More on Rodolphe Gasche on Derrida

by Steve Rodgers

Like Norris, Gasche thinks that we can't attempt to "master" Derrida by judging him as merely literary. Rather, we have to approach him philosophically. According to Gasche, Derrida's works--even his late works--question philosophy's laws and investigate its limits, from the inside. Here he sings in tune with Norris.

Yet it should be noted that Gasche makes it clear that if "philosophy" is identified with "one special technique of argumentation" (1), then Derrida's work cannot be called "philosophical." This may surprise us. But we need to keep in mind that for Gasche, Derrida's work is philosophical only insofaras it is "mediated" by traditional philosophical problems and methods of problem solving (2). He doesn't say Derrida is arguing with one special philosophical technique--he gives him a little more freedom than that--but he does say that Derrida's thrust is philosophical, that (and in this way he resembles Norris) Derrida "positively recast[s]" philosophy's possibilities--by deconstructing them (2).

But, in Gasche's mind, Derrida deconstructs philosophy because he thinks it is "absolutely indispensable" (2). Here I take exception. By terming philosophy "absolutely indispensable," he, like Norris, unnecessarily glosses over Derrida's playful and poetic side. (In Gasche's book The Tain of the Mirror, for instance, he virtually ignores Derrida's most daring and poetic works written after The Truth in Painting [1978].)

Gasche believes, in fact, that Derrida's entire output is, largely, continuously philosophical, in the sense described above: "I believe firmly that all the motifs of the earlier texts continue to inform and direct Derrida's more 'playful' texts" (4). Philosophy, then, even when defined rather loosely, still hovers behind play. It becomes, in fact, the standard by which play is defined; that is, play is only play because it is not philosophy, because it is deviant from philosophy. Accordingly, Gasche distinguishes between a discursive and non-discursive manner of making philosophical arguments (in this sense, "Plato's Pharmacy" would be more discursive than The Post Card). But as we can see, these definitions themselves are derived from the rubric of philosophy.