Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

anomaly in interpretation, Gadamer insists. In particular, the
patient’s dream, which provides material for the analyst, occu-
pies the opposite extreme from a literary work. In a poem or
work of fiction, “every word ‘sits’ there in such a way that it
appears almost without possibility of substitution, and in a
certain way it really can have no substitute” ( 49 ). A successful
artwork cannot be translated fully; it surprises even its author
with a newness of meaning that resists ready summary. An
artistic or literary statement, Gadamer claims, therefore stands
in contrast to the words of a neurotic patient. The latter can
and must be decoded in pursuit of an underlying meaning, as
art cannot be without harmful reduction.
Gadamer’s distinction between the case of the neurotic
analysand and that of the writer might have stung Derrida,
who was so adept at decoding the texts he chose to discuss,
studying them for signs of logocentric bias. Derrida plays the
analyst, and all of Western culture is his sick patient, afflicted
with the disease of metaphysics. Gadamer implicitly asks
whether Derrida is sufficiently ready to learn from the books
he takes up: whether he is willing to let them instruct him,
rather than merely inspecting them for symptoms.
Derrida’s response to Gadamer in 1981 consists of a brief,
disengaged series of comments. There is, perhaps, a hint of dis-
dain in them. As Gadamer later said, Derrida missed the point
of Gadamer’s speech—as it seemed to Gadamer, deliberately.
Derrida’s remarks, made the day after Gadamer’s lecture, were
unusually abbreviated, lasting only a few minutes. In this
speech, Derrida mainly claims that the Gadamerian idea of in-
terpretive good will, the effort I make to understand a person’s
or a book’s intended meaning, is bound up with Kant’s notion
of good will: the impulse to aim at unconditional moral val-
ues. Derrida, normally so generous, and prolix, in his com-


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 187

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