I.

What’s the most widely held misconception about you and your work?

That I’m a skeptical nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That’s stupid and utterly wrong, and only people who haven’t read me say this. It’s a misreading of my work that began 35 years ago, and it’s difficult to destroy. I never said everything is linguistic and we’re enclosed in language. In fact, I say the opposite, and the deconstruction of logocentrism was conceived to dismantle precisely this philosophy for which everything is language. Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith, and that I’m full of respect for the texts I read.
—“The Three Ages of Jacques Derrida,” LA Weekly interview with Kristine McKenna

I saw Jacques Derrida in 1993 at a conference entitled “The Deconstruction Is Dead.” The hall had been filled to its 3000-person capacity, and they had to place loudspeakers in the spaces outside for the hundreds of people that could not be seated. They were not all writing doctoral dissertations. I certainly wasn’t. I just wanted to see the man who wrote like an angel and I was surrounded, literally, by thousands of people who agreed. We were not let down.

Without a shred of pretension, but with perfect hair, he sat before the crowd that came to see him. The grace and compassion he showed the others at the round table only paled in comparison to the genuine consideration he paid to each question from the audience. I could not imagine a man who more fit the role of a philosopher.

Remembering that day and reading The Economist’s obituary of the man (the obituary they wrote on Idi Amin was more positive and the one they will write on Pinochet, I am sure, will be glowing) brought back how controversial Derrida really was.

Originally championed by Jean Hypolotite, the educator who brought Hegel to Lacan and Foucault and who radically sought to reconcile Marx and Hegel through the materialism of the idea, Derrida marked a return to German thought in French philosophy.

In the 1950s and early 1960s structuralism, as embodied in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, dominated philosophical thought. Structuralism favored the big picture at the expense of the details, favored the synchronic over the diachronic, and continuities over disunities. For a structuralist, actual moments and events didn’t happen. They were irrelevant, part of the emergence of the whole. Any information that didn’t fit was lost in the data cleaning. A rebellion was already brewing, but no one could envision what philosophy would come to look like. They would see in 1966.

Johns Hopkins University decided to hold a conference on “the new French philosophy” that year, and all of the heavyweights showed up. Before an American audience, Derrida presented an unpublished paper titled “Sign, Signature and Play”. It was an attack not only on Levi-Strauss but on the very assumptions that underpinned Western thought. And it was devastating. There was no doubt that structuralism, as it had been conceived, was dead. Never before did one paper so profoundly arrest the entire current of thought, in such a dramatic manner. “Writing and Difference” and “Of Grammatology” would swiftly follow, inaugurating our current philosophic climate.

II.

Throughout his career, Derrida really didn’t say anything that hadn’t been said before. The concept of language functioning as a differential system was Sassure’s. The idea of Western thought having a boundary is there in Foucault and Heidegger. The play of presence and absence is there in Lacan. And of course there was enormous debt to Hegel regarding sublation, the simultaneous destruction and conservation of an idea when a higher structure consumes a previous one. Nietzsche anticipated Derrida’s attitude to truth and sense of humor, Freud his critique of self-presence and mode of analysis.

In fact, what we now describe as “deconstructions” (linguistically-based analyses) have been practiced in philosophy since Socrates. Derrida did not invent the concept, but merely coined a word. What made Derrida unique was his willingness to completely accept the consequences of this thinking and follow it to its sometimes horrific conclusions.

The general premise is this: Humans understand concepts by considering them in relation to their opposites. (up /down, right/left, day/night.) The West has changed this system by stating that the first term is both superior and dominate; thus Man/woman, Presence/absence, God/devil, Good/evil, Speech/writing, etc. This is so all-encompassing that even simple terms are subsumed in this system. We do think Up is better than down, and Right handed people are superior to left-handed people. The superior terms are joined together in a chain of related meanings so that Man is related to Up, Right, Presence, God, Good, Day and Speech. Similarly, the inferior terms are joined so that woman is on a chain with down, left, absence, devil, evil, night and writing.

This system has to be reinforced by the rule of law because it is unstable. Like a living and organic thing, language struggles behind our back. It betrays us, and says more than what we mean to say. The natural innovative process of language is a threat to the Western system of thought, and so to maintain this system, violence is employed. Street gangs, police, soldiers, psychiatrists and teachers all maintain the same system of thought and the same relationships of power.

It is in the uncertain, the playful and the proliferant, where human freedom exists. Life occurs at the margins of our understanding, at the limit of our expression, in what is generative and erotic in reading. And we are faced with the reality that the signature of the author is not a mark of presence but of the absence and death of the author.

A page is inundated with words that leap up and join the sensual world, forming a latticework against the soiled white. Derrida wrote in that place where the words found a rhythm. If he seemed to contradict himself, it was because his work was founded on that tectonic terrain that shifts beneath our feet.

III.
   

There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move…

From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognised in the absoluteness of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock, shaping and undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself benamed as such in the period when, refusing to bind linguistics to semantics (which all European linguists, from Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of meaning outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing as a game within language (The Phaedrus condemned writing precisely as play — paidia — and opposed such childishness to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech).
 -Of Gramatology

The accusations of critics that Derrida was an obscuritanist are absurd. There has never been a writer of greater clarity. Let us look at ‘Sign, Signature and Play.’

The mode of Western thought is to gather data and give it order by arranging it around a center. This has been given many names in philosophy: essence, existence, substance, subject, truth, the transcendental, consciousness, conscience, God and man, for a few. Yet by attempting to name it, we are acting on an assumption about the nature of reality, that things actually do have a center. Obviously, this is not the case. This is the realization behind modern philosophy.

All these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics.There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history… But there are many ways of being caught in this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences which explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example, Heidegger considering Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last “Platonist.” One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.
-Sign, Signature and Play

Derrida is quite clear here; he is attempting to conceive of a philosophy outside of this circle, or at least begin to see through the blinds of language to the street outside.

If I say the same thing to you that you have heard for your entire life, then you will have no trouble understanding it.

Yet those words of a foreign language that strike new to the ear seem incomprehensible. As our ear learns the forms and shapes of the sounds, the words emerge with clarity and beauty. That is what it is like to read Derrida. Derrida continued the Joycean enterprise and thus denied himself no trade, tool or trick of the language. We follow the texture of his thoughts as he coaxes seeds of thoughts to grow.

Derrida had the ability to simultaneously describe and demonstrate phenomena in his writing. He not only argued that there was no difference between form and content but also proved it on every page. If he was at times difficult, it was because the concepts he was writing about were difficult.

IV.

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.
—Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University, London Times 1992

This was how a group of analytical philosophers closed their letter after misattributing the term “logical phallusies” to Derrida (This term, left to dangle between quotation marks, appears nowhere in Derrida’s work. This was not caught by the “fact checkers” at The Economist, which perpetuated the misattribution). Without a shred of irony, a group of philosophers trumpeted “reason, truth and scholarship” without one example of how Derrida was attacking them or one definition of what these values are.

Are these values so clear that they do not require definition?

Was the essence of these values revealed to this group of philosophers? Did God tell them what they are and that Derrida was a danger to these values?

Have these terms been thrown around so much that understanding them is unnecessary and we are expected to shudder and submit to their utterance? Are we supposed to drop to our knees before names of these authors names and their flaccid logical phallusies?

What these philosophers desired, in their call for clarity, is the 2000-year-old accumulation of a mistake.

The attacks on Derrida are proof positive of the death ideology and the rule of branding. Academic conservatives attack Derrida for his position on objectivity, yet W.V.O. Quine, an outspoken critic and signatory to the above attack, was far more radical on the impossibility of objective truth. Perhaps his status as a good Republican inured him from attacks of the sort that Derrida was frequently subjected to, even in death.

In fact, the only contemporary thinkers I am aware of that can and do argue for objective truth are Noam Chomsky based on his Transformational Linguistics, and Ralph Abrahams based on the Chaos theory in Mathematics. I don’t see them being championed by our new conservatives.

The fact is that Derrida, a self described “classist” and political moderate, and other “liberal educators” who have opinions that diverge from the Cliff Notes reading of texts, have been scapegoated as the great threats to the academy, destroyers of our universities. According to his critics, the rot in our academic system is not the fault of the exponential increases in class size, the failure of both our primary and secondary education, the transformation of our universities into glorified trade schools, or a system that awards professors who publish over those who educate, but rather it is the fault of Derrida and other “liberals” that actually want to read books.

Faced with Derrida’s death I find myself drawn to the closing lines from the second chapter of “Specters of Marx.”

Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? “Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio…. Question it.” The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “Intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let thus speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the “there” as soon as we open our mouths, even at a colloquium and especially when one speaks there in a foreign language: Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
-Specters of Marx