A submarine sandwich, also known as a sub, hoagie, hero, or grinder,
is a type of sandwich consisting of a length of bread or roll split
lengthwise and filled with a variety of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and
condiments. The sandwich has no standardized name, with over a dozen variations used around the world.
The terms submarine and sub
are widespread and not assignable to any certain region, though many of
the localized terms are clustered in the northeastern United States.
One theory says the submarine was brought to the U.S. by Dominic Conti (1874–1954), an Italian immigrant who came to New York in the early 1900s. He is said to have named it after seeing the recovered 1901 submarine called Fenian Ram in the Paterson Museum of New Jersey in 1928. His granddaughter has stated the following:
My grandfather came to this country circa 1895 from Montella, Italy. Around 1910, he started his grocery store, called Dominic Conti's Grocery Store, on Mill Street in Paterson, New Jersey
where he was selling the traditional Italian sandwiches. His sandwiches
were made from a recipe he brought with him from Italy, which consisted
of a long crust roll, filled with cold cuts, topped with lettuce,
tomatoes, peppers, onions, oil, vinegar, Italian herbs and spices, salt,
and pepper. The sandwich started with a layer of cheese and ended with a
layer of cheese (this was so the bread wouldn't get soggy).
The term hoagie originated in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Bulletin reported, in 1953, that Italians working at the World War I–era shipyard in Philadelphia known as Hog Island, where emergency shipping
was produced for the war effort, introduced the sandwich by putting
various meats, cheeses, and lettuce between two slices of bread. This became known as the "Hog Island" sandwich; shortened to "Hoggies", then the "hoagie".
Dictionary.com offers the following origin of the term hoagie. n. American English (originally Philadelphia) word for "hero, large sandwich made from a long, split roll"; originally hoggie (c. 1936), traditionally said to be named for Big Band songwriter Hoagland Howard "Hoagy"
Carmichael (1899–1981), but the use of the word predates his celebrity
and the original spelling seems to suggest another source (perhaps
"hog"). Modern spelling is c. 1945, and may have been altered by
influence of Carmichael's nickname.
The Philadelphia Almanac and Citizen's Manual offers a
different explanation, that the sandwich was created by
early-twentieth-century street vendors called "hokey-pokey men", who
sold antipasto salad, meats, cookies and buns with a cut in them. When Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore
opened in Philadelphia in 1879, bakeries produced a long loaf called
the pinafore. Entrepreneurial "hokey-pokey men" sliced the loaf in half,
stuffed it with antipasto salad, and sold the world's first "hoagie".
Another explanation is that the word hoagie arose in the
late 19th to early 20th century, among the Italian community in South
Philadelphia, when "on the hoke" meant that someone was destitute. Deli
owners would give away scraps of cheeses and meats in an Italian
bread-roll known as a "hokie", but the Italian immigrants pronounced it
"hoagie".
Shortly after World War II, there were numerous varieties of the
term in use throughout Philadelphia. By the 1940s, the spelling "hoagie"
had come to dominate less-used variations like "hoogie" and "hoggie".
It is never spelled hoagy. By 1955, restaurants throughout the area were using the term hoagie. Listings in Pittsburgh show hoagies arriving in 1961 and becoming widespread in that city by 1966.
Former Philadelphia mayor (and later Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell declared the hoagie the "Official Sandwich of Philadelphia". However, there are claims that the hoagie was actually a product of nearby Chester, Pennsylvania. DiCostanza's in Boothwyn, Pennsylvania,
claims that the mother of DiConstanza's owner originated the hoagie in
1925 in Chester. DiCostanza relates the story that a customer came into
the family deli and through an exchange matching the customer's requests
and the deli's offerings, the hoagie was created.
Woolworth's to-go sandwich was called a hoagie in all U.S. stores.
Bánh mì sandwiches are sometimes referred to as "Vietnamese hoagies" in Philadelphia.
Hero
New York style meatball hero with mozzarella
The New York term hero is first attested in 1937. The name is sometimes credited to the New York Herald Tribune food writer Clementine Paddleford in the 1930s, but there is no good evidence for this. It is also sometimes claimed that it is related to the gyro, but this is unlikely as the gyro was unknown in the United States until the 1960s.
Hero (plural usually heros, not heroes)
remains the prevailing New York City term for most sandwiches on an
oblong roll with a generally Italian flavor, in addition to the original
described above. Pizzeria menus often include eggplant parmigiana, chicken parmigiana, and meatball heros, each served with sauce.
A common term in New England is grinder, but its origin has several possibilities. One theory has the name coming from Italian-American slang for a dock worker, among whom the sandwich was popular. Others say that it was called a grinder because it took a lot of chewing to eat the hard crust of the bread used.
In Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and parts of New England, the term grinder usually refers to a hot submarine sandwich (meatball, sausage, etc.), whereas a cold sandwich (e.g., cold cuts) is usually called a "sub". In the Philadelphia area, the term grinder
is also applied to any hoagie that is toasted in the oven after
assembly, whether or not it is made with traditionally hot ingredients.
Some base the name wedge on a diagonal cut in the middle
of the sandwich, creating two halves or "wedges", or a "wedge" cut out
of the top half of the bread with the fillings "wedged" in between, or a
sandwich that is served between two "wedges" of bread. It has also been
said wedge is just short for "sandwich", with the name having originated from an Italian deli owner located in Yonkers, who got tired of saying the whole word.
Spukie
The term spukie ("spukkie" or "spuckie") is unique to the city of Boston and derives from the Italian word spuccadella, meaning "long roll". The word spucadella
is not typically found in Italian dictionaries, which may suggest that
it could be a regional Italian dialect, or possibly a Boston
Italian-American innovation. Spukie is typically heard in parts of
Dorchester and South Boston. Some bakeries in Boston's North End
neighborhood have homemade spucadellas for sale.
Rolls
filled with condiments have been common in several European countries
for more than a century, notably in France and Scotland.
In the United States, from its origins with the Italian American
labor force in the northeast, the sub began to show up on menus of local
pizzerias. As time went on and popularity grew, small restaurants,
called hoagie shops and sub shops, that specialized in the sandwich
began to open.
Pizzerias may have been among the
first Italian-American eateries, but even at the turn of the [20th]
century distinctions were clear-cut as to what constituted a true
ristorante. To be merely a pizza-maker was to be at the bottom of the
culinary and social scale; so many pizzeria owners began offering other
dishes, including the hero sandwich (also, depending on the region of
the United States, called a 'wedge,' a 'hoagie,' a 'sub,' or a
'grinder') made on an Italian loaf of bread with lots of salami, cheese,
and peppers.
— John Mariani, America Eats Out, p. 66
Subs or their national equivalents were already popular in many
European, Asian and Australasian countries when late 20th-century franchisee chain restaurants and fast food made them even more popular and increased the prevalence of the word sub. Many outlets offer non-traditional ingredient combinations.
A cheesesteak (also known as a Philadelphia cheesesteak, Philly cheesesteak, cheesesteak sandwich, cheese steak, or steak and cheese) is a sandwich made from thinly sliced pieces of beefsteak and melted cheese in a long hoagie roll. A popular regional fast food, it has its roots in the U.S. city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Philadelphians Pat and Harry Olivieri are often credited with inventing the sandwich by serving chopped steak on an Italian roll in the early 1930s. The exact story behind its creation is debated, but in some accounts, Pat and Harry Olivieri originally owned a hot dog
stand, and on one occasion, decided to make a new sandwich using
chopped beef and grilled onions. While Pat was eating the sandwich, a
cab driver stopped by and was interested in it, so he requested one for
himself. After eating it, the cab driver suggested that Olivieri quit
making hot dogs and instead focus on the new sandwich. They began selling this variation of steak sandwiches at their hot dog stand near South Philadelphia's Italian Market. They became so popular that Pat opened up his own restaurant which still operates today as Pat's King of Steaks. The sandwich was originally prepared without cheese; Olivieri said provolone cheese was first added by Joe "Cocky Joe" Lorenza, a manager at the Ridge Avenue location.
Cheesesteaks have become popular at restaurants and food carts
throughout the city with many locations being independently owned,
family-run businesses. Variations of cheesesteaks are now common in several fast food chains. Versions of the sandwich can also be found at high-end restaurants. Many establishments outside of Philadelphia refer to the sandwich as a "Philly cheesesteak".
Description
Meat
The meat traditionally used is thinly sliced rib-eye or top round, although other cuts of beef are also used. On a lightly oiled griddle at medium temperature, the steak slices are quickly browned and then scrambled into smaller pieces with a flat spatula.
Slices of cheese are then placed over the meat, letting it melt, and
then the roll is placed on top of the cheese. The mixture is then
scooped up with a spatula and pressed into the roll, which is then cut
in half.
In Philadelphia, cheesesteaks are invariably served on hoagie rolls. Among several brands, perhaps the most famous are Amoroso rolls; these rolls are long, soft, and slightly salted. One source writes that "a proper cheesesteak consists of provolone or Cheez Whiz slathered on an Amoroso roll and stuffed with thinly shaved grilled meat," while a reader's letter to an Indianapolis
magazine, lamenting the unavailability of good cheesesteaks, wrote that
"the mention of the Amoroso roll brought tears to my eyes." After commenting on the debates over types of cheese and "chopped steak or sliced", Risk and Insurance
magazine declared "The only thing nearly everybody can agree on is that
it all has to be piled onto a fresh, locally baked Amoroso roll."
White American cheese, along with provolone cheese, are the
favorites due to their mild flavor and medium consistency. Some
establishments melt the American cheese to achieve the creamy
consistency, while others place slices over the meat, letting them melt
slightly under the heat. Philadelphia Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan says "Provolone is for aficionados, extra-sharp for the most discriminating among them." Geno's owner, Joey Vento, said, "We always recommend the provolone. That's the real cheese."
Cheez Whiz, first marketed in 1952, was not yet available for the original 1930 version, but has spread in popularity. A 1986 New York Times article called Cheez Whiz "the sine qua non of cheesesteak connoisseurs."
In a 1985 interview, Pat Olivieri's nephew Frank Olivieri said that he
uses "the processed cheese spread familiar to millions of parents who
prize speed and ease in fixing the children's lunch for the same reason,
because it is fast."
Cheez Whiz is "overwhelmingly the favorite" at Pat's, outselling
runner-up American by a ratio of eight or ten to one, while Geno's
claims to go through eight to ten cases of Cheez Whiz a day.
In 2003, while running for President of the United States, John Kerry made what was considered a major faux pas when campaigning in Philadelphia and went to Pat's King of Steaks and ordered a cheesesteak with Swiss.
Variations
A chicken cheesesteak is made with chicken instead of beef.
A pizza steak is a cheesesteak topped with marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese and may be toasted in a broiler
A cheesesteak hoagie contains lettuce and tomato in addition
to the ingredients found in the traditional steak sandwich, and may
contain other elements often served in a hoagie.
A vegan cheesesteak is a sandwich that replaces steak and cheese with vegan ingredients, such as seitan or mushrooms for the steak, and soy-based cheese.
The Heater is a served at Phillies baseball games at Citizens Bank Park, so named for being a spicy variation as it is topped with jalapenos, Buffalo sauce, and jalapeno cheddar.
Engaged theory is a methodological framework for understanding social complexity. It takes social life or social relations
as its base category, with 'the social' always understood as grounded
in 'the natural', including humans as embodied beings. Engaged theory
provides a framework that moves from detailed empirical analysis about
things, people and processes in the world to abstract theory about the constitution and social framing of those things, people and processes.
Engaged theory is one approach within the broader tradition of critical theory. Engaged theory crosses the fields of sociology, anthropology, political studies, history, philosophy, and global studies. At its most general, the term engaged theory is used to describe theories that provide a tool box for engaging with the world while seeking to change it.
One lineage of engaged theory is called the 'constitutive
abstraction' approach associated with a group of writers publishing in Arena Journal such as John Hinkson, Geoff Sharp (1926–2015), and Simon Cooper.
A related lineage of engaged theory has been developed by
researchers who began their association through the Centre for Global
Research at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia – scholars such as Manfred Steger, Paul James and Damian Grenfell – drawing upon a range of writers from Pierre Bourdieu to Benedict Anderson and Charles Taylor. A group of researchers at Western Sydney University describe their work as 'Engaged Research'.
The politics of engagement
For
all of its concern for epistemological grounding (see below), Engaged
theory is an approach that is 'in the world'. All theory in some way
affects what happens in the world, but it does not always theorize its
own place in the constitution of ideas and practices. Anthony Giddens calls this movement a double hermeneutic. Engaged theory is more explicit than most about its political standpoint. Carol J. Adams expresses one dimension of this when she writes:
“
It is
engaged theory, theory that arises from anger about what is, theory that
envisions what is possible. Engaged theory makes change possible.
”
However, the other important dimension is that any theory needs to be
aware of its own tendencies to be ideologically driven by dominant
concerns of its day. Liberalism,
for example, with its reductive advocacy of the ideology of 'freedom',
fails to be reflexive about this dimension. Similarly, critical theory
sometimes fails to be reflexive of what it means to be critical or
advocate social change.
The grounding of analysis
All social theories are dependent upon a process of abstraction. This is what philosophers call epistemological
abstraction. However, they do not characteristically theorize their own
bases for establishing their standpoint. Engaged theory does. By
comparison, Grounded theory,
a very different approach, suggests that empirical data collection is a
neutral process that gives rise to theoretical claims out of that data.
Engaged theory, to the contrary, treats such a claim to value neutrality as naively unsustainable. Engaged theory is thus reflexive in a number of ways:
Firstly, it recognises that doing something as basic as collecting data already entails making theoretical presuppositions.
Secondly, it names the levels of analysis from which theoretical
claims are made. Engaged theory works across four levels of theoretical
abstraction. (See below: Modes of Analysis.)
Thirdly, it makes a clear distinction between theory and method,
suggesting that a social theory is an argument about a social
phenomenon, while an analytical method or set of methods is defined a
means of substantiating that theory. Engaged theory in these terms works
as a 'Grand method', but not a 'Grand theory'. It provides an integrated set of methodological tools for developing different theories of things and processes in the world.
Fourthly, it seeks to understand both its own epistemological basis, while treating knowledge formation as one of the basic ontological categories of human practice.
Fifthly, it treats history as a modern way of understanding temporal change; and therefore different ontologically from a tribal saga or cosmological narrative. In other words, it provides meta-standpoint on its own capacity to historicize.
The modes of analysis
In
the version of Engaged theory developed by an Australian-based group of
writers, analysis moves from the most concrete form of analysis –
empirical generalization – to more abstract modes of analysis. Each
subsequent mode of analysis is more abstract than the previous one
moving across the following themes: 1. doing, 2. acting, 3. relating, 4.
being.
This leads to the 'levels' approach as set out below:
1. Empirical analysis (ways of doing)
The method begins by emphasizing the importance of a first-order abstraction, here called empirical analysis.
It entails drawing out and generalizing from on-the-ground detailed
descriptions of history and place. This first level either involves
generating empirical description based on observation, experience,
recording or experiment—in other words, abstracting evidence from that
which exists or occurs in the world—or it involves drawing upon the
empirical research of others. The first level of analytical abstraction
is an ordering of ‘things in the world’, in a way that does not depend
upon any kind of further analysis being applied to those ‘things’.
For example, the Circles of Sustainability
approach is a form of engaged theory distinguishing (at the level of
empirical generalization) between different domains of social life. It
can be used for understanding and assessing quality of life.
Although that approach is also analytically defended through more
abstract theory, the claim that economics, ecology, politics and culture
can be distinguished as central domains of social practice has to be defensible at an empirical level. It needs to be useful in analysing situations on the ground.
The success or otherwise of the method can be assessed by
examining how it is used. One example of use of the method was a project
on Papua New Guinea called Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development.
2. Conjunctural analysis (ways of acting)
This
second level of analysis, conjunctural analysis, involves identifying
and, more importantly, examining the intersection (the conjunctures) of
various patterns of action (practice and meaning). Here the method draws
upon established sociological, anthropological and political categories
of analysis such as production, exchange, communication, organization
and inquiry.
3. Integrational analysis (ways of relating)
This
third level of entry into discussing the complexity of social relations
examines the intersecting modes of social integration and
differentiation. These different modes of integration are expressed here
in terms of different ways of relating to and distinguishing oneself
from others—from the face-to-face to the disembodied. Here we see a
break with the dominant emphases of classical social theory and a
movement towards a post-classical sensibility. In relation to the
nation-state, for example, we can ask how it is possible to explain a
phenomenon that, at least in its modern variant, subjectively explains
itself by reference to face-to-face metaphors of blood and place—ties of
genealogy, kinship and ethnicity—when the objective ‘reality’ of all
nation-states is that they are disembodied communities of abstracted
strangers who will never meet. This accords with Benedict Anderson's conception of 'imagined communities', but recognizes the contradictory formation of that kind of community.
4. Categorical analysis (ways of being)
This
level of enquiry is based upon an exploration of the ontological
categories (categories of being such as time and space). If the previous
form of analysis emphasizes the different modes through which people
live their commonalities with or differences from others, those same
themes are examined through more abstract analytical lenses of different
grounding forms of life: respectively, embodiment, spatiality,
temporality, performativity and epistemology.
At this level, generalizations can be made about the dominant modes of
categorization in a social formation or in its fields of practice and
discourse. It is only at this level that it makes sense to generalize
across modes of being and to talk of ontological formations, societies
as formed in the uneven dominance of formations of tribalism, traditionalism, modernism or postmodernism.
The
tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a
response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the
late 1950s of generative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially-accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language problems.
Although the field of applied linguistics started from Europe and
the United States, the field rapidly flourished in the international
context.
Applied linguistics first concerned itself with principles and
practices on the basis of linguistics. In the early days, applied
linguistics was thought as “linguistics-applied” at least from the
outside of the field. In the 1960s, however, applied linguistics was
expanded to include language assessment, language policy, and second language acquisition. As early as the 1970s, applied linguistics became a problem-driven field rather than theoretical linguistics,
including the solution of language-related problems in the real world.
By the 1990s, applied linguistics had broadened including critical
studies and multilingualism. Research in applied linguistics was shifted
to "the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems
in which language is a central issue."
In the United States, applied linguistics also began narrowly as
the application of insights from structural linguistics—first to the
teaching of English in schools and subsequently to second and foreign
language teaching. The linguistics applied approach to language teaching was promulgated most strenuously by Leonard Bloomfield, who developed the foundation for the Army Specialized Training Program, and by Charles C. Fries, who established the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Michigan in 1941. In 1946, Applied linguistics became a recognized field of studies in the aforementioned university. In 1948, the Research Club at Michigan established Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics, the first journal to bear the term applied linguistics.
In the late 1960s, applied linguistics began to establish its own
identity as an interdisciplinary field of linguistics concerned with
real-world language issues. The new identity was solidified by the
creation of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1977.
Associations
The International Association of Applied Linguistics
was founded in France in 1964, where it is better known as Association
Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, or AILA. AILA has affiliates
in more than thirty countries, some of which are listed below.
Australia
Australian
applied linguistics took as its target the applied linguistics of
mother tongue teaching and teaching English to immigrants. The Australia
tradition shows a strong influence of continental Europe and of the
USA, rather than of Britain.
Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) was established at a
national congress of applied linguists held in August 1976. ALAA holds a joint annual conference in collaboration with the Association for Applied Linguistics in New Zealand (ALANZ).
Canada
The
Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics / L’Association canadienne
de linguistique appliquée (CAAL/ACLA), is an officially bilingual
(English and French) scholarly association with approximately 200
members. They produce the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics and hold an annual conference.
Ireland
The Irish Association for Applied Linguistics/Cumann na Teangeolaíochta Feidhmí (IRAAL) was founded in 1975. They produce the journal Teanga, the Irish word for 'language'.
Japan
In 1982,
the Japan Association of Applied Linguistics (JAAL) was established in
the Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) in order to
engage in activities on a more international scale. In 1984, JAAL became
an affiliate of the International Association of Applied Linguistics
(AILA).
New Zealand
The Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand (ALANZ) produces the journal New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics
and has been collaborating with the Applied Linguistics Association of
Australia in a combined annual conference since 2010, with the
Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New
Zealand (ALTAANZ) later joining the now three-way conference
collaboration.
South Africa
The
Southern African Applied Linguistics Association (SAALA) was founded in
1980. There are currently four publications associated with SAALA
including the Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies Journal (SAJALS).
United Kingdom
The British Association for Applied Linguistics
(BAAL) was established in 1967. Its mission is "the advancement of
education by fostering and promoting, by any lawful charitable means,
the study of language use, language acquisition and language teaching
and the fostering of interdisciplinary collaboration in this study
[...]".
BAAL hosts an annual conference, as well as many additional smaller
conferences and events organised by its Special Interest Groups (SIGs).
Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work. Others cite: Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements.
He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his
approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made
him controversial.
Life
Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), Algeria, into a SephardicJewish family (originally from Toledo) that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of Algeria. His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970) and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991),
named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name",
though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name
when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie
after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid. He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision;
this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his
siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name".
Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul
Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was
born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a
replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.
On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée.
He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish
lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in
numerous football
competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this
adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and
writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Camus and Sartre.
Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term school of suspicion) and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate (doctorat d'État) by submitting to the University of Paris
ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of
his intellectual project under the title "L'inscription de la
philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture"
("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of
Writing"). The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS titled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ("L'idéalité de l’objet littéraire");
his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation
as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated
with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor (directeur d'études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie
(CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical
research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He
was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine,
where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were
filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and
sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute
of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued
in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow
and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC
Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007.
Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong
wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does
not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status
based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible
attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we
submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a
distinguished university".
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected, he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology). He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.
Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida's Elsewhere) by Safaa Fathy (1999), and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).
Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.
At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship,
whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself
before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time,
would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy
as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only
for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."
Philosophy
Derrida referred to himself as a historian. He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture. By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to
Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has
uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models
to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these
often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence"
to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism," Derrida
argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an
effect on everything from our conception of speech's relation to
writing to our understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an
attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics."
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions
which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense
whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by
the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is no out-of-context" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).
Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the
phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du
texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely
disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is
suggesting that nothing exists but words.
Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a
sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction [...]
means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form,
which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been
less shocking."
Early works
Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,
which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements
of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the
interviews collected in Positions
(1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was
already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of
'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science,
history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the
origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or
verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."
Derrida first received major attention outside France with his
lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism,
then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain
attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other
participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having
already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments
of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal
limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the
conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the
collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.
Phenomenology vs structuralism debate (1959)
In
the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly,
addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the
new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology
approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years
earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent
international conference, was so influential that it reframed the
discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a
"phenomenology vs structuralism debate."
Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of
philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has
dominated Western thought since Plato
in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the
individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological
bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and
describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or
event.
For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of
experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not
themselves experiential.
In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not
structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis,
be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?
In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a
history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding
its genesis.
At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the
origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be
articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge.
This original complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.
It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in
motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including
"deconstruction".
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and
varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences
in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful,
sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and
literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to
their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense
(authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias
and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle
ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever
be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.
1967–1972
Derrida's
interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide
array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work
published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology (initially submitted as a Doctorat de spécialité thesis under Maurice de Gandillac),and Writing and Difference.
On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.
Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what
are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under
the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object,
presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living
speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference
entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought
emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"." Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure, Hegel,Foucault,Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud.
This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated
Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very
heart of the Western intellectual tradition,
characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being
that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to
"ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance
that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger
as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body),
and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is
imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as
these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential
meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.
In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel. This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.
Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after
1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several
major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.
Of Spirit (1987)
On
March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled
"Heidegger: Open Questions," a lecture which was published in October
1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist
(spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was
one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on
dismantling.
With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out
as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an
exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this
meantime?" His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II). He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this Geflecht
[braid]": "the question of the question," "the essence of technology,"
"the discourse of animality," and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology
or the narrative order."
Of Spirit contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's
Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book
by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the NaziSturmabteilung
(SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger,
the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner
raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of
Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his
supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical
community.
1990s: political and ethical themes
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship
(1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that
much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated
to earlier essays.
Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring
the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and
unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars,
Derrida was seriously criticized for this.
Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.
In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity),
in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst
violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious
or nationalist fanaticism."
At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow).
Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals,
the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and
other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal
turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that
his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.
The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)
Beginning
with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series
of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends
and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man,
a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine
as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989
that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de
Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, "The end of the world, unique each time"), to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
2002
In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's
work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida
mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology,
the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the
markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation
of the spectacle." Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.
Politics
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:
Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École Normale Superieure,
he said "I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult
of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the
enthusiasm of a finally "freed" speech, of restored "transparence," and
so forth." During May '68, he met frequently with Maurice Blanchot.
He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.
In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean-Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.
In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leading a conference in Prague
that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production
and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited
Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled", as the Czechoslovakian
government put it) after the interventions of the Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on January 1, 1982.
He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1984.
He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin's Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.
Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was
engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and
beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone
had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career.
Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of
notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty,
Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more
marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come,"
and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become
important concerns.
Influences on Derrida
Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV.
In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from
book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the
places where man thinks he'll find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).
His book, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, reveals his mentorship
by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the
phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become
well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their
considerable differences of subject, and often also of a method, they
continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from
the early 1970s.
Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Paul de Man
Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University
and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat
different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and
philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of
readers.
Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry
called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's
War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before
Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian
literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in
the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi
newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read
de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political
essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in
relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have
argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing.
Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising,
given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism
and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.
Michel Foucault
Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.
In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness,
Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused
Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy
[...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text
[...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that
infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text." According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism. Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.
Derrida's translators
Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber
belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators
are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a
collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated
into English in a timely fashion.
Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's Dissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf
have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty
years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by
Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign
(presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002
and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I
(covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English
translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series
include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964-1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida,
an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic
explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top
two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of
every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to
show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called
the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in
particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the
"Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995
that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said
everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of
trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try
to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."
Marshall McLuhan
Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium,"[125] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."
He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. In a 1982 interview, he said:
I think that there is an ideology
in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with because he's an optimist
as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid
of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional
myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of
thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in
another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming
extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the
alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines
that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too.
And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said:
As writing, communication, if one
insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of
sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and
"communication of consciousnesses." We are not witnessing an end of
writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would
restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a
more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of
which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth,
etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this
questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.
Architectural thinkers
Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for the Parc de la Villette
in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida
envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of
the khôra. Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion of khôra (χώρα) as set in the Timaeus (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri within the domain of phenomenology.
Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking khôra to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings. El-Bizri's reflections on "khôra" are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on dwelling and on being and space in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking), and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics. This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen);
and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on
"χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the
worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and
environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking
Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's khôra, Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that khôra
rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which
everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an
image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a
reflection. For Derrida, khôra defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed".
Criticism
Criticism from Marxists
In a paper entitled Ghostwriting, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx. Commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx, Terry Eagleton
wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book,
as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the
heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide
open to parody."
Some analytic philosophers
have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is
"not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that
Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on
literature and other humanities disciplines.
In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., différance),
and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make
understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to
contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this
intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his
message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical
projects of his predecessors.
Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton
wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He
argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but
deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of
its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing
as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky
wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading;
and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of
standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe
I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted."
Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic
circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88
quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on
Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a
dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.
Searle–Derrida debate
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida
regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree
of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the
other of having misunderstood his basic points.[145][citation needed] Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection Limited Inc.
Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy
or even intelligible writing and argued that he did not want to
legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by dedicating any
attention to it. Consequently, some critics have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others
have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of
hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a
mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation
between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida
replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to
which I can subscribe". Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.
The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper "Signature Event Context", Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act.
While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational
account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical
of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that
Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a
"structure of absence" (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual
constraints) and by "iterability" (the constraints on what can be said,
given by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus
on intentionality
in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted
to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also
took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction,
non-serious or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was
because Austin had considered these speech genres governed by different
structures of meaning, or simply due to a lack of interest. In his brief
reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida",
Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed
that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and
meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission
of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of
Austin's inquiry.
Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes
iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used
by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental
conceptual apparatus. (This caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.) Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics
have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical
tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental
phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of
the exchange.
The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language—referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context—was
that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy
of language nor of contemporary linguistics in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language
he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure." Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that
is to say, disconnected from analytic tradition—and consequently, in
his perspective, naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since
resolved or otherwise found to be non-issues.
Searle also wrote in The New York Review of Books
that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation,
the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated
claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity
by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn
out to be silly or trivial."
Derrida, in his response to Searle ("a b c ..." in Limited Inc),
ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's
message could not be established, he suggested that Searle had formed
with Austin a société à responsabilité limitée (a "limited liability company")
due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's
reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not
reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his
critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant
appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic from
which they were only paradigmatic examples.
In the description of the structure
called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal," this possibility must
be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be
treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It
cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought
reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal
cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude
the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of
allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method,
since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and
indispensable about the structure of the act said to be normal as well
as about the structure of law in general.
He continued arguing how problematic was establishing the relation
between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its
"parasite", "for part of the most original essence of the latter is to
allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing
to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were".
He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:
what is "nonfiction standard
discourse," what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its
fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive "parasitism," is
always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the
same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)? This question is all the more
indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules
governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its
fictional "parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws,
symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very
normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the
fictional.
In the debate, Derrida praises Austin's work but argues that he is
wrong to banish what Austin calls "infelicities" from the "normal"
operation of language. One "infelicity," for instance, occurs when it
cannot be known whether a given speech act is "sincere" or "merely
citational" (and therefore possibly ironic, etc.). Derrida argues that
every iteration is necessarily "citational," due to the graphematic
nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all
without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate
readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for his attempt to get around
this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible
"intention". Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an
iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable.
All speech acts borrow a language whose significance is determined by
historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that
this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot
be altered or governed by the whims of intention.
In 1994, Searle argued that the ideas upon which deconstruction
is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual
confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are
merely banalities. He insisted that Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language.
As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different
tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with
different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of
any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the
original utterance token."
In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality.
He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida,
as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares
that there is nothing outside of texts..." Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is no outside-text"), which appears in Derrida's Of Grammatology.
According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is:
(a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte);
(b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. "'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts";
(c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—for example that everything exists in some context—is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim—nothing exists outside of text [sic]—had been established.
Cambridge honorary doctorate
In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University,
mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be
awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the
university's Professor of Philosophy David Mellor.
Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French,
Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and UK institutions,
including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom,
then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not
meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour" and describing Derrida's
philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of
the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:
... where coherent assertions are
being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status
based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible
attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we
submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a
distinguished university.
In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a vote; though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty.
Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the
attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified "the rules of
the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education
and the university scene." To answer a question about the "exceptional
violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the
"attacks," he would say that these critics organize and practice in his
case "a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should
know how to question and above all to moderate".
Dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB
Richard Wolin
has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's
major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger,
Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism.
For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of
overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of
the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".
In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy,
Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious
mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak,
simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the
consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given,
Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent
editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to
offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy
by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved
public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the
Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.
Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of
Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of
Books and Company do Business)", which was published in the book Points....
Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups –
often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a
letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.
Critical obituaries
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,The Economist, and The Independent. The magazine The Nation responded to the New York Times
obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and
trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an
obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly
influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."
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