Introducing Derrida

IT’S NECESSARY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE FATE OF THE WORD “DECONSTRUCTION”, AND OTHER THINGS THAT ARE ABLE TO DEVELOP AS DECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT THE NAME THE WORD WILL NOT BE USED INDEFINITELY. IT WILL WEAR ITSELF OUT. BUT BEYOND THE WORD, THIS MIGHT TAKE A LITTLE LONGER…

So Derrida writes “philosophy” in something like “literary” ways. That’s one reason for the anxieties at Cambridge. Derrida’s critique of philosophy puts boundaries between philosophy and literature into question.
Derrida has destabilized other boundaries. He’s taken his way of doing philosophy into art, architecture, law and politics. He’s engaged with nuclear disarmament, racism, apartheid, feminist politics, the question of national identities, and other issues – including the authority of teaching institutions.
The profile of a joker? Perhaps, if we’re willing to re-think joking …
“Jacques Derrida”
By the time of the Cambridge dispute, Jacques Derrida’s institutional credentials were internationally acknowledged.
Derrida was born in Algeria in 1930 to a lower middle-class, Sephardic Jewish family.
He studied philosophy in Paris with the Marx and Hegel scholar, Jean Hyppolite, at the École Normale Supérieure (1952-6). His work on phenomenology was quickly recognized: a scholarship to Harvard in 1956, the Prix Cavaillès in 1962.
He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne (1960-4) and the École Normale Supérieure (1964-84). From 1984, he was Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. These are well-founded institutions.
He taught regularly at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities in the USA. Alarmingly for the Cambridge dons, his ideas were attractive. By the early 1980s, “Yale deconstruction” had introduced a wide Anglophone readership to the name Derrida, now one of the best-known names in international contemporary philosophy. He died in Paris on 8 October 2004.
So Jacques Derrida was an establishment figure? Not entirely …
In 1957 Derrida planned a doctoral thesis on Husserl’s phenomenology. But he abandoned it

VE REALIZED ITS VALUE BY RECOGNIZING ITS LIMITS – BY NOT ASKING IT TO DO EVERYTHING FOR ME… I HAVE VERY LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE SO DEEPLY INTO DECONSTRUCTION THAT THEY HAVE NOTHING ELSE SUBSTANTIVE TO THINK ABOUT.

De Man’s article had been printed alongside other, notably “vulgar” anti-semitic articles. [Derrida]: ‘These coincide, in their vocabulary and logic, with the very thing that de Man accuses, as if his article were denouncing the neighbouring articles.’
It’s a reading of considerable subtlety. Derrida adds to it a further concern. Wasn’t the villification of de Man reminiscent of the excluding, eradicating mentalities of fascism?

TO CALL FOR CLOSING HIS BOOKS – THAT IS TO SAY, AT LEAST FIGURATIVELY, FOR CENSURING OR BURNING THEM – IS TO REPRODUCE THE EXTERMINATING GESTURE WHICH ONE ACCUSES DE MAN OF NOT HAVING ARMED HIMSELF AGAINST SOONER.
Derrida’s most ardent critics objected to this logic.
Terry Eagleton: “It makes de Man into the victim, rather than Belgian Jews. And it displaces the whole issue onto the malice of de Man’s critics: they are the true totalitarians. That’s shabby sophistry.”
But there’s more to deconstructive politics than this suggests…
Deconstruction and Feminism

How might deconstruction relate to practical, contemporary political struggles?
In the interview “Choreographies” (1982), Derrida suggests some possibilities. The politics in question are feminist, and deconstruction has no simple alliance with them…
To some (“difference”) feminists, deconstruction has seemed useful. To put it simply, it works to dislocate categories like male/female or masculine/feminine: the foundations of patriarchal sexuality.

Other feminists (e.g. “equality” feminists) have seen it as a deflection or appropriation of feminism. Refusing clear political allegiances, deconstruction offers no grounds for feminist political action. It’s the latest weapon in the male philosophers’ armoury…

At first look, some of Derrida’s arguments support the latter view. He has at times insisted on the estrangement of deconstruction from feminism.

FEMINISM: IT IS THE OPERATION THROUGH WHICH A WOMAN DESIRES TO BE LIKE A MAN, LIKE A DOGMATIC PHILOSOPHER, DEMANDING TRUTH, SCIENCE, OBJECTIVITY; THAT IS TO SAY, WITH ALL MASCULINE ILLUSIONS. DECONSTRUCTION IS CERTAINLY NOT FEMINIST… IF THERE IS ONE THING IT MUST NOT COME TO, IT’S FEMINISM.

But there’s more to this. Derrida doesn’t simply deny the necessity of feminist political struggles. They have their places. Feminism is to be deconstructed, but it’s also “a necessary form at a certain moment.”
Choreographies

In the interview “Choriographies”, Derrida’s interviewer invoked the figure of Emma Goldman (1869–1940), a “maverick feminist from the 19th century”:

IF I CAN’T DANCE I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION.

t first look, some of Derrida’s arguments support the latter view. He has at times insisted on the estrangement of deconstruction from feminism.

INSINUATED “ANTI-SEMITISM” SHOULD NOT BE THOUGHT TO PASS OVER, BY “ATMOSPHERIC CONTAGION”, TO ANYONE WHO DALLIES WITH AN ATTENTIVE READING OF HEIDEGGER.
Effectively, Heidegger’s philosophy is defended over his politics.

The facts were re-publicized along with new research in 1987. Victor Farias and others argued that Heidegger’s involvement was a deep-rooted and long-standing commitment, not a temporary career compromise.
Heidegger was appointed Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, in the early years of Hitler’s National Socialist government. He joined the party. His first administrative moves dismantled the democratic structures of the University, and his inaugural address encouraged the students to “sacrifice themselves for the salvation of our nation’s essential being and the increase of its innermost strength in its polity.”

But it had long been known that Heidegger supported German fascism and its social trajectories, what he called the “inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and modern man)”.

These include nuclear disarmament and the discourse of “deterrence”, and the movement for racial emancipation in South Africa.

question of European identity, with its problems of imperialism, racism, Eurocentricism