Futures: of Jacques Derrida (review)

Richard Rand, ed.,Futures: of Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 254 pages.

When the circumstances surrounding the reception of a given author start conforming to the paradigms of reading elaborated in his writings, one gets an uncanny feeling of a diabolical ploy at work. When the author acknowledges that he is bemused by this development as much as his followers seem to be unaware of it, this impression is doubly reinforced. Consider the fate of Derrida's works in this light. He is commonly grouped in the U.S. as a poststructuralist even though structuralism in the U.S. is "a past that has never been present." And since structuralism entered the mainstream through his "poststructuralist" critique, it would make as much sense to call Derrida a pre-structuralist. His most anthologized essay on "structure and play" has been transformed into the definitive formulation of the deconstructive doctrine even though this piece forms a corollary to the full-fledged critique of the structure/genesis relationship that constitutes a major axis of Derrida's early work. Thus, using the terms elaborated in Margins of Philosophy, one could say that a mere source of deconstructive knowledge became an origin of "deconstruction in America," and, in line with the arche-teleology that Derrida unearthed under the name of "logocentrism," this origin has been arriving at its historical destination ever since, thereby assuring that deconstruction is "always already" about play and against structure. Once deconstruction came under attack in the 1980s, the Derridian thematic of survivre and restance seemed to invade, metaleptically, the space of discussion, and to this day deconstruction continues to rest/remain in accordance with the undecidable logic of iterability everyone is eager to put to rest.

The millennial sentiment, the aging of the generational cohort and an autobiographical turn in Derrida's writing resulted in a wave of exegeses animated by Derrida's question apropos Hegel in Glas, "What remains, today, of a deconstruction?" Thanks to the delay built into academic publishing, this wave is still coming ashore (to cite only the outstanding books of the genre: Herman Rappaport's The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse [New York : Columbia University Press, 2001]; Geoffrey Bennington's Interrupting Derrida [London: Routledge, 2000]; Marian Hobson's Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines [London: Routledge, 1998]). Out of these often virtuoso exercises in commentary, Derrida's writing emerges as unassailable in its premises and infernal in its critical efficiency, always managing to ask the right question and, having evaded a predictable answer, to suspend readers' expectations indefinitely. Yet the titles (or subtitles) of these books--"opening lines", "interrupting Derrida," "deconstruction in eclipse"--indicate an undercurrent of frustration whose origins, perhaps, go back to the diabolical ploy with which I began this sketch of the deconstructive remains. With any luck, the collection of essays, Futures: of Jacques Derrida, consisting of papers presented at a conference occasioned by Derrida's sixty-fifth birthday, might serve to loosen its grip.

Derrida has rarely addressed the issue of truth, and this no doubt deliberate reticence has probably cost him some institutional acceptance. This lack of respect for speaking "within the limits of truth" also separates Derrida from the other figures whose names tend to surround his own. Thus, for all his critique of the institutional and epistemic processing of knowledge, Foucault never questioned the authority of truth-saying. Or, if one still needed to measure the distance Derrida had taken with respect to Heidegger, the suspicion that Derrida casts on truth as ale\theia would probably be its clearest indicator. "History of the Lie," collected in this volume, presents one of Derrida's most explicit confrontations with the questions of veracity, falsehood, lie and error. In a surprising deployment of Kant's terminology, in this paper Derrida sets out to reflect on the discursive parameters of writing a history of a political lie. And since by reflection Kant meant discovering rules operative in given instances by regressing to their transcendental conditions, Derrida's article is dense with...