Jacques Derrida
Philosopher Jacques Derrida died of cancer on 9 October 2004, aged 74. With others of his generation, he was an emblematic figure of French thought. This prolific author, translated into some twenty languages, will always be remembered as the inventor of deconstruction. A tribute to an exceptional life.
“Contingencies have made me a French Jew from Algeria.” Born in the suburbs of Algiers in 1930, the young Jackie Derrida was “a bit of a tearaway”, preferring football to school. Although he failed the baccalauréat the first time round, he had already set his sights on writing. In 1952, he entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the leading French institute for literature and philosophy, whereupon he decided to embark on a career as a philosopher. In the 1960s, he taught in Le Mans and then lectured at the Sorbonne. In 1967, he made a breakthrough on the international scene with the publication of three pioneering books: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. When invited to speak in the United States, his charisma so impressed the American public that they embraced his teaching en masse. In the States, he met Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Thus was born the Yale School of Deconstruction. From here on in, he travelled the world over writing profusely. Although seen as the dynamo of the French theory in America, French academia refused him any significant honours.
Notwithstanding his fame, Jacques Derrrida’s work is convoluted, hard going and even obscure to some. Yet one main line runs through it: his thoughts on writing. Based on a critical reading of Western metaphysics, Derrida argues against the subordination of writing to speech, which he terms “logocentrism”, in a tradition running from Plato through to Heidegger. He posits that the idealistic attempt to isolate what someone “meant to say” from its written “trace”, the content from the arbitrary nature of expression, in short the substance from the form, is doomed to fail. Instead, he seeks to show that textual polysemy and the ambiguity of words are “always already” within thought. This is why he puts forward the “deconstruction” of philosophical texts. The idea is based on a combination of two premises: the demonstration of the semantic ambiguity of conceptual rhetoric and the generation of this ambiguity by neologisms. Deconstruction consists as much of “undoing” established suppositions as “constructing” the conditions for the possibility of open unfettered thought. “The strict taste for refinement, paradox and aporia” for which Derrida is often criticised goes hand in hand in his writing with an effusive love for the richness of language.
Jacques Derrida’s work encompasses many fields such as psychoanalysis, linguistics, art and religion. He was interested as much in classical philosophers as writers, especially in his book Glas in which he stages a confrontation between Hegel and Jean Genet. He also liked to combine narrative with concept. For example, when discussing Judaism, he used the autobiographical “confession” form, mischievously calling his essay Circumfession. Derridean prose shows a flair for this kind of amalgamation of two terms. The important notion of “differance”, seeking to put over the “dissemination” of meaning, illustrates the pertinence of such a practice. Not only does the incongruous presence of this “a”, which has to be spelt out loud to be heard, support the theory of speech undermined by the written word, but it calls out to the reader as a distant audience and guarantor of dialogue. “Differance” combines the meanings of deferral and difference and therefore makes the “shifts” of meaning obvious via the use of a vowel. Derrida himself said that he lived as he wrote, with digressions, sidesteps, additions of supplements, prostheses, forays into writings for minors and non-canonical legacies, details and footnotes. His philosophical challenge was to keep this borderline, undecidable position between the body of the text and the margin, the essential and the incidental, the here and the there. The boldness of his nuance-filled style bears witness to a rare sensitivity in an era in which sensitivity is sometimes lacking.
Jacques Derrida was also a politically committed team player. In 1968, he launched a vast education survey with his fellow lecturers, giving rise to the creation of an atypical institution, the International College of Philosophy, over ten years later. In 1981, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia imprisoned him for a few days for speaking to dissident students at a clandestine seminar. In the last decade of his life, his political leanings became more explicit in his publications. For example, during a think tank on ethics, he addressed the subject of hospitality, which he defined based on the unconditional imperative, “Come in, whoever you are.” He spoke in favour of illegal immigrants in France and fought internationally for the release of Nelson Mandela and Mumia Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death in the United States. In 1993, he wrote in his Spectres of Marx, “Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine and thus economic oppression affected so many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity.” He added, “To be a democrat would be to act knowing that we never live in a democratic (enough) society.” The horror of injustice prompted him to speak out publicly. He put the media authority of his name to work for the most urgent causes.
The Work of Mourning - such was the title Jacques Derrida gave his 2003 volume of tributes to lost friends Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas and Pierre Bourdieu among others. In this work, he undertook the painful exercise of “a cogito of farewells, this goodbye of no return.” It is up to each one of us today to reflect on his thoughts and say a modest adieu.
Pierre-Henri Casamayou
taken from Actualité en France (magazine of the ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Print version
National Library of France