[Vision2020] Another take on Derrida

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:
When Adlai Stevenson was criticized for being too intellectual, he quipped 
"Eggheads of the world united, all you have to lose are your yolks!"  When 
I posted the eulogy on Derrida, I thought that I had, once again, wasted 
some of my precious yolk, but I was surprised at the responses I 
got.  Thank you, dear visionaries. I even have an invitation to give a 
sermon at a local church on the topic.  So, here's a critical essay on 
Derrida with which I agree.

THE APPROPRIATE DECLINE OF DECONSTRUCTIONISM.
The Death of the Author
by Richard Wolin
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 10.13.04
Anyone who tries to account for Jacques Derrida's success in North America 
is faced with a paradox. During the early 1980s, when his fortunes began to 
ebb precipitously in France--articles on his philosophy had slowed to a 
trickle of two or three per annum--in the United States deconstruction 
became something of an academic cottage industry. Translations of his 
books, conferences devoted to his thought, as well as endless commentaries 
trying to explicate the obscurities of "so-called deconstruction" 
proliferated.
The irony is that American academics--most of whom were clustered in 
comparative literature departments--attempting to ride the crest of the 
Parisian theoretical avant-garde were "always already" (to employ a pet 
Derrideanism) behind the times. For, by the mid-'70s, Derrida's exotic 
brand of "post-structuralism"--which had proclaimed that the ends of 
metaphysical "closure" pursued by first-generation, hard core 
structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel 
Foucault, could never be achieved--had become a dead letter.
Nineteen sixty-seven was Derrida's breakthrough year. He published three 
successful books and, for a brief, shining moment, became the toast of the 
Left Bank. Structuralism had become intellectually hegemonic. The claims of 
Derridean "différance"--viz., that all claims to determinate meaning were 
self-undermining--appeared revolutionary and refreshing. Yet, already by 
the following year, his hermetic, "negative semiotics"--a semiotics of 
"absence" rather than "presence"--had become an object of satirical 
derision. In Structuralist Mornings, the novelist Clément Rosset subjected 
deconstructionist pretense (specifically, the Derridean habitude of writing 
sous rature or crossing out words) to biting parody: "I write a first 
sentence, but in fact I should not have written it, excuse me, I will erase 
everything and I'll start over again; I write a second sentence, but after 
thinking about it, I should not have written that one either."
In France, the Derridean gambit foundered quite soon. Like the 
structuralists, Derrida prided himself on his discursive "illisibilité," or 
"unreadability." But after the breakthrough of the May '68 revolt, when 
structuralist platitudes concerning the "end of history" and the "end of 
man" were refuted on the streets of the Latin Quarter, "unintelligibility" 
had become a distinct liability. In the eyes of the May generation, Derrida 
was associated with the structuralist old guard. Deconstruction was 
perceived, not unjustly, as part and parcel of an elitist, self-enclosed, 
mandarin academic idiom. In the eyes of his critics, Derrida was never able 
to live down his famous bon mot, "There is nothing outside the text." The 
exclusive emphasis on "textuality" in his work, combined with the studied 
indifference to the political exterior or "outside," constituted a final 
nail in deconstruction's coffin.
Toward the late '80s, deconstruction also underwent a major crisis in North 
America. In the eyes of his acolytes, the Master's frequent proclamations 
concerning the "death of the subject" seemed to malign and belittle the 
idea of human agency itself--and, thus, the prospect of progressive 
political change. If all meaning were, as Derrida claimed, indeterminate, 
if moral and epistemological questions were ultimately "undecidable," what 
was the point of political commitment? When all was said and done, wasn't 
deconstruction merely an elaborate and convoluted prescription for 
political quietism?
In 1987 the Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger scandals broke--coincidently, 
within months of each another. In a stroke, deconstruction's key North 
American benefactor (de Man) and its leading philosophical inspiration 
(Heidegger) were exposed for their compromising associations with Nazism. 
Derrida did nothing to enhance deconstruction's credibility when he 
claimed: 1) that Heidegger had become a Nazi due to a surfeit of 
"metaphysical humanism" and 2) de Man's 1941 newspaper articles endorsing 
the deportation of Europe's Jews were actually the work of a closet 
résistant. Could it be that the claims and suspicions of deconstruction's 
vigorous detractors were true after all?
But the ultimate paradox besetting deconstruction lies elsewhere. It hinges 
on the fact that a methodology that promoted itself as "critical"--as the 
exemplar of political and textual criticism--quickly degenerated into a 
variant of run-of-the-mill academic corporatism. Each time deconstruction 
was exposed to criticism, the Derridean faithful predictably circled the 
wagons. Deconstruction had become a new Scripture or Holy Writ. And in the 
eyes of true believers, its progenitor could do no wrong. Anyone who dared 
to criticize the credo was branded as a heathen or non-believer. 
Deconstruction had its moment in the intellectual limelight. But, 
appropriately, that moment was fleeting.

Richard Wolin is the author of The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual 
Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to Postmodernism (Princeton University 
Press).

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