The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy

The Politics of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy Edited by MARTIN McQUILLAN Pluto P Press ...

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The Politics of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy Edited by MARTIN McQUILLAN

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

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First published 2007 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Martin McQuillan 2007 The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Hardback ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2675 7 ISBN-10 0 7453 2675 7 Paperback ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2674 0 ISBN-10 0 7453 2674 9 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future Martin McQuillan

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Part One: Philosophy of Politics 1. Demo Geoffrey Bennington 2. On the Multiple Senses of Democracy Jean-Luc Nancy 3. The Art of the Impossible? Derek Attridge 4. Impossible Speech Acts Andrew Parker

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Part Two: Politics of Philosophy 5. The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening of Politicisation in Levinas and Derrida Robert Bernasconi 6. The Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the Mother-Tongue Anne Berger 7. In Light of Light: on Jan Patocka’s Notion of Europe Rodolphe Gasché 8. Phenomenology to Come: Derrida’s Ellipses Joanna Hodge

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Part Three: Otherwise 9. From (Within) Without: the Ends of Politics Marc Froment-Meurice 10. Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pensée du désert) With(in) Jacques Derrida Laurent Milesi

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11. Graphematics, Politics and Irony Claire Colebrook 12. The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx Richard Beardsworth 13. Karl Marx and the Philosopher’s Stone, or, On Theory and Practice Martin McQuillan Notes on Contributors Index

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the contributors for their remarkable endurance. I would also like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this volume: Anne Beech, David Castle, Ika Willis, Marcel Swiboda, Eleanor Byrne, Claire Fenwick, and Shaun Richards. I would also like to thank friends, students and colleagues at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and the Department of English at Staffordshire University for their provocations and encouragement. This book was made possible by a generous conference grant from the British Academy and by research funding from the University of Leeds and Staffordshire University. It is dedicated to Oscar Marx and Felix Jacques.

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List of Abbreviations WORKS BY JACQUES DERRIDA FK

‘Faith and Knowledge: the two sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Sam Weber, in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity, 1998) G Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974) GL Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) MA Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996) MO Monolingualism of the Other: The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) MP Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985) OH The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) ON On the Name, trans. Tom Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) PA Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994) PoF Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997) SdM Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1994) SoM Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1979)

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Introduction The Day after Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future Martin McQuillan

‘De quoi demain sera-t-il fait?’ Victor Hugo Why should one read Derrida, tomorrow? The question, I think, is not asked prematurely. For some there were good ‘institutional’ reasons to read the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1980s as the ‘newness’ of the discourse inaugurated by Derrida opened up the arts and humanities. This, in itself, was not a good reason to read Derrida; deconstruction has never had faith in newness, especially its own. Such readers have moved on to other celebrity voices. That chase can only end in the cul-de-sac of disappointment. For others, there has been the constant insistence of a ‘must’ when it comes to reading Derrida. The precision and remarkable innovation of each Derrida text demanded to be read, they pressed themselves upon us and could not be ignored, moving from interest to interest with the breakneck speed of Derrida’s extraordinary mind. However, now that Derrida has penned his last text and left behind a finite, if astonishingly complex, corpus – his archive, as it were – why should we read him tomorrow? By asking this question, one is not cutting short the work of mourning for the person Jacques Derrida; wishing him and his intolerable absence away. Rather, as part of that work, this question asks how deconstruction can go on without Derrida. One answer would be that deconstruction has always gone on before Derrida and in the complete absence of knowledge of Derrida and his writing. Fine, it will continue as such. However, more pertinently (if more parochially) how can the discourse of deconstruction as a commitment to a certain practice of reading continue as something other than a museum for our own bereavement? It depends very much on what one might mean by ‘without Derrida’. My guess is that the family of deconstruction, those who knew Derrida and knew one another through Derrida, will never come to terms with his loss. Nor 1

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should they; when we stop missing Derrida it will be because we have forgotten Derrida and for some of us this will be plain impossible. My other guess is that having read Derrida so well and so closely for so long, the family of deconstruction, in thrall to and enthralled by the inaugurating discourse of Derrida, does not have the resources within it to go beyond Derrida and to innovate within a discourse which has been hitherto marked by its own singular innovation. Thus, deconstruction is in something of a bind. It always has been of course, but the drawing of a mortal limit across the life of Jacques Derrida has given this problem a massive legibility today. The originality of deconstruction must be its own undoing because such originality (i.e. singularity) pertains to and ends with its originator. The question is one of projection, what is the student of tomorrow to make of the text of Derrida, after the legacy conferences have been held, the biographies written and, with time, the anniversaries marked? This speculation is undoubtedly futile because of its dependence upon the sorts of chance and contingency which Derrida did so much to bring to our attention. However, its insistence remains; what shall those who only know Derrida’s texts know of Derrida’s texts? In other words, and this is why asking such questions is not a betrayal or curtailment of the work of mourning for Derrida, what is the future of Derrida? How will he live on? What form will his afterlife take and what will the deconstruction of the future look like? While there will no doubt be multiple answers to these questions, I would like to pursue just one possibility here. While Derrida has been a reliable and consistent commentator on the political and politics for as long as any of us can remember (‘The Ends of Man’ for example is an essay about Vietnam) we are now entering into an epoch in which we will have to live without this commentary. He made sense of the fallout from the fall of communism and brought intelligence to bear upon the irrational events of 9/11, but he will not be making comment on the Israeli assault on Lebanon, or on the future career of Nicholas Sarkozy, the eventual and inevitable withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the death of Bin Laden, the international trial of Donald Rumsfeld for the authorisation of torture, or any of the tomorrows in which his perspicacity and judgement will be so badly needed. This is not to say that the text of Derrida does not already contain long and detailed commentary on the politics of the Middle East or the future of international law. However, one day the events described in these texts will seem as distant to us as those discussed by Karl Marx or Tom Paine. History


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will retain an affiliation to this writing by Derrida but it will also stretch out beyond it, and, as Althusser knew, the future lasts a long, long time. For deconstruction the future is not what it used to be. And it is precisely for this reason, I would like to venture, that we will read Derrida tomorrow. We will read Derrida because here we will find an account of the political and an account of how to account for accounts of the political that will provide us with the resources to engage with the unknowable of tomorrow. Derrida’s deconstruction of the political is important not because of the examples he chooses to engage with – there are many occasions in Derrida’s writing where he refuses the example, or the absolute exemplarity of any given example. Interesting and, indeed, comforting as Derrida’s political examples are (I obviously mean ‘comforting’ here in the sense that they are reassuringly ‘of the left’) the point of Derrida’s commentary on the political is that it takes on board the radical alterity of the future as constitutive of the political event as such. If the political event is a thing of the future (that is to say that as an event it is both already irremediably of the past and yet to arrive from the future) then there can be no politics of presence. That is not to say that there is no politics in the present. The point of, say, democratie à venir would be that this is not a projection of a perfect future democracy but an insistence on democracy in the here and now which is made possible by the perfectibility of democracy as the promise of its future. Derrida’s politics is a politics of the future, one that is not given or pre-programmed according to any knowable model or theory. Rather, it is a performative and transformative critique which opens itself to the unpredictable and unknowable intervention of the future as the arrival of the other. Derrida’s future is open-ended and alive, it is always in process, without limit, telos or regulative principle. It is this imagining of the future which makes Derrida the philosopher of tomorrow, because this future is above all political. That is to say, this future has a future because it significantly opens itself to the very possibility of unknowability and the impossibility of discursive and material foreclosure. It gives chance a chance and gives the other its due by creating a space for its arrival, welcome or not, hospitable or not, ready or not. In expecting the unexpected, deconstruction raises the expectations of politics by opening politics onto a future beyond the traditional end of politics, namely, to secure the end of politics by the discursive misprision of any contestation through the hegemonic imposition of an agreed or enforced end or limit. In truth


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this future is the very possibility of politics itself. There would be no politics, no contest, no polis, no polemos, no political economy or desire without this. This is not to say that the future is bright for deconstruction. One can find suitably uplifting comments in ‘The Force of Law’ or Spectres of Marx, for example, concerning ‘justice’ as the undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction, i.e. the idea of futurity which structures the messianic without messianism as the historicity of political change is determined by an insistence at any given moment on the justness of the appeal of the other. However, the other in this sense is the arrival of an event of irreducible alterity. As such, this unpredictable and unknowable arrival need not be either welcome or progressive. We are entering into an epoch of new materialities for which we as yet have no theoretical vocabulary: unprecedented and perhaps irreversible climate change, the transformation of the globe by post-carbon technology and economies, the contestation over energy and resources which will shape the international relations of tomorrow, the globalisation of capital and media, the mutation of the institutions and domain of international law, the migration and displacement of the people of the world by military, climatic or economic forces, the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, the independent and inter-connected emergence of terroristic violences and proxy-wars of religion and race, the re-alignment of geo-political privilege with the development of new sovereignties and states, the dissemination and application of techno, genetic and nano-sciences, and so on. These are only the materialities of tomorrow whose horizons can be vaguely glimpsed today. Derrida knew some of them and has written at length on them. Others will require to be thought through after Derrida. Perhaps, as a constellation of possibilities, or, a historical conjuncture of possible tomorrows, this list is in fact an accurate description of today. Such would be the condition of the present. That as the present it is only ever the arrival or intervention of a possible tomorrow, while tomorrow as such never comes. Tomorrow lies ahead of us, beyond the knowable and predictable. It would no doubt be telling to revisit this text in five, ten or twenty years to reflect upon the concerns of this list, in contrast to the reality of the then ‘now’. To be concerned with the future is to take finitude seriously and to give history a chance. It is the present which is rendered constitutively open by its own futurity. The here and now is not just the latest instance of a present which has always failed to materialise but


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is also the arrival of the future in the form of the other. When one speaks of the now, or the contemporary, one is always speaking of the future. As Derrida states in the interview with Giovanna Borradori, concerning the chronology and chrono-logic of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York: We must rethink the temporalization of a traumatism if we want to comprehend in what way ‘September 11’ looks like a ‘major event’. For the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past. (You yourself, in fact, defined the event in relation to the future in your question; you were already anticipating by speaking of ‘one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime’). The ordeal of the event has as its tragic correlate not what is presently happening or what has happened in the past but the precursory signs of what threatens to happen. It is the future that determines the unappropiability of the event, not the present or the past. Or at least, if it is present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place.1 Derrida’s point here is that while what happened that day is in the past and will not happen again (it is over and done with, mourning is possible) the power of the meaning of that day is predicated on the possibility that this day heralds something even worse to come, an even worse repetition. In this situation no mourning is possible because such work can never be closed and has no possibility of completion. The materialities of tomorrow impinge upon us today because the landscape made up of these signs will be unlike any other. In the case of much of it, the scene will be worse than we have ever experienced before. The trauma that emerges from Iraq or Katrina is not curtailed by the occurrences themselves (Katrina has passed, one day the Iraq war will end). Rather, what gives them their resonance is the possibility of even worse to come: the further devastation to be wrought by irreversible climate change, or, future expanded, open-ended and uncontrollable ethno-religious energy wars. The two things are obviously connected within the political matrix of today, accumulatively they project the scenario of a possible tomorrow which is, in fact, the condition of our now. This is a curious circumstance of deconstruction. One will frequently find in Derrida the assertion that the metaphysical conditions of the political, as they have been experienced throughout Modernity, are, in this epoch of tele-communication and globalised capital, in ‘mutation’, and this mutation is irreversible. Here we might think


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of his comments on the state and the party or international law in Spectres of Marx. In this sense, it is the play of différance within historical meaning as a non-totalisable figure of auto-immunity which puts the historical, histories and the idea of history itself into deconstruction. These mutations, these deconstructions, continue unabated (it is irreversible, after all). The mutation of the institutions and circumstances of today takes place under the incessant pressure of the future. The mutation is predicated upon the arrival of what comes and further still, the possibility of what might come after it. The future, having arrived, we must always ask, what comes after it. Thus, the open-ended anteriority of the future is what makes history possible. It is the very chance and motor of history as a ground without stability, where any meaning, experience or figure may make itself possible. History is not a thing of the past, it is always a question of the future. It is for this reason that we might offer a couple of related propositions. Firstly, that the future of deconstruction will be guaranteed by the deconstruction of the future, that is, the figure of auto-immunity which makes itself legible as the future. Here, the future is différance, that which generates all generation, makes possible possibility itself, and is the condition of all and every significance. One might say that there can be no future without the future. Secondly, and accordingly, the question of how to read Derrida will always be a matter of the future. Derrida is a philosopher of the future; not only one whose philosophy is thematically concerned with the future, but one who recognises the importance of the future to philosophy and philosophy to the future. As he notes in a late text: I am incapable of knowing who today deserves the name philosopher (I would not simply accept certain professional or organizational criteria), I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reflect in a responsible fashion on these questions [of international law] and demand accountability from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language and institutions of international law. A ‘philosopher’ (actually I would prefer to say ‘philosopher-deconstructor’) would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridicopolitical system that is so clearly undergoing mutation. A ‘philosopher’ would be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between ‘comprehending’


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and ‘justifying’. For one can describe, comprehend, and explain a certain chain of events or series of associations that lead to ‘war’ or ‘terrorism’ without justifying them in the least, while in fact condemning them and attempting to invent other associations.2 The philosopher ‘would be’, in the future, the one who follows and reflects upon the mutations of their now and draws ‘practical and effective consequences’. Clearly, we might say that the very idea of the philosopher is in mutation. Perhaps, the injunction of the ‘must’ which accompanies reading Derrida is precisely the way in which the philosopher-reader of today is drawn towards reflection on the now by the opening up of the present by the insistence of the future. The student of tomorrow will read Derrida because she will also have a future to reckon with. Deconstruction as an institution has a future because it has a future. The deconstruction of the political will always be a question of the future, which is to say that it is a question of the here and now. However, the task here is not to speculate endlessly on the nature of our tomorrow. Some will say that this is the task of fiction not philosophy, as if the two could be separated. Certainly, the point should be ceded that what would be important for philosophy would not be the facts of tomorrow, rather the understanding of what the idea of tomorrow itself might be, not so much a question of what the future holds for us but of how we conceive and shape an idea of the future. Derrida comments on this in an early essay; let us recall the opening lines of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’: That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger – and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death – or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed in the shadow of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future – all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems philosophy cannot resolve. It may even be that these questions are not philosophical, are not philosophy’s questions. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable


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of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called philosophers; and called such in remembrance, at very least, of the fact that these questions must be examined unrelentingly, despite the diaspora of institutes and languages, despite the publications and techniques that follow on each other, procreating and accumulating by themselves, like capital or poverty.3 That history or politics might be the other of philosophy, what Derrida refers to here as nonphilosophy, should not surprise us. That Derrida here seems to be following Heidegger in ‘The End of Thinking’ [‘Zur Sache des Denkens’], when Heidegger notes that the future of philosophy will be the non-philosophical task of reflecting on thought itself, might surprise us. However, I think Derrida’s future is very different from that of Heidegger. Where for Heidegger there is no alternative or chance for philosophy, no rupture or hybridity on the way to its inevitable occupation, for Derrida the future might not even be philosophical. The paleonymic task of the name of philosophy for the philosopher-deconstructor, in the name of all that philosophy has made possible, in the name of all that deconstruction has made possible, will be to address and to participate in the ‘wellspring’ of history and nonphilosophy. While Jacques Derrida may have always been wandering towards his own death, the questions he asked (in particular those ones which question the divisions between philosophy and its others) are the ones which are today capable of enabling a deconstruction of the future. Deconstruction has a future because it has always been more than philosophy. Whether this future continues to take the form of a community, what I termed earlier ‘the family of deconstruction’ or ‘deconstruction as an institutional discourse’, I cannot say. Perhaps tomorrow calls for an altogether different invention of affiliation and solidarity, a new inauguration of questioning and examining in remembrance of what has been opened by deconstruction but beyond the name of deconstruction. However, it will still require affiliation and solidarity, as well as reading and reflection. A ‘community of the question’ as Derrida puts it in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, ‘the new international’ as he calls it in Spectres of Marx, ‘the freemasonry of the alert’ as Hélène Cixous has called it. The work of mourning for Derrida will be finite because those who mourn his insuperable absence are also finite. The reader of tomorrow cannot miss what they never had, although psychoanalytically


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speaking this is of course the only thing they can truly miss. Deconstruction, however, is interminable. The politics and possibility of tomorrow requires it to be so.

◀▶ What then would it mean, beyond the most banal of platitudes, to say that deconstruction ‘creates a space for the arrival of the other’? This is necessarily a task of reading and thinking, which requires patience and vigilance. The present collection of essays participates in this undertaking. The essays herein are all responses to the later writings of Jacques Derrida on politics. Given all that I have just ventured above and its seeming urgency, there is an obvious temptation to reach for the most dramatic and sensational of examples. However, quoting examples is no guarantee of understanding them. The essays in this book are reflections on the political (which is to say that politics is always close to hand) but they are also reflections on philosophy itself which understand, in Geoffrey Bennington’s formulation, that philosophy cannot be held accountable to politics because politics itself is a philosophical concept. Accordingly, they seek to understand and so to effect the political as such, which, given the size of this task, calls for due care and diligence. The significance of these essays lies in the attention and precision their authors have paid to the philosophical and the political – what Nicholas Royle might call their radical patience. Only under these conditions can one hope to produce the theoretical self-reflexivity which would create the space for the arrival of the unforeseeable. These essays were written between the summer of 1999 and the winter of 2000, when in retrospect the world seemed a safer place. It has taken some time to bring them to publication as a consequence of the institutional accidents that we might laughingly refer to as my career. Only the editor in his introduction has had the ‘benefit’ of writing under the contemporary conditions of this so-called war and after the death of Derrida. Accordingly, the authors should not be chastised for any perceived failure to invoke a now fashionable vocabulary. Rather, this collection of essays demonstrates an exemplary point in the philosophical discussion of politics. Namely, that the demand to address the urgency of a ‘today’, or even a tomorrow, can just as easily screen out reflection on the very thing which makes this moment significant, and on the contrary the loudest invocations of ‘the


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political’ can easily drown out the sober and rigorous deliberation this insistence requires, even if Hegel was correct to remind philosophers to read the daily news. These essays are examples of exactly the sort of vigilant counter-interpretation that is taking place in the academy today, unobserved by a mediatic space inhospitable to thought and exclusively concerned with the manufacture of the phenomenality of the political. These essays do not ignore this space, rather they insist that another understanding of the political is possible beyond the reductions of the market. The deconstruction of the future depends upon such assiduous and conscientious work. The reader of tomorrow will discover their own responsibilities through the example of these meticulous readings of the most scrupulous of philosophers. The future of deconstruction will be a dedication to a forensic idiom of reading, of both the other who comes and the other which is the work of Derrida. Why should deconstruction give up any of this? That which does not renounce anything; this would be a definition of the unconscious and accordingly the unconscious of deconstruction as the work of mourning is performed. The beginning of the question of the future of deconstruction is its past which has not yet reached us and which we have yet to think. It is appropriate then that this book arrives belatedly, after the contemporary and after Derrida himself. Its future is its faithfulness to the memory it holds within it. This collection of essays explores the complex and demanding question of how philosophy and politics can continue to be thought and read through one another, and beyond this, how it is even still possible to speak and write productively of philosophy and politics at a time in which both terms have attained a highly problematic status. Rather than seek to de-lineate the boundaries of philosophy and politics these essays seek in a variety of ways to deconstruct these terms in order to open up new possibilities for thinking politics and the political ‘otherwise’. In ‘Demo’, Geoffrey Bennington explores the problematic relation between politics and metaphysics. Proceeding via a deconstructive play on the colloquial usages of the term ‘demo’ (political demo, music demo, software demo…) he considers the idea of a demo ‘version’ of political constitutions in general before going on to address the problem of defining democracy and its noncategorical excess at a ‘limit of the political’. Jean-Luc Nancy’s piece ‘On the Multiple Senses of Democracy’ analyses democracy and its relation to the status of the ‘people’ from a range of perspectives,


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for example, as a subjugated ‘people’ who revolt against regimes, or alternatively as a sovereign self-constitutive whole. He then explores the different senses of democracy in relation to negative theology and a revolutionary ‘inversion of the theological-political sign’ and the idea that democracy might constitute an immanent or transcendent renewal of the theological-political, or else might entail its rupture. In ‘The Art of the Impossible?’ Derek Attridge considers the relation between deconstruction and impossibility by way of Derrida reading Kierkegaard reading the Biblical story of ‘the Binding of Isaac’. From here onwards Attridge analyses the tension between responsibility in deconstruction, the demand of the impossible (the unconditional singularity of one’s relation to the other) and the demands of the possible (the everyday, its rules, regulations and norms), before considering the relation between an ‘impossible’ ethics and a ‘possible’ politics. Andrew Parker’s ‘Impossible Speech Acts’, which examines the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, engages in a re-appraisal of the work of Erich Auerbach and in particular his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Parker considers Auerbach’s reading of the Tacitus and focuses on the question ‘can the plebeian speak?’, the problematic of legitimating the speech of Percennius and the provision of a ‘voice’ to the lower classes, which for Parker, as for Rancière, problematises the status of his speech in ways that fundamentally implicate political representation. In attempting to theorise this problem he considers Rancière’s reading of Louis-Auguste Blanqui for whom the ‘proletarian’ is ‘the name of an outcast’. Rancière’s position, according to Parker, is one of promoting a politics of ‘equality’, but crucially one of dis-identification, based on ‘the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other’. Robert Bernasconi’s essay entitled ‘The Crisis of Critique’ looks at deconstruction in relation to the crisis of the title, the term ‘critique’ initially considered in its ordinary ‘external’ sense before being explored in terms of immanent or ‘excessive’ critique. Bernasconi notes the proximity of Marxist radical critique to ‘hyper-critical’ deconstruction, this latter analysed as a means to challenging the claims made for deconstruction’s political neutrality by showing how its being hyper-critical permits ‘hyper-politicisation’. In ‘The Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the Mother-tongue’ Anne Berger takes up Rousseau’s distinction between the language of ‘nations’ and ‘domestic’ languages, with only the former acceding


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to the status of a ‘genuine’ language. Berger explores the wider implications of Rousseau’s distinction whereby she considers the shift between the enslaving ‘vernacular’ of ‘home’, or the ‘(m)othertongue’ and the language of the social bond (the language of the city), whereby the problem becomes effectively figured in terms of ‘birth’, or more specifically the ‘birth of society’. In attempting to discern more clearly the relation between the passive proto-language of the domicile and the ‘masculine’ language of social interaction she locates in Rousseau a shift from ‘love’ to ‘passion’ and the resulting acquisition of male sexual identity ‘through the substituting of the master for a (m)other’. Rodolphe Gasché’s ‘In Light of Light: On Jan Patocka’s Notion of Europe’ commences with the problem of the ‘end’ of Europe and analyses a philosophical ‘idea’ of Europe developed in twentieth-century phenomenology, initially with Husserl’s ‘absolute idea’. Gasché examines Gérard Granel’s critique of Husserl and the alternative phenomenological conception of Europe devised by the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka before going on to show how the Greek landscape provided the visual basis for the sculptural dimension of ancient Greek thought and how – beyond the more recent de-valorisation of the term ‘reason’ in relation to Europe and the West – there remains the connection to ‘light’ symptomatised by ‘the discipline of the eye’ and the idea of ‘clarity’. Joanna Hodge’s ‘Phenomenology to Come: Derrida’s Ellipses’ broaches the issue of Derrida’s relation to the phenomenological tradition on the key questions of time and history, where the genealogical emergence of ‘value’ is explored in relation to the genesis of ‘meaning’. Against systematisation, Hodge points to the work of Derrida and Blanchot and the ‘thinking of interruption’ by these writers before unfolding a detailed exposition of time and history in the work of many of Modernity’s great thinkers, including Kant, Freud, Bergson and Levinas, that leads her to promote the restoration of movement to thought figured by the term ‘oscillation’. The theme of ‘ends’ arises in ‘From (Within) Without’ by Marc Froment-Meurice (the end of politics, the end of the Occident, etc.) and in particular the question of the ‘ends’ of death. This question is addressed through Blanchot and Heidegger, in particular the former’s The Instant of My Death and the problem of naming the subject of Blanchot’s ‘instant’. The article is a deconstruction of his defence of his pre-War activities exploring the play of place, displacement and placelessness and the instant of death in relation to testimony


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in its (non)relation to politics. Laurent Milesi’s ‘Thinking (Through) the Desert’ analyses the spatio-temporal displacing of the definitive article in Derrida’s expressions ‘Il y a khôra’ and ‘il y a là cendre’ which emphasise the anteriority of the trace. Following an encounter with the Platonic khôra of the Timaeus, Milesi looks at negative theology in relation to khôra in differentiating ‘the deconstructive space of thinking/writing’ and the strategic process of ‘desertification’ or khoreographic ‘desert writing’. Claire Colebrook’s article ‘Graphematics, Politics and Irony’ takes the performative theory of meaning and Derrida’s Limited Inc as its points of departure, whereby she explores the limitations of context and the demand for an ‘ethicity’ of concepts that enables them to go beyond given contexts whilst remaining sensitive to the limits of such an endeavour. She provides an account of how performativity can be given to function according to shifts in context, for example the determination of the meaning of good as it shifts between the contexts of the priest, the bioethicist and the stockbroker. The key issue at stake for Colebrook is one of legitimation and the distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ utterances, whereupon she explores the question of ethicity in relation to the contingency of meaning’s production by recourse to Derrida’s idea of the resistance of language to self-present meaning and its prior relation to (self-) identity. The volume closes as it opens, with Marx. In ‘The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx’, Richard Beardsworth addresses the ‘culture’ of deconstruction, and introduces the problem of politics pertaining to deconstruction and its endeavours to open rather than close traditional Western thought to its implicit indeterminacies. He analyses the crucial role played by Marx in Western political thought and the no less important question of Marx’s relation to deconstruction, along with its potential political shortcomings and limitations. He explores Derrida’s re-working of the Marxian distinction between use-value and exchange-value qua their ‘spectrality’ and the temporality of the relations between ‘things’ and ‘persons’ as ‘out of joint’, considering also the role of the promise, ‘democracy to come’ and the new international. The volume closes with another essay on Marx, by the editor, in which he attempts to negotiate an understanding of the (non)relation between political theory and practice through a reading of The German Ideology as an unpacking of Paul de Man’s famous but undeveloped gloss on this text.


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NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 96. 2. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, p. 106. 3. WD, p. 79.


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Part One Philosophy of Politics


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1 Demo Geoffrey Bennington

‘…no doubt more serious for what is called democracy, if at least we still understand by that the name of a regime, which, as is well known, will always have been problematical’ (Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, p. 12). DEMO ‘Demo’ here refers in the first instance to democracy, as a sort of possible nickname (like some people used to refer to postmodernism as ‘pomo’, post-colonial studies as ‘poco’, and even deconstruction as ‘decon’, I think) and I will indeed be talking essentially about democracy. But I use ‘demo’ here too in the sense of demonstration. This second sense hangs between the strong philosophical or logical sense in which a point might be demonstrated, that is, proven; the slightly weaker sense in which someone might provide a demonstration, an exemplary execution of some more or less difficult technique or trick that a reader or spectator might then want to try for themselves; the music-industry sense of a trial or sample recording designed to show off one’s talent or potential, and the computer sense of a limited version of a program, designed to give a sense of its capacities and capabilities without providing what is called ‘full functionality’. This is only a demo, lacking full functionality and, I fear, still full of bugs. The point of the demo (about ‘demo’, then) is to approach Derrida’s slogan, in Politiques de l’amitié: ‘no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction’,1 but also the claim that what he calls the limit between the conditional and the unconditional inscribes an auto-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and the duty for democracy to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive auto-delimitation. A delimitation not only in the name of a regulative Idea and an indefinite perfectibility, but each time in the urgency of a here and now.2 17


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18 Geoffrey Bennington

And this demo about demo can then connect with a third sense of demonstration, as Derrida lays it out in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, playing a little uncertainly across French and English: I have perhaps just performed a ‘demonstration’, though perhaps not, but I don’t know which language to hear this word in. Without an accent, demonstration is not a logical argumentation imposing a conclusion, but primarily a political event, a street demonstration (I said a little earlier how I take to the street every morning, not on the road but in the street), a march, an act, an appeal, a demand.3 And that earlier moment here referred to comes in an almost lyrical passage where Derrida describes how his writing throws down a challenge of invention to translators, and ends with this: Compatriots of all nations, translator-poets, revolt against patriotism! Every time I write a word, you hear me, a word I love and that I love to write, for the time of that word, the instant of a single syllable, the song of this new international rises up in me. I never resist it, I take to the street when it calls, even if, apparently, from dawn, I have been working silently at my desk.4 This, then, will try to be a demonstration version of what would be an argumentative demonstration about the concept of democracy: and thereby a demonstration, with luck, in a more directly political sense, a response, however muted or modest, to the call of that ‘new international’. METAPHYSICS AND POLITICS Metaphysics cannot decide whether it or politics has philosophical priority. This is a well-known tension at least since Aristotle,5 and probably indeed since Plato’s attempted resolution of the relation between philosophy and government by the combination of the two in the ideal constitution of The Republic. I do not think that this tension can ever be resolved, if only because the traditional concepts of metaphysics and politics are defined in part by just that tension. This uncertainty needs to be read in both directions, as it were. On the one hand, we might say that ‘politics’ just is a metaphysical concept, defined by metaphysics just by being defined against metaphysics, and that therefore any attempted political reduction of metaphysics (along the lines of the other positive reductions attempted by the so-called human sciences, or by what is now most generally called ‘cultural studies’) is doomed to failure, however


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tempting it remains. The general logic of transcendental contraband always means that the very concept put up by such reductions to operate the reduction remains unthought and inexplicable in the terms of the reduction – just as the last thing the historicist reduction of metaphysics can understand is history, and the last thing the linguisticist reduction can understand is language, so the last thing the political reduction can understand is politics.6 But reading the situation in the other direction, as it were (remembering that, although politics might well be a metaphysical concept, there are no metaphysical concepts as such, because the logic of différance and the trace means that there are no concepts as such, in themselves, independent of their differential definition7), we might want to say that metaphysics is already a political concept. But saying this will only be possible by extending the range of the concept ‘politics’ so that it can describe all conceptual dealings and relations whatsoever. I want to say that deconstruction operates just such a radical politicisation of conceptuality in general.8 But this radical politicisation of all conceptual relations (including of course those affecting the metaphysical concept of ‘politics’ itself) naturally cannot produce results simply recognisable or exploitable by the metaphysical concept of politics. One way of putting this situation, in the terms of Martin McQuillan’s title for this book, is that deconstruction reads politics as part of a more general politics of reading that deconstruction just ‘is’. DEMOCRACY IS A FUNNY CONCEPT In Politiques de l’amitié, Derrida points to a fundamental disjunction at the heart of democracy, between a law of equality and a law of difference or singularity. This disjunction, he says, ‘forever carries political desire. It also carries the chance and the future of a democracy which it constantly threatens with ruin and which it yet keeps alive ... No virtue without this tragedy of number without number. Perhaps it is even more unthinkable than a tragedy.’9 Why would this be tragic, or ‘even more unthinkable’ than tragedy? Hegel, for his part, rather refers democracy to comedy: This Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as lord and ruler, and is also aware of being the intelligence and insight which demand respect, is constrained and befooled through the particularity of its actual existence, and exhibits the ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence,


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between its necessity and its contingency, its universality and its commonness. If the principle of its individuality, separated from the universal, makes itself conspicuous in the proper shape of an actual existence and openly usurps and administers the commonwealth to which it is a secret detriment, then there is exposed more immediately the contrast between the universal as a theory and that with which practice is concerned; there is exposed the complete emancipation of the purposes of the immediate individuality from the universal order, and the contempt of such an individuality for that order.10 Would this be one way of understanding the shift from an ancient to a modern view of democracy? From the type of ‘direct’ democracy associated with the classical theories to the representative or parliamentary type associated with post-Enlightenment thought? In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that the classical distinction between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy is only valid for the ancient world, but that it remains an ‘external’ principle of classification to the extent that it is based merely on questions of number – in the modern world, constitutional monarchy reduces these names to the status of moments, and more generally sublates them, so that the ‘democratic’ moment (that of the legislature) is ‘no longer democracy’.11 Within this tension between metaphysics and politics, the concept of democracy occupies a curious status in the philosophical tradition, and it is this that makes it a promising starting point for deconstructive attention, and seems to call from afar to Derrida’s long-term interest in the concept. And if, as I believe is the case, the general situation of inheritance that describes a deconstructive take on metaphysical concepts (and indeed on Being in general) is already plausibly describable as a political situation, then we might expect this explicitly political concept to concentrate or capitalise, as Derrida might say, the experience of deconstruction itself (and this seems to be confirmed by the slogan I quoted at the outset). This oddness seems to spring from a sort of inherent duplicity (or perhaps a more radical or multiple instability that cannot be grasped by the two-ness of duplicity) in the concept of democracy itself, as it is metaphysically formulated.12 On the one hand, democracy functions as the name of a type of constitution or regime, characterised most obviously as the rule of the people, the many (or perhaps of all: defined in opposition to monarchy, the rule of the one, and oligarchy, the rule of the few). But on the other hand (and Derrida says early in Politiques that it has always been problematical to understand democracy as


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the name of a regime,13 and that this is well-known), democracy functions in an excessive way with respect to such classifications, as a sort of limit of the political, out of which politics may emerge, or into which it always might dissolve. Given this duplicity or instability, democracy can show up in the tradition with conflicting valorisations attached to it, as the best or the worst, the best of the worst, and indeed as simultaneously the best and the worst. (Another distant conceptual horizon of this essay is this problem of best and worst once teleological schemas are suspended.) Let me at least start (I’ll actually be doing little more than this) by illustrating this problematic status briefly from some very ‘well-known’ texts.14 PLATO (AGAIN) In Plato’s Republic, democracy is of course criticised at length. But this critique is complex, if only because of the unusual degree of irony and even sarcasm it involves.15 Democracy seems to start off well enough: Possibly, said I [‘I’ in the Republic being of course Socrates himself], this is the most beautiful of polities; as a garment of many colours [ poikilon], embroidered with all kinds of hues, so this, decked and diversified with every type of character, would appear the most beautiful. And perhaps many would judge it to be the most beautiful, like boys and women when they see bright-coloured things.16 This at least apparent attraction of democracy (the sort of beauty that appeals to boys – or children at least – and women, at least, if not men) is to do with its diversity. Let’s not lose this reference to women, because one of the things I’d like to suggest is that the traditional concept of democracy has an irreducible relation to women, that democratisation is always seen as in some sense a feminisation. This does not sit easily with Derrida’s association of democracy with the model of fraternal friendship. But one of the persistent motifs of Plato’s critique of democracy is that it gives, or would give, a quite unthinkable degree of freedom to women; note the cumulative effect of the following passage, for example: Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths? – Of course. – And this anarchic temper, said I, my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals. – Just what do you mean by that? he said. – Why, I said, the father habitually tries to


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resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise. – Yes, these things do happen, he said. – They do, said I, and such other trifles as these. The teacher in such cases fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young, are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative. – By all means, he said. – And the climax of popular liberty, my friend, I said, is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men. – Shall we not, then, said he, in Aeschylean phrase, say ‘whatever rises to our lips’? – Certainly, I said, so I will. Without experience of it no one would believe how much freer the very beasts subject to men are in such a city than elsewhere. The dogs literally verify the old adage and ‘like their mistresses become’. And likewise the horses and asses are wont to hold on their way with the utmost freedom and dignity, bumping into everyone who meets them and who does not step aside. And so all things everywhere are just bursting with the spirit of liberty.17 This association of liberty with a sort of natural-animal-feminine quality is also a standard ingredient of so-called mass psychology. Democracy is a mix, a collection, a farrago of different things. And this is what gives it its curious status among different sorts of regime: democracy is not just one regime among others, because in a sense it includes all others within itself. In an abyssal logic that is probably what I am trying to understand here, democracy is a mixture of all regimes, including itself. Plato continues: Yes, said I, and it is the fit place, my good friend, in which to look for a constitution. – Why so? – Because, owing to this license, it includes all kinds, and it seems likely that anyone who wishes to organise a state, as we were just now doing, must find his way to a democratic city and select the model that pleases him, as if in a bazaar of constitutions, and after making his choice, establish his own.18 So if democracy is a bazaar, or catalogue or supermarket of different constitutions, a sort of demo version of any constitution the prospective founder of a state might look to in order to decide which model to choose, this is because it both is and is not itself – on this


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account, democracy is itself to the extent that it is anything but itself, i.e. everything including itself. Democracy is one among the list of possible constitutions, but is set apart from the other members of the list in that it just is the list of which it is also a part. (A part, then, bigger than the whole of which it is a part, as Derrida often says.) This double position generates paradoxical and sarcastic formulations: And the tolerance of democracy, its superiority to all our meticulous requirements, its disdain for our solemn pronouncements ... how superbly it tramples underfoot all such ideals, caring nothing from what practices and way of life a man turns to politics, but honouring him if only he says that he loves the people! – It is a noble polity, indeed! he said. – These and qualities akin to these democracy would exhibit, and it would, it seems, be a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley [anarkhos kai poikile], assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!19 And this double quality extends to the corresponding character type that Socrates derives: the democratic man ‘is a manifold man stuffed with most excellent differences, and ... like that city he is the fair and many-coloured [poikilon] one whom many a man and woman would count fortunate in his life, as containing within himself the greatest number of patterns [parageigmata] of constitutions and qualities’. This means that democracy is both political and beyond or above politics: just as democracy is one constitution and the whole list of constitutions, so the democratic man goes in for all sorts of activities, following his desire, and politics is just one of those activities: day by day indulging the appetite of the day,20 now winebibbing and abandoning himself to the lascivious pleasing of the flute and again drinking only water and dieting, and at one time exercising his body, and sometimes idling and neglecting all things, and at another time seeming to occupy himself with philosophy. And frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever enters into his head. And if military men excite his emulation, thither he rushes, and if moneyed men, to that he turns, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his the life of pleasure and freedom and happiness and cleaves to it to the end.21 It is difficult not to recognise in this structure, whereby democracy is both itself and part of itself, something of the order of the paradoxes of set-theory, but also, more importantly for us, something of the order of Jacques Derrida’s descriptions of what is now often called the quasi-transcendental. According to any number of Derrida’s analyses, here is a concept which seems troublesome for the metaphysics


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attempting to assign it its place, and that trouble shows up symptomatically here in the exaggerated irony with which it is treated. This excessive quality of democracy, which seems to expand to exceed and potentially include the conceptuality designed to master and explain it, makes it an attractive concept to take up against metaphysics. But of course just taking up this concept and declaring that it really is attractive, that democracy really is the best regime and the one we really do want, will always fail to shift the Platonic descriptions. A ‘democratic’ reduction of Platonism always runs the risk of remaining Platonist through and through. Think here of the demonstration around the concept of metaphor in the ‘Plus de metaphore’ section of ‘The White Mythology’: if metaphor is simply pulled out of the pond of metaphysical concepts in order to explain those concepts, according to the very tempting and attractive poetical reduction of philosophy Derrida is working through in that essay (wouldn’t it be nice if philosophy just turned out to be a bunch of poetical or rhetorical figures), then, unless there is a reinscription of that explanatory concept beyond the immediate resources offered by its metaphysical definition, the explanation will simply collapse back into the very metaphysics it was attempting to explain (away). Similarly here, democracy, which, as both part of the series and the whole series, stands apart from the other sorts of constitution and therefore offers, at least in principle, the prospect of some explanatory and deconstructive leverage, cannot simply be taken at face value (i.e. metaphysical value), and expected simply to do the work for us – the supplement required for that work is what I call reading.22 There are less ‘well-known’ moments in Plato which might also give us pause on this issue. In the much later Laws, for example, usually thought to be a less visionary and more pragmatic set of political proposals than the utopian Republic, democracy appears again in an interesting position, which does not quite match the one we have just seen in the Republic. Here the metaphorics is not straightforwardly that of motley and diversity, but an equally traditional (more ‘Platonic’ perhaps, but still troublesome, insofar as both terms to come unmistakably signal towards the women elsewhere so vigorously excluded from politics throughout the tradition) one of generation and weaving. This is the character called ‘The Athenian’ speaking: ‘Then let me have your attention. There are two matrices [meteres: mothers], as we may call them, of constitutions from which all others may truly be said to be derived: the proper name of the one is monarchy, of the other democracy ... These are the strands, as


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I have said, of which all other constitutions, generally speaking, are woven.’23 There’s no question here of going into ubiquitous Platonic images of weaving (symploke – you will remember Rodolphe Gasché’s wonderful analysis of the Statesman’s art in The Tain of the Mirror) if only because in fact the image of weaving here is being introduced by the translator (I am using A.E. Taylor’s standard translation in the Bollingen Series Collected Dialogues), for the Greek original simply says that these are the two forms of which the others are modifications (diapepoikilmenai: diversifications – note the poikilon root again); but of course Plato does use the image of weaving very regularly – see for example Laws 734e–735a: ‘Now just as in the case of a web or other piece of woven work, woof and warp cannot be fashioned of the same threads, but the material of the warp must be of superior quality – it must be tough, you know, and have a certain tenacity of character, whereas the woof may be softer and display a proper pliancy’, and we might want to look to Derrida’s long discussion of the Judaic rules about the weaving of the Taleth, in ‘Un ver à soie’, and the remarks there too about the traditional association of women and weaving, and especially Freud’s famous hypothesis about the invention of weaving and penis envy (which of course we’ve all been associating with the textuality of the text since Barthes’s S/Z).24 This persistent association of women and nature is also behind Hegel’s famous ‘irony of the community’ comment,25 and opens up for us the perspective that the deconstructive reinscription of democracy, and of sexual difference, would entail too a reinscription of that most reviled of concepts, nature. One way of doing this in our context here is to say that politics is always about its own interminable emergence from a state of nature as a state of intolerable violence – there is politics only to the extent that there is (still) nature, and the end of politics would be the end of nature. This would then, naturally, mean that nature is always already political, its own becoming-political. The structure of the ‘to-come’, as Derrida formulates it, and as we shall recall a little later around democracy itself, can only, or so it seems to me, be understood in this context of an interminable (and nonteleological) naturality.26 ARISTOTLE (AGAIN) The root of the reason for Plato’s complex ironic hostility to democracy, his repeated use of the motif of multi-colouredness or motley, is no doubt his insistence on the motif of unity in the context


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of the State, and his perception that democracy cannot be reduced to this value of unity, or that it threatens this value of unity more persistently and thoroughly than other types of regime.27 Aristotle, then, might be expected to give us some access to a more elaborated thinking of democracy, just because his primary objection to Plato’s political theory turns around this value of unity. For Aristotle insists that the State simply cannot be thought under the sign of unity, just because by definition it is a plural entity. In the Republic, Socrates says: ‘Do we know of any greater evil for a state than the thing that distracts it and makes it many instead of one, or a greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?’28 and, a little later, in an analogy which is no doubt defining for the metaphysical concept of politics: ‘The best city [is the one] whose state is most like that of an individual man.’29 Against this, Aristotle in the Politics (a text Derrida hardly mentions in Politiques) has a crushingly commonsense argument: Yet it is clear that if the process of unification proceeds with too much rigour, there will be no polis left: for the polis is by nature a plurality [plethos], and if its unification is pushed too far, the polis will become a family, and the family an individual: for we can affirm that the family is more unified than the polis, and the individual more unified than the family. Consequently, even supposing that one were in a position to operate this unification, one should refrain from doing so, because it would lead the polis to its ruin. The polis is composed not only of a plurality of individuals [pleionon anthropon], but also of specifically distinct elements ... even in poleis founded on the liberty and equality of the citizens [i.e. democracies], this differentiation must exist.30 This is perhaps even the leitmotif of Aristotle’s political thinking. We should note especially here the motif of ‘too much’ or ‘too far’: and he returns to the point a little later in criticising Plato’s recommendations for the community of possessions: The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been reduced to a single foot.31 A number of consequences flow from this critique, and they all relate to this irreducible element of plurality which, we might be tempted to say, just is the specifically political feature of politics (no


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politics without plurality, i.e. more than two – or maybe more than three).32 I’ll be trying to suggest that it is this element of plurality which will give the concept of democracy its curious position in political thought. First, in the context of our earlier remarks about women, it would not be difficult to show that the secret reason why the drive to unity must stop ‘at a certain point’ is the fact of sexual difference. Aristotle’s famous account of man as zoon politikon at the beginning of the Politics (which already troubles the possibility of the analogy between State and individual that Plato uses: in Aristotle, the individual with which the State is analogous is already in a State from the start) tracks the formation of the various associations [koinonia] that are associated together to form the polis as the unit achieving, or all but achieving,33 autonomy [autarkeia]; but the root necessity for the formation of associations at all is the lack of autonomy of the individual, who requires the asymmetrical association marked by sexual difference to avoid extinction. Subsequent associations are all associations of two or more similar entities (families associate with families to form ‘villages’; villages with villages to form the state); but the asymmetry at the origin (always of course forgotten or variously repressed in the tradition) returns to trouble all political philosophy sooner or later. As I have said, women are traditionally thought of as belonging on the side of nature, as it were (as opposed to politics); but as politics is the always failing attempt to eliminate nature, nature’s persistence as definitive of politics is also always a mark of sexual difference. In this respect, the most irreducibly political issue is the issue of sexual difference, and the fact that that difference is not resolvable (no horizon of equality, for example, can do justice to sexual difference, however politically necessary such a horizon may be) makes it a reasonable figure for the perpetual à-venir of democracy as Derrida presents it, already questioning thereby the fraternalist conceptualisation of democracy he follows in Politiques. Most importantly for us here, this principle of multiplicity that is definitive of the polis gives rise to the possible plurality of types of regime. Aristotle says: ‘The reason why there are several sorts of constitution is that every polis includes a plurality of elements.’34 Just because of the irreducible fact of plurality, there are different possible ways of organising that plurality. But among the spread of possibilities this opens up, I want to say that democracy has a privilege, in that in a sense it names just this plurality itself, in a way that other regime-names do not. The reasons for this seem reasonably


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straightforward, insofar as democracy just means the government of the many. The conceptual privilege of the traditional concept of democracy would in this case derive from the fact that other regime-names tend towards a convergent or pyramidal representation of the polis, whereas democracy is explicitly or at least potentially dispersive. This principle of plurality as named by democracy, then, opens the plurality of different types of constitution. But it also immediately compromises the purity of each of these types, so that the plurality is not ever quite going to be a plurality of atomic elements. Not only can there be monarchy, oligarchy and democracy because of this plurality at the root of the polis, but each of these classifications is in turn affected by plurality, so that there are many forms of monarchy, many forms of oligarchy, and many forms of democracy, and indeed the ‘many forms’ that flow directly from the originary plurality exceed the capacity of these names to name them properly at all – and this excess, not by chance I think, still surfaces in Aristotle’s text on the side of democracy: ‘We have in this way explained why constitutions take on many forms, and why there are some apart from those which have a name (for democracy is not numerically one, and one can say as much of the other constitutions).’35 Now, as is well known, Aristotle is not concerned to defend democracy as a form of constitution to be preferred to others (though he talks about it at great length, and it provides him with his basic definition of a citizen as participating in public office36), and indeed he places it among the perversions or deviations [parekbaseis] of the different constitutions rather than as a pure or ‘correct’ form. But again, the logic of this perversion turns out to be complex and quite disconcerting, especially in the case of democracy. The discriminating factor for deciding whether a form is correct or deviant is that the correct forms all govern in view of the common interest, whereas the deviant forms all govern in view of a particular interest. Royalty, aristocracy and ‘constitution’ (politeia: though this is just the generic name for any sort of constitution, again generating a paradoxical structure of excess and inclusion) are the correct forms; tyranny, oligarchy and democracy the corresponding deviations. Again, democracy here occupies an eccentric position with respect to the others, and there seem to be two reasons for this: 1) there is no real proper name for its corresponding ‘correct’ form (which Aristotle just calls politeia);37 and 2) it is difficult in the case of democracy to understand exactly what the distinction between the common


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and the particular interest would be. In the two other cases, the distinction between the one (or the few) and the many automatically opens the possibility of a particular interest coming into opposition with a common interest; but in the case of democracy, where the ‘particular’ interest defining the perversion is itself that of the mass,38 the distinction between the particular and the general or the common is harder to grasp, insofar as the mass tends to become identified with the totality, and its particular interest would then be identical with the common. Just as, in Plato’s description of democracy, the bazaar that democracy is includes all forms of regime including itself, so the concept of demos as defining the locus of power in democracy is paradoxically both inclusive and exclusive: inclusively, the demos names all the people; but exclusively it names the people as opposed to something else – the rich, the elite, the nobility, and so on. As will regularly be the case in the ensuing tradition, Aristotle plays on this difficulty (or is plagued by this difficulty) by associating ‘the many’ implied in democracy with the poor, or the indigent, or the rabble. These difficulties around democracy and its corresponding ‘correct’ form are difficult to overcome. One of their perverse effects takes place at the level of perversion or deviation itself. There are three correct forms of constitution and three deviant forms. The three correct forms have an order: royalty is the highest and ‘most divine’ form; then aristocracy; then the unnamed ‘correct’ form of the deviant democracy. But the deviant forms invert this order, on the vertiginous grounds that the worst perversion is the perversion of what is best39 – so the worst form of all is tyranny, which is the deviant form of the best form of all, which is royalty. Tyranny is in a sense as far as can be from the royalty of which it is the perversion (even though we must assume that in another sense it is very close to it, that royalty or monarchy always might catastrophically flip into its deviant form, ‘catastrophe’ here trying to grasp a sense in which that deviant form is both as close and as far as can be from that of which it is the deviant form – and maybe thereby suggesting a general logic of the deviant). According to this logic, the next worst deviant form is oligarchy (corresponding to the place of aristocracy as the next best correct form), and democracy is the least bad deviant form, just as the nameless form is the least good correct form. This difficult logic of proximity and distance again picks out democracy as the most indeterminate case, as becomes clear if we schematise the logic we have just been following:


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Royalty

Better

Aristocracy ‘Correct’ Forms politeia

Democracy ‘Perversions’ Oligarchy

Tyranny

Worse

It is not difficult to imagine on the basis of this analysis that democracy, as the least bad of the deviant forms, might always be going to turn out to be the best case of all40 – if for example it turned out that the ‘correct’ forms were in some sense unattainable: perhaps in the sense of being idealisations which could never be instantiated in pure form, Ideas in the Kantian sense, or perhaps rather because of a general logic of deviation or perversion affecting all cases from the start (and this second case is of course what we are suggesting, under the title of plurality). So if all regimes were in fact deviant with respect to the supposedly ‘correct’ forms, democracy would turn out to be the best form in fact, and if all regimes were in some sense transcendentally deviant (for example around the question of sexual difference) then democracy would turn out to be ‘transcendentally’ the best form. But this transcendental, which would have to allow for the logic of generalised deviance or perversion we are interested in, could not of course strictly be a transcendental at all. And you will have guessed that this is what I think gives rise to the ‘democracy to come’ in Derrida’s formulations (but I don’t seem to have needed the concepts of friendship or fraternity to get there…). This logic of the best as least bad, which will not fail to remind you of certain important formulations in both (early) Derrida and Lyotard, is already in fact at work in Plato: in the Statesman, again dividing possible constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and their deviations (reserving a seventh form for ‘the true constitution’), Plato distinguishes each of these according as


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they rule according to law or not; and he calls the lawless form of monarchy, tyranny; the lawless form of aristocracy, oligarchy; but the lawless form of democracy (confirming again its eccentric position) is also called democracy. STRANGER: The rule of one man, if it has been kept within the traces, so to speak, by the written rules we call laws, is the best of all six. But when it is lawless it is hard, and the most grievous to have to endure. YOUNG SOCRATES: So it would seem. STRANGER: As for the rule of a few, just as the few constitute a middle term between the one and the many, so we must regard the rule of the few as of middle potency for good or ill. The rule of the many is weakest in every way; it is not capable of any real good or of any serious evil as compared with the other two. This is because in a democracy sovereignty has been divided out in small portions among a large number of rulers. If therefore all three constitutions are law-abiding, democracy is the worst of the three, but if all three flout the laws, democracy is the best of them. Thus if all constitutions are unprincipled the best thing to do is to live in a democracy.41 Aristotle’s explicit disagreement with this is somewhat obscure: A writer who preceded me has already made these distinctions, but his point of view is not the same as mine. For he lays down the principle that when all the constitutions are good (the oligarchy and the rest being virtuous), democracy is the worst, but the best when all are bad. Whereas we maintain that they are in any case defective, and that one oligarchy is not to be accounted better than another, but only less bad.42 But the nuance here is probably important: what is the difference between the better and the less bad? As we are beginning to suggest, democracy might have an intrinsic link to the thought that politics is the domain of the less bad in general. You will remember that the explicit ground for Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato was that the defining characteristic of the polis was autonomy, and not unity. The polis is in essence plural, and, in our reading, this means that it is from the start contaminated by something of the order of democracy, insofar as democracy names something of this essential plurality at the root of politics. We have also seen that this leads Aristotle to a sense, not only of a plurality of possible regimes or constitutions, but also to the thought that that plurality exceeds the available named forms, and maybe even naming itself. This principle of contamination gives rise to the


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thought that the polis is in principle always a mixture of some sort. We have already seen Plato, in The Laws, talking about the two strands or matrices of all constitutions, which all turn out to be woven of the warp and woof of monarchy and democracy (or a principle of unification and a principle of diversification). Aristotle is scathing about this proposition (‘In the Laws it is maintained that the best constitution is made up of democracy and tyranny, which are either not constitutions at all, or are the worst of all. But they are nearer the truth who combine many forms; for the constitution is better which is made up of more numerous elements’43), and tends to move further towards the thought of a mixture as the natural outcome of the original thought of plurality, and as definitive of the unnamed ‘correct’ form of which democracy is the deviant. For it turns out that Aristotle’s unnamed or generic constitution (which, as we have seen, is called simply politeia in the absence of another name) is thought of as a mix of democracy and oligarchy (i.e. two deviant forms). The principles of this mix are themselves already plural (mixed): Next we have to consider how by the side of oligarchy and democracy the so-called polity or constitutional government springs up, and how it should be organised. The nature of it will be at once understood from a comparison of oligarchy and democracy; we must ascertain their different characteristics, and taking a portion from each, put the two together, like the parts of an indenture. Now there are three modes in which fusions of government may be affected. In the first mode we must combine the laws made by both governments, say concerning the administration of justice. In oligarchies they impose a fine on the rich if they do not serve as judges, and to the poor they give no pay; but in democracies they give pay to the poor and do not fine the rich. Now (1) the union of these two modes is a common or middle term between them, and is therefore characteristic of a constitutional government, for it is a combination of both. This is one mode of uniting the two elements. Or (2) a mean may be taken between the enactments of the two: thus democracies require no property qualification, or only a small one, from members of the assembly, oligarchies a high one; here neither of these is the common term, but a mean between them. (3) There is a third mode, in which something is borrowed from the oligarchical and something from the democratical principle. For example, the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratical, and the election of them oligarchical; democratical again when there is no property qualification, oligarchical when there is. In the aristocratical or constitutional state, one element will be taken from each – from oligarchy the principle of


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electing to offices, from democracy the disregard of qualification. Such are the various modes of combination. There is a true union of oligarchy and democracy when the same state may be termed either a democracy or an oligarchy; those who use both names evidently feel that the fusion is complete. Such a fusion there is also in the mean; for both extremes appear in it. So where Plato tends to resolve the issue of plurality by a dialectical weaving of opposites, Aristotle, who appears to go much further towards a thought of multiplicity as definitive of the polis, resolves that multiplicity by appealing to the familiar operator of the mean or medium, famously the fundamental operator of the Nichomachean Ethics. But this thought of the medium or the mean is intrinsically unstable, and cannot be taken to master or dominate the basic thought of plurality or multiplicity that we have seen to have an affinity with the concept of democracy. The reason for this is, perversely, logical: Aristotle’s central ethical principle prescribes the avoidance of excess in the name of the mean. It follows quite naturally that the pursuit of the mean should itself not fall into excess (so that there should not be an excessive avoidance of excess) – but this measured (non-excessive) pursuit of the mean will, just because of its measured nature, never quite reach the mean or median point at which plurality could be said to be mastered.44 The paradoxical logic of the mean entails that we stop short of the mean (which thereby itself becomes excessive), and therefore always remain (in fact, but transcendentally in fact, if I can put it that way) in plurality or dispersion. I want to say that it is this irreducible residue of plurality that constitutes the political as such, as inherently plural – it would be easy to show that this is also what opens the polis to its outside, as one state in a plurality of states, just as, at the other end of the question of plurality, as it were, this would be what opens ethics to politics, opens the dual face-to-face already to the third party (and therefore all the others, where ‘tout autre est tout autre’, of the political45), and the connivance of this motif of plurality with the concept of democracy that motivates its deconstructive survival, for example in the work of Derrida. Given this privileged situation of the concept of democracy as undecidably correct or deviant, or as undecidably naming both one possibility of politics and the political as such, it is perhaps not surprising that it is difficult to stabilise it into a ‘proper’ form of constitution. Insofar as it is constitutively ‘deviant’, democracy is


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already falling into a perversion of itself, a perversion of perversion, a hyper-perversion. This situation crystallises out as one where the paradoxical logic of the correct and the deviant is reproduced at the micro-level, as it were, of democracy ‘itself’. So that if democracy has a ‘correct’ form in the namelessly general politeia, it has a deviant form (which is, then, a deviant form of the deviant form that democracy already is) in demagogy (this is part of the process that allows Plato’s narrative transition from democracy to tyranny). And this seems to happen inevitably when the plurality that democracy names begins to affect democracy itself: for there are several types of democracy – but the one that looks superficially most democratic (i.e. where the people decide all issues in popular assemblies) is scarcely worthy of the name democracy at all: Of forms of democracy first comes that which is said to be based strictly on equality. In such a democracy the law says that it is just for the poor to have no more advantage than the rich; and that neither should be masters, but both equal. For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. And since the people are the majority, and the opinion of the majority is decisive, such a government must necessarily be a democracy. Here then is one sort of democracy. There is another, in which the magistrates are elected according to a certain property qualification, but a low one; he who has the required amount of property has a share in the government, but he who loses his property loses his rights. Another kind is that in which all the citizens who are under no disqualification share in the government, but still the law is supreme. In another, everybody, if he be only a citizen, is admitted to the government, but the law is supreme as before. A fifth form of democracy, in other respects the same, is that in which, not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees. This is a state of affairs brought about by the demagogues. For in democracies which are subject to the law the best citizens hold the first place, and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. For the people becomes a monarch, and is many in one; and the many have the power in their hands, not as individuals, but collectively ... At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour; this sort of democracy being relatively to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. The spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens. The decrees of the demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one


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what the flatterer is to the other. Both have great power; the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing. The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all things to the popular assembly. And therefore they grow great, because the people have all things in their hands, and they hold in their hands the votes of the people, who are too ready to listen to them. Further, those who have any complaint to bring against the magistrates say, ‘Let the people be judges’; the people are too happy to accept the invitation; and so the authority of every office is undermined. Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution. The law ought to be supreme over all, and the magistracies should judge of particulars, and only this should be considered a constitution. So that if democracy be a real form of government, the sort of system in which all things are regulated by decrees is clearly not even a democracy in the true sense of the word, for decrees relate only to particulars.46 And just this paradoxical tendency of democracy to collapse away from itself as it gets closer to itself – so that, to use a formula I’ve often used in the context of the deconstruction of the Kantian Idea, the end of democracy is the end of democracy – is the object of the suspicions with which it has traditionally been viewed (and explains for example why Rousseau’s Contrat social has so often been seen as an apologia for a totalitarian state). Kant, for example, famously says that democracy is always despotic (because it fails to respect the separation between sovereign and executive, which is pretty much Aristotle’s point here47), and the phobic object called ‘the mass’ or ‘the rabble’ of course surfaces in Hegel and Marx and far beyond.48 Democracy as always tending to become demagogy and thereby the opposite of itself just is what democracy is, in its presence, today, and even here and now. Which is why, in Derrida’s difficult formulation, democracy is always ‘to come’. The point here is not only that, as Derrida has said on occasion, democracy is the only regime-name that entails the thought of its own perpetual perfectibility – that point still remaining with the logic of the Kantian Idea – but that, just because of the paradoxical logic of democracy (whereby its most perfect form is its least perfect form) not only does democracy always in fact fall short of its Ideal form, so that we can always criticise so-called or self-proclaimed democracies in the name of democracy itself (however important that of course is), but also, if ever it did realise its Ideal form in the perfect reflective transparency of the totality of citizens to itself,


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then it would collapse into the worst imaginable political state (one of absolute nature or absolute techne, the absolute coincidence of utopia and dystopia), and the furthest remove from what democracy actually calls for. And it is no doubt a more or less obscure sense of this that motivates the traditional philosophical criticisms of democracy throughout the tradition. This structure of democracy – exemplarily political, on our reading – as thus interruptive or, better, disruptive of teleological determinations, also explains its affinity with deconstructive thinking more generally (and says something about our opening problem of the relative priority of metaphysics or politics by disrupting the teleological schema in which both were inscribed – we might indeed take the failure adequately to determine the priority as a trace within the structure of teleology of its own falling short of itself from the start, its failure to achieve its own telos of being adequately teleological49): for if the concept of democracy exemplarily disrupts teleology, it shows up a general feature of deconstructive thinking, which always and everywhere conducts, induces or observes this operation on teleological structures. And this helps to motivate our opening remark about deconstruction being a radical politicisation of conceptuality in general. We might now want to say that deconstruction is concomitantly a radical democratisation of thinking in general, a politics of reading that opens textuality up in principle to everyone: and this is why well-known texts, that bear down on us with all the weight of their authority and the authority of their traditional masters and guardians, can always, in principle, still be read, or (because reading, like democracy, is always to come – this was, remember, only a demo, after all) at least opened for reading, again, tomorrow. NOTES 1. PA, p. 128. All translations from Derrida are my own. 2. PA, p. 129. Cf. too ‘The demand for a democracy to come ... is deconstruction at work’, p. 183: this thematic of an ‘auto-delimitation’ that cannot be assimilated to the structure of the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ is the more abstract conceptual horizon of this essay. 3. MA, p. 134. 4. MA, pp. 107–8. 5. Cf. Metaphysics A, 982b, 4ff.: ‘And the science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences, and more authoritative than any ancillary science; and this end is the good of that thing, and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature.


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Judged by all the tests we have mentioned, then, the name in question falls to the same science; this must be a science that investigates the first principles and causes; for the good, i.e. the end, is one of the causes’; and Nichomachean Ethics, I, 1094a, 24ff., where apparently the same argument around the supreme good generates politics as the answer: ‘If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man.’ (Cf. too Politics, 1282b, 14ff.: ‘In all sciences and arts the end is a good, and the greatest good and in the highest degree a good in the most authoritative of all – this is the political science of which the good is justice, in other words, the common interest.’) In both cases the claim for the highest science is explicitly teleological, in the sense that neither of these two sciences is supposed to be subordinate to any further end. But the internal logic of teleology requires that there be only one end, so the apparent persistence here of two incompatible ends is troublesome. As the matter stands across these two passages, metaphysics is not done for the sake of politics, and politics is not done for the sake of metaphysics. We might of course assume in Levinasian vein that, to the extent that Aristotle in the Ethics is arguing for the pre-eminence of the ‘science’ of politics, metaphysics is still surreptitiously winning out. 6. See ‘Derrida and Politics’, in my Interrupting Derrida (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 18–33, and my attempt at a more general formalisation of this structure in ‘Derridabase’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 248–63, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 267–84. 7. ‘I have never thought that there were concepts which were metaphysical in themselves. Moreover no concept is itself and consequently is not, in itself, metaphysical’ (Jacques Derrida, Positions [Paris: Minuit, 1972], pp. 77–8), or, at the end of ‘Signature, Event, Context’: ‘Each concept... belongs to a systematic chain and itself constitutes a system of predicates. There is no metaphysical concept in itself. There is work – metaphysical or


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8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

not – on conceptual systems’, in Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 392–3. In a slightly different idiom, this is directly comparable to Lyotard’s point in Le différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), §190. PA, p. 40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §745. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Remark to §273. Derrida identifies a disjunction in the concept of democracy between equality and difference (PA, p. 40), and no doubt this is the root of the instabilities I will be illustrating here. More generally, the more frontal approach to the concept of democracy I am proposing here might hope to serve as a prolegomenon to Derrida’s much more complex (but perhaps rather elusive) reflection on democracy in his book. PA, p. 12. ‘Well-known’ here does not of course mean that everybody actually knows them well ... Rather these texts function as matrices (we’ll see that term, or something like it, appearing again in a moment) for subsequent philosophical discussion. The supposed ‘well-knownness’ of texts often functions as a powerful form of censorship: just because everyone is supposed to have already read such texts (so that people habitually pretend to have read them even if they have not), there is a barrier to actually reading them (not to speak of the barrier constituted by centuries of scholarship, which is always in principle hostile to reading). [This is a political remark.] It is also quite striking that Derrida does not choose to read these texts in his published work to date, perhaps just because they are so well known: the oblique approach to democracy in Politiques de l’amitié, for example, scarcely refers to either The Republic or the Politics. In Politiques, Derrida seems to suggest that the irony he finds at work in the Menexenus undercuts ‘Plato’s least ironical political discourse ... in particular in the Republic’ (PA, p. 125). It is not clear to me whether this passage of the Republic, which Derrida does not mention, would be undercut by the irony of the Menexenus. Plato, Republic, 557c. Plato, Republic, 562e–563d. Plato, Republic, 557d. Plato, Republic, 558a–c. Note the link here with Derrida’s insistence on the motif of the day, and the day-by-day, in the text translated as ‘Call it a day for democracy’ (in OH): the diversity inherent in the concept of democracy gives it a rhythm different from that of other regimes. (Note too that Aristotle more than once associates demagogy with ‘today’ or ‘this day’ [1320a 4 and 29].) It ought to be possible on the basis of this to show that the temporality of democracy is an impossible one: when exactly is a democracy democratic? Whence Derrida’s need to distinguish his insistence on ‘now’ from the traditional concept of ‘today’. Plato, Republic, 561c–e. Cf. too Derrida’s reflections in Politiques on the (relative) optionality of the name ‘democracy’ (PA, pp. 124ff.).


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23. Plato, Republic, 693d. 24. ‘No doubt one thinks that women have contributed little to the history of civilisation by their “discoveries and inventions” (Entdeckungen und Erfindungen). But they have discovered (erfunden), uncovered one technique, that of braiding and weaving. The unconscious motive of this “discovery”? Hiding, veiling a “defect of the genital organs”. So they discovered with a view to veiling. They have unveiled the means of veiling. In truth, looking more closely, over Freud’s shoulder, they have discovered nothing at all, all they did was imitate, since Nature, dame “Nature”, making pubic hair grow at puberty, had already “given”, he says, a model, a paradigm (Vorbild) for what was basically only an “imitation” (Nachahmung). This pubic hair already hides, it dissimulates, it veils (verhüllt) the genital organs. For this feminine “technique”, only one further “step” was necessary: make the threads or fibres (Fasern) hold together, intertwine them from where they were stuck on the body right on the skin, merely bushy, mixed up, felted (verfilzt). But what authorises Freud to speak here, against the very logic of his argument, of a “technique”? Is it still an art or an artifice, is it a discovery, this socalled “technique” which invents only the means of imitating nature, and in truth of unfolding, making explicit, unveiling a natural movement of nature? And unveiling a movement which itself consists in veiling? Of decrypting a nature which, as is well-known, likes to encrypt (itself), physis kruptesthai philei? This “technique” is less a break with physis than an imitative extension of it, thus confirming, perhaps, a certain animality of woman even in her artifices. (And what if a tekhnè never broke radically with a physis, if it only ever deferred it in differing from it, why reserve this animal naturality to woman?) A woman would weave like a body secretes for itself its own textile, like a worm, but this time like a worm without worm, a worm primarily concerned to hide in itself its non-being. What the woman would like to veil, according to Freud who, of course, does not mention the animal here, is that she does not have the worm she perhaps is. (I do not know what can be done with this piece of data, but in German one says Fasernackt for “naked as a worm” or “starkers”.) Freud’s conclusion, which I have already quoted, would deserve interminable analysis. It calls on the reader to witness: “If you reject this idea as imaginary [as a fantastical fantasy, als phantastisch], and if you impute to me as an idée fixe (als eine fixe Idee) the influence of the lack of a penis on the formation of femininity, then I am naturally disarmed (natürlich wehrlos)”. Freud names arms (Wehr). He is not, supposedly is not, without the truth of the true (wahrlos, if you like) but without arms (wehrlos) and naturally “naturally” (natürlich) disarmed, vulnerable, naked.’ (‘Un ver à soie’, in Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Voiles [Paris: Galilée, 1999], p. 50; translated by Geoffrey Bennington in Oxford Literary Review 18 (1997), pp. 3–63, here p. 35. 25. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §475, incidentally confirming and conceptualising Plato’s association of women and boys in the ‘bazaar’ remark of the Republic: ‘Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in


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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy – womankind in general. Womankind – the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community – changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family. Woman in this way turns to ridicule the earnest wisdom of mature age which, indifferent to purely private pleasures and enjoyments, as well as to playing an active part, only thinks of and cares for the universal. She makes this wisdom an object of derision for raw and irresponsible youth and unworthy of their enthusiasm. In general, she maintains that it is the power of youth that really counts.’ This famous paragraph goes on to show how this repressed power of natural individuality communicates, as it were, with that fact of the State itself as a natural individual in competition among other States – the so-called ‘ethical nation’ subsists only through the power in it of the individualistic naturality it represses in the figure of women and youth: in fact, the ethical nation can survive only by having its youth fight against other nations – but this dependency of the ethical nation on the natural values of strength and luck already means it is no longer quite ethical. See especially, just a little later in §476: ‘This ruin of the ethical Substance and its passage into another form is thus determined by the fact that the ethical consciousness is directed on to the law in a way that is essentially immediate. This determination of immediacy means that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself. For this immediacy has the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious tranquillity of Nature, and also the self-conscious restless tranquillity of Spirit. On account of this natural aspect, this ethical nation is, in general, an individuality determined by Nature and therefore limited, and thus meets its downfall at the hands of another.’ See too Derrida’s commentary on these passages in Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974; reprint, Denoël/Gonthier, 1981, vol. 2, pp. 262a ff.). It is also worth noting that these two principles are seen to be the principles of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit §736. I develop these points more fully in Frontières kantiennes (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Plato actually inscribes democracy into a declining narrative sequence whereby aristocracy gives rise in turn to timocracy, to oligarchy, to democracy, and finally to tyranny. This narrative is set in motion by the fact that the ideal State described in the Republic is of necessity temporal, and like all temporal things, subject to alteration and decay. Plato, Republic, 462a–b. Plato, Republic, 462c. Aristotle, Politics, 1261a 17–33; cf. too, 1277a 5–10. Aristotle, Politics, 1263b 30–5. See ‘Le mot d’accueil’, in Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997) for an extended discussion of the ‘political’ place of the third party in Levinas.


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33. That ‘all but’ is important: in fact no state can achieve complete autarkeia, if only because of the need to prepare itself for protection from attack from outside. Cf. too Aristotle, Politics, 1275b 20. See too my discussion of this motif in Frontières kantiennes. This is also the opening for Hegel’s remarks quoted above, note 25. 34. Aristotle, Politics, 1289b 27. 35. Aristotle, Politics, 1297b 28–31; cf. too 1316b 36. 36. Aristotle, Politics, 1275b 6. 37. ‘But when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name – a constitution. And there is a reason for this use of language. One man or a few may excel in virtue; but as the number increases it becomes more difficult for them to attain perfection in every kind of virtue, though they may in military virtue, for this is found in the masses. Hence in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1279a 37–1279b 4). This is an obscure passage which has exercised the commentators for centuries, and the problem is compounded by the fact that Aristotle does in fact regularly use the word democracy to refer to this supposedly non-deviant form, often assimilated by translators and commentators to the ‘republican’ form. See Derrida’s discussion in PA, pp. 223–34. 38. Aristotle, Politics, 1279a 31. 39. See Aristotle, Politics, 1289a, 37ff. Cf. too Nichomachean Ethics, 1160b, 8–9: ‘and we see more clearly in the case of tyranny that it is the worst of deviations, because the contrary of what is best is what is worst’. 40. It has actually been argued on philological grounds that the remarks about democracy in the Nichomachean Ethics amount to saying that it is the best form of all, and not just the least bad of the deviant forms. This depends on an attempt to challenge the accepted reading of Nichomachean Ethics, 1160b 19–20: ‘Democracy is the least bad of the deviations; for in its case the form of constitution is but a slight deviation’, but here the words ‘of the deviations’ are an interpolation. The Greek reads: ‘hêkista de mochthêron estin hê dêmokratia: epi mikron gar parekbainei to tês politeias eidos’. Although it looks implausible to argue that this is what Aristotle ‘really meant’, the drift of our argument is that, as least bad deviant form, democracy really is the best form according to a logic Aristotle does not entirely control or sign. This does not amount to accepting the dogmatic assertion by e.g. Tricot (whose name signals not so much towards the noble art of weaving as towards the much more domestic activity of knitting: let’s say that Tricot is woolly…) that Aristotle thinks that the politeia is the ideal form. Cf. his translation of the Politics (Aristotle, La Politique, trans. J. Tricot [Paris: Vrin/Bibliothèque des textes philosophiques, 1995]), p. 174, n3, and, extraordinarily, of the Nichomachean Ethics, where in his note 1 to p. 410, he claims that the politeia, which Aristotle here prefers to call timocratia, ‘constitutes, according to Aristotle, the most perfect form of political organisation’. A few lines further on, the translation has Aristotle saying, of the ‘normal’ forms: ‘The best of these constitutions is royalty, and the worst, timocracy’. Cf. the further traces of this dogmatism on La politique, p. 214, n2.


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42 Geoffrey Bennington 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Aristotle, Politics, 302e–303b; my emphasis. Aristotle, Politics, 1289b 5–12. Aristotle, Politics, 1266a 1–5. This is a complex point. In the Nichomachean Ethics, II, 6, which gives a full definition of moral virtue, Aristotle, having defined virtue in terms of the mean, points out that not all actions admit of a virtuous mean at all. For example, adultery, theft and homicide are ‘perverse in themselves’, and not just in their moments of excess and default. This is because such actions are already in the domain of excess or default, and there can be no mean, excess or default of excess itself. This is taken to disallow the type of second-level argument I have just put up: Aristotle is essentially saying that default, mean and excess cannot be reapplied to themselves – so just as we can’t rehabilitate murder as a virtue by applying the mean to it, so we can’t reapply default or excess to the mean itself. Virtue may be defined in terms of a mean used to measure actions, but is not itself to be measured in terms of the mean. This reading, forcefully defended by J.O. Urmson in Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) is vulnerable, however, to the charge of dogmatism. For example, it is difficult to see why ‘moderation’ or ‘temperance’ can be lost in default or excess, but not virtue itself, especially as what is translated here as moderation or temperance is sophrosyne, and just that quality is an essential component of moral virtue as Aristotle defines it. See for example 1105b, 1–12: ‘Actions, then, are called just and temperate [sophrona] when they are such as the just or the temperate [sophron] man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.’ But if we do allow the reapplication of the logic of the mean to the thought of the mean, so that virtue would consist in a sort of moderate moderation, then the paradoxes we are looking at cannot be repressed: a virtue of moderate moderation or a mean mean always might, on occasion (and of course Aristotle does also leave open here a thought of the occasion or the kairos), need to act excessively or immoderately. Cf. Derrida, ‘Le mot d’accueil’. Aristotle, Politics, 1291b 30–1292a 38; cf. too 1274a 5. See especially the ‘Perpetual Peace’ text, in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [2nd edition]), p. 101. See Richard Beardsworth’s discussion in Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 92–5. I argue this in depth, in the context of Kant’s account of teleological judgement, in Chapter 5 of Frontières kantiennes.


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2 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy Jean-Luc Nancy

Never do we wonder as much about the fragility of democracy as when democratic certainty is generally confirmed. When every discourse guarantees that ‘democracy’ is the only acceptable type of political regime for emancipated humanity that has come of age and that has no other purpose than itself, then the very idea of democracy loses its colour, becomes blurred, and perplexes us. Let us first establish the following: the so-called ‘totalitarian’ possibilities that put the twentieth century to the test have already emerged from this trouble. Unlike those who, during the 1920s and 1930s, could believe in the demand for a radical re-foundation of the res publica [la chose publique et commune], we can no longer ignore the traps and the monsters hiding behind our perplexities towards democracy. And yet, it is impossible simply to be ‘democrat’ without wondering about what this means, for the meaning of the term keeps posing problems, at every step, each time one has recourse to it. To ignore these difficulties – as political discourses constantly do – is as dangerous as to challenge democracy. Their avoidance forbids us to think and thus covers over the same traps and monsters, or even other ones. I propose here nothing other than a merely minimal argument or schematic procedure for the examination of the possible meanings of ‘democracy’: 1) Either the word points to the exercise of political power by the people and in this case: a) the ‘people’ refers to a fraction of the social whole that is distinct from another one to which it is supposedly inferior and that dominates it. In this case, democracy is not a regime but the overthrow of a regime (or at least, of a government). It is the revolt of misery and of the intolerable in bodies and souls, of hunger, of fear. From passive subjects, the subjected become active ones. The legitimacy of their revolt is absolute. It is however merely that of revolt and does not allow for the foundation of a regime. In revolt, there are democrats 43


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rather than democracy. Revolt only exists in its act, in its times and its places. It is not a coincidence if, in modern political experience, the idea of ‘permanent revolution’ has constituted both an infinitely vanishing point and a line of conduct. The subject of revolt simultaneously refers, for the time being, to an absolute, inalienable and indivisible dignity, or to a value that is measured to nothing but to itself – and, in the long run, to the same absolute value as an infinite opening that no quality, institution, or even identity should be able to close off. Democratic politics is thus a politics of periodic return to the breach of revolt (to the brink of revolt). It can determine the circumstance and the subject that open up this breach only on an ad hoc basis. Or, b) the ‘people’ is considered as the whole and as the body of social reality. Instead of a thought that proceeds in a differential manner, one is faced with a thought that favours the whole. The political sovereignty of the people thus signifies above all its selfconstitution as a ‘people’. This self-constitution obviously precedes every political constitution, which the people constitute, rather than being constituted by it. Here the people-subject is affirmed not as an actor and a force but first of all as a substance: the primary reality whose existence and movement flow only from itself. The history of modern thought shows in turn either the impossibility of engendering a politics that would be itself the self-engendering of the people (‘direct’ democracy, the infinite presupposition of a common and organic will, that is, according to Rousseau, the sole prerogative of the gods) – or else the solution to the problem of democracy as the dissolution of the entire political sphere as particular sphere, which disappears in the total and social self-productive sphere (Marx). When one has taken into account the whole of this first hypothesis, as our history appears to have done, two possible modalities of what can be called a politics in negativity [ politique en négativité ] emerge: either the periodical and dispersed politics of particular configurations of the ‘breach’, that yet implies the abstention from participation to the (parliamentary and republican) democratic institution – or else, the thought of democracy that holds the impossibility of embodying its essence and of representing its figure, with the necessity of maintaining ‘democratically’ this impossibility. In both cases, politics is affirmed essentially in a retreat in the precise sense that political authority, as the authority of a subsumptive unity of nature and fate, of the project and of the identity of something like a ‘people’, must be kept in retreat of itself, must remain the negative


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index of an always remote presence. The model here is that of a negative theology, and in fact what is at issue is nothing other than politics as onto-theo-politics (or the theologico-political) whose sign is inverted. (The question can be formulated in the following manner: Have revolutions done anything other than invert the sign of the theologico-political?) 2) Or else, ‘democracy’ does not so much point to a political specificity as to ‘civil society’ or to ‘the social bond’ considered from the perspective of an ethos or of a democratic feeling, namely, under the heading of the regulative idea that the motto ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ represents, whatever its precise interpretation may be. On this view, democracy is a description and/or an evaluation of the being-in-common based on the mutual recognition of fellow creatures and on the independence of each group who share this recognition. The model for such a group is given in the form of what is called a ‘commune’ or a ‘community’ (as in Marx). Two thoughts of the commun(e)ity are possible: According to the first (rather American in Tocqueville’s understanding), the commune is not yet in the political order: it is beyond the State and can be represented as subsisting without or under the latter (its freedom is in it more a franchise than a selfconstituting freedom). It is local and restricted, it does not involve power as such. It has the nature of an interiority and its outside is as much the other commune as the State itself. The latter thus appears less as a subsumptive and identificatory authority than as a separate one, responsible for another sphere (in the kind of an imperial or federal power). According to the second (more European and variously modulated in socialist or fascist versions), the community takes the place of the negativity formulated above. Its interiority or its subjectivity fulfils the identificatory and subsumptive role of the State which tendentiously erases or sublimates itself in it. One therefore reconstitutes a positive onto-theologico-politics, but an immanent version of it and no longer a transcendent one. 3) The question of democracy can thus apparently be condensed in the following manner: does this word finally point to the tacit renewal of the theologico-political through a negative-transcendent or immanent-positive metamorphosis, or does it point to a genuine rupture from the theologico-political? (We recognise one form of the debate on ‘secularisation’ as it opposed Carl Schmitt and Hans


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Blumenberg. More generally, this debate pertains to the essence or to the meaning of modernity.) If, as I think, what is at issue is a rupture, we should nevertheless determine in what way it is not yet brought to completion. Indeed, not only does the ‘European’ thought of democracy often remain burdened by the weight of the theologico-political (positive or negative), but ‘American’ thought simultaneously frees the forces of inequality that an ‘internal’ principle of the people no longer tempers, and the forces of the incompatible and sterilising communitarian turning in on oneself. There thus remains at least one meaning of ‘democracy’ (or of whatever name one may have to give to it) that is not yet spelled out. (The qualifiers ‘European’ and ‘American’ are here formal indexes: the real features are formed everywhere. It would not be naive to think that Europe, in spite of all its defects, could be a real place for putting an unheard-of meaning of ‘democracy’ to the test.) The task that is clearly expounded is therefore neither that of a destruction of democracy, nor that of its indefinite perfecting: it is above all that of coming to a decision about the ‘rupture’ at issue, therefore about ‘modernity’ (or about so-called ‘post-modernity’). The decision will have to involve a decision upon the nature, the stake and the place of the political. Should it still be thought in the shadow of the theologico-political (namely, what one calls today ‘the political’ tout court)? Or else, should it be thought according to an essential retreat of that ‘political’ (essential, substantial and subsumptive of all the being-in-common): this withdrawal [retrait] would not be a retreat [retraite], but a retracing of everything that is at issue with the being-in-common (being together or being-with). Namely and singularly, the question as to whether the political sphere should not remain distinct from the sphere of the ‘common’, which it neither exhausts nor overhangs. Politics is not responsible for the identity and for the fate of the common, but for the ruling – should it be infinite – of justice (it has therefore to do with power). The common puts into play existence (it has therefore to do with meaning [sens]). What is at issue is the gap between meaning and power. The one assuredly does not exclude the other, but nor does it substitute itself for it. (The legitimacy of revolt is not so much suppressed, as its ultimate horizon displaced.) The theologico-political subsumes together power and meaning, justice and existence, and absorbs the common into the political (or the reverse). Ultimately, one no longer knows what ‘common’ and ‘political’ mean. That is what makes us


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perplexed about ‘democracy’. It is therefore a question of thinking the interval between the common and the political: one does not belong to the one as to the other, and not ‘everything’ is political. Nor is ‘everything’ common, since the ‘common’ is neither a thing nor a whole. Between power and meaning, there is proximity and distance, there is altogether a relation of power and a relation of meaning [sens] ... It may be a new form of man’s relation to himself, who would not know how to be ‘his own end’ (if that is the foundation of ‘democracy’) without moving away from himself in order to move beyond. Jean-Luc Nancy, December 1999. Translated by Céline Surprenant

IS EVERYTHING POLITICAL? (A SIMPLE NOTE) A sentence floats on the horizon of our thoughts, it declares that everything is political. It can be addressed or received in many ways: sometimes in a distributive mode (the diverse moments or pieces of existence in common all proceed in some way from the moment or piece called ‘political’, which has a privilege of diffusion or of transversality), sometimes on a rather dominating mode (at first or ultimately, it is the ‘political’ sphere that determines or commands the activity of the other spheres), at other times, finally, in an integrative or assumptive mode (the essence of the whole of existence is of a political nature). In each of these cases, the tone of the enunciation or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, affirmative or protestatory. Before simply and vaguely ‘floating’, this sentence on the horizon has been the axiom of a modern elaboration. It has probably constituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long period – perhaps in fact from 1789 up until ‘today’, even if we do not know whether ‘our days’ are still or are already no longer circumscribed by this horizon. (But in particular, this sentence has become a maxim or a motto as much for fascism as for communism [les fascismes et les communismes]: it was probably, beyond all disparities, their point of contact.) So as not to dwell in this brief note on what has preceded modernity, let us limit ourselves to saying the following: politics was


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not ‘totalising’ for antiquity, which no doubt invented it but which conceived of it only in the condition of a city of ‘free men’, that is, of an essentially differential and not ‘totalising’ polis. Slavery alone, with its economical corollaries, prevents us from understanding, for example, the ‘architectonic’ place of politics in Aristotle according to the idea that ‘everything is political’. In this political space, the free man enjoys the polis for other ends than that of political management (for example, the bios theoretikos, the leisure of thinking life), just as the polis survives on infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence above all by familial units). As far as the politics of the sovereign Nation-State is concerned, it was sustaining itself, on the one hand, on the basis of everyone’s relation to a destination that always somewhat disregarded politics (a religious, symbolic destination) – whereas the same sovereignty, on the other hand, was leading towards ‘politics in totality’ [la politique en totalité ] that has become that of the moderns. If we say today that politics is held in check or on the edge by economy, it is only through a hasty confusion: what we thus call ‘economy’ is in fact nothing other than what was formerly called ‘political economy’, that is to say, the functioning of the management of subsistence and of prosperity, not so much at the level of the family which is relatively self-sufficient (the oikos, the household), but at the level of the city (polis). ‘Political economy’ was nothing other than the considering of the polis as an oikos, that is, as a collective or communitarian reality supposedly belonging to a natural order (generation, kinship, property of patrimony: ground, goods, slaves). It followed logically that if the oiko-nomia was transposed at the level of the polis, the shift could not simply be a matter of scale, but also implied that the politeia, the knowledge of the businesses of the city, should itself be reinterpreted as an oiko-nomia. But the latter was itself and simultaneously no longer reinterpreted only in terms of subsistence and of prosperity (of ‘good life’), but in terms of production and of reproduction of wealth (of the ‘having-more’ [plus-avoir]). When all is said and done, what is at issue is always the way in which the grouping of men is to be interpreted. It is understood as a ‘political whole’ insofar as the ‘political’ is itself determined as total, totalising or inclusive. It is indeed what it has done, in a major way, by determining itself as an encompassing oikos: more precisely, as an oiko-logical encompassment, that of a concourse or of a concurrence – in the primary sense of these terms – of the natural


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resources of its members. This was first called ‘physiocracy’ (‘government by nature’). At the same time, it was necessary to determine the ‘natural’ nature of the members of the political oikos. This was done by constituting the city itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent order with regard to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while being simultaneously of another essence than them), but on the basis of an assumed originary ‘oikology’, an originary familiarity between men themselves and between men and nature. Thus, the institution of the ‘social body’ or of a ‘civil society’ (in the primary and exact sense of the terms: a political society or a society where the notion of citizenship is central) was presented as being tendentiously, ideally or originally identical to the institution of humanity itself, the latter moreover having no other ultimate destination than to produce itself as second nature or as an entirely humanised nature (supposing that such a concept should not be contradictory, which is no doubt precisely one nub of the problem ...). According to this logic, ‘everything is political’ is given as a principle, whence it follows that ‘politics’ itself, as an order separated from any specific institution, knowledge (or art), cannot but tend towards the suppression of its own separation so as to realise the natural totality that it expresses or that it first indicates. In that case, there is no difference, ultimately, between ‘everything is political’ and ‘everything is economical’. Democracy and market can thus together and mutually force their way through the process that is today called ‘mondialisation’. ‘Everything is political’ thus also comes down to saying that there is a self-sufficiency of ‘man’, himself considered as producer of his nature and in him, of the whole of nature. The vague representation of this self-sufficiency and of this self-production has thoroughly dominated, up until now, the representations of politics, whether they be ‘of the right’ or ‘of the left’, at least all those that are presented under the heading of a global political ‘project’, whether it be ‘of the state’ or ‘against the state’, ‘consensual’ or ‘revolutionary’, etc. (There also exists a weak version of politics as an activity of regulation, of correction of the imbalances and of the lowering of tensions: but the background of this ‘social-democrat’ bricolage, incidentally sometimes very honourable [but also sometimes fraught with dishonest compromises], nevertheless remains the same.)

◀▶


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The only question that what is today called the ‘crisis’, the ‘eclipse’, the ‘paralysis’ of politics raises is in fact that of the self-sufficiency of man and/or of nature in him or through him. Now, it is precisely the inconsistency of this self-sufficiency that is gradually being demonstrated by our time. For mondialisation – or the general oikologicisation of the polis – also reveals increasingly vividly or more violently the non-naturality of its own process (but also, eventually, that of the alleged ‘nature’ itself: never have we been to such a great extent in the order of a meta-phusis). The ‘man’ that has emancipated itself through ‘total eco-politics’ – this man whose social-market represents simultaneously and symmetrically the universal form of ‘rights’ and the planetary proliferation of injustice, extortion and exploitation – turns out to be not so much ‘alienated’ (in the sense in which he could designate the ‘proper’ in relation to which ‘alienation’ can be measured and determined) as deprived of identity, of propriety, of end and of measure. Man first bears witness to a lack of being [manque à être]. On the one hand, existence is forbidden to the exploited that is submitted to survival (it is indeed a prohibition rather than a lack). The affluent, on the other hand, know increasingly well – even leaving aside compassion – that neither their well-being nor the suffering [mal-être] of the others that corresponds to it, produce beingman or being-world. But in this way – and this is the most recent lesson, still almost inaudible, most often unheard-of – the ‘lack’ itself reveals simultaneously the insufficiency of a simple logic of the lack. Such a logic, analogous to that of alienation, presupposes a ‘fullness’ as terminus a quo or ad quem. Now, if there is no terminus – neither origin nor end – it is because one is faced with the paradoxical logic of a complete incompleteness or of an infinite finitude. This logic turns out henceforth to form ‘man’, and with him (and through him), ‘nature’ as well as ‘history’. Now, in the singular light of this paradox, the invention of the politeia may turn out already to have been the revelation of such a logic. The man of the logos, that is properly the zoon politikon, is the being whose own measure is incommensurable and cannot be appropriated. The polis has simultaneously represented itself as a given common measure, or as the self-donation of a common measure, and as an indefinite instability and a permanent reworking [remise en chantier] (even if rare, with episodic manifestations) of


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the measure of the incommensurable. (The index of the ‘common measure’ is then to be understood both transversally: a linking measure, and in a distributive sense: a measure due to everyone [revenant à chacun].) The measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, from the moment that it is not given, the exercise of a power (thus of counter-powers, of reversals, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such a power, in whatever sense one may envisage it, is from the first incompatible with an identification carried out under the heading of the oikonomy: under the heading of natural self-sufficiency. But precisely, it has become obvious that there is no oikonomy: there is, in all respects, only an echotechny, that is to say a common place or a dwelling in the production, the invention and the ceaseless transformation of ends that are never given. No doubt, the domination of ‘political economy’ has never been more overwhelming; but never has the fundamental inconsistency of its so-called self-sufficiency been more manifest. Never has it been more manifest that the value (the value of ‘man’ or of the ‘world’) is absolutely incommensurable with any measured value (evaluated). (Commensurability is called ‘general equivalence’.)

◀▶ Politics has retreated as the donation (self- or hetero-donation, human or divine) of an essence and of a common destination: it has retreated as totality or totalisation. In this way, not everything is political. But politics traces itself again either as a place for the exercise of power that aims at an incommensurable justice – or as a place where to claim the in-finity of being-man and of being-world. By definition, it does not resorb in itself all the other places of existence. The others are those where incommensurability is somewhat formed or presented: they can be called ‘art’, ‘religion’, ‘thought’, ‘science’, ‘ethics’, ‘conduct’ [conduite], ‘exchange’, ‘production’, ‘love’, ‘war’, ‘kinship’, ‘rapture’, they can have an infinite number of names. Their distinctions and their mutual circumscriptions (that prevent neither contiguity nor compenetrations) each time define the occurrence of a configuration whereby a certain presentation takes place – even if this presentation should itself give rise to a non-presentation [imprésentation] or to a retreat of presence. (The non-political spheres are not


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however those of a ‘private’ order opposed to a ‘public’ one: all the spheres are public and private, if one must use these terms. All are shared, in the double edge of this word.) Between these configurations (and here again, without excluding their points of contact and their contagions) there is incommensurability. Politics is redrawn [se redessine] at this place: as the place where the opening of this incommensurability must be maintained, and in general, the opening of the incommensurability of justice and of value. Contrary to what was affirmed by the theologico-political as well as by political economy – but not without relation to what was at stake in the polis from ‘before politics’ (if one dare say so) – politics is no longer the place of the assumption of a uni-totality. It is therefore no longer the place of the taking form [mise-en-forme], or of the presenting [mise-en-presence] of incommensurability or of some unity of origin and end, in brief of a ‘humanity’. Politics is concerned with space and spacing (with space-time), but not with figure. Politics is no doubt the place of an ‘in-common’ as such – but only in the mode of an incommensurability kept opened (and according to the two axes sketched above). It does not subsume the ‘in-common’ under any kind of union, community, subject or epiphany. All that pertains to the ‘common’ is not political, and what is political is not entirely ‘common’. But at the same time, neither the sphere of the in-common, nor that of politics admit of the separation between a ‘society of exteriority’ and a ‘community in interiority’. (Dualism does not hold any more for the social body/soul than for the individual body/soul.) Politics must henceforth be understood as the specific place of the articulation of a non-unity – and of the symbolisation of a non-figure. The names ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’ are nothing but the problematical names, not saturated with meaning, under the heading of which must be kept open the demand for not achieving an essence or an end of the incommensurable, yet and precisely, they are the names under the heading of which its (im)possibility must be sustained. The exigency of adjusting power – the force that must hold the non-organic non-unity – to an incommensurable ‘justice’. The demand, then, for adjusting it to the universal (not given, but to be produced). At this point, politics is far from being ‘everything’ – even if everything goes through it, meets and crosses it. Politics becomes precisely a place of de-totalisation. Or else, could we risk saying: if ‘everything is political’ – but according to another acceptation than


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that of political theology and/or political economy – it is in the sense that ‘everything’, the ‘whole’ should in no way be total or totalised. Are we equal to the task of conceiving ‘democracy’ in this way, with such a degree of intensity? Jean-Luc Nancy, April 2000. Translated by Céline Surprenant


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3 The Art of the Impossible? Derek Attridge

My love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high: It was begotten by despair Upon Impossibility. Andrew Marvell, ‘The Definition of Love’ Bismarck famously observed that politics is the art of the possible, and it’s not difficult to agree. Determinate and achievable goals, practical and practicable policies, staged and cumulative programmes, these are the watchwords of a successful political platform. Politics happens squarely, it would seem, in the realm of the possible, the feasible, the achievable. Deconstruction, on the other hand, involves a constant engagement with the impossible.1 Here are a few statements by Derrida, out of many more I could have chosen. From ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’: ‘Deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible.’2 From ‘Force of Law’: ‘Deconstruction is the experience of the impossible.’3 From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’: ‘The impossible has already occurred.’4 The impossible is also a constitutive feature of many of the concepts or experiences on which Derrida has dwelt in his more recent work. Another small selection (the use of bold is mine): From Given Time: ‘The gift is the impossible.’5 From The Other Heading: ‘The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible.’6 From ‘Sauf le nom’: ‘The sole decision possible passes through the madness of the undecidable and the impossible.’7 And from the same work (more or less a rewriting of my epigraph from Marvell): ‘love itself, that is, this infinite renunciation which somehow surrenders to the impossible.’8 From Politics of Friendship: ‘This love that would take place only once would be the only possible event: as impossible.’9 From De l’hospitalité: ‘Everything takes place as if hospitality were the impossible.’10 A recent text of Derrida’s, to which I’ll return later, 54


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is called ‘La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible’ (which might be translated as ‘Literature Incommunicado: An Impossible Filiation’).11 The art of the possible; the experience of the impossible. Is the passage between the two, between politics and deconstruction, possible or impossible? In order to highlight one or two aspects of this huge question, I’d like to focus my attention on Derrida’s reading of a short Biblical text, the akedah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, told in Genesis chapter 22 – or, to be more accurate, his reading of Kierkegaard’s reading of this text in Fear and Trembling.12 In particular, I want to consider the move in chapter 3 of The Gift of Death whereby Derrida extrapolates from the situation in which Abraham finds himself, commanded by the God he worships to kill his beloved son and heir, the repository of the future of his race, to the situation of all of us, at every moment.13 This is a move which could be seen as paradigmatic of the passage from deconstruction to politics (and from reading to politics), a move from a unique account of a unique event, related in a unique text of a literary type (or, more accurately, a series of such texts), to the array of quotidian realities we have to deal with here and now; from an impossible demand to the possibilities of daily existence.14 This is how Derrida makes the move. Having emphasised how monstrous is the demand made on Abraham, how his responsibility to the absolute Other requires that, by sacrificing his son, he sacrifice the ethical obligations he is under as father, husband, patriarch, social being, Derrida comments: But isn’t this also the most common thing? what the most cursory examination of the concept of responsibility cannot fail to affirm? ... What binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice. There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others, to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility.15 And Derrida gives some examples which make it very clear that he really does mean that my responsibilities are infinite, and fulfilling them an impossible task: By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling


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my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness ... every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.16 Kierkegaard’s reading of the events on Mount Moriah also emphasises another aspect of the story, Abraham’s surprising silence about his acceptance of God’s demand, from which Derrida again extrapolates, to make his account of our daily condition even bleaker. I quote from The Gift of Death once more: Whether I want to or not, I can never justify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice the one (an other) to the other ... How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people? How would you justify your presence here speaking one particular language, rather than there speaking to others in another language?17 Derrida has spoken of the ‘quasi-fictional’ quality of this text, distancing himself to a degree from the philosopher or ethico-political commentator whose voice we hear – a stratagem which of course echoes Kierkegaard’s own text, published under a pseudonym and composed in a style that is as literary as it is philosophical. Whether or not Derrida might, if pressed, say this about every text he has published, it is true that there is a certain extravagance, occasionally bordering on comedy, in some parts of this work. No matter how familiar one is with Derrida’s writing, it’s easy to find oneself asking at these moments, ‘Is he being serious?’, and thus to put oneself in the position of those many readers – including those looking for concrete political recommendations – who resist Derrida’s thought because it pushes them beyond the point where they feel comfortable. Someone whom one would certainly not think to include among such readers is David Wood, a respected philosopher in the continental tradition who has written with acuity and sympathy on Derrida’s work and edited a number of collections devoted to Derrida. Yet Wood is among those who can’t stomach the move I’ve just summarised. I’ll give you a couple of excerpts from his essay, ‘Much Obliged’: First problem: ‘I can never justify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other’. Can this be true? Suppose I have promised something to


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one person and not to another, in such a way that they rely on my support in ways that others do not. Does that not give me special obligations? Or, suppose one person (or animal) in need is in front of me, and the other is not? ... The thought that there are no fixed boundaries here does not mean that there are none. Hospitality would self-destruct if it were ‘infinite’.18 And again: Unless we are holding on to some source of absolute justification, which I thought had long since been abandoned, it is just not true that ‘I can never justify this sacrifice’, that ‘I will always be secretive’. My justification for teaching my children about poison ivy is that they are my children and I care especially for them.19 In this response Wood is not far from the attitude of the impatient political activist who finds in Derrida’s writing no guide to practical life, and who asks, ‘How can an assertion of the impossibility of acting responsibly, and of justifying what one does, contribute to the needs of the here and now?’ Wood, quite reasonably (at least quite reasonably as a practical man if not as a philosopher of deconstruction) believes that he is perfectly able to rank his responsibilities and, if need be, justify this ranking. And the implication is that, having got his responsibilities in order, he can act upon them without too much difficulty – irrespective of all this rigmarole about starving cats. The worrying thing about Wood’s essay is not just that it has difficulties with this text of Derrida’s, but, as I’ve suggested, that its misreadings of the text imply an inability to grasp what is centrally radical about deconstructive thinking. One way of putting this would be that it does not acknowledge the consequences of the ‘impossibility’ of deconstruction and the associated impossibilities we have already noted. (I make no comment on the ad hominem aspects of his essay, the accusation that Derrida suffers from ‘what one could almost call ... hubris’ and the suggestion that the argument of The Gift of Death springs from a sense of guilt on Derrida’s part.20) There are two elements in Derrida’s argument that Wood, and no doubt many other readers, find troublesome. The first is the claim that every choice I make in favour of a person, an animal, a culture, a language, a place necessarily involves the sacrifice of every other person, animal, culture, language or place I might have chosen; the second is that I am unable to justify any such choice and sacrifice. The first claim follows ineluctably from Derrida’s understanding of responsibility as unconditional and singular, a unique response to a


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unique other, manifested in an extreme form in Abraham’s response to God but applicable to all instances of responsibility. (Wood appears to share this understanding: he says, ‘I must acknowledge that at one level Derrida is right about responsibility – right, that is, to insist that it must exceed any prescribable algorithm’.21) But if responsibility is unconditional, outside the operation of norms, conventions, discourse, rationality, there can be no fully reliable means whereby my responsibility to x can be calculated as greater or lesser than my responsibility to y. Responsibility, if it is not mere calculation, can never be anything other than absolute, whether it is responsibility to God, to humans, to cats, or to languages. Derrida’s apparently absurd examples are no more than the result of following through the consequences of this position. The second stage of Derrida’s argument, that I can never justify any of the choices and attendant sacrifices that I make, follows directly on from the first. It links the concept of responsibility to the singular other and the concept of the decision. Abraham’s decision to obey the command of God is made as a singular response to a singular set of circumstances, absolutely heterogeneous to all laws and generalities. We cannot say whether it is more an act or an event, whether it is something Abraham does or something that happens to him. ‘The instant of decision’, Derrida quotes Kierkegaard as saying in a strikingly proto-Derridean moment, ‘is madness’.22 The decision here consists in placing one responsibility – to God, to the singularity of the absolute other – above another, or rather many others – to Isaac, to the family, to the state, to the human community, to the covenanted future (of which Isaac is the embodiment), to ethics as a general system. Once we describe Abraham’s decision in these terms, the impossibility of justification, the inevitability of silence, is obvious. To account for his decision in language, in the public discourse of what counts as justification, would be to cross from the unconditional to the conditional, from the incalculable to the calculable, from the impossible to the possible. But to assert that Abraham is, and cannot avoid being, ‘silent’ about his decision is not to assert that he does not, and cannot, speak. (Derrida notes that ‘speaking in order not to say anything is always the best technique for keeping a secret’.23) What is more, Abraham is under an obligation to speak, to justify his action; once he descends from the lonely heights of Mount Moriah to the public spaces he has to pick up once more his familial and social existence, to move from the realm of the impossible to the possible,


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from, if you like, deconstruction to politics. He has to negotiate the unnegotiable.24 Another impossible demand, in other words. Which does not mean it cannot be done – one must never forget that, for Derrida, the impossible (which of course has nothing to do with the very difficult) is what opens the possible. Were it straightforwardly possible for Abraham to justify his decision, if he could speak with no reserve, no secret, no silence inhabiting his words, we would know that he had not made a decision, in the strict sense, that it must have been a calculation, with no ethical force, no enactment of responsibility. His attempted justification will succeed only if it fails, if his account of what he has done bears a silence at its heart – one might even say produces, without producing, a silence at its heart. This is what Kierkegaard’s account attempts to do, to testify to and thus produce without producing Abraham’s secret, to bear witness to the enormity and importance of that secret. This is what Derrida’s account attempts to do. This is what deconstructive writing does, testify to secrets.25 This is all very well, our political pragmatist may say, but Derrida carries the argument well beyond matters of life-and-death decisions, and that’s when it becomes troubling. It may be correct to say that there is a structural aporia at the heart of every genuinely ethical decision, that the ethical act, as an absolutely singular event, as the saying which exceeds the said, cannot, by its very nature, be justified. But when Derrida applies his arguments to the most banal of daily actions, actions which one would not normally characterise as ‘ethical’, an understandable resistance ensues. I did not choose to speak the language I speak, and so can hardly be accused of sacrificing all other languages to it; I have no option but to occupy the place I stand in, and so no sacrificial act in relation to other places is involved; I feed my cat out of sheer habit, and have to take no decision to do so. Thus David Wood tells us that he teaches his children about poison ivy, and has a straightforward justification for doing so, and for not making the hopeless attempt to ensure that all the children in the world know about poison ivy: ‘they are my children and I care especially for them’.26 It’s clearly not something he has to decide to do. No doubt he would have similarly down-to-earth justifications for virtually all his other actions that bear upon his responsibility to others. No impossibilities, no silences, no secrets. But Wood’s insertion of a proviso just before this assertion suggests that matters are not quite so simple: ‘Unless we are holding on to some source of absolute


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justification, which I thought had long since been abandoned.’ His justifications are, it would seem, partial, or tentative, or provisional; at any rate, they make no claim to be ‘absolute’. This rather changes the picture. Partial, tentative, provisional justification can have no purchase on the ethical act; such justification is not particularly difficult and it happens everywhere all the time. It is the bottomless resource of ‘good conscience’. It is the speech which simply covers over the secret. It’s not to be dismissed – it’s part of rational, practical discourse, and it can be legitimate or illegitimate, convincing or unconvincing. But its ever-present possibility depends on the impossibility of justification in the purity of its concept, which one can call ‘absolute’ if one wishes: the justification – and one has to add, if there is such a thing – that justifies, that makes immediately apparent, without shadow, the justness of the act in question. The same structure, as Derrida has shown, operates in the case of the gift, testimony, hospitality, justice itself, deconstruction. (I quoted earlier Wood’s comment: ‘The thought that there are no fixed boundaries here does not mean that there are none. Hospitality would self-destruct if it were “infinite”.’ He doesn’t seem to appreciate how right he is: hospitality, Derrida has argued, is both infinite and impossible.27) Wood’s swerve from Derrida becomes even clearer as the paragraph continues. He reasserts that there can be no such thing as absolute justification (in other words, absolute justification is impossible – something with which Derrida would clearly not disagree), and adds: ‘To describe me as sacrificing all other cats when I feed my own is to mistakenly read my inability to justify this activity as some sort of deficiency.’28 One begins to sense what is making Wood bridle here: he believes that Derrida is accusing him of some ethical or intellectual weakness in his unjustifiably selective treatment of the potential objects of his responsibility. If this were the case, it would be a universally shared weakness, and so hardly something to get individually worked up about; but in any case there is no suggestion in Derrida’s discussion that the impossibility of meeting all one’s responsibilities as an ethical subject is a mark of ‘deficiency’. There is animus in some places in his discussion, but there’s no obvious reason why David Wood should think it’s directed against him; Derrida inveighs, for example, against ‘the structure of the laws of the market’ and ‘the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities’ whereby so-called ‘civilised society’ sacrifices ‘tens of millions of children’ who die of hunger and disease,29 but there’s no reason to


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think he shouldn’t be anything other than very pleased to know that the Wood children have been warned about poison ivy. Nevertheless, Wood’s response does point to the extravagance of Derrida’s depiction of responsible choice and resultant sacrifice as everyday, in fact second-by-second, occurrences. If The Gift of Death has a fictional narrator prone to exaggeration, this is undoubtedly a place where we hear his voice, signalled, perhaps, by the throwaway irony of that ‘what the most cursory examination ... cannot fail to affirm’. But what is the point of this taking-to-extremes, insofar as it can be wrested into the domain of the thetic? It may help if we linger over the word ‘ethics’ for a moment. For Kierkegaard, ethics names the generality of laws which the knight of faith must succeed in transcending in the wholly ungrounded act that reaches from the finite into the infinite. (Abraham is the prime exemplar, but Kierkegaard himself in his love for Regine Olsen a further, subtextual, instance – and we might also recall the stanza by Marvell used as an epigraph.) In Levinas, another significant presence in The Gift of Death, we have a very similar structure, but now ethics names not the generality of laws but the act of transcendence towards the infinite, in response to the demand of the absolute other. Derrida has always had a Kierkegaardian suspicion of the term as too compromised by systematic philosophy (voiced in the discussion in Altérités, for example30) while remaining highly sympathetic to Levinas’s project, and here he brings to a point of crisis the tension between the two uses of the term. He proposes an ethical system of the most generalising kind, one that demands absolute responsibility to every other, and that makes no distinction between my children and my neighbour’s (or those of another country); and although this demand is given a Levinasian twist (a twist of the knife, to be sure) in Derrida’s catchphrase, tout autre est tout autre, every other is entirely other, the logic remains implacably general and systematic. Against this backdrop stand out the very specific obligations which Wood worries about – to my family, my cats, those whom I have promised to help, and so on. Now Derrida’s point is hardly that these specific obligations should receive no privilege; on the contrary, his argument rests on the assumption that they will, just as the specific responsibility to God overrides every ethical norm that Abraham holds dear. What he is alerting us to is the fact that these obligations make themselves felt and have to be dealt with in strict opposition to the ethical system, to the systematicity of ethics. Furthermore, any attempt to justify these singular obligations must fail, for justification can be


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given only in discursive, public, rational, terms – that is to say, the systematic terms which the act in question has challenged. Of course, most attempts to construct a practical ethics try to find a way to rank responsibilities; Derrida’s point is that such systems are necessarily incoherent, for they use a systematic philosophical language in an attempt to capture and legislate for what is constitutively resistant to such language. But incoherence is not a reason for abandoning ethical systems; it may in fact be a reason for preserving, and constantly refining, them. Derrida has consistently devoted his energies to an exploration of the structural incoherence – an incoherence which is far from arbitrary or innocent – of central concepts in Western discourse, concepts which he thinks of as legacies that we have, whether we like it or not, inherited. These concepts have often been used to promote or disguise inequality and oppression – in The Gift of Death Derrida is scathing about ‘the monotonous complacency of (civilized society’s) discourses on morality, politics, and the law’31 – but they also hold out the promise of a better future. As Wood’s response, and that of many other commentators, suggest, this is an aspect of Derrida’s thought that is easily misunderstood. He is not trying to describe the psychological process of deciding (or giving, or promising, or forgiving, or acting responsibly). He is offering a structural analysis of these concepts, as they exist in Western discourse, as they have been passed down to us. Whether they name something that ‘happens’ is impossible to say – impossible not because we can’t peer into our minds, but for wholly structural reasons. But what is certain is that they are enormously productive concepts, precisely because of their impossibility. There are, therefore, two ways of understanding ‘the impossibility of ethics’: ethics as systematic code (the Kierkegaardian sense) is impossible because it breaks down under the strains of singular responsibility, and ethics as singular responsibility (the Levinasian sense) is impossible because it involves an unconditionality that is unreachable and unteachable – except in a fable like the akedah, or in ‘literary’ readings of it like Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s. The first is impossible in the same sense that philosophy is impossible (but deconstructable);32 the second is impossible in the sense that the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, testimony, and justice are impossible (and undeconstructable). And there are two ways of understanding ‘the possibility of politics’: politics as practical, programmed activity in the pursuit of achievable goals, and politics as that which occurs when


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the passage from the impossible to the possible gives rise to acts of deciding, judging, promising, trusting, bearing witness, welcoming, instituting, giving and forgiving. If the passage from deconstruction to politics (which could also be understood as the passage from literature to politics) is the passage from the impossible to the possible, it is an impossible passage, and one that keeps the secret it may seem to be betraying. Yet it is a passage that makes possible every political act that is not merely the mechanical application of a programme or the unthinking implementation of an instruction. And what Derrida’s starving cats teach us, though it is a lesson that can never simply be ‘applied’, is that the apparent systematicity of any political programme, like any formal ethical scheme, conceals incoherences and inequities that can never be ironed out, but that both structure every move that is made and open up the space of decision and judgement, the space of a certain ‘democracy’.33 The politics of such a democracy may be ‘the art of the possible’, but it is a possibility begotten, like love, upon impossibility. NOTES 1. The force of the notion of impossibility in Derrida is something that is well brought out by John D. Caputo; see Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997). 2. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 328. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Force of Law’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Justice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 15. 4. WD, p. 80. 5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 7. 6. OH, p. 41. 7. Jacques Derrida, ‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’, in ON, p. 59. 8. Derrida, ‘Sauf le nom’, p. 74 9. PoF, p. 66 (translation modified). 10. Jacques Derrida with Anne Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), p. 71 (my translation). 11. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), pp. 159–209. 12. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 13. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 53–81.


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14. I have discussed this moment before, in a 1995 conference paper, ‘On Mount Moriah – The Impossibility of Ethics’ (forthcoming in a volume of conference proceedings edited by Richard Rand). My reason for returning to it, apart from the fact that I’m still fascinated and troubled by it, is that it has proved to be a particularly difficult morsel for many readers to swallow, even those sympathetic to Derrida’s work – and yet it follows through with impeccable logic the thought of the impossible that is so integral to deconstruction and its relation to politics. 15. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 67–8, translation modified. 16. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 69. 17. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 70–1, translation modified. 18. David Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, Philosophy Today, 41 (1) (Spring 1997), 135–40, here pp. 136–7. 19. Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, p. 137. 20. Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, pp. 136, 137. 21. Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, p. 138. 22. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 65. 23. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 59. 24. ‘Responsibility ... demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself with respect to the general and before the generality, hence the idea of substitution, and, on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy. What I am saying here about responsibility can also be said about decision’ (Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 61). Derrida used the phrase ‘negotiating the unnegotiable’ in a seminar on The Gift of Death in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1998. 25. It may also be what literature does. Here I can make only a brief reference to the text I mentioned earlier, ‘La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible’, which was published in 1999 with a revised version of ‘Donner la mort’. In this text Derrida revisits the scene of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, and makes the rather extraordinary but suggestive claim that literature, as this term is understood in the West, is descended from this scene of an unconditional and unrepresentable alliance between an individual and God, regarded as the ‘essential secret’ of sacred history. This ‘impossible’ filiation is one that literature betrays while constantly asking pardon for its unpardonable act of betrayal. Because Abraham is willing to sacrifice everything, nothing on earth remains sacred for him – and this sacrifice is repeated in literature’s desacralisation or secularisation of Scripture. 26. Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, p. 137. 27. See De l’hospitalité. 28. Wood, ‘Much Obliged’, p. 137. 29. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 86. 30. Jacques Derrida and Pierre-Jean Labarrière, Altérités (Paris: Osiris, 1986). 31. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 85–6. 32. Or in the sense that Laclau calls ideology the impossible attempt to constitute the social: see ‘The Impossibility of the Social’ in his collection of essays, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso,


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1990), pp. 89–92. Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s well-known notion of ‘antagonism’ is an attempt to integrate the notion of constitutive impossibility into social theory (see, too, Slavoj Žižek’s essay, ‘Beyond Discourse-Analysis’, in New Reflections, pp. 249–60). 33. The fullest discussion of this issue is to be found in Richard Beardsworth’s Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996). A couple of comments will indicate the closeness of Beardsworth’s emphases to my own: ‘Impossibility is not the opposite of the possible: impossibility releases the possible’; ‘Judgement is neither on the side of the incalculable nor is it on the side of the calculable: it is nothing but the impossible relation between the two’ (Derrida and the Political, p. 26).


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4 Impossible Speech Acts Andrew Parker

RANCIÈRE READING (AUERBACH) Near the beginning of The Names of History, Jacques Rancière turns his attention briefly to one of the founding texts of the field of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach’s monumental Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), a book that has all but been neglected in the Anglophone world – a few important studies notwithstanding – since the advent of deconstruction. Auerbach’s fortunes have declined so much over the past several decades that it is almost a shock to find Rancière excited today by a work that, as Herbert Lindenberger put it, has come to ‘seem old-fashioned’.1 For Mimesis has been criticised regularly in the age of theory and cultural studies not only, as might be expected, for its obvious Eurocentrism and ‘privileging’ of literature, but also for its practice of embedding explications du texte within a Hegelian conception of history. Already in Blindness and Insight (1971), Paul de Man argued that ‘the study of the “sensory appearances” that is the field of stylistics can never lead to the real meaning of the themes [of Mimesis] since both, at least in Western literature, are separated by a radical discontinuity that no dialectic is able to bridge’.2 De Man would suggest that even Lukács’s older The Theory of the Novel ‘makes much more radical claims’ about the nature of historicity than the more tradition-bound Mimesis.3 Similarly, David Carroll, writing in an early issue of the journal Diacritics, found Mimesis theoretically ‘naive’ (a charge he repeated several times) for mixing an empiricist commitment to sense perception with an understanding of history as the progressive unfolding of Geist. If Mimesis takes as its ‘principle of unity’ a transcendental conception of ‘man’, it can do so, Carroll showed, only by assuming from the start the ‘proximity of the spoken word to the self’ – only by valuing, that is, voice over writing: ‘The voice is always unproblematical for Auerbach.’4 Few have disagreed with that assessment since.5 66


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It thus is surprising to find a reader as exacting as Jacques Rancière so enthusiastic about an element in Auerbach’s text that bears precisely on the nature of voice. Rancière focuses in The Names of History on the second chapter of Mimesis, ‘Fortunata’, which contrasts two specimens of Roman writing – one by Petronius and another by Tacitus – with the account of Peter’s denial of Christ from the Gospel of Mark. For reasons that shortly will become clear, Rancière is especially interested in Auerbach’s treatment of the following long passage from Tacitus’ Annals (1:16–18): Thus stood affairs at Rome, when a sedition made its appearance in the legions in Pannonia, without any fresh grounds [nullis novis causis], save that the accession of a new prince promised impunity to tumult, and held out the hope of advantages to be derived from a civil war. Three legions occupied a summer camp together, commanded by Junius Blaesus, who, upon notice of the death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius, had granted the soldiers a recess from their wonted duties for some days, as a time either of public mourning or festivity. From this beginning they waxed wanton and quarrelsome, lent their ears to the discourses of every profligate, and at last they longed for a life of dissipation and idleness, and spurned all military discipline and labor. In the camp was one Percennius, formerly a busy leader of theatrical factions [dux olim theatralium operarum], after that a common soldier, of a petulant tongue, and from his experience in theatrical party zeal [miscere coetus histrionali studio doctus], well qualified to stir up the bad passions of a crowd. Upon minds uninformed, and agitated with doubts as to what might be the condition of military service now that Augustus was dead, he wrought gradually by confabulations by night, or when day verged towards its close; and when all the better-disposed had retired to their respective quarters, he would congregate all the most depraved about him. Lastly, when now also other ministers of sedition were at hand to second his designs, in imitation of a general solemnly haranguing his men, he asked them – ‘Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes? When would they be bold enough to demand redress, unless they approached the prince, yet a novice, and tottering on his throne, either with entreaties or arms? Enough had they erred in remaining passive through so many years, since decrepit with age and maimed with wounds, after a course of service of thirty or forty years, they were still doomed to carry arms; nor even to those who were discharged was there any end of service, but they were still kept to the colors, and under another name endured the same hardships. And if any of them survived so many dangers, still were they dragged into countries far remote, where, under the name of lands, they are presented with swampy fens,


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or mountain wastes. But surely, burdensome and ungainful of itself was the occupation of war; – ten asses a day the poor price of their persons and lives; out of this they must buy clothes, and tents, and arms, – out of this the cruelty of centurions must be redeemed, and occasional exemptions from duty; but, by Hercules, stripes, wounds, hard winters and laborious summers, bloody wars and barren peace, were miseries eternally to be endured; nor remained there other remedy than to enter the service upon certain conditions, as that their pay should be a denarius a day, sixteen years be the utmost term of serving; beyond that period to be no longer obliged to follow the colors, but have their reward in money, paid them in the camp where they earned it. Did the praetorian guards, who had double pay, they who after sixteen years’ service were sent home, undergo more dangers? This was not said in disparagement of the city guards; their own lot, however, was, serving among uncivilized nations, to have the enemy in view from their tents.’ The general body received this harangue with shouts of applause, but stimulated by various motives, – some showing, in all the bitterness of reproach, the marks of stripes, others their hoary heads, many their tattered vestments and naked bodies.6 As you may recall, Auerbach argues throughout ‘Fortunata’ that the New Testament succeeded in rendering the lives of common people complexly and seriously where the Roman writers failed to do so, bound as they were by rules of decorum that mandated for the depiction of the lower classes the low language of comedy. As a result, Roman writing could not be realistic since it lacked, in its adherence to unchanging ethical categories, all capacity for historical consciousness; there could be in it, for Auerbach, ‘no serious literary treatment of everyday occupations and social classes – merchants, artisans, peasants, slaves – of everyday scenes and places – home, shop, field, store – of everyday customs and institutions – marriage, children, work, earning a living – in short, of the people and its life’.7 The Tacitus passage may seem initially to fulfil these criteria for realism in the highly particularised details included in the soldiers’ complaints: ‘The grievances of the soldiers discussed in Percennius’ speech – excessive length of service, hardships, insufficient pay, inadequate old-age provision, corruption, envy of the easier life of the metropolitan troops – are presented vividly and graphically in a manner not frequently encountered even in modern historians.’8 But the fact that these grievances are presented not in Tacitus’ voice but as ‘utterances of the ringleader Percennius’ makes them something


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other than historically typical or realistic: ‘The factual information [Tacitus] gives on the causes of the revolt – information presented in the form of a ringleader’s speech and not discussed further – he invalidates in advance by stating at the outset his own view of the real causes of the revolt in purely ethical terms: nullis novis causis.’9 That Percennius is portrayed as a master of imitation – trained in the theatre, he mimics ‘a general solemnly haranguing his men’ – disqualifies him still further; in place of the ‘silence of military discipline’, we are given only the negative values associated with what Rancière terms memorably ‘the roar of urban theatrocracy’.10 Why, then, put Percennius on stage at all if Tacitus was hardly ‘interested in the soldiers’ demands and never intended to discuss them objectively’? The reason, Auerbach explains, is ‘purely aesthetic’: The grand style of historiography requires grandiloquent speeches, which as a rule are fictitious. Their function is graphic dramatization (illustratio) of a given occurrence, or at times the presentation of great political or moral ideas; in either case they are intended as the rhetorical bravura pieces of the presentation. The writer is permitted a certain sympathetic entering into the thoughts of the supposed speaker, and even a certain realism. Essentially, however, such speeches are products of a specific stylistic tradition cultivated in the schools for rhetors. The composition of speeches which one person or another might have delivered on one or another great historical occasion was a favorite exercise. Tacitus is a master of his craft, and his speeches are not sheer display; they are really imbued with the character and the situation of the persons supposed to have delivered them; but they too are primarily rhetorical. Percennius does not speak in his own language; he speaks Tacitean, that is, he speaks with extreme terseness, as a matter of disposition, and highly rhetorically. Undoubtedly his words – though given as indirect discourse – vibrate with the actual excitement of mutinous soldiers and their leader. Yet even if we assume that Percennius was a gifted demagogue, such brevity, incisiveness, and order are not possible in a rebellious propaganda speech, and of soldiers’ slang there is not the slightest trace.11 What Auerbach seems to be pondering here is nothing less than a question we have since learned to pose in a rather different context: ‘Can the plebeian speak?’ To which, for Rancière, the answer would be ‘no’: ‘Percennius doesn’t speak; rather, Tacitus lends him his tongue’.12 If we were expecting him to declaim in propria persona, we soon realise that ‘Percennius had no place to speak’ since, as a member of the poor, he has only ‘an essential relation with nontruth’.13 The justifications for the revolt that are credited to Percennius are not


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refuted by or even commented on by Tacitus; the historian has no need to do either since the arguments Percennius provides can be neither true nor false: They have, fundamentally, no relation to the truth. Their illegitimacy is not due to their content but to the simple fact that Percennius is not in the position of legitimate speaker. A man of his rank has no business thinking and expressing his thought. And his speech is ordinarily reproduced only in the ‘base’ genres of satire and comedy. It is ruled out that an essential conflict would be expressed through his mouth, ruled out that we would see in him, in a modern sense, the symptomatic representative of a historical movement that operates in the depths of a society. The speech of the man of the common people is by definition without depth.14 Thus Tacitus, as Rancière reads Auerbach, explains the revolt twice, doubly dispossessing Percennius by stripping him both of his justifications and his voice.15 According to Rancière, Auerbach here would be marking, ‘in his own way, the relation between a politics of knowledge and a poetics of narrative around the question of the politics of the other’.16 But this other is not simply excluded by Tacitus, whose discourse nonetheless manages, precisely, to give a place ‘to what it declares to have no place’.17 Where Auerbach leaves under-emphasised the question of ‘the modality of the poem’s enunciation’, Rancière suggests that what makes Percennius’ speech particularly fascinating is its ‘indirect style’, the narrator’s ‘they’ replacing the expected ‘you’ in Percennius’ address to his audience. What results from this substitution is much less a dialectic than a torsion between two distinct pronominal points of view – both of which nonetheless inhere at once: The indirect style, in practice disjoining meaning and truth, in effect cancels the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate speakers. The latter are just as much validated as suspected. The homogeneity of the narrative-discourse thereby constituted comes to contradict the heterogeneity of the subjects it represents, the unequal quality of the speakers to guarantee, by their status, the reference of their speech. Although Percennius may well be the radical other, the one excluded from legitimate speech, his discourse is included, in a specific suspension of the relations between meaning and truth.18 Percennius’ voice, then, is hardly rendered in an ‘unproblematic’ way: as Rancière reads Auerbach, Tacitus records in his discourse a speech event impossible to imagine historically as a phenomenal utterance. Moreover, Rancière stresses that the political efficacy of


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this event rests upon this very impossibility: ‘By invalidating the voice of Percennius, substituting his own speech for the soldier’s, Tacitus does more than give him a historical identity. He also creates a model of subversive eloquence for the orators and simple soldiers of the future. The latter henceforth will not repeat Percennius, whose voice has been lost, but Tacitus, who states the reasons of all those like Percennius better than they do.’19 No wonder Rancière was excited to discover this lesson in Auerbach’s Mimesis: he finds in it an example of an impossible speech event that forms, as we shall see, the condition of possibility for what he calls the political. (ŽIŽEK) READING RANCIÈRE Slavoj Žižek would seem to be disappointed that he cannot discern Percennius’ own voice – this, at least, is what might be inferred from The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, which constantly projects onto Rancière’s work the self-present voice that Žižek deems essential to Rancière’s argument. According to Žižek, Rancière takes as his ‘obvious paradigm the “spontaneous” rebellion of the proletarian masses (not the mythical Marxian proletariat as the Subject of History, but actual groups of exploited artisans, textile workers, working women, and other “ordinary” people) who reject the police frame defining their “proper” place and, in a violent politico-poetic gesture, take the floor, start to speak for themselves’.20 Žižek repeats this latter phrase so often – ‘Rancière endeavours again and again to elaborate the contours of those magic, violently poetic moments of subjectivization in which the excluded (“lower classes”) put forward their claim to speak for themselves’21 – that a reader previously unacquainted with Rancière’s work might think that it is, in fact, concerned centrally with ‘the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner’.22 Though Rancière indeed is interested in struggles for recognition that take the form of determined speech acts, there is nothing ‘obvious’ (or, again, ‘unproblematical’) about the way these claims are voiced. In a remarkable series of essays and books culminating with Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière explores the logic whereby an invisible and excluded group, ‘the part of no part’, upsets the prevailing ‘distribution of shares and the hierarchy of places’ in demanding for itself – vocally – a new mode of social visibility: ‘One can say that politics begins when those who have no share begin to have one ... when the uncounted are not only counted,


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but when counting the uncounted comes to be seen as the very principle, the very element, of politics.’23 Opposing itself to the legitimating functions of governance that Rancière calls la police, politics proper comprises claims for recognition that assume not only that all speaking subjects are equal but that this equality can be verified in practice: The process of emancipation is the verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. It is always enacted in the name of a category denied either the principle or the consequences of that equality: workers, women, people of color or others. But the enactment of equality is not, for all that, the enactment of the self, of the attributes or properties of the community in question. The name of an injured community that invokes its rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone.24 If politics thus concerns anyone but the self – if it begins ‘when it becomes apparent that the debate is about something that has not been noticed, when the person who says so is a speaker who has not been recognized as such and when, ultimately, that person’s very status as a speaking being is in question’25 – then politics cannot be understood simply as a struggle between voices over what would be claimed as their own. Speaking out to redress a wrong is something other than speaking for oneself or one’s rights, the anonym something other than a basis for the affirmation of identity. Though politics for Rancière is always a contest ‘over speech and voice’, the latter is never the ‘expression of a self asserting what belongs to it’ but ‘an occupation of space in which the logos defines a nature other than the phônê’.26 To occupy such space – to come into social visibility – is to play the minor premiss of a syllogism (there is no actual equality) against its major premiss (there is equality under the law), thereby demonstrating as speaking subjects a fluency in a discursive logic that had hitherto been withheld from them.27 This process can be illustrated in an example Rancière cites often, one that concerns the ‘outmoded name, “the proletarian”’: One of its first uses occurs in nineteenth-century France, when the revolutionary leader Auguste Blanqui was prosecuted for rebellion. The prosecutor asked him: ‘What is your profession?’ He answered: ‘Proletarian.’ Then the prosecutor: ‘It is not a profession.’ And the response of Blanqui was: ‘It is the profession of a majority of our people who are deprived of political rights.’ From the vantage point of policy, the prosecutor was right: it is no profession. And obviously Blanqui was not what is usually called a worker. But from the vantage point of


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politics, Blanqui was right: proletarian was not the name of any social group that could be sociologically identified. It is the name of an outcast.28 We see clearly in this example that what is in contention is less the identity of workers than ‘the very rationality of the speech situation’ itself.29 At once excluded from the social whole and coterminous with that whole, the ‘part of no part’ rehearses a supplementary logic inherent to a ‘class’ that is both less and more than itself: ‘Proletarian’ political subjectification ... is in no way a form of ‘culture’, of some collective ethos capable of finding a voice. It presupposes, on the contrary, a multiplicity of fractures separating worker bodies from their ethos and from the voice that is supposed to express the soul of this ethos: a multiplicity of speech events – that is, of one-off experiences of conflict over speech and voice, over the partition of the perceptible ... The name proletarian defines neither a set of properties (manual labor, industrial labor, destitution, etc.) that would be shared equally by a multitude of individuals nor a collective body, embodying a principle, of which those individuals would be members. It is part of a process of subjectification identical to expounding a wrong. ‘Proletarian’ subjectification defines a subject of wrong – by superimposition in relation to the multitude of workers. What is subjectified is neither work nor destitution, but the simple counting of the uncounted, the difference between an inegalitarian distribution of social bodies and the equality of speaking bodies.30 The emancipation of workers cannot be, for these reasons, ‘a matter of making labor the founding principle of the new society’ or of taking ‘worker’ to be an essential identity.31 If politics concerns ‘modes of subjectification’ that produce ‘a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable’, then the formula nos sumus, nos existimus becomes a model of the political in its capacity to create performatively the subject of its own utterance:32 ‘The construction of such cases of equality is not the act of an identity, nor is it the demonstration of the values specific to a group. It is a process of subjectification’ understood specifically as ‘the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other’.33 Since ‘any subjectification is a disidentification’ – ‘the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted’34 – then claims for equality radically ‘declassify’ rather than unify a social body by replacing ‘the supposed naturalness of orders’ with ‘the controversial figures of division’.35 A ‘community of sharing’ [partage] is thus, by the same token, ‘also a place whose very unity depended on the effecting of


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a division’ [partage],36 its possibility hence at once its impossibility. Rancière illustrates this tension through certain speech acts (‘We are the wretched of the earth’; ‘We are all German Jews’) that ‘cannot be embodied by he or she who utters [them]’.37 If ‘political subjectification is made out of the difference between the voice and the body, the interval between identities’,38 such difference resembles nothing so much as the impossible phenomenality of an utterance – the interval both linking and dividing the ‘voices’ of Tacitus and Percennius – that we encountered previously in Rancière’s reading of Auerbach: ‘Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes?’ Once more, for Rancière, the possibility of the political rests on the impossibility of such speech acts. Given all of the above, it should not be surprising that Rancière is no friend of identity politics, which in its reliance precisely on the logic of identity works on behalf of statist versions of community promoted by la police. If subjectification is defined as a disidentification, then Rancière’s political subject resists definition ‘in terms of ethnic properties’ or ‘a sociologically determinable part of a population’, for ‘the uncounted’ is ‘a name that could not possibly be confused with any real social group’.39 This is a lesson, Rancière admonishes, that we seem to have forgotten lately in the West. As opposed to a proper politics of grievance and imparity, our contemporary ‘logics of consensus ... reduce the division involved in the count of the uncounted to a breakdown of groups open to presenting their identity; they locate the forms of political subjectivity within places of proximity (home, job, interest) and bonds of identity (sex, religion, race, culture)’.40 Rancière thus will account for ‘the current dead end of political reflection and action’ as one more effect of ‘the identification of politics with the self of a community’41 – the same notion of selfhood as in Žižek’s misprision of Rancière’s workers ‘speaking for themselves’. Paradoxically, however, Rancière’s vision of the degraded fate of our ‘post-political’ world shares with Žižek a willingness to make sexuality a primary sign of this degradation.42 Criticising polling techniques for fabricating images of a unified population, Rancière suggests that The subject of the opinion says what he thinks of blacks and Arabs in the same real/simulated mode in which he is elsewhere invited to tell all about his fantasies and to completely satisfy these just by dialing four figures and as many letters. The subject who opines accordingly is the subject of this new mode


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of the visible where everything is on display, up for grabs, a subject called on to live out all his fantasies in a world of total exhibition and of the asymptotic coming together of bodies, in this ‘everything is possible’ of thrills displayed and promised – meaning, of course, doomed to disappointment: the subject being urged accordingly to search and destroy the ‘bad body’, the diabolical body that everywhere stands in the way of the total satisfaction everywhere within reach and everywhere snatched from one’s grasp.43 ‘By dialing four digits and as many letters...’: the Minitel already had appeared once before as an icon of All That Is Wrong Today in promoting ‘the regime of universal exhibitionism and the attendant promise of the total realization of all fantasies’.44 Sounding uncannily at such moments like Christopher Lasch, Rancière somehow holds together in a single series ‘commercial competition, sexual permissiveness, world music and cheap charter flights to the Antipodes’, each link in this chain reflecting ‘the banal themes of the pluralist society’ that ‘naturally create individuals smitten with equality and tolerant of difference’.45 Given such antipathy, it is rather ironic that one of the best approximations of what Rancière defines as ‘properly’ political is the emergent Anglo-American model of queer politics: anti-identitarian, anti-statist, anti-normative in its emphatic swerving from the rhetoric of gay and lesbian civil rights. If ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’ is something other than a claim on behalf of an identity, queer theorists might look indeed to Rancière’s work for its ways of posing rigorously the relation between voice and body and the impossible speech acts that bind and divide them. NOTES 1. H. Lindenberger, ‘On the Reception of Mimesis’, in S. Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 205. 2. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1971]), p. 23. 3. de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 53. 4. D. Carroll, ‘Mimesis Reconsidered: Literature, History, Ideology’, Diacritics, 5.2 (Summer, 1975), p. 11. 5. Timothy Bahti has been idiosyncratic in viewing Auerbach’s work as a significant forerunner to deconstruction (see T. Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography After Hegel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992]). Critics writing recently about Auerbach tend to focus less on his work per se than, as in Edward Said’s frequent encomia, on his exemplary status as a critical professional (see M. Holquist, ‘Erich


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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today’, Poetics Today, 20.1 [Spring, 1999], p. 80; see also P. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986] and A.R. Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture’, Critical Inquiry 25 [Autumn, 1988], pp. 95–125). Where Said finds inspiration in Auerbach’s ‘existential situation’ as a writer – Mimesis, as is well known, was composed in Istanbul during World War Two, its author having fled Nazi Germany with little in the way of scholarly resources – Aijaz Ahmad sees only more reason to criticise Said: ‘The particular texture of [Said’s] Orientalism, its emphasis on the canonical text, its privileging of literature and philology in the constitution of “Orientalist” knowledge and indeed the human sciences generally, its will to portray a “West” which has been the same from the dawn of history up to the present, and its will to traverse all the main languages of Europe – all this, and more, in Orientalism derives from the ambition to write a counter-history that could be posed against Mimesis, Auerbach’s magisterial account of the seamless genesis of European realism and rationalism from Greek Antiquity to the modernist moment’ (A. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [London and New York: Verso, 1992], p. 163). E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 33–6. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 31. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 36. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 37. J. Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge; trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 25. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 39–40. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 27. Rancière, The Names of History, pp. 25, 18. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 26. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 27. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 27. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 28. Rancière, The Names of History, p. 28. Rancière, The Names of History, pp. 29–30. S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 173, my italics. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 128–9. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 188. J. Rancière, ‘Interview: Democracy Means Equality’, trans. D. Macey, Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April, 1997), pp. 31–2. J. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, in J. Rajchman (ed.) The Identity in Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 65. Rancière, ‘Interview: Democracy Means Equality’, p. 35. J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy; trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 37.


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27. J. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics; trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 46. 28. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, p. 66. 29. Rancière, Disagreement, p. xi. 30. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 36–8. 31. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 48. 32. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 35–6. 33. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, p. 66. 34. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 36. 35. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 32–3. 36. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 86. 37. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, p. 67. 38. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, p. 68. 39. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 99, 126. 40. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 137. Žižek describes superbly what would seem to be Rancière’s position: ‘This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space. There is a clear contrast between this subjectivization and today’s proliferation of postmodern “identity politics” whose goal is exactly the opposite, that is, precisely the assertion of one’s particular identity, of one’s proper place within the social structure. The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) lifestyles perfectly fits the depoliticized notion of society, in which every particular group is “accounted for”, has its specific status (of victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind of justice meted out to victimized minorities requires an intricate police apparatus ... is deeply significant: what is usually praised as “postmodern politics” (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be negotiated within the “rational” global order allocating its particular component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of politics proper’ (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 208–9). Rancière will call this end ‘postdemocracy’ (On the Shores of Politics, p. 98). 41. Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization’, p. 64. 42. ‘This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the Real) and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography “shows it all”, “real sex”, and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality; while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing’ (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 242, n.28). 43. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 119–20. 44. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 105. 45. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 22.


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Part Two Politics of Philosophy


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5 The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening of Politicisation in Levinas and Derrida Robert Bernasconi

Derrida frequently warns against understanding deconstruction as critique. For example, in ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’ in 1977, Derrida says: deconstruction is not a critical operation; it takes critique as its object; deconstruction, at one moment or another, always aims at the trust confided in the critical, critico-theoretical agency, that is, the deciding agency, the ultimate possibility of the decidable; deconstruction is a deconstruction of critical dogmatics.1 If critique is taken in its ordinary sense of negative external criticism, then deconstruction and critique are not the same. They are separate operations. This is because critique in its most conventional sense employs principles to guide judgements and actions, whereas deconstruction does not leave intact any firm foundation on which to stand while employing such principles in the cause of critique.2 One of the reasons why there is widespread scepticism about the efficacy of deconstruction in politics is undoubtedly its hesitation about this kind of critique. In order to assess the political implications of deconstruction’s suspicion of critique, it is necessary to examine the crisis provoked by the loss of any such firm foundation. In doing so I will draw attention to another sense of critique in Derrida, one that I will argue is borrowed to a certain extent from Levinas and that seems to open up a relation between deconstruction and politicisation. In Derrida’s ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, dated 18 July 1983, when we are again told that deconstruction is not a critique in either a general or a Kantian sense, Derrida invokes the etymological connection between crisis and critique in order to clarify the difference between them: ‘The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgement, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential “themes” or “objects” of deconstruction.’3 Recalling the same etymological association of critique with crisis, Derrida in Passions asks the question: ‘what if the crisis even 81


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concerned the very concept of crisis or of critique?’4 Few questions take us so quickly into the heart of Derrida’s project. It asks if the crisis that strikes us head on does not perhaps arise from a deeper, hidden, crisis, but one that invites us to rethink what we mean by crisis. But how would a crisis of critique, a crisis of crisis, announce itself? It is clear already from Derrida’s early texts that what underlies the advent of a formal and thematically constituted practice of deconstruction is a certain diagnosis of the crisis. In ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ the crisis of reason is both a forgetting of origins, as Derrida already emphasises in the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and also a decision in the sense of krinein, the choice and division between the two ways separated by Parmenides.5 To be sure, Derrida from the outset recognises that this diagnosis is not a simple issue: such problems as whether philosophy died yesterday are problems put to philosophy, albeit as problems that cannot be resolved by philosophy.6 That is to say, these are problems that philosophy cannot decide. Nevertheless, within this constant questioning of the terms in which the diagnosis is cast, for example, the ideas of an end and a unity to Western metaphysics, the pertinence of the diagnosis is not questioned. Undecidability is introduced into philosophy and sustained there by a decision, a decision to read the history of Western philosophy along certain lines, lines set down by Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.7 The initial force of deconstruction, the necessity with which it imposed itself in its early years, the late 1960s and early 1970s, derived in large measure from the force with which Derrida pursued the question of the end of philosophy. In these early works, Derrida explicitly borrows from Heidegger the recognition that a certain sense of critique belongs to the unity of metaphysics so that any application of critique in this sense to metaphysics would only serve to continue it.8 Derrida even uses this law against Heidegger to claim that what he calls the Heideggerian critique or de-limitation appears to belong to the very sphere of that which it criticises or delimits.9 One strand of Derrida’s questioning of Heidegger’s procedure is internal to that procedure in the most traditional way, but it is so in a way that problematises the familiar opposition between the internal and the external within critique. As a contemporary text emphasises, Derrida deciphers a formal law whereby the ‘“critique” – or rather the denunciatory determination of a limit, the de-marcation, the delimitation – which at any given moment is believed to be applicable to a “past” text is to be deciphered within it’.10 That is to say, although


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every text of metaphysics carries within it the resources in terms of which it can be criticised, these operate in such a way as to put in question the sense in which it is a metaphysical text. It may seem unwarranted to focus on this early definition of deconstruction, particularly as Derrida seems to have gone out of his way over the years to seek to give it additional meanings and above all to extend its problematic far from the original issue of the delimitation of Western metaphysics, but certain features of this account are retained by Derrida in the 1991 interview ‘A “Madness” Must Watch Over Thinking’. François Ewald asks Derrida, ‘What is the relation between deconstruction and critique?’ Derrida begins by announcing another sense of critique, one which can be uncovered by a certain deconstructive genealogical take on that account of critique about which he had long entertained suspicions. Hence an appropriate name for this sense of critique is that of a critique of critique, a critique which is not external, but which is immanent yet excessive. Derrida’s answer is worth quoting in full: The critical idea, which I believe must never be renounced, has a history and presuppositions whose deconstructive analysis is also necessary. In the style of the Enlightenment, of Kant, or of Marx, but also in the sense of evaluation (esthetic or literary), critique supposes judgement, voluntary judgement between two terms; it attaches to the idea of krinein or krisis a certain negativity. To say that all this is deconstructible does not amount to disqualifying, negating, disavowing, or surpassing it, of doing the critique of critique (the way people wrote critiques of the Kantian critique as soon as it appeared), but of thinking its possibility from another border, from the genealogy of judgement, will, consciousness or activity, the binary structure, and so forth. This thinking perhaps transforms the space and, through aporias, allows the (non-positive) affirmation to appear, the one that is presupposed by every critique and every negativity.11 I shall return later to this affirmation, this ‘yes’, that appears through aporias and is presupposed by critique, thereby complicating the picture of critique as the voluntary judgement of a finite freedom. But first it is necessary to show how Derrida relocates this logic according to which critique appears to be an essential moment, even while such a critique is questioned in a political context. One sees it, for example, in The Other Heading, where Derrida calls into question the notion of crisis, at least in respect of the crisis of Europe.12 In this context he announces not only a duty to critique both totalitarian dogmatism and the religion of capital, but also a duty to cultivate the virtue of critique, its idea and its tradition,


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while at the same time submitting it to questioning in the form of a deconstructive genealogy ‘that exceeds it without compromising it’.13 However, it is in Specters of Marx that Derrida is most adamant that deconstruction must insist on and can never renounce ‘the critical idea or the questioning stance’ that belongs to the spirit of Marxism.14 This is not external critique but radical critique, a critique that is open to its own transformation as it takes place in self-critique.15 To be ‘hyper-critical’ in this way is to be deconstructive.16 This issue came to a head in 1996 at a conference which was subsequently published under the title Deconstruction and Pragmatism.17 In his ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’ Derrida concedes what has long been suspected, but that might otherwise take a long time to establish, the political neutrality of deconstruction. However, Derrida quickly introduces a note of caution: I would insist that everyone can use this motif [of deconstruction] as they please to serve quite different political perspectives, which would seem to mean that deconstruction is politically neutral. But, the fact that deconstruction is apparently politically neutral allows, on the one hand, a reflection on the nature of the political, and on the other hand, and this is what interests me in deconstruction, a hyper-politicization.18 By ‘hyper-politicization’ Derrida means the awakening of politicisation.19 However, it might seem that in this formulation Derrida tries to make light of what appears to be the long-standing objection about the political ambiguity of his work. More precisely, it seems that he tries to make a virtue of it. In order to address this objection, I shall in the first instance explore the resources Levinas brings to bear on this issue. Although Levinas is often dismissed as a resource for political philosophy in the conventional sense, there is every reason to believe him to be engaged in the task of hyper-politicisation in the sense just introduced.20 It is therefore quite striking that one can find in Levinas a sense of critique that perhaps exceeds everything Derrida delimits in this way.21 There is clearly a difference of register between Levinas and Derrida on the issue of critique, albeit one that Derrida from the outset seems keen to efface. Recall this passage from ‘Violence and Metaphysics’: ‘In the style by which strong and faithful thought is recognised (this is Heidegger’s style too), Levinas respects the zone or layer of traditional thought; and the philosophies whose presuppositions he describes are in general neither refuted nor criticised.’22 Even though some commentators have read ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ as


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a critique of Levinas, as opposed to a deconstruction avant la lettre, it is striking that Derrida in that essay already distances all ‘strong and faithful thought’, and presumably his own, from critique in its conventional sense.23 By contrast, Levinas is unmistakably critical of a number of thinkers to the point of being dismissive. However, at the same time, Levinas articulates a sense of critique that is so far from being conventional that it not only does not succumb to the questions deconstruction poses to critique, but also, as I will argue, ultimately proves indispensable to deconstruction. Critique in Levinas’s sense does not involve the possession of criteria by which to pass judgement.24 Critique operates by the insertion of a questioning, a moment of suspicion or hesitation enough to rob me of my sense of myself as a source of meaning. The source of this questioning comes from the Other. The Other does not tell me what to do or to say, so much as he or she disturbs my self-assurance. Levinasian critique as a calling into question of oneself by the Other is not simply negative. It takes place as the welcome of the absolutely other.25 Although there is already an extended discussion of critique as criticism in ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, Levinas introduces his distinctive notion of critique at the end of his 1957 essay, ‘Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite’.26 In opposition to a tradition that considers conscience a species of consciousness, Levinas asks if conscience is not the critique of and the principle of the presence of self to self.27 Conscience is elucidated as the exposure of my freedom to the judgement of the other. On this basis he proposes that ‘if the essence of philosophy consists in going back behind [en deça] all certainties toward a principle, if it lives from critique, the face of the Other would be the starting-point of philosophy’.28 What is problematic about this formulation, particularly in the light of what we have now learned from Levinas and Derrida, is not only that the language of foundational philosophy is left intact, but also that the association of critique with principle is not problematised, as if critique could only operate by principles to which the subject has access and which remain untouched by critique. At this time Levinas understands his relation to the history of philosophy in a way strikingly different from that suggested by Derrida in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. That is to say, although Levinas understands the reference of philosophy as critique to conscience in the face of the Other as the source of philosophy and critique to be a break with ‘a venerable tradition in philosophy’, it is performed only to pursue another direction that the philosophical spirit has already taken, most noticeably in Plato. Even


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though Western philosophy has most often chosen autonomy over heteronomy, the thesis of heteronomy is not without precedent.29 In Totality and Infinity Levinas reexamines the idea of philosophy as critique. In a formulation that mirrors both in its grammar and in its content the one I have just quoted from ‘Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite’, we read: ‘If philosophy consists in knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the other is presented as the Other, and where the movement of thematisation is inverted.’30 In this sentence critique, in its conventional sense of a foundational exercise conducted by reference to principles, is displaced insofar as Levinas passes beyond or behind what presents itself as a foundation to what conditions it. Thematisation, as Levinas understands the exercise of a freedom sure of itself, cannot account for the Other that unsettles it: ‘The Other alone eludes thematisation.’31 The inversion of the movement of thematisation is the inversion of critique in the sense that it amounts to a putting of the self in question. Levinas expresses it thus: ‘But this inversion does not amount to “knowing oneself” as a theme attended to by the other (autrui), but rather in submitting oneself to an exigency, to a morality.’32 It is significant therefore that the first occurrence of the term ‘ethics’ in Totality and Infinity, outside of the Preface, is as a synonym for ‘critique’. In a section of the book entitled ‘Metaphysics precedes Ontology’, Levinas distinguishes two senses of theory. In the first sense of theory, the known being is allowed to manifest itself in its alterity. In the second sense of theory, the known being is deprived of its alterity by the mediation of a third term, be it a concept, sensation, or Being.33 The first sense of theory is associated with metaphysics or transcendence, as the second is associated with ontology or the comprehension of Being. The first calls freedom into question, whereas the second promotes freedom. This provides the context in which the following sentences appear: But theory understood as a respect for exteriority delineates another structure essential for metaphysics. It is concerned with critique in its comprehension of being (or not). It discovers the dogmatism and naive arbitrariness of its spontaneity, and calls forth into question the freedom of the exercise of ontology; it then seeks to exercise this freedom in such a way as to turn back at every moment to the origin of the arbitrary dogmatism of this free exercise.34 One difficulty of these sentences is the fact that the referent of some of the pronouns is ambiguous. A more serious difficulty is the fact


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that if Levinas is indeed saying, as he appears to be, that theory as respect for exteriority is concerned with critique in its comprehension of being, then this seems to run counter to the way the two senses of theory had been distinguished. The likely solution seems to be that Levinas believes that theory as respect for exteriority also involves theory as comprehension of being. Metaphysics is not opposed to ontology, but implies it. However, this would no longer be a neutral ontology, but an ontology involved in critique, primarily the critique of the freedom which ontology promotes. So if theory in the sense of respect for exteriority is concerned with critique, it is because theory, in its comprehension of being, calls itself into question. In this turning back on itself, it would remain locked in an infinite regress, a critique of critique going nowhere, if it were not that the calling into question of freedom originates in the Other. critique does not reduce the other to the same as does ontology, but calls into question the exercise of the same. A calling into question of the same – which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same – is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his [or her] irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.35 Levinas says it again and again, as when he describes this ‘calling into question of oneself’ as ‘a critical attitude which is itself produced in face of the other and under his [or her] authority’.36 Levinas’s notion of critique is sui generis and not only by virtue of this reference to the Other. Levinas emphasises that this critique is distrustful of itself. This differentiates it radically from what ordinarily passes for critique. Levinas writes: Theory, in which truth arises, is the attitude of a being that distrusts itself. Knowing becomes knowing of a fact only if it is at the same time critical, if it puts itself in question, goes back beyond its origin – in an unnatural movement to seek higher than one’s own origin, a movement which evinces or describes a created freedom.37 Levinas clarifies that formulation a few pages later. Because knowledge as critique goes back to what precedes freedom, it can only arise in a being that is created. This is because to be created is to have an origin prior to one’s origin.38 Levinas frequently appeals to the idea of a creatio ex nihilo not as a support, but to frustrate the preconceptions of foundational philosophy. ‘The manifestation of the critical


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essence of knowing’ is, Levinas writes, ‘the movement of a being back to what precedes its condition’.39 In a section entitled ‘The Investiture of Freedom or Critique’ Levinas explains the conception of philosophy to which this gives rise. He writes: ‘to philosophise is to go back to what precedes freedom, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary’.40 If philosophy is epistemology in the sense of the quest for an objective knowledge of knowledge, then freedom remains at its centre. Levinas introduces critique as the Other putting in question my freedom. This leads to another conception of philosophy, one that follows the passage to the Other, as is indicated by the final sentence of the paragraph on epistemology which ends suddenly with the formulation: ‘To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom.’41 A parallel argument appears in ‘Meaning and Sense’ but with the term ‘critique’ used in a more conventional sense. Levinas again begins by identifying the calling into question of freedom with the welcome of the Other. The presence of the Other is a summons to answer, a summons to a responsibility that empties the I of its imperialism and its egoism, ‘even the egoism of salvation’.42 At this point Levinas introduces the issue of reflection: ‘The consciousness of philosophers is essentially reflective. Or, at least, consciousness is grasped by philosophers in its moment of return which is taken for its very birth.’43 The philosophers thus locate even within a consciousness without reflection a glance back at its origin that would secure its essence as critique or self-mastery.44 This is critique in the conventional sense and not as it is used in Totality and Infinity. Here Levinas uses the phenomenological problem of reflection to identify as humility, or one could also say ‘goodness’, the orientation of a consciousness that is absorbed in a work that goes infinitely to the Other without return. Levinas’s point is that this consciousness without reflection is not pre-critical because the ego is already put in question by the Other and so is ‘criticised in the very straightforwardness of its movement’.45 Levinas asks the now familiar question: ‘How would spontaneous thought turn back, if the other, the exterior, did not put it into question?’ He continues: ‘And how, in a concern for total Critique entrusted to reflection, would the new naivete itself be removed?’ Levinas answers his own question this way: ‘The Ego erodes its dogmatic naivete before the Other who asks of it more than it can do spontaneously.’46 Although the general direction of Levinas’s conception of critique should be clear after these citations, there is still room for misun-


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derstanding, and Levinas seems to have gone out of his way in at least two places in Otherwise than Being to revisit the conception of critique already set out in Totality and Infinity. In the first passage Levinas sets out to clarify what makes this putting into question of the naive spontaneity of the ego possible. For that reason he focuses on the obstacles to ‘pure criticism’ and certain ways of avoiding them. ‘Pure criticism’ does not reside in ‘the thematization operated by reflection on the self’.47 Levinas explains: ‘The ego [le Moi], in consciousness reflecting on itself, both declinable as an object and protected by its unrendable form of being a universal subject, escapes its own critical eye by its spontaneity, which permits it to take refuge in this very eye that judges it.’48 That is to say, it belongs to the nature of reflection, whereby I am both the one who reflects and the object of reflection, that I escape from my own judgement. I am only apparently exposed to critique, whereas in fact, by apperceiving itself as pure universal, the ego (le moi) has already escaped from the responsibilities that are its alone. Furthermore, and this can be understood as the correction of an interpretation that Totality and Infinity seems to invite, Levinas rejects the idea that pure criticism or critique resides in the simple look of the other who judges me: ‘Under the eye of the other, I remain an unattackable subject in respect.’49 It is not my own critical eye, nor the eye of the other that puts the ego in question, but the passivity of obsession, which has the structure of a trace. One is not dealing here with an empirical event, although it can be unveiled within such events in the form of an interruption of consciousness. Levinas accounts for the possibility of critique by reducing the ego to a self on the hither side of my identity, prior to self-consciousness. He explains: ‘To revert to oneself is not to establish oneself at home, even if stripped of all one’s acquisitions. It is to be like a stranger, hunted down in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’s very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself, already a substance.’50 The possibility of critique is here not located in separation but in substitution. The second passage from Otherwise than Being in which Levinas seems to be warning against possible misunderstandings of the idea of critique set out in Totality and Infinity appears in the central chapter, ‘Substitution’. Levinas rejects the suggestion that the first word of the ‘mind’ would be a naive unconditional ‘yes’ of submission that would negate truth and all the highest values. However, it is not the ‘yes’ as such that Levinas is dismissing but its interpretation, as is


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clear from a comparison of both versions of the text. The 1968 essay version of this chapter, ‘Substitution’, explains under the heading ‘Before Freedom’: ‘An unconditional Yes certainly, but not a naive one: a Yes older than naive spontaneity.’51 Levinas reexpresses it in 1974 when the essay was rewritten to become the central chapter in Otherwise than Being, as follows: ‘The unconditionality of this yes is not that of an infinite spontaneity. It is the very exposure to critique, the exposure prior to consent, more ancient than any naive spontaneity.’ In other words, this ‘yes’ is the answer to which the Other summons me as I welcome him or her. It is akin to the ‘(nonpositive) affirmation’ that Derrida invokes in ‘A “Madness” Must Watch Over Thinking’. In both versions of ‘Substitution’ Levinas insists that what is at issue is the meaning of responsibility. In the essay version, responsibility means to be responsible for that which the ego had not been the author, a responsibility that precedes freedom.52 In the book version, responsibility is over and beyond one’s freedom.53 In both cases responsibility is not understood in the sense of legal responsibility, responsibility for what one has done or caused. Levinasian responsibility is without limit. One more remark should be made about this passage in Otherwise than Being because Levinas proceeds to explore a question that inevitably suggests itself to readers of Totality and Infinity: If ethical terms arise in our discourse, before the terms freedom and nonfreedom, it is because before the bipolarity of good and evil presented to choice, the subject finds himself committed to the Good in the very passivity of supporting... Has not the Good chosen the subject with an election recognizable in the responsibility of being hostage, to which the subject is destined, which he cannot evade without denying himself, and by virtue of which he is unique? A philosopher can give to this election only the signification circumscribed by responsibility for the other.54 When we are told that ‘this antecedence of responsibility to freedom would signify the Goodness of the Good’, it is imperative that it not be understood in terms of ‘the bipolarity of good and evil presented to choice’ which it is expressly said to precede.55 Levinas writes that it is necessary that ‘the Good choose me first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome its choice’. The formulation is precise. I welcome my being elected, my responsibility. I can choose what to do, but I cannot choose the fact of my responsibility, although consciousness can veil itself from the assignation. That is to say, prior to deciding what I must do, I must choose whether


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to acknowledge this responsibility. This idea of a decision prior to decision is implied by Totality and Infinity, but not explored there. It arises because Levinas acknowledges that to recognise the Other is to give56 and yet he also concedes that ‘I am free to give or refuse’.57 This implies a freedom prior to my arbitrary freedom, a freedom to let my arbitrary freedom be put in question or not. This prior choice plays the role of decision in Levinas, as is clear from ‘Enigma and Phenomenon’. It takes the form of responding to the invitation with the recognition ‘it is up to me’.58 As Levinas explains, the one who at his or her own risk responds to the enigma and grasps the allusion is ‘the subjectivity, alone, unique, secret, which Kierkegaard caught sight of’.59 I have focused on Levinas’s account of such a decision because it takes us to the heart of recent uncertainty about the role of decision in deconstruction. At the conference on Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Ernesto Laclau questioned Simon Critchley’s attempt to orient deconstruction’s initial decision around the primordial ethical experience of the otherness of the other. Laclau complains that he cannot see the sense in which even an ethical injunction like that of opening oneself to the other can be anything other than a universal principle that precedes and governs any decision.60 Derrida responds by invoking what Levinas would say: ‘To take a decision in the name of the other in no way at all lightens my responsibility. On the contrary, and Levinas is very forceful on this point, my responsibility is accused by the fact that it is the other in the name of which I decide.’61 Derrida is quite explicit that one cannot give up the notion of infinite responsibility, because there would be no responsibility if one did so: If responsibility were not infinite, if every time that I have to take an ethical or political decision with regard to the other (autrui) this were not infinite, then I would not be able to engage myself in an infinite debt with regard to each singularity ... There are only moral and political problems, and everything that follow from this, from the moment when responsibility is not limitable. As a consequence, whatever choice I have made, I cannot say with good conscience that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities.62 It is hard to imagine Derrida uttering a less ambiguous underwriting of Levinas’s account of responsibility and thus of what Levinas means by critique, even if Levinas might not have put it exactly that way. Levinas is always alert to the possibility of people who might say that


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there are no moral and political problems. That is why he prefers to make philosophy the stakes, as we saw earlier. Derrida does not leave matters there. In response to Laclau’s claim that the subject does not exist prior to decision but is invented with the decision, Derrida concedes that even though identification is indispensable, it is accompanied by a process of disidentification. This leads Derrida to the following paradoxical formula: ‘One must say that in the relationship to the other, who is indeed the one in the name of which and of whom the decision is taken, the other remains inappropriable to the process of identification.’63 Derrida says that ‘the other is the origin of my responsibility without it being determinable in terms of an identity’.64 And yet the phrase ‘a decision in the name of the other’65 emphasises the problem. It is a problem that is readily apparent if one returns to Derrida’s remarks about hospitality: one should not even ask the name of one’s guest. It is the same in the Levinasian framework. The one who puts me in question is the abstract Other, the Other ‘without identity’. But just as one cannot approach the Other with empty hands, one cannot do so without knowing who is there. This is a serious problem which at very least calls for a revision of many of the standard readings of Levinas, but it does not authorise the criticisms raised by Richard Beardsworth who, in Derrida and the Political, claims that ‘the association between Derrida’s thinking of aporia and Levinas’s thinking of alterity has ... been unhelpful for advancing our thinking of the political’.66 Even though I agree with him that we should not look to Levinasian ethics to serve as specifically the ‘“political” supplement to Derrida’s negotiation with aporia’, a position he attributes to Simon Critchley,67 it seems that Beardsworth’s argument should be directed not only against those of Derrida’s readers who draw on Levinas for further resources, but also against Derrida himself who continues to do the same quite explicitly. The problem may well lie in Beardsworth’s reading of Levinas as revealed in his suggestion that ‘Levinas’s thinking risks being political by not wishing to be’.68 Levinas’s thinking on the political is not an afterthought. The political permeates Totality and Infinity from the first sentences of the Preface, where Levinas writes that everyone will agree that it is important to know whether they are not duped by morality, and then proceeds to a discussion of the relation of war to morality.69 In the absence of any sustained alternative account proposed by Derrida in his own name and in his own terms, and given the clear and frequent invocation of Levinas by Derrida in


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the context of questions about the motivation of deconstruction, I think we would do well to take seriously the possibility that it lies in critique as Levinas understands it. This notion of critique, however, brings with it a notion of decision: one is free to welcome or refuse the questioning introduced by the Other. The question about the force and motivation of deconstruction becomes all the more pressing to the extent that Derrida distances himself from his initial diagnosis of the crisis of critique with its heavy debt to Heidegger’s account of the so-called end of philosophy. Derrida puts the question in ‘Force of Law’ in this way: ‘For in the end, where will deconstruction find its force, its movement or its motivation if not in this always unsatisfied appeal, beyond the given determinations of what we call, in determined contexts, justice, the possibility of justice?’70 In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida explains that this idea of justice is infinite because it is irreducible in its affirmative character and in its demands because it is owed to the other before any contract.71 The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is of obligation (devoir) that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules.72 The same might be said of the awakening of politicisation in Levinas as it arises in the way that the Other refers to the other Others, the third.73 I have argued here that one can legitimately say that deconstruction is motivated by critique, so long as critique is understood in Levinas’s sense. To the extent to which this is true I hope to have thrown some light on what lies behind Derrida’s recent works with their clear and often direct evocations of Levinas. Derridean deconstruction answers to Levinasian critique without which there is neither decision, nor hyper-politicisation, just as I suspect that, were it not for deconstruction, we would be inclined to misidentify Levinas’s contribution, seeing it as the foundation of a morality and not the ethics of ethics, the ethics of suspicion, that it is.74 NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, in Points de Suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 60; translated by Peggy Kamuf as ‘Ja, or le faux-bond’, in Points . . . . Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 54. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be


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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Robert Bernasconi given in brackets after those for the English translation.) Compare Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 84. For a discussion of some of Derrida’s central discussions of critique, see Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 14 and 55 n. 40. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics’, in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 136. Jacques Derrida, ‘Lettre à un ami japonais’, in Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 390; translated by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin as ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Différance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 3. Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 16; translated by David Wood as ‘Passions’, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 6. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 96–7; WD, pp. 62–3. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) See also Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction’, in Edward Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), p. 13; translated by John P. Leavey as Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1978), p. 33. WD, p. 79 (pp. 117–18). That this history could be read differently is implicitly acknowledged by Derrida in the way he allows Jan Patocka’s somewhat different organisation of that same history in The Gift of Death. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Donner la mort’ in Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (eds), L’éthique du don (Paris: Métailié-Transition, 1992), pp. 11–34; translated by David Wills in The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–33. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 27n; translated by David Allison as Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 25–26n. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 142; trans. Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 119. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) MP, p. 60 (p. 70). Derrida, Points, p. 357 (p. 368). Jacques Derrida, L’autre cap (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 34; OH, p. 31. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) OH, p. 77 (p. 76) SdM, p. 146; SoM, p. 89. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) SoM, p. 88 (p. 145). SoM, p. 90 (p. 149). Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 85.


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18. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 85. 19. Derrida presents the secret as the condition of politicisation, the way of broaching the question of the political, of the history and genealogy of this concept, ‘with the most concrete consequences’ (Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 81). This is because the secret remains inaccessible and heterogeneous to the public realm. 20. I have argued this, albeit without using the term ‘hyperpoliticisation’, in a number of essays. For example, ‘The Third Party’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 30 (1) (January 1999), pp. 76–89. 21. One could complicate this discussion of critique further by introducing Levinas’s association of Derrida with Kantian critique in ‘Tout autrement’. Emmanuel Levinas, Noms Propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), p. 81; translated by Michael B. Smith as Proper Names (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 55. See the discussion by Simon Critchley in The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 145–50. Note also Derrida’s comments in La verité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 46; translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth of Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 39. 22. WD, p. 88 (p. 132). 23. WD, p. 88 (p. 132). In various places I have attempted to challenge the reading of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ as a critique. In some respects the present essay is an update on that controversy. See, for example, ‘The Trace of Levinas in Derrida’, in Wood and Bernasconi, Derrida and Différance, pp. 13–29. 24. The best treatment of critique in Levinas to date is to be found in Peter Atterton, ‘Levinas’s Skeptical Critique of Metaphysics and Antihumanism’, Philosophy Today, 41 (4) (Winter 1997), pp. 491–506. 25. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), p. 49; translated by A. Lingis in Basic Philosophical Writings, eds A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 54. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) 26. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La philosophie et l’idée de l’Infini’, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 165–8; translated by A. Lingis in Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 47–57. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) For ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ see ‘La réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps Modernes 38 (1948), pp. 771–2 and 787–9; translated in Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 1–3 and 12–13, as well as the discussion in John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 193–6. 27. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 59 (p. 178). 28. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 59 (p. 178). 29. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 47–8 (pp. 165–6). 30. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), p. 59; translated by A. Lingis, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 86. (Henceforth page references for


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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Robert Bernasconi the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86 (p. 58). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86 (p. 59). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 42 (pp. 12–13). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 43 (p. 13). Translation modified. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 43 (p. 13). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 81 (p. 53). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 82–3 (p. 54). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85 (p. 57). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 84 (p. 56). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 84–5 (p. 57). Translation modified. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85 (p. 58). Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 55 (Humanisme, p. 50). Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 55 (Humanisme, p. 51) Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 55 (Humanisme, p. 51). Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 57 (Humanisme, p. 53). Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 57 (Humanisme, p. 53). Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 116; translated by A. Lingis as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 92. Levinas’s italics. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 92 (p. 117). Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 92 (p. 117). Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 92 (p. 117). Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La substitution’, La Revue Philosophique de Louvain 66 (1968), p. 504; translated in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 93. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 94 (‘Substitution’, p. 506). Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 122 (p. 157). Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 122 (p. 157). Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 122 (p. 157). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 75 (p. 48). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 77 (p. 49). Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 70 (p. 208). Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 76 (p. 215). Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 53. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 85. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 86. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 84. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 85. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 85. Cf. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 103. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. 163. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, pp. 103 and 136. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 21 (p. ix). Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, Cardozo Law Review 11 (July/August 1990), p. 957.


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Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 965. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 963. cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 213–14 (pp. 187–90). An earlier version of this essay was delivered under the title ‘The Crisis of Critique’ at a conference organised by Geoffrey Bennington at the University of Sussex in July 1998 under the title ‘Critique and Deconstruction’.

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6 The Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the Mother-Tongue Anne Berger

The Essay on the Origin of Languages is also an essay on the origin of peoples, indeed of ‘the people’, conceived of as a political community. In his famous chapter on the ‘Formation of Meridional Languages’,1 Rousseau distinguishes between what he calls ‘popular languages’ and ‘domestic’ ones, that is, between the languages of ‘nations’ (in the pre-modern sense of the term) and those of the family. Only the first category is granted the status of a ‘genuine language’. Thus, Rousseau warns the reader in a footnote at the beginning of the chapter: Genuine languages are not at all of domestic origin. They can be established only under a more general, a more durable agreement. The American savages hardly speak at all except outside their homes. Each keeps silent in his hut, speaking to his family by signs. And these signs are used infrequently, for a savage is less disquieted, less impatient than a European; he has fewer needs and he is careful to meet them himself.2 Later in the chapter, Rousseau tries to characterise the stage of humanity which predates the ‘time’ of the simultaneous institution of societies and languages: ‘Before that time ... there were families, but there were no nations. There were domestic languages, but there were no popular ones.’3 Popular languages then, would differ from the domestic or familial ones, the way the public realm differs from the private, the outside from the inside, the ‘away from home’ from the ‘at home’. The language one speaks at home – the hut language – is hardly a language. An inner, endogamous language – one might call it today vernacular4 – would have neither the status nor the structure of a language. It could not generate a ‘nation’. A popular language, which is to say, according to Rousseau, language itself, language as the language of a people or a nation, originates from one’s encounter with others. For the philosopher, such an encounter is always at the same time an experience of adulteration and alienation. 98


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A people constitutes itself as such, then, by ‘othering’ its members, by becoming through language an other (as) ‘[it]self’: the co-event of language and the people happens in the double experience of the difference of the other and the difference from oneself. Thus to speak a language means to venture away from both the self and the home; and it is also the first act of a citizenship to come. In this sense, what we call ‘linguistics’ today is for Rousseau but a branch of politics. Indeed his conception of politics, as he states it for instance in the famous piece on ‘political economy’ he wrote for inclusion in the Encyclopédie, rests on the neo-Aristotelian principle of heterogeneity between the domestic and the political bodies, or between ‘family’ and ‘nation’.5 In the Essay, Rousseau gives a certain name to the pro(to)-linguistic experience of altering difference. He calls it ‘love’. The sentence I just commented on (‘there were families but there were no nations; there were domestic languages, but there were no popular ones’) ends with the following statement: ‘there were marriages but there was no love at all’. ‘Love’ would date, then, from the time of the institution of societies and languages, and conversely. Marriage, on the other hand, would predate it, as the condition of the ‘family’. Levi-Strauss, who views marriage as the institution of exogamy and hence as one of the fundamental structures of exchange that articulate the social as such, might be surprised by this phrase. The apparent paradox of the formula may well stem from Rousseau’s peculiar notion of the birth of language, more exactly of language as speech. Here is what he writes just before the passage quoted: In the arid places where water could be had only from wells, people had to rejoin one another to sink the wells, or at least to agree upon their use. Such must have been the origin of societies and languages in warm countries. ...There the first rendezvous of the two sexes took place. Girls would come to seek water for the household, young men would come to water their herds ... Imperceptibly water becomes more necessary. The livestock becomes thirsty more often. ... There at last was the true cradle of nations [le berceau des peuples]; from the pure crystal of the fountains flow the first fires of love.6 Love, language, nations [les peuples] are born at waterbreak: in ‘arid places’, in other words, at the place of lack and thirst: at the source where the thirst for (the) water becomes the thirst for the other. From an effect of need, thirst indeed becomes an indication of desire, as Rousseau’s dreamy description subtly implies: ‘Imperceptibly water becomes more necessary. The livestock becomes thirsty more often.’


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The irresistible attraction of water (l’eau/tre) founds the community. This magical water prompts people to speak and live together by designating one sex to the other as it quenches their thirst. The hetero-erotico-sexual union would not only be the originary form but also the driving force of the popular community as linguistic community. One is reminded of Freud’s analysis of the social bond as a libidinal bond in Civilization and its Discontents. According to Freud, the upholding and progress of civilisation indeed depends on the libidinal nature of the social bond. The Rousseauian fable of the link between language and the desire for the other also points to the engaging nature of language; such, Derrida will add after Rousseau, that it binds all speakers by the promise of an irrevocable engagement, before any articulated commitment and beyond any forswearing. For language does not only name; it calls;7 and it calls to the speaker as well as on the addressee by the very force of its performance. In describing the encounter prompted by a paradigmatic experience of lack, and the coupling in language of the differing sexes, Rousseau not only stresses the creative force of an inviting strangeness, he marks the exogamic character of the birth of Meridional languages. Speech as communal speech, hence the ‘first’ popular languages, would occur beyond the endogamous circle of the ‘family’, that is, outside and beyond the relation between mother and child. The consubstantiality of the phenomenon of language and of the popular body as political body does suggest in a complex manner that both the ‘birth of society’ and linguistic relations have to do with the ‘prohibition of incest’.8 A question arises: how does Rousseau conceive of what one calls a ‘mother-tongue’, that is, the child’s native language as it is transmitted to him/her by the mother? And (how) does he articulate the connection, if any, between the mother-tongue, the popular community, and the collective or ‘national’ formation of what he may be the first to have called the ‘social bond’?9 Rousseau is more eloquent on the issue of the status and practice of language between mother and child in The Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men than in the Essay.10 As in the Essay though, he starts by rejecting the idea that ‘languages are born from the domestic commerce of fathers, mothers and children’. Between mother and child as well as between the members or the parental copula, there is no necessary relation which would generate language by breaking down the isolation and limiting the autonomy proper to the ‘state of nature’. Thus the biological link counts for nothing in the emergence and experience of the social. Yet Rousseau assumes the existence of


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a proto-language, the origin and initiative of which he assigns not to the mother or father, but to the child itself: Note also that the child having all his needs to explain and consequently more things to say to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must make the greatest efforts of invention, and that the language he uses must be in great part his own work, which multiplies languages as many times as there are individuals to speak them. A wandering and vagabond life contributes further to this, since it does not give any idiom the time to gain consistency. For to say that the mother teaches the child the words he ought to use to ask her for a particular thing shows well how one teaches already formed languages, but it does not teach us how they are formed.11 The language of the child is explicitly and exclusively directed towards the mother. Its quasi-autological nature and self-engendered occurrence make it a strictly idiomatic, indeed idiolectic language. This infantile proto-language serves to ‘explain needs’, not to express desire(s). It cannot therefore exceed the time and place of the dual relation to the mother conceived as the time and place of the need of the mother. We have already seen that for Rousseau, it is not the ‘need’ to satisfy the ‘needs’ which prompts the advent of articulated speech and establishes the community, but rather the emergence of ‘love’ as a paradigmatic form of ‘passion’. Indeed, the need to satisfy needs is limited (and hence temporary) precisely because it can be satisfied. ‘The [first] invention of language does not stem from needs but from passions’, claims Rousseau in the title of chapter II of the Essay.12 The satisfaction of needs brings about the dispersal of the individuals who had been temporarily united. It is because they remain unsatisfied, indeed unsatisfiable, that desire and ‘passion’ – be it hatred or anger – bring people closer through speech in any lasting way. Does this mean, then, that the proto-linguistic relation of the child to the ‘first’ mother described by Rousseau as a kind of ‘preview’ (‘avant-première’) of the scene of speech, actually ignores both affects and lack? Whatever the case, it means that the infantile language spoken between child and mother (since the mother has to learn the language in order to meet the needs of the child) will never reach the stage of a ‘popular language’. This reversal of the pedagogical relation into a ‘metrogogical’13 one allows Rousseau to obfuscate to some degree the role of the mother in the scene of language teaching he describes in Emile or Education, where he takes up again the argument put forward in the Second Discourse.14 In Book I, which deals with the


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education of the infant and small child, Rousseau asserts that there exists originally for anybody, not a mother-tongue, but a ‘natural tongue’. The nature of this ‘natural tongue’ is such that children can speak it before they can speak: Whether there was a language natural and common to all has long been a subject of research. Doubtless there is such a language and it is the one children speak before knowing how to speak. This language is not articulate, but it is accented, sonorous, intelligible. The habit of our languages has made us neglect that language to the point of forgetting it completely. Let us study children, and we shall soon relearn it with them. Nurses are our masters in this language. They understand everything their nurslings say; they respond to them; they have quite consistent dialogues with them; and, although they pronounce words, these words are perfectly useless; it is not the sense of the word that children understand but the accent which accompanies it.15 As in the Second Discourse, the children are the masters of their nurses who, by virtue of ‘understand[ing] everything their nurslings say’, become in turn the ‘masters’ (the ‘maîtres’, not the mistresses), or rather, as Rousseau writes, ‘our masters’ (‘nurses are our masters’), that is, the masters of a – or the – community. The use of the first person plural possessive by the subject of utterance shows his identification with a community which is clearly constructed throughout the education treatise as an adult, masculine and proto-political community. In spite of what he claims in Book I, the ambition of Emile’s educator, who speaks for this community, is indeed to form a (male) citizen, rather than simply ‘a man’. But even before the master of ‘popular language’ comes to replace the mother, the child has already taken the master-mother’s place by teaching the nurse, who herself replaces from the start both the biological mother and the ‘master’ from whom she borrows (in the French text) the masculine gender as she takes on his function. From ‘mother’ (mère) to ‘master’ (maître), the sliding of the signifier is so irresistible that it authorises a signing off of power. In this chain of reversals, the collective subject of the educating community finds himself literally in the place of an ‘infant’, that is, in the place of one who is excluded from the language of the community – a community formed here by the nurses and their nurslings – and whose future inclusion depends on being taught the idiomatic language of ‘nature’ by the nurse-master (le maîtrenourrice). Thanks to his mastery of language, Rousseau manages to turn this domestic community into a masculine one; in other words, the community of nurses and nurslings becomes the inverted image


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of the political community to which the child will only gain access through the substituting of a master for a (m)other. In this sense, there would be no mother-tongue to speak of for Rousseau. For, according to him, the mother-tongue (i.e the language of the mother) is neither original nor originary: it is neither the first language of the child in the scenario I just recalled, nor the origin of the language of the city. The latter, as we have seen, only takes shape by virtue of the substitution of the heterosexual relation outside the domestic sphere for the (non)-relation of mother and child inside the hut, unless a master–child relation has always already replaced the mother–child one within the sphere of the house. Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712. Nine days later, his mother died. Of the mother, there remained only an infinite question: the question of origins, to which Rousseau brought and could only bring an original, unprecedented answer. Yet the accident of Rousseau’s birth only partly accounts for the originary absence of a mothertongue in his text. Moreover, it all depends on the sense one gives to the name ‘mother-tongue’, to paraphrase Rousseau’s formula in his first footnote to Emile, in which he tries to account for his first mention of the name ‘mother’, on the first page of his treatise: ‘Moreover [Au reste] the sense I give to the name mother must be explained; and that is what will be done hereafter.’16 Once he has sketched out his theory of the infantile language in the Second Discourse, Rousseau concedes, albeit in a negative form, that a linguistic relation between a ‘civilised’ mother and child can play a mediating role and attest to the formation of a ‘popular’ language; such a relation would figure the consolidation, rather than the underside, of the state of culture and the political community: ‘For to say that the mother teaches the child the words he ought to use to ask her for a particular thing shows well how one teaches already formed languages, but it does not teach us how they are formed.’17 Yet things are even more complicated than they look. One recalls that the infantile language is, if inarticulate, ‘accented, sonorous, intelligible’. It is perhaps all the more ‘intelligible’ as it is ‘accented’ rather than ‘articulate’. Since Derrida has commented on it in such detail, I will not dwell on the opposition between ‘accentuation’ and ‘articulation’, which founds Rousseau’s phonocentrism. I just want to remind the reader of the role the ‘sonorousness’ of both language and speech plays in Rousseau’s political theory. In chapter XI of the Essay as well as in the last chapter which deals with the ‘relationships of languages to governments’, Rousseau


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explores the connections between a sonorous language, a public or popular language and the political community: If they are ‘frequently obscure because of their power [énergie]’, he writes in chapter XI, the ‘sonorous, accented, eloquent’ languages are nonetheless the only ones suited to ‘giving laws to [the] people’; they and only they are fit to endow those who speak them with the ‘power [to sway] the multitude’.18 In the same chapter, Rousseau continues: Thus, if one who read a little Arabic and enjoyed leafing through the Koran were to hear Mohammed personally proclaim in that eloquent, rhythmic tongue, with that sonorous, persuasive voice, seducing first the ears, then the heart, every sentence alive with enthusiasm, he would prostrate himself, crying: Great prophet, messenger of God, lead us to glory, to martyrdom. We will conquer or die for you [nous voulons vaincre ou mourir pour vous].19 If Arabic, which as a sacred language is akin to the voice of God, were pronounced by the ‘sonorous voice’ of Mohammed, it would elicit in turn the sonorous explosion of the cry of the believer (‘he would prostrate himself, crying [criant]’). The arche-patriotic content of the cry – ‘conquer or die’ is the founding motto of the modern patriot – can be read as the ‘translation’ or semantisation of its very utterance. One should also note that, thanks to this resounding force of language, the singular subject of reading and hearing (‘if one who read a little Arabic ... were to hear ...’) becomes plural, as if under the multiplying, gathering and politicising spell of the sonorous language: ‘lead us to glory ... We will conquer and die for you.’ The conjunction between orientalism and proto-nationalism in Rousseau’s text deserves a lengthier commentary than I can afford here. Let me just say that the same type of argument is taken up again in the twentieth and last chapter of the Essay. There, Rousseau deplores the weakening of the French language, deemed both a northern and a modern language, and as such doubly removed from its origin. He ascribes the state of the French language to the absence or breaking apart of communication between the monarchic rulers and the people of France: There are some tongues [langues] favorable to liberty. They are the sonorous, prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a great distance ... But I say that any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to the people assembled is a slavish tongue. It is impossible for a people to remain free and speak that tongue.20


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One understands why, for Rousseau, music and politics belong to the same analytic field, that of the essay on the origins of languages. All this is also to say that the very characteristic of the idiomatic proto-language of the child – i.e. its ‘sonorousness’ – whose main addressee and interlocutor is, if not the mother, whomever Rousseau gives her name to, is precisely that which defines the quality of the social bond articulated by the popular language, that is, its democratic force and form. Thus, while he reasserts the principle of an essential heterogeneity of the domestic and public spheres, Rousseau formulates a theory of the connection between language learning, the social bond and what one could call the topology of the relation between child and mother, in Book I of Emile. Opposing, as often, the city and the village, he distinguishes the situation of linguistic exchange of the city child from that of the peasant child. The city child is under the thumb of a ‘governess’, who acts as a legislating substitute for the mother in a civilised noble or bourgeois order. She ‘dictates’ the words of the city to the child in such a way that he ‘repeats [them] poorly [il les rend mal]’, thus preventing the transmission of a ‘mother-tongue’ which alone would prompt the blending of the laws of the house with the laws of the land. The child encounters a double obstacle to the acquisition of the ability to express himself, an ability which not only affects the linguistic performance: it also signals the autonomy of the subject of utterance, a necessary prelude to the free exercise of citizenship. On the one hand, the excessive closeness of the governess, a figure of the child’s absolute dependency, prevents the child from magnifying his voice. Such an inhibition of the sound jeopardises the development of vocal potency, and in the end hurts even the ability to articulate. The confinement of words within the limits of the hearth maintains the ‘muttering’ child (le marmotteur) in a state of infancy (à l’état de marmot); it hinders the shift from the domestic to the public sphere, from the governess’s chamber to the chamber of the people’s government: ‘Up to five or six, city children, raised indoors and under the wing of a governess, need only to mutter to make themselves understood. As soon as they stir their lips, effort is made to hear them.’21 On the other hand, the conditions of the ‘dictation of words’ to the child prevent him from appropriating a language which, failing to express what he means and wants, remains the expression of the will of others: ‘Words are dictated to them which they repeat poorly; and since the same people are constantly with them, these


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people, by dint of paying attention to them, guess what they want to say rather than what they say.’22 Through this fable of the origin of speech (conceived as the necessary, if impossible, expression of the self), Rousseau raises just before Kant the Kantian problem of the conditions of access of a subject to the status of an autonomous and responsible citizen. He figures out the solution to this problem in the following paragraph: In the country, it is an entirely different thing. A peasant woman is not constantly with her child; he is forced to learn to say very clearly and loudly what he needs to make her understand. In the fields, the children, scattered, removed from the father, from the mother, and from the other children, get practice in making themselves understood at a distance and in measuring the strength [‘force’] of their voices according to the space [‘intervalle’] which separates them from those by whom they want to be understood. This is how one truly learns to pronounce, and not by stuttering some vowels in the ear of an attentive governess.23 What would guarantee the persistence of the sonorous quality of the infantile proto-language is the mother’s remoteness, her independence and her belonging to the public sphere of work – for the peasant woman works in the fields and not only in the house. This persistence in the child’s language of the first relation to the first mother would in turn determine the political future and the harmonic development of the community; the practice of language is indeed a matter of proficiency in musical harmony since, as Rousseau writes, one has to ‘measure the strength of the voice’ according to the ‘interval’ of separation. Just as in the paragraph of the Essay where Rousseau describes the effect of the sonorous voice of Mahomet,24 the exercise of the child’s vocal strength triggers an imperceptible shift from the dual scene of the relation to the mother based on the ‘expression of needs’ to the plural scene where the ‘scattered’ children make themselves heard by ‘those by whom they want to be understood’. The voicing of the children’s will (‘they want to be understood’), which follows the articulation of needs, may well be the prototype of the political expression of the ‘general will’, since, like it, it aims at bringing together the ‘scattered’ subjects through the unison of voices. Remoteness, though, is not absence. There is always a risk that the distant mother will not answer the child. Yet, the ‘space’ (‘intervalle’) which must ‘separate’ mother and child in order to elicit the will to speak in the latter, is also the harmonic principle of their dialogue. It creates a balance between the autarchic independence of the savage


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whose few ‘needs’ preserve him from language, and hence from any relation to others, and the dependency which inevitably results from recourse to language, according to Rousseau. For him, to call an other is always to call on him, that is, at the same time to confess one’s powerlessness and to enter into the infernal circle of supplementarity. To call (on) the other is to open oneself to the possibility of substitution, since, in begging for an answer, one signifies one’s insufficiency and invites the other to act in one’s name or place, to begin with the act of speaking: whoever answers me takes ‘my’ place as the locutor while acting on my behalf and/or my request. As with all first steps in Rousseau, the first step in the order of supplementarity is the most radical. Finally, the mother called and gone or kept at a certain distance remains a mother to come, and hence a desired one. Rousseau manages to turn a figure of the origin into the hidden horizon, indeed the very aim of the speaking community. Moreover, the ‘strength’ (‘force’) which the child must deploy in order to force the attention of a structurally inattentive mother, unlike the (too) attentive governess,25 likens language learning to a test of virility. Since the child has to overcome a kind of resistance if he wants to make himself heard by the mother, to learn how to speak to her is indeed to learn to speak ‘as a man’: to speak in a loud voice (parler fort), as one speaks to men and between men. This is exactly what Rousseau will say a little further, in his capacity of master of all the masters of the Emiles to come: ‘A man who learns to speak only in his bedroom26 will fail to make himself understood at the head of a battalion and will hardly impress the people in a riot. First teach children to speak to men; they will know how to speak to women when they have to.’27 But, in order to impress men and the people, shouldn’t one have tried first to impress one’s mother through the strength of one’s voice? It seems that one can only do that by going after her in the fields, rather than by talking with her in a bedroom as do the courtiers in the ladies’ ruelles. The peasant mother in this sense functions as the prototype of the efficient master, since the latter substitutes for her precisely to keep her at a distance. What the child must ultimately succeed in articulating clearly then, is his sexual identity as a boy. The compass of the voice gives the measure of the community as democratic community. Nowhere does Rousseau suggest this more clearly than in the chapters XI and XX I have briefly commented on. The political community he dreams of, such that the social bond


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and the governmental form would echo each other harmoniously, is a necessarily limited albeit wide enough one. The circle of the sonorous speech delineates a border between a sufficient internal heterogeneity and a dangerous external one, between the good and the bad ‘interval’, the measured distance (that is, measured up to presence) and the too far off. Thus Rousseau’s phonocentrism determines the proto-nationalist leaning of his discourse. It is not by chance that the link between phonocentrism and nationalism is suggested in Book I. For the linguistic relation between the small child and the peasant mother who stands for ‘the people’ provides the model for the ideal social bond within the confines of the popular community. ‘Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors’, warns Rousseau at the beginning of Book I.28 And a few lines earlier: Every particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is estranged from the all-encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They are only men. They are nothing in his eyes. This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives.29 One understands why the issue of the birth and upkeep of the ‘patriotic feeling’ is so immediately insistent in the book Rousseau devotes to infancy and early childhood, and more specifically to language learning and the problems of oral performance. How, then, do the restricted proto-national community, for which the peasant family provides a model and which alone awakens ‘patriotic feelings’, and the ‘barbarian’ family whom Rousseau depicts in chapter IX of the Essay, differ from each other? The difference rests precisely with language, which inserts the spacing of alterity at the heart of union. The savage incestuous ‘concentration’ produces only disjunction and dispersal because it lacks the (linguistic) interval between its members that would force them to articulate the connection between themselves. Let us go back to those ‘meridional languages’ which lead us towards the mother precisely by leading away from her, following a by now familiar route. Sometimes Rousseau call these languages ‘oriental’, but he seems to prefer the word ‘meridional’, maybe because one hears in it in French the distant murmur of the name of the mother (mère): ‘méridionale’. Since the ‘meridional languages’ are deemed the first languages, they are both languages in the sense of particular idioms


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and language in general. They are in this sense ‘closer to childhood’, as Derrida states in Of Grammatology,30 even if, as we have seen, they can only develop thanks to a coming out of the hut and the house, and thanks to the gathering at water springs of desiring individuals of the two sexes. A narrative of the formation of northern languages immediately follows the chapter on meridional languages in the Essay. Northern languages, Rousseau tells us in chapter X, are ‘the sad daughters of necessity’ and are thus opposed to the meridional ones, which are ‘the children of pleasure rather than need’.31 ‘In those wretched climates where everything is dead for nine months of the year’, ‘men are ceaselessly busy providing for their subsistence’ and ‘hardly think of pleasanter ties’.32 Now, if one is to believe Rousseau’s first statements (‘that the [first] invention of language-speech does not stem from needs but from passions’), only the passions in general and the anticipation of ‘pleasure’ in particular prompt the voice to rise and reach beyond the self towards the other. And only the other’s attraction guarantees the strength of the social bond as libidinal bond. Even if, as Rousseau states in the same chapter, ‘mutual need [unites] men to a greater extent when sentiment has not done so’,33 the northern languages, which are born from nine months of a death work, carry with them the seed of the dissolution of the communal links they were made to establish and express. Rousseau coins an extraordinary formula to both illustrate and sum up the difference between meridional and septentrional languages: Mutual need uniting men to a greater extent when sentiment has not done so, society would be formed only through industry. The ever-present danger of perishing would not permit of a language restricted to gesture. And the first words among them were not love me [aimez-moi] but help me [aidez-moi].34 ‘Aimez-moi’ versus ‘aidez-moi’. The proximity of the two syntagms at the level of the signifier does suggest that northern languages are the adulterated offsprings of the meridional languages. One letter is altered and everything is changed? Rousseau had already warned us: a ‘slight movement’, a slight ‘shift of the globe’s axis’ or of the line of writing ‘[decide] the vocation of mankind’, and ‘the face of the earth is [changed]’.35 But before we take the full measure of this grammatic change, let us ponder on these statements’ kinship: the first word pronounced in each language group is a perfect palindrome on the phonetic level: it exhibits the passing perfection of a language still curled up on itself, autological to the point of tautology; this phonetico-tautological balance of the originary statement is ruined


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by the heterogeneity of graphy (ai/ez); it would anyway be destroyed as soon as a ‘second word’ is uttered. On the grammatical level, both statements are in the imperative mode. Command or prayer, each ‘first word’ is a call addressed to someone else, according to the originary call of language. Since the first word articulates a demand of some kind, one could say that the locutor/speaker is paradigmatically in the position of the child who voices demands. The post-position of the ‘moi’ (love me / help me) and its grammatical function as object suspend the emergence of a ‘subject’ (both grammatical and psychological) to the other’s response. Finally, the plural form of the second person (aimez/aidez-moi) suggests that the aim of articulated language is indeed to found the community; the child, to whom Rousseau assigns in the Second Discourse, the Essay and Emile, the task of inaugurating if not languages, at least language, would address from the start the virtual body of co-locutors at the very moment he addresses the mother: no two without a third +n. However, the use of the plural form raises the question of the particular idiom in which Rousseau formulates his general theory of the birth of languages, namely French. For in French, the second person plural indicates undecidably in the absence of contextual clues, either a plurality of addressees or the respectful distance the locutor maintains towards his or her singular interlocutor. If the use of the plural in Rousseau’s double formula does retain the plurality of its functions, then the demand by the child-like locutor that his or her addressee come closer – for all demand as such is a demand for (more) closeness – does once again take an odd linguistic path: that of marked distance. But what are the status and meaning of the imperceptible shift from ‘aimez’ to ‘aidez’, that is, from the bi-labial ‘m’ to the sonorous dental ‘d’? On this issue, Jean Starobinski makes the following remarks in his annotated edition of the Essay: In a phonetic chain otherwise identical, the surplus of articulation is marked by the difference between the occlusive dental ‘d’ and the nasal bilabial ‘m’. ‘d’ is obviously harder, ‘m’ is softer, endowed with more ‘tenderness’ (‘mollesse’). But what can we say about the use of French to mark the distinction between the first northern and the first southern language?36 Indeed, the work of the signifier calls our attention to the idiom thus inscribed, namely the French language. Starobinski is right to ask what the status of French might be in Rousseau’s discourse, as the ‘first language’ spoken and written by the subject named Rousseau, and as a ‘northern language’ in the symbolic cartography of the


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philosopher. The signifying drift from ‘m’ to ‘d’ figures the relation of linguistic derivation which links, while sending them at a distance, the northern languages to the southern ones. For Rousseau, as we know, any form of derivation is a process of estrangement and perversion of the original meaning. Here, the adulteration which cuts into the original link between languages consists in replacing the ‘m’, that is, the phonological index of love in French (m/aime), with a dental which destroys the cratylic harmony that previously reigned between the signifier and the signified (‘m’/‘aimez’). Again, Starobinski is right to stress the ‘hardness’ of the ‘d’ and the surplus of articulation it requires, as if the progress in the ability to articulate in French – which exemplifies for Rousseau the historic evolution of languages – marked a conversion of love into aggression, an effect, perhaps, of the loosening of the original ties. In this sense, the northern locutor who would say ‘aidez-moi’ rather than ‘aimez-moi’ would not only express his need for an other but also his ‘dent’ against him (sa dent contre lui), as one says in French. In other words, the progress in the mastery of language indicated by the ‘surplus of articulation’ would correspond to a ‘hardening’ of the subject of speech. Psychoanalysis might read in this the idiomatic trace of the shift from a primary oral stage to a sadistic stage, which itself corresponds phenomenologically to the new use of his teeth (‘dents’) by the child. This hardening of the tongue, which Starobinski identifies in the coming out of the dental, is thematised throughout chapter X. Rousseau starts by saying: ‘the languages, sad daughters of necessity, reflect their [harsh] origin (leur dure origine)’.37 The men who speak these harsh languages are harsh men: ‘One can see already that the men, being more robust, are bound to have less delicate voices. Their voices are bound to be stronger and rougher.’38 Further on: ‘For the accents which the heart does not provide, distinct articulation is substituted. And if some trace of nature remains in the form of the language, this too contributes to its harshness [dureté].’39 The chapter ends with the following sentence: ‘Thus too their most natural tone of voice is angry and menacing, and their words are always accompanied by emphatic articulation, which makes them harsh and loud.’40 We have already heard the motif of the loud and strong voice played out loud in Book I of Emile. But there, the virility of articulation secures both the upholding of a certain relation to the mother and the success of the speaker’s inscription within the linguistic and political community. On the contrary, in the Essay, the loudness and harshness of the language and the men who speak it are the


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symptoms of an excessive hom(m)osexuation and distance between the members of the community; as such, they ruin both the memory of the tongue-mother and the future of the collectivity. ‘Reflecting’ on the meaning of the differences between northern and southern languages in the next chapter, Rousseau states: French, English, German: each is a language private to a group of men who help each other, [who reason cold-bloodedly] or who become angry. But the ministers of the gods proclaiming sacred mysteries, sages giving laws to their people, leaders swaying the multitude, have to speak Arabic or Persian.41 This statement is followed by Rousseau’s ‘reflection’ on the fanaticising efficiency of Mahomet’s voice, which I have already commented on. The European languages, mentioned here as the archetypes of northern languages, programme the bursting apart of the community. As ‘private’ languages, they are opposed to the meridional languages which alone can sway the multitude, for they are the ‘true cradle of nations’, as Rousseau says in the ninth chapter of his genetic fable. The request for or offer of help actually mean: everyone for himself. In this sense, the northern languages end up resembling the idiolectic, sonorous, proto-language of the child, which the latter uses provisionally to ‘explain his needs’ in a relation without relation, and without love being received or given, to the mother he calls on. Modern ‘French’ would ultimately be the result of an ultra-regressive idiomatising privatisation of an originary Arabic, leading to language/ speech’s deprivation of the ability to pronounce the ‘m’. Yet, Rousseau does state that ‘the modern tongues, with all their intermingling and recasting, still retain something of these differences’.42 Which means that, for all the differences, there are still lots of linguistic interunions; the north hasn’t completely lost sight of the south. After all, the opposition between ‘aimez-moi’ and ‘aidez-moi’ is internal to Rousseau’s French. Thus, as Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: ‘No language is from the south or the north ... That is why the polar opposition does not divide a set of already existing languages; it is described, though not declared by Rousseau to be the origin of languages.’43 The physical theory of the climates which supports this polar opposition is thus shown for what it is: not a realistic causal hypothesis, but a metaphor of a polarity internal to language(s). Rousseau himself keeps repeating in a thousand different ways throughout the Essay that there is no such thing as autochthony. The ceaseless migration of populations prevents one language or the other from taking root in a particular soil. Harshness,


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aridity or fertility are but qualities of language itself in its relation to itself and to the community it weaves. For a language to remain or become ‘popular’, that is, to bind together human beings with the ties of love by pulling them out of themselves, it just has to keep turning towards its orient.44 For French to remain oriented towards its interior and anterior Arabic as if towards an Orient to come, it may require the stamp of an ‘m’ to mark the place of a mother called to come under the guise of the demand for love; it may require that the quasi-sexual opposition between ‘d’ and ‘m’ resolve itself into a differantial attraction, without cancelling out the interval necessary to articulation. NOTES 1. The translation I use replaces the word ‘Meridional’ with the word ‘Southern’. For reasons that will appear later, I prefer to keep the original name. While relying on the translation mentioned, I will modify it when I deem it necessary. 2. J-J. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, trans. John H. Moran, in On the Origin of Language: Rousseau and Herder (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), p. 31. 3. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 45. 4. The word ‘vernacular’ comes from the Latin ‘verna, ae’, which designates the slave born in the house. In popular Latin, ‘vernaculus’ refers to anything that has to do with the slave born in the house, and hence, by extension, anything that has to do with the house. One should remember that the opposition between the domestic and public spheres in Greek and Roman civilisations is linked to the sharp contrast between (homebound) slavery and the city as the place of free men. 5. ‘It is with reason that one is used to make a distinction between public and private economies; since the State has nothing in common with the family but for the shared obligation of their respective leaders to secure their members’ happiness, the same rules of conduct cannot apply to both’ (Rousseau, Discours sur l’économie politique, eds B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond [Paris: Pléiade, 1964], p. 244). 6. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, pp. 44–5. 7. ‘Like the hospitality of the host even before any invitation, language summons when summoned. Like a charge [enjoignante], it remains to be given, it remains only on this condition: by still remaining to be given’ (Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other: or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], p. 67; ‘Appelée, [la langue] appelle, comme l’hospitalité de l’hôte avant toute invitation. Enjoignante, elle reste à être donnée...’ (Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine [Paris: Galilée, 1996], pp. 125–6). ‘Toute parole s’avance... dans la dimension de cette promesse et de cette foi jurée, même et surtout quand elle les trahit’ [All spoken word is ventured


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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

in the space of promise and oath, even and even more when it betrays them] (F. Benslama (ed.), Idiomes, Nationalités, Déconstruction [Casablanca: Editions Toubkal/ Paris: Intersignes, 1998], p. 264). ‘It concerns an irreducible experience of language, that which links it to the liaison, to commitment, to the command or to the promise: before and beyond all theoretico-constatives, opening, embracing, or including them, there is the affirmation of language, the “I am addressing you, and I commit myself, in this language, here; listen how I speak in my language, me, and you can speak to me in your language; we must hear each other, we must get along”: this affirmation defies all metalanguage, even if it produces, and precisely for this, by this even, the effects of metalanguage’ (Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael B. Naas [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], pp. 60–1; ‘...irréductible expérience de la langue: celle qui la lie à la liaison, à l’engagement, à l’ordre ou à la promesse: ... l’affirmation de la langue, le “je m’adresse à toi, et je m’y engage..., nous devons nous entendre etc” défie tout métalangage, même si elle produit, précisément pour cela-même, des effets de métalangage’, L’Autre Cap [Paris: Minuit, 1991], p. 60). In the same paragraph, Rousseau expands on the ordinariness and unavoidability of incest within the circle of the ‘natural’ family, but only between siblings. Yet a sentence such as: ‘each family was self-sufficient and perpetuated itself exclusively by inbreeding’ (Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 45) opens up all kinds of incestuous possibilities. On this topic, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 263–6. See the first draft of the Social Contract entitled ‘Du contrat social ou Essai sur la forme de la république’ (Rousseau, Du contrat social (1ère version), eds B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond [Paris: Pléiade, 1964], p. 297). As one knows, both texts are thought to have been roughly written in the same period. Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (Second Discourse)’, trans. R.D. and J.R. Masters, in The First and Second Discourses (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 121. Observe in passing the way in which the first word (‘[first]’) of the first sentence of the chapter is written out as it is written down: once again, Derrida has analysed this trembling of the origin through which the logic of the ‘supplement’ announces itself: other originary inventions, then, will cancel out the originarity of the ‘[first]’ one and hence their own originarity in this historical circle. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 288–9. My neologism: from the greek ‘metro’ (mother) and the stem which indicates the transmission of knowledge (‘gogic’). In Rousseau’s fiction, it is the child who teaches his language to the mother, not the mother to her child. Emile or Education was published in 1762, seven years after the Second Discourse.


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15. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 65. 16. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 38. The ‘explanation’ – by the child or the master? – will never be spelled out, unless one considers Emile as a whole as an attempt to give a meaning to what for Rousseau remained but a ‘name’, eliciting as such a passionate and furious interest for the language to which this ‘name’ belongs. 17. Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin’, p. 121. 18. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 49. 19. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 49. 20. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, pp. 72–3. 21. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 71. 22. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 71. 23. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 71. 24. Note the double ‘m’ of Mahomet’s name which recalls the name of ‘mamman’. 25. The verb ‘forcer’ (to force) is used twice in the paragraph. 26. Here the translation is inaccurate. Rousseau doesn’t mention the whole bedroom but the ‘ruelles’. The ‘ruelle’ is the space between the bed and the wall, where men used to sit to chat with aristocratic women who received company and held ‘salons’ in their bedroom. The mention of the ‘ruelles’ usually functions as a derogatory allusion to the Precieuses of the seventeenth century. 27. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 72–3. 28. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 39. 29. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 39. 30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 218. 31. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 46. 32. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 47. 33. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 47. 34. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 47. 35. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 39. 36. J. Starobinski, Edition de l’Essai sur l’Origine des langues (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1990), p. 250. 37. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 46. 38. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 47. 39. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 48. 40. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 48. 41. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 49. 42. Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, p. 49. 43. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 216. 44. ‘Language is ... an oriented structure. Let us rather say, only half in jest, that its orientation is a disorientation. One will be able to call it a polarization. Orientation gives direction to movement by relating it to its origin as to its dawning. And it is starting from the light of origin that one thinks of the West (l’occident), the end and the fall, cadence or check, death or night. According to Rousseau ... language turns, so to speak, as the earth turns’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 216).


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7 In Light of Light: on Jan Patočka’s Notion of Europe Rodolphe Gasché

Husserl claims, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, that ‘Europe’, rather than being a merely geographical entity, is an absolute idea. This claim consolidates philosophical and secularising notions of Europe’s spiritual determination, the end-point of a process which begins in the seventh century, when Western Europe first defines itself as sacrum imperium. Husserl thus raises the notion of Europe to a conceptual level unheard of until that date. But this claim, as well as the conceptual effort devoted towards clarifying the idea of Europe, sounds strange today. To pair words such as ‘Europe’ with ‘idea’, sounds odd at a time when, despite the active integration of the European nations into a unified economic and political zone, intellectual vitality seems to have migrated elsewhere. The coupling of the two words thus appears questionable for reasons of cultural and historical dynamics. But apart from these reasons, to identify Europe as an absolute idea has also been challenged on moral and political grounds. Gérard Granel, in his controversial preface to his 1976 translation of The Crisis, calls Husserl’s conception of Europe ‘completely outdated’, describing it as an ‘ancient scene of an ancient theater’. Although he recognises Husserl’s courage, particularly in the Vienna Lecture, in standing up to Nazi barbarism, Granel nonetheless questions how Husserl’s philosophy bears upon the historical context in question, and finds it morally reprehensible that the sole solution it offers for putting an end to the rise of fascism and the crisis of humanity is to invoke the idea of Europe, and the concomitant notion of the ‘“self-responsibility” of humanity’. Husserl’s attempt, in The Crisis, to ‘reawaken (and accomplish once and for all) under the form of absolute transcendental phenomenological philosophy the reason that is immanent in man and which defines his humanity’, thus shows itself, Granel concludes, as ‘the purest example of Western “theoretical” paranoia’.1 But even though he holds morality and politics to be more important than philosophy, 116

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Granel also objects to Husserl’s definition of Europe as an absolute idea on purely philosophical grounds. His objections are most evident in a lecture entitled ‘L’Europe de Husserl’, presented in 1987 in Lima on the occasion of a Franco-Peruvian philosophy colloquium, where he references Marx, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in order to criticise Husserl’s characterisation of Europe as a spiritual figure, or absolute idea. Granel suggests that Husserl may have projected upon the Greek conception of science an ideal of science that is essentially of modern origin. More importantly, he holds that because of the rise of the United States and its American ideology to world hegemony, every aspect which comprises the concept of Europe as an absolute idea, and which, according to Husserl, must be traced back to the Greek conception of a rational science, has lost all possible pertinence – including the idea that the sciences unfold according to a logic specific and internal to themselves, as well as the Greek model of political existence. Marx and Heidegger are invoked in order to argue that in the present the Greek model of political existence has been entirely replaced by a life at the service of capitalist production. Wittgenstein and Desanti serve Granel to explain that the sciences are no longer in need of justification and have become autonomous such that they can do entirely without philosophy. Furthermore, they no longer obey the logic of unitary development. Concluding his demonstration of Husserl’s completely obsolete conception of the ‘absolute idea’ of Europe, Granel exclaims: ‘American end of “Europe”. Metaphysico-scientist end of logicity. Total extinction, at the horizon of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the Greek days still reverberated.’2 If the concept of ‘Europe’ as a spiritual figure, or absolute idea, is passé and if this conception no longer has leverage nowadays, why bother taking up this notion at all? If, indeed, to suggest an ideational content to the notion of Europe is the outrageous expression of Europe’s arrogant self-representation, is one not contributing to Europe’s self-delusion if one is to take up this issue, even if only to criticise it, at a time when the complete obsolescence of this idea is plain to all? Or could it be that when it comes to dealing with the notion of Europe, things are even more complex, intricate, if not perverse? Granel, in foreseeing the ‘total extinction, at the horizon of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the Greek days still reverberated’, claims to take note of a fact. But significantly enough, this statement also mourns the disappearance from our horizon of the light that still reflected Greek clarity! Why such mourning? Since we


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may certainly exclude nostalgia in Granel’s case given that he views the disappearance of Europe as an entirely positive event, what reason could make such mourning inevitable? Could it be that without the clarity of the Greek day, even when it is said to have completely faded, it is impossible to notice the alleged extinction of the light at our horizon to begin with? Could it not be that without such clarity, it is not even possible to make others see that the light has faded from our horizon? Before continuing such questioning, let me briefly recall how Husserl conceives of the idea of Europe. This idea, which is said to originate in Greece and which unifies European history, is not something given positively to Europe but rather constitutes a task to be accomplished. In essence, it is the idea of a universal rational science. Considering the current suspicion that the concept of anything ‘universal’ would be a hegemonic, abstract idea oblivious of difference, whose role is one of dominion, I will sketch out in some very broad strokes what is meant by ‘universal science’, bringing out in relief some of the implications that come with this notion.3 The idea of a universal science – not in the modern, but in the Greek sense, that is, as philosophy from which the various sciences have branched out – marks a break not only with the pre-scientific world of myth, but also with everything of the order of regional traditionalisms, customs, beliefs and even linguistic idioms.4 Husserl, therefore, can contend that this science is an expression of ‘humanity struggling to understand itself’.5 With this, one beholds the first reason why such an idea is universal: it reaches out towards what unifies the whole of what is. However, to appreciate the specific sense in which ‘universal’ is to be taken here, it must be distinguished from the unmistakably universalist aspirations of the world-views, and conceptions of the human and the divine, in pre-Platonic Greece, or other civilisations, for that matter. Husserl, for one, clearly recognises a ‘world-encompassing interest’ in ‘Indian, Chinese, and similar “philosophies”’, and notes that this interest has led to a universal knowledge of the world. But, according to Husserl, the universal direction of interest is fundamentally different in Greek philosophy. He argues that the theoretical attitude that emerges in Greece not only reaches towards that which beyond all particularities in the natural and human world unifies the manifold, but is also an attitude that rather than being merely theoretical, takes shape as a practical attitude, that is, as a ‘vocation-like life-interest’, and commands life in terms of what is universal.6 To the extent that this philosophical


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science aims at freeing itself from all particularities, it conceives of a philosophising subject who transcends the specificities of nation, race or culture. It consequently implies as well the positing (and minimal recognition) of the human ‘other’ as an ‘other’ notwithstanding differences. Thus, a second dimension of this science’s universality comes to light. A science that makes universal claims is a science that is structurally open towards the other. When science turns to the other, the other is torn from the obscurity of anonymity, or from his or her state of foreignness. A science that is universal thus inscribes within itself an essential responsiveness, and thus responsibility, to the other. To call the object of the idea in question a science in the sense of a philosophical science, suggests, in addition, that ‘science’ is the idea of a mental disposition, or cognitive paradigm, that is conscious, or aware of itself as an interpretation of the world, and distinct from myth. With this the third, and especially crucial, sense in which this science is said to be universal, shows itself. This form of science’s self-consciousness as a science, as an interpretation of the world, requires it to sustain, ground and justify any claims it makes. The idea at the heart of Europe is the idea of a mental or ‘cognitive’ paradigm (in a very broad sense) that imposes on itself the burden to justify itself, in short, to identify itself on the basis of criteria and minimal rules of argumentation that can be held to be universally shareable. The very mode of exposition, that is, the argumentative, or discursive nature of this science, is an intrinsic part of its universality. It is a science that attends to its responsibility to the other by seeking to be accountable for any of the propositions it may advance. Even without further elaborating on the universality of this science, or philosophy, it should be clear that this idea cannot be relinquished easily, or only at a very high cost – tribalism, the denial of all humanity to the other, and the abandonment of any obligation to account for one’s words and deeds. Still, to point out that to part with the exigency of universality is to condone the worst, does not imply that this exigency is without problems, and does not exclude the possibility that, ultimately, it may need to be rethought. What is true of universality is true of Europe as an idea. As the idea of a rational science, a life of reason, and public responsibility, it cannot be surrendered in the blink of eye. From what I have sketched out so far, it should also be evident that if such a surrender is to be argumentative, and hence subject to a method and rules that any other could comprehend, it presupposes the very rationality that it seeks to overthrow. Evidently, all partial questioning of the conception


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of Europe discussed earlier (and thus of philosophy, or universality) is destined to fail since inevitably it makes use of rationality as it has been defined by this conception. By critically opposing this or that theme that is woven into the idea of Europe – the theme, for instance, of mankind’s self-responsibility, or of a rational and universal science – and be it in the name of the exalted theme of the Other of Europe, one remains tributary to the idea in question as a whole. But is it possible to challenge the whole concept in any judicious way? This can certainly not be achieved by having recourse to any of the historical variations on the basic tenets of the idea of Europe, for example, using a certain Marx, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, in whose names Granel thought to challenge Husserl. Nor can it be accomplished by making an about-face toward the non-Western, the Oriental, the absolutely Other, primitive, or irrational. For by turning to the other of Europe on the basis of preprogrammed oppositional patterns such as the non-Western, one remains indebted to what one turns away from (the Western), and performs a turn towards the irrational, in short, toward the rational in the shape of the other of the rational. If, furthermore, such a turn away from ‘Europe’ seeks universal assent, it yields again to what is specifically a European idea. As Nancy has noted, ‘all confrontation of other ways of looking than that of Europe, or of other ways of looking at Europe itself, must face this particular fact, namely that the “universal” as such, its category or point of view, is of European extraction’.7 In order to present, assert and justify themselves, all ways of looking other than the European gaze remain inextricably bound to the rationality by means of which such presentation, assertion, or claims can be made in a way that, in principle at least, could be intelligible to all. At this point it may be useful to distinguish between these contestations of Western thought which either substitute one formulation of Western philosophy for another, or invert this conception as a whole along with differences and oppositions laid out by this conception itself, from what I would like to call rewritings (I do not say reconceptions) of Western thought. These latter attempts do not seek to abandon Western thought’s universalist bent. Rather, they inquire into the structural limits that inhabit the unrelinquishable idea of universality. They seek the enabling limits whence universality comes into being, understanding that these limits also inscribe a certain finitude into it. Undoubtedly, there is today a deep malaise and discontent about everything Western, about a thinking and looking named ‘European’.


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To the cosmological, biological and psychological blows to human self-love that Freud distinguished, a new blow has been added. It is the deep-seated disillusionment with philosophical thought, and its universalist thrust.8 As said before, the attempts made to step outside the conception of Western thought by continuing to rely on what precisely they seek to escape – argumentative rationality and preprogrammed operating systems – are, undoubtedly, clear failures, which, rather than overthrowing Western thinking, continue to pay homage to it. And yet they are also unmistakably symptoms of a malaise with philosophical thought. But it remains that this malaise is also a symptom of misunderstanding. And hence attempts to overcome Western philosophical thought are heavy-handed, and fall short of their goal. In fact, these attempts constitute the malaise itself, and are symptoms of an inability to command the resources of the philosophical for a radical interrogation and rewriting of philosophy’s legitimate demands. To all the reasons I have pointed out that make these attempts to exit from Western thought unsuccessful, I need to add another, more formidable one. This concerns the category of the step outside, and of a farewell altogether to Western thought. Deeply rooted in the Platonic myth of the cave, the figure of the step outside is intimately linked to the thought of universality itself. Indeed, it is the opening gesture toward truth and universality. The very goal of reaching beyond Western thought is thus still dependent on the resources of Western thought itself. Distinct from these efforts to overturn Western thought, however, are those rewritings of philosophy, or of ‘Europe’, that articulate a new and singular experience, or feeling, of what philosophy or ‘Europe’ implies. Beyond the alternative of either full acceptance or total rejection of the idea of ‘Europe’, beyond the urge either to shore this idea up or set off to altogether new shores, are those writings on Europe and the idea of universality by contemporary thinkers who, by tapping unactualised resources of the concept of Europe, proceed to rethink this concept’s internal relation to the non-European. In addition, these writings are also attempts to open Europe up to the other in general, and, more precisely, to an otherness not yet constituted, or precalculated in terms of existing difference – an otherness to come. I am thinking, of course, of Derrida’s The Other Heading, and Nancy’s ‘Euryopa’, among others.9 However, these texts will not be on my agenda here. Rather, I will be interested in drawing out further implications that come with the idea of Europe, less obvious perhaps than those of rationality,


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universality, responsibility, but no less essential, as we will see, for a debate intent on reconfiguring the idea of Europe. Heidegger has been the first in the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Husserl to reinterpret the latter’s conception of Europe. Whereas Husserl identifies ‘Europe’ with a theoretical attitude (and philosophy as episteme) inseparably bound up with a life-interest in raising mankind above all its particularities to the higher state of humanity as such, Heidegger conceives of philosophy, and ‘Europe’, as a being attuned to being, that is, in terms of a state of mind, still pre-theoretical, and more akin to the pragmatic, as some have it, world of Dasein. A second major rearticulation within phenomenological thought of the idea of Europe takes place in the work of Jan Patocka. I will be concerned hereafter with his reworking of that idea. Patocka’s Plato and Europe is a series of lectures, delivered in the context of a private seminar in Prague in 1973 (which preceded the writing of Heretical Essays), whose aim is to inquire into whether the European heritage contains something that could also work for mankind east of Europe, as well as for those who come after Europe, after its decline. The central argument of these lectures is that the ‘tendance of, or care for, the soul is the central theme around which the project of life in Europe crystallises’.10 Since Patocka’s interpretation of this motif from Plato’s aporetic dialogues is very much tied to his own understanding of phenomenology, I need to linger for a moment on what sets his thought apart from Husserl.11 Undoubtedly, Patocka subscribes to Husserlian phenomenology as a science of the phenomenon as phenomenon, and of the essence of appearing, as a science in search of the fundamental structures of possibility that determine the way things show themselves. But the world is not only made up of phenomenal structures alone, Patocka argues. There are also ‘things’ that show themselves. Husserlian ‘phenomenology, the science of the phenomenon as such, does not show us the things, but [only] the mode of donation of things’.12 Distinct from the nonobjective structures of phenomenality, there are thus the structures of the things themselves, as well as of those beings to whom they show themselves, the human beings. By centring on how things, and especially human beings, are codetermined by the structures of manifestation, and by inquiring into the relations between phenomenon and being (or beings), Patocka wishes to draw attention to the metaphysical consequences of the phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon qua phenomenon. In contrast to Husserlian


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phenomenological analysis, Patocka’s approach lays claim, therefore, to being ‘already a certain phenomenological philosophy’.13 For the Czech philosopher, the Husserlian systematic exploration of the phenomenon qua phenomenon, that is, of appearing as such, is only the most radical continuation of philosophy’s discovery, continuing from its inception in Greece, that being as a whole, or the world, is manifest to the human in its totality. Yet for the Greeks, the appearing of being, as totality, to the human being implies that appearing is the privilege of the human being. It is his destiny since it is destined to him, but also because he can choose to encounter or refuse the encounter with what shows itself to him. If this is so, then this privilege may also bring with it an obligation, the obligation to embrace what shows itself – appearing, clarity in the world, the phenomenon as such. However, once embraced by the human being, the non-real aspect of the universe, appearing as such, becomes real, and acquires effective actuality.14 It becomes real in the shape of what Plato calls ‘the tendance of, or care for the soul’ (tes psyches epimeleisthai). Admittedly, Patocka’s phenomenological philosophy is a metaphysics, for it subordinates and brings to bear the phenomenological analysis of the structures of appearing as such upon the being to whom appearing is destined. As I mentioned already, the idea of a care for the soul, is, according to Patocka, the unique core of the heritage bequeathed upon Europe by the Greeks. The soul is what properly distinguishes the human being; that precise instance in us to which the totality of being shows itself, hence becoming phenomenon. Patocka writes: The soul is that to which things show themselves in what they are. They show that they are, and what they are. Our innermost being can show itself to us if the summoning that is contained in this situation becomes for us at the same time an incitement to revealing our own essence, our own being in what is its peculiar nature, to us.15 Indeed, as the sole addressee of the phenomenon, the innermost, or principial, possibility of the human being as human being, a possibility that presents itself precisely by the fact that being manifests itself in totality to him, depends on his response to manifestation as such, and on assuming responsibility for and to it. If Greek philosophy has become the foundation of European life it is because it derives, as Patocka ascertains, ‘a project of life from this situation’.16 He writes:


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The Greek idea suggests that because of this originary situation [i.e. that things appear to man] there are several possibilities that offer themselves to the human being. In this situation, precisely, man must prove himself. He must show himself to be a being who really turns the phenomenon, that is to say, clarity, truth, into the law of his life, and, consequently, of the entirety of the domain accessible to him. The human being is, or at least is in certain circumstances, capable of turning the human world into a world of truth and justice.17 As Patocka stresses, such a thing is possible only on the condition, of course, that we make clarity, the phenomenon as such, the phenomenalisation of the world, this bringing to light, into the program of all of human life. On condition that everything comes to us of this vision, of the intuition in the sense of the glance into what is! To always act in thinking as well as in practice with clarity.18 Because of the originary situation that makes the human being the addressee of the manifestation of the world in its totality, the human being has the possibility ‘to realise himself as a being of truth, as a being of the phenomenon’.19 ‘How to achieve this, this is precisely the object of the care of, or tendance for, the soul.’20 And this concept has, as Patocka contends, ‘given birth not only to Greek philosophy in the classical age, but also to Europe, to our history’.21 From what we have seen so far, it should be evident that the manifestedness of being, the phenomenon, or appearing as such, of which the human being, or the soul that, for the Greeks, defines the human being in essence, becomes aware, and by which it is summoned to respond, corresponds to the realisation in wonder that it is in light, in the clarity of the day, that things show themselves to us. With this realisation Greek philosophical thought comes into being and departs from myth. Patocka remarks: In myth there is no wonder, myth is not struck with amazement. Myth knows everything in advance. Wonder is characteristic of philosophy, wonder not at individual realities, but at this originary reality. This clarity is the clarity concerning the fact that things are there, that the manifest realities are in the world before our eyes.22 Insofar as the Greek heritage that makes up the idea of Europe is tied to the idea of the care for the soul, the concept of Europe is thus connected, even synonymous, with a concern with light, clarity, lucidity, limpidity. This concern with clarity translates into the


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practical demand of a life from which all obscurity is banned, a life of transparency, a life of truth. At this point I would like to quote a lengthy passage from C.M. Bowra’s The Greek Experience. While explaining the various reasons that have contributed to making Greece a unique civilisation, particularly the fact that its people were ethnically mixed, and that each of their city states maintained distinct local traditions, Bowra also comes to speak about ‘the influence which the Greek scene had on the eye and the Greek mind’. After evoking the commanding beauty that forces itself slowly and unforgettably on the traveller who approaches Greece from the North or the West, he writes: What matters above all is the quality of the light. Not only in the cloudless days of summer but even in winter the light is unlike that of any other European country, brighter, cleaner, and stronger. It sharpens the edges of the mountains against the sky, as they rise from valleys or sea; it gives an ever-changing design to the folds and hollows as the shadows shift on or off them; it turns the sea to opal at dawn, to sapphire at midday, and in the succession to gold, silver, and lead before nightfall; it outlines the dark green of the olive-trees in contrast to the rusty or ochre soil; it starts innumerable variations of color and shape in unhewn rock and hewn stonework. The beauty of the Greek landscape depends primarily on the light, and this had a powerful influence on the Greek vision of the world. Just because by its very strength and sharpening the light forbids the shifting, melting, diaphanous effect which give so delicate a charm to the French or the Italian scene, it stimulates a vision which belongs to the sculptor more than the painter, which depends not so much on an intricate combination or contrast of colors passing into each other as on a clearness of outline and a sense of mass, of bodies emphatically placed in space, of strength and solidity behind natural curves and protuberances. Such a landscape and such a light impose their secret discipline on the eye, and make it see things in contour and relief rather than in mysterious perspective or in flat spatial relations. They explain why the Greeks produced great sculptors and architects, and why even in their painting the foundation of any design is the exact and confident line. Nor is it perhaps fanciful to think that the Greek light played a part in the formation of Greek thought. Just as the cloudy skies of northern Europe have nursed the huge, amorphous progeny of Norse mythology or German metaphysics, so the Greek light surely influenced the clear-cut conceptions of Greek philosophy. If the Greeks were the world’s first true philosophers in that they formed a consistent and straightforward vocabulary for abstract ideas, it was largely because their minds, like their eyes, sought naturally what is lucid and well defined. Their senses were kept lively by the force of the light ... Just as Plato, in his search


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for transcendental principles behind the mass of phenomena tended to see them as individual objects and compared his central principle to the sun which illuminates all things in the visible world and reveals their shapes and colors, so no Greek philosophy is happy until it can pin down an idea with a limpid definition and make its outline firm and intelligible. That the Greeks were moved by some such consideration may be seen from their use of the words eidos and idea to mean ‘notion’ or ‘idea’. Originally they meant no more than ‘form’.23 The passage quoted from Bowra clearly resonates with the tradition according to which the distinctive clarity of Greek light is the birthplace of Western philosophy. The topos of the light, and its relation to the peculiar civilisation of ancient Greece, especially to Greek philosophy, pervades Western philosophical reflection at least from the eighteenth century to the present. From the heliotropic pull of ancient Greece expressed in Hölderlin’s ‘In lovely blueness...’, to Heidegger’s evocation, in his address to the Academy of the Sciences and the Arts in Athens, of the ‘unique’ and ‘strange’ light of Hellas, the light of Greece is understood not only to enjoy a very special brightness, but is associated with the origin of a culture of clarity that itself has stood as a model for Europe.24 Upon his return from his voyage to Greece Heidegger comes back to the question of ‘the enigma of the much-mentioned light of Greece’ of which he spoke in his address. He writes to Erhart Kästner: ‘This sea, these mountains, these islands, this sky – that here and only here a-letheia could open up, and that the gods could, or had to, settle in its sheltering light; that here Being as presencing occurred and founded human dwelling; this is today more amazing, and more unthinkable (unausdenkbar) to me than before.’25 I cannot presently take up the issue of philosophical geography itself, in which the features of the landscape are eloquently described in terms borrowed from the conceptual implements of the type of thinking that these geographical features are supposed to explain, and which is only further testimony to the primacy of the light of the philosophical over the geography that is believed to influence it. Rather, I present this passage to highlight the concern with clarity which characterises the thought of Western philosophy – a concern central to the type of thought that from Hegel to Heidegger is consistently said to have dawned in Greece. It is a mode of thinking that relies on sight and on the discipline of the eye, that is to say, on a vision that submits itself to a disciplinary rigour equal in sharpness to that which presents itself within clear, distinct outlines in a light so strong as to prevent any blending of forms. This


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clarity and precision permeates as well conceptuality, and rules for defining terms, not to mention Greek language, as Bowra asserts, whose ‘elaborate syntax is a testimony to [the Greeks’] desire to say things shortly and directly without circumlocution or ambiguity’, but which the Greek thinkers, significantly enough, did not hesitate to bend and manipulate, in short, to de-idiomatise, whenever clarity was needed.26 As we have seen, this clarity is not limited to the theoretical, but as our elaborations on Patocka have evidenced, it also bears on the practical, and does so even in a privileged fashion. The Platonic notion of a tendance or care for the soul, which spells out a life project for which clarity is the determining law, serves Patocka to make the point against Husserl (although as the first chapters of The Crisis demonstrate, and even more so ‘The Vienna Lecture’, he also acknowledges a practical dimension of the Greek heritage), that what constitutes the idea of Europe pertains to a life project that is not primarily theoretical. According to the Husserl of The Crisis and the Vienna Lecture, the absolute idea of ‘Europe’ is the rational idea of a universal science, and of a form of existence that takes its rule from pure reason. Certainly, clarity is intimately and essentially tied up with the idea of reason. Still, to conceive of the guiding idea of European thought, in terms of clarity, rather than of reason, could have the strategic advantage of forestalling the dominant prejudice against ‘reason’ as the common substrate of humanity, and the instance of universal appeal. How can one object to the demand to be clear and lucid, except in the name of obscurantism? But by privileging clarity as the essential demand of Greek philosophy, Patocka seeks in fact to shift emphasis from the theoretical to the practical, a practical in which the bios politicos is no longer subservient to the bios theoreticos as is the case with Greek thinkers, even including Aristotle. More precisely, to highlight clarity means to recognise a responsibility in terms of life that derives from the fact that the human is the sole addressee of appearing, the phenomenon, or manifestation. To tend to the soul is not done merely for the sake of clarity, but for the sake of justice. This practical framing of clarity as the essential component of the idea of Europe by Patocka must remain present to us, as we now question whether the universal request for clarity is problematic, and whether the idea of Europe can be dispensed with inasmuch as it is the incarnation of such a request. As I suggested before, to name ‘reason’ the few things that humanity, or rather the various humanities, share, has lost some of its credibility. Light, and its demand for clarity and lucidity, seems


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to be more difficult to do away with, even though, after all, it is the same as reason. As Derrida has noted in his response to Levinas, ‘it is difficult to maintain a philosophical discourse against light’.27 It needs now to be pointed out that after having asserted the primacy of light and the aspiration towards clarity over its opposites as the defining character of philosophy, Patocka remarks: ‘Philosophy wishes clarity, a clarity as radical as possible, but this clarity causes it to see the limits of clarity and the fact that the human being lives in an equivocation, in a specific polarity.’28 If light and clarity have limits, it is because light and clarity have the distinctive power to bring these limits to light. Within light itself certain strictures of light come into visibility. A reference in Plato and Europe to Eugen Fink’s Metaphysik der Erziehung im Weltverständnis von Plato und Aristoteles suggests that Patocka’s recognition of the limits of clarity that become visible within light itself owes some debt to Fink’s work. Patocka refers to Fink when he writes that Plato has been qualified as the philosopher of radical clarity. It is said that in him, ultimately, all obscurity disappears, and that what is important is the sun whose light shines forth in order to penetrate the continuously increasing darkness. But obscurity remains present, the cave does not cease to exist.29 Before formulating the specific point Fink wishes to make in the above-mentioned work, it is necessary to recall that Fink holds that with Plato, an interpretation of the world that seeks to conceive of the universe in a fundamental manner from the mundane moment of the ‘sky’ becomes victorious for two millennia. ‘Sky’ signifies the gathered appearing of the many things into a space of light. Sky is the luminously opened ‘open’ of an all encompassing clarity. Within it, the individual things show themselves. Within this clarity they have their appearance and outline, a character and a figure.30 Taking its clues from the mundane phenomenon of light, and from the distinctions and articulations grounded in this phenomenon, the Platonic-Aristotelian interpretation of being dominated for many centuries the Western conception of being, and in the same breath, the field of philosophy. Fink writes: Light makes appearing, shining possible. It brings clarity and brightness. It puts into relief, and brings out figures, sights, within the sharp edges of their characters. Light accentuates the limits of individual things, gives them independence and a fixed self-standing. But light also illuminates the interconnections between


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things, and the field in which they exist together; it shows the interconnected foundation from which they emerge, the ground that they cover and cover over, but to which they nonetheless belong ... Light ‘sets apart’ and gathers the sharply and clearly separated within its encompassing brightness.31 This conception of light which achieves world-historical ascendance with Plato and Aristotle, and on which, as Fink demonstrates, the Western model of education and the very notion of politics rest, is a conception intent on radically breaking with the tragic vision of the world. But as Fink argues, the victory of philosophical, or metaphysical, thought, as a thinking that proceeds from light, and in the name of clarity, rests on a hypostatisation of one singular mundane moment. All the conceptual tools that metaphysics uses to transcend the realm of phenomena, are taken from this one mundane moment.32 From the outset, metaphysics is thus rooted in ‘a onesided fundamental decision by which one moment of the world is rendered absolute, as it were’.33 As Fink remarks: ‘The one mundane moment of light, of reason, of individuation is the sole one that thinking takes into consideration.’34 By ‘overemphasising and exaggerating the moment of light’,35 the Platonic vision of the world is thus ‘cosmically onesided’.36 Having described the one-sidedness of light, Fink gestures suggestively towards the need to put into question the central world model of ‘lighting’, to search it for implications, to monitor it for hidden presuppositions, to recognise the interlockedness of the medium of light with other elementary media, and to contest onesided interpretations that have achieved for centuries undisputed domination.37 But the persistent (yet by no means sole38) objection that Fink expands on in this critique of the metaphysics of light, of the world model of ‘lighting’ by means of which nascent philosophy overcomes the tragic vision, is that it no longer seeks to think ‘the night from which we all originate and into which we all sink back – from which all things arise and in which they return again, this night of Pan, of the one indivisible foundation of being which undergirds all individuation, and sustains it’.39 Against the one-sidedness of the mundane moment of light, Fink recalls the tragic insight that ‘all rising into clarity comes from a figureless motherly night where all is one’.40 His critique of the model of intelligibility peculiar to Western metaphysics amounts to recalling the truth of the tragic


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world vision, the vision of an originary polemos of day and night, light and darkness. Yet, is it sufficient, or rather, is it possible, to counter the metaphysics of light by speaking of light as a moment, and thus, accuse it of onesidedness? Can the metaphysics of light be put into question in the name of another mundane moment, the night, especially if the latter is conceived as the opposite of light? As Derrida has observed, ‘light has perhaps no opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night’.41 Indeed, if it is so difficult to mount a discourse against light, is it not because everything that could be objected, or opposed to it, becomes visible within, and is conceivable only from, the lighting. The limits of light can only come from light, and become clear, in light itself, or with respect to light, that is, still in light. But if this is true, light is not a moment against which other moments could be opposed. Rather, it is the medium in which opposites come to make their stand. Fink, at one point, comes close to recognising this. In the context of a discussion of the parable of the sun in the sixth book of the Politeia, he remarks that light is the realm which is home both to the real things and their unreal reflective images, and shadows – a realm which harbours, therefore, also the very distinction between what is real and what is only a shadow, or a simulacrum. Fink writes: The realm of light is in itself already separated into the real and that which is of the order of the shadows. The correspondence at home in the realm of light between reality and the order of shadows becomes [for Plato in the context of the Politeia] the model that serves to characterise the relation of the illumined realm of the visible things to the dimension of the pure powers of being, the ‘ideas’, and finally to that which is in an eminent way, the agathon. That is to say, this thought takes off from the phenomenon of shadowing and reflection present in light in order to explain the whole sphere of light with all the socalled ‘real’ things, including their shadows that are within it, as, on the whole, a shadow of a lesser being compared to a more authentic being. The models and categories that serve to devalue the sphere of light are thus taken from this same sphere; it provides the conceptual means to ontologically condemn itself, as it were.42 This passage on the Platonic problematic of the good epekeina tes ousias would, of course, require a lengthy commentary. I must content myself with pointing out that rather than radically putting light into question, the limits of light that become visible in the sphere of light lead us to the conception of a light of a higher order than mundane light. The devaluation of light that occurs in the parable by way of


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a schema borrowed from the sphere of light itself, concerns only sensible light, and takes place in view of the agathon, the source of all good, intelligible light. The thought of the epekeina tes ousias complicates the metaphysics of light for it gestures towards a kind of shining forth and an opening that is no longer of the order of light in either a literal or a metaphorical sense, a shining forth in which light and its others become meaningful to begin with. To quote Derrida again, the agathon is ‘the light of light beyond light’.43 Compared to the intelligible light, the sensible sun is only the shadow of the agathon. This devaluation – which is also a form of making intelligible since, qua shadow, the sensible light is given a determined meaning from, and in view of, the source of intelligibility – takes place by applying the intramundane distinction between light and shadow to the difference between the sensible and the intelligible. This is thus a distinction that becomes visible, and meaningful, only within the intelligible light. As a consequence, the shadow, and the whole illumined realm of the sensible world, cannot be turned against the realm of the light of intelligibility. The possibility of invoking other moments as the very limits of light is one that thus originates only within mundane light. If this possibility depreciates the sphere of sensible light it is only to better highlight intelligible light. Therefore, by turning to other moments of light, moments that stand in a relation of opposition to it such as the shadow, or the night, Fink’s attempt to unseat the ‘one-sidedness’ of light, that is, of that on which Greek, and subsequently European, thought set all its hopes for overcoming myth and the tragic vision, must necessarily fail. But as we have seen, Fink also conceives of the moment of the night which he opposes to that of light as the night of Pan, or the motherly night from which everything originates only to return to it again. The night is thus thought of here as the womb of light itself. Rather than setting limits to the one-sidedness of mundane light, the night of origination and subsequent destruction to which Fink resorts is meant to counter the primacy of Plato’s intelligible light. The pre-Socratic tragic world-view is thus thought to set boundaries to the domination that light has enjoyed since the inauguration of Greek philosophical thought. But does not the very attempt to reinscribe light into the night draw on the intelligibility that only light can provide? Does not the thought that light returns into darkness as into its motherly womb continue to conceive of light as a moment, and hence, as sensible light? If this is the case, the Platonic light remains untouched. And the very meaningfulness


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of the limitation of light by the night of Pan remains dependent on light as the realm of intelligibility. Yet, if light cannot be confronted with the night to limit its onesidedness because nothing can be opposed to it, and in particular nothing that appears within its luminous opening, and if furthermore, its intelligibility cannot be challenged by recourse to the tragic vision, this does not mean that the indisputable superiority of light over darkness would not imply complication. But if it should prove possible and necessary to relate the principle at the core of Western thought, and the idea of ‘Europe’, to a certain darkness, in no way is this to be taken as a return to tragic vision. Such a return is to be avoided at all cost. The fundamental decision by which philosophy and the principle of light come into being, a decision against tragic vision, cannot be overturned, or rescinded, except at the price of the greatest violence. What can and must be demanded, however, is that the principle of light open itself up to a reflection upon what Fink has called for, namely, the implications, hidden presuppositions, and the essential interlockedness of the medium of light with other elementary media. The task that must no longer be avoided consists in spelling out the unthematised structural implications that are inextricably linked up with the concept of light. To inquire into these structural implications of the principle of light is not to do away with it. It is to reconfigure it, or rather, to use a Derridean term, to reinscribe it. The very possibility that the limits of sensible light come into sight in light itself does not only depreciate sensible light in favour of intelligible light. The possibility in question indicates that the shining forth of light and its subsequent limitation by shadows and darkness presupposes the opening of a more originary Open in which both illumination and darkening can occur. As Heidegger remarks, light is capable of illuminating what is present only if what is present has already unfolded into an open and a free region in which it can spread out. This openness becomes illuminated by light, but it does in no way bring it about, or form it. For even darkness requires this openness without which we could not cross or traverse it.44 With this, thinking faces a limit of light that cannot become visible in light itself, an irreducible limit to light, because it is one from which it shines forth. It is a limit to intelligibility as well, since without this limit the process of making intelligible could not even begin. Taking


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up the question of the enigma of the much-mentioned Greek light, Heidegger writes that its mystery rests in the unconcealedness, in the dis-closure that holds sway within it. This dis-closure belongs to concealedness, and conceals itself, but in such a manner that by way of this withdrawal it surrenders to things their stay [in the Open], a stay which comes into appearance from limitation.45 There is thus a limit to light and to its intelligibility that is a limit in a double sense, for it enables and at the same time sets an end point to light. Any attempt to pursue the question raised by Patocka concerning the limits of clarity constitutive of philosophy, and, by extension, of the idea of Europe, needs to take as its starting point Heidegger’s meditation on the constituting dependence of light upon the unconcealing openness that withdraws again into concealedness. But to conceive of the limit of light in terms of the origin of light and its end point is to conceive of only one of many sides of such a limit. However, the meaning of ‘limit’ as beginnings and end points does not provide just any limitation. Whereas the phenomenological reflection on the idea of Europe has always sought to counter deep European crises in which Europe appeared to sense its own ending, Granel, a thinker deeply indebted to phenomenology, declares such a reflection to be worn out, given that Europe has come to a final end with the ‘total extinction, at the horizon of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the Greek days still reverberated’. Indeed, all of phenomenological discourse about Europe is intrinsically tied up with the conception of an end. If this is so, it is, first and foremost, because the idea of Europe is bound up with the idea of light, clarity and lucidity. As the idea of light, Europe signifies the end of obscurity. It is therefore also necessarily haunted by the spectre of an end of light. For this reason, it would seem that it is impossible to extricate all reflection about Europe from the concern with finality. In fact, to do so would mean to have given up all concern with light and clarity from the start. Yet if it is not possible to gesture towards ends when speaking about the idea of light, all ends are therefore not equal. They can, and do, represent diverse desires, and stand for various agendas, among others, agendas that actively take an interest in extinguishing light. Faced with these desires and agendas, and having to acknowledge the ineradicable inscription of an orientation towards an end in the discourse about light and clarity, it needs to be emphasised that only the desire to end in clarity can decide upon the ends, or limits, of light. After having


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recalled that it is in the name of an Aufklärung that Kant undertakes to demystify an overlordly tone in philosophy, Derrida writes, in his ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’: We cannot and we must not – this is a law and a destiny – forego the Aufklärung, in other words, what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself and with it everything that speculates on vision, the imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, the last judgement. Thus each time, we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the subject, of consciousness, of history, of the West.46 To inquire into the limits of clarity, that is, to the idea bound up with the concept of Europe, cannot possibly mean to seek to bring clarity to an end in the sense of terminating the demand for transparency. Curtailing this demand would open the doors to the worst, to a violence so much greater than the violence that inevitably comes with the demand for transparency, and the request to account for one’s claims and deeds. If the limits of light are to be brought to light, it is in order to infinitely resist what in light itself may be accomplice to the worst. Indeed, blindness towards the limits of lucidity makes light side with the forces that seek its termination. The bounds of light are thus to be taken on in view of the never ending task of securing, and of increasing, clarity. Indeed, if light has limits light is not a given. It is not given once and for all. To inquire into the boundaries of light, where light comes to an end, is to seek out the limits from which it can shine forth, from which light thus becomes visible as an infinite task. To consider the end of light means, therefore, also to seek out in light that which, precisely, incites us to work in light of light. By thinking the limits of light, thinking thus assumes the infinite responsibility of making light shine forth from those limits, be they the invisible limits due to the Open presupposed by light, or those that become only manifest in the illuminated realm of what is present. NOTES 1. Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénomenologie transcendentale, trans. Gérard Granel (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. v–vii.


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2. Gérard Granel, ‘L’Europe de Husserl’, in Écrits logiques et politiques (Paris: Galilée, 1990), p. 55. 3. A more comprehensive analysis of the components implied at various times in the concept of universal rational science will be given in a forthcoming book-length study on the notion of Europe. 4. As is evident at least from the Logical Investigations, language for Husserl is essentially language in its logical use. Heidegger’s elaborations on Greek language, in What is Philosophy?, for example, show that it is not a language like others. It is non-idiomatic. Greek is a language that transcends its own idiomaticity. Indeed, have not many of the Greek words become philosophical concepts, and have they not remained so throughout the centuries? If deconstruction can be characterised as an attempt to both capitalise on the semantic and syntactical potential of singular idioms while writing at the same time against them, in its own complex way, it continues this concern with a language that would be universal. 5. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 14. 6. Husserl, Crisis, p. 280. See also pp. 283–4. 7. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Euryopa: Le regard au loin’, in Contributions, a prepublication (in French and German) of the proceedings of a conference at the University of Leipzig (11–14 May 1994) on ‘La philosophie européenne de la culture et le projet “Logos” de 1910’, p. 7. 8. This malaise with philosophical thought brings to a conclusion the retreat of philosophy in the face of the natural sciences, and of those human sciences that have acceded to a level of scientificity. Limiting itself to the secondary role of critically assessing the achievements of the sciences in the name of meaning, values, ethics, and so forth, philosophy has self-destructed. It has become a cultural commodity like any other. More fundamentally, philosophy itself has turned its constituting idea of universality into a norm, or value, where it has not simply relinquished it. However, as a norm, or value, universality invites disbelief, or at least, a profound unease. 9. For a detailed discussion of the essay by Nancy, and Derrida’s The Other Heading, see my ‘Alongside the Horizon’, in D. Sheppard et al. (eds), The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp.140–56, and ‘Feeling the Debt: On Europe’, in K. Ziarek (ed.), Future Crossings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000). 10. Jan Patocka, Platon et l’Europe: Séminaire privé du semestre d’été 1973, trans. E. Abrams (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1983), pp. 19 and 23. 11. To Heidegger, Patocka objects that ‘the problem of manifestation is deeper, more fundamental, more originary than the problem of being. Simply because I can arrive at the problem of being only by way of the problem of manifestation.’ Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 177. 12. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 39. 13. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 41. 14. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 42. 15. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 44.


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136 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Rodolphe Gasché Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 43. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 44. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 43. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 45 Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 44. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 45. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 69. C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969), pp. 11–12. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens’, in Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1983), p. 138. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 148; Martin Heidegger/Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel 1953–1974, ed. H.W. Petzet (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1986), p. 51. Bowra, The Greek Experience, pp. 14–16. WD, p. 85. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 149. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 149. Eugen Fink, Metaphysik der Erziehung im Weltverständnis von Plato und Aristoteles (Franfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1970), p. 32. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 316. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 306. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 33. Fink, Metaphysik, pp. 303–4. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 319. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 303. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 320. For further suggestions by Fink on how to put the metaphysics of light into question, see Fink, Metaphysik, p. 321. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 304. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 21. WD, p. 92. Fink, Metaphysik, pp. 36–7. WD, p. 86. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 147. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 148. Jacques Derrida, ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 148–9.


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8 Phenomenology to Come: Derrida’s Ellipses Joanna Hodge

INTRODUCTORY ELLIPSIS These remarks on time and history are organised in response to a gap covered over in the conjunction of the words ‘Derrida’ and ‘phenomenology’. Some of the earliest and most virulent critiques of Derrida came from adherents to phenomenology who either saw the dangers of his disruption of phenomenology for its existing configuration or, indeed, thought its importance exaggerated. Thus the history of the reception of Derrida’s thinking is marked from the beginning by controversy on this topic: the relation between Derrida’s thinking and phenomenology. The question remains whether or not Derrida can be understood as working within phenomenology and transforming it; or whether he can be understood to provide a definitive critique of phenomenology, thus surpassing it; or whether phenomenology remains undisturbed by the Derridean departures. The argument of this essay is intended to contribute to a clarification of the issues raised by these questions and by the various possible answers to them. By examining the proximity and distance between Derrida and phenomenology, it is possible to arrive both at a reformulation of the place of Derrida’s writing in relation to phenomenology, of the place in philosophy of a thinking of time and of history distinctive of phenomenology, and indeed of the place of Derrida’s writings within philosophy. The claim to be made in this chapter is that Derrida not only makes a significant contribution to an understanding of phenomenology, but that this contribution also constitutes a significant contribution to philosophy.1 It is becoming clear that in Derrida’s earlier engagements with Husserl, in the 1962 study of ‘Origin of Geometry’2 and in the Problem of Genesis for Husserl (1953–4),3 questions about the genesis of meaning and about the historicity of origins are critically in play in Derrida’s approaches to and differences with Husserlian 137


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phenomenology. Husserl himself in his methodological reflections, published posthumously by Walter Biemel as The Crisis of the European Sciences,4 makes the following clarification of his enduring interest in history, in section 15: The type of investigation that we must carry out, and which has already determined the style of our preparatory suggestions, is not that of a historical investigation in the usual sense. Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, and at the same time to achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal intentions.5 This then is the question of history for Husserl. For Derrida, the question of history is the question of how to reveal the disruption of Hegelian closure and reopen the question of the future. It may well be that this line of questioning explains the privileged place of a reading of Blanchot’s writings for Derrida, for Blanchot’s writings effect an interruption of dialectical inexorability.6 Derrida’s dispute with Hegel can be traced through the writings spanning from Writing and Difference7 and Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge,8 through the extended engagements with Freud, Kant and Levinas in the seventies and eighties, to Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.9 My claim is that this questioning arises out of the preceding engagement with Husserlian phenomenology and that Derrida’s capacity to engage with but maintain a distance from the workings of Hegelian dialectic is in part acquired on the basis of the philosophical lessons learned from Husserlian phenomenology about the temporal indices attaching to any achievement of a thinking or grasping of meaning. While for phenomenology – certainly in the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – time and history have been standing concerns, it turns out that, for Derrida, they have also always been at least obliquely in question. ONCE AND FUTURE PHILOSOPHY It would take too long and take me off my course to go into detail here about how, for Derrida, Hegelian closure is already subverted by an ante-post impact of Freudian thinking; and how any impending immobilisation of history in some Husserlian essentialism is disrupted by the aftershock of the heterodox phenomenology of Heidegger. This could be set out through extended readings of those writings,


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which explore the danger that the philosophy of Husserl will turn out to have been indistinguishable from that of Hegel. Such an erasure of difference Derrida seeks to avert at all costs, and in this enterprise he finds support in the writings of Levinas and Blanchot. For phenomenology, the question becomes: how to think an essence of history in relation to the question about a genesis of meaning and a genealogy of value, thus combining Husserl’s question about meaning with Nietzsche’s question about value. While the Sartrean trajectory of phenomenology seems to take this question back towards a systematic thinking of the relations between time, history and the concept, that of Blanchot is above all a thinking of interruption, stalling the working out of such systematic interconnections. But both of these are clearly to be located within the twentieth-century evolution of phenomenology as the question about the ordering of the appearances of what there is, opening out a contestation on how to think time and meaning. This insistence on a proximity and distance in the relation for Derrida between Hegel and Husserl cannot here be further followed up. Rather I shall focus on some methodological issues arising from the impact of phenomenology on Derrida’s writings and of Derrida’s writings on phenomenology. This double movement has as yet to be adequately traced out, and it is a reinscription of a more familiar double movement often designated as constitutive of deconstruction. I am here most concerned with diagnosing its recurrence as describing the nature of the engagement between Derrida and phenomenology, thereby revealing that a thinking of time and of history is organised for and by Derrida as an elliptical movement, in a fourfold sense. There is elliptical movement in the sense of a certain linguistic, even rhetorical figure; there is its logical register, as the form of an argument construed through a discontinuous series of lacunae; there is the setting out of a movement in a shape distinctive of the geometrical figure; and this is then recognisable as the movement of the planets. The hypothesis then might be formulated that a completion of Kant’s Copernican Revolution requires a substitution of elliptical thinking for analogical and paralogical argumentation. A thinking of such a movement captures the relation between history and time, as a structure within which history and time are shown to have contrary valencies. A thinking of history tends to spatialise time, turning it into a framing container in which to organise events as linked to each other, forming a density of interpretation. A thinking of time by contrast tends to reduce to an infinitesimal line of continuity,


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apparently neutral with respect to meaning and interpretation. Thus for Derrida, a thinking of history threatens to institute an immobilisation of time, in a framing not unlike that of the Heideggerian framing, or Gestell, where everything is made available for deployment in a contemporaneous sphere of activity. Conversely Derrida’s proposals about thinking time more originarily, as achrony and anachrony, which are increasingly strongly marked in later writings but perhaps already detectable from the start,10 throw up not just the need for but the possibility of rethinking the nature or essence of history, in a non-essentialising, that is non-immobilising, fashion. This then is the hypothesis which is to be developed in these remarks: that the conjunction of the words ‘Derrida’ and ‘phenomenology’, and their mutual impact, effects a disruption and deflection of the course of each, and a redeployment of theoretical direction; and that this gives rise to this possibility of thinking history and time as nonharmoniously conjoined in the organisation of experience, as the two disjoined foci for an elliptical movement as the basic organisation of time. This double structure of time and of history repeats itself in another double structure which is more directly discussed by Derrida: the futurity distinctive of the ‘à venir’ and the distinctive thinking of the past as articulated in the memory of mourning. The ‘à venir’ is announced by Mallarmé and taken up by Blanchot in relation to the writing of books and a thinking of meaning;11 the mourning of the past, of lost possibilities and the death of others are memorably brought to the fore by Derrida in his lectures Memoires: for Paul de Man.12 The ‘à venir’ is to be understood as a future arrival which cannot be anticipated, by contrast to conceiving of a future continuous from the present and extrapolated on the basis of current relations. The ‘à venir’ is to be contrasted to a thinking of a completion of the present, which would bring time to a standstill, by completing current intentions, thus rendering the future redundant. This is I think quite contrary to the structure of time thought by Benjamin in the notion of a Jetztzeit, in which present time is shot through with the impossible time of such completion, opening out a totality of present time to the infinities of alternate temporalities. The modalities of present and messianic completion are in the one case thought as continuous with one another; in the Benjaminian thinking, they are thought of as utterly opposed and incompatible. It is possible that Derrida’s thinking of the structures of messianic time oscillates between these two formulations, one corresponding


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to the Christian thinking of messianism and the other to a Jewish thinking of Messiah. ‘Memoires’, in the title of the lectures in memory of de Man, is to be left in French because as Derrida remarks, in a prefatory note: ‘The meaning of this word changes in French according to its generic determination (masculine/feminine) or its number (singular /plural).’13 This distinction marks the contrast between completing an account of a life in the writing of memoirs and the fragmenting structures of memory which reveal layerings of memories out of which no such continuous completable narrative could emerge. If a reading of Freud permits Derrida to unsettle some Hegelian certainties in Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge, de Man’s reading of Hegel in turn permits de Man to unsettle a few Freudian dogmas. Derrida in Memoires draws attention to how, for de Man, the Hegelian account of memory splits into a subjective interiorising process of Erinnerung, interiorisation, and an objectively inscribed Gedächtnis, that which has been thought, through which the thought of an immemorial past gains the status of conceptuality; and indeed through which conceptuality is revealed as that determinacy of thought which can not be retrieved in the finite conditions of human thinking. Whereas for Hegel what can be subjectively thought can achieve objective status and what can be conceptualised must have its moment of subjective registration, for de Man the task of reading and of literature is much more to mark the failure of reciprocity between these two moments: the potentialities of meaning and subjective experiences of meaning, and to trace out the postponement, anticipations, anteriorities and time lapses involved. The discontinuities traced out by de Man in relation to literature, Derrida supposes to hold also for philosophical writing and enquiry. Here then there opens out a gap between the meanings which might have been set down in some immemorial philosophical past, immune to change and to the disruptions of time and of history, and the meanings which might arrive, which might return, which might be retrieved, in a suspension of the interval, separating now from that moment of past inscription, leaving a present suspended between two never-to-be-made-present modalities of the immemorial and the time to come. The appeal for Derrida of this de Manian reflection has to be understood as the definitive suspension of the metaphysics of presence, the will to subjective appropriations of determinate meanings in which for Derrida the philosophical tradition in the main consists. There is then a contrast to be set out between readings of Hegel and Husserl


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which find in their writings a presumption that all possible meaning can be appropriated in a thinking of meaning, and those which find in their texts a meditation on this model as demarcating the dimensions of this impossible task as constitutive of the longevity of philosophising. The gesture of mourning marked up in the notion of the glas, the death knell, arises for Derrida from a juxtaposition of the Freudian thinking of a difference between a terminable mourning of the implications and consequences of human finitude, usually prompted by a quite specific death, and an interminable melancholy. The one is susceptible to coming to terms with and separating itself from an attachment to an impossible or no longer available object; the other is caught in a repetition of an incompletable gesture of partition. Thus mourning here is construed as the capacity to leave behind what cannot be retrieved into a futural present. By contrast to this split structure of time, with a retrievable and an irretrievable lost past, it is possible to discern a contrary movement of retrieval, through a thinking of elliptical movement, where it is not a question of leaving behind what cannot be carried forward, but rather of retrieving from the past lost elements which are preventing forward movement; and cutting free from that which immobilises the arrival of the future. For the history of human beings, this might be the retrieval of an understanding of history which does not eliminate from remembrance those who did not control the processes of making a mark on their times. Underneath the psychologistic structures of mourning there is then this ontological structure of elliptical movement whereby features of a present conjuncture recede into the past, indeed into oblivion, and have to be retrieved by some effort of imagination, or chance impact of events, or conjunction of the two.14 RECONFIGURING PHENOMENOLOGY The term ‘elliptical’ requires some further clarification. I suggest that under the rubric of the elliptical, there is to be found in Derrida’s writings both a diagnosis and a performance of a movement characteristic of phenomenological enquiry itself. Thus I am going both to attempt to characterise this movement as a construct distinctive of Derrida’s writings, from beginning to end, and to show that this distinctive construct is constitutive of those enquiries recognised and recognisable as phenomenology. This elliptical movement is in part masked by a movement of oscillation, the double movement, more


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commonly and easily identified at work there. This essay thus addresses itself to the question what Derrida’s contribution to philosophy consists in, through this tracing out of a relation between Derrida’s writings and the current state of phenomenology. The answer to this last question, to put it schematically, is that Derrida’s writings provide a diagnosis of a feature of phenomenology which marks it out from other forms of philosophical enquiry in such a way as to guarantee a continuing vitality for both phenomenology and philosophy into the coming century. This reconfigured phenomenology is both distinctive of the latter part of the twentieth century, and only a retrieval of what phenomenology has always been. History is here in question in three further respects. There is first of all the apparently local question of a relation between history and philosophy, specifically concerning the current condition of philosophy and the place of Derrida’s writings in the current formation. There is secondly the dual question of the place within phenomenology of historical specificity and of historical determinacy, and of the place of phenomenology within the history of philosophy and within human history. This dual structure looks relatively clear cut, until the implications of Husserl’s long-drawn-out struggle with thinking the relation between pure and degenerate signification, with their various irreducible temporal indices, are put into play. The question here would be: is the degeneracy of pure meaning the consequence or the cause of history? or perhaps rather linked to history and to the historicity of philosophy in some other less obvious way, not thus determined by the modernising categories of cause and consequence, sequence and succession, the categories of Kantian understanding. Thirdly, and most evidently presenting a philosophical challenge, although with no more obvious response, there is the long-standing problem of the relation between the human experience of time as directed, and irreducibly finite, which forms the backdrop against which Heidegger formulates his theses concerning the historicity of time, and the intimations of eternity given in the pure thought of temporal hiatus, or, with Levinas, of interruption. It is important to remark that the time of suspension, of interruption, is the time of Husserlian bracketing, and is thus by no means an optional extra in any phenomenological enquiry into time. This suspension can be misconstrued as a gesture abolishing time, which makes the artifice of a metaphysics of presence look like a natural given. However, the living present, as Derrida insists, is the time of achrony and anachrony, not of the permanence, succession and


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co-existence, diagnosed by Kant as determinations of time in the analogies of experience, in the analysis of transcendental principles offered in The Critique of Pure Reason.15 There is here then a duplicitous notion of the ‘now’, which can be understood as both unproblematically marking a present moment and as interrupting temporal flow. In addition to this duplicitous notion of the ‘now’, there is also the ‘now’ of an unquestioned notion of history, which gathers events together in their interrelations one to another, forming a continuous time; and there is a ‘now’ of an epoch, as a suspension of an unnoticed passage of time in favour of its analysis, in which a taken-for-granted notion of history as continuity comes in for scrutiny. In this fourth notion of the ‘now’, these first three ‘nows’, of a metaphysics of presence, of a living present, of a gathering together of history, and of their respective suspensions, may be distinguished from each other. This fourth ‘now’ of time is marked by the very features which Kant was at pains to rule out of court in the notes to the postulates for empirical thought, in The Critique of Pure Reason: hiatus, saltus, casus, fatum; suspension, discontinuity, chance and fate.16 Underlying this pluralisation of ‘nows’ is a distinction between an unbounded time, to which any human attitude is a matter of indifference; and finite time which, as we might say with Jean-Luc Nancy, is the infinite decision towards time.17 A QUESTION ABOUT PHENOMENOLOGY Derrida’s writings can thus be read as mapping out a multiple incidence of an elliptical movement. As already stated, the most significant of these here is a series of elliptical engagements with the phenomenological inheritance, which reveals a movement intrinsic to phenomenology and a movement intrinsic to Derrida’s writings and thinking. There are, however, other aspects to this elliptical movement, one of which is scrupulously traced out in relation to Western thinking of religion in the paper ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’.18 As its title indicates, the paper pursues an oscillation within responses to religion between one based in faith and one based in reason. It pursues this diagnosis through the twin responses of Bergson to moral life and religion, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion19 and of Kant, in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone;20 through a juxtaposition of a writing in italics and a writing in roman script; and through a doubtful double etymology of the word ‘religion’.


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Most important of all for my purposes, it proceeds by setting out an ellipsis constitutive of Western thinking about religion between an experience of belief and an experience of holiness, and in a diagnosis of a duplicity in the event of sacrifice itself. ‘Religion’, Derrida writes at number 41, roman script, ‘as a response that is both ambiguous and ambivalent, is thus an ellipsis: the ellipsis of sacrifice’.21 My claim then is that Derrida’s writings present a diagnosis of phenomenology as an ellipsis, both preserving and disrupting, philosophy. There is here a threefold differentiation between the emergence of a question, the lines of a movement and the formation of a hypothesis: a question about phenomenology, a movement of thinking, and this hypothesis about the status of Derrida’s writings, in relation to both phenomenology and to philosophy more generally. For it is often asked, with greater and lesser degrees of patience and engagement, what the contribution to philosophy of these writings might be. As the beginning of an answer to that question, it is worth noting how, on various occasions, Derrida stresses the importance for him of phenomenology and specifically of the question of the ideal status of literary objects. He writes in the paper ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, from 1980: Curious as it may seem, transcendental phenomenology was able, in the first stages of my work, to help me sharpen some of these questions, which at the time were not as well marked out as they seem to be today. In the fifties, when it was still not well received, Husserlian phenomenology seemed to some young philosophers to be inescapable. I still see it today, if in a different way, as a discipline of incomparable rigour.22 This qualification ‘in a different way’ could be the focus for an extended commentary and discussion. The long-drawn-out engagements with Levinas and with Blanchot bear testimony to the enduring force of the question: what remains of phenomenology today, especially and above all, in relation to forming an understanding of the status and significance of literary activity. Derrida’s writings, in their interactions with those of Blanchot and Levinas, trace out a disturbance of phenomenology which I take to be intrinsic to phenomenology, tracing out a fracture or indeed a possibility laid down in phenomenology from its inception, wherever that might be hypothesised as taking place. These interactions take the form of elliptical movement. The thinking of elliptical movement and the movement of elliptical thinking take the form of a double movement of displacement in line with all the invocations of double


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movements and displacements throughout Derrida’s writings. Its traces are especially strongly marked in the triangle mapped out by these three names: Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas; and its implications for phenomenology are there especially evident. It is notable that phenomenological analysis at various stages in the course of its development over the past century has faltered and seemed to lose its momentum and direction in response to an intermittent registering of a strange question: what happens when the movement of thought distinctive of phenomenology – the movement of intentionality from thinking to object of thought, from intuited sense to constituted meaning, from consciousness to world – what happens when this movement from finite thinking to infinite idea is interrupted and suspended for the purposes of analysis and description, and then is not just suspended but goes into reverse? The question is: can phenomenology accommodate the thought of the reversal of this movement, which then no longer moves from thinking to object of thought, but precisely the reverse: thinking arrives from its object; constituted meaning invokes a corresponding intuition of meaning; the fact of the world is to be thought as eliciting the movement distinctive of consciousness, and finally with Levinas, the infinite idea elicits the determinations of a finite body? Alongside the privileged movement of intentionality there is then to be thought both the suspension of that movement, for the duration of its analysis, and the reversal of that movement, as thought certainly by Emmanuel Levinas, but also by Merleau-Ponty and by Heidegger; perhaps already by Husserl himself. It is questionable whether phenomenology was ever committed to either a temporal order or a conceptual hierarchy between the various pairings, which can be read in the two different sequences; but I think only in these two sequences. From thinking to object of thought; from intuited sense to constituted meaning; from consciousness to world; from finite thinking to infinite idea; or from infinite idea to finite body; from world to consciousness; from constituted meaning to intuited sense; from object of thought to thinking. There are three options here: the first is to think that these two orders are opposed and mutually exclusive. The second option is to think that the focus of phenomenological enquiry must oscillate between the two directions as thought, since neither can accommodate all aspects of phenomenological enterprise on their own, and each adds a complementary angle to the other; but both together are ultimately incompatible. Thirdly, there is the view which I hope to attribute


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convincingly to the writings associated with the name Derrida: that of elliptical reading. Even if the enquiry is this conjunction of two incompatible orders of thinking, one has to be named first in the order of exposition, in order then to be complemented and challenged by the other. The requirements of an ordered exposition seem to be to state one and then the other, and then a conjunction of the two. Many of Derrida’s experiments with what appear to be disordered expositions might be thought then to be attempts to explore the possibilities of a suspension of such ordering and a suspension of the need to hypothesise a conjunction in order then to problematise the compatibility of the components conjoined. A MOVEMENT OF THINKING My question concerns what might be thought to be a crisis for phenomenology, one which shows not some weakness of phenomenology but rather its continuing vitality; for the capacity to endure crisis, to precipitate and witness its resolution, is the sign of a mature mode of enquiry. Under pressure from Bergsonian theories of time and from current cognitive reformulation, from Lyotard’s politics and from Nancy’s exquisite interrogations, it seems to me that phenomenology is far from exhausted. At this point in its history phenomenological enquiry is demonstrating a capacity to accommodate rather than succumb to the challenges currently posed to it. Far from being locked into a now outmoded subjectivism and obscurantism, it is demonstrating a capacity to accommodate both the rigours of cognitive science and the infinities of the new theology, and also some third moment of disruption of its received image which it is my purpose to explore here. It is, however, my claim that this question of reversal is the key to all the other challenges currently posed to the coherence – indeed the cogency – of phenomenology. Derrida both forewarns of and precipitates this crisis for phenomenology, and sets out some of the resources within phenomenology to articulate and provide strategies for analysing the implications of this reversal of phenomenology’s distinctive movement. Derrida’s analyses follow the movement of reversal, and the movement distinctive of his thinking is thus that of oscillation, both in terms of the famous double movements of deconstruction, which are by now well documented, and in terms of a double movement in relation to time. This double movement of time displays an alternating temporality of a hesitation, prompted by


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retardation of effects, figured in relation to Freudian Nachträglichkeit, and a precipitation, prompted by the infinitely evasive arrival of a completion of a thought, of enquiry, of a reading. The importance of the movement of oscillation to Derrida’s writings, especially to Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge was recognised and argued by Sarah Kofman in ‘Ca Cloche’,23 her contribution to the conference at Cerisy in 1980, The Ends of man: Response to Jacques Derrida, beginning with her remarks on a generalised theory of fetishism in Glas. She writes: It is the question of fetishism linked to indecidable oscillation (and thus to the gamble of speculation), which resounds throughout Derrida’s Glas. Beginning with a reading of Freud’s text, he proposes a generalization of fetishism as a first stage in the deconstruction of phallogocentrism (following a completely Nietzschean methodology) a stage which includes indecidability and oscillation: ‘My excitement is oscillation’…24 She quotes Derrida, quoting Jean Genet. More recently, in the text Khora, first published in 1987, but reissued in both French and English in 1995,25 the theme of oscillation comes prominently to the fore: The oscillation of which we have just spoken is not an oscillation among others, an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two types of oscillation: the double exclusion (neither/nor) and the participation (both this and that). But have we the right to transport the logic, the para-logic or the meta-logic of this super-oscillation from one set to the other? It concerned first of all types of existent thing (sensible/intelligible, visible/invisible, form/formless, icon or mimeme/paradigm), but we have displaced it toward types of discourse (mythos/logos) or of relation to what is or is not in general. No doubt such displacement is not self-evident. It depends on a sort of metonymy: such a metonymy would displace itself, by displacing the names, from types of being, to types of discourse.26 This remark would require a long commentary to clarify all that is here philosophically at stake. However, this invocation of a displacement of names from types of being to types of discourse presents the possibility of a reversal, whereby the displacement takes place from types of discourse to types of being. The suggestion of the possibility of such a reversal, whereby ontological disruption is thought to take place as a consequence of discursive change, is the Derridean – indeed the Foucauldian – offence to those committed to a certain kind of realism, which cannot countenance such a reversal. But if the Kantian contribution to philosophy is understood to stand


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and is understood to entail that what there is, is constituted through the processes of either a transcendental unity of apperception or its Foucauldian reformulation as a discursive deployment, then such a reversal not only can but must be thought, without surrendering the stance of realism to those who would deny the efficacy of all such constitutive activity. For it would turn out that there is no real constituted independently of its modes of articulation. The task then would be to show that phenomenology in its Derridean reconfiguration carries over the Kantian strategy of refusing to attempt to think the impossible: a reality maintained independently of the manner in which thinking constitutes it as an object of thought. This then would be Derrida’s achievement in his commentary on Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry’: to have shown the displacement of phenomenology arising from the workings of a Kantian inheritance within it, from the transcendental idealism formulated by Husserl, to a displaced realism. In this sense, those who sought to defend the Husserlian inheritance, understood as a commitment to transcendental idealism, were correct in their identification of a Derridean threat to orthodoxy. The upshot of this is the following series of questions concerning objects of thought. What happens when these more usually supposed to be immobile, static and stable in their interrelations are put into motion, swinging around each other in a series of complex and as yet unthematised uncharted trajectories? What happens if the relations constituting these objects of thought as objects consist in varying relations of intensity; of proximity and distance; and of harmony and contrariety in the forces out of which those relations of intensity and of proximity and distance arise? What happens if the identities of objects of thought are to be thought of as doubly or indeed triply elliptical, as constituted by these movements of forces around two or more poles of attraction and repulsion; as maintained in a dynamic, one in relation to the others; and as an elliptical movement between a constitution in terms of a single epicentre of movement and these multiple interactive trajectories conjured up as a consequence of a systematic instability of boundaries between objects of thought? This depiction of the constitution of objects of thought and thereby of entities might be thought to correspond more closely to the images of atomic and of sub-atomic realities, than to the common-sense notions of what there is. It may be that the relations constituting human and historical realities take rather this form than the form more usually hypothesised by common sense. This then would suggest the label elliptical realism.


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150 Joanna Hodge

There are here four movements to be distinguished one from the other. The first and second have been indicated as a suspension and then reversal of movement within phenomenology; the third, oscillation, is identified, and not just by Kofman, as distinctive of Derrida’s writings; and a fourth, also at work in these writings, but at a less obvious level, that of ellipsis. All four are predicated on the movement of intentionality, announced by Husserl as basic to phenomenology, and on the question of just what is the movement of intentionality. There is also the question: four movements, five movements, three movements, or one, or more or less than one? The movement of suspension is enacted perhaps most vividly in Blanchot’s writings. The movement of reversal is performed by Levinas in his thinking of the arrival of an infinite beyond being. Derrida writes in such a way as to keep open a threefold movement, both of the primordial movement of intentionality, and of the instant of my death, endlessly postponed, and in the thought of a Levinasian arrival. Combining the thought of Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas, a further thinking emerges, the Derridean; but they affect each other, such that there becomes an indistinctness of each movement in relation to the others. The individuation of theoretical positions in these conditions of mutual disruption becomes unstable. This then requires the development of a discussion of philosophy with less reliance on names to mark out distinct patterns of thought, without a naming of immobilised positions, but instead with a tracing out of movements of mutual displacement, each in relation to the others; it would suggest a notion of history similarly with no priority assigned to names and dates, to the work of memory and fixing, but rather with an emphasis on a work of forgetting and on rendering the temporarily fixed mobile. This is the movement ‘à venir’ of phenomenology, in which the thought of the ‘à venir’ of the literary is taken up by Derrida and transformed almost beyond Blanchotian and Mallarméan recognition.27 The task then is to think this ‘à venir’ of phenomenology, in its distinctness from either a Hegelian or a Benjaminian anticipation of the future, and on this basis to rethink history. This rethinking of the structure of history emerges by bringing Derrida’s writings into proximity and conflict firstly with those of Hegel and secondly and less obviously with those of Walter Benjamin, and measuring the mutual disruption and deflection, as a work of deviation through which this rethinking of history may arrive.


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NOTES 1. I should like to thank Martin McQuillan for having invited me to present the first version of this essay at the conference at Staffordshire in the Summer of 1999, ‘Deconstruction Reading Politics’, and Stella Sandford and Peter Osborne for inviting me to present another version of it at the Middlesex conference for the Society for European Philosophy, September 2000. It has also benefited from an outing at the Manchester Human Sciences Seminar, and especially from the responses of Roxana Baiasu, Gary Banham, Martin Bell, Lars Iyer, Simon Malpas and Wolfe Mays. 2. See Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Brighton: Harvester, 1979 [1962]), in which a contrast between Heidegger’s preoccupation with the meaning of being and Husserl’s preoccupation with the meaning of entities is understood to mark and displace a question to phenomenology about historicity. 3. See Jacques Derrida, La Problème de la Genèse dans la Philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). This was written under the direction of Maurice de Gandillac in Derrida’s second year at the Ecole Normale Superieur. In it the themes of bracketing, teleology and reactivation of genesis are prominent. 4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 [1954]). 5. Husserl, Crisis, section 15, p. 70. 6. For Blanchot’s interruption of Hegelian dialectics, see especially The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1971]); and The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986 [1980]). For Derrida reading Blanchot, see ‘Pas’ [1976], and ‘Survivre’, in Parages (Paris: Gallilée, 1986), the latter partially translated in ‘Living on: Borderlines’ in Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979); and Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1998]). 7. WD [1967]. 8. G [1974]. 9. SoM. For further discussions of the relation between Derrida’s writings and those of Hegel, see also Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). 10. It is possible to detect a thinking of achrony and of anachrony throughout his writings and especially in the formation of the notion of différance, but it comes especially strongly to the fore in Specters of Marx in the insistence on Hamlet’s apostrophes concerning time being out of joint. 11. See Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Book to Come’, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, in The Sirens’ Song (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 227–48, from Le Livre A Venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). 12. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 13. Derrida, Memoires, p. xxiv. 14. It would be the work of another occasion to show how the writings of Walter Benjamin explore this retreat and return of emancipatory


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152 Joanna Hodge potential, more usually buried in the trivialisations of historical narration and cultural activity. The completion and exhaustion of the artwork in the activity of criticism (see Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism [1920], translated in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, Harvard, 1996], pp. 116–200) forms a microcosm of the completion of history in the retrieval of its lost conditions of possibility. For this three conditions are required: a retrieval of the art of judgement in place of the corruption of the public world by the promulgation of opinion; a capacity to step aside from the tumult of occurrences to seize the possibility of a moment of judgement, in the standstill of history; and a capacity to break the continuities of past, present and future, in the mythical, mythologised present, by attending to and retrieving the history of the oppressed. The culmination of this diagnosis is to be found in the famous ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (see Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt [London: Fontana Collins, 1970], pp. 255–66) but these enigmatic aphorisms cannot be understood unless their context in the whole trajectory of Benjamin’s writings from the reflections on his own childhood to the Arcades Project (1935–1940) are brought into view. The demarcation of the differences between Benjamin and Derrida on judgement and language; on thinking the present; and on the priority of the past or the future in the schematisation of time remains to be established. For one of the best introductions to the writings of Walter Benjamin, see Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reigen, Walter Benjamin, trans. Laimdota Mazzarins (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996 [1991]). 15. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929 [1781, 1787]), A 176–218, B 218–65, pp. 208–38: ‘These then are the three analogies of experience. They are simply principles of the determination of the existence of appearances in time, according to all its three modes, viz: the relation of time to itself as magnitude (the magnitude of existence, that is duration); the relation of time as a successive series, and finally the relation in time as a sum of all simultaneously existence’ (A 215, B 262). It is these three determinations of time – in itself, as magnitude; in its internal self-relation, as succession; and as totality – that Derrida cumulatively brings into question. 16. See ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, note on the third postulate of empirical thought, concerning necessity, in Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, A 227–35, B 280–7, pp. 247–52. 17. The writings of Nancy are here pivotal. I should here briefly mark up the impact on the development of my thinking of the 1987 paper by Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Elliptical Sense’, printed in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992), pp. 36–50; and the exemplary fashion in which it attends to the rhythm, movement and register of the paper ‘Ellipsis’, which forms the last section of Derrida’s 1967 collection, Writing and Difference. I am thus here reading ‘Ellipsis’ elliptically, through Nancy’s response to it. It is also worth noting that Jean-Luc Nancy, in ‘Finite History’ (in Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 (1990)], pp. 143–66), in pursuing the conjunction minimally of Heidegger’s thinking of historicity


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18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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and Derrida’s thinking of the today, and of the arrival of the present out of the future, advances the thought that perhaps time and history are complementary but incompatible notions, time arranged, according to Kant at least, as a uniform sequence while history may be thought of as a construct through which to gather together the identifications which go under the name ‘humanity’. A third source for the contribution of Nancy to the thinking here is his contribution ‘The Ends of Man’, to the 1980 Cerisy conference concerning Derrida, in which a certain proximity, between a Derridean thinking of the aporetics of meaning, law and time, and Kant thinking duty, is brought out. FK [1998]. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Claudesley Brereton (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, no date, translation dated 1935 [1932]). It would be the work of another occasion to show the relation here back to Derrida’s thinking about Hegel in Glas. FK, pp. 51–2. See Jacques Derrida; ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 34–50, here p. 38. This lecture was delivered on the occasion of his candidacy for a doctorat d’Etat, based on published work. See Sarah Kofman, ‘Freud: ça Cloche’, in Hugh Silverman (ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction (Continental Philosophy II) (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 108–38. Kofman, ‘Freud: ça Cloche’, p. 119. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Khora’, in ON, pp. 89–127. Derrida, ‘Khora’, p. 91. See Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre A Venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), and also ‘Mallarmé’s experience’, in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]), pp. 38–48: ‘One would like to say that the poem, like the pendulum that marks the time of time’s abolition in “Igitur”, oscillates marvellously between its presence as language and the absence of the things of the world’ (p. 45). It would be worth exploring the pivotal nature of this opposition between things in the world and what there is and meanings as distinct from the former. A hypothesis about meaning as in the world, and ‘things’ as having no existence independent from meaning would prevent the chasm from opening.


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Part Three Otherwise


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9 From (Within) Without: the Ends of Politics Marc Froment-Meurice

My thesis, if I have one, would be without thesis, or the thesis of the ‘without’. In lieu of my first suggested title, ‘Fiction in Lieu of Politics: Derrida Siting Blanchot’, I now propose a title without anybody, without proper names, without place or site, or rather with ‘without’ as the only place: ‘From (Within) Without’. As it sounds obscure, let me add three points. First, there is nobody, here, speaking in my name. Second, I am that nobody. And third, yes, I am out of my first place, maybe also out of my mind. In place of politics, in place of reading politics in fiction or putting fiction in place of politics, I give up, for they might be the same, both in place of that which is without any place, both in place of the ‘without’. To start with (or without), I confess that I am still at odds with the very title of this book. I always get in trouble with politics, because I find myself ... lost, without any political position, or in the weird position of being without position, in a de-position that would not even be able to turn into another position, a solid and impregnable castle. Something that no one in my family of male politicians could understand, since they cannot get what makes politics impossible: its retrait (retreat or withdrawal) from within its ‘essence’, its being-without-being. They still believe that you can be a politician, do politics, whereas politics can only undo those who want to appropriate it all as a family business; while they claim to serve the State or the community, they represent what Hegel said of women: ‘the irony of community’. Once upon a time, like many in my generation, I felt deeply involved in politics. This was around May ’68, what we (in France) call the ‘events’. But I was wrong. What is wrong about ’68 is not what took place at the very instant, but what followed, the recycling of the events with the same old political reflexes. During the events themselves, I didn’t know what was taking place – which is the very 157


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158 Marc Froment-Meurice

notion of an event: something unpredictable, as surprising as death. I couldn’t even think that I was acting politically. There was no sense of doing politics, and that was precisely the meaning of ’68: an absent meaning. After – in the aftermath, après coup – we were given explanations, directions, deep meanings. But soon enough I lost all interest in those, for they were only words, catchwords, passwords, watchwords, keywords, loanwords, crosswords, in the name of Marx, Trotsky, Mao, de Gaulle, any egregious ego ... I then decided that the only way to get rid of this mess, of all those big names and heroes, was to become nobody – entering what Blanchot calls ‘the space of literature’. Only here do things get serious. But here, where? Everywhere – and nowhere. No specific place, or the place without place, of the without. This is how I read or translated ‘Dasein’: existence without essence, or with the only essence of being without essence. So be it. Amen. No subject – liquidation of any subject. In one word, death. But death insofar as it is never death, itself, ‘as such’. Liquidation of the subject, what an exciting ‘program’, but also what an impossible task, insofar as it requires a subject to undertake it. Did I say exciting? No, impossible: death is the most frightening. Yes. But precisely because of that, the most exciting: think that I will be myself at The Instant of my Death. Great. Great? No, horrible. Unbearable. Unbearable lightness of death. Because I will never live, experience it – or I will experience it as that which can never be experienced, lived, understood. I will experience my death as that which can never be experienced, but also as that which makes any experience possible. I will experience deconstruction. Deconstruction is my death ... I am just quoting from Derrida’s Post Card. So I come to Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death.1 On the instance of such an instant I shall not insist, since its momentous instancy marks it in such a way that the instant of death is not situated ‘in’ time, and death is always to come as well as past already, and therefore missed. Heidegger had said this already – did he live only to say it? (To say it, not to live it: a notable restriction in Heidegger’s case, unlike Blanchot’s or Dostoyevsky’s, not to mention the fate of thousands of other anonymous ones.) Except that it remains to be seen – whether you can see it with your own eyes, death, death itself. In any case, I quote Heidegger saying it – if it is to be said, if one can say, ‘Death, that is to say this or that, or even death’: ‘When death comes, it instantaneously disappears. Mortals die death in life. In death, mortals become im-mortals.’2 Those words


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can stand as a precise comment on the statement at the end of The Instant of my Death, which seeks ‘to say it more precisely’: ‘Only a feeling of lightness remains, which is my very death itself, or, to say it more precisely, The Instant of my Death henceforth always impending [en instance].’3 Or, to put it in the tersest of phrases, in less than a sentence: ‘Dead – immortal’. That precise instant is the one when death comes, that is to say: it escapes us. Death only comes as it escapes us again; death slips away, and this slipping away, this breakaway is ‘my very death itself’. Death comes when ‘instantaneously’ it disappears. For death to come is to disappear (disparêtre). Death ‘is’ its own disappearance; its ‘is’ is without being. Is death or The Instant of my Death related to politics? That is a pending matter – let’s first get to the heart of the matter. Let’s be even more precise – I might be tempted to say, let’s go to the quick, to the throbbing, living heart of this matter of death ... Impossible. How could I just walk into ‘my death’ as if it were a windmill, as we say in French, or a château, or, better, a Castle, where one just pushes the door, like the German officer knocking at the ‘young man’s’ door, the man who might have been Maurice Blanchot if he were not dead already as the one who could describe the instant of his death? ‘My death’ has no place, or, rather, it has an unbearably inhabitable place, even as it takes place there, before me, within reach or within range of a shotgun ... Neither French nor German, nor even Russian, death does not speak a word – or perhaps it speaks an unspeakably foreign language, as in the story that Nathalie Sarraute told about Chekhov: seeing his death coming, he was only able to utter in German: ‘Ich sterbe’.4 (And this is an opportunity to ask, if language is the home of Being, how can Heidegger also say that death is its secret, Being’s shelter or dwelling, its Heim or Geheimnis? What is this unsheltered dwelling that is everyone’s guest and nowhere at home?) Being without place or being, belonging to no one or making anyone be no one, that is transforming the subject into its own self of being without self, death is apolitical. Now, without further ado, let me jump feet first onto the most salient point, the one that really hurts, that is precisely the most difficult to situate. Indeed, we may read The Instant of my Death as a belated self-justification, coming half a century after the fact(s), by a ‘young man’ engaged (there is no other way to put it) in politics; and this young man, who is not named, is none other (even if he is not the same) than the witnessing narrator, the one who says ‘I’, who in turn is none other (even if he is not the same) than the


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author who publishes this story under a clearly identifiable name: Maurice Blanchot. There are three instances, ‘the young man’, ‘I’, and ‘Blanchot’, whom we must not confuse lest there be no narrative. But those three are not readily and discretely separable into entities that would entertain no relations with one another; indeed, those three instances of ‘Blanchot’ have complex relations with one and the same ‘entity’, if we may call it that: ‘my death’. Thus Blanchot is a name that gathers various interlaced instances of ‘Blanchot’, and its identity comes precisely from that which is meant to dissolve any identification: my death, which remains without a subject and without a dwelling. Consequently, speaking of Blanchot as a simple unity should be illegal – who is he who tells himself his own death, and who takes this opportunity to bleach (or blanch?) himself of any stain and clear his name? Forgive my brutality, but I must say that all this looks strangely like a trial, beginning with the very name of the house, the Castle. Let us suppose this story were signed by Heidegger and not by Blanchot – no need to go further and give you the graphic details. Admittedly, neither the Germans nor the Russians nearly shot Heidegger to death, but in 1944 there was no shelter for him either – and, besides, who could claim he had a shelter then?5 Defending Heidegger is the furthest thing from my mind: as far as I know, he risked his life only to save his manuscripts, and in that regard he was luckier than the ‘young man’ since not a single Frenchman mistook them for military blueprints or strategic maps. Furthermore, Heidegger’s actions in the Resistance amounted to mere words, and some of them were murky; but words, of course, were barely safer than actions then, in the historical ‘context’. If I were to consider decency a cardinal virtue in politics instead of the unspeakable indecency it is when ‘decency’ is invoked to accuse those who believe it to be shameful to have been such a ‘great’ thinker yet such a petty man (François Fédier, for it is he, speaking for the defence, insists on the term ‘greatness’),6 I would have abstained from comparing the two men to one another. In fact, I am not so much comparing them as pairing them off to make them appear in a compearance that is neither a comparison nor a reason but today’s agenda, today’s coming to terms, coming to a common day, even coming to the day of Judgement: is it not Blanchot himself who judges and summons Heidegger and blames him for a capital offence, or for what Blanchot’s biographer, Christophe Bident, calls, in Heideggerian fashion, an ‘absence of thinking’ that stems from using the same words for noble and ignoble matters? His argument


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has some weight; I admit that I once also subscribed to it. So let me quote the biographer’s remark in full: ‘Even beyond the fact that he [Blanchot] never made any partisan or institutional commitments to any fascist party, we can now better grasp what distinguishes his position from that of someone like Heidegger.’7 First, Blanchot did not sign up with the national socialist party, that is true. But he was French and there never was any French fascist party; there were only the quasi-fascist ‘Ligues’. French fascism was split and incapable of producing a unique, totalitarian party, even during the German occupation when small, organised groups of collaborateurs suffered so much internal strife that even the Germans could not take them seriously. But I would like to stress the real difference between Blanchot and Heidegger at the moment I have been evoking: it rests in their work and their work’s ‘position’. Heidegger had accomplished his work and it was ‘behind’ him, whereas Blanchot had yet to produce his own – it was yet to come; it was ‘before’ him: ‘Blanchot did not have a work like Being and Time behind him; he had, before him, Thomas l’Obscur, whose difficult, painful path he sought.’8 Second, Heidegger always presented Being and Time not as a ‘work’, a monument left behind him, but truly as a path to follow, a task to come; the incompletion of his Treatise attests to difficulties that are analogous to Blanchot’s while he worked on his first book – they are the difficulties of beginnings (to which Heidegger always remained faithful). Bident writes further: ‘His [Blanchot’s] thinking was not something he could submit to anyone since neither he nor anyone else lent any theoretical authority to his writings, and at the same time he struggled to acknowledge to himself his own literary authority about which no one knew anything.’9 The difference thus lies between two types of authority, ‘theoretical’ or ‘literary’; ‘recognition’ has little to do with it. Heidegger never ceased to complain about the misunderstanding that he felt was at the heart of his sudden renown: humanism – always the eternal return of the same subject coming back. Could one then argue that the one who has no recognised authority, who is not an author yet, is free and irresponsible? But here precisely comes into play the distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘literary’ authority unless one subsumes ‘literature’ under ‘theory’ as Sartre did in his theory of the engagé writer, a theory of the author’s political commitment that can (precisely) be traced back to his reading of Heidegger ...


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On the contrary, he accuses Heidegger of having compromised language and thought: ‘[Heidegger] put in Hitler’s service the very language and the very writing through which, at a great moment in the history of thought, we had been invited to participate in the questioning designated as the most high – that which would come to us from Being and Time.’10 A capital accusation for an unforgivable offence: beyond an ontic commitment, an ontological commitment, involving the gravest risk: ontology’s debasement, its ‘fall’ (Verfallen) from the heights of the ‘Most High’, to borrow Blanchot’s very language and very writing, only to tumble into the lowest abyss, with Hitler compared to Satan. Like many others, I trembled apprehensively when I read Heidegger’s so-called political writings, because, in all his calls and proclamations, he uses the same ‘Heideggerian’ language to extol the facticity of Dasein destined to die and the Führer’s unyielding law. As Michel Deguy said, we seem to suffer from double vision: is it the same Heidegger or is it ‘Sozi’ (Sosia), his double?11 But the question, the question of the ‘very’, the very same (‘the very language’, ‘the very writing’), of identity and identification (Heidegger like Hitler – that is always possible whereas the reverse is not; I will let you draw all the possible consequences from this remarkable non-reversibility), this question of the same is the same one can ask Blanchot: how could he write, admittedly without any ‘authority’, words that even Heidegger never uttered publicly, in sentences such as these (quoted by Bident as the only two instances of anti-Semitism in writings that have not yet cohered into a body of work): 1. [Blum] represents exactly all that is most contemptible for the nation he addresses: an ideology that is behind the times, an old man’s frame of mind, an alien race. 2. Blum, this ‘wog’ (métèque), does nothing but show off ‘his cosmopolitan instinct, his unmanly temperament, his taste for feeble rhetoric’.12 But the latter trait could apply to the accusing party if it is true, as Bident points out, that ‘anti-Semitism occurs only as a patch of secondhand eloquence in this discourse’, that is to say as a foreign body, an intruder, a virus that irrupts and jeopardises the integrity of the organism ‘proper’. Is it not strange that anti-Semitism, in this case, shares with its ‘anti’-body the same traits if it is a ‘patch of secondhand eloquence’, an intruder not cut from the same, ‘good’ cloth (or family)? Indeed, it is equally strange that twice on the same page (the same and only page to treat of this subject in a book of


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more than 600) the ‘treatment’ of this ‘subject’ wears a restrictive form: ‘Blanchot’s alleged anti-Semitism is only one logical element among others in the attempt to purify [the French nation]’, and ‘Anti-Semitism occurs only as a patch of secondhand eloquence in this discourse’, that is to say as a mere ‘detail’ (and forgive me if I almost resorted to profanity).13 I am not gathering evidence to try Blanchot; I am more than willing to believe him – to take him at his word. But precisely not this same word, that is the rhetoric a certain Blanchot (not the same Blanchot, not the one who ‘lived’ – or ‘died’ – the instant of [his] death) employed to besmirch Léon Blum, the smeary mud common to so many others at the time. And would the difference with Heidegger be that the latter, celebrating Hitler as ‘Germany’s law and reality’ (in incidentally correct terms at the time), spoke of a man, Hitler, who happened not to have been a mere ‘detail’; or that Heidegger used the ‘very’ language, the language of the ‘most high’ spheres of ‘pure’ thought (and not of politics, conceived as impure) in order to glorify what was very low indeed, an upstart corporal who miraculously reached the highest office as chancellor of the Reich while the ruling elites experienced their great debacle? Is death the place where the ‘young man’ is living? But he also lives in what is designated as ‘the upper room’ of the Castle. It is in this room that he writes and keeps his precious manuscripts, the ones that will be stolen by the Nazi officer. Highly valuable documents, maybe more valuable than his own life, since the young man is almost glad – enjoying the perspective of losing his life, but not his writings. We still don’t know what these were, certainly not ‘military maps’. Some critics have suggested that they were the first draft of Death Sentence, but in reading this book we find no evidence for it. On the contrary, if there is a mention of a first draft, it is said to have been completely destroyed by the author, and not stolen by someone else. I would like to propose this even riskier hypothesis that the stolen manuscript might have been, quite simply, The Instant of my Death. But of course, I cannot prove it, with a ‘living proof’, as we can read in Death Sentence. When The Instant of my Death was published in 1994, it caused quite a shock. Why? Because of its political implications, of course. One is entitled to read it as a self-justification, after the long, very long ‘silence’ kept by Blanchot about his pre-war political activities. You might even compare it to Heidegger’s (relative) silence, but then if you go along this way, you will also have to regret that Heidegger, unlike


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Blanchot, was not nearly shot to death ... by Nazi officers – since Heidegger claimed, at the ‘Liberation’ (a word that he would have resented), to have been actively engaged in the passive Resistance. Too bad, or so he would have commented, I was faithful to my fatherland: Deutschland über alles! Some more naive persons would simply say that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such a preposterous comparison has the merit of opening up the question: if we understand too well why Heidegger remained silent, we do not understand at all why Blanchot – if his story is truthful, not a mere fiction, but a testimony – kept silent for so long about an act that is much to his credit. Imagine, once again, Heidegger caught by the Gestapo in 1944, since after all he publicly said nasty things about the regime, at a time when speaking was almost as dangerous as acting ... In Being and Time we read that silence is one of the ‘most high’ ways to speak, and that on the contrary the one who has nothing to say is prone to waste his time in idle talk. Heidegger’s and Blanchot’s silences, while they do not mean the same thing, however, do say the same. They both say the shame. But not the same shame. There is a noble shame, and then there is an ignoble shame. In two words: the young man who was nearly shot – failed to be shot.14 This failure, as we can read between the lines in his quasi-posthumous story, is responsible for his feeling ashamed. He survived, and to survive, especially to survive when so many others did not, so many who were guilty simply of being born, born Jews, that is terrible. That – the complex of the survivor, as Giorgio Agamben would call it – defines not only his but our common situation as tragic or, better said, as beyond tragedy: it is a disaster. This is the ‘common’ lot shared by all the survivors: they should not have survived. The survivor lives with this terrible, unbearable thought: why me and not the others? Even those who escaped death in the death camps had to remain silent. They could not find a word for what is unspeakable. Now, not only was ‘the young man’ spared, but so was his house, the Castle, and only because it was a château. Here is the radical injustice that corresponds, symmetrically but reversely, to the injustice of being born a Jew. If you were born a Jew, you were (just about) doomed to extermination; if you were born in a château, you were (almost) safe. But is it still my, our lot? We were not even born! How could we feel responsible for the unspeakable ‘event’ that we never were able to experience – even in its non-experienceable condition? And so


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‘we’ lived for a long time if not ignoring at least not really paying attention to what had occurred, maybe because, in its unthinkable ‘nature’, it had not truly occurred to us that it could happen, that it could come all the way to us (cela n’était pas arrivé à arriver jusqu’à nous). The timing of the comeback of this absolute disaster may correspond to the time necessary for the work of mourning; on the condition, however, that you can be in mourning for what never happened to you, on the condition that this mourning, if indeed it is one, could ever be put to work: how to say goodbye – adieu – and to whom, when there is nothing left, no coffins, no burial places, nothing but ashes gone in Nacht und Nebel. In any case, let me insist – insistence of the instant – on this delay, because this is the originary meaning of the word demeurer: demorari. The demeure, the dwelling place, is the place where you linger (in French s’attarder, containing tard: late), and sometimes become a demeuré (retarded). For the young man extracted, by force, from his family home, the instant of his anticipated death is also the instant of his postponed death, when his death lingers, and when, maybe, he is longing for a death that takes too long to come, too long for the instant that, finally or in the very first place, never takes place. He is longing for death, for being at home in death, but death escapes, for, like the very existence of Dasein, death has no home, no place where it could rest. In French, you could say rester for dying, or settling for the final rest. But, precisely, you (or I) can never rest in death – you can only rest in peace. Only the dead, only those who can no longer die, being im-mortal because they have experienced that ‘experience not experienced’ and therefore have gone out of this experience that is what it is only in not being experienced, only the dead can rest and no longer long for dying. I can’t wait to die, that’s what the young man feels, that’s what he experiences with that extreme ‘lightness’ that alone lingers, only remainder of his deadly arrest or death sentence, a verdict that marks the hour of truth, only never to get there, be it; just to procrastinate the act to be carried out, as if dying were nothing but this delay selfaffecting time; in an instant, rather, which has no time to happen (to) itself and thus arrives; if death arrives only as if it had already taken place, as if it could really have a place. I would remind you here of the difference between two deaths that I evoked at the beginning of That Is To Say:15 the difference between real and fictive death, a difference that is itself a fiction. Anticipated death is the only one that is thinkable, no matter what takes place,


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but it is precisely what never takes place, or what takes place only in fiction – here, in this ‘fiction’ entitled The Instant of my Death. The impossibility but also the absolute necessity of saying one’s own death is the condition of possibility for any autobiography: you have to play the part of the dead, to do as though you went through death, like you go through New York or Berlin. To play the dead – or to counterfeit death. Imposture of the very truth, of the critical hour that steals out at the very instant, or of the instant that is unfaithful to itself, for want of being one instant itself. In order to be said as such, death must not be ‘real’ death. We can only act as if we were already dead if we want to experience death in its truth, as such. In its truth, that means in its fiction: in the instant of truth that escapes in the very instant of its coming, in the instant that escapes itself, for want of being one instant this very instant. Later – I jump to the ending or rather beyond it, after death has come and stolen out again, in its very coming; and I insist on this ‘stealing’ (dérober): rapture, theft, ecstasy are not only signs of the instant but also of that which is most properly one’s own (and the proper would rest only in depossession; there would be Ereignis only in Enteignis); later, then, and it will always be later, but this ‘later’ will always point to a kind of spacing particular to living on: afterward, but after nothing has actually happened, nothing but the young man fleeing without haste, vanishing as if he wished with some regrets to have been able to attend his own death, he wished to be its true witness and not his fictitious one; later, nothing will happen without or outside of this missed opportunity, this unique and unhoped-for chance with which the young man failed to meet. Later, it will always be too late. The instant of your death is only the instant when you can say what the instant of death will have been – deferred, suspended, arrested. I am talking about a sudden instant, a subitaneous instant – and if ‘subitaneous’, to translate the French subit, sounds painful it is because we suffer (subir) it. Subito, a direction in music, also begins with the prefix ‘sub-’ or ‘under’, as in the Latin subire – it all goes under: death steals upon you subito. That’s the way, always, even if you seek to overcome or dominate death by killing yourself, by self-inflicting it (we speak of the gift of death). Indeed, whoever seeks to dominate death – by inflicting it upon oneself in advance, in a fiction that anticipates death – obeys the old philosophic myth par excellence that travels from Socrates to Heidegger via Hegel with other way stations yet to be determined.


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Yes, or rather no, it needs repeating, after Blanchot or Derrida no one can dominate death, if ‘dominating’ implies being the master (dominus) of the house, the resident lord and master of the demeure, the man in his Castle. For there is no dwelling there, no demeure, no domus. Death remains with-out dwelling (la mort demeure à jamais hors demeure), or its dwelling is deferred (elle de-meurt); it is being tardy; it differs infinitely from being. Never will death be a subject, and any discourse that discusses it as a subject, mine included, is condemned to fiction. Death is a name that steals away from the name and from being. In French, dernière demeure, the last dwelling place, designates the place where one is put to rest and where the dead rest, while no one knows where they have gone or whether they remain elsewhere than in the survivors’ memory, or in writings, which are the only true graves. In my Tombeau de Trakl,16 precisely – and I ask you to forgive me this self-reference – I invented the verb ‘demourir’, to be used only in the third person in the present tense, a defective and quasi-impersonal verb, like il y a, there is. I was trying to catch what Trakl meant by ‘nearness of death’: the instant of an end that would infinitely defer – and differ from – its coming to an end. But now, in lieu of another ‘siting’ (Erörterung) of Trakl’s poetry, let me conclude with a few words on the ending of what Heidegger calls the land of the end or Abendland (land of the evening), wrongly called Occident. Wrongly, for I regret or do not regret to say it loudly, this word sounds to me unbearable, like many of the words that Heidegger bequeathed to us. Even if we disregard the fascist connotations that this word has in France in the aftermath of ’68, and even if you use it in the Heideggerian context of the Abend-Land, Occident always means some type of ending, the sunset, for example, or the land of the dead – as in Homer, Cimmeria, where Ulysses finds the entrance to Hell. Now how are we to read a statement such as: ‘the West is coming apart ... Westernisation is now over’?17 I found this phrase penned more or less by Jean-Luc Nancy. More or less because, on the one hand I only read it already translated into English, which takes the ‘West’ to be a term preferable to the French ‘Occident’, and on the other hand I found it in the transcription (more or less?) of an interview. What interested me was that the sentence came right after a quotation from Blanchot about ‘absent meaning’;18 and Nancy, rightly, refuses to understand it as an absence of meaning: ‘Not an absence of meaning,


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but a meaning that takes on meaning in its absence – one might even say, since its absence.’ Interestingly, this came also, in the context of a talk on techno music, after a long discussion on the end of politics or of the political, or more exactly of the theologico-political. Unlike rock music, techno claims to be deliberately apolitical, although in a sense different from the one that ‘apolitical’ has represented up to now, that is to say an inevitably reactionary retrenching and a return to the individual. The ‘a’ in ‘apolitical’ points to privation, but can be heard in two ways: either as a withdrawal from politics and the hegemony of politics; or as a withdrawal of politics, thus unconcealing its ‘absent meaning’ as its ‘end’, or, better yet, the absence of ends as its end or ending. It would seem that the political comes from the originary without-meaning (or the meaninglessness or senselessness of origin) as a means to put an end to it (to the absence of meaning), by assigning goals or ends (even values) that would prevent anyone from questioning this abyssal absent meaning or sense as the origin of any meaning or sense. The human ends in question are like Kant’s eternal peace: in the end, when it is reached, it really means death. When those ends collapse with their absence of meaning and because of it, the political flows back toward its a-political origin – an origin that is not one, neither a point of departure nor an ‘Orient’ (or ‘orientation’). The Orient is always already lost – that is the origin of the Occident, the West. Yet it is its origin insofar as the West, the Occident has always sought to return to it, in order to fill the void of the origin, in order to make up for the loss and thus efface its own abyssal origin, erase the ‘absent meaning’. To say about the West that it is ‘over’ is to say two things that do not overlap – or, on the contrary, that overlap endlessly, allowing no one to determine what meaning this end has or what end this meaning has. On the one hand, we have to conceive that the West is born as the end of meaning – that it is always already finished insofar as it prescribes meaning in the (as an) end, in a theological sense, be it atheist (e.g., Marxist) or religious, whereby the theological must always be understood as ontology in the same way that ontology is theological, firstly and lastly: the sense of Being is its end. On the other hand, one must also perceive that, having achieved its ends, meaning or sense falls into itself, dissolves into the catastrophe that had been its project; and, like the end of the West, it is precisely the Westernisation of meaning, deconstructed at the moment and point at which it happens (to) itself, in the globalisation of the West, that


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is also its globalkanisation, its fragmentation or dissemination, its implosion in the very explosion of meaning in every sense, and, by the same token, in a(b)-sense. Not a single (hi)story holds water still, if there is just one (hi)story. The end of the world is the world; it’s an ending that has arrived even before it was able to present itself: to come back to Jean-Luc Nancy, the sense or meaning of the world is finite, insofar as it has vanished into thin air in the infinite of absent meaning. Here is not the place to discuss Jean-Luc Nancy’s major thesis, his ontology of Mitsein. I’ll say a few things, and I’ll ask you to forgive their shallowness. First, what has always struck me, even shocked me, is his insistence on ontology; it is not the mit-, the ‘with’ that sounds problematical, but, as always, Sein, Being. I fully acknowledge that the ‘with’, insofar as it is not simply juxtaposed to Being, as too often is in Being and Time entirely transforms the meaning of Being. To say that the meaning of Being lies in the Mitsein is to take a step that completely modifies the landscape of ontology, but it still means navigating the same waters; what is more, it implies restoring ontology to life when it was, at long last, on the verge of drowning. On the other hand, Nancy is lucid enough to say that the with is what dislocates any ontology, because the with is precisely what Blanchot calls ‘absent meaning’. ‘With’ is without meaning, or with absent meaning, or with the only meaning of being without meaning. ‘Without’ is the meaning of being-with. I understand it strictly: when you are with someone, you are truly, meaningfully with this person only on the condition that this being-with remains without any other meaning. If there is a meaning to being with, then it is not the being-with that matters, but the meaning. The meaning justifies but also neutralises all the meaning that there is in being with. In order to make sense, being-with ought to remain without sense. Closely connecting this to what Blanchot would say about death and dying, I have a word that I use to call this impossible yet necessary conjunction: passance. In this word you can hear both the ‘pas’ (double, as in Blanchot’s pas that is ‘step’ or ‘not’) and the sense [sens] as sans, without. In English, within the word ‘without’ you find ‘out’. A literal translation would be: out of the with. ‘Avec’ comes from ‘apud’, ‘at’. So ‘without’ is to be understood as out of at home, and thus as the same as the ‘ex-’ of existence or of exile. But it is not merely the contrary of immanence, and it is not simply transcendence. You can approach it in the French for ‘homeless’, sans-abri, without shelter. To be homeless is neither to be immanent nor to be transcendent. Maybe


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it is not even to be. Both transcendence and immanence share this common characteristic: they are both at home, be it the self or the other. They are sheltered in the here or the beyond, a beyond that is always conceived as another home, or the home of an Other. On this level, any ontology, whether of immanence or transcendence, comes down to or back to – precisely returning to – the self or the other, the self being the other, each one at home in Being. This turn of the return seems unavoidable, even in the realm of the without (and despite the fact that ‘without’ excludes any return to the self, being without return), since it departs from ... its provenance is such and such ... and thus points to a point of departure that it makes into its origin resting in itself. Or let us say that the without reinstitutes the being (of the) with as that out of which it is without. To think a parting or a departing without starting point, a parting with without as a step out of any starting point, is what I attempted in inventing the following word: départenance (disowning / departing). It is not the mere opposite of appartenance, belonging. Départenance does not belong, not even to itself, being itself only by being without self. We should avoid naming it, since every name implies identification, and thus appropriation. Let us also avoid those pitfalls when we come to deconstruction. Deconstruction as disowning – enough to depose or defuse any claim that one belongs to deconstruction, as if one could belong to disowning in the way one is part of an association, a church, a political party, a nation, or even a family. Deconstruction does not read or bind (ne lit ni ne lie) politics; it unreads, undoes, unbinds (délit(e) ou délie) the political. Better yet, deconstruction is the political as it deconstructs itself or departs from itself and does not return to a mythical point of departure, an archpolitics withdrawn behind politics proper. Behind politics, as behind phenomena, there is essentially nothing. But that which is ‘in’ politics is the in that is out of its borders; it is the out in without, the apolitical. Here too are two ways of grasping what is at stake: the first view entails that ‘politics’ is basically always apolitical and has never reached the bottom of, or exhausted the political, and has been apolitical for want of ever having been political (enough). That is the radical, extremist, even eschatological view – politics covering up the promise of the political; being-with foreclosed for having made itself into one being-with, one being-with, unable to conceive the ‘with’ with its inner ‘without’. In this, while failing to overlap with it completely, the more radical view dovetails with the second view, that is to say


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the other sense, the absent meaning, the apolitical – the apolitical not of he who is upsipolis apolis, to cite Heidegger interpreting the chorus in Antigone, who is siteless or placeless because he must first institute it; the apolitical not of a being but of Nobody; the apolitical as Nobody, not a human being, not even a Dasein being, not even a flower (since a flower may always make sense after all); the apolitical as without, absent meaning, absentee sense, as passance. I shall not claim that it makes sense, or that it makes nonsense for that matter. But that is what happens: deconstruction arriving and happening everywhere, sparing not a single place, and therefore without politics, if there is politics only from (or, above all, with a view towards) a place, a site as an end. That is what takes place without place – everywhere. It is everybody and the whole world. This is the sense of the world. Or the without of the world, a withoutworld coming from the most salient point of sense when, having achieved its ends, meaning returns to itself, that is to say its sense suspended in absence. Politics is death at home; the a-political is death deferred: not life, not survival, but, simply, in the simplicity19 of the without, ex-istence from within without. NOTES 1. Maurice Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994). 2. Martin Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin’s Erde und Himmel’, in Gesamtausgabe 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), p. 165. 3. Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, p. 20. 4. See Nathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: G. Braziller, 1983). 5. To be (almost surgically) precise one more time, the date of 20 July that Derrida suggests for Blanchot’s near execution in Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998) happens, strangely, to correspond to the failed attempt on Hitler’s life. 6. I refer to the François Fédier preface entitled ‘Revenir à plus de décence’ (Returning to more decency) for Martin Heidegger, Ecrits politiques: 1933–1966 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), in which Heidegger’s accusers are presented as the ‘indecent’ ones. 7. Maurice Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire Invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), p. 112, my translation. 8. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 112. 9. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 112.


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172 Marc Froment-Meurice 10. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 112. Bident quotes Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 451 (i.e., p. 140, n. 4). I changed ‘most lofty’ to ‘most high’. 11. Michel Deguy, ‘Le sozi de Heidegger’, in Le Débat 48 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). See also my Solitudes: From Rimbaud to Heidegger (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1995). 12. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 96. 13. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 96, my emphasis. The ‘detail’ refers to the extreme-rightist French ‘leader’, Le Pen, speaking of the extermination camps as if they were mere ‘details’. 14. In French, faillir (to be nearly ...) is the same word as ‘to fail’. Faillite is a failure – bankruptcy. Blanchot nearly got shot – and this ‘nearly’ is his failure. 15. Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is To Say: Heidegger’s Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 9. 16. Marc Froment-Meurice, Tombeau de Trakl (Paris: Belin, 1992). 17. ‘An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy’, in Michel Gaillot, Multiple Meaning, Techno: an Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1998), p. 94. I thank Vladimir T. Djokic who sent me this text. 18. See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 42: ‘Keep watch over absent meaning.’ 19. In Latin, the word ‘simplicitas’ means ‘without a fold’. Interestingly, in German the word (Einfalt) reads as ‘one fold’.


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10 Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pensée du désert) With(in) Jacques Derrida Laurent Milesi

Four or five words set down as a title, an invitation to a voyage: thinking, desert, and ‘through’, which, more parenthetically than thetically, attempts to mark a path between the two, together with and within – but not without (sans) – Jacques Derrida. Why should reading him invite us to connect that noblest of human activity called ‘thinking’ with an image which traditionally evokes barrenness, suffering, a purgatorial and at best transitory experience – through a trans- which timidly hints at the traversing (‘through’) process of this title? How can one think the desert, think (one’s way) through the desert, maybe even think the desert through and through (if that were a possible invention), without succumbing to the temptation of taming it from the comfortable position of a ‘without’ into one of many figures, themes or loci? As questions of ethics supposedly became ostensibly more and more prominent in Derrida’s writings, so did the appeal of / to the desert as a ‘place’ to be surveyed and traversed by thinking, to be thought through for thinking itself to ‘take place’ or take a radically other place. Yet how should one approach such a radically inhospitable, inhuman, foreign and alien(ating) territory? And also perhaps: what of its ‘horizon’,1 its ‘beyond’ – bearing in mind Derrida’s own reservations towards the limited openings of horizons – and can one come back (which is to say here, go forward) from Derrida’s desert (thinking)? MIRAGES OF THE DESERT: THE RECEDING DISTANCING OF THINKING Regardless of whatever distinctive qualities this ‘desert’ might be endowed or ‘filled’ with, Derrida’s now familiar exposure of the limitations of thematic criticism and of the economy of metaphoricity should caution us against marshalling it into an army of metaphors, even as a more archaic figure for the figuration of the unfigurable,2 whose exhaustive cataloguing could claim to summon all its tropic 173


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effects.3 This conception of the desert would eventually deliver both more and less than what an engagement with its singular uniqueness should promise: it would perhaps simply miss the (experience of the) desert ‘itself’ – what, after Derrida, we shall designate as the ‘desert (with)in the desert’ – and the radical chance for thinking that this essay would like to consider. However, in retracing or following in Derrida’s footsteps, I will inevitably have to revisit the deserts conjured up in his peregrine writing, and there is perhaps no fundamentally other way of reading than this repérage of landmarks as a first ‘approach’ – like learning how to find one’s bearings in the desert where no cardinal origin or orientation is immediately available, as long as one remains aware of the dis-placement already at work via ‘translations’ and ‘metaphorisations’ in such a procedure. THE KHÔRIC SPACE AND THE AFFIRMATIVE APORIAS OF DECONSTRUCTION If, forced to do so by the constraints of this academic exercise, one had to isolate crucial moments in Derrida’s grappling with the desert, his patient discussion of Plato’s khôra should presumably qualify as (almost) a locus princeps and our first immediate port of call. Originally collected in the 1987 Poikilia for Jean-Pierre Vernant, the essay on the Platonic khôra elaborates the difficult reading / translation of the non-place of such a ‘place’, which gives (rise to) – donne lieu – without giving anything as an essential place or essence, in a withdrawal of the place from ‘place’ which Derrida wishes to demarcate from the residual remainders of an es gibt in negative theology.4 I shall return to this ‘demarcation’ from the via negativa but, as a preamble (to which I shall also return), let me first suggest a parallel with two poetic ‘loci’. When one reads il y a khôra in Derrida’s essay, one cannot help recalling the five obsessional words that stalk through several of his texts, from Dissemination onwards and via The Post Card,5 until they culminate in a more sustained poetic meditation in Feu la cendre (Cinders), originally also published in 1987: il y a là cendre. The haunting leitmotif that, for Derrida, proclaims the mystery of a self-effacing, inessential remainder, silently substitutes the referentless place for the ‘awaited’ definitive article, in a linguistic move or ‘dis-articulation’ that slightly bends or ‘translates’ the French idiom to gesture towards the anteriority of a place divested from the remaining and reassuring trappings of an essence, not unlike the


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calculated erasure of the definitive article in il y a khôra to mark its ‘place without (the) place’. Thus, in the roughly contemporaneous essay ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, within a context stressing the anteriority of the self-effacing trace, its radical avoir lieu, one reads about idiomaticity (within the ferment of Derrida’s French idiom ‘itself’) that ‘Une trace a eu lieu. ... même si elle n’arrive qu’à s’effacer, si elle n’advient qu’en effaçant, l’effacement aura eu lieu, fût-il de cendre. Il y a là cendre.’6 Yet there is an even more archaic resonance for the lack of identifiable placement for khôra-as-place, one that the following fragment, ‘s’il y a lieu ou, selon notre idiome, lieu donné, donner lieu ici ne revient pas à faire présent d’une place’,7 owes a debt to: Mallarmé’s ‘rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu’, one of the famous, often glossed lines cast across the double pages of Un Coup de dés, whose exercise should be read with the French poet’s fascination with the pure place of choreographic space in mind and, for a reading of Derrida, the latter’s own ‘choreographic’ use of male and female voices (‘polysexual signatures’) through texts which become indeterminate loci of vocal exappropriation.8 Such a place is not yet even an experience of place mediated by thinking through, the place constituted from (within) the event taking place, still retained by the event of a promise and of Scripture’s revelation in negative theology, a place already open, fallen into the tense / time of history and historicity. In the second part of Khôra, Derrida recalls the Socratic discourse, featured towards the opening of Timaeus, which makes a distinction between philosophers and politicians as being endowed with a proper place,9 versus the poets and sophists who itinerantly, iteratively migrate from place to place, and the non-place which Socrates feigns to occupy in his address: his speech ‘occurs in a third genus [triton genos10] and in the neutral space of a place without place, a place where everything is marked but which would be “in itself” unmarked’.11 ‘Likewise’, deconstruction, through a certain flexing and opening up of ‘classical’ philosophical questioning and argumentative procedures to poetry, aims to question the place of politics from a non-place that will reveal those constitutive differences in placements and bring to consciousness the ‘ante-primal’ (avant-premier) idiom for absolute responsibility, not the question of (the present of) being and essence (es gibt Sein) but the issue of place (il y a lieu).12 In ‘Faith and Knowledge’13 Derrida will return to what he called in the original the ‘avant-premier prénom’14 of khôra, as the second ‘track’ (piste) to be followed in the impossible locus of the desert he is


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trying to evoke, and will further outline the options for radical(ising) thinking. Plato’s place-without-place of the originary inscription of forms and differences15 ‘would situate the abstract spacing, place itself, the place of absolute exteriority, but also the place of a bifurcation between two approaches to the desert’:16 between a tradition of the via negativa, which still subscribes to the anthropo-theological possibility of thinking (beyond) Being whose idiom and figures remain caught within the particularisms of Greco-Abrahamic (philosophical [‘Western’] as well as religious) cultures on the margins or ‘merely’ in sight of a middle-eastern desert, and the ethical call of a more archaic place, before time and cultures, indeed out of time and ‘out of place’, more universalisable (though according to a most singular universality), impassibly / impassably alien to or untouched by what takes place within it (be it an event, a reply, an experience of the Name). This anterior experience is ‘the test [épreuve] of Khôra’,17 the implacable trial of an other place within the place (the abstraction or re-trait of / from the desert, or desertification, the desert within the desert of a ‘risque en demeure’18) but also doing without (sans) the other place,19 a singular place name for such an absolute spacing, still sans foi ni loi (as the condition for justice before the Law or the religious before Religion), ‘the very place of an infinite resistance, of an infinitely impassible persistance [restance]’20 which could also have as another ‘name’ deconstruction.21 Or to let Derrida’s own voice resonate again from this desert – in French, for reasons which will be made apparent below: Khôra ‘dit cet immémorial d’un désert dans le désert pour lequel il n’est ni seuil ni deuil’.22 So how can one think this desert before the knowable, revealable desert(s)? In order to return to and attempt to think (back to) this avant-premier ‘desert (with)in the desert’, we shall need to follow Derrida’s other lead towards the ‘messianic’ in ‘Faith and Knowledge’. But ‘first’ let us return to the demarcation between deconstruction and the via negativa. About the same time as Derrida’s thoughts on the Platonic khôra crystallised, the essay translated as ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ grappled with the vexing question of the relation between deconstruction and negative theology, for which one of many earlier contexts would have to be Derrida’s writings on Blanchot (mainly the essays collected in Parages, 198623), especially his fascination with the latter’s ‘step-by-step procedure of overstepping or of impossible transgression’24 in operators like pas, but also sans (cf. below) – the problematic place of origin of pas, sans, quasiment figuring a ‘horizon’ of (un)sayability in ‘How to Avoid Speaking’.25 Early in the essay


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for the Poikilia, we had read that the triton genos of khôra eschews the critical choice in the binary tension between a ‘neither ... nor’ and a ‘both this and that’, and that it is (therefore) aporetic26 – yet another word which I shall need to briefly reconsider in this endlessly receding panorama. The demarcation from the superficial affinity with negative theology / via negativa – the tenuous specificity of deconstruction ‘itself’ (despite overlapping strategies of de-multiplication / multiplicity of voices27) insofar as it ultimately radically asserts the affirmative and beckons towards what ‘ground’ thinking can find in what is anterior to Being in order to reorientate itself – is recalled and developed in ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ (in contexts reemphasising the anteriority of the trace), before announcing the three tempi or loci of the essay (the Greek [Platonic] paradigm and two tropics of negativity: the beyond-Being [epekeina] and khôra; khôra versus the Christian movement of apophasis; Heidegger’s ‘denials’ of faith, theology and Being), in which ‘a certain void, the place of an internal desert, will perhaps allow this question [of negative theology] to resonate’28 – a spacing rhythm which one may wish to see redeployed in the three aporetic loci of ‘Faith and Knowledge’: the desert, the Promised Land and the island (cf. below). The strategic importance of the Platonic khôra can be best grasped in the following two dovetailing passages, central to the articulation and demarcation of the deconstructive space of thinking / writing versus the apophatic experience: Radically nonhuman and atheological, one cannot even say that it gives place or that there is the khôra. The es gibt, thus translated, too vividly announces or recalls the dispensation of God, of man or even that of the Being of which certain texts by Heidegger speak (es gibt Sein).29 Contrary to what seemed to happen in the ‘experience’ of the place called khôra, the apophasis is brought into motion – it is initiated ... by the event of a revelation which is also a promise. This ... opens up a history and an anthropo-theological dimension ... This place itself [of an anthropo-theological union/adjunction of apophatic writing to God’s Scripture] is assigned by the event of the promise and the revelation of Scripture. It is the place only after what will have taken place. ... The place is an event.30 As opposed to the presence-as-reference of a negativised essence (God is not such and such, etc.), khôra is a reference without referent,31 a ‘place’ which ‘takes place’ [a lieu] without a place – au lieu de: ‘there is khôra but the khôra does not exist’.32 A place within / hollowed


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out of (the) place, it is anterior to ‘the thinking of an essential “having-taken-place”’33 and is thus neither an event / experience of presence nor of the presence of the present, which are eventually left unchallenged by Christian apophases / via negativa. JUST OPENING (UP) – THE MESSIANIC AND THE RE-LIGIOUS One of the significant additions to the 1993 republication in book form of the essay on khôra is the framing opening echo of the arrivant, which, in the context of writings such as Aporias and Specters of Marx, testifies to the discreet recentring on issues of ethics, responsibility and the messianic, of Derrida’s meditations on a quasi-originary ‘place’ (place-without-a-place). His opening ‘Khôra nous arrive...’34 allows us to reread this necessary ‘before-the-first place’ or originary (non-)place as an absolute giving (cf. ‘arrivant’) as well as given, though not as an essence, that conditions subsequent determinations of places from which questions of ethics, hospitality or responsibility towards the Other, etc., ought to be asked for their radical legitimacy. First articulated in Aporias, the quasi-neologism of the arrivant, i.e. the one / that which arrives / must be let to arrive as radically unanticipatable event, offered a linguistic peg on which to anchor the ceaseless vigilance of responsibility towards the other so as to preserve the possibility of justice, even in its radical impossibility, which Derrida had addressed in the roughly contemporaneous lecture first given on the occasion of the 1990 conference on ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice’ and republished as the first section of Force de loi: ‘Du Droit à la justice’. There, Derrida’s third and last proposition for the relationship between deconstruction, law and justice, stated that deconstruction takes place in the gap or space (intervalle) which separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of law, and is possible as an experience of the impossible – what he calls an experience of aporia and whose radical impossibility he defines as follows, in terms that could lend an a posteriori justification to the middle term in my title: an experience is a traversal, something that traverses and travels toward a destination for which it finds the appropriate passage. The experience finds its way, its passage, it is possible. And in this sense it is impossible to have a full experience of aporia, that is, of something that does not allow passage.35 No justice, then, without this experience of the impossible and impassable aporia, and the arrivant – in which we can recognise the


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strategic Derridean choice of an active suffix, as in différance or restance (cf. below) which came to ‘figure’ such a radical opening up to the call of the other without the programmable horizon of expectation(s), ‘the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice’,36 of an absolute future that cannot be anticipated and to which one must / can only say ‘yes’ or ‘come’:37 The new arrivant: this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without expecting it [s’y attendre], without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event.38 Where reflection on ethics meets thinking through the religious, the time of the arrival / arriving-as-event is also the (absolutely future) time of the messianic one has to wait for without expectations, ‘this desert-like messianism (without content and without identifiable messiah)’, which a range of texts were at work to elaborate throughout the 1990s. One of the attendant tasks of Specters of Marx is to rethink the political, ideological, social, etc. implications and forms of a spectral return of the religious and, more specifically, of a difference between ‘two messianic spaces’: the universality of the messianic call as a structure of experience and an archaic (Abrahamic), already particularised historico-religious messianism.39 I will cite at some length from Specters of Marx as the various ‘motifs’ glimpsed so far are orchestrated together in one and the same development: If the messianic appeal belongs properly to a universal structure, to that irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future, therefore to experience itself and to its language ... how is one to think it with the figures of Abrahamic messianism? Does it figure abstract desertification or originary condition? Was not Abrahamic messianism but an exemplary prefiguration, the pre-name [prénom] given against the background of the possibility that we are attempting to name here? But then why keep the name, or at least the adjective (we prefer to say messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion), there where no figure of the arrivant ... should be pre-determined, prefigured or even pre-named? Of these two deserts, which one, first of all, will have signalled toward the other? Can one conceive an atheological heritage of the messianic? Ascesis strips the messianic hope of all biblical forms, and even all determinable figures of the wait or expectation; it thus denudes itself in view of responding to


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that which must be absolute hospitality, the ‘yes’ to the arrivant(e), the ‘come’ to the future that cannot be anticipated ... Open, waiting for the event as justice, this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality. The messianic, including its revolutionary forms ... would be ... a waiting without horizon of expectation [une attente sans horizon d’attente – left out of the translation]. One may take the quasi-atheistic dryness of the messianic to be the condition of the religions of the Book, a desert that was not even theirs ... one may always recognize there the arid soil in which grew, and passed away, the living figures of all the messiahs ... One may also consider this compulsive growth, and the furtiveness of this passage, to be the only events on the basis of which we approach and first of all name the messianic in general. One may deem strange, strangely familiar and inhospitable at the same time ... this figure of absolute hospitality whose promise one would choose to entrust to an experience that is so impossible ... to a quasi-‘messianism’ so anxious, fragile, and impoverished, to an always presupposed ‘messianism’, to a quasi-transcendental ‘messianism’ that also has such an obstinate interest in a materialism without substance: a materialism of the khôra for a despairing ‘messianism’.40 Such a radical gesture amounts to a stripping of foundational values, yet without negativity – what is borne in the affirmative sans, its ‘negativity without negativity’, which Derrida had first discussed in Blanchot’s writings in ‘Pas’, then taken up in the context of Christian apophasis in ‘How to Avoid Speaking’:41 the religious without (sans) religion, the messianic without (sans) messianism,42 but also, within the topographies of Derridean thinking, the place within the place, the desert within the desert which one can only hope to glimpse from afar through an arduous, ardent, sometimes arid process of desertification. Deconstruction is – to echo Caputo’s fine gloss which partly takes in the above quotation – ‘a desertified Abrahamism ... it has deserted father Abraham and gone out into a khôral desert, like an an-khôr-ite, where the flower of no determinable Messiah grows’.43 So what ‘is’ the religious without religion, the messianic without messianism? Questions of hollowing out or exclusion which, paradoxically and aporetically as it may seem at first sight, will pave the way for the inscription of a ‘desert within the desert’. I recalled earlier that, in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida mentions three aporetic places, ‘with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point of arrival, without ... a calculable programme’, places which ‘shape [figurent] our horizon’, but the task at hand, Derrida adds, is to think and say a certain absence of horizon, hence the necessity to apprehend ‘an abyss in these places,44 for example a desert


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in the desert, there where one neither can nor should see coming what ought or could – perhaps – be yet to come. What is still left to come’.45 To get anywhere near the ‘desert in the desert’, two origins, sources, ‘tracks that are still invisible in the desert’,46 two ‘first name[s] prior to all naming’47are suggested (here in inverted order): khôra (the ‘test of khôra’, in order to think this desert ‘before’ the desert [cf. above]), and the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. Derrida’s first avant-premier prénom ‘takes place’ in the ‘stripping’48 of messianism from messianicity, the dispossession of identifiable prophetic figures necessary for the opening up to the absolute avenir, always untimely (intempestif) – as opposed to the future, still inscribed within a temporal continuity from past and present – or the (wel)coming of the other or arrivant as the advent of justice, in a wait without expectation, ‘waiting without awaiting itself’,49 reflection without auto-affective reflexivity. This messianic laying bare is the radical condition of the desire for justice and the hope for a universalisable culture of singularities, ‘a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced’.50 Of a rigorous and desert-like severity, it will run the risk of refusing to be contained within any of the received oppositions in our tradition, ‘réflechissant sans fléchir’;51 like khôra, it is therefore a triton genos, a performative event outside of / unrecuperable by what it inaugurates, including by what is called religion: Wherever this foundation founds in floundering, wherever it steals away under the ground of what it founds, at the very instant when, losing itself thus in the desert, it loses the very trace of itself and the memory of a secret, ‘religion’ can only begin and begin again.52 Thus religion ‘itself’ (and, with it, response and responsibility53) must be unbound – déliée54 – to conjure back the lien sans lien of religion without religion: to untie the tie and ‘return’ to the ‘avant-premier lien’ by attempting to ‘translate’ the Latin religio and recalling its dual controversial derivation or etymological source:55 – Relegere (from legere: to pluck [flowers], gather [flowers into a bunch] – what reading [legere] also does); – religare (from ligare: to tie, bind – in French: lier, relier) What both filiations, genealogies, have in common as ‘linguistic praxes’ is for Derrida, following Benveniste in Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, ‘a persistent bond that bonds itself first and foremost to itself’, ‘a resistance or a reaction to disjunction. To


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ab-solute alterity’,56 and ‘recollecter’ (Benveniste’s own translation) inevitably connotes lecture and election. From religion as ‘ce qui arrive à revenir’57 – let us not forget that Jacques Derrida is (also) addressing the ‘return of the religious’ as he had started doing indirectly via the spectral hauntings of Marx and Marxism in Specters of Marx – Derrida endeavours to think back to the absolute night or nocturnal light of the religious ‘turn’58 of a messianicity more archaic than any revealed religion,59 so as to glimpse the third aporetic place: ... a third place that could well have been more than archi-originary, the most anarchic and unarchivable place possible ... a certain desert, [not the desert of revelation but a desert in the desert, – left out of the translation] that which makes possible, opens, hollows or infinitizes the other ... That which would orient here ‘in’ this desert, without pathway and without interior, would still be the possibility of a religio and of a relegere, to be sure, but before the ‘bond’ of religare ... before the bond between men as such or between man and the divinity of the god.60 Even if it is called the social nexus, bond to the other in general, this fiduciary ‘bond’ would precede ... all positive religion, every onto-anthropo-theological horizon ... This can therefore resemble a desertification, the risk of which remains [risque en demeure] undeniable ... The abstraction of the desert can thereby open the way to everything from which it withdraws. Whence the ambiguity or the duplicity of the religious trait or retreat, of its abstraction or of its subtraction. This deserted re-treat thus makes way for the repetition of that which will have given way precisely for that in whose name one would protest against it, against that which only resembles the void and the indeterminacy of mere abstraction.61 The religious without religion would therefore be the originary liensans-lien (déliaison) that would make possible the gathering together without / before community or sociality (‘the social nexus’) that erases subjectivities in the name of a promised collectivity and revealed universality, the free inhabiting together of a place. INTERLUDE – LE RE(-)TRAIT DU / ‘DANS’ LE DÉSERT I will immediately link in (with) another quotation, on the threshold of this innermost desert, abs-tracted / sub-tracted radically through an abyssal hollowing out of the desert ‘itself’: Another ‘tolerance’ would be in accord with the experience of the ‘desert in the desert’, it would respect the distance of infinite alterity as singularity. And this respect would still be religio ... as ... reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction,


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coming from the threshold of all religion in the bond of repetition to itself, the threshold of every social or communitarian bond.62 Writing through / criss-crossing Derrida’s aporetic loci – in the last section of a joint text called La Contre-allée – Catherine Malabou will state that, ‘Le désert désigne l’écart improbable qui sépare l’origine déterminée de telle religion de la possibilité même de tout commencement et de tout événement.’63 Écart – or, palindromically, trace – thus cendres, reste sans reste (restance), difference within / without difference (différance as ‘the desert-like place without properties or genus’64), etc. What we are arduously groping towards here is the inter-est of an innermost desire,65 an archi-originary rift only accessible through its effects but which it is the responsibility of writing and thinking to respond to, religiously, without expecting any returns save the meagre satisfaction of having attempted to radically (re-)think by eradicating or uprooting, as much as is possible and feasible, the axiomatics of its structure.66 ‘Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise’, to echo the title in Levinas’s Noms propres, where Philosophy’s panorama, before and after Derrida, shifts from ‘everything is in place’ to ‘nothing is left inhabitable for thought’, ‘everything is ... left desolate’.67 FROM THE DESERT WITHIN / OF LANGUAGE TO THE LANGUAGE OF THE DESERT: DERRIDA’S (NON-)LIEUX D’ÉCRITURE No such radical uprooting of tradition, no such long-suffering crossing of the desert (within) would be conceivable without the reinvention of language, from the innermost conviction of an insuperable alterity within one’s language as the language of the other – the remaining habitable singularity of the mono in ‘My monolingualism dwells and I call it my dwelling’, whereby the subject has to learn that s/he has to give up any hope of ‘mastery’ of a ‘pure’ language that s/he owns ‘by (motherly) nature’ (‘I only have one language; it is not mine’68) – to the performative implementation of what I will name, and tentatively illustrate as, the khôreographic ‘desert-writing’. Monolingualism of the Other is undeniably Derrida’s most cogent cri de coeur proclaiming the radical ‘alienation à demeure’ within (one’s) language.69 Language, all language, all languages – ‘monolanguage’, rien qu’une, i.e. the deconstructive plus d’une as an injunction to cultivate the multiplicity of alien voices within one’s language, in that sense always therefore the language of the other – are always in transit,


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mourning a state of purity and unalienated Unicity, condemned to renounce mastery, ‘cannot manage to reach themselves [n’arrivent pas à s’arriver] because they no longer know where they are coming from, what they are speaking from and what the sense of their journey is’.70 But from these arrivées sans arrivée grows the desire to invent a first language that would be, rather, prior-to-the-first [avant-première] language destined to translate that memory. But to translate the memory of what, precisely, did not take place, of what, having been (the) forbidden, ought, nevertheless, to have left the trace, a specter, a phantomatic body, the phantommember ... of traces, marks, and scars ... ... Invented for the genealogy of what did not happen and whose event will have been absent, leaving only negative traces of itself in what makes history, such a prior-to-the-first language does not exist.71 Since the prior-to-the-first time of pre-originary language does not exist, it must be invented. Injunctions, the summons [mise en demeure] of another writing. But, above all, it must be written within languages, so to speak. One must summon up writing inside the given language.72 For this philosopher of Judeo-Christian-Maghrebin descent obsessed by (the dream of) the purity of the (his) French tongue, sometimes the withdrawal (retraite) into ‘a desert that I sometimes have the illusion of “cultivating” by myself, of surveying like a desert’,73 is inevitable, because ‘The miracle of translation does not take place every day; there is, at times, a desert without a desert crossing.’74 Placed under the seal of othering, destinerring and adestination, what can Derrida’s transit language, the loci of its / his writing (lieux d’écriture), ‘be’ or, rather, invent in order to become?75 I shall situate the half-elaborated notes that will follow from now on – like timid, half-erased traces of footsteps in the windblown desert that would still mask from sight a more primordial, quasi-originary, innermost desert – under the aegis of a remark by Anne Berger in her interview of Jacques Derrida, ‘Dialanguages’: ‘It would be as if, in a certain way, you knew the place that would allow you to write it [the dream of the book], as if you had found it, and at the same time it were lost to you.’76 Deserted by itself, a desert (in) ‘itself’, language (the desert of language) crosses over into the ‘ab-negating’ language of the desert in Derrida’s incessant endeavours to ‘invest’, inhabit a u-topian / a-topic, impossible place of writing, go ‘there where one cannot go’ but must therefore needs go: ‘il y a lieu de (which means il faut, “it is


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necessary”, “there is ground for”) rendering oneself there where it is impossible to go’,77 an introspective turn towards the desert inside (the desert) of which I will merely highlight several possible forms, strategies of resistance, haunting returns and restances: – The negotiations and the circumventions of the confessional (e.g. ‘Circumfessions’) and the autobiographical78 (Monolingualism of the Other, ‘Un ver à soie’), of the apophatic mirage of the renunciation of ontology (hauntology in Specters of Marx), or even of a reassuring soteriology (‘Pas’, Sauf le nom [Blanchot’s sauf], but also the quasisoteriological promise of the singular (im)possibility of all speech again in Monolingualism79), etc., are as many ‘figureless figures’ or strategies of calculated avoidance of this desert-writing or shifting sands of Derridean thinking that eventually demarcate themselves from the kind of demultiplication at work in negative theology, in favour of a more khôreographic performance sustained, as precariously long as is possible, by a suspensive syntax and ‘operators of (un)decidability’ (hymen, supplement, pas / plus de, etc.) or ‘shifting’ active operations (such as ‘-ance’ in restance, différance, demeurance, etc.), ‘hollowed-out’ particles (sans, sauf), a cultivation of spacing in phonic concatenation (sans foi ni loi, sans feu ni lieu, ni seuil ni deuil, ‘sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir’,80 etc.). In these stylistic peregrinations or via crucis, the ‘religious’ of Derrida’s scriptural choreographies seems to have undone its ‘primary’ meaning of an eschatological revelation81 of a ‘content’ in order to evoke the crossing of an unthought / unthinkable in the inhuman, in-hospitable desert of language,82 ethically binding and (re)collecting us to (re)read him patiently and with passion (re-ligare, re-legere), across lire, lier, lien, and lieu. – But, like Mallarmé’s fascinating ballet dancer that momentarily defies the laws of gravity and, while the tension of the leap is sustained, institutes a utopian / a-topic place – and may I recall in passing here that Derrida has compared the movement of signs in Mallarmé’s poetry to figures in ballets83 – Derrida’s ‘banderect’ syntax knows itself to be doomed to fall / fail sooner or later: indeed, attempts to take the absolute necessity of this hazard into account, and the motifs or topoi of cinders, the self-holocaustic trace, restance, burnt letters, etc., can be read as so many disseminative grains of sand in the desert that inhabits Derrida’s Jewish pyrographics. – Still, like the etchings in Lignées, to which his own vignettes offer ‘responses’ – and some of which feature meditations on the radical desertification of a place (i.e. beyond such and such a desert(ed) place) after the protagonists have left the scene, whereby rien ne


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reste du lieu que le lieu (the place hollowed out of the place ‘itself’) – Derrida’s (non-)lieux d’écriture, seeking to redress justice against the law(s) (of gravity, metaphysics, of institutions, etc.), offer themselves up as transitory, migratory crossings and (grands) écarts, challenging the conditions and foundations of positionality through the poetic re-grounding of ethics: the incinerated is no longer nothing, nothing but the cinder ... a remnant that must no longer remain, this place of nothing that may be, a pure place was marked out [un lieu pur se chiffrât-il] – Pure is the word. It calls for fire. Cinders there are [Il y a là cendre], this is what takes place in letting a place occur, so that it will be understood: Nothing will have taken place but the place [rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu]. Cinders there are: Places there is (il y a lieu).84 Pure pyrography of desire, of désir in the désert, the absolute chance as necessity of / in Un Coup de dés for thinking to be re-thought through and through (remember Mallarmé’s famous ‘Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés’); Derrida’s khôreographic desert-writing gestures towards the double bind of a (non)-lieu as a coming towards such a Mallarméan atopos (‘rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu’): the necessity and yet – hence the past subjunctive in ‘un lieu pur se chiffrât-il’ – the impossibility to find, found and fully inhabit such a radical place from which to speak and which yet should resist identification in order to preserve the full plenitude of the voice.85 ‘CONCLUSION’ – (RE)READING DERRIDA ‘RELIGIOUSLY’ Derrida’s life in writing / thinking will have been an enduring crossing towards an innermost desert, in an exfoliation of cruci-fictions (crisscross with hauntings, recurrent motifs and preoccupations) which we will never be able to do justice to, even if we read and reread him religiously, à la lettre – or even less, ‘diacritically’ rather than merely critically, as I tried to show elsewhere.86 Having been taught to unbind ourselves, we paradoxically remain obliged (ob-ligare) to the apostolic sendings of this ‘grand old gardener’87 cast into the Daliesque role of a ‘grand désertificateur’ by Levinas, for whom, if there were but one frail tiny little plant clinging to the arid soil of the desert in the fond hope of growing anew, Derrida would come and implacably pluck it up, ‘religiously’ though ruthlessly eradicating all forms of life in this bleak landscape of desolate sterility. But I suggest


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we absolve Derrida of this absolute crime, though I cannot do so in English, qui ici me fait défaut, et il me faut donc cette autre langue mienne qu’est le français. Je propose, en lointain écho à l’exergue de ‘La Mythologie blanche’, de faire une fleur à Jacques Derrida en rappelant qu’il en est une au moins (ou au plus) que ses écrits nous enjoignent à cultiver, dans ce désert qu’il arpente sans cesse avec passion. Cette fleur qu’il nous faut prendre, sans la cueillir, c’est la patience ... NOTES 1. Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67, here p. 26: ‘a horizon is both the opening and the limit that defines an infinite progress or a period of waiting’. Hence the fact that justice ‘has no horizon of expectation (regulative or messianic)’ (p. 27). 2. Compare with Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 73–142, here p. 119. 3. In this respect, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, Dissemination, trans., intr. and with additional notes by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 173–286, and ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in MP, pp. 207–1. 4. Derrida, ON, p. 96. Unless otherwise stated, references to this collection in English translation of three original 1993 booklets will be exclusively to ‘Khôra’, pp. 89–127. 5. This long-standing haunting is itself evoked towards the beginning of Cinders / Feu la cendre, trans., ed., and intr. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 21. The motifs of ashes and the desert had already been plumbed in a passage of Glas alluding to Leopardi’s La Ginestra, with its echos from St John in the exergue where a genêt flower is found that is ‘patient in the deserts’, in the ‘fields that are strewn / With unbreeding ashes’ (G, p. 66). 6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 560–1; compare with the attempt at an English translation in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, p. 98. About the trace not ‘taking place’ without effacing (itself), see ‘Différance’, in MP, pp. 1–27, here p. 24; it will be recalled that this now canonical essay contains Derrida’s first attempt to disengage deconstruction from the discourse of negative theology (see especially p. 6), for which see also Kevin Hart’s early critical discussion in The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 184–6. Cf. also Cinders, especially p. 43, about trace and cinders as ‘what remains without remaining’. 7. Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 37; ON, p. 100: ‘if there is place, or, according to our idiom, place given, to give place here does not come to the same thing as to make a present of a place’.


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8. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, in Points ... Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89–108: originally in Diacritics, 12 (2) (1982), pp. 66–76. 9. Derrida, Khôra, p. 55: ont lieu (ON, p. 107). 10. Cf. ON, p. 89, about khôra, and also ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 104. 11. ON, p. 109. I have silently emended the faulty translation ‘or’ to ‘of’; cf. Khôra, p. 59. 12. This questioning should not take place without being aware of the larger issues of the ‘place of deconstruction’, which I tried to address briefly in the 1998 conference on ‘Critique and Deconstruction’ organised by Geoffrey Bennington at the University of Sussex. 13. FK (1988). 14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la “religion” aux limites de la simple raison’, in La Religion (Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo) (Paris: Seuil / Laterza, 1996), pp. 9–86, here p. 29. 15. Cf. Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 105: ‘that gives place to every inscription’. 16. FK, p. 19. 17. ON, p. 76. 18. Derrida, ‘Foi et savoir’, p. 27 (untranslatable in English; cf. FK, p. 17). The complexities of the French demeure, let alone of the idiom rester à demeure – and of Derrida’s resuscitation of the Old French word demeurance – were further elaborated especially in Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998); cf. e.g. p. 11: ‘nécessaire mais impossible demeurance de la demeure’. 19. Cf. ON, p. 76. 20. FK, p. 21. 21. Both resistance and restance are the two ‘weapons’ or axes which characterise the work of deconstruction according to Derrida himself in ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. and intr. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 63–94, here p. 87. 22. Derrida, ‘Foi et savoir’, p. 31; cf. FK, p. 21. 23. One will have silently noted the Blanchotian reference to the ‘immémorial’ in the quotation above. 24. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 19. 25. p. 129. Cf. also Derrida, ‘Pas’, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986). 26. ON, p. 89. 27. Cf. ON, p. 35. 28. Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 100. 29. Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 106; cf. also p. 108: ‘the barren, radically nonhuman, and atheological character of this “place”’. 30. Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, pp. 117–18. 31. ON, p. 97.


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32. ON, p. 97. 33. Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 109. Cf. also p. 104: khôra is an ‘absolutely necessary place’ which preexists Being. 34. Khôra, p. 15; inadequately translated as ‘Khôra reaches us [...]’ in ON, p. 89. 35. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 16. 36. SoM, p. 28. 37. SoM, p. 168. 38. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 33. Originally given as a lecture for the Cerisy conference on ‘Le Passage des frontières’, 1992. 39. See John Caputo’s developments on this dilemma in John D. Caputo (ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), pp. 169–70. For the (Benjaminian) origins of Derrida’s thinking on the topic, see SoM, p. 181, n. 2. 40. SoM, pp. 167–9. 41. E.g. Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, pp. 73–4, 76, 77ff. 42. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: A Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Published about the same time as the main lines and form of this essay were taking shape, Caputo’s momentous study crosses mine in more paths than could be done justice to within the limits of such a short essay, and the necessary engagement with this admirable work must therefore be deferred. On the structure of Derrida’s Blanchotian pas sans pas, see also Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 147–86. I would also like to refer to Arthur Bradley’s excellent and succinct paper given at the Stoke Conference, ‘God sans Being: Derrida, Marion and “a paradoxical writing of the word without”’. 43. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 172. Further on, he adds: ‘Deconstruction is ... still one more messianism, or at least a “quasimessianism ... a quasi-transcendental messianism”’ (p. 173, again quoting from SoM, p. 168). 44. The phrase can also calculatedly refer, in the context of this inaugural ‘Italics’ section, to the Italic island (Capri) which was elected as the ‘place’ of reflection on religion, the theme chosen by Derrida for the first seminar in a new series of encounters between European philosophers. 45. FK, p. 7. 46. FK, p. 17. 47. FK, p. 19; in French: ‘avant-premier prénom[s]’ (‘Foi et savoir’, p. 29). 48. cf. FK, p. 18. 49. FK, p. 18. 50. FK, p. 18. 51. Derrida, ‘Foi et savoir’, p. 28; cf. FK, p. 18: ‘reflecting without flinching’. 52. FK, p. 19. 53. FK, p. 26. 54. About this déliaison, see e.g. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fidélité à plus d’un: Mériter d’hériter où la généalogie fait défaut’, Cahiers Intersignes, 13 (‘Idiomes, nationalités, déconstructions: Rencontre de Rabat avec Jacques Derrida’) (Autumn 1998), pp. 221–65.


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190 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

Laurent Milesi FK, pp. 34–5. FK, p. 37. Derrida, ‘Foi et savoir’, p. 53; cf. FK, p. 39. FK, p. 16. FK, p. 47. FK, p. 16. FK, pp. 16–17. I have silently substituted ‘bond’ for Samuel Weber’s ‘link’ for reasons of linguistic and thematic consistency in these and subsequent translations. FK, p. 22. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Voyager avec Jacques Derrida: La Contre-allée (Paris: Quinzaine littéraire, 1999), p. 252. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 97, where Caputo draws an analogy between différance and khôra. On the in-between (entre-deux) as the place / locus of desire in Derrida, esp. in Feu la cendre and its logic of ‘X without X’ (‘reste sans reste’), see Michel Lisse, ‘Comment ne pas dire le dernier mot? ou “Le pas au-delà de la dénégation”’, posted on Geoff Bennington’s Deconstruction site at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/texts/lisse/htm (p. 7), who quotes the following relevant extract (here in its English translation) from Derrida’s introduction to Feu la cendre: ‘Will I dare to say that my desire had a place, its place, between this call and this risk’ (Derrida, Cinders, p. 23). See also my own essay ‘Between Barthes, Blanchot, and Mallarmé: Skia(Photo)-Graphies of Derrida’, in Julian Wolfreys, John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins (eds), The French Connections of Jacques Derrida (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 175–209. Cf. FK, p. 19. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), p. 56. MO, p. 1. Cf. also p. 25: ‘My language ... is the language of the other’. Cf. MO, p. 25. MO, p. 61; cf. the original in MA, p. 117. MO, p. 61; MA, p. 118. MO, p. 64. MO, p. 72. MO, p. 72. ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ had already envisaged the ‘question of the place as place of writing, of inscription, of the trace’ (p. 101). Derrida, Points..., p. 143. ON, p. 59. See in this respect Patrice Bougon’s excellent ‘L’autobiographie et l’Algérie dans l’oeuvre de Jacques Derrida’, Études de Langue et Littérature Françaises 74 (1999), pp. 197–213. Cf. MO, p. 68. ‘Pas’, p. 26. Cf. Derrida’s emphasis on revealability before any revelation in FK, p. 15. Cf. MO, p. 58.


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83. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 238ff. Cf. Mallarmé’s piece on ballet dancing, ‘Crayonné au théâtre’, in Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 293–351, especially his fascination for the figures of suspension of dance, momentarily defying the laws of gravity (pp. 302, 311); ballet dancing as the ‘adventure of sexual difference’ (p. 305); the institution of a place by the perfect evolutions of the dancer (p. 309, about Loie Fuller; cf. also p. 305, the near-motif ‘rien n’a lieu’). See also Carol Barko, ‘The Dancer and the Becoming of Language’, Yale French Studies 54 (‘Mallarmé’) (1977), pp. 173–87, whose very title is programmatically relevant for Derrida’s own writing. 84. Derrida, Cinders, p. 37; with original Mallarméan echos inserted. 85. Cf. Derrida, Points..., p. 135 and ‘“There is No One Narcissism” (Autobiophotographies)’, in Points..., pp. 196–215. About Derridean writing and thinking as an attempt to cross towards such an ungraspable Mallarméan atopos, see e.g. Rudy Steinmetz, Les Styles de Derrida (Brussels: De Boeck, 1994), p. 199, n. 17. J. Hillis Miller too has evoked such an insidious (non-)place of / in Derrida’s writing, always ready to crypt itself from the reader’s gaze and exceeding the resources of a joint toponymy, -logy, -graphy; see Miller, ‘Derrida’s Topographies’, in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 291–315, especially pp. 296–7. 86. Cf. my tangential analysis of this fine point of strategy in Derrida’s ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, within my own Joycean context of interpretation, in ‘The Poetics of “The Purloined Letter” in Finnegans Wake: Narrative Foresight and Critical Afterthought’, in Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller (eds), A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift for Fritz Senn (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1998), pp. 306–22, especially p. 315. 87. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 30.


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11 Graphematics, Politics and Irony Claire Colebrook

It has often been noted that Derrida’s ethics works by a double method. On the one hand, meaning and experience are only possible within some differential system. On the other hand, this condition of difference is neither systemic nor systematisable. The conditions for meaning and sense are radically unconditioned, nonmeaningful and insensible. Derrida’s clearest statements on ethics and meaning are articulated through a theory of concepts that is clearly indebted to Kant. Derrida’s political theory, and his critique of the Western tradition of political agency, is also articulated through Kant, although this time through Kant’s aesthetic philosophy. Derrida’s ‘Afterword’ to Limited Inc offers a clear reformulation and transformation of Kant’s categorical imperative; it is this ‘side’ of Derrida’s approach that stresses the necessarily formal conditions of meaning and conceptuality. While the ‘Afterword’ of Limited Inc stresses the formal limits, repeatability and rigours of the concept, the first and earliest essay of the collection (‘Signature, Event, Context’) meditates upon a differential production that is neither within nor outside limits, and that is errant, volatile and singular. Both texts occupy the borders or limits of speech, exploring the ways in which what we say is disjoined from what we mean. In Limited Inc Derrida both accepts and extends the performative theory of meaning and concepts. While Derrida embraces the insight from speech act theory that meaning can’t be assigned to private speakers’ intentions because meaning is essentially transsubjective, he rejects the enclosure of this force or performance of meaning within human contexts. The issue concerns the status of pragmatics. The meaning of a speech act may reside in its force, effect or performance – rather than some independent sense – and this force can be understood as what a context or community of speakers expects, intends or does with words. Alternatively, the pragmatics and force of a speech act might be seen to exceed and in some way precede speakers, positions and intentions. In such a case speech acts would have a force that could not be reduced to action, and 192


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pragmatics would have to consider unintended, incommunicable, singular and passive forces at work in speech. This might then mean transforming the very notion of the performative – thinking of acts that do not originate in agents – or thinking of modes of speech that go beyond both constatives (S is P) and performatives. (The performative acknowledges the force of what we say, but does so by tying the speech act to performers. On a performative theory ‘S is P’ can be read as ‘I assert that S is P’.) The ‘debate’ between Derrida and Searle concerns a number of converging issues, including the relation between concepts and contexts, the possibility of meaning, and the limits of ethics. First, it might be best to occupy the common ground of Austin and Derrida. ‘Signature, Event, Context’ begins by recognising the positive achievements of Austin’s speech act theory. To recognise language as performative is to see language not just as the exchange of meanings (as though language were a mere vehicle for a pre-linguistic sense); it is to see language itself as an event. Language performs. There are no ‘meanings’ that language merely conveys. Language is productive of a process of exchange, expectation and convention. Grammar is not a static system of formal rules that speakers obey; grammar’s regularity is derived from what a community of speakers does, recognises and expects. Recognising this performative dimension of language, Derrida insists, gets us away from some fairly entrenched metaphysical dogmas about meaning. If we accept that language doesn’t reflect or represent meaning, then meanings are internal to the practice and performance of language itself; and it would make no sense to appeal to what a text or statement really means divorced from a context. Further, this also means that it’s not as though there are beings to which we then attach concepts, or meanings that we then share and articulate. Meaning is not something self-present that is subsequently exchanged; meaning is only produced through the performance of exchange. To a certain extent, then, meaning is context-dependent, already social and tied to use and function. There are two ways, at least, in which we can think through this imbrication of context and concept. It makes no sense to think that there are concepts, the meaning of which might be clarified or discovered. Nor does it make sense to think of the concept’s meaning as something usage invokes. Meaning is use. For Austin, but more specifically for Searle after him, such a recognition of the activity of speech requires that we do away with a lot of bad philosophical problems. Concepts have fuzzy boundaries. The concept ‘good’ can’t


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194 Claire Colebrook

just mean what I want it to mean, but that doesn’t mean there’s some essence or real meaning of ‘good’ that we can’t quite grasp. If ‘good’ means anything – if I want to use and exchange the concept – then I have to rely on others recognising the concept. And anyone who said, ‘This is a good painting’ and then proceeded to throw it in the dustbin, would have to be regarded as not really knowing what the word means, or how to use it. (Unless, of course, we had a further exchange that would make such an instance of ‘good’ recognisable: say, if the speaker then claimed to be a member of the ‘end of art’ movement. But use and misuse, meaning and incomprehension are decided, not by appealing to what lies behind the speech act, but by the context of expectation; clarification requires further exchanged actions and not some ‘meaning’ that hovers above what we say.) A concept works or means only with shared and regular usage. Concepts, such as ‘good’, don’t have an intrinsic meaning; meaning is just decided by legitimate use. To ask the Socratic question – but what does ‘good’ really mean? – is to lead us into philosophical muddles. And ethicists who feel that the ‘good’ might have a meaning that is other than everyday practice and usage have failed to see the shifting, fuzzy and contingent nature of concepts. They have failed to see the inherent limit of philosophy.1 Derrida also accepts that concepts only work if they are repeatable or contextually recognised. But far from this returning us to the human context of exchange, use and performance, he argues that concepts have an ‘ethicity’2 that opens and exceeds contexts. Derrida’s work as a whole is directed against attempts to account for, and enclose, the origin of meaning. Key examples include his critique of structuralism, Foucault and Lacan. In all these cases Derrida is critical of the production of a ‘hyperbolic’ point of view that would elevate itself above the opening of meaning.3 To a certain extent, then, it would seem that Derrida would agree with the anti-metaphysical pretensions of a performative account of language. We are always within a context. Any concept we use to explain a context – by referring to a community, culture, public sphere and so on – is itself context-dependent. There’s no getting outside, above or beyond contexts. (This is how we can read the oftenquoted remark that there is nothing outside the text. This does not refer to there being nothing outside the text – no real world outside language. Rather it insists on the real’s own textuality; there is no point from which textuality emerges.4 Each point is itself ‘textual’, already other than itself. Human language is just one mode of difference and


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exchange, it cannot function as the site of difference from which the real must be thought.) However, such an anti-metaphysical refusal of a founding presence is also, Derrida insists, the very height of metaphysics, and an unavoidable metaphysics at that. The very belief that we can finally recognise the locale of concepts (in context) and abandon grand questions about the origins of meaning merely displaces one metaphysical ground for another: in speech act theory it is ‘context’ that halts the transcendental question about the emergence of sense. The point is not to rest easy with the recognition that we are ‘always contextual’, but to assess the forces that determine any context, and to recognise that these political forces cannot be described exhaustively from the human point of view. For what allows the political or human speech and contexts to emerge may well be graphematic, inhuman, undecided: … one cannot do anything, least of all speak, without determining (in a manner that is not only theoretical, but practical and performative) a context. Such experience is always political because it implies, insofar as it involves determination, a certain type of non-‘natural’ relationship to others (and this holds as well for what we call ‘animals’, since, without being able to go into it here, what I am saying implies a rather profound transformation of the concept of the ‘political’ along with several others in order to be able to say that man is not the only political animal). Once this generality and this a priori structure have been recognized, the question can be raised, not whether a politics is implied (it always is), but which politics is implied in the practice of contextualization.5 What counts as a legitimate or sincere use of a concept? This would, Searle argues, be decided according to context. A concept can be used when it obeys rules of expectations. I know what the word ‘good’ means when uttered by a film critic, a bioethicist, a stockbroker or a priest. But this doesn’t mean that there’s a meaning of ‘good’ that attaches to a film, a decision, an investment or my soul. (And we all know that there are varying degrees of strictness of usage. I can demand of a stockbroker that he quantify just how good this investment is, and I can expect the film critic to work on a rough scale from one to five. But the bioethicist and the priest are, perhaps, allowed some mathematical leeway; we know they use the concept differently with a much vaguer quantitative sense, but with a much more strict moral sense.) Not only, according to Searle, can we sort out concepts, more or less, according to use and context, we can also decide ‘parasitic’ uses. If I say ‘Hell is other people’ in a stage play then you know I don’t mean (or really use) the phrase. Because we


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are in a theatre and this is a play ‘Hell is other people’ only counts as a mention. Of course a play is only meaningful if we take someone to be using the phrases. If a play were received as all mention then it would be as though we were watching people on stage uttering mere noise. We have to take the sounds we hear as being intended in some way, and so the mention – by the performer – relies on the use – by the character. What makes the theatrical utterance secondary or parasitic is that ‘mentions’ rely on a clear distinction between the performer (who speaks) and the performative (who is the performed speaker or character). This is how performatives work. ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ can be used only in certain contexts, by priests, ministers or celebrants. But it can be mentioned by actors, storytellers or linguists. (We might ask: Does an impersonator or con-artist use or mention the phrase? Perhaps we can say that he uses the phrase illegitimately, or that we mistook a mention for a use. The distinction requires that we be certain both of the context and of the user: this really is a registered celebrant’s office otherwise this marriage is all mere mention.) The force of the phrase, or what it does, depends on its context, and context is determined by shared recognition and expectation, those we sanction as priests or celebrants, and situations where we anticipate feigning (such as theatres, cinemas or lectures on narrative). But how do we decide on the borders of a context? In the first essay of his engagement with performatives Derrida uses the word ‘ethical’ in an almost pejorative sense: someone decides or polices the borders of a context, invoking an already present distinction between legitimate and parasitic uses (without questioning how such a border is decided). Derrida refers to a structural parasitism; it is part of the very structure of language that any original or sincere use already repeats and relies upon differences that are not unique to its own context. Austin’s division between sincere and parasitic uses ‘passes off’ an ‘ethical and theological determination’ as unquestioned fact, and does so because of a metaphysical commitment. The sincere use is one in which the speaker wants to say what is spoken. The parasitic use is detached from the speaker, merely quoted or feigned. Despite his manifest aim of not appealing to the metaphysical ideal of meanings and speaker’s intentions Austin relies on ‘the presence to self of a total context, the transparency of intentions, the presence of meaning to the absolutely singular uniqueness of a speech act’.6 Austin acknowledges that a concept works only if it can be repeated and used in more than one instance; but this departure of a concept


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from any single origin is contained by invoking contexts. The very force of concepts is halted by some moralising decision on what our context is, how we use the concept and what we mean. ‘We’ all know that ‘Hell is other people’ uttered by a character in a play does not have the same force as ‘Hell is other people’ being uttered in a philosophy essay. We might say, then, that we have a convention for recognising the distinction between a phrase uttered in earnest and one quoted or feigned. A committed use would rely on certain conventions, such as the genre of the philosophy essay or the culture of conversation. Sincerity or meaning would not be some psychological entity behind the speech act, such that we could ask whether what is said is really being meant; sincerity has certain clear external, social and customary markers. Actors wear costumes and stand on stages; sincere speakers sit around coffee tables or stand at lecterns. The distinction between use and mention relies, therefore, on a recognisable community of users. But if community sincerity is conventional and contextual it relies on a strict distinction between use and mention. The relation between use and community becomes circular. We only know what a use is because we have certain conventions to distinguish between sincerity and quoting, but such conventions work only if we take them as uses and not mentions. We have to know when a convention for sincerity is being used sincerely, and vice versa for quotation. Irony and sincerity are not intra-political or intra-philosophical issues. Often deciding whether a speech act is literary/fictional or sincere/propositional is directly political. Consider the recent case of the ‘novelist’ Helen Darville/ Demedenko, a case that raises all the political and metaphysical questions that are essential to literary criticism. Demedenko was a prize-winning novelist whose account of anti-Semitism and wartime atrocities in The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994) was recognised as a literary masterpiece. When her writing was itself accused of antiSemitism the literary establishment explained that what looked like or could be read as anti-Semitism in her work was actually a fictional use of anti-Semitic characters’ ways of speaking and point of view. The novel was actually anti-anti-Semitic, and showed the horrors of prejudice precisely by presenting it so faithfully. Appeal to context and authorship buttressed Demedenko’s case; she herself was of Eastern European Jewish heritage, with a father who had suffered in the camps. The problem of politics and authenticity arose when Demedenko was ‘exposed’ as an Anglo-Saxon Australian. How sincere


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was her claim to have not been speaking sincerely in her novel; could all those anti-Semitic speech acts be confidently taken as mentions? Was her novel a sincere use of the phrases of anti-Semitism, or was it an ironic ‘mention’ of anti-Semitic styles of speech and thought? Was she sincere in claiming her novel to be ironic? It had seemed that an appeal to facts outside the narrative (such as her ethnicity) would decide the issue. But what are we saying about speech acts and their ethical force if their sincerity and authenticity need to be contextually determined, and if this context is itself capable of being feigned or misrecognised? This reinforces the extent to which there could be nothing in the speech act itself that would differentiate its sincerity from its feigning. By lying about her own identity Darville-Demedenko had flaunted all the conventions for securing the boundaries between use and mention. Just how fictional her novel was depended on securing just how fictional the author’s biography was.7 These are issues that haunt literary criticism. We have to decide whether a story uttered from the point of view of an anti-Semite is mentioning, or sincerely using, its concepts. (A mention would rob the story of its anti-Semitic force.) We have to be secure about the conventions that govern speaking positions and we have to be sure that our community – all of it – recognises such conventions. Such a community would agree on certain markers for feigning and certain markers for sincerity, and would agree on contexts when these markers could be feigned or used unconventionally. The problem with all this becomes apparent if we look at how concepts work, if we look at the possibility of concepts. If it is the case that concepts work through recognition and exchange this means that we can’t just make them mean what we want them to mean. They must be experienced as having some sense that lies above and beyond any singular instance. A language can only mean if we rely on shared usage. Concepts only work with this intention of a sense to be fulfilled. When Derrida argues that concepts are intentional he is using the Husserlian or phenomenological notion of intention: a concept is always a concept of. Concepts are always more than their aural or written token; they are concepts insofar as they intend – point towards or aim at – some sense: … the telos of ‘fulfilment’ (and in this I believe Husserl was right) is not an accidental element, separable from the concept of intentionality. It is not a ‘metaphysical supplement,’ as in French one sometimes speaks of a ‘supplement


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of soul’ [supplément d’ame], a residue that need only be eliminated in order finally to speak scientifically (and not metaphysically) about intentionality; it is part of its concept. Intentional movement tends toward this fulfilment. This is the origin or the fatality of that ‘longing for metaphysical plenitude’ which, however, can also be presupposed, described, or lived without the romantic, even mystical pathos sometimes associated with those words.8 What makes a context possible – that we all speak with the aim of some sense that we share – is also what renders a context essentially open and impossible. For that plenitude to which all intentionality aims ‘is already inaccessible in perception or in intuition in general as the experience of a present content’.9 I can only have a context – you and I speaking together here and now – if there is some extracontextual, repeatable and meaningful language at our disposal. It’s true that this language only works by exchange and expectation, but that exchange (within contexts) relies on a system of exchange that can’t be reduced to context. If there is a context – some site of exchange that we recognise as our own – then there must already be a system or differential movement that inscribes that context and allows for its emergence. Before there is exchange between or among participants within a context Derrida argues for a more general exchange: not an economy circulating from one point to another, but an anarchic economy that allows each point to emerge. Such an economy could not be reduced to agents’ purposes and intentions precisely because intention and purpose are already events within meaning. This is why Derrida makes much of another sense of communication.10 Communication can be understood as the exchange of sense among participants; but it might also be understood in an inhuman and passive sense. A tremor can be ‘communicated’ through a material medium; viruses can be communicated, and one can speak of communications in a technological sense where data might still flow and yet be uncomprehended, unspoken or outside enunciation. Derrida draws attention to the possibility of Searle’s own position, where Searle suggests that he has been touched or affected by what Derrida has written – and this is so even if Derrida has not meant to say, or not said, what Searle has taken him to say.11 All this raises a whole new pragmatics and responsibility. If signs have a force that cannot be explained fully by speakers’ intentions or active purposes, or by contextual norms, then we might need to consider pragmatics and language beyond speech acts. The very possibility of a context


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– that there is some general shared system of meaning – also renders the closure of that context impossible. A context is just that capacity for speakers to confidently use signs or concepts and rely on the recognition and expectations of others. Contexts are enabled by concepts, signs that have a sense above and beyond their singular utterance. Consequently, a concept is meaningful only if it can exceed a context, if it can be quoted, feigned or simulated. A concept must have more than just an ostensive definition. Take the concept of justice. Now I may want to say that this concept just means what we – say, contemporary Australia – use it to mean. An Aboriginal land rights activist might point to times when the word justice was used by ‘us’ for certain unjust actions. (It was argued that it was in the interests of social justice that Aboriginal children were taken from their families and redistributed into white foster care and institutions. It was also argued, and still is argued, that ‘justice’ can’t just return land to Aboriginal peoples because there are other legal claims.) These issues are complex, but there is a condition for this complexity. First, we might want to appeal against the usage or context of justice. The land rights campaigner might point out that what ‘we’ mean by justice isn’t justice at all; in doing so she appeals, and is able to appeal, to a sense of justice beyond our context. And this is because insofar as justice is a concept it only works if any of its uses appeals to a sense beyond any specific use. The word would have no sense without its original context but it can’t be fully owned by that context. Indigenous Australians could take all the concepts that have been used for oppressive purposes – concepts like justice, democracy, autonomy and equality – and appeal to a more rigorous sense. Secondly, if it is the case that our context has used certain concepts for certain unintended effects, then this also means we have to expand the force of concepts beyond agents’ intended responsibility. The Australian government, for example, has refused to apologise to the ‘stolen generation’ of indigenous Australians on the grounds that they never intended such racist and pernicious effects and that such effects cannot be held to be the responsibility of the present government or contemporary white Australia. This limits responsibility to present and self-conscious intent, a limit transgressed by a Derridean understanding of concepts. Concepts may have unintended or passive effects, effects not of the subjects of enunciation, but which produce a political landscape nevertheless. Concepts like democracy, equality, rationality and so on do possess a positive and affirmative ethical dimension, but their circulation,


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communication and effect have also belied their sense. Insofar as our ethics is still well within this conceptual arsenal we must bear responsibility both for the history and risks of these concepts, as well as looking to a fulfilment of their sense and promise which lies beyond the current context. Perhaps one day there really will be justice, a justice to come. But this will only be possible if there is an expanded responsibility and pragmatics that recognises the unjust forces that are structural to any concept. (This is a concept’s essential capacity for moralism, for operating as a point from which the ethical might be decided or determined.) Like Kant, Derrida argues that concepts, or at least some concepts, bear an inherent metaphysical (and ethical) trajectory. Derrida’s ethics of the concept in the ‘Afterword’ in Limited Inc is directed against the metaphysical moralism that would appeal to contexts as some form of limit or foundation. It’s because ‘we’ have no context in general that a concept can always be open to future meaning. The condition for any recognisable or avowed context is a language and exchangeability that can’t be enclosed within a context. A context cannot guarantee that what I mean to say (or what you think ‘we’ mean) will be present to us both, or present to us all. On the contrary, insofar as ‘we’ have a context what we say is essentially and already other than ourselves. The notion of a closed context has often been used to buttress certain forms of communitarianism and pragmatism. If anything we say or mean is contextually located, then ethical laws can’t be transcendental. They must be determined through shared procedures of recognition, along with a resignation to the limits of ethics. But if, as Derrida insists, the argument for contexts is also an admission that meaning is never self-present, and that contexts only work if they are open, such an ethics of shared recognition is no longer the unsurpassable limit of the ethical. Rather, ethics lies also in an attention to the force of a concept, a force that cannot be contained within human (or community) intention. For human intention would already rely on a ‘graphematics in general’ beyond all decision. We might, then, also need to rethink the humanity of intention and the decision, for concepts and graphematics and not just persons might have a decisive force. Even if we don’t follow Derrida all the way regarding the status of graphematics within experience (as experience’s radically anterior condition) his argument regarding concepts and the ethics of concepts provides a radical extension of the relation between conditions of meaning and responsibility. If meaning works through


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shared contexts, then meaning is already other than any individual speaker and it is therefore always possible to extend the repeatability beyond any supposedly original or governing context. We can ask about the concept of justice in general. And we can look at all those instances where the concept has operated with a force not determined by its original context (where ‘justice’ has had effects for which no speaker might seem to bear direct responsibility).12 The condition for the possibility of a context – that there are concepts that are neither yours nor mine but that can be exchanged generally – is also the context’s impossibility. The iterability that makes a concept possible also tears it away from its contextual home. Derrida therefore insists on the ‘structural’ or ‘essential’ possibility of concepts. A concept may be repeated outside its intended context. But why would we wish to focus on this possibility? (This is Searle’s objection: for the most part we mean what we say and it is just wilful obscurantism to focus on those ‘parasitic’ cases where meaning doesn’t work or it isn’t sincere.) Why attend to the unstable side of meaning? For Derrida it is this possibility – of loss and non-meaning – that opens ethics. If a concept is repeatable, open to further articulation, then its force cannot be decided once and for all. There’s a certain promise within concepts – a promise that is given through the differential structure of graphematics and that cannot be reduced to speaker intention. This is the promise of a sense that is not present, not given, and which also enables us to think a beyond to human force and decision: There is a supplementary paradox that also must be taken into account and that complicates all of this in a manner that is both terrible and yet nonviolent (for it is perhaps nonviolence itself): as soon as it accommodates reference as difference and inscribes différance in presence, this concept of text or of context no longer opposes writing to erasure. The text is not a presence, any more than ‘remains’ [la restance] are the same as permanence … This concept of writing or of trace perturbs every logic of opposition, every dialectic. It delimits what it limits. This is why (a) the finiteness of a context is never secured or simple, there is an indefinite opening of every context, an essential nontotalization; (b) whatever there can be of force or of irreducible violence in the attempt ‘to fix the contexts of utterances,’ or of anything else, can always communicate, by virtue of the erasure just mentioned, with a certain ‘weakness,’ even with an essential nonviolence.13 Those who wish to limit concepts to contexts regard this possibility of ‘nonviolence’ as an accident or an anomaly, but they do so only


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by disavowing the very essence (or essential possibility) of concepts. A concept is necessarily repeatable, necessarily other than any selfpresent meaning. Recognising this means acknowledging that ‘we’ have no stable context, that there are no grounds or foundations to which we might appeal to give us the full sense of what we say. Ethics is this responsibility and promise of possibility, rather than the recognition and limitation of where we are. In addition to the futural and open dimension of a concept’s repeatability – a repetition made possible by an iterability that extends beyond the given and the human – a concept is also inherited, given from elsewhere and imbricated in a historicity that is not reducible to meaning and intention. Our context is not something we decided, nor are its borders decidable. Those concepts through which we seek ethical recognition and which we seek to recognise, have an undecidable emergence – one for which we must be responsible. A concept speaks to us from elsewhere and is given, just as much as it conditions the given. Derrida’s interrogation of philosophy’s conceptual arsenal – his classic deconstructive manoeuvres – attend to just this unintended, graphic and errant givenness of concepts. Is it possible to use the words ‘idea’, ‘metaphor’, ‘signifier’, ‘history’, ‘subject’ or ‘logic’ innocently? Against the logocentric notion that would tie a concept to the subject of enunciation or the voice, Derrida’s graphematics intensifies the machinic, monstrous, demonic and given emergence of concepts. Derrida’s ethics of concepts works around both sides of this monstrous givenness. Concepts ‘speak’ or mean only if they are other: already freed from the self-present voice of the speaker. If this is so we can always ask the Socratic question about the pure possibility of such concepts: what is justice in general? History in general? Writing in general? Reason in general? If we do not accept one of the already given or ‘determined figures’ of reason, meaning, history or writing, then we are open to an essential nonviolence. It is only through a ‘demonic hyperbole’ which exceeds ‘the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general’ that we open concepts to possibilities not already given or present.14 The futurity or ideal of concepts does not intimate some higher realm towards which we ought to strive, but a possibility within the very structure of speech in general. The appeal to already given conventions and contexts violently closes the concept’s capacity to intend more than ‘we’ say:


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… when I say that this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and very meaning of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets, I am not invoking an other world, an alibi or evasive transcendence. That would be yet another possibility of violence, a possibility that is, moreover, often the accomplice of the first one.15 We cannot reduce meaning to context, recognition or intent, for context, recognition and intention are the effects of iterability and not a possible ground. On the other hand, this voice of concepts – their elevation, lawfulness, promise or call – emerges from an inhuman event and a monstrous or anarchic genesis. If philosophy is a haunting – forever dazzled by an idea of truth it will never render present – it is no less an exorcism, an attempt to domesticate and internalise its ideals and concepts as its own. The medium for this domestication of the spectral and the uncanny is the figure of the voice: the subject speaks in order to render himself present, selfidentical and his concepts as conscious, intended and meaningful. What appears as demonic and pathological – as other within the human – must be comprehended as reason’s own. The voice is precisely just that passage from the brute givenness and recalcitrance of physicality to the self-affectation of sense. This duplicity of voice is what makes philosophy both a haunting and an exorcism: the concept must at once hover above and be irreducible to contexts, such that we can ask the philosophical question of the sense of the concept. At the same time, the question returns sense to voice, to what we must have meant when the concept emerged: Now, all this, this about which we have failed to say anything whatsoever that is logically determinable, this that comes with so much difficulty to language, this that seems not to mean anything, this that puts to rout our meaning-tosay, making us speak regularly from the place where we want to say nothing, where we know clearly what we do not want to say but do not know what we would like to say, as if this were no longer either of the order of knowledge or will or will-to-say, well, this comes back, this returns, this insists in urgency, and this gives one to think, but this, which is each time irresistible enough, singular enough to engender as much anguish as do the future and death, this stems less from a ‘repetition automatism’ (of the automatons that have been turning before us for such a long time) than it gives us to think all this, altogether other, every other, from which the repetition compulsion arises: that every other is altogether other. The impersonal ghostly returning of the ‘es spukt’ produces an automatism of repetition, no less than it finds its principle of reason there.16


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Derrida’s supplement to the spectrality and exorcism of philosophy is the monstrosity of graphematics; and this too has an ethical dimension. Perhaps, he suggests, there is a demonic repetition: before the repeatable exchange of concepts that carries sense through time and provides a medium of self-recognition, there is a repetition that is not the repetition of some agent or subject. Prior to sense, comprehension, conceptuality and presence there must have been an iteration. The syntax of a language, its phonematic or graphic structure, relies on identifiable marks – identifiable only after their repetition. This is not the repetition of sense or meaning; this iterability gives meaning. The graph or trace ‘gives’ repetition, a repetition that comes from elsewhere. If the meaning, repeatability and promise of concepts gives us a future, the ‘untamed genesis’ of the concept is sent or given, not from consciousness’s own past, but from a graphics or machinism that distributes past from present. The givenness of concepts is bi-directional: given from a past that was never present and giving a future sense that exceeds the force of our context. Concepts enable the intention of a truth in general, a justice in general or a democracy to come, where the sense of these terms is not delimited by the force of enunciation. The concept gives thought this inhuman dimension, the very possibility of the philosophical question, alongside the impossibility of any closed answer. But this gift of the opening of concepts, this impossibility of ever exhaustively deciding or determining what we mean, emerges from a no less undecidable ‘origin’. The Kantian emphasis on the concept’s openness and futural promise would seem to align Derrida with a radical liberal or possibly even existential ethics. In the absence of any closed or definitive context we are compelled to decide, and each act of speech should proceed with full awareness of, and responsibility for, its decision. Attending to the structure of concepts – what they do, their force and their possibility – extends the scope of this decision beyond present intent. But the possibility of this openness is not just undecidable in the sense that we are without foundations; it is also undecidable to the extent that we are placed within effects that proceed from no decision at all. What is before the decision is neither the pure passivity and inertia of an undifferentiated foundation, nor the pure activity of an absolutely unfounded spontaneity. Politics, ethics and responsibility are, particularly in modernity, tied to voice, ownness and responsibility. But what if the borders between ownness and alterity, between voice and mouth, between the


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active concept and received givenness were themselves ambiguously given? Such borders might be neither given from without nor given by the subject, but given in both senses: given in the sense of being received or factical (what is immutably given) and given in the sense of being bestowed or coming from elsewhere (the gift). The given is both that which we do not decide – the given in the sense of what is not open – as well as being a donation or surplus, what is in excess or beyond ourselves. Post-structuralism is often seen as a movement that reduces argument to rhetorical force. But we are also no less frequently told that this is not the point of post-structuralism, a movement that actually attends to the unavoidable hierarchical dimensions of any textual system.17 A text is not indeterminate, although it is always effected through a certain undecidability. As text it must always determine, inscribe, limit or trace; it will always adopt a certain tone. And this tone cannot but have a certain force. In the re-reading of this trace or the ‘intoning of tone’18 Derridean deconstruction attends to the undecidability of textual determination, the dependence upon a trace which constitutes the determinate but which can never be fully determined. Is Derrida ironic? Yes, if we regard irony as an attention to the limits of any voice or tone. Yes, if we regard irony as an attention to the unavoidable hierarchy that follows from the delimitation of the limit. But the absence, or claimed absence, of what lies above and beyond voice, tone, determinacy or tracing – ‘différance is not’ – also demands that deconstruction be a free-indirect inhabitation of style,19 rather than an ironic delimitation of style. It cannot pose a voice, world or transcendence above and beyond the text that it deconstructs: Deconstruction, in the singular, is not ‘inherently’ anything at all that might be determinable on the basis of this code and of its criteria. It is ‘inherently’ nothing at all … Deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it ‘is’ only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place.20 For Derrida, what lies outside style or rhetoric can only ever be approached rhetorically. Nevertheless, Derrida’s work begins with the question of the ‘unnameable’ and pre-temporal space beyond point of view and perspective. His meditation on the Platonic opening of philosophy is, typically, an investigation into the ‘khôra’ that precedes the recognition of point of view and is ‘beyond all anthropomorphy’:21


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We would never claim to propose the exact word, the mot juste, for khôra, nor to name it, itself, over and above all the turns and detours of rhetoric, nor finally to approach it, itself, for what it will have been, outside of any point of view, outside of any anachronic perspective. Its name is not an exact word, not a mot juste. It is promised to the ineffaceable even if what it names, khôra, is not reduced to its name. Tropology and anachronism are inevitable. And all we would like to show is that it is structure which makes them thus inevitable, makes of them something other than accidents, weaknesses, or provisional moments.22 Furthermore, Derrida situates Socratic discourse in an undecidable non-place. The Socratic position is a disturbance of the question of who is speaking. Khôra ‘means’: place occupied by someone, country, inhabited place, marked place, rank, post, assigned position, territory, or region. And in fact, khôra will always already be occupied, invested, even as a general place, and even when it is distinguished from everything that takes place in it … the discourse of Socrates, if not the Socratic discourse, the discourse of Socrates in this precise place and on this marked place, proceeds from or affects to proceed from errancy [depuis l’errance], from a mobile or nonmarked place, in any case from a space or exclusion which happens to be, into the bargain, neutralized. Why neutralized? If Socrates pretends to include himself among those whose genus is to have no place, he does not assimilate himself to them. Hence he holds himself in a third genus, in a way, neither that of the sophists, poets, and other imitators (of whom he speaks), nor that of the philosopher-politicians (to whom he speaks, proposing only to listen to them). His speech is neither his address nor what he addresses. His speech occurs in a third genus and in the neutral space or a place without place, a place where everything is marked but which would be ‘in itself’ unmarked.23 For Derrida, the demand to think the limit of meaning as such, is demanded – necessarily – by the hierarchy or inauguration of meaning in general. And this hierarchy would no longer be social or within the social. The delimitation of voice through irony would no longer – as in the tradition of irony – be a sign of high urbanity. Rather, it would be the opening of the social as such. Post-structuralist irony is not personality or position, but the logical condition for any position; it is a certain, but necessary, non-position. It is in the thorough dehumanisation of the limit of meaning, that irony reaches its limit. No longer a form of life or a way of placing the human beyond any given definition, the thinking of the limit is the recognition that there is nothing other than limit. Any form of life or personality which


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inaugurates the limit is always an (hierarchical) effect of the limit itself. It is not a personality or form of life recognising its limit that constitutes the ethical for Derrida, but a radically anterior tracing or mark which is essentially pre-human.24 If irony traditionally traced the limit of meaning in order to make room for the soul, Derrida’s philosophy of the limit sees any posited soul as an effect of the limit itself. Nevertheless, like Kant and the ironic tradition before and after him, Derrida notes that –whatever its genesis – ‘we’ are always haunted by the look of the law: This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion. Here anachrony makes the law. To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law.25 The task is to see this look as resulting from the death and absence of the subject. It is only when speech is freed from the mouth of one who speaks, when the look is no longer located within the intent of the theorising subject, that we can ask the question of sense in general, of the emergence or gift of what we mean that goes beyond what we want to say. If ‘Mourning presupposes sight’26 this is because we can only be other than life through the distance of the look. But we need to see the coterminous look and death that gives us voice as other than human, as the very possibility of the human. We cannot think the opening of thought except through one of ‘its’ determined figures, and this means that there is an essential passivity or machinism within all thinking. Prior to the conscious opposition between active and passive, man or machine ‘we’ rely on a vicarious image of the conscious. Such ‘examples’ are neither empirical nor metaphysical; they inscribe the opposition between the empirical and metaphysical. If we accept the vicarious nature of this exemplarity, then we also accept a new notion of the political. No longer a subject who proceeds from itself to determine and decide itself; for any decision as to what counts as human already relies on a vicarious, errant and contingent figure of the decision: Vicariousness would in turn be reassuring only if it substituted an identifiable term for an unrepresentable one, if it allowed one to step aside from the abyss in the direction of another place, if it were interested in some other go-around


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[interessé a quelque manege]. But for that it would have to be itself and represent itself as such. Whereas it is starting from that impossibility that economimesis is constrained in its processes. This impossibility cannot be said to be some thing, something sensible or intelligible, that could fall under one or the other senses or under some concept. One cannot name it within the logocentric system – within the name – which in turn can only vomit it and vomit itself in it. One cannot even say: what is it? That would be to begin to eat it, or – what is no longer absolutely different – to vomit it. The question what is? already parleys like a parergon, it constructs a framework which captures the energy of what is completely inassimilable and absolutely repressed. Any philosophical question already determines, concerning this other, a parergoric parergon. A parergoric remedy softens with speech; it consoles, it exhorts with the word. As its name indicates.27 NOTES 1. See B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985). 2. WD, p. 122. 3. WD, p. 61. 4. ‘What I call “text” implies all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that “there is nothing outside the text.” That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this “real” except in an interpretive experience’ (Derrida, Limited Inc [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988], p. 148). 5. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 136. 6. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 17. 7. For a documentary account of the case see J. Jost, G. Totaro and C. Tyshing (eds), The Demedenko File (Melbourne: Penguin, 1996). For a political critique of the ‘affair’ see M. Nolan, ‘Mistaken Identities – Narrating Literary Hoaxes’, Australian Studies 13.1 (1998), pp. 142–57. 8. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 121. 9. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 121. 10. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 1. 11. ‘Thus, Sarl did indeed understand. No question here of the essentials being misunderstood. Or rather, if “understanding” is still a notion dominated by the allegedly constative regime of theory or of philosophy, let us not use the word “understood,” let us instead say that Sarl was touched’ (Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 41). 12. Both deconstruction and – perhaps more explicitly – feminist criticism have looked at the ethical consequences of the errancy of concepts. No one, or at least not everyone, may have intended to use the concept


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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

of reason to institute a sexual hierarchy. (Interesting cases for feminist theory are not really those of conscious oppression or prejudice but concern all those ‘oppressions’ within the language we speak and the structure of our thought.) The concept of reason has an inscriptive history which no speaker or writer can fully control. ‘Reason’ translates the Latin ‘ratio’ which describes some grounding logic or order through which the world is given. And this concept relies on certain figures – of a world that possesses its own order awaiting representation in consciousness. This also gives certain norms for thinking: of an active subject who is rational insofar as he reflects and uncovers a world that is not in itself capable of giving forth its own sense. According to Luce Irigaray it is just this ‘scene’ of thinking which both produces the normative notion of the active, rational subject alongside a passive and mute world; and this scene is contaminated with the force of a sexual hierarchy or ‘scenography’. Derrida undertakes a similar analysis of many concepts to see whether they can, with all the efforts philosophers make, be disengaged from certain metaphysical determinations that are not autonomously intended or decided. In Limited Inc he argues that the concept of communication, for example, is intertwined with the concept of metaphor, and that both concepts determine a certain order of thought: ‘because the value of displacement, of transport, etc., is precisely constitutive of the concept of metaphor with which one claims to comprehend the semantic displacement that is brought about from communication as a semiolinguistic phenomenon’ (Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 2). Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 137. WD, p. 56. WD, p. 56. SoM, pp. 172–3. Norris’s defence of Derrida is the clearest example of the distinction between post-structuralism and relativist textualism. Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984), pp. 3–37. One of the great examples of free-indirect style in Derrida is his essay on Emmanuel Levinas’s attempt to think a point outside the violent determinations of the philosophical tradition. Most of the sentences repeat and retrace Levinas’s argument, without quotation marks or explicit attribution. The following sentences are clearly Levinas’s position rather than Derrida’s, for they are interspersed with quotation. Typically, for Derrida, they are expressed not as propositions but as a series of noun phrases: ‘Without intermediary and without communion, absolute proximity and absolute distance: “eros in which, within the proximity to the other, distance is integrally maintained; eros whose pathos is made simultaneously of this proximity and this duality.” A community of nonpresence, and therefore of nonphenomenality. Not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue, but a community anterior to Platonic light. A light before neutral light, before the truth which arrives as a third party, the truth “which we look toward together,” the judgmental arbitrator’s truth’ (WD, p. 91). But as the essay progresses and Derrida continues to speak through Levinas, the distinction between


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20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

211

voices and positions becomes less clear. Derrida is not offering another position so much as repeating Levinas’s own themes and style to disclose his complicity with the other voices of the tradition – in particular, Husserl and Heidegger. Beginning in free-indirect style, Derrida moves between explicitly quoting Levinas and interspersing his argument with other voices. The essay concludes, having been faithful to Levinas’s question and project, with the impossibility of any pure question, closing with a quotation from James Joyce. The very project of deconstruction – of being nothing other than a solicitation of the tradition – is inextricably tied, like literary modernism to a style of quotation, allusion and impure voices: ‘Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who we? Are we (not a chronological question, but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks?… And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”?’ (WD, p. 153). Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 141. ON, p. 111. ON, pp. 94–5. ON, p. 109. Following Drucilla Cornell we might argue that Derrida presents a philosophy of the limit, where the ethical lies precisely in the limit as such and not the character or being of that which exceeds the limit. SoM, p. 7. Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11.2 (1981), p. 3. Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, p. 25.


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12 The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx Richard Beardsworth

INTRODUCTION Deconstruction constitutes a corpus of thinking that emerged out of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Heideggerian ontology and Husserlian phenomenology. Since those readings – philosophical in kind – deconstruction has emerged as a powerful set of practices that has influenced and restructured, with other continental thinking, the humanities, social sciences and arts. In this chapter when I speak of deconstruction, I am focusing on the strategies of thought that constitute Derrida’s relationship to the tradition of philosophy, to texts outside that tradition and to the world as such, strategies that have been inherited and pursued by those interested in them, whatever their particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary field. When I speak of the culture of deconstruction I mean the general effects that deconstruction has had in its history since those initial readings. Deconstruction is a powerful set of practices concerning the political and a structurally problematic one. Its power and difficulty do not just concern its relation to the political (its understanding of it, its negotiations with it, its sense of political intervention to begin with), but is deeply rooted, as is the case for any philosophical system or complex of thoughts, in its very conception of thinking and discursive strategy. This is not an easy thing to argue in regard to any set of thoughts that carries much intellectual force, all the less easy with regard to the practice of deconstruction that has argued at length that it constitutes neither a system, nor a corpus nor indeed a set of ‘thoughts’ (as against a set of ‘acts’). For this reason, and in the awareness that this volume is prepared by its editor as a forum of debate concerning deconstruction’s relation to the political, I take this opportunity to be as frank as possible about what I find problematic in deconstruction’s very power.1 Deconstruction is structured by a profound irony, one that its fate as a culture of thought will perhaps reveal more straightforwardly 212


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than its own writings, but one that must be discussed in terms of these writings for the sake of the future of thought as such. The irony is this: in showing how from within philosophy it wishes to open up the world from out of metaphysico-ontological schema, at the same time it also closes the world down through the very set of strategies it puts in place to open it. The structure of the irony is such – and this is why it can be named by this figure in the first place – that deconstruction has no choice: through opening up the world (contra previous neutralisations), it also closes it down. The irony carries two further ironies. With regard to the political, deconstruction counters twentiethcentury versions of the totalitarian by in principle re-reading the political tradition as a whole as a tradition of metaphysical thinking and by looking within this tradition for structures of radical indeterminacy and opening that this tradition cannot account for. Since this tradition is one to which as human subjects we are all beholden, the indeterminacy and opening are irreducible. Consequently, all political determinations close this opening down to a lesser or greater extent. The regime of democracy less, modern substantial politics (fascism and communism) much more. It is consequently an imperative of a ‘quasi-ethical’ kind to track this opening, analyse its specific configurations within history, and respect it as far as possible in order to foster a re-politicisation and re-conceptualisation of the political at the closure of the metaphysical tradition. As I argued in Derrida and the Political, both this re-politicisation and re-conceptualisation work with the refinement of the modern democratic model of politics. The first implication of the above irony is therefore the following: Through countering the political saturation of the originary social bond – theorised by deconstruction in terms of Heidegger’s existentiale of Mitsein and/ or the Levinasian relation to the other – and through showing that saturation constitutes the risk of all political regimes (not just those of the twentieth century), deconstruction ends up itself closing down the very possibility of political invention. The second implication is that this is true for its relation to the real in general: Through discursively practising not anticipating the future, deconstruction ends up closing the future down. In these ironies lies the problem more largely of the relation in deconstruction between the indeterminate and determination. I consider that, contrary to deconstruction’s belief, this relation between the indeterminate and determination is specifically organised in its


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thinking, and that it is because of the way that it is organised that the above ironies ensue. It is also due to the philosophical nature of this gesture that I approach deconstruction as a philosophy (whatever else it has rightly become or wishes to be), or rather that I confront the problem philosophically. These are large claims, and I will not go into all of them here. I do not have the space, nor would it be entirely appropriate to this volume. What I will do here is develop these ironies, where they concern the political and the future, through Derrida’s engagement with Marx in Specters of Marx. I choose Marx for several reasons. First, if it is true that the fates of the political tradition of thinking in the twentieth century haunt the conceptual strategies of deconstruction more than necessary, then Marx and deconstruction’s relation to Marx are crucial to my thesis. For Marx, in the wake of the difference between the Kantian and Hegelian systems, constitutes the most important intellectual of modernity. Second, Derrida’s reading of Marx in Specters of Marx reveals most pertinently of his many readings of the Western philosophical tradition the irony in which I am interested. Third, as a result of this irony, deconstruction misses what is of interest in Marx to the future. Specters of Marx’s claimed inheritance of the radical tradition of political thinking in the nineteenth century, above and beyond its ‘ontology’, ends up accordingly limiting and, sadly, disempowering. We live in an epoch in which the system of capital, despite and beyond its crises and moments of lack of confidence, organises more and more the determinate structures of social life. It does so to the point that not only the economy, not only technology, communications, science and leisure, but also culture in general, education and the basic constituents of life are now being oriented to shortterm goals of profit. Recent thought, including deconstruction, has suggested or implied that those suffering from this system can only resist from within, that there is no other politico-economic system to come to oppose to capitalism as such. This – in deconstruction’s terms – is, politically, living at the closure of metaphysics. Perhaps. That said, and at the very least, alternatives in principle exist as to how to resist from within, and these alternatives are more or less powerful, and they can structure change more or less. In our epoch, and in order to move to one different and better, we need a thinking and a set of practices that works more from within these determinate structures, in particular, and from within the relativity of ‘more or less’, in general. And this in order to foster alternatives for future


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generations that will allow them, precisely, the possibility that the world can be otherwise. The irony of deconstruction as a set of thoughts and practices is to have focused on the indeterminacy of every determination, to have thought the invention of determination so exclusively out of respect of this indeterminacy that it has lost grasp of the world before it. In the absence of such grasp, the field is left open to others to organise. With the precedence of the massive organisational capacities of capital before us (our present historical past), this distance from the world not only proves to be politically ineffective, it is now, when thinking the political at a world level, politically irresponsible. Not in the name of the law of law, but because of history. My argument is as follows. Section One looks at the force of Derrida’s reading of Marx where, I believe, it most hurts Marx and the Marxist tradition. It is where this tradition, and the Left organised around it, cannot ignore deconstruction and needs to respond. In an age of systemic injustice at a world level, a response is important. With such a response, deconstruction will have proved, concerning the political, an important radical intellectual tradition. Section Two outlines what is problematic about this reading in its very power and, following my initial comments, why this is so, how that misses a Marx who remains important to us today and what that Marx is. In conclusion I suggest very briefly how we might proceed to think and act in order to articulate more the world as a world. My suggestions are minimal; they have the specificity, nevertheless, of pursuing into new territories what is the strongest lesson of Marxian epistemology.

SECTION ONE Specters of Marx has been much read and commented upon. Published during the high point of neo-liberalism in 1993, it carefully deflates the pretensions of the apologist of neo-liberal thinking, Francis Fukuyama, and situates – through a series of readings that involve, explicitly and implicitly, Shakespeare, Max Stirner, Heidegger, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas and Freud – a particular relation to Marx. This relation, it considers, begins to foster a way of thinking the future that Marx’s call for social justice merits. Let us first recall that this was an important gesture to make in the early ’90s, especially with


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regard to those in the East emerging out of totalitarianism, looking towards the West, either ideologically or physically, but wanting neither Hegel nor Marx, nor their heritage. A certain postmodern culture has since rung loud in the communicational and leisure networks (particularly in relation to film and sport) that ratifies this refusal of radical politics by producing and distributing on a massive scale a virtual set of communities that ignores and denies the logic and mechanics of this very virtuality. In the context of the East and the First World, Derrida’s call to Marx was more than pertinent and remains actual. Within this context, but in an active heritage of Marx more largely, Specters of Marx constitutes an attempt to lay out the conditions for ‘a re-politicization, perhaps for another concept of the political’ as such.2 These conditions are the ‘filtering’ of ontological schema that inform Marx’s understanding of the real and of the political that ensues therefrom. It is at this level that the text is to be read. Perhaps the most powerful example of this filtering is to be found towards the end of the last chapter ‘Apparition of the Apparent. The Phenomenological Conjuring Trick’3 in which Derrida gives a deconstructive reading of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. I will focus on it as my example of the force of Derrida’s thinking. COMMODIFICATION AND THE SOCIAL To recall, first, this theory and its importance. Marx’s tracing of the formation of the commodity form constitutes one genealogy of capital as such, and, therefore, that of the system of capital called capitalism.4 Marx starts with the distinction – inherited from classical economics (Ricardo and Smith), but returning to Aristotle’s reflections on the form of money – between use value and exchange value. This distinction is predicated on a general notion of value, ‘a supra-natural property of equivalence [my emphasis]’ that allows an object to be exchanged with another in terms of its ‘quantity’ and in disregard of its ‘quality’ (its specificity or singularity).5 Quality is, for Marx, put in Platonico-Heideggerian terms, the tality of the object: for example, the table as a table, not the table qua, in visible form, its price-tag by which it can be exchanged via money with other objects. This general equivalent is called ‘abstract value’ and finds visible expression in money: a commodity itself that has through time become the predominant form of exchange.


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As is well known (the point is, however, always worth rehearsing), this general equivalent is underpinned by ‘congealed quantities of undifferentiated labour’: that is, labour as quantity, as indeterminate, not as quality, as a particular determination.6 Underneath the pricetag, it is labour qua its abstraction as labour-time that allows for objects to be exchanged, since the measure of exchange, indeed the possibility of exchange as such in a complex market system, lies in abstract labour. Labour-time is covered by the capitalist’s costs in a way that provides for surplus profit which, in turn, allows for the accumulation, investment and productive potential of capital. Capital is thus nothing in Marx’s opinion but objectified past labour. This relation between labour, time and capital is what Aristotle’s philosophy of money could neither conceptualise nor anticipate, living in a slave society where labour is necessarily hidden. For labour’s equality qua abstract labour only emerges with the equivalence of the commodity-form, even if it historically underpins this form.7 It is for this reason that, with regard to conceptualisation and categorisation, philosophy cannot not be historical, while the order of its categorisations are not the same as that of historical succession. In the formation of a commodity, the labour congealed in the commodity qua undifferentiated labour (and in capital as objectified past labour) is rendered invisible. The social force of production is replaced by the force of exchange between objects, the general equivalent of which, money, appears in the social whole first. As the material representative of exchange and wealth (the totality of exchange value) money is the omnipresent commodity. This is why Marx begins his analysis of modern bourgeois society with it in the Grundrisse, even though the predominant element structuring the economic system of modern bourgeois society is not money but capital. Marx assumes through this analysis Hegel’s phenomenological method while transposing it into material terms. He moves, on the basis of Hegel’s distinction between ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) and ‘concept’ (Begriff), from intuitive abstraction (money) to the ‘concrete determination of abstraction in [its] rich totality’.8 This process of determination leads to a grasp of the structural mechanics of capital (over the intuitive appearance of money). I will recall this method at the end. For Marx, money hides the character of equivalence that is ‘social’ and ‘human’9 in the epiphenomenal form of a dialogue between objects and prices. With modern advertising, this dialogue has of course become very noisy, if from time to time entertaining in its own


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terms. Commodity fetishism is this inversion. As Marx puts it: ‘For the producers … the social relations between their private labours appear [as what they seem], i.e., they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as thing-like relations between persons and social relations between things.’10 As a result of this inversion and substitution, commodity fetishism constitutes the becoming-invisible of the condition of commodity production in the first place – labour. The social world of capital reproduces this inversion through 1) private ownership of the means of production and 2) the constant renewal of commodification to extract profit and renew the cycle. The system produces a world of appearance, of Schein. In response, for Marx, socialism constitutes a system of production, distribution, circulation and consumption in which the relation between persons and things becomes visible in their productive order of appearance. This would be historically unprecedented. For, prior to the emergence of the commodity form as a system, social individuals or juridical persons do not exist as articulated social entities. If it is the Enlightenment theory of rights that makes this articulation, socialism offers, in distinction, a world in which the invisible connections between things and between things and persons is given the social expression to which rights remain inadequate. Rather than money, prices and objects being the first social appearance, this appearance would be persons in their labouring interconnectedness with each other and with the determinations that make this interconnectedness up. This means the abolition of the political as such given that political form for Marx remains external to social force. In the abolition of private property the instance establishing the conditions for a socialist world (the party taking the power of the state) must thus abolish itself. What is Derrida’s deconstruction of commodity fetishism, and what are its implications, first, for the notions of production and fetishism as such and, second, for Marx’s socialist promise? SPECTRALISATION For Marx, the ‘mystical’ character of a commodity is what is spectral about commodities. Unlike spirit, Derrida observes, a ghost or spectre is both visible and invisible, acorporeal and incorporated, sensuously supersensuous. This, Derrida notes, is Marx’s very definition of the commodity. For Derrida, however, remarking Marx’s own


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uncomfortable awareness of the fact, this spectrality is particular to the use value of the object as well; indeed, it forms the object’s very possibility as a value. The value of use value allows in the first place for the object to be exchanged with other objects, preceding the classical and Marxian distinction between the two orders and the analyses that this distinction allows. Derrida’s reading offers an exemplary lesson in deconstruction.11 The spectral effect of a commodity ensues from the commodity’s relationality (the seat of the multiple connections underpinning general equivalence). This relation, as we have seen, is double. Derrida describes it in these terms: The double socius binds on the one hand men to each other. It associates them in so far as they have for all times been interested in time, Marx notes right away, the time or the duration of labor, and this in all cultures and at all stages of techno-economic development. This socius, then, binds ‘men’ who are first of all experiences of time, existences determined by this relation to time which itself would not be possible without surviving and returning, without that ‘out of joint’ that dislocates the self-presence of the living present and installs thereby the relation to the other. The same socius, the same ‘social form’ of the relation binds, on the other hand, commodity-things to each other.12 For Derrida, the subsumption of the first bond by the second derives from a relation that affects from the beginning both human experience of the socius and an object’s repetition – its ability to be recognised as something, what we called earlier its tality. With regard to the products, this repetition – iterability – opens the object to its phenomenal form as such as well as, at the same time, to its relation with other objects. Quality is always already quality. Relationality (‘value’) implies, in other words, a general structure of spectrality within all objects that delivers them from the first to the possibility and movement of exchange. Spectrality also constitutes, consequently, the condition of money, of money’s capitalisation, and therefore of the forms of merchant, industrial and financial capital that punctuate the modern history of capitalisation. Each of these forms is a determinate form of spectrality which enacts, under the movement of capitalisation, a progressive becoming-spectral of objectivity. In this sense, the ‘super-natural’ property of equivalence of money according to Marxian schema, is, according to the schema of iterability, simply nature’s ‘natural’ transcendence of itself. The movement of commodification on which capital is predicated is the


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originarily technical movement of physis, or différance, one, of course, high up the ladder of human social evolution or complexification. With regard to the relation between the producers, Derrida focuses, somewhat importantly, on the relation of labour to time, emphasising the fact that labour is a relation to time. As a temporal experience labour composes the relation of socialisation. The relation to temporality and the relation of the socius as such (sociality) is the same; this relation is non-historicisable, being one in which people, whatever the technico-economic organisation or culture they live in, come together and move apart through their labours. Thus spectralisation is the very element of the socius, and spectrality its condition. Derrida writes: ‘For the things as well as for the worker in his relation to time, socialization or the becoming-social passes by way of spectralization. The “phantasmagoria” that Marx is working here to describe, the one that is going to open up the question of the fetish and religion, is the very element of social and spectral becoming.’13 Spectrality forms the condition both of the social relation between things and of the social relation between persons: consequently it always already allows for the relation between things, between persons and between things and persons to become ‘out of joint’. The autonomisation of technology away from the human and beyond the logic of technical instrumentality (human use) constitutes one such development. Following through this move from a deconstruction of the distinction between use value and exchange value to an overall quasi-transcendental structure of spectrality that underpins the historical movement of socialisation and technicisation, Derrida continues: Just as there is no pure use, there is no use-value which the possibility of exchange and commerce (by whatever name one calls it, meaning itself, value, culture, spirit (!), signification, the world, the relation to the other, and first of all the simple form and trace of the other) has not in advance inscribed an out-of-use – an excessive signification that cannot be reduced to the useless. A culture began before culture – and humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as much as to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them.14 The mystical fetishism of the commodity and that of religion with which Marx famously compares it do not reflect, then, in inverse form the properties of the human as a social force. They reflect in displaced form, within a classical metaphysical opposition that structures human thinking, the becoming-spectral of all sociality (between things, people, people and things, people, things and ideas). Spectrality constitutes not only the condition, then, of the socius qua forms of socialisation


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(including the economy, technology, culture and science) but also the condition of religion. Thus, as a radical dis-appropriating structure it binds together and separates out precisely those social forms that have in the last two thousand years of capitalisation become opposed to each other: social organisation and religion.15 Deconstruction here exceeds Marx’s general theory of alienation and accounts for it in terms of the desire to ontologise the différance that opens out from the first objects and humans to time and alterity by bringing the movement of ex-appropriation back to the conditions of human labour, human labour-time and human use. As Derrida observes in conclusion to his deconstruction of commodity fetishism16 – and we have just seen how far this deconstruction goes – Marx’s signature is characterised by a double gesture. On the one hand, he is the first thinker of technology and of the teletechnological movement that constitutes the real in the first place. He constitutes here our heritage as we begin to develop spaces of democracy and accountability between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘physical’ in a u-topia of dis-location between ourselves and between ourselves and the material forces that run through us. On the other hand, within the terms of nineteenth-century industrialism, Marx closes this ‘space’ down by humanising both the non-human historical movement of spectralisation and the non-historicisable structure of spectrality that informs this movement. Now, this humanisation appears, for deconstruction, in the form of socialist politics, in the form of the party, of the party’s desire to take (the) power (of the state), and in the fates that this politics unleashes in the twentieth century (totalitarianism). These fates came to an empirical end in 1989, were already structurally over in the 1950s, but are there, from the start, in Marx’s humanism of production and exchange. Marx’s humanism cuts across, then, any ‘epistemological’ break between the early and later writings. It is where all his thinking is deeply implicated in the metaphysical schema that he at the same time wished to overturn qua idealism. His thinking of technicity and politics at a world level, while original and looking forward to us and beyond, expresses also his thinking of alienation, fetishism and emancipation from the political, a thinking that cuts short the différance of capitalisation by making it proper to traditional political conceptions of time and space. In this Marxian humanism loses the world at the same time as opening it up from under the early historical articulations of liberal democracy. It is this contradiction that deconstruction inherits.


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For deconstruction, Marx’s materialism and his ‘philosophy’ of practical social humanity and justice remain within the structures of ontology that Heidegger was the first to render explicit in Being and Time. It has been Derrida’s concern since the 1960s, working out of Heidegger, Husserl and Levinas and their respective concepts of presence and alterity, to show how deep these structures are in our understanding of the real and, more recently, of our understanding of politics that flows therefrom. Thus the condition of opening the world up again as a world is to deconstruct ontology and work out of this deconstruction. Crucially, for Derrida, it is where Marx himself calls us. Indeed, what remains irreducible in Marx’s socialist promise after the deconstruction of his ontology is the very promise of justice itself. The force of Derrida and deconstruction’s strategies for thinking the political and for thinking the conditions of another concept of the political could not be clearer from this analysis of spectrality. It would be foolish for any Left today to continue to place these analyses under the banner of the postmodern affirmation of ‘difference’. That said, there are major problems in the way that Derrida has read Marx (his materialist transposition of Hegelian phenomenological method, in particular) through modern phenomenology. I cannot go into detail here: what I will show in Section Two is, first, how, in doing so, Derrida still avoids the socialist promise there where it, precisely, promises; and, second, how this avoidance accompanies, necessarily, the most interesting aspects of Marx’s epistemology for Derrida’s very concept of the promise. But, beforehand, what does this promise constitute to which Marx’s call to justice calls us back? THE RADICAL PROMISE In Specters of Marx Derrida thinks the promise in several ways, and through several avenues of thought. Suffice it to say here that the promise is thought in four ways in particular: 1) as the condition of all promising (linguistic, economic, political, religious, etc.); 2) as the promise of democracy, that is, as ‘democracy to come’; 3) as absolute hospitality or the radical relation to the other (linked particularly to democracy to come); and 4) as the disjuncture of time (and space), its ecstasis, that exceeds all history: that is, as ‘historicity’.


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All four ways of speaking about the promise name the same opening; it is the same opening as that of spectrality. This is why in Derrida’s work it is impossible to separate his analysis of spectralisation from that of the radical promise. In the above senses the promise is messianic without proposing a messianism, democratic without proposing a model of democracy, social without proposing a social community and constitutes the condition of all historical form without proposing another history (narration, discourse, strategy of acts, events). Derrida speaks of it in relation to the democratic ideal of autonomy in the following terms: beyond the regulating idea in its classic form, the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy to come [la démocratie à venir], its ‘idea’ as event of a pledged injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself in the form of full presence is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has come to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart.17 This promise brings together, then, the radical promise of justice qua the very opening of spectrality, the ethics of absolute but impossible hospitality that this opening entails, and the condition of all events, the historicity of history. As a result of bringing these three together as the radical opening, this irreducible condition of events is at the same time, then, both justice and the non-historicisable opening to all historical form. It is the quasi-ethical law of all law and all history. Deconstruction respects it; it is its undeconstructible condition18 and in respecting it opens the world up; ontology does not respect it, thereby closing the world and history (qua the future) down. In this context Derrida observes: Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo-but also arch-teleological concept of history – in Hegel, in Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show how this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally


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cancels historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity – not a new history, or still less a ‘new historicism’, but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but … to open up an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise, and not as ontological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire … it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, and insist on it as the very indestructibility of the ‘it is necessary’. This is the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political.19 Thus spectrality is not only, in Derrida’s terms, a ‘hantological’ analytic that allows deconstruction to reread the tradition of metaphysics within which a certain Marxian spirit is embedded. At the same time, qua the promise, it releases another Marxian spirit (the herald of justice) and releases it by placing it back on its condition which its own way of understanding history denied. The law of history becomes the law of alterity. The promise, so manoeuvred, thereby becomes the condition that furnishes both a radical ethics (prior to any programme) and a radical thinking of events (prior to any specific history) that Marx’s articulations of justice, precisely, miss. It is here – concerning the all-pervading nature and method of the promise – that things become explicitly problematic.

SECTION TWO TWO PROMISES, AND MARX? Although this is a word that deconstruction’s very being would refuse, the promise is a method. It is a method that, in arguing that it opens the world contra ontology, actually closes it down. Let us now see in detail why. The deconstruction of commodity fetishism makes it clear that there is a difference between the democratic promise and the socialist promise as historical forms. Let us recall here the very wording of the penultimate quotation: ‘the … actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise’.20 Derrida is thus aware of the difference. The one, exploited by Francis Fukayama in The End of History and the Last Man, started out from the seventeenth century, with the emerging capitalist market, as a framework for safeguarding the rights of the individual within civil society against the sovereignty of the monarch and aristocratic class-power that underpinned it. The


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democratic promise then split along two axes: the one, predominantly Anglo-American, that protects civil society as the people from the State, the other, predominantly continental (Rousseau, Kant), that predicates these rights on the sovereignty of the will of the people as the State, whether this be in determinate (Rousseau) or regulative (Kant) form. There are, of course, large historical differences and similarities between these two axes, and, within these two axes, differences and similarities that make up much of the history of modernity. What has come out of this history is a liberal democratic model of people’s power, that, according to historical context, stresses alternatively the state’s role or the role of civil society as safeguarding the rights of people. ‘Globalisation’ is one such moment of history in which the state is losing its sovereignty; neo-liberalism is affirming the mechanics of civil society in exploitation of that loss. Now, for Derrida, the affirmation of the Marxian call for social justice, beyond Marx’s ontology and its totalitarian fates, lies here against the messianisms of neo-liberalism and liberalism. But what Marxian promise does Specters of Marx give us that distinguishes it from the ever-greater refinement of the democratic promise emerging out of Derrida’s deconstruction of Fukayama’s understanding of liberal democracy? We recall briefly that Derrida’s deconstruction of the difference between the idea of democracy and its actuality in Fukayama leads to the above exposition of ‘democracy to come’.21 Democracy to come, as I argue at length in Derrida and the Political, articulates the irreducible gap between the idea of democracy (autonomy) and its instantiations and rhythms in history. This gap means that democratic law will always engender singularities outside the law. These singularities reveal in the first place the originarily violent nature of law and are an expression, in phenomenal form, of the originarily open structure of the socius. This gap between two orders of events (ideal and actual) is the re-marking / iteration of the originary gap that precedes their distinction: the spectral promise. The disjuncture between the conceptual and the real, thinking and history, is the repetition, in other words, of the originary disjuncture of time that human thought cannot appropriate. In the way in which this gap is figured by Derrida as both that between democracy and its historical effectivity and that of originary justice, Marx’s socialist promise gets lost. Generalising the democratic promise back through his deconstruction of Fukayama’s model of liberal democracy and onto the radical opening to all forms of law


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and community, Derrida allows the Marxian promise to be also a promise of democracy. And yet never in Specters of Marx does Derrida elaborate what Marx’s version of democracy is and how it differs, methodologically and organisationally, from that of Enlightenment philosophy and the idea of liberal democracy that ensues from it. Specters of Marx certainly implies that the Marxian promise constitutes a desire to structure the social inequalities of civil society hidden structurally by liberal democracy; and this despite twentieth-century advances in social and economic rights. The work certainly theorises that this Marxian promise ends up in the party and that, therefore, it is imperative to separate the desire for justice from its socio-historical forms. It certainly theorises, finally, that this separation is the very condition of inheriting Marx’s call for justice and rethinking another concept of the political. But this is not enough; indeed it is perhaps the wrong way of mourning the twentieth century and the fates of modernity. For what these gestures of suggestion and theorisation do is slip over the difference between socialism and liberal democracy precisely when this difference concerns, epistemologically and socially, articulation. The example of Marx reveals that in oscillating between the indeterminate and determination, the promise and its historical rhythms and instantiations, deconstruction telescopes differences there where they may be important. This telescoping constitutes not only a lack of articulation between historical differences in preference for their radical condition, but, more importantly, in this very preference, it blocks investigation into empirical difference and it blocks investigation into how these empirical differences may retrospectively reorganise our understanding of radical opening as such.22 And this precisely because this opening has itself been telescoped: the originary ecstasis of time and space and the relation to the other (human or non-human) need articulation from the beginning for us to have conceptual purchase upon them that makes a difference in the world. Conjoined in an originary movement of disjuncture, they become transcendental structures of difference that neutralise the empirical. If deconstruction’s lack of relation to the sciences is most telling in this regard (above and beyond any ‘affairs’), the example of the empiricity of what Marx promised and of the way this empiricity is to be seized conceptually and socially is, perhaps, one of the most telling political examples of this irony. For what is particular to the socialist promise, from the beginning – both in terms of Marx’s materialism and in terms of his solutions to


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human agency in modern capitalist society – is its acute awareness that any promise must entail organisation if it is to contend with the historical forces that are already in place. To separate the socialist promise from organisation and to speak of this promise as the condition of history radically short-circuits what Marx was trying to say. The separation short-circuits it because it places Marx’s understanding of history and matter under the canopy of (Heidegger’s notion of) ontology as a teleoeschatological dialectical programme and method. In so doing, the separation loses the very things that matter, historical understanding and empowerment, and, by telescoping differences, leaves the field of politics open to other determinations and organisation. For Marx, this field was already structured by capital; how much more so it is today! In this sense, deconstruction’s elision of the socialist promise in Specters of Marx ends up underestimating the promise of Marxian materialism and the force of human agency. It thereby underestimates the conjoining of thinking and force in such a way that alternatives can be fostered. Deconstruction’s promise stands, indeed, at the edge of history and the world – but not in the way deconstruction thinks. I will end this section with two examples of where Derridean and Marxian method necessarily clash: thinking the international and thinking thinking. THE NEW INTERNATIONAL Chapter 3: ‘Wears and Tears. Tableau of An Ageless World’ constitutes a list of complaints to be made of the New World Order that point up how badly the world goes. In this tableau, Derrida strongly observes, following the logic of his deconstruction of the democratic promise in Fukayama, international law will become more refined and articulated. Here he makes the point that ‘a new international’ is being sought through the present crises of international law. It is one that follows the critical spirit of Marx, but one that distinguishes itself critically and practically from those other spirits that rivet this spirit to the body of Marxist doctrine (‘its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality’ and ‘the history of its apparatuses … projected or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity’).23 In this gesture what is Derrida’s new international that figures as one of the subtitles of the book as a whole? If it is searching most


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explicitly for itself through the crises of international law, the new international constitutes not ‘only’ this search, but: an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint,’ without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class … it marks a call to the friendship of an alliance without institution … to those who continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx … in order to ally themselves in a new, concrete and real way.24 We can see from this that the new international marks in the political domain the ecstasis in time and form that orients Derrida’s analysis of originary spectrality and the disjuncture of time. It is, however, not simply that mark. For it actually constitutes the remainder within the history of modernity of the determinate forms of this history. And, as such, it promises new alliances (‘new’, ‘concrete’ and ‘real’), always the while remaining in retreat from those alliances. The new international is thus a transhistorical category of alliance that is retrospectively theorised from out of the sufferings and disasters of the international labour movement. It marks the futurity of the future that no body of doctrine should close down and, looking to the u-topia of the radical promise, it marks the ways in which alliances can organise themselves more respectful of the promise than not – given the very forms from out of which it is theorised (the socialist call to justice, but also party, the Internationals of the labour movement, state, etc.). What Derrida misses here in Marx is both organisational and methodological. By stressing the indeterminacy of the bond rather than the determination from out of which this indeterminacy is thought in the first place deconstruction does two things. First, it does not construct the history of its own abstraction-making (the categorisation of the untimely bond above) and it waits to see what concrete alliances will come. Once these alliances will have come, it will stress their alterity to themselves, thereby always comfortable, consciously or unconsciously, in the way time re-enacts the promise. The promise thus ratifies the refusal, ontologically justified (beware: not another party, not a new totalitarianism!), to invent new forms. But, at the same time, in relation to the first point, it ratifies as a ‘non-method’ its blindness to its own method of determining the relation between the indeterminate and determination. As such, the new international


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constitutes, precisely, a non-historical bond that emerges out of Derrida’s oscillation between indeterminacy and indetermination. This oscillation misses Marx exactly where he still has something to say to us concerning human agency and concerning the relation between history and thinking. It is here important to remember and cite the passages in Marx’s early writings that call over the head of liberal democracy for ‘democracy’ as empowerment. In ‘On the Jewish Question’, for example, but already in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx the ontologist jumps into an empirical example of ‘universality’ that will free from private ownership the universality of this ownership’s hidden social force, the international proletariat. Not to countenance this gesture today (it is no longer technically possible, anyway) does not mean that we should forget, if we wish to inherit Marx (and deconstruction does), the socialist promise: that is to say, to articulate the necessary injustices of the system of capital, to articulate them in as systemic a way as possible since they are structural to the system, and to build, out of this analysis, with those people who are suffering these injustices, forms of social force that can make a difference. This is the promise of Marx’s politics and methodology in one – they are lost when both are read as metaphysical programmes (of logic and of society). It is, of course, to be seen – as the most interesting Marx knew – what social alternatives these forms of force could foster. In this context, let me quote one passage from ‘On the Jewish Question’: Only when the real, individual human being resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual being has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when humanity has recognised and organised its forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from it in the form of political force, only then can human emancipation be completed.25 The passage could not be more messianist. Emancipation is emancipation from political form such that social force can determine society, and not political law social force. The passage speaks of the end of the political, the very end that Derrida analyses in terms of metaphysical eschatology, and against which his call to reconceptualise the political is mobilised. And yet this passage also speaks of something else: it speaks of empowering people as people. People beyond their needs meet each other in their species being. It speaks of empowering people, from the bottom up, so that they can organise themselves in such a way that species being is articulated, in such a


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way that present political force does not determine the agenda of the future nature of force. This empowering, this thinking of the change of force is what the Marxian promise of democracy is about. It is predicated on the materialist recognition that people are preceded not by the law of law or a quasi-ethical other but by history as a particular social organisation of spectralisation in which others meet and confront them. This means that human beings are embedded in a movement of materialisation and immaterialisation that they at the same time can organise socially. I fear, therefore, that Derrida’s notion of the new international as the other of all determinate bonds remains complicit with capitalism in the precise sense that it leaves things unexplored and agencies unthought exactly where counter-forces need to be formed. As a result, in opening a world from under ontological schema that have dominated modernity, deconstruction also, at one and the same time, closes this world down through the way in which it opens it up. The future is consequently not fostered as a future through articulation, but it is left to other forces to organise in the fear of the saturation of the futurity of the future. The culture of deconstruction will inherit this problem more and more. These are terrible ironies for a philosophy and set of practices that has so strongly advocated the practice of waiting, that so strongly, page after page, article after article, and book after book, argues that the promise holds out the future, without saturating it in so doing. I believe, though, that the mechanics of this irony, as I have developed them, are correct. THE MATTER OF MARX We have seen Derrida conjoin historicity, the relation to the other and the radical promise. We have noted that the promise of democracy becomes in political contexts a way of talking about the radical promise of originary sociality. For deconstruction, this is justified by the fact that democracy is the least violent regime of all political regimes within the history of metaphysics, and, therefore, of all regimes, merits naming the non-horizonal horizon of political alliance. We have also seen how the socialist promise as a call to democracy becomes sucked under this promise without exposition of the differences between horizons of liberal democracy and socialism where they remain important to the future. I have argued that in this subsumption Derrida oscillates between the indeterminate and its determinations (the promise and its promises) in a way that


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necessarily telescopes these differences. This means that deconstruction will sit on the sidelines of empirical adventure precisely when, alive in a specific historical conjuncture, it is the responsibility of philosophy to be more engaged with empiricity and with the terms that the empirical (will) offer to the invention of other worlds. This demands a rethinking of the relation between indeterminacy and determination. Deconstruction’s way of thinking the promise of democracy confirms this despite itself and, therefore, confirms, for me, the continued importance of the historical way of thinking of Marx. Let me end this section with some very brief comments around Marx’s materialist method since it will address several arguments in the article that await formalisation. As the 1857 ‘Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy’ argues, a category by which one grasps the real emerges in its abstract universality at a particular moment of history. In this sense, the most ‘spiritual’ proceedings of one’s head are mediated by material forces. Marx takes the examples of ‘individuality’, ‘the person’ and ‘money’. For deconstruction, the historicisation of categories is ultimately part of the ontology of Marx’s materialist method and loses in so doing historicity. This historicity is made into an injunction through an amalgamation of the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas in which historicity, absolute hospitality and the promise mark the same opening. We have shown this. The relation to the other, the ecstasis of time, are thus mobilised against history. Deconstruction thereby loses, however, the philosophical ability to account for the way in which it comes across its concepts in such a way that its concepts remain contingent and historically articulated with the epoch in which it thinks. This would include the concepts of ‘historicity’, ‘hospitality’ and the ‘promise’. Following Marx’s method, it is important to include in any deconstruction of any democracy the necessity of the fact that it can only radicalise the concept of democracy into a general structure of political opening at a specific moment of history. This necessity is history; it is not the promise. As a result of theorising this necessity, deconstruction would see that while being a category that marks the opening of all history, the promise’s very categorisation can only understand its own opening in determinate ways: preeminently through religion. The specific historical conjuncture (and not disjuncture) at which an abstraction of this kind (and it is a momentous one, but it is not the closure of metaphysics) is possible must be taken into account in the very analysis of promising and, therefore, in the very relating of the


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indeterminacy of the promise to its historical precedents: notably, for deconstruction, religion, but also, as we have seen, democracy. That the promise precedes all structures of promising historically but is read out backwards from historical precedents like monotheism means that the radical promise is, like every precipitate of the head, an historical concept, in form and in content. Deconstruction ignores its historical itinerary at its peril. For following Marx’s method one last step, the historicity of the conceptualisation of the radical promise means that what it marks will reorganise itself. This change will happen with further empirical, material investigations of the real. As a result of this change we will come to understand, après coup, with another falling of the dusk, what the promise promises. Deconstruction’s way of relating the indeterminate to determination is a method because it is partial about the very truth that it announces. The fact, noted earlier in this essay, that deconstruction read the matter of production and labour in commodity fetishism in terms of the ‘abstraction’ of temporal experience is one important sign of this. A SUMMARY CONCLUSION The lesson that we inherit from Marx remains the need to think systemically. This need is historical. We need to think by grasping through thought material determinations (however virtualised) whose connections are effective but are either not visible socially and / or are not yet apprehended conceptually and practically. It is in such connections that people live and suffer the injustice of the present system. It is thus with those who suffer it phenomenally that thinking – through establishing connections there where they are socially unexpressed – can help articulate injustice and, through such articulation, foster alternatives to that very system. The predominant system of connections today is capital. Since Marx, the movement of capital, its procedures of commodification as well as the system of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, have become ever vaster and more immaterial. This is because of the massive advances in the technologies and exact sciences that capital, in turn, organises more and more. The spiral engendered is one that now allows capital to affect and increasingly organise all levels of culture, education as well as the basic constituents of life. In this historical context thinking needs, at a deeper level than capital, to develop:


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1) a systemic analysis of the social world that takes account of both the materiality and increasing immateriality of production processes in such a way that people who suffer such processes are empowered by this very thinking; 2) a systemic analysis of the world that assumes the deeper connections emerging from the sciences of the real (physical, chemical, biological), sciences that are themselves trivialised by their organisation through capital, the fate of molecular biology since the 1950s being one very good example; 3) with these sciences, and in resistance to their commodification and privatisation, their connections with sciences that are concerned to look holistically at the webs of causality that make up the real, at least on this planet: that is, the environmental and earth sciences. For these sciences are not au fond proposing a new subject of Nature, they are proposing new epistemologies of articulation and causality that necessarily resist the way capital makes deep connections invisible. Such epistemologies (as certain social agents already know) have a lot to give, and learn from, Marx. These three thoughts, at the very least, call, fourthly and finally, for a set of disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices between the humanities, the arts, social sciences and sciences that has not yet begun in a socially explicit way. The places to start are the places of education. It is after all for the sake of the future generations coming through education that these places still hold to a sense of their own dignity. Such practices within and without the traditional walls of the university will constitute a set of forces that will themselves conjoin, in new forms of alliance, with those suffering and acting within the system of the world as we know it. Such alliances may just refine the system of capital. The ‘cynicism’ of complexification, beyond good and evil. I am necessarily unsure. What I am sure of is that we will only know what alternatives are possible if we begin, in myriad, differentiated ways that digitisation makes possible, to think, determine, invent and organise – from the bottom up. If capital can organise, so can the species being of humans. NOTES 1. This essay presents a philosophical re-working of the unarticulated hesitations that marked the middle and end of my Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996) which exposited Derrida’s relation to the political in its forceful complexity.


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2. SoM, p. 126; SdM, p. 75. 3. SoM, pp. 125–76; SdM, pp. 201–79. 4. Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 125–77. 5. Marx, Capital, p. 145. 6. Marx, Capital, p. 160. 7. Marx, Capital, p. 152. 8. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 101. 9. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 160. 10. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 166. 11. SoM, pp. 149–63; SdM, pp. 238–58. 12. SoM, p. 154; SdM, p. 245. 13. SoM, p. 156; SdM, p. 249. 14. SoM, p. 160; SdM, p. 254. 15. This double condition of technology and religion is discussed in FK. 16. SoM, p. 170; SdM, p. 269. 17. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111. 18. SoM, p. 28; SdM, p. 56. 19. SoM, p. 74; SdM, pp. 126–7. 20. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111. 21. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111. 22. See my ‘Logics of Violence: Religion and the Practice of Philosophy’, Cultural Values 4 (2) (2000), pp. 137–66 for a preliminary exposition of this point. 23. SoM, pp. 88–9; SdM, pp. 145–6. 24. SoM, p. 86; SdM, p. 142, my emphasis. 25. Marx ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 234.


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13 Karl Marx and the Philosopher’s Stone, or, On Theory and Practice Martin McQuillan

‘Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. In some circles the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East.’ Terry Eagleton1 ‘Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.’ Marx and Engels2 Philosophy loves itself. It is in love with itself. Its narcissism knows no limits. Philosophy pines away for love of its own image and, as the story goes, its boundless egoism and tortured solecisms only succeed in transforming philosophy into a late flowering which withers on the vine. The self-love of philosophy is, traditionally speaking, in sharp contrast to the seeming altruism of political activism, the ragged-trousered philanthropy for which the point is not to interpret the world in various ways, but to change it. According to this familiar schema, the political is said to be otherwise than philosophy. It is an often-repeated caricature of deconstruction, which dismisses the rigour of Derridean thinking as mere mental masturbation. However, as much as one does not like to air these things in public, one should not be too quick to dismiss this too-quick dismissal, negotiating with the smuggled contrebande of phallogocentrism necessarily falls somewhere between blindness [se bander] and firmness [bander]. The image of the alert and erect philosopher is one Derrida has used frequently, notably in Glas and The Post Card.3 Marx himself is no stranger to the sexual imaginary of philosophy; one might recall the textual exposure of his obsession with bondage, slavery, sensuousness, conception, reproduction, labour, estrangement, and of course intercourse [‘Verkehr’], including ‘forms of intercourse’, ‘relations of intercourse’, and ‘intercourse between men’. 235


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This matter arises here for a concerned reader of both Marx and deconstruction given the seeming similarity between the aphorism cited above from The German Ideology and part 11 of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, as well as its apparent incongruity with a favourite passage from de Man, the exact meaning of which has always alluded me: What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit. They are, in short, very poor readers of Marx’s German Ideology.4 Here, in contrast to the seeming literalism of Marx and Engels’ comments, de Man finds in The German Ideology a counter-argument to accusations of self-love in philosophy. Of course, literary theory is not philosophy, but then again philosophy is always more than philosophy, or at least deconstruction is always more than philosophy, let us say for the moment it is otherwise than philosophy. However, the immediate task for this reader is to make sense of this gnomic suggestion by de Man in relation to the text of The German Ideology. Let us not, for the moment, rush to judgement on whether this would rescue de Man’s thought from the charge of mental masturbation, for masturbation in this context might not be a vice one wished to escape the grip of. Rather, let us examine to what lengths this masculinist metaphor could be extended and indeed what it might have to tell us, finally, concerning the politics of the Middle East. 1 Marx and Engels’ comment appears in the sub-section ‘Humane Liberalism’ of the lengthy and fragmented account of Max Stirner in part three of The German Ideology. This sub-section is the third subdivision of the sixth part of the first half of the opening element of this chapter. The chapter itself is structured in this way as a parody of Stirner’s own style of presentation in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, which often interrupts exposition to deviate from the subject matter with lengthy ‘episodical insertions’. Having opened with a proposed reading of Stirner’s article ‘Rencensenten Stirners’ (a


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reply to criticism of his book by Szeliga, Feuerbach and Hess) which Marx and Engels mockingly call ‘Apologetical Commentary’, they then set off on a deviation of their own which lasts for almost the entire chapter. This is a reading of Stirner’s own book, split into two sections in parody of Stirner’s own work. The sections by Marx and Engels ‘The Old Testament: Man’ and ‘The New Testament: “Ego”’ corresponding to Stirner’s own passages ‘Der Mensch’ [‘Man’] and ‘Ich’ [‘Ego’]. The sub-headings Marx and Engels use in this chapter are ironical inversions and subversions of Stirner’s own terms. The sub-section on ‘Humane Liberalism’ comes as the final part of the mockery of ‘Old Testament’ Stirner, under the sub-title ‘The Free Ones’.5 As we shall see, this labyrinthine structure is crucial to making sense of de Man’s proposed reading of The German Ideology and yet it has been systematically edited out of the English language version of the text, edited by C.J. Arthur, with which scholars and students are most familiar.6 Arthur’s edited version attempts to make sense of this episodic pastiche by eliminating it altogether, presenting an extracted version of this sub-section under the heading ‘Philosophy and Reality’: This path [to the materialist outlook] was already indicated in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbucher – in the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage. But since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as ‘human essence’, ‘genus’, etc. gave the German theoreticians the desired excuse for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garments … One has to ‘leave philosophy aside’ (Wigand, p. 187, cf. Hess, Die letzen Philosophen, p. 8), one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown of course, to the philosophers… Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.7 The editing here is compelling, leaving us in little doubt as to Marx and Engels’ ‘true’ intention; but the skilful editor is by necessity a skilful reader and a bad editor equally a bad reader. After Benjamin, perhaps, one might speak of the ‘Die Aufgabe des Redakteur’ (the task/ failure of the editor). Arthur’s excisions here make sense according to the familiar myth of philosophical narcissism so comforting to a certain materialist outlook but they are also indicative of his complete misreading of The German Ideology as a whole and so render the


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meaning of this extract from the chapter on ‘Saint Max’ the exact opposite of the one proposed by the un-expunged totality. In order to demonstrate this and so account for de Man’s vignette, let us begin by reinserting the deleted sentences from the text of Marx and Engels. The extract which sits alone in Arthur’s text comes as part of a discussion of Stirner’s critique of religion as an independent sphere, which, says Marx and Engels, is only a reheating of an old argument, ‘which has been flogged to the point of exhaustion’,8 but which allows Stirner to seem to be going beyond ‘German theory’ while appropriating its terms. The issue at stake is that of material relations and Stirner’s concentration on the heavenly emanation of exploitation rather than ‘those who are practically involved in the present-day world … Thus, the struggle against religious illusions, against God, was again substituted for the real struggle.’ Marx and Engels’ point here is derived from a detailed consideration of Stirner’s text as excessively humanist (the belief that Man makes history) and not material enough rather than a disagreement with him over his reading of the divine division of labour. The digressive discussion then turns to the theologian Bruno Bauer, whom Marx and Engels have treated in the previous chapter, whose idea of ‘“substance” is nothing but the predicates of God united under one name’ and ‘these predicates of God are again nothing but deified names for the ideas of people about their definite, empirical relations, ideas which subsequently they hypocritically retain because of practical considerations’. The ‘they’ in this sentence is important for what follows, the pronoun refers back to the generic ‘people’ of history rather than Saint Max and Saint Bruno. The text then continues: With the theoretical equipment inherited from Hegel it is, of course, not possible even to understand the empirical, material attitude of these people [i.e. the people of history]. Owing to the fact that Feuerbach showed the religious world as an illusion of the earthly world – a world which in his writing appears merely as a phrase – German theory too was confronted with the question which he left unanswered: how did it come about that people ‘got’ these illusions ‘into their heads’? Even for the German theoreticians this question paved the way to the materialistic view of the world, a view which is not without premises, but which empirically observes the actual material premises as such and for that reason is, for the first time, actually a critical view of the world. This path was already indicated in the Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbucher… If we follow the picaresque structure of this passage which strays between citations in the same way that it deviates between close


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reading and generalisation concerning world history, bouncing off pronouns as it goes, then it is clear enough that Marx and Engels are in fact determining what could be positively affirmed in regard to the so-called Leipzig Council of German theory. Namely, and it is italicised for our benefit, that the questions asked by the Young Hegelians as a continuation of the work of Feuerbach lead to the point of thinking about a materialist world-view, ‘which is not without premises’ and which is ‘actually a critical view of the world’. An opening shared with Marx and Engels’ own writing, which also shared a common philosophical phraseology. The point that follows for Marx and Engels is that German theory then mistakes an immergence in the discourse that this opening in philosophy gives rise to for an immergence in the real conditions it describes, ‘believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garment – just as Dr. Arnold Ruge, the Dottore Graziano of German philosophy, imagined that he could continue as before to wave his clumsy arms about and display his pedantic-farcical mask. One has to “leave philosophy aside” (Wigand, p.187….)’. This remark is a citation from Otto Wigand in whose Vierteljahrsschrift (volume 3) Stirner’s ‘Recensenten Stirner’ was published and who had sent Marx and Engels a proof copy. On the one hand, this entire chapter of The German Ideology could be read as a proto-case of the phenomenon which afflicts the history of Marxism, namely the appropriative hair-splitting which seeks to distinguish between pure or true Marxism and heretical or ‘splitist’ socialism. The critique of the Leipzig Council is intended to establish the truth of Marx and Engels’ position rather than to craft a dialogic relation of solidarity with other radical thinkers. On the other hand, the scenario which Marx and Engels are addressing is what we might now term, after Derrida, the quasi-transcendental nature of history, in which philosophy wishes to retain a conceptual understanding of History as historiographical and messianic, while political practice seeks to engage immanently with the oceanic experience of material events and relations. Thus, to outflank the transcendental gesture of philosophy one has to leap out of philosophy as such. Marx and Engels, as they acknowledge earlier in this section, are not antiphilosophers but fully engaged with ‘philosophical phraseology’ as they continue to be throughout The German Ideology. One reading of the quotation of Wigand’s injunction might find Marx and Engels using philosophy in order to denounce philosophy and thus remaining caught within the philosophical. However, another reading which


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pushed the sense a little (but only a little) finds the philosophers Marx and Engels calling for a philosophy that is otherwise than philosophy, ‘one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown of course, to the philosophers’. What is perhaps most interesting here is the suggestion from Marx and Engels that the study of actuality takes as its object not the actual but a body of literature. Whatever nonphilosophy is implied by this (the chapter for example is constantly engaged with Cervantes’ Don Quixote), the leap from philosophy is not one from text to world but would seem to be one from text to text. Thus, Marx and Engels’ understanding of this flight from philosophy is not a simple reduction to a binary division between thought and the real but one which is caught up in the various difficulties of reading, the quasi-transcendental question of history and of developing a mode of ‘interpretation that transforms what it interprets’ as Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, quoting Austin on performative speech acts to gloss the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.9 Such a performative interpretation responds to the task of philosophy’s own paleonymy, moving and removing philosophy into something more than philosophy, a philosophy otherwise than philosophy, something that might look like deconstruction. The point is not to read philosophy in various ways but to change it. To reinsert what remains of the paragraph under analysis, Marx and Engels go on to say: When, after that, one again encounters people like [Friedrich Wilhelm] Krummacher or ‘Stirner’, one finds that one has long ago left them ‘behind’ and below. Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism [onanie] and sexual love. Saint Sancho, who in spite of his absence of thought – which was noted by us patiently and by him emphatically – remains within the world of pure thoughts, can, of course, save himself from it only by means of a moral postulate, the postulate of ‘thoughtlessness’ (p.196 of ‘the book’). He is a bourgeois who saves himself in the face of commerce by the banqueroute cochenne [swinish bankruptcy], whereby, of course, he becomes not a proletarian, but an impecunious, bankrupt bourgeois. He does not become a man of the world, but a bankrupt philosopher without thoughts. One can sympathise with the way in which the structural dementia which afflicts these chapters on the Leipzig Council encourages Arthur’s path-of-least-resistance-reductionism. However, if we read carefully here we might note that the opening clause, ‘When, after


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that’ refers back to the leap into that other ‘enormous amount of literary material’ and so it is in comparison to the encounter with this nonphilosophy that Krummacher and Stirner are found wanting. The result of the comparison is classically dialectical, Krummacher and Stirner are said to be left ‘behind’ and below by the Aufhebung effected by this new performative interpretation. Stirner then characterised as Sancho Panza to Szeliga’s (the pseudonym of Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski, a contributor to Bruno Bauer’s periodical) Don Quixote, is further chastised not for his philosophy but for the proposal that one can only move from thought to action through an active forgetting of ‘theory’ (thoughtlessness). ‘The study of the actual world’ (and Marx and Engels are pointedly talking about ‘study’ here not action, which is nowhere named) should not be thoughtless, on the contrary, the notion that a consideration of material conditions can take place outside of or without thought is a bankrupt one. The task, for Marx and Engels, is not to abandon thought but to put it to work to transform that which it thinks about, a philosopher without thoughts is no use to anyone. The critique of Stirner is that he does not use thought to re-orientate thought but rather leaps outside of it in a non-productive way into supposed non-thought and so retains the boundary between a realm of abstract thinking and the actual world, voiding himself of the very thing which both presents a problem and the means to resolve the problem, like the bourgeois who responds to debt by making himself ineligible for credit. 2 Marx and Engels, on the other hand, propose something otherwise to Stirner’s philosophy in which, while operating within the ambit of philosophy’s interpretation of the world, the point is to change it. But to change it through ‘study’; the contrast here is not between philosophy and action, ‘Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love’. One might say, following Derrida’s remarkable account of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, that philosophy is supplementary to this proposed study. What might be implied by this relation and how might philosophy be thought of as a supplement to the study of the actual world? Let us note too quickly some of the characteristics of the supplement in Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s supplementation of sexual love by masturbation, while considering how such a scenario might be transferred over to the relation between philosophy and


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the study of the real world. Firstly, ‘the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-placeof; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.’10 Thus, philosophy operates in the space of the not-yet performative interpretation of the world, disposing that interpretation of its desire for presence (‘to change it’) within the very gesture of possession, which as ‘philosophy’ or ‘study’ stands only as a mediated representation of the world, assigned in the structure of representation ‘by the mark of an emptiness’.11 Secondly, ‘the supplement is what neither Nature nor Reason can tolerate’.12 Thus, philosophy-qua-mediation is neither of the order of the immanent nor the transcendental, substitutive of both, while excluded from both. The regulated substitution of one for the other, mediation for both pure thought and events, gives rise to blindness to the supplement. As we have been warned, supplementarity can make you go blind: The experience of auto-eroticism is lived in anguish. Masturbation reassures … only through that culpability traditionally attached to the practice, obliging children to assume the fault and to interiorize the threat of castration that always accompanies it. Pleasure is thus lived as the irremediable loss of the vital substance, as exposure to madness and death. It is produced ‘at the expense of their health, strength, and sometimes their life’.13 The experience of philosophy is lived in anguish, it reassures only through the culpability traditionally attached to the practice, obliging philosophers to interiorise their fault as an irremediable loss of vitality and exposure to madness – the castration and madness of Narcissus perhaps. If the study of the real world is no longer deferred by philosophy but takes place in absentia through the mediation of the supplement-philosophy then it is also absolutely deferred by its presentation through the medium of philosophy, as Derrida notes ‘Auto-affection is pure speculation’.14 The supplement is maddening, exposes the philosopher to madness, because ‘it is neither presence nor absence’15 and so breaches both pure thought and the real world, thus protecting the philosopher from the danger of his/her own abstraction and narcissism by substituting for that abstraction. As an auto-affection philosophy both fears and desires presence, both holding the actual world at a distance while attempting to master it. Philosophy is a dangerous supplement because it exposes itself to its own death in nonphilosophy but simultaneously is inoculated against such a death. It is not as dangerous, as Rousseau would say, as cohabitation with real women, such pleasure without mediation


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or suppletory ‘would be only another name for death’.16 Pure action would be Stirner’s unfortunate state of madness and death, ‘thoughtlessness’. One might conclude, as Derrida does concerning masturbation and sexual love, that there is no frontier between philosophy and the study of the actual world but an economic distribution between the two.17 The performative study that Marx and Engels propose substitutes for philosophy as such and through this sequence of supplementation a necessity of such study is articulated, namely, that this study is an interminable chain of supplementary mediations that produce the meaning of the very thing they both draw into representation and defer, like the immediacy of a mirage. It is undoubtedly no accident that having used the very example of masturbation to detail his consideration of the supplement, Derrida turns to the question of philosophy and empiricism in the section ‘The Exorbitant Question of Method’ in which the much mis-read sentence ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ is to be found. One might characterise Derrida’s argument here18 as italicising without privileging the word ‘study’ in the phrase ‘the study of the actual world’. He talks of his deconstruction of the Western tradition as a radical empiricism in which ‘the very concept of empiricism destroys itself’: To exceed the metaphysical orb is an attempt to get out of the orbit (orbita), to think the entirety of the classical conceptual oppositions, particularly the one within which the value of empiricism is held: the opposition of philosophy and nonphilosophy, another name for empiricism, for this incapability to sustain on one’s own and to the limit of coherence of one’s own discourse, for being produced as truth at the moment when the value of truth is shattered, for escaping the internal contradictions of scepticism, etc. The thought of this historical opposition between philosophy and empiricism is not simply empirical and it cannot be thus qualified without abuse and misunderstanding.19 Deconstruction, as an empiricism without empiricism, is then also a leap from philosophy but one which takes philosophy with it, turning philosophy around without going around it, straining at the limits of intelligibility to retain a philosophical critique of philosophy. This philosophical critique is an empiricism because it is otherwise than philosophy, a philosophy that would be able to think the ways in which philosophy itself has produced the boundary between philosophy and nonphilosophy. In this sense, The German Ideology has a particular place in the construction of this historical opposition. However, the question remains to be answered whether


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this is a consequence of Marx and Engels themselves or what de Man refers to as The German Ideology’s ‘very poor readers’. 3 There are at least two possible ways in which we could read de Man’s gnomic pronouncement: ‘Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit’. Firstly, in a strong reading of the relation between what ‘literary theory’ (de Man’s code for deconstruction in this essay) does and what The German Ideology has to say, namely, that Marx and Engels are exposing the ideological mystifications of German theory, using philosophy to show its own bourgeois status. Alternatively, we might accept a weaker reading of the relation implied by this sentence, namely, that it is Marx and Engels (who after all are doing the discrediting here) who have their own ideological mystifications (i.e. a certain empiricism) exposed by the tool they wish to discredit (i.e. philosophy). This second reading is counter-intuitive to the post hoc ergo propter hoc first reading and does not assume that de Man’s interest in Marx would be uncritical and in fact reminds us of the much later reading of the Saint Max chapter of The German Ideology in the further reaches of Specters of Marx in which Derrida reflects on the conjuration and confusion of the hauntological and the ontological in Marx. Undoubtedly, we could read de Man either way here and without further clarification from him it is difficult to pursue this reading. Unfortunately, while we do not have the proposed book on Marx, Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology, we do have the texts which de Man was working on as a ground-clearing exercise towards this study, posthumously assembled as Aesthetic Ideology. Accordingly, there is also a possible third more prosaic reading of de Man here, namely that what The German Ideology tells us is that ‘ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism’. A return to the complex structure of Marx and Engels’ text may help. Once the Saint Max chapter finally emerges from its digression in the closing section ‘Apologetical Commentary’, it also returns to the problem of philosophy’s relation to the actual world and to the issue of the quasi-transcendentality of history as previously discussed in the chapter on Feuerbach and so, structurally speaking, continues the argument of that chapter.20 Marx and Engels write:


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One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language into life.21 The criticism of German theory is that it has, through the transcendental gesture of philosophy, separated the conceptual and subsequently the linguistic from the material. This situation would be a necessarily contingent illusion for philosophy in order to allow thought to take place in a speculative context unhurried by material pressures. The error would come in mistaking this contingency for a normative condition. That is to say, that German theory precisely confuses linguistic with natural reality. Under such circumstances a quasi-transcendental understanding of the conceptual would be an indispensable tool in the masking of this ideological aberration. Thus, the fear of German theory, if you like, is that a ‘material’ understanding of language, let us call it a radical empiricism or de Man’s notion of the materiality of the letter, would be the very thing which exposed the ideological position of Stirner and Bauer while also being the object of their scorn. Marx and Engels continue in the next paragraph: We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German pettybourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. Marx and Engels are, in the first instance, referring back to their discussion of language and consciousness as part of the fundamental conditions of history (‘four aspects of primary historical relations’) in the chapter on Feuerbach, in which they write:


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…Man also possesses ‘consciousness’. But even from the outset this is not ‘pure’ consciousness. The ‘mind’ is from the outset afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me … Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.22 Language then, as ‘agitated layers of air’, has a certain phenomenalism of its own, a phenomenalism that burdens the business of reference. Language in this context is immanent to the production of historical relations, wherever and whatever those relations might be. Let us park for one moment the very difficult notion of relations, although they may finally be utterly germane to this entire problem.23 The difficulty of the relation is that as a relation it is only the presentation of presence as absence and not a manifest appearance. The relation is the absence of manifestation or appearance.24 Consciousness is coterminus with language, there is no separation between the two, both facilitating and arising from social relations, product and producer of the social. The belief that the two exist in independent realms (the error Marx and Engels associate with German theory although more time would be required to confirm or contest whether such an appellation were justified) is a sin against the supplement, and which might be characterised as a particularly reductive form of binary thinking. Such binary thinking, suggest Marx and Engels, is an ideological position used to justify a certain division of labour, which might be exposed by a different economic distribution of the relation between thought and the actual world proposed by a performative mode of interpretation. Although Marx and Engels would seem to want to have their cake and eat it, with the introduction of the distinction between ‘ordinary’ language and the bourgeois language of philosophy, their conjuration of the phantomatic nature of thought and language as ‘manifestations’ of actual life is suggestive of the supplementary absence and presence of language as the hinge between the actual and the conceptual. Neither philosophy (‘pure consciousness’) nor ‘the actual world’ can tolerate language, which insinuates itself in the place of both as the mediation of each, dispossessing the desire for presence which motivates each within the very gesture of possession through language. Language both fears


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and desires presence, drawing philosophy and the actual world into a presentation of presence while holding presence at bay by the structural necessity of its own absence. This hinge becomes a concern for Marx and Engels in the next paragraph of the ‘Apologetical Commentary’ when they write: Sancho [Stirner], who follows the philosophers through thick and thin, must inevitably seek the philosopher’s stone, the squaring of the circle and elixir of life, or a ‘word’ which as such would possess the miraculous power of leading from the realm of language and thought to actual life. Sancho has been so infected by his long years of association with Don Quixote that he fails to notice that this ‘task’ of his, this ‘vocation’, is nothing but the result of his faith in weighty philosophical books of knight-errantry. In other words, there can be no bridge between words and the actual because there are only words themselves which are the material suppletory to thought. To imagine otherwise would be to retain the false dichotomy between speculation and the actual, philosophy and action – masturbation and sexual love. The ‘philosopher’s stone’ is the dream of pure presence which would translate unmediated consciousness into fully-formed action, a universal translator for all situations of theory into practice. To dream of such a magic word, say Marx and Engels, is faith in ‘knight-errantry’. For all Feuerbach, Stirner and Bauer’s discussion of the political, as if invoking the political were itself enough to transform the political, the point is to change it, not to tilt at windmills. Thus, the text of Marx and Engels frequently comes close to stating that the division between the figural and the literal is itself an effect of language; language being both material itself, and the only place in which the material can ground itself. It does so only to continually ebb and flow to and from this position by the reinstigation of a division between philosophical and ordinary language which maintains the strictest of borders between the conceptual and the actual, transporting language away from itself by means of itself, as in the implied transparency of ‘language is the immediate actuality of thought’. Thus, The German Ideology as an allegorical text might be said to have some of its own ideological mystifications exposed by its own process of exposure and discrediting. We might say, following de Man, that the one thing that The German Ideology wants to do most but cannot do is to discredit (it uses philosophy to expose philosophy, language to denounce language, reading to dismiss reading and so on), yet the


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exhilarating textual effect of Marx and Engels’ allegory is that the text continues nevertheless to convince us that it has indeed discredited German theory. 4 On this reading, what both Marx and de Man seem to be saying is that all words are magic words, which as a social product regulate the substitution of signs for things, defining the order of the supplement. Thus, theory and practice are brought into a productive economy in which there is no pure passage from one to the other but only mediation through the suppletory of language, or, textuality. This scenario recalls de Man’s reading of Kant proposed in the essays of Aesthetic Ideology, in which Kant abandons the magical teleological properties of the word ‘judgement’ when faced with the ruin of migration between pure and practical reason. Kant’s situation in the third Critique is equally well expressed in his essay ‘On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice’. The second paragraph of this essay reads: It is obvious that between theory and practice there is required, besides, a middle term connecting them and providing transition from one to the other, no matter how complete a theory may be; for, to a concept of the understanding, which contains a rule, must be added an act of judgement by which a practitioner distinguishes whether or not something is a case of the rule; and since judgement cannot always be given yet another rule by which to direct its subsumption (for this would go on to infinity), there can be theoreticians who can never in their lives become practical because they are lacking judgment, for example, physicians or jurists who did well during their schooling but who are at a loss when they have to give an expert opinion. But even where this natural talent is present there can still be a deficiency in premises, that is, a theory can be incomplete and can, perhaps, be supplemented only by engaging in further experiments and experiences, from which the recently schooled physician, agriculturist, or economist can and should abstract new rules for himself and make his theory complete. In such cases it was not the fault of theory if it was of little use in practice, but rather of there having been not enough theory, which the man in question should have learned from experience and which is true theory even if he is not in a position to state it himself and, as a teacher, set it forth systematically in general propositions, and so can make no claim to the title of theoretical physician, agriculturist and the like. Thus no one can pretend to be practically proficient in a science and yet scorn theory without


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declaring that he is an ignoramus in the field, inasmuch as he believes that by groping about in experiments and experiences, without putting together certain principles (which really constitute what is called theory) and without having thought out some whole relevant to his business (which, if one proceeds methodically in it, is called a system), he can get further than theory could take him.25 This is a bold defence of theory but one which recognises that the work of theory is never purely theoretical. Rather, if theory is to be meaningful it should be refined and reformulated in relation to experience and example. For Kant here, however, as in the third Critique, there remains the possibility of a transposition from theory to practice through the conditions of teleological judgement, which has all the properties of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, which Marx and Engels dismissed. That is to say, judgement for Kant would work as a passageway or converter between theory and practice, turning one alchemically into the other, rather than as the actual site of mediation in which both theory and practice had their only meaningful, if deferred, existence. The problem posed by the aesthetic experience of judging art in the third Critique, on de Man’s reading, is that if the philosopher’s stone of such teleological judgement were impossible then the entire project of Critique as such would be in crisis.26 Even as Kant hints in the paragraph above that experience ‘supplements’ theory, rather than an endlessly deferred judgement supplementing both, there are considerable resources within Kant’s counter-intuitive argument to suggest that one might be able to formulate a commentary on the relation between philosophy and the actual world and ultimately, in reading Kant’s essay, to move from a consideration of the supplementary effects of masturbation to a considered response to the recent politics of the Middle East. In defence of theory Kant draws an analogy between the Law and its practice, arguing that in this case ‘the worth of practice rests entirely on its conformity with the theory underlying it, and all is lost if the empirical and hence contingent conditions of carrying out the law are made conditions of the law itself’.27 Again, one might argue in refinement of Kant, rather than against Kant in favour of the primacy of practice, that the enactment of the Law is never a pure application but always a moment of inevitably unjust judgement, in which both the Law and its practice have their only absent presence. The same situation can be said to apply in each of the attempts Kant makes ‘to test the supposed conflicting interests of theory and


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practice in philosophy’:28 against Garve, against Hobbes and against Moses Mendelssohn. While Kant outflanks the morbid empiricism of each by championing the theoretical: ‘…All this experience does not help him at all to escape the precept of theory, but at most only helps him to learn how theory could be better and more generally put to work, after one has adopted it into one’s principles…’.29 He continues to affirm the distinction between theory and practice and so replicates the same structural division between philosophy and the actual world proposed by those he criticises. In this way, Kant, in the terms of The German Ideology, remains an exemplary German theorist and the Young Hegelians may as well be Young Kantians. However, as with the third Critique, whenever Kant’s formulations on the triangulation of theory, practice and judgement come into contact with actual moments of ‘judgement’ as demonstrated in the reading of examples to support a philosophical argument, the certainty of these pronouncements begins to tremble. Let me conclude this essay by examining such a passage which would seem to have a poignant historical relation to us today. Firstly, in the conclusion to the section ‘Against Moses Mendelssohn’, and in response to Mendelssohn’s pessimistic assertion that the human race will never make moral progress, Kant opens up a discussion of ‘omnilateral violence’ and international law. Kant argues that just as the constant threat of violence within a community leads ultimately to the best defence of a civil constitution, so the unending threat of coercion between states ought equally to lead to a cosmopolitan constitution between states. This should be a federation of states in accordance with agreed rights of nations rather than a commonwealth of nations lead by the most powerful. Kant writes: For the advancing culture of states, along with their growing propensity to aggrandize themselves by cunning or violence at the expense of others, must multiply wars and give rise to higher and higher costs because of ever larger armies (remaining under pay), kept at the ready and in training and equipped with ever more numerous instruments of war; meanwhile the price of all necessities constantly rises, though a corresponding increase in the metals representing them cannot be hoped for; moreover, no peace lasts long enough for the savings during it to catch up with expenditures on costs for the next war, and the invention of a national debt against this, though certainly an ingenious expedient, is in the end a self-defeating one; hence impotence must eventually bring about what good will ought to have done but did not do: that each state becomes so organized internally that it is not the head of state, whom war


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really costs nothing (since he wages it at another’s cost, namely that of the people), who has the decisive voice as to whether there is to be war or not, but instead the people, which pays for it (admittedly, this necessarily presupposes the realization of that idea of the original contract).30 The people are not likely, continues Kant, to impoverish themselves for the sake of aggrandisement and so the internal organisation of prosperity leads (not out of the love of prosperity but out of ‘the self-love of each age’) to peace between nations unable to harm each other by force (because constrained by the will of their peoples) and instead constituted into a commonwealth of mutual assistance. This scenario, if not the solution, will be familiar to all observers of the recent politics of the Middle East. One could spend some time pursuing the analogy between Kant’s standing armies and the American-led occupation and privatisation of Iraq, in particular the robust defence of international law as the guarantor of peace which follows from this discussion. I will leave this as an exercise for the reader,31 not wishing the rawness of such an example to mediatise the more general point I wish to make here about mediation itself. Namely, that with this example Kant’s own theory is brought into practice, while practice is drawn into theory and simultaneously held at bay by it. Here an interpretation of the present (war) leads to a prognosis of the future (a cosmopolitan constitution) and so theory and practice combine in the moment of the example, which is a crafting of a relation between the two, the only relation the two have. This is a crafting which takes place over an abyss between relation and non-relation, an indefinite multiplication of the substitution by representation in a chain of examples which stands in the place of a relation, producing the sense of the very thing it defers, thus deriving the perceived immediacy of a relation which exists only in the impossible and endless gapping of the abyss. Let us call this relation ‘judgement’, a judgement which is not teleological but one which is suspended in the abyss between the misreading of present interpretation and the unknowable effects of future prognosis. This is a fluid judgement which distributes itself between the theory Kant expounds and the practice it intends to give rise to, while provisionally and contingently anchoring itself in the very textual event of the example which simultaneously dispossess it of the authoritative ambitions which predicate it. The example runs away with and from the philosophy which puts it in play, while mediating the actual of which it is only a representation.


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The example as such would seem to have magical properties for philosophy. Whenever philosophy comes into contact with ‘the example’, and the example only ever resides in the text of philosophy, all of the general principles and axiomatics proper to philosophical discourse begin to quiver. There is at once an anxiety about and a requirement for the example. The example should simultaneously be in conformity with the theory while testing the limits of that theory. The example as a textual event always transforms and translates philosophy into something otherwise than philosophy, compelling philosophy into a state beyond itself, transmuting the matter of philosophy with unknowable alchemical effects. Long may philosophers continue to be caught up in and caught out by their examples, and long may they continue to be displaced by the economic distribution which over-spills the boundaries between theory and practice, philosophy and its others, the politics of masturbation and the politics of the Middle East. In these dark days of Neo-Colonialism I will leave the last word to Kant, who in response to the great statesmen who ridicule theory, concludes his own essay thus: For my own part, I nevertheless put my trust in theory, which proceeds from the principle of right, as to what relations among human beings and states ought to be, and which commends to earthly gods the maxim always so to behave in their conflicts that such a universal state of nations will thereby be ushered in, and so to assume that it is possible (in praxi) and that it can be; but at the same time I put my trust (in subsidium) in the nature of things, which constrains one to go where one does not want to go (fata volentem duccunt, nolentem trahunt). In the latter, account is also taken of human nature, in which respect for right and duty is still alive, so that I cannot and will not take it to be so immersed in evil that morally practical reason should not, after many unsuccessful attempts, finally triumph over evil and present human nature as lovable after all. Thus on the cosmopolitan level, too, it can be maintained: What on rational grounds holds for theory also holds for practice.32 NOTES 1. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 2. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt, W. Lough and C.P. Magill, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 236. 3. For example, see the envois of 27 September 1978, or, 23 August 1979 in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).


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4. Paul de Man, ‘The Resistance to Theory’, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 11. 5. For further clarification see n. 45 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 594. 6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part I with selections from Parts II and III, (republished as The German Ideology: the student’s edition) ed. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970). 7. C.J. Arthur, ed., The German Ideology, p. 103. 8. This and subsequent Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 235–6. 9. SoM, p. 51. 10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 145. 11. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 145. 12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 148. 13. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 150–1. 14. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 154. 15. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 154. 16. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 155. 17. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 155. 18. I have considered this passage at length elsewhere. See, Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 7; Deconstruction: a Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 162. 20. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 41ff. 21. This and following, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 446–7. 22. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 43–4. 23. I have glossed the question of ‘the relation’ elsewhere, see Martin McQuillan, ‘The Girl Who Steps Along’, The Oxford Literary Review, 24, 2002, pp. 49–50. 24. See, Peggy Kamuf, ‘Translating Spectres: an interview’, parallax 20, ‘The New International’, ed. Martin McQuillan (July–September, 2001), p. 47. 25. Immanuel Kant, ‘On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice’, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 279. 26. See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 27. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, p. 280. 28. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, p. 286. 29. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, p. 290. 30. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, p. 308. 31. I have attempted a similar reading elsewhere of Kant’s ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, see Martin McQuillan ‘The Eternal Battle for the Domination of the World’, Parallax 15, April–June, 2000, pp. 67–81. 32. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, p. 309.


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Notes on Contributors Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York. His recent publications include J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004) and The Singularity of Literature (2004). Richard Beardsworth is Professor of Political Philosophy at the American University in Paris. He is the author of Derrida and the Political (1996) and Nietzsche (1997). Geoffrey Bennington is Professor of French at Emory University. His recent publications include Interrupting Derrida (2000) and Frontières kantiennes (2000). Anne Berger is Professor of French Literature at Cornell University and Director of the Centre Etudes Féminines at Université Paris VIII. Her recent publications include Scènes d’aumône: Misère et Poésie au XIXe siècle (2004) and Algeria in Other(s)’ Languages (2002). Robert Bernasconi is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at Memphis University. His recent publications include The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (with Simon Critchley, 2002) and How to Read Sartre (2006). Claire Colebrook is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her recent publications include Philosophy and Poststructuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze (2005) and Irony in the Work of Philosophy (2003). Marc Froment-Meurice is Professor of French at Vanderbilt University. His recent publications include Incitations (2002) and That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics (1998). Rodolphe Gasché is Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at SUNY (Buffalo). His recent publications include Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (1999) and The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (2003). Joanna Hodge is Professor of Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Derrida on Time (2007) and Heidegger and Ethics (1994).

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Martin McQuillan is Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis at the University of Leeds. His recent publications include The Origins of Deconstruction (with Ika Willis, 2007) and Textual Activism: deconstruction before and after 9/11 (2007). Laurent Milesi teaches at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. His recent publications include James Joyce and the Difference of Language (2003). Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Recent English-language translations of his work include The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007) and The Ground of the Image (2005). Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts. His publications include Performativity and Performance (with Eve Sedgwick, 1995) and Nationalisms and Sexuality (1992), and he is co-translator and editor of Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor (2004).


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Index Abraham(ic) 55, 58, 59, 61, 176, 179 Aesthetics 192, 244 Agamben, Giorgio 164 Althusser, Louis 3 Antigone 171 Aristotle 18, 25–33, 127, 129, 216 Auerbach, Eric 11, 66–70 Austin, John 193, 196 Auto-Affection 242 Auto-Immunity 6 Bahti, Timothy 75n.5 Barradori, Giovanna 5 Barthes, Roland 25 Beardsworth, Richard 65n.33 Benjamin, Walter 150, 151n.14, 215 Bennington, Geoffrey 9, 94n.1, 97n.74 Berger, Anne 184 Bergson, Henri 12, 147 Biemel, Walter 138 Bin Laden, Osama 2 Blanchot, Maurice 12, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 150, 158–64, 169, 185 Blumenberg, Hans 46 Capital 5, 214, 217, 221, 233 Caputo, John 180, 189n.42 Carroll, David 66 Chekov, Anton 159 Cixous, Hélène 8 Climate Change 5 Communism 47, 213 Community 52, 73, 102, 103, 107 Constitution 29, 44 Contingency 2 Critchley, Simon 91, 92 Critique 81, 144, 249 Cultural Studies 18 De Gaulle, Charles 158 Deguy, Michel 162

De Man, Paul 13, 66, 140, 141, 236, 244, 248 Democracy 10, 17–36, 43–53, 63, 105, 213, 225, 231 Democracy-to-come 3, 27, 223, 225 Derrida, Jacques (works by): ‘A Madness Must Watch Over Thinking’ 83, 90 ‘Aporias’ 178 ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ 25, 185 Cinders 174 ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ 82 ‘Dialanguages’ 184 Dissemination 174 ‘Faith and Knowledge’ 144, 175, 180 ‘Force of Law’ 4, 54, 93, 178 Given Time 54 Glas 138, 141, 148, 235 ‘How to Avoid Speaking Denials’ 176, 180 Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 82, 137, 149 ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’ 81 La Contre-allée 183 ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ 81 ‘Limited Inc’ 13, 192, 201 Memoirs for Paul de Man 140, 141 Monolinguism of the Other 18, 183, 185 Of Grammatology 109, 112, 241 ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’ 134 ‘The Ends of Man’ 2 The Gift of Death 56–62 ‘The Time of a Thesis’ 145 The Other Heading 54, 83, 114n.7, 121 The Post Card 158, 174, 235 The Problem of Genesis for Husserl 137 ‘Pas’ 176, 180, 185 257

McQuillan 03 index 257

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258

Index

Derrida, Jacques (works by): contd Politics of Friendship 17, 19, 26, 38n.14, 54 Positions 37n.7 ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’ 54 ‘Sauf le nom’ 54, 185 ‘Signature Event Context’ 193 Spectres of Marx 4, 6, 8, 84, 138, 178, 179, 182, 185, 214, 222, 226–7, 240 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ 7, 8, 84, 85 différance 6, 179, 206, 220, 221 Dostoyevsky, Feodor 158 Eagleton, Terry 235 Engels, Friedrich 235–48 Enlightenment 20, 134 Europe 83, 116, 118, 119, 121, 124, 127, 132–4 Fascism 47, 213 Fink, Eugene 128, 129–31 Forgiveness 62 Foucault, Michel 194 Freud, Sigmund 12, 25, 100, 138, 141, 215 Fukayama, Francis 224, 225 Future 1–10, 140 Gasché, Rodolphe 25 Genet, Jean 148 Globalisation 49, 50, 168, 225 Government 28 Granel, Gérard 12, 116, 117, 120, 133 Hegel, G.W.F 7, 10, 19, 20, 25, 35, 82, 126, 138, 139, 141, 166, 216, 217, 223, 229 Heidegger, Martin 7, 8, 12, 82, 84, 93, 117, 120, 126, 132, 143, 158–66, 171, 213, 215, 222, 223 History 6, 19, 140, 141, 143, 203, 223, 224, 230 Hölderlin, Friedrich 126 Hospitality 60, 62


Hugo, Victor 1 Hurricane Katrina 5 Husserl, Edmund 116–20, 122, 127, 138, 139, 141, 146, 149, 150, 215, 222 Impossibility 60, 62, 202 International Law 4, 250 Iraq 2, 5, 251 Justice 4, 51, 62, 127, 178, 200, 202, 203, 223 Kant, Immanuel 12, 30, 35, 83, 106, 134, 138, 144, 152n.15, 192, 201, 205, 208, 225, 248–52 Kierkegaard, Soren 55, 56, 58, 61, 62 Kofman, Sarah 148, 150 Lacan, Jacques 194 Laclau, Ernesto 91, 92 Lebanon 2 Levinas, Emmanuel 61, 81, 84–93, 128, 138, 139, 143, 145, 146, 150, 183, 186, 210n.19, 215, 222 Levi-Strauss, Claude 99 Literature 55, 64n.25, 200, 240 Lukács, Georg 66 Lyotard, Jean-François 147 Malabou, Catherine 183 Mallarmé, Stefan 140, 150, 175, 185 Marvell, Andrew 54, 61 Marx, Karl 2, 7, 13, 35, 44, 45, 83, 117, 120, 158, 182, 214–32, 235–48 Marxism 84, 182, 215 Mendelssohn, Moses 250 Messianism 140, 181 Merlau-Ponty, Maurice 138, 146 Middle East 2, 236, 251, 252 Mourning 1, 138 Nancy, Jean-Luc 121, 135n.7, 144, 147, 152n.17, 167, 169 Nation State 48 Nazism 162–4

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Index Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 82, 139 Paine, Tom 2 Patocka, Jan 12, 116, 122–33 Phenomenology 122, 137, 139, 142–7, 149 Phonocentrism 103, 108 Plato 13, 18, 21–5, 26, 30–3, 85, 121, 128–30, 174, 176 Political Economy 48, 51–3, 113n.5, 231 Post-colonialism 17 Postmodernism 17 Queer Theory 75 Rancière, Jacques 66–75 Rousseau, J.J 11–12, 35, 44, 98–113, 225 Royle, Nicholas 9 Rumsfeld, Donald 2 Sarkozy, Nicholas 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul 138, 161 Schmitt, Carl 45 Science 4, 233 Searle, John 193, 195, 199, 202 Shakespeare, William 215


259

Smith, Adam 216 Socrates 21, 23, 26, 31, 166, 175 Sovereignty 4, 11, 224 Speech Acts 193–7 Starobinski, Jean 110, 111 Stirner, Max 215, 236–8, 241, 247 Tacitus 67–70 Tarkl, Georg 167 Tele-communication 5 Telos 3, 36, 198 Terrorism 4, 5 Tocqueville, Alexander 45 Totalitarianism 43, 228 Trauma 5 Trotsky, Leon 158 Undecidability 82, 93 Universality 120, 180 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 174 Vietnam 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 117, 120 Wood, David 56–62, 152n.17 World Trade Center (New York) 5 Žižek, Slavoj 71–4

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