Why Derrida Should Be Read as a Poet

My contention that Derrida should be read as a poet is based in part, frankly, on my slow realization that his theories, once you untangle all his jargon and linguistic labyrinths, are really rather self-evident:

Anyone who's ever tried to learn a new language already understands that the signifier is arbitrary;

Anyone who's ever sent a sarcastic e-mail that was misread as sincere already understands slippage;

Anyone who's ever had a Freudian slip, or who has played with puns, already understands freeplay;

Anyone who's ever had a substitute teacher replace the regular teacher understands that the center is a function, not a being--and any group of rowdy students that takes over the class and drives the sub to tears has already demonstrated that the center isn't immutable;

Anyone who's ever clicked on an endless series of Wikipedia links, approaching but never reaching the final, stable definition of a word, already understands that the signifier never touches the referent;

And anyone who's ever found themselves babbling and rambling as they try to describe an experience for which you really had to be there, already understands how the structure of language inherently collapses.

I speak from experience: every time I've tried to explain to non-English-majors why Derrida is a big deal, they always end up looking at me and saying, "Well, yeah, isn't that obvious?"  And they're right.

To be clear: I'm not arguing that Derrida is wrong--oh, he's most certainly right--only obvious.  I don't mean "obvious" as a slight; as I've often told my own students, half of all good writing is stating the obvious.

What's more, the obvious here--that words have no intrinsic relationship to the things they represent--is a fact that is ignored all too often, e.g. I remember only too clearly arguing with evangelicals who tautologically insisted that "The Bible is the word of God because the word of God is in the Bible!"

But in retrospect, I can't get too mad at those evangelicals: their assumption that words contain the things they describe is a very ancient philosophical error dating back to Plato's Republic, wherein Plato justified artistic censorship in his "ideal" society by claiming that words were some sort of spoken telepathy that directly communicated ideas into another person's mind, sans mediation.

Hence it shouldn't surprise any us why Plato's error has persisted so insistently: the powerful have likewise long justified their censorships and imperalisms by assuming that language possessed the reality they similarly sought to control.  No thought could be more threatening to the powerful than to realize that their words do not contain, or even reflect, reality, and that their power structures inherently collapse. Remember that Jacques Derrida was an Algerian Jew--he especially would be interested in deconstructing the colonizer's claims upon him.  His linguistic liberations were political liberations, too.

Derrida throws a brick through a window with Post-Structuralism, waking everyone up to the too-long-ignored obvious; he is in effect the Will Ferrel character from Zoolander, shouting at everyone: "Doesn't anyone notice this?!  I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"  I honor and respect Derrida for that. 

So when I say that Derrida should be read as a poet, I'm saying the focus should not be on the fact that he states the obvious, but rather how. Any poor grad student who's ever had to navigate "Structure, Sign and Play in the Science of Human Discourse" or On Grammatology, knows that Derrida performs within his own prose the very slippages, shifting-centers, and deconstructions he claims are inherent to language.

Performative language: that is the realm of the poet, not the theorist.  Just the fact that you have to untangle his writing: hidden meanings are also the purview of poetry, not expository writing.  Even his blurring of the boundaries between theory and poetry is performative of his larger linguistic-deconstruction project--and performance is part of poetry, not theory. 

Read Derrida as a poet, try it out.  In the spirit of Derridean freeplay, consider recontextualizing the following quotes from "Structure, Sign, and Play" not as theory, but as verse, and notice how your relationship with the text shifts:

"The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center."

"In opposition to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks."

"The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author."

"superabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can refer."

"he must “brush aside all the facts” at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure"

"For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing."

What exactly do any of these selections mean?  One could spend semesters immersing one's self in Post-Structural theory to untangle it, but in the mean time, one could also just enjoy the delightful insanity, the Monty Python-esque lunacy, of Derrida's language itself!  Treat Derrida the same way TS Eliot termed his own "The Waste Land," as a series of "rhythmic grumbling" which, while it first doesn't seem to mean anything specific, does still seem to approach something primal about the human condition.

Ironically, for such a revered intellectual, you feel Derrida before you truly understand him--but then, according to his own theories, you'll never truly understand him either, for language will never quite signify just what we mean!  But poetry is less about what it means than how it means.  Few things are as irritating as when someone spoils the affectation of a poem by trying to pin down just what it means; Derrida's writings liberate us from the tyranny of singular definitions and the mundane.

Let his words wash over you--not for what they represent, but for what they are themselves.  Worry less about "getting" him or deifying him or understanding him.  Rather, let him trip and tangle up your tongue; let him, like Viktor Shklovsky said all art should, defamiliarize the familiar, so that you have a fresh new relationship with all the words you've taken for granted for too long.