Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)

1. Historical context and influences

To identify all of the philosophical problematics at stake in Derrida’s writings, it would probably be necessary to have some familiarity with the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Austin, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Lacking such familiarity, readers of Derrida are often not in a position to recognize – let alone assess – the philosophical moves he makes. Ill-equipped commentators have ascribed to Derrida theses that have nothing to do with his actual philosophical concerns. Some of the confusion can be traced to the borrowing of Derrida’s term ‘deconstruction’ by the literary critic Paul De Man and others for whom the term has come to refer to a style of reading texts. For Derrida, deconstruction is less a reading technique than it is a way of approaching the ‘wholly other’ and of attempting thereby to conjure ‘an experience of the impossible’.

Derrida’s work can be situated within the broad constellation of post-Hegelian efforts to consider whether a rigorous critique of the language of metaphysics can free philosophical thinking from its regularly repeated dogmatic gestures. The theme of avoiding metaphysical dogmatism is one that could be traced back to Kant and the British empiricists, and even to Descartes in certain respects. But criticizing metaphysical dogmatism and criticizing metaphysical language are not necessarily the same enterprise, and it is only in the post-Hegelian world that the project of interrogating language becomes a steady theme for Western philosophers. Defined in this way, the constellation of figures to which Derrida belongs would include members of the pragmatist and logical positivist movements as much as it would those thinkers associated with continental philosophy. But it is primarily out of the continental tradition that Derrida’s own philosophical concerns have developed.

In his earliest writings, Derrida is drawn to the Husserlian phenomenological project as a rigorous attempt to develop an account of signification (see Husserl, E.). Noting, however, that Husserl retains the philosophical ideal of univocal language, Derrida argues that Husserl’s phenomenological method remains motivated by a traditional metaphysical appeal to the value of truth as self-presence. To some extent, Heidegger had already criticized Husserlian phenomenology on similar grounds. Appreciative of Heidegger’s arguments but also hesitant about some of his conclusions, Derrida takes Heidegger’s attempt to define a ‘task for thinking’ at the ‘end of philosophy’ to pose a number of crucial questions to which he has repeatedly returned in his own work.

In his later writings, Heidegger critiques the claim that language is something which ‘belongs to man’, substituting for this the attempt to show how ‘man belongs to language’. Were he simply advancing a proposition thereby, Heidegger would seem to be saying that thought does not determine language; rather, language determines thought. But it would be a mistake to read Heidegger as making an empirical claim of the Whorfian variety. If the beings that comprise the world manifest themselves as such only by way of language, then language is that which opens up the world as such – that is, as a sphere of particular beings which can be studied empirically. Such a claim would be analogous to the Kantian thesis that the basic categories of human thought are not mere empirical concepts which we get from our observation of objects; rather, they constitute the very objectivity of the world. Kant’s thesis is transcendental. For Heidegger, the fact that different languages constitute the world differently for different speakers renders problematic the Kantian appeal to universal concepts. If thinking is always limited by a finite language which it cannot master, it follows that thinking can at most raise regional problems about the ways in which it is so determined.