Derrida’s Relevance: A review of Clayton Crockett, Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism

Abstract

Derrida’s RelevanceA review of Clayton Crockett, Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism Andrew Kingston (bio) Crockett, Clayton. Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism. Fordham UP, 2017. Clayton Crockett has written and edited multiple books on theology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary continental theory. Derrida after the End of Writing represents his first text explicitly dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. In this book, Crockett covers a great deal of Derrida's later interventions in religion and politics, while also situating them in relation to several somewhat recent philosophical trends like "New Materialism," "Speculative Realism," and "Object-oriented Ontology." In doing so, Crockett's book constellates a number of important points of potential connection between Derrida and these materialist strains of continental thought, some of which dismiss deconstruction as only a theory of language. While Crockett's premises sometimes seem to concede too much to this popular mischaracterization of Derrida's work, his text should be commended for its attempt to open new avenues for intellectual debate at the intersections of deconstruction, theology, politics, and (new) materialisms. This book will probably appeal most to contemporary materialist thinkers who might be deconstruction-curious; conversely, it would also work well as a primer for Derrida scholars with an interest in productively engaging with new materialist philosophies. The book opens with the contention that Derrida's thought "remains important" and that "it cannot be relegated to the dust-bin of some late-twentieth-century linguistic idealism and subjectivist constructivism." Crockett qualifies this statement by noting that "something changes in Derrida's work" around the late 1980s (1); or, more precisely, "something has changed in the background or the cultural and intellectual context of how we read him." For Crockett, this shift is especially marked in Derrida's oeuvre by a move away from what Catherine Malabou calls a "motor scheme" of writing, and toward another scheme—toward "the machinic, teletechnology, or technoscience," toward Malabou's own idea of "plasticity," and through this toward certain possible materialist readings. The book thus begins by introducing a division into Derrida's thought, and asking "what it would mean to read Derrida beyond the scheme of writing" (2). Another, quite different iteration of Crockett's opening gambit, then, would be that Derrida can only "remain important" or demonstrate a "continuing relevance" (2-3) today to the extent that we can overcome a supposedly outmoded schema of writing in order to show instead "how the so-called linguistic paradigm was already a material paradigm" (9). This ultimatum is more explicitly stated toward the end of the book: "The question that drives this book is whether Derrida's philosophy has a future, and its tentative suggestion is that this answer depends on the extent to which it can be released from writing" (112). Such a claim will inevitably energize some readers and irritate others, though the book's stated intention is to interrogate the ways that Derrida's thought "is important and relevant beyond simple polemics (whether pro or anti)" (3). Crockett seeks to accomplish this paradigm shift, from writing to a "non-reductionist materialism," not only through appeals to science later in his text, but also through sustained discussions of the material dimensions of religion and politics. It is in these discussions of religion and politics that the book is at its strongest. By the end of his introduction, Crockett locates one potential inroad to a materialist reading of Derrida along these lines—despite Derrida's general suspicion of materialisms, which Crockett acknowledges (3)—in the semiotic overdetermination of the word "force" in Derrida's work. Setting up some of the central concerns of the book, he reads "force" through texts like Carl Rashke's Force of God, Derrida's "Force and Signification" and "Force of Law," and finally the idea that Energy is force, forces, and these forces make us—they are us. These energy forces are at one and the same time fully material and fully spiritual. Here is where materialism, religion, and politics, including the themes and concerns of political theology, intersect. (11) Unfortunately, this confluence of forces is left relatively underdeveloped in the book...