Spent some time flicking through the opening pages of Writing and Difference today. Was struck by just how much Derrida uses history – and historicity – as a springboard into his philosophy. It’s a critical theme through a few of the essays, and notably Violence and Metaphysics.
If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilisation, the structuralist invasion might become a question for the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake first of all, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects–his own–in particular. (Writing and Difference, p.1)
Not that the historian is necessarily deceived, but only if he takes up his task in a particular way. What does Derrida think the historians task is here? He is, in some ways, himself an historian of philosophy – or at least he pursues the history of philosophy. I’ve been reading a little bit of Ricoeur’s early work of late – who is also profoundly interested in historicity, and who spends quite some time dwelling on the differences between the tasks of the historian of facts, and the historian of philosophy, and the two poles of system and singularity. Perhaps some room here for a comparison between Ricoeur and Derrida.
October 2, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Hey Drew. Way I look at it, Derrida is here more or less attacking the usual ‘history of ideas’ – attacking the idea that a philosophical question or problematic can be made into an object of historical scrutiny – such philosophical non-objects exceed the historical, and are sort of a condition for it, I think Derrida would say. If I remember right, this is the area in which the polemical exchange between Derrida and Foucault plays out – Derrida insisting that Descartes’ method can’t be, say, reduced to a particular moment in the history of systems of thought, with Foucault insisting (more or less…) on its historically contingent character. That would require a bit of finessing to be accurate.
Weird thing with Derrida, though – similar to Foucault – is that he sort of wants to have his cake and eat it; he wants to imply that historical contingency goes all the way down, while still preserving an unbreachable philosophical dignity that is, implicitly, trans-historical. It comes down, I think, to a basic equivocation: is Derrida dealing with actual, you know, historically contingent systems of thought, when he talks about ‘presence’ and such-like – systems of thought that would, presumably, connect to actual social and historical changes – or is he more operating in a quasi-Heideggerian space, talking about the destiny of Being and what have you? Derrida wants to have it both ways, I think – and that philosophical mysticism is always potent enough, in his work, that I think Derrida’s remarks about historicity generally require some careful handling.
I haven’t read Ricoeur, though.
October 3, 2008 at 8:50 am
Hi Duncan, thanks for the comment. Yeah, I think you’ve hit it on the head here. Both Derrida and Foucault occasionally have a go at ‘historians of ideas’… but I don’t think this is unusual for the context they are writing in. It only is once you bring it all across into a US/English context.
And just a few pages later in WD, Derrida does say, ‘well actually, it’s necessary to treat structuralism as an historical object…’ It’s always a dialectical, always a ‘trembling’, never an outright rejection.
The opposition to a ’systems of thought’ argument – and the essay on Foucault is brilliant on this, isn’t it? – is precisely where Ricoeur is quite interesting. Ricoeur, as far as I have gathered for the moment, is about conflicting and opposing, but complementary and necessary approaches. Thus ’system’ and ’singularity’ – and it would seem that Derrida does the same thing, but in a hyper-dialectical way. Emphasises the systemic nature (eg. the unity of the history of metaphysics), only to confront it with rupture, singularity, event.
Derrida, to my knowledge, never writes on Ricoeur directly, but cites him approvingly in his Husserlian writings. Which is interesting in itself, because often he spends a fair amount of time distancing himself from the French reading of Husserl.
I’ll put on some material on Ricoeur soon… most of what I have been looking at, at the moment, is his earlier work – particularly the volume History and Truth