Jacques Derrida and philosophy in America

Jacques Derrida and philosophy in America

In this paper, I would like to address the issue of Jacques Derrida's
special and ambivalent relation to America. What I mean by America will of
course itself be at issue here. My contention is that "America" is not a
signifier among many in Derrida's philosophical writing, that America as a
text plays a specific part in his works and his critique of metaphysics. By
America, I mean a text, the name of a text as defined by Derrida in Limited
Inc. "What I call 'text' implies all the structures called 'real',
'economic', 'historical', socio-institutional, in short : all possible
referents. Another way of recalling once again that 'there is nothing
outside the text'" (Limited Inc., 148). I would like to stress the relative
absence of the American text in general, and to question the radical
silence on one crucial aspect of the American text, namely, American
philosophy, in Derrida's works, or what I would call, its presence in
absentia.

Symptomatically enough, America does not seem to be a place for philosophy,
not at least for a philosophy of its own. The United States is not a nation
for philosophy: its people were not predestined to carry out the
metaphysical agenda; American English that Jacques Derrida progressively
came to speak is not German, this language characterized by Hegel as the
natural language of philosophy. Therefore, America is the place where
Derrida's anti-essentialist critique of metaphysics could emerge from and
thrive, a place of accidental election in his life and works.

At this point I would like to make a brief digression and tell you an
anecdote that I find quite revealing. A few days ago, I had this
conversation with a friend of Jacques Derrida and told her I would be
attending a Conference on Derrida and America in Dublin, and would be
addressing there the issue of Derrida and American philosophy. Her
immediate reaction was: "Ah bien sûr, il ne connaissait rien à cela" ("But
of course, he did not know anything about them"). What has fascinated and
puzzled me to this day is how obvious her answer sounded even to my ears:
Derrida and American philosophy were words that simply did not match. Now
my question is: why is it that Jacques Derrida has shown so little interest
in this other philosophical tradition? The improbability, impossibility to
phrase it in Derridian terms, of this encounter may be questioned.



Radical Silence

Derrida hardly refers to American philosophers. Even when he became
involved in a harsh controversy with an American philosopher, John R.
Searle, he did so through the mediation of a British one, John L. Austin.
This philosophical dispute is actually the only time Derrida ever engaged
in a dialogue with an American philosopher. After reading its English
translation (1977) Derrida's article "Signe Evenement Contexte," originally
published in 1971, in which the French philosopher discussed John L.
Austin's theory of the speech acts, John R. Searle, an American disciple of
Austin, violently denounced Derrida's misreading ("Reiterating the
Differences: A Reply to Derrida"). In response to Searle, Derrida wrote a
most ironic and vehement article entitled "Limited Inc. a b c" which Sam
Weber translated into English and which is reported to have offended its
addressee greatly. Interestingly enough, Derrida does not specifically
treat Searle in it as an American philosopher. On one occasion Derrida even
denies him his philosophical denomination, and his name, when he accuses
Searle, unlike himself, of reproducing even without noticing the manners
and methods of Continental philosophy:

Searle had written, « It would be a mistake, I think, to regard
Derrida's discussion of Austin as aconfrontation between two prominent
philosophical traditions.' I agree with the letter if not with the
intention of this declaration, having made it clear that I have
sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin than to a certain
Continental tradition from which Searle , on the contrary has
inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct. I now
have to add this: it is often because "Searle" ignores this tradition
or pretends to take no account of it that he rests blindly imprisoned
in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the
most elementary critical questions: not to mention the deconstructive
ones. It is because in appearance at least "I" am more a historian
that "I" am less passive, more attentive and more "deconstructive"
heir of the so-called tradition. And hence, perhaps again
paradoxically, more foreign to that tradition. I put quotation marks
around "Searle" and "I" to mark that beyond these indexes, I am aiming
at tendencies, types, styles, or situations rather than at persons.
(Limited Inc, 131)

Of course, the very existence of a distinct American philosophical
tradition is hardly known on the Continent, American philosophy being
little taught or even publicized as such. I wish to question now the
reasons for what I might call Jacques Derrida's radical silence on American
philosophy. For as I see it, deconstruction is at stake in the so-called
American philosophical tradition whether commentators will admit it or not.
Fruitful connections could be made between Derrida's critical assessment of
metaphysics and the Transcendentalists' own treatment of it. Emerson as
well as Thoreau had themselves begun to undermine the European heritage in
their writings: the System with a capital S had undergone serious attacks
in Emerson's philosophical style, or in the generic instability of
Thoreau's Walden. Emerson's ambiguous appraisal of metaphysics can be
traced in the obliqueness of his reading, quoting and juggling with his
European predecessors. Emerson's politics as regards citation which
consists in taking up and discussing arguments without mentioning their
authors and origin echoes the Derridian practice and underlying theory of
decontextualization. What is more, the well established and now documented
influence of Emerson on the formation of Nietzsche, may further testify to
the existence of a secret bond uniting the ancestors of deconstruction and
contemporary deconstructionists. Nietzsche read German translations of
Emerson's essays, copied passages from "History" and "Self-Reliance" in his
journals, and wrote of the Essays that he had never "felt so much at home
in a book." Derrida's deconstruction may have more in common with American
philosophical expressions that one would think. One contemporary American
philosopher, Richard Rorty, who both comments and admires the work of
Jacques Derrida, claims in his book entitled "Objectivism, Relativism and
Truth" the community of their anti-essentialist standpoint.

Of course, it would be unfair to blame Derrida for ignoring a tradition
largely unknown to his fellow European philosophers. Yet he, more than any
of his predecessors or contemporaries had a personal relationship with the
country and the language of American philosophers. The reasons why Derrida
was never curious enough to read American philosophers, or if he did, to
comment on them remain uncertain, but the fact of Derrida's radical silence
on American philosophy as such deserves further consideration. Conversely,
contemporary American philosophers with the exception of Richard Rorty,
hardly mention Derrida's name or when they do, they rhetorically pretend
not to know about his theories. Symptomatically enough, Stanley Cavell in
his preface to Senses of Walden (1972) even in its revised version (1992)
when dealing with what he calls "the dissociation of writing from
speaking," although he is wont to engage in intellectual debates of all
kinds, will not discuss Derrida's, nor Levi-Strauss's positions, for lack
of further understanding of their arguments: "I do not yet know or
understand the pertinent views of these authors well enough to dispute or
agree with them (Senses,xix). This paradoxical and frustrating attitude
which consists in mentioning thinkers in order to discard their
contribution on the subject could be regarded as Cavell's bitter response
to Derrida's deliberate ignorance of his American counterparts.

What I am suggesting is not that Derrida's radical silence on American
philosophy results from an intentional decision not to read American
thinkers. In my opinion, what Derrida's attitude betrays is certainly not
his contempt for American culture and letters, but his idea and his reading
of America as a text to come. America actually meant displacement and
dislocation to him: biographical, academic, and editorial displacement and
theoretical dislocation of the European logos. America is this locale where
the metaphysical tradition of the Old Continent could be uprooted. And
indeed, Derrida sought refuge, academic refuge and acknowledgement, in the
United States. One should never forget in this respect that the author of
Of Grammatolgy was never appointed a University professor in the French
academy. L'Ecole Normale or l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
not to speak of Collège International de Philosophie, which he himself
founded, are French prestigious institutions but are not universities as
such. America was the place for his name to philosophically resonate
outside France, for him to be made a full professor in all the meanings of
the term.

The Derridian notion of context may be useful to address the question of
Derrida's affirmative ignorance of the American text. Derrida hardly ever
re-inscribed explicitly deconstruction within the frame of American
history. Like Paul de Man, who had been called by a common friend
"Holderlin in America," Derrida was there out of context. For obvious
reasons, Derrida had to resist by any and all means the American text,
could not let it interfere with his own deconstructive preoccupations: for
the text of metaphysics to be brought out of context and uprooted, he had
to maintain to a certain extent the fiction of America as this out-of-
context textuality. And he did. What he had to ignore about America was its
radicalism (radicalité), it's radical critique of the European heritage,
and by the same etymological token, it's very roots. Grappling as he was
with the idea of origin, he could not be encumbered with or hindered by
this other text and it's impending genealogy.

The desire for fiction/America

I propose now to concentrate on a passage from "Mnemosyne", a conference
first delivered in March 1984 at Yale in memoriam Paul de Man, in which
Jacques Derrida makes a notorious statement about America and then
immediately retracts it: the first chapter of Mémoires—Pour Paul de Man,
Derrida starts out by confessing and speculating on his inability to tell a
story, what the fact of being a poor storyteller entails, a failure that
might be responsible for his becoming a philosopher:

I have never known how to tell a story.

And since I love nothing better than remebering and Memory
itself—Mnemosyne—I always felt this inability as a sad
infirmity. Why am I denied narration? Why have I not received
this gift? Why have I never received it from Mnemosyne, tes,
tôn, Mousôn metros, the mother of all muses, as Socrates recalls
in the Thaetetus (191b)? The gift (doron) of Mnemosyne, Socrates
insists, is like the wax in which all that we wish to guard in
our memory is engraved in relief so that it may leave a mark,
like that of rings, bands or seals. We preserve our memory and
our knowledge of them; we can then speak of them, and do them
justice, as long as their image (eidolon) remains legible.

But what happens when the lover of Mnemosyne has not received
the gift of narration? When he doesn't know how to tell as
story? When it is precisely because he keeps the memory that he
loses the narrative? (Memoires, 3)

What follows regarding America and deconstruction might not be indifferent
to this initial confession of a weakness or a frustration. A poor story
teller himself, Derrida could tell a good tale from a bad one: what
deconstruction precisely does is to undermine the tall-tale of metaphysics,
to dismiss the history of philosophy as a tale. What Derridian method is
about is the rationale of metaphysics as the self-legitimizing discourse of
logos.

In the following pages of this first chapter of Mémoires, Derrida
explicitly binds his incapacity to tell stories with the story of his
personal relationship to America. What could be read as a mere biographical
note turns out to be endowed with a decisive meaning: "Among the stories
that I will never know how to tell, no matter how much I want to, is the
story of all the journeys that have led me here. Not only those which have
for a long time drawn me to America, but specifically those which bring me
here today » (Memoires, 12). What Derrida expresses is his inability to
tell the story of his journeys and stays in America. Doing so, he confesses
his early and enduring attraction for the new found land: "le désir que
j'en garde" ("no matter how much I want to") is a most ambiguous clause in
French operating both forward and backward: le désir que j'en garde (de
raconter), le désir que j'en garde (de l'Amérique). The cause for Derrida's
desire of America will remain untold. Derrida's wish to tell stories makes
one even on a syntactical level with his wish for America. America
metonymically manifests Derrida's desire. Understandably, Derrida
considered moving to the United States: America was this place to go to.
And indeed, Derrida kept going back and forth, crossing the Atlantic his
whole life since he first visited the US in 1956, when he attended Harvard
as a special auditor at the Widener Library reading James Joyce.

The affinities uniting deconstruction to America are first asserted,
immediately questioned, and finally denied. This double and contradictory
motion is quite symptomatic of Derrida's ambivalent attitude toward
America. America could be seen as the place one can withdraw from, a place
liable to dismissal for its center does not hold, nor does it exist.

These entanglements are multiple; they meet nowhere, neither in
a point nor in a memory. There is no singular memory.
Furthermore, contrary to what is often thought, deconstruction
is not exported from Europe to the United States. Deconstruction
has several original configurations in this country, which in
turn—and there are many signs of this—produce singular effects
in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We would have to examine
here the power of this American radiation in all its dimensions
(political, technological, economic, linguistic, editorial,
academic, etc.). As Umberto Eco noted in an interview in the
newspaper Liberation (August 20-21, 1983), deconstruction in
Europe is a sort of hybrid growth and is generally perceived as
an American label for certain theorems, a discourse, or a
school. And this can be verified, especially in England,
Germany, and Italy. But is there a proper place, is there a
proper story for this thing? I think it consists only of
transference, and of a thinking through of transference, in all
the senses that this word acquires in more than one language,
and first of all that of the transference between languages. If
I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as
brief, elliptical, economical as a password, I would say simply
and without overstatement: plus d'une langue—both more than one
language and no more of a language. In fact it is neither a
statement nor a sentence. It is sentencious, it makes no sense
if, at least as Austin would have it, words in isolation have no
meaning. What makes sense is the sentence. How many sentences
can be made with "deconstruction"? (Memoires, 15)

Even if Derrida's contribution to the history of deconstruction could to
some extent bear the label "Made in America," deconstruction as such cannot
be understood as an American brand. Just like language, to paraphrase
Jacques Derrida on Paul Celan, deconstruction does not belong: la
déconstruction n'appartient pas. Deconstruction does not belong to a
country or a continent, to a people, the Chosen-people, or to a specific
language, German. Interestingly enough, the word "radiation" secretly
echoes the word tradition, which Derrida, impervious to the concept of an
American tradition, will not utter.

However, let me dwell for a second on a word, un mot seul, that Derrida
pronounces and comments: the French word "transfert" (transference) will
for sure prove polysemic in translation, being itself polysemic in French:
"transfert" pertains to linguistic translation, as Derrida suggests, as
well as to psychoanalytical transference, a relationship largely based on
the radical and affirmative ignorance of the Other. Ubertragung is the term
coined by Sigmund Freud to describe the constitutive process of the
analytical cure characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from
one object to another. One definition for transference is "the redirection
of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from
childhood toward a new object" (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (8th
ed.) 1976). Deconstruction is inseparable from the process of translation
and that of transference, both involving the redirection of
meaning/feeling, archaic or elaborate drives toward a different and
somewhat accidental object. America could presumably be this object. But
the reason why America cannot coincide with deconstruction is that
deconstruction is by definition nowhere to be and can only be encountered
in passing as a fleeting process or an incipient event.

A series of historical affinities may still attach deconstruction to
America whose causes may be briefly recalled. In the first place, America,
that is the United States, is a place of historical dissent and of
difference from European political and, I would add, philosophical values.
America is historically known to be the place where a political fiction
came true in the form of the performative Declaration of Independence, on
which Derrida has thoroughly commented. America is based on the notion of
religious and political dissent, a place where dissent did take shape and
was turned into a political system. America did largely, if not decisively,
contribute to the emergence of the Western democratic model Derrida regards
as the very condition of possibility of literature. Fiction is thus
undoubtedly an American topic. "La littérature est une invention moderne,
elle s'inscrit dans des conventions et des institutions qui, pour n'en
retenir que ce trait, lui assurent en principe le droit de tout dire. La
littérature lie ainsi son destin à une certaine non-censure, à l'espace de
la liberté démocratique (liberté de la presse, liberté d'opinion, etc.).
Pas de littérature sans démocratie sans littérature […] Mais on ne peut en
aucun cas, les dissocier l'une de l'autre." (Passions,65). Secondly,
America is this "plus d'une langue" country by both definition and
accident: America is more than a mere cosmopolitan nation of immigrants
speaking broken English, it is a nation where native speakers themselves
happen to be bi-lingual in their own mother tongue, that is in American
English, a differential version of British English, in keeping with
Derrida's description of his own relation to French as an Algerian born
Jew: "I only have one language; it is not mine." (Monolingualism, 1)

Jacques Derrida was fully aware of the impact and resistance to
deconstruction in the United States. As the following passage of
"Mnemosyne" shows, Derrida did not misconceive of the American context even
if he seldom dealt with it: as a reader of The Wall Street Journal, New
Yorker or New York Review of Books, he could perceive the political aspects
of deconstruction; as a connoisseur of the American society, he is wary
about forms of "deconstructivist theology" when it comes to it's religious
aspects and stresses the disturbing and powerful side-effects of
deconstruction in American Academia:

for deconstruction is also, and increasingly so, a discourse and a
practice, on the subject of the academic institution,
professionalization, and departmental structures that can no longer
contain it. And when professional philosophers feign concern over the
progress of deconstruction in literature departments, even to the
point of indicting the philosophical naiveté of the poor literary
scholar, you can easily conclude—and immediately verify—that what
makes Searle and Danto and others so nervous is what is happening all
around them, to their colleagues, assistants, or students in
philosophy departments). (Memoires, 17)

In this passage, Derrida alludes to the way deconstruction impacted the
American philosophical world and challenged the raison d'être of
disciplinary divisions. Jacques Derrida did interefere with American
philosophy in an oblique but no less actual way. The father of
deconstruction was indirectly responsible for a series of disputes and re-
definitions in the realm of American philosophy whose boundaries and issues
deconstruction tended to blur. Even without directly confronting his
counterparts, he had broken into the domain of American philosophy and he
was attacked for the trespassing of symbolical property. Deconstruction
could neither be contained within the boundaries of academic departments,
nor could it be contained within national, or even continental boundaries.
Because deconstruction is pervasive, it tends to redesign the map of the
American academic world, and redefine the terms of philosophical debates.

America under erasure

Here comes the key passage in regard to our subject:

Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of
deconstruction, I would risk with a smile, the following hypothesis:
America is deconstruction (l'Amérique, mais c'est la déconstruction).
In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction
in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its
place, its principal residence. And could we define the United States
today without integrating the following into its description; It is
that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through
all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most
sensitive, receptive and responsive space of all the themes and
effects of deconstruction. Since such space represents and stages, in
this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not
define it without at least including this symptom (if we can speak of
symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages in over the subject
of deconstruction, there is no front; there are no fronts. But if they
were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define
the lot, and in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned
from "Deconstruction" to suspend these always hasty attributions of
proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, deconstruction
is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of
deconstruction. Let us say instead: deconstruction and America are two
open sets which intersects partially according to an allegoric-
metonymic figure. In this fiction of truth, "America" would be the
title f a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the
deconstruction of history.

This is why I have decided not to talk to you about "deconstruction in
America." (Memoires, 18)

America is marked by a trope, which may be investigated: praeterition. This
reading is all the more legitimate since the rest of Derrida's conference
will focus on this other deManian rhetoric device: prosopopeia.
Furthermore, praeterition lends itself to be read as the rhetorical
modality of denegation. The relation of deconstruction and America is
filtered through a praeterition, which consists in bringing what Derrida
calls an "hypothesis" to the fore to (better) dismiss it. A praeterition is
this trope in which the speaker heavily insists on what he supposedly has
no intention of dealing with. Praeterition comes from the Latin verb:
praetereo, ire which means first to override, second, to omit, to leave
aside, not to mention, to silence. Littré's dictionary, which Derrida liked
to consult, gives the following definition for prétérition: "1) L'action de
taire, de passer sous silence 2) Figure de rhétorique par laquelle on feint
d'omettre des circonstances avec lesquelles on insiste avec beaucoup de
force 3) Terme de pratique. Omission d'un héritier nécessaire dans un
testament." Interestingly, based on the linguistic principle of negation
praeterition performs in language one essential feature of material
writing: the possibility to write down a word and cross it out. My
assumption is that America is conspicuously crossed out in Derrida's
discourse: America in Derrida is under erasure.

What the denegation of the hypothesis clearly makes a case for is the
necessity for America to be repressed in Derrida's writing. A question
still remains: why is the hypothesis raised at all? My tentative answer is
that Derrida himself cannot help it and will not resist temptation.
Remarkably, when Derrida refers to what he calls the "historical space," he
replaces the name 'America' by the United States. However, the whole
paragraph is based on a condition that will not be met, what French
grammarians calls l'irréel du présent: "Si j'étais moins souvent associé"
("Were I not so frequently associated"). As a result, the whole passage
lends itself to be read as fiction. Why would Derrida be entitled to claim
the Americanness of deconstruction if his name was not so often identified
with it? The underlying argument has to do with the misleading power of the
name. The reason why "l'Amérique mais ce n'est pas la deconstruction" —
there would be a lot to say about the adversative conjunction "mais" which
anticipates the denegation to come — and Derrida deliberately italicized
the determinant, is that deconstruction is manifold: "plus d'une langue,"
and I would venture to add, plus d'un nom (more than one name). America is
no less the name of deconstruction than Jacques Derrida is. Names are
misleading attributes that need to be suspended in order for deconstruction
to take place. The spell of the name is difficult to resist but the
illusion of essence naming bestows on a process that precisely cannot be
circumscribed would prove counter-productive. Jacques Derrida is certainly
not the name of deconstruction. Since Derrida's name is identified with
deconstruction, Derrida does not feel entitled to suggest any other name,
to substitute any other name.

Yet, the hypothesis should be taken seriously: for there is more to it than
a mere provisional intellectual process, it allows for the emergence of an
impersonal and fictitious mode reminiscent what of Derrida in Passions
calls a voice: a voce makes it possible for the speaker to utter words and
communicate meaning without speaking on his/her behalf, without being
associated with them, allows to dissociate the speaker from the spoken. In
this sense, hypothesis could be the other name of fiction. Deconstruction
cannot be named, not at least for good. A name is the basis of fiction, the
basic fiction, i.e. the fiction of essence. America is the name of
deconstruction as this impossible fiction. If deconstruction had a name, or
rather a nickname, its nickname would definitely be America. Yet America
cannot appear in Derrida's but on a hypothetical mode, in the thwarted turn
of a praetrition, in the negative form of denegation. Interpreting
Derrida's gesture in the light of Freud's 1925 essay entitled "Die
Verneinung," may help to better understand both its critical function and
seminal importance in his philosophy: "This is why I have decided not to
talk to you about 'deconstruction in America'."

Da es die Aufgabe der intellektuellen Urteilsfunktion ist,
Gedankeninhalte zu bejahen oder zu verneinen, haben uns die
vorstehenden Bemerkungen zum psychologischen Ursprung dieser Funktion
geführt. Etwas im Urteil verneinen, heißt im Grunde: das ist etwas,
was ich am liebsten verdrängen möchte. Die Verurteilung ist der
intellektuelle Ersatz der Verdrängung, ihr Nein ein Merkzeichen
derselben, ein Ursprungszertifikat etwa wie das "made in Germany".
Vermittels des Verneinungssymbols macht sich das Denken von den
Einschränkungen der Verdrängung frei und bereichert sich um Inhalte,
deren es für seine Leistung nicht entbehren kann.

(Given that it is the task of the intellectual function of judgment to
assert or negate contents of thought, the former remarks led us to
discover the psychological origin of this function. To negate
something in judgment basically means: this is something I would
rather repress. Negative judgment is the intellectual substitute of
repression; its "no" is a brand, a certificate of origin, comparable
to "made in Germany." Through the symbol of negation, thought frees
itself from the boundaries of repression and is enriched by contents
which are essential to its fulfillment).

The marginal status of America in Derrida's works should not be
misinterpreted for this veiled and hollow — suppressed — object is
precisely what allows the free play of the deconstructive discourse.
America is the name of fiction and a fiction, a narrative Jacques Derrida
is able to imagine, but not to tell for more than a paragraph. Hence, the
return of the repressed takes the form of a sudden fiction, une hypothèse.
In Derrida's works, America stands out as the fiction of the unconditional.
But of course Derrida's America is not the United States. Does America
exist at all? America is this fiction passed on from generation to
generation since Christopher Columbus discovered the continent he mistook
for India, what Rorty calls an "intentional object." One of the conditions
of the deconstructive process might have been the repression of America as
a text, and ultimately the repression of American philosophy.



Isabelle Alfandary

Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle



Works Cited
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DERRIDA, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, Il. : Northwestern University
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Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989
Passions. Paris: Galilée, 1993
Monolingualism of the Other Or The Prosthesis of Origin.
Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press,
1998
SEARLE, John. "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," _Glyph_ 1
(1977): 198-208