Table Of ContentDeconstructing Derrida
Deconstructing Derrida
Tasks for the New Humanities
Edited by
Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A.Peters
DECONSTRUCTINGDERRIDA
© Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A.Peters,2005.
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First published in 2005 by
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ISBN 978-0-312-29611-7 ISBN 978-1-4039-8064-9 (eBook)
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Deconstructing Derrida :tasks for the new humanities / edited by Peter
Pericles Trifonas and Michael A.Peters.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–29609–6 (hardcover)—ISBN 0–312–29611–8 (pbk.)
1.Derrida,Jacques.2.Humanities.I.Trifonas,Peter Pericles,1960–
II.Peters,Michael A.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction The Humanities in Deconstruction 1
Michael A.Peters and Peter Pericles Trifonas
One The Future of the Profession or the
Unconditional University (Thanks to the “Humanities,”
What Could Take Place Tomorrow) 11
Jacques Derrida (Translated by Peggy Kamuf)
Two Sovereignty Death Literature
Unconditionality Democracy University 25
J.Hillis Miller
Three Right to Humanities:Of Faith and
Responsibility 37
Denise Egéa-Kuehne
Four Higher Education and Democracy’s
Promise:Jacques Derrida’s Pedagogy of Uncertainty 53
Henry A.Giroux
Five War,Crimes against Humanity,and the
New Humanities:Derrida and the
Promise of Europe 82
Michael A.Peters
Six Higher Education and Everyday Life 104
Stanley Aronowitz
Seven Altering the Material Conditions of
Access to the Humanities 118
John Willinsky
vi Contents
Eight The Grammatology of the Future 137
Sung-Do Kim (Interview with Gregory Ulmer)
Nine Moving Devi 165
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Ten Ourselves as Another:Cosmopolitical Humanities 205
Peter Pericles Trifonas
Index 221
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The Humanities in Deconstruction
Michael A. Peters and
Peter Pericles Trifonas
To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still
greater achievement,by first discerning and bringing to light the
full, whole nature of man.This period...first gave the highest
development to individuality, and then led the individual to the
most zealous and thorough study of himself in all forms and under
all conditions.Indeed,the development of personality is essentially
involved in the recognition of it in oneself and in others.Between
these two great processes our narrative has placed the influence of
ancient literature because the mode of conceiving and representing
both the individual and human nature in general was defined and
colored by that influence.But the power of conception and repre-
sentation lay in the age and in the people.
Jacob Burckhardt,The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Burckhardt’s extraordinary essay published in an edition of 1,000 copies
was hard to sell and he received no royalties. Nietzsche, who joined
Burckhardt at the University of Basel in 1868,greatly admired the work,
although they were never friends.It was one of the few modern books
Nietzsche recommended. Burckhardt, a conservative antimodernist,
emphasized the individual person as the starting point of historical study.
For Burckhardt history provided the means to study the relation of
contemporary culture to the cultures of the past,and in The Civilization
of the Renaissance in Italy he registers the different ways in which
2 Michael A.Peters and Peter P.Trifonas
the Renaissance first gave the highest value to individuality.He believed
that the early signs of “the modern European Spirit”could be seen in
Florence.It was a historical vantage point for him to observe the declin-
ing fate of the individual who had become increasingly domesticated and
commodified in modern society,thus dimming the creative energies that
had first come to fruition in ancient Greece and were rediscovered and
extended during the Renaissance. He saw the rise of capitalism, self-
interest,and national wars and warned of the coming struggle between
freedom and the all-powerful State.Yet though a humanist in the old
sense of the word,he was not an idealist in his descriptions of Greek civ-
ilization,demonstrating how Athenians were victims of their democracy.
Burckhardt strongly influenced Nietzsche demonstrating a philosophy
of history that portrayed “man”as a historical construction,even though
he came to praise humanism through his historical excavations.They
shared a similar interpretation of classical Greek culture and Burckhardt
also anticipated important themes in Nietzsche’s work, including the
concept of the overman who realized his own unique individuality.
Nietzsche,inspired by Burckhardt’s method,and his concept of the State
as a work of art,applied his insights to the genealogy of values,of philos-
ophy,knowledge,and man in a way that radically called into question the
premises of the modern age,including its free-floating Cartesian–Kantian
rationally autonomous sovereign subject.
In the essay “Expeditions of an untimely man”(Twilight of the Idols),
Nietzsche writes a section titled “Criticism of modernity,” beginning
with the words:
Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: Everyone is
unanimous about that.But the fault lies not with them but in us.
Having lost all instincts out of which institutions grow, we are
losing the institutions themselves,because we are no longer fit for
them....For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will,
instinct,imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice:The
will to tradition,to authority,to centuries-long responsibility,to sol-
idarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in
infinitum...The entire West has lost those instincts out of which
institutions grow,out of which the future grows:Perhaps nothing
goes so much against the grain of its “modern”spirit as this.One
lives for today,one lives very fast—one lives very irresponsibly:It is
precisely this one calls “freedom”(1968,orig.1888,pp.93–94).
In passages like the one presented here in Twilight of the Idols,and in
Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power, Nietzsche identifies the
Introduction 3
break with tradition as the defining feature of modernity, and under-
scores its accompanying recognition that the sources of its values can no
longer be based upon appeals to the authority of the past. Modernity,
understood as a break with the past—an aesthetic,political,and episte-
mological break,encourages a self-consciousness of the present and an
orientation to the future based on notions of change,progress,experi-
ment, innovation, and newness. Most importantly modernity involves
the myth it constructs about itself—that it is somehow able to create its
own values and normative orientations out of its own historical force,
movement,and trajectory.Nietzsche rejects any simple-minded opposition
and refuses to embrace one option or the other unreservedly;rather,we
might see him contemplating how and why “we moderns”want to draw
up the historical stakes in terms of such an exhaustive dichotomy.
Heidegger takes up Nietzsche’s legacy and his critique of modernity
in various ways.The Italian philosopher Ernesto Grassi (1983:p.9),who
was the first to publish Heidegger’s Letter on Humanismin 1947,1 defines
Humanism as “that philosophical movement which characterized thought
in Italy from the second half of the fourteenth century to the final third
of the fifteenth century.”In his view it was Ficino’s translation of Plato at
the end of the fifteenth century,which led to a speculative Platonism and
Neo-Platonism,that broke with the Humanist approach to philosophy.
As he also suggests:
From the beginning of the study of Humanism a century ago,with
Burckhardt and Voigt,to Cassirer,Gentile,and Garin,scholars have
seen the essence of Humanism in the rediscovery of man and his
immanent values (Grassi,1983,p.17).
It was this notion of Humanism as a naive anthropomorphism,as Grassi
points out,that Martin Heidegger was at pains to expose,especially the tra-
ditional interpretation of Humanism,“either as a new affirmation of man
and, therefore, as an anthropology involving particular epistemological
problems [Ernst Cassirer],or as a renewal of Platonism or Neo-Platonism
and so ofWestern metaphysics [Paul Oskar Kristeller]”(p.31).2
Heidegger’s famous essay responds to all forms of humanism—the first
humanism,which he christens as Roman,and both forms of Renaissance
and Enlightenment humanisms,though he does not make this distinction.
As he famously argues,
Every humanism is either grounded in metaphysics or is itself made
to be the ground of one.Every determination of the essence of man
that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking
4 Michael A.Peters and Peter P.Trifonas
about the truth of Being,whether knowingly or not,is metaphysical
(Heidegger,1996,pp.225–226).
Heidegger’s Letter is a necessary preliminary to understanding Jacques
Derrida’s “humanism”—his engagement with and deconstruction of the
humanist subject—and his recasting of the “new humanities”without a
naive anthropology at the center. Derrida is, perhaps, the foremost
philosopher of the humanities and of its place in the university.Over the
long period of his career he has been concerned with the fate, status,
place, and contribution of the humanities.Through his deconstructive
readings and writings he has done much not only to reinvent the Western
tradition by attending closely to the texts that constitute it,but has also
redefined its procedures and protocols, questioning and commenting
upon the relationship between commentary and interpretation,the practice
of quotation,the delimitation of a work and its singularity,its signature,
and its context—the whole form of life of literary culture,together with
textual practices and conventions that shape it.From his very early work
on he has occupied a marginal in-between space—simultaneously,
textual, literary, philosophical, and political—one that permitted him
freedom to question,to speculate,and to draw new limits to humanitas.
In a way that few before him have done,with,perhaps,the exception of
Heidegger,Derrida has demonstrated his power to reconceptualize and
reimagine the humanities in the space of the contemporary university.
Mindful of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity, post-Nietzschean
philosophy of the university developed along two interrelated lines.The
first, pursued by Weber and continued by Heidegger, Jaspers, Lyotard,
andBourdieu,emphasized the dangers of economic interest vested in the
university through the dominance of technical reason.The second,initi-
ated by members of the Frankfurt School and developed differently by
Foucault,traces the imprint and controlling influence of the state in the
academy through the apparatus of administrative reason.Jacques Derrida,
in novel and unexpected ways,has contributed to both lines of inquiry.
He has done something different by engaging in a deconstructive
analysis that is both affirmative and utopian.He has pointed toward the
university to come and the future of the professions within a place of
resistance,and has yet maintained the historical link to the two ideas that
mediate and condition both the humanities and the performative structure
of acts of profession:Human rights and crimes against humanity.Derrida
maintains that the “modern university should be unconditional,” by
which he means that it should have the “freedom”to assert,to question,
to profess, and to “say everything” in the manner of a literary fiction.
