Jacques Derrida was the author of more than 50 books and hundreds of essays during his long and distinguished career. Soon after he published Speech and Phenomena , Writing and Difference , and Of Grammatology in , he became internationally recognized as one of the most influential, challenging, and original thinkers of our time. His books and essays constitute critical dialogues with philosophers from Plato to Heidegger, as well as with a wide range of writers and artists from different national traditions and periods.
In the almost 20 years he taught at UCI, Jacques gave courses on subjects as diverse as the sovereignty of the nation-state, friendship, hospitality, the death penalty, and the concept and practice of pardon, sharing with students his analyses of a wide range of philosophical, historical, literary, and political texts from Plato to the present.
His bi-weekly lectures were attended by approximately students and faculty, with participants arriving not just from the West Coast but from across the entire country. He also gave a weekly closed seminar for the students enrolled in his class.
His generosity with his time was legend and greatly appreciated by the many students and faculty who lined up during his long office hours to talk with him.
Derrida takes the idea of a call from Heidegger. But, it is really with the publication of The Truth in Painting , and then throughout the s, that Derrida intensified his reading of Heidegger. Most notable is J. Although throughout his career Derrida would mention Husserl in passing, he surprisingly wrote a chapter on Husserl in his Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. His frustration must have culminated when he was offered an honorary degree at Cambridge University in A group of analytic philosophers wrote an open letter available online to the Times of London , in which they objected to Derrida receiving this honorary degree.
Despite the letter, Cambridge University awarded Derrida the degree. From , Derrida taught one semester a year at the University of California at Irvine.
As its name suggests, this group investigated how philosophy is taught in the high schools and universities in France. Right to Philosophy 2. Sometime in , Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on October 8, Since his death two biographies have appeared Powell and Peeters As we noted, Derrida became famous at the end of the s, with the publication of three books in It is hard to deny that the philosophy publications of this epoch indicate that we have before us a kind of philosophical moment a moment perhaps comparable to the moment of German Idealism at the beginning of the 19 th century.
Hence the strict taste for refinement, paradox, and aporia. Will we one day be able to, and in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine?
Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening we call that an event and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition we call that a machine. For that, it would be necessary in the future but there will be no future except on this condition to think both the event and the machine as two compatible or even in-dissociable concepts. These two concepts appear to us to be antinomic because we conceive an event as something singular and non-repeatable.
Moreover, Derrida associates this singularity to the living. The living being undergoes a sensation and this sensation an affect or feeling for example gets inscribed in organic material. The idea of an inscription leads Derrida to the other pole. The automatic nature of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life.
It is easy to see the incompatibility of the two concepts: organic, living singularity the event and inorganic, dead universality mechanical repetition. In truth, against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster. Instead, the relation is one in which the elements are internal to one another and yet remain heterogeneous. This generation will remain pure.
But, the term is particularly appropriate for Derrida, since his thought concerns precisely the idea of purity and therefore contamination.
Contamination, in Derrida, implies that an opposition consisting in two pure poles separated by an indivisible line never exists. Nevertheless, for Derrida, a kind of purity remains as a value. It does not inspire any judgment in me.
It simply exposes me to suffering when someone, who can be myself, happens to fall short of it. Anything but a purism. The idioms of a language are what make the language singular. An idiom is so pure that we seem unable to translate it out of that language.
This idiom seems to belong alone to French; it seems as though it cannot be shared; so far, there is no babble of several languages in the one sole French language. And yet, even within one language, an idiom can be shared. In other words, the taste for purity in Derrida is a taste for impropriety and therefore impurity.
The value of purity in Derrida means that anyone who conceives language in terms of proper or pure meanings must be criticized. Machine-like repeatability and irreplaceable singularity, for Derrida, are like two forces that attract one another across a limit that is indeterminate and divisible.
These conditions would function as a foundation for all experience. Following Kant but also Husserl and Heidegger , Derrida then is always interested in necessary and foundational conditions of experience. So, let us start with the simplest argument that we can formulate. If we reflect on experience in general, what we cannot deny is that experience is conditioned by time.
Every experience, necessarily, takes place in the present. In the present experience, there is the kernel or point of the now. What is happening right now is a kind of event, different from every other now I have ever experienced. Yet, also in the present, I remember the recent past and I anticipate what is about to happen. The memory and the anticipation consist in repeatability. Because what I experience now can be immediately recalled, it is repeatable and that repeatability therefore motivates me to anticipate the same thing happening again.
Therefore, what is happening right now is also not different from every other now I have ever experienced. At the same time , the present experience is an event and it is not an event because it is repeatable. The conclusion is that we can have no experience that does not essentially and inseparably contain these two agencies of event and repeatability. This basic argument contains four important implications. First , experience as the experience of the present is never a simple experience of something present over and against me, right before my eyes as in an intuition; there is always another agency there.
Repeatability contains what has passed away and is no longer present and what is about to come and is not yet present. The present therefore is always complicated by non-presence.
Second , the argument has disturbed the traditional structure of transcendental philosophy, which consists in a linear relation between foundational conditions and founded experience. In traditional transcendental philosophy as in Kant for example , an empirical event such as what is happening right now is supposed to be derivative from or founded upon conditions which are not empirical.
Or, in traditional transcendental philosophy, the empirical event is supposed to be an accident that overcomes an essential structure. We can describe this second implication in still another way.
In traditional philosophy we always speak of a kind of first principle or origin and that origin is always conceived as self-identical again something like a Garden of Eden principle.
Third , if the origin is always heterogeneous, then nothing is ever given as such in certainty. Whatever is given is given as other than itself, as already past or as still to come.
Faith, perjury, and language are already there in the origin. Fourth , if something like a fall has always already taken place, has taken place essentially or necessarily, then every experience contains an aspect of lateness. It seems as though I am always late for the origin since it seems to have always already disappeared.
So far, we can say that the argument is quite simple although it has wide-ranging implications. As we said above, Derrida will frequently write about autobiography as a form of auto-affection or self-relation.
Always, Derrida tries to show that auto-affection is hetero-affection; the experience of the same I am thinking about myself is the experience of the other insofar as I think about myself I am thinking of someone or something else at the same time.
In Voice and Phenomenon Derrida recognizes that perception, for Husserl, is that of adumbrations, with an intentional meaning unifying the different profiles. More specifically, Derrida argues that, when Husserl describes lived-experience Erlebnis , even absolute subjectivity, he is speaking of an interior monologue, auto-affection as hearing-oneself-speak. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities.
Derrida's style was as upsetting to traditional philosophers as were his arguments. This was an important element of his famous debate in the s with the American philosopher John Searle concerning the significance of JL Austin's speech-act theory, which attempted to distinguish between different kinds of utterance. While praising Austin, Derrida criticised him for giving too much priority to "serious" uses of language, and not recognising the importance of the ways in which the same speech-acts are used in humour, play-acting, teaching, citation and on other "non-serious" occasions.
Searle criticised Derrida for misrepresenting Austin which in some respects he did , but the American, not appreciating the function of Derrida's playful style, equally misrepresented the Frenchman, who responded by writing an even more outrageous rejoinder.
What might have been a valuable dialogue between Derrida and analytical philosophy of language led nowhere. In fact, Derrida had several styles, ranging from the technical analysis of Greek terminology, through highly personal meditations to an exuberant sporting with language. He could be a highly comic writer - and an equally comic speaker, with an impeccable sense of timing - even when the issues were of the utmost gravity.
This affront to convention was not born of a desire to shock; it was part of a strategy of undermining the categories - including the distinction between the serious and the non-serious - that had long dominated philosophical language. Exceptions, such as Nietzsche, were given due credit. Derrida's writing is strange and difficult because it has to be: to test the limits of what can be thought is to test the limits of what can be articulated.
Imitations of the Derridean style seldom succeed, and it is not surprising that a caricature version of Derrida emerged. But this flamboyantly self-regarding figure, dismissing the search for truth, declaring historical knowledge to be impossible, denying that there is anything beyond language - and doing all this in a relentless series of puns and neologisms - bore no resemblance to the person himself. He was a cautious thinker, frequently pointing out the unavoidable simplifications in what he was saying; he always insisted on philosophical and linguistic rigour even if his understanding of what constituted rigour differed from the traditional one ; and he respected truth and historical accuracy in a very traditional manner.
He was a man of remarkable modesty and generosity, quite without self-importance. Anyone who attended one of the many conferences dedicated to his work observed how conscientiously he listened to every paper whether by a famous thinker or a graduate student , took careful notes, and asked polite but searching questions.
Unknown academics sending manuscripts would receive handwritten which sometimes meant virtually undecipherable comments in response, always written in a positive spirit. Jackie Derrida - he later adopted a more "correct" French version of his first name - was born in El-Biar, near Algiers, into an indigenous Jewish family. All Rights Reserved.
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