LETTER BY JUDITH BUTLER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 13, 2004

To the Editors of the NY Times:

Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time.  Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most.  This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it.  Why would the NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is most urgently required?

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California at Berkeley

MOURNING JACQUES DERRIDA
excerpt from an essay by Judith Butler in the London Review of Books (October 15)
copyright LRB

October 9, 2004

"How do you finally respond to your life and your name?"

Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published on August 18th of this year. If he could apprehend his life, he remarks, he would also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and absolute, without resurrection and without redemption. At this revealing moment, it is interesting that Derrida the philosopher should find in Socrates his proper
precursor, that he should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks, come to terms with one's life without trying to
apprehend one's death, asking, in effect, how a human lives and dies. Much of Derrida's later work is dedicated to mourning, though he offers his acts of public mourning as a posthumous gift,
for instance, in The Work of Mourning published in 2001. There he tries to come to terms with the death of other writers and thinkers through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us a way to begin to mourn this thinker who not only taught us how to read, but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes who died in 1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabes (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah
Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1998). The last of the essays, for Lyotard, included in this book is written six years before Derrida's own death. It is not,
however, Derrida's own death that preoccupies him here, but rather his "debts." These are authors that he could not do without, ones with whom and through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He "owes" them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them; their writing
exists as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges, importantly, as an address.