{"id":1653,"date":"2022-03-03T09:30:50","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T14:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1653"},"modified":"2022-03-03T09:30:50","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T14:30:50","slug":"the-real-universal-no-3-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/critical-theory-and-philosophy\/the-real-universal-no-3-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Universal, No. 3 &#8211; Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1654\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"960\" height=\"720\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY.jpeg 960w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY-300x225.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY-768x576.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/03\/Deg8X_3XUAEE0zY-800x600.jpeg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<em>Deconstruction aligns itself with the history of the European empires, with a universal and impossible colonization<\/em>. That\u2019s a claim likely to be met with more than customary suspicion, so I\u2019d like to present the clearest evidence for this without delay. What I mean to show is that deconstruction is an extrapolation from colonial history. Anyone inclined to doubt this should read out loud the following sentences, all of them from <em>Monolingualism of the Other<\/em>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Most of what we say about \u201csituations of \u2018colonial\u2019 alienation or historical servitude \u2026 also carries well beyond these determinate conditions.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cIt would be the exemplarity [of colonialism] \u2026 that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of a universal necessity.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201dI would not like to make too easy use of the world \u2018colonialism.\u2019 All culture is originally colonial.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\"><sup>[i]<\/sup><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These three sentences\u2014non-continuous; a motif not an instance\u2014should suffice to establish a first point: Deconstruction would have us believe that colonialism is a ubiquitous and permanent condition or even that we have to face up to an metaphysical colonialism from which no liberation is possible: \u201cthe truth of a universal necessity.\u201d <em>Monolingualism <\/em>was first published in 1996, and goes back to a lecture that Derrida gave in Louisiana in 1992, so it might be tempting to think of this colonial register as a novelty, an unusual feature of his late thinking, maybe even as an anomaly. One is powerfully reminded, however, of an interview that Derrida gave to a feminist interlocutor in\u00a0 1981. He was arguing, on party-line anti-humanist grounds, that women were wrong to seek liberation and agency, because such pseudo-goods would merely render them metaphysical. Emancipation, that is, would simply ensconce women in the bad illusions of Western personhood, from which they would still have to seek non-identity and alterity. This is the nuance of Derrida\u2019s argument: Liberation may not be possible, but then neither is it desirable.<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\"><sup>[ii]<\/sup><\/a> And so in <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, Derrida just comes out and says that \u201cemancipation\u201d and national \u201crevolution\u201d are a \u201ctrick,\u201d the suggestion being that colonization is, well, whatever isn\u2019t a trick: a candor, an illumination\u2014the ethical condition, in other words, having to speak a language that is not really your own, an alien language, in a manner that renders you open to the other.<a href=\"#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\">[iii]<\/a> It is possible, of course, to say that \u201cliberation is a trick\u201d and mean that the various freedom movements have mostly failed\u2014that many achieved freedoms have been insufficiently liberating, that what passed for independence in Jamaica in 1962 or Zimbabwe in 1980 was not, in fact, the unhobbling that it promised to be. That Derrida is arguing nothing of the sort should be clear if we linger for a bit over the word \u201calien.\u201d We all live in conditions of \u201ccolonial alienation\u201d\u2014that, too, sounds like a complaint, like an outmoded snippet of existentialist melancholy, but only until you recall that \u201calienation,\u201d in Derrida, is a condition to be embraced (because a name for what binds me to the not-I). Language is colonial because my relation even to my native tongue is \u201casymmetrical\u201d\u2014that\u2019s Derrida\u2019s word; in language, we are \u201calways for the other, from the other, kept by the other.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn4\" name=\"_ednref4\"><sup>[iv]<\/sup><\/a> And this position of being kept is, of course, what deconstruction has to offer by way of virtue; it is the stance from which one pursues justice and perhaps already a form of justice itself. Derrida: \u201cI always surrender to language.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn5\" name=\"_ednref5\"><sup>[v]<\/sup><\/a> People who are actually colonized\u2014let\u2019s call them \u201ccolonized in the narrow sense\u201d\u2014are thus closer to a certain wisdom, provided they know how to submit to that status, how not to struggle, how to follow Derrida by surrendering. Derrida is admirably upfront about the point: The \u201clanguage of the other\u201d will sometimes be \u201cthe language of the master or colonist.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn6\" name=\"_ednref6\"><sup>[vi]<\/sup><\/a> This might be \u201cunsettling,\u201d but deconstruction can\u2019t help with that. Anti-imperialism is immoral to the extent that it invites a subject people to seal themselves off from a disruptive and alien force to which one would more properly submit.<a href=\"#_edn7\" name=\"_ednref7\"><sup>[vii]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is the instant when one is tempted to start blabbing the established facts of Derrida\u2019s personal history: that he was <em>pied noir<\/em>; that he threw his lot in with the French when Algerian independence came; that he served in the French military, in Algeria, during the Algerian War; that he wrote a nineteen-page letter to Pierre Nora defending the accomplishments of French settler society.<a href=\"#_edn8\" name=\"_ednref8\"><sup>[viii]<\/sup><\/a> (Derrida was thirty-one when he wrote that letter, in case you\u2019re wondering whether the letter in question counts as juvenilia.) By themselves, though, such biographical data won\u2019t tell us much; it\u2019s not clear what they are supposed to disclose about his published writing. We don\u2019t have to supply Derrida\u2019s missing biography for him, however\u2014we don\u2019t have to excavate the life behind the writing\u2014since there is a lot we can say about how Derrida stages his life in that writing. Deconstruction is at its most revealing when it comes closest to autobiography. Sometimes, not often, the philosopher speaks about his own childhood and in doing so improvises for deconstruction the kind of sociological account that Marxists and others would otherwise feel compelled to cart in from the outside: <em>This is where deconstruction came from; these are the historical and political circumstances that gave rise to my thinking<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Monolingualism of the Other<\/em>, Derrida wants to account for himself and his philosophy in openly national-ethnic terms. It might be easiest at this point just to reach for a question: What nationality is Derrida? <em>French<\/em>, one replies without needing to think about it, having spent many decades now talking about \u201cFrench philosophers\u201d and \u201cFrench intellectuals\u201d and \u201cFrench theory.\u201d But then how would Derrida himself answer that question? That\u2019s harder to answer; not \u201cFrench,\u201d at any rate, at least not always and not without provisos. In <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, he assigns himself three different ethnicities, which then get superimposed on one another in complicated ways. This will take some explaining:<\/p>\n<p>First, he calls himself \u201cFranco-Maghrebi.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn9\" name=\"_ednref9\"><sup>[ix]<\/sup><\/a> This jumps out because it\u2019s a term that usually refers to North Africans living in France and so suggests that Derrida, in an unexpected moment of solidarity with the banlieues, is actively identifying with immigrants and their kin. It\u2019s the sort of formulation that would make a <em>beur <\/em>of any French-born deconstructionist.<a href=\"#_edn10\" name=\"_ednref10\"><sup>[x]<\/sup><\/a> As such, it calls to mind those rare passages in the early Derrida where he not only inveighs against \u201cWestern metaphysics,\u201d but also points to non-Western alternatives. There is something big right at the beginning of <em>Grammatology<\/em> that doesn\u2019t usually feature in presentations of Derrida\u2019s core arguments. As of 1968, one of the categories that most interested Derrida\u2014that, indeed, consistently roused his ire\u2014was \u201cphonocentric writing,\u201d writing that wanted to be close to speech, which mostly meant \u201calphabetic writing\u201d or any script that mimicked phonemes.<a href=\"#_edn11\" name=\"_ednref11\"><sup>[xi]<\/sup><\/a> This was the particular (and non-Heideggerian) way in which the younger Derrida thought the Greeks had ruined everything: Western writing was infected with self-loathing by its very alphabet. Mere spelling submits writing to the authority of speech. His attention thus turned, though only fitfully, to non-alphabetic writing systems, to the point where he was briefly claiming to prefer Chinese characters or the mixed writing systems of the ancient world.<a href=\"#_edn12\" name=\"_ednref12\"><sup>[xii]<\/sup><\/a> When Derrida calls himself \u201cFranco-Maghrebi,\u201d then, we have to hear him as fessing up that he is not comfortably or wholly French, nor even comfortably European. Deconstruction maintains a still operative allegiance to something outside the West.<\/p>\n<p>If it is nonetheless unclear whether or not to call this solidarity, then this is because Derrida, in Louisiana in 1992, called himself \u201cthe only Franco-Maghrebian here\u201d and, indeed, teasingly pulled rank on the people who otherwise fit that description: North African Arabs with strong ties to France and French culture. To one such person he said: <em>My friend, I am more Franco-Maghrebian than you.<a href=\"#_edn13\" name=\"_ednref13\"><strong>[xiii]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>His meaning becomes clear over the next few pages: Derrida is more Franco-Maghrebian because he is neither one nor the other, because his friend is really Moroccan, whereas he is not really Algerian. At that moment, something unusual about Derrida\u2019s formulation slides into view, which is that he wants the two-term ethnicities that have become common in immigrant societies to be able to indicate neither-nor instead of both-and, which is how they are usually glossed. In fact, he seems determined to reserve the hyphenate construction for the negative case, requiring us silently to revise any number of common usages. To anyone speaking Derridean, \u201cMexican-American\u201d would henceforth mean \u201cnot Mexican, but not American either.\u201d <em>I am Mexican-American \u2026<\/em> <em>I am an un-Mexican-un-American.<\/em> The hyphen furnishes not the fullness of a dual identity, of belonging more than one place, but the liberating severity of non-identity, of belonging nowhere, of feeling beholden to no formation.<\/p>\n<p>Not really Algerian\u2026. Second, then, Derrida makes a point of letting his audience know that his family was Jewish. He talks about being stripped of his citizenship during World War II and of being expelled from his French-colonial school as a pre-teen. He even links that near-calamity to his philosophical preoccupation with non-identity.<a href=\"#_edn14\" name=\"_ednref14\"><sup>[xiv]<\/sup><\/a> This matter is especially complicated, however, since it would have been easy for Derrida at this point to claim a Jewish identity. Plenty of scholars do this on his behalf.<a href=\"#_edn15\" name=\"_ednref15\"><sup>[xv]<\/sup><\/a> He was neither French nor Algerian <em>because he was Jewish<\/em>; one writes that sentence and Judaism takes up its accustomed place (or non-place) as the non-national and stateless term, the stranger, the third, the identity-that-is-not-one. It is all the more conspicuous, then, that Derrida refuses to make this claim. Plainly, the term \u201cFranco-Maghrebi\u201d is already in the way, occupying the spots in all the formulations where one might have expected to find the word \u201cJewish\u201d; it, and not its Abrahamic rival, is doing the work of non-identity. \u201cTo be a Franco-Maghrebian, one \u2018like myself,\u2019 is not \u2026 a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray\u2014a disorder of identity.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn16\" name=\"_ednref16\"><sup>[xvi]<\/sup><\/a> From this perspective, a man calls himself \u201cFranco-Maghrebi\u201d in order <em>not<\/em> to call himself \u201cJewish,\u201d presumably because this latter would too readily be perceived as a preformed category.<\/p>\n<p>Not really Algerian, then, but not really Jewish, either. Third, and in order to explain this last, Derrida offers that it was his absorption into French settler society that kept him from being in any emphatic way Jewish: No-one he knew spoke Hebrew or Ladino; the Algerian Jews trimmed the penises of infant boys, but called this \u201cbaptism\u201d; he grew up in \u201ca disintegrated \u2018community\u2019 \u2026 cut off \u2026 from Jewish memory.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn17\" name=\"_ednref17\"><sup>[xvii]<\/sup><\/a> Derrida way of putting this is to remark that he was socially and culturally a <em>pied noir<\/em>. This, at least, is an identification he reaches for without fuss: \u201cI have never ceased learning, especially when teaching, to speak softly, a difficult task for a \u2018pied noir\u2019\u2026.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn18\" name=\"_ednref18\"><sup>[xviii]<\/sup><\/a> Judaism moves in to block his identification with Algerians, and French settler society moves in to block his identification with Jews, but nothing arises in turn to block that <em>last <\/em>identification. The role of <em>pied noir<\/em> is the limbic of non-identity within which the other two are suspended, since it was under the umbrella of French colonial institutions that Algerian Jews and assimilated Arabs and the mutant French all met. The term \u201cFranco-Maghrebi\u201d thus ends up suggesting not North African Arab in France but displaced <em>pied noir<\/em>: the homeless Acadian or expropriated Rhodesian. A term that you might have thought was functioning like \u201cHaitian-American\u201d or \u201cAsian-American\u201d turns out to sport the old imperial hyphen after all, in the manner of \u201cAnglo-Indian\u201d or \u201cAnglo-Irish,\u201d while the qualities that a radical ethics has sometimes associated with Judaism get assigned to white colonials instead.<\/p>\n<p>What we\u2019ll want to see at this point is that Derrida goes out of his way to narrow the distance between the Algerian Jews and the <em>pied noirs<\/em>\u2014or, indeed, between the <em>pied noirs <\/em>and favored Arabs. He refuses, in other words, to distinguish between varied and unequal social positions in colonial Algeria, or is interested in those situations where these really were least distinct. Crucial here is a longish passage where Derrida describes his early education: \u201cFor all the pupils of the French school in Algeria, whether they were of Algerian origin, \u2018French Nationals,\u2019 \u2018French citizens of Algeria,\u2019 or born in that environment of the Jewish people of Algeria who were at once or successively the one and the other&#8230; \u2013for all these groups, French was a language supposed to be maternal, but one whose source, norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn19\" name=\"_ednref19\"><sup>[xix]<\/sup><\/a> Two points need to be made about this passage:<\/p>\n<p>First, it is Derrida\u2019s habit to fuse the positions of the colonizer and the colonized, and to associate both indifferently with the alterity for which Judaism has long served as shorthand. \u201cFor all the pupils \u2026 For all these groups\u2026\u201d This bit of improvised sociology is a historically concrete version of that argument he has already made in the abstract, via the philosophy of language: that none of us are the masters of language, not even of our native tongues, that we are all colonized by language. A person reading <em>Monolingualism of the Other <\/em>for the first time might think that the historical situation of the young Derrida was simply too peculiar to furnish any generalizable insight. Perhaps all Derrida can do, when thinking back to his childhood in the colony, is testify, to draft what at times reads like anti-fascist testimonio. But writing as a philosopher, Derrida says he has no interest in mere witnessing of this kind. Quite the contrary: He wants to consider the ways in which the seemingly anomalous settler-Jew, the not-quite-pied-noir, discloses something \u201cstructural, universal, transcendental, or ontological.\u201d Here\u2019s the single most Kantian sentence in the entire oeuvre: \u201cWhat holds for me, irreplaceably, also applies to all. \u2026 Everyone can say the same thing for themselves and of themselves.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn20\" name=\"_ednref20\"><sup>[xx]<\/sup><\/a> So everyone is a not-quite-pied-noir, and deconstruction asks us now to conclude that <em>no<\/em>&#8211;<em>one<\/em> is native. <em>No-one is native<\/em>\u2014you can\u2019t be a good Derridean and flinch from the realization that this line of reasoning simply shuts out indigenous people, by declaring them non-existent. You might, of course, think that Derrida is right about this\u2014that the people who call themselves indigenous are dismally self-deluding\u2014though hopefully you\u2019ll concede even so that this is going to come as news to the Quechua and <em>kanaka maoli<\/em>. The Algerian Jews, at any rate, \u201ccould not properly identify themselves,\u201d but then neither could the French-speaking Arabs or the white-settler kids; they were all equally \u201cdeprived of easily accessible models of identification.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn21\" name=\"_ednref21\"><sup>[xxi]<\/sup><\/a> Non-identity thrives in the colony, which is to that extent to be preferred to non-colonial formations\u2014either to decolonized institutions or to the putatively uncolonized metropolis.<\/p>\n<p>And yet\u2014second point\u2014the metropolis retains its position of priority even here, just when it seems to have been sidelined. The colony, as the scene of generalized liminality, is where deconstruction is best actualized, and yet it can only achieve its truth in relation to Paris. Without colonialism, no liminality; and without the metropolis, no colony. A few sentences bear the claim out. French literature, Derrida says\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2026was the only thing \u2026 that I enjoyed receiving. The discovery of French literature, the access to this so unique mode of writing that is called \u2018French-literature\u2019 was the experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one in which we lived, with almost nothing in common with our natural or social landscape.<a href=\"#_edn22\" name=\"_ednref22\"><sup>[xxii]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ll need to pause to absorb the force of these key Derridean claims: The French language was situated elsewhere. French literature had nothing in common with ordinary experience. It\u2019s not hard to see that Derrida has maneuvered the high bourgeois culture of the imperial center into what deconstruction takes to be the redemptive position, the position of <em>Autrui<\/em>. Racine and Voltaire are this short book\u2019s one specified instance of \u201clanguage \u2026 coming from the other,\u201d language as \u201cthe coming of the other.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn23\" name=\"_ednref23\"><sup>[xxiii]<\/sup><\/a> The idiom of alterity has always been wholly formal anyway and to that extent self-defeating, unable to distinguish among the world\u2019s many different candidates for the title of other, consigning them all in one go to the heap labeled \u201canything-that-isn\u2019t-me\u201d and thereby abolishing the very distinctions that the concept was commissioned to safeguard. More to the point, the concept of \u201cthe other\u201d is reversible; I possess a boundless obligation to the other, but then so does the other, who to that extent ceases to be altogether unlike me. Radical ethics thus establishes the identity of <em>moi <\/em>and <em>Autrui<\/em> in the very act of making our dissimilarity morally relevant. As concepts, non-identity and alterity are vacant, incapable of caring about which historical content you summon to fill them out. Politically, otherness becomes a non-starter as soon as you realize that one can easily plug the imperial metropolis into the alterity slot\u2014and not only that one <em>can<\/em>, but that Derrida <em>does<\/em>. For our purposes, the important point to carry forward is that when Derrida speaks of language in these (messianic) terms\u2014as \u201cthe coming of the other\u201d\u2014he is making a universal point about the colonial status of all language while <em>also<\/em> talking in historically specified ways about the projection outside of Europe of Parisian French: \u201can available monolanguage\u2014for example, French.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn24\" name=\"_ednref24\"><sup>[xxiv]<\/sup><\/a> In deconstruction, the other is a Gaul. \u201cI finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.\u201d Or almost two decades before that, in <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>: \u201cWhat is going to be called <em>enslavement<\/em> can equally legitimately be called <em>liberation<\/em>.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn25\" name=\"_ednref25\"><sup>[xxv]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[i] <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 23, p. 26, p. 39.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[ii] See \u201cChoreographies\u201d in <em>Points<\/em>, pp. 91-2: \u201cTo credit [the ordinary left-wing conception] of progress and entrust everything to it would be to surrender to a sinister mystification: everything would collapse, flow, founder in this same homogenized, sterilized river of the history of mankind\u2026. This history carries with it the age-old dream of reappropriation, \u2018liberation,\u2019 autonomy, in short the <em>cort\u00e8ge<\/em> of metaphysics and the <em>techn\u00e9<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref3\" name=\"_edn3\">[iii]<\/a> The claim is, for Derrida, startlingly direct: The idea of French national culture is \u201cthe first trick.\u201d \u201cLiberation, emancipation, and revolution will necessarily be the second trick.\u201d <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 40.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref4\" name=\"_edn4\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[iv] <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 40.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref5\" name=\"_edn5\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[v] ibid., p. 47.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref6\" name=\"_edn6\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[vi] Ibid., p. 62.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref7\" name=\"_edn7\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[vii] See also <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 40: \u201cwe cannot and must no lose sight of this obscure common power, this colonial impulse which will have begun by insinuating itself into \u2026 \u2018the relationship to the other\u2019 or \u2018openness to the other.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref8\" name=\"_edn8\">[viii]<\/a> For more on that letter, see Edward Baring\u2019s \u201cLiberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,\u201d in <em>Critical Inquiry <\/em>36 (Winter 2010), pp. 239-261. As of February 2021, the Wikipedia entry on Derrida states that \u201c[d]uring the\u00a0Algerian War of Independence\u00a0of 1954\u20131962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers&#8217; children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.\u201d In fact, Derrida was drafted in 1957; underwent military training outside of Algiers; and in addition to teaching schoolchildren, produced translations for the French colonial administration while it conducted war against the Algerians. See Benoit Peeters, <em>Derrida: A Biography<\/em>, pp. 91-94.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref9\" name=\"_edn9\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[ix] <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 12.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref10\" name=\"_edn10\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[x] \u201cMaghrebi-French\u201d is also common in the English-language scholarship, often as a more formal synonym for <em>beur<\/em>. For a general discussion, see Paul Silverstein\u2019s <em>Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation<\/em> (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref11\" name=\"_edn11\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xi] In <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, Derrida lays into \u201cthe phoneticization of writing\u201d as early as p. 4.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref12\" name=\"_edn12\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xii] He aligns <em>\u00e9criture <\/em>with China on pp. 25-26 and again on p. 76.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref13\" name=\"_edn13\">[xiii]<\/a> \u201cYou see, dear Abdelkebir\u201d\u2014the Francophone Moroccan critic and writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, eight years Derrida\u2019s junior\u2014\u201cbetween the two of us, I consider myself to be the <em>most <\/em>Franco-Maghrebian, and perhaps even the <em>only <\/em>Franco-Maghrebian here.\u201d <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 12.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref14\" name=\"_edn14\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xiv] <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 15-17.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref15\" name=\"_edn15\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xv] See especially Sarah Hammerschlag\u2019s <em>Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar France Thought <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref16\" name=\"_edn16\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xvi] ibid., p. 14.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref17\" name=\"_edn17\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xvii] ibid., p. 55.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref18\" name=\"_edn18\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xviii] ibid., p. 47.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref19\" name=\"_edn19\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xix] ibid. p. 41.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref20\" name=\"_edn20\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xx] ibid. p. 20.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref21\" name=\"_edn21\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xxi] ibid., p. 52.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref22\" name=\"_edn22\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xxii] ibid. p. 45.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref23\" name=\"_edn23\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xxiii] ibid., p. 68.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref24\" name=\"_edn24\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xxiv] ibid., p. 67.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref25\" name=\"_edn25\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xxv] <em>Monolingualism<\/em>, p. 73; <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, p. 131.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8211;Deconstruction aligns itself with the history of the European empires, with a universal and impossible colonization. That\u2019s a claim likely to be met with more than customary suspicion, so I\u2019d like to present the clearest evidence for this without delay. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/critical-theory-and-philosophy\/the-real-universal-no-3-part-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4033],"tags":[24271,76],"class_list":["post-1653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critical-theory-and-philosophy","tag-derrida","tag-empire"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}