Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994

by Jacques Derrida

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work. When did feminist discourse become an indispensable consideration for deconstruction? What was the impact on Derrida's work of his being an Algerian Jew growing up during World War II? Is there an ineradicable gap between language-based attitude such as those found in a deconstruction and subjectivity-oriented critical models such as those developed by Foucault and Lacan? Such questions as these are answered with great thoughtfulness and intensity. Derrida's oral style is patient, generous, and helpful. His tone varies with the questioners and the subject matter―militant, playful, strategic, impassioned, difference in modulation can sometimes be heard within the same dialogue. The informality of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications to be found of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear here for the first time in English, including an interview, conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books .

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Biography, Theory

516 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 1995

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

TWENTY-THREE INTERVIEWS, FROM MORE THAN TWO DECADES

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and writer, best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as “Deconstruction.” Fourteen of the twenty-three interviews included here are being translated into English for the first time.

He observes, “For example, take a text that is received as philosophical, which lends itself to that appearance, is signed by someone situated in a certain place within philosophical commerce, by some philosophical agent respecting the demands whose norms are the rules of exchange in the philosophical university. People read it. Suppose then that … heterogeneous… forces are introduced into the text with a more or less surreptitious violence … One cannot resist these forces, or rather one resists them, but in such a way that the resistance creates a symptom and is set to work on the body, transforming, deforming it and the corpus from head to toe---down to its very name. Then, perhaps, a forced entry will have taken place.” (Pg. 16-17)

He comments on his own books: “in ‘Speech and Phenomena,’ I wanted to analyze the process of idealization and the structures of ideality (of the signified but also the signifier) that support the effect of arbitrariness---and thus of rigorous identity, closed on itself---of the linguistic system. ‘Of Grammatology’ concerned the stakes and the interests engaged in this search (which is at once credulous and, precisely, scientific, at a certain point in the development of science), the search for the internal system of language. This develops, finally in a fairly consistent manner, in the interest I have had lately in the questions of the frame and the signature… In ‘Glas,’ there is a judas hole that puts these questions in play with reference to Saussure’s continued embarrassment concerning onomatopoeia and the words ‘glas’ and ‘fouet.’” (Pg. 54-55)

He says, “Among all these difficulties, the greatest one … would be to render perceptible and effective the coherence between, on the one hand, what passes by way of published writings of a certain form, those to which you referred and that carry an individual signature, and, on the other hand, certain endeavors in which I participate more anonymously, knowingly or even without knowing it, in some more or less heterogeneous group. All of this lends itself poorly to evaluation, is difficult to pin down in an analysis.” (Pg. 61)

He admits, “To deconstruct is a structuralist and anti-structuralist gesture at the same time: an edification, an artifact is taken apart in order to make the structures, the nerves, or as you say the skeleton appear, but also, simultaneously, the ruinous precariousness of a formal structure that explained nothing, since it is neither a center, a principle, a force, nor even the law of events, in the most general sense of this word. Deconstruction as such is reducible to neither a method nor an analysis… it goes beyond critical decision itself. That is why it is not negative, even though it has often been interpreted as such despite all sorts of warnings.” (Pg. 83)

In response to a question about his parents’ Jewish religion, he replied, “My family was observant in a very banal way, but I must say, unfortunately, that this observance was not guided by a true Jewish culture. There were rituals to be observed in a rather external way, but I was not really raised in what is called Jewish culture. I regret this, moreover. I don’t regret it simply out of nostalgia for a sense of Judaic belonging, but because I think it is a lacuna in anyone’s culture, mine in particular.” (Pg. 205)

He explains, “I have never assimilated a so-called philosophical text to a so-called literary text. The two types seem to me to be irreducibly different. And yet one must realize that the limits between the two are more complex… and especially that these limits are less natural, ahistorical, or given than people say or think. These two types can be interwoven in a same corpus according to laws and forms that it is not only interesting and novel to study but indispensable if one wants to continue to refer to the identity of something like a ‘philosophic discourse’ while having some idea of what one is talking about.” (Pg. 217) He adds, “Those who accuse me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric… have visibly and carefully avoided reading me.” (Pg. 208)

He asserts, "The question of knowing what can be called ‘philosophy’ has always been the very question of philosophy, its heart, its origin, its life-principle. Since this gesture, which is originally and constitutively a philosophical gesture, is both repeated and examined in everything I write, since my work would have no sense outside its explicit, recurrent, and systematic references to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and several other authors… references made over a period of thirty years, the motives of those who want to deny that my work is ‘philosophy’ must be sought elsewhere.” (Pg. 411)

He clarifies, “not all of what I write can be completely ‘classified as philosophy,’ and I have spent a good deal of time and many pages explaining why, how, and for what reasons that doesn’t then mean ‘non-philosophical’ and still less ‘anti-philosophical,’ not even simply foreign to philosophy. It is necessary to distinguish between several types of texts here. Some are, I hope, recognizable as being philosophical in a very classical way; others try to change the norms of philosophical discussion from inside philosophy; still others bear philosophical traits without being limited to that. The same goes for the variety of authors and texts which interest me (there are among them a good number of great authors from the canon, but there are also others; sometimes authors who don’t belong to the philosophical tradition at all inspire me more, whether about philosophy, or about questions bearing on philosophy)… In any case, whether I practice philosophy or ask questions bearing on philosophy, on its paradoxical history and on its limits, I always place myself in relation to philosophy. I will always find it hard to understand how it can be said of a question about philosophy that it is simply non-philosophical.” (Pg. 412)

He adds, “Hence the account for all kinds of social mediation: the press and publishing, which also have pedagogical responsibilities, education at school and outside school. This is why ‘deconstruction’ also takes an active concern in pedagogical reform, and why I am fighting, with others, for the extension of the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools and at the university.” (Pg. 415)

The book also includes the May 9, 1992 letter from a number of analytic philosophers (including W.V.O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, etc.) criticizing the award of an honorary degree in philosophy to Derrida; they argue that “Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule. Derrida’s voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all… his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.” (Pg. 419-421)

This is an excellent collection, that sheds a great deal of light on Derrida. It will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying Derrida and the development of his thought.

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Offered here is a proof of this writer's preternatural articulateness in spoken word, comprehensiveness of his responses, cogency and complexity of his thinking--the one that more than others accords with common sense, intuition, and presuppositions of a non-philosopher, a layman, who might perhaps have pondered some question or other one time, but who had been arrested at the first roadblock of aporia. Well, Derrida never stops, he goes farthest, at the very limit, and beyond, past every aporetic cul-de-sac. It is transformative to glimpse his journey, to attempt to accompany his flight.
In one instance Derrida's vortex of an answer takes the printed volume of twenty six pages--all the while one can almost palpably sense the rotating hum of a tape recorder--his discourse in volution, curving like a seashell, with a sound of a limitless sea deep within it.

[Vip Vinyaratn]

May be he (Derrida) is too smart, and I'm way too stupid...but all these interviews-as interesting as it may seems-cannot convey me the messages. There are a few relatively "easy" chapter of the book. But as a whole, I guess I can only change to the "read shelf" when I get more use to his philosophical project and -above all- his style. 20 years from now perhaps.....