An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
An Event, Perhaps
An Event, Perhaps
A Biography ofJacques Derrida
Peter Salmon
First published by Verso 2020
© Peter Salmon 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-280-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-283-3 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-282-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Salmon, Peter, 1955– author.
Title: An event, perhaps : a biography of Jacques Derrida / Peter Salmon.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An introduction to the life and work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021106 (print) | LCCN 2020021107 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788732802 | ISBN 9781788732833 (US ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Derrida, Jacques.
Classification: LCC B2430.D484 S275 2020 (print) | LCC B2430.D484 (ebook) | DDC 194 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021106
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021107
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
To Fiona
I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense.
– Socrates (Plato, Parmenides)
I’d never say this in public – I still love beautiful books and believe in them.
– Jacques Derrida
Contents
4. Jacques Derrida
5. An Event, Perhaps
6. Of Grammatology
7. Supposing That Truth Is a Woman – What Then?
8. Here Comes Everybody
9. Before the Law
10. Of God
11. An Event Has Occurred
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural – or structuralist – thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term ‘event’ anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks.
On 21 October 1966, a little-known thirty-six-year-old French philosophy teacher took to the stage at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to deliver a paper titled ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’.
The symposium, portentously titled ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, had been running for three days, and was a huge intellectual event, bringing together over a hundred philosophers, literary critics, ethnographers, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and other cultural theorists from eight countries. Speakers included Roland Barthes, Jean Hyppolite, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Northrop Frye, Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Lacan, while the attendees included future intellectual stars such as Paul de Man and Joseph Hillis Miller. Of the pre-eminent names in structuralism, only Michel Foucault was absent.
The symposium was organised to introduce structuralism to America. Structuralism was rapidly replacing the existentialism of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir as the dominant philosophical trend in France. Taking its lead from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and underpinned by Freud and Marx, structuralism rejected human-centred philosophy. Instead, it proposed that all elements of human culture, and all phenomena of human life, could only be understood as being part of a ‘structure’, and any explanation of motives, actions and behaviour had to overcome the illusion of a free subject. Everything could only be explained by its interrelationship to other parts of the scheme.
These insights were applied across a range of disciplines. In literature, structuralism moved away from the model of authorial intention – the work as a creation of a single mind which knew what it was doing during the creative process and which produced a work whose effect corresponded, more or less, with ‘what the author was trying to do’ – to a model which saw the meaning of a work as being produced by its place within a system of shared narrative techniques, shared tropes, shared conventions and assumed worldviews. Meaning is produced by the work’s place in a genre (or outside of one), by the circumstances of its production and by the social (and intellectual and cultural) position of the reader.
Derrida had only been invited to the conference at the last moment, after the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch was unable to attend. He came on the recommendation of the director of the École normale supérieure, Jean Hyppolite, who provided what was hardly a ringing endorsement. ‘I think’, said Hyppolite, ‘he would be somebody who would come.’1
Derrida was the final speaker on the final day. He remained a silent observer for much of the symposium. He looked on as Lacan rose to his feet with obscure questions at the end of each lecture, and as Barthes gently asked for clarification on various moot points. Eventually, however, Derrida, unused to speaking to large audiences, took to the stage, quietly shuffled his notes, and began, ‘Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event”…’ He spoke for less than half an hour. But by the time he was finished the entire structuralist project was in doubt, if not dead. An event had occurred: the birth of deconstruction.
Any biography of Derrida must, as a sort of contractual obligation to his thinking, foreground its caveats. Some are the