The Politics of Derrida: Revisiting the Past

Those who have read the recent issue of the journal SubStance that was dedicated to Jacques Derrida (34.1 [2005]) know that I have been among the first ones who protested against the indecent, almost obscene, obituaries that his death provoked, by the end of 2004, in the New York Times and The Economist. In fact, I may say that I have been one of the few persons who have always defended Derrida's work, both in France and in the US, and that I have done so continuously since my first articles on him appeared in Le Monde (1973) and Critique (1974). Derrida was a great professor, a powerful writer, and a philosopher who was instrumental in explaining why, contrary to what Heidegger believed, we simply cannot get out of the "logocentrism" characteristic of Western metaphysics. Furthermore, I am convinced that we still have a lot to learn from the way he deconstructed texts. Yet all this does not mean that I want to ignore the relevant critiques that have been expressed against some of his positions. And as his political positions, in particular, have often been a controversial issue, my aim, in the present essay, will be to revisit them and check their coherence—which I will try to do without indulging in unnecessary polemics.

Let us go back to the year 1952, when Derrida was admitted into the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS). At that time, the "caïman" (as the normaliens used to say in their own slang) or the department chair (as we would say today) who was in charge of philosophy students was Louis Althusser (1918–1990). Their first contact, in the early 1950s, was the point of departure of a close friendship which would last until Althusser's death. In fact, there was much in common between the two men. Both of them, being born in colonial Algeria, felt somewhat uneasy in the Parisian milieu. Both were highly critical of the then dominant philosophy of the Left Bank: existentialism. Still more important, both believed that Sartre's reading of Husserl, as well as of Marx, lacked conceptual rigor, and that insufficient conceptual rigor might lead to practical—that is to say political—errors. Mixing phenomenology with Marxism, in particular, as Sartre attempted to do in his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960), was, according to them, not only bold, but totally inconsistent. Therefore, in order to better distance himself from Sartre, Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), decided to stick to a kind of "pure" Marxism, which he reconstructed à sa manière for that purpose. As for Derrida, he was divided. From a philosophical viewpoint, he wanted to stick to phenomenology. Yet, from a political viewpoint, he felt himself close to Althusser and the positions of the PCF, although—unlike Michel Foucault, who had been admitted into the ENS six years earlier, in 1946—he never belonged to it (Foucault had been a PCF member between 1950 and 1952).

So Derrida rejected Sartre's philosophy but, oddly enough, started his political career as a fellow traveler of the PCF, which was exactly the role that Sartre had chosen for himself in the early 1950s. Let us add that, during the 1960s, while Althusser insisted on criticizing the PCF from the inside, which was an utterly uncomfortable position, both Sartre and Derrida moved towards an attitude of clear and open rejection of the PCF—or, to be more precise, of its Stalinist policies. For the PCF, at that time, was Stalinist. It purported to crush democratic aspirations inside and outside the USSR. It believed in the workers' movement only, while Derrida, like Sartre, knew that forces of emancipation were developing in French society outside of the proletariat. And this is why, as soon as the student revolt of May 1968 exploded in Paris, he decided to side with the students' movement (as Sartre did), while the PCF wanted to put an end to it. At that very moment, Althusser, a victim of his own contradictions, got through one of his many nervous breakdowns, which led him...