Fielding Derrida: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, History, and the Work of Deconstruction

Notes

Notes Introduction: Fielding Derrida 1. ‘‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-meme’’; Jacques Derrida, in Le Monde (August 2004). Chapter 1: Deconstruction as Skepticism 1. Paola Marrati’s La genèse et la trace (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998) [trans. Simon Sparks, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005]) was one of the first to examine in depth the roots of Derrida’s thought in phenomenology. In 1996 Leonard Lawlor declared ‘‘‘Violence and Metaphysics’ is deconstruction in the making’’ (‘‘Phenomenology and Metaphysics: Deconstruction in La voix et le phénomène,’’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27, no. 2 (1996): 116–36, 118); and he expanded this claim in Chapter 6 of Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). In 2005, I published Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 2. One example of such criticism, which on its terms presents quite a valuable account of Derrida’s project, is Jeffrey Nealon’s ‘‘The Discipline of Deconstruction ,’’ in PMLA (October 1992): 1266–79. 3. One notable exception is Henry Staten’s relatively early, and still relevant, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which in fact begins not from Wittgenstein, but from a careful examination of Husserl’s doctrines, especially those pertaining to signi- fication, and Derrida’s deconstruction of these. Staten goes out of his way not to position Derrida as a skeptic in respect to Husserlian phenomenology (Wittgenstein and Derrida [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984], 47–48). 217 4. Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 85–86. 5. Norris unequivocally affirmed deconstruction as skepticism in his earlier book; see Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982), 127–28. 6. Norris, Derrida, 87 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Ibid., 156. 9. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 98, and Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 112. 10. Rorty’s pointed Derrida interpretation is important, despite this. Leaving aside Rorty’s Derrida ‘‘redescriptions,’’ Rorty’s questions make us think further about Derrida’s project as a whole, and they raise the problem of the coherence of Derrida’s thought in totality. In Chapter 1 of my Essential History (Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005]), I treat at length Rorty’s interchanges with Rodolphe Gasché’s and Geoffrey Bennington’s quasi-transcendental interpretations of Derrida. 11. Derrida, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 81. 12. Norris, despite all that is genuinely helpful in his work, ultimately does not succeed in showing how such rationality and emancipatory discourse works in Derrida. Thus Norris, after discussing C. S. Peirce, declares: ‘‘Derrida describes it as his purpose in this essay ‘to bring about a dialogue between Peirce and Heidegger,’ a dialogue that would question the principle of reason without thereby giving way to an irrationalism devoid of critical force’’ (161). Norris remains unable to say how this ‘‘dialogue that would question the principle of reason without thereby giving way to irrationalism’’ is to take place, however. Norris’ introduction of Habermas’ neo-Kantian language shows this; Norris relies on Habermas’ model of critical reason to account for the critical force Norris imputes to Derrida because Habermas’ is a readily identifiable model of critical reason. The much more difficult task of isolating such a model in Derrida, especially at this epoch, is one that Norris does not pursue. Yet the Habermasian model is clearly an importation. It brings Norris back into contact with the pragmatist construal of truth Norris and Derrida supposedly reject, even in the very chapter that this rejection is enunciated. 13. Norris, Derrida, 156. 14. Bernasconi, ‘‘Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy,’’ 158, in Rereading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 149–61. 15. ‘‘Levinas (according to Derrida) like the skeptics (according to their opponents ) cannot help but resort to the language he is supposed to renounce’’ (Bernasconi , ‘‘Skepticism,’’ 154). 218 Notes to pages 12–15 16. From the other side, in part following Bernasconi’s lead, Simon Critchley, focusing primarily on Levinas (Levinas’ view of both skepticism and of Derrida) in his Ethics of Deconstruction (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 89–90, also encountered this same ambiguity. Levinas’ thought is ‘‘similar to the logic of skepticism ,’’ Critchley claimed...