{"id":77268,"date":"1993-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1993-05-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/laffaire-derrida\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:42:50","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:42:50","slug":"laffaire-derrida","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/laffaire-derrida\/","title":{"rendered":"L\u2019Affaire Derrida"},"content":{"rendered":"

Y<\/font>et another display of academic fatuity and bad faith has been playing itself out recently, this time in the letters column of The New York Review of Books.<\/i> The occasion was Thomas Sheehan\u2019s review last January of The Heidegger Controversy<\/i>, a collection of essays edited by the historian Richard Wolin about Martin Heidegger\u2019s now infamous connection with Nazism in the 1930s. (For details of that connection, see Roger Kimball\u2019s article \u201cHeidegger at Freiburg, 1933\u201d in our June 1985 issue.) The protagonist is none other than Jacques Derrida, the second most overrated French intellectual in history.<\/p>\n

A little background. The name of Derrida has been an unfortunate enchantment to hapless professors of literature and their graduate students since the mid-Sixties. As the chief architect of \u201cdeconstruction,\u201d the grim academic parlor game that did so much to destroy literary studies over the last three decades, Derrida has been the darling of irresponsible professors the world over. He has also been a darling of academic publishers. Derrida spawned an entire industry. Not only have his own books sold in the tens of thousands, but also an army of Lilliputian deconstructors\u2014epigones brimming with Derridean slogans and hauteur\u2014have tirelessly offered up their scribblings, interpretations, and hermeneutical hobbyhorses to the god of tenure and parochial notoriety.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>wo things above all have endeared Derrida to his acolytes. First, there is his manner of writing. Impenetrable and exquisitely condescending, bloated by an anemic obsession with violence and outr\u00e9 sexuality, it has denatured a generation of literary scholarship, doing to academic prose what methanol does to whiskey. Second, there is Derrida\u2019s corrosive cynicism, the generalized intellectual destructiveness of deconstruction. This finds expression (to take a few examples from his invitingly titled book Of Grammatology<\/i>) in Derrida\u2019s attempt to \u201cdecompose\u201d \u201cthe signification of truth,\u201d in his insistence that one \u201ccannot hold on to the difference between signifier and signified,\u201d in his suggestion that \u201cthe names of authors\u201d \u201chave no substantial value\u201d and \u201cindicate neither identities nor causes.\u201d In short, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, Derrida holds that there is no there there.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>wo things above all have endeared Derrida to his acolytes.<\/p>\n

Susceptible academics have found all this\u2014the poisonous prose, the make-believe kinkiness, the infatuation with nihilism\u2014irresistible: one draught and they are hooked. In the present context, what is most risibly ironic is Derrida\u2019s deconstruction of authorship. It turns out that Wolin, who teaches at Rice University, had translated and included in The Heidegger Controversy<\/i> an interview that Derrida gave to Le Nouvel Observateur<\/i> in 1987. Having discovered that the French publication, not Derrida, held the reprint rights to the interview, Wolin applied to the journal and paid for permission to translate and reprint the interview. That permission was granted, and the volume was duly published by Columbia University Press, also one of Derrida\u2019s American publishers.<\/p>\n

A<\/font>las, Wolin did not ask Derrida himself for permission to reprint the interview. This would not have mattered\u2014in fact, Wolin had been advised not<\/i> to bother the busy philosopher with such a mundane request\u2014if Wolin had not also had the temerity to criticize<\/i> Derrida for his pompous evasions about Heidegger\u2019s political activities in the 1930s. No one who has followed Derrida\u2019s career will find it surprising that, as Wolin put it elsewhere, he \u201cdeconstructs into nonexistence the gravity of Heidegger\u2019s Nazism.\u201d Derrida did the same thing when the literary critic Paul de Man was discovered to have written scores of articles for pro-Nazi newspapers in the late Thirties and early Forties. But Derrida does not take kindly to criticism. When he discovered Wolin\u2019s book in a New York bookshop, he immediately had his lawyer write Columbia University Press threatening legal action. Never mind that Derrida had no case: the intimidation worked. Columbia let the book (which was selling briskly) go out of print and bullied Wolin into withdrawing a planned paperback edition even without the Derrida interview.<\/p>\n

W<\/font>hat, has Derrida decided that \u201cthe names of authors\u201d have some \u201csubstantial value\u201d after all? Does he now believe that a byline \u201cindicates\u201d an identity, maybe even a cause? Perhaps so. In his review of the paperback edition of The Heidegger Controversy<\/i>\u2014which MIT<\/font> has just published sans the Derrida interview\u2014Thomas Sheehan meticulously recounted the grisly tale and Derrida\u2019s shameful part in it. Derrida shot back an angry letter to the editor: \u201cDo I not have the right to protest when a text of mine is published without my authorization, in a bad translation, and in what I think is a bad book?\u201d He accused Sheehan of \u201cfalsification\u201d and Wolin of \u201cunbelievable, shocking and inadmissible behavior.\u201d Derrida also declared flatly that \u201cno one ever threatened the existence of Mr. Wolin\u2019s book.\u201d<\/p>\n

There has followed a flurry of letters\u2014a baroque filigree of charges, counter-charges, counter-counter-charges\u2014from the pusillanimous director of the Columbia University Press, Derrida, Wolin, and a long roster of academic groupies pathetically eager to stand up for their idol. H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, doyenne of dour French feminism, has even contributed a sub-literate letter complaining about the \u201chatred Mr. Sheehan spreads across the pages of his letter [answering Derrida]\u201d and his mistranslation of a French dative. Sheehan himself, although he feels called upon repeatedly to assure readers that he \u201cis no enemy of deconstruction,\u201d has patiently exposed every lie, evasion, and misrepresentation in the whole sordid case.<\/p>\n

\u201cN<\/font>o one ever threatened the existence of Mr. Wolin\u2019s book,\u201d Derrida sniffed. Yet on November 22, 1991, Derrida\u2019s lawyer wrote to Columbia University Press to assert Derrida\u2019s right \u201cto procure the seizure of the book that you published without his agreement,\u201d and requiring as a condition for not suing that \u201call passages concerning him [in the book be] suppressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one ever threatened the existence of Mr. Wolin\u2019s book.\u201d But on February 10, 1992, Derrida himself wrote to John D. Moore, director of the Press, asking him to promise never to republish the interview and threatening that, if such a promise were not forthcoming, \u201cwe should have to demand . . .\u00a0that all copies of The Heidegger Controversy<\/i> be withdrawn from sale, including the first edition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one ever threatened the existence of Mr. Wolin\u2019s book\u201d? In fact, as Sheehan has shown beyond doubt, Derrida, \u201cfor the basest of reasons, forced Richard Wolin\u2019s book out of print.\u201d For many years now, our premier literary critics have been teaching themselves and their students to see the world in quotation marks, to deny that there is such a thing as intrinsic literary merit, objectivity, truth, facts, reality. Derrida\u2019s latest eruption\u2014and the collusion of his admirers\u2014provides a sterling illustration of what these ideas mean when they are translated into what the rest of us think of as the real world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2188,"featured_media":129894,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[553],"issue":[3178],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":1,"value_formatted":1,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Jacques Derrida. 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