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Jacques Derrida

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"Derrida" redirects here. For the documentary film, see Derrida (film).
Jacques Derrida
Born(1930-07-15)July 15, 1930
El Biar (Algiers), then French Algeria
DiedOctober 8, 2004(2004-10-08) (aged 74)
Paris, France
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolDeconstruction, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology
Main interests
Philosophy of language · Literary theory · Ethics · Ontology
Notable ideas
Deconstruction · Différance · Phallogocentrism · Metaphysics of presence

Jacques Derrida (/[invalid input: 'icon']ʒɑːk ˈdɛr[invalid input: 'ɨ']də/; French pronunciation: [ʒak dɛʁida]; July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy.[3][4][5] His prolific output of more than 40 published books, together with essays and public speaking, has had a significant impact upon the humanities,[6] particularly on literary theory and continental philosophy. Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion[7], which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his highly influential Of Grammatology (1967),[8] is the statement that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte),[8] meaning that there is nothing outside context.[9] Critics of Derrida have countless times quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction.[9][10][11][12][13]

Deconstruction has become associated with the attempt to expose and undermine the oppositions and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded.[14] He frequently called such paradoxes "binary oppositions." Derrida's strategy involved explicating the historical roots of philosophical ideas, questioning the so-called "metaphysics of presence" that he sees as having dominated philosophy since the ancient Greeks, careful textual analysis, and attempting to undermine and subvert the paradoxes themselves.[15]

Derrida's work has had implications across many fields, including literature, architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), sociology, and cultural studies. Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes, and his work influenced various activist and other political movements.[16] His widespread influence made him a well-known cultural figure, while his approach to philosophy and the purported difficulty of his work also made him a figure of some controversy.[17][18] His work has been seen as a challenge to the unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and Western culture as a whole.[14][19]

Life

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El Biar (Algiers), then French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Toledo that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Jews of French colonial Algeria.[20] He was the third of five children. His parents, Aimé Derrida (1896-1970)[21] and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901-1991) [22],[23][24] named him Jackie, though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris.[25] His youth was spent in El-Biar, Algeria.

On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide, an instrument of revolt against the family and society:[26]

It is true that my interest in literature, diaries, journals in general, also signified a typical, stereotypical revolt against the family. My passion for Nietzche, Rousseau, and also Gide, whom I read a lot at that time, meant among other things: "Families, I hate you." I thought of literature as the end of the family, and of the society it represented.

His readings also included Camus and Sartre.[26] On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his philosophy agrégation on Edmund Husserl. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–7 academic year reading Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.[27] In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.

Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term School of suspicion) and Jean Wahl.[28] His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure, which he kept until 1984.[29][30] In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.[30]

Beginning with his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his work assumed international prominence. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology. In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the petition against age of consent laws.

He completed his Thèse d'État in 1980; the work was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.

Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president.

In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. UCI and the Derrida family are currently involved in a legal dispute regarding exactly what materials constitute his archive, part of which was informally bequeathed to the university.[31] He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by Cambridge University (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, University of Leuven, Williams College and University of Silesia.

Derrida has often been criticized by academics, such as the analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine.[32] In 1992, a number of analytical philosophers from Cambridge University and external institutions tried to stop the granting of the degree,[33] but were outnumbered when it was put to a vote.[34] Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."[19][35]

Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected;[citation needed] he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology.) He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.

In 2002, Derrida appeared in a documentary about himself and his work, entitled Derrida.

In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a hospital in Paris on the evening of October 8, 2004.[36]

Work

Introduction

On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as an historian:[1][37]

Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [...] Deconstruction calls for a highly "historian's" attitude (Of Grammatology, for example, is a history book through and through).

Derrida's work centered on challenging unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly to Western culture as a whole.[14] By questioning the fundamental norms and premises of the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it.[19] During the American 1980s culture wars, this would attract the anger of politically conservative and right-wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.[6][14][19][38]

Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction".[14] On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.[39][40]

Early works

At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl.[41] In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."[42]

Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations;[page needed] this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.[3][4] Near the beginning of the essay, Derrida argued:

(...) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.

— "Structure, Sign and Play" in Writing and Difference, p. 353.

The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.

The Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate (1959)

In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of Structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the Phenomenology approach, started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of Structuralism to a "Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate."

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience;” for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.[citation needed] For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.[citation needed]

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[43] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[44] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[45] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".[46]

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.[47]

1967–1972

Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.[48]

In several occasions Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would have not said a single word.[49][50] Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?"[48] In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same[51] “Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."[52] Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure,[53] Hegel,[54] Foucault,[55] Bataille,[page needed] Descartes,[page needed] anthropologist Lévi-Strauss,[56][57] paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan,[page needed] psychoanalyst Freud,[58] and writers such as Jabès[page needed] and Artaud.[59]

This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric,[60] and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.[61] He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.[61][62] Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture",[61] arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings."[60] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.[citation needed]

In 1968 he published in the French journal Tel Quel, his influential essay Plato's Pharmacy.[63][64] Plato's Pharmacy, along with other lectures and essays produced by Derrida from 1968 till 1972, were collected in two books Dissemination and Margins of Philosophy. Also in 1972 a collection of interviews, entitled Positions, was published.

There is nothing outside the text

There is one statement by Derrida which he regarded as the axial statement of his whole essay on Rousseau (part of the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967),[8] and which is perhaps his most quoted and famous statement ever.[7] It's the assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'ya pas de hors-texte),[8] which means that “there is no such a thing as out-of-the-text”, in other words, the context is an integral part of the text.[9]

Critics of Derrida have countless times quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction.[9][11][12][13] Some commentators have said that it means that is not possible to think outside of the philosophical system,[10] or that there is no experience of reality outside of language.[11]

Regarding to the broadness of the concept of "text", he added:[7][65]

I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.

Deconstruction

Main article: Deconstruction

While discussing the reception his famous assertion that "There is nothing outside the text," Derrida gave the following description of deconstruction:[9]

One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.

1973–1980

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).

Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,[14] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.[60][66][need quotation to verify]

Quarrel with John Searle

Main article: Limited Inc

A sequence of encounters with analytical philosophy is collected in Limited Inc (1988). In 1972, Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context," an essay on J. L. Austin's speech act theory; following a critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long defense of his earlier argument. In the course of the exchanges, Derrida said that Searle seemed to have read very few of his works.[67]

In 1983, Searle told to The New York Review of Books a remark on Derrida allegedly made by Michel Foucault in a private conversation with Searle himself; Derrida later despised Searle's gesture as gossip, and also condemned as violent the use of a mass circulation magazine to fight an academic debate.[68] According to Searle's account, Foucault called Derrida's prose style "terrorist obscurantism"; Searle's quote was:

Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot' (hence "terroriste")

In his response, Derrida also noted that Searle's claimed quote was in grammatically incorrect French.[68][69] Searle exemplified his view on deconstruction in the New York Review of Books, February 2, 1984;[70] for example:

...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.

In 1988, Derrida wrote Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, to be published with the previous essays in the collection Limited Inc.

Analytic philosophers: "this is not philosophy"

Some analytic philosophers have claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.[60][66] Jonathan Culler has argued that these attacks stem from right-wing academics.[6]

Later in 1992 the claim was restated and publicized to the mass media with an open letter that analytic philosophers sent to The Times, in the attempt to put media pressure on Cambridge University which was going to grant Derrida an honorary philosophy degree.[33] When the mass media sensation was over, Derrida addressed the claim during an interview, responding that philosophy's best tradition has never confined itself to its own field:[19]

...And let's not go into the argument according to which the influence of a philosophy on other disciplines or more generally outside the profession means that it can't be philosophy! Here are intellectuals who are using the press to put about the idea that philosophy should only influence professional philosophers and should not be open to the judgement of scholars of other disciplines! How many examples could one find of the contrary, to remind them that philosophy, in its best tradition, has never allowed itself to be put under house arrest within the limits of its own discipline, to say nothing of the limits of its profession? Moreover would the authors of this letter to the Times be so worried if the work they denounce really had no influence on professional philosophers?

Of Spirit

On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1952. Derrida's book reconnects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy and the essays marked under the heading Geschlecht). Derrida reconsiders three other fundamental and recurring elements of Heideggerian philosophy: the distinction between human and animal, technology, and the privilege of questioning as the essence of philosophy.[citation needed]

Of Spirit is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.[citation needed]

Of Spirit was also one of Derrida's first publications on the relationship between philosophy and nationalism, on which he had been teaching in the mid-1980s.[citation needed]

1990s: political and ethical themes

Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.

Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac,[71][72] and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy.[citation needed] Derrida delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy.

Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (cultural identity, European identity, national identity, ..), in the name of which in Europe have being unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."[73]

The dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB

Perhaps most persistent among the accusers of nihilism[citation needed] is Richard Wolin, who in 1991 has argued that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism.[page needed] For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".[74] In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in the New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.[75] Derrida in turn responded, in somewhat acerbic fashion,[citation needed] to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points....[76]

Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups - often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction - signed a letter addressed to the New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.[77]

Cambridge Honorary Doctorate

Derrida has often been the target of attacks by analytic philosophers; an attack of major significance was their 1992 attempt at stopping Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate.[33]

For its historical impact through the centuries, Cambridge was widely recognized as the most influential European University, one that "continues to play a very particular role for the university consciousness in the world,"[19] Its decision to confer an honorary degree to Derrida was seen as a challenge to the apparent hegemony of the Anglo-American Analytic philosophy over most of the philosophy departments of the world.[78]

There were protesters from within Cambridge philosophy faculty,[citation needed] but mostly the letter signatoires were from other institutions from the US and UK, a circumstance that some condemned as an attack to the academic freedom of Cambridge scholars. Eighteen protesters from other institutions, including Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:

"... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university."[33]

In the end the protesters were outnumbered when Cambridge put the motion on a vote.[34] Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."[19][35]

Interviewed in 1995, Derrida talked about the difficulties of divulgatives tasks under limited space and time, when professors and journalists need to explain something difficult without betrying it; Derrida argument is also a rebuttal of certain charges of obfuscation and obscurantism:[79]

One must teach the reader as well as the student that the difficulty of a discourse is not a sin--nor is it the effect of obscurantism or irrationalism. And that it is often the contrary that is true: obscurantism can invade a language of communication that is seemingly direct, simple, straightforward.

The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)

Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.

2002

In the October of 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, (QEVERYTHING I SAY ABOUT THE MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY, THE SPECTACLE, AND THE 'CRITICISM OF THE SHOW', SO TO SPEAK, AND THE MARKETS — THE BECOMING-A-SPECTACLE OF EVERYTHING, AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE SPECTACLE.)[80] Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.[81]

Criticism

A broad overview of the history of Derrida's reception, covering the period until the publication of Specters of Marx (1994), is given in The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation (2006).

African bias

Christopher Wise in his book Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by Robert J.C. Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990)[page needed] and extended in his Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria.[page needed] In contrast, Wise compares Derrida's thought to precolonial notions of the word that are rooted in ancient Egyptian and African society. Wise argues that Derridean concept of spirit/specter as occult pharmakon is indebted not only to the Hebraic notion of ruah but also the Egyptian heka, Soninke naxamala, Mande nyama, and many other comparable Egypto-African concepts of the word, some that are historically prior to the Hebraic ruah. Wise suggests that Derrida deliberately elides related African concepts of the word in order to accord Judaism a place of special prominence within the history of European philosophy. He argues instead that European philosophy must acknowledge its historical indebtedness to Middle Eastern and African thought, which is not limited to the influence of Judaism alone.

Lack of analytic philosophy's clarity

Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association at least on one occasion in 1988,[82] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas,[83] and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

His work is criticized for his alleged misuse of scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1998).

Two quarrels in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage. The 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.

Intentional obfuscation

In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.[84]

According to journalist Jonathan Kandell, an example of Derrida's putatively obfuscationist style was a (QMURKY EXPLANATION) of his philosophy in a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: (QNEEDLESS TO SAY, ONE MORE TIME, DECONSTRUCTION, IF THERE IS SUCH A THING, TAKES PLACE AS THE EXPERIENCE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE.)[85]

Recycled Borges

Emir Rodríguez Monegal alleged that many of Derrida's ideas were recycled from the work of Borges (from essays and tales such as "La fruición literaria" (1928), "Elementos de preceptiva" (1933), "Pierre Menard" (1939), "Tlön" (1940), "Kafka y sus precursores" (1951)[86]), opening his article with[87]:

Siempre me ha resultado difícil leer a Derrida. No tanto por la densidad de su pensamiento y el estilo moroso, redundante, repetitivo en que éste aparece desarrollado, sino por una causa completamente circunstancial. Educado en el pensamiento de Borges desde los quince años, muchas de las novedades de Derrida me han parecido algo tautológicas. No podía entender cómo tardaba tanto en llegar a las luminosas perspectivas que Borges había abierto hacía ya tantos años. La famosa (QDESCONSTRUCCIÓN) me impresionaba por su rigor técnico y la infinita seducción de su espejo textual pero me era familiar: la había practicado en Borges avant la lettre.

I have always found difficult to read Derrida. Not so much by the density of his thought and style, morose, redundant, repetitive, that he seems to have developed, but for an entirely circumstantial reason. Educated in Borges's thought from the age of fifteen, many of Derrida's novelties struck me as somewhat tautological. I could not understand how it took him so long to capture the bright prospects that Borges had opened so many years ago. The famous "deconstruction" impressed me for its technical precision and the infinite seduction of its textual mirror, but I was familiar with it: it had been practiced in Borges avant la lettre.

Hostile obituaries

Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,[88]The Economist[89] and The Independent.[90] The magazine The Nation responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."[6][14]

Charges of nihilism

Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, in 1976 briefly labeled Derrida's 1967 criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.[91] In 1991, the dispute with Richard Wolin, which was also conducted and publicized through the mass circulation magazine New York Review of Books, also included charges of nihilism.[74][75][76]

Derrida often said that "his interests lie in provoking not an anti-Enlightenment but a new Enlightenment".[92] To provoke this new Enlightenment, he had to question the axioms and certainties of the Enlightenment itself. However, his critics respond by claiming that Derrida's obfuscating style and nihilistic tendencies cannot adequately provide any ground for a 'New Enlightenment’.[citation needed]

Politics

Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:

Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.

Influences on Derrida

Although Derrida has sometimes been characterized has belonging to a certain Continental philosophy tradition, as opposed to its ancestral antagonist the Analytic philosophy tradition,[citation needed] during the Derrida-Searle dispute he wrote:[1]

I sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin [prominent analytic philosopher] than to a certain Continental tradition from which Searle, on the contrary, has inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct. I now have to add this: it is often because "Searle" ignores this tradition or pretends to take no account of it that he rests blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions , not to mention the deconstructive ones. It is because in appearance at least "I" am more of a historian that "I" am a less passive, more attentive and more "deconstructive" heir of that so-called tradition. And hence, perhaps again paradoxically, more foreign to that tradition. I put quotation marks around "Searle" and "I" to mark that beyond these indexes, I am aiming at tendencies, types, styles, or situations rather than at persons.

Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist;[26] and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.[26] The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida's adolescence, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV.[98] In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos), saying [99]

Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger,[49][50] Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Stéphane Mallarmé[citation needed].

Derrida and his peers and contemporaries

Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Samuel Weber, Catherine Malabou and Simon Critchley.

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.

Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).

Paul de Man

Main article: Paul de Man

Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.

Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.

Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.

Michel Foucault

Derrida's criticism of Foucault in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.[29]

In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text."[100] According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.[91] Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.[91]

Derrida's translators

Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of these are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.

Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.

Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.[101] The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, which presents Derrida's seminar from 2001 to 2002, has appeared in English translation; further volumes currently projected for the series include The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (2002–2003), Death Penalty, Volume I (1999–2000), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).[102]

With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."[103]

Marshall McLuhan

Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium,"[104] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, techni­cal, and economic adventure of the West."[105]

He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.[106] In a 1982 interview, he said: "I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension - the overwhelming extension - of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too."[107]

And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said: "As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and “communication of consciousnesses.” We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan’s ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism."[108]

Works by Derrida

Main article: Jacques Derrida bibliography

Selected translations of works by Derrida

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Derrida (1988) Afterword, pp.130-1
  2. ^ Krantz, Susan What’s the Real Difference between Analytic and Continental Philosophy?
  3. ^ a b Bensmaïa, Réda Poststructuralism, in Kritzman (2005), pp.92-93
  4. ^ a b Poster (1988), pp.5-6
  5. ^ Vincent B. Leitch Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p .27.
  6. ^ a b c d Jonathan Culler (2008) Why deconstruction still matters: A conversation with Jonathan Culler, interviewed by Paul Sawyer for The Cornell Chronicle, Jan. 24, 2008
  7. ^ a b c Royle, Nicholas (2004) Jacques Derrida, pp. 62–63
  8. ^ a b c d Derrida (1967) Of Grammatology, Part II Intriduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title The Exorbitant. Question of Method, pp. 158–59, 163
  9. ^ a b c d e Derrida (1988) Afterword, p. 136
  10. ^ a b Reilly, Brian J. (2005) Jacques Derrida, in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.
  11. ^ a b c Coward, Harold G. (1990) Derrida and Indian philosophy, pp. 83, 137
  12. ^ a b Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) On a defence of derrida, in The Critical review (1990) Issues 30-32, pp. 40–41
  13. ^ a b Sullivan, Patricia (2004) Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, in Washington Post, October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007.
  14. ^ a b c d e f g Ross Benjamin Hostile Obituary for Derrida, The Nation, November 24, 2004
  15. ^ "Derrida, Jacques". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. January 12, 2010. Accessed August 11, 2010.
  16. ^ Jonathan Kandell, "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74," The New York Times, October 10, 2004
  17. ^ Derrida. Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Zeitgeist Films, 2002.
  18. ^ "Jacques Derrida". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. November 22, 2006. Accessed August 11, 2010.
  19. ^ a b c d e f g Derrida (1992) Cambridge Review, pp. 404, 408–13.
  20. ^ "I took part in the extraordinary transformation of the Algerian Jews; my great-grandparents were by language, custom, etc., still identified with Arabic culture. After the Cremieux Decree (1870), at the end of the 19th c., the following generation became bourgeois", Jacques Derrida The Last Interview, May 2003.
  21. ^ [1]
  22. ^ [2]
  23. ^ Bennington (1991) p. 325
  24. ^ "Safar surname: occupational name from Arabic saffar which means worker in copper or brass", The Safar surname"
  25. ^ Obituary in The Guardian, accessed August 2, 2007.
  26. ^ a b c d Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, pp.35, 38-9
  27. ^ Caputo (1997), p. 25.
  28. ^ Bennington (1991) p.330
  29. ^ a b Powell (2006) pp.34-5
  30. ^ a b Powell (2006) p.58
  31. ^ "The Chronicle of Higher Education", July 20, 2007, accessed August 1, 2007.
  32. ^ J.E. D'Ulisse Derrida (1930-2004), New Partisan 12.24.2004 Quote: "Academic conservatives attack Derrida for his position on objectivity ... W.V.O. Quine ... his status as a good Republican"
  33. ^ a b c d Barry Smith et al. Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University , The Times (London), Saturday, May 9, 1992
  34. ^ a b John Rawlings (1999) Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction at Stanford University
  35. ^ a b Derrida (1990) Once Again from the Top, p.332
  36. ^ Deconstruction icon Derrida dies, accessed August 2, 2007.
  37. ^ Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, p. 54
  38. ^ Derrida (1988) Afterword, p. 147
  39. ^ Derrida (1976) Where a Teaching Body Begins, English translation 2002, p. 72
  40. ^ Derrida (1993), Spectres of Marx (in French), p. 92.
  41. ^ The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. English translation: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (2003).
  42. ^ Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p.5
  43. ^ Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), Genèse et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:

    All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: "What does the notion of genesis in general, on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structure in general, on whose basis Husserl operates and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between genesis and structure in general?" is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.
  44. ^ If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (also in Writing and Difference, and see below), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):

    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.

    Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.

  45. ^ Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp.77-8:

    If the alterity of the other is posed, that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded (différance): inscription, mark, text and not only thesis or theme-inscription of the thesis.

    On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf., Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  46. ^ It is opposed to the concept of original purity, which destabilises the thought of both "genesis" and "structure", cf., Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:

    It is an opening that is structural, or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.

    And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why différance is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962).

  47. ^ Cf., Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:

    One of the more persistent misunderstandings that has thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect, and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [...] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to "account," in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the successful development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.
  48. ^ a b Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp.4-5 quote: "[Speech and Phenomena] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works. Of Grammatology refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture, Speech... would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology." Cite error: The named reference "67RonseP4" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  49. ^ a b Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p.8
  50. ^ a b On the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (Derrida and différance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms Destruktion and Abbau, via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy.
  51. ^ Derrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97-192.
  52. ^ Caputo (1997), p.42
  53. ^ Linguistics and Grammatology in Of Grammatology, pp.27-73
  54. ^ From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve in Writing and Difference
  55. ^ Cogito and the History of Madness in Writing and Difference
  56. ^ The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau in Of Grammatology, pp.101-140
  57. ^ Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Writing and Difference
  58. ^ Freud and the Scene of Writing in Writing and Difference
  59. ^ La Parole soufflée and The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference
  60. ^ a b c d Lamont '87, pp. 590, 602-606 (Lamont, Michele How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida. [3] American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 93, No. 3 [Nov., 1987])
  61. ^ a b c Wayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1-27).
  62. ^ Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément [1975] La jeune née
  63. ^ Spurgin, Tim (1997) Reader's Guide to Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"
  64. ^ Graff (1993)
  65. ^ Derrida and Ferraris (1997) p.76
  66. ^ a b Sven Ove Hansson Philosophical Schools - Editorial From Theoria vol. 72, Part 1 (2006).
  67. ^ Derrida, Jacques. Limited, Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988. p. 29: "...I have read some of his [Searle's] work (more, in any case, than he seems to have read of mine)"[4]
  68. ^ a b Derrida (1988) Afterword, in Limited Inc. page 158, footnote 12
  69. ^ Searle (1983) and (2000)
  70. ^ Louis Mackey and Searle (1984)
  71. ^ Jack Reynolds, Jonathan Roffe (2004) Understanding Derrida p.49
  72. ^ Gift of Death, pp. 57-72
  73. ^ The Other Heading, pp.5-6
  74. ^ a b Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin(Ed.) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p xiii. ISBN 0-262-73101-0
  75. ^ a b [5], [6]
  76. ^ a b Derrida, "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," published in the book Points... (1995; see the footnote about ISBN 0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French Version Points de suspension: entretiens (ISBN 0-8047-2488-1) there).
  77. ^ Points, p.434
  78. ^ Derrida et al. (1994) Roundtable discussios
  79. ^ Derrida (2005) Points... interviews, p.429
  80. ^ Derrida (2002) Q&A session at Film Forum
  81. ^ Derrida (2005) [1997], Les Intellectuels (in French), pp. 39–40.
  82. ^ Garver, Newton (1991), "Derrida's language-games", TOPOI, vol. 10, p. 187–98, doi:10.1007/BF00141339.
  83. ^ "Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida," The New Republic 197:14 (October 5, 1987).
  84. ^ Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida"
  85. ^ Kandell, Jonathan (October 10, 2004), "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74", The New York Times{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link).
  86. ^ Rodríguez Monegal, Emir (December 1955), "Borges: Teoría y práctica: Vanidad de la crítica literaria", Número (in Spanish), UY: Archivo de Prensa, pp. 125–57, archived from the original on 2007-05-27{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
  87. ^ Rodríguez Monegal, Emir (1985). "Maldoror". Emir Rodríguez Monegal website (in Spanish). Montevideo, UY: Archivo de Prensa. pp. 123–32. Archived from the original on 2007-10-17. {{cite web}}: |contribution= ignored (help)CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
  88. ^ Kandell, Jonathan. Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74", October 10, 2004
  89. ^ The Economist. Obituary: Jacques Derrida, French intellectual, Oct 21st 2004
  90. ^ The Independent
  91. ^ a b c Carlo Ginzburg [1976] Il formaggio e i vermi, translated in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii. ISBN 978-0-8018-4387-7
  92. ^ Caputo (1997), p. 54.
  93. ^ Derrida (1991) "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking", pp. 347–9.
  94. ^ Bennington (1991) p. 332
  95. ^ Powell (2006) p. 151
  96. ^ Jacques Derrida, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 70–1.
  97. ^ Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)". Diacritics, 1984
  98. ^ Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV, quote: «Familles, je vous hais! Foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.»
  99. ^ 1991 Interview with Francois Ewald Wahn muß übers Denken wachen published in: Werner Kolk (Translator). Literataz. 1992, p. 1-2. (German), as quoted in http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3891m6db#page-1
  100. ^ Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xxiv,573.
  101. ^ http://derridaseminars.org/team.html
  102. ^ http://derridaseminars.org/volumes.html
  103. ^ http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/Derrida/applied.html
  104. ^ Speech and Phenomena, Introduction
  105. ^ Of Grammatology, Part I.1
  106. ^ Poster (2010), pp.3-4, 12-13
  107. ^ Derrida [1982] Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview, with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia). No.1/1983: p. 42
  108. ^ Derrida 1972 Signature Event Context

References (works cited)

Further reading - Works on Derrida

Introductory works

  • Adleman, Dan (2010) "Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory"files/research_collection/657/Coleman_Derrida_Genre.pdf
  • Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics.
  • Culler, Jonathan (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
  • Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy.
  • Deutscher, Penelope (2006) How to Read Derrida (ISBN 978-0-393-32879-0).
  • Hill, Leslie (2007) The Cambridge introduction to Jacques Derrida
  • Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language.
  • Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
  • Lentricchia, Frank (1980) After the New Criticism.
  • Moati Raoul (2009), Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire
  • Norris, Christopher (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
  • Thomas, Michael (2006) The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation.
  • Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.
  • Goldschmit, Marc (2003) Jacques Derrida,une introduction" Paris, Agora Pocket, ISBN226611574X.

Other works

  • Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205-19.
  • Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (ISBN 0-415-10967-1).
  • Bennington, Geoffrey, Legislations (ISBN 0-86091-668-5).
  • Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (ISBN 0-415-22427-6).
  • Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.
  • Coward, H.G. (ed) Derrida and Negative theology, SUNY 1992. ISBN 0-7914-0964-3
  • de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102-41.
  • Foucault, Michel, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550-74.
  • Gasché, Rodolphe, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
  • Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror.
  • Habermas, Jürgen, "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
  • Mackey, Louis, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology," in Anglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3, July, 1983. 255-272.
  • Mackey, Louis, "A Nicer Knowledge of Belief" in Loius Mackey, An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature, Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219-240 (ISBN 978-0761822677)
  • Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN 0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
  • Magliola, Robert, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
  • Marder, Michael, The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN 0-8020-9892-4)
  • Miller, J. Hillis, For Derrida, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
  • Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida.
  • Norris, Christopher, Derrida (ISBN 0-674-19823-9).
  • Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
  • Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida (ISBN 0-415-94269-1).
  • Rorty, Richard, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
  • Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
  • Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida.
  • Sallis, John (2009). The Verge of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226734316.
  • Smith, James K. A., Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.
  • Goldschmit, Marc, Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006. ISBN 2-84938-058-X
  • Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
  • Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN 0-521-62565-3).
  • Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader.
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