In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll - In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) - Anthropological Quarterly 78:1 Anthropological Quarterly 78.1 (2005) 137-150 In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Chris Fleming University of Western Sydney, Australia John O'Carroll Charles Sturt University, Australia Philosophy and Anthropology Late in 1998, replying to a question from Catherine Paoletti, the philosopher, Jacques Derrida was asked to reflect on aspects of his own early life. He remarked on his own decision to write in the first place that it was for him A form of resistance, of retreat. In this journal I kept (as a youth), there were things that were at once autobiographical and personal, but also, already sketches of little works on Rousseau and Nietzsche. In this regard, I very well remember this debate within myself: I sought to reconcile them; I admired both of them equally. I knew that Nietzsche was a merciless critic of Rousseau, and I asked myself how one could be Nietzschean and Rousseauist at the same time, as I was to become, finally (Derrida 2000: 18) The claim appears strange. In the usual philosophical terms, Derrida's debt to Nietzsche and Rousseau is very slight. His work stands in the phenomenological-methodological tradition of Edmund Husserl. This is especially true of innovations like deconstruction. In a stylistic sense, Derrida had little of Nietzsche's confrontational literary verve and perhaps even less of Rousseau's astonishing...