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.