An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
of paradoxes and puns, which takes an evil pleasure in mocking a whole metaphysical tradition, leading to a nihilism which paralyses thought and action or, at best, to an “artistic” practice of philosophy and literary aestheticism’7 as opposed to analytic philosophy which ‘asks and resolves serious problems in short, clear and clean articles without getting lost in these quotations and commentaries, and it can pride itself in real understanding without making a fuss about it.’8 But the style of analytic philosophy, privileging clarity as though it was a transparent deliverer or meaning, is itself, as Derrida would argue, a style.
When I studied philosophy in the 1990s, in what one might call an outpost of the mainstream of Western metaphysics, Melbourne, Australia, the two main universities differed in their emphasis between ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. The latter was the domain of the moody, dreamlike Heideggerians, whose idea of a good time was to screen the film The Ister at lunchtime and think about Hölderlin, and then gather with the purple-haired overall-wearing Merleau-Ponty brigade (with their ‘chiasms’, ‘folds’ and long meditations on what it means when a hand touches another hand) and the Foucauldians, sniffing out power everywhere and generally messing up student politics. All of which was much more interesting, I felt, rightly or wrongly, than having the Principia Mathematica explained to me by a professor telling the same jokes as he had, by his own admission, been telling on the day of the moon landing.
But this either/or was not just a consumer choice between flavours of philosophy. It was, for one side at least, a war, and it was a conflict affecting all of Western philosophy. In May 1992, eighteen academics drawn from Mannheim to Florence, Los Angeles to Cracow wrote an open letter to The Times against the proposal that Derrida receive an honorary degree at Cambridge University, arguing that while Derrida ‘describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of that discipline’, his work ‘does not meet accepted standards of quality and rigour’ and that ‘M. Derrida … seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or the concrete poets’.9 One of the signatories, the philosopher David Hugh Mellor, later pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge, was moved to say, ‘I’m sure Derrida himself doesn’t believe most of the nonsense he is famous for, but if you filter that out, the rest doesn’t add up to anything worthy of an honorary degree.’10
The disdain did not dissipate even on his death. While the French president Jacques Chirac was eulogising ‘one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,’ the New York Times obituary, under the headline ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’ described deconstruction, of which Derrida was ‘the father’ (a designation which would have amused him no end) as ‘murky’ and ‘undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education’, and his prose as being ‘turgid and baffling’. It quoted lovingly from a number of Derrida’s detractors, including Malcolm Bradbury’s bon mot that ‘Literature, the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons.’
More recently Derrida has been lumped in with postmodernists in a discourse where ‘postmodernist’ means those who argue that there is no such thing as truth and who, in the more extreme versions, are responsible for the collapse of society, owing to their espousal of radical indeterminism (a word that does not exist in Derrida’s corpus, except where he rejects accusations of it), which has led either to a liberalism that cannot accept any grand narratives or an authoritarianism that feels no obligation towards any fundamental truths, and which therefore can appeal, straight-faced, to alternative facts.
In this post-truth world, thinkers such as Derrida are seen as anticipating this dangerous relativism or even actually causing it. As astute a political writer as Matthew d’Ancona, in his 2017 book Post Truth, was moved to write that postmodernists, ‘incomprehensible in [their] terminology and intellectual skittishness’, had ‘corroded our concept of truth’. It is, he writes, ‘an arresting reflection that, etched into the long Parisian paragraphs of convoluted, post-modern prose, so often dismissed as indulgent nonsense, was a bleak omen of the political future’.11
Similarly, the cultural critic Michiko Kakutani, author of The Death of Truth, blames ‘academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism’ for the rise of Donald Trump. Meanwhile the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, interviewed in the Guardian in 2017, stated baldly, ‘I think what the post-modernists did was truly evil.’12 More alarmingly, the 1,500-page manifesto A European Declaration of Independence, written by the Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, cites ‘Derridean deconstruction’ as a tool used by cultural critics to ‘remove traditional meaning and replace it with a new meaning … indoctrinating this new generation in feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy and the so-called “queer theory”.’
Derrida himself parodied his antagonists in Monolingualism of the Other:
So you ask yourself questions about truth. Well, to that very extent, you do not as yet believe in truth; you are contesting the possibility of truth. That being the case, how do you expect your statements to be taken seriously when they lay a claim to some truth, beginning with your so-called questions? What you are saying is not true because you are questioning truth. Come on! you are a sceptic, a relativist, a nihilist; you are not a serious philosopher! If you continue, you will be placed in a department of rhetoric or literature … You do not believe what you are saying; you want to mislead us.13
Derrida’s defenders and advocates have not always been especially helpful either – tending to concentrate their efforts on what might be called the more carnivalesque aspects of his thinking, his disruptive potential, while again ignoring the rigour of his philosophical project. In a sense this is fair enough. One of the more daunting aspects of a diligent reading of Derrida is that his work often appears to assume a thorough working knowledge of most of the history of Western philosophy, as well as vast tranches of non-Western philosophy, Western non-philosophy and non-Western non-philosophy too. For instance the opening section ‘Exergue’ of his influential essay ‘White Mythologies’, which takes as its jumping-off point an obscure chapter in the obscure Anatole France book The Garden of Epicurus, then assures us that to understand the argument requires an ‘examination of the texts of Renan and Nietzsche … as well as those of Freud, Bergson and Lenin … and one should reread the entirety of Mallarmé’s texts on linguistics, aesthetics and political economy’.14 The footnotes to this paragraph also list Lacan, Jakobson, Benveniste, Althusser, Hegel, Balibar, Marx and Jean-Joseph Goux.
Thus Derrida was no gadfly. He read deeply and intensely, scouring each text for the sorts of inconsistencies, hidden assumptions and breaks in logic which would become the target of deconstruction. It was a way of working he was able to joke about, as when, being interviewed in his extensive and chaotic home library for the 2002 documentary Derrida, he tells the interviewer, ‘I haven’t read all the books that are here … Maybe three or four. But I read those three or four really, really well.’
He also attempted to write really, really well. Having called into question the binary opposition philosophy/literature (also true/false, real/fictional, logical/rhetorical) his work often aspires to the condition of art, and employs many of its strategies, including irony, juxtaposition and hyperbole. While the latter in Derrida does not carry the strategic prominence that it does in, for instance, Nietzsche, Derrida confesses he is ‘an incorrigible hyperbolite. A generalized hyperbolite. In short, I exaggerate. I always exaggerate … hyperbolism [has] invaded my life and work. Everything that proceeds under the name of “deconstruction” arises from it, of course.’15
Here, then, was a new way of doing philosophy, in a new language. One that, rather than wishing to expel the poets from the polis – as philosophers had from Plato to J. L. Austin – had as part of its grounding notion the position that not only are the barriers between poetic speech and other utterances vague and sometimes meaningless, but that, arguably, poetic speech has a greater access to the particular ‘truth’ at which philosophy has aimed in its narrative. It was, and is, exhilarating stuff. For example, ‘White