Jacques Derrida: 1930-2004
by Joshua Adams

If you stepped into an English department at a US college any time during the past 30 years, chances are you have heard the following name at least once: Jacques Derrida. And if, for some reason — too busy pursuing an undergraduate business degree, perhaps — you haven't heard the name, surely you will have heard the brand, deconstruction. This is because Derrida and the approach to philosophy he invented were the most provocative pairing of a thinker and his work since Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus exported Existentialism after World War II.

Derrida died last week at 74, but the struggle over where to place him in the history of thought began years ago. He was beloved by American literary critics, disdained by British analytical philosophers, taken to task by Marxists, lambasted by conservatives, embraced by theologians and, through it all, often overlooked in his native France. But this much can be agreed upon: Derrida produced a body of work as astonishing for its scope as its difficulty. Some 80 volumes exist in French, and they range from novel readings of canonical texts to meditations on "the religious" to reflections on the role of philosophy after Sept. 11, 2001. Such intellectual breadth is more often a trademark of Continental philosophers, as opposed to their British and American counterparts, and it explains, at least in part, why literary and religious scholars in the United States gravitated toward Derrida in large numbers. Like him or not, it was hard not to take seriously such a prolific thinker.

But there is another explanation. In starts in 1966, when Derrida gave a paper at a Johns Hopkins University conference. It was, in philosophy, roughly equivalent to the Monterery Pop Festival where Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire. His paper was entitled "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and though it came at the start of his career it is the most important essay in his oeuvre, the one that made his reputation (and a slew of enemies). Derrida argued that the structures with which intellectuals try to comprehend the world are not value neutral; on the contrary, interpretations that claim total objectivity — such as an anthropologist's interpretation of a culture through scientific fieldwork — should be critically exposed through close reading, by which an analyst could prove them to be merely partial interpretations, rather than objective, complete statements. Alternative interpretations, with different values, are not only possible but also desirable. Deconstruction was born.

This seems like an obvious point to us now, but it was hardly the case then. The social sciences had exploded in popularity and productivity after the war, taking as their ideal clarity, objectivity and totality. Philosophy and the humanities were out; certainty was in. But Derrida not only showed that social sciences could never in fact be scientific, and that because of that fact philosophy still had a vital critical purpose, namely to explode the certainty with which science grasped human experience. Humanities scholars could finally take to the barricades, metaphorical though they might be.

If this had been the sum of Derrida's work, though, he would not be as widely praised or deeply scorned. But Derrida also turned the critical gaze with which philosophy looked at science back toward philosophy itself. What he found there, whether in Plato, or Rousseau, Hegel or even Foucault, were systems of thought that grasped futilely for a total enclosure of human experience. If one read each text closely enough, one could see that the stated goal of a text was always undermined by inconsistencies in the text itself. Philosophical discourse, in its various attempts to approximate wisdom, repressed the marginal and tangential insights in which wisdom might actually be found. (The "margin" became a favorite trope of Derrida himself, who entitled one of his books "The Margins of Philosophy," and wrote an entire commentary, "Glas," in the margins of a text on Hegel).

Given the fact that most of Derrida's critics proudly admitted to getting through only a handful of his pages, it is not surprising that some reacted with what might be called prejudice. In one famous episode, several thinkers sought to deny Derrida an honorary degree at Cambridge. Their reaction was predictable, but it was also mistaken, because it accused deconstruction of leading to an irrational nihilism. One wonders how analytical philosophers, many of whom toast the vexing obscurities of Ludwig Wittgenstein, could not, and cannot, grasp the difference between "destruction" and "deconstruction." What gets destroyed remains destroyed. What gets taken apart can always be reassembled — albeit in a slightly different form than its original manifestation.

This kind of approach held immediate appeal for an intellectual class that saw traditional radical politics fail in 1968 but held out some hopes for a parallel academic revolution. It also enlisted some singularly brilliant people in its cause, people like Paul de Man (later exposed as a Nazi sympathizer during the war) refined deconstruction to an extent that Derrida himself had never achieved. But philosophers who are brilliant do not always make the right political choices. The fact that de Man covered up his own youthful anti-Semitic writings in Belgium, and that Derrida attempted to partially exculpate him by offering a deconstructive reading of some of these ugly screeds, tells us that one man made a grievous mistake, and that his friend attempted to put it in the best light. It does not mean, as Allan Bloom memorably insinuated, with many echoes since, that people who challenge the objectivity of a text automatically become fascists.

Evidence suggests that Derrida himself was frustrated by the apolitical stance many took away from some of his early writings, particularly since his own public commitment to the Left was never in question. He eventually turned to writing about ethical and religious phenomena, introducing the possibility that some things — the name of God, for example, or the concept of justice — simply cannot be deconstructed. These elusive ideas do not absolve the lover of wisdom from asking the kinds of questions that philosophy has always asked since the days of Socrates. But, in their inscrutability, they ensure that the work of thought continues apace.

It's true: Derrida was difficult to read, and he was scarcely less difficult to follow in public presentations. Many scholars find this the ultimate turn off, as if the wisdom of the ages is properly expressed in the calmly lucid prose of a "Talk of the Town" piece. In fact, Derrida's famously elliptical style was a personification of the difficulties he was the first to honestly confront. To be relentlessly clear, to avoid metaphysical assumptions, to express exactitude without closing off avenues of thought, to uncover meanings that might otherwise lay hidden: These are the ethical characteristics that define philosophy at its most rigorous. Deconstruction may be out of fashion, but the task it set before us never will.

E-mail: joshua at uchicago dot edu.