Chapter 7 - L’ambiguité du concours

Summary

In the last chapter we tracked the changes in Derrida's thought during the middle years of the 1960s, showing how it mutated from a post-existentialist reading of phenomenology into a quasi-structuralist theory. But the causes and stakes of this transformation remain unexplained. Over the next two chapters, I intend to examine this change from two perspectives: the move away from phenomenology, and the confrontation with structuralism. The latter will shed light on the political meaning of Derrida's project and provide new ways to understand the role played by antihumanism in French theory. The former is worthy of consideration, because it concerns the rise of deconstruction as a methodology, the genesis of an aspect of Derrida's work that has been central to its reception into the English-speaking world. For, while before 1964 Derrida focused his attention almost exclusively on Husserl's texts and participated in the technical realm of French phenomenological discourse, after 1964 the vast majority of his books and articles examined texts from outside of the phenomenological canon. The key to this unprecedented expansion in Derrida's professional interests lies, as I will argue, in his new teaching responsibilities. While Merleau-Ponty opened phenomenology up to the human sciences, by urging the philosopher to place himself at “school of facts,” Derrida widened his intellectual horizons by returning to the ENS, Rue d’Ulm.

Scholars have been resistant to placing Derrida's thought within its institutional context, because his autobiographical statements seem to refuse such an analysis: the philosopher of the marginal, Derrida enjoyed his contested position on the fringes of academic philosophy. In a 1976 article, Derrida asserted that,

it had been obvious that the work in which I was involved…– the (affirmative) deconstruction of phallogocentrism as philosophy – did not belong simply to the forms of the philosophical institution…It did not proceed according to the established norms of theoretical activity. In more than one of its traits and in strategically defined moments, it had to have recourse to a “style” unacceptable to a university reading body (the “allergic” reactions to it were not long in coming).

Further, Derrida was careful to assert the “dissociation” between his published and teaching work, separating his philosophical project, which left no structure unquestioned, from his teaching role where he had to follow the norms of a jury and a canon “that in his eyes [had] been discredited.”