Derrida and the Political

Richard Beardsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134837373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers of our time, has come to be at the centre of many political debates. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's deconstruction. It is a timely response both to Derrida's own recent shift towards thinking about the political, and to the political focus of contemparary Continental philosophy.
Richard Beardsworth's study, Derrida and the Political, locates a way of thinking about deconstruction using the tools of political philosophy. Richard Beardsworth has provided students of philosophy, politics and critical theory with a thought-provoking, upper level introduction to Derrida'a work as a political theorist.

1

From Language to Law, an Opening onto Judgement

Saussure, Kafka, Derrida

The general structure of the unmotivated trace connects within the same possibility, and they cannot be separated except by abstraction, the structure of the relationship with the other, the movement of temporalization, and language as writing.

J. Derrida, Of Grammatology

Introduction

The first sustained reception of Derrida’s thinking took place in university departments of literature. The reception of his work within the context of literary studies was understandably selective; it often led, however, to poor negotiations with the political tenor of his thought. In turn the literary aspects of Derrida’s writings have deterred people with an eye on the political from reading these works carefully. My first chapter reconsiders two of Derrida’s works privileged by this reception – his deconstruction of the linguistic sign and his engagements with the ‘literary’ – with a specific view to the political dimension of his work as a whole. My concern is not to politicize these writings, nor to derive a politics from them, one elaborated in frustration, for example, at the seeming distance which they observe to immediate political issues. It is to show how Derrida’s writings regarding language and literature, by exceeding what we normally understand by these terms, as well as their fields of interest and influence, constitute a serious engagement with the future of thinking and acting. I demonstrate in particular that this engagement inheres in the very ‘method’ of deconstruction and that the political dimension of Derrida’s thinking can be gauged only in respect of this ‘method’. This dimension is found in his understanding of ‘aporia’ and ‘promise’.¹

The Fates of Deconstruction

Derrida’s work on Saussure in Of Grammatology (1967b) and his various pronouncements on the specificity of literary writing in Writing and Difference (1967a) and Dissemination (1972a) were instrumental in the shift from the structuralist culture of the 1960s and 1970s, to its inheritor ‘post-structuralism’ in the anglophone world of the late 1970s and 1980s. His deconstruction of Saussure’s theory of the sign was considered to be both a radical questioning of the human processes of signification and a severe rebuttal of philosophical axiomatic. Saussure had himself begun this questioning with his formal analysis of language as a differential system of values; Derrida removed the remaining philosophical nostalgia of Saussure’s project by deconstructing the desire for systematicity. Through his emphasis on écriture Derrida both reinvented the relations and spaces between philosophy and literature and opened up a new field of inquiry into textual processes, these processes exceeding traditional distinctions between the real and the fictional, the historical and the imaginary. The above three works were crucial in promoting the emergence in the anglophone world of the discipline and institutional practice of ‘literary theory’, whose interest lay in the complex mechanisms of language and in procedures of reading and writing in general.

Jonathan Culler spoke well, if symptomatically, of the relation of deconstruction to literary theory in his influential On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1983). He argued that the major concern of deconstruction was to read philosophy rhetorically and literature philosophically. His appraisal carried three implications. First, deconstruction was considered to be a practice of reading whose aim was to show that the philosophical telos of truth, reason or logic defined itself against the very writing in which this telos was expressed; the telos was undermined by the very rhetorical procedures of the writing which sustained it. Second – following this invitation to treat philosophical discourse as ‘literature’ – works of literature were themselves to be read in terms of their displacement of the values which philosophy promised, but necessarily denied by refusing to think the foundations of its discourse. In other words, literature could be read most fruitfully as a superior kind of ‘philosophizing’. Third, Derrida’s work was itself located within a tradition of thinking which included the major concerns of post-Kantian aesthetics, Nietzsche’s destruction of Platonism and the writings of Paul de Man (Blindness and Insight (1972) and Allegories of Reading (1979)). Working himself from within this tradition, the author of On Deconstruction argued persuasively for the importance of Derrida’s work for literary criticism, anticipating that literary criticism would become the avant-garde discipline of the humanities, contributing most to what came to call itself in the 1980s ‘critical theory’.

This evaluation of Derrida’s work characterized the reception of deconstruction until the latter part of the 1980s. In departure from it, and partly owing to increased philosophical interest in Derrida’s writings, the complex ‘logic’ of Derrida’s texts began to be untied. The works of Rodolphe Gasché (1979, 1986) and Geoffrey Bennington (1987, 1991) were particularly important in this respect. These analyses, together with the institutional history of deconstruction in the Anglo-Saxon world, made it clear that, at its intellectual best, the literary reception of Derrida’s thought overplayed its rhetorical side and, at its institutional worst, made it into a practice of literary criticism, the political orientation of which was easily advertised, but poorly elaborated. It was in this intellectual and historical context that the ‘affairs’ of Heidegger (his profound complicity with Nazism) and de Man (his journalism in Belgium between 1940 and 1942, showing sympathies with Germany) took place in 1987.

These two events allowed those already ill-disposed towards ‘deconstruction’ to confirm to their public that its overall tendency was indeed reactionary (for example, Ferry and Renaut, 1988; Habermas, 1988b). However unjust the accusation, Derrida’s reputation suffered through association, and the reach of his thinking was severely underestimated. In a country as culturally diverse and restless as the United States, there was a self-fulfilling desire to move on. First historicism, then multi-culturalism stole front stage in North American literature departments, the work of deconstruction being for the most part recast as an intellectual gesture still working within a traditional, Eurocentric canon. The Yale school’s versions of deconstruction, with its varied interests in European Romanticism, prepared for this judgement, whilst Derrida’s almost exclusive references to the western European tradition of philosophy and literature fuelled it. Multiculturalism did not, of course, emerge because of the Heidegger and de Man affairs. These affairs did serve, however, as a political pretext to a broad dismissal of what had become in the meantime an institutional culture, one which often brought to texts rather repetitive procedures of interpretation through which ‘deconstruction’ necessarily ran the risk of being considered a transcendental practice of reading. It was consequently not by chance that deconstruction came to be seen in the late 1980s as constitutively incapable of articulating the historical making and unmaking of subjectivities.

The case against the institution of deconstruction is rested; but that of deconstruction’s relation to its institution, and to its thinking of the institution in general, needs to be reopened. The opportunity is provided by means of a resituating of the stakes of Derrida’s text on Saussure, ‘Linguistics and grammatology’ (1967b), and of one of his major meditations on the specificity of literature, ‘Before the Law’ (1985). A rereading of these works will show that the institutional culture of deconstruction fell into contradiction with the radical insights of this culture’s beginnings. If this is the fate of all thinking that inaugurates a culture – following the iterable logic of all marks, Derrida’s writings lend themselves a priori to being ‘misunderstood’ – the complexity and implications of Derrida’s thinking have been simplified by its international reception remaining unduly in the field of textual analysis. The simplification has been aggravated by a common conviction that its concerns were, if not those of language, to be worked out through language-analysis, and that this work could best be done in the ‘spaces’ between literature and philosophy. Whilst this is not wrong, it has, however, confined the reach of Derrida’s thinking (its conceptual resources and strategies) to a debate either between the frontiers of literature and philosophy or one within their institutional confines. This debate has often proved extremely fruitful, generating questions which well exceed these frontiers, using indeed the resources of Derrida’s thinking to rearticulate the very concept of ‘frontier’ (Derrida, 1994a; Bennington, 1994). At the same time, this textual and institutional confinement of deconstruction has heightened the prevalent scepticism or nervousness concerning the political implications of Derrida’s thought.

The Method of Deconstruction

I said at the beginning of this chapter that we would be concerned with the ‘method’ of deconstruction and that its political dimension could be untied from this ‘method’. Derrida is careful to avoid this term because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida, as we shall see at length in this book, this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida’s philosophical adventure. That said, Derrida’s writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s – Writing and Difference (1967a), Of Grammatology (1967b), Dissemination (1972a) and Margins of Philosophy (1972b) – negotiate a relation between philosophy and what in France is called the ‘sciences humaines’ which is both characteristic of a certain style of philosophizing and carries with it and develops a clear set of intellectual, disciplinary and institutional stakes. On the one hand, Derrida wishes to show that it is impossible to dominate philosophical concepts from outside philosophy, since the attempt meets an essential limit in the very philosophical nature of the terms being used to dominate it (terms, for example, of propriety embedded in the discourses of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and psychoanalysis). On the other hand, and for the same reason, philosophy is incapable of dominating the ‘empiricity’ or ‘facticity’ of these same discourses (what I will later call their ‘inscription’) since this empiricity and facticity inform its very gestures when it is least aware of it. As we will see with the example of linguistics, Derrida traces through this double impossibility and shows how it is both ‘possible’ and irreducible.² The consequent negotiation between the discourse of philosophy and the human sciences enacts a displacement and reorganization of the ‘metaphysical’ opposition between the transcendental and the empirical, opening up an aporetic and uncontrollable ‘position’, neither in philosophy (as it is traditionally organized) nor outside it, one from which the future of thinking and practice is thought.

I call this orientation the ‘method’ of deconstruction. My use of the term ‘method’ is contextually determined and strategic, motivated by a wish to press home the precise intellectual stakes of Derrida’s philosophy, stakes which have often been ignored or underestimated. Thus, in distinction to writers who tend to emphasize the impossibility of the transcendental in Derrida’s writings, my use of the term ‘method’ underscores the necessity of reinscribing the metaphysical opposition between the transcendental and the empirical. Thinking this necessity means thinking the inescapability of inscription in general – which would include the instances of history, the body, technics, politics – but it means thinking it without losing the inescapable gesture of the transcendental in order to do so.

Through a careful exposition of the double move of this ‘method’ I then emphasize that it is in the irreducibility of the above double-bind or aporia (‘neither in philosophy nor outside it’) that Derrida locates both the necessity of judgement and the promise of the future. An aporia demands decision, one cannot remain within it; at the same time its essential irreducibility to the cut of a decision makes the decision which one makes contingent, to be made again. The promise of the future (that there is a future) is located in this contingency. In this contingency of time resides the possibility of justice. In other words, the aporia of thinking which emerges from within Derrida’s play between philosophy and the human sciences inaugurates a philosophy of judgement and a thinking of justice in relation to time. I shall argue that the ethico-political dimension of deconstruction resides in this relation between aporia and judgement.

The chapter is divided into two parts which mirror the above move from the ‘method’ of deconstruction and its stakes to the ensuing relations between aporia, judgement and justice. The first part elaborates the workings of deconstruction through a reading of ‘Linguistics and grammatology’ (1967b). The second part turns the consequences of this elaboration to an exposition of the inextricable nature of the relation in Derrida’s thought between aporia and judgement, maintaining that the thinking of aporia is understood by Derrida as a thinking of law, and that this thinking, as inscribed in the literary text, is the condition and, in a sense, ‘measure’ of judgements, judgements which have the chance of inventing the new. Derrida’s understanding of the ‘promise’ in terms of time – one to which considerable weight will be given, implicitly and explicitly, in Chapters 2 and 3 – will emerge through these reflections.

Let me now summarize the argument so far. The elaboration of Derrida’s ‘method’ in his work on Saussurean linguistics serves:

– to show the way in which a political orientation to deconstruction is to be found in its location of an irreducible aporia which ensues from its reinscription of the empirico-transcendental difference. For this aporia engenders a temporal analysis of judgement.

– to show how the passage through the transcendental in Derrida’s work opens up an understanding of institutions – I use this word to cover any act that acquires form, from institutions in the usual sense to disciplines and even broader cultural formations like religion – and an understanding of the relations between institutions and their history. These relations are violent. The necessity of the passage through the transcendental engenders an account of the irreducibility of violence (what Derrida calls ‘originary violence’).

– to show that the major political inflection to Derrida’s manoeuvre between the transcendental and the empirical is his deconstruction of the concept and practice of horizons (institutional, disciplinary, temporal).³ In his reinscription of the empirico-transcendental difference, Derrida reveals how any horizon of thinking or action is an ‘ethico-theoretical decision’ which denies finitude. The ethico-theoretical nature of the decision is ‘political’ in that, akin to politics in the common sense of the term, its demarcation of space and time is a violence predicated on disavowal. The effects of this deconstruction of horizonal thinking will then be reorganized with regard to modern political thought in Chapter 2.

– to show that each of the previous points is the same ‘thesis’ viewed from a different perspective.

The Trace, The Violence of Institution

The Privilege of the Sign

Before turning explicitly to ‘Linguistics and grammatology’ we should remind ourselves firstly of the reasons why Derrida considered the sign to be an exemplary terrain on which the deconstruction of metaphysics could be negotiated. In ‘The end of the book and the beginning of writing’, the introduction to Of Grammatology (1967b: 15–41/6–26), Derrida contends that language acquires methodological importance in reflection upon human facticity in the same movement that puts the identity of this language in crisis. The paradox places language on the horizon of our age, at what Derrida calls the ‘closure’ of metaphysics. Language does not simply embody the paradox, however; it brings it to light in the first place. On the one hand, the sign dominates the horizon of contemporary thinking because it is no longer regarded (the argument of ‘logocentrism’) as a secondary instance which represents or communicates a prior entity (logos, being, God, spirit, truth, subjectivity, consciousness, activity, intentionality); on the other hand, just when it assumes this primary position, it moves into crisis. Since language is largely defined as a medium conveying an instance prior to it, the moment this instance withdraws, the very identity of language does as well. The sign becomes at one and the same time both a privileged object of reflection and a volatile object unsure of its vocation.

Three consequences follow from this paradox. First, any discipline which prioritizes language in contradistinction to metaphysics is complicit with metaphysics since the theory of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translations
• Introduction
• 1. From Language to Law, an Opening onto Judgement
• 2. The Political Limit of Logic and the Promise of Democracy
• 3. Aporia of Time, Aporia of Law
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index