Smith on Derrida

James Smith’s conclusions regarding Derrida express more clearly than I’ve been able to do my own sense of Derrida. These are scattered quotations from The Fall of Interpretation , pp. 127-129:

“Derrida is honest about not challenging for a moment Rousseau’s and Levi-Strauss’s reading of violence; his own analysis is only a ‘radicalization’ of their thesis . . . . But as I have attempted to argue above, intersubjectivity is violent only if one maintains something of a latent Cartesian solipsism or egoism. But if, in contrast, we understand human be-ing as essentially inter-relational, then that may be understood as ‘good,’ as an instance of a good creation and not inherently violent. Admittedly, that is a ‘belief,’ but so too, we have discovered, is Derrida’s interpretation.”

“I would suggest that [Derrida’s] interpretation of interpretation as violent betrays another vestige of the modern tradition of immediacy, for it is only if one is looking for immediacy and full presence that the finitude of interpreting ‘as’ something is considered a lack, a fall, an impurity. The logic of supplementarity, despite all of Derrida’s intentions, remains a kind of metaphysics of infinity. This is not to say that Derrida is looking for full presence or that he has any dream of immediacy, of escaping the interpolation of the postal system or of stepping outside the spade of interpretation. He has given up ‘any dream of a full and immediate presence closing histotry, the transparence and indivision of a parousia, the suppression of contradiction and difference.’ The dream has died.

“However, its ghost continues to haunt his work. Of course, ‘a ghost does not exist’ . . . presence IS not, is NOT, never was. But its ghost remains, a specter lurking behind his discourse, unwittingly shaping the plot of the story. A dream that has become a ghoulish nightmare, a recurring haunting of a nostalgic longing . . . . Derrida fails to see this phantom lurking in his own work, the ‘phantom of subjectivity.’

“For instance, writing was traditionally construed as fallen and violent because it sacrificed full presence. Derrida’s radicalization of this is to push it back to the origin of language, to the very structures of language. But is that not to maintain full presence as a horizon? . . . Violence marks the very origin of language because it initiates the ‘loss of the proper.’

“But what if we were to give up an expectation of purity? What if we refused to be haunted by this ghost of full presence and gave up any pretensions to purity? Why must this be counted loss? . . . The decision is violent because it is finite; every decision is an incision only because it cannot measure up to infinity, ‘cannot furnish of itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions.’

“But is that not to make finitude a violence, and is this not violence only if we are expected to be gods, even if it is impossible — only a dead dream? What if, instead of construing interpretive decisions as finite INCISIONS, the hemeneutical moment was understood as ‘all we have,’ an inescapable aspect of being of which nothing more is expected . . . . It is not a matter of ‘giving up the infinite’ but rather of giving up the assumption that the only way to ‘do justice’ to the infinite is to speak of it in its infinity — which, of course, is impossible.”

From a creational perspective, finitude is good. Thus the structure of supplementarity is a “structure of respect.” Smith asks “Would not such a finitude be something like difference without being haunted by the ghost of full presence or the infinite ghost of metaphysics past?”

Amen. Wonderful stuff. My only question is how Smith works the Trinity into this. Perhaps elsewhere in the book. Keep reading.