Criticizing (unlike) Derrida

Many people try to outdo Derrida in their criticism of him: I will try to do this here as well (in a very limited way, merely by a little gesture), but will, in the process, also try and skew the direction in which this outdoing is done. For most will try to outdo him in his reading of words. In other words, they try to "outread" him: take for instance Foucault's response to him in "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," and in his response, which you can find now collected in the fully translated History of Madness. There Foucault points out how Derrida forgets aspects of the text of Descartes that he reads in "Cogito and the History of Madness," and accuses him of hypocrisy: if Derrida is constantly about reading texts closely, how come when he reads them he doesn't read certain crucial parts of the text?
This of course is to misunderstand what Derrida is about--though I think Foucault's reading of the words is indeed more thorough than Derrida's (but this is only because in "Cogito and the History of Madness" the real point is a certain stance on madness itself, on which the two thinkers differ largely--cf. certain remarks in "No (Point of) Madness--Maintaining Architecture" in Psyche II). It is, in short, to commit the great mistake (still so prevalent) of thinking that what Derrida means by "text" is only the words on the page (see my previous posts on this).
I will try to suggest that it is another aspect of Foucault's critique that is actually hard hitting, since this "outreading" only is what Derrida is asking for--that is, he wants people to be responsible in the face of the irresponsibility in any reading (for example, his) by reading again, reading (and not only once) more. This "other aspect" is the criticism of Derrida's ignorance of institutions that set up the text: it is the fact that Descartes is there, with his body, his paper, in front of this fire, that indeed ensures that (or at least assuages certain problems regarding whether) the writing he is doing is not the writing of a madman, or a dreamer--indeed that he is capable of reflection on his consciousness to begin (or end, considering his conclusions) with. That is, Foucault's critique also tries to outdo Derrida by reading other things than words: its outdoing is not first and foremost an outreading, but an analysis of institutions, regimens, rules, etc. Now, these institutions are not a priori excluded from the Derridan text--if we recast Foucault's criticism in Derrida's terms, it would not work for Derrida, since what Foucault calls that which "sets up the text" is indeed the text too for Derrida. However, there is a sense in which these institutional facts or facts about practices do make up a smaller part of the reading of that text than, say, the certain words (and facts about words) that Descartes writes. In this sense, then (and in this sense only--and I do believe this is Foucault's sense), one can say that Decartes' text for Derrida does largely ignore institutions: it does not consider them for the same length as it does words. Part of Derrida's genius is the realization of this fact in his later writings: his recasting of responsibility in terms of calculation and of hospitality (which indeed took place early in his career too, but to a lesser extent), and not in terms of reading (though he still uses the word frequently) is an effort to correct this fact--and the chief reason why some unbelievably simple-minded, analogically thinking literary critics find his later work less "useful" for the study of literature, more "political" (as if it wasn't both already!--and to get a sense of this simple-mindedness, one only has to look at a literary critic who has stepped into "thinking" "the ethical," though by no means are they all so simple).
But the criticism still stands: one can get a feel for it (and its viability when levied even against this later work) by looking at a passage from a discussion supplementing the (recently published) lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am. Derrida is in the middle of discussing (it was an impromptu session at the conference at Cerisy on his work demanded by the listeners, who hadn't had enough of him--even after his nine hours of addressing them) Heidegger and his seminar The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which focuses on the triad world, finitude, and solitude:

One must pay attention to this gesture, an apparently pedagogical gesture in Heidegger, but one that is more than pedagogical, and that each time consists in positing things in threes, and saying he is going to uncover their common root or else the median thesis. Here, the question or common root is the three questions [world, finitude, solitude] is the essence of time...
"I Don't Know Why We are Doing This" in The Animal that Therefore I Am, 150

Now, the point here is the importance given to the pedagogical, Derrida's revealing that what is "apparently" pedagogical is "more than pedagogical." In a way, what is happening here is that Derrida is taking a sort of provisional statement, necessary for Heidegger to organize his seminar, and showing that its necessity extends out to the rest of his entire discourse on world, finitude, and solitude. The provisional is precisely what is necessary: there thus is an evacuation of the sphere of provisionality in the text, one that seeks to include what is written, what is there, but never really said--that is, never really fully, properly there. In the inclusion of this unsaid, written, formal or pedagogical element, Derrida reconstitutes the text of Heidegger here--he prevents the exclusion of what is not said by what is said, prevents its being made into something other than discourse. And he does this by showing that this unsaid's being written there is just as much a sort of being-said as anything that is "really" said, if not more than this. In short, what is excluded gets included, by making what is included, not by including it, but by making what is included of the same status as what is excluded. What is unsaid, isn't unsaid: in being written, it counts.
We've seen this gesture before, and also with gestures of Heidegger: I focus on writing and speech here to recall Of Grammatology. Old hat, right? Well, so are the criticisms of this gesture. They take the following form: so what? So the included is made excluded, the excluded included-excluded. We still have to read this text you have now made for us, Derrida--that is, do something you, precisely in your doing it, have not done. In a very literal way, you make no difference--only your odd word, différance. Which gives us nothing we can read--precisely by making everything readable, by making everything excluded, or just as included as excluded.
But what is more interesting (and here is my little gesture towards outreading, to reading more) is what Foucault would focus on: the fact that the pedagogic is looked at here primarily as something that can, once we see that it is textual (and thus that texts are marks and not spoken words), constitute a text in the philosophic tradition, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. That is, this writing is seen as informing or being informed by our knowledge of Heidegger and what Heidegger is treating, when it could just as easily (and just as textually, in Derrida's sense) be looked at as something that informs or is informed by our knowledge of various institutional constraints, various mechanisms or protocols delineating the paths certain gestures could and would take in the classroom, etc. Heidegger himself was a notoriously weird lecturer: why not look at this to begin with, why not start here, and see the written words here, the pedagogic gesture, even as a function of it. In short, everything that constitutes the pedagogical here for Derrida as something external to the main thrust of the thinking, everything that makes it merely a "rhetorical" (that is, unimportant, external to thinking) gesture, and by virtue of which he is able to then include it as a necessary element of a text--everything here can be analyzed precisely as rhetorical, as something that is occurring (pedagogically) in words, and not in, say, physical gestures, gesticulations, in costuming (Heidegger wore traditional peasant clothing as he lectured) in intonations (Heidegger spoke methodically, slowly--there are many documents about this, but there is also a lot unsaid--precisely, commandingly).

Or at least this would be the starting point for the undoing of this exclusionary logic--we might therefore not jump immediately to considering what is written qua written in words. The initial gesture, the preference in analysis, wouldn't be towards the recuperation of the excluded as something written, but the analysis of the modes of exclusion--one of which is speaking instead of writing. To be brief: there are more levels of text than words--Derrida himself affirms this by including the pedagogical--but why not articulate their operation in the textuality of those levels first and foremost? Why all this focus on the little mistakes or successes in the operation of certain grammatical elements, when there are so many other (similarly untotalized) grammars of which to make up a text, something that we may (and must, according to Derrida) read and read again? Indeed, Derrida himself affirms that there are more things to a text than just words by including the pedagogical, but he also insists on this by saying that whole discourses turn upon these few mistakes, these provisional remarks--as he does here, with Heidegger? This is the gesture that I do not understand, along with Foucault: the insistence, the "must" in "one must pay attention to this gesture," the notion that if we do not pay attention, we will miss the moment that the whole text turns upon. While this can be true, how precisely--at what levels, in what ways, with what costs--does this moment distribute the determination of the text throughout the whole? In other words, why not register the other moments? Luckily, in this moment, and in many others, Derrida does this. But he does so only with respect to the other words used: how does this text, which we know is not just a book, not just the words on the page (though it is of course also them)--how does this text as a whole, which may include actions, gestures, even institutions, remain informed by this moment? Why don't we get any of those as well? In such a way Derrida analyzes three pages of History of Madness and says that the whole rest of the (nearly seven-hundred page, in its French printing) book is determined or informed by them, revolves around them somehow. Taking him at his word, why do we only hear Derrida talking about the rest of the book's words here--and not certain facts about its distribution, the fact that it didn't sell well, the fact that it was made in a certain moment in the French institution, with the help of certain people, with a certain political situation, etc. etc.? I'll repeat the complaint: why all this focus on the little weaknesses, little privosos or provisional statements, when there are so many other elements of which to make up a text?
Now, this criticism is not one about the status that Derrida gives to what is provisional. What is objectionable isn't that Derrida is knocking down these thinkers with low blows, focusing only on where they are weak--that is, in their provisional statements, in their temporary remarks. To object to this is not only to put oneself in the uncomfortable position of affirming the right of thinkers to certain provisional statements which indeed are out of line. It is also to concede that there exists a realm of discourse that should sometimes be free of the responsibility to answer to what is said there, and sometimes not. In short, it is to institute a greater lawlessness than any attempt to count these provisional statements as statements would institute, because the rule by which they are counted as significant or not is never thematized. In fact, it is to found any discourse that counts upon this possibility (among others, of course--but this does not make this any less disconcerting) of accessing lawlessness: one saw this completely with the explosion of comments in France and elsewhere during "the Heidegger controversy." It isn't that Heidegger's occasional or more impromptu remarks--especially those in his letter to Victor Schwoerer--don't reflect serious aspects of his thinking, or that can't be in fact more serious and significant than that thinking itself. It is that the decisions by which we include or do not include these remarks traffic in the distinction between the marginal or the impromptu and the serious, the belabored, the well-thought-out that they question, and that there is no formalization of these rules themselves... a fact that often leads to arbitrary inclusions or exclusions and, more significantly, the feeling that discussion can only take place in the absence of this formalization. In the end--and this is indeed what happened in the "controversy"--a serious issue merely ends up producing unfounded discussion for the sake of this production itself, and without any responsibility for this production: in other words, people write articles and talk about the issue precisely by evaporating any of its particular constitution, its specificity, which merited discussion in the first place. In short, discussion itself becomes an institution, or (what is even more loathsome) a market, without foundation. (This is all similar to what Frederic Jameson says of the utopian.)
So it is not that one should defend these thinker's mistakes or more "private" triumphs--in short, their weaknesses, external to their "real" thought--against Derrida's utilization of them. It is precisely that these weaknesses are not merely informing a text made of words: they articulate themselves on so many other levels. One thus does not have to affirm differences against différance--that is, affirm that there simply exist distinctions between what is included and excluded, and that we have to analyze those rather than focus on how they collapse into differing ("as") these differences, how they collapse into différance. One has to say merely that the levels at which we are isolating the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps to collapse them so, are many more in number than certain works of the philosophic tradition and their allegedly "pedagogic" elements. In fact, they can precisely be institutions such as the school. Doesn't it make more sense for Derrida to ask of the school itself and this gesture's place within it if he wants to really look at the gesture? It is in this sense that Foucault is right when he says Derrida remains a philosopher, as non-philosophical as he is: what matters to him most in Foucault's seven-hundred page book are the three pages where a philosophic text is brought up.
Of course, Derrida is authorized by the fact that he is indeed working on a certain plane in which there is exclusion on a more massive level than just a particular philosopher and his offhand remarks: that of the subordination of writing to speech within the institution of philosophy itself, for example (whether there exists another aspect to his corpus of this scale remains an open question, and not one that can be answered by insistences of so-called "ethical turns" or "later" thinking: I do indeed believe it occurs, however). But it is only insofar as this is remembered that his remarks here gain their specificity in this larger way--and even those that look like they are about other institutions (law, politics) must be remembered this way and within the scope of this analysis--which they usually don't seem to be. Or at least by us, who read him: perhaps the largest change possible in our thinking about Derrida would be to see his writings on something like terrorism or international politics as precisely an ongoing critique of philosophy (as something like an institution). We could say this in the end, with respect to Foucault and Derrida in general: the former might focus most on writing about institutions (psychiatry, prisons), but might be a greater thinker of writing and discourse (in something like The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge), while the latter might focus most on writing about writing and discourse, while he might be a greater thinker of institutions--that is, if we read them both right.