Daily Times – Site Edition Deconstruction � Derrida�s lasting legacy �Suroosh Irfani

Daily Times – Site Edition
INSIGHT: Deconstruction � Derrida�s lasting legacy �Suroosh Irfani

With thanks to I d e a n t: Derrida and God.

Suroosh Irani’s very interesting article Deconstruction – Derrida’s lasting legacy. As Ideant correctly states:

The article succinctly summarizes the uses and abuses of deconstruction, but more importantly, gives us a glimpse into a man’s quest for understanding the Divine in his own terms, free from the indoctrination of religious as well as secular fanaticism and formulas.

More people should do that…

INSIGHT: Deconstruction � Derrida�s lasting legacy �Suroosh Irfani

In Bal-i-Jibril, Iqbal highlights the imperative of reconfiguring God by equating such undertaking with jihad. The deconstructionist voice has urgent relevance for today�s Pakistan � a society where in the name of God, many Muslims have turned madrassas into nurseries of intolerance, and mosques into mortuaries of sectarian vengeance

When Jacques Derrida, one of the world�s most influential thinkers died of cancer in Paris on October 9, it was the French President Jacques Chirac�s office that broke the news to the world. The gesture says a lot about the place of the intellectual in the western culture, especially for a man like Derrida � an iconoclast admired and reviled for dismantling the edifice of western philosophy and thought. After all, �deconstruction� as an interpretive mode of analysis that Derrida popularised, aims at not only subverting western philosophic thought, �but everyday thought and language as well�.

Derrida first argued in his path breaking work Of Grammatology (1967), that all texts, if read carefully enough, provide the resources for their own critique. Deconstruction, then, is a way of reading and analysis that �carefully teases out the war for meaning within the text itself�. This implies that there are multiple meanings embedded in a text, and that the suppression of other meanings is the price exacted by the meaning dominating the text.

While deconstruction started off as a literary strategy, its radical spirit has seeped into multifarious struggles, including the struggle against capitalism and class, white supremacy and patriarchy. Indeed, feminism�s deconstructive engagement with patriarchy � a �father-ruled� culture that promotes masculine values to secure the privileged position of men � was crucial in mobilising women�s struggle for their rights.

Even so, the onset of deconstruction had its detractors, not least because Derrida is notoriously unreadable. For Christina Sommers, professor of philosophy at Clarks University, deconstruction is a �dreary approach� that has robbed literature of its beauty, by narrowing the reader�s focus on a text�s underlying political agenda. �To tell students to see Tolstoy in terms of his gender allegiance diminishes literature and misleads students�, Sommers said in a recent interview. As for deconstructionist feminism, it was �spinning out of control�, breaking into a politics of �gay and straight… going nowhere�.

To be sure, if some regard deconstruction as a cynical approach that has stripped literature of its majesty and the inherited order of its stability, others highlight the ethics of deconstruction as a responsibility for the �undoing of closed structures to make possible the coming of the other�. Indeed, as a politics of ethics, democracy and justice are among deconstruction�s central concerns and the deconstructionist concept of hospitality is becoming increasingly relevant in a multicultural world that continues to be wary of the ethnic and religious other.

To be sure, during the last decade of his life, Derrida showed a growing tendency for engaging religion. Indeed, while a study of Derrida�s religious motifs by John Caputo, professor of philosophy at Villanova University, led him to term Derrida �as a man of faith bridging Jewish and Christian traditions�, Derrida extended the bridging role by invoking the figure of the French Islamologist Louis Massignon (biographer of the tenth century Muslim mystic Hallaj) as a Western bridge to Islamic thought.

In fact, Derrida�s The Gift of Death (1995) gives rare glimpses of his deconstructionist religious sensibility. Here, Derrida�s readings of God as a mysterium tremendum (Terrible Mystery) on the one hand, and prophet Abraham�s sacrificial ordeal on the other, leads to a position that virtually amounts to a secular approximation of a mystical encounter with oneself. Indeed, the trace of Hallaj�s ecstatic enunciations �I am God� (Haq/Truth), and of God being �more me than myself�, seem to resonate in the Derridean maze as well:

�Once I have within me a witness others cannot see, and who at the same time is other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists (there is) what I call God in me. [It happens that] I call myself God. God is in me, he is the absolute �me� or �self�. And he is made manifest when there appears the desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness of that invisibility�.

Rejecting a Judeo-Christianity of �idolatrous stereotyping and representation�, he dwells instead on an understanding of God as �the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not the exterior�.

Even so, for all his inner readings of texts on religion, Derrida seems to linger in his predilection regarding the undecidability of God. In Circumfession, the autobiography where he draws personal analogies with the Confessions of Saint Augustine (d. 430), Derrida notes: �the omnipresence of what I call God in my private language is neither that of a voice nor a transcendent law or an immanent Schechine (sakina), that feminine figure of a Yahewah who remains so strange and so familiar to me�. However, as Caputo notes, �even if by the standard of the local pastor or rabbi Derrida was an atheist, the name of God was tremendously important for him, because it was one of the ways that we could name the unconditional, the undeconstructible�.

Clearly, regardless of whether Derrida is admired or reviled, deconstruction as an ongoing process will continue encompassing an ever-growing range of concepts, processes and institutions, even while transforming the concept of God and of what it means to be human. Indeed, as an iconoclastic spirit, deconstruction may well be an avatar of the kind of iconoclasm that underpinned the poet-philosopher Iqbal�s world-view earlier in the twentieth century. Indeed, for Iqbal, such iconoclasm was intrinsic to the birth of Adam himself, (Milad e Adam), who as humanity�s prototype was �self-maker, self-critical, and self-demolisher� (khud�gari, khud�naygari, khud shay�kani).

Moreover, there appears more than a trace of the Derridean project of reconceptualising God in Iqbal�s works. For example, in Bal-i- Jibril (Gabriel�s Wing), Iqbal highlights the imperative of reconfiguring God by equating such undertaking with jihad. This is borne out by a discourse between Iqbal and his spiritual mentor, Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic, where Rumi tells Iqbal: Demolish (the outmoded) concept of God in the name of God (Naqsh e Haq ra hem bay amr e Haq shayken).

Such a deconstructionist voice from the Gabriel�s Wing has urgent relevance for today�s Pakistan -a society where in the name of God, many Muslims have turned madrassas into nurseries of intolerance, and mosques into mortuaries of sectarian vengeance.

Suroosh Irfani is co-director of the Graduate Programme in Communication and Cultural Studies at National College of Arts, Lahore