Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction

Badredine Arfi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136462153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

International Relations (IR) theorists have ceaselessly sought to understand, explain, and transform the experienced reality of international politics. Running through all these attempts is a persistent, yet unquestioned, quest by theorists to develop strategies to eliminate or reduce the antinomies, contradictions, paradoxes, dilemmas, and inconsistencies dogging their approaches. A serious critical assessment of the logic behind these strategies is however lacking. This new work addresses this issue by seeking to reformulate IR theory in an original way.

Arfi begins by providing a thorough critique of leading contemporary IR theories, including pragmatism, critical/scientific realism, rationalism, neo-liberal institutionalism and social-constructivism, and then moves on to strengthen and go beyond the valuable contributions of each approach by employing the logic of deconstruction pioneered by Derrida to explicate the consequences of taking into account the dilemmas and inconsistencies of these theories. The book demonstrates that the logic of deconstruction is resourceful and rigorous in its questioning of the presuppositions of prevailing IR approaches, and argues that relying on deconstruction leads to richer and more powerfully insightful pluralist IR theories and is an invaluable resource for taking IR theory beyond currently paralyzing 'wars of paradigms'.

Questioning universally accepted presuppositions in existing theories, this book provides an innovative and exciting contribution to the field, and will be of great interest to scholars of international relations theory, critical theory and international relations.

1 Re-thinking via deconstruction qua affirmation

Introduction

This book is an effort to re-think international relations (IR) theory, or, more accurately, various theories of IR, yet without suggesting a new paradigmatic ‘ism’, a synthesis of sorts, or any type of grand theorizing. Rather, the book proposes a new conceptual-operational framework for critiquing and re-thinking IR theories.

Why am I using ‘re-think’ with a hyphen and not simply ‘rethink’ as one word, or ‘think’ tout court since every re-thinking is a thinking anyway? Why am I writing ‘theories’ and not simply ‘theory’?

I take the position that any thinking is inescapably a re-thinking because there always is more or less iteration in it of traces of what preceded it. However, I simultaneously take the position that any re-thinking is also more or less invention, an innovative thinking within which there are traces of expectations of what might come after it. There always is a constitutive concatenation of change, invention and repetition in a process of re-thinking/thinking. Repetition takes the form of traces that shape, or haunt through and through, whatever we think in re-thinking. As the saying goes, we cannot build anything without relying on the shoulders of the previous/existing giants—so-called major works and defining texts and theories. The invention shows up as an unpredicted and un-anticipated coming of new ways of otherwise conceptualizing, arguing, formulating, and critiquing.

This book takes thus the dual position, first, that simultaneous iteration and change is the condition of possibility of thinking, that is, without iteration and change no thinking is possible, and, second, that simultaneous iteration and change is also the condition of impossibility of a thinking qua originary thinking. That is, iteration and change always already inscribe traces both of past and future (as expectations of) thinking in any present thinking, including the most innovative ones. Therefore, in thinking we cannot not be re-thinking.

Why ‘theories’ in the plural and not simply ‘theory’? First, it has become widely accepted in the study of IR (and social science or social theory discipline as well as philosophy) that seeking a ‘grand theory’ of anything is a totalitarian delusion and an utopian illusion that harm and obstruct the process of thinking more than help the understanding of the subject-matter of study. It is no surprise that students of IR of all stripes are divided and continuously so, thereby remaining engaged in a seemingly never ending proliferation and dissemination of ‘isms’, approaches, etc.; a situation that IR enjoys or suffers from (depending where you stand on the issue of pluralization and diversification). As such we cannot not speak always already of theories as a multitude and in the plural. Second, this is a book about theories of IR, or, more accurately, it is an effort that seeks to read, critique and re-affirm through almost unavoidable displacements a number of theoretical/conceptual works in IR in ways more or less different from what is customarily done in so-called mainstream of IR discipline. In other words, I read a number of IR texts to re-think their ‘thinking’ of IR. In doing so I neither simply negate nor do I simply re-affirm them; I do both and neither at the same time, more or less. I thus critique to affirm, re-affirm to displace, and displace to open the horizon of thinking to/in unanticipated ways of thinking and conceptualizing. I thus read to re-affirm the possibility of other readings, readings that keep the possibility of futural readings always already open.

In affirming, re-affirming, displacing, and opening the thinking of IR to future possibilities of thinking that simultaneously entail risks and chances, I deploy a ‘new language’ or ‘framework’ with which and through which I proceed to explore the various theories. In other words, I suggest a conceptual framework or, more precisely, a framework of conception which makes it possible to affirm, re-affirm and displace as well as keep always open the possibility of future (re-)conceptualizations inherent within the process of conceptual thinking. Yet my reliance on this ‘language’ does not strictly mean that I rely on so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in social theory and philosophy, or, more generally put, in various ways of thinking about life (and death). However, I do not deny the importance of the ‘linguistic turn’. To the contrary, I find it inescapable, if however in a certain way as I explicate later on in the book. My thinking about IR is unavoidably impregnated with the imperative of a ‘linguistic turn’. I thus espouse the ‘linguistic turn’ through and through and yet this espousal while being an affirmation and re-affirmation of the ‘linguistic turn’ is also simultaneously a displacement—another turn of the turn, a turn which is both a turn and an un-turn, without being a complete return. It repeats and changes what it means to take a ‘linguistic turn’ in thinking IR, with the change assuming the form of a work of deconstruction, a disseminative work, a work that disseminates in re-affirming the ‘linguistic turn’ and its prior ‘others’. This dissemination is constitutive (in important ways) of the ways of reading that I engage into. Consequently, the ‘language’ that I speak of herein is not just a medium within which one can develop one’s own thinking/rethinking, a conclusion which of course concords with the spirit and practice of the ‘linguistic turn’. Indeed speaking in/from within a language which is understood à la ‘linguistic turn’ means that there is an ‘other’ to language that is ‘beyond/outside’ language but cannot be addressed or thought of ‘outside’ language, an ‘other’ that manifests itself and arrives through and within the process of re-thinking the theories of IR à la ‘linguistic turn’, in a certain way.

My re-thinking of IR theory is in certain ways internal to IR through and through. I cannot begin except by relying on ‘original’ and ‘authoritative’ works of IR, that is, originally published and received as IR works. Yet I can neither exclude nor preclude other—so-called not typically IR—works from supplementing these ‘originary’ IR works, thereby showing the ‘originary’ debts of so-called authoritative IR works to various ‘outsides’ of IR. This eventually leads the project towards directions that are non-controllable not only in questioning and enlarging what can be defined as ‘IR’ as such (if this is possible or meaningful), but also towards ‘endpoints’ that seem to always remain deferred, suffering an incessant process of differentiation, yet a differentiation that always fails to efface the traces of the spectral haunting of the original IR works which I read and critique in the first place. In other words, my way of reading and re-thinking the IR works that I focus on seeks to ‘meet’ the ‘other’ within these works through the textual weaving of these very works when read through the ‘conceptual language’ that I use, that is, through works of deconstruction that bring forth their own pseudo-conceptual apparatuses, all the while avoiding an appropriation of this ‘other’ by turning it into a familiar linguistic being (that is, a concept).

On the one hand, one might think of these readings as ‘immanent’ readings since I rely on the conceptual frameworks deployed in the very texts themselves to read them, if in different ways however. On the other hand, the immanent readings are accurately speaking not faithfully immanent as they bring forth pseudo-concepts that undermine the ‘origin’ and context of immanence. In other words, the immanent readings are rendered and exposed as originarily autoimmune, that is, as inherently and constitutively self-perverting their origins and the immanent readings since they disclose an always already spectrally haunted nature of the texts themselves. The immanent readings reveal a constitutive heterogeneity and heteronomy of the IR theoretical texts. The theories are thus found to follow a logic of undecidable aporia, which continuously displaces through deferral and differentiation whatever presuppositions are posited to undergird the theories themselves and the thinking thereof.

Because of this way of reading theories of IR, I am not claiming to present a new theory or theories of IR as such. Nor am I claiming to present an integrated story—a sort of synthesis—about a given set of theories that address a certain issue-area of IR literature. Rather, on the face of it the book might seem to be a collection of a variety of insights and critiques of various topics or issue-areas, some dealing with ‘foundational’ issues, others dealing with practical and/or policy problems, and others dealing with methodological ways of thinking of IR. While these choices are indeed more or less eclectically and somewhat arbitrarily done, they do nonetheless illustrate, if indirectly perhaps, one of the motives driving any engagement in a work of deconstruction. Whereas I am not presenting a ‘coherent’ narrative on socalled substantive issues I do believe that there is a good degree of faithfulness to the claim of the project—that is, to present a re-thinking of IR theories. More specifically: I am seeking to re-think IR theories by engaging them into works of deconstruction. Because of this, some might say that this is the overriding theme of the project, a meta-narrative of the book. I agree if with a cautionary ‘perhaps’, that is, I agree only under the condition of a destabilizing, without being destructive, ‘perhaps’.

On the one hand, I do engage into a work of deconstruction in every chapter of the book. I thus critique and supplement to displace all the theories that I focus on, with supplements that not only question but also add something new to the stories being told in the theories. On the other hand, my supplements are never conclusive enough (in the common sense of the term conclusion, that is, to come to an end or bring an end) either to jettison what I begin with, or to present what I add as replacements of certain elements of critiqued theories. Yet, the supplements are presented as being necessary and inescapable. Why? Simply because my supplements are not just at the level of theories, they also are at the level of the presuppositions of the theories, by which I mean the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the theories, whether the latter speak of ontology, epistemology, methodology, logic, practice, or anything else. At this point, one might be led to conclude that this book is thus about the conditions of possibility and impossibility of a given set of IR theories, or even perhaps that it is about theorizing IR without claiming a grand theory of theorizing. Neither statement is inaccurate, that is, more or less. Indeed, on the one hand, this is in part what I do in the various chapters.

Yet, on the other hand, speaking of conditions of possibility and impossibility raises the issue of such a ‘speaking and/or writing’ in and of itself. In other words, I am not only engaged in critiquing the various theories from ‘certain’ angles, I am also simultaneously undermining the very process of formulating IR theories by speaking of the conditions of impossibility of these theories. One key marker (if one can put in this way) of a work of deconstruction is to neither destruct/destroy nor stabilize a theory (or a text, to put it more broadly), yet there always is some level of undermining in a certain way. The undermining itself occurs in different ways.

First, the work of deconstruction shows that any theory is always already sustainable only via a conscious deployment of some sort of amnesia about the ‘borrowings’ from outside IR theories, borrowings that are rhetorically used to legitimate and authoritatively anchor the validity of the theoretical arguments, borrowings that are presupposed to be self-sustaining even when and after they are de-contextualized away from their originary contexts and texts (assuming that this is more or less possible). Yet deconstruction shows that such an amnesia is never complete because the text remains haunted by the traces of the theories, concepts, ideas, and contexts that the amnesia seeks to efface, not only at the level of rhetoric but also at the constitutive and/or conceptual level, and even more so at the level of conditions of possibility and impossibility of the theories themselves, in the language deployed and in the analytics of the arguments presented.

Second, the work of deconstruction shows that the role of the speaker, writer, analyst is inseparable from the framing process that the texts resort to in formulating arguments and the like. Not only do we see this not surprisingly at the level of ‘rhetoric’ (if by this we mean the usual understanding of rhetoric), but also in the performativity of the text. The text is presented as being constative, and it indeed is. Yet it also is inescapably performative, and it makes what it claims to be making by ‘saying it’, by saying and implying that it is constative. The constative cannot escape being performative and the performative cannot occur without being constative. Yet because the two are inextricably mutually constituted, they more or less neutralize the claims of the text in the very moment that the text makes its ‘claims’. In other words, the text claims to be making an event, that is, to eventually and eventfully introduce some theoretical arguments to the literature, and because of this the text is deconstructible. The work of deconstruction brings forth the aporiatic nature of the text in making the claims that it makes. This ‘second hand’ leads to a ‘third hand’.

On a third hand, I show in my practice (of writing) that the claims of the project are also at work within my very text. In other words, my text is (more or less) an instantiation of the pseudo-conceptual framework that I deploy in seeking to immanently critique a number of IR theories through a work of deconstruction. My text deconstructs itself through itself by ineluctably putting into practice the various aporias that inhere not only in the theories that I critique but also in the conceptual, logical, rhetorical strategies and ‘pseudoconcepts’ that I rely on in trying to make the cases that I claim to be making. Put differently: As the reader might have already noticed I am writing this introduction at this very moment using the pseudo-concepts (such as aporia, dissemination, autoimmunity, supplement, trace, non-originary origin, spectrality, etc.) that I use in the immanent critiques of the following chapters. Yet, were I to succeed in doing so, that is, in introducing my book using the pseudo-conceptual framework of deconstruction in a strict and exclusive way, this would imply that I failed in fact in carrying out the project. Why? Because if I were to succeed in, say, satisfying readers with critical (deconstructive) eyes, this would imply perhaps a certain closure is possible. This would be the Achilles’ heel of my project. This leads to the issue of impossible closure that the work of deconstruction always shows to be the case in any text and hence any theory, both in the text being deconstructed and in the work of deconstruction itself, that is, in the text reporting the work of deconstruction.

The issue of closure is of great importance in deconstruction because it seeks and demonstrates the non-closure of any text (theory and otherwise). This however does not fare well with most students of social sciences. Many students of IR do indeed raise questions like: If we were not interested in seeking closure on theorizing IR, even if only at the level of a (Kantian-like) regulative idea, utopia, or telos, what is the purpose of the whole enterprise? What would be the purpose of the ‘social scientific’ enterprise of the study of IR? What would be the utility of IR theory as a way of impacting on the world or reconstructing it? Not only is it often assumed that accumulation of knowledge is a primarily normative goal (e.g., in statements such as “now we understand better” and the like), it also is the case that many students of IR (and other social sciences) would see their enterprise as futile if they were not driven by a goal of seeking closure, even if only as a norm and even if only as a temporary closure which is potentially liable to ad hoc addenda. Yet closure is the nemesis of deconstruction, or, more accurately, deconstruction sees closure as violent totalitarianism. Unfortunately, to many this makes deconstruction nihilistic. This is an issue that I explore in three ways.

First, I show the impossibility of closure through the immanent critiques that I develop. I thus explicate a number of irresolvable aporias that necessarily haunt the various theories that I explore.

Second, I suggest a re-thinking of the process of theorizing which does not seek closure through resolving these aporias but rather structurally makes non-closure as the condition of possibility of theorizing itself.

Third, I endeavor to be as forthcoming as I can be about the conditions of impossible closure in my own exploration of these issues by deploying the very pseudo-concepts of the work of deconstruction. I thus engage in a sort of immanent self-deconstruction to the extent that I can perform it. Of course, were I to believe that I might succeed in this effort, it would mean a closure of my own argument and hence the failure of my very argument on the impossibility of closure. Yet the failure is precisely the success of the whole enterprise. In other words, the project has two simultaneous continuous moments or turns. On the one hand, I endeavor to be as accurate, thorough and complete as I can be in developing various works of deconstruction, that is, in immanently critiquing the theories and then re-affirming them in different ways through a deployment of pseudo-concepts of deconstruction and thus explicating the aporias inherent within the theories and extensions thereof. On the other hand, the very explications of the aporias and the deployment of deconstruction’s pseudo-concepts also inherently prevent/preempt a closure, that is, an erasure, effacement, or lifting of the aporias of the theories.

This makes my conclusions always already deconstructible. This means that attempting to reach any conclusion regarding the success or failure of my works of deconstruction inherently also turns out to be an aporia resulting from two imperative calls both of which are irresistible. On the one hand, there is an (institutional, disciplinary, practical, pragmatic, ego-psychological, even, some would say, ethical) urgent call to reach—or, at least, to seek—closure at every turn of the project. On the other hand, there is deconstruction’s call for resisting closure forever.

Because I show through the very experience of writing about the practice of deconstruction that my conclusions are always already deconstructible, I expect that opponents of deconstruction (and like-minded) approaches to see the project as yet another dangerous attempt that threatens the scientific, or, at least, the scholarly and serious character of IR theory. They would cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Re-thinking via deconstruction qua affirmation
• 2. ‘Testimonial faith’ in/about IR philosophy of science: The possibility condition of a pluralist science of world politics
• 3. Khôra as the condition of possibility of the ontological without ontology
• 4. Re-thinking the ‘agent-structure’ problematique: From ontology to parergonality
• 5. Identity/difference and othering: Negotiating the impossible politics of aporia
• 6. Autoimmunity of trust without trust
• 7. Re-thinking international constitutional order: The autoimmune politics of binding without binding
• 8. The quest for ‘illogical’ logics of action in IR
• 9. Concluding without a conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index