Did you know that there's a recipe out there
for a deconstructed Caesar Salad?
Or that you can buy a pair of deconstructed jeans?
But deconstruction is not really about ripping
the hems, or serving all the ingredients separately,
instead of together in a bowl, it's
a way of reading philosophical texts.
And this week, we examine the work of the
man who coined the term--and sometimes wished
he hadn't--the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida.
That's who we're talking about this week
on The Philosopher's Zone.
Hi, I'm Alan Saunders.
In his day, Derrida was a shining star in
the French philosophical firmament, but in
other countries, such as Australia, he received
most attention in departments of Media Studies
or Literature.
It was from him, among others, that they got
what they referred to as 'theory'.
We heard recently on this show from a critic
of theory.
Now let's see whether it's possible to take
a more sympathetic view.
Our guide is Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy
at the University of New South Wales.
But before we turn to the thought, let's look
at the thinker.
Jacques Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish
family in 1930, in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers,
at a time when Algeria was a French colony.
How important to him were these two facts:
being Jewish and being from Algeria?
Paul Patton.
I think they were both very important for
his thoughts and his relation to philosophy,
and his relation to both French language and
French culture, and of course French philosophy.
And he wrote a fascinating essay called 'Monolingualism
of the Other', in which he talks about that
upbringing, and talks about the exclusions
that he suffered as a child, as a Jewish child,
neither Arabic nor French.
And he talks about his relation to the French
language, which he says in one of his paradoxical
formulations was 'his only language, even
though it was not his mother tongue'.
He talks then about his relation to the French
education system and the experience of moving
to France as an upper level high-school student
in the '50s.
And one of the things that I think is a characteristic
of Derrida's philosophy is its extraordinary
attention to language, the detail and the
nuance of language, and the sense in which
he is both an extraordinary practitioner of
French, both as a speaker and a reader.
It's hard not to think that that has something
to do with growing up as an outsider, growing
up, in effect, as a colonial of a very particular
sort, with an outsider's relation to French
and to French culture.
In the late 1940s, he studied philosophy in
Paris at the renowned Ecole Normale Superieure.
What were his early philosophical influences?
He always describes himself who by training
and formation was a phenomenonologist, so
his work and his initial thesis projected
at the Ecole Normale Superieure, was work
on the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl,
and I think that was one of the figures who
influenced him most and who a number of his
influential early works were about.
That's interesting.
I mean phenomenology, it's a distinctly first-person
philosophy, isn't it?
It's about your own perceptions and how you
interpret your perceptions of the world.
I mean it goes back in many ways to Descartes,
sitting alone and wondering whether he could
trust the impressions of the world that his
senses seem to be giving him.
So this was the sort of philosophy that influenced
the young Derrida.
Yes, and it's true that it is, as you say,
very much a first-person approach to philosophy.
It's probably also true to say that Derrida's
relation to that was critical from the outset,
and indeed that's where he - it was in the
context of that critical engagement with Husserl
that he worked out some of the distinctive
themes of his deconstructed approach to philosophy.
In 1992, it was proposed that Derrida receive
an Honorary degree from the University of
Cambridge.
This proposal met with a lot of opposition
from a number of very distinguished analytical
philosophers, among them the great American
philosopher, Willard Quine.
He's also been taken to task by another analytical
philosopher, a distinguished philosopher,
John Searle from Berkeley.
What's their problem?
Why does he annoy Anglo-American analytical
philosophers so much?
Well, it's hard to answer that question.
I mean one thing to say about that rather
shameful episode in the recent history of
philosophy is that many of those people who
signed petitions and signed that infamous
letter to The Times of London, it's quite
clear were people who had not read Derrida.
And it's difficult to understand how philosophers
in particular, can take a stand on a thinker,
on a body of work, that they have not read.
And it's a decision that can only be taken
on some kind of a-priori grounds, that this
is not a tradition of thought worth taking
seriously, or this is so obviously unclear
and confused.
But I think it's really a decision taken on
the basis of ignorance and to that extent,
unjustified and unjustifiable.
What it is that annoys them so much again
it's hard to say.
I mean it may be the misapprehensions that
circulated about Derrida's work, the idea
that he was some kind of shameless and inconsistent
relativist who thought there was no such thing
as truth, no basis for objectivity.
These again are ill-informed, understandings
of his philosophy and his concerns, but they
certainly circulated.
I suppose a third thing that one might point
to is that although Derrida was trained as
a philosopher and completed the aggregation
as a philosopher in the French system, his
translation, so to speak, into the English
world didn't happen through philosophy, but
more through literature and through departments
of Comparative Literature.
So the phenomenon of deconstruction as it
developed, particularly in the United States
from the late '70s onwards, was a phenomenon
very much associated with literary programs,
not with philosophy programs, and philosophy
departments.
So it's possible that again, part of the response
might have been territorial turf-protecting
on the part of the professional philosophers.
Well, let's turn to his approach to metaphysics.
He argued that metaphysics affects the whole
of philosophy and has affected it from Plato
onwards, and that metaphysics creates dualistic
oppositions, and installs a hierarchy that
privileges one term of each opposition.
Now that's already quite complex, so first
of all what does he mean by metaphysics?
He understands and I think in particular his
understanding of metaphysics is derived from
Heidegger.
This is the 20th century German philosopher
who of course was still around when Derrida
was a student.
Yes, he was.
And Heidegger has a particular understanding
of the history of European philosophy, Western
philosophy in general, as not so much a series
of footnotes to Plato, but a series of recurrent
attempts, as he puts it, to think the meaning
of being.
And I think for Heidegger that's what metaphysics
amounts to, are these efforts in the history
of philosophy to understand or to come up
with a concept of the nature of being.
That I think is the basis of Derrida's understanding
of metaphysics, but again his relation to
it is critical, and again, his project in
many ways is to take issue with that conception
of metaphysics; to deconstruct tradition,
as he puts it.
Now, I said that he believes that metaphysics
creates dualistic oppositions.
What are these dualistic oppositions, what
would be an example of one?
Well, there are a number that he engaged with.
I guess one of the most fundamental is the
opposition between presence and absence.
Another would be the opposition between identity
and difference, and a more particular that
he engaged with in one of his early books
was the opposition between speech and writing.
And if I could just elaborate a little bit
on the presence/absence in relation to that
speech and writing: he engages critically
with the tradition insofar as he thinks that
it is very much a tradition of thinking about
'being' in terms of presence.
And there are a number of ways in which this
can be identified, exemplified in the history
of philosophy.
The classic way is perhaps Plato's theory
of the forms, which for Plato were the forms
of intelligibility of the meaning of being.
So, if we just sort of simplified Plato's
theory of the forms - you're sitting on a
chair, but your chair is an instance of the
form of a chair, which exists in some presumably
sort of philosophical heaven where there is
the ideal form of the chair.
Yes.
And Plato's view is that the philosopher,
by dint of his intellectual training and superior
form of understanding can actually come to
perceive not just the chair but the form itself
of which the chair is an expression.
And that's a classic example of what Derrida
means by a philosophy of presence, the idea
that meaning or that the being of things in
themselves can be present to the mind.
To jump forward several centuries, Descartes
is another version of this, to the extent
that Descartes thinks we can find a foundation
for truth through the examination of our consciousness.
Again, the idea that the basis of meaning,
truth, is something that is perceptible by
the mind.
So, we're privileging being presence over
absence.
I suppose what I feel inclined to say is that,
well is that really a surprise, that we privilege
presence over absence?
I mean if something is present to me, I know
what's present.
But the number of things that are absent is,
well, it's numberless.
No, you're right, it's not a surprise, and
I don't think Derrida would disagree with
that comment or with the idea that the presence
is important, it's part of us, part of our
experience and part of who we are.
But I think what he always wanted to stress,
to draw attention to, was that in some sense
it's an illusion to think that meaning, that
truth and intelligibility, are the kind of
thing that can be immediately present to us.
And this is where this conception of language
and in particular his understanding of language
as a system of writing, comes into play.
I think for Derrida, the forms of consciousness
in general, of meaning, understanding and
writing in particular, are always complex
and differentiated systems of a certain kind.
And for that reason, not the kind of thing
that can be fully or completely present to
the mind.
So his insistence on absence or as he elsewhere
says 'difference' rather than 'presence',
is in many ways an insistence that things
are more complex than the philosophy of presence
would lead us to believe.
Now this question of binary oppositions brings
us to the term associated with Derrida, and
that is 'deconstruction'.
Now this is a hugely popular word these days.
You can go to a restaurant and find a deconstructed
trifle on the menu, but it doesn't mean what
people seem to think it means, it doesn't
just mean taking things apart, does it?
No, it doesn't, no.
Derrida is one of the distinguished few philosophers
who've invented a concept that has been taken
up in the popular culture, but you're absolutely
right, it doesn't mean quite the same thing.
I think to understand what Derrida means by
it, I could follow on from what I was just
saying about speechwriting and his development
of that concept of writing in general.
So in one much cited account that he gives
on what he means by deconstruction, in an
essay called "Positions", published in the
early 1970s, he says that deconstruction as
he understands it, starts out with a hierarchical
dualism of the kind we've been talking about,
speech writing.
It begins by challenging the duality itself
by pointing out, as I did in relation to speech
and writing that elements that characterise
one applied to the other.
And that's a first step as it were, of questioning
the dualism itself.
But he insists the important second step is
always the generation of this third term,
this deconstructive term, and writing in general
is an example of that, a term that encapsulates
or that breaks up the dualism from which we
started.
We've talked about one approach to dualisms,
which is deconstruction; what about the idea
of 'undecidability'?
What is that?
That's another of Derrida's key terms, and
indeed his philosophical career is marked
by a whole series of terms like this.
What he means by undecidability is also often
misunderstood.
It was often taken to mean the impossibility
of deciding, being stuck in a dilemma like
the famous ass of Buridan, who couldn't decide
between one pile of hay and another.
That's not what Derrida means by it, but what
he does mean does have to do with the tension,
the aporia, as he calls it, that's embodied
in the very idea of decision.
So he talks about this, for example, in relation
to the law and legal judgment.
And he asks the question, 'What is it in fact,
to make a legal decision?'
And the paradox, or the aporia that he points
to, is that on one hand a decision is supposed
to be informed by the facts, informed by the
relevant principles on which a decision or
determination is to be made.
And that to a large degree, can be a rule-governed
process, the kind of thing, he says, that
in principle could be undertaken by a machine.
But then he says, 'But if it were taken by
a machine, or if it were completely rule-governed,
would it really be a decision?'
And he elaborates the point that any legal
determination or decision at some point, has
to put an end to consideration of the facts,
consideration of the principles.
considerations of a precedent; at some point,
a judge has to decide.
That is what judges do.
And it's the tension between that moment,
that element, that factored decision on the
one hand, and the element or moment or fact
of consideration of the relevant facts and
principles, which is part of every decision.
He says these are in a sense, in tension,
and an irresolvable tension, and that's really
what he means by the 'undecidable', and he
says that the undecidable in that sense is
present like a ghost in every decision.
One of the most striking aspects of Derrida's
later philosophy is his advocacy of the tout
autre, the wholly other.
What is the 'wholly other'?
That's another very interesting Derrida concept.
One of the places where he develops that notion
and uses it, is in a fascinating essay called
'Psyche, the invention of the other', and
in that essay he talks at length about the
concept of an invention.
What is an invention?
And what he elaborates is a paradox in the
concept of invention that parallels the one
I was just talking about in relation to a
decision.
So he says, 'On the one hand, an invention
is the bringing about the creation of something
new, something other, something different'.
On the other hand he says, 'To be recognized
as an invention, it is something that we clearly
have to be able to understand to fit into
our existing technology, our existing forms
of knowledge.'
So to be a technological invention you have
to be able to write a patent for it, have
it accepted.
But he says, and again referring back to the
first element, the creative side of invention,
and asks, 'But if invention is bringing about
something new, something other, surely to
really be an invention it would have to be
something completely other.'
So he says, 'An invention, properly speaking,
would be something that we couldn't recognise,
that we couldn't write a patent for, that
we couldn't fit into our existing technology'.
So that would be a pure invention, or an invention
properly speaking, and that would be the invention,
the bringing about of something truly other.
Which, is of course impossible, he recognizes.
Now a criticism sometimes made of deconstruction
from the left, is that it leaves the world
more or less as it found it.
There's no political commitment here, and
as we know, political commitment is very important
to French philosophers, but towards the end
of his life, Derrida did engage with political
thought, didn't he?
Yes, he did, and it's a much-discussed question,
what exactly was his engagement with political
thought, and whether it changed in the course
of his career.
This is sometimes bound up with an argument
about whether there was a larger shift in
Derrida's thinking.
People sometimes distinguish between an earlier
phase of so-called negative deconstruction
and a later phase of more positive deconstruction,
and this is sometimes aligned with his later,
more overt engagement with political issues
and political philosophy.
I think it's true that he was in a sense,
always thinking politically about philosophy.
As he puts it in one essay: Thinking about
politics, about political economy, because
of course as a French philosopher in the post-war
period, political thinking meant Marx, and
Marxian though, and he says that a lot of
his work involved thinking about politics
and political economy, even in contexts which
were not obviously political, where that wasn't
apparent.
And I'm thinking for example of an essay that
he wrote on Kant's aesthetic theory where
he talks about the political economy that
is expressed in Kant's account of judgments
and beauty and of fine art, and he develops
a deconstructive concept that he calls economimnesis,
to bring that out.
But it's certainly true that he took more
overt political stands later in his life.
He wrote an essay after 9/11 for example,
one of the last books that he published was
a collection of essays called Rogues which
was about the idea of rogue states but also
about terrorism, about international relations,
about the fate of democracy.
And he elaborated a number of things, particularly
in relation to democracy and the fate of democracy
in the modern and post-modern world.
And here in common with some of his other
political engagements, he does offer I think,
something more than simply negative deconstruction.
He offers what he calls a concept of a democracy
to come, which is a concept a little bit like
that concept of the truly other that we spoke
about, in the sense that it's not a determinate
form.
Derrida is not someone who tells us what democracy
is or should be, but rather elaborates this
concept of the possibility of future new and
different forms of democracy, and brings that
to bear on what he, and in common with many
others, see as the democratic deficits of
a national and international political order
in the present.
So here, he is at least arguing for let's
say more democracy, or a process of democratisation
in the world.
And in that sense, and indeed in a similar
way in other contexts, and in relation to
law and justice, in relation to equality,
in relation to hospitality, and our treatment
of foreigners, I think he does offer more
positive indications for political philosophy.
He also takes a rather I suppose deconstructive
view of the opposition between democracy and
sovereignty; the idea being that sovereignty
cannot share power and it cannot give reasons,
that is not what it is to be sovereign, but
in democracy it is necessary to give reasons
for what you are doing.
Therefore in democracy, he says, I think rather
extremely, the use of power is always an abuse
of power.
Yes, you're right.
In that essay, Rogues, that I mentioned, he
does focus on this issue of the relationship
between democracy and sovereignty.
And here I think he is picking up on something
that a number of political thinkers have drawn
attention to, namely that our modern forms
of democratic government have evolved out
of a tradition of very undemocratic government,
and have evolved out of a notion of sovereign
power that derives from the power of monarchs,
and that was a power that for a long time
was considered to be outside and above the
law.
And I think what Derrida draws attention to
is the sense in which that notion of untrammelled,
or as he would put it, unconditioned power
still remains a part of our systems of democratic
government.
So it's not that he thinks that power is avoidable,
or that indeed governments shouldn't be about
the exercise of power, but what I think he
wants to insist on is that power should always
be accountable, and that as you said, power
is something that we should always be able
to give reasons for its exercise.
So in that sense, what he's concerned with
I think is to try and disentangle the tradition
of thinking about political power that comes
from sovereignty and the tradition of sovereign
power, from let's say a more democratic way
of thinking about power and that would be
divorced from sovereignty, from unconditional
power, and that might be one of the ways in
which we could move towards a different kind
of democracy, a democracy to come.
Well Paul Patton, thank you very much for
your contribution to that process today.
Thank you.
Paul Patton is Professor of Philosophy at
the University of New South Wales.
