DECONSTRUCTION OPENS NEW WAYS OF THINKING

DECONSTRUCTION OPENS NEW WAYS OF THINKING

1. DERRIDA CHALLENGES THE NOTION OF "RESOLUTION"

David Wood, Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 1-2

What once seemed to be a philosophical reflex ‑ marking out a critical distance from the philosopher or the position one is dealing with ‑ is triply problematized in the case of Derrida. Derrida does not, typically, take up philosophical positions, traditional or otherwise. Nor does he ever unequivocally endorse the particular discourse he happens to be employing or engaged with. Finally, the kind of relationships that Derrida establishes with the texts he reads do not resolve themselves within, and indeed fundamentally problematize the idea of, a homogenous space in which critical distances can be measured and marked out.

David Wood, Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 3

None of Derrida's readers is required to take on board the various dimensions of his writing that we have singled out. But not to notice the specificity of the relations he establishes to other texts, not to recognize that Derrida is elaborating a new space of reading, is surely to fail to address the real challenge (and seduction) of his work. The differences between, say, Gaschd's articulation of Derrida's work as a theory of infrastructures (in The Tain of the Mirror), Llewelyn's drawing out of an ethics of responsibility, Nancy's evocation of the passion of the text and Sallis's account of Derrida's mimetic mechanisms are real enough. What unites them with the other contributors‑Michel Haar, Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Christopher Norris, and Richard Rorty, and what Manfred Frank so clearly resists‑is an engagement with the expanded space of reading that Derrida's writing exemplifies without fully determining (a structure which takes us close to Irene Harvey's concerns). This space involves both the kind of features on which Gasch6 has concentrated‑supplementarity, infrastructures and so on‑which would suggest the possibility of something like a deconstructive logic, and the ethical space, the space of responsibility, which Llewelyn deals with here, and which Derrida. is increasingly concerned to emphasize himself. We can begin to think the relation between the two by coming to think of deconstructive readings not as undermining a finished text, but as a responsiveness that re‑engages with the conditions of a text's production, with the desire that philosophy (and perhaps all theory) articulates even when it is lost sight of. It might almost be worth the metaphysical overdraft required to say that Derrida is engaged in a theatrical re‑animation of the textual space of philosophy's passion.
DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT NIHILISM
1. DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT NIHILISM

Niall Lucy, nqa, INTERPRETATIONS: DEBATING DERRIDA, 1995, p. 1

The modest aim of this book is to encourage people to read the work of Algerian‑born French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Before it is 'political', I take reading to be a first principle of my profession. As a professional humanities academic, my own teaching and research practices do not otherwise make any sense to me or hold any value unless they begin from this principle, regardless of what might follow. In a word, I think it is unprofessional of anyone involved in humanities scholarship to hold an opinion on Derrida's work or what 'Derrida' stands for without having read him. My point is that too much of what currently passes for a knowledge of Derrida's work‑in academic journals and in the popular press, in lectures and at conferences, and in university corridors‑is inadequate, ill informed, and very often wrong. The reason for this is that many of those who have written Derrida off haven't actually read very much of what he has written, if anything at all. Whatever else it may be, that's not a good model of critical practice.

DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT PROPERLY POLITICAL

1. DECONSTRUCTIVE "PLAY" IS SILLINESS THAT DESTROYS ITS POLITICAL POTENTIAL

Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. xii-xiii.

In asking whether deconstruction might be the possibility of justice, Derrida is asking whether there might be another conception of politics, another thinking of the polis. This book aims to sharpen the sense of the alternative conception, theoretically and practically, and to show why it is necessary to political thinking and praxis. In pursuing this aim I connect especially with central themes in the Marxist tradition (or traditions). However, I am greatly concerned here with the fate of deconstruction. I worry that it may not be able to do all of the work that it could do, because of its tendency‑the tendency, at any rate, of "what is now called deconstruction, in its manifestations most recognized as such"‑to get bogged down in etymological play. This tendency gives way, with some proponents of deconstruction, and sometimes with Derrida's work as well, to a kind of silliness lacking any political edge whatsoever. This silliness seems to me a preoccupation that a tired and even cynical Eurocentrism might indulge in. There are better possibilities in deconstruction, especially when Marxist and Kantian themes are engaged. In some respects this text is a workbook for such an engagement.

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 236.

The quarrel about whether Derrida has arguments thus gets linked to a quarrel about whether he is a private writer‑writing for the delight of us insiders who share his background, who find the same rather esoteric things as funny or beautiful or moving as he does‑or rather a writer with a public mission, someone who gives us weapons with which to subvert 'institutionalized knowledge', and thus social institutions. I have urged that Derrida be treated as the first sort of writer, whereas most of his American admirers have treated him as, at least in part, the second. Lumping both quarrels together, one can say that there is a quarrel between those of us who read Derrida on Plato, Hegel and Heidegger in the same way as we read Bloom or Cavell on Emerson or Freud‑in order to see these authors transfigured, beaten into fascinating new shapes‑and those who read Derrida to get ammunition, and a strategy, for the struggle to bring about social change. Norris thinks that Derrida should be read as a transcendental philosopher in the Kantian tradition‑somebody who digs out hitherto unsuspected presuppositions. 'Derrida', he says, 'is broaching something like a Kantian transcendental deduction, an argument to demonstrate ("perversely" enough) that a priori notions of logical truth are a priori ruled out of court by rigorous reflection on the powers and limits of textual critique.'9 By contrast, my view of Derrida is that he nudges us into a world in which 'rigorous reflection on the power and limits . has as little place as do 'a priori notions of logical truth'. This world has as little room for transcendental deductions, or for rigour, as for self‑authenticating moments of immediate presence to consciousness.
3. DERRIDA HAS NO GROUND FROM WHICH TO ASSAULT LOGOCENTRISM

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 237.

On my view, the only thing that can displace an intellectual world is another intellectual world‑a new alternative, rather than an argument against an old alternative. The idea that there is some neutral ground on which to mount an argument against something as big as 'logocentrism' strikes me as one more logocentric hallucination. I do not think that demonstrations of 'internal incoherence' or of 'presuppositional relationships' ever do much to disabuse us of bad old ideas or institutions. Disabusing gets done, instead, by offering us sparkling new ideas, or utopian visions of glorious new institutions. The result of genuinely original thought, on my view, is not so much to refute or subvert our previous beliefs as to help us forget them by giving us a substitute for them. I take refutation to be a mark of unoriginality, and I value Derrida's originality too much to praise him in those terms. So I find little use, in reading or discussing him, for the notion of 'rigorous argumentation'.