The Philosophy of Derrida

Mark Dooley, Liam Kavanagh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317494294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida has attempted to unsettle and disturb the presumptions underlying many of our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley examines Derrida's large body of work to provide an overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact. One of the author's primary aims is to make accessible Derrida's writings by discussing them in a vernacular that renders them less opaque and nebulous. Derrida's unusual writing style, which mixes literary and philosophical vocabularies, is shown to have hindered their interpretation and translation. Dooley situates Derrida squarely in the tradition of historicist, hermeneutic and linguistic thought, and Derrida's objectives and those of "deconstruction" are rendered considerably more convincing. While Derrida's works are ostensibly diverse, Dooley reveals an underlying cohesion to his writings. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel and de Saussure, to his most recent writings on justice, hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Derrida is shown to have been grappling with the vexed question of national, cultural and personal identity and asking to what extent the notion of a "pure" identity has any real efficacy. Viewed from this perspective Derrida appears less as a wanton iconoclast, for whom deconstruction equals destruction, but as a sincere and sensitive writer who encourages us to shed light on out historical constructions so as to reveal that there is much about ourselves that we do not know.

CHAPTER ONE

The catastrophe of memory: identity and mourning

Identity and belonging

On the first day of school in 1942, the twelve-year-old Jacques Derrida was expelled from the Lycée de Ben Aknoun, near El-Biar in Algeria. Two years previously, in October 1940, the French citizenship that had formerly been granted to Algerian Jews by the Crémieux Decree of 1870 was abruptly withdrawn. And when segregation laws were subsequently introduced in Algeria in March 1941, all Jews were prohibited from working in the liberal professions, and Jewish children were expelled from elementary and secondary schools to meet segregationist quotas. The decision by the Vichy administration at once denied the Jewish community their right to citizenship and identity, while cynically unleashing the officially sanctioned anti-Semitism that followed. Without warning or explanation, the young “Jackie” Derrida, “a little black and very Arab Jew” (C: 58), suddenly found himself exposed to the violent trauma of exclusion and non-belonging.

The memory of this event would have a profound effect on the young Derrida. Henceforth, he had no sense of self. He had neither language nor tradition, and was an exile in his own community, a fact highlighted in the following reflection:

From that moment, I felt – how to put it? – just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them “the Catholics”). In France, the suffering subsided. At nineteen, I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared, at least there where I was living at the time. But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else … Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. Symmetrically, sometimes, an impatient distance with regard to the Jewish communities, whenever I have the impression that they are closing themselves off by posing themselves as such. Whence a feeling of non-belonging that I have no doubt transposed …

(P: 121)

Those early experiences of detachment and non-belonging permeate Derrida’s entire philosophical endeavour. And that is because he was forced to recognize that identity is not something concrete and certain. Rather, it is a complex web containing within itself multiple layers that cannot easily be unravelled. As he asks, “what is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates in monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging?” (MO: 14). In other words, do geographical borders, shared languages, traditions or currencies determine one’s personal or national identity? When, for example, these borders expand and contract, or when traditional “European” values are influenced by values from other cultures, does the identity of Europe itself change?

In 1942, to be “French” was predicated on not being an Algerian Jew. And that was not a matter of mere semantics. The subtle shift in the determination of French identity resulted in very real acts of violence. So, just as his own identity was marked by the memory of difference and non-belonging, Derrida argues that all of our traditional values, customs and institutions conceal repressed acts of violence and exclusion. That being said, it is not our traditional ideals, values and institutions themselves that Derrida finds problematic; rather, it is the particular form of identity they presuppose. In other words, they are structured by what Derrida calls the logic of “presence”, or “logocentrism”.

Presence and loss

In one of his most celebrated essays, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Derrida writes “that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth” (WD: 279–80). This typically obscure Derridean sentence simply means that identity has traditionally implied purity and wholeness. To identify with someone or something means to have a full knowledge of that person or object. As such, knowledge admits of no black spots or inaccessible dimensions. What we identify with is completely present to consciousness.

Things are never that simple, however. The identity of a person or thing always conceals something from view. Part of what we are endeavouring to understand defies our longing to make it transparent. And the reason for that is that everything has a long and convoluted history that cannot be rendered fully present. While I can try to understand a person or an object by unstitching its history, I cannot fully recreate its actual temporal experience. We can try our best to comprehend the thoughts and life of another person, but we can never make them absolutely present to us. Even the act of perception is always incomplete. We can only perceive things from limited angles and perspectives. Something will always evade speculative comprehension.

That is why Derrida never wrote an autobiography. In fact, he did not believe such a thing was possible. The nearest he came to writing a personal memoir was a book he co-wrote with Geoffrey Bennington entitled, Jacques Derrida (1993). On the top half of each page, Bennington attempted an exhaustive analysis of Derrida’s work. On the bottom, Derrida contributed “fifty-nine periods and periphrases”, which he called “Circumfession”. That, of course, is a play on the word “circumcision” or the original cut. Derrida’s confession about his life and times is, in other words, incomplete. It is a confession that is circumcised. And it is so because, as he asserts, no human being can fully recover the manifold layers of history that make up a life. Each of us is cut from our origins by time and what Derrida calls “the catastrophe of memory”:

I would say that what I suffer from inconsolably always has the form, not only of loss, which is often! – but of the loss of memory: that what I am living not be kept, thus repeated, and – how to put it? – decipherable, as if an appeal for a witness had no witness, in some way, not even the witness that I could be for what I have lived. This is for me the very experience of death, of catastrophe.

(P: 207)

The catastrophe of memory renders autobiography impossible. With the passing of each and every second, time ravages the present. And what we are left with is a past incapable of being completely recollected.¹ Hence we have Derrida’s refusal to write a conventional autobiography. Instead, he gives us elusive fragments representing patchy and incomplete memory, which are totally at odds with Bennington’s philosophical biography at the top of the page.²

The time is out of joint

Derrida cannot write an autobiography because he is, to cite Julia Kristeva, a stranger to himself. The name “Jacques Derrida” symbolizes a history that is haunted from within by secrets and ghosts, none of which can be made fully present to him or us. And the same goes for every person, thing and institution. This accounts for why he opposes the idea of history as a comprehensive process in which the past is gathered up and rendered fully present. On Derrida’s account, history is not linear, developmental, logical or coherent. Due to the fact that it contains within itself gaps and secrets, ghosts and holes, it can never tell us who we are. If identity is dependent on history, and if history is founded on faulty memory, then identity is without origin or foundation. And if that is so, then it follows we are always “dislocated” from ourselves. Derrida explains:

“The time is out of joint,” says Hamlet. Literally, “to be out of joint” is said of a shoulder or a knee that has gone out of its socket that is dislocated, disjointed. Thus, time “out of joint” is time outside itself, beside itself, unhinged; it is not gathered together in its place, in its present.

(TS: 6)

All time and history is out of joint. It is simply impossible, given the catastrophe of memory, to adjust time in such a way that all its component parts can be gathered up harmoniously. For, to repeat, no matter how hard we try we cannot re-enact historical events in their fullness. Each event is a singular experience that vanishes into memory. And once that happens, the singularity of that experience is lost forever, retained only in spectral form; which is why, for Derrida, the possibility of any identity is its simultaneous impossibility. In other words, everything has a history, and because it is impossible to give a complete account of that history there can be no such thing as pure identity. The very possibility of the painting of a landscape, for example, is simultaneously the impossibility of that painting capturing every possible detail. And just as the painting is a partial or incomplete encapsulation, so too history is an incomplete encapsulation of the past. There will always be something that has escaped the artist’s and the historian’s gaze. What Derrida calls the “unity of identity” is thus shattered from within.

As for the dream of unity … this dream is forever destined to disappointment; this unity remains inaccessible; that does not mean that the dream is but a fantasy, imaginary, a secondary moment …

Even if this dream is destined to remain a dream, the promise – it is better to speak of promise rather than dream – the promise, as promise, is an event, it exists; there is the promise of unity and that is what sets desire in motion; there is desire.

(P: 136)

If the dream of unity is destined to disappointment, however, that does not and must not prevent us from endeavouring to recreate the past or to write biography. While unity and complete recollection are impossible, the dream or promise of unity is what drives us to undertake historical research; it is still the driving force behind our quest for meaning and identity. All passion, and all hopes for a better future, presuppose this incompleteness of desire.

From Derrida’s point of view, the task of the historian is to acknowledge that while retrieving historical contexts in their purity is impossible, we must still make decisions regarding how to make history coherent. That is a task for the imagination and creative impulse of the historian. And because filling in memory’s gaps is a highly speculative and uncertain exercise, it is an endless enterprise. This is what Derrida means when he says, “what we call the opening of the [historical] context is another name for what is still to come” (TS: 20).

Memory and mastery

Once a historical context is consumed by memory, it contains secrets that elude excavation. As a result, “the context is not absolutely determinable: there is a context but one cannot analyze it exhaustively” (TS: 13). The singularity of experience itself, of my lived experience, is something that defies and resists repetition. The lived moment is unique and singular because it can never be repeated exactly as it happened in the past.³ But, according to Derrida, trying to repeat and recollect the singularity of past events and contexts is precisely the vocation philosophy has assumed for itself. Philosophers have always aspired to this sense of mastery over the past, this attempt to capture everything without remainder:

The philosopher is someone whose desire and ambition are absolutely mad; the desire for power of the greatest politicians is absolutely minuscule and juvenile compared to the desire of the philosopher who, in a philosophical work, manifests both a design on mastery and a renunciation of mastery on a scale and to a degree that I find infinitely more powerful than can be found elsewhere, for example, with the great politicians or military men, or those who have economic power at their disposal.

(P: 139)

Philosophers, however, have traditionally failed to take account of the fact that this desire to master the past is destined to fail. Instead of acknowledging the catastrophe of memory, “philosophy, or academic philosophy at any rate, for me has always been at the service of this autobiographical design of memory”. And that autobiographical design of memory – what Derrida refers to as “memoirs” – is “the wild desire to preserve everything, to gather everything together in its idiom” (TS: 41). Whether in the name of the Good, God or Universal Spirit, philosophers always attempt to gather everything round a single organizing centre, assigning everything its proper place and leaving nothing unaccounted for. This is why, for Derrida, our traditional understanding of identity, history and memory always assumes the form of a circle: an “Odyssean structure”, whereby everything “would always follow the path of Ulysses … that of an economy and a nostalgia, a ‘homesickness,’ a provisional exile and longing for reappropriation” (GT: 6–7). Historical memory, for example, always begins with an original presence or lived event that is temporarily deferred, only to be recollected again at a later stage. Like Ulysses, the historian follows this circular path in an attempt to return home and relive the past.

The figure of the circle is at the heart of Derrida’s critique of the philosophical tradition, and recurs again and again throughout his texts. Since The Post Card (PC) in which he traces the circular movement of letters in the post, to his analysis of writing, intentionality and the archive, to the circular cut of circumcision, Derrida continually discerns in the philosophical tradition the attempt to gather all identity and memory within the safe enclosure of a circle. But if historical memory follows the movement of a circle, then the catastrophe of memory testifies to the fact that the circle can never be complete. Like the mark of circumcision, the circle is always cut. We are always cut and detached from our past. Unlike Ulysses, who always finds his way back, we are like Abraham, exiled from his place of birth, endlessly destin-errant, wandering the desert in search of a home. And because time cuts and dislocates me from my past, leaving only traces of what was once present, I am to a certain extent blind. Memory robs me of sight, in as much as I cannot bring the past fully into view. As such, all memoirs are by their very nature “memoirs of the blind”.⁴ I simply cannot see the past in its purity or presence. And what is concealed from view is “not a thing, some information that I am hiding or that one has to hide or dissimulate; it is rather an experience that does not make itself available to information, that resists information and knowledge, and that immediately encrypts itself” (P: 201).

Cinders and mourning

The point here is that what the past hides from view, what escapes the closure of the circle, is not something that awaits retrieval or exposure. It is not a secret in the conventional sense, where information is being shielded from view only to be recalled or discovered at some future date. What is hidden, according to Derrida, is irretrievably lost. That is why he says that the catastrophe of memory is an “experience of death”. The fact that I cannot write an autobiography means that self-presence or identity is shattered from within by death. As each moment passes, something of myself dies. Sometimes what is lost is partially retained in written, oral or pictorial form. But there are many moments that simply disappear without a trace, or without any testimony whatsoever. Such is what Derrida calls the “experience of cinders”:

I would be reconciled with everything I live, even the worst things, if I were assured that the memory of it would stay with me, or stay as well as the testimony that gives meaning or that brings to light, that permits the thing to reappear. The experience of cinders is the experience not only of forgetting, but of the forgetting of forgetting, of the forgetting of which nothing remains.

(P: 207)

Cinders or ashes are traces of a disintegrated past, consumed by the fires of time. They are “something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder” (P: 208). Cinders symbolize the remains of something that was formerly present but is now dead. While they bear witness to the existence of something, they never reveal what that something was. It is impossible, in other words, to reconstruct what once was from a pile of cinders. Hence, they testify “to the disappearance of memory” or “to the destruction of memory itself” (P: 208–9). And that experience of destruction or death is, according to Derrida, at the heart of all experience:

to say that there are cinders there [il y a là cendre] … is to say that in every trace, in every writing, and consequently in every experience (for me every experience is, in a certain way, an experience of trace and writing), in every experience there is this incineration, this experience of incineration which is experience itself.

(P: 209)

In short, we are cut from our origins, blinded to our past, and incapable of writing an autobiography, because the present is haunted from within by traces and cinders. Death and loss are at the heart of all identity and experience. Which is why, for Derrida, an act of memory, the desire to identify with the past, is always a work of mourning: “the only motif or motive that would be proper to me” (P: 48). We mourn the fact that we can never resurrect the past, but this should not be cause for sorrow and regret. The past may be irretrievably lost, but that does not prevent us from attempting to resurrect it. Cinders may testify to the impossibility of recollection, but that does not mean that we do not do our best to interpret them. If memor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. The catastrophe of memory: identity and mourning
• 2. Death and différance: philosophy and language
• 3. Repetition and post cards: psychoanalysis and phenomenology
• 4. The risks of negotiation: ethics and politics
• Afterword
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading
• References
• Index