When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died last month
at seventy-four, the response was loud, passionate, and
predictably divided according to demographic origin. If the
response came from outside the academy, it tended to be bemused or
critical. If a response came from the purlieus of the professoriate,
however, it was likely to be sorrowful, eulogistic, even
starry-eyed.

There was nothing surprising about this.
“Deconstruction”—the movement that Derrida created in the mid-1960s
and over which he presided with tireless attention until his
demise—was always a hothouse phenomenon, ill-equipped to
thrive in the rough-and-tumble of what Derrida would have
scorned to call the real world. Again, this was hardly
surprising. It was a central tenet of
deconstruction—insofar, we hasten to add, as
deconstruction can be said to have entertained anything so
vulgarly pedestrian as a “tenet”—that “there is nothing
outside the text”: en français, “il n’y a
pas de hors-texte.” Think about that. You can see why we
have always thought that Gertrude
Stein admirably summarized the essential tendency of
Derrida’s philosophy when she observed about the city of
Oakland that “there is no there there.” Unfair to Oakland,
possibly, but not, we think, to deconstruction.

The palm for the funniest eulogy of Derrida must go
to the London Times, which weighed in with a leader on the
question “Is Derrida dead?
A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of
mortality.” The Times was brief, but poignant. It began
thus:

Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida?
The obituarists’ objective attempts to place his life in a
finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic
relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are
mere “narrations” or social constructions. Surely, a
postmodernist deconstruction of their import would
inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories
of prior science—among them, Derrida’s own existence—which
become problematised and relativised. This conceptual
revolution has profound implications for the content of
future postmodern and liberatory science of mortality.

What makes this funny instead of fatuous is the fact that
the writer is engaged in parody. Can the same be said for
Derrida’s encomium for his friend Paul de Man? Born in
Belgium, de Man wound up at Yale where he emerged as the
most celebrated and cerebral of literary deconstructionists.
Alas, in 1987, four years after de Man’s death, it transpired that
the great man had written scores of articles for
Nazi-controlled papers during the war. Sample from March, 1941:
“one thus sees that a solution to the Jewish question that
envisions the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from
Europe would not involve deplorable consequences for the
literary life of the West.” Embarrassing to the
deconstructionist brotherhood, that. Or so one might have
thought. Although Derrida was himself of Jewish origin, he
seems to have been more troubled by criticism of de Man than
de Man’s anti-Semitic effusions:

Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I
will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and
what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in
turn several questions prior to the definition of a

responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory
the concept of responsibility? One’s own as well as the
responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon
others?

Derrida concludes his sixty-page exercise in exculpation by
comparing critics of de Man to Nazi thugs:

To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of
what was a brief episode [in fact, it lasted from
1939–1943], to call for closing, that is to say, at least
figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to
reproduce the exterminating gesture against which one
accuses de Man of not having armed himself sooner with the
necessary vigilance.

OK, no one actually called for “censuring or burning” de
Man’s books. But Derrida knew that you can get a lot of
rhetorical mileage out of suggesting that criticism of de Man’s
behavior during the war was tantamount, “at least
figuratively,” to “censuring or burning his books”—we’re
all against that, right? And he upped the rhetorical ante
even higher by using the word “exterminating” in the next
phrase. The Nazis burned books and exterminated lots of
people; the callous critics of Paul de Man somehow did the
same thing “at least figuratively” by exposing Paul de Man.

Derrida’s was only one of many anguished, exculpatory
responses by deconstructionists to the revelations about de
Man’s flirtations with Nazism. For many of us, that episode
offered a graphic illustration of something that had been
obvious about deconstruction all along: that it was a
mendacious intellectual parlor game, completely divorced from,
indeed impervious to, reality. This is something that has
been pointed out early and often by critics inside and
outside the academy. In 1977, for example, the philosopher
John Searle wrote “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to
Derrida,” an attack on deconstruction that was
devastating—we would have said “unanswerable,” except that
Derrida instantly swung into print with a tenebrous piece of
sophistry that would have been funny if it had not been in
earnest. (“When I say that I do not know John R. Searle,
that is not ‘literally’ ‘true.’ For that would seem to
mean that I have never met him ‘in person,’ ‘physically,’

and yet I am not sure of that,” etc., etc.)

Among other things, Derrida’s response to Searle illustrated
the Janus-faced character of deconstruction. For Derrida’s
followers, deconstruction was a weapon, an instrument of
subversion. The statement that “there is nothing outside the
text” was intended to throw a monkey wrench into any
traditional account of truth or value. Derrida spoke
in
this context of “the destruction,” the
“de-construction,” of traditional
accounts of rationality “particularly the signification
of

truth.”
But try pointing that
out and you get the beneficent face of deconstruction: all
he meant by “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” Derrida says in
responding to Searle, is that “there is nothing outside
context.” Oh. Deconstruction: bombshell or
banality—depending on who’s asking.

Yet criticism, however devastating, however unanswerable
intellectually, has never mattered to deconstructionists.
And that is because their commitment to deconstruction is
primarily one of faith, not reason. No argument can shake
their embrace of the dogma because it was never argument
that mattered to them. Indeed, to argue against
deconstruction shows that you don’t really understand
it—even to ask what it might mean to “understand”

deconstruction betrays a frame of mind unattuned to its
governing protocols. Deconstruction exerted the seductive
call of—no, not a religion exactly, but an ideology, a
system of ideas that seemed, if only you closed your eyes
and granted its premises, to explain everything and yet be
beholden to nothing. In this, deconstruction resembles
Hegelianism, Marxism, and Freudianism, other ideologies
renowned for their imperviousness to “mere facts.”

This aspect of the deconstructionist creed helps explain a
curious disparity. As its name implies—and as the writings
of Derrida and his followers amply
demonstrate—deconstruction is primarily a negative
enterprise. It is about subverting established meanings,
exposing unacknowledged interests and intentions. Like
Marxism, like Freudianism, deconstruction
sets itself against inherited values. Derrida writes about
Rousseau and finds himself dilating on
masturbation. He writes about philosophers and their ideas
but concludes that “the names of author or of doctrines have
… no substantial value.” And so on. Deconstruction is
above all a disillusioning philosophy.

How curious, then, that the partisans of deconstruction were
so ostentatiously pious in their responses to criticism of
The Master. The New York Times runs an obituary which
notes that “Many readers found his prose turgid and
baffling.” In response, two Derrida epigoni
(joined by
“more than 300 academics, architects,
artists, musicians and writers”)
write a
hand-wringing letter to the Times that associates Derrida
with “Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Heisenberg,” and protests
that he “wrestled with central works of the Western
tradition, including Plato, Shakespeare and the Declaration
of Independence, none of which he slighted.”

(Well, a child tearing up a book hasn’t exactly “slighted”
it, either.)

For pure unctuousness, however, no one has yet topped
Professor Mark C. Taylor, a well-known Derrida groupie who
teaches at Williams College. Writing on the
OpEd page of The New York Times, Professor Taylor also
begins by invoking Wittgenstein. (How sweet it is to imagine
what the man who castigated most philosophy as an “idling of
language” would have to say about the work of Derrida!)
Professor Taylor then proceeds to give us a kinder, gentler
Derrida. To uncouth ignoramuses—“people addicted to sound
bites and overnight polls”—Derrida’s works might seem
“hopelessly obscure.” But we sophisticated chaps know that
his famously convoluted prose

“reflects the density and complexity
characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature
and art.”

Leave aside the question of whether
“all great works” of intellect and art really do exhibit
“density and complexity.” (That’s the cliché, but is it
true? Surely some, perhaps many, great works are great on
account of their clarity and simplicity.) Professor Taylor’s
main goal is to present Derrida as a sort of theologian
manqué, “preoccupied with religion,” human fallibility and
imperfection in all its forms, cognitive, moral, and
political. Professor Taylor coyly emphasizes the political.
In this uncertain, strife-torn world, he says, there is an
understandable but dangerous desire for “simplicity,
clarity, and certainty.” And this desire, Professor Taylor
tells us, “is responsible, in large measure,
for the rise of
cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism.” Get it?
George W. Bush blurs into Osama bin Laden. Thank God—or,
rather, thank Derrida, who has come to teach us about a form
of belief “that embraces uncertainty and enables us to
respect others whom we do not understand.” In Professor
Taylor’s hands, Derrida emerges as a messianic figure, a
hybrid of Martin Heidegger, St. Francis, and Kahlil Gibran.

It is a nauseating performance, as unfair to Jacques Derrida
as it is to the readers of The New York Times. Professor
Taylor even supplies a homely anecdote to conclude his
billet-doux, fondly recalling one time (one of many, please
note!) he visited Derrida outside Paris. The Great
Sage graciously insisted on picking up the Taylor family at their hotel
and had toys waiting for the children when they arrived at
the Derrida homestead for dinner. All true, no doubt—and
completely beside the point. Professor Taylor has given us a
Derrida with a muzzle and with the claws removed. It makes for a more
respectable figure. But it leaves entirely mysterious how
such an emasculated creature could ever have seduced
hundreds of politically and intellectually antinomian academics
like Professor Taylor. No, it is much better to do Derrida the
courtesy of taking him at his word. And then what? For our
part, we think that the English philosopher Roger Scruton
had it right when he observed that
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is
‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So
don’t.”