197. Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps — A Biography of Jacques Derrida

Miguel Zenha

(Versão em português / Portuguese translation)

In Peter Salmon’s book, we are before a defense of Derrida as a philosopher since it

aims to set out the intellectual development of Jacques Derrida (…) argue for its importance in the history of philosophy. It will argue that Derrida is one of the great philosophers of this or any age; that his thinking is a crucial component of any future philosophy; that his thinking is immediately—always already—applicable to the world as we find it; and that this application has political heft. (p. 4)

Derrida’s purposes are plainly announced in Salmon’s plainspoken introduction: “Derrida’s fundamental idea is to (…) reject, disorder, complicate (…) what we mean by ‘key concepts’ or ‘fundamental ideas’” (p. 3), inasmuch as “any emphatic statement carries within it a cultural, lexical and political history that reinforces (engenders, instigates, propagates) what Derrida called ‘metaphysics of presence’” (p. 4). Moreover, Derrida’s first kick-off is appropriately credited as the study on Husserl’s conception of “now”, that is, “the unexamined assumption (…) that consciousness is fully present” (p. 5).

An Event, Perhaps uses Derrida’s private life as steppingstone regarding his work and thought. Nearly every detail of Derrida’s intimacy is predominately a glimpse coming from Benoît Peeter’s Derrida, which indeed remains to this day the most exhaustive and reliable biography of the author of Dissemination. So one does not, for example, learn much about Derrida’s occasional depression episodes, amphetamine use, his doubts regarding a career as a teacher, the relationship both with his wife Marguerite Aucouturier and with their two sons, or the affair with Sylviane Agacinski. Yet, and showing Salmon’s insightfulness, there are two important exceptions to the haste usually deployed when Derrida’s private life is on the table: his childhood and the query with high-flown political engagements.

“The Kid”, the book’s first chapter, focus on Derrida’s early years in Algeria—Derrida was born in 1930—namely the progressive yet bumpy assimilation of the Jewish population—Derrida’s family was Sephardic presumably from Toledo—, the “particularly intense” bond with his mother and the death of his brother Paul, who died before Derrida was born. That is why “he described himself as existing ‘in the place of another’” since “the death of Paul, it is impossible not to speculate, was responsible for the birth of Jackie [Derrida’s real first name]” (p. 19). According to Salmon, even though “it is, of course, biographically reductive to see in this mélange of identities (…) the origin of deconstruction—leaving aside Derrida’s problematizing of ‘origin’” (p. 22), it is nevertheless important to observe that Derrida himself says that “‘genealogy does not clarify everything (…) but could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing’”. This leads Salmon to the conclusion that “identity (…) is never given, received or attained: only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures” (p. 23). What has been said is pivotal and precise since, for Derrida, “identity” is not entirely the same as “genealogy”, tradition or heritage, but, or consequently, all these domains are intimately kindred: identity and genealogy exist in line with a logic of blend and compound.

Another enduring aspect arising from Derrida’s childhood is his relationship with the French language: “‘(…) if I love this language like I love my life (…) it is because I love it as a foreigner who has been welcomed, and who has appropriated this language for himself as the only possible language for him’”. Furthermore,

“Why there is in my writing a certain, I wouldn’t say perverse but somewhat violent, way of treating this language. Out of love. Love in general passes by way of the love of language (…) you don’t just go and do anything with language: it pre-exists us and it survives us” (p. 25)

As it become especially clear here, language matters since it outbids its linguistic trait: it is linked to understanding as the primary instance for being in the world.

This peculiar connection with language is actually reinforced by Derrida’s concept of “promise”, a manifestation of that “non-presence” dear to him, which Salmon, despite his preference for “secret”, rightly often ascertains—namely when Salmon talks about the performative feature of words in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Walter Benjamin’s “translation” and Derrida’s distinction between “to come” and “future”. In fact, “promise” is engaged with a cascade of Derridean notions, all mentioned in the book, such as “secret”, “aporia”, “memory”, “time”, “hauntology”, “writing”, “self-affection”. As a matter of fact, this engagement greatly owes its specificity to Derrida’s utmost commitment, literature, since both literature and promise are incommensurable “inscriptions”. They come about within diverse periods of time, and we witness the interplay of a considerable amount of distance. Overall literature stands for dealing with dead people, so we are before a significant form of spectrality. These inscriptions disseminate belief as a vital attribute of individuals, professing an inward dimension as onset. A promise is thus a manifestation of that “perhaps”, the contingency which builds the sets of filters depicting the relationship between individuals and phenomena. That is to say, literature is a form of promise.

As for the question on ostensible political engagements, Salmon begins to tick Derrida’s doubts and misgivings accurately:

Here [the Algerian independence], as during May 1968, Derrida’s temperamental resistance was of a piece with his, at this point, nascent philosophy. Crucial to his thinking, and indeed later his deconstruction, was a radical questioning of ‘the decision’ and the violence of any gesture that pretends (assumes, supposes, presupposes) to know, whether it be in politics, philosophy and language. (p. 43)

Derrida’s diffidence is notorious when political tactics and their effects are at stake. As he states, “‘I have always had trouble vibrating in unison’”, a reference which leads Salmon to mention “a failure to act” somehow linked “to a defense offered by intellectuals” (p. 150). Yet, I would not label it a “failure”. For Derrida, philosophy is not unaware nor alien to politics, as it can produce political outcomes altogether. However, the transposal from a private or, firstly, an inner standpoint—the one of ideals, attitudes, intentions, beliefs—to the public or shareable sphere is not automatic nor unruffled, notably within bulky political actions. In other words, since it is a loaded notion, politics­—together with ideology—are not at all exempted from dogmatism, inattention and absent-mindedness.

In addition, the topic is linked to the pivotal relationship between Derrida and Michel Foucault. According to Peter Salmon, Derrida’s hit into the academic scene occurred in 1966, when he delivered at Johns Hopkins University his “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, an essay that would be collected in Writing and Difference one year later. The importance of the moment is rightly stressed by Salmon—“an event, perhaps” is in fact a shortened paraphrase of the first sentence of Derrida’s essay­—, since it begins to be manifestation of a willingness to defy. The conference—“The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—was mostly, despite the presence of Hans-Georg Gadamer or Northrop Frye, a celebration of structuralism—Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Lacan were guest speakers. This is crucial since “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” sets forth how the main structuralist purposes and tools end up disagreeing with their own implications. And this is done precisely when structuralism is the head topic, where structuralism is present and leading, i.e., Derrida is facing and encroaching the matter, a process which would be his trademark: interpretation starts from within, and it strains presence, immediacy and wholeness. As Salmon also claims, Derrida wished to provide structuralism with its death certificate; and although Foucault was absent, he was, together with Claude Lévi-Strauss, the movement’s major figure.

In the middle of this book, there is an allusion to the somewhat personal relationship between Derrida and Foucault. One of Writing and Difference’s essays, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, is an interpretation of Foucault’s influential Madness and Civilisation. To sum up, “Derrida finds the whole project suspicious. Foucault presumes to ‘write a history of madness itself. (…)’ As in his Artaud essays, Derrida fears that by categorizing madness we tame it, or we are forced to exclude the very aspects of it that make it madness” (p. 123). Foucault begins to concede Derrida’s reading; however, in 1972 he writes the text “My Body, This Paper, This Fire”, withdrawing himself from any philosophical interests and fighting Derrida back, mentioning the latter’s “‘omissions, displacements, interventions and substitutions’ (…) and then dismisses deconstruction as ‘a historically well-determined little pedagogy’” (p. 124). Despite some later punctual rapprochements—notably in 1982 when Derrida was seized in Prague due to taking part in a seminar organized by the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which the Communist regime saw as subversive—the two were never quite close and, moreover, their thought displayed great discrepancies.

The most prominent discrepancy concerns politics’ range since Foucault nurtures a public and collective agenda whimsical in a way for Derrida—Derrida stoutly fears the disregard of particulars. In what has to do with interpretation—which was in a sense the core of the debate between structuralism and deconstruction back in the 60’s and 70’s—Foucault is the one who “kills the author”, dissolved into a sociological and anthropological backdrop stiff compound; Derrida’s contexts are not well-meant paradigms, as for example his “force”, the most functional concept in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, attests. Thus, today’s influence of these features could have been more detailed, especially when Salmon discusses, in the chapter called “Here Comes Everybody”, Derrida’s reputation both inside and outside academy, namely when cultural studies are on the table. I believe cultural studies, which were considerably Derrida’s heirs, ended up waiving him in favor of Foucault: intense senses of context, reading, interpretation, text and reader are being replaced for decades in a tongue-in-cheek return of structuralist influenced ways of considering literature—one can think about Bruno Latour and Franco Moretti, among others.

Quite outspoken about his preference for “continental’ philosophy” over, for example, “Principia Mathematica” (p. 7), Salmon never gets tired of aptly pinpointing one of the major slants regarding Derrida, i.e., the dogmatic postmodernist approach. In fact, some Derrida supporters take him as a badge, an everything-has-to-do-with-anything inconsistent machine, “ignoring the rigour of his philosophical project”, based on “read deeply and intensely” (p. 10). Since Derrida’s “work often aspires to the condition of art”, being “irony, juxtaposition and hyperbole” (idem) crucial resources, we must bear in mind that Derrida is intimately interested in “internal contradictions in texts”, that is, “an inbuilt feature of language, the impossibility of its coherence” (p. 14). Without debriefing the skew stemming from a text-conveyed distance, the language-embodied mismatch between intending and action, and the challenging closeness implicated by reading and writing, we cannot go along with Derrida.

This book holds more helpful references. First, apart from the blatant influences of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, Salmon highlights the enduring importance for Derrida of authors like Hegel, Freud, Joyce, Kafka and Celan. Second, Kabbalah and a more apparent religious impetus over the years, predicated on Simone Weil and Maimonides, are also remarked. Derrida’s original reading of Marxism in Specters of Marx rightly deserved notice. Friendship as “fundamental ethics” (p. 230), arising from Lévinas but blended with the actual personal relation with controversial Louis Althusser and Paul de Man is critical too. Finally, the magnitude assigned to “Violence and Metaphysics” and to Of Grammatology—Derrida’s most important book according to Salmon—is more than beneficent.

Yet, there are two utmost omissions. An Event, Perhaps does not allude to the so-called “Gadamer-Derrida debate”, which was the encounter between the two philosophers at Sorbonne in 1981. It was a notable occasion on two grounds. First, it was the opportunity to witness the leading figures of philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction mostly discussing their striking similarities. Second, Gadamer’s engaged and fruitful attitude contrasted with Derrida’s boyish pose. He did not actually add anything to the debate, and we can ask why this had happened: was he fearful and sulky by their forerunner’s—Heidegger, of course—legitimate heir? Furthermore, it lacked any reference to Richard Rorty, arguably Derrida’s best interpreter and successor. Actually, Rorty should have been more than merely referred since his essays on Derrida as well as his philosophy justify the Frenchman’s longevity.

That said, Derrida’s work is not devoid of some lengthy weaknesses. His “citationality” is fuzzy and inoperative. When reading J. L. Austin, Derrida could have been clearer: the “‘possibility of fiction’” (p. 194)—which tends to occur in literature—does not drain all possibilities. If literature rendered an ontological gap in relation to other forms of language, we would still be unknowingly stuck in the “metaphysics of presence” since fiction would generate a hovering totalization itself. Moreover, Derrida never quite convincingly explained the pivotal role played by history in deconstruction. Yet, these remarks do not subscribe in any way the Cambridge episode of 1992 mentioned in the book. Ruling W. V. O. Quine out, the letter published in The Times complaining about Derrida’s honorary degree must have been intended by whoever finds ridicule a proper alternative to irrelevance. Similarly, invectives like Michiko Kakutani’s who accused “academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism for the rise of Donald Trump” (p. 9) are as accurate toward Derrida as calling John Milton satanic or blaming Nietzsche for horse slaughter.

Thus, An Event, Perhaps is as a skilled overview of Derrida’s thought. The book ends with Derrida’s death in 2004 from pancreatic cancer. As Salmon adds, death was a regular topic in Derrida’s work: it is what comes closest to being the most personal descriptive and interpretive device we have. It is both singular and shared, unique and repetitive. In Aporias—which is the analysis of the self-affection’s expression “my own death”—Derrida talks about a “marrano”, a believer who is devoted to a handed down “secret”. Marranos were the Iberian Jews who, despite being forced to conform to Catholicism in order to survive, remained privately professing their primary religion. Therefore, a marrano is someone who is particularly able to question death, putting himself in attentive coexistence with other individuals and phenomena since he is a staunch believer. A marrano can induct public forms of allegiance through a promise while preserving a secret. The same happens with Derrida: chiefly with literature, he urges us to be aware that qualifiers can be the most troublesome instances. So, Derrida does not deny the existence nor the importance, for example, of truth; what happens is that he rouses certain attributes, unsettles what is conventional, consisting literature—or art in general—actually in a hairsplitting truth performance. For him, there is no interpretive prior and outer self-standing instance able to make a real difference, successful in dictating meanings. There are no neutral interpretations or innocent descriptions either, and there is nothing dismayed nor paranoiac in that. The quest for the meaning is indecisive and idle: life is strongly made of connectable parts, webs of elements that are personal to someone as secrets are. And this is why Derrida remains inventive and relevant. Invoking curiosity and imagination, Derrida upholds further steps instead of grand pictures: we belong as long as we challenge. Thus, Derrida’s fondness for hyperbole, irony, metaphor and metonymy stands as the powerful grasp of an idea, the attention and commitment to a belief.

REFERÊNCIA:

Salmon, Peter. An Event, Perhaps — A Biography of Jacques Derrida. Londres: Verso, 2021.