Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

ized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of
corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps.” Genocide
and combine harvesters appeared to be equivalent evils to him.
Whether it was Jews or stalks of wheat that were being mas-
sacred, the real point was the imposition of technology on
daily life.^9
Derrida’s book, it is important to note, has an additional
political background.Of Spirit,like Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s
Heidegger, Art, and Politics( 1987 ), and like Derrida’s resurrec-
tion of Marxism six years later in Specters of Marx,can be seen
as an attack on the revival of liberal humanism in France. The
publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelagoin
the early seventies had led to a resurgence of anti-Communist
liberalism among French intellectuals. In opposition to this
wave, which seemed to many to be insufficiently critical of the
oppressions exacted by what Marxists call “late capitalism,”
Derrida in Of Spiritoutlined the similarity he saw between
Nazism and humanism. He suggested that Husserl and Paul
Valéry, both of them convinced democrats and opponents of
fascism, had an affinity with Heidegger, who had used Nazi
rhetoric in his Rektoratsrede,his speech accepting the rector-
ship at Freiburg.
In the days when Communism dominated the universi-
ties and the intellectual life of France, Derrida had rebelled; he
was a liberal who remained suspicious of revolution and left-
wing authoritarian regimes. Now that liberal humanism was
fashionable, Derrida, true to form, espoused Marx (as will be
discussed next chapter) and compared humanism to Nazism—
at exactly the moment when Marxism, exposed as a repressive
sham, was heading for permanent defeat in Europe. Derrida
was a contrarian to the end; he had found a new authority to
resist.^10


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 213

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