Derrida's House of Mirrors

I must admit that I am exceedingly proud of myself for having finished this excerpt from "Of Grammatology." At the same time, I must confess that I had first attempted to read Lacan-- unsuccessfully. So I suppose this qualifies my triumph. Ha.

In any case, I found Derrida challenging but also fascinating. I had an elementary understanding of deconstruction, and it proved helpful as I navigated his text. His theory tears apart the concept of "logocentrism," which includes not only words but also reason and central truths. I found his arguments and illustrations clever, and I thought his wordplay was entertaining, to say the least.

However, from my perspective, portions of his text-- especially his justifications-- seemed linked together with non sequitors. I simply couldn't understand in some cases how the beginning of the paragraph was linked to Derrida's conclusion at its end. It's very possible that I didn't entirely understand his description, but it's also possible that his reasons for defending deconstruction are false.

When Derrida goes about his deconstruction, he reveals what he calls "an abyss," a hall of endless mirrors, "an indefinitely multiplied structure." He then states that this scenario demonstrates how the text (and I suppose reality, if he believes in it) reveals the nonexistence of metaphysics, including truth.

I could see from whom postmodernism inherited its dislike of metanarratives and its declaration that truth does not exist.

Now here is my question: How does Derrida distinguish between those "central truths" which he claims do not exist and the truth of what he's explaining on these pages? Have I failed to see an invisible line here? To state that metaphysics have deconstructed-- or that they do not exist-- contradicts one's statement. If one claims that truth does not exist, then he or she is claiming a truth. Honestly, I am curious about the diehard deconstructionists' objection to this.

In addition, I had expected various elements of popular postmodernism to appear somewhere in Derrida's text, and their absence surprised me. I anticipated some kind of overlap between his work and the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. Instead, Derrida focuses on looking into the text to see how it deconstructs its surface meaning. He does not even consider outside voices, and he has little concern for the metaphysics of multiple social voices. In other words, no semblances of heteroglossia exist for Derrida.

Perhaps I'm a heretic, but I thought Derrida's exclusive focus on the text, its multiple iterations of substitions, and its ability to undermine metaphysics more closely resembled the Formalists, namely Wimsatt and Beardsley. Derrida does not focus on the author, and he does not focus on the reader. It seems to me that deconstruction is the logical continuation of the Formalists' thought, not necessarily an anti-modernism.