The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World Apart

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
October 11, 2004
AN APPRAISAL 
The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World Apart
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
 
The way I recall the lecture — archaeologically
digging beneath a quarter-century of accumulated
intellectual detritus in my mind — is as a kind of
highfalutin entertainment, an embrace for the
initiate, a coy extravaganza of pyrotechnics and puns
and peculiarities. In a lecture room at the University
of Chicago, Jacques Derrida drew an enormous circle on
the blackboard. As he spoke, he dramatically added
lines and curves, each signifying another form of
textual interpretation, intersecting or glancing off
the circle. A Venn diagram of Deconstruction seemed to
be taking shape. And Deconstruction was, of course,
Derrida's much-vaunted interpretive method of making
sense out of non-sense (or vice versa). 

That diagram also turned out to be an enormous eye -
complete, if I remember correctly, with pupil and
cornea. A cartoon. But the eye, Derrida explained, as
if mentally winking in our direction, was really an
"I." And the "I" was how we come to see. Another
cartoon, this time in words. Or was the point
something else that I would be able to discern only by
studying further, trying to pin down his mercurial
weaving and wobbling while juggling allusions to
Rousseau, the Talmud and Heidegger? 

It hardly seemed worth the effort, because by that
time, despite the presence of the charismatic figure
himself, despite the fact that his work still carried
the promise of esoteric knowledge and that he had yet
to reach his peak of influence in the American
academy, the seductive lure was gone. 

But what a lure it was! And how many still feel its
pull! Now, with Derrida's death last week and the
promise of accumulating assessments and
reconsiderations, I can almost summon up a bit of
nostalgia for the initial encounter with the
Algerian-born French philosopher's works, the thrill
of learning his language, piecing together paradoxes
to get at his idiosyncratic vision, his eye's "I."
Here is a writer of almost impenetrable obscurity who
nevertheless managed to overturn traditions in
American literary teaching, feed the postmodernist maw
of relativism, redefine the acceptable limits for
academic prose and even give popular culture one of
its most overused words: deconstruction. 

Derrida partly provided the thrill of sheer nerve:
daring to write something that wouldn't just modify
interpretations but challenge the entire philosophical
and literary enterprise. His was an imperial ambition,
one inherited from Nietzsche and Heidegger: don't
reinterpret. Uninterpret. Show not just that some
formulations are mistaken, but that all are. And that,
moreover, they have to be. Show how all of Western
thought is based on a type of ignorance or
incompleteness, that everyone who claimed to get the
point was missing the point. 

We have all learned that great works of art and
literature may contain ideas and assumptions that
their creators may not have been entirely aware of.
There is the Freudian unconscious, the Marxist theory
of superstructure, the learned dissections of metaphor
and allusion in literary criticism. Who would be
surprised to learn that things are seldom what they
seem?

But for Derrida, things can also never be what they
say. Any attempt to explain or reason or demonstrate
or communicate already contains the seeds of its
undoing; any statement must conjure up its opposite.
Pay close attention and it becomes clear how much
energy is being expended on pretending to make clear
what really cannot be. Look even more closely and
there is always a small point in the text - a paradox,
an unexplained word, a knotty phrase - that when
properly probed can undermine the pretense, pull aside
the curtain of ideology and show what indeterminacy
and uncertainty lie beneath the surface. 

There is a great appeal in this promise, because it
is, in part, a familiar part of ordinary experience.
We already know that all cannot be as it appears.
Perhaps it is also the case that it is impossible to
make a seamless system. Perhaps there is no way to tie
up all loose ends. We know that this is often the
case: few human activities can be tidily organized by
orthodoxies. Why not endorse a kind of radical
suspicion, one that would be particularly useful in
challenging traditions and orthodoxy?

Such were the secrets and lures promised in Derrida's
texts, a dizzying undermining of presuppositions. Take
any received opinion, aesthetic judgment, historical
analysis or cultural activity, find its hidden
premises, its unacknowledged preferences, its knots
and feints, and its authority is undone. Applying this
method to the works of the West, Derrida became a kind
of prophet for counter-Western thought. He found his
intellectual liberation by closely reading works by
Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss. If these works could seem
to break down the pretense of Western civilization
while heralding the virtues and values of a
pre-civilized world, for Derrida they did not go far
enough: they too embodied Western orthodoxy. 

But, of course, one reason for the extraordinary
success of Derrida's ideas is that they also followed
an orthodoxy in which rebellion is privileged over
tradition and iconoclasm over authority. Independence
is declared; obeisance is dismissed. This devotion to
autonomy, accompanied by a spirit of play, is partly
what gave Derrida a following in America far more
enduring than that in France. His radical
anti-authoritarianism and counter-Western ideas also
gave him an empathetic reception on the international
political left.

But this orthodoxy, too, can be as ruthless and
demanding as any other. This may have been why Derrida
could often become mannered and puerile, endlessly
turning rebellion on itself. And late in his life,
Derrida, bristling at charges that he was a
relativist, tried to find some sort of firm,
unshakeable ground upon which to stand a notion of
political activity and justice that might justify his
triumphant orthodoxy. To no avail. In the recent book,
"Philosophy in a Time of Terror," here is what he said
about 9/11: 

"We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming
in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September
11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11,
9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical
necessity. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a
number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing
that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do
not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what
we are talking about." 

The rest is silence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/arts/music/11derr.html

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com