Necessity and Derrida

Near the end of a lengthy TLS review of a posthumously published series of interviews with Jacques Derrida ( Apprendre a vivre envin ), reviewer Ramona Fotiade quotes several intriguing selections from the interview. Derrida admits that life is “irreducible to what I say” and goes on to concede that “everything I oppose, so to speak, in my texts, everything that I deconstruct – presence, living, voice and so on – is exactly what I’m after in life. I love the voice, I love presence, I love . . . ; there is no love, no desire without it.” Though he is “constantly denying in my life what I’m saying in my books or my teaching,” this does not mean “I don’t believe in what I write.”

Fotiade asks the obvious question: Why deconstruct then, and answers “Strangely, Derrida’s answer echoes the premiss of the entire tradition of philosophical thinking which he so adamantly strove to dismantle: because of the unsurpassable pronouncement of the Greek ANANKE, Necessity itself, that – as Aristotle said – ‘cannot be persuaded to change.’” Derrida himself puts it this way: “I try to understand why there is what I call Necessity, and I write this with a capital ‘N’ – Necessity, as if it were someone, perhaps a woman, a Necessity which compels me to say that there is no immediate presence, compels me to deconstruct . . . . I take into account this Necessity and I obey, I account for, this Necessity. Nevertheless, in my life, I do the opposite. I live as if it were possible . . . to be presence with voice, or vocal presence.”

This appears to point to two conclusions: First, that Derrida is (as he recognized) engaging in an Augustinian “interrogation over the living contraditions of the self,” though, crucially, without knowing Augustine’s God. Second, that he remains, as James KA Smith pointed out in a different context, far more withint the Greek/Platonic framework than his works on Plato would suggest.