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Thursday, Oct 14, 2004

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Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004

By Vaiju Naravane

One of the most widely published and discussed philosophers of our time, Derrida, best known for his theory of deconstruction, was adulated and denigrated in equal measure.

JACQUES DERRIDA, who died in Paris on Saturday at the age of 74, was the last in a line of dazzling 1960s philosophers in France that included giants such as Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deuleuze, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. France's intellectual community has been orphaned by his passing.

Although Derrida was suffering from pancreatic cancer and had been admitted to a Parisian hospital three weeks ago awaiting an intestinal operation, sources close to the philosopher said the immediate cause of death was cerebral haemorrhage.

Derrida was one of the most widely published and discussed philosophers of our time, adulated and denigrated in equal measure. His work has been the subject of about a thousand books and dissertations. In the areas of philosophy and literary criticism alone, he has been cited over 14,000 times in academic journals in the past 15 years.

While Derrida authored over 80 works of a high philosophical order, he was best known for his theory of deconstruction — the re-reading or breaking down of a text to show the multiple meanings at work within language. Focussing mainly on language, he contends that the traditional or metaphysical reading of a text makes a number of false assumptions — that language is capable of expressing constant and unchanging ideas, that the author of a text is the only source of its meaning and that in the hierarchy of language, writing is secondary to speech.

"His death is indeed a very great, an almost irreparable loss. Derrida was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century who made a substantial contribution to classical philosophical thought. But he was also a bridge between the often impenetrable and abstruse world of classical philosophy and the more immediate concerns of humanity, of humankind," said Olivier Betourne, his publisher at Fayard.

In "De quoi demain ... " (roughly translated as And What Tomorrow ... ) co-authored with psychoanalyst Elizabeth Roudinesco, he addressed questions of such burning immediacy as the death penalty, the relations between humans, animals and nature, new forms of anti-Semitism, and, with the advent of technologically-assisted procreation, the evolution of the institution of the family.

The cornerstone of Derrida's work, however, continued to be the theory of deconstruction through which he attempted to show that language is constantly shifting and that a text has multiple legitimate interpretations. There could therefore be no absolutes in terms of truth, meaning or permanence. His concept found wide acceptance, particularly in the United States, and was applied to a broad range of subjects, including literary theory, linguistics, anthropology, art, music, architecture and political science. This led to a re-reading of texts by Shakespeare or the Greek philosophers, which unravelled hidden biases and contradictions. As a result, Derrida was adulated by feminists, gay activists and other marginalised groups which applied his theories to show up discrimination and racial and sexist biases in accepted texts and ideas.

Derrida himself refused to give a pat definition of deconstruction, saying it had to be arrived at through a deconstructive re-reading of texts. "Deconstruction is to take an idea, an institution or a set of values, and to understand its mechanisms by removing the cement that constitutes it," was one critic's definition.

Derrida's lectures drew overflowing crowds of enthusiastic students and academic colleagues. Always well dressed, with a deeply tanned, handsome face topped by a shock of prematurely white hair, his was a charismatic, even magnetic presence. His lectures were peppered with puns, rhymes and enigmatic statements.

But his writing, deeply influenced by the work of German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, as well as by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud among others, was described by several critics as negative, abstruse, incoherent, nihilistic and destructive. "Many unmalicious people have been hoping for deconstruction's demise — if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it," one of his critics wrote in The New York Times Magazine. And when the Cambridge University decided to award him an honorary doctorate, protests by a sizeable number of dons led to a vote that Derrida won 336-204.

Born in Algeria in 1930 to Leftist Jewish parents, Derrida attended France's most prestigious intellectual institution, the Ecole Normale Superieur, and then went on to teach at the Harvard University in America and the Sorbonne in Paris. He continued to teach in France and the U.S. throughout his life, becoming a professor at the EHESS or School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris.

Although Derrida was a serious classical thinker, he remained firmly rooted in the French tradition of philosophy combined with political activism, following in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre who inspired the student revolt of May 1968 or Pierre Bourdieu, one of the torchbearers of the anti-globalisation movement. His political commitment was resolutely Leftist although he steered clear of party politics. In the 1970s, he became known for taking a public stand against apartheid and the muzzling of intellectual freedom under communism (he was detained by the Czech Government for supporting the Charter of 77).

In the 1980s, he came out in support of voting rights for immigrants, and more recently offered a blistering and corrosive critique of the neo-conservative ideologies emanating from Washington. In his book, The Concept of September 11, Derrida deconstructs the neo-conservative doctrine, Project for a New American Century, expounded in 2000 by hegemonists such as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and which led directly to the war in Iraq, coming to the conclusion that a philosopher must examine the transitions in global and political institutions and act thereupon. "Philosophy today or the duty of philosophy is to think this in action, by doing something," he said.

Derrida believed that one of the ways forward was through "messianicity without messianism," a coming together of the weak forces of this world without the input of organised religion. He harboured a certain utopian ideal of the weak inheriting the earth through just strife and struggle.

"One of the incarnations of this messianism without religion may be found in the alter-globalisation movements," he said in a recent interview. "Movements that are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, full of contradictions, but that gather together the weak of the earth, all those who feel crushed by the economic hegemonies, by the liberal market, by sovereignism. I believe it is these weak who will prove to be the strongest in the end and who represent the future."

Once divested of their contradictions these "alter-globalisation" movements will march against the hegemonic organisations of the world, Derrida predicted. "Not just the United States, but also the IMF, the G-8, all those organised hegemonies of the rich countries, the strong and powerful countries of which Europe is a part. It is these movements that offer one of the best figures of what I would call messianicity without messianism ... in the shape of peace and justice, a promise independent of religion, a faith without religion in some sort... "

Derrida's prestige in the U.S. was damaged through a scandal at Yale University in 1987 when it was revealed that Professor Paul de Man, a leading defender of deconstruction analysis who had died four years earlier, had in fact contributed over 150 articles of an anti-Semitic nature in the 1940s to a pro-Nazi newspaper in his native Belgium. Derrida was criticised for standing by his friendship with de Man although he admitted that the late professor's positions during the war smacked of anti-Semitism. Equally damaging was the discovery, also in 1987, that one of his intellectual heroes, German philosopher Martin Heidegger, was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. Again, Derrida condemned Heidegger's Nazi past but maintained that it in no way reflected upon the validity of his philosophical work.

Derrida's French friends and colleagues bristle at Anglo-Saxon criticism, saying the fascist beliefs of two people he was closely linked with in no way detract from the quality and value of Derrida's own work. Alexander Adler, a well-known French commentator who was at university with Derrida described him "as one of the truly good people I have known."

Says Mr. Betourne: "Derrida gave a fig for the snobbishness and worldliness that marks Paris intellectual life. He continued to live in a suburban detached house in [the] totally unfashionable area of Ris Orangis. Friendship, hospitality, generosity were the tenets by which he lived. Which is why our loss is so great, for he was not just a great thinker, he was an exceptional human being."

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