Derrida by Peter Salmon & John Gray

REVIEW:

“Deconstructing Jackie, a review by John Gray,” published in the New Statesman magazine, 17th March - 24th March 2021.

This review is of the book - “An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida” by Peter Salmon, Verso, 2020, 320 pp, £16.99

Blog Post Dated December 2021

Jacques Derrida seated at desk, with plant

My protracted university studies were firmly grounded on the great thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Within that body of though, there are two principal schools. Empiricism (now more commonly known as British Empiricism) grounded on David Hume, and associated with many others, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In parallel, Rationalism, founded on the ideas of Rene Descartes. In some sense above them both, lies the Idealism of GWF Hegel, where the term “German Idealism” is often used. Standing to one side of these three streams of thought sit the immense insights of Immanuel Kant, which defy easy categorisation. Readers will sometimes find Kant’s work described as rationalist-idealism.

For a student of political philosophy, there are other themes within the discipline, such as sovereignty and the State (Thomas Hobbes), the individual as citizen and community (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and the great liberal tradition of the 19 century, represented by such men as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Finally, we cannot fail to include the important modernist, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Above all, however, we must constantly reflect that, in the undertaking of these intellectual endeavours, across the Age of the Enlightenment, most thinkers were seeking to extirpate the exhausted validity of scholasticism, and its stepchild classical metaphysics, while at the same time absorb the inextricable pressure of the passing from natural philosophy to modern science and its close sibling, the scientific method.

The workings of the Enlightenment has led us to where we are now - appreciation of that process is essential to grasping the thinking of Derrida, which is the subject of Salmon’s biography.

There are numerous branches of philosophy across which the thought of Enlightenment men ranged - morals and religion, ethics, logic, aesthetics - but always at the centre of focus were the two areas that throughout the Enlightenment excited most debate - Ontology and Epistemology. What is it to be human, what is the reality of the world. And how can we know anything about that world in reality? This problem of knowledge - knowledge of what is external to us, as well as knowledge of each other (the other) - is in my view what lies at the absolute heart of philosophy and the examination of which is what it is to be a philosopher.

The investigation of this key set of questions has, since the early years of the Twentieth Century, become sharply divided into two camps, now called analytic and continental philosophy. The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell was an important catalyst in the creation of this distinction. At the risk of enormous simplification, we may say that the issue of subject/object lies at the heart of the divide - the subject being humans, the object being the external world (both things and ideas, and generally, other humans as well). It will be immediately evident that this implies that “other humans” are objects of my subjectivity - so this issue of the objectivity of the other is crucial and problematic.

Broadly, analytic philosophy takes, as its central method of investigation what is called “sensation” (sensory input). So, firstly, the world out there exists absolutely independently of me as an individual and of us as sentient human beings. The way in which we get to know about this externally is through sensory input and the use of the methods of modern science to measure, evaluate and describe. Analytical philosophy is so close to the scientific method as to lead some thinkers to question any essential distinction.

The school of continental philosophy takes the opposite position on objects. The idea that reality exists independently of humanity is rejected - rather the external world is “created” by man via his perception and his consciousness. In this proposition, the term “meaning” as part of, or in place of, knowledge, is crucial to the concept.

So, thrown in a substantial chunk of Newtonian physics and Marxist economics, and you have the intellectual roots of students who got their university education in the 60’s. The passages above are, if you wish, my attempt to outline the field of battle on which the philosophical divisions of the first decades of the Twenty First Century are being fought out.

In surveying the topography of this battlefield, I do not wish to imply that the shape of things to come was not forming on the distant horizon. I gave my first seminar on Edmund Husserl in 1968 (it was a disaster). Derrida rose to prominence in the late 60’s, by then Foucault was already noted. From then onwards we have all been obliged (or perhaps tempted) to grapple with firstly phenomenology and subsequently existentialism. These mines being burrowed beneath the architectural monuments of the Enlightenment, would, in the 1960s and 70s, be exploded with much destruction.

Intellectually challenging as it has been to deal with the texts of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, it is now clear that these thinkers provided the foundations for the illuminations of the Frankfurt School, as well as of course the writings of Derrida and Foucault. For forty years the struggle has niggled away in my mind, but I am finally coming to accept that I can no longer hide from the Flash Flood of postmodernism and deconstructionism. The overarching jigsaw picture of the ‘problem of philosophy’ finally comes into focus in my mind’s vision, and for this I have, at least in part, John Gray and Peter Salmon to thank.

As outlined above, on the one hand, we have thinkers who take world as a thing of measurement, assessment, validification - and in the end - proclaimed fact and truth (as opposed, in their minds, to “opinion” and assertion/falsehood). In this approach, society is one starting point, the intellectual stature of which encloses countless individuals who are not “of themselves”, but of society, of the collective. Thus essentially an object - measurable and quantifiable.

On the other, we have thinkers for whom, while society does exist, the motive force of what makes society is countless autonomous decisions by independently sentient intellectual individuals, in principle able at any point to go their individual way, singularly or collectively. Society does not make them, rather they make society. They, the atoms if you like, are the starting point. And therefore, society, it's truths, norms, conventions, structures and narratives are the creation of individual minds and has no other agency.

We can make of our relationship: with each other, with material, with events, what we choose. At times meanings will coalesce, at other times the nexus of the social plasma will collapse into a wholly different flux.

So much is clear, but for extended illumination we have John Gray’s penetrating insights in to some key aspects of Derrida’s thought, as well as for his contextual elaborations of the world of academic philosophy in which Derrida thought and wrote.

And so we also have much less reason to treat Derrida standoffishly, as many philosophers and commentators in the Anglosphere have done, but also fewer excuses to vilify the man. Vilification has been and remains common reaction to this work. Jacques Derrida with cat

Gray opens his review with the following:

“In an interview in the Guardian in 2017, the celebrated rationalist Daniel Dennett declared: ‘I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.’ (Gray, New Statesman Review, 17th March 2021)

In the introduction to his book, Peter Salmon recounts a similar story, redolent with the contempt in which Derrida was held:

“It was, for one side at least, a war, and it was a conflict affecting all of Western philosophy. In May 1992 eighteen academics drawn from Mannheim to Florence, Los Angeles to Cracow wrote an open letter to The Times against the proposal that Derrida receive an honorary degree at Cambridge University, arguing that while Derrida ‘describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of that discipline’, his work ‘does not meet the accepted standards of quality and rigour’ and that ‘M. Derrida …… seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or the concrete poets’. One of the signatories, the philosopher David Hugh Mellor, later pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge, was moved to say, ‘I’m sure Derrida himself doesn’t believe most of the nonsense he is famous for, but if you filter that out the rest doesn’t add up to anything worthy of an honorary degree.’” (Salmon page 8)

Gray, in his usual crisp style, puts before us three categories of valuable insight. Firstly, his assessment of Salmon’s exposition. This biography is not solely a philosophical commentary, but an intricately woven fabric of reflection on the man’s life, circumstances and intellectual background, interlaced with seriously textured insights into the thinking of a man who is universally judged to be absurdly opaque in his writing. While studying for his aggregation at the ENS, Derrida was supervised by Louis Althusser, who “….marking one essay, noted that his work would only meet the approval of the examiners, ‘if you perform a radical overhaul, in the exposition and the expression.’” In an earlier comment, Althusser noted - “I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure’”. (Both quotes from Salmon, page 57)

Salmon points the reader to key points of development in Derrida’s thinking - interaction with Husserl’s writing, The Baltimore Conference of 1966 - the publication of Voice and Phenomenon, the pivotal work in Derrida’s oeuvre.

Secondly, Gray pulls out some of the central themes of Derrida’s thought, which helps us appreciate what intellectual prizes we stand to acquire from the book.

Two examples:

“In 1973 Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon, a critical enquiry into phenomenology, was published in English. Husserl defined phenomenology as the reflective study of the phenomena of consciousness from a first-person point of view. This might sound like a philosophy of subjectivity, but Husserl aimed to show that logic and mathematics were composed of necessary truths, wholly independent of the human mind. Without these certainties, he was convinced, objective knowledge was impossible. Derrida, however, found radical uncertainty in the first-person itself. The human subject was not given but inherently problematic. For ever being made and unmade, it offered no privileged access to truth.” (Gray, New Statesman Review, 17th March 2021)

“Derrida is more tentative and subversive (than Nietzsche). For him, what Nietzsche called nihilism was the endemic instability of meaning. Part of being human, this is not a condition that can be overcome.” (Gray, New Statesman Review, 17th March 2021). (MV emphasis).

And finally, owing to his connections within and familiarity with the Academy, Gray is able to entertain us with vignettes as well as with his usual dry humour. I, personally, was relieved at the last, that he reversed his rather damning earlier proposal …..

“To be a Derridean is to miss the joke. Derrida’s thought was an unending self interrogation. He knew the identity he had made for himself was a performance. …… But if he was a charlatan, as he sometimes suspected, Derrida was one of a very special kind: a charlatan manque, an authentic thinker despite himself, and one of great insight.” (Gray, New Statesman Review, 17th March 2021)

Dr Mark Venables

April 2021