Following Jacques Derrida to the University of Manitoba

International academics celebrate the life and
legacy of their founding father

BRENDAN CATHCART STAFF

From Oct. 4 to 8, the University of Manitoba hosted an international conference celebrating the life and legacy of recently deceased literary theorist and philosopher Jacques Derrida. The event was organized by Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature based at the university. “Following Derrida: Legacies,” was touted as an “international interdisciplinary conference,” and it was a remarkable event with speakers and attendees from across the globe and the humanities, from departments of philosophy, English, native studies, religious studies, law, politics, history, art, architecture, foreign languages, psychology and sociology. Including keynote speakers, presenters, students, and people chairing each session, more than 200 academics gathered to discuss the legacy left behind by Derrida’s work.

Derrida ruptured the world of structuralism into the “post-” scene in 1966, when he presented Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences at Johns Hopkins University to a room full of believers. Upon lifting the veil, the room gasped and the walls of the building fell down. The spectral figure of western metaphysics, so embarrassed by its own phantasmically formless figure, died on the spot. “God is dead!” resounded the joyful voice of Nietzsche. Derrida then began to lay a new anti-foundationalist foundation: “Structure — or rather the structurality of structure — although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure (one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure), but above all else to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” In this single sweeping gesture, the world of literary theory was changed irrevocably. Scholars have since been forced to confront the dramatic and revolutionary implications of Derrida’s theory.

For many the grand rupture of deconstruction was like divine revelation, minus of course the divine. With the old-growth forest razed, there was nothing to do but begin determining the new shape of the land. David Richter, in The Critical Tradition, says, “Derrida’s system of freeplay, like the philosophy of Nietzsche, is ‘joyful’ in its affirmation of the power of the will to assign and alter all values. For Derrida, the lack of a center betokens freedom, not the loss of security. The Derridean is an adventurer who must abandon certainty for chance in following the ‘trace’ — the chain of signifiers — wherever it leads.”

Following the chain of signifiers has certainly led to a proliferation of ideas, as was demonstrated at the conference by the astounding variations of topic and focus from the presenters. Papers went in all directions, from discussions of justice, responsibility and nationality, to archiving, television, to new ways of reading literature and engaging with film and art, to appropriations of Hegelian philosophy and interpretations of historiography, to questions about the relevancy and justification of the university as an authoritative institution.

Sessions at the U of M conference were definitely not for the uninitiated, as most of the discussions were conceptually and terminologically complex, assuming extensive prior knowledge and understanding of Derrida’s work.

Spread over four days and multiple venues at the university, the conference provided a fantastic opportunity for scholars and students from different countries, universities, disciplines and occupations to meet, discuss and debate their various engagements with Derrida’s theories.

Lisa Muirhead, production manager for Mosaic, was very pleased with the international turnout. “Everywhere you turn there are different accents,” she said, as the room filled with academics anticipating the address by keynote speaker Michael Naas, from the department of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. At the beginning of his address about Fictions of Self, State, and a Sovereign God, Naas admonished the crowd to continue pressing forward with their work. He added, wisely, a word of caution to the Derridean community about the danger of reifying Derrida into the very phantasm of authority that he spent his life’s work trying to dispel. “Following Derrida’s thinking about the phantasms of self, state and the sovereign God,” said Naas, “I would inevitably conclude that in a time such as ours when the powers of the phantasms show no sign of abating, a thought like Derrida’s becomes all more vital . . . now may really be the time to be following Derrida. I say that, I hope, without phantasm or illusion.”