Searle (Still) on Derrida (Seriously?)

Why is it that so many otherwise sober, careful philosophers seem to kiss their brains goodbye when it comes to Jacques Derrida? 

Well, I can partly understand this.  If you've cut your teeth reading Frege and Russell, then grew your hair out reading Quine, and then watched your hair fall out while reading Davidson and Tarski, then I'll concede that brief forays into the sprawling, experimental corpus of Jacques Derrida will feel like a psychadelic kaleidoscope in the lexical family of Jabberwocky.  In other words, I can see how, in a way, Derrida kind of asked for it.

But on the other hand, is it really asking so much for them to carefully read a few of Derrida's own rather "sober" texts?  (I'm not asking Alvin Plantinga to give me a charitable reading of Glas.  I'm asking philosophers of language to slow down and actually attend to Derrida's argument.)  Or, at least, could they refrain from making ridiculously mistaken claims about them--and, in particular, refrain from repeating them 25 years later!?

John Searle has made a regular habit of this.  The latest installment can be found in Searle's recent review in the New York Review of Books.  The claim comes as an aside in his critique of "social constructivism." Teaming up with the book under review, the burden of Searle's article is to preserve the objectivity of facts against the claims of social constructivists who think even the "facts" are "constructed."  Searle thinks there are bad arguments for this (from Putnam and Rorty), and then there are "truly dreadful arguments" from "authors" such as Jacques Derrida (don't miss that slight).  The latter don't even deserve refutation, Searle claims; they're a lost cause.  We'll never be able to convince such slippery ideologues that reality is "objective," that facts are "out there." 

But does anyone else find it ironic, then, when Searle can make a claim like this about Derrida's texts?

"He argues, for example, that there is no tenable distinction between writing and speech."

I'll grant that matters are complicated here (as I've tried to explain elsewhere).  Certainly the burden of Derrida's early work is to contest traditional, naive ways of distinguishing "writing" and "speech" (e.g., that speech is somehow "immediate" while writing is characterized by "mediation").  But that is not the same as trying to show that "there is no tenable distinction" between the two (as in the laughable interpretation of Derrida which thinks he's claiming that people wrote with utensils before they learned to talk!).  And nowhere in Derrida's corpus does he try to simply obliterate "any" distinction between the two.  Those are the facts of the matter.  Only a selective constructivist like Searle could tell himself otherwise.

Comments

[Tim]

This post is ironic, Dr. Smith. I am a graduate student in philosophy at an analyical leaning department. Friday night, I happen to be having a drink with a guy with a PhD in philosophy from Rutgers, having studied logic with Quine, and being a logical genius of the Frege, Russell, and Quine sort; and I mentioned the name of Derrida, and he literally almost had a heart-attack and fell out of his seat. He basically said Heidegger through to Derrida is pointless to read and is not "real" "philosophy." Who determines what is "real" philosophy?

[James K.A. Smith]

Obviously what counts as "real" philosophy--or who counts as "real" philosophers--is contested. And I'm generally OK with that; I think it's part of the nature of philosophy (indeed, one can see such debates all over Plato's dialogues). I'm a pluralist about these matters and don't generally get hung-up on apologetics for "continental" philosophy.

On the other hand, there are hopeful signs. Consider, for instance, Robert Brandom and John McDowell's engagements with Heidegger, or Samuel Wheeler's reading of Derrida alongside Davidson.

[John]

I know nobody likes or appreciates this author but this site provides an excellent description of his work in relation to both modernism and postmodernism---especially in the related fields of both literature and Sacred Art.

http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism.html

Plus to paraphrase your statement re kissing their brains good-bye.

Why do supposedly religious people who claim to be interested in the pursuit or understanding of Truth & Reality kiss their brains good-bye when they come across the work of the above Spiritual Master (and thus never ever discuss His extraordinary Wisdom Teaching, or His Divine Image Art).

Especially as he points out that the Realized Saints, Yogis, Mystics and Sages are and always have been the ONLY source of Truth in the the world. And that it (the Truth) certainly does not come from theologians.