Jacques Derrida is widely regarded as the most important French philosopher of the late twentieth century. Yet when his name was put forward for an honorary degree at Cambridge University in 1992, a significant portion of the Anglo-American philosophical establishment was outraged. Eighteen philosophers from nine countries signed a letter to The Times opposing the award on the grounds that Derrida’s work consisted of “tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets” and amounted to “little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship”. Understanding Derrida’s legacy, then, must also involve understanding why he should have been the target of such vitriol.
Born into a Jewish family in Algeria in 1930, Derrida learned at an early age about the damage caused by the imposition of fixed categories on human diversity: in 1942 the Vichy regime lowered the percentage of Jewish students allowed in schools, resulting in his expulsion and a period of somewhat haphazard education. In 1949 he moved to metropolitan France for further study, and in 1956, having written a dissertation on the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, passed the agrégation examination that qualified him as a teacher. In 1964, after two years of military service in Algeria, he began teaching at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he remained for twenty years, giving a weekly seminar – on a fresh topic every year – that became a magnet for the intellectually curious.
Philosophical scene
In 1962 Derrida published a book-length introduction to his translation of Husserl’s short work The Origin of Geometry in which the seeds of his later thinking were already evident, but it was in 1967 that he truly made his mark on the French philosophical scene. In that year he published no fewer than three books, and in so doing displayed the startling originality and productiveness that was to characterize his career until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2004: L’écriture et la difference, La voix et le phénomène and De la grammatologie. Five years later, another trio of books appeared, cementing Derrida’s position at the forefront of what became known in the English-speaking world as “post-structuralism”: La Dissemination, Marges de la philosophie and Positions. There followed a steady stream of publications; a recent posthumous volume produced by his favourite French publisher, Galilée, lists fifty-seven books from their own house and another thirty-one from other publishers – and this list includes only the first two volumes in the planned series of hitherto unpublished seminars delivered over more than forty years.
Derrida’s range was extraordinary: he wrote analyses of the works of a host of philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to his contemporaries and engaged with the poetry, fiction and drama of numerous French, English and German writers. His commentaries on the visual arts are among his most challenging publications, and he made telling contributions to current political concerns. His influence has been felt across an even wider range of disciplines and institutions, political movements and creative practices.
Central strands
Such a productive and comprehensive intellect would be difficult to summarize briefly, but we may draw out some of the central strands of Derrida’s thinking. The set of assumptions at which much of his work takes aim – assumptions at the heart of both the Western philosophical tradition and of what goes for “common sense” – can be labelled presence. When I reflect on my own consciousness what I experience is self-presence: there seems to be no intervening medium between my sense of myself and that self. Similarly, the world I see and hear is present to me without mediation. The meanings I constantly encounter seem immediately present; it’s hard to see how the apparently simple (spatial) here and (temporal) now of being in the world could be divided or complicated.
Presence is implicit in Western philosophy’s reliance on reason, which distinguishes sharply between what is present (now, here) and what is absent (past or future, somewhere else), and searches for a pure origin and secure ground for thought, summed up in the Greek word logos – hence Derrida’s name for this way of thinking, logocentrism. If presence is fundamental and inalienable, anything that threatens to complicate or sully it must be regarded as secondary, derivative and regrettable. For presence is a value; it is what is proper, proper to meaning, to consciousness, to existence, but also good and correct (the French propre carries a suggestion of cleanliness and purity). Derrida defines the “metaphysics of presence” as “the enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc”.
But what if presence were a fantasy, a product of our desires rather than the way things are? In his early works, Derrida analysed a number of philosophical, linguistic, autobiographical and anthropological texts to show how, again and again, attempts to keep at bay the impurities that threaten presence succeed only in proving that those apparently secondary properties are in fact primary. The best-known instance in these early studies is the relationship between speech and writing, the subject of Of Grammatology and of part of Dissemination. In the history of Western thought, Derrida argues, there is an assumption that speech is primary and self-sufficient while writing is a secondary system by which speech is transcribed. In all the thinkers he examines, writing is found wanting in comparison to speech because it is cut off from its source, open to corruption, a set of dead symbols rather than the lively expression of a self, and thus of presence.
Careful reading
But Derrida doesn’t simply point out this continuing prejudice; by means of careful reading, he shows how the very properties for which writing is repeatedly found wanting by thinkers from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss are what make speech possible. Speech too, no matter how immediate it feels to speaker and hearer, is mediated by the system of language and by the cultural context of speaker and hearer, and can always be falsified or misunderstood. Language, in any form, is a kind of writing (Derrida calls this generalized sense “arche-writing”); it is never a pure manifestation of presence – and only because this is so can it function at all. This is the insight that the thinkers under consideration have to resist, often quite vehemently, in order to preserve the illusion of the purity and simplicity of presence.
The point of this demonstration, which Derrida carried out over hundreds of pages of close analysis of works such as Plato’s Phaedrus, Rousseau’s Confessions, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, is not simply to correct a mistaken view of the way language works; for Derrida it is the sign of a larger problem at the core of Western thought, one that underlies not only philosophical treatments of meaning, subjectivity and communication, but which also has profound ethical implications. Much of Derrida’s energy in the later part of his career went into developing these ethical consequences. -Times Literary Supplement
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