[Mb-civic] COMMENTARY A Man Who Defied Words LATimes

[Michael Butler]

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COMMENTARY

A Man Who Defied Words
 By Crispin Sartwell
 Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Six Names of Beauty" (Routledge
2004).

 October 12, 2004

 Those who wished the mighty Jacques Derrida dead (and there are many of
them) have gotten what they wanted.

 With only a few possible rivals (Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty,
perhaps) Derrida was, by the time he died last week, the world's best-known
philosopher. In a way, this is not saying much, because no philosopher in
the world is truly well known, at least outside France.

 That's in part because most people have never been especially interested in
inquiry at the highest level of generality, especially if it has no decisive
results and no practical upshot. It's also in part because of an almost
willful refusal of academic philosophers to talk to people who are not
already experts.

 Derrida, the founder of the deconstructionist movement, reflects all this
at its degree absolute: Not only can't most laypeople understand him,
neither can most PhDs in philosophy. And though plenty of folks would deny
this, I think that Derrida wrote intending to be obscure, in language
designed for a small cadre of followers.

 Here is a tiny sample, selected quite at random from Derrida's "Margins of
Philosophy": "Therefore the sign of this excess must be absolutely excessive
as concerns all presence-absence, all possible production or disappearance
of beings in general, and yet in some manner it must still signify, in a
manner unthinkable by metaphysics itself." Who could quibble with that?

 If deconstruction could be summed up quickly, it'd be something like this:
Words subvert their own meanings, and every text, ultimately, undermines
itself, betrays itself, parodies itself, collapses in on itself.

 An obscure theory, perhaps, but as a philosophical movement, it caught on.
By the 1980s, Derrida's influence was pervasive, particularly in the
literature departments of universities. His acolytes were everywhere, a
slightly glazed and crazed gleam in their eyes. More crazed yet were his
opponents, who seemed to think he was the antichrist because no truth or
goodness survived his deconstructive method.

 To me in that era, Derrida was a mere irritant, something that other
graduate students would try to hold over my head as we established our tiny
brainiac pecking order.

 Then one day I met him, briefly, at a meeting of the American Philosophical
Assn.: Three thousand philosophers in the Washington Sheraton ‹ a geek
polis. I was a new PhD looking for a job. He was a legend.

 As we stood at neighboring urinals, I made some bright remark along these
lines: "Hey, you're Jacques Derrida!" And he replied, as I recall, "Perhaps
I am." His eyes sparkled with the true spirit of mischief. Sometimes,
despite yourself, you like someone instantly. Derrida looked like a gremlin
or a leprechaun: small, shaggy, gray-haired and (as I thought, anyway)
irrepressibly happy. I thought much better of him after that because I
realized he had a kind of performance art happening. It's not that he was
insincere; it's just that there was a parodic element throughout.

 Indeed, if deconstructionism held that every text was, in a sense, a parody
of itself, Derrida could not deny that this was as true of his own texts as
of anyone else's. So he made it explicit, just kept giving you no ground to
stand on, keeping just out of reach of your interpretation of what he was
doing.

 As he went on, he perhaps deepened, and made some assertions that must have
driven his own followers to drink and given comfort to his enemies, such as
that justice was the only concept that escaped deconstruction. And his
pervasiveness faded: Deconstruction became one strategy among many for
textual interpretation. The world had survived the apocalypse.

 Though we may blame him for making obscurantism fashionable, we should also
credit him for the spirit of play with which he did it. And so we shove
Jacques Derrida off into the afterlife, if there is one. Depending on the
verdict, he is even now demonstrating to God that God is Satan, or to Satan
that Satan is God.







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