Derrida’s Relevance

Andrew Kingston (bio)

A review of Crockett, Clayton. Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism. Fordham UP, 2017.

Clayton Crockett has written and edited multiple books on theology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary continental theory. Derrida after the End of Writing represents his first text explicitly dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. In this book, Crockett covers a great deal of Derrida’s later interventions in religion and politics, while also situating them in relation to several somewhat recent philosophical trends like “New Materialism,” “Speculative Realism,” and “Object-oriented Ontology.” In doing so, Crockett’s book constellates a number of important points of potential connection between Derrida and these materialist strains of continental thought, some of which dismiss deconstruction as only a theory of language. While Crockett’s premises sometimes seem to concede too much to this popular mischaracterization of Derrida’s work, his text should be commended for its attempt to open new avenues for intellectual debate at the intersections of deconstruction, theology, politics, and (new) materialisms. This book will probably appeal most to contemporary materialist thinkers who might be deconstruction-curious; conversely, it would also work well as a primer for Derrida scholars with an interest in productively engaging with new materialist philosophies.

The book opens with the contention that Derrida’s thought “remains important” and that “it cannot be relegated to the dust-bin of some late-twentieth-century linguistic idealism and subjectivist constructivism.” Crockett qualifies this statement by noting that “something changes in Derrida’s work” around the late 1980s (1); or, more precisely, “something has changed in the background or the cultural and intellectual context of how we read him.” For Crockett, this shift is especially marked in Derrida’s oeuvre by a move away from what Catherine Malabou calls a “motor scheme” of writing, and toward another scheme—toward “the machinic, teletechnology, or technoscience,” toward Malabou’s own idea of “plasticity,” and through this toward certain possible materialist readings. The book thus begins by introducing a division into Derrida’s thought, and asking “what it would mean to read Derrida beyond the scheme of writing” (2). Another, quite different iteration of Crockett’s opening gambit, then, would be that Derrida can only “remain important” or demonstrate a “continuing relevance” (2-3) today to the extent that we can overcome a supposedly outmoded schema of writing in order to show instead “how the so-called linguistic paradigm was already a material paradigm” (9). This ultimatum is more explicitly stated toward the end of the book: “The question that drives this book is whether Derrida’s philosophy has a future, and its tentative suggestion is that this answer depends on the extent to which it can be released from writing” (112). Such a claim will inevitably energize some readers and irritate others, though the book’s stated intention is to interrogate the ways that Derrida’s thought “is important and relevant beyond simple polemics (whether pro or anti)” (3).

Crockett seeks to accomplish this paradigm shift, from writing to a “non-reductionist materialism,” not only through appeals to science later in his text, but also through sustained discussions of the material dimensions of religion and politics. It is in these discussions of religion and politics that the book is at its strongest. By the end of his introduction, Crockett locates one potential inroad to a materialist reading of Derrida along these lines—despite Derrida’s general suspicion of materialisms, which Crockett acknowledges (3)—in the semiotic overdetermination of the word “force” in Derrida’s work. Setting up some of the central concerns of the book, he reads “force” through texts like Carl Rashke’s Force of God, Derrida’s “Force and Signification” and “Force of Law,” and finally the idea that

Energy is force, forces, and these forces make us—they are us. These energy forces are at one and the same time fully material and fully spiritual. Here is where materialism, religion, and politics, including the themes and concerns of political theology, intersect.(11)

Unfortunately, this confluence of forces is left relatively underdeveloped in the book. Even so, over its eight main chapters, Derrida after the End of Writing presents a series of provocative insights like this one, through which Derrida might be brought into a closer—if ultimately asymptotic—relation with the materialist currents that dominate contemporary continental thought today.

In the first half of the book, Crockett takes religion as “a mode for Derrida to articulate deconstruction beyond the constraints of writing in a narrow sense” (25). The text goes on to describe religion not as any isolated institution, but as a wider set of principles that have been diffused (as Max Weber described, for instance) throughout the hegemonic structures of capitalism and Western culture more generally (32). From this perspective, toward the end of Chapter 2, Crockett offers a noteworthy commentary on the character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, vis-à-vis Derrida’s reading of the play in “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” and Gil Anidjar’s Blood: A Critique of Christianity. Following Derrida, Crockett observes how Shylock and his forced conversion act as a figure of the relève (or sublation) by Christianity of that which would oppose it, whether theologically, politically, or economically; the violently sublating “ruse of mercy” described by Shakespeare’s play, and through which Shylock is made to convert to Christianity under duress, thus becomes an important “site of the link between the theological and the political, which Derrida wants to deconstruct” (Crockett 38). The book pursues this complex relationship of the theological and the political through several Derridean figures, such as “auto-immunity” (47)—or as Derrida calls it elsewhere, “auto-co-immunity” (Acts of Religion 87). But again, in terms of Crockett’s overall argument, what ties these political and religious topics together is that they “are not figures of writing; they constitute an opening to another form of conceptuality” (Crockett 47).

These early inquiries—into religion, politics, economics, and community—then lead Crockett toward an explication of what he calls (as the title of Chapter 3) a “political theology without sovereignty” in Derrida’s later thought. In other words, after showing that religion is always already political, Crockett wants also to demonstrate that the political is always already religious; but in contrast to Carl Schmitt’s idea of a political theology (i.e., the secularization of theological concepts in politics, transcendentally guaranteed by a God-like form of sovereignty), Crockett explores the possibility of a kind of political theology of the event, which unsettles the idea of sovereignty upon which Schmitt’s political theology relies. He locates this twist on political theology in Derrida’s later Blanchotian formulations of “messianicity without messianism” and “religion without religion” (50), after which he briefly begins to think through what such a non-sovereign understanding of political theology would mean for the contemporary world, by raising questions of ecology, global politics, and religious fundamentalism. Although these questions are brought up in a more or less cursory manner, they do point to the many crucial ways in which Derrida’s thought remains pertinent to this time in history, with its perpetual crises and impossible decisions.

Another aspect of this book that is worth pausing over is a discussion that takes place primarily in Chapter 5, which puts a Derridean ethics into conversation with Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects and with “Object-oriented Ontology.” In doing so, this chapter contains perhaps the text’s most compelling and original contribution to contemporary trends in continental thought. Its argument begins from Derrida’s move toward Heidegger at the end of his reading of Paul Celan in “Rams” (the subject of the book’s fourth chapter), in which Derrida problematizes Heidegger’s famous statement that “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming” (qtd. in Crockett 67). Crockett suggests that contemporary theories of objects can offer productive ways to continue to destabilize what is specifically human in this Heideggerian idea of “world.” This would be accomplished not (only) in relation to the supposedly world-poor animal—which Derrida already often addressed and was addressed by—but in relation to the worldless stone, which is to say in relation to the worldless and inanimate object. In this regard, Crockett claims that Object-oriented Ontology provides a way to think about how the worldlessness of inanimate objects can call us into asymmetrical ethical relationships with them, precisely due to our “inability to respond adequately to them” (85), our inability to respond to a radical otherness that confronts us through their lack of world. From this orientation toward the worldless object, Crockett turns back to Derrida, and toward the possibility that an ethical relationship might arise at the moment when, in Celan’s words, “Die Welt ist fort”—from which it follows that “ich muß dich tragen:”

The World is gone. Derrida says that “as soon as I am obliged, from the instant when I am obliged to you, when I owe, when I owe it to you, owe it to myself to carry you, as soon as I speak to you and am responsible for you, or before you, there can no longer, essentially, be any world.” (85; slightly altered due to typographical error in the text)

Similarly, Crockett cites Derrida’s phrase tout autre est tout autre (which is something of a subtheme throughout the text) as another ethical injunction to be read in light of the worldless object: “If every other is every other, that does not simply mean all human others who exist in Kantian terms as rational moral beings. Derrida’s late work, in particular, has the purpose of questioning the status of the human and its relation to nonhuman others, in a way that has not always been fully acknowledged” (92). These non-human others, for Crockett, should include objects.

After this central discussion of objects, the book’s three final chapters address three contemporary thinkers whose work is indebted to Derrida: John D. Caputo, Catherine Malabou, and Karen Barad. What ties these chapters to one another and to the rest of the book is, again, the contention that each develops Derrida’s thought outside of a paradigm of writing. While Crockett’s reading of Caputo’s theology can be more easily understood in terms of the text’s earlier claims, his last two chapters rather abruptly pivot toward interpretations of Derrida in relation to the sciences—namely, neuroscience (Malabou) and theoretical physics (Barad). While these chapters are informative and interesting, they come across as more isolated from the broader arguments that Crockett sets up in the first half of his text. They certainly provide helpful discussions of further potential avenues for materialist reinterpretations of Derrida, but at the same time they tend to diminish some of the more unique contributions that Crockett himself makes (such as his readings of Derrida and political theology, or his juxtaposition of a Derridean ethics with Object-oriented Ontology). But if the reader is curious about the legacies of Derrida’s thought in Caputo, Malabou, or Barad, Crockett manages to condense a large amount of information into brief, readable overviews. There are also provocative observations about Derrida’s non-concept of différance in relation to physics at the end of the chapter on Barad.

The main body of the book more or less ends after these final surveys. In place of a conclusion, one finds an afterword, titled “The Sins of the Fathers—A Love Letter,” which is not meant to summarize the book’s argument or build upon its previous chapters; instead, the afterword is written as a highly personal and confessional piece, through which Crockett “reflects more personally on Derrida in relation to love, fatherhood, and mourning” (139). Here Crockett denounces the pervasiveness within the discipline of philosophy of what Derrida called phallogocentrism, as well as the ways in which cis male philosophers consciously or unconsciously perpetuate its patriarchal order by identifying with other male philosophers as surrogate father figures (144). To that end, Crockett cedes the end of his book to a number of female-identifying philosophers such as Malabou, Bracha Ettinger, and Catherine Keller. This is a constructive gesture, though its reliance on heterosexual familial metaphor is perhaps unnecessary. Overall, however, Crockett’s explicit recognition of sexism in philosophy (and across academia) is an extremely important intervention to continue to make—and the vulnerability with which he lays out this problem is admirable.

One issue with this book is its scope, or more precisely the relationship between its scope and its size. Among other topics, Derrida after the End of Writing addresses Derrida’s thought on both Christianity and religion in general, his deconstructions of sovereignty, and his readings of Celan and Heidegger, situating these topics alongside Caputo’s weak theology, Malabou’s notion of plasticity, Morton’s hyperobjects, Meillassoux’s theory of “correlationism,” and Barad’s engagements with theoretical physics. It does all this in 156 pages (really 138, excluding the afterword). Unavoidably, then, the text is unable to spend much time developing any one of its claims, and instead adopts a mode of writing that could be called exploratory or even manifesto-like.

Secondly, given the spatial constraints of the book, it unfortunately leaves out a number of other texts that would have contributed to or even altered its arguments. For instance, although Crockett acknowledges that Derrida “certainly kept a critical distance from materialism” (3), he does not go any further in demonstrating or giving reasons for this critical distance. The book’s engagements with the new materialisms would have been strengthened by addressing Derrida’s own complicated relation to materialisms in general (as he outlined it, for example, in Positions 62-67). Additionally, in a text that interprets Derrida in relation to materialism and later in relation to the sciences, it is strange not to see acknowledgments of other efforts (outside Malabou and Barad) to think explicitly about these relations. For example, the book might have mentioned Arkady Plotnitsky’s Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, Claire Colebrook’s “Matter Without Bodies,” or the more recent work of Francesco Vitale on Derrida and biology, such as his 2014 essay, “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction.” The latter investigates Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar, La vie la mort, in which he analyzes the work of French biologist François Jacob alongside figures of life (and) death in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Freud. There are also more recent texts on this seminar that Crockett could not have taken into account, but that should now be considered in relation to his text, such as Vitale’s Biodeconstruction, Dawne McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death, and the recent French publication of the seminar itself.

Finally, there remains the question of writing, its “end,” and the suspicions that such a proclamation might raise with some readers of Derrida. Such readers might dispute not only that there is an “end” of writing, but also that “writing” has a stable enough identity within Derrida’s oeuvre that it could have a beginning or end in the first place. For example, one might point out that if indeed a notion of writing can be said to be privileged in Derrida’s early work, this privilege is usually derived more from the historical and philosophical portrayal of writing as a figure of exteriority or of derivativeness, and less from a desire on Derrida’s part to view the world through the lenses of semiotics or linguistics. Further, these readers might say, Derrida often discussed writing alongside other terms that are not primarily linguistic, such as “the supplement” or “spacing;” when he does focus on writing specifically, it is not in order to make everything into a text but in order to make very specific interventions in the history of Western philosophy—for example (as in Voice and Phenomenon), to destabilize the mechanisms of “auto-affection” that produce and reinforce the supposed interior selfsameness of the phenomenological subject. If, for reasons like these, this figure of writing does not simply present what Derrida calls a “vulgar [vulgaire] concept of writing” (Of Grammatology 56), then to propose a split in his work whereby one might move beyond writing is already to pose a complex question (plurium interrogationum), according to which the inextricably contextual functions of writing in Derrida’s work would need to be first universalized and reified before this figure could be superseded by another “scheme.” Derrida’s early arguments, in other words, cannot be consolidated around a unified question of writing without removing them from the particular ways they use this figure in relation to different aspects of the Western metaphysical tradition. To suggest that Derrida’s early philosophy can be understood in terms of writing, then, is something like saying that the Odyssey can be understood in terms of sailing: yes, there is a lot of it, but that is not the whole story.

Crockett is well aware of this. Reading his text closely reveals a consistent hesitation concerning the false dilemma inherent in the idea of an after or an end of writing. For instance, he makes many statements like “[w]riting is always already material, and Derrida was never a linguistic or transcendental idealist” (6); or “we ignore the complexities of language at our peril” (9); or “most readers assume that différance is a purely linguistic phenomenon. I think this is a misunderstanding of Derrida.” Shortly after this last statement, Crockett writes: “There is no proper Derrida, but there are more interesting, relevant, and compelling iterations of Derrida’s thought” (138). In the end, the book returns to the question of relevance with which it began. This is a book concerned with relevance, written by someone who is genuinely concerned with the fate of Derrida’s thought in a now predominantly materialist episteme. But in positing an end of writing, it is also a book concerned with the relève, with the sublation of writing and of Derrida—not into an Absolute Knowledge but into a New Materialism. Like Derrida in his essay on translation, one would want to emphasize the violence intrinsic to this question of relevance. But from another, more pragmatic perspective, it is also the case—rightly or wrongly—that the possibility of so much worthwhile intellectual dialogue depends on the question of relevance, which often determines whether a reader will open one book, or another, or none at all. In the interest of furthering this dialogue, Crockett’s text offers an impressively wide-ranging and insightful look at Derrida’s engagements with religion and politics, while also outlining ways that deconstruction might be brought to bear on some of the current relevancies in continental theory. In its own way, then, it offers its reader a spoonful of materialist sugar to help the pharmakon go down.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2002.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected Edition, Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1981.