TRIBUTE
Pied piper of deconstruction
M.S. NAGARAJAN
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Remembering Jacques Derrida, whose system of enquiry had a massive impact on the arts and social sciences.
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PHOTO: AFP
Cult figure: Jacques Derrida.
THE French intellectual Jacques Derrida was born in Algeria on July 15, 1930 of Jewish parentage and died on October 8, 2004 at a private hospital in Paris, reportedly of pancreas cancer, leaving behind his wife and three sons.
He is the accredited patriarch of the much-debated philosophical system of enquiry known as deconstruction. This movement has grown so widely — and wildly — that there is not a single discipline in the arts or the social sciences that has not felt its massive impact.
Seminal paper
The paper "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" Derrida presented at the Johns Hopkins University seminar in 1966 shook the literary academy off its complacency, dismantling radically all previous notions about the phenomenon of art and literature, leading it to fresh woods and pastures anew.
When all others (liberal humanists) believed in such axioms as literature is timeless, it contains moral truth, it is essentially human, a piece of literature has a meaning of its own, capable of being interpreted and explained, Derrida said, much to their chagrin, that a text has no meaning, it does not say what it believes it says. There is an inherent contradiction in any piece of communication since language, by its very nature, is slippery and dynamic, fluid and unstable. Hence, words do not stand for concepts; words do not — in fact, cannot — signify anything in particular, or for that matter, anything at all! Meanings are proliferated and disseminated in endless ways. Any attempt at capturing the meaning of an utterance has in it the seeds of its undoing. Every meaning undermines itself. This is what Derrida means when he says, "language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique".
By way of expounding his theory, Derrida sought recourse to terms such as `aporia,' `difference,' `bricolage,' `logocentrism,' etc., all of which have now admittedly grown into systems of thought and the vocabulary of criticism.
Inspiring
It is not surprising that this anti-historical movement inspired young aspiring academics. Works, even classics, came in for radical revisionist re-readings, aided and abetted by high-powered journals, the policy of which was to promote dazzlingly new rhetorical reinterpretation of works.
Derrida did not have the advantage of an uninterrupted formal education. From his early years, he was passionately — though eclectically — interested in the Continental philosophers, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Camus whose works he devoured ravenously: his appetite for these writers was impulsive. After a late graduation in France, he studied for a time at Harvard, and later taught at the University of Paris for a number of years.
He was adored as a Parisian intellectual; his articles in learned journals on the philosophy of language became focal points of interest. His charisma rendered him a cult figure in the world of analytical and linguistic philosophy. His fame so spread in Europe and the U.S. that he came to be in great demand as a Visiting Professor in many of the highly visible metropolitan Universities. He had a strong following at the English Department in Yale with Paul de Man and Hillis Miller becoming his fervent followers. Admiringly, they came go be called Yale critics!
Time of disfavour
However, there was a time in the late 1980s, when he fell into disfavour with his admirers, as it became known that his chief protégé Paul de Man was a regular contributor, in his early years, to Belgian journals, which carried his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic writings. Derrida openly defended his friend's fascist ideas, and this led to a widespread scandal from which there was no recovery.
This was grist to his detractor's mill. With the growing interest in postcolonial theories and culture studies, there has been a steady and noticeable decline in the fortunes of deconstruction and the dominance of the deconstructionist approach to literary study.
Prolific writer
Derrida was a prolific writer, with some 40-plus books to his credit, written in French and translated into English. His writings Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Spivak), Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy, Dissemination, Positions are all difficult, turgid, obscure and even impenetrable in the density of their prose.
The detractors of Derrida — and they are a legion — accuse him of nihilism, since he is wholly consumed by, and obsessed with, language cut off from the world of reality. Is not human civilisation built upon the solid bedrock of shared enquiry and belief?
Remember his forbears were Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger! Those who attack Derrida raise a very simple, yet, valid question; how can Derridean deconstruction find its place within an institution it seeks to subvert?
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