The rumpus at Cambridge over Derrida's honorary degree was on the whole such a lamentable episode - such a display of petty resentment and unthinking "philosophical" prejudice - that one's first response was to count the whole affair best forgotten as quickly as possible¹. What is the use of engaging in dialogue with those whose idea of intellectual debate is represented by the kind of stock- in-trade insult and downright slanderous misrepresentation that appeared over various eminent signatures in the "quality" British press? Why remark - yet again - on the willingness of so many otherwise reputable academics to go along with the bugbear image of "deconstruction" that has acquired currency on the chat-show circuit and in various organs of middlebrow cultural opinion? After all, there is little reason to hope that Derrida's opponents might yet be persuaded to read some of his work, rather than hold forth on its alleged demerits - its "irrationalism", "nihilism", "sophistry", "lack of intellectual rigour", etc. - whenever invited to do so by this or that hard-pressed journalist in search of a topical space-filler. Nor is Derrida likely to have lost much sleep over the intended snub, having known pretty well what to make of it from previous experience with their counterparts on the US professional network². All of which inclined me not to comment any further on this latest outbreak of professional ressentiment raised to a high point of principle by academics who lacked both the will and the competence to understand his work at anything like an adequate level of philosophic grasp. Better not dignify this sorry display by treating it as if the opposing faction could muster even the semblance of an argued case against Derrida's candidature.

But to let it go at that - in the hope that at last a few readers will show more intelligence and capacity for independent judgment than a clutch of obtuse and ill-willed academics - would perhaps be unwise, given the extent to which the latter managed to impose their views on a duly scandalized (or easily diverted) public. So I will offer the following remarks by way of explaining first how the rumpus came about, second (more importantly) how the non-readers have got Derrida wrong, and third (less so) why Cambridge would have shown up in a yet worse light had the anti-Derrida cabal triumphed and the vote gone against him as seemed very possible until the last moment.

As I say it is a depressing little saga and one that must appear quite absurd to those overseas watchers of the British cultural scene with an eye to the special kinds of ingrown rancour that periodically surface to trouble the calm of our ancient universities. But since the issue had better not go by default let me run through just a few of idiotic slogans that were canvassed under the name of "deconstruction" by those who (in virtue of their academic calling, not to mention the common intellectual and moral decencies) should have known better. The most that I can hope to do here is indicate just how wrong are these characterizations, and offer some corrective remarks for those in need of guidance through the minefield of obfuscating ideès recues.

1) "All readings is misreading, all interpretations misinterpretation, all truths merely modes of error" (etc.). This idea has most often been imputed to Derrida by literary critics - sympathetic or hostile - who have little interest in philosophy and suppose that deconstruction is just another name for the "anything goes" style of hermeneutic licence that rejects all standards of interpretative truth or rational accountability. It bears no relation to Derrida's work, as should be plain to anyone who has read (for instance) his two early books on Husserl, his essay on Plato (in Dissemination), or the emphatic disavowals of any such creed to be found, e.g., in Of Grammatology³. Thus: "To recognize and respect all [the] classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything"⁴. Which is not of course to deny that textual close-reading of the kind that Derrida practises may often go against the intentionalist grain - or against what the author consciously and explicitly wanted to say - in response to anomalous or discrepant details which have hitherto escaped notice. So far as the appeal to intentions is concerned, "this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading". And again, in perhaps his most succinct formulation: "[a deconstructive reading] must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses"⁵.

Of course these might be taken as mere passing gestures toward a high-toned ethic of "respect" and "recognition" which is elsewhere belied by Derrida's practice in the reading of philosophical or literary texts. After all (slogan 2), everyone knows that, according to Derrida, philosophy is just another "kind of writing", on a par with poems, novels, literary criticism, or any other sort of text you care to name. No matter that this phrase actually comes from the title of an essay by Richard Rorty who makes no bones about his own lack of interest in the more "philosophical" aspects of Derida's work, and his desire to speed up the imminent demise of philosophy as an academic discipline by playing off "bad brother Jacques" against "honest uncle Kant" and all those other earnestly deluded seekers-after-truth⁶. Deconstruction thus figures as the sophist's revenge, as a handy set of rhetorical tricks for deflating philosophy's grandiose self-image, or again - in less provocative style - as a sensible adjustment to the pragmatist view of what's good in the way of belief. For Rorty indeed there can be no obligation to interpret Derrida aright, since notions like truth, right reading, argumentative rigour etc. are merely so many hung-over symptoms of that same (now obsolete) "foundationalist" paradigm that has long exerted such a powerful and delusory appeal. One can see why this "strong revisionist" reading has enjoyed great favour with literary critics, few of whom posses much knowledge of philosophy beyond a vague sense of wounded self-esteem at having suffered an age-old history of arrogant put-downs, starting out with Socrates versus the poets, sophists and assorted rhetoricians, and carried on nowadays in numerous faculty disputes. More unfortunate is the fact that a good many philosophers have likewise given credit to the Rorty version, thus confirming all their preconceived ideas. For if this were anything like a fair rendition of Derrida's arguments then one could hardly blame the Cambridge Faculty of Philosophy for regarding him as a less than worthy recipient of its highest mark of esteem.

Hence (slogans 3, 4, and 5) the widespread idea that deconstruction heralds the "end of philosophy", or its demotion to the level of an undifferentiated textual "freeplay" where literary critics can claim the upper hand since they - unlike the philosophers - have long be aware that "all truths are fictions", that "all concepts are metaphors", and that interpretation (in Stanley Fish's phrase) goes "all the way down"⁷. This message - or something very like it - has been doing the academic rounds for some time now, and was batted back and forth between journalists and philosophers during the Cambridge campaign. But even the most limited acquaintance with Derrida's work - for instance, with his essays in Writing and Difference or the superb deconstructive reading of Kant's third Critique - is enough to discountenance any such view of him as endorsing that facile "end-of-philosophy" rhetoric that Rorty so assiduously seeks to promote⁸. On the contrary, Derrida has often insisted that deconstruction has nothing whatever in common with those fashionable trends (postmodernism, post-humanism, post-Marxism etc.) which naively presume to turn page on so-called "Western metaphysics" while failing to engage its problems and aporias with the requisite degree of analytical care⁹. One could multiply quotations to precisely this effect, all of them refuting the idea - the vulgar-deconstructionist doxa - that philosophy is just another "kind of writing", a literary genre whose concepts and truth-claims are so many sublimated metaphors, and whose stylistic resource (or periodic shifts of "final vocabulary") are its only contribution to the ongoing "cultural conversation of mankind". Such may be Rorty's view of the matter, one shared by a more than a few literary theorists with reasons of their own for adopting it. Still there is no question of Derrida's subscribing to any such wholesale irrationalist creed. See his classic essay "White Mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy" for a subtle and rigorous account of these issues that afford no excuse for the sloppy misreading put about by admirers and detractors alike¹⁰.

6) "If Derrida has anything worthwhile to say why it in a style so wilfully obscure, cryptic, mandarin, prolix, self-indulgent, allusive, repetitious, rhetorical, 'literary' (etc. etc.)?" And again: "why attempt to understand him if Derrida adopts such a range of sophistical techniques for baffling the good-willed reader?" On the rare occasion that this charge is backed up by reference to any specific text it is usually Derrida's notorious "response" to John Searle on the topic of Austinian speech-act theory¹¹. Otherwise it seems to express little more than a resentment of the fact that he manages to write so much and a failure to grasp that his writings are "performative" in the sense of raising certain philosophic issues (e.g. the relation between concept and metaphor, or between constative and performative utterance) in and through the practice of a written style that self-consciously foregrounds those issues. One can see why such writings has caused great offence - if mainly through scandalized hearsay - to philosophers bred up on more orthodox ideas of what constitutes a decently intelligible style. But it is yet another sign of ingrown professionalism when these latter are treated as the hallmark of genuine, "serious" philosophical work as opposed to mere "literary" dilletantism. Of course those who take this line will claim to be upholding the standards of argumentative rigour and truth against the blandishments of a pseudo-philosophical rhetoric which belongs (if anywhere) in departments of Comparative Literature, or maybe to some minor course-option in the history of ideas. Clear thought and fancy writing just don't mix, least of all the kind of writing that exploits certain fictive (as well as figural) devices by way of questioning the "law of genre" that would keep them firmly apart. What is thus ruled out - despite all the manifold counter-examples from Plato to Wittgenstein, Austin, Kripke, or Parfitt - is any notion that philosophy might stand to gain (to sharpen and refine its analytical insights) through a speculative but none the less rigorous reflection on the realms of metaphorical and fictive possibility. Otherwise there is simply no accounting for the view that Derrida's "style" goes beyond all the limits of genuine, competent or good-faith philosophical debate. For instances to the contrary see (e.g.) "Plato's Pharmacy", "The Double Session", "The Law of Genre" and - most strikingly - his essays on the tangled relationship between philosophy, fiction and psychoanalysis: "Coming Into One's Own" and "To speculate - on 'Freud'"¹².

7) "How can Derrida see fit to complain that his work has been traduced, his texts misread, his arguments ignored or vulgarized etc., when he himself makes a regular practice of doing just this with whatever he reads?" Or, in similar tu quoque fashion: "why bother even trying to get Derrida right if, according to him, textuality rules and there is no appeal to the old ("logocentric") constraints of right reason, interpretative truth, authorial intention (etc.)?"¹³. Again, this is just the kind of reflex response that "deconstruction" provokes among those who have avoided any contact with Derrida's work beyond a mere handful of phrases taken out of context and a firm conviction - on the authority of other non-readers - that the whole thing amounts to just a species of sophistical wordplay. It is hard to know what it would take to dislodge this deep-laid prejudice, backed up as it is by the guild mentality that equates "serious" philosophy with work in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, and which views the other ("Continental") line of descent after Kant as fit for consumption only by muddle-headed literary theorists. So the point needs making with maximum emphasis: that Derrida is an exemplary close-reader of philosophic texts whose keen eye for the marginal, the discrepant or the anomalous goes along with an equally exigent sense of the prime obligation - the ethical imperative - to respect what is written and not let interpretation develop "in any direction at all". And this despite the fact - well attested in the latest round of polemics - that such reading may produce results which are counter-canonical (or counter-intuitive) to a degree that provokes outrage among mainstream commentators. But blanket dismissals are of course no substitute for what has so far been altogether lacking, that is to say, a critique of Derrida's claims that would engage them at anything like their own level of detailed textual exegesis. If he is able to run rings around an opponent like John Searle it is because Searle reads always with a view to confirming his own preconceptions, and thus fails to register the logical (as well as rhetorical) complications of Austin's, Derrida's and - not least - his own writing¹⁴.

Of course this is hugely annoying for Searle, as for others with the same understandable desire to ignore such bother-headed "textualist" puzzles and get straight on with the business of expounding a clear-cut, coherent and pragmatically useful speech-act theory. Hence (slogan 8) the idea of deconstruction as a set of geared-up sophistical techniques for "doing things with texts". But it remains the case - as I have argued at length elsewhere - that Derrida is by far more attentive, scrupulous, and faithfully Austinian exponent of Austin's How To Do Things With Words¹⁵ . Above all he is alert to those signs of categorical confusion which begin with the attempt to distinguish clearly between constative and performative speech-act modes, and which then create problems (or, in Austin's phrase, "play old Harry") with the effort to sort out "serious" from "non-serious" instances, good-faith promises from promises uttered in jest, real-life from fictive or set-piece examples, "authentic" from "deviant" ("parasitical") cases, and so forth¹⁶ . What is at issue is the relation between constative theory and performative practice, a relation which Searle thinks unproblematic - provided one adopts an orderly and disciplined approach - but which Derrida (and Austin) find subject to all manner of destabilizing ironies, doubts and complications. There are two crucial points to be made here, as against the standard view (standard at least in the Anglo-American "analytic" community) that Searle won the argument hands down and exposed Derrida as a charlatan intent upon creating deconstructive mischief. One is that Austin, had he lived to witness this exchange, would surely have acknowledged more affinity - more sense of a kindred philosophical spirit - with Derrida's "playful" than with Searle's ultra-"serious" way of reading his work. This is, he would have seen it as much more in keeping with his own willingness to suspend the requirements of "constative" system and method when confronted with examples (jokes, anecdotes, "deviant" performatives, awkward bits of written or oral evidence) which failed to support his larger philosophical claims. And the second point - following from this - is that Austin, like Derrida, perceived no merit in the standard (implicitly ethical) equation between truth, seriousness, and the drive to assimilate marginal or non-standard cases. What unites these thinkers - and sets them at odds with a theorist like Searle - is an openness to the sheer variety of human needs, satisfactions, and sense-making gambits, and also a knowledge of the violence that can often mask behind doctrinaire systematizing habits of thought.

That Derrida to some extent reads Austin against the grain is not - as Searle would have it - a wilful misprision or an act of hermeneutic violence on his part. Rather it signals an awareness of the deep ambivalence in Austin's project, on the one hand his striving to articulate a systematic theory of (proper, authentic) speech-acts, and on the other his sense of the difficulties that arose to frustrate that ambition at every turn. A good deal has been written lately about the "ethics of deconstruction", some of it (e.g. Harpham, 1987 and Critchley, 1992) very much to point while others (Miller, 1987) give plentiful scope for those who would maintain - slogan 9 - that deconstruction celebrates the "death of the author", the dissolution of the subject (the knowing, willing, and judging subject) into so many radically "decentred" discourses or language-games, and hence the demise of any "ethics" worthy the name¹⁷ . There are, I should allow, some few isolated passages in Derrida's (mostly early) work that lend themselves to a reading in line with this late-60s Nietzschean apocalyptic tone. They include the much-cited paragraph from "Structure, Sign and Play" where Derrida writes of the two "interpretations of interpretation", the one turned back nostalgically toward a Rousseauist ethos of origins, truth and presence, the other opening itself up to "the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation"¹⁸. One can see - just about - why readers looking sharp for evidence of Derrida's profligate ways should have jumped at these seemingly extravagant pronouncements and felt themselves justified in avoiding any closer acquaintance with his work.

But such passages must always be read in context, like Derrida's equally notorious dictum that "there is nothing outside the text" (more accurately rendered, "no 'outside' to the text")¹⁹. This statement has similarly been bandied about - item 10 - as proof that deconstruction is just a species of last-ditch solipsism, a textualist variant of the sceptic's refusal to acknowledge any reality beyond the prison - house of ideas, sense-data, private imaginings or whatever. But when restored to its original context in his reading of Rousseau the passage turns out to have no such dire or self-disabling implications. Derrida's point - familiar enough at least since Kant - is that we cannot have direct or unmediated access to the real, since our knowledge thereof is ineluctably structured by the forms of our sensory, perceptual, cognitive or linguistic grasp. To suppose otherwise is to confuse ontological with epistemological issues, and hence to find oneself driven - like Hume - into all sorts of fargone sceptical doubt. Textuality (or "writing", in Derrida's extended sense of that term) is best construed as a deconstructive metonym for the various culturally mediated structures of thought, knowledge and representation which alone make understanding possible. Thus it is nearer the mark to see Kant, not Hume, as the thinker who anticipates some of Derrida's most characteristic turns of argument. Of course one has to take account of the difference between Kant's transcendental (or strong universalist) claims as regards the a priori powers and limits of human understanding, and Derrida's much greater allowance for the various (culture-specific) constraints that play a role in thus establishing the "conditions of possibility" for thought and experience in general. Indeed, as Rodolphe Gaschè has argued most convincingly, it is often with Derrida a matter of ascertaining the precise conditions of impossibility for anything like a Kantian transcendental deduction from first principles²⁰. But these issues are raised - or these aporias located - through an enquiry into the structure, the logic and the grounding suppositions of Kantian thought which respects Kant's critical imperative to take nothing on trust but always to question what is offered in the name of self-evident (received, commonsense, or authoritative) belief. As with Austin, so here: Derrida's reading is more properly and rigorously "Kantian" than those orthodox accounts (or unswervingly "faithful" exegeses) that equate fidelity with a fideist acceptance of the standard interpretative line.

This is not to say of deconstruction (as Paul Ricoeur once remarked about structuralism) that it amounts to nothing more than "Kant minus the transcendental subject", or a replay of nineteenth-century idealist themes in an updated linguistic-textualist idiom²¹. Where such arguments all too easily wind up - as with Rorty - is by sinking the difference between philosophy and literature, viewing all texts (Kant's included) as so many optional "kinds of writing", and thus presenting the pragmatist upshot as an issue out of all our philosophical afflictions²². In fact Derrida's relation to Kant is both closer and more complicated than anything allowed for by Rorty's line of easygoing pragmatist adjustment. One has only to read an essay like "Parergon" (in The Truth in Painting) to appreciate how Derrida questions the "unthought axiomatics", i.e. the strictly unwarranted assumptions, pre-critical residues, de jure stipulations passed off as de facto truths, etc., which continue to characterize Kant's argument at certain crucial and problematic junctures in the three Critiques²³. But this is - I repeat - no mere display of wire-drawn "textualist" ingenuity, or perverse demonstration of the pleasures to be had by pursuing out-of-the-way details (or odd turns of metaphor) with a view to undermining the entire edifice of Kantian critical thought. On the contrary, Derrida argues his case with meticulous attention to the logic (as well as the rhetoric) of Kant's text, despite what emerges in the course of his reading as the difficulty of maintaining any such clear-cut distinction. On one point at least his opponents are right: that deconstruction raises issues (or discovers complications) which are simply not there according to the mainstream interpretive view. Certainly one's reading of an essay like "Parergon" does nothing to facilitate - and much to problematize - one's reading of the three Critiques. Hence no doubt the quite extraordinary degree of resistance (including the downright refusal to read) which Derrida's texts have typically provoked among scholars of a more orthodox mind.

So the Cambridge affair should occasion no surprise when viewed in this larger (though scarcely less provincial) perspective. Of course it was an episode not without precedent in the history of that august institution. After all William Empson, another great philosopher-critic of our time, was likewise the victim both of Cambridge faculty intrigue and of a deep-seated prejudice against the idea that textual close-reading - of the kind so brilliantly displayed in Seven Types of Ambiguity - could go along with a powerful and original intelligence applied to philosophic questions. By the end of Seven Types, Empson has moved far beyond the style of super-subtle semantic exegesis - producing multiple meanings like rabbits out of a hat - for which that book is widely celebrated²⁴. In the last couple of chapters he raises questions about the relation between logic, grammar and rhetoric which cannot be resolved (in New Critical fashion) by appealing to language of "irony" or "paradox" that would safeguard poetic truth by cutting it off from the plain-prose standards of rational accountability. And in The Structure of Complex Words (1951) Empson went on to develop a theory of logico-semantic entailment - a theory of extraordinary range, subtlety and analytic power - which has so far been pretty much ignored by literary critics and philosophers alike²⁵. The critics were mostly put off by they saw as the book's overly "philosophical" approach, while the philosophers - with very few exceptions - appear to have regarded Empson, like Derrida, as a jumped-up rhetorician or literary theorist whose work scarcely merited serious treatment. Still there are insights in Complex Words which neither the critics nor the philosophers have yet caught up with. And the same applies to Derrida's work, despite the resistance currently mounted by those who would equate philosophical "rigour" with a steadfast indifference to issues beyond their own, tightly regulated sphere of professional competence.

If one effect of Derrida's deconstructive readings - as like of Paul de Man's late essays - is to complicate the logic/rhetoric distinction, this is not for want of rigorous argument on their part, or out of some bother-headed "literary" desire to have done with reason, logic, and truth. "To empty rhetoric of its epistemological impact", de Man writes, "it is possible only because its tropological, figural function are being bypassed. It is as if rhetoric could be isolated from the generality that grammar and logic have in common and considered as a mere correlative of an illocutionary power²⁶ .Which is also to say that those commentators err who suppose deconstruction to be just a "rhetorical" bag of tricks on account of its extreme - and to their minds perverse -attentiveness to matters of textual detail. Thus deconstruction's "final insight may well concern rhetoric itself, the discovery that what is called 'rhetoric' is precisely the gap that becomes apparent in the pedagogical and philosophical history of the term. Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative but when considered as a system of tropes, it deconstructs its own performance"²⁷. Such statements would carry little weight - would indeed amount to so much empty rhetoric - were they not backed up by that level of sustained conceptual exegesis that one finds most impressively ( if disconcertingly) displayed in de Man's essays on Pascal, Locke and Kant²⁸. And the debate is likely to become yet more heated as deconstruction approaches the source-texts of modern analytic philosophy, pointing out some of the unresolved problems - "aporias" in the strictest sense of that term - which accompanied Frege's strenuous attempt to demarcate the realm of logical truth from those of rhetoric, metaphor, ambiguity, and other such ills to which natural language was all too frequently prone²⁹.

To be sure it is the case - as neither Derrida nor de Man would for a moment deny- that such claims are open to argued and cogent refutation; that they involve determinate values of truth and falsehood (as well as protocols of right reading) which set deconstruction firmly apart from its pseudo-deconstructive offshoots in literary criticism. But in order to demonstrate the falsity (or inaccuracy) of Derrida's or de Man's readings, one would need at least to match - and at certain points to surpass - the standards of interpretive rigour and probity established in their own best work. In some few cases the adversary discourse has achieved something like this level sustained interrogative critique. Elsewhere - as in Gaschè's exemplary essay on de Man - it has started out from a position of principled resistance, and then come around, as the argument proceeded, to a standpoint of grudging but compelled respect for the force and validity of his claims³⁰ (Thus de Man: "what makes a reading more or less true is the necessity of its occurrence, regardless of the reader's or of the author wishes... It depends, in other words, on the rigour of the reading as an argument... Reading as an argument... because it has to go against the grain of what one would want to happen in the name of what has to happen"³¹). But for the most part this whole "debate" has been characterized by the mixture of ignorance, prejudice and downright failure to read which stood plain to view in the Cambridge petition. No doubt it will provide fascinating material for some future cultural historian or latterday Flaubert with a relish for such catalogues of pompous fatuity and clichÈd common-room wisdom. Meanwhile Derrida's writings are there for those puzzled by the Cambridge charade and willing to read for themselves.

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