The Philosopher-Son

Many elements of Derrida's “psychoanalytic” philosophy support the view that for most of his career he remained a philosopher-son: the disruptive attitude toward a systematic style, the tendency to exaggerate, the fervor—so like that of Heidegger, Freud, and especially Nietzsche—with which he repeatedly stages confrontations with his father-masters. However, Derrida never claimed, with the postmoderns, that every kind of reality is socially and historically constructed. His “mistake” is rather to have confused ideal objects, such as geometrical shapes and theorems, with social objects, such as promises, contracts, and bills; for ideal objects do not depend on their embeddedness in a trace-structure as contracts and marriages undoubtedly do. The “Husserlian” theme of the centrality of writing becomes a powerful tool when applied to social reality: inscriptions are the ground of an enormous ontology that everywhere surrounds us. Derrida's achievement resides in his denunciation of the unconscious denigration of this ground and in his having foreseen the coming of our present “era of writing.” Notes NOTES 1. “An exaggerated hyperbole. Eventually, I exaggerate. I always exaggerate.” See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. During the 1930s, at a time when he was considering leaving Germany, someone urged Husserl to attend to the preservation of his writings (which were in fact subsequently transported to Louvain), but Husserl remained unperturbed, answering as a true idealist: “It does not matter, since everything I have written is true.” Quite the contrary was to befall Derrida. Not simply with respect to his bibliography (as when, according to the anecdote, in a conversation with Foucault outside the Bibliothèque Nationale, Foucault exhorted him to commence writing, claiming that the phrases would begin to occur to him if only he once overcame his writer's block, the obstacle of the empty page) but theoretically, since all of Derrida's thought is concentrated on the non-exteriority of expression with respect to essence, and of writing with respect to the idea. 3. See Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 90–109. 4. As Derrida puts it: “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y pas de hors-texte] ... in what one calls real life ... there has never been anything but writing; there has never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references”; see “Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158–59. 5. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 59–78; 177–97. 6. Ibid., 165. 7. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136. 8. J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 159: “Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts ... . And in any case, in a subsequent polemical response to some objections of mine, he apparently takes it all back: he says that all he meant by the apparently spectacular declaration that there is nothing outside of texts is the banality that everything exists in some context or other!” 9. David Bowie, “Space Oddity,” in Space Oddity (Virgin, SB00001OH7M, 1999; original release date 1969)

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