Jacques Derrida is dead. At least, I think we can day he's 'dead', although alternate discourses should not be dismissed as the periphery challenges the unidiscourse of the central 'concept', if we may use that word.
For a straightforward obituary with good detail on his life, work and thought, check out Sunday's LA Times. But for a hilarious sendup, try the London Times:
Is Derrida dead? A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality
Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists’ objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere “narrations” or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, Derrida’s own existence — which become problematised and relativised ...
It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal’s inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge, thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple “either/or” structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither “either/or” nor “both/and” nor even “neither/nor” while at the same time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us.
The reference to Sokal gives this away as a satire, but yes -- Derrida did write like that. [PS: Interested readers will note that the Sokol link is to an online article from the left side of the political world ... just for balance after Eberhardt and Cohen.]
JK: Robin was too modest to put it this way, but there's a really excellent discussion of Derrida and postmodernism here.
I say he's just dead. For you PoMo sufferers, that's the epistemic equivalent of "pining for the fjords" ...
No, he's just busy deconstructing himself. The mold, worms and bacteria may have different views on the causal actor, on this, but I say, screw the invertebrates and below.
This post and thread at Samizdata is fun with deriding Derrida. I recommend reading it. 1. 2.
Gary writes: Robin, Wow, substantive remarks. I'm shocked.
And I'm amused that you feel the need to be snide. This isn't the first time I've commented on the meaning of logos in the Greek tradition. (And those who've read my comments on my undergrad education know I've read some of the Greek authors in the original language.)
Gary you don't come close (yet, at least) to being the fiercest defender of Derrida and the postmoderns I've engaged with - that would be my daughter when she was a grad student in literary critical studies at a school with some very well known postmodern critics as faculty.
Tim Oren makes an excellent point about sign and signifier in engineering. I don't have a problem with some formulations about this distinction. I do have a problem with many of the ways in which Derrida uses the distinction.
Re: undermining the idea of central concepts and their usefulness, see "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", in particular this excerpt from the beginning paragraphs. Note that he is responding to the French Structuralists here:
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language ... up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.
No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.
Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. ... Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent.
... If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies ... It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center I have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.
The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper,.... From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word
Derrida here calls on some of the central concepts in Greek philosophy, concepts that Western thinkers had discussed and built on for over 2000 years: arche (first principle), telos (the end for which something exists), energeia (action), ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia (truth). And he is saying that these concepts and all others can no longer serve as the organizing center that gives meaning to a structure of thought. Specifically, he asserts, we can no longer define a system of thought in which a central concept makes some ideas illegitimate or false within the system
Now granted, he is writing specifically against Structuralism, a school of thought about which I have some serious criticisms as well. But it would be disingenuous and simply inaccurate to say that this argument was only aimed at the structuralists in the social science like Claude Levi-Strauss. This essay was the birth of deconstruction and it echoes in the social sciences strongly even today, nearly 40 years later. I see it when I read research papers in my own field that argue for multiple-viewpoint qualitative field narratives rather than empirical and quantitative studies. I could easily quote top journals in my field which have published methodology papers arguing for this approach.
Individual insights that some have taken from Derrida are indeed useful - and are, as others have noted, found in other writers as well. What uniquely defines Derrida as a seminal thinker, however, is the deconstruction of central meaning within a system of thought for which he lays the foundations in the essay I've excerpted above.
And that is why the London Time obituary specifically cites the Sokol hoax, more about which in a new entry I'll add to WOC above.
Robin -
There's something else unique about Derrida. More than any other individual, he created France's chief contribution to contemporary culture.
I'll leave it to others to ponder the implications of that. People who can ... you know, keep a straight face, and stuff.
I haven't read Derrida, so I won't comment on his life and works.
I suggest others who have not read him exercise the same forbearance.
There is a piece in the New York Times op-ed today in his defense, What Derrida Really Meant.