Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy

Vivienne Orchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351194891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

"Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was unquestionably one of the most celebrated and reviled French thinkers of the last thirty years. Outside France his influence in comparative literature circles, through deconstruction and other ideas, has been so profound that his personal role as a leader of contemporary French philosophy has been almost overlooked. Perhaps because there is no equivalent in English-speaking countries to the timetabling of philosophy in the French education system, writers on Derrida outside France have not fully appreciated the importance of this political and cultural struggle. In this ground-breaking book, Orchard examines a hard-fought debate of great importance not only to Derrida himself, but also to France's idea of what studying 'philosophy' might mean after the student uprisings of 1968."

Chapter 1
Situating Greph

Introduction

French theory, so-called, is dead and it is now time to call in the historians, according to one recent commentator.¹ At the same time the question of legacies in the wake of the death of Jacques Derrida has come to the fore in a cluster of publications in response to this and to the heralded 'death of theory' or to a 'post-theory' jurisdiction. That the historicizing of theory is the mark of death — but not mourning — is a crucial distillation of the supposed incompatibility of the two modes. The 'story' of theory as a kind of mourning — both loss and dismay — has been in force since the extant narrative summary of 'Derrida in America' came into play in the early 1980s. But it has become a kind of blank counter to be played in particular theory wars and in certain games, and what is at stake remains almost out of sight. If 'at least one definition of deconstruction might be that it involves a rethinking and readjustment of context', as Christopher Johnson remarks in relation to the question of technology,² then the negotiation of thought and its determinations, of historicity and the transcendental, is in part what underlies this glibly posited incompatibility which cannot be equated simplistically with theory's dying moment.³ This study takes on these questions through an engagement with Derrida's work on institutional questions, and most specifically his involvement with GREPH, the Groupe de recherches sur l'enseignement philosophique. As is well known, the initial institutional moment of 'deconstruction in America' is 1975, when Derrida began teaching at Yale University for a few weeks each year, alongside Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, who were known afterwards as 'Yale deconstructionists'. A year previously, GREPH was founded in Paris. In the period in which the influence of Derrida's work became an institutional phenomenon outside France, Derrida was engaged in a distinctively French institutional struggle and context. The group which he helped to found campaigned on behalf of what had until very recently been known as the 'classe de philosophie', the unique French arrangement of teaching philosophy in secondary schools. As its name suggests, GREPH was a collective movement. The campaign which it organized in 1975 and the collection of texts which it published two years later, Qui a peur de la philosophie? (QP), remain obscure. GREPH survives, if at all, in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida, and only as a codicil there. At the time when, beyond France, Derrida's work became part of first 'literary theory' and then 'theory' tout court — a body of work which was marked by its productivity, internationality, self-conscious eclecticism, and interdisciplinarity — Derrida was involved in a campaign about the school timetable and philosophy as a school subject, the most traditional and conservative of humanities school subjects which was zealously guarded by its ultra-traditionalist and conservative practitioners and upholders. These simultaneously unfolding arenas are paradoxical in relation to one another. That of 'theory', a literary critical and then multidisciplinary zone, produced in English, principally in the United States, with an expanding clientele within university teaching and research, and that of 'philosophy', a compulsory school subject throughout France, of interest primarily to those whose future employment was at stake.

Those who allied themselves with GREPH and took part in its activities included philosophers who were already well known or subsequently became so, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Michèle Le Dœuff, and also unknown lycée teachers of philosophy. The group was a collective enterprise formed as a result of dissatisfaction with the way philosophy was being taught, overseen, and managed in schools. The impetus was institutional and political in the first instance. GREPH was not a band of disciples, nor a work-group engaged in projects closely linked to the half dozen or so works published by Derrida over the preceding decade which had brought him to increasing prominence from 1967 onwards. Derrida was, however, the key founder of the group, its public figure-head — 'l'âme du GREPH', in the words of one sympathizer.⁴ In 1990, Derrida published a large collection of writings from the previous fifteen years entitled Du droit à la philosophie (DP). This collection brought together all of Derrida's previously scattered writings on institutional questions. This included the collectively agreed documents which drew up GREPH's foundation. When originally published, Derrida's essays had also appeared with these same documents. GREPH cannot simply be subsumed into Derrida's oeuvre without remainder. However, his role and involvement was crucial, and his participation is significant within the trajectory of his work in general. Derrida himself consistently draws attention to it as part of an ongoing concern with institutions, manifested in his involvement with GREPH, with the Sorbonne assembly of 1979, the 'États-Généraux de la Philosophie', and with the creation of the Collège International de la Philosophie in Paris in 1983. This strand of his activities has received little attention from 'theory'. The nature and kinds of attention which it has received are themselves significant to the 'translation' of Derrida's work across disciplinary and national borders. Mostly, it has been awarded a particular status within arguments about the political relevance and potential of Derrida's work, where it is cited as 'proof' of engagement by Derrida.

The approach of Derrida's non-French interlocutors, both sympathetic and hostile to his work, forms part of the overall frame of this study. In the preface to Du droit à la philosophie, Derrida states that:

Ce qu'on a appelé la 'déconstruction', c'est aussi l'exposition de cette identité institutionelle de la philosophie, (p. 22)

Derrida here refers to the threatened 'specificity' of philosophy in France. He is careful to place the term within quotation marks. Nonetheless, for 'theory', these are surprising declarations on behalf of philosophy as a particular discipline. What these interlocutors miss out is any sense of the substantive concerns of Derrida and GREPH, which would enable the elucidation of this statement. Derrida's 'deconstruction' is primarily associated with a particular, recognizable kind of literary, textual criticism, one which resists traditional disciplinary ties and is self-consciously radical and avant-garde. The disruptive force to which the latter lays claim sets out to undermine all kinds of academic norms and practices, including disciplinary boundaries. Most of all, it undermines philosophy's self-understanding as a mode of enquiry characterized by, and striving for, objectivity, lucidity, universalism, and rationality. Literature becomes the superior term in opposition to philosophy in 'theory's' understanding of Derrida's work, able to dismantle, through close reading, the transcendental ground of philosophy. Derrida's concern with 'institutional questions', however, focuses pre-eminently on philosophy. This is barely acknowledged by those who eagerly take up this area of his work, who are themselves located in literature departments. The specificity of the context in which Derrida and GREPH were operating is thereby lost — both its national, cultural, and political reference-points and determinations, and its philosophical ones.

The rest of this chapter 'situates' GREPH in order to uncover its significance in relation first to some of the issues around Derrida's American context of reception, and secondly to the history of philosophy in French education from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Neither segment attempts a full account nor even a full overview of these areas which in themselves each require a separate study, merely attempting the work of situating. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the educational reforms which GREPH opposed, and the nature of their campaign, Derrida's work on the relationship between philosophy and education, and the aims and demands of the group. The final chapter turns to Derrida's involvement in the creation of the Collège International de Philosophie after the change of government in 1981, and the continuation of the underlying question of the relationship of his work to the 'institutional identity' of philosophy. Most of the work by Derrida discussed here is to be found in Du droit à la philosophie, and of GREPH in Qui a peur de la philosophie? Although I will refer to other works by Derrida, I take the best-known texts, the expositions of them, and the endless precautionary gestures habitually produced m relation to the term 'deconstruction' to some extent for granted, as already amply and ably dealt with elsewhere.⁵ Neither 'deconstruction' nor 'philosophy' are monolithic, self-evident 'methods' or bodies of work. However both are used as terms within the debates and the problematics opened up by GREPH, and are employed by them and by Derrida in relation to this area. A consideration of this work cannot, therefore, function without them.

The work of GREPH has itself become part of a distinctively French tradition of 'petits écrits' on the teaching of philosophy in France from the nineteenth century onwards, which has been exhumed and republished by former GREPH affiliates. This degree of relative obscurity conceals the significance of the group in relation to Derrida's own celebrated oeuvre, to the recent context of philosophy in France, and to the relationship of philosophy to its own practice. This book does not aim to produce a 'total history' of GREPH. Such a history could only be undertaken by a former participant since parts of its activities were not fully documented, and many of its publications are no longer extant, having only ever appeared ephemerally and for internal purposes. Rather, it examines GREPH in the light of these problematics and the relations between them, in order to situate and engage with the group's concerns and modes of activities, and to understand the nature of their campaign 'pour la philosophie'.

The kinds of attention which GREPH has received outside of France have been in relation to Derrida's work, rather than to philosophy in France more generally. A particular strand of American commentators have appropriated the group as a useful instance of the political dimension ofthat work: a kind of'applied' deconstruction, or 'political translation' of his work.⁶ As such, it acts as a crucial reference point in that other 'translation' of Derrida's work: the institutional and intellectual transfers and displacements of it within the Anglophone context of 'theory'. The theorist Samuel Weber remarks suggestively in passing that:

I have long been convinced that one of the decisive institutional conditions responsible for the emergence of what has been called 'French theory' has been the fact that for almost two centuries philosophy has been an obligatory subject of instruction in the last year of the lycée.⁷

But little work has been done in unpacking this putative problematic. The relative lack of interest in (or, more accurately, ignorance of) GREPH's existence is striking and must be measured in relation to the massive impact of Derrida's work in general in this domain. In the countless English-language articles and books devoted to Derrida in the last thirty years, GREPH scarcely features or is often given a glancing reference at best. In the light of this relative scarcity of reference, the effects of mediation, and thus potential distortion and realignment, can only be heightened.

GREPH's primary concern was with the institution of philosophy — with its institutionalization — within a single national and cultural context, in part due to the practical nature of their objectives. The idea of context or of philosophy as a cultural form leads to the question of determination, one which philosophy itself, as a discipline, has steadfastly disallowed, refusing to see its own material determinations and history as of philosophical interest. To conceive of philosophy as being part of a particular culture, as being written in a particular language, even as having a nationality in the way that literature has been analysed, categorized and institutionalized in the last century, is viewed as not just questionable, but as impossible. I will examine this constitutive view of philosophy as not part of culture in the third section of this chapter. First of all, I address GREPH's reception as an important frame to this problematic of philosophy as institution and as culture: that of the institutionalization of Derrida's work, and of the passage of philosophy across national and linguistic borders. Both this, and what can initially be termed the question of the institutional frame, are notable considerations in his oeuvre. In his thesis defence presentation of 1980, published as 'The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations', Derrida comments on how, over the course of his early years teaching philosophy, he came to see deconstruction as unavoidably caught up in this question of the institution:

I came to understand better to what extent the necessity of deconstruction [...] was not primarily a matter of philosophical contents, themes or theses, philosophemes, poems, theologemes or ideologemes, but especially and inseparably meaningful frames, institutional structures.⁸

How this passage and this institutionalization in turn affect that oeuvre is therefore a significant question. Situating GREPH entails first of all understanding how this passage has taken place, in order then to locate it within the context in which its own imperatives and objectives were formed.

Most strikingly, accounts of Derrida's work which declare an interest in its institutional dimension offer references to, and readings of, his work on the university, but have only just started to pay attention to GREPH with the publication of Jan Plug's two-volume translation of Du droit à la philosophie in 2002 and 2004.⁹ The Anglophone mode of address of this body of work still does not engage with the 1977 collection of GREPH's material, Qui a peur de la philosophie? which, unlike Derrida's articles on the university which appeared first in English, has never been published in English. GREPH remains still largely a citation reference for commentators who do not go much beyond echoing the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Situating GREPH
• 2 Politics and Reform: Radicals and Conservatives
• 3 The Double Strategy
• 4 'Reine ou rien': The Extension of Philosophy
• 5 The Insistence on Philosophy
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index