{"id":1775,"date":"2021-05-07T13:57:35","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T11:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=1775"},"modified":"2025-02-28T18:57:36","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T16:57:36","slug":"oliver-precht-portrait-of-a-philosopher-notes-on-a-new-biography-of-jacques-derrida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2021\/05\/07\/oliver-precht-portrait-of-a-philosopher-notes-on-a-new-biography-of-jacques-derrida\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Precht: PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER (Notes on a New Biography of Jacques Derrida)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing a biography of Jacques Derrida is no small task. The biographer is not only confronted with an abundance of personal material, he or she must also confront Derrida\u2019s extensive and notoriously complex oeuvre. Matters become even more complicated when considering the author\u2019s autobiographical writings and his almost obsessive attempt to create his own archive. In the early years of his career, Derrida was extremely reluctant to disclose any biographical information, but once he had revealed the first details on his personal life in a 1983 interview with Catherine David for Le Nouvel Observateur<\/em>, Derrida intensified his attempts to narrate and thereby control his biography. This biographical turn resulted not only in some of his best known texts,[1]<\/sup><\/a> but also in the donation of his personal archive to the Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine, and the Institut M\u00e9moires de l\u2019\u00e9dition contemporaine (IMEC), close to Caen. However, as Peter Salmon notes (Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps. A Biography of Jacques Derrida<\/em>, London \/ New York: Verso, 2020), this self-archivisation and self-narration does \u201enot simply record, it produces. By selecting what is important, it rejects what is not\u201d (270). The same is true of Salmon\u2019s book: it \u201cadds another narrative version of the life of Jacques Derrida\u201d (ibid.).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>As stated in the introduction, the author considers his work to be \u201can intellectual <\/em>biography\u201c that \u201cseeks to identify and explicate the \u2018key concepts\u2019 or the \u2018fundamental ideas\u2019\u201c (3) of the philosopher. More precisely, Salmon\u2019s book \u201caims to set out the intellectual development of Jacques Derrida; to situate it in events both private and public; and to argue for its importance as an event in the history of philosophy and of thought more generally\u201d (4). The book can probably best<\/span>\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0understood against the background of a common misrepresentation of deconstruction, especially in the English speaking world: While Derrida is usually depicted as a \u2018post-modern\u2019 or \u2018post-structuralist\u2019 <\/span>enfant terrible<\/em>, aiming at violently destroying the distinction between nature and culture and hence the possibility of political philosophy (or even of the <\/span>polis<\/em> itself), Salmon wants to give a more nuanced account of the \u201cevent in the history of philosophy\u201d that is associated with both the notion of deconstruction and the name Jacques Derrida. More precisely, he tries to picture the appearance of Derrida not as a mere spectacle or an episode in the history of philosophy but as an \u201cEreignis\u201d in the philosophical sense of the word, as something that would radically transform and maybe even transcend philosophy itself. For this purpose, he neither attempts to gather new biographical material, nor does he want to give a comprehensive account of Derrida\u2019s personal life. While he devotes lengthy digressing passages to Derrida\u2019s philosophical influences (such as an exhaustive portrait of Edmund Husserl or seven consecutive pages on the life and thought of Emmanuel Levinas), Derrida\u2019s teenage and university years and in fact his entire life up until the event in 1966 (the philosopher\u2019s famous appearance at a conference on structuralism at John Hopkins University in Baltimore that serves as the opening scene of the book) are given surprisingly little attention.<\/span><\/p>\n

Derrida himself stated that his \u201cintellectual biography\u201d began in 1942, with his traumatic expulsion from school due to the Vichy government\u2019s anti-Semitic measures. \u201cFrom that point on,\u201d Derrida claims, \u201cit is no longer possible\u2014for me or for anybody else\u2014to distinguish the biographical from the intellectual, the non-intellectual from the intellectual biography.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> <\/span>And it is precisely the biographical material from the period between 1942 and the aforementioned conference in Baltimore in 1966 that proved to be the most illuminating for the philosophical and political nature of Derrida\u2019s entire project. <\/span>His Algerian youth with its profound experiences of racism, anti-Semitism and colonialism, his early involvement with existentialist philosophy, his first years in Paris at the preparatory Lyc\u00e9e Louis-le-Grand, his defining years at the \u00c9cole normale sup\u00e9rieure, his opposition to the Algerian War; all these experiences shed a light on his deep roots in the philosophical tradition and on his understanding of the political that would come to shape his writing and thinking.<\/span>[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Salmon makes little effort to investigate these formative years. He does not so much write the biography of the philosopher, he rather paints a portrait of the event of his philosophy. In this sense, the main title of the book is quite accurate, which is to say that Salmon portrays Derrida\u2019s philosophy as something unexpected, something radically new, a bolt from the blue, an event in the Heideggerian sense. In his effort to do so, Salmon might remind the reader of the main character in C\u00e9line Sciamma\u2019s 2019 movie Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on fire)<\/em>. In the film, the young painter Marianne sets out to paint a portrait of H\u00e9lo\u00efse, a young lady who is to be married to a nobleman from Milan even though they have never met. The portrait is commissioned by H\u00e9lo\u00efse\u2019s mother to convince the nobleman of the union. Marianne\u2019s mission is a difficult one. She has to travel to a remote island to undertake the work, to a place that seems strangely detached from society and history. But more so, H\u00e9lo\u00efse resists not only to the idea of becoming married to a stranger, but also to having her portrait painted at all. Her mother has therefore instructed Marianne to paint her in secret. The outcome is an accurate, but conventional portrait.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same can be said of Salmon\u2019s portrait: with a few firm strokes, he carefully sketches the event that began to unfold in 1966. In eleven chapters and less than 300 pages, he paints an accurate and conventional picture that is dearly needed both within and beyond the realm of academic philosophy.[4]<\/sup><\/a> As opposed to many other commentators, Salmon has taken on the task of working through most of Derrida\u2019s oeuvre. He remains equally distant to Derrida\u2019s overly mimetic disciples and to his often unfair and sometimes embarrassingly ill-informed critics who accuse him of \u201cdangerous relativism\u201d (9). His distant but sympathetic perspective allows for a balanced account of the most complicated and misunderstood subjects, such as Derrida\u2019s relation to women and to feminism (chapter 7), his involvement in the affair following the killing of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Rytmann by her husband Louis Althusser (177\u201381), or the controversies surrounding Martin Heidegger\u2019s and Paul de Man\u2019s political entanglement (212\u201322). Unfortunately, Salmon does not dismiss the myth of the \u2018ethical turn\u2019 in Derrida. Although he points out that Derrida himself argued that the \u201cnew concern with law, and friendship, the gift, and hospitality\u201d which informed his writings from the early 1980s onward \u201cwere not in fact new, but grew logically from his earlier thinking,\u201d Salmon holds that \u201cthis dimension of his thinking need not have occurred to him\u201d before (222).<\/span><\/p>\n

Derrida can be portrayed in a different way, perhaps a bit less Olympian, a little rougher and more militant. But Salmon\u2019s entertaining intellectual biography paints a recognizable portrait of the event that connects Derrida to so many crucial moments of the 20th<\/sup> century, to fundamental philosophical problems, and to countless pressing issues of our time. While the Derrida-scholar will likely stick to Beno\u00eet Peeters\u2019 extensive study, Salmon\u2019s elegant and concise style appeals to a much broader audience. Thirty years after the intervention against Derrida\u2019s honorary degree at Cambridge University, this portrait may serve as an introduction for many different readers from various backgrounds, both within and outside of academia. In this sense, Salmon\u2019s accurate portrayal is a valuable achievement. And yet, the reader might feel a bit like H\u00e9lo\u00efse in Portrait of a Lady on fire<\/em>\u00a0when she gets to see Marianne\u2019s first attempt at her portrait. It is conventional, the model is recognizable, and the future husband will be satisfied. It will do the job, but something is missing: the fire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oliver Precht<\/a>\u00a0is a research associate at the ZfL, currently working on his project\u00a0\u201cMarx in France. The Self-Determination of French Theory (1945\u20131995)<\/a>\u201d.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Cf. \u201cCircumfession\u201d, transl. Geoffrey Bennington, in: Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida<\/em>, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1993, pp. 3\u2013315 [French: \u201cCirconfession\u201d, in: Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida<\/em>, Paris: Seuil 1991, pp. 7\u2013291; German: \u201cZirkumfession\u201d, in: Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida. Ein Portr\u00e4t, <\/em>transl. Stefan Lorenzer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1994, pp. 11\u2013323]; Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin<\/em>, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999 [French: Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. Ou la proth\u00e8se d’origine, <\/em>Paris: Galil\u00e9e 1996; German: Die Einsprachigkeit des Anderen. <\/em>Oder die urspr\u00fcngliche Prothese, <\/em>transl. Michael Wetzel, M\u00fcnchen: Fink 2003], to mention but the two most important texts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> Jacques Derrida, \u201cI Have a Taste for the Secret\u201d, in: Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, <\/em>transl. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, Cambridge: Polity Press 2001, p. 37.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/sup><\/a> Aside from a range of interviews in which Derrida speaks extensively on this period of his life, Beno\u00eet Peeters\u2019 biography and Edward Baring\u2019s excellent study provide a great amount of valuable material and analysis, cf. Jacques Derrida, \u201cPolitics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida\u201d, trans. Robert Harvey, in: The Althusserian Legacy<\/em>, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinkler, London \/ New York: Verso 1993, pp. 183\u2013231; Beno\u00eet Peeters, Derrida. A biography, <\/em>transl. Andrew Brown, Cambridge: Polity Press 2013 [French: Politique et amiti\u00e9. <\/em>Entretien avec Michael Sprinker autour de Marx et d’Althusser, <\/em>Paris: Galil\u00e9e 2011; German: Politik und Freundschaft: Gespr\u00e4ch \u00fcber Marx und Althusser<\/em>, transl. Noe Tessmann, Wien: Passagen 2014]; Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy (1945<\/em>\u20131968), <\/em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/sup><\/a> While using a similar format, David Mikics\u2019 \u201cstory of Derrida\u2019s skepticism\u201d fails at this task, and his depiction does not bear much resemblance to the actual event, cf. David Mikics, Who was Jacques Derrida? An intellectual Biography<\/em>, New Haven: Yale University Press 2009, p. xiii.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Oliver Precht: Portrait of a Philosopher (Notes on a New Biography of Jacques Derrida), in: ZfL BLOG, 7.5.2021, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2021\/05\/07\/oliver-precht-portrait-of-a-philosopher-notes-on-a-new-biography-of-jacques-derrida\/<\/a><\/span>].<\/span>
\n<\/span>DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20210507-01<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n