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FEATURES 
Is Derrida really dead?
Rod Liddle grapples with
the life and meaning of the great deconstructionist
Jacques Derrida, the famous French philosopher, is ‘dead’. But as
there is no straightforward, one-to-one relationship between the
signifier (‘dead’) and the thing signified (the termination or otherwise
of the actual person, M. Derrida), we cannot be entirely sure what
has happened. We are faced instead with an endless multiplicity
of truths, a string of infinite possibilities. I suppose it is entirely
up to the reader to decide. It would be logocentric of us all to
assume that Jakki’s corporeal remains are in a state of decomposition
simply because of the unbidden and puzzling presence, in our newspapers,
of that signifier ‘dead’ in relation to the name ‘Jacques Derrida’
— a name which is, of course, itself merely a signifier bearing
no straightforward relationship with the actual thing which we have
come to call ‘Derrida’. The ‘Jacques Derrida’ which has ‘died’ was,
or is, merely a refraction of a refraction of reality. So ‘Jacques
Derrida’ might indeed be ‘dead’. After all, he was getting on a
bit and had been suffering from that thing which we have come to
call ‘cancer’. And then again, he might not be ‘dead’, whatever
that is. Take your pick. We have to allow for the possibility that,
contrary to the doctor’s notes, which are a refraction of reality
again, and contrary to the lamentations of family and friends and
admirers and the newspaper obits and the undertaker’s report, what
has actually happened might well be this: somebody who isn’t ‘Jacques
Derrida’ hasn’t ‘died’. Go on, write that headline.
,img>Hell, it’s confusing stuff, isn’t it? I bet it wasn’t like
this when a good old dependable British philosopher like Hume, or
maybe Bertrand Russell, bit the dust. With them, one minute they
were there, alive, without speech marks, and the next minute they
were dead, devoid again of speech marks, and indeed breath. You
know where you are with British philosophers and, up to a point,
German philosophers. Except for Nietzsche, of course. And maybe
Habermas. And Hegel.
Our problem comes, as ever, with the French. You think the ‘death’
of ‘Derrida’ is philosophically problematic? Just wait until Jacques
Lacan dies. Believe me, we won’t know whether we’re coming or going.
Lacan makes Derrida look like Paul Gascoigne.
The thing I always loved about Derrida was that all of those people
on the Left who loved him never, ever read anything he wrote. This
was about the only thing Derrida had in common with Marx: a huge
fan club and a great lagoon of unreadness. University courses dedicated
to their work; acre after acre of academic library stuffed to the
gills with commentaries and revisions; thousands upon thousands
of graduates pinning pictures of them on the mildewed walls of their
bedsits. And only nine people in Europe actually read their published
work. Well, maybe a few of your more intellectual Trots and commies
read a couple of pages of Das Kapital or, more likely, the Communist
Manifesto or Grundrisse and then, faced with Derrida, managed most
of the preface to Of Grammatology. Then, through the conduit of
helpful five-page readers and crib notes they would bandy about
terms and concepts like the ‘negation of the negation’ (from Marx)
and of course ‘différance’ (from Jakki) and start to Change The
World. (Philosophers have hitherto attempted to explain the world:
the point, however, is to change it. Remember?)
Reader: I read the stuff. Solely out of adolescent intellectual
one-upmanship. There were many other more pleasurable things to
be doing when you were 17. I wished I’d done them more and Derrida
less, frankly. Although Derrida at least was interesting, from time
to time. I’m not sure you can say the same thing of Marx.
Pleasingly, Derrida became championed by the leading proponents
of late 1970s popular culture. He starred in a strange film during
which he insisted that the person at whom the camera was pointing
was not, actually, Jacques Derrida. I can’t remember the name of
the film but I do recall that the soundtrack was not by Dmitri Tiomkin
or even Ennio Morricone, but provided instead by a chap playing
the drums on a roof to the accompaniment of the Radio Four Shipping
News.
Derrida got into the charts, too. The briefly cool Welsh blue-eyed
soul band Scritti Politti recorded a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’.
Its first few lines went like this:
I’m in love with Jacques Derrida,
Read a page and know what I needta
Take apart
My baby’s heart.
And after a while Jacques began to spread his wings. There is only
so far that you can go with lit. crit., after all. So he moved into
architecture. There was a deconstructionist house which looked pretty
weird and had all the central heating on the outside. Why had nobody
thought of that before? Genius.
So that’s all the funny stuff, the stuff that makes us think the French
are suckers where yer bloody intellectuals are concerned. But while
the stuff for which Jacques Derrida will be remembered — the death
of the author, the absence of such a thing as a single inviolable
truth, and an embracing of the beautiful complexity of the linguistic
process — may lead to apparent philosophical absurdities, occasional
hilarity and the sort of moronic and predictable leader column in
the Daily Telegraph which greeted his death, we should not give him
up so lightly. Because at the heart of Derrida’s philosophy was a
laudable commitment to making mischief and, more than this, a fervent
belief in the notion of doubt, something which is intrinsic to our
conception of democracy. Without doubt, there’s no democracy.
Nor was Jacques Derrida necessarily a man of the Left. Sure, along
with his sulphurous Francophone fellow travellers — Roland Barthes,
Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault — he considered himself a man of the
Left. But by his own lights we are not obliged to take him at his
word. Certainly there is nothing very left-wing about the people from
whom Derrida drew his philosophical inspiration. Sigmund Freud was
a bourgeois liberal. Friedrich Nietzsche, I think we have to concede,
was somewhat right-of-centre. And Martin Heidegger, whom Derrida adored
and was later forced to become an apologist for, cheerfully supported
the Belgian Nazi party. I mean, come on, be honest. As mentors go,
it’s hardly William Morris, Gramsci and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist,
is it?
At heart, Derrida was for the individual, and his brilliance was to
question everything in which we believe. So, Jakki, rest in peace.
If you are Jacques Derrida. And if you are dead.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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