Defending Derrida

(this post was written by Kyle on February 28, 2006, and it concerns & & & & )

I finished reading an awesome book last night. With a three-tiered title, it’s name is , by University of Virginia professor, .

The book is exactly what the title says it is. Edmundson pits poetry (or really, any creative work) against the literary theorists whose modus operandi comes from Plato’s original denunciation of poetry. Edmundson writes:

To Plato - to put it unceremoniously - the poets must lie, for they live among the phantoms, at a third remove from reality. There exists, somewhere on high, the form of the bed; the craftsman building a bed draws on this form, imitating it, though imperfectly. Along comes a painter or poet, whose rendering merely imitates the craftsman’s imitation. Why can’t it be an imitation of the form of the bed? Plato handles this adroitly. The bed made by the craftsman can be seen from a variety of perspectives; one learns more about what a bed is by looking at it from one side, then from above, then getting underneath it and examining the slat-work. But the painter gives you the bed from only one perspective (presumably, the poet renders it from one point of view, his); thus you learn less about beds from artistic and poetic imitations than from the craftsman’s rendering (p. 4).

Furthermore, poets do not counsel rulers, nor do they do acquire disciples, both of which show that poetry does not educate people and make them better. Add on poetry’s ability to move the soul — a dangerous ability, especially when you consider that “the best sort of people are wise and reserved” (p. 5) and whose passions and emotions are always controlled by reason — and you have all the reasons Plato condemns poetry as the very enemy of proper philosophical thought.

Edmundson’s book is a defense of poetry against such thinking. In each chapter, he puts a leading literary theorist (descendants of the philosophical tradition) up against a poet from the Romantic period (Edmundson’s speciality), and tries to show why the poet’s understanding of the world and poet’s passion for creating his own world leaves the reader with a sense of hope, while the theorists most often leave their readers with some sense of despair. Neither, he argues, reveal the truth of the world, but both reveal something that may be true of ourselves. And he asks if we don’t prefer the truth of the poets to the truth of the philosophers.

Now, with all that being said, I think Edmundson may judge my favorite philosopher, Jacques Derrida, a little too harshly.

Derrida’s central goal, Edmundson writes, is “the displacement of metaphysics in favor of something else (but what precisely?)…” (p. 75). In that parenthetical question, I think we find Edmundson’s misunderstanding.

I hold that Derrida does not favor anything else. He simply wants to displace metaphysics. It is this motivation that, I think, caused him to be labeled a philosophical terrorist, and it is this desire to displace without replacing that I attempted to describe in my paper, ““

Between [literature and philosophy], a war rages. It is a small war, a secret war, not secret in the way that no one knows it is occurring, but secret in the way that no one knows when and where a battle will break out. This war is as a war between an Empire and its colonies; or rather, it is as a war between an Empire and a stateless, formless, and internal and excluded enemy; it is as a war between an Empire and what that empire calls terrorists; or rather, it is as a war between an Empire and, as they might call themselves, freedom fighters, liberationists — or possibly and simply and more correctly, mujahideen, those who struggle.

As anyone who has ever struggled with reading Derrida knows — that is, as anyone who has ever stopped struggling with Derrida and let him play knows — Derrida comes down firmly on the side of those who struggle.

Edmundson’s critique of Derrida is that, when the philosopher registers his polemic against a metaphysics of presence, demanding that all language involving the appearance of truth be outcast, “he is not — and this is the point that matters — doing what he claims, trying to put an end to metaphysics; rather, he is improving on it: making it more severe, abstract, unworldly than it has previously been…The imaginary worlds of metaphysical true being were simply not free enough of appearance for Derrida’s taste, and he went on to purge them (p. 94).”

To which I respond: Nice try. I agree with the effect of Derrida’s words upon metaphysics. I agree with Edmundson that, after Derrida, metaphysics can only be more severe, abstract, and unworldly than it has previously been. But I would not say that such an effect is an improvement upon metaphysics.

Derrida desires to take metaphysics beyond its limit. Being a metaphysician, however, he understands that such a move is impossible. And so he points out its limits. He shows metaphysics its horizon. It is this expression of the limit that makes Derrida as important as he is. It is why Edmundson can’t help but admit that “Derrida’s best readings are performances (p. 80)” and that “Derrida seems to be trying to do to philosophy what Samuel Beckett did to theatre, what Jackson Pollock did to painting, what Art Ensemble of Chicago does to jazz, and John Ashbery to poetry (p. 82).” Derrida is no simple philosopher. He aims to be the last one, until the next one, whose form he imagines may well be an “unnamable…monstrosity (Writing and Difference, p. 293).”

Edmundson writes one of Derrida’s distinctions is his “confidence that the West might pass beyond the age of metaphysics (p. 81),” but because he believes that Derrida is actually “improving” metaphysics, rather than passing beyond it, his concern is that “better is often the enemy of good (p 90).” By making metaphysics better, by improving it, Derrida does not achieve anything good.

But this thought does not follow. The effect of Derrida is, as I suggested, to show metaphysics its horizon, to show metaphysics that it is necessarily limited by the condition of language (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrated this more scientifically in their books, and ). The only path out of Derrida is not to become more abstract, since such a thing is impossible, but rather, the only path out of Derrida’s condemnation of the language of appearances in metaphysics is to return to all the senses (read the title of Lakoff and Johnson’s second book again).

Derrida shows that metaphysics subjugates the rest of our senses by privileging the sense of sight. As I wrote in “” Derrida’s performance in the introductory thrusts to his essay, “Form and Meaning: A note on the phenomenology of language,” which you can find in , show that:

In Husserl’s phenomenology…there is a bottom domination in a hierarchical structure of a categorical language. Sense is the categorical umbrella under which seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling find their meaning. In Husserl, however, the sense of sight has dominated the others and claimed itself as the privileged sense. In the world of signifiers and signifieds, the signified Sight has snuck into the royal bedroom of the signified Sense and slit its throat. In the morning, in the glorious light of the rising sun, the signified Sight assumed the robe of the signifier Sense, and it saw that no one recognized the difference. But with its eye turned toward the rising sun, it was blind to those who had long been cast out into the shadows.

Having read, and for the most part, agreed with Rousseau’s vision (as opposed to Rousseau’s words), Derrida is aware of Rousseau’s insistence that what is most natural in a human is one’s sense of pity. Having demonstrated that sight is privileged over the other senses, the natural inclination is to feel for the other senses, to be emotionally compelled to side with them as underdogs. He realizes, perhaps, that when we give up our nostalgic desire for seeing the always already invisible truth, we would have to turn our eyes not off, as Edmundson would suggest, but rather, back on ourselves and on our presence in the world.

Edmundson writes that, in philosophy, “vision and the image won’t be preserved or transformed by Derridean deconstruction; they must be displaced pure and simple (p. 100).” I agree. But as made clear in that parenthetical question at the top of this post, “Displaced by what?,” Edmundson has no idea what comes next.

Vision and image are not displaced by some single, non-sensical, “severe, abstract, unworldly” form of language, as Edmundson suggests. They are not displaced by a single anything. Instead, vision is displaced by all the other senses. The other senses, liberated by Derrida’s terroristic performance at the expense of the privileged classes, rise up to displace the tyranny of sight.

Edmundson writes, “The poets aspire to become, however temporarily, liberating gods, as Emerson called them… (p. 110).” I suggest that Derrida liberates writing from the tyrannical power of philosophical presence, philosophical sight. His “ascetic rigor (p. 111),” however is due to the subversive nature of his writing. After all, Derrida writes in metaphysical terms. Subversion means playing by the rules dictated by the ruler, while at the same time struggling to overcome that same ruler. It is not a poetic revolution of metaphysics. It is metaphysical subversion. But the outcome is the same: the ascendency of the others.

The rest of Edmundson’s sentence (and paragraph) is:

…liberating gods, as Emerson called them, when they offer images of a world in which desire and limit need not be perpetual strife, and where discipline may be a spur to creation, not merely its inhibitor. The quality I am describing here is akin to what Robert Poirier calls “density,” a quality he finds in works of art that offer strong initial pleasures but that also reveal themselves as complexly textured, and that fruitfully resist our routine powers of understanding.”

If that quality does not describe the best performances of Derrida….

[In my paper, I explained how one can feel the strong initial pleasures offered the difficult performances:

Let Derrida breathe into you, feel it swirl within, do not hold it, do not struggle to keep it separate from your own breath, let them mingle, let them play inside you, let them move, let them leap from lung to lung, let them dance through the chambers of your heart, feel them as they slide around your mind, and then, when the moment comes, and you’ll know it when it does, simply exhale.

]

….the Derrida of Plato’s Pharmacy, of Of Grammatology, and of Writing and Difference, then I don’t know Derrida.

Derrida seeks to liberate writing from speech (and its metaphysics of presence, metaphysics of sight). In its liberation, writing becomes poetry. And in that, Derrida is “a figure who makes the philosophy/poetry opposition obsolete (p. 96).”

Edmundson, I think, has mistaken Derrida’s designation as a metaphysician. While the designation may be true, it is more true that he is poetry’s fifth columnist in the land of philosophy. By condemning Derrida, Edmundson condemns one of his own tragic heroes, the writer who gave up his presence among the poets in order to subvert philosophy’s influence upon writing.