The Philosopher of Surplus

Jacques Derrida, who died on October 8 at the age of 74, was a remarkable figure in 20th century letters. Deconstruction, an intellectual mo...

Jacques Derrida, who died on October 8 at the age of 74, was a remarkable figure in 20th century letters. Deconstruction, an intellectual movement most associated with his name, transformed the intellectual landscape of post-war philosophy and literary theory. Ever since his ideas burst on to the scene in an obscure academic conference on structuralism in ’66, they gathered the kind of momentum that made him into more than just a distinguished academic. He became, to use Auden’s appropriately famous description of Freud, a whole climate of opinion.

Like Freud, Derrida became associated with the idea that the world had a surplus of meaning. Critics will endlessly debate how much substance there is behind the fog of opinion. The linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy had had made the thought that the world reveals itself through language, a commonplace one. But Derrida argued that language does not reveal anything outside itself. It cannot, in part because the traditional assumption that language expresses ideas or represents the world is simply mistaken. Language is too unstable to be pinned down to a single or unified meaning.

Deconstructive readings of texts examine the metaphors writers use to make their points. Their purpose is to demonstrate, through close analysis of a work’s arguments and its metaphors, that writers contradict themselves, not just occasionally, but invariably. The slipperiness of language makes a grasp of the truth elusive.

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This rather stark claim had profound consequences. It opened up the possibility that any text itself had multiple interpretations. In literary studies it led to the disquieting idea that the author’s intentions cannot exercise any authority over the text. But, more seriously, if language cannot represent the world, what happens to the traditional enterprise of philosophy: truth, revealing things as they truly are?

For Derrida’s critics, this lead to an impossible nihilism. To his supporters, this was a therapeutic liberation. They raised slogans like “the indeterminacy of the sign” or “there is no world outside the text”. At its best, deconstruction guarded against the belief that the world is simple and can be known with certainty or confidence. Students were drawn to him in droves because his ideas made the world more enchanting. His books, from On Grammatology to his more recent, Glas, were paradoxically scholastic examples of his ability to expose the fissures in the most rigorous of texts. To his critics, this was simply an excuse for endless procrastination and deliberate obfuscation. But Derrida confronted us with the limits of human thought. He tenaciously subverted the false comforts of supposing that we can easily possess the world or make sense of it.

Born in 1930, El-Bair, Algeria, to a Jewish family, Derrida taught at the Ecole Normale Superieure from ’65 to ’84. He was never associated with a political party but lent his voice to a variety of political causes: from anti-Vietnam movements to anti-apartheid protests. That he, along with Foucault, became the most celebrated intellectual of the second half of the 20th century is beyond doubt. But whether he was successful in being able to “overcome his time in himself” and become timeless, as Nietzsche — another great influence — thought philosophers should, only time will tell.

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