Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time, the time between Candlemas and the 40 days of Lent, which begins the day after tomorrow, Ash Wednesday (14 February 2024). Tomorrow is known in many places as Shrove Tuesday.
We spent two days in Paris last week, and so, during these 11 days in Ordinary Time, my reflections each morning are drawing on the lives of 11 French saints and spiritual writers.
When this series of reflections began nine days ago, I admitted I am often uncomfortable with many aspects of French spirituality, and that I need to broaden my reading in French spirituality. So, I have turned to 11 figures or writers you might not otherwise expect. They include men and women, Jews and Christians, immigrants and emigrants, monks and philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, and even a few Anglicans.
Before the day begins, I am taking some quiet time early this morning for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, A reflection on a French saint or writer in spirituality;
2, today’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
French saints and writers, 10: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
The Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was born Jackie Élie Derrida on 15 July 1930. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he developed in many books and papers, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word ‘postmodernity.’
During his career, Derrida published more than 40 books, as well as hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, music, architecture, and political theory.
Into the 2000s, his work had major academic influence throughout the US, Europe, South America and other place, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics and the philosophy of language.
In most of the English-speaking world, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida’s influence is most felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture, music, art and art criticism.
His important works include Speech and Phenomena (1967), Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). His approach to philosophy has been controversial and he has influenced activists and political movements.
Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in El Biar (Algiers) in Algeria. His father, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (‘Aimé’) Derrida (1896-1970), worked all his life in the wine trade as a travelling salesman; his mother was (Georgette Sultana Esther (1901-1991), daughter of Moïse Safar. His family was Sephardic Jewish, originally from Toledo, and became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree gave full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria.
His parents named him Jackie, but he later adopted a French version of the name when he moved to Paris. At his circumcision, he was given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, and later her referred to this as his ‘hidden name.’
Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar. On the first day of the school year in 1942, he was expelled from his lycée as the French administrators in Algeria began implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government. In his adolescent years, Derrida he read philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche and Gide, as well as Camus and Sartre.
He attended the Lycée Bugeaud in Algiers in the late 1940s, and moved to Paris in 1949, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Étienne Borne was his professor of philosophy. He was admitted to to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1952, completed his master’s degree in philosophy on Edmund Husserl, and then passed the agrégation exam in 1956.
Derrida spent the 1956-1957 academic year at Harvard University reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. He married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston in 1957. During the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Derrida taught French and English to soldiers’ children in 1957 to 1959in lieu of conscription.
Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1960-1964, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur, discussed in yesterday’s reflection, and Jean Wahl. He then taught at the ENS until 1984, and for seven years he was associated with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists. He was awarded his State doctorate (doctorat d'État) at the University of Paris in 1980.
Derrida took part in the May 1968 protests in France and registered his objections to the Vietnam War in a lecture he gave in the US. He founded the French Jan Hus association in 1981 to support dissident Czech intellectuals and was arrested in Czechoslovakia.
He was an advocate of nuclear disarmament, protested against apartheid in South Africa, opposed capital punishment, and met Palestinian intellectuals during a visit to Jerusalem in 1988. Although Derrida was not associated with any political party until 1995, he supported the Socialist candidacy of Lionel Jospin. He opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Derrida travelled widely, and held a series of visiting and permanent positions, and received many honorary doctorates. Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, in 1986, and taught there until shortly before his death in 2004.
Derrida’s honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992 drew protests from many leading philosophers, including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, who wrote objecting that ‘Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.’
They said Derrida’s philosophy was composed of ‘tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists,’ and they said: ‘Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not … sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.’
He visited Dublin in 1997, when he gave two lectures in University College Dublin on ‘The History of the Lie: State of the Lie, Lie of State.’
Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002, and died during surgery in Paris on 9 October 2004. Peter Hommelhoff of the University of Heidelberg said: ‘Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age.’
On the other hand, Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, ‘He’s difficult to summarise because it’s nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes.’
Noam Chomsky wrote: ‘I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.’
Richard Wolin has argued that Derrida’s work leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the ‘deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism.’
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that ‘there is no out-of-context’ (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte (‘There is nothing outside the text’) and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.
Derrida once explained that this assertion ‘which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction … means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.’
Derrida engaged in the long debate on Martin Heidegger’s Nazism. Derrida’s friendship with Paul de Man began when they met at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man’s death in 1983. De Man provided a different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers. But Derrida’s memoir of de Man was controversial when it was revealed that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost 200 essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
In The Other Heading (1992), he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed ‘the worst violences,’ ‘the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.’
Some refer to The Gift of Death (1996) as evidence that Derrida began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
His book Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (1999) reveals his mentorship by the philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response. The use of deconstruction to read Jewish texts – like the Talmud – is relatively rare but has recently been attempted.
Questions of identity and secrecy were always present for Derrida, from his early work in the 1960s to his late work in the early 21st century. His family were secular Jews, but as a teenager he found suddenly that being Jewish was the main thing about him as far as the Vichy puppets in Algeria were concerned.
The loss of his French identity as a Jewish teenager later led him to understand how arbitrary and fragile our sense of identity can be, and how it can be taken from us by outside forces – and that, sometimes, we must keep secrets to survive.
Speaking in a Catholic church in Toledo that was once a synagogue, then a mosque, before becoming a church, he said in a documentary in 1999: ‘What is an absolute secret? I was obsessed with this question quite as much as that of my supposed Judeo-Spanish origins. These obsessions met in the figure of the Marrano.’
Derrida called himself by several names, such as ‘the Marrano’ and ‘the last and the least of the Jews.’ He wrote in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994) of ‘the Marranos, with whom I have always secretly identified (but don’t tell anyone).’
Derrida was drawn to what he called ‘marranism’ for a number of reasons, including the tension between an individual having no essential ‘I’, and the persistence of the idea of the secret as exemplary in revealing an ‘I’ that is the true self. But ‘marranism’ for Derrida is also an example of ‘religion without religion.’
He deployed the tensions within discourses of or about being Jewish in order to challenge a particularist politics of identity as well as a discourse of political universalism or humanism.
In her recent bookDerrida’s Marrano Passover ( Bloomsbury, 2022), Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham, notes: ‘Derrida never emphasises his Jewishness but also never silences it either.’
In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2004) his lifelong friend, the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, followed the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that played through Derrida’s life and works. She identified Judaism cloaked in Catholicism as an example of the undecidability of identity that influenced Derrida, whom Cixous calls a ‘Jewish Saint.’
Mark 8: 11-13 (NRSVA):
11 The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. 12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, ‘Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.’ 13 And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side.
Today’s Prayers (Monday 12 February 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Ash Wednesday Reflection.’ This theme was introduced yesterday by the Revd Jessie Anand, Chaplain, USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (12 February 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
As we approach the season of Lent, we pray for courage to face uncomfortable truths. May we be honest in our reckoning of the past and sensitive in our unfolding the future.
The Collect:
Almighty Father,
whose Son was revealed in majesty
before he suffered death upon the cross:
give us grace to perceive his glory,
that we may be strengthened to suffer with him
and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Holy God,
we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ:
may we who are partakers at his table
reflect his life in word and deed,
that all the world may know his power to change and save.
This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Holy God,
you know the disorder of our sinful lives:
set straight our crooked hearts,
and bend our wills to love your goodness and your glory
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflection (Paul Ricœur, 1913-2005)
Continued Tomorrow (Vladimir Lossky, 1903-1958)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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