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Biography of Jacques Derrida

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A scintillating new biography should make many doubters reappraise the enigmatic French philosopher
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magaz...t-overrate

EXCERPTS (Julian Baggini): . . . The Jacques Derrida portrayed by Peter Salmon would have shared these doubts. His “nagging fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right never left him.” Given Derrida’s whole project was one of radical doubt, he could hardly have felt otherwise. Derrida was both admiring and mocking when he described analytic philosophers’ “imperturbable ingenuity,” but their absolute confidence in the rightness of their approach was anathema to him. He was in this respect more truly a philosopher than those who question everything except the peculiarities of their own methods of questioning.

An Event, Perhaps is called a biography but, as Derrida incessantly argued, all categorisations are to some degree arbitrary [...] One of Derrida’s claims that analytic philosophers would have no difficulty agreeing with is: “One shouldn’t complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten round.” The difference is that they take a different view of what is difficult. The complication of analytic philosophy arises from the attempt to be as precise as possible, whereas the complication for Derrida is the result of meticulously trying to avoid being more precise than is possible.

That is not to say Derrida is never guilty of linguistic extravagance. He admitted that he was “an incorrigible hyperbolite,” and that “I always exaggerate.” Early in his career he accused Heidegger of using “Noisy, pretentious and heavy dialect… [a] crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous,” which leads Salmon to sardonically note that “Derrida’s prejudices against this sort of writing were, one might point out, not ongoing.”

Yet Derrida also sagely said “ordinary language is probably right,” because ordinary language never pretends to have the precision or purity of philosophical speech. Philosophy’s attempted resolutions of aporias are attempts to tidy up language. Derrida, in contrast, wants to remind us that language is even less precise, even more equivocal than common sense presumes. Philosophers’ attempts to pin down words are as futile as nailing jelly to a wall. Language is slippery since each new iteration newly recombined by each speaker brings with it the possibility of a mutation of meaning, even from the meaning the speaker intended for it.

A revealing dispute with a leading analytic philosopher, John Searle, makes the cleft between the two approaches clear. Searle’s early work was on his mentor JL Austin’s concept of the “speech act.” Austin’s insight was that words do not only convey meanings, they can be used to actually do things. If a priest pronounces a couple man and wife, they become married; a judge sends someone to prison merely by issuing a sentence.

If this recognition of the heterogeneity of speech was helpful to Derrida, the ways in which analytic philosophers developed the idea were not. For instance, when talking of promising as a speech act, Searle wrote: “I am ignoring marginal, fringe, and partially defective promises.” For Derrida this was inexcusable. By only focusing on abstracted, tidied-up, ideal forms of speech acts, Searle was ignoring how they actually work. Searle thought this simplification was harmless, just “a matter of research strategy.” Derrida thought it was another example of philosophy choosing a false precision over more truthful messiness.

The written dispute with Searle was bitter. The American was snide and condescending, but Derrida came to view his own reply “with a certain uneasiness,” seeing it “not devoid of aggressivity.” He at least recognised that philosophical debate involves passions and personalities, not just language and logic. For all his 20th-century jargon, Derrida at heart belongs to a long line of sceptics that traces back to Pyrrho in Ancient Greece... (MORE - details)
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