Derrida, Girard, and the Involvement of Personal Life in Theory

INTRODUCTION

There are many touch points between the work of Jacques Derrida and René Girard. To me, as a student of literature, these two writers particularly stand out as great readers or great exegetes.¹ The way they handle and combine texts, the way they dare to break with reading conventions, has proved to be really fruitful.

Some time ago I watched a documentary about Derrida, made by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, published in 2002, carrying the simple title Derrida.² I found that this experimental documentary at the same time reflected Derrida’s many reservations, not to say his skepticism, as to the possibility of making portraits—and—proved to be far more revealing, even intimate, than a conventional documentary ever could be. This experience said to me that the many complaints about deconstruction in the sense of sterility or of being merely a game with words—complaints also made by René Girard—are to a certain degree unjust. The Derrida documentary is very much alive, full of biographical and referential energy. Personal life and theory are not to be kept apart in the thought of Derrida—and with this in mind I started to reread a number of his works.

In the work of René Girard we find a similar refusal to separate personal life and theory. In his work it is even more outspoken. Whereas Derrida’s approach is mainly epistemological, focusing on creating images and truths, Girard explicitly, even emphatically, says that you cannot understand mimetic theory without submitting your own personal life to its insights. In this essay I would like to further investigate the similarities in the work of Derrida and Girard limited to this topic.

Limited to this topic—I want to stress this because I am aware that a larger, more encompassing debate about deconstruction versus mimetic theory has been going on for several decades now. A lot of interesting things have been said about the curious love/hate relationship between these two theories, but I will try to keep this larger discussion at bay as much as I can. For the moment, let me mention Andrew McKenna’s criticism, with which I largely agree. I still consider his 1992 study Violence and Difference a standard work on the subject.

THE LIMITS OF RETICENCE

It would have been very strange if the two thinkers I am concerned with here had not shown a certain readiness to disclose important fragments of their personal lives. It would have been strange because their theories do not fit with a conventional worldview in which life and work are thought of as two separate domains. In this conventional view, philosophers reside in theoretical space while working, and migrate to personal space while retreating or relaxing from their work, a private domain that is generally closed off to outsiders. If thinkers gain renown, if they become famous, they may—or they may not—open the door to journalists, interviewers, and documentary-makers; start to publish diaries, letters, and confessions; and give insight in areas differing from the ideas or scientific views they express in their works.

This great divide between theory on the one hand and personal life on the other, gets largely bridged in a genre we might call intellectual biography. Many great intellectual biographies have been written, and often they may help us to gain insight in the formation of ideas and how they are interrelated to sometimes very personal experiences. But—however much I can enjoy the better writings in this genre—here I am not really concerned with intellectual biography. What I would like to point out is that biography, personal life, is implicated on a very theoretical level in both the theoretical work of Derrida and Girard.

Derrida and Girard both started their intellectual careers in an atmosphere of high reticence to the piquing curiosities of journalists and other interviewers. Girard, being converted to Christianity as early as 1959, took a long time to become wholly explicit about his relationship to the Christian faith and the church. The first series of interviews...