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Specters and Scholars: Derrida and the Tragedy of Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Adam Thurschwell

Extract

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“To be or not to be?” – in a sense that has always been the question of ethics, of the life worth living, and philosophy would be the search for the answer to that question. In this essay I would like to propose an alternative formulation and interpret it, rather grotesquely (Shakespeare I'm not), as the following: “To ontologize the ethical or not to ontologize the ethical: that is the question of politics.” Ultimately, I would like to suggest that this is a question that must but cannot be answered, or at least answered by philosophy, by a philosophy that retains the ideal of an “answer” that conforms to the form of knowledge. The vehicle for this exposition will be several texts by Jacques Derrida (primarily “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority'” and Specters of Marx). My hope is that this discussion will ultimately justify (or at least excuse) my grotesque paraphrase of Hamlet as well as my rather pretentious subtitle.

Type
Articles: Special Issue: A Dedication to Jacques Derrida – Memoirs
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Articles: Special issue - A Dedication to Jacques Derrida , 01 January 2005 , pp. 87 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Derrida, Jacques, Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Drucilla Cornell et al, eds., M. Quaintance trans., 1992) [hereinafter Force of Law].Google Scholar

2 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (P. Kamuf trans., 1994) [hereinafter Specters of Marx].Google Scholar

3 Derrida, Jacques, Force of Law at 15, 28.Google Scholar

4 Id. at 26.Google Scholar

5 Derrida, Jacques, Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty (Address to the States General of Psychoanalysis), in Without Alibi 278 (Peggy Kamuf, ed. and trans, 2002) [hereinafter Address to the States General].Google Scholar

6 Derrida, Jacques, Politics of Friendship (George Collins trans., 1997).Google Scholar

7 Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (David Wills trans., 1995).Google Scholar

8 Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 115 (Pascal-Ann Brault & Michael Naas, trans., 1999).Google Scholar

9 Derrida, supra note 5 at 277-8.Google Scholar

10 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority 39 (Alphonso Lingis trans., 1969).Google Scholar

11 Derrida, supra note 1 at 20-21.Google Scholar

12 Derrida, supra note 5 at 277-8.Google Scholar

13 Derrida, Jacques, supra note 1 at 10-11.Google Scholar

14 Id. at 11.Google Scholar

15 Derrida, supra note 2 at 73 (emphasis original).Google Scholar

16 Strangely, almost sixty years ago (and in a text that Derrida was studying in a seminar shortly before he became ill), Maurice Blanchot identified a similarly corrosive ambiguity within linguistic meaning and gave it the name “literature.” Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death, in The Work of Fire 344 (L. Davis trans., 1995). Listen as Blanchot interlaces the themes of death, understanding and comprehension, hope and redemption (in the medium of “the creator of the world in man”), and “unhappy fate” in an “irreducible double meaning, a choice whose terms are covered over with an ambiguity that makes them identical to one another even as it makes them opposite”:Google Scholar

Death ends in being: this is man's hope and task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands. Death ends in being: this is man's laceration, the source of his unhappy fate, since by man death comes to being and by man meaning rests on nothingness; the only way we can comprehend is by denying ourselves existence, by making death possible, by contaminating what we comprehend with the nothingness of death, so that if we emerge from being, we fall outside the possibility of death, and the way out becomes the disappearance of every way out. Id.Google Scholar

This “original double meaning,” Blanchot goes on to say, “which lies deep inside every word like a condemnation that is still unknown and a happiness that is still invisible, is the source of literature.” Id.Google Scholar

Blanchot's text is far too rich to address here at any length, beyond noting the virtual identity of the themes Blanchot identifies with those that we have seen structuring the passage from Specters of Marx – redemptive meaning, “hope” and ethical “tasks” on one side, and “unhappy fate” on the other. The difference, of course, is that Blanchot thematizes this ambiguity (and also relates it directly to death) while (as I have tried to show) Derrida's text exemplifies it. It may be that this difference between the two texts not only itself exemplifies a certain key difference between “the literary” and “the political,” but lies at the heart of the ancient quarrel between the two, which runs from Plato's complaints about the tragic poets to the contemporary resistance of most American legal scholars to the new understandings of legal rhetoric and performativity provided by advances in poetics.Google Scholar

17 Derrida, supra note 2 at 176.Google Scholar

18 Id. at xvii & 177 n.1.Google Scholar

19 Id. at 11.Google Scholar

20 See, in this regard, id. at, 189 n.6, where Derrida suggests that the figure of the “specter” can be articulated with a moment of Husserlian phenomenology (the noeme) that is neither real (“'in’ the world'”) nor a component of subjectivity (“'in’ consciousness”) but which constitutes the “condition of any experience, any objectivity, any phenomenality” and thereby is “also what inscribes the possibility of the other and of mourning right onto the phenomenality of the phenomenon.” For Derrida's classic analysis of the inextricable intertwining of phenomenality and the ethical event, see Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in Writing and Difference 79-153 (Alan Bass trans., 1978).Google Scholar

20a Derrida, supra note 2 at 89.Google Scholar

21 Derrida, supra note 2 at 89.Google Scholar

22 Id. at 91.Google Scholar

23 Again, if I'm right about this, can one not hear in this dilemma much more than an echo of the Benjamin of Critique of Violence, for whom divine (“unalloyed”) violence cannot be distinguished from the profane in the order of human knowledge? “Less possible and also less urgent for humankind … is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases … because the expiatory power of [divine] violence is invisible to men.” (Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, in 1 Selected Writings (1913-1926) 252 (Edmund Jephcott trans., 1996). From another direction, Paul de Man's reflections on the positional structure of language in Allegories of Reading, which move from demonstrations of how this structure leaves our “ontological confidence … forever shaken” to analyses of law and justice in terms of the structure of the promise and (blind), would also seem to be relevant here. See Paul de Man, Social Contract (Promises), in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust 123 (1979); see also Adam Thurschwell, Reading the Law, in The Rhetoric of Law (Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns eds., 1994).Google Scholar