Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

Still Waiting to Hear from Derrida

Still Waiting to Hear from Derrida the death of Jacques Derrida in October 2004, at the age of seventy-four, should not be seen as the end of an epoch, the demise of an intellectual movement, or even the final act in the life of the man with that proper name. For if Derrida left any legacy at all, it was a radical suspicion about closure and completion, the inexorable linearity of before and after, indeed any “straightforward” temporality not haunted by the specters of a past it imagines it has left behind or pregnant with a future (avenir) still to come (à venir). His many critics were right, at least in one sense, in calling his deconstructive theorizing a preposterous undertaking , for it clearly jumbled the pre and the posterior in ways that confounded those with a penchant for the sens unique of traditional narrative. as a result it remains especially resonant in a twenty-first century that in many respects—the return, for example, of religious violence and faith-based antiscientism—seems less like a continuation of the twentieth than a regression to the fourteenth. What also speaks to his continued relevance is the lesson he taught or better exemplified in his work and life, a lesson in what can be called the inescapable power of performativity. that is, among the most potent gifts he bestowed on those who read his texts and followed his career was an appreciation of the impossibility of disentangling ideas from the modes and vehicles of their presentation and the vicissitudes of their reception. although the message, pace McLuhan, could not be reduced to the medium, it could never be entirely extracted from it. For Derrida, it was impossible to abstract ideas from their material substrate, to forget that that every looking glass has an opaque tain or silver backing behind its reflecting surface, which enables its function as a mirror. and while it would be wrong to make writing into an alienated expression of the spo- 124 essays from the edge ken word or explain ideas away through reductive psychologizing, it would be no less problematic to efface the traces of their mediation through the unique, if never fully coherent, individuality of the writer and thinker. the value of that lesson was ironically made clear to me when i attempted to make sense of his work by situating it in a larger discursive context, which i characterized as the pervasive critique of hypervisuality—or “ocularcentrism”— in twentieth-century French thought from Bergson, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to Foucault, Barthes, and Lyotard. in the book published in 1993 on that theme called Downcast Eyes, i devoted a chapter to Derrida and the feminist theorist Luce irigaray. it was playfully entitled “Phallogocularcentrism,” a self-consciously monstrous word invented to highlight their common disdain for the mutually reinforcing hegemonies of logos, the phallus, and the eye in Western culture culminating in the modern Enlightenment. all were complicit, they argued , in the traditional power of the reifying male gaze, the fetish of rigid, fully transparent meaning, and the spread of disembodied visual surveillance. During the composition of the book, i had a chance to speak with both of them and sent copies when it was completed. irigaray never responded, but in October 1993 i was thrilled to receive a letter from Derrida acknowledging its arrival. Until then my relations with him had been oblique and distant—a few scholarly conferences together, dinner at the house of a mutual friend in Berkeley , no sustained intellectual exchanges—and it would have been easy to infer a likely incompatibility between our views on a number of issues (assuming, to be sure, that anyone was benighted enough to compare them at all). identified as i was with the Frankfurt School and seen as a defender of Habermas’s pro-Enlightenment critique of postmodernism, i often found myself easily positioned by others during the so-called theory wars of the 1980s as an opponent of deconstruction—indeed, of poststructuralism as a whole. and in fact, there was some truth to this characterization.1 When the irvine campus of the University of California invited Derrida, Lyotard , and J. Hillis Miller to its precincts in the 1980s as the stars of a new program in “theory,” there was also a sense in some quarters that Berkeley, where Michel Foucault had been a powerful presence in the first years of the decade, was hostile territory (Derrida and Foucault having been at odds since their quarrel...