Derrida In and Out of Context: On the Necessity to Know "Why Derrida?"

Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida, Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Apart from its several encyclopedia or series format treatises that have already assumed the status of definitive reference works in contemporary critical theory and the humanities, Routledge has recently launched a new series, Routledge Critical Thinkers, subtitled "essential guides for literary studies." Volumes, written—as far as I can see—mostly by British scholars, have appeared on Maurice Blanchot, Judith Butler, Paul de Man, and Sigmund Freud, among others. Nicholas Royle, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, author of a previous book on Derrida, entitled After Derrida (1995), has been trusted the responsible task of introducing Derrida in this series.

There is hardly any doubt about the weight and momentousness of the work of Jacques Derrida for our age, and, equally evident, there is a large audience wanting to come to grips with his thinking. Finding access to Derrida's work, particularly on an introductory level, is, however, a rather demanding enterprise. Reading Derrida tends to require substantial amounts of specialized knowledge, coming from a variety of fields such as philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the like. Matters are further complicated by the fact that Derrida is the author of no less than some fifty or sixty books that not only often refer to each other but also tend to start out as meticulous close readings of often difficult, sometimes overlooked philosophical or literary texts. While building the argumentation on concepts found in the first place in the very texts under scrutiny, Derrida goes on to develop readings that analyze the presuppositions and limits of not only the texts in question but, more importantly, Western metaphysics as such. Thus, while the readings are seemingly minute and microscopic, their stakes are enormous.

Derrida, and what in the wake of his work became known as "deconstruction," has without question been the single most influential driving force in literary theory during the past thirty or so years. According to recent estimates there are some 400 books and 500 dissertations on Derrida; no similar count of articles is available, for evident reasons. Derrida's presence and influence has been particularly felt in the United States, where, ever since his first lecturing visit in the country in 1966, deconstruction has marked and almost single-handedly defined what the study of literature is and can be.

Although Derrida's reception, particularly his American reception, has seen various debates on the question of what role or stress exactly should be allocated to philosophy and, respectively, to literature in Derrida's work, there has been a general consensus that, in the wake of deconstruction, the future of the humanities lies in a certain interdisciplinariness. What Derrida shows, and with unquestionable depth, is that while philosophy on the one hand governs all the other disciplines, i.e., in the sense that there are philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions underlying these disciplines (whether they acknowledge this themselves or not), it cannot, on the other hand, remain pure, but is internally and structurally constituted by what it tries to exclude and govern, for example literature. After Derrida there is no clearly definable pure philosophy or "literary studies," rather these fields, while keeping their relative independence, are opened up to a certain interdisciplariness, aptly named by Jonathan Culler as simply "theory" in his On Deconstruction.

As Derrida states in his 1971 article "Supplement of Copula," in the context of philosophy's relation to structuralism and linguistics, "if it still were a question, here, of a word to say it, it certainly would not be for philosophy or linguistics as such to say it." What Derrida has brought us, is, indeed, a crisis of the "as such."

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In the face of the highly specialized level of Derrida's argumentation and the wealth of material already existing on his work, Nicholas Royle is certainly up against a difficult task. Is...