Publication: Arena Magazine
Publication Date: 01-DEC-04
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Cooper, Simon
Article Excerpt
To confirm the cultural significance of the recently deceased philosopher Jacques Derrida, you need go no further than register the number of jokes that have arisen questioning whether he had died at all--jokes which in their own way rely on the language and concepts of Derrida's work for their effect. Hence the use of quotation marks to sceptically announce Derrida's 'death', or statements that he finally seemed to have 'deconstructed' (but had he really?) and so on. The sheer number of these rather feeble lines on the Internet and in the newspapers represent the final shot for many of those who were at one time frustrated by efforts to grasp the significance of this influential but notoriously difficult thinker. Indeed, the rather mean-spirited quality of many of the obituaries for Derrida was perhaps motivated by the fact that, despite the best efforts of the 'culture wars' of the 80s and 90s to diminish Derrida (and more generally what has come to be known as 'theory'), he had a profound influence in virtually all fields of scholarship.
As supporters of Derrida have pointed out, it is important to distinguish the philosopher from caricatures of his work. Hence Derrida the cautious thinker engaged with the whole western tradition can be distinguished from the nihilist who sought to undermine the tenets of classical education and the...
source: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3597592/Post-Derrida-the-complex-legacy.html#abstract
Post-Derrida: the complex legacy of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers.(Cooper's Last)
Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes (1964)
Source: Elements of Semiology, 1964, publ. Hill and Wang, 1968
In his Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916, Saussure postulated the existence of a general science of signs, or Semiology, of which linguistics would form only one part. Semiology therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification. There is no doubt that the development of mass communications confers particular relevance today upon the vast field of signifying media, just when the success of disciplines such as linguistics, information theory, formal logic and structural anthropology provide semantic analysis with new instruments. There is at present a kind of demand for semiology, stemming not from the fads of a few scholars, but from the very history of the modern world.
The fact remains that, although Saussure's ideas have made great headway, semiology remains a tentative science. The reason for this may well be simple. Saussure, followed in this by the main semiologists, thought that linguistics merely formed a part of the general science of signs. Now it is far from certain that in the social life of today there are to be found any extensive systems of signs outside human language. Semiology has so far concerned itself with codes of no more than slight interest, such as the Highway Code; the moment we go on to systems where the sociological significance is more than superficial, we are once more confronted with language. it is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message (which happens in the case of the cinema, advertising, comic strips, press photography, etc.) so that at least a part of the iconic message is, in terms of structural relationship, either redundant or taken up by the linguistic system. As for collections of objects (clothes, food), they enjoy the status of systems only in so far as they pass through the relay of language, which extracts their signifiers (in the form of nomenclature) and names their signifieds (in the forms of usages or reasons): we are, much more than in former times, and despite the spread of pictorial illustration, a civilisation of the written word. Finally, and in more general terms, it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language: to perceive what a substance signifies is inevitably to fall back on the individuation of a language: there is no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of language.
Thus, though working at the outset on nonlinguistic substances, semiology is required, sooner or later, to find language (in the ordinary sense of the term) in its path, not only as a model, but also as component, relay or signified. Even so, such language is not quite that of the linguist: it is a second-order language, with its unities no longer monemes or phonemes, but larger fragments of discourse referring to objects or episodes whose meaning underlies language, but can never exist independently of it. Semiology is therefore perhaps destined to be absorbed into a trans-linguistics, the materials of which may be myth, narrative, journalism, or on the other hand objects of our civilisation, in so far as they are spoken (through press, prospectus, interview, conversation and perhaps even the inner language, which is ruled by the laws of imagination). In fact, we must now face the possibility of inverting Saussure's declaration: linguistics is not a part of the general science of signs, even a privileged part, it is semiology which is a part of linguistics: to be precise, it is that part covering the great signifying unities of discourse. By this inversion we may expect to bring to light the unity of the research at present being done in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis and stylistics round the concept of signification.
Though it will doubtless be required some day to change its character, semiology must first of all, if not exactly take definite shape, at least try itself out, explore its possibilities and impossibilities. This is feasible only on the basis of preparatory investigation. And indeed it must be acknowledged in advance that such an investigation is both diffident and rash: diffident because semiological knowledge at present can be only a copy of linguistic knowledge; rash because this knowledge must be applied forthwith, at least as a project, to non-linguistic objects.
The Elements here presented have as their sole aim the extraction from linguistics of analytical concepts, which we think a priori to be sufficiently general to start semiological research on its way. In assembling them, it is not presupposed that they will remain intact during the course of research; nor that semiology will always be forced to follow the linguistic model closely.' We are merely suggesting and elucidating a terminology in the hope that it may enable an initial (albeit provisional) order to be introduced into the heterogeneous mass of significant facts. In fact what we purport to do is to furnish a principle of classification of the questions.
These elements of semiology will therefore be grouped under four main headings borrowed from structural linguistics:
I. Language and Speech.
II. Signified and Signifier.
III. Syntagm and System.
IV. Denotation and Connotation.
It will be seen that these headings appear in dichotomic form; the reader will also notice that the binary classification of concepts seems frequent in structural thoughts as if the metalanguage of the linguist reproduced, like a mirror, the binary structure of the system it is describing; and we shall point out, as the occasion arises, that it would probably be very instructive to study the pre-eminence of binary classification in the discourse of contemporary social sciences. The taxonomy of these sciences, if it were well known, would undoubtedly provide a great deal of information on what might be called the field of intellectual imagination in our time.
read this article at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm
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The Derrida Phenomenon
By Domenica-Antoine Grisoni
Literary magazine n° 196 - June 1983.
Jacques Derrida caricatured by Pancho for the literary Magazine.
A coterie carrying an authentic philosophical step. At the head, Jacques Derrida: that which gives its name. And also, which gave the tone. A machine to crush the texts. A Master of reading.
Eh yes, there is a Derrida phenomenon well. At the hour of the great crisis of the models of the thought, of the which gallops intrusion of subjectivity in philosophy, of the confirmed death of the Master-thinkers, at the moment even where we will pour in the third millenium, imbus of revival and "post-modernism", some that the last intellectual archaisms are in process of resorption, there is still, with same the body of the French philosophy (or this which holds place of it), a kind of outgrowth vieillotte and insolente, an effect of group, a vault: derridiens. Philosophers à.la.mode old, who follow all evenly the work of a Master, stick to its steps, miment its tics, steal its words and coil their reflexion in thinnest meander of his.
Seen outside, the coterie often starts the laughter, and sometimes stimulates the humour of his detractors. The ones make fun what they name its logorrhée, or joke the "logology" (speech on the speech) which swells and tends to slip towards a "logologology" without end. Others scoff what they judge being a revival of the philosophical clericalism. Others finally see only the version there Xxe century of Invaluable ridiculous; but did these, the laugher-prosecutors, read work which they disparage? If you ask them the question, they will answer that obviously not, then that they are perfectly "illegible".
Critical easy, too convenient, which makes mine regulate an account, but do not regulate it. Also I will risk another assumption. That of a current derridien carrying an authentic philosophical step. Of a which been obstinated work, obscure and ungrateful. Of a rigorous, radical work in its expression because it does not aim anything less than definitively to sap the protective base of the Western speculative speech.
At the head thus, Jacques Derrida: that which gives its name. And also, which gave the tone. A machine to crush the texts. A Master of reading.
Almost the totality of sound œuvre in progress is appeared as comments. Plato, Rousseau, from Saussure, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, and well from others passed to the moulinette, "déconstruits" the ones after the others. With a simple and acknowledged aim: in finishing, through them, with traditional philosophy. To break the vicious circle of the illusions of truth which let believe that there are criticisms destroying. To further go that Nietzsche, for example, which proclaims the death of the metaphysics, which among the first carried the hardest blows to him, but which will never cease living with its phantom, of speaking its language and to reorganize its images. Or that Heidegger, another destroyer of this same metaphysics, which will not really arrive, in spite of its efforts, to get rid of its presupposed. It is with this trap, of the mode to think, which registers in the same mental space for and it against, back and its place, which Derrida wants to escape. Then it changes tactic. It inaugurates a strategy of the variation. It moves the glance. Either outside, but from now on inside the texts. The œil philosopher is inserted in the flesh of the concept, detects the most negligible articulations which hold welded the opposed couples, raison/déraison, présence/absence, etc i.e. what constitutes the architecture of the metaphysical spirit, and finishes by doing everything to explode. Illegible Derrida? Thus let us go: Derrida is a Devil, a Malignant philosopher. And read Of an apocalyptic tone adopted at one time in philosophy : you will find there in a luminous language the application of what I have just presented. The subversion of the texts by the œil and the ear. The philosophical one, strictly speaking.
Behind the Master: the close relations, the disciples, those which adopt its stakes, marry its engagements. A group whose members produce work of unequal interest. But from which Sarah Kofman is detached clearly. A philosopher who has a cast: œil right on the left phillosophie, œil on the psychoanalysis. All its books until now made fly. Readings without concessions, iconoclasts. The enigma of the woman : Freud just as it is, misogynist, working out his theory around a massive retention of femininity. Or the respect of the women : a comparative study of the systems of constraint and in the long term, negation of the female fact, through the speeches of Rousseau and Kant. And today, two short texts. Pugnacious. Aggressive. How to leave itself there? A question put with Plato, the examination of philosophy like poros (in the myth exposed in the Banquet, Poros is the god of ingeniousness, the success), i.e. like stratagem to reach the light. Simple translation of the metaphor: how to make that philosophy helps with knowledge? Then, slope psychoanalyses: An impossible trade. Reading of a writing of Freud going back to 1937, therefore among the last, Constructions in analysis. Malicious reading. Where it is learned that the Master of Vienna was until the end a quite bad lot, fixed on his capacity of analyst and eager to bequeath it intact to his successors. Here still which will not arrange the businesses of the French analysts.
An ultimate mention with Jean-Luc Nancy, who gathered in collection a series of articles disseminated through the reviews. It does not touch with morals, says it, but it scans some of its bases. And it is instructive.
With the assessment, Derrida, the derridiens: a free philosophical work, which continues in spite of the movements and the doubts. One can think of them what one wants. But that exists and that advances.
Quoted books
Of an apocalyptic tone adopted at one time in philosophy, Jcques Derrida. ED. Gallilée
The Categorical imperative, Jean-Luc Nancy. ED. Flammarion
How to leave itself there? Sarah Kofman. ED. Galileo
An impossible trade, Sarah Kofman. ED. Galillée
The Politics of Jacques Derrida
this is the section 2. read the previous page
From this point of view it would seem that all Western political ideologies--fascism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism--would be equally unacceptable. That is the logical implication of Derrida's attack on logocentrism, and sometimes he appears to accept it. In Specters of Marx and The Other Heading he denounces the new liberal consensus he sees as having ruled the West since 1989, lashing out hysterically, and unoriginally, at the "New International" of global capitalism and media conglomerates that have established world hegemony by means of an "unprecedented form of war." He is less critical of Marxism (for reasons we will examine), though he does believe that communism became totalitarian when it tried to realize the eschatological program laid out by Marx himself. Marx's problem was that he did not carry out fully his own critique of ideology and remained within the logocentrist tradition. That is what explains the Gulag, the genocides, and the terror carried out in his name by the Soviet Union. "If I had the time," Derrida tells his undoubtedly stupefied Russian interviewers in Moscou aller-retour, "I could show that Stalin was 'logocentrist,"' though he admits that "that would demand a long development."
It probably would. For it would mean showing that the real source of tyranny is not tyrants, or guns, or wicked institutions. Tyranny begins in the language of tyranny, which derives ultimately from philosophy. If that were transformed, or "neutralized" as he says in Politics of Friendship, so eventually would our politics be. He proves to be extremely open-minded about what this might entail. He asks rhetorically whether "it would still make sense to speak of democracy when there would be no more speaking of country, nation, even state and citizen." He also considers whether the abandonment of Western humanism would mean that concepts of human rights, humanitarianism, even crimes against humanity would have to be forsworn.
But then what remains? If deconstruction throws doubt on every political principle of the Western philosophical tradition--Derrida mentions propriety, intentionality, will, liberty, conscience, self-consciousness, the subject. the self, the person, and community--are judgments about political matters still possible? Can one still distinguish rights from wrongs, justice from injustice? Or are these terms, too, so infected with logocentrism that they must be abandoned? Can it really be that deconstruction condemns us to silence on political matters, or can it find a linguistic escape from the trap of language?
4.
Readers of Derrida's early works can be forgiven for assuming that he believes there can be no escape from language, and therefore no escape from deconstruction for any of our concepts. His achievement, after all, was to have established this hard truth, which was the only truth he did not question. But now Jacques Derrida has changed his mind, and in a major way. It turns out that there is a concept--though only one--resilient enough to withstand the acids of deconstruction. That concept is justice.
In the fall of 1989 Derrida was invited to address a symposium in New York on the theme "deconstruction and the possibility of justice." His lecture has now been expanded in a French edition and published along with an essay on Walter Benjamin.7 Derrida's aim in the lecture is to demonstrate that although deconstruction can and should be applied to the law, it cannot and should not be taken to undercut the notion of justice. The problem with law, in his view, is that it is founded and promulgated on the basis of authority, and therefore, he asserts (with typical exaggeration), depends on violence. Law is affected by economic and political forces, is changed by calculation and compromise, and therefore differs from place to place. Law is written into texts and must be interpreted, which complicates things further.
_________________
7 The original lecture appears in Drucilla Cornell, et al., editors, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Routledge, 1992).
Of course, none of this is news. Our whole tradition of thinking about law, beginning in Greek philosophy and passing through Roman law, canon law, and modern constitutionalism, is based on the recognition that laws are a conventional device. The only controversial issue is whether there is a higher law, or right, by which the conventional laws of nations can be judged, and, if so, whether it is grounded in nature, reason, or revelation. This distinction between law and right is the foundation of continental jurisprudence, which discriminates carefully between loi/droit, Gesetz/Recht, legge/diritto, and so forth. Derrida conflates loi and droit for the simple reason that he recognizes neither nature nor reason as standards for anything. In his view, both are caught up in the structures of language, and therefore may be deconstructed.
Now, however, he also wishes to claim that there is a concept called justice, and that it stands "outside and beyond the law." But since this justice cannot be understood through nature or reason, that only leaves one possible means of access to its meaning: revelation. Derrida studiously avoids this term but it is what he is talking about. In Force de loi he speaks of an "idea of justice" as "an experience of the impossible," something that exists beyond all experience and therefore cannot be articulated. And what cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed; it can only be experienced in a mystical way. This is how he puts it:
If there is deconstruction of all determining presumption of a present justice, it operates from an infinite "idea of justice," infinitely irreducible. It is irreducible because due to the other--due to the other before any contract, because this idea has arrived, the arrival of the other as a singularity always other. Invincible to all skepticism . . . this "idea of justice" appears indestructible.... One can recognize, and even accuse it of madness. And perhaps another sort of mysticism. Deconstruction is mad about this justice, mad with the desire for justice.
Or again in Specters of Marx:
What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction, is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice--which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights--and an idea of democracy --which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.
There is no justice present anywhere in the world. There is, however, as Derrida puts it, an "infinite idea of justice," though it cannot and does not penetrate our world. Yet this necessary absence of justice does not relieve us of the obligation to await its arrival, for the Messiah may come at any moment, through any city gate. We must therefore learn to wait, to defer gratifying our desire for justice. And what better training in deferral than deconstruction? If deconstruction questions the claim of any law or institution to embody absolute justice, it does so in the very name of justice--a justice it refuses to name or define, an "infinite justice that can take on a 'mystical' aspect." Which leads us, without surprise, to the conclusion that "deconstruction is justice."
Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the grounds that only philosophy could see things as they truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida, mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only the undoing of rational discourse about justice will prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.
5.
How seriously are we meant to take all this? As always with Derrida it is difficult to know. In the books under review he borrows freely from the modern messianic writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin.8 But whatever one makes of these two thinkers, they had too much respect for theological concepts like promise, covenant, Messiah, and anticipation to throw these words about cavalierly. Derrida's turn to them in these new political writings bears all the signs of intellectual desperation. He clearly wants deconstruction to serve some political program, and to give hope to the dispirited left. He also wants to correct the impression that his own thought, like that of Heidegger, leads inevitably to a blind "resolve," an assertion of will that could take any political form. As he remarked not long ago, "My hope as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or--because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States--will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic."9 Yet the logic of his own philosophical arguments, such as they are, proves stronger than Derrida. He simply cannot find a way of specifying the nature of the justice to be sought through left-wing politics without opening himself to the very deconstruction he so gleefully applies to others. Unless, of course, he places the "idea of justice" in the eternal, messianic beyond where it cannot be reached by argument, and assumes that his ideologically sympathetic readers won't ask too many questions.
___________________
8 Derrida has had a long-standing interest in Levinas, to whom he recently devoted a short volume called Adieu (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1997). On Benjamin's messianism, see my article, "The Riddle of Walter Benjamin," The New York Review, May 25, 1995.
9 "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism," in Chantal Mouffe, editor, Deconstruction and Pragmatism.
But politics on the left, no less than on the right, is not a matter of passive expectation. It envisages action. And if the idea of justice cannot be articulated, it cannot provide any aim for political action. According to Derrida's argument, all that remains to guide us is decision, pure and simple: a decision for justice or democracy, and for a particular understanding of both. Derrida places enormous trust in the ideological goodwill or prejudices of his readers, for he cannot tell them why he chooses justice over injustice, or democracy over tyranny, only that he does. Nor can he offer the uncommitted any reasons for thinking that the left has a monopoly on the correct understanding of these ideas. He can only offer impressions, as in the little memoir he has published in Moscou aller-retour, where he confesses to still being choked with emotion whenever he hears the Internationale.
This nostalgic note is struck time and again in Specters of Marx and Moscou aller-retour, which deserve permanent places in the crowded pantheon of bizarre Marxist apologetics. In the latter book Derrida declares that "deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism." Not, of course, that he wishes to defend anything Marx himself actually wrote or believed. He declares Marx's economics to be rubbish and his philosophy of history a dangerous myth. But all that is beside the point. The spirit" of Marxism gave rise to a great heritage of messianic yearning, and deserves respect for that reason. Indeed, in a certain sense, we are all Marxists now simply because Marxism, well, happened.
Whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism. That is, as we were saying a moment ago, they are heirs of the absolute singularity of a project--or of a promise--which has a philosophical and scientific form. This form is in principle non-religious, in the sense of a positive religion; it is not mythological; it is therefore not national --for beyond even the alliance with a chosen people, there is no nationality or nationalism that is not religious or mythological, let us say "mystical" in the broad sense. The form of this promise or of this project remains absolutely unique....
Whatever one may think of this event, of the sometimes terrifying failure of that which was thus begun, of the techno-economic or ecological disasters, and the totalitarian perversions to which it gave rise, . . . whatever one may think also of the trauma in human memory that may follow, this unique attempt took place. A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.
With statements like these Jacques Derrida risks giving bad faith a bad name. The simple truth is that his thinking has nothing to do with Marx or Marxism. Derrida is some vague sort of left democrat who values "difference" and, as his recent short pamphlet on cosmopolitanism shows, he is committed to seeing Europe become a more open, hospitable place, not least for immigrants. These are not remarkable ideas, nor are they contemptible. But like so many among the structuralist generation, Derrida is convinced that the only way to extend the democratic values he himself holds is to destroy the language in which the West has always conceived of them, in the mistaken belief that it is language, not reality, that keeps our democracies imperfect. Only by erasing the vocabulary of Western political thought can we hope for a "repoliticization" or a "new concept of politics." But once that point is achieved, what we discover is that the democracy we want cannot be described or defended; it can only be treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic dream. That is the wistful conclusion of Politics of Friendship:
For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists.
6.
Things have changed in Paris. The days when intellectuals turned to philosophers to get their political bearings, and the public turned to intellectuals, are all but over. The figure of the philosophe engage promoted by Sartre has been badly tarnished by the political experiences of the past several decades, beginning with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's books, then the Cambodian horrors, the rise of Solidarity, and finally the events of 1989. For structuralism in all its forms, it was the disappointments of le tiers monde that did most to call into question the philosophers' notion that cultures are irreducibly different and men simply products of those cultures. To their credit, some of the French intellectuals who became structuralists in the Fifties began to see that the vocabulary they had once used to defend colonial peoples against Western tyranny was now being used to excuse crimes committed against those peoples by homegrown, post-colonial tyrants.
Their abandonment of structuralism and deconstruction was not philosophically motivated, at least at first; it was inspired by moral repugnance. But this repugnance had the hygienic effect of reestablishing the distinctions between, on the one hand, pure philosophy and political philosophy and, on the other, committed engagement. There is today a new French interest in rigorous moral philosophy, epistemology. philosophy of mind, and even cognitive science. The tradition of political philosophy, ancient and modern, is also being studied intensively for the first time in many years, and there is some original theoretical.work being done by younger French political thinkers who are no longer contemptuous of politicians or the state. This all could change tomorrow, of course. But it is difficult to imagine the French stepping into the structuralist river twice.
The persistent American fascination with Derrida and deconstruction has nothing to do with his current status in French philosophy, which is marginal at best. This raises a number of interesting questions about how and why his work has been received with open arms by American post-modernists, and what they think they are embracing. Derrida is often asked about his American success and always responds with the same joke: "La deconstruction, c'est l'Amerique." By which he apparently means that America has something of the decentered, democratic swirl he tries to reproduce in his own thought. He may be on to something here, for if deconstruction is not America, it has certainly become an Americanism.
When continental Europeans think about questions of cultural difference and the Other, they are thinking about many deep and disturbing things in their own past: colonialism, nationalism, fascism, the Holocaust. What makes these historical events so difficult for them to grapple with is that there is no moderate liberal intellectual tradition in Europe that addresses them, or at least not a vigorous and continuous one. The continental philosophical tradition makes it difficult to think about toleration, for example, except in the illiberal terms of Herder's Romantic theory of national spirit, the rigid French model of uniform republican citizenship, and now, most improbably, the Heideggerian messianism of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction .
When Americans think about these issues of cultural difference they feel both pride and shame: pride in our capacity to absorb immigration and shame in the legacy of slavery that has kept black Americans a caste apart. The intellectual problem we face is not that of convincing ourselves that cultural variety can be good, or that differences should be respected, or that liberal political principles are basically sound. These we absorb fairly easily. The problem is in understanding why the American promise has only been imperfectly fulfilled, and how we should respond. About this we are clearly divided. But the fact that some political groups, such as those claiming to represent women and homosexuals, portray their moral enfranchisement as the logical extension of the social enfranchisement given to immigrants and promised, but never delivered, to American blacks, speaks volumes about the social consensus that exists in this country about how to think and argue about such questions.
In light of these contrasting experiences, it is a little easier to understand why the political reckoning structuralism faced in France during the Seventies and Eighties never took place in the United States. The souring of the post-colonial experiments in Africa and Asia and the collapse of Communist regimes nearby induced enormous self-doubt in Europe about the ideas that reigned in the postwar period. These same events have had no appreciable effect on American intellectual life, for the simple reason that they pose no challenge to our own self-understanding. When Americans read works in the structuralist tradition today, even in its most radicalized Heideggerian form in deconstruction, they find it difficult to imagine any moral and political implications they might have. People who believe it is possible to "get a new life" will not be overly concerned by the suggestion that all truth is socially constructed, or think that accepting it means relinquishing one's moral compass. That the anti-humanism and politics of pure will latent in structuralism and deconstruction, not to mention the strange theological overtones that Derrida has recently added, are philosophically and practically incompatible with liberal principles sounds like an annoying prejudice.
No wonder a tour through the post-modernist section of any American bookshop is such a disconcerting experience. The most illiberal, anti-enlightenment notions are put forward with a smile and the assurance that, followed out to their logical conclusion, they could only lead us into the democratic promised land, where all God's children will join hands in singing the national anthem. It is an uplifting vision and Americans believe in uplift. That so many of them seem to have found it in the dark and forbidding works of Jacques Derrida attests to the strength of Americans' self-confidence and their awesome capacity to think well of anyone and any idea. Not for nothing do the French still call us les grands enfants.
The Politics of Jacques Derrida
Mark Lilla
Source: Hardcopy The New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, pp. 36-41.
The history of French philosophy in the three decades following the Second World War can be summed up in a phrase: politics dictated and philosophy wrote. After the Liberation, and thanks mainly to the example of Jean-Paul Sartre, the mantle of the Dreyfusard intellectual passed from the writer to the philosopher, who was now expected to pronounce on the events of the day. This development led to a blurring of the boundaries between pure philosophical inquiry, political philosophy, and political engagement, and these lines have only slowly been reestablished in France. As Vincent Descombes remarked in his superb short study of the period, Modern French Philosophy (1980), "taking a political position is and remains the decisive test in France; it is what should reveal the ultimate meaning of a philosophy." Paradoxically, the politicizing of philosophy also meant the near extinction of political philosophy, understood as disciplined and informed reflection about a recognizable domain called politics. If everything is political, then strictly speaking nothing is. It is a striking fact about the postwar scene that France produced only one genuine political thinker of note: Raymond Aron.
The list of important French philosophers who protected their work from the political passions of the day is short but contains some significant figures. One thinks of the Jewish moral philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the misanthropic essayist E. M. Cioran, both of whom have recently died, and the Protestant thinker Paul Ricoeur, now ninety-five, who are all being rediscovered today. One also thinks of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, a claim that may surprise American readers, given the ideologically charged atmosphere in which Derrida and his work have been received on our side of the Atlantic. Unlike so many of his fellow students at the Ecole Normale Superieure in the Fifties, Derrida kept clear of the Stalinized French Communist Party (PCF), and later adopted a skeptical attitude toward the events of May '68 and the short-lived hysteria for Mao. Over the next decade, as Michel Foucault became the great white hope of the post-'68 left, Derrida frustrated all attempts to read a simple political program into deconstruction. He declared himself to be a man of the left but refused to elaborate, leaving more orthodox thinkers to wonder whether deconstruction reflected anything more than "libertarian pessimism," as the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton once charged.
As Derrida's star began to fall in France in the 1980s, it was rising in the English-speaking world, where questions about his political commitments were raised anew. This must have been awkward for him on several counts. Derrida's thought is extremely French in its themes and rhetoric, and is difficult to understand outside the context of long-standing Parisian disputes over the legacies of structuralism and Heideggerianism. In the United States, however, his ideas, which were first introduced into literary criticism, now circulate in the alien environment of academic postmodernism, which is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and post-colonial theory. Academic postmodernism is nothing if not syncretic, which makes it difficult to understand or even describe. It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva--and, as if that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures from the German Frankfurt School. Given the impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.
In America, Derrida is considered a classic of the postmodern canon. But as recently as 1990 he still declined to explain the political implications of deconstruction. Occasionally a book would appear claiming to have cracked the code and discovered hidden affinities between deconstruction and, say, Marxism or feminism. The Sphinx just grinned. But now, at long last, he has spoken. During the past five years Jacques Derrida has published no fewer than six books on political themes. Some are no more than pamphlets and interviews, but three of them--a book on Marx, one on friendship and politics, another on law--are substantial treatises. Why Derrida has chosen this particular moment to make his political debut is a matter of speculation. His thoughts could not be more out of season in France, and his six books met bafflement when they appeared there. But given the continuing influence of postmodernism in the United States, where Derrida now spends much of his time teaching, his interventions could not be more timely. They give us plenty of material for reflection about the real political implications of deconstruction and whether American readers have quite grasped them.
1.
On or about November 4, 1956, the nature of French philosophy changed. That, in any case, is what the textbooks tell us. In the decade following the Liberation, the dominant presence in French philosophy was Jean-Paul Sartre and the dominant issue was communism. Sartre's L'Etre et le neant (1943) had earned him a reputation as an existentialist during the Occupation, and his famous lecture of 1945, "L'Existentialisme est un humanisme," brought his message that "man is the future of man" to a wide European audience at war's end. Yet within a few years of having spoken out on behalf of absolute human liberty, Sartre became an obedient fellow traveler. In his infamous tract "Les Communistes et la paix," which began to be serialized in 1952, he dismissed reports of the Gulag, and after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1954 declared in an interview that "the freedom to criticize is total in the USSR." Having once extolled man's unique capacity for free choice, Sartre announced a decade later that Marxism was the unsurpassable horizon of our time.
But in 1956 (so the story goes) the myth of the Soviet Union was shattered in France by Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Conference in Moscow in November, and the suppression of the Hungarian revolt. This brought an end to many illusions: about Sartre, about communism, about history, about philosophy, and about the term "humanism." It also established a break between the generation of French thinkers reared in the Thirties, who had seen the war as adults, and students who felt alien to those experiences and wished to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the cold war. The latter therefore turned from the "existential" political engagement recommended by Sartre toward a new social science called structuralism. And (the story ends) after this turn there would develop a new approach to philosophy. of which Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are perhaps the most distinguished representatives.
The problem with this textbook history is that it vastly overstates the degree to which French intellectuals stripped themselves of their Communist illusions in 1956. What it gets right is the role of structuralism in changing the terms in which political matters generally were discussed. Structuralism was a term coined by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe a method of applying models of linguistic structure to the study of society as a whole, in particular to customs and myths. Though Levi-Strauss claimed inspiration from Marx, he interpreted Marxism to be a science of society, not a guide to political action.
Sartre's engaged Marxist humanism rested on three basic presuppositions: that history's movements can be understood rationally; that those movements are determined by class relations; and that the individual's responsibility was to further human emancipation by assisting progressive class forces. Levi-Strauss drew two very different principles from reading Marx in light of the French sociological tradition (especially the works of Emile Durkheim) and his own anthropological field work. They were that societies are structures of relatively stable relations among their elements, which develop in no rational historical pattern, and that class has no special status among them. As for man's existential responsibilities, Levi-Strauss had nothing to say. It was a provocative silence. For if societies were essentially stable structures whose metamorphoses were unpredictable, that left little room for man to shape his political future through action. Indeed, man seemed rather beside the point. As Levi-Strauss put it in his masterpiece Tristes Tropiques (1955), "The world began without the human race, and it will end without it."
Today it is somewhat difficult to understand how this austere doctrine could have appealed to young people caught up in the cold war atmosphere of the Fifties. It helps to realize how profoundly Levi-Strauss was attacking the defining myth of modern French politics. Beginning in the Third Republic there developed a shaky political consensus in France, to the effect that the Declaration of the Rights of Man pronounced in 1789 reflected universal truths about the human condition which France had been anointed to promulgate to the world. After two world wars, the Occupation, and Vichy, this myth of universalism in one country struck many young Frenchmen as absurd. Levi-Strauss's structuralism cast doubt on the universality of any political rights or values, and also raised suspicions about the 'man" who claimed them. Weren't these concepts simply a cover for the West's ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide, as Levi-Strauss charged? And wasn't Sartre's Marxism polluted by the same ideas? Marxism spoke of each nation's place in the general unfolding of history; structuralism spoke of each culture as autonomous. Marxism preached revolution and liberation for all peoples; structuralism spoke of cultural difference and the need to respect it. In the Paris of the late Fifties, the cool structuralism of Levi-Strauss seemed at once more radically democratic and less naive than the engaged humanism of Sartre.
Besides, structuralist concern with "difference" and the "Other" also had a strong political effect in the decade of decolonization and the Algerian War. Levi-Strauss's most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. Sartre was much engaged in anti-colonial politics and saw in Third World revolutions the birth of a "new man," as he put it in his passionate preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnees de la terre (1961). Levi-Strauss never engaged in polemics over decolonization or the Algerian War. Nonetheless, his elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be European. Using the rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau, he evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. And though Levi-Strauss may not have intended it, his writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left that grew up in the Sixties that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance--reason, science, progress, liberal democracy--were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference.
As François Dosse shows in his useful new study of structuralism, the movement had a lasting impact on French thought and intellectual politics, even though its doctrines were quickly misunderstood and misapplied in the next generation.1 For Levi-Strauss, structuralism was a scientific method for studying differences between cultures, in the hope of one day achieving a more genuinely universal understanding of human nature. For the tiers-mondistes he inspired, and who were radicalized by the Algerian War, this scientific relativism degenerated into just another primitivism that neutralized any criticism of abuses within foreign cultures. (Not to mention the crimes of Communist totalitarianism, which now could be excused on culturalist rather than Stalinist grounds.) As the Sixties progressed, the children of structuralism came to forget Levi-Strauss's skepticism about the French revolutionary myth and began promoting the Other as an honorary sans culottes. All that was marginal within Western societies could now be justified and even celebrated philosophically. Some followed Michel Foucault in portraying the development of European civilization as a process of marginalizing domestic misfits--the mentally ill, sexual and political deviants--who were branded and kept under surveillance through the cooperation of social "power" and 'knowledge." Others turned to psychology, searching for the repressed Other in the libido or the unconscious.
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1 This next generation is usually called "post-structuralist" in English to mark the break with structuralism's original scientific program. This term is not used in French, however, and Dosse employs "structuralism" to refer to the entire movement. I follow him in this.
By the mid-Seventies the structuralist idea had declined from a scientific method informed by political and cultural pessimism into a liberation anti-theology celebrating difference wherever it might be found. In one sense, then, little had changed since 1956. French intellectuals still thought of themselves on the Dreyfusard model, and philosophers continued to write thinly veiled political manifestoes. But the structuralist experience had changed the terms in which political engagements were conceived philosophically. It was no longer possible to appeal to a rational account of history, as Sartre had, to justify political action. It was not clear that one could appeal to reason at all, since language and social structure loomed so large. One could not even speak of man without putting the term in quotation marks. "Man" was now considered a site, a point where various social. cultural, economic, linguistic, and psychological forces happened to intersect. As Michel Foucault put it in the closing sentence of Les Mots et les choses (1966), man was a recent invention that would soon disappear, like a face drawn in the sand.
That surely was not what Levi-Strauss had in mind when he spoke of creation outlasting man, but the die was already cast. What this radical anti-humanism would mean for politics was not altogether clear. For if "man" was entirely a construct of language and social forces, then how was homo politicus to deliberate on and justify his actions? Whatever one thought of Sartre's political engagements, he had an answer to that question. The structuralists did not.
2.
François Dosse describes Jacques Derrida's doctrine of deconstruction as an "ultrastructuralism." This is accurate enough but does not tell the whole story. In France at least, the novelty of deconstruction in the Sixties was to have addressed the themes of structuralism--difference, the Other--with the philosophical concepts and categories of Martin Heidegger. Derrida's early writing revived a querelle over the nature of humanism which had set Heidegger against Sartre back in the late Forties and had many political implications. Derrida sided with Heidegger, whom he only criticized for not having gone far enough. And it is to that decision in favor of Heidegger that all the political problems of deconstruction may be traced.
The Sartre-Heidegger dispute followed Sartre's 1945 lecture on humanism, which Heidegger read as a travesty of his own intellectual position. Sartre had appropriated the Heideggerian language of anxiety, authenticity, existence, and resolution to make the case for man as "the future of man," by which he meant that man's autonomous self-development should replace transcendent ends as the aim of all our striving. In a long, and justly famous, "Letter on Humanism" (1946), Heidegger responded that his aim had always been to question the concept of man and perhaps free us from it. Ever since Plato, he wrote. Western philosophy had made unexamined metaphysical assumptions about man's essence that disguised the fundamental question of Being--which is the meaning of Being apart from man's comprehension of the being of natural entities--and placed man himself at the center of creation. All the scourges of modern life--science, technology, capitalism, communism--could be traced back to this original "anthropologization" of Being. This was a heavy burden, which could only be lifted through the dismantling (Destruktion) of the metaphysical tradition. Only then could man learn that he is not the master but rather the "shepherd" of Being.
Deconstruction was conceived in the spirit of Heidegger's Destruktion, though Derrida had no intention of making man the shepherd of anything. In a remarkable lecture in 1968, "The Ends of Man," Derrida pointed out that by anointing man the "shepherd of Being," Heidegger had returned to humanism "as if by magnetic attraction." He then claimed that the metaphysical tradition could only really be overcome if the very language of philosophy was "deconstructed," a language in which even Heidegger was snared. At the root of the metaphysical tradition was a naive notion of language as a transparent medium, a "logocentrism," as Derrida dubbed it. The Greek term logos means word or language, but it can also mean reason or principle--an equation of speech with intentionality that Derrida considered highly questionable. What was needed was a radical "decentering" of the implicit hierarchies imbedded in this language that encourage us to place speech above writing, the author above the reader, or the signified above the signifier. Deconstruction thus was described as a prolegomenon to--or perhaps even a substitute for--philosophy as traditionally conceived. It would be an activity allowing the aporias, or paradoxes, imbedded in every philosophical text to emerge without forcing a "violent" consistency upon them. The end of logocentrism would then mean the end of every other wicked "centrism": androcentrism, phallocentrism, phallologocentrism, carnophallologocentrism, and the rest. (All these terms appear in the books under review.)
As a specimen of normalien cleverness, Derrida's attack on his intellectual forefathers could hardly be bettered. He accused both structuralists and Heidegger of not having pushed their own fundamental insights far enough. Structuralists destabilized our picture of man by placing him in a web of social and linguistic relations, but then assumed that web of relations-- structures--to have a stable center. Heidegger's blindness to his own language led from the Destruktion of metaphysics to the promotion of man as the "shepherd of Being." Derrida's contribution, if that is the correct term, was to have seen that by pressing further the anti-humanism latent in both these intellectual traditions, he could make them seem compatible ways of addressing logocentrism.
But having done that, Derrida then found himself bound to follow the linguistic principles he had discovered in his campaign against logocentrism, especially the hard doctrine that since all texts contain ambiguities and can be read in different ways (la difference), exhaustive interpretation must be forever deferred (la differance). That raised the obvious question: How then are we to understand deconstruction's own propositions? As more than one critic has pointed out, there is an unresolvable paradox in using language to claim that language cannot make unambiguous claims.2 For Derrida coping with such evident paradoxes is utterly beside the point. As he has repeatedly explained, he conceives of deconstruction less as a philosophical doctrine than as a "practice" aimed at casting suspicion on the entire philosophical tradition and robbing it of self-confidence.
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2 See, for example, John Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down" The New York Review, October 27, 1983.
Anyone who has heard him lecture in French knows that he is more performance artist than logician. His flamboyant style--using free association, rhymes and near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions--is not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative strategy" for combating logocentrism. As he puts it in the interview published in Moscou aller-retour:
What I try to do through the neutralization of communication, theses, and stability of content, through a microstructure of signification, is to provoke, not only in the reader but also in oneself, a new tremor or a new shock of the body that opens a new space of experience. That might explain the reaction of not a few readers when they say that, in the end, one doesn't understand anything, there's no conclusion drawn, it's too sophisticated, we don't know if you are for or against Nietzsche, where you stand on the woman question....
It also might explain the reaction of those readers who suspect that the neutralization of communication means the neutralization of all standards of judgment--logical, scientific, aesthetic, moral, political--and leaves these fields of thought open to the winds of force and caprice. Derrida always brushed aside such worries as childish, and in the atmosphere of the Sixties and Seventies few questions were asked. But the Eighties proved to be trying times for deconstruction. In 1987 a Chilean writer named Victor Farias published a superficial book on Martin Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and its alleged roots in his philosophy. While the book contained no revelations, it was taken in France and Germany to confirm the suspicion that, to the extent that philosophy in the Sixties and Seventies was Heideggerian, it was politically irresponsible. Jacques Derrida rejected these associations out of hand, as readers of this paper will recall.3
But that same year it was also revealed that the late Yale professor Paul de Man, a leading champion of deconstruction and close friend of Derrida's, had published collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles in two Belgian newspapers in the early Forties. These might have been dismissed as youthful errors had Derrida and some of his American followers not then interpreted away the offending passages, denying their evident meaning, leaving the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you're sorry.4 It now appeared that deconstruction had, at the very least, a public relations problem, and that the questions of politics it so playfully left in suspension would now have to be answered.
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3 See Thomas Sheehan, "A Normal Nazi," The New York Review, January 14, 1993, as well as letters from Derrida, Richard Wolin, and others in The New York Review, February 11, March 4, and March 25, 1993.
4 For a full account, with references see Louis Menand, "The Politics of Deconstruction," The New York Review, November 21, 1991.
Yet how would that be possible? Derrida's radical interpretations of structuralism and Heideggerianism had rendered the traditional vocabulary of politics unusable and nothing could be put in its place. The subjects considered in traditional political philosophy--individual human beings and nations--were declared to be artifices of language, and dangerous ones at that. The object of political philosophy--a distinct realm of political action--was seen as part of a general system of relations that itself had no center. And as for the method of political philosophy--rational inquiry toward a practical end--Derrida had succeeded in casting suspicion on its logocentrism. An intellectually consistent deconstruction would therefore seem to entail silence on political matters. Or, if silence proved unbearable, it would at least require a serious reconsideration of the anti-humanist dogmas of the structuralist and Heideggerian traditions. To his credit, Michel Foucault began such a reconsideration in the decade before his death. Jacques Derrida never has.
3.
The most we are ever likely to learn about Derrida's understanding of strictly political relations is contained in his most recently translated work, Politics of Friendship--the only one of his books with the word "politics" in the title. It is based on a seminar given in Paris in 1988-1989, just as Europe was being shaken to its foundation by the rapid collapse of the Eastern Bloc. As it happens, I attended this seminar and, like most of the participants I met, had difficulty understanding what Derrida was driving at. Each session would begin with the same citation from Montaigne--"O mes amis, il n'y a nul ami" ("O my friends, there is no friend")--and then veer off into a rambling discussion of its possible sources and meanings. The published text is much reworked and gives a clearer picture of what Derrida has in mind.
His aim is to show that the entire Western tradition of thinking about politics has been distorted by our philosophy's peccatum originarium, the concept of identity. Because our metaphysical tradition teaches that man is identical to himself, a coherent personality free from internal difference, we have been encouraged to seek our identities through membership in undifferentiated, homogenizing groups such as families, friendships, classes, and nations. From Aristotle to the French Revolution, the good republic has therefore been thought to require fraternite, which is idealized as a natural blood tie making separate individuals somehow one.5 But there is no such thing as natural fraternity, Derrida asserts, just as there is no natural maternity (sic). All such natural categories, as well as the derivative concepts of community, culture, nation, and borders, are dependent on language and therefore are conventions. The problem with these conventions is not simply that they cover up differences within the presumably identical entities. It is that they also establish hierarchies among them: between brothers and sisters, citizens and foreigners, and eventually friends and enemies. In the book's most reasoned chapters, Derrida examines Carl Schmitt's conception of politics, which portrays the political relation as an essentially hostile one between friends and enemies.6 Derrida sees Schmitt not as a mere Nazi apologist with a thirst for conflict, but as a deep thinker who made explicit the implicit assumptions of all Western political philosophy.
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5 In case the reader failed to grasp the real target of Derrida's campaign against the idea of fraternite, in Politics of Friendship he emphasizes that "this book set itself up to work and be worked relentlessly, close to the thing called France. And close to the singular alliance linking nothing less than the history of fraternization to this thing, France--to the State, the nation, the politics, the culture, literature and language."
6 On Schmitt's concept of politics, see my article, "The Enemy of Liberalism," The New York Review, May 15, 1997.
Living On (Happily) Ever After: Derrida, Philosophy and the Comic
Robert S. Gall
Originally published in Philosophy Today 38 (1994):167-180
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other -- since there are no kings -- messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.Franz Kafka(1)
In reading the texts of Derrida, one easily notes how they repeatedly exhibit the frivolous and joking character of writing (AF 125-127; D 93)(2) through puns, double entendres, and turns of phrase that, like jokes, are often untranslatable. Taking a closer look, we also recognize occasional allusions to the conventions and strategies of comedy in these texts. For example, Derrida's call for a kind of thinking at the end of philosophy that is affirmed "in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance" (MP 27; cf. WD 136) recalls the feast and reconciliation typical of the end of comedy. One also cannot help but notice how Derrida, either as commentator (AT 30; EO 141; Ltd 82) or signatory (WD 300: "Reb Derrisa," a homonym of "Reb de risée", the "rabbi of the laugh" or the "laughing rabbi"), frequently reminds us of the comic implications of his texts. Add to that their playful and performative nature (which suggests a comparison with literary- dramatic forms) and their labyrinth of forms and styles that is reminiscent of comic texts, and it is no wonder that there are frequent references to the genres of comedy and the comic in characterizing the texts of Derrida.(3)
However, despite the frequent references to a comic quality in the texts of Derrida, little has been done to show what this means for understanding those texts. That is, commentators (including Derrida) use the trope "comedy" and the "comic" to suggest/promote an understanding of philosophy and a comportment toward the world that is "comic" in some larger sense, but they tend to leave that comic quality unexplored. It is, however, just this comic quality, and the larger sense of "comedy" that it implies, that I wish to explore in an effort to distinguish the texts of Derrida. Noting this comic quality and the comic strategies employed by Derrida will, I suggest, prove helpful for suggesting how we might better understand the texts of Derrida, their relationship to the philosophical tradition and such traditional concerns as ethics, politics, and religious thought.
* * *
It is difficult to find unanimity on the subject of comedy and the comic. As one critic has put it, not only comedy but its criticism is a labyrinth. Yet a labyrinth is an order as well as a tangle,(4)and we can take note of a number of features and strategies that are important, if not absolutely necessary, for characterizing the comic, and which are echoed in the texts of Derrida.
(1) The Arbitrary and Discontinuous. A variety of critics have noted that a common feature of comedy and the comic is an emphasis on discontinuity and the arbitrary.(5) On the one hand, this means that comedy usually represents the dominant society or practices of its play as operating according to arbitrary laws. The dominant order is a matter of chance, not necessity. For instance, Aristophanes attempts to show his countrymen in Lysistrata that war between Athens and Sparta is not necessary; another order (i.e., peace between Athens and Sparta) is not only possible but beneficial. So too Molière, in The School for Husbands, by contrasting the way in which two brothers treat their wards (and intended brides), shows that the traditionally 'proper' way to raise a faithful wife is not the only way and can in fact (does, in fact, in the play) fail. Figaro, in the 5th act of Beaumarchais' play, challenges his master by pointing out that his master's position is only an accident of birth. On the other hand, this emphasis means that the accidental and the discontinuous tend to dominate the comic rhythm. As far back as Aristotle, it was noted that plot was not very important for comedy. Comedy tends toward the episodic -- witness the comic strip, or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There is sometimes a jumping back and forth in time, as in Billy Pilgrim's "progress" through Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Chance encounters are the rule, rather than the exception. Magic and fantasy are not uncommon, as is the case when a magician enables a humanities professor at CCNY to become a character in Madame Bovary in Woody Allen's short story "The Kugelmass Affair."(6) Even the magic is chancy; Puck's magic is less than certain in Midsummer Night's Dream, and Kugelmass accidentally ends up trapped in a remedial Spanish textbook, chased ever after by the verb tener ("to have").
Of course, Derrida takes the arbitrariness of the sign acknowledged and repressed by Saussure as one of the starting points for his deconstructive enterprise of/from grammatology (OG 44ff; cf. MP 10f, AF 110-112). Since "the thing itself" is a sign, and what is represented is always already a representatum (OG 49, 50), the presumed necessity of any system of signs -- which assumes the priority of one sign as signified and others as properly or improperly signifying that signified -- is subverted. Since what is signified always already implies a sign that points to it, what is signified is itself a sign, a trace, the trace of a presence (an absolute origin) that never was there. By showing the interconnectedness and con-textual nature of sign/signified and all other metaphysical binary oppositions, deconstructive discourse, like comedy, shows that the presumably absolute, categorical authority of a law (BL 190ff; cf. Par 249-287) assumes an authority it does not have.
But then, like comedy, Derrida also shows this arbitrariness by enacting it. His texts often take their point of departure from accidental or incidental features, correlations or correspondences in language and texts. A footnote in Sein und Zeit (MP 31ff), an incidental piece by Kant (AT), an isolated comment by Nietzsche (SNS 123ff) become starting points for his analyses. The "mute irony" of substituting an "a" for an "e" creates the nonconcept différance (MP 3ff); the unheard accent grave changes a feminine pronoun into a place in Cinders. Seemingly incongruous commentaries are laid side by side in Glas and "Survivre" (Par 119-178). The writing is telegraphic, as postcard dispatches punctuate The Postcard, and aphorisms (even the less than aphoristic) leave their mark on Roland Barthes and architecture, and mark time in Romeo and Juliet (Ps 273-304, 509-518, 519-533). Seemingly odd associations are made, and concepts transformed: différance becomes the trace becomes hérisson (a hedgehog, also reminding us of hérisser, "to spike"; CCP), or fire and ashes (C; OS). The texts of Derrida are like the harlequin's costume -- patchwork and piecemeal -- showing us the pretense of our presentations to the world.
(2) Repetition and Reproduction. The arbitrariness of laws leads to the arbitrariness of ends in comedies and in Derrida. On the one hand, this means that since the established order has no point or purpose, repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy (Frye 168; et. al.). Comedy reveals that the dominant society is caught in obsessive, repetitive behavior that accomplishes nothing. Abbott and Costello's comic routine "Who's on First[?]", in which each participant asks the 'proper' questions and gives the 'proper' answers about the players on the new baseball team, over and over, to no avail, is a classic example of this point. "The Roadrunner" cartoons, where the predator (Wile E. Coyote) quite 'properly' pursues the roadrunner, over and over, even attempting, like a proper American coyote, to employ modern technology in his quest, would be another example. On the other hand, since there is no point, the end, i.e., the finish, of comedies likewise often enact this arbitrariness; they interrupt something that will go on ever after (happily or not). The Taming of the Shrew, at first glance, seems to end, happily, but Kate's submission is suspect (and is usually played so that we are not convinced she has submitted); we have the sneaking suspicion that the agon of this marriage (and all marriages) will go on indefinitely. Molière, much to the chagrin of drama critics, is often blatantly arbitrary, ending Tartuffe with the miraculous intervention of the king, for example, or rather incredibly tying together all sorts of loose ends in The Miser. And exactly how could you end the "Who's on First[?]" routine, or "The Roadrunner" cartoons, except arbitrarily?
It is much the same with deconstructive discourse. Derrida sees philosophical discourse ruled by a desire, an obsession, namely, a desire and obsession for "meaning", i.e., "wanting to say" (vouloir dire) something -- a full and unspoiled presence, a foundational and/or constant arche or telos. Yet this desire is infinitely deferred and comes to nothing. Why? There could be no meaning, no communication, without the absence of what is meant, and without the iterability of words and meanings. Hence all presentations (of meaning) are always already (possible) re-presentations. The purity of the origin or end is disrupted "from the start"; mimesis, imitation, 'rules' something like philosophy. But a mime (e.g., a philosopher) does not do anything (D 216), does not accomplish anything. Hence philosophy -- which thinks that it is going somewhere, from somewhere, i.e., that it has an absolute telos and/or arche -- is ultimately unable to justify its beginning or end (e.g., AF 108-109, 118-119; D 182n, 271). Meaning -- the burning desire and obsession of philosophy -- entails a wandering from sign to sign, trace to trace, deferring infinitely the presence it desires.(7)
The desire and obsession in comedy that is reproductive rather than productive often turns, not surprisingly, on sex. Old comedy such as survives in the work of Aristophanes included wearing huge artificial phalluses and telling obscene jokes. Ever since, from high comedies of manners to the low comedy of farce, whether it is women getting the better of men, youth overcoming obstacles to their desire, or the cuckold winning his horns, comedy has usually had something to do with sex. It is not hard to see why. Being perhaps the lowest common denominator among human beings, sex is a natural focus for a genre concerned with the common interests of mankind. Thus sex can serve as a great equalizer and leveller, an ideal focus for showing that the rich, the powerful, the unique, are really no different, no better, than anyone else. Likewise, if you wish, as comedy does, to show the impotence of the old order, there seems no better way to do that than by reference to sex.
Derrida and deconstruction have had recourse to much the same strategy, noting the "phallo-centrism" of "logocentrism" (= "phallogocentrism"; see, e.g., D 48-49 & n.47; Gl 113a, 188a; PSF 477ff) and the (intellectual) "masturbation" of trying to erect a philosophical system (OG 141-164). Deconstructive reading therefore involves castration -- "always at stake" (D 302) -- that cuts into the columns of text that are the erection of philosophy to note the gaps, the fissures, the openings (as in a woman) -- i.e., the radical alterity ("woman") -- on which philosophy depends, and which it therefore does not control. Deconstruction takes note of the feminine phantom haunting the smoke (and mirrors) of philosophy (C 33) and thereby seeks to think as a woman, "woman being one name for the untruth of truth" (SNS 51; cf. Gl 126a, 126bi, 187a; PSF 442ff). To think as a woman would not be to erect a philosophy but to be fertile in another way -- by playing, affirming an endless substitution that is neither signified nor signifier, presentation nor representation, showing nor hiding (P 86-87).
(3) The Ironic. The arbitrariness, discontinuity, and mimicry in comedy make meaning and self a tricky matter. Comedy usually deals in characters (a Falstaff, a Groucho Marx, Chaplin's Tramp) that fit any number of situations and therefore come across as representative figures, general "types" rather than "individuals." As representative figures, they do not evolve or change. But in order to maintain themselves in a hostile world, we find that comic characters need to show wide variances in their appearance and their language. Their persona become fluid and multiply; puns, double meanings, and the disguises of language proliferate. Thus Euripides, in Aristophanes' The Poet and the Women, appears in various parts from his plays (Menelaus, Perseus, Echo) in an attempt to save his once-disguised father-in-law Mnesilochus. Groucho Marx plays with language to say the unspeakable, i.e., to attack an enemy, or make lecherous advances toward a woman, all the while remaining Groucho. Woody Allen's Zelig is a "human chameleon" so as to fit in the world around him. The incongruity between character and mask, word and meaning, is ironic, and evokes laughter. In addition, as the designation of Zelig indicates, this duplicity often goes to the point of breaking the bounds of humanity, mixing (with) the divine, the bestial, or the mechanical. Many of Aristophanes' plays, with their bestial titles (The Birds, The Wasps, The Frogs), point to this breakdown between man and beast, as do stock comic figures like the cuckold (who grows horns), the shrew (as in The Taming of the Shrew), or the often inhuman babel of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Likewise, the mechanization of comic characters by reducing them to the physical -- with emphasis on their predictable desires for food, shelter, and sex, or their routine bodily functions -- emphasize these breakdowns. Humanity is shown to be but one more mask. Indeed, everything is turned into mask and revealed as mask in comedy; everything reduces to pure surface and inessential appearance.
This masking in comedy is the truth of deconstruction, a truth that will not be pinned down by truth, a truth that is no truth because it plays at dissimulation, ornamentation, deceit, and artifice (SNS 55, 59, 67, 69; cf. WD 263). Here the self is a trace, i.e., "the erasure of selfhood, of one's own presence" (WD 230; SP 66, 85), disrupting the proximity of self-presence necessary for self-identity and identification by "the proper word and the unique name" (MP 27; cf. OG 107ff). The self always exceeds the récit (story) it tells (itself) (Par 272-273), because it is not what it is unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated (of being a re-citation). As a result, the self withdraws in the supplement (e.g., its name) that presents it (D 168). Such is the "anonymity" of the trace in which the possibility of being repeated makes one's "own", "proper" name (e.g., one's signature) available to anyone (D 143-144; Ltd 29ff). The "democracy" of writing (D 144) that comes at the end of history, whereby the individual is 'lost' in the Dionysiac mirror-play of language, thereby marks the end of man and humanity (MP 111-136; cf. the inhumanity of the name, Ps 528). Thus Derrida too, like comedy, breaks the bounds of humanity, writing in a language that is monstrous, bringing forth monsters from the tradition (DO 123): Francis Ponge/sponge, or Hegel/eagle, or the death that haunts one's name, the Geist of humans reduced to fire and ashes.
(4) U-topia. Much of what has been said so far in characterizing the comic comes into focus with regard to what we may call the comic u-topia -- what others have called the argument or the discussion, reminding us of the links between philosophy and comedy since the (anti-tragic) dialogues of Plato.(8) Comedy aspires to, or culminates in, or takes its perspective from, a u-topia, literally, a "non-place" free of the constraints of the everyday world, detached from the old or dominant order and outside of time, a ludicrous context marked by the lack of (conventional) rationality, morality, and/or work in which the comic character is not threatened. Such a u-topia takes many forms. It might be the traditional, festive end of comedy, that "bliss beyond time" in which everyone lives happily ever after, or simply the carnivalesque atmosphere of a pilgrimage such as we find in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It might be a safe haven in the midst of the world -- the parlor (where women rule) in domestic comedies, the forests of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, the Boar's Head Tavern where Falstaff presides, the hospital ward where Yossarian finds refuge in Catch-22. It might simply be a different, detached perspective on things that is neither inside nor outside the comedy. A comedy of shifting perspectives like Thackeray's Vanity Fair that recognizes the universal folly of human being would be one such example; the ironic discussions that take place between author and reader in such works as Cervantes' Don Quixote or Fielding's Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews would be other examples. Whatever form it takes, the detached perspective of the comic u-topia thoroughly informs the play, for what is at stake is the conservation and survival of the comic, whatever his or her point.(9)
Correspondingly, Derrida has characterized the task of deconstruction in terms of a search for the non-place, the non-lieu, the non-site or u-topos from which to interrogate philosophy (DO 108, 112) (or any other dominant order). Deconstruction tends to what is neither inside nor outside, what does not 'take place' (n'a pas lieu), is not an 'event,' or is an event (événement) whose advent (avènement) is to come (à-venir). On the one hand, this involves constant reference to what are called "undecidables" or "quasi-transcendentals." Undecidables (non-concepts such as pharmakon, supplement, gram, etc.) are unities of simulacrum that inhabit but are not included in a system, resisting and disorganizing it instead (P 43; cf. 101n13). Undecidables might be described as u-topias of language, holes in the fabric of the text, punctures that punctuate the text and give it its texture (cf. Ps 274, 278-280). These "non-places" then are not resources and reserves of meaning, but mark a mise en abyme/abîme, an abysmal staging and setting of meaning, a simultaneous creation and ruination of meaning. On the other hand, what is 'accomplished' by Derridean deconstruction is not some new system but "undecidability" (D 93, 127, 219ff; S 64). In other words, it seeks in its writing to inhabit and enact a u-topia, a "non-place" of alterity and otherness that marks the end of history, the closure of the history of meaning and being.(10)
The way in which this u-topia shows itself and is inhabited, however, is crucial to understanding the debates surrounding the texts of Derrida. We might make this clarification by taking a closer look at comedy, and to a distinction made by Charles Baudelaire between the significative comic (le comique significatif) and the absolute comic (le comique absolu).(11)The significative comic includes comedy that has some sense of utility about it; for instance, it serves as a moral critique and corrective to whatever dominant society, order or practice is depicted. Its critique favors those (either a character in the play and/or the audience) who, in one way or another, inhabit the dominant society depicted in the play but are nonetheless marginal and left out by that society. To do this, it focuses on those interests common to all men (civic and private concerns such as making money, getting a mate, etc.) and, with regard to these interests, applies a standard that is perceived to be the social norm and mean (or should be the norm and mean).(12) In Aristophanes' satiric comedies, for example, the famous (Socrates in The Clouds, Euripides in The Frogs) or the powerful (government officials or armies in The Knights and The Acharnians) are shown to be ridiculous and thus the cause for the troubles of the heroes (Demos ["the people"] in The Knights, Dikeopolis ["honest citizen"] in The Acharnians). In comedies of manners, gentlemen and ladies of high and sophisticated society (and who thereby presumably sets standards for society) -- because of their foolishness and/or violations of social norms (that they have established) -- are shown to be really no different or better than anyone else. So the drama critic hero of Arsenic and Old Lace learns that he is a bastard and, indeed, exults in the fact, for it allows him to get the girl. In romantic comedies (such as are common with Shakespeare), the true lovers are prevented for a time from coming together by an often patriarchal figure and/or society that reveals itself as old-fashioned, stuffy, conventional -- but their love survives these threats. What is accomplished in all this, as Frye notes (169), is a movement "from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the old characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom." In the 'end,' everyone gets together and is brought together. In its classic form, comedy 'ends' in a feast or banquet, often attendant upon a marriage, from which even those characters who served as obstacles to the comic hero's desire are not excluded. Taking its cue from its utopian perspective, significative comedy administers the quintessential pharmakon -- the laughter of comic relief -- which is both deadly to the old order or perspective, and therapeutic in providing a new, inclusive perspective on things.
Is the utopian perspective of the texts of Derrida to be understood along the lines of a significative comedy, with its celebration of conversation and community? Is there some ethical/political point to its practice? Some have thought so.(13)Such a view has its source not only in his apparently political "attacks" against racism and nuclear proliferation (Ps 353-362, 363-386, 453-475) or in the apocalyptic tone of some of his early essays, but also in the apparently subversive nature of the texts of Derrida. For instance, Derrida's deconstructive strategy, like that of comedy, places a great deal of emphasis on the marginal. Indeed, Derrida is almost obsessed with margins, evidenced not only by his investigations of titles, frames, signatures, and footnotes, but also by his continual writing in the margins. This margin(al) writing is sometimes extensive, as when seven page footnote dominates the text and contains a key to the entire text(14) or when a borderline text runs along the bottom margin of a main text (JD, Par 119-218). Sometimes this margin(al) writing is exclusive, as in The Truth in Painting, which Derrida notes is composed entirely of writing "around painting" (9), or Glas, which can be seen as a text of two margins, side by side (with additional writing inscribed in these margins), or the recently published Jacques Derrida, in which Geoffrey Bennington's account of the thinking of Derrida ("Derridabase") is accompanied throughout by a co-text from Derrida ("Circumfession"). Margins are important for Derrida because they are neither inside nor outside the system of meaning which they enclose and thus indicate that the system does not have the self-control that it thinks it has (MP xff; P 40). Margins are "loose ends" that provide deconstructive discourse with a way of inhabiting the structures it seeks to demolish, whereby it can use the logic of the system to unravel it and thereby subvert and overturn its logic. This subversion, as in comedy, is accomplished by overcoming the paternal/patriarchal obstacles put in its way (by 'castrating' them, i.e., showing their impotence). So Derrida cuts into the texts of philosophy through imitation (of their desire for presence) and, looking for presence, does not find it. He thereby cuts down the "transcendental signified", Logos, God the Father (D 76-78) -- which seemingly had stopped "play" -- and thereby accomplishes the play (irony) that was always already there (e.g., in philosophy) by affirming it.
This affirmation is an affirmation of freedom and the future -- freedom from the unrealizable and illusory desires and obsessions that bound the past, freedom for the future and "an entirely different logic" (Ltd 157n) which is radically other, unfettered, and undefinable (by current standards). So we find Derrida speaking frequently in and of the future perfect, e.g., when he notes that the phrase il y a là cendre "says what it will have been" (C 35), or when he mulls over the phrase "He will have obligated" (il aura obligé; Ps 159ff), or when he disclaims any intention to present a work by saying: "This therefore will not have been a book" (D 3). Derrida, like comedy, gives priority to the future, the future that always already will have been perfect(15) -- perfect in that it is always already privy to the imperfection (the "dead time", "le passé absolu"; OG 66, 68) of the present (and the past). Moreover, just as this movement toward the future in significative comedy is a move toward greater inclusiveness and integration, so it is with Derrida. The value of truth is not contested or destroyed, but reinscribed within a wider context (Ltd 146). Past thinkers like Hegel and Plato are not ignored and dismissed but read over and over (P 77; EO 87). The thing attacked in the deconstructive 'attack' is not ruined but monumentalized (S 4; cf. Gl 1b); past thinkers are erected (relevé), elated, raised up, put into relief and relifted (relève) in the affirmative comic relief (relève) of deconstruction that shows that there always already was play (irony), and nothing but play (irony). As a result, speaking of ourselves and others "in a deconstructive vein is precisely to unfold their absolute sociability, their constitutive entanglement in alterity and difference."(16)
However, there is reason to doubt an ultimately significative reading of the texts of Derrida, just as there is reason to doubt that comedy has any ultimately significative function. The doubt arises from the double bind in which both comedy and Derrida are caught. The double bind of comedy is that if one defines one's u-topian perspective, it is no longer a u-topia: defined, it is placed within the oppositional order of the dominant society, and is appropriated into that society. Comedians and comic characters are aware of this and, since part of what animates them is a desire to be free of any appropriation, their attitude tends to be that of Groucho Marx: they do not want to belong to any club that would have them as members. As a result, the comic immediately turns against the goal toward which he seemed to work. The comic is only comfortable as the loyal opposition. This is hardly the basis for an ethical or political program, which may be why Prince Hal had to abandon Falstaff and the Boar's Head Inn in order to govern, and one reason why so much of comedy avoids making ethical or political points altogether. Indeed, when you come right down to it, one may forcefully argue that comedy does not lend itself to making ethical points; at best one can say that comedy can influence conduct in one way or another, which is to say that it could serve to deprave and corrupt just as easily as reform and elevate.(17)
Derrida, like a (good) comic, is also conscious of his double bind. All too aware of the trap of becoming entangled in the order of metaphysics, he insists that he opposes nothing to the oppositional logic of philosophy (Ltd 117; PSF 259f); any apocalyptic tone he has taken in the past is "ironic," and does not try to lead or conduct (AT 30, 33ff). In addition, this irony is not the traditional sort of irony that masks some secret knowledge or presence (as the "good" irony or play in Plato presumably does). There is no secret knowledge (C 41, BL 205), no law behind the representation (BL 207ff); this is why Derrida works so hard sometimes to distance himself from negative theology (Ps 535-595; cf. MP 27). The texts of Derrida supplement rather than supplant, mimicking the desire of philosophy by continuing to desire, to play, endlessly. Put another way, one always begins again, one is always beginning; "the whole does nothing but begin" (Par 275; cf. Ps 649-650). So Derrida's 'hope' is not to erect another truth in the place of metaphysics (which would only re-establish an opposition), but simply to neutralize the system by laughing at it. But even that is not quite right, for the subversions playing about the law that he shows us do not mock or transgress the law; these games would not be possible, would have no force, without the instance of the law they seem to defy. There is no reason for Derrida's "play" unless he draws reason from the law, unless he provokes it. Hence he must produce the desire of philosophy in twisting it; he must demonstrate the madness of philosophy rather than oppose it from the outside with another madness (Par 246; cf. Par 285-286). As castration and mimesis (P 84), transgression and affirmation (WD 274), the double reading (writing/bind/science) of deconstruction might be either conservative or revolutionary, depending upon how it is deployed (Ltd 141). Or, put another way, despite whatever ethical/political stance it takes, Derrida's theory of deconstruction "leaves the world as it is and was," though "our grasp of why it is and must be left as it is and was" has changed.(18)
(5) Living On. This seems to completely deconstruct Baudelaire's distinction between the significative and absolute comic, and return us to the singular purpose of any and all comedy: to go on, to survive. As W.D. Horwath has put it (6),
comedy may be said to be 'moral' if it is based on a wholesome, positive attitude to life. Though it does not normally set out to change men's attitudes, nevertheless its effect is to reinforce our acceptance of a viable social order, a norm of behavior based on an unwritten compact between the playwright and the audience. The misfits, the social schemers, those who would upset the order of things are rendered harmless; if they are not converted to a right way of thinking, at least they are excluded from the social microcosm that the dramatist has created. The tricks and deceits, the moral turpitude of the rogues and villains, become part of a larger scheme which flatters the spectator's need for security and sends him home reassured.
In other words, comedy in its many forms is a celebration and affirmation of life, of living on, of conserving oneself and/or society. The fertile imagination of the comic ironist is put in the service of securing the comic and/or his view of the world. This is the case from the simplest fairy tale, where everyone (all the "good" people, anyway) lives (happily) ever after, to the grandeur and abstractness of life everlasting in Dante's Divine Comedy (where both the good and bad live on ever after, both happily and unhappily), from philosophy's escape into the magical forest of the Academy and Plato's dialogues, where Socrates lives on to play the fool who makes the wise seem foolish as he carries on endless discussions that espouse a multiplicity of views (and hence no particular view) of no one in particular, to Kierkegaard's "transcendental buffoonery" (Simon, 78ff) that parodies systematic philosophy (and even his own work) from behind pseudononymous masks. Ethics is incidental or irrelevant to the ultimate task of salvation, of being saved in order to live on.
So too the Derridean u-topia seems to consist of a comedy of ever-shifting perspectives that refuses to take a stand, or takes a stand "to be specified," because it is self-conscious that every stand is always already contaminated by what it is not, every point of view no view (point de vue; PSF 442, 459) with the goal of making us more self-conscious of the games we play, including the fact that there is nothing else but games. What lives on with Derrida? The text, including the text of philosophy, lives on, like some inhuman hypertext on computer that goes on being written from semester to semester in contemporary university writing classes.(19) Or, more precisely, what lives on is the law and desire of texts, and of philosophies. Indeed, Derrida wants it to live on, for if it were to reach its goal, its telos (a conclusive thesis), the desire of philosophy, and its telos, would disappear, become paralyzed, immobilized, die (Ltd 129; Par 119ff; PSF 285). Hence deconstruction strives to keep the discussion going, living on, open (Ltd 111,116); that is the ethics of this discussion, this u-topia. As a result, we can see Derrida as the end of philosophy in the sense that philosophy attains its goal in Derrida: to go on, to survive and continue in a world that is especially hostile to it.
Nevertheless, it is far from clear that we should rejoice in this prospect, for there is much despair in comedy, a despair that comes from the recognition that the repetitive, obsessive, foolish behavior depicted in the comedy will go on and on, indefinitely. In Stanley Kubrick's black comedy "Dr. Strangelove," Joint Chief of Staff "Buck" Turgidsen relishes the future life underground proposed by Dr. Strangelove (complete with numerous women for every man!) to the point of worrying about a shelter gap; the film then closes with shots of mushroom clouds accompanied by the song "We'll Meet Again." In Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the heroine (Cecilia), having foresaken the ideal man come to life from the screen for the "real" actor (who played the ideal man), only to be dumped by the actor, returns to her escape into the movies. In both cases, nothing has been accomplished, nothing has been learned; both stories begin again. Or, as Derrida says, we are always beginning; the arche-originary "yes" with which we "begin" and "end" can only be a fiction, a fable, hearsay (Ps 647-648; UG 57ff). We are given over to affirming an endless recitation of ourselves that never takes place (Par 243, 266ff).
Walter Kerr puts an escapist twist on this theme, suggesting not only that "within comedy there is always despair," but also adding that it is "a despair of ever finding a right ending except by artifice and magic."(20) Comedy is an escape-aid; its celebration and affirmation of life requires a triumph of fantasy and imagination over the realities of life (and death). One must rise above (beyond) the 'real' world, without gravity -- one must detach oneself from the way things are -- in order to accomplish one's desire. Comedy's triumph of life involves a triumph over life. But detachment, distance, tends to make one insensitive. This is certainly true of comedy, where we laugh at the faults, foibles and injuries of others. Comedy is the original theater of cruelty, the comic the original assassin whose highest aspiration is "to kill the audience." Horace Walpole's famous line -- "The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" -- rings true.
Since Derridean deconstruction works on the basis of, and directed toward, an undecidable, undefinable, all-inclusive u-topia of endless re-presentation and re-production, with a faith that, at bottom, it all comes to the same thing (a will-to-presence, "wanting to say") and the superior, comprehensive view that "one politics is always being played against another (Ltd 135), it is not surprising that the detachment, violence and insensitivity of comedy shows itself in the texts of Derrida as well. We can see it in the lack of feeling for Romeo and Juliet (Ps 519-533) or for the country man denied access to the law (BL). We can see it in the priority given to freedom, to the unfettered future rather than the limited past, for in giving the future priority, Derrida would seem to exhibit the revenge that characterizes metaphysics, the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was'. 'It was,' the imperfect: that is "the fundamental trait of time in its authentic and entire unfolding as time,"(21) whereas the future is "the incognito of the eternal which is incommensurable with time" (Caputo, 15). To be is to be in time and therefore imperfect or, shall we say, questionable and questionworthy. Dissatisfied with such 'imperfection', such "questionable-worthiness" [frag-würdigkeit], Derrida and comedy seek to suspend time and achieve the perfection of some transcendental archilimbo ("neither inside nor outside") that exceeds the grasp of history though it is only realized within the context of history (Ps 648). Everything is contretemps (Ps 521). Or, as pointed out before, for Derrida "the whole does nothing but begin", such that history is mastered in a total and present resumption (Par 275; IOG 103). Such a suspension of time is revenge against time -- and that is the project of philosophy (metaphysics).
From its superior, u-topian perspective, comedy thrives on representation; caricature, for instance, is a staple of comedy. Derrida shares this strategy with comedy; Derrida in fact finds representation, as a posited image, to be the necessary character of all presentations (Ps 120, 123). However, in this Derrida would seem to repeat the slippage that takes place in Aristotle whereby all being is something produced, reproduced, ultimately, in the modern era, by man himself.(22) The world then becomes how I see it, how I produce it, how I want to represent it, since there is no authority other than the representer (D 195). So Derrida (like comedy) claims to be free of destiny; all sendings are messages without message or destination (see "Envois" [PSF 3-256]; cf. AT 34-35; Ps 391-392, 519ff). What, for example, is left of Hegel? Just quotations (Gl 1a), quotations which, like aphorisms and names, can be quoted infinitely out of any context (Ltd 65; MP 316-317; Ps 520) -- which is exactly what Derrida does in a text like Glas (196bi-198b; see his comments in AT 30) or the whole of Cinders. Everything is thus at the deconstructionist's disposal (AF 118, 134). Derrida's will to control is on display in several areas: his effort to control the 'undecidability' of language by intending (like Joyce; see IOG 102) the ambiguity of various signifiers in his texts, in his desire (like Plato and others) to choreograph a multiplicity of voices (EO 183-184; see, e.g., Cinders), and, most recently, in his refusal to allow his thought to be characterized without having a say (JD). This even goes so far as to affirm an "active forgetfulness" (MP 136; WD 247, 265; cf. Ps 649-650) whereby one tries to control one's forgetfulness and oblivion, at least a little -- by affirming it. The result of all of this would seem to show deconstruction as manipulative and frivolous as philosophy, but self-consciously so, a willful dissemination of fictions and constructs by which one is aware of being the fool.
Indeed, the self, characterized as a network of traces, a tele-phone exchange (UG 84), or (like Plato) a post-master (PSF 200, 207; Ps 271), is not attached to others but to a multiplicity of disembodied voices and languages. As a result, for all the apparent sociability of the comic-Derridean u-topia, an isolated, narcissistic individualism seems to prevail here. This, not surprisingly, is in keeping with what Frye notes as the final stage of comedy: the comic society collapses and disintegrates such that "the social units of comedy become small and esoteric, or even confined to a single individual," with "the love of the occult and the marvelous, the sense of individual detachment from routine existence" becoming more prominent (185; my emphases). Such a para-sitical individualism -- constantly subjecting all others who profess even a provisionally unified meaning to continual analysis and criticism that it always already will have been inadequate (whereby the other does not speak to deconstruction) -- coupled with a self that is no self, unbound by limits that would define it and give it responsibility, makes for the ultimate u-topia. It constitutes an escape into a faith that grants that "kind of certainty which is safe even in the uncertainty of itself, i.e., of what it believes in."(23) With Derrida, that faith is an affirmation of the innocence of becoming that aspires to the immortality of Dionysus (who survives, though torn to pieces, and who is the technician of and spectator to tragedy [e.g., in Euripides' Bacchae]) rather than mortal participation in the play of the world, an affirmation of fantasy and imagination over reality.(24) One puts on the mask of Kierkegaard's knight of faith, or Zen Buddhism's laughing Buddha, safe and secure behind an ironic smile.
To conclude. In conjuction with the comic, we have seen that the task of delimitation as set forth in the texts of Derrida is u-topian in the radical sense of the word, attempting to breach the very limit that it marks. Unravelling the texture of philosophy and its obsession for a presence infinitely deferred, Derridean deconstruction laughs at the old order, breaking the rules as it defines them, marking the end of authority, of history, of the self. Freed from constraint, deconstruction affirms the irony and play that is always already there, scattering meaning to the winds in an infinitely repeatable dissemination of significance. But this, as Derrida shows us, is what philosophy always already has been doing. Thus philosophy lives on in the texts of Derrida, for better or for worse, in the hands of couriers from a king that was never present, (doubly) bound by their oaths of service. On the one hand, there is the apparent duty and desire to be significant, to matter, to be relevant, to be useful, to impart a secret knowledge, even if that secret knowledge is only knowing that one does not know, that no one knows. On the other hand, there is a desire for freedom, bound not to be bound by the past, or even the desire for significance. One longs to retreat from politics in the streets to the magic forest of the Academy, from the world to the labyrinth of the (cogito's) imagination. Such is the double bind of comedy, of Derrida, of philosophy.(25)
NOTES
1. "Couriers," in Parables and Paradoxes, bilingual ed. (1958; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 175.
2. The abbreviations of the texts of Derrida cited in this article:
AF Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
C Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
CCP "Che cos'è la poesia?", trans. Peggy Kamuf in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 221-237.
BL "Before the Law," trans. A. Ronell and C. Roulston in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 183-220.
DO "Deconstruction and the Other," in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
D Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
EO The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1985; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
IOG Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Gl Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
JD Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Ltd Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
MP Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
AT "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6 (1984), pp. 3-37.
OG Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
OS Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Par Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Three of the four essays in this text ("Survivre," "Titre à préciser," "La loi du genre") have appeared in English translation in various books and journals.
P Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
PSF The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Ps Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Most of the essays in this text have appeared in English translation in various books and journals.
Sb "Shibboleth," trans. Joshua Wilner in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sandford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 307-347.
S Signéponge/Signsponge, bilingual ed., translated by Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
SP Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
SNS Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, bilingual ed., translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
TP The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
UG Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987). The two essays in this book, named in the title, have been translated separately in collections of essays on Joyce.
WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
3. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 24 and passim notes the constant "jesting" and "comedy" of Derrida's texts, and Eve Tavor Bannet refers to the way in which Derrida "parodies traditional forms of scientific discourse in the humanities" in Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 225, while Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 267, makes reference to the wit and possible recovery of the comic in Derrida. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 151, hints at the comic character of Derrida's though by noting its playful (almost silly) nature, and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 195, 291-293 notes the comic nature of Derrida's thinking as characteristic of one side of postmodern thought. While Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 15, 158-168, makes reference to the "levity of comedy" that results from a deconstructive a/theology that exploits the insights of Derrida, and Candace D. Lang, Irony/Humor. Critical Paradigms (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 3-4, 55-58, and passim refers to Derrida's "humorous" (i.e., postmodern ironical) critical strategies, Stephen W. Melville hints at the laughter of deconstruction in the title of his book, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
4. Richard Keller Simon, The Labyrinth of the Comic (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), pp. 8, 10.
5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 169; Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low: An Introduction to the Experience of Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 5 and passim; Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys. An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 20.
6. Side Effects (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 41-55.
7. See, e.g., SP 50, 52, 57, 67, 99 and MP 162-163, regarding the issues of "meaning", "wanting to say", representation, repetition and "nonproductive re-production." See also "Différance", "Signature Event Context" (MP 3-27, 309-333), Ltd 29-110, Par 173-174, 241, concerning these matters. Regarding the desire of philosophy, see AF 119, 129-131, 133-135, and DO 126.
8. See Levin, pp. 29-39, regarding the comic ethos as "the argument," and George McFadden, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 35ff and passim, regarding the comic ethos as "the discussion". Regarding the anti-tragic character of Plato's dialogues, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 122-135; regarding the figure of Socrates as comic, see, e.g., Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. & trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 129, 152, and Wylie Sypher, "The Meanings of the Comic" in Comedy. ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 215, 229-230.
9. W. Moelwyn Merchant, Comedy (London: Methuen and Co., 1972), p. 82. Regarding the superiority, detachment and comprehensive vision of comedy, see also Horwath, p. 6, Ricoeur, p. 323, and Kern, p. 8, 19, 37 and passim. Regarding the definition of the comic context as "ludicrous", see Neil Schaeffer, The Art of Laughter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
10. Regarding "undecidables" and "undecidability," see also Ltd 116, 145, 148-149. Regarding "quasi-transcendentals", see, e.g., Ltd 127, 152; Par 273; Ps 640ff. See D 183-184; MP 63f; P 56ff; SP 68, 102; WD 165-168 regarding the 'concept' of time and the end of history in deconstruction. For references to, and play on, the "en abyme/abîme", see, e.g., Gl 137bi, 151a, 257a; PSF 488; TP 17, 24. The u-topian character and aspirations of deconstruction (i.e., "no place", not taking place, not having a place, an event to come) emerge in a variety of ways and contexts; see, e.g., AT 33f; BL 205-206, 208-209; EO 14, 168-169; Gl 56b, 232ai; MP 22, 24; Par 150-151, 181, 234, 244-245; P 6-7; Ps 15-16; PSF 274; Sb 335; SNS 61, 63; and A. J. Cascardi, "Skepticism and Deconstruction," Philosophy and Literature 8 (1984), p. 4.
11. See "De l'essence du rire" in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1961), pp. 985-986; translated by Jonathan Mayne as "On the Essence of Laughter," The Mirror of Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 143-144. Edith Kern has made use of this distinction to explore the comic genre in her book The Absolute Comic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
12. Herbert J. Muller, The Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 15. See also W. D. Horwath, "Introduction: Theoretical Considerations" in Comic Drama: The European Heritage (London: Methuen and Co., 1978), pp. 2-3, and W. G. McCollom's discussion of comedy in terms of The Divine Average: A View of Comedy (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), p. 7 and entirety.
13. E.g., Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Caputo, pp. 257ff ("An Ethics of Dissemination"), 293; Lang, p. 66; Melville, pp. 154-155. Bannet, pp. 184-227, locates Derrida within the "logic of dissent" of structuralism in post-war France. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), attempts to find an ethical demand in Derridean deconstruction via the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.
14. In De l'esprit, nearly 8 pages (147-154) are dominated by a footnote, a textual matter that is obscured in the English translation, Of Spirit. What is even more remarkable is that the footnote in many ways ties together much of what Derrida is trying to bring to light in the "main body" of the text, and is therefore hardly "mariginal" in the sense of "unimportant."
15. See Andrew J. McKenna, "Postmodernism: It's Future Perfect" in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 228-242. Cf. David Farrell Krell's "The Perfect Future: A Note on Heidegger and Derrida" in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 114-121.
16. Melville, p. 154. Cf. WD 118-119 and the "community" of the question(s) (of philosophy).
17. A parallel between the comedian's attitude toward utopia and philosophy's can be seen in Plato: Plato excluded himself from his dialogues, and excluded all philosophers of his type (i.e., "poets") from the utopia he portrays in The Republic. And, of course, the Platonic dialogues have been used in a variety of ways politically.
Regarding the unclear formulation of the 'conclusion' of comedy, see Frye, p. 169. Regarding the ethics of comedy, see Charney, p. 145, and Levin, p. 22.
18. Joseph Margolis, "Deconstruction; or The Mystery of the Mystery of the Text" in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, p. 149.
On deconstruction's inhabiting the text, see, e.g., OG 24; WD 194, cf. 284-285. Regarding the nonoppositional character of deconstruction, see, e.g., D 3ff; MP 329; P 40-42; MP 27, 136; WD 252, 256-257; cf. D 201; Gl 187a-188a, 232ai.
See DO 120 on how Derrida's political stances are detached from his intellectual project of deconstruction. See also WD 274, Ltd 141, Christie MacDonald's comments in questioning Derrida at EO 174, and Hartman, p. 24, regarding the conservative nature of Derrida's deconstruction.
19. It is interesting in this regard to note the following prefatory remark in JD: "The guiding idea of the exposition comes from computers: G.B. would have liked to systematize J.D.'s thought to the point of turning it into an interactive program which, in spite of its difficulty, would in principle be accessible to any user."
20. Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1985), p. 79.
21. Martin Heidegger, "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" in Nietzsche, Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 224.
22. For an account of this slippage, see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 83, 86, 97-105, 255f.
23. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 23.
24. See Merchant, pp. 79-82 ("The Metaphysics of Comedy") and Clifford Leach, Tragedy (London: Methuen and Company, 1969), p. 77, regarding the ultimate attitude of comedy. See also, Kern, pp. 13, 41-49, 114-15 and passim, regarding the triumph of fantasy and imagination over reality that occurs in comedy. See Hartman, p. 24, regarding the forced nature of Derrida's jesting, Schürmann, p. 321n.44, regarding Derrida's apparent regret over the loss of the One, and the readiness of some Christian theology to take up deconstruction (see, e.g., note 3), all of which suggest these conclusions. Carl Raschke, "The Deconstruction of God" in Thomas J.J. Altizer, et. al., Deconstruction and Theology, (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 29-30, suggests the link between deconstruction and the immortality of Dionysus.
25. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Boston, MA in October, 1992. My thanks to Jim Walter at Sinclair Community College, who read a draft of this paper and provided helpful suggestions. Some of the work for this paper was done while attending an NEH Summer Seminar during 1991 at the University of California-Riverside, "Postmodern Postures: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty." My thanks go to the NEH and especially the seminar director, Bernd Magnus, for their support.
[After Post-Modernism Conference. Copyright 1994 by the author.]
Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview
On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia), no. 1/1983: p. 42
In 1982, Paul Brennan spoke to Jacques Derrida at the Collège de France. He specified his questions to issues arising out of Derrida's De la grammatologie.
P.B.: How would you respond to the assertion that you are trying to set up a kind of literary science?
J.D.: It's not really a science in the traditional sense. It's strategy for interpreting sciences, and philosophy also... to deconstruct them, to look at them from many points of view (but of course also from a political point of view) and to show the implicit limits of sciences. For instance, language sciences are the dominant models of science on the French scene.
P.B.: What can a grammatologist do that other philosophers and linguists can't do?
J.D.: First I must say [laughs] that since grammatology is not a positive science... nor a philosophy, there is no "grammatologist". The book on grammatology is not a book for grammatology; it's also a book which insists on the limits of grammatology.
P.B.: You talk about living languages, where the written language closely reflects the spoken language. And you talk also about dead languages, where the written language has no connection with the spoken language. If you look around the world at the hundreds of languages which exist at the moment, which ones would you say are very much alive and which ones are approaching death?
J.D.: Excuse me, but I never said exactly so. I never said that there are totally living languages and that there are dead languages. I think that there is a part of death in every language. And the opposition of life and death in language is a false opposition. The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language. And this is what I'm fighting against. So, I would not engage myself in saying that there is a hierarchy of more or less living languages today. There are more or less powerful languages - on for instance the technical level, on the economic, or scientific or military level. There are some languages - for instance, English, Russian, Chinese - which are spoken not only by more and more people, but by people and nations which are, for the moment, more powerful than others. But I wouldn't draw the consequence that they are more "living" than the others.
P.B.: You do make a contrast between spoken language and written language and the relationship between them...
J.D.: Ah... it's not an opposition. What I've been doing in the last few years is to extend I mean to give an absolute extension to - the concept of writing so that even the spoken language is written in some way. I mean, there is what I call an "arche-writing" (arche-écriture) which is implied within the spoken language, which implies that the concept of writing is transformed, of course. So there is no opposition between them. For instance, tape recordings are writings in some sense.
P.B.: You've suggested we should stop thinking about various media - speech and writin - that we should stop thinking about them ethically and that the two media of language are beyond good and evil. This obviously puts you at variation with someone like Marshall McLuhan who talks about the medium in very ethical terms - "the microphone created Hitler" and so on.
J.D.: Mm... I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension - the overwhelming extension - of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too.
P.B.: You end your book with a quotation from Rousseau, who has written about writing as a kind of dreaming. He says:
The dreams of bad nights are given to us as philosophy. Younwill say that I too am a dreamer. I admit this. But I do what others fail to do. I give my dreams as dreams and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.
My question to you is: are you allowing me to interview in much the same spirit - as a dream to be taken as the listener or reader wishes?
J.D.: Yes, but if I were to indulge in saying so, I would imply that I am totally awakened while dreaming, and I have no illusion about that.
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*this article is officially published at http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/so.html
Derrida Interview with Robert Maggiori
appeared in:
Le more cahier livres de Libération, Jeudi, 24 novembre 1994, pp. I-III
Translated by Hans-Peter Jaeck
Q: After year Spectres de Marx you publish at the same time with Politiques de l'amitié a still much more political text: Force de loi (dt.: legal power, 1991). called is that, you wants for the rumor an end to prepare, whereafter the Dekonstruktion before questions of the ethics, the social one and the policy resigns as it were nihilistically?
A: No, primary intention is not the retort or the final speech. Since beginning before nearly 30 years has itself my work under the indication, says we, a ethical-political affirmation developed. It concerned itself first with the question of the political one, the moral one, the fair one and the right. One of the manuals will have been the problem of the nationalism. This topic gewidmteten seminars Politiques de l'amitié prepared, particularly for the topic of the Autchtonen, the birth and the fraternity. That is only one example. It actually concerns the responsibility generally - since years the topic of my instruction meetings. A new experience to make with the ethical-political responsibility, to which we are called, i.e., itself the collateral and conceptualnesses too entaeussern, which have an old and tough history: that is a painful experience, thus a dangerous and a Unabschliessbares. The vibrations of our current time make these unimpaired collateral many faster homeless than all dekonstruktiven discourses. The entrance to these requirements after responsibility runs over critical ways, over an obviously destructive, destructive Negativitaet, which like a shade also still the allerverantwortungsbewussteste Affirmation accompanies, the unabschliessbare Affirmation Gerechtigkeit/des of right. One may stop never times to shift the dominating term of the democracy in unrest: the sympathetic, republican and universal fraternity can let the symbolic of the blood return at any time, the nation, the Ethnie or the sublimated Anthrozentrismus. On the other hand one will not react appropriately to these necessities, if one thinks not in other way and writes for not exercising thus without any force opposite thoughtless readings and withdrawn paths of the legitimacy. Particularly in the area of the policy, where one believes, who sloping courses follow, which justify simplifying and p;after bereinstimmung looking for Rhetorik, to be allowed to demand from the reader or the voter not too much trouble.
Q: One does not hesitate today to explain the ideal of the emancipation and release for outdated. They do not support such an explanation. Why not? And does one have to have in order to animate, the Moeglihkeiten of the justice, the right think such ideals again again, at the risk, shows that Gerechtigkeit/das right requires from the outset for force?
A: They know very well that I was never, even as it usual fashion, something against the ideal of the emancipation and release (sexually, culturally, linguistically, socially, economically, politically) said or along-talked also only in such a way. I remain progressistic in my kind. Let us nevertheless steadily continue, the classical inheritance of the clearing-up, the Metaphysiken of consciousness, the subject, the liberty, to ask the property or the reappropriation of the cultural tradition again. To do without but without on other clearing-up. And by, more than before, arguing from different control rooms for the Emazipation or release, even, where a certain Heteronomie can be unavoidable - and to be may! Instead of throwing these slogans on the garbage: why them a new value in use don't give, recalling the power of their reliability? That may appear impossible, but without this other language it will not give politics, which are worth the trouble. Above all also no justice. Not the right is it, then one could say, which demands the force (the right must remain disarmed and a rule-free and term-free respect erheischen, an infinite respect for the singularity), but the obligation, the justice as much as writing possible into the calculable public of a law. This obligation is difficult to think and in the work set: the justice becomes never outside of the shape of a law effective, outside of a legal power, which exceeds it however nevertheless. One calls that the policy or history.
In Politiken of the friendship you grant much place, which defines the policy over the distinction of friend and enemy to Carl Schmitt. Meanwhile you add a long note here, in order to hold at least an unavoidable ambiguity within limits. Were you that one would make you - like already before some theoreticians extreme linking - responsible for the rehabilitation of this philosopher, afraid you of its anti-Semitic affect, which had accepted extreme an extent, remind, and of which you say, he had remained probably also after that time, when he explained himself openly as it, Nazi?
Rehabilitate in no case! The word and the gesture frighten me. I referred unambiguously to the Nazi mash and the Antisemitismus Schmitts. It dedicated chapter are from me consciously wanted minutioese questioning of its venture, its Vorannahmen, its diskursiven strategy, its anchorage in the European right, its oppositional logic, its dezisionistischen thinking, the sovereignty and the state of emergency. Briefly said, I believe, one must Schmitt, like Heidegger, again read - and also what takes place between them. If one decided the watchfulness and the daring courage of this reactionary philosopher seriously takes, straight, where it is on restoration out, one can estimate its influence on the left one, in addition, at the same time the disturbing affinities - to Leo bunch, Benjamin and unites others, which do not suspect that. To understand and not formalize the law from these paradoxes - is that not a good introduction to the political tasks from tomorrow? When sleepless guard saw Schmitt me coming or as scouts with the siege its fear courage, what the European order, its political theology, their international right, their state -, war and technique terms, their term of the parliamentary democracy and the media threatens. It is not easy to dismantle the schmittianischen discourse if one wants to do that honestly, and even that is not even sufficient; but I ask myself, whether ies is not one of the useful exercises, in order new political thinking, new thinking of the policy to sharpen.
Q: The Aristoteles awarded sentence - O my friends, it does not give a friend - is the red thread of their reading. At one point you set in addition, what he states over the friendship or the friend to translate into terms of the love but you leave the dissolution in the schwebe. What does he say about the love?
A: I believe, the book act particularly of the love. Tacitly, in the Gleichnis or secretly perhaps - however with each sentence a restrained singing reminds it of the magic transmission, from which you stated evenly, would remain in the schwebe. There is by the way one point perhaps, where everything remains in this book in this dangerous, Nietz coming thinking adds and to which I, as you know, gave much attention. A paper over the love must be a dear act, an act: an explanation and an endorsement, the answer give to the love in the right name, in order to use another word here Nietz. This triftigkeit excludes neither the deceit picture nor the verruecktheit. With respect to the reason I could never differentiate between the love and the friendship, nor want. But over a friend or a friend -I love you to say to be able and for amour fou one must cross so many historical gates into the own body, an immense forest of interdictions and distinctions, code, Scenarien, positions. Perhaps in order to animate again the voice magnetizing loving, which before all distinction between loved and are loved, of a love and a friendship, Eros and Philia, Eros and Agape, a mercy, a fraternity and a next love sounds. This singing lures us on the soil of a labyrinthischen and and-codable, seductive and desperate history. I risk there gladly a step, I may also lose themselves there, to me the time take lose me there. But this Chnace can do us also, strength of word, one moment, a jealous view or a Liebkosung assigns to become. Perhaps that occurs, but without or the other one to betray or the others one cannot do of it account placing.
Q: In order to update your analyses, you did consciously without illustrations, which you the political or medium "Aktualitaet" infer would have can and which would have ordered a canvas to reflection. That is disappointing. One would e.g. gladly have seen, what from the definition its would have become, which says Kant, not only regarding the philanthropist, but also regarding the people friend, on the humanitarian or concerning the process of the fraternal humanization, which you analyze.
A: I hope nevertheless that these "current" purchases one come there into the sense, where I mean allusions not unfold cannot still also do must. The question of the humanitarian one is an example under thousand others. By so many geopolitical tragedies through the interventions in the name of the humanitarian one are inclined to multiply itself it require today, then I, after a new right, assume a more appropriate name, another term of humans - and of the alive one at all. These interventions mark first, then it seems me, the daily confirmed border of the states and the international institutions. Neither their power nor its right, neither their political discourses nor the interpretation of humans or the human rights, who justify it, are on the height its that we, if one may say in such a way, expect from us, in view of the new world-wide disasters, the hunger emergencies, the foreign trade indebtedness, the genocides, the mafia, the inequality before death and before the science, the nameless wars, the crimes against the humanity, apart from all the war crimes and the political crimes. Even, where Kant differentiates the people friend more clearly from the philanthropist, this cannot be we no more humans of the Philsophie or the human, still also the Kanti subject, from which I try to show that it remains still all too very like brothers, clarified male, familial, ethnical or national etc.. But I try to become fair other possibilities of the kantischen discourse which it resumes or shifts. Permit me to point out at least once clearly that it is difficult at the many different in this point as also to speak balanced about it.
Q: They take off with all canonical discourses over the friendship on the exclusion of the friendship between women and that the friendship between a man and a woman. In it does the outstanding feature of the history of the friendship lie? And which were thereby the influences on the constitution of political models e.g. the democracy?
A: It does not concern mind you, to denials that a friendship between women or between man and woman is not possible, completely in the opposite. It goes to a certain extent and all only into Europe around analyzing history through the shape of the friendship - the pair of friends and its testamentischen federation -, phallozentrische through, controlling, canonical became and alone a legal claim on political, philosophical and literary archiving kept. The interpretation of this archives is not easily, rather an endless affair, but it opens to material history (it is now diskursiv or not), de for this model to the political supremacy help. I began to follow to this so rich and so distorted motive of the fraternity: by Greek and Christian representations through, in the process and after the French revolution - so had trouble with the eddy around this into many eyes so Christian word. And despite the intensive effort of the Vergeistigung, sanctioning, the Universalisierung the ideal meaning of the fraternity - and even those the praised and sworn fraternity - remains verwurzelt in the family or in the birth (and thus in its national nature: Blood, soil, Autochtonie) and in the maleness, in the virtue of the sons, the heroes and the soldiers. Thus the topic appears in its Klassizitaet: the virtue, in particular the political virtue, the virtue of the love and the necessity to entreissen this virtue their and RON trichloroethylene mash peculiar vorvaeterlihen. The civilian, civic equality between the men and the women, which is in its kind, particularly with us, only newer date, remains, in order to mark out here only this aspect, still another affair furthermore future. The Brueerlichkeit was helpful to the democratization and her even their range give could, but this horizon marks also a border. No historical break will have become with this Fraternalismus finished, about whose meaning we have to think today, particularly regarding a future democracy: neither the circulation from the Greek to the Christian world (whose usual interpretation I denies in this point), still the post office-revolutionary republic (you look yourselves the exciting writings of Michelet or from Hugo - by through I the little bit a French epoch of these Fraternisierung pursue), still the revolution of the psychoanalysis, still also the today's time, and straight that is the one which can be estimated at most, also at most disturbing section of this book: the writings of those, for which the authority of this greco Christian paradigm is no longer natural: Nietz and still many more ueberfeinerter, more quietly, Maurice Blanchot or Jean Luc Nancy. The fraternity, so legend I sometimes, is worried it perhaps not too much.
Q: Jacques Derrida, who are your friends? Not: whose friend are it, but whom love you, since now times the first gentleman-out-rising up moment of your history of the friendship points out with Platon or Aristoteles that one should prefer it, to even love, instead of being friend?
A: My friends and my friends! Even if time and space were left us in addition, I would be silent here. The public answer to this question would be located in my book, sometimes between the lines, sometimes (toward end) in certain names. Those do not designate lle, but they state enough over it that all - male and womanlike - could be called only in the Singular, in the irreplaceable Vokativ. As you see, everything hangs on the Frge the singularity and the number: can one have more as a friend, more than one friend? How many? And where with the equality, the otherness one and the justice in this relationship? Perhaps with this "more as one" and "more than one" the policy begins. The sensitivity and the perseverance, which one spends on the investigation of this place of the Aporien, make perhaps ready and sensitively to the friendship, as I it love. It gives her more opportunity, but all that is never a condition. The friendship does not place conditions, it expects no rueckerstattung: Equality without reciprocity or symmetry. And everywhere, where also only a friendly thought is gently the brother authority, and it those of the idealized brother, asks, it shifts, to worry can, resembles this friendly thought, if he writes himself down, perhaps the thought of a friend; but why not, if the sister is not any more a special case of the brother?
Q: The most beautiful sides of the Politiques de l'amitié are in my opinion those, which dedicate you to Maurice Blanchot. But its term of the friendship seems nevertheless - indivisible and unreversible friendship, for which one leaves, without traces too, a permeable-passive answer for the Nichtpraesenz unknown quantities permits, or: Appeal to dying, coinciding with the separation - not possibly, untenable. Can this term entrance into a policy of the friendship find?
A: No, and the whole problem lies there. No, if one limits the policy - or the democracy - to its today identifiable or unangezweifelten forms. I dream to also always be about a policy, which remains an effective policy, without the possibility of this friendship, so improbably it may do force beyond the mutual cooperative, the neighborly proximity, the identification. Briefly, a policy, which does not do to this friendship opposite wrongly. Is that bare a dream? Perhaps. Still one would have to give one day to it: which seems impossible, already one promised and remains thus conceivablly. We keep it in thinking memory of everyone times, if we love, if we pass the words on love or friendship transferred and. If we it, the love and the friendship make each mark. Perhaps at the origin of the policy this endorsement confessed, even if at this point - inkommensurabel with the secret - a policy remains inadequat and must remain.
This article was translated from German to English. Below is the original text in German that taken from http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/force.html
Derrida zum Freundespreis
erschienen in:
Le cahier livres de Libération, Jeudi, 24 novembre 1994, pp. I-III
Übersetzt von Hans-Peter Jäck
Q: Ein Jahr nach Spectres de Marx publizieren Sie gleichzeitig mit Politiques de l'amitié einen noch viel politischeren Text: Force de loi (dt.: Gesetzeskraft, 1991). Heißt das, Sie wollen dem Gerücht ein Ende bereiten, wonach die Dekonstruktion vor Fragen der Ethik, des Sozialen und der Politik gleichsam nihilistisch abdankt?
A: Nein, primäre Absicht ist nicht die Erwiderung oder das Plädoyer. Seit Beginn vor fast 30 Jahren hat sich meine Arbeit unter dem Zeichen, sagen wir, einer ethisch-politischen Bejahung entwickelt. Sie beschäftigte sich zunächst mit der Frage des Politischen, des Moralischen, des Gerechten und des Rechts. Einer der Leitfäden wird das Problem des Nationalismus gewesen sein. Die diesem Thema gewidmteten Seminare haben Politiques de l'amitié vorbereitet, besonders die zum Thema des Autchtonen, der Geburt und der Brüderlichkeit. Das ist nur ein Beispiel. Tatsächlich geht es um die Verantwortung im allgemeinen - seit Jahren das Thema meiner Unterrichtsveranstaltungen. Eine neue Erfahrung zu machen mit der ethisch-politischen Verantwortung, zu der wir aufgerufen sind, das heißt, sich der Sicherheiten und Begrifflichkeiten zu entäußern, die eine alte und zähe Geschichte haben: das ist eine schmerzvolle Erfahrung, also etwa Gefährliches und Unabschließbares. Die Erschütterungen unserer heutigen Zeit machen diese ungestörten Sicherheiten viel schneller heimatlos als alle dekonstruktiven Diskurse. Der Zugang zu diesen Ansprüchen nach Verantwortung verläuft über kritische Wege, über eine offenkundig zerstörerische, destruktive Negativität, die wie ein Schatten auch noch die allerverantwortungsbewußteste Affirmation begleitet, die unabschließbare Affirmation der Gerechtigkeit/des Rechts. Man darf niemal aufhören, den dominierenden Begriff der Demokratie in Unruhe zu versetzen: die sympathische, republikanische und universelle Brüderlichkeit kann jederzeit das Symbolische des Blutes wiederkehren lassen, die Nation, die Ethnie oder den sublimierten Anthrozentrismus. Andererseits wird man auf diese Notwendigkeiten nicht angemessen reagieren, wenn man nicht in anderer Weise denkt und schreibt, also nicht ohne irgendwelche Gewalt gegenüber leichtfertigen Lektüren und ausgetretenen Pfaden der Legitimierung auszuüben. Besonders auf dem Gebiet der Politik, wo man glaubt, den abschüssigen Bahnen folgen, die vereinfachende und nach p;bereinstimmung suchende Rhetorik rechtfertigen, dem Leser oder dem Wähler nicht allzuviel Mühe abverlangen zu dürfen.
Q: Man zögert heute nicht, das Ideal der Emanzipation und der Befreiung für veraltet zu erklären. Sie unterstützen eine solche Erklärung nicht. Warum nicht? Und muß man, um solche Ideale neu zu beleben, die Möglihkeiten der Gerechtigkeit, des Rechts neu denken, auf die Gefahr hin, zeigen zu müssen, daß die Gerechtigkeit/das Recht von Anfang an nach Gewalt verlangt?
A: Sie wissen sehr gut, daß ich niemals, selbst als es gängige Mode war, etwas gegen das Ideal der Emanzipation und der Befreiung (sexuell, kulturell, sprachlich, sozial, ökonomisch, politisch) gesagt oder auch nur so dahergeredet habe. Ich bleibe auf meine Art progressistisch. Laßt uns doch beständig fortfahren, das klassische Erbe der Aufklärung, die Metaphysiken des Bewußtseins, des Subjekts, der Freiheit, des Eigentums oder der Wiederaneignung der kulturellen Tradition neu zu befragen. Aber ohne auf andere Aufklärungen zu verzichten. Und indem wir, mehr als zuvor, von verschiedenen Warten aus für die Emazipation oder die Befreiung streiten, selbst da, wo eine gewisse Heteronomie unvermeidbar sein kann - und sein darf! Statt diese Parolen auf den Müll zu werfen: warum ihnen nicht einen neuen Gebrauchswert geben, eingedenk der Macht ihrer Glaubwürdigkeit? Das mag unmöglich erscheinen, doch ohne diese andere Sprache wird es keine Politik geben, die der Mühe lohnt. Vor allem auch keine Gerechtigkeit. Nicht das Recht selbst ist es, so könnte man sagen, das die Gewalt fordert (das Recht muß entwaffnet bleiben und einen regelfreien und begriffsfreien Respekt erheischen, einen unendlichen Respekt für die Singularität), sondern die Pflicht, die Gerechtigkeit soviel wie möglich in die kalkulierbare Allgemeinheit eines Gesetzes einzuschreiben. Diese Pflicht ist schwer zu denken und ins Werk zu setzen: die Gerechtigkeit wird niemals außerhalb der Gestalt eines Gesetzes wirksam, außerhalb einer Gesetzeskraft, die sie aber dennoch überschreitet. Das nennt man die Politik oder die Geschichte.
In Politiken der Freundschaft räumen Sie Carl Schmitt viel Platz ein, der die Politik über die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind definiert. Indes fügen Sie hier eine lange Anmerkung an, um wenigstens eine unvermeidbare Zweideutigkeit in Grenzen zu halten. Fürchteten Sie, daß man Sie - wie schon zuvor einige Theoretiker der extremen Linken - für die Rehabilitierung dieses Denkers verantwortlich machen würde, an dessen antisemitischen Affekt, der ein extremes Ausmaß angenommen hatte, Sie erinnern, und von dem Sie sagen, er sei wahrscheinlich auch nach jener Zeit, als er sich offen dazu erklärt hat, Nazi geblieben?
Auf keinen Fall rehabilitieren! Das Wort und die Geste erschrecken mich. Ich habe unzweideutig auf den Nazismus und den Antisemitismus Schmitts hingewiesen. Die ihm gewidmeten Kapitel sind eine von mir bewußt gewollte minutiöse Infragestellung seines Unterfangens, seiner Vorannahmen, seiner diskursiven Strategie, seiner Verankerung im europäischen Recht, seiner oppositionellen Logik, seines dezisionistischen Denkens, der Souveränität und des Ausnahmezustands. Kurz gesagt, ich glaube, man muß Schmitt, wie Heidegger, neu lesen - und auch das, was sich zwischen ihnen abspielt. Wenn man die Wachsamkeit und den Wagemut dieses entschieden reaktionären Denkers ernst nimmt, gerade da, wo es auf Restauration aus ist, kann man seinen Einfluß auf die Linke ermessen, aber auch zugleich die verstörenden Affinitäten - zu Leo Strauss, Benjamin und einigen anderen, die das selbst nicht ahnen. Das Gesetz aus diesen Paradoxien heraus zu verstehen und zu formalisieren - ist das nicht eine gute Einführung in die politischen Aufgaben von morgen? Als schlafloser Wächter oder als Späher bei der Belagerung hat Schmitt mir seinem Furchtesmut kommen sehen, was die europäische Ordnung, ihre politische Theologie, ihr internationales Recht, ihre Staats-, Kriegs- und Technikbegriffe, ihren Begriff der parlamentarische Demokratie und der Medien bedroht. Es ist nicht leicht, den schmittianischen Diskurs zu demontieren, wenn man das ehrlich tun will, und selbst das ist noch nicht einmal ausreichend; aber ich frage mich, ob ies nicht eine der nützlichen Übungen ist, um ein neues politisches Denken, ein neues Denken der Politik zu schärfen.
Q: Der Aristoteles zugesprochene Satz - O meine Freunde, es gibt keinen Freund - ist der rote Faden ihrer Lektüre. An einem Punkt setzen Sie dazu an, das, was er über die Freundschaft oder den Freund aussagt, in Begriffe der Liebe zu übersetzen, doch Sie lassen die Auflösung in der Schwebe. Was sagt er denn über die Liebe?
A: Ich glaube, das Buch handelt vor allem von der Liebe. Stillschweigend, im Gleichnis oder insgeheim vielleicht - aber bei jedem Satz erinnert ein verhaltener Gesang an die magische Übertragung, von der Sie eben behauptet haben, sie bliebe in der Schwebe. Es gibt übrigens einen Punkt, wo alles in diesem Buch in diesem gefährlichen vielleicht verharrt, das Nietzsche dem kommenden Denken zurechnet und dem ich, wie Sie wissen, viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt habe. Eine Abhandlung über die Liebe muß ein Liebesakt sein, ja ein Akt: eine Erklärung und eine Bürgschaft, die Antwort gibt im rechten Namen der Liebe, um ein anderes Wort Nietzsches hier zu verwenden. Diese Triftigkeit schließt weder das Trugbild noch die Verrücktheit aus. Im Grunde habe ich nie zwischen der Liebe und der Freundschaft unterscheiden können, noch wollen. Aber um einem Freund oder einer Freundin -ich liebe Dich- sagen zu können und für amour fou muß man bis in den eigenen Körper so viele historische Gatter durchschreiten, einen immensen Wald von Untersagungen und Unterscheidungen, Codes, Scenarien, Positionen. Vielleicht um die Stimme einer magnetisierenden Liebe neu zu beleben, die vor aller Unterscheidung zwischen lieben und geliebt werden, Liebe und Freundschaft, Eros und Philia, Eros und Agape, Barmherzigkeit, Brüderlichkeit und Nächstenliebe ertönt. Dieser Gesang lockt uns auf den Boden einer labyrinthischen und undechiffrierbaren, verführerischen und verzweifelten Geschichte. Ich riskiere dort gerne einen Schritt, ich mag mich dort auch verlieren, mir die Zeit nehmen, mich dort zu verlieren. Aber diese Chnace kann uns auch, kraft eines Wortes, eines Moments, eines eifersüchtigen Blicks oder einer Liebkosung zuteil werden. Das kommt vielleicht vor, aber ohne den einen oder den anderen, das einen oder den anderen zu verraten, kann man davon nicht Rechenschaft ablegen.
Q: Um Ihre Analysen zu aktualisieren, haben Sie bewußt auf Illustrationen verzichtet, die Sie der politischen oder Medien-"Aktualität" entnehmen hätten können und die der Reflexion eine Leinwand geboten hätten. Das ist enttäuschend. Man hätte z. B. gerne gesehen, was aus der Definition dessen geworden wäre, was Kant sagt, nicht nur im Hinblick auf den Philanthropen, sondern auch im Hinblick auf den Menschenfreund, auf das Humanitäre oder bezüglich des Prozesses der brüderlichen Humanisierung, den Sie analysieren.
A: Ich hoffe doch, daß diese "aktuellen" Bezüge einem selbst dort in den Sinn kommen, wo ich meine Anspielungen nicht entfalten kann, noch das auch tun muß. Die Frage des Humanitären ist ein Beispiel unter tausend anderen. Durch so viele geo-politische Tragödien hindurch neigen die Interventionen im Namen des Humanitären dazu, sich zu vervielfältigen, sie verlangen heute, so vermute ich, nach einem neuen Recht, einem angemesseneren Namen, einem anderen Begriff vom Menschen - und vom Lebendigen überhaupt. Diese Interventionen markieren zunächst, so scheint es mir, die alltäglich bestätigte Grenze der Staaten und der internationalen Institutionen. Weder ihre Macht noch ihr Recht, weder ihre politischen Diskurse noch die Deutung des Menschen oder der Menschenrechte, die sie begründen, sind auf der Höhe dessen, was wir, wenn man so sagen darf, von uns erwarten, angesichts der neuen weltweiten Katastrophen, der Hungersnöte, der Außenhandelsverschuldung, der Völkermorde, der Mafia, der Ungleichheit vor dem Tode und vor der Wissenschaft, der namenlosen Kriege, der Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, neben all den Kriegsverbrechen und den politischen Verbrechen. Selbst dort, wo Kant deutlicher den Menschenfreund vom Philanthropen unterscheidet, kann dieses wir nicht mehr der Mensch der Philsophie oder des Humanismus sein, noch auch das Kantische Subjekt, von dem ich zu zeigen versuche, daß es noch allzu sehr brüderlich, verklärt männlich, familial, ethnisch oder national usw. bleibt. Aber ich versuche, anderen Möglichkeiten des kantischen Diskurses gerecht zu werden, die er weiterführt oder verschiebt. Erlauben Sie mir, zumindest einmal deutlich darauf hinzuweisen, daß es in diesem Punkt wie auch an den vielen anderen schwierig ist, ausgewogen darüber zu sprechen.
Q: Sie heben bei allen kanonischen Diskursen über die Freundschaft auf den Ausschluß der Freundschaft zwischen Frauen und dem der Freundschaft zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau ab. Liegt darin das Hauptmerkmal der Geschichte der Freundschaft? Und was waren dabei die Einflüsse auf die Konstituierung politischer Modelle wie z.B. der Demokratie?
A: Es handelt sich wohlgemerkt nicht darum, zu leugnen, daß eine Freundschaft zwischen Frauen oder zwischen Mann und Frau nicht möglich sei, ganz im Gegenteil. Es geht gewissermaßen und allererst in Europa darum, die Geschichte zu durchleuchten, durch die hindurch die phallozentrische Gestalt der Freundschaft - des Freundespaares und ihres testamentischen Bundes - beherrschend, kanonisch geworden ist und allein einen Rechtsanspruch auf politische, philosophische und literarische Archivierung behalten hat. Die Interpretation dieses Archivs ist nicht leicht, vielmehr eine endlose Angelegenheit, doch sie öffnet sich zur realen Geschichte (sei sie nun diskursiv oder nicht), de diesem Modell zur politischen Vorherrschaft verholfen hat. Ich habe begonnen, diesem so reichhaltigen und so verzwickten Motiv der Brüderlichkeit nachzugehen: durch griechische und christliche Darstellungen hindurch, im Verlauf und nach der Französischen Revolution - die sich so schwer tat mit dem Wirbel um dieses in vieler Augen so christliche Wort. Und trotz der intensiven Anstrengung der Vergeistigung, der Sanktionierung, der Universalisierung bleibt die ideale Bedeutung der Brüderlichkeit - und selbst die der gelobten und geschworenen Brüderlichkeit - verwurzelt in der Familie oder in der Geburt (und damit in seiner nationalen Natur: Blut, Boden, Autochtonie) und in der Männlichkeit, in der Tugend der Söhne, der Helden und der Soldaten. So erscheint das Thema in seiner Klassizität: die Tugend, insbesondere die politische Tugend, die Tugend der Liebe und die Notwendigkeit, diese Tugend ihrem eigentümlich vorväterlihen Androzentrismus zu entreißen. Die zivile, staatsbürgerliche Gleichheit zwischen den Männern und den Frauen, die in ihrer Art, besonders bei uns, erst neueren Datums ist, bleibt, um hier nur diesen Aspekt anzureißen, noch eine Angelegenheit ferner Zukunft. Die Brüerlichkeit war der Demokratisierung dienlich und hat ihr sogar ihre Reichweite geben können, aber dieser Horizont markiert auch eine Grenze. Kein geschichtlicher Bruch wird mit diesem Fraternalismus fertig geworden sein, über dessen Bedeutung wir heute nachzudenken haben, besonders hinsichtlich einer zukünftigen Demokratie: weder die Umwälzung von der griechischen zur christlichen Welt (deren gängige Interpretation ich in diesem Punkt bestreite), noch die post-revolutionäre Republik (schauen Sie sich die aufwühlenden Schriften von Michelet oder von Hugo an - durch die hindurch ich ein wenig verbissen eine französische Epoche dieser Fraternisierung verfolge), noch die Revolution der Psychoanalyse, noch auch die heutige Zeit, und gerade das ist der am meisten zu schätzende, auch der am meisten beunruhigende Abschnitt dieses Buches: die Schriften derer, für die die Autorität dieses greco-christlichen Paradigmas nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist: Nietzsche und noch viel überfeinerter, leiser, Maurice Blanchot oder Jean-Luc Nancy. Die Brüderlichkeit, so sage ich mir manchmal, beunruhigt sie vielleicht nicht allzu sehr.
Q: Jacques Derrida, wer sind Ihre Freunde? Nicht: wessen Freund sind Sie, sondern wen lieben Sie, da nun mal das erste herrausragende Moment Ihrer Geschichte der Freundschaft bei Platon oder Aristoteles aufzeigt, daß man es vorziehen sollte, selbst zu lieben, statt Freund zu sein?
A: Meine Freunde und meine Freundinnen! Selbst wenn uns Zeit und Raum dazu gelassen wäre, würde ich hier schweigen. Die öffentliche Antwort auf diese Frage würde in meinem Buch stehen, manchmal zwischen den Zeilen, manchmal (gegen Ende) in bestimmten Eigennamen. Die benennen nicht lle, doch sie sagen genug darüber aus, daß alle - männlich und weiblich - nur im Singular genannt werden könnten, im unersetzbaren Vokativ. Wie Sie sehen, hängt alles an der Frge der Singularität und der Zahl: kann man mehr als einen Freund, mehr als eine Freundin haben? Wieviele? Und wohin mit der Gleichheit, der Andersheit und der Gerechtigkeit in dieser Beziehung? Mit diesem "mehr als einer" und "mehr als eine" beginnt vielleicht die Politik. Die Sensibilität und die Ausdauer, die man für die Erkundung dieses Ortes der Aporien aufwendet, macht vielleicht bereit und empfänglich für die Freundschaft, so wie ich sie liebe. Sie gibt ihr mehr Gelegenheit, aber all das ist niemals eine Bedingung. Die Freundschaft stellt keine Bedingungen, sie erwartet keine Rückerstattung: Gleichheit ohne Reziprozität oder Symmetrie. Und überall, wo auch nur ein freundschaftlicher Gedanke sanft die Bruder-Autorität, und sei es die des idealisierten Bruders, befragen, verschieben, beunruhigen kann, ähnelt dieser freundschaftliche Gedanke, wenn er sich niederschreibt, vielleicht dem Gedanken einer Freundin; aber warum nicht, wenn die Schwester nicht mehr ein Sonderfall des Bruders ist?
Q: Die schönsten Seiten der Politiques de l'amitié sind meiner Ansicht nach die, die Sie Maurice Blanchot widmen. Aber doch scheint sein Begriff der Freundschaft - unteilbare und unumkehrbare Freundschaft, für die man, ohne Spuren zu hinterlassen, eine durchlässig-passive Antwort für die Nichtpräsenz des Unbekannten zuläßt, oder: Appell ans Sterben, zusammenfallend mit der Trennung - unmöglich, unhaltbar. Kann dieser Begriff Eingang in eine Politik der Freundschaft finden?
A: Nein, und da liegt das ganze Problem. Nein, wenn man die Politik - oder die Demokratie - auf ihre heute identifizierbaren oder unangezweifelten Formen begrenzt. Ich träume von einer Politik, die eine wirksame Politik bleibt, ohne der Möglichkeit dieser Freundschaft, so unwahrscheinlich sie auch immer sein mag, Gewalt anzutun, jenseits der wechselseitigen Genossenschaft, der nachbarlichen Nähe, der Identifizierung. Kurz, eine Politik, die dieser Freundschaft gegenüber nicht unrecht tut. Ist das bloß ein Traum? Vielleicht. Noch müßte man ihm einen Tag vorgeben: was unmöglich scheint, ist schon versprochen worden und bleibt also denkbar. Wir behalten es in denkender Erinnerung jedes mal, wenn wir lieben, wenn wir die Worte Liebe oder Freundschaft übertragen und weitergeben. Jedes Mal wenn wir sie machen, die Liebe und die Freundschaft. Am Ursprung der Politik hat vielleicht diese Bürgschaft gestanden, selbst wenn an diesem Punkt - inkommensurabel mit dem Geheimnis - eine Politik inadequat bleibt und bleiben muß.
Cardozo Law School interview: An Interview with Jacques Derrida
Famed philosopher and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida is a professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socials in Paris and has visited Cardozo regularly for the past 10 years. He holds the title of Cardozo Distinguished Scholar and often lectures at the Law School as part of the Law & Humanism Speakers Series, which is co-sponsored with the New School University. When Professor Derrida visited in October, Michel Rosenfeld, Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights, talked with him about his relationship to law and his thoughts on current international political events.
ROSENFELD: Thanks very much, Jacques Derrida, for agreeing to talk to us for publication in Cardozo Life.
I note that Cardozo and you have now had a relationship for 10 years. You first came here when we organized the "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice" conference, which still ranks as one of the greatest conferences that we have held here. At that time, you delivered a paper, "The Force of Law," which was subsequently published in Cardozo Law Review (vol. 11, 1990).
I want to ask you about your relationship to law. When did you start getting interested in law as a topic of inquiry?
DERRIDA: My interest in law as an academic discipline started very early, although I never studied law in the strict sense. I first became interested in the question of law as it pertains to literature . . . the legal constraints that have to do with the name of the author, the copyright, etc. Once, a long time ago, I gave a seminar at Yale on copyright-on the Droit d'Auteur (the rights of the author), and on the history of copyright. Of course they're superficially similar. At that time, I studied both the French and English history of copyright. I was particularly interested in the relationship in the 17th century between the King, the librarian (the "Librairie" we call it), and the owner of the copyright and the changes that then occurred with the French Revolution.
I also became interested in the affinity between literary work and the legal production of law. When a number of ethical and judicial questions impacted on deconstruction, I felt summoned to respond to such questions as I did at the "Possibility of Justice" conference, which for me was a very memorable, precious occasion to address legal scholars on the relationship between constructing law and justice. So, I have had this ongoing interest in law. However, I never acted on my dream to really study law.
Cardozo is for me the place where I can learn, where I can discuss what interests me in the law.
ROSENFELD: I think we at Cardozo are unique among law faculties in that we always have had a great deal of inter-disciplinary interests with training in philosophy, literature, political theory. Many of us had looked at deconstruction to see to what extent it could help us in our legal analysis and legal theory, so it was a particularly important occasion to have you come to talk to us.
DERRIDA: The hospitality at Cardozo has been precious to me. In the last 10 years, all the seminars I gave-and we have mentioned only the one-have brought me close to legal colleagues and have-I just realize-always dealt with the general question of responsibility. The seminars on the secret, on testimony, on hospitality, and now today's on forgiveness-all have to do with a question of responsibility of one person to another.
ROSENFELD: May I suggest that perhaps your own interest in explicit questions of law and justice may have derived from your deconstructive theory? It seems to me that there has been a growing interest in law, legal issues, and legal justice by philosophers in the last 15 or 20 years. Do you agree with that, and if you do, to what do you attribute this interest?
DERRIDA: I remember the first time I addressed the question of the law in a lecture on Kafka's "Before the Law." I made a distinction between the law in general and the law in the strict sense or legal justice-in French, le droit and la loi. In French when you speak of the law (la loi), you do not necessarily refer to legal issues.
Now to go back to your question. What we see in Western democracy today is the increasing importance of the legal authority on politics-sometimes in an abusive fashion, as is the case in Italy, France, and in this country too. We have a feeling that today the independence of justice is the crucial test for democracy. So a philosopher interested in ethics and/or politics must come back to the question of the law. With democracy becoming truly global, philosophers must be, can't escape, really, looking at law and justice.
ROSENFELD: Your relationship with Cardozo dates back a decade. Can you characterize this relationship that makes us so fortunate to see you every year? Do you have relationships with other law schools?
DERRIDA: It is me who is fortunate. First of all, my relationship with Cardozo is unique. Perhaps I don't have to mention that at Cardozo I find colleagues who are well-known legal scholars and are also interested in literature, in biblical scholarship, philosophy, and so on and so forth. So for me, these are very rich occasions for discussion. I have worked infrequently with other law schools. Once while I was teaching at Yale, which I did for 12 years, I was invited by a law school to discuss a paper that I had given on Kant. Then, just yesterday, I was invited by Larry Kramer at NYU Law School to organize a workshop. I have been teaching at NYU for 10 years, and this is the first time that I have had an invitation from the law school.
In France we tried to organize conferences, discussions, and debates with a few interested people from the faculty of law, but these efforts didn't succeed as far as I can tell. So Cardozo is for me the place where I can learn, where I can discuss what interests me in the law.
When I read what you write and what Arthur Jacobson writes, this is very important to me. Over the course of the 10 years, there has been growing familiarity and common premises. From my narrow point of view, things are changing at Cardozo and for the best.
ROSENFELD: I don't know if it is well known that you were born and grew up in Algeria as a member of the Jewish community. Could you tell us generally how that experience has influenced your intellectual development?
DERRIDA: Perhaps one of the many things which made me sensitive to law is that I belonged to a minority in a colonized country. The Jewish community in Algeria was there long before the French colonizers. So on one hand, Algerian Jews belonged to the colonized people, and on the other they assimilated with the French.
During the Nazi occupation, there were no German soldiers in Algeria. There was only the French and the Vichy regime, which produced and enforced laws that were terribly repressive. I was expelled from school. My family lost its citizenship, which is a legal event. Even when you're a child, you understand what it means to lose your citizenship. When you're in such a marginal and unsafe and shaky situation, you are more attentive to the question of legal authorization. You are a subject whose identity is threatened, as are your rights.
... the fact that Clinton allowed himself to be trapped suggests that he failed in his responsibility.
ROSENFELD: I know that you have visited South Africa and familiarized yourself with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the work that it has done. Can you tell us how you got interested in the subject of forgiveness and mercy?
DERRIDA: Last year I started a seminar on forgiveness and mercy, a subject which has several legal dimensions to it. Then, last summer I went to South Africa, at which time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was just beginning to write its report. Discussion on the work of the Commission was everywhere. I gave a number of lectures on forgiveness and reconciliation and read a lot on the subject. I had the opportunity to meet many people who were on the Commission, and I was introduced to many aspects of the process: the way it was instituted, the way it became controversial (no one on either side totally agrees with it), the way this Commission had to solve problems which could have at any moment really destroyed relations between the A.N.C. and the white government. The Commission was really an agreement between the A.N.C. and the white government to resolve the situation through amnesty rather than revenge.
I became especially interested in the process they called "healing away," which was a form of political therapy. I became interested in how and to what extent such a political therapy was compatible with the idea of pure forgiveness. I had the opportunity to meet and hear from witnesses from both sides, as well as members of the Commission. So I learned a lot, and I learned about the history of South Africa.
In South Africa, as you know, there are 11 languages that are officially recognized by the Constitution. Anyone speaking before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could choose to speak any one of the official languages. This presented a huge problem since the testimony was then translated into English, a Christian and Western language. For example, I was told that the word "forgiveness" has no strict equivalent in a number of the officially recognized languages. So people challenged the use of just one particular language for the final translation. I became very interested in the linguistic issues presented by the Commission and the idea of a language of repentance. What does it mean when I say, "I beg your forgiveness" or you respond, "I forgive you"?
ROSENFELD: This is fascinating. So as an English-speaking person, I may understand the Commission's findings and testimony in a way that is totally or slightly different from the way one of the native language speakers may understand it.
DERRIDA: Exactly. It was primarily black people who were the victims in South Africa, but the A.N.C. had also to appear before the Commission. The black people were disappointed with the Commission because they were not interested in forgiveness-they wanted justice or, at the very least, to know what happened to their loved ones. They wanted to go on with the work of mourning. While the Commission was in session, the regular judicial courts continued to work. Although people were granted amnesty for political misdeeds, criminal offenses were not forgiven. So people appeared before the Commission and would often argue that since it was a political war and they were given and then acted on orders, they were not guilty.
ROSENFELD: Is it fair to say that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed each person, for different personal reasons, the ability to have closure on this part of South African history?
DERRIDA: That's obviously the goal-closure. To put an end to what might be otherwise an endless process of revenge; to put an end to the mourning and to get on with the future. Mandela and his associates and his allies wanted South Africa to survive. They understood that if they wanted to live together-black and white-both groups had to share the work of mourning in order to share a common destiny.
ROSENFELD: You mentioned Nelson Mandela, and I wonder if you would comment on what you think his role has been in all of this. He was a prisoner, a victim of the apartheid regime, and then became the country's leader. Was it through example or through persuasion that he played his particular role? Was he a unique figure? Might this healing process not have been possible had there been a leader other than Nelson Mandela?
DERRIDA: This is a good question and I have no short answer. Of course, the individual Nelson Mandela played a major role. What would have happened without him, I don't know. But the fact is that this man, who had been in jail for 27 years, left jail without any visible resentment. It was he who decided that reconciliation should be the goal of the Commission. I read that at some point he disobeyed his own group, his own party, when he started negotiating with the government. He did this without the approval of his colleagues. He lent a strong individual signature to the proceedings.
ROSENFELD: Now may I bring you to a more mundane subject which is arousing a lot of interest, commentary, and debate in the United States. I refer here to the issues concerning President Clinton, impeachment, and the president's responsibility for his actions. As someone from a different country, a different culture, and looking at this philosophically rather than politically, do you have some insights into this American phenomenon?
DERRIDA: This would require a long time. However, let me give a couple of quick answers. The first is my spontaneous reaction-shared by many outside of the United States, particularly in France-one of outrage and disgust with the politicization of, and the attention from the press to, the sexual parts of the story. We found it to be not only outrageous, but so obviously orchestrated by the Independent Counsel and organized by a larger group of politicians. In Europe, we never thought that this kind of thing could happen in the United States.
Then, I would pay attention also to a more complicated issue: the question of perjury in the Paula Jones case. There, the question seems to be not simply one of sexual privacy but the idea of sexual harassment. Harassment really is about the dignity of the human person. Also, the fact that Clinton allowed himself to be trapped suggests that he failed in his responsibility.
Additionally, the fact that the president had to testify and confess not only in front of American citizens but in front of the world is indication of the new globalization, and our entering a new phase in international law and the rights of man.
ROSENFELD: Before we close, I want to ask you generally about your current work on forgiveness. Are you planning to write a book on the subject?
DERRIDA: You know, each time I give a seminar, in a certain way I write everything and there is material for a possible book. But I don't have enough time to revise or to write. I would love to if I have time, but I have no current plans to do so.
ROSENFELD: I want to thank you very much and let you know that the Cardozo Law Review would be eager to publish any of this material.
DERRIDA: Thank you, and let me take advantage of this situation to thank Cardozo formally and officially and sincerely for the hospitality. I am very grateful.
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*This compilation © Peter Krapp 1994 - 2004
*http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/law.html
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