Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida has had an enormous impact on intellectual
life around the world. So much so that his work has been the subject, in whole or in part, of more than 400
books. In the areas of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14,000 times
in journal articles over the past 17 years 1. He was recently featured in
a story in The New York Times.
More than 500 US, British and Canadian dissertations treat him and his writings as primary subjects. He came
into prominence in America with his critical approach or methodology or philosophy of deconstruction,
and it is this line of thought that continues to identify him.
Derrida's deconstructionist works are integrally related to the more general phenomenon of postmodernism.
Postmodernist theories and attitudes come in a variety of forms. In the realm of social and political theory,
what unites them -- from Foucault to Baudrillard, from Lyotard to Derrida and others -- is a challenge to,
and largely a rejection of, both the truth value and pragmatic capacity for achieving justice or peace of the
modern system of political and economic institutions, as well as the very ways in which we know and act to
explain and understand ourselves. Especially in the latter theoretical and explanatory domain, Derrida's
deconstructionism is provocative, if not subversive, in questioning the self-evidence, logic and
non-judgmental character of dichotomies we live by, such as legitimate/illegitimate, rational/irrational,
fact/fiction, or observation/imagination.
During the 1960s Derrida published several influential pieces in Tel Quel, France's forum of leftist avant-garde theory. Among this group were not only those mentioned above in relation to postmodernism, but also Bataille, Barthes, Kristeva, and several others. He later distanced himself from Tel Quel.
He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960-1964 and the École Normale Superieure from 1964-1984. He currently directs the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he has also been Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and continues to lecture in academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Derrida is "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher -- if not the only famous philosopher," in the words of Dinitia Smith, the talented and entertaining author of the aforementioned New York Times feature "Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas." Ms. Smith confided in the article, "A scholar ... warned against asking him [Derrida] to define 'deconstruction,' the notoriously difficult and widely influential method of inquiry he invented more than three decades ago. 'Make it your last question,' the scholar counseled, because it sends deconstructionists into "paroxysms of rage.'"
If Derrida and deconstruction can not be discussed one without the other, what then is deconstruction? Definitions even vary, from a seven page-explanation to a four page entry or an eleven page reference. How does Professor Derrida himself define it? He says of course a very great deal in numerous writings as well as in published interviews such as Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida. What Ms. Smith reported of their conversation at the Polo Grill is the following:
"It is impossible to respond," Mr. Derrida said. "I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied." But after some prodding, he gave it a try anyway. "I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text."
Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed."
The name Derrida brings up controversies that would normally be reserved for political figures. In 1992 at the ever proper Cambridge University, the granting of an honorary degree to Derrida provoked an impassioned debate among the dons. The end result was the unusual step of putting the issue to vote, the first rift of its kind in twenty-nine years. It was settled by a 336-204 vote in Derrida's favor (a veritable landslide victory in the context of normal politics).
And in such an atmosphere of keen debate and disagreements, parody is not unknown. Stanford English Professor John L'Heureux, with deconstruction and its critical-theoretical progeny in view, offered the reader this prospect of a brave new academic world in his novel The Handmaid of Desire:
This department [The Department of Theory and Discourse] was his dream; it would revolutionize university studies. It would include Comp Lit, Mod Thought, and all the little language departments -- French, Russian, Spanish, you name it. It would take on all written documents, equally with absolute indifference to the author's reputation or the western canon or the nature of writing itself -- whether it was Flaubert's Bovary or a 1950 tax form or a label on a Campbell's soup can . . .-- and subject them all to the probing, thrusting, hard-breathing analysis of the latest developments in metaphilosophical trans-literary theory. Whatever those theories might be. Wherever they might lead.
However one values Derrida's writings and the philosophical positions and intellectual traditions from which he proceeds, it would be wrongheaded to think of him as an occupant of some "ivory tower". Derrida is the proverbial activist-theorist, who, over the years, has fought for a number of political causes, including the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, anti-apartheid, and the rights of Czech Charter 77 dissidents. True to his own construction of the world and his own autobiography, he has admitted few, if any, strict dichotomies in his life. As he put it in another context, "I am applied Derrida." 1 Based on a search of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
By Etienne Balibar Philosopher
Just a few hours after the death of Jacques Derrida, I do not want to try to describe his work in just a few
lines. I wish even less to enclose him within a label. I just want to go over a few moments of a life and
thought that I had the good fortune to encounter as a student, colleague and friend.I remember his arrival at
the Ecole Normale Supérieure where we were studying for the aggregation. Preceeded by his reputation as
“the best phenomenologist of France”, Derrida was, for us, above all, the author of a brilliant essay on
the origin of Husserl’s geometry in which the question of the historicity of truth was plucked out of the
debate between sociologism and psychologism. He went straight to the heart of what was most difficult : the
question of the conditions of possibility of demonstration, displacing it from being a problem of formal
guarantee to a problem of reproduction in time, thus anticipating his grand theme of “trace”, i.e. of the
connection between thinking and the materiality of writing. His lectures were eloquent but above all rigorous
in the setting out of concepts and in reading texts ( as they will always be : a reading of “Politique de
l’Amitié” will suffice to show that. Years later, I discovered that I had memorised whole passages of
these lectures, thanks to the clarity and the force of his interpretation.To this practice as a great
teacher, I wish to adjoin a more general lesson. Derrida, who has become a prominent media figure throughout
the whole world, never stopped working in the University, and saw in it the fundamental venue of
philosophical activity ( even though in his own country at least, it has granted him but sparse recognition).
Through initiatives such as the “Etats Généraux de la Philosophie”(the States General of Philosophy) in
1979 or the founding of the “Collège International de Philosophie” in 1983, he tried to help the
University shed its hierarchical shackles, the isolationism of its different subjects and its nationalism
(which has a sterilizing effect when, as in France, it feels certain that it is the bearer of “universal”
values). It is true that in a lecture given at Stanford in 1998, he called that kind of university, a
university without condition, which, irrespective of frontiers and Power control, ascribes to itself the task
of re-thinking all human works and of stating the possible (and even the impossible) – and this in the era
of mechanisation and globalisation.I remember when the three manifestos of this new method which was later to
be called “deconstruction” were published in 1967 : Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing
and Difference, and the subtle interplay found in them between literature and philosophy. I remember the
grand controversies with Levy-Strauss on the reading of Rousseau, with Foucault on the reading of Descartes,
which can be re-read today as so many founding “quarrels” of philosophical structuralism, in which its
demarcation from metaphysics is at stake, and, already, the virtuality of its transformation into
“post-structuralism”. That is to say into an internal critique of the concept of structure (in particular
of its claim to represent “totalities”). However, this critique was not undertaken from the point of view
of humanism or of the freedom of the subject, but from the point of view of the differences which complicate
our concept of man (and thus of the aims of man and of his rights), and which stress his ambivalence :
consciousness and unconsciousness, body and letter (1), masculine and feminine (and neuter). For these
differences all contain a surplus that is irreducible to formal binary oppositions. Such a surplus of meaning
(that he calls “the innate surplus”) opens the way equally to a violence of identity mechanisms and
strategies of “appropriation” of the world and to making fresh and multiple interpretations. We find
there the embryo of the great themes of his maturity, in particular his conception of the “event” as an
incalculable “yet to come” in which individual or collective responsibility is carried to its extreme,
not because we would be capable of controlling the consequences of our acts “performatively” but because
we know already that they will drag indefinitely in their wake the “relaunching” and the reformulation of
the problem of law and justice.Finally I remember all the circumstances - from the help given to the Czech
intellectual “dissidents” within the Jan Huss association to the stand in favour of the rights of the
Palestinian people and the reconciliation of the belligerents in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as well as
the defence of the right to asylum in Europe against security policies and the stigmatising of
“foreigners”, and of course other causes – when we, as intellectuals unaligned if not uncommitted, have
tried to contribute to the emergence of what he called a “new internationalism”. Not that we were
entirely in agreement in our analyses and our historical references.But there again, along with many others,
and often on his initiative, we shared the conviction that intellectuals and artists have their own part to
play in putting together a multiform and multi-polar resistance to the ascendancy of State or Market
sovereignity which engenders mass violence and in return feeds on it - which supposes the deconstruction of
their discourse and a constructive dialogue among their opponents (as he just illustrated by joining forces
with his old “enemy” Habermas in order to dismantle the endless war-propaganda machine against terrorism
and “rogue States”.Without his contribution it is more difficult to reflect on all that, whether
concerning the question of the future of the University or the philosophy of the “yet to come”, the
responsibility of intellectuals and their place in the world of global communications. But the search for
resources of thought, both in his example and in his writings, is not likely to cease for a long time. Adieu,
dear Jacques, or rather, see you tomorrow.