LETTER BY STEPHEN MELVILLE TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 11, 2004

To The Editor:

It is unfortunate, to say the least, that Jonathan Kandell’s obituary for Jacques Derrida makes so little effort to do justice to an admittedly difficult philosopher and settles instead for merely recycling a farrago of misconceptions, some well-intentioned and others malicious, that have dogged Derrida’s American reception from the beginning. I don’t see any point in trying to undo all that now, but there is perhaps something to be said for trying to redress the balance, however slightly,

The philosopher who Kendall cites as writing “needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible” is, on the face of it, interested in experience and its relation to its limits. More particularly, Derrida took it that the limits of experience did not simply lie outside experience but in some way belonged to its very substance. His general grounds for this view were a body of propositions, both widely shared and distinctly controversial in twentieth century philosophy, about the co-exensiveness of language and world: the fact of the world, he argued, is always also the fact of language, and of language not simply as a system of meanings but as an order of signs possessed of their own concrete materiality and contingency. He further claimed that the major traditions of Western thought had repeatedly attempted to relegate these more fractious aspects of language to its outside, to the mere conventionality of writing over and against the presumably fuller and more immediate presence of meaning in speech. Given these presuppositions, Derrida found himself both with a philosophic problem of a relatively familiar kind about the structure of experience and, as an essential part of that problem, a special problem about philosophy’s capacity to account for or acknowledge its own writing. It’s this nesting of problems that drives Derrida’s writing in both its difficulty and its playfulness and experimentation. One may, of course, think that in choosing to follow this track Derrida has gotten all sorts of things wrong, but it should be clear enough that it is a particular philosophic path and is after something other than the assertion of confusion and contradiction, murkiness and slipperiness, to which Kandell so casually reduces it.

I haven’t, of course, tried to say why any of this should matter to anybody who doesn’t already take some kind of interest in these questions. But I can’t really answer that kind of question about Descartes or Kant or Wittgenstein either; philosophy, like math or physics, makes its difficulties worthwhile for those who find themselves in need of it. There are nonetheless some things one can say Derrida has done: he has, for example, perhaps succeeded in giving us a distinction between “a reading” and “an interpretation” that will continue to be productive; it would be another job entirely to show how this ultimately yields a political imagination that has pretty much nothing to do with “dead white males” and everything to do with what shapes of solidarity and freedom finite beings might hope for. To do that job, we’d having to be willing to do some reading, and not just of Derrida.

Stephen Melville,
Professor, History of Art,
The Ohio State University