel had been able to rescue history from the con-
descension of previous philosophers. Since truth, according to the tradition that
Derrida had outlined, required an appeal to the infinite and Hegel was adamant
that truth had to be historical, he needed to find a way to insert the infinite into
history: “it was necessary that the infinite be history, that is, an unthinkable thing
for a classical philosopher, that God should give birth to himself, should have
determined himself, limited himself, finish himself [se finisse], finitize himself
[se finitesse], to be what he is.”55
For Derrida, Hegel was able to achieve this by overcoming the distinction
between the finitude and infinitude in Geist [Spirit]: “the finite passes essentially
into the infinite and the infinite into the finite and this passage is essential and
it is the history of truth and the truth of history.” Hegel understood this inter-
relation by ceasing to think of finite spirit as static and absolutely constrained
by its limits: “finitude is not opposed to the infinite, it is the thought of its limit
as passage beyond that limit. The limit can only appear in being transgressed.”56
Thus the finite remained finite, because it had limits, but it also was able to
move beyond any particular limit. This movement, the “disquiet of the infinite
[inquiétude de l’infini],” simultaneously underwrote the thought of truth and

54. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 9.

55. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 10.
56. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 12.
186 EDWARD BARING

drove history.57 Hegel’s innovation had real advantages for conceptualizing the
history of philosophy. As he understood it, “on the one hand, all philosophies are
the manifestations of the same infinite Idea, but at the same time, each moment
of philosophical discourse is indispensable as that which enriches and deepens
the idea and certitude of truth.”58 The historical becoming of philosophy was
essential to it.
But Hegel’s account was not fully satisfying for Derrida. As Derrida remarked,
“It remains for us to ask if the Hegelian reconciliation of history and truth in
the disquiet [inquiétude] of the infinite Idea, if this reconciliation, despite the
immense and extraordinary revolution that it accomplishes in classical thought,
is not simultaneously the most powerful and subtle way to hide the truth of his-
tory [dérober la vérité de l’histoire].”59 For the “disquiet of the infinite” was not
in Hegel’s eyes infinite.60 Though detaching it from what he considered vulgar
interpretations, Derrida focused his discussion on the Hegelian idea of the end
of History, the possibility of a final correspondence [adéquation] of truth and
history. Because this marked a “positive” infinite, rather than a “false” or “bad”
infinity, Derrida suggested that “Hegel cannot but make history and movement
secondary . . . ; thus at the limit, an eschatology constitutes history.” For Hegel,
the movement of history is reduced once philosophy reaches true self-knowledge.
The final philosophy becomes, in a sense, timeless. For all the progress Hegel
had made over previous thinkers, he had ultimately, like them, given priority to
truth over history.
At the very end of his lecture course, Derrida turned to Heidegger and the text
“On the Essence of Truth.” The essay seemed productive for Derrida’s purposes,
because it too had historicized truth.61 For Heidegger, the elaboration of the his-
tory of the concept of truth must precede any determination of truth as either exte-
rior to history or conditioned by empirical history, because it is only by knowing
what history and truth meant that one could determine their relationship.62 It was
precisely this history that Derrida had detailed in his course, a history of truth
that tracked the changing relationship between history and truth within the philo-
sophical tradition.
In the text “The Essence of Truth,” Heidegger outlined two ideas of truth.63
For instance, the term “true gold” suggests that reality matches up to what we
expect from it (the metal we are looking at really is gold). Conversely, we might
57. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 13. Cf. other moments when Derrida refers to this
“inquiétude,” in “Cogito et l’histoire de folie,” 94 and Derrida’s “introduction” to Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry, section XI, and “Cogito et l’histoire de folie” and “Violence et métaphysique,” in Jacques
Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967), 94 and 189-191.
58. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 16. Here Derrida referred to the 56th section of Hegel’s
Encyclopedia.
59. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 16.
60. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 17.
61. See also the longer version taken from Heidegger’s courses: Martin Heidegger, The Essence
of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, transl. T. Sadler (New York: Continuum), 5.
Compare Derrida’s with Heidegger’s account of the move from Platonic to Christian thought, 52.
62. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 19.
63. The French translation reads “la chose est en accord avec ce qu’elle est estimée être.” Hei-
degger, De l’essence de la vérité, transl. A. de Waelhens (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948), 69. In German it reads,
“die Sache stimmt.”
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 187
define truth to be when a proposition matches up to reality.64 Truth could mean
either “the correspondence of the matter to knowledge” or the “correspondence
of knowledge to matter.” But of the two sides of the correspondence, one had
priority. Traditionally, Heidegger argued, it has been seen as more incumbent on
the knower to mold his or her knowledge to the state of affairs, than it is to mold
that state of affairs to knowledge.
Heidegger explained this “nonreciprocity” by showing that both ideas of truth
were derivative of the scholastic definition of truth as “adaequatio rei et intel-
lectus.” As Derrida wrote, this context implied a “theological and even creational
determination of the conception of truth as correspondence [adéquation].”65 The
nonreciprocity was “theological” because “veritas as adaequatio rei ad intellec-
tum” (true gold) implied that the matter corresponded to the idea “preconceived
in the intellectus divinus.”66 But this understanding also marked the second form
of truth: correspondence of knowledge to matter. Human propositions always had
to measure themselves against the fixed certainty of an underlying truth: truth
in the mind of God. Indeed, only the existence of the idea in the mind of God
permitted absolute correspondence between our idea and reality. For the divine
mind transformed the comparison of two heterogeneous elements [intellectus
and res], into the comparison of similar elements [intellectus humani, intellectus
divinum].67 Outside of this theological understanding, the very idea of complete
correspondence did not make sense. How can a proposition be fully adequate to
a thing?
One could not, Derrida said, simply “kill God” to escape from this theological
understanding of truth.68 Rather, one had to reveal the presuppositions at work
and recognize this concept of truth as a historical determination. Heidegger went
further, seeking to uncover beyond this theological determination of truth, a non-
infinitist notion of correspondence: in Greek οµοίωσις [homoiosis].69 Homoiosis
emphasized a likeness between a statement and a matter, without asserting the
identity of the two. So in this notion of correspondence that does not rely on
the idea of an infinite mind, we are left with a sense of a difference in the heart
of truth, the difference between proposition and thing that undergirds both the
possibility of correspondence and the impossibility thereof. As Derrida argued,
using Heidegger’s example of a coin [pièce], although a coin might be made out
of metal and be round, a statement [énoncé] about it is neither metallic nor round.
For this reason, the question arises as to how the statement could ever be adequate
to the coin. Derrida answered: “it is necessary that the statement remains what

64. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 117.

65. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 22. This theological nonreciprocity is maintained,
according to Derrida, even in otherwise atheistic philosophies.
66. Heidgger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 118.
67. See ibid., or Heidegger, De l’essence de la verité, 71.
68. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 24.
69. Heidegger made clear that this is “not the oldest” tradition of thinking. It is significant that
Derrida ignores Heidegger’s designation of truth as aletheia. Indeed his explication de texte stops at
the end of the second section of Heidegger’s essay. Derrida’s silence on what many scholars see as
Heidegger’s central argument here indicates a tacit criticism that would be worked out more fully
later in Of Grammatology. It also indicates the ways in which, at this early stage, Derrida cannot be
read simply as a Heideggerian.
188 EDWARD BARING

it is or becomes what it is or must be, that is, different [étranger] from the coin,
fundamentally heterogeneous from the coin, in order to have the chance of being
true, that’s to say, adequate to the other, to the thing. This difference is the condi-
tion of correspondence [adéquation] as truth.”70 Further, this difference, which
was not “one difference among others,” refused, in contradistinction to Hegel’s
dialectic, any final Aufhebung; it was irreducible. The appeal to truth as homoio-
sis did not entail the end of history.

WRITING HISTORY I

Derrida’s emphasis on history in this early course sheds new light on the vexed
question of his impact on the discipline. His argument engaged with the dual
aversions—to both an ahistorical and a fully historicized truth—that I suggested
marked the history of philosophy in France at the time. In his readings of Plato,
Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, Derrida constantly reaffirmed
the priority of history. He directed his criticism primarily at those philosophers
whose work was guided by the ideal of a timeless truth. Yet this did not mean
that he endorsed a historicist position. Given the institutional position of the his-
tory of philosophy in France, Derrida did not want to claim that all thought was
ultimately dependent upon its moment of origin. Rather his goal was to reassert
the importance of the historical study of philosophy for students who might have
been inclined to dismiss it. He wanted to present the history of philosophy as a
form of philosophy. He achieved this by distancing “history” from its traditional
meaning as the purely empirical and contingent: a form of history that historians
today remain loath to give absolute priority.71 Derrida’s expanded concept of his-
tory comprised the transmission necessary for history as récit, and thus provided
the means for understanding how something like the stability and continuity
attributed to truth might arise. In other words, according to Derrida’s presentation
of history, historicization was no longer a gesture of philosophical delegitima-
tion, and history could not necessarily be seen as the antipode to truth. And, of
particular importance to intellectual historians, he provided an understanding of
truth that would be available for historical inspection and explanation.
In this way, and despite the obvious disciplinary differences, Derrida’s early
lectures on “History and Truth” have clear resonances with historical study. Der-
rida privileged historical change over timeless truth, refused teleology as being
essentially ahistorical, and urged us to be receptive to complexity in the past.
Moreover, the instability that Derrida hoped to reinject into past texts was not
opposed to history. Instead this instability powered historical change. Derrida’s
early thought, then, can be seen as a legitimization of historical study even of
those areas that have traditionally most resisted historical modes of understanding.

70. Derrida, “Histoire et vérité” 8:10, sheet 25. See Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 121.
71. In other ways Derrida is more radical, because he overcomes the skepticism of historicism
to which he was always opposed by engaging in a thoroughgoing reformulation of the conceptual
structure he considered to be common to logocentric philosophy and historicism.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 189
This proto-form of deconstruction also aids us in thinking about the practice of
intellectual history.72 In this earlier stage of his writing, as later, Derrida refused
the complete subsumption of a text into the broader historical totality in which
it first emerged. Derrida reserved his sharpest rebuke for Foucault, when he
suspected him of falling into this trap.73 Because historicity, for Derrida, arose
through the recognition of the limits set by any particular historical moment or
philosophical tradition, important texts, and by implication texts worth studying,
were engaged in a contestatory relationship with their context. By drawing out
and developing marginalized strands of a contested contextual space, texts could
challenge the dominant presuppositions of that context; filiation could also be
critique.
For this reason, historical change could not be seen as the emergence of a new
paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, what Derrida would later class as the attempt “to
change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive manner.”74 Nor need it be con-
sidered as a change within a particular paradigm, which would merely develop
the implicit potential of an already established philosophical system. Both these
models rely on a conception of philosophy as stable and internally coherent that
Derrida had tried to counter in his lectures on “history and truth.” Rather we
could uncover and help explain historical development by using a text to fore-
ground latent tensions within the texts or contexts with which it was engaged, and
by showing how it could thus promote a thoroughgoing transformation of their
philosophical premises. In the example Derrida elaborated in his course, he used
the Christian reformulation of the idea of creation to identify tensions inherent in
the Platonic theory of Forms, and explain the philosophical attraction of an infi-
nite mind. Here a deconstructive reading of a particular historical development
reveals new ways of figuring the relationship between texts that might otherwise
seem opposed and different.

WRITING HISTORY II

Derrida’s lectures on “History and Truth” represent an early stage of his thought.
They were written quickly for a student audience and were never published. We
might then be tempted to disregard them when considering the impact of Der-
rida’s thought on the discipline of history. The lectures, however, are instructive
because they foreshadow the strategies of Derrida’s more canonical texts.
First, in the course of Derrida’s meditations on history and truth he coined
much of his most recognizable philosophical vocabulary. The 1964 lecture course
on “History and Truth” contains, to the best of my knowledge, Derrida’s first use

72. Many of these considerations are valid for the more canonical forms of deconstruction. See
Derrida’s description of arche-writing in Of Grammatology, 62. They also resemble Dominick
LaCapra’s claims about the contested nature of contexts. See, in particular, his searching criticism
of Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna, in Dominick LaCapra, “Reading
Exemplars: Wittgenstein’s Vienna and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Rethinking Intellectual History:
Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). LaCapra’s most influential
discussion of this question is his “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” first published
in History and Theory 19, no. 3 (1980), 245-276.
73. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 88.
74. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 135.
190 EDWARD BARING

of the word “différance.” Though, as I have shown elsewhere, we cannot simply

identify “différance” in Derrida’s early work with its later appearances, his argu-
ment here is informative.75 Explaining Hegel’s presentation of the relationship
between the finite and the infinite, Derrida suggested that “history” was “the
difference between limited and unlimited, a non-historical difference, différance
as movement (with an a).”76 The appeal to a form of différance allowed Hegel to
bring the infinite into history, and thus respect both the truth claims of philosophy
and its historical development. Further, in a course given the following year on
history in Heidegger’s philosophy, Derrida first used something like the phrase
“metaphysics of presence.” Derrida described the “metaphysics of the living
present [présent vivant]” as the attempt to withdraw ideas and truth from history.
This metaphysics encouraged the sharp distinction between truth and history that
he had analyzed in his earlier course.77 But according to Derrida, because truth,
the only truth that we can access, only ever appeared within history, the sugges-
tion that it was timeless and held in an atemporal present was unjustifiable.
Second, the course “History of Truth” prefigures the structures and argumenta-
tive gestures of Derrida’s later more canonical deconstruction. In the “Of Gram-
matology” articles, published over the winter of 1965–66, Derrida proposed to
recuperate “writing” in order to challenge the conceptual opposition between
speech and writing that had, he thought, always been active in the Western philo-
sophical tradition.78 Reading philosophical texts that instantiated this division,
Derrida worked to find traces of a more profound writing at the heart of speech.79
This more profound writing, an “arche-writing” marked by the movement of dif-
férance, would show itself robust enough to explain the characteristics tradition-
ally attributed to speech.80
As elaborated in Of Grammatology, arche-writing is both the instability due
to the lack of a transcendental signified that would secure meaning, and that
which allows tradition over time. Indeed, the two aspects of writing were related:
because writing is free from a transcendental signified, because it is untethered,

75. See my The Young Derrida and French Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), chapter 6.
76. Derrida marks the distance between his thought and Hegel’s only after introducing the new
word. At this stage, différance could apply both to Hegelian and Derridean thought; it does not yet
define the difference between the two. After “History and Truth,” the term virtually disappears from
Derrida’s courses until March 1966, the same time as the “Freud et la scène de l’écriture” talk, where
it plays an important role. It is in fact, to my knowledge, used only once in between, and that directly
after “Histoire et Vérité.” In the notes of a single séance of “Le visible et l’invisible,” on May 15,
1964, Derrida seems to have corrected the word “différent,” and, as was his later revisionary practice,
made it “différant.” The point in question is the relationship between the vue and vie, two terms that
seem to be equally extensive, but also different. At the very end of the course, written on the corner
of the page, is a small pencil note, stating simply “vue et difference,” Irvine Special Collections and
Archives, Jacques Derrida papers (MS- C001), Box 8 Folder 11. There is no explanation.
77. “Heidegger et la question de l’histoire,” Irvine Special Collections and Archives, Jacques
Derrida papers (MS- C001) Box 9 Folder 2, lecture, February 8, 1965, sheet 60. The “metaphysics of
presence” then was first opposed to the historical. Later the metaphysics of presence would be rede-
ployed in the voice/writing deconstruction for which Derrida is most famous. The voice purported to
be immediately present to its meaning, whereas writing was constituted by the deferral (différance)
of meaning.
78. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 30-44.
79. See, for example, ibid., 44-65.
80. See especially ibid., 56-57.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 191
it can do without its author and we can read it in other times and other places
(where the author is no longer present). As change and tradition, arche-writing
is reminiscent of the history, as Geschichte and Historie, that Derrida had for-
mulated in his early course.81 For the same reasons that Derrida coined the term
“arche-writing,” one might name the more profound history, a history of truth
that Derrida unveiled within the history of philosophy, “arche-history.”
Not only does this “arche-history” share traits with “arche-writing,” but the
deconstruction needed to uncover it follows that laid out in Of Grammatology.
To approach this “arche-history,” Derrida read the texts from the history of phi-
losophy in order to uncover a form of history at work in what previous thinkers
had labeled “truth.” This (like writing in Of Grammatology) was the most effec-
tive weapon against the “metaphysics of presence.”82 But once Derrida had chal-
lenged the “metaphysics of presence” and the stark polarization between history
and truth that he thought had always been founded upon it, he was able to enrich
the concept of history (in this case reasserting history as transmission) such that
it could account for those qualities previously only attributed to “truth.”83 The
course “History and Truth” then provides us with a deconstruction avant la lettre,
focusing on a conceptual opposition (history and truth) that would come to be
displaced into another discourse (writing and speech), but whose traces would
remain visible there.
The chronological precedence of history and truth over writing and speech
in Derrida’s philosophy, and the structural parallel between the two, allow us
to translate Derrida’s earlier claims about truth and history into the language of
his more canonical deconstructions and vice-versa. For instance, following the
schema we have just laid out, we might reread Derrida’s famous catchphrase
“il n’y a pas de hors-texte [there is nothing outside the text]” as something far
more amenable to historians (and a little less sensational): perhaps something
like “nothing escapes history.”84 In extending this translation project further, we
might well find new resources in Derrida’s work for developing historical meth-
odologies, and come to understand why deconstruction has been so appealing to
some historians.
But, if we are to take this early stage of Derrida’s thought seriously, we have
to confront the fact that, whatever the formal parallels, the proto-deconstruction
of history and truth is not precisely the same thing as the later deconstruction of
speech and writing. From the mid-1960s Derrida became increasingly skeptical
about history even in its polyvalent form. In his revisions to his earlier articles
for the collection Writing and Difference, Derrida added short notes that qualified
81. In his later course, “Heidegger et la question de l’histoire,” Derrida discusses the connection
in Heidegger’s thought between the idea of a “history of Being” and the importance of language.
Language is the “guardian of Being,” and language itself is historical, so Being must have a history
too. For this reason, in Derrida’s reading, the emphasis on language facilitates Heidegger’s movement
from a concentration on the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein (Being and Time) to the Geschichtlichkeit of
Sein in his postwar writings. See also Derrida, Of Grammatology, 27, where Derrida writes: “historic-
ity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general . . . writing opens
the field of history.”
82. See the centrality of the notion of “strategy” in Of Grammatology, 39 and 142.
83. See ibid., 27-28.
84. See ibid., 158.
192 EDWARD BARING

earlier references. For instance, having questioned Levinas’s attempt to locate the
“Other” outside of history, Derrida added the following passage: “Our own refer-
ence to history here is only contextual. The economy of which we are speaking
does not any longer accommodate the concept of history such as it has always
functioned and which is difficult, if not impossible, to lift from its teleological
or eschatological horizon.”85 Two pages later, having made reference to “a more
profound history,” Derrida in 1967 added another sentence, suggesting that this
history “might have to change its name.”86
There are two processes at work here. First, it is clear that history is being
reinterpreted in its metaphysical sense, in part in response to the Marxist history
then popular at the ENS. The history that Derrida rejects in the late 1960s is not
identical with the history that he embraced earlier in the decade, and he is less
concerned than before to resist its subsumption under “metaphysical” categories.
History has become “the unity of a becoming, as the tradition of truth or the
development of science or knowledge oriented towards the appropriation of truth
in presence and self-presence.”87 For Derrida, rather than opening it up, history
now curbs the play of différance, by enclosing it within linear paths that lead
inexorably from one event or toward another. In this later work Derrida would
rather have history as a convenient adversary than an unruly friend.
But it is also clear that Derrida, by 1967, had become more critical of his
earlier ideas. In the proto-deconstruction of truth and history, the close reading
of a philosophical work would become a privileged way to reveal the tensions
and contesting strands of the tradition from which it arose.88 Just as Derrida was
able to point to tensions within the Platonic system by looking at its reformula-
tion in Christian thought, the historian of philosophy could recognize repressed
moments in a tradition to the extent that they were worked out and developed
subsequently. In this way the actual development of philosophical ideas would
act as a guardrail against the excessive freedom of interpretation so often
bemoaned in “postmodern” accounts.
In Of Grammatology and later texts, Derrida emphasized the play within a
signifying system rather than the movement beyond any determined totality.
Consequently, conceptual instability might not be expressed historically by con-
ceptual change. After all, the history of metaphysics for him had shown great per-
sistence in its repression of writing. From this perspective, the conflicting strands
at work within one philosophical system that a deconstructive reading could
uncover did not necessarily have to play out in the historical record. It was left
to the philosopher or the student of literature, rather than the historian, to reread
texts and draw out the unsaid, the implied, and to reveal the possibility of a path
that history did not take.89 Such a shifting of the deconstructive project rendered

85. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 148. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 220.
86. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 222. See also the addition on 260, and in Derrida, De la
grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 127.
87. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 291.
88. See Dominick LaCapra’s 1995 article “Language and Reading: Waiting for Crillon,” American
Historical Review 100, no. 3 (1995), especially 811-819. But see also his parenthetical remarks about
deconstruction and dialogical reading, 824.
89. Of course, an appreciation of these repressed moments is also valuable for recognizing the
contingency of particular historical developments.
 NE ME RACONTE PLUS D’HISTOIRES 193
historical accounts of philosophy themselves suspect. A narrative in intellectual
history, rather than being the recognition that no philosophical system is entirely
stable, would now be an attempt to constrain that instability within a fixed path
of conceptual development.
Despite this seeming opposition between deconstruction and history, it is pos-
sible to read Derrida’s mature work as the radicalization of the central historical
principle that had animated his earlier course. The opposition between a changing
Geschichte and a stable and definitive Historie, as asserted by many historians,
might be interpreted as the latest instantiation of the old metaphysical opposition
between history and truth, with truth winning out once again. In this model, His-
torie as a science would be able to construct narratives that, as faithful accounts
of the past, would not themselves be subject to the change and development
attributed to Geschichte. That is to say that, whatever the claims of historiography
and whatever the reality of historical revision, the search for definitive historical
narratives structured by the belief in an extra-discursive historical reality would
be a search for a way out of history. One might imagine Derrida pleading, “ne
me raconte plus d’histoires.”
Deconstruction would then fascinate and frighten historians because it diag-
noses the ways in which in order to write history they have to break their own
laws, seeking a truth (about the past) that is immune to the forces of history.
Historians are sensitive to the deconstructive criticism of history because it is
eerily familiar. The appropriate response to this criticism is not, however, to
leave history behind. Derrida did not think one can simply escape metaphysics,
and he routinely criticized his contemporaries for believing that they had done
so.90 Without a secure place to stand outside of metaphysics, all one can do is
work through the problems and tensions inherent in any methodological system,
without trying to paper over or ignore them. This is why Derrida’s work remains
a valuable resource for historians, those who study intellectual history and those
who do not. For in reading Derrida’s texts we can face up to the ghosts that haunt
historical writing and which, despite the best efforts of the discipline, can never
be fully exorcised.

Drew University

90. See especially Derrida’s criticisms of structuralism in the closing pages of “The Ends of Man”
in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.