Décalage and Narrative Identity: An Approach from Pêcheux and Derrida

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the limits and possibilities of the constitution of subjectivity and its narrative meaning in Michel Pêcheux from a comparison of the notions of décalage, interdiscourse and hetero-constitution with certain Derridean ideas. Pêcheux (1975) develops the concept of interdiscourse by investigating its relationship with discursive formations and the way in which they “hold” the subject, constituting it through a series of subtractions/forgettings that, far from vanishing, are the paradoxical condition of possibility of a kind of memorial montage; memory that ultimately depends on an archive that inscribes traces on the surfaces of meaning (corporeal-biographical but especially social). Both the Pecheutian décalage and the Derridean différance can be thought of as that dynamic instance that, in its differing, in turn enables and disables any archive and, therefore, any event (biographical or not). It is from this “bad” differentiating archive, from this auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic enunciative scene, that we can consider whether or not it is viable to think about the narrativity of a life and what ontological, subjective and discursive implications are played there.