Simon Glendinning

One commentator has recently suggested that Derrida's work has an impact akin to “something that goes bump in the day”. Perhaps this explains why his work – like his death – has been marked so prominently by responses ranging from the adulatory to the derogatory. There is both a resistance and an attraction on the part of us all to find what we usually find unproblematic and familiar, problematic and uncanny. In responding to Derrida, one of these reactions tends to come to the fore at the expense of the other. Those who take the line of greatest resistance tend to find him digestable at all only by first re-processing his thought into something more familiar and tractable. The obituary in the New York Times , an obituary which has received considerable attention for its particularly vitriolic and disparaging tone, is a good example of this. As I write, there are over 3,000 signatures on a web-site based at the University of California , Irvine , supporting a letter to the New York Times complaining about this “mean-spirited and uninformed” obituary. But not everyone is quite so hostile to his writings, and it was noticeable that most of the other broadsheet obituaries were by and large calm, attentive and sometimes quite thoughtful. It is worth noting too that the original death announcement came from the French President's office. President Chirac, claiming Derrida for France , made warm comments, especially on Derrida's work for an “open Europe ”.

Nevertheless, while most of the obituaries were fairly considered pieces, the same could not be said of most of the opinion columns and commentary articles. From the very first press releases from the Associated Press carrying the news of his death to the world, it was clear that the papers were going to have a field day with the kind of depressingly familiar distortions of Derrida's thought that he had to face so often (and typically faced so graciously) when he was alive; not least the stupidity that Derrida was a kind of relativist or nihilist who affirms that “all statements are of equal value”, or that as far as interpretation is concerned “anything goes”.

Derrida's work was indeed controversial. From the first to the last he fundamentally challenged the Western ethnocentrism expressed by the long-cherished idea that human history has moved and is moving still along a linear path from primitive animality to civilised humanity. Yet, he didn't simply affirm the opposite side of that ethnocentric coin. He didn't affirm, á la Rousseau, the “nobility” or uncontaminated “purity” of primitive mankind. The book that many, myself included, regard as his greatest work, Of Grammatology , does begin by calling Western ethnocentrism into question – but it ends with a critique of Rousseau. Derrida wanted us to think our existence as finite creatures in a new way, and to see history as everywhere “pluridimensional”, neither simply the linear march to some kind of redeeming end of man, nor an equally linear fall from some original primitive height. Against the tendency to write as if from the effective end of history, Derrida wrote for a future to come. His hope – and this was a kind of faith in the thoughts that came to him that went beyond knowledge – his hope was that in doing so he will have been faithful to that future to come, a future which will no longer be dominated by Western ethnocentrism and its anti-ethnocentric opposite.

His was thinking right at the limits of our time, and at the limits of our current understanding of ourselves. The upshot, to take a term from Roland Barthes, was that he has left us with texts of a profoundly “writerly” type. This term characterises kinds of texts which do not conform to a reader's ordinary expectations concerning what well-disciplined writing of a certain type or genre (a “philosophical text” for example) should look like. It is not easy to spell out “Derrida's philosophical views” because the resources typically available to us for spelling out such things seem to give us an only partial competence – or worse a kind of structural in competence – in coming to terms with what is going on in his texts. So people who are in a hurry to know what it all means and want to know without having to go through the trouble of actually reading the work, are typically infuriated by Derrida's texts – and infuriated too by people who defend him but cannot themselves provide unproblematic summaries of “what Derrida really means”.

Derrida is not the only philosopher who seems always somehow to evade our best attempts at understanding his work. Indeed, my experience in philosophy (perhaps I am only confessing my stupidity here) is that this is normal . I cannot say why, despite the fact that I felt that I understood almost nothing, I continued to read and re-read Wittgenstein when I was an undergraduate. I would still feel massively awkward suggesting that I understand his writings. Reading Wittgenstein is not over for me – not at all. Nor is reading Derrida. But making your way in these remarkable textual environments is far from easy – you have to learn to endure ongoing struggles of not knowing your way about. You have to learn to be prepared to be unprepared.

A case that both Wittgenstein and Derrida spend a great deal of effort trying to come reflectively to terms with is the question of meaning. The “common sense” presupposition here is that the meanings of words are a kind of “something” in roughly the same way that the leavings of worms are. Here the worm, there the leaving; here the word, there the meaning – the meaning normally thought of not as something earthy (or worldly) but as an ideality of some kind; something “present to the mind”. Surely, one might think, something like this must be right? But “common sense” answers are not always the best departure points for reflection. Here is an analogy. Eighty Harvard social science graduates were asked on their graduation day to explain why there were seasonal differences in temperature where they lived. The most common answer by far was that the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun brings their part of the planet closer and then further from the sun.

Why did they say this? I would say, they used common sense. They made use of a familiar model to explain a less familiar instance. We all know that if you sit nearer and then further from a fire you will feel in turns warmer and cooler. Now the Harvard social scientists made use of this to help resolve the larger scale temperature variance problem: it's a matter of the orbiting earth's varying distance from the sun. Both Wittgenstein and Derrida think that we use the model of the “name/object-named” relation in the same misleading way to think about words and their meanings.

To return to the key Derridean theme concerning our assumption of the linearity of human history, we can see a similar pattern. Of Grammatology famously criticises the dominant conception of the history of writing. According to that conception there were, first, pluridimensional pictures, then symbols, then hieroglyphics, then characters, and then finally a phonetic alphabet which properly “represents” spoken sounds. The history of writing is thus conceived as a (linear) history in which we move from non-linear marks to linear script. As I have mentioned, Derrida's aim is to retrieve the non-linear within (what we tend to regard today as such) “purely linear” formations. But why are we inclined to look at the history of writing in this way? There are many reasons, but one powerful influence is again the use of a familiar model to explain the less evident instance; in this case it is the model of a child's cognitive development. Indeed, traditional anthropology used to talk blithely of “the childhood of mankind”, of humanity then passing through its adolescence and now (hooray/boo) reaching full rational and scientific maturity. And as a modern child learns to write properly, so – we think – did Man. But what if we begin to read the non-linear remains left between the lines of this linear picture? This requires, Derrida suggests, a form of rationality and scientificity that neither simply conforms to nor simply rejects our traditional ideas of rationality and science. With the becoming legible of the “mythography” of Western ethnocentrism, we are perhaps entering a new age of writing. We are beginning, as Derrida affirmed in Of Grammatology, “to write differently”. It was never going to be easy to defend this turn in our time.

I am conscious that my own work of elucidation is going to be of only very limited help to readers who have not themselves found their time well-spent with Derrida's ways of “writing differently”. Perhaps many will still wish that Derrida had written very differently, had written “normally” in fact. Don't thinkers and academics in the humanities have a duty to explain their thoughts in ways that are easy to consume, ways that can be grasped by what we call the educated general public? I have recently taken up the post of director of the Forum for European Philosophy, so this question is of more than merely passing interest to me. And it is an interest that is not separable from my association with and interest in Derrida either. Since its launch in 1996 the Forum has (like this magazine) gained widespread recognition for cultivating new audiences for philosophy, outside philosophy departments and indeed outside the university world altogether. Jacques Derrida was a committed supporter of the Forum from its earliest days. He was one of its founding patrons and he participated personally in a number of Forum events. He never underestimated the capacity for so-called “non-professionals” to engage fruitfully and deeply with philosophy. He never sought to palm people off with “sugared pills”. And the Forum today continues that effort. The activities of the Forum do not just tell people “what philosophers think” (still less “what European philosophers think”) but engage and involve the general public in discussions that are reflective and thoughtful. We challenge, we provoke, we discuss – we let thinking take its time – our thinking now dedicated to the memory of our friend, Jacques Derrida.

Simon Glendinning is fellow in European philosophy at the European Institute at the LSE and director of the Forum for European Philosophy.

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