An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
definition be partial, selective. Such an undertaking forms a narrative that could be told otherwise and that, presented in the form of a book with a beginning, middle and end, uses the structures of literature to present an object – a life – which is not ipso facto propitious to literary form, nor has any essential reason to mirror its tropes. The writer and the reader make a compact with each other – sign a contract of sorts – to ignore this deceit as much as possible, as the readers of fiction suspend their disbelief in order to care about the characters.
That Derrida explicitly problematised what we call biography makes the need for these caveats even more pressing. His analyses of proper names, the signature, hospitality, autobiography and, ultimately, the act of writing itself means that any declarative sentence is under suspicion, let alone any declarations about another human being. Access to the real is always already a ‘representation’, and all language is rhetorical rather than denotative.
The problem intensifies in an intellectual biography that, as part of its raison d’être seeks to identify and explicate the ‘key concepts’ or the ‘fundamental ideas’ of a particular thinker. Derrida’s key concept or fundamental idea is to – and here one immediately searches verbs that are not emphatic – reject (‘reject’), disorder (‘disorder’), complicate (‘complicate’) or, to put it another way, to deconstruct (‘deconstruct’) what we mean by ‘key concepts’ and ‘fundamental ideas’. As Derrida himself wrote, ‘once quotation marks demand to appear, they don’t know when to stop.’2
This can lead to a kind of panicked rush of obfuscation. Derrida’s insistence on the equivocal, the ambiguous and the conditional renders unequivocal, unambiguous and unconditional statements instantly suspicious. The temptation to mimic Derrida’s own gnomic, allusive and elusive language can be overwhelming.
To ‘do’ deconstruction is indeed to start from the position that any emphatic statement carries within it a cultural, lexical and political history that reinforces (engenders, instigates, propagates) what Derrida called the metaphysics of presence, the existence of the transcendental signifier into which we can plant our flag of meaning. It is a genuine problem, a genuine insight – but obeying its demands can also lead to genuine rubbish.
Indeed part of the difficulty of approaching Derrida for the first time can be reading the secondary texts that cluster around him, worrying out the implications of his thought in a sort of hermeneutic magic circle. Many of these texts end up talking to themselves in a sub-Derridean word salad – full of puns, neologisms, scare quotes, parentheses, footnotes and clubbable jokes, none of which Derrida was averse to himself (he was just better at it).
So a choice must be made between speaking, as it were, in the voice of Derrida’s thought, or not. Neither option will necessarily result in a ‘truer’ version of Derrida or his thought. And neither option will, necessarily, get closer to the man named ‘Jacques Derrida’ and the concepts he sought to elucidate and interrogate. One option will, however, be easier to read. As Derrida himself put it, in one of his more laconic utterances, ‘ordinary language is probably right.’3
This biography aims to set out the intellectual development of Jacques Derrida; to situate it in events both private and public; and to argue for its importance as an event in the history of philosophy and of thought more generally. It will argue that Derrida is one of the great philosophers of this or any age; that his thinking is a crucial component of any future philosophy; that his thinking is immediately – always already – applicable to the world as we find it; and that this application has political heft.
In doing so, I approach Derrida as philosopher. The Anglo-phone world has tended to elide this fundamental fact about his thinking. Whatever form his writings took, whichever discipline took him up or he took up himself, he was a philosopher first and foremost. Thus the first half of the book concentrates on his development and the development of his ideas – from the student and junior teacher from Algeria with his interest in Sartre, Joyce and Camus (among others); to the philosophy student carrying out an intense reading of Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas; and then on to the newly published lecturer at the École normale supérieure who felt, tentatively, and then with a growing sense of excitement and nervousness, that he had found an aporia – a break, an unresolvable contradiction – in Husserl. And that this aporia, this unresolvable contradiction was not Husserl’s, but belonged to the whole history of Western metaphysics, an insight about the nature of all of philosophy from Plato to the present day.
Deconstruction is, as we shall see, born with Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s ‘now’ – that originary moment, that imaginary vantage point, where one can carry out a phenomenological description of the world as though time does not exist (nor, therefore, history). Husserl relies on this ‘now’ to generate his philosophy and to set its limits, but the concept ‘now’ is itself assumed, unquestioned. For Derrida this is an example, par excellence, of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ – the unexamined assumption and therefore privileging of the notion that consciousness is fully present, that the world is fully present, and that we can analyse it with concepts which are fully present and that, in some sense, exist as things. Metaphysics privileges presence over absence. This is one of the binary oppositions which sustain metaphysics, and metaphysics is
the enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.4
The task of deconstruction is to examine these binary oppositions in which the first term is privileged – good/evil, positive/negative, pure/impure, simple/complex, essential/accidental, imitated/imitation (as well as speech/writing, man/woman, light/darkness, white/non-white, Western/Oriental) – to problematise them, uncover their fabrication, and analyse the violence that this initiates and sustains.
Derrida argues that
an opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination. Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralisation: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practise an overturning of the classical opposition, and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticises.5
To do our own sort of justice to this position requires a patient and in some sense radical reading – the coherence of Derrida’s thinking, from his earliest works through to his last is remarkable. It requires that our attention be directed towards the foundational texts, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel. While structuralism furnished Derrida with an immediate field of enquiry, any philosophical theory would have done so.
Far from being the slippery and slick operator that his detractors have attempted to paint him as, Derrida doggedly explored the implications of his fundamental insight across disciplines – literature, feminism, (post-)colonialism, law, psychoanalysis, politics, film theory, theology, even architecture, friendship, gift-giving and hospitality – and did so with rigour and logic. From his first writings on religious mysteries to his final works on animals and animality, Derrida displays a meticulous consistency of thought and method. While this leads him into areas presumably unthought of by the nascent phenomenologist he started as, bugged by a small section on writing in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, it seldom led him to contradict himself or recant. As he himself wrote, ‘Whether it’s my luck or my naiveté, I don’t think I have ever repudiated anything.’6
That his writings are abstruse is an effect of his philosophy. His thought generates his style just as Wittgenstein’s generated aphorisms, Spinoza’s numbered propositions, Heidegger’s