SOME INTERVIEWS WITH DERRIDA How Derrida Reads Derrida
from "Unsealing ('the old new language')" pp. 115-117Q.: "An interview with Derrida? At last maybe we're going to understand
something about him!" That's what some people said when I announced I was
preparing this work with you. It is said your texts are difficult, on the limit of
readability. Some potential readers are discouraged in advance by this reputation.
How do you live with that? Is it an effect you are seeking to produce or, on the
contrary, do you suffer from it?J.D.: I suffer from it, yes, don't laugh, and I do everything I think possible or
acceptable to escape from this trap. But someone in me must get some benefit
from it: a certain relation. In order to explain this, it would be necessary to draw out
some very ancient things from my history, and make them speak with others, very
present, from a social or historical scene that I try to take into account. It is out of the
question to analyze this "relation" while improvising in front of this tape recorder, at
this speed. But don't you think that those who accuse me in the way you described
understand the essential of what they claim not to understand, namely, that it is a
matter first of all of putting into question a certain scene of reading and evaluation,
with its familiar comforts, its interests, its programs of every kind? No one gets
angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all,
or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers
with Your own language, with this "relation" precisely, which is yours...I assure you that I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of
being difficult. That would be too ridiculous. it's just that I believe in the necessity of
taking time or, if you prefer, of letting time, of not erasing the folds. For
philosophical or political reasons, this problem of communication and receivability,
in its new techno-economic givens, is more serious than ever for everyone; one can
live it only with malaise, contradiction, and compromise.Q.: In short, you demand for the philosopher what is accorded at the outset to
the scientist: the necessity of a translation, of an explanation that will be performed
by others.J.D.: We are all mediators, translators. In philosophy, as in all domains, you
have to reckon with, while not ever being sure of it, the implicit level of an
accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays (teaching,
newspapers, journals, books, media), with the shared responsibility of these relays.
Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some
scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers? And why not
the writer, who can invent, break new paths only in "difficulty," by taking the risks of
a reception that is slow to come, discreet, mistaken, or impossible? In truth--here is
another complication--I believe that it is always a "writer" who is accused of being
"unreadable," as you put it, that is, someone who is engaged in an explanation with
language, the economy of language, the codes and the channels of what is the most
receivable.The accused is thus someone who re-establishes contact between the corpora and
the ceremonies of several dialects. If he or she is a philosopher, then it's because
he or she speaks neither in a purely academic milieu, with the language, rhetoric,
and customs that are in force there, nor in that "language of everyone" which we all
know does not exist.Things became virulent (since it's the case, isn't it, and fortunately so, that people
do not always complain about those they cannot read) when, after some books on
Husserl, I accelerated or aggravated a certain contamination of the genres. "Mixing
the genres," people thought, but that's not the right word. So certain readers
resented me perhaps when they could no longer recognize their territory, their
"being-at-home" or "among-themselves," their institution, or--still worse--when these
were being perceived from this angle or this distance...Q.: In short, in order to read you, one must have an idea not only of philosophy
but also of psychoanalysis, literature, history, linguistics, or the history of painting...J.D. : There is especially the potential that opens up necessarily, whether one
wishes it or not, from one text to another, a kind of chemistry..Q.: To read you, one has to have read Derrida...
J.D.: But that's true for everyone! Is it so wrong to take account of a past
trajectory, of a writing that has in part sealed itself, little by little? But it is also
interesting to undo, to unseal. I also try to begin over again in proximity to the
simplest thing, which is sometimes difficult and dangerous.You know, the "thinking" that has it out with [s'explique avec] philosophy, science,
or literature as such does not totally belong to them. It calls for a writing that
sometimes can be read with an apparent facility..
Birth and Intellectual Development
from "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking" pp. 339-343Q.: Let us imagine your future biographer. One may suppose he will write, in a
lazy repetition of the public record: Jacques Derrida was born July I5, I930, in El
Biar, near Algiers. It is up to you perhaps to oppose this biological birth with your
true birth, the one that would proceed from that private or public event in which you
really became yourself.J.D.: For starters, that's a bit too much. You go so far as to say: "it is up to you
[il vous revient] " to say when you are born. No, if there is anything that cannot be
"up to me," then this is it, whether we're talking about what you call "biological birth"
transferred to the objectivity of the public record, or "true birth." "I was born": this is
one of the most singular expressions I know, especially in its French grammatical
form. If the interview form lent itself to it, I would prefer, instead of answering you
directly, to begin an interminable analysis of the phrase "je, je suis, je suis nè" in
which the tense is not given. Anxiety will never be dispelled on this subject, for the
event that is thereby designated can herald itself in me only in the future: "I am (not
yet) born," but the future has the form of a past which I will never have witnessed and
which for this reason remains always promised--and moreover also multiple. Who
ever said that one was born just once? But how can one deny that through all the
different promised births, it is a single and same time, the unique time, that insists
and that is repeated forever? This is a little what is being recounted in
Circumfession. "I am not yet born" because the moment that decided my nameable
identity was taken away from me. Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this
is what is called culture. Thus, through so many different relays, one can only try to
recapture this theft or this institution which was able to, which had to take place
more than once. But however iterable and divisible it remains, the "only once"
resists.Q.: Do you mean to say that you do not want to have any identity?
J.D.: On the contrary, I do, like everyone else. But by turning around this
impossible thing, and which no doubt I also resist, the "I" constitutes the very form of
resistance. Each time this identity announces itself, each time a belonging
circumscribes me, if I may put it this way, someone or something cries: Look out for
the trap, you're caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself. Your engagement is
elsewhere. Not very original, is it'?Q.: Is the work you do aimed at refinding this identity?
J.D.: No doubt, but the gesture that tries to refind of itself distances, it
distances itself again. One ought to be able to formalize the law of this
insurmountable gap. This is a little what I am always doing. Identification is a
difference to itself, a difference with/of itself. Thus with, without, and except itself.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is at once a chance, a
sign of life, and a wound. If it closed in on birth, on a plenitude of the utterance or the
knowledge that says "I am born," that would be death.Q.: What relation should one see between the first birth and this other birth
that would be your arrival in France, your studies at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, the
khâgne, an inscription in a completely other world.?J.D.: In Algeria, I had begun, let's say, to "get into" literature and philosophy. I
dreamed of writing--and already models were instructing the dream, a certain
language governed it, and certain figures and names. It's like circumcision, you
know, it begins before you do. Very early I read Gide, Nietzsche, Valéry, in ninth or
tenth grade. Gide even earlier no doubt: admiration, fascination, cult, fetishism. I no
longer know what remains of all this. I remember a young teacher, a redhead,
whose name was Lefèvre; he came from the Mètropole, which, in the eyes of us
young pieds-noirs who were a little tough, made him somewhat ridiculous and
naive. He sang the praises of the state of love and Les nourritures terrestres. I
would have learned this book by heart if I could have. No doubt, like every
adolescent, I admired its fervor, the lyricism of its declarations of war on religion
and families (I probably always translated "I hated the home, families, every place
where man thinks he can find rest" into a simple "I am not part of the family"). For
me it was a manifesto or a Bible: at once religious and neo-Nietzschean,
sensualist, immoralist, and especially very Algerian, as you know. I remember the
hymn to the Sahel, to Blida, and to the fruits of the Jardin d'Essai. I read all of Gide,
and probably L'immoraliste sent me to Nietzsche, which I doubtless understood
very badly, and Nietzsche, oddly enough, led me in the direction of Rousseau, the
Rousseau of the Rêveries. I remember I became the stage for the great argument
between Nietzsche and Rousseau and I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
I loved, precisely, what Gide says about Proteus, I identified naively with him who
identified, if that's possible, with Proteus. It was the end of the war ("my" Algeria
was basically almost constantly at war, because the first uprisings, and thus first
portents of the Algerian war, were suppressed at the end of the Second World
War). Paris being occupied in 1943-44, the liberated Algiers became a sort of
literary capital. Gide was often in North Africa, Camus was talked about a lot, new
literary journals and new publishers sprang up everywhere. All of this fascinated me.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, I kept a "private
diary." But even as I withdrew into this reading or other solitary activities, well, in a
dissociated, juxtaposed way, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan, in a
"gang" that was interested more in soccer or track than in studying. In my last two
years at the lycée, I began to read Bergson and Sartre, who were very important to
me for what could be called a philosophical "training," in any case at its beginnings.Q.: Was it you or your parents who wanted you to go to the Ecole Normale?
J.D.: My parents didn't know what it was. Neither did I, even when I enrolled in
hypokhâgne. The next year, when I began khâgne at Louis-le-Grand, it was quite
simply the first trip I made in my life, at nineteen years of age. I had never left El
Biar, in the suburbs of Algiers. The boarding-school experience in Paris was very
hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on
the, edge of a nervous breakdown.Q.: Until you got to the Ecole Normale?
J.D.: Yes. Those were the most difficult, most threatening years. In part, it had
to do with a kind of exile, in part with the monstrous torture of the national
competitions in the French system. With competitions like those of the Ecole
Normale and the agrégation, rnany who found themselves in my situation had the
impression of risking everything in this horrible machine or of awaiting a life or
death sentence. Failure meant a return to Algiers in a state of absolute
precariousness--and I didn't want to go back to Algeria once and for all (both
because I felt that I could never "write" while living "at home" and already for political
reasons; from the early '50s colonial politics and first of all colonial society had
become unbearable for me). These years of khâgne and the Ecole Normale were
thus an ordeal (discouragement, despair-failures on the exams themselves: nothing
was handed to me on the first try).Q.: And yet you remained for a long time at the Ecole Normale?
J. D.: This paradox has not escaped you; there would no doubt be a lot to say
about that. I have always had "school sickness," as others have seasickness. I cried
when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of
such behavior. Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution (for
example the Ecole Normale, where I taught for twenty years, or the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes, where I have been teaching for six years) without physical
symptoms (I mean in my chest and my stomach) of discomfort or anxiety. And yet,
it's true, I have never left school in general, I stayed at the Ecole Normale for almost
thirty years altogether. I must suffer also from "school sickness" in the sense this
time of homesickness.
Derridean Method
from "There is No One Narcissism" pp. 199-201Q.: [ ... ] you have often repeated that deconstruction is not a method, that
there is no "Derridean method." How, then, is one to take account of your work?
How do you evaluate its effects? To whom is your work addressed and, finally, who
reads you?J.D.: By definition, I do not know to whom it is addressed. Or rather yes I do! I
have a certain knowledge on this subject, some anticipations, some images, but
there is a point at which, no more than anyone who publishes or speaks, I am not
assured of the destination. Even if one tried to regulate what one says by one or
more possible addressees, using typical profiles, even if one wanted to do that it
would not be possible. And I hold that one ought not to try to master this destination.
That is moreover why one writes. Now, you mentioned idiom. Yes, but I also do not
believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or
writes, to sign in an idiomatic, that is, irreplaceable manner. But as soon as there is
a mark, that is, the possibility of a repetition, as soon as there is language,
generality has entered the scene and the idiom compromises with something that is
not idiomatic: with a common language, concepts, laws, general norms. And
consequently, even if one attempts to preserve the idiom of the method--since you
spoke of method--of a system of rules which others are going to be able to use, so
even if one wants to preserve, then, the idiom of the method... well, by the fact that
the idiom is not pure, there is already method. Every discourse, even a poetic or
oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things
and thus an outline of methodology. That said, at the same time I have tried to mark
the ways in which, for example, deconstructive questions cannot give rise to
methods, that is, to technical procedures that could be repeated from one context to
another. In what I write, I think there are also some general rules, some procedures
that can be transposed by analogy--this is what is called a teaching, a knowledge,
applications--but these rules are taken up in a text which is each time a unique
element and which does not let itself be turned totally into a method. In fact, this
singularity is not pure, but it exists. It exists moreover independently of the
deliberate will of whoever writes. There is finally a signature, which is not the
signature one has calculated, which is naturally not the patronymic, which is not the
set of stratagems elaborated in order to propose something original or inimitable.
But, whether one likes it or not, there is an effect of the idiom for the other. It is like
photography: whatever pose you adopt, whatever precautions you take so that the
photograph will look like this or like that, there comes a moment when the
photograph surprises you and it is the other's gaze that, finally, wins out and
decides. So, I think that in what I write in particular--but this is valid for others--the
same thing happens: there is idiom and there is method, generality; reading is a
mixed experience of the other in his or her singularity as well as philosophical
content, information that can be torn out of this singular context. Both at the same
time.The 'Derrida Affair' at Cambridge University
from "Honoris Causa: 'This is also very funny'" pp. 409-413Q.: Your work has, to put it mildly, always stimulated a great deal of
controversy, but more than this, you have been attacked in exceptionally violent
ways, and denounced as undermining the very nature of intellectual inquiry itself.
How do you account for the ferocity and exaggeration of these attacks on your
work?J.D.: If it were only a question of "my" work, of the particular or isolated
research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these
denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole
ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses,
can't be limited to a personal "oeuvre," nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic
institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of
students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to
the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they
invoke when they attack me and my work. If this work seems so threatening to them
this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic
(which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they
believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction
in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of
dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the
structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What
this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries
to politicize and democratize the university scene. If these blindly passionate and
personal attacks are often concentrated on me alone (while sometimes maintaining
that it isn't me but those who "follow" or "imitate" me who are being accused--an all
too familiar pattern of argument), that's no doubt because "deconstructions" query
or put into question a good many divisions and distinctions, for example the
distinction between the pretended neutrality of philosophical discourse, on the one
hand, and existential passions and drives on the other, between what is public and
what is private, and so on. More and more I have tried to submit the singularity that
is writing, signature, self-presentation, "autobiographical" engagement (which can
also be ethical or political) to the most rigorous--and necessary--philosophical
questioning. Not that I intend putting the subject (in the biographical sense) at the
center or origin of philosophical discourse (indeed, I would normally be accused of
doing the opposite), but I do try in each case to put these questions in their primary
terms, to relate them with themes which no doubt must irritate or disturb certain
colleagues who would prefer to repress them (for example questions of sexual
difference and femininity, the "proper name," literature and psychoanalysis--but it
would be necessary here to review so many other themes, scientific, technical, or
political). All of this probably explains why my most resolute opponents believe that I
am too visible, that I am a little too "personally" "alive," that my name echoes too
much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible. In short, to
answer your question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity,"
and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," I would say that these critics organize and
practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should
know how to question and above all to moderate.
Politics and Derrida
from "The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable" pp. 86-88Q.: As regards the political field, you have never taken up noisy positions
there; you have even practiced what you call a sort of withdrawal.J.D.: Ah, the "Political field"! But I could reply that I think of nothing else,
however things might appear. Yes, of course, there are silences, and a certain
withdrawal, but let's not exaggerate things. Provided that one has an interest in this,
it is very easy to know where my choices and my allegiances are, without the least
ambiguity. No doubt I don't manifest it enough, that's certain, but where is the
measure here and is there one? It often seems to me that I have only typical and
common things to say, in which case I join my voice or my vote to that of others,
without claiming some authority, credit, or privilege reserved to what is so vaguely
called an "intellectual" or a "philosopher."I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual
(philosopher, writer, professor) playing his political role according to the screenplay
that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned. Not that I
disdain or critique it in itself; I think that, in certain situations, there is a classical
function and responsibility there that must not be avoided, even if it is just to appeal
to good sense and to what I consider to be the elementary political duty. But I am
more and more aware of a transformation that renders this scene today somewhat
tedious, sterile, and at times the crossroads of the worst procedures of intimidation
(even when it is for the good cause), having no common measure with the structure
of the political, with the new responsibilities required by the development of the
media (when, that is, one is not trying to exploit the media for some small profit, a
hypothesis not easily reconcilable with the classical typology of the intellectual).This is one of the most serious problems today, this responsibility before the current
forms of the mass media and especially before their monopolization, their framing,
their axiomatics. For the withdrawal you spoke of does not at all mean in my view a
protest against the media in general; on the contrary, I am resolutely for their
development (there are never enough of them) and especially for their
diversification, but also resolutely against their normalization, against the various
takeovers to which the thing has given rise, which has in fact reduced to silence
everything that does not conform to very determinate and very powerful frames or
codes, or still yet to phantasms of what is "receivable." But the first problem of the
"media" is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the
dominant political languages, the ones that dictate the laws of receivability,
precisely, on the left as much as on the right.It is for this reason that what is most specific and most acute in the research, the
questions, or the undertakings that interest me (along with a few others) may
appear politically silent. Perhaps it is a matter there of a political thinking, of a
culture, or a counter-culture that are almost inaudible in the codes that I have just
mentioned. Perhaps, who knows, for one can only speak here of the chances or the
risks to be run, with or without hope, always in dispersion and in the minority.Q.: This brings us back to your political activity with the group GREPH, the
Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy.J.D. : GREPH brings together teachers, high school and university students
who, precisely, want to analyze and change the educational system, and in
particular the philosophical institution, first of all through the extension of the
teaching of philosophy to all grades where the other so-called basic disciplines are
taught. François Mitterrand has made very precise commitments in this direction.
We were delighted by that and will do everything possible to see that they do not
get shelved, as we have begun in the last few months to fear they might. In any
case, these problems will not go away and neither will those who are fully aware of
their seriousness and who have to deal with them.All of this calls for a profound transformation of the relations between the State,
research or teaching institutions, at the university level and elsewhere, science,
technics, and culture. The models that are now collapsing are roughly those that, at
the dawn of industrial society, were discussed by Germany's "great philosophers,"
from Kant to Heidegger, passing by way of Hegel, Schelling, Humboldt,
Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, before and after the founding of the University of Berlin.
Why not reread them, think with them and against them, but while taking philosophy
into account? This is indispensable if one wishes to invent other relations between
the rationalization of the State and knowledge, technics, and thinking, if one wants
to draw up new contractual forms among them or even to dissociate radically their
duties, powers, and responsibilities. Perhaps it would be necessary now to try to
invent places for teaching and research outside the university institutions?
©1995, Stanford University Press
The following interviews were extracted from Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994.
Stanford University Press, 1995.
© Elvira Gabaldón, 2000