Johann Hari

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him.

I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish. But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious.

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of opposing words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

So there are, Derrida concluded, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no 'sense', only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The search for intellectual coherence is 'violent' and must be shunned.

Derrida claimed he was offering a critique within the Enlightenment tradition - yet within his own explanatry framework he made Enlghtenment values untenable. (He spoke openly of using tactics of "duplicity" and "the playing of a double game" to "challenge" the Enlightenment. He explained he was operating wthin the language of reason since there was no other, but he would try to lay traps for reason by posing it problems it could not answer. This was designed to expose the inherent contradictions in reason and ultimately destroy it.)

Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.

Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis. Everything else is a polite excuse. So the foundation our Enlightenment culture is built on - the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day - are rotten. All we can hope for is to destroy this "metaphysics of presence", which is the assumption that we can expect immediate access to meaning. Then we might be able to experience a few 'concepts' - somehow. Derrida's method for destroying language is deconstruction - a technique that makes us see that "signifiers" are so ambiguous and shifting that they can mean anything or nothing.

Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony.

If reason is just another language game, if our words cannot match anything out there in the world without doing 'violence' to others - what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. The fiction the preceded postmodernism - for all its flaws - usually engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". Of course we should always question the ctegories of our thought - but the wave of deconstruction seems to have reduced academics to doing nothing else. The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism; Derridan readings invariably in my experience encourage confusion and passivity in the face of injustice, rather than action.

To be fair to him, late in his life Derrida seems to have begun to understand the terrible forces of ultra-scepticism he unleashed. Very few people can actually bear to be nihilists; very few people can preach a message of paralysis and despair for long. So Derrida declared in the early 1990s that there are some "infinitely irreducible" ideas that should not be deconstructed - particularly justice and friendship.

But it was too late. Derrida had vandalised all the tools he could have used to make a case for justice. If reason is just an "exclusionary strategy", if words are mere symbols in a dense fog, if everything must be broken into warring fragments, how can he suddenly call a halt to the process of deconstruction when it comes to one particular value he happens to like? Is his use of the word "justice" somehow immune to all the rules he spent his career articulating? How could he formulate the concept without violently excluding, say, the unjust? How can the battle between thsoe two words be saved from endless mutual obfuscation?

Derrida was left making the preposterous case that justice is a "Messianic" concept that would somehow be revealed to us once we stripped away language and reason.

I suppose it's touching that Derrida made a tragic final attempt to chain his own decontructionist beast. But the time for him to dissociate himself from nihilism was decades earlier, when he first launched the idea of deconstruction. He should have admitted that, yes, division and tension can be found in all things - but sometimes we need to accept that and build larger categories anyway, witout being accused of 'supression'.

Buried in Derrida's philosophy there are small nuggets of insight. It is worth bearing in mind that the Enlightenment project has contingent and uncertain roots, even if it is the best hope we have. It is essential to know that the structure of language determines our thought much more than we understood before Wittgenstein, and that grand narratives are inherently dangerous unless their exponents admit that they are partial and always doomed to be (at best) necessary fictions.

Derrida could have drawn the sane conclusions from this at the start of his career: that we should show a greater degree of scepticism both toward language and narratives than before. But Derrida always promoted a far more shrill and silly agenda to unpick and 'expose' the Enlightenment tradition.

And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives except in language so opaque it is impossible to decipher. In the real world, the alternatives to reason (Divine revelation? Superstition? Pure will? Despair?) are even more flawed and even less likely to lead to the "liberation" Derrida claims to seek.

We can see this in Derrida's personal route out of nihilism - through susperstition. Not for nothing was Derrida described as "a Jewish mystic"; he even wrote about his belief in ghosts, which seems to be literal (if one can assume anything in Derrida is literal or rational).

When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about whether the world is really there at all or whether it can ever be described in language or whetehr there are ghosts about the place. To claim to do so in the name of "true justice" is simply insulting to the victims of injustice. No hungry person craves deconstruction. No tyrannised person feels they are trapped in a language game. It is not only shallow but decadent to claim to be on the left and to dedicate your energy to these demoralising intellectual games.

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist academic with whom I disagree on many things (like the Soviet Union) - but we have a shared belief in rational Enlightenment politics based on notions like evidence, truth and open dispute. He chides Derrida for believing in "the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, , the lie of progress and the pervasiveness of power... [Derrida] greets the suggestion there has been any progress in human history with scorn while [he] regularly avails himself of anaesthetics and water closets."

Eagleton continues, "Derrida says there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of moral or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do... These judgements are left accordingly hanging in the air. For Derrida ethics is a matter of absolute decisions - decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible', and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualisation. One can only hope he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court."

Just so. There is no doubt a space for a continuing debate about post-modern thought in the more obscure philosophy departments, in the same way that some people still discuss Berkeley's idealism and other philosophical ideas that nobody would ever actually act on.

But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.

POSTSCRIPT:

It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics. Although there are always some appreciative adademics - or some intelligently critical ones - too often they don’t try to answer you or rebut what you say; they simply accuse you of being stupid.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, here is one typical e-mail:

"Dear Mr. Hari,
You are an idiot.
Professor Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Goldsmith's College, University of London."

(Feel free to respond to Professor Duttmann at ADuttmann@aol.com)

(I seriously considered becoming an academic for a time. E-mails like this remind me why I opted for journalism instead).

This is the MO of the postmodern academic charlatans. If I wasn’t ridiculously intellectually self-confident (I wouldn't normally mention this, but I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy, darling) I would probably be intimidated by this stuff – and that’s very revealing. These writers use deliberately opaque prose and their arguments are often manifestly absurd (remember Negri arguing that "he doesn’t believe in memory" because it "dulls the revolutionary spirit" when I confronted him with his obscene apologetics for the Soviet Union and Maoism?). When anybody calls them on it, they call their critics thick. Most people lack the confiedence to see through it.

Don’t get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument. There are many views that can only be expressed in extremely complex language, and not just scientific views. I always thought the sneering at Gordon Brown for talking about "neo-endogenous growth theory", for example, was daft – it’s a complicated economic theory and can’t be boiled down into words of two syllables. Plenty of what I write (and more of what I’d like to write) wouldn’t be accessible to the general readership of a popular newspaper. Try discussing Marx’s Capital or pensions policy or the WTO in very simple language – it’s tough.

The rule is not 'Don't use complex language.' It’s: 'use the most straight-forward language possible.' Sometimes the most comprehensible language will still be complex and tough because the subject is; but most often, simple language will do. With Derrida and Negri, the convoluted language masks facile or empty thought. If they wrote in clear prose, there would be nothing there.

Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. So for example, I received this:

"Dear Mr Hari

I am writing to you in anger concerning your appallingly ill-informed column on the late Jacques Derrida. Virtually every sentence imputes ideas into Derrida's work that are simply not there. As a research student completing a Ph.D in philosophy, I am expected to give precise and full references to any claim or counter-claim that I make in my work. As a journalist, you obviously do not feel the obligation to do so.

Your column evinces a lack of philosophical culture, a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty, a lack of rigour, a lack of decency, a lack of probity, and most of all, a lack of responsibility. Little wonder that your profession is held in such low esteem. If I could be bothered, I would reach over to my shelves, and provide you with full citations from Derrida's work that would refute the claims made in your column. However, I feel that it would be better to allow you to read Derrida's work for yourself.

Yours sincerely

William Hutson"

Now, unfortunately, in a newspaper column you can’t use footnotes or extensive references. Any intelligent person understands that. Should philosophical ideas therefore never be discussed in newspapers? Is philosophy for a tiny academic elite? But note also the implicit snobbery: "a lack of philosophical culture." No, I don’t write in wilfully obscure prose (although I can – how do you think I got that double first?) and, no, I do not share the mindset of the postmodern academy. I believe in social engagement, not a retreat into postmodern confusion and apathy: that, to them, is in itself evidence of stupidity and crudity.

Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not – as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla’s ‘The Reckless Mind – Intellectuals in Politics’, which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'.

Hutson can’t be a very good Derridan if he’s trying to rebut me with quotes from Derrida. For a start, Derrida contradicted himself – as everybody knows, and the late Professor admitted - all the time, and when he was challenged on it he would say that he was being "playful" and "appreciated irony." And he often spoke in blatantly contradictory language. For example, speaking on a simple political matter, he said: "Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa."

Anyway, is Hutson trying to say my reading is wrong because I have misunderstood the author’s intention? Hello?

Occassionally intellectual life will take a wrong turn. I think the agonies of epistemological doubt and ultra-scepticism unleashed by Derrida and his fellow postmodern intellectuals have been a terrible wrong turn, especially at a time when we have rarely needed engaged intellectuals more. To argue - as Michel Foucault did - that the Enlightenment tradition is simply a bankrupt veil for violence, and that we should revert to public lynching ("popular justice"), is dangerous. To try to destory the possibility of Enlightenment discourse - as Derrida in practice did - is dangerous. Okay, so few people will take it seriously and act on it (indeed, I would wager that nobody will) - but it distracts the intellectual classes and universities that could be doing something worthwhile.

Anybody who tries to make this case inevitably opens themselves up to accusations of stupidity, I guess; I open myself up tpo accusations that I "just don't understand the turn we have taken," as one e-mailer put it. No; I get it perfectly well - I just don't agree.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Professor Clifford Staples of the University of North Dakota wrote to explain:
“I'm a U.S. academic sociologist and have been through all the pomo stuff (I actually find some of it quite liberating and useful. Deconstruction of a sort is an utterly necessary element of any good critical sociology), but of course you are correct concerning Derrida and the endgame of nihilism).

My colleague and friend Bob Antonio from the University of Kansas writes brilliantly, I think, on the continued relevance and necessity of Enligtenment-inspired Modern Social Theory (see his work over the last ten years in the American Journal of Sociology (mostly) "Nietzsche's Anti-Sociology," After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.").

In the same vein, I am currently working on Richard Rorty, reading him from the MST tradition. Rorty's pragmatism gets him most of the way to social theory, but his armchair empirical speculations-- as evidence in Geras' devestating critique in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind shows, is his undoing. But I was interested to see in some of your comments how you come close to the "ungroundable" liberalism of Rorty that gets Geras so worked up. This is the stuff I live for (well, that and golf and sex and my daughter and freedom and justice and so forth).”

Gregory Fried, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Sussex University, wrote:
"As an academic who has read and written on Derrida, I just wanted to let you know that your treatment was, to my mind, fully on target. Very well, it might not satisfy the pedantry of Derrida's more obsessive followers (what would?), but as you say: may not journalism treat philosophy seriously?
And you pay Derrida at least that much of a compliment: you do take him seriously.

In particular, what I think you get right is how the "mad axeman of Western philosophy" pulled down the edifices of reason that support our free institutions -- and only too late realized that what he had done was NOT
effect a new, deeper form of liberation. In his last decade, he scrambled to build a shadow-edifice, but to no avail.

I plan to use your appraisal when I teach him in the future, at least to get students started.

If you ever do wish to put yourself to sleep with an "academic" deconstruction of the Grand Deconstructor, try my book, 'Heidegger's
Polemos', which treats both Heidegger's politics and the effects of that politics on the postmodernist left."

James Lindgren, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, said:
“I found some of the responses to your Derrida "eulogy" hilariously inept. So your critics know the absolute truth of what Derrida meant and you don't. Given the impossibilities of language that Derrida claims, how can this even be possible? Either Derrida is wrong about language or your critics are wrong to be certain that you misunderstood Derrida. I think your critics, particularly the philosophy student that attacked you, need to do a little more critical thinking. There is some wheat among the chaff in Derrida, but it takes a genuinely critical eye to pull it out."

Professor Christopher Morris from the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland wrote:
"About Derrida: his influence in the US is not inconsiderable. But one should note that no serious philosophy dept in the English-speaking world has any full-time prof. who takes Derrida seriously. His influence is entirely in depts of literature and other fields where, sadly, there are few publicly discernable standards of excellence. There are many smart thinkers who cannot express themselves. In English-speaking depts of philosophy virtually no graduate student can obtain a degree w/o learning to express him or herself reasonably clearly. Derrida's opacity has nothing to do with the depth of his thinking.

I trust you won't be bothered by the nasty mail you receive."

Stephen Barrell of Newnham e-mailed to say:
"I read your piece on Derrida in todays independent with some interest, but it left me with a lot of questions and points that I was hoping that you might be able to address for me:

1. Deconstruction of our most cherished values may seem pernicious while their objects continue to sufuse the world we find ourselves in, but why would this invalidate what deconstruction demonstrates to us? Surely the world is filled with unpalatable ideas which we are none the less forced to accept. I'm not for a moment suggesting that Derrida's critiques are self-evident or necessarily valid, but surely we need a more incisive criterion when judging them than the taste they leave in our mouths. More specifically, if we are to attack the theory of the floating signifier we will need to attack the entirety of structuralism and post-structuralism, the Saussurean school of linguistics, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as numerous other figures from the history of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, cybernetics, marxism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, etc...

At the heart of this theory is an approach to the problem of essence and the status of universals, putting us firmly into the camp of metaphysics (a great title for critique of sexuality in metaphysics) where ethico-political arguments will necessarily be of little use to us.

2. Indeed, we do quickly descend into absurdity if we try to treat metaphysics as ethics (the infamous slide from 'is' to 'ought'), of course you are right to suggest that it would be lunacy for a society to ignore a serial killer on the grounds that madness is an indeterminate signifier, but it would be just as ridiculous to attempt to understand the actions of our serial killer through an appeal to the quantum mechanics that structure its
body, but no one would argue that quantum physics is a decadent conceit. We will need to go elswhere to find a place for ethics in Derrida's system.

3. Assuming that we might be able to sidestep the question of whether Derrida's work rests on sound principles, why should we imagine that deconstruction can only lead to nihilism? (I'm not disputing the fact that many people have tried to take derrida's work in this direction and that its a very real trap for the lazy thinker). Why should we not experience derrida's work as a liberation? If it turns out that we can validly argue that the beliefs we esteem are a product of metanarratives (and this puts us far closer to Lyotard than it does Derrida) and harbour something equally as
pernicious as their object at their base why should this lead us to ethical paralysis? If deconstruction shows us that all that was solid melts into air and that this shifting techtonic is part of our own essential structure
surely the result must be that we are called on to act. Deprived of the luxury of simple formulae or pat answers we are reinvigorated as ethical agents who, while aware that meaning and right are transitory phenomena, are forever impelled to fully engage with the world as we meet it without certainty but with urgency. In this sense deconstruction would not signify the death knell for ethics but would be its birth cry.

4. Finally, on a far more pedestrian note, if derrida's metaphysics of presence appear incomprehensible and much of his writing strikes us as giberish perhaps we should take this as a sign that Derridas ideas are
subtle and, as with any new idea we're presented with, requires a level of commitment from us before we can engage with it on a critical level.

Thanks for taking the time to look over this. I admit that there was very little in your article that I agreed with, but I certainly found it interesting. I think youre absolutely right to suggest that a naive and nihilistic form of deconstruction does run rife through humanities departments, but I would suggest that this is more a result of lazy thinking than Derrida's logocidal intent and we do him an injustice if we crucify him for his followers sins.

Keep on working people up, it gets things done..."

And from Michael Deitich:
"you say, 'no tyrannised person ever felt they were trapped in a language game.'

hmmm....can you spell Kafka?"

I replied: "Good point. The central character in 'The Trial' is clearly oppressed not by people who subject him to judicial kidnapping and hold him without informing him of the charges against him. No - he was oppressed by the terrors of langauge.

I have been a fool. I assumed the people in Guantanomo needed a high-profile and popular campaign to guarantee their basic human rights. In fact, they needed the concept of Guantanomo to be deconstructed."

Perian Wyar wrote to say:
"As much as it is shooting fish in a barrel, I'm glad that you're busting on Derrida. It never gets old.

The attractiveness of postmodern concepts is that they offer an eternal retreat- every time you see a concept you find threatening, you can just climb another tree by calling its basic concepts invalid on whatever criteria you choose. It is a shortcut in intellectual rigor- all justification and no justice."

Dave Boucher wrote:
"I think the ultimate irony (one might even call it Derridean) is that neither Derrida's critics nor his pseudo-followers have any understanding of deconstruction. Deconstruction is the perfectly free-floating signifyer that is used to instantly 'shut up' one's opponents (a conservative will simply roll his eyes, incant the magic word 'deconstruction' and thus dismiss his opponent; the pseudo-leftist will simply steel his face, cite the magic word 'logocentric' and thus dismiss his opponent). Alas, neither side makes any effort to actually understand what of value there might be in deconstruction.

To somewhat randomly illustrate some of the many errors in your post:

'The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation.'

This, quite simply, completely misunderstands deconstruction as an historical phenomenon. Post-structuralism (of which deconstruction was one version) was a reaction to the horrors of the twentieth century and (new for France) an attack on the totalizing theories (like Marxism) that had emerged from modernity. One can debate whether or not these totalizing theories were true inheritors of the Enlightenment (a similar debate took place in the 1940s in American political theory between the followers of Sabine and emigres like Strauss) as post-structuralists like Derrida believe, but one cannot assert that it is a product of decadence (except to say that it is a reaction to the decadence all around us).

'Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.'

Again, you are ignoring the context in which Derrida wrote -- that of hyper-political France of the mid-twentieth century. The Enlightenment in France gave us the Terror and, by the 1950s, the 'truth' that the culmination of knowledge was the French Communist Party! This was a delusion that needed to be, and thank God was, smashed. Or have you failed to notice that the primary casulty of post-structuralism was precisely its intended target -- Marxism? Why do you think communists like Eagleton are so worked up about deconstruction?

'Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis.'

Yes, and how is this different from Kierkegaard's argument that all 'knowledge' rests on a "leap of faith" or Kuhn's argument that all scientific knowledge exists within a paradigm that is itself neither true nor false? Or do you condemn Kierkegaard and Kuhn as nihilists too?

'And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives'

Of course he neglected to discuss alternatives -- since the evils of the modern world are primarily a result of the systems modernity build, why would you possibly want to build yet another system? The problem is not a neglect of alternatives, the problem is that Derrida's pseudo-followers have constructed their own monstrous system (see below).

'When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about...'

Except that most of the 'urgent crises' in the world have been CAUSED by the left-wing! As intellectuals, French post-structuralists engaged in the project of tearing down the left-wing illusions of the intelligentsia that had enabled these urgent crises. And by the way, tyrannized people DO write about being trapped in language-games, or have you never read an East European novel?

'But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.'

Huh? Since when have academic pseudo-followers of Derrida been paralyzed? Walk into any humanities class and you will get an hour-long hate-speech diatribe of Absolute Truth (men bad, women good; white bad, black good; straight bad; gay good). Of course, this shows that Derrida's 'followers' do not understand him any better than you do. Academia could use some deconstruction, and we could start with the Absolute Dualities of Men/Women, White/Black and Straight/Gay.

'It's very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher - even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri - you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.'

Why is it interesting to note that when you condemn a philosopher you clearly don't understand (and criticize by name-calling -- 'silly,' 'bankrupt'), you in turn get condemned by name-calling? Since when is there anything new in the dynamic of the sandbox?

'Don't get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument."

Huh? Your post IS an anti-intellectual 'argument'!

'Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. '

Well, the medium of journalism IS worthless, although it is one step above academia.

"Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not - as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla's ˜The Reckless Mind - Intellectuals in Politics', which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'."

Ugh! Citing an uniformed, neo-conservative denunciation of Derrida and a fraudulent, communist denunciation of Derrida is not reassuring as to your understanding of deconstruction. Instead, you should read Vincent Descombes' Modern French Philosophy for an examination of Derrida philosophically (Descombes, by the way, is not a deconstructionist or a supporter of deconstruction, but at least he understands it) and Morris Abrams' How to Do Things with Texts for an examination of deconstruction as literary criticism (Abrams was also not a deconstructionist). Alas, these are the only two texts critical of deconstruction that I have ever found that also understand it.

Sorry, but I have to conclude "a pox on both your houses."

Somebody from besht03@patriot.net wrote to say:
“Pynchon ain't who you think he is: his meta-narratives, while balancing out, are real, objectively actual--that his world is tragic forces overlapping between the heroes and the villains--arguably in too calculatedly schema that end up losing much of the world\'s messiness and resistance to the moral imperative of doing good--but no mistake about it--these things are not word games--they presuppose a real world where consequences play out--in Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist, Lt. Slothrop and his girlfriends wink out loose coherence; but this is not a narrative game--the novel has a very real Lt. Slothrop actually, not only allegorically, disappearing.

Its politics aside, for its descriptive language alone, forgetting the modernist and post-modernist (not the same thing as deconstructionist) allusions--this is one of the great novels. Try to reread it. From personal experience, reading Gravity's Rainbow in a Tel Aviv bomb shelter 1973 and in Lebanon in 1978 where we saw with our own eyes "A screaming comes across the sky" try to trust me when I say the novel is not some incestuous pointless interior self-referential monologue. This is not Derridean--there's some real bad mojo out in the world and Pynchon's taken a long hard look at it. Once you get past the first couple of chapters it will come easier. I don't know about the other feller.”

Jeb Bishop from Chicago wrote:
“Thank you for your article on Derrida. I studied philosophy for seven years and read a fair amount of Derrida both in French and in English translation, though nowhere near all of his work, and my reading was concentrated entirely on his earlier writings, the ones most specifically addressing philosophy and philosophers.

While there is no question that his verbiage is infuriating at times, I think it's a mistake to see him as nothing but an anarchic, anti-rationalist nihilist. At what I think of as his best, he makes a case that (among other points) we have no access to reality unmediated by concepts, i.e. language, and that any attempt to give a final explication of the meaning of a text is doomed because there is nothing to put such an explication on a more "foundational" level than any other piece of language. Whether or not you think he's made that case successfully (and I am not taking a stand on that), those are serious ideas worthy of discussion, not just a pseudointellectual shell game.

And in many of his writings he can in fact be found taking philosophical argument seriously, and attempting in good faith to construct arguments for his positions. I think here of Speech and Phenomena, many of the essays in Margins of Philosophy, the interviews in Positions, and significant parts of Limited Inc., especially the Q&A with Gerald Graff in the appendix. In the latter, for one, he is at pains to reject what he considers misinterpretations of his ideas (which itself shows that he accepts that some interpretations are better than others), arguing that he never claimed that linguistic meaning is completely undecidable, but only that its decidability is always limited to a particular context of discussion, and is never absolute in some God's-eye-view, transcontextual, ahistorical sense.

Again, whether he succeeds in his effort is one question, but the ideas themselves are both intelligible and nontrivial. Of course there is also the "bad," for me generally later, Derrida, as epitomized by the quote you give about the supercollider, or his ridiculous reaction to the events of September 11th. I'm not interested in defending or explaining that side of him, but only in pointing out that there is also, I think, a "good" side of his work.
Finally, I must take exception with your condemnation in passing of the writings of David Foster Wallace. While his style can be grating and smug, it's just factually incorrect to dismiss his work as nothing but self-referential semantic games. Infinite Jest, his major work so far, is in many ways a quite conventional novel, telling the interwoven stories of a large cast of well-drawn characters, and engaging issues of addiction, entertainment, and the sense of desperation in modern life in a passionate, heartfelt, moving, and non-ironic manner. Of course Wallace does also attempt to stretch form and storytelling convention in the book, but there's nothing nihilistic, or even especially Derridean, about his approach to that.”

A charmer called Aquarius Jackson e-mailed to say:
“I've read After Theory, and I think you're flattering yourself a bit too much by aligning Eagleton with yourself on Derrida. As a Marxist, Eagleton naturally had problems with poststructuralism and postmodernism, but he was also to intelligent and respectful not to call Derrida the "mad axeman of Western Philosophy" right after his death. I suspect his response to Deridda's passing was more measured and reasoned than yours.
Mark my words, "Johann Hari," I will outlive you just long enough to call you the "mad axeman of the blogosphere" right after you die. You've already made a convincing case "Why I won't be Mourning for Hari." Of course, I probably won't be able to publish it anywhere but a blog, because nobody's going to care when you die. Mark my words.”
Those words are, indeed, marked.

L Brunswick said:

"Your blog on Derrida was spot on. As you explained, the central problem is that he has a political motivation, but his ideas render political projects impossible. I would add that if there are no reality and no values, then it is impossible to have a political philosophy that describes what is the good society.

I think a lot of why the post-structuralists go wrong is that they were very influenced by Rousseau. This is partly because they are French and so were taught him growing up, and partly because the 19th century German philosophers they have taken up, such as Hegel and Neitzsche, were also very influenced by Rousseau (see Bernard Yack's remarkable book, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Neitzsche).

Rousseau taught that human beings are naturally asocial, and in that case to live in society is to be terribly oppressed (unless, he thought, you totally surrender your self). Foucault is following Rousseau here, as is Derrida, the latter making language, a feature of social existence, the means of oppression. Hence the post-structuralists strive for liberation, but believe it is impossible to achieve in even the smallest degree.

Rousseau could claim that the humans originally lived a solitary existence because at the time there was no solid knowledge about pre-history. More recently scientists have determined that humans have always been social, living originally in band societies, and so have social motives along with self-oriented ones (see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which is aimed directly at the post-modernists). Hence you have a basis for universal values, not in metaphysics, but rather in human nature.

Interestingly, many members of the English Enlightenment, in particular Hobbes and Smith, also believed that humans originally lived in band societies, and they had views of human nature rather similar to those of the evolutionary psychologists. It was on this basis that they developed their liberal political philosophies.

Something else: Though Derrida attacks metaphysics, he is himself actually quite metaphysical. For instance, to say that we cannot know reality directly, but only through language, is a version of cartesian dualism where mind and matter are in two different universes. More truly post-metaphysical is Heidegger, who throws cartesian dualism away and describes human existence as always already involved in the world, including understanding it.

Derrida is also metaphysical in that he assumes that distinctions are all up in the non-material symbolic realm, and so the body, allegedly dumb, disorderly matter, cannot produce them. Actually, the body is itself a structure of distinctions, and makes further distinctions in the process of its material, biological, social, and linguistic living (see Merleau-Ponty's books The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception.) As Wittgenstein said, what we finally have are the activities of living, and he meant that in a literal, biological sense.

A third way Derrida is metaphysical is that he assumes that meaning has validity only if it is total and absolutely non-contradictory. He is here following Socrates' method of the elenchus, where you propose a definition, but then throw it away if it is shown to be in some way imperfect. But actually, as Wittgenstein shows, real, useful meanings are
always imprecise. "

John Williamson wrote:
"I encourage critics of Derrida to step forward and air their critiques and I also encourage Derrida's definders to make their case. While I
fall in the pro-Derrida camp, I feel that Derrida's defenders perform a disservice to public discourse about Derrida whenever they attack a critic. I wholeheartedly agree with your point that you should not be required to footnote every remark and that you as a journalist have a valuable role to play in discourse that is different from the role of
academics.

Regarding the substance of your remarks on Derrida, I believe Derrida was attempting to solve a difficult problem. Namely, he wanted to critique the fundamentals of language and philosophy while operating within the bounds of language and philosophy. While deconstructionism asserts the presence of a bias in all language, I am not persuaded that it is nihilism or anything close. One of Derrida's main theses was that language and philosophy always served some group or interest. His most persuasive arguments used the language and formulations within the text he critiqued. Working within the text is deconstruction with a little 'd' at its best.

When I first started reading Derrida, I actually expected to find the nihilist critics described. But when reading Derrida on a variety of
subjects, I was surprised at how little he fit this description. Derrida's positions do not lend themselves to sound bites, but he always takes a stand. While some people may find his work dense or impenetrable, I would say to these people, take a breath, read slowly, give it some time. Derrida is worth the effort."

Phillip Ross wrote:
I loved what you had to say about Derrida, but do think that there's a lot of confusion still about postmodernism -- my academic subject
speciality. Postmodernism is a period of time marked by anxiety and uncertainty. It's a diverse period. Somehow, though, it has come to be associated with just one style of writing, one type of thinking. Perhaps this is evidence of the powerful influence of certain thinkers and writers.

But in time we'll look back on the postmodern period as we do the Romantic period, or perhaps impressionism. Certain themes will stand out, certain figures will stand out. But I don't think we're going to toss out everything produced in the second half of the 20th century. Rorty will stand out as an important figure; Derrida, hopefully, will lose some of
his sway. Infinite Jest will remain a major novel; Pynchon will fade away. Other, more traditional-seeming novelists today, like Graham Swift, may come to be regarded as offering better representations of our period, while works by writers like Amis and Rushdie will lose their appeal. This is all speculation of course -- or perhaps wishful thinking."

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just stumbled across this comment froma few years back by Noam Chomsky, with whom I have disagreed on many issues:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

Absolutely right. I see a Popular Front in defence of basic Enlightenment values forming here...

Nick Cohen, Observer columnist, wrote to Professor Gluckman:
"I read your impudent and vulgar email to Hari on the net. What is striking about it, apart from the obvious points about intelligent people paying their taxes to keep fools like you in work, the inability of tenured buffoons to stand by the basic principles that justify their universities, is its white male Eurocentric pseudo-self-confidence. Why on earth do you take the statement "Derrida is dead" to mean that Derrida is dead? I read it to mean that he was alive and well and living in a council flat in Doncaster. But then I'm not a part of the oppressive state which seeks to brainwash the young by filling their minds with debilitating, obscurantist drivel."

POST-POST-POST-SCRIPT: You can read a very interesting comment on this article at

http://www.logopolis.org.uk/weblog/2004/10/of-all-comments-made-about-jacques.html

and another interesting one at

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/derrida_et_al.html

and a rather snide one at

http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2004/10/insulting-dead.html

(Watch out for the 'you-don't-accept-our-view-so-you-are-intellectually-illiterate' mentalty there. This is a guy who thinks Antonio Negri can be intellectually engaged with.)