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Jacques
Derrida is the most important French philosopher still
alive. He is perhaps more influential abroad - in
the United States in particular - than in France.
He is the author of more than fifty books published
over the last forty years, but his most important
works were written mainly during the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Exactly ten years ago, in April/May 1993,
he gave a series of lectures in California that were
published the same year under the title “Spectres
of Marx”. Derrida’s engagement with Marx’s
thought had been long awaited, however it is questionable
whether some form of concrete politics can be deduced
from Derrida’s project.
Derrida’s
main contribution is what became known later as “deconstruction”.
If examined more closely, deconstruction is not some
new exciting world view, it is rather a highly technical
close reading of philosophical texts, more akin to
the protocols of analytical philosophy than some apocalyptic
versions of “postmodernist” and “poststructuralist”
theories. Deconstruction is not a method, but a way
of uncovering rhetorical strategies at work within
texts. Derrida has been able to combine Husserl’s
methodological prudence and reserve with Nietzsche’s
genealogical critique and Heidegger’s radical
questioning. Derrida’s central concern has been
to think the limits of philosophy. In an interview,
Derrida once declared: 'My central question is: from
what site or non-site can philosophy as such appear
to itself as'other than itself, so that it can interrogate
and reflect upon itself in an original manner?' The
philosophy of deconstruction is thus the deconstruction
of philosophy. For Derrida, literature and language
can provide this non-philosophical site from which
western metaphysics can be radically questioned. More
specifically, Derrida is interested in certain radical
movements within literature, writers like Blanchot,
Bataille, Jabes, Artaud, Mallarme, whose work questioned
the limits of literature and language.
Deconstruction
typically expose the textual strategies at work within
philosophy, it uncovers rhetoric behind “logic”,
metaphors behind “concepts”. Derrida describes
metaphysics as “white mythology”, that is
a sort of palimpsest of metaphors like “logos”
“eidos”, “telos”, “ousia”,
and myths like “return”, “home coming”,
transcendence” etc which are covered over and
forgotten as soon as philosophical concepts are construed
as pure and univocal abstractions, as totalizing universals
devoid of myth and metaphors. But there are always
“traces” of those metaphors that the violence
of the concept is not able to repress. “Logocentrism”
or the “metaphysics of presence” as Derrida
calls it, is philosophy’s quest for purity, for
forgetting its literary Other. Deconstruction shows
how any attempt to define concepts or meanings as
self sufficicent is incoherent, and thus how any attempt
to determine the relationships between concepts as
oppositional breaks down. As opposed to “pure
philosophy”, deconstruction is interested to
uncover what makes philosophy “impure”.
Deconstruction is therefore a critique of “pure”
reason (logos). Derrida is not privileging literature
over philosophy, for deconstruction philosophy is
not just “one kind of writing”. For him,
philosophy and literature are two poles of an opposition,
and none of the two can be privileged, The limits
of philosophy are also those of literature. The logic
of deconstruction, “differance” (with an
“a”), cannot be defined in terms of oppositional
predicates (such as “philosophy” and “literature”);
it is neither this nor that, but rather this and that
(e.g. the act of differing and of deferring). Differences
are never absolute, and neither therefore identities.
Derrida’s
close reading of philosophical texts has generated
enormous controversies. Critics have in particular
seized upon Derrida’s statement that “there
is nothing beyond the text”. Deconstruction is
not a suspension of reference, it is always concerned
with the “Other” of language, but it challenges
and complicates common assumptions about it. What
deconstruction tries to show is that the question
of reference is much more complex and problematic
than traditional theories supposed. It also asks whether
our term “reference” is entirely adequate
for designing the “other” beyond language.
Derrida has also been accused of trying to dispense
with human subjectivity. Derrida in fact acknowledges
subjectivity, but questions whether the subject is
what it says it is. Deconstruction does not destroy
the subject, it simply tries to resituate it: the
subject is not some meta-linguistic substance or identity,
some pure cogito or self-presence; it is always inscribed
in language. Deconstruction is not some form of nihilism,
but rather openess towards alterity. Derrida’s
thought has in fact little to do with the sort of
caricatures that have been made of it. Those caricatures
also includes some left wing writers that have since
the 1970s tried to incorporate deconstruction in a
left-wing if not Marxist political agenda. It is difficult
to understand how they can draw any political conclusions
from such close readings of the nature of language
in Rousseau, Husserl's account of the origins of geometry
or Levi Strauss’s analysis of the relation between
the spoken word and writing for example. This was
Derrida’s answer to the question as to whether
the theoretical radicality of deconstruction could
be translated into a radical political praxis:
This
is a particularly difficult question. I must confess
that I have never succeeded in directly relating
deconstruction to existing political codes and programmes.
I have of course had occasion to take a specific
political stand in certain codable situations, for
example, in relation to the French university institution.
But the available codes for taking such a political
stance are not at all adequate to the “radicality”
of deconstruction. And the absence of an adequate
political code to translate or incorporate the radical
implications of deconstruction has given many the
impression that deconstruction is opposed to politics,
or is at best apolitical. But this impression only
prevails because all of our political codes and
terminologies still remain fundamentally metaphysical,
regardless of whether they originate from the right
or the left.
So
Derrida is stuck between the fact that he takes specific
political stances (see his standard liberal views
on feminism, the threat of nuclear war, Europe or
Mandela), and the fact that he is not able to rely
on any political theory to justify or explain those
stances given that they are metaphysical or not adequate
to the theoretical radicality of deconstruction. One
of the problems with deconstruction is that by escaping
binary thinking and oppositions, it leaves an undecidable
space. Traditional political theory has always tried
to domesticate the dimension of the indecidable, whereas
deconstruction affirms it. The politics of deconstruction
are based on ungrounded decisions, and Derrida's politics
are not possible to be grounded theoretically. For
that reason, deconstruction cannot be annexed to recognisable
political theories or programmes like Marxism.
The
difficulty is to gesture in opposite directions
at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a
distance and suspicion with regard to the official
political codes governing reality; on the other,
to intervene here and now in a practical and engaged
manner whenever the necessity arises. This position
of dual allegiance, in which I personally find myself,
is one of perpetual uneasiness. I try where I can
to act politically while recognising that such action
remains incommensurate with my intellectual project
of deconstruction.
Derrida
is a very cautious, prudent thinker, and is not ready
to engage in the sort of revolutionary politics some
of his left wing supporters ascribe him. In political
terms, Derrida’s thought is more about challenging
assumptions and radically questioning things than
positive prescriptive solutions. That is the political
significance of deconstruction.
Note: the interview referred to is to be found
in Richard Kearney, “Dialogues with contemporary
continental thinkers”, Manchester University
Press, 1984 pp.105-126
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