Derrida and Descartes

What is it about?

I argue that Descartes enjoys a larger, more important, and more sympathetic role in Derrida's writing than is perhaps generally assumed. Descartes is, indeed, in many contexts, often taken as all-too-well-known, and easily encapsulated, while names like Nietzsche, or Heidegger, seem more evidently to signal difficulties that must be confronted. I take, however, Derrida's remark, in an early essay, that we are too familiar with Descartes, as a cue to defamiliarise. What emerges is a a Descartes with some kinship to that of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. This article is part of a broader project looking at mastery, not just as a theme of critical theory, but as something with which theory has to contend within itself. To put it bluntly, a masterly critique of mastery could scarcely claim to have overcome mastery. Then again, failure is hardly an option. For me, Derrida's struggle with this double bind is exemplary; then again I want to resist simply turning Derrida into my master, and thereby a means of mastering others. Derrida's late seminars on the beast and the sovereign mark an intensification of Derrida's engagement with these problems, and Descartes plays an important role in them which it is my concern to trace.

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Why is it important?

In all spheres of public debate, from mainstream media to social media comment threads, polemical and reductive forms of argument are on the rise, dominated by charges and counter-charges of bullying, privilege, and mendacity. A difficult philosopher such as Derrida may seem to be at a considerable remove from such spheres. Then again, one of the most vital contemporary debates, over trans and feminism, has an evident relation to the work of Judith Butler, another difficult 'poststructuralist'. I write in the belief that there are links, however convoluted, obscure, and unpredictable, between seemingly rarified academic debate, and everyday activism; and in the hope that thinking hard with Derrida can help to think through the relations between argument and power in ways that neither simply deny mastery nor enjoy it surreptitiously, and that can help to do justice to the difficulty of ideas without doing violence to those who advocate them.

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