Jonathan Derbyshire

This review of David Mikics’s Who Was Jacques Derrida? appeared in the February edition of the Literary Review.

WHO WAS JACQUES DERRIDA: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

David Mikics

Yale University Press, £25

Review by Jonathan Derbyshire

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once observed drily that the reputation of his French counterpart Jacques Derrida deserved a ‘finer fate than its detractors wish[ed] for it, if not perhaps the finality that its admirers … traded on.’ That it was Derrida’s fate (in the English-speaking world at least) to be both unfairly maligned and lavishly overpraised was demonstrated when he died in 2004. Under the headline ‘Abstruse Theorist Dies at 74′, the New York Times described Derrida in its obituary as the ‘father of deconstruction’, a theory that, it alleged, ‘asserted that all writing was full confusion and contradiction’ – not least Derrida’s own, which was ‘turgid and baffling’, and peppered with ‘enigmatic pronouncements’ such as ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend …’ (a pronouncement in fact attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Aristotle – as the paper’s obituarist would have known had he bothered to read the book by Derrida in which that phrase recurs).

Derrida’s acolytes responded swiftly. A letter signed by students and faculty of the University of California at Irvine, where Derrida taught between 1987 and 2003, expressed ‘outrage’ at the New York Times obituary, charging it with ’shabbily misrepresent[ing] the life and achievements of a great thinker’ (not to mention a ‘courteous human being’). They didn’t, however, go so far as to explain in what Derrida’s intellectual achievements actually consisted, preferring instead to advise the Times’s writer to read his CV, which listed honorary degrees awarded by universities on several continents, as well as the Legion d’honneur. ‘We regret,’ the letter concluded, ‘that the New York Times was willing to publish an obituary that feels like an insult when people around the world are mourning one of the greatest thinkers of our time.’

This unedifying exchange is probably best read as a late skirmish in the ‘culture wars’, fought on American university campuses throughout the 1980s and ’90s over the future of the humanities in general, and the study of literature in particular. If David Mikics is right, those battles are at an end, and the ‘theory camp’, to which Derrida was co-opted by his supporters in the US, has prevailed. It is probably a propitious time, therefore, to attempt a more dispassionate assessment of Derrida’s legacy and to show, as Mikics puts it in the coda to this book, that he was ‘neither so brilliantly right nor so brilliantly wrong as his enthusiasts and critics respectively claimed.’

That such clarification is still required is largely a function of the way Derrida’s work was received in Britain and the US in the 1970s – through university departments of literature rather than philosophy. Mikics, himself a professor of English at an American university (though a philosophically literate one), doesn’t examine that reception in detail (a task already successfully carried out in any case by Francois Cusset, in his book French Theory). Instead, he takes it for granted that Derrida’s thought was significantly distorted in its transmission across the Atlantic, and sets about restoring it to its proper context, tracing the doctrines that came to be associated with ‘deconstruction’ back to a fateful intellectual choice he made as a student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in the early 1950s.

Mikics’s original and illuminating suggestion is that everything in Derrida’s mature thinking is to be understood in the light of his youthful preference for the work of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, over the then-fashionable existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Husserl appealed to Derrida, Mikics argues, because he argued against the ‘entwining of psychology and philosophy’. Mikics is referring here to Husserl’s arguments against ‘psychologism’, the view that the laws of logic, for example, are psychological laws. But for Husserl, logic is a ‘normative’ discipline – that is, it lays down how we ought to think, rather than describing, as psychology does, how we, as a matter of fact, do think.

Derrida’s subsequent and notorious claims about the impossibility of ’self-presence’ and the rest of it begin to look rather different, and much less threatening, when considered in this light. And if saving Derrida from his foes (not to mention his more excitable allies) means domesticating his ideas somewhat, then that seems a small price to pay.

Mikics doesn’t stop with the claim about psychology and philosophy, however. He goes on to argue that Husserl, who conceived of philosophy along Platonic lines as a kind of ideal super-science, provided the ‘original stimulus’ for what he calls Derrida’s ’scepticism’, by which he means the view that ‘we live in a fundamentally written and therefore phantom-like world, one that denies us the reality we seek.’ This latter being Mikics’s gloss on Derrida’s even more notorious assertion that there is ‘nothing outside the text’.

The rest of Derrida’s career, Mikics’ argues, is to be understood as an attempt to break free from the ‘airless paradox’ generated by the conflict between ‘metaphysics’ and ’scepticism’. Everything in this book turns on the plausibility of that narrative framework. However, there are other possibilities that Mikics does not take into account – for instance, that Derrida’s pronouncements on ‘undecidability’ and the free ‘play’ of meaning, far from tending to a classical form of scepticism might in fact part of an attempt, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, simply to account for the ways in which language actually works. But that is a tale for another day.

The following articles appeared in the New Statesman over the past couple of months:

A contribution to the NS’s dissection of the decade in culture.

A piece about modernism and the black American diaspora.

A profile of Iain Duncan Smith in the NS’s special Tories issue.

Over the past couple of years, David Cameron’s Tories have sailed under a flag of convenience marked “progressive conservatism”. For most commentators, the important question has been just how “progressive” this new ideological confection is. Many on the left have taken it for granted that talk of Cameronian “progress” is just that - talk - and that the Conservatives’ commitment to, in their leader’s own words, the “progressive end of making British poverty history” is entirely rhetorical. On the right, the intellectual outriders of Cameronism have laboured strenuously to establish its “progressive” bona fides.

Read the rest of my essay on the meaning of conservatism in the New Statesman.

This review of Fred Inglis’s biography of R.G. Collingwood appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.

Fred Inglis
History Man: The
Life of R.G. Collingwood
Princeton University Press, 400pp, £23.95

Gilbert Ryle, the grey eminence of Oxford philosophy during its heyday in the 1950s, used to say that the correct way to read the great philosophers of the past was to treat their work as if it had appeared in the previous month’s edition of the journal Mind. Read in this fashion, Plato’s Parmenides, for example, turns out to have been an attempt at a theory of types of the sort perfected two millennia later by Bertrand Russell. And lurking in the “transcendental idealist” undergrowth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a modest little essay in what Ryle’s colleague Peter Strawson called “descriptive metaphysics”.

The widespread acceptance of this method of “rationally reconstructing” philosophical classics so as to make them speak to contemporary concerns -often at considerable cost to the internal coherence of the works concerned- completed a process described by the late Bernard Williams as the “complete obliteration … from the collective local consciousnes” of Ryle’s predecessor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, R.G. Collingwood. For it was one of Collingwood’s most fiercely held intellectual principles that to attribute to a historical author views he never actually held (or, alternatively, to chastise him for failing to hold views one held oneself) was like “planting treasonable correspondence” in someone’s coat pocket.

Despite the existence today of a thriving academic cottage industry devoted to his work, Collingwood’s reputation has never really recovered from the damage done to it after his death in 1943. The hegemony of Ryle, J.L. Austin and the other “linguistic philosophers” in the years following the Second World War was confirmed in 1958, when a survey of English Philosophy Since 1900, written by Austin’s ammanuensis Geoffrey Warnock, contained not a single reference to Collingwood.

Fred Inglis’s vividly written biography is devoted, therefore, to “bring[ing] up the light” on its subject. However, it is also a reminder that, despite his academic achievements (he acceded to the Waynflete in 1935, having been narrowly beaten seven years earlier, at the age of only 39, to the White’s Chair in Moral Philosophy), Collingwood had in fact begun to fade from the “collective local consciousnes” long before he died.

In what Inglis rightly describes as his “best-known and surely classic work”, An Autobiography, published in 1939, Collingwood frankly acknowledged that the corollary of his considerable social and professional success was more or les complete intellectual isolation. As Inglis observes, Collingwood was cut off from both the group of philosophical revoltés that in the mid -’30s had gathered around Austin (and which included Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and A.J. Ayer) and an older generation of “realist” philosophers loyal to the shade of John Cook Wilson.

Collingwood began his career attacking Cook-Wilsonian realism for its indifference to the history of philosophy. He developed in its place something he called the “question-and-answer” method, the gist of which was that in order to grasp the meaning of a proposition, or a historical text for that matter, one must know the question to which it is an answer. In other words, propositions and linguistic utterances do not wear their meanings on their sleeves.

The implications of this method for the study of historical texts were obvious. When a philosophical treatise, say, becomes a “classic” -when, that is, the author’s contemporaries are long dead- the question to which it is an answer is forgotten. Excavating that question requires, Collingwood thought, the “exercise of considerable historical skill”. The alternative to such hard labour is to treat the the author as one’s contemporary - or else to take it for granted that philosophical questions are eternal and unchanging; that our preoccupations are the same as Plato’s.

Inglis’s great achievement in this book is to apply the question-and-answer method to Collingwood’s biography, the “interpreted life” being no more susceptible to instant appraisal than the interpreted text. (With attractive modesty, he describes History Man as merely an “extended gloss” on the story Collingwood himself tells in his autobiography.) He recreates not only the long-forgotten intellectual milieu of Oxford in the 1920s, but also the circumstances of Collingwood’s extraordinary upbringing: until the age of 13, he was educated at home in the Lake District by his artist parents, who were friends and devotees of Ruskin. That “alternative education”, Inglis argues, goes some way to explaining the isolation and marginalisation that Collingwood would feel so keenly later in life.

Collingwood’s separateness was partly self-imposed, however, as Inglis recognises when he considers the remarkable final chapter of An Autobiography. That “ringing sermon” against the political accomodations and complacencies of his contemporaries, delivered in the midst of the “gravest crisis” in the country’s history, reveals Collingwood as, in the words of his biographer, “one of Britain’s best, lost intellectuals of the 1930s”. But as Oxford prepared to vote in the “appeasement” by-election of October 1938, this intellectual manqué was leaving Birkenhead aboard a steamer bound for Java - and leaving Britain “to the care of appeasers with every appearance of eager anticipation of his first extended departure from Europe.”

From last week’s New Statesman:

Fifty years ago, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote a rather gloomy essay about the state of the “socialist movement” in Britain. There was, she said, a “moral void in the life of the country”, and on the left in particular. Where the left had once been the source of an animating vision of the good society, now it was the repository of a drearily technocratic utilitarianism. An obsession with central planning and the streamlined organisation of social relations had triumphed over older, more explicitly ethical traditions: Christian socialism, say, or the critique of injustice that had driven early Marxism (before it, too, had gone technical and scientific).

Read the rest here.