Hesitancies

I have expressed quite often a certain hesitancy with regard to various interpreters of Derrida, especially those that, over the years, have taken it upon themselves to maintain a privileged relationship with Derrida's writings, especially in English speaking countries. By "privileged" I mean the following: they have, either, prior to saying something about Derrida, translated a text of Derrida's, directly allowing his French to enter the English-speaking world, and usually in doing so (or prior to doing so) have consulted Derrida himself; or have taught Derrida constantly, and done so as his thought developed over the years, following and anticipating its course all the way. In both cases there is privilege, because--whether they wanted this or not--these interpreters have ended up representing his thinking, and done so to an extent not able to be performed by just anyone (qualified, that is) who talked about Derrida.
Now, this hesitancy is not necessarily a hesitancy revolving around the old problem of the "reception" of Derrida in the United States. Let me be clear: I don't caution against certain remarks of these interpreters because I believe that something has gone horribly wrong in the way Derrida's thinking has been represented (although many do make the case for this, preferring to call it deconstructivism rather than deconstruction--more on this later). In most cases, the interpreters I am referring to--one might cite John Caputo as well as John Sallis as particularly great examples--have recognized the necessity to respond to a thinking as important as Derrida's. Their interpretations (a word I am using very loosely, of course: one might also say explanations, teachings, translations, even asides), even if they are off the mark, are not off the mark because they mean to be, but because in the effort to teach, appropriate and ultimately think beside an important contemporary thinker, one is on a path that is still developing and extremely uncertain.
Rather, the hesitancy revolves around the particular dynamics of power and influence that come with these privileged positions: that is, their active ability to guide interpretation into the future simply because of these positions. Indeed, it is an issue of authority. But it is not one that argues against authority per se. It is one that simply asks for a level playing field (or something approximating this) with respect to a very contemporary thinker. Essentially, all that I worry about, and here urge others to worry about, is whether Derrida is distant enough from us to be able to think about him and alongside him in such a way that the discourse produced would, in turn, produce its own authority: Derrida, in short, would be someone to discuss, to study, rather than someone who could be used only in various dynamics of power on the part of students or "followers" of someone representing Derrida (which I would say is currently the case here). This would only be to take stock of the fact that Derrida is indeed discussed everywhere. In short, I think we are not yet at the point (in English-speaking countries, this I don't think applies to France, which has various points of view on Derrida, many very rich) where several Derridas can emerge, the way there are certain Kants (that is, certain established readings of or "takes" on Kant and also the various individual works of Kant). Part of this is due, I think, to the remarkable consistency of Derrida's project--something I have remarked about earlier (alongside Frances Ferguson, who makes this point well in a recent essay against Richard Rorty), and will expand upon later. But it is probably mostly due to this power dynamic, which I think would generally occur around any significant thinker (it definitely occurred with Husserl, for example, as well as Hegel, to go further back). (I would not, I'll add, simply reduce the reasons for this to that of "time" and not enough of it having passed yet. This presupposes--and I have expanded and will expand upon this extensively--that it "takes time" to understand a thinker, which itself presupposes that with time, with reading slowly, and not in a quick and fast and even mechanical or technical manner, a manner exceeding the "organic" power dynamics many of these people representing Derrida would impose upon the university, a manner that reads only bits and pieces of essays, but perhaps lots of them, with a certain regularity, as much of the reading of Derrida is done today in America--this presupposes that if one does not read in all these ways, one then, necessarily, comprehends.)
This could be said to be an argument for the "academicization" or "institutionalization" of Derrida--something people might say is not quite in the spirit of what Derrida wished. But--and here is my point--that institutionalization has, with these representatives of Derrida, already occurred. Some, indeed, have profited enormously by making it seem as if they are rebels within the institution because they precisely occupy the position of a representative of Derrida--someone who supposedly resists institutionalization, discussion, teaching. The hypocrisy (which I would say is something other than irony) has already gone that far. I think the challenge has always been how to incorporate Derrida into an academic discourse when he already has been incorporated there--not how to use Derrida to undo this discourse. Indeed, this I think would be the only way to understand precisely how to undo the incorporation, to force the acts by which a thinking is appropriated by a discourse into a different way of operating.
In arguing this, I explicitly am resisting the tendency in philosophy departments to appropriate Derrida as if there were a certain undiscovered and fresh version of him, untainted by (chiefly) American literary criticism's decimation of his ideas. This would be a move that renders what was called deconstruction into a school of literary criticism that should properly be called deconstructivism: in short, it was a bad reception of Derrida that made what he advocated--deconstruction--into a parody of what it really was. Not only does this move presuppose that Derrida is at home more in a philosophical tradition (something that I don't necessarily deny), indeed more of a phenomenologist than a critic or something of the like, but it also assumes that we can simply erase the thinking done around Derrida in other fields than philosophy over the last few decades, even the fact that it was indeed done in these other fields. What is even more indicative that this view is wrongheaded is that it can easily become a view of some literary critics: all it amounts to is an effort to try and level the playing field all at once and without any responsibility. Thus, while it seems to be a version of what I'm talking about here, I think it is really a pragmatic (and I don't use this term in a flattering way) and ultimately nominalistic shortcut.
This view does recognize something important, however: deconstruction was thought about as a hermeneutic, another mode of interpreting the world. If anyone has read even the first few pages of Grammatology, for example, it would be clear to them that this gesture is absolutely not what Derrida was talking about. Thus, there needs to be a serious rethinking of what deconstruction is. I would say this is generally being realized especially in literature departments, as they try to rethink the last few decades and all of the discipline's twists and turns. But what is absolutely lost by the people who are quick to say what deconstruction isn't, and relegate certain ideas about Derrida to the realm of "deconstructivism" (and the person under discussion in the next few paragraphs is definitely one of these, even though she is seen as belonging to the field of literary criticism), is that though deconstruction isn't a hermeneutic, it is absolutely critical that it always risk becoming one. And this, I would argue, is why one can't simply dismiss the past few decades and the people who have indeed represented Derrida in this time.
Now, as I've hinted, all these points most definitely apply to Gayatri Spivak and her work on and with Derrida: the work is very accurate, done in order to elucidate Derrida, and has its faults, when it has them, mainly because it is trying to think alongside someone who also does not have everything together in his thought.
And yet, particularly with Spivak's work, this hesitancy I have is the most strong, and I feel most forcefully the need to oppose the mode of representation of Derrida that Spivak has cultivated over the years with this "academicization" or "institutionalization" of Derrida I spoke about. It should be noted that Spivak has indeed contributed to this, holding many classes on Derrida over the years. But I would say that "institutionalization" in the manner I spoke of it above was not the result of this effort. And I would claim that the reasons for this can be seen if one takes the class, but also, in a more generally accessable manner, if we look back at her "Translator's Preface" to Of Grammatology.
Now, it should be clear that this preface was written in he early 70's, and doesn't obviously represent her thinking about Derrida fully now (for something closer to this now, see her appendix to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and many of the remarks on Derrida throughout that book). But indeed a corrected edition of Grammatology went out in 1997, and one wonders whether the remarks here couldn't have been changed or corrected as well. Because they don't seem to be changed in any highly significant way, one is invited to see the remarks as "still valid" to a certain extent. However, to exactly what extent they are doesn't really matter to me here. What is more important to me are the particular ways of phrasing certain aspects of what Derrida is trying to communicate that pepper this preface and that orient even certain changes in phrasing in the most recent work of Spivak (which nevertheless are pretty minimal in my opinion, but like I said this is a different matter). And all I wish to do here is articulate them and what they, together, seem to say about Derrida and how to approach him. Hopefully this will warn people to be hesitant about them in the manner I suggested above. Of course this doesn't mean they are necessarily "wrong:" but unless they are pointed out, currently we don't usually get a chance to think about whether their correctness (if they are correct) has some kind of flexibility to it, whether the approach these ways of putting things allow may be accomplished differently.
I'll try and be brief. Here, in my view, are the particular "tics" in the phrasing:

First, a particular progressivism that is quite dangerous: Spivak situates Derrida rightly alongside the efforts of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and structuralism--a gesture correct in and of itself, and indeed merely one that reduplicates the gesture of Derrida in his essay "Différance," as well as "Structure, Sign, and Play"--but in such a way that we range all these thinkers around the thinking of différance and "how far" they go in thinking it. Not only does this presuppose that Derrida thinks différance as such, something that in itself is impossible and that Derrida repeatedly says is impossible, but that all the other thinkers in this tradition are able to be yoked together like this around Derrida merely because of they are thinking something similar. In this act we can see the future of literary theory and its willingness to move from Bataille to Heidegger to Leibniz in the blink of an eye, without wondering what precisely allows these moves: a thinking that generally critiques mimesis presupposes almost always a certain resemblance between the content of the thought of (or at least the general orientation inhabited by) various thinkers. When Derrida ranges these thinkers around a thinking of différance, not only is he trying to outline how a thought seems to be similar to that of others and perhaps even be inherited from them (something that Spivak is trying to reconstitute) but he is is also referring to three main members of a philosophical discourse in France at that time. In fact, one could argue that he does more of this reference than constitute a genealogy: since he is referring specifically to his papers which think these thinkers individually and at length, the point is not that a thinking of différance has been more or less accomplished over the years by various people, but that the philosophical resources that France (or, more specifically, a specific set of French thinkers) in particular has at its disposal at the time (in the moment in which we are, Derrida says, and we cannot let this "'we'"--which is itself in quotes--become indeterminate, at the risk of missing its strategic constitution: "...I am starting, strategically, from the place and the time in which 'we' are...", Margins of Philosophy, 7) are precisely those that merit a thinking towards (if one can say this) différance. No doubt Derrida too succumbs to the desire to occasionally range thinkers along a certain line which led up to a thinking of différance--this was most the case (and to many people's outrage, Spivak among them) it seemed in Specters of Marx. But I would argue that this is mistaken and incompatible with most of what he says: when Derrida says particular thinkers are not yet accomplishing a deconstruction of metaphysics or what have you (most importantly, I think, when he says this of Heidegger), we must not interpret this to mean that these thinkers, as Spivak says of the structuralists, "have stopped short" in any way (Of Grammatology, corrected edition, lix). There is no stopping short, because there is no way for them to go further: elsewhere (in "The Supplement of Copula") Derrida critiques Benveniste for applying this quantitative measure to knowledge or thought (without totally transforming, a la Nietzsche or Freud, the idea of thought into something more commensurate with being quantitatively determined), a critique or a reprimand that could be directed towards Spivak as well and, as I suggest, even towards Derrida himself. Structuralists do not come up short of a thinking of différance or of anything that Derrida himself might think. Neither does Freud, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, even when Derrida himself says something crudely like the following: "This is perhaps what Nietzsche wanted to write..." (Of Grammatology, 143: all the emphasis must be put upon the "perhaps" here, which would suspend the timeline that one would construct). No one should follow Spivak's tendency to simply think of things in the following manner, even if she tries to cancel out what she says by putting it all under erasure (sous-rature) or in quotes: "Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger... All three proto-grammatologues... It was for Derrida to 'produce' their intrinsic power and 'discover' grammatology, the science of the 'sous rature'" (Of Grammatology, l). What is in question here is, again, a tic in the phrasing that betrays a whole orientation or possible orientation in approaching Derrida--one that we should be hesitant about.

Next, an overemphasis upon the phrase "desire for presence:" Derrida uses this phrase often, but unless one completely rethinks what the word "desire" means, it risks being used precisely as Spivak uses it: as an equivalent, however qualified, for "mere prejudice," something that could be dismissed, cured, done away with, even if this were to require an immense effort or purging. It is what precisely makes it seem to be a longing, a nostalgia, but in the colloquial and not, again, in a completely transformed way: "it is a longing for a center, an authorizing pressure, that spawns heirarchized oppositions" (lxix). This is too simple, and one can tell precisely by the use of the word "spawn:" this word, linked metaphorically to production in the sense of phusis, of reproduction, of growth, is inappropriate here because it is being applied to what has already grown or reproduced--what is spawned here has already been spawned by the time that Spivak says it is spawned. Indeed, this is what makes it an opposition in the first place. Regardless, the point is that the desire for presence is not a desire in the sense of a baseless prejudice: it is, as Derrida particularly in Of Grammatology ceaselessly emphasizes and chiefly is attempting to articulate (this is the entire purpose of the second essay on Rousseau), a logic. This desire is logic itself. And it is only in this sense that it is baseless: this desire is logic itself as a baseless prejudice. And unless this thought is, logically, impossible, one hasn't conceived of what is meant by the word "desire" with enough rigor. At issue is the transit between the colloquial sense of "desire" and a desire that would be this impossibility of logic (in all the senses of this phrase, with the emphasis on the double genitive). Spivak moves too quickly between them, precisely because she is trying to find out a way to signify what Derrida is getting at--alongside Derrida who also is trying to find a way to signify what he is getting at. But in "Structure, Sign, and Play," for example, where this language of nostalgia gets its most thorough use (besides Grammatology), we find it very thoroughly qualified. To use it as often as Spivak does makes it seem, again, as if various thinkers' desire for presence were something that could be used to arrange them along a line leading up to Derrida, who, as she says, "seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence" (xvi). The simplicity of the thinking here becomes explicit, precisely in the word "show:" by what standard of visibility is Derrida being judged alongside these other philosophers? It would seem to have to be a standard that relied upon a particular visible--that is, verifiable, commonly held, colloquial--understanding of desire and nostalgia, deriving from an idea of want, of lack, of need: not one that has a logic, or is simply logic itself.

Next, a pragmatist interpretation of Derridian ethics: this last point obviously indicates that any thought of a transformation somehow brought about by a deconstruction would have a quality too close to a production (in the colloquial sense of this word too), or something like a dispelling of an illusion. Underlying this is an idea of what deconstruction gives us. Spivak is uncomfortable, it seems, with this notion: it seems to be, as Stanley Fish recently concluded, nothing at all. The question is elaborated along the lines (or line) of filiation that we have already questioned: what makes Derrida different from Nietzsche, after all? We see here the internal inconsistency of Spivak's argument, even if she is attempting to try and follow Derrida in making it: of course if you situate Derrida alongside Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, and interpret them proleptically as proto-thinkers of deconstruction, one will have to come back to the telos one has established (Derrida, only real, authentic thinker of deconstruction) and see if one can squeeze out of the circle that one has thus made for oneself. Spivak doesn't really seem to make it out, either. But again, it is also a matter of what deconstruction gives us that a general, and sometimes devastating, critique of metaphysics--of the manner of Freud, Nietzsche, or Heidegger--doesn't. It is, once again, a questioning of what differentiates deconstruction from destruction or disassembling or desedimentation. Here is Spivak's answer: "Perhaps the entire argument" (and the whole purpose of my discussion here is to question whether the indeterminacy here in the word "argument" is, at bottom, only a matter of one person trying to represent and speak for another: it is not clear whether "the entire argument" regarding how Derrida moves past a critique of metaphysics and into deconstruction of it, is Spivak's or Derrida's, and Spivak, it seems, would keep having this slippage work, simply because it obviously works in her favor, allows her to represent with a bit more authority)-- "perhaps the entire argument hangs on who knew how much of what he was doing. The will to knowledge is not easy to discard. When Derrida claims for himself that he is within yet without the clôture of metaphysics, is the difference not precisely that he knows it at least?" (xxxviii). At issue here is not whether one is in or out of metaphysics. It is how Derrida knows he is on the border between them--a border that cannot be crossed without coming back, without being rebounded back into metaphysics--where Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, who were on this same border constantly, did not know it. Now this word "know" is seriously qualified by Spivak. But it becomes clear later that, again, what is meant is "simply a matter of attitude" (lxxiv): "Simply to recognize that one is shaped by differance, to recognize that the 'self' is constituted by its never-fully-to-be-recognized-ness, is enough" (xliv). This is, according to Spivak, what Freud taught Derrida, against Nietzsche: Nietzsche would have us somehow take over différance and use it against metaphysics, when Freud realizes that it is being used all the time. But the phrase comes to have a bit of an authority of its own throughout the text of Spivak here: what it says seems to govern precisely what makes deconstruction different from destruction, or a critique. In other words, it is precisely what makes, on the one hand, deconstruction different than something violent and extremely active, something with a very visible effect upon metaphysics, and, on the other hand, something that is not too passive, something that, in its very slow and delicate work with texts, combined with its insistence upon impossibility and the unconditional, merely looks like a change in point of view, a very weak passivity with little or nothing to actually do to metaphysics. Now, what is in question here, for me, is not whether this is a wrong characterization of deconstruction: I think this balance between passivity and activity is precisely what is at stake in it. What is wrong is the idea that the balance is achieved precisely through a recognition that is unlike that of Nietzsche or Freud or Heidegger: as if, presented with the various theses of Derrida (which were, no doubt, precisely what Nietzsche, Freud, or Heidegger, would have said, were really trying to get at all along), they would balk at them, reject them outright, whereas Derrida, without nostalgia for presence, accepts them wholeheartedly. For what is at issue is the fact that, indeed, deconstruction doesn't do much. It in fact shouldn't do anything: it is precisely the broaching of a limit that rebounds one back to where one was, a stepping forward that steps back, a mere opening up of what can be perceived to alterity, and alterity that is different than any perceivable alteity. It is simply the response to the coming of the infinitely other, a response which precisely allows this other to come. As such, it has nothing to say: all that occurs if something is deconstructed (if that is possible) is the opening up of a possibility. Now, Spivak knows this, but she characterizes it precisely as an act, as a recognition, as something that is not, as an act, impossible--is not an opening up of the possible precisely by impossibility. Instead of stressing the impossible, she stresses the possible: but because she in fact almost gets rid of the impossible in the same gesture, the action of deconstruction seems to look like it is actually possible when, in fact, it is doomed from the start. In the face of being doomed, in short, she removes its oppressiveness. And because this oppressiveness is remove, she can say that Derrida has somehow acquiesced to something Nietzsche, Freud, or Heidegger, didn't see or want: it was too impossible a thought for them, when, for Derrida, it is precisely possible. Thus we get odd sentences that Derrida seems to be "more effectively" questioning metaphysics, as if the difference were something that Derrida could actually do, recognize, take over or accept (l). We suddenly get the notion that everything is about acceptance--pop psychology at its worst. And what this betrays is, to return to the topic or tic at hand here, a fatalistic pragmatism: faced with the fact that deconstruction is all about calculating the incalculable or the impossible, of redoubling one's efforts to try and force the breakdown of one's own actions, that it is, in a way, all about making one's possibilities into impossibilities, Spivak tries to make it seem as if what we should do is simply face up to the fact that all our possibilities are impossible. As if facing up to the fact was a possibility. As if, that is, we should only (although this is not an "only" for Spivak in the sense of "merely") approximate as best we can a deconstruction that, of course, we can't be sure will happen. Now, this isn't questionable in fact: an approximation is, according to Derrida, how things will usually end up, as we can't indeed be sure an act will indeed open up alterity. But this is most definitely false in principle--and yet this is what deconstruction is all about for Spivak; this is what it gives us: the "should" in the sentences above. In other words, for her, deconstruction is all about trying to face up to something that one has some vague sense is right, but ultimately one can't get to unless one tries to approximate it as best one can. And it isn't that this is totally off the mark: it is just the idea of approximation, which seems to guide most of her political thinking (try and construct a politics that will approximate, as best as possible, what is impossible or totally transformative), is fatalistic: one thinks one sees the ends of all one's actions before one carries them out. This, I would say, is not necessarily what Derrida is getting at: it is a sort of pragmatism that feels good about making compromises if what is achieved is somewhere around the ideal. Ultimately, it makes deconstruction sound something like a regulative idea, except without any of the rigor that Kant gave this notion (Derrida, furthermore, himself critiques the regulative idea in Rogues). For Derrida, even this approximation, this compromising, would already be impossible, or only possible, that is, by virtue of an impossibility. And this impossibility is not something that one could be fatalistic in front of: one takes a stand on it, or is marked by it, even before one could possibly resign oneself to it and hope for something approximately near it.

Next, an interpretation of alterity that reduces its infinitude: in short, this is the interpretation of alterity that sees it as abyssal but doesn't know how to articulate it. This interpretation then, precisely to try and articulate it, then makes it into something total or homogenous, when, for Derrida, alterity is a sort of iterability, a sort of repetition of the other within the other to carry the other beyond the other. This point has much to do with the last--simply because opening up oneself to the other qua infinite alterity is the impossibility I spoke of--and, as I spent a lot of time with that, and have the hardest time articulating it (for I think it goes to the deepest foundations of Spivak's interpretation of Derrida), I won't say much more. The point, however, is that when one talks of the "totally other," what one designates by alterity already is itself becoming other. This, I think, is not emphasized enough by Spivak throughout the preface: it is what leads her to talk about the text as if it were "made up" of traces. For what is at stake here is an interpretation of the trace and its relationship to différance. Unless one reifies différance, the only way one can conceive of it is as a trace. Différance itself is a trace (if one can say this). Thus, nothing gets "made up" of the trace: like différance, whatever leaves traces or is "made up" of them would itself be a trace. So when Spivak explains a signifier, for example, and its relation to alterity, and does so by saying that it is already inhabited by the trace of alterity--well, alterity itself here is already a trace "itself:" alterity is not something that is related to, except when "relation" is conceived as an opening onto infinite repetition, to an alterity that is already different than the alterity that one relates to. Something similar can be seen to be at work in the following, which talks about how to read in a Derridian way:

If a metaphor seems to suppress its implications, we shall catch at that metaphor. We shall follow its adventures through the text and see the text coming undone as a structure of concealment, revealing its self-transgression, its undecidability. It must be emphasized that I am not speaking simply of locating a moment of ambiguity or irony ultimately incorporated into the text's system of unified meaning but rather a moment that genuinely threatens to collapse that system (lxxv).

It is clear that Spivak is, indeed, talking about locating a moment of ambiguity here, all her qualifications aside. For what is at stake is only a vague notion of how that moment of ambiguity is indeed "genuinely" threatening the system. She cannot, at this moment, specify what makes it genuine precisely because she does not have a concept of alterity that is clearly more other than merely, totally, and ultimately just genuinely other. The alterity that one opens up in the text at this moment is therefore homogenous: even though it seems to be more than just other, it is still too determinable because it is not infinitely recursive, or en abyme, as Derrida often likes to say. No doubt it is not this because--and here is where the pragmatism comes in again--one would not be able to see how the text always "seems to suppress its implications:" it goes without saying that it is not localizable in a crude way (one cannot pick at a point in a text that one sees is infinitely other) but one cannot suspect it either, catch at what seems to suppress its implications, without running into impossibility already, as soon as one thinks one sees something seeming a certain way. This is what it means for a moment of alterity in the text to be totally other: one precisely cannot be pragmatic in the face of it and somehow try and recognize it, try and approximate it, working with hunches or what seems to be the case, if only because the point is that one is always only working this way, even when one thinks one knows something clearly. Indeed, this approximation will have to be the result of the action, but that does not mean it should be the action's aim: for Spivak, this is the case, and this is why her ethics and politics is so strange. It confuses cause and effect and then calls them by a different name.

Finally, an idea that Derrida is always playing, in Of Grammatology in particular: Of Grammatology is a pretty straightforward text. We would not be mistaken to regard it as Spivak does, that is, as a text that, "denying the uniqueness of words, their substantiality, their transferability, their repeatability... denies the possibility of translation" (lxxxvi). That is, as a text that not only denies translation in its theses, but also, as she effectively goes on to say, in its form, its exposition: "each twist of phrase becomes at the same time 'significant' and playful when language is manipulated for the purpose of putting signification into question" (lxxxvi). The implication here is that this is happening in the book she is translating, De la Grammatologie. But I would say that this play is not as pronounced as it is in something like Glas, and that this should have been recognized by Spivak more at length, rather than resisted (as it had to be) by playing up the play sometimes at work in Of Grammatology. Why? Simply because the difference between these two texts (Glas and Grammatology) is indeed a difference. One can change this difference, defer it, but why would one do this in the direction of trying to establish, yet again, a filiation between them? Why this way and not the other? Grammatology is a lot more like the book on Husserl: it presents its arguments in a pretty straightforward manner, trying to adjust the philosophical discourse which it uses to deal with its problem, which lies, perhaps, beyond this discourse. When it transgresses this discourse, if it does, it does not do so in the same manner as Glas: or at least the similarity is not of the type that a mere emphasis upon "play" in the abstract, as Spivak seems to be bringing about, would produce. One could call the text more "philosophical," but I think this is too simple. No doubt Spivak was aware of this problem, but I think she opted for the more exciting solution: that here was a person who was not just presenting an argument, but changing the way arguments are made. But this is, again, too pragmatic: it is making Derrida's work, when it transgresses philosophy, precisely into another way to do philosophy. The significant thought should be, rather, the opposite: that one can bring about, somehow, with a seemingly philosophical, rational, calculated discourse, something that renders this discourse other. Thus we get a fetishization of play in the abstract (which is ultimately more empirical, more determinate, more perceivable: play is determined as play upon words--again we see the reduction of alterity at work) at the expense of the real play that is going on: the transgression of words by writing.

I hope that the overall picture Spivak gives us of Derrida has, through these various points, become clear. One could also emphasize that this Derrida is made into someone easy to defend: Spivak becomes one of the first in English to get on the side of her Derrida against certain others by calling them violent or "virulent" (lxi). She does this with Foucault, but also with Heidegger here in this introduction, who is dismissed too quickly--indeed, Derrida's ties to Heidegger are, though not of the order of an explicit inheritance, much more close than Derridians (and perhaps Derrida himself, though he is often good at marking this) would like to think. It is in the discussion of Foucault especially that the tone and manner of defense comes through: it is a certain self-righteousness that comes with the close reading of texts: precisely what Foucault, in the section that Spivak quotes in order to condemn him, tries to get at:

Today Derrida is the most decisive representative of a [classical] system in its final glory... It is a historically sufficiently determined little pedagogy which manifests itself most visibly. A pedagogy that tells the pupul that there is nothing outside of the text, but that within it, in its interstices, in its white paces and unspokennesses, the reserve of the origin reigns... A pedagogy that conversely gives to the voice of the teacher that unlimited sovereignty which permits them to read the text indefinitely (from the History of Madness, qtd. in lxi-lxii).

Spivak says that this should "give you a taste of the hostility towards the threat of the 'sous rature,'" (lxi) but in the end, it seems merely to give us an idea of what Spivak herself seems to be doing in quoting this: glorying in the fact that Foucault has not read Derrida closely enough, spent enough time with him, or realized that, indeed, texts are to be read in minute careful ways, in white spaces and unspokennesses, and indefinitely. Now, it must be asserted that Foucault is not exactly on the mark here when he says Derrida is authorizing the indefinite reading of texts--and Spivak herself in effect (I have to say this because she has thought it self-evident enough and so doesn't explicitly say) does indeed assert this. But we say that she indeed glories in the fact that Derrida is someone who authorizes unending reading because, in her efforts to correct Foucault, together with all the various tics that I've outlined above, she seems to be saying: so what if we do get to read indefinitely? Isn't that rigorous? Isn't that more rigorous than what you are doing? In short, Derrida is, for Spivak, an interpreter: if you haven't read like him, approximately, you are probably (like Foucault) not reading close enough or long and hard enough. To deny this, moreover, is hostility. This is virulence. It is, indeed, violence. It is what it would be not to read. You, you who oppose my Derrida, whenever you oppose my Derrida, do not read--if you read, you would not oppose him. A not unjustified claim in some cases (maybe even this one), but one that seems to try and be extraordinary and spectacular--not to say logically unfounded and universalist--precisely to cover up how everything in this idea of Derrida needs to be reversed: what Derrida perhaps accomplishes is not interpretation, is not close reading, is, as I have argued before, precisely something more like distant reading--if one can even still call it reading in the sense in which Spivak understands it. What is being consolidated here is precisely a dynamic of power of the type I am talking about (Spivak is on the side of Derrida, which means, somehow, she is in the position of being able to be on the side of him, which means she is representing him), and it is happening in the place of a justification why we should accept that dynamic or even why it is, here, necessary to establish. Violence and virulence in the abstract will always be put in service--in this type of defense that I am talking about--to cover this up, and, moreover, to try and appropriate Derrida against someone else--which reduces what Derrida advocates into something able to be appropriated (which by definition it isn't).
What is ultimately the goal of provoking, with all the remarks above, this hesitancy that I keep talking about? Trying to free Derrida from a certain dynamic, a certain filiation to a set of interpreters. The result would risk "academicization," but the point is to make Derrida approachable, to prepare people to enter into a thinking alongside him, if that's possible. This may indeed risk having too much faith in the possibility of discussion, but as it is I think the situation is horrible: people are mostly reading Derrida by themselves, becoming confused, and have no where to turn. When they encounter others, they simply assert that "that was not what Derrida was trying to get at:" the atmosphere becomes combative. This is why a certain hesitancy with respect to the "Translator's Preface" is necessary, I think: we currently are discussing Derrida less than reading him, and this preface here--in its scope and its ambition, as well as its renown, not to mention the mere fact that it is there right in front of the book, so we turn to it first when we turn to our Derrida in our self-righteous solitude and silence--has a particularly privileged position, even now. For many, it remains one of the main things that orients their approach to Derrida--if not in their view of him, in the way that this approach has taken place. This is not something that we should get rid of or expunge. It is simply something we should discuss more, out in the open, with less at stake in the particular handling of a proper name, despite the radical nature of the texts it is written under.

Note: This risk of "academicization" is precisely that--a risk. It should be recognized that Derrida's writings still challenge precisely that acadmicization. Unless we remember this, and read him accordingly, we will be erasing precisely that call not to erase the possibility of a discourse other than that from which we speak. It should be especially remembered that what Derrida says is indeed non-philosophy: attempts to seize him and place him under the banner of a particular department (as we have already seen with literature in the U.S.) must fail, especially when he is being appropriated by philosophy (along similar lines, it is also problematic for the French even begin to claim him as French, as they seem poised to do). However, we should also remember that Derrida is not simply non-philosophy: he does not share a relationship to philosophy which is that of simple opposition. But Derrida is not a philosopher, just as much as he is not a literary critic.
One more remark, which I perhaps should have been more clear about all throughout the above: I should note that several of these tendencies in Spivak are tendencies of Derrida as well. Thus in Positions, for example, he describes a "theoretical regression" (65), which seems too linear a view of the history of thought--exactly in the manner of Spivak that I hinted at. Helpfully, it is usually Spivak who points this out, especially in her work in the late 80's and throughout the 90's.