Derrida: a marginal intellectual?

It is striking to note the extent to which the big names in post-war French intellectual life wanted to marginalize themselves. Whether Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, most of them never stopped telling their interlocutors that they were “ marginal » in relation to their fields of research and that their ideas went against the grain of the orthodoxy of the moment. Jacques Derrida made the same speech. Born in Algeria, of Jewish origin, with intellectual tendencies which were not those of Sartrean existentialism, nor of Althusserian Marxism, he was convinced of his singularity within French philosophy. The method he developed during his long career – the “ deconstruction » – only reinforced this image: instead of dwelling at length on the historical context, he encourages his disciples to restore the “ traces » hidden in each text. He thus marks a distance from his colleagues by creating a new philosophical method, an approach which is similar to that of Bourdieu in The State Nobility (1989), which takes a critical look at the institutions and ideologies of the French elite.

However, these intellectuals were followers of this elite ; historically there is nothing marginal about them. They are even pure products of the republican school. They read the same books, prepared for the same competitive exams and all ended up joining a single establishment, the École Normale Supérieure. From this point of view, Derrida’s journey was very classic: a high school student in Algiers, he dreamed of studying philosophy at theENS like most of his comrades. The only difference is his success in the competition, while the vast majority fail. Subsequently, he did not leave the royal path of the young philosopher: he passed the aggregation, taught at the Sorbonne and ended up returning to theENS in 1964 as a tutor, responsible for teaching dozens of students each year how to pass a competition that he said he did not like. Derrida, like so many others, was unable to escape the academic and intellectual system in which he was so strongly anchored.

This tension between self-proclaimed marginalization and a very conformist reality poses a particular problem for historians of French philosophy. In Derrida’s case, it would be easy to dismiss the marginal position as absurd ; but this posture nevertheless remains fundamental to understanding his work. Although Derrida was part of the country’s highest intellectual elite, his radical innovations were based on a sense of non-belonging and otherness. It is Edward Baring’s great success in this book to have been able to navigate between these two contradictory poles: he takes Derrida’s thought seriously without neglecting the very particular context in which this thought was deployed.

Derrida and Christian thought

Baring’s approach is both historical and biographical. The first and last chapters examine the historical context of French philosophy in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, while the core of the book develops an analysis of Derrida’s texts throughout this same period. From the start, he attacks the myths surrounding the famous philosopher: according to Baring, the link between Derrida’s Algerian roots and his philosophy are weak (p. 10). It’s not because of his experiences as an Algerian Jew. marginalized » that he will subsequently create a philosophical method at the margins of the major trends of the time. On the contrary, Baring maintains that the young Derrida wanted at all costs to integrate into metropolitan intellectual life, and in particular that of Paris. His thinking must be understood above all in relation to “ multiple pressures of academic life in the capital » (p. 20).

It is therefore appropriate to return to the major philosophical debates of the late 1940s in order to understand how they were able to influence Derrida. By far the most important was the controversy surrounding Sartre’s interpretation of existentialism. Through a judicious analysis, Baring shows the extent to which reactions to Sartre’s conference entitled Existentialism is humanism (1945) depended on a confrontation between communists and Catholics. After the Liberation, each group wanted to appropriate its own definition of “ humanism » and thus establish its legitimacy in an uncertain political context. At the time Derrida was only a passionate philosophy student in Algiers but the controversy surrounding existentialism was present from his first dissertations ; following the Sartrean approach, the young high school student will see Heidegger and Husserl as existentialist humanists. However, we are already seeing the emergence of a second element of Derrida’s thought which will remain present throughout his early work: Christian philosophy.

By emphasizing the importance of Christian philosophy, Baring significantly modifies our vision of Derrida. We discover a philosopher steeped in the great movements of post-war French Christian thought. Already in high school, Derrida sought to temper the “ nihilism ” And “ atheism » by Sartre by appealing to a transcendental god. When he arrives at theENS in 1952, he was immersed in a highly politicized environment and he was obliged to conceal his Christian tendencies, but traces remained visible in his writings. In his 1954 memoir, he integrated Kierkegaard’s existentialism and the “ mysticism » of his thesis director Maurice Patronnier de Gandillac in an analysis “ transcendental » of the concept of “ Genesis » in Husserl’s work. Later, in 1962, he took up themes from Christian philosophy in his introduction The Origin of Geometry by Husserl. According to Baring, it is in this little-known text that Derrida “ compares the indeterminacy of the infinite idea, as an ideal pole which is transcendent to history, to God » (p. 170). The philosopher thus manages to reconcile Husserl and a Christian interpretation of Heidegger.

This approach was both political and philosophical. In a Normalian environment powerfully marked by communism, Derrida wanted to make the link between the Christian philosophy that he held dear and a philosopher (Husserl) to whom the communists were very attached. His aim was to bring about a synthesis between existentialism and phenomenology – a synthesis rigorously scientific in the communist manner but open to the transcendental possibilities of God. He was not the only one in search of this magical synthesis: across Western Europe, populations distraught by the catastrophe of the Second World War were seeking a happy medium between the two great ideologies of the post-war period – Christian democracy and communism. Through his historical interpretation of Derrida from the 1950s and 1960s, Baring allows us to situate the young philosopher in a much broader context, even if his writings remain difficult – and sometimes impossible – to decipher.

Beyond structuralism ?

The second part of the book continues the contextualization of Derrida through the first attempts to define the concept of “ différance “. Here again institutions played a crucial role: Derrida’s return toENS as an associate professor in 1964, he was brought into close contact with the philosophical avant-garde. His thinking will be profoundly reshaped by his interaction with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. This transformation will eventually become a separate method – deconstruction, often called “ post-structuralism “. Unfortunately, Baring’s book does not go further than the events of May 1968: the reader will have to content himself with an analysis of the period from 1964 to 1968, during which Derrida laid the foundations for his new method.

The most innovative and convincing argument of the last three chapters is the one which connects Derrida’s educational requirements and the development of his philosophy in the 1960s. Nowadays it is common to make the link between the insularity of the world French philosophical XX^e century and a competitive system (prep, aggregation, etc.) which promotes homogeneity. Even if the vast majority of Normalian philosophers in the 1960s did not think they had been “ formatted “, it is evident that they were fully assimilated into powerful intellectual and ideological networks that often led to conformity. Therefore, the difficulty for the historian is to show precisely the various ways in which an intellectual environment can influence philosophical thought.

In Derrida’s case, it was his new position as tutor which marked his philosophy. From 1964, he was responsible for preparing normaliens for the aggregation and he devoted the vast majority of his teaching hours to this. During his lessons, he had to quickly make his students understand that an analysis of a philosophical text was based on two inseparable elements: a clear and convincing presentation of the main arguments and an original interpretation. This educational strategy, however, had unexpected side effects because it influenced not only the students, but Derrida himself. Baring shows how the need to prepare courses for aggregation focuses attention on reading, the text and the meaning of the written word. It then contributes directly to “ shape » (p. 256) his new method: paradoxically, the deconstruction, which seems so revolutionary, was the fruit of long hours spent in classrooms. This is not to say that intellectual debates – notably the conflict between Derrida and the disciples of Althusser that Baring describes in his final chapter – are unimportant, simply that a subtle vision of Derrida’s philosophy relies on multiple contexts. , including the institutions in which it was developed.

Such contextualization will undoubtedly not be enough to convince Derrida’s detractors, for whom the philosopher represents the worst excesses of post-war French thought. Likewise for the followers of the “ French Theory » and poststructuralism, for whom Derrida remains a timeless and untouchable philosopher. We must, however, applaud the immense archival and analytical work of the young British researcher who has succeeded in reconciling intellectual history and political history in a relatively brief and accessible work. Baring makes clear that post-war intellectuals like Derrida were neither prophets nor monsters ; they were just one group among many in a fluid political space. Their ideas therefore deserve to be studied alongside other historical phenomena. We would then see that, despite their insight and intelligence, the reach of the intellectuals of this period was always rather modest.