An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
to extract a flower, to mount it, or rather to have it mount itself, bring itself to light – and turning away, as if from itself, come round again, such a flower engraves – learning to cultivate, by means of a lapidary’s reckoning, patience.16
While his seminal early essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ opens like an incantation:
That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger – and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death – or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed in the shadow of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future – all these things are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.17
If philosophy is ‘wandering toward the meaning of its death’, Derrida is teasing out its implications, in a sense of praying over it.
For many outside France, Derrida arrived, as it were, fully formed. Here was an enfant terrible who had declared, notoriously, ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). This was a sentence destined to be ripped from its context by both supporters and antagonists and reduced to a slogan, often held up as proof positive of either the calumnies or daring of postmodern thought. Derrida and ‘that lot’ had declared the author dead, and argued that all is text, that all truth is conditional and that the great narratives should be treated, at best with suspicion, at worst with contempt. To which Derrida would have answered: well, perhaps.
Also, reflecting a bias towards language and logic, most Anglophone introductions to Derrida have tended to start their analyses via linguistics and semiotics. In this version, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics establishes the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, the word and that which it denotes, and Derrida simply represents what happens when this argument is taken to its logical conclusion – viz all signifiers float free of their putative signifieds such that no transcendental signified can guarantee meaning. We become trapped in a mesh of language (il n’y a pas de hors-texte), where all is relative, contingent, tending towards chaos.
This reading does two things. First, it situates Derrida as simply a logical endpoint to language’s dominance of philosophy in the twentieth century. Someone had to take the thought of Saussure to its logical conclusion, so it may as well be Derrida. The uniqueness and richness of his thought is effaced – anyone could have thought of that. But it also pulls him away from the philosophical discourses that, positively and negatively, were touchstones for a certain generation of French philosophers. These include Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, but also the phenomenology of Husserl and Sartre, Alexandre Kojève’s revolutionary 1933 lectures on Hegel, the battles against and within existentialism as represented by Sartre and Heidegger, debates around communism and Algeria, as well as the influence of thinkers who are less well known outside of France – Georges Canguilhem, Jean Cavaillès and Gabriel Marcel.
The ‘Derrida’ who became something of a cause célèbre in the 1980s had in fact won his ‘fundamental concepts’ through exhaustive philosophical work. For obvious pop cultural reasons, as well as philosophical reasons, this has generally been ignored. In fairness, Derrida played to this crowd. Intellectually demanding French philosophers who at the age of thirty-seven are still slaving away unrecognised on obscure passages of Edmund Husserl concerning the origin of geometry, and of Rousseau’s use of the word ‘supplement’, don’t tend to find themselves, fifteen years later, smoking pipes and being sexy and incomprehensible in major feature films, so why not enjoy?
The Derridean writings of the mid-1970s and early ’80s are his most experimental (again sexy) and autobiographical. While both of these moves are philosophically justifiable in terms of his ‘project’, neither harmed his growing reputation outside the academy. That his work was difficult also, perhaps, helped. It saved the bother of reading him. To be for or against Derrida could thus be a stance, and that position could be projected back onto him by both those who gloried in him and those who excoriated him.
This ambivalence often fed his work. Unlike that other ‘literary philosopher’, Nietzsche, he did not turn his back on the academy, whatever the academy’s attempts to turn its back on him. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘this mingling of respect and disrespect for the academic heritage and tradition in general is legible in everything I do.’18
For the word ‘academic’, substitute ‘philosophical’. As Husserl had argued ‘to the things themselves’, Derrida’s battle cry might have been ‘to the texts themselves’. Derrida’s achievement is one of reading as much as of writing and, as he puts it, his ‘desire to be faithful to the themes and audacities of a thinking’.19 His ‘deconstruction’ of the great and sometimes less great works of philosophy, was a form of close reading, as rigorous as that of the New Critics, with whose work his own has parallels. He comes to bury and to praise simultaneously. ‘I love very much everything that I deconstruct,’ he wrote, ‘the texts I want to read from a deconstructive point of view are texts I love.’20
For Derrida, this close reading involved taking philosophers at their word, and looking for where this operation leads to inconsistencies and internal contradictions, not due to the infelicities of the writers themselves, but as an inbuilt feature of language, the impossibility of its coherence. It also involved finding in the work of philosophers the points where it broke down or repressed certain notions in order to frame their position. Thus while the master of the spatial, Husserl, is analysed by the metaphor of the temporal, the great materialist Marx is confronted with the ethereal presence of ‘spirit’ in his work.
By identifying these inconsistencies and contradictions, we are led to explore how the text in question is, indeed, constructed. In part this is a political operation – we ‘analyse historically the formation and layers of its concepts’, ‘carry out a genealogical analysis of a trajectory through which its concepts have been built, used and legitimized’ and ‘analyse the hidden assumptions.’21 Deconstruction – which Derrida himself described as ‘an ugly and difficult word’ – is not a method or a tool imposed from outside the text, rather, ‘there is always already deconstruction at work in works.’ Here we can identify, for instance, where power lies, who is signing the cheques. In the Derridean sense, we also uncover logocentrism, phallogocentrism, ethnocentrism, among others.
But it is, crucially, also to seek out that term, or terms, which give the text the illusion of stability, a centre that holds the text in place. The history of Western metaphysics, Derrida argues, is a history of these ‘centres’. He listed such terms in the paper he delivered at Baltimore, as ‘eidos [which he defines as form, essence, type, species], arche [beginning, origin, source], telos [end, purpose, goal], energia [energy, at-work-ness], ousia [essence, existence, substance, subject], alethia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth,’ each taken up by different eras, different philosophers, different systems.
Add to that another ‘centre’ that later became crucial to Derrida: justice. Our system of law is predicated on the existence of justice, as our systems of theology are predicated on the existence of God, and yet neither justice nor God occur within the systems, nor can their existence be guaranteed. They are both, argues Derrida ‘to come’. But this does not refute the system, rather it is the engine of both its survival and its need to adapt. Law will cease to have a function on the arrival of justice, as theology will be made redundant by the arrival of God, and philosophy on the arrival of Truth.
Until such time, there will be deconstruction.
The unknown thirty-six-year-old who rose to speak at Baltimore in 1966 was not yet the father of deconstruction.