DERIDING DERRIDA

Jerry Harkins

Jacques Derrida who died recently at 74 invented deconstructionism, an academic vogue that had a long run but then mercifully faded from all but the most dicky niches of our culture including the Yale English Department. His friend Mark C. Taylor wrote a nice op-ed euloogy under the title “What Derrida Really Meant.” Of course, there is a delicious bit of academic irony in the title because what Derrida really meant was that nothing means anything. The problem, it seems, is that the only reality is the text but every text inherently contradicts itself. It was all a big joke, a literary hoax, but many academicians didn’t get it for several decades. As Derrida himself said, “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.” It probably sounds better in French but that is precisely what deconstruction is, if it exists. It is simply not possible to know what an author meant when he or she created a text such as “See Spot, see Spot run” because one cannot understand text and context simultaneously. Derrida thought this was a Good Thing. It frees Spot to take his or her rightful place in the entire panoply of impossibility instead of eternally running across a single page in search of some Platonic hydrant. It opens up an infinite Wonderland of interpretations all of which are equally invalid but the process is democratic. In the name of said process, the academic community set out to “destroy the illusion that the signifier has any fixed relation to the signified” and they damn near succeeded.

After demolishing the critics of this nonsense by the simple expedient of calling them names (“people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls”), Professor Taylor goes on to show how almost nobody really understood the master. He manages this without the slightest hint of satiric intent. The legion of the ignorant includes not only the aforementioned critics, but also many of his “most influential followers” who used the theory to propound pernicious ideas that were the very opposite of what Derrida was trying to teach. In other words, maybe it’s not so democratic after all. Taylor has the priestly gnosis but most deconstructionistas are fools, knaves or both. Jesus Christ had a similar problem. The only difference is you can’t name any of Derrida’s influential followers except, possibly, Jacques Chirac who thinks of the master as one of the seminal figures in the intellectual life of our times. I hope that clarifies your impression of M. Chirac.

French philosophy, though, is like French fashion. Succeeding generations of fetishists strut and fret their fifteen minutes upon the stage but nobody actually wears that stuff. Nor is it meant to be worn. It is sufficient to be seen in the front row at the show. This anoints you with the wisdom to say or write such foolish things as, “Orange is the new black.” Orange isn’t black, you know, but then again, according to the deconstructionists, neither is black. Which is a relief because no one knows what the hell is going on, least of all the couturiers who are barely articulate enough to sound better than they parse.

Derrida grew up under the influence of existentialism which is philosophy’s confirmation of the political nihilism of Nineteenth Century Russia. You have to be really depressed to be an existentialist. Its major themes are dread, alienation, instability and, my personal favorite, the "nullity of existential possibilities." One of the pioneers of this school was a German who taught in Switzerland. His name was Martin Heidegger but that’s not important because no one ever understood a single sentence he wrote. Unfortunately, he also wrote bad but revealing poetry such as these lines:

                   Today I am.
                  Unlike the rocks and trees
                  I exist.
                 Horses have nothing on me

Poor old Rene Descartes, another French philosophe, had claimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Which is where Heidegger got the idea that rocks and trees are not but horses are—at least for the moment. I mean, if thinking confers existence on Descartes, who, truth be told, was a horse’s ass, why not on the whole horse? Another servant of nihilism was Albert Camus who once, at the end of a long night, said, “I call the existential attitude philosophical suicide. How else to start from the world’s lack of meaning and end up by finding a meaning and a depth to it?” I think he’s trying to say either that meaning is self-destructive or that he is. Enter Derrida whom I like to think of as the hula hoop of philosophy, born from the marriage of despair and ignorance. Hundreds of thousands—millions maybe—of students have now wasted copious amounts of their parents’ assets in the pursuit of what is admitted to be meaningless and boring.

Derrida was not actually an existentialist. He was something worse, a phenomenologist. As a young man in Algiers, he had been attracted to the work of Edmund Husserl who is often credited as the father of phenomenonology which he defined as, “…the formal structures of phenomena or of both actual and possible material essences that are given through a suspension of the natural attitude in pure acts of intuition.” Husserl was not an existentialist either, but a psychologist before there was such a discipline. However, he was succeeded by Martin Heidegger, the poet we have already met whose incomprehensibility bows to no man and does homage to Husserl.

Philosophy would be fine if it weren’t for the philosophers and French philosophy would be fine if it weren’t for the French. Except, of course, for Voltaire who was a heretic and Rousseau who was a Swiss heretic. You might say the same thing about German, English and American philosophers (if there were any; John Dewey doesn’t count). But only the French could produce a philosopher king like Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre who ruled by the dictum, “Terror without virtue is powerless.” This is another of those aphorisms that should not be translated from the French. It is, nonetheless, the dictum at the heart of deconstructionism although as Taylor says, many of Derrida’s followers read him ass backwards. It comes out, “Virtue without terror is powerless.” Although it means nothing either way, it became the governing principle of the Modern Language Association for twenty years or more. Some years ago, there was a panel at the MLA convention called “Cultural Narratives of the Stock Exchange.” It was a hilarious discussion but not one of the panelists or audience members betrayed any sense of amusement. That couldn’t happen today because the scholars have replaced Derrida as gospel with Dragons and Dungeons 3.5 which makes their meetings a lot less boring without making them any more meaningful or relevant.

The great philosopher Lee Hayes once said, “Things ain’t what they used to be and, what’s more, they probably never were.” I have long asked myself two questions. First, was philosophy any better when it was being practiced by Greek stoics? And, second, why do I care about any of this? The answer to the first question is obvious. It is but a short step from Plato’s cave to Derrida’s black hole, albeit a step that took the philosophers the better part of 2,500 years to negotiate. The answer to the second question should be equally obvious. Caring about such things is why they pay me the big bucks.