Johann Hari has been casting around for authorities on whom to lean after his tendentious and rather intemperate reaction to the death of Jacques Derrida attracted a good deal of criticism. Today he's calling on Noam Chomsky and Terry Eagleton for support.
The problem with the bit of Chomsky he cites is that it's not a direct comment on Derrida's work at all, but a general criticism of "poststructuralism and postmodernism" - which rather reinforces one in the suspicion that Hari simply used the occasion of Derrida's death to noisily grind an axe about "postmodernism" and its hostility to the values of the Enlightenment. It seems reasonable to me, and not at all a narrowly academic reflex, to wonder at the propriety of attributing to a thinker views he never held, at least not in the garbled and obviously ludicrous form in which Hari reports them. Hari's sleight of hand is to conflate Derrida's thought with a much wider intellectual current, and so to dismiss those who came to Derrida's defence as enemies of openness and rational debate.
Among these latter is Eagleton, whose criticisms of Derrida's views on ethics Hari quotes approvingly. And there are at least two problems with Hari's leaning on Eagleton in this way: one trivial, the other more substantive. The first, trivial problem is one pointed out by a commenter at Harry's Place, and it's that Eagleton himself himself this week disdained the "bemused, bone-headed responses" of "our home-grown intelligentsia" to Derrida's death. One looks forward to Hari thinking about why Eagleton considers his previous criticisms of Derrida to be consistent with an approving admission of him into "a lineage of anti-philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, who invented a new style of philosophical writing". (It might be, as I suggested in a previous post on this topic, that Derrida's lasting significance lies not in any substantive theses about meaning or whatever, but in his reflections on the nature and limits of philosophical style.)
The second, more substantive problem has to do with the thought of Eagleton's that Hari endorses. This runs as follows:
Derrida says there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of moral or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do... These judgements are left accordingly hanging in the air. For Derrida ethics is a matter of absolute decisions - decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible', and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualisation. One can only hope he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court.The problem with this is that Eagleton conflates what philosophers would call a "meta-ethical" question -that is, a question about the status of moral values and judgements; whether, for instance, they are grounded in some feature of the world or not- with first-order morality; with the everyday business of making of moral judgements. Now it's not at all obvious that meta-ethical considerations need necessarily have first-order ramifications. For example, most of us no longer think that moral judgements derive from divine decree, but that doesn't stop us from making them and, in making them, supposing them to have binding force.
Addendum: It seems Hari has form when it comes to denouncing the work of theorists and philosophers whose work he hasn't read first hand. Disclaimer (all of which should be obvious, but unfortunately probably needs spelling out): this link implies no endorsement whatsoever of the views of Hardt and Negri.
And this is very fine indeed.
Update: This is eminently sensible and makes some good points about, inter alia, Derrida's presumptive heirs in literature departments, his attitude towards the "canon" (veneration, largely) and close reading (what he did best). (And I suspect The Reading Experience is a blog I'll be going back to.)
