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Legacy and Pedagogy, or How to Read Derrida

Michael Naas. Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of
Deconstruction. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003. 211 pp.

So long and hard did I search that these words on the work of Jacques
Derrida represent less the results of my search than simply a few reflections
on the path my search took. For what I discovered in the end was not
some new theme, concept, or principle in the work of Derrida but, sim-
ply, a way of conducting the search, a means of feeling my way, of tak-
ing the lay of the land, of marking out the boundaries of the terrain of
thought by following not the differences already present on the terrain
or hidden beneath it but the movement of these differences along its sur-
face (76).

The above epigraph, drawn from the opening paragraph of chapter 5,

I believe, captures the impetus for and the itinerary of Michael Naas’s
exemplary reflections on the texts of Derrida in Taking on the Tradition:
Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction. This truly original and
insightful second book by Naas, following Turning: From Persuasion to
Philosophy, is exemplary not only because of the caliber of the writing
and the subtlety of the interpretations but also because it demonstrates
the ways in which the “logic of exemplarity” function in Derrida’s
engagements with both the philosophical and literary traditions.1 In
fact, each of the book’s chapters, nearly all of which were written for
and presented on particular occasions (from the annual meeting of
SPEP and the Collegium Phaenomenologicum to a conference at the
Collège international de philosophie in Paris and a foreign study program
in Athens), not only examines this logic and its structures but, perhaps
more importantly, exemplifies how the logic of exemplarity always
operates within particular readings and specific contexts.
Taking seriously Derrida’s writings on “performativity,” from “Signature
Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, and Limited Inc to more recent
texts that treat themes such as the promise, perjury, and forgiveness,
Naas astutely analyzes the performative nature of Derrida’s writings,
that is to say, the way in which the language and rhetoric, the style
and tone of these texts reflect and affect the arguments and claims
being made. A skillful and precise translator of numerous books and
Research in Phenomenology, 36
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articles penned by Derrida, including The Other Heading: Reflections on

Today’s Europe (1992), Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
(1993), Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999), The Work of Mourning (2001),
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005), Naas navigates his way around the
texts of Derrida with great care and attention. It is evident that the
task of translation has informed the author’s own approach to taking
up and taking on the great works of the tradition. Thus, it is no
surprise that throughout the book, Naas turns his reader’s attention
away from the traditional terrain of philosophy—that of arguments
or concepts—and toward what philosophy deems and rejects as its
“other,” toward that which it depicts as mere ornament or a dangerous
supplement.
This approach, on the author’s part, ought not be read as a naïve
reversal of the classical philosophical hierarchy that would give form
precedence over content and celebrate style over substance. Rather,
Naas’s nuanced readings, which often examine how this very hierarchy
came to be established and how its supposed validity comes to be
reaffirmed time and again by and as the tradition, precisely take on
the priority philosophy has accorded itself. What becomes clear when
reading this book and what links each chapter to the others, without
ever reducing the singularity of each reading, is the insistence that
every negotiation with a tradition requires us to respond not simply
to the what but to the how of every argument. What Taking on the
Tradition demonstrates is that the force of Derrida’s negotiation with
the Western philosophical tradition derives not only from his rethinking
of classical concepts and themes but also from his reworking of “tra-
ditional ways of making arguments and claims, of claiming authority,
producing evidence, and gaining conviction” (xix). Therefore, it is not
the terrain of philosophy that Naas is turning the reader away from;
rather, it is with and through Derrida that he is exploring another
way of mapping and traversing this terrain, that is, another way of
reading philosophy or reading philosophically.
Thus, in carefully staging or re-staging scenes of donation and recep-
tion in which “the tradition” is bequeathed or inherited, Naas’s nine
chapters, as well as the book’s conclusion, simultaneously show and say
what the stakes are in Derrida’s interventions into the writings of his
predecessors (from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Montaigne),
as well as those of his contemporaries (including Foucault, Levinas,
and Vernant). In Taking on the Tradition, it is the author’s contention
that we ought to reexamine these “moments of reception” inscribed
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within the Western tradition, less to account for what goods are handed
down from generation to generation, than to see how the passing on
of tradition is itself implicated in the establishment of the legitimacy
and power of a tradition—a process which makes it possible for us to
employ such an authoritative expression as “the tradition.”
How, then, does one take on the tradition? In the book’s introduc-
tion, “Signing Off on Tradition,” Naas describes his use of the mul-
tivalent phrase taking on the tradition, which serves as both the title and
guiding thread for the book, as “another way of glossing ‘deconstruction’”
(xix). Whether the expression “to take on” indicates a moment of
contestation or a mode of acceptance, the author suggests, it always
implies reception. In other words, whether we are for or against a tra-
dition or something within this tradition, we have already taken it up
as our own. “We are signed into a tradition and a history,” Naas
writes, “not only by agreeing with those who came before us, that is,
by explicitly taking on their tradition or their history, but simply by
recognizing their signature” (xvii). If we are always already preceded
by a tradition that enables us to read, write, and reflect, then we are,
by virtue of being formed by this history, always already signed on to
it. And, even if one protests against something within this tradition,
one is, the author argues, nonetheless an inheritor of it and even pro-
grammed by it.
How, then, does one begin to take on the tradition? Perhaps, we
should first ask: Where does one begin in taking on the tradition and
from what vantage point does one approach the canon? As Naas notes,
Derrida has shown that there is no other place to begin than from
“within” a tradition, from “within” a history. And, as Derrida insists,
in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, “one must begin by listening to the canon”
regardless of what one ends up doing with it.2 This is, of course, what
Derrida has done with so many figures, major and minor, in the
Western philosophical tradition, perhaps most famously with Augustine,
Rousseau, and Husserl. Likewise, Naas acknowledges that there is no
privileged point of entry into the vast and diverse corpus of Derrida.
Nonetheless, he adds that one’s starting point is never arbitrary or
innocent, and therefore it is essential to begin well. So, let us begin
at the beginning and take the lay of the land.
* * *
Taking on the Tradition, which is divided into three parts—Part I, “Greek
Gifts,” Part II, “French Receptions,” and Part III, “‘Our’ Legacies”—
devotes five of the nine chapters either to Derrida’s re-readings of the
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Ancient Greeks or to reading Derridean texts through the Greeks. The

book, thus, takes us back to the beginning of “our” tradition—to the
Ancients, but not only to Plato and Aristotle, these patriarchs of our
philosophical line, but also to their forefather, Homer. More specifically,
in the first two chapters, “A Given Take: The Platonic Reception of
Plato in the Pharmacy” and “Given Time for a Detour: The Abyssal
Gift of Khòra,” Naas elucidates Derrida’s interventions into the Platonic
corpus to explicate the way in which these texts thematize and enact
donation and reception, filiation and inheritance. In chapters 3, 8, and
9 (“Stumping the Sun: The Odyssey of Metaphor in ‘White Mythology,’”
“Just a Turn Away: Apostrophe and the Politics of Friendship,” and
“Hospitality as an Open Question: Deconstruction’s Welcome Politics”),
the reader once again encounters Derrida’s engagement with the
Ancients. These chapters, however, go beyond Derrida’s interpreta-
tions of metaphor, friendship, and hospitality and take the reader on
a few “detours,” specifically, through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, not
only to enrich, even “supplement,” the Derridean texts but also to
provide deconstructive readings of Homer in terms of, for example,
“sure signs” (chapter 3), “guest-friendship” (chapter 8), and hospitality
(chapter 9).
The question of hospitality that is so fully developed in the final
chapter of the book is set up and follows from chapter 6, “The
Phenomenon in Question: Violence, Metaphysics, and the Levinasian
Third.” In this chapter, the author addresses Derrida’s engagement
with Levinas, which spanned three decades, from the publication of
“Violence and Metaphysics” in 1964 to Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas and
Of Hospitality, which both appeared in 1997, the year following the
death of Levinas. Naas reinterprets Derrida’s early text through the
latter ones, especially Adieu, and makes a case for continuity between
these writings, despite the temporal distance between them. He writes
that “we can today, in the light of Adieu, begin to read ‘Violence and
Metaphysics’ as a great text on hospitality, on a hospitality that is
always granted by means of the question but can never be reduced
to it” (94). The tension between “questioning” and “welcoming” what
is foreign or other is not only the central concern of this chapter but
is the guiding question in chapter 9, in which Naas makes a case for
both an ethics and politics of “deconstructive hospitality” and a think-
ing of “deconstruction as hospitality” (155).
Perhaps the most playfully written chapters of the book, thus the
most attentive to language, are chapter 5, “Lacunae: Divining Derrida’s
Sources Through ‘Telepathy,’” chapter 7, “Better Believing It: Translating
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Skepticism in Memoirs of the Blind,” and the Conclusion, “Passing on

the Mantle: Elijah’s Glas and the Second Coming of Dr. John Alexander
Dowie.”3 Although these chapters are absolutely heterogeneous, each
grapples with a relationship of inheritance and legacy that is thought
in terms that are generally rejected by, and thus excluded from, philo-
sophical discourse—faith, belief, divination, telepathy, “messianicity”—
terms that are most often relegated to the realm of religion, even
mysticism. Although these chapters do not directly address the ques-
tion of religion, each in its own way highlights the relation between
the “Judeo” and the “Christian” legacies that are inscribed in Derrida’s
thought.
* * *
As the book’s subtitle “Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Decon-
struction” suggests, the thread that weaves these diverse chapters together
is the question of legacy itself. As a correlate to a thinking of legacy,
the problem of reception necessarily comes to the fore. In fact, one
could claim that every one of the book’s chapters is preoccupied with
the problematic of how one is to inherit the tradition. For this reader,
the preeminent concern of Taking on the Tradition is how to receive the
tradition well—that is to say, how to be receptive to something untra-
ditional, something non-canonical, even something entirely unforesee-
able, within the very tradition that has given us “all the means and
resources for our receiving” (18). And, if any reception of the tradition
is inseparable from the task of reading or receiving texts, then Naas’
motivation is first and foremost a pedagogical one. Not only is the
pedagogical question of how to teach Derrida highlighted in the book’s
last chapter in which the author instructs an undergraduate audience,
but also in his readings of Derrida Naas examines and undertakes a
deconstructive pedagogy throughout. “Indeed,” as the author admits,
“this is an implicit goal of the entire book” (xxviii). In the space remain-
ing, we will briefly and all too schematically trace the relationship
between legacy and pedagogy through three of the book’s chapters.
The book’s first chapter, which provides a patient analysis of Derrida’s
philosophical and rhetorical strategies in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” merits
special attention as it sets up many of the central problematics—includ-
ing reading and writing, mastery and pedagogy—around which the
entire book is organized. In this chapter the author attends to Derrida’s
treatment of Plato’s Phaedrus and, in particular, to its well-known myth
in which the servant Theuth presents the gift of writing to King Thamus.
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Although “Plato’s Pharmacy” is best known for taking on the privi-

lege that Plato accords speech over writing, Naas demonstrates the
complexity of what Derrida is doing in this important essay when he
interrupts or “cuts off” the king before any decision can be made and
any value, positive or negative, can be conferred on the gift that is
being received.4
By freezing the dialogue, the author claims, Derrida gives us a
chance to see how the reception of the philosophical tradition is itself
figured within this seemingly minor Platonic myth: “By suspending this
moment of donation . . ., Derrida suspends the moment when we will
have to decide how to read, to read ourselves, when we will have to
decide what reading and writing—what we—are” (14). The suspension
of this scene of donation and reception enables us not simply to catch
a glimpse of a particular instance of legacy within a Platonic text but
more generally the setting up and passing on of “Platonism” and thus
of philosophy itself, along with its attendant hierarchies that organize
its laws of inheritance: “speech/writing, life/death, presence/absence,
master/servant, father/son, legitimate son/ bastard son, and so on” (9).
To receive Plato’s text unequivocally, to search for what it means or
intends, rather than attending to what it says, does, and performs,
would be, Naas argues, to treat the pharmakon as polysemic rather than
ambivalent and would be to follow the program set in place in Plato’s
text that urges the reader to choose between the different meanings
of pharmakon as “poison” or “remedy” according to context or inten-
tion, thus overcoming an ambivalence that is not only a “capital threat”
to the reading of Phaedrus but also “an even more radical ‘parricide,’”
a threat “to the tradition itself ” (17).
The book’s second chapter, “Given Time for a Detour: The Abyssal
Gift of Khòra,” also raises the question of how one is to receive that
which interrupts all reception. What is at issue in this chapter is giving
and taking, more specifically, the giving of one text to another within
a corpus, or what the author calls “autodonation.” Naas examines
Derrida’s thinking of the logic of the gift in Given Time through a
remarkable reading of “the figure” of khòra—the space or receptacle
that “gives us all our determinations and distinctions” (xxiv). “Khòra,”
an essay that was itself given by Derrida as an homage to the French
classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, from whom he had already received so
much, especially how to think something like khòra, is taken up with
an examination of this strange “thing” belonging neither to the sensible
nor to the intelligible, which is beyond mythos and logos and exceeds
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all determinations. As Naas explains in the book’s introduction, he

reads “the khòra as an exemplary figure of reception and donation in
the Western philosophical tradition and Plato’s Timaeus as an exem-
plary text of reading and reception” (xxiv).
While reading “Khòra” with Given Time, Naas takes the time for a
detour and, in so doing, calls attention to its own status as a detour—
“a detour concerning detours,” as it were. Now, a detour is typically
taken to capitalize on time or space, yet in his wonderfully abyssal
chapter, the detour itself is, will be, and will have been the point. Thus,
Naas asks, how does a text receive such a detour as khòra? Would
being confronted with khòra be akin to “the first pure detour?”(26). Would
a detour, like khòra in the essay “Khòra,” be what is harbored, shel-
tered, or incorporated within the philosophical program while at the
same time exceeding it? Naas reads the khòric space as “a sort of chasm
or abyss” (27), the “space” on or in which everything can be projected
(29). Yet, he cautions that this “mise en abîme” results not in “an infinite
regress” but in “a series of aporias wherein the contained narrative
turns out to contain the conditions for the containing one, and the
containing narrative turns out to be a moment or example within the
narrative it contains” (31).
Taking on the Tradition is not exclusively devoted to notions of giving
and receiving in the Greek tradition and the giving and receiving of
this tradition but is also concerned with the ways in which Derrida
received from and gave to other French intellectuals, including Vernant,
Foucault, Levinas, and Blanchot, all of whom were a generation or
two his senior and were in the position of pedagogue or master. In
addition to sketching out the logic of the gift through Derrida’s giving
of “Khòra” to Vernant, Naas traces the movements of Derrida’s rap-
port with another French master in chapter 4, “Derrida’s Watch/
Foucault’s Pendulum: A Final Impetus to the Cogito Debate.” In this
chapter, the author scans the passage of texts and time—from the
appearance of Foucault’s The History of Madness in 1961 to the publi-
cation of Derrida’s essay “To Do Justice to Freud” in 1991—not with
the hope of rekindling the debate over the exclusion of madness in
Descartes’ Meditations or with the aim of archiving it in the annals of
a history of ideas. Rather, he reenacts the movement of this contes-
tation between a “disciple” and his “master,” that is, Derrida’s strug-
gle with Foucault over the notion of mastery itself, in order to reveal
another way of doing justice to one’s teacher or master, which would
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not involve an oedipal master/slave dialectic but would entail “a process

of mourning, an unmasterable dialectic of mourning” (60).
If, as Naas persuasively argues, mastery is the master term of the
entire “debate” between Foucault and Derrida, and if both of Derrida’s
essays are about the question of mastery in general, then what does
Naas teach us about mastery? He shows us that the relationship between
the master and the disciple functions on the basis of the absence of
the master, that “the master is—as a master —perhaps always absent”
(72–73), that to be faithful or to do justice to the master would be
not to simply acquiesce to the master’s voice, to pay tribute or homage
“for past services rendered” with an admiring discourse, but to show
fidelity to an ambivalence between the master and the disciple and within
each one of them. The only way, then, not to fall into the trap of the
master-disciple dialectic would be to “locate a moment, a questioning
moment” (73) within the text, that would allow us to linger over the
ambivalent relation of mourning. Perhaps, then, Naas is asking us in
Taking on the Tradition to think legacy and pedagogy in terms of the
“work of mourning,” which necessarily involves “a mourning for the
master, for oneself as the disciple of the master, and for that which
relates the disciple to the master, a mourning, then, for an unmas-
terable ambivalence” (74).

Pleshette DeArmitt
Villanova University

NOTES
1. Michael Naas, Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad, (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1995).
2. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault,
and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 74.
3. Chapter 7, “Better Believing It,” which is written in two “voices,” is co-authored
by Pascale-Anne Brault, who is also Naas’ co-translator.
4. As Naas notes in the “Introduction,” Theuth and Thamus are the first of many
“father/son” pairs, who are also situated within a pedagogical structure, that appear
in the book. Indeed, as Derrida’s work makes acutely aware, the question of filiation
is central to any thinking of legacy and tradition. However, with no hint of nostalgia
or reverence for the figure of the father (sun, king, chief, sovereign, etc.), Derrida
tirelessly deconstructed this paternal privilege and with it the legitimacy and pro-
priety of the father-son lineage that upholds and passes on the Western philosophical
tradition as we have known it. To his credit, Naas draws our attention to the prob-
lem that if “[i]n each case the tradition is established across generations—and if
mother and daughters are absent here, it is perhaps because they have been for the
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most part cut out of this inheritance” (xxiv). Although the author suggests that “[t]his
absence provides yet another reason to interpret this testamentary scene and to read
Plato, for example, with any eye not only for father figures but for other thoughts
of legacy and inheritance, for daughters and mothers like Pharmaceia and Khòra,”
no such legacies are explored in the book (xxiv).