Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext
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Derrida and Indian Thought:
prospects for an East/West dialogue?
(A conversation between Alison Scott-Baumann and Christopher Norris)
by
University of Gloucestershire
and
University of Wales Cardiff
ASB: Chris, today we are taking up this challenge of comparing and contrasting Derrida’s philosophy with Indian philosophy. Indian philosophy falls broadly into two areas, the Brahmanical tradition that has a definite core to it, something permanent, strong, robust, and timeless, to be found in the Upanishads; if you like, the ‘substance’ view. The other is the Buddhist tradition, very different from the Brahmanical tradition; all is in flux, all is an illusion. This is termed the modal view. I don’t know if any of that resonates for you with Derrida.
CN: Well yes, I suppose, in the sense that from his earliest work, from the essays he was writing in the early-to-mid sixties, he has been concerned with questions that go right back to the ancient Greeks, metaphysical ideas about substance, reality, appearance, and (in this respect following Heidegger, though ‘following’ at a distance of finely-judged critical reserve) the primordial ‘question of Being’. So in a sense he has been engaged with the ancient issue between, say, Parmenides who held that that everything is one, that change and multiplicity are just illusory surface appearances concealing or distorting that ultimate reality of things, and on the other the idea of Heraclitus that everything is in a constant, perpetual state of flux, that you never step into the same river twice. The Parmenidean idea gave rise to some famous paradoxes about time, change, and motion, and to an extent you could say that a lot of Derrida’s work, early and late, has been an attempt to work through but also to sharpen some of those paradoxes. Of course they have also re-surfaced elsewhere in modern philosophy – for instance, in the problems that Russell brought to light with regard to the axioms of classical set-theory, or in Gödel’s undecidability-theorem – and you will find some incisive commentary on that in Derrida’s great early texts on Husserl and the aporias of mathematical thought.
So although I am rather doubtful, indeed (to be honest) highly sceptical about various recent attempts to affiliate Derrida’s thought with some of these main currents in Indian philosophy, I do think there’s a case to be made that all the great philosophical traditions in the world must in a sense concern themselves with certain very basic conceptual problems, such as the relationship between the one and the many, the relationship between substance and attribute, essence and accident, reality and appearance, which perhaps connect with your distinction between those two main traditions of Indian thought. These are problems which I think present themselves to any kind of philosophical reflection beyond a certain stage of conceptual advance so they crop up very early in the history of western philosophy and in a sense they are still what philosophy is concerned with, at least those branches of philosophy – Derridean deconstruction included – which continue to engage in a critical dialogue with their past. In fact I would say that deconstruction, in so far as you can speak of it in general terms, is a particular, highly advanced and very close-focused, text-specific way of engaging with those same issues.
If you look at the early formative influences on Derrida’s thought, especially the influence of Heidegger, but also that of Husserl, not to mention Kant, Descartes, Aristotle and Plato, you can see that he was led to engage with these issues through a philosophical tradition that stretches back to the very origins of classical philosophic thought. To that extent it is possible to draw comparisons and I am sure that you could do – as indeed some scholars have already done – some very detailed studies of deconstruction in relation to Jewish thought, to Christian thought, to Islamic thought, and (as you are suggesting) to various ancient or more recent main currents in Indian thought. Still it seems to me that the comparisons work at a pretty high level of generality and mostly concern certain basic binary distinctions like those I mentioned: substance and attribute, reality and appearance, permanence and change, etc., which are sure to crop up in just about any mode of philosophical reflection quite early on.
ASB: I suppose at some point we should grasp the nettle and discuss whether we can say anything about why Derrida, and for example, a second-century Buddhist thinker like Nagarjuna, have both engaged in an attempt to deconstruct those dualisms, and whether the energy they thereby generate can lead us to significant advances or whether that energy achieved by pitting such terms against each other is simply a pretext for yet further displays of deconstructive ingenuity. I would like to think that this could lead on to a discussion of whether Derrida’s work has important ethical, social, and political implications, for instance with regard to the drastic, often violent, sometimes murderous binaries which structure the way that so many people live out their relation to various perceived ‘others’. I suppose that in this connection one would look first to Derrida’s writings explicitly on the topic of racism, on the conflict between peoples who define themselves by who or what they are not, which raises the question whether deconstructive thinking can perhaps do something to point a way beyond this appalling ‘logic’ of self versus other as a governing mode of cultural and ethnic perception.
Obviously that would be a huge undertaking and I guess that before we get there we would have to look at whether these dualisms are artificially created just in order to be knocked down, or whether they really are fundamental to the way we are, to the way we think of ourselves and others. Certainly Nagarjuna argues that the dualism that has attracted so much philosophical debate over the centuries is intrinsic, not artificially created, it is inherent to the way we think, inherent to language itself. Thus he tries to use language in order to deconstruct its categories from within and show that each concept is dependent on the other, on its opposite, at least when conceived in binary or exclusive (either/or) logical terms. If they are viewed, on the contrary, as mutually defined or reciprocally dependent pairs, then any attempt to grant self-sufficient meaning or absolute priority to just one term is surely bound to fail. Still this relational approach doesn’t work out as any kind of cultural or linguistic relativism, any idea that it is all just a matter of how we interpret such things. Indeed this relativistic tendency is much abhorred by Buddhist thought which would argue that such relativism is not compatible with the attempt to configure the idea of nonduality. The dualism has to be deconstructed, not merely dismissed or subject to some kind of rhetorical vanishing-trick.
: Well, yes, again, whenever you look at these things you find suggestive parallels, analogies, convergences, or sometimes (one suspects) just chance resemblances. For instance, let’s take as a starting point what Kant has to say about the inbuilt tendency of the mind, of what he calls pure speculative reason, to produce all sorts of insoluble antinomies, of paradoxical or aporetic thoughts that can’t be reconciled with the basic principles of logic, such as non-contradiction of excluded middle. Thus whenever we reflect on metaphysical topics like the immortality of the soul, or the nature and attributes of God, or cosmological topics (is the universe finite or unbounded?) or temporal questions (did time have a beginning, and in that case what came before the beginning of time?) then you always get two, equally cogent but mutually inconsistent or downright contradictory answers that leave us completely at a loss what to think. Kant has an answer to this, a kind of answer, although many people (myself included) feel it is not entirely satisfactory. He lays it down as a stipulative thing that pure reason has to recognise certain liabilities in its own nature, namely those imposed by its going beyond the limits of conceptual understanding. When we understand something in the proper (Kantian) sense we do so by applying concepts to sensuous intuitions, or again – as he puts it – by bringing intuitions under concepts so as to achieve a cognitive or epistemic match/correspondence between them. Pure reason is perfectly at liberty to speculate and, moreover, is compelled to do so by a kind of inbuilt metaphysical tendency of thought that constantly seeks to transcend the bounds of ‘mere’ conceptual understanding. Indeed such thought has to do with issues of the utmost human concern, such as the immortality of the soul and the central questions of ethics, metaphysics, and even natural science. All the same we go wrong – run into various kinds of antinomy or dead-end paradox – if we suppose such questions to leave room for any kind of answer or adequate solution on conceptual terms. Hence the title of his first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant tries to set limits to this speculative tendency whilst conceding that it cannot be prevented, that the human mind has an inbuilt speculative urge which inevitably leads it to generate these sorts of puzzling but metaphysically revealing dilemma.
Now there do seem to be parallels here – or at least a certain suggestive affinity – with that particular current of Indian thought (Nagarjuna’s Buddhist philosophy) which you described a few minutes ago. According to Kant the best we can hope for in relation to these problems and perplexities is to get a firm grasp on the essential difference between speculative reason, which has this intrinsic paradox-creating character, and cognitive understanding which is always a matter of bringing sensuous (or phenomenal) intuitions under adequate concepts. In a way this is quite typical of what many Western philosophers, Derrida included, have tried to do. Thus you find Wittgenstein, for instance, saying in his later work that the proper business of philosophy is to put itself out of business, to give philosophy peace, or to coax us down from all that needless fretting about the ‘problem of knowledge’, ‘other minds’, how to answer the sceptic, and so forth. So if only we recognised what Wittgenstein has to show us, which is basically that it is language – or the philosophers’ chronic ‘bewitchment’ by language - which leads us into all these perplexities, then we could just let them go with a sigh of relief and achieve, I suppose, a kind of Buddhist deliverance, a wise and philosophically untroubled acceptance of the way things are. And yet of course Wittgenstein, like Derrida, was a thinker who compulsively worried away at those same old problems and dilemmas. He wrote an enormous amount, not (of course) for the sake of academic advancement or even with a view to eventual publication but out of a deep and well-nigh obsessive concern with problems that he none the less urged us to regard as mere pseudo-problems. These latter were artificially induced by the philosophers’ habit of removing language from its natural, everyday context and giving it some different, specialised and troublesome range of alternative meanings. Still this doesn’t make the problems go away for all Wittgenstein’s sage counsel, either in his own case (where they keep cropping up with undiminished force and power to disturb) or in the case of his legion disciples and commentators, where they have sustained a veritable academic industry devoted to (what else?) the same old issues of knowledge, scepticism, other minds, and so forth.
Thus it may well be, to go back to the point you were making, that there is a certain innate, perhaps even ‘hardwired’ tendency of the human mind to think in terms of binary opposites, of one thing as opposed to or distinct from another, including all the famous Derridean pairs: speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, reason/rhetoric, concept/metaphor, male/ female, the intelligible versus the sensible. Perhaps they constitute a strictly inescapable aspect of human thinking, even - as a cognitive psychologist might say – something that results from the very physiology and structure of the brain, since the neurone is either firing or not firing . . . . No doubt it is vastly more complex than that if you wire millions of neurones together and allow for massive parallel processing, but maybe there is something intrinsic, in a sort of Kantian sense, about the nature of human thinking that pushes us towards this constant binary urge to classify and differentiate and define one thing as opposed to another. On the other hand, as you say, this can take many forms, sometimes benign or ethically neutral, but sometimes vicious and dangerous forms, as in those currently resurgent strains of ethnocentric, racist, or deep-grained sexist prejudice. So it is a mode of thought that, understandably, certain philosophical traditions, including the Buddhist tradition, have seen as something we should try to overcome, something that requires therapy, something we need to wean ourselves off by whatever available means. Whether this can be achieved I really don’t know, but it is very noticeable that in the case of a thinker like Derrida the effort to achieve it goes along with a curious (though maybe, as I have said, an inevitable) attachment to just those binary distinctions which he expressly sets out to deconstruct.
To be sure, Derrida is in some sense ‘attacking’ those distinctions, bringing out their problematic nature, showing that that they are so complex, unstable, or intrinsically self-subverting that they cannot be held in place except through a kind of unwitting blindness to whatever challenges their authority. Nevertheless his own thinking is deeply vested in certain binary distinctions, as is all philosophical thinking, and indeed all thinking tout court. He can’t frame his arguments without setting up certain oppositions, which he then of course proceeds to complicate and disrupt, but without (as he would be the first to admit) coming out altogether on the far side of such binary pairs. Even if he shows (as in those classic early readings of Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, etc.) that one term is implicated in the other, that the apparently primary term turns out in fact to be dependent on the other, i.e., ‘secondary’, ‘derivative’ or ‘supplementary’ term since the latter is its type-constitutive opposite or – in Kantian parlance – its very condition of possibility. So this is a pretty standard definition of what deconstruction is or does, but it still bears all the hallmarks of its structuralist origins in the sense that it is inescapably based on a series of binary oppositions. Thus it may be the case, and probably Derrida would concede this now, that once we stop thinking in binary terms, we just stop thinking altogether. Possibly we enter some kind of seventh heaven of enlightenment, but it would be a heaven beyond language, beyond articulation, certainly beyond the kind of highly articulate, intensely philosophical discourse that typifies Derrida’s work. In fact it would be a purely private, inexpressible state of grace, so you can’t afford to have too many people entering it, otherwise everything would come to a stop, or certainly philosophy would.
ASB: But I think that is precisely what Nagarjuna would recommend as a solution to the ills of the world, that if we were able to, if we worked harder at attempting to achieve a state of calm and nonduality we would be better off even if our state was imperfect and prone to accident, because, you know, the meditative Buddhist would argue that it is only occasionally and by accident that he can actually come anywhere near a state of enlightenment. So it is precisely by striving towards it that he makes himself more accident prone, more liable to be able to have an accidental, aletheic revelation. I think that would be Nagarjuna’s ultimate aim, and I guess it would not be Derrida’s and yet I think there is something in common between them, something that makes this a worthwhile dialogue . . . . I am not sure about Derrida, but Nagarjuna is famous for his advocacy of the middle path, the middle way by which he attempts, not to find a mean between existence and non-existence, but to slip between and then away from these binary categories. This might just allow us to look at Derrida in a slightly different way, because although he cannot escape from them, still at the end of all his arguments, in the very process of thinking them through, he may be opening up possibilities that would allow us to free ourselves from these binary oppositions, to free ourselves from certain sterile, metaphysical debates. We may end up still stuffed full of words but in that process perhaps there could be something closer to a calmness of detached and contemplative, non-binary or at least (I’d want to say) non-violent or non-aggressive thought. There I go again with a binary distinction, but I hope you see what I mean; a calmness which enables one to look at oneself as an integral part of the universe, so that one experiences no further conflict, no further friction between myself and others, because it is my conviction that nonduality is better than duality.
CN: Yes. Well I think that ethically, in terms of real-world situations, especially present-day political situations, and also in interpersonal terms, so in all sorts of ways, that would be a very good thing in so far as you could reach it, or at any rate aspire to it. But what still worries me so far as our present topic is concerned is that I can’t see Derrida moving in that direction. No doubt this goes all the way back to his early engagement with structuralism but I am thinking more specifically of one passage in Derrida where he is responding to John Searle on the topic of his famous, in some circles notorious, exchange with Searle about Austin’s speech act philosophy. A quick run-down might be useful here since I think it provides a different way into some of the things we’ve been discussing. Derrida basically problematizes some of Austin’s philosophical premises, showing that Austin’s binary distinctions were often rather leaky, or not logically watertight. Thus, according to Derrida, Austin hadn’t distinguished clearly between felicitous and infelicitous speech acts, he hadn’t clearly defined the notion of an ‘appropriate’ as distinct from an ‘inappropriate’ context for this or that kind of speech-act, and he hadn’t specified the sincerity-conditions – or conditions for good-faith performative utterance – with anything like the required degree of conceptual precision. There were borderline cases, problematical instances, contexts (a potentially infinite range of them) that might always defy the best efforts of speech-act theory or classification . . . . So Derrida had offered a critical yet none the less admiring or appreciative commentary on Austin, in the process of which – as it happens – Austin comes out as an extremely interesting, complex, subtle, and indeed (one might say) proto-deconstructive thinker.
However John Searle, an analytic philosopher and speech-act theorist with no taste for such subtleties, came along and accused Derrida of muddying the waters by demanding a kind and degree of conceptual precision in Austin that Austin did not seek to provide. Austin was, after all, a noted practitioner of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and was therefore not in the business of creating conceptual problems and dilemmas such as those that Derrida discovers or, as Searle would have it, perversely and absurdly invents. Rather he (Austin) was talking about the way we actually use language to express ourselves, communicate, make promises, utter threats or blandishments, get married, enter into binding legal commitments or contractual obligations, and so forth. In such cases there is always a certain amount of contextual imprecision or unpredictability and you don’t have clear-cut, conceptually precise, strictly exceptionless logical distinctions. Then Derrida came back and responded to Searle by saying, rather mischievously, that it was really quite disgraceful on Searle’s part to claim that you could do philosophy without making your distinctions sharp and precise. We are not dealing here (he admonishes Searle) with flavours of ice ream or toothpaste, we are dealing with philosophical concepts and a concept is clear and precise or it is nothing at all. Any fuzziness as regards the classical (binary) values of truth/falsehood – or their various speech-act correlates – means that we are no longer dealing with concepts but with something much more vague and ill-defined, such as ‘ideas’ or maybe ‘notions’.
Now Derrida is really pushing the boat out here because there do exist a whole variety of non-classical logics (many-valued, deviant, paraconsistent, even Derrida’s ‘own’ logics of supplementarity or parergonality) which would at least raise certain questions about this claim. So really he was turning the tables on Searle, in, as I said, a rather mischievous way, because Searle claimed to speak very much for the values of mainstream analytic philosophy and these were identified so closely with the norms of conceptual rigour and precision. Derrida was basically saying, look, I am more ‘analytic’ than you, not at all the kind of maverick, careless, wilful misreader of Austin’s text that you (Searle) are so keen to denounce. There was that side to it, but I think Derrida was quite serious when he also said, look, if you are going to philosophise and especially if you are going to analyse, perhaps in a deconstructive way, certain assumptions and premises of speech-act philosophy, then you have to have clear concepts and you have to strive for as much clarity as possible. So this is not just Derrida upping the ante, although I think that is one of his motives in the reply to Searle. What he does, here and elsewhere, is argue in very careful, cogent, logically precise, rigorously conceptual way, to the point where you encounter certain limits of classical logic, points at which that logic can be seen to break and pass over into something different. This is connected with what he calls ‘iterability’ in the context of Austin and speech act philosophy, a feature of performative language that creates real problems for the sorts of categorical distinction which Searle takes pretty much for granted even though he is prepared, scandalously Derrida thinks, to fuzzy them up a bit as and when required. And his point contra Searle is that all this is all there to be read in Austin’s text, in his book How To Do Things With Words, much more so than Searle perceives or is willing to admit, determined as he is to bring Austin out in agreement with his own (Searle’s) understanding of speech-act theory.
I know you will be thinking ‘How can I get him back to the topic of Derrida and Indian philosophy?’, but I do have a point to make, and it has to with this highly distinctive way of raising logical issues through modes of deconstructive close-reading. To be sure, the logics that emerge in his texts on Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, and others are nonstandard, deviant, perhaps paraconsistent logics, but they are logics nevertheless – often of a highly complex modal or tense-specific type – and they are arrived by dint of rigorous argumentation. This is what I like so much about early Derrida, the way that he strives for maximum logical precision and even for a reading consistent with the norms of classical (two-valued, i.e., true-or-false) logic, but is constantly forced to acknowledge its limits in the face of certain recalcitrant or anomalous features of the text in hand. This takes us back to what we were saying earlier about the ancient Greek philosophers, about the kinds of anxiety they suffered on account of the fact that certain kinds of perfectly logical thinking seemed to get you into various aporias or forms of paradoxical dead-end. That is why they worried so much about Zeno’s paradoxes, or why they found it so hard to acknowledge the existence of irrational numbers. For us, ‘irrational’ in this context doesn’t mean absurd or anti-rational; an irrational number simply means that it does not work out as a fraction expressible as one integer divided by another. But for them this was something very worrying; these numbers couldn’t be worked into a consistent ‘logical’ system, or at least any system computable in terms of their own mathematical understanding. Now Derrida knows a good deal about modern philosophy of mathematics and logic, as you will know from his early texts on Husserl and his far from casual or opportunist citing of the paradoxes of classical set-theory or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. So he is not going to be fazed by the notion of irrational numbers! But he does have a keen and vigilant sense of the need to strive for logical rigour and consistency even – or especially – when his own responsiveness to the complications of the text in hand leads him to question the scope and limits of classical logic.
This is why I am not altogether happy with the notion of a deep affinity between Derrida’s work and that particular strain of Eastern philosophical thought that counsels a wise abstention from any such futile and self-defeating quest. Of course there is another side to his work – an aspect more in keeping with that idea – which is apt to strike readers who approach him mainly through his post-1990 writings on topics such as religion, hospitality, friendship, justice, and an ethics of absolute ‘alterity’ or otherness with its source in Levinas’s thinking. Not that there is something ‘Eastern’ about this in a vaguely well-meaning, ecumenical way, but there are passages – and indeed entire texts – where Derrida does seem to gesture beyond the inherited concepts and categories of Western philosophical thought. I suppose this comes out most strikingly in his more ethically oriented writing about the need to re-think the possibilities of justice, democracy, and a certain ‘cosmopolitical’ ideal in a way unprovided for by any of our standard conceptual resources. Still I think that Derrida is too much a thinker who works from within that particular tradition – albeit from a highly dissident, critical and self-consciously marginal standpoint – to let go the values that provide the very basis for his various acts of resistance. One thing you can definitely say about Derrida, whatever else you may think about him, is that he is a quite extraordinarily gifted close-reader of texts and one who inhabits those texts with a depth and acuity of insight that is unrivalled by any of his current detractors, whether on scholarly or philosophic grounds. He has a vast philosophical literature at his fingertips and I think it would be simply impossible for someone like that to achieve some kind of intellectual nirvana, some deliverance from all our inherited philosophic problems and dilemmas, unless (maybe) they had gone through some kind of drastic conversion experience.
Wittgenstein was always suggesting that he had managed it, come out on the far side of all those problems, but he still kept on worrying about them and actually spawned a whole vast secondary literature where they keep cropping up. As somebody once said about Richard Rorty, you don’t truly rid yourself of obsessions like that by just cultivating a non-obsessive tone. Besides, Derrida has made the point again and again: that thinkers who claim to ‘turn the page’ on philosophy or leap to some post-philosophical ‘beyond’ (beyond metaphysics, beyond modernity, beyond ‘Western logocentrism’, or whatever) are usually just philosophising badly. I don’t think this rules out the kind of cross-cultural comparison you’re keen to make but does mean the argument needs working through in a detailed and meticulous way.
ASB: Well yes, I agree with that, but I still think the dualisms are not so tenacious or philosophically deep-rooted as to make the encounter between deconstruction and certain forms of Indian thought such a hugely problematic and fraught affair. I guess that is why people find this juxtaposition between Derrida and Nagarjuna attractive because some would argue, like David Loy for example, that a Buddhist thinker like Nagarjuna takes deconstruction even further than Derrida does by deconstructing not only ideas and arguments, but also the very sense of personal identity which (he would argue) Derrida leaves intact, perhaps so as to continue being, as you say, an extremely prolific writer and philosopher. I am not at all sure whether it is possible at this point even to challenge this dualistic way of thinking which is fundamental to both Derrida and Buddhist thinking, but when I am faced with racist preconceptions, racist situations, racist behaviour, I find myself deploying certain modes of thought – certain conceptual strategies, if you like - that can perhaps more readily be found in a thinker like Paul Ricoeur, one who has devoted a lifetime of effort to finding some way beyond the various conflicts of present-day thought and culture. When I am working with my colleagues from within the British Muslim community I have to consciously resist the dualist habits of mind and response patterns which come to me almost automatically, almost as ‘second nature’. In order to empathise with their condition I have to suspend my disbelief, I have to accept certain constructs which are alien to me in my sense of identity as a ‘liberated’ Western woman and the price that I pay is something possibly akin to sunyata, which is nothingness, because I find that in order to achieve understanding of people who seem to be very different from me I have to empty my value-sets of a lot of their baggage, but what I then end up with is a more universalisable, more generalisable range of thoughts which allow me to encompass some, no doubt limited and limiting, comprehension of their way of life. This does give me a less parochial, more open-minded and tolerant way of thinking about myself as well as about them, but it is often extremely uncomfortable and I am not sure whether Derrida can help me very much with that. Nagarjuna would offer support but the price I would then have to pay is that I would have to meditate regularly, I would have to become ‘other-worldly’ as you intimated earlier on, not just a pacifist, but I would have to renounce the opportunity to debate vociferously about ideas, renounce the logophilic culture in which Derrida and the rest of us are steeped. Maybe I would then become so passive, so introverted, so ‘navel-gazing’ as you rather unkindly put it, that I wouldn’t be able to think or act to any worthwhile effect.
CN: Well, I suppose it’s a version of the old objection to the monastic ideal, isn’t it, that if you really take those ideas to the limit you don’t actually do anything. You become a totally self-absorbed person concerned with perfecting their own inner life or spiritual self, and that means neglecting all sorts of other social and political (as well as intellectual) responsibilities. In this sense all the big issues about deconstruction and its relation to various religious traditions connect with issues in philosophy of ethics. What is so odd about these debates is they often flip over from one extreme to the other, from self-absorption to an outlook (or a proclaimed outlook) of total selflessness in the face of the ‘other’, the other who, as Levinas would say, confronts us with the absolute ethical imperative to relinquish our very selfhood in response to her or his implacable demand. Take the question of altruism: does altruism necessarily require that you empty yourself in that sense? Do you (should you) become so completely receptive to other people’s needs, so utterly self-effacing or devoid of ‘egological’ interests and concerns that you would no longer really exist as a willing, thinking, experiencing subject? I don’t think there is anything cynical about the idea that ethical reflection and behaviour can include a fair amount of enlightened self interest. People actually get a good deal of pleasure, not simply out of thinking well of themselves, but through actually identifying with other people and deriving satisfaction from the knowledge that they have brought about a situation in which other people can achieve various kinds of happiness, fulfilment, etc. So altruism can include a fair amount of, not egotism, but (as I say) a kind of enlightened self-interest without becoming something other than altruism.
I think this does connect directly with some of the debates around the ethics of deconstruction. There’s an early essay of Derrida which I am very keen on, more so than some of his more recent ones, an essay called ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, which is actually a very long, detailed, and in many ways highly critical discussion of Levinas. Levinas has been a great influence on Derrida but in this early essay he looks very closely at Levinas’s notion that ethics, any ethics worthy of the name, any genuine ethics, must be founded upon an unqualified respect for the absolute alterity of the other. This would perhaps be a kind of equivalent to what you were saying just now, the idea that we should totally empty ourselves of what Levinas calls ‘egological’ concerns, that is to say, whatever has primary reference to the thoughts, values, beliefs, desires, and priorities of the first-person subject. This is why, for Levinas, ethics is ‘first philosophy’, rather than the theory of knowledge (or epistemology), as supposed by just about every mainstream Western philosopher from Plato to Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and beyond. So we are to wean ourselves off all those dominant notions of the self, the ego, the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian transcendental subject, or however it has been described, and take Levinas’s point that western philosophy, almost from the outset, got off on the wrong foot because it placed the first-person knowing subject at the heart of its concern. Thus the big questions were issues like: What can I know? How can I know it? What precisely are the scope and limits of my knowledge? How can we defeat the epistemological sceptic? Levinas says that this is getting things back to front. Ethics is first philosophy and the only genuine, authentic ethics is one that involves a complete renunciation of that first-person epistemological perspective through which we come to accept the other person as being quite possibly, so far as we can know, so utterly different from us that none of our interests, values, or priorities may be thought of as applying to them. So it involves this emptying-out of the self which you might perhaps analogise to certain strains of Indian thought.
Now in his early essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ Derrida, as I have said, expresses various misgivings with regard to this whole line of argument and indeed offers what might fairly be described as a full-scale critique of Levinasian ethics. Basically he says it is impossible to achieve because if we were to make this effort and actually succeed in thinking of the other person as unknowably different from us then we wouldn’t be thinking of them as a person at all. We must always to some extent, Derrida says, think of them as an alter ego, which of course means respecting their alterity – their otherness – but also means accepting that we couldn’t begin to understand them, to sympathise with them, even to make due allowance for their differences from us unless, as fellow human beings, we shared a great deal in the way of basic needs, experiences, interests, perceptual modalities, conceptual (including linguistic) resources, etc. So issues of knowledge (epistemology) do have a crucial bearing here and cannot be simply demoted – as Levinas would have it – to some merely derivative or secondary role. But it is also an ethical question. If you like, to change the idiom somewhat, Derrida is saying that there can be such a thing as enlightened or other-regarding self-interest, just as we can treat others as sharing certain basic aspects of our own experience or lifeworld without thereby reducing them to mere creatures or projection of our own egos. So ethics doesn’t – cannot – involve a total emptying-out of the self in response to the intransigent demand of the other conceived in terms of absolute alterity.
This is also a point that Derrida makes via his reading of Levinas on Husserl. To summarise rather brutally: Levinas claims that the project of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is the last, no doubt the most advanced and refined but also perhaps the terminal stage in that same ‘egological’ tradition of thought which presumes to derive the conditions of possibility for all thought and experience by reflecting on them from a first-person epistemological standpoint. This involves a very rigorous, intensely self-critical, and (at any rate so Husserl would claim) a universally valid since apodictically self-warranting exercise in transcendental reflection. Levinas wrote several early books on Husserl that adopted a broadly sympathetic approach but then reacted very sharply against Husserl’s influence and said that, on the contrary, we have passed beyond that stage and opened ourselves to a thinking of otherness – of absolute alterity – which leaves phenomenology far behind, along with all its surplus epistemological baggage. Now, Derrida is very respectful of Levinas, but not so respectful – at least in this early essay – as to take these arguments on board without criticism. If we did somehow manage to think of other people in the way that Levinas proposes then they would become so remote, so utterly strange, so alien to all our most basic modes of shared knowledge, understanding, and experience that we would have no genuine sense of them as persons but as so many objects in our field of perceptual acquaintance. That is to say, we would be confronted with the problem of ‘other minds’, but in a form more acute than ever comes across when analytic philosophers raise that question as a standard sceptical topic of debate.
All the same I should mention that Derrida has shifted ground quite a bit in his later work with regard to Levinasian ethics. He is now much more receptive to Levinas’ thinking, not without certain residual doubts, but at least as regards that basic idea of the other as exerting an ethical challenge beyond anything remotely comprehensible within the horizons of Western post-Hellenic philosophical thought. Thus he does venture some criticisms of Levinas – and likewise of Heidegger – for ignoring issues of sexual difference when raising these supposedly primordial concerns. Still his subsequent writings on Levinas have taken a much more emollient line, and when he now addresses ethical themes it is from a standpoint far more in tune with notions of radical alterity, of ethical decisions as involving an almost Kierkegaardian leap of faith, or as somehow arrived at without any recourse to grounds, reasons, justifications, guiding principles, and so forth . . . . I have to say that, for me, Derrida’s later writings very often seem to lack the critical edge, the philosophical cogency of his earlier work.
ASB: So are you saying that, as Derrida becomes more explicitly ethical, he tends to relax his previous standards of argumentative rigour, logical precision, or whatever?
CN: Well, I think there is some truth in that, although others – including many who have written about the ethics and politics of deconstruction – would disagree sharply. They would say that those later writings mark the transition from a negative, critical mode of thought to something more affirmative, more deeply engaged with issues that were always there in his work but kept, so to speak, in reserve.
ASB: Still you seem to think that he is in some sense lowering his critical guard, or even suspending his critical faculties, in order to not contaminate or complicate the ethical argument?
CN: I suppose you might say he’s become more irenic in his later writing, less apt to criticise those (like Levinas) whose work has been important to him. Not that Derrida was ever very polemical except when he felt himself attacked and traduced by those (like Searle) who hadn’t taken the trouble to properly read or understand him. But I think that the case for drawing comparisons between deconstruction and various religious traditions becomes more convincing in his later work, partly because he is quite explicit about it. He talks about the Jewish theological tradition, about Christianity in various forms, about the interplay of Greek philosophical thought with the Judaeo-Christian heritage . . . . And of course he has lately had quite a bit to say about those strains of broadly postmodern theological (or ‘post-theological’) thinking that have carried on from the ‘death-of-God’ debates of the 1960s and evolved, very often, in close relation to developments in critical and literary theory, deconstruction among them. Here again, Derrida has shifted ground, and done so in a way that involves some relaxation – if not exactly a slackening – of critical engagement. In his early work he is very insistent that deconstruction has nothing whatsoever to do with negative theology of the type that goes back to thinkers like Meister Eckhart and has most recently been picked up by ‘deconstructionist’ theologians such as Thomas Altizer. Negative theology involves a process wherein you start by applying various predicates in the attempt to define or describe God, and then you discover that they can’t be applied in that way, because God necessarily – by very definition – exceeds or transcends whatever range of predicates you have at your disposal. But of course you started out with just this conclusion in mind and so it amounts to a roundabout way of defining what you mean by ‘God’.
Early Derrida states very firmly that deconstruction is not doing that, it is not just a negative or inverted form of theological, metaphysical, or (in Heidegger’s parlance) ‘onto-theological’ discourse. But then in his later work he becomes much more receptive to that idea, I think partly because there is now a flourishing, mainly US based school of deconstructive theology – including people like Mark C. Taylor - which claims to derive inspiration from Derrida. I suppose he appreciates the compliment so he’s much more, well, not exactly enthusiastic, but at least tolerant and good-willed toward it Again there is a kind of mellowing with age, I suppose, something that fortunately happens to most of us but which I think connects with lots of other issues as regards the passage from ‘early’ to ‘late’ Derrida. Still he never lets up on the basic requirement that thinking should aspire to the highest, most rigorous and (as he often says) the most intellectually and ethically responsible standards of philosophic discourse. I talked about Searle, the exchange between Derrida and Searle, but I think this goes back to the point you made at the very beginning, that in some sense human thinking is irreducibly binary and that we won’t understand where differences can turn into conflicts, antagonisms, and hatreds unless we think these issues through with the utmost care and precision. This may have to do with brain structure, I think it probably does, but it also has to do with cultural structures, and of course it has a lot to do with linguistic structures. If you believe Saussure, and in this sense at least he seems to be right, we do define things, pick them out, classify and describe them according to their perceived differences one from another or their various distinctive attributes.
Still this is no reason to go along with post-structuralists, postmodernists, social constructivists, or ‘strong’ sociologists of knowledge and end up by embracing a wholesale version of cultural-linguistic relativism. Indeed you can draw just the opposite conclusion, i.e., that quite literally it doesn’t make sense to claim that language is prior to thought, or that the structure of some given natural language (e.g., ancient Greek) must determine what counts as a logical statement, argument, or thought-form for speakers of that same language (e.g., the subject-predicate form as reflected in the grammar of ancient Greek and its various successor tongues). The ‘analytic’ philosopher Donald Davidson has effectively demolished this sort of argument in his well-known essay ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, but it is also – as some may be surprised to hear – demolished to equally telling effect in Derrida’s essay ‘The Supplement of Copula’. Anyway my point in all this is that you can’t opt out of thinking logically – or suppose that there exist as many different logics as there exist different languages or conceptual schemes – without running into various kinds of absurdity or patent self-contradiction. In the case of a statement like p or not-p, the two things are logically exclusive, they can’t both be true, just as somebody who makes a statement to the effect p and not-p will be taken to be either speaking in riddles, indulging a penchant for paradox, or just plain stupid or confused. To be sure, as I have said, there are various other logics – many-valued, paraconsistent, non-dialethic, etc. – but the point Derrida is making against Searle is that at least for basic philosophical (and indeed for most everyday-practical) purposes we need to operate with logical concepts which do involve sharp, well-defined binary distinctions. Thus there is a logical form of reasoning called modus ponens which goes: if p then q; but p; therefore q. And there is another, modus tollens, which runs: if p then q; but not-q, therefore not-p. ‘Rules’ of logic: this may sound restrictive, coercive, even (as some cultural critics might think) downright ethnocentric or imperialist, but even those critics won’t get far in arguing their case unless they abide by the basic standards of logical thought. Moreover, those standards simply must apply across otherwise large differences of language and culture because they are built into the way we think and act – must think and act if we want things to come out right – in all sorts of everyday situation.
ASB: Yes, but at this point I feel quite affectionate towards Nagarjuna because, perhaps, he pushes a little bit further to the point where we should realise that although what you have described is obviously true, it is fundamentally ridiculous and futile to run our lives on such drastic polarities. If we see ourselves as being part of the universe, then the polarities are something that we create in order, as you say, to get through the working day, get through our leisure time, get through our various relationships. That allows us to make certain predictions, so if we think in dualisms, then perhaps we can predict other people’s behaviour, we can predict their belief systems, we can define, post hoc, the way we do things, but that doesn’t mean to say that it is a particularly realistic, desirable, or constructive way to think. I suppose Nagarjuna is extremely stubborn in insisting that we have to cast aside these dualities if we are to have any real sense of the self as a non-self. Then of course you get into those dualistic paradoxes again but I guess that if Nagarjuna calls to his aid at this point all the meditational tools that have been developed, then he can make his case a bit more robust. That brings us back again to the point that it might render one unable to act upon one’s insight about the holistic nature of being alive because one would then be in a deeply meditative state, which could be mistaken by an outsider as a merely vegetative state.
CN: Well, you know, there’s that puzzle about where all the little monks come from . . . . But this puts me in mind of an essay on Gandhi by George Orwell where he says that saintliness is all very fine in its way but you just can’t afford to have too many Gandhis. Your average saint requires a large support mechanism of practical-minded, non-saintly types, including a few who can think straight on everyday matters, and too many saints can make life very difficult for those around them. So a certain number of saints is probably a good idea, for moral uplift and so on, but if a large section of society went that way you wouldn’t have much of a society.
ASB: According to Nagarjuna you would have a peaceful state, a state of achieved non-conflict, and obviously that is beyond our comprehension. But let’s go back to your comparison between my account of the efforts I’ve made to reduce racist feelings, and Levinas’s very strong but, as you see it, highly problematical notion of absolute alterity. In my own defence I would want to say that I don’t go anything like that far but rather that, simply in order to displace my own ego, I may exaggerate the primacy and the call on our moral, social, and political conscience of the rights of the other. Of course it’s a delicate balance and I think that perhaps multiculturalism in this country has made the mistake of effacing the predominant, ‘white’ set of cultural values and priorities so as to hand over some moral entitlement which can then, as an unintended side-effect, entail that the existing white culture becomes confused and loses its own sense of identity.
CN: Then it becomes fragile, defensive, and embittered.
ASB: Yes, exactly, and at this point I think I would want to draw on Ricoeur because he seems to me, in much of his writing, to be very much on guard against the kinds of culturally entrenched dualism which, as you say, can take some pretty vicious and destructive forms. Of course he accepts that the basic thought-forms exist, that they have existed as long as the human mind has functioned but they are still products of a certain cultural mind-set which we tend to fall back on just because we haven’t got a better one to work with. Still Ricoeur doesn’t see this way of thinking as particularly helpful, constructive, or humanly beneficial. That may not be so dissimilar from Derrida’s views as you have described them here, but I think it comes across as a real difference of emphasis and ethical tone. Ricoeur’s sense of self as being reflected in the other creates in one’s mind a very interesting kind of zigzag, whereby I see my own values, interests, and beliefs given back, so to speak, in a different form but one that I can still get on terms with through an effort of sympathetic insight. I try to understand how they might see me and, in doing so, I gain a much better understanding of how I might see them despite and across all the differences between us. It is complicated process all right but one which could contribute towards intercultural understanding at a much higher level of genuine reciprocity than we are managing to achieve at the moment. Maybe we’re really saying much the same thing, you from a basically Derridean standpoint and me from a standpoint more directly inspired by Ricoeur’s kind of hermeneutic and phenomenological approach. Either way it could surely help to deconstruct some of our more deep-rooted and insidious racial stereotypes.
CN: I agree with that, the idea that these much-touted disputes between various thinkers, schools, or movements are a lot less important than their points of contact. If you start off from that fairly ecumenical but not too fudgy position then all sorts of possible working alliances come to mind. Take for instance some of the work done by linguistic philosophers, people like H. P. Grice, his idea of the kinds of mutual understanding that normally result through what calls the ‘co-operative maxims’ of social or interpersonal discourse, or the implicit, taken-for-granted guidelines of conversational ‘implicature’. A lot of our linguistic or communicative uptake depends on this sort of thing. That is, it involves an often highly complex but largely intuitive process, you know, the intention that when we say something – make a statement, utter a promise, express an opinion – then our interlocutor should understand us as intending to say it with a certain kind of force, and intending that they should understand it just as we intended it, and understand us to have had that second-order (or maybe third-order) intention, and so forth. So there might seem a danger of infinite regress, but of course it has got to stop at some point since a vast amount of human social-linguistic interaction goes on in that way. We are predicting, second-guessing what people will make of our words, we are framing our utterances so as to elicit the right kinds of feedback loop, if you like. Presumably this started out at the earliest stages of proto-linguistic communication when one cave-dweller intended to warn his cave-dwelling neighbour that a wild animal had just entered his (the neighbour’s) cave, and also intended that this should be recognised as his intention, etc. etc. At least it seems an intuitively plausible idea that language began like this and then built up its more elaborate structures on a basis of reciprocal communicative grasp through imputed meanings and intentions.
ASB: So, in a way, you are agreeing with Ricoeur that the main thing (and perhaps the first thing, logically or philosophically speaking) is to bridge linguistic and cultural differences, to achieve a background of shared understanding against which we can then work more effectively to grasp those differences and make due allowance for them. Rather than coming at it from the opposite end: starting out from the supposed fact of radical difference and then raising it into a full-scale theory of ‘incommensurable’ language-games, conceptual schemes, paradigms, or whatever.
CN: Well yes, that’s right, and it is the kind of argument you find in a philosopher like Donald Davidson, the idea that such scheme-relativist talk about different, ‘incommensurable’ languages or paradigms just doesn’t make sense unless you interpret it against such a background, in which case the talk is completely off-the-point. The same thing follows, at a rather more basic level, from Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and his way of applying the co-operative maxim as a ground-rule of dialogue and discourse generally. If you don’t start out from this and the other Gricean maxims – especially the relevance-maxim – then you won’t get the hang of other people’s meanings and they won’t get the hang of yours. Unless you are being ironic, or making a joke, or of course trying to deceive them, in which case the ground-rules are suspended. But very often you guess that they are suspended – you pick it up from various contextual cues and clues – so you will spot the joke, the irony, the metaphor, or maybe (if their strategy didn’t work) the intent to deceive. You realise that they can’t have meant what they said, as it is so wildly off the point or out of keeping.
AS: Can you link this up with what we were saying earlier about Levinas, Derrida, and the ethics of radical alterity? I mean, in so far as those issues relate to Davidson’s or Grice’s take on the question of just how much must be presupposed, in the way of shared understanding, before we can talk intelligibly about differences of language, belief, or conceptual scheme? There does seem to be some connection . . . .
CN: Yes indeed: it is the point we discussed way back, about Derrida’s rejecting the notion of radical alterity, since if we thought of other people as being so very different from us then they would fall outside the sphere of ethical responsibility, as well as the realm of inter-personal relations and shared linguistic understanding. But I’d like to return to the main topic here, the topic of deconstruction and Indian thought, because in one sense we’ve rather veered off it while in another it goes to the heart of these issues about language and communication. After all, there are other philosophers in the western tradition who would perhaps come to mind more readily if you were looking for cross-cultural links of this sort. Schopenhauer is the most obvious example, the thinker who really was influenced by his reading in Indian philosophy, although maybe he is a bit of an embarrassment here since the lessons he derived were so uniformly grim and repugnant to most modern tastes. Life was, on balance, more to be endured than enjoyed, what we took to be ‘reality’ was merely a veil of illusion, the ultimate reality was Will, a blind, ceaseless, unconscious striving that drove us from one unsatisfied desire to the next, without respite except for occasional moments of detached (mainly aesthetic) contemplation. And of course he had some pretty obnoxious views: deeply misogynist, politically ultra-conservative, nothing you would want to promote as an advertisement for Buddhist or any other ‘Eastern’ way of thought.
Still Schopenhauer is a pretty way-out thinker by just about any standard. There are more interesting comparisons to be drawn with a present-day philosopher like Derek Parfit, who wrote a book called Reasons and Persons which has made quite a splash in recent ethical debate. It is a speculative, highly adventurous book book which uses a range of often far-fetched but intuitively powerful thought-experiments with the aim of convincing us that we need to get away from first-person-centred, if you like ‘egological’, ways of thinking about ethical issues. He says that we should take a much larger, wider, longer-term, impersonal, or trans-individual view of things, since only by doing that can we break the hold of such thinking. In a way he wants us to return to something more like Hume’s sceptical position on the nature of personal identity, that is to say, a notion of the ‘self’ as really just a loose-knit bundle of impressions, memories, desires, anticipations, and so forth, which don’t add up to anything like the self (or the person) as usually conceived. Thus, for Parfit as for Hume, we had much better let go of this idea that there’s a deep further fact about me that makes me what I am, whether the soul as in much religious teaching, or the mind as some sort of Cartesian theatre, or as what Kant calls the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. For Kant, conversely, there has to be some kind of framework that contains all our memories and experiences, present perceptions and sensations, future anticipations and so forth, since otherwise we couldn’t make sense of our lives. Certainly morals would make no sense, Kant says, if we didn’t have this underlying sense of personal continuity, of our being still responsible – as autonomous agents - for our own past actions, choices, or commitments and of our also having responsibilities in the present that carry over to subsequent stages in our lives when we ought to keep promises, honour marriage-vows, atone for past misdeeds, etc. So if you take Hume’s view – that the unitary self is nothing more than a kind of consoling illusion – then, according to Kant, you are cutting away the very basis or foundation of morals.
Parfit thinks that Kant got it wrong, not only as concerns the metaphysics of personal identity but also with regard to what works out best as a matter of ethical theory and, more directly, of making good choices on a rational and well-considered basis. We are most of us capable, unless we are suffering some kind of psycho-pathological affliction, of thinking or projecting ourselves into other people’s situations so as to take adequate account of their needs, priorities, wishes, and desires. We can think of future generations and their best interests, for instance when weighing up the pros and cons of some policy decision on matters of environmental concern. We can go at least that far beyond the sorts of limiting perspective imposed by a narrow, first-person-centred, merely ‘egological’ approach. After all, Parfit asks, what can be the difference between taking a sensible, long-term rather than short-term view of the best choice to make with regard to our own, ‘individual’ future interests and taking a broad, socially inclusive rather than narrow and self-preoccupied view. In both cases the wiser approach is one that so far as possible resists the tendency to base our ranking orders – our sense of what counts as important, desirable, morally compelling, etc. – on what merely happens to be closest to us in temporal or subjective terms. So ranking other people’s interests and concerns on a par with our own, and the interests and concerns of future generations on a par with those of people now alive, is really just a matter of logical consistency with the same basic principle.
Of course it is hard, maybe even counter-intuitive, given our acculturated habits of thought. Maybe we are all parochial in some degree, incapable of truly living up to Parfit’s ideal by adopting a wholly impersonal viewpoint from which to evaluate the rights and wrongs of some present course of action. So, when weighing up our own priorities, we tend to have proportionally less concern about temporally distant events than about what is likely to happen tomorrow. On the other hand we can develop this capacity for taking other people’s needs and interests into account, just as (when it comes to environmental issues) we can reckon on the needs and interests of future generations, and not just those of our children, or our grandchildren, or people with whom we feel some immediate bond of kinship or affinity. So if it is a question of making decisions on matters of long-term environmental concern then you would probably find a good measure of agreement, not perhaps among politicians, certainly not among US republicans, but at least among most ethical philosophers and morally or socially aware people that future generations must come into the reckoning. It’s a complicated issue because it has to include consideration of presently non-existent, that is to say, future-possible or potential persons who don’t yet have any needs or interests. And it is even more complex because our present decisions may decide whether or not there might be any such future persons, more or less of them, along with the quality of their lives and the kinds of condition they will possibly or probably live in. Still it is not so utterly remote or so completely beyond the scope of rational reflection as to leave us at a loss for anything to think or decide.
I hope this will chime with some of the things you are saying about Indian philosophy, the emptying of self, the transcendence of the ego, and so forth. Parfit wouldn’t want to get there by means of a contemplative, a religious, or (least of all) a mystical route. He would say that we can best, most reliably get there by rationally thinking through the options and seeing that we are often misled – betrayed into making morally wrong, even socially calamitous decisions – by the false belief that there is some deep further fact about the self which makes these issues crucially a matter of autonomous, individual choice. He argues that it is rational to give up that way of thinking, especially nowadays when decisions of this sort might always turn out to have such far-reaching consequences, geographically speaking and also with regard to the interests and the very existence of future generations. So it’s a practical imperative, arrived at on rational grounds. But he also brings in lots of thought-experiments, about brain transplants and split identity. Thus, for instance, he poses the question: if you were going to have a brain transplant, and your brain was going to be put in another body, would you rather wake up from the anaesthetic and find that ‘you’ were now that body or that brain? Of course, most people opt for the second possibility, since they suppose the mind to be somehow identical with the brain, or at any rate to be more dependent on certain brain-states than on bodily functions, or perhaps – if they’re philosophers – to stand in an ‘emergent’ or ‘supervenient’ relation to various physical goings-on in the brain. But of course this amounts to just a version of old-style Cartesian dualism, however nuanced or qualified, along with all the well-known problems thrown up by that line of argument. And besides, even if you went for the ‘brain’ option, would it still be you in any other than an abstract, disembodied, and hence merely notional sense?
Or again, Parfit asks: what if they – these future surgeons and neurophysiologists – could produce a perfect, neuron-by-neuron, identically wired-up and configured replica of your brain? Would there then be two of ‘you’, and would it then be a matter of perfect indifference as to whether you – the person who was posed this question before the operation took place – woke up in possession of the ‘original’ brain or its cloned counterpart? Parfit has lots of other examples in a similar far-out speculative vein. Some have to do with teletransportation and the question whether you would care – whether you would have any reason to care – if your whole body (including brain) were deconstituted into a computer programme, beamed to some distant region of the universe, and then perfectly reconstituted atom-by-atom together with all its memory imprints, acquired characteristics, neurophysiologically-based personal traits, etc. These are really extraordinary, mind boggling questions and of course invite the charge that they belong more to the realm of science-fiction than anything remotely conceivable within the limits of present-day medical or techno-scientific possibility. Thus we can’t yet do brain transplants, we can’t yet produce perfect clones of existing brains or a machine that could teletransport you or me to Alpha Centauri. Still these possibilities are not absolutely unthinkable, not in breach of some basic, exceptionless law of nature (such as the conservation-laws or the veto on retroactive causation) so it is legitimate to run thought experiments like this if they get us to do some hard thinking about issues – like that of personal identity and the scope and limits of ethical concern. So maybe, if these questions strike us as lacking any ‘rational’ solution on presently acceptable terms, then we should set about radically re-thinking those terms and coming up with some alternative, that is to say, less restrictive and dilemma-inducing habits of thought. After all, what we usually think of as ‘our’ memories and experiences, as distinct from the memories and experiences of other people, is a pretty fuzzy distinction at best and sometimes impossible to draw. We often have a much more vivid recollection of what we read in a novel, perhaps, or in someone else’s diary, than of events in our own lives. And this is not just a kind of naïve illusion, like the people who write in to ‘East Enders’ or ‘The Archers’ with advice on how the characters should sort things out, but a reflection of the fact that our ‘individual’ lives are bound up with the lives of others in all sorts of complex, intricate, and often quite inseparable ways. Parfit is not a Buddhist, not a practising Buddhist, at least so far as I know, but you can see how it connects with his thinking about ethical issues, about the need to move beyond unitary concepts of selfhood, and so forth . . . .
ASB: Yes, I am not sure if I can go anywhere with brain transplants, although maybe thought-experiments like that are useful as metaphors, or speculative instruments. I think a lot of people who work with Derrida and with Indian philosophy, people like Coward and Magliola, would find real affinities between the two, in that they wish to provide some kind of map that can help us to make sense of our daily lives. Whether this is really translatable into our daily lives or not is another matter, but the offer, the invitation is there. I don’t know if I can use Derrida to guide and inform my daily actions. I can certainly use him as a powerful inspiration for my thinking. He has the power, the imagination, the speculative range, the ability to come up with new and – very often – with profoundly unsettling ideas that challenge metaphysical assumptions. But when he writes more explicitly about ethical issues, about moral dilemmas and matters of urgent, real-world political concern, then sometimes his writing seems to lack the critical edge that you find in his earlier, more ‘philosophical’ work. Does this take us back to the notion that you have to set up those same old dualisms and dichotomies in order to achieve any kind of intellectual rigour? If this is the case, then we seem to be trapped, as Loy would say, in an endlessly circulating verbal whirlpool, whereas Nagarjuna would leap out of the whirlpool and invite us to use the power of our thinking to liberate ourselves from the dualisms that constrain us.
Of course here is a problem about chronology here, about cultural change and the availability of past ideas to present understanding. Nagarjuna wrote in the second century, so we must be seeing him differently now from how he was understood then. I can do no other than try and understand him through the over-educated, over-verbal milieu in which we function now. I have to take what I can from thinkers like Derrida and Nagarjuna, and hope to see a way beyond my anxieties, my anger and frustration when looking at the state of things now, such as the political structures that are offered to me in this so-called democracy that we live in. I can try to achieve a sense of relative calm that allows me to put some distance between myself and those frustrations, and perhaps to act ethically, to behave a bit better as a result. I actually derive more inspiration from Ricoeur, with his tentative and nuanced (you would probably say his eclectic and inconclusive, even philosophically evasive) way of approaching these issues. From one of his early works, Fallible Man, through to a fairly recent text, Oneself as Another, Ricoeur provides ways of puzzling out a route through and beyond the dualisms that we set up for ourselves. This helps me to act ethically with small groups of others at a local level, but it can certainly be quite a difficult, sometimes painful experience. Derrida gives me intellectual challenge, and the challenge of deconstructing texts, but not necessarily insight into the ways in which I can deconstruct racism for myself and with others.
CN: Well, there is a big difference between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Derrida in this respect. At one time, if people asked him in interviews whether there were any general lessons to be taken away from his readings of Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, or whoever, then he would say quite firmly no. These were very specific, highly detailed readings of particular texts and they might raise interesting philosophical problems that were perhaps capable of being extended to some limited range of other contexts, but you certainly couldn’t derive from them any general deconstructive method, theory, or worldview. Derrida reacted, as many French thinkers of his generation did, against the Sartrean idea of the public intellectual, the maitre à penser, the figure who exploited his philosophic eminence as a platform from which to pronounce on matters of wider (national or international) public concern. Sartre was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, one who took a much-publicised stand on all the major public issues and was seen as making too much of himself as one of these grand, authoritative figures. In fact this was highly unfair to Sartre, as Derrida has recently conceded in some much more generous and conciliatory, even quite admiring remarks. He has never claimed that kind of status for himself, but he has shown a much greater readiness to talk about world-political issues and questions of immediate, topical relevance. This can be seen in the series of interviews he gave after 9/11 that were published as a book, alongside interviews with Habermas. (The two of them didn’t engage in any direct, face-to-face dialogues, which is a pity, given their unfortunate history of past disagreements and mutual misunderstandings.) Here Derrida is talking very explicitly about global politics, about the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’, about the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism but also about the dangers posed – in the wake of 9/11 – by the kind of resurgent Christian fundamentalism, linked to a US neo-imperialist drive, represented by George W. Bush and his entourage. Now here are some good, politically acute, at times very courageous things that Derrida says in the course of these conversations. They are linked in with a whole range of themes from his other writings over the past decade: themes like hospitality, asylum, cosmopolitanism, global justice, thoughts about the future, the possible future of a federal Europe as a counterbalance to the threat of US global hegemony. On the other hand – and this is something I feel about a lot of Derrida’s recent work – they are positions, basically progressivist or left-liberal positions, that you could arrive at (so to speak) without benefit of deconstruction. That is, they are not reached by anything like the highly distinctive, characteristically ‘Derridean’ mode of argument that typified his earlier writings.
Well, maybe that is not entirely true; there is still a certain kind of deconstructive turn that leads him, for instance, to essay the limits of justice, or hospitality, or federalism as normally conceived, and to show how those conceptions run up against certain constitutive aporias or blind-spots. In fact he makes some tellling points to this effect in the context of post-9/11 global politics and the current situation in what we are pleased to call the ‘Free World’ of US-dominated Western liberal democracy. Still they are points that might have been made, if not perhaps quite so strikingly, if one approached these topics from a more conventional left standpoint within the discourse of political philosophy, or of international-relations theory. This struck me first when I read Derrida’s book The Other Heading, published in 1989. It is a book about the future of Europe, about the prospects for a united, federal Europe, written at a time when there was much debate (as now) concerning this particular topic. What Derrida has to say is impeccably left-liberal, extremely well-informed, meticulously balanced, even-handed almost to a fault. It’s very much a ‘both/and’ book, in fact, and this is I suppose the main difference that strikes me between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Derrida. Early Derrida, although he sets out to deconstruct the logic of certain binary oppositions, still pushes that either/or logic to the limit and doesn’t suggest that we abandon it in favour of something more inclusive, less contradiction-prone, a ‘both/and’ logic, if you like. But in The Other Heading, and in some of his later texts, he does seem to take something more like this approach, not a line of least resistance, exactly, but one of balancing rival claims, alternative priorities, competing interests, and so forth. In the case of European federalism, you have to balance the aspiration for a united, peaceful, trans-national, ‘cosmopolitical’ future with a respect for the particularity of national traditions – of cultures, languages, traditions – and, beyond that, for various regional cultures or ways of life. Which is all very much what you would expect and want him to say, as a left intellectual with progressivist views but also with a keen, deconstructively inflected sense of the risks that come from suppressing difference, from imposing coercive or premature forms of totalisation . . . . Still you do feel a certain lack of critical edge, a certain easing-off in the degree of analytic or conceptual rigour.
Up to a point Derrida is adopting a very Kantian line on all this. Kant, in his political writings, takes a cosmopolitical approach and says that we should try to create new kinds of trans-national structure, even global forms of governmentality beyond these isolated nation-states which constantly generate wars and competition for scarce resources. We should recognise that the most basic human interests are universal human interests, and we should construct our political systems in the light of that universality. We may never get there, in fact Kant thought we never would, not to the stage of actually achieving global democracy, ‘perpetual peace’, an international sensus communis, etc., but at least this can serve as a regulative idea that guides our various imperfect efforts in that direction. Now it is important to hang onto this kind of Kantian distinction because otherwise you are apt to get conservatives (or postmodernists like Lyotard) saying: ‘well, look what has become of all those fine ideals, they haven’t worked out in practice, so let’s dump that whole discredited enlightenment discourse and stop telling such naïve stories about progress, democracy, and social hope’. Still there is a problem when Derrida insists on drawing such a sharp, categorical distinction between the idea of a democracy always ‘to come’ – something that can never be cashed out in terms of present or realisable future institutions – and anything, any socio-political order, that we might actually hope to achieve. Here again you want to say (well, I want to say) that this can all too easily work out as a recipe for quietism, or for placing such an absolute, unbridgeable gulf between political philosophy and political practice that there seems little reason to strive for improvement in the here-and-now, or at least in the foreseeable future.
The same is true of some of his more recent books, Spectres of Marx, for instance. In many ways this is a brilliant book, dense with allusions, quotations, cross-references, offbeat yet strangely evocative, like that between the opening ghost-scene in Hamlet and the famous first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, ‘A spectre is haunting old Europe . . . . .’. And Hamlet’s reflection that ‘The time is out of joint’, which Derrida links with the promissory character of Marxist thought, the idea of a Marxism ‘yet to come’, something that continues to haunt the thinking of those (like Fukuyama) who nowadays so jubilantly trumpet its demise. Nevertheless it is a very elusive piece of writing in political terms, that is to say, if you go to it in hopes of finding some definite political content, some clear indication of just what is required in order to realise its potential. If we wish to remain true to that promise, so Derrida implies, or if we want to avoid betraying it, then we need always to think in terms of a ‘Marxism to come’, a spectral possibility that is forever beyond any prospect of actual achievement. Again this resembles a Kantian idea of reason, but with certain quasi-theological implications, as when Derrida speaks (here alluding to Walter Benjamin) of a ‘weak messianism’ that holds open this endlessly deferred promise. And again, one wants to say that this is all very well – a subtle, brilliant, sometimes profound, often highly eloquent, even passionate meditation on Marxian themes – but it does leave the reader wondering just what all this amounts to in philosophic, let alone in practical-political terms. If I were to offer a general account of the way Derrida’s thinking has gone, it is from the early work where he is engaging closely with a range of philosophical texts, where he is pursuing the anomalous logic of deconstruction with maximum rigour and sharpness of analytic focus, to the later work where he is much more willing to accept a logic of ‘both/and’, an inclusive logic that often works out as a kind of good-willed ecumenical advice that we should stretch our minds all around certain issues and try to see them from every point of view. Of course this is a very good thing in certain contexts and for certain purposes. To anyone like yourself, Alison, concerned with race relations and ethnic conflict, it is probably the best approach to take.
ASB: Although, as you say, it can come to seem rather lacking in logical rigour or philosophic force. But then how about Derrida’s work on the politics of friendship? That seems to me perhaps more satisfying than some of his texts on big issues, questions to do with Europe and the world, globalisation, US hegemony, East and West. Maybe this is a possible solution to certain otherwise irreconcilable dualisms, that through friendship, individuals can forge bonds that will transcend the conflicts that may be orchestrated and fuelled by bigger forces. Friendship on its own cannot resist such forces, but maybe it’s the best we can do. That is certainly very often the situation in my work with Muslims, Hindus, Jains, or Sikhs. There is always some hope of improved relations if we can just come together, initially, with a shared idea, be it for an educational project in Britain or in another country. This sense of common purpose is enough to begin with, but in the long term, as is so often the case, it’s the personal friendship which becomes the enduring feature. Yet this all seems very remote from philosophy, at least from academic philosophy, and I suppose that is ultimately a problem for me, because in my projects, which are real-world projects, I long to apply philosophy and would be very enthusiastic about using the work of Derrida, for example, to deconstruct racist attitudes, but I am not sure how to proceed, as there seems to be a discrepancy between how he treats philosophical issues and how he addresses issues of more immediate ethical concern. Issues to do with race seem to be as intransigent now as ever, not least with the media whipping people into an almost hysterical fear of immigration.
CN: Well, it depends on what sort of students you are teaching, and how directly you want to bring Derrida’s work to bear on their particular concerns. If you were teaching in a department of politics, especially international relations, you could very well give them a text like The Other Heading, and they might find something useful, even inspirational in it, because – despite my misgivings as mentioned before – it does set out the prospects and problems in a clear-headed and provocative way. I think that what Derrida now really wants to avoid is the idea put around by some ‘literary’ deconstructionists that it is all about inverting received distinctions, binaries, structural oppositions, etc. Just turning them upside-down, so to speak, which of course leaves the same opposition very firmly in place. This is why he has always insisted that it is a four-stage operation: first, locating the binary in question; then showing that one term in the pair (speech, nature, melody, etc.) is taken as the primary or privileged term; then the reversal-stage where it turns out that the second, supposedly derivative or adjunct term (writing, culture, or harmony) is a prerequisite, a condition of possibility for the first; and lastly the stage when it becomes apparent – through a kind of perpetual oscillating movement – that there is no stability here, that neither term can achieve a position of absolute conceptual priority. But, again, there is that difference between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Derrida, that the early texts show a detailed and meticulous working-through of these four stages while the later writings tend to take that labour for granted – take it as read, if you like – and adopt the view that one had better just avoid any risk of setting up the kinds of binary distinction that might fall back into polarised, exclusionary habits of thought.
I think that this is also what has kept Derrida from identifying himself more strongly or explicitly with any Jewish tradition of thought, and also what explains his degree of critical reserve – albeit less marked in recent years – with the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. In brief, it is the danger of a certain kind of particularism, the identification with some maginalised, persecuted, yet highly resilient cultural or religious tradition which then raises itself into a universalism with punitive sanctions attached. This can be especially dangerous when it is linked, as in Levinas, with the idea that there has always existed a special, even if complex and in some ways antagonistic relation between that tradition and some other, more ‘universal’ or world-historical counterpart. Just recently I was reading a PhD thesis by Paul Overend, a colleague in Cardiff, who makes this point rather forcefully. In fact he cites some disturbing, not to say shocking passages where Levinas says that for him the only traditions, the only intellectual and religious cultures that that really, importantly count are the Greek and the Judaeo-Christian, and within the Greek he includes certain prominent aspects of the Christian, so it’s the Helleno-Christian tradition. He says he cannot take seriously any claims for other traditions of thought and he actually speaks about the ‘yellow hordes’, about the threat of dilution or of disintegration posed (one assumes) by Asiatic religious or cultural ways of thought. Overend’s thesis finishes with some dramatic words to the effect: ‘So there we have it, Levinas, Judaic thinker, philosopher of religion, holocaust survivor, and racist’.
I don’t think Derrida was aware of these passages but I do think he is very aware of the logic that can lead you from resisting oppression in the name of the oppressed to raising the claims of the oppressed until they acquire a kind of sovereign status, a universality with its own, potentially oppressive powers. I suppose we can see that process at work in the Middle East today, in the situation of Israel with respect to Palestine or the Occupied Territories. Also, nearer home, you could see a movement like Christian Zionism as a version, albeit a crude and primitive version of that same Levinasian idea, the idea of Judaic thought and culture as rooted in a stubborn particularism that none the less achieves universality through its special, however complex relation to Helleno-Christian values. And of course that movement has some pretty violent and nasty things behind it. What they seem to believe – on the basis of Old Testament prophecy – is that Israel should utterly defeat or destroy the Palestinian people, extend their occupation as far and wide as possible, and then (as foretold) convert to Christianity, at which point they and all God’s elect will receive their eternal reward. Pretty repulsive stuff, and a long way from Levinas’s thinking, I admit, but not so utterly remote as to make the comparison downright irrelevant or mischievous. At any rate it helps to explain both why Derrida has distanced himself from certain aspects of Levinas’s thinking and – in a more general way – why he has always been so anxious to insist that deconstruction is not just the overturning of binary oppositions.
ASB: There is a phrase that Loy uses, ‘the metaphysics of common sense’. He pays tribute to both Derrida and the Buddhist tradition, their ability to shatter common sense. We could easily lead lives in which we do not question what comes down to us through the philosophical tradition, a life that appears, on the surface, to be quite reasonable but is in fact a life constructed only of those surface features. Loy’s conclusion would be that, although Derrida does not go as far as the Buddhists, his aim is very similar to Buddhist ideas. Yet, for me at least, his whole approach can at times be very confusing, and is difficult to relate to real life problems.
CN: It’s very hard to say what a life would look like if lived according to Derridean principles, There are critical theorists who claim to have derived a politics of deconstruction, or an ethics of deconstruction, where the ethics usually works out as a somewhat more ‘deconstructive’ version of Levinas. This is what you see, most influentially, in Simon Critchley’s work. I do have to say that I have problems with this whole line of thought, for reasons I’ve explained already. The politics mostly works out as a kind of left-liberal, or sometimes left-communitarian position based – as you would expect – on the leading idea of respecting differences, all sorts of differences, whether of culture, politics, religion, or sexual (for which read gender) orientation. Thinkers like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have pressed further in this direction, a ‘post-Marxist’ direction, I suppose, which takes for granted the obsolescence of political theories – like classical Marxism – that privilege just one (e.g., class-based) mode of analysis above the manifold discourses, practices, subject-positions, and so forth, available at any given time. Here again I find this type of argument elusive and ill-defined almost to the point of philosophical vacuity, but I don’t think it is the only way of understanding Derrida’s work.
ASB: Where does it come from, this ‘politics of deconstruction’? Does it come from Derrida’s philosophical texts or from his more explicitly political thinking, which, as we have agreed, can present themselves very differently?
CN: I suppose it comes from his idea, one that goes right back to his earliest writing, that you should always look to the margins of the text or, for that matter, to the margins of culture and society. You will find the most interesting, often problematic, but also most revealing details of a text very often in footnotes, parentheses, stray remarks, ‘incidental’ metaphors, and other such unlikely places. Or maybe in some ‘minor’, non-canonical text that has been marginalised by mainstream scholarship, like Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language, which was long considered very marginal, very minor but has become much better-known now, chiefly because Derrida has written about it. In the same way, so this argument goes, if you’re going to deconstruct certain mainstream, dominant conceptions of politics, or certain hegemonic modes of theorising cultural identity, then you should always look first to the writings and experience of those who have been marginalised in various ways and degrees. That is to say, it’s the people who are most oppressed, excluded, or victimised by society who actually have the best understanding of how that society works, and more specifically, of how it works to oppress and exclude them. The idea comes from Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, a famous section in the Phenomenology of Mind, where he argues that the slave knows more than the master with respect to the conditions of his own servitude and is therefore ultimately in a stronger, or at least an epistemologically privileged position. After all the slave is, by very definition, at the sharp end of things, the suffering end, like the working class under capitalism. The master is entirely dependent on the slave, just as capitalism depends entirely on those who sell their labour, but the slave and the proletariat are those who have the least interest in upholding the system.
You get a version of this argument in what is called ‘feminist standpoint epistemology’. This is the claim that women’s exclusion from various fields of knowledge – such as the physical sciences – leaves them better placed than men when it comes to understanding just how that exclusion has worked not only to restrict their own life-opportunities but also to influence and distort the development of knowledge. It is an argument with its sources in Marx, and more directly in Lukacs’s great book History and Class-Consciousness. In a way Derrida’s appeal to the margins, whether it’s the margins of society or the margins of the text, is a similar kind of claim. Critics of Derrida – mainstream scholars, historians, philologists, some philosophers – often say he’s perverse in picking out details, passages or whole texts that haven’t hitherto been regarded as very important. He would claim, on the contrary, that if a writer feels (perhaps in some obscure or semi-conscious way) that they have to acknowledge some problematic point which is apt to disrupt an entire line of argument, they are not going to stick it right up front, in a prominent passage or central part of the text. Much likelier it will turn up in the sorts of place where Derrida looks in his readings of Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Husserl, or Saussure.
ASB: This sounds rather similar to current research trends, where the outlying, discrepant data that does not fit the curve of the graph can be suppressed or ‘normalised’ for just that reason. They may well be the most interesting, valuable, ground-breaking results yet they are rejected because they cannot be reconciled with dominant trends or expectations. But doesn’t this lead to some real ethical difficulties? For the argument that you have just outlined to possess any force, we would always need to have certain marginal groups which are effectively disenfranchised. But this is problematic, since presumably Derrida would like to endorse the idea of friendship as developed by philosophers from Aristotle down, and that would mean seeking equality so far as possible, whatever the paradoxes that Derrida reveals when he examines that idea of friendship. But it is hard to see how you can logically maintain any such position if you are taking that deconstructionist line, that is to say, if you are depending – as a matter of preconceived theoretical commitment – on insights that are only gained from the perspective of perpetually marginalised others.
CN: Yes, that is a problem. Whenever you try to privilege marginality you get into that sort of contradictory logic. I suppose it might be possible to argue, on Derrida’s behalf, that of course we must do all we can to equalise differences of wealth, rank, opportunity, privilege, education, cultural access, and so forth, but there will always be those who are relatively marginalised, or who occupy a sufficiently marginal position to have a critical view of what is going on at the centre. To some extent Derrida is no doubt thinking of his own childhood and experience as a school-child in Algeria. At this time he was marginalised several times over, being outside French metropolitan culture, subject to French colonial rule, the child of a Sephardic Jewish family in a culture locally dominated by Arab and Muslim values, and above all a victim of persecution under laws imposed the French collaborationist regime. So there is undoubtedly a certain autobiographical element here, a keen awareness of marginality resulting from personal experience and a well-developed set of critical strategies for putting that awareness most sharply and productively to work. Still I wouldn’t for a moment want to suggest – and here, for once, I’m sure of Derrida’s agreement – that these factors come anywhere near to accounting either for the various philosophic directions that his work has taken, or for the force of his arguments when assessed in philosophical rather than autobiographical terms. In fact I would want to side with the ‘analytic’ types on this issue, and say that if you’re going to do philosophy as distinct from sociology, or cultural criticism, or the history of ideas then you need to draw a firm line between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’, or what counts as interesting background information and what counts as philosophical argument. I guess that this claim won’t go down at all well amongst most Derrideans but it is one that I think Derrida would endorse readily enough.
ASB: Well, we’ve come a long way around in all this, but we ought to get some of these issues back into focus. How should we answer the challenge that we started out with, namely the suggestion that perhaps, by looking at Indian philosophy and at Derrida, we might be able to gain some insight into the fundamentally racist history of western philosophy, and even some indication of a future philosophy which would not be racist. The Brahmanical tradition is rooted in the caste system, which is still very strong in India. Systems have been put in place, such as the reservation system, to try to reduce the effect of caste. Buddhism, reacting against Brahmanical hegemony, takes the extreme opposite view that caste-distinctions are a product of power/knowledge, of an epistemic will-to-power whose most immediate effect is to keep those distinctions firmly and forcefully in place. So in the present-day context Buddhism defines itself very much against that divisive, hierarchical, violently imposed system of thought. If there can be no substance, if there is ultimately nothing to distinguish, differentiate, or classify, then of course there can be no hierarchy. Whether deconstruction has anything useful to contribute here – anything that might really help to undermine the kinds of deep-grained cultural prejudice that we’re always coming up against – is for me a very difficult question, as you’ll surely have gathered by now!
CN: There is a standard, rather routine sort of answer that you often get when critical theorists are asked about the relevance of this kind of work for real-life, urgent, everyday-practical or socio-political problems. It can come across that way but we shouldn’t too readily discount it when the theorists concerned have their own claim to speak from a marginal, a post-colonial, or in some sense ‘privileged’ (which here means culturally under-privileged) standpoint. They would say that their work in critical theory as applied to texts or to social, cultural, and educational structures is deconstructive just to the extent that it has encouraged people, students and others, to criticise and challenge existing distinctions, be they distinctions of caste, social class, cultural privilege, or colour and ethnic origin. Of course this answer is a bit too pat, it’s open to objections from other people – those outside the academy – who are even more marginalised and a whole lot worse off in terms of intellectual or cultural capital. In this context I remember reading a piece by an Indian critical theorist who remarked that it was all very well for these high-caste, emigré (mostly US-based) Indian scholars to make a big deal of their ‘marginal’ status vis-à-vis the academic establishment but their marginality was nothing compared with his own situation back home as a member of the untouchable caste. So ‘marginal’ is very much a relative term, especially in the academic context, and one that is always liable to be turned back against the user on grounds of their being less under-privileged – less marginal – than other, more deserving candidates.
In a way this resembles the kinds of debate around liberalism – debates about the scope and limits of liberal thought – that have been going on for decades now. There is always a chance for political opponents, whether of the left or the right, to attack liberalism by pointing out how often it has fallen woefully short of its own professed values, its own aims and ideals. So, you know, there were people like the US Founding Fathers who espoused all sorts of very fine, impeccably liberal sentiments as regards human freedom, dignity, moral status, citizenly rights, and so forth, but who saw nothing wrong – no conflict of principle – in the existence of an institution like antebellum slavery. Or again, those of a ‘liberal’ persuasion on other social and moral issues who thought it perfectly acceptable, indeed just a part of the natural order of things, that women should not have the vote. You can multiply examples of this sort of thing, almost to the point – especially in the current US context – where to call oneself a ‘liberal’ is to risk being treated with a kind of pitying fondness, as if one were simply too stupid to have learned all those chastening lessons from history. Either that, or the word gets hi-jacked by those – supply-side economists and neoconservative gurus – who equate ‘liberal’ values with the freedom to maximise profits and the redistribution of wealth in favour of the most highly-paid. Also, of course, they want to ensure the restriction of state ‘interference’ to a night-watchman role of just making sure that nothing impedes this process, such as (for instance) the provision of a decent welfare system and adequate health-care for the less well-off.
Now there are two points I’m making here: first, about the issue of marginality with regard to the politics and ethics of deconstruction, and second about this whole question – which you’re rightly trying to keep on our agenda – concerning relationship between theory and practice. On the first point I’d just want to say that, whatever its specific political credentials, deconstruction does share at least one saving grace of the liberal tradition in politics, namely its capacity for self-criticism, for eventually coming to recognise its own ideological blind-spots. So you can always argue that it has fallen short, that it has failed to live up to its own best values, principles, insights, etc., but if so, then you’ll be arguing from just the same standpoint that liberals – real liberals, not the fudgers, US think-tank pundits, or advocates of a ‘third way’ – themselves seek to promote. And this connects with the issue of marginality because one has to be aware of the manifold, constantly shifting ways in which groups, classes, or ethnic communities can find themselves subject to various, often quite subtle and far from obvious kinds of marginalisation. It seems to me that there is a large enough (and strong enough) body of work in post-colonial criticism, subaltern studies, feminist theory, and other politically engaged areas – all of them bearing the mark of Derrida’s influence – to refute any idea of deconstruction as a narrowly academic, ivory-tower sort of enterprise. So to the second point, your worry about how these complex theoretical issues might link up with your work in the classroom, or in the wider community where often there are simply more urgent, more practical things that need sorting out, like defusing ethnic tensions or getting people to talk across barriers of mutual fear and mistrust. Well, I suppose I’m enough of a dyed-in-the-wool theorist to reject the idea that we can separate ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in quite that way, or that practice can ever get along without some kind of implicit theoretical content. The economist John Maynard Keynes once said that those who claim to have no need for theory are usually in the grip of a bad old theory which they just don’t recognise, or just won’t acknowledge. So if theorising makes you more aware, more reflective, self-critical, or less in the grip of unexamined beliefs and prejudices, then surely that’s sufficient justification.
Besides, there is fairly straightforward sense in which changing your mind (or other people’s minds) through an effort of independent thought is absolutely basic to any kind of social or political advancement. I once wrote a book, an introductory book, called Deconstruction: theory and practice, and a couple of reviewers objected very strongly to that: if Norris thinks you can make that distinction after reading Derrida then clearly he hasn’t begun to understand what deconstruction is all about. At the time I thought this was just a piece of one-upmanship, a rather tiresome rhetorical ploy, but really they were right and the sub-title was ill chosen. Aristotle makes the point that there exist certain kinds of practical reasoning whose form approximates to that of the deductive syllogism – with major and minor premises – but where the most fitting, most adequately justified conclusion is not a statement or another strictly entailed proposition but an action, a way of behaving that draws the appropriate consequence. So this could be something like Huck Finn’s deciding, on the basis of broad moral but also very specific considerations, that he ought not to turn in the runaway slave since to do so would be not just wrong but inconsistent with the conjunction of premises on which he operates. Or again, to take an example from Derrida, what we properly admire about Nelson Mandela is his courage in applying this sort of practical (but none the less logical or rigorous) thinking to issues that were systematically obscured or distorted under the pressures of a wicked socio-politico-judicial dispensation.
In putting it like this I’m aware of going very much against the grain of those commentaries on Derrida that stress his recent paradoxical statements about justice as a kind of transcendent, almost quasi-mystical ideal beyond any possible instantiation in legal or socio-political terms. Still I make no apology for bringing his reflections back down to earth in this particular way since I do think it is another side of his work that has gone unremarked, or has been consistently downplayed, by some of his more prominent commentators. What I would want to say basically is that anyone who has read Derrida, who has read him carefully and without being got at by those commentators, will have reason to adopt a critical stance with regard to certain kinds of prejudice, injustice, unwarranted preconception, or whatever. This might lead them not to undertake a Ph.D. on Derrida, but to go and do what they can to alleviate the effects of ethnic prejudice or racial discrimination in Palestine, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, Britain, or elsewhere. Or they might combine that sort of practical, politically and socially engaged work with the business of writing a thesis that sets out its philosophic justification in deconstructive or other such critical-diagnostic terms. Of course there is an issue of priority here – of apportioning one’s available time and resources, and doing the most important work that comes to hand – but there is no need to think that theory is some kind of bolt-hole or alibi for intellectual types who don’t want to get politically involved. If deconstruction is to have any kind of ethical or socio-political impact then it will need to take a line firmly opposed to that way of thinking.
ASB: Let me try to take up those points in relation to the kinds of issue I’ve been raising throughout this interview. In my project work, both with children and adults, on national and global citizenship I find that people, adults especially, and perhaps with good reason, very often don’t wish to express an opinion about, for example, the conflict in Iraq. They would much prefer not to be asked to have an opinion. Teachers believe it is somehow inappropriate to express an opinion in class, as this could influence the children. They don’t feel it is right to become engaged in any discussion about the Middle East, for instance, although, or maybe because, they have strongly-held ethical views about justice and peace. Now I know that Derrida has been much involved with certain movements, or pressure-groups, concerned with the teaching of philosophy in school, at lycée level, and I wonder if you think that this might be extended to other, more ‘elementary’ stages of the educational process. This might involve setting up a community of enquiry in the classroom, such that the children themselves learn to debate and discuss in an atmosphere of mutual trust, so that they can work toward clarity of thought, clarity of expression. It is like the Buddhist long journey which never ends and, instead of feeding them the pap of the National Curriculum, it could teach them, as you say, to spot a bad argument, to think through and beyond false dualisms, but also to derive energy form the dualisms that we have, which after all are what we have, so we must to some extent work with them. Then they will see that their teachers accept the idea that some problems have many answers, that some truths are provisional and that they must work hard, in a Ricoeurian way, to interpret their world ethically. Possibly, as adults, they will then make decisions that define their place as citizens in a just community. Still this verbally-based, in some degree duality-dependent approach falls far short of Nagarjuna’s ideal. There is some glimmer of Buddhist influence in schools, in that teachers of religious studies use techniques known as ‘stilling’ and ‘guided visualisation’, and these are good for freeing the mind, albeit temporarily and briefly, from the constraints of daily timetables.
This is why I do think there are some similarities, some occasional points of convergence between Derrida’s thinking and various forms of Buddhist thought. You have rather resisted this idea so far, or expressed certain reservations, but I still want to press the case because it seems to me both philosophically valid and important for the kind of work I do, my work with teachers and students. Bhartrari has a much more linguistically orientated approach and therefore resembles Derrida more than Nagarjuna. The differences are very striking if we look at some of Derrida’s more recent remarks that it is just not possible to get along without the notion of the subject, or the notion of ethical responsibility as vested in the choices, decisions, and commitments of a subject who cannot be simply ‘deconstructed’ into so many ‘post-humanist’ fragments, discursive functions, subject-positions, or whatever. You might say that Derrida has this much in common with Bhartrari: that they both find language to be a constituent part of inner personal experience. We deconstruct our own consciousness by deconstructing our own thinking and ways of speaking through language. For Nagarjuna, personal identity is a great burden, something that stands in the way of peaceful co-existence, that obstructs our progress toward that desirable condition. Moreover, Nagarjuna sees language as mundane and as a kind of conceptual entrapment. On the other hand, Derrida is more ‘like’ Bhartrari in so far as he uses deconstruction to dismantle difference, to show us the flux that underlies certain metaphysical dualisms, concepts, and categories. If, on balance, the differences are more significant than the points of similarity, still this doesn’t prevent us from exploring the creative tension that is thereby created ……
CN: Well, again, we are pretty much in agreement on that, even if, as you say, what our talk has come around to is more a kind of creative tension than a meeting eye-to-eye on all the basics. Partly, I think, it is question of emphasising different aspects, even different periods of Derrida’s thought. My own strong preference is for those early-to-middle period texts where he is, very clearly, engaging with philosophical issues and doing so, moreover, in distinctively philosophical ways. Indeed I would want to claim that these modes of engagement can be formalised to some extent, even – as I have argued with regard to his reading of Rousseau and ‘the logic of supplementarity’ – expressed in the kinds of symbolic notation developed by theorists of modal logic, tense-logic, and certain forms of deviant or paraconsistent logic. So this is very much my angle on Derrida, and if it has come out as a certain resistance, a certain lack of responsiveness to some of your proposals, then no doubt that’s the main reason. Still I think you’re on stronger ground with his recent (say, post-1990) writings, where Derrida broaches a good many themes – of justice, human rights, forgiveness, hospitality, asylum, cosmopolitanism, subjectivity, as well as religion and (most recently) the question of our ethical relationship to non-human animals – which very clearly connect with various topics you’ve raised in the course of this interview. Anyway I’m grateful to you for pointing me in these directions and putting up with my various diversionary tactics. I’m sure that Derrida is one of the very few, maybe the only living philosopher whose work will still be read and debated centuries from now, if humankind survives that long. And maybe you’re right that if we read him with a view to some of these lately emergent concerns then we’ll have a better chance of surviving.