An advocacy/defence of Derrida: featuring Freud, Peter Salmon, Robert Trumbull, '“After Deconstruction: Rebuilding science and culture”...
Former Analysand comments.
Headline: The old dream
Sub-headline: How Derrida was haunted by Freud
The Reader is taken aback by the first paragraph of Peter Salmon’s essay:
A colloquium was held at the Sorbonne in January this year called “After Deconstruction: Rebuilding science and culture”. Its stated aim was to retaliate against the “ideological control” of postcolonial thought which tries to “impose a moral dogma against the critical spirit” and attacks not only the human sciences but also “music, mathematics, physics”. This followed ominous warnings from the French President Emmanuel Macron about the country being undermined by “theories entirely imported from the United States” and claims from his Minister of Education that “woke-ism is penetrating the structures of society”. We must, the Minister said, “deconstruct deconstruction”.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/from-life-to-survival-robert-trumbull-derrida-freud-book-review-peter-salmon/
It should not surprise about Macron’s utter ignorance of the origins of deconstruction, nor of his Education Minister’s notion of woke-ism:
To many who attack “woke-ism”, the name Jacques Derrida looms large. Accused on the one hand of radical scepticism about truth (an accusation he painstakingly rejected) and on the other of promoting limitless identity politics by exploring the sustaining myths of what he called “white mythology”, Derrida again finds himself resuscitated as a “corrupter of youth”. That Macron – who worked for the philosopher Paul Ricœur on his last book – could claim deconstruction was imported from the United States perhaps shows the extent of Derrida’s influence, and the extent to which Macron feels he must push back against this “foreign” invader.
For an enarque to express such utter ignorance of deconstruction as something other than a homegrown intellectual phenomenon, leaves this reader not so much astonished, but seems predictable for a highly educated Technocrat, who became a Banker.
The interested reader might start with Edward Baring’s The Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945-1968, published in 2011:
Peter Salmon seems almost as ignorant as Macron and his Education secretary! Start here for the American reception ‘deconstruction’:
‘The Word Turned Upside Down’ by John R. Searle of October 27, 1983 issue of The New York Review of Books, a review of ‘On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism’ by Jonathan Culler:
“Deconstruction” is the name of a currently influential movement in American literary criticism. The underlying theory was developed not by literary critics but by a French professor of philosophy, Jacques Derrida, and many of his ideas are in turn owing to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Culler writes as a disciple of Derrida and his primary aim is to expound his master’s philosophy and show how it “bears on the most important issues of literary theory” (p. 12).
What exactly is deconstruction, and why has it become so influential in American literary criticism while largely ignored by American philosophers? I think if you asked most practicing deconstructionists for a definition they would not only be unable to provide one, but would regard the very request as a manifestation of that “logocentrism” which it is one of the aims of deconstruction to, well, deconstruct. By “logocentrism” they mean roughly the concern with truth, rationality, logic, and “the word” that marks the Western philosophical tradition. I think the best way to get at it, which would be endorsed by many of its practitioners, is to see it, at least initially, as a set of methods for dealing with texts, a set of textual strategies aimed in large part at subverting logocentric tendencies. One of the several merits of Culler’s book is that he provides a catalog of these strategies and a characterization of their common aims:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/10/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/
Or here Louis Menand reviews of Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man by David Lehman of November 21, 1991 issue NYRB: ( I bought this book and read it till I had had enough… It was an inept Newspaper article, writ large! F.A.)
Signs of the Times is a study of the critical practice known as deconstruction, and of the career of deconstruction’s leading proponent in America, Paul de Man, who died in 1983 but who achieved posthumous notoriety when, in 1987, articles he had written as a young man for two Belgian newspapers controlled by the Nazis were discovered. The book’s author, David Lehman, is a literary journalist and poet who has a doctorate in English from Columbia.
Although the verb “to deconstruct” has entered the vocabulary as a fashionable synonym for “to take apart” or “to unmask,” deconstruction is still a method of criticism whose provenance and purpose are likely to be somewhat obscure to the general reader. And although the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings, 180 articles altogether, mostly on literature, but clearly collaborationist in tendency, set off a small avalanche of commentary, opinion about the connection between those early articles and de Man’s mature criticism remains unsettled. Was an attraction to deconstruction natural in someone who, like de Man, had once expressed an attraction to fascism? Or did de Man’s embrace of deconstruction represent a kind of tacit repudiation of his youthful beliefs?
An account of deconstruction and the de Man affair by someone who has had academic training but who writes for a general audience is therefore extremely welcome; and it is disappointing to have to report that much of Lehman’s discussion of deconstruction is uninformed and unreliable, and that his analysis of de Man’s career, though well-reported, is made tendentious by an unsuppressed animus against de Man and de Man’s defenders.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/11/21/the-politics-of-deconstruction/
Derrida’s most enlightened English language critic was John Sturrock. I’ll post links to his London Review essay and his book:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n07/john-sturrock/sabotage
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n01/john-sturrock/1
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n15/john-sturrock/on-the-verge-of-collapse
I will add this review of Sturrock’s ‘Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida’, by Roger Poole:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n11/roger-poole/roger-poole-on-the-seductions-and-dangers-of-structuralism
And his Word from Paris, Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2770-the-word-from-paris#:~:text=The%20Word%20from%20Paris%20is,have%20marked%20its%20recent%20history.
J. G . Merquior’s offers vital historical/critical insights on the precursors of Derrida:
From Prague To Paris: a Critique of Structuralist and Post -Structuralist Thought
The point of my long iteration of sources of information that again act as precursors to Derrida, and the ignorance demonstrated by Macron, his Education Secretary, and other hysterics, is that there are sources of information available to anyone.
Retuning to Peter Salmon’s essay Derrida is now presented as a victim of ‘cancel culture’ in 1992, attributing a validity to an academic squabble of another era via a concept of the political present And compares Derrida to another ‘iconoclast’ Sigmund Freud, taking that theme from Robert Trumbull. Yet Freud called Psychoanalysis a Science? So the notion of ‘iconoclast’ is more historical displacement.
Derrida – who had his own brush with “cancel culture” in 1992 when The Times published a letter signed by nineteen academics objecting to his honorary doctorate from Cambridge – might have been surprised at this particular line of criticism, but he would not be surprised that his work remains controversial. Like the work of that other famous iconoclast Sigmund Freud, his thinking is alternately embraced and rejected. His writings are regarded by his opponents simultaneously as a nonsensical but finished phase in philosophy – and as a clear and present danger.
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Robert Trumbull’s new book is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the two thinkers. Derrida was always explicit about the debt his work owed to psychoanalysis. From one of his earliest essays, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, right up to his final published seminars (in The Beast and the Sovereign), Derrida’s work is haunted – a key word for the unspoken, hidden influences behind what is presented – by that of Freud. Debts are, as Derrida recognized, complicated things, and Trumbull’s book excels at elucidating them.
On the question of Freud, and his relation to Derrida there is also : ‘The Post Card’, published in 1980. Just reading these two chapters of this book makes clear that Derrida was a committed Freudian:
1. Notices (Warnings)
2. Freud’s Legacy
What follows are Turnbull’s elucidations as explained by Salmon.
For Derrida, Freud represented a “breakthrough in rethinking the metaphysics of presence”, his term for philosophy’s unacknowledged confidence that, ultimately, there is some attainable purity. This purity has had many names (Plato’s “idea”, Descartes “cogito”, the various closing gambits in philosophical arguments called “Truth” or, alternatively, “God”). It has also been named the “self” – that still point from which we, fully conscious, view the world.
More interpolation by Salmon that places Derrida’s “breakthrough in rethinking the metaphysics of presence”, ‘his term for philosophy’s unacknowledged confidence that, ultimately, there is some attainable purity.' under the bus.’ But note that Life is, according to Kant, if it is to have any meaning is about the project of self-emancipation from tutelage-to speak in a weak pastiche of Derrida idioms ‘life is about un-learning the learned’ .
More ‘under a bus’ dreck:
But the sovereignty of the self is thrown under a bus by Freud. We do not generate ourselves from within; rather we are created in many ways from outside, from relationships, from experiences, from traumas. Derrida tracks Freud’s metaphors for the psyche across his work – from the early biological ones, where the model of the psyche draws on natural science, to the mystic writing pad, the child’s toy in which a thin sheet of plastic covers a piece of wax. The pad allows for the addition of new impressions from the outside, while retaining the old: this is the psyche as palimpsest.
Derrida as reiterated by Salmon via Turnbull: interpellation/derivation to the third power ?
And yet for Derrida, as Trumbull shows, Freud ultimately fails to understand the implications of his own discovery. Crucially, for Freud the self can be made whole, we can aspire to normality and to sovereignty over our own being (that Holy Grail of self-help). Freud draws back from the total indeterminacy of the self: however inexplicable things seem, explication is always possible.
Derrida, is in the estimation of Turnbull, presents the concept/idea that ‘Freud ultimately fails to understand the implications of his own discovery.’ Has the reader arrived at the point where the Intellectual Rehabilitation of Derrida becomes manifest? In American, Derrida was defamed by dull-witted Newspaper men, and equally by academics. The question is…
In the next paragraph Turnbull/Salmon covers the territory in ‘The Post Card’s’ and beyond: ( As a Reader I found ‘Envois’ … I lasted to page 25)
1. Notices (Warnings)
2. Freud’s Legacy
Take for instance the death drive, Freud’s attempt to explain why individuals repeat behaviours which are destructive not only to others but to themselves. This compulsion does not fit with Freud’s idea of the “pleasure principle”, whereby we immediately act in ways to gratify our needs, wants and urges. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud attempts to situate the death drive exactly there – in a beyond, as a supplement. It can in a sense be hived off. But for Derrida, death, and the drives it stimulates, are no supplement. They are always already part of life – in fact, Derrida introduces the term “Life Death”, to critique the dichotomy we assume between the two. Death limits life, but also makes it possible. Our little lives are not just rounded by a sleep, but utterly determined by it.
In the interest of not trying The Reader’s patience, to the point of fracture. I will quote the opening sentences of this review’s last two paragraphs and the final paragraph in full:
…
Trumbull examines how both Freud and Derrida work with phantoms and spectres – the former attempting to talk them away, the latter to welcome them.
…
Finally, Trumbull also points the way forward for deconstruction as a radical openness to the future, resisting as far as possible the foreclosing he identifies in Freud, and in much of the history of metaphysics.
…
Derrida and Freud still have their passionate defenders and their even more vehement critics. Why might this be? As Freud himself put it, “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”, and the zeal with which both have been attacked often verges on the neurotic – an excess of anger, an anxiety about tiny slights, an endless cycle of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. As in the neurotic individual, the complicated is a particular threat. None of us can bear too much reality, of course, let alone its complications – particularly when those complications undermine our most passionately held shibboleths. But as Derrida himself said, “If things were simple, word would have gotten around”.
That two Academics, even though the information on Mr. Salmon is - I’ll make a wager about his status. And both committed to Derrida and his possible rehabilitation
https://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/about/directory/profile/robert-trumbull.html
https://www.petersalmon.co.uk/#aboutpetersalmon
That these two writers, both deeply involved with Derrida and with Freud, are completely ignorant of the work of Frederick Crews in The New York Review of Books : ‘Memory Wars’ etc. , and books ‘Follies of The Wise’ , ‘Freud: The Making of an Illusion’? All this falls under the rubric of ‘and the zeal with which both have been attacked often verges on the neurotic – an excess of anger, an anxiety about tiny slights, an endless cycle of obsessive-compulsive behavior.’ Arm-chair Psychoanalysis redux!
Having followed the American Hysteria about Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Derrida and ‘deconstruction’, and the career of Richard Rorty for decades. As well as the unmasking of Psychoanalytic Science- I began my exploring of Freud with a Bantam edition of ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’ in 1970, along with the Neo-Freudians, like Karen Horney and her Neurotic Personality of Our Time.
Looking forward to reading Robert Trumbull’s book!
Former Analysand