Customer Reviews

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

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Much of this book is seems to alternate between giddy celebration of Derrida and a prickly defense of Deconstruction. The latter is probably unneeded in this book, the former makes me impatient. Caputo's "playful" style becomes quite annoying - unfortunate because the material is very interesting (I particularly liked the chapter on Community).

The first part of the book, the interview, is quite good. The questions are engaging and Derrida's responses are clear and relevant. The rest of the book is more spotty. On the whole, the book is worthwhile but it might be more profitable to go straight to Derrida's writing.

I would suggest that anyone (a "beginner") purchasing this book to understand "Deconstruction" as a philosophy in the grand meta-narrative sense will be disappointed. "Deconstruction" should be understood more precisely as a process of keeping a critical check on philosophical assumptions employed in philosophy in any historical time. It involves --as a process-- analysis of (un)warranted assumptions and conclusions in philosophy, and in that regard is extraordinarily helpful in assessing --to a certain extent-- philosophical arguments. One should be quick to add that "Deconstruction" is a tool, not a dogma or philosophical worldview per se, which the book attempts to address implicitly. I would take care not to recommend this and related works to those interested in analysis of pure philosophy, which does have value unto itself outside of socio-historical and linguistic criticism, which --to a large extent-- is the main thrust of "Deconstruction" as a "discipline." Overall, the book constitutes a good introduction to Derrida's thinking --thinking which has without doubt provided much of the furniture of the landscape of "Deconstructive" analysis. This book is a nice introduction to that landscape, not philosophical landscapes as conceived by philosophers. Though Derrida is an extraordinary philosopher, "Deconstruction" should probably not be thought of as a philosophical process. I am not sure if this book communicates this implicit distinction that is currently drawn among many respectable academicians.

There are a few books that attempt to make Derrida's though more accessible. this is one of the best, as it is an interview with Derrida, himself. He tends to be more accessible when he is not writing, but speaking. We also find Derrida in interview mode in a tome entitled "Positions." Both of these helped we quite a lot with Derrida, as did Derrida for Beginners.

it is true that derrida is not for the faint of heart. and one needs to have a good background in philosophy to begin to understand the issues he is examining. but this book will give you a good general idea of the direction of derrida's thought. however, i would warn against critiqing it until you have actually read the real thing. believe me, his thought is truly original, subtle and powerful.

I bought this book as a last-ditch attempt to find something by Derrida that I could understand. It turns out that what Derrida says in the roundtable discussion transcribed here is both understandable and sensible. *However*, as Prof. Caputo says in his commentary: "[A]ll were on their best behavior, trying to make deconstruction (look) respectable" (p. 37). The book raises 2 questions for me: (1) How much has being on his good behavior distorted Derrida's presentation and self-presentation from what he would do in a setting where he wasn't watching his steps? And (2) What if anything is really new in "deconstruction" if it's as here presented? The book is readable and thought-provoking, but my "net" (if Amazon will let me write this...) is that, unless you're interested in Derrida per se, what has enduring value in this book is far better presented in, e.g., Cornelius Castoriadis's _Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy_ (Oxford, 1991).

DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTSHELL contains a series of questions to and answers by Jacques Derrida at the inauguration of Villanova's doctoral program in philosophy a few years ago. Why it is for the most part Catholic schools that are willing to teach any sort of innovative philosophy in the Anglo world I'm not entirely sure. Anyway, Derrida talks about justice, comparing it with the giving of a gift. Before quoting what he says, I'd like to bear in mind a few maxims from La Rochefoucauld:

"A man's ingratitude may be less reprehensible than the motives of his benefactor."

"Over-eagerness to repay a debt is in itself a kind of ingratitude."

"Almost everybody enjoys repaying small obligations, many are grateful for middling ones, but there is scarcely a soul who is not ungrateful for big ones."

Here's Derrida: "The only thing I would say about the gift - this is an enormous problem - is that the gift is precisely, and this is what it has in common with justice, something which cannot be reappropriated. A gift is something which never appears as such and is never equal to gratitude, to commerce, to compensation, to reward. When a gift is given, first of all, no gratitude can be proportionate to it. A gift is something that you cannot be thankful for. As soon as I say 'thank you' for a gift, I start canceling the gift, I start destroying the gift, by proposing an equivalence, that is, a circle which encircles the gift in a movement of reappropriation. So, a gift is something that is beyond the circle of reappropriation, beyond the circle of gratitude. A gift should not even be acknowledged as such. As soon as I know that I give something, if I say 'I am giving you something,' I just canceled the gift. I congratulate myself or thank myself for giving something and then the circle has already started to cancel the gift. So, the gift should not be rewarded, should not be reappropriated, and should not even appear as such. As soon as the gift appears as such then the movement of gratitude, of acknowledgment, has started to destroy the gift, if there is such a thing - I am not sure, one is never sure that there is a gift, that the gift is given. If the gift is given, then it should not even appear to the one who receives it, not appear as such. That is paradoxical, but that is the condition for a gift to be given. "That is the condition the gift shares with justice. A justice that could appear as such, that could be calculated, a calculation of what is just and what is not just, saying what has to be given in order to be just - that is not justice. That is social security, economics. Justice and gift should go beyond calculation. This does not mean that we should not calculate. We have to calculate as rigorously as possible. But there is a point or limit beyond which calculation must fail, and we must recognize that."

To the extent that Derrida is not just being mystical, he seems to me to be talking about kindness, and would be better off using that word, even if Plato did not. Derrida takes La Rochefoucauld's ideas to an extreme, which is strange. La Rochefoucauld was convinced that there was no kindness in the world. He spoke of justice as a disguised expression of "self-interest," just as political theorists referred to it as a contract. Derrida seeks to promote more kindness in the world, well aware of its existence, by accepting La Rochefoucauld's assertion that it does not exist.

This round table discussion, delivered at Villanova in 1994, is one of the clearest and most engaging introductions to the thought of Jacques Derrida. Surrounded by faculty, and speaking in excellent English, Derrida fields a wide range of questions regarding the nature of deconstruction and how it has been misunderstood so frequently and irresponsibly by his critics. John Caputo has also provided an outstanding collection of critical commentaries which address in greater detail the issues which were brought up at the round table. Although Caputo is a little polemical at times, he does an excellent job refuting the mediocre criticisms leveled at Derrida from the likes of Sokal, Quine, Gutmann and others who are quick to condemn without truly reading the work of Derrida. This is an exceptionally clear and engaging collection of essays for any reader looking for a safe entryway to the complexity of Derrida's massive corpus.

....for Derrida is not easy reading. This fine book takes some of his best concepts and explains them in a clear and witty style. Highly recommended starting point for the beginner to deconstructionist thought.

Caputo's tone in the commentary, which constitutes all but the first 30 or so pages of this book, is infuriatingly cutesy and playful, and behind his cutness and attempts to paraphrase Derrida, there is very little interesting commentary. It is obvious that Caputo has a great deal of admiration and love for his subject, but beyond that, I found an awful lot of defensive rhetoric and lots of wonderful aspects of Derrida's work completely left out of the discussion. It seems Caputo's greatest interest lies in Theology and Deconstruction, and I was interested by his brief comments about Derrida's relationship to Judaism, but he barely gets into the subject in this book, and instead recommmends that the reader read one of his several other books on Derrida. One can only hope that his other books contain more original ideas and less of his own titles in the ever-present footnotes!

Also: although this title will undoubtedly attract "beginners" to Deconstruction, I must say I am grateful that this text was not my first introduction to Derrida. While Derrida has a reputation for being difficult reading, the rewards one gets are certanly worth the effort! There is bound to be something that interests you among the titles that make up his prodigious output. Buy Dissemination, or Writing and Difference, take it in, and then check this book out of the library, read the "Roundtable", bask in the brilliance, and return it. Now you'll have more room on your bookshelf for books worth owning!

Readers of Derrida in America often say he's hard to understand, as if this is a necessarily bad thing. We've lost as a culture any idea that the arcane may be a source of truth. The arcane may or may not be a source of truth, but we tend as a culture to assume that if the author does not shuck and jive in an expected and received way, we are wasting our hard earned money.

This has generated in both science and in philosophy a demand for the precis and the best of sort of book which will give the exhausted middlebrow white collar worker who aspires to finer things The Big Picture. My words sound disimissive but actually are not, for I am precisely one of these types of readers. It is not "pretentious", in a world where one of our leading literary-critical lights, Stanley Fish, has stated "I won't read a poem unless I'm paid." That is, in a world where the elect have elected damnation, the person who reads a poem in his limited spare time if more human, and more truly "educated" than Stanley Fish.

I shall be brief. Caputo's seminar and book make clear that in a culture carrying out a war on memory and reducing an open, multidimensional world to the Euclidean geometry of a web page, Derrida's type of analysis has intellectual respectability and it is sorely needed.

His analysis of the structural relationship of justice and law, for example, shows us how to avoid anarchy on one side and Fascism on the other, for it shows a working policeman (who may believably be a graduate of Norte Dame rather than Princeton) how to use his common sense, but avoid racial profiling. That is, there is currently a move against the use of racial profiling in stopping cars and suspects: this profiling was initially enforced top-down by administrators in a rigid and unimaginative way, and it used poorly designed computer software (from the production of which the actual cops were rigorously excluded) which necessarily had racist results. Counterpressure by minorities shall, it is thought by beat cops and the Smokeys, actually prevent them from stopping minorities at all.

Both sides are demanding perfect justice, perfectly encoded in law and in software: but Derrida and Caputo show us two necessary truths (1) justice and law shall never merge, and (2) we should ever seek to merge them, indeed the very process is what Dr. King died for. This means, in my example, that at this point cops should probably err on the side of compassion, and indeed let suspicious cars go if they are driven by minorities, and come down a bit harder on drunken white boys. This is not perfect justice but the brutal fact is that the drunken white boys will probably get off.

The strange alliance with Roman Catholicism is this. America itself was founded by Puritans who wanted to found a city on a hill. Much to their distress, however, the joint actually had to be built by imperfect riff raff including African slaves and my Irish ancestors. Our Constitution, which to me is a holy document, gives the riff raff equal time but when the riff raff gets to the mike, it tends to say the wrong thing, since the terms of the discourse are set by the Puritans.

In the black and white world of the Manichean Puritan, black is more acceptable than grey, and thus the most Satanic messages of rock and roll are actually USED as a technique for social control. As to the chaos that results, well, are there no SWAT teams: are there no helicopters: are there no maximum security prisons.

In this brutal world, the agenda is set by Rep. DeLay, but true subversion for the underclass and the soon to be downsized may be maintaining an even strain. Deconstruction in a nut shell gives the riff raff a way to smooth out the edges, just enough, and lose some of the riff and the raff. Basically, the Puritans are wrong, but they run the shop and we must discourse, we must negotiate, we must compromise, we must play ball with them. French theory is a useful appliance for so doing. Perhaps that's why it is so hated by the commanding heights of academe, which contrary to their popular reputation actualy pour down scorn on deconstrction, from the Non Placet at Oxford issued in protest to Derrida's honorary degree, to Harold Bloom. Like to Roman senator, the leading lights say deconstruction must be destroyed in the oddest damn contexts: yet it keeps on Popping Up in the damnest places, here at Notre Dame.

Robert Bly has pointed out that the geometry of Hell is probably Euclidean, and two-dimensional. Deconstruction shows that we are creatures who are thrown into a world of many more dimensions that we are capable of handling, but that we must try anyway, indeed that is a definition of our thrown-ness. In a nut shell read this book in your less than abundant spare time.