There is Jacques Derrida
himself, the man who is married with children, who lives in Ris
Orangis, a suburb of Paris and there is Derrida the name, like
a brand name, like a lovemark, like a draw card. How many of
you are reading this because of 'Derrida'? What is it
about a name? What is it about Derrida's name?
These questions about the power of the name are very interesting I think. Names are more than just names. In the Bible, names are descriptive. Names given to new-born babies belong to the destiny - the future - of the baby as a person: the structure of the not-yet.
In the Book of Genesis, which is so central to Western culture, everything has a name. Adam gives everything on earth a name. But day, night, heaven, earth and sea receive their original names from God not Adam. God calls each star by name (Isa. 40:26). God is outside language. 'God' is not a name. It is a name for that which, beyond any form of existence, cannot be named. A Black Hole in language. The name of God is unpronounceable. And yet God is able to name himself; at least, to Moses (Ex. 3:13-16; 6:3).
Abram became Abraham (Gen. 17:5), when he was 99 years old. Before that, 'Abraham' was unknown to Abram. That is how Abram lived: with the unknown before him.
God changed Abram's name. What does that mean - 'God changed Abram's name'? Something happened to him. His destiny altered. These things are not fixed in the stars. Or in the body. They depend on the name. With a new name Abram is someone else altogether. Same body, different person.
Abram names a birth. Abraham names a new birth or rebirth.
His faith that he could keep a promise, that he could become the Father of all the promises in the world, turned him from Abram into Abraham: "father of many nations". His promise came true. He is the Father of three world religions.
God changed Sarai's name to Sarah (Gn. 17:15) and Jacob's name to Israel (Gen. 32:28), which means: "man who wrestles with God". This happened at Peniel, which means: "face of God". Israel gives his twelve sons names that are glimpses of the future.
Names are prophetic. They establish that which they glimpse.
In an unsent letter from Gershom Scholem to Franz Rosenzweig dated December 26th 1926, that is in Derrida's possession, we read: "In the names the power of language is enclosed; in them its abyss is sealed."
In Christianity, it is the name of Jesus which enables the disciples to heal the sick and insane (Acts 3:6; 9:34), cast out demons (Mk. 9:38; 16:17; Lk. 10:17; Acts 16:18; 19:13) and work miracles (Mt. 7:22; Acts 4:30) Jesus appears as his name indicates: He who saves (Mt. 1:21-25 cf. Acts 3:16; 4:7-12; 5:31; 13:23).
What then about Derrida's name? What birth or rebirth does it indicate? From what does it save us? For what does it save us? When did Jack become Derrida? When, and how?
These are not questions about how we understand him. They are questions beyond hermeneutics, or from beyond it (hermeneutics being the name for solo interpretative practise). These are questions that call. They call for dialogue, for conversation. They are dialogical questions. I don't want to ask you what his name collectively represents, but how we exchange it between ourselves. The name Derrida is as much about us as about him.
The word 'religion' has the etymological meaning of that which binds. There is a religiosity about a name, a binding quality. We are reading this - most likely, because of the name. Imagine: Derrida is in town. The name Derrida makes us bound to want to see and hear him, or bound to stay away. In either case, we were bound to do something. And not merely by ourselves, but as part of a collectivity: either as those who Derrida's name draws, or as those whom it repels. In this is the religiosity of the name Derrida.
In the Book of Judges there is the story of Jephthah (Jud. 12:4-6) who used the Hebrew word shibboleth to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites from his own people, the Gileadites. The Ephraimites said 'siboleth'; they couldn't pronounce the 'sh'. Jephthah's men would then grab them and kill them.
In English the word shibboleth has come to mean a word or phrase by which the in-crowd can discern themselves from those who do not belong to their special group.
Our shibboleths say something about us, about our identity, about our difference, about what we do not want to let pass.
Is the name of Derrida a shibboleth I wonder? What is his name a password for? Into what does it allow us to enter? Where does his name prevent us from going?
When Cambridge University offered Derrida an honorary Doctorate in 1992 there was a mutiny of the dons, or fellows of the Colleges, at least those who had heard of him. They thought the man, Derrida, was a charlatan and that the University was damaging itself by conferring honours on a person of such dubious reputation. It wouldn't do the name of the University any good to have association with Derrida. Someone stood up at a plenary meeting and shouted NON PLACET ("You must be kidding!") which brought proceedings skidding to a halt. The name of Derrida was not to pass. The newspapers ran lurid articles on the subject which upset and offended Derrida. It seemed that people who had never read his work knew what to think about it because of the name he had. To them his name was mud. The name of Derrida and those putting it forward, was stopped in its tracks.
A later vote in the resumption of the meeting saw Derrida's name get through by an easy majority.
What is it about his name that evokes the ire of the mighty, the wrath of the dogmatist?
What is it about a Jewish name?
It was your Jewish name, your maiden name, your name before it was Germanised or Francofied or Anglicised that singled you out as a Jew to be exterminated, not so long ago in Europe under the Nazis. Your name was how they found you out. That was how they weeded you out. A simple flip through the phone book, a check on the deeds of births and deaths, old records... easy. Derrida was a name in 1940 that spelt DEATH.
The shops with Jewish names above them got their windows smashed on Kristelnacht.
Every Jew was an Ephraimite. Every Nazi a Gileadite guarding the passes, making sure that no-one got away. And then there were the collaborators: trumped up Gileadites. And then there were the those like Chamberlain in the 1930s in England, whose civilised disbelief in evil prevented them from recognising it, and kept them justifying it. Chamberlain belongs to the type that can't discern spirits.
What arouses so much ire about the name of Derrida is the way he thinks. This derives, in large part, from the way he reads, but that is a whole further discussion.
"M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," the Cambridge dons wrote in their testimonial against Derrida. "In our view, M. Derrida's voluminous writings stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition." "Above all... his works employ a written style that defies comprehension."
There you have it: Derrida defies comprehension. What he means is undecidable. 'Undecidable' is one of his words. It belongs to Derrida most of all.
The name of Derrida is synonymous with difficulty. An udecidability which - he has shown us - is the essence of thinking on one side; an incomprehension before such a writing style as his on the other.
In an interview published by Stanford University Press in 1995 in their Meridian crossing aesthetics series - the book is entitled Points, Derrida says, "I assure you that I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult."
Derrida knows the accusation of obscurity levelled against Mallarmé by the young Proust in his Figaro column. And he knows what Mallarmé said (rather contemptuously for Mallarmé) in reply: "I prefer, faced with aggression, to retort that my contemporaries do not know how to read [this of Proust!] except in the newspaper; it certainly provides the advantage of not interrupting the chorus of preoccupations". Proust eventually became an admirer of Mallarmé. Derrida knows it is a thin line - invisible too - between genuine difficulty and plain obscurity. Hegel suffered similar accusations. Mallarmé was the first in French to walk this thin line and, in this respect, Mallarmé is Derrida's master.
In the same interview from which I have just quoted Derrida say he never intends to be difficult we hear his everyday voice about this subject of difficulty and philosophy. Here it is:
We are all mediators, translators. In philosophy, as in all domains, you have to reckon with, while not ever being sure of it, the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays (teaching, newspapers, journals, books, media), with the shared responsibility of these relays. Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers? And why not the writer, who can invent, break new paths only in "difficulty", by taking the risks of a reception that is slow to come, discreet, mistaken or impossible? In truth - here is another complication - I believe that it is always a "writer" who is accused of being "unreadable", as you put it, that is, someone who is engaged in an explanation with the language, the economy of language, the codes and the channels of what is most receivable.
The accused is thus someone who re-establishes contacts between the corpora and the ceremonies of several dialects. If he or she is a philosopher, then it's because he or she speaks neither in a purely academic milieu, with the language of rhetoric, and customs that are in force there, nor in that "language of everyone" which we all know does not exist.
In this last part of the quotation "the accused", that is, "the writer" who "re-establishes contacts between corpora and the ceremonies of several dialects", reminds me of the poet T. S. Eliot (another "difficult writer"!) in Little Gidding, where he writes, "our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe." This line by Eliot is actually a citation from Mallarmé's sonnet, Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe.
"For," Eliot goes on, "last year's words belong to last year's language, / And next year's words await another voice..."
Is this why a difficult writer is "difficult", because he or she is an other voice?- because he or she does not talk à tempo with "last year's language"?
Is this why the "difficult writer" differs from the writer who plays to the crowd, or who, in Mallarmé's phrase, crows with the "chorus of preoccupations"; the one who, according to Derrida in the passage quoted, must "break new paths"?
If this is so, surely, there is no "difficulty" without risk? Is that why another difficult writer - Rainer Maria Rilke, withdrawn, alone in a borrowed tower in the Switz Alps - said: We, we infinitely risked? (Sonnets to Orpheus).
"Man is the most precarious of all beings, for he jeopardises himself," wrote Maurice Blanchot (The Space of Literature).
The name of Derrida is a shibboleth for this whole question of difficulty and philosophy - of a difficult freedom? If so, Derrida has made the identities of the Gileadites and Ephraimites, and fixing of difference between them undecidable. It seems no-one knows how to pronounce his name. Is it Der-rida or Der-rida or Derri-da? Derrida himself says that when he hears his name he is prone to hear Dare-ee-Da, which to his ear sounds like derrière le rideau (behind the curtain). Behind the curtain: the elusive question, the hidden figure, the jeopardy of coming out. Derrida's name is like him in this regard.
Yet if the proper name of Derrida is undecidable, that means it succumbs to the very philosophy - of undecidability - that gave rise to it. 'Derrida', the name as much as the work, exists only in mediation, only in translation - Derrida's words. But note: this is where responsibility enters in. Derrida refers to the complexity of relays between which his name and work shuttle - sometimes in contrary directions: teaching, newspapers, journals, books, media.
The responsibility for undecidability is shared by the writer who makes philosophy difficult on one side and the contexts and communities of interpretation which take that writing differently, which identify it individually, on the other side. The conceptual opposition between public and private, which those who attack Derrida rely upon is deconstructed.
Later I will take up what I have failed to mention here: the theme of Derrida and rabbinic styles of interpretation, and the importation of these into modern philosophy, that is linked with his name, and belongs to the question of the difficulty of his work.
Let us stop with the general questions. How much is philosophy in the act of writing, rather than thinking? How literary rather than conceptual or cognitive is philosophy? What about the relays, Derrida mentions, in which the philosophy gets caught? Is philosophy only ever in translation? - in relay? And if so, what does that mean for us, who want to do philosophy, or to partake of it? Where is this thin line between the academic milieu and the language of everyone? How true is what Derrida says, that walking this line is what makes a philosophy "unreadable"? What about the difficulty of purifying the language of the tribe? - What has happened to purifying the dialect of the tribe in the age of the IBM and ABC and MTV and PMT? And lastly, what's in a name? - and, in particular a philosopher's name?
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Matthew Del Nevo is a member of staff at the Centre of Spirituality (Sydney).
