Derridian Wisdom Explained

After publishing Jonathan Kandell's ugly (for both its xenophobia and its arrogant ingorance) obiturary on the occcasion of Jacques Derrida's death, it's somewhat heartening to see that the New York Times has published a more fair and informed account of Derrida's project by Mark C. Taylor, who edited Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, a useful anthology of 19th-and-20th century continental philosophy from Kant to Derrida, and who actually has read and engaged with Derrida's texts.

Unfortunately, in a situation similar to the Times's willingness to propagandize on behalf of the pro-Iraqi war neoconservatives, it may be a case of too little, too late. Taylor's piece, "What Derrida Really Meant, was published on the op-ed pages, implying, perhaps, that Taylor's account is more subjective and less accurate than Kandell's ostensibly objective obituary.

I don't want to suggest that any obituary can be entirely objective; indeed, Derrida's thought teaches us to be attentive to the dangers of understanding any situation in terms of the crudely reductive objective/subjective binary. Nonetheless, for those who have read any Derrida, it is clear that Kandell went beyond the typical obituary format, a death notice accompanied by a biographical account of the person's life, to launch a vitriolic attack on a straw man dubbed 'deconstruction.'

But enough on Kandell and his hack work. I want to congratulate Taylor for managing to convey a few important Derridean insights in a short, fourteen-paragraph-long essay. For those of us who occasionally teach Derrida to undergraduates, Taylor's essay is a particularly welcome gift, for it not only explains why Derrida is such an important philosopher, but also explains how not to approach Derrida's texts.

Taylor's second paragraph opens with this fantastic observation: "To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure." I say fantastic, because Taylor doesn't hesitate to imply that it is intellectual laziness, not philosophical complexity, that should be condemned. One of the particularly disturbing and disgusting trends to be discerned in the mass mediasphere is a general willingness to condone intellectual laziness, either through outright dismissals of attempts by people, such as John Kerry or Ralph Nader, to articulate complex position, or through the failure to provide an adequate forum for intelligent debate.

Anticipating a typical anti-intellectual response to Taylor's claim, I'd just like to add that Taylor is not being elitist or endorsing complexity for complexity's sake. Rather, he is simply suggesting that the world is complex, and any truly thoughtful engagement with it should reflect that fact. Thus, Taylor goes on to note, correctly, that "density and complexity [are] characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature, and art."

I particulary appreciated the following sentence, which pinpoints Derrida's especial relevance at a time when "cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism" are on the rise around the globe: "Fortunately, he [Derrida] also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open."

'Nuff said, for now anyway...