Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has drawn my attention to an article on Derrida by Johann Hari. I kind of wish that he hadn’t, as I was in a rather dyspeptic mood to begin with.
In a postscript, Hari notes ‘It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly [deary me] as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.’ Now this is obviously nonsense. Nobody is objecting to the fact of criticism. Duttman, whom Hari cites, has himself been critical of Derrida and Negri. I have myself. What they, presumably, are objecting to is an ignorant and insulting tirade, full of demonstrable falsehoods, rhetorical banalities and lazy and occasionally offensive metaphors (‘Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism”’). Hari objects that his article has elicited insult rather than refutation, but Thought seems to have left no indentations here in which refutation might find a worthy foothold. A serious argument, after all, also provides the criteria by which it is to answered.
Hari begins by expressing incredulity at Derrida’s ‘popularity amongst academics’. This ‘popularity’ has in fact declined in recent years, and in any case we need to know whether he’s talking about France, the U.S. or Britian. Anyway, Hari seems to think that what popularity there is is rendered puzzling by the fact that ‘Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free ‘. Don’t ask me what is being argued here. I have no idea why supposed ‘safety’ should put a stop to rigorous critical thought, although it may well have done in Hari’s case. This, 'popularity'says Hari, can only be understood as a ‘symptom’ – this last being one of a number of such insidious metaphors pressed into service by Hari in lieu of an argument (‘viruses’, ‘cancers’). Hari refers to Derrida, who made a career of patiently and closely reading canonical texts and re-directing students’ attention to these, ‘trashing’ the humanities. This and the ensuing statements are simply worthless, without any discernable meaning; ‘logocentricism’ is not ‘the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way’ nor does a philosopher who disputes this idea count as a ‘deconstructionist’. It's pretty much a default common-sense assumption that would be the starting point of any philosophical interrogation. Derrida explicitly does not maintain that ‘The Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition [sic] that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions’. Derrida’s investigation of Enlightenment concepts is, by his own confession, made from within the enlightenment itself. Indeed, this is key, for it is here that Hari is actively misleading, especially when he lapses into this piece of sensationalist headlining: “Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are’. Rather than ‘hacking’ at anything Derrida was in fact concerned to tease out language’s own implicit logic; his critique was immanent, microscopic, cautious, humble.
But there is little point in continuing: Once again, Hari has waded in, far beyond the cordon of his competence or knowledge, his shrill journalistic head bobbing above the water, repeating prefabricated banalities and in general gauchely and gormlessly exhibiting his own intellectual illiteracy. The fact that he cites, in his defense, a first class degree from Cambridge ‘specializing in philosophy’ only makes more indefensible his howlers and misconceptions. All of what he says about Derrida’s thought is, without exception, false. The nearest he gets to the truth is about ten rumours away. He cites not a single work, nor is there any direct quotation. His article is a disgrace, and after wasting my time writing the above I can see why Professor Duttman preferred a more concise formulation.
N.B., My old tutor Terry Eagleton was weighed in with some worthwhile thoughts on the response to Derrida's death.