The real story about Derrida's ideas on truth

Novelist and biographer Peter Salmon, discusses the misconceptions surrounding Derrida’s ideas of truth and post-truth.

Peter Salmon

Novelist and biographer

View Author ->

Peter Salmon

Novelist and biographer

09 Nov 2021

Key Points

Derrida is held up as a relativist and radical sceptic despite countering these identities in his lifetime; he is thought, along with other philosophers, to have destroyed philosophy, culture and truth in the narrow sense that some understand it.
Derrida attached himself to thinkers with questionable, or terrible, reputations, like Louis Althusser, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, which caused his own reputation to suffer.
Derrida believed democracy, God and justice could not ever actually exist; that they were futures to build towards but always out of reach. Sometimes his ideas were disputed to the extreme, such as in the case of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik.

Truth and post-truth

One of the ways in which Derrida has remained controversial to this day – in a sense, has become more controversial recently – is to do with truth and post-truth. Derrida explored the idea of truth. He did not prove whether truth existed in philosophical terms, and he said that what we had to do was deconstruct that idea to look at how the word truth is used. Now, for many of his detractors, this has been seen as a case of radical scepticism or relativism to say that anything can be true. That was a position Derrida did not hold. He knew that if you went outside and it was raining, you would get wet.

In 2016, there was this idea of alternative facts where one could look at a crowd at an inauguration, for instance, and say that a certain number of people there were more than a certain other number of people, even though that other number of people was actually greater. This abuses the idea of truth. Mathematics has a set of truths that one number is greater than another. If you want to dispute that, then you have to take apart all of mathematics. Derrida’s position was never this. He thought that you could analyse things in any way that you wanted to that would have greater or lesser results, that would yield more or less meaning. So, to say that he is post-truth is false. However, he has been held up as having this radical scepticism, and particularly at the moment, he is seen as the demon in many ways: that he allows all these new voices to speak, that he allows different voices to have the platform, but also that he doesn’t believe that there’s a truth that we can get to.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Cycle of lectures by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, at the Hospital das Clínicas of the University of the State of Guanabara (UEG), 30 October 1974. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Derrida is quite often used as a political device. In fact, Derrida and Michel Foucault, another French philosopher, have been yoked together in this almost portmanteau word – Derrida and Foucault, or Foucault and Derrida – that somehow they are causing the destruction of philosophy, of culture, of language, as though identity and truth had not been questioned for hundreds of years, in fact, thousands of years. Kant questioned what it was to be a human. Plato and Socrates, thousands of years ago, were doing the same thing. Derrida is doing this, but Derrida, in his lifetime but more as a political tool now, is held up as getting rid of all the certainties, of all that’s good in many ways for those who want to defend this idea of truth that’s very narrow.

When we think about Derrida and truth, we have to think about some of the later writings of Derrida, in particular, that have to do with ethics, law, justice and democracy. Derrida had what many people call – but he disputed – an ethical turn, in that his later writings start to directly tackle things like ethics and law. Why was this? We can’t absolutely ascribe what Derrida thought to what happened to him; however, there were a few bruising encounters which did happen to him during the 1980s and 1990s.

Althusser and Heidegger

The first of them was to do with Louis Althusser, who was a Marxist philosopher and also a sort of mentor to Derrida. He was the first person who welcomed him at university. Derrida would step in when Althusser missed teaching his classes, which was quite often because he spent a lot of time in psychiatric institutions. Althusser spent five years in a prisoner of war camp, and it damaged him very badly. The pair of them were close friends in many ways; mentor and mentee to each other, swapping those roles.

Louis Althusser. Pencil 4B on Canson. 28 January, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

In 1980, Althusser had a psychotic episode during which he killed his wife. It was huge news, of course, in France, and Derrida, as a friend, looked after Althusser. Althusser was not charged with a criminal act because it was seen as a psychotic episode. He was seen as out of control during that time. For the critics of Derrida, this was gold; here was Derrida defending this man who was a Marxist and a murderer. That was the first time that Derrida was really bruised.

Shortly afterwards, he wrote a slim volume about Martin Heidegger, who became a notorious philosopher, in that, in the 1930s, he was part of the Nazi Party and gave a speech for his university in favour of Nazism. Heidegger was a great philosopher; however, this was a stain on his reputation, and at the same time as Derrida’s book, a large volume came out listing Heidegger’s crimes. There was nothing particularly new in the book except it was the first time they’d been collected together in one volume. Derrida, although his book wasn’t a defence of Heidegger, was seen as defending Heidegger. On top of having the murderer as a friend, he had one of his greatest influences as a member of the Nazi Party. Yet, perhaps worse for Derrida was the affair of Paul de Man.

Derrida and Paul de Man

Paul de Man, for many people, is one of the greatest of deconstructionists. He certainly took Derrida’s ideas and ran with them, perhaps more brilliantly than many others have. They became close friends. De Man was there at the start of Derrida’s fame. They spoke to each other often. De Man died, and Derrida wrote a very moving eulogy about him. Shortly afterwards, it came out that de Man had worked for a Nazi newspaper during the war. However, it turned out he’d been sacked from the newspaper for unethical behaviour – and getting sacked from a Nazi newspaper for unethical behaviour is quite an achievement.

It turned out that he was also a bigamist. He’d left his wife and married another. He had also set up shell companies for publishing and embezzled lots of money from the government setting them up. He had also lied to get into university, making up papers that he hadn’t written. Basically, he was a sociopath who had somehow become a brilliant academic.

Derrida was deeply hurt by this. He wrote what I think is the one really bad Derrida paper, where he defended Paul de Man, or at least he asked the question, what was it like for Paul de Man to live with this lie for all these years? How does it affect his philosophy? Now, they’re the sorts of questions you might ask in a couple of hundred years’ time. It’s not really what you write at the time. Derrida was bruised by all of these encounters, and by one final thing.

Derrida’s arrest in Prague

On a visit to Prague, Derrida was arrested and spent a night in jail for drug smuggling. It was a trumped-up charge, as everyone admitted at the time. It was just to put pressure on the French government. Derrida, in his prison cell, didn’t know how long he was going to be there. He was stripped of his identity, of everything that made him Jacques Derrida. This hurt him deeply and was the major trauma of his adult life.

All of these things came together for Derrida in ideas about law and ethics. One of the criticisms of deconstruction had been that it was wilful, that it was “anything goes”. For Derrida, that was never the case. He foregrounded the ethics of deconstruction, and part of that was saying that when you’re deconstructing a text, you are being authentic with it. You are treating it with real respect by getting as close as you can to it. Derrida described this as an act of hospitality; it’s hospitality to treat a text seriously.

Ruzyne Prague, Prison, where Derrida was arrested. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Deconstruction and the law

More than that, he looked at the idea of law, how law was constructed. Religion is constructed with the idea of God in mind. Law is constructed with the idea of justice in mind. Justice is the thing that holds the system together. Laws which are changing all the time, which governments keep changing in order to keep up with changing circumstances, are a constructed thing and can be deconstructed.

What Derrida said is they’re based on justice. Justice cannot be deconstructed because, in a way, justice does not exist. Justice is always something in the future. I can be part of a legal case and win that legal case. I can know that I’m legally in the right, but I can’t know that I am just. If someone kills someone and is killed themselves, executed, there’s no parity there. There is no justice. Justice is always this thing in the future which generates laws. All laws are, in a sense, an act of violence; in that they are imposed on a society by a sovereign, whatever sort of sovereign that is.

Derrida then expanded this thinking to democracy. Democracy is always something to come. It guarantees lots of our freedoms or denies lots of our freedoms. It’s always a work in progress, but actual democracy can never exist. Actual justice can never exist. They are outside and beyond the system, so they’re always to come. For Derrida, this was very crucial in looking at ethics and law. Again, coming back to the idea that they’re constructed: they’re human constructs, and as human constructs, they’re made by people for specific or unspecific reasons, but always made. Therefore, they’re always open to reinterpretation and to developing and making better.

Derrida for a Norwegian terrorist

Several years ago, the mass murderer Anders Breivik mentioned Derrida in his manifesto about how the world was going to hell. Derrida, in that manifesto, was seen as one of the people taking apart society, getting rid of truths, getting rid of justice, getting rid of all these things. It’s a position that has been taken up by politicians recently, particularly populist politicians, where it used to be that identity was set, the order was set, that you could know truth and that you could know what was going on and who should be in power. For many of them, lashing out against those who dispute that power is done in the name of Derrida.

Derrida is an easy target for this; first of all, because he’s difficult to read. You can therefore hold him up as the enemy without actually engaging with his work. One of the ways you can usually stop someone saying Derrida did this, is by asking them to cite part of Derrida where he talks about truth being relative, because he doesn’t. So, he’s become this sort of easy way for people to express their anger at the world starting to break apart into singularities, into respect for other cultures, for other ways of thinking, for other religious thoughts.

Dissonance between Derrida’s and others’ truths

Painting depicting the death of Socrates in prison about to drink hemlock given by his executioner. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

In questioning truth, in saying the truth is a constructive thing, Derrida has become an easy target for those who want to hold onto the old truths, who want to keep those old truths as sacred in some sense. There is a real correlation here between Derrida and Socrates. Socrates was charged with corrupting youth, with questioning everything, with holding every truth up for examination. Socrates, of course, was forced to drink hemlock. Derrida wasn’t forced to drink hemlock; however, in many ways, if you search for Derrida online, you’ll see half of the articles saying that he is a corrupt figure like Socrates, that he is someone who gets rid of all truthful things from before. In many ways, he is. He always thought of deconstruction as in some way parasitic. It would get into something and start to work away at it – but for Derrida, that was a very ethical thing to do. It was not to take slabs of truth as unexamined, as unexplored. It was to treat them with the respect they deserved by looking at how they were made.

‘There is nothing outside the text’

First of all, he means that anything we encounter, we encounter through culture, through our language, through ways of seeing that we’ve learnt. We cannot have absolute access to the natural world in any sense. This is not a new idea with philosophers, but Derrida was very firm on it – that whatever thoughts we have are constructed by humans and therefore can be deconstructed. So, to say that there’s nothing outside the text is to say that we are always going. We are always approaching things via concepts; we cannot escape from those concepts, and they are cultural and constructed, so that’s part of it.

The second thing to say is that anything, therefore, can be treated as a text to be interpreted: anything in the natural world, any creation of humans, any piece of art, any book, any movie, any piece of music has been constructed and can be treated in the same way as texts can be treated, to look at how they contradict themselves, to look at why they exist, to look at whose advantage it is that they exist in that form.