Jacques Derrida

A vital measure of the influence of a thinker on a discipline is the extent to which they transform its customs, protocols and practices in a way that makes it difficult to conceive how things were done before they appeared on the scene. Such transformations are usually simply incorporated into the discipline and presupposed by those who come after. This is why we often have a thankless relation to the most influential thinkers - because their innovations are now the way in which we are accustomed to see and do things. Definitionally then, great thinkers are often those who change the way we do things in a peculiarly thankless way. Jacques Derrida was a great thinker. He exerted a massive influence over a whole generation of people working in philosophy. His death is an unfathomable loss. In what follows I would like to thank him for what he enabled people like me to presuppose thanklessly in our practice.

How did Derrida transform the way in which people like me do philosophy? Let me begin negatively with a couple of confessions. I was never a structuralist and always found Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics a deeply improbable approach to language, meaning and the relation of the latter to the world. There is no doubt that Saussurean structuralism enabled some stunning intellectual work, particularly in Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud and Roland Barthes’s brilliant and enduring literary and cultural analyses. But that doesn’t mean that Saussure was right. Therefore, Derrida’s early arguments in this area, particularly the critique of the priority of speech over writing in the hugely influential Of Grammatology, left me rather cold. Talk of ‘post-structuralism’ left me even colder, almost as cold as rhetorical throat-clearing about ‘post-modernism’. So, in assessing Derrida’s influence, I would want to set aside a series of notions famously associated with him - like différance, trace and archi-writing - in order to get a clearer view of what I think Derrida was about in his work.

I have a similar scepticism about the popular idea of deconstruction as a methodological unpicking of binary oppositions (speech/writing, male/female, inside/outside, reason/madness, etc. etc. etc.). In my view, this is a practice which led generations of humanities students into the intellectual cul-de-sac of locating binaries in purportedly canonical texts and cultural epiphenomena and then relentlessly deconstructing them in the name of a vaguely political position somehow deemed to be progressive. Insofar as Derrida’s name and half-understood anthologised excerpts from some of his texts were marshalled to such a cause, this only led to the reduction of deconstruction to some sort of entirely formalistic method based on an unproven philosophy of language.

In my view, Derrida was a supreme reader of texts, particularly but by no means exclusively philosophical texts. Although, contrary to some Derridophiles, I do not think that he read everything with the same rigour and persuasive power, there is no doubt that the way in which he read a crucial series of authorships in the philosophical tradition completely transformed our understanding of their work and, by implication, of our own work. In particular, I think of his devastating readings of what the French called ‘les trois H’: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, who provided the bedrock for French philosophy in the post-war period and the core of Derrida’s own philosophical formation in the 1950s. But far beyond this, Derrida’s readings of Plato, of Rousseau and other 18^th Century authors like Condillac and his relentlessly sharp engagements with more contemporary philosophers like Foucault, Bataille and Levinas, without mentioning his readings of Blanchot, Genet, Artaud, Ponge and so many others, are simply definitive. We should also mention Derrida’s constant attention to psychoanalysis in a series of stunning readings of Freud.

In my view, what confusedly got named ‘deconstruction’, a title Derrida always viewed with suspicion, is better approached as double reading. That is, a reading that does two things:

1. 1. On the one hand, a double reading gives a patient, rigorous and – although this word might sound odd, I would...