Would Jesus be a Christian?

August 30, 2011 at 2:26 P.M. Some previously corrected "errors" were restored to this text. I have made the corrections, again, from a public computer. I hope that these corrections will not have to be made ever again.

January 28, 2011 at 10:53 A.M. I had not reviewed this essay for a while. I noticed that several words emphasized in quotes had been altered. Rather than reintroducing the italics, I simply eliminated the emphasis in each quote. I have dealt with this inserted "error" several times in the past. Perhaps this alternative will finally resolve the issue for the person indulging in this amusing ploy.

June 26, 2010 at 1:14 P.M. New Jersey's hackers have denied my access to these essays in "Philosopher's Quest." Hence, I will repost them here until I can regain that access.

"A man once died upon the cross, but one must learn to die upon the cross every day."

Jose Marti, "Letter to Gonzalo de Quesada," in On Art and Literature: Critical Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), p. 332.

Cornel West has said it best in a paragraph that I treasure:

"Despite the challenges presented by the widespread trivialization and dilution of the Christian Gospel, I remain committed to its fundamental claim: To follow Jesus [or to agree, even as an atheist, with the ethics of the Gospels,] is to love your way through the darkness of the world. This love appears absurd -- in fact pure folly in the face of much of the world’s misery -- and yet it yields indescribable levels of sorrow and joy, sadness and ecstasy. To be a Christian is to look at the world through the lens of the cross and thereby to keep one’s focus on human suffering and struggle."

The Cornel West Reader, p. 355.

One need not be a Christian, as I am not in any traditional sense, to accept the ethical wisdom in this message. ("Cornel West On Universality" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

I can never accept the literal truth of the mythical aspects of religion, but there is so much truth of a different sort, beauty, and lasting importance in these great stories found in the New Testament. It was George Santayana’s moral admiration for a Catholicism in which he could no longer believe that led to Bertrand Russell’s quip:

“Santayana believes that there is no God and that Mary is His mother."

Perhaps the same may be said of me.

Much depends, I suppose, on what is meant by “being a Christian.” I can accept a great deal that seems obviously true in the moral message of the “gnostic” Gospel of Thomas, for example -- which I very much prefer to that of John, despite the latter’s historical victory. I say this as someone who does not believe in the supernatural, nor in an anthropomorphic God, nor (I repeat) in the literal truth of the Gospel stories, nor in the "factual" truth of any religious myth. (The reader who wishes to pursue this controversy further is directed to the works of Professor Elaine Pagels.)

A key source for this individualist perspective on the Christian message of love is Kierkegaard:

"The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because, although he addressed himself to all, He would have no dealings with the crowd, because He would not permit the crowd to aid him in any way, because in this regard He repelled people absolutely, would not found a party, did not permit balloting, but would be what He is, the Truth which relates itself to the individual. -- And hence everyone who would truly serve the truth is eo ipso, in one way or another a martyr. ..."

Soren Kierkegaard, “That Individual,” Quoted and Translated by Walter Kaufman, in Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York & London: Penguin, 1956), pp. 96-97.

Professor Elaine Pagels’s views and those of Kierkegaard are in tension, however, when it comes to the thorny issue of free will and the degree to which “submission” is required of the Christian “knight of faith.”

Compare Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), p. xxvii (“An act of religious affirmation is always, in some sense, a practical [or political?] and consequential act.") with Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, trans.: London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 75-76. (“On this the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd.”)

What is essential to the Christian commitment? Is it an unquestioning acceptance of the literal truth of the Gospel story? Is the essential gesture an act of defiant free will? Or is it infinite resignation and absolute belief that is required? Obedience to authority? Or moral rebellion in the cause of justice and love? Or is it the resignation itself that must be freely willed? May we reject belief in the literal truth of religious stories so as to benefit from their moral truth? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Perhaps we can only hope, at best, for that faith that is a “gift of grace” which yields answers to such questions or makes them irrelevant. I am reminded also of William James and his idea of a “will to believe” and of the utility of faith. Pragmatism (New York: Prometheus, 1991), p. 128; (first published in 1907); see also, George Santayana, “William James,” in Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1967), pp. 64-96.

Despite his somewhat (to my mind) pejorative terms “tough- and tender-minded,” James knew himself to have “religious yearnings and transcendental aspirations” that would not be denied. He was both tough- and tender-minded, as are most interesting thinkers. Like John Stuart Mill, whose own mental crisis was similar to the episode experienced by James in 1870, it was impossible for James to deny his need for poetry and beauty as well as this religious aspiration, what he called the “hope for the absolute,” in his own life. There are useful comparisons to draw between James and Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death. It has been said that:

"It is ... possible to accept literally [Kierkegaard’s] designation of Christ as 'the historical, the existential' individual, without making this truth the major premise of existential investigation. The culmination of personal life in communion with God would then be intimated rather than laid down as first principle. Kierkegaard himself leaves his readers free to make their own reading of existence, since such freedom is the condition of acquiring individual selfhood."

James Collins, The Existentialists (Chicago: Gateway, 1952), p. 17. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

In commenting on George Santayana’s theory of religion, Morton White suggests that Santayana “rejects the theology of Catholicism but rejoices in the poetry and ritual of its religious ceremony. For him religion is not a literal account of anything but an allegorical and metaphorical rendering of moral truth. It becomes almost a species of poetry and is therefore to be measured by aesthetic and moral standards rather than by scientific methods.”

The Age of Analysis (New York: New American Library, 1955), p. 54. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Conversation On a Train.")

This is to turn the Christian mass into a sort of spiritual Opera, which, I guess, it is. But there may be something in this idea, which is not Christian alone, of an "aesthetic of redemption." (Walter Benjamin) Santayana comes very close to Carl Jung's later view of religion as the "collective dream" of a people. The analogy to art should be obvious. W.T. Stace's brilliant Time and Eternity is a recent discovery for me. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")

For the believer, there is also the issue of how to interpret the risen Christ's admonition to Mary Magdalene -- Noli me Tangere "Do not touch this." (Gospel of John)

Is the life-story of Christ an example to be emulated and discussed as opposed to a biography in which every detail is to be tested for historical accuracy? Was it not Christ's most important theological instruction to his followers to "interpret" his teaching freely in light of their own needs? I think so. (And please do not mention The Da Vinci Code.)

Why would Christ choose to speak, first -- as resurrected figure or divinity -- to a woman who had been a prostitute? Why was this Magdalen "the beloved apostle" who was to share with Peter responsibility for the creation of the Church and why was she so maligned later? ("The Gospel of Mary Magdalen" is fascinating.)

This questioning is to give new meaning to the "passion" of St. Mathew. Those attracted to these questions which are philosophical-theological-historical-hermeneutic are directed to the writings of scholars Elizabeth Johnson, Elaine Pagels, Marina Warner, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Peter Stanford (biography of Pope Joan) and John Boswell. (Again: "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")

Many theologians interpret Christ's instruction to his "beloved Apostle" as a caution against getting bogged down in the details of the Gospel story, in ritual and doctrine, as opposed to focusing on the fundamental message of the texts, which is certainly (for us) a communication of ethical wisdom and a reminder of our freedom to love one another no matter what. ("Is There a Gay Marriage Right?")

Santayana’s characteristically wry and worldly assessment of religion is worth quoting at length:

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s that 'a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds to religion.' ... Indeed, the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion -- something which the blindest half see -- is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the skeptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is so 'malapert as a splenetic religion,' a sour irreligion is almost as perverse."

The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons., 1933), Chapter I, quoted in The Age of Analysis, p. 57.

In light of this paragraph, it should be clear why I am unpersuaded by Professor David J. Bartholomew’s no doubt well-intentioned effort to establish the plausibility of religious belief on the basis of “probability theory and creative mathematics.” See David J. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be a Christian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). You cannot argue someone into (or out of) religious belief, which exists at a deeper than a rational level. Both belief and skepticism are rational. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Sigmund Freud emphasizes the illusory character of religion and the need to get beyond it in, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961). I disagree with Freud not in the details of his critique of religion, but in his lack of empathy and understanding for the human needs that give rise to spiritual yearnings. For a great psychoanalyst to display (as Freud often does in his undeniably brilliant writings) such a stunning lack of sensitivity, compassion and charity is enough to set one’s teeth on edge.

Freud simply misses the point of religious belief, which is not exactly an insignificant aspect of human life. It is with regard to art and religion that I find Carl Jung's "analytical psychology" superior -- or a much needed corrective -- to Freudian psychoanalysis. ("Is this atheism's moment?")

Much the same may be said of the notorious critiques of religion offered by Nietzsche and Marx. To quote Professor Pagels:

"When I found that I no longer believed everything I thought Christians were supposed to believe, I asked myself, Why not just leave Christianity? Yet I sometimes encountered, in churches and elsewhere -- in the presence of the venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor’s singing at a bat mitzvah, and on mountain hikes -- something compelling, powerful, even terrifying that I could not ignore, and I had come to see that, besides belief, Christianity involves practice -- and paths towards transformation."

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 143.

The most important point about religion, including Christianity, is that it provides adherents with a sense of meaning and purpose at moments of crisis and an explanation for suffering. Religions can heal, this is part of what is meant by “practice," and religions can change people, even if they can sometimes also be harmful. The etymology of the word "religion" is instructive on this issue. It comes from the Latin, re and ligare, to "bind together." Religion, through love, can unite the fragments of the self, and of the self-with-others. (See the stories "Pieta" and "The Sleeping Prince.")

Is there some way to separate the good consequences of religious belief from the intolerance and dogmatism to which they can often lead? There must be. I have been quoting Santayana, the master of the epigram, so I will give him the final word on the definition of religion: “Religion is the love of life,” Santayana said, “in the consciousness of impotence.”

Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.

"God contradicts himself already." -- Jacques Derrida.

Introduction.

Jacques Derrida's effect on Western thought is impossible to measure so soon after his departure. I do not agree with Roger Scruton that Derrida and Foucault will be forgotten. I am sure that both men are important philosophers whose works will last well into the next century. Each man seems to have understood one important aspect of our historical predicament that is associated with the various challenges to freedom in our time. I believe that Foucault and Derrida struggled to find a way to remain free in unfree "situations." Each man expressed disdain for Sartre's concept of a "project"; yet each of these French philosophers came to crystalize that idea of a project in his life and work. "A man is defined by his project." (Jean Paul Sartre)

I wish to explore this idea of imperiled freedom -- as the key to contemporary subjectivity -- with reference to Derrida's "linguistic anthropology." I will reserve the opportunity to analyze, at some future date, Foucault's philosophy of politics and law as kinds of power. While I am sure that these French philosophers will last, as I have said, and that their thinking is important, neither man would be pleased about what I contend is most valuable in their works: Derrida is a great theologian; Foucault is our most important prophet of doom and liberation. Foucault is a reluctant and unwilling revolutionary. Gadamer and Ricoeur are the master interpreters of our symbols and symbolizing. Umberto Eco connects semiotics to the study of power. Judith Butler and Roberto Unger are designing quicksilver identities -- with multigendered options "just for you" -- to match the plasticity of our institutions in postmodernist cultures. Cornel West and Angela Davis are translating Continental theory and philosophical efforts from the highest levels of culture into an African-American popular idiom, even as they bring America's urban culture into a dialogue with government power in global culture, that is, they are creating culture as revolutionary power beyond all governments. There is no way that each of these philosophical "superstars" can avoid affecting (or being affected by) the others. ("America's Holocaust.")

If philosophy has become jazz then we may think of Derrida, perhaps, as the Miles Davis of our contemporary band of thinkers. Derrida takes a bar of "music," improvises upon a theme, and lays down a track for others to follow:

"Derrida is deeply attracted to this notion of an other that exceeds all concepts, all words, and thus can be said to exist outside of thought. [There is a word for an Other who cannot be thought, but is thought.] Yet he also remains firmly convinced of Western thought's continual ability to appropriate whatever other might appear on the horizon, just as he remains convinced that we live within language and cannot realistically hope to escape it." (McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics, at p. 199.)

Please see my short stories "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Metaphor is Mystery," then "Pieta." This tension between a totalizing tendency in Western metaphysics as an "imperial project" (masculine) against the dissonances and paradoxes, or supplements, built into this very effort to overwhelm and absorb knowledge, including knowledge of the other, (feminine) in order to celebrate difference and otherness is essential to Deconstruction. Logos is in constant tension with Eros. Hence, the Western intellectual project -- including science -- resolves itself into a kind of Mythos. Philosophy is "White Mythology." Like it or not, increasingly, this Logos-Eros-Mythos is feminine territory. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

After several months, I came to review this essay and discovered inserted "errors" as part of a continuing effort to deny or obscure such merits as my argument may display. I am still baffled by the evil and envy motivating such actions on the part of very sick persons deluded into believing that such hateful totalitarian tactics can further the cause of "twee" ideologies in the East Village and "feministing." Whatever. ("Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

"It was because responsibility before the other could too easily be taken as a call to attend to beings, albeit personal beings, that Jacques Derrida sought to locate it definitively within the luminosity of openness." -- Please see Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." -- "Levinas had shown why the grasping of being that perpetually hovered over the horizon of Heidegger's opening toward it could not be accomplished. In its limiting case, it would be tantamount to the abolition, by the absorption of the person. But he had not clearly voiced the non-realizability of the apocalypse. Derrida was the one who most forcefully expressed the insight that apocalypse is precisely what cannot be accomplished. If it were to become imminent, it would not be the apocalypse. In this way Derrida brought theoretical clarity to centuries of ecclesiastical struggles with dreams of the millennium that has not yet happened and the millennium that is already now. Initially his path into perennial postponement was by way of a reflection on the endless deferral ["Las Meninas"] and difference that is both the character and condition of writing. Derrida coined the neologism differance to suggest a semiological condition that, far from being a limitation, was what provided the possibility of all meaning." (Walsh, "The Luminosity of Existence," at pp. 22-23.)

For Jacques Derrida, especially at this moment in history, it is always "not yet," "now," "unfinished."

I. "Derrida -- Live and In Concert!"

Derrida's dates are 1930-2004. There are two crucial incidents, at least, in Derrida's life that are helpful for interpreters of his work: First, his exclusion from schooling in his native Algeria because of his "problematic" Jewish identity; second, his use of philosophy as both a "forest" in which to hide and play as well as a mechanism of revolutionary struggle or resistance. Freedom. During his 1942 exclusion from Ben Aknoun high school in El-Biar, Algeria (Jews were restricted to 7% of the student population), Derrida was a peripheral victim of Nazi policies under the German occupation of French territories. Derrida's life was directly affected by the Holocaust. Traditionally, it was Jews whose writings were violated; never Jews who were complicit in the destruction or alteration of the creative works of others. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's use of philosophy is demonstrated in his improvised philosophical seminars discussing forbidden topics from behind the iron curtain. He was detained (on false charges of drug possession and smuggling) during his visit to dissident scholars in Prague. I have done similar philosophizing in New York restaurants and other locations with fascinating results, results that are often surprising in a political sense. I was astonished to discover groups of very different people -- from all walks of life and with varying levels of education -- reconstructing and deconstructing -- an entire development of thought in the history of philosophy over a two-hour period. This happened too often for the process to be a mere coincidence.

Derrida's emotional response on visiting Nelson Mandela's empty cell in South Africa was revealing of his life-long passionate opposition to all forms of racism as an African-born, Jewish and French intellectual. Professor Derrida is one of the distinguished intellectuals who opposed, publicly, the railroading and threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Among the striking aspects of Derrida's physical presence was a powerful "openness" to the world of others that allowed for meaningful connections with those he met. I do not believe that I am mistaken in suggesting the impression of such a connection when I met Derrida in New York, briefly, a few years before his death. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.") Cornel West, "On Black-Jewish Relations," in Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 69-81. (Has Cornel West been silenced or suppressed?)

Jacques Derrida was born of "assimilated" sephardic Jewish parents. All of his family members' names and several other converso names are encrypted in La Carte postale. In many of Derrida's works there are layers of meaning -- including encrypted (or coded) highly personal meanings -- that are often excluded from analyses by commentators. All of my stories are similar in this respect. The short stories are my most revealing autobiographical writings. They are also philosophical works. Finally, they are my most indirect messages to private recipients. I regret that Benoit Peters excellent biography appeared after this essay was posted. Revelations concerning Derrida's non-marital relationships and children do not substantially alter this comment. (Norris, "Derrida," pp. 239-245.)

Derrida married the psychoanalyst, Marguerite Aucouturier. He must have kept her busy. Derrida's son Pierre was born in 1963; a second son, Jean, was born in 1967. To my knowledge, neither son has expressed a great interest in philosophy. Nor has any other of Derrida's children or family members. It is important to understand that Derrida's works contain a subtle invitation to "deconstruct" the veiled identity of an author who chooses to live within languages' figurative power (metaphor), with his personal narratives and loved-ones, but also in the literal significance of his texts (descriptive terms), "objectively," with colleagues and students sharing his intense interest in philosophical questions and controversies.

The destruction of a text, for Derrida, is a kind of murder. I am sure that Derrida would be horrified at the daily alterations and defacements of these writings, I believe, by U.S. state officials or their agents. An "error" inserted in the foregoing sentence since my previous review, not found in earlier versions of this text, has just been corrected. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

Deconstruction is the opposite of destruction because it is a kind of creation of richer meanings in the text. No philosopher recoils in greater horror from the spectacle of fascist burnings of books -- or any defacements of texts -- than Jacques Derrida:

"Since language [cinema] serves as the ground of personal existence, the human-world emerges as infinite Text. [What is an infinite Text?] Everything gets textualized. All contexts, whether political, economic, social, psychological, historical or theological, become intertexts; that is, outside influences and forces undergo textualization. Instead of literature we have textuality; in place of tradition, intertextuality. Authors die so that readers can come into prominence. In any case, all selves, whether of critics, poets, or readers, appear as language constructions -- texts. What are texts? [Notice the reference and association to developments in quantum physics that came AFTER Derrida's early writings. For Derrida, texts are:] Strings of differential traces. Sequences of floating signifiers. Sets of infiltrated signs dragging along ultimately indecipherable intertextual elements. Sites for the free play of grammar, rhetoric, and illusory reference. What about the truth of the text? The random flights of signifiers across the textual surface, the dissemination of meaning, offer truth under one condition: that the chaotic processes of textuality be wilfully regulated, controlled, stopped." (Kearny, "Modern Philosophical Movements," at pp. 122-123.)

Particle physicist, Brian Greene -- who is probably unaware of Derrida's work -- also suggests that "there is nothing outside the text." He likens the five string theories unified by M-Theory's purported unification as differing translations of the single text that is the book of nature. Ironically, I have also met Professor Greene and even discussed his book briefly as we shared a subway ride. I am sad to report that Professor Greene's name is occasionally altered to a lower case rather than being capitalized, possibly for antisemitic reasons. I will continue to make the identical correction of this inserted "error" in the text. The bizarre possibility that Jewish persons may yield to a fashionable anti-semitism would appear to Derrida as the ultimate "deconstruction" of identity. I suspect that the "strategy" behind "error" insertions is to keep me guessing concerning the status of any of these writings on any given date. I will continue to write.

Analogies to Deconstruction suggest themselves with regard to the resolution offered by Andrew Wiles to "Fermat's Enigma" in mathematical theory with reference to techniques of "choosing factorizations." By means of this more free understanding of mathematical order new concepts of "beauty" or "elegance" are being formulated by scientists to describe the workings of the universe -- concepts that seem remarkably theological:

"For the impression inherent in textual translations, readers have a couple of immediate remedies. The best option, if the reader's linguistic skills are up to the task, is to consult the original manuscript. At the moment, the analog of this option is not available to string theorists. By virtue of the consistency of the dictionary developed by Witten and others, we have strong evidence that all five string theories are different descriptions of a single master theory, M-Theory [.] ... Imagine a master manuscript [God?] infused with such an enormous range of puns, rhymes, and off-beat, culture-sensitive jokes, that the complete text cannot be expressed gracefully in any single one of five given languages [religions?] into which it is being translated. [Deconstructed?] ..." (Greene, "The Fabric of the Cosmos," at p. 381.)

Readers interested in pursuing the suggestiveness of deconstruction for researchers in the so-called hard sciences or theoretical sciences, such as mathematical theory, are directed to Simon Singh, Fermat's Engima: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), at pp. 114-116. ("There is no longer a unique factorization but rather a choice of factorizations.") Students may wish to turn next to the notorious "Nash Equilibrium," see Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1993), pp. 128-138, then John Forbes Nash, "Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games," in Volume 36 of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, pp. 48-49 (1950). (I recommend Ron Howard's film, "A Beautiful Mind.") Michael J. Field & Mathew Golubitsky, Symmetry in Chaos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Derrida would now call our attention to something seemingly distant from deconstructive analysis and his own experiences with antisemitism, in order to suggest that deconstructive analyses shows them to be expressive of identical semantic associations that are also found in physics and mathematics: Slavoj Zizek, "Does the Subject Have a Cause?," in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York: Verso, 1994), at pp. 48-49. (" ... 'Jew' starts to function as the hidden marker ... that accounts for the Jewishness of the Jews." A "choice of factorizations"?)

This is where Derrida's work attaches itself to Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom because what he is saying, essentially, is that interpreting is Being. Creating meaning is identity. The observer distortion becomes the observer's creation. The life of Jacques Derrida is a "narrative in the world" belonging to people (like all of us) in the community of this essay sharing our interest in his work. This is a Sartrean project and understanding of philosophy, as subjectivity, but also a religious vision of self and world in eternal "flux" with regard to meanings and mutually-constitutive. ("What you will" and "Magician's Choice" then "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

For political implications of this discussion that are meant to be read alongside this essay, please see "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" then "America's Holocaust" and "Martin Buber's Diet Judaism." A dialogue can be conducted in multiple languages -- indeed, I am confident that the universe extends such a complex invitation to interpreters -- either the language of war or a torture chamber, for instance, or the dulcet tones of academia. (Irony?) Each language presents its own hermeneutics of freedom and variable possibilities for consensus. I am sure that terrorism, robot bombs, tortures and "cruel embargos" -- or cybercrime and censorship -- are equally failed means of communication. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

Philosophy -- like the "book of the world" for Professor Greene -- is "White Mythology," that is, "white" (i.e., colorless) writing on the blood spattered wall of history.

We create or invent "Jacques Derrida" through our interpretations. This is certainly what happens with our celebrities in the age of images, but perhaps we do much the same in inventing our social world and the arts that we need to live meaningfully, especially our movies, also by inventing ourselves as "individuals." (Compare "'The Matrix': A Movie Review" with "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

The analogy between celebrity and identity is developed into a fusion, I suspect, of Jung's collective unconcious with aesthetic-cinematic experience in the forthcoming film "Inception." Actors -- like Mr. DiCaprio -- are in the unusual situation that much of that inventing of the self and exploration of subconscious interiority takes place "indirectly," by way of the "truncated ontology" of the signs, symbols, and images of their cinematic "lives." Now that is what I call "weird." Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004), http://www.lulu.com/JuanG ("A Doll's Aria" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Those interested in fusing high culture with your pleasure in what looks to be a great Hollywood action film should apply the discussion in Fred R. Dallmayr, "Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogue," in Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1987), at pp. 130-159 to your experience of the DiCaprio movie. Obviously, we are being escorted by Director Christopher Nolan to a number of sources in literary and cinematic history, everything from "The Dream of the Red Chamber" to Jorge Luis Borges' "Fictions" is a reference for a "stealer" of dreams. The so-called "Dream Merchants" in Hollywood and Madison Avenue may finally be getting their due. Vance Packard, Aldous Huxley, and Marshall McLuhan will help interpreters of this movie. Have fun. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951) and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967).

Mr. Packard's seminal writings concerning "subliminal conditioning" are also crucial. Not only have your dreams been stolen long ago, but they have been used to sell you things and political candidates. Richard Rorty, "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?," in Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), at pp. 137-147.

"Truth comes forth in the reifications ... of reading. Truth is not an entity or property of the text. [The Text and the reader make the truth of the work in a kind of Kantian constructivism.] No text utters its truth; the truth lies elsewhere in the reading. Constitutionally, reading is misreading. Deconstruction works to deregulate controlled dissemination and celebrate misreading." (Kearny, pp. 122-123.) ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")

There is also the mirage of fame and the illusions of global celebrity for Derrida's students to contend with -- genuine misreadings of others, as "texts" -- as one becomes a presence in newspapers and magazines, even in serious intellectual journals. Like Borges, John Fowles, Jean Paul Sartre and others amused, bewildered, and angered or indifferent at times to fame, Derrida was constantly shadowed by a person bearing his name strolling through airports and the scholarly press, doing weird or controversial things, sometimes resulting in deportations or other troubles.

Perhaps Derrida was seen as "unethical" or "irresponsible" by some of his opponents. ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.")

This theme of doubling and the dangers of being transformed into the ephemera of a media age is one great topic in the writings of Philip Roth. (The Counterlife.) Dame Iris Murdoch's encounter with Derrida -- Dame Iris was one of Derrida's best British readers, even as an elderly woman who was still a brilliant philosopher -- attests to this curious phenomenon of intellectual charisma and doubling of personality. The bizarre alchemy of star-power is captured in what Dame Iris describes as Derrida's "linguistic idealism":

"Philosophers are not often popular idols, and works of philosophy rarely become guide-books to living, during the philosopher's lifetime. In the twenty years after the war Sartre was probably the best-known metaphysician in Europe, best-known that is not just among professional thinkers (many of whom ignored him) but among young and youngish people who, for once, found in philosophy, in his philosophy, the clear and inspiring explanation of the world which philosophers are generally supposed to provide. The fundamental and attractive idea was freedom. [I suggest that, in very different terms, this is also Derrida's concern -- to understand freedom.] ...The only other occasion when I saw a philosopher being hailed as a prophet was in California in 1984 when I attended a lecture by Jacques Derrida." (Murdoch, "Sartre," at pp. 9-10; then Murdoch, "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals," at p. 97.)

Derrida is an important and strongly FEMINIST thinker whose foundational metaphysics of language, I believe, opens on to a redescription of knowledge and truth -- even philosophy itself -- as what might be called (by us) a "feminine approach to life." Even in draft form this essay has been vandalized, suggesting these feminist themes are still controversial. Derrida's strong rejection of "logocentrism" is sure to produce more vandalism from those hankering for an impossible control of all knowledge and thought as well as others. The deepest lessons of our times seem to concern this need to align ourselves with (and not against) nature as well as life in our relations with the environment, in our "freedom to create linguistic meaning in opposition to forced meanings," also in the experience of love and encounter with death. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy'" and "Is clarity enough?")

We must allow the other to "be." We must realize that we cannot bend and twist the world and all others to serve our needs or to conform to our interpretations. Freedom, for Derrida, is a kind of "playing" with and for the other, as a free being, because knowing is a happy splashing about in the ocean of linguistic resonances and meanings where we are all equals. Mother and child imagery recurs in his writings. I suggest that this "splashing about" is both aesthetic and spiritual, intellectual and affective, accepting and contradicting -- bivalent logics are absorbed and turned upside down.

The best image of knower and known is not an agent in a white smock standing apart from what he wishes to know and "control," scientifically, but rather a knowing agent is both playing and protective of the reality in which she participates and to which she wishes to contribute. Perhaps this is an idea for BP and other corporations to ponder. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" soon "What is it like to be raped?")

Derrida's engagement with Kant's Critical Theory results from both rejection of key aspects of Kant's system and acceptance of the mood of Kant's aesthetics and late religious writings. This dual-aspect thinking -- or "doubleness" -- is at the center of what Derrida takes to be "human nature" as demonstrated in his greatest essay to which I now turn. Please see Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge/Myron. For an image of this dual-aspect knower think of Brian Greene and/or Lisa Randall explaining quantum physics. ("Master and Commander.")

"[Derrida's deconstructive] Structuralism is deeply motivated by an appreciation of languages of science and technology, which seem to undermine our ordinary language and its 'naive' truth values. Such scientific languages can also be seen as more genuinely universal (for instance international). They are written, not spoken. Speech is regional, local, full of accidents. Archi-ecriture is also to be thought of (postulated) as 'written' not spoken, and as, in the scientific sense of deep, deep. This is the ecriture celebrated by Derrida in his chapter heading ... (the end of books, and the beginning of writing). 'Taoism' is of course a very general name for a vast region of religious and metaphysical theory and social practice. I am speaking of it now as a view referred to in recent western books about oriental religion, and as an idea, connected with moderation and harmony and the coexistence of opposites, which seems to have some kinship with the moods and theories of this age. One can readily see how multiform and ambiguous such an idea is. Opposites, or alleged opposites, good and evil, or Ying and Yang, can be thought of as enemies, or as demanding an achievable harmony. [Foucault versus Derrida? Or Derrida complimenting Foucault?] There is a half-truth here also. Why not peace instead of war? Compromise is rational. Love your darkness. Integrate your personality. Why become neurotic by attempting to achieve impossible moral goals? [This may allow for possible moral goals that are partly achieved.]" (Murdoch, "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals," at p. 199.)

II. "The Ends of Man/Woman."

Derrida's greatest essay develops the implications of the three quotations used to open the work: Kant, Sartre, Foucault are seen as predecessors to Derrida's development of Husserl's phenomenology in a linguistic direction where "free play" and the power of resonance in speech/writing serve the hermeneutic function assigned to "texts" by Derrida's colleague, Paul Ricoeur -- liberation. I believe that Derrida's key insights are highly apt and useful in interpreting cinematic works emerging in our postmodernist culture. (Again: "'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The American': A Movie Review.")

For literary dramatizations of the challenge to the human interpretive faculty posed by deconstructive hermeneutics (Derrida) and constructive hermeneutics (Ricoeur), see Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow (New York: Dell, 1992) and the excellent film with Julia Ormond by the same title, then the breathtaking short story by Ted Hughes, "Snow," in Frederick R. Karl, ed., The Signet Classic Book of British Short Stories (New York: Signet Classic, 1985), at p. 556. (Derrida will help with the first book; Ricoeur will be useful in interpreting the Hughes story.)

It is because there is always something beyond our linguistic structures that is unfinished about ourselves that meaning is possible, usually in unsuspected ways, and that truth may be known however tentatively, falteringly, or imperfectly. Derrida is not an "anything goes" philosopher. The analogy to Gadamer and Ricoeur is strongest at this point:

"When I wrote that 'intelligible being is language' I meant to say that being can never be completely understood -- since every linguistic medium [cinema?] always goes beyond what is directly articulated.' [God?] ..." (Dallmayr, at p. 134, quoting Hans-Georg Gadamer in dialogue with Derrida.) ("Magician's Choice.")

Some interpretations are indeed better than others even if they are always subject to revisions and clarifications, self-underminings, and deconstructions. The space (or "gap") between words and things -- also, between words as things (Austin) -- is the territory where deconstructive freedom emerges. This is a religious -- indeed, a kaballistic vision -- of textuality and meaning informing Derrida's late religious interests and concern with ethics as well as justice. Derrida's late focus is on the dual mystery of meaning in relation with propositions and the tentative association of both, propositions and their meanings, with sentences, words, languages embodied in empirical form. Cinematic imagery is a language. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's project may be aligned with the work of Levinas and, again, with Ricoeur's hermeneutics in that he sees human ethical life as always an imperfect effort to realize the inchoate striving for connection with others that cannot be totally captured in any scheme of rules, but which is notheless real and true, even fundamental to human beings as language-used and -using beings. Derrida's structuralist foundations are in tension with his genuine humanism that he tries to disown. There are increasingly stronger humanistic elements in his late writings. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

At least part of the problem that I detect in current efforts to generate Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) capable of consciousness and understanding in a human context is a set of highly doubtful assumptions about language, communication and subjectivity. These are profound philosophical errors, category mistakes to paraphrase Gilbert Ryle, that should send computer scientists back to the writings of Colin McGinn and Noam Chomsky. Clive Thompson, "What is I.B.M.'s Watson?," in The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010, at p. 30, then Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) and Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Finally, the thoughts of a philosophical "dabbler" are highly recommended: Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?," in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

For a different approach to these issues by philosophers in rival traditions that are still "alive," compare Jurgen Habermas, "Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason," in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), at pp. 294-326 with John Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down," in Working Through Derrida, Supra, at pp. 170-184.

For a journalist's somewhat "clueless" attempt to deal with these issues, see Amy Harmon, "Circuitry With a Feel for Humanity," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A1 and Amy Harmon, "Trying to Forge A Friendship With a Robot Named Bina48," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A11. (I wonder whether Ms. Harmon has visited my sites? "Luci?" Anne Milgram? "Natasha Vargas Cooper," perhaps? "Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers.")

The thing to notice about the "Turing test" applied to candidates for "A.I." is that conscious beings redefine or deconstruct questions (and interlocutors) in responding to such a challenge, like Rachel in Philip K. Dick's novel, Blade Runner or the film of the same name, we all alter modes of discourse through mere participation in dialectics. Dialogue is mutually constitutive for partners in discussion or relation. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")

When I say that dialogue is "mutually constitutive" I am suggesting that by constructing the other as "X," you had better take care that he will not interpret you as "Y." Rival interpretations -- or the conflict of interpretations -- accounts for much of the suffering in this world. When you insert "errors" in the texts of others, you may expect to be identified with such tactics and the hatred that they produce in victims will then, inevitably, follow "error inserters" and those who protect them for many years to come. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and see the film, "Sicko.")

A. Kant.

"Now, I say, man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will."

Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Derrida begins by expressing doubts or skepticism about gatherings of academics, especially philosophers, in light of the grim realities of 1968. Our realities today may be much worse, certainly as regards the threat to the planet. Philosophy's task of self-justification is greater and less often discharged. Furthermore, philosophy -- in both the good and bad sense of assumptions and defenses of fundamental ideas -- is inextricable from contemporary dilemmas. This is part of Derrida's "excuse" for his important project of reassessing philosophical anthropology in late twentieth century conditions. Philosophical mistakes are central to a great deal of human suffering today, notably our attitudes to nature and all life on the planet. The solutions to many of these troubles will be philosophical insights and must come from philosophers.

We face a genuine peril of self-extermination that is entirely of our own making. We once feared nuclear holocaust. The worry now is that we will -- we may have done so already -- destroy our ecosystem. At risk is all life on earth. Conceptually, however, what is endangered is "Man" -- the human subject as the beloved concern of Western thought defined in logocentric and masculine terms. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

In the aftermath of the Holocaust -- against the madness then in Vietnam, or today in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with who knows how many other armed conflicts in the world -- humanism in any form or fashion appears quaint, child-like, or absurd to many intellectuals. The opposite of humanism is even worse. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "What you will.")

These are classic conditions for what is known as "philosophical despair." Nihilism is a dead end. Humanism is not a view that can be taken seriously by many people, often the same persons who have rejected all religious consolations also dismiss humanism as "naive." The options are: 1) trendy forms of "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" (Lindsey Lohan?); or 2) bleak pessimism and defeatism with occasional journeys to the "dark side" (Dick Cheney). Is there some way to rescue humanism that is intellectually respectable? (Please see my forthcoming essay, "Do Not Adjust Your Minds -- Reality is Out of Focus.")

I have encountered persons who have held one or another of these antihumanist views who were often unaware of reflecting perfectly the categories assigned to them by the Zeitgeist. It is far from unusual for persons consumed by self-disgust and hatred for humanity to communicate loathing even for the greatest achievements of the human species or the notion of intrinsic ontological value in persons. Evil and genius are both part of the human story. It is unwise to ignore or deny either of these aspects of what I unhesitatingly call, "human nature." I sometimes have the impression that reviewers do not want movies to be good or that they try to avoid acknowledging when movies are great. Why? "Stephen Holden?" "Ruth Davis Konigsberg"? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "David Denby is Not Amused" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

This defeatist attitude, nihilism, reflects and constitutes a surrender to the forces that bring about Holocausts and ethnic cleansings, or such lingering horrors as child-prostitution in New Jersey. The denial of human dignity is not only a false view, but it is an evil understanding of the human condition associated with totalitarianism in all of its forms. These are the people who respond to criticism by turning off a dissident's computer. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

Structuralists and post-structuralists opposed Enlightenment humanism and the so-called "ideologies of man" in the name of the networks or systems in which persons must always be enmeshed, especially languages. Michel Foucault had spoken of the "disappearance of Man," as conceived in the sexist, Western, logocentric forms of the Enlightenment handed down to Husserl and Heidegger, then to Sartre and the generation of the post-war existentialists who placed "consciousness" -- the thinly disguised and slightly denuded Kantian rational will -- at the center of the projects of Modernity. ("Out of the Past.")

Marxists had replaced God with the proletariat, but otherwise followed the identical script handed down from Hegel to the twentieth century Marxists, except for the Critical humanists of the Frankfurt school and very few others, notably Fidel Castro, who placed pragmatism and social justice concerns above adherence to any orthodoxy -- whether we agree that this is a position held by such figures as Fidel Castro may be set aside for the moment. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

Kant's Critical Theory invents "Modernity," in other words, the intellectual world in which we still live. Modernity led to some hoped-for and expected places, the landing on the moon; Modernity also led to some unexpected places, like Auschwitz. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")

Kant locates the human "essence" -- a controversial term irremovable from Western thought on these matters -- in the rational faculties and transcendental capacities of the human subject or "agent of cognition" who creates, through HIS (unfortunately, for Kant, I do mean "his") freedom, moral as well as metaphysical realities by means of a difficult cognitive synthesis. This rich, profound, and still dominant picture of the human condition is optimistic, universalist, objective (purportedly), and ethically cognitivist. The "Transcendental Ego" developed by Kant (as a construct) was bigger than even he realized, "transcending" gender and race:

" ... this neutralization of every metaphysical or speculative thesis as concerns the unity of the anthropos could be considered in some respects as the faithful inheritance of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and of the fundamental ontology in Sein und Zeit ["Being and Time"] (the only partially known work of Heidegger's at the time, along with 'What is Metaphysics?' and 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics'). And yet, despite this alleged neutralization of metaphysical presuppositions, it must be recognized that the unity of man is never examined in and of itself. Not only is existentialism a humanism, but the ground and horizon of what Sartre then called his 'phenomenological ontology' (the subtitle of 'Being and Nothingness') remains the unity of human-reality. To the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality, phenomenological ontology, is a philosophical anthropology. Whatever the breaks marked by this Hegelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian anthropology as concerns the classical anthropologies, there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so naturally, links the we of the philosopher to 'we men,' to the we in the horizon of humanity." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 131.)

"We" is like "snow" for the eskimo. "We" is where we "are." ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")

" ... 'To recognize oneself (or one's own) in the other and find a home abroad -- this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.' ... the challenge is to recognize otherness or the alien in oneself (or one's own). Much, perhaps everything, will depend on our ability to find a mode of interaction [a choice of factorizations?] balancing hermeneutics and counter-hermeneutics, [deconstruction,] cumulative self-understanding and self-abandonment, identity and transformation. ... [Think of quantum physics:] 'The messenger must come from the message; but he must also already have moved towards it.' ..." (Gadamer/Derrida, in Dallmayr, at p. 157.)

Husserl absorbs Kant's transcendental idealism in a project aimed at cleansing the metaphysical component from the philosophy in order to leave the more rigorous and scientific epistemological components of the Critical Theory, resulting in a new phenomenology of the knowing subject. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

This strategy, in turn, produces a concern with language as the means of knowing where the subject must develop and "be," presenting us with the task of interpretation, hermeneutics, by way of Heidegger and Gadamer -- also Paul Ricoeur -- developing a centuries-old tradition of thought about words and things, signs and systems, form and substance.

Is "Man" the object and not the subject? Do languages speak us, as structuralists say? Or do we create ourselves through interpretations? What is this language that creates us in which we are and must be? "Rosebud." ("Would Jesus be a Christian?" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

"What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure. The example of the Sartrean project remarkably verifies Heidegger's proposition according to which 'every humanism remains metaphysical,' metaphysics being the other name of ontotheology." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 132.)

If metaphysics is inescapable as the feature of language in which we are and must be, as persons, then God is inescapable for persons. Any artistic masterpiece reflects and communicates human spiritual values. All genuine art "elevates" creator and recipient. The secularization of this idea is "revolution" or social liberation for liberation theology. ("Pieta" and "Is it rational to believe in God?" then "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")

I think this may be the area of greatest difficulty for computer scientists. Languages are not mathematically reducible to a set of calculable options because true human languages are not static, quantifiable entities. Rather, languages are organic and dynamic entities that are thriving and growing, as their users grow, to reflect an external and internal "set" of realities "linked" or fused through this linguistic power.

What is the meaning of a spinning top? (Again: "Metaphor is Mystery" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

In an important sense, my language in this essay is not only written English -- drawing on French or German terminology -- but also the language of a torture chamber, as it were, of my struggle against censorship, cybercrime, and creative adjustments and alterations in response to these assaults or state efforts at silencing, suppressions, destructions of these essays and my mind.

My torturers have been forced to become my collaborators as part of my project of resisting evil. In a variation or "deconstruction" of Sartre's essay "Anti-Semite and Jew," the "Anti-Semite Becomes a Jew," the would-be censor becomes a co-author, the audience member is the ultimate director of every movie as demonstrated by the currently raging revolution in Egypt where national identity is at issue:

"He would have liked to tell his friend this. It took away the stigma, he thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say, or the Finklerish Conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself."

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2010), at p. 17. (Significantly, this quotation was altered with the removal of a word since my previous review of this text.)

I am confident that Howard Jacobson is also Jacques Derrida. This may be the only answer to the Finkler question. The word "snow" has hundreds of variations and interpretive nuances for eskimos, some may be erotic and others political, still others psychological or aesthetic. Movies, for us, are like snow for eskimos. I have chosen to make my would-be censors and torturers unwilling collaborators in my project of liberation through self-expression in an action movie, perhaps, "The Blogger Code." ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meaning(s) of Prison.")

In physics, the idea of a "perturbation theory" has been suggested and such theories help to explain my efforts to cope with cybercrime. Butterflies flapping their wings may affect weather patterns all around the globe, so a "philosophical butterfly" on-line may alter political realities through protest and struggle even while experiencing censorship as well as repetitive torments.

The words "Being" or "God" have similar protean qualities in our languages. The moving image in the age of cinema has taken on some of these variable features and connective powers. "You would not have asked about the nickel." Please see "The Last Tycoon." (Again: "What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "'The American': A Movie Review.")

Derrida enters this discussion by taking on two philosophers who were his contemporaries -- Sartre and Foucault. Sartre develops phenomenology in a consciousness-based direction focused on the individual. Even Sartre's late "Critique of Dialectical Reason," is subject-centered. Despite Sartre's encounter with Structuralist-Marxism (Althusser), he remains a humanist. Foucault's early and middle work excavates historical preconditions for phenomenological interpretations and even consciousness, through Nietzschean genealogies, challenging the possibility of any humanism while doubting attempts to examine language in ahistorical terms that are disconnected from, say, power-relations. Nietzsche begins his intellectual life as a philologist. Derrida will focus on language through examining this idea that language is what "speaks us."

Jacobson's novel explicitly gestures at several of Derrida's works exploring Jewishness, notably Derrida's "Circumfession." In his most famous sentence, Derrida asserts that: "There is nothing outside the text." This raises the question of what is language? What is this "text" in which we are necessarily placed? "Jewishness" unfolds within a set of ethical-religious texts and the culture to which those texts give rise.

Like any texts these Hebrew works are deconstructible/reconstructible for every person. There is no way to be a Jew in the abstract, apart from what it is like to be each individual Jewish person interpreting a set of texts and traditions. Hence, the answer to the Jewish (Finkler) question is for every Jew (Finkler) to provide. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?" then Karl Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and Derrida's "Specters of Marx.")

Paul Ricoeur is led to similar religious speculations from a purely hermeneutic direction as one of the great scholars of mythology and aesthetics in the twentieth century and also as a Christian thinker. These French philosophers provide us with a hermeneutic circle by bringing Western thought "home" to an engagement with the inescapable religious foundations of all speculative thought, including science. This is true despite their political or other differences as co-founders of the Center for the Study of Phenomenology in Paris.

Derrida's and Ricoeur's insights transcend the French intellectual scene in the late sixties. Derrida's return to religion as a subject of study is through Jewish mysticism. Ricoeur was fascinated by gnosticism and the works of Augustine on memory, as a Christian.

I turn to Sartre and Foucault; I then offer Derrida's comments. I conclude with criticisms of Derrida's philosophy by Habermas and Foucault. Also, I argue on behalf of feminist implications of Derrida's work by commenting on the reservations and defenses on the part of leading feminist philosophers to Derrida's theorizing. In this final section, I will refer -- once again -- to deconstruction's affinities with jazz. ("Images and Death.")

B. Sartre.

"Ontology ... has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibility, and the value which haunts it."

Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

Sartre's avowed atheism notwithstanding, the adventures of his philosophical subject, consciousness, in the journey towards freedom outlined in "Being and Nothingness" is a kind of humanism for our dismal age. There is an indestructible value and dignity in the human subject, according to Sartre, even under conditions of torture. The lessons of the Second World War and Sartre's experiences in the French resistance made the affirmation of this wisdom more and not less essential for Sartre. ("Out of the Past.")

Despite the turn towards Marxism in the "Critique of Dialectical Reason," the Sartrean choosing agent -- assuredly, under increasing constraints based on environmental factors as the century progresses -- asserts his or her freedom by way of a "totalization" or aspiration for political and metaphysical revolution. The value of freedom cannot be questioned because it is constitutive of human "being-in-the-world" towards others. Freedom is simply what we are.

There is a powerful truth in this Sartrean philosophical vision of the human adventure in a post-Holocaust age. Furthermore, I suggest that a development of Sartre's thinking in the direction of "humanity as freedom" can only be realized in loving -- directedness towards others -- which is the ultimate ontological "totalization." ("The Allegory of the Cave.") Love may also be the ultimate language.

Che Guevara described every revolutionary as motivated, ultimately, by love. Iris Murdoch agrees:

"Sartre's novels, then, describe the drama of people who are reacting more or less consciously and in various modes to the predicament of their ethical loneliness and their state of war with other selves. And it is not only ethical loneliness that is described. ["Nausea"] which is certainly one of Sartre's most remarkable books, describes what one might call a sort of logical loneliness. Meaning is suddenly seen as withdrawn not from a world of objective values, but [from] physical objects themselves. This is a plunge into the absurd. If indeed we confer meaning, [Sartre's humanism,] not only upon ethical and religious systems, but upon the physical world too, in that we see it as the correlative of our needs and intentions, then this meaning could in principle vanish, leaving us face-to-face with a brute and nameless nature. [Quantum physics.] This is the predicament of Antoine Roquetin, the hero of ["Nausea"] And one might say, the purpose of the book is to reveal to us our real situation by contrast with one from which a familiar element has been removed. A similar device is used in the play Huis-clos. ["No Exit."] We might compare Kant's use of the notion of intellectual intuition, or the contemporary philosopher's games with the queer logics of imagined languages." (Murdoch, "Existentialists and Mystics," at pp. 106-107. Please see the great Daniel Auteuil's performance in "A Heart in Winter" and Frank Langella in "The Box.")

Derrida's attitude to such meaning-creating views in this essay -- in accordance with much French philosophy emerging from les evenements (May, 1968) -- is utterly disdainful and condescending of such "philosophical anthropology." The hostility is reserved, especially, for religious forms of existentialism. Hence, Derrida's distancing and debates with Emmanuel Levinas become clear examples of the war between philosophical generations.

Nevertheless, Derrida's late work develops in a parallel direction to these Sartrean insights. Derrida's final ideas may be traced to the undertones in his first great essay, an essay whose implications -- notably, theological implications -- Derrida could not have seen when it was written. Derrida would have rejected these ideas if he had seen them entailed in his theorizing. It is no coincidence that Levinas and Sartre have Jewish roots, both men saw themselves as connected to texuality -- "dialogue" (Levinas) and "words" (Sartre). The same "connectedness" to/as texts is true for Derrida. Harold Bloom sees the identification with textuality as essentially kaballistic.

I am sure that Derrida would reject my interpretations of this specific essay. Perhaps he would have been outraged by the suggestions I make concerning his metaphysical and even theological importance in terms of the ultimate implications of his theorizing in his lifetime. Nonetheless, these theological implications seem very clear to me and many others. Through Derrida's unwilling plunge into metaphysics he was led to a kind of linguistic humanism and mysticism. Let us consider a similar movement from Murdoch's interpretation of Sartre to Derrida's work as the journey from Roquetin to Genet in philosophy:

"Sartre finally offers us Genet as personifying the futility of the bourgeois subject who is condemned to maintain values which he really knows to be empty and vanishing. Genet is redeemed, is saint, martyr, edifying exemplar, and hero of our time, [Derrida's Nietzschean roots!] because he lives this condition with full awareness to both extremes, both as subject and object, accepting (like Saint Theresa as Sartre points out) all accusations against him as having some substance. [Derrida versus Searle] But he is better than Saint Theresa, because she is supported by general esteem and he is not. (To put it absurdly in Kierkegaardian terms, Saint Theresa is a tragic hero while Genet is a true Knight of Faith.)"

Genet -- like Derrida -- "deconstructs" the bourgeois world:

"Genet is worthy of our attention, Sartre argues, because he is sincerely and openly and extremely what we, bourgeois, are secretly, timidly and hypocritically." (Murdoch, "Sartre: Romantic Rationalist," at p. 16 and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

You can see Sartre's notion of freedom developed in the struggle within society against others, leading to Derrida's process of differentiation from others through linguistic instantiation in identity, differance. This process of "differentiation" unfolds within "our homeland, the text." (George Steiner) It is the text in which we are and must be with others -- or that "is" others/ourselves -- who are, always, aready a part of us in logos, then eros.

For Derrida, "becoming human towards death" is a linguistic challenge of "differing" by way of "deconstructions" of linguistic projects in which we inevitably find ourselves and that are not of our making. This is a "field approach" to the challenge of identity, also of Being. Consciousness as/is community. Derrida provides readers with a delinquent metaphysics or the metaphysics of a delinquent Western subject alienated from the racism, sexism, materialism that has been central to the culture for centuries. Derrida is a "philosophical psychopath." (Norman Mailer's "The White Negro.")

Rather than beginning by telling us what is a person Derrida will insist on what persons are not -- bourgeois subjects fitting fantasy notions of "normality." We are not characters in a Disney cartoon epic. Or are we? I believe some political leaders wish to transform persons into such one-dimensional caricatures, especially women and members of political minority groups. Americans are too often governed by political versions of "Mrs. Givings." ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" then "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's structuralism and post-structuralism produces not serene acceptance of anti-humanism, but a Miltonian rebellion against the prison-house of language that is reinvented (deconstructed) as freedom or as a kind of metaphysical elan. Deconstruction is philosophical jazz. This is to see freedom as "play," creative reinventions, constant imaginative recreations of the boundaries of speech and writing, scripting selves, societies, universes of discourse -- including science -- as a genius child's solution to being a Jew in a hostile culture, perhaps, an outsider everywhere, misunderstood and vilified.

The implications for women deconstructing gender roles in sexist societies should be clear. ("A Doll's Aria.")

Derrida is philosophy's juvenile delinquent. Can a computer become a juvenile delinquent? I would love any computer that is arrested for a criminal act. The line of continuity is clear from Spinoza to Nietzsche by way of Kant-Hegel to Husserl and Derrida, through Michel Foucault's "technologies of the self." ("'Eagle Eye': A Movie Review" and see Will Smith in "I, Robot.")

If language will speak us, Derrida insists, then we must "deconstruct" the terms in which we are spoken.

This comes very close to Sartre's maxim: "We are always free to decide what to make of what is made of us."

Deconstruction provides an important lesson for any celebrity coping with the mirage of fame. It may be even more important for women to absorb and transform this insight. Sex may become the language in which we are "spoken" that is, only voluntarily, reinvented by us. There is NO apprehension of a woman in Western culture that is entirely asexual. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

"The determination of essence is first a matter of establishing a way of arriving at the differences which will count as essence, and that is done by appeal to the ground, which, as source of such differences, and so of the structure, is itself in a way, 'beyond essence': 'The center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure escapes structurality.' But this makes the position of the 'transcendental signified' [Kant] contradictory, both without and within the structure. [Deconstructed.] As ground, it must lie outside, as determining a particular way of arriving at differences as the truth. But it can only function as ground for our determinations of differences if it can be appealed to, and so addressed in language. And it can only be spoken of if it can be distinguished from what it is not, and so subject to a process of differentiation. It must, that is, have an 'essence,' a difference, which it cannot, however, justify as essence." (Michael Weston, 'Derrida, Wittgenstein, and the Question of Grounds,' in "Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy," at p. 118.) ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Derrida's description of "transcendental phenomenology" weirdly foreshadows his own thinking decades later as metaphysics becomes both impossible and inescapable. There is "nothing outside the text" and there is always something "left out of our texts" that allows them to continue to grow by demanding our freedom of reinvention. Phenomenal versus noumenal. Science, philosophy, literature and the arts are trapped in this two-step process. The melody is always there. But then, so are the opportunities for improvisation. One aspect of the "Matrix" films which has often not been noticed is that the word "matrix" is both the German term for the Internet and it is derived from the Latin term for "mother," mater. The "matrix" (language) is all around you. ("The Matrix': A Movie Review."):

"Transcendental phenomenology is in this sense the ultimate achievement of the teleology of reason that traverses humanity. Thus, under the jurisdiction of the founding concepts of metaphysics, which Husserl revives and restores (if necessary affecting them with phenomenological brackets or indices), the critique of empirical anthropologism is only the affirmation of a transcedental humanism." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 138.)

Finally, substitute "God" for the word "Being" in the following quote:

"So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way. As we have intimated, we always already conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us towards its completion. We do not know What is 'Being?', we keep within an understanding of the 'is,' though we are unable to fix conceptually what that 'is' signifies." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 140.)

"We" is a social term that implies Being. Mother and child imagery. This is true whether or not we know what is meant by Being. Derrida says: "God contradicts Himself already." But this is only in human "ontotheological" understandings that are made possible by our a priori assumptions concerning God/Being. God bleeds creation. God, in gnosticism, "sunders" Him- Herself to create man and woman. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")

This sets the stage for Foucault's critique and the feminist storm troopers, also for able defenders of the Enlightenment -- like Jurgen Habermas, Richard Wolin, Roger Scruton -- who oppose Derrida's linguistic interpretations of a kind of new Romanticism aligned with Gadamer's and Ricoeur's equally romantic-hermeneutics:

C. Foucault.

"As the archeology of our thought clearly shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things.

Foucault criticizes Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus because Derrida sets aside questions of truth to investigate the distinction between writing and speech. Derrida reverses Plato's preference for dialectic, that is, speech over writing. Foucault insists that this misunderstands Plato's primary concern with truth itself as distinct from rhetorical form or strategies.

Neither philosopher ponders Plato's concern both with truth and method -- Gadamer's classicism is not irrelevant to the title of his greatest work, "Truth and Method" -- or with language as the means by which truth is best approached. What is "snow"? For Plato, that best method towards truth is the "immediacy of speech." Derrida, essentially, sees immediacy as a feature of all language use -- including writing -- because, as John Fowles says, "the butterfly of meaning cannot be pinned to the page for long." (Again: "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

Derrida is an advocate of writing as a "play of signifiers," a kind of freedom of improvisation. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

Whatever the outcome of the Foucault/Derrida debate, the focus in the "Ends of Man" is upon the question of humanism together with post-structuralist doubts about humanity expressed after the Holocaust. Yes, this is a new surrealism. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")

Like Derrida, Foucault is usually classified as an antihumanist, typically on the basis of his poorly understood early work. It is certainly inaccurate to represent these French philosophers as simplistic deniers of truth or nihilists of any kind. Gertrude Himmelfarb's comments and criticisms of something she calls "postmodernism," for example, really refers to a bastardization of the views of several Continental philosophers, misunderstood by their American admirers, that are mixed with popular versions of Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism.

American "Whateverism" is indeed a version of a sophomoric or undergraduate twist on much more subtle Continental theories:

"Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide. Postmodernists boast that in rejecting metaphysics, they are also delivering themselves from humanism. In his essay 'The Ends of Man' (playing upon the two meanings of 'ends'), Derrida quotes Heidegger approvingly, 'Every humanism is metaphysical,' and goes on to explain that metaphysics is the 'other name of ontotheology.' Similarly, Foucault, in his celebrated account of the 'end of man,' mocks those who cling to the old humanism." (Himmelfarb, 'Postmodernist History,' in "On Looking Into the Abyss," at p. 160, then David Hoy, 'Derrida: Foucault's Critique,' in "The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences," at pp. 58-61.)

Derrida's work -- like Gadamer's and Ricoeur's hermeneutics -- is based on Heidegger's philosophical writings criticizing humanism as not humanistic enough.

"It remains that the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being, in the name of which Heidegger de-limits humanism and metaphysics, remains as thinking of man. Man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of Being as such as it is put to metaphysics. ... 'The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity ... Only thus does the overcoming of homelessness ... begin from Being, a homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man (das Wesen der Menschen) stumbles aimlessly about.' [Quoting Heidegger.] Therefore, this essence will have to be reinstated. 'But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being ... he must first learn to exist in the nameless (im Namenlosen).' In the same way he must first recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks (bevor er spricht) man must first let himself be claimed ["spoken"] again (wieder ansprechen) by Being, taking the risk that under this claim (Anspruch) [to be spoken] he will seldom have much to say. ..." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at 145.)

What Derrida and so much postmodernist thought opposes is a humanism that is a mask for a highly particular understanding of Western humanity, embodied (as Carlos Fuentes suggests) in "Aristocratic Europeans on a Sussex lawn." For John Locke, this ideal human nature was only imperfectly found in "savages, madmen, and all women." (Again: "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")

Hence, by virtue of being a woman -- as Mary Wollstonecraft observed -- one was denied the status of full humanity. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft" then "Cornel West and Universality.")

Heidegger, later Derrida, wants to get at something more primal about what it means to be human as a linguistic animal already placed in a language assigning essences to persons when we begin to think -- essences or universals that are inescapable, like man or woman, middle-aged, father or mother, philosopher, student, English-speaking, legal subject, citizen, and so on -- like standing in "snow" and then asking "What is snow?":

"Through this determination of the essence of man [persons] the humanistic interpretations of man as animal rationale, as 'person,' as spiritual-ensouled-bodily being, are not declared false and thrust aside. Rather, the sole implication is that the highest determinations of the essence of man in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man [and woman] ... To that extent the thinking in 'Being and Time' is against humanism. But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man. Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p,. 147, then Ratzinger's exchanges with Habermas should be seen: Jurgen Habermas & Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), pp. 67-81.)

If there is nothing outside the text, if human freedom only unfolds in the play of meanings -- the jazz between languages and what must always lie beyond our explanatory schemes -- the unspoken, or unspeakable, which is always changing as more is articulated or rearticulated, or the "noumenal" (Kant), that province "whereof we cannot speak" (Wittgenstein), then this "beyond" is where "being-towards-death" must unfold as our true humanity that is eternally spoken also eternally speaks itself. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

The current Pope's first encyclical is entitled: Humanitas. I believe that the Catholic church may be subject to some of the same criticisms that it is "not humanistic enough" if same-sex lovers and women are excluded or devalued in any way. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

This is a return to "ontotheology." Deconstruction is an escape from metaphysics that always leads us back to metaphysics. This is to step outside our concept of God in order to discover God. I am suggesting that Derrida's life-work cannot be understood as anything other than a religious journey or philosophical metanoia, as indeed Foucault's late stoicism and rediscovery of an early Christianity was a movement towards similar insights. I believe that Foucault's interest in gnostic Christianity and stoicism would have blossomed late in his life. ("Why Philosophy is for everyone.")

Derrida's philosophy opens on to a mysticism of the word that is an engagement with kaballism. Derrida's Jewishness, if you like, becomes more important and clearer as a philosophical source just as his life draws to a close. This is a development and enrichment, not a decline for Derrida. This mysticism of the word, logos, sees the speech/writing in which we are as the "house of Being."

Derrida's "humanism" -- if readers wish to use that forbidden word -- asserts that we are this freedom of self-creation amidst being spoken or created by our languages. We are a paradoxical "two-step" process developing, now, where improvising happens within our linguistic melodic schemes. That's jazz.

We are somehow "fitted" for this task of remaking the human world through a constant process of reinterpretation or "Deconstruction" -- for example, dismantling Western humanism to elevate what is excluded and denied, the female, dark-skinned, non-Western, gay/lesbian "other" that is already within and a part of us no matter who we are. This theme concerning freedom of self-invention as to gender or sexual-orientation -- whether expressed in cinematic or literary language -- is also the true subject of Vidal's (1968) masterpiece, Myra Breckinridge. G.C. Scott, His Mistress's Voice: An Erotic Novel (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), pp. 21-22. ("Her alternation between dominatrix and slave, and his own similar alternation, confused and delighted him ...")

If the reader wishes to hold an image in mind, picture a man and/or woman walking in snow, leaving their footprints, testing the density of the snow to gauge the direction in which to walk. The snow is language -- our music -- where we must stand in order to find our way home. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" and "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" then "snow" is transformed into darkness in my story: "Out of the Past.")

Our lives are realized in the embrace of that other, already within ourselves, in which we best recognize ourselves. This is to speak of love. Jean-Luc Marion takes up many of these themes -- also in an explicitly Christian context -- as do the great liberation theologians. A fruitful comparison to the work of Lezsek Kolakowski would be welcome.

Deconstruction leads to placement of that alienated "other" at center stage in philosophy. This is a truly subversive act. We tell the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy from the point of view of a butler or groom -- or slave -- not to deny the importance of those central characters, but in order to discover the equal reality of others who are close at hand. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters that you do on to me." ("Serendipity, III" and "Master and Commander.")

Derrida and Foucault meet in the newly-created theoretical space for the philosophical subject that is and must henceforth be a plurality. This is the space shaped by previously denied historical forces (Foucault), or linguistic forces (Derrida), that are pushed outside of ourselves, as Western persons, so as not to be seen inside ourselves, as "world-persons."

Saying this makes it necessary to insert "errors" -- or to detroy the messenger in America -- because it means that you do not have to worry about America "becoming colored" or Muslims in your neighborhood since all of these others are already a part of who you are in the twenty-first century. You cannot even begin to understand yourself any more without these terminologies and cultures that you have internalized long before you begin to philosophize about issues like identity or nationality. You have been deconstructed; you have also reconstructed yourself every day. ("America's Love of Violence" and "'The Island': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's work welcomes developments he may not have anticipated, such as feminist appropriations of his ideas and their use in the struggle of formerly colonial people for emancipation. In conclusion, I will turn to advocates of Enlightenment/Modernity and feminist theorists contributing to this discussion through their criticisms of Derrida's deconstructive project.

Conclusion.

Derrida's work has been criticized from the political Left by feminists and Critical School theorists claiming Derrida reinstates the Western subject as language-user. The subject "spoken" by a culture is only the Cartesian "I" in disguise. On the other hand, Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School challenge Derrida and the so-called "posties" -- i.e., postmodernists -- for neglecting epistemological foundations and displaying an excessively cavalier attitude to the classic texts of the discipline. Conservatives, like Richard Wolin and Roger Scruton, see Derrida's "deconstruction" as a dangerous abandonment of logical standards leading to nihilism or totalitarianism:

"Perhaps the most curious claim made by the disciples of Derrida is that the 'subject' has been finally abolished by the deconstruction of meaning. The self has been shown to be a fiction, by the argument that reference is impossible.. ["David Hume's Philosophical Romance."] In fact, however, nothing looms larger in the practice of deconstruction" -- or in phenomenology and hermeneutics -- "than the self -- the destruction of meaning is in reality the destruction of the other, the final revenge against Them. All that remains thereafter is the subject, who can choose what to think, what to feel and what to do, released from external constraints, and answerable to nothing and no one. [Sartre, Foucault] There are indeeed arguments, as I shall show, for the conclusion that the self -- at least as constructed by Descartes, and perhaps in its subsequent manifestations too -- is some kind of grammatical illusion. ... The suggestion that the subject is a fiction is itself a fiction [fictions may be painfully, if paradoxically, "real"] part of the attempt to claim over the objective world the kind of absolute sovereignty that attaches to a purely subjective view of things." (Scruton, "Modern Philosophy," at p. 479.) (Schopenhauer and Buddhism should be mentioned here.)

These criticisms are mistaken -- certainly as regards feminism -- but also as concerns the later "religious turn" in Derrida's thought which Conservatives should welcome. The other, as I have been at pains to show, is always with us in language:

"Though Derrida expresses ambivalence about some forms of feminism, a considerable amount of his work has been concerned with deconstructing the opposition between masculinity and femininity. From almost his earliest work, Derrida was interested in how sex, sexual difference, genealogy and women have figured in the history of philosophy, so much so that 'Of Grammatology' has been described as possessing a 'strangely feminist voice' (Jardine 1985, 188). In some early works, differance became the term for sexual differing and deferring, and an endless play of sexual differentiation, ["What You Will"] that would call into question sexual identity, and the certainty of being a thoroughly male man or a thoroughly female woman. Is anybody's maleness or femaleness definitive? It is a matter of a complex network of meanings for biology, behavior, sexuality, genealogy. Early in his work, we find Derrida playing with this question and casting into doubt the consistency with which he was, and wrote like, a man." (Deutscher, "How to Read Derrida," at pp. 47-48, emphasis added.)

The charge that deconstruction can be easily misread is powerful. The influence of Derrida's work on persons who have a non-existent grasp of the history of philosophy -- combined with vague exposure to something called "cultural theory" or knee-jerk, shallow, and trendy forms of feminism -- is often a sophomoric relativism and non-cognitivism in ethics. I have encountered and debated such people. The shockingly irresponsible and shallow disdain for truth claims and standards has to be experienced to be believed. I am sure that some of these people are among the computer criminals against whom I struggle. Sadly, Derrida's name is often invoked by such people. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Many of these poorly-informed people, furthermore, claim the authority of what they call, "postmodernism." This is really bizarre, especially when they mention the names of philosophers that they have not read or who have been grossly misunderstood by them, usually Derrida and also Foucault.

While Ms. Himmelfarb's critique is not especially cogent, philosophically, Professor Scruton is a serious and worthy opponent of "deconstructive analysis" whose criticisms cannot be easily dismissed. Much of the problem may be due to Derrida's experimentation with style or efforts to have his form of expression reflect his substantive theory. Some of Derrida's writings are highly opaque to all readers. Derrida does not disdain argument, he redefines argument to include a literary, cinematic, or demonstrative component. For this reason, I have not hesitated to use novels or films to illustrate Derrida's ideas. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

What I like about Derrida's work is the rediscovery of the joy or "eros" in philosophy. There is delight in intellectual and aesthetic play that accompanies Derrida's method of grappling with philosophical issues. His final religious insights are profound and merit respect. The sophistication and knowledge of philosophy which Derrida certainly does display is contagious. Philosophy should be a kind of creative and passionate improvising with friends -- friends like Plato and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel -- who become members of Derrida's band of jazz musicians. ("Hansel and Gretl" then "Conversation On a Train.")

I have heard Cornel West and Noam Chomsky lecture on themes close to Derrida's philosophical concerns. Derrida may certainly be thought of as their equal even if he was different from both American philosophers in style and terminology. ("David Hume's philosophical Romance.")

Derrida argues for an engaged philosophy that is skeptical without being cynical, political without ideology, ethical without tendentiousness, on the side of a politically-powerful feminism and against all forms of racism. The warmth of Derrida's personal response to me as a single insignificant person attending one of his lectures was not unusual. This is only one indication of the humanity and genuine quality of this great philosopher.

I am sure that Derrida's deconstruction will continue to be applied to the products of our global entertainment culture. Derrida's ideas will make their way into unsuspected areas of aesthetic endeavor, like cinema, also into our political conversation at the dawn of a new century and millennium. It is for the reader to decide whether this will be a good or bad development. (See, again, Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream.")

"The 'techno-mediatic power,' as well as its 'spectral effects,' must be analyzed, claims Derrida, in terms of its 'new speed of apparition': that is, in terms of 'the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance,' as well as 'the speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers.' ..." (Wolin, 'Afterword,' in "Labyrinths," at p. 238.) ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")

Sources:

Primary Sources:

Article:

Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 119-161.

Books:

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1974).
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Website:

http://www.hydra.edu/derrida/

Movies:

Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman "Derrida" (2002).
Fathy, Safaa, "Derrida's Elsewhere" (1999).

Periodicals:

Clive Thompson, "What is I.B.M.'s Watson?," in The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010, at p. 30.
Amy Harmon, "Circuitry With a Feel for Humanity," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A1. Amy Harmon, "Trying to Forge a Friendship With a Robot Named Bina48," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A11. (No mention of the "Turing Test"?)
Sean O'Hagan, "Interview: Meet Slavoj Zizek, Superstar of the New Left," in The Observer, June 27, 2010, at p. 10.

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Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
Michael Weston, "Derrida, Wittgenstein and the Question of Grounds," in Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 116-136. ("Burn Notice?")
John Wild, The Promise of Phenomenology: The Posthumous Papers of John Wild (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006), Richard I. Sugarman & Roger B. Duncan, eds.
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Mass., 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York: Verso, 1994).