Jacques Derrida: Encyclopedia II - Jacques Derrida - Work

Jacques Derrida - Work

Jacques Derrida - Early works

Derrida's earliest work was in phenomenology. His earliest academic manuscript for a degree was a work on Edmund Husserl and "genesis", submitted in 1954 and much later published as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Phenomenology. In 1962 he published a translation of Husserl's Foundations of Geometry, for which he wrote a lengthy introduction entitled "The Origin of Geometry".

Derrida's first major contribution to the international academic community came with his paper "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", delivered at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. (This essay was subsequently included in Writing and Difference - see below.) The conference was billed as a consideration of structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France but only then becoming familiar to academic audiences in the United States, particularly departments of French and Comparative Literature, where faculty were least dependent on the lengthy process of translating monographs. Derrida was remarkable among invitees in that he never had orthodox commitments to structuralism and had offered papers critical of structuralist scholarship as early as 1963.

Derrida's lecture was written with words of praise for structuralist accomplishment and reservations about its internal limitations. This contributed to a sense that the labours of structuralism had moved on to a point where structuralism wasn't itself anymore, supporting subsequent declarations that many of the same people who had contributed to structuralism were now rather producing "post-structuralism". Near the beginning of the essay, Derrida argued:

"[...] the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence - eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth." ("Structure, Sign and Play" in Writing and Difference, p. 353.)

The fallout from Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also of personal note to Derrida, being where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.

Jacques Derrida - 1967-1972

Derrida's work consistently demonstrated an interest in all the disciplines under discussion at the Baltimore conference, as was evidenced by the subject matter of the three collections of work published in 1967, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, which contained essay-length studies of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ferdinand de Saussure, Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger, Hegel, Foucault, Georges Bataille and Descartes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, and writers such as Edmond Jabes and Antonin Artaud. It is in this trinity of early-ish works that the 'principles' of deconstruction were set out, not through theoretical explication but, rather, by demonstration, where he showed that the arguments promulgated by their subject-matter exceeded and contradicted the oppositional parameters in which they were situated. The next five years of lectures and essay-length work were gathered into two 1972 collections, Dissemination and Margins of Philosophy, at which time a collection of interviews - published together as Positions in 1981 - was also released.

Jacques Derrida - Of Spirit

On March 14th, 1987, Derrida first presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was subsequently published, in October 1987, with revisions as Of Spirit (the French title Heidegger et la Question: De l'esprit et autres essais makes very pointed reference to the burned book De l'esprit by Helvétius and mockery of Heidegger's reference to "French rationalism" in his famous Spiegel interview "Only a God can save us now"). Of Spirit demonstrates, in response to the controversy over Heidegger's Nazism, the transformation of Derrida's active philosophical inheritance. The work is headlined by Derrida's tracing of the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work. Reconnecting in a number of respects with previous work on Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy) Derrida reconsiders three other fundamental and recurring elements of Heideggerian philosophy which span the corpus: the distinction between man and animal, technology, and the privilege of questioning as the essential mode of philosophy.

"Of Spirit" is a crucial intervention in the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism, and, somewhat unexpectedly, came off the press at the same time as the publication, in France, of a book by an unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farias, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farias in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He correctly noted that Farias was a very weak reader of Heidegger's thought, and added, controversially at the time, that a lot of the evidence Farias and his supporters touted as new had been known in the philosophical community for a long time. Much of Derrida's position in "Of Spirit" and subsequent essays on Heidegger is echoed in the positions of Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

The Heidegger controversy of 1987 is important because, in the long run, it highlighted the ethical and religious turns that Derrida's writing was taking, especially his philosophical proximity to Emmanuel Levinas.

Jacques Derrida - Other Works

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. He was said to have released more work in 2003 than in any other year. He was so prolific that there is no current bibliography of his work that might be firmly described as complete. However, a good starting point is the bibliography included in Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe (eds.), Understanding Derrida (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Two further points deserve mention: Derrida's 'political turn', heralded by Specters of Marx in 1994, saw him divert his attention to, perhaps, more specific matters in politics, though his views remain subject to critical speculation.

His 'ethical turn', as witnessed in works such as The Gift of Death, see Derrida employing his still controversial method of deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. Derrida critiques Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in this work and claims a leap of faith is required in many aspects of life, not just religious faith. In the view of the present author (so to speak), Derrida's debt to Nietzschean genealogy is unmistakable - particularly in the two writers' linking of the concepts of responsibility, guilt and the genesis of the Judeao-Christian tradition.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Work", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki