Sunday, October 10, 2004
(1:02 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The State of the Debt
What do I owe to Derrida?I do not owe Derrida a writing style, though there exists an industry devoted to convincing the reading public that imitation of Derrida’s writing style is the best indicator that one has understood his thought. I do not owe him a concept or a clever turn of phrase—although, again, the Derrida industry would have us believe that the greatest act of fidelity is to work over, again and again, the same plays on words, to explain yet again the huge difference made by the switch from “e” to “a.”
If I owe Derrida an intellectual debt—and I do—I hope that it will eventually become difficult to trace, discernable only to those for whom Derrida’s texts, his way of thinking, have become a part of the unconscious infrastracture that makes their writing possible. It is true that every Derrida book is in some sense a disappointment, that one can always say, as the members of the Derrida seminar at Chicago Theological Seminary so often did, “I was really with him for a few pages there, and then he just drifted off—I wish he would have followed up on that.” He continued to put new ideas out in public, continued to find his way into new bodies of knowledge, until it seems as though there is hardly a nook or cranny of the Western philosophical and literary tradition that he has not touched. That is why the scholarly impulse to compile a list of influences and clever puns, though necessary and justified on a certain level, finally misses the point. If the name “Derrida” is to have any enduring significance, it must denote not a system of thought—not even the system of deconstruction—but a certain opening of thought, a concrete opening in specific circumstances, an intellectual risk that will have misfired if it results in an intellectual trajectory that gets stuck in a vicious circle of différance and tout autre est tout autre.
Derrida is above all a historical thinker, and at the risk of appearing ridiculous, it is perhaps appropriate for me to state clearly what I owe to Derrida, in my own concrete circumstances. Without Derrida, I may never have read Nietzsche and Heidegger, or at least not in the same way. That is certainly debt enough—Nietzsche is a complete education in himself, and I have never met anyone who read Being and Time without thinking to herself, “Wow, that’s really right.”
But more than that, I owe Derrida a debt of gratitude for my time with A. She was the one who forced the Derrida essay on our Lit Crit class, the one who alerted our professor of the upcoming Derrida lecture—on the idea of the university—at the University of Chicago, which was later published under the title “The University without Condition.” She was the one who walked beside me on the streets of Chicago, the weird one who wore dresses every day, the one who invited me to spend a weekend in France while I was in Oxford and whom I turned down. She was the one I ran into in the coffee shop after returning to Olivet because I couldn’t stand the thought of a summer at home after having travelled abroad; she invited me, silently, to help her, to carry things for her, to take this out to her car with her, and invited me verbally to come to a party at her house that night, which began a fling that proved to be formative in ways I never would have predicted. A summer fling, filled with conflict and misunderstanding, followed by the year in which I read my hundred books—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, but returing again and again to Derrida, even teaching the lesson on Derrida the next time Lit Crit class was offered. I read Of Grammatology to prepare for Craig Keen’s “Postmodern Philosophy” course, where I met an amazing group of people, older, well-read kids who inexplicably welcomed this brash and arrogant kid into their ranks—who continue to be an important part of my life. That group of people was behind Trigger’s, which was a major part of why my first year after graduating was such a good time. That was what made it okay that I was still in Bourbonnais, and that was where I got to know Adam Robinson, where I met Monica and many others, and where I met Ted Jennings, which means that I largely owe my CTS career to the community that surrounded that house. And is it possible that I owe to Derrida my knowledge of Craig Keen himself? His taped lecture on Derrida for Lit Crit class was my first introduction to this “life-changing” professor, a true scholar who had humbled himself to live among students who didn’t even realize how starving they really were.
It may sound ridiculous to say that I owe almost the entire shape of my life for the past four years to the fact that I enrolled in the same lit crit course that A was in and read an essay by Derrida—but that essay really did make a difference. My time with A was freeing in a lot of ways, and so was my time with Derrida—reading his work not only opened up a huge range of thinkers and ideas, but it also left me feeling free and eager to explore. Even if the intellectual preparation of that summer after Oxford was not a condition of my becoming friends with the Trigger’s crowd, it gave me the confidence I needed not to feel intimidated by a group of older and very well-read people. And reading Derrida freed me from my GRE-preparation-induced worship of the canon, freed me to seek out the new and to view contemporary work in the humanities as something other than politically correct nonsense—which in turn helped me to shake free of my vestigial Republicanism, decisively crushed on 9/11, when my first reaction was horror at what the US was likely to do in response. That, in turn, led me to Slavoj Žižek, whose original “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” made so much sense compared to everything I was reading in the mainstream media.
None of this an argument in favor of the validity of his philosophical ideas or of his readings of texts—in fact, it doesn’t prove anything at all. Still, discovering Derrida, and being exposed to the friends—living and dead—he introduced me to, helped to change me from a fundamentalist Catholic, Republican, “canon”-worshipping cynic into whatever I am now. I don’t know if that’s a recommendation or not, but for me, it has made all the difference.
