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Derrida on 'forgiveness'
Should we forgive him for it?
Mark Newbrook
A Skeptical view of Derrida's Monash Lecture
The ‘big guru’ of French postmodernism spoke for about three hours to a large audience about forgiveness, and in particular about whether there are deeds it is not possible to forgive, such as the carrying out of the Nazi Holocaust. Jane Curtain and I attended for the first 100 minutes until we had to leave for another commitment. My comments below are based almost entirely on what we ourselves heard; but, from what we have been told, Derrida did not say anything later that would make it likely that I would revise my main judgments.
Reactions to the talk were mixed, but in my own view Derrida said remarkably little that had any substance, still less contributed to our understanding of such matters. Jane Curtain suggests that many were taken in by Derrida’s reputation and assumed that behind all the surface obscurity the ideas of such a master must be truly profound, perhaps too profound for the average listener (even a scholarly listener) to grasp. I am inclined to agree; and this assumption was certainly apparent from the tone of some of the subsequent press reporting. However, few of those who reported themselves well satisfied were able to specify what, exactly, they had learned or gained.
Etymology
As is not unusual in his tradition, Derrida’s approach to the issue of forgiveness included a considerable focus on the etymology of the word forgive and that of equivalent words in other languages. Mainstream linguists have long argued that such considerations are not normally relevant to the thinking or practice of ordinary users of languages, untutored in historical linguistics. And - again not uncharacteristically - much of Derrida’s discussion consisted of undisciplined analysis of the sense of words such as forgive, and of the development of a priori accounts of what Derrida takes to be the mental aspects of the process of forgiveness and the states of having forgiven or having been forgiven. Most of the relevant scholars outside the postmodernist camp - linguists, philosophers of language and (most of all) philosophers of mind and empirical psychologists - would rightly view all this as, at best, highly tentative speculation (naturally not acknowledged as such by Derrida).
Indeed, while Derrida is identified as a philosopher, what he practises is not really what is called philosophy in the analytical-philosophical tradition, which is the form of philosophy occupying a central place in the ‘modernist’ post-Enlightenment ‘paradigm’ of intellectual activity. The European existentialist tradition has included much a priori speculation (as opposed to the careful analysis of problems) concerning language and more particularly concerning the mind, occupying a much more central place in the overall scheme of things than mainstream analytical philosophers would deem legitimate; and, as noted, Derrida and his followers have continued in this vein. Derrida’s material was also characterised by other common features of postmodernist work: a) the over-analysis of concepts; b) what appeared at times to be almost deliberate obfuscation; and c) the simultaneous assertion of paradoxically opposed statements. By way of a further paradox, this last is sometimes interpreted by perplexed commentators as somehow conferring additional depth and significance on the obscure propositions which are thus expressed; this almost certainly contributed to some of the positive reactions referred to above. (The relativism which often intrudes - predictably - into postmodernist thinking did not loom particularly large in the context of this specific issue.)
Derrida forgot to...err...um...
What is especially unfortunate here is that Derrida missed the opportunity to discuss (in a coherent and disciplined way) several very interesting philosophical and linguistic points surrounding the exact sense and implications of the word forgive and the notion of forgiveness. Some of these he did discuss but not in a satisfactory way, others he merely hinted at, others he ignored. They include:
a) Can one (legitimately) forgive someone who does not seek forgiveness, or maybe even thinks that what one might forgive them for was not wrong and requires no forgiveness?
b) Can one forgive someone on behalf of a ‘group’ or ‘community’ to which one (purportedly) belongs? (Despite Derrida’s apparent equation of commonality or group/community membership on the one hand and mere plurality on the other, they are not the same thing; his linguistic points on this front - chiefly based on the existence in most languages of separate singular and plural personal pronouns - were naïve and unpersuasive.)
c) Can one forgive someone on behalf of others who do not consent to forgive them?
d) Can one forgive someone on behalf of others who cannot consent to forgive them (eg, the dead)?
e) Can one forgive those who do not or cannot know what one is (purportedly) doing?
f) A very important special case of e): can one forgive the dead?
g) Are there deeds which are unforgivable? What exactly distinguishes such deeds?
h) How can blame and hence the possibility of forgiveness be divided up in cases like the Holocaust where those who physically perpetrated the individual wrongs were not those who instigated them?
The domains and statuses of some of these questions (linguistic? philosophical? psychological?) might itself be a focus of discussion. Some of them may be variously interpreted as belonging to a range of such domains, and in some such cases ambiguity and hence confusion may be possible.
Derrida contributed almost nothing to the resolution of any of these issues. The points of this kind which he did make were for the most platitudinous and low-level, eg, dealing in general terms with the question of the link between forgiveness and the claimed right (legal or moral) to punish. Even here his discussion was not especially coherent, and (again typically) he made unsupported claims about ethical theory which are by no means axiomatically or obviously true.
Postmortem on Postmodernism
While I acknowledge that postmodernist thinking has raised or at least highlighted some neglected and important points about language and the world, this event further confirmed my generally negative view of the overall effects of the postmodernist tradition. It is striking that Derrida was here on part of the postmodernists’ ‘home ground’, the study of literature and what passes in postmodernist circles for philosophy. As Sokal and others have shown, these thinkers rapidly get out of their depth when they venture into other fields, especially science; but this kind of performance suggests that their reputation within their ‘own’ domains is itself seriously overblown.
Derrida may not be the worst offender in this respect; that ‘distinction’ should perhaps go to Julia Kristeva, who has (alarmingly for this writer) identified as a linguist (I challenge anyone to summarise three pages of Kristeva intelligibly). But on this occasion he was certainly bad enough. We (especially those of us with any expertise in the relevant disciplines) should keep our eyes open and our weapons in readiness!
Newbrook, Mark. 1999. The Skeptic, Vol.19, No.4.,pp.12-14.
Dr Mark Newbrook is a skeptic, linguist and football hooligan. He managed to combine two of these interests to help pioneer the field of Skeptical Linguistics.
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