Hardly A/The Last Word

Abstract

Looking back on the series of exchanges published here, I think that in some ways we have achieved the goals we set at the beginning. While we have indeed settled some disagreements and overcome some misconceptions, this is not the most interesting aspect of these discussions. The more important thing is that we have been able to talk about the very substantial and interesting disagreements which continue to separate us-in particular issues concerning what it is to read deconstructively and one appropriately reads a deconstructive text. I think that we have at least come to a clearer understanding of the nature of those disagreements, which center around what I have come to call the how do you get there from here?' question. If one takes this question seriously, then one will tend to understand the task of reading (the reading Derrida undertakes and the undertaking of reading Derrida) in certain ways. If one is not oriented in terms of something like this question, then one will tend to conceive of the task of reading very differently. When I proposed these exchanges, I also had some very specific issues in mind. 1. I was concerned to defend the of my work in Strategies of Deconstruction against charges of bad faith and lack of raised by Lawlor and Kates. 2. In view of the fact that neither Len nor Josh found even one of my criticisms of Derrida to be justified, I wanted to pursue discussion of some of the specific issues my book raised. 3. Since both Lawlor and Kates, each in his own way, argued that my entire way of reading Derrida was fatally flawed, I wanted to investigate our different approaches to the texts in question and our different conceptions of the tasks of reading. With respect to these issues, I must say that I am pleased at well Strategies has stood up to their intense criticism. If I were to reissue Strategies today, I would certainly make some changes, but it would remain substantially the same book. The exchanges with Len Lawlor have, I think, been productive in casting light on the differences of approach and background assumptions that separate us. However, I don't think that the discussion of my first two issues have been similarly productive. To summarize: Len questioned the integrity of Strategies of Deconstruction in his review. I responded to these charges in some detail both in my initial response to his review and again in my SPEP paper. Other commitments kept Len from responding to my original response prior to SPEP, and HE did not discuss my defense of the of my work either in his SPEP paper, in the oral discussion following the SPEP papers, or in his letter of March 21, 1995. His SPEP paper suggests that he still maintains the charge when he writes that [Evans] still does not, or perhaps cannot or will not, recognize the most basic issue that animates Speech and Phenomena (cf. p. 186 above). In his review Len made it clear that he does not think that any of my criticisms of Derrida's work on Husserl hold any water. I argued in my SPEP paper that when he discussed specific examples with the aim of showing that I was in error, he got the Derrida wrong. Len has not responded to this argument. Indeed, I gather from his references to Strategies in his SPEP paper that counter argument on such issues is simply not called for, since according to him Strategies never attains the level from which something worthy of counter argument might be said. When I accepted HansDieter Gondek's characterization of the criticisms in Strategies as for the most past ad-hocrefutations, I attributed this character of the book to its rather restricted project: that of reading Derrida's readings of Husserl. Len, in contrast, interprets this to mean that Strategies pursues merely minutiae, a characterization that disqualifies everything I write as being inconsequential. I shall argue that this is simply wrong. My position is that if all, most, many, some, or even just one or two of my criticisms of Derrida's reading of Husserl (and Aristotle, and Saussure) are correct, then one has to reconsider the philosophical significance of Derrida's work at those points. …