Post 5: Defend Derrida!

1-Year Plan
Post 5: 10/10/04

Defend Derrida!

Jacques Derrida's obituary in the New York Times is an index to the reactive jingoism that stands for intellectual debate in this country. It is a grand symptom of xenophobia, the "fear of the other" that has produced a series of scapegoats in the second half of the twentieth century, from communists under the bed to Freedom Fries and the Axis of Evil. Derrida must be defended as a site for questioning this fear of the other. But even more, Derrida at his best provided an exemplary instance of an open philosophical stance that pursued the questions of language and certainty from a position that first and always comes under its own self-scrutiny. The method of deconstruction, which can never be objectified as a positive doctrine, is not Derrida's alone, but intersects with varying and widespread practices of self-reflexive questioning as the basis of poetry, ethics, and truth. Language-centered critical writing of all sorts has a long-standing common cause with Derrida.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other "dead white male" icons of Western culture. (NYT)

Ich bin der und der, a phrase which means all these things. You will not be able to hear and understand my name unless you hear it with an ear attuned to the name of the dead man and the living feminine—the double and divided name of the father who is dead and the mother who is living on, who will moreover outlive me long enough to bury me. (Derrida, "Otobiographies," 16)

I am not now, and never have been, a Derridean. Like the far-off radio signal of a distant galaxy, Derrida's work reached me slowly, in stages, and my celestial map of it is at this point only partial and incomplete. My reception of it began, early on, with essays such as "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," or "Cogito and the History of Madness" and "Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference, but has continued in a fitful and discontinuous manner up to the present. For one thing, I was never comfortable with the universalizing term différance, and I do not presently own copies of Of Grammatology or Glas. If Derrida was supposed to defend a precedence of writing over speech, and to demonstrate the irreducibility of the iterable in the self-presence of any speech act, well and good. But there often seemed a somewhat narrow and overly literary register of what he means by writing in his work. Derrida's choice of literary examples, in this sense, gives a significant perspective on his sense of the possibilities of writing. Apart from his philosophical and psychoanalytic precursors, these included Celan, Artaud, Joyce, Mallarmé—all great writers and thoroughly defensible as canonical examples of modern literariness. Yet—

Other critics found it disturbing that obscure academics could presume to denigrate a Sophocles, Voltaire or Tolstoy by seeking out cultural biases and inexact language in their masterpieces. "Literature, the deconstructionists finally proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons," wrote Malcolm Bradbury. (NYT)

Is it a question of the same ear, a borrowed ear, the one that you are lending me or that I lend myself in speaking? Or rather, do we hear, do we understand each other already with another ear? (Derrida, 35)

Derrida's examples offer an initial place to begin criticizing him. In philosophy and psychoanalysis, to begin with, one can only be inspired by what Derrida attempted—a contingent and unfolding critique of the master texts of the tradition, read to the letter and even beyond. In Derrida's work, there is an insistence that the act of reading is a unique (time-based and site-specific) encounter with the text; a transitoriness of textual construction always extends, undermines, reinvents, inverts the eternity of the text's horizon of meaning. This is a basic protocol for any encounter with a major text—that the reader "go to an encounter" with the author, and by doing so augment the author's own project. True, most if not all of the authors Derrida reads in this way are men (and, with the exception of an uncharacteristically bad-tempered debate with Nelson Mandela, white men), but his methods have been extended by women such as Gayatri Spivak and Avital Ronnel. Derrida's examples, while in themselves restricted in content to a series of privileged texts, are even so open in possibility, and nothing can prevent his phenomenology of encounter from being extended to noncanonical texts like Valerie Solanis's The Scum Manifesto, as in Ronnel's recent account of it.

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Once again, Mr. Derrida was accused by critics of being irresolute, this time for failing to condemn Heidegger's fascist ideas. (NYT)

An interpretive decision does not have to draw a line between two intents or two political contents. Our interpretations will not be readings of a hermeneutic or exegetic sort, but rather political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destination. (Derrida, 32)

Possibly the most damning aspect of Derrida's work for conservatives has been his dismantling of the opposition between philosophy and literature, the disciplinarily maintained boundaries of truth and fiction. In Glas, as his necrologist points out, Derrida juxtaposes texts by Hegel and Jean Genet, then supplements them with a third column of his own commentary; its mere description purports to unveil the pretense of such an irresponsible manner of writing for an objective determination of his author's meaning or its larger truth. Philosophy would bleed into literature, and vice versa—both coming together in the running commentary that is Derrida's performance at their intersection. The boundaries of either text are thereby contaminated; the aura of transgressive excess translates into the supplementarity of comment; and there is no final determination of meaning, truth, or value. Philosophers roll over in the premature graves of their methodological obsolescence every night with this nightmare, while literary critics have long since been convinced—even if not converted on the spot to Derrida's methods—that the act of literature is philosophically serious in and of itself. In the very long run, Derrida on this point will have been exemplary—literature and philosophy will be conjoined in a manner of thinking, knowing, disclosing the truth of the condition they present.

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. For many years, he declined to be photographed for publication. . . . He peppered his lectures with puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like "Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun," or, "Oh my friends, there is no friend. . . ." (NYT)

We no longer consider the biography of a "philosopher" as a corpus of empirical accidents that leaves both a name and a signature outside a system which would itself be offered up to an immanent philosophical reading—the only kind of reading held to be philosophically legitimate. This academic notion utterly ignores the demands of a text which it tries to control with the most traditional determinations of what constitutes the limits of the written, or even of "publication." (Derrida, 5)

The fear of Derrida that results from the disquiet of methodology not only persists in the trenches of academia, it flows into a raging anti-intellectualism in the open fields of public discourse that has long since delimited what may be said within confines of relevance and legitimacy. Intellectuals have been bashed as a matter of policy since Eisenhower's defeat of Stevenson; Bush America only inherits a long legacy of "dumbing it down" as a politics that has been prepared for it for decades. The effects of this legacy, however, are now so widespread and insidious that they can scarcely be perceived, much less questioned. The current discourse of political likeability, for instance, has been constructed on the negative reactions of the common man to the intellectual—from Stevenson's bookishness to Gore's lack of affect to Kerry's use of complex sentences and subordinated clauses. The attack on Derrida, in a precise sense, is an attack on what kind of language can be used in public debates, while the charge of perspectivism surfaces in the characterization of flip-flopping. On the model of the attack on Derrida, the public figure one should most mistrust is the one who cannot be pinned down to a series of one-liners, sound bites, or syllogisms. It is thus no accident that the New York Times ran its attack on Derrida on the front page; intellectual-bashing takes part in a much wider discourse than the mere policing of disciplinary boundaries. Intellectuals must be restricted in their access to public debate precisely for their capacity to undermine its legitimacy.

"The trouble with reading Mr. Derrida is that there is too much perspiration for too little inspiration," editorialized The Economist in 1992, when Cambridge University awarded the philosopher an honorary degree after a bruising argument among his supporters and critics on the faculty. Elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Derrida's deconstruction gained earlier and easier acceptance. (NYT)

The contradiction of the "double" thus goes beyond whatever declining negativity might accompany a dialectical opposition. What counts in the final accounting and beyond what can be counted is a certain step beyond. (Derrida, 19)

Between Derrida's necrology and his own words on the subject of the life and death of the author, a vast and productive abyss opens up. Derrida, in his own sense and in his reading of others, is not reducible to a dead methodology, simply because he is living as he writes. Even dead, his writing is not simply the writing of one who would end up being dead; he would not have written if he had not lived. This matters in the crucial scene of the work's meaning: Derrida, like any writer, is going to be read differently now that he is dead, and yet he cannot be read as if that were the end of it. Living looks forward in the manner of the work in a particular way that is not delimited by anything such as a monument (of text, reputation, influence) that is left behind when the writer is finished. This is the freedom in which Derrida wrote in his present, and the freedom in which we may read him. Derrida's work, in relation to himself and others, sees the present of the act of writing in other terms, as if it were present only at the moment of being other. Derrida wrote toward the moment of his death; now he is dead, and we can only continue to read him after that moment. But it is obvious that no work—no one's—ends at that point, else it could not have been undertaken.

For young, ambitious professors, his teachings became a springboard to tenure in faculties dominated by senior colleagues and older, shopworn philosophies. For many students, deconstruction was a right of passage into the world of rebellious intellect. (NYT)

Once again, the destruction of life is only an appearance; it is the destruction of the appearance of life. One buries or burns what is already dead so that life, the living feminine, will be reborn and regenerated from these ashes. (Derrida, 26)

However specific to his own philosophical practice Derrida's notion of writing may have been, it can continue to be inspiring and productive, a new horizon of possibility, for writers and critics. It implies, no less, that there is ever more to be done, and that it is within our capacity to undertake it. Openness is precisely a consequence of the refusal of closure and the irreducibility of différance. The example of Derrida leads, in this way, to other and unanticipated notions of what an example may be. In sum: we should never monumentalize, but always be ready to defend, the work and legacy of Jacques Derrida!

[Quotations from the New York Times and from Jacques Derrida, "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name," trans. Avital Ronnel, in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie M. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 21-38. Text copyright © Barrett Watten 2004. For discussion only; not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]

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