DERRIDA IS DRIVING ME NUTS. Well, not really–but I am about 10 pp. from the end of John Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, and I think the guy’s got some ‘splainin’ to do. The book is largely an attempt to refute misunderstandings of deconstruction (for example, that deconstruction aims to destroy reason, or religion, or science) while introducing us to deconstruction via six examples (six “nutshells”)–deconstructive approaches to institutions and “the right to philosophy,” Plato, community/hospitality, justice, the messianic, and James Joyce. I’m reading this book because the Old Oligarch lent it to me, so blame him if this post bores you. Some of it is taken from an email to him. This will be a series of my questions re Derrida/deconstructionism; I have a larger or weirder question/response which I’ll post next.

–> The first, and broadest, question is, What is there in Derrida’s work that can’t be gotten better from other thinkers? I am still not clear that Derrida has actually contributed to philosophy rather than just rearranging philosophical/theological ideas or terms in a not terribly helpful way. When I did feel like I grasped what he was getting at, generally I thought other people had put the matter better, and I fairly often was just puzzled as to why he didn’t seem to feel that his intentional vagueness was a PROBLEM. So this suggests that, assuming there’s a point to Derrida, I totally missed it. Any thoughts on that would be welcome.

–> So Derrida speaks of these misty abstractions/prophetic pronunciations without content (justice, messiah, the other, hospitality, the avenir), none of which CAN be cashed out, because to cash them out even a little, even merely by analogy or allusion, would be to constrain them. (Though Caputo indicates that perhaps they ARE constrained despite Derrida’s best efforts; Caputo implies that, merely by using terms taken from Judaic contexts, deconstruction must still be constrained [but how?] by specifically Jewish notions of justice and messiah.) And then when we come down from the cloud-hung mountaintop, Caputo gives us these specific policy

choices–affirmative action and other leftist nostrums. And there’s NO connective tissue between the prophetic abstractions and the concrete policies! In fact, if I understand the book, there can’t be any connective tissue, b/c to show how “a deconstructive notion of justice” should lead, via these steps, to affirmative action would be to constrain the understanding of justice. So you’re left (no pun intended…) with a philosophy that says, in effect, “Do the good! Eschew the bad!”

This is unsatisfying on many levels.

–> It seems like decon. is privileging the creation of an ethos, or the shaping of a character, over against the following of a set of rules (or even principles). I felt like many of Derrida’s obscurities might be clarified–if clarification were what he was after–if he just said, “Deconstruction is an attitude toward the world, more than it is a method or a principle.” But maybe not. One problem is that decon. seems, at times, to be “any approach to the world that Derrida/Caputo likes”–which makes it hard to figure out how I might go about deconstruction!

–> When he speaks of traditions and institutions, is Derrida actually saying anything MORE than Jaroslaw Pelikan’s line, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living”?

–> The section on the way that a gift always implicates the recipient in a debt (you have to give a gift back, or at the very least be thankful for the gift you got) would benefit from an acknowledgment that giving thanks can be pleasurable. Thanksgiving is a feast, after all. We, humans, often enjoy thanking others for the gifts they gave us. That’s not the only true story of gift-giving–it’s obviously true that gifts can be “poison” (apparently that’s a pun if you speak German), a “commercial” exchange in which the giver manages to pat himself on the back and command an unpleasant debt of gratitude from the recipient. But the poison-gift isn’t the only kind. Thus there can be such a thing as a gift of love.

–> Similarly, the section on “justice vs. law” (quickie summary: “justice” signifies perfect justice, the ability to respond to each individual’s unique situation with the fullness of justice; “law” signifies codes, rules, abstractions, which necessarily prevent us from responding to individual situations–the Abbe of Digne [was he an Abbe?] was acting in accordance with justice, not law, when he said he had given the candlesticks to Jean Valjean) would have benefited from an understanding of why law is necessary. Here; let Radley Balko explain! Trying to institute perfect justice means rejecting the staid predictable rules that allow people to build lives for themselves. The criticism of the universal in favor of the particular is necessary; but the law is equally necessary.

–> Derrida is right (although I think Pelikan does this quicker and with less self-congratulation!) about the need for a second “yes” to tradition, a “yes, yes” in which the second yes is not just a robotic repetition of the first but a renewal, a re-engagement. This is part of what I was getting at in my post about “progress, return, or renewal.”

–> I wonder why deconstruction engages in a kind of hyper-privileging of scattering over gathering. If you focus only on the things that show tension, dissimilarity,

disjunction, etc., your community dissolves. There then is no tradition or institution, there’s just a bunch of people squabbling over which neglected bits of history they happen to like. The whole importance of the history is the fact that it’s a history of a tradition and institution; if you focus solely on the “gaps” or suppressed aspects of the tradition, you LOSE the tradition, which will make your archeological work look sort of silly. (For an oversimplified example: Why are you spending all this time on problems with the Founders’ leadership unless the Founders are crucially important?)

–> Deconstruction engages in a similar hyper-privileging of the avenir (future; what is to come) over the present. There are two ways, I think, of taking a decon.-like stance toward the relationship of justice to the present order. One is a constructive (!) approach, using our constant anxiety about the ways in which the present order does not measure up to the ideals of justice as a goad to get us to work harder, to investigate more intensely, to imagine new ways of approaching the fullness of justice, even if we know we’ll never attain that fullness.

George Orwell had a line about the other way of approaching the difference between (what Derrida is calling) justice and law. I can’t remember it exactly, but he basically responded to some pacifist arguments against Britain entering WWII by saying, “This is the carping of people who have never borne responsibility.” If you focus solely on the faults of the present order, it’s very tempting to remove yourself from that order, to pretend that you do not have any personal responsibility for the relative sucktitude of the current situation. You are the Prophet! and so you don’t have to actually prophesy against your own failures. (Or if you do discuss your own failures, it tends to be in a self-congratulatory way–“Look! I’m big enough to discuss my own failures! Aren’t I responsible and humble?” Much talk of “white privilege,” for example, would fall under this category.) Similarly, you don’t have to exercise charity toward those who are (stupidly or incompetently or unluckily or immaturely or…etc.) bearing the responsibility of leadership. And most importantly, you don’t have to come up with positive alternatives and try to put them into practice–and watch them fail, too, and learn that you require the charity you deny to others.