Delacampagne Views
Delacampagne writes a bird’s eye view of Derrida the political figure, through which his philosophy seems subject to a deconstruction similar to the one he practiced himself. The essay proclaims itself a check of Derrida’s politically active coherence, but the lens through which Delacampagne connotes judgment on his political character seems to violate the solidarity of the text while dismissing Derrida’s own textual explorations on the ethics of political action.
Faithful to the promise of democracy, we next see Derrida turning away from a centralized hope in the Proletariat by joining the student’s movement as lecturer and teaching (to anyone with an interest) from the viewpoint of the most politically “left” in the class. Derrida breaks a fundamental rule of the institution in his radical teaching style and is (supposedly) covered by Althusser, his friend, the Secretary General of the ENS, a friend on the inside. Delacampagne mentions this incident in a framework of Derrida’s political actions (being called into ‘coherence’) but appears more (less constructively) concerned with the license of political confidence Derrida provides for himself at this point, while teaching a “collective” thinking to his students.
Something like a thesis emerges from Delacampagne halfway through the essay, after a more preliminary proclamation in which Derrida is accused of a philosophy which had “from the very beginning, a political turn—“(867)—he states; “And yet Derrida never accepted to appear as a hostage of his students on the far left or, still worse, of the PCF. He wanted to behave as a free person, and, to a large extent, he succeeded in doing so in the course of the next three decades.” (867)
An activity list of Derrida’s issues and actions takes up the next page of text, in which he is animated like a cartoon across the reader’s chain of international-political image referents. Acutely aware of otherness and the call to responsibility, Derrida seems to obtain ‘freedom’ in answering multiple calls, the subjects of which link him back to a belief in the Marxism he spent so long alienating himself from. This contradiction of position, whose parts (in text) could be easily enunciated and divorced, bears no weapon under the eye of political action. The epitome of Derrida’s flawed political action, according to Delacampagne, is not to be found in the self-slipping contradiction of actions themselves, but in an assertion that Derrida’s movement to and from political stances depended primarily on a pathological, cheap and necessary rejection of whatever the current ‘mainstream ideology’ was.
Delacampagne Images
