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Defending Derrida: A Response to Milbank and Pickstock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Guy Collins
Guy Collins
Affiliation:
52 Boileau Road Barnes London SW13 9BLUK Email: gc226@cus.cam.ac.uk
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Extract

The reception of Jacques Derrida in the academic community has frequently been a source of controversy. Whilst America has often been hospitable to his thought, the situation in British and even French universities has occasionally been openly hostile. Derrida arouses an intensity of emotion illustrated by the two hundred and four academics at Cambridge University who attempted to block the award of an honorary degree in 1992. Like the reaction within other disciplines, the theological response was, and remains, fissured. Leading the critics, Brian Hebblethwaite lent vocal support to Derrida's detractors. Nevertheless, Hebblethwaite's published criticisms of Derrida at the time lack either theological or philosophical arguments. Instead, his assessment reveals a knowledge of Derrida gleaned almost exclusively from secondary sources, with the exception of a lone reference to Derrida's debate with John Searle in Limited Inc.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , August 2001 , pp. 344 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2001

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References

1 Following the eventual award of the degree, Derrida's assessment of the ‘Cambridge affair’ was published in the Cambridge Review 113, no. 2318 (October 1992), pp. 131–9. It has subsequently been collected in Points … (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) ed. Elisabeth Weber, where he describes a comparable antagonistic misrepresentation of his work in ‘The Work of the Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company Do Business)’, pp. 422–54.

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3 Taylor's, Mark C. main relevant works are: Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Altarity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

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13 Ibid., p. 280.

14 Ibid., p. 270

15 As well as articles and almost continual allusions to the two thinkers, there are two texts where Derrida's approach to Nietzsche and Heidegger is more ‘systematic’: see especially Spurs: Nietzsche's styles/Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche introd. Agosti, Stefano trans. Harlow, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979Google Scholar) and Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question trans. Bennington, Geoffrey and Bowlby, Rachel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

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28 Ibid. p. 125

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33 Milbank, , Theology and Social Theory, p. 315Google Scholar. Pickstock reaffirms the arbitrary nature of deconstruction in After Writing, p. 34.

34 ‘The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a “referent” in the normal sense which linguists have attached to this term. But to distance oneself from the habitual structure of reference, to challenge or complicate our common assumptions about it, does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language.’ Derrida in interview with Kearney, Richard, Dialogues with contemporary Continental thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 123–124Google Scholar.

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38 There are also earlier anticipations of such questions, as in ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’ trans. Porter, Catherine and Lewis, PhilipDiacritics 14, no. 2 (1984), pp. 20–31Google Scholar. Both Milbank and Pickstock neglect this irrevocably political article as well as Derrida's fuller analysis of Heidegger, politics and metaphysics in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Chief amongst crucial pieces to come out more recently are: ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ in Cornell, Drucilla, Rosenfeld, Michel and Carlson, David Gray (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Spectres of Marx, trans. Kamuf, Peggy (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’ in Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; and The Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar.

39 Derrida, , Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) trans. Allison, David, p. 141Google Scholar.

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41 Ibid. p. 25.

42 Ibid., p. 27.

43 Ibid., p. 22.

44 Ibid., p. 23.

45 Ibid., p. 23.

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49 Derrida, , Points, p. 364Google Scholar.

50 While the first chapter is expressly concerned with ‘Secrets of European Responsibility’, the theme of responsibility runs throughout The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For other explicit references to responsibility see the books in footnote 37 as well as: Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, On the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of the Origin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998Google Scholar) and Religion (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998)Google Scholar. The final two are recent publications and would have been unavailable to Pickstock.

51 There are good discussions in Critchley, Simon, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar, Bernasconi, Robert, ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics’ in Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 122–239Google Scholar, and Wood, David (ed.), Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.