Derrida on Exile and the Nation

Reading Fantom of the Other

Herman Rapaport

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350169807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Providing crucial scholarship on Derrida's first series of lectures from the Nationality and Philosophical Nationalism cycle, Herman Rapaport brings all 13 parts of the Fantom of the Other series (1984-85) to our critical attention. The series, Rapaport argues, was seminal in laying the foundations for the courses given, and ideas explored, by Derrida over the next twenty years. It is in this vein that the full explication of Derrida's lectures is done, breathing life into the foundational lecture series which has not yet been published in its entirety in English. Derrida's examination of a master signifier of the social relation, Geschlecht, acts as the critical entry point of the series into wide-ranging meditations on the social construction and deconstruction of all possible relations denoted by the core concept, including race, gender, sex, and family. The lecture series' vast engagement with a range of major thinkers, including philosophers and poets alike – Arendt, Adorno, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Trakl, and Adonis – tackles core themes and debates about philosophical nationalism. Presenting Derrida's lectures on the implications of key 20th century philosopher's understandings of nationalism as they relate to concerns over idiomatic language, notions of race, exile, return, and social relations, adds richly to the literature on Derrida and reveals the potential for further application of his work to current polarising debates between universalism and tribalism.

Part One

Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Exile, and Return

1

Of Philosophical Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Fichte, Grün, Marx, Engels

We know that during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, educated people mainly wrote in Latin, not only in order to keep their thoughts and speculations out of public circulation where they could be misunderstood and condemned as heretical, but because the educated assumed vernacular national languages would be unsuitable for expressing advanced ideas, given that the vernacular was far too idiomatic and imprecise. Latin by contrast soared above nationalist and regional differences of linguistic expression (including untranslatable idioms) and functioned on a plane considered to be firmly established in terms of conceptual specificity (precision) and general access, given that Latin was transnational (in our own historical terms, cosmopolitan) and, as such, considered universal. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, John Milton was trading barbs with intellectuals on the Continent in political tracts written in Latin in order to elevate local political justifications with respect to England on a plane that was not merely nationalist in orientation. This was extremely important to the English who did not want the Continent to contemplate invasion of their country for being what today we would call a rogue state. However, like many of his educated countrymen, Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton included, John Milton wrote in English for an already large reading public, anglicizing tracts whose rhetorical staging and execution were derived from Latinate tradition. Hence in Milton’s corpus one can easily see a national-cosmopolitan divide concerning a certain politics of language concerning the nation-state.

In the lecture course La Langue et le discours de la méthode (Language and the Discourse on Method), given in 1981–82, Derrida explored the vexed set of circumstances with respect to de-Latinization that in France had started occurring under kings of the sixteenth century who were seeing relationships between language, law, and the state that privileged French over Latin for the simple reason that if French were the common currency of legal discourse, people could not exempt themselves from the law on account of being ignorant of the Latin in which it was written. From the perspective of the state, French was the more universal language.

In the first place, it was the great moment of establishing the monarchy as State: a massive if not terminal or decisive progress of a French language imposed on the provinces as administrative and juridical medium. What we are trying to follow in this seminar is the constitution of the legal subject and of the philosophical subject tout court, starting from the imposition of a language. As you know, under François I, in 1539, the royal decree of Villers-Cotterêts ordered that legal judgments and other proceedings be ‘pronounced, recorded, and delivered in the French mother tongue.’¹

Derrida will return to issues of the mother tongue in later lectures, but here his main focus will be Descartes’s Discourse on Method and his famous declaration that “if I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than in Latin,” this is because “I hope that those who use only their pure natural reason will better judge my opinions than those who believe only in old books.” Descartes tells us that he has confidence in “those who combine good sense with scholarship, whom alone I wish to have as my judges,” those who “will not be so partial to Latin as to refuse to hear my reasons because I express them in a vulgar tongue.”²

If French is considered a natural language, which by nature would be unphilosophical, crude, confusing (in terms of its various idiomatic locutions, ellipses, etc.), or, to put it in other words, homespun, how can it be justified for the purposes of a discourse devoted to a method that considers itself to be analytical, rigorous, and precise? Does philosophy not take distance from “pure natural reason”? Derrida sees a problem with the word “natural” in that it means something different when addressing language versus reason. “We call ‘natural’ a particular language, a historical language as opposed to the artificial, formal language constructed from the ground up to become the universal language.” A natural language “is native or national, but also particular and historical; it is the least common thing in the world. The natural reason Descartes speaks of is in principle universal, ahistorical, pre- or metalinguistic.”³ Natural language and natural reason are by definition opposed as particular versus universal, local versus global.

At issue, of course, is the question of language as not just natural but national, of a “politics of language” that is hardly incidental to the history of French philosophical thought. In what is clearly a seminar laying the groundwork for Fantom of the Other, Derrida remarks that “it is still a question of opposing a national language, which at a given moment has become the language of the State … to national idioms that are subject to the same State authority and that constitute dissipating or centrifugal forces, risks of dissociation or even subversion, even if, and this is the first contradiction, they are simultaneously encouraged.”⁴ This oppositionality of idiom to what the State would like to establish as an official national language, whose rules are standardized with great precision, compares with a second related opposition that concerns privileging one’s national language to “other natural languages (‘dead’ or ‘living’) that … have become privileged media of philosophical or techno-scientific communication.”⁵ Descartes’s declaration that he is writing in French for those whose natural language is French speaks to both of these oppositions, which, not by accident, become foundational to the central concerns of Fantom of the Other with its emphasis upon idiom and the national-cosmopolitan divide.

As Jürgen Habermas and others have noted, the promotion of national languages over Latin was instrumental to the formation of a civic public sphere of educated readers for whom notions of natural reason or common sense became the universalizing conditions for opinion making and civic-legislative debate.⁶ The French philosophes—among them, Condillac, Constant, Diderot, Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu—had embraced an authoritative standard of the French language as the means of communicating with those countrymen who were hungry for opinionated debate, witty personal reflection, and methodological clarity (“theory”). In Germany, Kant, Fichte, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Hegel were all writing in contemporary German. Kant, in particular, was interested in reaching a general public, which he did in numerous articles written for national edification.

At the outset of Fantom of the Other, Derrida returns to the question he began thinking about in the lecture course on Descartes, namely, whether or not writing philosophy in the vernacular is inherently a species of philosophical nationalism. In Fantom this inquiry is historically progressed to far more recent times. Although aimed mainly in the direction of Martin Heidegger, Derrida has Fichte and Kant in mind, who as German Idealist thinkers had cosmopolitan aspirations, something that contrasts implicitly with Heidegger who openly displayed a conservative provincialism that has been roundly criticized by liberal, cosmopolitan academics. From the point of view of Derrida’s course, such criticism is problematic because one cannot avoid the fact that Western philosophy is riddled with philosophical nationalism and often of the most unpalatable kinds. Even writing in Latin would represent a philosophical nationalism, one attached to some notion of political and/or spiritual identification with Roman civilization, its imperialist tendencies included, that many European nations appropriated into their cultures and politics: often by way of the arts and letters, by way of imitating or appropriating aspects of Roman law, or by way of allying with an ideology of cultural superiority and imperial power and right.

At the outset of Fantom, in the first lecture, Derrida states that his major concern is principally of idiom, its philosophical translation, if not idiom as a national trait. Perhaps with Language and the Discourse of Method still in mind, Derrida tells us that he wants to investigate “the aporias of the philosophical translation of philosophical idioms.”⁷ Notable is that “there are several philosophical idioms” and that the experience of them “cannot not be lived by a philosopher, by a self-styled philosopher, by whoever claims to be a philosopher, as both a scandal and as the very chance of philosophy.”⁸ In other words, there is something unpredictable about idioms, both in terms of how they may crop up more or less by chance and in terms of their resistance to translatability. Hence the scandal of idiomaticity as something irrational or unaccountable and yet most fitting and logical. “A scandal: i.e. what makes philosophy trip and fall, what stops it in its tracks if the self-styled philosopher considers that philosophy is essentially universal and cosmopolitan, that national, social, idiomatic difference in general should only befall it as a provisional and non-essential accident that could be overcome.”⁹ From the perspective of the universalization of philosophical discourse, which is to say, of philosophy itself, idiomaticity is a scandal; however, it is also a chance or opportunity “in so far as the only possibility for a philosophy, for philosophy itself to speak itself, to be discussed, to get (itself) across, to go from the one to the other, is to pass through idioms, to transport the idiom and transport itself, translate itself via or rather in the body of idioms which are not closures or enclosings of self but allocutions, passages to the other.”¹⁰

But, Derrida asks, what is an idiom? Not restricted to language,

I shall be taking “idiom” in a much more indeterminate sense, that of prop(ri)e(r)ty, singular feature, in principle inimitable and inexpropriable. The idiom is the proper. And given this, if I say that my most proper concern in this seminar is idiomatic difference in philosophy, it is nonetheless not entirely in an accessory or absent-minded manner that I chose for its title, “Philosophical nationality and nationalism.”¹¹

Not just the definition of idiom in general is in question but that of “what is a national idiom in philosophy?” Hence “how does a philosophical idiom pose itself, claim its rights, appear to itself, attempt to impose itself as a national idiom?”¹² Immediately, Derrida jumps ahead into asking about what a nation is, a question that is hard to delimit, since “it is to be confused neither with the question of people, nor that of race, nor that of State” even if these topics have to be of concern to the overarching question at hand and give “rise to the most serious equivocations.” Moreover, Derrida specifies that in the past and the present we have to be aware of philosophical discourses about nationality, “discourses which claim to recognize national philosophical characteristics, in oneself or in others, sometimes to praise them, sometimes to discredit them. This national idiom may or may not be linked by those who speak of it, to a given language.”¹³ That said, Fantom of the Other is, in fact, very much about idiom in the context of language, something that is most pronounced, perhaps, in lectures six to thirteen on Heidegger and Geschlecht. What Derrida calls his “principal concern” with “philosophical idiom or translatability, and immediately afterwards the link of that idiom to a national characteristic” is very much mediated by how this concern (or question, as Derrida also calls it) “is set out in language, in an idiom, and with certain features of the national idiom.” He continues by saying that philosophical nationality and nationalism concern everyone today and that in the past they have “always occupied all philosophers.”¹⁴

A trajectory that Derrida appears to have had an interest in opening up is that of the Anglo-American versus Continental European philosophical divides characterized most generally in terms of communications and exchanges between “territories, institutions, groups, and schools,” all of which have their own idioms, if not national limits or nationalistic claims.¹⁵ “Exchanges, meetings, so-called philosophical communication … exposes the at least supposed national differences to influences, grafts, deformations, hybridizations,” all of which encounter interests in national identity and consciousness. Such exchanges amount to “a sort of state of war, a war in the course of which, as in all wars, you see the enemy everywhere, and the collaborator, the enemy within, the one who in France likes German philosophy too much, who in the USA is over-impressed by French philosophy, or in Britain by Continental philosophy.”¹⁶ Later in this course, Derrida will consider Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparison of French philosophy to American philosophic method.

Paradoxically, scholarly exchanges, colloquia, activities of translation, and instruments of archivization and collection require the recognition of national boundaries of whatever sort even as such relays of exchange presume universal unboundedness. The conviction among...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Exile, and Return
• Part 2 Geschlecht as Social Relation: Nation, Sex, Race, Kith, and Kind
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint