Times,and of Jacques Derrida’s many other opponents both
inside and outside the academy, serves only to distort an accu-
rate assessment of his work, of the kind that I have attempted
in this book. Derrida was neither so brilliantly right nor so
badly wrong as his enthusiasts and critics respectively claimed.
My central point remains Derrida’s own sense of baffle-
ment, his wish to find an escape from the battle between meta-
physical assertion and deconstructive doubt that he had de-
signed. Fairly early in Derrida’s career, the conflict between
metaphysics and skepticism, between logocentrism and the
thought of différance, began to take on the look of an airless,
unproductive paradox. He sought a way out by means of the
prophetic style that he borrowed, at different moments, from
Nietzsche in his high, rhapsodic pitch, and from the more
sober Lévinas.
In the de Man affair of the late 1980 s, Derrida’s two paths
leading away from the metaphysics-skepticism question, the
Nietzschean and the Lévinasian, collided. Derrida suggested
that, since the logos floats free of any controlling human
agency, there is a basic irresponsibility encoded in all our
words and actions: we cannot judge de Man because we re-
main incapable of defining and rendering accountable the bi-
ographical entity “de Man.” This was the Nietzschean element,
Derrida’s assumption of a free play of meaning. (Nietzsche
himself, of course, was more interested in psychological in-
sight. Derrida takes as his guide not the proto-psychoanalytic
Nietzsche but the deconstructionist Nietzsche of the late Will
to Powerfragments, who was busy dissolving the categories of
personal intention and consciousness.)
After concluding that the de Man case was insoluble,
Derrida then took a further, contradictory step. He decided
that we are obligated to confront and forgive de Man, who was
Coda 245