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Once made public, methods have a way of taking on a life of their own and, besides, Derrida has repeatedly attempted to distance himself from his more radical disciples. Yet Derrida probably can't be let off the hook altogether. Is deconstruction itself inherently evil or atheistic? Caputo is right that such a conclusion is "a serious misunderstanding" (Prayers and Tears, p. 4). Rather than necessarily harming religion, Caputo insists that deconstruction "helps religion examine its conscience, counseling and chastening religion about its tendency to confuse its faith with knowledge" (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 159). All of that, however, needs to be prefaced with the word can; whether deconstruction actually helps depends on who is doing the deconstructing and what motives lie behind it. In other words, deconstruction probably needs to be kept in check—by deconstruction.
More important, though, can Derrida himself be considered irresponsible in his thinking and reading of texts? Such a question cannot be answered simply by assessing the "accuracy" of Derrida's explications, since competent specialists in Husserl, Plato, and Joyce (just a few of the figures Derrida has explicated) disagree as to the accuracy of his interpretations. We might make more headway, then, by considering some of the extreme statements Derrida has made. One could, of course, simply write these off by the politically incorrect observation that hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of French philosophers. Yet a careful reading of Derrida reveals that he himself often qualifies his more startling claims.
Let's examine three of Derrida's more radical claims: (1) "there has never been any 'perception'" (Speech and Phenomena, p. 97), (2) "there is nothing outside of the text" (Of Grammatology, p. 158), and (3) there is no "center which arrests and grounds the play" ("Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Writing and Difference, p. 289).
First, Derrida's surprising pronouncement about perception only comes at the end of an extended analysis of Husserl's notion of perception as "intuitive givenness" (which, to grossly simplify a detailed and nuanced concept, means that when I perceive something that thing itself is present to my mind). Derrida's claim is that, if we take Husserl's conception of perception as the standard of what counts as perception, then human perception doesn't quite live up to that standard. Even if Derrida misreads Husserl here, his point about the limits of human perception may still be valid.
What about the phrase "there is nothing outside of the text"? Some have read this as a statement of "creative anti-realism" (a term used to describe a view in which what we call "the world" is merely a construct of our minds). If that is what Derrida actually means, then I for one must part company with him. But I am more inclined to think that such an interpretation has gained hegemony in this country largely because it is heavily promoted by Richard Rorty, who wants to make Derrida an ally for his own agenda.
Derrida's own read (in the "Afterword" to Limited Inc, p. 136) is: "'there is nothing outside the text' means nothing else but: there is nothing outside context." Or, as Caputo aptly puts it, there is "no naked contact with being which somehow shakes loose of the coded system" (Prayers and Tears, p. 17). But note how Derrida further qualifies this statement. Right before the phrase "there is nothing outside of the text," Derrida emphasizes the need for a careful "doubling commentary" of a text "with all the instruments of traditional criticism" to serve as an "indispensable guardrail" (i.e., to protect the meaning of the text). Otherwise, "critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything." I take it that Derrida wants to insist both that understanding is contextual and that texts (or the world) have a meaning which cannot be simply construed however we like. Whatever we might label this view, it doesn't sound like "creative anti-realism."
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