The writer and essayist Benoît Peeters published in 2010 Derrida (Flammarion), the first biography of the philosopher. In an interview with “Le Monde des livres”, he returns to the current influence and place of this thought in a context which is evolving philosophically. He also questions the posterity of a work that is often difficult to find in bookstores, due to an editorial situation that has long been alarming.
How can we characterize the current reception of Jacques Derrida?
First, let's avoid confining her to her French and North American reading. In Latin America, Spain and even Asia, it is very present. Today it is a worldwide reception. In the United States, we know well that fashions come and go and that, after a somewhat astonishing popularity of French Theory and Derridism in universities, other thinkers have taken their place. Certainly, interest and curiosity around Derrida's work remains strong, but the immense and strange Derridaian wave has subsided a little. In France, this reception suffers from a simplistic use of the term “deconstruction”, which already infuriated Derrida. We transform deconstruction into a form of nihilism, of questioning everything and nothing. We forget that, for Derrida, it first meant a genealogy, a patient and careful reading, and not this crude concept used indiscriminately, even evoked in a polemical way as the cause of all our ills, of everything that goes wrong…
The recent discovery of the degree of Nazi and anti-Semitic commitment of Martin Heidegger [1889-1976] Did it have repercussions on the reception of Derrida, whose thought is influenced by the German philosopher?
The Heideggerian question actually constitutes an element likely to “damage” this reception. His support book, Of the mind. Heidegger and the question [Galilée, 1987]and his defense of Heidegger had a circumvented character which can be criticized. The finesse of Derrida's reading prevented him, in this case, from stating clearly what had been a form of Heidegger's allegiance to Nazism. However, I believe that Derrida's debt to the German philosopher diminishes as his work progresses. From the end of the 1980s, political, ethical and religious questions took on increasing importance. Here we see a movement which seems to respond indirectly to its criticisms. Derrida did not like people to talk about a “turning point”, but, in reality, when we look at the seminar on the question of responsibility [Répondre − du secret. Séminaire 1991-1992, Seuil, 2024]we see that his thinking detaches itself from a very old Heideggerian trace, specific to his generation. The meetings that many had wanted to organize between old Heidegger and Derrida never took place, and Derrida believed that it was not an accident.
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