Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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Theory After Derrida: Essays in Critical Praxis edited by Edited by Kailash C. Baral and R. Radhakrishnan: Routledge, 2009; ISBN 978-0-415-48447-3; Hard cover: $110.00 (South Asia only) / Marc Ouelette
<1> Jacques Derrida’s death in Oct. 2004 eventually may become as noteworthy for others’ reactions to it as for the passing of one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers and scholars. In a career spanning nearly fifty years of prolific output, Derrida never shied away from starting, creating, engaging and obliterating scholarly debate through a relentless pursuit of examining contradictions and paradoxes in all manner of texts in a continuous display of form as content so that any definitive reading of the man or the text is deferred endlessly. Thus, the vitriol (which is spread widely on the Internet and will not be shared here) and the admiration one finds in the comments reflects an uncertainty about the standing of the man (in)famous for providing the impetus through which "deconstruction" became simultaneously a part of everyday vernacular and a widely misunderstood concept—or non-concept, as Derrida described it. Regardless of how one feels about Derrida, post-structuralism, deconstruction or critical theory, his reach and his absence will be felt.
<2> In the spirit of Jacques Derrida, Kailash Baral and R. Radhakrishnan manage to combine confounding, confusing, contradictory and concrete word play in the title of their collection of essays on the influences and legacies the thinker left with his passing.[1] As the editors cite in their introduction, the entirety of the project hinges on the multiple and simultaneous meanings of "after." The obvious connotations point to a consideration of theory in Derrida’s absence, a consideration of where it might go, and a consideration of who—if anyone—might be a successor. Then, there is the problematics of theory in the vein of, or akin to Derrida’s oeuvre, and the various derivatives which differ and yet defer to the originary and its own impossibilities. Of course, one might also consider Derrida’s own theory and determine the accuracy or aptness of dividing his corpus into periods, one after the other. Some might be tempted to consider the conjunctive form and connect the two so that theory comes after Derrida, or fills in the gaps as a sort of Gestalt closure.[2] The auxiliary sense might posit theory chasing after Derrida as some sort of spectral other. Indeed, it is tempting to spend the entire review locating and exploring nothing more than the title and the contents of the collection, likely to the chagrin of the publisher and the contributors, despite it being a book about Derrida after all. [3]
<3> However, there is another definition of "after" which seems to be at play in the collection and that is the idea of something being "behind" something else. Here, the text is true to its subject in that I am left throughout my many readings of the essays—in various orders and with various readings in mind—with the abiding sense of many things Derrida and his works appear to be and yet are not. Somehow, this is appropriate. The introduction is hardly finished before one finds a definition by disclaimer of "deconstruction" being derived from Heidegger’s concepts, but with something added after by Derrida (14). After Derrida, though, one recognizes that deconstruction belongs to him as much as it belongs to any practitioner. Like any textual practice, the signification simultaneously is a state of being and a process of becoming. Given the transubstantial figuration of Derrida’s methods—neither a part of culture, nor of nature as D. Venkat Rao argues—one finds Fred Dallmayr’s essay on Derrida’s legacy particularly apt. Dallmayr deftly demonstrates Derrida’s derivations and departures from a host of theoretical traditions on the subject of democracy but each of these lead one to the conclusion that Derrida favours democracy not as a system of government but as a prime example of différance, whereby satisfaction is endlessly deferred by a succession of regimes differing from their predecessors while occasioning the relentless critique of the institution itself (39). So, Derrida does not really favour humanism, Marxism, democracy or anything so much as he favours critique, especially of critique.
<4> Thus, Dallmayr’s essay is a fitting prelude to many of the essays which follow, for these deal precisely with Derrida’s critiques of critiques. Indeed, Bernard Sharratt’s essay takes its occasion from Ousia et Gramme, a note on a footnote in Being in Time. It is telling and appropriate for the collection that Sharrat finds Derrida’s analysis of time leaves something behind–whether time is–an aporia trailing after only to be answered by that which follows it–the nature of time (61). It is this repetition of the dual species of presence–what trails after and what comes after–that seems to place Derrida as a member of and yet not a member of the theoretical traditions behind him (71). It is no surprise then that Gordon Hull finds in Derrida’s critique of Platonism a position which is not philosophical but rather moral and political (76). Derrida’s persistent negation leads to a similar finding regarding the belief in what theorists (sometimes) euphemistically call a "univocal textual authority;" that is, belief in a god that isn’t God in the first place. For me, nothing in Derrida’s corpus illustrates this better than the translations, the mistranslations and the retranslations of texts composed by someone who was deliberately writing with an eye to being recoded, decoded and encoded endlessly. Even being able to read it in French offers little solace. Here, Sylvano Facioni and R. Radhakrishnan seem to agree. The former, intimately associated with the publication history of Glas, generously and candidly acquiesces to the uncertainty of the translations (146). The latter finds in translation a "truly Derridean problematic of centrism" because the language of the (one) reality must be indeterminate (287). After reading this essay, I could not help but take pity on Benjamin as Derrida takes him apart. For if, as Radhakrishnan asserts, Benjamin’s sense of translation and of language "would want to have it both ways," both literal and metaphorical, it becomes clear that Derrida does not want to have it both ways at all (293). Instead, he produces both at the same time.
<5> In this regard, a series of essays which consider Derrida’s positions on faith and on religion show another argument that proceeds with an aporia that is closed, covered, concealed, contained and condensed by what comes after. As Eric Boynton shows, Derrida finds that arguing that God is dead somehow reaffirms the development of faith (222). Yet Gianfrasco Dalmasso also surmises that Derrida is neither immanentistic in the mode of Hegel, nor secularistic in the mode of Feuerbach, for the deconstructive impulse mines "the ongoing generation of man by God and that of God by man" so that faith, too, seems endlessly deferred (208). Perhaps this occurs because, as Natalie Roberts asserts in her own deconstruction of rituals that foster and further uncritical beliefs, "Christian practice is, in truth, more fragmented and differentiated than even denominational lineages account for" (240). It is interesting but hardly astonishing that deconstruction finds that truth lies in fragments, if at all. What becomes apparent after reading these perspectives on Derrida and something that approaches but isn’t quite spirituality is that if there is faith in Derrida—in all the permutations and figurations of that little phrase—it is faith in deconstruction and faith in différance. After all, if not true, truth seeking or leading to (the) truth, these are always available.
<6> Perhaps Puspa Damai’s essay on "Cosmopolitanism after Derrida" most eloquently captures the latter’s flitting and fleeing to and from, inside and out, of belonging and of being an alien, for here the corporeality of presence seems at least momentarily inescapable. Yet the simultaneity of being and becoming provides an obvious destabilizing factor, for as Julie Elaine Goodspeed- Chadwick rightly recognizes, the body is a sign that demands reading (275). Thus, it was refreshing to read Jon Baldwin’s take on Derrida and Bourdieu, since the latter definitely has something to say about the former, especially the "artificial paradoxes" that seem to pervade Derrida’s work (101). Seeing the self as subject to habitus, Bourdieu questions whether a disinterested is possible. Following Derrida, one quickly arrives at only one conclusion: deconstruction is a/the disinterested act. The debate about the exchange of gifts is only a pretext, an opportunity to demonstrate the deconstructive moment. One wonders if Bourdieu was being set up, so that Derrida’s non-response really is a response which again reveals the ubiquity of différance.
<7> If there is something missing from Theory After Derrida, it is the spectral figure of Michel Foucault. Admittedly, Foucault did assist in the rescue of Derrida from Czech authorities in the early 1980s. Even so, the rift that opened following Derrida’s 1963 criticisms of Foucault’s works had never really closed. There are hints of Foucault and about Foucault in several places—including, perhaps appropriately, Facioni’s essay about Glas and Peter Zeillinger’s "Reflections before Friendship"—but nothing one might call an engagement. There is a respectful and mindful distance as if to differ and to defer since the two men left the aporia. It could be argued that any aporia is left to the next reader, the next interpreter, the next translator to resolve a split between two scholars so closely associated with French thought, including and especially the uprising in 1968 and its aftermath, and yet so dissociated from each other. Admittedly, the topic remains worthy of volumes in its own right.
<8> While I might be a little disappointed that the critics and the editors mind the gap, as it were, it does mean that I cannot offer a criticism I might have offered six months ago in suggesting that two other aporic spectres linger–Judaism and Africa–after reading Theory After Derrida. Without going into structuralist detail of counting occurrences, I can assure anyone that these together occur and appear less frequently than Christianity and the Bible. Moreover the discussions focus on the latter whereas the former are only occasional objects. While continental philosophy clearly influenced Derrida’s thinking, his own stated "feeling of non-belonging" to a(n Algerian) Jewish community (into which he was born) reflects an ambiguity in his attachments and in his affiliations (qtd. in Shakespeare 242). He was never wholly inside nor completely outside the multiple and simultaneous identity positions which might have been and are ascribed to him. Again, this may be a result of the many things Derrida and his readings were and are not. However, speaking before the so-called "Arab Spring" of 2011 surely would have given a different reading. What would Derrida say about this historical moment when longstanding oppressive regimes near his Algerian birthplace–Tunisia, Egypt, Libya–have fallen suddenly and left such uncertainty? What would the moment say about Derrida? Now I am thankful for the deferral afforded by the span of time, for this reading has yet to come and yet it will condition the reading that has just occurred. This paradoxical duality speaks to a singularity not a circularity, a moment of existing as two (or more) things in one substance, determinate and yet not. This, then, is theory after Derrida.
Notes
[1] The word "spirit" is struck through in the first sentence as a (predictable) nod to Derrida’s own habit of including such words to indicate that the word is not quite correct but should remain because it could not be replaced, either.
[2] Closure refers to the tendency to fill in gaps based on available information and the interpellated self. Its popular usage runs a similar course to that of deconstruction; hence, its insertion.
[3] I must admit that after reading Derrida myself some years ago I became skeptical about skepticism and cynical about cynicism. After reading so-called Derrideans and after my comprehensive exams, which were admittedly in Critical Theory, the sense was only heightened.
Work Cited
ShakespeareSteven. "Thinking about Fire: Derrida and Judaism" Literature & Theology 12.3 (1998): 242-55
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