The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (Ideas in Context)

THE YO UN G D E R R I D A AN D FRE N C H PHILOSOPHY, 1 9 4 5– 1 9 6 8 In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds f...

Author: Edward Baring

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THE YO UN G D E R R I D A AN D FRE N C H PHILOSOPHY, 1 9 4 5– 1 9 6 8

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida’s thought arose in the closely contested space of postwar French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrean existentialism, religious philosophy, and the structuralism that found its base at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of postwar France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and antihumanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. e d w a r d b a r i n g is Assistant Professor of Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History at Drew University. Educated at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, his work was awarded the Harold K. Gross Prize by Harvard University in 2010. He has won fellowships from the DAAD, ACLS, and Mellon Foundation.

id ea s i n con tex t 9 8 The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968

id ea s i n con t ex t Edited by David Armitage, Jennifer Pitts, Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

THE YOUNG DERRIDA AND FRENCH PHILOSOPHY, 1945–1968 EDWARD BARING

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107009677 C Cambridge University Press 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Baring, Edward, 1980– The young Derrida and French philosophy, 1945–1968 / Edward Baring. p. cm. – (Ideas in context) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00967-7 (hardback) 1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Philosophy, French – 20th century. I. Title. b2430.d484b377 2011 194 – dc23 2011027241 isbn 978-1-107-00967-7 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on translations and reproductions

page viii xi 1

Introduction part i: derrida post-existentialist

15

1

Humanist pretensions: Catholics, communists, and Sartre’s struggle for existentialism in postwar France

21

2

Derrida’s “Christian” existentialism

48

3 Normalization: the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Derrida’s turn to Husserl

82

4 Genesis as a problem: Derrida reading Husserl

113

5 The God of mathematics: Derrida and the Origin of Geometry

146

part ii: between phenomenology and structuralism

183

6 A history of différance

190

7

L’ambiguité du concours: the deconstruction of commentary and interpretation in Speech and Phenomena

221

8 The ends of Man: reading and writing at the ENS

259

Epilogue Bibliography Index

295 306 319 vii

Acknowledgments

I have been very fortunate in the research and composition of this book. Archives opened up as if on cue during my research, including the Derrida letters held at the IMEC archives. The team at IMEC, especially José Ruiz-Funes, Yves Chevrefils-Desbiolles, and Catherine Josset, made me feel enormously welcome. One could not imagine a more pleasant introduction to archival research: pétanque on their lawns, cycling around the beautiful grounds, and convivial conversation over what must be the best food served at an archive in the world. My sole criterion for future research projects is that they must take me back to the Abbaye d’Ardenne. When I was not so lucky with timing, I benefited from the generosity of archivists: Catherine Goldenstein allowed me access to letters at the Paul Ricoeur archives before they were ready, and Françoise Dauphragne permitted me to rummage through the unsorted boxes that will become the Hyppolite archives at the ENS. For perhaps my greatest archival find, a picture of Derrida sporting a cravat and Converse trainers which graces the cover of this book, I would like to thank Marianne Cayette, who guided me through the archival holdings at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and Mikaël Schinazi, who rushed around Paris to obtain a high resolution scan of the photograph. Where written archives needed to be explained, and queries answered, Marguerite Derrida, Maurice Caveing, Richard Macksey, and Pierre Nora were both generous with their time and knowledge and patient with a British historian who had much to learn. I did not, however, do the bulk of my research in France, but in California, where I sweated out two summers. This book would not have been possible without the support of the Special Collections Staff at the University of California at Irvine, who look after the Derrida archives there. Both Jackie Dooley and her successor, Michelle Light, very kindly extended opening hours so that I could make the most of my time, and I am grateful to their team for making it happen in practice. The extensive research and writing this book required was generously supported by grants viii

Acknowledgments

ix

from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, a Frank Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the ACLS, the Mellon foundation, and a research grant from Drew University. My writing has been aided by the unwavering support of my adviser, Peter Gordon, who is always a source of sage counsel, a perfectly turned phrase, and words of encouragement. His faith in my work made me feel that I could tackle such a large project and his engagement kept me excited when the road seemed long and difficult. Advisers can make or break the graduate school experience, and I was truly fortunate to be able to work with Peter. Judith Surkis too has been of immeasurable value to my project and development as a scholar. Her close reading drew ideas and subtleties out from my chapters that always made me feel smarter than I deserved; this book owes much to her insight and dedication. I would also like to thank both David Blackbourn and Sean Kelly for keeping me honest – though in different ways – as I worked through some of the most treacherous texts of modern intellectual history. I have been very lucky in the help provided by academics in other universities. Sam Moyn provided some valuable advice at the beginning of my research and useful comments as it got going, while Alan Schrift showed me that academic good neighborliness is not dead, sending details of the agrégation concours that was the product of many days of original research to a graduate student he had never met. I have benefited from meeting and talking with Martin Ruehl and Martin Crowley at the University of Cambridge, Marc Crépon at the ENS, Stefanos Geroulanos at NYU, and Hent de Vries from Johns Hopkins. Though I have never met them in person, Len Lawlor, Ian Hunter, Alan Schrift, and Todd Shepard have been immensely generous with their time and criticisms in the later stages of my work. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press for their invaluable insight and suggestions, and the editorial team, including Richard Fisher, Lucy Rhymer, Jo Breeze, and David Watson, for helping turn my manuscript into a book. One of the great advantages of an institution like Harvard is the vibrant graduate community. This book was conceived, planned, and thought through in discussion groups dedicated to this purpose but also in the myriad conversations over dinner, a beer, or coffee. In particular, I would like to recognize the friendships of Angus Burgin and Daniel Shore, who were able to look beyond my anarchic approach to commas, to help me see what was good in my work and what was not. In other forums too, I have been overwhelmed with good advice and comment from Phil Fileri, Sam Goldman, Martin Hägglund, Macabe Keilher, Kris Manjapra, Yascha

x

Acknowledgments

Mounk, Nick O’Donovan, Knox Peden, Ward Penfold, Kristin Poling, Sarah Shortall, and Juliet Wagner, amongst others. Later, the support and friendship of my colleagues at the Writing Program at Princeton and the history department at Drew University were important for the final stage of writing. I feel very lucky to have found my place in the academic world amidst such interesting and intelligent people. Finally I would like to thank those close to me, who have been a great help even though I didn’t let them know sufficiently at the time. First and foremost, my wife Katja Guenther, whose comments and support, a healthy skepticism, and good humor were invaluable during the long process of writing a first book. She knows my frustrations and my joy and I feel privileged to be able to share them with her. I must thank my family in England, especially my mother, Anstice, who read some of my work, even though she was sure that she would not understand a word. And finally, my father Michael, who I hope would have liked the idea of a son who wrote history, which was for him an enduring passion.

A note on translations and reproductions

Throughout the book and where possible, I use and modify standard translations for the major texts I discuss. In doing so, I hope that a broader group of scholars will be able to engage substantively with my argument. All other translations are my own. I would also like to thank the editors of Modern Intellectual History for permission to reproduce “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’s Struggle for Existentialism in Postwar France,” which appears here in revised form.

xi

Introduction

The intellectual history of postwar France often resembles village life. Most of the important academic institutions – the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Collège de France, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, even the cafés where Sartre debated with Camus – sit within the same square mile on the left bank of the Seine. This “village” was not only geographically limited. Names recur with surprising regularity: Bachelard, father and daughter, two Merleau-Pontys, as well as numerous Jolys, Lautmans, Pons and Michauds filling up the promotions at the elite centers for higher learning. The founder of Tel Quel, Philippe Sollers, married the philosopher Julia Kristeva; Jacques Lacan married Georges Bataille’s widow; his daughter married the Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Serres, and Jacques Derrida were schoolfriends before they were philosophical interlocutors and then rivals. Everyone knew everyone else. Throughout their careers French intellectuals socialized with each other, went on holiday together, attended parties at each other’s homes, corresponded, read the same books, and published in the same journals. Before being a republic of letters, the French intellectual community was a social set. It has been common to castigate the proponents of a unified field called “French Theory” for being philosophically na¨ıve. “French Theory,” it is argued, is a peculiarly American construct that can only be understood as the product of the blinkered enthusiasm of Anglo-Saxon academics for a range of thought they have not properly understood.1 The manifold theoretical differences between, say, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Derrida are sufficient to scotch any idea that they shared a common program or had similar ideas. But what seems philosophically unsophisticated can be historically plausible. The search for philosophical ties is warranted by the 1

See for instance François Cusset, French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

1

2

Introduction

thick and dense historical connections that recast the manifold debates not as fundamental differences but as the passionate confrontations of the philosophically and socially proximate. Not only were “French theorists” part of the same community, they also formed what might be called a single generation. The majority of thinkers who have had a significant effect on English-speaking academia were born at approximately the same time. As the final shots of the Second World War rang out, Michel Foucault was eighteen, Jean Baudrillard was sixteen, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida were fifteen, while Gilles Deleuze was twenty. They all emerged into philosophical consciousness at the height of the existentialist explosion in French philosophy and culture, a philosophical movement unrivalled in its ability to appeal to young students and which initiated a “golden era” in French intellectual history as philosophers wrestled over its legacy. Though often classed as “postmodern,” their work a reflection of the social and cultural currents of 1968 and beyond, these intellectuals were formed in the philosophical crucible of the preceding quarter century. Jacques Derrida is a case in point, participating in virtually every important philosophical movement in postwar France. When existentialism was the order of the day at the close of the Second World War, Derrida aligned himself – though as we shall see, not without some reserve – with Sartre. Then, beginning his philosophical education in the early 1950s, when existentialism had run its course, he embraced the “scholasticism” of the period, the careful rereading of Husserl and Heidegger that marked a collective exorcizing of Sartre from the French academic scene. His readings of Husserl, in particular, brought him into close contact with the French tradition of epistemology, best represented by Jean Cavaillès and Gaston Bachelard. Later, as Derrida began to publish his first essays and books, a new trend emerged that, while challenging the primacy of philosophy, made it relevant to a new and broader audience. Structuralism, one of the first major interdisciplinary movements in postwar French thought, made philosophical readings valuable to scholars across the humanities and social sciences. It was a vehicle that carried Derrida’s ideas to the broadest possible audience and allowed him to contribute to debates about Marxism, psychoanalysis, and ethnology. Finally, when he was a young teacher in the mid 1960s, the baby-boomers were intent on reshaping contemporary society and looked to a new generation of scholars for theoretical resources.2 From 2

In this way this book covers similar ground to Michele Lamont’s article “How to become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” in The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 93, no. 3 (November 1987), though it adopts a different methodology.

Introduction

3

existentialism to post-structuralism, Derrida’s career tracked the development of French philosophy and can stand in metonymically for the intellectual history of the period. Not only can Derrida’s itinerary give us a new perspective on the history of French philosophy, it also brings attention to the academic institutions, practices, and social organizations that were central to French intellectual life. Derrida went to the best schools, passed the right exams, and found jobs in the most prestigious research and teaching institutions. His closely documented life gives us the means to understand what it meant to be a philosopher in postwar France, how intellectual communities were formed, and how institutions and pedagogical structures impacted life and thought. In particular, it reminds us of the central position occupied by the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), and the small community of philosophers there whose work was disproportionately influential. At the Ecole, philosophy was not only studied but lived; students and teachers attributed philosophical significance to broader social and political trends, while political disputes seeped into academic exchange. In particular, the communist and Christian affiliations of many Normaliens, which structured their social and political lives, demanded the adoption of specific theoretical positions in academic work: communists read Marx and adhered to theories of social and economic determinism, while Christians looked to Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel and emphasized Man’s spirituality. Even those students and teachers who, like Derrida, had no direct affiliation to the Catholic circle or the communist cellule were not oblivious to the political and cultural valences attributed to philosophical ideas. Their work too could be classed as ideological or nihilist with all the attendant social consequences. Ideas, which today seem abstract and socially irrelevant, were invested then with great political and cultural meaning. At the ENS it was hard to draw a line between the social and the philosophical. Derrida’s education and philosophical development up until his major publications of 1967 (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference) show that he was the product of the wider French intellectual community. Like many of his generation, Derrida was not the protégé of a particular school or movement, but was nourished by several: he was engaged by existentialism, drew on the strengths of phenomenology, and learned from the rigor of structuralism. Though recent studies have tended to regard him as an outsider, based upon his later fractious relationship with mainstream philosophy, until the end of the 1960s at least, institutionally and intellectually he occupied a central position in French intellectual life.

4

Introduction communists and catholics debating man

An analysis of Derrida’s work in the years preceding 1968 reveals the structural importance of two axes in French intellectual life, which provide the structure for a wide-ranging contextualization of postwar French thought. These axes show why seemingly abstract philosophical work could have value for the most pressing of political questions and provide a framework for analyzing how philosophical quarrels could take on the forms of a political contest or negotiation. First, throughout this period, and for Derrida in particular, philosophy was interwoven by the dual strands of communist and Christian thought. From Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to communist and Christian critics in the 1945 paper “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” through the social divide between the Catholic “Talas” and the communist cellule at the ENS in the 1950s, to Louis Althusser’s criticism of the religious-leaning Marxist humanism of Roger Garaudy in his 1965 For Marx, the “double messianism” of Christian thought and Marxism defined much French philosophy and granted often abstract reasoning political and social value.3 Marxist thought gained from the prestige of the Communist Party in France, while ironically Christian philosophy benefited from the French secular school system. As we shall see, whatever the laws on the teaching of religion, lycée professeurs could still discuss the ontological proof in class, or bring their students’ attention to the latest book by Christian philosophers such as Simone Weil or Jacques Maritain. Philosophy classes acted as a haven for religious ideas refused their own disciplinary home. The second major axis in postwar French philosophy is that which led from humanism to antihumanism. The significance of these terms, as I will argue, was not their philosophical sophistication. Indeed their value arose partly from the fact that nobody really knew exactly what they meant. This vagueness allowed them to reach across political and philosophical divides, including, for short periods, that between the communists and the Christians. In 1945, “humanism” was a label claimed by Marxists like Henri Lefebvre, Catholic personnalists like Emmanuel Mounier, and atheistic existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre. In the 1960s, and in part as a reaction to the success of Sartrean humanism, antihumanism allowed the rapprochement between structuralist Marxism, Christian Heideggerianism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. There was no explicit agreement as to 3

The phrase “double messianism” comes from the historian Renée Béderida, cited in Jean-Philippe Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” unpublished Maˆıtrise d’Histoire, Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille III (1993), p. 74.

Introduction

5

what humanism and antihumanism entailed, and it was for this very reason that they could be clarion calls to political and philosophical alliances. Derrida too followed broader intellectual trends, shifting away from an early – if critical – humanism to become one of the most vocal proponents of the “end of Man.” But, as I will show, Derrida was never so unambiguously antihumanist as has often been suggested, and traces of his earlier humanism show up even in texts from the mid 1960s. Unlike the communists, for whom the antagonism between humanists and antihumanists caused an insuperable rift in Marxist theory, Derrida cleaved closer to the Christians, for whom the humanist assertion of Man’s need for God and the antihumanist rejection of the autonomous self were never so dramatically opposed. While Althusser and his students urged the disavowal of humanist ideology to open up the possibility of a Marxist science, Derrida demanded a type of philosophical humility that Christian scholars thought appropriate to our human limitations. derrida and christian thought One of the central claims of my study, which I discuss at length in the first part of this book, is that Derrida’s thought can be understood within the context of French Christian philosophy. The emphasis on religious thought may not be entirely unexpected. Scholars have recognized for over a decade that Derrida’s philosophy provides powerful resources for considering religious questions.4 Responding to his later texts after the so-called “religious turn” in the 1980s, John Caputo has described Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism,” Richard Kearney has proposed an ethical poetics of religion, while Hent de Vries has looked to the reciprocal implications of philosophy and religion to develop a sophisticated deconstructive theology.5 Through a close study of Derrida’s early unpublished essays and courses, however, I show that these religious themes can be traced back to Derrida’s first philosophical writings. Religious thought was not a new interest for the middle-aged Derrida, but rather the milieu in which deconstruction first developed. 4 5

Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 155. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and his Religion and Violence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Caputo’s phrase comes from Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge,” in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002) p. 56.

6

Introduction

What is more surprising is that deconstruction drew on Christian sources. Traditional presentations of Derrida’s philosophy cast him as a “Jewish” philosopher. The claim has been picked up in much of the secondary literature, and developed often with great finesse and sophistication.6 But, the desire to understand deconstruction through reference to a lost or effaced Jewish consciousness, whatever validity it may have, ignores another better-documented genealogy. Derrida, by his own admission, only read the Talmud late in life, but he did read Christian philosophical texts while at school.7 Several of the themes and questions in Derrida’s philosophy that have been attributed to a latent Judaism can equally be found in the type of Catholic thought to which the young Derrida turned, especially the works of Simone Weil, Gabriel Marcel, and René le Senne. It is without a doubt significant that Weil converted from Judaism and Marcel embraced the Catholic faith late in life. But the confusion of labels should make us wary of claiming certain philosophical theses as the exclusive property of particular religious groups. Though one can distinguish “Christian” and “Jewish” philosophy, such modifiers do not restrict the scope or influence of ideas to particular individuals or groups, especially, as we shall see, for a tradition of theistic existentialism that displayed a marked skepticism to all forms of determined and institutionalized dogma; a Jewish Derrida would not necessarily consider all Christian thought beyond the pale. In highlighting Derrida’s engagement with Christian thought, therefore, I do not intend to substitute one religious identity for another. The fact that Derrida drew on Christian philosophy does not make his philosophy doctrinally “Christian,” and it in no way implies that Derrida 6

7

See for an analysis of Derrida’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lauwrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse University Press, 2001); Martin Srajek, In the Margins of Deconstruction: Jewish Conceptions of Ethics in Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998); or Andrew König, Splitterflüsse (Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2006); and with greater sophistication Joseph Cohen, ed., Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Hélène Cixous, Un Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness (Stanford University Press, 2008). For a compact statement of Derrida’s own use of the terms “Jewish,” “Judaism,” and “the last of the Jews,” see his interview in Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism, trans. R. Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 40–58. Derrida’s use of this Jewish identity to destabilize traditional identity politics has been a major theme in much of the secondary literature. Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974–1994 trans. Peggy Kamus (Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 80. Further, as Derrida has asserted on other occasions while adding important caveats that are equally valid here, “deconstruction’s link with Christianity is more apparent, more literal than with other religions.” Yvonne Sherwood, ed., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 33.

Introduction

7

accepted Christian doctrines personally; we should beware of mistaking philosophical genealogy for religious identity. Rather, I want to show how Derrida’s thought developed lines of argument that emerged at a particular moment in French intellectual history, ones proffered predominantly by self-confessed Christian thinkers, but which cannot be restricted to them. Derrida turned to Christian thought, not because it was Christian, but because, in France, it offered the most valuable resources for criticizing Sartre’s atheistic existentialism. Nevertheless, this Christian background provides new means for understanding the stakes of deconstruction. I show that what has been interpreted as a “skeptical” element in Derrida’s philosophy was closely allied with a Pascalian philosophical tradition that challenged the pretensions of human thought. Just as Derrida would later confront texts with marginal moments that conflicted with their most basic presuppositions, Christian existentialists confronted the categories of our understanding with existence in all its complexity to show that no human philosophical system could fully grasp the richness of experience. Both looked for “scandals” that discredited human claims to philosophical authority.8 For these thinkers, we could never have but the most obscure idea of God, who was only an aspiration or a promise, accessed through the blindness of an uncertain and dangerous faith rather than revealed through the light of knowledge. Consequently, any dogmatic assertion of divine immediacy (or absence) was ultimately hubristic and had to be refused. Given the importance of religious themes in Derrida’s early thought, the question is no longer what incited the emergence of these questions in the “religious turn” of the 1980s, but rather what kept them out of sight until then. The time period is suggestive. For the twenty years following 1964, when Derrida taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure under the watchful eye of Louis Althusser, explicitly religious themes were almost entirely absent from his work. In the second part of this book, I relate how Derrida, returning as a teacher to the ENS, had to engage with Althusser and his newly politicized students and make his work relevant for them. First and foremost, this entailed an adoption of the terms and categories of structuralism. The reformulation of Derrida’s ideas in structuralist language was ultimately resistant to his earlier religious thought. Derrida no longer hoped to disrupt idolatrous ontotheologies by asserting the “difference” between 8

See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. 283; and Etienne Borne, Le Problème du mal (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958), p. 10.

8

Introduction

the divine idea and its earthly manifestations. Instead this difference was equated with the Saussurean difference between signifiers that produced linguistic meaning. Recast as the play of signifiers, Derrida’s “différance” in the late 1960s presented the “theological,” not as the cause, but as “a determined moment in the total movement of the trace.”9 It is for this reason that contemporary philosophers interested in the connection between deconstruction and religion have tended to avoid Derrida’s work from this period and have criticized the first reception of deconstruction in America that it informed.10 The “turn” in Derrida’s thought makes sense of recent conflicting voices, like that of Martin Hagglund, who has argued that not only was Derrida an atheist in refusing God, but he was radically atheist – a term ironically also used by Caputo11 – in his rejection of the desire for the infinite and the “absolutely immune.”12 The desire for immortality, shared according to Hägglund by believers and vulgar atheists alike, was the true target of Derrida’s deconstruction. Hägglund argues that Derrida’s thought implies a positive affirmation of our finitude and mortality, which is the condition of any desire or affirmation at all.13 A history of Derrida’s thought, sensitive to both the traditions in which he participated and the change of his thought over time, suggests that Hägglund cannot be right about Derrida’s radical atheism. But in recognizing the essential role of spacing and différance in the key texts from 1967, Hägglund does draw attention to the reformulation of Derrida’s thought that complicated his appeal to religion and makes the misreading of his atheism understandable. Further, Hägglund’s work encourages us to be careful in our analysis of Derrida’s use of religious thought. Though his work was nourished by religious philosophy, the religious resources that Derrida relied upon were used to destabilize the thought of Man, not to construct a thought of the divine. For this reason, the religious genealogy of Derrida’s thought can never be the ground for a simple rejection – or indeed embrace – of deconstruction. Even at his most religious, Derrida’s appeal to the resources of a Christian tradition always arose from an 9

10 11 12 13

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 47. Of course, the theological is not God, and, like the Christian Heideggerians, Derrida was always resistant to their identification. See de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, pp. 23–8 and Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 233. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 62 citing Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 103. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford University Press, 2008). Ibid., p. 34.

Introduction

9

internal critique of secular thought. Derrida probed first Sartre’s existentialism, then a phenomenology of science, and finally Althusser’s Spinozist Marxism, and for internal reasons found them all wanting. God was an axiom Derrida could do without; his anti-foundationalism was consonant with a religious tradition criticizing human arrogance, but he never proposed substituting a final religious ground. derrida and history This book is the first detailed archival and contextual study of Derrida’s philosophy, and many commentators might regard its very approach as a betrayal of his ideas.14 For them, in its assumptions and methodology history is intrinsically biased against deconstruction. In the words of one critic, “Derrida refused . . . to become part of history.”15 Further, put off by Derrida’s critical writings on archives, scholars have shied away from his own carefully preserved papers.16 Indeed this assumed hostility between history and deconstruction explains why, over a third of a century after the first books appeared on Derrida’s work, there has been no sustained treatment of Derrida’s archives, nor a rigorous attempt at historical contextualization.17 This opposition to history has expressed itself in two forms: the resistance to the idea of historical change, and a reticence in reading Derrida’s philosophy within the broader context of French intellectual history. Several scholars have asserted that Derrida’s thought has been remarkably constant over his career, and they refuse to subject his work to historicizing narratives. Geoffrey Bennington suggests that there was no change between the supposedly “philosophical” works of the 1960s and the “literary” work 14

15

16 17

Benoˆıt Peeters’s magisterial biography, Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), appeared as I was putting the final touches to this book. His work draws on similar sources to mine but he reads them for different purposes, emphasizing the personal and the private, and their impact on Derrida’s work. As such my book and his provide different but, I hope, complementary accounts of Derrida’s early years. This book also builds on the ground-breaking work of Allan Megill in his Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). David Bates, “Crisis between the Wars: Derrida and the Origins of Undecidability,” Representations (Spring 2005). See also Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing, eds., Histories of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2007), Introduction, pp. 1–24; and more recently Warren Breckman, “Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas (July 2010), pp. 339–61. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also the antipathy from historians, amongst others, Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Derrida, Michelet and Dust,” The American Historical Review (October, 2001); or Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), pp. 81–2. For a sophisticated account of the attempts to sideline deconstructively informed histories see Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” forthcoming in the American Historical Review.

10

Introduction

later on, that Derrida’s work cannot be divided into “styles or periods.”18 Where some attempt at periodization and a sensitivity to change has arisen in the scholarship, it has often been confined by the limited and ironically (as we shall see) Althusserian attempt to read a divide between the “late” and the “early” Derrida, demarcated by “religious,” “ethical,” or “political” turns.19 We have a Hobson’s choice between two stable forms, marked by a break, or a consistency over forty years of writing and publishing. Neither provides a useful account of historical change. Similar hesitations can be seen with respect to contextualization. Derrida often attested to his status as an outsider, rejected by the philosophical establishment, a claim that many scholars have taken at face value. The limited contextual accounts of Derrida’s thought have often concentrated on his Algerian or Jewish background, reiterating his own narrative of exclusion from the French mainstream.20 In this way, the attempts to contextualize Derrida have strangely served to decontextualize him. But, as I will elaborate more fully later, with limited sources to appraise the impact of Derrida’s Algerian past or Jewish heritage, such forms of contextualization rely predominantly on a one-sided conceptualization of Sephardic Jewish identity. Where they do appeal to Derrida’s own work, it is only to his pronouncements in the 1980s and beyond, and we should treat such autobiographical writings with caution, especially when they serve to bolster the myth Derrida carefully constructed of his own relationship to the French mainstream. The resistance to contextualization also seeks legitimation in Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy. As several commentators have noted, Derrida’s concept of writing describes the process of decontextualization: unlike speech, writing can do without the presence of the author and be readable in another time and place. Since it is the defining property of writing that it can forgo this presence, the desire to return to its “point of origin” smacks of unhealthy nostalgia. To yearn for the lost fullness of a contextual moment as the guarantor of sense is to remain beholden to the “metaphysics of presence.”21 18 19

20 21

Bennington, Jacques Derrida, p. 13. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992); Peng Cheah ed. Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). Though I write on the “young Derrida,” I emphasize neither a profound opposition to the “old Derrida,” nor an essential unity to his early writings. See Robert Young, White Mythologies (New York: Routledge, 1990) and the two recent biographies by Jason Powell and David Mikics. See Peter Gordon’s remarks about Heidegger and Derrida at the end of his “Hammer without a Master,” in Bevir, ed., Histories of Postmodernism, p. 125.

Introduction

11

But as I will argue, in sketch here, and more thoroughly throughout this book, the strong tendency to deny historical change and to distance Derrida’s thought from its context resides in what he would have considered a metaphysical understanding of philosophy. Further, in rejecting such an understanding, Derrida’s thought provides the intellectual historian with valuable resources for thinking through the complex relationships between philosophy, which aspires to transhistorical validity, and the particular historical moment in which it arose. In a traditional metaphysical schema, history is opposed to philosophy, as the ephemeral to the eternal, the myopic blindness of particularity to the clear-sightedness of universal truth.22 In this way the relationship between philosophy and history mirrors that between speech and writing, which furnished the occasion for Derrida’s most famous deconstruction. According to Derrida, in the history of philosophy, speech was always the locus of truth, whether for Aristotle, where the voice expressed the truth of the soul, or in the Christian idea of the word of God. In comparison, writing like history was considered as a fall from this immediate access to logos; it was parasitically dependent upon the voice of which it was only the inadequate sign. But such a characterization relied on a utopian idea of philosophy and the voice; utopian in a double sense, for utopias are always ripped from history (they never change), but also by being ripped from history, by being removed from the world in which we live, they are “no-where,” inexistent. They are a myth or chimera. As I will discuss in chapter 8, Derrida perceived a more fundamental writing at the heart of speech (arché-writing) that simultaneously underwrote and undermined its claim to absolute certainty. He argued that the properties traditionally attributed to writing (a process of the deferral of meaning) provided the philosophical resources for explaining those qualities traditionally attributed to speech (the immediate presence of meaning). By a parallel logic, one could say that subtending the opposition between history and philosophy we can pick out a more foundational history that allows us to explain their relation and shows that the ways through which philosophy has tried to achieve a transcendent universality are themselves historically contingent. The opposition to absolute notions of philosophy does not however imply a banal relativism. It rather underscores the fact that history can 22

I take my lead here from Derrida’s 1964 course “Histoire et vérité,” given at the Sorbonne. MSC001, box 8, folders 9–10, Jacques Derrida Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine (hereafter: Irvine, box.folder).

12

Introduction

produce ideas and truths that stand the test of time. Though many historians feel threatened by the supposed skepticism of deconstruction, by deconstructing the metaphysical opposition between truth and history, we can begin to understand how it is possible to have something resembling historical truth at all. Rejecting the idea of Truth with a capital “T” reinvigorates our concept of history, which has often been defined negatively in opposition to it. For this reason, though deconstructive critics are perhaps misguided in their broad attacks on “history,” they are justified in attacking a mode of history that reduces philosophical texts to their contextual moment. One should not see biographical, political, or cultural background as an “origin” for philosophical ideas. Much of Derrida’s early work was a criticism of such an appeal to origins, of the argument that understanding where something comes from tells us what it is, and in my writing I have tried to avoid this error. The historical background that I describe was itself intertwined with a set of causes, consequences, relations, and so cannot be regarded as an ultimate ground. If this book does in a loose sense look for origins, they are neither simple nor totalizing. History challenges any claims to absolute originarity, because it shows that all origins themselves have a past. As Derrida himself has argued, the appeal to an origin is rather an attempt to tame history, tying it to one moment in face of which all subsequent development would be inessential.23 In this sense, an historical account should not assume that the relationship between Derrida’s thought and the broader intellectual history of which it was a part was harmonious; between an “origin” and what it produces, there is always change and difference. As we shall see in numerous examples, even when Derrida’s work responded to the demands of a particular context, that context did not exhaust his text’s meaning. Often in his treatment of the problems posed by one particular tradition he was compelled to escape its self-defined limits – bringing to light its tensions and difficulties – and produce new ideas, what might be called the “worklike” character of his texts.24 Contexts just like texts throw up scandals that cannot be reconciled fully with them. But it is only by reading Derrida within the context of twentieth-century French philosophy to see how his work grew out of it that we can understand why at times they were so mutually allergic. 23 24

See for example Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 291. See, on this question, the debate between Dominick LaCapra and Martin Jay, especially LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in his Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Jay, “Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian,” in his Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1988).

Introduction

13

I recognize that, as a dual history of Jacques Derrida’s early thought and the intellectual history of postwar France, this book will be comprehensive in neither. The benefit of following the developments of philosophy through the prism of one thinker is that it avoids abstract analysis and detached meta-narrative. A disadvantage is that it privileges one route over others. It thus will not provide a schema that can be simply and unproblematically applied to other philosophers of the same generation, even if it hopes to provide a model. Major intellectuals from Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, and Roland Barthes to Kostas Axelos, Henri Lefebvre, and the Arguments group play no or only a limited role in my story, despite their contemporary significance. Similarly, the constraints of a book mean that it could never hope to be more than a restricted analysis of Derrida’s own work, missing key elements of his development, and in particular his private life. The sources I use are concerned almost exclusively with philosophy, and, as I suggest in the Introduction to the first part, I lack the evidence and inclination to write either a psychoanalytic account or an intellectual biography, commonly understood. For the same reason, I have also virtually ignored Derrida’s engagements with avant-garde literature, which were crucial for his thought and after all have been treated so well elsewhere. This book is not and could not be a full account of Derrida’s philosophy. As a first sustained reading of his archives and an exploratory attempt at contextualization, my analysis remains provisional, hoping to be revised and improved. For just as Derrida later suggested that no archive could fully contain Hélène Cixous’s genius, no book on Derrida could ever encapsulate his thought.25 If this book will encourage some to read or reread Derrida, and to return with fresh eyes to a period of intellectual history that continues to offer so much to scholars today, then I hope its own flaws may be forgiven. 25

See Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. B. Brahic (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

part i

Derrida post-existentialist

My intention to read Derrida’s thought within the French philosophical tradition, indeed to use him as a privileged guiding thread for tracing the twists and turns of postwar intellectual history in France, very quickly confronts the question of Derrida’s personal history and in particular his family roots in Algeria: How can a Sephardic Jew from North Africa be an exemplary French philosopher? The question is rendered more pressing because Derrida’s Algerian heritage has played a far more prominent role in standard interpretations of his work than colonial history has for other French philosophers born in North Africa such as Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou. The biographical impulse can be explained in part by the attractive parallels between Derrida’s early life and his philosophy of deconstruction; scholars have been tempted to present the two as different facets of the same story, even to the point of suggesting a causal relation. A recent biography begins thus: “Derrida’s thought cannot be understood apart from his life. From the beginning, he was an intellectual outsider, a rebel.”1 Derrida was born in Algeria, supposedly at the edge of the French Empire (though in Algiers, perhaps the least marginal part of France’s imperial holdings), and he was a Jew, heir to memories of exclusion and marginalization. Derrida’s personal history thus seems to reflect the very themes that would come to preoccupy him in his philosophical writings; the philosopher of the margins was himself located at the margins of French society and culture. This reading of deconstruction as the philosophical expression of personal outsidership has gained authority through its appeal to Derrida’s own “autobiographical” works from the 1990s. In texts like Monolingualism of the Other and Circumfession, Derrida came to foreground his abiding sense of alienation from French culture, declaring that he was “a sort of child on the margins of Europe, a child of the Mediterranean, who was neither 1

David Mikics, Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 11.

15

16


simply French, nor simply African.”2 As a “Franco-Maghrebian,”3 caught between two heritages, Derrida asserted that he never felt fully at home in the French language because it remained governed and disciplined by the correct usage in Paris; it was a colonial imposition. The desire to emphasize his distance from the colons explains the force of Derrida’s famous self-description as a child: a “black and very Arab Jew.”4 Nevertheless, Derrida remained suspicious of the biographical approach to philosophical exegesis. In a 1983 interview, when Derrida was pressed on his childhood in Algeria, he immediately questioned his interlocutor: “Ah you want me to say things like ‘I-was-born-in-El Biar-on-the-outskirts-ofAlgiers-in-a-petit-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but . . . ’ Is it really necessary? I can’t do it. You will have to help me.”5 Derrida wanted to avoid the biographical turn in the interview because it threatened to render his philosophical project a function of his heritage, to relate too closely a man and his thought. This error, which mirrors historicism’s tendency to reduce thought to its historical moment, neglected the autonomy of philosophy and its ability to speak to others in other places and other times, while ideologically posing biography as a stable ground, free from the complexities and interpretative tensions of texts.6 Thus while Derrida’s writings on his childhood have been a particularly rich resource for his biographers, one must be wary of taking these “autobiographical” writings at face value. Aside from the problems normally associated with autobiography, Derrida’s meditations on his childhood experience can be particularly treacherous for those hoping to find an “origin” for deconstruction in his personal history. None of these texts can be read simply as an account of his past, because Derrida drew on childhood memories in order to elaborate many of the themes that had become central to his philosophical project, including the ambivalence of identity, our relationship to language, and the aporias of autonomy. The deconstructive coloring of his childhood memories is in part an artefact of Derrida’s selfconscious and deliberate mobilization of his past; the teleological fallacy is as understandable as it remains misleading. Derrida’s childhood was available for deconstructive appropriation because the Sephardic Jews of North Africa were liminal figures, sitting uncomfortably between the colonizers and the colonized. Many could 2 3 4 6

Quoted in Mustapha Chérif, L’Islam et l’Occident (Paris, 2006), p. 56. See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, trans. P. Mensah (Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 10–4. 5 Derrida, Points, p. 119. Derrida, “Circumfession,” p. 58. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 157–60.


17

trace their family histories in North Africa to well before the French conquest of 1830, and the Jewish population was only belatedly integrated into colonist society in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the famous Crémieux decree of 1870 granted all Jews in Algeria French citizenship. Even afterwards this citizenship remained insecure, a fact testified to by the Vichy government’s revocation of the Crémieux decree in 1940, which left Derrida, along with all the other Algerian Jews, stateless. Derrida then was French, but according to many other Français d’Algérie not French enough, marginalized by a group who were themselves at the edge of French society and suffered under the condescending gaze of their metropolitan concitoyens. But the liminal position of Sephardic Jews within Algerian society could manifest itself in two conflicting, though not mutually exclusive, ways; either it could promote in the Jewish population an abiding feeling of alienation from the dominant French culture, or it could encourage them to embrace that culture more fervently. Indeed, historically, a sizable majority of especially urban and middle-class Sephardic Jews in Algeria took the second option. The Crémieux decree marked the beginning of a period that saw great linguistic, cultural, and economic assimilation with the dominant French Algerian population. And, ironically, the withdrawal of citizenship in 1940 by the Vichy régime, though attesting to the fragility of their position, made many Jews more protective of their status as French. As the historian Benjamin Stora has said, “the Vichy regime and the abrogation of the Crémieux decree led the Jews of Algeria to consider the assimilation promised by that famous decree as their most precious possession.”7 Derrida himself concurred, arguing that the revocation and the withdrawal of his French citizenship created “a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community.”8 The Algerian War made the difference between the two options even starker. A small minority of French Algerian Jews, like the communist Henri Alleg, supported the Algerian revolutionaries of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), who fought against French colonial rule. Many embraced the Algerian nationalist claims of the FLN and sought to rediscover and revitalize an ethnic heritage that would highlight historic commonalties with Arab and Berber populations. A sizable proportion of the Jewish population and the majority of their leaders, however, were “liberal,” 7 8

Benjamin Stora, Trois Exiles (Paris: Editions Stock, 2006), p. 106. Derrida, Points, p. 121. See also Jacques Derrida, “L’Ecole a e´té un enfer pour moi,” Cahiers pédagogiques 270 (January 1989), and Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford University Press, 2004), “Of the Anti-Semitism to Come,” pp. 109–12.

18


in that they supported the French state, even as they remained critical of what they saw as its “abuses,” especially the widespread use of torture during the Algerian War. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, Derrida understood himself as a French Algerian liberal during this period, and only slowly came to recognize the need for Algerian independence.9 This tendency to efface and downplay differences with the Europeans of Algeria, a group that the young Derrida tellingly labeled “Catholic,” can be seen elsewhere in Derrida’s biography and work. The Jewish culture in which he was immersed was, in his own words, “contaminated” with Christianity; in Derrida’s family circumcision was called “baptism,” and bar mitzvah, “communion.” Furthermore, Derrida rebelled against what he called his “ossified” Jewish heritage, which had become merely a “ritualized comportment.”10 He refused to go to the Jewish Lycée Maimonides when he was excluded from the aryanized Lycée Ben Aknoun in 1942,11 and in the late 1940s, after his Baccalaureate, he studied in the Lycée Bugeaud d’Alger, the most prestigious school in French North Africa, named for the General who had led the French conquest in 1830. Thus, though Derrida only set foot in mainland France for the first time when he had just turned nineteen, educationally he was already installed within the French system. What we have left of his archive from his school days in Algeria is not too different to what one might expect from a lycéen in Marseille or Lyon. His essays treat French themes, deal with up-to-theminute French topics, and show a familiarity with, especially philosophical, texts from the Metropole. Derrida’s teachers, such as Jan Czarnecki, were trained in Paris and brought the ideas of the imperial capital to Algeria with them. When the time came for Derrida too to apply to study in France, he simply submitted his file to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris; administratively his case was no different to that of any other student from France. French Algeria may have been a colonial fiction, but it was a fiction with considerable power and left its imprint upon Derrida as it did upon many others.

9 10

11

See Edward Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 2010). See Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p. 54. Derrida traced his resistance to a Judaism of “external signs” back to the “insidious Christian contamination,” which fostered in him “the respectful belief in inwardness, the preference for intention, the heart, the mind, mistrust with respect to literalness or to an objective action given to the mechanicity of the body, in short, a denunciation, so conventional, of Pharisaism.” Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992), p. 129. Derrida and Roudinescu, For What Tomorrow, pp. 110–11.


19

Before leaving the realm of biography, however, it is worth noting that, if Derrida’s personal history helps explain why in this period – as opposed to in his later writings – he foregrounded his belonging to the French community and embraced French literature and philosophy, the back history was not without its effects. Derrida’s embrace of France might plausibly be called a repression of his “Jewish identity,” as long as we are careful not to assume that this Jewish identity is in some way more authentic and originary than Derrida’s French one, or that they were necessarily mutually exclusive.12 And we might be able to locate the traces of this “repression” – or perhaps better “effacing” – in Derrida’s work. After all, it is because this repression was never total that Derrida could later re-narrativize his biography, and highlight themes of marginalization and exclusion rather than integration. This helps us understand why, in later discussions of his relationship to Judaism, Derrida appealed to the figure of the Marrano.13 The Marranos were Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity in the fifteenth century, and yet were suspected by the Inquisition of practicing their Jewish faith in secret. The Marranos therefore disavowed their Jewishness, and yet were never fully accepted into the Christian fold.14 Derrida wrote: “I am a sort of marrane of French Catholic Culture, and I also have my Christian Body, inherited from SA [Saint Augustine] in a more or less twisted line.” But, he continued, “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”15 Thus, if one of the main claims of this book is that we cannot simply use Derrida’s Sephardic Jewish heritage to explain what philosophical movements he engaged with – that heritage, to a large extent, remained an inaccessible secret even to Derrida himself – we can perhaps suggest, speculatively, that it had an impact upon how he engaged with them. As Derrida wrote, “I am European, I am without doubt a European intellectual, I like to remember that, like to remind myself of that . . . But I am not, nor do I feel, completely European.”16 12

13

14 15 16

The question of Jewish authenticity is, of course, a particularly fraught one. For a subtle analysis, which treats debates in this period, see Peter E. Gordon, “Out of ‘Huis Clos’: Sartre, Levinas, and the Debate over Jewish Authenticity,” The Journal of Romance Studies 6 (2006), pp. 155–68. For a sophisticated discussion of this aspect of Derrida’s work, and an analysis of how the figure of the Jew with which it engaged emerged from within the French tradition, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago University Press, 2010). This is also the sense of Derrida’s title Monolingualism of the Other. As he put it in the book,“I only have one language, yet it is not mine,” p. 2. Bennington, Jacques Derrida, pp. 170–1. For a slightly different use of the term “Marrano” see Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans T. Dutoit (Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 74–8, 81. Jacques Derrida, L’Autre Cap (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 81.

20


This “not completely” is an important caveat, and we should bear it in mind throughout this book. But to think about this “not completely,” I do not intend to dwell on the history of Sephardic Jews in North Africa, a history that is both complex and, in Derrida’s case, as yet poorly documented and understood. Rather the “not completely” will show itself in my analyses of Derrida’s engagement with the French mainstream. For, as I will suggest, though Derrida was not an outsider to French philosophy, he resided in those curious margins at its heart, straddling divides between the religious and the secular, Catholics and communists, phenomenologists and structuralists. This mainstream with all its fractures and divisions will dominate my account, because, if Derrida wasn’t born into the Parisian culture in which he would make his career, this was his elective community, and his thought should be understood first and foremost as a response to the pressures of academic life in the French capital. For these reasons, my story does not start in Algiers on July 15, 1930, the place and date of Derrida’s birth. Rather, I begin in a Parisian lecture hall fifteen years later and almost a thousand miles away from Derrida’s home. The debates of the Metropole set the terms of Derrida’s first engagement with philosophy, and no event was more significant for the future development of postwar French intellectual life, or more influential for a young generation of aspiring philosophers, than the lecture Jean-Paul Sartre gave at the Salle des Centreaux on 29 October, 1945.

c h a p t er 1

Humanist pretensions Catholics, communists, and Sartre’s struggle for existentialism in postwar France

Nowadays, everybody is a humanist . . . If Marxists can claim [se prétendre] to be humanists, then followers of the various religions – Christians, Hindus, and many others – can also claim to be humanists, as do the existentialists in turn. Pierre Naville, discussion in Existentialism Is a Humanism.1

When Sartre declared that existentialism was a humanism in front of the tightly packed crowd at the Salle des Centraux, it was a brilliant tactical move. In the year leading up to his lecture, Sartre’s writings had been subject to numerous and sometimes conflicting criticisms from right and left. Derided as a decadent bourgeois philosophy or vilified as the modish immorality of secular youth, “existentialism” had become a pawn in a chess game whose stakes were national and political. But in the talk he gave that night, Sartre regained the initiative and emerged in the political sphere as an active and determined participant.2 It was a new direction for Sartre, whose philosophical work from the 1930s had focused on rather technical points of phenomenology – even the social analyses of Being and Nothingness (1943) had outlined no explicit political agenda. Existentialism Is a Humanism broke new ground by bringing Sartre’s thought into direct communication with broader themes and questions of postwar political discourse. Venturing into new territory, Sartre did not have the luxury of importing his own terms or recreating the debate; he inscribed existentialism into a field with its own vocabulary, set-piece arguments, and rhetorical moves. His intervention was strategic, exploiting the hasty alliances and barely hidden antagonisms already at work in liberation politics. 1 2

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 62–3 (translation modified). See for example Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 46.

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Historians have been slow to consider the immediate political context, but for Sartre’s audience its relevance would have been clear, because the structure of his talk directly mirrored the contemporary machinations of high politics in France. While Sartre was addressing the Club Maintenant, defending existentialism against the criticisms of “communists” and “Catholics” by labeling it “humanist,” the three main political parties were picking over the result of the election held eight days previously. Talk of a coalition had abounded, and the Socialist Party (SFIO) was trying to draw together the Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) and the Communist Party (PCF) to form a government, an alliance that would be called tripartisme.3 It was in this context that one of the by-words of the socialists came to be particularly useful. The SFIO had decided that it could help unify the parties and discipline the most extreme wings of the MRP and the PCF by declaring itself to be “humanist.” The structure and thesis of Sartre’s paper was then over-determined. When Sartre, in his talk, stated that the contemporary moral choice was that between the MRP and the communists, he was only making explicit the underlying framework of his text; Existentialism Is a Humanism was a political document drawing on the resources and pushing the limits of tripartisme.4 Such an immediate and conscious appeal to a particular political moment, however, carries risks. Proclaiming existentialism a humanism and thus consonant with a particular moment in French history, Sartre allowed both his immediate success and his philosophy’s later decline. As politics moved on, Sartre’s gesture quickly dated. By 1947, the tripartite alliance was falling apart, buffeted by the winds of an ever-harsher international climate. Because Sartre had exploited a political situation where all major parties were willing to ignore their differences to achieve a humanist consensus, the decline of tripartisme was an ill omen for existentialism; the French philosophical community began to outgrow a philosophy tailored to the fashions of 1945. Freed of the need to profess humanism, communist phenomenologists turned to a new interpretation of Husserl to counter Sartre’s subjectivist reading, and, casting off the uneasy discipline of humanism, Christian philosophers appealed to Heidegger’s famous letter to Jean Beaufret for resources in the battle against Sartre’s atheism. Existentialism was successful in part because Sartre was able to present it as the one true humanist philosophy, aligning it with the rising star of liberation politics. But when that star began to fade in the late 3

4

Tripartisme refers to the period from 1945 to 1947 when the three main parties, PCF (Parti Communiste Français), MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire) and SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) shared power. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 47.

Humanist pretensions

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1940s and early 1950s, existentialism too lost much of its luster. As French philosophy entered the antihumanist age, existentialism would be the first casualty. the rise of humanism The political context for the humanism debate is crucial for understanding Sartre’s 1945 paper. It shows the political stakes of the turn to “humanism” as well as the indeterminacy of the word that allowed it to be successfully deployed in the creation of an alliance, whether political or philosophical. Previous commentators have assumed that when Sartre claimed existentialism as a humanism, he was responding to direct assertions to the contrary. But the central question in 1945 was not whether existentialism was a humanism, but rather what type of humanism it was, and why that mattered. Catholic and communist philosophers did not want to argue that Sartre was an antihumanist, but rather that his form of humanism was corrupt. And if they could show that his humanism was inadequate, even dangerous, then they could also apply that argument to the political stage where it really mattered. Sartre’s existentialism became, in 1945, the perfect opportunity for Catholics to discredit an atheistic humanism, and for communists to attack a bourgeois humanism that they felt to be harmful to their position within the tripartite alliance. If existentialism was not already accepted as a humanism, if the debate was not a debate within and about humanism, it would not have so exercised communist or Catholic intellectuals.5 The ultimate stakes of the debate had been set eight days earlier on the national stage. The election on 21 October 1945 had seen the vote relatively evenly divided between the Communist Party, the Catholic MRP, and the socialists, and the intervening week had been filled with questions of possible alliances, rumors of the eventual form of the government.6 In this uneasy ménage a` trois, it was the socialists who were the brokers, attempting to form a coalition government with the implacably opposed PCF and MRP. It was a shrewd move by the SFIO to use “humanism” as a precipitation point for the alliance. Sufficiently broad and positive that few of the parties 5

6

Stefanos Geroulanos’s recent book, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford University Press, 2010) gives the fullest and best account of philosophical debates within humanism and the development of early forms of antihumanism in France. His sensitive analysis of the humanist quarrels before the War provides a valuable frame for understanding the reemergence of conflicting humanisms in the immediate postwar period. These three parties had gained approximately a quarter of the vote each, but with the PCF just leading in terms of votes cast.

24


would disown it, it also provided a strong rhetorical ground to criticize what the SFIO saw as the more problematic elements of Catholic and communist agendas. The idea of “humanism” did not merely help form an alliance, it was particularly adept at disciplining it. Drawing its power from a common opposition to Nazi barbarity, “humanism” by 1945 was deployed against resistance allies; it was the return to politics as usual in Paris. Primarily, the term humanist was directed against the communists, as its main proponents made clear. They saw “humanist socialism” as offering a middle way between American capitalism and Soviet communism. Because it was “socialism” it avoided the excessive individualism of the United States, but because it was “humanist” it avoided the subsumption of the individual into the collective that commentators identified in Russia. André Hauriou popularized the term in his 1944 book, Socialisme humaniste: Vers une théorie de la Résistance. He wanted to open a “new path . . . between capitalist liberalism and total collectivism . . . between class warfare and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”7 The term was seconded by another socialist, Philippe Viannay, writing under his Resistance pseudonym Indomitus; though he was “socialist,” he belonged “to a family of those who state principally that Man, the human person, is greater than the collectivity, taken as such.”8 Humanism’s place in Socialist Party rhetoric was assured when the grand old man of the SFIO, Léon Blum, returning in early 1945 from German captivity, adopted it – with its anti-communist resonances intact – in his speech to the Socialist National Congress in August 1945 and his book A l’échelle humaine of the same year.9 When the Socialists used the term “humanism” they did so to distinguish themselves from the PCF. marxist humanism and the man of tomorrow Willing to be part of the “humanist” alliance, the communists were not prepared to accept the socialists’ interpretation of the word. In a debate played out in the pages of the Catholic personnalist journal Esprit in the early months of 1945, journalists and politicians – including the socialist 7 8 9

André Hauriou, Le Socialisme humaniste: vers une doctrine de la Résistance (Algiers: Fontaine, 1944), pp. 113–14. Indomitus, Nous sommes les rebelles (Paris: Entreprise de presse, 1945), p. 106. Blum speech, August 13, 1945 at the Congrès Nationale Ordinaire, cited in Roger Quilliot, Le SFIO et l’exercice du pouvoir: 1944–1958 (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 41. Léon Blum, A l’échelle humaine (Lausanne: Mermod, 1945).


25

Catholic Jean Lacroix and Viannay (Indomitus) himself – discussed the new watchword of the SFIO. On the communist side, Pierre Hervé, the editor of the communist journal Action, showed a clear distrust of the term “humanist socialism,” even as he was aware of its uses: You speak to us of humanist socialism. OK, if it is understood that Marxism is a humanism and that the communist movement is in all respects a social and political manifestation of that great current that one calls humanism. But whenever you speak of humanist, French, liberal etc. socialism, one has the distinct impression that there is an unstated polemic. In reality, you have it in for communism. When that humanism becomes the badge of a political bloc, we are in our rights to wonder if its promoters, weary of the communist presence in the resistance, don’t want to constitute an anti-communist coalition.10

While unwilling to reject “humanism” in toto, Hervé recognized all too well its anti-communist connotations. In a book-length treatment of the same subject, Hervé proclaimed that “the new socialism calls itself humanist, to imply that the other is not.” But for Hervé the SFIO project would reveal itself to be only a “pseudo-humanism,” when compared to the great humanism at work in the USSR.11 That Hervé was prepared to ally communism with humanism shows how seriously the PCF took national unity in the months following the liberation. Coming out of the cooperation in the National Council of the Resistance, the PCF wanted to present itself as a willing partner in the anti-fascist front, just like the Soviet Union on the international level. The PCF’s slogan from August 1944 was “unite – struggle – work,” changing to the even more moderate “Renaissance! Democracy! Unity!” in 1945.12 The change was not skin-deep, and on several occasions the party went against its own interests to support the national cause, disbanding the various liberation committees in late 1944 so as not to challenge the authority of Charles de Gaulle. The PCF’s turn to patriotic respectability paid off and helped double its membership over 1945 to 750,000. If the desire to play a major role in reconstruction made the communists unwilling to emphasize differences with other parties, the real possibility of power gave party officials yet another reason to be open to humanism. A substantial alliance with the SFIO seemed possible, even to the extent of L’Humanité publishing a draft charter of a unified party on 12 June 1945.13 10 11 12 13

Pierre Hervé, “Un Socialisme humaniste,” Esprit (February 1945), pp. 408–11. Pierre Hervé, La Libération trahie (Paris: B. Grasset, 1945), pp. 57 and 63. Cited in Maxwell Adereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History (1928–1984) (Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 126. See L’Humanité, June 12, 1945.

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The plan came to nothing, but it is important to recognize that it was not completely implausible for the two resistance allies to come together in the postwar political field, and the hope was enough to have a discernible effect on both parties’ policies. When unity with the “humanist” socialists was realistic, it is not surprising that the PCF should toy with the term themselves. The task, then, was to reappropriate the word and rid it of its anti-communist overtones. Part of the strategy was to deploy the term against the third party, the Catholic MRP. In an address given by party intellectuals Roger Garaudy and Georges Cogniot to the 10th Party Congress in June 1945, they asserted that, with the end of the War, the “renaissance of French culture” had become a central task for the PCF. This renaissance was intimately connected to academic freedom. As Garaudy described communist historians, “Marxism commands their actions, but not their thoughts” because they do not want to do “partisan, but scientific history.”14 It was a subtle attack on the Catholics. Opposing “dogmatic education,” the communists presented themselves as defenders of academic freedom and implicitly invoked the MRP’s attempt to reinstitute religious education in schools. By calling upon humanist ideas, the Communist Party adopted a popular and very French stance, upholding the école la¨ıque.15 Similarly, Hervé asserted that the true patron of humanism was Prometheus: religious humanism seemed to him “to be as contradictory as atheistic Catholicism.”16 The party knew which elements of “humanism” it liked and which it didn’t, and hoped to make a bid for its own version. The debate over the term “humanism,” then, made the party more receptive to its homegrown movement. Marxist humanism had played an important role for the PCF during the Popular Front in the 1930s. But this momentary recognition had come to an abrupt end in 1939 only weeks after the publication of its standard-bearing text, Henri Lefebvre’s Le Matérialisme dialectique. The French translation of the official Histoire du parti communiste Bolchévik de l’U.R.S.S., which reasserted a narrow materialism, and the news of the Nazi–Soviet pact shredded the PCF’s reputation with communist sympathizers. In response, many Marxists such as Georges Politzer dropped their commitment to humanism in favor of their allegiance to political communism, while others such as Georges Guterman and Henri Lefebvre remained more faithful to their ideas and consequently were pushed to the 14 15 16

Roger Garaudy and Georges Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la renaissance française (Paris: Editions du Parti communiste français, 1945), p. 5. See especially L’Humanité, 27 September 1945, “L’Ecole de la liberté.” Hervé, La Libération trahie, 62.


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edges of the communist movement, rejected by the mainstream party.17 In early 1945, then, advocates of Marxist humanism were either marginal figures in the PCF, such as Henri Lefebvre, Auguste Cornu, and Dionys Mascolo, or writing from outside, such as Luc Sommerhausen, Emile Baas, or Pierre Bigo, who were Catholics: only Roger Garaudy occupied a central position in the party.18 But the new political situation after the liberation gave the movement a new lease on life.19 Where before they had been politically dangerous, opposing the Stalinist orthodoxy, now Marxist humanists were a useful resource for a party trying to appropriate the word of the minute. The need to engage in the debate over the meaning of humanism explains the communist reaction to Sartre. In December 1944, Sartre had published a defence of existentialism in the communist paper Action, and had, in passing, aligned his philosophy with the new fad of humanism: existentialism, Sartre asserted, was “a humanist philosophy of action, of effort, of combat, of solidarity.”20 We have already seen how the editor, Pierre Hervé, was particularly sensitive to the valence of “humanism,” and the confrontation with Sartre offered him a perfect opportunity for debating the term in a field that was not so politically charged. It was a proxy for the broader political debate. To respond to Sartre, and reclaim humanism, Hervé chose none other than the recently rehabilitated Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s attack drew on the humanist Marxism that he had been proposing since his 1939 book, which relied heavily on Marx’s 1844 manuscripts and their theory of alienation. This theoretical background was clear from the start of Lefebvre’s article; he accused Sartre of ignoring the alienation that reduced Man to his product. The modern division of labor did not allow the extreme freedom for which Sartre argued. Rather, the current existing relations of production were the preeminent modern force for dehumanization. Sartre, from his class position in the educated elite, projected freedom of the most abstract kind; he could not get beyond the “narcissism of the pure intellectual,” and so gave no hope for a real and concrete liberation.21 For Lefebvre, Sartre had outlined a quietist philosophy, just the sort of thing one would expect from a bourgeois, whom the 17 18 19 20 21

See William Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), ch. 4. See the list of Marxist humanist texts in Mark Poster, Existential Marxism from Sartre to Althusser (Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 50. See Lewis, Louis Althusser, ch. 5 and especially pp. 127–35. Jean-Paul Sartre, “A propos de l’existentialisme: mise au point,” Action, December 29, 1944. Henri Lefebvre, “‘Existentialisme’ et Marxisme: Réponse a` une mise au point,” Action 8 (June 1945).

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division of labour required only to think and not to act. Only real practical transformation could free Man. But if Lefebvre posed his humanism as more authentic, he did not refuse Sartre the label. He merely stated: “it is impossible to accept that Sartre should present his metaphysics as the only current humanism.” For Lefebvre, Sartre’s was the empty humanism of the intellectual classes who ignored the dehumanization of capitalism; true humanism was the humanism of tomorrow, the result of the revolution, not its cause. It was a complaint that could just as easily have been leveled against the socialists, who hoped to instantiate “humanist” ideals in the present, at the expense of the greater humanism after the revolution. The conflict between Marxist and socialist “humanism” played an important role for the Communist Party. It challenged the SFIO’s authority on precisely the concept with which they were attacking the PCF, and made it easier for communists to take part in a “humanist” alliance. The PCF courted the idea of “humanism” because the term was still in play; half turned against Marxism, it could also be aligned with a communist political project. man turned towards god: catholic humanism A very similar set of concerns animated the Catholic response to Sartre. Humanism exerted a strong attraction on the Christian left. Indeed, when Blum used humanist language at the SFIO August conference in 1945, it was felt by many to be a concession to the personnalist journal Esprit.22 Esprit had been at the heart of the Catholic turn to humanism in the 1930s, when its founder, Emmanuel Mounier, declared the need to “redo the Renaissance,” referring to the need to redirect humanism away from the secular and individualistic path that, historically, it had taken.23 Humanism was also central to the work of the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who both before and during the War had advocated an “integral humanism.”24 Just as “humanism” provided important resources for the communists to attack the Catholics, especially on the question of secular education, it appealed to the Catholics for the critical edge it could provide against the communists. Catholic critics such as Jean Daniélou could see humanist Marxism as ill fitting with “a communism, which is often nothing more 22 23 24

See Quilliot, Le SFIO, p. 41. For a contemporary example, see Georges Jarlot, “A l’échelle humaine,” Etudes (November 1945), pp. 229–33. Esprit, October 1, 1932, pp. 5–51. Jacques Maritain, Principes d’une politique humaniste (Paris: P. Hartmann, 1944).


29

than political Machiavellianism,” and could suspect the communist review La Pensée of rejecting humanism.25 But the Christians too had an ambivalent relationship with the term, for it was difficult to ignore the possible atheistic reading of “humanism” that the communists promoted. The newly founded MRP, led by Georges Bidault, had as one of its major goals an overturning of the secular education policies from the Third Republic, which had chased religion out of the classroom. For the Catholics, humanism had too often been tied to “la¨ıcisation,” a debate that had begun to rumble again even before the war was over, given the support provided to Catholic schools under the Vichy regime and the expected reversal under the new government.26 Indeed a book entitled Humanisme by Léon Emery, published during the War, had pursued precisely this policy of secular education. A. de la Croix-Laval’s review for the Catholic journal Etudes started, “what a shame that such a seductive little book should be not only an incontestable pedagogical and literary accomplishment, but also an undeniable danger to the souls of our children,” and ended “what a shame, we can conclude, that the humanism to which so much pedagogical science and so much literary value introduces us should be, at the end of the day, just the old secular humanism.”27 The Catholics, then, just like the communists, had an ambivalent relationship to the term. It was a powerful tool for opposing other parties, but it also, if interpreted a certain way, had the potential to backfire on some of their most cherished political projects. It is not surprising that there were several attempts amongst Catholics to redefine “humanism,” just as there had been with the communists. In 1945, Père Henri de Lubac published the highly successful, Drame de l’humanisme athée, which discussed the dangers of a humanism detached from God, a humanism that in Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche could often turn into its opposite.28 As he suggested 25

26

27

28

Jean Daniélou, “La Vie intellectuelle en France: Communisme, Existentialisme, Christianisme,” Etudes (September 1945), pp. 241–54. See also J. Lieven, “Le Communisme a-t-il changé?” pp. 179–92, in the same edition. See the abundant articles in Catholic journals such as Etudes, or Les Temps nouveaux, and La Vie intellectuelle all through 1945. See also the attempt to reclaim “humanist teaching” for Christianity, in Louis Meylan, Les Humanités et la personne (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1944). Armand de la Croix-Laval, review, “Chefs d’œuvre. Introduction a` l’Humanisme,” Etudes (March 1945), pp. 422–4. For a Christian humanist response to the education question, see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Hérédité sociale et e´ducation,” Etudes (April 1945), pp. 84–94, especially 92. Henri de Lubac, Le Drame de l’humanisme athée (Paris: Editions Spes, 1945). Lubac compared Marx, Feuerbach, Comte, and Nietzsche to Dostoyevsky, who, by showing the absurdity of life, quashed any attempts to “found eternal life down here,” p. 411. Against the deifying efforts of the humanists, Lubac left his readers with a sense of our limitation and the hope of eventual liberation. As Michael

30


in his Avant-propos, “without God, Man can in the end only organize himself against Man. Exclusive humanism is inhumane humanism.”29 When the book was reviewed by Gabriel Marcel in the Catholic review La Vie Intellectuelle, a couple of months after Sartre’s talk, he tied this concern directly to Sartrean existentialism. Closed atheistic Nietzschean humanism exhibited “a certain disposition of the soul, where ressentiment plays a central role.” This was, Marcel asserted, the type of humanism that could “be found amongst many of our contemporaries: existentialism, not in itself, but in the negative form in which it is presented by Sartre, undeniably assumes it.”30 For the Catholics, atheistic humanism led to its own corruption: one could be truly humanistic only if one recognized Man’s need for and openness to God. Just as the communists saw the debate with Sartre as an ideal and low-stakes forum for asserting their own definition of humanism, for the Catholics it provided an opportunity for challenging humanism’s atheistic undertones. Therefore, as with Lefebvre, the goal was not to refuse Sartre the label, but rather to show that his version of humanism was limited and unattractive. In Jeanne Mercier’s important 1945 critique of Sartre, she stated that for him, “fundamentally, Man is vice,” and in the end, a “Man minus humanity.”31 Mercier continued, “how can one be surprised . . . if the need for the true God could have been replaced by others, if his very name was obscured? We have first extinguished our spirit . . . Where better than [Sartre] to survey the degeneration of a humanity without God?”32 It was the same analysis that de Lubac had deployed against atheistic humanism, and Marcel had tied to Sartre. Sartre’s existentialism provided a particularly powerful example of the failure of secular humanism, of the type being advocated by the socialists and communists. Sartre’s Catholic and communist critics were not bandying around the charge of antihumanism. Rather they were engaged in a subtler and politically more crucial debate over the meaning of “humanism,” for which Sartrean existentialism offered a suitably uncontroversial occasion. The Christians decried a humanism turned atheistic in Sartre’s work, the communists, a humanism of the bourgeois. The point wasn’t to deny him the title, but rather to show the failings of his particular version. In both cases

29 30 31 32

Kelly notes, though de Lubac did not want to promote Christian humanism himself, his work was appropriated by Christian humanists in 1945; see Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 149. De Lubac, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, 10. Gabriel Marcel, “Le Drame de l’humanisme athée,” La Vie intellectuelle (December 1945), pp. 141–8. Jeanne Mercier, “Le Ver dans le fruit,” Etudes (February 1945), pp. 238–40. Ibid., pp. 240, 249.

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it was a testing ground for a larger debate being played out at the political level, a debate the result of which would have profound consequences for the causes they held closest, whether in education or in the transformation of the social system. agency today: sartre’s humanism It is only by understanding the controversy and stakes involved in the invocation of humanism that we can begin to read Sartre’s 1945 lecture. Sartre understood the cleavages in the debate and saw the fraught political and semantic situation as a perfect opportunity for furthering his own ends. Like the socialists and the Catholics, he asserted a humanism that affirmed individual autonomy today, against what he saw as the totalizing and enveloping whole offered by the communists. Like the socialists and the communists, his was a secular humanism. Sartre’s use of “humanism” to argue against conventional Marxism mirrored the arguments used by the socialists; it was the Trojan horse in which Sartre tried to smuggle subjectivism into Marxism.33 The Marxists asserted that only a bourgeois humanist could imagine the existence of absolute freedom in the modern capitalist world. Before the revolution, this freedom could only be abstract, unable to change anything. But Sartre turned the criticism back against them. He attacked materialism for treating “all men – including oneself – as objects – which is to say as a set of pre-determined reactions indistinguishable from the properties and phenomena that constitute, say, a table, a chair, or a stone.”34 Sartre argued that if we believed in ironclad laws of history we would never act, because history would accomplish itself, by itself: “Will collectivization ever be a reality?” I have no idea. All I know is that I will do everything in my power to make it happen. Beyond that, I cannot count on anything. Quietism is the attitude of people who say: “Others can do what I cannot do.” The doctrine that I am presenting to you is precisely the opposite of quietism, since it declares that reality exists only in action. It ventures even further than that, since it adds, “Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing else more than his life.35

Only by allowing individual freedom was the revolution possible. Sartre took communist political engagement and made it dependent upon a break with vulgar Marxist theory. For Sartre, as for the socialists, humanism meant 33

Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, pp. 35–8.

34

Ibid., p. 41.

35

Ibid., pp. 36–7.

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that communism had to relax its laws of history and accept individual human action and choice in the present. But, of course, a direct reiteration of the socialist account would not make Sartre any friends in the communist camp. Socialist humanism, for them, impeded the revolution, undermined the unity of the social whole, and strayed dangerously close to the individualism that they so despised in capitalism. If Sartre was willing to use the semantic possibilities of socialist humanism, he did not want to embrace it fully. Sartre went to considerable lengths to show that his version was not the one the communists rejected. It is for this reason that Sartre was so concerned to rebuff the charge that existentialist freedom was purely individual: The word “subjectivism” has two possible interpretations and our opponents play with both of them, at our expense. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject to choose what he will be, and, on the other, man’s inability to transcend human subjectivity. The fundamental meaning of existentialism resides in the latter. When we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men. In fact, in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be . . . Our responsibility is thus much greater than we might have supposed, because it concerns all of mankind.36

Existentialist choice was not the selfish and bourgeois freedom of an isolated individual, restricted to the private sphere. Rather than an individualistic softening of the socialist ideal, for Sartre, the liberation promised by humanism was consonant with communism. Sartre argued that a common human project was possible because of a shared “condition.” This “condition” was not a human essence, but the “limitations, which a priori define Man’s fundamental situation in the universe . . . the necessity for him to be in the world, to work in it, to live out his life in it amongst others, and, eventually, to die in it.” Even if the specifics were always different, we could nonetheless understand how people attempted to “surpass such limitations, to postpone, deny, or to come to terms with them”: good or bad faith.37 It was this common desire to change the world in which we live, or in failure, to submit to it, that was universal across the great variety of human existence. Despite the lack of a human essence, the mainstay of existentialism, Sartre still could appeal to the universal form of all human projects, and assert that the goal of 36

Ibid., p. 24.

37

Ibid., p. 42.


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subjective freedom was to facilitate this surpassing, both for the self and for others. This was, Sartre insisted, the communists’ goal too. One could choose to support freedom or not, choose to oppose slavery or not, choose good faith and the truth of existentialist freedom, or bad faith and the error of its dissimulation, the PCF or the MRP: “A man who joins a communist or revolutionary group wills certain concrete ends that imply the abstract will to freedom, yet that freedom must always be exercised in a concrete manner . . . as soon as there is commitment, I am obliged to will the freedom of others at the same time as I will my own.”38 The desire to realize freedom concretely, to ensure the conditions for its occurrence in the world, was also the desire to will it for all, to help the workers, one might say, lose their chains. This return to Kantianism, a universal form for morality, even if Sartre was wary about defining any specific content, has been much attacked in the secondary literature. Sartre’s attempt to render the more individualist freedom of Being and Nothingness social seems to renege on his previous refusal of a priori moral principles.39 But the apparent weakness of Sartre’s argument highlights the political necessity to reach beyond the isolated subject and promote a universal project for human liberation. Sartre had to distance himself from the socialist humanism claimed by the SFIO that was otherwise so central to his argument against Marxist materialism. The strategic demands of Sartre’s first foray into politics posed the problem of how one could socialize existentialist freedom, which would remain a focus for his ongoing thought up through his Critique of Dialectical Reason fifteen years later. christian existentialism With respect to the Christians the rhetorical situation was more complicated. The complexity can be seen in a peculiarity of Sartre’s 1945 paper: Christian thinkers were invoked at two separate and apparently conflicting stages. Firstly, exemplified by Mlle Mercier, they were presented as critics of existentialism. And then later, Christian existentialism, predominantly Catholic in Sartre’s eyes, was named as the second major category of existentialism. The Catholics were both inside and outside the movement. 38 39

Ibid., pp. 48–9. See T. Storm Heter, Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement: Authenticity and Civic Virtue (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 148–50, or Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, p. 33.

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But it would be wrong to assume that Sartre was simply referring to two separate groups. In fact, Jeanne Mercier’s critique, “Le Ver dans le fruit,” sketched the classic Christian existentialist critique of atheistic existentialism: it was not an attack on existentialism tout court, as Sartre had implied. Mercier suggested that Sartre’s atheism was the worm in the apple; the fruit of existentialism, however, could be saved.40 Sartre’s presentation of Mercier and other Christian thinkers as outside of existentialism was part of a larger project of claiming existentialism for himself. He wanted to make existentialism atheist, and to do that, his first step was to show that it was humanist. The need to confront a Christian strand of existentialism must be understood through the history of existentialism. Before the War, existentialism had been dominated by Catholics, especially René le Senne, Gabriel Marcel, and Louis Lavelle. In le Senne’s second edition of the Introduction a` la philosophie from 1939, his discussion of modern philosophy was divided into two sections entitled “German” and “French Existentialism,” and it was in this second grouping that he placed his own philosophy.41 In 1939 all his French examples were Christian. The Christian existentialists were also institutionally established in France, publishing in the series Philosophie de l’Esprit, run by Lavelle and le Senne, which counted amongst its titles most of Gabriel Marcel’s oeuvre, key works by Lavelle, Jean Wahl’s Etudes Kierkegaardiennes,42 le Senne’s Obstacle et Valeur, and Gaston Berger’s book on Husserl. After all, it was widely affirmed that the father of existentialism was the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and the Protestant Karl Jaspers was hailed alongside the “atheist” Heidegger as a major influence. When looking back to the fathers of existentialism, it was to Pascal and St Augustine that one turned as well as to modern phenomenology. Thus when the editor of Esprit, Emmanuel Mounier, wrote an article on “existentialisms” in April 1946, he drew a family tree to show both its predominantly Christian roots, and the thick boughs of its modern religious exponents, including his own personnalism.43 Sartre’s Heideggerianism was part of a sparse and isolated branch, deformed by a Nietzschean outgrowth. 40 41 42

43

Mercier, “Le Ver dans le fruit.” The title draws on Sartre’s own description of Nothingness as a worm in the heart of being. René Le Senne, Introduction a` la philosophie, 2nd edn (Paris: F. Alcan, 1939), pp. 229–35. Jean Wahl’s relationship to the Christian existentialists is more problematic, and he preferred a secular Heidegger to a religious Kierkegaard. But his importance in introducing the thought of Kierkegaard and Jaspers into France places him in direct conversation with all the people we are talking about here. Emmanuel Mounier, “Introduction aux existentialismes,” Esprit (April 1946).


35

Figure 1: The Existentialist Tree, Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes C Editions Deno¨ el, 1960. (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1947), p. 159.

Even after the War, Christian existentialism maintained its position. In his Que sais-je book on existentialism published in 1946, the Jesuit Paul Foulquié moved through atheistic existentialism, to Christian existentialism, before concluding with the Christian “essentialist existentialism” of Lavelle.44 44

Paul Foulquié, L’Existentialisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947).

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Given this strong Christian tradition of existentialism it is not surprising that the most significant Christian response to Sartre was not to contest existentialism in toto, but rather to argue for the validity of a Christian approach. As Mounier put it, “historically, existentialism is more often synonymous with Christian philosophy, transcendence, and humanism, than atheism and despair.” If the two movements showed great divergence on metaphysical issues, these would be debated as “comrades in the same battle.”45 A number of books would appear in the postwar period to show that there was space within existentialism for the Christians, or at least for religious thought. Among others were Roger Troisfontaines’s Le Choix de Sartre (1946) and Existentialisme et pensée chrétienne (1948), Jean Paumen’s Existentialisme spirituel (1949), Jean Wahl’s Petite histoire de l’existentialisme (1947) and his Les Philosophies de l’existence (1954), as well as the essay collection Existentialisme chrétien from 1948. Just as Jeanne Mercier did in her 1945 critique, Christian existentialists attempted to show that the rejection of God in Sartre’s system was not philosophically necessary; it was based upon Sartre’s own individual choice.46 Existentialism was supposed to confront the categories of our understanding with existence and show them to be wanting. If we could not even understand the world that was given to us, argued the Christian existentialists, how could we make dogmatic claims about the existence, or not, of God. God, in Marcel’s words, was a mystery, to be approached through faith, not knowledge. Sartre’s assertion of atheism ran against the very tenor of existentialism. But the Christian existentialists were not content simply to leave a space open for a belief in God. If God could not be proved, they argued, then a powerful moral argument for his existence could be derived from our experience of the world. The Christian existentialists were particularly concerned about Sartre’s “one-sided” description of existence, which led to his supposed moral nihilism. As Mercier argued: It is true that Man carries the stigmata of the nothing, and that sin ravages his life; an overwhelming burden of misery weighs on the world, an inexpressible anxiety embraces it. But it is also true that human experience is not completely limited to this desolate landscape. M. Sartre has deliberately effaced, to the point of rendering it unrecognizable, nobility and joy . . . all the values of intelligence, of fidelity, of tenderness and of courage . . . the pure smiles of children. Optimism 45 46

Emmanuel Mounier, note, Esprit (December 1945), pp. 960–3. Hence Troisfontaine’s title “Le Choix de Sartre.” See also Mercier, “Le Ver dans le fruit,” p. 238.


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or pessimism? . . . One must enlarge the search to the scale of all the dimensions of existence. And it is a fact, an incontestable fact indeed, that Revelation has shone on the world, that a message of hope and of salvation has been given to us, and the hearts of men are witnesses to grace.47

It was a point reiterated by many others. Gabriel Marcel raised the question in a lecture early in 1946 whether Sartre would have been able to write Huis clos if the characters had been a “glorious general,” a “mother of an honest family,” and a “carmelite nun.”48 “Hell is other people,” it seems, only when they are an infanticide, an adulterer, and a murderous postal worker. If attention was turned to the positive experiences in life, a more optimistic and moral philosophy could be built, one that would point towards God. It was this debate about and for existentialism that was most pressing in 1945, when the new atheistic existentialism had not yet succeeded in fully excluding religious belief. Sartre’s 1945 talk was the most audacious attempt yet to appropriate existentialism for the atheists. existentialism is an atheism We can now understand why the Christians should occupy such an ambivalent place in Sartre’s talk. It would have been impossible to ignore the Christian existentialists, but Sartre showed great hostility towards them; his presentation of Christian politics and choice of examples (the man whose failure in life led him to the priesthood, or the mad woman who thought she was talking to God) show that for him Christianity was always on the side of bad faith and resignation.49 The acknowledgment of Christian existentialism was grudging at best; Sartre suggested that existentialism was simple to define, but “what complicates the matter is that there are two kinds of existentialists: on the one hand, the Christians, among whom I would include Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, a professed Catholic; and, on the other, the atheistic existentialists, among whom we should place Heidegger, as well as the French existentialists and myself.”50 Whereas le Senne’s “French existentialists” from 1939 were all Christian, Sartre, in a declaration that was more wishful than descriptive, asserted in 1945 that 47

48 49

Ibid., p. 248. See also I. Lepp’s review of L’Etre et le néant in Les Etudes philosophiques (January 1946), or René le Senne, “La Mission permanente et contemporaine du philosophe,” Les Etudes philosophiques (January 1948), pp. 1–16. Gabriel Marcel, “L’Existence et la liberté humaine,” in Les Grands Appels de l’homme contemporain (Paris: Editions du temps présent, 1946), p. 148. 50 Ibid., p. 20 (translation modified). See Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, pp. 26, 34, 47.

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they were atheists; Sartre wanted French existentialism to undergo a crisis of faith. But how did Sartre hope to incite this conversion? The text gives very few philosophical reasons for atheism. True, Sartre used the example of God to explain the thesis that “essence precedes existence,” because a God who created Man would already have an idea of that Man before he existed. Existentialism, on the other hand, drew the philosophical consequences of the death of God. But when, later in the talk, Sartre declared that “atheistic existentialism” was more coherent, it was not with the Christian variety that he made the unfortunate comparison, but rather with an atheism that persisted in believing in stable essences.51 Atheism in Sartre’s text was always an axiom, never a conclusion. While Sartre did not prove the nonexistence of God, he did argue for the primacy of existential freedom that was its consequence. As he elaborated in his example of the woman hearing the voice of God, there is never any pure injunction from on high: If I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconscious, or some pathological condition? . . . I will never find any proof at all, nor any convincing sign of it. If a voice speaks to me, it is always I who must decide whether or not this is the voice of an angel; if I regard a certain course of action as good, it is I who will choose to say that it is good, rather than bad.52

Divine commands required human consent, required us to choose them as divine. Existentialist freedom was always lurking at one degree removed. The Christian existentialists might not have disagreed. Human freedom was just as important to them as a necessary condition of faith. If humans weren’t free then faith would not be meaningful: for Sartre’s absurdity, the Christians substituted their own, credo quia absurdum est. God wasn’t present in the world, obvious to all, rather he was a “hidden God,” and false idols had to be chased away by a “purifying atheism.”53 As Jean Beaufret suggested in a 1946 article, “isn’t it legitimate . . . to see in atheism itself, however little it confesses to a malaise, a cryptogram of the act of faith?”54 Sartre’s argument that atheism and existentialism were co-extensive would thus have had no purchase on the Christian existentialists; his atheistic premise could just as easily be replaced by their particular type of theology. 51 53 54

52 Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 22. For “Athéisme Purificateur” see Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1948), and Borne, Le Problème du mal. Jean Beaufret, “Vers une critique marxiste de l’existentialisme,” Revue socialiste 2 (1946), reprinted in Jean Beaufret, De l’Existentialisme a` Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), pp. 149–54.

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“Humanism” then was the key. It was only by using this concept that Sartre was able to argue in favor of atheistic existentialism as opposed to its theistic alternative. As we have seen, one of the dominant tropes in the Christian existentialist critique of Sartre’s philosophy was that of choice. Sartre had chosen to be atheist, both in his choice of existential descriptions and in his pessimistic conclusions. By invoking humanism, Sartre suggested that it was the right choice. At the end of his lecture, Sartre stated that for him “the only universe that exists is the human one – the universe of human subjectivity.” Man was his own legislator and it was by “seeking a goal outside of himself in the form of liberation, or of some special achievement, that Man will realize himself as truly human.” The closing lines were a direct attack on the Christian theistic model: What man needs is to rediscover himself and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic, it is a doctrine of action, and it is only in bad faith – in confusing their own despair with ours – that Christians are able to assert that we are “without hope.”55

Sartre denied that yearning for the divine could be humanist. The Christians’ submission to an almighty God was just an expression of their fear of human agency. For Sartre, this refuge was worse than the anguish they fled. True humanism, rather, accepted the dangers of human freedom, assumed the mantle of responsibility, and turned to Men, not Gods, for salvation. If the Christians turned anguish into despair, and thereby denied their responsibility, the existentialist, Sartre suggested, saw anguish as the ground for optimism and for the adoption of a truly humanist philosophy. When in 1945 Sartre declared his philosophy humanist, it was not a bland and undifferentiated adoption of a fashionable term. Rather, in his intervention, Sartre played certain meanings of humanism off others. Recalling his own mockery of the humanist auto-didacte in Nausea, Sartre declared, “the word ‘humanism’ has two very different meanings.” For some, humanism was “a theory that takes Man as an end and as the supreme value.” But an existentialist could “never consider Man as an end, because Man is constantly in the making.” Instead, existentialist humanism proclaimed that “man is always outside of himself, and it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that man is realized.”56 Man was not the ultimate value, but, in the absence of the divine, value’s very source: he possessed a freedom to create value that only a communist society could let flourish. 55

Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, pp. 53–4.

56

Ibid., pp. 51–2.

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At a time when existentialism could just as easily be religious as not, and his philosophy was decried as bourgeois and decadent, Sartre reset the table by exploiting the fissures of a local and very political postwar debate. Existentialism was both philosophically atheistic and politically communist, because, as Sartre declared, it was a humanism. the end of the humanist age i: husserl and the science of historical materialism If Sartre constructed his philosophy on the sure ground of “humanism,” that foundation would become ever more shaky as the tectonic plates of the French political scene began to shift. What had previously raised his profile, and provided him with the resources to make his work acceptable to communists and wrench existentialism away from the Christians, now became a liability. The debate would no longer concern what type of humanist Sartre was, but whether humanism tout court should be supported, with Sartre now right in the firing line. With the rising anti-communism of the MRP and a cooling international climate, tripartisme started to fragment in early 1947, the final communists being ejected by a Ramadier government careful to appease the Americans with their vital Marshall Plan Aid. For the Catholics, the final split would have to wait until the failure in 1951 of the “troisième force” government, which followed tripartisme. Without the political pressure to assert humanism, the uneasy label was often discarded and new approaches taken on board. At the limit some even started to question humanism directly. Perhaps Sartre’s existentialism was a humanism, and therein lay the problem. Communist attacks on Sartre that valorized humanism petered out by late 1947, with the PCF kicked out of the government and the burgeoning Cold War dividing East from West.57 After this period the key political battle was not within France but rather between capitalism and communism on a global scale, and Andrei Zhdanov, head of the newly formed COMINFORM, which was instituted to coordinate the Communist Parties in Western Europe, made clear that intellectual life would be no exception. At first, the end of political cohabitation freed several intellectuals to make criticisms of the status quo through the humanist paradigm. The rationalist Marxist journal La Pensée began to invoke the humanist label for the first time at the end of 1947, not in an attempt to mark a belonging to the 57

See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).


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national community, but rather as a means to criticize its bourgeois form.58 In the long term, however, the humanist tag became unconvincing to the communists. The new tactic became the assertion of objective science vs. bourgeois ideology. The new approach became institutionalized with the founding of the journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1948, which fervently advocated the doctrine of the two sciences (proletariat and bourgeois) and, notoriously, Lysenko biology. In a regular section, at least in the first years of the journal, it allowed prominent intellectuals to perform autocritique. Two of the first three were those who had been at the forefront of the humanist attack on Sartre, Roger Garaudy and Henri Lefebvre; the PCF was retreating from its previous tolerance of the humanist stance.59 Lefebvre’s autocritique strongly attacked socialist humanism: to confer upon humanism, he asserted, “a sort of philosophical actuality – precisely in detaching it from its current conditions, from the present historical context – involves a serious danger.”60 Garaudy was more direct in his appropriately entitled autocritique: “Zhdanov was here.”61 No longer having to appear humanist, communist philosophers tried new approaches to attack Sartre. The possibility of refiguring Husserl, of re-thinking his place in the contemporary philosophical world, was in large part due to the influence of a group of communist phenomenologists that would become enormously important in the late 1950s. Unlike the “subjectivist” phenomenologists, under which label they placed Sartre, Raymond Aron, and surprisingly Georges Canguilhem, this new group would concentrate on Husserl’s more “scientific writings.”62 Althusser noted this movement in 1954, describing “the increasingly clear abandon of existentialism and the ‘return to Husserl,’ to his rationalist theses and to his theory of science.”63 Following in the tradition of Jean Cavaillès, this movement was spearheaded by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and, 58

59 60 61 62

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See H. Denis, “Humanisme et matérialisme dans la pensée de Karl Marx,” La Pensée (September 1947), A. Cornu, H. Muhlestein, “Y’a-t-il encore un humanisme bourgeois?” La Pensée (March 1948), or A. Bonnard, “Vers un humanisme nouveau,” La Pensée (May 1948). See Lewis, Louis Althusser, ch. 5. Henri Lefebvre, “Contribution a` l’effort d’éclaircissement idéologique,” La Nouvelle Critique (1949), p. 52. Roger Garaudy, “Jdanov est passé par là,” La Nouvelle Critique (1949). For this appraisal of Canguilhem, see Louis Althusser, “Textes sur la lutte idéologique,” Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, Caen (hereafter IMEC), Fonds Althusser, ALT2, A42–02.11. The place of Merleau-Ponty is more equivocal. Many looking back suggest that he was acceptable to party communists in the 1950s. But see Jean Desanti, “Merleau-Ponty et la decomposition de l’idéalisme,” La Nouvelle Critique (June 1952), or François Châtelet, “M. Merleau-Ponty lance la dernière mode de l’anti-communisme,” La Nouvelle Critique (July 1955). Louis Althusser, “L’Enseignement de la philosophie,” Esprit (June 1954).

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most importantly, the Vietnamese philosopher writing in France, Tran Duc Thao.64 In figuring Husserl as a philosopher of science, these phenomenologists attempted to distance him from the existentialist reading. As Lyotard put it: We see, then, the two faces of phenomenology: a strong faith in the sciences drives its program of solidly establishing their underpinnings, and of ultimately stabilizing their whole edifice and heading off a future crisis. But to accomplish this, it must leave even science behind, and plunge into matters “innocently.” A rationalist bent leads Husserl to engage himself in the prerational [anté-rationnel]; yet an imperceptible inflection can turn this prerationality into an irrationality [anti-rationnel], and phenomenology into a stronghold of irrationalism. From Husserl to Heidegger there is certainly an inheritance, but equally treason.65

The existentialist emphasis on freedom and escape from positive science was figured as an unjustified misreading of the Husserlian project. For the communist phenomenologists, Husserlian phenomenology provided the ground for an understanding of the sciences, human and natural; it explained the rise of the objective – exemplified by Marxism – not a return to free subjectivity, as manifested in bourgeois (often “fascist”) ideology. Only by understanding the true meaning of phenomenology could one return to objective science, one informed by dialectical materialism. Back in the more comfortable territory of Marxist science and freed from the straitjacket of humanism, the communists had opened up an important new direction in postwar French phenomenology, cut loose from its existentialist interpretation. the end of the humanist age ii: christians and the turn to heidegger While the shift away from the humanist paradigm allowed the communists to reassess their relationship to Husserl, a parallel movement by the Catholics allowed a new appreciation of Heidegger. Though scholars have paid attention to the new readings of Heidegger by the Arguments group, Blanchot, Levinas, Hyppolite, and the circle around Jean Beaufret, the antihumanist and Catholic reading of Heidegger is an important and much understudied context for the reception of the German phenomenologist 64

65

See Tran Duc Thao “Existentialisme et Matérialisme Dialectique,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (July 1949), and Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trans. D. Herman and D. Morano (Boston: D. Reidel, 1986). Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. B. Beakley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) p. 33 (translation modified).


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into France. In the 1960 edition of the Revue internationale de philosophie dedicated to Heidegger, all the French writers were Christian, and religiously minded writers produced a large proportion of all the Heideggerian literature in French in the 1950s and early 1960s.66 Heidegger was not always popular amongst Catholics. In the 1940s, some proclaimed his thought the atheistic source of Sartre’s existentialism.67 Others had a more nuanced view, for several, including Jeanne Mercier, saw promise in the German’s philosophy. Mercier suggested that in Being and Time “Heidegger arrived at a philosophy of despair that he has not yet overcome,” and she anxiously awaited the expected second volume, which would go beyond this.68 It was a common reading. The most influential book in French on Heidegger during this period was Alphonse de Waelhens’s La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (1942). De Waelhens argued that though Heidegger had intended to write an “existential” philosophy, it had ended up being merely “existentiel.” Though he had wanted to uncover the structures of Being, in the end he had merely presented an analytic of Dasein, or in the French translation “réalité-humaine.”69 From de Waelhens’s perspective, Sartre was right that existentialism was a humanism, it focused on Man and not Being, even though Heidegger had intended the opposite. So when Beaufret invited Heidegger to respond to Sartrean existentialism in 1945, eliciting the famous Letter on Humanism, it did not have an immediate impact on the debate. Heidegger, by reasserting that his project was to understand “Being,” which an emphasis on humanism would only obscure, merely repeated his old unsubstantiated claims. Heidegger’s restatement of his case did not change the fact that his existentialism had not moved beyond the human. There was another reason why the absorption of Heidegger’s ideas would be slow in France. As Anson Rabinbach has shown, Heidegger’s rejection of humanism must be understood within a broader field of ideas that connected it to technological thought, nihilism, and ultimately Nazism: it was the meaning of humanism in the German context that led Heidegger to refuse it.70 But Heidegger’s understanding of the term “humanism” did not match that of the French philosophers to whom he wrote, who explicitly 66 67 69 70

See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001–2), vol. I, pp. 140–7. 68 Mercier, “Le Ver dans le fruit,” 232. See Lepp, review of L’Etre et le néant, p. 75. See Alphonse de Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1942), p. 302. Anson Rabinbach, “The Letter on Humanism as Text and Event,” New German Critique, 62 (1994).

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opposed humanism to Nazism. Heidegger’s letter may have been addressed to Jean Beaufret, but it was a response to the situation in Germany and could not expect a smooth reception on the other side of the Rhine. For all the caveats, an ex-Nazi rejecting the term “humanist” for his philosophy in 1946 showed insensitivity to French political norms. Only when the political system undergirding the humanist moment broke down did Heidegger make inroads into French philosophy. Rabinbach makes much of the inexplicable Marxism in Heidegger’s letter, but the elements in the letter that were open to a Christian interpretation played a more important role in its reception across the Rhine.71 When domestic developments allowed an antihumanist philosophy, Heidegger’s Letter found traction in the French Catholic philosophical community. It would not take long. Though the Catholics were involved in government for much of the Fourth Republic, they had lost considerable support by the early 1950s, sliding in the polls due to the return to the political scene of the Gaullists.72 The MRP’s intellectual credentials were also weakened, as the always-fractious relationship with left-Christian journals such as Esprit and Témoignage Chrétienne became increasingly hostile. It was only then that Heidegger’s letter attracted a wider readership. The publication history of the letter reflects this timeline. An abridged version of the letter was published in Fontaine in November 1947. It was then published in its expanded and definitive form in 1953, a translation that was only widely available from 1957, published in the Christian existentialist Philosophie de l’Esprit collection over ten years after the letter was written. Only when political Catholicism was breaking down did some writers look for new means to attack existentialism, and Heidegger’s criticism of humanism became an attractive model. In both 1947 and 1953, the letter was translated by Catholics, Joseph Rovan and the Jesuit Roger Munier, and it became central to the Christian reading of Heidegger.73 The development can be seen most clearly in Gabriel Marcel. In 1952 he wrote a play, the Florestan Dimension, which mocked Heidegger’s philosophy mercilessly. In one scene the main character is seen questioning the possibility that an “apple apples” or a “pear pears” to the profound admiration of his audience. But when Marcel came to publish the play in book form in 1958 he regretted his mocking tone. After meeting Heidegger 71 72 73

Ibid., p. 30. Between 1951 and 1958 the MRP got no more than 12 per cent of the vote, as opposed to a high of 28 per cent in 1948. See especially Roger Jolivet, “Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine,” Revue Thomiste (1953), pp. 404–14, as well as the book it reviewed, Albert Dondeyne, Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine (Louvain: Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1951), p. 49.


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at Cérisy in 1955, a conference chaired by Marcel and attended by a predominantly Christian audience, Marcel suggested that he was “struck, like all those present, by a certain simplicity, even a modesty, almost a naivety which made a great impression on all of us.”74 Heidegger’s letter was attractive to Catholics because it attempted to shed the atheistic reading that had predominated in France. Heidegger had written, after all: “it is not only rash but also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of Man from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being is atheism.”75 In addition, Heidegger’s letter introduced the concept of the “sacred” (das Heilige), a realm of Being that would only become apparent once metaphysical and humanistic suppositions were put aside. The analysis resonated with many Catholics, who thought Sartre’s pessimistic analyses of the réalité-humaine closed off the possibility of a connection to God. For them, the Letter served to replace the second volume of Being and Time that never came, a way to challenge Sartre’s humanist existentialism and move to a richer understanding of Being that would be open to religious thought. From the mid 1950s, Catholic philosophers became more open in their criticisms of humanism. Abel Jeannière’s 1954 article for Etudes in 1954 even criticized Heidegger’s early work for its humanistic resonances: “From his doctrine developed a new humanism exalting heroism before death, which must have known great success in Hitler’s Germany.”76 Rejecting “humanism, even its Christian form,” Jeannière asserted that “the true path to Salvation is that which leads to the clearing of Being.”77 Corvez followed a similar line in a long study for the Revue Thomiste, which sketched out Heidegger’s philosophy before turning to the Letter on Humanism and asking about the place of God in his ontology.78 Corvez argued that Heidegger’s ontology was not incompatible with faith, quoting Heidegger’s definition of his work in the Letter on Humanism as a “waiting for God.”79 The most influential of this new generation of Christian Heidegger scholars was Henri Birault. To achieve an understanding of Being we had to move beyond “humanism,” “the least ‘humane’ doctrine there is, that which, by the destruction of the Sacred, must deprive our existence of its horizon and all warmth and drive us towards that nihilism, which finds 74 75 76 77 78 79

Gabriel Marcel, La Dimension Florestan (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 161. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1993), p. 253. Albert Jeannière, “L’Itinéraire de Martin Heidegger,” Etudes (January 1954), p. 65. Ibid., p. 83. Olivier Corvez, “La Place de dieu dans l’ontologie de Martin Heidegger,” Revue Thomiste (1953). Ibid., pp. 385–8.

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its most pathetic expression in Nietzsche’s cry ‘God is dead.’”80 The most valuable tool for achieving this task, according to Birault, was Heidegger’s ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings.81 Humanism like other ontotheologies structured its understanding of Being by asserting the pre-eminence of one particular being, in this case, Man. The ontological difference implied, however, that no being could dominate the meaning of Being in general. Though God and Being were rigorously distinguished, according to Birault, it was only by approaching Being through an understanding of Heidegger’s difference that we could be open to the Being of the divine, and thus to God. The first major article on the “ontological difference” in French was written by le Chanoine Albert Dondeyne, Professor at the University of Louvain, in 1958. Moving through the arguments against ontotheology, like the other Christian thinkers, Dondeyne was particularly careful to separate the idolatrous God of metaphysics from that of religious faith.82 It was the very thought of the ontological difference that brought philosophy beyond the dead-end of such metaphysics towards the “dimensions of the Sacred,” and it was “only this sentiment of the Sacred” which could “open the essential space (Wesensraum) for a possible encounter with God.”83 The concern for the ontological difference became somewhat of a leitmotif for the Christian thinkers. If God was to be understood analogically with Being, then the ontological difference was the only way to avoid idolatry. It was negative theology for a new age. From the mid 1950s, for many Christians in France, Heidegger became a philosopher of the sacred, a guide for thinking about the relationship of men to the divine. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism was a central document in the overcoming of Sartre’s existentialism, drawn on by a generation of Catholic philosophers who rejected humanism and existentialism in the same philosophical gesture. Seeking to recover God, they rejected the pretensions of Man. conclusion The turn against existentialism in the 1950s should not perhaps be overrated. Sartre continued to be influential, especially after his condemnation 80 81 82 83

Henri Birault, “Existence et vérité d’après Heidegger,” in De l’être, du divin, et des dieux (Paris: Cerf, 2005), p. 189. Ibid., pp. 162 and 181. Albert Dondeyne, “La Différence ontologique chez M. Heidegger,” Revue philosophique de Louvain (1958), pp. 35–62 and 251–93. Ibid., p. 290.


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of the Soviet Union in 1956 and due to his principled critique of colonialism, while his political philosophy became ever more sophisticated as he revised his claims from 1945, often back-tracking from the humanist label itself. But Sartre’s continued appeal should not blind us to developments in academic philosophy in France. The 1950s have too often been lost in intellectual histories between the golden age of existentialism and the structuralist invasion. And yet it is the post-humanist and scientistic developments in French phenomenology during that decade that provided the necessary precondition for the reception of structuralism and poststructuralism in the 1960s. If Naville was right to say in 1945 that everyone, including Sartre, was pretending to be humanist, then Sartre’s lecture was too successful; the pretense became reality. His attempt to dictate his own reception only placed it further outside his control; Sartre had bound his philosophy to a moment that was quickly slipping into the past. While the humanist age provided the conditions for the rise of existentialism, allowing it to mold phenomenology to its subjectivist and atheistic purposes, its passing freed up Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophies to be re-thought in new contexts. French philosophy in the 1950s can be read as a careful sifting through the phenomenological debris of existentialism. But instead of Sartre’s “death of God,” a new consensus would declare the end of Man.

ch a p ter 2


It was in this broader history of postwar French intellectual life that Derrida was first introduced to philosophy and developed his ideas. From his 1952 admission to the ENS as a student, until he reentered it as a teacher in 1964, Derrida was what could be described as a “post-existentialist,” navigating the phenomenological wilderness after the decline of the dominant Sartrean interpretation. As I will show later in this book, Derrida was no structuralist, much less a post-structuralist, before 1964. Structuralism, in the 1950s, developed outside the tightly limited philosophical world to which Derrida aspired, and only had a minimal impact there. Rather it was to the inheritors of the phenomenological legacy, in their communist and Christian guises, that Derrida was drawn, caught up in both the new communist reading of Husserl, and much later the Christian reading of Heidegger. Although Derrida very rarely mentioned Sartre in the 1950s, the existentialist’s philosophy still exerted a strong, if negative, influence, commanding Derrida’s thoughts at one degree removed. Derrida’s break with Sartre and his slow liberation from Sartrean readings of Husserl and Heidegger, however, were built upon an initial fascination. For, as a schoolboy before 1952, Derrida saw himself as an existentialist, attracted to philosophy by the charms of the quintessential intellectual. The existentialist Derrida was, to be sure, a very young man, and his early essays lack the nuance and sophistication of his later writings. His schoolwork remains, however, instructive. First, as we shall see, it provides a frame for thinking about the development of Derrida’s thought: the traces of his earliest interests can be picked out in his more mature philosophy and they inform my reading of it. Second, corresponding to the broader ambitions of this book, these early essays shed light on an aspect of existentialism that, historically, set it apart from other philosophical movements. In the late 1940s, the teenage Derrida was not alone in waiting for key existentialist texts to arrive on the shelves of a local librairie. Existentialism found devotees amongst the young all over France. To explain the reception of 48


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existentialism and to understand the stakes of debates over it, we must first grapple with its extraordinary influence over a generation that entered adulthood in a newly liberated France. derrida’s youthful existentialism The speed with which existentialism pervaded the cultural milieu in postwar France is truly remarkable. This was certainly the case in Paris. When in 1949 Derrida left Algeria for the first time to head for the prestigious Ecole Préparatoire the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, his professor there, Etienne Borne, even conflated “existentialism” with “modern philosophy,” and this in a course on Hellenism.1 The course opened with the question as to whether there were moderns and classics in philosophy, and answered it in the affirmative, but with only existentialism overcoming the centuries-old prejudice for essence over existence. Even in Algeria, at the Lycée Ben Aknoun or later the Lycée Bugeaud d’Alger, where Derrida studied seemingly far away from Paris, the intellectual presence of existentialism was palpable; let us not forget that this was Camus’s Algeria, and by Derrida’s own admission it was a broadcast about Camus that set him on his path towards philosophy.2 The reach of contemporary philosophy into high schools was not out of the ordinary in France. As I will discuss later, the French academic system and especially the agrégation meant that there was always a vital connection between the secondary and higher education systems, even if the highly qualified agrégés complained about what they saw as menial teaching duties in the lycées.3 But with existentialism, the reach and influence was of a different magnitude, considerably greater than that of any intellectual movement, either before or since. Alexandre Koyré, the philosopher of science, noted in a 1946 paper presented to the New School for Social Research that “in present-day France, everybody everywhere is speaking about existentialism. Not only professional philosophers – I mean professors and students of philosophy – but also the infinitely larger (and socially infinitely more important) literary circles . . . This is, for France, a quite unusual situation.”4 Of course, existentialism had its enemies at all levels, but in the first few years after the War, it set the terms of philosophical discussion. Whether for 1 2 3 4

See Derrida’s notes from Borne’s course “Recherche sur l’hellénisme” at his archive, Irvine, 1.6. See Bennington, Jacques Derrida, p. 328, and Derrida, Points de suspension, p. 131. See chapter 7. Alexandre Koyré, “Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought,” in The Journal of the History of Ideas (July 1998), pp. 531–48, p. 534.

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or against existentialism, nobody could ignore it.5 In the late 1940s, existentialism was not a detached, academic philosophy that students might encounter in the upper echelons of further education; it was a living presence, permeating down to all levels of philosophical study. Even those who later came to reject it often approached philosophy through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre while teenagers, a crucial experience in their intellectual development. Existentialism was in the air in the late 1940s, and Derrida breathed it in. From his earliest extant essays, those written when he was only sixteen, Derrida showed an allegiance to existentialist philosophy, with an almost total reliance on Sartre’s vocabulary. Looking at Derrida’s work from the period before 1952 and his entry into the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the stamp of existentialism is clear. Derrida constantly availed himself of the Sartrean language of the “pour-soi” and “en-soi,” “angoisse,” and the difference between existence and essence, even the term “existentialism” itself. Such was his enthusiasm for the technical vocabulary that in an essay written during his first year at the Parisian Lycée Louis-le-Grand, his teacher urged him “not to imitate existentialist language too slavishly.”6 It was not a lone reaction, and throughout his school days, teachers would often reprimand him for use of jargon, specialist existentialist and phenomenological vocabulary. Although, as we shall see, Derrida did not spare Sartre himself from criticism, the use of Sartre’s language was the most prominent feature in Derrida’s writing during this early period. Sartre’s existentialist project set the terms and the questions of Derrida’s philosophy, and even when he used other thinkers against Sartre, whether René le Senne, Georges Gurvitch, or Gabriel Marcel, he read them from a Sartrean perspective. Existentialism was attractive to Derrida because it announced the possibility of a moral philosophy. Derrida’s emphasis on morality was not a lone response to Sartre’s corpus. It was the focal point for numerous supporters and opponents, whether Francis Jeanson or Simone de Beauvoir’s attempts at the construction of an atheistic existentialist morality or the Christian criticism of that very possibility.7 At a time when many in France 5

6 7

For a discussion of “Existentialism” as a cultural phenomenon, which often had little to do with Sartre’s philosophy but was labeled as such by the press, see Susan Weiner, Enfants Terribles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 122–8. Jacques Derrida, “Fonction philosophique de l’humeur,” Irvine, 1.7, sheet 1. See Francis Jeanson, Le Problème morale et la pensée de Sartre (Paris: Editions du Myrte, 1947); and Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambigu¨ıté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). For the Christian criticism of this morality see Roger Troisfontaines, Existentialisme et pensée chrétienne (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1948). For Sartre’s own unpublished considerations on the question, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics (Chicago University Press, 1992).


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looked for new theories to cope with recent memories of war, collaboration, and resistance, existentialism seemed to provide valuable tools for understanding the contemporary predicament. Successful in reaching beyond the traditional limitations of academia because of its concentration on the real issues of everyday life, morality included, it was precisely with respect to those questions that existentialism inspired the greatest interest, debate, and controversy. Derrida’s earliest surviving school essay, on “Moral Experience,” was written in 1946 and drew on three books. Explicitly it was an analysis of André Darbon’s Une philosophie de l’expérience.8 Derrida’s understanding of Darbon was supplemented by René le Senne’s book on moral philosophy, but all were read through the optic of Sartre’s thought, especially his Existentialism Is a Humanism.9 The first thing to recognize is how recently these books were published. Sartre’s and Darbon’s books had appeared that year, whereas le Senne’s was a mere four years old. At a very young age, Derrida focused his attention on what appeared to be the cutting edge of philosophy. Even more so, because the current dominant trend (Sartrean existentialism) determined Derrida’s reading of all the others (le Senne, Darbon). Le Senne and Darbon did not mention Sartre and yet Derrida formulated the essay in his language. Derrida began by trying to separate science from morality. The problem with morality was that, unlike sciences such as biology, psychology, or physics, its object of study was ill defined.10 Rather than studying what exists in the world, Derrida, quoting le Senne, suggested that morality “studies what must be, isn’t yet, and maybe will never be.”11 But Derrida was not content to remain with le Senne’s definition, for he continued, “and this thought inevitably reminds us of the existentialist slogan: ‘Man’s existence precedes his essence.’”12 Sartre’s mantra was of great value to Derrida, for it opened up a path beyond moral nihilism. Moral nihilism arose primarily, according to Derrida, with the denial of freedom: morality required the ability to make free choices, and so a will constrained to act in a particular way could not be regarded as moral. In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre had given the notion of human freedom a philosophical basis. He contrasted the determined behavior of those beings whose “essence preceded their existence” (être-en-soi) with the freedom of Man (être-pour-soi). Unlike those things 8 9 10 11

André Darbon, Une Philosophie de l’expérience (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1946). René le Senne, Traité de morale générale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1942). Jacques Derrida, “L’Expérience morale,” Irvine, 1.1, sheet 2. 12 Derrida, “L’Exp´ Le Senne, Traité de morale générale, p. 687. erience morale,” sheet 2.

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studied by science, Man’s behavior was not governed by a priori laws. The existentialist distinction between the en-soi and the pour-soi thus allowed Derrida to conceptualize the opposition between the realm of fact and that of value, and thus to build up morality as an autonomous field of study. Derrida stated that whether the existentialists realized it or not, only existentialism provided the necessary tools for the research into morality.13 It was for this reason that Derrida rejected a “Kantian” approach to the question of morality. He argued that if a firm metaphysical principle could be found for the pour-soi, either based in nature or in philosophy, it would destroy human liberty. As Derrida asserted, metaphysics “studies existing reality,” and so cannot expound a morality, which describes what “isn’t yet.”14 Referring explicitly to Spinoza’s ethics, Derrida argued, To look for ethics [morale] in metaphysics is to deny Man’s liberty. Because, to say that man is an integral part of nature is to take his originality away from him. What is his originality, what distinguishes him from nature, if not the ability he has to choose between two possible actions, that is to say his ethics [morale]? His existence precedes his essence, that is his originality. To look for ethics in metaphysics, then, is paradoxically to deny that man can have an ethics, that through that ethics man can determine his essence, that is, determine who he will be. That is again to affirm that he is not just a part of a universal nature which is invariable and of which the essence precedes the existence.15

Because freedom was so central to morality, a moral code modeled on the laws of nature was a contradiction in terms. But if a Kantian approach failed, if no absolute principle of morality could be elaborated once and for all, that did not mean that one should give up hope of outlining a moral system, as Derrida thought Sartre had done. Indeed though he was attracted to existentialism because it promised new answers to moral questions, Derrida, like many others at the time, found Sartre’s solutions deeply unsatisfying. According to the sixteen-yearold, Sartre had unjustifiably moved from the impossibility of laying out definitive metaphysical principles for morality to the denial of transcendent value. In Existentialism Is a Humanism Sartre had suggested that the freedom of the pour-soi was so absolute that there was no reason to choose one moral system over another. For Derrida, this radicalization of the pour-soi’s freedom, just as much as its denial, prevented the production of a moral philosophy.16 Morality demands that some actions are to be favored above 13 15

14 Ibid., sheet 4. Ibid. Ibid., sheet 5. See also le Senne, Traité de morale générale, pp. 685–734.

16

See also ibid., p. 20.


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others, that some choices are better, more worthy. If the pour-soi expressed its freedom by releasing itself from all exteriorly imposed moral codes, then there could be no way to privilege one way of life over another. The difficulty of morality was that it had to find some mid-way between total determinism and total freedom, both of which stymied the moral choice. To overcome the limitations of Sartre’s approach, Derrida turned to Darbon. Darbon had elaborated such a third way between Kantianism and a renunciation of all moral codes. If Kantian morality conceived the pour-soi as mathematics did the en-soi, submitting it to certain rules and axioms to found a determined science, Darbon proposed a moral theory parallel to physics. Physics never has the apodicity of mathematics, given its empirical basis, but nevertheless maintains what Derrida called “an undeniable consistency.”17 Physics, then, provided a model for morality in navigating between metaphysical determination and unconnected experience. As it was described by the editors of Darbon’s book, the result was a “third way between Kant and Rauh. The Master from Königsberg constructs a priori, as a mathematician. The syndicalist thinker tries to paint faithfully . . . André Darbon works as a physicist: confronted with experience, he looks to draw out the ideas that clarify and explain it. His powerful and comprehensive thought applies to reality without subsuming it under the category of necessity.”18 By describing actual moral acts we could slowly develop a science that could determine what was moral. In le Senne’s terms, we would be able to uncover a determined ethics (morale), an empirical set of laws for moral behavior, which – based on real experience – would have the additional benefit of being inherently practical. It was by remaining in the realm of existentiel analyses, the direct description of moral phenomena, that we could slowly outline a model for our actions. And, just as in physics, it was an approach that offered the possibility of real progress. The physics approach did not breach the existentialist code, because it refused to set up insuperable absolutes; each ethics (morale) would be provisional. Just as a new experimental result could cause a reevaluation of the laws of physics, so too the analysis of a new moral experience could undermine our faith in the validity of any determined morale. In the face of what le Senne called a general and indeterminable “morality” (moralité), 17 18

Derrida, “L’Expérience morale,” sheet 6. Darbon, Une Philosophie de l’expérience, p. 147. Frédéric Rauh was a French moralist at the beginning of the twentieth century who focused on an analysis of the moral experience, rather than trying to determine any a priori laws of morality. He was also le Senne’s teacher, and is figured by some, including le Senne, as the father of French existentialism.

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each individual morale would reveal its insufficiency.19 No particular or determined ethics, then, had absolute authority; in particular we would have no right to impose any such system on others.20 The physics approach preserved the existentialist concern for human autonomy, but in contradistinction to Sartre, it maintained a belief in some transcendent value. As humans, we are caught between the insufficiency of any determined moral system (morale), its changeability and its historicity, all the while desiring a higher Good, the Absolute, whose existence was hinted at by the analysis of experience. As Derrida suggested, “there is yet another example, a proof of what Pascal called the ‘disproportion of man.’”21 Darbon’s approach better suited existentialism than Sartre’s moral pessimism. According to Derrida, in a 1948 essay, Sartre’s failure to ground a moral philosophy derived not from his phenomenological descriptions of existence, Sartre’s existentiel analyses, but rather from his attempt to outline an ontology, the existential elements of his theory.22 The existentiel side of Sartre’s theory, best exemplified in his early works of phenomenological psychology (L’Imagination (1936), the Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions (1939), and L’Imaginaire (1940)) was, according to Derrida, “unattackable,” because it was based on immediate psychological givens that were “very fresh, very original . . . It is only when, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre wants to shift to the ontological and announce a metaphysics that his theses risk insolidity.”23 For Derrida, Sartre erred when he went beyond the sure ground of phenomenological description and started to infer a deductive conceptual system, positing the ontological opposition between Being and Nothingness. By deducing that the pour-soi was constituted by its relationship to Nothingness, and that the en-soi participated in brute Being, Sartre had unjustifiably and metaphysically systematized his existentiel analyses. Existentialism, for Derrida, arose from the recognition that human knowledge was limited; existentiel description was intended to challenge any given ontology, not inform one. 19

20 21 22

23

Morale for le Senne was the set of determined moral laws that exist at any particular point and time. Moralité was the attitude by which that morale was adjusted in light of a higher undetermined good in changing situations. Derrida, “L’Expérience morale,” sheet 8. Ibid., sheet 9. See also a similar remark by le Senne, Traité de morale générale, pp. 28–9. In this chapter we will continue to use the distinction, described in the last chapter, between existentiel and existential. The first refers to the study of existence, the second to the study of Being. Derrida himself, however, was not consistent in his use of these terms, and where the distinction was not at issue often used existential to describe ontic analysis. For clarity, I have continued to use the distinction throughout this chapter. Jacques Derrida, “Sartre: Psychologie – Phénoménologie,” Irvine, 1.3, sheet 1.


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The criticism was directly pertinent to the possibility of instituting an existentialist morality, for when Sartre claimed that the pour-soi could not authentically appeal to any transcendent value because it resisted all positivity, he did so on the basis of his false phenomenological ontology, which tied the pour-soi to Nothingness, and not on the basis of his existentiel descriptions. The denial of absolute moral principles – just as much as their assertion – was a metaphysical gesture. The appeal to René le Senne, the focus on questions of morality, and the concern that Sartre had broken existentialism’s own rules by developing an ontology all place Derrida in line with a tradition of French thought, one defining and reconstituting itself in opposition to Sartre’s thought. It would have to wait for Derrida’s move to France in 1949, to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, for this connection to become explicit, but already his future direction was clear: Derrida, the marrano, was becoming a Christian existentialist.24 the lycé e louis-le-grand The Lycée Louis-le-Grand was one of the elite Parisian Ecoles Préparatoires. Normally, upon completing the Baccalaureate, a high school student would either leave school or go straight to a local university. However, for the most academically successful students there was the hope of entering one of several elite institutions called Grandes Ecoles. These colleges, specializing in science and engineering like the Ecole Polytechnique, public policy like the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, or on the purely academic as in the Ecole Normale Supérieure had their own special concours for entry. A normal lycée education would not be sufficient to prepare for these exams, so there existed a special set of state-supported schools especially dedicated to that end. Of these so-called Ecoles Préparatoires, the Lycée Louis-leGrand, just across the street from the main campus of the Sorbonne and next door to the Collège de France, was the most successful. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, it dominated the entrance exams to many of the Grandes Ecoles, especially the ENS, and typically sent twice as many students there as its nearest rival, the Lycée Henri IV, which in the highly centralized French academic world was but a few minutes’ walk away. The standard two years of preparation were called Hypokhâgne and Khâgne, though the high level of competition at the ENS concours meant 24

I would like to reiterate that this should be understood as an historical contextual claim, and not a doctrinal one.

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that many repeated the final year.25 Derrida had already done one year of Hypokhâgne in the Lycée Bugeaud d’Alger in Algiers, but at the time, 1949, not one member of that school had ever made it to the ENS. So, in 1949, after his file had been accepted by the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Derrida left Algeria for the first time.26 It was the first and perhaps the most important move in his life. French academia was Paris, and it was only there that he could realistically expect to fulfill his hope to be a writer.27 On arriving in Paris, Derrida went straight into the Khâgne year. He was reasonably successful there, in all but physical education where he was ranked bottom of the class, but in the early summer he failed the ENS concours for the first time.28 In the second year, due to personal problems including depression, he had to drop out temporarily, moving out of the school dormitories into a bedsit in the 18th Arrondissement. The move clearly was not as beneficial as was hoped, and Derrida missed all his school exams and failed the entrance concours for the ENS a second time. He was absent for all papers apart from history, and there he gained 0 out of 20. The third year, however, was far more successful, with very positive comments from the teachers, and Derrida finally gained entrance to the ENS, placed 16th out of 30. Derrida spent three years at the “Baz Grand,” as it was known to students, all in the Khâgne year, effectively repeating it twice. His philosophy teacher for the first and third years – the only two where Derrida was present for any length of time – was Etienne Borne.29 Borne had a very high opinion of Derrida, describing him as “excellent in all regards.” In his final term, Derrida was ranked first in Borne’s class, with an impressive grade of 16 out of 20.30 Borne was one of the founding members of the MRP and a constant defender of Christianity against atheism, and given Derrida’s burgeoning interests he was a good match for the young philosopher. If implicit references to a certain form of Christian existentialism are visible in Derrida’s earliest work, this became more and more obvious during his time at the Parisian Ecole Préparatoire. 25

26 27 28 29 30

Khâgneux: a student in Khâgne was a pseudo-Greek transliteration of câgneux, meaning “knockkneed.” Hypokhâgne came to mean “the year below Khâgne.” The course was highly stressful and despite the success of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand only about one in six would be successful in gaining entrance to the ENS. There were no formal exams and certainly no interview. Entry was based purely on a report sent from the student’s school and previous results. See Derrida, Points de Suspension, p. 253. Archives Louis-le-Grand, Derrida report card 1949–50. For an idea of life in the Louis-le-Grand Khâgne see “Khâgne 1950,” Le Débat 3 (1980), written anonymously by the editor and Derrida’s classmate Pierre Nora. Archives Louis-le-Grand, report cards 1951–2.


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Like Derrida, while Borne was critical of atheistic existentialism, he did not find fault with existentialism as a whole. In addition to privileging existentialism in his courses at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Borne’s own work can be read as existentialist.31 His most successful book, Le Problème du mal, published in 1957, also used the practice of existentiel analyses and appealed to the experience of anguish, which he presented as the confrontation with evil. Borne thought that it lay in the very nature of evil that it resisted intellectual understanding; if evil made sense and could be integrated into a higher, perhaps redemptive logic (e.g. that evil tests our faith) it would no longer be evil. Because of the existence of evil, then, the world would never be fully comprehensible: Borne gave existentialist absurdity a distinctly religious flavor. It was for this reason that, like Derrida and most other Christian existentialists, Borne refused to follow Sartre in his movement from these existentiel analyses to ontological assertions. Borne argued that existentiel analyses should lead us not to the “secondary abstractions” of “Being” and “Nothingness,” but rather to an analysis of sense and nonsense, the true domain of philosophy.32 By adopting Sartre’s existentiel method while rejecting his ontological conclusions, Borne occupied a very similar philosophical position to his new student. Borne’s criticisms reflected those of many Christian existentialists, who felt that Sartre had been unfaithful to his original project.33 The study of existence was not the foundation for, but utterly opposed to, any attempt to conceptualize and define the world as we experience it, even in the contradictory categories of “Being” and “Nothingness.” Rather than founding a new phenomenological ontology, existentiel analyses revealed the limits of our conceptual understanding. They marked a confrontation with human finitude. The key representative of this “Christian existentialist” tradition was Gabriel Marcel.34 Marcel, credited with coining the term “existentialism” 31 32 33

34

It was Borne who assimilated modern philosophy and existentialism in his course on hellenic philosophy. Borne, Le Problème du mal, p. 10. I use the term “Christian existentialist” for convenience. As we shall see, the term had considerable currency in the first few years after the War, during which time the division between atheistic and Christian existentialism was standard in all presentations of the movement. The success of Sartre’s particular brand of existentialism, however, led several philosophers to distance themselves from it, often preferring related terms like philosophie existentielle, spiritualisme existentiel, or philosophy of existence. I will elaborate the difficulties for Weil, le Senne, and Marcel. The problems with naming Marcel as a Christian existentialist should be noted. Marcel adopted the term himself, and a 1947 analysis of his work edited by Jean Delhomme chose the title Existentialisme chrétien. The term was applied to him freely by Foulquié, le Senne, Wahl, Hyppolite, and Borne. However, by 1948 Marcel tried to distance himself from the moniker, feeling that it related him too

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itself in his Journal Métaphysique, had converted to Christianity in the late 1920s. The conversion was the end result of a long struggle with idealist metaphysics in the French university, especially its hubristic faith in human reason. In both its style and content Marcel’s journal hoped to counter this systematizing tendency, writing in the short and personalized diary format, without any attempt to unify his thinking. Rather than to speculative questions and to sophistic reasoning, Marcel applied himself to real and concrete confrontations with existence, confrontations that challenged rather than reinforced our faith in reason to explain and dissect. In particular, existentiel analysis would reveal what Marcel called the mystery, that which exceeded our limited faculties. Where Sartre saw the absurdity of the world, Marcel saw an experience that questioned our very ability to make such definitive judgments.35 Sartre’s ontology, moving away from his enlightening existentiel analyses, was an attempt to define what was beyond our ability to grasp; and in his treatment of Sartre it was precisely this ontology that Marcel attempted to disrupt.36 According to Marcel, Sartre’s ontology was justified more by his pessimistic worldview than his existentiel descriptions, and it prematurely excluded more optimistic conclusions. For this reason Marcel labeled Sartre’s thought a “philosophy of failure.”37 Of particular concern was Sartre’s perceived rejection of meaningful intersubjective relationships, and Marcel strongly criticized Sartre’s description of love in Being and Nothingness, which, he thought could not “but finish with a statement of failure.”38 According to Marcel, Sartre deliberately and ideologically denied the “wesubject,” regardless of any evidence that existentiel analyses might provide. Existentialism did not, according to Marcel, have to lead to such a dreary end.39 Sartre had chosen pessimism, a choice rooted in his atheistic worldview and expressed in his selection of existentiel descriptions.40 Marcel concluded that

35 36 37 38 39 40

closely to Sartre, and preferred the term “Christian Socratic” instead. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 4th edn (Boston: Kluwer, 1982), p. 458. The first major repudiation came in the 1951 French publication of Gabriel Marcel, Le Mystère de l’Etre (Paris: Aubier, 1951). We will further elaborate Marcel’s understanding of the mystery in chapter 4. See Gabriel Marcel, L’Existence et la liberté humaine chez Sartre (Paris: J. Vrin, 1981) (text from 1946), p. 53. See also Foulquié, L’Existentialisme, p. 97. Marcel, L’Existence et la liberté humaine chez Sartre, p. 70. See also Marcel’s 1943 reaction to Sartre published in Homo Viator (Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1945), pp. 233–56. See also Ignace Lepp’s review of Being and Nothingness for Les Etudes Philosophiques (January– March 1946), p. 78.


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existentialism appears to me today to be at a crossroads: it is, in the final analysis, constrained to deny or to transcend itself; it denies itself purely and simply when it runs into a non-dialectical materialism; it transcends itself, on the other hand, or rather it tends to a self-transcendence, where it opens, not perhaps upon, but towards a supra-human experience that probably cannot become ours, authentically and durably, this side of death, but of which the reality is attested to by the mystics, and the possibility is guaranteed by a reflection that refuses to be prisoner of the postulate of absolute immanence.41

Remaining aware of our human limitations, this hope could never be proven, it could only be asserted by the “we [nous]”; it was a knowledge “but a knowledge which excludes all presumptions, a knowledge granted, authorized, a knowledge that is a gift of grace, and in no way a conquest.” It was the truth of a community rather than the egotistical and imperialistic certainty of deductive reasoning. Christian existentialism, then, did not attempt to justify the existence of God against atheism. For the Christian existentialists the ontological proof, just as much as the denial of God, profaned the divine.42 Simone Weil echoed Marcel’s description of human rational limitation in the face of theological questions.43 Weil was the daughter of a secularized French Jewish family. The sister of the mathematician André Weil, she was among the first women to study philosophy at the ENS Sèvres pour jeunes filles, beating Simone de Beauvoir to first place in the entrance examination of 1929. But by the early 1930s she turned away from her previous beliefs and came to embrace a strong and sometimes anti-Jewish mystical Christianity. Her religious beliefs motivated her involvement in the labor movement in France and, at the outbreak of war, her entrance into the Resistance. But the hardships of factory life and resistance operations were too much for the weak and sickly Weil, and she succumbed to tuberculosis in 1943, aged just thirty-four. After her death, her papers were collected together by friends and published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, finding immediate popular success. Writing on social issues and politics (L’Enracinement) and a spiritual biography (L’Attente de Dieu), it was her meditations on philosophical and mystical questions (La Pesanteur et la grâce) that particularly entranced the teenage Derrida.44 Like Marcel, Weil described a confrontation with 41 42 43 44

Marcel, L’Existence et la liberté humaine chez Sartre, p. 87. See also le Senne, Introduction a` la philosophie, pp. 391–400. Simone Weil died in 1943 and so could not respond to Sartre’s work, or indeed choose for herself the suitability of the title “Christian existentialist.” Simone Weil, L’Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe, 1950), and La Pesanteur et la grâce. All of Derrida’s citations from Weil come from this last book.

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an experience exceeding our understanding, which marked the first stage of our spiritual development. In life, she asserted, we are constantly confronted by contradictions, experiences that do not fit neatly into our conceptual categories. Due to our human limitations, our inability to move beyond the “gravity [pesanteur]” that marks normal human life, it was only through the gift of grace from God that we could be rescued. For Weil, we were powerless to save ourselves. All we could do was to empty our lives of human needs and desires, including the desire for salvation, and give ourselves entirely to God. Like Marcel and Weil, Derrida dedicated much of his early work to challenging the pretensions of philosophy. Writing on “nihilism” in 1949, Derrida defined it as the “act or affirmation of total immanence.”45 For Derrida it was clear that the traditional idealist and materialist philosophies were nihilist when they sought to reduce either the physical or the mental world to the other. Materialism was nihilistic because, according to Derrida, it denied the existence of value: The essence of materialism consists in this: there is nothing essential or valuable “in-itself” outside of matter. Matter moves itself according to necessity, mechanical or dialectical determinism. The transcendence of value, if it appears, is inessential.

In a materialist world system, because Man was determined fully, he was just a “stone.” Ethical values, if they existed, had no effect on human action, which was governed solely by biological or chemical processes. It was not possible to affirm or deny anything freely. Idealism, on the other hand, was insufficient, because although everything was a mental act, value was entirely immanent to the Mind (Esprit), the “supreme end.” Choice was so absolute that nothing outside of it could have any intrinsic value. As the adolescent Derrida concluded, there was just as much “negative power in the total determination of only matter, as in the total indetermination of mind by itself.”46 Whereas materialism was a “nihilism of fullness,” refusing humans free space to act, idealism was a “nihilism of emptiness,” where that freedom was so total and without direction to be meaningless. Existentialism seemed to offer an escape. By asserting both the factual world and its transcendence by the réalité-humaine, matter and spirit, it accounted both for human freedom and an object upon which that freedom could be exercised. But, as we have seen, according to Derrida, 45

Jacques Derrida, “Nihilisme et volonté de néant,” Irvine, 1.9, sheet 1.

46

Ibid., sheet 2.


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Sartre’s philosophy too was mired in nihilism. For the atheistic existentialist, “human liberty was the only source of value.” Either the atheistic existentialist determined the subject’s liberty negatively – what Sartre called “authenticity,” allowing only arbitrary freedom – and he succumbed to the same problems as the idealist. Or, despairing of finding any positive value, Man would inauthentically alienate his faculties “either in a materialism, or a vitalism, or an exaggerated and atheistic individualism, which is itself, like materialism and vitalism, a type of determination, of total negation, thus of nihilism.”47 Essentially, without any possible guide for the use of his transcendent freedom, Man was condemned either to revel in endless and empty freedom, or to submit himself to one particular moral code. It was, in 1949, a repetition of Derrida’s earlier argument about the aporias of moral experience. But in this early essay, Derrida had moved a step further. By assimilating atheistic existentialism to the critique of idealism and materialism, Derrida tied all philosophy together. Sartre’s failure to found a non-nihilistic philosophy brought to light the failure of philosophy tout court. Either philosophy over-determined value, reducing freedom, or it under-determined it, allowing freedom but giving it no direction, making it into a parody of itself: decisionistic and essentially random choice. Human philosophy, by itself, could never escape nihilism. But there was hope. When condemning atheistic existentialism, Derrida was careful to distinguish it from the “impure” Christian variety. Christian existentialism was “impure” because it recognized the need to look beyond its own solipsistic calculations in order to avoid the pitfalls of nihilism.48 It demonstrated the necessary and positive contamination of an insufficient and nihilistic philosophy with something else. As Derrida suggested “at the moment when the existentialist recognizes the existence of God, through, for example, the sentiment of value that he feels in himself,” he would be able to suppress the sense of his own primacy. Philosophy, rather than producing a closed system, should instead act as a “propadeutic.”49 According to Derrida, reflective thought by showing the necessary limitations of human knowledge should lead us to recognize what exceeds it: belief. Invoking the Christian existentialists and following the arguments of writers like Marcel and Weil, Derrida suggested that a way was needed beyond philosophy, which would not be a rejection “but a surpassing that 47 48 49

Ibid., sheet 2. See Jacques Derrida, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique du Secret,” Irvine, 1.8, sheet 1. Derrida, “Nihilisme,” sheet 3.

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would also be a return to an existence enriched and purified by reflection.”50 Faith did not have to stand alone, but was bolstered and justified by a careful study of the world. This supplement was crucial, because one possible conclusion to be drawn from the failure of philosophy to escape nihilism was that such nihilism was simply inescapable. Derrida rather hoped to show that even if nihilism was philosophically unavoidable, practically it was impossible. Nihilism, though constantly asserted by human philosophy, would show itself to be existentially false. Derrida turned his attention to what might appear the most nihilistic of all acts: suicide. If this ultimate act of despair could be shown to avoid nihilism, then it no longer mattered whether all philosophies asserted its inevitability. As Derrida understood it, in the act of suicide, I assume absolute value for my self, giving myself the divine power to choose over life and death. Precisely when in suicide a person seemed to assert the valuelessness of human life, he awarded himself ultimate power and jurisdiction. Suicide could not be nihilistic.51 The discussion of suicide was only one nihilistic example that unraveled itself. Derrida felt that even a cursory look at existence would reveal numerous instances that would be placed in the balance on the side of hope, rather than despair. Derrida’s two favorite examples were love and artistic creation. Indeed the reference to love and artistic creation as pointing towards the possibility of authentic communion with the other, and at the limit God, was constant during this period of Derrida’s life. We will return to these particular examples later in the chapter. For now it is sufficient to note that, for Derrida, existentiel analyses, in exceeding philosophy, rather than guiding it to Sartre’s “pessimistic” conclusions, led towards a hopeful understanding of the world and intersubjectivity. In particular it opened up the possibility of the divine, that, though philosophically unreachable, forever guided human actions. Existentialism should, for Derrida, lead us towards God. In two essays, Derrida discussed God directly. The first, in December 1949, was written under the title “God and the Gods: Do Gods Exist? Is the existence of God a problem?”52 Derrida’s approach was to take an idealized history of religion, what he saw as a “dialectic” between our essential “insufficiency” – an “existentiel need” that led us to posit God – and an “arrogance” that motivated us to reject the idea of an all-powerful being, to kill God. Derrida traced theology from pagan beliefs, through 50 52

51 Ibid., sheet 3. Ibid., sheet 3. Jacques Derrida, “Les Dieux et Dieu: les Dieux existent-ils?” Irvine, 1.12.


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Judaism, Christianity, and eventually to modern atheism, when arrogant philosophers, wanting to systematize and rationalize God, ended by denying his existence. The death of God was a delayed result of the ontological proof. The dialectic may have ended with a denial of his existence, but Derrida asserted that it was nonetheless “necessary to believe in God, because that is the only solution that respects the authenticity of my own existence.”53 The move from atheism to a renewed faith was driven by a tension at the heart of non-belief. Just as philosophy was unable to maintain its absolute nihilism, it was equally unable to sustain atheism. Rather than killing God outright, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre, according to Derrida, merely displaced his divinity into society, history, or the human subject.54 As Derrida suggested in his other essay on God, “Atheism is aristocratic,” the divine was existentially impossible to escape.55 Aristocracies like atheism asserted autarchy, an autarchy modeled on the infinity of the divine.56 The internal failings of atheism did not, however, render it useless. As Derrida suggested, “to find God and religion again, Simone Weil talks of a purifying atheism [athéisme purificateur]; one must lose God . . . to find him again.”57 As he suggested in his essay on the existence of God, this new belief arising out of atheism would no longer be na¨ıve, it would rather be a free choice.58 One did not prove [prouver] the existence of God, but rather felt [éprouver] it. Paraphrasing Marcel, Derrida wrote, “God is the mysterious, the meta-problematic par excellence. He is the object of love, and thus uncharacterizable” by human rational powers. And because he could not be grasped rationally, Derrida asserted that “I believe because it is absurd . . . which is to say that my belief is not na¨ıve and spontaneous; neither is it detached from reason; it is a voluntary and courageous act.”59 Derrida had absorbed Sartre’s language of authentic choice and turned it against him. There could be no certainty about God, one had to make a resolute decision to believe. But because that belief responded to the existentiel structure of human life, our constant awareness of insufficiency, the choice was the only authentic one. Derrida, parodying Sartre, asserted that Man was “condemned to be an optimist.”60

53 56 57 59

54 Ibid., sheet 3. 55 The title comes from a 1793 speech by Robespierre. Ibid., sheet 1. Jacques Derrida, “L’Athéisme est aristocratique,” Irvine, 1.19. sheet 1. 58 Derrida, “Les Dieux et Dieu,” sheet 4. Derrida, “L’Athéisme est aristocratique,” sheet 5. 60 Derrida, “Nihilisme,” sheet 3. Ibid., sheet 4.

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Derrida post-existentialist problematizing the mystery From the outside to the inside – every precious movement of the human spirit consists in a conversion by which something which at first appeared to it to be extrinsic, which presented itself to it as other, is assimilated to the point at which the human spirit becomes capable, from its own intimacy and by its operation, not only to engender this something, but to transform it at will, in transcending it. At the beginning of this conversion the spirit felt estranged and inferior to what it apprehended; that thing excluded it; when the spiritual appropriation has been accomplished, the spirit becomes familiar with it and understands it; it has become its own.61 René le Senne

In Derrida’s essays from the period 1949–52, he followed the Christian existentialists in their rejection of human reason’s absolute validity, in the necessary return to experience, and – through an analysis of this experience – the opening up of the possibility or even a moral necessity of faith in God. At one point in his discussion, at least, he explicitly aligned himself with a particular form of Christian existentialism. This form, however, would draw Derrida away from Gabriel Marcel and Simone Weil, and closer to René le Senne and his own teacher, Etienne Borne. Etienne Borne had little time for Marcel’s passive acceptance of the mystery. He attacked Marcel’s analysis for not being sufficiently philosophic: “the problem of evil is perhaps insoluble and it is this possibility that engenders anguish, but it cannot be taken to task in its capacity as a problem.” The problem of evil, God, or Being may never allow a full and definitive answer, but that does not liberate us from the imperative to continue questioning it: “it would remain to dig further, to deepen, to exasperate our anguish, to trust in the thought that it carries and the light which it is not incapable of casting on Man, the world, and God.”62 In Derrida’s essays he too was unwilling to leave the mystery alone. Like Borne, while accepting that Being would always escape thought, Derrida felt that this should not stop us striving to understand it. Derrida elaborated this in a 1949 essay on the “secret.” He argued that in addition to a secret that we might have (secret because we decided not to reveal it) there was also a secret of who we were (what we could not communicate) that he came to equate with the Sartrean pour-soi.63 This secret, falling to the side of mystery, should, in the Marcellian model, resist human thought. But Derrida refused to accept its absolute indetermination. 61 62 63

René le Senne, opening lines of his Traité de morale générale. See Borne, Le Problème du mal, pp. 39–41. Derrida, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique du Secret,” sheet 1. Marcel in his discussions of the secret had restricted it to the side of Avoir.


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Quite how he hoped to achieve this was not very clear. In his essay he appealed to two positive experiences that could “conserve the relationship without suppressing interiority,” that is they could establish a connection to the secret without unveiling and so denaturing it. First, Derrida appealed to an experience of communion, which he distinguished from communication.64 As the immediate unity of two beings, communion in love allowed the relationship between two pour-sois, without, as Sartre had argued, one alienating the other. Second, in artistic creation, we were able to grant value to our work without destroying its essential mystery: “in art . . . I lose and recover myself simultaneously in the created object – the work of art expresses the secret of things without alienating them.”65 The argument is hard to follow, and Etienne Borne, too, upon reading it was unhappy, labeling Derrida’s claims “assertions” and writing a skeptical “how?” prominently in the margin. But the language Derrida used provides two clues as to his line of thinking. First, in describing artistic creation, Derrida suggested that it “restitutes the secret in attributing it a sense. It spiritualizes it.”66 Second, at one crucial moment Derrida referred to his philosophy as a “spiritualisme existentiel.”67 For Derrida, existentiel spiritualism marked a third way between an idealism and materialism that aimed to determine the secret or the pour-soi fully, and Sartrean existentialism, which merely accepted its indeterminacy. “Existentiel spiritualism” was the title used by the Christian philosopher Jean Paumen for a 1949 book dedicated to the work of René le Senne, whose work on morality had provided one of the cornerstones of Derrida’s first essay. Paumen argued that le Senne’s work represented the culmination of “existentiel philosophy.” In particular, it marked a significant improvement on Marcel’s faith in an absolute and unknowable God, which was “only intelligible as a mystery.”68 For Marcel, the gap separating us from God could only be crossed with a leap of faith, not the forward movement of thought. Instead, le Senne’s experimental spiritualism provided the possibility of respecting God or the mystery while not completely excluding them from human understanding. What was beyond philosophy could with work be assimilated to it. According to le Senne the history of philosophy had shown constant movement towards idealism.69 As history progressed humanity became 64 65 66 67 68

See the same distinction in Troisfontaines, Existentialisme et pensée chrétienne. Derrida, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique du Secret,” sheet 4. Ibid., sheet 3–4. See Gabriel Marcel, Etre et Avoir (Paris: Editions Universitaire, 1991), p. 107. Derrida, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique du Secret,” sheet 3. 69 See le Senne, Introduction a ` la philosophie, première partie. Marcel, Etre et avoir, p. 22.

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more and more aware of the fact that the exterior world was not composed of brute matter, but rather conformed to the laws of the mind as expressed in mathematics and physics. As an ordered world, it could only be the expression of spirit. But this did not mean that each individual human spirit was infinite and could comprehend the world in its totality. Rather the finite manifestation of spirit in the individual placed a limit on its understanding, when faced with the world its mental faculties would constantly show themselves to be inadequate: “The Spirit is elastic, possibly eristic, it can subdivide itself, without tearing itself in two, into finite consciousness, between which antagonisms must appear.”70 Human finitude entailed that our mental faculties alone were incapable of understanding the world and we were condemned to disagreement and conflict. The only way out lay in a humble return to the school of experience, from which, according to le Senne, all philosophy had to begin. Because of our human limitations, experience would sooner or later throw up something that would not fit into the inadequate categories of our understanding, something that would appear as a scandal for us. This “scandal” or “obstacle” was not, however, an insuperable Marcelian mystery. True, we could figure the obstacle as a permanent barrier, give up our hopes of overcoming it, and either fall into mysticism or submit to the idea of the absurdity of a world without meaning. But we could also, asserting the insufficiency of all our thought, choose to place our faith in a supreme and ungraspable “Value,” to see beyond the heterogeneous multiplicity of experience the possibility of higher unity. This desire for an ultimate “Value” would motivate us to “spiritualize” the obstacle. It would be an impetus not just to recognize our own limitations but to seek to go beyond them, to educate ourselves further about the world and experience, and in the end, to forge a new understanding, a new philosophy: Spirit would expand to understand itself further. This new philosophy could never be complete, it too would show its limits, its insufficiency: for if a definitive method or philosophy were possible, it would place all finite spirits within a determined whole, where “necessity reigns without contest” and “pantheism takes the place of spiritualism.” The finitude of each individual spirit was necessary for human freedom.71 But at the same time, it was practically impossible to deny the ultimate unity of spirit or assert the absurdity of the world, because that would reduce us to solipsism without “conversation, nor society, nor science, nor love.” Philosophy should rather operate by transgressing the 70

Ibid., p. 247.

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René le Senne, Obstacle et valeur (Paris: F. Aubier, 1934), p. 259.


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border between determined theories and the real affective existence that seemed to escape it, what Derrida would call the relation and the secret’s interiority. As Jean Paumen put it: The relationship that M. Le Senne recognized thus in the principle of experience, is not the unity of abstract terms, but the unity of the intellectual relation with infinite existence, the unity of impurely ideal and imperfectly existential terms, the unity of continuity and discontinuity. This is what authorizes the simultaneous usage of intellectual dialectics and affective moments. Emotional existence and abstract argumentation then reunite [s’épousent], to convince.72

This ideal unity of Value would allow, in Marcelian terms, some continuity between être and avoir, even if it were never total. It would legitimate the “spiritualization” of the secret without ever fully betraying its indeterminacy, without asserting that one had grasped it once and for all. Le Senne allowed Derrida, as he would put it as late as 1955, to envisage a dialectic of the “problematic and the mysterious,” to move beyond the negative theology that he saw in Marcel or Weil.73 To escape nihilism and to allow the possibility of Value, there must be a difference between the world and us. But such an assertion of difference should not leave the pour-soi to the pitfalls of decisionism, detached from any guiding star. The spiritualist philosopher had to decide freely to search for a transcendent Value, which would motivate the overcoming of all finite determinations. It was the desire for a Value that was always out of reach, which would encourage him to overcome contradictions, and not halt, disheartened before the very first obstacle. Philosophy required, as Derrida remarked, a “courageous choice” to seek out a hidden God. humanist phenomenology These broader philosophical and religious commitments were manifested in Derrida’s reading of Husserl and Heidegger. Derrida had turned to Husserl and Heidegger because of their importance in Sartre’s work. In brief, we can say that Derrida was a phenomenologist because Sartre was a phenomenologist, and it is no coincidence that both built their thought on the same two German philosophers.74 Not only was Derrida’s choice 72

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Jean Paumen, Le Spiritualisme existentiel de René le Senne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), pp. 23–4. The formulation recalls Derrida’s mémoire, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. M. Hobson (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Jacques Derrida, “La Notion du problème,” Irvine, 1.48. sheet 3. In an interview with Dominique Janicaud, Derrida admits the importance of Sartre in his first readings of Heidegger, Janicaud, Heidegger en France vol. II, p. 89.

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of reading material strongly influenced by his reading of Sartre, it was also interpreted through Sartre’s writings. In particular, Derrida argued that both Husserl and Heidegger’s thought should be recast as humanist. By moving beyond an overly restrictive theoretical phenomenology, Husserl’s method should be used to describe the structures of human-reality and not a transcendental consciousness, and in recognizing the limitations of Heidegger’s ontology, the value of his work would be revealed to be his existentiel analytic of Dasein. But as we shall see in the development of this humanistic reading of phenomenology, Derrida would find occasion to reiterate his religious critique of Sartrean existentialism. Derrida’s reading of Husserl and Heidegger is clearest in two essays prepared for an after-school philosophy group called the Cogito Club at the Lycée Bugeaud d’Alger run by Derrida’s teacher Jan Czarnecki in 1948.75 The club came together to discuss major contemporary philosophers, with an emphasis on presenting their work, rather than any serious critical engagement. In Derrida’s case the essays are almost entirely made up of summaries and at times only barely modified citations from primary and secondary works. The essays are informative nonetheless. Firstly, they represent Derrida’s particular interests. That Derrida’s two surviving essays are presentations of Sartre and Heidegger confirms their importance in his other surviving student work. But in addition, the presentations were never wholesale endorsements. The admitted enthusiasm for both Sartre and Heidegger was tempered by moments of criticism and interpretation, which, while marking the limits of Derrida’s espousal of their ideas, also reaffirmed his commitment to them within those limits. In this sense they allow us an important perspective on one particular moment in Derrida’s development, and his Sartrean reading of the two German phenomenologists. In 1932 Sartre discovered Husserl through his friend Raymond Aron, who had just returned from a year studying in Germany. Like many of his generation, moving away from the dominant Brunschvicgian NeoKantianism, Sartre wanted to reject the abstract, and in the words of Jean Wahl’s contemporaneous essay, move towards the concrete.76 With 75

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Jan Czarnecki passed the agrégation in 1933 and gained the same rank as Jean Beaufret: both were placed sixth. Interestingly he was also one of the signatories of Sartre’s “Manifeste des 121” in 1961. For his involvement in the Algerian War, see Guy Pervillé, “Remarques sur la Revue Christianisme Social face a` la guerre d’Algérie,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 150 (October–December 2004), pp. 683–701. Wahl’s book, Vers le concrète (Paris: Librarie philosophique J. Vrin, 1932), was mainly a discussion of William James, Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel, but it framed these analyses with a discussion of Heidegger.


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phenomenology, according to Aron, one could philosophize about anything, including, so the story goes, the beer that Sartre and he were drinking during the conversation.77 But the flight from the abstract and the speculative should not, according to Sartre, entail an uncritical embrace of empiricism that na¨ıvely accepted the existence of objects in the world. It was its avoidance of these twin perils – a priori rationalism and empiricism – that made phenomenology so attractive for Sartre and his contemporaries. Husserl’s phenomenology concerned itself with the rich base of human experience, but it did not, like traditional psychology, treat that experience as purely contingent. The need to reach beyond a purely empirical account could be shown by a close analysis of traditional psychology. As Sartre stated in the Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, psychology as a positive science dealt with facts, which meant it preferred “the accidental to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder to order.”78 But in order to delimit its field, to set a framework for its researches, psychology must already have some idea of what it is looking for. In the case of the imagination or the emotion, it must already know what the imagination or emotion is, to be able to enter into an empirical study of them. This starting point prejudiced any research from the beginning. After correlating the various facets of an emotion, its “bodily reactions,” “behaviors,” and “states of consciousness,” the scientist had to resort to his initial understanding of what emotion was to develop an over-arching theory. Sartre continued, “if I am the partisan of an intellectualist theory, for example, I would establish a constant and irreversible relay between the interior state, considered as antecedent, and psychological troubles considered as its consequences. If, on the contrary, I think, with the partisans of the theories of the periphery: ‘A mother is sad because she is crying,’ I would confine myself, essentially, to invert the order of factors.”79 With respect to these most pressing questions, positive psychology could only resort to speculation. The phenomenologist, according to Sartre, was able to escape this confusion because he realized that experience could also give us immediate access to essences.80 The key was the phenomenological reduction.81 By placing the world in brackets, refusing to infer the external existence of 77

78 79 81

There is no great consensus on this incident. For all their discussion of exact phenomenological description, there is discord as to whether the drink was an apricot cocktail, as suggested by Simone de Beauvoir, or a beer, as the two men in the party concur. See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 141–2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Paris: Hermann, 1939), p. 5. 80 See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imagination (Paris: F. Alcan, 1936), p. 140. Ibid., pp. 6–7. See ibid., p. 8.

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objects from the content of our immediate intuition, the phenomenologist was also able to bracket the contingency and singularity that were characteristics of the world. I may doubt the existence of an object that I see, but I cannot deny the appearance of that object in consciousness, and a careful analysis of that object would reveal its constitutive laws. Intuition was a Wesensschau that provided us with certain knowledge of essences, of what the imagination or emotion really was, something unheard of in the positive sciences. The irony of the reduction for Sartre, however, was that, far from closing us off from the world, it showed us to be completely and irrevocably embedded in it. The investigation of the immediate givens of consciousness revealed that they were all consciousness of something. Fear is not merely a state of mind, but it is lived immediately as fear of heights, enclosed spaces, of something in the world.82 Even an illusion refers to or, in the French, “aims at” (viser) an object that is presented as beyond the illusion, outside of the mind. The different acts of consciousness can “aim at” the object in different ways. They can imagine, perceive, love, hate, etc. and yet all of these “noetic” acts refer to a transcendent object, that which is imagined, perceived, loved, or hated: this was, for Sartre, Husserl’s fundamental concept of intentionality.83 For Derrida in his essay, these analyses would reach their apogee in Sartre’s discussion of the image, whether in the mind or in the world: a photograph or painting. The phenomenological description of the image expressed “the most essential structure of consciousness, its relations with the real, its intentionality, its irrealizing function, the nothingness of which it is constitutive.”84 If all consciousness was intentional, then even the image that had previously been regarded as an internal impression, a residue of a perceptive act, should be considered as an image of something, its intentional aspect being constitutive of it as image. The intentionality of the image showed that it was not mere appearances. What then was the difference between the perceived object and the image? For Sartre it lay in the particular type of intentionality involved, for one posited the object as existing whereas the other did not. When looking at a photograph of a friend, we are not fooled into thinking that she is there, and yet the image is still clearly of her. Derrida, himself, took a step further, translating Sartre’s work on the imagination into the 82 83 84

See ibid., p. 29. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947): “Une Idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: Intentionalité,” pp. 31–5. Derrida, “Sartre,” sheet 3.


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language of his later philosophy in Being and Nothingness: “What is the guiding idea of this critique? Well! It’s the distinction between the pour-soi and the en-soi.”85 The image is the object “for-itself,” and the perceived object was “in-itself,” brute existence and positivity. The irreality of the imagined object, the non-presence of the intended object in the image, demonstrated the negating power of consciousness, its ability to transcend what was there. Derrida’s discussion shows that he had followed Sartre in his appropriation of Husserl. But, he was just as attentive to Sartre’s criticism. In the development of his argument Sartre had criticized Husserl in two connected ways. For Husserl the world of the natural attitude before the reduction was subordinated to the transcendental after the reduction. Once the reduction had been achieved, it became clear that the theses of the natural attitude were constructed out of the transcendental sphere. The transcendental sphere was, using Eugen Fink’s famous phrase, really the “origin of the world.” Husserl, especially in Ideas I, seemed to make intentionality a purely subjective construction of transcendent objects. After the reduction to the transcendental sphere, intentionality could no longer be consciousness of transcendent objects, for they were precisely what had been reduced. As Sartre said, the “moment [Husserl] makes of the noema [the object as intended] an unreal, a correlate of the noesis [the subjective intending act], a noema whose esse is percipi, he is totally unfaithful to his principle.”86 For Sartre this understanding seemed to mutilate the concept of intentionality that was so central to him. The whole point of intentionality was that it broke down the limits of solipsism; consciousness was consciousness of something, actively intending objects that really exist. It was this that freed the subject from idealism or skepticism. In Sartre’s reformulation, the “natural attitude” and the “transcendental sphere” were refigured as “perception” and “imagination.” Like the “natural attitude,” perception posits its objects as existent. They are also thereby dubitable. In contrast, the image is certain, relying on the immediate givens of consciousness. But as we have seen, rather than seeing the reduction to the transcendental sphere as the placing of intentional references out of play,

85

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Derrida, “Sartre,” sheet 3. The terms pour-soi and en-soi appear briefly in L’Imagination, but it is only by Being and Nothingness that they achieve a central place in Sartre’s system. It is at least questionable whether the distinction between imagination and perception corresponds completely with that between the pour-soi and the en-soi. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 23.

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Sartre now saw it as a transformation of them.87 The difference between the image and perception was that between two types of intentionality: “We can now grasp the essential condition for a consciousness to be able to imagine: it must have the ability to pose a thesis of irreality.”88 The movement to the “transcendental sphere” was not Husserl’s reduction; it was a different positing of the object, this time as absent. For Sartre, rather than one being rooted in the other, the real world being a construction out of the transcendental sphere, the pour-soi and en-soi were parallel ontological regions.89 And though Derrida was clearly uneasy with the rooting of the distinction in the categories of Being and Nothingness, he agreed that it was the opposition between pour-soi and en-soi that constituted “the radical ontological difference separating image and thing.”90 Sartre’s second criticism was related. If intentionality really got consciousness out into the world, then it was no longer possible to consider phenomenology as an entirely theoretical philosophy. Following Levinas’s influential critique in La Théorie de l’intuition dans la philosophie de Husserl (1931), Sartre suggested that Husserl’s conception of phenomenology was too limited.91 In Derrida’s presentation, Husserl already had the status of a surpassed philosopher. He wrote, “for Husserl, to exist for consciousness is to appear. For Heidegger, to exist for the réalité-humaine is to assume one’s own Being in the existential mode of comprehension. Thus the description of every human phenomenon will put in place not only the essential structures of consciousness, as Husserl would have it, but all of the réalitéhumaine, as Heidegger has shown.”92 A full phenomenological analysis would not just read the givens of theoretical consciousness, but describe affect and emotion, especially the crucial existentialist state of anguish. As Sartre suggested in the Esquisse, so too it was for Derrida in much of his early work; the broadening of phenomenology through Heidegger allowed 87

88 89 91 92

Husserl’s use of “transcendent” and “transcendental” can lead to confusion. Real objects in the world are transcendent, because they exist beyond the immanent sphere of direct intuition. Images in this sense are immanent, because they are in consciousness. But after the transcendental reduction to what is given immediately such a distinction between inside and outside – itself a worldly distinction – no longer makes sense. Rather this sphere is transcendental because it is no longer worldly and, analogically to Kant’s transcendental, comprises the ground of perception and the world. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), p. 232. 90 Derrida, “Sartre,” sheet 3. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 59–60. See the last section of the Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, pp. 51–2. Or L’Imaginaire, conclusions, especially pp. 234–6. Derrida, “Sartre,” sheet 3. cf. Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, p. 10. The line is almost a direct citation from Sartre, but Derrida reverses the order of the presentation and edits much of the citation to mark a development from Husserl to Heidegger that was still ambiguous for Sartre in 1939.


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the inception of a philosophical anthropology and existentialism.93 Derrida wanted to humanize Husserl’s phenomenology. Because Husserl had been surpassed by Heidegger in Sartre’s eyes, the older phenomenologist was relatively absent from Derrida’s work before 1952. As Derrida suggested in an interview with Dominique Janicaud, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger better fit his youthful temperament than the “cold Husserlian discipline.”94 Before he arrived at the ENS, Heidegger was a constant presence, and his work even merited an individual treatment: the second 1948 essay from the Cogito Club. Derrida began his 1948 essay with a complaint of Heidegger’s “noisy, pretentious and heavy dialectic,” which was “disappointing and even sometimes grating.” Overburdened with a “crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous, this reverse preciosity, consists in leadening and complicating his language, as if for fun, and in giving the most everyday, the simplest thoughts an appearance of profundity.”95 Such criticisms, ironically the same as those that would one day be aimed at Derrida himself, meant that Heidegger was particularly difficult to approach in the original, and that Derrida was sent into the arms of his French interpreters.96 Most of the time, one begins to make individual contact with Heidegger, as with all the German philosophers, across the French authors who have presented the substance of his philosophy in a very clear, very French, manner.97

Derrida read Heidegger through French eyes. Indeed much of this early essay comprises of unattributed citations from Gurvitch, Wahl, and Corbin. Derrida consulted a considerable quantity of secondary literature for his Cogito Club presentation on Heidegger. A majority of his remaining early notes held at his archives at Irvine are from translations of, and essays on, Heidegger, apparently from his reading for this essay.98 Firstly, there exists a set of notes from Henry Corbin’s Heidegger anthology of 1938, centered on his translation of “What is Metaphysics?” The book also contained a few short passages from Heidegger’s key work, Being and Time, 93 94 95 96 97 98

Cf. Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, p. 12. and Derrida, “Sartre,” sheet 3. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. II, p. 90. Jacques Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” Irvine, 2.40, sheet 1. It is perhaps significant to note that Derrida was aware at the time of Heidegger’s Nazi past, and yet accords this fact very little weight. Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” sheet 1. The notes from Algeria are distinguished from later ones by the fact that they are written on blank menus sent out from Mumm Champagne to restaurants.

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“Being-for-Death” and “temporality and historicity,” from division II.99 It was the only widely available translation of Heidegger into French at the time,100 and was enormously successful, going through many new editions and selling in total 12,980 copies.101 But the success was not just financial. The collection of essays was particularly influential in the French reception of Heidegger. As Dominique Janicaud notes, the Heidegger scholars Jean-Pierre Faye and Edgar Morin discovered Heidegger through it. Sartre himself stated, “certainly, if Corbin hadn’t published his translation of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ I would never have read it. And if I hadn’t read it, I would not have undertaken a reading of Being and Time, last Easter [1939].”102 Both in the choice of texts and in the translation used, Corbin’s collection reflected and projected a very particular and peculiarly French reading of Heidegger’s philosophy.103 Given the influence of Corbin’s book on Sartre, it is not perhaps surprising that Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger did not deviate far from the standard Sartrean version.104 But Derrida also drew on two other Heidegger scholars, who had a powerful effect on his introduction into France: Derrida read the last chapter of Georges Gurvitch’s book on Les Tendances actuelles dans la philosophie allemande, Jean Wahl’s seminal essay “Heidegger and Kierkegaard” as well as his small but influential A Short History of Existentialism. Following these authors, Derrida was at pains to assert, as he would twenty years later in his essay “The Ends of Man,” that, despite Heidegger’s protestations, his philosophy was still anthropological. In the debate over whether existentialism was a humanism, Derrida took Sartre’s side against Heidegger. An index of the debate, and one that would come to be important for Derrida himself later, was the translation of Dasein. Corbin had notoriously translated Dasein as “réalité-humaine.” In 1968, Derrida referred to it as a “monstrous translation.”105 Heidegger, it is argued, used the word “Dasein” in order to divest the concept of any of the connotations and philosophical baggage tied to anthropology; Corbin, by using the term réalité-humaine 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

In the English translation, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie (London: SCM Press, 1962) the chapters in question are II.1 and II.5, pp. 279–312 and 424–456 respectively. It was published in 1938. It would have to wait till the 1980s for Heidegger’s masterwork to be translated in full. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. I, p. 47. Sartre, Carnets de Guerre, p. 225, cited in Janicaud, Heidegger en France. For an analysis of this first reception of Heidegger into France, see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 49–154. This does not mean that Henry Corbin himself agreed with Sartre on his interpretation. See Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. I, p. 41. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 115.


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had ignored the deep philosophical motive of Heidegger’s project, and had subordinated the understanding of Being to the empirical science of the study of Man. In his reminiscences on the period, Derrida was at pains to note that he recognized the problems of the Sartrean exposition of Heidegger: “réalitéhumaine – I already knew that it was a disastrous translation for Dasein.”106 Nevertheless, the evidence in his 1948 essay suggests otherwise. The discussion of the translation of Dasein constitutes one of the main sections of Derrida’s essay. He suggested three possible options: “être-là” [Being-there], “existance (avec a)” and “réalité-humaine.”107 The first was rejected as insufficiently active. Derrida wrote, “there the verb ‘to be’ is transitive. Dasein is not an immobile, passive, and stunned Being-there; it is the dynamic project of a world, it is a surpassing towards a world.” It is in this sense that “existance” marked an improvement, “because it clearly brings the idea of surpassing, of a surging.”108 But “réalité-humaine” was superior, because in addition to this sense of activity, “it is very vague, vague enough to ask for precisions.” Derrida denied that “réalité-humaine” had burdensome connotations, ones that in later interpretations would render the term so unsuitable.109 That Derrida at eighteen and thirty-eight should offer such apparently contradictory readings of the value of “réalité-humaine” as a translation of Dasein can only be understood if we realize that, at this stage, Derrida had not even considered that the anthropological reading of Dasein could be controversial. He unquestioningly adopted Corbin’s, and by implication Sartre’s, interpretation. Though Derrida read Dasein as the réalité-humaine, he was aware that Heidegger was resistant to humanist interpretations of his philosophy as a whole. He recognized that the goal of Heidegger’s work was to understand Being and not the structures of the réalité-humaine. The réalité-humaine, the “être de l’humanité,” nonetheless, had a central position in Heidegger’s philosophy, because of a crucial principle in his thought: the ontological 106 107

108 109

Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. II, p. 91. Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” p. 6. The options come from Corbin’s Introduction, except for être-là, which is never discussed, but is simply a direct translation of Dasein. Existance is suggested, but not to translate Dasein; rather it is Corbin’s translation for Existenz. Derrida departed from Corbin’s translation for Seiende, which Corbin translated as Existant, and which Derrida preferred to translate as Etant. In doing so he follows the translation of Alphonse de Waelhens and Walter Biemel in their version of De l’essence de la vérité (Paris 1948). It is intriguing that Derrida considers the possibility of “existance (avec a).” As we shall later see, the transcendence of Dasein was at first the ground of différance (with a). See chapter 6. In the “Ends of Man,” Derrida does admit that it was supposed to be a neutral and indeterminate term, but challenges this reading. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 115.

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difference. As Derrida wrote, “in effect, Heidegger distinguishes, the being (Seiendes) . . . and the Being of the being (Sein).”110 To ask the question of Being (Sein) by an analysis of one particular type of being (Seiendes) would be to prejudice the investigation, to infer falsely the properties of Being from that of a particular being. But the réalité-humaine was different. Because Man “ek-sists,” that is, he is able to transcend his determination, this affords a privileged access to Being. We already have an implicit understanding of Being, which is manifest in our relationship to the world, we are “open to the apérité of Being.” We demonstrate this openness to Being every time we use a hammer, or sit on a chair, something we would never be able to do if we didn’t have some primordial understanding of what a hammer or a chair is. An existentiel anthropology, therefore, a description of the existence of the réalité-humaine, of how it interacts with beings in the world, would reveal their modes of Being, it would thus be the first step towards an ontology. It was réalité-humaine’s openness to Being that made it a privileged starting-point for philosophy. So what, according to Derrida, do we learn from an existentiel analytic of the réalité-humaine? The picture again follows the existentialist template.111 The most important aspect, as attested by the debate over the translation, was that of action. The réalité-humaine was “dynamic,” “a movement,” “an irruption.” This movement was first and foremost reflected in the primordial temporality of the réalité-humaine: “time which temporalizes itself in its exstases: exstases of the past, the present, and the future.”112 Man was thrown into a history, and was open to the future, the constant possibility of surpassing his determined state. This openness to the future was characterized by souci or care, the possibility of a project or morality. This could be manifested either by a fear of the world in inauthentic existence, or authentically in anguish, in the existentialist interpretation, confronting “the abyss of indetermination which surrounds thrown [délaissée] humanity on all sides.”113 The analytic of Dasein in Heidegger was for Derrida a mere reiteration of existentialist themes: “Well! Very generally we can say that the existentiel stage, in all that concerns his phenomenology of existence, brings us nothing very new except an existentiel synthesis that he made of the diverse experiences that one finds in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.”114 110 111 113

Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” p. 4. See also Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans. F. Williams (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 11. 112 Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” p. 8. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 51. 114 Ibid., p. 25. Ibid.


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Like many others in France, Derrida emphasized that Being and Time was incomplete. Its existentiel analytic of Dasein was only meant to be a precursor to the elaboration of Heidegger’s ontology. For Derrida this movement was far more original; in his opinion, neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had considered the question of Being itself. As Derrida noted, it was because Heidegger’s project ultimately concerned Being and not the réalité-humaine, that he rejected the label “humanist.” But if Derrida endorsed Heidegger’s existentiel analyses, he doubted Heidegger’s success in moving beyond them. Because the “phenomenological interpretation of existence” (viz. Man) was a necessary first step in elaborating his ontology, Derrida argued that Heidegger would never be able to fully divest his philosophy of its humanistic tendencies: he would only be able to describe what a chair or a hammer is for us. Whatever the advantages of the study of the réalité-humaine for the understanding of Being, Derrida thought that Heidegger’s “philosophy is, despite itself, strongly anthropocentric.”115 This second stage of Heidegger’s thought was only developed in “What Is Metaphysics?” As we have seen, “What Is Metaphysics?” was crucial to Sartre’s understanding of Heidegger, with its focus on the “Nothing.”116 It was, after all, in meditating on the Heideggerian Nichts that Sartre came to develop his own opposition between Being and Nothingness. But just as Derrida was suspicious of this part of Sartre’s thought, so too it was the “completion” of Heidegger’s project in this 1929 essay that endured the bulk of Derrida’s criticism. In his 1929 essay, Heidegger argued that the Nichts was what resisted being transformed into a being, it could never become the object of thought, such would be a “counter-sense, a contradiction in terms.”117 Rather it was only in the pre-rational and affective experience of “anguish” (Angst/Angoisse) that one could attest to the Nothing. This Nothing was central to Heidegger’s thought for it was the ground of the exstases described in primordial temporality, and thus for the movement and liberty of the réalité-humaine. Dasein was temporal because it is thrown out into the Nothing, and it could exceed its ontic ground only by negating it. The Nothing was the condition for Dasein’s ek-sistence and transcendence; it was what allowed Dasein to come into contact with Being, the necessary condition for ontology.

115 117

116 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 50. Ibid., p. 3. Derrida, “Martin Heidegger,” p. 4.

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Derrida post-existentialist Derrida doubted Heidegger’s success in developing an ontology:

One can address Heidegger with the same reproach with which we addressed Sartre, who wanted to found a phenomenological ontology . . . How can one found an ontology, when one thinks, as do Kierkegaard and Heidegger, that existence is alienated in objectivity? For a universal and objective ontology depends on the domain of curiosity and not of anxiety [inquiétude], the problem rather than the mystery. Heidegger himself says that curiosity is an inauthentic form of existence.118

Heidegger’s very analyses of the réalité-humaine and its movement of transcendence upset the project of a definitive ontology. The valuable part of Heidegger’s philosophy was his existentiel anthropology; his attempt to move beyond this was a failure. It was, as we saw in the first chapter, a common interpretation of Heidegger in France. Derrida’s criticisms of Heidegger, then, mirrored his concerns with Sartre’s philosophy. For both it was the attempt to expound an ontology based on existentiel analyses that marked the greatest failing. The parallel failures reiterated Derrida’s argument about morality. Sartre’s ontologization of the pour-soi’s free activity, just as much as Heidegger’s submission of that freedom to a passivity in the face of Being, blocked the rise of a moral philosophy.119 Instead of these flawed ontologies, what was valuable in both Sartre’s and Heidegger’s work was the existentiel analysis on which they were based. So Derrida placed himself between two types of humanism. He appealed to a certain form of humanism to criticize Heidegger’s move to a definitive ontology. It was Heidegger’s analysis of the réalité-humaine that was most valuable and not his misguided attempt to go beyond human limitations and found a theory of Being: the lycéen Derrida was an existentiel and not an existential philosopher. But for the same reasons, Derrida criticized the ontological foundations of Sartre’s humanism, especially his assertion of Man’s constitutive relationship with Nothingness. Heidegger erred in effacing the essential movement of the réalité-humaine, rendering it passive before Being, Sartre erred by making it absolute. Just as in his contemporary essays, Derrida hoped to use phenomenology to leave open the possibility of transcendent values, without ever defining them fully. 118 119

Ibid., p. 7. See also Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, for a similar comparison between Sartre and Heidegger.


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This curious tension can be seen in Derrida’s first direct treatment of the subject as a lycée pupil in 1951. Asked to write an essay with the title, “Man, is he the measure of all things?,” Derrida argued for a version of humanism that twinned freedom with an openness to a transcendent Value. Derrida presented the two familiar errors: insufficiency and arrogance. A critical analysis of the human situation would, Derrida believed, assert the former: we are always governed by base needs, love is always just an illusion masking sexual desire, aesthetic tastes are mere epiphenomena of biology. As Derrida argued, “a supremely acute and lucid consciousness cannot but be conscious of its determinations, that is, of its servility.”120 This recognition debased all values; Man mired in heteronomy could not be the measure of all things. Opposed to insufficiency was the “arrogance” of Man, the arrogance that suggested Man had “an absolute and infinite right to be the measure of everything.” The arrogant Man, recognizing his ability to transcend all particular determinations declared his own will to be infinite and the source of the Good. But Derrida rejected this source of value too: “it is a humiliated humanism, which, from the beginning, made Protagoras say that Man is the measure of everything.”121 Rooting value in subjective human choice would lead, according to Derrida, to the most inane form of relativism, undercutting human judgment, which it purported to respect. To move beyond this opposition, Derrida suggested: We will try to see how neither insufficiency nor arrogance should and can be alienated to the profit of the other in a philosophy of measure, that however contradictory they should be, they appear in a quasi-indissoluble experience . . . If man were not this contradiction, he would never have had the idea to measure Being and non-Being.122

The very acknowledgement of our insufficiency, our finitude, according to Derrida, marked the possibility of our surpassing it: “the impossibility of the measure when it appears is only the sketch and the dream of the power to measure.” Without the possibility of transcendence we could never recognize any particular measure as insufficient. Arrogance drew hope from this transcendence that Man could freely set his own values, insufficiency understood that this transcendence was never total. We are left caught between the dual immanence and transcendence of the measure; we are never certain of the legitimacy of any particular value, but in our constant 120 121

Jacques Derrida, “L’Homme est-il la mésure de toute chose?” Irvine, 1.14, p. 19. 122 Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 2.

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desire to overcome our limitations, we continually reach for something better. Derrida’s argument made no claim as to what the ultimate Value would be; indeed his point was that we could never directly assert an absolute. The movement to Value was always one of “risk and of faith.”123 But Derrida also distanced his ideas from those of a certain type of theism that posited the “definitive and irreducible transcendence” of value, placing it forever out of reach, such as in the absurd faith of Kierkegaard.124 The transcendence of all earthly values, rather, gave a sign of the Absolute: “it is not possible that this vertigo should be absurd and without an opening towards the Good.”125 It was the ultimate Value that shed light and cast away shadows, even if we could never make out the source. In declaring a new form of humanism, which depended upon human freedom to choose freely to seek a transcendent Value that it could never fully grasp, Derrida hoped to move beyond simple atheism and simple theology. God may be beyond human understanding, but that should not lead us to deny, or, in a parallel move, despair of ever understanding him. The movement and progress of philosophy required both the recognition of our own limitations and the faint glimmer of an Absolute that would constantly incite us to cast off our earthly shackles and seek a deeper relationship with the divine. It was this tension between an immanence that could never fully entrap us and transcendence that we could never fully achieve that constituted Derrida’s “existentiel spiritualism.” conclusion Derrida’s thought in the years leading up to his acceptance into the Ecole Normale Supérieure was heavily indebted to Existentialism. Both Heidegger and Husserl were read through Sartre, and – in the teleology imposed by that reading – up to him: both were presented or recast as humanist existentialists. But Derrida never simply assumed the Sartrean system. From the beginning, Derrida sought to counter Sartre by appealing to a vibrant Christian existentialist tradition. His critique tried to temper the idealism and complete freedom of the pour-soi by submitting it to its own existentiel analyses, ones that pointed to a transcendent Value, and ultimately to God. 123

Ibid., p. 12.

124

Ibid., p. 7.

125

Ibid., p. 25.


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The explicit predominance of existentialism and Christian thought in Derrida’s work would not, however, last. Already powerful currents within the French philosophical community, and especially in that holy of holies the Ecole Normale Supérieure, were moving against the Sartrean phenomenon and against existentialism more generally. And this would have a profound effect on Derrida when in 1952, on the third attempt, he finally gained entry to that prestigious institution.

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Normalization The Ecole Normale Supérieure and Derrida’s turn to Husserl

All of this should be resituated in the strange history of this strange institution and the no less strange “community” that it housed – or, even more precisely, in the genealogy of the Rue d’Ulm philosophers. A work yet to be undertaken: it would clarify a certain number of things about life and about intellectual fashions in this country over several decades. Jacques Derrida1

In 1952, when Derrida entered the ENS, the names of the modern existentialists disappeared almost entirely from his work: le Senne, Weil, and Marcel, who had been mainstays of his thought, dropped out completely, while references to Sartre and Heidegger greatly declined.2 In their place, Derrida turned to the more technical language of phenomenology and especially to a philosopher who before he had only discussed in passing. Husserl became so central in Derrida’s work that already by 1954 Louis Althusser, then his teacher, complained that Derrida was too dominated by his “master.”3 Over the next decade, the discussion of Husserlian phenomenology would be Derrida’s major philosophical preoccupation. Derrida’s adoption of Husserl’s phenomenology as an object of study was not simply a philosophical decision. Rather it was encouraged by considerations that only make sense in the context of the ENS, with its peculiar combination of political dogmatism enforced through social pressure. Derrida’s discussion of the reduction, intentionality, and the life-world, though seemingly abstract and detached from the messy questions that dominate political life, were invested at the Ecole with political meaning. Intellectual history, for obvious disciplinary reasons, makes the move to politics very readily. The attempt to link a philosophical doctrine to 1 2 3

Derrida interview in Michael Sprinker, ed., The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 185. Heidegger would return after Derrida’s Mémoire, as I will show in the next chapter. Sartre was still mentioned in passing in essays from Derrida’s first year at the ENS. Jacques Derrida, “L’Inconscient,” Irvine, 1.49.

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a political one, while making an intellectual historian’s work relevant to his or her colleagues, also grants the work present value. The study of the relationship between past academic work and politics can, by proxy, assert the significance of modern scholarship, of the role of the university or of the intellectual in the wider world. But the move from philosophy to politics is often a fraught one, and the translation complex. The political situation of academic work often presents two heterogeneous elements that resist easy identification. It is a heterogeneity that historical actors are often at pains to assert, and we, as historians, should not disregard them; some academics do live in ivory towers. But though, as we shall see, the ENS was not the home of pragmatic politicians interested in the minutiae of policy detail – far from it – ideological politics seeped into all parts of everyday life. In the early 1950s, the small elite institute for higher education provided a space where social pressure took on political form, and political loyalty, more often than not, demanded intellectual loyalty. It demonstrates in an extreme form the translation of the academic into the everyday; the social conditions for the political contextualization of philosophy. the ecole normale superieure In analyzing the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the 1950s one immediately faces a major problem. The accounts and memories of the period are often strikingly divergent. To many Old Normaliens, claims that the Ecole provided anything but a free space for academic endeavor would seem absurd. Intellectual freedom formed one of the principal pillars of the school’s self-identity, and the majority of the students remember it as such. After all, the Normaliens were the elite, and thus supposedly not susceptible to the pitfalls of “group-think.” Pierre Greco, a philosophy student, wrote in 1947, “I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that at the Ecole there is no set philosophical line.”4 Nevertheless a significant minority of students had a very different experience. Michel Serres, Derrida’s exact contemporary, recalled his constant fear of being accosted and accused of some “intellectual crime,” calling the ENS “one of the most terroristic societies ever created by the French intelligentsia.”5 To explain these conflicting accounts, we will have to understand how in the absence of official 4 5

Pierre Greco, “La Vie philosophique a l’Ecole Normale Supérieure,” Les Etudes philosophiques (January-March 1947), pp. 21–6. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. R. Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 5.

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authority figures the largest social groups gained disproportionate power in the formation of political and intellectual norms. Like most of France’s important intellectual institutions, especially in the period before 1968, the ENS was situated in the Quartier Latin on the Rive Gauche of the Seine. Within a five-minute walk from each other lay the most successful Ecole Préparatoires (the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and the Lycée Henri IV), the Ecole Polytechnique for the sciences and engineering,6 the Ecole Normale Supérieure Rue d’Ulm, the Collège de France, and the Sorbonne, all clustered around the Pantheon, that Temple of Reason dedicated to the great men of the Republic. It was an area of Paris that Derrida hardly left during his academic career, studying at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the ENS, to which he returned to teach after serving as an assistant at the Sorbonne.7 But though geographically part of this larger conglomeration of educational institutions, the Ecole Normale Supérieure was different. The sense of being special pervades discussions of the ENS. Old Normaliens, or “archicubes” as they called themselves, reported of stoic parents crying with pride at the news of admission. As Claude Nicolet, who entered the letters stream in 1950, said, “the school was still one of the great things of this world,” and his parents, though sad to be losing him (“to Babylon, of all places”), swelled with pride: “You’re going to be a Normalien, my child.”8 For many, entry into the Ecole was a sign of having made it, an important step in guaranteeing a place in the French establishment, whether in academia or politics.9 The ENS constituted the elite, both by choosing its members and by guiding their intellectual formation.10 The first thing that one would notice on entering the Ecole was its size, not only physically, focused as it was around a single courtyard, but in the number of students. In the early 1950s enrollment stood at around 200 men.11 Though the school continued to grow throughout the 6 7 8 9

10

11

Until it moved from the center of Paris in 1976. It would thus be his principal workplace from 1949 until 1984, leaving aside his time in Harvard, Algeria, and Le Mans from 1956 to 1959, and visiting professorships during the later years. Claude Nicolet, “L’Ecole existe-t-elle encore?” in Alain Peyrefitte, ed., Rue d’Ulm (Paris: Fayard, 1994), p. 309. Though we should note the irony in Nicolet’s account. The periodical for the alumni of the Ecole, the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (hereafter, Bulletin), would, during this period, regularly cite lists of Normaliens in the Assemblée Nationale, in the Diplomatic Service, in the administration, as well as in academic fields. Its impact was predominantly in the world of academia, but before the creation of the ENA in 1945, it also had a notable effect on political life. It was the alma Mater of Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, and Georges Pompidou amongst others. A small but not insignificant number of Normaliens went on to study at the ENA in the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Until 1985 the sexes were divided in the ENS system, with ENS Sèvres and Jourdan training women.

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1950s and 1960s, yearly admission was limited by the space available to house the students and hovered around forty in sciences and thirty-five in letters.12 There were around thirty students studying philosophy at any one time, but with an intake ranging from two, in 1953, to nine, in 1950.13 The ENS was so small that a mere statistical analysis often makes little sense, and we can follow, in outline at least, the career of each philosophy student. When Derrida matriculated in 1952, one classmate was Michel Serres, a philosopher of science and later an “Immortal” at the Académie Française. Together, they accounted for a third of all the philosophers accepted that year. Looking more broadly, current or recently graduated philosophers included Pierre Bourdieu (1951), his collaborator Jean-Claude Passeron (1950), and Michel Foucault (1946). The success of the students is remarkable, especially given the young age at which they had been selected, set apart from their peers when they were barely out of their teenage years. It is not surprising that many felt upon entry that they had already arrived. After all, this was the alma mater of Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, and Henri Bergson. The sense of elitism was particularly strong amongst the philosophers. In part a result of the success of existentialism, philosophy in the 1950s was the queen of all disciplines, attracting the best and the brightest students. According to Pierre Bandet, Derrida’s contemporary at the Ecole, “the non-philosopher always has an obscure inferiority complex with respect to his philosopher friends, who affect a clear sentiment of superiority.”14 This dominance was secured when Jean Hyppolite, the dean of French Hegel studies, became the school Directeur in 1954. Then with Louis Althusser as school secretary and the logician Roger Martin as librarian, philosophy both officially and in spirit ruled the ENS. The elitism of the school did not, however, seek to reflect already existing social hierarchies in French society. After all, this was a school first founded in 1794 by the Convention and supposedly embodying the principles of the French Revolution. It may, as Pierre Bourdieu is keen to suggest, have in fact reproduced the existing system of privilege, but its self-image was determined more by its relationship to democracy than by class division. 12

13 14

“Réunion Petit Conseil de l’ENS,” March 24, 1955, IMEC, ALT2, E1–01.01. By the later 1960s, yearly intake in the Lettres section rose to the lower forties. Nevertheless during this period, when other educational institutions were undergoing a large rise in student numbers, the ENS remained small and intimate. See Louis Althusser, “Liste des philosophes sortis de l’ENS depuis la guerre,” IMEC, ALT2, E3– 02.07. Revue de Paris (March 1953), pp. 102–3. See also Jean d’Ormesson, Au revoir et merci (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 76.

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Indeed Bourdieu’s sociological project was made possible in part by the vast swathes of statistics and surveys collected by the French state to keep a check on, and control, the social origins of its students.15 These statistics show that the Ecole did predominantly favor the children of the middle classes. On average, in the twentieth century, only about 3–4 percent of all students came from agricultural backgrounds, with a similar number coming from workers’ families. In the 1950s about 10 percent were children of artisans. Only about 30 percent, however, were the sons of upper management and liberal professions such as lawyers or doctors. In addition, as Eris MensionRigau has shown, the old aristocracy generally kept their distance from the Revolutionary institution, with its reputation for left-wing politics.16 The majority of its alumni became schoolteachers, and it recruited heavily from the families of this social grouping. The figures show that, although hardly representative, the Ecole did not draw predominantly from the social elite. Indeed its social breakdown was virtually identical to that of the Sorbonne, compared with whose students the Normaliens felt themselves vastly superior.17 Further, in its self-presentation, the Rue d’Ulm acted as a conduit for social mobility: Laurent Fabius, a Lettres (Humanities) student from the 1960s, suggested “the Ecole was like the laboratory of an idea: that of a socially fluid society, where the equality of opportunity was real; that of a social mobility built upon knowledge and work and not on money.”18 Education, which since 1927 had been free for all, was according to the French ideal the best possibility of social advancement. Anyone, so the ideology went, if they were bright enough, could get into the Ecole, and the son of a postmaster from the Pyrenees could eventually become a professor at the Collège de France. In fact, for many the intellectual elitism of the Ecole was the necessary correlate of French democracy. As the President of the Société des amis de l’Ecole, M. Francois-Poncet, suggested in a speech from 1946, “as a democracy becomes more democratic, it needs to pay more attention to the recruitment of its elites. True equality does not consist in fitting all men to the same mold, but in offering all the same chances to distinguish themselves according to their own merits.”19 15 16 17 18

See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Héritiers (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964), and Homo Academicus (Paris: editions de Minuit, 1984). See Jean François Sirinelli, ed., L’Ecole Normale Supérieure: Le livre du bicentennaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 170–9. For the Sorbonne, in 1965, see La Premiere Année de Faculté de Lettres; Enquête sur les Etudiants de 1962–3 inscrits au Certificat d’Etudes Litteraires Generales (Paris, 1965). 19 Bulletin (1946), p. 21. Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, p. 327.

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Rather than attempting to reproduce the social hierarchies of society at large, then, the ENS shut them out. The elitism of the school was marked less by a reproduction of outside class divisions than by the sharp line drawn between it and the rest of the world. As even the ENS communists of the 1960s admitted, the Ecole represented “caste rather than class.”20 The Ecole was not a haven for the already privileged, it created its own privilege: producing, not reproducing, social distinction. As far as the Normaliens were concerned, at least, the main social division was that between inside and outside. Indeed this was the distinction that was reasserted most strongly by Normaliens in their contact with the rest of the world. The school argot was used continually, even outside of the Ecole, where diligent editors added footnotes to the work of Normaliens to explain to the average reader the meanings of the words cacique, bassins des ernests, thurne, pot, ca¨ıman, archicube.21 The discussion of the slang used at the Ecole was also one of the favorite topics of the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure. It served as the cement that brought Normaliens together while excluding all others. The idiosyncrasy of the Ecole extended to people’s names. Derrida was “Jackie” in internal school documents until 1967, and Michel Foucault was called by his first given name, Paul, or referred to as “Fouks.” Pierre Bourdieu was simply known as Félix. Similarly, Normaliens, who settled on “Tao” even later in published works, ignored the transliteration that the Vietnamese Normalien Tran Duc Thao preferred for his own publications. One of the few explicit school rules, in article 5 of the Réglement Intérieure, was that it was “formally forbidden to invite any outsider [toute personne étrangère] into the canteen or to lodge them in school buildings.”22 This same sense of exclusivity was extended to political rights. The ENS granted complete freedom of assembly, except when non-Normaliens were involved. Such rules were not just silent and little-used regulations. Article 5 was the single most enforced rule within the Conseil de discipline in the period 1950–60. On several occasions Normaliens were called to the Conseil to explain the presence of an extra mattress in their room, the fact that a friend had dined at the refectory, or that non-Normaliens had attended 20 21

22

“Conditions et perspectives d’une action a` l’Ecole,” IMEC, ALT2, A43–02.02 sheet 1. The cacique was the student who came top of an exam, in particular the entrance exam to the ENS; the ernests were the fish in the pond at the center of the Ecole; the thurne was the study; the pot was the dining hall, but also the name given to special dinners; the caiman was the director of studies; an archicube was an alumnus. The word canular was successful outside of the narrow confines of the Ecole. It meant a practical joke. For a full list see Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm. “Réunion Petit Conseil de l’ENS,” October 7, 1954, IMEC, ALT2, E1–01.01.

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political events at the Ecole. The only regulation that took up more of the Conseil’s time was that concerning the maintenance of a minimum academic standard. In the case where a student was not deemed to have satisfied these requirements, he could be asked to take a year off, or even leave. The boundaries between Normaliens and the rest of the world were constantly being marked out and reinforced.23 the freedom of the elite Though strict about imposing the division between the inside and outside, for truly “internal” matters, the Conseil de discipline played a very limited role. Only slightly exaggerating, one French review suggested in October 1957 that “the ENS is probably the only academic institution in the world without internal rules.”24 The lack of internal discipline meant that the students had a great level of freedom in their everyday routine. Life was also significantly easier because of the salaries earned by the students as stagiaires fonctionnaires. Officially employees of the state since 1948, they earned a considerable wage above the free accommodation with which they were provided. In addition their status allowed them paid holidays, sick leave, and union representation. Existence at the Ecole seemed carefree. The Normaliens were particularly famous for their practical jokes or the canular, as they called it. Old students would often reminisce about their own, and the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure would regularly dedicate articles to famous canulars of the past, whether transporting a car into the bassins des ernests (the central pond), impersonating a telephone technician to get the school director to sing the “Marseillaise” to test the line, or pretending to be an ignorant Swiss preparing for the baccalaureate, in order to mock the earnest tutoring efforts of a student in the nearby ENS Sèvres pour jeunes filles.25 This lack of institutionalized control extended to academic work: students had no set program of study, nor any determined canon set by their teachers. This intellectual freedom was a product of the School’s history. The Ecole Normale Supérieure was founded in 1794 for the apparently 23 24

25

See papers of the Disciplinary Council, IMEC, ALT2, E2–01.02–12, especially the réunions of July 8, 1952 and March 11, 1953. Quoted in Bulletin (November 1957), p. 7. Only two of the cases between 1950 and 1957, for which records exist, that appeared before the Conseil de discipline did not involve non-Normaliens: two cases involving damage to Ecole property by its students. Cf. Bulletin (November 1957), p. 9. Also Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, p. 500.

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mundane task of training lycée professeurs.26 Nevertheless, its centrality meant that during the nineteenth century the ENS Rue d’Ulm became an important and powerful institution, earning a prestige far beyond that originally imagined. Its power and influence was felt particularly strongly during the Dreyfus affair in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when the Ecole aligned itself with the Dreyfusards. First in a small group around the school librarian Lucien Herr, and then more generally when the head of the ENS, Gabriel Monod, made a public declaration in favor of Dreyfus, the Ecole adopted a hitherto unknown politicization. The embarrassment caused to the government at the time led to a reformation of the ENS in the decree of November 10, 1903 where it was “reunited” with the University of Paris. Following article 10 of this decree, all ENS teaching positions were abolished, and faculty members were given posts at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France.27 It was a change that continued to elicit bitter responses a century later. Even in 1994 there remained ill feeling, with the Livre de Bicentennaire explaining the decree by the jealousy and prejudices of the Sorbonne faculties.28 The reform meant that the only permanent teaching staff was a small group of agrégé-répétiteurs, ex-students normally recruited just after leaving the Ecole. Althusser, for instance, was hired in 1948 immediately after passing the agrégation.29 The figures of authority, then, were few and mostly only a little older than the students they taught. Even they had little contact with the majority of the student body. Althusser would bring together all new students at the beginning of each academic year and ask those that wanted to take philosophy to send him a piece of work by which he would judge their suitability for the subject.30 It is probably this meeting to which Derrida refers when he suggests that he met Althusser on his first day at the Ecole.31 Students would not, however, take a course with him until the year of preparation for the agrégation, two or three years later. In his memoirs, Althusser was clear that he did not aim to impress his way of thinking on his students at the ENS. He was very careful not to affect their own development and would avoid writing comments in the margins 26

27 28 29 30 31

Indeed this is what distinguished the Rue d’Ulm from its brother school, the ENS at St. Cloud, which, at least traditionally, trained teachers for the collèges (schools that did not prepare students for the Baccalaureate). Kleinberg, Generation Existential, pp. 53–4. Sirinelli, Livre du bicentenaire, preface by René Rémond, p. viii. See “Dossier Althusser,” Centre des Archives Contemporaines (hereafter CAC), 930595/31. Yann Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie (Paris: B. Grasset, 1992), p. 461. Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy, p. 183.

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of essays. French schoolchildren were trained to leave most of the first page blank in any composition. This was to allow the professeur to write his or her comments on the front of the work. Althusser, however, feeling such a process unnecessarily invasive, opted instead to write his comments on a separate sheet that could be discarded at will.32 Even this aimed mostly at the presentation of the argument rather than the content. Indeed Althusser took pride in the fact that he “never told anyone to adopt a line of thought which was not his own and to have done otherwise would have been folly.”33 We have evidence of him giving good marks to and approving a wide variety of philosophical styles, from the existentialist to the Christian and Marxist. On first glance the structure of philosophical education at the ENS seemed to work against the formation of philosophical schools or orthodoxies. And though socially the Ecole was relatively closed, it was intellectually open. As no real teaching was undertaken at the Ecole, beyond the agrégation seminars run by invited professeurs délégués, the students were forced to seek classes elsewhere. The need to search for training, teachers, and advisors outside of the Rue d’Ulm opened up students to all the resources of academic Paris, a fact that helps explain the enormous diversity of philosophical and extra-philosophical interests of its students. Given no particular preference for the Sorbonne, Normaliens also looked to other philosophical centers for instruction. Both the Collège de France and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, traditionally peripheral to tertiary education in France, became important sources of new ideas for Normaliens forced to look outside their narrow cloisters for their education. The reform thus unintentionally opened to the students a far greater diversity of educational possibilities than had previously been the case. Numerous Normalien philosophers became important in other fields – with Ducrot, Pariente, Bourdieu, Passeron, and Foucault being only the most famous examples. In a letter of 1975 to the minister of Education the Director of the Ecole noted that “unlike the other Grandes Ecoles, the ENS has no final rankings, because each student personally orients himself towards one of the agrégations, or his own research.”34 Institutionally, the Ecole was an open book, free for students to choose their own educational path. Indeed far from imposing the homogeneity of an elite, the Ecole 32 33 34

Derrida’s later practice mimicked Althusser’s. See Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, “Agrégatifs,” IMEC, ALT2, E6–02.03. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and the Facts, trans. R. Veasey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 163. “Guide sur l’ENS,” IMEC, ALT2, E4–03.02.

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merely provided a secure and comfortable base from which myriad educational opportunities were accessible. In this sense it is just to consider the ENS itself as an ideological “vacuum.”35 In the early 1950s, it was plausible to regard the ENS as merely a dormitory with a library.36 Especially with an agrégé-répétiteur in philosophy who was often sick and away, it seemed as if the Ecole was the ideal seat of learning, a free space where the best and the brightest of France had the freedom to develop their thinking; individual ideas and personal interests could be given free reign. social constraints This picture of a space where students of many different social and metaphysical stripes coexisted in a spirit of intellectual camaraderie was shared by many. It fits both the officially sanctioned presentation of the Ecole as well as the memories of the majority of its students. There were, however, a few for whom the ENS did not resemble such an idyll. As we saw, Michel Serres complained about the “terrorism” of the communist cellule, and Derrida himself later recalled that “Stalinism dominated . . . in a very tyrannical manner.”37 This view was shared by many of those entering the ENS at this time. Some like Philippe Moret,38 Alain Peyrefitte,39 and Jean Charbonnel,40 who were on the right, but others like Derrida, and Bourdieu who were on the non-conformist left, felt the over-bearing pressure of a dominant communism.41 Indeed, on looking back at his time at the Ecole in the early 1950s, the historian Le Roy Ladurie described it as a “spiritual Gulag,” for which, as secretary of the cellule, he felt personally responsible.42 The communists could impose themselves on a certain portion of the student population, because in the absence of explicit regulation social 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Interview Maurice Caveing, November 21, 2006. Cf. also Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser: Une biographie, p. 450. See Jean-Francois Revel, “Une pension de famille autour d’une bibliothèque,” in Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, pp. 320–2. Revel’s title comes from a saying of Albert Thibaudet. Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy, p. 187. See Philippe Moret (Lettres 1956), “Une cellule royaliste,” in Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, pp. 364–5. Moret complained of being called a collabo or a fasciste, because of his monarchist views. He concluded: “the following year, I learnt in Oxford, under a Monarchy, the pleasure of regulated controversies, of civilized political passions, of tolerated eccentricities – well, democracy.” See Alan Peyrefitte, “L’Ecole des Forts en anathées,” in Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, pp. 373–8. See Jean Charbonnel, “La Tentation stalinienne,” in Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, pp. 341–5. See Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), p. 13. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier: P.C.-P.S.U 1945–1963 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 77. Le Roy Ladurie was the head of the communist cellule at the Ecole at the beginning of the 1950s.

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groupings assumed an unavoidable importance. What is surprising about many of the accounts of the ENS is that relations with other students seem to have been very limited. This was despite the size of the school and the closeness of the living conditions, where the first-years’ beds were separated in the dormitory by curtains, and the studies were shared. Very few of Derrida’s contemporaries at the Ecole referred to him in their reminiscences, and, if they did, it was only on the basis of his later philosophy (often negatively). As Macey, in his biography of Foucault, describes, “meals were taken communally at tables of eight in the dining room and it was the custom to remain at the same table for the full three years.”43 It was possible to spend three or four years without knowing all others in your own class: this in an institution where the annual Lettres intake was barely larger than the standard secondary-school class. Social groups were strongly delineated, an ordering both distinguishing them from other groupings and imposing a certain level of uniformity within. The greatest categorical line fell between those who came from Paris and the “provincials.”44 This division carried through from the lycées, where the “provincials” were boarders, while the Parisians went home every night. Bourdieu, recalling his time at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, referred especially to his embarrassment over his accent, which he attempted to disguise, mimicking his peers despite his marked antipathy to Parisian social dominance.45 Beyond this fissure, there existed others that cut through the ENS: such as that between the years and between the Lettres and the Science communities. Life at the ENS was a constant confrontation of social barriers. Michel Serres has described the loneliness that resulted from falling between two large groupings, in his case the scientific and the humanities communities.46 For Derrida, who never fitted neatly into a pre-made faction, the social pressure could be felt even more strongly. Even into the 1990s he still feared entering the ENS and encountered “physical symptoms (I’m talking about my chest and stomach)” at the doorway, but that he also experienced a “school sickness” akin to homesickness when away.47 43 44 45

46 47

David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 26. During this period only 20 percent of students came from Paris proper, but 70 percent had undertaken Ecole Préparatoire there. See Sirinelli, Livre du bicentenaire. Michael Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, Agent Provocateur (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 11–13. For Derrida’s own worries about his non-metropolitan accent see Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 5. Jacques Derrida and François Ewald, “A Certain ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking,” Educational Theory (Summer 1995), pp. 273–91, p. 276.

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In an institution where social networks were small and divisions constantly confronted, the experience of social pressure was very uneven. Louis Althusser described the school as a “womblike” place “where [he] felt warm and at home and was protected from the outside world.”48 As MoulierBoutang stated in his biography, “in short Althusser was crazy about the school [fou de l’Ecole], a true love.”49 But then Althusser had a ready-made social community in the communist cellule. Those who did not belong to such groups often felt threatened and miserable. The two most important types of groupings, which both provided community and a larger purpose to the otherwise inward-looking life of the Normalien, revolved around politics and religion. catholics and communists In a school that presented itself as a free space, but in reality offered a fractured and divided social scene, the largest groupings gained disproportionate influence. It was the communist cellule and the Catholic “Talas” who made their presence felt most keenly during the 1950s, a division and opposition that shows up constantly in all the literature on the school during this period and most of the autobiographies that deal with it.50 There was no a priori reason why these groups should have been mutually exclusive. Indeed, immediately after the war, there was no absolute dividing line between them at the ENS. In a talk by Guyard to mark the 150th anniversary of the Ecole in 1946, two years delayed because of the war, he described “that fraternity where Catholics, existentialists, and communists are but the labels that one wears, often simultaneously.”51 In the late 1940s the Christians and communists were not exclusive groupings, and several students belonged to both camps. In many ways they fed off each other and fought with each other for political predominance and members.52 At the beginning of this period, around 1947, the students’ union, which was part of the larger French syndicalist movement, was dominated by the Christian left and according to Le Roy Ladurie this dominance was overturned by the communists only by 1950.53 Aside from this site where the two groups 48 49 50

51 53

Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, p. 163. Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser: Une biographie, p. 446. See d’Ormesson, Au revoir et merci, p. 78; and Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique.” Though the etymology is disputed, the name Tala, to describe Catholic students, is said to derive from a shortening of “ils von[t a` la] messe.” 52 See also d’Ormesson, Au Revoir et merci, p. 78. Bulletin (November 1946), p. 9. Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier: P.C.-P.S.U. 1945–1963, p. 44. It is important to realize that this was written after the event once Le Roy Ladurie had left the party and was increasingly skeptical of his earlier communist commitments.

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interacted and competed, there was also a significant number of crossovers between the two. Le Roy Ladurie himself was originally part of Catholic groups around 1945 when he was at the Lycée Henri IV.54 His “conversion” to communism only came at the beginning of 1949, and he described it as a religious experience, his “road to Damascus.”55 Indeed this comparison of communism to Christianity is constant in his autobiography, a comparison which at the time was mainly deployed by critics of communism.56 Althusser also made the transition from devout “Tala,” to engaged “Stal.”57 As Moulier Boutang’s biography has shown, despite Althusser’s later account of the period in his autobiographical writings, he was both a Tala and a member of the Communist Party in the period from 1948 until 1952, around when he finally cut ties with the Jeunesse de l’Eglise.58 In what must have been a joke, while writing notes for a presentation on “Religion and Philosophy” in 1948, Althusser wrote on the back of two pieces of paper, one being a circular letter from the Jeunesse de l’Eglise, the other being the current cellule news sheet.59 Throughout this period most Talas were socialist, and many preferred at least a political alliance with the communists.60 Towards the end of the 1940s, however, the comfortable cohabitation of the Christians and the communists became troubled: the Cold War had come to the Ecole. As we have seen, relations between the Church and Party were always tense, perhaps in part due to their competition over the allegiances of the young. But soon the national split came to manifest itself at the local level. In 1949 by Papal decree all members of the Communist Party were excommunicated, and the Church authorities looked mistrustfully on the radical political programs of several of its young 54 56

57

58 59

60

55 Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 26. See IMEC, ALT2, E4–02.01, where the students of the Mouvement de la Paix are described as “Jesuits of communism.” Or the complaint by the editor of the communist journal Action of “those sensitive souls that complain that communism is a Church,” in a letter to Esprit, February 1945, p. 409. Le Roy Ladurie and Althusser were not alone, and a significant number of their year professed allegiance to both groups in the early years after World War II. Other notable Catholics-becomecommunists were Sève, Verley, Verret, Ricci, Caveing. See Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” p. 71. For problems concerning metaphysical questions and burgeoning points of dissonance, see the survey by Esprit: “Le Communisme et les e´tudiants,” Esprit (February, March and April 1946). Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie, p. 237. See “Agrégation exposés,” IMEC, ALT2, E5–02. The notes come as part of exposés on the same theme from 1954, but it appears that Althusser often brought his own earlier student work to such sessions and inserted them there in his files. See Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” p. 71. And Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, p. 374. The MRP had only brief support at the ENS at the end of the War.

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adherents. The left-leaning Jeunesse de l’Eglise – “faithful to the Church while resisting” – which acted as a significant cross-over journal in this period for young French Catholics, was censored by the Church and forced to close in 1953.61 The crisis caused by the split led to a decline in the Talas, where members had to choose between the political and the spiritual, a crisis that was not fully overcome until the mid 1950s.62 The resistance to the previous peaceful coexistence did not only come from the Catholics. It also grew out of the strengthening position of the cellule that was becoming more unwilling to accept the religious idiosyncrasies of some of its members. This was the time of the Tito rebellion and the Lysenko affair, when the communists aimed to promote ideological purity and no longer turned a blind eye to doctrinal deviance.63 Much of the antipathy was directed specifically towards the Catholics, and the rising voice of the Stalinist left, La Nouvelle Critique, accused the personnalist journal Esprit in 1949 and 1950 of Titoism.64 Politically, the communists were for most of this period unrivalled, and it was they who made the deepest impression on the generation of Normaliens who entered the school in the decade between 1946 and 1956. The party of “75,000 fusillés,” fallen comrades of the French Resistance, enjoyed a considerable allure and mystique during the “années d’épuration” in a country coming to terms with its Vichy and collaborationist past. This prestige and unimpeachable moral standing was essential to the party as the Cold War came to dominate the political horizons. On a more local level many of the Ecole’s own resistance heroes had strong links to communism. It was natural that the cellule was the first organization in the ENS to have explicit links to a national political party.65 The popularity of the communists was not only limited to intellectuals. Around this time about 5 million or about 25 percent of the electorate regularly voted for the Communist Party. It also occupied a central place in the political imagination of the time, from the start of the Cold War around 1947, through China’s revolution in 1949, to the wars in Indo-China and Korea, and the McCarthy witchhunts in the United States. In this general context, its level of support in the student body was hardly exceptional. 61 62 63 64 65

“Communiqué: Supplement au Bulletin de Liaison,” La Jeunesse de l’Eglise 24 (October 1953). See also La Jeunesse d’Eglise (November 1953). This was the last issue. See Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” p. 74. See Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie, p. 312. And Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” chapter 1. See Jean Kanapa: “Gendarmes et sirènes,” La Nouvelle Critique (January 1950), pp. 33–4, with the gloves coming off in “‘Esprit’ jette le masque,” La Nouvelle Critique (April 15, 1950). See Sirinelli, Livre du bicentenaire, p. 202.

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On the other side, despite being the largest group at the ENS and the apparent organization under the “Prince Tala,” by the early 1950s the Catholics had been severely weakened by the clashes with the communists. They settled back into political neutrality that allowed old wounds to heal, and maintained an uneasy unity of students from across a political spectrum ranging from monarchists to communist fellow travelers. Never presenting a unified front, the influence of the Catholics was never felt so forcefully outside their circle as that of the communist cellule.66 But if the Catholics were not doctrinally evangelical like the communists, they did at least provide an intellectual safe haven. Both due to its support amongst the students, its political neutrality, and the peculiar religious history of many of the communist cellule members, Christianity was accepted as a legitimate doctrinal choice. The Catholics provided respite and space free from the dominant communists. Roger Faroux, who entered the Ecole in 1947, suggested that, when faced with harassment from the “Vychinsky en herbe,” one always had the possibility to “proclaim oneself a Tala, and thus untouchable.”67 For this reason, even at the peak of the cellule’s importance and success, it was never hegemonic. It is clear from the panoply of religious and political groupings at the ENS that even in the early 1950s the communist cellule did not enforce its belief on the majority of the student population. It was possible to be a Catholic (many were), and indeed there were even a few Gaullists in the ENS. When the changing situation dictated that one could no longer be both a communist and a Christian, several chose to drop their political, rather than religious, affiliation. Nevertheless, while in the late 1940s communists and Catholics grudgingly attempted to work together, and in the ENS ideas swapped easily and quickly, as students changed their alignment, with the cooling of relations at the beginning of the Cold War, positions hardened, and opposing orthodoxies became unavoidable. Those who found themselves outside of any of the standard social and political groups would become the targets of a newly intensified communist evangelism. philosophical politics and politicized philosophy When Derrida entered the Ecole, the two main social groupings mapped directly onto the twin poles of French philosophy, indicated by Sartre’s 66 67

Jean-François Sirinelli, “Les Normaliens de la Rue d’Ulm après 1945: une génération communiste?” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (October–December 1986), p. 573. Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, p. 326. Andrei Vyshinsky was the public prosecutor in the Stalinist show trials.

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Existentialism Is a Humanism. It was no coincidence. As we have seen, Christian and communist parties benefited the most in the elections after the War. When Normaliens too turned to the two great ideologies of the age in 1945, they followed broader trends in French society. But the impact of Catholicism and communism was felt more strongly at the Ecole, whose curious social situation provided a mechanism whereby these social groups amassed considerable influence, not only over their own members, but also – in the case of the communist cellule – over other students. Understanding the influence they wielded is important for our study of Derrida, because the Catholic Talas and the communist cellule had a profound impact on the type of philosophy studied at the Ecole. Indeed, the success of communism and Catholicism after the War can be attributed in part to an inherent intellectual element, what Bédarida has called a double messianism.68 Both offered an explanation of the sufferings of the War and the trials of the occupation, and both inscribed them into a larger picture that gave them meaning. Further, they both adhered to metaphysical systems that claimed authority in all areas of academic study, not just religion or politics. With Marxism as much an intellectual stance as a political outlook, philosophers dominated not just the membership but also the leadership of the cellule.69 So the social divisions served to reinforce a philosophical divide. This was exacerbated by the peculiarities of the political moment. For the communists, after 1947 and the beginning of the Cold War, politics played out at the international level. The defining issues were external, distant, and focused on foreign affairs. It was a time of world-historical struggle but not immediate local political action. Le Roy Ladurie referred to it as a “sterile time,” lacking the passion of the Resistance, or the strength of feeling surrounding the Algerian War or the events of May 1968.70 The era was characterized predominantly by a strong but generalized antiAmericanism – the communists demonstrating against visits of American generals and presidents – coupled with marked anti-German feeling.71 The journal of the ENS cellule at this period almost never discussed issues pertaining to the institution itself, except for an article on strikes at 68 70 71

69 Ibid., p. 59. See Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” p. 74. See also Derrida’s judgment in “The Time of a Thesis,” in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge University Press, 1983). One of the favourite slogans was “Ridgeway-le-Peste,” referring to Matthew Bunker Ridgeway, a leading American general in the Korean War, come to Europe as the Commander of the Allied Forces. The slogan referred to allegations that he was responsible for the use of biological warfare in Korea.

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the school in December 1953.72 It rather focused on international questions, such as German rearmament, the war in Indo-China, the CED (Communauté Européenne de Défense), and the death of Stalin: “Stalin has gone, his work remains.”73 In comparison to the 1960s, when the majority of strikes at the Ecole militated for improved living conditions, wages, and safety, in the early 1950s it was nuclear armament and the school’s role in weapons development that sold communist pamphlets and got students onto the streets. With the attention focused at the international level, politics seemed a battle of ideas, and the struggle more abstract than real and concrete. As Gabriel Robin (Lettres 1949) declared, the sounds of a world in tumult (Korea, Indo-China) broke through the walls of our cloister all the more as we were persuaded to recognize there the echo of another battle, the true one, our own, that which tore in two the Republic of Letters, and had at stake, not the derisory movement of some frontier, but the meaning of history and the future of the Spirit . . . That was what gave to the séances at the Salle des Actes the allure of a revolutionary tribunal, before which, from Tito’s rebellion to the trial of Mindszenty, the events of the day were cited to be compared and to justify themselves.74

The obverse side of this intellectualization of politics was a politicization of intellectual life. Perspectives on science in the very early 1950s provide a case study for this phenomenon.75 With Pavlov in psychology and Lysenko in biology, the Soviet Union hoped to promote a “proletarian science” that would challenge Western “bourgeois” dominance.76 This challenge was particularly fraught over the question of biology, where Lysenko’s adaptation-based “neo-Lamarckianism” fit communist ideology better than the competition-driven Darwinian explanation, which seemed to naturalize capitalist ideology.77 Thus before 1952, in numerous student presentations on biology, a Lysenko approach was taken as a necessary 72

73 74

75 76 77

Up until the school year 1948–9, the majority of the newssheet touched on issues directly pertaining to the school. From mid 1948, however, and later as the Cold War developed, the journal turned its sights on national and international projects that only concerned the ENS indirectly, if at all. March 1953 edition of ENS, the cellule journal, p. 6, in IMEC, ALT2, A43–03.02. Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, p. 302. Mindszenty was a Hungarian cardinal, arrested in December 1948 and tried in 1949. In February he was found guilty of conspiring against the Hungarian government and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The main charge was his resistance to the secularization of Hungary’s schools. Science was a particularly important part of the Zhdanov project, and the journal Le Nouvelle Critique in the period 1948–52 published articles supporting Lysenko in virtually every edition. For a more detailed account of the affair see Dominique Lecourt, Lysenko (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976). In fact Lysenko’s major opponent was Mendel, and his work is not incompatible with a Darwinian model.

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critique of simplistic Darwinism. As a student (François Ricci) stated in 1949, setting up an opposition between Darwin’s purely efficient causes and Kant’s finalism, “causality [Darwin] doesn’t explain enough, finalism [Kant] explains too much.”78 It was only the adaptive approach that Lysenko supported, which offered a happy balance. Further, taking into account the work and praxis of the individual, Lysenko’s biology sat better with Marxist epistemology. Even such moderate Marxists as Foucault subscribed to the view.79 In philosophy, adherence to Soviet Marxist orthodoxy and Lysenkoism was perhaps easier than in the hard sciences, where such movement away from Western scientific norms caused severe professional difficulties. For Claude Engelmann, a biologist who entered the ENS in 1945 and like many of his generation joined the Communist Party, the tension between his political views and scientific practice proved too much. According to Moulier Boutang, his suicide in 1949 is in part attributable to the conflict.80 The Lysenko affair had a powerful effect on the communists at the Ecole, and from this perspective the portrayal of the cellule in the 1950s as a tame Soviet lapdog is perhaps excessive. For it was precisely in reaction to the affair that the Ecole cellule asserted itself against the French party. At the conference of the PCF section de la Vème Arrondissement in May 1954, Althusser addressed his comrades.81 The move followed hot on the heels on the exclusion of Auguste Lecoeur in March of that year. Lecoeur, one of the rising stars of the PCF, had enforced the commitment to Lysenko’s biology in France, but had fallen out of favor with the death of Stalin and a changed political landscape. Althusser, representing the ENS cellule, expressed dismay that Lecoeur’s “heterodoxy” had taken so long to be unearthed and, in what must have been a bold intervention, blamed it on the excessive centralization of the party in France, which quashed any criticism. Althusser offered the ENS cellule as an appropriate site of critique, the intellectual elite of France who should also be the intellectual elite of the Party. Even as Althusser presented the ENS as the critical heart of the PCF, he declared it responsible for the intellectual health of the nation as well. The goal was 78 79 80 81

François Ricci, “Explication en biologie,” 1949, in IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. Fiszer, “Biologie, e´volution,” February 6, 1951; Jean Laplanche “Finalité,” March 27, 1950; Michel Foucault, “Que-ce que un fait σ ?” February 23, 1951; all in IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. See Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie, p. 415. The report was from Althusser and written for the ENS Langevin cellule for personnel, but given the fonctionnaire stagiaire status of the students and the fact that this name was often used interchangeably with that of the Elèves Communistes de l’ENS on the Communist newsletter, it can be assumed that they were one and the same thing.

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to defend and further our ideological principles, those of Marxism-Leninism, amongst the intellectuals, to make known the works of Soviet science and culture, to develop our own scientific and artistic works inspired by the principles of dialectical materialism and socialist realism: as many examples as will provide the concrete demonstration of the justice and the richness of our principles, and will lead more and more honest intellectuals to adopt our own ideological positions, upon which French culture will tomorrow be built.82

The reaction to the Lecoeur exclusion was not to weaken the link between the political and the academic, to reject the inter-mixing of politics and science. On the contrary, Althusser wanted to strengthen it. If the ENS cellule had an aspiration to be the guardian of orthodoxy in the PCF, this boded even less well for those on the fringes of the cellule at the Ecole. The effort towards a pure Marxism began at home. The cellule saw its role in the promotion of Marxist-Leninism in the party and beyond, at the most abstract and philosophical level. When Althusser sought signs of bourgeois decadence, he found them not in general culture, but in the university: I think that in all fairness we must go much further and say that the ideological concept of science represents at the current hour the most advanced form, a characteristic form, of Imperialist bourgeois ideology. In an entire current of bourgeois ideology, in effect, whether it is in the philosophy of history, from Dilthey, Weber, up until Raymond Aron; or in social psychology and cultural anthropology with the current American school, or whether in the history of science with, to take but one example, the work of Canguilhem, or whether in philosophy properly speaking with Heidegger and his epigones, we are witnesses of the radical reduction of science to ideology, of which Heidegger’s philosophy (and it is no coincidence) in an abstract form, provides the final philosophical justification.83

The political oppositions of the time were translated for the students at the Ecole into the academic realm. Indeed, the cellule saw intellectual work and especially philosophy as the most pressing area of concern. It is for this reason that they founded the Politzer Circle in 1948. Named after the Marxist psychologist and resistance hero Georges Politzer, it intended to inform both communists and non-communists alike of “the possibilities of Marxist criticism.” Diagnosing the intellectual state of many students, the group suggested that “Normaliens, whatever their intellectual orientation, on the one hand prove each day, in their work and their activity, that the universe of traditional culture is breaking up and is becoming more and 82 83

“Report of ENS cellule 1954,” IMEC, ALT2, A42–02.07. Louis Althusser, “Sur la lutte idéologique,” IMEC, ALT2 A42–02.11, sheets 11–12.

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more distant from the real world, and on the other hand, imperiously feel the need to bring back their disciplines and their activities to the world in which they live.”84 The Politzer Circle organized seminars in all academic subjects, from history and philosophy to mathematics and biology, to remedy intellectual ills with the salve of Marxist-Leninist ideas. The focus was thus predominantly on theoretical questions, where philosophy was seen as the cornerstone discipline. For the Marxists at the Ecole the primary struggle was academic, and the battleground was the classroom. At its peak, this un- or hyper-critical Stalinism – to the other students it amounted to much the same thing – firmly imprinted itself on life at the ENS. Its influence was felt within the party; wobbly comrades were sent to the ca¨ıman of philosophy to have their faith affirmed, or in the terminology of the school, “se faire Althusser [to Althusser oneself].”85 But more importantly it made itself felt outside of the party. By seeing its mission in the grandest of historical terms, the cellule may have blinded itself to immediate political demands, but it did remain acutely aware of the political valence of intellectual life. As Mochon described, “the zealous militantism which was demanded of the Normaliens, doubled up as a strict intellectual discipline.”86 The Christians too presented a certain orthodoxy. After all, philosophical study gave the opportunity to question materialist perspectives and open up the possibility – through judicious references to Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Marcel – of religious belief; religious commitments also manifested themselves in philosophical work.87 But, at a time when it was the communists 84

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Marxist theory at the Ecole placed emphasis both on the students’ intellectual formation and on the more material aspect of their lives, which was supposed to inform it. Jacques Juillard perhaps best sums up this atmosphere governed by grand political dreams which had no immediate outlet save in the academic sphere or the laughably banal: “[the communists] inundated us with petitions in favor of political prisoners from around the entire world, except of course from the communist world, and they assured us that the rearmament of Germany would certainly provoke a Third World War. And, good materialists, they looked, in the struggle for the amelioration of our living condition, for the spark that would make us ‘understand’; thus they were particularly active in the Pot commission which regularly discussed with the Intendent the quality of the Friday fish.” Jacques Julliard, “Rentrée dans les basses couches de l’atmosphère,” in Peyrefitte, Rue d’Ulm, pp. 120–2. Derrida at the time was on the pot commission with Jacques Juillard. See “ENS: Vie associative et sportive,” CAC, 930595/108. According to Marguerite Derrida, his culinary activism arose from his food allergies. François Dufay, Les Normaliens (Paris: JC Lattès, 1993), p. 200. According to Peeters, Derrida, “se faire Althusser” referred also to academic support. Mochon, “L’Ecole Normale et la politique,” p. 126. The Marxist students included Lucien Sève, Arthur Krebs, and André Vergez. Among the Christians were Jean Reynaud, Jacques Fauve, Olivier Bloch, Jean Beaulieu, and Hubert Grenier. In an interesting move the communist Verret demonstrated a reverse development from traditionally Marxist solutions to increasing mystical ones in the early 1950s. See “Agrégation exposés,” ALT2, E5–01, 02, and 03.

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who were the most vibrant social grouping and the most evangelical, it was they and not the Christians who were able to project their political and philosophical influence outside the bounds of the party. saving husserl and heidegger from sartre The Ecole Normale Supérieure provided a space where the largest social and political groups could exercise considerable philosophical influence over the students. Philosophical positions were not isolated from general social life, but had direct and powerful meanings there. Non-communists felt considerable pressure to conform to party ideology, and, unable to appeal to the relative sanctuary of the “Cave Tala,” non-aligned students such as Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida were especially vulnerable. It is consequently of vital import to understand the precise political valence of certain philosophical positions, in order to understand how they might have impacted upon Derrida’s development. For our purpose here, the philosophical manifestations of social and political differences is most important with respect to Sartre, Heidegger, and Husserl. In an article that Althusser wrote under the pseudonym Pierre Découd in 1949 discussing the agrégation exam in philosophy, he declared that idealism as a philosophy was dead:88 After Munich, World War II, treason, resistance, in the face of the great strikes, the threat of war, and the struggle for peace, you don’t need to be a psychologist or a sociologist, it is enough to be a man to believe in history and in man, in the science of human facts and Marxist rationalism, and to throw over the roofs the carcass of the Kantian subject or the envelope of the Hegelian Spirit.89

Althusser interpreted the number of questions about history on the agrégation exam as the self-recognition of a crisis within petit-bourgeois philosophy. His criticism was aimed against the new interpretations of Hegel, especially those of Kojève and Hyppolite, which focused too much on the anthropological and subjective side of Hegel. This “revisionnisme sorbonnard” was, according to Althusser, “fascist.”90 He, on the other hand, emphasized the objective elements of Hegel’s thought, something that he had promoted since his Mémoire thesis on the concept of content in 88 90

89 Ibid. Louis Althusser, “Sujets d’agrégation,” IMEC, ALT2, A1–01.08. “Le Retour a` Hegel, dernier mot du revisionnisme universitaire,” IMEC, ALT2, A34–04, published in La Nouvelle Critique 20 (1950), pp. 42–53, signed “La Commission de critique du cercle des philosophes communistes.”

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Hegel. The battle lines were drawn between objective science and individual experience.91 But if the new Hegel interpretation was bad, far worse was “existentialofascist” philosophy.92 Indeed it was idealist phenomenology, Heidegger and his “existentialist epigones,” that was presented as the greatest danger to historical materialism.93 The indiscriminate raising of individual experience to the realm of philosophical validity through the process of phenomenological description privileged subjective experience above objective science. At the ENS, the move against Sartre can be seen in the DESs (Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures or Mémoire, comparable to a Master’s thesis) and the practice agrégation exposés (oral presentations) of the period, which Althusser collected and preserved. Sartre, for all the stated Normalien disregard for the populist philosopher, was a standard reference for much of this period. From the beginning of this period up until 1953 or 1954 there were even a few figures who one might even call “existentialist” in a broad sense: students such as Jean-Jacques Rinieri (1944 promotion), Pierre Aubenque (1947), Claude Papin (1948), Michel Gourinat (1949), or Gérard Granel (1949). It was a group that is surprising for its heterogeneity: Aubenque, a Protestant with communist leanings; Gourinat and Granel, who were central figures in the Tala community; and Claude Papin, a card-carrying communist. But apart from this noteworthy but small group of students, what is most apparent about the first part of this period, up to the first two years of the 1950s, is that Sartre was a constant reference for a large number of Normaliens on a wide range of subjects, including “Others” (autrui), “time,” “nothingness,” “emotion,” “sentiment,” “signification,” and “psychoanalysis.” Sartre’s philosophy could be employed for almost any theme. The students, at this time, took Sartre seriously, even if he was no master thinker. For some Sartre acted as a mediating figure, leading Jacques Fauve, Michel Foucault, and François Jodelet to phenomenology,94 or Gérard Granel towards Bergson.95 For many others, he was the last moment of their dissertation before a final critical but 91

92 93 94

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Though Hegel had been an important interlocuteur in the first years after the War, the names of Kojève and other important Hegel commentators are not found in the ENS exposés, and references to Hegel were predominantly negative. Louis Althusser, “Notes,” IMEC, ALT2, A34–02.05. “L’enseignement de la philosophie,” Esprit (June 1954), in IMEC, ALT2, A49–01.02. Scheler and Husserl respectively see Jacques Fauve, “Sentiment,” April 7, 1950; Pierre Aubenque, “Présent,” July 7, 1950; or Michel Foucault, “Connaissance d’autrui,” February 13, 1950; all in IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. Gérard Granel, “Néant,” November 20, 1952, IMEC, ALT2, E5–01.

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personal conclusion. For instance Jean-Paul Milou, in a discussion of the néant (nothingness), followed Sartre through his attempt to suppress traditional dualities but then criticized the reestablishment of such dualities in the system pour-soi/en-soi, which Milou hoped to overcome in a Hegelian dialectic.96 Though rarely more than just a reference, his consistent presence in so many of these papers shows that, while he was not always endorsed, Sartre was unavoidable and respected.97 But as the 1950s progressed, first the communists and then later the Christians stopped referring to Sartre. By the time Derrida arrived at the Ecole, Sartre had lost his centrality.98 After 1954 it is only on exposés about “autrui” that he was mentioned, and then in passing along with a large number of other philosophers, an example of a pessimistic approach to intersubjectivity. From being a thinker of reference, he had become a useful example on a single subject. The existentialist age at the Ecole had come to an end. Heidegger too suffered a decline in fortunes. He had, to be sure, never enjoyed the same popularity and certainly not the same breadth of appeal. Rather he was just another existentialist approached through Sartre. When mentioned, it was the Heidegger of What Is Metaphysics?, giving a modern twist to Kierkegaardian themes, who was most often invoked. Indeed in the DESs that we have from the time, Heidegger was read almost exclusively through the Corbin translation and discussed only in relation to Sartre, and the existential analysis of Dasein.99 But in the ENS, just as outside of the Ecole, the Catholics were beginning to take seriously a new analysis of Heidegger, a change precipitating around the presence at the Ecole of Jean Beaufret himself. Between 1953 and 1957, mapping Derrida’s time at the ENS, the only people who refer to Heidegger were those interested in mystical thought, using Heidegger to justify openness to the divine, and the place of the sacred.100 And this was an interpretation that had cut its ties with Sartre. Very few of those referring to Heidegger after 1952 referred to Sartre at the same time; Heidegger had been disaggregated from the existentialist mélange. Now philosophers 96 97 98 99

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Jean-Paul Milou, “Néant,” 1950, IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. See Claude Papin, “ et Metaϕ,” [undated, probably 1950–1], IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. The communists really stopped referring to Sartre at the end of 1952, and it was only Christians like Granel, Faucon-Lamboi, Gourinat, and Arnaud who continued doing so up until 1954. See ENS Archives, Jean-Jacques Rinieri, Mémoire 1946/3; or Pierre Greco, Mémoire 1948/8. Also Michel Foucault, “Temps,” [undated, probably 1949–50]; Claude Papin, “Néant,” [undated, probably 1951–2]; René Faucon-Lamboi, “Néant,” [undated, probably 1951–2]; in IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. See Michel Gourinat, “Le phénomène,” [undated, probably 1952–3]; [unnamed], “L’Homme mesure,” 1954; Philippe d’Harcourt, “Problème,” 1955; all in IMEC, ALT2, E5–03.

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such as Gourinat, Faucon-Lamboi, Dussort, and Jodelet focused on Being, translated into Christian language.101 In his reminiscences, Derrida himself remarked upon the religious and spiritualist interpretation of Heidegger at the Ecole, describing the “occult atmosphere” in which Gourinat, Granel, Grenier and Faucon-Lamboi studied Heidegger.102 On the other side of the aisle, after the existentialist age, “Hitler’s philosopher” (as Althusser named him in 1949) had no support among communists.103 But if the communists were resistant to Sartre and Heidegger during Derrida’s stay at the ENS, this was not true of Sartre’s other German source: Husserl. True, in the first part of this period, Husserl and Heidegger’s work was intimately connected with Sartre’s. Husserl was presented almost always through the existentialists, drawing on existential themes, particularly the return to the concrete. Many in the late 1940s cited his perspectivism, or the immanence of sense, while Aubenque emphasized negative intentionality in an exposé on existence, privileging the Sartrean reading.104 However, at this stage Husserl remained but a passing reference, except for a few students like Pierre Aubenque or Michel Foucault, who had approached Husserl through Sartre, and at least at this stage maintained a Sartrean interpretation.105 As Sartre began to lose his status in the early 1950s, so did Husserl. Of those joining the Ecole in 1948, not one invoked Husserl in their exposés. As we have seen, by the beginning of the 1950s a new Husserl interpretation was gaining currency outside of the ENS and it would soon find adherents within it. Althusser, who in his 1949 article had attacked Sartre and Heidegger, did not blanketly condemn Husserl too. As Althusser suggested, Husserl’s project was like Kant’s, a transcendental philosophy, one that would found a science. The existentialists, on borrowing ideas from Husserl and Kant’s philosophy, “betray the still valid inspiration of those masters to whom they expressly adhere.”106 The argument is clearly reminiscent of Thao’s and Lyotard’s, which I discussed briefly in chapter 1. 101 102

103 104

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Cf. Alain Pons, exposé, [undated, probably 1955–6], IMEC, ALT2, E5–03. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. II, p. 93. Faucon-Lamboi is later mentioned in the Annuaire of the Ecole as working at the Ecole Chrétienne a` distance. Pons and André Tubeuf wrote for the Catholic journal Cahiers Tala. Morin’s exposés often have a religious theme: see especially “Autrui,” which demands a mystical aspect for all interhuman relations. See Althusser, “Sujets d’agrégation.” See Foucault, “Négation chez Husserl et Hegel,” [undated, probably 1949–50], IMEC, ALT2, E5–01, and early Mémoires such as that by Jean-Jacques Rinieri, “Esquisse d’une esthètique phénoménologique,” which draws on the Corbin Heidegger and the existentialist Husserl. ENS Archive Mémoire 1946–3. Aubenque also wrote his DES on intentionality in Husserl. Louis Althusser, “Notes,” IMEC, ALT2, A58–04.04.

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From 1950 this non-Sartrean interpretation of Husserl was beginning to show through in the Normalien exposés. Starting with Jacques Fauve (promotion 1947), it spread to others, such as Foucault, who by 1951 had left his Sartrean reading of phenomenology behind.107 For these students, Husserl was a philosopher of science, writer of the Crisis of the European Sciences and the Formal and Transcendental Logic. But the real impetus to the new reading was the publication of Tran Duc Thao’s book in 1951.108 Thao had argued that Husserl’s thought had been tending ever further towards materialism, where an openness to the pre-predicative sphere could explain the rise of science. The process of genesis from this sphere, moreover, suggested that the material substratum must be understood dialectically. Read carefully, according to Thao, Husserl’s work provided a phenomenological justification for Marxist dialectical materialism. In the academic year 1952–3 Husserl came back with a vengeance, and Thao’s interpretation dominated. Now, rather than the author who returned to “the things themselves,” the students focused on Husserl’s analysis of the genesis of knowledge from the antepredicative sphere. Existence was no longer “absurd”; it provided the foundation for science. Around half of the exposés that mention Husserl in that year make a direct reference to Thao, something otherwise unheard of for the author of a secondary work.109 At first, Thao’s influence was felt almost entirely by the communists. Other older Christian Husserlians like Gourinat writing at the same time do not seem to have absorbed the new interpretation, nor do Catholic students like Oswald Ducrot, Arnaud, or Dussort, readers who were still considering Husserl through the lens of Sartre.110 But, unlike Catholic ideas, which never found a receptive audience outside the group of Tala philosophers, by 1954 we see non-aligned students starting to absorb the Thao line – students like Pontevia, analyzing passive synthesis and genesis – that started to influence everyone by 1955. Reading student work, we can see considerable development in the understanding of phenomenology in the ENS from 1950 to 1955. At the 107

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Fauve was a communist whose work shows considerable mystical and religious leanings, writing at the time when such a combination was possible. See Jacques Fauve, “Méthode,” March 13, 1950, IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. Foucault “ϕ et σ ,” [undated, probably 1949–50], IMEC, ALT2, E5–01. Indeed it was Foucault who recommended Tran Duc Thao’s book to Derrida. Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trans. D. Herman and D. Morano (Boston: D. Reidel, 1986). See two unnamed exposés: “Objectivity,” 1953; and Bloch, “L’Association des idées”; IMEC, ALT2, E5–01 and 03. See Michel Gourinat, “Le Problème de la peine,” January 23, 1953, IMEC, ALT2, E5–02.

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beginning, existentialism found a broad base of support, with many students regarding Sartre as a serious philosophical interlocutor, even if for the majority he was an opponent. If Heidegger or Husserl was invoked, it was always and only through the existentialist interpretation. But as the communist distrust of Sartre peaked in the 1950s, first the communists, then those in between, and finally the Christians dropped Sartre, and along with him, Husserl and Heidegger. It was only later, with the rise of new interpretations of Husserl and Heidegger, supported by the communists and the Christians respectively, that these thinkers returned to the Normalien canon, now disaggregated from each other. The ENS had entered into the post-existentialist world, where Sartre’s critics hoped to salvage the existentialists’ main philosophical resources. Looking at the period when Derrida was at the Ecole, the greatest intellectual divide was that between the Christians and the communists, who had only recently closed their mutual border. In a survey of the reading habits of Normaliens in 1953 written by Pierre Bandet, this division took on a structural dimension: Above all, let us not forget the influence exerted by political and religious preferences. One person will spend the year reading Aragon’s The Communists or the new Soviet novelists; the other will prefer Bernanos or Léon Bloy;111 one will meditate on the work of Lenin, the other the Bible or the Church Fathers . . . a knock on the door; it’s a student selling l’Humanité, or Témoignage Chrétien.112

In addition to their different reading habits, the two groups also adopted opposing stances on Husserl and Heidegger. Both looked to one or other of Sartre’s German influences for grounds to criticize existentialism. By the mid 1950s and reflecting broader trends in French philosophy, Normaliens had come to regard Husserl as a resource for Marxist scientific thought and Heidegger as a quasi-Christian thinker. derrida’s place Where, in this highly fraught and politically charged institution, can one locate Derrida? He cannot be placed unproblematically in either the communist or the Christian camp. From his philosophical history, one would be inclined to group him with the Catholics. At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, between the Catholic Etienne Borne, his philosophy teacher, and the 111 112

Georges Bernanos and Léon Bloy were mid-twentieth-century French Catholic writers. La Revue de Paris (March 1953), pp. 95 and 103.

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Marxist Emile Tersen, who taught him history, Derrida leaned towards Borne. The feeling was mutual, and in a report card sent to the ENS for entry in 1952, Borne praised his student as “a candidate of the absolutely first order,” whereas Tersen remarked simply that he had “a very solid and serious year.”113 Further, we can plausibly trace Derrida’s suspicion of the Communist Party to his Algerian background. In a 1998 interview, Derrida stated, “when I was in Hypokhâgne in Algiers, I began to belong to leftist Algerian groups. Mandouze114 was around at that time, in ’47, ’8 and ’9 and I was 17 years old. I belonged to groups that took a stance, I was politically aware. Without being for Algerian independence, we were against the harsh politics of France. We fought for a decolonization by the transformation of the special statutes for Algerians.”115 Combining support for the political and social development of the non-European Algerian population, with a resistance to calls for Algerian independence, Derrida’s political stance resembled that of liberals like Albert Camus.116 Comparing French colonialism unfavorably to the standards of French republicanism, this “liberal” position, which would attract the ire of Algerian nationalists and French communists in the later 1950s and early 1960s, may have made Derrida sympathetic to many of the communists’ social aims, but suggests a significant divergence on matters of ideology. Thus, though by the time Derrida arrived at the Ecole Le Roy Ladurie might have been convinced, as Marguerite Derrida has recalled, that one day Derrida would join the cellule, we can understand why he never did.117 According to Derrida’s own account it was to dissident left-wing groups that he belonged, along with his friends Lucien Bianco and Pierre Bourdieu:118 “when I was a student at the Ecole Normale (we have to speak 113 114 115 116

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“ENS: Concours d’entrée,” Archives nationals (hereafter AN), AJ 61, 173, 1952. André Mandouze, a Catholic anti-colonial activist. Aziz Chouaki, L’Etoile d’Alger (Alger: Marsa, 1998), p. 130. Indeed it was only in the late 1950s that Derrida’s perspective on colonialism came to change, and his identification with the French of Algeria would last far longer. See my “Liberalism and the Algerian War: the case of Jacques Derrida.” Interview Marguerite Derrida, May 26, 2007. According to Bourdieu, he with Derrida, Jean Pariente and Louis Bianco formed the anti-Stalinist Committee for the Defence of Freedom. (Pierre Bourdieu, Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocyba and Bernd Schwibs, “The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory, Culture, and Society 3.3 (1986), p. 35.) But we must remember that Bourdieu made his claim after Pierre Juquin had identified him as a member of the cellule in Le Monde, and there seems precious little other evidence for its existence. See Jean-Pierre Bernard, Paris Rouge 1944–1964 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1991), pp. 76–7.

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about this they aren’t anecdotes), the school’s communist group was truly hegemonic – Stalinist and hegemonic. And it was extremely difficult for someone on the Left (need I remind people that I’ve always been on the Left?) to be thought of only as a crypto-communist or a fellow traveler. It was very difficult not to join the Party.”119 If the complexities of Derrida’s Jewish Algerian background were obstacles to his wholehearted acceptance of communism, they must have made his relationship to the Talas even more difficult. Derrida’s friends at this time included many Catholics, including Robert Abirached and Michel Aucouturier, whose sister, Marguerite, Derrida would marry in Boston during his year at Harvard from 1956 to 1957.120 But for all this personal closeness, it is clear that Derrida was never a Tala. The Talas were predominantly a social group. They were comprised of people who went to Mass and joined together for prayer and religious service. If Derrida was close to the Talas philosophically and even personally, he was never one of them. The particular conjuncture of social, ideological, and political forces at the Ecole would have placed considerable pressure on Derrida’s philosophical ideas. Though he was close philosophically with the Talas, he could never join them. Rather Derrida found himself on the outskirts of the cellule, attracted perhaps to their political project, but resistant to their philosophical ideas. He was thus particularly susceptible to the social influence of the communists, who were at the peak of their power, and able to impose their ideas with an unrivalled ease on a certain section of the student body. In this position, it was no longer possible for him to make explicit reference to Christian existentialism. Derrida turned to the only one of his early sources regarded by the communists as ideologically acceptable: Husserl. a marxist husserl? The realignment of Derrida’s philosophical position was never total. As Derrida conformed to the philosophical norms of ENS Marxism, he maintained earlier interests. In his first two essays written at the Ecole, one on the “idea of simplicity” and the other on the “unconscious,” Derrida presented his work as a meditation on the phenomenological reductions. 119 120

Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy, p. 199. Aucouturier and Abirached both wrote for Vin Nouveau, the Tala journal.

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But his were not the familiar épochè, eidetic and transcendental reductions of the German phenomenologist. Rather Derrida organized his work around three reductions that he labeled the “aesthetic,” the “ethical,” and the “transcendental.” The first two, as reductions, appear to my knowledge nowhere else in the phenomenological canon. The “aesthetic reduction” was, for Derrida, the reduction down to the pure immediacy of a moment without relation: absolute discontinuity.121 In the unconscious it was the realm of immediate emotion, as Derrida saw in Freud’s sexual reductionism. The “aesthetic reduction” was the appeal to the pre-reflexive, “the simplicity of the immediate, which does not have to justify itself with respect to any general value or category”: it was the simplicity of the pour-soi, free from any determination, without an integrated place in a larger whole.122 The second reduction attempted to provide an ethic, to integrate all elements into a totality. It was related to Jung’s collective unconscious that supplied moral imperatives. Rather than the privileged moment of immediacy, it was the conquered whole that had precedence. While in the aesthetic reduction, one had to clear away complexity to find the simple elements out of which it was composed, in the ethical reduction, one had to struggle through complication to find the simple elements that controlled it, a hidden order governing the mass of conscious acts. As these descriptions make clear, Derrida reductions were a rewriting in Husserl’s language of the first two stages described in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or; Derrida had translated Christian existentialism into phenomenology. The aesthetic moment for Kierkegaard was the moment of pure indeterminacy. In the “The Seducer’s Diary” from Either/Or the seducer immerses himself in the sensuous and explicitly avoids taking responsibility for his acts, hoping to remain forever at the moment of the choice. As Derrida elaborated, “with Kierkegaard, one can define the aesthetic attitude as the cult of the pure individual, of the singularity irreducible to the concept and the relation, to the instant as an absolute beginning.”123 Recognizing the absence of any compelling reasons for committing to one particular path, both Derrida’s and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic responds to a denial of the concept. On the other hand, the ethical was described by Derrida as “the moment when the philosopher attempts to give a concept, a category, or a system 121 122 123

It corresponds to what Derrida had, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, called the “secret.” Jacques Derrida, “L’Idée de simplicité,” Irvine, 1.29, sheet 3. Ibid. See also Derrida, “L’Inconscient,” sheet 5.

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to the unconscious substance, when the aesthetic attitude, reflecting upon itself, immobilizes itself in the sphere defined by Kierkegaard as that of the general, of repetition, of formalism, of duty, etc.”124 In Either/Or, Kierkegaard contrasted the aesthetic to the ethical stage, best represented by marriage. The ethical consists in an absolute commitment, come what may. From the indeterminacy of the aesthetic, the ethical recognized the necessity of making a binding life-choice that would determine action in all situations, and subsume human freedom. But like Kierkegaard’s aesthetic and ethical realms, Derrida’s reductions were ultimately inadequate. The aesthetic remained too detached from reality, unwilling to make a choice or to engage, whereas the ethical made that choice on unfirm ground. Though not presented as such, Derrida’s third option, a “transcendental reduction,” might compare with the religious stage in Either/Or. As Derrida described it, the transcendental encompassed both reductions. It comprised spirit and matter, consciousness and the unconscious, uncovering the intentionality of human reality that could never be contained within one determined system.125 It combined the variability of the aesthetic and the moral striving of the ethical. As such, one might suggest that this transcendental was not open to human knowledge, but could only be grasped through faith. It subordinated phenomenology to the religious questions that had motivated Derrida’s earlier thought. conclusion The mapping of philosophical positions onto social groupings at the ENS was not a simple one-to-one translation. Derrida’s social position drew him away from his previous philosophical stance, moving (if never completely) from one to the other side of the opposition that marked the post-Sartrean philosophical world. And though Derrida’s work at the Lycée Louis-leGrand would seem to place him philosophically close to the Christians, in the ENS socially, and for political reasons, he was closer to the communists. This precarious position manifested itself in his work. He was under enormous pressure to tone down any references to mystical thinking, and to reframe his ideas in a manner that would be acceptable to the communists at the Ecole. 124

Ibid.

125

Derrida, “L’Idée de simplicité,” sheet 12.

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When Derrida dressed Kierkegaard up as Husserl, he did it in response to a very particular social and philosophical situation. The translation allowed him to render old ideas acceptable, restyling them for a changed environment. It was his response to a disparity between his social and philosophical positions, a compromise that marked his distance at once from both the communists and the Catholics. Given the situation at the Ecole, we can imagine that Derrida felt both a communist and a Christian temptation. That he succumbed fully to neither would leave its mark on his future philosophy.

c h a p t er 4

Genesis as a problem Derrida reading Husserl

Derrida’s 1954 dissertation is often presented as proof of his mastery of Husserl. After the controversy caused by his most famous text on the German phenomenologist, Speech and Phenomena from 1967,1 the 1990 publication of his student thesis (his Mémoire), The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, seemed to demonstrate a much more conventional reading of Husserl, one that was more readily assimilated by the phenomenological community. Derrida’s credentials in this earlier study were impeccable. He dealt with Husserl’s entire oeuvre from his earliest publications to his last essays, both the translated and untranslated works. Derrida studied not only published books and articles but, with the support of Père Van Breda, had been allowed to visit and consult the Husserl archives at Louvain. The visit to the archives at Louvain was perhaps more significant for what it indicated about Derrida’s interest in Husserl than for what he learnt there. His visit was short, about two weeks according to his wife, and his notes from the visit are relatively slim, playing only a small role in his analysis for the Mémoire.2 Rather than providing any actual material that he may have gleaned from the thousands of pages of Husserl’s stenographed notes, the visit was significant in that it legitimized Derrida as a phenomenologist. Following the example of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a visit to the Husserl archives at Louvain became an important qualification for up-coming students of Husserl’s works. It showed Derrida to be a serious student of Husserl and not an existentialist hoping for a validation of his or her own theories. The drive to completeness and the comprehensive scope of Derrida’s Mémoire perhaps seems at odds with Derrida’s later concern for the marginal over the totalizing, for the close reading of a paragraph over the all-encompassing theory of a life’s work. We might then be tempted 1 2

See J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Interview with Marguerite Derrida, May 26, 2007.

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to draw a line between this early student work and the later “mature” philosophy. Such a move would, however, be overly hasty. Firstly, Derrida did not try to close off phenomenology, indeed the last paragraph of Derrida’s dissertation cited Husserl on his deathbed, declaring to his sister that phenomenology must begin again.3 In his thesis, Derrida wanted to understand this constant necessity to restart. His guiding thesis was the impossibility of a rigorous and stable definition of phenomenology. Secondly, the Problem of Genesis does play with the marginal, but in a different way. For as we shall see, though the question of the Mémoire was clearly Normalien and the language phenomenological, these acted as a pretext for other, older, themes. Despite much important work that has been done in recent years proving the centrality of Husserl for the early Derrida, I would like to suggest that the true significance of the Mémoire thesis lies outside of phenomenology narrowly defined, even if we cannot discount its role.4 As I have explained, within the Ecole, Derrida’s preoccupation with existentialist and mystical philosophy was sidelined in favor of a sustained study of the conditions and possibility of science and objectivity, often with a reference to Husserl. This downplaying of the mystical was, however, merely superficial, and Derrida continued to discuss earlier themes in phenomenological garb. In the 1954 Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, not only do the old themes remain, but they are right at the heart of Derrida’s project. He had registered his Mémoire at the beginning of the year as “Studies on the Notion of Genesis in Husserl,”5 but when he came to write it the title had changed to “The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy.” The change may seem insignificant, but by introducing the term “problem” into the title of his Mémoire, Derrida signaled the importance of a thinker he had ceased to invoke explicitly since his arrival at the ENS. For “problem” was one pole of Gabriel Marcel’s central opposition, the mundane counterpoint to the incalculable “mystery.” As I will go on to argue, the instability and movement of Husserl’s philosophy as it was described in Derrida’s book arose from Husserl’s continued attempt to pose “genesis” as a problem, that is a question susceptible to a definitive answer. At each stage of Husserl’s philosophy, Derrida noted a “mysterious” element that disrupted Husserl’s attempt at a solution. Only a recognition and acceptance of the mystery 3 4

5

See Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 178. See the very important and valuable work by Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace (Stanford University Press, 2005); and Joshua Kates, Essential History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) amongst others. See “ENS Rapport d’activité 1953–4,” CAC, 930595/62.

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that escaped all rational thought could allow one to comprehend the aporias of objectivity. In his later language, one can say that the mysterious was both the condition of the possibility and the condition of the impossibility of science. The mystical Marcel was invoked to remedy the scientistic Tran Duc Thao’s ills. As Derrida suggested in his 1990 Introduction, he was “upping the ante” on Thao, but also profoundly rejecting him. Derrida, in his Mémoire, undertook a deconstruction of the thought of objectivity, for which the study of Husserl was merely the occasion. genesis at the ens Derrida described the circumstances surrounding his Mémoire in an interview with Dominique Janicaud. Having read Tran Duc Thao and a little Husserl, Derrida said that he “had been able to pre-identify, in some way, the question of the history of science, of the genesis of objectivity. And thus, the choice of subject could be explained by the simultaneously historical and normalien conjuncture.”6 It was these twin contexts, both that of the ENS and that of the wider philosophical community, that set the initial terms for Derrida’s Mémoire. What did the question of objectivity mean at the ENS in the early 1950s? In the various exposés on the problem two names occur more than any others, and for both the question of objectivity was intimately connected to that of “genesis”: Husserl and Piaget.7 The rapprochement of the two authors strikes us today as odd: on the one hand the phenomenologist who had rejected psychologism, and on the other a scientist who hoped to make sense of the empirical developmental stages of the categories of a child’s understanding. One seemed to study the transcendental conditions of science in general, while the other applied the methods of a particular science to understand human development. But the difference between the two as it is considered today is misleading. As we shall see, the development of phenomenology in France made it progressively more open to the contributions of the positive sciences, and in his concept of “genetic epistemology” Piaget saw his work as being more than just a description of empirical development; he hoped to explain the validity of the categories whose genesis he studied.8 In the 1950s in France, 6 7 8

Janicaud, Heidegger in France, vol. II, p. 94. See especially the bundle on “Objectivité,” 1952–3, Jean Beaulieu, “Objectivité,” January 16, 1953, and the section of Psychology and the Object, January 16, 1953, IMEC, ALT2, E5–02. See the debate between Derrida and Piaget in the 1959 conference, in Jean Piaget and Maurice de Gandillac, eds., Entretiens sur les notions de genèse et de structure (Paris: Mouton, 1965).

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Piaget and Husserl looked more compatible than at any time before or since. While Tran Duc Thao resorted to a Piaget-inspired analysis of human development to resolve problems he encountered at the heart of Husserl’s project, other phenomenologists would see in the German master the only way to secure the objective validity of Piaget’s system. Piaget and Husserl were figured as philosophical opponents arguing over the same questions.9 Jean Piaget was a child psychologist based in Geneva. Opposing innate ideas of intelligence, observations and experiments on his own children suggested to Piaget a developmental model of human intelligence. He traced the movement from the child’s first reaction to the world to the mature concepts of number, object, and even ethics. The result was a set of stages, correlated to the age of the child, which defined normal development. One of Piaget’s most famous experiments tracked the genesis of our idea of objectivity. A newborn child at first only pays attention to objects in its field of vision; a toy placed behind a screen will cease to be of interest. But as experience of the world leads the child to recognize that objects persist even when they can no longer be seen, the child will start to look behind the screen to retrieve the lost toy. According to Piaget’s interpretation, the category of permanence had arisen genetically from the child’s interaction with the world.10 The word “genesis,” the central preoccupation of Derrida’s Mémoire, found its greatest resource and support in Piaget’s writings at the time. It was Piaget who brought the term “genesis” to the center of French philosophical vocabulary, and it is not surprising that Tran Duc Thao, who explained Husserl’s turn to genetic philosophy, should follow his analysis with a discussion of Piaget’s own genetic epistemology. Outside of Derrida’s own work and those referring to Thao, in the ENS exposés, the term genesis was only used in discussions of Piaget. Piaget even had exposés devoted solely to his thought throughout the time Derrida was at the ENS, a rare privilege.11 He was an unavoidable philosophical presence.12 This did not mean that Piaget was accepted uncritically, for often the empirical nature of his work and its psychologism – the rooting of rational 9 10

11 12

See also ibid., p. 49. See Jean Piaget, La Psychologie de l’intelligence, 3rd edn (Paris: A. Colin, 1952), pp. 130–3. This is the example that Derrida used in his exposé “Psychologie et objet,” [undated, probably 1953–4], IMEC, ALT2, E5–02. IMEC, ALT2, E5–01, 02, 03. Individual treatments in 1950–1, 1956–7. See Michel Verret, “Notion de réalité,” February 29, 1952; Arthur Krebs, “L’Idéalisme,” February 21, 1952; Beaulieu, “Objectivité”; Pierre Artemko, “Psychologie et notion de l’objet,” January 16, 1953; Derrida “Psychologie et objet”; all IMEC, ALT2, E5–02.


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structures in empirical psychology – sat badly with the philosophers at the Ecole. Piaget’s work was distinguished from philosophy due to its methodology, and the genesis he described was often regarded as false because the development of the child always followed the same fixed path. Rather than the upsurge of the truly new, it appeared to be the unveiling of a pre-existent teleology. Derrida too cited Piaget extensively, if critically.13 In an exposé on psychology and the notion of the object, probably from the year 1954–5, Derrida dedicated one of three sections to a presentation of Piaget’s theories. Derrida, like most of the others at the Ecole, opposed Piaget’s “psychologism.” He felt that empirical psychological facts were insufficient to ground the category of the object; they could not explain the “abrupt jump [saut brusque]” from the empirical to the logical. No quantity of empirical and messy data of the actual functioning of the brain could ever provide us with the accuracy and clarity of logical laws. Piaget’s theories gained their legitimacy, according to Derrida, by appealing to a pre-existing and unacknowledged logic. For instance, the genesis of the idea of the object through the action of the child merely revealed an unacknowledged prior synthesis of the object existing in the world.14 The insufficiencies of Piaget’s psychologism led Derrida, like at least one of his ENS contemporaries, to find surer ground in transcendental phenomenology.15 His arguments drew on the analyses in his Mémoire, and I will discuss them later in this chapter. But it is significant that the section on Husserl did not represent the final section of the exposé. In the final section, Derrida concluded by reasserting, it seems, the rights of psychology. Insofar as Husserl’s transcendental constitution was temporal, it had a tripartite structure: retention, presence, and protention, corresponding essentially to the past, present, and future. The retention of a previous and already constituted moment was crucial because it suggested that the transcendental was not a simple origin but was already contaminated with the world: “philosophy of discovery [découvrement] and recovery [recouvrement]. The recovery essential to discovery.”16 Temporality united the constituting (philosophy/discovery) and the constituted (psychology/recovery) and so the psychological and empirical analysis of the rise of the categories 13 14 15

We also have notes taken by Derrida on Piaget, especially the Psychologie de l’intelligence and Le Jugement morale chez l’enfant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956). As we shall see, this is the same analysis that Derrida will give of Husserl’s own early psychologistic work, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. D. Willard (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). 16 Derrida, “Psychologie et objet.” See Beaulieu, “Objectivité.”

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of experience in Piaget was pertinent to understanding the purely transcendental genesis described by Husserl. The appeal to Husserl to answer questions of objectivity and the validity of science was, as I suggested in the last chapter, symptomatic of a new approach to the phenomenologist. Trying to move away from Sartre’s supposed “idealist” reading of Husserl, the students at the Ecole saw him rather as trying to ground science, and for textual support they turned to his later “genetic” writings. If a passive genesis (recovery) played an important role in the production of scientific knowledge, then existence could no longer simply be regarded as “absurd.” Rather, a careful phenomenological analysis would explain the existence of scientific meaning latent in the world of experience, not its impossibility. By 1952, when Derrida entered the Ecole, references by other students to Husserl had come to focus almost entirely on his logical work. In an exposé from 1952–3, which drew heavily on Tran Duc Thao’s account, one student concentrated exclusively on the attempts of both static and genetic phenomenology to deal with the problem of objectivity.17 Following Thao, the student drew attention to aporias at the heart of phenomenology, ones that, he asserted, could only be understood through the appeal to a materialist dialectic. Husserl was also referenced in exposés on “evidence,” with his concentration on the ante-predicative sphere from which objects can be constituted.18 At the Ecole the study of Husserl meant the possibility of founding objective truth on immediate experience. Sense was not the free act of the subject but was based on an intentional connection to the object. The concern for scientificity at the Ecole linked Husserl’s transcendental and Piaget’s empirical account of the genesis of objectivity. When Derrida chose to study the problem of genesis in Husserl’s philosophy the project fit perfectly into the philosophical and political mores of his context. towards a materialist phenomenology The changing approach to Husserl in the ENS reflected broader trends in French philosophy, where a renewed interest in Husserl’s works served as a means to delegitimize Sartre’s existentialism. The shift is most visible in the difference between two books entitled Phénoménologie that appeared in 1951 and 1954. In his 1951 introduction to phenomenology, Francis Jeanson, Sartre’s student and advocate, saw his mentor’s work as the ultimate expression of the 17

IMEC, ALT 2, E5–02.

18

Exposés from 1952–3, IMEC, ALT 2, E5–02.


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movement. Phenomenology, according to Jeanson, emphasized the responsibility of the subject for the “sense” of the world, highlighting the role of “a more radical zone of subjectivity.”19 Concentrating on a phenomenological description of emotions, Jeanson asserted that phenomenology concerned itself with those acts of which “consciousness is the author.”20 Once this authorship was recognized, then one could take responsibility for the free acts of consciousness. But if Jeanson asserted the freedom of consciousness in the attribution of “sense,” this did not, he thought, lead to idealism. For, like Sartre, Jeanson acknowledged the existence of the inert en-soi that was independent of the acts of consciousness. When Husserl seemed to suggest that this too was the result of the constituting power of consciousness – and hence verged on idealism – Jeanson explicitly rejected the idea.21 In addition to the phenomenology of human subjectivity, there was another realm of phenomenology, which investigated the phenomena that were independent of the subject; the subject’s role was limited only to their understanding. For this strand of phenomenology Jeanson pointed to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Three years later, Jean-François Lyotard published another overview of phenomenology. In the first part of his book, he undertook of history of Husserl’s thought. He traced the movement from the eidetic analyses of the Logical Investigations (1900–1) that privileged stable essences, through the constitution of those essences by a transcendental ego in Ideas (1913), to a grounding of that constitution in a passive synthesis in the life-world (Lebenswelt) (1930s). In this final stage the essence was “given” in intuition.22 Sartre, in Lyotard’s analysis, drew entirely from the second stage, which saw the subject as author of the world.23 Instead of Sartre’s existentialism, Lyotard gave pride of place to Merleau-Ponty and Tran Duc Thao. Both, he suggested, understood the importance of passive synthesis, the discovery of the final stage of Husserl’s thought, and thus reasserted the existing world as the ground of that synthesis.

19 20 22

23

Francis Jeanson, La Phénoménologie, 2nd edn (Paris: Téqui, 1951), p. 8. 21 Ibid., p. 122; see also pp. 68–70. Jeanson, La phénoménologie, p. 70. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), and Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1952). For a representative work from the 1930s see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). See Jean-François Lyotard, La Phénoménologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), pp. 66 and 71. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux 1951–1961 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), pp. 74–81 and 95–6.

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So Lyotard argued that Sartrean existentialism and indeed Jeanson’s book offered the very type of idealism, a “simplistic subjectivism,” that Jeanson had tried to reject.24 He tied Sartre to Husserl, the philosopher of eidetic analyses, of the Wesensschau that gave us a privileged access to “essences,” which governed all existence. Such an access to essences was achieved not by privileging existence, but rather by bracketing it in the phenomenological reduction. Sartre’s philosophy turned out to be the opposite of existentialism.25 The criticism then seems to be in bad faith, or at least ironic. How was the identification of Sartre’s system with Husserlian idealism effected? The answer will take us through the history of phenomenology and its fraught relationship to existentialism. The ability to relate Sartre and Husserl arose from a rising interest in Husserl’s development. Before 1950 most French phenomenologists had ignored any change in Husserl’s thought, or had relegated it to a footnote.26 For the first half of the 1950s, however, it became the central preoccupation in French phenomenology. Virtually every article or book written on Husserl presented itself first and foremost as a history of his thought. In part the change can be read as the transference of interest, and the assimilation of Husserl into the canon: a move from live theory to the history of philosophy. But such an explanation misses the intellectual stakes of a historical reading of Husserl’s thought. The majority of philosophers in the 1950s strongly criticized what they saw as the excesses of Sartre’s conception of freedom. This view was drawn more from the broad analyses of Existentialism Is a Humanism than the sophisticated phenomenological analyses of Being and Nothingness or, say, The Imagination. Simultaneously, a similar charge of idealism was leveled at the Husserl of Ideas, repeating the claims of Husserl’s first students such as Edith Stein. Even better, Ideas was the main Husserlian text that Sartre had used for his own philosophy. Thus while Beaufret’s seminal “A propos de l’existentialisme” from 1945 hardly mentioned the founder of phenomenology, by the early 1950s it became increasingly common to trace Sartre’s philosophical genealogy back to Husserl. Pierre Thévenaz’s 1952 overview of the phenomenological movement, though drawing parallels between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, suggested that Sartre really took 24 25 26

Lyotard, La Phénoménologie, p. 5. Even Jeanson saw Sartre as at the “essentialist” end of existentialism: La Phénoménologie, p. 123. An exception would be Gaston Berger’s Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1941). But this too hopes to understand the connection with existential philosophy.


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his lead from Husserl.27 Sartre was a phenomenologist in the Husserlian tradition because his definition of the pour-soi resulted from a radicalization of the phenomenological reduction. While Husserl had reduced the empirical world and factual claims of existence to arrive at the transcendental sphere of the phenomenological subject, with Sartre everything was effaced, equating the transcendental subject with the nothingness of the pour-soi.28 If Sartre’s thought could be equated with a radicalization of Husserl’s project as expressed in his Ideas, then an analysis of Husserl’s development after Ideas – how he had moved beyond idealism – would work as a surrogate critique of Sartrean existentialism. This was the motive behind most historical studies of Husserl’s thought in the early 1950s. It did not, necessarily, mean a criticism of existentialism in general. After all, with his emphasis on the pre-predicative life-world as the ground for the constitution of science and reason, the later Husserl seemed to privilege existence over essence: he might turn out to be more existentialist than Sartre. But the concentration on the later Husserl did provide resources for a criticism of Sartre’s version. It was for these reasons that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tran Duc Thao, and Jean Wahl should place so much value on Husserl’s final “genetic” phenomenology.29 The difference between the early and later Husserl was cast as his changing understanding of the relationship between the constituting ego and intuition, moving from idealism to empiricism. Was the constituting ego primary in that it could freely attribute sense to the content of intuition, as some passages from Ideas seemed to suggest? Or rather did what was given 27

28 29

See, for attempts to follow the path from “phenomenology to existentialism,” Alphonse de Waelhens, “De la Phénoménologie a` l’existentialisme,” in Jean Wahl, ed., Le Choix–le monde–l’existence (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1947), and Emmanuel Levinas’s “avant-propos” to En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1949). Pierre Thévenaz, “Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?” Revue de théologie et de philosophie (1952), saw Husserl as surpassed, and only of interest to those trying to understand Heidegger, Sartre, or Merleau-Ponty. See Thévenaz, “Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?”, p. 296. I draw my references predominantly from Derrida’s bibliography and have concentrated purely on post-1950 French phenomenology. An analysis of Derrida’s other sources provides some interesting insights into his work. For instance, the term “logocentric,” often seen as Derrida’s neologism, is actually found in the work of an American phenomenologist, Marvin Farber: see his “The Idea of a Presuppositionless Philosophy,” in Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Cambridge, Mass.: published for the University of Buffalo by the Harvard University Press, 1940), p. 53. Farber used “logocentric” to refer to the forgetting of origins diagnosed by Husserl in the Crisis of the European Sciences. This term was borrowed from a 1926 review of the second edition of Russell’s Principia Mathematica in the journal Isis to refer to the problems of the self-foundation of logic. Logocentrism is a fault twinned with egocentrism, both assuming that rational thought can ground itself.

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in intuition determine the way in which it was constituted, prefiguring and guiding the action of the ego? Traditionally in phenomenology the line had been blurred, and the problem had not been formulated in this way. Gaston Berger in 1940 had tried to avoid the language of activity and passivity in constitution, to preserve it “in its character of being at once intuitive and creative,”30 and yet he did not really explain how this could be possible. In America, for many like Marvin Farber the suspension involved in the reduction allowed what was bracketed to be used as a fil conducteur, the constituted guiding the process of constitution, even if the transcendental subject still constituted alone. Many of these analyses relied on an immediate appeal to the concept of intentionality that aimed to tie the constituting subject to the constituted world, and to square the circle of an immediate givenness to consciousness and the constitution of intentional objects. As Eugen Fink suggested, the constituting and constituted are brought together by intentionality, but Husserl never really developed this theme: “with Husserl the sense of ‘transcendental constitution,’ oscillates between the instauration of sense and creation.”31 But with the Cold War, the question of the role of the ego and its relationship to the world became of pressing importance. Communists saw the subjectivist “idealist” reading as yet another form of bourgeois ideology, because it emphasized the freedom of the subject, its ability to constitute the world as it saw fit. Those emphasizing a prior constitution that the subject passively received were easier to accept into the Marxist fold, for they posed thought and philosophy as superstructures to more originary, often material, processes. On a more technical level, the discussion concentrated on Husserl’s concept of intentionality. In the phenomenological model, it was intentionality that allowed the subject to grasp the unity of an object. Our sensory input is in constant flux. For instance, we may come across different perspectives of what later we come to call a chair. We see it from above, below, from different angles. From each of these perspectives the sensory input is different. The question arises how we experience these changing aspects or Abschattungen as those of a unified object. For Husserl, the answer was intentionality, the perception of the object, which unifies the differing sense impressions. Considered intentionally, each Abschattung is one particular perspective on a unified object – perspective of . . . – and because of this 30 31

Berger, Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl, p. 94. Herman van Breda, ed., Problèmes actuels de phénoménologie (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), p. 79.


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intentional relation, the ego is able to “constitute” its object through the various Abschattungen. As it was understood in the 1950s in France, this intentional object “constituted” by consciousness was called the “noema.”32 It is clear that the “noema” could not be “real” and existing in the world, and the idealist viewpoint drawing on Ideas emphasized this. In addition, since consciousness constituted the object in an original intuition that it gave itself, consciousness could not itself be constituted (what would constitute it?) and thus was radically free. It was this view that was imputed to Sartre and espoused by a few others such as Père Van Breda, who tied the acceptance of the “ego actif” to Heideggerian authenticity: it is authentic to recognize the role of the transcendental ego in the constitution of the world.33 Inauthenticity is the false belief that we are determined from the outside.34 The move was repeated in Levinas’s reading of Husserl. For Levinas, in the phenomenological reduction the “mind [esprit] becomes conscious of itself (Selbstbesinnung), assumes self-responsibility and, at the end of the day, its liberty.”35 Though Levinas resisted the idea of the free construction of objects, the nature of Husserlian intentionality meant that we could never be surprised: “Sinngebung, the fact of thinking and of giving a sense, intellection – is not an engagement like any other. It is liberty. Every engagement is, conversely, reducible in principle to a sense, and thus – before even being a subjugation of mind [Esprit] to beings – it is liberty and origin.”36 Levinas admitted that we returned to the “things themselves,” but these found their ground in a transcendental sphere, which was itself part of consciousness. In the terms of an earlier French interpreter of Husserl, intuition was not receptive, but “creative.”37 This group of scholars placed particular emphasis on the famous Fink essay “Phänomenologie und die gegenwärtige Kritik,” which contested the neoKantians’ assertion that phenomenology was a failed critical philosophy: setting out to discover the conditions for appearance, and thus establish a certain science, according to the neo-Kantians, phenomenology finally 32

33 34 35 36 37

See Aron Gurwitsch, “On the Intentionality of Consciousness,” in Farber, Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, pp. 74–7. In modern phenomenology the noema is no longer considered to be the intentional object but rather those conditions that the object must fulfill to be recognized as such. See Tran Duc Thao, “Existentialisme et materialisme dialectique,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1949), for the implications of Sartre’s espousal of this idea. Henri Birault, ed., Phénoménologie-existence (Paris: A. Colin, 1953), p. 7. Levinas, En découvrant l’existence, p. 8. It is in this sense that Levinas saw Husserl’s work as distinct from Heidegger’s, where “man is already submerged in existence” (p. 25). Ibid., p. 39. This was, however, Levinas’s central point of criticism. If we can never be surprised in consciousness, it is because Husserl’s conception of phenomenology was too theoretical. Berger, Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl, p. 100.

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devolved into irrationalist intuitionism. But such a critique, Fink suggested, relied on a false interpretation of phenomenology’s goals. Rather than seeking the conditions that had to be fulfilled for anything to appear to us, Husserl’s project was far more radical: examining the transcendental sphere, he sought the very “origin of the world.”38 It was in response to this radical subject centeredness that, in the early 1950s, the advocates of Husserl’s later philosophy countered the idealist interpretation. Moving beyond the absolute idealism of Ideas, they argued, Husserl had restricted the constituting power of the transcendental subject. The power of constitution found its mirror or parallel in initial sense impressions and the “flux vécu.” These realists reemphasized the intuitive element of phenomenology: the passive synthesis that they argued was the ground for all constitution. But rather than seeing this intuition as part of transcendental consciousness, they argued that the later Husserl had come ever closer to identifying it with the exterior world. That is, it is not surprising that the perceiver of the chair should objectify and detach it from its surrounding context, because the limits of the object are already, as it were, inscribed in the flux, a synthesis we absorb passively. We constitute a noema of the chair not because we arbitrarily decide to divide up reality in that way to give it sense, but because it is already given to us as unified, our constituting consciousness merely repeats in our mind an already existing reality: a synthesis in the world precedes the mind’s own. This was the approach taken by Jean Wahl in his analysis of Husserl’s later work Experience and Judgment. Wahl noted in Husserl’s later work an “underlying passivity [passivité sous-jacente]” that preceded and determined predicative judgments.39 According to Wahl, Husserl had moved from a constructive idealism to an “ante-predicative realism.”40 It was the same position that had been proposed by Tran Duc Thao, whose work Wahl cited approvingly.41 The question of active vs. passive syntheses had particular importance for the study of the transcendental ego. If the ego was fully transcendent 38

39 40 41

Ricoeur’s analysis in the Introduction to his translation of Husserl’s Idées directrices pour une phenomenology, trans. P. Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) suggests that this emphasis on intuition moderates, even in Ideas, the idealist element of Husserl’s thought. See Thao’s critique of Fink: Tran Duc Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Paris: Editions Minh-Tân, 1951), pp. 85–7. Thao thinks that this idealist version of Husserl’s thought breaks down with the question of others who cannot be simply intentional objects. Van Breda, Problèmes actuels, p. 85. See also Thévenaz, “Qu’est ce que la phénoménologie?”, p. 30. Van Breda, Problèmes actuels, p. 105. See also Pos in ibid. Pos put emphasis on the descriptive side of phenomenology, which, he thought, leads to a realist position, at least with respect to the natural sciences (see especially p. 48). For the human sciences, however, Pos felt that the constitutive ideal of phenomenology had a greater value.


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and the “origin of the world” then it could not be studied empirically. But if, in the later Husserl, the reduction had broken down, if the ego was no longer absolutely and de jure prior to the world, then mundane science could be marshaled to understand it. Sociology, psychology, linguistics, even dialectical materialism could be deployed to study the constituting power of consciousness. Against the “existentialists,” who Thao thought betrayed this return to the real by “refusing to stain their notions with any mundane predicate,” he asserted that Husserl’s later development opened up a place for the positive sciences.42 It was for this reason that Merleau-Ponty had such an important place in the analyses of so many of these thinkers. Merleau-Ponty seemed to have legitimated the marrying of phenomenological and empirical analyses, arguing that “all forms of thought show, in a certain sense, solidarity with each other.”43 While Husserl still maintained a sharp distinction between the two, Merleau-Ponty had upset the hierarchy of the transcendental over the mundane, positing instead a “reciprocal envelopment.”44 But how, according to Merleau-Ponty, did this relationship work? With the increased emphasis on the Lebenswelt, our understanding of the world and essences arose from direct contact with experience; he described a “phenomenology of genesis.” Existence and experience were prior to essences that arose from them. Because essences were generated from pre-predicative experience, we could never fully transcend our time and place, as Husserl had originally thought. The human subject already finds himself in a world with a pre-existing language and society. But this enrooting in a particular moment did not imply historical relativism. What seemed contingent and random to the eye of the historian, linguist, or sociologist would show itself to have a coherent meaning from the position of the “talking subject”: It is no longer a question, as it was in the old text the Logical Investigations . . . of making us leap out of language and attain a universe of thought under which language would be understood as a particular sector. The reflection on language consists now in rediscovering the speaking subject, not a transcendental subject 42 43

44

Thao, “Existentialisme et matérialisme dialectique,” p. 320. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le Philosophe et la sociologie,” Cahiers internationales de sociologie (1951), p. 50. See also “Sur la phénoménologie du langage,” in van Breda, Problèmes actuels, pp. 94–6, and his “Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie.” Merleau-Ponty, “Le Philosophe et la sociologie,” p. 55. See also “Sur la phénoménologie du langage,” p. 94, where he talks about the “dialectic” between the two. According to Merleau-Ponty, however, Husserl never fully acknowledged the homogeneity between psychology and phenomenology, and so settled rather for the notion of “parallelism”: “Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” p. 94.

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disengaged of all linguistic situations in which he can find himself, but a speaking subject who aims at truth and reaches a presumptively universal thought only by way of a certain linguistic situation and by the exercise of language.45

By taking the view of the speaking subject we could give sense to what the historian/linguist/sociologist saw as merely contingent. But it would give us the sense of that experience, not of experience in general. The goal was no longer to find a universal logos behind all reality, but rather to find a logos in reality.46 Science and philosophy studied the same thing from different perspectives, one as positive fact, the other as sense; each could contribute to the other. And our constant confrontation with the diverse findings of the human sciences would test and reevaluate our sense of what is universal; the philosopher, according to Merleau-Ponty, had to “place himself at the school of facts.”47 This constant confrontation of phenomenological analysis with the results of history, sociology, and ethnology was possible, according to Merleau-Ponty, because of the essential intersubjective nature of phenomenology. Because the philosopher “is always situated, he is always individualized, and this is why he needs dialogue; the surest way for him to breach his own limits is to enter into communication with other situations.” Citing Husserl, Merleau-Ponty affirmed that “transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity.”48 The vast majority of phenomenologists in 1950s France rejected the “idealist” model, and followed Merleau-Ponty in the revalorization of existence. But there existed too a grave problem with the “realist” route. For the “materialist” complication of the idealist picture referred back to a preexisting and independent reality, which was already constituted: a world of objects, societies, cultures, minds. But if constitution was the act of a transcendental subject, then it begged the question as to who had constituted this reality. If all constitution referred back to a ready-constituted substratum, we appear to have placed the cart before the horse, or entered into an eternal regress. Similarly, if the transcendental subject itself is constituted, who is doing the constituting? These are questions that Derrida would face in the composition of his thesis. 45 46 47 48

Merleau-Ponty, “Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” p. 108. And the sociologist, or linguist, can only understand other societies or languages based on the model of his own. Merleau-Ponty, “Le Philosophe et la sociologie,” p. 59. Merleau-Ponty, “Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” p. 122. Ibid., p. 62. See also “Sur la phénoménologie du langage,” pp. 104–9.


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derrida’s problem of genesis Derrida’s 1954 Mémoire thesis was a product of its times. First, Derrida analyzed Husserl on his own terms, and not those of the existentialists, who bundled him together with Heidegger.49 Second, Derrida’s treatment of Husserl took the form of a history of his thought. Third, mirroring the central debate in French phenomenology, Derrida’s analyses focused on the differend between activity and passivity implicit in the notion of genesis. He adopted the terms that a predominantly communist phenomenological school had developed to criticize Sartrean existentialism. Derrida’s Problem of Genesis began with an Avant-propos and an Introduction, before the main part of the work, which was an extended chronological analysis of Husserl’s philosophy. Significantly it had no conclusion. Within the body of the work, a certain guiding structure becomes clear. The historical part was divided into four sections: 1. The pre-phenomenological period of Husserl’s work, including the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1896) and the first volume of the Logical Investigations (the Prolegomena to a Pure Logic) (1900); 2. static phenomenology, which spanned Husserl’s work from the second volume of the Logical Investigations (1901) up until Ideas (1913); 3. genetic phenomenology, in Experience and Judgment (1927) and the Cartesian Meditations (1930); 4. The final “historical” phenomenology of Husserl’s Crisis (1936). The four sections may have outlined a developmental history of Husserl’s thought, but a close look shows that each was structured around a single aporia. Because at each stage the same difficulties arose, when, as was the norm, Derrida came to present his Mémoire to the third and fourth year Normaliens preparing for the agrégation, he only discussed the first section. All the essential elements of his argument could be found there, and there was no need to present the whole work.50 Appropriately, as we shall see, this first section dealt with what Derrida felt to be the pre-phenomenological stage of Husserl’s work. The analysis of the problem of genesis did not have to pass through phenomenology. Derrida started earlier in Husserl’s work than almost any other scholar, studying the Philosophy of Arithmetic, which was written in 1896.51 The 49 50 51

Although, as we shall see, Heidegger was not quite as absent as it would at first appear. Jacques Derrida, “Problèmes de la genèse chez Husserl,” [undated, probably 1954], IMEC, ALT2, E5–03. See also Derrida, “Objectivité.” Derrida’s analysis of the Philosophy of Arithmetic follows closely that of Marvin Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943).

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choice seems perverse. Traditional accounts of Husserl’s development, including his own self-analysis, discount the Philosophy of Arithmetic as psychologistic, and many histories, including Thao’s, simply ignored it. Derrida paired it with the first volume of the Logical Investigations. The pairing makes sense, because, for Derrida, the first volume of the Logical Investigations was pre-phenomenological too, preceding the discovery of the phenomenological reduction.52 Both operated at the level of the mundane and constituted. But apart from this particular unity between the two texts, there was another line of continuity that ran through Derrida’s analysis. For Derrida was unwilling to regard one or the other as simply psychologistic or simply logicist, as many commentators had argued. The Philosophy of Arithmetic attempted to understand the psychological processes that undergirded mathematics. But if logic were purely the result of psychological laws, there would be no way to ascertain its validity; there is no reason why our minds could not be incorrectly wired. As Derrida said, “the discontinuity between logic or objective knowledge and psychology is thus one of essence.”53 In order to assure the objectivity of such operations, Husserl appealed to Brentano’s concept of intentionality, which he thought could give him immediate consciousness of a logical object.54 Husserl set out to ground the concept of number, or rather that of plurality on which it was based. Following Weierstrass, Husserl asserted that this was the only presupposition needed for arithmetic, which would follow if the concept of plurality could be successfully grounded. According to Husserl, plurality arose from the process of abstraction. We can abstract from several objects in order to find the category of an “object in general” and so eventually “number.” Derrida, however, thought that, to be able to abstract from a situation, that situation must already be given in a synthetic unity. There must be a synthesis that exists from the first – an a priori 52

53

It is not entirely clear what Derrida meant by the first volume. Husserl’s logical investigations were divided up into three parts: a first volume, the Prolegomena to a Pure Logic, and then a second volume divided into two which contained the actual investigations. Derrida only cites the Prolegomena in his chapter on the first volume. He asserted that the second volume achieved the “properly phenomenological level,” but it is not cited. Rather, his argument that phenomenology was only breached after the first volume, follows that by Thao, which draws the reader only to the second part of the second volume, especially the fifth and sixth investigation, as the beginning of phenomenology. See Thao, Phénoménologie et materialisme dialectique, pp. 43–51. Later, Derrida would make a distinction between the first four investigations and the later ones, which marked a turn to subjectivity, see his 1966 article “La Phénoménologie et la clôture de la métaphysique,” first published in the Greek journal Epokhe and in French in Alter: Revue de Phénoménologie (2000), pp. 69–84, p. 76. 54 Ibid., p. 15. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 10.


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synthesis – from which to abstract. If not, it would be impossible to cleave experience along the lines of the essential and inessential, to subtract just the right elements of experience to arrive at the purity of objecthood. The process of abstraction must then be secondary to an originary synthesis that made it possible; the psychological act had to be founded upon a unity that was already given.55 Derrida’s analysis suggested that even as Husserl tried to found logic on the concrete acts of the subject he was forced to recognize the importance of a prior synthesis for which it was not responsible. His psychology of arithmetic was saved from solipsistic relativism by the covert assumption of a non-subjective and passively accepted logical principle. So the “contre-pied” of the Logical Investigations, an outline of the pregiven structures of logic, was not a change in direction at all, but rather the thematization of the pre-given logical synthesis that the Philosophy of Arithmetic had shown to be essential. What Husserl had implied but never fully elaborated in the Philosophy of Arithmetic became the center of discussion in the Logical Investigations: a logical synthesis. But if the direct apperception of a theoretical logic had to be entirely purified of empirical content, then it was hard to understand how it could be related to reality; it seemed to offer a type of platonic idealism with all the concomitant problems. How could the theory or logic thus accessed be a theory or logic of something? The trick was to find a logical synthesis that was not simply formalism: it had to be concrete. Husserl only sketched a solution. To avoid the charge of a hypostatized formalism, Husserl refused any absolute determination of logic, calling it rather an infinite possibility. But the infinite possibility, which suggested an eternal becoming of logic, sat uncomfortably with the static and essentialist claims of the Logical Investigations. As Derrida said: “if in a scholastic or Kantian perspective, invoking a closed, rigorous formal system, constituted for eternity, the putting in brackets of every historical genesis is authorized, this remains contestable in principle, but coherent. If, on the contrary, logic is a pure possibility, open to the infinite, then a concrete becoming of logic has, it seems, to be granted existence and credit. Because this becoming is not empirical, what is its status?”56 To shore up his logicism, Derrida thought that Husserl had surreptitiously relied on a return to genesis that could only be empirical. 55

56

This was Frege’s point in his famous criticism of Husserl: “the number is no whit more an object of psychology or of mental processes, than, let us say, the North Sea is.” Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. Austin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 34. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, pp. 46–7.

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Husserl, according to Derrida, oscillated between two contradictory and yet mutually implicating stances. Either his philosophy was a psychologism, a stance explicit in the Philosophy of Arithmetic and implicit in the Logical Investigations, where “pure concepts were created by a real genesis.” Or, implicitly in the Philosophy of Arithmetic and explicitly in the first volume of the Logical Investigations, Husserl appealed to a logicism where “the real genesis presupposed pure a priori logical forms, in order to be understood and to be organized in objective experience.” Derrida summed up the difficulty: “It is not possible to choose between a genesis of sense or a sense of genesis.”57 That is, insofar as logical laws are the result of an empirical genesis, created by the acts of concrete subjectivity, there are no laws to determine their rise, we cannot give them universal validity; the genesis has no guiding sense. But insofar as genesis has a sense, and is governed by a prior logical synthesis, then it becomes difficult to understand how that prior synthesis is valid and active in the world – the sense has no genesis. Working on the level of the constituted sciences of logic and psychology denied Husserl any middle way. The opposition between the two must be overcome: enter phenomenology. The flip in the first section of the book mirrored the central debate in French philosophy, and both sides had been found wanting. Neither a purely active constituting subject nor a passively receptive ego could comprehend the emergence and validity of logic. The “idealists” and the “realists” both provided inadequate understandings. Of course, one may object that the French phenomenologists in the 1950s were discussing Husserl’s phenomenological works and predominantly those of the final period. But, as we shall see, the structure and organization of Derrida’s essay suggested that the problem would not go away even in the final stages of Husserl’s work. In Derrida’s account, Husserl’s turn to phenomenology in the second volume of the Logical Investigations ushered in a new stage of his thought, but the same chiasmic aporia would reappear at the next level. Even though Husserl deepened his analyses throughout his life, according to Derrida, he could never move beyond the essential ambivalence at the heart of “genesis.” Like in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, the texts of the first half of each stage tried to emphasize genesis, but Derrida saw in each a more fundamental synthesis preceding it. Thus though in the Lessons on Internal Time Consciousness Husserl discussed “noematic” temporality, the process 57

Ibid., p. 48.


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of change was referred to a pre-given synthesis: “it is the meaning of time that is static and that authorizes the whole of Husserl’s analysis.”58 At the next stage, genetic phenomenology, “it is because the unities of the substrates are already constituted that it is going to be possible to retrace a ‘second’ genesis of categoric judgment.”59 Again, in the final stage of Husserl’s life, his turn to a historical philosophy was tamed by a preconstituted teleology. At each stage genesis, to guarantee its objectivity, had to appeal to a founding synthesis, a “sense of genesis.” On the other side of the zig-zag, Ideas repeated the move of the first volume of the Logical Investigations, the necessity of appealing to a real genesis to explain the contact between the formal and the real. In order to understand the provenance of the static synthesis, Husserl was forced to reinject temporality through the role of the constituting subject. Shunning a ready-constituted goal, Husserl expressed this temporality as a movement guided by an “infinite idea,” and the development would be experienced as “indefinite,” open to the future.60 The Cartesian Meditations, like the Crisis after it, relied on an infinite idea too.61 But the appeal to the infinite by the finite human, according to Derrida, was contradictory.62 As Derrida suggested, “instead of unveiling the absolute consciousness of an essential finitude, out of idealism, he gives a concrete content to an indefinite . . . The inauthenticity of a supposed intuition of the indefinite in the face of the noncompletion of the present, and the indetermination of the future is exceeded in ‘anguish’ faced with the absolutely indeterminate.”63 Derrida’s thought did not then resolve onto any one of the two poles that structured French phenomenology in the 1950s. In particular, though dealing with the questions and themes of communist and scientistic phenomenologists like Tran Duc Thao, he did not adopt their reading of Husserl. Rather than settling on one side, Derrida suggested that at each stage one had to choose between a genesis that, to be guaranteed, had to be undergirded by logic, and a logical foundation that itself required a genesis. As Derrida suggested, “we always run up against one and the same irreducible paradox.”64 This is why, even at the end of his life, Husserl had insisted to his sister that “we must start again from the beginning.”65 Even his last attempt was unable to solve the paradox at the heart of the problem of genesis. 58 61 63

59 Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 148–9, and pp. 172–6. Ibid., p. 203, note. See also p. 5.

60 62 64

See especially ibid., pp. 97–8. Ibid., pp. 148–9 and pp. 177–8. 65 Cited in ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 108.

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Derrida post-existentialist the many uses of the dialectic

Derrida’s unwillingness to privilege either side of the duality – the constituted vs. the constituting – led him to assert a dialectic across it. In his 1990 preface to the student Mémoire, Derrida suggested that his use of the word “dialectic” was “a kind of road sign about the philosophical and political map according to which a student of philosophy tried to find his bearings in 1950s France.”66 But if the word “dialectic” was a signpost, it is not entirely clear where it was pointing. The interpretation of phenomenology as a dialectical philosophy had a long history. We must remember the Hegelian atmosphere in which Husserl’s philosophy was first read in France. The oft-cited parallelism between Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenology, and the analyses of time found with Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré in the 1930s, primed later readers of Husserl to see his thought as compatible with dialectic.67 Thao had used the dialectic to guide his own version of phenomenology. Like Merleau-Ponty and Wahl, he hoped to show that Husserl had in the later part of his life moved to privilege the empirical and the historical. According to Thao, the internal exigencies of Husserl’s work pushed him ever further away from his early idealism. Thus the return to the life-world in the final period was really a return to the concrete and the mundane, a tendency towards materialism that was only limited by the blinkers imposed by Husserl’s socio-economic position. The second part of Thao’s book took the step that Husserl refused; it was a reworking of phenomenology based upon dialectical materialism, suggesting that a Marxist understanding of matter would explain and justify Husserl’s phenomenological analyses. For Thao, it was the dialectic that prevented his materialism from becoming mere historicism and relativism; matter was dialectic, and this explained the genesis of consciousness, which was merely a superstructure. On the other hand the mathematical philosopher Jean Cavaillès, though writing almost a decade before, had seen a formal dialectic as the necessary solution to the problems of phenomenology, a dialectic of the concept, rather than of the world, which allowed his theory to escape from the pitfalls of formalism or psychologism.68 But in appealing to a dialectic between the constituting and the constituted, Derrida rejected both one-sided versions. Though his language at the 66 67

68

Ibid., pp. xv–xvi. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. Nichols (New York: Basic Books 1969), and Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel a` Jena,” in his Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: A. Colin, 1961). We will discuss Cavaillès’s analysis of Husserl in the next chapter.


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time might seem to have allied him with the communists – the necessity of turning to a dialectic to understand the aporias in Husserl’s philosophy – a closer look at his analysis shows this not to be the case. Rather than being restricted to matter that was passively grasped by consciousness, as in Thao’s case, Derrida’s dialectic was the meeting and mutual implication of activity and passivity, the transcendental subject and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, philosophy and history. Indeed, one of the key sites of the dialectic for Derrida was time, which united the constituted (the retention of a previous present) with the constituting (the present). Derrida felt the need to reassert the role of a constituting subjectivity, which would be more than just the superstructure to dialectical materialism that it had become in Thao’s system. It was those phenomenologists who used the dialectic to bridge the supposed rupture at the heart of phenomenology – of the originary givenness of intuition and the power of the constituting ego – whose work most closely resembles Derrida’s, and the examples are predominantly Christian. One important figure was the Protestant philosopher Pierre Thévenaz in his 1951 contribution to the Actes de colloque international de phénoménologie. There was a tension in Husserl’s work, he thought, between its logical ground and temporal starting point. The world may be constructed from a constituting ego that has logical precedence, but we find ourselves first in the natural attitude. If we have to start from what is really only secondary, it is difficult to see how we can rely on our results; they are built on unsure ground. The first movement, the reduction, must be a jump out of the empirical and mundane, but we can never arrive at the transcendental, because each time we perform the reduction it is a “reprise that must give meaning to what we have lived and thought.”69 Thévenaz saw Husserl’s method as a circle rather than a straight line, the process ever further elucidating what is given and thus providing firmer ground for another épochè. There was never a pure transcendental sphere, never a complete beginning. But the most developed attempt to move beyond the privileging of either the constituting ego or the givenness of intuition was the early work of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur’s understanding of Husserl drew in part from his own philosophical project: a philosophy of the will. Following Levinas’s criticism of Husserl, Ricoeur suggested that the essential problems of Husserl’s thought derived from his confinement to the theoretical sphere. Ricoeur, in contrast, wanted to develop a phenomenology of the voluntary 69

Pierre Thévenaz, “La Question du point de depart radical chez Descartes et Husserl,” in van Breda, Problèmes actuels, p. 22.

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and involuntary that would tackle the question of the passivity or activity of consciousness head on.70 By extending a noetico-noematic analysis to the “affective and practical sector of consciousness,” describing the correlation between intentions and intentional objects – how something is approached and what it is, with respect to action rather than thought – phenomenology could, Ricoeur thought, make singular progress.71 This move would, in particular, serve to complicate the idea of the “‘constituting’ power of consciousness” and thus move beyond Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the will was thus a direct attempt to confront the central issue of French phenomenology in the period. For by studying the involuntary intentionally, one could limit the pretentions of the subject to set itself up as primitive reality.72 The difficulty about the involuntary, the unconscious, was that it could not be understood as such. Insofar as it remained unconscious it was not susceptible to phenomenological description, and the very process of that description denatured it by rendering it conscious. Thus Ricoeur limited himself to understanding not the involuntary itself, but rather “the living relationship between the voluntary and the involuntary.”73 The “will [vouloir]” was able to give the involuntary a meaning, to place it into a larger context, to give, say, emotion and desire sense. In this way, the voluntary was constitutive of and qualified the involuntary. The idea of the will gave a privileged access to questions of constitution. But because the will gave meaning to the preexisting involuntary it was no longer creative. Rather there existed a “dialectic of the voluntary and the involuntary.”74 Neither side could be reduced, neither the freedom of the constituting will nor the resistance of the involuntary, “the bipolarity of its condition appears irreducible.”75 Ricoeur’s own project was reflected in his analyses of Husserl’s philosophy and his interventions in the debates occurring at the time. For instance, in his reading of the second volume of Ideas, Ricoeur was very keen to separate intentional analyses from idealism: “[intentional analyses] consist in departing from an already elaborated ‘sense’ in an object, which has a unity and permanence before the mind [esprit], and in undoing the 70 71 72 73 74

See especially his doctoral thesis, Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté, 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1949). Paul Ricoeur, “Méthodes et tâches d’une phénoménologie de la volonté,” in van Breda, Problèmes actuels, p. 113. By posing the question at this level, Ricoeur also hoped to counter any premature attempt to move to the Husserl of the Crisis, and to conduct his analyses in the terms set by Husserl’s Ideas. Ricoeur, “Méthodes et tâches d’une phénoménologie de la volonté,” p. 119. 75 Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 126.


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multiple intentions which interlace in that ‘sense.’”76 It was certainly not a question of creation, even though Husserl himself made this mistake. Rather, according to Ricoeur, Husserl’s analysis set up two poles, akin to Kant’s transcendental idealism and empirical realism. When concentrating on the noema, engaged in description, phenomenology seemed to veer towards empirical realism. Consciousness aimed at stability even across different sense impressions: red was still red even in different circumstances, under a green light, at night, etc. Ricoeur explicitly contrasted this aspect of Husserl’s work to that of the “existentialist” phenomenologists, who, he suggested, attempted to dissociate existence and objectivity.77 On the other hand the ego for Husserl was also a free subject: “I am at two extremities: as a man at the extreme of objectification, as a transcendental Ego at the extreme of subjectivity.”78 Ricoeur tied this understanding directly to his work on the voluntary and the involuntary. We can still approach the concrete pole through the empirical sciences, by understanding the person in his influences and motivation, even if we must preserve the possibility of a transcendental freedom.79 It was the same problematic that Ricoeur faced in the most famous of his early essays, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire.” Here, Ricoeur tried to understand the relationship between the constituted and the constituting, between the ego and the history, in which – according to the later Husserl – it was embroiled. As Ricoeur asked, “how are we to understand that on the one hand historical Man is constituted in an absolute consciousness and that, on the other, the meaning that history develops engulfs the phenomenological Man who operates that consciousness? It appears that here a difficult dialectic of engulfing-engulfed [englobant-englobé] between the transcendental ego and the meaning that unified history announces itself.”80 The relationship between history and the ego, related in Ricoeur’s eyes to a similar paradoxical relationship between an ego and the other egos it constituted as described in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, presented an aporia that for Ricoeur could not be surpassed, but only approached through a dialectical understanding.81 For Ricoeur the dialectic was not a solution to the tensions at the heart of phenomenology, as it had been for Thao. Rather the dialectic was merely 76 77 79 80 81

Ricoeur, “Analyses dans Ideen II,” in Birault, Phénoménologie-existence, p. 24. 78 Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 32. See François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). Ricoeur was very much influenced by Merleau-Ponty but felt he erred on the side of immanence: p. 130. Paul Ricoeur, A l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), p. 26. Ibid., pp. 56–7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960).

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the recognition of their incomprehensibility. The same is true for Derrida. Despite his constant avowal of the dialectic, at other places he was clear that “the word ‘dialectic’ has only an analogical sense.”82 It was a dialectic only at the formal level, oscillating from one to another constituted pole.83 What was driving the dialectic was to be found at the transcendental level, where the opposition between the ideal and the material as yet made no sense. For this reason, the dialectic was not a solution to the aporias of genesis. Dialectic, he wrote, does not “efface the dilemma,”84 in fact “to say that the meaning of genesis is dialectic . . . is not to propose a ‘solution’ to the problem; it is simply to affirm that in a dialectic known as such, the aporia ‘understands itself’ as a ‘real’ aporia. So perhaps we shall meet up with philosophy.”85 The last line of the original draft of Derrida’s Mémoire was: “the absolute ‘motif’ of every history of philosophy and every philosophy of history is a dialectical motif.”86 But, when Derrida came to submit his thesis, and indeed to publish it forty years later, he erased that line, an effacing of the dialectic that is fitting given its place in the thesis. christian existentialism? The analogical nature of the dialectic and the closeness to Ricoeur suggests another subterranean influence in Derrida’s Mémoire.87 As I suggested in the last chapter, in his first few semesters at the ENS, Derrida had translated Christian existentialism into phenomenology by a reworking of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic and ethical stages into different reductions. In reading the more sophisticated phenomenology from the latter part of Derrida’s career at the Ecole, many of the arguments seem similar. In fact the very structure of Derrida’s Mémoire draws heavily on his earlier work. One can read each section of his Mémoire as showing by turns the limits of an aesthetic and an ethical reduction of genesis. The similarities between Derrida’s early Kierkegaardian essays and his Mémoire suggest that the Christian existentialism that had informed his earlier work could well be at work in the Mémoire itself: the problem of genesis may reveal itself formally to be a dialectic, but at a more fundamental level it could well be a mystery. 82 83 84 86 87

Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. xxii. Derrida is very keen to point out that the dialectic cannot be regional and therefore cannot be determined “in a metaphysical sense, be it materialist or idealist.” Ibid., p. xx. 85 Ibid., p. xlii. Cf. also pp. xxvii–xxviii. Ibid., p. 132. See Althusser’s copy, IMEC, ALT2, F3–03.01. For Ricoeur’s debt to Marcel, see Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: les sens d’une vie, p. 133.

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A presentation of Marcel’s notion of mystery makes clear its pertinence to the issues discussed in the Mémoire. Marcel’s most developed discussion of the mystery can be found in his book Etre et Avoir, a continuation of his Journal Métaphysique from the 1920s. The mystery was opposed to the problem. In Marcel’s understanding of the “problem,” the framework in which a problem was posed was not called into question by the process of attempting to answer it. The solution of a problem followed paths that were already laid out. With a “problem” we are endowed with the resources necessary to solve it. On the other hand, as the name suggests, the mystery was impenetrable to rational thought. It could not be further explicated; rather, like Derrida’s aporia, it had simply to be “recognized.” But the notion of mystery was not merely theological dogma, an assertion of the limits of human thought. There were specific and important reasons for its irreducibility. As Marcel described it, it is in the nature of a mystery “not to be completely before me. It is as if in that zone, the distinction between the in me and the outside loses its meaning.”88 The thinking subject was itself embroiled in the mystery, its own faculties brought into question. The locus classicus of Marcel’s mystery is theodicy, the problem of evil in the world. One attempt to understand the existence of evil is to consider the universe as a defective machine. But the very assumption that one has a sufficiently clear view of the universe to make such an assertion excludes oneself from the very defect that was posited as universal. If the universe is defective and we are part of it, how can we be sure that our faculties telling us so are not faulty too? For this reason, according to Marcel, the problem of Evil was unthinkable, it revealed itself to be a mystery, an aporia that we had to accept and recognize, but not understand. The use of mystery clearly extended to ontology, for knowledge lies within Being, “enveloped by it.”89 We cannot make claims about Being without these immediately coming to revise the very basis for our assertions. The genesis of objectivity too seems to qualify as a mystery, for intellectual categories were both the subject and the object of its study. Husserl’s constant appeal to a more fundamental level to give sense to each genesis, then, was an attempt to turn genesis into a problem, to find some underlying and stable ground for its examination. But we saw that the appeal to a primordial synthesis did not satisfy Husserl; it too had to be explained. Problems required an acceptance of the laws that governed the particular region, which it was precisely the aim of “genesis” to comprehend. 88

Marcel, Etre et Avoir, p. 71.

89

Ibid., p. 81.

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Because we wanted to understand and justify the concepts of our understanding, rather than simply use them, genesis could never simply be a problem. To all intents and purposes, in his Mémoire, Derrida attacked Thao for making a problem out of a mystery. In the dialectical materialism for which Thao opted, consciousness became a super-structural supplement to matter. It was materiality that brought itself, by itself, into consciousness. According to Thao, we can study this material without bringing the validity of our own concepts into question. But by completely exteriorizing the dialectic, by reducing the role of subjectivity and active genesis, Thao situated the dialectic on what Marcel would call the realm of “avoir” (what we have before us) and forgot its necessary intertwining with “être” (what we are). Derrida’s criticism of Thao, following Marcel, was then a reassertion of the rights of subjectivity against a materialist dialectic. Thao, according to Derrida, “falls back into the difficulties posed by a ‘worldly’ genesis and a materialist dialectic.”90 He did not realize that the movement from thing to thought was, as Derrida asserted, “mysterious.”91 The word “mysterious” occurs almost entirely in the second part of each of Husserl’s stages in Derrida’s account. If in the first half of each section, by reducing it to the effect of a predetermined schema, Husserl treated genesis as a problem, in the second half he rediscovered its mysterious elements. As we saw, it was always by the appeal to an “infinite” that Husserl hoped, according to Derrida, to justify the applicability of his a priori synthesis. In the Logical Investigations, the assertion of the infinite task of philosophy arrives “mysteriously,” to “put off and to get over an aporia.”92 In the Cartesian Meditations, it is the “possession” of the infinite idea, or in the Crisis it is the appearance of the infinite idea into history, that is called “mysterious.” It was always the invocation of the infinite that was mysterious for Derrida.93 And it was always after confronting the mysterious that Husserl would elaborate a new stage of phenomenology. The mystery was always the appeal to the indeterminate, that which escaped constitution, to govern it; it was what entered into history to make apodictic knowledge possible. Both Husserl and Marcel’s theologian, in hoping respectively to understand genesis or Evil, overstepped the bounds 90

91 93

Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, pp. xli–xlii. Thao was not unaware of these problems and tried to develop a theory of materiality that did not fall into them. Compare ibid., p. 160, to Thao’s analysis of the dialectic. 92 Ibid., p. 46. Cf. also p. 31. Ibid., p. 211 note. Cf. a similar mystery p. xxxvii. Ibid., pp. 97, 136, 154, 155, 159, pp. 208 and 211 notes.

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of their human finitude in appealing to an infinite idea to which they did not have complete access. The solution to what they saw as a “problem” required them to be more than they really were. As Derrida suggested in his lycée essays, human thought is limited, and the answers to the great questions of philosophy always lie just beyond our grasp. Marcel may have been missing in name from the Mémoire, but his ideas were clearly still active in Derrida’s thought at that time. In the notes for an essay on “La Notion du Problème,” from 1954–5, the year after the Mémoire, Derrida discussed the Marcelian distinction. Using mathematics as his main example of the problem, Derrida suggested, “mathematics is the ‘already known’ and the problems that develop in its region are only the explications of already constituted truths.”94 Mathematics was then reliant on Kantian ideal temporality, which did not allow real or noumenal change. Mathematics was not creative activity; it did not constitute the truth, but rather “reconstituted” it following a set pattern. We might, in translating this into the terms of the Mémoire, suggest that the problem, always being pure verification (recovery), can never be genesis (discovery): “to say that man only poses problems that he can resolve is not to start from a positive definition of man, finitude, historic naturality, mundane conditioning and enrooting; it is to hold oneself to the strict definition of the concept of the problem.”95 Problems were only found within well-defined eidetic regions, whose laws preset the answers to given questions. Their solutions existed before they were uncovered. Philosophy, for which there was no determined region and, at least in Husserl’s case, needed to work without presuppositions, could not rely on such a preconstituted eidetic. To accept these laws without question would be to abdicate the very task of philosophy. And yet, Derrida interpreted the history of philosophy as a constant transformation of mysteries into problems, whether in Plato, Descartes, Kant, or even in Husserl when he reduced genesis.96 The question then arose as to how we could approach the mystery. For Derrida, we could not completely reject the guidance of the constituted, of the preset laws of a determined region. Derrida argued that because both the problem and the mystery were mutually implicating, the former could act as a guiding thread for understanding the latter. As examples, Derrida took the following dualities: 94

Derrida, “La Notion du problème,” sheet 1.

95

Ibid., sheet 1.

96

Ibid., sheet 2.

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Anguish and Fear. Anxiety [inquiétude] and curiosity. Being and Having [être et avoir]. The first suppose the mysterious indetermination of Being, the originary nothing from which the second take their meaning. Thus the problem has its foundation of possibility in the mystery.97

Derrida argued that problems could only exist on the foundation of the mystery, for as we have seen the foundational synthesis that constituted the realm of the problem must itself be accounted for; we must understand how eidetic regions arise. But at the same time, our only access to the mysterious was through those constituted realms that were founded upon it. We can only get to the ontological through the ontic, to the transcendental through the natural attitude: The foundation [that is, anguish, anxiety, Being] only appears to us (originary finitude of the Heideggerian “anthropos”) in what is founded. Logical negation, curiosity, and fear = the transcendental guides . . . in the text of which one can read analogically the truth of the foundation (originary Nothing, anxiety, and anguish). Analogical and dialectical unity of the problematic and the mysterious, of the meta-problematic.98

The dialectic of the mysterious and the problematic was thus also the dialectic of the constituting and the constituted. When Derrida appealed to the dialectic, he was orienting himself with respect to the communists in name only. The dialectic really expressed the constant movement of the mystery working beneath it. Derrida’s appeal to a dialectic of the mysterious and the problematic makes sense of his choice of thesis adviser. Derrida wrote his Mémoire under the supervision of Maurice Patronnier de Gandillac. De Gandillac was remarkably eclectic in his interests. Indeed he was an early translator of Nietzsche and was also interested in contemporary German philosophy. But his main work focused on medieval mystics like Nicholas de Cusa and ancient mystics like Plotinus, studying their strange mixture of irrationalism and rationalism, which de Gandillac too hoped to understand through a dialectic.99 philosophy and the rise of history A corollary of the repetition of Derrida’s argument in each successive section of his Mémoire was the constant openness of Husserl’s phenomenology 97 99

98 Derrida, “La Notion du probl` Cf. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 136. eme,” sheet 2. See Maurice de Gandillac, La Philosophie de Nicholas de Cues (Paris: Philosophie de l’Esprit, 1941), pp. 231 sq. and 274 sq. and his La Sagesse de Plotin (Paris: Hachette, 1952).


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to the dialectic. Whereas for Thao, the dialectic was the never-reached telos of Husserl’s philosophical itinerary, for Derrida it was always lurking behind the scene, instantiated in the very chiasmus that made up each stage of Husserl’s philosophical development. For this reason, a dialectical understanding could not only inform the content of Derrida’s Mémoire but also its structure. The historical development of Husserl’s philosophy was dialectic, so the progress of his thought provided a model for understanding its essential aporia and solution.100 This concentration on the movement of Husserl’s thought can be clearly seen in comments Derrida made on Quentin Lauer’s contemporaneous doctoral dissertation, the Genesis of Intentionality in Husserl’s Phenomenology.101 Lauer, an American Jesuit priest, had studied under Jean Hyppolite, who, in 1954 on taking over the reins of the ENS, had asked Derrida for his opinion on the recently completed work. It seemed a natural move given the similarities between the two philosophers’ projects. Derrida, however, was not at all generous in his responses. His written response was a general critique followed by a page-by-page analysis. The central problem was, however, all too obvious: “the essential inadequacy of the work: it did not try to bring out the unity of a problematic motivating the very becoming, the ‘genesis’ of the theme of intentionality.”102 As Derrida defined the unity of this problematic: “it is always by a reduction of effective temporality that Husserl assures the unity of the theme of intentionality and of ideal objectivity. While tending ever more to confuse the movement of originary intentionality with the movement of time . . . Husserl always finished by disassociating them.”103 The crucial problem for Husserl was then, according to Derrida, precisely what drove the future development of his work. With Derrida’s dialectic driving the history and development of Husserl’s philosophy, one can see another crucial element of his thought. For all the similarity between the four stages of the Mémoire, there does seem to be a progression. Though each stage repeated the aporia of the last, these aporias did not occur at the same level. Right from the start Derrida always alerted the reader to the importance of the next stage: how, after the aporias of psychologism and logicism, Husserl was impelled to move towards phenomenology, and later to genetic phenomenology, and then to history. Finishing his first section, Derrida suggested that: 100 101 102

Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, pp. xxxix, 35. Cf. Derrida, “La Notion du problème,” sheet 2. Quentin Lauer, Phénoménologie de Husserl: essai sur la genèse de l’intentionnalité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955). 103 Ibid., sheet 11. Jacques Derrida, “Reading notes on Husserl,” Irvine, 2.31, sheet 1.

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By assimilating and assuming the most legitimate, the most well-founded discourse of psychologism and logicism, [Husserl] plans to bring to light a domain of constitution that is neutral and absolutely originary, where logic and psychology, both engendered and founded, resolve their opposition.104

At the end of the second: The empirical and the transcendental seem to resist any rigorous dissociation. A new phenomenological effort must try to find this again, far away and in depth. This is the price to be paid for philosophy.105

At the end of the third section: If passive genesis, forcing us into an infinite regression, seems unable to be assimilated to an egological activity, must there not be an attempt to re-conquer it by enlarging the transcendental to the dimensions of history in general, and through a teleological idea, give back to passive genesis itself an intentional sense that the ego alone could not confer on it?106

Though never arriving at a solution, Husserl did move beyond the particular paradoxes of each individual stage. Each one uncovered a new and larger sense of the transcendental. This progressive aspect of the dialectic recalls Derrida’s complication of Marcel’s existentialism that we discussed in chapter 2. Then, Derrida drew on le Senne to suggest that an ever-expanding idealism could comprehend the Marcelian mystery, if never fully grasp it. Now that insight was recast in dialectical terms. The movement from the pre-phenomenological to the phenomenological, and then from its static to its genetic and finally historical versions could all be understood as a “spiritualization” of the previous aporia. Le Senne validated the forward-moving zig-zag between the passive and the active and stopped it from being merely an oscillation. It is thus appropriate that Derrida’s framing of his Mémoire in the Avantpropos should have drawn most heavily on the final stage of Husserl’s thought, that he should have privileged Husserl’s later meditations on history over his early discussions of psychology. And, looking ahead, we can understand why he chose, as his first major project, the translation and commentary of Husserl’s final essay, The Origin of Geometry (1936). Though the mystery of genesis could never fully be understood, Husserl up until his last works had made great strides in that direction. The first section of Derrida’s avant-propos was entitled “History of philosophy and philosophy of history.” Rather than hoping to undertake a historical analysis of philosophy, here Derrida proposed a philosophical 104

Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 49.

105

Ibid., p. 100.

106

Ibid., p. 148.


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analysis of history. As Derrida said, “it is not a question here for us of obeying a fatality, of applying the laws of a history of philosophy constituted as a science, of following through to its conclusions a problem that will have been discussed elsewhere: this problem will be our problem.”107 The aim was to show how philosophy both was anchored to its time and transcended it, was both constituted and constituting. If it were fully anchored it would not have universal validity, but if it fully transcended it, it would be impossible to know how it arose and how it could have been recognized in a particular time and place. The central aporia at the heart of Derrida’s analysis of Husserl was presented in the avant-propos as a question of methodology in the history of philosophy. heidegger returns Heidegger played little explicit role in Derrida’s Mémoire. He is only cited once positively, in Derrida’s discussion of Husserl’s notion of time. Because Husserl’s time was purely noematic it could not provide an ontological grounding for his transcendental idealism. Heidegger, then, seemed to be an improvement, because for him Being was fundamentally temporal.108 But from all the other explicit references, it is clear that Heidegger betrayed his great development. By assuming the possibility of “a definitively authentic existence, assuming ‘being for death’ in a ‘resolute decision,’ the possibility of an absolute purity of ‘anguish’ suspends the dialectic of originary temporality.”109 Like Derrida’s earlier existentialist reading, it was the freezing of the dialectic or the “ek-sistence” of Dasein in a definitive ontology that marked Heidegger’s great error. And yet, despite this relatively negative presentation of Heidegger’s ideas, there are signs that his work was more important to Derrida than he cared to admit. In the Janicaud interview that we have cited during this chapter Derrida declared that the Mémoire was “widely marked by references, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, to Heidegger and to a certain questioning of Husserl by him,” and that the project “would not have been possible without reference to Heidegger.”110 Indeed at the end of his Introduction, Derrida suggests that his dialectic is “Being and time,” an unmistakable reference to Heidegger’s magnum opus.111 We can also see 107 109 110 111

108 Ibid., pp. 198–9 note. Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., p. 211 note. This repeats Yvonne Picard’s criticism of Heidegger; see Picard, “Le Temps chez Husserl et Chez Heidegger,” Deucalion 1 (1946), pp. 94–122, pp. 111–13. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. II, p. 92. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 4. See also p. 156 on the necessity of an “existentiel analytic” of the “réalité humaine” in the “Heideggerian sense” (translation modified).

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a turn to Heidegger, from the Finkian perspective, a move that parallels Sartre and Derrida’s reading of him from his earlier essays. Reasserting the existentiel, Derrida moved focus from Fink’s “origin of the world” to Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” – where Dasein transcends each particular constituted moment – as a necessary correlate to the Husserlian transcendental. By an emphasis on the constituted, expressed predominantly through the necessary retention in time, Derrida too broke down Husserl’s reduction.112 It was a reassertion of the traditional existentialist reading of Heidegger that Derrida had first undertaken six years previously. But given the great antipathy towards Heidegger and the existentialists in the ENS, Heidegger was rarely mentioned in Derrida’s work. Heidegger would again become a recognized and major source for Derrida’s work only after he left the Ecole in 1956, and then the existentialist interpretation would be left behind. One of the most important developments in Derrida’s thought over the next eight years occurred in his understanding of Heidegger. Over time, he would come to reevaluate his existentialist interpretation, and, just as his Sartrean Husserl had been recast in the communist mold, so his Sartrean Heidegger would find itself reappraised in light of the developing Christian reading. conclusion Derrida’s Mémoire began as a classic Normalien (and communist) project, a study of the conditions of possibility for scientific objectivity. But in elaborating this project, Derrida returned to his earlier fascination with the mystical, a fascination which can only be deduced from certain clues: the phenomenological context, the structure of Derrida’s Mémoire, and his use of the dialectic. In the Ecole, Husserl became the vehicle for discussing older themes and questions, when their traditional setting and language were no longer accepted. We should not thereby discount Husserl. By framing the discussion in Husserlian language, Derrida presented himself with a new object of enquiry. Derrida’s Christian existentialist heritage provided him with the 112

It is also significant that Derrida’s whole essay mirrored a work by Heidegger that, when Derrida wrote his essay, had only recently been translated into French: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. In that book, Heidegger tried to reinterpret Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by revealing the common root of intuition and the understanding, passive and active synthesis, in the transcendental faculty of the imagination. And crucially this imagination was temporal. The valid application of the categories of the understanding to the objects of empirical intuition was grounded in their common root, one necessitated by man’s essential finitude. More work needs to be done on this particular connection.


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tools to read Husserl, but it also taught him to take Husserl seriously. With each successive “spiritualization” of the central dilemma of genesis, Husserl deepened his understanding. If Derrida started out investigating the links between scientific objectivity and psychology, it was through his continued contact with Husserl that he decided to recast that question in historical terms. That, after all, was the path Husserl had taken. Derrida’s central problematic was now the articulation of truth and time, science and history. Or, in French: épistémologie.

ch a p ter 5

The God of mathematics Derrida and the Origin of Geometry

On May 29, 1964, in the Salle des Actes at the ENS, Jacques Derrida received the “Prix Cavaillès for Modern Epistemology” in recognition of his translation of, and commentary on, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. In his address to the assembled members of the Société des Amis de Jean Cavaillès, Raymond Aron proudly asserted that with the work of Derrida and Roger Martin (the other laureate) “Jean Cavaillès’s work will continue [aura les continuateurs].”1 The Prix Cavaillès is often listed in short summaries of Derrida’s work, brief biographical paragraphs and the like, but it is never remarked how incongruous the award seems. After all, Cavaillès was a philosopher of logic, trained in mathematics, whose work seems almost totally at odds with conventional presentations of Derrida’s thought. It was not just the name of the award, given by the Société two or three times a decade, but also its recipients who seem so out of place. Jacques Bouveresse, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, and Suzanne Bachelard all grace the lists of laureates for works on rationality in physics, symbolic logic, or mathematical idealities. This was no Adorno prize, another, later, addition to Derrida’s CV.2 If the conferral of the Prix Cavaillès seems strange to us today, it was not necessarily so at the time. Derrida’s engagement with a more scientific branch of French phenomenology in The Problem of Genesis gives a clue why his first publication might have been welcomed by the epistemological community. Admittedly things had changed in the ten years since Derrida had written his Mémoire: the early enthusiasm for Husserl amongst Marxist philosophers had mostly waned. As we shall see in the following chapters, communist thinkers instead looked outside of phenomenology for resources to ground scientific and objective thought. But the initial 1 2

Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’ENS (December 1964), p. 20. Awarded in 2001. The current society also expresses disbelief at their most famous laureate. Jacques Lautman suggested in email correspondence that he did not know how Derrida could ever have been awarded the prize.

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The God of mathematics

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Marxist reading had left its mark, and the interpretation of phenomenology as a philosophy of science had become mainstream; the late 1950s saw an attempt to integrate Husserl’s work into the broader French epistemological tradition. As I will show in the first part of this chapter, Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry participated in this form of scientific or logical phenomenology. As surprising as this may sound to today’s readers, Derrida’s first book was a project in the philosophy of mathematics. In 1962, at least, Derrida was good company for the likes of Suzanne Bachelard, Jacques Bouveresse, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti. epistemology in france In his famous Introduction to the English translation of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault identified what he saw as the central cleavage in postwar French philosophy. Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem were the key representatives of the “philosophy of the concept,” a movement essentially heterogeneous to Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy of the subject.”3 For Foucault the “philosophy of the concept” and the “philosophy of the subject” were both interpretations of Husserl’s phenomenology. But until the late 1950s, phenomenology had only a fractious relationship with mainstream epistemology in France. Most of its main proponents, including Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, and Jean Piaget, treated phenomenology with distrust. Cavaillès, the great philosophe-résistant shot by the Nazis after he had finished his magnum opus in a prison camp, held for many reasons enormous prestige in the postwar French academic world. Reburied in the Sorbonne with rooms named after him at the ENS and at the University of Paris, he was their most celebrated son, whose political and philosophical work each added glory to the other. Derrida had already read Cavaillès’s Logic while at the ENS, but it is worth running through its claims here to understand its significance during this period. Cavaillès’s Logic is divided up into three parts. The first is an analysis and critique of the Kantian idea of the understanding. The essential problem with the Kantian understanding is that while it claimed a priori status, according to Cavaillès it was drawn from Kant’s own descriptions of the understanding; logic was grounded in the structure of empirical consciousness, and so succumbed to psychologism.4 3 4

Michel Foucault, Introduction to the English translation of Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. Fawcett (Boston: D. Reidel, 1978), p. 8. This is the same critique that Derrida leveled against formalism in his Mémoire.

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In the second section, Cavaillès investigated an opposed danger. He turned his attention to the logical positivists, who prioritized the demonstrable aspect of science. In this view, each system was governed by formal rules. This constituted its syntax, the laws that organized the interaction of elements. But, in Cavaillès’s view, Carnap’s syntactical construction of the world neglected a full analysis of semantics. We needed to know how to connect a formal system to the reality it purported to explain in order to move from the rules that exist between elements in a system to the rules that tie that system to the world. Because semantics was essentially descriptive, it could not be contained within a syntactical system, and yet it was the very characteristics of “protocol statements” that grounded syntax: “what [syntax] takes for an absolute beginning is only the surreptitious evocation of anterior acts and sequences.”5 “Protocol statements” in Carnap’s language, those positive descriptions of the world, presupposed a possible translation into the formal sphere. Mathematics could only be applied as a syntactical system to physics, if nature could already be translated into mathematics.6 The formal relations of syntax had to have a “necessary affinity” with the described characteristics of the existing object. As Cavaillès suggested, formalism was just one small step away from being itself a descriptive ontology.7 It was in this situation that Cavaillès turned to Husserl. Husserl seemed to offer the opportunity of mediating between a philosophy of consciousness like Kant’s that was not necessary, and a formalism that surreptitiously appealed to an empirical foundation, a` la Carnap. And it was to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic that he appealed, the book whose later translation and commentary would mark a turning in the French understanding of Husserl, as Gaston Bachelard’s 1960 preface to Cavaillès’s book suggested.8 If Kant had failed in his attempt to establish a secure science by basing it on empirical descriptions of the mind, and Carnap had failed by stealthily grounding his system on empirical descriptions of the world, Husserl’s sense of intentionality, which showed a way to unite mind and world, offered the possibility of moving beyond the impasse. All knowledge, even mathematics, was knowledge of something; the formal could not be abstract because of its intentional relation to the world; Husserl showed that the formal logic of judgments, or apophansis, was rooted in general ontology.9 In Cavaillès’s reading of Husserl, this ontology was in turn founded on the certainty of transcendental consciousness, 5 6

Jean Cavaillès, Sur la logique et théorie de la science (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947), pp. 52–4. 7 Ibid., p. 56. 8 Ibid., p. 9. 9 Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 54.

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which “is the totality of Being: what [transcendental consciousness] affirms, if it is truly what [consciousness] affirms in full certainty of itself, is only because [consciousness] affirms it.”10 For Cavaillès, however, this appeal to a transcendental consciousness raised the same problems that Kant encountered. Though the transcendental sphere was more expansive than Kant’s, it too relapsed into psychologism. Insofar as the ontological foundation of logic was constituted by a transcendental subject, it could not be certain, for the very role of logic was to govern the thought processes of that transcendental subject. Logic cannot govern the conditions of its own constitution: “it is perhaps to abuse the singularity of the absolute to reserve for it the coincidence between the constituting moment and the constituted moment.”11 Undoing this unjustified elision, Cavaillès was left with an exclusive choice: either trace the genesis of logic back into the transcendental sphere or assert its absolute authority. One could not do both: “if transcendental logic truly founds logic, then there is no absolute logic (that is to say one that governs absolute subjective activity). If there is an absolute logic, it can only draw its authority from itself, it is not transcendental.”12 A second problem with Husserl’s transcendental logic suggested itself. After Kurt Gödel, it was no longer possible to declare a formal system that contained arithmetic to be saturated, i.e. all its possible propositions able to be declared true or false. Godel’s 1931 theory had provided a method by which undecidable propositions could be generated for any particular mathematical system of a certain “power.” Because such propositions exceeded the powers of a given system, they could only be “decided” as true or false by placing the system “within a more powerful theory.” Gödel’s theory could generate undecidable propositions for this theory too. No system in itself could ever be complete. Gödel’s theory, for Cavaillès, was a body blow to Husserl’s approach. It directly undermined the central principle of the “excluded third” – that is the assumption that propositions could only be true or false – that was essential to Husserl’s formal logic.13 Further, from Cavaillès’s perspective, Godel’s theory showed that the problems of formal logic could not be solved by an appeal to the transcendental sphere. Formal logic generated higher instances from within itself, forever demanding to be surpassed. The “necessity” was “internal,” occurring as it were downstream from the transcendental, which in Husserl’s theory was supposed to constitute and 10

Ibid., p. 69.

11

Ibid., pp. 77–8.

12

Ibid., p. 78.

13

Ibid., p. 85.

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inform formal logic.14 If the drive for change and development was internal to formal logic, then it could no longer be said that it was dependent upon the transcendental. While Husserl’s phenomenology only allowed a “consciousness of progress,” the ability to evaluate the development of formal logic from the sure and unchanging ground of the transcendental, Cavaillès wanted to understand, both in reaction to Gödel and through an appreciation of the history of science, a “progress of consciousness.” It is thus that Cavaillès was led to suggest what he called a philosophy of the concept, where logic drew its authority from itself, and developed over time. Cavaillès ended by describing the “generating” necessity, which was “not that of an activity, but a dialectic.”15 Cavaillès had a powerful influence on many in the next generation. But, in part because he survived the war, it was Gaston Bachelard who dominated the field in the 1950s. Bachelard now is best remembered for his work on Le Nouvel esprit scientifique (1934). Indeed it was this work that had made him famous and was crucial for Althusser in the 1960s with its concept of the coupure épistémologique that explained the genesis of science from ideology.16 In the 1950s, however, the earlier works were less central. It was what Gaston Bachelard had been writing since the war that captured the imagination of young philosophers, especially his book Le Rationalisme appliqué (1949). Along with Bachelard’s other texts from the period, such as Le Matérialisme rationnel and L’Activité rationaliste dans la physique contemporaine, Le Rationalisme appliqué attempted to understand the relationship between matter and the precise mathematical equations that seemed to govern it. Bachelard, like many of his generation, explicitly rejected the Kantian solution, where the transcendental aesthetic that presented the world to us in Euclidean form was a necessary condition of experience. Bachelard refused the clean separation of the formal and the material that the Kantian model suggested. For Kant, scientific categories were stable, orthogonal to the experiences that they ordered, and thus incapable of being changed by them. For Bachelard, however, “physics has two philosophical poles. It is a field of thought that specifies itself into mathematics and into experiments and which animates itself maximally in the conjuncture of mathematics and experiments. Physics determines, as an eminent 14 15

16

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 90. The meaning of the last pages of Cavaillès’s book is particularly cryptic. Quite what a “philosophy of the concept” is is left ambiguous. Lawlor gives a convincing reconstruction in his Derrida and Husserl, pp. 64–7. See chapter 8.


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synthesis, an abstract-concrete mentality.”17 New facts from experiments would come to change theories, and theories themselves would guide experiments towards new phenomena. Indeed by determining how new phenomena might be tested, providing the conditions in which they arose, science was a “phenomeno-technique,” producing, not merely recording, experience. So against Kant, Bachelard described a symbiotic relation between rationality and reality, between the experimenter and the theoretician, both an “applied rationalism” and an “educated materialism.”18 Because of this conception of science, Bachelard was resistant to what he saw as the claims of phenomenology. For him, phenomenology threatened to descend into blind formalism through the reduction, which detached it from experience; it was preoccupied with only one of the poles of science. A priori essences, guaranteed by a transcendental subject, were universally valid and atemporal, regardless of what a scientific experiment might uncover. In Bachelard’s conception of science, in contrast, each new experience brought into question and tested previous rationalizations: “one must renew the mind in contact with a new experiment.”19 While downplaying the role of experience on theory, phenomenology also neglected the role of theory in shaping experience. According to Bachelard, there was no pure experiential given; rather, matter was already engaged in and instructed by reason.20 Thinking that it merely “received” the givens of consciousness, phenomenology forgot the active role of technique in making phenomena appear.21 For Bachelard, rather than being a mere description, formal rules also shaped the world in which we live. New theory crafted new experiences, which in turn demanded a shifting of the claims of rationality. In addition to Cavaillès and Bachelard, a third key figure of the older generation was Jean Piaget. We encountered Piaget in the discussion of Derrida’s Mémoire, and just as he served as an unavoidable reference for the Normaliens in the first half of the 1950s, he was a major figure in the epistemology of the second half. His notion of a “genetic epistemology,” which described the unstable development of the formal structures

17 18 20 21

Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949), p. 1. 19 Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 4. See also Gaston Bachelard, L’Activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1951), pp. 2–3. For an account of the relationship between the two men that asserts a strong continuity underneath apparent critique, see Bernard Barsotti, Bachelard critique de Husserl (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).

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of our understanding, moving from one equilibrium to the next, mirrored the mobile rationalisms of Bachelard and Cavaillès.22 Because of his dynamic notion of reason, Piaget too opposed his “genetic epistemology” to phenomenology, which in his eyes operated through introspection, and provided static, and psychologistic, accounts of mental structures.23 Bachelard, Cavaillès, and Piaget were all concerned that phenomenology would immobilize the fluid rational and formal structures that they described. Insofar as they appealed beyond these structures it was in a dialectical relationship between theory and reality that refused the supposed priority of Husserl’s detached transcendental sphere. Phenomenology’s model for the genesis of scientific laws seemed too static to explain the tortuous history of modern science. the next generation For many this mistrust of phenomenology was maintained into the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of his 1962 La Philosophie de l’algèbre, the newly elected Professor at the Collège de France, Jules Vuillemin, turned to Husserl’s analysis in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. According to Vuillemin, phenomenology best fit the type of formalized mathematics that arose in the nineteenth century. It made a valuable contribution by outlining a new role for intuition that previously had been reduced to an expository appendix, a symbolic manifestation of formal mathematics.24 But though phenomenology declared intuition the absolute ground of formal systems, according to Vuillemin, it was an external one. Phenomenology was purely descriptive – in this sense Vuillemin followed Cavaillès’s critique of Husserl – and so it could not explain the movement of mathematics, especially that made necessary by Gödel’s theorem.25 If formal systems were dependent on their rooting in the transcendental sphere, the purely internal limitations of the former could not affect the latter, and the fixed transcendental would thus be a constant brake on the necessary development of the formal. In Vuillemin’s eyes, this made phenomenology dogmatic. The philosopher of mathematics and Derrida’s fellow laureate, 22 23

24 25

For a good summary of Piaget’s genetic epistemology, see his paper on “Genèse et structure en psychologie,” in Piaget and de Gandillac, Entretiens. See Piaget, La Psychologie de l’intelligence, p. 21. Piaget and de Gandillac, Entretiens, pp. 39, 61, and the debate with Derrida, pp. 49–50. See also Jean Piaget, ed., Etudes d’épistémologie génétique XVI (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), Conclusion, where Piaget explicitly takes on the criticisms from phenomenologists, especially Suzanne Bachelard and Gilles Gaston Granger. Jules Vuillemin, La Philosophie de l’algèbre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), p. 478. Ibid., p. 499.


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Roger Martin, made a similar criticism two years later.26 Phenomenology returned to an absolute origin, and so was not flexible enough to account for the history of mathematics. Vuillemin and Martin, however, did not think that formal systems on their own sufficed. Both recognized the need to understand why such systems would be applicable to the real world. Thus like many in their generation, the question of formalization was one of their central preoccupations. Formalization is the process by which aspects of consciousness and experience are expressed in a well-defined language that allows the manipulation of those objects, though now detached from their original ground. Mathematics provides one of the most successful examples of formalization. Rather than considering individual objects as concrete realities, we can classify a set of symbols and a set of axiomatized rules to represent them, which we can manipulate at will. In algebra it makes no difference if the symbols refer to physical objects, groups, or chemical compounds, as long as the laws of combination fit. It was this formalization that had permitted such astonishing progress in the exact sciences. If formalization explained the success of modern mathematical science, the philosophical interest lay in the process, the move from the concrete to the formal. When systems were sufficiently formalized they could run automatically following their internal rules – the scientists could then take over – but the problem was to understand how one arrived at this stage, and if this stage was final. Even if certain epistemologists refused the turn to phenomenology’s transcendental sphere, they still recognized the need to embed formal systems in a broader field of human thought. As Roger Martin in his 1964 book Logique contemporaine et formalisation described, they aimed to understand the movement from the na¨ıve to the formal and the formal to the na¨ıve, paying attention to the semantic aspects of formal theories as well as to their syntactical laws.27 This was also Gilles Gaston Granger’s goal, criticizing the rarified and syntactical systems of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap and emphasizing the need to return to real languages. He suggested, “all knowledge is knowledge of something; a strictly formal description of knowledge can only be an artifice.”28 Though formalized systems had an autonomy of their own, contact with 26 27 28

Roger Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), p. 190. Ibid., p. 8. Cf. also p. 188. See Gilles Gaston Granger, “Logique, langage, communication,” in Georges Bouligand, ed., Hommage a` Gaston Bachelard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1957), p. 56. See also the Introduction to Gilles Gaston Granger, Pensée formelle et sciences de l’homme (Paris: Aubier, 1960), p. 24.

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experience was, as the Belgian philosopher of science Jean Ladrière asserted, “the starting point, a beginning . . . a necessary support [appui].”29 So too for Jean-Toussaint Desanti, to understand modern mathematics we had to return to a “domain of apprenticeship” in which mathematical theories were worked over, or “remis en chantier” to use his favorite expression.30 As Suzanne Bachelard suggested, “we think that the ‘objective’ examination of mathematics can redouble itself in a ‘subjective’ examination, and that the latter can be a starting point for a study of the consciousness of rationality.”31 The broader concern for formalization opened the possibility of reevaluating the place of Husserl. Indeed both Vuillemin and Martin had recognized the value of phenomenology for grounding of formal systems, even if at the final stage they disagreed with him. If a new generation of phenomenologists could show that Husserl’s thought did not lead to static systems, if they could describe a historical phenomenology, they would be able to make room for Husserl at the epistemological table. Take the example of Gilles Gaston Granger. He too agreed that a certain form of phenomenology froze the development of mathematics; the objects of a formal ontology in the transcendental sphere were “hypostatized as the focus of evidence [foyers d’evidence]” and Granger thought it dangerous to “objectivize in this simple manner all the acts of demonstrative reason.”32 But nonetheless, he saw the benefits of phenomenology and hoped to readjust it to prevent this hypostatization. Granger argued for what he called a “dehiscence of phenomenologies,” where concepts detached from their original productive ground would be integrated into a new phenomenological system.33 It was a system that in Cavaillès’s terms allowed both a “consciousness of progress” as formal systems adapted better to a transcendental origin, and a “progress of consciousness” where that origin would be mobilized too. In the words of Suzanne Bachelard, in her study of the Conscience de rationalité, “it is not void of meaning, we believe, still to speak of phenomenology when however it is no longer a question of

29 30 31

32 33

Jean Ladrière, “Mathematiques et formalisme,” Revue des Questions Scientifiques (October 1955), p. 554. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, in Piaget and de Gandillac, Entretiens, p. 150. Suzanne Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958), p. 6. The term “conscience de rationalité” comes from Gaston Bachelard in Le Rationalisme appliqué, p. 14. Granger, “Logique, langage, communication,” p. 55. Gilles Gaston Granger, Méthologie économique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955), p. 133. See also his Pensée formelle, p. 10.


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researches that climb back to an absolute origin . . . all progress of thought is, in reality, a collection of origins.”34 Indeed, ironically taking the lead from Jules Vuillemin, Bachelard saw this development in Husserl’s thought itself, remarking that Husserl was tending towards a “dialectical” understanding of phenomenology that saved it from Cavaillès’s criticisms.35 In this new understanding, there would be a reciprocal relationship between “reason and its structural form.”36 This is what Jean-Toussaint Desanti meant in his book Phénoménologie et praxis, which outlined the “auto-destruction” of phenomenology “as a first philosophy.”37 Analyzing the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Desanti hoped to show that phenomenology in its considerations of time and the other was forced to recognize its own limitations and move beyond an “egology.”38 Because they foregrounded a reciprocal relationship between the formal and the transcendental, these phenomenologists no longer understood the transcendental as an absolute origin. For them, it could change over time, and respond to new theoretical situations. They understood the transcendental as essentially historical, and thus sidestepped the criticisms that had previously led epistemologists to reject phenomenology.39 The history of mathematics could not, however, be an ordinary history. It was not dependent on the chaotic chain of events often described by historians: “the history of science is in the end a history where contingency is eliminated . . . it must reveal itself following the lines of rationality, and taking note of the necessity of well ordered thoughts [pensées bien enchainées].”40 This was a transcendental history, which had a motive drive of its own, an “internal life.”41 Though they appealed beyond the formal systems of mathematics to explain them, it was never contingent human elements that piqued their interest. 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, p. 2. see also Granger, Pensée formelle, pp. 9–10. Suzanne Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans L. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 220–3. Bachelard was referring to a footnote in Jules Vuillemin L’Héritage kantien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954) when, after having criticized Husserl’s static phenomenology, Vuillemin suggested that the internal “order of reasons” in Husserl’s work had led him to a temporal foundation. Ibid., p. 228 note 3. Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 222. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1963), p. 16. See JeanToussaint Desanti’s reflections on his own turn to Husserl in “Sartre et Husserl, ou les trois culs-de-sac de la phénoménologie transcendantale,” Les Temps modernes 531–3 (1990), pp. 350–64. Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis, pp. 119–20. We can see a similar argument in Desanti’s later Les ´ Idéalités mathematiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), pp. V–VIII, 290, and 233ff. See also Antoinette Virieux-Reymond, La Logique formelle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962). Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, p. 8. Jean Ladrière, Les Limitations internes des formalismes (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1957), p. 407.

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The idea of multiple origins and transcendental historicity may have allowed the mathematical phenomenologists to overcome certain objections, but Gödel’s shadow loomed large. Both Cavaillès and Vuillemin had discounted the primacy of the transcendental sphere because the motor of change as analyzed by Gödel seemed to be inherent to the formal. An exterior grounding would not be able to take into account the dynamism that Gödel’s theory required. In response, the mathematical phenomenologists gave a different interpretation of Gödel’s thesis. A formal system did not produce a new system of a higher power out of itself. Rather, Gödel’s theory, by generating undecidable propositions, merely showed the insufficiency of each particular system. It was this insufficiency that demanded a reference to the transcendental sphere: the transcendental supplemented a formal that Gödel had shown to be incomplete. This view was in fact close to that of Gödel himself, who had great confidence in the power of the human mind to resolve questions left open by any delimited mathematical system. Jean Ladrière devoted his 1957 thesis to an extended treatment of Gödel’s theorem, commentating on its philosophical significance in the last chapter. He argued that the formal could never attain the richness of the intuitive; there would always remain an irreducible gap between the two. It was this gap that demanded the constant reevaluation of the formal in the intuitive and initiated what Ladrière called a dialectic.42 Suzanne Bachelard, too, as we will note later, drew the lesson from Gödel that the mathematician had to return to the transcendental sphere.43 Husserl’s transcendental provided a ground that survived any particular revolution in mathematics. This was the sense of Bachelard’s “consciousness of rationality.” For Ladrière, Bachelard, and, as we shall see, Derrida, Gödel’s theorem, rather than undermining Husserl, had made the turn to the German phenomenologist even more necessary. Because of Gödel, the completely formal could only exist as a telos or goal. It acted for all as an ideal not a reality: an idea in the Kantian sense. Teleologies were, therefore, a necessary part of formalization. As Bachelard suggested, the very nature of its deductive power meant that “all rational science has an evident teleological power,” and the intentionality of consciousness meant that an origin was always an “origin of . . . ”: “origin and teleology are the terms of a duality that has a phenomenological unity.”44 In science, “total knowledge has a meaning for the activity of 42 43 44

Ibid., p. 403. It is also an inadequation that would be asserted by Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation, p. 183, and later Derrida in his courses. Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 53–5. Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, p. 3.


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mathematical physics, insofar as it is an asymptotic ideal, insofar as it is a limit-concept in the Husserlian sense of the term.”45 This concurred perfectly with Ladrière’s language.46 The teleology could not be substantive. It did not provide an explicit and fleshed-out end. Indeed the value of an open telos was that, given the limitations expressed by Gödel, it allowed the functional norm of a closed system without itself succumbing to undecidability. It was thus that in discussing the teleology, the other key term used was “horizon,” that is an implicit sphere of possibilities not yet actualized. As Granger said “total formalization appears only ever as a horizon of scientific thought.”47 The concept of the horizon explained the unpredictability of the future, the unpredictability in a formal system that undermined its “linear” nature.48 Bachelard explained that in science knowing the premises did not necessarily give an immediate knowledge of the conclusions of an argument: “even within the rational, because its development comprises something unforeseeable for a lucid consciousness, one can, we believe, legitimately speak of an ‘experience’ of the rational that always brings something ‘new’ that was not implied in the elementary.”49 For Ladrière and Bachelard, moreover, this horizon was linked to a tripartite understanding of time, which explained the interaction of the formalized elements of mathematics and the intuition on which they were based. For both, it was the process of retention that allowed formalized mathematics to impact on the process of formalization and constitution in the present, a process that opened up the future in anticipation. Ladrière saw that it was only in a tripartite temporality that the precise relationship of constituting and constituted could be maintained:50 “there is thus here, in the uninterrupted doubling of self with self that characterizes the movement of temporalization (and that characterizes at the same time the movement of reflection), the source of that always open possibility of an after which characterizes constructive operations.”51 This was a process that ensured that “it is not given to us to have access to a pure presence . . . presence is always mixed with absence and positivity with negativity.”52

45 47 48

49 50

46 Ladri` Ibid., p. 190. ere, Les Limitations internes des formalismes, p. 410; see also pp. 440–4. Granger, Pensée formelle, p. 44. Cf. Roger Martin, “Epistémologie et philosophie,” in Bouligand, Hommage a` Gaston Bachelard; and Nicholas Bourbaki, Eléments de pure mathematique (Paris: Hermann et compagnie Editeurs, 1954), p. 7. Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, p. 4. 51 Ibid., p. 438. 52 Ibid., p. 443. Ladrière, Les Limitations internes des formalismes, p. 437.

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There is one other aspect of the work of the mathematical phenomenologists that deserves our attention, given the future development of Derrida’s philosophy. For in their concern to reassert the autonomy of formal systems (in order to allow a truly reciprocal relationship with the intuitive or transcendental), many epistemologists in the late 1950s paid great attention to the symbol, either implicitly or explicitly written. The most obvious example is Gilles Gaston Granger, who, both in his article for the Gaston Bachelard collection, and in Pensée formelle, elaborated the concept of writing at length. Writing was valuable for two reasons. Firstly, it allowed calculations to rise above the particular subject matter involved: Writing marked the key stage of formalization.53 As Granger noted, language was important to detach science from perception: “the form of the scientific object does not directly concern sensible content, but language.”54 The movement was so crucial that Granger suggested that without language the concept of structure would lose its meaning.55 But along with this role came another that was equally important. The transfer into language also allowed the reduction of the individual constituting subject. Language was necessarily intersubjective.56 As Ladrière suggested, In the objective language that constitutes the formal system . . . the movement of speech retires, leaving the elements of the discourse to themselves, in a dispersion which permits us to consider them on their own account and to submit them to the operations of counting [dénombrement]. Once a linguistic object has retired from the living current that ties the parts of language to the sources of meaning, it can no longer be considered but as the trace of an act which has been thematized, like the reference point for an operation that no longer belongs to the actuality of consciousness, but which has been projected outside of itself into the world of things.57

Preempting Derrida’s similar formulation by almost a decade, Granger wrote that to understand the role of writing in the construction of formal systems and thus of science, it would be necessary to “[reverse] the relations between oral language and writing.”58 Rigorous truth drew more from the desubjectifying and formalizing process of writing than the bound intuitive sense of speech. 53 54 57

58

See also Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation, p. 6; and Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, pp. 16–18. 55 Ibid., p. 38. 56 Ibid., p. 36. Granger, Pensée formelle, p. 12. Ladrière, Les Limitations internes des formalismes, pp. 434–6; see also pp. 439, 416–17; and Jean Ladrière, “Les Limitations des formalismes et leur signification philosophique,” Dialectica (1960), pp. 279–320, p. 308; and Granger, “Logique, langage, communication,” pp. 31–2. Derrida too refers to Granger in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 323 note.


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Suzanne Bachelard also drew on the peculiar nature of the symbol at key moments in her texts. Again it was a form of writing that could no longer be considered as purely secondary to thought: “the sign, by its type of sensible existence, realizes an economy of memory that thus liberates thought . . . but to see in the sign only a means to relieve thought of an unnecessary effort would be to depreciate its value: the sign had an inductive role for the development of thought.”59 This inductive role of the sign, one that detached calculations from the specific example and gave them universal applicability, meant that they were not just tools or sedimentations of live thought, but allowed a crucial step in that thought itself. Gary Gutting in his book on twentieth-century French philosophy mourns the death of Cavaillès, shot during the war for his resistance activity. But for this quirk of fate, Gutting suggests, a logical phenomenology might have arisen to challenge the subjective existentialist variety.60 In prematurely lamenting its demise, Gutting ignores the importance of this movement in French philosophy, which acted as a conduit from the phenomenology and existentialism of the 1950s to the structuralism of the next decade. Emphasizing the role of transcendental subjectivity like existentialism, yet aiming for the sureness of logical validity like structuralism, this form of “mathematical phenomenology” – and not the famous debates conducted by Lévi-Strauss or Althusser with Sartre – marks the hinge and crossover between the two movements.61 Mathematical phenomenology in the 1950s and early 1960s showed a strong interest in formalized mathematical structures. But unlike those of the later structuralists, their structures were not static, synchronic descriptions, but active, constitutive participants in the understanding and perception of the world. They were structures on the move, constantly changing and developing, working on internal tensions and difficulties that required the genesis of new structures. And these geneses, these movements and interactions between the formal and the intuitive were mediated through language and, more specifically, the written sign. Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry should be read in this context.62 He too hoped to tie a supposedly independent mathematical 59 60 61 62

Bachelard, La Conscience de rationalité, p. 207. Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 228. For this group of epistemologists and a brief discussion of their relationship to Husserl see Bernard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 380–96. We should not, as does Lawlor, regard Derrida’s concern with geometry as merely an effort to show the error of Husserl’s preferred example: Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, p. 105.

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discipline to a richer immediate experience. Like the epistemologists, he attributed its ability to transcend immediate subjectivity and its historical moment through an appeal to language, and following their lead, he sought to understand it as historical. Beyond works by Husserl, Derrida cited Suzanne Bachelard more than any other author. That Derrida’s Introduction drew on the texts and problematics of the epistemological tradition is suggested by the presentation of the book itself. In the English translation, the book is described as Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry and includes Husserl’s text as an appendix, for comparison. In French, however, Derrida’s name is not so prominent, the book as published is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Origine de la Géométrie. It is Husserl’s text that is supplemented by Derrida’s Introduction and not vice-versa. In the English-speaking world, Derrida’s reading has been seen as a proto-deconstruction, a first over-turning of Husserl’s logocentric project. In French, rather, it is a support to the text itself, aimed at deepening a reading rather than leaving it surpassed. Indeed in the Etudes philosophiques review of the translation the Introduction merited just one line. Contemporaries read the book for Husserl’s treatment of geometry, a work of epistemology appearing on the bibliographies of Desanti’s 1968 Les Idéalités mathématiques and the 1969 agrégation theme, “science and technology.” Scholars who would have bought the Origin of Geometry were philosophers of mathematics and phenomenologists, not skeptical postmodernists. Much lies in a title. If this is the case, then Derrida’s first discussion of writing cannot be interpreted unproblematically to be in continuity with his later work. As I will show over the next few chapters, the writing Derrida discussed in 1962 was not what it was in 1967. Further, it is only in Derrida’s later works that it came to assume centrality. After all, the discussion of writing is entirely contained within section seven of the Introduction, a chapter that seems to occupy an important but not pivotal point in the argument.63 In Derrida’s contemporaneous courses, writing was also conspicuously absent, an absence that would be overcome only after 1965 and the publication of 63

Most commentators, such as Paola Marrati, focus predominantly on the first sections, and especially section VII, without recognizing the wide use of such concepts in French epistemology at the time. Very few consequently spend any time on the invocation of God at the end of the Introduction, Marrati not even mentioning it. One exception is Len Lawlor, whose comparison with Hyppolite bridges both elements. The comparison with Hyppolite is, I think, a productive one, for Hyppolite found himself midway between the two main groupings that I am analyzing here. Interestingly enough, however, though the Hyppolite archive contains many of the drafts of the translation of the “Origin of Geometry,” it does not contain a copy of the Introduction. And despite Hyppolite being Derrida’s directeur de thèse, there is surprisingly little communication between them except to discuss Derrida’s continual failure to progress.


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his “Of Grammatology” articles in Critique. Rather than 1962 representing the genesis of a theme that would come to dominate much of Derrida’s career, as many commentators have impatiently tried to imply, I suggest that Derrida’s appeal to writing in his Introduction arose in conversation with a specific French tradition of epistemology. the origin of geometry In the chapter on the Problem of Genesis, I showed how the original concentration on questions of objectivity and psychology came to be translated into questions of the relationship between philosophy and history. This movement was to a large extent carried by the trajectory of Husserl’s own texts, whose later interest in history made up the subject matter of the last part of Derrida’s student work. It is from this last section that the Origin of Geometry was chosen. The Origin of Geometry thus combines the discussion of objectivity with an analysis of history, and it does this by inscribing a supposedly atemporal science (geometry) in a historical development. The content of the essay is also significant. The Problem of Genesis described Husserl’s constant and unsuccessful attempts to square the circle between a logicism (later a philosophy without history) and a psychologism (or a history without philosophy). It is these same concerns that animated the Origin of Geometry, but this time with a difference. In the Mémoire, like Derrida’s presentations of the rest of Husserl’s work, the Origin of Geometry was seen as intending one side of the duality, but failing in this enterprise and thus falling back to the other side. In this case, Derrida had suggested that the Origin of Geometry relied on an empirical approach, taking as its starting point existing science: it succumbed to the same aporias as empiricism and psychologism, it could not found certain truth. And the inadequacies of the approach lead Husserl to posit a “hidden reason” in history to tame empirical genesis and give it sense. This interpretation of the Origin of Geometry would not last. One of the rare notes that Derrida added to his Mémoire when it came to be published in 1990 refers to this description of the Origin.64 The note was appended to a sentence that asserted that “traditionality,” that is the process by which geometrical forms could be handed down through the generations for the possibility of reactivation, was purely empirical.65 In 1990 Derrida wrote, “sometime afterward, I noted: ‘No, look at again!’ opposite these lines.” 64 65

Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, p. 212 note. See Kates, Essential History, p. 57, who ties this to a change in stance towards Jean Cavaillès.

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If traditionality were not an entirely empirical process, then perhaps this might change the status of the text. Whereas before the different stages of Husserl’s thought had merely transcribed the same mysterious aporia from one to another phenomenological level, here, for the first time, there might be something that transcended the difference. That would be the interest in translating the Origin of Geometry: it was Husserl’s last, and best, chance to overcome the paradoxes that had dogged him his entire career, and thus it was the perfect text to which Derrida could apply himself. This reasoning is clear right from the first pages of the Introduction: Initially, The Origin of Geometry is not distinguishable by its double cluster of critiques that are directed, on the one hand, against a certain technicist and objectivist irresponsibility in the practice of science and philosophy, and on the other hand, against a historicism blinded by the empiricist cult of fact . . . But never had the two denunciations of historicism and objectivism been so organically united as in The Origin of Geometry.66

This did not mean that the problems were resolved here. As Derrida suggested “these pages of Husserl, first written for himself, have the rhythm of a thought feeling its way rather than setting itself forth.”67 Rather it was an attempt to bring to light a new “profundity of historicity” that no longer saw the origin and tradition of “ideal objectivities,” such as geometrical objects, as grounded in “the factual interconnections of empirical history, nor [in] an ideal and ahistoric enrichment.”68 Here lay the development from the Problem of Genesis: the Origin of Geometry was the first and only text to approach the aporia directly. And in posing the question in this way, Derrida aligned his analysis with the contemporary epistemological debate. If the likes of Gaston Bachelard, Jean Piaget, Gilles Gaston Granger, and Jules Vuillemin had criticized Husserl for denying the history of ideal objectivities, Derrida suggested a close examination of the Origin of Geometry would show that that was not the case, for there the question of history was investigated directly. Derrida thus followed Suzanne Bachelard in protecting Husserl from their criticisms, by showing that, in the end, he agreed with them. In aligning himself and Husserl with the French epistemologists, Derrida drew attention to three crucial elements of their project: the grounding of formal systems in a more expansive domain, the centrality of language, and 66 67

Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 26. 68 Ibid., p. 26 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 26 note 2.


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especially writing, in the constitution of those formal systems, and finally the possibility of a “history of mathematics” that would not merely be contingent and empirical, but transcendental. But, as we shall see, in each of these three elements, like Bachelard and Ladrière before him, Derrida noted the appeal to a Kantian idea, whose validity in the Husserlian system was, at the very least, problematic. After following the French epistemologists closely in the first sections of his Introduction, it was in the final analysis of the Kantian idea that he would break with them. up from the lebenswelt 69 What was the origin of geometry? For Husserl, the answer was clear: geometry arose out of what Husserl called the Lebenswelt, the immediate world of our experiences. As Derrida described, the Lebenswelt was not the pre-predicative sphere, it was not an absolute beginning independent of all human thought, but was the most proximate ground for geometrical idealizations.70 Prior to geometry, the Lebenswelt could not rely on geometrical categories. The checkered grid imposed by a Euclidean (or any other) understanding of space was a product of geometry, and so in the Lebenswelt space and time could not be determined by its standards. But this did not mean that space and time were not there already.71 Moreover, the “anexactitude” of the pre-geometrical sphere did not impede the rigor of the description of the world. Anexactitude, the absence of exactness, was not inexactitude, the failure to achieve exactness. It was a characteristic of this pre-geometrical field that forms could be progressively perfected, lines made straighter, and surfaces more smooth in the imagination. In the Lebenswelt there were no geometrical lines and surfaces, but rather “inexact but pure morphological types: ‘roundness’ for example, under which is constructed the geometrical ideality of the ‘circle.’”72 Though a description of the Lebenswelt and a purifying of its forms were possible, this was not in itself sufficient for the move to intelligible ideality. The morphological forms created by the imagination remained sensible, but geometrical shapes had to transcend these and be detached from all 69

70 71 72

In my presentation I have reversed the order of Derrida’s and Husserl’s text, in order to show the parallels with the other French epistemologists. The reversal is, as we shall see, an artefact of the Husserlian Rückfrage. See ibid., p. 125 and note on “Sartre’s breakthrough [trouée Sartrienne].” According to Husserl, this was Kant’s error in the Critique of Pure Reason. Derrida, Introduction, pp. 123–4. Here Derrida refers to Gaston Bachelard’s work on pre-scientific phenomenology.

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sensible ground, whether in the imagination or in perception. However much we perfect the forms of actual experience, we can never arrive at the purity of, say, the circle. As Derrida suggested, “the institution of geometry could only be a philosophical act,” it had to break with the finite.73 This was the first infinitization that withdrew geometry from the finite sensible world and made it universally applicable. The first infinitization raised geometry up to philosophy, universalized its axioms. But this was at first a closed totality, and a second infinitization was required to free this science for an unlimited development: Galileo’s revolution. In both cases, the philosopher is a man who inaugurates the theoretical attitude: the latter is only the mind’s [esprit] radical freedom, which authorizes the surpassing of the finite and opens the horizon of knowledge as that of a pre-having, i.e. of an infinite project or task (Vorhaben). Thereby, the theoretical attitude makes idealization’s decisive “passage to the limit” possible, as well as the constitution of the mathematical field in general. Naturally, this passage to the limit is only the surpassing of every sensible and factual limit.74

As Derrida explained it, it was an infinite idea that allowed the institution of geometry. language and the rise of non-subjective truth Once mathematics had been formed and detached from its experiential ground in the Lebenswelt the question arose as to what allowed it to be readable across time and space. What was it that made mathematics omnitemporal, valid at all times, “how can the subjective egological evidence of sense become objective and intersubjective?”75 For Derrida, the answer was language. Language represented objective ideality, because across a diversity of different instances it aimed at the same object. No matter how often one says Löwe (lion), in whatever accent, in whatever voice, whoever is speaking, and indeed, in whatever language, it would still mean the same thing. Like the epistemologists Derrida wanted to show that language was the basis of the formal. But in this example, there was still a necessary relationship to the content. To understand the word Löwe, one must first have had some experience of a lion. Mathematics had moved beyond even this level of ideality; it 73 74

Ibid., p. 127. Cf. Gaston Granger in Pensée formelle, pp. 62–6, when he suggests that we need to move beyond a phenomenology of perception. 75 Ibid., p. 63. Derrida, Introduction, p. 127 (translation modified).


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was detached from any empirical grounding. A final detachment must also occur. Following the epistemologists, Derrida argued that language must also detach the formal from its subjective ground. To achieve this, Derrida, like them, appealed to writing, which constituted a “subjectless transcendental field.”76 “From then on, writing is no longer only the worldly and mnemotechnical aid to a truth of which the sense of being can dispense with all consignation. Not only is the possibility or necessity of being incarnated in a graphic sign [graphie] no longer extrinsic and factual with regard to ideal objectivity: it is the condition sine qua non of Objectivity’s internal accomplishment.”77 But the discussion of language, like that of the genesis from the Lebenswelt, also required an infinite idea. The infinite idea was necessary, firstly, because it was impossible to exclude all empirical elements from language. Language implicitly instituted the eidetic reduction; the meaning of a given word is detached from all its possible real instantiations. But, according to Derrida, the ease of the eidetic reduction compromised the phenomenological reduction, because this required the reduction of alreadyconstituted eidetics, in order to understand their genesis in the transcendental sphere.78 And since the phenomenological reduction required the use of language, it could never fully reduce the eidetics at work there. By, of necessity, using language, a tear was opened in the phenomenological reduction itself. It was this difficulty that led Husserl to “defer” the discussion of language in all of his works.79 It is why Derrida cited Suzanne Bachelard’s suggestion of a return to psychologism in Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic.80 If language could not be fully reduced in phenomenology, it maintained phenomenology in a worldly attitude.81 This was particularly pressing with questions of “history” and “origins,” words which, as Derrida had shown, Husserl was at pains to distinguish from their mundane meanings. Even as Husserl tried to recast these words, the impetus that had led him to use them in the first place showed that they could not be detached entirely from conventional understandings. It was a criticism that, according to Derrida, Husserl never answered and one which remained valid, even if Derrida put it aside now. Language is always contaminated with the real, and so by implication is the history that language founds.82 An infinitely translatable language detached 76 77 78 80 81

Ibid., p. 88. The final expression was taken from Jean Hyppolite. Ibid., pp. 88–9 (translation modified). Cf. Bachelard’s description of writing earlier. 79 Ibid., p. 68 note 65. Ibid., p. 69. Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. xxxi. 82 Ibid., p. 69. Derrida, Introduction, p. 69 note 66.

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from all connection to the real could only be given as an unachievable telos. The same problem arose with writing. As we saw, writing detached formal structures from their roots in human subjectivity. But, by the very fact that it liberated meaning from its “present existence for a real subject,” writing opened up the possibility of “passivity, forgetfulness, and all the phenomena of the crisis.”83 Detached from its subjective ground, it inaugurated the possibility of a transcendental “disappearance of truth.”84 Husserl put aside the most obvious examples. This wasn’t the type of loss of truth suggested by a bonfire of all existent books, a “world-wide burning of libraries.”85 Of course, this might entail a loss of knowledge and truth in fact, but this was not the disappearance that concerned Husserl here. Because we had already moved through the reduction away from all material instantiations, the ideality of the geometrical object, its truth, would be resistant to such a burning.86 The angles of a triangle would still add up to 180 degrees even if every document saying so were lost.87 The only real danger was that which threatened the intentional meaning of writing. In becoming ideal, geometrical meaning was detached from its subjective ground, and hence the meaning of the symbols could become lost. According to this argument, we could never forget an idea as we thought it, but with the passage of time a note we jotted down on a piece of paper could become indecipherable. Writing instigated a blindness and an automatism that the other epistemologists distrusted. This was, after all, what happened in Husserl’s Crisis of the Sciences, when a formalized science became detached from the Lebenswelt, and made significant advances by forgetting the very roots that had initially legitimated it, like a machine working over millions of computations but without knowing what they 83 86 87

84 Ibid., p. 93 (translation modified). 85 Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 87. Though this would not be true for “enchaˆınées” cultural idealities like literature. The destruction of every copy of War and Peace would have a significant effect on its existence. Derrida, however, is unsure: “We would be completely convinced if here – as in his static analyses – Husserl had considered writing to be a sensible phenomenon. But did we not just find out that writing, inasmuch as it was grounding (or contributing to the ground of ) truth’s absolute objectivity, was not merely a constituted sensible body (Körper), but was also a properly constituting body (Leib)?” (Derrida, Introduction, p. 97). It is clear that, if it were just a Körper, non-constitutive, then its physical disappearance would not matter. But writing, actual existent writing, is, according to Derrida, not just a Körper, but also Leib, it plays a central role in constitution. Being at the same time both constituted and constituting, it is difficult to see how the one can be separated from the other, how the end of factical writing existing in the world would not also be the end of its sense-giving role. In order to move beyond this problem, Husserl has to undertake yet another reduction of writing, away from its Körper, to its Leiblichkeit. Of the possible ways in which writing can impede geometry compare p. 36 note.


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meant. But because this disappearance and forgetting were purely intentional, they were moral rather than physical failings. The preservation of meaning was a question of responsibility, and hence allowed a reactivation; the sedimentation of truth, the forgetting of its living ground, provided the basis for its later enlivening. The very possibility of a loss or a mutation in meaning posed a major problem to Derrida. It set up a possible equivocity of meaning that threatened the very phenomenological project. Detached from their original sense there was no guarantee that writing would be reactivated in the same way, that a note we wrote to ourselves yesterday would still mean the same thing to us today. Confronted with this we are left with a choice. Either following James Joyce we could attempt to gather up all the equivocity and make “visible [affleurer] the greatest possible synchrony with the greatest potential for buried intentions.”88 We could revel in the world of possible meanings. Or, like Husserl, we could reduce all equivocity to arrive at a unique and pure meaning. But, according to Derrida, we were left with a situation where the choice was not really possible; Joyce’s project demanded a mastering of history “in a total and present resumption,” while complete univocity would similarly stall the historical process for Husserl.89 For this reason, Husserl had to appeal to a complete reactivation, grounded in the univocal meaning of geometry, only as an ideal or telos.90 Derrida continued by placing great emphasis on the concept of the “horizon,” which was always already there in experience as a precondition of any knowledge, but never fully grasped. The horizon was the condition for all thought, which at the same time preserved “the indetermination of its infinite opening.” The concept of horizon thus “converts critical philosophy’s state of abstract possibility into the concrete infinite potentiality secretly presupposed therein. The notion of horizon thus makes the a priori and the teleological coincide.”91 the possibility of a historical phenomenology of mathematics The analysis of language had shown how, after its genesis, geometry could be transmitted across time and space. But it did not in itself account for its history. As we saw, the question of history and the connected issues posed by Gödel’s incompleteness theory were what had made phenomenology so 88 90

89 Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 102 (translation modified). 91 Ibid., p. 117 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 105.

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unattractive in the first place to many French epistemologists in the early postwar period. Derrida too recognized serious obstacles in the development of a historical phenomenology. Phenomenology was meant to found the regional sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and history. If phenomenology were itself to be historical that would invert the hierarchies, and cause the same type of problems that had been at the root of the crisis of the sciences, when a constituted science (history) was deployed to understand constitution (phenomenology). But, as Derrida was keen to point out, for all the originarity of the transcendental, methodologically it could only come second: “the reduction needs as its starting point the constituted result it neutralizes.”92 The return to origins must be a regression from constituted science, like Kant moving back to the conditions of possibility of all appearances. Otherwise how would we know where to start? But like all of the epistemologists, Derrida rejected the Kantian approach. Kant’s forms were too static. According to Derrida, even Kant had to assume that these ideal objects had a history, which nonetheless “remains hidden” for him.93 Derrida asserted that, if we were searching for the origins of mathematics, we would have to look back to a history that was no longer empirical, as Kant had shown, but transcendental. What would this transcendental history look like? Derrida sketched out the necessary forms of this new historical phenomenological sphere, centered on what he called “reactivation.” The conditions of this new reduced sphere were the following: it had to involve an “essence-of-thefirst-time.”94 The specific factual moment was no longer important, and reduced, but the fact that one existed was central. The more mundane and empirical notion of “origin” was then injected with a transcendental and phenomenological meaning. Secondly, it was essential that before this “first time” there was a “non-geometry.” And thirdly, the sense of that first geometry also had to be the sense now, because the reactivation required that we already know what the phenomenon “geometry” is, in order to locate and delimit it. These three conditions provided the means to start from already constituted geometry and search back for its meaning: “From a received and already legible document, the possibility is offered to me of interrogating anew and in return the originary and final intention of that which was delivered by the tradition”: Husserl’s Rückfrage Derrida translated as the “question en retour.”95 The “question en retour” was the key moment in the new historical phenomenology of geometry. 92

Ibid., p. 38.

93

Ibid., p. 42.

94

Ibid., p. 48.

95

Ibid., p. 50.


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Derrida was particularly concerned about the third condition. For the question en retour, there needed to be some constancy in the sense of geometry. Insofar as it changes we would be unable to draw on it to reactivate its origin, it would be as if the letter had been intercepted and edited on its journey. But what was this unity, and how could it be assured? One could no longer define it as “a system of axioms which ‘governs’ a multiplicity,” where “every proposition is determinable either as analytic consequence, or as analytic contradiction.”96 After Gödel had shown the incompleteness of all formal systems of a certain power, this definition of the unity of mathematics was no longer valid. Geometry and mathematics more generally would have to find their ground outside of formal systems. But Derrida suggested that the very question of decidability, upon which Gödel’s theorem depended, only made sense within a “geometricmathematical horizon in general, as the open unity of a science.” The question of decidability only makes sense in the broader field of a science that cares about such things. Derrida’s argument mirrored that of the mathematical phenomenologists, and Derrida turned explicitly to Suzanne Bachelard to counter the criticism leveled against Husserl by critics like Cavaillès.97 Rather than the instability of the formal as expressed by Gödel undermining the idea that it was rooted in a transcendental sphere, it was only because of this transcendental logic that it could maintain its unity across the reformulations of higher formal systems. Husserl’s theory did not succumb to Gödel’s criticism, because it reached back to a more basic mathematical drive that was continuous across different axiomatizations.98 It was a particular geometry that failed due to the incompleteness theorem, not geometry in general. For Husserl, geometry was grounded in originary evidences, which were “prior to those axioms and served as their ground.”99 It was what Suzanne Bachelard had called the “consciousness of rationality.” Derrida doubted that Gödel’s theory could simply be pushed aside. If the unity of geometry lay beyond decidability, as Ladrière and Bachelard thought, it could no longer be fitted into the decidable distinction between “true” and “false.” Consequently, geometry could never expect a determined definition, i.e. one that could be affirmed or denied. One would never be able to say, “Geometry is such and such,” because such a phrase declared itself to be true and thus part of the set of decidable propositions; a set we now know was posterior to the essential unity of geometry. 96 98 99

97 Ibid., p. 53 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 53. Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 52–5. Derrida, Introduction, p. 55.

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Not able to have a determined form, geometry could “only indicate the pure openness and unity of an infinite horizon.”100 Furthermore, because geometry had the pretension to universality, it had to be separated from the mere cultural traditions that were limited to one particular historical moment. Derrida stated that geometry’s status as a “science,” its refusal to be “enclosed in any determined historical culture as such,” could only exist as an infinite idea.101 the infinite idea of god So at each stage of Husserl’s work, Derrida noted the necessary appeal to an infinite idea. The discussion of the horizon and the Kantian idea, so central for the epistemologists, would become the keystone of Derrida’s analysis, the subject of the final section. On this idea, Husserl’s project stood or fell: it was the condition of possibility for geometry and phenomenology more generally. Derrida, quoting a phrase from Ricoeur that in contemporary courses was one of his favourites, suggested that Husserl did phenomenology, but it was Kant who “limited and founded it.”102 As Ricoeur’s catchphrase suggested, the Kantian idea, which saved phenomenology from being mere phenomenalism, was particularly difficult for phenomenology to understand. It was an infinite idea whose evidence was “mysterious,” not fitting into phenomenology’s “principle of principles.”103 Because it was infinite, it could never be given “in person” to finite intuition. The keystone of phenomenology, and one that was necessary both for Husserl and for Derrida’s contemporary epistemologists, escaped its grasp. It was here that Derrida’s analysis took a very strange turn, a change in direction that, I think, is the most important in the book. Derrida compared the indeterminacy of the idea, as an ideal pole that is not in itself transcendent to history, to God.104 The appeal to God is particularly surprising, for in the Origin of Geometry Husserl never mentioned him.105 100 102 103 104 105

101 Ibid., p. 58 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 140 note 167, quoting Ricoeur in Kant-Studien, reprinted in Ricoeur, A l’école de la phénoménologie. Derrida, Introduction, p. 106. The declaration of the Idea as mysterious should recall the Problem of Genesis. See ibid., p. 148, and p. 45 note. Ibid., p. 163. Lawlor makes a note of this appeal to God, but sees it as the continued critique of Husserl, whose philosophy is “a sort of Christianity.” See also his references to the cross: Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, p. 129. But his discussion is quite brief. Hent de Vries gives a lengthier treatment of this moment: see de Vries, Philosophy and the turn to Religion, p. 148, and Derrida’s tying of the religious to the historical, most clearly in chapter 3, “Formal Indications.”


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To understand the move we need to turn to Derrida’s contemporary courses.106 In one prepared in early 1963, Derrida explicitly discussed the ambivalent role of God in Husserl’s phenomenology. First, Husserl tried to separate himself from what he thought were the “theological” presuppositions of previous philosophies, especially that of Kant. In particular he opposed Kant’s distinction between the thing for-us and thing in-itself, which derived from the distinction between limited human intuition (intuitus derivativa) and an infinite divine intuition (intuitus originaria) that created the object, and thus could access it independently of human capacities. But for Husserl, God too was constrained to see an object in Abschattungen, one side at a time, because spatiality was part of the eidos of the object, not just the product of our perception. Spatiality was an “essential and irreducible eidetic component of the body itself.” If the principle of principles – the certainty of the eidetic laws drawn from a phenomenology – held, it had to hold for all possible subjects, including God.107 In Husserl’s first works, especially Ideas, then, God was “a limit concept, a phantom destined to make the absolutely unconditioned universality of certain eidetic laws appear.” Second, under the transcendental reduction, the totality of the world, including God, was reduced; in returning to the transcendental sphere “the God of religions” had to be put in brackets.108 But despite this rigorous and “cold atheology,” as Husserl’s philosophy developed the name of God became increasingly present. The seeds of such a reemergence could be seen in the debate with Kant. To Husserl’s objections, Derrida, ventriloquizing Kant, riposted that the idea of an infinite consciousness was implicit in the idea of the Abschattung, of the inadequation of the intuition to the object: It is on the foundation of the infinite that I perceive the indefiniteness of the finite. It is from the horizon of a total adequation of my perception to the thing that I can become conscious of the inadequation. And Kant would reproach Husserl for not starting sufficiently explicitly from this relationship between the finite, the indefinite, and the infinite, and from this difference between an infinite consciousness and a finite consciousness. Neglecting this difference, while making the finite consciousness the originary absolute, he forgets precisely finitude itself, both its condition and its derivation. 106 107

108

See Jacques Derrida, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie: le dieu de Husserl,” Irvine, 7.8, sheets 31–3 and 41–2, and Jacques Derrida, “Le Sens du transcendental,” Irvine, 6.9, sheet 71. If the opposite were true, and God had access to a nonspatial object, then the intuition would become mere appearances, and we could no longer rely on “immediate clear and distinct intuition of the thing present in person” to provide truth; philosophy would lose all value. Derrida, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie,” sheet 7. Ibid., sheet 22.

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Indeed, Husserl found himself continuously required to appeal to an infinite idea in order to maintain his system, fittingly calling it a Kantian idea. This infinite idea was necessarily indeterminate. As Derrida asserted, “the Kantian idea, for Husserl, is an opening to the indefinite horizon and not to an actual infinity. It is time itself and not an immobile eternity.”109 So, even after the phenomenological reduction, a close analysis revealed a persistent form of transcendence. One such transcendence in immanence was the unity of the transcendental subject that accompanies all my representations. But in Ideas, Husserl talked of another immanent transcendence, which was not immediate to experience like the subject but mediate: what Husserl named God.110 This God manifested itself mediately in thought, firstly through teleology, “the recognition of a certain final order,” secondly through the idea of a moral order, and thirdly in religious consciousness. Husserl thought that he could fully reduce this idea of God, because it was present only mediately, through signs. Nevertheless, because God still “announces himself ” in the immanence of the transcendental experience, Derrida declared that this reduction could never be definitive, that God was “deferred [differé]” rather than reduced. As Husserl’s thought developed, this mediate transcendence in immanence would return, not as the factual God of religions – the human fleshing out of this sign could be definitively placed to one side – but “a God who, in the methodological operation of the reduction has lost all his classical ontological attributes.”111 For this reason, this new God, appearing in the transcendental sphere, “can no longer be an absolutely transcendent God, determining the world and consciousness from the outside,” he no longer accorded with the “classical concept of God, which is mundane and anthropological.”112 According to Derrida, it was by drawing out these implications, that, in the later works, God became more central for Husserl, especially in his analyses of the mathematical object, whose omnitemporality required the idea of an infinite mind. The consciousness that projects such objects, who in consequence seeks the truth, demands the truth, the consciousness that renders itself responsible in history for that infinity and that universality, the consciousness which feels itself called to such a project, which infinitely overflows the totality of what in fact is, this consciousness that thinks the universal truth across [par-delà] its factical determinations, this 109 111 112

110 See Husserl, Ideas I, § 58. Ibid., sheet 14. Derrida, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie,” sheets 29–30. It is for this reason that Husserl claimed that his philosophy could be a “non-confessional path to God.” Derrida, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie,” sheets 30–2.


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consciousness that poses and thinks the value of infinite and universal truth, this consciousness makes the divine rise up [affleurer] within it.113

The divine arose within finite consciousness, because it had responsibility for the infinite mathematical object: There is then no infinite or universal or eternal independent of a completely historical and temporal consciousness . . . The Telos of truth, such as it manifests itself in the sciences and philosophy . . . is thus the manifestation of divinity, the emergence of the divine in history, the irruption of divine logos.114

Indeed this form of divinity that is intimately related to the Kantian idea showed itself to be essential at several levels, broadly corresponding to the three elaborated in Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, all opening up the possibility of history.115 In all these cases God was not a transcendent thing, but the pole of historicity: “he is the opening . . . of history, in the sense of an infinite Telos . . . always deferred [differé], situated at the infinite as a horizon . . . ‘Selbstrealisierungsprozessus der Gottheit’ [the divine’s process of self-realization].”116 Because the infinite idea for Husserl was God, Derrida’s engagement with questions of epistemology was a propadeutic to the more critical discussion of the divine. According to Derrida, the very claims of French philosophy of science, especially as concerned the crucial question of formalization, were dependent on an appeal to the infinite idea, and hence to theology.117 This was why Derrida referred to God in the final section of his Introduction. Derrida’s contemporary courses deal only briefly with questions of mathematics and science. It was religious questions that most exercised him, whether of God, Evil, or Theology. Geometry in Derrida’s Introduction merely served as another occasion for discussing the divine. The theoretical tenor of Derrida’s contemporary courses chimes with a tradition of French Heideggerianism that had arisen in opposition to Sartre’s humanism, a tradition I discussed briefly in the first chapter. Though this was a broad movement, incorporating a variety of theoretical views, one scholar in particular should catch our interest here. Henri Birault was the most important and successful Christian Heideggerian in 113 115

116 117

114 Ibid., sheet 35. Ibid., sheet 34. See also his analysis of Husserl’s Kantian idea in the course “L’Idée” from 1961–2, Irvine, 6.6, especially sheets 80–5, where he describes the idea as a mystery and identifies it with the idea of God. Derrida, “Phénoménologie, téléologie, théologie,” sheets 38 and 42. The other phenomenologist for whom this is the case is Jean Ladrière. See especially his article “Histoire et destinée,” Revue philosophique de Louvain (February 1960), pp. 103–34.

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France, a scholar who was one of the rare contemporary commentators on Heidegger that Derrida cited.118 Birault’s most important article, the 1960 “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” was a rejection of the “Judaeo-Christian idea of finitude” that had been read into Heidegger’s concept of Endlichkeit. To explain this, Birault entered into a long analysis of the history of the finite. For the Greeks, Birault asserted, it was the infinite that was the fallen form, presented as the non-complete. A thing only became what it was once it was finished, finite: the perfect as opposed to the imperfect. Even in the Jewish theological tradition the finite was not demeaned. It lacked infinity but wasn’t bereft of it, “the limitation that is no longer good as with the Greek, but which is not yet bad as with the moderns.”119 It was only in its Christian theological formulation that the finite gained its negative meaning, compared unfavorably to a perfect and infinite God. This unfavorable reading of the finite, as the inability to achieve the infinite, was experienced by the finite subject as “evil/pain [mal].”120 The pained sense of its own limitations motivated the finite subject to exceed them. This was the origin of atheism that reversed the meaning of previous theological discourse: “To think the finite as finitude is to transform this privation into a stance [position] to make the finite no longer the negation of the infinite but rather to make the infinite the negation of the finite.”121 Finitude was the condition for freedom, a yearning to overcome finite limitations, an opening to the indefinite and the unlimited: “What then is this infinity of free finitude if not an irreligious and Promethean infinite of Man who, in making himself God, makes himself man by the transgression of sin?”122 And yet despite its atheistic claims, this reversal maintained the old structure of the theological opposition: even though they had rejected the idea of a positive infinite, philosophies of finitude still felt finite existence as a “mal.” As Birault remarked “the problem is to know if the unhappy and properly finite dimension of finitude can be maintained when the inanity of the infinite finds itself denounced.”123 Birault presented Heidegger’s theme of Endlichkeit as a direct rejection of this old metaphysical and theological (even when atheist) framework. For Birault, with his concept of Endlichkeit Heidegger had attempted to 118

119 121

See Jacques Derrida, “Penser, c’est dire non,” Irvine, 4.16. p. 57, referring to Birault’s “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” Revue internationale de philosophie (1960), p. 140. as “a beautiful article . . . difficult and subtle but of great richness.” See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 317 note 70, and Jacques Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?” Irvine, 7.9, sheet 65. 120 Ibid., p. 147. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” p. 141. 122 Ibid., p. 148. 123 Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 149.


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dispense with all onto-theologies, the assertion of any particular being as supreme. Refusing the stifling idea of a positive infinite as a structuring principle, whether accessible to humanity or not, Heidegger turned to his analysis of the “veiling,” the hiding of Being in its very presentation: the “veil of Being absolutely essential to its unveiling.”124 Thought had to recall this veiling, “without it, Being would always threaten to collapse into one privileged form of being and the thought of Being would remain a latent [larvée] theology, so that it would still be the thought of some Absolute.”125 In short, to avoid onto-theology, we had to respect the ontological difference. Birault’s article may seem to be a rejection of religion and theology, but a cursory glance at his broader project suggests that in fact the opposite was the case.126 In the article on “La foi et la pensée d’après Heidegger,” Birault argued that, though Heidegger had placed an absolute distinction between Faith and the interrogation of the ontological question – between theology and philosophy – there existed a certain community between them, a community that explained their fractious relationship in history.127 Philosophy, in Heidegger’s sense, dealt with the Being of beings. Traditionally this had meant the recourse to a summum ens, a supreme being, creating what Heidegger called an “onto-theology.” Being had been seen as God, the Good, the Other, or, in Descartes’s case extension, all of which according to Heidegger were rather determined beings with their own way of Being, not Being itself. Since Being was the possibility of any determination whatsoever – a being is good/beautiful/small/spiritual etc. – Being itself could not be determined. The history of philosophy for Heidegger was the perpetual dissimulation of Being under beings, thought under one metaphor or another. Since this dissimulation was necessary and unavoidable, there was no right determination to which it could refer, no perfect being, God, or infinite, existing outside of the various metaphors. Bad metaphysics then was not a bad metaphor, but rather “onto-theology,” refusing to think this metaphor as metaphor. Onto-theology thought that Being actually “is” (though the sense of this “is” was left undecided) the Good, God, the Other, or res extensa. As Birault asserted, “Being unveiling itself in being 124 125 126

127

Ibid., p. 160. Compare with Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 144. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” p. 161. We might say, using the words of Martin Hägglund, that Birault was not just an atheist (rejection of a positive absolute), but a radical atheist in his rejection of the theological remainders in the concept of finitude. But if Hägglund’s description of radical atheism works just as well for Birault as for Derrida, it raises questions about the polemic intention of his book. Ibid.

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dissimulates itself in dissimulating this very dissimulation.” In other words, onto-theology arose, because when Being revealed itself in beings it forgot that that revelation was also a veiling. Philosophy had to resist onto-theology and sweep away human idols: “only a thought turned resolutely from all theology will be able to make itself capable to spell out the names of disappeared gods [dieux disparus]. It recognizes first the Abyss in which Metaphysics works and to which Christianity [christianisme] has not a little helped to precipitate us.” In so doing this thought would “drive us to the living sources of Being and the Sacred [Sacré].” Though never a substitute for faith, this philosophy was the only one that could better help understand “the very word of ‘God.’”128 Such a view distanced Heidegger’s work from what Birault saw as the crass atheism of a Nietzsche or a Sartre and the na¨ıve religion that appealed to an accessible infinite. Birault’s analysis of Heidegger’s Endlichkeit, then, was a rejection of both bad theology and bad atheism, because both worked within the same onto-theological structure. For Birault, as for the other Christian Heideggerians, the combined veiling and unveiling of Being in beings, or the ontological difference allowed them to think the divine without positing a theological absolute. It limited knowledge to make room for faith. This difference then was the Heideggerian equivalent of Marcel’s mysterious “absent God,” and the overturning of onto-theology was the updated variant of Weil’s and Borne’s “purifying atheism.”129 It is on this basis that we can make sense of Derrida’s other courses that treated theological questions. Take, for example, the 1963 course “peut-on dire oui a` la finitude? [can one say yes to finitude?].” Following Birault, Derrida defined finitude as a combination of a finite being and infinite freedom, a freedom that, in a particular modern tradition, stemmed from the recognition of limitations and the possibility of transcending them. Finitude thus described a finite being structured by a recognition, a “yes” to its limits, which allowed a practical, and ethical “no” to them.130 As Derrida showed, finitude made a surreptitious appeal to the divine. The imperfection of the finite being, its unflattering comparison with the infinite, was necessary for Descartes to doubt and thus the ground of his freedom to say yes or no to any particular piece of knowledge. Thus, the very possibility of doubt, of saying no, was dependent on a primordial, 128 129

130

Ibid., pp. 131–2. Birault does not actually use the word “difference” in this article, but it is a major presence in his other work. See especially Birault “De l’être, du divin et des dieux chez Heidegger,” in De l’être, du divin et des dieux, pp. 513–50. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 21.


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though dissimulated, “yes to god.” “It seems that the consciousness of finitude as a lack [comme manque] cannot be originary. It always creates itself on the foundation of an infinite” to which the no would always be derivative and secondary.131 And this “yes to God” must also be a “yes of God,” “a self-affirmation [auto-affirmation] of God,” because as the ground of all philosophical interrogation, it could never be the simple affirmation of the finite philosopher.132 Philosophy is only the recognition of this originary divine speech [parole]. It is a yes to the yes of God, it is a response and a recognition. Philosophy is the recognition (in both the cognitive and ethical sense of this word) I recognize God, the yes of God . . . My yes, in the strong sense of the word, replies to the yes of God.133

But if this “yes” was truly primary, and the “no” purely secondary, this would undermine human freedom. If the “yes” to God was the unadulterated ground of philosophy, if it weren’t somehow contaminated with a “no,” then we would have no choice, we would have to affirm the divine; the “yes” of faith would be, in Derrida’s words, an “obligated recognition.”134 Classical philosophy, however, for all its assertion of human freedom, was incapable of thinking the inherence of a “no” in its ontotheological presentation of the infinite; negativity had to be purely human and the original affirmation could only be divine.135 According to Derrida, to make room for human freedom our “yes” had to be radical, a free choice, dependent on a co-primordial possibility of the “no.” Our freedom – and negativity – had to be an integral part of God. Citing Kafka, a phrase of which he was particularly fond in this period, Derrida said “we are the nihilistic thoughts that arise in God’s brain.”136 To understand the essential negativity within the divine, Derrida turned to Heidegger. The Heideggerian concept of Endlichkeit implied that a 131

132 134 135

136

Ibid., sheet 40. In an earlier course, “Penser, c’est dire non,” Derrida argued that Husserl’s phenomenology was similarly structured, the “no” of the reduction was dependent on a “yes” to immediate intuition. Derrida, “Penser, c’est dire non,” pp. 40–1. 133 Ibid., sheet 48. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 47. Ibid., sheet 49; see also sheet 65. Derrida continued to describe the Nietzschean “Dionysiac yes,” which was the “affirmation of the finite by the finite.” But in being beyond Man, the “yes” of the Overman was a self-overcoming not essentially different from the classical sense of finitude. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 52. Compare with Birault in “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” p. 489: “One has seen that only negativity’s [Négatif] power of discrimination can found the discursivity of discourse. Then, to save discourse and to save God, one only has to carry discourse into God himself, that is to say to interpret God as the word or as Mediation to build on that collapse [effondrement] of substance a new figure of the Absolute.” Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 49. See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 68, which develops a similar argument.

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thing only became what it was through its limit. Limitation was the “definition and condition of Being and of Being such.”137 Though Being was dissimulated in beings, it was only as a being that it could reveal itself. It was the veiling essential to its unveiling. Thus Heidegger’s thought allowed Derrida, like Birault before him, to imagine finitude and freedom without first positing an infinite absolute that was, in a sense, a priori.138 There was no Being outside beings, just as there was no being without Being, no infinity preceding finitude, nor a perfect finite. If neither were possible alone, if neither could pre-exist nor precede the other, then it must be the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings that was primary.139 The turn to Heidegger to understand God, while repeating the moves of the Christian Heideggerians, still leaves many questions unanswered. For the relationship between God and Being, whose identity was denied by Heidegger and his French followers, was always a fraught one. To bring out the tensions I would like to discuss one more lecture from the period, significantly – as we shall see later – one of Derrida’s last lectures at the Sorbonne, entitled “ontology and theology.” The relationship between the ontology and theology was fraught because each declared its own priority. From the perspective of ontology, theology was a particular science dealing with that particular being called God and thus was dependent on an understanding of what Being in general was: “Theology would be submitted to ontology as a particular science to a universal science.”140 But, theology could not be seen simply as a “discourse on God,” because “God cannot be designated as . . . the object of speech [parole], of a discourse.” Theology might rather be the discourse “of God.” Further, an omnipotent God could not be subsumed to one particular ontological category and thus be subservient to ontology itself. God escaped any essence and was absolutely singular: “because God is unique and because there is no concept for something unique.”141 These particularities of theology could just as easily be asserted for ontology. Ontology was not the science about Being, just as theology could 137 138

139 140 141

Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 57. In a later course it was a similar analysis that Derrida undertook for the problem of evil. Insofar as evil is grounded on a greater good, it is no longer evil. A true understanding of evil requires a philosophy of originary finitude, detached from any prior relationship to an infinity. Jacques Derrida, “Le Mal est dans le monde comme une esclave qui fait monter l’eau,” Irvine, 7.13, especially sheet 46. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui a` la finitude?”, sheet 67. Jacques Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine, 8.12, sheet 3. Ibid., sheet 4. Derrida noted that this necessarily privileged monotheism.


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not be the science about God. To be the object of a science, Being had to be a being, but this identification was, as Heidegger asserted, the central error of onto-theology. If theology was a model for ontology, then there was an alternation, and perhaps a mutual implication in both, each one seemingly dependent and drawing upon the other. The question arose whether “the thought of Being precedes . . . the thought of God, as the opening in which God announces himself? or rather if God is the very name of that opening in which Being shows itself as Being, Being as such?”142 The question, Derrida asserted, could be answered neither by a finitist philosophy nor by one pinning its hopes to an infinite. Rather, it was Heidegger’s difference that offered the clues to understanding the relationship between God and Being. Concluding, Derrida posed the unanswered question “But God = difference, or that in which difference appears?”143 The understanding of the concept of God, and so of the infinite idea, through an appeal to Heidegger’s difference is the central movement in the last section on Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. God was both what was read through history and yet was transcendent to all the constituted moments of that history, it was an infinite that could not be immediately opposed to finite beings: transcendence in immanence. So too “the Idea is not an Absolute that first exists in the plenitude of its essence and then descends into history or becomes disclosed in a subjectivity, whose acts would not be intrinsically indispensable to it.”144 Because the Kantian idea was both immanent and transcendent in Husserl’s work, Derrida was able to challenge Cavaillès’s criticism of Husserl. The idea was both an active part of the constitution of the world (transcendent) and something that was read from it (immanent): we did not need to choose, pace Cavaillès, between an “absolute logic” and a “transcendental logic.”145 Thought is activity at one and the same time following and preceding passivity. It is both guided by formal systems and is their ground, dialecticially. Thus, as Derrida argued, both God and the Infinite idea, immanent transcendences, were the movement of history: If there is any history, then historicity can only be the passage of a Speech [parole], the pure tradition of a primordial logos towards a polar Telos. But since there can be nothing outside the pure historicity of that passage, since there is no Being which has sense outside of this historicity or escapes its infinite horizon, since the 142 145

143 Ibid., sheet 8. 144 Derrida, Introduction, p. 142. Ibid., sheet 7. Ibid., p. 143. Cf. Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 99, 163, 220–2.

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Logos and the Telos are nothing outside of the interplay [Wechselspiel] of their reciprocal inspiration, this signifies then that the Absolute is Passage.146

Phenomenology was a response to the originary Logos, it always came late to Being, a “delay [retard] or lateness of Discourse after the showing [monstration] of Being.” It is this lateness that was the “philosophical absolute.”147 It was another way of asserting the priority of the ontological difference: the originary Logos, God’s voice, “is present only in being deferred-delayed [se différant] without respite[.] This impotence and this impossibility are given in a primordial and pure consciousness of Difference.”148 God, like the Kantian idea, could never be given completely, it always exceeded philosophy, always concealed itself in phenomena. But this concealment was just its mode of givenness. There was no infinite lying outside of history: the ontico-ontological difference was this recognition, a difference powering a transcendental historicity. conclusion Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry elaborated the very questions and problems discussed by contemporary epistemologists. That Derrida should have won the Prix Cavaillès was not a mistake, nor an oddity of history; the first ten sections of his Introduction engaged with some of the most pressing questions of this tradition at the time, by tying the history of mathematics to its phenomenological ground. But while analyzing the possibility of mathematical idealities and their history, Derrida kept running up against one condition that escaped phenomenological analysis. The Kantian idea – necessarily both the pole of historicity that governed it and immanent within history – turned out to have the same characteristics as a certain understanding of the Divine. Derrida’s last section thus fit better with the works of Christian Heideggerians who drew upon the German’s later writings to understand the human relationship to God. It was Heidegger’s difference, a difference that was also a passage, the revealing/veiling of Being in beings, God in the world, that offered the greatest hope for explaining the possibility of mathematics. The book’s reception and reading public do not contain all the answers to its philosophy. Derrida wrote for the epistemologists, but not as an epistemologist. 146 148

147 Ibid., p. 152. Derrida, Introduction, p. 149. Ibid., p. 153. See also Derrida’s discussion of God and Being in the closing section of “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, esp. pp. 148–50.


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As in his Mémoire, Derrida again contaminated his epistemology with religious themes. We saw in the first chapter that the intellectual history of the 1950s can be figured as the twin attempts of communist and Christian thinkers to pick over the bones of Sartrean existentialism, which in the halls of academia was no longer taken seriously. The communists, in reinterpreting Husserl through his more scientific writings, set the tone for the study of his phenomenology throughout the 1950s. The Catholics, on the other hand, reappropriated Heidegger to show that his philosophy was not atheistic, as Sartre had asserted, but provided valuable resources for a revitalized religion. The two traditions disaggregated the phenomenologists to develop non-humanist readings. Derrida’s Introduction is thus particularly significant. For the first time since Sartre (perhaps prematurely) had synthesized Husserl and Heidegger around Man, Derrida’s “Introduction” reunited them around God, and in doing so brought together in one work the two key strands of post-existentialist post-humanist philosophy. In this sense Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry can be read as the culmination of 1950s phenomenology in France.

part ii

Between phenomenology and structuralism

In the fall of 1964, Derrida left the Sorbonne, where he had been teaching as an assistant, to take up his new role as agrégé-répétiteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. From the bustling anonymity of the Cour d’Honneur, working alongside the phenomenologists Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, and Suzanne Bachelard, Derrida once again entered the intimate, even claustrophobic, institution where Louis Althusser held court and antihumanist Marxism was the order of the day. Though only a few hundred meters’ walk from the lecture halls in which he had been teaching for the past four years, socially and philosophically the ENS was a world apart. In passing through the main gates, Derrida was not only embarking on a new stage of his career, he was entering into a structuralist lions’ den: it was to be a rude introduction to 1960s philosophy. The move would have a profound effect on Derrida’s philosophy, and leave its mark on the three books he published in 1967: Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology, three texts that present what could be called the canonical Derrida. Analyzing each text in turn, the next three chapters will present three different perspectives on Derrida’s developing thought. In chapter 6, I provide an overview of the shift, by following the mutations in Derrida’s use of différence/différance. This analysis lays the foundation for a discussion of Derrida’s engagement with a form of structural psychoanalysis that had made a base at the ENS. In chapter 7, I argue how Derrida’s new teaching responsibilities shaped his thought, transforming it from a specialized phenomenological theory into a mode of reading applicable to a large range of texts and discourses: what Derrida called deconstruction. Finally, in chapter 8, I examine Derrida’s confrontation with structuralism and consider the political valence of these changes, explaining how antihumanism and writing served to ease his negotiation of the fraught political, social, and philosophical space at the Ecole. 183

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The traces of this development are made clearest by the internal tensions of Derrida’s 1967 book Writing and Difference, which collected together all his article-length essays written since 1959. Indeed, appropriately, the most important line of continuity spanning all the essays in Writing and Difference is a resistance to the very concept of a unified totality, what Derrida called the “book.” In the early 1960s, Derrida had presented the “book,” especially as understood by Leibniz and Hegel, as the antithesis of his own project.1 The book represented totalizing philosophy, the text that purported to be complete with the certainty of absolute knowledge and the synchronicity of a mathematical system. Like Hegel’s Encyclopedia, it had the task of understanding everything and let nothing escape its ambit; the book was in this sense doubly “comprehensive.” But for Derrida, this comprehensiveness was illusory. Due to the limits of the human mind, the book was a mere dream, and one that could only impose itself by denying this finitude. The “book,” as seen by Derrida, was Man trying to be God. The disruption of human thought and its dreams to be encyclopedic also take pride of place in Derrida’s writing from the late 1960s. In “Ellipsis,” the final essay, written specifically for the 1967 publication, Derrida wrote: “here or there, we have discerned writing: a nonsymmetrical division designated on the one hand the closure of the book, and on the other the opening of the text. On the one hand the theological encyclopedia and, modeled on it, the book of Man. On the other, a fabric of traces marking the disappearance of the exceeded God or of an effaced Man.”2 But because a book is itself composed of text, its own claims to comprehensiveness and totality are constantly challenged. Writing breaks the “self-identity of the origin,” which is only the trace of something else. Text is the very possibility of repetition, of a “re-presentation” authorized by the absence of the singular signified; where there are no originals, all copies are equal. It follows that, because a book was written, whatever its pretensions to absolute identity and synchronicity, it can never be self-contained. The “return to the book is then the abandoning of the book.”3 It was perhaps this possibility of self-overcoming that justified Derrida’s enterprise when, in December 1966, he set about compiling his own book, Writing and Difference. Clearly, there can be no easy identification of the concept “book” as it occurs in Derrida’s writing and the concrete product that was the result of his labor that winter. But, neither is it possible simply to disassociate the two. For Derrida, in Writing and Difference, did make 1

See Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 10.

2

Ibid., p. 294.

3

Ibid., pp. 295–6.


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great efforts to detach his own work from the traditional book form, a form that he would regard as exemplary of the metaphysical concept. Writing and Difference is a collection of essays. It is fragmentary, and eschews from the first any totalizing interpretation. Further, the book, unusually for the time, contains no prefatory material.4 The reader is taken straight to the first essay, and there is no explicit attempt to guide the readings of the individual articles with a unifying introduction. It is only at the end that Derrida provided some type of overview, a short passage after the bibliography. Here, rather than trying to summarize or unify the book under one common theme, Derrida brought attention once again to the heterogeneous nature of his work, which effected a pointillism, the essays only loosely sewn together: “If text means tissue, all these essays have stubbornly defined it as loose stitching [faufilure].”5 Of course the book was unified by the title, but on the whole it attempted to undo any pretension to tightly knit homogeneity.6 The only over-arching structure for the book was a historical one. Even as late as March 1967, when Derrida was finishing his corrections, he did not consider the chronological presentation itself as necessarily “bookish.” When every determined system was considered as synchronic, and the overcoming of these finite systems took place in and because of time, history was one of the only ways of escaping the “book.” In fact, for Derrida historicity was the constant overcoming of “books,” the refusal to submit historical change to historically transcendent schemas. The chronological structure of the book, and consequently the narrative that it tells, has often been lost on those reading Writing and Difference. First, it is not immediately obvious that the essays are, in fact, in chronological order. The most obvious deviation from this schema is the placing of “Genesis and Structure” at the center of the book, when, as a paper for the 1959 Cérisy conference, it should have come first. But when the paper was finally published, in a 1965 collection, it had been substantially revised, mostly to absorb the themes from Derrida’s introduction to the Origin of Geometry, which he had not started before the conference.7 In a letter questioning another deviation from sequential ordering, Derrida did not even consider the placement of “Genesis and Structure” as 4 5 6 7

The innocence of the preface is placed under scrutiny in Derrida’s later work; see especially “Hors livre,” in Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). ´ Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 437. However the title is not as unambiguous as it might first appear. See the conclusion to chapter 6. See in comparison the transcript of the 1959 talk sent to Derrida for corrections for the 1965 volume: Irvine, 57.8.

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a problem. Derrida had written to his publishers on March 25, 1967 to query the location of the 1966 “Structure, Sign and Play” after the essay “Restricted Economy” of 1967. He asked, “Will you do me the favor of verifying if that was my intention? I tried to understand why I did it. The reason escapes me.”8 The momentary forgetfulness lasted but three days, when he wrote again, assuring the editor, “I think I have understood why I inverted the chronological order of the articles on Bataille, and structure, sign, and play. Everything is fine.”9 The incident demonstrates globally what it contests locally: Derrida did indeed propose to present his essays in the order they were written.10 This desire also explains the lack of a preface. A preface written after the book it introduces would have disrupted the chronological presentation of the essays. Encompassing the changes in Derrida’s thought, Writing and Difference itself tells a story: the first five essays up to and including “Structure and Genesis” were originally written before Derrida returned to the Ecole, while the final six were written while he was teaching there. If the Derrida that I have presented over the past four chapters sits uncomfortably with traditional presentations of his work, Writing and Difference lays out the path from the “post-existentialist” of the Origin of Geometry to the canonical deconstructive philosophy of Of Grammatology. The text has one foot in his phenomenological past and another in the structuralist present. the double seance While the placement of his essays and the care with respect to prefatory material suggest that Derrida was conscientious in maintaining the historical ordering of his earlier articles, he was not so scrupulous with respect to their content. The essays were amended and revised without remark. From small changes, such as the introduction of italics at certain points or the habitual decapitalization of key words, to large revisions, such as the addition of important later terms (différance, économie, and métaphysique de la présence), Derrida attempted to homogenize in content the chronological development he wanted to respect in form. This process of homogenization, however, was never complete. In 1972, Derrida described the double séance: 8 9 10

“Letter March 25, 1967,” IMEC, Seuil, SEL252, B640, D7. “Letter March 28, 1967,” IMEC, Seuil, SEL252, B640, D7. Derrida gives no suggestion why he did decide to have the “Structure, Sign, and Play” essay out of order, but it might be an attempt to secure a symmetry between the first and the penultimate essays, which deal with similar themes, and mirror each other in style and content.


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This structure of the double mark (caught – borrowed and enclosed – in an oppositional couple, a term retains its old name to destroy the opposition to which it no longer completely belongs, to which it will have moreover never ceded, the history of that opposition being that of an incessant and hierarchical struggle) works the entire field in which these texts displace themselves. It is thus also worked over: the rule, according to which each concept necessarily receives two comparable marks – repetition without identity – one inside, the other outside of the desconstructed system, must provide a double reading and a double writing . . . a double science.11

But before he conceptualized this “paleonymy,” Derrida practiced it. For, often when Derrida attempted to integrate his later vocabulary into earlier texts, the additions clashed with the conceptual structures already at work there. Within the 1967 revisions of Derrida’s essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” the newly minted concepts of jeu and économie were inserted into a context where those words already had a meaning. For Levinas, and within the 1964 version of the Levinas essay, “play” was never serious. It was the trick of the totality, the inauthentic disruption of a system, never truly endangering the dominance of the same.12 But the concept of “play” would become central for Derrida himself, especially after his 1966 talk “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” and in 1967 he reinserted this new concept into the earlier essay. In the revisions to the early essays, play became the internal movement of a structure that escaped all control and ultimately disrupted the structure itself. Further, play preceded the opposition between finitude and infinity. The movement of a structural totality allowed the possibility of the thought of the infinite, by disrupting any pretentions to a determined finite, and so static, system: “a system is neither finite nor infinite. A structural totality escapes this alternative in its play.”13 If Levinas’s notion of play represented the illusion of alterity tolerated by the totality, Derrida’s new concept emphasized that that totality was an illusion too. The same is true for the term économie, which has a similar history; thought by Levinas as a ruse of the totality to master alterity and reduce its effects, it became, for Derrida, when he inserted it into the article in 1967, a way to confront that totality from the inside, by using the system’s terms 11 12 13

Derrida, La Dissemination, p. 10. See also Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 96. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 102, 126–7. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 37, 148, or 270. Added to Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 123 (translation modified); see also addition p. 107.

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against itself.14 Here the tension within the word was already apparent in 1964. In one key passage in the original version, Derrida noted that a broad economy “cannot reduce itself to what Levinas aims under that word,” even though Levinas’s restricted sense already required it.15 Levinas’s economy was described as the process by which alterity was neutralized and converted into something that could be compared and subordinated to the “same.” But Derrida insisted that this process already required the contamination of alterity described by his own concept of economy. If alterity had to be domesticated, it must have once been dangerous and foreign. Even as the term “economy” was a linchpin of Levinas’s system, it never fully belonged. Levinas’s concept of economy was dependent upon Derrida’s. Neither Levinas nor Derrida, then, was able fully to master his own text. Levinas’s vocabulary clamored for the revision of his system, to which, in the words of Derrida’s double séance, “it will have never ceded.” And, as Derrida’s hesitation between the old and the new senses of jeu and économie shows, that revision could never be total; with paleonymy a word could never fully free itself from its old meaning. The double séance was a double mark, between two books, at home in neither. It was for this reason that Derrida could state that “the time of writing no longer follows the line of modified presences. The future is not a future present, yesterday is not a past present.”16 The past heralded the future, to the extent that the future could be inscribed there, and the future could never fully expunge the trace of its past. There were no clean breaks, nor a succession of two Derridas, before and after 1965, the grammatological moment, but rather only the movement between them, the turning of the page. Thus, though Derrida’s revisions may seem to efface the heterogeneity of his book, they are also a symptom of its historicity. The author’s inability to master his or her texts completely – the persisting trace of the past and an uncontrollable openness to a future – was essential to the process of deconstruction, but it equally permits the writing of its history. It is the traces of old texts, their resistance to change, that best marks any development: the maintenance of the past in the present. History, for all its inclination towards linear narratives, relies on the fact that no moment is absolutely contemporaneous with itself. 14

15

On its occurrences in the first version see Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 93–4, 126 (bottom), and 147, amongst others. In 1967 Derrida added the concept of a general economy, pp. 102, 126 (top), 129, 141, 148. For Levinas, see Totality and Infinity, especially Section II, “Interiority and Economy.” 16 Ibid., p. 300 (translation modified). Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 117.


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This non-effaceable heterogeneity is characteristic of all texts, but due to Derrida’s revision practices, it is peculiarly visible in Writing and Difference. When Derrida came to rework his essays, he began with offprints of the original articles. The additions, deletions, and changes were clear to see, whether in the blue marker, which “corrected” those parts that required only small emendations, to the extra passages, which were literally cut and pasted into the original copy.17 Derrida’s itinerary can be read in his additions and crossings-out, which simultaneously conflict with the original text (otherwise why revise?) and resonate with it. To best understand Derrida’s development in the period between 1962 and 1967, we must first turn to his attempts to hide it. 17

See Jacques Derrida, “L’Ecriture et la difference: offprints,” Irvine, 50, 8–11.

c h a p ter 6

A history of différance

The model of the double séance works above all for Derrida’s central concept of différance, a term that, as much as “deconstruction,” has come to represent his philosophy. Derrida introduced différance to the French intellectual public in his 1966 paper “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” But if this paper marked in a sense an origin, it was not a simple one. Already, in the opening pages of the text, Derrida gave a waypoint for a history of the term, referring to a passage in his recently published article “Of Grammatology.”1 But, significantly, the word différance did not appear in the passage cited, nor indeed in the whole of that article. The passage read: Coming to recognize . . . that the meaning of Being is not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified . . . but already in an unprecedented sense, a determined trace, is to affirm that in the decisive concept of the ontico-ontological difference, everything should not be thought in one go: being and Being, ontic and ontological, ontico-ontological would be, in an original way, derived from difference. The ontico-ontological difference would not be the “foundation” (Vom Wesen des Grundes). Difference tout court would be more “originary,” but one could no longer call it “origin” or “foundation,” (these notions belong essentially to the history of onto-theology).2

Drawing out those parts in Heidegger’s text where he complicated any understanding of the “truth of Being” as a “transcendental signified” and 1 2

Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 198. Jacques Derrida, “De la grammatologie I,” Critique (December 1965), p. 1029. This quote is the second half of the footnote as it appeared in the article. In the book, the note was promoted into the main text and substantially revised. The revised part reads: “being and Being, ontic and ontological, ontico-ontological would be, in an original way derived from difference; and in relation to that which we will later call différance, an economical concept designating the production of differing/deferring [différer], in both senses of the word. The ontico-ontological difference and its foundation (Grund) in the ‘transcendence of Dasein’ (Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 16) would not be absolutely originary. Différance tout court would be more ‘originary,’ but one could no longer call it ‘origin’ or ‘foundation,’ because these notions belong essentially to the history of onto-theology, that is to say, a system functioning as the effacement of difference.” Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 38, changes italicized. See also Derrida, Positions, p. 19.

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suggesting that it too was a sign, Derrida argued that the ontico-ontological difference could no longer be primary; the difference between Being and beings appealed to a Being that was itself riven with difference. Because Being and its ontic determinations were both signs, the (structuralist) difference at the heart of signification preceded that between Being and beings. If the passage asserted a rupture, it was contained within the word “difference,” between the “ontico-ontological difference” and “difference tout court” – repetition without identity – which came into tension with itself over the course of the footnote. The tension was only formally recognized later, in the book form of De la grammatologie, which grew out of the two original articles, when this more “originary” difference was rewritten as “différance.” No longer the temporalization and differing of the onticoontological difference, the deferral of Being that could only show itself in hiding itself, Derrida’s différance, spacing and temporalization, preceded and constituted Heidegger’s. Derrida completed his footnote (which by 1967 was no longer just a note) with some advice about how to think this new difference: “One cannot nevertheless today think it in itself without determining it as the onticoontological difference and without erasing [biffer] this determination.” This suggestion, though a classic gesture of deconstruction, can also be taken as descriptive of Derrida’s own process and development. He constructed the concept of différance by first determining it following Heidegger and then erasing that determination. Though différance was the “pre-opening of the ontico-ontological difference,” chronologically it came second. difference We have already seen how crucial Heidegger’s concept of the onticoontological difference was for Derrida in his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. There, whilst giving an account of the Kantian idea, whose infinitude sat uncomfortably with the finite capabilities of Man and yet was necessary for the rise of science, Derrida used the word différant, which showed how the consciousness of the “difference” between God’s voice and its appearance in the finite world expressed itself in a constant deferral. In this way, the regulatory powers of an infinite idea (of absolute transmissibility, of absolute straightness/smoothness, of absolute univocity) could be preserved even if the telos itself could never be given fully. Concealment constituted the mode of givenness of the infinite, to which no finite appearance could be adequate.

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This understanding of the ontico-ontological difference was central to all of Derrida’s early essays. In their original versions, they emphasized the inability of all formal systems to explain themselves in their genesis and change.3 It is not insignificant that Derrida opened his first published essay, “Force and Signification,” and thus later Writing and Difference, with a quotation from Flaubert complaining that “we have too many things and not enough forms.” No determined formal system could ever be sufficient to explain the richness of the world, just as no ontic understanding of Being could fully comprehend it.4 The essays that constituted the first half of Writing and Difference fit well with Derrida’s early post-existentialism and Heideggerianism. The essay “Force and Signification” was originally a review article for Critique of Jean Rousset’s Forme et Signification, a collection of essays of structural literary criticism, detecting in the works of Corneille, Flaubert, Proust, Marivaux, and Claudel hidden structures and mathematical forms that constituted their literary merit. But if Derrida approved of the method in general, he suggested that it lacked something: “in the future it will be interpreted, perhaps, as a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to force.”5 It was not that Rousset ignored the genesis of the structures. Indeed, as Derrida suggested, he wanted to turn the productive imagination from a na¨ıvely used “operative [opératoire]” concept into a considered “thematic” concept.6 But Rousset’s understanding of the imagination, for various reasons, ended up reducing all meaningful change. For Rousset, literary works were detached from the world. As he wrote in the preface of his book, “to enter into a work is to change universe, it is to open a horizon.”7 Mirroring Derrida’s analysis in the Origin of Geometry, writing detached sense from its subjective ground.8 Rousset’s understanding of writing, the movement of separation from any mundane causality, allowed him to consider the work as autonomous, without an origin. It was independent, especially from its author.9 While these literary structures were autonomous, they did not descend from another world, a topos ouranious, to be clothed in earthly form later; Rousset like Derrida rejected conventional Platonism.10 Human writing, then, differs from that of Leibniz’s God, who is constrained to construct the best of possible worlds. In Leibniz’s model, there is a parallelism between the theological encyclopedia and the book written by Man, with which 3 6 8 9

4 Ibid., p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 4. See, for example, Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 160. 7 Jean Rousset, Forme et signification (Paris: J. Corti, 1962), p. ii. Ibid., p. 7. See especially the discussion of writing in Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 13. 10 Ibid., p. vii. Cf. Rousset, Forme et signification, p. xv.


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it can be compared. Such a system presupposes that sense exists before it is inscribed, and that our earthly writings are merely attempts to copy, as faithfully as possible, the divine writing of truth.11 But, for Derrida and Rousset, there was no theological book that governed all earthly ones. As Derrida put it, “writing, as only Man writes” is to know that sense never precedes the written, but is constituted by it, that “what is not yet produced in the letter had no other abode.”12 Determined neither by the heat of passion and earthly demands, nor by a celestial realm analogous to our own that prescribed all forms, literary structures found their genesis in the free voice, the creative moment in imagination. But if writing was not constrained from above or from below, neither was it the random creation of a “hypocritical humanism.”13 Rousset was clear that writing was an inscription, a revelation, “to make the alreadythere arise in its sign”; it was a response to Being.14 Even if there were no set aesthetic rules, we were not free to create the beautiful as we pleased. So far, Rousset’s structuralism seems to align with Derrida’s own thought as we have elaborated it over the past few chapters. But according to Derrida it still had one major problem. Rousset presented the aesthetic forms he analyzed as stable entities that could be definitively described. Because Rousset’s analysis separated written forms from mundane causality, he thought that they achieved the beautiful directly and without loss. Rousset’s structuralism threatened to become static, rejecting with empirical historicity a deeper history that would be more than just a simple correlation of life and work.15 In Derrida’s eyes, this forgetting manifested itself in the limited concept of development provided by Rousset’s schema, which was often reduced to the fulfillment of a determined teleology or the working out of a pre-formation; change was neutralized, disciplined by a preset pole. For Rousset, then, development was predetermined, Corneille’s work leading inexorably to the formal perfection he achieved in Polyeucte (1643).16 For Derrida, on the other hand, because we are human and limited, the aesthetic structures unveiled by creative writing could never achieve the beautiful once and for all. Rousset had forgotten the “impossibility [for a work] to ever be present, of it ever being summarized in some absolute simultaneity or instantaneity.”17 The temporality of a work, its necessary unfolding, could not be separated from it, or determined by static schemas. 11 13 14 17

12 Ibid., pp. 10–11 (version from original article). Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 10. This criticism is consonant with Derrida’s earlier response to Sartre’s existentialism. 15 Ibid., p. 14. 16 Ibid., pp. 17 and 26. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 12. Ibid., p. 14 (translation modified).

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As Derrida asserted, for Rousset “to write would be still to play ruses with finitude, and to want to arrive at Being outside of beings, at Being that could neither affect me, nor be by itself. To write would be to forget difference.”18 The last line is instructive, because, as we saw in the Origin of Geometry, transcendental historicity was powered by the ontological difference, showing that we could never achieve Being outside of beings. In the Rousset essay, Derrida used similar language to describe artistic creation. Just as Being, the ground of all determination, was “nothing [rien]” outside of beings (no Being without beings), so too, for Derrida, the freedom of the voice was a “nothing [rien]” that allowed the construction of aesthetic forms. Like the history of Being, then, the movement and development of aesthetic structures was governed by something akin to the ontological difference: the difference between Being and beings, between the free voice and its determinate condensed written form, generating a transcendental history. Derrida then hoped to balance signification with force, structure with genesis; in the Nietzschean language that Derrida used, Apollo and Dionysus. It was the difference between the two, a difference that preceded both – the Apollonian unveiling that was also a violent Dionysiac dissimulation and veiling – that disrupted all structures as it gave free speech an earthly manifestation. This difference was “the opening of history, historicity itself.”19 And, as in Derrida’s 1962 Introduction, this history allowed the regulative idea of a telos, not the determined end of Rousset’s pre-formation, but the telos of an open horizon, “in its most indeterminate form.”20 One can find a similar schema in the second essay, Derrida’s famous analysis of Foucault’s History of Madness. The paper centered on the very possibility of Foucault’s project, a history of madness, describing that which, at least since the seventeenth century, had been excluded from totalitarian reason. It was an exclusion that Foucault himself tried to escape, wanting to write the history of madness itself, not the rational discourse on madness that he condemned. But if the language of reason that suppressed madness was itself excluded, Derrida asked, in which language could Foucault himself write? What was the vocabulary of a history of madness, when “all our European languages, the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason – all this is the immense 18

Ibid., p. 13. In the 1967 version a new line was added: “to forget writing in the so-called living and pure present speech” (translation modified), which significantly changes the sense. See later. 19 Ibid., p. 28. 20 Ibid., p. 26; see also p. 13.


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delegation of the project that Foucault defines under the rubric of the capture or objectification of madness?”21 For Derrida the answer was clear, one only found the resources to fight against reason in reason itself. This meant that it had to be possible to represent madness in language indirectly, “metaphorically” – as Being is in beings, Derrida might have added.22 Madness had to be concealed in reason for it to show itself. Whatever Foucault’s explicit methodology, this possibility of metaphor, the contamination of reason with madness, was the necessary condition of his book. Foucault at least made gestures in this direction. For while recounting the history of a madness excluded by reason, in his first chapter he also made reference to a prior age when the absolute division between the sane and insane had not yet been asserted and the mad circulated freely within the city. The primordial unity of reason and madness opened up the possibility of a communion of reason and madness, which, according to Derrida, a history of that madness would itself have to practice. Derrida, however, was not happy with this Foucauldian narrative, moving from unmediated unity to insuperable division, from onto- to negative theology. Rather, both in the classical age and before, Derrida asserted a complication to the story. According to Derrida, the ancient Greek concept of hubris was at least in tension with Socratic reason – to call it free circulation was overstatement – while, at the same time, even modern reason allowed some openness to the hyperbolic, “mad” moment that exceeded it. Derrida’s attention was thus drawn to the turning point in Foucault’s book, the opening of the chapter on the classical age that described the great confinement. Here, over four pages, Foucault discussed Descartes’s Meditations.23 For Foucault, these Meditations reflected the wider and violent expulsion of madness from the city. Mirroring the rounding-up of the insane and their confinement in large institutions, Descartes excluded madness from his hyperbolic doubt. Unlike error and dreaming, which sharpened this doubt and showed us of what we can be certain even if we err in our sensory perception or if we dream, madness was beyond the pale, irrecoverable. And if a consideration of madness could not aid Descartes on his path to ultimate infallible truth, then, according to Foucault, he could only reject it: “dreams or illusions are surmounted in the very structure of truth; but madness is excluded by the subject who doubts.”24 The cogito, 21 Ibid., p. 35. 22 Ibid., pp. 36–7. 23 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie 24 Foucault, Histoire de la Folie, p. 55.

(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961), pp. 54–7.

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the ground of all certainty in philosophy, in Foucault’s eyes was predicated on a violent exclusion of madness. But Derrida presented another reading of the passage, a reading that, as he noted, was far more traditional. In this reading madness was not treated differently from the other sources of doubt; it added to them. It was not cogito, ergo sum as long as I am not mad, as Foucault would have had it, rather cogito, ergo sum “even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad.”25 The cogito was absolutely indubitable. Madness was just another ratchet in the ever-increasing scale of doubt, just like sensible error, dreams, and the evil demon. The cogito, then, was not the final sanctuary of the sane, but rather a hyperbolic moment exceeding any opposition between madness and sanity. It allowed us to think the totality of rational thought because it exceeded it, a transcendence towards a “nothing [rien].”26 Just as the reach towards a nothing allowed the genesis of Rousset’s structures, detaching them from the normal causal chain of history, so too it was the hyperbolic moment that at first defined any possibility of a determined sanity or rational system. It was an inaugural moment, as was the hubris of the Greeks. The same could not be said of the discourse on the cogito, for in order to have sense, according to Derrida, philosophical discourse had to exclude madness. It was not the cogito but rather its inscription in language that marked “the break with madness.”27 Here lay the totalitarian moment that reduced the hyperbole down to a determined rational or historical structure, a totalitarian moment that Foucault threatened to repeat, when he saw the cogito as a representative of the Classical age. The onto-theological invocation of God in Descartes’s Meditations thus did not confirm the cogito, but rather secured its transference into language, the maintenance of its truth after the hyperbolic moment. God guaranteed the validity of the ergo sum after the certainty of the hyperbolic cogito had passed. It was this moment that reduced the “passage” or the “différence” between the hyperbolic moment and its determined recorded form, just as writing reduced difference in “Force and Signification.” This was why madness would always be silent. The relationship between the hyperbolic moment and the finite determined structure in which it was understood was also, as in the previous essay, the very possibility of history, of meaningful change within structures: “The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted 25 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 55. 26 Ibid., p. 57 (translation modified); see also pp. 73 and 27 Ibid., p. 55; for the sense of inscription see pp. 58–9.

164.


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in this passage, this dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity.”28 Reason was both the expression and the forgetting of the mad hyperbolic moment, just as the metaphors for Being both revealed and hid it. This movement of constitution and forgetting defined history and reached beyond any break that Foucault was supposed to have discovered, for it was the very process that drove change. Both the Rousset and the Foucault essays presented an opposition between finite structures and something that constantly disrupted and exceeded them, even if this excess had no independent existence. And in both cases the difference between the determined and the origin of all determination – between criticism and the creative voice, reason and the mad cogito, beings and Being – allowed the transcendence of each finite structure.29 In Derrida’s early articles, then, he maintained his commitment to Heidegger’s ontological difference, which powered a more profound history and was manifested in the transcendence of limited structures, both in the freedom of literary creation and the hyperbolic moment of the cogito.30 the rehabilitation of writing As the 1960s progressed, however, Derrida complicated the duality and changed many of the central terms of the work. Firstly the number of references to infinity and finitude drastically declines, along with the discussion of the Kantian idea and an infinite God, two themes that had been linked since the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry.31 What previously seemed to be the effect of Man’s finitude, the constant replacement of one metaphor by another, by 1966 and “Structure, Sign, and Play” was considered as the product of excess, the play of the system.32 It was not the inadequacy but rather the excess of the sign – the “overabundance” of conflicting meanings – that caused movement.33 Moreover, the resistance of God to any mundane manifestation, instead of causing this movement, was now its effect.34 No longer was the ontico-ontological difference expressed 28 Ibid., p. 60 (translation modified). 29 See also ibid., p. 74. 30 See also Jacques Derrida, “M´ ethode et métaphysique,” Irvine, 7.6, sheet 28. 31 The notion of the Kantian idea is mostly discussed in “Gen` ese et structure”

and “Violence et métaphysique,” having no place in Derrida’s work afterwards. Similarly references to the infinite are disproportionately grouped in the first five essays. 32 For the discussion of inadequation, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 120–1 and 167. 33 Ibid., p. 290. Compare with the “too many things” of “Force and Signification.” For the excess of the signifier, see also p. 267. and the passages added on pp. 36 and 62. 34 See the additions, especially in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 107 and 108.

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in the free voice that grounded the movement of formal systems, now the play of différance in writing preceded it. The changing status of the concept of writing provides a perspective that allows us to understand the change in Derrida’s difference. In the period before 1965, as we saw, it was language in general which corresponded to the totalitarian reduction to the finite, which had to be enlivened by free thought, and when a distinction was made between speech and writing, speech took the place of the indeterminate free moment, with writing its condensation into a stable formal system.35 Writing was the finite rendering of the ineffable. Whatever its future role, here writing was a fall; it forgot difference.36 In the earlier texts writing was related to human finitude. In the revisions it was not uncommon for “writing” to replace “man,”37 or phrases such as “to write, as only man writes,” to lose their qualification.38 In Derrida’s pre-1965 courses, too, writing, in the rare occasions it was discussed, still represented the formal, which was dependent on a transcendental field. It was writing that needed to be put into motion by the free voice, its meaning destabilized. Thus in a course on “Irony, Doubt, and the Question,” from early 1964, Derrida could assert that “claiming to transmit to us the speech of Socrates, claiming to fix the live speech of irony by writing, Plato paralyzed or killed it, he arrested it . . . writing and the system . . . served up the death of irony.”39 This view of writing lasted right up until 1965 and was still active in “La Parole Soufflée,” where Derrida discussed the playwright Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” attempted to remove mediation from the arts, to undermine the idea of acting, of re-presenting something not there, for the benefit of a new authentic theater. But if Artaud wanted to free theater from the forced repetition of a text, he did not want to desert it in absolute and arbitrary freedom, the caprice of the actor.40 Turning from phonetic writing, which referred to a voice that could always be spirited away, Artaud appealed to mathematical language. The text did not refer to a spoken language of which it was merely the representation – the sign of a sign, opening up the structure of the renvoie – but rather provided a 35

See also Jacques Derrida, “Force et signification 1,” Critique (June 1963), p. 491, where Derrida related artistic creation to the “freedom of speech [parole],” cut in Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, p. 17; “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” where writing is referred to as a “vicar of speech [vicaire de la parole]” in the absence of the voice of God, p. 73. In this essay the relationship of the infinite to God, as in the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, is clear. 36 See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 9 and 13. 37 Ibid., pp. 71 and 74. 38 Ibid., p. 10. Cf. “Force et signification,” pp. 493–4. 39 Jacques Derrida, “L’Ironie, le doute, et la question,” Irvine, 8.4. sheet, 17, lecture from April 21, 1964. Derrida did not make substantive claims about writing in his courses until 1966. 40 Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 190–1.


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language of the body. The reading of such a text would no longer refer to a world of linguistic meaning, but create something concrete. Artaud’s script would determine the sounds, the facial expressions, the bodily movements, directed with such minute attention that they could not be robbed by a relay to a non-present meaning. Telling no story, theatre would just be, the shapes and sounds appealing directly to the subconscious and involving no interpretation.41 Artaud hoped that this writing would stem the constant slipping-away of meaning: différance. Such formulations of writing would not fit Derrida’s developing philosophy.42 If in 1963 Derrida could state: Literary criticism, which must explain itself to and exchange with creative speech, need not expect that resistance to be organized first in a “philosophy” commanding some aesthetic methodology from which it would receive its principles.43

By 1967, the primacy of the voice could no longer be tolerated. The line was changed to: Criticism, if it must one day explain itself to and exchange with literary writing, need not expect that resistance to be organized first in a “philosophy” commanding some aesthetic methodology from which it would receive its principles.44

Asserting the injunction to resist metaphysical oppositions and language, Derrida declared in 1963 that this resistance would allow criticism to take account of the movement and force of an ever-elusive creative voice, which could never be subordinated to a philosophy. By 1967 that elusiveness was found rather in writing itself, which previously was the stable ground of determination.45 The change is similar to another radical substitution. At earlier stages it was speech that protected the “liberty of the question,” representing the nothing that exceeded all determined structures, and writing that wanted to forget difference. The first claim was erased in 1967; the second was supplemented by another phrase that substantially changed its meaning.46 If to write was to want to forget difference, now that forgetting was recast as the forgetting of “writing in the presence of so-called living 41 Ibid., p. 42 On this

192; see also pp. 175 and 179. question see Robert Bernasconi’s discussion of the trace in “Violence and Metaphysics” in “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida,” in David Wood, ed., Derrida & Différance (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985). 43 Derrida, “Force et signification,” p. 323. 44 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 28 (translation modified, my emphases). 45 See also passages added throughout the first essays including Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 62. 46 “The freedom of the question (double genetive) must be said and protected, as it is in speech,” in Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (December 1964), p. 323, final clause deleted in Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 80.

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and pure speech.”47 It is for the very same reasons that Derrida would have to replace the word “text” with “book” at the end of his essay “Jabès and the Question of the Book,” when “text” came to represent that which unsettled any totality, rather than that which constituted it.48 Rather than “writing, as only man writes” being the necessary dissimulation of indeterminate Being under an ontic metaphor, now writing itself was the movement that undermined any static structures. Movement was not caused by the ontico-ontological difference that recognized every finite determined metaphor for Being as both an unveiling and a veiling; now it was an internal movement within signification that was responsible for the instability of structures, caused by the excess of the sign, its process of supplementing and not its inadequacy. When in the earlier essays “difference” was rewritten “différance,” it substantially changed the meaning of the essays. This is the significance of the introduction of the word “différée” or “différant” into the early essays, despite their attractive resemblance to the word used in the Origin of Geometry.49 The revisions privileged the internal movement of a structure, rather than the constant attempt to escape it. The centrality of this change in Derrida’s conception of writing explains why in his 1966 paper on Freud he should have looked back to the Grammatology articles to explain the genesis of différance. As we shall see in chapter 8, within Grammatology, Derrida attempted to undermine the privilege of the voice, which he had begun to see as symptomatic of metaphysics. Rather than a voice in full presence to itself, it was writing with its rejection of the absolutely self-present that seemed to be the best metaphor for (structuralist) philosophy. If writing was to achieve a privileged place in Derrida’s philosophy, it could no longer be thought of as derivative of the voice: writing as its inscription. Writing was the absence of the signified, and this liberation could only be consummated if a transcendental signified was not considered to be lurking in the background, at one degree removed. Writing had to be the trace of the trace, and not the trace of a pure if impossible (spoken) presence. In this new philosophical framework, Heidegger’s difference seemed to come dangerously close to representing 47 Derrida,

Writing and Difference, p. 13. pp. 76–7. Also on p. 76, “signs” in the 1964 version was replaced by “books” in the 1967 book for the same reasons. 49 The word différer and its cognates do occur, though rarely, in the early essays, but their meanings correspond only with difficulty to the later work; see Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, pp. 21 and 80. It would be difficult to give these rare occurrences the weight that Derrida would appear to require. All others instances before “Freud et la scène de l’écriture” are to my knowledge, later additions, see pp. 22, 23, 42, 133, and 138, or indeed the additions in the 1965 version of “Structure et genèse.” 48 Ibid.,


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this type of impossible presence, a Being that could not be contained in any ontic metaphor. Derrida felt able to assert late in 1967: The ultimate determination of difference as the ontico-ontological difference – however decisive and necessary that this phase might be – seems to me, in a strange way, still caught in metaphysics.

The inscription of the ontico-ontological difference onto the field of writing, and the consequent denial of the transcendental signified, came to trouble the precedence of the ontico-ontological difference: “there is, without doubt,” Derrida argued “a certain Heideggerian phonologism,” and one could add a “Derridian phonologism” of the early 1960s.50

diffé rance : neither a word nor a concept I will discuss the move to grammatology and its effect on Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the final chapter. For the moment we will hold the questions related to this move in suspension, and take a step forward beyond the grammatology articles to follow the fate of Derrida’s différance. If we can see a relationship between Derrida’s turn to grammatology and his move away from Heidegger’s ontological difference, what one might call the genesis of the “concept” of différance, this did not fit easily with the history of what loosely one can call the “word.” Whatever the role of the “Of Grammatology” articles, indicated by Derrida himself when he divided his work into before and after the “grammatological opening,” it is significant that the word “différance” was not used in the first article. The absence of the word “différance” is rendered more enigmatic, for Derrida was already using it elsewhere. The word played a small role in Derrida’s work before its co-option to patrol the boundaries dividing Heidegger’s and Derrida’s philosophies. It was in “La Parole Soufflée,” published early in 1965, that the word made its first printed appearance.51 Artaud, as we saw, hoped to avoid what Derrida at that time called the “différance” which destroys all claims to absolute immediacy, the system of relays between written script and performed play, actor and public. This différance, a deferral of responsibility for one’s own voice, speaking for another (an author or character), allowed accumulation and capitalization, the creation and use of a reserve of words, ideas, or thoughts: a script or a text.52 But the word “différance” 50 Derrida,

Positions, p. 19. Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, p. 284. Ironically, Alan Bass in his English translation misses this “différance” and renders it with an e. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 189. 52 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 189. 51

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was not flagged or introduced in any way whatsoever; its appearance like the concept it described was furtive. It was hardly a fitting introduction for a seminal term. And further, at this stage, rather than drawing the line between his and Heidegger’s philosophies, Derrida asserted that this “différance” could only be thought as such “beyond metaphysics, towards the Difference – or the Duplicity – of which Heidegger speaks.”53 The word “différance,” as it was deployed before 1966, shared key characteristics with its later use (movement, resistance to full presence), but cannot be assimilated to it. When Derrida came to revise “La Parole Soufflée,” the word was reinserted many more times into the text, at points where previously Derrida considered “différence” would suffice.54 The concept of a différence that preceded Heidegger’s appeared just after the word “différance” was coined, but it was only later that the two were identified. The question then presents itself as to why they should have been associated, why a word that Derrida had been using elsewhere, albeit in a related sense, should come to stand in for this key concept, and what effect that might have had. So in our analyses we have been taken back to where we started: Derrida’s presentation before André Green’s seminar at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in March 1966, “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” It was only here that the word différance and the “différence tout court” of Grammatology that preceded the onticoontological différence were identified, and that Derrida embarked on his first detailed discussion of the term. The imprint of the talk, and psychoanalysis more generally, is clear in the later formulations of “différance.” Freud took pride of place with Heidegger and Nietzsche in Derrida’s 1968 essay on his neologism. Freud’s reality principle, after all, caused the “deferral” of pleasure economically, and it should not be surprising then that Derrida should proffer his “différance” as a translation for Aufschub at the beginning of “Freud and the Scene of Writing.”55 The reception of Derrida’s ideas into the psychoanalytic community thus provides a first clue as to the identification of the word and concept of “différance” in 1966. It is possible that the use of the word in “La Parole Soufflée” had already piqued the imagination of the Freudians. In that essay, Derrida had appealed to them, making references both to Freud’s Wunderblock, which would be the main text for his later talk, and to Lacan. It could well be that the change in the centrality of the term “différance” 53 54 55

Ibid., p. 194. See ibid., pp. 176, 191, 192, where it is either converted from “différence” or added. Ibid., p. 198.


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grew up because of the response of many psychoanalysts to this earlier text, and its rise in Derrida’s philosophy might have a very particular psychoanalytic stamp. Could it be that Derrida in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” was responding to the eager interests of his host, or saw an opportunity to attune his thought to a particular audience? Could the development that we have been tracing over the past twenty pages be, not the internal development of one thinker, but a reciprocal relationship of reading and writing that would render the new structuralist Derrida, fittingly, as the product of a community? To understand the stakes of this talk, and Derrida’s first sustained use of “différance,” we have to turn to a set of debates that ricocheted through French psychoanalysis, and whose traces are apparent in Derrida’s 1966 lecture. freud’s scene The history of psychoanalysis in France is often told as the story of one man, Jacques Lacan. But for our purposes here, it is necessary to understand his position with respect to the other major institutions and individuals in the French movement. Lacan had broken from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1953, along with other analysts under the direction of the Sorbonne psychologist Daniel Lagache, to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). But, if Lagache had played the significant role in the split – indeed if Lacan had at first resisted it – it was Lacan who came to dominate the new society, using it as an institutional base to disseminate his linguistic interpretation of Freud. The split between the SFP and the SPP came to be seen as a rupture between Lacanians and those who rejected his particular reading of psychoanalysis.56 Whereas the SPP maintained its strong links with the medical sciences – its leader, Sacha Nacht, demanding that analysts earn medical degrees – the SFP emphasized linguistics and asserted the autonomy of psychoanalysis from medicine. The most forceful presentation of Lacan’s new form of psychoanalysis was his 1953 Rome Report, which consummated the break from the SPP. And, although Lacan’s thought was constantly evolving, the ideas presented here and in other crucial texts from the 1950s, such as “The Instance of the Letter,” had the most immediate impact on French philosophy and Derrida.57 Avoiding the hydraulic model of the unconscious, Lacan 56 For

a comprehensive discussion of the intricacies of the 1953 split see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1982–6), vol. II, pp. 236–65.

57 In a later interview Derrida admitted to having only read these two early texts when he wrote “Freud

and the Scene of Writing.” See Derrida, Positions, p. 113.

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suggested that linguistic processes lay at its heart. In his tripartite division of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, it was the Symbolic that achieved precedence. The Real was the realm of the id, biological needs, and the unattainable object of desire. It existed outside language, inaccessible to it, and its effects were only felt by its punctuation of a discourse, both in the grammatical sense, and as a breaking through, the knock of a door during a dream, or the ending of a psychoanalytic session.58 The Imaginary, on the other hand, was the realm of false identifications, first and foremost the ego, which was formed by a baby’s imaginary identification with its reflection in Lacan’s “mirror stage.” It was only by the identification with its image that a child could form an idea of a unified self. But given the process involved, it was clear that this unified self was purely imaginary, the wholeness of the specular image deceiving the child into thinking that it was psychologically unified. A similar process occurred when encountering another person, such that conversation (and psychoanalytic practice) would be structured by two imaginary objects, the imaginary self and the imaginary other, the latter, through the process of transference, often just an ideal doubling of the first. The Symbolic was the real ground of psychoanalysis, the realm of signifiers, whether in dreams, the symbolic nature of somatic pathology, or in the very discourse of the patient. This was the import of Lacan’s dictum “the unconscious is structured like a language”: Freud may not have been faithful to this fundamental discovery, but Lacan was more rigorous and was determined to follow through on its implications. As he put it “my task shall be to demonstrate that [psychoanalytic] concepts take on their full meaning only when oriented in a field of language and ordered in relation to the function of speech.”59 In part the reliance on language and especially speech derived from its centrality in analysis. Freud after all had founded psychoanalysis as “talk therapy,” and his colleague Josef Breuer’s patient Anna O. had famously classed it as the “talking cure.” With the unconscious structured like a language, other therapeutic methods such as hypnosis or medication would not be effective. Drawing on the linguistic model, Lacan asserted that the traditional psychoanalytic concepts of condensation and displacement as discussed in Freud’s Interpreting Dreams should be seen as metonymy and metaphor respectively, substitutions in the chain of signifiers.60 This 58

See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), pp. 56–7. W. Norton & Co., 2006), p. 205.

59 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. B. Fink (New York: W. 60 See especially “The Instance of the Letter,” in ibid.


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process of exchange, of metaphor and of metonymy, found its condition of possibility in Lacan’s asserted priority of syntactical relations, and the slipping of the signifier over the signified, its detachment from the hic et nunc.61 In a word, a symbol, the absent is presented. It recapitulates the Fort-Da game, played by Freud’s grandson, who tried to master the absence of his mother by the symbolic repetition of her coming and going with a reel of thread.62 Lacan’s ideas had a profound significance for the actual practice of psychoanalysis.63 In a Lacanian session, the analysand presents his imaginary ego, with its imaginary – and in a sense, false – desires. But by talking about the ego and its desires, presenting it in speech, the ego already begins to loosen its grip on the patient. Because the symbolic is the realm of the absent signified, it disrupts the immediate identification with the specular self and allows the disturbance of the ego’s self-presentation in slips of the tongue. This disruption of the ego was crucial in therapy, because by sweeping away his imaginary desires, the patient could uncover the “language of his desire, that is the primary language in which – beyond what he tells us of himself – he is already speaking to us unbeknown to himself, first and foremost, in the symbols of his symptom.”64 By breaking the stranglehold of the imaginary ego, the patient would come to recognize his true desires, those of the unconscious. These desires were not true because they revealed an otherwise hidden self, the slips of the tongue indicating a subtending desire.65 Rather the unconscious, as structured like a language, was its enunciation, its own truth.66 This was how Lacan reworked Freud’s famous declaration “wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” It was understood previously in France and elsewhere as the imperative for conscious thought and the “ego” to displace the id – “le moi doit déplacer le ça”; Lacan’s reading of the mirror stage made this interpretation impossible. The Ich in Freud’s phrase was no longer translated as the moi or ego, for it was precisely the imaginary ego that had to be worked around to get at true desire. In Lacan’s translation, the Ich stood for the je of the enunciation, the subject of the unconscious, which 61

If anything, signifiers structured the Real. Lacan’s classic example is that of the two words men/women on lavatories, the signifier here distinguishing between two otherwise identical doors. See ibid., p. 416. 62 See ibid., p. 228. 63 See Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. II, pp. 265–71. 64 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 243. 65 For an analysis of the history of this idea in Lacan’s own work and how it changed in the period before the Rome Report, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master (Stanford University Press, 1991), ch. 3. 66 See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 140.

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Lacan distinguished from the imaginary ego in his Ichspaltung, the division of the subject.67 The goal was to escape the distortions of the imaginary ego expressed in “empty speech,” to bring the speech of the patient to the true desires expressed by the unconscious: “full speech.” It was the analyst’s mastery of the symbolic, of the patient’s unconscious, that would lead the patient to the recognition of his own desires. To do this, the analyst had to “punctuate” the patient’s speech, intervening at crucial moments when the ego had dissolved and the unconscious signification became clear. As Lacan stated, “when the subject’s question assumes the form of true speech, we sanction it with our response.”68 In psychoanalytic practice, then, “punctuation . . . establishes the meaning; changing the punctuation renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation distorts it.”69 This was the theoretical reasoning behind Lacan’s infamous sessions de durée variée. A fixed session time would be like the injunction to place a full stop after every sixtieth word without concern for the meaning. Worse, it would allow the patient to bide his time, play games until the end of the hour to preserve his cherished identifications. Since the creation of the ego was an understandable defense mechanism employed by the patient, the attempt to break its hold elicited great resistance. It would only be in sessions of variable length, where the patient could not while away a set amount of time to avoid coming to terms with his desires, that true progress could be made. The session would end as dictated by the dissolution of the ego and the emergence of the patient’s speech into truth, and not as ordained by the clock in the analyst’s office. The rejection of set session times had caused Lacan trouble with other psychoanalysts in the early 1950s, and it was the SPP’s resistance to it that had eventually pushed Lacan to join Lagache and the rebels in the newly formed SFP. To the cynical, variable-length sessions invariably meant short sessions, a practice that allowed Lacan both more patients – and as a consequence, more money – and crucially more students, up to three times more than other analysts.70 The SPP had no room for such blatant self-aggrandizement and empire building. The 1953 split and the formation of the SFP briefly gave Lacan the school he wanted, but the trauma of the earlier break returned to haunt him. The International Society for Psychoanalysis had never recognized 67 Lacan,

Ecrits, p. 251. The distinction derived from that made by the French grammarian Edouard Pichon in 1926. See Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. II, p. 311. See also Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 46–8. 68 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 255. 69 Ibid., p. 258. 70 See Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 1993), p. 271.


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the new society, and it became increasingly clear that Lacan with his short sessions was the key obstacle to its return to the psychoanalytic fold. Several of Lacan’s students and colleagues were willing to sacrifice him, and in 1963 they edged him out of the society; Lacan was left homeless.71 What must at first have seemed an unforgivable betrayal turned out to be a great opportunity.72 On Louis Althusser’s recommendation, the ENS director, Robert Flacelière, offered Lacan the Salle Dussane for his seminar, and effectively a ready supply of enthusiastic Normaliens to follow his instruction. The invitation was probably one of the most significant single events in postwar French intellectual history, crucial as it was in the absorption of structuralist ideas into the French philosophical mainstream. For the first time Lacan had an audience of philosophers, detached from the corporatist squabblings of the psychoanalysts, students receptive to his new reading of Freud and willing to grant him the status of maˆıtre a` penser. The students at the ENS editing and writing for the new journal Les Cahiers pour l’analyse inherited the linguistic mantle from the SFP, adopting one side of an opposition that had wrenched French psychoanalysis apart for most of the postwar period. The role of the Normaliens in the psychoanalytic movement fits into a broader history of structuralism at the ENS that we will discuss in the final chapter, a history that is crucial for understanding Derrida’s development. Between 1964 and 1969, Derrida, Althusser, and Lacan were teaching the same active and engaged students. It was through these shared students that the philosophical norms and political meaning of both Lacan’s and Althusser’s work were impressed upon Derrida. Lacan’s students made psychoanalysis relevant to Derrida; their interest piqued his. The precise form of Derrida’s first intervention into psychoanalysis, however, was provided by a debate that preceded the arrival of psychoanalysis at the Ecole, and whose opposing positions went beyond the interpretation of the philosophers there. the unconscious The debate began with Dr. Henri Ey’s now famous conference on the unconscious at Bonneval in 1960, which brought psychoanalysts and philosophers together, just as Lacan would do a few years later at the 71

See ibid., pp. 323–9; and her Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. II, pp. 328–77. The SFP was formally dissolved in January 1965. 72 See Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 1–6.

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ENS. But, unlike Lacan, Ey, though open to structuralism, was a psychiatrist promoting an “organo-dynamic” understanding of the mind, refusing any absolute autonomy of the psychic from the organic. For Ey, psychoses should be understood as an “energetic deficit” that prevented the subject from controlling its instinctual tendencies, the contamination of the organic in the psychological.73 At the conference, two of Lacan’s students, Serge Leclaire and Jean Laplanche, opposed Ey’s energetic and organic account.74 Focusing on Freud’s The Unconscious from 1913, they identified two different ways in which he attempted to understand the difference between consciousness and the unconscious. At times Freud asserted a “qualitative difference”: conscious and unconscious contents were a “double inscription” divided by a physical line; what one might call a topographical understanding.75 Elsewhere Freud asserted a “quantitative difference”: the unconscious and the conscious were distinguished by the pulsional energy invested in each one, an economic model.76 Rather than an unconscious content being reinscribed in a new location when it became conscious, it merely changed its state.77 Leclaire and Laplanche resisted the second idea. In particular, they faulted the economic model for its identification of “cathected” with “pulsional energy.” According to Freud, because the drive was organic and not originally conscious or unconscious, it could only manifest itself in psychic life by linking itself to a Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz, a representative of the drive in the realm of representations. For Leclaire and Laplanche, because that representative was a signifier, it must itself already be conscious or unconscious, and so the division between the conscious and the unconscious could not be determined by the drive: “in contrast, the topographical position of this representation decides the topographical position of the 73 For

Ey, see Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. II, pp. 144–7. And Henri Ey, La Conscience (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963). 74 Their paper was published in Les Temps modernes in 1961 and thus had a significant role in public perceptions of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The conference proceedings were published, if markedly revised, in 1966. See Henri Ey, ed., L’Inconscient (Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer, 1966). 75 Leclaire and Laplanche regarded both qualitative and quantitative differences as central to the topical distinction between consciousness and the unconscious, but in his response Green assimilated the idea of qualitative difference to a topical understanding and that of a quantitative difference to an economic understanding. See Ey, L’Inconscient, p. 144. 76 Ibid., pp. 103–6. Leclaire and Laplanche even went as far as to declare the second version “phenomenological,” because the same object was given “a different lighting,” a different noesis for the same noema, p. 104. 77 See especially Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, trans. J. Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2006), last part.


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libido that has just fixed itself there.”78 The syntactical laws of the unconscious were independent of any investment with pulsional energy. It was these laws that decided the movement from the conscious to the unconscious through the application of metaphor (repressing the initial signifier) and not the quantity of pulsional energy cathected into a representation.79 Psychic content, to all intents and purposes, was cut off cleanly from the drives and the organic. By asserting the topographical model of the unconscious, Laplanche and Leclaire could reiterate the key battle-cry of the Lacanian system: “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Once translated into a Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz, the drives were detached from their original organic meaning and placed under the iron rule of syntactic laws, of metaphor and of metonymy.80 Leclaire and Laplanche wanted to assert the absolute rupture of the signifier from the signified, the “cutting out of the signifier [découpage du signifiant]” crucial for Lacan’s theory. The economic model, they felt, could too easily assert the continuity between the biological and the psychological, giving the organic drive a role in the movement of the psyche, and so complicate the absolute difference crucial to the rise of a linguistic understanding of the unconscious. It was precisely by reasserting the economic model that the SPP psychoanalyst and student of Henri Ey André Green responded to Leclaire and Laplanche.81 Broadly, he hoped to balance out the privilege of the linguistic elements in Freud’s thought, granted by Lacan and his student Leclaire, with a reassertion of the somatic side, especially pulsional energy and affect.82 As the title of Green’s later book Le Discours vivant suggested, a dry linguistic model would not be enough.83 According to Green, 78 Ey, L’Inconscient, p. 106. 80 Ibid., p. 114. Laplanche

79 See ibid., p. 118. went on to complicate the Lacanian orthodoxy by suggesting that the unconscious was the condition of language, not that it was structured by it. Laplanche suggested that for Freud only the pre-conscious and conscious had access to language as it is commonly understood, while in the unconscious words were not treated as words, but rather as things. Thus in the unconscious one has representations of things, whereas in the conscious one also has representations of words. The different status of unconscious language rendered more understandable the points de capiton, the eventual concordance of conscious language and the unconscious. Ibid., pp. 120–1. Despite the differences, which provoked a varied response from Lacan over the coming decade, for Green as for several others, the Leclaire/Laplanche paper represented the Lacanian orthodoxy. Crucially, despite the difference between representations of words and representations of things in Leclaire’s and Laplanche’s theory, they were still first and foremost signifiers. See André Green, Le Discours vivant (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973), pp. 5–6. 81 Andr´ e Green “L’Inconscient Freudien et la psychanalyse française contemporaine,” Les Temps modernes (August 1962), pp. 365–79. See also in Ey, L’Inconscient, pp. 143–53. 82 On the connection between these two concepts see Green, Le Discours vivant, p. 18. 83 See also Andr´ e Green, “La Psychanalyse devant l’oppositions de l’histoire et de la structure,” Critique 194 (July 1963), p. 654.

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interpreters of Freud’s work had tried either to “eliminate the role of hypothetical construction to integrate [the unconscious’s] mechanisms into the knowledge of the biological or psychological sciences” or, “in a diametrically opposed fashion, [strip] the concept of every scientistic resonance, to raise it to the level of an authentic phenomenology of mind [esprit].” If Lacan and his friends at the SFP had concentrated on linguistics to the detriment of affect, it was not so on the other side of the French psychoanalytic aisle, around figures such as Maurice Bouvet and Jean Mallet.84 Taken individually, both cases, Green asserted “will not go without some impoverishment of the Freudian text.” It was for this reason that he doubted whether Freud would find in Laplanche and Leclaire’s model “an account of his theory – I mean a full account [son compte – je veux dire tout son compte].”85 Green, then, hoped to provide a comprehensive model. Finishing his response to the 1961 article, Green stated, “whatever reproach of eclecticism that one could address us . . . we delight when across the dissonances between Freud’s sons, we seem to be able to perceive agreement where the protagonists harmonize without realizing.”86 Again the argument revolved around the question of the VorstellungsRepräsentanz, the representative of the drive in the psyche. As we saw, for Leclaire and Laplanche, because the drive only figured in the psyche through its representative, it played no role itself in psychic function. But as Green would later suggest, this Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz had to be supplemented by an Affekt-Repräsentanz. In the terms of the 1960 debate, Green charged Leclaire with ignoring the Repräsentanz’s economic connotations. The Repräsentanz was not merely defined topographically, but also with respect to the quantity of “affective charge” with which it was invested: “force” as well as “sense.”87 This “affective charge” was particularly crucial in the consideration of the movement from one part of the mind to another, say in repression. While Leclaire and Laplanche had denied the role of the drive in the move from conscious to unconscious states, Green saw it as an essential and irreducible motor of psychic activity. Green asserted that quantitative differences of energy could manifest themselves in qualitative differences, moving up the scale from somatic need, through instinctual drive, psychological desire, to a conscious demand: “Qualitative differences maintain solidarity with quantitative 84 See

Green, Le Discours vivant, p. 132. For Bouvet, see Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse, vol. II, especially pp. 285–7. L’Inconscient, p. 144. See especially Green’s discussion of Lacan in Le Discours vivant, pp. 136–41. 87 Ibid., p. 145. See also Green, Le Discours vivant, pp. 306–9. L’Inconscient, p. 153.

85 Ey, 86 Ey,

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changes that govern the passage from one level to another.”88 The drives themselves were not a language, but must already be in a sense symbolic – indeed the dualism between the libido and the death drive implied a prior symbolic structure. Further, to be able to be translated into the VorstellungsRepräsentanz, the drives had to be already differentiated.89 The unconscious was not a language, but was structured like a language, and at each level became further demotivated and detached from its biological ground, moving from drives to representations of things to representations of words in consciousness. The psyche was not governed by a single homogeneous linguistic system, but by a differential structure; the different levels of the mind following their own specific laws. Green concluded that it was only correct to call the elements of the psyche “signifiers” “at the condition of adjoining to the Freudian signifier, different in this from Saussure’s, its economic connotation.”90 The economic understanding of the unconscious refused any absolute rupture between consciousness and the unconscious and it allowed a contamination of the psyche by the somatic, in the form of affect. By inference, one could say that Green refused the absolute separation of the Lacanian Real and Symbolic. The organic drives were already symbolic, there was no absolute cut that delimited an entirely independent realm of signifiers. There was a sliding scale from “need, drive, desire, and demand,” and differences arose between the representation of a thing and the representation of a word, between the crude symbolism of the drives and the more nuanced play of signifiers in the psyche, for the symbolic was no longer a homogeneous field but dissolved into the Real and the biological.91 In conceiving language, according to Green, Freud “explains simultaneously the origin from which it emanated and the path traveled to its arrival.”92 psychoanalytical difference Where did Derrida fit into these questions? His crucial intervention came at the seminar organized by Leclaire’s opponent André Green at the SPP, with his talk “Freud and the Scene of Writing” from March 1966. It was thus at the crossroads of French psychoanalysis that Derrida gave his talk, on the non-Lacanian side of the divide, but at the seminar of a doctor who was peculiarly receptive to Lacan’s innovations, and whose work had attempted a synthesis. Indeed the series of seminars to which Derrida had 88 Ey, L’Inconscient, 92 Ibid., p. 151.

p. 130.

89 Ibid.,

p. 147.

90 Ibid.,

p. 151.

91

Ibid., p. 150.

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been invited was an attempt to introduce the training analysts of the SPP to linguistic philosophy; Green wanted to bridge the divide.93 The very terms of Derrida’s paper mirrored those of the debate between Leclaire and Green, both of whom were in his audience that day. Discussing the unconscious, like them, Derrida weighed the topographical and economic understandings of the psyche, following the question of the relationship between conscious and unconscious contents, even discussing the fraught question of the relationship between representations of words and representations of things.94 Indeed Derrida introduced the central section of his talk, an analysis of Freud’s Note on the Magic Writing Block (1925), by highlighting the difficulties in Freud’s text The Unconscious, the paper that was at the center of the Leclaire/Green debate.95 Derrida agreed with Green that a phonocentric model, like Leclaire’s, neglected pulsional energy, when it called for an absolute difference between the real drives and the symbolic psyche.96 But, unlike Green, Derrida suggested that one could not include the biological elements of the drives by supplementing a linguistic understanding with an analysis of affect. Rather, one had to change linguistic models, rejecting phonocentrism by recognizing that everything – including the drives and the somatic – was already structured like writing. Derrida picked up upon the arguments he had put forward in Of Grammatology, especially that Western metaphysics had repressed writing, which was its condition of possibility.97 In particular he saw the same repression of writing, and consequently the return of the repressed, in Freud’s own work.98 Derrida argued his case by charting the rise of the scriptural metaphor in Freud’s psychoanalysis in the analysis of both psychic content (breaching/photography/writing) and the non-psychic apparatus (biological neurons/optical machines/writing pad) of the mind: the psychological and the somatic.99 Writing, Derrida suggested, allowed Freud to overcome the distinction between the topographical and economic models of the psyche. Writing explained “forces but also locations,” because it preceded and constituted both.100 As Derrida said, “psychoanalysis sees itself called to collaborate with a graphematics to come [à venir], rather than with a linguistics dominated by an old phonologism.”101 93 94 96 98 99 101

Other participants included Michel Serres, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. See Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse, vol. II, p. 394. 95 Ibid., p. 221. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 331 note 22. 97 See chapter 8. See Derrida, Positions, pp. 117–21. See references to phonologism in Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 198–9 and 220. 100 Ibid., p. 204. See pp. 201–2, 215, and 221. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 220 (translation modified).

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Derrida argued that the distinction between signifier [signifiant] and signified [signifié] suggested by the phonological model could not be “radical,” for if it were, the idiosyncracy of oneiric (dream) language would render any dream interpretation impossible. Without a uniform dream language, interpretation could only take place by a reasoned explanation of the links between dream symbols and what they represented.102 But ironically this residual connection between signifier and signified meant that complete translation too was unattainable. The signifier did not float so completely above the signified that it could be replaced by another without loss. The “body” of the signifier, its materiality, was central in dreams, hence Freud’s ability to use plays on words and puns in his interpretation. Translation, however, focusing entirely on ultimate signification, had to forget the body of the signifier, and allow it to be replaced by another. The emphasis on the materiality of the signifier, then, made it impossible to describe the movement from the unconscious to the conscious as a simple transcription. Further, the model of transcription or translation suggested the existence of “a text, which would be already there, immobile: the serene presence of a statue, of a written stone or archive, whose signified content might be harmlessly transported into the milieu of a different language, that of the pre-consciousness or the conscious.” But to explain the movement from the unconscious to consciousness, Derrida argued, the topographical model was insufficient. Echoing Green, Derrida asserted that “an entirely and conventionally topographical metaphor of the psychical apparatus is to be completed by an appeal to force.” Force entered into Derrida’s analyses through his appeal to writing, which, taken seriously, should undo any pretensions of immobile primary texts: “the text is not conceivable in an originary or modified form of presence.” The unconscious text that had been “translated” was “already a weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning [sens] and force are united . . . everything begins with reproduction.”103 The scriptural metaphor suggested that the unconscious text was not fully present. Because of this inadequacy it had to be supplemented by the conscious one: “we must . . . understand the possibility of writing advanced as conscious . . . in terms of the labor of the writing which circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious.”104 With the scriptural metaphor the topographical and economic models of the psyche were combined: inscription and drive for reinscription. As Derrida 102

Ibid., p. 209.

103

Ibid., p. 211 (translation modified).

104

Ibid., p. 212.

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concluded, “the distinction between force and meaning is derivative in relation to an archi-trace.”105 Writing acted as the condition of possibility for both a linguistic understanding of the psyche and force or energy, which effected the translation into consciousness. The generative effects of différance produced the conscious text out of the unconscious inscription, supplementing it. The trace was a signifier, but also was more or less effaced, demanding to be repeated or supplemented, to be reinscribed elsewhere. It was in his short essay on the Note on the Magic Writing Block (1925) that Freud managed to find an analogy for the psychical apparatus that would complement the scriptural quality of psychical content. As Derrida described it: “From a system of traces functioning according to a model that Freud wanted to be natural and from which writing was perfectly absent, one orients oneself towards a configuration of traces that one can no longer represent but by the structure and functioning of writing.” The magic writing block comprised two elements: An upper sheet, representing the pre-conscious/conscious system, and a wax or resin base: the unconscious. The upper sheet was itself constructed out of two parts: on top clear celluloid, covering and protecting a thin layer of wax. Normally the upper sheet would sit lightly on the resin base, and the surface of the writing pad would appear blank. But if pressure was applied to the upper celluloid sheet, say with a stylus, it would force together the two waxy surfaces, the underside of the upper sheet and the resin base. This would render the mark visible. The trace on the upper sheet (the conscious) disappeared, however, when the machine was reset, because the contact between the waxy lower surface of the upper sheet and the bottom resin layer was broken. In Freud’s model the proximity of the two elements, which made the block ready to receive writing, constituted a Besetzungsinnervation, a pulsional investment of the unconscious. As we saw, such an investment could be just as easily withdrawn, the two elements separated such that the marks disappeared: repression. Then, only the resin base retained a lasting record. The condition of the model was that “there be neither a permanent contact, nor an absolute break between the strata.”106 The writing block combined a topographical (two sheets) model of the mind with an economic system (investment) that controlled the effacing of the sign. In the magic writing block the two could not be separated. Like Green, for Derrida the movement of content from one part of the psyche could not be understood without the resources of an economic model, but for him this economic aspect was integral to writing itself, 105

Ibid., p. 213.

106

Ibid., p. 226.


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which was already a trace and effacement. The unconscious was structured like a language, but it was a written language, and for this reason one didn’t need to choose between the topographical and the economic. The internal movement of différance preceded both; it brought together Green and Leclaire.107 Différance as a concept became Derrida’s mediating solution to the major debate in French psychoanalysis. the letter a The Green/Leclaire debate also suggests why Derrida might have chosen the word “différance.” In the months preceding Derrida’s talk, Leclaire and Green had reopened their debate on the pages of the Normalien journal, Les Cahiers pour l’analyse, and at the heart of their discussion was the new centerpiece of Lacan’s theory: the objet (a) (read “objet petit a”). The debate was set off by a text written by the editor of the journal, Jacques-Alain Miller, in the first edition from late 1965. In “La Suture,” Miller argued that “the logician’s logic [la logique logicienne]” depended upon a logic of the signifier that allowed the “suturing” or the closing-up of non-identity. The question of the “suture” tied into the very project of the Cahiers. In his avertissement to the new journal, Miller suggested that the suture was the psychoanalytic condition of scientific discourse, that is a discourse constrained by the requirement of truth.108 To show how the suture undergirded scientific discourse, Miller turned to Frege’s discussion of the construction of numbers. Frege started with zero, which was defined as the “number assigned to the concept ‘nonidentical to itself.’”109 Since in Frege’s system all objects were identical to themselves, no object conformed to this concept. The extension of the zero set, then, was zero. This declaration of the zero set’s extension was, for Miller, the suture. The zero, a “0” circling an absence, made that absence visible: “from the zero-lack to the zero-number, the non-conceptualizable conceptualizes itself.” This number zero, unlike the zero it represented was 107

108 109

The last part of Derrida’s essay deals with the question of the representation. The Magic Writing Pad “represents” the living mind, but according to Freud it is a poor imitation because it does not work by itself, it is “dead.” Another hand is required periodically to separate the upper sheet from the wax base. For Derrida, however, this was just another example of the supplementarity of writing: a supposedly “dead” representation coming to make up for the insufficiencies of the live model, just as the writing pad is both an inadequate model for memory, and, in practice, an aid to it. The question of representation, referred to in Freud’s text on the unconscious (Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 221), links this question to that of the Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz. This “representational relation [rapport représentatif]” is one of supplementarity (p. 228). Jacques-Alain Miller, “Avertissement,” Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 1, p. 1. See chapter 8. Jacques-Alain Miller, “La Suture,” Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 1, p. 44.

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an object, identical to itself; thus the number assigned to the concept of the “number zero” was one. By representing the unrepresentable, Frege had turned 0 into 1; he had sutured the non-self-identical to produce a self-identical object. The process continued. The number assigned to the concept “member of the sequence of numbers ending by n” is n + 1. It subsumes all the numbers up until n, as well as the zero number; n + [0] (the sutured 0) is n + 1. The suture, then, allowed the indefinite construction of the integers. But, since the suture transformed the non-identical into an object that was identical with itself, it could not be understood within the confines of logic, traditionally understood. Rather, the construction of numbers in Frege’s plan depended upon the logic of signifiers, the possibility of signifying 0 for it to count as 1. In this logic, the non-identical was transformed into the identical; difference was stitched up in the suture. The “logic of the signifier” and the suture that it made possible thus allowed the rise of mathematical logic and undergirded it. In the latter part of his paper, Miller tied the suture to Lacan’s subject of the unconscious. The subject too was that non-identical thing that allowed the possibility of “one extra signifier,” the concatenation of the signifying chain. But it was only represented in, and thus itself excluded from, the unconscious. Miller’s analysis hoped to mediate between his two teachers, Lacan and Althusser, by maintaining Lacan’s reference to the subject of the unconscious, while preserving Althusser’s ideal of a non-subjective science. Both sides, however, rejected Miller’s compromise. Criticized later by Althusserians such as Alain Badiou, Miller’s article was not well received by orthodox Lacanians.110 Lacan himself appreciated the attempt at mediation, but distanced himself from Miller’s analysis in his later conference “Science and Truth,” suggesting that science always failed to suture the subject.111 For Lacan, the impossibility of the suture was related to the objet (a). As initially presented, the objet (a) was the residual lack caused by a lost unity with the mother. As such, in Lacan’s system, it was the cause of desire, a desire that could never be fully satiated because the lack was real, and unity with the mother was irretrievable. The objet (a) could never be fully sutured; desire persisted to power the movement of the signifying chain. 110

111

See Alain Badiou, “Marque et manque,” Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 9. For an analysis of the debate, see my “Reading Lévi-Strauss with Derrida and the Cercle d’Epistémologie; or, How to be a Good Structuralist,” in Knox Peden and Peter Hallward, eds., Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought, vol. II (London: Verso, 2011). See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 427, and Lacan, Ecrits, p. 731. See also in Cahiers pour l’Analyse 3, where Lacan shows that the attempt to save the truth leads to the suturing of the subject, p. 6.


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Leclaire opposed Miller’s understanding in the same way. As we have seen, for Leclaire, the cutting-out of the signifier (découpage du signifiant) required the difference between the organic and the psychic to be absolute and irreducible. Because difference was primary, Miller’s analysis of the suture dissimulated the prime focus of psychoanalysis. Responding in the same edition as Miller’s piece, Leclaire asserted that “the analyst does not suture,” because he is not interested in preserving truth or remolding the non-identical into the self-sameness of the number. Leclaire continued “if one renounces, for a moment, the saving of the Truth, what appears? I would say, for me, it is radical difference, that is, sexual difference.”112 The suture had to be resisted because it concealed the foundational difference that structured psychoanalysis. Further, Leclaire argued that this difference appeared in Freud’s work around the “unconscious concept” – a concept intimately related to Lacan’s “objet (a)” – which, as a concept, was unified, but comprised non-identical objects, represented by parts of the body like the nose, penis, or finger that, as Borch Jacobsen has written, drifted “between imaginary continuity and real separation.”113 As the non-identical object, for Miller it would have been a perfect candidate for the suture, brought into the chain of signifiers to produce a stable formal system. But according to Leclaire the analyst must resist the operation, resist the temptation to cover over the “the truth of a radical difference, of a self-difference that imposes itself in the last analysis before the irreducibility of sexual reality.”114 Because this difference was irreducible, it would always resist the suture, the zero number would never fully represent the zero lack, there would remain what Leclaire would later call the “irreducible difference between the sought after and the obtained satisfaction.”115 Green was quick to respond, again hoping to temper the absoluteness of Leclaire’s difference. Writing in the third edition of Les Cahiers pour l’analyse, Green drew on many of the themes with which we have become familiar such as the role of affect in the Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz, but, like Leclaire, recast the debate around the objet (a), the theme of Lacan’s seminar that year.116 The objet (a) allowed Green to refine his criticism of Saussurean linguistics. For him, the analysis of the objet (a) would “mark 112 113 114 115 116

Serge Leclaire, “L’Analyste a` sa place,” in Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 1, p. 51. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, p. 231. Leclaire, “L’Analyste a` sa place,” p. 52. Ibid., p. 70. See also his “Objet de la psychanalyse,” Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 3, p. 133. Green first discussed the objet (a) in the 1963 Critique article. See pp. 661–2.

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the limits of the agreement of Lacan’s thought – and without doubt all psychoanalytic thought – with modern structuralism.”117 Green revisited Miller’s paper, arguing for the equal importance of both the cutting out (coupure) and the suture to understand the concatenation of the signifying chain.118 This concatenation showed that the psyche was not a homogeneous field of signifiers, but was rather made up of different levels – a “differential distribution” – that were continuous with each other and permitted an economic understanding of their interrelations. Arguing against Leclaire, Green claimed that the objet (a) had to be sutured into the signifying chain, producing a set of partial objects.119 And yet, he agreed with Leclaire on the internal exigencies of the “unconscious concept,” i.e. the necessity of the cutting-out and difference. Moving beyond this simple duality of the assertion of difference or its effacing, Green suggested that “to this binary opposition, that which linguistics offers us, that of phonology where relations are always posed in terms of antagonistic couples . . . one substitutes here a process with three terms (n, + , n ) with the blacking out of a term as soon as it has manifested itself.”120 For Green the structure of the suture described an operation that would move beyond the opposition of signifier and signified. This, according to Green, was the significance of the Mobius strip metaphor in Lacan’s work. Signifier and signified were separated, two sides of the same band, but the curious topology of the strip meant that they were also continuous with one another. Circumnavigating the strip would bring one to the other side: the crossing of the bar between Real and Symbolic that the suture described. For this to work, the Real too must be able to enter into the chain of signification: a “cutting-out” at the level of the signified, which founded that on the level of the signifier. It was only because the Real objet (a) could be separated from the body that it could then be sutured into the signifying chain, as a partial object of desire, making one tour of the Möbius strip: “it is the cut [coupure] that permits representation.”121 The suture allowed the possibility of a new signifier in the chain, by suturing the non-identical objet (a), a process that at one and the same time symbolized and effaced it. If there was a general economy and interchange between the signifier and signified, Green suggested this also implied the presence of affect in 117 118 119

André Green, “L’Objet (a),” in Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 3, p. 16. It was a reproduction of a talk he had given at Lacan’s seminar on December 21, 1965. 120 Ibid., p. 25. 121 Ibid., p. 27. Green, “L’Objet (a),” p. 24.


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the psyche: the representative of the objet (a) in the signifying chain could not be reduced to a simple representation. According to Green, by the end of his life, Freud was particularly concerned to give affect the status of a signifier, participating in the psyche like other signifiers, even if it followed different rules. It was an element that Green regarded as lacking in Lacan.122 The division between the affect and representation of the objet (a) mirrored and repeated that of Lacan’s split subject between the ego and the subject of the unconscious, also continuous with each other like the two sides of the Möbius strip.123 The suture then explained the rise of partial objects of desire of the objet (a) and the inscriptions of affect into the psyche. The differential distribution of signifiers, the different levels of the mind rising out of the organic could be understood through an economic model. The movement of the signifying chain, the replacement of one partial object for another, was the result of an integral understanding of the objet (a), combining both a concern for its representative and its affective elements. The objet (a) produced and effaced the trace, putting the signifying chain in motion.124 Lacan and Leclaire’s description of the “objet (a)” mirrored Derrida’s own reading of Heidegger’s difference in the essays from the early 1960s. The Real always exceeded the Symbolic – too many things, not enough forms – and it was the inadequacy of any Symbolic system that drove structural change, and to which the psychoanalyst must always be open. But, as we have seen, by the mid 1960s Derrida had refigured his understanding of difference. Structural instability no longer arose from the inadequacy of written forms, the difference between reason and the hyperbolic moment, but rather by the excess and movement of the Symbolic itself. Différance was not what demanded the partial object as an inadequate stopgap, but rather what produced and effaced it: Derrida’s neologism became an alternative to Lacan’s objet (a), supplementing and preceding the analysis of the Symbolic, which for Derrida remained phonological.125 In doing so Derrida never strayed too far from Green’s own analysis. Preempting Derrida’s own treatment of writing, Green introduced his paper by asserting that it would “allow us to consider the objet (a) less as the support of the partial object than as the path of a tracing hand, inscription, letter, a.”126 122 125

126

123 Ibid., p. 29. 124 See Fink, The Lacanian Subject, pp. 90–5. Ibid., pp. 28–30. Though Leclaire clearly saw in Derrida a theoretical ally. See Serge Leclaire, “Les Elements en jeu dans un psychanalyse,” Les Cahiers pour l’analyse 5, pp. 20–1, citing Derrida, “De la grammatologie II,” pp. 29 and 33–5, republished in Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 77 and 95–6. Green, “L’Objet (a),” p. 21.

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Between phenomenology and structuralism conclusion

I suggested at the beginning of part II that only one element of Derrida’s book L’Ecriture et la différence seemed to escape its historical structure; the title summarizing the book was devised after it, but presented first. But a closer look challenges this initial judgment. Like all of Derrida’s titles, L’Ecriture et la différence hides several meanings, which arise in dialogue between its spoken and written form, playing on the homophones in French between et and est, différence and différance. To someone who had never read Derrida, the title reads as it is written, writing and difference, the confrontation of two heterogeneous terms, a writing that would forget Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference as in the first five chapters. But, after a reading of the book, with an ear attuned to Derrida’s terminology, the sense of writing being différance is inescapable. L’écriture et la différence or L’écriture est la différance: Derrida’s book is caught in the polyvalence of its title. The title is an implicit double séance, the never full repression of an old word in the production of new meaning. And, as in Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the movement between the two meanings, between the latent and the explicit, was an effect of writing itself. It was the very différance of writing that allowed the movement between Derrida the post-existentialist and Derrida the non-conformist structuralist. Derrida’s Writing and Difference thus allows a transformative reading, a passage between two covers. It cannot be the totalitarian book in the Leibnizian or Hegelian sense.

c h a p t er 7

L’ambiguité du concours The deconstruction of commentary and interpretation in Speech and Phenomena

In the last chapter we tracked the changes in Derrida’s thought during the middle years of the 1960s, showing how it mutated from a post-existentialist reading of phenomenology into a quasi-structuralist theory. But the causes and stakes of this transformation remain unexplained. Over the next two chapters, I intend to examine this change from two perspectives: the move away from phenomenology, and the confrontation with structuralism. The latter will shed light on the political meaning of Derrida’s project and provide new ways to understand the role played by antihumanism in French theory. The former is worthy of consideration, because it concerns the rise of deconstruction as a methodology, the genesis of an aspect of Derrida’s work that has been central to its reception into the Englishspeaking world.1 For, while before 1964 Derrida focused his attention almost exclusively on Husserl’s texts and participated in the technical realm of French phenomenological discourse, after 1964 the vast majority of his books and articles examined texts from outside of the phenomenological canon. The key to this unprecedented expansion in Derrida’s professional interests lies, as I will argue, in his new teaching responsibilities. While Merleau-Ponty opened phenomenology up to the human sciences, by urging the philosopher to place himself at “school of facts,”2 Derrida widened his intellectual horizons by returning to the ENS, Rue d’Ulm. Scholars have been resistant to placing Derrida’s thought within its institutional context, because his autobiographical statements seem to refuse such an analysis: the philosopher of the marginal, Derrida enjoyed his contested position on the fringes of academic philosophy. In a 1976 article, Derrida asserted that, 1

2

Derrida resisted the idea that deconstruction is simply a method, and, as the following chapter makes clear, I do not want to imply that there exists an autonomous methodology called deconstruction that is merely applied to texts. Indeed, in chapter 8, we will see how what could be classed as the first object of deconstruction played a considerable role in the construction of the theory. Merleau-Ponty, “Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” p. 122.

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it had been obvious that the work in which I was involved . . . – the (affirmative) deconstruction of phallogocentrism as philosophy – did not belong simply to the forms of the philosophical institution . . . It did not proceed according to the established norms of theoretical activity. In more than one of its traits and in strategically defined moments, it had to have recourse to a “style” unacceptable to a university reading body (the “allergic” reactions to it were not long in coming).3

Further, Derrida was careful to assert the “dissociation” between his published and teaching work, separating his philosophical project, which left no structure unquestioned, from his teaching role where he had to follow the norms of a jury and a canon “that in his eyes [had] been discredited.”4 To understand these claims as drawing a clear line between deconstruction and the academic institutions in which it first emerged would, however, be an unjust reading of a philosophy that refused absolute exteriority. Margins for Derrida were never on the outside of a text, and if Derrida felt that his work was a “scandal” for the mainstream, it must be remembered that, according to his philosophy, “scandals” were as much a product of, as an outrage to, a system.5 For all his discussion of the “dissociation” between his philosophical project and teaching duties, Derrida also made clear that this dissociation was a “fiction,” and when he declared that deconstruction did not “belong simply” to the forms of the philosophical institution, he wanted to highlight the complexity of the relationship, not its nonexistence. The educational system in France, by the mid 1970s, had become an object of deconstruction, but Derrida was insistent that deconstruction was also its “effect.”6 This chapter aims to understand the crucial and unexplored connection between Derrida’s philosophy and one of the most important institutions in French academic life: the agrégation. I will argue that the practice of deconstruction was a response to the conflicting demands of the exam, and that Derrida’s later criticism and resistance to the agrégation concours grew out of an early and intimate involvement with it. Rebels often depend on the institutions that they assault and can never wholly stand beyond them. In Derrida’s case, it was only from within the French philosophical system that he found the resources and the authority to attack it. The agrégation de philosophie was the gatekeeper of French academic philosophy. Taken by students in their mid-twenties between the completion 3 4 5 6

Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? trans J. Plug (Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 71–2. Ibid., p. 77. For a discussion of scandals see Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 104–5, or Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 283–4. See Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? p. 74.

L’ambiguité du concours

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of a Mémoire thesis and the beginning of doctoral work, the agrégation effectively granted a small elite of young philosophers access to university positions. It was not an institution that Derrida particularly liked. Both while taking the exam – when he described it to Althusser as “concentration camp idiocy [une connerie concentrationnaire]” – and later when teaching it, Derrida found the exam a constant burden. According to his wife, he saw it as “ghastly”; “very codified, very constraining, he had trouble submitting himself to its demands.”7 In spite of all his opposition to the agrégation concours, there were few other twentieth-century philosophers who had such an intimate relationship with it: Derrida taught for twenty years at the ENS, training students to take the exam. He was the agrégé-répétiteur, a teacher who, as Derrida described, was “destined to repeat and make others repeat, to reproduce and make others reproduce: forms, norms, and a content. He [had to] assist students in the reading and comprehension of texts, help them interpret and understand what is expected of them, what they must respond to at the different stages of testing and selection.”8 Derrida’s day-to-day role at the ENS was to reassert and enforce the rules imposed by the test. In 1982 he considered that he had done a good job, “the results have been excellent (if I appreciated such honors, I would say they were amongst the best in the Ecole, of all the Ecoles) both in the percentage and the placing of those who passed.”9 When in the early 1960s two Normaliens, including Robert Linhart, decided that they did not want to take the exam and asked to be released from the obligation, Derrida opposed their petition.10 The majority of the pages that Derrida wrote during the 1960s and 70s were lecture courses preparing students for the concours. To discard this enormous intellectual production as incidental would be a mistake. While intellectual historians have often looked to biographical, social, and political contexts in which to place an author’s thought, the day-to-day academic work of professional philosophers and intellectuals remains a relatively untapped and yet immediate context.11 For while biographical, social, and political themes often require some form of translation to 7 8 9 10 11

Derrida Letters at IMEC to Althusser, April 25, 1956, cited in Peeters, Derrida, p. 103. Interview with Marguerite Derrida, May 2007. Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? p. 75. Derrida was promoted to maˆıtre-répétiteur later, but continued to teach with the agrégation in mind. Letter July 23, 1982 to ENS directeur. Derrida personnel file at the ENS, CAC, 19930595/31. “Commission des Etudes de l’ENS,” CAC, 930595/8. For an important study of the pedagogical context of Cambridge Mathematicians in the nineteenth century see Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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explain their impact on often abstract theory, the norms and demands of academic institutions directly affected the form and content of written work. Students crafted their essays in ways that they thought would ensure success, while in courses, their teachers were directly influenced by the syllabus and the exams to be taken. In the majority of cases, it is not possible to separate teaching from research. Indeed, as we shall see, within the context of the agrégation, the two were seen as mutually dependent. First, academic courses are often, and rightly, considered alongside publications; they are text more than context. From Aristotle’s Ethics to Kant’s Logic, lecture courses have been assimilated into the canon. In Derrida’s case, many of his own lectures acted as the first draft of a book. Second, even where publications and books emerged from independent research, the courses that academics taught often dealt with parallel subjects and helped shape arguments and approaches; we cannot draw an absolute line between the two. For many intellectuals, academic demands and institutional constraints – which mobilized the interest of their students and the expectations of their employers – had a profound influence on all their theoretical work. In particular, the agrégation plays an important part in my story of Derrida’s development. The agrégation only became critical for Derrida’s continued work when he became the agrégé-répétiteur in the History of Philosophy at the ENS in the autumn of 1964. We can understand the transformation of Derrida’s theory from a predominantly technical study of phenomenology into a mode of reading applicable to a wide variety of texts from a number of diverse traditions, by showing how his new philosophy could provide valuable resources for his students entering the concours. Derrida expanded the scope of his philosophical reflections and learnt how to approach textual fragments from the history of philosophy at the very moment he was teaching his students to do the same thing. the agregation de philosophie Taking the agrégation was a daunting affair. In the 1950s, of three hundred or so candidates, only about fifteen passed each year. By 1965, despite the massive growth in the higher education system, this number had risen to only thirty. Because of the importance and intensity of the course and program, students would start serious preparations a year beforehand. In the summer before the student intended to take the exam, he or she would refer to a copy of the Revue universitaire, or the Bulletin officiel de


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l’éducation nationale, to find the program for that year.12 With philosophy considered the queen of university disciplines, the philosophy agrégation graced the first page of the special supplement. The program consisted of two sections: one listing the authors to be discussed in the written exam, the other listing the texts set for the oral. In the period 1945–65 the written program named a number of authors for study (approximately five or six through the 1950s and settling down to two in the early 1960s).13 These were taken from the slowly developing philosophical canon. In this period the only twentieth-century author to appear on the written program was Henri Bergson.14 Each author remained on the program for two years, with approximately half the program changing every session, probably in an effort to reduce the instructors’ workload. Based on this corpus, students would face a set of three compositions in June.15 The first two questions were based on far-reaching philosophical topics, such as the “conflict of duties,” “determinism,” “certitude,” or the relationship between science and philosophy. The students would then face a composition in the history of philosophy. Though not explicitly formulated as such, the question generally consisted in a citation from one author of the program, commenting on another, or a comparison between the two. For example, when Derrida first sat the exam in 1955 he had to answer the question: “What does Plotinus’s system owe and what does it not owe to Platonism?” Of the three hundred or so students each year who sat the written part of the exam, only a small portion – around a sixth during this period – were classed as “admissibles.” These were allowed through to the next stage, an exam that would normally take place a couple of weeks later after the examiners had marked the 900 or so essays.16 The organization of the oral exam was less stable during this period. Essentially, however, it consisted of two types of test: a leçon on a topic chosen by lot, and a number of explications de textes.17 In an explication de texte a student was required to give a detailed oral presentation of a philosophical passage. The selection of authors and texts for these explications made up the bulk of each program. From 1919 until the 12 13 14 15 16 17

The Revue Universitaire ran until 1957, after which the only source appears to be the Bulletin Officiel, or the BO as it is referred to. After 1960 the number of authors dropped, before being replaced by a list of themes for discussion. In 1951–2 and 1956–7. Each composition took place between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., falling on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Two examiners would mark each question. In the early 1950s, there were two leçons, a grande and a petite. However, in the second half of the decade the latter were considered to be too specialized, and were replaced by the explication of an unknown text. This too did not survive long.

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mid 1960s, when other languages were introduced, the candidates had to give one French and one Latin explication, and then could choose between a Greek, a German, or an English one.18 The language qualifier referred not to the origin of the author, but rather to the language in which the text would be given in the exam.19 So Nietzsche, Hegel, and Husserl at times appeared in the French Section, while in 1957 the candidates faced a Latinate Descartes. Unlike the written section, which would demand knowledge spanning the corpus of the authors cited, in the oral exam only a single text, or perhaps only a small part of it, was listed on the agrégation syllabus: the fifty-sixth lesson of Comte’s Positive Philosophy, or book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The students were asked to analyze a philosophical fragment. For the leçon, a different topic was given to each candidate, and after five hours’ access to the library at the Sorbonne, they were supposed to present a lecture to the jury of about fifty minutes. In recent years, philosophers and historians have begun to appreciate the centrality of the agrégation in French philosophy, and the work of Alan Schrift has done much to focus attention and interest.20 The importance of the agrégation can be shown in three central areas: the constitution of major themes and trends in French thought, the production of a French philosophical community, and finally the style of philosophy undertaken in France. In the secondary literature most emphasis has been placed on the first area: the connection between the authors listed on the program and those that came to interest philosophy more broadly at the time. The program for the agrégation, it is argued, played a major role in canon formation. If an author was placed on the agrégation syllabus, it immediately created a market for critical literature on his philosophy. Thus, as Schrift notes, when the sociologist Georges Davy became president of the jury soon after the end the War the number of empiricist philosophers on the program greatly increased, and this played an important role in the rise of the social sciences in French philosophy.21 Schrift has also remarked on the coincidence of 18

19 20

21

Alan Schrift has pointed out to me that, before the First World War, certain students were able to provide an explication of either Kant’s Critique de jugement, or Mill’s Examen de la philosophie de Hamilton instead of the Greek text. The exam, however, would always be in French. See Julian Bourg, ed. After the Déluge (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004), pp. 23–5. Alan Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 201–4, and most recently, “The Effects of the Agrégation on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (July 2008), pp. 449–73. Schrift, “The Effects of the Agrégation,” p. 462.


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the appearance of Nietzsche on the exam in 1958 and a whole slew of books written on him.22 He suggests that the institutional pressures and opportunities provided by the agrégation were fundamental for the rise of French Nietzscheanism, especially that of Deleuze, Foucault and, of course, Derrida. Using the agrégation to understand the processes of canon formation in French philosophy provides an important corrective to traditional explanations, but we cannot see it as absolutely determinative. Firstly, the program of the agrégation was as much a response to trends as generative of them. In most cases, a new addition to the program had to be available in French, something that was certainly the case for Nietzsche by the late 1950s: the Henri Albert translation indicated on the program of the Genealogy of Morality was over half a century old.23 In terms of secondary literature too, Nietzsche was hardly ignored before 1958. As we saw in the first two chapters, in the period after 1940 scholars had become increasingly interested in Nietzsche’s work, for he had been seen as a critical influence for the existentialists and Heidegger. Nietzsche even appeared regularly in ENS student exposés from the early 1950s. There was a society dedicated to his philosophy formed in 1946 by Armand Quinot, and Nietzsche’s work had elicited many critical responses in French, albeit not always by mainstream philosophers, while several German analyses had been translated.24 We cannot therefore conclude that there existed a simple causal relationship between the appearance of his name on the agrégation program and the rise of French Nietzscheanism; without a tradition of Nietzsche studies in France he would never have been included. The appearance of authors on the agrégation program did, however, serve to magnify their importance, mobilize publishing machines, and incite several philosophy professors to write and publish on them. The agrégation may not have created the canon out of nothing, but it did affirm that canon and secure it. Secondly, the program did not exhaustively determine the philosophies that could be used and referred to in the exam. Though Hegel’s texts only appeared on the compulsory section of the agrégation in 1951, Georges Davy complained in 1947 that “several candidates have sacrificed so much 22 23 24

See ibid., pp. 464–9. Friedrich Nietzsche, La Généalogie de la morale, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1900). Schrift notes books by Bataille and Lefebvre and the interest given by Wahl amongst others, and shows how Nietzsche’s relatively regular appearance on the agrégation d’allemand program from before the War informed the Germanist literature on Nietzsche.

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to Hegel, to the point of scorning almost anyone else.”25 Husserl was not placed on the program until 1959, and yet he was a standard reference in the exam from the late 1940s, while devotees of Bachelard, Sartre, Marcel, and Merleau-Ponty were noted by the jury throughout the 1950s.26 Though the explications des textes presented a rigid reading list, the thematic questions on the written part and the leçons allowed a certain freedom of choice. Even in the explications, Marx, Hegel, or Sartre could be used to elucidate the chosen texts, though their own books might not have been on the syllabus. The explicit program of agrégation authors represented a relatively stable and slow moving canon, but no candidate felt limited to it. Open to philosophical fashions, the official agrégation program would only confirm a new movement once it was already underway and established. The fact that the set program could act as a pretext for discussing other themes and authors and bringing to bear different theoretical apparatuses on set texts suggests another key role of the agrégation: maintaining the unity of the French philosophical community. This unity can be attributed more to the stability than to the movement of the canon. One thing that is perhaps most remarkable about this period in France is the enormous variety of different movements in philosophy: Existentialism, phenomenology in all its heretical forms, structuralism, post-structuralism, Christian spiritualism, French analytic philosophy, epistemology, amongst many others. This heterogeneity is even more remarkable given the size of the university philosophical population. Even with the two philosophers at the Collège de France and the grouping in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the community was very small. There were around fifteen professors of philosophy at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, and around fifty others spread around the fourteen or so other philosophy faculties in France. Taking 1953 as an example, the university community in Paris aside from the historians of philosophy comprised the existentialist Merleau-Ponty at the Collège de France; Mikel Dufrenne, a phenomenologist, at the Sorbonne; Hyppolite, concentrating on Hegel; Jankélevitch, the moral philosopher; Jean Wahl, an expert on contemporary German thought; Gaston Bachelard, 25

26

For the rapports, a good if not complete selection of this period have been grouped together at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, under the title “Agrégation: Philosophie” (Paris, 1950–). Several of the other rapports can be found in the national archives. See “Rapport du President,” 1947, in CAC, 19880121, art. 2. Hegel had been on the German section of the agrégation in 1938. See similar complaints concerning Husserl and Heidegger in 1951 and 1952. Rapport 1951, pp. 1 and 4; 1952, p. 8. Cf. 1955, p. 6; and 1958, p. 5. In the 1960s a number of candidates started using “structuralism” as a guiding theory; see Rapport 1965, p. 6.


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the historian of science; and Poirier, a logician.27 At the university level there were no large communities following any particular methodology, and for philosophical conversations to be possible they had to reach across doctrinal lines. The agrégation, a shared reference for all university philosophers, served as common ground. Phenomenologists, structuralists, and logicians could all engage in debates over the same philosophical canon, which was, to a large extent, reflected in the agrégation program. The centrality of Descartes is a clear example of this. A major factor in the absorption of phenomenology into French philosophy was the parallel made between Husserl and Descartes. Gaston Berger’s Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl (1941) and Husserl’s own Cartesian Meditations (developed from lectures given in Paris in 1929) helped nativize the German phenomenologist. Once he had been assimilated to a certain form of Cartesianism, Husserl was far more acceptable to the French intellectual community. It is not surprising that the key clash between Derrida and Foucault should revolve around Descartes, or that he should have been the focus of a protracted debate in the early 1950s between Henri Gouhier, Martial Guéroult, and Fernand Alquié, a debate that brought together existentialist, proto-structuralist, and surrealist interpretations.28 The agrégation played a central role in the constitution of a French philosophical community, while mirroring and reinforcing philosophical movements. But for certain individuals, it went beyond the determination of authors read and themes discussed. Appropriate tactics for answering agrégation questions were repeatedly impressed upon students in their yearlong preparation, and for those teaching them these demands were felt no less insistently. For Derrida too, the exam exerted a powerful normative role, determining what good philosophy was. The constant demand to train his students in the most effective way possible for an exam that would determine their future careers imprinted the peculiar and often conflicting demands of the concours on Derrida’s own work. To understand the agrégation’s role in the development of deconstruction, we must first analyze these demands and investigate the various strategies employed to address them. 27 28

See the list in Etudes philosophiques 3 (1953), p. 339. Of course, philosophy instructors at the Ecoles Normales and the agrégés teaching at Parisian lycées could be added to this roster. See on this issue the excellent article by Knox Peden, “Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinand Alquié versus Martial Guéroult,” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (August 2011).

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Between phenomenology and structuralism pedagogy and research: the conflicting demands of the agregation

As we have seen, the agrégation played a significant role at the highest level of French academic philosophy. As the most important filter for the next generation of scholars, the jury showed disproportionate interest every year in the very best candidates. In the rapport they compiled after each year’s concours, the jury would often bemoan the lack of any great stars who might have wowed them, or remark on the brilliance of the cacique: the jury was on the lookout for the next Bergson or Sartre.29 Such was importance of the rankings that on at least one occasion in the female concours it was decided not to grant a first place to preserve the prestige of the top agrégée.30 In selecting the next generation of French philosophers, the jury tried to remain up to date, and remarked on the “necessary rejuvenation of the competition with the evolution of the world.”31 In the leçons, though some topics reiterated traditional themes such as “is there a science of the individual?” or “rationalism,” many showed an awareness of contemporary ideas. In 1969, just after Derrida’s triple publication in 1967, “writing and speech” was included as one of the leçons. Similar occurrences can be seen following other important events in philosophical life in France, such as the leçon “Myth and History” in 1958, the year of Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale and two years after his Tristes tropiques, or one on “anguish” in 1950, tracking its importance for the existentialists. The agrégation jury hoped to keep abreast of current philosophical trends and they expected the candidates to demonstrate an awareness of the most modern themes. In 1949, Mikel Dufrenne, while serving on the jury, complained that too many candidates were unwilling to engage with contemporary philosophy.32 Though the present could not be ignored, students also had to avoid parroting fashionable authors. In 1962, the jury warned the candidates that “tens of their competitors can utilize the same conventional plans and recall the same clichés just as well as them.”33 In the 1950s in particular the jury regularly complained of students using “phenomenology” or “dialectics” uncritically and without fully engaging with either these ideas or the texts 29 30 31 33

See for instance the disappointment in Rapport 1950, when Pierre Aubenque came first, or Rapport 1957, which notes the small number of the very best, or Rapport 1959. In 1948, when the first and third places were left unfilled, the highest-ranking women were given second and fourth places. 32 Rapport 1949, p. 3. See also Rapport 1950, p. 2. Rapport 1949, p. 6. Rapport 1962, p. 3.


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they were supposed to elucidate. Two of the most highly praised qualities were “personality” and “originality.”34 Similarly, in the explications de textes, the candidates were urged to go beyond superficial or schematic readings. In 1959, the jury objected that “too many candidates . . . seem to believe that to explicate is to paraphrase . . . to explicate a text, does not mean to say it otherwise (and generally poorly). It is to analyze it, and to show the development of its thought, its structure, its general intention; it is to disengage the main ideas, to show the dialectical or hierarchical relationship between these primary ideas with its secondary ideas, etc.”35 Given this emphasis on the very highest quality work, the most able candidate, and the most up-to-date philosophy, it is perhaps surprising that the official purpose of the agrégation was so mundane. For though it was one of the key filters into the philosophical elite in France, its explicit and traditional purpose was to select high-school philosophy teachers. Indeed for most of its history, the majority of agrégés would enter life-long careers teaching in lycées. Because of the agrégation’s role in educating and qualifying high-school teachers, it was a powerful political and social tool. One of the agrégation’s champions in the mid nineteenth century, Victor Cousin, used it to promote his own philosophy in French society, which he hoped would foster social peace. As Jan Goldstein has shown, Cousin opposed the fragmented subject of the Condillac sensationalists. The introspective discovery of the “moi,” Cousin hoped, would reunite the heterogeneous and physicalist self of prior philosophy and thus help to form responsible citizens. As president of the agrégation jury from 1840, Cousin hoped to disseminate this program more generally in France, by training reliable and conformist educators, not maverick and radical philosophers.36 As time had progressed, in practice, this had changed. In 1950, a new exam, the CAPES (Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du Second degré) was instituted to recruit teachers alongside the agrégation. It was a less prestigious concours, and recipients of the CAPES worked harder and earned less than their agrégé colleagues.37 The new exam was created in recognition of the changing structure of the French educational system. With the vast growth of university education after the War, more 34

35 36 37

See Rapports, 1949, p. 6; 1950, p. 6; 1951, pp. 2 and 4; 1952, p. 8; 1957, p. 2; 1959, p. 5; 1961, p. 8. Both Althusser and Derrida in their comments on practice agrégation dissertations rewarded those that were “personal”; see Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, “Agrégatifs,” IMEC, ALT 2, E6–02.01–03.03. Rapport 1959, pp. 11–12. See Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), ch. 5. An agrégé had to teach twelve hours a week. A holder of the CAPES would teach eighteen hours.

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agrégés were moving to university teaching posts, and fewer were content to remain in the secondary system. But the history and original intentions of the agrégation system still marked the structure and demands of the concours. Following success at the exam, philosophers were contractually obliged to spend five years teaching in lycées before they could pursue a university career: Bergson taught at schools in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand, Sartre in Le Havre, Deleuze in Amiens and Orléans. By sending the best and brightest philosophers to teach in schools around the country, the agrégation brought current philosophical ideas to a broad intellectual community. Derrida, for one, teaching at the lycée in Le Mans from 1959 to 1960 introduced his students to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss.38 The interchange between tertiary and secondary education in France was exemplified and facilitated by a set of television programs made in the mid to late 1960s, aimed at philosophy students in terminale (the final year of lycée). Organized by Dina Dreyfus, and produced by the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique de France, the Enseignement de Philosophie programs were hosted by the young Alain Badiou and brought together some of the most important thinkers of the age: Hyppolite discussed the relationship of philosophy and its history, Ricoeur spoke on philosophy and language, and Foucault presented the relationship between philosophy and psychology.39 Dreyfus and Badiou led a roundtable discussion of philosophy and truth with Hyppolite, Ricoeur, Foucault, and Canguilhem, while Bourdieu, Serres, Eric Weil, and Guillermit amongst others were brought in to discuss their own specialties. That such a range of philosophers would have deigned to address teenagers, or that it should have been considered worthwhile to confront schoolchildren with this material, only makes sense in a system where academic philosophy had such a rich connection to secondary education, a connection that found its concrete expression in the agrégation. It is perhaps no surprise that the tradition of the public intellectual should have had such an important place in French cultural life, that thinkers could become household names, and that the themes and interests of the philosophical elite should have had a resonance and importance for a wider 38

39

See Lycée Montesquieu teaching material at Irvine, 4, 10–15. Derrida spent only one year at Le Mans, because his position as assistant at the Sorbonne was treated as a lycée post for official purposes. It was only after four years there that he had fulfilled his five-year contract and could look for other positions. A total of twenty-nine films can be seen in the Audio Visual room at the BNF, filed under Dina Dreyfus as the producer.


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public.40 The agrégation did not only mark philosophers; by bolstering the links between university philosophy and the far larger field of secondary education, it left its imprint upon France.41 The role of the agrégation in France’s broader educational system manifested itself in the organization and form of the concours. The number of admis, those who would eventually pass the exam, was set earlier in the year by the Ministry for Education to fit the number of posts available in the lycées. It is for this reason that many candidates from the French Empire were classed as “hors-rang [non-classed]”: it was assumed that they would return to their home country and teach there. As they would not take French jobs it was not considered necessary to include them in the official statistics, even as they were accorded the rank that they had earned with respect to the other candidates. The relationship to the lycées also explains why the men’s and the women’s concours were separated: in the secondary education system in France at the time, the majority of schools were single-sex and thus the vacancies were similarly divided on gender lines. Before the War, with a very limited number of women taking the exam, men and women were assessed together; hence Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s impressive first and second place in the 1929 concours. But with the expansion of education after the War, the male and the female concours were split, even if they responded to the same program and were judged by the same jury. When the jury members were assessing each candidate, the requirements of a lycée philosophy class were always on their minds. Even as they sought originality and brilliance, they required evidence of pedagogical skills above all. The leçon was meant to simulate a lycée class, so clarity, concrete examples, and a broad, interesting theme were required. Candidates were encouraged to avoid the small and technical and instead to debate issues that would attract the attention of their future charges. Leçons on freedom, determinism, politics, and social policy as well as vast over-arching theories about the history of philosophy were favored over limited and specialized technical questions. The candidates were trained to set their philosophical sights on the large themes, without getting bogged down in the details or being too abstract.42 40 41 42

One should not perhaps romanticize this too much. The introductory sequence of Michel Serres‘s program showed several people unable to identify Descartes. See Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch. 3. See Rapport 1949, p. 6; or Rapport 1957, p. 13.

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The pedagogical emphasis also manifested itself in the demand for moderate and responsible analyses. Because the leçon was meant to mimic a philosophy class, it was imperative that in the discussion of topics students should not move too quickly to the finer and controversial issues. The teacher’s first duty was to provide a comprehensive and rounded understanding of the topic, and not embroil him- or herself in particular interests before having outlined the fundamentals. Indeed in Foucault’s first attempt at the agrégation he failed because of his inability to fulfill the basic requirements in his discussion of “hypothesis,” the designated subject. In this leçon, the agrégation examiners expected students to refer to a canonical experiment undertaken by Claude Bernard in the 1860s and described in his book, Introduction a` l’Etude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Bernard noticed that a starved rabbit had acidic urine, normally only found in carnivores. Hypothesizing that the rabbit had begun to consume its own blood, he constructed a set of experiments to test this claim. This scientific method demonstrated the now standard model of Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Interpretation, and Conclusion. By ignoring this canonical figure in the discussion of “hypothesis,” Foucault failed to demonstrate the basic pedagogical skills that the agrégation tested. “I forgot to mention rabbit pee,” he remarked afterwards.43 Cleverness by itself was not enough to succeed; a firm grasp of conventional ideas was also a clear requisite.44 It was in this vein that the jury continually complained about the presentation of the leçon. If the candidate spoke too fast, too slowly, did not fill up the time, badly organized his or her work, or simply read the lecture, he or she would be severely penalized: “many candidates have a badly posed voice; several speak a little too softly or confusedly; but a certain number speak with brilliance of voice, a forceful flow that would be intolerable in a class.”45 teaching to the test The possible tension between these two elements – verbal brilliance and clear, dutiful exposition – was never far from sight. In a presentation to the 43

44 45

Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 37. Eribon goes on, “the report by the president of the jury, written in Davy’s hand, spoke volumes: ‘A candidate who is certainly cultivated and distinguished and whose failure can be considered as an accident. But, having already placed badly on the written, he made the mistake on the oral, and on a standard subject, of being more concerned with demonstrating his erudition than with treating the subject proposed.’” Cf. also Rapport 1961 p. 21. See Rapport 1959, p. 13; and Rapport 1949, p. 2; Rapport 1958, p. 13; Rapport 1960, p. 14.


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Société Française de la Philosophie in 1938, the philosopher Georges Friedman suggested that too much emphasis had been given to the pedagogical elements in the agrégation and that this unfairly disadvantaged the brightest students, especially Normaliens: the “scientific” and the “pedagogical” elements were seen as conflicting, what was described as the “ambiguité du concours.”46 Merleau-Ponty complained that a student could pass the agrégation and still have no understanding of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, or Heidegger.47 Emphasis was placed on the difference between the ENS entry concours and the agrégation. The first was alleged to spot brilliance, the other to pass mediocrity. An analysis of the two exams does not at first show any major difference. At this period the ENS concours was modeled on the agrégation, with similar questions in the written paper and a comparable list of leçons to be given in the oral.48 The resemblance is not surprising given that the ENS too was originally designed to train schoolteachers and from the middle of the nineteenth century had a privileged relationship to the agrégation. At the Ecole classes were specifically geared towards the exam. The ENS convened seminars with the express purpose of preparation for the agrégation, while the répétiteur-agrégés, Althusser and then Derrida, saw their prime task as preparing students for the test, giving them advice and technical tricks that would work to their advantage in the highly ritualized concours.49 In these seminars, students were encouraged to present exposés, mocks of the leçon, and were expected to hand in written work in the style of an agrégation dissertation. As Althusser described in a rapport at the end of the academic year 1950–1: “every week, a two-hour class, under the direction of the agrégé-sécretaire [Althusser], is dedicated to scholarly exercises destined to improve candidates’ ‘technique’ at the agrégation.”50 In the 1950s, between the written and the oral part of the agrégation exam, Louis Althusser took those of his students who had passed the first stage of that exam to an Abbey 35 kilometers north of Paris. The Abbaye de Royaumont had been recently converted into a cultural center by its “propriétaires-mécènes,” Henri and Isabelle Gou¨ın.51 In the quiet of the medieval abbey, far away from other disturbances, Althusser put the students through an arduous training schedule in preparation for the second and potentially most difficult part of the exam: the oral. Each 46 47 48 49 51

“L’agrégation de philosophie,” Bulletin de la Société Française de la Philosophie (1938), pp. 117–58. Ibid., pp. 148–9. See “Rapports du Jury du Concours ENS,” in CAC, 930595/62 50 “ENS: Enseignement, Examens,” CAC, 930595/89. Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 33. Jean-Paul Aron, Les modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 64.

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evening he handed out subjects for the next day’s presentations and after a night of frantic preparations they would present to their classmates.52 Althusser would then comment on the morning’s work, judging whether each effort was worthy of admission at the final exam. It was an almost sacred retreat, and Normaliens often used religious language to describe the agrégation. As one successful candidate put it, writing to Althusser after the exam, “if the agrégation wasn’t, like baptism and confirmation, one of those sacraments so solemn that one can only receive it once, you would have passed the agrégation today for the 2nd (10th or 11th . . . ) time . . . this agrégation is as much yours as mine.”53 This attribution was justified by the enormous effort shown by Althusser in the preparation for the exam: the student continued, “it only remains for me to thank you once more for the constancy, the precision, and the fecundity of your guidance.” When the result was not so positive it was with personal regret that they wrote to Althusser. One student, upon being placed lower then he had expected, declared, “I would have loved to have given you a more impressive result, but deep down I don’t think that I am an agrégation animal!”54 The sheer time and effort invested by the Ecole did not ensure the success of its students. Indeed, during the 1950s, a considerable number, including Derrida and Foucault, had to reenter the concours at least once before passing. In the five-year period before Derrida took the exam, the Ecole had been doing extraordinarily badly, and a third of the philosophers had left the ENS without passing.55 But the problem was perennial: one contributor to the 1938 debate suggested that it could “have as its subtitle: How to explain the failures of Normaliens at the agrégation?” The speaker was none other than the director of the Ecole, embarrassed by what seemed to be demanded of him.56 The efforts, then, to reconcile the two conflicting demands of the agrégation were of crucial importance to the Ecole. With a considerable number of failures every year, no one could take the agrégation for granted; the norms of the exam became law for young Normaliens. Understandably advice abounded. The rapports by the agrégation jury, published every year, 52 53

54 55 56

Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie, pp. 465–6. This telling phrase highlights continuities between the intellectual practices demanded by the agrégation and the “spiritual exercises,” which according to Ian Hunter mark the history of theory. See Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2006). IMEC, ALT2, E3.03.02, notes from after the 1960 and 1961 agrégation. See Althusser, “Liste des philosophes sortis de l’ENS depuis la guerre.” “L’Agrégation de philosophie,” p. 138.


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emphasized that teaching and research were opposite sides of the same coin. In 1948, the president stated that: in our opinion, the divorce between teaching and research is a grave error. Rather if it is true that expression is not only an instrument of communication, but just as much a deepening of thought, they should sustain and mutually provoke each other. It is in this spirit that the agrégation works to distinguish a double aptitude in demanding the proofs of significant learning, the solid foundation on which will be built both the professeur and the savant, and at the same time the proof of a gift of presentation, which is no less useful perhaps for the latter as for the former.57

According to the jury, one could not be original without a clear confrontation with the philosophies of the past: “it is therefore impossible to do philosophy without a long familiarity with the philosophers, but it is also impossible to understand what they are saying to us, except by starting to philosophize ourselves, humbly but courageously.”58 In 1961, the jury went further. One could not separate the two elements of the agrégation, because a “personal” reading had to emerge organically from a thorough and solid commentary of the text: “one must first earn [conquérir] the right to criticize a text; and earn it through a preliminary and effective effort to interpret it, to show its veritable meaning, and that which is worthy of our interest.” They continued, “the art of the philosophical dissertation resides primarily in that ability to rebound from a first spontaneous analysis to the critical mode.”59 In Denis Huisman’s Guide de l’étudiant en philosophie from 1956 he suggested five different models for writing the dissertation.60 The specific model for the commentary of texts was to move from simple explication, to discussion and appreciation. Most of the options could be described as “dialectical”: “every dissertation draws on this simple schema, however Hegelian it might be, of a thesis (that appeals to common sense, to the opinion of the man on the street), surpassed in the second part by a generally rationalist antithesis, where one takes common sense as a primary target [tête de Turc], before finishing with a synthesis which would transcend the antinomy of the first two parts.”61 This approach would allow one to fulfill 57 59 60

61

58 Rapport 1952, CAC, 19880121, art 2, p. 8. Rapport 1948, CAC, 19880121, art 2, p. 2. Rapport, 1961, pp. 13 and 5. Denis Huisman, Guide de l’étudiant en philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956). Huisman gave advice for all levels of philosophical education after the Baccalaureate. But the demands of the agrégation filtered down to the lower levels. Ibid., pp. 14–16.

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the pedagogical requirement in the thesis and antithesis, before complicating it in the latter parts of the essay. In a section dedicated to the dissertation in the History of Philosophy, Huisman offered advice and stark warnings: “above all, what is required is an internal analysis of the thought of the author.”62 Or later, “too many papers present all or part of a philosophical system as flowing, without jolts, obstacles, from a ‘central intuition’ or ‘principles’ come from who knows where.”63 The recognition of a text’s complications and difficulties was an essential part of any dissertation, but they had to be encountered through the first-order understanding of the work: immanent critique, not detached and abstract musings from first principles. In all these cases, the strategy involved presenting a clear and standard exposition of a text that would act as the foundation for any further analysis, and provide the means to draw out contradictory and, at first glance, hidden implications. If we look at the work of other philosophers intimately involved in the training for the concours we can see similar approaches. Take, for example, Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s book Phénoménologie et praxis, from 1963, which derives from work done during his first year at the ENS Saint-Cloud in 1960 preparing students to present Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation at the agrégation. Desanti’s task was to show the unraveling of phenomenology, as a philosophy privileging consciousness (a “unilateral philosophy”), by following its “fundamental development” whereby it aimed to arrive at the knowledge of the object. Analyzing phenomenology as it unfolded would permit the philosopher to see it “affirm and undo itself.”64 In a process that Desanti called “destruction,” the moment of critique would emerge organically from within an exposition of the text itself, charting the tortured path of its construction. By following the process of the phenomenological reduction in the first three Cartesian Meditations, Desanti showed how Husserl confronted the twin obstacles of time and the other in the fourth and fifth. These obstacles could not be reduced, even though they were incompatible with the guiding primacy of the ego. This fundamental tension required that Husserl would constantly have to “rework [remettre en chantier]” his key concepts. Desanti’s “destruction” of phenomenology would take seriously these reduced moments of time, the other, and their union in “History,” to provide a reevaluation that would overturn the privilege of consciousness. Though we will discuss Derrida’s treatment of Husserl later, when he 62

Ibid., p. 108.

63

Ibid., p. 110.

64

Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis, pp. 13–14.


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studied a different text, the similarities between Desanti’s “destruction” and Derrida’s “deconstruction” are notable. derrida and the agregation We can see Derrida’s response to the peculiar demands of the agrégation by looking at a mock agrégation essay (dissertation) he wrote for the Centre Nationale pour télé-enseignement in 1965–6, and the comments he gave to papers written at the ENS. Again the same concern with responsible exposition and brilliant flair that reflected the dual demands of the agrégation exam played a crucial structuring role. Derrida trained his students to reconstruct the arguments of a text carefully in order to be able to perform a critical reading that called into question the starting premises. With Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic (Logic) on the agrégation program in 1965 and 1966, Derrida had been employed to write a study guide to the text, and later in the year he provided a model agrégation dissertation for his students.65 Derrida set himself the question: “In the first section of the Formal and Transcendental Logic, the concepts of sense and truth are not co-extensive. In your opinion, what were the intention, the stakes, and the value of this distinction?”66 Derrida emphasized the pedagogical demands of the agrégation. In his notes, Derrida urged his students to “begin with as few presuppositions as possible,” to “appeal to only the minimum of complicity in the historical knowledge of Husserl’s themes and terminology,” to be “very ‘pedagogical’ in the articulation of the problem of the difficulty to which one has to respond.” Derrida reiterated this imperative in his general remarks on his students’ essays, citing the importance of “the moment of comprehensive and accessible commentary.”67 But Derrida, like other philosophers who taught to the exam, knew that a simple commentary on the text was insufficient. He criticized one of his ENS students because he “took each philosophy in its synthetic moment and in its conclusion, never in the work of a discourse creating itself.” Derrida’s essay was not just going to be a simple résumé of the themes of Husserl’s Logic. The first section was entitled “the path towards the distinction,” tracing the split between sense and truth back to Husserl’s Logical 65 66 67

Jacques Derrida, “Agrégation preparation,” Irvine, 2.45–6. Derrida noted at the end that he was confusing the text on the oral section of the agrégation and the form of the written part, but he considered it nonetheless an important exercise. Derrida, “Agrégation preparation,” p. 8.

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Investigations from 1900–1. Derrida turned to the history of Husserl’s philosophy to understand its inner workings, and bring to light the obstacles and tensions that would allow the second and critical moment. In the fourth Logical Investigation, Husserl had developed a logic of sense, described as a “pure grammar,” an a priori science of significations, independent of any factual existence. The advance over previous formulations of logic was that it would be entirely formal, detached from any objects in the world; formal apophantics was distinct from the logic of “existents.” This “grammar” of significations determined whether a proposition had any sense, distinguishing between non-sensical (unsinnig) utterances such as “a man is and” from well-formulated propositions that fulfilled all syntactical requirements. It did not in itself verify these propositions: sense was a necessary but not sufficient condition for truth. In the second section of his essay, Derrida explained how this division was developed in Husserl’s Logic. There were two key changes. First, by the time Husserl wrote the Logic he had replaced the term “signification” with that of “judgment”; it was no longer a question of sense in general, but of “statements of judgment [énoncés judicatifs].”68 The terminological change highlighted a new emphasis on the intentionality of these judgments – their constitutive nature as judgments of . . . – even if it was only in their form and not their content that they were assessed. This reflected another major change. Unlike the double division between the a priori grammar and the logic of the object in the Logical Investigations, by the Logic there were three different layers. In addition to that separating out the non-sensical (unsinnig), a new layer within the logic of sense excluded the contradictory (widersinnig) such as “a square circle.” This middle level comprised all propositions that obeyed syntactical laws and thus passed the first syntactical test, but it excluded all those that were self-contradictory. In contrast to the Logical Investigations, the “region of sense” was supposed to decide whether the object of a proposition was possible. Such requirements would have to be met before the consideration of the truth-value of the propositions, unlike before, where the possibility (non-contradiction) and actuality of the object were not distinguished. In Husserl’s Logic, truth only appeared at the final level of formal logic, after the logic of non-contradiction. It was only at the final level that a statement such as “there is a gold mountain,” which is both grammatically correct and non-contradictory, could be questioned. It is false because it conforms to no existing mountain. Truth, unlike sense, is based on the 68

Ibid., p. 3.


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possibility of adequation outside of formal logic, the fulfillment of its Bedeutungsintention with an intuition. The two changes, elaborated by a careful historical analysis of the texts, elicited several questions. For despite the initial concentration on formality, both highlighted the porous border between the formal and the concrete. The logic of non-contradiction, which had previously been seen as the realm of ontology, was now regarded as an element of formal logic, and the entire class of formal propositions was now declared to be structured by the possibility of judicative assertions. Though still formal, they were disciplined by their ultimate function of making concrete claims about the world. This blurring of the boundaries manifested itself most clearly in the final level of formal logic, confusingly labeled “the logic of truth.” Husserl insisted that truth required “clarity [Klarheit]”; logic had to be given content by intuition. Yet one had to understand the necessity of intuitive fulfillment within the realm of the purely formal and a priori – i.e. before intuition. As Derrida asked “will it be possible, as Husserl suggests, to transgress the sphere of the a priori of sense, while still remaining inside the domain of the a priori, and of an a priori that is still formal?”69 Husserl’s answer was that the logic of truth required that the statements of the previous layer be “fulfilled.” But since this fulfillment rested on an appeal beyond formal logic, it could only be demanded, not enacted. This meant that the formal logic of truth, the third layer of formal logic, added nothing in content to the previous two layers: there would be no actual proposition that could be discounted by moving from the logic of non-contradiction to the formal logic of truth. Alone, purely formal, and without intuitive consciousness, it could never actually determine whether something was true or not, whether a gold mountain actually did exist. Rather it just “changes the orientation, makes a new theme arise, and reminds us, in opening formal ontology, what is the final intention of all logic: the intention of a clear, originary, and adequate knowledge.” The logic of truth then clearly showed the goal underlying all formal logic that had been suggested in the previous analyses: it was a mere propadeutic, headed from the beginning towards a necessary confirmation in intuition. It required the transcendental field. In answer to the original question, then, Derrida had shown that the distinction between sense and truth found its place within formal logic, but only as a preparation for a more radical grounding in transcendental 69

Ibid., p. 5.

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logic. It thus showed the way between the first and the second section of Husserl’s Logic, demonstrating their indissoluble unity, the final section guiding the first teleologically. Derrida continued: If a critique of the Husserlian intention has some chance of reaching its goal and touching the “thing itself,” it is in remaining aware of the rigorous necessity of the stratification proposed by Husserl’s Logic. It is only thus that one can ask oneself about the metaphysical origin of the values of truth, intuitive adequation, intentional fulfillment and clear and distinct evidence, which, though only appearing at the summit of the stratification, guided nonetheless the construction of the objective formal logic from the beginning, like its telos.70

The question of “truth” had guided Husserl’s analyses of “sense” from the start; the teleological standard of a full and complete presence in intuition was active, even in the empty form. The recognition of this teleology was the key critical moment that had emerged from the careful commentary of the text, one that allowed a more “active” reading. Derrida’s mock essay followed the carefully laid-out structure of a good agrégation answer. He demanded that his students move through pedagogical commentary, explaining the text in its process of construction in order finally to reveal its hidden presuppositions. Derrida required an organic union between the profound close readings and a sense of the general, what he called “the apparently contradictory twin demands” of the concours.71 The driving principle was the tension between a critical analysis that uncovered the aporias in a text, and a constant awareness of how these aporias fit into and possibly conflicted with the broader system: Derrida asserted that it was the reconciliation between these two that “defined the entelechy of the dissertation.”72 In more concrete terms, he suggested to one student writing on Rousseau that the goal was to “mark better the body of theoretical presuppositions that is in fact present behind and in Rousseau’s explicit theses . . . this suggestion holds moreover in general for the philosophical treatment of any ‘subject’: seek behind the visible characters the one that is absent, or the hidden concepts which stage the visible concepts. By this means, while respecting the letter of your subject, you give it a new theoretical profundity.”73 In Derrida’s mock essay from 1965, the theoretical presupposition uncovered through a careful reading was a residual metaphysics teleologically guiding all of Husserl’s phenomenology, the structural priority of intuition even over the purely formal – what Derrida would later call the 70 71 72

Ibid., pp. 6–7. See amongst others Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, “Agrégatifs,” IMEC, ALT2, E6–02.02, Comments 1963–4. 73 Ibid., 1966. Ibid., 1965.


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metaphysics of presence. Described as such, it recalls some of the major themes in Derrida’s published work. Indeed, at times, despite the avowed distance between his own work and teaching, it seems that in the mid 1960s Derrida considered many of his own ideas amenable to the demands of the agrégation. We have evidence of students using Derrida’s “différance” in agrégation essays as early as 1966, and by that period Derrida had come to describe his students’ successful analyses of philosophers as “repetitions,” just as in his own work.74 He praised one of his students for “the quiet, autonomous and critical power . . . by a thought at once clear and difficult, which de-constitutes with the calmest mastery the very concept of subjectivity as mastery.”75 Or in another, less successful case, he complained that the essay on subjectivity did not “attempt an opening of that which, from a certain outside, worries a certain inside of the philosophy of the subject[.] I am thinking of Nietzsche, or psychoanalysis, of certain intellectual gestures that one loosely collects under the heading ‘human sciences.’”76 Similarly Derrida rued the inadequacy of the “personal” part of one student’s dissertation, “which wanted to produce ‘a new concept of the subject’ even though [he] had previously recognized that the very concept of the subject belongs in general to the closure of onto-theology. This last part, then, is the shortest, the most allusive, and the most dogmatic.”77 When Derrida urged his students to avoid a “classical” construction in their essays, he implicitly proffered his own deconstruction as an alternative. This analysis suggests that it might be possible to read Derrida’s published work with an eye to the demands of the agrégation. As we have seen, much of the content and subject matter of his books often followed the agrégation program and began as courses for the concours. The form too of his philosophy might have reflected its peculiar criteria. For this enterprise there can be no example as good as Speech and Phenomena, one of the three books Derrida published in 1967.78 speech and phenomena A reading that can be neither simple commentary nor simple interpretation. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena79 74 78 79

75 Ibid., 1966. My emphasis. 76 Ibid., 1967. 77 Ibid., 1967. Ibid., 1966. It is perhaps fittingly deconstructive that we can best understand Derrida’s movement away from phenomenology by studying his last major work on Husserl. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 88. Like other scholars, I recognize the weakness of the translation of Derrida’s title by Speech and Phenomena, when Voice and Phenomenon better fits Derrida’s program and meaning. In the interests of my readers, however, I have stuck with the standard English translation, only

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At several key points in Derrida’s book Speech and Phenomena, he refers to the distinction between commentary and interpretation.80 Commentary, as we have seen, was the foundation of the agrégation essay, the clear and responsible pedagogical reading that aimed to make ideas accessible to a teenage audience. Derrida’s choice to pair commentary with “intepretation” in Speech and Phenomena is more specific to the book. As we shall see, in large part, Speech and Phenomena confronts the vexed question of “meaning” in Husserl’s phenomenology: vouloir-dire, or in the German Bedeutung. At the heart of the German word Bedeutung is the verb deuten, to interpret. As Derrida asserted, to interpret was to bring out the implicit, what was not immediately obvious. It described the process that he had taught his students: drawing out the “theoretical presuppositions” hiding behind the first layer of the text.81 In bringing together commentary and interpretation, Speech and Phenomena mapped onto the opposing demands – the pedagogical and research-oriented elements – of the agrégation.82 To regard any part of one of Derrida’s most notorious texts as pedagogical might appear laughable. Speech and Phenomena is a very dense and difficult book, and, at the same time, an apparently idiosyncratic interpretation of Husserl’s work. An analysis of Husserl’s first Logical Investigation, it focuses on a text that was in no way as central to Husserl scholarship in France as Ideas, the Cartesian Meditations, the Formal and Transcendental Logic, or the Crisis of the European Sciences. It presents an unfamiliar Husserl, seemingly detached from standard interpretations. But, as we shall see, the strangeness of the text is in part a function of the agrégation. Before tackling the claims in Derrida’s book, we must first see how and why it took the form it did and explain Derrida’s decision to study the first Logical Investigation for his first book-length treatment of Husserl. As we have seen, in 1965 and 1966 Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, a text published over a quarter of a century after the Logical 80 81 82

modifying it when necessary. A new translation by Leonard Lawlor under the title Voice and Phenomenon will be published in 2011. See also the analysis of commentary and the need to move beyond it in Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 157–64. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 33–7. See ibid., pp. 31, 53 and 88. Lawlor notes the importance of the distinction too, see Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, pp. 175–6. See also René Schérer’s review in La Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1968), where he stated: “Derrida’s reading, which offers an admirable model of interpretative criticism, operates by successive delimitations and sketches, up until the point where it makes visible, as the ultimate horizon, from the very interior of the text, the present condition of its own over-coming. Here commentary no longer opposes the work with another conception; it is the depth of the reading which, following the progressive and necessary unfolding of a thought, discovers in it the motifs which refute its essential project, in this instance, with respect to phenomenology, the access to ‘the things themselves’” (p. 350).


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Investigations, was on the program for the agrégation. In addition to his notes for the Centre Nationale pour télé-enseignement, Derrida taught a course at the ENS in 1964–5, preparing his students for the exam. Though explicitly treating the Logical Investigations and the Ideas, Derrida asserted its relevance to Husserl’s Logic at the first meeting: The work that we are beginning today . . . should bring us to the threshold of Husserl’s Logic and more precisely the first section set by the agrégation program . . . It is evident that, beyond the general and intrinsic interest that the problems we are dealing with may present, the considerations that we will have for Husserl’s Logic would not only be an ulterior motive or a promise. Often we will have to refer to it explicitly.

But why not approach the text directly? The answer was relatively banal: We will not concern ourselves with that first section of Husserl’s Logic for itself during these classes, because . . . S. Bachelard will be explicating it at the Sorbonne.83

With the author of the standard commentary on the text – a commentary that Derrida, moreover, advertised with great enthusiasm to his téléenseignement students – teaching but five minutes away, Derrida’s course hoped to complement and not repeat what was being provided elsewhere.84 Whatever its overt subject matter, the course from which Derrida’s 1967 text Speech and Phenomena first developed was concerned with the Formal and Transcendental Logic.85 Derrida also made the argument in Speech and Phenomena itself. From the very beginning, Derrida was clear that the Logical Investigations set the terms of Husserl’s later works: “Ideas I and Formal and Transcendental Logic develop without break the concepts of intentional or noematic sense, the difference between the two strata of analytics in the strong sense (the pure forms of judgments and consequence-logic), and suppress the deductivist or nomological form which had hitherto limited his concept of science in general.”86 Further, Derrida asserted that his reading was valid for the whole of phenomenology: “each time that we go beyond the text of the First Logical Investigation, it is to indicate the principle of a general interpretation of Husserl’s thought.”87 83 84 85

86 87

Jacques Derrida, “La Théorie de la signification dans les Recherches Philosophiques et dans Ideen I,” Irvine, 9.4, sheet 18. See Jacques Derrida, “Agrégation preparation,” Irvine, 2.45, p. 2. The obscured centrality of the Formal and Transcendental Logic for Speech and Phenomena goes a long way to explain the very varied response to the book. For a sense of the controversy over Derrida’s first book-length project on Husserl see Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction, “Introduction.” Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 3; see also p. 91. Ibid., p. 4 note. See also Kates, Essential History, p. 116.

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What was the contribution of the earlier work? We have already seen the importance of the Logical Investigations in Derrida’s mock essay. As the second chapter of Husserl’s Logic testified, the Logical Investigations was the first text in the history of philosophy to discuss a “pure formal logic” and a “formal ontology,” even if the latter had not been named as such in the earlier text. With the emphasis on formality, detached from the real, the Logical Investigations had made an important stride beyond previous logics that had remained beholden to some material determination. The Logical Investigations then marked a key waypoint on the path to Husserl’s logic. As Derrida said in his course, “in explicating the Logical Investigations . . . we will have already taken a step into the Logic.”88 The first Logical Investigation had made the key distinction between “expression” and “indication.” Propositions were “expressions” if they were sufficient unto themselves, they were “indications” if they made direct reference to things existing in the world. The reduction of “indication” then cut expressions off from any dependence on the world; they remained entirely formal. As propositions, it was of no immediate consequence if expressions were fulfilled or verified in intuition. It was only elsewhere in the Logical Investigations that Husserl would explicitly breach the question of the transcendental ground of such a logic, especially in the last two investigations. In Husserl’s later language, one could say that the realm of expression offered a midway point between the natural attitude and the transcendental sphere: it was the eidetic foundation of formal logic. But as would become increasingly clear, the formal studied in the first investigation (the investigation that would be the central object of study in Speech and Phenomena) was not entirely uncontaminated by the intuitive. According to Derrida, the very idea of “expression” marked the “parallelism” between “the signifying intention and the fulfilling intuition,” the formal and the transcendental.89 Moving beyond commentary to interpretation, Derrida wanted to argue that direct intuition governed formal sense teleologically, and that this would have profound consequences for phenomenology as a whole. It was the very point with which he had ended his mock dissertation. Derrida’s turn to the first Logical Investigation allowed him to bring up some of the key themes in phenomenology. Though Husserl’s Logic was probably the most important text for Husserl scholarship in France in the 88 89

Derrida, “La Théorie de la signification I,” sheet 19. Jacques Derrida, “La Théorie de la signification II,” Irvine, 9.5, sheet 1. See also Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 11–12.


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late 1950s and early 1960s, it did not deal at length with the key phenomenological questions of the reduction, intersubjectivity, and time, which had been central since Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The distinction between Ausdruck and Hinzeichen, expression and indication, at the beginning of the Logical Investigations, however, afforded Derrida the opportunity to deal with the big questions of phenomenology without leaving the confines of the text in question. Ironically, the turn to this obscure part of Husserl’s work allowed Derrida to treat French phenomenology’s central themes and fulfill the pedagogical requirement of any agrégation dissertation far better than if he had been bound by the terms of the first section of the Formal and Transcendental Logic. First, the distinction between expression and indication allowed Derrida to discuss the phenomenological reduction, a theme not fully addressed in Husserl’s Logic. Though expression and indication were distinguished in the first pages, it was not a simple separation. Practically, expression always indicated something, especially when it was involved in communication. But despite this factual contamination of expression and indication, Husserl thought that one could have a “rigorous distinction of essence.”90 To prove this, Husserl had to show one particular moment, be it only ideal, where expression was free of indication. His choice was “the solitary life of the soul,” reducing the sign down to its Bedeutungsintention, the pure relationship to an object, without directly implicating any particular object directly.91 The attempt to purify the expression, thus, brought the first Logical Investigation into line with the phenomenological principle of intentionality: Transcendental phenomenological idealism answers to the necessity of describing the objectivity of the object (Gegenstand) and the presence of the present (Gegenwart) – and objectivity in presence – from the standpoint of an “interiority,” or rather a self-proximity, an ownness (Eigenheit), which is not a simple inside but rather the intimate possibility of a relation to a beyond and to an outside in general.92

Not attempting to understand the object itself, phenomenology contented itself to analyze the intention that aimed at it. 90 91

92

Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 20. The English translation, “solitary mental life,” in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 22, mirrors Derrida’s 1964–5 courses and the French translation in the Logical Investigations of “im einsamen Seelenleben,” as “vie psychique solitaire.” Derrida’s retranslation of the phrase as “vie solitaire de l’âme” in the book is of singular importance. See J. Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris, 1967), p. 22. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 22.

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The move to study pure expression was thus equivalent to the phenomenological épochè, or the eidetic reduction: it reduced all reference to existence (indication) to arrive at the realm of pure intentional objects. This link to the épochè was further revealed by the title of the second chapter of Derrida’s book: “The Reduction of Indication.”93 Indication always pointed beyond the sign, it “always links an actual consciousness to a nonactual consciousness.”94 As such it did not carry meaning fully in itself: the chalk mark on the door indicates to the thief that the owners are away, the brand name on a packet indicates its contents, it was not the absence or the cereal itself, and so, with indication, one could always be mistaken. Conversely, by reducing all references to existence, reality, and the empirical and returning to what was immediately given, expression was indubitable.95 Second, the emphasis on expression allowed Derrida to describe the reduced sphere. The next chapter began, “let us suppose that indication is excluded.”96 Although in terms of Husserl’s own development, the reduction of indication preceded the development of the real reduction and the turn to the reduced sphere, Derrida was clear that they were comparable, “later, after the discovery of the transcendental reduction, [Husserl] will describe this solitary life of the soul as the noetic-noematic sphere of consciousness.”97 To demonstrate this, Derrida had to show that the reduction to expression was not simply a return to psychologism. The linguistic components of expression could not exist in the world, as the vibrations of air particles, or as marks on paper. They existed rather as ideal forms that were animated by a meaning and were uncontaminated by the empirical differences that occurred every time the same word was spoken or written. For if not, the physical instances of each word would “indicate” the meaning, referring to an ideal form beyond themselves. The word then had to be apprehended as “imagined” and not as “perceived.”98 In this sense Derrida wanted to suggest that, for Husserl, an expression was no longer a sign. With meaning “immediately present to itself,” the expression “signified” nothing.99 Words did not exist out in the world, but Husserl denied that they could exist in the empirical mind either. Derrida elaborated, 93 98 99

94 Ibid., p. 28. 95 Ibid., p. 30. 96 Ibid., p. 32. 97 Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 27. As Derrida suggested in a footnote, without this distinction between the imagination and perception, the whole structure of phenomenology would come crashing down. Ibid., pp. 45–6 note. Ibid., pp. 42–3. It is for this reason that Derrida opposed Schérer’s translation of Bedeutung as signification. For Derrida the expression had meaning, but had no signification because the meaning was immediately present, it signified nothing. See p. 17.


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if in the Investigations Husserl conducts his description within the realm of the mental rather than the transcendental, he nonetheless distinguishes the essential components of a structure that will be delineated in Ideas I: phenomenal experience does not belong to reality (Realität). In it, certain elements really (reell) belong to consciousness (hyle, morphe and noesis), but the noematic content, the sense, is a nonreal (reell) component of the experience.100

If the noema were not real or existing in consciousness, then they could not be tied to a psychologistic understanding of phenomenology. This set the reduced sphere apart as transcendental. Even though the first Logical Investigation preceded the discovery of the transcendental reduction, Derrida’s careful analysis allowed him to present, by proxy, the transcendental sphere. Derrida’s redescription of the expression/indication opposition in the later language of phenomenology allowed him to address two issues that had troubled French thinkers: time and the other. A commentary on Husserl’s phenomenology that ignored these questions would have been inadequate and we have already seen that they were right at the heart of Desanti’s parallel discussion. The discussion of the “other” was motivated by Husserl’s discussion of expression in the first Logical Investigation. Refusing all indication, the realm of expression also had to exclude that which was involved in communication. Insofar as communication transmitted the lived experiences of one ego to another, it was fatally contaminated with indication. When another person says “I am happy,” I do not have immediate access to the sentiment, it is only indicated by the words used: “the subjective side of his experience, his consciousness, in particular the acts by which he gives sense to his signs, are not immediately and primordially present to me as they are for him and mine are for me.”101 To preserve the purity of the expression, then, one must reduce the other with whom one might communicate. If the relationship to another ego had to be reduced, so too did time. For the same reasons that another person’s indication of his or her interior state was excluded, Husserl eliminated the possibility of reminding yourself of a thought from the past, or an idea that had been forgotten. The expression had to reveal its meaning to the same ego that had originally expressed it. Speaking and understanding all had to occur in the “blink of an eye,” otherwise one ego would “indicate” a meaning to another ego that was not absolutely identical. To develop this theme, Derrida moved 100

Ibid., p. 47.

101

Ibid., pp. 38–9.

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on to the explicit discussion of time in Husserl’s Lessons on Internal Time Consciousness. Derrida’s turn to the Logical Investigations and his broad sweep over the totality of Husserl’s philosophy allowed him to provide a relatively standard and clear account of phenomenology, presenting the épochè, the transcendental sphere, and the twin questions of time and the other that exercised French phenomenology in the period. It thus fulfilled the pedagogical section of the agrégation, giving a clear introductory analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology as a whole. Indeed, where Derrida’s text did seem to move away from a standard presentation, especially the framing of his discussion of the natural attitude and the reduction in the language of the sign, it was only to align his analyses with themes at the heart of the Formal and Transcendental Logic, the agrégation text that guided his analysis of the Logical Investigations. Speech and Phenomena was a dual attempt to present the key issues of the first part of Husserl’s Logic, especially expression (the matter of logical propositions) and formality, with an analysis of Husserl’s thought as a whole. If anything, its complexity demonstrates the lengths that Derrida took to fulfill the first pedagogical “commentary” that was required in any agrégation answer, his willingness to transform a reading of Husserl’s Logic into an explication of the major themes of phenomenology. In his presentation, Derrida’s commentary was already bordering on interpretation, drawing out implicit presuppositions. As the handbooks for students had explained and as Derrida had reiterated, the critical moment had to arise organically out of the commentary. Indeed, at several key points in his analysis, Derrida broke out of his commentary voice to make gestures towards broader arguments, but in the earlier stages these remarks were provisional or anticipatory. For instance, from the beginning he made suggestions that Husserl’s analysis could be interpreted to privilege language over phenomenology; the linguistic distinction between expression and indication founding, rather than being predicated on, the reduction.102 But in the first few chapters he prefaced such remarks with phrases such as “we would be tempted to say” before suggesting, “let us return to the text.”103 Later he used the conditional when he asserted that a thesis “would make us pass from commentary to interpretation.”104 Similarly in making claims about the centrality of the voice, which arose in his discussion of the reduced sphere, Derrida insisted that “we only wanted to note here what ‘expression’ means for Husserl,” and “we shall have to return to 102 104

103 Ibid., p. 21. “Poursuivons notre lecture.” Ibid., pp. 21, 25, and 30–1. Ibid., p. 31. Translation adjusted. The English translation does not preserve the conditional.


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this.”105 As was required in an agrégation answer, Derrida’s broader critical argument arose during the commentary section of his text; it was in fact derivative of it. But, it was only later in Speech and Phenomena that such arguments gained traction and the remarks moved from the conditional to the indicative. The first developed move away from commentary occurred in Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s conception of time. Husserl recognized that time could not be cut up into single moments: “no now can be isolated as a pure instant, a pure punctuality.”106 In the Lessons, it was impossible, according to Derrida, to maintain the absolute distinction between presentation and re-presentation. Firstly, as Husserl himself stated, the triple structure of time composed retention and protention with presence. For Husserl, retention was still perception; the key distinction rather lay between primary and secondary memory, retention and re-presentation. But retention was perception only in the loosest sense, and this was the only text where Husserl allowed the “perception” of what was not present. Derrida referred to other conflicting instances, where Husserl had classed it rather as “nonperception.” If retention and protention were really non-perceptions and it was impossible to disentangle them from the living present, it invited absence right into its heart: “One then sees quickly that the presence of the perceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded with a nonpresence and a nonperception.”107 In the retention of the past moment, non-presence was already at work, suggesting that this trace and what Derrida would later call différance was already at work at the most fundamental level of phenomenology. But according to Derrida, it was a suggestion that Husserl strongly resisted. Despite the necessary contamination of the present with the past, Husserl still insisted on thinking this irreducible complexity and “spread” of time “on the basis of the self-identity of the now as point.”108 To reduce indication fully, Husserl asserted the “dominance of the now” that his analysis seemed to undo.109 In his discussion of time, then, Derrida started to unpick the very gestures that he had so painstakingly elaborated in the first few chapters, and which Husserl, metaphysically, hoped to guard from criticism. The move from commentary to interpretation gained pace in chapter IV. Here, Derrida developed his claims about the primacy of language, which had been tantalizingly intimated earlier. He drew on his claims 105 106 107

Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 61, emphasis in the French version, Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène, p. 68. 108 Ibid., p. 61. 109 Ibid., p. 63. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 64.

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about imagination and fiction: the imaginative status of expression, and the fiction of talking to yourself. Both elements seemed to privilege “representation”: the “re-presentation” (Vergegenwärtigung) of the imagination as opposed to the presentation of perception, and the “representation” (Vorstellung) of oneself as talking to oneself, even though nothing was actually communicated. The commentary that had presented the reduced sphere, then, highlighted the possibility of re-presentation as that sphere’s central characteristic. For Derrida, this tied the reduced sphere to the sign, which was already worked over by a structure of repetition. The sign was a re-presentation – Vergegenwärtigung – of both the signified and the ideal form of the signifier. No matter how we say or write a word, its meaning does not change: “it must remain the same, and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across the deformations which the empirical event necessarily makes it undergo.”110 Even if Husserl had tried to detach expression from this empirical ground in his analysis – in the expression the word was merely “represented/Vorgestellt” in the mind – this very process was parasitic of the general structure of the sign, which was to be always and everywhere the same.111 With the repetition of the sign as primary, preceding any distinction between expression and indication because it was at work in both, the purity of the expressive sphere was troubled. Expression was already repetition, so it could no longer be considered as absolutely originary. The analysis unsettled the clean distinction between the real and representation, for the process involved in the latter was irreducible in the former. Just as the understanding of time came to complicate Husserl’s idea of presence, so too the careful analysis of expression invited the non-self-presence of the sign into the reduced sphere. In both cases the immediate presence of intuition could not be pure. In Derrida’s secondary moment of interpretation, he drew out implications that were in tension with the original commentary. But despite the exigencies of his own project, Husserl adamantly preserved the originarity of immediate presence. Just as in his analysis of time, in which Husserl still gave theoretical precedence to the idea of pure presence in spite of the irreducibility of the past moment, the non-effaceable movement of the sign was presented as dependent on an originary stability. The sign was always “the reproduction of a presence.” It “retains a primary reference to a primordial presentation, that is, to a perception and positing of existence, to a belief in general.”112 Derrida argued that, 110

Ibid., p. 50.

111

Ibid., p. 51.

112

Ibid., p. 55.


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because the realm of expression was constantly worked over by repetition, to preserve the purity of phenomenology Husserl would have to resort to a “pre-expressive” sphere, of which expression was just the re-presentation. Forced to move beyond language, Husserl referred to a “phenomenological ‘silence.’”113 In the Formal and Transcendental Logic, this “pre-expressive sphere” was the transcendental ground for formal logic. All of the levels of language, distinguishing between Unsinnigkeit and Widersinnigkeit, were structured by the possibility of a Bedeutung, or a final grounding in intuition: “Speech that is false is not speech, and contradictory (widersinnig) speech avoids nonsense (Unsinnigkeit), only its grammaticalness does not prohibit a meaning or meaning-intention [intention-de-Bedeutung], which in turn can be determined only as the aiming at an object.”114 Whatever its pretensions to formality, “the telos of perfect (intégrale) expression is the restitution, in the form of presence, of a sense actually given to intuition.”115 Husserl’s turn to a telos, the discipline of expression by a non-present ideal, further troubled his distinction between expression and indication. A telos, by its nature, could only be indicated, and so even after the reduction of all empirical indication, expression was still structured by a “theoretical core of indication.”116 To preserve the phenomenological principle of principles and refuse priority to repetition and absence, Husserl was forced again to resort to a more fundamental level. The noema as an ideal object could find its home neither in the world nor in a detached realm of ideas. “The ideal object is the most objective of objects; independent of the here-and-now acts and events of the empirical subjectivity which intends it,” but at the same time, to avoid a conventional Platonism, “being nothing outside of the world, this ideal being must be constituted, repeated, and expressed in a medium which both preserves the presence and self-presence of the acts that aim at it.”117 The appropriate medium then was one “whose phenomenality does not have worldly form.”118 For Husserl the answer to the conundrum was clear; only the voice seemed to fulfill these criteria. The voice, speaking to itself, didn’t seem to leave that self or enter into the world. It was perfectly one’s own, the central object of expression confined to the solitary life of the soul. With the internal voice the expressed Bedeutung or meaning was always immediately there. Manifesting pure auto-affection, absolute immediacy of the signifier 113 116

Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 72.

114 117

Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., pp. 75–6.

115

Ibid., pp. 74–5. 118 Ibid., p. 76.

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to the signified, source and recipient, it denied any indication.119 It was the voice, then, that was the teleology of all expression, its structural disciplining by the idea of pure presence. Husserl’s strategy for turning to the voice was his last-ditch attempt to preserve his principle of principles. But as a stopgap measure, the final resort after the Husserl’s recognition of the irreducible contamination with indication, the voice was not completely effective. Though the voice forewent the need for any incarnation, Husserl could not deny the importance of the incarnated sign. Husserl was insistent on the impossibility of scientific truth without writing, as we saw in the Origin of Geometry. As always in Husserl’s schema, this writing was secondary to the voice that it inscribed. Drawing out implications which did not seem significant in his 1962 introduction, Derrida asserted that writing in the Origin of Geometry “proceeds to fix, inscribe, record, and incarnate an already prepared utterance. To reactivate writing is always to reawaken an expression in an indication.”120 Even though writing was secondary to the voice, it did reassert the necessity of the incarnated and the indicative right at the heart of ideality. The auto-affection that marked the voice required the self to divide, splitting in two to be able to affect itself. It was this self-division at the heart of the self, the moving of absence into the heart of presence, this “différance” that now seemed absolutely primary: If indication is not added to expression, which is not added to sense, we can nonetheless speak in regard to them, of a primordial “supplement”; their addition comes to make up for a deficiency, it comes to compensate for a primordial nonself-presence. And if indication – for example, writing in the everyday sense – must necessarily be “added” to speech to complete the constitution of the ideal object, if speech must be “added” to the thought identity of the object, it is because the “presence” of sense and speech had already from the start fallen short of itself.121

This unavoidable complication of presence and the necessary supplementing of the transcendental also explained the other aporias enumerated throughout the book: the movement of time or the presence of the other in the transcendental sphere. According to Derrida, in order to preserve the purity of absolute presence, Husserl had been led first to exclude indication from expression, and then teleologically to ground an expression worked over by the structure of repetition in the eternal self-sameness of the pre-expressive, a “voice that preserved silence.” But at each stage he was unable to reduce the constant 119

Ibid., p. 78.

120

Ibid., p. 81.

121

Ibid., p. 87.


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contamination of presence by absence, the absence in the sign allowing repetition, the absence of the past moment in retention. The ideal moment of pure presence, never achievable, was always deferred. But if one took this deferral as primary, the movement of the sign that always seemed to encroach on the stability of pure intuition, it could account for the structure of consciousness, the various levels that required the transcendental to be supplemented by the formal, and the formal to be supplemented by the natural attitude. To take this moment and movement seriously was Derrida’s goal in the final chapter.122 Différance was at work in the auto-affecting self, it drove temporality, and at the same time opened up the differences that existed between the subject and the world, and the subject and the other. That Husserl resisted this implication, that he privileged presence through the invocation of the voice against many of the implications of his own text, relinquished phenomenology to metaphysics. With the process of différance and supplementarity at the heart of the transcendental sphere, it might appear that all certainty was lost. After all, it was in order to reduce doubt that Husserl had asserted the voice in the first place, and now that voice seemed threatened. But Derrida was adamant that this was not the case. The fact that the expression was not fulfilled by an intuition did not impair its “meaning [vouloir-dire]”; presence was not absolutely necessary for meaning. The Formal and Transcendental Logic was filled with examples of Bedeutungs without the possibility of an object or an intuition: “A square circle,” according to Husserl, still had a meaning. In fact, for the process of signification, a non-intuition was required; we only need to signify what escapes our intuitive grasp.123 In a sideswipe at the Cartesian cogito, Derrida noted that Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” still had sense even though Descartes was no more, and the intuitive certainty of his cogito had passed.124 It was what Derrida called the autonomy of the “vouloir-dire,” the liberty of language, “francparler”: the possibility of meaning without full presence. The relationship between formal apophansis and formal ontology thus lay at the heart of Speech and Phenomena just as it did in Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl’s Logic. The question was whether the formal structure of language needed to be governed teleologically by the possibility of pure presence, by the hope at least of a fulfilling intuition. Derrida wanted to show that the very goal of preserving this pure presence was metaphysical 122 123

It is here that the structure of Derrida’s deconstruction seems especially to mirror Desanti’s “destruction.” 124 Ibid., p. 95. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 93.

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and that Husserl constantly had to defer the key questions of language in his attempt to reduce absence. By uncovering a deeper movement of différance, the common ground of both absence and presence, which undergirded phenomenology and disrupted it, Derrida suggested that Husserl’s teleology was no longer necessary. conclusion The agrégation’s twin demands informed the very process of deconstruction. They helped mold it into a new reading method, pairing an initial commentary that presented a standard reading of a text with a second disruptive reading, organically growing out of the first: reliable pedagogical presentation and “personal” brilliance. Whatever future conflicts Derrida might have with the university establishment, to which I shall return shortly, it is clear that deconstruction, a way of reading a variety of texts that he developed and honed while teaching his students for the agrégation, was suited to the tasks and exigencies of the exam. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Derrida’s thought to this particular context for two different reasons. First, it is clear that Derrida’s strategy was not the only possible response to the framework instituted by the agrégation, which set up a series of constraints without providing an explicit solution. Traditionally, the agrégation had favored the synthetic over the fragmentary, and the majority of approaches urged stabilizing readings: Cousin’s recuperative moi, the Hegelian synthesis, or, for all its attractive similarities to Derrida’s method, Desanti’s recourse to a foundational historical materialism. Since his early essays on the Christian existentialists, Derrida had argued against totalizing systems, either due to the elusive nature of the mystery, or the emphasis on the ontological difference to oppose the pretentions of “onto-theological” thought. While the form of the disruption – not the insufficiency but rather the excess of the sign, as texts overcame their own limits – might be related to the agrégation context, in privileging the disruptive, Derrida maintained old interests. The agrégation is only one of several contexts in which we can read Derrida’s thought. We should also be wary of reductive readings for a second reason, one closely connected to the practice of deconstruction. Even though a text is the product of a certain environment, we cannot draw a one-to-one connection between textual claims and the milieu in which it arose. From a deconstructive perspective, no system is sufficiently stable that its products must necessarily be harmonious with it. In the words of the citation with


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which this chapter began, Derrida’s work did not “simply belong” to the forms of the educational institution, because for Derrida there is no such thing as simple belonging. We can even cast Derrida’s later opposition to the agrégation in the light of his adherence to its norms. In January 1975, Derrida played a leading role in the formation of GREPH (the Research Group on Philosophical Education), which aimed to examine modes of production and reproduction in the education system and militated for fundamental reform. That Derrida’s first explicit political intervention concerned the university system was a sign not of the exteriority of his philosophy to the forms of philosophical education in France, but of his intense engagement with them. In an article marking the foundation of the new organization, Derrida referred to what he called a “sort of contraband between the agrégation and the GREPH.”125 We can interpret that contraband as the disruptive reading or “play” that the agrégation promoted, coming to unsettle the concours itself. The agrégation background remains instructive nonetheless. In deconstruction, interpretation is dependent on commentary. As we saw, it was only by the rigorous and careful construction of phenomenology as a philosophy of presence that Derrida was able to draw attention to the themes of representation, time, and the other that unsettled it, and ultimately to uncover the primordial movement of différance at work at even the most fundamental level of phenomenology. The pedagogical commentary provided a grid whose confrontation with the text would make incongruous elements visible. Further, the dependence on the moment of commentary was more than just a starting point that would be revised and developed over the course of the analysis. In deconstruction, unlike in other structurally similar reading techniques, the moment of interpretation did not attempt to refute the commentary, or replace one poor reading by a second better one. What interested Derrida was the necessity of texts to overstep themselves, exceed their own limits, and break their own laws. But the second moment only transgressed the limits set by a text if the commentary that had elaborated them was assumed to be correct. Deconstruction requires that the text should both definitively set its own limits and overcome them. The moment of interpretation should not call into question the value of the initial commentary; both must be valid. Speech and Phenomena presents an important example where this presupposition could be called into question. As we have seen, one of the 125

Jacques Derrida, Du droit a` la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), p. 141.

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most striking aspects of Derrida’s book was its attempt to give an overarching presentation of Husserl’s thought, using a text that preceded the emergence of phenomenology. To develop his commentary Derrida had to read Husserl’s later theses into one of his earliest books. Given the difficulty of constructing the initial reading, we should consider whether the contestatory moment staged by this commentary was a set-up. The heterogeneity of texts, their complex and contradictory structure, raises the question as to the best starting point. How could one choose between Husserl the philosopher of intuition and presence or Husserl the thinker of time and the other, if both were manifested in the same text?126 The limits that différance hoped to overcome cannot be unproblematically read from the very text that calls them into question. In practice, it appears that Derrida’s commentary arose not only from his contact with the text, but also from standard readings of the author, emphasizing Rousseau’s sharp distinction between nature and culture, Marx the materialist, and Hegel the philosopher of Absolute Knowledge. In the context of the agrégation de philosophie, the reason for starting with and assuming the validity of a traditional reading is clear; a disruptive reading was always secondary to the communally accepted “pedagogical” reading upon which it was based. But if one strays from the immediate context of the agrégation concours, it is perhaps worth asking whether this privilege of a traditional reading, which was as much an interpretation as the reading that aimed to disrupt it, was a metaphysical prejudice. One might then wonder whether Derrida’s presuppositions lay not in his willfully perverse reinterpretations of texts, but rather in the standard readings from which they emerged.

126

What Lawlor has called the first and second Husserl. Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, p. 167.

c h a p t er 8

The ends of Man Reading and writing at the ENS

However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the “simplest” acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. Louis Althusser1

In its formative years, deconstruction would find a privileged object in structuralism. Indeed it is the intensity of Derrida’s first confrontation with structuralism and the lasting traces that this confrontation left on his thought that has legitimated the “post-structuralist” label in so many secondary accounts. Derrida’s turn to structuralism was not merely a response to the latest intellectual fashion. Rather, it was occasioned by both local and global factors. After 1964, Derrida found himself right at the heart of an engaged student body. It was these students who constituted Derrida’s primary intellectual audience and who were his most constant interlocutors in the three years before the publication of Of Grammatology in 1967. And, it was their political aspirations that rendered the philosophy taught at the school pertinent to the larger debates of the Cold War. In order to be relevant to these students, Derrida would have to translate his work into their language, emphasizing the antihumanist elements of his thought and adopting their structuralist terminology. The new language did not tolerate his earlier explicitly theological considerations or the simple evocation of phenomenological themes. As Derrida would be the first to assert, no translation is ever innocent or without loss. But one should not read the translation of Derrida’s earlier phenomenology into structuralist language as a capitulation or the dissimulation of his earlier ideas beneath the forms a new philosophical fashion. After all, it is 1

Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 15.

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not clear what such a dissimulation would be in philosophy, for it is the very language and argumentative structures in which ideas are expressed that give them philosophical value. Alone, theses are merely dogmatic claims, and one cannot separate the ideas expressed in Of Grammatology from the way in which they were formulated. Even as certain themes were effaced or deemphasized, the structuralist translation of his thought provided Derrida with new and powerful philosophical resources. The change in Derrida’s thought should not be read as a capitulation for a second reason: Derrida drew on the powerful resources of structuralism to promote philosophical ideas that were directly inimical to the students’ own. In the essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” published almost contemporaneously with his move to the Ecole, Derrida suggested that to kill the Greek king, one must first learn to speak Greek.2 Adopting the language of his Althusserian students was not a submission to their philosophical project, but rather allowed Derrida the opportunity to engage with it fully. If one wants to develop the conspiratorial trope – a trope that, as we shall see, is appropriate to ENS philosophical politics – one might say that Derrida mastered the ways and forms of Normalien structuralism to agitate against and ultimately dethrone a fetishized science. Derrida’s continued resistance to science and the pretensions of human knowledge indicates a line of continuity across the apparent rupture in his philosophical development. By challenging the Normalien faith in a coupure épistémologique that would guarantee the separation of science from ideology, Derrida demonstrated that there was no radical break in his own work. For all the differences and changes after 20 years of work and study, Grammatology can be read as a repetition of Derrida’s earlier religiously inspired criticism of epistemological hubris. marxism and the rise of the althusserians The Ecole to which Derrida returned in 1964 was not the same that he had left eight years earlier. In particular, as a result of the tortuous history of communism over the period, Normalien Marxists had shifted allegiance from the Soviet Union and European parties and looked to the East for political inspiration. Soviet communism had lost much support in 1956 after the brutal suppression of dissent in Hungary and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. But it was the Party’s attitude towards decolonization that was most important for its 2

Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 89.

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delegitimization at the Ecole. In 1956 the Communist Party delegates voted to give special powers to the French authorities in Algeria, condoning the increasingly violent repression there. The Algerian War and the question of decolonization more generally had become defining political issues in France in the latter part of the 1950s, but they were particularly important for Normaliens, who were required to spend two years in military service after their studies, most often in Algeria. When the PCF endorsed the French “police action” in North Africa, it severely damaged its reputation among those who would become the unwilling tools of an oppressive French state.3 Of the two main groupings discussed in chapter 3, it was the Catholics who gained most from the new political climate. Esprit, the journal edited by Emmanuel Mounier, became the leading voice of intellectual opposition to the War, and Catholics at the Ecole profited from its enhanced reputation. Several Normaliens who would later become intimately involved with Althusserian Marxism, like Alain Badiou and Emmanuel Terray, were engaged in Christian socialist politics in the late 1950s.4 These political changes were mirrored in the philosophical norms current at the ENS. Gone were the strident Marxists espousing philosophical materialism. When Jacques Rancière arrived in the Ecole in 1960, he claimed that the majority of students were Heideggerians, under the influence of Jean Beaufret.5 But things began to change in the early 1960s. The communist cellule, renamed the Union des Etudiants Communistes (UEC), was again on the rise, and the new intake, including Jacques Rancière, Régis Debray, and Etienne Balibar, regrouped around Althusser. The policy reversal of the French Communist Party with respect to Algeria – by 1960 it had come to support Algerian independence – helped raise its profile again at the Ecole. At the same time the fortunes of the previously popular Radical Party took a turn for the worse after the failure of the Mollet government in Algeria and its embarrassment at the collapse of the Fourth Republic. With de Gaulle’s presidential style written into the Fifth Republic’s constitution, conventional parliamentary parties lost their appeal, and politically minded

3 4 5

Though all students went through compulsory military training, most Normaliens took positions in the administration or taught in military schools. Badiou was a regular contributor to the Christian Normalien journal Vin Nouveau. See François Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), vol. I, p. 290. Rancière was probably referring to philosophers like Jacques English, a future historian of phenomenology, Dominique Janicaud, a Heideggerian, and Michel Haar.

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students turned to forces outside of the mainstream. Revolutionary politics were back in style.6 The failings of other parties on the pressing question of decolonization helped precipitate the students’ return to the PCF. But, the circumstances of the French party’s rehabilitation in student politics proved a doubleedged sword. Communism may have become politically important again, but the Soviet Union was no longer the unchallenged standard-bearer of the movement. Because of its interventions in Eastern Europe, it was all too easy to recast the USSR itself as an imperialist power that had forgotten its revolutionary origins in an attempt to hold onto power. Many Normaliens, like other young communists, looked for guidance rather from the fresher revolutionary struggles of Vietnam, Latin America, and, increasingly, China: Castro, Che, and Mao replaced Stalin, Khrushchev, and Thorez in the youthful communist imagination.7 The development can be seen in the steady drift of the Normalien communist journal, Les Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, which hoped to provide a secure theoretical footing for an analysis of political events.8 The first edition, published in late 1964, played down the idea of a split in the Party: the communists were, “if one believes the bourgeois press, of two orders: an incidence of the Moscow-Peking ‘ideological conflict,’ a generational struggle between the elders of the Party and the youth of the UEC. The Ulm Circle has applied itself to demonstrate the inanity of these questions.”9 The bourgeois press was, however, right. The second edition of the Cahiers turned its attention away from the old imperial powers to the developing world. It focused on India and Algeria, applying Marxist concepts to the process of decolonization. The fifth number treated Latin America. By late 1966 the Cahiers opened a discussion of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and its allegiances became obvious to all. The editorial policy of the Cahiers followed political changes at the Ecole. In April 1966 the Ulmien UEC was dissolved to create the Maoistleaning Union des Jeunes Communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJC-ml).10 6

7 8 9 10

Indeed part of the reason students moved away from the Communist Party in the mid 1960s was its support of the socialist candidate, François Mitterrand, in the December 1965 presidential election. See Julian Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris,” History of European Ideas 31 (2005), p. 477. See also Philippe Robrieux, Notre generation communiste (Paris: R. Laffont, 1977), pp. 304–5. For an evocative account of this period, see Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération (Paris: Seuil, 1987), pp. 255–88. The Ulm Circle was the communist cellule at the ENS. Les Cahiers Marxistes Léninistes 1 (1966), “Présentation.” See the document prepared by Benny Lévy, “Faut-il réviser la théorie marxiste-léniniste?” published in Patrick Kessel, ed., Le Mouvement “maoiste” en France (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1972), pp. 149–61.

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For its part, the French Communist Party became increasingly distrustful of the wayward Normaliens, who in November 1966 had rejected the resolution prepared at Romainville for the upcoming Eighteenth French Party Congress. Several high-powered members of the Party wrote to Althusser late in 1966, urging him to discipline his students. He politely demurred, citing illness.11 Althusser himself did not break with the Communist Party – and in his autobiography he suggested that he was willing to give the renegade students “a rocket.”12 He nonetheless refused to disown them as they openly declared their support of Mao. In part his recalcitrance stemmed from a shared philosophical platform. Althusser’s philosophy was a crucial element in the radicalization of the Normalien Maoists. In his reminiscences of the period, one student, Clément Rosset, confirmed Althusser’s claim that he had never tried to “inculcate” his students with his philosophy. But Rosset continued, if a little polemically, that many students still slavishly followed his work: “the subjugated ear of the faithful to a master.”13 That it was Althusser’s work that gave philosophical form to the students’ political grievances stems in part from a major institutional change at the ENS. Since the mid 1950s, the Ecole had aspired to become a research institution. In practice, the drive to fill the ranks of the secondaire had long stopped being its central purpose, and the importance of the Ecole for higher education meant that research rather than teaching was the ultimate career goal of a significant proportion of its students. Already in 1951, a survey by Jean Duché showed that many Normaliens resented their five-year obligation to teach in secondary schools and held as their eventual goal the escape to higher education.14 In light of these aspirations, the ENS compared less and less favorably with the other Grandes Ecoles. From the mid 1950s, it began to lose some of the best science students to the Ecole Polytechnique, which, without the official duty to train schoolteachers, could introduce its students to research far earlier in their careers. Things came to a head when, in the early 1960s, twenty-one scientifiques at the ENS refused to take the agrégation. A debate ensued, hotly followed by the national press, and eventually the Ecole secured the right to allow students to dispense with the exam. In the 11 12 13 14

IMEC, ALT2, A43–02.09, letters from Daniel Monteux and Paul Laurent. See also Le Monde (January 27, 1967). That is, Althusser scolded his students for their political excesses. Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and the Facts, p. 354. Clément Rosset, En ce temps-là (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992), p. 13. Rosset set himself the task of distinguishing what he saw as the liberal and thoughtful Althusser from his radical disciples. Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (June 1951).

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Decree of October 3, 1962, the ENS was redefined as “an establishment of higher education . . . destined to prepare for teaching and for research.”15 It was considered a revolutionary move; in the next edition of the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, archicubes wrote angrily protesting the changes.16 But if the modification in the school’s status upset many alumni, it provided important new possibilities for research. The decree ensured support for new research groups and seminars, and vastly increased the number and scope of learning opportunities for the students. In a document prepared in June 1963, Althusser outlined possible expansions of philosophy teaching at the Ecole. Having been the lone agrégérépétiteur for sixteen years, Althusser felt that the increased responsibilities meant that one full-time instructor was no longer sufficient.17 So, in October, on returning to the Ecole, he petitioned for the creation of another post, citing as cause the expanded mission of the school. The new position was agrégé-répétiteur in the History of Philosophy, and he put forward Derrida’s name.18 Althusser and Derrida were joined by a third, the newly agregated Bernard Pautrat, in 1968. But it was not just the quantity of teaching that was affected. The goal and focus changed as well. In addition to traditional courses in philosophy, Althusser added new seminars, either led by a specialist or conceived as a research group.19 From being merely a base from which Normaliens directed their own line of studies as it had been in the 1950s, the ENS found itself on the frontline of philosophical research. If you were clever and lucky enough to gain a place at the ENS to study philosophy in the 1960s, the choice and level of the courses and seminars on offer was quite astounding. Philosophers could study Marxism with Althusser, deconstruct metaphysics with Derrida, and investigate the unconscious with Lacan, while taking further courses with Canguilhem, Bourdieu, Badiou, Serres, and Bouveresse. The ENS became one of the most important centers for the new French philosophy: structuralism. 15 16

17 19

See “Reflexions sur le statut de l’école,” CAC, 930595/1 (1), my emphasis. Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (March 1963). Archicube was the name given to an alumnus of the Ecole. Especially incensed were those lycée professeurs whose doctoral theses were being advised by the then directeur of the Ecole, Jean Hyppolite. One wrote, “I can’t believe that you are truly interested in my work, when you publicly affirm that the possession of the agrégation and secondary teaching are incompatible with the advancement of research.” In his letter, the student noted the danger of mental collapse caused by solitary academic study, citing both Jean Beaufret and Michel Foucault as telling examples. Letter Michel Gourinat to Jean Hyppolite, 3 January 1963. See Fonds Hyppolite, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. 18 “Dossier Althusser.” “Commission des Etudes de l’ENS.” See “Commission des Etudes de l’ENS.”

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I have already examined the influence of Lacan, whose arrival at the Ecole was facilitated by the decree, but it was Althusser’s courses that would be determinative for a large number of the students. Developing research seminars, Althusser engaged his students as partners in a new philosophical project. In the mid 1960s, a large Althusserian school formed at the ENS, responsible for a range of ventures and publications: running Les Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, playing a major role in the Cahiers pour l’analyse, and of course collaborating with Althusser himself on Reading Capital.20 Althusser’s biographer Moulier Boutang noted a change in his approach to teaching after 1960, showing how his work became more engaged, more political. It was only as the school remodeled itself as a research institution and Althusser merged his teaching and research duties that his philosophical program gained currency. The combined effect of these political and institutional changes meant that the ENS of the 1960s housed a politically radical generation of students who were particularly receptive to Althusser’s philosophical project. It was through these students that Althusser’s and Derrida’s ideas came into contact. Derrida avoided theoretical confrontations with Althusser, but he could not avoid interaction with the students they shared. The reforms at the ENS provided a space where Althusser’s ideas were absorbed and sharpened by a generation of committed Marxists who were on the lookout for ideology and intent on combatting it. To remain relevant and to make his ideas attractive to the new generation, Derrida had to address their project and translate his work into a language they understood and valued. althusserian antihumanism Althusser’s work suited his students because it provided them with a language in which to frame their rejection of Soviet communism.21 For Althusser, the theoretical failings of Party-endorsed Marxism could be summed up in one word: humanism. In its process of destalinization after 1956, the Soviet Union announced that it had moved beyond class warfare and instigated a new stage in history: a “humanism” under the slogan, 20

21

Althusser suggested that his first foray into Marx was a result of the request by Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, and François Regnault. See Louis Althusser, L’Avenir dure longtemps (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992), p. 200. This did not mean that they were uncritical of the Chinese Communist Party, but that for strategic reasons they did not want to make these criticisms public. See notes of the Groupe Spinoza, IMEC, ALT2, All-03.02.

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“All for Man.”22 Humanist Marxism, which as we saw in the first chapter had had only limited and periodic success in the 1930s and 40s, was now graced with the imprimatur of the Soviet state and flourished in France and abroad. Roger Garaudy again took up the crusade, emphasizing the work of the “young Marx” and concentrating on his denunciation of capitalist alienation.23 Althusser believed that this was a theoretical error that muddied the water of Cold War politics and weakened the communist movement. By signaling its adherence to humanism, the Party had joined a broad reactionary front that stretched across the political spectrum and placed them in dialogue with Christian democrats, socialists, and liberals. The blurring of theoretical lines was accompanied by a general thaw in Cold War relations, with the Soviet Union expressing a desire for peaceful coexistence with the West. In Althusser’s eyes, this “revisionism” indicated that the Soviets had abdicated their world historical mission. To set communism back on track, humanism had to be combated at all costs. This was the central political purpose guiding a set of articles and courses that would culminate in Althusser’s dual publication of 1965: For Marx and Reading Capital. In Althusser’s opinion, Marx’s early humanist writings, such as the 1844 manuscripts, did not hold the key to his philosophical system, but rather remained stuck in an old metaphysical tradition, best represented by Ludwig Feuerbach. It was only when Marx came to renounce his earlier humanism in the “epistemological break [coupure épistémologique]” of 1845 that he was able to found a scientific theory of history. Responding to the Soviet Union’s “for Man,” Althusser set out to establish a theory “for Marx.” When Althusser attacked the new orthodoxy, however, he did not propose a return to Stalinist dogmatism.24 Rather, he contended that humanist Marxism and the Stalinist emphasis on the forces of production were linked by a common metaphysical attempt to understand history as the development of one particular narrative, whether about the economy or Man. Marx’s key discovery from 1845 was not the inversion of Hegel’s dialectic, as party theorists asserted, moving from an idealist to a materialist core, but rather a rejection of any single unified dialectic at all. Monocausal economic explanations (as in the Stalinist model) or the simplistic story of human alienation in capitalism (as in humanist Marxism) were no longer 22 23 24

See Preface “To my English Readers,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 9–15. See Roger Garaudy, Humanisme Marxiste (Paris: Editions sociales, 1957). See Althusser, For Marx, p. 30.

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sufficient; Althusser regarded both as overly reductive and urged the consideration of a more complex, or “over-determined,” dialectic, the result of the interaction of many layers of ideology and society, as well as economic forces. Rather than the movement of the base simply determining history, as many traditional Marxists wanted, its effects could be mediated through the various levels of superstructure. A change in the base might be held up by the resistance of politics and ideology, out of step with the forces that would only determine them “in the long run.”25 In Althusser’s view, only by rejecting the ideological and distorting idea that there was one dominant motor of historical change, whether Man or the forces of production, could Marx formulate the object of his science: history in all its complexity.26 Antihumanism then was a necessary precondition for science, providing the theoretical rigor that was essential to the success of the communist movement. Althusser made no secret of his theoretical disagreements with the Party and openly rejected the March 1966 Argenteuil resolution, in which the PCF sided with the humanists.27 Whether from within or without, Althusser and his students adopted a critical stance with respect to the humanist doctrine expounded by the Party, and for both this manifested itself in an overt preference for the Marx of Capital and a resistance to his presentation as a philosopher of alienation.28 In their 1966 break with the party, Althusser’s students had translated his philosophical dispute into political terms.29 derrida’s antihumanism On the face of it, it is difficult to see how Derrida could fit into a school whose structuralist Marxism was so opposed to the religiously minded phenomenology he had taught at the Sorbonne. The philosophical norms at the Ecole – communist, reveling in the sureness of science, and resolutely atheistic – were overtly hostile to the themes that had characterized 25 26 27

28 29

Ibid., p. 112. Althusser was very clear to separate his conception of history from traditional understandings. See Althusser, Lire le capital, vol. II, pp. 35–54. For an analysis of the debate over the Argenteuil Resolution see Louis Althusser and Louis Aragon, Aragon et le Comité central d’Argenteuil (Rambouillet: Société des amis de Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet, 2000), especially pp. 176–80 and 289–98. See Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes: 1. “Sciences et ideologies.” We should also be wary of placing too much weight on the fact that Althusser stayed in the Party, as some commentators have done. In the notes of the Groupe Spinoza that we will discuss shortly, it was stated that to achieve their political goal, the Althusserians would have to place members both inside and outside the party.

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Derrida’s early work. In his reminiscences of the period, Derrida said that he felt enormous pressure from his students, remarking that during the 1960s he was marginalized at the ENS.30 He felt “a sort of theoretical intimidation: to formulate questions in a style that appeared, shall we say, phenomenological, transcendental, or ontological was immediately considered suspicious, backward, idealistic, even reactionary. And since I was already formulating things in these manners, this appearance was rendered complicated to the extreme, that is, to the point of making them unreadable for those at whom they were directed.”31 Antihumanism, however, provided a vital point of contact, and a common resistance to philosophical humanism became a crucial element in Derrida’s negotiation with the philosophical tradition at the Ecole. In a letter he wrote to Althusser in September 1964, just before he was to take up his new position, Derrida made much of the commonality: “I feel as close as possible to the ‘theoretical antihumanism’ which you propose with as much force as rigor.” But for Derrida the true sources of antihumanism were not to be found in the classic texts of communism. After his statement of broad agreement, Derrida continued: “I was less convinced by everything that tied these propositions to Karl Marx himself . . . What you presented . . . clearly demonstrated Marx’s rupture with a certain humanism, a certain conjuncture of empiricism and idealism, etc. But the radicalization [of this position] appeared to me often, in its strongest and most seductive moments, very Althusserian.” Instead of looking towards Marx, Derrida suggested “that other – non-Marxist – premises could govern this antihumanism.”32 It is not entirely clear what Derrida meant by these non-Marxist antihumanist premises, whether they were Althusser’s own, or whether Derrida was suggesting a different theoretical foundation. A look at Derrida’s own intellectual itinerary, however, suggests that he was referring to Martin Heidegger.33 As I suggested in chapter 5, Derrida’s thought in the period preceding 1964 culminated in an antihumanistic reading of Heidegger, drawing on a French Christian tradition that opposed atheistic thought. Following Christian Heideggerians like Henri Birault, Derrida marshaled Heidegger’s ontological difference to challenge idolatrous ontotheologies, including Sartre’s humanism. 30 31 32 33

Anne E. Kaplan, The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 186. Ibid., p. 188. IMEC, Derrida Letters, September 1, 1964. Cited in Peeters, Derrida, p. 187. Cf. Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, p. 176.

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Derrida’s tracing of an antihumanist genealogy back to Heidegger is not merely of passing academic interest; it entailed significantly different positions on defining issues. In the letter, Derrida was explicitly critical of Althusser’s notion of “ideology.” He asserted that the very notion of ideology “troubles me, for philosophical reasons . . . it appears to me to be still the prisoner of a metaphysics and a certain ‘reverse idealism’ that you know better than anyone else.” Just as Althusser diagnosed Feuerbach’s humanism as an inversion of the Hegelian problematic, leaving its essential structure in place, Derrida implied that Althusser’s division between subjective ideology and objective science did not radically challenge the foundations of philosophical subjectivism that it hoped to reject. A more rigorous analysis, Derrida implied, would also challenge this duality. Derrida’s resistance to Althusser’s concept of ideology thus was code for his opposition to the older man’s concept of science, which was always defined in opposition to it. Where Althusser saw antihumanism as marking an epistemological breakthrough that allowed a more scientific understanding of society and history, Derrida’s antihumanism cleaved to the Christians, demanding recognition of the limitations of human knowledge.34 It is worth dwelling on one of the very few occasions in his early work where Derrida discussed humanism directly: his 1964 article on Levinas. Derrida had been introduced to Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity by Paul Ricoeur one summer afternoon in 1961.35 His response to the book, “Violence and Metaphysics,” was written over the summer and autumn of 1963, and – following a relatively long correspondence over the conditions of its publication – accepted by Jean Wahl for the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in early 1964. It was published in the final two editions of the journal that year. The essay, then, marks one of the last pieces published by Derrida before his return to the ENS. Written at the Sorbonne under the auspices of Paul Ricoeur, the general tenor of the essay fits into this 34

35

For a parallel discussion of the split in antihumanism, see Julian Bourg on Clavel and Foucault in From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 261–75. Fonds Ricoeur. Derrida admitted to only having read Levinas’s “classic” texts on Husserl and Heidegger before then. Derrida dates the meeting with Ricoeur as 1961 or 1962. But, as he qualifies it as before Levinas’s soutenance de thèse, we must assume that it occurred in 1961. Derrida then suggests that it was in the following summer that he himself read the book. Given that his first remarks on his essay come from the autumn of 1963, we can perhaps suggest that he meant the summer of 1962. Derrida first cited Levinas in the article on Jabès – published January 1964. There is, however, a note found in his course “Je, Moi, Personne,” in late 1961, Irvine, 6.2, sheet 15, which makes passing reference to Totality and Infinity, asking why Levinas had to resort to the metaphor of the face. After that there is no mention before 1964. Derrida’s own correspondence with Levinas only seems to start in 1964.

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period of Derrida’s work, with its concentration on human finitude and the divine. Derrida argued that Levinas in Totality and Infinity was engaged in a project that was structurally similar to that of Husserl and Heidegger, despite his powerful criticisms of both. Levinas asserted that Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s thought of Being obscured the absolute alterity of the Other, which was the necessary source of all philosophy. Husserl always reduced the Other to the categories of the transcendental ego as the fifth Cartesian Meditation showed, and Heidegger subsumed the Being of the Other under Being in general, preventing any absolute alterity. But Derrida remarked that all three men looked back beyond the Greeks and hoped to reinvigorate something that they had left out. For though Levinas would attack Husserl and Heidegger for remaining within the “philosophy of the same,” his desire to exceed Being and theoretical consciousness towards the thought of the Other mirrored their own desires to surpass the mundane and the ontic towards the openness of the transcendental (Husserl) or the indeterminacy of Being (Heidegger). If Levinas thought the philosophy of the same had obscured the Other, it was, Derrida argued, not structurally different to Husserl’s charge that science had forgotten its very origins, or Heidegger’s charge that ontotheology ignored the ontological difference. In order to argue that Husserl and Heidegger were both implicated in the Greek tradition despite their own protests, Levinas had to suggest that their movements beyond the “Greek” philosophy of the same were mere feints. The differences they described inside the self were “false” differences. In contrast, Levinas pointed to the immediate encounter with the Other in what he called the “Face.” The “Face,” always resisting attempts to reduce it to our categories, was for Levinas the very condition of thought, for it broke our primordial solipsism. It was the “infinity” that exceeded any “totality.” Because Levinas wanted to avoid the reduction of alterity, with which he charged Husserl and Heidegger, the Face had to present the Other directly, without a familiarizing metaphor. It was not a sign, but “expresses itself, giving itself in person.”36 For Derrida, however, the Other could not give itself “in person.” It was impossible to grasp it without resorting to the language of the same, the necessity to explain the Other in terms we understand. As we saw in earlier chapters, for Derrida there was no unadulterated infinity that preceded finitude. This stance led Derrida to refuse Levinas’s all-or-nothing 36

Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 100.

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approach to metaphor, where any contamination of the Other with the same was interpreted as its total subsumption. He argued instead that we must accept that alterity reveals itself in language, while recognizing the insufficiency of all discourse to grasp the Other fully.37 Further, language can be used to denounce its own inadequacies; this is what Derrida meant by the “economy of violence.” This violence, the use of metaphors against other metaphors, an inadequate language turned on itself, defined history. As language proclaimed its own failings, it could never be described as the closed totality that Levinas wanted to condemn, nor was it receptive to the pure presence of the infinite that Levinas saw in the “Face.” History was not a finite totality, as Levinas wanted, but “the history of movements out of the totality, history as the movement of transcendence, of the excess over the totality without which no totality would appear.”38 This recognition saved Husserl and Heidegger from Levinas’s attacks. One could not reduce their thoughts to the dominance of the same, an inauthentic alienation of the Other in the language of the self, because their philosophy was never as totalizing as Levinas suggested. Husserl’s was open to the infinite horizon of thought, his concept of intentionality demonstrating the impossibility of the full adequation of an intuition to its object. In Derrida’s reading, Husserl acknowledged the object’s irreducible alterity.39 Indeed in the relationship to other egos described in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl’s analogical representation respected rather than eclipsed otherness: it described an alter ego, rather than an alter ego; it did not mistake what was given for the unmediated Other.40 Husserl’s philosophy was in fact preferable to Levinas’s because it permitted the possibility of representing the Other, even if it always involved some dissimulation of its alterity. If Levinas wanted to end all violence, all forcing of the Other into the categories of the self, Husserl recognized that this was not possible. Absolute peace was an unreachable goal, and so the search for the unadulterated Other could only lead to failure or more violence. For Heidegger too the thought of Being did not reduce all difference to the thought of the same, one unique category under which everything was subsumed; Being was not a supreme being, a God governing everything else. It made no sense to give Being precedence or authority, Derrida argued, for precedence and authority were ontic characteristics.41 By submitting Being to such an analysis, Levinas had forgotten the ontological difference whose main purpose was to inhibit the identification of Being with a being. 37 39

Note the use of the word “insufficiency,” in ibid., p. 116. 40 Ibid., p. 123. 41 Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 121.

38

Ibid., p. 117.

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Rather, Derrida argued, it was Levinas’s thought that verged on ontotheology. Levinas’s Other, by transcending all totalities, itself resembled a supreme being.42 And because this privileged Other was human, Levinas’s philosophy was what Heidegger in the Letter on Humanism had called a “humanist metaphysics.”43 For Derrida, Levinas’s humanism was parallel to Sartre’s, only that, for Levinas, it was the Other rather than the poursoi that was supposed to transcend metaphysics and escape all totalities. Both theories retained a privileged place for “Men,” modeled on and usurping the place of God. It is not surprising that Derrida should later qualify Levinas’s humanism as “atheistic.”44 In contrast, for Derrida, Husserl’s teleological idea and Heidegger’s difference were both recognitions of the limitations of human thought. In particular, Derrida appealed to Heidegger’s ontological difference, a difference that had to be primary because there was no Being outside of beings, nor beings without Being.45 It was this difference that drove History, or rather ensured that Being was History, the constant movement from one ontic metaphor to another. It is a reading that directly recalls Birault’s work and the themes we discussed in chapter 5. And like Birault and the other Christian Heideggerians, Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” moved directly from his discussion of the ontological difference to a discussion of the Holy that it made possible. Criticizing Levinas’s claim that Heidegger instituted a pagan philosophy, Derrida asserted that Heidegger’s concept of the Holy, as “the essential experience of divinity,” preceded any determined relation to God, a non-denominational space before any particular religion, before even the distinction between atheism and faith.46 In Derrida’s presentation, then, Humanism was to be replaced not by the certainty of science, as Althusser had wanted, but rather by the humility and patience of an openness to God.47 Derrida’s antihumanism, which followed from his destruction of onto-theology through an appeal to the ontological difference, was not an attack on religious faith, but rather was its necessary condition. The emphasis on the ontological difference, as Derrida would later suggest, made his antihumanism, at the very least, ambiguous.48 As he 42 43 47

48

It was at this point that Derrida made a favorable reference to Birault, who had recognized this problem. Ibid., p. 317 note. 44 Ibid., p. 143. 45 Ibid., pp. 148–9. 46 Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 142. Compare with Henri Birault, “Existence et vérité d’après Heidegger,” in De l’être, du divin et des dieux, especially pp. 351–6. It is for this reason that Derrida is concerned that this would not be a negative theology. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 106 and 146. See Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, and Of Grammatology, p. 24.

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admitted in 1967, the motor of the ontological difference was the transcendence of Dasein, and it was only a small step from Dasein, which Derrida had in 1948 suggested translating with “existance (with an a),” to the movement of “différance (with an a).”49 As late as the early 1960s Derrida still translated Dasein as réalité-humaine, and in courses during this period he was clear that only Man is historical, only “Man is Ek-sistence, ‘nature’ does not have a history.”50 The ability to transcend any particular determination was what distinguished Man from other beings.51 We also saw the centrality of the concept “Man” in Derrida’s early articles, hastily written out for the 1967 collection. In its preservation of the possibility of human transcendence towards the divine this form of religious antihumanism was as close as possible to the Christian humanism from which it emerged. When Derrida turned away from humanism, he rejected not the idea of “Man” as the author of philosophy, but rather his arrogance and sense of self-sufficiency. The end of Humanism, for Derrida, did not at first entail the death of Man. the groupe spinoza Althusser and his students were well aware that Derrida’s antihumanism did not fit easily with their own. But this did not disqualify Derrida’s version for them. Their toleration for Derrida’s ideas derived from their understanding of the role of philosophy, best expressed in the writings of a secret organization called the Groupe Spinoza. Formed by Althusser in 1966, the Groupe Spinoza comprised around fifteen present and past students, including Alain Badiou, Michel Tort, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey. The Groupe Spinoza reiterated Althusser’s claims about the political role of philosophy, asserting the link between “theoretical research and political intervention.”52 Ideology was the misrecognition of the political dimension, and “only Marxist philosophy openly confronts and assumes this task: not only is it political, like all philosophy, but it recognizes, thinks, and knows this organic relationship to politics that makes it a philosophy.”53 It is because they understood their work as inherently political – hoping to 49 50 51 52

Derrida used “existance” as late as 1960. See Irvine, 4.11, p. 50. For use of the translation “réalité-humaine,” see Derrida’s course on the “Transcendental,” 1961–2, Irvine, 6.9, sheet 74, seminar dated March 1962. Jacques Derrida, “Erreur et errance: Heidegger,” Irvine, 8.1, sheet 3. Though Derrida asserted that this freedom was not a characteristic of Man, but rather Man was possessed by “l’ek-sistence.” 53 Ibid., sheet 2. “Groupe Spinoza,” IMEC, ALT2, A10–03.03, sheet 1.

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influence the policy of the PCF and Communist Parties more widely – that the groupe’s meeting notes seem conspiratorial. Convening in secret every two weeks, the group began to use pseudonyms after May 1968, fearing that their deliberations might be discovered and their work compromised. Inexplicably, many of the pages are covered in muddy boot prints, as if indicating a late-night raid by the forces of order. The corollary of the Groupe Spinoza’s attempt to “intervene in politics as a philosopher” was a desire to intervene in “philosophy as a politician.”54 Though philosophical in content, their project resembled political intrigue, where theoretical interventions were judged on their strategic importance and possibility of success.55 The notes depict a world of opposing alliances, locked in a fundamental combat, in what Michel Tort called “a theoretical war.” The clear enemy was humanism, which they argued was the “cement, the ideological connection which alone reunites conjuncturally disparate elements” on a “front” comprising spiritualists-personnalists, idealists-rationalists-critical philosophers, existentialists-phenomenologists, and humanist Marxists.56 To resist this diverse group of humanists, the Groupe Spinoza set about forming their own alliance, which, making an oblique reference to the Algerian revolutionaries, they named the “Front de Libération Philosophique.” Like the humanist front, theirs was a broad church, recruiting antihumanist philosophers of many different theoretical stripes. The obvious partners in such a front were the “neo-structuralists,” Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, whose philosophy provided valuable intellectual resources for the criticism of humanism.57 If sufficient intellectual strength could be mustered, the Groupe Spinoza believed that they could overturn the PCF’s support of humanism, and so strengthen the communist movement in France and beyond. For all the fundamental differences between their philosophical projects, then, Derrida was a valuable ally. The Groupe Spinoza’s support for this motley bunch of antihumanists was not, however, unqualified. Referring to the two fronts, Tort stated, “it is not possible to make use of them in the same way, to distinguish ourselves in the same way from the ‘allied’ elements (Foucault, Lacan) and the 54 55

56

57

Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, p. 197. The Groupe Spinoza criticized the Cahiers pour l’Analyse for their attack on psychology in the second number, considering it ill-judged and ineffective. On the other hand they regarded it of critical importance to protect Foucault from attacks. See “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2, A11–03.10. “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2 A11–03.09, sheets 5–6. Cf. “Conjoncture philosophique et recherche théorique marxiste” (26 June 1966), in Louis Althusser, Ecrits philosophiques et politiques (Paris: Stock/ IMEC, 1994), pp. 393–415. “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2, A11–03.09, sheet 5.

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humanist bloc. Here, it is necessary to determine the procedures of effective and precise critique-contestation-investment, different to those that it is appropriate to use with respect to the humanist front.” With philosophy governed by political demands and ideology a weapon to be wielded, parallel antihumanistic philosophies were allies to be used and disciplined. The clear problem with antihumanists like Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida was that they placed a theoretical revolution above the political one. As Michel Tort suggested in a note from late 1967 that refers explicitly to Derrida, certain “theoretical enterprises repress the political scope of their work.”58 This work, then, while helpful for the general project, was ultimately reactionary. Lacan was depicted as a cynic intent on preserving the legitimacy of psychoanalysis by shoring up its intellectual credentials at the Ecole and advocating a mere “revolutionism de bon ton on the political level.”59 Derrida was regarded as particularly dangerous, at least from the perspective of the Groupe Spinoza. They worried that his philosophy, might easily “in the near future, serve as the ideological cement to humanism.”60 The reasons given for this expectation were: 1. He is incontestably the only traditional philosopher of any stature. 2. His conjunctural position is such that he is at the same time obliged (and intelligent enough) to integrate the results obtained on the antihumanist front. 3. The very content of his philosophy is appropriate to serve a future compromise between the humanist front and the other. 4. He already has a considerable hold on an important element of the conjuncture (the discourse on literature where the contradiction humanism/non-humanism is lived acutely).61

In other words, the members of the Groupe Spinoza recognized the ambivalence of Derrida’s antihumanism. He was one of the most dangerous figures on the field, placed at a crucial strategic position. Though currently aligned with them in his antihumanism, he was capable of reshifting the alliances and forming a new front. Derrida was a friend, but an unreliable one. His antihumanism could not be trusted. The Groupe Spinoza distrusted Derrida and his turn to antihumanism, just as much as they distrusted the other members of the “antihumanist front.” Though they saw the benefits of Derrida’s reading of the history of philosophy and its understanding of metaphysics, they had no place for what we will see was his equal indictment of (especially Althusserian) 58 60 61

59 Ibid., sheet 10. Ibid., sheet 3. See also “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2, A11–03.12, sheet 4. “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2, A11–03.09, sheets 10–11.

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science.62 The Groupe Spinoza was also wary of the religious tone of Derrida’s work. Describing his rapprochement with the human sciences, they remarked that “the metaphysico-religious enterprise is taking the forms of an aggiornamento,” a reference to the modernization efforts of the Second Vatican Council.63 Maintaining the antihumanist front – and in particular preventing Derrida’s drift to the other side – became a central task for the Groupe Spinoza. With Foucault the greatest danger was his “political adventurism.” This was to be reined in by Althusser, who was to make him “intervene strongly against spiritualist phenomenology (cut all ties with Ricoeur) and with Sartre.” With Lacan, a discreet critical support was recommended. Derrida presented a more problematic case. The Groupe Spinoza decided to take preventative action: 1. Through criticism, force Derrida to maximize his critique of phenomenology and his pseudo-rupture. 2. Short-circuit him at the level of the status and nature of philosophical discourse . . . 3. Make metaphysics as such an object of analysis. 4. Strike at the level of literary theory to denounce the non-humanist obscurantism of the same group.64

Tort referred to Althusser’s “Humanist Controversy” article, as a preliminary step towards the disciplining and coopting of Derrida’s thought.65 Antihumanism acted in the Ecole as a unifying doctrine that brought together approaches as diverse as Foucauldian genealogy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralist Marxism, and Heideggerianism. It provided a point of confluence that allowed otherwise opposing doctrines to interact and coexist. But this did not mean that these differences were without import. Throughout this period Derrida remained as suspicious of the group around Althusser as they were of him. The tensions were particularly difficult due to the close friendship between Althusser and Derrida. Just as in 1945, when humanism was both a rallying point and a highly contested term, twenty years later antihumanism was the buzzword of a fraught alliance. Derrida was useful to the Groupe Spinoza, but he was also dangerous, threatening at any moment to adopt a humanist line and reintegrate cast-off religious themes. Derrida would have to be watched, and pressured to conform ever more closely to Ecole orthodoxy. 62 63 65

Ibid., sheet 14. See also “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2 A11.03.12, notes by Althusser. 64 Ibid., sheet 11. “Groupe Spinoza,” ALT2 A11–03.09, sheet 13. “La Querelle de l’humanisme,” in Althusser, Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques, pp. 433–529. See especially the reference to Derrida’s refusal of origins and the “trace,” p. 456.

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the turn to structuralism Antihumanism was a crucial plank in the Normalien program, but the language of their thought was structuralist. Not that this meant an uncritical adoption of Lévi-Strauss’s philosophy. Rather, structuralism provided a common set of conceptual tools that could be used to read other philosophies and judge them. According to his student Yves Duroux, Althusser, by appealing to a common language of structuralism, was able to organize the “liaison between psychoanalysis, linguistics, history of science, and epistemology that constituted this singular moment in philosophy.”66 This function of structuralist language can be seen in Althusser’s 1962–3 seminar on that topic, the first research seminar after the change in the status of the Ecole. The structuralism seminar from 1962 to 1963 was run for and by the agrégatifs, including Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Macherey. Althusser and his students gave presentations on such diverse subjects as linguistics, Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, mathematical formalism, and Foucault. The driving force of the course was the question of origins, whether the origins of history, language, or of structuralism itself.67 But in all cases the question was ironic. The search for origins for Althusser and his students was the classical gesture of ideology. He presented Husserl as a key culprit. Husserl posited a “gap” between signifier and signified, but in his reference to an original unity between the two, he allowed the subject to reactivate the latent sense (signified) in discourse (signifier) teleologically. The idea of the origin led Husserl to believe that one could reach beyond an explicit discourse to discover its hidden meaning, just as the humanists thought they could read into the complexity of history the signs of an alienated human essence.68 Opposed to this, Althusser presented Foucault’s work on the History of Madness, which suggested that discourse was founded upon what it excluded and refused: the foundation of reason rested on the suppression of madness.69 No longer could there be a sense that a hidden truth could be discovered behind the explicit, for what was repressed was not a discourse but precisely the “non-work [non-oeuvre]” of madness, “the unsaid [non-dire] is not a statement [dire] . . . but the condition of possibility for 66 67 68 69

Yves Duroux, “Elèves d’Althusser,” Magazine littéraire 304 (November 1992), p. 47. Louis Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3” ALT2, A40–02.01. Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3,” ALT2, A40–02.02, folder 1, sheets 1–2. Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3,” ALT2, A40–02.01, sheet 2, and ALT2 A40–02.02, sheet 3.

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the discourse.”70 There was no original moment where the unsaid was immediately given, to be reactivated later. Not looking for a “horizontal” analysis, following the unfolding of history, Althusser suggested that Foucault provided a “vertical” one, studying synchronic structures of which texts and institutions were just manifestations. As we shall see, this analysis of Foucault’s work closely paralleled Althusser’s own understanding of structural analysis as expressed in Reading Capital. But according to Althusser, Foucault did not remain true to his structuralist premises, and at times seemed to veer close to the Husserlian perspective. Foucault was not content merely to analyze particular structures of reason, but rather hoped to uncover the foundational suppression that had formed a discourse, but which had since been forgotten. For Althusser, this development in Foucault’s project was a betrayal of his most important claims. The attempt to return to the great exclusion in the history of madness was structurally similar to Husserl’s ideological attempt to find the original meaning of the formal. Both reactivated something lost: “curious reversal of metaphors, that which was hidden in the vertical [structural conditions] becomes the sense of the horizontal [meaning of history].”71 When Foucault turned to the history of these structures and hoped to uncover their originary conditions, he implied that it was possible to reach beyond discourse to its ultimate ground, “that it is possible to discover the structures of the signified and the relationship between signifier and signified.” But this was what structuralism, which “looks for the structures of the signifier,” expressly prohibited, and thus, in trying to write a “history” of madness, Foucault undermined the scientificity of his project.72 The turn to the structures of signification entailed a refusal of all questions of origins. In the same seminar Pierre Macherey presented an analysis of this theme looking at the ideas of Condillac and Rousseau, especially the latter’s essay On the Origin of Language.73 While Condillac had traced the origin of language to the natural, for Rousseau the absolute difference between nature and culture made the idea of a natural origin of language contradictory. As Macherey put it, “there are no absolute premises, no immediate givens of the understanding, no ‘savage mind.’”74 In language that recalls Althusser’s opposition between over-determination and 70 71 73 74

Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3,” ALT2 A40–02.02, sheet 3. 72 Ibid., sheets 21–3. Ibid., sheet 5. Derrida would write on the same theme for the second half of Of Grammatology, and it would figure prominently in Jean Mosconi’s account. See Cahiers pour l’Analyse 4, p. 74. Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3,” ALT2, A40–02.02, sheet 9.

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humanism, Macherey stated that Rousseau figured language as the dialectical relationship between several types of explanation, not a simple origin that could be located in history. The twin analyses of Condillac and Rousseau allowed Macherey to intervene on the contemporary theoretical scene. Lévi-Strauss, according to Macherey, conformed to Condillac’s model despite a declared debt to Rousseau. He sought an origin in the animal and natural, where structures ultimately reflected the biology of the brain.75 Lévi-Strauss, like Foucault, betrayed the promise of his theory by breaching its asserted division between signifier and signified in an attempt to find some ultimate ground for the structures of signification. The criticism that Lévi-Strauss hoped to privilege and naturalize primitive structures was one that Althusser himself would repeat in an August 1966 paper.76 Lévi-Strauss overstepped the crucial line dividing signifiers from the signified, culture from nature, that marked the boundary between science and ideology. In this sense he had betrayed his formalist intentions. Althusser argued: “all thought which is knowledge is the thought of forms that is of the relations that unite determined elements . . . I don’t address the reproach of formalism in general to Lévi-Strauss, but of bad formalism.”77 Lévi-Strauss’s work manifested a “bad formalism” because it thought that some forms were more universal and essential than others. In particular Lévi-Strauss thought that he could uncover universal archetypes in primitive societies. These societies were posited as an “origin” for culture, for they “contain, under a real and visible form the truth that is obscured and alienated today in our non-primitive, complex, civilized, etc. societies.” It was the reverse racism of ethnologists, “children of colonization, who comfort their bad conscience by finding, in primitive peoples, ‘men’ at the dawn of human culture.”78 The error repeated that of humanist Marxism. Both theories unjustifiably privileged one ideological and subjective idea of the human, rather than concentrating on the system itself; both “missed [manque] their object.” As Althusser suggested, Lévi-Strauss and 75

76 77 78

Althusser, “Seminaire 1962–3,” ALT2, A40–02.01, folder 3, sheet 10. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), p. 130; and The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 263–4. See also a similar criticism by Althusser, ALT2, A40–02.03, sheet 2. Lévi-Strauss hoped to find invariant and basic structures in primitive societies and dissolve culture back into nature. See my “Reading Lévi-Strauss with Derrida and the Cercle d’Epistémologie; or, How to be a Good Structuralist.” Althusser, Ecrits Politiques et Philosophiques. Ibid., p. 419, makes especial reference to Balibar’s contribution to Reading Capital. Ibid., p. 420

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his epigones “claim to be representatives of Marx, while misrecognizing him.”79 This error came at a price, for, by declaring primitive social structures to be direct manifestations of human nature or brain biology, Lévi-Strauss refused himself the analytical tools required to investigate them further. In particular he could not give an account of the cultural variety found in ethnological research. For Althusser, in contrast, the reasons for variation were clear; the structures of kinship were not simple expressions of the human spirit or the brain, but rather relations of production intimately connected to different modes of production. In prematurely asserting the “object” of his science, talking about the human brain and not the relations of production that were really fundamental, Lévi-Strauss had falsely appealed to an ideological and thus empty universalism, seeing a universal “essence” in what was really a complex and over-determined structure. In their readings of the other structuralist thinkers, Althusser and his students asserted the importance of restricting oneself to the scientific study of the signifier and decried any attempt to root structures elsewhere, especially in the ideological and subjective ground of immediate experience. In this they directly opposed the central gesture of phenomenology, which hoped to ground formal structures in the transcendental field. According to Althusser, it was not possible to reach the signified independently of the signifier, and so any claim to do so was ideological. We can see how Derrida came to cleave to the Althusserian orthodoxy in the Ecole by his own reading of Lévi-Strauss. Derrida’s treatment of the father of French structuralism was perhaps his text that was most immersed in Normalien culture. Although it would achieve its definitive form as a chapter in Of Grammatology, the paper began as a course for the agrégation in early 1966 at the ENS. Unlike previous courses, Derrida made space in his discussion of “writing and civilization” in Lévi-Strauss for his students to respond. Usually his lecture would fill the ninety minutes allocated, but in this course Derrida deliberately confined himself to the first hour, reserving the final thirty minutes for questions and answers.80 His meditations on Lévi-Strauss were then published as an article in the Normalien Cahiers pour l’analyse, in late 1966. At several stages of its presentation and revision then, Derrida opened his text to the critical eye of his students. The text is a privileged example for gauging the rapprochement that had occurred between Derrida and the norms of the ENS over his first two years there. 79 80

Ibid., p. 418. Althusser referred in particular to the passage in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), pp. 364–75. Jacques Derrida, “Nature, culture, ecriture,” Irvine, 9.14, sheet 20.

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Derrida’s analysis centered on a chapter from Tristes tropiques, where Lévi-Strauss recounted how he had taught a Nambikwara chief to write. As Derrida noted, Lévi-Strauss had always associated the civilized/primitive distinction (in Lévi-Strauss’s language, hot and cold societies) with the presence or not of writing; he had even changed the name of his chair at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from “Religions of Primitive Peoples” to “Religions of Peoples without Writing Systems.”81 For Lévi-Strauss, it was writing that allowed the institution of social hierarchies and violence that were typical of “civilized” societies. In Lévi-Strauss’s presentation, the Nambikwara was a “cold” society without writing, and when he taught the chief to write, the insidious effects of social “warming” were soon visible. According to Lévi-Strauss, the chief “immediately understood its role as sign, and the social superiority that it confers.”82 Lévi-Strauss considered writing to be wholly damaging for a society, emphasizing the violence and social hierarchy that it allowed, rather than its role in the constitution of science: writing was “more a ‘sociological’ than an ‘intellectual’ necessity.”83 Like Althusser and his students, Derrida questioned Lévi-Strauss’s nostalgia for primitive societies, which supposedly contravened basic structuralist imperatives. Following this description, primitive society became an “anti-ethnocentric mirror,” the “index to a hidden good Nature, as a recovered native soil, or a ‘zero degree’ with reference to which one could outline the structure, the growth, and above all the degradation of our society and our culture.”84 Just as Althusser criticized Lévi-Strauss’s moral privileging of primitive societies, so too Derrida suggested that his declaration of Nambikwara purity demonstrated a reverse ethnocentrism, keeping the same categories and distinctions (society without writing), but just reversing the value judgment. For Derrida, as for Althusser, this primitivism made a nonsense of Lévi-Strauss’s declared Marxism.85 Derrida reprimanded Lévi-Strauss for taking primitive societies out of the Marxist paradigm, declaring them free from any form of exploitation. Where Althusser challenged the priority that Lévi-Strauss gave to “savage thought [la pensée sauvage]” by asserting that primitive societies were just as overdetermined and complex as those that were more advanced, Derrida appealed to a concept of writing that troubled the distinction between the primitive and the civilized. 81 82 83

Dosse, A History of Structuralism, vol. I, p. 13. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), pp. 317–18. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 314–18, Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 183. 84 Ibid., p. 114. 85 Ibid., pp. 118–20. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 130.

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Firstly, for Derrida the reaction of the chief of the Nambikwara showed that writing was not as alien a concept to the Nambikwara as Lévi-Strauss thought, that though they might not have had writing “au sens courant,” they already had the means to understand it; it could not have been entirely foreign to them.86 Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between societies with and without writing could not be as absolute as he wanted to suggest. Secondly and most importantly, Derrida refused Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to separate the social and scientific aspects of writing. Ever since his introduction to the Origin of Geometry, Derrida was adamant that writing was a necessary condition for science. And because writing was so clearly a condition for social hierarchies and economic oppression, the very science that LéviStrauss wanted to institute could not be detached from the ideologies he hoped science would overcome. To the question “is there a knowledge, and, above all, a language, scientific or not, that one can call alien at once to writing and to violence?” Derrida responded with an unequivocal no.87 It was a remarkable turnaround. What had begun as a reiteration of Althusser’s criticism of Lévi-Strauss turned out to be a direct rebuttal of one of Althusser’s most cherished claims. Writing and différance were the common ground for both science and the processes of capitalization and class hierarchy – the realm of ideology.88 Derrida’s engagement with Lévi-Strauss shows that, while adopting a language and many philosophical strategies from the Althusserians, he was able to marshal this language to challenge their idea of science. He followed them in their engagement with structuralism, adopted their criticism of attempts to leave the realm of the signifier, and questioned any search for origins. And yet he used these ideas to criticize their claims to pure scientificity. The key to this curious combination was writing, which, crossing the boundary between science and ideology, allowed Derrida to criticize structuralist scientificity in structuralist language. As we shall see, writing played an even more important role in Derrida’s thought. For though Althusser excluded the work of Husserl and Heidegger as ideological, the turn to a study of writing would allow Derrida to smuggle his earlier phenomenology into the structuralist paradigm.

86 88

87 Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., pp. 130–1. In Althusser’s reading notes on Derrida’s essay, he remarked that Derrida wasn’t sufficiently attentive to the differences of violence. Lévi-Strauss was only talking about class violence, not violence in general. The corollary of this would be that the violence of writing and class violence could be distinguished, which would save science from an intimate connection to ideology. See Louis Althusser, “Notes sur Derrida,” ALT2, A58–02.03, sheet 4.

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grammatology: a science of writing If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. Jacques Derrida89

Derrida’s science of writing was a direct response to the new style of reading proposed by Althusser and his students in the collaborative work Reading Capital. Over two volumes Althusser, Macherey, and Balibar among others sketched and then elaborated two different models of reading: an old theological model that aimed to read an essence in appearance, and a new scientific reading that concerned the conditions of discourse.90 The two forms of reading mapped onto Althusser’s earlier distinction between the early and the late Marx, separated by the epistemological break. If it was only since Freud, Althusser asserted, acknowledging the Lacanian roots of many of his concepts, that we have begun to listen and speak, it is only since Marx’s later writings that we have known what it is to read and write.91 The young Marx, Althusser insisted, followed the old way of reading, for which “to know the essence of things, the essence of the historical human world, of its economic, political, aesthetic, and religious production, was simply to read (lesen, herauslesen) in black and white the presence of the ‘abstract’ essence in the transparency of its ‘concrete’ existence.”92 Thus in the 1844 manuscripts Marx was able to “read” Man’s alienated essence in the capitalist economy, just as Feuerbach had been able to read it in God. Humanism too – reading all of history as one simple dialectic – participated in this mode of reading that cut through all complexity to get to the supposed heart of the matter. In contrast, Althusser asserted that “the history of men . . . is not . . . a text written on the pages of a Book . . . The truth of history cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.”93 Instead of trying to read something that was already there, to get to the signified hidden behind the signifier, or the “real” object hidden in its appearances, Althusser suggested that reading itself was governed by structures in society that determined what was visible or invisible, that 89 91 93

90 Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, p. 42. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 86–7. 92 Ibid., p. 16. Althusser, Reading Capital, p. 16. Ibid., p 17. The first sentence is not found in the English translation. See Louis Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, pp. 16, and 41, and its critique of an “expressive reading.” Cf. also Derrida’s criticism of expression, in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena.

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caused the errors [bévue] and lacunae of a reading, just as much as what it was able to see. Reading did not reach through the mess of existence to gain a glimpse of the real object in its essence, but produced its own object of knowledge, like in Foucault’s epistemes:94 The sighting is thus no longer the act of an individual subject, endowed with the faculty of “vision” which he exercises either attentively or distractedly; the sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is the relation of immanent reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its problems. Vision then loses the religious privileges of divine reading: it is no more than a reflection of the immanent necessity that ties an object or problem to its conditions of existence, which lie in the conditions of its production.95

Detaching the object of knowledge from a mythical real object that expressed itself in knowledge, and refusing the teleologies that he had suggested allowed the convergence of the two in phenomenologies such as Husserl’s, Althusser argued that history was not linear, but rather marked by “radical discontinuities,” as new epistemological regimes arose that created new objects of knowledge.96 Of particular interest was Marx’s epistemological break, which instituted the science of historical materialism. Althusser analyzed Marx’s reading of the classical political economists, and their discussions of the value of labor, in particular Ricardo’s claim that “the value of labor is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of labor.” As it stood the sentence seemed to be nonsense. After all, Althusser asked, what was the “maintenance” or “reproduction of labor”?97 But when Marx read the passage, he was able to see something to which the classical political economists were blind. He saw that Ricardo had unintentionally produced the idea of “labor-power,” i.e. the undifferentiated energy required for work that had to be fueled by the nourishment of the worker. No longer concerned with the value of the work itself, the classical political economists had surreptitiously moved to discuss the means necessary to keep the worker functioning.98 In making this shift, classical political economists like Smith and Ricardo had answered a different question than the one they had originally set themselves (what is the value of “labor”?) and they had “produced” a new object.99 As Althusser rewrote the phrase: “The value of labor (power) is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of labor (power).” It was 94 95 96 98

See also Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, pp. 41–53 and 70–81. Althusser, Reading Capital, p. 25. See also Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, pp. 42 and 48–9. 97 Ibid., p. 22. Althusser, Reading Capital, p. 52. 99 Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, p. 25. Ibid., p. 23.

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only after Marx’s epistemological break of 1845 that he was able to move past prior ideological formulations and construct a new object of discourse.100 In defining grammatology, Derrida made the same move, reading into the texts of the – in his case – classical linguists a new object that they had been unable to see themselves.101 Where Althusser analyzed the rise of the “labor power” and its corollary “surplus value” – what the capitalist could take for himself after having paid the worker for his labor – Derrida discussed arche-writing, to be studied in a new science of grammatology. Mirroring Althusser’s own presentation, Derrida rewrote Saussure, replacing the word “semiology”: I shall call it (grammatology) . . . Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of that general science . . . ; the laws discovered by (grammatology) will be applicable to linguistics.102

Adopting its forms and mode of expression, Of Grammatology began as a recognizably Althusserian project. The formulation of arche-writing and its emergence out of the work of the classical linguists comprised the majority of the first part of Derrida’s book. As the Normaliens stressed, both in their readings of Marx and appropriation of Lacan, the determination of the scientific object was the most important task for philosophy.103 And, as in Althusser’s presentation of Marx, the new object was produced through the recognition of the internal conceptual inadequacies of the previous object of linguistics. Modern linguistics, according to Derrida, was governed by the metaphysical priority of speech over writing: phonologism. Indeed Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, had considered the history of writing to be separate and unimportant compared to the history of speech. Writing was the signifier of the signifier, whereas the spoken word was “a unity of sense and sound, of concept and voice, or, to speak a 100

101 102 103

Althusser would then go and perform a similar “symptomatic reading” for Marx, showing that he had produced the “concept of the efficacy of a structure on its elements,” without being able to see it as such (p. 29). Althusser and his students hoped to uncover this structure in their own reading of Capital, this structure being the object of their science. See the similar use of the word “classical” in his discussion of the linguists: Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 21, 31, and 39. Amended citations from Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1916), p. 16, in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 51. See all the articles on the “Object of psychoanalysis,” in the Cahiers pour l’analyse 3, or Althusser’s second contribution to Reading Capital, “The Object of Capital.” As it became clear over Reading Capital, this object was defined more generally as the “concept of the capitalist mode of production” (p. 208).

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more rigorously Saussurean language, of the signified and the signifier.”104 Given the exteriority of writing to pure speech, any impact it might have on, say, pronunciation represented an unhappy contagion. Writing was a dangerous “outside” come to disturb the proper functioning of language.105 Further, writing’s malicious tinkering with speech was considered by Saussure to be an unhappy forgetting of the “origin” of language.106 Speech, in this model, came first and writing was secondary and derivative of it, an inessential “clothing [vêtement]” thrown over the true purveyor of meaning.107 Following Althusser’s outline of ideology, Derrida argued that this prejudice (the metaphysics of presence) privileged immediate intuition, and regarded science, logic, and writing as fallen and unimportant, to be shown their rightful place at the bottom of the metaphysical hierarchy. Writing was dependent upon and secondary to speech, according to a purportedly “natural” relationship, and so its attempts to change speech demonstrated an unjust revolution of the proper order. Derrida considered that modern linguistics after Saussure participated in the very metaphysical assumptions that had always debased writing – assumptions that Althusser too would have called ideological because they were structured by the teleological unity of signifier and signified. And yet, the exclusion of writing in modern linguistics was particularly problematic. Writing was a system of signifiers like any other, and it was difficult to see on what grounds it could be so passionately excluded. If the watchword of Saussure’s linguistics was the arbitrariness of the sign, how could one type of sign be distinguished from another and placed in a hierarchy? Further, if writing were really exterior to speech, how could one explain the possibility of its usurpation? How could one account for the fact of what was de jure prohibited: the unnatural contamination of speech by its written form, especially in pronunciation changes?108 Derrida’s answer was that the best model for the functioning of the sign was not – as had previously been thought – speech, but rather writing. Speech was no longer the prototype for all language, but should itself be seen as just another “kind of writing.”109 Because speech was already a type of writing, there was no absolute dividing line that could permanently 104 107 108

109

105 Ibid., p. 34. 106 Ibid., p. 37. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 31. The image of “clothing [vêtement]” was a direct reference to Husserl in the Krisis. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 39–41 and 43–4. Derrida argued that the sign was instituted following the structure of the trace, “in which the other is announced as such.” The sign was then not unmotivated but rather “becoming-unmotivated,” effacing its relationship to absolute presence, pp. 45–7. The difficulties Derrida confronted in this passage can be attributed to those of his attempt to unite Heideggerian and Saussurean difference. Ibid., p. 75.

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exclude writing narrowly defined from speech, explaining the possibility of the contamination that Saussure decried. Derrida found resources for his claim in Saussure’s text itself. It was one of Saussure’s major theses that difference was fundamental to the production of linguistic value. In Saussurean linguistics, meaning is produced not by an immediate referential relationship of the signifier to its signified, but rather by the differences that exist between signs themselves. If a language teacher pronounced the word bleu on presenting a blue vase, it would not be clear whether she were referring to the color, the shape, or the object. If, however, she presented many different vases of different colors, along with the words rouge, bleu, and vert, then by a correlation of the differences between signifiers (the color words) and the differences between the signifieds (the vases), it would be possible to develop a sense of the “value” of the words, what they meant. As Derrida argued, the emphasis on differences placed the materiality of the sign to one side. Whatever the state of the signifiers themselves, the differences between them could not be classed as phonic or graphic – they were inaudible and invisible.110 At this level, writing and speech could not be distinguished. But at a more fundamental level, writing or the trace seemed a better model for the priority of difference. At several moments of the Cours Saussure was compelled to use the model of writing in order to illustrate certain essential characteristics of language, including its arbitrariness (the purely conventional relationship of a letter to its sound), its negative and differential nature (the letter t is defined by its difference from all other letters), and hence the inconsequence of variations in form and material (it does not matter how and where t is written, as long as it is still distinguishable from the rest of the alphabet).111 Even though writing was excluded from Saussure’s analyses, he had to call on it to elucidate his arguments. Saussure’s appeal to writing was not a mere slip or an expendable illustration of his ideas. It resulted, according to Derrida, from the philosophical proximity of a traditional understanding of writing to the major claim of Saussure’s linguistics. As understood within the metaphysical tradition, speech was the immediate unity of signifier and signified; it seemed to privilege a referential understanding of language by making that relationship primary. But writing was prevented from making a direct appeal to the signified from which it was buffered by another level of signification: 110 111

Derrida continued with a lengthy analysis of the disputes of Jakobson and Martinet with Hjelmslev over the necessary phonic quality of the signifier, which was added for the book, ibid., pp. 78–90. Ibid., p. 326 note.

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speech. Writing, as the signifier of a signifier (the written word signifying the spoken), better modeled the horizontal relationship between signifiers that Saussure’s linguistics prioritized. For Derrida, writing was a privileged metaphor in the structuralist account of all language, including speech:112 I would wish . . . to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the “original,” “natural,” etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing.113

The emphasis on arche-writing and différance allowed Derrida to criticize the search for origins, as had Althusser before him. If arche-writing (or the trace as it was also called) was the “origin of sense,” Derrida asserted that this “amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general.”114 Origins, as we saw for Althusser, required the original unity of heterogeneous elements, signifier and signified. In Derrida’s words, it demanded the “reference to a signified able to ‘take place’ in its intelligibility, before its ‘fall,’ before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below.”115 If, on the other hand, Derrida’s trace was “originary,” preceding any distinction between signifier and signified, sensible and intelligible, there could be no absolute origin, for the trace was always the trace of something else, refusing the absolute immediacy of the signifier and signified, in a process of constant deferral. Though Derrida’s approach to origins seemed to mirror many of Althusser’s claims, there was one major difference. While Althusser refused the search for origins, Derrida absorbed the origin itself into the play of signifiers. Rather than restricting the realm of signifiers, excluding any claims about origins and the signified, Derrida argued that the origin and the signified were already worked over by différance and the trace. His was an expansive rather than restrictive version of structuralism. It was writing that provided the model for this expansive version. In writing, because the signified (speech) was itself a signifier, the signified did not need to be excluded, for it too was part of the general system of signification. 112

113

This curious linking between the intentionality of the signifier, i.e. its intended relationship to a signified, and the differential relationship between signifiers is problematic, as Joshua Kates has shown, and constitutes perhaps the greatest difficulty in Derrida’s attempt to translate his phenomenological investigations into structuralist language. That is, the identification of the movement of deferral from a signifier to the signified (which is itself a signifier) with the diacritical relationship between signifiers is more complex and fraught than Derrida allowed. See Kates, Essential History, p. 181. 114 Ibid., p. 95. 115 Ibid., p. 13. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 56.

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Thus, whereas Althusser condemned the appeal beyond structure – in Husserl’s case, to the transcendental – as ideological, Derrida was able to rehabilitate phenomenology within the structuralist framework. Derrida suggested that just as the origin was already a trace, Husserl’s transcendental was already a sign.116 The differences between Derrida and Althusser are clearest in Derrida’s discussion of Louis Hjelmslev, the Danish theorist of glossematics. Unlike Jakobson and Martinet, Hjelmslev had recognized that the differential nature of the sign prohibited a privilege of the voice, but Derrida suggested that he remained nonetheless metaphysical. The discussion of Hjelmslev could well have been a substitute for Althusser himself, for Hjelmslev rigorously adhered to a formal linguistics, detached from any material or immaterial substance, such as phonics or logic. In particular, by concentrating on formal systems, like Althusser, Hjelmslev refused any appeal to “experience.” But for Derrida “experience” was absolutely central. From a phenomenological standpoint formal systems had no validity if they were not grounded in the “experience” of the transcendental sphere. Derrida considered that the presentation of formal systems was itself an “experience.” Without a reference to this more fundamental experience (which put what was traditionally understood as experience “in parentheses”), Derrida claimed that “the decisive progress accomplished by a formalism respectful of the originality of its object, of ‘the immanent system of its objects,’ [would be] plagued by a scientificist objectivism, that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed metaphysics.”117 Hjelmslev’s and Althusser’s claims, by rejecting lived experience, were threatened by what Husserl had called the crisis of the sciences. Althusser’s and Hjelmslev’s retort would have been that this appeal to experience was necessarily ideological, because by reaching beyond the formal system of signifiers, it sought to ground science in the vagaries of undisciplined and prejudicial subjectivity.118 But because in Derrida’s schema, this transcendental was already structured by arche-writing, it did not conform to traditional presentations. Rather than a move outside of the formal system to find a transcendental origin, that transcendental ground revealed itself to be another manifestation of the formal system of writing: “the value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased . . . the origin did not even disappear . . . it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus 116 117

Here Derrida referred to his analyses in Speech and Phenomena. 118 Ibid., p. 60. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 61

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becomes the origin of the origin.”119 Arche-writing and différance preceded the difference between the formal and transcendental, the world and the “lived,” appearance and that which appeared, because it structured both. By appealing to writing Derrida was able to absorb his previous work on phenomenology into the general movement of the sign, reframing it in structuralist language. As in Speech and Phenomena, where the movement of différance structured the experience of time and created the spatial categories of inside and outside, arche-writing allowed the articulation of speech and writing, temporalization and spacing, the transcendental and the formal, phenomenology and structuralism. While the turn to writing allowed Derrida to bring Althusser and Husserl together, the formal and the transcendental, it also allowed a rapprochement between Saussure and Heidegger. Derrida argued that in certain parts of Heidegger’s work, and especially in his criticism of Nietzsche, the thought of Being threatened to become a transcendental signified, a “primum signatum . . . implied by all categories or all determined significations.”120 It was a claim that was corroborated, according to Derrida’s schema, by Heidegger’s constant reference to the “voice of Being.” At these moments, for all his precautions, Heidegger too seemed metaphysical, because he appeared to posit Being beyond the beings in which it was “signified.” But in grammatology, as we have seen, the difference between a signifier and a signified (the ontological difference), could be subsumed under the general difference between signifiers (Saussure’s difference). In Heidegger’s case, this would mean that Being too was structured like a signifier, another element in the play of signification. As Derrida was careful to make clear, Heidegger only implied that Being was a transcendental signified in certain parts of his work. The move to the primacy of différance followed gestures elsewhere in Heidegger’s thought, and functioned in its “horizons.” As Derrida had often asserted since his introduction to the Origin of Geometry, for Heidegger the sense of Being was nothing (rien) outside of its ontic manifestations; there was no Being detached from a particular determined form, and so the difference between signified and signifier was nothing (rien) too.121 It is for this reason that Heidegger, in his later writings, was increasingly concerned to cross “Being” out – what Derrida called the “last writing of an era.”122 Just as the signified was the trace of the trace, a creation of the fundamental movement 119 121 122

120 Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 22. For this reason we should also be wary of Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger here, which seems to concede a little too much to his Normalien students. Ibid., p. 23.

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of signification, so too the “sense of Being” was produced by the movement between its determined forms. The difference between Being and beings was not the difference between two “things,” but rather was made apparent by the instability of any particular ontic determination of Being. Différance then preceded and conditioned the “ontico-ontological difference and its ground (Grund) in the ‘transcendence of Dasein,’” which had first to be thought before being “struck out.”123 The ontological difference may have been struck out, but its function of destabilizing any determined system was preserved. It was because Saussure’s difference had been contaminated with Heidegger’s that Derrida was able to unsettle structuralism’s synchronic systems. The reinscription of the ontological difference in the language of structuralism had a profound effect that is worth noting here. It shifted the emphasis in Derrida’s work from the transcendence of Dasein to the movement of signification. Rather than the transcendence of any determined structure being an essential attribute of human finitude, now it was the internal differing and deferring of the signifier that powered systematic change. For this reason, on outlining the characteristics of a new grammatology, Derrida made clear that it must release itself from the concept of “Man.” Drawing on the work of the anthropologist André LeroiGourhan, Derrida suggested that “the unity of man and of the human adventure . . . [is] a stage or an articulation in the history of life – of which we will here call différance – as history of the gramme.”124 Différance preceded and constituted Man, and a genetic “pro-gramme” was more fundamental than any distinction between Man or beast, uniting all forms of “life” from the amoeba to the new electronic programs of a cybernetic world. In his adoption of the structuralist language that was common currency at the Ecole, Derrida had shifted closer to Althusser’s version of antihumanism where “Man” was the product of a given historical moment rather than that which denied the very possibility of such a determined totality. The strengthening of his antihumanist position was not, however, sufficient to ingratiate Derrida with the Althusserians. The signifier in Derrida’s work, by encompassing the seemingly recalcitrant domain of experience – 123

124

This was the passage that played a central role in my argument in chapter 6. Kates makes this section a “topic sentence for the entire discussion of Grammatology.” Kates, Essential History, p. 162. In his reading notes, Althusser gave this sense of “striking out” considerable prominence, and we can perhaps see his hand in Derrida’s decision to promote the footnote into the text and vastly expand the Heidegger section in his 1967 book. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 84.

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Husserl’s transcendental and Heidegger’s Being – was markedly different from Althusser’s. We can see why the Groupe Spinoza thought Derrida’s break with phenomenology was only a pseudo-rupture. By turning to writing, the “signifier of the signifier” as the primary model of linguistics, Derrida made everything a type of discourse; he effaced the difference between the real and the discursive, signified and signifier, phenomenology and structuralism, ideology and science. Though Derrida had presented grammatology as a science of writing, the very trajectory of his discussion showed that writing both preceded and threatened the distinction between the real object and the object of discourse, and thus, in Althusser’s view, science itself. Derrida’s turn to writing, despite all its attractive similarities to Althusser’s new mode of reading, was in fact a radical critique of the Althusserian project. It was for this reason that Derrida eventually declared that grammatology could not simply be a science. Science in Althusser’s model relied on a secure and rigorous opposition between signifier and signified, the object of knowledge and the real object, and so it was dependent on “a certain kind of structurally and axiologically determined relationship between speech and writing,” more specifically the idea of phonetic writing. Since arche-writing preceded and constituted this division between writing and speech, it was a condition for the rise of science itself. Arche-writing was the “condition of possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the episteme.”125 Simultaneously condition and object, the science of writing should . . . look for its object at the roots of scientificity . . . A science of the possibility of science? A science of science that would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics?126

Exceeding the bounds of science, arche-writing could not simply be its object. As the common condition of the real and the discursive object, the sensible and the intelligible, the transcendental and the formal, archewriting would always resist the attempt to reduce it down to one side. In particular, preceding and conditioning the oppositions of presence and absence, arche-writing “is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of presence. The latter orders all objectivity of the object and all relation of knowledge.”127 Science could only study the “work and the fact of différance, the determined differences and the determined 125 126 127

Ibid., p. 27. See also Althusser, Lire le Capital, vol. I, p. 89. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 27. Final sentence added in the 1967 book. Ibid., p. 57. See also the French version, in Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 124.

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presences that they make possible. There cannot be a science of différance itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain nonorigin.”128 The foundation of the concepts in which science worked, the very ground of the distinction between intelligible and sensible, and so the possibility of their articulation, could not be subordinated to that science. The science of writing, then, far from further supporting the idea of science, or indeed writing, shook “logocentrism” itself.129 Science, presupposing the very oppositions between sensible and intelligible that différance and the trace preceded, was caught up in a metaphysics that Derrida criticized. In an attack that must have been particularly bruising for Althusser, Derrida suggested that even Spinoza, one of Althusser’s most important influences, had not escaped onto-theology.130 For all the progress they had made, “structuralism” and “Marxism” and implicitly Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, by maintaining the sharp distinction between signified and signifier, the real object and the object of knowledge, and thus ideology and science, were beholden to metaphysics.131 conclusion The history of Derrida’s thought from 1964 till 1967 has a great appeal for the intellectual historian. As his context changed so too did Derrida’s philosophy: when he moved from the traditionalist Sorbonne, where phenomenology still held sway, to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, perhaps the most important center of the structuralist revolution, Saussure replaced Husserl and Heidegger as his most visible influence. In his effort to engage with the Normaliens and make his work relevant, Derrida adopted his students’ language, emphasized his adherence to their theoretical antihumanism, and like them criticized the search for origins and an extra-scientific ground for objective knowledge. Moreover, in the Normalien negotiation between two antihumanisms – “Man” presented as a dangerous illusion, or his humbling in the face of the divine – it was the constructivist claims of Derrida’s mentor Althusser that won out. Derrida moved away from an earlier reliance on the transcendence of Dasein as the motor of historical change, replacing it with the internal movement of signification that forever deferred the moment of pure presence. Given all these changes, one 128 130

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 63. 131 Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 71.

129

See ibid., p. 33.

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might be tempted to see an epistemological break, separating the old and the young Derrida. But Derrida was always suspicious of the idea of such a break, a concept, which, he remarked later, “is much used or abused today.”132 The very problematic of writing and différance, which allowed Derrida to reinscribe his earlier phenomenological investigations into the new philosophy, showed that the trace of the past was irreducible. Discontinuity is never total, and context is never entirely determinative. Rigorously adhering to structuralist language, a privilege of signification over subjectivity, Derrida showed that structuralism could not claim the stability and certainty to which it aspired; that ideology could never be entirely reduced, and science was never pure. Just as in his early work, in which Derrida had hoped to show the limitations of human thought to make room for faith, now his form of post- or neo-structuralism challenged the pretensions of a hubristic humanity. The still readable traces of Derrida’s early phenomenological and religious leanings in Of Grammatology made his students wary of him. In the 1960s at least, Derrida never developed the type of following enjoyed by Lacan or Althusser. For though Derrida was always reticent in making his political positions explicit – a reticence that has led to charges of apoliticism – his ambivalence towards his students’ political project was clear to them in his careful criticism of their philosophical ideas. In the Ecole Normale Supérieure all philosophy was inherently political, given meaning by the students who saw it as a powerful tool in the pursuit of tangible ends, and even the abstract analyses of linguistics had, for them, an immediate political relevance. For these young French men who looked for redemption in the sureness of science and in distant revolutions, it was Derrida who constantly reminded them that no science is free from ideology, and no upheaval of the social order, however foreign, can be entirely just. 132

Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 24.

Epilogue

A challenge to the Normalien political program was not long in coming. In the early spring of 1968, there were rumblings of student discontent at the Nanterre University campus, just to the west of Paris. Predominantly, the students complained of living and study conditions at the university, which had suffered most from the poorly planned and rushed higher-education expansion in the early 1960s. But the sense of unrest was bolstered by widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, seen as exemplary of the Third World and communist resistance to the capitalist West. Posters of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung could be found plastered around university buildings. The events in Nanterre caused relatively little stir, but in early May the same complaints could be heard on the streets of Paris. As a sign of solidarity with the leaders of the Nanterre demonstrations, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who were facing a disciplinary hearing, some students organized a poorly attended protest at the Sorbonne on May 3. The Sorbonne Rector, Jean Roche, and the National Education Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, overreacting and fearing the expansion of the Nanterre disturbances, ran roughshod over the traditional privileges of the university by inviting the police to break up the gathering. The decision escalated the unrest, and, on the evening of the May 10, barricades were erected in the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, channeling the ghosts of 1848 and the Paris Commune. Violence erupted in clashes between the students and the increasingly unrestrained riot police, the CRS, who resorted to their batons and tear gas. The unrest caught the Althusserians at the ENS off guard. On the face of it they shared common goals with the students from Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Both criticized the capitalist West and in particular its often exploitative relationship with the emerging Third World. Indeed, Reading Capital had been an indispensable handbook for student Marxists across Paris since its publication in 1965, and Althusserian vocabulary 295

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had infiltrated often unacknowledged into the myriad pamphlets and speeches of May. But in the event, Althusser and his students were no longer the avant-garde. The student movement had begun elsewhere with other student leaders, and the Normaliens had to play catch-up. Even as barricades were constructed on the Rue d’Ulm, the Ecole’s most important role was in the provision of medical care and as a haven for injured students. The fate of the revolution was no longer in its hands. As we saw in the last chapter, the Althusserians had placed their hopes on a realignment of the political and theoretical orientation of the international communist movement and particularly of the PCF. But, for the most part, the 68ers ignored the Communist Party, and the revolts in the Latin Quarter seemed at first detached from the needs of the working class, who only joined the movement in the major strikes that were unleashed the following week. It was this disconnect from the working classes and the labor movement that made Althusser’s students so suspicious of many of the revolutionaries. Stuck in their own “petit-bourgeois” concerns – sexual liberation and conditions at the university – the students demonstrated precisely the type of ideological and utopian thinking that Althusser had attacked.1 The antipathy was not one-way. The disciplined theoretical overhaul urged by Althusser and his students was out of place in the carnivalesque atmosphere of May, where most participants were poorly versed in current philosophy, and which thrived in its diversity of competing groupuscules. Insofar as it is possible to extract broad trends from the ideas of the 68ers, their concerns and hopes matched better the playful analyses of the situationists than the dry and lengthy discussions by the structuralists. Lefebvre’s depiction of alienation in everyday life seemed more topical than Althusser’s presentation of over-determination, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the only established philosopher invited to address the students at the Sorbonne. As Nanterre psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu wrote, “the characteristics of ‘bureaucracies,’ to which the students seem definitively allergic, curiously find themselves in the structural method.” While the Althusserians defined ideology as the misrecognition of social and economic structures, the emphasis on illusory human agency, and the rejection of science, the soixante-huitards saw it as the subservience of human creativity to such structures, and regarded science as an integrating technique that hoped to 1

See the notes to this effect of the Groupe Spinoza, ALT2, A11.04.04, which tied the events to “petit-bourgeois ideology.”

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quash dissent. For them, “the structuralist era in France has done nothing but transpose into the domain of ideas the patent immobilization of the social structures of the corresponding epoch.”2 Humanity had to be freed from a system that wanted to turn everyone into mere cogs in a machine. Symbolically, “Althusser a` rien [Down with Althusser]” was scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne.3 His austere rereading of historical materialism had little place, when, as Andrew Feenberg has it, “poetry ruled the streets.”4 Althusser’s students did not fare much better: Macherey was booed at the Sorbonne, Balibar was chased out of Vincennes, and the Maoist student leader Robert Linhart, editor of Les Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, had a nervous breakdown.5 Locked in his ENS thurne in the first few sleepless days of May, Linhart struggled to find an appropriate response to what at the beginning seemed a purely petit-bourgeois student revolt. Indecision and inaction ruled. Before the events were over, Linhart admitted himself to a clinic.6 His Althusser-inspired UJC-ml collapsed, and the new Gauche Prolétarienne was formed by some of its members, careful not to fall into the errors of “theoreticism” again.7 This political weakness precipitated the decline of the philosophical influence of the Althusserians. Though Althusser would develop his own thought and perform an autocritique, the days of his hegemony at the school were over.8 derrida: we revolutionaries We have very little sense of Derrida’s involvement in the events of May. He has not written directly about it, and there exists, to my knowledge, no record of what he did in those crucial days. We do, however, have one document stamped May 12: a paper entitled “The Ends of Man.” Derrida commented on the timing of his essay, suggesting that it was marked by the events. It was clear that Derrida expressed considerable sympathy for 2 3

4

5 6 7 8

Didier Anzieu, writing as Epistemon, Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France (Paris: Fayard, 1968), pp. 28–9. As many have pointed out, “Althusser a` rien” is a homophone of “Al, tu sers a` rien [Al, you are hopeless].” See Keith Reader, The May 1968 Events in France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 63. Andrew Feenberg When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2001). See also Clément Rosset writing as Roger Crémant, Les Matinées structuralistes (Paris: R. Laffont, 1969), which mocks the Lacano-Althusserians at the ENS. Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. II, p. 120. Hamon and Rotman, Génération, pp. 468 and 480–1. See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 51–60. ´ ements d’autocritique (Paris: Hachette, 1974). See Louis Althusser, El´

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the students. He referred to 1968 events as a “shaking movement [mouvement d’ébranlement],” aligning them with the central theme in his essay, a “shaking” of humanism, the “end of Man.”9 Derrida gave the paper in October that year at a Franco-American conference at the SUNY conference center at Oyster Bay on Long Island.10 In his opening remarks, he discussed the conditions of possibility for such international philosophical conferences. They presupposed both the national differences that made them necessary and a “common element” that made a discussion of those differences possible. More specifically, they required “the representation of a certain transparent ether that all the participants must have, that would be none other than what is called the universality of philosophical discourses.” But such a representation was false. International conferences were not in fact universal, but met predominantly in certain geographical regions (Europe and America), and the “societies, languages, cultures, and political or national organizations with which no exchange in the form of an international philosophical colloquium is possible are of a considerable number and extent.”11 This geographical limitation – the Occidentalism of a certain form of philosophy – was brought further into relief by the theme of the conference, “Language and Human Nature.” A conversation solely between EuroAmerican philosophers, the conference purported to speak for all mankind. It seemed yet another example of Western arrogance. This did not mean that such a conference repeated the very claims of the West, nor that it endorsed the West’s “imperialistic” goals. Indeed, many participants had expressed their opposition to the War in Vietnam. But Derrida asserted that their opposition “was not bothersome [ne gêne pas].” It was accepted – police did not disrupt the conference – because it posed no direct threat to Western dominance. International conferences such as that in New York did not shake the very foundations of Western society; they rather reinforced the sense that Western societies themselves could understand and speak for Man in all his universality. This was the certainty that – beyond any particular policy positions, including that on such a major issue as the Vietnam War – had to be challenged, a “shaking” to which Derrida wanted to contribute. Those who were a real threat to this certainty – and here Derrida referred to Martin Luther King and the 1968 student movement – were met with force: the assassin’s bullet or the police officer’s baton. 9 10 11

Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp. 114 and 134 (translation modified). See the conference proceedings published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (June 1969). Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 112 (translation modified).

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The soliciting of the concept of Man and the student revolution of 1968, twin ébranlements, “played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other, whether a ‘linguistic’ relationship (where very quickly the question of the limits of everything leading back to the question of the meaning of Being arises), or ethnological, economic, political, military relations, etc.”12 Such were the sense and stakes of Derrida’s analysis of the current situation: “Where does France stand with respect to Man?” Derrida hoped to participate and aid this shaking, to prevent it from being reabsorbed once again by a system that too often domesticated its rebels and turned hopes of escape into false exits. Philosophically, France had turned against “man” defined for and by Western scholars, but the turn-around was neither simple nor complete. “We are,” Derrida wrote, in a “period” that has brought humanism into question, an “antihumanist and antianthropologist ebb.”13 But by using the pronoun “we [nous],” Derrida marked the complexities of the current situation – its difficult and contestatory relationship to humanism. For as we shall see, Derrida considered that the “we” – so close to “we-men” – could play the same falsely universalizing role as the word “man.” Though it was an antihumanist “we,” it was stuck within the ethnocentric system it hoped to escape.14 To aid this present-day nous, to secure and promote its shaking and deconstruction of humanism, Derrida provided a history whose subject was the on. In French the pronoun on hesitates between “we” and “they,” indeterminate with respect to the speaker; in this case, a hesitation between the on of a detached history, or the on of collective autobiography. Such indeterminacy is all the more significant because the history that Derrida recounted repeats the story I have elaborated over the past 300 pages: a story that was at once his, and that of French philosophy more broadly. Derrida’s account started as we did, with humanism. In the early postwar period, he argued, humanism was “a sort of common ground of Christian or atheist existentialism, of the philosophy of values (spiritualist or not) or personalisms of the right or the left, of Marxism in the classical style,” a unity mirrored on the political scene with the shared “anthopologism” of communists, socialists, and Christian Democrats.15 The main culprit, JeanPaul Sartre, though rejigging the concept of Man to detach it from its earlier 12 13 14 15

Ibid., pp. 134–5. See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 282. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 118. Cf. ibid., p. 119. When used in the text, nous most often refers to a residual humanism in antihumanist projects. See especially pp. 123–4. Ibid., p. 117.

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spiritualist and metaphysical presuppositions, never called into question the unity of Man. “What one [on] then called the ‘réalité-humaine’”was still Man, and this facilitated the translation of the “we” of the philosopher to “we-men”; the philosopher was allowed to use his own experience to act as a spokesman for all humanity. Matching his earlier complaints, Derrida argued that this unjust privilege of a particular human experience – “what one [on] had thus named in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God . . . [T]he project of becoming God as the project constituting the réalité-humaine” – marked Sartre’s step into onto-theology.16 This uncritically assumed consensus about the fundamental unity of “Man” was challenged in the 1950s by new readings of phenomenology. It is true that the developments in phenomenology were, by 1968, sideshows to the dominant trend in the French intellectual arena: structuralism, which in its turn against “Man” had rejected Husserl and Heidegger as humanists rather than working through the antihumanist implications of their thought. But in a phrase where the trace of the je remains particularly strong, Derrida asserted that this “does not exclude that one [on] had made some progress in France in the reading of Hegel, Husserl, or of Heidegger, nor that this progress had led to the questioning of the humanist insistence.”17 Derrida with others had come to recognize that the claims of the German phenomenologists went beyond anthropologism, which was a determined and regional science, secondary to and derivative of broader concerns. Humanistic interpretations of Husserl privileged “descriptive and regional work” and “one [on]” ignored the “transcendental questions” that grounded it, where the phenomenological reduction bracketed all questions of mundane objects including “Man.”18 Moving beyond anthropologism, which like psychologism and historicism could evoke a crisis of the sciences, writers such as Tran Duc Thao, Suzanne Bachelard, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti proposed a transcendental phenomenology, where the vagaries of human experience were sidelined in favor of the sure development of science. The same humanist misreading had dominated the initial Heidegger reception in France. Humanist philosophers restricted themselves to Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology, the existentiel analyses of Man, and in their commentaries and interpretations they bypassed the ontological 16 18

Ibid., pp. 115–16 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 117 (translation modified).

17

Ibid., p. 119 (translation modified).

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questions that constituted Heidegger’s explicit project. For Heidegger, the French emphasis on Man, like all onto-theologies, obscured the true relationship with Being. It was, as we saw in chapter 5, the argument made by Christian Heideggerians like Henri Birault, who urged the rejection of humanism as a first step towards an understanding of Being, and ultimately the Being of God. And yet, in 1968, Derrida recognized a humanism at a higher level in both German thinkers, and implicitly their later French interpreters: they demonstrated, as Derrida argued, a “sublation of Man [relève de l’homme].”19 For Husserl, though transcendental phenomenology exceeded and comprised anthropology, “one [on] can read in that same opening the teleology that commands Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology,” which announced itself to “humanity.”20 Reason teleologically uncovered itself in a transcendental History. This teleology of reason and transcendental phenomenology, as Husserl noted, “functions in every man, the animal rationale, no matter how primitive he is.”21 It was still a “Man” who grounded the transcendental and allowed its development and movement, even as this transcendental demanded the surpassing of the regional science of “Man.” The end (telos) of Man coincided with the drive to move beyond him (the end of Man). The same was true for Heidegger. Derrida argued that the question of Being was always inextricably linked to what he called the “proper of man.” In Being and Time Heidegger had stressed that “we” always have a pre-understanding of Being. Despite his distrust of the word “Man” and preference for “Dasein,” the latter was still “that being that we are ourselves” that had privileged access to Being; Man was always “close [proche] to Being.” This was why Dasein (or “we”) was that being that had to be interrogated to open up ontological questions. As Derrida summarized his argument, “one [on] sees then that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing but man.”22 In the later works, even after the explicit turn against humanism, the thinking of Being (objective genitive) was always the “thinking of man” (subjective genitive).23 All the metaphors of the clearing, or the Lichtung, were understood in the sense of this proximity of Man to Being. Man was still privileged in Heidegger’s thinking, and he resisted metaphysics and 19 20 21 22

Relever was Derrida’s new translation of the Hegelian Aufheben, which meant to cancel, preserve, and raise to a new level. See “Le Puits et la pyramide,” in ibid. Ibid., p. 122 (translation modified). Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” cited in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 122. 23 Ibid., p. 128. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp. 126–7 (translation modified).

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humanism only to respect better the “dignity of man.” Derrida argued that even as Heidegger turned against humanism (constituting the end of Man) for the thought of Being, the thought of Being was Man’s end or telos. In both Husserl and Heidegger, the study of Man as a regional science was made subservient to a broader phenomenology that, as primary, was no longer able to draw on anthropology’s insights. But, as Derrida showed, the subject of both Heidegger and Husserl’s phenomenology was still human. In both one could recognize a conspiratorial complicity between the writer and the reader, an unspoken understanding between the “we” or “we-men” to whom the meaning of Being was always accessible. In moving beyond an ontic humanity, Husserl and Heidegger had merely displaced Man from the object to the subject of philosophy. For Husserl the ambivalent turn away from/back to Man operated according to the “essential motif” of a “reduction to meaning [sens].” Similarly for Heidegger, the “destruction” of “metaphysical humanism is produced initially on the basis of a hermeneutical question on the meaning or the truth of Being.” Husserl and Heidegger rejected anthropology as a regional science because it had always impeded the uncovering of sense and meaning. But because this was the traditional project of philosophy, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies were never fully radical. They attempted “an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments and stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language.”24 In their relève of humanism, the essence of Man was merely replaced by the “we” that had a privileged access to meaning. Both humanism and the philosophies that wanted to overturn it implied an unjustifiable universality. It was this residual humanism that legitimated the structuralist critique of phenomenology: “what shakes perhaps today, is it not this security of that which is close, the co-belonging and co-propriety of the name of Man and the name of Being, such as this co-propriety inhabits, and is inhabited by the language of the West.” The breaking away from this concern with meaning, the “reduction of meaning” as opposed to the phenomenological “reduction to meaning,” constituted the most significant advance by the structuralists. In terms that resembled the analyses of the Althusserians, Derrida argued that the structuralist project showed that “meaning [sens]” could only be understood “on the basis of a ‘formal’ organization which in 24

Ibid., pp. 134–5.

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itself has no meaning.” There was no ultimate and transcendental meaning to which we had access, everything was dependent upon local conditions: “one [on] conceives that the reduction of meaning operates by means of a kind of break with a thinking of Being which has all the traits of a relève (Aufhebung) of humanism.”25 In reducing meaning, the structuralists, and more specifically the Althusserians at the ENS, participated in the general antihumanist movement. They targeted the very metaphysical ideas that retained phenomenology as a humanism, the sense of the privileged access of a (Western) Man to universal meaning. In this sense, Derrida implied, the Althusserians shared a common goal with the 68ers, in particular the resistance to the Vietnam War that Derrida noted at the beginning of his paper. Both hoped to separate themselves from bourgeois and ideological Western ideas and install themselves in the “outside” “in a discontinuous and irruptive manner.”26 But such an approach posed many dangers. The Althusserian attack on meaning could all too well be seen as complicit with the system it attacked. As the students who denigrated the work of the Althusserians attested, the structuralists threatened to reinscribe their thought into the old system, it was another part of the machine that crushed human creativity. Derrida suggested that they ran the danger of “inhabiting more na¨ıvely and more strictly than ever the inside one [on] declares one has deserted.” As he elaborated, “the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the ‘new’ terrain on the oldest ground.”27 It was the same criticism that Derrida had detailed in Of Grammatology: by using the old opposition between signifier and signified, structuralism maintained the very metaphysics that it tried to overcome. The difficulties of escaping ethnocentrism and the constant danger of subtly reinscribing old systems were common to both the phenomenological immanent critique of metaphysics and the structuralist attempt at a clean break: “from the inside in which ‘we [nous] are,’ one [on] has nothing but the choice between two strategies,” and yet, because neither could fully overcome the system they criticized, “the choice . . . cannot be simple or unique. A new writing must weave and interlace the two motifs.”28 Writing, Derrida declared, as was his central thesis in Of Grammatology, allowed a convergence of phenomenology and structuralism, where each prevented the other from falling into its own particular errors. Structuralism would 25 27

26 See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 282. Ibid., pp. 133–4. 28 Ibid., p. 135 (translation modified). Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 135.

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limit phenomenology’s attempt to revert to a humanism of “meaning,” while phenomenology would bring to attention the dangers of an old metaphysical vocabulary, which it would deconstruct from within. The end of Man was only conceivable from the perspective of a grammatology that worked between these two “ends of Man.” Such a deconstruction could never fully detach itself from “man,” and yet it continually worked at the undoing of all humanisms. In his history of the “on,” every type of humanism was the result of the overcoming of a prior more metaphysical form. Even Sartre’s humanism, Derrida noted, resulted from “one [on]’s” attempt to break with the old spiritualist ideas about the essence of Man “with all its metaphysical heritage.”29 So too the residual humanism in Heidegger’s “proper of Man” was in the process of its own deconstruction in his critique of the “close [proche]”: “In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of Man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocity of the end, in the play of telos and death.”30 The history of the “on” gives us the story of the continual effacement and reinscription of Man. Fittingly so because, like its German counterpart man, the French on was itself etymologically tied to the homme, a Man effaced by the process of linguistic transformation and history. There was no clean break, no coupure épistémologique, no doing away with history. Rather the always insufficient attempts to move beyond “man” were themselves part of the broader history of the on/homme. It was the constant play of différance, the movement beyond “man,” that never reached an absolute outside. Where the Althusserians urged a clean break, Derrida recommended play and the dance of Nietzsche’s Overman. Through an understanding of Heidegger and phenomenology, an understanding first expressed in a religious argument about Man’s finitude, structures could be destabilized, their claims to totality threatened, without supplanting them with newer, better models. Derrida’s history was the history of play, of the constant overcoming of humanism, without thereby asserting new and more all-encompassing systems. This play, the traces of Derrida’s theological and phenomenological past, brought him into line with the “mouvement d’ébranlement” in Paris that had left its stamp on the paper’s composition. As the situationists wrote, “the proletarian revolutions will be festivals or they will not be at all, because the life that they announce will itself be created under the sign 29

Ibid., p. 115.

30

Ibid., p. 134.

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of the festival [fête].”31 Far more than the dry theory of his Althusserian students, Derrida’s play made common cause with the language and ideals of the revolution. If in his 1967 Of Grammatology, Derrida attempted to mediate between phenomenologists and structuralists, expounding a kind of prestructuralism, the fervor and carnivalesque that marked 1968 allowed him to be appropriated as part of the new philosophy. Alongside Deleuze’s anti-psychiatry and celebration of difference, Barthes’s playful structuralism in S/Z, and the developing “post-structuralism” of Michel Foucault, Derrida’s thought became emblematic of postmodernism. As Lévi-Strauss and Althusser dropped by the wayside, Derrida sat at the threshold of a new intellectual age. In this conclusion we remain at a crossroads. We finish with the “events,” events that would reshape the intellectual landscape of postwar France, as they would play an important role in the reception and future development of Derrida’s thought. And yet at this vigil of a bright new day, the hope of another beginning, Derrida returned to the past, detailed his own history and the intellectual history of postwar France that were united in the “on” of his narrative. Derrida’s strategy here is instructive. While he has often been charged with neglecting history, Derrida’s joyful plural readings remained open to the future not because they broke with the past, but rather because they reveled in its possibilities. 31

The Poverty of Student Life, Situationists International, cited in Hamon and Rotman, Génération, p. 399. For an analysis of the concept of “play” in Situationist discourse, its relationship to anthropology and ethnography, and its differences from the post-structuralist version, see Douglas Smith, “Giving the Game Away: Play and Exchange in Situationism and Structuralism,” Modern and Contemporary France (November 2005).

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Index

Baas, Emile, 27 Bachelard, Gaston, 1, 2, 147, 148, 150–1, 162, 163, 228 Bachelard, Suzanne, 1, 146, 147, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 165, 169, 179, 183, 245, 300 Badiou, Alain, 15, 216, 232, 261, 264, 273 Balibar, Etienne, 261, 265, 273, 277, 279, 283, 297 Barsotti, Bernard, 151 Barthes, Roland, 13, 274, 305 Bass, Alan, 201 Bataille, Georges, 1, 186, 227 Bates, David, 9 Baudrillard, Jean, 2 Beaufret, Jean, 22, 38, 42, 43, 44, 68, 104, 120, 261, 264 Beaulieu, Jean, 101, 115, 116, 117 Bédarida, Renée, 4, 97 Bennington, Geoffrey, 9, 10 Berger, Gaston, 34, 120, 122, 229 Bergson, Henri, 85, 103, 225, 230, 232 Bernard, Claude, 234 Bernasconi, Robert, 199 Bevir, Mark, 9 Bianco, Lucien, 108 Bidault, Georges, 29 Biemel, Walter, 75 Bigo, Pierre, 27 Birault, Henri, 45, 123, 135, 173–6, 177, 178, 268, 272, 301 Blanchot, Maurice, 42 Bloch, Olivier, 101, 106 Blum, Léon, 24, 28, 84 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 205, 217 Borne, Etienne, 7, 38, 49, 56, 57, 64, 107, 176 Bourbaki, Nicholas, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 2, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 108, 232, 264 Bourg, Julian, 226, 262, 269, 297 Bouveresse, Jacques, 146, 147, 264 Bouvet, Maurice, 210

Abirached, Robert, 109 Adereth, Maxwell, 25 agrégation, 49, 89, 90, 102, 103, 127, 222–9, 232, 236, 242, 245, 250, 256, 257, 263, 264, 280 Demands of, 230–9 See also Jacques Derrida Albert, Henri, 227 Algerian War, 17, 68, 97, 108, 261, 274 Alleg, Henri, 17 Alquié, Fernand, 229 Althusser, Louis, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 41, 82, 85, 89, 93, 94, 99–100, 101, 102, 105, 150, 159, 183, 207, 216, 223, 231, 235, 261, 263, 264, 265–7, 268, 272, 273, 276, 277–8, 279–80, 281, 282, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295–7, 305 For Marx, 4, 266 Reading Capital, 259, 265, 266, 278, 283–4, 295 See also Groupe Spinoza antihumanism, 4, 268, 274–6, 293, 299, 302, 303 Christian, 4, 5, 22, 44–6, 173–6, 181, 269, 293, 300 Derrida’s, 5, 181, 183, 259, 267–73, 274, 275, 291, 298, 299, 304 Marxist, 4, 5, 22, 181, 183, 259, 265, 267, 269, 283, 291, 293 Sartrean, 304 See also Louis Althusser, Henri Birault, Jacques Derrida, Groupe Spinoza Anzieu, Didier, 296 Aristotle, 11, 224, 226 Arnaud, Pierre, 104, 106 Aron, Jean-Paul, 235 Aron, Raymond, 41, 68, 85, 100, 146 Artaud, Antonin, 198, 201 Artemko, Pierre, 116 Aubenque, Pierre, 103, 105, 230 Aucouturier, Michel, 109 Axelos, Kostas, 13

319

320

Index

Breckman, Warren, 9 Brentano, Franz, 128 Breuer, Josef, 204 Brunschvicg, Léon, 68 Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, 262, 265, 267, 297 Cahiers pour l’analyse, 207, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 265, 274, 278, 280, 285 See also Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, André Green, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire Camus, Albert, 1, 49, 108 Canguilhem, Georges, 41, 100, 147, 232, 264 Caputo, John, 5, 8 Carnap, Rudolf, 148, 153 Castro, Fidel, 262 Cavaillès, Jean, 2, 41, 132, 146, 147–50, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 169, 179 Caveing, Maurice, 94 Chaplin, Tamara, 233 Charbonnel, Jean, 91 Châtelet, François, 41 Che Guevara, 262 Cheah, Peng, 10 Chérif, Mustapha, 16 Cixous, Hélène, 6, 13 Clavel, Maurice, 269 Cogniot, Georges, 26 Cohen, Joseph, 6 Cohn-Bendit. Daniel, 295 Collège de France, 1, 55, 84, 89, 90, 152, 228 Comte, Auguste, 29, 63, 226 Corbin, Henri, 73, 74, 75, 104, 105 Corneille, Pierre, 193 Cornu, Auguste, 27, 41 Corvez, Olivier, 45 Cousin, Victor, 231, 256 Crémieux, Adolphe, 17 Critchley, Simon, 10 Critique (journal), 161, 189, 192, 198, 209 Cusset, François, 1 cybernetics, 291 Czarnecki, Jan, 18, 68 d’Harcourt, Philippe, 104 Daniélou, Jean, 28 Darbon, André, 51, 53 Davy, Georges, 226, 227, 234 de Beauvoir, Simone, 13, 50, 59, 69, 233 de Condillac, Etienne Bonnot, 231, 278 de Cusa, Nicholas, 140 de Gandillac, Maurice, 140 de Gaulle, Charles, 25, 261 de la Croix-Laval, Armand, 29 de Lubac, Henri, 29, 30

de Saussure, Ferdinand, 8, 211, 285–8, 290, 291, 293 de Vries, Hent, 5, 170 de Waelhens, Alphonse, 43, 75, 121 Debray, Régis, 261 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 2, 13, 227, 232, 305 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 183, 221, 229, 232, 264, 274, 276 and the agrégation, 127, 222, 223, 225, 227, 229, 230, 235, 236, 239–43, 244, 250, 256, 257, 258, 280 and atheism, 7, 8, 61, 63, 80, 175, 268, 272 childhood in Algeria, 10, 15–18, 49, 56, 108 and Christianity, 18 “Cogito and the History of Madness,” 194–7 and communism, 109, 112, 140, 144, 268, 294 deconstruction, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 160, 183, 188, 190, 191, 221, 222, 229, 239, 243, 255, 256–8, 259 différance, 8, 72, 75, 172, 179, 180, 183, 186, 190–1, 194, 198, 199, 200, 201–3, 215, 219, 220, 243, 251, 254, 257, 273, 282, 288, 290, 293 économie, 186, 187, 188, 271 editorial practices, 189 “Ellipsis,” 184 and existentialism, 2, 3, 7, 9, 48–55, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 70, 74, 78, 80, 104, 109–11, 136, 142, 143, 144, 221, 256 “Force and Signification,” 192–4, 197 “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 190, 200, 202, 211–15, 220 “Genesis and Structure,” 185 God, 63, 64, 67, 171–3, 177, 178–9, 180, 181, 184, 191, 197 GREPH, 257 and history, 9–12, 142, 145, 161, 165, 167–70, 179, 185, 188, 193, 194, 196, 271, 304 as Jewish philosopher, 6, 18, 19–20, 109 logocentrism, 121, 222, 293 and Marxism, 7, 9, 91, 131, 132, 138, 183, 267, 268, 275, 282, 285, 293 and morality, 50–5, 60 and nihilism, 51, 60–2, 67 Of Grammatology, 3, 158, 161, 183, 186, 190, 191, 200, 201, 202, 212, 259, 280–2, 293, 294, 303, 305 Origin of Geometry, 146, 147, 159–60, 161, 163–70, 173, 179–80, 181, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200, 254, 282, 290 as outsider, 3, 10, 15, 20, 221, 257 “La Parole Soufflée,” 198, 201 personal relationships, 1, 83, 85, 87, 92, 102, 107, 108, 109, 111, 183, 265, 276

Index and the Prix Cavaillès, 146, 180 The Problem of Genesis, 67, 113, 114, 127–31, 140–5, 151, 161, 162, 181 and psychoanalysis, 183, 202–3, 207, 211–15, 219 Reading of Heidegger, 2, 3, 67, 72, 73–8, 80, 82, 105, 140, 143–4, 173, 177, 180, 181, 191, 200, 201, 202, 219, 221, 271, 272, 290, 293, 301, 304 Reading of Husserl, 2, 3, 9, 67, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82, 109–11, 113, 117, 127–31, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 156, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 179, 181, 183, 221, 224, 239–42, 243–56, 258, 271, 289, 293, 301 and religious thought, 5–7, 8, 19, 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 80, 97, 109, 110, 111, 133, 136, 140, 142, 144, 176, 178, 180, 256, 259, 268, 272, 276, 304 religious turn, 7 “Restricted Economy,” 186 secret, 64 and skepticism, 6, 7, 12, 71 Speech and Phenomena, 3, 113, 183, 243–56, 257, 283, 289, 290 and structuralism, 2, 3, 7, 48, 183, 207, 221, 259, 267, 280–2, 285–8, 290, 293, 294, 302, 305 “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 186, 187, 197 “The Ends of Man,” 74, 305 “Violence and Metaphysics,” 187–8, 260, 269–72 writing, 10, 158, 160, 165, 166, 183, 193, 196, 197–201, 212–15, 220, 254, 281, 282, 285–90, 292, 303 Writing and Difference, 3, 183–6, 189, 192, 220 Derrida, Marguerite, 101, 108, 109, 113, 223 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 41, 146, 147, 154, 155, 160, 238–9, 249, 255, 256, 300 Descartes, René, 139, 175, 176, 195, 196, 226, 229, 233, 255 dialectic, 62, 67, 104, 106, 118, 132–6, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 150, 152, 155, 156, 179, 230, 237, 266, 279, 283 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 100 Dondeyne, Albert, 44, 46 Dosse, François, 135, 136, 261, 281, 297 Dreyfus, Alfred, 89 Dreyfus, Dina, 232 Ducrot, Oswald, 90, 106 Dufay, François, 101 Dufrenne, Mikel, 228, 230 Dumézil, Claude, 277 Duroux, Yves, 277 Dussort, Henri, 105, 106

321

Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), 1, 3, 50, 55, 81, 82, 83–93, 183, 207, 221, 235, 260, 263, 267, 293, 296 argot, 87, 264 Catholic groups, 3, 4, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 103, 105, 106, 109, 261 communist cellule, 3, 4, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97–101, 109, 261, 262–3 Emery, Léon, 29 Engelmann, Claude, 99 English, Jacques, 261 Eribon, Didier, 234, 235 Esprit (journal), 24, 28, 34, 41, 44, 94, 95, 261 Evans, J. Claude, 113, 245 Evans, Richard, 9 existentialism, 2, 3, 21, 22, 32, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 57, 58, 60, 62, 68, 74, 80, 82, 93, 103, 104, 105, 107, 113, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 144, 159, 181, 227, 228, 229, 274 anguish, 39, 50, 57, 64, 72, 76, 77, 131, 140, 143, 230 atheistic, 50, 57, 58, 61, 299 authenticity, 55, 59, 61, 62, 63, 76, 78, 123, 131, 143 Christian, 7, 33–8, 55, 57–60, 61, 64, 65, 80, 110, 136–8, 144, 256, 299 distinction existentiel/existential, 43, 54, 57, 76, 78, 143, 144, 300 See also Jean Beaufret, Etienne Borne, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Foulquié, Henri Gouhier, Francis Jeanson, Louis Lavelle, René le Senne, Gabriel Marcel, Jeanne Mercier, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paumen, phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Troisfontaines, Herman van Breda, Jean Wahl, Simone Weil Ey, Henri, 207 Farber, Marvin, 121, 122, 127 Faucon-Lamboi, René, 104, 105 Fauve, Jacques, 101, 103, 106 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 74 Feenberg, Andrew, 297 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 29, 266, 269, 283 Fink, Bruce, 206, 219 Fink, Eugen, 71, 122, 123, 124, 144 Flacelière, Robert, 207 Flynn, Thomas, 21, 33 Foucault, Michel, 1, 2, 85, 87, 90, 92, 99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 147, 194–7, 227, 229, 232, 234, 236, 264, 269, 274, 276, 277, 279, 284, 305 Foulquié, Paul, 35, 57, 58 Frege, Gottlob, 129, 215

322

Index

French Theory, 1–2 Freud, Sigmund, 110, 202, 204, 208, 214, 215, 232, 283 Friedman, Georges, 235 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 17, 274 Garaudy, Roger, 4, 26, 27, 41, 266 Geroulanos, Stefanos, 23 Gödel, Kurt, 149, 152, 156–7, 167, 169 Goldstein, Jan, 231 Gordon, Peter E., 10, 19 Gouhier, Henri, 229 Gou¨ın, Henri and Isabelle, 235 Gourinat, Michel, 103, 104, 105, 106, 264 Granel, Gerard, 103, 104, 105 Granger, Gilles Gaston, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162, 164 Greco, Pierre, 83, 104 Green, André, 202, 208, 209–11, 217–19 Grenfell, Michael, 92 Grenier, Hubert, 101, 105 Groupe Spinoza, 265, 267, 273, 274, 275, 276, 292, 296 See also Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michel Tort Guéroult, Martial, 229 Guillermit, Louis, 232 Gurvitch, Georges, 50, 73, 74 Gurwitsch, Aron, 123 Guterman, Georges, 26 Gutting, Gary, 159 Haar, Michel, 262 Habermas, Jürgen, 6 Hägglund, Martin, 8–9, 175 Hammerschlag, Sarah, 19 Hamon, Hervé, 262, 297, 305 Hargis, Jill, 9 Harvard University, 109 Hauriou, André, 24 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 102, 103, 104, 132, 184, 220, 226, 227, 228, 235, 237, 256, 258, 266, 269, 300 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 37, 42, 44, 47, 73, 82, 102, 127, 178, 190, 227, 228, 232, 235, 261, 268, 270, 271, 290, 292, 293 atheism, 34, 45, 176 Being and Time, 43, 73, 77, 143, 301 Christian readings of, 4, 42–6, 48, 104, 107, 173–6, 180, 181, 268, 272, 301 existentialist readings of, 34, 48, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 103, 104, 107, 120, 123, 140, 143–4, 300 French translations of Dasein, 43, 74–6, 273, 300

humanist readings of, 68, 72, 74, 77, 78, 300, 301, 302, 304 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 144 “Letter on Humanism,” 22, 43–4, 45, 46, 272 Marxist readings of, 100, 103, 105, 144, 276, 282 Nazism, 43, 73 ontological difference, 46, 76, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 190, 191, 194, 197, 200, 201, 219, 220, 256, 268, 270, 272, 286, 290, 291 “What Is Metaphysics?” 73, 77, 104 Herr, Lucien, 89 Herve, Pierre, 25, 26, 27 Heter, T. Storm, 33 Hjelmslev, Louis, 287, 289 Hollander, Dana, 6 Huisman, Denis, 237 humanism, 4, 47, 193, 268, 272, 274, 276, 277, 279, 298, 299, 302 Christian, 28–30, 31, 36, 273, 299 Derrida’s, 68, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79–80, 272, 275, 304 Marxist, 4, 24–8, 31, 40, 266, 274, 279, 283, 299 Sartrean, 4, 21, 23, 31–3, 34, 39–40, 72, 74, 173, 181, 268, 300, 304 socialist, 22, 24, 31, 32, 299 See also Jacques Derrida, Roger Garaudy, Martin Heidegger, Pierre Hervé, Edmund Husserl, Henri Lefebvre, Gabriel Marcel, Jeanne Mercier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl Hunter, Ian, 236 Husserl, Edmund, 2, 34, 47, 72, 82, 102, 112, 113, 132, 141, 142, 148, 152, 156, 160, 161, 221, 226, 228, 229, 235, 243–56, 258, 270, 277, 278, 289, 290, 292, 293 archives at Louvain, 113 Cartesian Meditations, 127, 131, 135, 138, 155, 229, 238, 244, 270 Crisis of the European Sciences, 127, 131, 134, 138, 166, 244, 289 existentialist readings of, 42, 48, 67, 73, 80, 105, 107, 118–19, 135 Experience and Judgment, 124, 127 Formal and Transcendental Logic, 106, 148, 152, 165, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247, 250, 253, 255 Genesis, 106, 114, 115, 118, 121, 127, 131, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145 God, 171, 172, 173 humanist readings of, 68, 72, 300, 302 idealism, 119, 120, 122, 124 ideas, 71, 119, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131, 134, 171, 172, 244, 245, 249

Index intentionality, 70, 71, 105, 122, 128, 135, 141, 148, 241, 247, 271 intersubjectivity, 270, 271 Lebenswelt, 119, 125, 164, 165, 166 Lessons on Internal Time Consciousness, 130, 250, 251 Logical Investigations, 119, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 138, 240, 244, 245–50 Marxist readings of, 22, 42, 48, 106, 107, 119–20, 122, 127, 132, 146, 181, 277, 282, 289 noema, 71, 123, 124, 135, 208, 249, 253 Origin of Geometry, 142, 146, 160, 163–70, 180 Philosophy of Arithmetic, 127, 130 reductions, 71, 72, 110, 121, 122, 128, 133, 144, 171, 238, 248, 250 and science, 106, 114, 115, 118, 121, 125, 146, 147, 152, 154, 169, 289 teleology, 131, 138, 164, 167, 170, 172, 173, 179, 242, 272, 284, 301 temporality, 117, 130, 131, 141, 143, 238, 250, 258 Hyppolite, Jean, 42, 57, 85, 102, 141, 160, 165, 228, 232, 264 Jabès, Edmond, 200, 269 Jakobson, Roman, 287, 289 James, William, 68 Janicaud, Dominique, 43, 67, 73, 74, 75, 105, 115, 143, 261 Jankélevitch, Vladimir, 228 Jaspers, Karl, 34, 37 Jaurès, Jean, 84 Jay, Martin, 12 Jeannière, Abel, 45 Jeanson, Francis, 50, 118, 120 Jodelet, François, 103, 105 Jolivet, Roger, 44 Joyce, James, 167 Juillard, Jacques, 101 Jung, Carl, 110 Juquin, Pierre, 108 Kanapa, Jean, 95 Kant, Immanuel, 53, 72, 99, 102, 105, 135, 139, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 163, 168, 170, 171, 224, 226 formalism, 129 idea, 147, 156, 163, 170, 172, 173, 179, 180, 191, 197 and morality, 33, 52 temporality, 139 Kates, Joshua, 114, 161, 245, 288, 291 Kearney, Richard, 5 Kelly, Michael, 30

323

Khrushchev, Nikita, 260, 262 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 34, 76, 78, 80, 101, 104, 110, 111, 112, 136 King, Martin Luther, 298 Kleinberg, Ethan, 74, 89 Kojève, Alexandre, 102, 103, 132 König, Andrew, 6 Koyré, Alexandre, 49, 132 Krebs, Arthur, 101, 116 Kristeva, Julia, 1 Lacan, Jacques, 1, 203–7, 216, 219, 264, 274, 276, 277, 285, 294 LaCapra, Dominick, 12 Lacroix, Jean, 25 Ladrière, Jean, 154, 156, 157, 158, 163, 169, 173 Lagache, Daniel, 203, 206 Lamont, Michele, 2 Laplanche, Jean, 99, 208, 209, 210 Lauer, Quentin, 141 Laurent, Paul, 263 Lautman, Jacques, 146 Lavelle, Louis, 34, 35 Lawlor, Leonard, 114, 150, 159, 160, 170, 244, 258 le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 91, 93, 94, 97, 108 le Senne, René, 6, 34, 37, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 64, 65–7, 82, 142 Leclaire, Serge, 208, 210, 217 Lecoeur, Auguste, 99 Lecourt, Dominique, 98 Lefebvre, Henri, 4, 13, 26, 27, 30, 41, 227, 296 Leibniz, Gottfried, 184, 192, 220 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 291 Levinas, Emmanuel, 42, 72, 121, 123, 133, 187, 269–72 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 159, 230, 232, 277–82, 305 Lévy, Benny, 262 Lewis, William, 27, 41 Linhart, Robert, 223, 297 Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 18, 49, 50, 55–6, 84, 92, 107, 110, 111 Lyotard, Jean-François, 41, 105, 119 Lysenkoism, 41, 95, 98, 99 Macey, David, 92 Macherey, Pierre, 265, 273, 277, 278, 283, 297 Mallet, Jean, 210 Mandouze, André, 108 Mao Tse Tung, 262, 263, 295 Marcel, Gabriel, 3, 6, 30, 34, 36, 37, 44, 50, 57–9, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 82, 101, 114, 137, 138, 139, 142, 176, 228 Maritain, Jacques, 4, 28 Marrati, Paola, 114, 160 Martin, Roger, 85, 146, 153, 156

324

Index

Martinet, André, 287, 289 Marx, Karl, 3, 27, 29, 63, 228, 235, 258, 265, 266, 267, 268, 280, 283, 284, 285 Marxism, 2, 4, 31, 44, 90, 97, 100, 109, 183, 260, 262, 264, 265, 273, 281, 293, 295 and science, 5, 26, 41, 42, 99, 102, 107, 122, 146, 267, 284, 285 See also Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, Roger Garaudy, Groupe Spinoza, Pierre Hervé, Jean Kanapa, Henri Lefebvre, Robert Linhart, Pierre Macherey, Pierre Naville, Georges Politzer, Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tran Duc Thao, Michel Tort Mascolo, Dionys, 27 Megill, Allan, 9 Mension-Rigau, Eris, 86 Mercier, Jeanne, 30, 33, 36, 43 Merleau-Ponty, Jacques, 1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 40, 41, 113, 119, 120, 121, 125–6, 132, 135, 147, 221, 228, 232, 235, 247 Meylan, Louis, 29 Mikics, David, 10, 15 Mill, John Stuart, 226 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 1, 215, 218 Milou, Jean-Paul, 104 Mitterrand, François, 262 Mochon, Jean-Philippe, 4, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101 Mollet, Guy, 261 Monod, Gabriel, 89 Monteux, Daniel, 263 Moret, Philippe, 91 Morin, Bernard, 105 Morin, Edgar, 74 Mosconi, Jean, 278 Moulier-Boutang, Yann, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 236, 265 Mounier, Emmanuel, 4, 28, 34, 35, 36, 261 Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), 22, 23, 26, 29, 33, 40, 44, 56, 94, 299 Munier, Roger, 44 Nacht, Sacha, 203 Naville, Pierre, 21, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 30, 34, 46, 63, 76, 140, 176, 177, 194, 202, 226, 227, 232, 235, 243, 290, 304 Nora, Pierre, 56 Nouvelle Critique (journal), 41, 95, 98, 102 Ofrat, Gideon, 6 ontotheology, 7, 46, 174–6, 179, 190, 196, 243, 256, 268, 270, 272, 293, 300, 301

Papin, Claude, 103, 104 Pariente, Jean, 90, 108 Parti Communiste Français (PCF), 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33, 40, 41, 95, 99, 261, 262, 267, 273, 296, 299 Pascal, Blaise, 34, 54, 76, 101 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 85, 90 Paumen, Jean, 36, 65, 67 Pautrat, Bernard, 264 Peden, Knox, 216, 229 Peeters, Benoˆıt, 9, 101 Peyrefitte, Alain, 84, 86, 88, 91, 295 phenomenology, 3, 9, 21, 34, 41, 47, 69, 82, 103, 106, 110, 113, 115, 119, 120, 126, 130, 131, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 159, 167, 181, 186, 221, 228, 229, 230, 257, 259, 276, 280, 282, 289, 292, 293, 300, 302, 303 See also Suzanne Bachelard, Jean Beaufret, Gaston Berger, Henri Birault, Jean Cavaillès, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, existentialism, Marvin Farber, Eugen Fink, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Francis Jeanson, Jean Ladrière, Quentin Lauer, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Tran Duc Thao, Pierre Thévenaz, Herman Van Breda Piaget, Jean, 115–17, 118, 147, 151, 162 Picard, Yvonne, 143 Plato, 139, 198, 225, 253 Plotinus, 140, 225 Poirier, René, 229 Politzer, Georges, 26, 100 Pompidou, Georges, 84 Pons, Alain, 105 Poster, Mark, 27 Powell, Jason, 10 psychoanalysis, 2, 103, 202, 203, 218, 243, 275, 277, 296 See also Cahiers pour l’analyse, Jacques Derrida, Henri Ey, Sigmund Freud, André Green, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Daniel Lagache, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, Jacques-Alain Miller, structuralism Quinot, Armand, 227 Rabinbach, Anson, 43 Rancière, Jacques, 261, 277 Rauh, Frédéric, 53 Reader, Keith, 297 Regnault, François, 265 Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 42, 244, 269 Reynaud, Jean, 101

Index Ricardo, David, 284 Ricci, François, 94, 99 Ricoeur, Paul, 124, 133–6, 170, 183, 232, 269, 276 Ridgeway, Matthew Bunker, 97 Rinieri, Jean-Jacques, 103, 104, 105 Robrieux, Philippe, 262 Roche, Jean, 295 Rosset, Clément, 263, 297 Rotman, Patrick, 262, 297, 305 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 212, 216 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 242, 258, 278 Rousset, Jean, 192–4, 196, 197 Rovan, Joseph, 44 Rushing, Sara, 9 Russell, Bertrand, 121 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 2, 9, 21, 46, 48, 50, 67, 68, 74, 80, 82, 85, 103, 104, 105, 107, 118, 121, 123, 143–4, 147, 159, 181, 228, 230, 232, 233, 276, 296, 299 atheism, 4, 7, 23, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39, 47, 61, 63, 176 Being and Nothingness, 21, 33, 54, 58, 71, 120 Christian readings of, 30, 43, 45 and colonialism, 47 Critique of Dialectical Reason, 33 Existentialism Is a Humanism, 4, 21–3, 31–3, 37–40, 47, 51, 52, 97, 120 freedom, 27, 31, 32, 38, 39, 51, 52, 61, 63, 65, 78, 120 Huis clos, 37 human condition, 32 The Imaginary, 54 The Imagination, 54, 120 intentionality, 70, 71 intersubjectivity, 58, 65, 70, 78, 104, 247 Marxist readings of, 27, 30, 40, 41, 120 and morality, 52, 54, 55 Normalien readings of, 103–5, 107 ontology, 55, 57, 58, 72, 78 Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 54, 69, 72 vocabulary, 50 Scandal, 7, 66, 222 Scheler, Max, 103 Schérer, René, 244, 248 Schrift, Alan, 226, 227 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 33, 299 Serres, Michel, 1, 83, 85, 91, 92, 102, 212, 232, 233, 264 Sève, Lucien, 94, 101

325

Sirinelli, Jean-François, 86, 89, 92, 95, 96 Smith, Adam, 284 Sommerhausen, Luc, 27 Sorbonne, 1, 55, 84, 86, 89, 90, 147, 178, 183, 203, 226, 228, 232, 245, 267, 269, 293, 295, 296 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 58 Spinoza, Baruch, 52, 293 Srajek, Martin, 6 Stalin, Joseph, 98, 99, 260, 262 Steedman, Carolyn, 9 Stein, Edith, 120 Stora, Benjamin, 17 structuralism, 2, 3, 7, 20, 47, 48, 159, 183, 186, 193, 200, 207, 228, 229, 259, 264, 277, 292, 293, 294, 296, 300, 302, 303 difference, 191, 219, 286 at the ENS, 260, 277–82, 293 and literary criticism, 192 Marxism, 2, 4 and post-structuralism, 47, 220, 259, 292, 294, 305 and psychoanalysis, 2, 4, 183, 209, 218, 265, 277 See also Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Macherey, Jean Rousset, Ferdinand de Saussure Surkis, Judith, 9 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 29 Terray, Emmanuel, 261 Tersen, Emile, 108 Thao, Tran Duc, 42, 87, 105, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132–3, 135, 138, 141, 300 Thévenaz, Pierre, 120, 121, 124, 133 Thorez, Maurice, 262 Tort, Michel, 273, 274, 275, 276 Troisfontaines, Roger, 36, 50, 65 Tubeuf, André, 105 van Breda, Herman, 113, 122, 123, 124 Vergez, Andre, 101 Verley, Etienne, 94 Verret, Michel, 94, 101, 116 Viannay, Philippe, 24, 25 Virieux-Reymond, Antoinette, 155 Vuillemin, Jules, 152, 154, 155, 156, 162 Wahl, Jean, 34, 36, 57, 68, 73, 74, 76, 78, 121, 124, 132, 183, 227, 228, 269 Waldenfels, Bernard, 159 Warwick, Andrew, 223 Weber, Elisabeth, 6

326 Weber, Max, 100 Weierstrass, Karl, 128 Weil, Eric, 232 Weil, Simone, 4, 6, 38, 59–60, 61, 63, 64, 82, 176 Weiner, Susan, 50

Index Whitehead, Alfred North, 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 153 Young, Robert, 10 Zhdanov, Andrei, 40, 98

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hb 978 0 521 59260 4 pb 978 0 521 02631 4 49 david weinstein Equal Freedom and Utility Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism hb 978 0 521 62264 6 pb 978 0 521 02686 4 50 yun lee too and niall livingstone (eds) Pedagogy and Power Rhetorics of Classical Learning hb 978 0 521 59435 6 pb 978 0 521 03801 0 51 reviel netz The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics A Study in Cognitive History hb 978 0 521 62279 0 pb 978 0 521 54120 6 52 mary s. morgan and margaret morrison (eds) Models as Mediators Perspectives in Natural and Social Science hb 978 0 521 65097 7 pb 978 0 521 65571 2 53 joel michell Measurement in Psychology A Critical History of a Methodological Concept hb 978 0 521 62120 5 pb 978 0 521 02151 7 54 richard a. primus The American Language of Rights hb 978 0 521 65250 6 pb 978 0 521 61621 8 55 robert alun jones The development of Durkheim’s Social Realism hb 978 0 521 65045 8 pb 978 0 521 02210 1 56 anne m c laren Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 hb 978 0 521 65144 8 pb 978 0 521 02483 9

57 james hankins (ed) Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections hb 978 0 521 78090 2 pb 978 0 521 54807 6 58 t. j. hochstrasser Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment hb 978 0 521 66193 5 pb 978 0 521 02787 8 59 david armitage The Ideological Origins of the British Empire hb 978 0 521 59081 5 pb 978 0 521 78978 3 60 ian hunter Rival Enlightenments Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany hb 978 0 521 79265 3 pb 978 0 521 02549 2 61 dario castiglione and iain hampsher-monk (eds) The History of Political Thought in National Context hb 978 0 521 78234 0 62 ian maclean Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance The Case of Learned Medicine hb 978 0 521 80648 0 63 peter mack Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice hb 978 0 521 812924 pb 978 0 521 02099 2 64 geoffrey lloyd The Ambitions of Curiosity Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China hb 978 0 521 81542 0 pb 978 0 521 89461 6 65 markku peltonen The Duel in Early Modern England Civility, Politeness and Honour hb 978 0 521 82062 2 pb 978 0 521 02520 1

66 adam sutcliffe Judaism and Enlightenment hb 978 0 521 82015 8 pb 978 0 521 67232 0 67 andrew fitzmaurice Humanism and America An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 hb 978 0 521 82225 1 68 pierre force Self-Interest before Adam Smith A Genealogy of Economic Science hb 978 0 521 83060 7 pb 978 0 521 03619 1 69 eric nelson The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought hb 978 0 521 83545 9 pb 978 0 521 02428 0 70 harro hopfl Jesuit Political Thought The Society of Jesus and the State, c1540–1640 hb 978 0 521 83779 8 71 mikael hornqvist Machiavelli and Empire hb 978 0 521 83945 7 72 david colclough Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England hb 978 0 521 84748 3 73 john robertson The Case for the Enlightenment Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 hb 978 0 521 84787 2 pb 978 0 521 03572 9 74 daniel carey Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond hb 978 0 521 84502 1 75 alan cromartie The Constitutionalist Revolution An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 hb 978 0 521 78269 2

76 hannah dawson Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy hb 978 0 521 85271 5 77 conal condren, stephen gaukroger and ian hunter (eds) The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe The Nature of a Contested Identity hb 978 0 521 86646 0 78 angus gowland The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy Robert Burton in Context hb 978 0 521 86768 9 79 peter stacey Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince hb 978 0 521 86989 8 80 rhodri lewis Language, Mind and Nature Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke hb 978 0 521 874750 81 david leopold The Young Karl Marx German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing hb 978 0 521 87477 9 82 jon parkin Taming the Leviathan The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 hb 978 0 521 87735 0 83 d weinstein Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism hb 978 0 521 87528 8 84 lucy delap The Feminist Avant-Garde Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century hb 978 0 521 87651 3 85 boris wiseman Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics hb 978 0 521 87529 5

86 duncan bell (ed) Victorian Visions of Global Order Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought hb 978 0 521 88292 7 87 ian hunter The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius hb 978 0 521 88055 8 88 christian j emden Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History hb 978 0 521 88056 5 89 annelien de dijn French Political thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville Liberty in a Levelled Society? hb 978 0 521 87788 6 90 peter garnsey Thinking About Propety From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution hb 978 0 521 87677 3 pb 978 0 521 70023 8 91 penelope deutscher The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance hb 978 0 521 88520 1 92 helena rosenblatt Liberal Values Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion hb 978 0 521 89825 6 93 james tully Public Philosophy in a New Key Volume 1: Democracy and Civic Freedom hb 978 0 521 44961 8 pb 978 0 521 72879 9 94 james tully Public Philosophy in a New Key Volume 2: Imperialism and Civic Freedom hb 978 0 521 44966 3 pb 978 0 521 72880 5 95 donald winch Wealth and Life Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914

hb 978 0 521 88753 3 pb 978 0 521 71539 3 96 fonna forman-barzilai Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory hb 978 0 521 76112 3 97 gregory claeys Imperial Sceptics British Critics of Empire 1850–1920 hb 978 0 521 19954 4 98 edward baring The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 hb 978 1 107 00967 7

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