With
the death of the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida
earlier this month, French society lost a second
'penseur' in quick succession, the novelist Francoise
Sagan predeceasing the philosopher by a matter of
weeks. If it were not for the French, European intellectual
apparel over the past four decades would have looked
a tad threadbare, its bearers inclined to limp rather
than strut along the global cultural catwalk. The
intellectual equivalent of haute couture would have
descended to the level of dementia. Consequently,
more people may have looked across the Atlantic
for cerebral inspiration.
The
rock of French philosophy was a bulwark against
the facile march of US ideas and arguably prevented
the colonising of more European minds. This is perhaps
one element feeding into the delirious Francophobia
afflicting the governing class in America in current
times. Paris, May 1968, and the notion of a vibrant
counter culture is not something to be welcomed
in the US ‘Fukayaman’ world of no ideas
other than their own.
Intellectual
influences are frequently a matter of taste and
choice. Whenever I follow my own curiosity and browse
- without ever delving enough to acquire much understanding
- the produce of other European countries on the
good side of the English Channel my mind rarely
dwells on more than one morsel from each. Fleeting
glances at Habermas in Germany, Kundera in Czechoslovakia,
Mandel in Belgium or Milosz in Poland are the sum
of my forays. But France is different - Sartre,
Camus, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida. Paris gave
to thinking what Rio de Janeiro did to soccer. Whether
in the fields of literature or philosophy the French
have deep wells of tradition to draw from and their
pails have always brimmed.
The
US right are not alone in their resentment of the
autonomy of French intellectual life. Being French
alone suffices to turn many Brits off from engaging
with a culture barely 35 minutes away courtesy of
the Eurotunnel. The 1992 balking response of Cambridge
dons, most of them probably immersed in a world
of spooks, to a proposal that Derrida be awarded
a prize for his work, prompted the comment from
that bane of academic snobbery, Terry Eagleton,
that 'English philistinism continues to flourish,
not least when the words "French philosopher"
are uttered.' Derrida was the first nominee for
one of Cambridge’s annual awards to have been
opposed in 29 years.
'Continental
philosophy', as the mental labour of the French
is sometimes described with pejorative inflection,
has also found its detractors amongst the Irish
left. A few years ago when I reviewed a book on
the work of Derrida, our own leftoids howled with
disdain. Suspecting a postmodernist challenge to
their totalitarian drivel that might just discomfit
their love of certainty, they railed against 'pissing
with continental philosophy', paradoxically overlooking
the origins of the founder of their own secular
religion, Karl Marx.
When
he came to Dublin towards the end of the 1990s,
Jacques Derrida explained that an objective of
his work was to deconstruct ‘pervasive shibboleths.’
In his view politics functioned as ‘a privileged
space for the lie.’ Seemed reasonable to me.
But when I tried reading this French iconoclast
my experience proved similar to that of the novelist,
JG Ballard: ‘I've been floating around Derrida
like a space capsule whose landing instructions
have got lost, and I have never really made contact.’
Nevertheless,
his ‘rebel yell’, as it has been called,
combined with his acceptance of ‘the Marxian
spirit of opposition’ always held me within
range of his insights. Derrida took on board Zygmunt
Bauman’s fear that citizens of the western
world, in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern
bloc, were ‘living without an alternative’
when he wrote his 1993 Spectres of Marx.
It was a response to the end of history/no alternative
thesis put forward by Francis Fukuyama in his History
And The Last Man, published the year previously.
At a time when many in the Marxist tradition were
thinking only of how to plan a comeback for the
vanguard party led by some dictator of the proletariat,
Derrida was seriously trying to revitalise the influence
of Marx in an era where Marxist sects and cults
were caricaturing the philosophy of their own master.
In
dismissing Fukuyama, Derrida offered the following
assessment:
Gay
rights activists, death row prisoners, nuclear disarmament
movements, blacks fighting apartheid, North African
immigrants in France, Czech dissidents, third world
resistance culture all found sustenance in Derrida’s
work and quite often secured his active support
for their causes. But despite being a man of the
left, the left quite often could never rest comfortably
with his erosion of the notion of absolute truth
and certainty. And it was not that he served as
some nihilist locked in a labyrinthine relativism
from which no political judgement could be ventured.
His very advocacy of ethical resistance belied this.
When he challenged the dogma of certainty his point
was never that meaning was endless, but that there
was never merely one meaning. As Brian Boyd in the
Irish Times wrote, ‘belief not tempered
by doubt was mortal danger for Derrida.’ His
was a constant struggle against the totalitarian
impulse:
Earlier
this year, already suffering from the effects of
the pancreatic cancer to which he would eventually
succumb, he signed a petition published in Les
Inrockuptibles magazine along with thousands
of other French intellectuals, doctors, lawyers
and artists accusing the French government of ‘waging
war on intelligence’ and of instituting ‘a
new state anti-intellectualism.’ To the end
he promoted diversity and difference.
The
author of around 70 books and numerous essays, Derrida,
according to Christina Howells, in each of them
demonstrated that he was a ‘scrupulous, meticulous,
patient reader, determined to disentangle what has
been conflated, bring to light what has been concealed,
and to pay scrupulous attention to marginalia and
footnotes.’ Those at the margins, those dismissed
as mere statistics, those viewed as heretics for
harbouring that awful word ‘why?’ or being
that hideous thing, ‘other’, all lost
a champion when Jacques Derrida faced the ultimate
deconstruction.
