Derrida, the renowned philosopher and one of the rogues who is partly responsible for screwing up my nice little analytical philosophical world, just died today. The BBC article on his death begins the third paragraph with, “Fellow academics have charged that Derrida’s writings are ‘absurd’ but his mark on modern thinking is undisputed…” The NYT concludes that his “approach was controversial.” I wonder if it might be more accurate to say, “His approach has been hijacked and used by everyone in amazingly diverse ways and his challenges to the field of philosophy, the practice of reading, and the art of writing have contributed to a veritable civil war in the humanities which continues today.”
I like how the BBC article quotes him in a documentary made about him:
At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”
“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.
All of these articles refer to him founding a “school” of “deconstructionists”? Is this true? I know his work, which include the idea of deconstruction, has been amazingly influential, but are there people out there who call themselves “deconstructionists” and does anyone in literature or theory think there is a school which thinks it is “doing what Derrida does”?
Anyways, it was strange to hear this news today since I just started Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida which is the first time these two very different philosophers have agreed to be published together. I don’t know that much about Derrida’s work. I never made it through Spivak’s introduction to his On Grammatology. However, I really liked the book Derrida by Christopher Norris, all of whose work I really respect, and also Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, which I think does a decent job of explaining the idea.
UPDATE: There is a longer obituary in the NYT I didn’t see earlier. I like one quote especially:
“Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise – if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it,” Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine.
UPDATE: Enowing has a nice entry on this, which points to an article at the Chronicle which doesn’t refer to the “deconstructionism” that I puzzled over above. Also enowing has a great quote which cracked me up:
Avital Ronell recalls being with Derrida when a new edition of a French dictionary is released, and it includes the word differance with an a. Avital wants to organize a celebration of this historic occasion. Derrida’s mom, who’s been sitting at the dinner table listening to this conversation, turns to Derrida aghast and asks, “Jacky, you spelt differance with an a?”
The last quote is particularly telling…
I’d be curious about your response to the Borradori book.
cheers.
The Avital Ronell remark is from the Derrida documentary from Amy Ziering-Kofman and Kirby Dick, as your cite indicates. Ronell was speaking of Derrida’s humility, remarking that he didn’t try to force his work on his family. She was proposing a champagne toast over the appearance of the word in the dictionary. She remarked that on seeing Derrida’s mother’s response, “I realized I had blabbed.”
As for a school of deconstruction, people have attempted to group together Derrida with Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom as the “Yale Critics”, largely because Derrida taught at Yale owing to his close relationship with de Man and in turn drew considerable interest from the aforementioned members of the Yale faculty. When Louis Menand was writing on “The Politics of Deconstruction” for The New York Review of Books, he noted that all of the above (with the exception of Bloom) were considered to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of deconstruction in 1987, when de Man’s writings for Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land appeared, yet could not seem to agree on how to interpret de Man’s work from that time or its significance for his later work. Whatever the merits of Menand’s article, it didn’t occur to him that deconstruction, such as it could be referred to in the singular even in the context of work by people who had spent a reasonably long time reading and discussing their work, might never have set out to be such a narrow path that agreement would be possible about the specifics of concern to Menand in respect to such a difficult question that was bound to have very individual implications.
One might just as breezily speak of a French “school” of deconstruction, whose avowed members included Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. When the former three felt compelled to publish books (two in Derrida’s case) on Heidegger, Nazism, and the Shoah when the issue hit the media in 1987, it became abundantly clear that Lyotard wasn’t inclined to agree with Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, whose works were distinct from one another but did not seem to square off either.
Even when the stakes didn’t look so high and the occassion less urgent, one can reasonably judge from de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Blindness”, Derrida’s “Writing Proofs”, and Lyotard’s “Translator’s Notes” that there is no single identity that could subsume the work of all. I would hesitate at any analysis that assumed that deconstruction was nothing more than what they fully shared. These people were always friends to Derrida, and Derrida always insisted that an essential aspect friendship was that something of a friend remain forever strange and obscure, even to the most intimate friendships sealed by the sharing of secrets, personal or otherwise.
Derrida said elsewhere that he was rather dissatisfied to have spoken of deconstruction so much in the plural, and Lyotard certainly made an effort to distinguish different deconstructions by referring to Derridean deconstruction, Heideggerean deconstruction and so forth. Deconstruction always being something of an event and therefore impossible to define exhaustively, one cannot get away from speaking of it with terms like trait, signature, and counter-signature.