Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

Nicole Anderson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441199591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia moderna

Derrida's work is controversial, its interpretation hotly contested. Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure offers a new way of thinking about ethics from a Derridean perspective, linking the most abstract theoretical implications of his writing on deconstruction and on justice and responsibility to representations of the practice of ethical paradoxes in everyday life. The book presents the development of Derrida's thinking on ethics by demonstrating that the ethical was a focus of Derrida's work at every stage of his career. In connecting Derrida's earlier work on language with the ethics implicated in his later work on justice and responsibility, Nicole Anderson traverses literary, linguistic, philosophical and ethical interpretative movements, thus recontextualising Derrida's entire oeuvre for a contemporary readership. She explores the positive ethical implications of Derrida's work for representation and practice and asks the reader to consider how this new ethical reading of Derrida's work might be applied to concrete instances of his or her own ethical experience.

Chapter 1

The ‘Ethics of Deconstruction’?

The border between the ethical and the political here loses for good the indivisible simplicity of a limit . . . the determinability of this limit was never pure, and it never will be.

–Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, 99

Ethical–Political Turns: Setting the Scene

Key to this chapter is the relation between ethics and politics. Not only are both extremely important to Derrida, but deconstruction is important to an understanding of ‘ethics’ and ‘politics’ and the way they operate in our cultural and social institutions, (re)presentations and everyday intersubjective relations. Yet Derrida does not offer a political or ethical treatise or philosophy; to do so would be to perpetuate what ethics and politics already are – metaphysical concepts – and thus also the opposition between them which sustains their metaphysical determinations. This does not mean that there is no difference between the two terms. While Derrida has argued that he does not dissociate them because ‘[e]thical problems are already taken up in the so-called space of the political’ (Derrida 2002, 302) and ‘it is necessary to deduce a politics and a law from ethics’ (Derrida 1999a, 115), nevertheless he insists that the difference between ethics and politics is in the way they are structured in relation to action and response.

It is precisely Derrida’s deconstruction of these terms that has led to his work being dismissed as ethically useless or nihilistic, even though the ethical has been a concern of his from the very beginning in books such as Of Grammatology through to, and more obviously, ‘The Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Of Hospitality, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas and The Gift of Death. Moreover, many scholars (such as Simon Critchley) argue that deconstruction is politically neutral, or reaches a political impasse, because, as the general argument goes, deconstruction is not a method or form of analysis and therefore can’t produce concrete formulas for action. And yet many of Derrida’s books– if not providing a prescriptive political treatise– address the political as such; for instance, Negotiations, The Politics of Friendship, Specters of Marx and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; not to forget also Derrida’s involvement in what can only be described as his political action, from his attempted reform of the University (see Derrida 1983) through his intervention in various political injustices, which can be seen in his letters to the American President Bill Clinton asking him to intervene in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (see Derrida 2002, 125–32). In all these works and issues, the ethical is taken up in the political and vice versa.

If the ethical–political is the key theme of this chapter, then the theme is rigorously unravelled through Simon Critchley’s book The Ethics of Deconstruction. This book was first published in 1992 (and again in 1999), and the reader may ask why address the ethical and political via Critchley, especially because in the time between 1999 and the present there has been a proliferation of writings on deconstruction and the political, not least by Critchley whose position on this issue in relation to Derrida has shifted over the years.¹ In answer, it is by unpacking and challenging Critchley’s ethical-political interpretation of Derrida that this chapter aims to not only expose the weakness of Critchley’s argument, but in doing so, more generally address the various positions (for example, Badiou’s, Spivak’s and Zizek’s among others) that have since developed the Critchley line that deconstruction reaches a political impasse, albeit for different reasons: because too utopian; too formless; too much focused on the ‘other’, to produce political ‘action’. In preparation for this unravelling, however, let us briefly situate Critchley’s book within the historical scene of the reception of Derrida’s work in the Anglo-American community, before ending this section with an outline of the argumentative trajectory of this chapter.

Writing in 1999, Critchley argued that there were three waves or trends in the Anglo-American reception of Derrida’s work. The ‘first wave’ occurred in the 1970s and was characterized by the literary emphasis on, and appropriation of, deconstruction represented by the ‘Yale School’ (Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller) (Critchley 1999, 1). Christopher Norris, Rodolphe Gasché, John Llewellyn and Irene Harvey represent the ‘second wave’: the philosophical reception of Derrida (Critchley 1999, 1; see also Bennington 1988, 76).² Finally, Critchley argues that his book The Ethics of Deconstruction (originally in 1992), along with J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1987), moves ‘beyond its literary and philosophical appropriation’ by focusing on the ‘ethical’, which marks the ‘third wave’ (Critchley 1999, 2–3).

This is undoubtedly a convenient and useful way to understand the ‘history’ of the reception of Derrida’s work in the Anglo-American community. It is also a legitimate way of recalling the context out of which Derrida’s works, and Critchley’s response to them, arise. Nevertheless, at the same time, it is also worth keeping in mind that any ‘periodizing’ account, no matter how useful, potentially risks missing, at least in regards to Derrida, the way his individual works also speak to each other ‘connect[ing] forward and back’ (Hobson 1998, 3) across eras from Derrida’s earliest to latest works and vice versa. These periodizing accounts also risk homogenizing the differences between various scholars’ arguments on the ethical in Derrida’s work. We at least have to take into account that there is more than one ethical reception of deconstruction, with different emphasis on what constitutes the ‘ethical’, even within the ‘third wave’.

Furthermore, the idea of ‘waves’ or trends proposed by Critchley, while useful, inevitably raises several questions: exactly what characterizes this ethical turn? Is it characterized, for instance, by a Levinasian emphasis on understanding the ethical in Derrida, or by a concern with how, if at all, deconstruction poses ethical questions, especially given that deconstruction is not a ‘method, critique, analysis, act or operation’ (Derrida 1988b, 3)? Or does this ‘third wave’ have to necessarily follow a linear trajectory? At what point in time, in history, does this ethical turn occur, especially given, as we will see, that there seems to be various writings on Derrida and ethics that fall outside the ‘ethical turn’? For instance, in regards to this last question, by situating Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1987) as well as his own book at the vanguard of this ethical turn, Critchley marks the trend as beginning in the very late 1980s and early 1990s. Certainly during this time a proliferation of writings came to the fore focusing on the Levinasian connection when thinking about the ethical in relation to Derrida’s work, such as Robert Bernasconi (1987, 1988) and David Wood (1987). But also a number of other scholars at this time were making the connection between deconstruction and ethics, justice or law, and applying this connection to topics as diverse as feminism, literature, economics and religion: John Caputo (1987), Drucilla Cornell (1992), Henry Louis Gates (1992), Christina Howells (1999), J. Hillis Miller (1992), Samuel Weber (1992), and so on. (While in the first decade of the twenty-first century this has continued with writings on the ethical by prominent scholars such as Geoffrey Bennington (2000), Hent de Vries (2001), Martin Hägglund (2008), John Llewellyn (2002), J. Hillis Miller (2009) and Michael Naas (2008)).

Critchley situates this ethical turn in the context of the prevailing prejudice of the times, which believed deconstruction to be ‘a species of nihilistic textual freeplay’ and thus unethical (Critchley 1999, 3). One of the ways of challenging this prejudice, then, was to reveal Derrida’s concern for the question of the ethical by turning to his engagement with Levinasian ethics in his essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. It is this Levinasian emphasis that Critchley implies dominates this third wave or ethical turn, although it is not until Critchley’s publication that a full-scale book-length account of the importance for understanding Derrida’s relation to ethics via Levinas was undertaken. (The importance of Levinas for Derrida’s thinking on ethics was also later confirmed by the first publications in French, in 1997, of Derrida’s books Of Hospitality and Adieu.)

The significance and importance of Critchley’s book for this chapter, however, is not primarily the connection it established between Levinas’ ethics and Derrida’s deconstruction. Its significance lies, first, in the relation Critchley constructs between ethics and politics in Derrida’s work, and second in Critchley’s notion of ‘clôtural reading’, both of which, he argues, moves his book beyond the philosophical into the ethical reception of Derrida. Critchley uses the term ‘clôtural’ to extend Derrida’s notion of closure as he uses it in relation to metaphysics. Critchley interprets closure as ‘the double refusal both of remaining within the limits of the tradition [metaphysics] and of the possibility of transgressing that limit’ (Critchley 1999, 20). While what he coins ‘clôtural reading’ is defined as ‘the production of a dislocation within a text’ (Critchley 1999, 88), which reveals how this ‘double refusal’ and thus the possibility of transgressing the metaphysical tradition (by opening the text to a moment of alterity) can occur. More on this later.

Clôtural reading is also what Critchley believes sets his project apart from other writings on ethics and deconstruction (but which do not necessarily focus on the Levinasian influence). Marking the ‘ethical turn’ as developing in the late 1980s and early 1990s and characterizing it as dominated by a Levinasian perspective, Critchley inadvertently precludes these other writings. For example, the works of Richard Kearney, initially in 1981, and Christopher Norris (in 1987) made the correlation between ‘the other’ and ethics in Derrida’s early work, specifically emphasizing the ethical importance of deconstruction in its connection with the ‘other’ of writing, language and the text, and in the process demonstrating that Derrida has always been concerned with the ethical right from his earliest works, such as Of Grammatology. In this book Derrida argues that ‘there is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, writing’ (Derrida 1976, 139–40). Here Derrida suggests that a metaphysical determination of ethics is made possible by what makes it impossible: archewriting, différance, trace, and so on. That is, these quasi-transcendental palaeonymies and neologisms make possible the ethics of speech as presence, but which means, at the same time, that presence is never absolute.³ In this sense metaphysical ethics, or the ‘ethic of speech’, ‘is the delusion of presence mastered’ (Derrida 1976, 139). And in the next sentence Derrida defines archewriting as ‘the origin of morality as of immorality. The non-ethical opening of ethics. A violent opening’ (Derrida 1976, 140). How the ‘other’ is connected to the non-ethical, and ethics to violence, will be investigated in more detail throughout this chapter. Suffice to say that because non-ethics haunts ethics as presence, ethics exceeds its metaphysical determination.

This now brings us to the central arguments of this chapter. Critchley claims, first, that the opening of ethics in Derrida can only be understood through Levinas’ notion of ethics and ‘the other’. That is, deconstruction can be read ‘ethically’, but only in the Levinasian sense (Critchley 1999, xiv–xv). He further claims, second, that deconstruction reaches a political impasse that only a ‘Levinasian politics of ethical difference’ can overcome (Critchley 1999, xiv–xv). This chapter questions the opposition Critchley sets up between the first and second claims: that is, between ethics and politics respectively. While Critchley’s work in general, and his notion of ‘clôtural reading’ in particular, is extremely important in revealing the ethical dimension of Derrida’s notion of ‘double reading’, his claims lead him to constitute further oppositions within Derrida’s work more generally. The second section of thi...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The ‘Ethics of Deconstruction’?
• Chapter 2: Ethical (Im)possibilities
• Chapter 3: Ethics Under Erasure
• Chapter 4: Ethical Experience: A Cinematic Example
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright