Theory after Derrida

Essays in Critical Praxis

Kailash C. Baral, R. Radhakrishnan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429941511
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A critical anthology that re-examines Jacques Derrida's thought by way of theory and praxis, this volume reflects on his striking legacy and the future of theory. Among contemporary thinkers, Derrida challenges not only our ways of thinking but also hitherto methods of inquiry. This book captures how Derrida renovates and re-energises philosophy by questioning the fundamental assumptions of Western philosophical thought. By doing so, he exposes the intricate lie behind binaries, such as speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, black/white, literature/criticism, etc., which have continued to shape our worldview, where a hegemonic centre is always already in place dominating or marginalising the 'other'.

A significant contribution to literary theory, this book explores not only the status of Derrida's contribution as a critical thinker but also the status of critical theory as such in the contemporary milieu. The central question that it asks is whether we should dismiss Derrida as a thinker who espoused an extreme form of relativism, bordering on nihilism, or has he something fundamental to contribute to the future of theory. Could it be that deconstruction is not destruction but a possibility that casts doubts on whether the present can have faith in future?

This second edition includes a new Postscript and addresses some important concerns of our times, such as religious practice, art and aesthetics, translation, sociology of philosophy, and democracy. Scholars and researchers of English literature, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies will find this work particularly interesting.

1

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come

Fred Dallmayr

Martin Heidegger writes somewhere that ‘higher than actuality is possibility’. With this statement, the philosopher lifts the weight of prevailing conditions and makes room for untapped future scenarios — not in the sense of utopian blueprints but of open horizons and uncharted transformations. To be sure, preoccupied with the linkage of ‘being and time’, Heidegger always remained aware of the interlacing of temporalities — of the future-direction of the past as well as the past sedimentations in the future — and hence of the correlation of actuality and possibility. Yet, even in his case, the burden of an oppressive present tilted the balance; sometimes in the direction of radical transgression — as is evident in his writings on Nietzsche and some other texts penned during the 1930s.¹ Suffering under the same oppressive weight, some of his later students or followers shifted the accent steadily towards transgression of, or noncompliance with, actuality; easily, the most resolute thinker in this respect is Jacques Derrida. Influenced by both Nietzsche and Heidegger (and some French Nietzschean thinkers), Derrida placed his focus entirely on ‘overcoming’ of the past — something he called ‘deconstruction’ and which involved the dismantling of the metaphysical–ontological premises or underpinnings of inherited frameworks and traditions of thought. Proceeding in this manner, Derrida’s life-work amounted to a restless journey or peregrination, a relentless exodus from all forms of positivism, conformism, and habitual practices — including the prevailing practices of democracy.

In large measure, the fascination exerted by Derrida is rooted precisely in this transgressive spirit, this radically deconstructive élan. To be sure, over the decades, this élan was manifest in different guises and varying contexts. During his early years, a central preoccupation of his work was with language, grammar, and linguistic signification; a main effort at this point was to disrupt traditional humanistic conceptions of meaning and understanding, conceptions construing language as a pliant vehicle for the expression of human thought. During subsequent decades, attention began to shift toward broader philosophical and political topics, including the themes of friendship, Marxism, and Eurocentrism; again, the chief endeavour was to challenge or unsettle traditional premises undergirding these themes. It was during this phase of deconstruction that the notion of a ‘democracy to come’ first surfaced in his writings. During ensuing years, Derrida’s outlook came increasingly under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas, especially the latter’s opposition between ‘totality and infinity’ — a bifurcation pitting an immanent actuality against a radically ‘transcendent’ possibility (or what Derrida came to call an ‘impossible possibility’). A major manifestation of this later shift was the concern with questions of religion and with a resolutely transnational cosmopolitanism. For purposes of illustration, I select the following three texts corresponding to the mentioned phases. From among the writings of the early phase, I select Derrida’s critique of humanism, published under the title ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982). Regarding the middle period, I turn to his attack on Eurocentrism launched in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe(1992b). Concerning the final period, I discuss his book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005a) which contains his most extended reflections on trans-national (or post-sovereign) politics and the (im)possibility of a ‘democracy to come’. I conclude with brief comments on the (im)possibility of democratic praxis.

The Ends of Man

In the context of French (and more broadly European) intellectual life, the year 1968 constituted a kind of watershed: namely, a turning away from a certain subject-centered phenomenology and existentialism in the direction of a radical de-centering or dispersal of the ‘subject’. In many ways, this change was intimately linked with the status of ‘humanism’ in Western thought. Derrida’s essay ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982) was first presented in the fall of 1968 as a lecture at a colloquium dealing with ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’ (the latter term being largely a stand-in for humanism). The lecture refers explicitly to the turbulent events of that year: the opening of the Vietnam peace talks, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and (later in that year) the French student rebellion and the invasion of the universities by ‘the forces of order’. For Derrida, these events carried both a political and a philosophical significance because of their impact on cherished French (and European) thought patterns of the past. After the Second World War, he notes, ‘under the name of Christian or atheist existentialism, and in conjunction with a fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France presented itself essentially as humanist’ (Derrida 1982: 115). The focus of existentialist and personalist thought was on ‘human reality’ which was a translation of Heidegger’s Dasein but actually closer to the traditional concept of ‘human nature’. Among authors exemplifying the outlook, Derrida mentions such idealists as Brunschvig and (more importantly) the leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In the writings of these authors, he maintains, the meaning and ‘unity of man’ was never really examined but simply presupposed. To this extent, ‘not only is existentialism a humanism [as Sartre had insisted], but the ground and horizon of what Sartre called his “phenomenological ontology” remains the unity of human-reality’ (ibid.).² In describing the structure of this human-reality, Sartrean existentialism was a ‘philosophical anthropology’ or simply an anthropologism.

In Derrida’s presentation, the humanist–anthropological outlook was projected by existentialist writers even on thinkers who were relatively free of the existentialist bias: thinkers like Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. In the case of Hegel, a certain privileging of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) encouraged an ‘anthropologistic’ reading of the philosopher’s work which sidelined such non-humanist texts as his Logic (1812) and Encyclopedia (1817). In the case of Husserl, the existentialist vogue fastened on the centrality of pure consciousness and subjectivity — neglecting the fact that the critique of anthropologism was ‘one of the inaugural motifs’ of Husserl’s phenomenology. As Derrida states emphatically: ‘The transcendental structures described after the phenomenological reduction are not those of the intrawordly being called “man”; nor are they essentially linked to man’s society, culture, language, or even to his “soul”’ (1982: 118). A similar misreading (or lopsided reading) characterised the reception of Heidegger’s work in France, where the tendency has been to interpret ‘the analytic of Dasein in strictly anthropological terms’. At this point, ‘The Ends of Man’ waxes somewhat rhetorical, complaining about a kind of intellectual culture lag which has allowed the existentialist mentality to persist in the radically changed situation after 1968. ‘After the tide of humanism and anthropologism that had covered French philosophy’, Derrida writes, ‘one might have thought that the antihumanist and anti-anthropological ebb that followed, and in which we are now, would rediscover the heritage of the systems of thought that had been disfigured’ (ibid.). Unfortunately, ‘nothing of the sort’ has happened. On the contrary, despite the dominant aversion to existentialism, the prevailing tendency still seems to be ‘to amalgamate Hegel, Husserl, and — in a more diffuse and ambiguous fashion — Heidegger with the old metaphysical humanism’ (ibid.: 119).

The remainder of the essay intends to offer a corrective to these prevalent readings or misreadings. Given the strong condemnation of humanist or anthropological misconstruals, one would have expected a novel exegesis which completely exonerates the discussed philosophers of any humanist leanings. Surprisingly and curiously, this is not — only partly — the case. Although transgressing existentialist appropriations, the essay still detects in the works of the three thinkers traces of a metaphysical humanism — traces that block the needed radical exodus from the humanist tradition. Turning first to the author of the Phenomenology, Derrida finds it necessary to recognise that according to Hegel, ‘the relations between anthropology and phenomenology are not simply external’ because ‘the Hegelian concepts of truth, negativity, and Aufhebung, with all their results, prevent this from being so’ (1982: 120). Basically, the Hegelian system culminated in the notion of ‘spirit’ which in turn was a stand-in for subjectivity and purified consciousness; in this manner, it proclaimed — and could not but proclaim — a higher-level anthropologism: ‘Consciousness is the truth of the soul, that is, precisely the truth of that which was the object of anthropology’ (ibid.). To be sure, subjectivity in Hegel was not just an isolated ego, but rather a subject writ-large, a synonym for a perfected humanity — and to this extent testified to the unity ‘of God and man, of ontotheo-teleology and humanism’. Although critical of Hegel’s system, Husserl still followed Hegel’s perfectionist teleology by presenting ‘humanity’ as the telos of philosophy. Despite his anti-systemic bent, Derrida observes, ‘humanity’ in Husserl’s work still serves as ‘the name of the being to which the transcendental telos . . . is announced’ (ibid.: 122). As in the case of Hegel (but with a different accent), transcendental phenomenology for Husserl remains committed to ‘the ultimate achievement of the teleology of reason that traverses history’ (ibid.: 123). Hence, although distancing itself strictly from any empirical or sociological anthropologism, phenomenology in Husserl’s sense is ‘only the affirmation of a transcendental humanism’.

Things are more complicated in the case of Heidegger because of his radical turning-away from the philosophy of subjectivity (inherited from Descartes, Kant, and Husserl). As Derrida acknowledges: ‘The existential analytic [that is, the analysis of Dasein as offered in Being and Time (1967)] has already overflowed the horizon of a philosophical anthropology: Dasein is not simply the ‘man’ of metaphysics’ (1982: 124). On the other hand, several of Heidegger’s writings — including his Letter on Humanism (1977) — testify to the attraction of the ‘proper [eigen] of man’, an attraction which will not cease to direct ‘all the itineraries of his thought’. Basically, what Derrida is trying to do is to bring to light a certain ambivalence in Heidegger’s work — his oscillation between humanism and anti-humanism — by drawing attention to the ‘hold’ which ‘the “humanity” of man and the thinking of Being’ maintain on one another. This ‘hold’ or attraction is manifest already in Being and Time where human Dasein is singled out as the privileged being able to interrogate, or raise the question of, Being. In Derrida’s words: ‘It is the proximity to itself of the questioning being which leads it to be chosen as the privileged interrogated being. The proximity to itself of the inquirer authorizes the identity of the inquirer and the interrogated. We who are close to ourselves, we interrogate ourselves about the meaning of Being’ (ibid.: 126). This emphasis on the proximity of Dasein and Being is a prominent feature which has inspired many ‘anthropologistic’ interpretations of Heidegger in the past — from which Derrida demurs only partially or half-heartedly. ‘We can see then’, he states, ‘that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man. It is, as we shall see, a repetition of the essence of man permitting a return to what once were the metaphysical concepts of humanitas’ (ibid.: 127).

As Derrida acknowledges, Heidegger’s work does not merely assert the proximity of Dasein and Being but also their mutual distance, their unfathomable remoteness. ‘The Da of Dasein’, he writes, ‘and the Da of Sein will signify as much the near as the far’ (ibid.). Ontologically speaking, the so-called ‘Being of beings’ signals a distance which is ‘as great as possible’. Notwithstanding this admission, the essay returns quickly to the charge of humanism, claiming that Heidegger’s entire thought is guided ‘by the motif of Being as presence’ and ‘by the motif of the proximity of Being to the essence of man’ (1982: 127–28). Derrida at this point turns to the Letter on Humanism (1977) in an effort to corroborate this charge. The Letter famously describes thinking as the ‘thinking of Being’ (in the dual sense of a subjective and objective genitive). Seizing upon this formulation — but bracketing its internal complexity — Derrida briskly integrates the passage into his overall humanist interpretation, stating that ‘the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being’ remains after all just the ‘thinking of man’. What is happening generally in the Letter on Humanism is not so much a dismissal or transgression but rather a ‘re-evaluation or revalorization of the essence and dignity of man’. Another formulation which can be construed along similar lines is the passage presenting Dasein as a creature of ‘care’ [Sorge], as the caretaker of the Being of beings. For Derrida again, the passage is revealing because: does the stress on care not imply also ‘a concern or care about man? Where else does “care” tend but in the direction of bringing man back to his essence’? Still another formula invoked for the same purpose is the notion of ‘authenticity’ [Eigentlichkeit], with its corollary notion of the ‘proper’ [eigen], familiar already from Being and Time. Derrida interprets the formula, giving it an anthropological twist: If Being is ‘near’ to man and man is ‘near’ to Being, then one can also say that ‘the near is the proper’ and that ‘man is the proper of Being’. What all this adds up to is a refurbished version of humanism, a humanism in which human beings are seen as close to themselves and their being: ‘The proper of man, his Eigenheit, his “authenticity”, is to be related to the meaning of Being; man is to hear and interrogate it in ek-sistence, to stand straight in the proximity of its light’ (Derrida 1982: 133).

In opposition to half-hearted revivals or modifications of traditional metaphysics, Derrida’s essay proposes or intimates a more thoroughgoing rupture with the past — a rupture more faithful to, and in keeping with, the anti-existentialist mood after 1968. Are we not witnessing, he asks, a deeper seismographic tremor dislodging the past: ‘Is not this security of the near what is trembling today, that is, the cobelonging and co-propriety of man and the name of Being, such as this co-propriety inhabits, and is inhabited by, the [met aphysical] language of the West’ (ibid.)? For Derrida, this trembling is not generated by an internal teleology inhabiting Western thought, but ‘can only come from a certain outside’ which puts an ‘end’ to the internal telos. In his account, this trembling has already given rise to several profound changes or outcomes. One is the decline of existentialism and phenomenology and their replacement by theoretical frameworks focusing on ‘system’ and ‘structure’ — frameworks which seek to determine the possibility of significance ‘on the basis of a “formal” organization which in itself has no meaning’. This shift of focus has a more radically ‘deconstructive’ effect than Heidegger’s own so-called ‘destruction’ of metaphysics which still operated in the mode of a hermeneutical questioning of the meaning and truth of Being. Leaving hermeneutical questioning behind, the structural reduction of meaning operates by means of ‘a kind of break with a thinking of B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come
• 2 Quoting Time: Notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’
• 3 Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction
• 4 ‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? Derrida and Bourdieu, Ethical Subjectivity and the Gift
• 5 Before and After Glas: Approximations to the Cognitio Vespertina
• 6 Perhaps the Impossible, therefore, Will have been Necessary: Reflections before Friendship
• 7 Cosmopolitanism after Derrida: City, Signature and Sovereignty
• 8 The Generation of the I
• 9 Derrida and Religious Reflection in the Continental Tradition
• 10 On Following without Following: Deconstructing a Notion of Faithfulness in Church Practice
• 11 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies
• 12 Is Translation a Mode?
• 13 Derrida Elsewhere: A Mnemocultural Dispersal
• Editors’ Note to the Second Edition
• Postscript: The Philosopher That Therefore He Has to Be
• Index