Good Speed, Jacques

By Crispin Sartwell

Those who wished the mighty Jacques Derrida dead (and there are many of them) have gotten what they wanted..

With only a few possible rivals (Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty, perhaps) Derrida was, by the time he died last week, the world's best-known philosopher. In a way this is not saying much, because no philosopher in the world is truly well-known, at least outside France.

That's in part because most people have never been very interested in inquiry at the highest level of generality, inquiry with no decisive results and no practical upshot. It's also in part because of an almost willful refusal of academic philosophers to talk to people who are not already experts.

In one way, Derrida represents this tendency at its degree absolute: not only can most "laypeople" not understand it, but (truth be told) most Ph.D's in philosophy cannot understand it. And though plenty of folks would deny this, I myself think it's clear that Derrida wrote with purposeful obscurity, in a language designed for a small cadre of followers.

Here is a tiny sample, selected quite at random from Derrida's Margins of Philosophy: "Therefore the sign of this excess must be absolutely excessive as concerns all presence-absence, all possible production or disappearance of beings in general, and yet in some manner it must still signify, in a manner unthinkable by metaphysics itself." Who could quibble with that?

By the 1980s Derrida's influence was pervasive, particularly in literature departments. His acolytes were everywhere, a slightly glazed and crazed gleam in their eye. More crazed yet were his opponents, who seemed to think he was the antichrist, because no truth or goodness survived his "deconstructive" method.

To me in that era Derrida was a mere irritant, something that other grad students would brandish as we established our tiny brainiac pecking order.

Then one day I met him, briefly, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association: three thousand philosophers in the DC Sheraton: the geek polis. I was a new-minted Ph.D. looking for a job. He was a legend.

As we stood at neighboring urinals, I made some bright remark along these lines, "Hey, you're Jacques Derrida!" And he replied, as I recall, "Perhaps I am." His eyes sparkled with the true spirit of mischief.

Sometimes, despite yourself, you like someone instantly. Derrida looked like a gremlin or a leprechaun: small, shaggy, grey-haired, and (as I thought, anyway) irrepressibly happy.

I thought much better of him after that, because I suddenly realized there was a kind of comedy or performance art happening. It's not that he was insincere, it's just that there was a parodic element throughout.

Indeed, if deconstruction could be summed up quickly, it'd be something like this: every text undermines itself, betrays itself, parodies itself, collapses in on itself. And of course Derrida could not deny that this was as true of his own texts as anyone else's.

So he made it explicit, just kept giving you no ground to stand on, kept just out of reach of your interpretation of what he was doing.

As he went on, he perhaps deepened, and made some assertions that must have driven his own followers to drink and brought comfort to his enemies, such as that justice was the only concept that escaped deconstruction.

And his pervasiveness faded: deconstruction became one strategy among many for textual interpretation. The world had survived the apocalypse.

Though we may blame him for making obscurantism fashionable, we should also credit him for the spirit of play with which he did it.

And so, Jacques, as you wing your way toward the afterlife, if any - there to demonstrate to God that he's Satan, or to Satan that he's God - I bid you a fond adieu.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Six Names of Beauty" (Routledge 2004).