Editing Jacques Derrida (section)

=== Criticism from Anglophone philosophers ===
Though Derrida addressed the [[American Philosophical Association]] on at least one occasion in 1988,<ref>{{Cite journal|first = Newton|last = Garver|author-link=Newton Garver |year = 1991|title = Derrida's language-games|volume = 10|pages = 187–98|doi = 10.1007/BF00141339|issue = 2|journal = Topoi|s2cid = 143791006}}</ref> and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like [[Richard Rorty]], [[Alexander Nehamas]],<ref>"Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida," ''The New Republic'' 197:14 (5 October 1987).</ref> and [[Stanley Cavell]], his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as [[John Searle]] and [[Willard Van Orman Quine]],<ref name="DUlisse">J. E. D'Ulisse, [http://www.newpartisan.com/home/derrida-1930-2004.html ''Derrida (1930–2004)''], ''New Partisan'', 24 December 2004. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160310180410/http://www.newpartisan.com/home/derrida-1930-2004.html |date=10 March 2016}}</ref> as [[pseudophilosophy]] or [[sophistry]].

Some [[analytic philosopher]]s have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy". One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other [[humanities]] disciplines.<ref name="Lamont87" /><ref name="Hansson"/>

In his 1989 ''[[Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity]]'', [[Richard Rorty]] argues that Derrida (especially in his book, ''[[The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]]'', one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., ''[[différance]]''), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.<ref name= a>Rorty, Richard. ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. {{ISBN|0-521-36781-6}}. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida".</ref>

[[Roger Scruton]] wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."<ref name="The Guardian">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/12/philosophy|title=Deconstructing Jacques|date=12 October 2004|newspaper=The Guardian}}</ref>

On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, [[Noam Chomsky]] wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted."<ref>{{cite web |last=Chomsky |first=Noam |title=Postmodernism? |website=ZCommunications |url=http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/postmodernism-by-noam-chomsky/ |access-date=27 September 2014 |date=August 2012}}</ref>

[[Paul R. Gross]] and [[Norman Levitt]] also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in ''[[Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science]]'' (1994).<ref>Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, ''Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).</ref>

Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.

==== Searle–Derrida debate<!-- no longer linked from 'John Searle'--> ====
{{main|Searle–Derrida debate}}

==== Cambridge honorary doctorate ====
In 1992 some academics at [[Cambridge University]], mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy [[David Hugh Mellor|Hugh Mellor]]. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and British institutions, including [[Barry Smith (academic and ontologist)|Barry Smith]], [[Willard Van Orman Quine]], [[David Malet Armstrong|David Armstrong]], [[Ruth Barcan Marcus]], and [[René Thom]], then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour"<!-- original spelling --> and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the [[Dada]]ists". The letter concluded that:

{{blockquote|... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.<ref name="BarrySmithEtAl">Barry Smith et al., "Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University," ''The Times'' [London], 9 May 1992 [http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/Derrida_Letter.htm].</ref>}}

In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot;<ref>John Rawlings (1999) [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/ Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction] at [[Stanford University]]</ref> though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Richmond |first1=Sarah|title=Derrida and Analytical Philosophy: Speech Acts and their Force|journal=European Journal of Philosophy |date=April 1996 |volume=4|issue=1|pages=38–62 |doi=10.1111/j.1468-0378.1996.tb00064.x}}</ref> Hugh Mellor continued to find the award undeserved, explaining: "He is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad".<ref>{{cite web |title=Professor Hugh Mellor obituary |work=[[The Times]] |date=29 June 2020 |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/professor-hugh-mellor-obituary-hft23p3d0 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene". To answer a question about the "exceptional violence", the compulsive "ferocity", and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks", he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult that philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate".<ref name="Derrida 1995pp409-413">{{cite book| last1=Derrida| first1=Jacques| title=Points ...: Interviews, 1974–1994| edition=1st| year=1995| publisher=Stanford University Press| location=New York| isbn=978-0810103979| chapter='Honoris Causa: "This is also very funny{{"'}}| pages=409–413| chapter-url=http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/interviews.html#cambridge}}{{blockquote |If it were only a question of "my" work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can't be limited to a personal "oeuvre," nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work.<br/><br/>If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene.&nbsp;...<br/><br/>In short, to answer your question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," I would say that these critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate.}}</ref>

====Dispute with Richard Wolin and the ''NYRB''====
[[Richard Wolin]] has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive [[nihilism]]. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".<ref name="Wolin93Preface">Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin (ed.) ''The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p. xiii. {{ISBN|0-262-73101-0}}.</ref>

In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of ''The Heidegger Controversy'', Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of ''The Heidegger Controversy'' by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar [[Thomas Sheehan (academic)|Thomas Sheehan]] that appeared in ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.<ref name="NYRBLetters">{{cite magazine |author=Thomas Sheehan |date=February 11, 1993 |title='L'affaire Derrida' |magazine=The New York Review |department=Letters |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2658}} and {{cite magazine |author=Helene Cixous |display-authors=etal |date=April 22, 1993 |title='L'Affaire Derrida': Yet Another Exchange |magazine=The New York Review |department=Letters |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2591}}</ref> Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", which was published in the book ''[[Points...]]''.<ref name="DerridaOnNYRB">Derrida, "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", published in the book ''[[Points...]]'' (1995; see the footnote about {{ISBN|0-226-14314-7}}, [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|here]]) (see also the [1992] French version ''[[Points de suspension: entretiens]]'' ({{ISBN|0-8047-2488-1}}) [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|there]]).</ref>

Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to ''The New York Review of Books'', in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.<ref name="PointsP434">''Points'', p. 434.</ref>