Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher of Jewish descent, considered the first to develop "deconstruction" after it emerged in the work of Martin Heidegger.

Work

Derrida's earliest work was in phenomenology. His earliest academic manuscript for a degree was a work on Edmund Husserl and "genesis", submitted in 1954 and much later published as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Phenomenology. In 1962 he published a translation of Husserl's Foundations of Geometry, for which he wrote a lengthy introduction entitled "The Origin of Geometry". At Johns Hopkins University in 1966, he met and subsequently befriended Paul de Man. Derrida's presentation at a Johns Hopkins conference on The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (the "human sciences" being a broad grouping of French academic studies including linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis). The conference was billed as a consideration of structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France but only then becoming familiar to academic audiences in the United States, particularly departments of French and Comparative Literature, where faculty were least dependent on the lengthy process of translating monographs. It drew considerable French participation, including Jean Hyppolite, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, the latter of whom Derrida met for the first time. Derrida was remarkable among invitees in that he never had orthodox commitments to structuralism and had offered papers critical of structuralist scholarship as early as 1963. Derrida's lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was also written with words of praise for structuralist accomplishment and reservations about its internal limitations. This contributed to a sense that the labours of structuralism had moved on to a point where structuralism wasn't itself anymore, supporting subsequent declaration that many of the same people who had contributed to structuralism were now rather producing "post-structuralism" (although that term has much more a term of reception than structuralism) ? by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection became The Structuralist Controversy.

Related Topics:
Phenomenology - Edmund Husserl - 1962 - Johns Hopkins University - 1966 - Paul de Man - Linguistics - Anthropology - Psychoanalysis - Structuralism - United States - Jean Hyppolite - Roland Barthes - Jacques Lacan - 1963 - Post-structuralism

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Labels aside, Derrida's work consistently demonstrated an interest in all the disciplines under discussion at the Baltimore conference, as was evidenced by the subject matter of the three collections of work published in 1967, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, which contained essay-length studies of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ferdinand de Saussure, Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger, Hegel, Foucault, Georges Bataille and Descartes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, and writers such as Edmond Jabes and Antonin Artaud. The next five years of lectures and essay-length work were gathered into two 1972 collections, Dissemination and Margins of Philosophy, at which time a collection of interviews titled Positions was also released. Thereafter and continuing until his illness Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. He was said to have released more work in 2003 than in any other year. He was so prolific that there is no current bibliography of his work that might be firmly described as complete.

Related Topics:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Ferdinand de Saussure - Husserl - Levinas - Heidegger - Hegel - Foucault - Georges Bataille - Descartes - Claude Lévi-Strauss - Sigmund Freud - Edmond Jabes - Antonin Artaud

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Apart from his interest in disciplines bordering philosophy, Derrida frequently commented on another set of borders mostly avoided by philosophy in the past century : nations, "national traditions", and national languages. Derrida noted in the "Ends of Man" that his ability to remark freely on the Vietnam War was a prerequisite to his attendance at American colloquia -- an exception underscoring the national rule. Not out of diplomatic concerns about offending the American "delegation", but because the democratic form (Derrida's emphasis and choice of words) of the event assumed an instability of these national identities, or rather non-identities, and it is with those Americans opposed to the war that Derrida wanted to state his solidarity, to assert that these so-called identities, frequently assumed, do not exist in fact. (The events of April and May 1968: commencement of the Paris peace talks, the 1968 American election, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the later events of May 1968, particularly in Paris, led Derrida to mark off "democratic form", a certain obtuseness of governments to these phenomena.)

Related Topics:
1968 American election - Martin Luther King

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Derrida also discerned in the exceptional internationalism of the Hopkins conference (perceived as an exposition of French goods to new academic markets) "less a fact than a project" ("Ends of Man", p. 112) and took it up as such. His seminar was devoted to the subject of philosophical nationalism from 1984 to 1988.

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As with any philosopher, and in keeping with Derrida's cautious, highly respectful relationship with the philosophical corpus, Derrida's work would be ill-served by condensing it into a small number of themes. As mentioned above, the term deconstruction serves as a translation of the term Destruktion which Heidegger deploys extensively in Being and Time. Derrida noted that the relation to the Heideggerean term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition", as Derrida shared with Heidegger an interest in renovating philosophy to allow it to treat increasingly fundamental matters, an interest that demands perseverant efforts to reinterpret the tradition. Derrida's deployment of Freud was also crucial in respect of this interpretive initiative. Psychoanalysis was seminal for Derrida, particularly in connection with Heidegger. While Heidegger passes through Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides, and finds their work wanting where the question of Being is concerned, Derrida prefers to mine the heterogenous nature of their works, applying Freud to the distinctions made and dishonored in the attempts of philosophers (including Heidegger) to summarize and make sense of their own works as philosophy, the problems recognized but then set aside as non-philosophical or non-serious.

Related Topics:
Being and Time - Freud - Nietzsche - Hegel - Kant - Descartes - Aquinas - Aristotle - Plato - Parmenides

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Deconstruction and literary criticism

Though Derrida's work cannot be condensed too quickly, a reader can recognize that the problems of inheritance, tradition, and invention occur throughout. Derrida's ?uvre is said by its champions to consist entirely of meticulous readings (of texts, whether apparently philosophical or not), which find philosophy anew.

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Derrida's practice of reading raises the question of the relationship between deconstruction and literary theory. Schematically put, the interest in deconstruction shown by many of its literary students takes deconstruction to be a method, a hermeneutic for reading in general.

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Further, deconstruction's sensitivities to philosophical efforts at defining limits have been taken by some to imply a deconstructive agenda for the ultimate reversal of order. This agenda would cover: philosophy's claim to be the first of all academic disciplines; holding out hopes of uniting all; delineating what is proper to each as they remain apart; and expelling from itself non-philosophy (via judgements which irreducibly take part in violence and hinge on matters of interpretation made through language). This has been seen as the privilege of the non-serious and the literary over a humbled philosophy.

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Some of Derrida's critics (among them Richard Wolin, Thomas Sheehan, and John Searle, the last of whom is discussed below) have opted for this characterization. They have popularized an account of deconstruction as a radical and dangerous relativism.

Related Topics:
Richard Wolin - Thomas Sheehan - John Searle - Relativism

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A more nuanced view emerges in Derrida's readings of Kant, particularly "Conflict of the Faculties" and his essays on the "program" (though this word is unsatisfactory) of CIPH ("Titles" and "Sendoffs").

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Derrida, on the other hand, maintained a practise of literary criticism that is almost certainly indispensable to deconstruction.

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System and aporia

Derrida received the 2001 Adorno Prize, named after Theodor Adorno. In accepting this award, Derrida noted both differences and affinities with Adorno. Their treatment of aporia was noted as an affinity. Aporia comes from the Greek ?????? (from ?-?????) meaning "the impassable". The aporetic was a recurring structure for Derrida: Derrida strived to render as determinate as possible an interpretation, finding a series of "undecidable" decisions between a series of determinate constructions of interpretations. These passages through impossible decisions are unavoidable, according to Derrida, and potentially lead to a model of responsibility. This is not "boutique multiculturalism"; there is no safety rail of respect for others that provides any kind of guarantee. This is also philosophy's hope, its chance, the opening onto the future. This matter is outlined in "Nietzsche and the Machine" (with Richard Beardsworth, in Negotiations, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg). In his "Circumfession" he beholds a philosophical fantasy of an easier way:

Related Topics:
Theodor Adorno - Aporia

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: "From the invisible inside, where I could neither see nor want the very thing I have always been scared to have revealed on the scanner, by 'analysis' — radiology, echography, endocrinology, hematology — a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once stored in that bottle under a label that I doubted could avoid confusion or misappropriation of the vintage, leaving me nothing more to do, the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside, 'expressing' itself before my eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the pen to the syringe, and I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the inscribable. playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the right vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives itself up, and you can do as you like with it, it's me but I'm no longer there..." (Derrida, pp, 10–12)

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In Derrida's view, the system-dream of philosophy is a promise on which it cannot deliver. Philosophy would like to deliver its complete system, here and now: its absolute work made manifest to its reader, the end of philosophy being the end of philosophy. Heidegger speaks of a return to the most ancient origins of thought, to the first questions before the divisions of thought into logic and ethics as the future of philosophy, as a matter of giving philosophy a future, but we might expect this philosophy to be a brief, Heidegger's Rapture before all is resolved.

Related Topics:
Logic - Ethics

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Relationship to Heidegger's thought

Although Derrida is often regarded as the progenitor of deconstruction, he has insisted at times that the term came to him through Heidegger. Heidegger's thought is in some sense indispensable to Derrida's, but this should not be taken to mean that the two are coterminous in any simple fashion. Derrida has offered transformative criticisms of Heidegger since his earliest work. Beginning in 1984, Derrida made philosophical nationalism the subject of his seminar and devoted attention to Heidegger in this context. Notes from the archives of his work at the University of California, Irvine, indicate that the work that became Of Spirit matured over a period of some years, probably fermenting at an increased pace during the seminar. The publication of Victor Farías's 1987 book on Heidegger caused many to declare the new controversy of a "Heidegger affair" and demand political explanations from Heideggerian thinkers. On March 14th, 1987, Derrida first presented at CIPH the lecture, initially titled "Heidegger: Open Questions," published with revisions as Of Spirit (the French title Heidegger et la Question: De l'esprit et autres essais makes very pointed reference to the burned book De l'esprit by Helvétius and mockery of Heidegger's reference to "French rationalism" in his famous Spiegel interview "Only a God can save us now").

Related Topics:
Victor Farías - Helvétius

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Of Spirit demonstrates, in response to the controversy over Heidegger's Nazism, the transformation of Derrida's active philosophical inheritance. Geoffrey Bennington asks, without an answer,"Where does commentary on Heidegger stop and assertion by Derrida begin?" ("Spirit's Spirit Spirits Spirit", in Legislations). The work is headlined by Derrida's tracing of the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work. Reconnecting in a number of respects with previous work on Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy) Derrida reconsiders three other fundamental and recurring elements of Heideggerian philosophy which span the corpus: the distinction between man and animal, technology, and the privilege of questioning as the essential mode of philosophy. Heidegger's meditations on these subject draws heavily on Greek, Latin, and German resources, which in the much later Spiegel interview Heidegger insisted resist translation, perhaps absolutely, indicating explicitly that neither American English nor French can receive the lexical networks which his thought must transit. Heidegger here stumbles, in many readers' view, failing to account for influences on his thought. Even as Derrida was willing to exploit such lexical networks himself, he was careful to account for their operation not only in translation between stunningly obvious cases, such as that from German to French, but even within "a" language, the unity of which Derrida frequently calls into question, defining "deconstruction" in the Memoires for Paul de Man as plus d'un langue, which translates as both more than and less than one language.

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Of Spirit was not without controversy, even among Derrida's philosophical friends, the accounts of which are not entirely settled. Derrida said of Gilles Deleuze that he "never felt the slightest objection well up in me, not even virtually" (p. 193 "I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone", in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault). In the film documentary Derrida, Derrida commented that he had never had a disagreement with his sister, only to be reminded that he had tried to set her on fire when they were children, so even a sympathetic viewer may ask whether this fond memory given in eulogy virtualizes the "never". The differences have been more open, even intractable. Derrida's much earlier criticism of Foucault in the essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (from Writing and Difference), first given as a lecture which Foucault attended, caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended. Harsh words imputed to Foucault were brandished against Derrida after the former's death, by critics who said little of his work. Lyotard's essay Heidegger and "the jews" and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics are key primary texts on this question, as is Avital Ronell's "The Differends of Man" in her Finitude's Score. Ronell takes these two books together with two Cerisy colloquia, ("The Ends of Man", dedicated to Derrida's work, and "The Faculty of Judgement", dedicated to Lyotard's) to triangulate sharp debates about Heideggerian "piety" and the connection between a mode of forgetting reiterated by Heidegger and a nexus of remembering and non-representation foundational to Judaic monotheism in Lyotard's reckoning. As Ronell remarks at one point, "while the stakes are very high indeed, the complaint is so curious that it is difficult not to wonder whether Lyotard is proposing that we adopt some sort of disrespectful nihilism to overcome the respect that still inundates deconstruction. The choice of idiom seems very odd for a Kantian." (p. 264)

Related Topics:
Gilles Deleuze - Derrida - Lyotard - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe - Avital Ronell - Monotheism

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Whatever the outcome of these discussions, Derrida was often left in the unappealing position of having an opportunity for the last word in too many, as he outlived many of his peers. Death and mourning are foundational to the analysis which lead Derrida to his understanding of inheritance, interpretation, and responsibility. Much of the groundwork for this is laid in works such as "Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok", as well as "Signature Event Context" and "Limited Inc a b c..." (from Limited Inc). Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War", a reading of Ortwin de Graef's initial selection of de Man's writings for the papers Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, controlled by the German Occupation government of Belgium. Ultimately fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning, which was expanded in the French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.

Related Topics:
Ortwin de Graef's - Le Soir - Gérard Granel

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Derrida and his circle

Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of translators, many of whom are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prodigious output to be translated in a timely fashion. Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the Derridabase) using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the Circumfession). Virtually all of the aforementioned translators have produced essays and book-length manuscripts on Derrida's work which are recommended often to students searching for secondary literature.

Related Topics:
Gayatri Spivak - Alan Bass - Peggy Kamuf - Circumfession

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Prominent controversies in reception

Outside this circle Derrida's work has often been at least as controversial as within; analytic philosophers and scientists are prominent among his detractors, who have variably disputed his work and an understanding of it received through recurring commonplaces, with some going so far as to regard his work as non-philosophical or pseudophilosophy and a few dismissing it as charlatanism. The philosophical substance of these claims is itself debatable, beginning with their adherence to their own proposed evaluation criteria. The reliance on received understanding of Derrida's work in such cases may be motivated in part by the difficulty of Derrida's texts, many of which are written in a style that does not resemble conventional philosophical prose, including polylogues and parallel texts presented in varied page layouts, which has itself drawn objection. Derrida remarked on this on separate occasions in very late interviews:

Related Topics:
Analytic - Scientist - Pseudophilosophy

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:You also asked me, in a personal way, why people are angry at me. To a large extent, I don't know. It's up to them to answer. To a small extent I know; it is not usually because people are angry at me personally (well, it happens in private, perhaps); but rather they are angry at what I write. They are angry at my texts more than anything else, and I think it is because of the way I write ? not the content, or the thesis. They say that I do not obey the usual rules of rhetoric, grammar, demonstration, and argumentation; but, of course, if they were simply not interested, they would not be angry. As it is, they start to get involved but feel that it's not that easy, that to read my texts they have to change the rules, to read differently, if only at another rhythm. ("Following Theory", p. 17, in life.after.theory, eds. Michael Payne and John Schad)

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:...whether we are talking about Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, Althusser, or Lyotard, I have always had the feeling that, despite all the differences in style, they maintained a common relationship to the French language, one that is at the bottom very placid, very sedentary. They all write "a certain French"; they have the respect not of an academic or conventional attitude but of a certain classicism... it does not shake up the most conventional French rhetoric. In that regard, I have the feeling that everything I'm trying to do involves a hand-to-hand struggle with the French language, a turbulent but primal hand-to-hand struggle; one in which the entire stakes are set, in which the essential is at stake. (pp. 13-14, For What Tomorrow..., w/ Elisabeth Roudinesco)

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Derrida and his supporters have argued that his harshest detractors do not take his work in its proper difficulty as philosophy, rather using it as a proxy or straw-man in the name of allegedly honorable causes, often giving various aliases for "Enlightenment values" (Derrida: "Those who wish to simplify at all costs and who raise a great hue and cry about obscurity because they do not recognize the unclarity of their good old 'Aufklärung' are in my eyes dangerous dogmatists and tedious obscurantists", 'Limited, Inc', 119). No small number of these seem to have taken their cue from the controversy that arose with John Searle over Derrida's reading of John Austin in "Signature Event Context" (ISBN 0810107880). Derrida was the first to argue that Searle's criticism is written from ignorance of his work. (He has applied criticisms of this sort to harshly dismissive critics of his work.)

Related Topics:
Enlightenment - John Searle - John Austin

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In 1992 the University of Cambridge awarded an honorary doctorate to Derrida, despite strenuous opposition from its Philosophy Faculty. Twenty philosophers from other institutions, including W. V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus, signed a letter to protest the award, maintaining that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing his philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." Derrida replied that the letter embarrasses itself immediately, transgressing banal standards of "clarity and rigor" by citing examples ("logical phallusies") which are not to be found in his work except suspended in quotation marks.

Related Topics:
University of Cambridge - W. V. Quine - Ruth Barcan Marcus - Dadaists

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Marcus had been at loggerheads with Derrida at least since his visiting professorship at Yale, where she held an endowed chair in the Philosophy faculty. Derrida strenuously protested Marcus's use of Yale stationery and various of her positions in professional associations in a 12 March 1984 letter to the Ministry of Research and Technology, protesting "as a joke" Derrida's unanimous election as the first Director of CIPH and asking the minister to intervene to set aside the election, and raising "more seriously" the question of "intellectual fraud" by way of a citation imputed to Foucault by Searle, were the "appointment" not a "joke." Again one can reasonably question the scholarly character of charges laid in such fashion, just as Derrida questioned the validity and integrity of employing so many scholarly credentials to insist upon a political intervention to set aside the result of an academic process whose integrity qua process provided no basis for objection. Derrida discusses the Cambridge incident at length and with a view to his wider view of the institutional setting of philosophy in the interview "'Honoris causa': This is also extremely funny" (in Points...) but consigns Marcus to footnotes to that interview and the "Afterword" of Limited Inc. The two somehow managed to spend more than two decades working in the same institutions in succession (Marcus joined the Philosophy Department at Irvine in 1992).

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