Introducing Derrida E-Book

Jeff Collins

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Introducing...
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Brilliant illustrated guide to the best-known and most controversial continental philosopher of the latter 20th century. Jacques Derrida is the most famous philosopher of the late 20th century. Yet Derrida has undermined the rules of philosophy, rejected its methods, broken its procedures and contaminated it with literary styles of writing. Derrida's philosophy is a puzzling array of oblique, deviant and yet rigorous tactics for destabilizing texts, meanings and identities. 'Deconstruction', as these strategies have been called, is reviled and celebrated in equal measure. Introducing Derrida introduces and explains his work, taking us on an intellectual adventure that disturbs some of our most comfortable habits of thought.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-205-0

Text copyright © 1996 Jeff Collins

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Who was Derrida?

What Is Deconstruction?

BORDER LINES

The Critique of Philosophy

“Jacques Derrida”

Reading Derrida’s writing

The Viral Matrix

UNDECIDABILITY

Between Life and Death

Oppositions

The Horror of Indeterminacy

Plato’s Inauguration of Philosophy

Plato’s Pharmacy

The Cure for Pharmaceuticals

The Supplement

The Joker

Magician and Scapegoat

SPEECH AND WRITING

Phonocentrism

Is Writing Both Useless and Dangerous?

Metaphysics and Logocentrism

How Are the Foundations Laid?

Derrida and Metaphysics

Overturning

Displacement

The Metaphysics of Presence

Presence and Speech

The Repression of Writing

The Agenda of the 1960s…

Saussure’s Linguistics

The Trace

Structuralism and Phenomenology: Derrida’s Operations

The Four Fields of Différance

DISORDER IN COMMUNICATION

The Assurance of Context

Events

The Etiolations of Language

The Writing Lesson: Iterability

Citations and Grafts

The Law of Possible Failure

Communication?

Signatures and Paraphs

It’s Not What You Think?

WRITING AND LITERATURE

Literary Texts, Philosophical Texts

Contamination

Writing at the Limits

Decomposing the Word

Reading Mallarmé

Ulysses Gramophone

Other Yeses

In the Name of Joyce

The Tasks of Criticism

Opening Up the Text

Glas

A title?

Philosophy, Literary Art

Deconstructive Architecture

Le Parc de la Villette

Deconstruction at the Park

Functional Folie

Collaborations: Philosophy and Architecture

Choral Work

Re-inscription

Postmodernism

THE VISUAL ARTS

Jasper Johns

The Truth in Painting

Kant’s Aesthetics

Inside/Outside

The Parergon

Mémoires d’Aveugles

Butades and the Début of Drawing

POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONS

Writing Around Politics

Alignments and Allegiances

The Heidegger Disputes

The Paul de Man Controversy

Deconstruction and Feminism

Choreographies

Marx and Marxisms

Spectres of Marx

Deconstruction’s Last Word?

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Biographies

Index

Who was Derrida?

Jacques Derrida was a philosopher. Yet he never wrote anything straightforwardly philosophical.

His work has been heralded as the most significant in contemporary thinking. But it’s also been denounced as a corruption of all intellectual values.

Derrida has famously been associated with something called DECONSTRUCTION. Yet of all development in contemporary philosophy, deconstruction might be the most difficult to summarize…

What Is Deconstruction?

There have been many answers.

All of these (and more) have been said of deconstruction. But there’s some consensus on one point: its leading exponent has been Jacques Derrida.

Derrida’s writing undermines our usual ideas about texts, meanings, concepts and identities – not just in philosophy, but in other fields as well.

Reactions to this have ranged from reasoned criticism to sheer abuse – deconstruction has been controversial. Should it be reviled as a politically pernicious nihilism, celebrated as a philosophy of radical choice and difference… or what?

There’s much more to Derrida’s work than the public controversies suggest. But controversy can reveal something about what’s at stake in contemporary philosophy. A small quarrel at Cambridge has done precisely that…

BORDER LINES

According to a tradition dating from 1479, English universities award honorary degrees to distinguished people. It’s never been quite clear why. But it’s assumed that both parties benefit.

On 21 March 1992, senior members of the University of Cambridge gathered to decide its annual awards. It should have been a formality – no candidate had been opposed for twenty-nine years. But the name Jacques Derrida was on the list. Four of the dons ritually declared non placet (“not contented”). They were Dr Henry Erskine-Hill, Reader in Literary History; Ian Jack, Professor of English Literature; David Hugh Mellor, Professor of Philosophy; Raymond Ian Page, Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. And they forced the University to arrange a ballot.

NON PLACET NON PLACET NON PLACET NON PLACET

There were two problems. First, this was a boundary dispute. Most of Derrida’s proposers were members of the English faculty, but by training and profession Derrida was a philosopher. But more trenchantly, Cambridge traditionalists in both disciplines saw Derrida’s thinking as deeply improper, offensive and subversive.

Campaigns were organized, and the Press was alerted. To the outraged dons, Derrida represented an insidious, fashionable strand of “French theory”. They struck Anglo-Saxon attitudes…

FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY RUNS BY A SYSTEM OF MANDARINS AND GURUS AND FASHIONS. THEY WOULD BE GENERALLY PERCEIVED BY BRITISH PHILOSOPHERS AS NOT HAVING THE SAME STANDARDS OF PRECISION AND CLARITY AND RIGOUR WE WOULD. [David-Hillel Ruben] LOTS OF PEOPLE THESE DAYS INVOKE SOMETHING CALLED “THEORY”, WHICH I THINK A PROPER PHILOSOPHER WOULD NOT ADMIT TO. WHAT SORT OF WRITER IS DERRIDA? IS HE A FAILED THEORIST? IF NOT A THEORIST, THEN WHAT IS HE? [Henry Erskine-Hill] THE FRENCH EXCEL IN FABRICATED TERMS OF SHIFTY MEANING WHICH MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO DETECT AT WHAT POINT PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATION TURNS TO GIBBERISH. DECONSTRUCTION IS A THEORY WHICH APPEARS TO LEND ITSELF MOST READILY TO BABBLING OBFUSCATION [Peter Lennon]

THESE ARE ABSURD DOCTRINES WITH DISMAYING IMPLICATIONS.… THEY DEPRIVE THE MIND OF ITS DEFENCES AGAINST DANGEROUSLY IRRATIONAL IDEOLOGIES AND REGIMES. [Prof. David Mellor and others – anti-Derrida flysheet] TO CALL HIS THINKING NIHILIST WOULD BE TO FLATTER IT BY SAYING IT WAS INTELLIGIBLE [Prof. Barry Smith in The Times.]

19 academics summed up the indictments in a letter to The Times:

Derrida is accused of obfuscation, trickery and charlatanism.

He’s not a philosopher, he’s a flim-flam artist. And strangely, his trivial joking gimmickry is seen as a powerful threat to philosophy – a corrosion in the very foundations of intellectual life.

But Derrida had his defenders, such as Jonathan Rée: “The traditionalists were offering a mere and meagre argument from authority. They were refusing the possibility of dissent from established systems – an establishment stance, yes, but scarcely a philosophical stance…”

The ballot on 16 May vindicated Derrida and his supporters by 336 votes to 204. Derrida collected his award. But the dispute has continued.

What was at stake? Underneath the posturing, there were two important questions:

If the dons had wanted a rigorous address to these questions, they might have found one in the writings of a certain Jacques Derrida…

The Critique of Philosophy

Derrida’s writing is a radical critique of philosophy. It questions the usual notions of truth and knowledge. It disrupts traditional ideas about procedure and presentation. And it questions the authority of philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY IS FIRST AND FOREMOST WRITING. THEREFORE IT DEPENDS CRUCIALLY ON THE STYLES AND FORMS OF ITS LANGUAGE – FIGURES OF SPEECH, METAPHORS, EVEN LAYOUT ON THE PAGE JUST AS LITERATURE DOES.

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.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO WRITE ABOUT PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING WITHIN THE LIMITS OF AN ACADEMIC THESIS? WOULDN’T IT HAVE TO PERFORM WHAT IT ARGUED, AND THEREFORE HAVE TO BE WRITTEN DIFFERENTLY? WHAT IF THE EXAMINERS INSIST ON THE STANDARD PHILOSOPHICAL PROTOCOLS – THE ONES I WANT TO QUESTION?

Instead, Derrida embarked on a set of critical encounters with Western philosophy, literature and theory.

In philosophy this included German idealism (Kant and Hegel), phenomenology and its critics (Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas), and the writings of Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche and others.

Among literary writers, Mallarmé, Jabès, Artaud, Kafka, Joyce, Blanchot and Ponge figured prominently.

And between 1965 and 1972, Derrida was in contact with the Tel Quel group (Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others). They debated contemporary theory, especially psychoanalysis, structuralism, and Marxism.

Reading Derrida’s writing

Derrida’s critique of philosophy is not a standard critique. It’s not couched in the usual terms.

Derrida doesn’t adopt any fixed position among competing tendencies and traditions. He doesn’t simply advocate or refute any of them. And he doesn’t advance any overarching theories, concepts, methods or projects of his own.

So Derrida’s writing is impossible to summarize. In his terms it has no “basic” concepts or methods to pick out and explain. Yet it alludes constantly to a wide range of Western thinking. And it’s often strategically convoluted. It disobeys the usual procedures – start at the beginning, lay out the exposition, advance the propositions, make a conclusion, etc.

The Cambridge dons were right. Derrida’s writing is difficult and maybe subversive. It has a rigour and a logic, but of an unfamiliar order.

Is there a way of beginning to read this writing?

The Viral Matrix

If Derrida’s writing has no extractable concepts or method, we can still look at what it does: what effects it has.

Derrida offers a way of thinking these effects. By his own account, his writing has a matrix. Its two strands are DERAILED COMMUNICATION and UNDECIDABILITY. Derrida finds both of these in the figure of the virus.

EVERYTHING I HAVE DONE IS DOMINATED BY THE THOUGHT OF A VIRUS, THE VIRUS BEING MANY THINGS. FOLLOW TWO THREADS. ONE, THE VIRUS INTRODUCES DISORDER INTO COMMUNICATION, EVEN IN THE BIOLOGICAL SPHERE – A DERAILING OF CODING AND DECODING. TWO, A VIRUS IS NOT A MICROBE, IT IS NEITHER LIVING NOR NON-LIVING, NEITHER ALIVE NOR DEAD. FOLLOW THESE THREADS AND YOU HAVE THE MATRIX OF ALL I HAVE DONE SINCE I STARTED WRITING.

We can take the second threat first: UNDECIDABILITY. If the virus is neither living nor non-living, then it’s puzzlingly undecidable. As we’ll see, undecidability is a thread to the traditional foundations of philosophy. But it’s also a thread that can be picked up “outside” philosophy, in the cinema…

UNDECIDABILITY

The zombie is a late arrival in Western culture. It figures in the religion of enslaved West Africans in Haiti from the 17th century. For two hundred years Western colonialists pictured “voodoo” as a terrorist religion of blood sacrifices and cannibalistic atrocities.

But the zombie is a different kind of terror: a body without soul, mind, volition or speech. It’s said to be a reactivated corpse, or a living body rendered soulless and mindless by sorcery.

Between Life and Death

The zombie entered Western popular culture in the late 1920s. White Zombie, 1932, set the formula for Hollywood: white science meets black magic.

It’s an anxious encounter. What if the Western rationalist distinction of “life” and “death” doesn’t hold?

The anxiety has taken many forms. Zombies have been cast as catatonic lovers, inner-city policeman, invaders from the stratosphere, military expeditionaries, night club entertainers, and so on.

BUT WHATEVER THE SCENARIO, THE ZOMBIE HAS A BASIC MODEL: ALIVE BUT DEAD, DEAD BUT ALIVE. IN A CULTURE WHICH SEPARATES THE LIVING FROM THE DEAD, THE ZOMBIE OCCUPIES THE SPACE IN BETWEEN.

Between life and death – it’s an uncertain space. The zombie might be EITHER alive OR dead. But it cuts across these categories: it is BOTH alive AND dead. Equally it is NEITHER alive NOR dead, since it cannot take on the “full” senses of these terms. True life must preclude true death. The zombie short-circuits the usual logic of distinction. Having both states, it has neither. It belongs to a different order of things: in terms of life and death, it cannot be decided.

According to Hollywood, the zombie is a “secret we must refuse to believe, even if it’s true”.

UNDECIDABLES ARE THREATENING THEY POISON THE COMFORTING SENSE THAT WE INHABIT A WORLD GOVERNED BY DECIDABLE CATEGORIES.

Oppositions

The terms “life” and “death” from a BINARY OPPOSITION: a pair of contrasted terms, each of which depends on the other for its meaning. There are many such oppositions, and they’re all governed by the distinction. EITHER/OR.

If we accept this, it establishes conceptual order. Binary oppositions classify and organize the objects, events and relations of the world. They make decision possible. And they govern thinking in everyday life, as well as philosophy, theory and the sciences.

Undecidables disrupt this oppositional logic. They slip across both sides of an opposition but don’t properly fit either. They are more than the opposition can allow. And because of that, they question the very principle of “opposition”.

The Horror of Indeterminacy

Zombies are cinematic inscriptions of the failure of the “life/death” opposition. They show where classificatory order breaks down: they mark the limits of order.

Like all undecidables, zombies infect the oppositions grouped around them. These ought