Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

is that he recognizes the shortcomings of a merely negative,
demystifying skepticism.
Derrida needs an outside of philosophy, a glimpse of the
real world. The need becomes stronger in the face of the revolt
of 1968. With their privileging of life over mere books, the stu-
dent revolutionaries present a threat to Derrida’s text-centered
approach. Derrida meets this challenge by evoking a Nietz-
schean apocalypse in which the free play of meaning abolishes
all previous forms of metaphysical security and proves our old
assumptions illusory. Derrida’s heralding of the Nietzschean
future is one instance of the prophetic style he frequently in-
dulged in the late sixties. But such broad proclamations carry
little explanatory power; they demonstrate only Derrida’s de-
sire to share in the mood of his era. A liberated reality cannot,
after all, be so easily attained; the traumatic and constraining
realities described by Lévinas and Freud will prove more
significant for Derrida’s future development.
The major theme ofWriting and DifferenceandOf Gram-
matology,then, is the question of empiricism and its possible re-
lation to an outside of philosophy. Derrida scorns the empirical
commitment of Foucault to discover the history of madness, as
well as the empirical anthropological research of Claude Lévi-
Strauss. Madness will not be a key term for Derrida, because it
implies the psychological perspective that he warns against.
Saussure’s emphasis on empiricism, his grounding in the evi-
dence of conversational practice, is seen by Derrida as an aspect
of the same devotion to presence that characterizes Husserlian
phenomenology (charged with an overestimation of voice, as we
saw in chapter 1 ).
But the empirical begins to take on a different, more
positive light in Writing and Difference,a collection of essays
mostly composed of pieces that appeared in the avant-garde


Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 63

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