Derrida's Writings Research Articles

The Epoche as the Derridean Absolute

The exchanges in which I participated over the last two years with J. Claude Evans and Joshua Kates have been among the most insightful and friendly exchanges of my career; my thanks to them both. For more than ten years prior to these exchanges I had been investigating Derrida's writings on Husserl and phenomenology. These investigations (evidence of which can be seen in my 1992 Imagination and Chance)1 led me not only to formulate a book project on Derrida's interpretation of Husserl (a book which I hope to finish in 1999),2 but also to organize the 1993 Spindel Philosophy Conference at the University of Memphis on Deride and Husserl.3 Although the participation in the Spindel Conference crucially developed my understanding of Derrida's writings on Husserl, the exchanges with Kates and Evans pushed my reflections to a higher level. The pressure that Evans and Kates exerted on me has resulted in three insights. First, thanks to them, I realized that Derrida's writings on Husserl (indeed, all of his writings) require a hermeneutical reading. Even if the type of deconstruction popularized by Derrida ultimately subverts many if not all of the principles with traditional hermeneutics, the first issue in any reading is understanding. To understand a text, especially a text as complex as that of Derrida, one must pay careful attention to context, to authorial intention; one must be sensitive to allusions and images used in concept development. Thus, it seems to me that, on the one hand, the reading that Kates provides in this volume is exemplary; on the other, the readings that Evans has provided, most notably in Strategies of Deconstruction,4 lack hermeneutic awareness. Simply, it is not sufficient to bring only the textual and historical context of Husserl's writings to bear on Derrida's Husserl writings; it is also necessary to bring the textual and historical context of Derrida's own writings into the picture. For instance, Derrida was a student of Jean Hyppolite;5 Gilles Deleuze (another student of Hyppolite) used the word destruction in 1967;6 the dominant issue in French phenomenological philosophy in the Sixties was to reconceive the relation between genesis and structure; in other words, an antiHegelianism dominated French phenomenological (and structural) thought in the Sixties.7 If one leaves these facts out of account, then it is impossible to understand Derrida's writings on Husserl. The discussions with Evans and Kates provided me with a second insight: we are still far from understanding the practice of deconstruction (despite the large number of publications that have appeared on this subject). It seems to me that not only is it necessary to compare Derrida's so to speak pre-deconstructive texts (that is, Le Probleme de la genese dans la philosophic de Husserl [1953-54],8 The Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry [1962],9 and the essays collected in Writing and Difference [1959-1966])10 with his deconstructive texts (the first of which are Speech and Phenomena [1967]11 and Of Grammatology [ 1967]),12 but also a new effort must be made to systematize Derrida's numerous programmatic statements concerning deconstruction from the late Sixties and early Seventies.13 Most, if not all commentators on Derrida's thought have recognized that, if one follows the trajectory from The Introduction to Speech and Phenomena, it is impossible to disregard the increasing influence of Heidegger. Heidegger's thought of the ontological difference involves two interwoven challenges to which Derrida responds during this period. On the one hand, the ontological difference challenges Derrida to conceive the ground (that is, Being) such that it in no way depends on the grounded (that is, beings). In other words, the ground can never resemble what it grounds; otherwise, the ground presupposes what it grounds and therefore is not a ground at all.14 On the other hand, the ontological difference challenges Derrida to conceive the ground (that is, Being) in such a way that does not lead to its reification; one can never posit the ground as a beyond of beings because this would imply a separation of structure and genesis, in short, Platonism. …

Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida

Responding to questions put to him at a held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with unusual clarity and great eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, the community, the distinction between the messianic and the concrete messianisms, and his interpretation of James Joyce. Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of relativism and nihilism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The Roundtable is marked by the unusual clarity of Derrida's presentation and by the deep respect for the great works of the philosophical and literary tradition with which he characterizes his philosophical work. The is annotated by John D. Caputo, the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, who has supplied cross references to Derrida's writings where the reader may find further discussion on these topics. Professor Caputo has also supplied a commentary which elaborates the principal issues raised in the Roundtable. In all, this volume represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. An ideal volume for students approaching Derrida for the first time, Deconstruction in a Nutshell will prove instructive and illuminating as well for those already familiar with Derrida's work.

Derrida (review)

204Philosophy and Literature largely escapes the critiques of deconstructionism. ThL· Sartre is not "logocentric "; he is "subversive of logic." AU weU and good. But the author seems blissfully unaware of the dUemma she has created. The Sartre who was famous, who had something pointed, important, and intelligible to say to people struggling with their lives—that Sartre was (we are told) a kind of poseur—a propagandist with no ultimate insight into the human condition. The other Sartre—the real one, standing in the wings—was an unbelievably prolix transcriber of convoluted investigations leading nowhere. The process ofreflecting on our reading ofSartre, the author teUs us, "can never end" (p. 202). But now we have to wonder, given such a choice, why we should begin. University of North TexasPete A. Y. Gunter Derrida, by Christopher Norris; 271 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, $25.00 cloth, $8.95 paper. This is one of the last tides commissioned for the Modern Masters series, and it shares with the best of its predecessors the virtues of a good epitome: accuracy and concision. By proceeding topically rather than within a biographical or chronological framework (which would be suspect for other reasons in Derrida's case), Norris manages to discuss a really surprising number of Derrida 's writings through about 1984, in a way which is usuaUy comprehensible and seldom superficial. Norris does include a chronology, but he records the public events and contexts of Derrida's career rather than a personal itinerary; in addition Derrida features an exemplary bibliography. The initial wave of Anglo-American response to Derrida was produced by Uterary critics, with the result, notoriously, that the phüosophical aspect of his project was misunderstood or neglected. There has followed a further wave of explicidy phüosophical studies of deconstruction (by Henry Staten, Irene Harvey, and Rodolphe Gasché, among others), on the very lip of which Norris rode in TL· Deconstructive Turn (1983) and TL· Contest of Faculties (1985). In Derrida his praiseworthy aim is to view his subject whole, or anyway as someone whose writing concerns a single thing, Uterature/phUosophy. Three large flaws, though, render this book dispensable for those who, beyond being informed about Derrida's work, want to think about it. First, Norris is wholly uncritical of Derrida, and in this respect faüs the standard set by the best Modern Masters volumes. His is one more tide now added to the Ust of pubhcations—many too many of them—by people who seem to have expended aU their inteUigencejust in reading Derrida, as ifnothing Reviews205 were left to do afterwards but defend the oracle against blasphemers. Yet much of the power of Derrida's thought is a function of some extremely narrow and arbitrary assumptions which he makes about phUosophy and literature. By default of the true believers, opportunities for shrewd comment have been left to an even unworthier group, the rabid antideconstructors. Derrida is a great phüosopher whose views are mosdy wrong: Norris leaves us still awaiting the person who wiU argue this (not uncommon) case. A second problem with Norris's new book carries over from his previous ones, which is relendess waffling as to the critical reach of deconstruction. Sometimes Derrida is presented as having pretty much already succeeded in unraveling the fabric of Western thought, while at other times Norris shifts, jarringly, to a rhetoric of modesty, in which Derrida is described as someone who is only raising questions, casting doubts, and initiating readings. Anthony Appiah's review of TL· Deconstructive Turn remains the best diagnosis of what aus Norris in the matter of deconstruction (Diacritics, Spring 1986). The third shortcoming ofDerrida has to do with Norris's extraordinary claim that he hopes especiaUy to address analytic phUosophers in it. Here he faüs completely, partly I think because he does not know much about analytic phUosophy, as witness his amateurish discussions of Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, etc., in earlier writings. At any rate Norris seems to think that if he insists often enough that Derrida is not just playing "literary" games, analytic phUosophers wül eventuaUy be won over. A real confrontation between deconstructive and analytic thought would be significant...

The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?

In the summer 1980, a conference entitled The Ends Man: Spinoffs the Work ofJacques (Lesfins de l'homme: apartirdu travail de Jacques Derrida) was held at C6risy, France. Participants included many French philosophers in and around the Derridean circle as well as a number American literary critics. Readers the proceedings this event' are likely to find that the most interesting and, as it subsequently turned out, the most fruitful portion the meeting was the Political Seminar. Here, at last, were raised explicitly all the questions which have long been bugging those who have followed the career Derrida's writings and their peculiar reception in the United States: Does deconstruction have any political implications? Does it have any political significance beyond the byzantine and incestuous struggles it has provoked in American academic lit crit departments? Is is possible and desirable to articulate a deconstructive politics? Why, despite the revolutionary rhetoric his circa 1968 writings,2 and despite the widespread, taken-for-granted assumption that he is of the left, has Derrida so consistently, deliberately and dextrously avoided the subject politics? Why, for example, has he danced so nimbly around the tenacious efforts interviewers to pin