La « survie » de Jacques Derrida
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Dans le déménagement de ma vie,
j’avais emporté quelques livres, quelques compagnons sûrs. Parmi eux, des
livres de Jacques Derrida, Dissémination, La religion, Le
monolinguisme de l’autre. Je les avais lus sans savoir que je
partirai.
C’est dans cette ignorance-là, à
tout et à soi, que nous placent les textes de Jacques Derrida. Etait-ce
cette expérience discrète de ne pas savoir, que j’avais voulu emporter avec
moi ? Je ne le savais pas. Je ne le sais pas encore. Mais ces livres
choisis hier sont aujourd’hui bien à leur place sur les rayons de la
bibliothèque. Ils détiennent ce savoir qui voyage en nous sans qu’on le
sache. Livres rares qui vivent en nous dans un perpétuel devenir.
Rachel Boué
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“Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74:”
The New York Times and The ‘Abstruseness’ of Deconstruction.
“Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris
at 74,” read the front page obituary in the October 10, 2004 edition of
the New York Times. Abstruse? Would not a term like “renowned,” in
all its bland, even-keel journalistic intent, have sufficed? Normally,
working against memory and the archive, the obituary pieces are frankly
quite forgettable. Does not the use of abstruse add a moralizing and
implicitly negative value judgment, to what is meant to be a summation of
Derrida’s life and work?
In English abstruse is derived from
the Latin abstrusus,
from abstrudere, meaning “to thrust away” or “to conceal.” Two
definitions are given in most English dictionaries, one meaning “remote
from apprehension, difficult to be comprehended or understood, recondite,”
as in abstruse learning. Surely this is the sense the Times implies,
conjuring a popular image of Derrida as some confusing academic neo-mystic,
a magician performing semantic parlor tricks.
The Times described Derrida
as a theorist rather than philosopher. The use of the word theorist points
to the myriad of disciplines Derrida influenced. Mark Taylor did write,
four days later, a piece that did intellectual justice to Derrida entitled
“What Derrida Really Meant.” This piece captured Derrida’s
influence on a number of academic spheres. It is indeed hard, if not
impossible, to imagine philosophy today without Derrida. And as his
influences were pan-disciplinary, the future of philosophy may very well
lie in its relation to other fields. As Taylor illustrates, the effects of
this dispersion are not always to add complexity to these other areas.
Emily Eakin writes in the October 17, 2004 edition of the New York Times,
“Today, the term [deconstruction] has become a more or less meaningless
artifact of popular culture, more likely to turn up in a description of an
untailored suit in the pages of Vogue than in a graduate seminar on James
Joyce.” The point is quite astute. In several short decades the term
traversed from philosophy and literary criticism through art, to popular
culture. Deconstructing Harry?
In this
era of news tickers plastered on cable channels, and public opinion
measured in instant polls, deconstruction can easily seem obscure. Is this
entirely wrong-headed? The second definition of abstruse is listed as
“obsolete” English usage, that of something being concealed or hidden out
of the way. Read in this light, even Derrida’s disciples should embrace
the idea that Derrida was an abstruse theorist, one whose “real work,” if
there is such a thing, is constantly concealed behind a popular culture
cloak of misunderstanding.
The New York Times certainly
does not help to curb the propagation of deconstruction’s misapplications.
Indeed, a cursory search on deconstruction at the paper’s own website
yields results on topics as seemingly disparate as a post-presidential
election analysis to the San Francisco Exploratorium museum’s replica of
dermestid beetles eating the flesh and bones of a dead baby mouse. In
almost all cases, the term is predictably used to mean “to take apart” or
to dissemble.” This misuse, or pop vernacularism, brings us back to the
abstruseness of deconstruction in the wake of Derrida’s death.
The obituary ends with a final
anecdote, wherein Derrida is asked by a Times reporter what deconstruct “is.”
He responds angrily, “Why don’t you ask a physicist or a mathematician
about difficulty? Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so
obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel
they understand enough to understand more.” While many no doubt attended
in response to a familiarity with his work, all attended to understand the
thoughts hidden behind the abstruseness, in the obscure sense, of
deconstruction.
The obituary concludes with Derrida
refusing to respond to the question of what deconstruction is, asked again
later in the same interview. “It is impossible to respond. I can only do
something which will leave me unsatisfied.” The Times reporter
interprets this comment as willfully descending into abstruseness in the
popular sense. With the obsolete sense in mind, Derrida spent a lifetime
writing books that attempt to answer this very question, even in it’s
unanswerably.
When reading the New York Times coverage of Derrida’s death, the
image left in my mind was one from the 2002 US documentary Derrida.
There is a great media clip that beautifully captures Derrida’s thoughts
on misapplications of his work due to sloppy reading in the face of
abstruseness. Derrida is being interviewed by a BBC reporter. The BBC
reporter is explaining an argument wherein the sitcom Seinfeld is said to
be deconstructive. The reporter elaborates that Seinfeld is a show about
nothing, wherein what one has for dinner has the same gravity as the
existence of God. Derrida looks into the camera, genuinely baffled, and
replies, “Deconstruction as I understand it does not produce any sitcoms.
Do your homework and read."
James Zika
