Jacques Derrida is a very fine writer, but incredibly hard to read. His sentences, though often beautiful, tend to be sinuous; and while his vocabulary can be exuberant, bountiful and exact, it is often clogged with the jargon of old-fashioned textbooks of philosophy – “transcendental”, “originary”, “philosopheme”, “ontology” and “aporia”, for instance, not to mention fragments of Latin and Greek. He also had a taste, which you may or may not share, for puns and typographical tricks in the manner of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. If you skimmed through one of his books without knowing anything about him, you might conclude that he’s a charlatan or a nerd, or both. You would put it back on the shelf and say, “Not for me, life’s too short.”
But you’ve probably heard a lot about Derrida, even if you never read a word. By the time of his death – in 2004, at the age of 74 – he was the most famous philosopher in the world, and his stock has barely declined since then. He is still adored by many, and touted as a prophet for troubled times, and he continues to supply ample grist to academic mills. But he has his detractors as well: back in 1992, some self-selected guardians of philosophical virtue wrote to The Times to proclaim that his work “does not meet accepted standards of quality and rigour”. A left-wing professor at Essex University called him “the Liberace of philosophy”, and a Cambridge conservative assured us that “Derrida himself doesn’t believe most of the nonsense he’s famous for.” These professorial paragons have since been joined by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer, who denounced Derrida for attempting to “remove traditional meaning and replace it with a new meaning . . . feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy, and so-called queer-theory.”
Peter Salmon cuts through the hullaballoo with his brief, well-written and rather moving intellectual biography, An Event, Perhaps. Derrida has often been seen as an exponent of effortless Parisian glamour, for which he is sometimes envied and sometimes mocked, but Salmon shows that he was never at ease as a cultural rock-star, and that privately he remained shy, patient, conscientious, attentive and generous. He was, after all, an outsider at several removes. He was born in Algiers in 1930, and his humble Jewish parents tried to Americanise him by calling him Jackie, after the actor Jackie Coogan who played a winsome waif in Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid. But he could not escape his origins, and when he came top of his class at the age of ten he was denounced as a “dirty Jew” and deprived of the customary honour of hoisting the school tricolour. He was excluded from his lycée in Algiers when its Jewish quota was cut in 1941, and though he was readmitted a year later, after the allied invasion of French North Africa, he did not settle down. He failed his leaving exam in 1948, but had better luck the following year, and at the age of 19 he won a scholarship to a top lycée in Paris.
The birth of "deconstruction"
Paris in 1949 was not an easy place for a solitary overseas student. Derrida failed his exams again, but in 1952 he was admitted to the exclusive but spartan École Normale Supérieure, which he found to be a place of “theoretical intimidation” and “tormented silence”. But he also met the writer and psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier, who would be his wife and ally for the rest of his life, and in 1955 he got a scholarship to Harvard, where he taught himself English by studying the works of James Joyce. He fulfilled his military service obligation by teaching for two years at a school for army children in Algeria, and then returned to Paris, where he earned a living as a lowly university teacher, while devoting his spare time to writing. By now he was steeped in academic philosophy, French style: he had a thorough familiarity with the writings of the great dead philosophers, and expected the same of his readers. He worked amazingly hard over the next ten years, making forays from philosophy into poetry, drama, linguistics, ethnography and psychoanalysis, and ended up, as he would recall, in a state of “nervous exhaustion not far removed from despair”. In 1967, however, he brought out three large books – Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference – and began to be noticed not only in France, with its philosophically educated public, but also in Britain and America.
By the 1980s everyone seemed to be talking about Derrida and his supposedly revolutionary doctrine of “deconstruction”. I myself tried to read several of his books, without getting very far, but they were now garnering prizes and prestige and I thought I’d better try again. I was working as a philosophy teacher at the time, and my colleagues agreed that we ought to put Derrida on the syllabus. When it came to teaching, however, they were not so keen. “He’s like the tar-baby,” said one: “touch him and you’ll never get free.” “He’s not a proper philosopher,” said another: “he doesn’t have a position on any of the big issues.” So it was down to me. I persevered with my reading, and my resistance dissipated: I felt I was beginning to get the point, and I managed to fulfil my quota of lectures. Since then, I must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading Derrida, and getting to know certain passages by heart. Reader, I do not regret a minute.
My colleagues were not wrong. If you let Derrida into your head it will be hard to turf him out, and I can think of quite a few people who have been reduced to Derrida tribute acts as a result. And it’s true that you cannot pin him down to definite “positions”: he’s not exactly a Hegelian or a Marxist, for example, but he’s not anti-Hegelian or anti-Marxist either; nor can you tell if he’s a materialist or an immaterialist, a rationalist or an empiricist, a realist or an idealist. But that was precisely his point: he wanted to persuade us that such labels are impediments to philosophical inquiry. The great virtue of philosophy, as far as Derrida was concerned, is not that it provides us with proofs or refutations, but that it weans us off an irrational yearning for intellectual closure.
Did Derrida respect the philosophical tradition?
For better or for worse, I came to Derrida with a mind already reeling from Heidegger’s Being and Time. I was particularly taken with a section of the introduction, where Heidegger argued that we have a built-in tendency to misunderstand the process by which traditions are passed from one generation to the next. We come into possession of our traditions, he said, by actively interpreting them in the light of our own preoccupations; but we prefer to see the process the other way round, as if we were the passive receivers of external influence. In the case of philosophy, this meant that we conspire with each other to treat the great figures of the past, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as monuments to be inspected and conserved, rather than incitements to fresh philosophical activity. The ringleaders of the conspiracy are, it would seem, the historians of philosophy, who have made it their business to squeeze the life out of philosophical texts by reducing them to simple summaries and assigning them to neat little cells in some pre-existing chart of philosophical opinions. They may imagine that they are treating philosophy’s past with reverence and respect, but in reality they are allowing their pithy paraphrases to become surrogates for the originals – agents not of remembrance but of neglect. Heidegger therefore called for a new approach to philosophy’s past: we must “break up a tradition that has become compacted”, as he put it, “and expose the cover-ups to which it has given rise.” Heidegger described his exercises in philosophical rescue-archaeology as Destruktion or “destruction . . . with a positive aim”.
When Derrida engaged in “deconstruction” he was, in effect, playing variations on Heidegger’s theme. (That at least is how it struck me.) He focused on one philosophical text after another, demonstrating case by case that they are far stranger and far more interesting than the historians of philosophy would have us believe: Plato turns out to be a poor Platonist, and Descartes is not much of a Cartesian, and Hegel is no good at Hegelianism. Derrida’s critics saw these encounters as attempts to denigrate philosophy or bring it into disrepute, and so too did some of his admirers: they thought that philosophy had always conducted itself like an arrogant aristocrat, and that Derrida was a person-of-the-people leading a popular insurrection in the name of less elevated forms of literature. (Salmon quotes Derrida’s American translator Barbara Johnson, who claimed, rather implausibly, that “philosophy is defined by its refusal to recognise itself as literature”, while “literature is defined as the rhetorical self-transgression of philosophy.”) But that gets Derrida completely wrong: his attitude towards philosophy was not hostile but infinitely affectionate, and that is why, like Heidegger before him, he sought to rescue it from false friends.
On occasion, Derrida appeared to go even further in his valorisation of the philosophical tradition. He seemed to follow Heidegger (and Hegel too for that matter) in seeing philosophy as a massive, unified enterprise which got underway in ancient Greece and has since functioned as the intellectual engine driving the progress of civilisation in Europe, and perhaps through the rest of the world. Back in 1963, for instance, he pronounced that “the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would be impossible to philosophise … without them”, and in 1966 he spoke of “the history of philosophy, of the west, that is, of the world”, while claiming that “we have no language … which is foreign to this history”. His tone was perhaps ironic – but only up to a point: the notion of philosophy as the heart and soul of human culture functioned as a Derridean Aunt Sally, which he kept putting back on its pedestal so that he could have another go at knocking it down.
Beyond the jargon
After a while I lost patience with these disquisitions about what “philosophy” really means; and I was relieved to find that Derrida had got bored with them too. Salmon traces the change to the early 1970s, when Derrida embarked on a vast exploration of the ramifications of patriarchy (or “phallocentrism”), after which he started writing about an enormous miscellany of new themes, without having to keep returning to the canonical heartlands of philosophy: the relations between politics and friendship, between Marxism and the future, between forgiveness and the unforgivable, between justice and law, between teaching and learning, between memory and mourning and between humans and animals.
Salmon guides us through these discussions with clarity, wit and self-deprecating humour – at one point, for instance, he wonders whether he has done enough to “fudge bits I don’t understand so well” and to conceal his dependence on Wikipedia. He is well aware that his postage-stamp summaries of dozens of thinkers touched on by Derrida go against the spirit of deconstruction, but many readers will thank him for them anyway, and they will also be pleased that he keeps his distance from the sort of groupies who, as he puts it, try to “sound hyper-French” when speaking their native English, and end up talking a “sub-Derridean word salad”.
Derrida was capable of spinning his ideas out at extraordinary length, but he could also come up with memorable turns of phrase, and Salmon quotes some excellent examples. “Surviving – that is the other name for mourning”, for instance, and “to have a friend . . . is to know in an intense way . . . that one of the two of us will see the other die.” As a less-than-perfect humanist I cherish Derrida’s remark that he “rightly passes for an atheist”, because “the constancy of God in my life is called by other names.” If that is too cute for your taste, try this: “if things were simple, then word would have got around.”
“An Event, Perhaps” by Peter Salmon is published by Verso
This article is from the New Humanist summer 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
