Stuart Sim

Celebrated by some, abused by others, Derrida is the most discussed philosopher at the end of this century.

Derrida and the End of History

Tim Pendry

Stuart Sim's very short (75-page) 1995 exploration of Jacques Derrida's politics as we moved towards the Millennium is still well worth reading for its clarity of exposition (which is a lot more than can be said about Derrida himself). It is about a riposte to Fukyama's neo-Hegelian notion that history was coming to an end (in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union), a thesis that was ridiculous if fashionable then and looks even more so as we survey the world of 2025. There is not much point any more in engaging with Fukuyama any more than one might engage with 'Mein Kampf' - except as an historical curiosity that helped fuel an unbalanced ideology (in his case the variants of liberal internationalism and neo-conservatism that have plagued us ever since). However, such interventions at least have the virtue of provoking a reaction. Sim's account of Derrida's response is not merely lucid. It managed to trigger in this reader a degree of respect for Derrida who I had pigeon-holed previously as a rather useless and obscure navel-gazer. In 'Specters of Marx' (1994), Derrida comes down from his ivory tower long enough to apply his insights about how language operates to the political sphere. It seems, thirty years on, that he was more right than not. It is also a lesson that Marx still has something to say to us about power relations in the world even if there is no cause to 'believe in him'. When Fukuyama is long forgotten, the spectre that is Marx will continue to haunt our world. Unfortunately Derrida's use of his deconstructionist form of thinking is not something that can affect more than a very few people active in the world. Sartre perhaps was the only philosopher capable of creating a potentially mass level activist philosophy after Marx and even that was never truly mass. Derrida's Marx is also a shorn of the simplicities of any ideology that can mobilise humanity. His considerations tend to descend into word play and the game. Marx has 'right' things to say (though not to be wholly 'right) but it is left to us to decide how to say these things on our own terms. It is an excellent and lucid little pamphlet that captures the atmosphere of the intellectual life of the 1990s as left-inclined thinkers fought against the pessimism that had emerged as a Sovietism that they never really liked in any case no longer offered a counterweight to neo-liberalism and empire. Most intellectuals simply went with the flow and became what we would now call 'liberal-left', a sad travesty of the liberatory thought of the bulk of the twentieth century, but we get a hint in this book that there was a baby to be saved from going out with the bath water.

Derrida and the End of History

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