Against the Very Idea of Jacques Derrida

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As far as the mainstream press goes, one of the better articles on Derrida's death was printed in the Guardian a few days ago. Though I'm inclined, on a gut level, to be sympathetic with the kind of reactionary-liberal criticism (stay with me folks) levelled at Derrida by the New York Times among others, the Guardian article, I think, offers a fairer and more subtle account of exactly what's at issue when we talk of the differences between realism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, analytical and continental philosophy. By the way you can find it HERE.

The divide between French (and to some extent German) thought and its Anglophonic counterpart is at least as hotly contested and nuanced as the divide between french fries and proper English chips. But the stakes are far greater. I'm not going to claim any expertise on the debate, but I am (and certainly we all should be) an anxious and interested party to it. Richard Lea does as good a job of hitting the main points as can be done in a newspaper article, so I won't echo him. But I will disagree with him on one point. Contrary to what Lea suggests, it DOES seem to me that there ARE genuine relativists out there, prominent ones like Richard Rorty, to use a name Lea mentions, and Frederic Jameson, to use one he does not. But the classic targets of anglophonic venom--Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard for starters--don't, on my reading, come out in the end as strictly relativistic.

Serious thinkers warrant serious consideration, and I doubt there is an analytical philosopher around who could walk away from The Order of Things, Who's Afraid of Philosophy?, or The Postmodern Condition, without being expanded. If the purpose of philosophy is to touch reality, than we cannot reject the continental project wholesale just because we don't like its methods. Regardless, the onus is on analytical philosophy to answer the critiques of the Western Tradition/Rationalism/Humanism/Modernity that the post-Marxists, poststructuralists and postmodernists have put forward. If our analytic is really so much better than their hermeneutic, then why does their's seem to gain ground even as our's loses it? To reply that people are stupid or base is to evade the question. We need better and more usable answers.

This, of course, is not to say that there aren't about a zillion Po-Mo "critical theorists" who will be FIRST AGAINST THE WALL when the Revolution comes. There was a time when the only "critical theorist" around was a Prussian out of Königsberg by the name of Immanuel Kant. Nowadays, any lit-crit with a chip on his shoulder and a Ph.D. in the "Human Sciences" can lay claim to endless stretches of interpretive space and theoretical discourse. These latte-sipping lemmings are about as post-Marxist as Stalin was. I'd like to think that any of the dead Frenchmen mentioned above would have more interest in bedding one of these sophists than supervising their dissertation. But I digress...

The point is, ideas are grand and learning new ones is positively orgaistic. But if there is one thing old Jacques-the-Ripper taught us, it's that ideas, bound as they are to language, are readily hijacked and distorted. Just ask the Editorial Board at Duke University's publication Social Text, who learned this the hard way after falling ass-first into the postmodern parody of Sokal's Hoax (If you click one thing in this meandering post, make it this one. It's positively priceless). So maybe it isn't, as many an old English philosopher have worried, that we have to protect the masses from postmodernism. Maybe it's that we have to protect postmodernism from the masses.

-A Fosterian dialectic