Jacques Derrida: 1930-2004

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Bruno Chalifour

Born July 15, 1930 in El Biar, outside Algiers in what was then known as "French Algeria", Jaques Derrida died October 9, 2004.

The lives of some human beings can be traced back to concepts that they defined more aptly than others, as exemplified in words of our current vocabulary that they coined. Sir John Herschel left us the term "photography." Walter Benjamin focused on the impact of technology, our relationship to objects and art, and spoke of the loss of "aura." He would now be quite interested in the various usages of the term, its numerous acceptations and definitions, and the way it has infiltrated the discourse in and on the arts. Who has escaped "aura"--can escape it--in art school? In the same fashion, Derrida's work and legacy now has often been reduced to one term "deconstruction." Along with other philosophers and humanists of his generation--Barthes, Bourdieu, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Kofman, Cixous, Guattari, De Man, Lyotard--he prolonged the work of such authors and philosophers such as Sartre or Camus and gave new conceptual tools and approaches to the humanities. As all the above, Derrida, a philosopher who advocated the implementation of philosophy at an early stage of secondary education in the French system, "strayed" from his studies of Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, delving into literature and poetry. Blanchot, Bataille, Genet, Mallarme, and most of all Artaud were the frequent objects of Derrida's reflections. In 1974 he, along with a group of others, founded the GREPH (a research group on the teaching of philosophy), and similarly, in 1983, the College International de Philosophie.

Two years ago, in an interview with Le Monde, Derrida reasserted the fact that DECONSTRUCTION was NOT A METHODOLOGY (1) but "an analysis of the sedimentary elements that constitute the discursive element, the philosophical discourse within which we think. Everything happens through language." Deconstruction should be understood as an incitation to open new doors, a "rhizomic" approach to thinking and writing where meaning cannot be separated from sign. One of the consequences of Derrida's work was the reassertion of the preeminence of text over the spoken word (logocentrisme), of "philosophy as an act of resistance."

    "If I had invented my own writing, I would have defined it as an
    interminable revolution. In every situation, one has to create a
    specific mode of exposition, to invent a law for a singular event,
    to consider the expected or desired recipients; and simultaneously
    one has to pretend that this writing will determine the readers who
    will learn to read (to "live") what they were not used to receive
    from someone/somewhere else.[...] Every book is a pedagogy whose
    goal is to train, to educate (to "form") its reader. The mass
    productions that flood the press and publishers do not "form" their
    readers, they suppose, in a fantasy fashion, a pre-programmed
    reader. Thence they end up formatting the very mediocre recipient
    that they had pre-postulated," "Asking me to renounce what educated
    me, what I have loved so much, is asking me to die. For instance,
    avoiding difficulties in the formulation of ideas, concepts,
    avoiding any crease, any paradox, any new contradiction, because one
    may not be understood, or rather because such a journalist who will
    not get it, who cannot even read the title of a book, thinks that
    the reader or the audience will not get it either, and that the
    polls will be impacted, and his own audience and job will be
    jeopardized, is an unacceptable obscenity for me. It's just like
    asking me to bow, to fall into servitude, slavery, or to die of
    stupidity." (2)

(1) the interview "Je suis en guerre contre moi-meme" (I Am AT War With Myself") was reprinted in a special supplement of LeMonde (Oct. 12, 2004) dedicated to Derrida (pp.vi-vii).

(2) Ibid, vi. [All translations by the author of this article].