This strange institution called ‘philosophy’

Abstract

In 1981, after 20 years of teaching and writing philosophy, Derrida claimed that ‘less than ever’ did he ‘know what philosophy is’. Indeed, his ‘knowledge of what … constitutes the essence of philosophy’ remained ‘at zero degree’.¹ These were not flippant remarks. Rather, Derrida’s avowed uncertainty is part of a more general metaphilosophical view; namely, that ‘Philosophy has a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself’.² In this article I will critically reconstruct and develop this view, paying particular attention to the ‘institutional’ dimension of contemporary philosophy.

Keywords

community foundations hospitality institutions legitimation metaphilosophy

The history of philosophy is philosophy itself taking its time, and its way of taking its time includes not merely a continual bringing forth of new things, but a continual review of the old. It continually re-sifts, re-selects, and re-orders its past creations, re-edits, re-translates, re-reads, re-interprets, and criticizes afresh … Thus the institution which is eminently the critic of all others is also that which, more than any other, is critical of itself.³

1 Introduction

Alongside Rorty, Derrida is perhaps the most metaphilosophically inclined philosopher of recent years. Not only are his writings littered with reflections on the nature, role and scope of philosophy, there is a vast secondary literature documenting Derrida’s complex relationship with the western philosophical tradition. Unsympathetic commentators, like Habermas, consider his views to be a self-refuting assault on the authority of reason, truth and argument. Indeed, on this reading, Derrida reverses the traditional ‘primacy of logic over rhetoric’,⁴ thereby levelling the ‘genre distinction between philosophy and literature’ (PDM: 192).⁵ As such, his work is at best relativist,⁶ at worst nihilistic.⁷ Other commentators consider this assessment to be fundamentally mistaken. Thus, according to Norris, Derrida’s writings are eminently philosophical; ‘careful, meticulous … logical’,⁸ and replete with substantive arguments that often parallel those of mainstream analytic philosophers. Indeed, properly understood, ‘deconstruction … belongs within that same “philosophical discourse of modernity” that Habermas sets out to defend’.⁹ Norris emphatically denies that Derrida reduces ‘all texts to an undifferentiated “free play” of signification’ (HOD: 102), though many of his ‘latter-day Nietzschean’ (HOD: 97) admirers are guilty of this. Of Derrida’s analytic critics (who generally have not read him), Norris wonders if their hostility is partly motivated by ‘resentment’ towards his ‘extraordinary range, originality and depth’.¹⁰ Unlike Habermas and Norris, Rorty thinks Derrida is most interesting when playfully undermining the pretensions of traditional philosophical discourse, specifically in his more literary, quasi-autobiographical texts. Derrida goes astray, however, when attempting to write ‘serious’ philosophy; especially when he assumes that the ‘banal’¹¹ reality of ethical-political life demands endless theoretical ‘problematizing’¹² rather than just piecemeal ‘muddling through’ (RSC: 42). What is notable about these three prominent interlocutors is that each offers an assessment, explicit or otherwise, of Derrida’s metaphilosophy. This is not incidental, for the question ‘What is philosophy?’ is one of his recurrent preoccupations. Although Derrida does not offer a straightforward answer to this question, he repeatedly insists that ‘Philosophy has a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself’ (TFS: 55). The suggestion here, or so I will argue, is that ‘What is philosophy?’ constitutes the perennial question of philosophy.

2 Philosophy and/as metaphilosophy

Whether Derrida’s work belongs within the western philosophical canon, on its margins, or somewhere else entirely (though it is probably too soon to say), his estimation of that tradition is incontestably high.¹³ Indeed, he considers ‘all of the great philosophical texts’ to be ‘still before us’; thus far we have ‘merely scratched the[ir] surface’ (DCT: 113).¹⁴ Not only is this high opinion evident in Derrida’s endeavours to widen philosophical teaching through Groupe de recherche sur l’enseignement de la philosophie (GREPH) and the Collège International de Philosophie,¹⁵ he also thinks that we ‘need philosophy’ to deal with the pressing ethical-political challenges of our time.¹⁶ As such, the ‘question of teaching philosophy is not simply a question for teachers and pupils’, but a ‘worldwide political question’ (RTP: 27). Philosophy is therefore poorly understood as one academic discipline among others,¹⁷ for ‘every kind of thinking … is philosophical’ (RTP: 22). Given that ‘philosophy is everywhere’ (RTP: 27)¹⁸ (‘in literature, in physics’ [ RTP: 28], etc.¹⁹), it needs to be represented, ‘not only in the university, but on the radio’, and even ‘within the speeches of … politicians’ (ibid.).²⁰

Analogously, for Derrida metaphilosophy is not one philosophical sub-discipline among others. Rather, philosophy is inherently metaphilosophical. Although contemporary philosophers have a tendency to seclude themselves in specific philosophical enclaves, ‘doing’ philosophy is (albeit tacitly) always already to be ‘doing’ metaphilosophy. (I will return to this later.) Derrida is emphatic then that ‘the philosopher’ as such is, or should be, ‘someone for whom philosophy is not given’; someone who continually raises questions about the ‘essence and destination of philosophy’ (RTP: 4).²¹ Because the question of ‘knowing what can be called “philosophy” has always been the very question of philosophy, its heart … its life-principle’ (PNT: 411),²² we should be cautious about the assumed ‘limit between the inside and the outside … what is essential and proper to philosophy and what is not’ (WAP: 41).²³ For Derrida then, philosophy is a type of questioning

… that does not let itself be closed up at the outset in a region of discourse or in a region of knowledge. Philosophy is not a science related to a domain of determined objects. Consequently, philosophy is always called upon to transgress the border of the regions of research or knowledge and to ask itself about its own limits, but also about its own destination. Philosophy does not know … what its destination is … Philosophy is always in the process of displacing its limits. (PNT: 376)

That there is no general consensus among philosophers about how to answer the question ‘What is philosophy?’ – here we find ‘a “conflict of interpretation”’ (PNT: 332) both between individual philosophers and between their various professional sub-groupings – is a relatively uncontroversial observation. (Of course, the normative question ‘What should philosophy be?’ is significantly more contentious.) But Derrida makes a series of bolder claims about the pre-eminence of metaphilosophy. For example:

All philosophical discussions carry within them the question: What is philosophy? Where does it begin, where does it end? What is the limit? Even if the discussion seems to bear on a determined object, it suffices to pursue it a little to realize that it is the question of the limit of the philosophical that is, each time, in play. (PNT: 376)

The assertion that all philosophical activity is metaphilosophical may offset professional philosophy’s complacency about its modus operandi, but how plausible is it? Surely, the exchanges typical of research seminars, workshops and conferences do not reveal the sort of metaphilosophical stakes Derrida here alludes to. For these interactions commonly involve parties who agree, if not on all specific argumentative details, then at least on general methodological procedures. The implication of Derrida’s remarks above is that such mundane philosophical consensus is either naïve or illusory. What are we to make of this? Consider what he proceeds to say:

[E]ach time a philosopher, ensconced in his or her philosophical niche, doesn’t understand another philosopher, another philosophical language, other premises, other rules or other logical or rhetorical procedures, other discursive or pedagogical setups, each time s/he wants to attack them or remove their legitimacy, s/he simply says: this is no longer philosophy. (PNT: 411)

This is a crucial qualification, for here Derrida is talking about what happens when one philosopher ‘doesn’t understand another’, yet nevertheless ‘wants to attack them’.²⁴ This is an important proviso because, without some mutual understanding, philosophical argument (in fact any sort of argument) would be impossible. Indeed, without some methodological or procedural agreement, it is unsurprising that more rhetorical-combative means offer themselves.²⁵ Still, Derrida does not seem overly convinced by non-contextual appeals to ‘argumentation’. As he notes, when his critics accuse him of ‘not arguing’ (RP: 78), this often presupposes ‘a certain model’ of ‘argument’ (TFS: 54); i.e. one dominated by a specific kind of ‘propositional form’ where the ‘attention to language is necessarily reduced’. What interest Derrida, however, are ‘other protocols, other argumentative situations where one does not renounce argumentation simply because one refuses to discuss under certain conditions’ (RP: 78). One should not assume that ‘there is no argument’ simply because one does not recognize ‘different procedures’ (TFS: 54) at work. Indeed, Derrida insists that

… all the discussions between philosophers throughout history are not only discussions – thus, argumentations – about theses … but are also about argumentative norms … There is a great ensemble, which we call philosophy, where multiple argumentations appear to occupy a space assigned them by a general contract; but not even this is certain. (TFS: 54–5)²⁶

That ‘there is argumentation and argumentation’ (RP: 78) is doubtless true, though this does not imply that anything could qualify as ‘argumentation’. To unpack Derrida’s point, it will first be useful to outline three sorts of philosophical dispute:

A accuses B of doing good philosophy badly; e.g. of making specific blunders in what both A and B already agree is the right methodology, argumentative strategy, etc. This is the most common and philosophically productive sort of disagreement, for it is here that theses and arguments are refined (and sometimes abandoned) to accommodate relevant criticisms from one’s interlocutor(s).

A accuses B of doing bad philosophy; e.g. of using philosophical methods A considers impoverished, irrelevant, or outdated. This is more serious insofar as having a philosophically productive exchange here becomes less likely. (It is not inconceivable that A here judges B to have applied her methods perfectly, but this will be of little consolation if those very methods are judged irrelevant or faulty.)

A accuses B of being under the misapprehension that she (B) is doing philosophy of any description. Here, B will likely be seen as making pseudo-philosophical noises, or doing something else (e.g. literary or cultural theory).

Scenarios (1) and (2) are less troublesome insofar as both A and B at least consider one another to be part of the wider ‘philosophical community’ – however that may be construed.²⁷ Despite their specific disagreements, both parties can reasonably expect (though this may in fact prove false) that they share some background knowledge, familiarity with specific philosophical texts, authors, arguments and procedures. In this sense, their disagreement is local. (Even in (2), A and B can reasonably expect to find common ground on other philosophical matters.) Scenario (3) is significantly more problematic, for here trust in shared background knowledge, familiarity with texts and arguments (etc.) is less assured. Of course, sometimes philosophers and literary/cultural theorists have read many of the same books. But even then what tends to be lacking is a shared way of reading, interpreting and writing about those texts/authors.²⁸ This disparity becomes most evident in the set of salient questions each audience brings to a given work/author, for these will inevitably orientate one’s reading, and thereby subsequent discussion and research.²⁹ Though there will often be some overlap, in philosophy and literary/cultural theory there are different hermeneutic possibilities available.³⁰ As such, in each discipline certain kinds of reading, interpretation and writing will effectively be ruled out from the start.

One final observation before moving on. ‘I do not understand your question’ is a fairly common response within ordinary philosophical discussion. Such rejoinders sometimes have an implicit rhetorical dimension, and can roughly be translated: ‘Your question is ill-formed’, or even ‘You are not making sense’. These exchanges can become more fraught when different disciplines encounter one another,³¹ especially where diverse methodological assumptions, ontological commitments and general conceptual vocabularies are at play. In these contexts ‘I do not understand your question’ can mean: ‘Your question is unclear because the background assumptions of your discipline are unclear’, or more gravely ‘I do not understand you because the background assumptions of your discipline are misguided’. Setting aside cases motivated by mere prejudice or ignorance, there is nothing obviously wrong with such rejoinders – unless, of course, one thinks that academic discourse should be governed by an exaggerated principle of charity. After all, it is perfectly conceivable that one’s interlocutor does not realize that his background assumptions are, at the very least, contentious. (Likewise, one might come to realize that one’s own theoretical commitments are far from intuitive.) Not to accept this possibility would commit us to an extreme meta-disciplinary relativism, where – like certain crude forms of cultural relativism – the mere existence of a different discipline is taken as paralysing ‘external’ critical assessment. But given that academic disciplines (like cultures) are neither static nor rigidly bounded, such relativistic quietism would, at best, be hasty.

The above catalogue of types of philosophical disputes is clearly not definitive. After all, demarcating (1) from (2), and (2) from (3) is far from straightforward. But there is another sense in which this brief taxonomy is potentially misleading. For what counts as (e.g.) a ‘philosophically relevant’ or ‘interesting’ reading of a given text/author is rarely transparent. Indeed, the criteria of ‘relevant’ and ‘interesting’ are often what is being contested (explicitly or otherwise) within the diverse readings and writings offered by specific philosophers, literary and cultural theorists. It is this broader metaphilosophical issue that motivates Derrida to suggest that ‘All philosophical discussions carry within them the question: What is philosophy?’ (PNT: 376) – and, not least, ‘Is this philosophy?’ This explains why, as previously noted, he is suspicious of the unqualified appeal to ‘argumentation’. For what counts as a ‘good argument’ (not merely sound and valid) will depend upon the ‘argumentative norms’ (TFS: 54) regulating a particular disciplinary/sub-disciplinary context.

Now, one might reasonably suppose that philosophers will share such ‘argumentative norms’ simply in virtue of being philosophers. But Derrida thinks that we cannot even take that for granted (let alone the ‘norms’ at work between philosophy and other disciplines). The obvious response to this is to note that, for the most part, even when philosophers fervently disagree, they generally understand what it is they are disagreeing about, why such disagreement has arisen, and why this is a philosophical disagreement. As such, it is surely misleading to suggest that in these exchanges philosophers are questioning the origins, nature and scope of ‘the philosophical’ (PNT: 376). Derrida may be right that sometimes – even perhaps ‘very often’ – the unqualified appeal to ‘argument’ has a rhetorical dimension. (Much the same can be said about ‘clarity’.³²) But whether ‘[a]ll the discussions between philosophers throughout history’ (TFS: 54) possess this rhetorical dimension is a much stronger thesis that is liable to provoke a general scepticism about philosophical discourse. For here one might conclude (as Habermas thinks Derrida does) that philosophical argumentation is mere rhetoric, albeit in the garbs of universal, ahistorical ‘reason’.³³ But while some might welcome this radical conclusion, I doubt that Derrida would be quite so incautious. In any case, we do argue and debate with one another, and thereby persuade with (and are persuaded by) mutually accepted reasons – not only in philosophy seminars. It is notable then that, against Holocaust revisionist history, Derrida avows his commitment to the eminently traditional ‘argumentative norms’ of truth, evidence, honesty and disciplinary expertise:

One has the right to ask all questions. But when one responds to questions with falsifications or counter-truths, gestures that have nothing to do with honest research or critical thought, then that’s something else. It’s either incompetence or unjustified instrumentalism, and it has to be reprimanded … If Faurisson had simply said: ‘Let me have the right to do historical research, let me have the right not to take witnesses at their word,’ then I would have been all for letting him work. But when he then wants, against a mountain of evidence, to go from these critical questions to affirmations that are unacceptable from the point of view of attested and proven truth, then he is simply incompetent, harmful as well, but first of all incompetent … In this case, debate is impossible. But, in principle, the university remains the only place where critical debate must remain unconditionally open. (LLF: 48–9)

Clearly, one can have philosophical worries about ‘questioning’, ‘argument’ and ‘reason’ without thereby rejecting them, or indeed reducing them to mechanisms of power, patriarchy, or logocentrism. Likewise, to engage in argument with an interlocutor is not inherently coercive, unless one defines ‘coercion’ so broadly that it ceases to pick anything out. As Derrida himself acknowledges, ‘even the prospect of arguing … [is] already to recognize that arguing … [is] possible’ (AWD: 53). Indeed, more generally, interlocutors presuppose a communicative ‘we’, or ‘minimal way of … understanding’ each other. (At the very least, one reasonably assumes that the other has a ‘sufficient mastery of the language … even if the addressee in question should contest, deny, suspect, disbelieve the content of what is said’.³⁴) Such exchanges, philosophical or otherwise, certainly require ‘trust in the other’ or a ‘minimal act of faith’³⁵ rather than ‘knowledge’ narrowly construed, but they do not thereby invite radical doubt or a hermeneutics of paranoia.³⁶

Mindful of this, one soon discovers a number of more qualified metaphilosophical claims in Derrida’s work. For example:

A philosophical debate is also a combat in view of imposing discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, rhetorical and pedagogical techniques. Each time a philosophy has been opposed, it was also, although not only, by contesting the properly, authentically philosophical character of the other’s discourse. (PNT: 219)

As above, Derrida is here referring to philosophical debates of a very particular sort. For if we consider a disagreement between interlocutors about how to weight certain variables in a philosophical argument, then Derrida’s claim seems implausible. These sorts of dispute do not obviously (even ‘also’) constitute a disagreement about competing ‘discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, rhetorical and pedagogical techniques’.³⁷ But again, this mundane, local disagreement is not Derrida’s primary concern. The sort of ‘philosophical debate’ he is referring to is much broader, for it involves ‘a philosophy’ being ‘opposed’. A plausible candidate for what Derrida has in mind here is the ongoing discord between analytic and Continental traditions.³⁸ Although I do not have space to deal with that topic here, it is worth noting that Derrida’s own relation to analytic philosophy is significantly less clear than one might expect. Evidently he has anxieties about the sheer dominance of analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world, not least because the ‘hegemony of a type of philosophy’ cannot be dissociated from a cultural and ‘linguistic hegemony’ (RTP: 28). (Today ‘no theoretical work, no literary work, no philosophical work, can receive a worldwide legitimation without crossing the States, without being first legitimized in the States … That’s a serious problem. It’s not simply a problem of language’ [ RTP: 29].³⁹) Nevertheless, Derrida openly confesses to having neglected analytic philosophy,⁴⁰ and Wittgenstein in particular.⁴¹ It should also be noted that at the 1999 Ratio conference ‘Arguing with Derrida’, Derrida insisted that he was ‘not simply on the “continental” side’, but rather ‘on the side of conceptual philosophy’ (AWD: 84). Indeed, Derrida even suggested that he could thereby be described as ‘an analytic philosopher’ (AWD: 83).⁴² One might balk at this suggestion. But there is a sense in which Derrida’s attempts to map the ‘autodeconstruction in every concept’ (to describe their internal ‘aporias’ to the point where ‘[e]ach concept becomes hospitable to its other’⁴³) can plausibly be described as a form of ‘conceptual analysis’. Still, I do not want to argue that point here. Neither will I attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of Derrida’s metaphilosophy. For the remainder of this article I want to focus instead on one prominent theme; namely, the ‘institutional’ dimension of philosophy.⁴⁴ I would like to begin, however, with some of Derrida’s remarks on the institution of literature. The relevance of this to his metaphilosophy will become clear shortly.

3 Literature, philosophy and counter-institutions

Although the question ‘What is literature?’ is as daunting as ‘What is philosophy?’,⁴⁵ and while in neither case does Derrida provide decisive answers, he does have a considerable amount to say about the nature of literature. (I will return to philosophy later.) By ‘literature’ Derrida has at least two things in mind: (1) literature as an ‘historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc.’, and (2) literature as an ‘institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them’.⁴⁶ Indeed, in this coupling⁴⁷ Derrida sees something of broad ethical-political significance:

The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy … What we call literature … implies that license is given to the writer to say everything he wants to or everything he can, while remaining shielded, safe from all censorship, be it religious or political. (AOL: 37)⁴⁸

Of course, such ‘license’ is far from being universally recognized, instituted, or protected; it is rather a right in principle to ‘say everything’. But I do not want to dwell on this (alleged) political dimension of literature, or how it relates to Derrida’s repeated allusions to a ‘democracy still to come’ (WAP: 42).⁴⁹ Rather, what interests me is the idea that literature is both ‘institutional and wild’, and thereby constitutes a ‘counter-institutional institution’ (AOL: 58). As we will see, this idea has important resonances in Derrida’s metaphilosophy.

Unsurprisingly Derrida is keen to avoid any essentialist hankerings when approaching the question of literature. He is therefore emphatic that ‘there is no essence of literature’ (RTP: 35),⁵⁰ and the reason for this is that, in keeping with his general account of iterability,⁵¹ Derrida denies that there is any ‘text’ that is ‘literary in itself ’. That is to say: ‘Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the [any] text’ (AOL: 44), and as such there is no text that is intrinsically serious, comic, tragic (etc.).⁵² (For simplicity’s sake, I will here interpret ‘text’ in a narrow way.) Although texts do not determine their own interpretation, this does not mean that in specific cases we are left hermeneutically clueless. Nevertheless, what cannot be ruled out is the possibility that ‘a newspaper article, a scientific theorem, a snatch of conversation’ (indeed ‘any statement’) can always be ‘reinscribe[d] in a literary space’ (AOL: 45).⁵³ Moreover, such recontextualization is not merely always in fact possible; it is the quasi-transcendental⁵⁴ condition of possibility of writing and speech as such.⁵⁵ It is in this sense then, that the infinitely porous ‘literary space’ is capable of accommodating everything; literature ‘can say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything’ (DEM: 29).⁵⁶ Thus, Derrida maintains:

No internal criterion can guarantee the essential ‘literariness’ of a text. There is no assured essence … of literature. If you proceed to analyze all the elements of a literary work, you will never come across literature itself, only some traits which it shares or borrows, which you can find … in other texts. (AOL: 73)⁵⁷

The assumption that there must be some essential ‘literariness’ is doubtless tempting. But on this matter Derrida claims to be ‘very much a historian’ (AOL: 54), for one must ‘discern exactly the historically determined phenomenon of social conventions and the institutions which give rise, give its place, to literature’ (AOL: 71). That said, he does not think, even after such historical work has been done, that literature is merely ‘one institution among others’. For, as previously noted, literature is ‘an institution which consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing its constitutional law’ (AOL: 72). In other words, literature does not know what it is or where it is going, and this uncertainty is part of the (albeit ‘relatively modern’ [ AOL: 37]⁵⁸) concept of ‘literature’ itself.

Literature might therefore appear to be a unique ‘institution’. Nevertheless, what Derrida says of literature is echoed in his metaphilosophical reflections in two ways. (1) If literature embodies the right (in principle) to ‘say everything’ (AOL: 37), then philosophy is similar in this regard. Thus, speaking of deconstruction (though the point can be extended), Derrida refers to the ‘unconditional right to ask critical questions not only about the history of the concept of man, but about the history even of the notion of critique, about the form and the authority of the question, about the interrogative form of thought’ (WA: 204).⁵⁹ Indeed, the ‘unconditional right’ of philosophy to question everything ‘links the university, and above all the humanities, to what is called literature, in the European and modern sense of the term, as the right to say everything publicly’ (WA: 205).⁶⁰ (2) Neither ‘literariness’ nor ‘philosophicity’ are ‘essences’ on Derrida’s view; there simply are ‘no natural philosophemes or natural works of literature’ (RTP: 48).⁶¹ Rather, both ‘literariness’ and ‘philosophicity’ are ‘functions in the same language’, for exactly the ‘same statements, grammatically and in their lexicon, can function here as everyday language, here as philosophemes, and here as poems … It depends on the context of the interpretation – of the conventions, the agreement or disagreement’ (RTP: 48).⁶² This is why Derrida objects to Rorty’s ‘privatizing philosophy, letting it take shelter in literature’. For Derrida, one cannot ‘leave philosophy behind’ by opting for some ‘non-philosophical discourse’ (TFS: 10)⁶³ – or, for that matter, by returning to the purported safety of ‘ordinary language’.⁶⁴ Thus, without wanting to ‘reduce’ (PNT: 218)⁶⁵ philosophy to literature (as Habermas alleges), Derrida nevertheless emphasizes that ‘ there is always, in what we call “philosophical,” an adherence to natural language, a profound indissociability of certain philosophemes from the Greek, the German, the Latin, which is … something that philosophy shares with literature’ (TFS: 11).⁶⁶

For Derrida then, literature and philosophy are neither interchangeable nor radically separate:

[S]ince they share their belonging to a natural language, there are at work within philosophical – so-called philosophical – texts, texts which are legitimized by the institution, by the academy as philosophical texts – there are in these texts some structures which could be considered literary. (RTP: 35)

He therefore denies that there exists ‘“a specifically philosophical writing,” a sole philosophical writing whose purity is always the same and out of reach of all sorts of contaminations’. After all, philosophical vocabularies (of which there are many) do not drop from the heavens; philosophy is ‘spoken and written in a natural language, not in an absolutely formalizable and universal language’ (PNT: 219).⁶⁷ Derrida thus places considerable emphasis on the relation between philosophy and natural languages, specifically ‘European languages’. Indeed, mindful of the pivotal role Greek and European languages have played in the history of western thought, he warns that one cannot ‘simply say that philosophy is something universal’ (RTP: 22).

Derrida here sounds at his most metaphilosophically radical. But while it may be tempting to read these passages as echoing Nietzsche’s (partial) reduction of philosophy to an epiphenomenon of natural languages and grammars,⁶⁸ this deflationary view is not easily attributable to Derrida. Indeed, it is worth noting that in his essay on Benveniste’s linguistics, Derrida considers just such a Nietzschean thesis.⁶⁹ The question Benveniste raises is: ‘[W]hat … has language governed in philosophy?’ (MOP: 197); in other words, ‘is philosophical discourse governed … by the constraints of language?’ (MOP: 177).⁷⁰ More specifically, Benveniste wants to emphasize the ‘limiting constraints which the Greek language imposed upon the system of Aristotelian categories’ (MOP: 179). While Aristotle took himself to be describing the categories of human thought, what he actually did was reproduce (albeit unwittingly) the categories embedded in the particular natural language with which he was familiar.⁷¹ As Benveniste remarks, Aristotle was

… bound to reflect unconsciously the distinctions which the [Greek] language itself showed among the main classes of forms … He thought he was defining the attributes of objects but he was really setting up linguistic entities; it is the language which, thanks to its own categories, makes them to be recognised and specified … No matter how much validity Aristotle’s categories have as categories of thought, they turn out to be transposed from categories of language … [W]hat Aristotle gave us as a table of general and permanent conditions is only a conceptual projection of a given linguistic state. (PGL: 61)

Thus ‘the linguist’ (Benveniste) ‘ transcribes in terms of language what the philosopher [Aristotle] previously, “unconsciously” transposed, or projected from language into terms of thought’ (MOP: 189).⁷²

What primarily interests Derrida here are the various ‘aporias’ facing anyone ‘who takes on the task of defining the constraints which limit philosophical discourse’. This is significant because ‘it is from the latter [philosophical discourse] that the noncritical notions which are applied [such as “system”, “form” and “content”] … must be borrowed’ (MOP: 180). No matter how strenuously one might try, the ‘filiation’ between philosophy and natural language can never be ‘absolutely interrupted’ (ibid.). In his critique of Aristotle then, Benveniste himself cannot avoid employing a number of distinctions (‘between language and thought’ [ MOP: 182]) and concepts (the ‘reality of language’ [ MOP: 180], the ‘empirical’ [ MOP: 192], and, not least, the ‘category of the category’ [ MOP: 182]⁷³). But for Derrida, the ‘major … problem’ (MOP: 193) is Benveniste’s assertion that, within Aristotle’s categorization, ‘there is the notion of “being” which envelops everything. Without being a predicate itself, “being” is the condition of all predicates … [A]gain, this concept reflects a very specific linguistic quality.’ Here then, we are not being asked to consider ‘one category among others in the system’ (MOP: 194), but rather the ‘transcategorial condition of the categories’ (MOP: 195) as such.⁷⁴ This is an important problem, for as Derrida rhetorically enquires: ‘Why does the is still give its form to all of these questions?’ (MOP: 205) (including, one might add, Derrida’s own). For ‘[w]ithout the transcategoriality of “to be,” which “envelops everything”,’ as Benveniste himself acknowledges, the ‘transition between categories of language and categories of thought would not have been possible … for Aristotle or for Benveniste’ (MOP: 197). Derrida’s point here thus pertains to philosophy as such; namely, that ‘whoever alleges that philosophical discourse belongs to the closure of a [natural] language must still proceed within this language and with the oppositions it furnishes’. In short: ‘philosophy always reappropriates for itself the discourse that de-limits it’ (MOP: 177). While Benveniste assumes that the linguist can step outside philosophical discourse to cast a neutral, critical eye upon its workings, Derrida insists that ‘Philosophy is not only before linguistics as one might find oneself facing a new science, a new way of seeing or a new object; it is also before linguistics, preceding linguistics by virtue of all the concepts philosophy still provides it, for better or worse’ (MOP: 188).⁷⁵ Given this inescapable ‘filiation’ (MOP: 180) between philosophy and non-philosophy – specifically, between philosophy and those eager to deflate it – Derrida ends on a quasi-Wittgensteinian note: ‘If it were still a question, here, of a word to say, it would surely not be for philosophy or linguistics as such to say it’ (MOP: 205).

Derrida’s treatment of Benveniste is in keeping with his readings of Austin⁷⁶ and Levinas⁷⁷ (among others), for in none of these does Derrida simply want to disprove or reject the positions under consideration. Rather, what interest him are their internal tensions. Understandably, some readers find this strategy frustrating and oblique. What they want from Derrida are clearly defined arguments and theses. Some commentators do attempt to reconstruct Derrida with these requirements in mind.⁷⁸ So, for example, Norris presents Derrida’s reading of Benveniste as echoing Davidson’s attack on a ‘whole raft of cultural-linguistic relativist doctrines’ (APA: 29). On Norris’ estimation then, Derrida responds to Benveniste’s challenge

… by pointing out – through a mode of transcendental (or condition-of-possibility) argument – that Benveniste’s case depends at every stage on categorial distinctions such as those between language and thought or form and content which, however problematic their character, cannot be addressed except by way of the conceptual and logical resources provided by a strictly antecedent philosophical discourse. (APA: 28)⁷⁹

Thus both Davidson and Derrida hold that ‘the priority of logic over language’ cannot be questioned ‘except by way of an argument [philosophical, linguistic, psychological, or whatever] which necessarily borrows its every last conceptual resource from that same discourse that it seeks to supplant’ (APA: 31). In this sense, philosophy is immune to external attack – though not, of course, immune to its ‘autodeconstruction’ (AOR: 362).⁸⁰ As such, one might say, philosophy shares with literature the ability to ‘receive anything, suffer anything’ (DEM: 29); even the most virulent anti-philosophical assaults.

Reconstructing Derrida’s work in this way is valuable, especially for those more accustomed to analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, caution is needed here, for even when Derrida sounds most critical, he does not select his objects of analysis merely for strategic purposes. It would therefore be odd to think that Benveniste figures as a convenient foil for Derrida’s quasi-Kantian anti-relativism. Indeed, it should be noted that Derrida explicitly states that he raises the aforementioned questions not merely ‘to object to his [Benveniste’s] discourse’ (MOP: 180).⁸¹ This, combined with Derrida’s ruminations on the intimate relationship between philosophy and natural languages (mentioned earlier), should make us wary about oversimplifying his metaphilosophical views, no matter how useful that might be.⁸² Further discussion will, I think, bear this cautionary point out.

4 Institutions, foundations and openness

Although the question ‘What is philosophy?’ may be irredeemably essentialist, Derrida evidently thinks that there is a characteristic ‘philosophical gesture’, and this consists in philosophy ‘trying to render itself universal’ (PNT: 379). After all, it is the philosopher, for better or worse, who ‘authorizes himself to speak about … everything’ (WAP: 61).⁸³ In this universalist ‘gesture’ Derrida detects an allergic reaction toward everything contingent and non-essential.⁸⁴ As he notes, philosophers tend to consider the ‘date where it [philosophy] is written to be an empirical accident that can be lost, that must be effaced, that … must play no role within the philosophical demonstration’. More strongly stated: ‘The philosophical, in its specificity, is a particular way of effacing the date, and of doing so deliberately’ (PNT: 379).⁸⁵ While this characterization captures many analytic philosophers’ instrumentalist attitude toward the history of philosophy,⁸⁶ Derrida does not seem to think that this outlook is peculiar to any specific philosophical genre or tradition. Rather, ‘[e]very philosopher, each in his own way, started off by saying that it was time to be done with the history of philosophy … [I]n a sense, there is nothing more philosophical than the interruption of historical memory, and philosophers continually outdo one another in advocating ahistoricism’ (TFS: 66).⁸⁷ But this claim seems too general to be plausible. A weaker, more credible, version can be found in the following passage:

Philosophical gestures that consist in saying, ‘we are going to begin, we are going back to square one, we are going to start from scratch’ – as Descartes does, as Kant does in one way and Husserl in another – all vindicate ingenuousness, but they are ingenuous themselves, and ingenuously so. They claim to recover the archē, the beginning, and are thus naïve. Naïvety consists in believing that one can be naïve – that one can begin at birth, as if one had just been born … This declared ingenuousness conceals a deeper one, which consists in believing that one can begin, when instead it has already begun. (TFS: 69)⁸⁸

Philosophy’s anxiety about taking historical contingencies too seriously⁸⁹ is important, not only to how one assesses the great milestones in the history of philosophy, but also to the less prestigious activities of its many under-labourers. While Derrida does not simply reject philosophy’s universalist aspirations (recall his discussion of Benveniste), he remains wary of any appeal to unsullied philosophical ‘origins’. On Derrida’s account, philosophy has ‘never been the unfolding responsible for a unique, originary assignation linked to a unique language or to the place of a sole people’. That is, philosophy ‘does not have one sole memory’, for even under ‘its Greek name and in its European memory’, philosophy has ‘always been bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear, and polyglot’. And this fact, he thinks, should inform the way we conceive of the history of philosophy.⁹⁰ In a similar vein, Derrida thus observes that philosophers are prone to think that ‘proper names do not count: “It’s not because it [a given text or argument] was written by Plato that it’s interesting”; and this is true, in a certain empirical context. But as soon as we take proper names and signatures seriously, things change.’ Specifically, ‘taking proper names seriously means taking history seriously: the history of works … [and] of language (the fact that philosophy is bound up with natural languages)’ (TFS: 67). Precisely what Derrida means by ‘taking history seriously’ is not entirely clear. For, on the one hand, he repeatedly stresses the importance of approaching philosophical texts in their singularity, and thereby reading them in their own terms.⁹¹ Textual-historical ‘fidelity’ (AID: 220) is therefore one aspect of Derrida’s metaphilosophy. However, he is equally renowned for reading texts against themselves; not through wilful perversion, but in order to map their ‘autodeconstruction’ (AOR: 362). Likewise, Derrida’s predilection for marginal texts (and what is customarily deemed ‘marginal’ within canonical texts) should not go unmentioned. His justification for this practice is pertinent to our concerns:

The philosophical institution necessarily privileges what it comes to call the ‘great philosophers’ and their ‘major texts.’ I also wanted to analyze this evaluation, its interests, its internal procedures, its implicit social contracts. By rooting out minor or marginalized texts, by reading them and writing in a certain way, one sometimes projects a stark light on the meaning and the history, on the interest of ‘majoration …’ (PNT: 85)⁹²

Here we are introduced to one of Derrida’s main interests; the institutional dimension of philosophy. I have already referred to his remarks on philosophy’s ‘counter-institutional’ status. As previously noted, just as literature has the right (in principle) to say anything, philosophy has the right (in principle) to question anything; not least itself.⁹³ Nevertheless, such reflexive interrogations are only possible insofar as there is a more or less secure institution – some recognized constellation of people, practices and objects – already there to work on.⁹⁴ While everything in philosophy may, in principle, be open to critical re-evaluation, not everything is available for such appraisal simultaneously. There is, after all, a relatively stable philosophical terrain of established and respected texts, authors, arguments and methodologies bequeathed to us. But, as Derrida notes, while there are ‘moments of great stabilization’ (‘[e]veryone agrees that The Critique of Pure Reason is a major philosophical work’), things can change. (In France, he thus notes, Rousseau ‘was not on the programs of the philosophical competitions until two decades ago’.) There are therefore ‘canonizations, … legitimations’, and even ‘within a single corpus’ there are texts that are ‘consider[ed] major at some point and minor at another’ (RTP: 48–9).⁹⁵ What this suggests, I think, is that ‘ordinary’ philosophical practice needs to be understood as involving a complex relationship between philosophers’ daily activities (teaching, research, student consultation, grading, devising courses, attending conferences, reviewing journal articles, library acquisitions, etc.) and the various institutional structures guiding them. This, I take it, is partly what Derrida has in mind when he remarks:

[W]ith students and the research community, in every operation we pursue together (a reading, an interpretation, the construction of a theoretical model …), we argue or acknowledge that an institutional concept is at play, a type of contract signed, an image of the ideal seminar constructed, a socius implied, repeated or displaced, invented, transformed, menaced or destroyed. An institution – this is not merely a few walls or some outer structures surrounding, protecting, guaranteeing or restricting the freedom of our work; it is also and already the structure of our interpretation. (MOC: 22)

Today, of course, philosophy operates predominantly within universities. As such, the way these institutions are organized, funded and managed plays a role (direct and explicit, or otherwise) in shaping philosophical curricula. Likewise, university hiring procedures can significantly affect the sort of philosophy undertaken in those institutions, and thereby the sort of philosophy its staff, students and visitors are routinely exposed to.⁹⁶ This, in turn, will partly determine the sort of philosophers who emerge in graduate programmes, just as this will influence how the next generation of professional philosophers turn out; not least how their metaphilosophical commitments will be inherited by their students (etc.). Clearly, this is an immensely complex process. But once we consider these pedagogical variables alongside the role played by editorial boards, committees, reviewers, publishing companies, unofficial journal rankings, and blogs⁹⁷ in shaping the way philosophers operate at any given time, it becomes apparent that the question ‘What is philosophy?’ is, at least in part, an empirical question.⁹⁸ And let us here recall, according to Derrida it is precisely this sort of question that jars against philosophy’s desire to interrupt ‘historical memory’ (TFS: 66) and thereby ‘render itself universal’ (PNT: 379). Thus, although he thinks that the question ‘What is philosophy?’ cannot be ‘exhausted’ (RTP: 39) by such institutional considerations,⁹⁹ neither does he think that philosophy is ‘free from any institution’. On this Derrida is emphatic; there is not ‘on the one side, philosophy or philosophical institutions, and on the other side, free thinking’ (PNT: 85).¹⁰⁰ Indeed, the very ‘idea that institutions are merely external structures having nothing to do with philosophy itself, in its internal essence’, is little more than a ‘conservative illusion’ (DIN: 62).¹⁰¹ Here then is one reason we should be cautious about demarcating too neatly between ‘what is essential and proper to philosophy and what is not’ (WAP: 41). This also helps to explain why Derrida is concerned with the ‘relation of the juridical structures that implicitly or explicitly support philosophical institutions (teaching or research) to philosophy itself’ (WAP: 2). As he remarks:

Everywhere and always, institutions articulate teaching and research, they attempt to dictate our rhetoric, the procedures of demonstration, our manner of speaking, writing and addressing the other. Those who think they stand outside institutions are sometimes those who interiorize its norms and programs in the most docile manner. Whether it is done in a critical or deconstructive way, the questioning of philosophy’s relation to itself is a trial of the institution, of its paradoxes as well, for I try to show nonetheless what is unique and finally untenable in the philosophical institution: it is there that this institution must be a counter-institution, one which may go so far as to … cast suspicion on the very concept of institution. (PNT: 327–8)

The issue here is not simply whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ institutions per se, as that would falsely presuppose that philosophy is available ‘without detour … without the mediation of … philosophical institutions’ (WAP: 3).¹⁰² But while we should not think that ‘philosophy can be done outside institutions, in the wild so to speak’ (for ‘[w]e need philosophical institutions to guarantee the tradition, the transmitting of skills, to learn to read traditional writings which are not immediately accessible; so institutions are necessary’¹⁰³), Derrida insists that this ‘doesn’t mean that every institution is good, and that we have to content ourselves with the institutions at hand’ (FPC: 106–7). That we cannot simply extract ourselves from philosophy’s institutions does not entail that the forms and functions of those institutions are irredeemably fixed; indeed, they are changing all the time, albeit in intricate, unpredictable ways. Likewise, the institutionality of philosophy does not necessitate passive acquiescence on our part. There is little reason to think that we cannot influence the shape of philosophy’s future. Doubtless many of its transformations will be out of our (or anyone’s) direct control. But this does not mean that we are utterly at the whim of ‘external’ forces.

It is here worth noting that, although Derrida is ‘in favour of academic freedom and the autonomy of the academic field’, he does not rule out the intervention of ‘some power outside’ to prevent philosophy from merely ‘reproducing itself’ (RTP: 54). Left to their own devices, it seems, philosophers are inclined to see philosophy’s future as just more of the same. But Derrida clearly worries about this. Indeed, he explicitly cautions: ‘[I]f you don’t impose on the philosopher[s] that they appoint someone totally foreign to their own school of thought, nothing will change for centuries’ (ibid.).¹⁰⁴ Broadening this claim, Derrida thus endorses what he calls ‘a community of thought’:

Such a community would interrogate the essence of reason and of the principle of reason, the values of the basic, of the principal, of radicality, of the arkhe in general, and it would attempt to draw out all the possible consequences of this questioning … What is meant by community and institution must be rethought. This thinking must also unmask … all the ruses of end-orienting reason, the paths by which apparently disinterested research can find itself indirectly reappropriated, reinvested by programs of all sorts … I am defining the necessity for a new way of educating students that will prepare them to undertake new analyses in order to evaluate these ends and to choose, when possible, among them all … [What] I am calling ‘thought’ [is] … a dimension that is not reducible to technique, nor to science, nor to philosophy … [it is] where philosophy itself would be questioned … (PRP: 16)

These quasi-messianic allusions to a ‘community of thought’ have clearly captured the imagination of some commentators. Thus, Bennington similarly recommends a genuinely ‘new’ (i.e. deconstructively inspired) ‘philosophical institution’. Such a counter-institutional institution ‘ought to welcome all sorts of “external” parasitings … the institution would not be an ivory tower or a tower of Babel, but would allow for dissemination, including the “confusion” of tongues’ (DER: 265–6). All of this, we are further told, should be done in order to ‘welcome’ the ‘event’ (DER: 264).¹⁰⁵ Bennington’s gloss usefully highlights one potentially worrying aspect of Derrida’s metaphilosophy. Being open to what is ‘to come’ may be all very well in theory,¹⁰⁶ but in practice such ‘openness’ can have pretty dire (and avoidable) consequences.¹⁰⁷ To illustrate this, let us imagine a small, but relatively healthy, philosophy department coming under threat from non-specialists elsewhere in the university. By ‘non-specialists’ I mean those who have some interest and expertise in very specific areas of philosophy (say, later Heidegger, Blanchot and Deleuze), but whose main work is in comparative literature, French studies, or cultural theory. (Of course, they do not consider themselves to have a narrow view of philosophy, but conceivably this is itself a symptom of their narrowness.) By ‘under threat’ I mean that these non-specialists attempt to have their own preferred job candidates – those who share their specific philosophical interests – hired and placed into the existing philosophy department. (Imagine also that this is attempted without due consultation with the department.) Unsurprisingly, the philosophers object to having members of staff – not least those working on relatively marginal, non-standard authors/topics – imposed on them by non-specialists. Not only do the latter lack detailed knowledge of the wider philosophical profession, the philosophers point out that they would never attempt such an imposition on a department of literature or French studies. What I have described here is not some distant possible world; these academic-political manoeuvrings happen all the time.¹⁰⁸ How then should we assess such a scenario? In the spirit of Derrida’s (and Bennington’s) recommendations, one might see the above as an attempt to ‘open’ philosophy to its ‘other’, ‘the event’, that which is ‘to come’ or ‘the future’ (PRP: 16). That is one hermeneutic possibility. But it would, I think, be a perversely over-theorized interpretation of the situation sketched above. In one sense, of course, it is a platitude to say that philosophy’s future is ‘to come’ – in this regard philosophy is just as subject to luck and contingency as everything else. But Derrida’s (and Bennington’s) remarks are not merely descriptive; they contain a normative component: namely, that such openness to the ‘future’ should be positively welcomed. Taken as a general policy this is clearly deficient, for it glosses over the specificities of concrete situations, and thereby neglects that one must often do one’s utmost to keep certain possibilities at bay – again, in philosophy as much as anywhere else.

It might here be objected that in outlining the above scenario I have relied on some metaphilosophically contentious distinctions; not least between philosophers proper, and those with mere philosophical interests. But again, these sorts of distinctions are sometimes required.¹⁰⁹ It would be mere prejudice to think that disciplinary resistance in these circumstances must amount to some quasi-totalitarian attempt to ‘erect a barricade against a future’ (PRP: 19). While there may be no general rule for determining when to employ traditional disciplinary criteria and rhetoric, sometimes the latter are strategically necessary. This may seem to run counter to Derrida’s explicit desire for ‘change’ (RTP: 54), but I doubt that even he would consider ‘change’ to be intrinsically good.¹¹⁰ (It is a surprisingly common assumption that not-changing must be an expression of reactionary good conscience or intellectual complacency.) After all, Derrida himself was always in favour of strategic ‘interventions’, and there is little reason to think that such interventions can never justifiably be used to prevent ‘change’. Of course, it is true that Derrida repeatedly insists that what is ‘to come’ entails ‘risk’¹¹¹ – even the possibility of ‘evil’.¹¹² But again, this does not mean that we should abandon ourselves to unnecessary risks; as if by doing so we could secure our deconstructive good conscience.¹¹³ It may also be true that, from a quasi-transcendental perspective, ‘what threatens is also what makes possible’ (WA: 135). But in the singularity of concrete situations, what actually threatens should often be resisted. As intimated above, I doubt that Derrida would dispute these qualifications, even if he and his commentators are sometimes insufficiently clear on this point.

A final word before moving on. As is often the case, when considering concrete situations, the devil lies in the detail. One might therefore object that the above scenario is too simplistic in its portrayal of those ‘under threat’ from ‘outsiders’. What if we instead imagine that the philosophy department in question has 30 staff members, all working in the central areas of contemporary analytic philosophy. This department, let us further suppose, is thriving and financially secure. Notwithstanding their current success, surely a little more philosophical breadth in research and teaching – even if that needs to be ‘imposed’ from ‘outside’ (RTP: 54) – would be a good thing. Perhaps. But it is not obvious why a philosophy department of any size should have all branches of the discipline represented. (Such a department might conceivably have as little interest in the history of philosophy or applied ethics as it does in Continental or Asian philosophy.) It is even less clear why any particular department should embrace strategies that would, in Derrida’s words, ‘transform the modes of writing, approaches to pedagogy, the procedures of academic exchange, the relation to languages, to other disciplines, to the institution in general, to its inside and its outside’ (PRP: 17). Such potentially drastic transformations require substantial motivation; certainly more than any a priori commitment to ‘openness’. (I will return to this later.)

5 Performatives, baptisms and reiteration

Derrida’s metaphilosophy, like much of his work, has a quasi-utopian dimension. Indeed, he confesses that he was ‘always torn between the critique of institutions and the dream of an other institution’. (The ‘idea of a counter-institution’ was the ‘most permanent motif that … has guided me in my work’ [ TFS: 50].) As noted earlier, Derrida characterizes philosophy as a ‘counter-institutional institution’ to highlight its right, in principle, to question anything. One consequence of this is that philosophy can (indeed should) interrogate the various forms and functions of its own institutionality, not only the institutionality of other academic (and non-academic) domains. As we also saw, a specific understanding of ‘literature’ is significant here. There is, however, another area where these considerations are prominent; namely, in Derrida’s discussion of law.¹¹⁴ This is relevant to our present metaphilosophical interests because it concerns the relationship between institutions and their foundations. As he remarks, the ‘apparent firmness, hardness, durability, or resistance of philosophical institutions betrays … the fragility of a foundation’ (WAP: 10).¹¹⁵ In order to ascertain what Derrida means by this, I want to turn briefly to his remarks on the authority of law.

What concerns Derrida here can be summarized fairly simply: the grounding of law is ‘neither legal nor illegal’ in its ‘founding moment’. That is, to speak of the ‘origin’ of law is to refer to some act or event that was itself neither legally justified nor unjustified.¹¹⁶ The same point can be extended, for likewise, the origin of ‘morality’ was itself neither moral nor immoral, just as the ‘origin of reason and of the history of reason is not rational’¹¹⁷ or irrational. Derrida elaborates:

An event of foundation can never be comprehended merely within the logic that it founds. The foundation of a law is not a juridical event. The origin of the principle of reason, which is also implicated in the origin of the university, is not rational. The foundation of a university institution is not a university event. An anniversary of the foundation may be, but not the founding itself. Though such a foundation may not be merely illegal, it also does not arise from the internal legality it institutes. And while nothing may seem more philosophical than the foundation of a philosophical institute, whether it involves a university, a school, or a department of philosophy, the foundation of the philosophical institution as such can never be already strictly philosophical. (MOC: 30)¹¹⁸

I will develop this latter point shortly. For the moment, it is the more general claim that is important; namely, that ‘[w]hoever asks a question about the origin of meaning, the origin of reason, the origin of the law, the origin of humanity [etc.] … the condition of the question does not yet belong to the field of what it questions’ (ECH: 109). Such founding events thus ‘exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded’ (AOR: 242), for in this ‘initial moment, it is neither legal nor illegal … neither just nor unjust’ (AOR: 234). Derrida therefore insists that his ‘questioning of foundations’ is ‘neither foundationalist nor antifoundationalist’ (AOR: 236), and thereby not essentially sceptical in orientation. He then develops the point:

The very emergence of justice and law, the instituting, founding, and justifying moment of law implies a performative force, that is to say always an interpretative force … [and] interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previously founding law, no pre-existing foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate … Discourse here meets its limit … It is what I propose to call here the mystical. There is a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act … [T]he very thing that I am saying is done or occurs at the origin of every institution. (AOR: 241–2)

Derrida’s allusion to the ‘performative force’¹¹⁹ of such founding acts draws on Austin’s idea that a performative does not describe an existent state of affairs, but rather ‘produces or transforms a situation’ (MOP: 321).¹²⁰ Applying this to institutions then, Derrida refers to ‘the “performative event”’ (WAP: 22)¹²¹ of self-foundation that institutions – including philosophical institutions¹²² – depend upon. Indeed, such founding acts are themselves ‘eminently philosophical’ (WAP: 178) insofar as it is the philosopher qua philosopher who ‘authorizes himself to speak about … everything’ (WAP: 61), including ‘grounds’ and ‘foundations’.¹²³ Now of course, an individual’s self-authorization (e.g. sincerely declaring ‘I am a philosopher’) will not be sufficient, for ‘[o]nly an institution (the title of the body entitled to confer titles) can give someone his or her title’:

This institution can no doubt be incarnated by people, even by a single person, but this incarnation is itself guaranteed by some institution … That a title is given (or refused) someone by an institutional body means that guarding over titles, as much as guaranteeing them, falls to that which, as institution, already holds the title. The origin of the power to entitle or accredit can thus never be phenomenalized as such. The law of its structure – or the structure of its law – demands that it disappear. (WAP: 4–5)¹²⁴

This last point is crucial. For the authority of such institutions hinges, in part, on their ability to forget, trivialize, or mask their foundational ‘fragility’ (WAP: 10). This can be aided by (e.g.) designating certain philosophical questions or topics ‘perennial’, representing the history of philosophy as the teleological unfolding of Truth or Spirit, or thinking of philosophy as a basic, ‘natural’ human activity. Such strategies can be used, consciously or otherwise, to deflect attention away from philosophy’s institutionality and its ‘bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear, and polyglot’ (RTP: 10) history. In other words, each of these strategies (and doubtless others) can be employed to give contingent, complex historical processes an air of the ‘ mystical’ (AOR: 242),¹²⁵ or that which is incontestably given.

It is institutions then, not isolated, solitary individuals, which possess the authority to determine what qualifies as ‘philosophy’ (including what counts as good, salient, interesting and cutting-edge philosophy) and ‘non-philosophy’ in the relevant sense. Derrida thus insists that even the title of a philosophical work, not only ‘depends upon a speech act’, but also ‘brings the work together by naming it and allows it, thus identified, to assert its right to existence and to be recognized’ (WAP: 4).¹²⁶ Of course, a title alone cannot achieve this. Still, such quasi-baptismal ‘namings’ form part of the ‘canonizations’ and ‘legitimations’ (RTP: 49) Derrida has in mind. Though one could plausibly describe many academic rituals (doctoral vivas, book launches, etc.) as quasi-baptismal,¹²⁷ for the most part such legitimizing activities are dispersed across a variety of institutional groupings.¹²⁸ These include the editorial boards of journals and book publishers, research funding bodies, professional philosophical associations, and those involved in designing, implementing and teaching university curricula. Baptizing a text ‘philosophy’ (or an author ‘a philosopher’) allows it henceforth to be ‘identified’ and ‘recognized’ (WAP: 4) as philosophy. To borrow Kripke’s terminology, such baptismal acts establish a causal ‘chain of communication’ that disseminates from the baptism to the wider (relevant) ‘community’.¹²⁹ Such communicative ‘chains’ are unlikely to be simple linear processes, but rather complex, unpredictable and thereby vulnerable to all manner of displacements.¹³⁰ That a specific text is baptized as ‘philosophy’ does not guarantee that its status will persist down the generational ‘chains’, for such causal histories can be undermined by other, conflicting baptisms. We might therefore say that these causal chains have ‘multiple groundings’¹³¹ rather than a unitary, unique founding moment; groundings that can override the authority of the (purported, quasi-mystical) initial ‘baptism’. This is why such baptisms, if they are to function properly – namely, bring about a relatively stable identity – require reiteration. After all, the great authors and texts of western philosophy only remain so if enough authoritative institutions continue to treat them as such.¹³² And again, such reiteration cannot be a purely private affair. Given that baptizing oneself ‘a philosopher’ is not sufficient for being one, neither does merely repeating to oneself ‘I am a philosopher’ make it so. Rather, reiteration requires a collective ‘we’; a repeating-authenticating community. Membership of such a community need not, of course, involve vigorous participation; an individual member may have little interest in attending conferences, seminars and meetings of philosophical associations, or in contributing to blog discussions. All that is required for membership in the aforementioned ‘we’ is that the community’s general metaphilosophical values (its demarcations between ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘non-’ philosophy) are manifested, reiterated, and thereby affirmed in its members’ teaching, research, writing and other professional activities.

That one ‘affirms’ a conception of philosophy even in one’s mundane philosophical practice is, I think, crucially important here. For Derrida insists that to ‘inherit is not essentially to receive something, a given that one may then have’, but rather an ‘active affirmation … it presupposes the signature or countersignature of a critical selection. When one inherits, one sorts, one sifts, one reclaims, one reactivates’ (ECH: 25). Indeed, such inheritance ‘implies decision, responsibility, response and, consequently, critical selection, choice … whether it is or isn’t conscious’ (ECH: 69).¹³³ Simply by choosing (albeit unreflectively) to teach or write on specific authors, texts and issues, one thereby countersigns and validates their authority, pertinence, status, and general ‘philosophicity’ (RTP: 48).¹³⁴ Thus, when Derrida claims that philosophers as such are those ‘for whom philosophy is not given’ (RTP: 4), he means to say that philosophers are – or should be – those for whom philosophy is not merely (passively) ‘received’. This then goes some way toward explaining why, as noted earlier, ‘doing’ philosophy is always already to be ‘doing’ metaphilosophy.

As we have seen, on Derrida’s account it makes little sense to think that there was a single, original baptism from which everything ‘philosophical’ subsequently flowed. The legitimacy of the texts and authors of the western philosophical tradition resides, not in the unitary source of a causal history emanating from some primordial source, but rather, in the complex historical chains of repeated countersignatures.¹³⁵ (And let us recall; even if there had been such a single, unique founding act of ‘philosophy’, it would itself have been neither philosophical nor unphilosophical, neither rational nor irrational, etc.¹³⁶) These historical reiterations doubtless produce the ‘origin-like effects’ (I&C: 135) of merely duplicating an original legitimizing act, but these ‘effects’ should not be taken as evidence that anything indubitably grounds the aforementioned countersignatures.¹³⁷ Still, even if we accept that unitary founding events are essentially fictitious, they might nevertheless be necessary and productive fictions. Perhaps, in order for philosophers to take themselves seriously (and convince others to do likewise) they need to posit a little naturalness or necessity at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. For without doing so, they are liable to wander too far from the fold, and (like Rorty) reduce philosophy to one optional conversational ‘turn’. How then is one to avoid the Rortian conclusion that philosophers’ interests are merely the ‘results of historical accident’¹³⁸ (and peculiar ‘metaphysical upbringing’ [ CIS: 94]), and therefore that philosophy, like other idiosyncratic pastimes, is ‘something you can take or leave alone’ (RSC: 45)? Perhaps this conclusion can only be avoided by philosophy positing its own foundations, and subsequently treating these as ‘ mystical’ (AOR: 242).

6 Philosophy, community and hospitality

As Critchley notes, today there is a ‘huge institutional blind spot … whose symptom is the name “Derrida”’; an ‘intellectual and cultural … resistance’¹³⁹ that is particularly strong in contemporary analytic philosophy. While many literary and cultural theorists are today much less preoccupied with the ‘deconstructive method’¹⁴⁰ dominant in the 1980s, mainstream philosophy has never been enthused about Derrida. Indeed, the very name ‘Derrida’ continues to provoke overt hostility from most sections of that institution. Today it thus seems unthinkable that his work could ever be read by analytic philosophers with the same care and attention received by Frege, Russell, Lewis and Kripke. But then imagination is a notoriously unreliable source of knowledge. After all, the proper names ‘Derrida’ and ‘deconstruction’ are as multiply grounded as any other, and thereby similarly capable of inaugurating new and unpredictable causal-historical chains. In this sense, the future of philosophy is indeed ‘open’. Nevertheless, as suggested above, adopting ‘openness’ as a metaphilosophical policy is rather different. Just as acknowledging that tomorrow might herald one’s death does not legitimize reckless driving, recognizing that the future of philosophy is ‘open’ does not demand our uncritical acceptance of whatever comes along in its name. This is important, not only for the pragmatic reasons specified earlier, but also because, as Derrida himself notes, ‘no community can identify itself without exclusion’ (NEG: 57).¹⁴¹ As such, identifying oneself as part of a ‘philosophical community’ (broadly or narrowly conceived) requires differentiation and discrimination; that is, one identifies oneself contrastively. Such exclusions can be more or less overt: sometimes particular individuals, schools, or methodologies are (like Derrida himself) publicly ridiculed or condemned as irrationalist and nihilist. Less dramatically, such individuals and groupings find themselves barred, actively or by omission, from university curricula and graduate programmes. These exclusions do not, however, pertain only to how specific persons (and collections thereof) are treated here and now. There is an equally important sense in which a community – philosophical or otherwise – ‘excludes’ in order to ‘identify itself’. For what it means to be part of a community is to share, not merely a past heritage, but also a conception of what is possible for the future integrity of that community. At any point in time, some future possibilities will be significantly unthinkable for a given community, even if its members know only too well that the future is, strictly speaking, ‘open’ in the aforementioned sense. To repress or forewarn specific future possibilities is not therefore inherently unjust, parochial, or reactionary; rather, such acts are part of what constitute community membership. After all, a truly unconditional or radical ‘openness’ towards the future would be indistinguishable from mere indifference, and no community – however minimally conceived – can sustain itself under those conditions.

Although Derrida is suspicious of a certain conception of ‘community’ (namely, that which emphasizes ‘participation, indeed fusion, identification’ rather than a ‘being-together’ of ‘singularities’ [ OTN: 46]), his work on hospitality is, I believe, pertinent at this juncture. The intricacies of these analyses need not concern us.¹⁴² What is significant is how any talk of ‘community’ engages us, albeit unwittingly, with the question of hospitality towards what is unexpected, foreign, or ‘other’.¹⁴³ While Derrida’s reflections on home and hospitality are most obviously relevant to domestic and geo-political spaces,¹⁴⁴ they can usefully be applied to the institutions and borders of one’s particular philosophical ‘home’. More specifically, we should note that in Derrida’s quasi-utopian allusions to ‘unconditional hospitality’ (HJR: 70) he explicitly links hospitality with hostility. (Hence his preferred hybrid term ‘hostipitality’.¹⁴⁵) For Derrida then, hostility is an ineliminable component of hospitality: ‘[S]ince there is … no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence’. In other words, ‘a certain injustice … begins right away, from the very threshold of the right to hospitality’ (OH: 55).¹⁴⁶ It would therefore be mistaken to think that here Derrida is simply lamenting this ‘injustice’ – as one might bemoan some empirical misfortune. For on his account, such ‘violence’ does not befall hospitality from the ‘outside’. What Derrida is emphasizing is that even the most generous, well-intentioned acts of hospitality are always already discriminatory and sacrificial. One chooses this other over another other, these others over those (etc.),¹⁴⁷ not due to some contingent failure, but necessarily. In short, there could be no hospitality, gift, generosity, friendship, love or welcome without selection and sacrifice:¹⁴⁸ ‘exclusion and inclusion are inseparable’ (OH: 81).¹⁴⁹ (Likewise, there could be no hospitality, gift, generosity [etc.] without the possibility of things going awry.) Mindful of this, it is surely not incidental that Derrida characterizes philosophy as having ‘a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself’ (TFS: 55). In much the same way as the domestic/geo-political sense of hospitality requires limitation, selection and exclusion, one’s philosophical practice is similarly sacrificial. After all, one inevitably reiterates this heritage at the expense of that, countersigns and affirms these authors, texts and methods instead of those, teaches these courses rather than others (etc.). Although there are no metaphilosophically neutral criteria for determining the ‘right’ decisions here, one cannot not choose.¹⁵⁰ Thus, we are responsible (unwittingly or otherwise) for how we select, countersign and reiterate what we ‘receive’ from our philosophical heritage.

7 Concluding remarks

I have attempted to reconstruct and develop Derrida’s central metaphilosophical claims; though in this, of course, I too have been selective. Although summarizing Derrida’s views is notoriously difficult, let me risk the following formulation: for Derrida, metaphilosophy constitutes the bad conscience of philosophy. This, I would suggest, is the sense in which ‘Philosophy has a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself’ (TFS: 55). Like other forms of bad conscience, philosophical bad conscience can be hard to live with. It is therefore unsurprising that we need our metaphilosophical mythologies, not to mention the communal reassurance provided by our various professional groupings. The daily business of contemporary professionalized philosophy certainly diverts philosophers’ attention away from reflexive metaphilosophical questions. But while this may be pragmatically necessary, Derrida prompts us to consider the metaphilosophical significance of even the most mundane of our philosophical activities – whether or not we concur with his specific diagnoses. Perhaps Derrida demands too much when he suggests (or at least implies) that metaphilosophical bad conscience is a necessary condition for being ‘a philosopher’. After all, most of us are philosophical under-labourers, concerned with reconstructing, developing and criticizing the ideas of others, or making relatively minor moves within pre-established, transitory debates. Still, even for those of us who fulfil these latter roles, a degree of self-interrogation is surely appropriate; not least because philosophy seems intent on maintaining its position as ‘the institution which is eminently the critic of all others’ (TCI: 150–1).