Jacques Derrida died today from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. I must confess that while Derrida was frequently despised by many, that to me he was one of my favorite philosophers. I recall reading him for the first time in a collection of papers called A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Even though I probably wasn't prepared for his writings, having read little Heidegger and no Husserl or Hegel, I found myself entranced by his writings - especially his demonstrative ones. My favorite Derrida writing is among his least overtly philosophical. "Tympan" takes two texts, one in the margin of the other, to demonstrate many aspects of decontruction and intertextuality. I was at the time learning semiotics had had been devouring both Umberto Eco and C. S. Peirce. To read Derrida was to see things in a new light. From a purely literary perspective, it was a joy to read. It was like nothing I had seen before, connecting several notions that I'd been developing on my own. The text was amazing and if people read only one work by Derrida, I'd almost encourage it to be this one rather than his earlier and perhaps more approachable texts.
My second favorite Derrida work was The Gift of Death. It once again is a very interesting discussion, primarily about religion and the sacrifice of Abraham. While Kierkegaard is always lurking in the text, in a way the text is primarily about the notion of "gift" and "giving" as a kind of unspeakable universal. As such, I think it is one of his clearest works. Indeed while his latter works are probably his most misunderstood, I think they end up being phenomenological analysis of various "universals." As such they probably bear a striking resemblance to conceptual analysis as found in the Analytic tradition. The difference is that Derrida takes seriously his discoveries regarding grounds, phenomenology and most importantly semiotics. In a sense these latter works are all investigations of some universal with the universal being "conceived" (or perhaps unveiled?) as a Heideggarian for-the-sake-of. As such they are always incomplete, always oriented around a "center" which is an aporia or paradox wherein the center or ground is missing. They are so powerful precisely because they are indeterminate, incomplete and point not to a sure origin but to "something else."
There are so many of his texts that I could quote as my own memory to this major figure of 20th century philosophy. I think I'll chose the end of Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, a eulogy given to his friend and perhaps one of his greatest influences.
Once again the à-Dieu as time or, more precisely, as the future "according to the way that is proper to me and that consists in treating time on the basis of the other": "It [time] is, according to its meaning (if one can speak of a meaning without intentionality: without vision or even aim), patient awaiting of God, patience of excess (an à-Dieu, as I express myself now); but an awaiting where nothing is awaited.
I have two related posts on this as well. The first is a few quotations of Derrida on his own ideas, attempting to clarify some misunderstandings. Since these misunderstanding appear to be repeated quite regularly in many responses to his death, some might find them informative. I should add that while I think charges of nihilism or relativism have no place with Derrida, many of the criticisms do fit various so-called disciples of his - typically shoddy thinkers in the humanities or social sciences. The other post was about whether Derrida was original. I don't think he really was. I think he came to his ideas via some original thinking. Basically an engagement with Husserl via semiotics (especially Peirce and Duns Scotus). But I think where he ended up was pretty much the same place Heidegger found himself in. In the same way I think Levinas (who was very influential on Derrida, especially in the 1970's) attempted to break with Heidegger but ended up merely creating a new path to the same place. Others might disagree, of course.
Just a few more comments. I really like the following from the TRIBnet write-up of his death. (Link thanks to Will to Blog)
As Derrida grew ill, death haunted him. In a Le Monde interview in August, Derrida said that learning to live means learning to die. "Less and less, I have not learned to accept death," he was quoted as saying. "I remain uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die."
This reminds me of something Chauncey Riddle taught in his old epistemology class. (Not really a class on epistemology but more an introduction to religion and philosophy for Freshmen) While I'm not sure I'd consider Riddle a postmodernist, he was deeply affected by existentialism. One theme he kept speaking of was that to learn to live one must learn to die. The greatest thing one can do in ones life is have a strategy for death. As I can recall, there weren't any Heideggarian overtones to Riddle's comments. I think it was much more of a kind of existentialist view of the Mormon plan of salvation. But the comments by Derrida reminded me of it rather profoundly, especially since violence and death, at the metaphysical level, were so much a part of Derrida's thought.
A few of the better or at least quite interesting comments on Derrida's death:
Quadrant Crossing
Spurious
New York Times
Wood's Lot has some great excerpts from Derrida and related links.
Pinocchio Theory has some great comments, somewhat similar to some of mine the past month or two.
In Medias Res is one of the better write-ups on Derrida, from fellow Mormon, Russell Fox.
Times and Seasons had some good comments by Jim Faulconer as well. (Who I must confess guided me a lot in my early reading of Derrida and Heidegger.
I'll continue to add here the better ones, but EKnowing has a rather comprehensive list. Unfortunately he doesn't appear to have read them all. Lots of rather cruel "good riddance" type of comments. I can somewhat understand that in the political blogs. Politics, especially the last couple of years has become very uncivilized. But I really was surprised at some of the vitriol, much of which probably is from people who couldn't tell you what Derrida was saying. Of course since they can't understand that is clear evidence that it is all nonsense. I'll have to give them a copy of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler and ask them to explain a few chapters. There's something rather annoying about people who take affront at the mere fact they can't understand and interpret it so personally. It demonstrates a rather grave insecurity.
Clark, thanks for the list of other sites. I found it very useful. Thanks also for voicing something I also find irritating, as if everything is supposed to be easy to read and understand.
BTW - since I suspect a lot of people didn't get the reference, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is the standard GR textbook. (For some reason physicists always refer to textbooks by the last name of the author) The point being that were I to take a chapter out of that book and give it to someone to read, chances are they wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails out of it.
As I said back in the whole Continental vs. Analytic post, I think part of the problem is that most people criticizing Derrida haven't read him nor really grappled with him. I'd probably encourage anyone spouting nonsense about Derrida to pick up a copy of Lawlor's Derrida and Husserl and see where he is coming from.
A few more of the better reactions:
Adam Kotsko: A nice sort of personal bio of how Derrida affected his thought. (I'm not quite sure of the political implications, mind you - but that's me)
Michael Bérubé: A very nice overview of Derrida and misunderstandings of what deconstruction attempts. I ought to do my own "one page misleading summary" myself one of these days.
Mixing Memory: a very nice overview of the reactions to Derrida's death - both those admiring him and disparaging him. He ties it all back into the whole Analytic - Continental divide debate over what a philosopher is.
I should probably link here to Jim's excellent online primer on Deconstruction as well. I've recommended it numerous times.
Clark,
Note this article as well.
www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1324160,00.html
(Sorry, I don't know how to put this up as a link.)
CG Note: Just do links like you would in HTML. So the above would
be written in your text as
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1324160,00.html">
www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1324160,00.html</a>
There's been a few other interesting comments on Derrida. The Chronical of Higher Education has an interesting writeup on Derrida. Thanks to Enowning for the link. I should add they have up an other excellent set of comments and links regarding Derrida.
Also, while I linked to Chris' original post earlier, Brian Leiter posted a few comments on Derrida over at Mixing Memory. Leiter's comments basically reduce to the fact that Derrida read Nietzsche quite poorly. Not only does he think Derrida a poor reader, but the "the kind Nietzsche would have despised." I'm not enough of a Nietzsche scholar to be able to reply to that. I think Behler's book on Derrida and Nietzsche was interesting to read, however, for perhaps a contrarian view (as well as a critique of North American ways of reading Nietzsche). Probably one ought to read Leiter's own comments on Derrida's death at his blog, however.
I am, needless to say, with the vast majority of philosophers in thinking Derrida's work of a philosophical nature was badly confused and pernicious in its influence, and in the substantial minority within that group who formed that opinion after actually reading his work. His preposterously stupid writings on Nietzsche were, of course, a particular source of annoyance. And even his more apparently scholarly work on, e.g., Husserl turns out to be rather poor, as J. Claude Evans showed more than a dozen years ago. Like the Straussians, Derrida and his followers tend to be willfully bad readers of texts. Fortunately, their influence has already faded from the scene in both North America and Europe.
"Not only does he think Derrida a poor reader, but the "the kind Nietzsche would have despised." "
I'm certainly not all that familiar with Nietzsche, but wouldn't Nietzsche have despised most readers? Broadminded acceptance of the way most people read doesn't strike me as Nietzsche's style.
I'd have thought that too. But while I've read a lot of Nietzsche and most of the main commentaries, I'm anything but confident in my ability to argue from him. And Brian Leiter is one of the better known Nietzsche experts in the country, as I understand. However I've also noticed that most experts on Nietzsche seem to have radically different ways of reading him. Compare, for instance Schacht to many other readings. Even if we ignore Derrida and Heidegger as "creative" readings, and Kauffman's as problematic, there still seems to be little consensus on Nietzsche. Given that, Derrida's hypothesis that there isn't a single Nietzsche doesn't seem that far out.
Everyone seems to have a pet interpretation of Nietzsche. I know I have mine, and it's probably very different from Leiter's, and I know it's different from Derrida's. Still, I don't really find that odd, and I don't think Nietzsche would either. He seems to anticipate this often in his writings, with his talk of misunderstandings, and the influence of motives on reading and philosophy.
If I were brave enough to say something definitive about Nietzsche's view of Derrida, the passage I would reference would be one from TSZ, in which he says, "One would repay one's teacher poorly if one were to remain nothing but a pupil."
Just to add to the above, Jim has a great post over at Times and Seasons that is quite related to the Derrida discussion. It's more about how there is a tendency to reduce analysis to jingoism. We see this a lot in politics, unfortunately. But I think a lot of the Derrida situation is a prime example. Many of the comments are well worth reading.
A few more good Derrida eulogies. The first, thanks to Russell Fox, is from Matt Stannard at the Underview. Kind of a wide ranging set of comments focusing in on politics. I'm not sure I agree with all of Matt's comments, but they are an interesting different take from some of the Derrida heaping of the past week.
Not really a eulogy, since it was written in 1998, but there's a great article from the New York Review of Books on Derrida's politics that someone linked to. (Was it Jim?)
One more rather interesting account, mainly of student life under Derrida in France. From an online journal called "n + 1" with a second part to emerge next week.
Also there is an online "letter" to the New York Times regarding their obituary on Derrida, signed by various scholars. Almost 800 scholars have signed it thus far.
Jonathan Kandell’s obituary for Jacques Derrida is mean-spirited and uninformed. To characterize Derrida, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, as an "Abstruse Theorist" is to employ criteria which would disqualify Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Heisenberg.
Most of the comments have wound down although I suspect we'll see some more formally written commentary in the monthly magazines over the next few weeks.
I should really add Jim Faulconer's comments from Times and Seasons (towards the end of the comments) They were rather touching.
A friend of mine transcribed the “last words” of Derrida, read by his son at the grave. Some may be interested in them:
“Mes amis, je vous remercie d’être venus. Je vous remercie pour la chance de votre amitié. Ne pleurez pas : souriez comme je vous aurai [aurais?] souri. Je vous bénis. Je vous aime. Je vous souris, où que je sois.”
“My friends, I thank you for coming. I thank you for the good fortune of your friendship. Do not cry: smile as I would smile at you. I thank God for you. I love you. I am smiling at you, wherever I am.”
You've probably already seen this, but Terry Eagleton has a brief but forceful defense of Derrida in the Guardian yesterday (the 15th).
I should point out that Maverick Philosopher links to the excellent New York Times explanation of Derrida. Unfortunately as with most of the other critiques of Continental philosophy he's made the last while, he seems to miss the point. I'm frankly amazed at this, as he seems to read a lot of Continental writers, yet seems to never understand in the least what they are saying. (See my comments on previous attempts at critiquing Continental philosophers here and here (towards the bottom) Given how wildly he reads them, his comments on Derrida aren't that surprising.
I should add that I don't think Derrida will be remembered as one of the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century. I'd definitely put Derrida on the second tier, despite his popularity in American humanity departments. Further, as I read him, he really isn't that original. Which isn't to downplay his work. Merely that I think he is a distant second to Heidegger or Wittgenstein. I'd most likely put Gadamer ahead of him as well. I'd also put Quine, Austin, Davidson, Russell, Husserl, and many others ahead of him as well. So let's not overstate our case while defending Derrida.
I do think that Dr. Vallicella is a little "extravagant" in claiming that the 20th century was a dismal century for philosophy. I can understand his dismissing Heidegger (although clearly I think him significantly wrong in this judgment) but the work in mathematical foundations is hugely significant, not to mention the work in the philosophy of physics (and the changes in physics itself) This century has probably had more progress in philosophy than any other. (IMO) Perhaps philosophy isn't keeping quite up with the advances in science, but it is close. BTW - anyone who says Husserl wrote clearly and easy to read I have to wonder about. Maybe he's easier in the original German. As I've mentioned before and as I just noticed Enowning pointing out, there are lots of significant philosophy texts that have an impenetrable style. I usually link to Newton's Principia, which starts off easy, but gets dense quickly. Enowing linked to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Matematica. However I'll throw in Quine's Set Theory and its Logic since I've waded through that one before.
I should add that Maverick Philosophy's main critique of Derrida reduces to the fact a lot of the terminology assumes you already are familiar with the context. (i.e. Kantian categories of thought) i.e. you have to have read other works before you can read it. Admittedly there is a lot of philosophy, especially in the Analytic tradition, where you can dive in and quite quickly get up to speed. However in the mathematical sciences I studied in college it was quite the opposite. Take your average grad level text and see if you can follow it. The fact a reader is ill prepared to read a text does not entail that it is poorly written, obfuscated, or otherwise problematic.
The final funny point at Maverick Philosophy is that he criticizes (wrongly I might add) that Derrida assumes a kind of Kantianism going in. Yet later on he makes the criticism he's presented before about a clear, determinate thesis, defended. But that is itself a philosophical assumption that many find problematic. So there is some unintended irony there.
I suspect I'm nearing the point where I may get duplications, but I found a few more interesting discussions on Derrida's death. One of the more interesting ones was from the blog Charlotte Street. There Mark Kaplan brings out the obvious point that most of the criticisms of negative articles about Derrida aren't simply indignation that someone would criticize some idol. Rather, they are "objecting to is an ignorant and insulting tirade, full of demonstrable falsehoods, rhetorical banalities and lazy and occasionally offensive metaphors..."
It is more than a little ironic that those accusing Derrida of shoddy reading, relativism, and letting words mean "anything" are in fact better exemplars of such tactics than Derrida ever was.
A few more before I go to bed.
The first is from Amardeep Singh which has some relevant comments to how Derrida did not see deconstruction as a negative theology. I think that's an important point and is why I tend to differ so strongly with many of the so-called theological postmodernists. (Who I tend to see as merely adopting the old strong link between neoPlatonism and Christianity) Most significantly he has Derrida say, "he would not accept God as an ontologically whole entity with whom human beings can 'communicate.'" I think this a very important point, and one reason why I don't think the "God" of neoPlatonism or recent postmodern theologians "works." God for Heidegger or Derrida is an endlessly deferred and absent God. Despite the theological language, they are, I think, far closer to Nietzsche in terms of theology.
On a related note to that, check out Maverick Philosopher's recent comments on Nietzsche. He says:
for Nietzsche, every desire is at ontological bottom (albeit not manifestly) a desire for something absolute and infinite, i.e., God. This is supposed to hold even for such velleities as that for ice cream. I think this is essentially right. I am reminded of a passage from Zarathustra which I quote from memory: "Alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit. . . ." "All desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity. . . ."
I've never quite thought of it that way, but put in those terms I do tend to see more commonality to Nietzsche, Derrida, and Heidegger than I expected. God is dead for Nietzsche, yet simultaneously inescapable, as the madman found. The theist, who focuses on the anthropology of God rather than fundamental ontology, does find the claim that the missing God of these figures did appear in history. It was the philosophers who killed him, or at least made us see only the empty tomb.
One last one is Johann Harii, which I'd read several days ago, but don't think I linked to. His is a fairly critical view of Derrida. However there is some truth in it, even if there is simultaneously some error. More interesting, however, are the many comments from various figures. Some are rather notable philosophers. For instance I was surprised to read a rather positive response by Gregory Fried. As some might recall he wrote Heidegger's Polemos which I'd blogged about here a few weeks ago. Fried wrote:
In particular, what I think you get right is how the "mad axeman of Western philosophy" pulled down the edifices of reason that support our free institutions -- and only too late realized that what he had done was NOT effect a new, deeper form of liberation. In his last decade, he scrambled to build a shadow-edifice, but to no avail. I plan to use your appraisal when I teach him in the future, at least to get students started.
Now I agree in that I think that Derrida's attempts in his latter works to ground a political ideology failed miserably. Further I agree that Derrida didn't realize that problem, especially in his middle period. However I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing, being a rather strong skeptic of political philosophy. I'm more of a pragmatist who doesn't necessarily see this all as a problem.
I think the Derrida obituary commentary is finally dying out. I have to admit that most of the ones I liked the best were little Derrida stories, since I admit to only knowing him through his writings, these little insights into his personality and thought were quite enjoyable. I really have to watch the documentary on him one of these days. I'm sure it is rather helpful in that regard, even if Derrida does his typical thing in it. The best of these stories from the bogsphere is the following from Encyclopedia Hanasiana that transpired at a philosophy conference in Kansas.
Taking advantage of the setting, a questioner from the audience brought up the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and company finally meet the wizard. He is powerful and overwhelming, at least until Toto pulls away the curtain to reveal a very small man.
"Professor Derrida. Are you like that?" the audience member supposedly asked.
Derrida paused before answering.
"You mean like zee dog?" he asked.
I have to love that since it both plays up the problem of undecidability in texts as well as how, perhaps, Derrida sees himself.
The blog Kitabkhana has an interesting introduction to his comments via a quote Derrida liked to utter but whose origins is questionable.
Apparently Derrida used to open his lectures for many years with this quotation: "Oh my friends, there is no friend." It's supposed to be from Aristotle, but can't easily be traced back to Aristotle's works--appropriate enough for the man who declared that there was nothing beyond the text. I met him once in Delhi, when he delivered a lecture at the Delhi School of Economics a few years ago: it was a bizarre experience listening to him, like being mesmerised by words that sounded like absolute brilliance one moment and wet cotton wool in verbal form the next.
This quote of Derrida's was actually brought up in many commentaries on Derrida's death, both in the popular media as well as in various blogs. Of course the quote comes up in Derrida via an engagement with Montaigne who utters the cry. My take on that phrase, of course, is that Derrida is expressing that friendship isn't something that can be captured in any definition or goal. Rather it is what Heidegger would call "for-the-sake-of." A kind of "entity" (note the scare-quotes) which is never present before us. It is pure possibility and never an actuality. Thus it has to be approached in a fashion akin to negative theology (although clearly it isn't a theology in the typical sense)
Finally I should note two blogs which while criticizing the way "Derridean disciples" especially in English departments treated Derrida, still manage to give some thoughtful, if tempered, praise of Derrida. The first is from Leonard Bast. The second is from the blog, This Space. It's especially interesting how the latter comments distinguish Derrida as presented as a "mechanical device for reading texts" versus how he was read by someone with experience in phenomenology. I especially agree with his latter comments, which sees Derrida's gift to literature not as an anything goes relativism nor a kind of weird play with binary opposites, but rather as a recognition that texts are always living texts which always exceed the grasp and intents of the author. His examples in literature is well made and something I'd not considered before.
If we apply Scruton's concerns to writing, then we would have to regard a piece of writing as a person - an individual that you meet face-to-face – rather than communicating a concrete truth at our disposal. In this way, meaning becomes less stable, although it is not destroyed. Indeed, this is part and parcel of what we call literature.
The idea is what some, in a Heideggarian context, call "embodied actions." When I use a tree in my work, that has reference to the real trees. Thus that part of the text can not be limited by my intentions, since the tree so used is the real tree and not the tree as I understand it. Even if I attempt to do violence to the tree, in the sense of limiting the tree to how I conceive of it, within the text the tree is the real tree and not this limited "conceptual" tree. It escapes my attempts and is thus "alive" in the sense that the text is made up of a real entity and not just my thoughts.
I don't know if you've mentioned it anywhere, by Daniel Greene at "The Reading Experience" has a blog post on Derrida, too. I was reminded of it because he makes a similar point about Derrida's work to recognize that texts are texts (i.e., 'logocentrism' doesn't indicate the tyranny of reason but approaching a text as if it were just the author speaking to us).
Thanks for the link. That was one of the better ones. I've not said much about the valid literary aspects of Derrida, simply because they are so often drowned out by all the shoddy uses. But they definitely are there. The Dan Green post you linked to really was quite excellent. I especially like the point he makes, and that Leonard Blast made in the prior link I gave. The idea was that many within the humanities latched onto Derrida as much for political expediency as for "faddish" reasons. Yet that use always was doomed. One quote of his I really liked:
I think that the people who cared most about politics, not literature, realized that Derrida was unnecessary and might even be an obstacle to their goals. Why go through the trouble of decoding him when you could be much more direct and simply rant against literature as an instrument of oppression?
I think some of Christopher Norris' various points about the political influence of Derrida in Europe are quite perceptive. He rants in most of his books about the abuse of Derrida by self-styled disciples. But he also notes the effect it had on marxism. While I'm not well enough versed on the European political scene to say, I have been told that the general movement, of which Derrida was but one part, had far more of an effect on marxism than critics like Popper ever did. And this was well before the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course Derrida's politics is a confused and contradictory story. If there is one place where some of the critics are dead on, it is there. What Derrida attempted to do was forever undermined by what I think he philosophy led to.
An other link on the page you gave, In Favor of Thinking made a rather perceptive point as well:
What the right wing and the general media never seemed to understand, in characterizing all literary theory, and especially deconstruction, as the Evil Force of Chaos about to Destroy the Canon (remember the so-called Culture Wars?), was that in order to really understand Derrida's work, you had to be steeped in the Western literary and philosophical tradition.
One final new link I don't think I've put up before is from IdiotProgrammer. Once again I think he both provides a good measure of the real literary use of Derrida as well as why some abuse him or criticize him.
When dealing with texts on a purely textual level, it was boring to leave aside dramaturgy, characterization and literary gossip (oops, I mean “context"). In retrospect, a text-centered approach seemed increasingly irrelevant as the rest of the world drifted into visual and interactive genres (and where semiotics seemed a little more relevant). The problem with putting Derrida into the literary classroom (as well as Eagleton, deMan, Barthes, Foucault and Lacan) is that discussions seemed to lose their humanity, and texts seemed to be mere jumping points for almost irrelevant discussions of epistemology or social science. At least with Fish or Frye we could talk about authorial voice and irony (and indirectly pay homage to romanticized notion of the author as sage).
I suspect that this was one reason I loved Derrida's writings. Probably due to my bias from my background in physics, I love theory. I love reading specch act theory applied to literature. I love nearly any linguistic discovered as it is applied to literature - even some of the mythic criticism ala Eliadi or Campbell. (Although I admit those latter ones are far more problematic) I even admit that I enjoy reading criticism for its own sake - if it is well written criticism. The problem, of course, is that most criticism isn't well written.
Whew - a few more. I should add that I submitted this post to the Philosopher's Carnival in hope of getting people to read some of the more thoughtful commentary on Derrida and his passing.
Derbyshire has two Derrida posts on his blog. The first is primarily an analysis of that positive Guardian article on Derrida. It points out that Derrida, as a positive philosophy, might be seen as asking what constitutes a philosophical question, rather than attempting to answer it. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. But it is an interesting way of thinking about it. I'll have to muse about that for a while. The second post is primarily a response to Hari's critique of Derrida that I linked to above. It's quite good.
An other response to Hari's rather well linked to critique of Derrida is from the blog Backword.
An other interesting post on Derrida, thanks to Ektopos. It is from the American Prospect, which means we're starting to get the obituaries from the weekly and monthly print journals. This one is one of the better ones, since it demonstrates a lot of the conflicting things many feel about Derrida. Heavens, even though I understand why he often wrote the way he did, I'd have preferred many of his essays have been done in a different style. Worse yet were all the people who tried to mimic him.
I'd add one caveat to the above essay. I'm not sure it is accurate to say Derrida rejected absolute truth. In some of the quotes I provided in my post Derrida on Derrida I think he shows he holds to such notions. Rather he rejects the notion of a present absolute truth. Instead we get only traces of it, leading to a kind of undecidability. While I'm always leery of making the comparison because I know how abused it gets, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem probably is the best analogy to how I see Derrida. It's especially apt since Gödel used it to argue for a kind of platonism. The undecidability within the system means we have to make a decision and points to something else, "something" out of the system that can't be expressed within the system. But then I tend to see Derrida as moving quite strongly into the neoPlatonic camp.
A few more. The first, thanks to Maverick Philosopher, is from the blog Junk for Code. Bill, at Maverick Philosopher, critiques this response. I'd respond, but I just don't have a lot of time right now. My quick quibble with Dr. Vallicella would be that he conflates what a text means with what an author means by a text. Further, I think he begs the question regarding how we are to take the intentions of a person. As I understand Derrida and related philosophers like Gadamer, they would say that our intents are always in terms of "real entities" and thus include more than the author. So to say that the meaning of a text is determined by the authorial intent begs the question if the authorial intent is itself more than the conceptual understanding of that intent. Indeed it may be that the authorial intent ends up being so broad as to be unhelpful. This is quite contrary to the way intents are analyzed in many within the analytic tradition, such as say John Searle. One can, of course, disagree with Derrida, Gadamer or others. But that doesn't make their thought problematic. It is just the rather unsurprising phenomena that philosophers often disagree on fundamental matters.
Maverick Philosopher has a second entry on Derrida's response to 911. I'll briefly respond to this since it has been brought up a lot in the various responses to Derrida's death. Basically everyone was asking about the physical event and its meaning. Derrida, perhaps unwisely, decides to analyze the question in terms of a fundamental critique of meaning in texts. i.e. people wanted a straightforward political answer and Derrida gave a more complex answer about philosophy. I tend to agree with Derrida's answer, but I don't think it was really an answer to the question raised.
I find this critique of Derrida a valid one - that he tries to bring his philosophy to every problem and make a semitoic analysis rather than answer the question. My sense is Derrida recognizes this problem he often had. I'd blogged a few weeks ago about Derrida shockingly answering some questions about the state of Israel in a rather clear and straightforward way. So he can do it. I, along with many others, do wonder why Derrida attempts to deal with so many inquiries in terms of his fundamental philosophy. I think one can discuss very theoretical matters without needing to discuss every topic in terms of this theory. You don't find physicists invoking quantum mechanics to answer straightforward problems.
Of course on these more pragmatic and political issues I don't particularly see Derrida having any more insight that I have or anyone else has. I think that the tendency to ask philosophers political or social questions an odd one. It is, I think, no different than asking some Hollywood actor about the topics and expecting something profound.
Just to add to that last comment. Many, many people conflate what an author means by a text with the text's meaning. It is understandable. There is an obvious example to demonstrate this problem.
When you are writing a paper at the end you proof read it. Sometimes you find a sentence that says something entirely different from what you intended to say. Now, does that sentence mean what you intended to say or does it mean what the text means independent of your intents?
Those sorts of events happen all the time in writing. I don't think it a terribly controversial point. One can see Derrida as simply arguing (rigorously) that this is the typical state and that we simply don't notice the distinction between the author and the text in our normal way of reading texts. We might minimize this phenomena, but we can never eliminate it. Further, in philosophical texts, this effect ends up undermining certain arguments.
Exactly how far to take this phenomena is a matter of debate. Even those sympathetic to Derrida don't necessarily agree with how far he takes it. I linked to an interesting paper a few days ago on Derrida's use of Peirce in this regard. However I've been meaning to blog about the Derrida - Gadamer debate from a few years back that most explicitly takes up this issue. (Gadamer is famous for arguing for a charity of interpretation which Derrida tends to disbelieve)
My complaint with Derrida is that even if we buy his view of Gadamer, he can't explain why language is so often successful. As we find in epistemology, what is amazing isn't how often we are wrong, but how often we are right.
This post is starting to get to the stage that it is far too long. So I'll wrap it up, one way or an other, Friday, and not add anything more. Still there were several new ones that I noticed today.
The best one was from The Age, a newspaper from Australia. I liked a few paragraphs so much I'll quote them below.
Encountering Derrida, I was taken first by the fact that he had developed to a high degree the art of close reading, which I had been taught to appreciate by my Cornell professors - a way of reading they had learned at the feet of the New Critics, whose work focused on the close analysis of short, single lyric poems. Like Derrida, those critics frequently discovered, at the heart of the poem, some unresolved conflict or tension that the text simultaneously displayed and sought to conceal. As if the poem was the performance of the attempt to conceal the contradiction at its origin.
But at the same time, Derrida brought to this practice an immensely informed philosophical critique of, say, each one of the terms I just used in the previous fragment: performance, conceal, contradiction, origin. Derrida has written extensively about each one of those notions, bringing the power of his philosophical scepticism to bear on them in order to transform the way we use those categories and think about their concepts. Deconstructing texts is a form of radical scepticism towards traditional categories, a form of iconoclasm, breaking idols.
The rest is nearly as good and is a fantastic and clear exposition of why Derrida wrote the way he did. (Far better than I ever could communicate)
An other interesting one is from The Blanket, apparently a newspaper from Ireland. There the author tries to argue that Derrida was revitalizing Marxism. Perhaps. I know that a lot of postmodernists were trying to salvage Marx from the critiques that were made in the 60's and 70's. I honestly don't see Derrida doing that, although perhaps a Marxist would disagree with me. But then I'm probably not enough of a Marxist to be granted much weight.
A very nice tribute, filled with personal stories, comes from Open Democracy. The author's reaction to Derrida is very much like my own. Not a lot of philosophy here, but a great response nonetheless.
An other very interesting tribute came from the Jewish Times discussing Derrida's influence on Jewish thought. It wasn't something I was that familiar with, beyond noting that Derrida was Jewish and that one of his most significant influences, Levinas, was a Rabbi.
A more political reflection on Derrida, from the American Enterprise, questions why Derrida was such a boogey-man for the right. He suggests that Derrida is rather like Strauss in some ways. I don't know about that, but that may be due to my ignorance of Strauss. Yet many neo-conservatives question whether Strauss could be seen as a philosopher for the "right" either. The article doesn't really add that much to the discussion. I thus bring it up not as saying much about Derrida but as an example of something positive said about Derrida by the right. (Finally -- speaking as a Republican myself)
The finally one I'll bring up tonight is an excellent one from Christianity Today. It brings out one of the best Derrida quotes for his death. Far better than my selection. It is from "Circumfession."
when I am not dreaming of making love, or being a resistance fighter in the last war blowing up bridges or trains, I want one thing only, and that is to lose myself in the orchestra I would form with my sons, heal, bless and seduce the whole world by playing divinely with my sons, produce with them the world's ecstasy, their creation. I will accept dying if dying is to sink slowly, yes, into the bottom of this beloved music.
Habermas has up some reflections on Derrida over at Libération. It's in French, but you can always use Babelfish to try and translate it. It was surprisingly gracious, considering some of Habermas' previous critiques of Derrida.
Yeah, I said I wasn't going to link to anymore. However Brian Leiter had a fairly interesting criticism of some of the recent comments in the press about Derrida. In one way I agree with a lot that he says. I think the pro-Derrida camp has, in many ways, exaggerated nearly as much as the anti-Derrida camp. Simply put, there is no way Derrida is one of the three top philosophers of the 20th century. Heidegger, probably. Whether you agree with him or not, he radically changed how many people do philosophy. But Derrida? He may be in the top five favorite philosophers for a lot of people. But that really is a different matter.
Of course Leiter goes off the deep end at the end, returning to his shrill politics making some odd conspiracy theory about what he sees as Derrida's irrationality and Reagan's rise in the 80's. Since Leiter is such a strong leftist, I guess he has to try to tie Derrida (also a strong leftist) to the right somehow. (Despite the fact that the harshest criticisms of Derrida arose in the American right)
One last one, because it is among the best... The London Review of Books has a great obituary by Judith Butler. (Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link)
Yeah I ought to have put this one in its own section given how old this one is now. Still here seems more appropriate. This is the Village Voice's treatment of Derrida, mainly focusing in on his stage presence during lectures. Interesting, if only for such a different approach.
Thanks to Ektopos two more. I'm putting it here, despite saying it was a dead thread because I'm too lazy to start up a new post.
The first is from The Nation noting that most obituaries on Derrida neglect his later period from the late 90's onward where he did such things as reconciled with his former philosophical opponent Habermas.
The Nation also has a rather interesting discussion of Derrida relative to Maxime Rodinson, a scholar of Islam who died this year. "The Interpreters of Maladies" I confess I don't know much about Rodinson, so it's hard for me to comment on the article too much. It is quite interesting though. One of their comments is that play, for Derrida, "was a synonym, really, for the unexpected reversals of history with which he was intimately acquainted." Those of you familiar with Derrida recognize this as one of the big differences between Derrida and many hermeneutic figures. For Derrida progress or evolution isn't always forward progress but can have absolute ruptures with radical reconceptions.
I think, based upon how I read history, that Derrida's perspective is persuasive. Not just in terms of history, but also how I see communication. However at the more technical philosophical level, I agree that some find some of Derrida's assertions (tied to what Peirce called iconicity) controversial. If you disagree with Derrida on those fundamental issues, then most of his applied writings from the 1970's on will be nonsense to you. So it really behoves people to turn to those fundamental issues. Unfortunatley there are few real approachable texts on them. (Lawlor's Derrida and Husserl is best, but even it is more an overview than an engagement with the fundamental issues) I mentioned one good paper on this topic back a few weeks ago.
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