At Lehigh University (PA), dr. Nitzan Lebovic works as Assistant Professor of History, and holds a chair in Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values. As such, he is of course very familiar with the work of Derrida, who is pre-eminently a Jewish thinker. However, there is much more that binds him to Derrida. Lebovic wrote articles about film, literature, and the intellectual history of contemporary politics. Currently he is writing a book about German Jewish Tempoarlity. Via Derrida he learned how to think beyond the structuralistic paradigm.

Nowadays Lebovic applies Derrida in different ways than before; during the years that formed him as a scholar he wasn’t trained to think like Derrida. ‘Philosophy is one of the major tools in my work. I started studying it while studying history and literature, as the groundwork for any textual approach. At the time the latter department was heavily structural minded, which I found troubling as I developed. They never tried or find the philosophy conditions for their approach, or to historicize it. It was used from the perspective of ‘new criticism’; the text was taken out of context and read for itself.’

Structuralism did however give Lebovic the means needed to develop his analytical mind. ‘On the one hand, I greatly appreciated the tools that structuralism gave us to get in the text and actually analyze it. That is what really convinced me that the best way to understand our world is through close-readings. On the other hand it was lacking all context. I found this really problematic because it avoided the metaphysical assumptions about what structuralism is all about. And lacking the contextual background it also failed to see its own blind spots. Those blind spots is of course where Derrida came in. I was trying to find the framework of analytical tools I was trained in. Structuralism is a bit like military training, until you read Derrida. Then your own weapons are turning against you.’

Even though Lebovic has read Derrida extensively he can still remember the struggle of getting a grip on Derrida. ‘It’s total infinity. I think everybody who reads him will eventually have problems with getting a complete picture of Derrida.’ During the course of his reading this changed for Lebovic. ‘Derrida is important for me in the sense that his method helped me to get into some issues, to think about how to place them, or rather how to unplace them sometimes. I’m usually dealing with the formalisation of politics in different institutal settings  and how it relates to – and this is where Derrida becomes important – the issues of power and force, specifically within the Israeli context, the occupation of the west bank, the Gaza strip. Derrida was very helpful in demonstrating where the relationship between these things goes back into our language and into the way we tend to think about our surroundings and how it conditions us. Derrida taught me how to redirect my research to different mechanisms of description,. Through Derrida I realized that we need to be sensible and cautious about our use of language and the way it is mobilized for political purposes, while hiding its own conditions of possibility or impossibility.’

After reading Derrida Lebovic actually attended a lecture by Derrida. ‘I heard him speak in Tel Aviv in 1998. In a huge hall I was amongst thousands of others who had come to hear him speak. During his lecture he tried to take the notion of hospitality and actually apply that to how we discussed contemporary politics in the Middle East. Specifically he criticized the way the state of Israel discussed and related to the Palestinian people.’

During his career Derrida was accused of not being political and not dealing with political issues. In his last years he did discuss more the relevance of deconstruction for actual politics. ‘Now when we look back we see that many of his topics where there to begin with. You can see these motives go back to the very early work, but the way it’s leading towards it is very convoluted, a very sophisticated way of thinking through language, through the conditions that languages creates for our discussion. That is another important lesson I got from Derrida. He taught me that there are many different ways to write about important subjects. His way of writing about these topics is more reflective on his own assumptions regarding the working of language as both a tool for analysis and description. What Derrida was doing was so powerful. On the one hand he was using these observation in order to create something that is not only analytic and descriptive but also creative. Derrida was not only de- constructing, but also re-constructing, re-creating something that wasn’t there before. He was making something seemingly simple into a multilayered phenomenon, and simultaneously opening the subject  to critique. He undermined our sense of an absolute ‘subject’.’

What Derrida had shown Lebovic could not be undone. ‘What he taught me in Israel during my BA, is simply that the world is more complicated than what we are thaught by structuralism, not black and white. The academic world would not suffice in that sense, we have to go beyond academic discourse. If we don’t, we will never know how the relationship with the self and the outside world is really framed.’ Naturally, this does not mean that we should leave structuralism behind. ‘I think it would be a mistake to let go of structuralism completely. The result of that would be to go without systematic training, like close reading, and the ability to analyze text. I still believe in the structuralistic starting point, it should start with the text itself and not from an outside consideration or from where the text should stand. You need both, structuralism and deconstruction. In a way, — and that is the historian in me — structuralism must be there because that is where deconstruction begins.’

The reason deconstruction isn’t perfect on its own is simple. ‘Deconstruction implies but never admits hierarchies between different options of analysis. It opens up different options of reading and declares the different options to be equal, but I don’t think the different kinds of readings are really equal in the end. Even Derrida has his preferences. In contrast to other thinkers he would, I think, apply that to his own self. Derrida, whether he liked it or not, was an authority in the field of deconstruction so when people read his reading, they would follow his opinion. I think that is a blind spot in deconstruction.’

Derrida wasn’t just an authority, he was an individual foremost: ‘You tend to open up to him, he shows the reader so much of him- or herself. As he pointed out in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy[1] one cannot touch without ‘an extension towards the touch.’ It is impossible to separate Derrida the thinker from Derrida the person, and the “work” from both. Nor can you distinguish his readers from their ‘extensions.’  ‘He is very approachable, he doesn’t seem vain, he projected a notion of modesty and his willingness to discuss everything. ‘When I see how the legacy lives on, how scholars compete with each other on who is better at reading Derrida, I am bemused by that. Sometimes I find it ridiculous. I don’t know if the Derrida camp is aware of this — I don’t think so — but it is exactly the opposite of what Derrida tried to do. Now I myself sound like an authority, which I am not, nor would I claim or want to be.’ For Derrida of course the real authority is the interpreting reader. ‘As a great philosopher, Derrida knows how to build a system that is always dynamic, evolving and in a way extending or transgressing the notion of a system. During his life this already placed him in a very problematic place in the academia, because the academics prefer clear systems of thinking.’

In his work — it is very visible in Force of Law[2] — Derrida spoke against the accusation that was made towards him. He was supposed to have been using deconstruction in a way that would be irrelevant to or not directly affiliated with the notion of justice. His response was that everything in his deconstruction is really about justice, about power, and about the idiomatic relation between those. But the language he uses cannot be a direct one, because that would exactly place justice on the spot where he does not want it to be. ‘He does not want justice to end up in a normative, judgmental hierarchical place. So what Derrida tries to do, is to go around that. He chooses, he says so explicitly, to use a language that will not be directed at justice. His language is sliding on a descriptive bypass, parallel to normative language, because he wants it to reach justice  by a detour; from behind, in surprise, where justice cannot be expected, and therefore no be banned or excluded. He does that with many issues that were important to him. He has a sophisticated virtuosic relation to language and is able to play with it. This is one of the biggest concepts for him: playing with language. And he does it in an eloquent and deep manner. Being implicit or indirect has to do with a certain choice. A choice to be critical or not to get involved too directly in the political theatre — a metaphor he borrows from Schmitt — that asks for identification, a division between friends and enemies, a catharsis. It is a choice about how you want to be affiliated with certain philosophical schools or not.’

Playfulness is part of the game. Derrida is playful but not childish. It may look as if Derrida has a childlike curiosity towards the text, but for Lebovic that isn’t the complete picture. ‘I don’t entirely trust the idea that Derrida was completely open. Even for Derrida, once you have decided on the tools of deconstruction, you’re already in it. However, Derrida’s power is his ability to actually admit that, points out his touch, his force, his resistance to law which is not less powerful. He makes this the essence of politics, and its elaboration is what charges his later years with issues we are still digesting and trying to comprehend. What is, exactly, the meaning of a ‘democracy to come’? That will continue to occupy me in the coming years.’

[1] Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, 1998, Galilée, translation:On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, 2005

[2] Force de Loi, Galilée, 1994, English version: Force of Law, 1990.