'Giving bullshit a bad name'
But Foucault also had a disciple: Jacques Derrida
, who took his course at the ENS: "I was struck, like many others , by
his speaking ability . His eloquence, authority , and brilliance were
impressive ," said Derrida later of his mentor. Derrida was taken by
Foucault to the psychiatric hospital of St. Anne to hear patients
examined (Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon, p. 50).
Derrida
has been less of a political exhibitionist than Foucault. Derrida was
arrested by the communist authorities in Prague in 1 981 on charges of
drug trafficking; he said that he had come to meet dissidents and was
released after protests . In the mid-1980s , Derrida authored a
characteristically garbled essay!in praise of Nelson Mandela.
In general , Derrida claims always to have been a leftist . Foucault
and his pupil Oerrida quarreled during the 1970s , and Foucault has
provied some trenchant summations of Derrida' s work, which he rightly
called "terrorist obscurantism . " Obscurantism because Derrida
deliberately writes in an incomprehensible ay . If one ventures to
criticize Derrida, the latter says: "You misunderstood me you are an
idiot" (LimitedI nc. , p. 158). roucault also said of Derrida: "He's the
kind of philosopher w 0 gives bullshit a bad name" (Illiberal Education
by Dinesh D'Souza, p. 190). The main exception seems to be when Derrida
has to argue for funding for his activities; in these cases he seems to
be able to speak quite clearly (see Tenured Radicals) . The destruction
of language Those who try to read Derrida find a smokescreen of
infuriating jargon, thoroughly pedantic but in a modish way. What is
Derrida up to behind the smokescreen? One thinks of Moliere's pedant
Vadius in Les Femmes Savantes . His task at one level is simply to
destroy the literate languages of western Europe and their developed
capacity to transmit advanced scientific, artistic, and epistemological
conceptions.
Derrida wants to wreck everything that has been
accomplished since De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the
Vernacular) by Dante, Petrarch, and their heirs in many countries.
Derrida also knows that in order to destroy the efficacy of these
languages, he must also destroy the heritage of Plato. Derrida wants to
show that all written and spoken discourse is umeadable, undecipherable,
incapable of meaning anything. Reading a written text, above all, is
for Derrida always a misreading.
For this operation Derrida
proceeds in the spirit of an ultra-Aristotelian radical nominalism which
abolishes any relation between language on the one hand, and concepts
and reality on the other. Such an outlook is always closely linked with
paranoid schizophrenic mental pathologies. The operation is far from
new, but has been attempted many times during the centuries, in recent
times especially by the AngloVenetian or continental oligarchical
schools of philosophy. Derrida is like David Hume, who began with the
usual "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu" ("Nothing is in the
intellect that was not first in the senses") of Paolo Sarpi's disciples
among the British empiricists, and soon ended up denying the possible
existence of truth, the world, causality, knowledge, and the self.
Derrida
uses "texts" as the primary sense impressions and arrives at the same
kind of radical skepticism. Signs without reality Much of modem
philosophy is an attempt to dissolve epistemology into language and then
to cripple epistemology by dissolving language. This is typical of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has had immense influence in the AngloAmerican
world. Ernst Cassirer wrote in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms about
language becoming the principal weapon of skepticism rather than the
vehicle for philosophical knowledge. Stuart Chase and the semanticists
tried to show that most important political and historical concepts were
meaningless verbiage.
The modem hermeneutic school is not far
behind. Derrida's late comrade in arms, Paul de Man, the leading "boa
deconstructor" at Yale University until his death in 1984 , talked about
the predicament of modem thought as being linguistic rather than
ontological or hermeneutic- meaning once again that language is a
self-contained world of signs without links to reality. Concepts about
the real world are degraded to rhetorical figures and tropes. Derrida's
trick is to veil his extreflle subjectivist denial of reality with an
apparent negation of both subject and object: " ... not only [does]
meaning ... ot essentially imply the intuition of the object but ...
it essJntially excludes it .. .. The total absence of the subject and)
object of a statementthe death of the writer and/or the dis ppearance of
the object he was able to describe--does not prevent a text from 'mean-
I ing' something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth to
meaning as such, gives it out to be eard and read" (Speech and Phenomena
, pp. 92-93). Derrida's irrationalism has more flair than that of his
plodding factional adversaries in thi older Anglo-American linguistic
analysis schools.
When Derrida was a young boy, he was
locked by his sister in a cedar chest in the family home and kept there
by her for what seemed to him to be an eternity. During this time the
child Derrida thought that he had died and gone to another world. After
he had been rescued from the cedar chest, he somehow conceived the idea
that he had been castrated. He came to see himself as the Egyptian pagan
god Osiris, who had died and been dismembered, but then reassembled and
brought back from the dead (minus his male organ) by Isis.
Derrida
told his Paris students of the early 1970s that this decisive
experience in his life had led him to write the book Dissemination
(Paris, 1972), which includes much elaboration of the theme of seed that
is scattered, etc.
Derrida felt compelled to narrate the
Isis-Osiris-Horus myth in detail in the chapter of Dissemination
entitled"Plato's Pharmacy," which is otherwise a document of his hatred
for both Socrates and Plato. The Kabbala and mysticism Derrida is the
bearer of another form of irrationalism of a specifically Venetian
stamp: He has been pervasively influenced by the mystical writings of
the Kabbala, a school cultivated over centuries by the Luzzato patrician
family of the Venetian ghetto.
Derrida cites a certain "Rabbi
Eliezer": "If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with
reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments and if all human beings
practiced the art of writing, they would not exhaust the Torah I have
learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than
is the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it."
Can
this be Eleazar Ben Judah of Worms, the Hasidic Kabbalist who lived
from 1160 to 1238? An ancient text with rach single word surrounded by .
en . dless pages of exegetica commnt, with each note pomtmg to a
another, older text-this IS one of Derrida's d.ominating visions.
errida's lessay . on the Livre des Questions (B ook of QuestIOns) and
reBatls Ma Demeure (I Build My House) by the contemporary French author
Edmond Jabes yields a singular quotation on "the difficulty of being a
Jew, which coincides with the difficulty of writing: for Judaism and
writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion."
"The art of the writer consists in little by little making words
interest themselves in his books" I (Writing and Difef rence, p. 65.
Derrida sometimes assumes the persona of a Kabbalist and signs his
essays as "Reb Rida" or "Reb Derissa." I Derrida was much influened by
the French writer Emmanuel Levinas, who populahzed the phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl and the pro-Nazi existentialism of Martin Heidegger in
France. Husserl and Heidegger had appeared as co-thinkers until Hitler's
seizure of power in 1933, when Heidegger came out openly asia raving
Nazi, while Husserl declined to do so. At this point, Levinas gravitated
to Heidegger's, that is to say, to the oPfn Nazi side. Levinas helped
to direct Derrida' s attention 0 Heidegger, who was also profoundly
influencing Frenc thought via Sartre, who was also a convinced
Heideggerian. Just as Heidegger is a commentator of the protofascist
ietzsche, so Derrida can be seen as a commentator of the Nazi
Heidegger. Derrida's endorsement of Heidegger is iqdeed very strong: "I
maintain . . . that Heidegger's text is 0t extreme importance, that it
constitutes an unprecedented, lirreversible advance and that we are
still very far from haying exploited all its critical resources"
(Positions, pp. 70, 3). Deconstruction is destruction A typical theme of
the irrtionalists of the Weimar Republic was Destruktion . Karl
¥annheim wrote in his Ideology and Utopia (1929) about thd need to
promote the Destruktion of self-deceiving ideologi s. For the Heidegger
of Being and Time , Destruktion meant something similar, approximately
the clearing away of what deconstructionists call "western metaphysics"
from life and the institutions of thought. Heidegger wrote afteI the war
in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (p. 211) of the need for a
"destructive retrospect of the history 0 I ontology" whose task would be
to "lay bare the internal character or development" of its objects of
study. This would ivolve a "loosening up" of the "hardened tradition"
of "ontology" by a "positive destruction." The Nazi Heidegger's noti n
of Destruktion is the immediate starting point for Derrid and his
entire school. In the first published edition of De La GrammatoLogie (Of
Gramma- I tology) published in Paris in 19f67 , Derrida does not talk
about "deconstruction" but rather abfut "destruction" throughout.
Derrida says that in deconstruetion, "the task is . . . to dis-mantle
[deconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at
work . . . not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe
them in another way" (Margins of Philosophy). Derrida is nervous to the
point of paranoia lest this connection become too obvious: He
deliberately lies that "deconstruction has nothing to do with
destruction. I believe in the necessity of scientific work in the
classical sense. I believe in the necessity of everything which is being
done . "
The destruction of reason With deconstruction
thus revealed as a slyly disguised form of destruction , the next
question is to determine what is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the
destruction of reason, the deconstruction of the Logos, which he
identifies as the central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical
tradition. That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking
when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is anti-western
because he regards the line of development from Socrates and Plato
through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric" and racist. When he attacks
"metaphysics," he means human reason itself.
Derrida writes:
"The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be abandoned for
reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence-which governs a
writing is thus enlarged and radicalized , no longer issues from a
logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but
the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations
that have their source in that of the logos . Particularly the
signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth,
and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger
reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the
instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the
logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the
philosophical sense, in the sense of God ' s infinite understanding or
in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian
sense" (OfGrammatology, pp . 1 0- 1 1 ) .
And again: "This
absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval
theology: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the
word and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13). How then can reason
and the logos be destroyed?
Heidegger had already given the
example of attempt this by mystifying the concepts having to do with
language: ''Thinking collects language into simple speaking . Language
is therefore the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds
of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows into
language . These furrows are even simpler than those plowed with slow
steps by the farmer. " 'The death of civilization of the book' For
Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the realm of "sign" and
"signified . " "The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a
profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by
the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more
systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian
creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek
conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one
cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing
with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13).
In
other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and
that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The
scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends
in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg
Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida is fully conscious that the
exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death
of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of
Grammatology, p . 8).
Again following his Nazi guru
Heidegger, Derrida focuses his destructive attention on the "metaphysics
of presence" as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a
solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that something
exists . Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind
is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual apparatus of western
philosophy from the time of the Greeks on down: "It could be shown that
all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have
always designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche
[principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence,
existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality,
consciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the
metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or
"ultimate referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee of
meaning.
We see that for Derrida, all western languages are
"metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are permeated by
Christian Platonism. They are also metaphysical, he thinks, because the
only way to be sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes
the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida
therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while
hoping to destroy the civilization along with both.
Reason and
speech Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric,"
that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but
also lawfulness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse,
argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and
essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other
words, human reason and human speech are inextricably bound up together.
The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of
Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St.
Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe,
Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in
a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical
poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung
aloud.
If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this,
colossal cultural damage would of course be the result. Western language
is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to
say, western language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over
the written language.
"The system of language associated with
phoneticalphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics,
determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced"
(OfGrammatology, p. 43).
Derrida obviously cannot deny that
spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while
the spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign
of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general
that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene,
calling this arche-ecriture , (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing
but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has
nothing going for it.
In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates
language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and
other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything to
writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the
world. Black marks on white paper In order to attack the logos and
reason through the spoken word, Derrida sets against them his notion of
writing: l' ecriture . Derrida explains that what he means by writing is
"a text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination , p. 203).
That means a text already written, black on white. Black marks on white
paper, plus excruciating attention to spaces, numbers, margins,
paragraphs, typefaces, colophons, copyright notices, plus patterns,
groups, repetitions of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism.
Since it is probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer
of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics in the
process, we can feel free to say that Derrida attempts to establish the
ontological priority of writing over language and speech. Nothing in
the way of proof is offered in favor of this absurd idea: The argument
proceeds through a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer
revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black marks on the
page:
"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).
This
is Derrida's new pseudo-science called "grammatology," which studies
the marks (grammata) on the paper. Each gramme or grapheme can be
endlessly commented upon. The word comes from a nineteenth-century
French dictionary by Littre and has been more recently used by 1.J. Gelb
in the title of his book A Study of Writing: The Foundations of
Grammatology.! For Derrida, the black marks on the white paper are the
only reality, as he very radicallylasserts in Of Grammatology: "The
axial proposition of this essay is that there is nothing I outside the
text." Since the notion of the "text" has already been expanded to
include all language, and since real events are reduced by Derrida to
"discdurse" about those events, the deconstructors argue that this
islnot as fanatical as it sounds. But the fact remains that for Derrida,
the sense data we have are the texts. There is no other perception.
Better yet, as he says, "I don't believe that anything like perception
exists" I ("Structure, Sign and Play in tpe Discourse of the Human
Sciences" in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of I Man
(Baltimore, 1970), pp. 27 ff., "Discussion").
Deconstructing Plato
Derrida
exalts writing over speech, but logocentric-phonocentric western
thinking refuses to go along with him. Derrida directs his rage against
Plato by "deconstructing" the dialogue Phaedrus .
The result is
the essay "Plato's Pharmacy" which appears in Dissemination . This is
classical Derridean obfuscation, playing on the multiple meanings of the
Greek word pharmakon, which can mean variously poison,remedy, magic
potion, or medicine.
But the fields of meaning are even more
complicated: Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue, recounts the
story of the nymph Orithyia who was playing with the nymph Pharmakeia
when Orithyia was blown over a cliff by Boreas, the north wind.
Pharmakeia was herself associated with a healing fountain.
Phaedrus
has brought some written texts for Socrates to read, and these are
compared to a drug (pharmakon) which has lured Socratesto
Are these texts a healing drug or poison?
Socrates
narrates the fable of the Egyptian god Tlileuth, a Hermes-Mercury
figure who had invented counting, geometry, astronomy, dice, and letters
(grammata) for writing. Theuth wants to share all these arts with the
people of Egypt, so he goes to Amon Ra (Thamus) and offers the l to him.
Amon Ra rejects the letters, explaining that these will weaken memory
and make available only the appearance and presumption of knowledge, but
not true knowledge. Derrida explodes with rage against Socrates and
Plato: ('One begins by repeating without knowing-through a myth-the
definition of writing: repeating without knowing .. 1 .. Once the myth
has dealt the first blows, the logos of socres will crush the
accused." (Dissemination. p. 84)
He the proceeds to an
obsessive recounting of the Isis-Osiris story. Derrida also makes much
of the fact that although Plato includes reference to Socrates as pharmakeus (poisoner, medicine man , sorcerer), he does not free-associate from pharmakon/pharmakeus to pharmakos, meaning scapegoat. The idea is that Socrates really became a scapegoat at his trial, while Plato is making a scapegoat of "writing ." The conclusion is that "the pharmakon is neither the cure nor the poison, neither good nor evil , neither the inside nor the outside , neither speech nor writing" (Positions,
p. 59). Through a hidden pattern of ambiguities , the text, in addition
to saying what Plato might have meant, also says what Plato cannot have
meant.
The dialogue thus deconstructed is hopelessly contradictory and impossible to interpret or construe.
