Abstract
This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual.
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Notes
This essay first appeared in the Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie (1969), 63(3), 73–104. It was also delivered as a lecture before the Society at the Collège de France on February 22, 1969.
The archives for Derrida’s work can be accessed at http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/uci.html.
Insister of Jacques Derrida (2008) is a stream of consciousness, poetic writing that Cixous addresses to her deceased beloved friend, Jacques Derrida.
See Derrida’s discussion of the five foyers of the democracy to come in his Rogues (2004).
This is significant because it demonstrates that Derrida was more powerful when alive and making appearances as opposed to now, when all we have are his words, his legacy.
Famous and forceful because it was Derrida and not some unknown figure.
I would very much like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of Human Studies who read a draft of this article. Their suggestions and critiques were very insightful and helped with the reworking of the article.
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Calcagno, A. Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author. Hum Stud 32, 33–51 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9108-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9108-2