Derrida,Autobiography and Postcoloniality

The question of Derrida's relationship with postcolonial theory has for a long time been a fraught one. Some of the major postcolonial critics engage directly with Derrida's reflections on dissemination and excentricity, while others argue, on the contrary, that his mode of thinking is too abstract to tell us anything informative about the mechanics of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This article responds to these postcolonial critics, and analyses two recent texts, L'Autre Capand Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, in order to argue that the intermingling of philosophy and autobiography can tell us something new about the dangers and difficulties of postcolonial inquiry. These works attempt to examine the damaging effects of European cultural hegemony, and the imposition of the colonial language in Algeria, but, in including anxieties about this project expressed in the first person, they also convey a sense of doubt about the appropriateness of a universalising philosophical language. The philosopher grapples with an aporia between the need to describe the universal experience of alienation and dispossession in language (since this indeed weakens the coloniser's assumed position of dominance and ownership), and attention to the very singularities that colonial culture oppresses, and that resist theorisation in general terms. The hesitant incursion of the autobiographical subject into Derrida's later texts dramatises this aporia and its effects on postcolonial debate.