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Monday, July 16, 2007
Deed of Gift
The Chron of Higher Ed has a piece on the Derrida archive controversy. Free link. No one is coming up heaped in gloire. Derrida apparently interfered with an ongoing sexual harassment investigation in what sounds like quite inappropriate fashion:
In July 2004, Derrida sent a letter to Ralph J. Cicerone, then the chancellor at Irvine. In it he writes that he feels “great surprise, worry, and indignation” upon hearing of the allegations against Mr. Kujundzic. While he approves of injunctions against sexual harassment, he writes, those same rules “can give rise to applications that are abusive, capricious, or even perverse and deceitful.”
Derrida admits in the letter that he does not have access to the “confidential file” and so is in no position to judge the merits of the case. He also states that his knowledge of what happened came exclusively from his colleagues, including Mr. Kujundzic.
Despite that acknowledgment, Derrida appears to have arrived at a firm conclusion. He calls the allegations made by the graduate student “unfair” and “in bad faith.” He asserts that “there has been neither coercion or violence brought to bear on her.” When referring to Ms. Anderson, he puts the word “innocence” in quotation marks and points out that she is in her mid-20s.
Derrida argues that his friend is “absolutely incapable of using or abusing his power with students.” He also includes a long paragraph listing Mr. Kujundzic’s scholarly accomplishments and attempts to elicit sympathy by revealing that the professor experienced “dramatic weight loss, depression, and so forth” as a result of the accusations.
The letter ends with a threat. If the case against his friend is not “interrupted or canceled,” then Derrida will end “all my relations” with the university.
On the other hand, the university has played some legal hardball in response:
Within weeks of Derrida’s death, according to Ms. Ronell, his widow (who declined to speak to The Chronicle) received a letter from the university, inquiring about the remainder of the archive. Marguerite Derrida made it plain to university officials that Irvine would receive no more papers. That was, she believed, her husband’s wish, and she would abide by it.
More letters were exchanged between the university and Ms. Derrida. She held firm. No papers. No books. Nothing.
Then, in November of last year, Ms. Derrida, a psychoanalyst, returned from a session with a patient to find a uniformed official standing at her door. (That is how legal papers are served in France.)
Irvine had upped the ante, filing a lawsuit in California against Ms. Derrida and her two sons. The lawsuit also named a third son, whom Derrida had fathered with another woman. The inclusion of this third son seemed, to those who were close to Derrida, to be either a callous legal maneuver or a deliberate low blow.
Comments
This article seems like an improvement from some of the pieces floating around the LA Times and such, but the whole thing still isn’t sitting right with me. It isn’t the stain on Derrida’s reputation that’s bothering me anymore, I don’t think. Recalling Derrida’s state of health at the time of his letter, his limited information on the sexual harassment charges, and the importance of loyalty to an old friend as a motive should go a long way to limiting the shadow this affair casts on Derrida’s name and work. So it’s not without some disappointment (and some regret for whatever small contribution my own writing on the subject may have made to its continued survival) that I see that the story, with its somewhat spurious scandalizing impulse, is still circulating. At the same time, I’m somewhat relieved to see it on the Valve (for the second time, sort of, in a less transient form), opening the space for some much needed discussion.
Part of what sits poorly with me is that, though I can quite easily find cause to exonerate Derrida, I cannot exonerate the act of writing itself. That is, I can, I think, in good faith separate Derrida’s signature from his letter and thus keep both his historical existence (including his personal life, his family, who have been unfortunately dragged into this affair) and the corpus of his work at some degree of remove from the act of writing that set these events in motion. Doing so cannot, however, cover over the violence of the letter itself, the perpetuation of the very real violence by Professor Kujundzic against his advisee that, at a minimum, I do not feel comfortable dismissing, even if I am not personally in a position to affirm that anything which could be called violence did occur. The letter, even if Derrida cannot be called to response for it, perpetuates that violence not only because of the impact I know it to have had on Professor Kujundzic’s accuser, but also because it brings the full economic value of Derrida’s gift, now converted into a commodity, to bear as a counterforce against a university policies designed to protect real victims of quid pro quo sexual harassment.
The haste to settle these events by casting judgment upon either Derrida or the university seems to me like a way to avoid reading the situation. Thus, while I regret my own contributions to the perpetuation of the scandal against Derrida, I am equally concerned about the reigning interpretation of UCI’s choice to sue by Derrida’s friends and colleagues. Certainly, I can’t deny that the timeline of events suggested by the Chronicle of Higher Education article corresponds point for point with the narrative of an institution acting purely of out of economic self-interest. While not wishing to undercut this “individual against the institution” narrative I do want to insist that, even if it successfully accounts for the facts, it does not exhaust the possible interpretations of the university’s actions. The fact that the university’s responses, however self-interested, were shaped in response to laws and pressures (both public and internal) designed to ensure some modicum of justice implies a much larger sphere of meaning than that controlled by any of the individual actors in this drama.
Even if motivated purely by economic self-interest, the university’s response, however violent itself, to the violence of Derrida’s letter constitutes a vital counter-defense of the university’s ability to execute its sexual harassment policy free from the very forces that have traditionally protected sexual harassers in the university. We need not blame Derrida himself to recognize this - that his physical and mental condition and limited knowledge may have impaired his ability to resists affixing his signature to the latest iteration of an act of violence that has long plagued academia does not undo the violence or the need for a counter-defense. The university’s lawsuit may have brought with it heavy consequences to many people involved, but its success would have meant that no signature is above the law, that the symbolic capital that comes with academic reputation cannot be exchanged for interventions in the enforcement of laws and policies. Viewed this way, the university’s withdrawal of the lawsuit in defense of its own reputation seems almost as cowardly and as self-interested as the initiation of the suit.
In all likelihood, the university made both decisions (the suit and its withdrawal) on the basis of a rationale that was both economic (protecting its assets, protecting its reputation) and ethical (protecting its ability to enforce sexual harassment policies, respecting the wishes of Derrida and his family). As a result, the situation cannot possibly be evaluated on the basis of the university’s “true” motive alone, and it is only further distorted by narratives that presume to assign blame and separate the hero from the villain. Whether this gets us any closer to evaluating the situation, I can’t say. But the conversation that is taking place in scatter print outlets needs to take a different form than it has taken to date.
If Derrida is a philosopher, something that UC Irvine stated they believed was true multiple times, he is the expert on justice. Such a person is expert on the soul and virtue of people, and thus is qualified to give opinion on the virtue of Kuzundjic. Moreover, he is not only qualified to determine justice, but he is also qualified to dole out those punishments he deems appropriate and are within his power.
Indeed, if a philosopher deemed that UC Irvine was an unjust institution, it is required for him to punish UC Irvine if possible. Unjust institutions should not receive philosophic works, because one cannot trust the unjust with knowledge.
Since the decisions of the wise are superior to those of the unwise, if Derrida is a philosopher, then his decisions simply are better than those of UC Irvine. And his friends, since everybody wishes to be ruled by the wise, should therefore obey Derrida versus UC Irvine.
Even a blind man can see it is so, burritoboy.
While I can’t say that this comment will take up the expressed “need” for this conversation to take a different form, for those interested in “reading the situation,” the link below may provide some pages:
http://www.jacques-derrida.org/UCI%20Affair.html
The institution isn’t the only thing that played hardball, from what this page’s links suggest.
Three points that continue to trouble me:
*How scholars like Judith Butler would seem compelled to protest a policy that, it seems, sought to supplement established sexual harassment policies by acknowledging the difficulties of consent in a relationship between those in power (an academic advisor) and those who must submit institutionally to it (an advisee). Yes, the policy is vague in its lack of prescribed punishments, but why is the distinction between criminal act and policy violation enough to exclude termination of employment as a consequence of violating the terms of employment? Does the danger of losing tenure trump the danger of being propositioned by people in positions by definition more powerful than one’s own?
*Is not the necessity of such a policy repeated in each instance of Derrida’s, The Chronicle’s, and all of the cited professors’, failure to consider the victim of the original policy violation in their deliberations and reporting as an agent as capable--even if only through her legal counsel--of speaking as they are? Before she was named in The Chronicle, this was less of a question for me. But now that she is, did the writer even try to seek comment from the silenced? I saw no equivalent to Kujundzic’s refusal to respond directly but through his lawyer. We get to hear of Kujundzic’s health issues reportedly related to the inquiry into his behavior but hear nothing of the effects on the victim’s health as a result of the actions he took, not to mention those taken by UCI professors as they circled the wagons, leaving the student unprotected and, effectively, told to leave the program for her having spoken out and taken steps prescribed for such grievances.
*The theoretical implications of Derrida’s letter, especially from these two paragraphs:
1. “Mais chacun le sait, dans la pratique, elles peuvent donner lieu à des instrumentalisations abusives, capricieuses, voire perverses et vicieuses —fréquemment dévastatrices pour la personne, la réputation et la carrière de ceux ou de celles qui sont injustement victimes de manoeuvres souvent diaboliques et parfois d’erreurs judiciaires.”
Can the same not be said of the position of the other, the accuser?
2. “Bien que je ne sois pas habilité à porter ici un jugement sur un dossier confidentiel, et bien que je veuille faire confiance au Senate Committee et à vous-même, Monsieur le Chancelier, comme au sens de la justice qui vous anime, je crois de mon devoir de témoigner ici, en tant que ce qu’on appelle en France et je crois aussi aux Etats-Unis, ‘amicus curiae’. Mon témoignage sera de deux ordres, celui de la probabilité et celui de la certitude.”
The letter goes on to establish “certitude” of action--the threat of holding back archival materials--based upon the “probability” that he is right in supporting Kujundzic, despite the “bien que” that qualifies the paragraph. In effect, he seems to argue that we can establish certitude on the basis of not having laid eyes on the texts that might prevent such certitude from being reached, and indeed that we *must*, if it is a question of privileging the power of the professoriate over a possible professor to come.
But the accuracy of the claims in this letter is dubious. If one false statement by a witness can threaten to compromise the entire testimony, can we take this sentence: “Je connais Dragan mieux et depuis plus longtemps que quiconque à Irvine,” and ask where Kujundzic was in the late 60’s and early 70’s when some of the professors at Irvine in 2004 were at Johns Hopkins and Yale? Either Dragan Kujundzic is the Doogie Howser of deconstruction, or there are misstatements in this letter that may speak to its being compromised in a number of ways.