I still have Jacques Derridas voice captured in my answering machine: Hello, this is a message for Kay Dilday, from Jacques Derrida, from Paris. When he called, it had been more than a decade since I first met his work in the essay Diffêrance. That first reading had stayed with me: it was one of those rare life-changing textual encounters.
In an English translation by Alan Bass of the University of Chicago, Diffêrance begins thus: I will speak, therefore, of a letter. Of the first letter, if the alphabet, and most speculations which have ventured into it are to be believed.
The poet Joseph Brodsky said that every writer should study poetry it teaches you to make every word count. Derrida has been derided for his impenetrable labyrinthine prose (the very style of which is fundamental to his philosophical assertions) but look at the poetry of those initial lines: economical yet full of intent. Not many poets could have done better. Immediately, I knew that I was being taken to a place that my mind had never gone.
I first studied Derridas writings in the 1990s when I went to Massachusetts for college, in a course called Sexuality, Literature and Critical Theory. Who knew that those three things could be connected? The secondary education I received in the deeply religious American south had been blushingly modest. I did not know that modern academia is saturated with sex.
But I came from precisely the right place to appreciate Derridas work because what best prepares one to be invigorated by his philosophical approach is a life on the outside. Derrida was born in Algeria, where he was forced to leave school during Frances Vichy years because he was a Jew. I had been one of the few black students in a mostly-white school, in Mississippi, a state of conservative mores and dubious values, one that had gained worldwide notoriety for its racial strife. People who grow up as part of a systematically degraded group think in opposition. If, like Derrida, you take on that role as you form your identity, that early contrariness can stay with you for the rest of your life whether you were considered too Jewish, too dark-skinned, too female, or too poor to do whatever is what you wanted to do.
If youve reached Derridas work from that background, its likely that youve already turned a few normative assumptions upside down. But his work is like a beacon, urging one to go further still. Youve come this far, it says, but there is still a way to go. While the angry moralistic repudiations of his theories charge that he rejects the concept of truth, thats a misleading simplification. What I took away from his writings on his signature theory, deconstruction (and please know that I am aware that the notions of deconstruction run much deeper and involve much more complex explorations of the connections between language, speech and thought) is that truth as relayed by any one person or persons is compromised in ways that they cannot recognise. It is embedded even in the very structure of the language they use to relay it that first letter, if the alphabet is to be believed.
Derrida strikes at the fundamental assumptions and ways that people organise their minds, and it is frightening. Unnecessarily? I dont think so. What stays with me forever is the caution against the danger of a pacific mind, of resting comfortably on ones assumptions in any way. But to counter his critics, a mind open to any possibility does not mean that it can be seduced by every possibility.
Jacques Derrida called me because I was to interview him for the New York Times. I had faxed him a list of topics I wanted to talk about; this was six months or so after 11 September 2001. I wanted to talk about the current political climate, about immigration in France topics, he told me, much too important to answer over the phone.
So when I went to meet him, at the première party for a documentary film about his life and work, I saw him through the window of the Tribeca Grand Hotel in Manhattan. He was standing, bathed in the light from a camera crew from the BBC, the only news organisation he let interview him that evening. We talked and confirmed our appointment for the next day, and then I milled around and watched; there isnt much else to do at those parties. I saw Derrida surrounded by a bevy of women translators, collaborators who protected him fiercely. But sometimes the women were distracted and, since people were afraid of him, he also was often standing alone, and then his face collapsed into fatigue.
The next day, we sat down at a café, and I asked him questions tentatively. As anyone who has ever attached monumental significance to someones work and then met the author can attest, one often discovers that the book is better. I scribbled the answers he gave me on a pad I held under the table.
I had a glass of wine to mitigate my shyness; he had mineral water. We talked for an hour or so. We didnt talk about anything of world significance; we didnt talk about philosophy. He was much happier going through his memories speaking of when he and his wife of nearly four decades, Marguerite, were at Harvard and did very little other than wander around Cambridge. He talked about meeting Nelson Mandela, and commented that French intellectuals were more political than American ones, yet by and large during his life he refrained from the avid political commentary that people like Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre or Raymond Aron were known for. He had two sons, he said, both of whom are philosophers.
Yet when I read the obituaries, I learned of his third son, commonly known in Paris, the child he had with the scholar Sylviane Agacinski. And then I wondered if in fact I had really listened well when we spoke.
Because the story he told me had a straight line: one woman, one love, one family. Or so I had thought it did. But perhaps I had forgotten to listen and to really think about how his answers were constructed, as much as what his answers were. Perhaps that other life was in there somewhere.
Its possible that only those who have started on the margin and bored their way in will appreciate what deconstruction does. I dont care to argue that Derrida is right what good philosopher would ever characterise his work as right? Philosophy is a way of exercising the mind, of keeping it from becoming complacent. It urges us to think long and hard about things, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to question our very existence, and to work to improve ourselves, and the world, through rigorous examination. What I learned from Jacques Derrida was simply to examine everything in the most fundamental way.
I think differently about the hour I spent with the unfailingly polite man with the simple life. I had read him as a polite, charming man with a complicated philosophy and a simple life. In retrospect, I realise that he was consistent, the man I sat down with was Derrida as I first encountered him in text: a dark horse, a sly old fox.