Product Code Database
Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida;Peeters (2013), pp. 12–13. See also 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophyVincent B. Leitch Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 27. although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disavowed the word "postmodernity". Augustine and Postmodernism, in response to George Heffernan of Merrimack College. Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-34507-3 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21731-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) page 42:
During his career, Derrida published over 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He has had a significant influence on the humanities and , including philosophy, literature, Jurisprudence, (1992). 9780810103979, Routledge. ISBN 9780810103979
"Critical Legal Studies Movement" in "The Bridge"
GERMAN LAW JOURNAL, SPECIAL ISSUE: A DEDICATION TO JACQUES DERRIDA , Vol. 6 No. 1, 1–243, 1 January 2005. anthropology,"Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology", Rosalind C. Morris, Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume: 36, pp. 355–389, 2007.
historiography,"Deconstructing History", published 1997 (2nd. edn. Routledge, 2006). applied linguistics, sociolinguistics,"The sociolinguistics of schooling: the relevance of Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin", Michael Evans, 01/2012; . In Edith Esch and Martin Solly (eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts, Peter Lang, pp. 31–46. psychoanalysis, music, architecture, and political theory.
Into the 2000s, his work retained major academic influence throughout the United States, continental Europe, South America and all other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. For the last two decades of his life, Derrida was Professor in Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics. He also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music"Deconstruction in Music – The Jacques Derrida", Gerd Zacher Encounter, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2002. (especially in the musical atmosphere of hauntology), art,E.g., "Doris Salcedo", Phaidon (2004), "Hans Haacke", Phaidon (2000). and art criticism.E.g. "The return of the real", Hal Foster, October – MIT Press (1996); "Kant after Duchamp", Thierry de Duve, October – MIT Press (1996); "Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry – Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975", Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October – MIT Press (2000); "Perpetual Inventory", Rosalind E. Krauss, October – MIT Press, 2010.
Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work, while others cite Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial.Lawlor, Leonard. "Jacques Derrida". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu. 22 November 2006; last modified 6 October 2016. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.
On the first day of the school year in 1942, French Algeria—implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy France government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
In the late 1940s, he attended the , in Algiers; in 1949 he moved to Paris, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne.Marc Goldschmidt, Jacques Derrida : une introduction, 2003, p. 231. At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. A professor of his, Jan Czarnecki, was a progressive Protestant who would become a signer of the Manifesto of the 121. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy ( ) on Edmund Husserl. He then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.Caputo (1997), p. 25.
With "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come.Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 331 A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books— Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.
In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate ( doctorat d'État) by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title "L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture" ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing").Powell (2006), p. 145. The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft doctoral thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ("L'idéalité de l'objet littéraire"); Jacques Derrida – Editions de Minuit his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor ( ) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH; 'International college of philosophy'), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel. "Obituary: Jacques Derrida", by Derek Attridge and Thomas Baldwin, The Guardian, 11 October 2004. Retrieved 19 January 2010.
On 8 May 1985, Derrida was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Class IV – Humanities, Section 3 -Criticism and Philology.
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. When Derrida's colleague, Dragan Kujundzic, was accused of sexual assault, Derrida wrote a letter to then-Chancellor Cicerone saying "if the scandalous procedure" against Kujundzic was not "interrupted or cancelled," he would end all his "relations with UCI." Regarding his archival papers, there would be "another consequence: since I never take back what I have given, my papers would of course remain the property of UCI and the Special Collections department of the library. However, it goes without saying that the spirit in which I contributed to the constitution of these archives (which is still underway and growing every year) would have been seriously damaged. Without renouncing my commitments, I would regret having made them and would reduce their fulfillment to the barest minimum." After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007.
Derrida was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School. Jacques Derrida Former Professor of Media Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.
He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Silesia, the University of Coimbra, the University of Athens, and many others around the world. In 2001, he received the Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.
Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university".
Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida ( Derrida's Elsewhere) by Safaa Fathy (1999), IMDb and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002). IMDb
On 19 February 2003, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq impending, moderated a debate entitled "Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" between Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, co-hosted by Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis and Le Monde Diplomatique. The debate discussed the relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion.
Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002. He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of 9 October 2004. "Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher", Washington Post, 9 October 2004. Retrieved 9 May 2012.Peeters, Benoît (2013). Derrida: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 540
At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to University of Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg at that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism", Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from the conception of speech's relation to writing to the understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics".
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure.Nicholas Royle (2004), Jacques Derrida, pp. 62–63.Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76: Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967),Derrida (1967) Of Grammatology, Part II: "Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title "The Exorbitant. Question of Method", pp. 158–59, 163. is the statement that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.Reilly, Brian J. (2005) Jacques Derrida, in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.Harold Coward (1990) Derrida and Indian philosophy, pp. 83, 137.Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) On a Defence of Derrida, in The Critical review (1990), Issues 30–32, pp. 40–41.Sullivan, Patricia (2004), Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, in Washington Post, 10 October 2004, p. C11. Retrieved 2 August 2007. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ... means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."Derrida (1988) Afterword, p. 136.
Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations;Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 278. this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.Bensmaïa, Réda, "Poststructuralism", in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93.Poster (1988), pp. 5–6.
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida had a mixed relationship.
Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience"; for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.
In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), Genèse et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:
Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.
And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why différance is a matter not only of difference, but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962).
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:
On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8.On the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" ( Derrida and différance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms Destruktion and Abbau, via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerge: the Other as opposed to the SameDerrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97–192. "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other", beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."Caputo (1997), p. 42. Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure, Linguistics and Grammatology in Of Grammatology, pp. 27–73. Hegel,"From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" in Writing and Difference. Michel Foucault,"Cogito and the History of Madness" in Writing and Difference. Georges Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau in Of Grammatology, pp. 101–140."Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Writing and Difference paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, Of Grammatology, pp. 83–86. psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,"Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference. and writers such as Jabès"Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book" and "Ellipsis" in Writing and Difference, pp. 64–78 and 295–300. and Antonin Artaud."La Parole soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" in Writing and Difference.
This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as Androcracy, patriarchal and masculine.Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément 1975 La jeune née. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", Wayne A. Borody (1998), pp. 3, 5, "Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition". Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27). arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.
In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel.Spurgin, Tim (1997) Reader's Guide to Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" Graff (1993). This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.
Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.
Of Spirit contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazism Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.Powell (2006), p. 167.
However, scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Robert Magliola, and Nicole AndersonNicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Publishing Plc, London, 2013 have argued that the "turn" has been exaggerated.Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Hume: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 211; Robert Magliola, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Scholars Press of American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 157–165; Nicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 24. Some, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.
Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this.Rorty, R. (1995). Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy. Revue internationale de philosophie, 49(194 (4), 437–459.Rorty, R. (1989). "Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?". The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2(2), 207.McCumber, J. (2000). Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault. Indiana University Press.
Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.
Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.B. L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas, "Que dirait Eurydice?" / "What would Eurydice Say?" (1991–93). Reprinted to coincide with Kabinet exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. This is a reprint of Le féminin est cette différence inouïe (Livre d'artiste, 1994, and it includes the text of Time is the Breath of the Spirit, MOMA, Oxford, 1993). Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.
In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism." The Other Heading, pp. 5–6.
At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.Derrida (2008), 15.
In 1981, Derrida was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government for leading a conference without authorization and charged with drug trafficking, although he claimed the drugs were planted on him. He was released with the help of the Mitterrand government and Michel Foucault.Jacques Derrida, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 70–71. Derrida was an advocate for nuclear disarmament,Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)". Diacritics, 1984. protested against apartheid in South Africa, and met with Palestinians intellectuals during a visit to Jerusalem in 1988. He also opposed capital punishment and was involved in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Although Derrida was not associated with any political party until 1995, he supported the Socialist candidacy of Lionel Jospin, despite misgivings about such organizations.Peeters (2013), p. 234. In the 2002 French presidential election, he refused to vote in the Two-round system between far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen and center-right Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.Peeters (2013), p. [25]. Derrida opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself within and beyond philosophy. He focused on understanding the political implications of notions such as responsibility, reason of state, decision, sovereignty, and democracy. By 2000, he was theorizing "democracy to come" and thinking about the limitations of existing democracies.
Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. AustinDerrida (1988) Afterword, pp. 130–31. and Stéphane Mallarmé.
His book, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response. The use of deconstruction to read Jewish texts – like the Talmud – is relatively rare but has recently been attempted.Dal Bo (2019).
Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy ( On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.
In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy ... which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text .... A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text."Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xxiv, 573. According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.Carlo Ginzburg 1976, Il formaggio e i vermi, translated in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii. Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.
Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's Dissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from 12 December 2001 to 27 March 2002 and from 11 December 2002 to 26 March 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I (covering 8 December 1999 to 22 March 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."
He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what he called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.Poster (2010), pp. 3–4, 12–13. In a 1982 interview, he said:
And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said:
Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking khôra to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings.(Nader El-Bizri, 2004, 2011) El-Bizri's reflections on khôra are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on dwelling and on being and space in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking),(Nader El-Bizri, 2018) and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics.(Nader El-Bizri, 2001, 2004, 2011, 2015) This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being ( Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold ( Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities ( Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on "χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking (2025). 9781315106267 ISBN 9781315106267
Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's khôra, Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that khôra rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida, khôra defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed".
Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy". One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.
In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, , one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. . Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida".
Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted."
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in (1994).Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.
In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot;John Rawlings (1999) Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction at Stanford University though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty. Hugh Mellor continued to find the award undeserved, explaining: "He is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad".
Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene". To answer a question about the "exceptional violence", the compulsive "ferocity", and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks", he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult that philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate". (1995). 9780810103979, Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780810103979
In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. and Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", which was published in the book Points....Derrida, "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", published in the book Points... (1995; see the footnote about , here) (see also the 1992 French version () there).
Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin. Points, p. 434.
|
|
