What happens when a French philosopher decides to take on the truth commission? To find out, Chris Roper attended Jacques Derrida’s lecture on forgiveness at the University of the Western Cape
`Pardon,” says the stylishly clad and devastatingly sexy Jacques Derrida. It is the first word of his lecture – one that will go on for two and a half hours, and will end with words like “pardon, thank you, merci, mercy, pardon”.
Later, speaking about this concept of pardon, Derrida will tell his audience, “you didn’t know, and you still don’t know, what I was doing”. Several people nod thankfully, liberated by the knowledge that it’s okay not to know what’s going on, and that confusion is in fact a necessary condition of knowledge. The middle bit of the lecture is an exciting, voluptuous, painstaking, interminable deconstruction of the word “forgive”.
The lecture was titled Forgiving the Unforgivable, and was an extended deconstruction of the word “forgive”. The major effect, perhaps, was to get people to think about what the word might mean. This is the most political effect of deconstruction, the way it forces people into a confrontation with language.
It is all too easy to make a forceful point – such as, “we forgive you for planting a car bomb/torturing a prisoner” – if you imagine that everyone understands the words you are using in the same way you do. So when Derrida asks us to consider whether forgiveness can be granted if the victim is dead – because forgiveness can only work on a face-to-face basis between victim and perpetrator – we are forced to think about our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in a different way.
Many people find that deconstruction seems to make them powerless; you’re so embroiled in thinking about the terms of your argument (“head up arse”, as anti-deconstructionists refer to it), that you never actually get around to doing anything. Well, some would argue that making the exercise of power a difficult thing to justify is the most active thing you can do.
But I have to admit, when Derrida tells a hall full of South Africans that forgiveness is impossible, because it only exists by excluding itself from the law of the possible, I feel a slight fear. Are they going to throw things at him?
No, they all love him. The small lecture hall was packed, with people spilling out into the street. UWC organisers, in a touching display of the inferiority complex that bedevils academics in this country, decided not to use a larger venue, fearing that the greatest living philosopher would not be able to fill it.
The crowd is varied, from the intellectual elite to the merely curious. Moments of humour are provided by the smug flurries of knowing grunts from challenged Derrida fans every time they recognise a bit of jargon – grunts that serve only to indicate that they are being seduced by the flow.
One of the most interesting things about the lecture was Derrida’s announcement that he was not going to talk about the TRC. Instead, he drew his examples of atrocities, repentance and forgiveness from the Holocaust. He did, though, mention the TRC a few times, as if in passing. This had the effect of inciting the audience to do their own deconstruction of the TRC, as we all struggled to translate the ideas with which he was presenting us to our own, local conditions.
What was new, or at least novel to some of the audience, was his rigorous and absolute insistence on looking at the history, the tortuous etymological affiliation, of the word “forgive”.
This necessary deconstructive device evoked the usual predictable, stupid questions from the floor. One twit expressed his doubt that Derrida had taken the socio-economic context into account. Another pointed out that Derrida – the thinker many consider largely responsible for the problematisation of Western metaphysics in the late 20th century – was perhaps operating from within a Western framework. To Derrida’s credit he fielded these questions with kindly aplomb, and in fact only got irritated when asked questions that dripped with excessive in-house jargon and fancy attempts to reproduce the Derridean style.
Reading over my notes, I am conscious that what I was ultimately reviewing was a performance. To watch Derrida is to see deconstruction in action, and to become aware that the simplest definition of deconstruction is “a philosophy that sees language in action”.