Derrida and the Phenomenology of Technology

Derrida was long regarded primarily as a philosopher of language or deconstructor of other philosophical and literary texts. Closer examination of his writings reveals that his oeuvre of almost a hundred published works also contains countless examples of philosophical reflections on technology. This chapter seeks to illuminate the way in which technology appears in his writings. It offers an overview of the basic features of a deconstructive phenomenology of technology that extends the concept of technology to encompass the entire phenomenological field: the technological here is not the opposite term of the psychical but constitutes, rather, a close relation between two analogous apparatuses: the psychical and the non-psychical. I argue that Derrida’s understanding of technology in this way was the gradual result of his deep engagement with Edmund Husserl’s writings. Derrida’s “definition” of technology clearly does not accord with Martin Heidegger’s thesis of a sharp line of demarcation between thinking about essence and technology itself. Although Derrida acknowledges Heidegger as one of the first philosophers to carry out a fundamental enquiry into the great question concerning technology, he identifies serious problems in his later writings in particular.