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  • Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy
  • Sarah Wood
Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy. By Vivienne Orchard. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. 206 pp.

It is impossible to take up this book in Britain today without thinking of the tough institutional regime academics are working under, and without wondering what open or protected spaces remain for critique, subversion, and contestation amid the flourishing research environments and bastions of teaching excellence we read about in the university prospectuses. Derrida's work with the Groupe de Recherches sur l'Enseignement Philosophique (GREPH) between 1974 and 1981 championed and sought to extend the 'unique French arrangement of teaching philosophy in secondary schools' (p. 1). It is a powerful example of academic intervention and engagement on behalf of disciplinarity at a particular historical juncture. It may not have succeeded in its immediate aims, but it did bring together academics and school teachers and it led to the foundation of the Collège International de Philosophie and to the production of a body of work by Derrida and others (including Le Doeuff, Lyotard, Nancy, and Rancière) that reflected on philosophy and its material determinations in unprecedented ways. There is something inspiring about that. Vivienne Orchard exercises legitimate caution about idealizing GREPH as proof of deconstruction's political credibility. Her approach to Derrida, French philosophy, and its institutions is differentiated, and observant rather than polemical. She leaves it to others to undertake deconstructive readings, but has taken time to study a wide range of texts and documents and to present her knowledge in a way that is patiently historical, philosophically astute, and politically aware. The book also attends to the question of context, observing the impoverishing effect of identifying a thinker's work with their 'position', and honouring the complexity of situations beyond simple oppositions. Orchard's insistence on understanding the aims and arguments of GREPH, and of Derrida, its soul, remains faithful to Derrida's own strategy as a reader and a teacher. The book shows GREPH working over a period of years in an informal and decentralized way that refused to be held within disciplinary or professional boundaries. The group did far more than protest; it worked for radical change in education, and on the teachers' terms. It confronted the difficulty of defending philosophy in ways that themselves carry unexamined and perhaps unwarranted assumptions, for example in terms of passing on vaguely defined 'critical skills' without ideological or social awareness (pp. 56, 63). Orchard puts the story of GREPH in a number of contexts, encouraging a long view and providing a wealth of interesting information about the 'perpetual reform' (p. 46) of educational institutions and practices by French governments since 1789. Anglophone academics working on Derrida, teaching, the university, and French philosophy have generally not been aware of this material and its significance. This book will change that. Along with the account of GREPH in Benoît Peeters's 2010 biography Derrida (Flammarion; English translation (Polity) in preparation), Orchard's careful attention to significant details promises to refresh thinking in an important area of theory and philosophy. [End Page 581]

Sarah Wood
University of Kent
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