MEMORY-ESSAY #1
This ESSAY has FIVE parts. Click here for the FIRST part, “CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND PART, “THEN AND NOW”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “SILENCED”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIFTH PART, “ETHOPOEIA”.
13. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 75.
14. Ibid., p. 100.
15. “Burnt Norton” (1935), in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 171.
16. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 39–40.
17. Nicolas [Nikolai] Berdyaev, Towards a New Epoch, trans. Oliver Fielding Clarke (1947; London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), pp. 74–5.
IV
WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES
Derrida’s project of deconstruction was anti-religious. There was a rejection of what he termed in Specters of Marx any “onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design”,13 where “program or design” were typically dismissive labels. In an alarmist paragraph later in the book, Fukuyama the Hegelian liberal was scorned for his so-called “neo-evangelism” and on the same page Derrida envisaged a future “Holy Alliance” between post-communist Russia and Roman Catholic “Old Europe”.14 This implausible hypothesis—or conspiracy theory—suggested that Derrida the illustrious “avant-garde scholar” was in this area conservatively dedicated to a secular, European status quo which was hostile in its bones to the thought and tradition of its vast eastern neighbour: not just the regime so easily and smugly denigrated as Stalinist or
neo-Stalinist, but even Russia in the chaos of its re-emergence out of the ruins of the Soviet Union. For it was possible that this wounded Russia, if it survived, might reclaim its old and eschatological faith. In keeping with the underlying hostility, this French philosopher’s book about the downfall of communism cited no Soviet or Russian sources, not even dissident ones. (Fukuyama, by contrast, did cite such sources.) By defending the elitist, atheist supremacy of Franco-German philosophy, to the extent of excluding any native voices, Derrida was in his own way as much of a liberal cold warrior as the State Department philosopher he belittled. WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES
Derrida claimed authority on the basis of his canon—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to name the chief figures once more—in addition to his institutional seniority in several universities, and also by force of in-group terminology and rhetorical repertoire. While the style of Specters of Marx wasn’t outlandish for what was after all a specialist academic book—though no doubt one which its author hoped would break through to a wider audience, as Fukuyama’s had—the added complication is that Derrida’s waffling account of time and history being haunted and nonlinear was arguably much less original than it purported to be, especially if the religious thought he discounted is allowed back into the discussion. To illustrate the point, it is enough to recall a famous Christian view of time’s paradoxes which was expressed in very plain though poetic language—
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past15
—and then to set that beside, first, a passage from Specters of Marx, and after it another from Russian religious (and anti-communist) philosophy, in order to gather that Derrida’s formulations were distinctive by virtue of their jargon rather than their content:
Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.16
The Russian Social Revolution in all its grandeur and fullness will one day take its place in a far-off past. It will however continue to live in the present of that future. There will then also be new factors which we cannot foresee and those new elements without doubt will be ranged against the immediate past. But they too will be unable to annihilate the force of the past. The past and the future will mingle anew. Such is the mystery of time and history.17
And with that I have nothing further to say about Jacques Derrida.
Go to part 5