Over at the ‘Leiter Reports’ there is a post on Chomsky and Derrida. I might summarize the whole thing by following some of the notions in a few of the comments that appear below the post. That is, the central issue there might be translated as a conflict between the ‘tough-minded’ thinkers and the ‘obscurantist’ performers. (I do want badly to say ‘the philosophers’ and ‘the sophists’ here, but, as you’ll see below, that’d be flat-out incorrect.)
Of course these are caricatures, but they probably contain elements of accuracy. By ‘tough-minded’ I mean ‘particularly concerned with solving puzzles as clearly and as carefully as possible’. And by ‘obscurantist’ I mean ‘playful while wanting on a deeper level to be serious, but being in the end unwilling to accept the consequences of serious teaching’.
Some of the other comments discuss the excerpt itself, which may or may not have been written by Chomsky, because they focus on whether Derrida can be understood by reasonably intelligent people. I used to ask the same question all the time, but now I don’t think it’s an optimal one. As with any master thinker who wrote by the truckload, some of what is said is intelligible and some is not so. In what follows I refrain from questions altogether and home in instead on one of the strange consequences of Derrida’s work: the fraught relationship in English departments with something like basic logic.
Indeed I have had a 'relationship' with Derrida too. I went from being amazed by him to hating him; and now I’m merely indifferent to him. At this point I can say of him only a few things, most of which have been said before, and said better. He is, painful to say, thrice the thinker I'll ever be. He's sometimes deadly serious (The Animal that Therefore I Am), sometimes bizarrely poetic (Glas), and very rarely entirely understandable and reasonable (Philosophy in a Time of Terror).
I believe he's wrong metaphysically: Platonism isn't what he thinks it is, and it's not a synecdoche for 'Western metaphysics' (see his Speech and Phenomena and ‘La pharmacie de Platon’, esp. pp. 118, 127, 147 & 167 in the last-named; and see Tallis, Not Saussure, pp. 202 ff. for a solid and entertaining critique on these same lines).
I think he's also wrong on a fundamental level about language (though not necessarily about meaning), and especially in terms of his views on interpretation. For one thing, in spite of his famous line in Of Grammatology, there I am all the same, ‘outside’ the book (literal-minded though I might be); just as there Derrida was, outside the Phaedrus, while reading it rather ingeniously but ultimately wrongly. (Yes, I know; that's the point, i.e., to misread. But if all readings are misreadings, then all we end up with is silence or infinite chatter, to borrow a phrase, once again, from Stanley Rosen.)
And so on. None of this takes much away from his work, and none of it necessarily puts him in any philosophical category. After all, as Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy, p. 12) and others have noted quietly, these views may actually put him closer to an Ayer or a Dummett than to a Foucault or a Heidegger. And he's in great company either way there.
No, what really bothers me, to repeat myself a bit here, is his disciples, many of whom have decided that his views authorize more than they do. (And some of whom, I’m almost certain, have not really read him at all but decide despite this to riff off of him anyway, with works based on second- and even third-hand readings of him. For shame. . .)
One of these disciples appears in the comments below the post. This is Jeffrey Nealon, who has definitely read Derrida, and whose work I have admired in the past (namely, Plant Theory, which is much better than it sounds). Nealon, however, falls prey to the sub-optimal question noted above, as he offers the following: ‘No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’. And then: ‘I've not found it hard over the years to explain it to undergraduate students’.
To which I would reply, ‘Jeff, my man, that’s because you are concerned to chase after what’s interesting and novel at the expense of what’s true and boring’.
For example I doubt Nealon understands fully how to use the law of the excluded middle or the principle of non-contradiction. Or he does, but he prefers not to use them properly, since they are anything but novel. Thus in Double Reading (pp. 16–21) Nealon takes up Derrida’s thoughts on the pharmakon. He writes somewhat confusingly that theory is a ‘cure’ for criticism but that it leads to a ‘professionalism’ that is also a ‘poison’. Further, what he thinks are ‘opposites’—‘theory and academy, poison and cure, thinking and acting’—lead to an ‘impasse’ involving ‘two conclusions that radically exclude each other’.
Now I don’t know that Nealon has isolated his terms here clearly enough so that we can put them into p’s and q’s. And I don’t know what his actual conclusion amounts to. But I do know that, first of all, these terms aren’t actually ‘opposites’. And second, as Devaney has already pointed out with aplomb in her brilliant Since at Least Plato (e.g., pp. 31–33 & 208–209), that neither ‘theory’ nor ‘professionalism’ necessarily leads to any firm conclusions, nor would those conclusions ‘radically exclude each other’ if, say, theory has more than one property. A little of it might make me feel good. Too much and I might fall seriously ill.
And whether I’m right or wrong about Nealon here, what’s clear is that he offers polarized thinking as a remedy, as it were, for polarized thinking, without, however, recognizing that nothing he is for or against needed or was polarizing in the first place.
In summary—and these are things I want to discuss more in future posts—Derrida’s followers often decide that his questioning of ultimate meaning, of absolute truth, licenses them to declare contradictions where there are none, to oppose doctrines that are not in competition with one another and to throw out entire chunks of philosophy and art without first accepting them on their own terms.
I don’t think these consequences are Derrida’s fault, at least not entirely. I think his novelty blinded his disciples such that they couldn’t see that much of what they were saying was at odds with basic logic. But the task of pointing out these potential logical problems drives one to the point of distraction.