Page 41 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

context that will determine the meaning of a text. The context is never 'saturated.' Thus Derrida can include Freud's personal history in a discussion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but cannot claim any psycho- biographical authority; his title is '"Specifier"—sur Freud' and he considers how even an auto- biography might speculate.
The larger question of a deconstructive politics has been widely debated. Barbara Johnson, one of the shrewdest American deconstructors, says:
There's no political program, but I think there's a pol- itical attitude, which is to examine authority in language, and the pronouncements of any self-constituted authority for what it is repressing or what it is not saying.
Johnson's attitude is antidogmatic; political dogma itself, as it asserts a party line, can become one of those monolithic structures which deconstruction views as always already fissured by otherness. And the positive, indeed affirmative role claimed by deconstruction has increasingly focused on its response to the other and to otherness, to the alterity that self-identity tries to exclude: 'every culture is haunted by its other.' Decon- struction can then claim to contribute to a necessary cultural self-interrogation whose range is potentially vast: Derrida, describing 'the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other,' invokes ethno- logical, economic, political, and military relation- ships, besides the linguistic and philosophical relationships which form his usual approach (Derrida 1982:134-35). His work on denegation, marginal- ization, violent suppression, and exclusion during the 1980s concentrated on Nazism. There are several reasons for this concentration. No doubt it owes something to Derrida's own experiences as a Jewish child in colonial Algeria after the fall of France (Wood and Bernasconi 1985:113). More recently, violent debates followed the discovery that Paul de Man—a personal friend—had during World War II produced a body of journalism in occupied Belgium that included some collaborationist and anti-Semitic sen- timents (Miller 1991:359-84). Most particularly, per- haps, it stemmed from the wish not to suppress awkward facts about philosophers whose work had been important to him. Thus it was necessary not to avoid the specific Nazi involvement of Martin Hei- degger during the 1930s, and his silence about sub- sequent events.
8. DerridaonHeidegger
Derrida was one of several writers (including Lacoue- Labarthe and Lyotard) to reopen Heidegger's case. His book Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
appeared in French in 1987; the title's strategy recalls
l
Des Tours de Babel'; and on this occasion, the reader
is specifically reminded of how De I 'esprit invoked a tradition of the learned treatise; the overlap of French and Latin de lends it classical authority. But the title
also echoes 'a scandalous book' of the same name: Helvetius's De I 'esprit, proscribed and burned in 1759. This too is conveyed to the reader, in a mysteriously proleptic footnote which begins 'Since the whole of this discourse will be surrounded by fire...'; it goes on to describe the burning of other heretical books, and indeed the burning of a heretic. Already, with this apparent digression, Ciceronian learned solemnity is wearing thin; a different interest appears through the opposition of dogma and heresy, the deconstructive interest in exclusion and repression. The notion of system or structure as that which perpetuates the same at the expense of the other is acted out here through disruptions at various levels of the text. Thus, what seems to be on offer is a formal scheme, an analytic narrative about Heidegger's use of a certain set of terms between 1927 and 1953; but its methodical sequence is constantly interrupted by retrospect and anticipation: 'Twenty years later, Heidegger will have to suggest... .' And, as in the Helvetius footnote, a digressive tendency, a substitution for the apparent topic, is constantly suggested by initially obscure interventions:
I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame, and of ashes. And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.
These are the opening sentences; with hindsight, they are purposefully ambiguous. In one sense, their con- cerns are all present in the narrative; in another they are largely absent, excluded, 'avoided' in their his- torical aspect—which is nevertheless invoked through passages like the Helvetius footnote, which with its burning of books and bodies can hardly fail to recall Nazi incinerations. The rare direct references are powerfully understated: 'this was not just any quarter century.' Through such reticence the text mimes Hei- degger's attempted avoidance of an historical referent in the postwar period; and, at another level, the Nazi attempt to efface the Final Solution.
8.1 Language and Nationalism
Another way of putting this would be to describe the return of the repressed. What returns, in French, is a revenant, a ghost; and a ghost in German is der Geist; but Geist is also spirit—Geist and its compounds are what Of Spirit is 'about.' In its oscillation between concept and context the book works like a huge and tragic pun. This pun is also an oscillation between languages, and questions of translation recur through- out. And unlike the treatment of translation in 'Des Tours de Babel,' where it serves as what Derrida calls a 'conceptual generality,' translation in this text is particularized: 'What I am aiming at here is, obviously enough, anything but abstract.' One particular field of translation concerns philosophical nationality and nationalism; not only in the linguistic problems revealed by translating Geist into the languages of its European neighbors, but also in the massive ideo-
Deconstruction
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