The aporetic humanism of early Derrida

In his famous lecture ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ (‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’), Jacques Derrida more or less inaugurated the era of poststructuralism and outlined its agenda. He gave this lecture on 23 October 1966 at the conference entitled The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at John Hopkins University. Contrary to structuralism’s synchronic reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics, which posited stable structures of extra-personal meaning, Derrida argued for an inalienably diachronic understanding of the science of the sign. ¹ The sign, Derrida argued, is not the full unity of signifier and signified but, rather, the aspiration for such a unity and assumption of it. But the very movement of discourse attests to a difference between these terms that cannot be overcome. Were there such a unity of signifier and signified, the scope for discourse would be drastically curtailed because this primeval and simple accord would often render explication and argument impossible and superfluous. The meaning of all terms, including the most abstract ones, would be fully present and transparent. As concerns most philosophical and many practical matters, then, there would simply be nothing about which to disagree and no need to articulate the matter. That this is not so is because discourse is the play of the signifier in a never-ending search of itself – of its full determination or meaning – and, consequently, in search of its signified, which is (or would be) the only thing that could vouchsafe this determination or meaning. For all its claims to bypass the variability of lived experience and subjective judgment in favor of direct access to structures of meaning, structuralism does not evade this dynamic, and the structures it proposes are also subject to the play of signifiers that is interpretation. This play can never be arrested because there is no center, no origin, and no foundation to the structure that could act as an ultimate reference, a ‘transcendental signified’, to impose a final order on it. Derrida’s peroration is a stunning recognition of the unending ambiguity of the postmodern condition, which he elsewhere calls the ‘closure of metaphysics’:

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. ²

The final sentence of this rousing declaration would seem to endorse the view that, from a relatively early stage of his career, Derrida was a convinced anti-humanist. Indeed, one encounters this assessment quite frequently. To this way of thinking, Derrida fits neatly into the discourse of the ‘Death of Man’ that circulated at the time among French thinkers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and, especially, Michel Foucault.

Supposedly the bequeathment of Martin Heidegger to the French structuralists and post-structuralists, this antihumanism flew in the face of interwar and early postwar French thought. The entire spectrum of this thought, from Emmanuel Mournier’s Christianity to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, had embraced humanism as an antidote to the appalling brutality of Nazism, the cruelty of modern mechanized warfare, and the deep disenchantment of the twentieth century. ³

Humanism is a broad term. It calls to mind notions of ‘human dignity’, the supposedly unified traditions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Rights of Man… Humanists frequently view themselves as celebrating human worth and potential in contradistinction to more severe religious views of humanity as fallen and redeemed only by faith and obedience. On a more abstract level, the term signifies the philosophy of the subject; that is, the doctrine that all knowledge begins with the affirmation of the cogito and all claims to knowledge must pass muster with an epistemology grounded thereon to be accepted as valid. The political and social corollary of the philosophy of the subject is an esteem for individual autonomy and rationality. Thus, it is not surprising that the country of Descartes – second only to fellow philosopher of the subject Kant among modern philosophers in appearances on the agrégation – the Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Rights of Man should honor a tradition of humanism, intimately linked as it was with democracy, liberalism and human rights. ⁴ Finally, there is the closely related sense of the word ‘humanism’ as a doctrine that all members of the species share a common human nature. For this reason, humanism and cosmopolitanism are frequently interchanged terms. Thus, all humanisms concern themselves with that which is uniquely human, treating the human condition, confronting human dilemmas and occupying themselves primarily with human perspectives and concerns. Most celebrate rationality and individual autonomy and aspire to a cosmopolitan world order. But it is crucial to recognize that none of this implies or necessitates that humanists need be blithely indifferent to the treatment of other sentient beings, the structures and dynamics entangled with human experience, the shortcomings and conflicts of liberalism and democracy, cultural variation in human experience or the aporias and limits of rationality. Especial regard for humanity is not necessarily the same thing as worship of humanity, disregard for the non-human, or oversimplification of what it means to be human.

In its existentialist variant, French postwar humanism rested in large part on the French reception of the Germans thinkers G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. ⁵ But the early French humanist reading of Heidegger was at least partially a misreading, involving a highly tendentious translation of Dasein as la réalité humaine. ⁶ Heidegger rebuffed this early French appropriation of his work in his famous 1946/7 Brief über den Humanismus (Eng. Letter on Humanism, Fr. Lettre sur l’humanisme). Therein, he insisted that his thought was, in the first place, a contemplation of Being, concerned with human being only insofar as the latter could illuminate the former. ⁷

This drive to surpass the bounds of the properly ‘human’ and to make contact with the sublimity of the absolute other – while somehow maintaining absolutely its otherness – propelled the structuralist and post-structuralist reaction against the dominant humanism of the first decade of French postwar thought. For Heidegger, this other was Being, which he frequently spelled Seyn (eschewing the conventional spelling of Sein) to emphasize its radical alterity. But his French interpreters and interlocutors recognized a number of candidates for this unspeakable other: Lévi-Strauss’ structures, Lacan’s unconscious, Foucault’s madness and body, Kristeva’s semiotic, Irigaray’s woman, and for many of the figures associated with the pioneering journal of literary criticism Tel Quel the Third World, the Far East and, especially, Mao Zedong’s Red China. ⁸

Derrida, so critics claim, fit well into this group and continued Heidegger’s ontological pursuits, even if taking them in new semiological directions, while just as assuredly rejecting any traditional or recognizable form of humanism in favor of a total dedication to ‘the other’, which, whatever it may be, is decidedly not human. ⁹ Similarly in substance, though far removed in valuation, a number of theorists admire Derrida for his putative antihumanism. These theorists long for broader, deeper and fresher possibilities of liberation than those offered under the rubrics of ‘humanity’ and ‘humanism’, which they see as responsible for all the atrocities committed in the name of ‘humanity’ and its advancement: imperialism, Nazism, capitalism, Communism, environmental degradation, phallo- and hetero-centrism and the massive abuse and destruction of animal life. Such thinkers may not always explicitly claim Derrida as an anti- or post-humanist but they certainly seem to regard him as such and look to him for inspiration. ¹⁰

One can find much in Derrida’s work to support the view that he was an anti-humanist. This is particularly true of his middle and later writings, wherein his Levinasian ethical turn takes him closer and closer to an uncritical devotion to the other. But even from his earliest days of notability in the late 1960s Derrida evinced a clear suspicion of some stronger versions of humanism and a fascination with and longing for whatever lay beyond human categories. Nevertheless, at this point in his career, Derrida alloyed this suspicion of humanism with an appreciation for its achievements and respect for the seemingly endless expanse of its intellectual horizon. Likewise, Derrida tempered his longing for the other with an awareness of the other’s incommensurability with the human categories to which Derrida knew his own thought, and that of his peers, was inevitably subject. Finally, and apparently paradoxically for the philosopher of difference, Derrida counterbalanced his fascination with the other with a salubrious regard for self – though, as we shall see, Derrida’s understanding of ‘self’ was far from standard.

Thus, prior to his later ethical and theological turns, Derrida was something of a humanist by default; that is, a human being who philosophized and recognized himself as such. There is a growing body of work that acknowledges that Derrida’s ambivalence with regard to humanism in no way implied outright rejection of it. ¹¹ This article contends that such ambivalence, or multivalence, not only does not imply a rejection of humanism but is integral to Derrida’s humanism, a humanism inextricably entangled with the very dynamics of différance and arche-writing that exceed, confound and problematize the human in Derrida’s work.

Before arguing this point in detail, a brief review of the basic contours of Derrida’s early thought is necessary. The early works of Derrida nearly all elaborate on ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’s’ theme of the structural indetermination and the aporetic nature of meaning, with its very incompleteness as the condition of its possibility. ¹² Though Derrida did not use the term in the lecture, what he was describing is différance. Différance is one of the core concepts in Derrida’s oeuvre, although Derrida would, for good reasons, deny its conceptual nature, its core status, and its very existence. Différance is the gap between the signifier and the signified. It is also the gap between signifiers, as they try vainly to reach the transcendental signified by consummating themselves through reference to each other. To take a simple example, if Socrates believes that he has reached the signified of ‘justice’ with the concept of ‘each man doing his duty’, Derrida would point out that the signifier ‘justice’ is complete, or self-present, only if those of ‘man’ and ‘duty’ are themselves entirely self-present, entirely understood by all auditors without any residue of ambiguity or disagreement. This, of course, is not the case. If one tries to solve the problem by defining ‘man’ and ‘duty’, one does so by, again, referencing other signifiers, which are also underdetermined. The process continues ad infinitum. What results is not an infinite regress but an endless play of signifiers, forming an ever-expanding, involuting and overlapping hermeneutic moebius strip, striving always for the transcendental signified that will arrest their play.

In this play, the signified is never reached. It is never fully present. Hence, Derrida’s confrontation with what he, following Heidegger, calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. Yet, the signified is never simply absent, either. If that were so, all of what is now speech and writing would be nonsense at best. Though ‘justice’ is never fully defined, its meaning never fully present, the word continues to signify a certain I-know-not-what; that is, an I-know-not-what that remains distinct from other I-know-not-whats. To signify this absence of pure absence, Derrida supplements différance with the concept of trace. If there were moments of determination in the play of signifiers, moments of sheer representability, it would be the trace that referred to these moments. If it is permissible to speak of something beyond language, it is the trace that grants such permission. The trace is the allure of the transcendental signified – that which distinguishes différance from chaos and meaninglessness. At the same time, différance is the trace; they are the same movement viewed from different angles. With différance and trace, Derrida tries to think a category beyond presence and absence. But a supplement is not a complement, and if this attempt is bound to fail, or, at least, remain incomplete, Derrida accepts as much. To misquote a near contemporary, différance is what it is not and is not what it is. ¹³

But différance is not so recondite a dynamic as it may first appear. Anyone who has ever paused to ask herself who she is, or why this ice cream tastes so good, or why pain is painful, or why blue is blue has thematized the experience of différance. Différance functions not only on the semiological level but also on the phenomenological, or, perhaps, it is the juncture between the two. Indeed, as much of Derrida’s early work demonstrates, neither logos can escape the other. What is deferred in différance is not just the unity of signifier and signified but the unity of phenomenon and sense or of sense and concept. What is deferred is the arrest of thought and doubt, the total clarification of the ambiguity of lived experience, and the Aufhebung of subject and object in a pure self-knowing self-presence. Différance is the temporal spacing that separates what is called the experience from its anticipated meaning, its anticipated form. It is the deferral of this meaning indefinitely into a future that is always to-come or a past that never-was. Différance is the condition of possibility for both yearning and nostalgia. If there were an answer to the Merleau-Pontian question of why experience does not lend itself to precision and always yields a residue of ambiguity and uncertainty in attempts to make sense of it, the answer would be différance.

Methodologically, différance takes the form of deconstruction. This method – though calling it a ‘method’ may already be overstating the case – involves exposing the metaphysical assumptions at work in a text by revealing the tension between what the author declares and what he describes followed by a demonstration that what is suppressed, denied, or elided in the described always pervades and underwrites the declared. That is to say, all philosophical declarations must ultimately either assume an unwarranted metaphysical foundation, thus belying any authorial claims of systemic autonomy and self-justification, or must confess themselves to be ungrounded and subject to différance. Deconstruction is both the deconstructionist’s double reading (declaration vs. description) of a text and the play of différance within that text that prevents its self-presence, creates its textuality and intertextuality and allows for its deconstruction via said double reading. Derrida consistently applies this practice to his own texts, never claiming to escape metaphysics but always to move through the closure of metaphysics, the era in which différance and its decentering consequences have been gaining increased recognition.

Deconstruction is not necessarily more fundamental or universal than any other theory. Rather, it is a hermeneutic that accounts for the lack of fundamentality and universality of every theory and of thought itself. Similarly, deconstruction need not claim to be the ground of all experience or of discourse. Deconstruction and différance account for experience’s and discourse’s inabilities to either ground or transcend themselves, to capture or exceed every experience in a single experience or every meaning in a single statement. It is an explanation for and a demonstration of why there can be no philosophical theory of everything or fundamental experience of life. Deconstruction posits an endless, eternally ramifying hermeneutics, to which it is itself subject, from which it is constituted, and which it helps to constitute. Derrida tells us the simple truth that the problem of interpretation will always remain; indeed, it is the very possibility of discourse.

This is why Derrida focuses so intently on writing in his early works. He charges Western metaphysics with phonocentrism, arguing that it privileges speech as the transparent, immediate, unconcealing medium of representation and communication. But, to Derrida’s mind, writing is a more honest form of communication as it is impossible to deny that writing is at least once-removed from the object of its representation, whose independent existence can no longer be taken for granted without an immediate medium of representation (i.e. the status claimed for speech in the phonocentric tradition). Writing does not seek to conceal this breach, whereas speech does. This observation prompts Derrida to posit an originary breach between speech and phenomenon in the form of an arche-writing. Arche-writing enacts the same sundering effect as différance. It is an intimate difference that separates as well as binds the terms of the speech-writing and representation-reality binaries:

I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the ‘original’, ‘natural’, etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. ¹⁴

More than any other philosopher, except possibly Nietzsche, Derrida thematized and propounded the truth that reality is not of a nature that allows itself to be thoroughly divided into and articulated in altogether clear and distinct propositions, on which one can take either a yay or nay position. This does not mean that all interpretations have equal explanatory power or plausibility, but it does mean that any attempt to fully measure explanatory power or to fully explain its source and meaning will be forever incomplete. This is not a trivial insight; it is an articulation of one of the key dynamics allowing for revolutions in thought and for the indestructibility of uncertainty.

For all of this abstruse theorizing, the early Derrida can be aptly described as a ‘humanist’, not only in the sense of his regard for political liberalism but also in his regard for the philosophy of the subject and deep respect for humanity’s rational capacities, ambivalent as he may have been on all counts. Derrida certainly rejected the notion of a static and thoroughly present self. But he makes it clear in numerous places that the fact of subjectivity (the cogito) cannot be escaped and should not be denied. ¹⁵ The subject is that which disappears or slips away into the play of signifiers and the disjunctions of time when one tries to grasp it but the subject is also and necessarily that through which the semantic field is constituted, even as it (the subject) is constituted as ephemerality within that field. And it is the subject that tries vainly to arrest the play of signifiers and to coordinate the disjunctions of time, so as to transform its ephemerality into pure presence and determination. ¹⁶ This understanding of the subject marks one of Derrida’s signal advancements on Heidegger and distinguishes him from some other structuralists and post-structuralists who view the subject as ontologically incidental. Heidegger sought to transform the self into Dasein, a pure vessel for arriving at the truth of Being. Derrida, by contrast, had no false illusions as to the final arrival of Being or of anything else.

Two early texts of Derrida shed light on this aspect of his thought: ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’ (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’) from 1963 and his critique of Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity), ‘Violence et Métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas’ (‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’), of 1964. ¹⁷

‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’ may be the most remarkable text in Derrida’s entire oeuvre. It was his first major article delivered and it was unlike any other that followed in that it is the closest Derrida ever comes to a straightforward approach to the philosophy of the subject. Broadly, it is a deconstruction of Foucault’s archeology of knowledge. More specifically, it is an extended objection to Foucault’s treatment of Descartes’ first and second Meditations. Foucault had argued in Folie et Déraison (History of Madness) that Descartes helped to create the classical discourse of madness by banishing madness from any rational treatment or consideration. According to Foucault, Descartes was willing to consider dreams as subject to rational engagement and something like falsification but did not grant madness the same status. In order for the cogito to be achieved, Foucault argued, Descartes had to banish madness from consideration because he could not make sense of it. ¹⁸ Derrida correctly points out that this reading is not supported by Descartes’ text, in which, in fact, Descartes accords madness and dreams the exact same epistemological status and ability to deceive. What Foucault took for Descartes’ view on madness was merely Descartes’ paraphrasing of the layman’s view, which Descartes does not endorse but, rather, challenges through the device of dreams. In fact, it is through the confrontation with the possibility of a hyper-madness visited upon him by the device of the evil demon that Descartes achieves the cogito because, as radical as any form of experience may be, including madness, one cannot doubt that one is experiencing. ¹⁹ For this reason, Derrida argues, Foucault’s interpretation of history, of historical structures, was at least partially mistaken. The classical discourse of reason and madness could not have been as exclusionary or oppositional as Foucault claimed because Descartes did, in fact, allow the possibility of madness to engage with reason. At the same time, Derrida notes, to the great extent that reason does exclude that which Foucault calls madness, this exclusion far predates Descartes and the classical age, going at least as far back as Socrates.

But Derrida goes much farther than making these editorial corrections and drawing their historical implications. His essay outlines a semiological epistemology that sharply distinguishes Derrida’s approach from Foucault’s. According to Derrida, Foucault had tried to write a history of madness itself with Folie et Déraison, of an absolute alterity to reason, language and the cogito. Foucault had attempted to voice the ineffable, to make sense of the senseless. This cannot be done, Derrida argues, not because there is no such thing as madness or because it is ontologically or socially inferior to reason but because, if there is such a thing as the total madness that Foucault vaunts, it lies perforce outside the order of language. For language and reason, the madness that Foucault wishes to describe can only take the form of silence. Any attempt to communicate it or to speak in its name would be a pure fiction, and Foucault’s archeology is no exception:

But, first of all, is there a history of silence? Further, is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work? Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word, of the act perpetrated against madness – and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced? ²⁰

If there is anything beyond language’s and reason’s capacity for sense-making, the historian, like the philosopher, can anticipate it, poke at its edges, try to open passages to it but cannot speak it and cannot speak for it. This is due not to any particular historical instantiation of logos but to logos itself: ‘The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason, that which makes it not just another actual order or structure (a determined historical structure, one structure among other possible ones), is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it’. ²¹ Silence does not speak. Whatever may be beyond language most assuredly does not speak. Consequently, to quote another enigmatic philosopher of language, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. ²²

Further, it is not only outside the order of language that Foucault’s notion of absolute madness lies but outside that of the cogito. But Descartes did not exclude that which is more commonly called madness (i.e. delusion and hallucination) from the cogito but, rather, assimilated madness into it. Be the madman ever so mad – be he even in doubt as to whether he really sits next to this fire and his hands and his body are really his – he cannot cease to exist for as long as he experiences himself as thinking, doubting, feeling... And the cogito is an experience for Descartes and for Derrida. It is an utterly unique experience in that for once, signifier and signified seem to coincide. The experience of the cogito, the act of the cogito, creates the possibility of subjectivity, which is the possibility of all (effable) possibility. The experience is the I’s enunciation of itself. Even if this enunciation can take on no more content than its form, and that only ever so fleetingly, it is enough to set the play of signifiers in motion:

It can no longer literally be said that the Cogito would escape madness because it keeps itself beyond the grasp of madness, or because, as Foucault says, ‘I who think, I cannot be mad’; the Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. ²³

If there is a total madness or anything else beyond the cogito, it is like no madness of which we can speak, and there could be no thought of the cogito or logos excluding it but only of mutual and total exclusion – probably total unawareness. Such a madness would be utterly inconceivable to those subjects defined by the cogito because there is no speech (or writing) without a subject of some sort:

Any philosopher or speaking subject (and the philosopher is but the speaking subject par excellence) who must evoke madness from the interior of thought (and not only from within the body or some other extrinsic agency), can do so only in the realm of the possible and in the language of fiction or the fiction of language. Thereby, through his own language, he reassures himself against any actual madness—which may sometimes appear quite talkative, another problem—and can keep his distance, the distance indispensable for continuing to speak and to live. But this is not a weakness or a search for security proper to a given historical language (for example, the search for certainty in the Cartesian style), but is rather inherent in the essence and very project of all language in general. ²⁴

Here, we see that it is not only the subject that needs language, as is clear from many of Derrida’s writings, but also language that needs the subject because the cogito is ‘inherent in the essence and very project of all language in general’. ²⁵

The early Derrida took the philosophy of the subject seriously. He refused to speak for the radically other. Moreover, he refused to portray other human beings as radically other or to admit the radically other into human affairs. If Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas was less confrontational and more tremulous than was his onslaught against Foucault, it was no less resolute. Derrida shows that each of Levinas’ attempts to think the radically other, especially as the face and the voice, either resorts to the metaphysical and humanistic suppositions that Levinas is denouncing or fails to withstand their criticisms. In refusing to acknowledge the other on the common basis of ego – that is, the speaking or writing subject – Levinas apotheosized the other, placing it beyond dialogue and criticism, thereby laying the groundwork for the very totalizing, discourse- and plurality-suppressing violence that he sought to overcome through alterity:

There is war only after the opening of discourse. Peace, like silence, is the strange vocation of a language called outside itself by itself. But since finite silence is also the medium of violence, language can only indefinitely tend toward justice by acknowledging and practicing the violence with itself. Violence against violence. Economy of violence. An economy irreducible to what Levinas envisions in the word. If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse. […] The philosopher (man) must speak and write within this war of light, a war in which he always already knows himself to be engaged; a war which he knows is inescapable, except by denying discourse, that is, by risking the worst violence. ²⁶

Thus, Derrida refuses to countenance mysticism or an absolute other, the invocation of which could silence all dissent. If there is violence in speech, in disagreement, in dissension, it is necessary to prevent a far greater violence: the violence of total suppression of thought and language. As Derrida correctly notes, ‘The infinitely other and the infinitely same, if these words have a meaning for a finite being, is the same’: totalitarianism. ²⁷

There is no other without a same – or, at least, the trace of a same – to which it can be contrasted and no alter without an ego to recognize it. Recognition invariably involves commonality and mutuality. If there is an absolute other, we are simply not capable of recognizing or engaging it in any way, anymore than it is us. It could have no face or voice, imploring us, on the Levinasian model, not to kill it. It would be beyond the categories of ‘to kill’ and ‘to die’. It is utterly beyond us. But, as regards the other we can engage, both other and same, ego and alter, must be thought on the basis of non-identity, différance, of experiencing and interpreting the world, rather than simply being in it. Only by being inconsummate and dispersed in the economy of speech and writing is the human human. Arche-writing and différance are not displacement or obliterating supersession of humanity and humanism but, rather, their condition of possibility. And whatever différance may be, it is not absolute alterity; it is the antithesis of any absolute. The recognition of the other as alter ego ‘is the most peaceful gesture possible. We do not say absolutely peaceful. We say economical’. ²⁸ Such a tack, rather than fetishizing the other, approaches the other as what he is: ‘my fellow man as foreigner’. ²⁹

Not incidentally, Derrida makes a similar point in a discussion of arche-writing in Of Grammatology, wherein he criticizes Lévi-Strauss for projecting a purity and innocence upon the Nambikwara People of the Amazon Rainforest. The matter revolves around Lévi-Strauss’ supposedly tricking Nambikwara girls into revealing the names of other tribespeople, though these names, as Lévi-Strauss tells us below, are supposed to be closely guarded secrets:

One day, when I was playing with a group of children, a little girl was struck by one of her comrades. She ran to me for protection and began to whisper something, a ‘great secret’, in my ear. As I did not understand I had to ask her to repeat it over and over again. Eventually her adversary found out what was going on, came up to me in a rage, and tried in her turn to tell me what seemed to be another secret. After a little while I was able to get to the bottom of the incident. The first little girl was trying to tell me her enemy’s name, and when the enemy found out what was going on she decided to tell me the other girl’s name, by way of reprisal. Thenceforward it was easy enough, though not very scrupulous, to egg the children on, one against the other, till in time I knew all their names. When this was completed and we were all, in a sense, one another’s accomplices, I soon got them to give me the adults’ names too. When this [cabal] was discovered the children were reprimanded and my sources of information dried up. ³⁰

Derrida alleges that, in recounting this incident, Lévi-Strauss makes himself – the Westerner – the central figure in this plot and the one ultimately responsible for the transgression of naming and of tarnishing the tribe’s previously unblemished simplicity. In such a way, Derrida asserts, Lévi-Strauss idealizes the Nambikwara, falsely attributing to them an originary innocence, non-violence and intactness:

One already suspects—and all Lévi-Strauss’s writings would confirm it—that the critique of ethnocentrism, a theme so dear to the author of Tristes Tropiques, has most often the sole function of constituting the other as a model of original and natural goodness, of accusing and humiliating one-self, of exhibiting its being-unacceptable in an anti-ethnocentric mirror. ³¹

Non-European peoples were not only studied [by European anthropologists] as the index to a hidden good Nature, as a native soil recovered, of a ‘zero degree’ with reference to which one could outline the structure, the growth, and above all the degradation of our [Western] society and our culture. As always, this archeology is also a teleology and an eschatology; the dream of a full and immediate presence closing history. ³²

Thus, according to Derrida, Lévi-Strauss ultimately dehumanizes the Nambikwara by denying to them the différance that is inalienable to human beings as linguistic beings. Contrarily and refreshingly, Derrida himself recognizes and emphasizes the complicity of the girls in the transgression of naming, this violence of norm-breaking, and argues that such violence is intrinsic to all human beings because it is intrinsic to the arche-writing in which humanity is enacted and which is enacted in humanity. The violence of this arche-writing, of this sundering, gives rise to the violence of those institutions of language, culture, and law that strive to efface this rupture through prohibition, which, in turn, give rise to the violence of violating these prohibitions:

To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance. Out of this arche-violence, forbidden and therefore confirmed by a second violence that is reparatory, protective, instituting the ‘moral’, prescribing the concealment of writing and the effacement and obliteration of the so-called proper name which was already dividing the proper, a third violence can possibly emerge or not (an empirical possibility) within what is commonly called evil, war, indiscretion, rape; which consists of revealing by effraction the so-called proper name, the originary violence which has severed the proper from its property and its self-sameness. ³³

Derrida’s humanism was a humanism of imperfection, an imperfection that is the generative nexus of the réalité humaine and the réalité sémiotique.

One final text of Derrida’s early career merits mention, one that seems to confirm the evaluation of Derrida as an anti-humanist on cursory readings. Derrida first presented the ‘Ends of Man’ at a November 1968 conference in New York City on ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’ and published it 4 years later in Margins of Philosophy. ³⁴ In his prelude to the article, he dates its composition to April 1968, explicitly connecting it to the peace talks in Vietnam and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. of that month and to events in France the following month. But exactly what the nature of this connection is, Derrida leaves for his auditors and readers to determine. He announces, with an enigma that became more and more typical of his style, by turns frustrating and intriguing, ‘I have simply found it necessary to mark, date, and make known to you the historical circumstances in which I prepared this communication. These circumstances appear to belong, by all rights, to the field and problematic of our colloquium’. ³⁵

In Margins of philosophy, three epigraphs precede the text. The first is Kant’s statement, from Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, of the categorical imperative to treat every rational being (Mensch or man) not merely as a means but always as an end in itself. The second, from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, asserts that ontology has revealed the ends of human reality, its ‘fundamental possibilities’ and ‘value’. The last is the famous anti-humanist declaration of Derrida’s erstwhile friend and now intellectual adversary, Michel Foucault, from The Order of Things, one which largely set the agenda for Derrida’s intervention: ‘As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’. ³⁶

It is the reign of antihumanism in contemporaneous French theory that is Derrida’s subject. He confesses that there is something of an anti-humanist revolution taking place in France, a challenge to the supremacy of ‘man’ as the center of philosophical thought and, one can surmise from Derrida’s preface, political action. But he does not take this strange and nebulous phenomenon for granted and does not align himself with it (though also not against it). Instead, he wishes to inquire into the nature of this inchoate happening.

To this end, Derrida first sketches an intellectual history of postwar France, centering on humanism and the figure of man. He notes, as reviewed above, that humanism was the common coin of postwar French thought, spanning the philosophical and political spectrum. He acknowledges the autochthonous roots of this humanism in French spiritualism but traces it also to the early anthropological readings of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger that dominated the reception of these thinkers in early twentieth-century France. Derrida agrees with his anti-humanist contemporaries that these were misreadings. The thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger does ‘not have to do with something one might simply call man’. ³⁷ He briefly reviews some of the main thrusts of their works to show that this is the case. Hegel’s ‘science of the experience of consciousness, […] science of the structures of the phenomenality of the spirit itself relating to itself […] is rigorously distinguished from anthropology’. Likewise, Husserl’s subject is consciousness, not man, psyche, or soul per se. Lastly, that Henry Corbin’s translation of Heidegger’s Dasein as ‘la réalité humaine’ was a grievance mistranslation was already well established at the time of Derrida’s address, and he notes as much. ³⁸

Yet, Derrida continues, French antihumanism had also not done its homework. Rather than undertake a serious intellectual history of the Western philosophical tradition, particularly of the German thinkers whom Derrida had named and whom contemporary anti-humanists claimed as inspiration, the French anti-humanists had settled for a reductive and peremptory interpretation of these same. Despite its strident tones, this interpretation had not escaped humanism:

After the tide of humanism and anthropologism that had covered French philosophy, one might have thought that the antihumanist and antianthropologist ebb that followed, and in which we are now, would rediscover the heritage of the systems of thought that had been disfigured, or in which rather, the figure of man too quickly had been discerned. Nothing of the sort has happened, and it is the significance of such a phenomenon that I now wish to examine. The critique of humanism and anthropologism, which is one of the dominant and guiding motifs of current French thought, far from seeking its sources or warranties in the Hegelian, Husserlian, or Heideggerian critiques of the same humanism or the same anthropologism, on the contrary seem, by means of a gesture sometimes more implicit than systematically articulated, to amalgamate Hegel, Husserl, and—in a more diffuse and ambiguous fashion—Heidegger with the old metaphysical humanism. ³⁹

The language of the tides is a clear allusion to Foucault’s confident assertion that the figure of man might soon be ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’. ⁴⁰ To the contrary, Derrida suggests: ‘we are still on the same shore [bord]’ of humanism. ⁴¹

That Derrida took this to be so is not surprising, given that neither Hegel, Husserl, nor Heidegger, on Derrida’s readings of them, intended to break simply with humanism or to efface the figure of man or of the human being. Rather, according to Derrida, each saw the figure of man as a crucial conduit to and instantiation of something greater. All three thinkers had to approach their subjects – spirit, consciousness, and Being, respectively – through the medium of man. For Hegel, ‘Consciousness is the truth of man, phenomenology is the truth of anthropology’. ⁴² True, Hegel would negate man to achieve spirit, but the Hegelian Aufhebung, as is well known, is far from a simple negation or canceling. It is an elevation, a relever or relève, in Derrida’s words, a refounding of man on a higher plane: ‘This equivocal relationship of relief doubtless marks the end of man […] but by the same token it also marks the achievement of man, the appropriation of his essence. It is the end of finite man’. ⁴³ Thus, for Hegel, the end of man is the sublimation of man in the infinity of spirit that is realized through him. The dynamic is similar with Husserl, for whom ‘the critique of empirical anthropologism is only the affirmation of a transcendental humanism’, in that, ‘the transcendental end can appear to itself and be unfolded only on the condition of mortality, of a relation to finitude as the origin of ideality’. ⁴⁴ For Hegel and Husserl, then, it is only through the thinking and conscious finitude that is man that the infinite is thought and is to be achieved. The end of man – in the sense of purpose, fate, and, in reference to the Kantian epigraph, ethical duty – is the realization of man on a higher level than the finite. And it is in relation to this end that man understands himself. For Derrida, this has ‘since always’ been the very essence of humanism: finite man as the usher and recipient of the infinite. ⁴⁵ Moreover, in the work of Hegel and Husserl, this ‘man’ is emphatically the collective ‘man’ – not the ‘I’ but the ‘we’, a total elision of difference and finitude. Derrida sums the matter up thusly:

The thinking of the end of man, therefore, is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man. What is difficult to think today is an end of man which would not be organized by a dialectic of truth and negativity, an end of man which would not be a teleology in the first person plural. The we, which articulates natural and philosophical consciousness with each other in the Phenomenology of Spirit, assures the proximity to itself of the fixed and central being for which this circular reappropriation is produced. The we is the unity of absolute knowledge and anthropology, of God and man, of onto-theo-teleology and humanism. ‘Being’ and language—the group of languages—that the we governs or opens: such is the name of that which assures the transition between metaphysics and humanism via the we. ⁴⁶

This same basic dynamic also characterizes the thought of Heidegger. Though, Derrida insinuates, Heidegger was somewhat more aware and wary of this dynamic than were Hegel or Husserl, he could not escape it, either before or after his Kehre. What is ‘ownmost’, ‘eigenste’ or ‘proper’ to Dasein is its relationship to Being as the being that understands itself in terms of Being. And Derrida acknowledges, seemingly imputing this acknowledgment also to Heidegger, that Dasein never escapes the horizon of humanity to something beyond. Instead, in classic deconstructive fashion, Dasein ‘relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys’. Derrida quotes Heidegger from Sein und Zeit to illustrate this point, italicizing appropriately:

Inquiry (Suchen), as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some say [sic]. As we have intimated, we always already conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us toward its conception. We do not know what ‘Being’ means. But even if we ask ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact. ⁴⁷

Derrida here italicizes the ‘we’ to show its – and, thus, humanism’s – indissoluble link to the ‘is’ and to Being in Heidegger:

I have italicized the we (us) and the always already. They are determined, then, in correspondence with this understanding of ‘Being’ or of the ‘is’. In the absence of every other determination or presupposition, the ‘we’ at least is what is open to such an understanding, what is always already accessible to it, and the means by which such a factum [i.e., the fact of being and our understanding of ‘is’] can be recognized as such. It automatically follows, then, that this we—however simple, discreet, and erased it might be—inscribes the so-called formal structure of the question of Being within the horizon of metaphysics, and more widely within the Indo-European linguistic milieu, to the possibility of which the origin of metaphysics is essentially linked. ⁴⁸

This metaphysics in which the question of Being is inscribed is the very same metaphysics that arises codeterminately with humanism and the figure of man. And it is only in the name of man (or woman) that Being can be articulated or made explicit, even if there were some implicit force connecting us to Being before language or outside of it. ⁴⁹

And it is here that Derrida returns to contemporaneous French thought, arguing that French antihumanism is but an ill-informed and rather trivial gesture because it does not take seriously the problems of man and spirit, man and consciousness, and man and Being. In another clear and derisive reference to Foucault, Derrida again asserts that these problems and, thus, the figure of man far predate Foucault’s assignation of the discursive formation of ‘man’ to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Any questioning of humanism that does not first catch up with the archeological radicalness of the questions sketched by Heidegger, and does not make use of the information he provides concerning the genesis of the concept and the value of man (the reedition of the Greek paideia in Roman culture, the Christianizing of the Latin humanitas, the rebirth of Hellenism in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, etc.), any metahumanist [i.e., anti-humanist] position that does not place itself within the opening of these questions remains historically regional, periodic, and peripheral, juridically secondary and dependent, whatever interest it might retain as such. ⁵⁰

Derrida goes on to suggest that there can be no end of man but only ends. Because metaphysics cannot be surpassed but only made aware of its ongoing closure, because the ontotheological project of full presence and meaning can never be achieved, because the full dignity of man can never be consummated in static spirit, transcendental consciousness, or Being, man can never meet his end. Rather, each end heralds a new beginning, a new interpretation of humanity, even if such interpretations studiously avoid the words ‘man’ and ‘human’. It is, Derrida implies, only naïve to think otherwise. Perhaps, Derrida concludes, there will be a final end to man, an ascent of the Übermensch. But if this comes, it will come as an event, something wholly unheralded, whose conditions of possibility ‘we’ cannot articulate. ⁵¹

If, then, Derrida in his earlier years embraced a sort of antihumanism, this was of a type directed not against humanism as philosophy of the subject, as a declaration of human dignity, as veneration for humanity’s rational capacities, or as a doctrine of some degree of human commonality (biological, mental, and semiological) but against a humanism that would make a pure presence of humanity and human beings and place them outside the play of interpretation, reducing all significant difference and différance within humanity. Derrida’s antihumanism was precisely an anti-totalitarianism, an anti-reductivism, an anti-essentialism. It was as suspicious of Heidegger’s ontology as of Levinas’ metaphysics because Heidegger’s thought – despite Derrida’s lifelong refusal to admit as much – was clearly directed at yet another end to man in the form of a higher unity and not a continual play of pluralities. As such, Derrida’s so-called ‘antihumanism’ was entirely compatible with humanism in many of its most important senses: esteem for humanity, regard for the individual, respect for – though not faith in – reason, recognition of the cogito and the subject. What Derrida was anxious to avoid was the total collapse of the I, with all of its aporias and non-identities, into the We of totalizing philosophical schools and political movements because such a We brooks no significant difference.

If labels are to be applied, it seems most fitting to label Derrida an ‘aporetic humanist’. Différance and arche-writing may exceed the subject but they do not obliterate it, nor would their play be possible without the interest and awareness that is subjectivity. Conversely, différance and arche-writing define what it means to be a human subject for Derrida: limited, imperfect, unconsummated. Derrida does not overlook humanity or the subject but sees them at play in a semiotic-phenomenological field that extends beyond them. Kant was devoted to humanity despite his recognition that nothing straight would ever be built from its crooked timber. Derrida recognized that this crookedness marks not only humanity but the whole continuum of interpretation in which humanity is situated. If he was more sensitive to alterities, irregularities and anomalies in this continuum than was Kant, the early Derrida, at least, remained devoted to humanity.