Today's Chronicle of Higher Education notes a new book: Islam and the West: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press). The focus or hook is Derrida's Algerian roots. The Chronicle's summary:
Though Jacques Derrida died in 2004, his textual wake is far from over. Publishing has continued apace with posthumously released writings, translations, and interviews, as well as meditative works that engage Derrida on a personal level as man and memory.
Just out in translation, Mustapha Chérif's Islam and the West: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press), blends several of those approaches. In it, Chérif brings Algeria, a shared place of origin, front and center in his encounter with the philosopher.
The genesis of the book was an invitation extended by Chérif, a professor of philosophy and Islamic studies at the University of Algiers and a visiting professor at the Collège de France. In May 2003, he invited Derrida to a colloquium on Algeria and France at Paris's Institut du Monde Arabe. What made the occasion unusual and in fact poignant was that Derrida arrived from the hospital only having just learned of the cancer that would kill him 15 months later. "For any other meeting," Chérif says Derrida told him, "I wouldn't have had the strength to participate."
In a foreword longer and more telling than forewords tend to be, Giovanna Borradori describes the two men as an "odd couple" and says that a profound love of Algeria is almost all they share. However, the Vassar College philosopher argues that the book advances the "crucial but largely underestimated role" Algeria played in Derrida's "philosophical itinerary." She also says that despite his anti-institutional bent and preference for "fluidity over rigidity," Derrida was a highly guarded man. The book, she argues, "pierces that reticence at a moment of great vulnerability, revealing the depth and complexity of Derrida's feelings for Algeria." Asked by Chérif what his Algerian origins have meant, Derrida responds that "a Judeo-Franco-Maghrebin genealogy does not explain everything, far from it, but can I ever explain anything without it?" He goes on to discuss his experience of Arabs and the Arabic language in Algeria in wistful terms as "an other, who was the closest of the close."
The book's format is impressionistic. Chérif paraphrases his questions to Derrida from that day — "confidences" he calls them — and then transcribes in quotation Derrida's answers. That material is then embedded in Chérif's own running commentary.
On the book's titular theme, Chérif argues for an end to historical amnesia and for the need to understand Islam's contributions to modernity and its continued emancipatory potential "beyond the deviations of some of its own followers today" — violent usurpers of the faith. "Is it reasonable," he asks Derrida, "to view our worlds as opposites?" Derrida agrees to the need to "deconstruct the European intellectual construct of Islam" and rediscover the "reciprocal fertilization of the Greek, the Arab, and the Jew."
Where the two men struggle more is on what Chérif capitalizes as the Mystery and the Divine. At one point, Derrida casts faith in earthy terms of social interaction. "One's relationship to the other, addressing the other, presupposes faith," he tells Chérif. "The act of faith is not a miraculous thing; it is the air that we breathe."
Just out in translation, Mustapha Chérif's Islam and the West: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press), blends several of those approaches. In it, Chérif brings Algeria, a shared place of origin, front and center in his encounter with the philosopher.
The genesis of the book was an invitation extended by Chérif, a professor of philosophy and Islamic studies at the University of Algiers and a visiting professor at the Collège de France. In May 2003, he invited Derrida to a colloquium on Algeria and France at Paris's Institut du Monde Arabe. What made the occasion unusual and in fact poignant was that Derrida arrived from the hospital only having just learned of the cancer that would kill him 15 months later. "For any other meeting," Chérif says Derrida told him, "I wouldn't have had the strength to participate."
In a foreword longer and more telling than forewords tend to be, Giovanna Borradori describes the two men as an "odd couple" and says that a profound love of Algeria is almost all they share. However, the Vassar College philosopher argues that the book advances the "crucial but largely underestimated role" Algeria played in Derrida's "philosophical itinerary." She also says that despite his anti-institutional bent and preference for "fluidity over rigidity," Derrida was a highly guarded man. The book, she argues, "pierces that reticence at a moment of great vulnerability, revealing the depth and complexity of Derrida's feelings for Algeria." Asked by Chérif what his Algerian origins have meant, Derrida responds that "a Judeo-Franco-Maghrebin genealogy does not explain everything, far from it, but can I ever explain anything without it?" He goes on to discuss his experience of Arabs and the Arabic language in Algeria in wistful terms as "an other, who was the closest of the close."
The book's format is impressionistic. Chérif paraphrases his questions to Derrida from that day — "confidences" he calls them — and then transcribes in quotation Derrida's answers. That material is then embedded in Chérif's own running commentary.
On the book's titular theme, Chérif argues for an end to historical amnesia and for the need to understand Islam's contributions to modernity and its continued emancipatory potential "beyond the deviations of some of its own followers today" — violent usurpers of the faith. "Is it reasonable," he asks Derrida, "to view our worlds as opposites?" Derrida agrees to the need to "deconstruct the European intellectual construct of Islam" and rediscover the "reciprocal fertilization of the Greek, the Arab, and the Jew."
Where the two men struggle more is on what Chérif capitalizes as the Mystery and the Divine. At one point, Derrida casts faith in earthy terms of social interaction. "One's relationship to the other, addressing the other, presupposes faith," he tells Chérif. "The act of faith is not a miraculous thing; it is the air that we breathe."
Out-of-body Thinking
Derrida gets the language for his epistemology from Husserl. Phenomenology starts with a "principle of principles" that "primordial presence to intuition is the source of sense and evidence, the a priori of a prioris."
This means that "the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. The relation with the presence of the present as the ultimate form of being and of ideality is the move by which I transgress empirical existence, factuality, contingency, worldliness, etc." [Speech and Phenomena, 53-54.]
However, the choice of the words "present" and "presence" to indicate the ground of all knowledge has some very unfortunate consequences. That choice sets up a confusion between two completely different meanings of the word "presence."
One meaning is "phenomenological presence". This refers to the immediate access to being in the original act of knowledge. It does not refer to time at all. So, phenomenological presence might be better expressed by calling it presence-to-being. That would save it from being confused with the other meaning of "presence", what we should call "temporal presence", that is, the occurrence of an event at a particular moment in time.
Derrida also calls this living presence "the now". This reinforces the confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time. It is also unfortunate that Derrida uses the word "form" in the phrase "the universal form of all experience". What he wants to refer to is the "universal basis of all experience", which is not a form. It is an act. But this word-slippage is also quite telling, and one of the many clues in Derrida's work that he is confusing the order of abstract concepts and the order of actual reality.
This epistemology leads to the cornerstone mistake of claiming that iterability is an a priori condition of knowing, whereas in fact iterability is an a posteriori result of knowing. An original presence-to-being (insight) occurs in time. Consequently it is repeatable. So, iterability is not "inside" phenomenological presence, it is extrinsic to it. This mistake is made all the more easy since both relationships are necessary. Once you get this, then all of Derrida's objections to realist epistemology collapse, and his whole philosophical system collapses into imaginary ashes.
I have discussed these issues at length in my article "Dealing With Derrida", which you can find on the Radical Academy web site. http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefphilmhd1.htm
Although running down Derrida's mistakes in his text is difficult, once you get the key point that he was dissociated, the whole pattern of his out-of-body thinking makes sense. Once you discover Derrida's dissociation, you find it in many thinkers. There is a lot of out-of-body thinking in philosophy and social theory. Perhaps leaving one's body is an occupational hazard for professional thinkers. Dissociation is the result of trauma, and trauma is easy to come by.
There are many sources of insight into dissociation. I recommend Trauma and the Body (2006) by Pat Ogden et al. as a start.
Posted by: Michael Ducey | January 31, 2009 at 10:40 AM