Derrida in philosophy

I have reservations about philosophy reading Derrida and treating him as a philosopher, especially after all the tensions around him have sort of mellowed out. It's too akin, sometimes, to thinking that this treatment would grant him some dignity. Regardless, when philosophers come close to doing this--unless they're brilliant and innovative like David Farrell Krell or John Sallis--they risk being just reductive.

This is because philosophy still has a very, very hard time with reading anything but propositions and arguments. Or, rather, positions. I hold X. He holds Y. Y involves A and B, and I might see eye to eye with him on A, and then maybe be able to see something in Y, but because he holds both A and B together, because he relates A and B so closely, and ultimately can't think A without B (as I might), I hold X. X, then, is perhaps even more open to A than Y... and so on and so on. It would be a mistake even to consider this argument: the latter is a move by other people in the humanities to try and show how philosophical thinking is linguistically based, and ultimately tied to rhetoric. But it isn't as accurate of a characterization of philosophical practice.

I would say this is worse on the Continent than it is in America: here, we have gone pretty far, through emphasis on clarity, not to be clearer (as many people claim) but to write and convey ourselves a bit better. Which makes the effort of reading philosophy closer to something like reading arguments, rather than reading for positions. The American appropriation of the Continental tradition has actually improved this even more. This is why I don't mind many of the new books coming out in America on Derrida: they tend to be actually pretty good.

But still, we're all a long way from reading in a way that would make me comfortably hand over Derrida, once and for all, to philosophy. And this probably is a good thing for philosophy--I think so at least. For I'm not saying a certain type of reading is better for the job generally than another type of reading (and it would be a mistake to think that even one type of reading practice characterizes philosophical work generally). Derrida made that case himself, and I'll let him make it to philosophers (if it can be read). Rather, I'm challenging the notion that philosophy can deal with Derrida quite well without thinking about its reading practices, changing them a little in order to comprehend what he wrote--and especially with the idea that now literary theorists have had their fun with him, philosophy can now be left to do the real understanding, since its reading practices are so thorough.

Let me give an example of what I'm talking about. We continually risk taking Derrida's writings in too thematic a way. This is so especially when we begin to talk about particular problems that he has addressed over the years--writing, the institutions, politics, etc., as was popular a couple years ago after his death (as people tried to sum up such a varied career). This notion of the "theme," is already a pretty broad and flexible tool for philosophical reading. But a literary critic, for example, could point out that it is actually quite crude, for numerous reasons (both theoretical and practical) which literary critics and theorists have spent the last fifty years elaborating. No wonder then that certain people with ties to the Continent are growing frustrated with all this "discourse" in philosophy, and wanting to get the hell out of the whole business of critique and interpretation! Critique and interpretation makes us too polemical, they say. Too self-reflexive. Ultimately, too idealist (the worst thing a philosopher has in his vocabulary). Back to positions--they're not polemical at all!

My point is, again, not that philosophy has to become literary criticism in order to read well (see the comments for more on this--I'm not Ricoeur, who wants philosophy to systematically cultivate the equivocal). My point is that in encountering Derrida, philosophy has to think at least about what would be involved in reading differently philosophically, and then be willing to see that Derrida might require a enacting such a practice. What is differance? It is finite infinite difference. But just stating Derrida's position there doesn't tell you why, for example, he would bring up fetishism in a book involving Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Genet. You can see how an approach to Derrida that only brought this insight about differance to bear on Glas would probably not make things clearer.

This is why I usually hold the position that it isn't a bad thing if philosophy leaves Derrida behind, or uses it for very local issues--indeed moves in arguments--though it would be sad if (especially in the Continental work) it turned away from the larger task of interrogating its reading practices. It might be good if literary theory does so too. Critical theory, though, might be a great place for some reading and rereading, as the seminars start to come out.