21 On Jacques Derrida and something in Trochtelfingen /

I made Jacques Derrida’s acquaintance under peculiar circumstances. I was engaged as a music critic for the Stuttgarter Zeitung at the beginning of the 1980s, and was sent to report on a multi-day open-air festival in the Swabian Alb, near Tübingen. It was a very pastoral and almost hippie-nostalgic atmosphere by a small lake, surrounded by forest, in unadulterated nature. The full moon hung peaceful and unperturbed in the sky and presided happily over the lively goings-on. This also provided me with the key word for the title of my subsequent review in the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

A tent village had been built, everywhere were stands with illustrious and novel cuisine (the organic and ecological movements were just starting). As usual for the time, cheap illicit copies of books and bootleg records were plentifully on offer—there was probably no commercial LP that could not be had for considerably cheaper. Regular LPs cost €15–25 (adjusted), and were thus very expensive for us young people.
At one of these stands I discovered a small, slim volume of about 60 pages that fascinated me immediately. A philosophical text, wholly incomprehensible, in various typefaces and interspersed with long quotations; a treatise that also concerned itself for many pages with a single fragment from Nietzsche’s writing: “I’ve forgotten my umbrella.” Now and then ironic warnings flashed out in the text, which might move the whole closer to the realm of parody, perhaps of persiflage: Watch out! Mockery! was to be heeded.

And there I also found such prose-monsters as:

From the moment the question of woman suspends the decidable opposition between the true and nontrue, from the moment it installs the epochal regime of quotation marks for all the concepts that belong to the system of philosophical decidability, when it disqualifies the hermeneutical project of postulating a true sense for the text and liberates reading from the horizon of the meaning or the truth of being, of the values of production and produced, or the presence and the present—from that moment on, it becomes the question of style as the question of writing, the question of a spurring operation, more powerful than any content, any thesis, any meaning.1

Over such “incomprehensible” formulations one might very well break one’s head. Later, they were overtrumped in their hermeticism only by the “retracting the foreskin of the glans” and phallocratic masculine sexism, as far as its logocentrism is concerned. The treatise was titled “Spurs – the Styles of Nietzsche.” It dealt primarily with the difference between the sexes, with man and woman: that they are different, they think different, they might love differently.

Such a subject was highly topical.

Will women turn away from men and declare a new Amazonian state? What would then transpire with us, we phallocrats and emotionless logocentrics? Alice (Schwarzer) stands at the door and threatens with her cynic’s shillelagh, if we should ever find her sexy, her red hair and cute dress. In the same way, despite the well-meaning encouragement of some women, we can still find no favor, can we? Even when the men’s movement bears illustrious flowers and certain helpful books on delicate men’s issues, successful penetration techniques, and similar.
It was the 80s, and was always in the middle of it as silent reporter. And thus I became acquainted with Jacques Derrida.

Via Claudius Homolka, a young architecture student recently returned from the US and living in our shared apartment, I was also able to learn about postmodern architecture. A monumental new building from the star-architect James Stirling was just then under construction to enlarge the Stuttgart State Gallery, across from the Opera; and thus a circle closed within me encompassing postmodern thought, postmodern architecture, and contemporary philosophy.

I was ensnared in this trap made of æsthetics, thinking, fashion, and new breakthroughs. I have never gotten free of it.

Derrida continued thenceforth, and with great success, to make trouble for international philosophy. He and his comrades-in-arms—Baudrillard, Lyotard, or Virilio, to name but a few, to whom so many of the present day’s so-current acceleration and deceleration theories go back—in Asia and the US were especially successful. Meanwhile in Germany a bitter resistance ruled, despite attempts at embrace by Jürgen Habermas. The international affirmation was, however, quite large and encompassed many areas of the arts, fashion, literary theory and thinking; even lawyers declared themselves infected with the deconstruction-bacterium.

Even one such as Niklas Luhmann expressed to me, in an interview, respect and recognition, although he couldn’t endorse most of Derrida’s theses. He told me about a symposium on systems theory in the US “in a mostly feminist circle” (there already existed the idea of “feminist philosophizing”), where Derrida, right at the beginning of his lecture declared, “the precondition for the possibility of systems theory is that no systems theory can exist” (laughter).

I shall append here two episodes from Derrida’s work in order to recall something of his modus operandi, which is not at all exhausted by such æsthetic performances. The first example I’m citing from my own “Æsthetics, Volume Ⅱ” (art-book), p.20ff. I’m referring here to a report in taz from Lutz Engelke in autumn 1985:

Scene of the action: Cornell University, in New York State, where Jacques Derrida held a guest position alongside his professorship for the history of philosophy in Paris. A lecture “on the right hand of Heidegger” is announced, a picture of the German philosopher and wordsmith is distributed. Before Derrida begins to speak, a group of wildly made-up figures storm the lecture-hall and chant Derrida’s name loudly, alongside Paul Feyerabend the new philosophical guru, expert tracker, and chaotic thinker of our age.
The now-following lecture had, in its mercurial style and associative manner, a certain method. Rather than holding forth on Heidegger’s right hand, the speaker wandered off on an associative meandering on the term “sex” as Fichte defines it and on the difficulties that arise in translating the term into other languages; the whole was presented alternately in German, French, and English. Not yet finished, there followed a flood of etymological expeditions into the history of words, on word- and citation-games, and scurrilous realizations such as: if one translates the German term “Handwerk” into French (métier), then the hand will ever be in danger of getting lost. And then, after a surprising parenthesis on Fichte’s æsthetics, there followed—with considerable laughter—the claim, that the purest thought of the Christian Occident is … silence.

The second example is a newspaper report from 1992-05-23 on the fervent controversy that erupted in Great Britain, the motherland of analytical philosophy and its Philosophy of Science on the occasion of the awarding of an honorary doctoral laureateship to Jacques Derrida:

The controversial awarding of an honorary doctorate upon French philosopher Jacques Derrida is decided today with a 2:1 majority of the faculty of Cambridge University. In the case of the 62-year-old French philosopher, a pioneering champion of “deconstructionism” during the Parisian student uprisings of 1968, the Philosophy Department nevertheless rebelled and which, despite its small size, had never been consulted. On this matter it is worth noting that the Department’s members are likely the only ones who have actually read and studied Derrida’s books.
According to them, Derrida is a charlatan, whose research methods destroy the normal criteria of evidence and argumentation to first principles. Professor Hugh Mellor named Derrida a nihilist who calls into question any concept of truth. To honor Derrida would be equivalent to electing a pyromaniac as chief of the fire department …
Derrida-ism combats the view, that an author determines what his or her words mean. Moreso, however, the buried meaning of a deconstructed text reveals that the superficial meaning is not the real one. The locus of “truth” is where the critic places it, and every arbitrary interpretation is as good as every other.
On the side of his supporters it was emphasized, that Derrida compelled his opponents to regard their own ideas critically and consciously, and thence had earned their gratitude … The conservative Daily Telegraph commented, not wholly inapplicably, that Cambridge University, with its vote, had apparently momentarily lost its collective mind. (Roland Hill, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 1992-05-23).

Alongside Jacques Derrida I treasure just as much, perhaps even somewhat more, the Swiss philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, who occupied the Herbert Marcuse chair at UC-Berkeley (California) for many years.

1From Jacques Derrida, “I have forgotten my umbrella,” originally in Éperons: les Styles de Nietzsche, here in English translation from D.B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, MIT Press: 1977, 188.

Translated by N. Andrew Walsh