Derrida's Influence on the Academy

Spring 2005

Jacques Derrida died on October 9th of last year, less than a month before the presidential election last November 2nd. That confluence leads me to ask about difference—that is, what difference Derrida made in that election. Derrida had an immense influence in the academic world. On the web page “Remembering Jacques Derrida” one can find signatories from all sorts of humanities departments, and a number of those signatories are professors or students at the university where I am now, Emory University.

My question leads to a broader question: what difference did the academy make in this election of 2004? College towns are easy to spot in the general sea of red on election maps. Austin, Athens, Chapel Hill—they show up as islands of blue in the midst of red. These university spaces are also magnets for money, both from the government in research dollars and from private business, and numerous tenured professors think and write in the shelter of these institutions. An immense amount of work—including dissertations, presentations at academic conferences, and journal articles—has had negligible influence on America as a whole.

I first heard about Derrida’s death through the obituary in the New York Times. In the next few days I was surprised to get a number of departmental e-mails protesting his treatment in the obituary and urging me to sign the above mentioned web-site in support of Derrida. The obituary on Derrida was written by a reporter, and reportorial in style. He had written an obituary in July entitled: “Carmine de Sapio, Last Tammamy Hall Boss, dies at 95.” Kandell sketched Derrida’s career and did not neglect to mention that Derrida had been a controversial figure in many quarters of the academy.

The response was furious, leading to a long list of signatories on the web site supported by UC Irvine. Along with these signatures are about a dozen open letters protesting the obituary, and these letters I find telling. On response is by Judith Butler, a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley. She opens her letter: “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?” First, I am not sure what advanced world she lives in to dismiss the idea of a “culture war” as past its time. The sea of red on the electoral map and the popularity of Fox TV makes it clear that there is nothing “past its time” about the culture war. More importantly, there was no evidence from the obituary that Kandell was out to do anything more than sketch what he understood as a controversial career. This was no hack job, and Kandell did not deserve to have his “intellectual limitations” pointed out. One gets the feeling that it may require a Ph.D. to write what Butler considers a fitting obituary meant for the general reader of the New York Times.

Several more criticisms of the obituary mentioned the title: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.” It is the adjective “abstruse”—apparently as opposed to “profound” or “brilliant”—that stirs up the antagonism. “Mr. Kandell sets the tone right away, already dismissing Derrida as an ‘Abstruse Theorist’ in the title of his hatchet job”—that from the letter by Yve-Alain Bois from Harvard University. But really, what word could be more fitting for Derrida and his work than “abstruse”?

My own induction into the world of post-structuralist thought came upon my arrival to Emory, where I was starting on a Ph.D. in comparative literature, a field particularly receptive to Derrida. It was in one of my first seminars that the professor mentioned that some undergraduate students come to class actually believing that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was about love, and not the failure of language. I sat silent at that, a little nervous about the fact that I did see something about love in Romeo and Juliet, and even more alarmed because I was a graduate student.

I am tempted to launch into my own critique of Derrida and to vent some of my frustrations over the kind of orthodoxy that has formed around him. But any attempt to criticize Derrida is immediately tied up in subtleties. How not, when his thought centers on the failure of language itself. I like to compare Derrida to a porcupine sitting in the middle of a road. It is devilishly hard to attack the porcupine. An attack that assumes the straightforwardness of language will simply be turned around against the attacker. Incidentally, that kind of philosophy also makes an obituary tough to write. If one does not talk about the “impossibility” of writing an obituary, then one will be untrue to Derrida.

An important flaw within Derrida’s thought, and poststructuralist thought in general, is the unwillingness of the theorists to present ideas that can be debated and understood by a group of relatively well-educated and inquisitive people. One has the choice of either learning the meta-language that allows one to talk about talk, or being doomed as a living example of language’s ultimate failure. Luckily there is another option: one can simply walk around the porcupine and not worry too much about it, as it sits there in the middle of the road.

Why should one not worry about it? Because it has become a hindrance to talking about issues that matter. My department is hosted a conference this past fall entitled “The Event of War.” War is of course an important topic, and what does the academic call for papers look like? Here is a taste: “How can approaching war as an event impel us to read it differently? The event has been defined, according to Lyotard and others, as radically singular. Its moment of “happening” does not disclose its “true meaning” but rather the unique presentation of its occurrence. The event of war comes as a surprise and as such breaks continuity, producing, in the language of psychoanalysis, a trauma.”

Derrida is, to be sure, more eloquent than that. But this nevertheless serves as an example of the discourse surrounding the study of Derrida’s work. (Lyotard is himself an important post-structuralist and the one time I heard Derrida lecture in person was a lecture given at Emory as a memorial to Lyotard, who had recently died.) To my mind this kind of discourse takes us nowhere. It first of all manages to make the reality of war into an abstract discussion instead of taking us to the very real world of personalities and ambitions and delusions that bring wars about. But secondly it is the kind of language that scores a zero in the red covered electoral map of the United States.

I am not proposing some new radicalization of the academy, or trying to make up some kind of new activism. I think it is highly doubtful, anyway, that a radical campus would do much either to communicate with most Americans. I am proposing something a little more modest: simply that academics begin to speak in a language that is clear and approachable, a language that people can understand and that does not instantly become grist for the Bill O’Reillys of this world who lie in wait for new academic absurdities. If a fraction of the money and time that gets poured into papers delivered at a distant university that have a handful of listeners, or into journal articles read by God knows who, or into narrow books published by academic presses.. if only a fraction of that was invested in talking to non-academics, then the academy could perhaps help unite our divided country. A first step to addressing this group of people is to leave Derrida behind, and start down our open road.