There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book on The Fantasy of Feminist History does a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.Footnote ¹

Another dimension of these exhausted ideals is the “left-wing melancholy”—a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin in the face of fascism triumphantFootnote ²—generated by the loss of familiar metanarratives about the Western progressive trajectories from barbarism to Enlightenment, and from oppression to political emancipation. Here Jacques Derrida's work played an important role in dismantling the philosophical and political totalities that had become so familiar. Thus far, the sense of decline and also of opportunity has not been addressed fully as a cultural phenomenon but treated in a more fragmented fashion by scholars who in the aftermath of 1968 wish to rethink politics from lessons learned, debates about the Muslim headscarf in France, the Scott-like emphasis on resurgent racism and feminism in particular contexts, and, more indirectly, post-Marxist efforts to conceive emancipation without resorting to foundationalism, among others. Mathy's book is significant for its broad treatment of the affective investments that inform this mourning for a past in which the French knew where they were headed or in efforts to reinvent tradition. Baring's book on the young Derrida, by exposing Derrida's deep attraction to mysticism and his own location in the most mainstream French philosophical currents of his time, illuminates unacknowledged ways in which the phenomenological variant of philosophical discourse may have in fact anticipated some of the losses now mourned. In so doing, Baring also suggests that these real and symbolic losses, as Mathy argues, are “the condition[s] of the possibility of recovery” (44), an argument Mathy attributes to Derrida, among others (43).

The two books span the entire history of postwar French thought from very different perspectives: Baring traces Derrida's thought painstakingly back not only through the optic of French phenomenology since 1945, but also to the political and intellectual impact of the institutions within which it took shape until 1968. As noted, Mathy's own account takes on the current “melancholy” about the dashed hopes of 1968, and more generally the decline of familiar metanarratives that Derrida's generation did so much to bring about. And yet these books could not be more different. Baring's is a dense contextualist account of the development of Derrida's central philosophical concepts and Mathy's is an impressionistic and elegantly conceived meditation on the current state of French intellectual and political life from a wide variety of perspectives. He seeks to provide a snapshot of a complicated cultural moment rather than an extended analysis of one philosopher's thought over two decades.

Baring's book is an impressive demonstration of how revelatory contextual and synoptic intellectual history may be even when it examines the thinker held most responsible for undermining both approaches; Derrida, after all, exposed how the reduction of ideas to context or paraphrase is compromised by the way in which the imaginative work of interpretation inevitably supplements texts and relies on multiple contexts (which are often hypostatized by reference to “the” context).Footnote ³ Indeed, Baring both embraces the idea that texts cannot be self-same and shows how the deconstruction of texts presumes for its own (always illusory?) coherence a stable reading of the text to be deconstructed. He does not elaborate this observation more extensively (hence my question mark), though it could legitimate Derridean play or point to the limitations of deconstruction, depending upon how one makes the argument.

The Derrida that Baring reconstructs is not the one we thought we knew. His reconstruction is so persuasive that the book succeeds in revising interpretations that have become truisms in Derrida scholarship, among them the relationship between Derrida's Jewish origins and his thought (Hebraic iconoclasm, or the privileging of words over images);Footnote ⁴ Derrida's marginality to the Parisian intelligentsia because of his Algerian background, a view encouraged by Derrida himself; and the crucial passage through structuralism as well as phenomenology. Instead, Baring shows us that all three presumptions are extremely problematic and even erroneous. Derrida's trajectory, in spite of his Algerian birth and upbringing, was similar to that of other Parisian intellectuals—the privileged Parisian preparatory school, the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), the aggrégation, the Sorbonne, and back to a career at the ENS in 1964. Of course, Derrida couldn't participate in Catholic social circles (his friends went to Mass together) and was shaped by his Algerian experience sufficiently to have a different perspective than his peers (initially he supported a more inclusive French Algeria), and these differences are important. He was not, to be sure, from the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie, as were others, like Lacan. But interaction with and adaptation to other French philosophers and the most privileged institutions in which they worked shaped his ideas in interesting and as yet underexplored ways. As the ENS sought to accommodate a growing number of students when the numbers of French students in higher education exploded after the war, Louis Althusser proposed that Derrida join him to train young men (preparation was then gender-segregated) to take the aggrégation. He was thus not exactly on the outer circles of French intellectual life.

Derrida's intellectual development begins in the context of French academic philosophy in the 1950s, when phenomenology and then structuralism replaced existentialism after its “golden age.” Baring shows brilliantly how political developments had rendered humanism an increasingly contentious term. As he notes, “the central question in 1945 was not whether existentialism was a humanism, but rather what type of humanism it was and why that mattered” (23, original emphasis). Sartre begins his famous “Existentialism is a Humanism” lecture in 1945 by defending himself against Catholic existentialism and communist efforts to define his path as too subjectivist. In brief, Catholics thought existentialism's focus on man's freedom represented an atheistic humanism and Communists believed the same focus neglected the real constraints on freedom generated by the capitalist mode of production. In order to make various claims about God's place in the universe and about scientific Marxism, respectively, the Catholics turned to Heidegger and the communists to Husserl, whose works French philosophers, influenced by the Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao, interpreted through the lens of the philosophy of science.

Baring's mining of Derrida's papers at Irvine (and for other claims, the ENS archives) reveals that, in this context, Derrida turned to Christian existentialism, inspired by thinkers as varied as Gabriel Marcel and Simone Weil. As Baring demonstrates, Derrida's main concerns were ethical, but he rejected Kantian formalism and its absolute principle of morality. He also rejected Sartrean nihilism, since Sartre's phenomenological ontology tied freedom (the pour soi he contrasted with the en soi) to nothingness. Derrida found in Christian existentialism the recognition of the rational limitations of human beings and sought a way to reject both formalist absolutism and nihilism. The foundations for all of Derrida's later work are here: the emphasis not on “man’s” death but on his limitations, the interest in mysticism as a means of developing that emphasis, the rejection of totalizing systems that had not yet taken a particular shape.

The continuity of Derrida's work from this early period through the end of his life is surprising. Baring guides us step by step through the maze of institutional affiliations and philosophical influences that shape how he works through his early interests and eventually facilitates the development of his signature concept, différ(a)nce. Because he traces Derrida's thought not only to Husserl or Heidegger, but in intricate detail to the French philosophical discourses and academic politics within which these thinkers were interpreted,Footnote ⁵ Baring revises not only the emphasis on Derrida's Jewish identity and his scholarly marginality, but also his indebtedness to structuralism. The major figure for Derrida, as has often been remarked, is Husserl, whose Origin of Geometry Derrida translated and commented on, his efforts winning the prestigious Prix Cavaillès in 1964. Yet Baring succeeds in showing not just that Husserl was crucial in the development of Derrida's thought, but that Derrida's engagement with Husserl (with whose thought he had already struggled in his Mémoire) was as strategic as it was philosophical. By then, mathematical phenomenology was a mainstream current of French philosophy and allowed him to adapt to the Marxist environment at the ENS, where others used Husserl's transcendental logic and the phenomenological reduction as a means to ground formal systems to legitimate Marxism's scientificity. Derrida's work on Husserl both defended the master against some of his French phenomenological critics and allowed him to revisit his own interest in “man’s” limitations, including via Husserl's own invocation of God in Ideas. Derrida addressed the ever-unresolved questions regarding the relationship between formal systems (rules and syntax as elaborated not only by Husserl but also by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Carnap) and the empirical objects they constitute as well as how formal systems that constitute the world are themselves constituted. He concluded, as had others like Gaston Bachelard, that the phenomenological emphasis on intuition as the ground of formal systems was ultimately unpersuasive. In so doing, he turned to Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, his insistence that theology and philosophy were distinct, as elaborated by the Christian Heideggerian Henri Birault (173–81). Birault had argued that Heidegger asserted that no being was supreme because it was impossible to grasp being in its infinity (for Heidegger, Being was always dissimulated by beings) and thus always “veiled” in its “unveiling”: “Thought,” Birault argued, “had to recall this veiling,” for “without it, Being would always threaten to collapse into one privileged form of being and the thought of Being would remain a latent [larvée] theology” (175). Baring argues that Birault was no secularist but simply used Heidegger to reject the idea of a theological absolute rather than to reject the concept of divinity. As he puts it, “it limited knowledge to make room for faith” (176). Derrida used Heidegger in this fashion not to assert the existence of a God or faith, but to insist that Being cannot exist outside its historicity, outside its limited self-unveiling in time, and thus to insist that if we conceive Being as such we must acknowledge the limitations of human knowledge. Moreover, the difference between Being and beings meant that “God was both what was read through history and yet was transcendent to all the constituted moments of that history, it was an infinite that could not be immediately opposed to finite beings: transcendence in immanence” (179). When Husserl alluded to God, Derrida argued, he interpreted the Kantian idea, which defined pure reason as a form always inadequate to (but regulating) objects given to the senses, as immanent and transcendent; always concealed in phenomena; always, in Heideggerian terms, “veiled.” Formal systems can ground thought and guide it dialectically and do not necessarily have to distinguish between absolute and transcendental logic. The difference between Being and being meant that no infinite lay outside history's movement and that Being could never be identical to beings but was always delayed or deferred in the movement it took philosophy to trace it, deferred in the unveiling that was also a veiling.

Indeed, as Baring argues, it was mathematical phenomenology and its dynamic approach to structures that proved the conduit to structuralism in the 1950s (“and not the famous debates conducted by Lévi-Strauss or Althusser with Sartre” (159)), because it sought to ground subjectivity in formal logic. Though no reviewer can do justice to the complexity of the history of ideas that this book covers, Derrida's consistent emphasis on the inability of formal systems to account for themselves over time led him to develop the concept of différ(a)nce, which was already implied in his commentary on Husserl. Mathematical phenomenologists like Gilles Granger and Suzanne Bachelard had already focused on writing as a means of detaching science from perception, since the scientific object took the form of language. Language thus reduced subjectivism and allowed for a formalization of rules. Derrida picks this up a decade later. By the time he published the essays in Writing and Difference, Derrida's construction of writing had shifted from tracing and marking an impossible presence (the difference between Being and beings). The word différ(a)nce was first used in Derrida's essay on Artaud in 1965, later published in Writing and Difference.Footnote ⁶ Now, in the context of his criticism of structuralist literary analysis, his participation in debates over Lacanian psychoanalysis in the early 1950s, and other essays before 1967, Derrida radicalized his understanding of the primacy of writing over speech, which was to find its full articulation and argument in Of Grammatology. Baring summarizes two movements: first, Derrida identified the movement of thought no longer in the difference between Being and beings, but as one internal to signification itself caused “by the excess of the Sign, its process of supplementing and not its inadequacy” (200); second, and similarly, writing was no longer the formalized inscription of a voice. In order to provide the most appropriate metaphor for structuralism and its rejection of the “self-present,” writing had to be the absence rather than the inscription, again, of a transcendental signifier that could never be fully unveiled. Thus writing was “the trace of the trace, and not the trace of a pure if impossible (spoken) presence” (200). In this way Derrida finally conceived Heidegger's work as itself still containing traces of metaphysics (because there was still a transcendental, if always veiled, signifier present).

In essence, Derrida never adopted structuralism and was never part of the new philosophy: he adapted phenomenology as it had developed throughout the 1950s to address the limits of structuralism. The powerful critique of structuralism that he offered preceded structuralism and was made more forceful through its engagement with Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and other prominent structuralists. Indeed, as Baring demonstrates, until 1968 the preeminence of communism and of Althusser at the ENS forced Derrida to make his own work relevant to structuralism so that he would be relevant to the students and thus the examinations for which he was supposed to prepare them. His institutional location meant that he was exposed to structuralism and forced to contend with it intimately, yet he did not do so by jumping on the bandwagon but by extending a particular critique of metaphysics already well under way in his own prior and unfolding phenomenological work.

This book impresses at every level. The extremely compressed version of his argument in this review cannot begin to convey the rigorous engagement with extremely difficult ideas. Baring is diligent at getting things right—dating the first appearance of a particular word, comparing translations, reconstructing the chronology of Derrida's intellectual development by reading all the philosophy to which Derrida might have been exposed or cited, no matter how secondary or forgotten. Given all that he has accomplished it is hard to ask him to engage more fully the extant literature. By contextualizing Derrida, his work implicitly rebuts a great deal of conventional wisdom. But it would be interesting to know, for example, if Baring thinks the literature on Derrida's presumed Jewish perspective is of any interest. Similarly, where does he stand on Derrida's contribution itself other than to celebrate its playfulness and to prove again the power of his revision of phenomenology in the face of structuralism? To return to his allusions to the presumptions that Derrida had to make about his own reading of texts in order to deconstruct them, we might ask whether in the end Derrideanism has exhausted itself (a common refrain) or, since Baring refutes clearly and refreshingly the charges of nihilism, how is Derrida's thought “ethical” in contemporary terms? Does this revision of Derrida offer a new perspective on the “mourning” now taking place about the end of metanarratives—a Derridean joyful rather than melancholy take that might also refute, as Derrida sought to do in Specters of Marx, the discourse of loss and decline while acknowledging it? It is already an extraordinary achievement to have revised our understanding of Derrida, and it is also clear that Baring believes that Derrida's thought did not break with the past, but used it to renew the vigor of its potential for future thought. But what does that mean substantively at a time when Derrida has been mostly relegated to the past, his followers often conceived as acolytes, his troubling defense of Paul de Man's ostensible anti-Semitism often overwhelming his legacy and the sheer brilliance of his intervention? It is true that Baring stops at 1968, and it is true that placing Derrida very carefully in context enables his argument. As Baring notes, “Derrida's thought provides the intellectual historian with valuable resources for thinking through the complex relationships between philosophy, which aspires to transhistorical validity, and the particular historical moment in which it arose” (11). In so arguing, he defends Derrida against baseless charges of nihilism and relativism. But since Baring demonstrates that Derrida's thought is inspired by a certain messianic streak, some more meditation (perhaps a thicker epilogue) on these questions would have been welcome. Surely, however, Baring has now given other scholars an entirely new opportunity to revisit some of these arguments.