Response to New York Times Derrida Obituary

Yesterday, an email from the eng-grads mailing list at the University of Virginia (I’m still on the graduate student mailing list through the calendar year) came to me about a response to the NY Times’ anti-intellectual obituary of Jacques Derrida.

I went to the site and read letters by Judith Butler, the University of California, Irvine, faculty students and staff, and Yves-Alain Bois. Butler’s letter focuses on the Jonathan Kandell’s inaccurate appraisal of Derrida’s significance to philosophy as well as his failure to assess the degree to which Derrida was fully engaged with the most important thinkers of Western culture including “Plato and Rousseau, among others.” The letter jointly authored by the personnel of UCI recalls the many honors and honorary degrees conferred upon Derrida which give the lie to Kandell’s characterization of Derrida as an “abstruse theorist.” The faculty, students, and staff of UCI also emphasize the massive impact deconstruction has had on Western thought and letters and they testify to Derrida’s generosity with his time during his annual one-third time teaching position.

But of those letters, the one which most captured my attention was Bois’s, which takes Kandell and the NY Times to task for suggesting that by “borrowing Derrida’s logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-semitism.” (This is a quotation that Kandell himself is quoting.) For me, the suggestion that Derrida is culpable for the actions and behaviors of his former Nazi colleagues is unconscionable. Bois explains that Paul de Man

as a young man, between the age of 20 and 23, from 1940 to 1943, de Man had published literary columns in several Belgium journals controlled by the German occupiers

which is hardly qualifies as “numerous pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles.” However, my concern is that even if it had come to light that de Man and Martin Heidegger were active members of the Nazi Party, Derrida’s congress with ideas of theirs that do not support anti-Semitism is not blameworthy. It is important to recognize and evaluate the ethics and morality of the thinkers one engages, but it does not mean that should their morals be compromised that their support of a separate line of thinking invalidates that line of thinking outright.

In my “Critical Approaches to Fiction” class on Monday, I talked for maybe five minutes about the Derrida’s death, his importance to twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory, and the skew of Kendall’s obituary. Besides Kendall’s willingness to turn Derrida into a Nazi by intellectual association, I also remarked that for Kendall to say “[b]y the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic” is a gross misrepresentation of Derrida’s intellectual stature. On the contrary, by the late 1980s, a new generation professors-in-training grappled with Derrida’s ideas as they professionalized themselves in a market that refused to improve as had been predicted by many within the academy. During this time period and continuing into the present, Derrida is one of the few thinkers whose influence on dissertations and book manuscripts would rarely be questioned. His thinking on a wide range of subjects and influence on movements as fundamental as poststructuralism and deconstruction make Derrida one of the most prominent figures of twentieth-century intellectual life.