…there can only be one ultimate end of all the operations of the mind. To this all other aims are subordinate, and nothing more than means for its attainment. This ultimate end is the destination of man, and the philosophy which relates to it is termed moral philosophy. The superior position occupied by moral philosophy, above all other spheres for the operation of reason… (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Method)
Derrida found himself in a difficult situation in the 1960s. That is, if knowledge and truth are "tools of power" (Foucault's phrase), then, as a philosopher, he had to deal in knowledge and truth (therefore “tools of power). At least that's what traditional philosophers had attempted to do. So how could he offer his readers truths about, say, the "clandestine friendship [between] light [and power]” without becoming part of the problem (as he conceived it)? Wasn't he in a Catch 22 situation? He wanted to uncover this "clandestine friendship", amongst other things, but could only do so by using the tools of one half of that "clandestine friendship" (i.e. "light"). So, on the surface, he appeared not to use them. But I think that this was essentially a gimmick (if a well-meaning one). He didn't forgo truth, knowledge and logic; he simply disguised them with poetic prose, games, humour, puns and the rest of the Derridean weaponry. If he had truly given up on knowledge, truth and logic he would have had nothing to say because you can't say anything without at least a semblance of truth, logic and the rest. So Derrida may well have been a 20th century Protagoras. The Greek "sophist" offered his audiences one argument only to immediately contradict it with a counter-argument. However, Protagoras could only have done so, self-evidently, within the realms of logic. Indeed it takes a more logically acute mind to offer people two equally powerful yet contradictory arguments in succession. And the same was partly true in Derrida's case. And what's wrong with playing the sophist in this respect? Why shouldn't both sides of the argument be given equal treatment, rather than the pretence of an equal treatment that we often find in many philosophical works?
Just as moral philosophy was Kant's First Philosophy (he didn't use that term), so too for Derrida; though, unlike Kant, he never really acknowledged this. This may have been for reasons similarly to those in the case of Marxists. That is, many Marxists, at least at one time, rejected all morality. Morality was, after all, a bourgeois invention;; therefore it wasn't for them. But underneath much Marxist theory and practice, underneath the proselytising and the zealotry, the devotion, the enthusiasm, the dogmatism, was a moral passion that could not be spoken. Marxists, or at least a certain type of Marxist, simply erased the word "morality" from their vocabulary; but the moral impulse remained. But what if morality need not have been exclusively bourgeois after all ? And the same was true of Derrida.
So, in the second half of the 1960s, morality and ethics were tainted with the bourgeois brush. Derrida was not a Marxist. (He detected large chunks of the tradition of western metaphysics in Marxism.) However, the suspicions of bourgeois morality were still of course prevalent, and, no doubt, Derrida to some extent followed this trend. Let's not forget that morality was deemed to be a tool of oppression; much more so than something as abstract as "truth" or "knowledge" in Foucault's sense. It was seen as being almost on par with politics. Morality, since Marx (and before), was seen as a way of controlling not just the working class, but, in terms contemporary with the 1960s, "the Other" too. (And we now know that in the 1980s and 1990s onwards, Derridean moral philosophy, which I think is the correct term, or post-structuralist ethics, became puritan in form, just as Marxist morality in its own way had become so before it.)
Levinas, a very strong influence on Derrida in the early days, was fairly explicit about his ethical stance. Derrida borrowed and adopted many of his terms and ideas. Anyway, here is Derrida in moral mode:
Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. (1967/1978)
Indeed Derrida detected a "friendship" between knowledge itself ("light") and "power":
That ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession. (as above)
Foucault put it less grandiloquently when he said that "truth is a tool of power". (And didn't Francis Bacon say something similar?) Of course Derrida's statements weren't about politics, or even political theory or philosophy. They weren't even about moral philosophy or theory. It was philosophy itself that was a "tool of power". More specifically, it was ontology that was the prime culprit. Prima facie, the fact that ontology, of all the divisions of philosophy, was seen as capable of "violence", seems very strange at first. After all, ontology, being part of metaphysics, seems one of the most distant branches of philosophy from the Real World. We could see the point with, say, political philosophy or moral philosophy, or even the philosophy of science, but ontology? (Derrida's reference to "phenomenology" is too much of a localised phenomenon to comment upon here.) As I said, much was learned from Levinas, but, perhaps, it was Heidegger who set this particular ball rolling with his anti-Aristotelian, Duns Scotian, and pre-Socratic position. This is Derrida quoting Heidegger:
'If the other could be possessed, seized, and known, it would not be the other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.' (as above)
At first glance this passage could be seen by some to be a good description of the scientific approach. And, of course, the negative aspects of the "western scientific spirit" have been well commented upon. The Baconian position springs to mind and particularly his reference to "torturing nature" so it will "give up its secrets". But ontology is like First Science or Primary Science. It is a broader more generalised science. It deals with wider more metaphysical generalisations. Ontology tells us about objects in general, whereas science tells us about particular objects or natural kinds of objects. Ontology asks us what is an event. Science tells us what events consist in. Science does indeed "seize" and "possess" and have "power" over nature (or at least its technological child does). But ontology set the agenda. It set the ball rolling. An ontologist would perhaps have been keen to tell us that he looks into the soul of nature, whereas the scientist gets his hands dirty on its body. The scientist cannot see the wood for the trees. (And perhaps the ontologist cannot see the trees for the wood.)
Did the "technico-political" powers really need the ontologists, of all people? Was it the case that ontology really did have an influence on science and its practitioners? But what about, for a start, that great proto-empiricist, Francis Bacon? His strong reaction against Aristotelian ontology is well known. However, it was indeed a reaction. And like all reactions, it was a reaction against something. Just as “the tradition of Western metaphysics” shaped and moulded both Derrida and Heidegger (as Hegel had moulded Marx), so too did Aristotelian ontology mould Bacon (despite his violent reaction against it). And we know how ontologically literate the scientists were in the early days of science. Indeed, it couldn't have really been any other way if we remember that science, after all, grew out of ontology and metaphysics generally.
Today, of course, such a Derridean stance towards philosophy (but mainly science) is de rigueur within certain environments, or at least less refined versions of it. So we get the cultural theorist Camille Paglia saying the following in the early 1990s:
…the west's quest for form. The west insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know, to know is to control. (1992)
(It is strange, therefore, that in the same book she should talk of "pernicious French imports" and their "turgid texts".)
According to Derrida, the very claim of "objectivity", which comes along with knowing, is also a claim of or to power. If you have "theoretical objectivity" you more or less have the truth. If you more or less have the truth, you are in a special or superior position. If you are in a special and superior position you have, or should have, power over those who are victims of meresubjectivity (and, no doubt, irrationality). And if the theoretical objectivists had the truth or the keys to the truth, then those with "technico-political" power wanted the keys to the theoretical objectivists. (I should stress here that Derrida is not talking about single truths or single pieces of knowledge, etc., but systems of truth or knowledge.) Whether or not Derrida's historical genealogy of truth and objectivity is correct is for someone else to decide, but what are the philosophical implications of such a position?
Regardless of the dangerous liaison between "theoretical objectivity and technico-political" power, according to the Heidegger passage earlier and Derrida himself, ontology itself, whether or not it was befriended by "technico-political" power, indulges in the practices of control and power.
Let's recall that Heidegger passage earlier:
If the other could be possessed, seized, and known…all synonyms of power. (From Being and Time)
Yes, if you possess something you almost self-evidently have power over it. And certainly if you seize something. But what about knowing something? For a start, it seems straightforwardly wrong. I can know something about x, without my knowledge having the slightest effect on x. How can knowledge itself be an act of power? Knowledge can lead to acts of power (just as science can lead to nuclear destruction, but isn't itself nuclear destruction), but knowledge itself doesn't appear to be power. The Heidegger quote above, therefore, seems like a poeticism. We may come to know that people are starving in a certain country, and help do something to alleviate the problem. I suppose that alleviation of a problem would thereby still be power - a positive act of power. Here again, however, the knowledge that people were starving in a certain country lead to, but was not the same as, the following political alleviation of suffering.
Surely Heidegger and Derrida didn't make the simple logical mistake of believing that if A leads to certain negative consequences, that therefore A must always and necessarily lead to negative consequences. Philosophy can indeed be abused (it depends, though, on what you deem to be abuse), and so can science, but so too can paracetamols, cars and even, perhaps, Derridean post-structuralism. I suppose if ontology was exclusively in the hands of "technico-political" power in the past, Derrida may have been factually correct in his conclusions. But this was never the case. And even if it had been the case, the ontologists of power could have bitten the hands that fed (as also happened historically). This prompts the question: Was Derrida simply doing an historical survey of philosophy, or was he doing the philosophy of philosophy (or meta-philosophy)? The fact is that he attempted to do both, but it is worthwhile to make the distinction because of the importance of the concept of "historicity" in continental philosophy. This itself brings in another dimension to Derrida and much continental philosophy: it is essentially inter-disciplinary, hence Derrida's psychologisms too (to co-opt and misuse a useful technical term).
Didn't Derrida know lots of things about that abstract object or Platonic idea he called "Western Metaphysics"? Didn't he know that "theoretical objectivity and technico-political" power formed a "clandestine friendship"? Didn't he know that "phenomenology and ontology" were "philosophies of violence"? Didn't Western Metaphysics have a "discrete identity" as an - abstract - "object" (Paglia, 1992)? Didn't he indulge in a "quest for form" as he travelled through the annals of Western Metaphysics?
You need knowledge and "form" just as much to liberate as you do to oppress. And you need logic, data, evidence, consistency and coherency to liberate as well as to oppress. However, as I said, such things did indeed exist in early Derrida. He was systematic, coherent, logical, etc. He was also poetic (as were Wittgenstein and Nietzsche), rhetorical, mocking, humouress, sophisticated and seemingly anti-systematic. However, all this was on the surface. He was saying something with his style as well as through his style. Derrida rejected the philosophy-literature dualism (or "binary opposition"), as did Wittgenstein (at times), Nietzsche and many other philosophers. Perhaps, of all people, so too did Heidegger. (Even David Lewis, the possible wordlist, game player and analytic philosophy’s own Derrida, tells jokes and uses the odd explicit metaphor in his papers.) But, as I said, Derrida knew that he knew these things. And he may have known that some of his readers knew that he knew that he knew some of these things. Let's not forget that the rejection or denial or both of knowledge, truth and logic was itself a disguised logical stratagem utilised to effect certain philosophical but primarily moral/political goals. A philosopher brought up in the tradition of Descartes, Kant and Husserl could hardly have carried out a Cartesian or Husserlian Reduction on himself and simply erased his own logical grammar, so to speak. Logic would have been second nature to Derrida (despite what his detractors said and still say).
We must also acknowledge and agree with Derrida that knowledge can indeed lead to "possession" and oppression of "Being" and "the Other". Knowledge (and science) has been and continues to be seized by "technico-political" power. But, again, let's not forget that knowledge can lead in the opposite direction too. For example, doesn't the knowledge that chimpanzees share 98% of our genes contribute to our re-evaluation of our attitude to certain animals? Doesn't our knowledge that certain philosophers at certain times have endorsed an oppressive status quo make us sceptical about certain contemporary philosophical positions? Doesn't our knowledge that knowledge is (can be) power lead us to be on our guard to its abuse? That is, we can have knowledge about knowledge (just as we can apply truth to truth and logic to logic).
However, perhaps I'm using all these terms a little too platonistically here. Perhaps Heidegger and Derrida shouldn't have platonised knowledge and turned it thereby into Knowledge. That is, into a determinate abstract object with specific - negative - conceptual criteria of identity. We should acknowledge Michael Williams's recognition of the platonisation (not his way of putting it) of knowledge:
The epistemological realist thinks of knowledge in very much the way the scientific realist thinks of heat: beneath the surface diversity there is structural unity. (1991)
On the other hand, it is wrong to think "that knowledge has any fixed, context-independent structure"?.
The Comfort of Systems
The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter - from a gifted friend who died too young - these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals, and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong."…we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question "what is the truth" is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural… (William James, Pragmatism, VII)
Pure truth or the pretension to pure truth is missed in its meaning as soon as one attempts…to account for it from within a determined historical totality, that is, from within a factual totality, a finite totality all of whose manifestations and cultural productions are structurally solidary and coherent, and are all regulated by the same function, by the same finite unity of a total subjectivity. This meaning of truth, or of the pretension to truth, is the requirement of an absolute, infinite omni-temporality and universality, without limits of any kind. The Idea of truth, that is the Idea of philosophy or of science, is an infinite Idea, an Idea in the Kantian sense. Every totality, every finite structure is inadequate to it. Now the idea or the project which animates and unifies every determined historical structure, every 'weltanschauung', is finite: on the basis of the structural description of a vision of the world one can account for everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy. (Derrida, from ‘Genesis and Structure’)
I think it is clear that Derrida was not talking about single truths in the above. Would he have denied, for example, the arithmetical truth that 2+2=4 or even the logical truth that if A=B=C then A=C (though he has made pronouncements about logic, specifically the law of identity)? He wouldn't have had a problem with certain empirical truths either, such as Tony Blair being the Prime Minister of Great Britain or daffodils usually being yellow. Perhaps even certain scientific truths may have been acceptable (again, despite his animadversions against - western - science). No, it sounds to me that Derrida was thinking about Truth with a capital "T". A concept of truth that is far more refined and dignified than mere single truths. He doesn't, in that paper, use a platonic capital.for truth. However, he does talk about "the Idea of truth…in the Kantian sense" ().
Indeed, the more one thinks about it the more it is obvious to all but the most naïve anti-Derridean that Derrida couldn't have been against truth (in whatever form). The logic is painfully simple. All I need to ask is: Is it true that "the Idea of truth is an infinite Idea"? Derrida would have said yes. Similarly, if Derrida had believed that "the Idea of truth is an infinite Idea" at t¹, and also at t², then he would have believed in logical consistency. He would have also believed in the law of identity. That is, the statement "the Idea of truth is an infinite Idea" at t¹ would be the same statement as "the idea of truth…" at t² (or at least a token of the same type). As I said, it's hardly worthwhile making these points because by doing so I may well be missing Derrida's point.
I think that Derrida was talking about systems not single truths. This would include conceptual schemes, belief-systems, axiom systems, logical systems, political ideologies and religious systems, but, most relevantly, philosophical systems. Within all these systems, mere single truths like 2+2=4 or even most swans are white are pretty feeble entities. A system, or, to use Derrida's term, a "totality", wants to offer us much more than a single truth, or a group of truths or even a large group of truths. It wants to offer us something that is an "absolute" of "omni-temporality and universality", something "without limits of any kind". Something transcendent. Perhaps something which makes it quasi-religious in nature; even in the case, or perhaps especially in the case, of a logical or mathematic system!
This is not only an attack on the psychology behind system-belief and system-infatuation. It is, I think, also a philosophical argument against such systems being able to offer up "infinite omni-temporality and universality".Derrida sees western philosophy itself as the macro system. The abstract object that is Western Philosophy, to Derrida, encapsulates a whole host of micro systems that adhere to that macro system's pronouncements.
The psychological penchant for systems is well known to psychologists (Cf. Freud). The psychological need for a religious system, for example, is often commented upon. But what of other macro and micro systems whose "pretensions to truth" aren't quite so obvious? There's something about the comfort of systems. Of a multitude of questions being answered in one go and thereby the promise of future certainty. Think of one of the most widespread and influential systems of all time: Marxism. This was/is a quasi-religion. It offered the truth in all domains. If you visited a Marxist bookshop or attended a Marxist conference in the past, you would have found books under the titles Marxism and Opera, Marxism and Quantum Mechanics, Marxism and Pizzas, and so on. Nothing was left untouched. The psychological comfort was absolute. However, on the smaller scale we all like "exactitude" and mini systems. We cut the grass every week. We arrange things in alphabetical order. We buy the same newspaper every day. We vote for the same political party throughout our lives. We eat porridge every morning. We formulate and refine an axiom system in the afternoon. We go to church in the evening. And Derrida systematically tried to formulate an - anti - system capable of destroying the system of western metaphysics. And so on. Who cares if 2+2=4? And does it matter that roses only flourish in spring and ummer? On a more refined level. logical and mathematical systems can offer you the keys to the world and even infinity. Listen to Bertrand Russell speak:
Mathematics…possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere…without appeal to any part of our weaker nature…sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection…The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics…(Study of Mathematics)
So too with, say, scientific and philosophical systems. Psychologists may be able to tell us why we, effectively, want "to close the question" (). And, yes, I can't help but submerge myself in the waters of empirical psychology if Derrida was himself a psychologist of sorts. Derrida committed the sin of psychologism (to misuse a technical term from analytic philosophy). Or, to put it in a more down-to-earth manner, he was using ad hominem arguments not only against philosophers but also philosophical ideas. But what of the philosophical arguments against systems?
These have been well rehearsed in 20th century philosophy by, amongst others, Godel, Tarski, Popper,Feyerabend, etc. It was all about systems being, in various respects, auto-referential, incomplete, hermeneutically circular, question begging, infinite regress entailing, self-defeating, self-contradictory, sound but not true. Derrida himself focuses on the word "historical". If systems are historical, then they are, by definition, contingent, etc. That's why certain system builders tried so hard to escape history and contingency (or stop or deny history). Something that is historical can't play the game of "an absolute, omni-temporality and universality". Almost by definition this is the case. A system is an historical abstract object (if that's possible). And system builders are born and they die. What's more, their "pretensions to truth" come from a position of "total subjectivity". That is, from a "finite" self. How much can a simple flesh and blood individual grasp of the absolute and infinite? Santayana, a long time before Derrida, recognised the problem:
What is the function of philosophy? To disclose the absolute truth? But is it credible that the absolute truth should descend into the thoughts of a mortal creature, equipped with a few special senses and with a biased intellect, a man lost amidst millions of his fellows and a prey to the epidemic delusions of the race? Possession of the absolute truth…excludes any particular station, organ, interest, or date of survey…it is undiscoverable just because it is not a perspective…[the philosopher] himself a part of the world he observes, must have a particular station in it; he cannot be equally near to everything, nor internal to anything but himself; of the rest he can only take views, abstracted according to his sensibility and foreshortened according to his interests…They read nature in their private idioms. (Realms of Being, Pref )
Again, I must stress that Derrida was not talking about single truths - isolatedtruths. He was not even talking about large groups of truths. He was talking about systems. A system joins the dots - all the dots (sometimes). It offers a vista on the world or even the universe. It provides a full picture without any blanks.
We all adhere to micro systems. Even a system of three interlinked and mutually supportive beliefs (if three beliefs can be truly autonomous). However, perhaps it would be better here to distinguish "systems" from "schemes". The hypothetical isolated three beliefs may simply constitute a scheme rather than a system. After all, they may be more or less fortuitously linked. A system, on the other hand, is there to fulfil a higher purpose (psychological as well as philosophical). A scheme may exist without any grande illusions.
Derrida quite happily recognised the positives of a system or a "totality". For example, he accepted, for a start, that it can indeed be a "totality". It can be a "factual totality". And systems may well be "structurally solidary [sic] and coherent, and…regulated by the same function" (). So within their own limited ambits, and despite their pretensions, they still cannot achieve what they set out to achieve. That is, "absolute, infinite omni-temporality and universality". It was like trying to catch fish with a net whose holes are larger than the fish. The problem, according to Derrida, is that such systems are "cultural productions [of] subjectivity". The finite web cannot capture the infinite. This is why religions have recognised the limitations of temporal and fleshly systems and have therefore offered us their own systems as a way out or as a remedy.
However, I think that Derrida mistakenly conflated the comfort of systems with the legitimate desire to know the truth about something or indeed many things. For example, one can adopt a micro system, say, of logic, in the hope of achieving certain positive results in one's general philosophical endeavours. However, it may not be the case that the philosopher in question gets any sort of quasi-spiritual or emotional comfort from the adoption of such a system (he may, however, be aware of the temptation, and not submit to it). Derrida should have known that there are no true scientific generalisations or laws in psychology. So, quite frankly, his analysis of the souls of philosophers may well be partly correct, but partly incorrect.
In any case, Derrida was as committed to truth as any philosopher. In a strange sort of way, he was committed to at least one system too - his own. That system was an anti-system. Anti-systems can clearly be systems of a kind. Derrida's had to be systematic and coherent in order to debunk other systematic and coherent systems. However, it was a system that turned certain truths on their heads. But it did so systematically.
Indeed, contrary to Derrida (and, perhaps even pragmatism), one's pursuit of truth may be the cause of psychological pain rather than psychological comfort. Sometimes the truth does indeed hurt. Sometimes there's a comfortable system with its arms outstretched in front of us, and yet we turn away and walk into the wilderness. However, it could well be the case that we give up on one system (say, a familiar or conventional one), only to adopt another (say, a more exotic one). And even if we reject the pursuit of isolated single truths, or even a pretty innocuous micro system, and adopt a fully-fledged macro system, that system may be far from comfortable to live with. It could be a sceptical or a nihilistic system. That is, nihilism may be a bitter truth, but a truth nonetheless. And there have been many global sceptics.
(One mustn't play down the psychological approach of Derrida. According to Derrida, philosophicalideas spring from philosophical men, not surprisingly. Despite that, it is clearly the case that not many run of the mill psychologists would be up to this task of correlating philosophical souls with philosophical ideas.)
There is another riposte to Derrida. Why should the "pursuit of truth", or the desire for truth, be a desire for an "infinite Idea"? Perhaps not every philosopher's "pretensions" are quite so grand. It depends on whether Derrida's statements were descriptive or revisionary (or historical and-factual or ethical). If we take, say, Kant or Hegel, then these two philosophers did indeed want to grasp the "infinite Idea" of truth. They created all-encompassing systems in which every microcosm reflected the macrocosm. Every link in the chain mattered and every link was vital for the larger machine. Derrida was so steeped in the German/French system-building tradition of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger, that he didn't even acknowledge that there could be or had been alternatives to such a mind-set (remember that the structuralists were his contemporary system-builders).Hadn't Derrida ever read Hume or Hobbes (he had, actually), or even his fellow Frenchmen Montaign and Voltaire? (One can indeed detect a certain system in Hume. However, we mustn't conflate coherence, consistency, internal validity etc. with self-conscious and emotional system building.) Some philosophers simply don't think that their philosophical works or ideas can be applied to everything. There is no, say, Humean theory of sport or Fodorean politics. However, if we take Marxism, we can see that such a system has been applied to just about everything under the sun. There are Marxist theories of opera, quantum mechanics, sex, etc. And this is true of Kantianism (perhaps less so). Kant himself said that his moral philosophy was First Philosophy (not his term), and everything else was derived from that. And we can see Kantian positions on a whole host of subjects. It is ironic, then, that in the 1980s and 1990s we could find post-structuralist or Derridean positions on every subject under the sun.So it is easy to see what kind of environment Derrida was writing in. He was writing in the aftermath of the tradition of French/German system building. And, indeed, in the 1960s the system of Marxism was still prevalent. There was indeed a continental search for the "infinite Idea, an Idea in the Kantian sense".
So it is strange, prima facie, that the English"workmanlike" tradition of criticism of continental system building should be so critical of Derrida, the putative destroyer of systems. However, as I've said, perhaps Derrida created a system by virtue of his grande design of destroying systems. The very fact that he invented - or accepted from others -his own particular abstract object (platonic object),Western Philosophy, almost entails that he would need to take a systematic position against so huge a platonic bogeyman. You need a system in order to destroy so huge and complex an abstract object as Western Philosophy. Despite that, I don't think that the analytic workmen of analytic philosophy, the ones that have criticised Derrida for various sins, were in fact criticising Derrida because he was a system builder, or even a closet system builder. They were criticising him because he was, amongst other things, "wilfully obscure", a "sophist", to use Hugh Mellor’s words.
One could ask if Derrida was critical of philosophy itself or simply the wrong kind of philosophy. He wasn't against philosophy itself because there was at least one exception to the rule: his own philosophy. And Derrida had tremendous respect for certain philosophers like Levinas. And perhaps too much respect for, say, his main adversaries, Heidegger and Hegel. (In recent years he has rekindled his love affair with, of all system-builders, Marx!) Indeed, where would Derrida have been without the system builders he deconstructed?
