The Politics of Deconstruction J Derrida The Other of Philosophy

The Politics of Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy

Edited by
MARTIN McQUILLAN
Pluto P Press
LONDON ANN ARBOR, MI
McQuillan 00 pre iii 29/6/07 14:58:33
First published 2007 by Pluto Press
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Copyright Martin McQuillan 2007
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow
or, The Deconstruction of the Future 1
Martin McQuillan
Part One: Philosophy of Politics
1. Demo 17
Geoffrey Bennington
2. On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 43
Jean-Luc Nancy
3. The Art of the Impossible? 54
Derek Attridge
4. Impossible Speech Acts 66
Andrew Parker
Part Two: Politics of Philosophy
5. The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening of
Politicisation in Levinas and Derrida 81
Robert Bernasconi
6. The Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the
Mother-Tongue 98
Anne Berger
7. In Light of Light: on Jan Patockas Notion of Europe 116
Rodolphe Gasch
8. Phenomenology to Come: Derridas Ellipses 137
Joanna Hodge
Part Three: Otherwise
9. From (Within) Without: the Ends of Politics 157
Marc Froment-Meurice
10. Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pense du dsert)
With(in) Jacques Derrida 173
Laurent Milesi
McQuillan 00 pre v 29/6/07 14:58:33
vi Contents
11. Graphematics, Politics and Irony 192
Claire Colebrook
12. The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx 212
Richard Beardsworth
13. Karl Marx and the Philosophers Stone, or, On Theory
and Practice 235
Martin McQuillan
Notes on Contributors 255
Index 257
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of the contributors for their remarkable
endurance. I would also like to thank the following for their help
in the preparation of this volume: Anne Beech, David Castle, Ika
Willis, Marcel Swiboda, Eleanor Byrne, Claire Fenwick, and Shaun
Richards. I would also like to thank friends, students and colleagues
at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the
University of Leeds and the Department of English at Staffordshire
University for their provocations and encouragement. This book
was made possible by a generous conference grant from the British
Academy and by research funding from the University of Leeds
and Staffordshire University. It is dedicated to Oscar Marx and
Felix Jacques.
vii
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List of Abbreviations
WORKS BY JACQUES DERRIDA
FK Faith and Knowledge: the two sources of Religion at the
Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Sam Weber, in Religion, eds.
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity,
1998)
G Glas (Paris: Galile, 1974)
GL Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
MA Le monolinguisme de lautre, ou, la prothse dorigine (Paris:
Galile, 1996)
MO Monolingualism of the Other: The Prosthesis of Origin, trans.
Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
MP Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1985)
OH The Other Heading: Reections on Todays Europe, trans. Michael
Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992)
ON On the Name, trans. Tom Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995)
PA Politiques de lamiti (Paris: Galile, 1994)
PoF Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso,
1997)
SdM Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galile, 1994)
SoM Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994)
WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge,
1979)
viii
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Introduction
The Day after Tomorrow
or, The Deconstruction of the Future
Martin McQuillan
De quoi demain sera-t-il fait?
Victor Hugo
Why should one read Derrida, tomorrow? The question, I think, is not
asked prematurely. For some there were good institutional reasons to
read the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1980s as the newness of the
discourse inaugurated by Derrida opened up the arts and humanities.
This, in itself, was not a good reason to read Derrida; deconstruction
has never had faith in newness, especially its own. Such readers have
moved on to other celebrity voices. That chase can only end in the
cul-de-sac of disappointment. For others, there has been the constant
insistence of a must when it comes to reading Derrida. The precision
and remarkable innovation of each Derrida text demanded to be
read, they pressed themselves upon us and could not be ignored,
moving from interest to interest with the breakneck speed of Derridas
extraordinary mind. However, now that Derrida has penned his last
text and left behind a nite, if astonishingly complex, corpus his
archive, as it were why should we read him tomorrow?
By asking this question, one is not cutting short the work of
mourning for the person Jacques Derrida; wishing him and his
intolerable absence away. Rather, as part of that work, this question
asks how deconstruction can go on without Derrida. One answer
would be that deconstruction has always gone on before Derrida
and in the complete absence of knowledge of Derrida and his
writing. Fine, it will continue as such. However, more pertinently
(if more parochially) how can the discourse of deconstruction as a
commitment to a certain practice of reading continue as something
other than a museum for our own bereavement? It depends very
much on what one might mean by without Derrida. My guess is that
the family of deconstruction, those who knew Derrida and knew one
another through Derrida, will never come to terms with his loss. Nor
1
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2 Martin McQuillan
should they; when we stop missing Derrida it will be because we have
forgotten Derrida and for some of us this will be plain impossible. My
other guess is that having read Derrida so well and so closely for so
long, the family of deconstruction, in thrall to and enthralled by the
inaugurating discourse of Derrida, does not have the resources within
it to go beyond Derrida and to innovate within a discourse which
has been hitherto marked by its own singular innovation. Thus,
deconstruction is in something of a bind. It always has been of course,
but the drawing of a mortal limit across the life of Jacques Derrida
has given this problem a massive legibility today. The originality of
deconstruction must be its own undoing because such originality (i.e.
singularity) pertains to and ends with its originator. The question
is one of projection, what is the student of tomorrow to make of
the text of Derrida, after the legacy conferences have been held, the
biographies written and, with time, the anniversaries marked? This
speculation is undoubtedly futile because of its dependence upon
the sorts of chance and contingency which Derrida did so much to
bring to our attention. However, its insistence remains; what shall
those who only know Derridas texts know of Derridas texts? In other
words, and this is why asking such questions is not a betrayal or
curtailment of the work of mourning for Derrida, what is the future
of Derrida? How will he live on? What form will his afterlife take and
what will the deconstruction of the future look like?
While there will no doubt be multiple answers to these questions,
I would like to pursue just one possibility here. While Derrida has
been a reliable and consistent commentator on the political and
politics for as long as any of us can remember (The Ends of Man
for example is an essay about Vietnam) we are now entering into an
epoch in which we will have to live without this commentary. He
made sense of the fallout from the fall of communism and brought
intelligence to bear upon the irrational events of 9/11, but he will
not be making comment on the Israeli assault on Lebanon, or on
the future career of Nicholas Sarkozy, the eventual and inevitable
withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the death of Bin Laden,
the international trial of Donald Rumsfeld for the authorisation
of torture, or any of the tomorrows in which his perspicacity and
judgement will be so badly needed. This is not to say that the text
of Derrida does not already contain long and detailed commentary
on the politics of the Middle East or the future of international law.
However, one day the events described in these texts will seem as
distant to us as those discussed by Karl Marx or Tom Paine. History
McQuillan 01 intro 2 29/6/07 14:58:17
Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow... 3
will retain an afliation to this writing by Derrida but it will also
stretch out beyond it, and, as Althusser knew, the future lasts a long,
long time.
For deconstruction the future is not what it used to be. And it is
precisely for this reason, I would like to venture, that we will read
Derrida tomorrow. We will read Derrida because here we will nd
an account of the political and an account of how to account for
accounts of the political that will provide us with the resources to
engage with the unknowable of tomorrow. Derridas deconstruction
of the political is important not because of the examples he chooses
to engage with there are many occasions in Derridas writing where
he refuses the example, or the absolute exemplarity of any given
example. Interesting and, indeed, comforting as Derridas political
examples are (I obviously mean comforting here in the sense that
they are reassuringly of the left) the point of Derridas commentary
on the political is that it takes on board the radical alterity of the
future as constitutive of the political event as such. If the political
event is a thing of the future (that is to say that as an event it is both
already irremediably of the past and yet to arrive from the future)
then there can be no politics of presence. That is not to say that
there is no politics in the present. The point of, say, democratie venir
would be that this is not a projection of a perfect future democracy
but an insistence on democracy in the here and now which is made
possible by the perfectibility of democracy as the promise of its future.
Derridas politics is a politics of the future, one that is not given or
pre-programmed according to any knowable model or theory. Rather,
it is a performative and transformative critique which opens itself
to the unpredictable and unknowable intervention of the future as
the arrival of the other. Derridas future is open-ended and alive, it
is always in process, without limit, telos or regulative principle. It is
this imagining of the future which makes Derrida the philosopher
of tomorrow, because this future is above all political. That is to say,
this future has a future because it signicantly opens itself to the very
possibility of unknowability and the impossibility of discursive and
material foreclosure. It gives chance a chance and gives the other its
due by creating a space for its arrival, welcome or not, hospitable
or not, ready or not. In expecting the unexpected, deconstruction
raises the expectations of politics by opening politics onto a future
beyond the traditional end of politics, namely, to secure the end of
politics by the discursive misprision of any contestation through the
hegemonic imposition of an agreed or enforced end or limit. In truth
McQuillan 01 intro 3 29/6/07 14:58:18
4 Martin McQuillan
this future is the very possibility of politics itself. There would be no
politics, no contest, no polis, no polemos, no political economy or
desire without this.
This is not to say that the future is bright for deconstruction. One
can nd suitably uplifting comments in The Force of Law or Spectres
of Marx, for example, concerning justice as the undeconstructible
condition of any deconstruction, i.e. the idea of futurity which
structures the messianic without messianism as the historicity of
political change is determined by an insistence at any given moment
on the justness of the appeal of the other. However, the other in this
sense is the arrival of an event of irreducible alterity. As such, this
unpredictable and unknowable arrival need not be either welcome
or progressive. We are entering into an epoch of new materialities
for which we as yet have no theoretical vocabulary: unprecedented
and perhaps irreversible climate change, the transformation of the
globe by post-carbon technology and economies, the contestation
over energy and resources which will shape the international relations
of tomorrow, the globalisation of capital and media, the mutation
of the institutions and domain of international law, the migration
and displacement of the people of the world by military, climatic or
economic forces, the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons,
the independent and inter-connected emergence of terroristic
violences and proxy-wars of religion and race, the re-alignment of
geo-political privilege with the development of new sovereignties
and states, the dissemination and application of techno, genetic
and nano-sciences, and so on. These are only the materialities of
tomorrow whose horizons can be vaguely glimpsed today. Derrida
knew some of them and has written at length on them. Others will
require to be thought through after Derrida. Perhaps, as a constellation
of possibilities, or, a historical conjuncture of possible tomorrows,
this list is in fact an accurate description of today. Such would be
the condition of the present. That as the present it is only ever the
arrival or intervention of a possible tomorrow, while tomorrow as
such never comes. Tomorrow lies ahead of us, beyond the knowable
and predictable. It would no doubt be telling to revisit this text in
ve, ten or twenty years to reect upon the concerns of this list, in
contrast to the reality of the then now.
To be concerned with the future is to take nitude seriously and
to give history a chance. It is the present which is rendered consti-
tutively open by its own futurity. The here and now is not just the
latest instance of a present which has always failed to materialise but
McQuillan 01 intro 4 29/6/07 14:58:18
is also the arrival of the future in the form of the other. When one
speaks of the now, or the contemporary, one is always speaking of the
future. As Derrida states in the interview with Giovanna Borradori,
concerning the chronology and chrono-logic of the attack on the
World Trade Center in New York:
We must rethink the temporalization of a traumatism if we want to comprehend
in what way September 11 looks like a major event. For the wound remains
open by our terror before the future and not only the past. (You yourself, in fact,
dened the event in relation to the future in your question; you were already
anticipating by speaking of one of the most important historical events we
will witness in our lifetime). The ordeal of the event has as its tragic correlate
not what is presently happening or what has happened in the past but the
precursory signs of what threatens to happen. It is the future that determines
the unappropiability of the event, not the present or the past. Or at least, if it
is present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign
of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that
has ever taken place.
1
Derridas point here is that while what happened that day is in the
past and will not happen again (it is over and done with, mourning
is possible) the power of the meaning of that day is predicated on
the possibility that this day heralds something even worse to come,
an even worse repetition. In this situation no mourning is possible
because such work can never be closed and has no possibility of
completion. The materialities of tomorrow impinge upon us today
because the landscape made up of these signs will be unlike any
other. In the case of much of it, the scene will be worse than we
have ever experienced before. The trauma that emerges from Iraq
or Katrina is not curtailed by the occurrences themselves (Katrina
has passed, one day the Iraq war will end). Rather, what gives them
their resonance is the possibility of even worse to come: the further
devastation to be wrought by irreversible climate change, or, future
expanded, open-ended and uncontrollable ethno-religious energy
wars. The two things are obviously connected within the political
matrix of today, accumulatively they project the scenario of a possible
tomorrow which is, in fact, the condition of our now.
This is a curious circumstance of deconstruction. One will frequently
nd in Derrida the assertion that the metaphysical conditions of
the political, as they have been experienced throughout Modernity,
are, in this epoch of tele-communication and globalised capital, in
mutation, and this mutation is irreversible. Here we might think
McQuillan 01 intro 5 29/6/07 14:58:18
6 Martin McQuillan
of his comments on the state and the party or international law
in Spectres of Marx. In this sense, it is the play of diffrance within
historical meaning as a non-totalisable gure of auto-immunity
which puts the historical, histories and the idea of history itself into
deconstruction. These mutations, these deconstructions, continue
unabated (it is irreversible, after all). The mutation of the institutions
and circumstances of today takes place under the incessant pressure
of the future. The mutation is predicated upon the arrival of what
comes and further still, the possibility of what might come after it.
The future, having arrived, we must always ask, what comes after
it. Thus, the open-ended anteriority of the future is what makes
history possible. It is the very chance and motor of history as a
ground without stability, where any meaning, experience or gure
may make itself possible. History is not a thing of the past, it is always
a question of the future. It is for this reason that we might offer a
couple of related propositions. Firstly, that the future of deconstruc-
tion will be guaranteed by the deconstruction of the future, that is,
the gure of auto-immunity which makes itself legible as the future.
Here, the future is diffrance, that which generates all generation,
makes possible possibility itself, and is the condition of all and every
signicance. One might say that there can be no future without
the future.
Secondly, and accordingly, the question of how to read Derrida
will always be a matter of the future. Derrida is a philosopher of the
future; not only one whose philosophy is thematically concerned
with the future, but one who recognises the importance of the
future to philosophy and philosophy to the future. As he notes in
a late text:
I am incapable of knowing who today deserves the name philosopher (I would
not simply accept certain professional or organizational criteria), I would be
tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reect in a responsible
fashion on these questions [of international law] and demand accountability
from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language
and institutions of international law. A philosopher (actually I would prefer
to say philosopher-deconstructor) would be someone who analyzes and then
draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between
our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-
political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation. A philosopher would
be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between comprehending
McQuillan 01 intro 6 29/6/07 14:58:18
and justifying. For one can describe, comprehend, and explain a certain chain
of events or series of associations that lead to war or terrorism without
justifying them in the least, while in fact condemning them and attempting to
invent other associations.
2
The philosopher would be, in the future, the one who follows and
reects upon the mutations of their now and draws practical and
effective consequences. Clearly, we might say that the very idea of
the philosopher is in mutation. Perhaps, the injunction of the must
which accompanies reading Derrida is precisely the way in which the
philosopher-reader of today is drawn towards reection on the now
by the opening up of the present by the insistence of the future. The
student of tomorrow will read Derrida because she will also have a
future to reckon with. Deconstruction as an institution has a future
because it has a future. The deconstruction of the political will always
be a question of the future, which is to say that it is a question of
the here and now.
However, the task here is not to speculate endlessly on the nature
of our tomorrow. Some will say that this is the task of ction not
philosophy, as if the two could be separated. Certainly, the point
should be ceded that what would be important for philosophy would
not be the facts of tomorrow, rather the understanding of what the
idea of tomorrow itself might be, not so much a question of what
the future holds for us but of how we conceive and shape an idea of
the future. Derrida comments on this in an early essay; let us recall
the opening lines of Violence and Metaphysics:
That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger
and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death or that it
has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed in the shadow
of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died
one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent
way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and
its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature,
of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even,
as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in
store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future all these are
unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are
problems philosophy cannot resolve.
It may even be that these questions are not philosophical, are not philosophys
questions. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable
McQuillan 01 intro 7 29/6/07 14:58:18
8 Martin McQuillan
of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called
philosophers; and called such in remembrance, at very least, of the fact that
these questions must be examined unrelentingly, despite the diaspora of
institutes and languages, despite the publications and techniques that follow
on each other, procreating and accumulating by themselves, like capital
or poverty.
3
That history or politics might be the other of philosophy, what
Derrida refers to here as nonphilosophy, should not surprise us.
That Derrida here seems to be following Heidegger in The End of
Thinking [Zur Sache des Denkens], when Heidegger notes that the
future of philosophy will be the non-philosophical task of reecting
on thought itself, might surprise us. However, I think Derridas future
is very different from that of Heidegger. Where for Heidegger there
is no alternative or chance for philosophy, no rupture or hybridity
on the way to its inevitable occupation, for Derrida the future might
not even be philosophical. The paleonymic task of the name of
philosophy for the philosopher-deconstructor, in the name of all
that philosophy has made possible, in the name of all that decon-
struction has made possible, will be to address and to participate
in the wellspring of history and nonphilosophy. While Jacques
Derrida may have always been wandering towards his own death,
the questions he asked (in particular those ones which question the
divisions between philosophy and its others) are the ones which are
today capable of enabling a deconstruction of the future. Deconstruc-
tion has a future because it has always been more than philosophy.
Whether this future continues to take the form of a community, what
I termed earlier the family of deconstruction or deconstruction as
an institutional discourse, I cannot say. Perhaps tomorrow calls for
an altogether different invention of afliation and solidarity, a new
inauguration of questioning and examining in remembrance of what
has been opened by deconstruction but beyond the name of decon-
struction. However, it will still require afliation and solidarity, as well
as reading and reection. A community of the question as Derrida
puts it in Violence and Metaphysics, the new international as he
calls it in Spectres of Marx, the freemasonry of the alert as Hlne
Cixous has called it.
The work of mourning for Derrida will be nite because those who
mourn his insuperable absence are also nite. The reader of tomorrow
cannot miss what they never had, although psychoanalytically
McQuillan 01 intro 8 29/6/07 14:58:18
speaking this is of course the only thing they can truly miss.
Deconstruction, however, is interminable. The politics and possibility
of tomorrow requires it to be so.
What then would it mean, beyond the most banal of platitudes, to say
that deconstruction creates a space for the arrival of the other? This
is necessarily a task of reading and thinking, which requires patience
and vigilance. The present collection of essays participates in this
undertaking. The essays herein are all responses to the later writings
of Jacques Derrida on politics. Given all that I have just ventured
above and its seeming urgency, there is an obvious temptation to
reach for the most dramatic and sensational of examples. However,
quoting examples is no guarantee of understanding them. The
essays in this book are reections on the political (which is to say
that politics is always close to hand) but they are also reections
on philosophy itself which understand, in Geoffrey Benningtons
formulation, that philosophy cannot be held accountable to politics
because politics itself is a philosophical concept. Accordingly, they
seek to understand and so to effect the political as such, which, given
the size of this task, calls for due care and diligence. The signicance
of these essays lies in the attention and precision their authors have
paid to the philosophical and the political what Nicholas Royle
might call their radical patience. Only under these conditions can
one hope to produce the theoretical self-reexivity which would
create the space for the arrival of the unforeseeable. These essays were
written between the summer of 1999 and the winter of 2000, when
in retrospect the world seemed a safer place. It has taken some time
to bring them to publication as a consequence of the institutional
accidents that we might laughingly refer to as my career. Only the
editor in his introduction has had the benet of writing under the
contemporary conditions of this so-called war and after the death
of Derrida. Accordingly, the authors should not be chastised for any
perceived failure to invoke a now fashionable vocabulary. Rather,
this collection of essays demonstrates an exemplary point in the
philosophical discussion of politics. Namely, that the demand to
address the urgency of a today, or even a tomorrow, can just as easily
screen out reection on the very thing which makes this moment
signicant, and on the contrary the loudest invocations of the
McQuillan 01 intro 9 29/6/07 14:58:18
10 Martin McQuillan
political can easily drown out the sober and rigorous deliberation this
insistence requires, even if Hegel was correct to remind philosophers
to read the daily news. These essays are examples of exactly the sort
of vigilant counter-interpretation that is taking place in the academy
today, unobserved by a mediatic space inhospitable to thought and
exclusively concerned with the manufacture of the phenomenality of
the political. These essays do not ignore this space, rather they insist
that another understanding of the political is possible beyond the
reductions of the market. The deconstruction of the future depends
upon such assiduous and conscientious work. The reader of tomorrow
will discover their own responsibilities through the example of these
meticulous readings of the most scrupulous of philosophers. The
future of deconstruction will be a dedication to a forensic idiom of
reading, of both the other who comes and the other which is the
work of Derrida. Why should deconstruction give up any of this?
That which does not renounce anything; this would be a denition
of the unconscious and accordingly the unconscious of deconstruc-
tion as the work of mourning is performed. The beginning of the
question of the future of deconstruction is its past which has not
yet reached us and which we have yet to think. It is appropriate
then that this book arrives belatedly, after the contemporary and
after Derrida himself. Its future is its faithfulness to the memory it
holds within it.
This collection of essays explores the complex and demanding
question of how philosophy and politics can continue to be thought
and read through one another, and beyond this, how it is even still
possible to speak and write productively of philosophy and politics
at a time in which both terms have attained a highly problematic
status. Rather than seek to de-lineate the boundaries of philosophy
and politics these essays seek in a variety of ways to deconstruct these
terms in order to open up new possibilities for thinking politics and
the political otherwise. In Demo, Geoffrey Bennington explores the
problematic relation between politics and metaphysics. Proceeding
via a deconstructive play on the colloquial usages of the term demo
(political demo, music demo, software demo) he considers the
idea of a demo version of political constitutions in general before
going on to address the problem of dening democracy and its non-
categorical excess at a limit of the political. Jean-Luc Nancys piece
On the Multiple Senses of Democracy analyses democracy and its
relation to the status of the people from a range of perspectives,
McQuillan 01 intro 10 29/6/07 14:58:19
for example, as a subjugated people who revolt against regimes, or
alternatively as a sovereign self-constitutive whole. He then explores
the different senses of democracy in relation to negative theology and
a revolutionary inversion of the theological-political sign and the
idea that democracy might constitute an immanent or transcendent
renewal of the theological-political, or else might entail its rupture.
In The Art of the Impossible? Derek Attridge considers the relation
between deconstruction and impossibility by way of Derrida reading
Kierkegaard reading the Biblical story of the Binding of Isaac. From
here onwards Attridge analyses the tension between responsibility
in deconstruction, the demand of the impossible (the unconditional
singularity of ones relation to the other) and the demands of the
possible (the everyday, its rules, regulations and norms), before
considering the relation between an impossible ethics and a possible
politics. Andrew Parkers Impossible Speech Acts, which examines
the political philosophy of Jacques Rancire, engages in a re-appraisal
of the work of Erich Auerbach and in particular his book Mimesis:
The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Parker considers
Auerbachs reading of the Tacitus and focuses on the question can
the plebeian speak?, the problematic of legitimating the speech of
Percennius and the provision of a voice to the lower classes, which
for Parker, as for Rancire, problematises the status of his speech
in ways that fundamentally implicate political representation. In
attempting to theorise this problem he considers Rancires reading of
Louis-Auguste Blanqui for whom the proletarian is the name of an
outcast. Rancires position, according to Parker, is one of promoting
a politics of equality, but crucially one of dis-identication, based
on the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a
self to an other.
Robert Bernasconis essay entitled The Crisis of Critique looks at
deconstruction in relation to the crisis of the title, the term critique
initially considered in its ordinary external sense before being
explored in terms of immanent or excessive critique. Bernasconi
notes the proximity of Marxist radical critique to hyper-critical
deconstruction, this latter analysed as a means to challenging the
claims made for deconstructions political neutrality by showing
how its being hyper-critical permits hyper-politicisation. In The
Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the Mother-tongue Anne
Berger takes up Rousseaus distinction between the language of
nations and domestic languages, with only the former acceding
McQuillan 01 intro 11 29/6/07 14:58:19
12 Martin McQuillan
to the status of a genuine language. Berger explores the wider
implications of Rousseaus distinction whereby she considers the
shift between the enslaving vernacular of home, or the (m)other-
tongue and the language of the social bond (the language of the
city), whereby the problem becomes effectively gured in terms of
birth, or more specically the birth of society. In attempting to
discern more clearly the relation between the passive proto-language
of the domicile and the masculine language of social interaction she
locates in Rousseau a shift from love to passion and the resulting
acquisition of male sexual identity through the substituting of the
master for a (m)other. Rodolphe Gaschs In Light of Light: On Jan
Patockas Notion of Europe commences with the problem of the end
of Europe and analyses a philosophical idea of Europe developed in
twentieth-century phenomenology, initially with Husserls absolute
idea. Gasch examines Grard Granels critique of Husserl and the
alternative phenomenological conception of Europe devised by
the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka before going on to show how
the Greek landscape provided the visual basis for the sculptural
dimension of ancient Greek thought and how beyond the more
recent de-valorisation of the term reason in relation to Europe and
the West there remains the connection to light symptomatised
by the discipline of the eye and the idea of clarity. Joanna Hodges
Phenomenology to Come: Derridas Ellipses broaches the issue of
Derridas relation to the phenomenological tradition on the key
questions of time and history, where the genealogical emergence of
value is explored in relation to the genesis of meaning. Against
systematisation, Hodge points to the work of Derrida and Blanchot
and the thinking of interruption by these writers before unfolding
a detailed exposition of time and history in the work of many of
Modernitys great thinkers, including Kant, Freud, Bergson and
Levinas, that leads her to promote the restoration of movement to
thought gured by the term oscillation.
The theme of ends arises in From (Within) Without by Marc
Froment-Meurice (the end of politics, the end of the Occident, etc.)
and in particular the question of the ends of death. This question is
addressed through Blanchot and Heidegger, in particular the formers
The Instant of My Death and the problem of naming the subject of
Blanchots instant. The article is a deconstruction of his defence
of his pre-War activities exploring the play of place, displacement
and placelessness and the instant of death in relation to testimony
McQuillan 01 intro 12 29/6/07 14:58:19
in its (non)relation to politics. Laurent Milesis Thinking (Through)
the Desert analyses the spatio-temporal displacing of the denitive
article in Derridas expressions Il y a khra and il y a l cendre which
emphasise the anteriority of the trace. Following an encounter
with the Platonic khra of the Timaeus, Milesi looks at negative
theology in relation to khra in differentiating the deconstructive
space of thinking/writing and the strategic process of desertica-
tion or khoreographic desert writing. Claire Colebrooks article
Graphematics, Politics and Irony takes the performative theory of
meaning and Derridas Limited Inc as its points of departure, whereby
she explores the limitations of context and the demand for an
ethicity of concepts that enables them to go beyond given contexts
whilst remaining sensitive to the limits of such an endeavour. She
provides an account of how performativity can be given to function
according to shifts in context, for example the determination of the
meaning of good as it shifts between the contexts of the priest, the
bioethicist and the stockbroker. The key issue at stake for Colebrook is
one of legitimation and the distinction between moral and ethical
utterances, whereupon she explores the question of ethicity in relation
to the contingency of meanings production by recourse to Derridas
idea of the resistance of language to self-present meaning and its
prior relation to (self-) identity. The volume closes as it opens, with
Marx. In The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx,
Richard Beardsworth addresses the culture of deconstruction, and
introduces the problem of politics pertaining to deconstruction and
its endeavours to open rather than close traditional Western thought
to its implicit indeterminacies. He analyses the crucial role played by
Marx in Western political thought and the no less important question
of Marxs relation to deconstruction, along with its potential political
shortcomings and limitations. He explores Derridas re-working of the
Marxian distinction between use-value and exchange-value qua their
spectrality and the temporality of the relations between things and
persons as out of joint, considering also the role of the promise,
democracy to come and the new international. The volume closes
with another essay on Marx, by the editor, in which he attempts to
negotiate an understanding of the (non)relation between political
theory and practice through a reading of The German Ideology as
an unpacking of Paul de Mans famous but undeveloped gloss on
this text.
McQuillan 01 intro 13 29/6/07 14:58:19
14 Martin McQuillan
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, a Dialogue
with Jacques Derrida, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with
Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 96.
2. Derrida, Autoimmunity, p. 106.
3. WD, p. 79.
McQuillan 01 intro 14 29/6/07 14:58:19
Part One
Philosophy of Politics
McQuillan 01 intro 15 29/6/07 14:58:19
McQuillan 01 intro 16 29/6/07 14:58:19
1
Demo
Geoffrey Bennington
no doubt more serious for what is called democracy, if at least we still
understand by that the name of a regime, which, as is well known, will always
have been problematical (Derrida, Politiques de lamiti, p. 12).
DEMO
Demo here refers in the rst instance to democracy, as a sort of
possible nickname (like some people used to refer to postmodernism
as pomo, post-colonial studies as poco, and even deconstruction
as decon, I think) and I will indeed be talking essentially about
democracy. But I use demo here too in the sense of demonstration.
This second sense hangs between the strong philosophical or logical
sense in which a point might be demonstrated, that is, proven;
the slightly weaker sense in which someone might provide a
demonstration, an exemplary execution of some more or less difcult
technique or trick that a reader or spectator might then want to try
for themselves; the music-industry sense of a trial or sample recording
designed to show off ones talent or potential, and the computer
sense of a limited version of a program, designed to give a sense of
its capacities and capabilities without providing what is called full
functionality. This is only a demo, lacking full functionality and, I
fear, still full of bugs. The point of the demo (about demo, then) is
to approach Derridas slogan, in Politiques de lamiti: no deconstruc-
tion without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction,
1
but
also the claim that what he calls the limit between the conditional
and the unconditional inscribes
an auto-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility
and the duty for democracy to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of decon-
structive auto-delimitation. A delimitation not only in the name of a regulative
Idea and an indenite perfectibility, but each time in the urgency of a here
and now.
2
17
McQuillan 01 intro 17 29/6/07 14:58:19
18 Geoffrey Bennington
And this demo about demo can then connect with a third sense of
demonstration, as Derrida lays it out in Le monolinguisme de lautre,
playing a little uncertainly across French and English:
I have perhaps just performed a demonstration, though perhaps not, but I dont
know which language to hear this word in. Without an accent, demonstration
is not a logical argumentation imposing a conclusion, but primarily a political
event, a street demonstration (I said a little earlier how I take to the street
every morning, not on the road but in the street), a march, an act, an appeal,
a demand.
3

And that earlier moment here referred to comes in an almost lyrical
passage where Derrida describes how his writing throws down a
challenge of invention to translators, and ends with this:
Compatriots of all nations, translator-poets, revolt against patriotism! Every
time I write a word, you hear me, a word I love and that I love to write, for
the time of that word, the instant of a single syllable, the song of this new
international rises up in me. I never resist it, I take to the street when it calls,
even if, apparently, from dawn, I have been working silently at my desk.
4
This, then, will try to be a demonstration version of what would be
an argumentative demonstration about the concept of democracy:
and thereby a demonstration, with luck, in a more directly political
sense, a response, however muted or modest, to the call of that new
international.
METAPHYSICS AND POLITICS
Metaphysics cannot decide whether it or politics has philosophical
priority. This is a well-known tension at least since Aristotle,
5
and
probably indeed since Platos attempted resolution of the relation
between philosophy and government by the combination of the
two in the ideal constitution of The Republic. I do not think that this
tension can ever be resolved, if only because the traditional concepts
of metaphysics and politics are dened in part by just that tension.
This uncertainty needs to be read in both directions, as it were.
On the one hand, we might say that politics just is a metaphysical
concept, defined by metaphysics just by being defined against
metaphysics, and that therefore any attempted political reduction
of metaphysics (along the lines of the other positive reductions
attempted by the so-called human sciences, or by what is now most
generally called cultural studies) is doomed to failure, however
McQuillan 01 intro 18 29/6/07 14:58:19
Demo 19
tempting it remains. The general logic of transcendental contraband
always means that the very concept put up by such reductions to
operate the reduction remains unthought and inexplicable in the
terms of the reduction just as the last thing the historicist reduction
of metaphysics can understand is history, and the last thing the
linguisticist reduction can understand is language, so the last thing
the political reduction can understand is politics.
6

But reading the situation in the other direction, as it were
(remembering that, although politics might well be a metaphysical
concept, there are no metaphysical concepts as such, because the
logic of diffrance and the trace means that there are no concepts as
such, in themselves, independent of their differential denition
7
),
we might want to say that metaphysics is already a political concept.
But saying this will only be possible by extending the range of the
concept politics so that it can describe all conceptual dealings and
relations whatsoever. I want to say that deconstruction operates just
such a radical politicisation of conceptuality in general.
8
But this
radical politicisation of all conceptual relations (including of course
those affecting the metaphysical concept of politics itself) naturally
cannot produce results simply recognisable or exploitable by the
metaphysical concept of politics. One way of putting this situation,
in the terms of Martin McQuillans title for this book, is that decon-
struction reads politics as part of a more general politics of reading
that deconstruction just is.
DEMOCRACY IS A FUNNY CONCEPT
In Politiques de lamiti, Derrida points to a fundamental disjunction
at the heart of democracy, between a law of equality and a law of
difference or singularity. This disjunction, he says, forever carries
political desire. It also carries the chance and the future of a democracy
which it constantly threatens with ruin and which it yet keeps alive ...
No virtue without this tragedy of number without number. Perhaps
it is even more unthinkable than a tragedy.
9
Why would this be
tragic, or even more unthinkable than tragedy? Hegel, for his part,
rather refers democracy to comedy:
This Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as lord and ruler, and is also
aware of being the intelligence and insight which demand respect, is constrained
and befooled through the particularity of its actual existence, and exhibits the
ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence,
McQuillan 01 intro 19 29/6/07 14:58:20
between its necessity and its contingency, its universality and its commonness.
If the principle of its individuality, separated from the universal, makes itself
conspicuous in the proper shape of an actual existence and openly usurps and
administers the commonwealth to which it is a secret detriment, then there
is exposed more immediately the contrast between the universal as a theory
and that with which practice is concerned; there is exposed the complete
emancipation of the purposes of the immediate individuality from the universal
order, and the contempt of such an individuality for that order.
10
Would this be one way of understanding the shift from an ancient
to a modern view of democracy? From the type of direct democracy
associated with the classical theories to the representative or
parliamentary type associated with post-Enlightenment thought?
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that the classical distinction
between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy is only valid for the
ancient world, but that it remains an external principle of classi-
cation to the extent that it is based merely on questions of number
in the modern world, constitutional monarchy reduces these
names to the status of moments, and more generally sublates them,
so that the democratic moment (that of the legislature) is no longer
democracy.
11
Within this tension between metaphysics and politics, the concept
of democracy occupies a curious status in the philosophical tradition,
and it is this that makes it a promising starting point for deconstruc-
tive attention, and seems to call from afar to Derridas long-term
interest in the concept. And if, as I believe is the case, the general
situation of inheritance that describes a deconstructive take on
metaphysical concepts (and indeed on Being in general) is already
plausibly describable as a political situation, then we might expect
this explicitly political concept to concentrate or capitalise, as Derrida
might say, the experience of deconstruction itself (and this seems
to be conrmed by the slogan I quoted at the outset). This oddness
seems to spring from a sort of inherent duplicity (or perhaps a more
radical or multiple instability that cannot be grasped by the two-ness
of duplicity) in the concept of democracy itself, as it is metaphysically
formulated.
12
On the one hand, democracy functions as the name
of a type of constitution or regime, characterised most obviously
as the rule of the people, the many (or perhaps of all: dened in
opposition to monarchy, the rule of the one, and oligarchy, the rule
of the few). But on the other hand (and Derrida says early in Politiques
that it has always been problematical to understand democracy as
McQuillan 01 intro 20 29/6/07 14:58:20
Demo 21
the name of a regime,
13
and that this is well-known), democracy
functions in an excessive way with respect to such classications, as a
sort of limit of the political, out of which politics may emerge, or into
which it always might dissolve. Given this duplicity or instability,
democracy can show up in the tradition with conicting valorisations
attached to it, as the best or the worst, the best of the worst, and
indeed as simultaneously the best and the worst. (Another distant
conceptual horizon of this essay is this problem of best and worst
once teleological schemas are suspended.) Let me at least start (Ill
actually be doing little more than this) by illustrating this problematic
status briey from some very well-known texts.
14
PLATO AGAIN
In Platos Republic, democracy is of course criticised at length. But
this critique is complex, if only because of the unusual degree of
irony and even sarcasm it involves.
15
Democracy seems to start off
well enough:
Possibly, said I [I in the Republic being of course Socrates himself], this is the
most beautiful of polities; as a garment of many colours [ poikilon], embroidered
with all kinds of hues, so this, decked and diversied with every type of character,
would appear the most beautiful. And perhaps many would judge it to be the
most beautiful, like boys and women when they see bright-coloured things.
16

This at least apparent attraction of democracy (the sort of beauty
that appeals to boys or children at least and women, at least, if
not men) is to do with its diversity.
Lets not lose this reference to women, because one of the things
Id like to suggest is that the traditional concept of democracy has an
irreducible relation to women, that democratisation is always seen as
in some sense a feminisation. This does not sit easily with Derridas
association of democracy with the model of fraternal friendship.
But one of the persistent motifs of Platos critique of democracy is
that it gives, or would give, a quite unthinkable degree of freedom
to women; note the cumulative effect of the following passage, for
example:
Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all
lengths? Of course. And this anarchic temper, said I, my friend, must
penetrate into private homes and nally enter into the very animals. Just
what do you mean by that? he said. Why, I said, the father habitually tries to
McQuillan 01 intro 21 29/6/07 14:58:20
resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the
father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free
man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to
him, and the foreigner likewise. Yes, these things do happen, he said. They
do, said I, and such other tries as these. The teacher in such cases fears and
fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their
overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them
in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young,
are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may
be thought disagreeable and authoritative. By all means, he said. And the
climax of popular liberty, my friend, I said, is attained in such a city when the
purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid
for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights
in the relation of men to women and women to men. Shall we not, then, said
he, in Aeschylean phrase, say whatever rises to our lips? Certainly, I said,
so I will. Without experience of it no one would believe how much freer the
very beasts subject to men are in such a city than elsewhere. The dogs literally
verify the old adage and like their mistresses become. And likewise the horses
and asses are wont to hold on their way with the utmost freedom and dignity,
bumping into everyone who meets them and who does not step aside. And so
all things everywhere are just bursting with the spirit of liberty.
17
This association of liberty with a sort of natural-animal-feminine
quality is also a standard ingredient of so-called mass psychology.
Democracy is a mix, a collection, a farrago of different things. And
this is what gives it its curious status among different sorts of regime:
democracy is not just one regime among others, because in a sense
it includes all others within itself. In an abyssal logic that is probably
what I am trying to understand here, democracy is a mixture of all
regimes, including itself. Plato continues:
Yes, said I, and it is the fit place, my good friend, in which to look for a
constitution. Why so? Because, owing to this license, it includes all kinds,
and it seems likely that anyone who wishes to organise a state, as we were
just now doing, must nd his way to a democratic city and select the model
that pleases him, as if in a bazaar of constitutions, and after making his choice,
establish his own.
18
So if democracy is a bazaar, or catalogue or supermarket of different
constitutions, a sort of demo version of any constitution the
prospective founder of a state might look to in order to decide which
model to choose, this is because it both is and is not itself on this
McQuillan 01 intro 22 29/6/07 14:58:20
Demo 23
account, democracy is itself to the extent that it is anything but itself,
i.e. everything including itself. Democracy is one among the list of
possible constitutions, but is set apart from the other members of the
list in that it just is the list of which it is also a part. (A part, then,
bigger than the whole of which it is a part, as Derrida often says.) This
double position generates paradoxical and sarcastic formulations:
And the tolerance of democracy, its superiority to all our meticulous
requirements, its disdain for our solemn pronouncements ... how superbly it
tramples underfoot all such ideals, caring nothing from what practices and way
of life a man turns to politics, but honouring him if only he says that he loves
the people! It is a noble polity, indeed! he said. These and qualities akin to
these democracy would exhibit, and it would, it seems, be a delightful form
of government, anarchic and motley [anarkhos kai poikile], assigning a kind of
equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!
19

And this double quality extends to the corresponding character type
that Socrates derives: the democratic man is a manifold man stuffed
with most excellent differences, and ... like that city he is the fair and
many-coloured [poikilon] one whom many a man and woman would
count fortunate in his life, as containing within himself the greatest
number of patterns [parageigmata] of constitutions and qualities.
This means that democracy is both political and beyond or above
politics: just as democracy is one constitution and the whole list of
constitutions, so the democratic man goes in for all sorts of activities,
following his desire, and politics is just one of those activities:
day by day indulging the appetite of the day,
20
now winebibbing and abandoning
himself to the lascivious pleasing of the ute and again drinking only water and
dieting, and at one time exercising his body, and sometimes idling and neglecting
all things, and at another time seeming to occupy himself with philosophy. And
frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever
enters into his head. And if military men excite his emulation, thither he rushes,
and if moneyed men, to that he turns, and there is no order or compulsion in
his existence, but he calls this life of his the life of pleasure and freedom and
happiness and cleaves to it to the end.
21
It is difcult not to recognise in this structure, whereby democracy is
both itself and part of itself, something of the order of the paradoxes
of set-theory, but also, more importantly for us, something of the
order of Jacques Derridas descriptions of what is now often called the
quasi-transcendental. According to any number of Derridas analyses,
here is a concept which seems troublesome for the metaphysics
McQuillan 01 intro 23 29/6/07 14:58:20
attempting to assign it its place, and that trouble shows up sympto-
matically here in the exaggerated irony with which it is treated. This
excessive quality of democracy, which seems to expand to exceed and
potentially include the conceptuality designed to master and explain
it, makes it an attractive concept to take up against metaphysics. But
of course just taking up this concept and declaring that it really is
attractive, that democracy really is the best regime and the one we
really do want, will always fail to shift the Platonic descriptions. A
democratic reduction of Platonism always runs the risk of remaining
Platonist through and through. Think here of the demonstration
around the concept of metaphor in the Plus de metaphore section
of The White Mythology: if metaphor is simply pulled out of the
pond of metaphysical concepts in order to explain those concepts,
according to the very tempting and attractive poetical reduction
of philosophy Derrida is working through in that essay (wouldnt
it be nice if philosophy just turned out to be a bunch of poetical
or rhetorical gures), then, unless there is a reinscription of that
explanatory concept beyond the immediate resources offered by
its metaphysical denition, the explanation will simply collapse
back into the very metaphysics it was attempting to explain (away).
Similarly here, democracy, which, as both part of the series and the
whole series, stands apart from the other sorts of constitution and
therefore offers, at least in principle, the prospect of some explanatory
and deconstructive leverage, cannot simply be taken at face value (i.e.
metaphysical value), and expected simply to do the work for us the
supplement required for that work is what I call reading.
22
There are less well-known moments in Plato which might also
give us pause on this issue. In the much later Laws, for example,
usually thought to be a less visionary and more pragmatic set of
political proposals than the utopian Republic, democracy appears
again in an interesting position, which does not quite match the one
we have just seen in the Republic. Here the metaphorics is not straight-
forwardly that of motley and diversity, but an equally traditional
(more Platonic perhaps, but still troublesome, insofar as both
terms to come unmistakably signal towards the women elsewhere
so vigorously excluded from politics throughout the tradition) one of
generation and weaving. This is the character called The Athenian
speaking: Then let me have your attention. There are two matrices
[meteres: mothers], as we may call them, of constitutions from which
all others may truly be said to be derived: the proper name of the
one is monarchy, of the other democracy ... These are the strands, as
McQuillan 01 intro 24 29/6/07 14:58:20
Demo 25
I have said, of which all other constitutions, generally speaking, are
woven.
23
Theres no question here of going into ubiquitous Platonic
images of weaving (symploke you will remember Rodolphe Gaschs
wonderful analysis of the Statesmans art in The Tain of the Mirror) if
only because in fact the image of weaving here is being introduced
by the translator (I am using A.E. Taylors standard translation in the
Bollingen Series Collected Dialogues), for the Greek original simply says
that these are the two forms of which the others are modications
(diapepoikilmenai: diversications note the poikilon root again); but
of course Plato does use the image of weaving very regularly see for
example Laws 734e735a: Now just as in the case of a web or other
piece of woven work, woof and warp cannot be fashioned of the same
threads, but the material of the warp must be of superior quality it
must be tough, you know, and have a certain tenacity of character,
whereas the woof may be softer and display a proper pliancy, and
we might want to look to Derridas long discussion of the Judaic rules
about the weaving of the Taleth, in Un ver soie, and the remarks
there too about the traditional association of women and weaving,
and especially Freuds famous hypothesis about the invention of
weaving and penis envy (which of course weve all been associating
with the textuality of the text since Barthess S/Z).
24
This persistent
association of women and nature is also behind Hegels famous irony
of the community comment,
25
and opens up for us the perspective
that the deconstructive reinscription of democracy, and of sexual
difference, would entail too a reinscription of that most reviled of
concepts, nature. One way of doing this in our context here is to say
that politics is always about its own interminable emergence from
a state of nature as a state of intolerable violence there is politics
only to the extent that there is (still) nature, and the end of politics
would be the end of nature. This would then, naturally, mean that
nature is always already political, its own becoming-political. The
structure of the to-come, as Derrida formulates it, and as we shall
recall a little later around democracy itself, can only, or so it seems
to me, be understood in this context of an interminable (and non-
teleological) naturality.
26
ARISTOTLE AGAIN
The root of the reason for Platos complex ironic hostility to
democracy, his repeated use of the motif of multi-colouredness or
motley, is no doubt his insistence on the motif of unity in the context
McQuillan 01 intro 25 29/6/07 14:58:20
of the State, and his perception that democracy cannot be reduced
to this value of unity, or that it threatens this value of unity more
persistently and thoroughly than other types of regime.
27
Aristotle,
then, might be expected to give us some access to a more elaborated
thinking of democracy, just because his primary objection to Platos
political theory turns around this value of unity. For Aristotle insists
that the State simply cannot be thought under the sign of unity, just
because by denition it is a plural entity. In the Republic, Socrates
says: Do we know of any greater evil for a state than the thing that
distracts it and makes it many instead of one, or a greater good than
that which binds it together and makes it one?
28
and, a little later, in
an analogy which is no doubt dening for the metaphysical concept
of politics: The best city [is the one] whose state is most like that
of an individual man.
29
Against this, Aristotle in the Politics (a text
Derrida hardly mentions in Politiques) has a crushingly common-
sense argument:
Yet it is clear that if the process of unication proceeds with too much rigour,
there will be no polis left: for the polis is by nature a plurality [plethos], and if
its unication is pushed too far, the polis will become a family, and the family
an individual: for we can afrm that the family is more unied than the polis,
and the individual more unied than the family. Consequently, even supposing
that one were in a position to operate this unication, one should refrain from
doing so, because it would lead the polis to its ruin. The polis is composed not
only of a plurality of individuals [pleionon anthropon], but also of specically
distinct elements ... even in poleis founded on the liberty and equality of the
citizens [i.e. democracies], this differentiation must exist.
30
This is perhaps even the leitmotif of Aristotles political thinking.
We should note especially here the motif of too much or too far:
and he returns to the point a little later in criticising Platos recom-
mendations for the community of possessions:
The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which
he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some
respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of
unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist,
it will become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm
which has been reduced to a single foot.
31

A number of consequences ow from this critique, and they all
relate to this irreducible element of plurality which, we might be
tempted to say, just is the specically political feature of politics (no
McQuillan 01 intro 26 29/6/07 14:58:20
Demo 27
politics without plurality, i.e. more than two or maybe more than
three).
32
Ill be trying to suggest that it is this element of plurality
which will give the concept of democracy its curious position in
political thought.
First, in the context of our earlier remarks about women, it would
not be difcult to show that the secret reason why the drive to unity
must stop at a certain point is the fact of sexual difference. Aristotles
famous account of man as zoon politikon at the beginning of the
Politics (which already troubles the possibility of the analogy between
State and individual that Plato uses: in Aristotle, the individual with
which the State is analogous is already in a State from the start)
tracks the formation of the various associations [koinonia] that are
associated together to form the polis as the unit achieving, or all
but achieving,
33
autonomy [autarkeia]; but the root necessity for
the formation of associations at all is the lack of autonomy of the
individual, who requires the asymmetrical association marked by
sexual difference to avoid extinction. Subsequent associations are
all associations of two or more similar entities (families associate
with families to form villages; villages with villages to form the
state); but the asymmetry at the origin (always of course forgotten
or variously repressed in the tradition) returns to trouble all political
philosophy sooner or later. As I have said, women are traditionally
thought of as belonging on the side of nature, as it were (as opposed
to politics); but as politics is the always failing attempt to eliminate
nature, natures persistence as denitive of politics is also always a
mark of sexual difference. In this respect, the most irreducibly political
issue is the issue of sexual difference, and the fact that that difference
is not resolvable (no horizon of equality, for example, can do justice to
sexual difference, however politically necessary such a horizon may
be) makes it a reasonable gure for the perpetual -venir of democracy
as Derrida presents it, already questioning thereby the fraternalist
conceptualisation of democracy he follows in Politiques.
Most importantly for us here, this principle of multiplicity that
is denitive of the polis gives rise to the possible plurality of types
of regime. Aristotle says: The reason why there are several sorts of
constitution is that every polis includes a plurality of elements.
34

Just because of the irreducible fact of plurality, there are different
possible ways of organising that plurality. But among the spread
of possibilities this opens up, I want to say that democracy has a
privilege, in that in a sense it names just this plurality itself, in a way
that other regime-names do not. The reasons for this seem reasonably
McQuillan 01 intro 27 29/6/07 14:58:21
straightforward, insofar as democracy just means the government
of the many. The conceptual privilege of the traditional concept
of democracy would in this case derive from the fact that other
regime-names tend towards a convergent or pyramidal representation
of the polis, whereas democracy is explicitly or at least potentially
dispersive.
This principle of plurality as named by democracy, then, opens the
plurality of different types of constitution. But it also immediately
compromises the purity of each of these types, so that the plurality is
not ever quite going to be a plurality of atomic elements. Not only can
there be monarchy, oligarchy and democracy because of this plurality
at the root of the polis, but each of these classications is in turn
affected by plurality, so that there are many forms of monarchy, many
forms of oligarchy, and many forms of democracy, and indeed the
many forms that ow directly from the originary plurality exceed
the capacity of these names to name them properly at all and this
excess, not by chance I think, still surfaces in Aristotles text on the
side of democracy: We have in this way explained why constitutions
take on many forms, and why there are some apart from those which
have a name (for democracy is not numerically one, and one can say
as much of the other constitutions).
35
Now, as is well known, Aristotle is not concerned to defend
democracy as a form of constitution to be preferred to others (though
he talks about it at great length, and it provides him with his basic
denition of a citizen as participating in public ofce
36
), and indeed
he places it among the perversions or deviations [parekbaseis] of the
different constitutions rather than as a pure or correct form. But
again, the logic of this perversion turns out to be complex and quite
disconcerting, especially in the case of democracy. The discriminating
factor for deciding whether a form is correct or deviant is that the
correct forms all govern in view of the common interest, whereas
the deviant forms all govern in view of a particular interest. Royalty,
aristocracy and constitution (politeia: though this is just the generic
name for any sort of constitution, again generating a paradoxical
structure of excess and inclusion) are the correct forms; tyranny,
oligarchy and democracy the corresponding deviations. Again,
democracy here occupies an eccentric position with respect to the
others, and there seem to be two reasons for this: 1) there is no real
proper name for its corresponding correct form (which Aristotle
just calls politeia);
37
and 2) it is difcult in the case of democracy
to understand exactly what the distinction between the common
McQuillan 01 intro 28 29/6/07 14:58:21
Demo 29
and the particular interest would be. In the two other cases, the
distinction between the one (or the few) and the many automatically
opens the possibility of a particular interest coming into opposition
with a common interest; but in the case of democracy, where the
particular interest dening the perversion is itself that of the mass,
38

the distinction between the particular and the general or the common
is harder to grasp, insofar as the mass tends to become identied with
the totality, and its particular interest would then be identical with
the common. Just as, in Platos description of democracy, the bazaar
that democracy is includes all forms of regime including itself, so
the concept of demos as dening the locus of power in democracy
is paradoxically both inclusive and exclusive: inclusively, the demos
names all the people; but exclusively it names the people as opposed
to something else the rich, the elite, the nobility, and so on. As will
regularly be the case in the ensuing tradition, Aristotle plays on this
difculty (or is plagued by this difculty) by associating the many
implied in democracy with the poor, or the indigent, or the rabble.
These difculties around democracy and its corresponding correct
form are difcult to overcome. One of their perverse effects takes
place at the level of perversion or deviation itself. There are three
correct forms of constitution and three deviant forms. The three
correct forms have an order: royalty is the highest and most divine
form; then aristocracy; then the unnamed correct form of the
deviant democracy. But the deviant forms invert this order, on the
vertiginous grounds that the worst perversion is the perversion of
what is best
39
so the worst form of all is tyranny, which is the
deviant form of the best form of all, which is royalty. Tyranny is in
a sense as far as can be from the royalty of which it is the perversion
(even though we must assume that in another sense it is very close
to it, that royalty or monarchy always might catastrophically ip
into its deviant form, catastrophe here trying to grasp a sense in
which that deviant form is both as close and as far as can be from
that of which it is the deviant form and maybe thereby suggesting
a general logic of the deviant). According to this logic, the next worst
deviant form is oligarchy (corresponding to the place of aristocracy
as the next best correct form), and democracy is the least bad deviant
form, just as the nameless form is the least good correct form. This
difcult logic of proximity and distance again picks out democracy
as the most indeterminate case, as becomes clear if we schematise
the logic we have just been following:
McQuillan 01 intro 29 29/6/07 14:58:21
It is not difficult to imagine on the basis of this analysis that
democracy, as the least bad of the deviant forms, might always be
going to turn out to be the best case of all
40
if for example it turned
out that the correct forms were in some sense unattainable: perhaps
in the sense of being idealisations which could never be instantiated
in pure form, Ideas in the Kantian sense, or perhaps rather because
of a general logic of deviation or perversion affecting all cases from
the start (and this second case is of course what we are suggesting,
under the title of plurality). So if all regimes were in fact deviant with
respect to the supposedly correct forms, democracy would turn
out to be the best form in fact, and if all regimes were in some sense
transcendentally deviant (for example around the question of sexual
difference) then democracy would turn out to be transcendentally
the best form. But this transcendental, which would have to allow for
the logic of generalised deviance or perversion we are interested in,
could not of course strictly be a transcendental at all. And you will
have guessed that this is what I think gives rise to the democracy
to come in Derridas formulations (but I dont seem to have needed
the concepts of friendship or fraternity to get there).
This logic of the best as least bad, which will not fail to remind
you of certain important formulations in both (early) Derrida and
Lyotard, is already in fact at work in Plato: in the Statesman, again
dividing possible constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy and
democracy and their deviations (reserving a seventh form for the
true constitution), Plato distinguishes each of these according as
Royalty
Aristocracy
politeia
Democracy
Oligarchy
Tyranny
Better
Worse
Correct
Forms
Perversions
McQuillan 01 intro 30 29/6/07 14:58:21
Demo 31
they rule according to law or not; and he calls the lawless form of
monarchy, tyranny; the lawless form of aristocracy, oligarchy; but the
lawless form of democracy (conrming again its eccentric position)
is also called democracy.
strtncrr: The rule of one man, if it has been kept within the traces, so to speak,
by the written rules we call laws, is the best of all six. But when it is lawless it
is hard, and the most grievous to have to endure.
\ounc socrttrs: So it would seem.
strtncrr: As for the rule of a few, just as the few constitute a middle term
between the one and the many, so we must regard the rule of the few as of
middle potency for good or ill. The rule of the many is weakest in every way; it
is not capable of any real good or of any serious evil as compared with the other
two. This is because in a democracy sovereignty has been divided out in small
portions among a large number of rulers. If therefore all three constitutions are
law-abiding, democracy is the worst of the three, but if all three out the laws,
democracy is the best of them. Thus if all constitutions are unprincipled the best
thing to do is to live in a democracy.
41

Aristotles explicit disagreement with this is somewhat obscure:
A writer who preceded me has already made these distinctions, but his point of
view is not the same as mine. For he lays down the principle that when all the
constitutions are good (the oligarchy and the rest being virtuous), democracy
is the worst, but the best when all are bad. Whereas we maintain that they are
in any case defective, and that one oligarchy is not to be accounted better than
another, but only less bad.
42
But the nuance here is probably important: what is the difference
between the better and the less bad? As we are beginning to suggest,
democracy might have an intrinsic link to the thought that politics
is the domain of the less bad in general.
You will remember that the explicit ground for Aristotles
disagreement with Plato was that the dening characteristic of the
polis was autonomy, and not unity. The polis is in essence plural, and,
in our reading, this means that it is from the start contaminated by
something of the order of democracy, insofar as democracy names
something of this essential plurality at the root of politics. We have
also seen that this leads Aristotle to a sense, not only of a plurality
of possible regimes or constitutions, but also to the thought that
that plurality exceeds the available named forms, and maybe even
naming itself. This principle of contamination gives rise to the
McQuillan 01 intro 31 29/6/07 14:58:22
thought that the polis is in principle always a mixture of some sort.
We have already seen Plato, in The Laws, talking about the two strands
or matrices of all constitutions, which all turn out to be woven of
the warp and woof of monarchy and democracy (or a principle of
unication and a principle of diversication). Aristotle is scathing
about this proposition (In the Laws it is maintained that the best
constitution is made up of democracy and tyranny, which are either
not constitutions at all, or are the worst of all. But they are nearer
the truth who combine many forms; for the constitution is better
which is made up of more numerous elements
43
), and tends to move
further towards the thought of a mixture as the natural outcome of
the original thought of plurality, and as denitive of the unnamed
correct form of which democracy is the deviant. For it turns out that
Aristotles unnamed or generic constitution (which, as we have seen,
is called simply politeia in the absence of another name) is thought
of as a mix of democracy and oligarchy (i.e. two deviant forms). The
principles of this mix are themselves already plural (mixed):
Next we have to consider how by the side of oligarchy and democracy the
so-called polity or constitutional government springs up, and how it should
be organised. The nature of it will be at once understood from a comparison of
oligarchy and democracy; we must ascertain their different characteristics, and
taking a portion from each, put the two together, like the parts of an indenture.
Now there are three modes in which fusions of government may be affected.
In the rst mode we must combine the laws made by both governments, say
concerning the administration of justice. In oligarchies they impose a ne on
the rich if they do not serve as judges, and to the poor they give no pay; but
in democracies they give pay to the poor and do not ne the rich. Now (1) the
union of these two modes is a common or middle term between them, and is
therefore characteristic of a constitutional government, for it is a combination
of both. This is one mode of uniting the two elements. Or (2) a mean may
be taken between the enactments of the two: thus democracies require no
property qualication, or only a small one, from members of the assembly,
oligarchies a high one; here neither of these is the common term, but a mean
between them. (3) There is a third mode, in which something is borrowed from
the oligarchical and something from the democratical principle. For example,
the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratical, and the
election of them oligarchical; democratical again when there is no property
qualication, oligarchical when there is. In the aristocratical or constitutional
state, one element will be taken from each from oligarchy the principle of
McQuillan 01 intro 32 29/6/07 14:58:22
Demo 33
electing to ofces, from democracy the disregard of qualication. Such are the
various modes of combination.
There is a true union of oligarchy and democracy when the same state may be
termed either a democracy or an oligarchy; those who use both names evidently
feel that the fusion is complete. Such a fusion there is also in the mean; for both
extremes appear in it.
So where Plato tends to resolve the issue of plurality by a dialectical
weaving of opposites, Aristotle, who appears to go much further
towards a thought of multiplicity as definitive of the polis,
resolves that multiplicity by appealing to the familiar operator of
the mean or medium, famously the fundamental operator of the
Nichomachean Ethics.
But this thought of the medium or the mean is intrinsically unstable,
and cannot be taken to master or dominate the basic thought of
plurality or multiplicity that we have seen to have an afnity with
the concept of democracy. The reason for this is, perversely, logical:
Aristotles central ethical principle prescribes the avoidance of excess
in the name of the mean. It follows quite naturally that the pursuit of
the mean should itself not fall into excess (so that there should not be
an excessive avoidance of excess) but this measured (non-excessive)
pursuit of the mean will, just because of its measured nature, never
quite reach the mean or median point at which plurality could be
said to be mastered.
44
The paradoxical logic of the mean entails that
we stop short of the mean (which thereby itself becomes excessive),
and therefore always remain (in fact, but transcendentally in fact, if
I can put it that way) in plurality or dispersion. I want to say that it
is this irreducible residue of plurality that constitutes the political as
such, as inherently plural it would be easy to show that this is also
what opens the polis to its outside, as one state in a plurality of states,
just as, at the other end of the question of plurality, as it were, this
would be what opens ethics to politics, opens the dual face-to-face
already to the third party (and therefore all the others, where tout
autre est tout autre, of the political
45
), and the connivance of this
motif of plurality with the concept of democracy that motivates its
deconstructive survival, for example in the work of Derrida.
Given this privileged situation of the concept of democracy as
undecidably correct or deviant, or as undecidably naming both one
possibility of politics and the political as such, it is perhaps not
surprising that it is difcult to stabilise it into a proper form of
constitution. Insofar as it is constitutively deviant, democracy is
McQuillan 01 intro 33 29/6/07 14:58:22
already falling into a perversion of itself, a perversion of perversion,
a hyper-perversion. This situation crystallises out as one where the
paradoxical logic of the correct and the deviant is reproduced at the
micro-level, as it were, of democracy itself. So that if democracy has a
correct form in the namelessly general politeia, it has a deviant form
(which is, then, a deviant form of the deviant form that democracy
already is) in demagogy (this is part of the process that allows Platos
narrative transition from democracy to tyranny). And this seems to
happen inevitably when the plurality that democracy names begins
to affect democracy itself: for there are several types of democracy
but the one that looks supercially most democratic (i.e. where the
people decide all issues in popular assemblies) is scarcely worthy of
the name democracy at all:
Of forms of democracy rst comes that which is said to be based strictly on
equality. In such a democracy the law says that it is just for the poor to have
no more advantage than the rich; and that neither should be masters, but both
equal. For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiey to be found
in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the
government to the utmost. And since the people are the majority, and the
opinion of the majority is decisive, such a government must necessarily be a
democracy. Here then is one sort of democracy. There is another, in which the
magistrates are elected according to a certain property qualication, but a low
one; he who has the required amount of property has a share in the government,
but he who loses his property loses his rights. Another kind is that in which
all the citizens who are under no disqualication share in the government,
but still the law is supreme. In another, everybody, if he be only a citizen, is
admitted to the government, but the law is supreme as before. A fth form of
democracy, in other respects the same, is that in which, not the law, but the
multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees.
This is a state of affairs brought about by the demagogues. For in democracies
which are subject to the law the best citizens hold the rst place, and there are
no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring
up. For the people becomes a monarch, and is many in one; and the many have
the power in their hands, not as individuals, but collectively ... At all events this
sort of democracy, which is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of
law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the atterer
is held in honour; this sort of democracy being relatively to other democracies
what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. The spirit of both is the same, and
they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens. The decrees of the
demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one
McQuillan 01 intro 34 29/6/07 14:58:22
Demo 35
what the atterer is to the other. Both have great power; the atterer with the
tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing.
The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring
all things to the popular assembly. And therefore they grow great, because the
people have all things in their hands, and they hold in their hands the votes of
the people, who are too ready to listen to them. Further, those who have any
complaint to bring against the magistrates say, Let the people be judges; the
people are too happy to accept the invitation; and so the authority of every
ofce is undermined. Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it
is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no
constitution. The law ought to be supreme over all, and the magistracies should
judge of particulars, and only this should be considered a constitution. So that if
democracy be a real form of government, the sort of system in which all things
are regulated by decrees is clearly not even a democracy in the true sense of
the word, for decrees relate only to particulars.
46

And just this paradoxical tendency of democracy to collapse away
from itself as it gets closer to itself so that, to use a formula Ive
often used in the context of the deconstruction of the Kantian Idea,
the end of democracy is the end of democracy is the object of the
suspicions with which it has traditionally been viewed (and explains
for example why Rousseaus Contrat social has so often been seen
as an apologia for a totalitarian state). Kant, for example, famously
says that democracy is always despotic (because it fails to respect the
separation between sovereign and executive, which is pretty much
Aristotles point here
47
), and the phobic object called the mass or
the rabble of course surfaces in Hegel and Marx and far beyond.
48

Democracy as always tending to become demagogy and thereby the
opposite of itself just is what democracy is, in its presence, today,
and even here and now.
Which is why, in Derridas difcult formulation, democracy is
always to come. The point here is not only that, as Derrida has said
on occasion, democracy is the only regime-name that entails the
thought of its own perpetual perfectibility that point still remaining
with the logic of the Kantian Idea but that, just because of the
paradoxical logic of democracy (whereby its most perfect form is
its least perfect form) not only does democracy always in fact fall
short of its Ideal form, so that we can always criticise so-called or
self-proclaimed democracies in the name of democracy itself (however
important that of course is), but also, if ever it did realise its Ideal form
in the perfect reective transparency of the totality of citizens to itself,
McQuillan 01 intro 35 29/6/07 14:58:22
then it would collapse into the worst imaginable political state (one
of absolute nature or absolute techne, the absolute coincidence of
utopia and dystopia), and the furthest remove from what democracy
actually calls for. And it is no doubt a more or less obscure sense of this
that motivates the traditional philosophical criticisms of democracy
throughout the tradition.
This structure of democracy exemplarily political, on our reading
as thus interruptive or, better, disruptive of teleological deter-
minations, also explains its afnity with deconstructive thinking
more generally (and says something about our opening problem
of the relative priority of metaphysics or politics by disrupting
the teleological schema in which both were inscribed we might
indeed take the failure adequately to determine the priority as a
trace within the structure of teleology of its own falling short of itself
from the start, its failure to achieve its own telos of being adequately
teleological
49
): for if the concept of democracy exemplarily disrupts
teleology, it shows up a general feature of deconstructive thinking,
which always and everywhere conducts, induces or observes this
operation on teleological structures. And this helps to motivate our
opening remark about deconstruction being a radical politicisation
of conceptuality in general. We might now want to say that decon-
struction is concomitantly a radical democratisation of thinking in
general, a politics of reading that opens textuality up in principle
to everyone: and this is why well-known texts, that bear down on
us with all the weight of their authority and the authority of their
traditional masters and guardians, can always, in principle, still be
read, or (because reading, like democracy, is always to come this
was, remember, only a demo, after all) at least opened for reading,
again, tomorrow.
NOTES
1. PA, p. 128. All translations from Derrida are my own.
2. PA, p. 129. Cf. too The demand for a democracy to come ... is decon-
struction at work, p. 183: this thematic of an auto-delimitation that
cannot be assimilated to the structure of the Idea in the Kantian sense
is the more abstract conceptual horizon of this essay.
3. MA, p. 134.
4. MA, pp. 1078.
5. Cf. Metaphysics A, 982b, 4ff.: And the science which knows to what end
each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences, and
more authoritative than any ancillary science; and this end is the good
of that thing, and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature.
McQuillan 01 intro 36 29/6/07 14:58:22
Demo 37
Judged by all the tests we have mentioned, then, the name in question
falls to the same science; this must be a science that investigates the rst
principles and causes; for the good, i.e. the end, is one of the causes;
and Nichomachean Ethics, I, 1094a, 24ff., where apparently the same
argument around the supreme good generates politics as the answer:
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its
own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we
do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate
the process would go on to innity, so that our desire would be empty
and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not
the knowledge of it, then, have a great inuence on life? Shall we not,
like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what
is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is,
and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem
to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the
master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that
ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which
each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should
learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to
fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses
the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to
do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include
those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. (Cf. too
Politics, 1282b, 14ff.: In all sciences and arts the end is a good, and the
greatest good and in the highest degree a good in the most authoritative
of all this is the political science of which the good is justice, in other
words, the common interest.) In both cases the claim for the highest
science is explicitly teleological, in the sense that neither of these two
sciences is supposed to be subordinate to any further end. But the internal
logic of teleology requires that there be only one end, so the apparent
persistence here of two incompatible ends is troublesome. As the matter
stands across these two passages, metaphysics is not done for the sake of
politics, and politics is not done for the sake of metaphysics. We might
of course assume in Levinasian vein that, to the extent that Aristotle
in the Ethics is arguing for the pre-eminence of the science of politics,
metaphysics is still surreptitiously winning out.
6. See Derrida and Politics, in my Interrupting Derrida (New York and
London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1833, and my attempt at a more general
formalisation of this structure in Derridabase, in Geoffrey Bennington
and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 24863,
translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1993), 26784.
7. I have never thought that there were concepts which were metaphysical
in themselves. Moreover no concept is itself and consequently is not,
in itself, metaphysical (Jacques Derrida, Positions [Paris: Minuit, 1972],
pp. 778), or, at the end of Signature, Event, Context: Each concept...
belongs to a systematic chain and itself constitutes a system of predicates.
There is no metaphysical concept in itself. There is work metaphysical or
McQuillan 01 intro 37 29/6/07 14:58:23
not on conceptual systems, in Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie
(Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 3923.
8. In a slightly different idiom, this is directly comparable to Lyotards point
in Le diffrend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 190.
9. PA, p. 40.
10. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 745.
11. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Remark to 273.
12. Derrida identies a disjunction in the concept of democracy between
equality and difference (PA, p. 40), and no doubt this is the root of the
instabilities I will be illustrating here. More generally, the more frontal
approach to the concept of democracy I am proposing here might hope
to serve as a prolegomenon to Derridas much more complex (but perhaps
rather elusive) reection on democracy in his book.
13. PA, p. 12.
14. Well-known here does not of course mean that everybody actually
knows them well ... Rather these texts function as matrices (well see
that term, or something like it, appearing again in a moment) for
subsequent philosophical discussion. The supposed well-knownness
of texts often functions as a powerful form of censorship: just because
everyone is supposed to have already read such texts (so that people
habitually pretend to have read them even if they have not), there is a
barrier to actually reading them (not to speak of the barrier constituted by
centuries of scholarship, which is always in principle hostile to reading).
[This is a political remark.] It is also quite striking that Derrida does not
choose to read these texts in his published work to date, perhaps just
because they are so well known: the oblique approach to democracy in
Politiques de lamiti, for example, scarcely refers to either The Republic or
the Politics.
15. In Politiques, Derrida seems to suggest that the irony he nds at work
in the Menexenus undercuts Platos least ironical political discourse ...
in particular in the Republic (PA, p. 125). It is not clear to me whether
this passage of the Republic, which Derrida does not mention, would be
undercut by the irony of the Menexenus.
16. Plato, Republic, 557c.
17. Plato, Republic, 562e563d.
18. Plato, Republic, 557d.
19. Plato, Republic, 558ac.
20. Note the link here with Derridas insistence on the motif of the day, and
the day-by-day, in the text translated as Call it a day for democracy (in
OH): the diversity inherent in the concept of democracy gives it a rhythm
different from that of other regimes. (Note too that Aristotle more than
once associates demagogy with today or this day [1320a 4 and 29].) It
ought to be possible on the basis of this to show that the temporality of
democracy is an impossible one: when exactly is a democracy democratic?
Whence Derridas need to distinguish his insistence on now from the
traditional concept of today.
21. Plato, Republic, 561ce.
22. Cf. too Derridas reections in Politiques on the (relative) optionality of
the name democracy (PA, pp. 124ff.).
McQuillan 01 intro 38 29/6/07 14:58:23
Demo 39
23. Plato, Republic, 693d.
24. No doubt one thinks that women have contributed little to the history
of civilisation by their discoveries and inventions (Entdeckungen
und Erndungen). But they have discovered (erfunden), uncovered one
technique, that of braiding and weaving. The unconscious motive of
this discovery? Hiding, veiling a defect of the genital organs. So
they discovered with a view to veiling. They have unveiled the means of
veiling. In truth, looking more closely, over Freuds shoulder, they have
discovered nothing at all, all they did was imitate, since Nature, dame
Nature, making pubic hair grow at puberty, had already given,
he says, a model, a paradigm (Vorbild) for what was basically only an
imitation (Nachahmung). This pubic hair already hides, it dissimulates,
it veils (verhllt) the genital organs. For this feminine technique, only
one further step was necessary: make the threads or bres (Fasern)
hold together, intertwine them from where they were stuck on the body
right on the skin, merely bushy, mixed up, felted (verlzt). But what
authorises Freud to speak here, against the very logic of his argument,
of a technique? Is it still an art or an artice, is it a discovery, this so-
called technique which invents only the means of imitating nature,
and in truth of unfolding, making explicit, unveiling a natural movement
of nature? And unveiling a movement which itself consists in veiling?
Of decrypting a nature which, as is well-known, likes to encrypt (itself),
physis kruptesthai philei? This technique is less a break with physis than
an imitative extension of it, thus conrming, perhaps, a certain animality
of woman even in her artices. (And what if a tekhn never broke radically
with a physis, if it only ever deferred it in differing from it, why reserve
this animal naturality to woman?) A woman would weave like a body
secretes for itself its own textile, like a worm, but this time like a worm
without worm, a worm primarily concerned to hide in itself its non-being.
What the woman would like to veil, according to Freud who, of course,
does not mention the animal here, is that she does not have the worm she
perhaps is. (I do not know what can be done with this piece of data, but in
German one says Fasernackt for naked as a worm or starkers.) Freuds
conclusion, which I have already quoted, would deserve interminable
analysis. It calls on the reader to witness: If you reject this idea as
imaginary [as a fantastical fantasy, als phantastisch], and if you impute
to me as an ide xe (als eine xe Idee) the inuence of the lack of a penis
on the formation of femininity, then I am naturally disarmed (natrlich
wehrlos). Freud names arms (Wehr). He is not, supposedly is not, without
the truth of the true (wahrlos, if you like) but without arms (wehrlos) and
naturally naturally (natrlich) disarmed, vulnerable, naked. (Un ver
soie, in Jacques Derrida and Hlne Cixous, Voiles [Paris: Galile, 1999],
p. 50; translated by Geoffrey Bennington in Oxford Literary Review 18
(1997), pp. 363, here p. 35.
25. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 475, incidentally conrming and concep-
tualising Platos association of women and boys in the bazaar remark
of the Republic: Since the community only gets an existence through
its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving
[individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in
McQuillan 01 intro 39 29/6/07 14:58:23
what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal
enemy womankind in general. Womankind the everlasting irony [in
the life] of the community changes by intrigue the universal end of the
government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a
work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of
the state into a possession and ornament for the Family. Woman in this
way turns to ridicule the earnest wisdom of mature age which, indifferent
to purely private pleasures and enjoyments, as well as to playing an active
part, only thinks of and cares for the universal. She makes this wisdom an
object of derision for raw and irresponsible youth and unworthy of their
enthusiasm. In general, she maintains that it is the power of youth that
really counts. This famous paragraph goes on to show how this repressed
power of natural individuality communicates, as it were, with that fact
of the State itself as a natural individual in competition among other
States the so-called ethical nation subsists only through the power in
it of the individualistic naturality it represses in the gure of women and
youth: in fact, the ethical nation can survive only by having its youth
ght against other nations but this dependency of the ethical nation
on the natural values of strength and luck already means it is no longer
quite ethical. See especially, just a little later in 476: This ruin of the
ethical Substance and its passage into another form is thus determined
by the fact that the ethical consciousness is directed on to the law in a
way that is essentially immediate. This determination of immediacy means
that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply
reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the
beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself. For
this immediacy has the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious
tranquillity of Nature, and also the self-conscious restless tranquillity of
Spirit. On account of this natural aspect, this ethical nation is, in general,
an individuality determined by Nature and therefore limited, and thus
meets its downfall at the hands of another. See too Derridas commentary
on these passages in Glas (Paris: Galile, 1974; reprint, Denol/Gonthier,
1981, vol. 2, pp. 262a ff.). It is also worth noting that these two principles
are seen to be the principles of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit
736.
26. I develop these points more fully in Frontires kantiennes (Paris: Galile,
2000).
27. Plato actually inscribes democracy into a declining narrative sequence
whereby aristocracy gives rise in turn to timocracy, to oligarchy, to
democracy, and nally to tyranny. This narrative is set in motion by the
fact that the ideal State described in the Republic is of necessity temporal,
and like all temporal things, subject to alteration and decay.
28. Plato, Republic, 462ab.
29. Plato, Republic, 462c.
30. Aristotle, Politics, 1261a 1733; cf. too, 1277a 510.
31. Aristotle, Politics, 1263b 305.
32. See Le mot daccueil, in Jacques Derrida, Adieu Emmanuel Levinas (Paris:
Galile, 1997) for an extended discussion of the political place of the
third party in Levinas.
McQuillan 01 intro 40 29/6/07 14:58:23
Demo 41
33. That all but is important: in fact no state can achieve complete autarkeia,
if only because of the need to prepare itself for protection from attack
from outside. Cf. too Aristotle, Politics, 1275b 20. See too my discussion
of this motif in Frontires kantiennes. This is also the opening for Hegels
remarks quoted above, note 25.
35. Aristotle, Politics, 1297b 2831; cf. too 1316b 36.
37. But when the citizens at large administer the state for the common
interest, the government is called by the generic name a constitution.
And there is a reason for this use of language. One man or a few may
excel in virtue; but as the number increases it becomes more difcult
for them to attain perfection in every kind of virtue, though they may
in military virtue, for this is found in the masses. Hence in a constitu-
tional government the ghting-men have the supreme power, and those
who possess arms are the citizens (Aristotle, Politics, 1279a 371279b
4). This is an obscure passage which has exercised the commentators
for centuries, and the problem is compounded by the fact that Aristotle
does in fact regularly use the word democracy to refer to this supposedly
non-deviant form, often assimilated by translators and commentators to
the republican form. See Derridas discussion in PA, pp. 22334.
38. Aristotle, Politics, 1279a 31.
39. See Aristotle, Politics, 1289a, 37ff. Cf. too Nichomachean Ethics, 1160b,
89: and we see more clearly in the case of tyranny that it is the worst
of deviations, because the contrary of what is best is what is worst.
40. It has actually been argued on philological grounds that the remarks
about democracy in the Nichomachean Ethics amount to saying that it is
the best form of all, and not just the least bad of the deviant forms. This
depends on an attempt to challenge the accepted reading of Nichomachean
Ethics, 1160b 1920: Democracy is the least bad of the deviations; for in
its case the form of constitution is but a slight deviation, but here the
words of the deviations are an interpolation. The Greek reads: hkista
de mochthron estin h dmokratia: epi mikron gar parekbainei to ts
politeias eidos. Although it looks implausible to argue that this is what
Aristotle really meant, the drift of our argument is that, as least bad
deviant form, democracy really is the best form according to a logic
Aristotle does not entirely control or sign. This does not amount to
accepting the dogmatic assertion by e.g. Tricot (whose name signals
not so much towards the noble art of weaving as towards the much
more domestic activity of knitting: lets say that Tricot is woolly) that
Aristotle thinks that the politeia is the ideal form. Cf. his translation of
the Politics (Aristotle, La Politique, trans. J. Tricot [Paris: Vrin/Bibliothque
des textes philosophiques, 1995]), p. 174, n3, and, extraordinarily, of
the Nichomachean Ethics, where in his note 1 to p. 410, he claims that
the politeia, which Aristotle here prefers to call timocratia, constitutes,
according to Aristotle, the most perfect form of political organisation. A
few lines further on, the translation has Aristotle saying, of the normal
forms: The best of these constitutions is royalty, and the worst, timocracy.
Cf. the further traces of this dogmatism on La politique, p. 214, n2.
McQuillan 01 intro 41 29/6/07 14:58:23
41. Aristotle, Politics, 302e303b; my emphasis.
43. Aristotle, Politics, 1266a 15.
44. This is a complex point. In the Nichomachean Ethics, II, 6, which gives a
full denition of moral virtue, Aristotle, having dened virtue in terms of
the mean, points out that not all actions admit of a virtuous mean at all.
For example, adultery, theft and homicide are perverse in themselves,
and not just in their moments of excess and default. This is because such
actions are already in the domain of excess or default, and there can be
no mean, excess or default of excess itself. This is taken to disallow the
type of second-level argument I have just put up: Aristotle is essentially
saying that default, mean and excess cannot be reapplied to themselves
so just as we cant rehabilitate murder as a virtue by applying the mean
to it, so we cant reapply default or excess to the mean itself. Virtue may
be dened in terms of a mean used to measure actions, but is not itself to
be measured in terms of the mean. This reading, forcefully defended by
J.O. Urmson in Aristotles Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) is vulnerable,
however, to the charge of dogmatism. For example, it is difcult to see
why moderation or temperance can be lost in default or excess, but
not virtue itself, especially as what is translated here as moderation or
temperance is sophrosyne, and just that quality is an essential component
of moral virtue as Aristotle denes it. See for example 1105b, 112:
Actions, then, are called just and temperate [sophrona] when they are
such as the just or the temperate [sophron] man would do; but it is not
the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who
also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then,
that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing
temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would
have even a prospect of becoming good. But if we do allow the re-
application of the logic of the mean to the thought of the mean, so
that virtue would consist in a sort of moderate moderation, then the
paradoxes we are looking at cannot be repressed: a virtue of moderate
moderation or a mean mean always might, on occasion (and of course
Aristotle does also leave open here a thought of the occasion or the
kairos), need to act excessively or immoderately.
45. Cf. Derrida, Le mot daccueil.
46. Aristotle, Politics, 1291b 301292a 38; cf. too 1274a 5.
47. See especially the Perpetual Peace text, in H. Reiss (ed.), Kants Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [2nd edition]),
p. 101.
48. See Richard Beardsworths discussion in Derrida and the Political (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 925.
49. I argue this in depth, in the context of Kants account of teleological
judgement, in Chapter 5 of Frontires kantiennes.
McQuillan 01 intro 42 29/6/07 14:58:23
2
On the Multiple Senses of Democracy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Never do we wonder as much about the fragility of democracy as
when democratic certainty is generally conrmed. When every
discourse guarantees that democracy is the only acceptable type of
political regime for emancipated humanity that has come of age and
that has no other purpose than itself, then the very idea of democracy
loses its colour, becomes blurred, and perplexes us.
Let us rst establish the following: the so-called totalitarian
possibilities that put the twentieth century to the test have already
emerged from this trouble. Unlike those who, during the 1920s and
1930s, could believe in the demand for a radical re-foundation of
the res publica [la chose publique et commune], we can no longer ignore
the traps and the monsters hiding behind our perplexities towards
democracy.
And yet, it is impossible simply to be democrat without wondering
about what this means, for the meaning of the term keeps posing
problems, at every step, each time one has recourse to it. To ignore
these difficulties as political discourses constantly do is as
dangerous as to challenge democracy. Their avoidance forbids us
to think and thus covers over the same traps and monsters, or even
other ones.
I propose here nothing other than a merely minimal argument or
schematic procedure for the examination of the possible meanings
of democracy:
1) Either the word points to the exercise of political power by the
people and in this case:
a) the people refers to a fraction of the social whole that is distinct
from another one to which it is supposedly inferior and that dominates
it. In this case, democracy is not a regime but the overthrow of a
regime (or at least, of a government). It is the revolt of misery and of
the intolerable in bodies and souls, of hunger, of fear. From passive
subjects, the subjected become active ones. The legitimacy of their
revolt is absolute. It is however merely that of revolt and does not
allow for the foundation of a regime. In revolt, there are democrats
43
McQuillan 01 intro 43 29/6/07 14:58:23
44 Jean-Luc Nancy
rather than democracy. Revolt only exists in its act, in its times and
its places. It is not a coincidence if, in modern political experience,
the idea of permanent revolution has constituted both an innitely
vanishing point and a line of conduct. The subject of revolt simul-
taneously refers, for the time being, to an absolute, inalienable and
indivisible dignity, or to a value that is measured to nothing but to
itself and, in the long run, to the same absolute value as an innite
opening that no quality, institution, or even identity should be able
to close off. Democratic politics is thus a politics of periodic return
to the breach of revolt (to the brink of revolt). It can determine the
circumstance and the subject that open up this breach only on an
ad hoc basis.
Or, b) the people is considered as the whole and as the body of
social reality. Instead of a thought that proceeds in a differential
manner, one is faced with a thought that favours the whole. The
political sovereignty of the people thus signies above all its self-
constitution as a people. This self-constitution obviously precedes
every political constitution, which the people constitute, rather
than being constituted by it. Here the people-subject is afrmed not
as an actor and a force but rst of all as a substance: the primary
reality whose existence and movement ow only from itself. The
history of modern thought shows in turn either the impossibility of
engendering a politics that would be itself the self-engendering of the
people (direct democracy, the innite presupposition of a common
and organic will, that is, according to Rousseau, the sole prerogative
of the gods) or else the solution to the problem of democracy as the
dissolution of the entire political sphere as particular sphere, which
disappears in the total and social self-productive sphere (Marx).
When one has taken into account the whole of this rst hypothesis,
as our history appears to have done, two possible modalities of what
can be called a politics in negativity [ politique en ngativit ] emerge:
either the periodical and dispersed politics of particular congurations
of the breach, that yet implies the abstention from participation
to the (parliamentary and republican) democratic institution
or else, the thought of democracy that holds the impossibility
of embodying its essence and of representing its gure, with the
necessity of maintaining democratically this impossibility. In both
cases, politics is afrmed essentially in a retreat in the precise sense
that political authority, as the authority of a subsumptive unity of
nature and fate, of the project and of the identity of something like
a people, must be kept in retreat of itself, must remain the negative
McQuillan 01 intro 44 29/6/07 14:58:24
On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 45
index of an always remote presence. The model here is that of a
negative theology, and in fact what is at issue is nothing other than
politics as onto-theo-politics (or the theologico-political) whose sign
is inverted. (The question can be formulated in the following manner:
Have revolutions done anything other than invert the sign of the
theologico-political?)
2) Or else, democracy does not so much point to a political
specicity as to civil society or to the social bond considered from
the perspective of an ethos or of a democratic feeling, namely, under
the heading of the regulative idea that the motto liberty, equality,
fraternity represents, whatever its precise interpretation may be.
On this view, democracy is a description and/or an evaluation of
the being-in-common based on the mutual recognition of fellow
creatures and on the independence of each group who share this
recognition. The model for such a group is given in the form of what
is called a commune or a community (as in Marx). Two thoughts
of the commun(e)ity are possible:
According to the first (rather American in Tocquevilles
understanding), the commune is not yet in the political order: it
is beyond the State and can be represented as subsisting without
or under the latter (its freedom is in it more a franchise than a self-
constituting freedom). It is local and restricted, it does not involve
power as such. It has the nature of an interiority and its outside is as
much the other commune as the State itself. The latter thus appears
less as a subsumptive and identicatory authority than as a separate
one, responsible for another sphere (in the kind of an imperial or
federal power).
According to the second (more European and variously modulated
in socialist or fascist versions), the community takes the place of the
negativity formulated above. Its interiority or its subjectivity fulls the
identicatory and subsumptive role of the State which tendentiously
erases or sublimates itself in it. One therefore reconstitutes a positive
onto-theologico-politics, but an immanent version of it and no longer
a transcendent one.
3) The question of democracy can thus apparently be condensed
in the following manner: does this word nally point to the tacit
renewal of the theologico-political through a negative-transcendent
or immanent-positive metamorphosis, or does it point to a genuine
rupture from the theologico-political? (We recognise one form of
the debate on secularisation as it opposed Carl Schmitt and Hans
McQuillan 01 intro 45 29/6/07 14:58:24
46 Jean-Luc Nancy
Blumenberg. More generally, this debate pertains to the essence or
to the meaning of modernity.)
If, as I think, what is at issue is a rupture, we should nevertheless
determine in what way it is not yet brought to completion. Indeed,
not only does the European thought of democracy often remain
burdened by the weight of the theologico-political (positive or
negative), but American thought simultaneously frees the forces of
inequality that an internal principle of the people no longer tempers,
and the forces of the incompatible and sterilising communitarian
turning in on oneself. There thus remains at least one meaning of
democracy (or of whatever name one may have to give to it) that
is not yet spelled out. (The qualiers European and American are
here formal indexes: the real features are formed everywhere. It would
not be naive to think that Europe, in spite of all its defects, could
be a real place for putting an unheard-of meaning of democracy
to the test.)
The task that is clearly expounded is therefore neither that of a
destruction of democracy, nor that of its indenite perfecting: it is
above all that of coming to a decision about the rupture at issue,
therefore about modernity (or about so-called post-modernity).
The decision will have to involve a decision upon the nature, the
stake and the place of the political. Should it still be thought in the
shadow of the theologico-political (namely, what one calls today
the political tout court)? Or else, should it be thought according
to an essential retreat of that political (essential, substantial and
subsumptive of all the being-in-common): this withdrawal [retrait]
would not be a retreat [retraite], but a retracing of everything that is
at issue with the being-in-common (being together or being-with).
Namely and singularly, the question as to whether the political sphere
should not remain distinct from the sphere of the common, which
it neither exhausts nor overhangs. Politics is not responsible for the
identity and for the fate of the common, but for the ruling should
it be innite of justice (it has therefore to do with power). The
common puts into play existence (it has therefore to do with meaning
[sens]). What is at issue is the gap between meaning and power. The
one assuredly does not exclude the other, but nor does it substitute
itself for it. (The legitimacy of revolt is not so much suppressed, as
its ultimate horizon displaced.) The theologico-political subsumes
together power and meaning, justice and existence, and absorbs the
common into the political (or the reverse). Ultimately, one no longer
knows what common and political mean. That is what makes us
McQuillan 01 intro 46 29/6/07 14:58:24
perplexed about democracy. It is therefore a question of thinking
the interval between the common and the political: one does not
belong to the one as to the other, and not everything is political. Nor
is everything common, since the common is neither a thing nor a
whole. Between power and meaning, there is proximity and distance,
there is altogether a relation of power and a relation of meaning
[sens] ... It may be a new form of mans relation to himself, who
would not know how to be his own end (if that is the foundation
of democracy) without moving away from himself in order to move
beyond.
Jean-Luc Nancy, December 1999.
Translated by Cline Surprenant
IS EVERYTHING POLITICAL?
A SIMPLE NOTE
A sentence oats on the horizon of our thoughts, it declares that
everything is political. It can be addressed or received in many ways:
sometimes in a distributive mode (the diverse moments or pieces
of existence in common all proceed in some way from the moment
or piece called political, which has a privilege of diffusion or of
transversality), sometimes on a rather dominating mode (at rst or
ultimately, it is the political sphere that determines or commands the
activity of the other spheres), at other times, nally, in an integrative
or assumptive mode (the essence of the whole of existence is of a
political nature). In each of these cases, the tone of the enunciation
or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, afrmative or
protestatory.
Before simply and vaguely oating, this sentence on the horizon
has been the axiom of a modern elaboration. It has probably
constituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long period
perhaps in fact from 1789 up until today, even if we do not know
whether our days are still or are already no longer circumscribed by
this horizon. (But in particular, this sentence has become a maxim
or a motto as much for fascism as for communism [les fascismes et
les communismes]: it was probably, beyond all disparities, their point
of contact.)
So as not to dwell in this brief note on what has preceded
modernity, let us limit ourselves to saying the following: politics was
McQuillan 01 intro 47 29/6/07 14:58:24
48 Jean-Luc Nancy
not totalising for antiquity, which no doubt invented it but which
conceived of it only in the condition of a city of free men, that is,
of an essentially differential and not totalising polis. Slavery alone,
with its economical corollaries, prevents us from understanding, for
example, the architectonic place of politics in Aristotle according to
the idea that everything is political. In this political space, the free
man enjoys the polis for other ends than that of political management
(for example, the bios theoretikos, the leisure of thinking life), just as
the polis survives on infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence
above all by familial units). As far as the politics of the sovereign
Nation-State is concerned, it was sustaining itself, on the one hand,
on the basis of everyones relation to a destination that always
somewhat disregarded politics (a religious, symbolic destination)
whereas the same sovereignty, on the other hand, was leading
towards politics in totality [la politique en totalit ] that has become
that of the moderns.
If we say today that politics is held in check or on the edge by
economy, it is only through a hasty confusion: what we thus call
economy is in fact nothing other than what was formerly called
political economy, that is to say, the functioning of the management
of subsistence and of prosperity, not so much at the level of the family
which is relatively self-sufcient (the oikos, the household), but at
the level of the city (polis). Political economy was nothing other
than the considering of the polis as an oikos, that is, as a collective
or communitarian reality supposedly belonging to a natural order
(generation, kinship, property of patrimony: ground, goods, slaves).
It followed logically that if the oiko-nomia was transposed at the
level of the polis, the shift could not simply be a matter of scale,
but also implied that the politeia, the knowledge of the businesses
of the city, should itself be reinterpreted as an oiko-nomia. But the
latter was itself and simultaneously no longer reinterpreted only in
terms of subsistence and of prosperity (of good life), but in terms
of production and of reproduction of wealth (of the having-more
[plus-avoir]).
When all is said and done, what is at issue is always the way in
which the grouping of men is to be interpreted. It is understood as
a political whole insofar as the political is itself determined as
total, totalising or inclusive. It is indeed what it has done, in a major
way, by determining itself as an encompassing oikos: more precisely,
as an oiko-logical encompassment, that of a concourse or of a
concurrence in the primary sense of these terms of the natural
McQuillan 01 intro 48 29/6/07 14:58:24
resources of its members. This was first called physiocracy
(government by nature).
At the same time, it was necessary to determine the natural nature
of the members of the political oikos. This was done by constituting the
city itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent
order with regard to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while
being simultaneously of another essence than them), but on the
basis of an assumed originary oikology, an originary familiarity
between men themselves and between men and nature. Thus, the
institution of the social body or of a civil society (in the primary
and exact sense of the terms: a political society or a society where the
notion of citizenship is central) was presented as being tendentiously,
ideally or originally identical to the institution of humanity itself,
the latter moreover having no other ultimate destination than to
produce itself as second nature or as an entirely humanised nature
(supposing that such a concept should not be contradictory, which
is no doubt precisely one nub of the problem ...).
According to this logic, everything is political is given as a
principle, whence it follows that politics itself, as an order separated
from any specic institution, knowledge (or art), cannot but tend
towards the suppression of its own separation so as to realise the
natural totality that it expresses or that it rst indicates. In that case,
there is no difference, ultimately, between everything is political and
everything is economical. Democracy and market can thus together
and mutually force their way through the process that is today called
mondialisation. Everything is political thus also comes down to
saying that there is a self-sufciency of man, himself considered as
producer of his nature and in him, of the whole of nature. The vague
representation of this self-sufciency and of this self-production has
thoroughly dominated, up until now, the representations of politics,
whether they be of the right or of the left, at least all those that are
presented under the heading of a global political project, whether it
be of the state or against the state, consensual or revolutionary,
etc. (There also exists a weak version of politics as an activity of
regulation, of correction of the imbalances and of the lowering of
tensions: but the background of this social-democrat bricolage,
incidentally sometimes very honourable [but also sometimes fraught
with dishonest compromises], nevertheless remains the same.)
McQuillan 01 intro 49 29/6/07 14:58:24

50 Jean-Luc Nancy
The only question that what is today called the crisis, the eclipse,
the paralysis of politics raises is in fact that of the self-sufciency
of man and/or of nature in him or through him. Now, it is precisely
the inconsistency of this self-sufciency that is gradually being
demonstrated by our time. For mondialisation or the general oiko-
logicisation of the polis also reveals increasingly vividly or more
violently the non-naturality of its own process (but also, eventually,
that of the alleged nature itself: never have we been to such a great
extent in the order of a meta-phusis).
The man that has emancipated itself through total eco-politics
this man whose social-market represents simultaneously and
symmetrically the universal form of rights and the planetary
proliferation of injustice, extortion and exploitation turns out to
be not so much alienated (in the sense in which he could designate
the proper in relation to which alienation can be measured
and determined) as deprived of identity, of propriety, of end and
of measure. Man rst bears witness to a lack of being [manque
tre]. On the one hand, existence is forbidden to the exploited that
is submitted to survival (it is indeed a prohibition rather than a
lack). The afuent, on the other hand, know increasingly well even
leaving aside compassion that neither their well-being nor the
suffering [mal-tre] of the others that corresponds to it, produce being-
man or being-world.
But in this way and this is the most recent lesson, still almost
inaudible, most often unheard-of the lack itself reveals simul-
taneously the insufciency of a simple logic of the lack. Such a
logic, analogous to that of alienation, presupposes a fullness as
terminus a quo or ad quem. Now, if there is no terminus neither origin
nor end it is because one is faced with the paradoxical logic of a
complete incompleteness or of an innite nitude. This logic turns
out henceforth to form man, and with him (and through him),
nature as well as history.
Now, in the singular light of this paradox, the invention of the
politeia may turn out already to have been the revelation of such
a logic. The man of the logos, that is properly the zoon politikon,
is the being whose own measure is incommensurable and cannot
be appropriated. The polis has simultaneously represented itself as
a given common measure, or as the self-donation of a common
measure, and as an indenite instability and a permanent reworking
[remise en chantier] (even if rare, with episodic manifestations) of
McQuillan 01 intro 50 29/6/07 14:58:24
the measure of the incommensurable. (The index of the common
measure is then to be understood both transversally: a linking
measure, and in a distributive sense: a measure due to everyone
[revenant chacun].)
The measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, from the moment
that it is not given, the exercise of a power (thus of counter-powers,
of reversals, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such a power,
in whatever sense one may envisage it, is from the rst incompatible
with an identication carried out under the heading of the oiko-
nomy: under the heading of natural self-sufciency. But precisely,
it has become obvious that there is no oikonomy: there is, in all
respects, only an echotechny, that is to say a common place or a
dwelling in the production, the invention and the ceaseless trans-
formation of ends that are never given. No doubt, the domination
of political economy has never been more overwhelming; but never
has the fundamental inconsistency of its so-called self-sufciency
been more manifest. Never has it been more manifest that the value
(the value of man or of the world) is absolutely incommensurable
with any measured value (evaluated). (Commensurability is called
general equivalence.)
Politics has retreated as the donation (self- or hetero-donation,

human or divine) of an essence and of a common destination: it
has retreated as totality or totalisation. In this way, not everything
is political.
But politics traces itself again either as a place for the exercise
of power that aims at an incommensurable justice or as a place
where to claim the in-nity of being-man and of being-world. By
denition, it does not resorb in itself all the other places of existence.
The others are those where incommensurability is somewhat formed
or presented: they can be called art, religion, thought, science,
ethics, conduct [conduite], exchange, production, love, war,
kinship, rapture, they can have an innite number of names. Their
distinctions and their mutual circumscriptions (that prevent neither
contiguity nor compenetrations) each time dene the occurrence of a
conguration whereby a certain presentation takes place even if this
presentation should itself give rise to a non-presentation [imprsenta-
tion] or to a retreat of presence. (The non-political spheres are not
McQuillan 01 intro 51 29/6/07 14:58:24
52 Jean-Luc Nancy
however those of a private order opposed to a public one: all the
spheres are public and private, if one must use these terms. All are
shared, in the double edge of this word.)
Between these congurations (and here again, without excluding
their points of contact and their contagions) there is incommensur-
ability. Politics is redrawn [se redessine] at this place: as the place
where the opening of this incommensurability must be maintained,
and in general, the opening of the incommensurability of justice and
of value. Contrary to what was afrmed by the theologico-political
as well as by political economy but not without relation to what
was at stake in the polis from before politics (if one dare say so)
politics is no longer the place of the assumption of a uni-totality. It
is therefore no longer the place of the taking form [mise-en-forme], or
of the presenting [mise-en-presence] of incommensurability or of some
unity of origin and end, in brief of a humanity. Politics is concerned
with space and spacing (with space-time), but not with gure.
Politics is no doubt the place of an in-common as such but only
in the mode of an incommensurability kept opened (and according to
the two axes sketched above). It does not subsume the in-common
under any kind of union, community, subject or epiphany. All that
pertains to the common is not political, and what is political is not
entirely common. But at the same time, neither the sphere of the
in-common, nor that of politics admit of the separation between a
society of exteriority and a community in interiority. (Dualism does
not hold any more for the social body/soul than for the individual
body/soul.)
Politics must henceforth be understood as the specic place of the
articulation of a non-unity and of the symbolisation of a non-gure.
The names equality and liberty are nothing but the problematical
names, not saturated with meaning, under the heading of which
must be kept open the demand for not achieving an essence or an
end of the incommensurable, yet and precisely, they are the names
under the heading of which its (im)possibility must be sustained.
The exigency of adjusting power the force that must hold the
non-organic non-unity to an incommensurable justice. The
demand, then, for adjusting it to the universal (not given, but to be
produced). At this point, politics is far from being everything even
if everything goes through it, meets and crosses it. Politics becomes
precisely a place of de-totalisation. Or else, could we risk saying: if
everything is political but according to another acceptation than
McQuillan 01 intro 52 29/6/07 14:58:25
that of political theology and/or political economy it is in the sense
that everything, the whole should in no way be total or totalised.
Are we equal to the task of conceiving democracy in this way, with
such a degree of intensity?
Jean-Luc Nancy, April 2000.
Translated by Cline Surprenant
McQuillan 01 intro 53 29/6/07 14:58:25
3
The Art of the Impossible?
Derek Attridge
My love is of a birth as rare
As tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.
Andrew Marvell, The Denition of Love
Bismarck famously observed that politics is the art of the possible,
and its not difcult to agree. Determinate and achievable goals,
practical and practicable policies, staged and cumulative programmes,
these are the watchwords of a successful political platform. Politics
happens squarely, it would seem, in the realm of the possible, the
feasible, the achievable.
Deconstruction, on the other hand, involves a constant engagement
with the impossible.
1
Here are a few statements by Derrida, out of
many more I could have chosen. From Psyche: Invention of the
Other: Deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is
impossible.
2
From Force of Law: Deconstruction is the experience
of the impossible.
3
From Violence and Metaphysics: The impossible
has already occurred.
4
The impossible is also a constitutive feature of many of the
concepts or experiences on which Derrida has dwelt in his more
recent work. Another small selection (the use of bold is mine): From
Given Time: The gift is the impossible.
5
From The Other Heading:
The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a
certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible.
6

From Sauf le nom: The sole decision possible passes through the
madness of the undecidable and the impossible.
7
And from the same
work (more or less a rewriting of my epigraph from Marvell): love
itself, that is, this innite renunciation which somehow surrenders to
the impossible.
8
From Politics of Friendship: This love that would take
place only once would be the only possible event: as impossible.
9

From De lhospitalit: Everything takes place as if hospitality were
the impossible.
10
A recent text of Derridas, to which Ill return later,
54
McQuillan 01 intro 54 29/6/07 14:58:25
The Art of the Impossible? 55
is called La littrature au secret: Une liation impossible (which
might be translated as Literature Incommunicado: An Impossible
Filiation).
11
The art of the possible; the experience of the impossible. Is the
passage between the two, between politics and deconstruction,
possible or impossible?
In order to highlight one or two aspects of this huge question, Id like
to focus my attention on Derridas reading of a short Biblical text,
the akedah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, told in Genesis chapter
22 or, to be more accurate, his reading of Kierkegaards reading of
this text in Fear and Trembling.
12
In particular, I want to consider the
move in chapter 3 of The Gift of Death whereby Derrida extrapolates
from the situation in which Abraham nds himself, commanded by
the God he worships to kill his beloved son and heir, the repository of
the future of his race, to the situation of all of us, at every moment.
13

This is a move which could be seen as paradigmatic of the passage
from deconstruction to politics (and from reading to politics), a move
from a unique account of a unique event, related in a unique text
of a literary type (or, more accurately, a series of such texts), to the
array of quotidian realities we have to deal with here and now; from
an impossible demand to the possibilities of daily existence.
14
This is how Derrida makes the move. Having emphasised how
monstrous is the demand made on Abraham, how his responsibility
to the absolute Other requires that, by sacricing his son, he sacrice
the ethical obligations he is under as father, husband, patriarch, social
being, Derrida comments:
But isnt this also the most common thing? what the most cursory examination
of the concept of responsibility cannot fail to afrm? ... What binds me thus
in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other immediately propels
me into the space or risk of absolute sacrice. There are also others, an innite
number of them, the innumerable generality of others, to whom I should be
bound by the same responsibility.
15
And Derrida gives some examples which make it very clear that he
really does mean that my responsibilities are innite, and fullling
them an impossible task:
By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring
my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing
and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fullling
McQuillan 01 intro 55 29/6/07 14:58:25
56 Derek Attridge
my duty. But I am sacricing and betraying at every moment all my other
obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or dont know, the
billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other
others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness ...
every one being sacriced to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our
habitat every second of every day.
16
Kierkegaards reading of the events on Mount Moriah also emphasises
another aspect of the story, Abrahams surprising silence about his
acceptance of Gods demand, from which Derrida again extrapolates,
to make his account of our daily condition even bleaker. I quote from
The Gift of Death once more:
Whether I want to or not, I can never justify the fact that I prefer or sacrice
the one (an other) to the other ... How would you ever justify the fact that you
sacrice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning
for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention
other people? How would you justify your presence here speaking one particular
language, rather than there speaking to others in another language?
17
Derrida has spoken of the quasi-fictional quality of this text,
distancing himself to a degree from the philosopher or ethico-political
commentator whose voice we hear a stratagem which of course
echoes Kierkegaards own text, published under a pseudonym and
composed in a style that is as literary as it is philosophical. Whether
or not Derrida might, if pressed, say this about every text he has
published, it is true that there is a certain extravagance, occasionally
bordering on comedy, in some parts of this work. No matter how
familiar one is with Derridas writing, its easy to nd oneself asking at
these moments, Is he being serious?, and thus to put oneself in the
position of those many readers including those looking for concrete
political recommendations who resist Derridas thought because it
pushes them beyond the point where they feel comfortable.
Someone whom one would certainly not think to include
among such readers is David Wood, a respected philosopher in the
continental tradition who has written with acuity and sympathy
on Derridas work and edited a number of collections devoted to
Derrida. Yet Wood is among those who cant stomach the move Ive
just summarised. Ill give you a couple of excerpts from his essay,
Much Obliged:
First problem: I can never justify the fact that I prefer or sacrice any one (any
other) to the other. Can this be true? Suppose I have promised something to
McQuillan 01 intro 56 29/6/07 14:58:25
one person and not to another, in such a way that they rely on my support in
ways that others do not. Does that not give me special obligations? Or, suppose
one person (or animal) in need is in front of me, and the other is not? ... The
thought that there are no xed boundaries here does not mean that there are
none. Hospitality would self-destruct if it were innite.
18
And again:
Unless we are holding on to some source of absolute justication, which I
thought had long since been abandoned, it is just not true that I can never
justify this sacrice, that I will always be secretive. My justication for teaching
my children about poison ivy is that they are my children and I care especially
for them.
19
In this response Wood is not far from the attitude of the impatient
political activist who nds in Derridas writing no guide to practical
life, and who asks, How can an assertion of the impossibility of
acting responsibly, and of justifying what one does, contribute to the
needs of the here and now? Wood, quite reasonably (at least quite
reasonably as a practical man if not as a philosopher of deconstruc-
tion) believes that he is perfectly able to rank his responsibilities and,
if need be, justify this ranking. And the implication is that, having got
his responsibilities in order, he can act upon them without too much
difculty irrespective of all this rigmarole about starving cats.
The worrying thing about Woods essay is not just that it has
difculties with this text of Derridas, but, as Ive suggested, that its
misreadings of the text imply an inability to grasp what is centrally
radical about deconstructive thinking. One way of putting this
would be that it does not acknowledge the consequences of the
impossibility of deconstruction and the associated impossibilities we
have already noted. (I make no comment on the ad hominem aspects
of his essay, the accusation that Derrida suffers from what one could
almost call ... hubris and the suggestion that the argument of The
Gift of Death springs from a sense of guilt on Derridas part.
20
)
There are two elements in Derridas argument that Wood, and no
doubt many other readers, nd troublesome. The rst is the claim
that every choice I make in favour of a person, an animal, a culture,
a language, a place necessarily involves the sacrice of every other
person, animal, culture, language or place I might have chosen; the
second is that I am unable to justify any such choice and sacrice.
The rst claim follows ineluctably from Derridas understanding of
responsibility as unconditional and singular, a unique response to a
McQuillan 01 intro 57 29/6/07 14:58:25
58 Derek Attridge
unique other, manifested in an extreme form in Abrahams response
to God but applicable to all instances of responsibility. (Wood appears
to share this understanding: he says, I must acknowledge that at one
level Derrida is right about responsibility right, that is, to insist
that it must exceed any prescribable algorithm.
21
) But if responsibil-
ity is unconditional, outside the operation of norms, conventions,
discourse, rationality, there can be no fully reliable means whereby
my responsibility to x can be calculated as greater or lesser than my
responsibility to y. Responsibility, if it is not mere calculation, can
never be anything other than absolute, whether it is responsibility
to God, to humans, to cats, or to languages. Derridas apparently
absurd examples are no more than the result of following through
the consequences of this position.
The second stage of Derridas argument, that I can never justify any
of the choices and attendant sacrices that I make, follows directly
on from the rst. It links the concept of responsibility to the singular
other and the concept of the decision. Abrahams decision to obey the
command of God is made as a singular response to a singular set of
circumstances, absolutely heterogeneous to all laws and generalities.
We cannot say whether it is more an act or an event, whether it
is something Abraham does or something that happens to him.
The instant of decision, Derrida quotes Kierkegaard as saying in
a strikingly proto-Derridean moment, is madness.
22
The decision
here consists in placing one responsibility to God, to the singularity
of the absolute other above another, or rather many others to
Isaac, to the family, to the state, to the human community, to the
covenanted future (of which Isaac is the embodiment), to ethics as
a general system.
Once we describe Abrahams decision in these terms, the
impossibility of justication, the inevitability of silence, is obvious.
To account for his decision in language, in the public discourse of
what counts as justication, would be to cross from the unconditional
to the conditional, from the incalculable to the calculable, from the
impossible to the possible. But to assert that Abraham is, and cannot
avoid being, silent about his decision is not to assert that he does
not, and cannot, speak. (Derrida notes that speaking in order not
to say anything is always the best technique for keeping a secret.
23
)
What is more, Abraham is under an obligation to speak, to justify his
action; once he descends from the lonely heights of Mount Moriah to
the public spaces he has to pick up once more his familial and social
existence, to move from the realm of the impossible to the possible,
McQuillan 01 intro 58 29/6/07 14:58:25
from, if you like, deconstruction to politics. He has to negotiate the
unnegotiable.
24
Another impossible demand, in other words. Which
does not mean it cannot be done one must never forget that, for
Derrida, the impossible (which of course has nothing to do with the
very difcult) is what opens the possible. Were it straightforwardly
possible for Abraham to justify his decision, if he could speak with
no reserve, no secret, no silence inhabiting his words, we would
know that he had not made a decision, in the strict sense, that it
must have been a calculation, with no ethical force, no enactment
of responsibility. His attempted justication will succeed only if it
fails, if his account of what he has done bears a silence at its heart
one might even say produces, without producing, a silence at its
heart. This is what Kierkegaards account attempts to do, to testify
to and thus produce without producing Abrahams secret, to bear
witness to the enormity and importance of that secret. This is what
Derridas account attempts to do. This is what deconstructive writing
does, testify to secrets.
25
This is all very well, our political pragmatist may say, but Derrida
carries the argument well beyond matters of life-and-death decisions,
and thats when it becomes troubling. It may be correct to say that
there is a structural aporia at the heart of every genuinely ethical
decision, that the ethical act, as an absolutely singular event, as
the saying which exceeds the said, cannot, by its very nature, be
justied. But when Derrida applies his arguments to the most banal
of daily actions, actions which one would not normally characterise
as ethical, an understandable resistance ensues. I did not choose to
speak the language I speak, and so can hardly be accused of sacricing
all other languages to it; I have no option but to occupy the place
I stand in, and so no sacricial act in relation to other places is
involved; I feed my cat out of sheer habit, and have to take no
decision to do so.
Thus David Wood tells us that he teaches his children about
poison ivy, and has a straightforward justication for doing so, and
for not making the hopeless attempt to ensure that all the children
in the world know about poison ivy: they are my children and I care
especially for them.
26
Its clearly not something he has to decide to
do. No doubt he would have similarly down-to-earth justications
for virtually all his other actions that bear upon his responsibility to
others. No impossibilities, no silences, no secrets. But Woods insertion
of a proviso just before this assertion suggests that matters are not
quite so simple: Unless we are holding on to some source of absolute
McQuillan 01 intro 59 29/6/07 14:58:25
60 Derek Attridge
justication, which I thought had long since been abandoned. His
justications are, it would seem, partial, or tentative, or provisional;
at any rate, they make no claim to be absolute.
This rather changes the picture. Partial, tentative, provisional
justication can have no purchase on the ethical act; such justication
is not particularly difcult and it happens everywhere all the time. It
is the bottomless resource of good conscience. It is the speech which
simply covers over the secret. Its not to be dismissed its part of
rational, practical discourse, and it can be legitimate or illegitimate,
convincing or unconvincing. But its ever-present possibility depends
on the impossibility of justication in the purity of its concept,
which one can call absolute if one wishes: the justication and
one has to add, if there is such a thing that justies, that makes
immediately apparent, without shadow, the justness of the act in
question. The same structure, as Derrida has shown, operates in the
case of the gift, testimony, hospitality, justice itself, deconstruction.
(I quoted earlier Woods comment: The thought that there are no
xed boundaries here does not mean that there are none. Hospitality
would self-destruct if it were innite. He doesnt seem to appreciate
how right he is: hospitality, Derrida has argued, is both innite and
impossible.
27
)
Woods swerve from Derrida becomes even clearer as the paragraph
continues. He reasserts that there can be no such thing as absolute
justication (in other words, absolute justication is impossible
something with which Derrida would clearly not disagree), and
adds: To describe me as sacricing all other cats when I feed my own
is to mistakenly read my inability to justify this activity as some sort
of deciency.
28
One begins to sense what is making Wood bridle
here: he believes that Derrida is accusing him of some ethical or
intellectual weakness in his unjustiably selective treatment of the
potential objects of his responsibility. If this were the case, it would
be a universally shared weakness, and so hardly something to get
individually worked up about; but in any case there is no suggestion
in Derridas discussion that the impossibility of meeting all ones
responsibilities as an ethical subject is a mark of deciency. There is
animus in some places in his discussion, but theres no obvious reason
why David Wood should think its directed against him; Derrida
inveighs, for example, against the structure of the laws of the market
and the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities
whereby so-called civilised society sacrices tens of millions of
children who die of hunger and disease,
29
but theres no reason to
McQuillan 01 intro 60 29/6/07 14:58:25
think he shouldnt be anything other than very pleased to know that
the Wood children have been warned about poison ivy.
Nevertheless, Woods response does point to the extravagance of
Derridas depiction of responsible choice and resultant sacrice as
everyday, in fact second-by-second, occurrences. If The Gift of Death
has a ctional narrator prone to exaggeration, this is undoubtedly a
place where we hear his voice, signalled, perhaps, by the throwaway
irony of that what the most cursory examination ... cannot fail to
afrm. But what is the point of this taking-to-extremes, insofar as
it can be wrested into the domain of the thetic? It may help if we
linger over the word ethics for a moment. For Kierkegaard, ethics
names the generality of laws which the knight of faith must succeed
in transcending in the wholly ungrounded act that reaches from
the nite into the innite. (Abraham is the prime exemplar, but
Kierkegaard himself in his love for Regine Olsen a further, subtextual,
instance and we might also recall the stanza by Marvell used as
an epigraph.) In Levinas, another signicant presence in The Gift
of Death, we have a very similar structure, but now ethics names
not the generality of laws but the act of transcendence towards the
innite, in response to the demand of the absolute other. Derrida
has always had a Kierkegaardian suspicion of the term as too
compromised by systematic philosophy (voiced in the discussion
in Altrits, for example
30
) while remaining highly sympathetic to
Levinass project, and here he brings to a point of crisis the tension
between the two uses of the term. He proposes an ethical system of
the most generalising kind, one that demands absolute responsibility
to every other, and that makes no distinction between my children
and my neighbours (or those of another country); and although
this demand is given a Levinasian twist (a twist of the knife, to be
sure) in Derridas catchphrase, tout autre est tout autre, every other is
entirely other, the logic remains implacably general and systematic.
Against this backdrop stand out the very specic obligations which
Wood worries about to my family, my cats, those whom I have
promised to help, and so on. Now Derridas point is hardly that these
specic obligations should receive no privilege; on the contrary, his
argument rests on the assumption that they will, just as the specic
responsibility to God overrides every ethical norm that Abraham
holds dear. What he is alerting us to is the fact that these obligations
make themselves felt and have to be dealt with in strict opposition to the
ethical system, to the systematicity of ethics. Furthermore, any attempt
to justify these singular obligations must fail, for justication can be
McQuillan 01 intro 61 29/6/07 14:58:26
62 Derek Attridge
given only in discursive, public, rational, terms that is to say, the
systematic terms which the act in question has challenged.
Of course, most attempts to construct a practical ethics try to nd
a way to rank responsibilities; Derridas point is that such systems
are necessarily incoherent, for they use a systematic philosophical
language in an attempt to capture and legislate for what is constitu-
tively resistant to such language. But incoherence is not a reason for
abandoning ethical systems; it may in fact be a reason for preserving,
and constantly rening, them. Derrida has consistently devoted
his energies to an exploration of the structural incoherence an
incoherence which is far from arbitrary or innocent of central
concepts in Western discourse, concepts which he thinks of as
legacies that we have, whether we like it or not, inherited. These
concepts have often been used to promote or disguise inequality
and oppression in The Gift of Death Derrida is scathing about the
monotonous complacency of (civilized societys) discourses on
morality, politics, and the law
31
but they also hold out the promise
of a better future.
As Woods response, and that of many other commentators, suggest,
this is an aspect of Derridas thought that is easily misunderstood.
He is not trying to describe the psychological process of deciding
(or giving, or promising, or forgiving, or acting responsibly). He
is offering a structural analysis of these concepts, as they exist in
Western discourse, as they have been passed down to us. Whether
they name something that happens is impossible to say impossible
not because we cant peer into our minds, but for wholly structural
reasons. But what is certain is that they are enormously productive
concepts, precisely because of their impossibility.
There are, therefore, two ways of understanding the impossibility
of ethics: ethics as systematic code (the Kierkegaardian sense) is
impossible because it breaks down under the strains of singular
responsibility, and ethics as singular responsibility (the Levinasian
sense) is impossible because it involves an unconditionality that is
unreachable and unteachable except in a fable like the akedah, or
in literary readings of it like Kierkegaards and Derridas. The rst
is impossible in the same sense that philosophy is impossible (but
deconstructable);
32
the second is impossible in the sense that the gift,
hospitality, forgiveness, testimony, and justice are impossible (and
undeconstructable). And there are two ways of understanding the
possibility of politics: politics as practical, programmed activity in the
pursuit of achievable goals, and politics as that which occurs when
McQuillan 01 intro 62 29/6/07 14:58:26
the passage from the impossible to the possible gives rise to acts of
deciding, judging, promising, trusting, bearing witness, welcoming,
instituting, giving and forgiving.
If the passage from deconstruction to politics (which could also be
understood as the passage from literature to politics) is the passage
from the impossible to the possible, it is an impossible passage, and
one that keeps the secret it may seem to be betraying. Yet it is a
passage that makes possible every political act that is not merely the
mechanical application of a programme or the unthinking imple-
mentation of an instruction. And what Derridas starving cats teach
us, though it is a lesson that can never simply be applied, is that
the apparent systematicity of any political programme, like any
formal ethical scheme, conceals incoherences and inequities that
can never be ironed out, but that both structure every move that is
made and open up the space of decision and judgement, the space
of a certain democracy.
33
The politics of such a democracy may
be the art of the possible, but it is a possibility begotten, like love,
upon impossibility.
NOTES
1. The force of the notion of impossibility in Derrida is something that
is well brought out by John D. Caputo; see Deconstruction in a Nutshell:
A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press,
1997).
2. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), p. 328.
3. Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld
and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Justice
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 15.
4. WD, p. 80.
5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 7.
6. OH, p. 41.
7. Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum), in ON, p. 59.
8. Derrida, Sauf le nom, p. 74
9. PoF, p. 66 (translation modied).
10. Jacques Derrida with Anne Dufourmantelle, De lhospitalit (Paris:
Calmann-Lvy, 1997), p. 71 (my translation).
11. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galile, 1999), pp. 159209.
12. Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
13. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 5381.
McQuillan 01 intro 63 29/6/07 14:58:26
64 Derek Attridge
14. I have discussed this moment before, in a 1995 conference paper, On
Mount Moriah The Impossibility of Ethics (forthcoming in a volume of
conference proceedings edited by Richard Rand). My reason for returning
to it, apart from the fact that Im still fascinated and troubled by it, is
that it has proved to be a particularly difcult morsel for many readers
to swallow, even those sympathetic to Derridas work and yet it follows
through with impeccable logic the thought of the impossible that is so
integral to deconstruction and its relation to politics.
15. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 678, translation modied.
16. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 69.
17. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 701, translation modied.
18. David Wood, Much Obliged, Philosophy Today, 41 (1) (Spring 1997),
13540, here pp. 1367.
19. Wood, Much Obliged, p. 137.
20. Wood, Much Obliged, pp. 136, 137.
24. Responsibility ... demands on the one hand an accounting, a general
answering-for-oneself with respect to the general and before the generality,
hence the idea of substitution, and, on the other hand, uniqueness,
absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and
secrecy. What I am saying here about responsibility can also be said
about decision (Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 61). Derrida used the phrase
negotiating the unnegotiable in a seminar on The Gift of Death in Pieter-
maritzburg, South Africa, in 1998.
25. It may also be what literature does. Here I can make only a brief reference
to the text I mentioned earlier, La littrature au secret: Une liation
impossible, which was published in 1999 with a revised version of
Donner la mort. In this text Derrida revisits the scene of Abraham
and Isaac on Mount Moriah, and makes the rather extraordinary but
suggestive claim that literature, as this term is understood in the West,
is descended from this scene of an unconditional and unrepresentable
alliance between an individual and God, regarded as the essential secret
of sacred history. This impossible liation is one that literature betrays
while constantly asking pardon for its unpardonable act of betrayal.
Because Abraham is willing to sacrice everything, nothing on earth
remains sacred for him and this sacrice is repeated in literatures
desacralisation or secularisation of Scripture.
27. See De lhospitalit.
30. Jacques Derrida and Pierre-Jean Labarrire, Altrits (Paris: Osiris,
1986).
31. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 856.
32. Or in the sense that Laclau calls ideology the impossible attempt to
constitute the social: see The Impossibility of the Social in his collection
of essays, New Reections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso,
McQuillan 01 intro 64 29/6/07 14:58:26
1990), pp. 8992. Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes well-known notion
of antagonism is an attempt to integrate the notion of constitutive
impossibility into social theory (see, too, Slavoj ieks essay, Beyond
Discourse-Analysis, in New Reections, pp. 24960).
33. The fullest discussion of this issue is to be found in Richard Beardsworths
Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996). A couple of comments
will indicate the closeness of Beardsworths emphases to my own:
Impossibility is not the opposite of the possible: impossibility releases
the possible; Judgement is neither on the side of the incalculable nor is
it on the side of the calculable: it is nothing but the impossible relation
between the two (Derrida and the Political, p. 26).
McQuillan 01 intro 65 29/6/07 14:58:26
4
Impossible Speech Acts
Andrew Parker
RANCIRE READING AUERBACH
Near the beginning of The Names of History, Jacques Rancire turns
his attention briey to one of the founding texts of the eld of
comparative literature, Erich Auerbachs monumental Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), a book that has all
but been neglected in the Anglophone world a few important studies
notwithstanding since the advent of deconstruction. Auerbachs
fortunes have declined so much over the past several decades that
it is almost a shock to nd Rancire excited today by a work that, as
Herbert Lindenberger put it, has come to seem old-fashioned.
1
For
Mimesis has been criticised regularly in the age of theory and cultural
studies not only, as might be expected, for its obvious Eurocentrism
and privileging of literature, but also for its practice of embedding
explications du texte within a Hegelian conception of history. Already
in Blindness and Insight (1971), Paul de Man argued that the study
of the sensory appearances that is the eld of stylistics can never
lead to the real meaning of the themes [of Mimesis] since both, at
least in Western literature, are separated by a radical discontinuity
that no dialectic is able to bridge.
2
De Man would suggest that even
Lukcss older The Theory of the Novel makes much more radical
claims about the nature of historicity than the more tradition-bound
Mimesis.
3
Similarly, David Carroll, writing in an early issue of the
journal Diacritics, found Mimesis theoretically naive (a charge he
repeated several times) for mixing an empiricist commitment to
sense perception with an understanding of history as the progressive
unfolding of Geist. If Mimesis takes as its principle of unity a tran-
scendental conception of man, it can do so, Carroll showed, only
by assuming from the start the proximity of the spoken word to
the self only by valuing, that is, voice over writing: The voice is
always unproblematical for Auerbach.
4
Few have disagreed with
that assessment since.
5
66
McQuillan 01 intro 66 29/6/07 14:58:26
Impossible Speech Acts 67
It thus is surprising to nd a reader as exacting as Jacques Rancire
so enthusiastic about an element in Auerbachs text that bears
precisely on the nature of voice. Rancire focuses in The Names of
History on the second chapter of Mimesis, Fortunata, which contrasts
two specimens of Roman writing one by Petronius and another
by Tacitus with the account of Peters denial of Christ from the
Gospel of Mark. For reasons that shortly will become clear, Rancire
is especially interested in Auerbachs treatment of the following long
passage from Tacitus Annals (1:1618):
Thus stood affairs at Rome, when a sedition made its appearance in the
legions in Pannonia, without any fresh grounds [nullis novis causis], save that
the accession of a new prince promised impunity to tumult, and held out the
hope of advantages to be derived from a civil war. Three legions occupied a
summer camp together, commanded by Junius Blaesus, who, upon notice of the
death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius, had granted the soldiers a recess
from their wonted duties for some days, as a time either of public mourning or
festivity. From this beginning they waxed wanton and quarrelsome, lent their
ears to the discourses of every proigate, and at last they longed for a life of
dissipation and idleness, and spurned all military discipline and labor. In the
camp was one Percennius, formerly a busy leader of theatrical factions [dux
olim theatralium operarum], after that a common soldier, of a petulant tongue,
and from his experience in theatrical party zeal [miscere coetus histrionali studio
doctus], well qualied to stir up the bad passions of a crowd. Upon minds
uninformed, and agitated with doubts as to what might be the condition of
military service now that Augustus was dead, he wrought gradually by con-
fabulations by night, or when day verged towards its close; and when all the
better-disposed had retired to their respective quarters, he would congregate
all the most depraved about him.
Lastly, when now also other ministers of sedition were at hand to second
his designs, in imitation of a general solemnly haranguing his men, he asked
them Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes?
When would they be bold enough to demand redress, unless they approached
the prince, yet a novice, and tottering on his throne, either with entreaties or
arms? Enough had they erred in remaining passive through so many years,
since decrepit with age and maimed with wounds, after a course of service of
thirty or forty years, they were still doomed to carry arms; nor even to those
who were discharged was there any end of service, but they were still kept to
the colors, and under another name endured the same hardships. And if any
of them survived so many dangers, still were they dragged into countries far
remote, where, under the name of lands, they are presented with swampy fens,
McQuillan 01 intro 67 29/6/07 14:58:26
68 Andrew Parker
or mountain wastes. But surely, burdensome and ungainful of itself was the
occupation of war; ten asses a day the poor price of their persons and lives;
out of this they must buy clothes, and tents, and arms, out of this the cruelty
of centurions must be redeemed, and occasional exemptions from duty; but,
by Hercules, stripes, wounds, hard winters and laborious summers, bloody wars
and barren peace, were miseries eternally to be endured; nor remained there
other remedy than to enter the service upon certain conditions, as that their
pay should be a denarius a day, sixteen years be the utmost term of serving;
beyond that period to be no longer obliged to follow the colors, but have their
reward in money, paid them in the camp where they earned it. Did the praetorian
guards, who had double pay, they who after sixteen years service were sent
home, undergo more dangers? This was not said in disparagement of the city
guards; their own lot, however, was, serving among uncivilized nations, to have
the enemy in view from their tents.
The general body received this harangue with shouts of applause, but
stimulated by various motives, some showing, in all the bitterness of reproach,
the marks of stripes, others their hoary heads, many their tattered vestments
and naked bodies.
6
As you may recall, Auerbach argues throughout Fortunata that the
New Testament succeeded in rendering the lives of common people
complexly and seriously where the Roman writers failed to do so,
bound as they were by rules of decorum that mandated for the
depiction of the lower classes the low language of comedy. As a result,
Roman writing could not be realistic since it lacked, in its adherence
to unchanging ethical categories, all capacity for historical
consciousness; there could be in it, for Auerbach, no serious literary
treatment of everyday occupations and social classes merchants,
artisans, peasants, slaves of everyday scenes and places home,
shop, eld, store of everyday customs and institutions marriage,
children, work, earning a living in short, of the people and
its life.
7
The Tacitus passage may seem initially to full these criteria for
realism in the highly particularised details included in the soldiers
complaints: The grievances of the soldiers discussed in Percennius
speech excessive length of service, hardships, insufcient pay,
inadequate old-age provision, corruption, envy of the easier life of
the metropolitan troops are presented vividly and graphically in a
manner not frequently encountered even in modern historians.
8
But
the fact that these grievances are presented not in Tacitus voice but
as utterances of the ringleader Percennius makes them something
McQuillan 01 intro 68 29/6/07 14:58:26
other than historically typical or realistic: The factual information
[Tacitus] gives on the causes of the revolt information presented
in the form of a ringleaders speech and not discussed further he
invalidates in advance by stating at the outset his own view of the
real causes of the revolt in purely ethical terms: nullis novis causis.
9

That Percennius is portrayed as a master of imitation trained in
the theatre, he mimics a general solemnly haranguing his men
disqualies him still further; in place of the silence of military
discipline, we are given only the negative values associated with what
Rancire terms memorably the roar of urban theatrocracy.
10
Why,
then, put Percennius on stage at all if Tacitus was hardly interested
in the soldiers demands and never intended to discuss them
objectively? The reason, Auerbach explains, is purely aesthetic:
The grand style of historiography requires grandiloquent speeches, which
as a rule are ctitious. Their function is graphic dramatization (illustratio) of
a given occurrence, or at times the presentation of great political or moral
ideas; in either case they are intended as the rhetorical bravura pieces of the
presentation. The writer is permitted a certain sympathetic entering into the
thoughts of the supposed speaker, and even a certain realism. Essentially,
however, such speeches are products of a specic stylistic tradition cultivated
in the schools for rhetors. The composition of speeches which one person or
another might have delivered on one or another great historical occasion was
a favorite exercise. Tacitus is a master of his craft, and his speeches are not
sheer display; they are really imbued with the character and the situation of the
persons supposed to have delivered them; but they too are primarily rhetorical.
Percennius does not speak in his own language; he speaks Tacitean, that is, he
speaks with extreme terseness, as a matter of disposition, and highly rhetorically.
Undoubtedly his words though given as indirect discourse vibrate with the
actual excitement of mutinous soldiers and their leader. Yet even if we assume
that Percennius was a gifted demagogue, such brevity, incisiveness, and order
are not possible in a rebellious propaganda speech, and of soldiers slang there
is not the slightest trace.
11
What Auerbach seems to be pondering here is nothing less than a
question we have since learned to pose in a rather different context:
Can the plebeian speak? To which, for Rancire, the answer would
be no: Percennius doesnt speak; rather, Tacitus lends him his
tongue.
12
If we were expecting him to declaim in propria persona, we
soon realise that Percennius had no place to speak since, as a member
of the poor, he has only an essential relation with nontruth.
13
The
justications for the revolt that are credited to Percennius are not
McQuillan 01 intro 69 29/6/07 14:58:27
70 Andrew Parker
refuted by or even commented on by Tacitus; the historian has no
need to do either since the arguments Percennius provides can be
neither true nor false:
They have, fundamentally, no relation to the truth. Their illegitimacy is not due
to their content but to the simple fact that Percennius is not in the position of
legitimate speaker. A man of his rank has no business thinking and expressing
his thought. And his speech is ordinarily reproduced only in the base genres of
satire and comedy. It is ruled out that an essential conict would be expressed
through his mouth, ruled out that we would see in him, in a modern sense,
the symptomatic representative of a historical movement that operates in the
depths of a society. The speech of the man of the common people is by denition
without depth.
14
Thus Tacitus, as Rancire reads Auerbach, explains the revolt twice,
doubly dispossessing Percennius by stripping him both of his jus-
tications and his voice.
15
According to Rancire, Auerbach here
would be marking, in his own way, the relation between a politics
of knowledge and a poetics of narrative around the question of the
politics of the other.
16
But this other is not simply excluded by
Tacitus, whose discourse nonetheless manages, precisely, to give
a place to what it declares to have no place.
17
Where Auerbach
leaves under-emphasised the question of the modality of the poems
enunciation, Rancire suggests that what makes Percennius speech
particularly fascinating is its indirect style, the narrators they
replacing the expected you in Percennius address to his audience.
What results from this substitution is much less a dialectic than a
torsion between two distinct pronominal points of view both of
which nonetheless inhere at once:
The indirect style, in practice disjoining meaning and truth, in effect cancels
the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate speakers. The latter are just
as much validated as suspected. The homogeneity of the narrative-discourse
thereby constituted comes to contradict the heterogeneity of the subjects it
represents, the unequal quality of the speakers to guarantee, by their status, the
reference of their speech. Although Percennius may well be the radical other,
the one excluded from legitimate speech, his discourse is included, in a specic
suspension of the relations between meaning and truth.
18
Percennius voice, then, is hardly rendered in an unproblematic
way: as Rancire reads Auerbach, Tacitus records in his discourse a
speech event impossible to imagine historically as a phenomenal
utterance. Moreover, Rancire stresses that the political efcacy of
McQuillan 01 intro 70 29/6/07 14:58:27
this event rests upon this very impossibility: By invalidating the
voice of Percennius, substituting his own speech for the soldiers,
Tacitus does more than give him a historical identity. He also creates
a model of subversive eloquence for the orators and simple soldiers
of the future. The latter henceforth will not repeat Percennius, whose
voice has been lost, but Tacitus, who states the reasons of all those like
Percennius better than they do.
19
No wonder Rancire was excited to
discover this lesson in Auerbachs Mimesis: he nds in it an example of
an impossible speech event that forms, as we shall see, the condition
of possibility for what he calls the political.
IEK READING RANCIRE
Slavoj iek would seem to be disappointed that he cannot discern
Percennius own voice this, at least, is what might be inferred from
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, which
constantly projects onto Rancires work the self-present voice that
iek deems essential to Rancires argument. According to iek,
Rancire takes as his obvious paradigm the spontaneous rebellion
of the proletarian masses (not the mythical Marxian proletariat as
the Subject of History, but actual groups of exploited artisans, textile
workers, working women, and other ordinary people) who reject
the police frame dening their proper place and, in a violent
politico-poetic gesture, take the oor, start to speak for themselves.
20

iek repeats this latter phrase so often Rancire endeavours again
and again to elaborate the contours of those magic, violently poetic
moments of subjectivization in which the excluded (lower classes)
put forward their claim to speak for themselves
21
that a reader
previously unacquainted with Rancires work might think that it is,
in fact, concerned centrally with the struggle for ones voice to be
heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner.
22
Though Rancire indeed is interested in struggles for recognition
that take the form of determined speech acts, there is nothing
obvious (or, again, unproblematical) about the way these claims
are voiced. In a remarkable series of essays and books culminating
with Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancire explores the logic
whereby an invisible and excluded group, the part of no part, upsets
the prevailing distribution of shares and the hierarchy of places
in demanding for itself vocally a new mode of social visibility:
One can say that politics begins when those who have no share
begin to have one ... when the uncounted are not only counted,
McQuillan 01 intro 71 29/6/07 14:58:27
72 Andrew Parker
but when counting the uncounted comes to be seen as the very
principle, the very element, of politics.
23
Opposing itself to the
legitimating functions of governance that Rancire calls la police,
politics proper comprises claims for recognition that assume not
only that all speaking subjects are equal but that this equality can
be veried in practice:
The process of emancipation is the verication of the equality of any speaking
being with any other speaking being. It is always enacted in the name of a
category denied either the principle or the consequences of that equality:
workers, women, people of color or others. But the enactment of equality is
not, for all that, the enactment of the self, of the attributes or properties of the
community in question. The name of an injured community that invokes its
rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone.
24
If politics thus concerns anyone but the self if it begins when it
becomes apparent that the debate is about something that has not
been noticed, when the person who says so is a speaker who has not
been recognized as such and when, ultimately, that persons very
status as a speaking being is in question
25
then politics cannot be
understood simply as a struggle between voices over what would be
claimed as their own. Speaking out to redress a wrong is something
other than speaking for oneself or ones rights, the anonym something
other than a basis for the afrmation of identity. Though politics for
Rancire is always a contest over speech and voice, the latter is
never the expression of a self asserting what belongs to it but an
occupation of space in which the logos denes a nature other than
the phn.
26
To occupy such space to come into social visibility is
to play the minor premiss of a syllogism (there is no actual equality)
against its major premiss (there is equality under the law), thereby
demonstrating as speaking subjects a uency in a discursive logic
that had hitherto been withheld from them.
27
This process can be
illustrated in an example Rancire cites often, one that concerns the
outmoded name, the proletarian:
One of its rst uses occurs in nineteenth-century France, when the revolutionary
leader Auguste Blanqui was prosecuted for rebellion. The prosecutor asked him:
What is your profession? He answered: Proletarian. Then the prosecutor: It
is not a profession. And the response of Blanqui was: It is the profession of a
majority of our people who are deprived of political rights. From the vantage
point of policy, the prosecutor was right: it is no profession. And obviously
Blanqui was not what is usually called a worker. But from the vantage point of
McQuillan 01 intro 72 29/6/07 14:58:27
politics, Blanqui was right: proletarian was not the name of any social group
that could be sociologically identied. It is the name of an outcast.
28
We see clearly in this example that what is in contention is less the
identity of workers than the very rationality of the speech situation
itself.
29
At once excluded from the social whole and coterminous
with that whole, the part of no part rehearses a supplementary logic
inherent to a class that is both less and more than itself:
Proletarian political subjectication ... is in no way a form of culture, of some
collective ethos capable of nding a voice. It presupposes, on the contrary, a
multiplicity of fractures separating worker bodies from their ethos and from the
voice that is supposed to express the soul of this ethos: a multiplicity of speech
events that is, of one-off experiences of conict over speech and voice, over
the partition of the perceptible ... The name proletarian denes neither a set
of properties (manual labor, industrial labor, destitution, etc.) that would be
shared equally by a multitude of individuals nor a collective body, embodying
a principle, of which those individuals would be members. It is part of a process
of subjectication identical to expounding a wrong. Proletarian subjectication
denes a subject of wrong by superimposition in relation to the multitude
of workers. What is subjectied is neither work nor destitution, but the simple
counting of the uncounted, the difference between an inegalitarian distribution
of social bodies and the equality of speaking bodies.
30
The emancipation of workers cannot be, for these reasons, a matter
of making labor the founding principle of the new society or of
taking worker to be an essential identity.
31
If politics concerns
modes of subjectication that produce a capacity for enunciation
not previously identiable, then the formula nos sumus, nos existimus
becomes a model of the political in its capacity to create perfor-
matively the subject of its own utterance:
32
The construction of
such cases of equality is not the act of an identity, nor is it the
demonstration of the values specic to a group. It is a process of
subjectication understood specically as the formation of a one
that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other.
33
Since
any subjectication is a disidentication the opening up of a
subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space
where those of no account are counted
34
then claims for equality
radically declassify rather than unify a social body by replacing the
supposed naturalness of orders with the controversial gures of
division.
35
A community of sharing [partage] is thus, by the same
token, also a place whose very unity depended on the effecting of
McQuillan 01 intro 73 29/6/07 14:58:27
74 Andrew Parker
a division [partage],
36
its possibility hence at once its impossibility.
Rancire illustrates this tension through certain speech acts (We are
the wretched of the earth; We are all German Jews) that cannot
be embodied by he or she who utters [them].
37
If political subjec-
tication is made out of the difference between the voice and the
body, the interval between identities,
38
such difference resembles
nothing so much as the impossible phenomenality of an utterance
the interval both linking and dividing the voices of Tacitus and
Percennius that we encountered previously in Rancires reading of
Auerbach: Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer
tribunes? Once more, for Rancire, the possibility of the political
rests on the impossibility of such speech acts.
Given all of the above, it should not be surprising that Rancire is
no friend of identity politics, which in its reliance precisely on the
logic of identity works on behalf of statist versions of community
promoted by la police. If subjectication is dened as a disidentication,
then Rancires political subject resists denition in terms of ethnic
properties or a sociologically determinable part of a population,
for the uncounted is a name that could not possibly be confused
with any real social group.
39
This is a lesson, Rancire admonishes,
that we seem to have forgotten lately in the West. As opposed to a
proper politics of grievance and imparity, our contemporary logics
of consensus ... reduce the division involved in the count of the
uncounted to a breakdown of groups open to presenting their
identity; they locate the forms of political subjectivity within places
of proximity (home, job, interest) and bonds of identity (sex, religion,
race, culture).
40
Rancire thus will account for the current dead end
of political reection and action as one more effect of the identi-
cation of politics with the self of a community
41
the same notion
of selfhood as in ieks misprision of Rancires workers speaking
for themselves.
Paradoxically, however, Rancires vision of the degraded fate of
our post-political world shares with iek a willingness to make
sexuality a primary sign of this degradation.
42
Criticising polling
techniques for fabricating images of a unied population, Rancire
suggests that
The subject of the opinion says what he thinks of blacks and Arabs in the
same real/simulated mode in which he is elsewhere invited to tell all about
his fantasies and to completely satisfy these just by dialing four gures and as
many letters. The subject who opines accordingly is the subject of this new mode
McQuillan 01 intro 74 29/6/07 14:58:27
of the visible where everything is on display, up for grabs, a subject called on
to live out all his fantasies in a world of total exhibition and of the asymptotic
coming together of bodies, in this everything is possible of thrills displayed and
promised meaning, of course, doomed to disappointment: the subject being
urged accordingly to search and destroy the bad body, the diabolical body that
everywhere stands in the way of the total satisfaction everywhere within reach
and everywhere snatched from ones grasp.
43
By dialing four digits and as many letters...: the Minitel already
had appeared once before as an icon of All That Is Wrong Today in
promoting the regime of universal exhibitionism and the attendant
promise of the total realization of all fantasies.
44
Sounding uncannily
at such moments like Christopher Lasch, Rancire somehow holds
together in a single series commercial competition, sexual permis-
siveness, world music and cheap charter ights to the Antipodes,
each link in this chain reecting the banal themes of the pluralist
society that naturally create individuals smitten with equality and
tolerant of difference.
45
Given such antipathy, it is rather ironic that
one of the best approximations of what Rancire denes as properly
political is the emergent Anglo-American model of queer politics:
anti-identitarian, anti-statist, anti-normative in its emphatic swerving
from the rhetoric of gay and lesbian civil rights. If Were here, were
queer, get used to it is something other than a claim on behalf of an
identity, queer theorists might look indeed to Rancires work for its
ways of posing rigorously the relation between voice and body and
the impossible speech acts that bind and divide them.
NOTES
1. H. Lindenberger, On the Reception of Mimesis, in S. Lerer (ed.), Literary
History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 205.
2. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983
[1971]), p. 23.
3. de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 53.
4. D. Carroll, Mimesis Reconsidered: Literature, History, Ideology, Diacritics,
5.2 (Summer, 1975), p. 11.
5. Timothy Bahti has been idiosyncratic in viewing Auerbachs work as a
signicant forerunner to deconstruction (see T. Bahti, Allegories of History:
Literary Historiography After Hegel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992]). Critics writing recently about Auerbach tend to focus
less on his work per se than, as in Edward Saids frequent encomia, on
his exemplary status as a critical professional (see M. Holquist, Erich
McQuillan 01 intro 75 29/6/07 14:58:27
76 Andrew Parker
Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today, Poetics Today, 20.1 [Spring,
1999], p. 80; see also P. Bov, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical
Humanism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986] and A.R. Mufti,
Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question
of Minority Culture, Critical Inquiry 25 [Autumn, 1988], pp. 95125).
Where Said nds inspiration in Auerbachs existential situation as a
writer Mimesis, as is well known, was composed in Istanbul during
World War Two, its author having ed Nazi Germany with little in
the way of scholarly resources Aijaz Ahmad sees only more reason to
criticise Said: The particular texture of [Saids] Orientalism, its emphasis
on the canonical text, its privileging of literature and philology in the
constitution of Orientalist knowledge and indeed the human sciences
generally, its will to portray a West which has been the same from the
dawn of history up to the present, and its will to traverse all the main
languages of Europe all this, and more, in Orientalism derives from the
ambition to write a counter-history that could be posed against Mimesis,
Auerbachs magisterial account of the seamless genesis of European
realism and rationalism from Greek Antiquity to the modernist moment
(A. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [London and New York:
Verso, 1992], p. 163).
6. E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953),
pp. 336.
7. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 31.
10. J. Rancire, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge; trans. Hassan
Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 25.
11. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 3940.
12. Rancire, The Names of History, p. 27.
13. Rancire, The Names of History, pp. 25, 18.
19. Rancire, The Names of History, pp. 2930.
20. S. iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London
and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 173, my italics.
21. iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 1289.
22. iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 188.
23. J. Rancire, Interview: Democracy Means Equality, trans. D. Macey,
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April, 1997), pp. 312.
24. J. Rancire, Politics, Identication, Subjectivization, in J. Rajchman
(ed.) The Identity in Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1995),
p. 65.
25. Rancire, Interview: Democracy Means Equality, p. 35.
26. J. Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy; trans. Julie Rose
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 37.
McQuillan 01 intro 76 29/6/07 14:58:28
27. J. Rancire, On the Shores of Politics; trans. Liz Heron (London and New
York: Verso, 1995), p. 46.
28. Rancire, Politics, Identication, Subjectivization, p. 66.
29. Rancire, Disagreement, p. xi.
30. Rancire, Disagreement, pp. 368.
31. Rancire, On the Shores of Politics, p. 48.
39. Rancire, Disagreement, pp. 99, 126.
40. Rancire, Disagreement, p. 137. iek describes superbly what would seem
to be Rancires position: This is politics proper: the moment in which
a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests
but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric
condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space. There
is a clear contrast between this subjectivization and todays proliferation
of postmodern identity politics whose goal is exactly the opposite,
that is, precisely the assertion of ones particular identity, of ones proper
place within the social structure. The postmodern identity politics of
particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) lifestyles perfectly ts the depoliticized
notion of society, in which every particular group is accounted for, has
its specic status (of victim) acknowledged through afrmative action or
other measures destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind
of justice meted out to victimized minorities requires an intricate police
apparatus ... is deeply signicant: what is usually praised as postmodern
politics (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be
negotiated within the rational global order allocating its particular
component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of politics proper
(iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 2089). Rancire will call this end post-
democracy (On the Shores of Politics, p. 98).
42. This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the Real)
and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the
distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography shows it
all, real sex, and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of
sexuality; while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of
appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain
of the suprasensible sublime Thing (iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 242,
n.28).
McQuillan 01 intro 77 29/6/07 14:58:28
McQuillan 01 intro 78 29/6/07 14:58:28
Part Two
Politics of Philosophy
McQuillan 01 intro 79 29/6/07 14:58:28
McQuillan 01 intro 80 29/6/07 14:58:28
5
The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening
of Politicisation in Levinas and Derrida
Robert Bernasconi
Derrida frequently warns against understanding deconstruction as
critique. For example, in Ja, ou le faux-bond in 1977, Derrida says:
deconstruction is not a critical operation; it takes critique as its object; decon-
struction, at one moment or another, always aims at the trust conded in the
critical, critico-theoretical agency, that is, the deciding agency, the ultimate
possibility of the decidable; deconstruction is a deconstruction of critical
dogmatics.
1
If critique is taken in its ordinary sense of negative external criticism,
then deconstruction and critique are not the same. They are separate
operations. This is because critique in its most conventional sense
employs principles to guide judgements and actions, whereas decon-
struction does not leave intact any rm foundation on which to
stand while employing such principles in the cause of critique.
2
One
of the reasons why there is widespread scepticism about the efcacy
of deconstruction in politics is undoubtedly its hesitation about this
kind of critique. In order to assess the political implications of decon-
structions suspicion of critique, it is necessary to examine the crisis
provoked by the loss of any such rm foundation. In doing so I will
draw attention to another sense of critique in Derrida, one that I will
argue is borrowed to a certain extent from Levinas and that seems to
open up a relation between deconstruction and politicisation.
In Derridas Letter to a Japanese Friend, dated 18 July 1983, when
we are again told that deconstruction is not a critique in either a general
or a Kantian sense, Derrida invokes the etymological connection
between crisis and critique in order to clarify the difference between
them: The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgement,
discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental
critique, one of the essential themes or objects of deconstruc-
tion.
3
Recalling the same etymological association of critique with
crisis, Derrida in Passions asks the question: what if the crisis even
81
McQuillan 01 intro 81 29/6/07 14:58:28
82 Robert Bernasconi
concerned the very concept of crisis or of critique?
4
Few questions
take us so quickly into the heart of Derridas project. It asks if the crisis
that strikes us head on does not perhaps arise from a deeper, hidden,
crisis, but one that invites us to rethink what we mean by crisis. But
how would a crisis of critique, a crisis of crisis, announce itself?
It is clear already from Derridas early texts that what underlies
the advent of a formal and thematically constituted practice of
deconstruction is a certain diagnosis of the crisis. In Cogito and the
History of Madness the crisis of reason is both a forgetting of origins,
as Derrida already emphasises in the Introduction to Husserls Origin
of Geometry, and also a decision in the sense of krinein, the choice
and division between the two ways separated by Parmenides.
5
To be
sure, Derrida from the outset recognises that this diagnosis is not a
simple issue: such problems as whether philosophy died yesterday are
problems put to philosophy, albeit as problems that cannot be resolved
by philosophy.
6
That is to say, these are problems that philosophy
cannot decide. Nevertheless, within this constant questioning of the
terms in which the diagnosis is cast, for example, the ideas of an end
and a unity to Western metaphysics, the pertinence of the diagnosis
is not questioned.
Undecidability is introduced into philosophy and sustained
there by a decision, a decision to read the history of Western
philosophy along certain lines, lines set down by Hegel, Nietzsche
and Heidegger.
7
The initial force of deconstruction, the necessity
with which it imposed itself in its early years, the late 1960s and early
1970s, derived in large measure from the force with which Derrida
pursued the question of the end of philosophy. In these early works,
Derrida explicitly borrows from Heidegger the recognition that a
certain sense of critique belongs to the unity of metaphysics so that
any application of critique in this sense to metaphysics would only
serve to continue it.
8
Derrida even uses this law against Heidegger to
claim that what he calls the Heideggerian critique or de-limitation
appears to belong to the very sphere of that which it criticises or de-
limits.
9
One strand of Derridas questioning of Heideggers procedure
is internal to that procedure in the most traditional way, but it is so in
a way that problematises the familiar opposition between the internal
and the external within critique. As a contemporary text emphasises,
Derrida deciphers a formal law whereby the critique or rather
the denunciatory determination of a limit, the de-marcation, the de-
limitation which at any given moment is believed to be applicable to
a past text is to be deciphered within it.
10
That is to say, although
McQuillan 01 intro 82 29/6/07 14:58:28
The Crisis of Critique 83
every text of metaphysics carries within it the resources in terms of
which it can be criticised, these operate in such a way as to put in
question the sense in which it is a metaphysical text.
It may seem unwarranted to focus on this early denition of
deconstruction, particularly as Derrida seems to have gone out of
his way over the years to seek to give it additional meanings and
above all to extend its problematic far from the original issue of the
delimitation of Western metaphysics, but certain features of this
account are retained by Derrida in the 1991 interview A Madness
Must Watch Over Thinking. Franois Ewald asks Derrida, What is
the relation between deconstruction and critique? Derrida begins by
announcing another sense of critique, one which can be uncovered
by a certain deconstructive genealogical take on that account of
critique about which he had long entertained suspicions. Hence an
appropriate name for this sense of critique is that of a critique of
critique, a critique which is not external, but which is immanent yet
excessive. Derridas answer is worth quoting in full:
The critical idea, which I believe must never be renounced, has a history and pre-
suppositions whose deconstructive analysis is also necessary. In the style of the
Enlightenment, of Kant, or of Marx, but also in the sense of evaluation (esthetic
or literary), critique supposes judgement, voluntary judgement between two
terms; it attaches to the idea of krinein or krisis a certain negativity. To say that all
this is deconstructible does not amount to disqualifying, negating, disavowing,
or surpassing it, of doing the critique of critique (the way people wrote critiques
of the Kantian critique as soon as it appeared), but of thinking its possibility
from another border, from the genealogy of judgement, will, consciousness or
activity, the binary structure, and so forth. This thinking perhaps transforms the
space and, through aporias, allows the (non-positive) afrmation to appear, the
one that is presupposed by every critique and every negativity.
11

I shall return later to this afrmation, this yes, that appears through
aporias and is presupposed by critique, thereby complicating the
picture of critique as the voluntary judgement of a nite freedom. But
rst it is necessary to show how Derrida relocates this logic according
to which critique appears to be an essential moment, even while such
a critique is questioned in a political context.
One sees it, for example, in The Other Heading, where Derrida calls
into question the notion of crisis, at least in respect of the crisis of
Europe.
12
In this context he announces not only a duty to critique
both totalitarian dogmatism and the religion of capital, but also
a duty to cultivate the virtue of critique, its idea and its tradition,
McQuillan 01 intro 83 29/6/07 14:58:28
while at the same time submitting it to questioning in the form of a
deconstructive genealogy that exceeds it without compromising it.
13

However, it is in Specters of Marx that Derrida is most adamant that
deconstruction must insist on and can never renounce the critical
idea or the questioning stance that belongs to the spirit of Marxism.
14

This is not external critique but radical critique, a critique that is open
to its own transformation as it takes place in self-critique.
15
To be
hyper-critical in this way is to be deconstructive.
16
This issue came to a head in 1996 at a conference which was
subsequently published under the title Deconstruction and Pragmatism.
17

In his Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism Derrida concedes
what has long been suspected, but that might otherwise take a long
time to establish, the political neutrality of deconstruction. However,
Derrida quickly introduces a note of caution:
I would insist that everyone can use this motif [of deconstruction] as they
please to serve quite different political perspectives, which would seem to
mean that deconstruction is politically neutral. But, the fact that deconstruc-
tion is apparently politically neutral allows, on the one hand, a reection on
the nature of the political, and on the other hand, and this is what interests me
in deconstruction, a hyper-politicization.
18
By hyper-politicization Derrida means the awakening of politici-
sation.
19
However, it might seem that in this formulation Derrida
tries to make light of what appears to be the long-standing objection
about the political ambiguity of his work. More precisely, it seems
that he tries to make a virtue of it. In order to address this objection,
I shall in the rst instance explore the resources Levinas brings to
bear on this issue.
Although Levinas is often dismissed as a resource for political
philosophy in the conventional sense, there is every reason to believe
him to be engaged in the task of hyper-politicisation in the sense just
introduced.
20
It is therefore quite striking that one can nd in Levinas
a sense of critique that perhaps exceeds everything Derrida delimits
in this way.
21
There is clearly a difference of register between Levinas
and Derrida on the issue of critique, albeit one that Derrida from the
outset seems keen to efface. Recall this passage from Violence and
Metaphysics: In the style by which strong and faithful thought is
recognised (this is Heideggers style too), Levinas respects the zone or
layer of traditional thought; and the philosophies whose presupposi-
tions he describes are in general neither refuted nor criticised.
22
Even
though some commentators have read Violence and Metaphysics as
McQuillan 01 intro 84 29/6/07 14:58:28
a critique of Levinas, as opposed to a deconstruction avant la lettre,
it is striking that Derrida in that essay already distances all strong
and faithful thought, and presumably his own, from critique in its
conventional sense.
23
By contrast, Levinas is unmistakably critical
of a number of thinkers to the point of being dismissive. However,
at the same time, Levinas articulates a sense of critique that is so
far from being conventional that it not only does not succumb to
the questions deconstruction poses to critique, but also, as I will
argue, ultimately proves indispensable to deconstruction. Critique in
Levinass sense does not involve the possession of criteria by which to
pass judgement.
24
Critique operates by the insertion of a questioning,
a moment of suspicion or hesitation enough to rob me of my sense of
myself as a source of meaning. The source of this questioning comes
from the Other. The Other does not tell me what to do or to say, so
much as he or she disturbs my self-assurance. Levinasian critique as
a calling into question of oneself by the Other is not simply negative.
It takes place as the welcome of the absolutely other.
25
Although there is already an extended discussion of critique as
criticism in Reality and Its Shadow, Levinas introduces his distinctive
notion of critique at the end of his 1957 essay, Philosophy and the
Idea of the Innite.
26
In opposition to a tradition that considers
conscience a species of consciousness, Levinas asks if conscience
is not the critique of and the principle of the presence of self to
self.
27
Conscience is elucidated as the exposure of my freedom to the
judgement of the other. On this basis he proposes that if the essence
of philosophy consists in going back behind [en dea] all certainties
toward a principle, if it lives from critique, the face of the Other
would be the starting-point of philosophy.
28
What is problematic
about this formulation, particularly in the light of what we have now
learned from Levinas and Derrida, is not only that the language of
foundational philosophy is left intact, but also that the association
of critique with principle is not problematised, as if critique could
only operate by principles to which the subject has access and which
remain untouched by critique. At this time Levinas understands his
relation to the history of philosophy in a way strikingly different
from that suggested by Derrida in Violence and Metaphysics. That
is to say, although Levinas understands the reference of philosophy
as critique to conscience in the face of the Other as the source of
philosophy and critique to be a break with a venerable tradition in
philosophy, it is performed only to pursue another direction that the
philosophical spirit has already taken, most noticeably in Plato. Even
McQuillan 01 intro 85 29/6/07 14:58:28
though Western philosophy has most often chosen autonomy over
heteronomy, the thesis of heteronomy is not without precedent.
29
In Totality and Innity Levinas reexamines the idea of philosophy
as critique. In a formulation that mirrors both in its grammar and
in its content the one I have just quoted from Philosophy and the
Idea of the Innite, we read: If philosophy consists in knowing
critically, that is, in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in justifying
it, it begins with conscience, to which the other is presented as the
Other, and where the movement of thematisation is inverted.
30
In
this sentence critique, in its conventional sense of a foundational
exercise conducted by reference to principles, is displaced insofar as
Levinas passes beyond or behind what presents itself as a foundation
to what conditions it. Thematisation, as Levinas understands the
exercise of a freedom sure of itself, cannot account for the Other that
unsettles it: The Other alone eludes thematisation.
31
The inversion
of the movement of thematisation is the inversion of critique in the
sense that it amounts to a putting of the self in question. Levinas
expresses it thus: But this inversion does not amount to knowing
oneself as a theme attended to by the other (autrui), but rather in
submitting oneself to an exigency, to a morality.
32

It is signicant therefore that the rst occurrence of the term
ethics in Totality and Innity, outside of the Preface, is as a synonym
for critique. In a section of the book entitled Metaphysics precedes
Ontology, Levinas distinguishes two senses of theory. In the rst
sense of theory, the known being is allowed to manifest itself in its
alterity. In the second sense of theory, the known being is deprived of
its alterity by the mediation of a third term, be it a concept, sensation,
or Being.
33
The rst sense of theory is associated with metaphysics
or transcendence, as the second is associated with ontology or the
comprehension of Being. The first calls freedom into question,
whereas the second promotes freedom. This provides the context in
which the following sentences appear:
But theory understood as a respect for exteriority delineates another structure
essential for metaphysics. It is concerned with critique in its comprehension
of being (or not). It discovers the dogmatism and naive arbitrariness of its
spontaneity, and calls forth into question the freedom of the exercise of
ontology; it then seeks to exercise this freedom in such a way as to turn back at
every moment to the origin of the arbitrary dogmatism of this free exercise.
34
One difculty of these sentences is the fact that the referent of some
of the pronouns is ambiguous. A more serious difculty is the fact
McQuillan 01 intro 86 29/6/07 14:58:29
that if Levinas is indeed saying, as he appears to be, that theory as
respect for exteriority is concerned with critique in its comprehension
of being, then this seems to run counter to the way the two senses of
theory had been distinguished. The likely solution seems to be that
Levinas believes that theory as respect for exteriority also involves
theory as comprehension of being. Metaphysics is not opposed to
ontology, but implies it. However, this would no longer be a neutral
ontology, but an ontology involved in critique, primarily the critique
of the freedom which ontology promotes. So if theory in the sense
of respect for exteriority is concerned with critique, it is because
theory, in its comprehension of being, calls itself into question. In
this turning back on itself, it would remain locked in an innite
regress, a critique of critique going nowhere, if it were not that the
calling into question of freedom originates in the Other.
critique does not reduce the other to the same as does ontology, but calls into
question the exercise of the same. A calling into question of the same which
cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same is brought about by
the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence
of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his [or her] irreducibility to
the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling
into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.
35
Levinas says it again and again, as when he describes this calling into
question of oneself as a critical attitude which is itself produced in
face of the other and under his [or her] authority.
36
Levinass notion of critique is sui generis and not only by virtue of
this reference to the Other. Levinas emphasises that this critique is
distrustful of itself. This differentiates it radically from what ordinarily
passes for critique. Levinas writes:
Theory, in which truth arises, is the attitude of a being that distrusts itself.
Knowing becomes knowing of a fact only if it is at the same time critical, if it
puts itself in question, goes back beyond its origin in an unnatural movement
to seek higher than ones own origin, a movement which evinces or describes
a created freedom.
37
Levinas claries that formulation a few pages later. Because knowledge
as critique goes back to what precedes freedom, it can only arise in
a being that is created. This is because to be created is to have an
origin prior to ones origin.
38
Levinas frequently appeals to the idea
of a creatio ex nihilo not as a support, but to frustrate the preconcep-
tions of foundational philosophy. The manifestation of the critical
McQuillan 01 intro 87 29/6/07 14:58:29
essence of knowing is, Levinas writes, the movement of a being
back to what precedes its condition.
39
In a section entitled The
Investiture of Freedom or Critique Levinas explains the conception
of philosophy to which this gives rise. He writes: to philosophise is
to go back to what precedes freedom, to disclose the investiture that
liberates freedom from the arbitrary.
40
If philosophy is epistemology
in the sense of the quest for an objective knowledge of knowledge,
then freedom remains at its centre. Levinas introduces critique as
the Other putting in question my freedom. This leads to another
conception of philosophy, one that follows the passage to the Other,
as is indicated by the nal sentence of the paragraph on epistemology
which ends suddenly with the formulation: To welcome the Other
is to put in question my freedom.
41
A parallel argument appears in Meaning and Sense but with the
term critique used in a more conventional sense. Levinas again
begins by identifying the calling into question of freedom with the
welcome of the Other. The presence of the Other is a summons
to answer, a summons to a responsibility that empties the I of its
imperialism and its egoism, even the egoism of salvation.
42
At this
point Levinas introduces the issue of reection: The consciousness
of philosophers is essentially reective. Or, at least, consciousness
is grasped by philosophers in its moment of return which is taken
for its very birth.
43
The philosophers thus locate even within a
consciousness without reection a glance back at its origin that
would secure its essence as critique or self-mastery.
44
This is critique
in the conventional sense and not as it is used in Totality and Innity.
Here Levinas uses the phenomenological problem of reection to
identify as humility, or one could also say goodness, the orientation
of a consciousness that is absorbed in a work that goes innitely to
the Other without return. Levinass point is that this consciousness
without reection is not pre-critical because the ego is already put in
question by the Other and so is criticised in the very straightforward-
ness of its movement.
45
Levinas asks the now familiar question: How
would spontaneous thought turn back, if the other, the exterior, did
not put it into question? He continues: And how, in a concern for
total Critique entrusted to reection, would the new naivete itself
be removed? Levinas answers his own question this way: The Ego
erodes its dogmatic naivete before the Other who asks of it more
than it can do spontaneously.
46
Although the general direction of Levinass conception of critique
should be clear after these citations, there is still room for misun-
McQuillan 01 intro 88 29/6/07 14:58:29
derstanding, and Levinas seems to have gone out of his way in at
least two places in Otherwise than Being to revisit the conception of
critique already set out in Totality and Innity. In the rst passage
Levinas sets out to clarify what makes this putting into question of
the naive spontaneity of the ego possible. For that reason he focuses
on the obstacles to pure criticism and certain ways of avoiding
them. Pure criticism does not reside in the thematization operated
by reection on the self.
47
Levinas explains: The ego [le Moi], in
consciousness reecting on itself, both declinable as an object and
protected by its unrendable form of being a universal subject, escapes
its own critical eye by its spontaneity, which permits it to take refuge
in this very eye that judges it.
48
That is to say, it belongs to the
nature of reection, whereby I am both the one who reects and
the object of reection, that I escape from my own judgement. I am
only apparently exposed to critique, whereas in fact, by apperceiving
itself as pure universal, the ego (le moi) has already escaped from
the responsibilities that are its alone. Furthermore, and this can be
understood as the correction of an interpretation that Totality and
Innity seems to invite, Levinas rejects the idea that pure criticism or
critique resides in the simple look of the other who judges me: Under
the eye of the other, I remain an unattackable subject in respect.
49
It
is not my own critical eye, nor the eye of the other that puts the ego
in question, but the passivity of obsession, which has the structure
of a trace. One is not dealing here with an empirical event, although
it can be unveiled within such events in the form of an interruption
of consciousness. Levinas accounts for the possibility of critique by
reducing the ego to a self on the hither side of my identity, prior to
self-consciousness. He explains: To revert to oneself is not to establish
oneself at home, even if stripped of all ones acquisitions. It is to be
like a stranger, hunted down in ones home, contested in ones own
identity and ones very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing
the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself,
already a substance.
50
The possibility of critique is here not located
in separation but in substitution.
The second passage from Otherwise than Being in which Levinas
seems to be warning against possible misunderstandings of the idea of
critique set out in Totality and Innity appears in the central chapter,
Substitution. Levinas rejects the suggestion that the rst word of
the mind would be a naive unconditional yes of submission that
would negate truth and all the highest values. However, it is not the
yes as such that Levinas is dismissing but its interpretation, as is
McQuillan 01 intro 89 29/6/07 14:58:29
clear from a comparison of both versions of the text. The 1968 essay
version of this chapter, Substitution, explains under the heading
Before Freedom: An unconditional Yes certainly, but not a naive
one: a Yes older than naive spontaneity.
51
Levinas reexpresses it in
1974 when the essay was rewritten to become the central chapter
in Otherwise than Being, as follows: The unconditionality of this
yes is not that of an innite spontaneity. It is the very exposure to
critique, the exposure prior to consent, more ancient than any naive
spontaneity. In other words, this yes is the answer to which the
Other summons me as I welcome him or her. It is akin to the (non-
positive) afrmation that Derrida invokes in A Madness Must
Watch Over Thinking. In both versions of Substitution Levinas
insists that what is at issue is the meaning of responsibility. In the
essay version, responsibility means to be responsible for that which
the ego had not been the author, a responsibility that precedes
freedom.
52
In the book version, responsibility is over and beyond
ones freedom.
53
In both cases responsibility is not understood in the
sense of legal responsibility, responsibility for what one has done or
caused. Levinasian responsibility is without limit.
One more remark should be made about this passage in Otherwise
than Being because Levinas proceeds to explore a question that
inevitably suggests itself to readers of Totality and Innity:
If ethical terms arise in our discourse, before the terms freedom and non-
freedom, it is because before the bipolarity of good and evil presented to
choice, the subject nds himself committed to the Good in the very passivity of
supporting... Has not the Good chosen the subject with an election recognizable
in the responsibility of being hostage, to which the subject is destined, which
he cannot evade without denying himself, and by virtue of which he is unique?
A philosopher can give to this election only the signication circumscribed by
responsibility for the other.
54
When we are told that this antecedence of responsibility to freedom
would signify the Goodness of the Good, it is imperative that it not
be understood in terms of the bipolarity of good and evil presented
to choice which it is expressly said to precede.
55
Levinas writes that
it is necessary that the Good choose me rst before I can be in a
position to choose, that is, welcome its choice. The formulation
is precise. I welcome my being elected, my responsibility. I can
choose what to do, but I cannot choose the fact of my responsibil-
ity, although consciousness can veil itself from the assignation. That
is to say, prior to deciding what I must do, I must choose whether
McQuillan 01 intro 90 29/6/07 14:58:29
to acknowledge this responsibility. This idea of a decision prior to
decision is implied by Totality and Innity, but not explored there. It
arises because Levinas acknowledges that to recognise the Other is
to give
56
and yet he also concedes that I am free to give or refuse.
57

This implies a freedom prior to my arbitrary freedom, a freedom
to let my arbitrary freedom be put in question or not. This prior
choice plays the role of decision in Levinas, as is clear from Enigma
and Phenomenon. It takes the form of responding to the invitation
with the recognition it is up to me.
58
As Levinas explains, the one
who at his or her own risk responds to the enigma and grasps the
allusion is the subjectivity, alone, unique, secret, which Kierkegaard
caught sight of.
59
I have focused on Levinass account of such a decision because it
takes us to the heart of recent uncertainty about the role of decision
in deconstruction. At the conference on Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, Ernesto Laclau questioned Simon Critchleys attempt
to orient deconstructions initial decision around the primordial
ethical experience of the otherness of the other. Laclau complains
that he cannot see the sense in which even an ethical injunction like
that of opening oneself to the other can be anything other than a
universal principle that precedes and governs any decision.
60
Derrida
responds by invoking what Levinas would say: To take a decision
in the name of the other in no way at all lightens my responsibil-
ity. On the contrary, and Levinas is very forceful on this point, my
responsibility is accused by the fact that it is the other in the name
of which I decide.
61
Derrida is quite explicit that one cannot give
up the notion of innite responsibility, because there would be no
responsibility if one did so:
If responsibility were not innite, if every time that I have to take an ethical or
political decision with regard to the other (autrui) this were not innite, then
I would not be able to engage myself in an innite debt with regard to each
singularity ... There are only moral and political problems, and everything that
follow from this, from the moment when responsibility is not limitable. As a
consequence, whatever choice I have made, I cannot say with good conscience
that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities.
62
It is hard to imagine Derrida uttering a less ambiguous underwriting
of Levinass account of responsibility and thus of what Levinas means
by critique, even if Levinas might not have put it exactly that way.
Levinas is always alert to the possibility of people who might say that
McQuillan 01 intro 91 29/6/07 14:58:29
there are no moral and political problems. That is why he prefers to
make philosophy the stakes, as we saw earlier.
Derrida does not leave matters there. In response to Laclaus claim
that the subject does not exist prior to decision but is invented with
the decision, Derrida concedes that even though identication is
indispensable, it is accompanied by a process of disidentication.
This leads Derrida to the following paradoxical formula: One must
say that in the relationship to the other, who is indeed the one in
the name of which and of whom the decision is taken, the other
remains inappropriable to the process of identication.
63
Derrida
says that the other is the origin of my responsibility without it
being determinable in terms of an identity.
64
And yet the phrase a
decision in the name of the other
65
emphasises the problem. It is a
problem that is readily apparent if one returns to Derridas remarks
about hospitality: one should not even ask the name of ones guest.
It is the same in the Levinasian framework. The one who puts me in
question is the abstract Other, the Other without identity. But just
as one cannot approach the Other with empty hands, one cannot
do so without knowing who is there.
This is a serious problem which at very least calls for a revision of
many of the standard readings of Levinas, but it does not authorise
the criticisms raised by Richard Beardsworth who, in Derrida and
the Political, claims that the association between Derridas thinking
of aporia and Levinass thinking of alterity has ... been unhelpful
for advancing our thinking of the political.
66
Even though I agree
with him that we should not look to Levinasian ethics to serve as
specically the political supplement to Derridas negotiation with
aporia, a position he attributes to Simon Critchley,
67
it seems that
Beardsworths argument should be directed not only against those of
Derridas readers who draw on Levinas for further resources, but also
against Derrida himself who continues to do the same quite explicitly.
The problem may well lie in Beardsworths reading of Levinas as
revealed in his suggestion that Levinass thinking risks being political
by not wishing to be.
68
Levinass thinking on the political is not an
afterthought. The political permeates Totality and Innity from the
rst sentences of the Preface, where Levinas writes that everyone
will agree that it is important to know whether they are not duped
by morality, and then proceeds to a discussion of the relation of war
to morality.
69
In the absence of any sustained alternative account
proposed by Derrida in his own name and in his own terms, and
given the clear and frequent invocation of Levinas by Derrida in
McQuillan 01 intro 92 29/6/07 14:58:29
the context of questions about the motivation of deconstruction, I
think we would do well to take seriously the possibility that it lies in
critique as Levinas understands it. This notion of critique, however,
brings with it a notion of decision: one is free to welcome or refuse
the questioning introduced by the Other.
The question about the force and motivation of deconstruction
becomes all the more pressing to the extent that Derrida distances
himself from his initial diagnosis of the crisis of critique with its
heavy debt to Heideggers account of the so-called end of philosophy.
Derrida puts the question in Force of Law in this way: For in the
end, where will deconstruction nd its force, its movement or its
motivation if not in this always unsatised appeal, beyond the given
determinations of what we call, in determined contexts, justice, the
possibility of justice?
70
In Force of Law Derrida explains that this
idea of justice is innite because it is irreducible in its afrmative
character and in its demands because it is owed to the other before
any contract.
71
The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two
decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign
to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged it is of obligation
(devoir) that we must speak to give itself up to the impossible decision, while
taking account of law and rules.
72
The same might be said of the awakening of politicisation in Levinas
as it arises in the way that the Other refers to the other Others, the
third.
73
I have argued here that one can legitimately say that decon-
struction is motivated by critique, so long as critique is understood
in Levinass sense. To the extent to which this is true I hope to
have thrown some light on what lies behind Derridas recent works
with their clear and often direct evocations of Levinas. Derridean
deconstruction answers to Levinasian critique without which there
is neither decision, nor hyper-politicisation, just as I suspect that,
were it not for deconstruction, we would be inclined to misidentify
Levinass contribution, seeing it as the foundation of a morality and
not the ethics of ethics, the ethics of suspicion, that it is.
74
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Ja, ou le faux-bond, in Points de Suspension (Paris:
Galile, 1992), p. 60; translated by Peggy Kamuf as Ja, or le faux-bond,
in Points . . . . Interviews, 19741994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), p. 54. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be
McQuillan 01 intro 93 29/6/07 14:58:29
given in brackets after those for the English translation.) Compare Jacques
Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 84. For a discussion of some of Derridas central discussions of
critique, see Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruc-
tion (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 14 and 55 n. 40.
2. See Robert Bernasconi, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics, in
John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), p. 136.
3. Jacques Derrida, Lettre un ami japonais, in Psych (Paris: Galile, 1987),
p. 390; translated by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin as Letter to a
Japanese Friend, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida
and Diffrance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 3.
4. Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galile, 1993), p. 16; translated by David
Wood as Passions, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), p. 6.
5. Jacques Derrida, Lcriture et difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 967; WD,
pp. 623. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will be
given in brackets after those for the English translation.) See also Jacques
Derrida, Introduction, in Edward Husserl, Lorigine de la gomtrie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), p. 13; translated by John P. Leavey
as Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (New York: Nicolas
Hays, 1978), p. 33.
6. WD, p. 79 (pp. 11718).
7. That this history could be read differently is implicitly acknowledged by
Derrida in the way he allows Jan Patockas somewhat different organisation
of that same history in The Gift of Death. See Jacques Derrida, Donner
la mort in Jean-Michel Rabat and Michael Wetzel (eds), Lthique du
don (Paris: Mtaili-Transition, 1992), pp. 1134; translated by David
Wills in The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
pp. 133.
8. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phnomne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1967), 27n; translated by David Allison as Speech and Phenomena
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 2526n.
9. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 142;
trans. Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), p. 119. (Henceforth page references for the French edition
will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.)
10. MP, p. 60 (p. 70).
11. Derrida, Points, p. 357 (p. 368).
12. Jacques Derrida, Lautre cap (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 34; OH, p. 31.
(Henceforth page references for the French edition will be given in
brackets after those for the English translation.)
13. OH, p. 77 (p. 76)
14. SdM, p. 146; SoM, p. 89. (Henceforth page references for the French edition
will be given in brackets after those for the English translation.)
15. SoM, p. 88 (p. 145).
16. SoM, p. 90 (p. 149).
17. Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York and
London: Routledge, 1996), p. 85.
McQuillan 01 intro 94 29/6/07 14:58:30
18. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 85.
19. Derrida presents the secret as the condition of politicisation, the way of
broaching the question of the political, of the history and genealogy of
this concept, with the most concrete consequences (Mouffe, Deconstruc-
tion and Pragmatism, p. 81). This is because the secret remains inaccessible
and heterogeneous to the public realm.
20. I have argued this, albeit without using the term hyperpoliticisation, in
a number of essays. For example, The Third Party, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 30 (1) (January 1999), pp. 7689.
21. One could complicate this discussion of critique further by introducing
Levinass association of Derrida with Kantian critique in Tout autrement.
Emmanuel Levinas, Noms Propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976),
p. 81; translated by Michael B. Smith as Proper Names (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), p. 55. See the discussion by Simon Critchley in
The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 14550. Note
also Derridas comments in La verit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978),
p. 46; translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth
of Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 39.
22. WD, p. 88 (p. 132).
23. WD, p. 88 (p. 132). In various places I have attempted to challenge the
reading of Violence and Metaphysics as a critique. In some respects
the present essay is an update on that controversy. See, for example,
The Trace of Levinas in Derrida, in Wood and Bernasconi, Derrida and
Diffrance, pp. 1329.
24. The best treatment of critique in Levinas to date is to be found in
Peter Atterton, Levinass Skeptical Critique of Metaphysics and Anti-
humanism, Philosophy Today, 41 (4) (Winter 1997), pp. 491506.
25. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de lautre homme (Montpellier: Fata
Morgana, 1972), p. 49; translated by A. Lingis in Basic Philosophical
Writings, eds A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 54. (Henceforth page references for
the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English
translation.)
26. Emmanuel Levinas, La philosophie et lide de lInni, En dcouvrant
lexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 1658; translated
by A. Lingis in Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,
1987), pp. 4757. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will
be given in brackets after those for the English translation.) For Reality
and Its Shadow see La ralit et son ombre, Les Temps Modernes 38
(1948), pp. 7712 and 7879; translated in Collected Philosophical Papers,
pp. 13 and 1213, as well as the discussion in John Llewelyn, Emmanuel
Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 1936.
27. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 59 (p. 178).
29. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 478 (pp. 1656).
30. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1961), p. 59; translated by A. Lingis, Totality and Innity (Pittsburgh,
Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 86. (Henceforth page references for
McQuillan 01 intro 95 29/6/07 14:58:30
the French edition will be given in brackets after those for the English
translation.)
31. Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 86 (p. 58).
33. Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 42 (pp. 1213).
34. Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 43 (p. 13). Translation modied.
37. Levinas, Totality and Innity, pp. 823 (p. 54).
40. Levinas, Totality and Innity, pp. 845 (p. 57). Translation modied.
42. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 55 (Humanisme, p. 50).
43. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 55 (Humanisme, p. 51)
47. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qutre ou au-dela de lessence (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 116; translated by A. Lingis as Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 92.
Levinass italics. (Henceforth page references for the French edition will
be given in brackets after those for the English translation.)
48. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 92 (p. 117).
51. Emmanuel Levinas, La substitution, La Revue Philosophique de Louvain
66 (1968), p. 504; translated in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 93.
52. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 94 (Substitution, p. 506).
66. Cf. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge,
1996), p. 103.
67. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. 163.
68. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, pp. 103 and 136.
69. Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 21 (p. ix).
70. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law, Cardozo Law Review 11 (July/August 1990),
p. 957.
McQuillan 01 intro 96 29/6/07 14:58:30
71. Derrida, Force of Law, p. 965.
73. cf. Levinas, Totality and Innity, pp. 21314 (pp. 18790).
74. An earlier version of this essay was delivered under the title The
Crisis of Critique at a conference organised by Geoffrey Bennington
at the University of Sussex in July 1998 under the title Critique and
Deconstruction.
McQuillan 01 intro 97 29/6/07 14:58:30
6
The Popularity of Language:
Rousseau and the Mother-Tongue
Anne Berger
The Essay on the Origin of Languages is also an essay on the origin
of peoples, indeed of the people, conceived of as a political
community.
In his famous chapter on the Formation of Meridional Languages,
1

Rousseau distinguishes between what he calls popular languages and
domestic ones, that is, between the languages of nations (in the
pre-modern sense of the term) and those of the family. Only the rst
category is granted the status of a genuine language. Thus, Rousseau
warns the reader in a footnote at the beginning of the chapter:
Genuine languages are not at all of domestic origin. They can be established only
under a more general, a more durable agreement. The American savages hardly
speak at all except outside their homes. Each keeps silent in his hut, speaking
to his family by signs. And these signs are used infrequently, for a savage is less
disquieted, less impatient than a European; he has fewer needs and he is careful
to meet them himself.
2
Later in the chapter, Rousseau tries to characterise the stage of
humanity which predates the time of the simultaneous institution
of societies and languages: Before that time ... there were families,
but there were no nations. There were domestic languages, but there
were no popular ones.
3
Popular languages then, would differ from
the domestic or familial ones, the way the public realm differs from
the private, the outside from the inside, the away from home from
the at home. The language one speaks at home the hut language
is hardly a language. An inner, endogamous language one might
call it today vernacular
4
would have neither the status nor the
structure of a language. It could not generate a nation. A popular
language, which is to say, according to Rousseau, language itself,
language as the language of a people or a nation, originates from ones
encounter with others. For the philosopher, such an encounter is
always at the same time an experience of adulteration and alienation.
98
McQuillan 01 intro 98 29/6/07 14:58:30
The Popularity of Language 99
A people constitutes itself as such, then, by othering its members,
by becoming through language an other (as) [it]self: the co-event
of language and the people happens in the double experience of the
difference of the other and the difference from oneself. Thus to speak
a language means to venture away from both the self and the home;
and it is also the rst act of a citizenship to come. In this sense, what
we call linguistics today is for Rousseau but a branch of politics.
Indeed his conception of politics, as he states it for instance in the
famous piece on political economy he wrote for inclusion in the
Encyclopdie, rests on the neo-Aristotelian principle of heterogeneity
between the domestic and the political bodies, or between family
and nation.
5
In the Essay, Rousseau gives a certain name to the pro(to)-linguistic
experience of altering difference. He calls it love. The sentence I
just commented on (there were families but there were no nations;
there were domestic languages, but there were no popular ones) ends
with the following statement: there were marriages but there was no
love at all. Love would date, then, from the time of the institution
of societies and languages, and conversely. Marriage, on the other
hand, would predate it, as the condition of the family. Levi-Strauss,
who views marriage as the institution of exogamy and hence as one
of the fundamental structures of exchange that articulate the social
as such, might be surprised by this phrase. The apparent paradox of
the formula may well stem from Rousseaus peculiar notion of the
birth of language, more exactly of language as speech. Here is what
he writes just before the passage quoted:
In the arid places where water could be had only from wells, people had to rejoin
one another to sink the wells, or at least to agree upon their use. Such must
have been the origin of societies and languages in warm countries.
...There the rst rendezvous of the two sexes took place. Girls would come
to seek water for the household, young men would come to water their herds
... Imperceptibly water becomes more necessary. The livestock becomes thirsty
more often. ... There at last was the true cradle of nations [le berceau des peuples];
from the pure crystal of the fountains ow the rst res of love.
6
Love, language, nations [les peuples] are born at waterbreak: in arid
places, in other words, at the place of lack and thirst: at the source
where the thirst for (the) water becomes the thirst for the other. From
an effect of need, thirst indeed becomes an indication of desire, as
Rousseaus dreamy description subtly implies: Imperceptibly water
becomes more necessary. The livestock becomes thirsty more often.
McQuillan 01 intro 99 29/6/07 14:58:30
100 Anne Berger
The irresistible attraction of water (leau/tre) founds the community.
This magical water prompts people to speak and live together by
designating one sex to the other as it quenches their thirst. The
hetero-erotico-sexual union would not only be the originary form
but also the driving force of the popular community as linguistic
community. One is reminded of Freuds analysis of the social bond
as a libidinal bond in Civilization and its Discontents. According to
Freud, the upholding and progress of civilisation indeed depends on
the libidinal nature of the social bond. The Rousseauian fable of the
link between language and the desire for the other also points to the
engaging nature of language; such, Derrida will add after Rousseau,
that it binds all speakers by the promise of an irrevocable engagement,
before any articulated commitment and beyond any forswearing. For
language does not only name; it calls;
7
and it calls to the speaker as
well as on the addressee by the very force of its performance.
In describing the encounter prompted by a paradigmatic experience
of lack, and the coupling in language of the differing sexes, Rousseau
not only stresses the creative force of an inviting strangeness, he marks
the exogamic character of the birth of Meridional languages. Speech
as communal speech, hence the rst popular languages, would occur
beyond the endogamous circle of the family, that is, outside and
beyond the relation between mother and child. The consubstanti-
ality of the phenomenon of language and of the popular body as
political body does suggest in a complex manner that both the birth
of society and linguistic relations have to do with the prohibition
of incest.
8
A question arises: how does Rousseau conceive of what
one calls a mother-tongue, that is, the childs native language as it is
transmitted to him/her by the mother? And (how) does he articulate
the connection, if any, between the mother-tongue, the popular
community, and the collective or national formation of what he
may be the rst to have called the social bond?
9
Rousseau is more eloquent on the issue of the status and practice of
language between mother and child in The Origin and Foundations of
Inequality among Men than in the Essay.
10
As in the Essay though, he
starts by rejecting the idea that languages are born from the domestic
commerce of fathers, mothers and children. Between mother and
child as well as between the members or the parental copula, there
is no necessary relation which would generate language by breaking
down the isolation and limiting the autonomy proper to the state of
nature. Thus the biological link counts for nothing in the emergence
and experience of the social. Yet Rousseau assumes the existence of
McQuillan 01 intro 100 29/6/07 14:58:30
a proto-language, the origin and initiative of which he assigns not
to the mother or father, but to the child itself:
Note also that the child having all his needs to explain and consequently more
things to say to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must
make the greatest efforts of invention, and that the language he uses must be in
great part his own work, which multiplies languages as many times as there are
individuals to speak them. A wandering and vagabond life contributes further
to this, since it does not give any idiom the time to gain consistency. For to say
that the mother teaches the child the words he ought to use to ask her for a
particular thing shows well how one teaches already formed languages, but it
does not teach us how they are formed.
11
The language of the child is explicitly and exclusively directed
towards the mother. Its quasi-autological nature and self-engendered
occurrence make it a strictly idiomatic, indeed idiolectic language.
This infantile proto-language serves to explain needs, not to express
desire(s). It cannot therefore exceed the time and place of the dual
relation to the mother conceived as the time and place of the need
of the mother. We have already seen that for Rousseau, it is not the
need to satisfy the needs which prompts the advent of articulated
speech and establishes the community, but rather the emergence of
love as a paradigmatic form of passion. Indeed, the need to satisfy
needs is limited (and hence temporary) precisely because it can be
satised. The [rst] invention of language does not stem from needs
but from passions, claims Rousseau in the title of chapter II of the
Essay.
12
The satisfaction of needs brings about the dispersal of the
individuals who had been temporarily united. It is because they
remain unsatised, indeed unsatisable, that desire and passion
be it hatred or anger bring people closer through speech in any
lasting way. Does this mean, then, that the proto-linguistic relation
of the child to the rst mother described by Rousseau as a kind of
preview (avant-premire) of the scene of speech, actually ignores
both affects and lack?
Whatever the case, it means that the infantile language spoken
between child and mother (since the mother has to learn the language
in order to meet the needs of the child) will never reach the stage of
a popular language. This reversal of the pedagogical relation into
a metrogogical
13
one allows Rousseau to obfuscate to some degree
the role of the mother in the scene of language teaching he describes
in Emile or Education, where he takes up again the argument put
forward in the Second Discourse.
14
In Book I, which deals with the
McQuillan 01 intro 101 29/6/07 14:58:31
102 Anne Berger
education of the infant and small child, Rousseau asserts that there
exists originally for anybody, not a mother-tongue, but a natural
tongue. The nature of this natural tongue is such that children can
speak it before they can speak:
Whether there was a language natural and common to all has long been a
subject of research. Doubtless there is such a language and it is the one children
speak before knowing how to speak. This language is not articulate, but it is
accented, sonorous, intelligible. The habit of our languages has made us neglect
that language to the point of forgetting it completely. Let us study children,
and we shall soon relearn it with them. Nurses are our masters in this language.
They understand everything their nurslings say; they respond to them; they have
quite consistent dialogues with them; and, although they pronounce words,
these words are perfectly useless; it is not the sense of the word that children
understand but the accent which accompanies it.
15
As in the Second Discourse, the children are the masters of their nurses
who, by virtue of understand[ing] everything their nurslings say,
become in turn the masters (the matres, not the mistresses), or
rather, as Rousseau writes, our masters (nurses are our masters),
that is, the masters of a or the community. The use of the rst
person plural possessive by the subject of utterance shows his identi-
cation with a community which is clearly constructed throughout
the education treatise as an adult, masculine and proto-political
community. In spite of what he claims in Book I, the ambition of
Emiles educator, who speaks for this community, is indeed to form
a (male) citizen, rather than simply a man. But even before the
master of popular language comes to replace the mother, the child
has already taken the master-mothers place by teaching the nurse,
who herself replaces from the start both the biological mother and the
master from whom she borrows (in the French text) the masculine
gender as she takes on his function. From mother (mre) to master
(matre), the sliding of the signier is so irresistible that it authorises a
signing off of power. In this chain of reversals, the collective subject
of the educating community nds himself literally in the place of an
infant, that is, in the place of one who is excluded from the language
of the community a community formed here by the nurses and
their nurslings and whose future inclusion depends on being taught
the idiomatic language of nature by the nurse-master (le matre-
nourrice). Thanks to his mastery of language, Rousseau manages to
turn this domestic community into a masculine one; in other words,
the community of nurses and nurslings becomes the inverted image
McQuillan 01 intro 102 29/6/07 14:58:31
of the political community to which the child will only gain access
through the substituting of a master for a (m)other.
In this sense, there would be no mother-tongue to speak of for
Rousseau. For, according to him, the mother-tongue (i.e the language
of the mother) is neither original nor originary: it is neither the rst
language of the child in the scenario I just recalled, nor the origin of
the language of the city. The latter, as we have seen, only takes shape
by virtue of the substitution of the heterosexual relation outside the
domestic sphere for the (non)-relation of mother and child inside
the hut, unless a masterchild relation has always already replaced
the motherchild one within the sphere of the house.
Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712. Nine days later, his mother
died. Of the mother, there remained only an innite question: the
question of origins, to which Rousseau brought and could only bring
an original, unprecedented answer. Yet the accident of Rousseaus
birth only partly accounts for the originary absence of a mother-
tongue in his text. Moreover, it all depends on the sense one gives
to the name mother-tongue, to paraphrase Rousseaus formula
in his rst footnote to Emile, in which he tries to account for his
rst mention of the name mother, on the rst page of his treatise:
Moreover [Au reste] the sense I give to the name mother must be
explained; and that is what will be done hereafter.
16
Once he has sketched out his theory of the infantile language in the
Second Discourse, Rousseau concedes, albeit in a negative form, that a
linguistic relation between a civilised mother and child can play a
mediating role and attest to the formation of a popular language;
such a relation would gure the consolidation, rather than the
underside, of the state of culture and the political community: For
to say that the mother teaches the child the words he ought to use
to ask her for a particular thing shows well how one teaches already
formed languages, but it does not teach us how they are formed.
17

Yet things are even more complicated than they look. One recalls
that the infantile language is, if inarticulate, accented, sonorous,
intelligible. It is perhaps all the more intelligible as it is accented
rather than articulate. Since Derrida has commented on it in such
detail, I will not dwell on the opposition between accentuation and
articulation, which founds Rousseaus phonocentrism. I just want
to remind the reader of the role the sonorousness of both language
and speech plays in Rousseaus political theory.
In chapter XI of the Essay as well as in the last chapter which
deals with the relationships of languages to governments, Rousseau
McQuillan 01 intro 103 29/6/07 14:58:31
104 Anne Berger
explores the connections between a sonorous language, a public or
popular language and the political community: If they are frequently
obscure because of their power [nergie], he writes in chapter XI, the
sonorous, accented, eloquent languages are nonetheless the only
ones suited to giving laws to [the] people; they and only they are
t to endow those who speak them with the power [to sway] the
multitude.
18
In the same chapter, Rousseau continues:
Thus, if one who read a little Arabic and enjoyed leang through the Koran were
to hear Mohammed personally proclaim in that eloquent, rhythmic tongue,
with that sonorous, persuasive voice, seducing rst the ears, then the heart,
every sentence alive with enthusiasm, he would prostrate himself, crying: Great
prophet, messenger of God, lead us to glory, to martyrdom. We will conquer or
die for you [nous voulons vaincre ou mourir pour vous].
19
If Arabic, which as a sacred language is akin to the voice of God,
were pronounced by the sonorous voice of Mohammed, it would
elicit in turn the sonorous explosion of the cry of the believer (he
would prostrate himself, crying [criant]). The arche-patriotic content
of the cry conquer or die is the founding motto of the modern
patriot can be read as the translation or semantisation of its very
utterance. One should also note that, thanks to this resounding
force of language, the singular subject of reading and hearing (if
one who read a little Arabic ... were to hear ...) becomes plural,
as if under the multiplying, gathering and politicising spell of the
sonorous language: lead us to glory ... We will conquer and die for
you. The conjunction between orientalism and proto-nationalism
in Rousseaus text deserves a lengthier commentary than I can afford
here. Let me just say that the same type of argument is taken up
again in the twentieth and last chapter of the Essay. There, Rousseau
deplores the weakening of the French language, deemed both a
northern and a modern language, and as such doubly removed from
its origin. He ascribes the state of the French language to the absence
or breaking apart of communication between the monarchic rulers
and the people of France:
There are some tongues [langues] favorable to liberty. They are the sonorous,
prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a
great distance ...
But I say that any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to
the people assembled is a slavish tongue. It is impossible for a people to remain
free and speak that tongue.
20
McQuillan 01 intro 104 29/6/07 14:58:31
One understands why, for Rousseau, music and politics belong to
the same analytic eld, that of the essay on the origins of languages.
All this is also to say that the very characteristic of the idiomatic
proto-language of the child i.e. its sonorousness whose main
addressee and interlocutor is, if not the mother, whomever Rousseau
gives her name to, is precisely that which denes the quality of the
social bond articulated by the popular language, that is, its democratic
force and form.
Thus, while he reasserts the principle of an essential heterogeneity
of the domestic and public spheres, Rousseau formulates a theory
of the connection between language learning, the social bond and
what one could call the topology of the relation between child and
mother, in Book I of Emile. Opposing, as often, the city and the
village, he distinguishes the situation of linguistic exchange of the
city child from that of the peasant child. The city child is under
the thumb of a governess, who acts as a legislating substitute for
the mother in a civilised noble or bourgeois order. She dictates
the words of the city to the child in such a way that he repeats
[them] poorly [il les rend mal], thus preventing the transmission of
a mother-tongue which alone would prompt the blending of the
laws of the house with the laws of the land. The child encounters a
double obstacle to the acquisition of the ability to express himself,
an ability which not only affects the linguistic performance: it also
signals the autonomy of the subject of utterance, a necessary prelude
to the free exercise of citizenship. On the one hand, the excessive
closeness of the governess, a gure of the childs absolute dependency,
prevents the child from magnifying his voice. Such an inhibition of
the sound jeopardises the development of vocal potency, and in the
end hurts even the ability to articulate. The connement of words
within the limits of the hearth maintains the muttering child (le
marmotteur) in a state of infancy ( ltat de marmot); it hinders the
shift from the domestic to the public sphere, from the governesss
chamber to the chamber of the peoples government: Up to ve or
six, city children, raised indoors and under the wing of a governess,
need only to mutter to make themselves understood. As soon as they
stir their lips, effort is made to hear them.
21
On the other hand, the conditions of the dictation of words to
the child prevent him from appropriating a language which, failing
to express what he means and wants, remains the expression of
the will of others: Words are dictated to them which they repeat
poorly; and since the same people are constantly with them, these
McQuillan 01 intro 105 29/6/07 14:58:31
106 Anne Berger
people, by dint of paying attention to them, guess what they want to
say rather than what they say.
22
Through this fable of the origin of
speech (conceived as the necessary, if impossible, expression of the
self), Rousseau raises just before Kant the Kantian problem of the
conditions of access of a subject to the status of an autonomous and
responsible citizen. He gures out the solution to this problem in
the following paragraph:
In the country, it is an entirely different thing. A peasant woman is not constantly
with her child; he is forced to learn to say very clearly and loudly what he needs
to make her understand. In the elds, the children, scattered, removed from the
father, from the mother, and from the other children, get practice in making
themselves understood at a distance and in measuring the strength [force] of
their voices according to the space [intervalle] which separates them from those
by whom they want to be understood. This is how one truly learns to pronounce,
and not by stuttering some vowels in the ear of an attentive governess.
23
What would guarantee the persistence of the sonorous quality
of the infantile proto-language is the mothers remoteness, her
independence and her belonging to the public sphere of work for
the peasant woman works in the elds and not only in the house.
This persistence in the childs language of the rst relation to the
rst mother would in turn determine the political future and the
harmonic development of the community; the practice of language is
indeed a matter of prociency in musical harmony since, as Rousseau
writes, one has to measure the strength of the voice according to the
interval of separation. Just as in the paragraph of the Essay where
Rousseau describes the effect of the sonorous voice of Mahomet,
24

the exercise of the childs vocal strength triggers an imperceptible
shift from the dual scene of the relation to the mother based on
the expression of needs to the plural scene where the scattered
children make themselves heard by those by whom they want to
be understood. The voicing of the childrens will (they want to be
understood), which follows the articulation of needs, may well be
the prototype of the political expression of the general will, since,
like it, it aims at bringing together the scattered subjects through
the unison of voices.
Remoteness, though, is not absence. There is always a risk that the
distant mother will not answer the child. Yet, the space (intervalle)
which must separate mother and child in order to elicit the will to
speak in the latter, is also the harmonic principle of their dialogue. It
creates a balance between the autarchic independence of the savage
McQuillan 01 intro 106 29/6/07 14:58:31
whose few needs preserve him from language, and hence from any
relation to others, and the dependency which inevitably results from
recourse to language, according to Rousseau. For him, to call an
other is always to call on him, that is, at the same time to confess
ones powerlessness and to enter into the infernal circle of supple-
mentarity. To call (on) the other is to open oneself to the possibility
of substitution, since, in begging for an answer, one signies ones
insufciency and invites the other to act in ones name or place, to
begin with the act of speaking: whoever answers me takes my place
as the locutor while acting on my behalf and/or my request. As with
all rst steps in Rousseau, the rst step in the order of supplementarity
is the most radical.
Finally, the mother called and gone or kept at a certain distance
remains a mother to come, and hence a desired one. Rousseau
manages to turn a gure of the origin into the hidden horizon,
indeed the very aim of the speaking community. Moreover, the
strength (force) which the child must deploy in order to force
the attention of a structurally inattentive mother, unlike the (too)
attentive governess,
25
likens language learning to a test of virility.
Since the child has to overcome a kind of resistance if he wants to
make himself heard by the mother, to learn how to speak to her is
indeed to learn to speak as a man: to speak in a loud voice (parler
fort), as one speaks to men and between men. This is exactly what
Rousseau will say a little further, in his capacity of master of all the
masters of the Emiles to come: A man who learns to speak only in
his bedroom
26
will fail to make himself understood at the head of
a battalion and will hardly impress the people in a riot. First teach
children to speak to men; they will know how to speak to women
when they have to.
27
But, in order to impress men and the people,
shouldnt one have tried rst to impress ones mother through the
strength of ones voice? It seems that one can only do that by going
after her in the elds, rather than by talking with her in a bedroom
as do the courtiers in the ladies ruelles. The peasant mother in this
sense functions as the prototype of the efcient master, since the
latter substitutes for her precisely to keep her at a distance. What
the child must ultimately succeed in articulating clearly then, is his
sexual identity as a boy.
The compass of the voice gives the measure of the community as
democratic community. Nowhere does Rousseau suggest this more
clearly than in the chapters XI and XX I have briey commented
on. The political community he dreams of, such that the social bond
McQuillan 01 intro 107 29/6/07 14:58:31
108 Anne Berger
and the governmental form would echo each other harmoniously,
is a necessarily limited albeit wide enough one. The circle of the
sonorous speech delineates a border between a sufcient internal
heterogeneity and a dangerous external one, between the good
and the bad interval, the measured distance (that is, measured up
to presence) and the too far off. Thus Rousseaus phonocentrism
determines the proto-nationalist leaning of his discourse. It is not
by chance that the link between phonocentrism and nationalism
is suggested in Book I. For the linguistic relation between the small
child and the peasant mother who stands for the people provides
the model for the ideal social bond within the connes of the popular
community. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length
in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulll around
them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to
love his neighbors, warns Rousseau at the beginning of Book I.
28
And a few lines earlier:
Every particular society, when it is narrow and unied, is estranged from the
all-encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They are only men.
They are nothing in his eyes. This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling.
The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives.
29
One understands why the issue of the birth and upkeep of the
patriotic feeling is so immediately insistent in the book Rousseau
devotes to infancy and early childhood, and more specically to
language learning and the problems of oral performance.
How, then, do the restricted proto-national community, for which
the peasant family provides a model and which alone awakens
patriotic feelings, and the barbarian family whom Rousseau depicts
in chapter IX of the Essay, differ from each other? The difference
rests precisely with language, which inserts the spacing of alterity at
the heart of union. The savage incestuous concentration produces
only disjunction and dispersal because it lacks the (linguistic)
interval between its members that would force them to articulate
the connection between themselves.
Let us go back to those meridional languages which lead us towards
the mother precisely by leading away from her, following a by now
familiar route. Sometimes Rousseau call these languages oriental, but
he seems to prefer the word meridional, maybe because one hears
in it in French the distant murmur of the name of the mother (mre):
mridionale. Since the meridional languages are deemed the rst
languages, they are both languages in the sense of particular idioms
McQuillan 01 intro 108 29/6/07 14:58:31
and language in general. They are in this sense closer to childhood,
as Derrida states in Of Grammatology,
30
even if, as we have seen, they
can only develop thanks to a coming out of the hut and the house,
and thanks to the gathering at water springs of desiring individuals
of the two sexes. A narrative of the formation of northern languages
immediately follows the chapter on meridional languages in the
Essay. Northern languages, Rousseau tells us in chapter X, are the
sad daughters of necessity and are thus opposed to the meridional
ones, which are the children of pleasure rather than need.
31
In those
wretched climates where everything is dead for nine months of the
year, men are ceaselessly busy providing for their subsistence and
hardly think of pleasanter ties.
32
Now, if one is to believe Rousseaus
rst statements (that the [rst] invention of language-speech does
not stem from needs but from passions), only the passions in general
and the anticipation of pleasure in particular prompt the voice to
rise and reach beyond the self towards the other. And only the others
attraction guarantees the strength of the social bond as libidinal
bond. Even if, as Rousseau states in the same chapter, mutual need
[unites] men to a greater extent when sentiment has not done so,
33

the northern languages, which are born from nine months of a death
work, carry with them the seed of the dissolution of the communal
links they were made to establish and express.
Rousseau coins an extraordinary formula to both illustrate and sum
up the difference between meridional and septentrional languages:
Mutual need uniting men to a greater extent when sentiment has not done
so, society would be formed only through industry. The ever-present danger
of perishing would not permit of a language restricted to gesture. And the rst
words among them were not love me [aimez-moi] but help me [aidez-moi].
34
Aimez-moi versus aidez-moi. The proximity of the two syntagms
at the level of the signier does suggest that northern languages are
the adulterated offsprings of the meridional languages. One letter
is altered and everything is changed? Rousseau had already warned
us: a slight movement, a slight shift of the globes axis or of the
line of writing [decide] the vocation of mankind, and the face of
the earth is [changed].
35
But before we take the full measure of this
grammatic change, let us ponder on these statements kinship: the
rst word pronounced in each language group is a perfect palindrome
on the phonetic level: it exhibits the passing perfection of a language
still curled up on itself, autological to the point of tautology; this
phonetico-tautological balance of the originary statement is ruined
McQuillan 01 intro 109 29/6/07 14:58:31
110 Anne Berger
by the heterogeneity of graphy (ai/ez); it would anyway be destroyed
as soon as a second word is uttered. On the grammatical level,
both statements are in the imperative mode. Command or prayer,
each rst word is a call addressed to someone else, according to the
originary call of language. Since the rst word articulates a demand of
some kind, one could say that the locutor/speaker is paradigmatically
in the position of the child who voices demands. The post-position
of the moi (love me / help me) and its grammatical function as
object suspend the emergence of a subject (both grammatical and
psychological) to the others response. Finally, the plural form of the
second person (aimez/aidez-moi) suggests that the aim of articulated
language is indeed to found the community; the child, to whom
Rousseau assigns in the Second Discourse, the Essay and Emile, the task
of inaugurating if not languages, at least language, would address
from the start the virtual body of co-locutors at the very moment he
addresses the mother: no two without a third +n. However, the use of
the plural form raises the question of the particular idiom in which
Rousseau formulates his general theory of the birth of languages,
namely French. For in French, the second person plural indicates
undecidably in the absence of contextual clues, either a plurality of
addressees or the respectful distance the locutor maintains towards
his or her singular interlocutor. If the use of the plural in Rousseaus
double formula does retain the plurality of its functions, then the
demand by the child-like locutor that his or her addressee come closer
for all demand as such is a demand for (more) closeness does once
again take an odd linguistic path: that of marked distance.
But what are the status and meaning of the imperceptible shift from
aimez to aidez, that is, from the bi-labial m to the sonorous dental
d? On this issue, Jean Starobinski makes the following remarks in
his annotated edition of the Essay:
In a phonetic chain otherwise identical, the surplus of articulation is marked
by the difference between the occlusive dental d and the nasal bilabial m. d
is obviously harder, m is softer, endowed with more tenderness (mollesse).
But what can we say about the use of French to mark the distinction between
the rst northern and the rst southern language?
36
Indeed, the work of the signier calls our attention to the idiom thus
inscribed, namely the French language. Starobinski is right to ask
what the status of French might be in Rousseaus discourse, as the
rst language spoken and written by the subject named Rousseau,
and as a northern language in the symbolic cartography of the
McQuillan 01 intro 110 29/6/07 14:58:32
philosopher. The signifying drift from m to d gures the relation of
linguistic derivation which links, while sending them at a distance, the
northern languages to the southern ones. For Rousseau, as we know,
any form of derivation is a process of estrangement and perversion
of the original meaning. Here, the adulteration which cuts into the
original link between languages consists in replacing the m, that
is, the phonological index of love in French (m/aime), with a dental
which destroys the cratylic harmony that previously reigned between
the signier and the signied (m/aimez). Again, Starobinski is right
to stress the hardness of the d and the surplus of articulation
it requires, as if the progress in the ability to articulate in French
which exemplies for Rousseau the historic evolution of languages
marked a conversion of love into aggression, an effect, perhaps, of
the loosening of the original ties. In this sense, the northern locutor
who would say aidez-moi rather than aimez-moi would not only
express his need for an other but also his dent against him (sa dent
contre lui), as one says in French. In other words, the progress in the
mastery of language indicated by the surplus of articulation would
correspond to a hardening of the subject of speech. Psychoanalysis
might read in this the idiomatic trace of the shift from a primary oral
stage to a sadistic stage, which itself corresponds phenomenologically
to the new use of his teeth (dents) by the child.
This hardening of the tongue, which Starobinski identies in
the coming out of the dental, is thematised throughout chapter X.
Rousseau starts by saying: the languages, sad daughters of necessity,
reect their [harsh] origin (leur dure origine).
37
The men who speak
these harsh languages are harsh men: One can see already that the
men, being more robust, are bound to have less delicate voices. Their
voices are bound to be stronger and rougher.
38
Further on: For the
accents which the heart does not provide, distinct articulation is
substituted. And if some trace of nature remains in the form of the
language, this too contributes to its harshness [duret].
39
The chapter
ends with the following sentence: Thus too their most natural tone of
voice is angry and menacing, and their words are always accompanied
by emphatic articulation, which makes them harsh and loud.
40
We have already heard the motif of the loud and strong voice
played out loud in Book I of Emile. But there, the virility of articulation
secures both the upholding of a certain relation to the mother and
the success of the speakers inscription within the linguistic and
political community. On the contrary, in the Essay, the loudness
and harshness of the language and the men who speak it are the
McQuillan 01 intro 111 29/6/07 14:58:32
112 Anne Berger
symptoms of an excessive hom(m)osexuation and distance between
the members of the community; as such, they ruin both the memory
of the tongue-mother and the future of the collectivity. Reecting
on the meaning of the differences between northern and southern
languages in the next chapter, Rousseau states:
French, English, German: each is a language private to a group of men who help
each other, [who reason cold-bloodedly] or who become angry. But the ministers
of the gods proclaiming sacred mysteries, sages giving laws to their people,
leaders swaying the multitude, have to speak Arabic or Persian.
41
This statement is followed by Rousseaus reection on the fanaticising
efciency of Mahomets voice, which I have already commented
on. The European languages, mentioned here as the archetypes of
northern languages, programme the bursting apart of the community.
As private languages, they are opposed to the meridional languages
which alone can sway the multitude, for they are the true cradle
of nations, as Rousseau says in the ninth chapter of his genetic
fable. The request for or offer of help actually mean: everyone for
himself. In this sense, the northern languages end up resembling the
idiolectic, sonorous, proto-language of the child, which the latter uses
provisionally to explain his needs in a relation without relation,
and without love being received or given, to the mother he calls on.
Modern French would ultimately be the result of an ultra-regressive
idiomatising privatisation of an originary Arabic, leading to language/
speechs deprivation of the ability to pronounce the m.
Yet, Rousseau does state that the modern tongues, with all
their intermingling and recasting, still retain something of these
differences.
42
Which means that, for all the differences, there are
still lots of linguistic interunions; the north hasnt completely lost
sight of the south. After all, the opposition between aimez-moi and
aidez-moi is internal to Rousseaus French. Thus, as Derrida writes
in Of Grammatology: No language is from the south or the north
... That is why the polar opposition does not divide a set of already
existing languages; it is described, though not declared by Rousseau
to be the origin of languages.
43
The physical theory of the climates
which supports this polar opposition is thus shown for what it is: not
a realistic causal hypothesis, but a metaphor of a polarity internal
to language(s). Rousseau himself keeps repeating in a thousand
different ways throughout the Essay that there is no such thing as
autochthony. The ceaseless migration of populations prevents one
language or the other from taking root in a particular soil. Harshness,
McQuillan 01 intro 112 29/6/07 14:58:32
aridity or fertility are but qualities of language itself in its relation to
itself and to the community it weaves. For a language to remain or
become popular, that is, to bind together human beings with the
ties of love by pulling them out of themselves, it just has to keep
turning towards its orient.
44
For French to remain oriented towards
its interior and anterior Arabic as if towards an Orient to come, it
may require the stamp of an m to mark the place of a mother called
to come under the guise of the demand for love; it may require that
the quasi-sexual opposition between d and m resolve itself into a
differantial attraction, without cancelling out the interval necessary
to articulation.
NOTES
1. The translation I use replaces the word Meridional with the word
Southern. For reasons that will appear later, I prefer to keep the original
name. While relying on the translation mentioned, I will modify it when
I deem it necessary.
2. J-J. Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages, trans. John H. Moran,
in On the Origin of Language: Rousseau and Herder (New York: F. Ungar
Publishing Co., 1966), p. 31.
3. Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages, p. 45.
4. The word vernacular comes from the Latin verna, ae, which designates
the slave born in the house. In popular Latin, vernaculus refers to anything
that has to do with the slave born in the house, and hence, by extension,
anything that has to do with the house. One should remember that the
opposition between the domestic and public spheres in Greek and Roman
civilisations is linked to the sharp contrast between (homebound) slavery
and the city as the place of free men.
5. It is with reason that one is used to make a distinction between public
and private economies; since the State has nothing in common with the
family but for the shared obligation of their respective leaders to secure
their members happiness, the same rules of conduct cannot apply to
both (Rousseau, Discours sur lconomie politique, eds B. Gagnebin and
M. Raymond [Paris: Pliade, 1964], p. 244).
6. Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages, pp. 445.
7. Like the hospitality of the host even before any invitation, language
summons when summoned. Like a charge [enjoignante], it remains to
be given, it remains only on this condition: by still remaining to be
given (Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other: or the Prosthesis of Origin,
trans. P. Mensah [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], p. 67;
Appele, [la langue] appelle, comme lhospitalit de lhte avant toute
invitation. Enjoignante, elle reste tre donne... (Le monolinguisme de
lautre, ou, La prothse dorigine [Paris: Galile, 1996], pp. 1256). Toute
parole savance... dans la dimension de cette promesse et de cette foi
jure, mme et surtout quand elle les trahit [All spoken word is ventured
McQuillan 01 intro 113 29/6/07 14:58:32
114 Anne Berger
in the space of promise and oath, even and even more when it betrays
them] (F. Benslama (ed.), Idiomes, Nationalits, Dconstruction [Casablanca:
Editions Toubkal/ Paris: Intersignes, 1998], p. 264). It concerns an
irreducible experience of language, that which links it to the liaison, to
commitment, to the command or to the promise: before and beyond
all theoretico-constatives, opening, embracing, or including them, there
is the afrmation of language, the I am addressing you, and I commit
myself, in this language, here; listen how I speak in my language, me,
and you can speak to me in your language; we must hear each other,
we must get along: this afrmation dees all metalanguage, even if it
produces, and precisely for this, by this even, the effects of metalanguage
(Derrida, The Other Heading: Reections on Todays Europe, trans. Pascale-
Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992], pp. 601; ...irrductible exprience de la langue: celle qui la lie
la liaison, lengagement, lordre ou la promesse: ... lafrmation de
la langue, le je madresse toi, et je my engage..., nous devons nous
entendre etc de tout mtalangage, mme si elle produit, prcisment
pour cela-mme, des effets de mtalangage, LAutre Cap [Paris: Minuit,
1991], p. 60).
8. In the same paragraph, Rousseau expands on the ordinariness and
unavoidability of incest within the circle of the natural family, but only
between siblings. Yet a sentence such as: each family was self-sufcient
and perpetuated itself exclusively by inbreeding (Rousseau, Essay on the
Origins of Languages, p. 45) opens up all kinds of incestuous possibilities.
On this topic, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976),
pp. 2636.
9. See the rst draft of the Social Contract entitled Du contrat social ou Essai
sur la forme de la rpublique (Rousseau, Du contrat social (1re version),
eds B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond [Paris: Pliade, 1964], p. 297).
10. As one knows, both texts are thought to have been roughly written in
the same period.
11. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among
Men (Second Discourse), trans. R.D. and J.R. Masters, in The First and
Second Discourses (New York: St Martins Press, 1964), p. 121.
12. Observe in passing the way in which the rst word ([rst]) of the rst
sentence of the chapter is written out as it is written down: once again,
Derrida has analysed this trembling of the origin through which the
logic of the supplement announces itself: other originary inventions,
then, will cancel out the originarity of the [rst] one and hence their
own originarity in this historical circle. See Derrida, Of Grammatology,
pp. 2889.
13. My neologism: from the greek metro (mother) and the stem which
indicates the transmission of knowledge (gogic). In Rousseaus ction,
it is the child who teaches his language to the mother, not the mother
to her child.
14. Emile or Education was published in 1762, seven years after the Second
Discourse.
McQuillan 01 intro 114 29/6/07 14:58:32
15. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (New York: Basic
Books, 1979), p. 65.
16. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 38. The explanation by the child
or the master? will never be spelled out, unless one considers Emile as
a whole as an attempt to give a meaning to what for Rousseau remained
but a name, eliciting as such a passionate and furious interest for the
language to which this name belongs.
17. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin, p. 121.
20. Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages, pp. 723.
21. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 71.
24. Note the double m of Mahomets name which recalls the name of
mamman.
25. The verb forcer (to force) is used twice in the paragraph.
26. Here the translation is inaccurate. Rousseau doesnt mention the whole
bedroom but the ruelles. The ruelle is the space between the bed and
the wall, where men used to sit to chat with aristocratic women who
received company and held salons in their bedroom. The mention of
the ruelles usually functions as a derogatory allusion to the Precieuses
of the seventeenth century.
27. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 723.
30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 218.
36. J. Starobinski, Edition de lEssai sur lOrigine des langues (Paris: Gallimard,
Folio, 1990), p. 250.
44. Language is ... an oriented structure. Let us rather say, only half in jest, that
its orientation is a disorientation. One will be able to call it a polarization.
Orientation gives direction to movement by relating it to its origin as to
its dawning. And it is starting from the light of origin that one thinks of
the West (loccident), the end and the fall, cadence or check, death or
night. According to Rousseau ... language turns, so to speak, as the earth
turns (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 216).
McQuillan 01 intro 115 29/6/07 14:58:32
116
7
In Light of Light:
on Jan Patokas Notion of Europe
Rodolphe Gasch
Husserl claims, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, that Europe, rather than being a merely geographical
entity, is an absolute idea. This claim consolidates philosophical
and secularising notions of Europes spiritual determination, the
end-point of a process which begins in the seventh century, when
Western Europe rst denes itself as sacrum imperium. Husserl thus
raises the notion of Europe to a conceptual level unheard of until that
date. But this claim, as well as the conceptual effort devoted towards
clarifying the idea of Europe, sounds strange today. To pair words such
as Europe with idea, sounds odd at a time when, despite the active
integration of the European nations into a unied economic and
political zone, intellectual vitality seems to have migrated elsewhere.
The coupling of the two words thus appears questionable for reasons
of cultural and historical dynamics. But apart from these reasons, to
identify Europe as an absolute idea has also been challenged on moral
and political grounds. Grard Granel, in his controversial preface
to his 1976 translation of The Crisis, calls Husserls conception of
Europe completely outdated, describing it as an ancient scene
of an ancient theater. Although he recognises Husserls courage,
particularly in the Vienna Lecture, in standing up to Nazi barbarism,
Granel nonetheless questions how Husserls philosophy bears upon
the historical context in question, and nds it morally reprehensible
that the sole solution it offers for putting an end to the rise of fascism
and the crisis of humanity is to invoke the idea of Europe, and the
concomitant notion of the self-responsibility of humanity.
Husserls attempt, in The Crisis, to reawaken (and accomplish once
and for all) under the form of absolute transcendental phenomeno-
logical philosophy the reason that is immanent in man and which
denes his humanity, thus shows itself, Granel concludes, as the
purest example of Western theoretical paranoia.
1
But even though
he holds morality and politics to be more important than philosophy,
McQuillan 02 chap07 116 29/6/07 14:57:57
On Jan Patokas Notion of Europe 117
Granel also objects to Husserls denition of Europe as an absolute
idea on purely philosophical grounds. His objections are most evident
in a lecture entitled LEurope de Husserl, presented in 1987 in Lima
on the occasion of a Franco-Peruvian philosophy colloquium, where
he references Marx, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in order to criticise
Husserls characterisation of Europe as a spiritual gure, or absolute
idea. Granel suggests that Husserl may have projected upon the
Greek conception of science an ideal of science that is essentially of
modern origin. More importantly, he holds that because of the rise
of the United States and its American ideology to world hegemony,
every aspect which comprises the concept of Europe as an absolute
idea, and which, according to Husserl, must be traced back to the
Greek conception of a rational science, has lost all possible pertinence
including the idea that the sciences unfold according to a logic
specic and internal to themselves, as well as the Greek model of
political existence. Marx and Heidegger are invoked in order to argue
that in the present the Greek model of political existence has been
entirely replaced by a life at the service of capitalist production.
Wittgenstein and Desanti serve Granel to explain that the sciences
are no longer in need of justication and have become autonomous
such that they can do entirely without philosophy. Furthermore,
they no longer obey the logic of unitary development. Concluding
his demonstration of Husserls completely obsolete conception of
the absolute idea of Europe, Granel exclaims: American end of
Europe. Metaphysico-scientist end of logicity. Total extinction,
at the horizon of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the
Greek days still reverberated.
2
If the concept of Europe as a spiritual gure, or absolute idea, is
pass and if this conception no longer has leverage nowadays, why
bother taking up this notion at all? If, indeed, to suggest an ideational
content to the notion of Europe is the outrageous expression of
Europes arrogant self-representation, is one not contributing to
Europes self-delusion if one is to take up this issue, even if only to
criticise it, at a time when the complete obsolescence of this idea is
plain to all? Or could it be that when it comes to dealing with the
notion of Europe, things are even more complex, intricate, if not
perverse? Granel, in foreseeing the total extinction, at the horizon
of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the Greek days still
reverberated, claims to take note of a fact. But signicantly enough,
this statement also mourns the disappearance from our horizon of the
light that still reected Greek clarity! Why such mourning? Since we
McQuillan 02 chap07 117 29/6/07 14:57:58
118 Rodolphe Gasch
may certainly exclude nostalgia in Granels case given that he views
the disappearance of Europe as an entirely positive event, what reason
could make such mourning inevitable? Could it be that without the
clarity of the Greek day, even when it is said to have completely
faded, it is impossible to notice the alleged extinction of the light at
our horizon to begin with? Could it not be that without such clarity,
it is not even possible to make others see that the light has faded
from our horizon?
Before continuing such questioning, let me briey recall how
Husserl conceives of the idea of Europe. This idea, which is said
to originate in Greece and which unies European history, is not
something given positively to Europe but rather constitutes a task
to be accomplished. In essence, it is the idea of a universal rational
science. Considering the current suspicion that the concept of
anything universal would be a hegemonic, abstract idea oblivious
of difference, whose role is one of dominion, I will sketch out in some
very broad strokes what is meant by universal science, bringing out
in relief some of the implications that come with this notion.
3
The
idea of a universal science not in the modern, but in the Greek
sense, that is, as philosophy from which the various sciences have
branched out marks a break not only with the pre-scientic world
of myth, but also with everything of the order of regional tradi-
tionalisms, customs, beliefs and even linguistic idioms.
4
Husserl,
therefore, can contend that this science is an expression of humanity
struggling to understand itself.
5
With this, one beholds the rst
reason why such an idea is universal: it reaches out towards what
unies the whole of what is. However, to appreciate the specic sense
in which universal is to be taken here, it must be distinguished from
the unmistakably universalist aspirations of the world-views, and
conceptions of the human and the divine, in pre-Platonic Greece, or
other civilisations, for that matter. Husserl, for one, clearly recognises
a world-encompassing interest in Indian, Chinese, and similar
philosophies, and notes that this interest has led to a universal
knowledge of the world. But, according to Husserl, the universal
direction of interest is fundamentally different in Greek philosophy.
He argues that the theoretical attitude that emerges in Greece not
only reaches towards that which beyond all particularities in the
natural and human world unies the manifold, but is also an attitude
that rather than being merely theoretical, takes shape as a practical
attitude, that is, as a vocation-like life-interest, and commands life
in terms of what is universal.
6
To the extent that this philosophical
McQuillan 02 chap07 118 29/6/07 14:57:59
science aims at freeing itself from all particularities, it conceives of a
philosophising subject who transcends the specicities of nation, race
or culture. It consequently implies as well the positing (and minimal
recognition) of the human other as an other notwithstanding
differences. Thus, a second dimension of this sciences universality
comes to light. A science that makes universal claims is a science that
is structurally open towards the other. When science turns to the
other, the other is torn from the obscurity of anonymity, or from his
or her state of foreignness. A science that is universal thus inscribes
within itself an essential responsiveness, and thus responsibility, to
the other. To call the object of the idea in question a science in the
sense of a philosophical science, suggests, in addition, that science
is the idea of a mental disposition, or cognitive paradigm, that is
conscious, or aware of itself as an interpretation of the world, and
distinct from myth. With this the third, and especially crucial, sense
in which this science is said to be universal, shows itself. This form
of sciences self-consciousness as a science, as an interpretation of the
world, requires it to sustain, ground and justify any claims it makes.
The idea at the heart of Europe is the idea of a mental or cognitive
paradigm (in a very broad sense) that imposes on itself the burden
to justify itself, in short, to identify itself on the basis of criteria and
minimal rules of argumentation that can be held to be universally
shareable. The very mode of exposition, that is, the argumentative, or
discursive nature of this science, is an intrinsic part of its universality.
It is a science that attends to its responsibility to the other by seeking
to be accountable for any of the propositions it may advance.
Even without further elaborating on the universality of this
science, or philosophy, it should be clear that this idea cannot be
relinquished easily, or only at a very high cost tribalism, the denial
of all humanity to the other, and the abandonment of any obligation
to account for ones words and deeds. Still, to point out that to part
with the exigency of universality is to condone the worst, does not
imply that this exigency is without problems, and does not exclude
the possibility that, ultimately, it may need to be rethought. What
is true of universality is true of Europe as an idea. As the idea of a
rational science, a life of reason, and public responsibility, it cannot
be surrendered in the blink of eye. From what I have sketched out
so far, it should also be evident that if such a surrender is to be
argumentative, and hence subject to a method and rules that any
other could comprehend, it presupposes the very rationality that it
seeks to overthrow. Evidently, all partial questioning of the conception
McQuillan 02 chap07 119 29/6/07 14:57:59
120 Rodolphe Gasch
of Europe discussed earlier (and thus of philosophy, or universality)
is destined to fail since inevitably it makes use of rationality as it has
been dened by this conception. By critically opposing this or that
theme that is woven into the idea of Europe the theme, for instance,
of mankinds self-responsibility, or of a rational and universal science
and be it in the name of the exalted theme of the Other of Europe,
one remains tributary to the idea in question as a whole. But is
it possible to challenge the whole concept in any judicious way?
This can certainly not be achieved by having recourse to any of
the historical variations on the basic tenets of the idea of Europe,
for example, using a certain Marx, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, in
whose names Granel thought to challenge Husserl. Nor can it be
accomplished by making an about-face toward the non-Western, the
Oriental, the absolutely Other, primitive, or irrational. For by turning
to the other of Europe on the basis of preprogrammed oppositional
patterns such as the non-Western, one remains indebted to what
one turns away from (the Western), and performs a turn towards the
irrational, in short, toward the rational in the shape of the other of
the rational. If, furthermore, such a turn away from Europe seeks
universal assent, it yields again to what is specically a European idea.
As Nancy has noted, all confrontation of other ways of looking than
that of Europe, or of other ways of looking at Europe itself, must face
this particular fact, namely that the universal as such, its category
or point of view, is of European extraction.
7
In order to present, assert
and justify themselves, all ways of looking other than the European
gaze remain inextricably bound to the rationality by means of which
such presentation, assertion, or claims can be made in a way that, in
principle at least, could be intelligible to all.
At this point it may be useful to distinguish between these
contestations of Western thought which either substitute one
formulation of Western philosophy for another, or invert this
conception as a whole along with differences and oppositions laid
out by this conception itself, from what I would like to call rewritings
(I do not say reconceptions) of Western thought. These latter attempts
do not seek to abandon Western thoughts universalist bent. Rather,
they inquire into the structural limits that inhabit the unrelinquish-
able idea of universality. They seek the enabling limits whence
universality comes into being, understanding that these limits also
inscribe a certain nitude into it.
Undoubtedly, there is today a deep malaise and discontent about
everything Western, about a thinking and looking named European.
McQuillan 02 chap07 120 29/6/07 14:57:59
To the cosmological, biological and psychological blows to human
self-love that Freud distinguished, a new blow has been added. It is
the deep-seated disillusionment with philosophical thought, and
its universalist thrust.
8
As said before, the attempts made to step
outside the conception of Western thought by continuing to rely on
what precisely they seek to escape argumentative rationality and
preprogrammed operating systems are, undoubtedly, clear failures,
which, rather than overthrowing Western thinking, continue to pay
homage to it. And yet they are also unmistakably symptoms of a
malaise with philosophical thought. But it remains that this malaise
is also a symptom of misunderstanding. And hence attempts to
overcome Western philosophical thought are heavy-handed, and fall
short of their goal. In fact, these attempts constitute the malaise itself,
and are symptoms of an inability to command the resources of the
philosophical for a radical interrogation and rewriting of philosophys
legitimate demands. To all the reasons I have pointed out that make
these attempts to exit from Western thought unsuccessful, I need
to add another, more formidable one. This concerns the category
of the step outside, and of a farewell altogether to Western thought.
Deeply rooted in the Platonic myth of the cave, the gure of the
step outside is intimately linked to the thought of universality itself.
Indeed, it is the opening gesture toward truth and universality. The
very goal of reaching beyond Western thought is thus still dependent
on the resources of Western thought itself. Distinct from these
efforts to overturn Western thought, however, are those rewritings
of philosophy, or of Europe, that articulate a new and singular
experience, or feeling, of what philosophy or Europe implies. Beyond
the alternative of either full acceptance or total rejection of the idea
of Europe, beyond the urge either to shore this idea up or set off to
altogether new shores, are those writings on Europe and the idea of
universality by contemporary thinkers who, by tapping unactualised
resources of the concept of Europe, proceed to rethink this concepts
internal relation to the non-European. In addition, these writings are
also attempts to open Europe up to the other in general, and, more
precisely, to an otherness not yet constituted, or precalculated in
terms of existing difference an otherness to come. I am thinking, of
course, of Derridas The Other Heading, and Nancys Euryopa, among
others.
9
However, these texts will not be on my agenda here. Rather, I
will be interested in drawing out further implications that come with
the idea of Europe, less obvious perhaps than those of rationality,
McQuillan 02 chap07 121 29/6/07 14:57:59
122 Rodolphe Gasch
universality, responsibility, but no less essential, as we will see, for a
debate intent on reconguring the idea of Europe.
Heidegger has been the rst in the phenomenological tradition
inaugurated by Husserl to reinterpret the latters conception of Europe.
Whereas Husserl identies Europe with a theoretical attitude (and
philosophy as episteme) inseparably bound up with a life-interest
in raising mankind above all its particularities to the higher state of
humanity as such, Heidegger conceives of philosophy, and Europe,
as a being attuned to being, that is, in terms of a state of mind,
still pre-theoretical, and more akin to the pragmatic, as some have
it, world of Dasein. A second major rearticulation within phenom-
enological thought of the idea of Europe takes place in the work
of Jan Patocka. I will be concerned hereafter with his reworking of
that idea.
Patockas Plato and Europe is a series of lectures, delivered in the
context of a private seminar in Prague in 1973 (which preceded the
writing of Heretical Essays), whose aim is to inquire into whether
the European heritage contains something that could also work for
mankind east of Europe, as well as for those who come after Europe,
after its decline. The central argument of these lectures is that the
tendance of, or care for, the soul is the central theme around which
the project of life in Europe crystallises.
10
Since Patockas interpreta-
tion of this motif from Platos aporetic dialogues is very much tied
to his own understanding of phenomenology, I need to linger for a
moment on what sets his thought apart from Husserl.
11
Undoubtedly,
Patocka subscribes to Husserlian phenomenology as a science of the
phenomenon as phenomenon, and of the essence of appearing, as
a science in search of the fundamental structures of possibility that
determine the way things show themselves. But the world is not only
made up of phenomenal structures alone, Patocka argues. There are
also things that show themselves. Husserlian phenomenology, the
science of the phenomenon as such, does not show us the things,
but [only] the mode of donation of things.
12
Distinct from the non-
objective structures of phenomenality, there are thus the structures
of the things themselves, as well as of those beings to whom they
show themselves, the human beings. By centring on how things,
and especially human beings, are codetermined by the structures
of manifestation, and by inquiring into the relations between
phenomenon and being (or beings), Patocka wishes to draw attention
to the metaphysical consequences of the phenomenological analysis
of the phenomenon qua phenomenon. In contrast to Husserlian
McQuillan 02 chap07 122 29/6/07 14:57:59
phenomenological analysis, Patockas approach lays claim, therefore,
to being already a certain phenomenological philosophy.
13
For the Czech philosopher, the Husserlian systematic exploration
of the phenomenon qua phenomenon, that is, of appearing as such,
is only the most radical continuation of philosophys discovery,
continuing from its inception in Greece, that being as a whole, or
the world, is manifest to the human in its totality. Yet for the Greeks,
the appearing of being, as totality, to the human being implies that
appearing is the privilege of the human being. It is his destiny since
it is destined to him, but also because he can choose to encounter
or refuse the encounter with what shows itself to him. If this is so,
then this privilege may also bring with it an obligation, the obligation
to embrace what shows itself appearing, clarity in the world, the
phenomenon as such. However, once embraced by the human being,
the non-real aspect of the universe, appearing as such, becomes real,
and acquires effective actuality.
14
It becomes real in the shape of
what Plato calls the tendance of, or care for the soul (tes psyches
epimeleisthai). Admittedly, Patockas phenomenological philosophy
is a metaphysics, for it subordinates and brings to bear the phenom-
enological analysis of the structures of appearing as such upon the
being to whom appearing is destined.
As I mentioned already, the idea of a care for the soul, is, according
to Patocka, the unique core of the heritage bequeathed upon Europe
by the Greeks. The soul is what properly distinguishes the human
being; that precise instance in us to which the totality of being shows
itself, hence becoming phenomenon. Patocka writes:
The soul is that to which things show themselves in what they are. They show
that they are, and what they are. Our innermost being can show itself to us if
the summoning that is contained in this situation becomes for us at the same
time an incitement to revealing our own essence, our own being in what is its
peculiar nature, to us.
15

Indeed, as the sole addressee of the phenomenon, the innermost, or
principial, possibility of the human being as human being, a possibility
that presents itself precisely by the fact that being manifests itself in
totality to him, depends on his response to manifestation as such,
and on assuming responsibility for and to it. If Greek philosophy has
become the foundation of European life it is because it derives, as
Patocka ascertains, a project of life from this situation.
16
He writes:
McQuillan 02 chap07 123 29/6/07 14:57:59
124 Rodolphe Gasch
The Greek idea suggests that because of this originary situation [i.e. that things
appear to man] there are several possibilities that offer themselves to the human
being. In this situation, precisely, man must prove himself. He must show himself
to be a being who really turns the phenomenon, that is to say, clarity, truth, into
the law of his life, and, consequently, of the entirety of the domain accessible
to him. The human being is, or at least is in certain circumstances, capable of
turning the human world into a world of truth and justice.
17

As Patocka stresses, such a thing is possible only
on the condition, of course, that we make clarity, the phenomenon as such, the
phenomenalisation of the world, this bringing to light, into the program of all
of human life. On condition that everything comes to us of this vision, of the
intuition in the sense of the glance into what is! To always act in thinking as
well as in practice with clarity.
18
Because of the originary situation that makes the human being the
addressee of the manifestation of the world in its totality, the human
being has the possibility to realise himself as a being of truth, as a
being of the phenomenon.
19
How to achieve this, this is precisely
the object of the care of, or tendance for, the soul.
20
And this concept
has, as Patocka contends, given birth not only to Greek philosophy
in the classical age, but also to Europe, to our history.
21
From what we have seen so far, it should be evident that the mani-
festedness of being, the phenomenon, or appearing as such, of which
the human being, or the soul that, for the Greeks, denes the human
being in essence, becomes aware, and by which it is summoned to
respond, corresponds to the realisation in wonder that it is in light,
in the clarity of the day, that things show themselves to us. With
this realisation Greek philosophical thought comes into being and
departs from myth. Patocka remarks:
In myth there is no wonder, myth is not struck with amazement. Myth knows
everything in advance. Wonder is characteristic of philosophy, wonder not
at individual realities, but at this originary reality. This clarity is the clarity
concerning the fact that things are there, that the manifest realities are in the
world before our eyes.
22

Insofar as the Greek heritage that makes up the idea of Europe is tied
to the idea of the care for the soul, the concept of Europe is thus
connected, even synonymous, with a concern with light, clarity,
lucidity, limpidity. This concern with clarity translates into the
McQuillan 02 chap07 124 29/6/07 14:57:59
practical demand of a life from which all obscurity is banned, a life
of transparency, a life of truth.
At this point I would like to quote a lengthy passage from C.M.
Bowras The Greek Experience. While explaining the various reasons
that have contributed to making Greece a unique civilisation,
particularly the fact that its people were ethnically mixed, and that
each of their city states maintained distinct local traditions, Bowra
also comes to speak about the inuence which the Greek scene had
on the eye and the Greek mind. After evoking the commanding
beauty that forces itself slowly and unforgettably on the traveller who
approaches Greece from the North or the West, he writes:
What matters above all is the quality of the light. Not only in the cloudless
days of summer but even in winter the light is unlike that of any other European
country, brighter, cleaner, and stronger. It sharpens the edges of the mountains
against the sky, as they rise from valleys or sea; it gives an ever-changing design
to the folds and hollows as the shadows shift on or off them; it turns the sea to
opal at dawn, to sapphire at midday, and in the succession to gold, silver, and
lead before nightfall; it outlines the dark green of the olive-trees in contrast to
the rusty or ochre soil; it starts innumerable variations of color and shape in
unhewn rock and hewn stonework. The beauty of the Greek landscape depends
primarily on the light, and this had a powerful inuence on the Greek vision of
the world. Just because by its very strength and sharpening the light forbids the
shifting, melting, diaphanous effect which give so delicate a charm to the French
or the Italian scene, it stimulates a vision which belongs to the sculptor more
than the painter, which depends not so much on an intricate combination or
contrast of colors passing into each other as on a clearness of outline and a sense
of mass, of bodies emphatically placed in space, of strength and solidity behind
natural curves and protuberances. Such a landscape and such a light impose
their secret discipline on the eye, and make it see things in contour and relief
rather than in mysterious perspective or in at spatial relations. They explain
why the Greeks produced great sculptors and architects, and why even in their
painting the foundation of any design is the exact and condent line. Nor is it
perhaps fanciful to think that the Greek light played a part in the formation of
Greek thought. Just as the cloudy skies of northern Europe have nursed the huge,
amorphous progeny of Norse mythology or German metaphysics, so the Greek
light surely inuenced the clear-cut conceptions of Greek philosophy. If the
Greeks were the worlds rst true philosophers in that they formed a consistent
and straightforward vocabulary for abstract ideas, it was largely because their
minds, like their eyes, sought naturally what is lucid and well dened. Their
senses were kept lively by the force of the light ... Just as Plato, in his search
McQuillan 02 chap07 125 29/6/07 14:57:59
126 Rodolphe Gasch
for transcendental principles behind the mass of phenomena tended to see
them as individual objects and compared his central principle to the sun which
illuminates all things in the visible world and reveals their shapes and colors,
so no Greek philosophy is happy until it can pin down an idea with a limpid
denition and make its outline rm and intelligible. That the Greeks were moved
by some such consideration may be seen from their use of the words eidos and
idea to mean notion or idea. Originally they meant no more than form.
23
The passage quoted from Bowra clearly resonates with the tradition
according to which the distinctive clarity of Greek light is the
birthplace of Western philosophy. The topos of the light, and its
relation to the peculiar civilisation of ancient Greece, especially to
Greek philosophy, pervades Western philosophical reection at least
from the eighteenth century to the present. From the heliotropic pull
of ancient Greece expressed in Hlderlins In lovely blueness..., to
Heideggers evocation, in his address to the Academy of the Sciences
and the Arts in Athens, of the unique and strange light of Hellas,
the light of Greece is understood not only to enjoy a very special
brightness, but is associated with the origin of a culture of clarity that
itself has stood as a model for Europe.
24
Upon his return from his
voyage to Greece Heidegger comes back to the question of the enigma
of the much-mentioned light of Greece of which he spoke in his
address. He writes to Erhart Kstner: This sea, these mountains, these
islands, this sky that here and only here a-letheia could open up,
and that the gods could, or had to, settle in its sheltering light; that
here Being as presencing occurred and founded human dwelling; this
is today more amazing, and more unthinkable (unausdenkbar) to me
than before.
25
I cannot presently take up the issue of philosophical
geography itself, in which the features of the landscape are eloquently
described in terms borrowed from the conceptual implements of
the type of thinking that these geographical features are supposed
to explain, and which is only further testimony to the primacy of
the light of the philosophical over the geography that is believed to
inuence it. Rather, I present this passage to highlight the concern
with clarity which characterises the thought of Western philosophy
a concern central to the type of thought that from Hegel to
Heidegger is consistently said to have dawned in Greece. It is a mode
of thinking that relies on sight and on the discipline of the eye,
that is to say, on a vision that submits itself to a disciplinary rigour
equal in sharpness to that which presents itself within clear, distinct
outlines in a light so strong as to prevent any blending of forms. This
McQuillan 02 chap07 126 29/6/07 14:57:59
clarity and precision permeates as well conceptuality, and rules for
dening terms, not to mention Greek language, as Bowra asserts,
whose elaborate syntax is a testimony to [the Greeks] desire to say
things shortly and directly without circumlocution or ambiguity,
but which the Greek thinkers, signicantly enough, did not hesitate
to bend and manipulate, in short, to de-idiomatise, whenever clarity
was needed.
26
As we have seen, this clarity is not limited to the
theoretical, but as our elaborations on Patocka have evidenced, it also
bears on the practical, and does so even in a privileged fashion. The
Platonic notion of a tendance or care for the soul, which spells out
a life project for which clarity is the determining law, serves Patocka
to make the point against Husserl (although as the rst chapters of
The Crisis demonstrate, and even more so The Vienna Lecture, he
also acknowledges a practical dimension of the Greek heritage), that
what constitutes the idea of Europe pertains to a life project that is
not primarily theoretical.
According to the Husserl of The Crisis and the Vienna Lecture, the
absolute idea of Europe is the rational idea of a universal science, and
of a form of existence that takes its rule from pure reason. Certainly,
clarity is intimately and essentially tied up with the idea of reason.
Still, to conceive of the guiding idea of European thought, in terms
of clarity, rather than of reason, could have the strategic advantage of
forestalling the dominant prejudice against reason as the common
substrate of humanity, and the instance of universal appeal. How can
one object to the demand to be clear and lucid, except in the name
of obscurantism? But by privileging clarity as the essential demand
of Greek philosophy, Patocka seeks in fact to shift emphasis from
the theoretical to the practical, a practical in which the bios politicos
is no longer subservient to the bios theoreticos as is the case with
Greek thinkers, even including Aristotle. More precisely, to highlight
clarity means to recognise a responsibility in terms of life that derives
from the fact that the human is the sole addressee of appearing,
the phenomenon, or manifestation. To tend to the soul is not done
merely for the sake of clarity, but for the sake of justice. This practical
framing of clarity as the essential component of the idea of Europe
by Patocka must remain present to us, as we now question whether
the universal request for clarity is problematic, and whether the idea
of Europe can be dispensed with inasmuch as it is the incarnation of
such a request. As I suggested before, to name reason the few things
that humanity, or rather the various humanities, share, has lost some
of its credibility. Light, and its demand for clarity and lucidity, seems
McQuillan 02 chap07 127 29/6/07 14:58:00
128 Rodolphe Gasch
to be more difcult to do away with, even though, after all, it is the
same as reason. As Derrida has noted in his response to Levinas, it is
difcult to maintain a philosophical discourse against light.
27
It needs now to be pointed out that after having asserted the
primacy of light and the aspiration towards clarity over its opposites
as the dening character of philosophy, Patocka remarks: Philosophy
wishes clarity, a clarity as radical as possible, but this clarity causes
it to see the limits of clarity and the fact that the human being lives
in an equivocation, in a specic polarity.
28
If light and clarity have
limits, it is because light and clarity have the distinctive power to
bring these limits to light. Within light itself certain strictures of light
come into visibility. A reference in Plato and Europe to Eugen Finks
Metaphysik der Erziehung im Weltverstndnis von Plato und Aristoteles
suggests that Patockas recognition of the limits of clarity that become
visible within light itself owes some debt to Finks work. Patocka refers
to Fink when he writes that Plato
has been qualied as the philosopher of radical clarity. It is said that in him,
ultimately, all obscurity disappears, and that what is important is the sun whose
light shines forth in order to penetrate the continuously increasing darkness.
But obscurity remains present, the cave does not cease to exist.
29
Before formulating the specic point Fink wishes to make in the
above-mentioned work, it is necessary to recall that Fink holds that
with Plato,
an interpretation of the world that seeks to conceive of the universe in a
fundamental manner from the mundane moment of the sky becomes victorious
for two millennia. Sky signies the gathered appearing of the many things into
a space of light. Sky is the luminously opened open of an all encompassing
clarity. Within it, the individual things show themselves. Within this clarity they
have their appearance and outline, a character and a gure.
30

Taking its clues from the mundane phenomenon of light, and from
the distinctions and articulations grounded in this phenomenon,
the Platonic-Aristotelian interpretation of being dominated for many
centuries the Western conception of being, and in the same breath,
the eld of philosophy. Fink writes:
Light makes appearing, shining possible. It brings clarity and brightness. It puts
into relief, and brings out gures, sights, within the sharp edges of their characters.
Light accentuates the limits of individual things, gives them independence and
a xed self-standing. But light also illuminates the interconnections between
McQuillan 02 chap07 128 29/6/07 14:58:00
things, and the eld in which they exist together; it shows the interconnected
foundation from which they emerge, the ground that they cover and cover over,
but to which they nonetheless belong ... Light sets apart and gathers the sharply
and clearly separated within its encompassing brightness.
31
This conception of light which achieves world-historical ascendance
with Plato and Aristotle, and on which, as Fink demonstrates, the
Western model of education and the very notion of politics rest,
is a conception intent on radically breaking with the tragic vision
of the world. But as Fink argues, the victory of philosophical, or
metaphysical, thought, as a thinking that proceeds from light, and
in the name of clarity, rests on a hypostatisation of one singular
mundane moment. All the conceptual tools that metaphysics uses
to transcend the realm of phenomena, are taken from this one
mundane moment.
32
From the outset, metaphysics is thus rooted
in a onesided fundamental decision by which one moment of the
world is rendered absolute, as it were.
33
As Fink remarks: The one
mundane moment of light, of reason, of individuation is the sole
one that thinking takes into consideration.
34
By overemphasising
and exaggerating the moment of light,
35
the Platonic vision of the
world is thus cosmically onesided.
36
Having described the one-sidedness of light, Fink gestures
suggestively towards the need
to put into question the central world model of lighting, to search it for
implications, to monitor it for hidden presuppositions, to recognise the
interlockedness of the medium of light with other elementary media, and to
contest onesided interpretations that have achieved for centuries undisputed
domination.
37
But the persistent (yet by no means sole
38
) objection that Fink
expands on in this critique of the metaphysics of light, of the world
model of lighting by means of which nascent philosophy overcomes
the tragic vision, is that it no longer seeks to think the night from
which we all originate and into which we all sink back from which
all things arise and in which they return again, this night of Pan,
of the one indivisible foundation of being which undergirds all
individuation, and sustains it.
39
Against the one-sidedness of the
mundane moment of light, Fink recalls the tragic insight that all
rising into clarity comes from a gureless motherly night where
all is one.
40
His critique of the model of intelligibility peculiar to
Western metaphysics amounts to recalling the truth of the tragic
McQuillan 02 chap07 129 29/6/07 14:58:00
130 Rodolphe Gasch
world vision, the vision of an originary polemos of day and night,
light and darkness.
Yet, is it sufcient, or rather, is it possible, to counter the metaphysics
of light by speaking of light as a moment, and thus, accuse it of one-
sidedness? Can the metaphysics of light be put into question in the
name of another mundane moment, the night, especially if the latter
is conceived as the opposite of light? As Derrida has observed, light
has perhaps no opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night.
41
Indeed,
if it is so difcult to mount a discourse against light, is it not because
everything that could be objected, or opposed to it, becomes visible
within, and is conceivable only from, the lighting. The limits of light
can only come from light, and become clear, in light itself, or with
respect to light, that is, still in light. But if this is true, light is not a
moment against which other moments could be opposed. Rather, it
is the medium in which opposites come to make their stand. Fink,
at one point, comes close to recognising this. In the context of a
discussion of the parable of the sun in the sixth book of the Politeia,
he remarks that light is the realm which is home both to the real
things and their unreal reective images, and shadows a realm
which harbours, therefore, also the very distinction between what is
real and what is only a shadow, or a simulacrum. Fink writes:
The realm of light is in itself already separated into the real and that which is
of the order of the shadows. The correspondence at home in the realm of light
between reality and the order of shadows becomes [for Plato in the context of
the Politeia] the model that serves to characterise the relation of the illumined
realm of the visible things to the dimension of the pure powers of being, the
ideas, and nally to that which is in an eminent way, the agathon. That is to
say, this thought takes off from the phenomenon of shadowing and reection
present in light in order to explain the whole sphere of light with all the so-
called real things, including their shadows that are within it, as, on the whole,
a shadow of a lesser being compared to a more authentic being. The models
and categories that serve to devalue the sphere of light are thus taken from this
same sphere; it provides the conceptual means to ontologically condemn itself,
as it were.
42

This passage on the Platonic problematic of the good epekeina tes
ousias would, of course, require a lengthy commentary. I must content
myself with pointing out that rather than radically putting light into
question, the limits of light that become visible in the sphere of light
lead us to the conception of a light of a higher order than mundane
light. The devaluation of light that occurs in the parable by way of
McQuillan 02 chap07 130 29/6/07 14:58:00
a schema borrowed from the sphere of light itself, concerns only
sensible light, and takes place in view of the agathon, the source
of all good, intelligible light. The thought of the epekeina tes ousias
complicates the metaphysics of light for it gestures towards a kind of
shining forth and an opening that is no longer of the order of light in
either a literal or a metaphorical sense, a shining forth in which light
and its others become meaningful to begin with. To quote Derrida
again, the agathon is the light of light beyond light.
43
Compared
to the intelligible light, the sensible sun is only the shadow of the
agathon. This devaluation which is also a form of making intelligible
since, qua shadow, the sensible light is given a determined meaning
from, and in view of, the source of intelligibility takes place by
applying the intramundane distinction between light and shadow
to the difference between the sensible and the intelligible. This is
thus a distinction that becomes visible, and meaningful, only within
the intelligible light. As a consequence, the shadow, and the whole
illumined realm of the sensible world, cannot be turned against the
realm of the light of intelligibility.
The possibility of invoking other moments as the very limits of
light is one that thus originates only within mundane light. If this
possibility depreciates the sphere of sensible light it is only to better
highlight intelligible light. Therefore, by turning to other moments
of light, moments that stand in a relation of opposition to it such as
the shadow, or the night, Finks attempt to unseat the one-sidedness
of light, that is, of that on which Greek, and subsequently European,
thought set all its hopes for overcoming myth and the tragic vision,
must necessarily fail. But as we have seen, Fink also conceives of
the moment of the night which he opposes to that of light as the
night of Pan, or the motherly night from which everything originates
only to return to it again. The night is thus thought of here as the
womb of light itself. Rather than setting limits to the one-sidedness of
mundane light, the night of origination and subsequent destruction
to which Fink resorts is meant to counter the primacy of Platos
intelligible light. The pre-Socratic tragic world-view is thus thought
to set boundaries to the domination that light has enjoyed since the
inauguration of Greek philosophical thought. But does not the very
attempt to reinscribe light into the night draw on the intelligibility
that only light can provide? Does not the thought that light returns
into darkness as into its motherly womb continue to conceive of
light as a moment, and hence, as sensible light? If this is the case,
the Platonic light remains untouched. And the very meaningfulness
McQuillan 02 chap07 131 29/6/07 14:58:00
132 Rodolphe Gasch
of the limitation of light by the night of Pan remains dependent on
light as the realm of intelligibility.
Yet, if light cannot be confronted with the night to limit its one-
sidedness because nothing can be opposed to it, and in particular
nothing that appears within its luminous opening, and if furthermore,
its intelligibility cannot be challenged by recourse to the tragic
vision, this does not mean that the indisputable superiority of light
over darkness would not imply complication. But if it should prove
possible and necessary to relate the principle at the core of Western
thought, and the idea of Europe, to a certain darkness, in no way
is this to be taken as a return to tragic vision. Such a return is to be
avoided at all cost. The fundamental decision by which philosophy
and the principle of light come into being, a decision against tragic
vision, cannot be overturned, or rescinded, except at the price of
the greatest violence. What can and must be demanded, however,
is that the principle of light open itself up to a reection upon what
Fink has called for, namely, the implications, hidden presupposi-
tions, and the essential interlockedness of the medium of light with
other elementary media. The task that must no longer be avoided
consists in spelling out the unthematised structural implications
that are inextricably linked up with the concept of light. To inquire
into these structural implications of the principle of light is not to
do away with it. It is to recongure it, or rather, to use a Derridean
term, to reinscribe it.
The very possibility that the limits of sensible light come into
sight in light itself does not only depreciate sensible light in favour
of intelligible light. The possibility in question indicates that the
shining forth of light and its subsequent limitation by shadows and
darkness presupposes the opening of a more originary Open in which
both illumination and darkening can occur. As Heidegger remarks,
light is capable of illuminating what is present only if what is present has already
unfolded into an open and a free region in which it can spread out. This openness
becomes illuminated by light, but it does in no way bring it about, or form it.
For even darkness requires this openness without which we could not cross or
traverse it.
44

With this, thinking faces a limit of light that cannot become visible in
light itself, an irreducible limit to light, because it is one from which
it shines forth. It is a limit to intelligibility as well, since without this
limit the process of making intelligible could not even begin. Taking
McQuillan 02 chap07 132 29/6/07 14:58:00
up the question of the enigma of the much-mentioned Greek light,
Heidegger writes that its mystery
rests in the unconcealedness, in the dis-closure that holds sway within it. This
dis-closure belongs to concealedness, and conceals itself, but in such a manner
that by way of this withdrawal it surrenders to things their stay [in the Open],
a stay which comes into appearance from limitation.
45

There is thus a limit to light and to its intelligibility that is a limit
in a double sense, for it enables and at the same time sets an end
point to light. Any attempt to pursue the question raised by Patocka
concerning the limits of clarity constitutive of philosophy, and, by
extension, of the idea of Europe, needs to take as its starting point
Heideggers meditation on the constituting dependence of light upon
the unconcealing openness that withdraws again into concealedness.
But to conceive of the limit of light in terms of the origin of light
and its end point is to conceive of only one of many sides of such a
limit. However, the meaning of limit as beginnings and end points
does not provide just any limitation.
Whereas the phenomenological reection on the idea of Europe
has always sought to counter deep European crises in which Europe
appeared to sense its own ending, Granel, a thinker deeply indebted
to phenomenology, declares such a reection to be worn out, given
that Europe has come to a nal end with the total extinction, at the
horizon of our future, of the light in which the clarity of the Greek
days still reverberated. Indeed, all of phenomenological discourse
about Europe is intrinsically tied up with the conception of an end. If
this is so, it is, rst and foremost, because the idea of Europe is bound
up with the idea of light, clarity and lucidity. As the idea of light,
Europe signies the end of obscurity. It is therefore also necessarily
haunted by the spectre of an end of light. For this reason, it would
seem that it is impossible to extricate all reection about Europe
from the concern with nality. In fact, to do so would mean to have
given up all concern with light and clarity from the start. Yet if it is
not possible to gesture towards ends when speaking about the idea
of light, all ends are therefore not equal. They can, and do, represent
diverse desires, and stand for various agendas, among others, agendas
that actively take an interest in extinguishing light. Faced with these
desires and agendas, and having to acknowledge the ineradicable
inscription of an orientation towards an end in the discourse about
light and clarity, it needs to be emphasised that only the desire to end
in clarity can decide upon the ends, or limits, of light. After having
McQuillan 02 chap07 133 29/6/07 14:58:00
134 Rodolphe Gasch
recalled that it is in the name of an Aufklrung that Kant undertakes
to demystify an overlordly tone in philosophy, Derrida writes, in his
On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy:
We cannot and we must not this is a law and a destiny forego the Aufklrung,
in other words, what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for
the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at
the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire
for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, deconstruct
apocalyptic discourse itself and with it everything that speculates on vision,
the imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, the last judgement. Thus
each time, we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to
what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the subject, of
consciousness, of history, of the West.
46
To inquire into the limits of clarity, that is, to the idea bound up with
the concept of Europe, cannot possibly mean to seek to bring clarity
to an end in the sense of terminating the demand for transparency.
Curtailing this demand would open the doors to the worst, to a
violence so much greater than the violence that inevitably comes
with the demand for transparency, and the request to account for
ones claims and deeds. If the limits of light are to be brought to
light, it is in order to innitely resist what in light itself may be
accomplice to the worst. Indeed, blindness towards the limits of
lucidity makes light side with the forces that seek its termination.
The bounds of light are thus to be taken on in view of the never
ending task of securing, and of increasing, clarity. Indeed, if light
has limits light is not a given. It is not given once and for all. To
inquire into the boundaries of light, where light comes to an end,
is to seek out the limits from which it can shine forth, from which
light thus becomes visible as an innite task. To consider the end of
light means, therefore, also to seek out in light that which, precisely,
incites us to work in light of light. By thinking the limits of light,
thinking thus assumes the innite responsibility of making light
shine forth from those limits, be they the invisible limits due to the
Open presupposed by light, or those that become only manifest in
the illuminated realm of what is present.
NOTES
1. Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences europennes et la phnomenologie
transcendentale, trans. Grard Granel (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. vvii.
McQuillan 02 chap07 134 29/6/07 14:58:00
2. Grard Granel, LEurope de Husserl, in crits logiques et politiques (Paris:
Galile, 1990), p. 55.
3. A more comprehensive analysis of the components implied at various
times in the concept of universal rational science will be given in a
forthcoming book-length study on the notion of Europe.
4. As is evident at least from the Logical Investigations, language for Husserl
is essentially language in its logical use. Heideggers elaborations on
Greek language, in What is Philosophy?, for example, show that it is
not a language like others. It is non-idiomatic. Greek is a language that
transcends its own idiomaticity. Indeed, have not many of the Greek
words become philosophical concepts, and have they not remained so
throughout the centuries? If deconstruction can be characterised as an
attempt to both capitalise on the semantic and syntactical potential of
singular idioms while writing at the same time against them, in its own
complex way, it continues this concern with a language that would be
universal.
5. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1970), p. 14.
6. Husserl, Crisis, p. 280. See also pp. 2834.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, Euryopa: Le regard au loin, in Contributions, a
prepublication (in French and German) of the proceedings of a conference
at the University of Leipzig (1114 May 1994) on La philosophie
europenne de la culture et le projet Logos de 1910, p. 7.
8. This malaise with philosophical thought brings to a conclusion the
retreat of philosophy in the face of the natural sciences, and of those
human sciences that have acceded to a level of scienticity. Limiting
itself to the secondary role of critically assessing the achievements of the
sciences in the name of meaning, values, ethics, and so forth, philosophy
has self-destructed. It has become a cultural commodity like any other.
More fundamentally, philosophy itself has turned its constituting idea of
universality into a norm, or value, where it has not simply relinquished
it. However, as a norm, or value, universality invites disbelief, or at least,
a profound unease.
9. For a detailed discussion of the essay by Nancy, and Derridas The Other
Heading, see my Alongside the Horizon, in D. Sheppard et al. (eds), The
Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge,
1997), pp.14056, and Feeling the Debt: On Europe, in K. Ziarek (ed.),
Future Crossings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000).
10. Jan Patocka, Platon et lEurope: Sminaire priv du semestre dt 1973, trans.
E. Abrams (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1983), pp. 19 and 23.
11. To Heidegger, Patocka objects that the problem of manifestation is
deeper, more fundamental, more originary than the problem of being.
Simply because I can arrive at the problem of being only by way of the
problem of manifestation. Patocka, Platon et lEurope, p. 177.
12. Patocka, Platon et lEurope, p. 39.
McQuillan 02 chap07 135 29/6/07 14:58:01
136 Rodolphe Gasch
19. Patocka, Platon et lEurope, p. 45
23. C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969),
pp. 1112.
24. Martin Heidegger, Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des
Denkens, in Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1983),
p. 138.
25. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 148; Martin Heidegger/Erhart Kstner,
Briefwechsel 19531974, ed. H.W. Petzet (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1986),
p. 51.
26. Bowra, The Greek Experience, pp. 1416.
27. WD, p. 85.
30. Eugen Fink, Metaphysik der Erziehung im Weltverstndnis von Plato und
Aristoteles (Franfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1970), p. 32.
31. Fink, Metaphysik, p. 316.
34. Fink, Metaphysik, pp. 3034.
38. For further suggestions by Fink on how to put the metaphysics of light
into question, see Fink, Metaphysik, p. 321.
41. WD, p. 92.
42. Fink, Metaphysik, pp. 367.
43. WD, p. 86.
44. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 147.
45. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 148.
46. Jacques Derrida, On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, in
Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative
Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), pp. 1489.
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8
Phenomenology to Come:
Derridas Ellipses
Joanna Hodge
INTRODUCTORY ELLIPSIS
These remarks on time and history are organised in response to
a gap covered over in the conjunction of the words Derrida and
phenomenology. Some of the earliest and most virulent critiques
of Derrida came from adherents to phenomenology who either saw
the dangers of his disruption of phenomenology for its existing
conguration or, indeed, thought its importance exaggerated. Thus
the history of the reception of Derridas thinking is marked from the
beginning by controversy on this topic: the relation between Derridas
thinking and phenomenology. The question remains whether or
not Derrida can be understood as working within phenomenology
and transforming it; or whether he can be understood to provide
a definitive critique of phenomenology, thus surpassing it; or
whether phenomenology remains undisturbed by the Derridean
departures. The argument of this essay is intended to contribute
to a clarication of the issues raised by these questions and by the
various possible answers to them. By examining the proximity and
distance between Derrida and phenomenology, it is possible to arrive
both at a reformulation of the place of Derridas writing in relation
to phenomenology, of the place in philosophy of a thinking of time
and of history distinctive of phenomenology, and indeed of the place
of Derridas writings within philosophy. The claim to be made in this
chapter is that Derrida not only makes a signicant contribution to
an understanding of phenomenology, but that this contribution also
constitutes a signicant contribution to philosophy.
1
It is becoming clear that in Derridas earlier engagements with
Husserl, in the 1962 study of Origin of Geometry
2
and in the
Problem of Genesis for Husserl (19534),
3
questions about the genesis
of meaning and about the historicity of origins are critically in
play in Derridas approaches to and differences with Husserlian
137
McQuillan 02 chap07 137 29/6/07 14:58:01
138 Joanna Hodge
phenomenology. Husserl himself in his methodological reections,
published posthumously by Walter Biemel as The Crisis of the European
Sciences,
4
makes the following clarication of his enduring interest
in history, in section 15:
The type of investigation that we must carry out, and which has already
determined the style of our preparatory suggestions, is not that of a historical
investigation in the usual sense. Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology
in the historical becoming of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, and at
the same time to achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers of this
teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal intentions.
5

This then is the question of history for Husserl. For Derrida, the
question of history is the question of how to reveal the disruption
of Hegelian closure and reopen the question of the future. It may
well be that this line of questioning explains the privileged place of
a reading of Blanchots writings for Derrida, for Blanchots writings
effect an interruption of dialectical inexorability.
6
Derridas dispute
with Hegel can be traced through the writings spanning from Writing
and Difference
7
and Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge,
8

through the extended engagements with Freud, Kant and Levinas
in the seventies and eighties, to Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt,
the Work of Mourning and the New International.
9
My claim is that this
questioning arises out of the preceding engagement with Husserlian
phenomenology and that Derridas capacity to engage with but
maintain a distance from the workings of Hegelian dialectic is in
part acquired on the basis of the philosophical lessons learned from
Husserlian phenomenology about the temporal indices attaching to
any achievement of a thinking or grasping of meaning. While for
phenomenology certainly in the writings of Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty time and history have been standing
concerns, it turns out that, for Derrida, they have also always been
at least obliquely in question.
ONCE AND FUTURE PHILOSOPHY
It would take too long and take me off my course to go into detail
here about how, for Derrida, Hegelian closure is already subverted by
an ante-post impact of Freudian thinking; and how any impending
immobilisation of history in some Husserlian essentialism is disrupted
by the aftershock of the heterodox phenomenology of Heidegger.
This could be set out through extended readings of those writings,
McQuillan 02 chap07 138 29/6/07 14:58:01
Phenomenology to Come 139
which explore the danger that the philosophy of Husserl will turn
out to have been indistinguishable from that of Hegel. Such an
erasure of difference Derrida seeks to avert at all costs, and in this
enterprise he nds support in the writings of Levinas and Blanchot.
For phenomenology, the question becomes: how to think an essence
of history in relation to the question about a genesis of meaning
and a genealogy of value, thus combining Husserls question about
meaning with Nietzsches question about value. While the Sartrean
trajectory of phenomenology seems to take this question back towards
a systematic thinking of the relations between time, history and the
concept, that of Blanchot is above all a thinking of interruption,
stalling the working out of such systematic interconnections. But
both of these are clearly to be located within the twentieth-century
evolution of phenomenology as the question about the ordering
of the appearances of what there is, opening out a contestation on
how to think time and meaning. This insistence on a proximity and
distance in the relation for Derrida between Hegel and Husserl cannot
here be further followed up. Rather I shall focus on some methodo-
logical issues arising from the impact of phenomenology on Derridas
writings and of Derridas writings on phenomenology.
This double movement has as yet to be adequately traced out,
and it is a reinscription of a more familiar double movement
often designated as constitutive of deconstruction. I am here most
concerned with diagnosing its recurrence as describing the nature
of the engagement between Derrida and phenomenology, thereby
revealing that a thinking of time and of history is organised for and
by Derrida as an elliptical movement, in a fourfold sense. There
is elliptical movement in the sense of a certain linguistic, even
rhetorical gure; there is its logical register, as the form of an argument
construed through a discontinuous series of lacunae; there is the
setting out of a movement in a shape distinctive of the geometrical
gure; and this is then recognisable as the movement of the planets.
The hypothesis then might be formulated that a completion of Kants
Copernican Revolution requires a substitution of elliptical thinking
for analogical and paralogical argumentation. A thinking of such
a movement captures the relation between history and time, as a
structure within which history and time are shown to have contrary
valencies. A thinking of history tends to spatialise time, turning it
into a framing container in which to organise events as linked to
each other, forming a density of interpretation. A thinking of time
by contrast tends to reduce to an innitesimal line of continuity,
McQuillan 02 chap07 139 29/6/07 14:58:01
140 Joanna Hodge
apparently neutral with respect to meaning and interpretation. Thus
for Derrida, a thinking of history threatens to institute an immobilisa-
tion of time, in a framing not unlike that of the Heideggerian framing,
or Gestell, where everything is made available for deployment in a
contemporaneous sphere of activity. Conversely Derridas proposals
about thinking time more originarily, as achrony and anachrony,
which are increasingly strongly marked in later writings but perhaps
already detectable from the start,
10
throw up not just the need for
but the possibility of rethinking the nature or essence of history, in
a non-essentialising, that is non-immobilising, fashion.
This then is the hypothesis which is to be developed in these remarks:
that the conjunction of the words Derrida and phenomenology,
and their mutual impact, effects a disruption and deection of the
course of each, and a redeployment of theoretical direction; and that
this gives rise to this possibility of thinking history and time as non-
harmoniously conjoined in the organisation of experience, as the two
disjoined foci for an elliptical movement as the basic organisation
of time. This double structure of time and of history repeats itself
in another double structure which is more directly discussed by
Derrida: the futurity distinctive of the venir and the distinctive
thinking of the past as articulated in the memory of mourning. The
venir is announced by Mallarm and taken up by Blanchot in
relation to the writing of books and a thinking of meaning;
11
the
mourning of the past, of lost possibilities and the death of others are
memorably brought to the fore by Derrida in his lectures Memoires:
for Paul de Man.
12
The venir is to be understood as a future arrival
which cannot be anticipated, by contrast to conceiving of a future
continuous from the present and extrapolated on the basis of
current relations. The venir is to be contrasted to a thinking of a
completion of the present, which would bring time to a standstill, by
completing current intentions, thus rendering the future redundant.
This is I think quite contrary to the structure of time thought by
Benjamin in the notion of a Jetztzeit, in which present time is shot
through with the impossible time of such completion, opening out
a totality of present time to the innities of alternate temporalities.
The modalities of present and messianic completion are in the one
case thought as continuous with one another; in the Benjaminian
thinking, they are thought of as utterly opposed and incompatible.
It is possible that Derridas thinking of the structures of messianic
time oscillates between these two formulations, one corresponding
McQuillan 02 chap07 140 29/6/07 14:58:01
to the Christian thinking of messianism and the other to a Jewish
thinking of Messiah.
Memoires, in the title of the lectures in memory of de Man,
is to be left in French because as Derrida remarks, in a prefatory
note: The meaning of this word changes in French according to its
generic determination (masculine/feminine) or its number (singular
/plural).
13
This distinction marks the contrast between completing
an account of a life in the writing of memoirs and the fragmenting
structures of memory which reveal layerings of memories out of which
no such continuous completable narrative could emerge. If a reading
of Freud permits Derrida to unsettle some Hegelian certainties in Glas:
What Remains of Absolute Knowledge, de Mans reading of Hegel in
turn permits de Man to unsettle a few Freudian dogmas. Derrida in
Memoires draws attention to how, for de Man, the Hegelian account
of memory splits into a subjective interiorising process of Erinnerung,
interiorisation, and an objectively inscribed Gedchtnis, that which
has been thought, through which the thought of an immemorial
past gains the status of conceptuality; and indeed through which
conceptuality is revealed as that determinacy of thought which can
not be retrieved in the nite conditions of human thinking. Whereas
for Hegel what can be subjectively thought can achieve objective
status and what can be conceptualised must have its moment of
subjective registration, for de Man the task of reading and of literature
is much more to mark the failure of reciprocity between these two
moments: the potentialities of meaning and subjective experiences
of meaning, and to trace out the postponement, anticipations,
anteriorities and time lapses involved. The discontinuities traced
out by de Man in relation to literature, Derrida supposes to hold
also for philosophical writing and enquiry. Here then there opens
out a gap between the meanings which might have been set down in
some immemorial philosophical past, immune to change and to the
disruptions of time and of history, and the meanings which might
arrive, which might return, which might be retrieved, in a suspension
of the interval, separating now from that moment of past inscription,
leaving a present suspended between two never-to-be-made-present
modalities of the immemorial and the time to come. The appeal
for Derrida of this de Manian reection has to be understood as
the denitive suspension of the metaphysics of presence, the will
to subjective appropriations of determinate meanings in which for
Derrida the philosophical tradition in the main consists. There is
then a contrast to be set out between readings of Hegel and Husserl
McQuillan 02 chap07 141 29/6/07 14:58:01
142 Joanna Hodge
which nd in their writings a presumption that all possible meaning
can be appropriated in a thinking of meaning, and those which
nd in their texts a meditation on this model as demarcating the
dimensions of this impossible task as constitutive of the longevity
of philosophising.
The gesture of mourning marked up in the notion of the glas, the
death knell, arises for Derrida from a juxtaposition of the Freudian
thinking of a difference between a terminable mourning of the
implications and consequences of human nitude, usually prompted
by a quite specic death, and an interminable melancholy. The one
is susceptible to coming to terms with and separating itself from an
attachment to an impossible or no longer available object; the other
is caught in a repetition of an incompletable gesture of partition.
Thus mourning here is construed as the capacity to leave behind
what cannot be retrieved into a futural present. By contrast to this
split structure of time, with a retrievable and an irretrievable lost past,
it is possible to discern a contrary movement of retrieval, through a
thinking of elliptical movement, where it is not a question of leaving
behind what cannot be carried forward, but rather of retrieving from
the past lost elements which are preventing forward movement; and
cutting free from that which immobilises the arrival of the future.
For the history of human beings, this might be the retrieval of an
understanding of history which does not eliminate from remembrance
those who did not control the processes of making a mark on their
times. Underneath the psychologistic structures of mourning there
is then this ontological structure of elliptical movement whereby
features of a present conjuncture recede into the past, indeed into
oblivion, and have to be retrieved by some effort of imagination, or
chance impact of events, or conjunction of the two.
14

RECONFIGURING PHENOMENOLOGY
The term elliptical requires some further clarication. I suggest that
under the rubric of the elliptical, there is to be found in Derridas
writings both a diagnosis and a performance of a movement char-
acteristic of phenomenological enquiry itself. Thus I am going both
to attempt to characterise this movement as a construct distinctive
of Derridas writings, from beginning to end, and to show that this
distinctive construct is constitutive of those enquiries recognised and
recognisable as phenomenology. This elliptical movement is in part
masked by a movement of oscillation, the double movement, more
McQuillan 02 chap07 142 29/6/07 14:58:01
commonly and easily identied at work there. This essay thus addresses
itself to the question what Derridas contribution to philosophy
consists in, through this tracing out of a relation between Derridas
writings and the current state of phenomenology. The answer to this
last question, to put it schematically, is that Derridas writings provide
a diagnosis of a feature of phenomenology which marks it out from
other forms of philosophical enquiry in such a way as to guarantee
a continuing vitality for both phenomenology and philosophy into
the coming century. This reconfigured phenomenology is both
distinctive of the latter part of the twentieth century, and only a
retrieval of what phenomenology has always been.
History is here in question in three further respects. There is rst
of all the apparently local question of a relation between history
and philosophy, specifically concerning the current condition
of philosophy and the place of Derridas writings in the current
formation. There is secondly the dual question of the place within
phenomenology of historical specicity and of historical determinacy,
and of the place of phenomenology within the history of philosophy
and within human history. This dual structure looks relatively clear
cut, until the implications of Husserls long-drawn-out struggle with
thinking the relation between pure and degenerate signication,
with their various irreducible temporal indices, are put into play.
The question here would be: is the degeneracy of pure meaning
the consequence or the cause of history? or perhaps rather linked
to history and to the historicity of philosophy in some other less
obvious way, not thus determined by the modernising categories of
cause and consequence, sequence and succession, the categories of
Kantian understanding. Thirdly, and most evidently presenting a
philosophical challenge, although with no more obvious response,
there is the long-standing problem of the relation between the human
experience of time as directed, and irreducibly nite, which forms the
backdrop against which Heidegger formulates his theses concerning
the historicity of time, and the intimations of eternity given in the
pure thought of temporal hiatus, or, with Levinas, of interruption. It
is important to remark that the time of suspension, of interruption,
is the time of Husserlian bracketing, and is thus by no means an
optional extra in any phenomenological enquiry into time. This
suspension can be misconstrued as a gesture abolishing time, which
makes the artice of a metaphysics of presence look like a natural
given. However, the living present, as Derrida insists, is the time
of achrony and anachrony, not of the permanence, succession and
McQuillan 02 chap07 143 29/6/07 14:58:01
144 Joanna Hodge
co-existence, diagnosed by Kant as determinations of time in the
analogies of experience, in the analysis of transcendental principles
offered in The Critique of Pure Reason.
15

There is here then a duplicitous notion of the now, which can be
understood as both unproblematically marking a present moment
and as interrupting temporal ow. In addition to this duplicitous
notion of the now, there is also the now of an unquestioned notion
of history, which gathers events together in their interrelations one
to another, forming a continuous time; and there is a now of an
epoch, as a suspension of an unnoticed passage of time in favour of its
analysis, in which a taken-for-granted notion of history as continuity
comes in for scrutiny. In this fourth notion of the now, these rst
three nows, of a metaphysics of presence, of a living present, of a
gathering together of history, and of their respective suspensions, may
be distinguished from each other. This fourth now of time is marked
by the very features which Kant was at pains to rule out of court in the
notes to the postulates for empirical thought, in The Critique of Pure
Reason: hiatus, saltus, casus, fatum; suspension, discontinuity, chance
and fate.
16
Underlying this pluralisation of nows is a distinction
between an unbounded time, to which any human attitude is a
matter of indifference; and nite time which, as we might say with
Jean-Luc Nancy, is the innite decision towards time.
17

A QUESTION ABOUT PHENOMENOLOGY
Derridas writings can thus be read as mapping out a multiple
incidence of an elliptical movement. As already stated, the most
signicant of these here is a series of elliptical engagements with the
phenomenological inheritance, which reveals a movement intrinsic
to phenomenology and a movement intrinsic to Derridas writings
and thinking. There are, however, other aspects to this elliptical
movement, one of which is scrupulously traced out in relation to
Western thinking of religion in the paper Faith and Knowledge:
the Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone.
18
As
its title indicates, the paper pursues an oscillation within responses
to religion between one based in faith and one based in reason.
It pursues this diagnosis through the twin responses of Bergson to
moral life and religion, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
19

and of Kant, in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone;
20
through
a juxtaposition of a writing in italics and a writing in roman script;
and through a doubtful double etymology of the word religion.
McQuillan 02 chap07 144 29/6/07 14:58:02
Most important of all for my purposes, it proceeds by setting out an
ellipsis constitutive of Western thinking about religion between an
experience of belief and an experience of holiness, and in a diagnosis
of a duplicity in the event of sacrice itself. Religion, Derrida writes
at number 41, roman script, as a response that is both ambiguous
and ambivalent, is thus an ellipsis: the ellipsis of sacrice.
21
My claim
then is that Derridas writings present a diagnosis of phenomenology
as an ellipsis, both preserving and disrupting, philosophy.
There is here a threefold differentiation between the emergence of a
question, the lines of a movement and the formation of a hypothesis:
a question about phenomenology, a movement of thinking, and this
hypothesis about the status of Derridas writings, in relation to both
phenomenology and to philosophy more generally. For it is often
asked, with greater and lesser degrees of patience and engagement,
what the contribution to philosophy of these writings might be. As
the beginning of an answer to that question, it is worth noting how,
on various occasions, Derrida stresses the importance for him of
phenomenology and specically of the question of the ideal status
of literary objects. He writes in the paper The Time of a Thesis:
Punctuations, from 1980:
Curious as it may seem, transcendental phenomenology was able, in the rst
stages of my work, to help me sharpen some of these questions, which at the
time were not as well marked out as they seem to be today. In the fties, when
it was still not well received, Husserlian phenomenology seemed to some young
philosophers to be inescapable. I still see it today, if in a different way, as a
discipline of incomparable rigour.
22

This qualication in a different way could be the focus for an extended
commentary and discussion. The long-drawn-out engagements
with Levinas and with Blanchot bear testimony to the enduring
force of the question: what remains of phenomenology today,
especially and above all, in relation to forming an understanding
of the status and signicance of literary activity. Derridas writings,
in their interactions with those of Blanchot and Levinas, trace
out a disturbance of phenomenology which I take to be intrinsic
to phenomenology, tracing out a fracture or indeed a possibility
laid down in phenomenology from its inception, wherever that
might be hypothesised as taking place. These interactions take the
form of elliptical movement. The thinking of elliptical movement
and the movement of elliptical thinking take the form of a double
movement of displacement in line with all the invocations of double
McQuillan 02 chap07 145 29/6/07 14:58:02
146 Joanna Hodge
movements and displacements throughout Derridas writings. Its
traces are especially strongly marked in the triangle mapped out by
these three names: Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas; and its implications
for phenomenology are there especially evident.
It is notable that phenomenological analysis at various stages in
the course of its development over the past century has faltered
and seemed to lose its momentum and direction in response to an
intermittent registering of a strange question: what happens when
the movement of thought distinctive of phenomenology the
movement of intentionality from thinking to object of thought,
from intuited sense to constituted meaning, from consciousness to
world what happens when this movement from nite thinking
to innite idea is interrupted and suspended for the purposes of
analysis and description, and then is not just suspended but goes
into reverse? The question is: can phenomenology accommodate
the thought of the reversal of this movement, which then no longer
moves from thinking to object of thought, but precisely the reverse:
thinking arrives from its object; constituted meaning invokes a
corresponding intuition of meaning; the fact of the world is to be
thought as eliciting the movement distinctive of consciousness, and
nally with Levinas, the innite idea elicits the determinations of
a nite body? Alongside the privileged movement of intentionality
there is then to be thought both the suspension of that movement,
for the duration of its analysis, and the reversal of that movement, as
thought certainly by Emmanuel Levinas, but also by Merleau-Ponty
and by Heidegger; perhaps already by Husserl himself.
It is questionable whether phenomenology was ever committed to
either a temporal order or a conceptual hierarchy between the various
pairings, which can be read in the two different sequences; but I think
only in these two sequences. From thinking to object of thought;
from intuited sense to constituted meaning; from consciousness to
world; from nite thinking to innite idea; or from innite idea to
nite body; from world to consciousness; from constituted meaning
to intuited sense; from object of thought to thinking. There are three
options here: the rst is to think that these two orders are opposed
and mutually exclusive. The second option is to think that the
focus of phenomenological enquiry must oscillate between the two
directions as thought, since neither can accommodate all aspects
of phenomenological enterprise on their own, and each adds a
complementary angle to the other; but both together are ultimately
incompatible. Thirdly, there is the view which I hope to attribute
McQuillan 02 chap07 146 29/6/07 14:58:02
convincingly to the writings associated with the name Derrida: that
of elliptical reading. Even if the enquiry is this conjunction of two
incompatible orders of thinking, one has to be named rst in the
order of exposition, in order then to be complemented and challenged
by the other. The requirements of an ordered exposition seem to be
to state one and then the other, and then a conjunction of the two.
Many of Derridas experiments with what appear to be disordered
expositions might be thought then to be attempts to explore the
possibilities of a suspension of such ordering and a suspension of
the need to hypothesise a conjunction in order then to problematise
the compatibility of the components conjoined.
A MOVEMENT OF THINKING
My question concerns what might be thought to be a crisis
for phenomenology, one which shows not some weakness of
phenomenology but rather its continuing vitality; for the capacity
to endure crisis, to precipitate and witness its resolution, is the sign of
a mature mode of enquiry. Under pressure from Bergsonian theories
of time and from current cognitive reformulation, from Lyotards
politics and from Nancys exquisite interrogations, it seems to me
that phenomenology is far from exhausted. At this point in its
history phenomenological enquiry is demonstrating a capacity to
accommodate rather than succumb to the challenges currently posed
to it. Far from being locked into a now outmoded subjectivism and
obscurantism, it is demonstrating a capacity to accommodate both
the rigours of cognitive science and the innities of the new theology,
and also some third moment of disruption of its received image which
it is my purpose to explore here. It is, however, my claim that this
question of reversal is the key to all the other challenges currently
posed to the coherence indeed the cogency of phenomenology.
Derrida both forewarns of and precipitates this crisis for
phenomenology, and sets out some of the resources within
phenomenology to articulate and provide strategies for analysing
the implications of this reversal of phenomenologys distinctive
movement. Derridas analyses follow the movement of reversal, and
the movement distinctive of his thinking is thus that of oscillation,
both in terms of the famous double movements of deconstruc-
tion, which are by now well documented, and in terms of a double
movement in relation to time. This double movement of time
displays an alternating temporality of a hesitation, prompted by
McQuillan 02 chap07 147 29/6/07 14:58:02
148 Joanna Hodge
retardation of effects, gured in relation to Freudian Nachtrglichkeit,
and a precipitation, prompted by the innitely evasive arrival of a
completion of a thought, of enquiry, of a reading. The importance of
the movement of oscillation to Derridas writings, especially to Glas:
What Remains of Absolute Knowledge was recognised and argued by
Sarah Kofman in Ca Cloche,
23
her contribution to the conference at
Cerisy in 1980, The Ends of man: Response to Jacques Derrida, beginning
with her remarks on a generalised theory of fetishism in Glas. She
writes:
It is the question of fetishism linked to indecidable oscillation (and thus to the
gamble of speculation), which resounds throughout Derridas Glas. Beginning
with a reading of Freuds text, he proposes a generalization of fetishism as a
rst stage in the deconstruction of phallogocentrism (following a completely
Nietzschean methodology) a stage which includes indecidability and oscillation:
My excitement is oscillation
24

She quotes Derrida, quoting Jean Genet. More recently, in the text
Khora, rst published in 1987, but reissued in both French and English
in 1995,
25
the theme of oscillation comes prominently to the fore:
The oscillation of which we have just spoken is not an oscillation among others,
an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two types of oscillation:
the double exclusion (neither/nor) and the participation (both this and that).
But have we the right to transport the logic, the para-logic or the meta-logic
of this super-oscillation from one set to the other? It concerned rst of all
types of existent thing (sensible/intelligible, visible/invisible, form/formless,
icon or mimeme/paradigm), but we have displaced it toward types of discourse
(mythos/logos) or of relation to what is or is not in general. No doubt such
displacement is not self-evident. It depends on a sort of metonymy: such a
metonymy would displace itself, by displacing the names, from types of being,
to types of discourse.
26
This remark would require a long commentary to clarify all that
is here philosophically at stake. However, this invocation of a
displacement of names from types of being to types of discourse
presents the possibility of a reversal, whereby the displacement takes
place from types of discourse to types of being. The suggestion of
the possibility of such a reversal, whereby ontological disruption is
thought to take place as a consequence of discursive change, is the
Derridean indeed the Foucauldian offence to those committed to
a certain kind of realism, which cannot countenance such a reversal.
But if the Kantian contribution to philosophy is understood to stand
McQuillan 02 chap07 148 29/6/07 14:58:02
and is understood to entail that what there is, is constituted through
the processes of either a transcendental unity of apperception or its
Foucauldian reformulation as a discursive deployment, then such
a reversal not only can but must be thought, without surrendering
the stance of realism to those who would deny the efcacy of all
such constitutive activity. For it would turn out that there is no real
constituted independently of its modes of articulation. The task then
would be to show that phenomenology in its Derridean recongura-
tion carries over the Kantian strategy of refusing to attempt to think
the impossible: a reality maintained independently of the manner in
which thinking constitutes it as an object of thought. This then would
be Derridas achievement in his commentary on Husserls The Origin
of Geometry: to have shown the displacement of phenomenology
arising from the workings of a Kantian inheritance within it, from the
transcendental idealism formulated by Husserl, to a displaced realism.
In this sense, those who sought to defend the Husserlian inheritance,
understood as a commitment to transcendental idealism, were correct
in their identication of a Derridean threat to orthodoxy.
The upshot of this is the following series of questions concerning
objects of thought. What happens when these more usually supposed
to be immobile, static and stable in their interrelations are put into
motion, swinging around each other in a series of complex and as yet
unthematised uncharted trajectories? What happens if the relations
constituting these objects of thought as objects consist in varying
relations of intensity; of proximity and distance; and of harmony
and contrariety in the forces out of which those relations of intensity
and of proximity and distance arise? What happens if the identities
of objects of thought are to be thought of as doubly or indeed triply
elliptical, as constituted by these movements of forces around two or
more poles of attraction and repulsion; as maintained in a dynamic,
one in relation to the others; and as an elliptical movement between
a constitution in terms of a single epicentre of movement and these
multiple interactive trajectories conjured up as a consequence of a
systematic instability of boundaries between objects of thought? This
depiction of the constitution of objects of thought and thereby of
entities might be thought to correspond more closely to the images
of atomic and of sub-atomic realities, than to the common-sense
notions of what there is. It may be that the relations constituting
human and historical realities take rather this form than the form
more usually hypothesised by common sense. This then would
suggest the label elliptical realism.
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150 Joanna Hodge
There are here four movements to be distinguished one from the
other. The rst and second have been indicated as a suspension
and then reversal of movement within phenomenology; the third,
oscillation, is identied, and not just by Kofman, as distinctive of
Derridas writings; and a fourth, also at work in these writings, but
at a less obvious level, that of ellipsis. All four are predicated on
the movement of intentionality, announced by Husserl as basic to
phenomenology, and on the question of just what is the movement
of intentionality. There is also the question: four movements, ve
movements, three movements, or one, or more or less than one?
The movement of suspension is enacted perhaps most vividly in
Blanchots writings. The movement of reversal is performed by
Levinas in his thinking of the arrival of an innite beyond being.
Derrida writes in such a way as to keep open a threefold movement,
both of the primordial movement of intentionality, and of the instant
of my death, endlessly postponed, and in the thought of a Levinasian
arrival. Combining the thought of Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas, a
further thinking emerges, the Derridean; but they affect each other,
such that there becomes an indistinctness of each movement in
relation to the others. The individuation of theoretical positions
in these conditions of mutual disruption becomes unstable. This
then requires the development of a discussion of philosophy with
less reliance on names to mark out distinct patterns of thought,
without a naming of immobilised positions, but instead with a
tracing out of movements of mutual displacement, each in relation
to the others; it would suggest a notion of history similarly with no
priority assigned to names and dates, to the work of memory and
xing, but rather with an emphasis on a work of forgetting and on
rendering the temporarily xed mobile. This is the movement
venir of phenomenology, in which the thought of the venir of
the literary is taken up by Derrida and transformed almost beyond
Blanchotian and Mallarman recognition.
27
The task then is to think
this venir of phenomenology, in its distinctness from either a
Hegelian or a Benjaminian anticipation of the future, and on this
basis to rethink history. This rethinking of the structure of history
emerges by bringing Derridas writings into proximity and conict
rstly with those of Hegel and secondly and less obviously with
those of Walter Benjamin, and measuring the mutual disruption and
deection, as a work of deviation through which this rethinking of
history may arrive.
McQuillan 02 chap07 150 29/6/07 14:58:02
NOTES
1. I should like to thank Martin McQuillan for having invited me to present
the rst version of this essay at the conference at Staffordshire in the
Summer of 1999, Deconstruction Reading Politics, and Stella Sandford
and Peter Osborne for inviting me to present another version of it at the
Middlesex conference for the Society for European Philosophy, September
2000. It has also beneted from an outing at the Manchester Human
Sciences Seminar, and especially from the responses of Roxana Baiasu,
Gary Banham, Martin Bell, Lars Iyer, Simon Malpas and Wolfe Mays.
2. See Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Husserls Origin of Geometry, trans.
John P. Leavey, Jr. (Brighton: Harvester, 1979 [1962]), in which a contrast
between Heideggers preoccupation with the meaning of being and
Husserls preoccupation with the meaning of entities is understood to
mark and displace a question to phenomenology about historicity.
3. See Jacques Derrida, La Problme de la Gense dans la Philosophie de Husserl
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). This was written under
the direction of Maurice de Gandillac in Derridas second year at the
Ecole Normale Superieur. In it the themes of bracketing, teleology and
reactivation of genesis are prominent.
4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 [1954]).
5. Husserl, Crisis, section 15, p. 70.
6. For Blanchots interruption of Hegelian dialectics, see especially The Innite
Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993 [1971]); and The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986 [1980]). For
Derrida reading Blanchot, see Pas [1976], and Survivre, in Parages (Paris:
Gallile, 1986), the latter partially translated in Living on: Borderlines
in Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979);
and Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1998]).
7. WD [1967].
8. G [1974].
9. SoM. For further discussions of the relation between Derridas writings
and those of Hegel, see also Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida (New
York and London: Routledge, 1998).
10. It is possible to detect a thinking of achrony and of anachrony throughout
his writings and especially in the formation of the notion of diffrance, but
it comes especially strongly to the fore in Specters of Marx in the insistence
on Hamlets apostrophes concerning time being out of joint.
11. See Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, in
The Sirens Song (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 22748, from Le Livre A
Venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
12. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Avital Ronell and
Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
13. Derrida, Memoires, p. xxiv.
14. It would be the work of another occasion to show how the writings
of Walter Benjamin explore this retreat and return of emancipatory
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152 Joanna Hodge
potential, more usually buried in the trivialisations of historical narration
and cultural activity. The completion and exhaustion of the artwork in
the activity of criticism (see Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German
Romanticism [1920], translated in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol.
1, 19131926, [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, Harvard, 1996], pp. 116200)
forms a microcosm of the completion of history in the retrieval of its
lost conditions of possibility. For this three conditions are required:
a retrieval of the art of judgement in place of the corruption of the
public world by the promulgation of opinion; a capacity to step aside
from the tumult of occurrences to seize the possibility of a moment
of judgement, in the standstill of history; and a capacity to break the
continuities of past, present and future, in the mythical, mythologised
present, by attending to and retrieving the history of the oppressed.
The culmination of this diagnosis is to be found in the famous Theses
on the Philosophy of History (see Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intr.
Hannah Arendt [London: Fontana Collins, 1970], pp. 25566) but these
enigmatic aphorisms cannot be understood unless their context in the
whole trajectory of Benjamins writings from the reections on his own
childhood to the Arcades Project (19351940) are brought into view.
The demarcation of the differences between Benjamin and Derrida on
judgement and language; on thinking the present; and on the priority
of the past or the future in the schematisation of time remains to be
established. For one of the best introductions to the writings of Walter
Benjamin, see Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reigen, Walter Benjamin, trans.
Laimdota Mazzarins (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996 [1991]).
15. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929 [1781, 1787]), A 176218, B 21865,
pp. 20838: These then are the three analogies of experience. They are
simply principles of the determination of the existence of appearances in
time, according to all its three modes, viz: the relation of time to itself as
magnitude (the magnitude of existence, that is duration); the relation of
time as a successive series, and nally the relation in time as a sum of all
simultaneously existence (A 215, B 262). It is these three determinations
of time in itself, as magnitude; in its internal self-relation, as succession;
and as totality that Derrida cumulatively brings into question.
16. See The Refutation of Idealism, note on the third postulate of empirical
thought, concerning necessity, in Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason,
A 22735, B 2807, pp. 24752.
17. The writings of Nancy are here pivotal. I should here briey mark up
the impact on the development of my thinking of the 1987 paper by
Jean-Luc Nancy, Elliptical Sense, printed in David Wood (ed.), Derrida:
A Critical Reader (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992), pp. 3650; and the exemplary
fashion in which it attends to the rhythm, movement and register of the
paper Ellipsis, which forms the last section of Derridas 1967 collection,
Writing and Difference. I am thus here reading Ellipsis elliptically, through
Nancys response to it. It is also worth noting that Jean-Luc Nancy, in
Finite History (in Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and
others [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 (1990)], pp. 14366), in
pursuing the conjunction minimally of Heideggers thinking of historicity
McQuillan 02 chap07 152 29/6/07 14:58:03
and Derridas thinking of the today, and of the arrival of the present out
of the future, advances the thought that perhaps time and history are
complementary but incompatible notions, time arranged, according to
Kant at least, as a uniform sequence while history may be thought of as
a construct through which to gather together the identications which
go under the name humanity. A third source for the contribution of
Nancy to the thinking here is his contribution The Ends of Man, to the
1980 Cerisy conference concerning Derrida, in which a certain proximity,
between a Derridean thinking of the aporetics of meaning, law and time,
and Kant thinking duty, is brought out.
18. FK [1998].
19. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley
Audra and Claudesley Brereton (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, no
date, translation dated 1935 [1932]).
20. It would be the work of another occasion to show the relation here back
to Derridas thinking about Hegel in Glas.
21. FK, pp. 512.
22. See Jacques Derrida; The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations, in Alan
Monteore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), pp. 3450, here p. 38. This lecture was delivered
on the occasion of his candidacy for a doctorat dEtat, based on published
work.
23. See Sarah Kofman, Freud: a Cloche, in Hugh Silverman (ed.), Derrida
and Deconstruction (Continental Philosophy II) (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989), pp. 10838.
24. Kofman, Freud: a Cloche, p. 119.
25. See Jacques Derrida, Khora, in ON, pp. 89127.
26. Derrida, Khora, p. 91.
27. See Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre A Venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), and also
Mallarms experience, in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]), pp.
3848: One would like to say that the poem, like the pendulum that
marks the time of times abolition in Igitur, oscillates marvellously
between its presence as language and the absence of the things of the
world (p. 45). It would be worth exploring the pivotal nature of this
opposition between things in the world and what there is and meanings
as distinct from the former. A hypothesis about meaning as in the world,
and things as having no existence independent from meaning would
prevent the chasm from opening.
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Part Three
Otherwise
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9
From (Within) Without:
the Ends of Politics
Marc Froment-Meurice
My thesis, if I have one, would be without thesis, or the thesis of
the without.
In lieu of my rst suggested title, Fiction in Lieu of Politics: Derrida
Siting Blanchot, I now propose a title without anybody, without
proper names, without place or site, or rather with without as the
only place: From (Within) Without. As it sounds obscure, let me
add three points. First, there is nobody, here, speaking in my name.
Second, I am that nobody. And third, yes, I am out of my rst place,
maybe also out of my mind. In place of politics, in place of reading
politics in ction or putting ction in place of politics, I give up, for
they might be the same, both in place of that which is without any
place, both in place of the without.
To start with (or without), I confess that I am still at odds with
the very title of this book. I always get in trouble with politics,
because I nd myself ... lost, without any political position, or in
the weird position of being without position, in a de-position that
would not even be able to turn into another position, a solid and
impregnable castle. Something that no one in my family of male
politicians could understand, since they cannot get what makes
politics impossible: its retrait (retreat or withdrawal) from within its
essence, its being-without-being. They still believe that you can be
a politician, do politics, whereas politics can only undo those who
want to appropriate it all as a family business; while they claim to
serve the State or the community, they represent what Hegel said of
women: the irony of community.
Once upon a time, like many in my generation, I felt deeply
involved in politics. This was around May 68, what we (in France)
call the events. But I was wrong. What is wrong about 68 is not
what took place at the very instant, but what followed, the recycling
of the events with the same old political reexes. During the events
themselves, I didnt know what was taking place which is the very
157
McQuillan 02 chap07 157 29/6/07 14:58:03
158 Marc Froment-Meurice
notion of an event: something unpredictable, as surprising as death.
I couldnt even think that I was acting politically. There was no
sense of doing politics, and that was precisely the meaning of 68:
an absent meaning. After in the aftermath, aprs coup we were
given explanations, directions, deep meanings. But soon enough
I lost all interest in those, for they were only words, catchwords,
passwords, watchwords, keywords, loanwords, crosswords, in the
name of Marx, Trotsky, Mao, de Gaulle, any egregious ego ... I then
decided that the only way to get rid of this mess, of all those big
names and heroes, was to become nobody entering what Blanchot
calls the space of literature. Only here do things get serious. But
here, where? Everywhere and nowhere. No specic place, or the
place without place, of the without. This is how I read or translated
Dasein: existence without essence, or with the only essence of being
without essence. So be it. Amen. No subject liquidation of any
subject. In one word, death. But death insofar as it is never death,
itself, as such.
Liquidation of the subject, what an exciting program, but also
what an impossible task, insofar as it requires a subject to undertake
it. Did I say exciting? No, impossible: death is the most frightening.
Yes. But precisely because of that, the most exciting: think that I
will be myself at The Instant of my Death. Great. Great? No, horrible.
Unbearable. Unbearable lightness of death. Because I will never live,
experience it or I will experience it as that which can never be
experienced, lived, understood. I will experience my death as that
which can never be experienced, but also as that which makes any
experience possible. I will experience deconstruction. Deconstruction
is my death ... I am just quoting from Derridas Post Card.
So I come to Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death.
1
On the
instance of such an instant I shall not insist, since its momentous
instancy marks it in such a way that the instant of death is not situated
in time, and death is always to come as well as past already, and
therefore missed. Heidegger had said this already did he live only
to say it? (To say it, not to live it: a notable restriction in Heideggers
case, unlike Blanchots or Dostoyevskys, not to mention the fate
of thousands of other anonymous ones.) Except that it remains to
be seen whether you can see it with your own eyes, death, death
itself. In any case, I quote Heidegger saying it if it is to be said,
if one can say, Death, that is to say this or that, or even death:
When death comes, it instantaneously disappears. Mortals die
death in life. In death, mortals become im-mortals.
2
Those words
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From (Within) Without 159
can stand as a precise comment on the statement at the end of The
Instant of my Death, which seeks to say it more precisely: Only
a feeling of lightness remains, which is my very death itself, or,
to say it more precisely, The Instant of my Death henceforth always
impending [en instance].
3
Or, to put it in the tersest of phrases, in
less than a sentence: Dead immortal. That precise instant is the
one when death comes, that is to say: it escapes us. Death only comes
as it escapes us again; death slips away, and this slipping away, this
breakaway is my very death itself. Death comes when instantane-
ously it disappears. For death to come is to disappear (dispartre).
Death is its own disappearance; its is is without being.
Is death or The Instant of my Death related to politics? That is a
pending matter lets rst get to the heart of the matter. Lets be even
more precise I might be tempted to say, lets go to the quick, to the
throbbing, living heart of this matter of death ... Impossible. How
could I just walk into my death as if it were a windmill, as we say in
French, or a chteau, or, better, a Castle, where one just pushes the
door, like the German ofcer knocking at the young mans door,
the man who might have been Maurice Blanchot if he were not dead
already as the one who could describe the instant of his death?
My death has no place, or, rather, it has an unbearably inhabitable
place, even as it takes place there, before me, within reach or within
range of a shotgun ... Neither French nor German, nor even Russian,
death does not speak a word or perhaps it speaks an unspeakably
foreign language, as in the story that Nathalie Sarraute told about
Chekhov: seeing his death coming, he was only able to utter in
German: Ich sterbe.
4
(And this is an opportunity to ask, if language
is the home of Being, how can Heidegger also say that death is its
secret, Beings shelter or dwelling, its Heim or Geheimnis? What is this
unsheltered dwelling that is everyones guest and nowhere at home?)
Being without place or being, belonging to no one or making anyone
be no one, that is transforming the subject into its own self of being
without self, death is apolitical.
Now, without further ado, let me jump feet rst onto the most
salient point, the one that really hurts, that is precisely the most
difcult to situate. Indeed, we may read The Instant of my Death as a
belated self-justication, coming half a century after the fact(s), by
a young man engaged (there is no other way to put it) in politics;
and this young man, who is not named, is none other (even if he
is not the same) than the witnessing narrator, the one who says
I, who in turn is none other (even if he is not the same) than the
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author who publishes this story under a clearly identiable name:
Maurice Blanchot. There are three instances, the young man, I, and
Blanchot, whom we must not confuse lest there be no narrative.
But those three are not readily and discretely separable into entities
that would entertain no relations with one another; indeed, those
three instances of Blanchot have complex relations with one and
the same entity, if we may call it that: my death. Thus Blanchot is
a name that gathers various interlaced instances of Blanchot, and
its identity comes precisely from that which is meant to dissolve
any identication: my death, which remains without a subject and
without a dwelling. Consequently, speaking of Blanchot as a simple
unity should be illegal who is he who tells himself his own death,
and who takes this opportunity to bleach (or blanch?) himself of any
stain and clear his name? Forgive my brutality, but I must say that all
this looks strangely like a trial, beginning with the very name of the
house, the Castle. Let us suppose this story were signed by Heidegger
and not by Blanchot no need to go further and give you the graphic
details. Admittedly, neither the Germans nor the Russians nearly shot
Heidegger to death, but in 1944 there was no shelter for him either
and, besides, who could claim he had a shelter then?
5
Defending Heidegger is the furthest thing from my mind: as far
as I know, he risked his life only to save his manuscripts, and in
that regard he was luckier than the young man since not a single
Frenchman mistook them for military blueprints or strategic maps.
Furthermore, Heideggers actions in the Resistance amounted to
mere words, and some of them were murky; but words, of course,
were barely safer than actions then, in the historical context. If I
were to consider decency a cardinal virtue in politics instead of the
unspeakable indecency it is when decency is invoked to accuse those
who believe it to be shameful to have been such a great thinker
yet such a petty man (Franois Fdier, for it is he, speaking for the
defence, insists on the term greatness),
6
I would have abstained
from comparing the two men to one another. In fact, I am not so
much comparing them as pairing them off to make them appear
in a compearance that is neither a comparison nor a reason but
todays agenda, todays coming to terms, coming to a common day,
even coming to the day of Judgement: is it not Blanchot himself
who judges and summons Heidegger and blames him for a capital
offence, or for what Blanchots biographer, Christophe Bident, calls,
in Heideggerian fashion, an absence of thinking that stems from
using the same words for noble and ignoble matters? His argument
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has some weight; I admit that I once also subscribed to it. So let me
quote the biographers remark in full: Even beyond the fact that he
[Blanchot] never made any partisan or institutional commitments
to any fascist party, we can now better grasp what distinguishes his
position from that of someone like Heidegger.
7
First, Blanchot did not sign up with the national socialist party,
that is true. But he was French and there never was any French fascist
party; there were only the quasi-fascist Ligues. French fascism was
split and incapable of producing a unique, totalitarian party, even
during the German occupation when small, organised groups of col-
laborateurs suffered so much internal strife that even the Germans
could not take them seriously. But I would like to stress the real
difference between Blanchot and Heidegger at the moment I have
been evoking: it rests in their work and their works position.
Heidegger had accomplished his work and it was behind him,
whereas Blanchot had yet to produce his own it was yet to come;
it was before him: Blanchot did not have a work like Being and Time
behind him; he had, before him, Thomas lObscur, whose difcult,
painful path he sought.
8

Second, Heidegger always presented Being and Time not as a work,
a monument left behind him, but truly as a path to follow, a task
to come; the incompletion of his Treatise attests to difculties that
are analogous to Blanchots while he worked on his rst book
they are the difculties of beginnings (to which Heidegger always
remained faithful). Bident writes further: His [Blanchots] thinking
was not something he could submit to anyone since neither he nor
anyone else lent any theoretical authority to his writings, and at the
same time he struggled to acknowledge to himself his own literary
authority about which no one knew anything.
9

The difference thus lies between two types of authority, theoretical
or literary; recognition has little to do with it. Heidegger never
ceased to complain about the misunderstanding that he felt was
at the heart of his sudden renown: humanism always the eternal
return of the same subject coming back. Could one then argue that
the one who has no recognised authority, who is not an author
yet, is free and irresponsible? But here precisely comes into play the
distinction between theoretical and literary authority unless one
subsumes literature under theory as Sartre did in his theory of the
engag writer, a theory of the authors political commitment that can
(precisely) be traced back to his reading of Heidegger ...
McQuillan 02 chap07 161 29/6/07 14:58:03
On the contrary, he accuses Heidegger of having compromised
language and thought: [Heidegger] put in Hitlers service the very
language and the very writing through which, at a great moment
in the history of thought, we had been invited to participate in the
questioning designated as the most high that which would come
to us from Being and Time.
10
A capital accusation for an unforgivable offence: beyond an ontic
commitment, an ontological commitment, involving the gravest risk:
ontologys debasement, its fall (Verfallen) from the heights of the
Most High, to borrow Blanchots very language and very writing,
only to tumble into the lowest abyss, with Hitler compared to Satan.
Like many others, I trembled apprehensively when I read Heideggers
so-called political writings, because, in all his calls and proclamations,
he uses the same Heideggerian language to extol the facticity of
Dasein destined to die and the Fhrers unyielding law. As Michel
Deguy said, we seem to suffer from double vision: is it the same
Heidegger or is it Sozi (Sosia), his double?
11
But the question, the
question of the very, the very same (the very language, the very
writing), of identity and identication (Heidegger like Hitler that
is always possible whereas the reverse is not; I will let you draw all
the possible consequences from this remarkable non-reversibility),
this question of the same is the same one can ask Blanchot: how
could he write, admittedly without any authority, words that even
Heidegger never uttered publicly, in sentences such as these (quoted
by Bident as the only two instances of anti-Semitism in writings that
have not yet cohered into a body of work):
1. [Blum] represents exactly all that is most contemptible for the nation he
addresses: an ideology that is behind the times, an old mans frame of mind,
an alien race.
2. Blum, this wog (mtque), does nothing but show off his cosmopolitan
instinct, his unmanly temperament, his taste for feeble rhetoric.
12

But the latter trait could apply to the accusing party if it is true,
as Bident points out, that anti-Semitism occurs only as a patch of
secondhand eloquence in this discourse, that is to say as a foreign
body, an intruder, a virus that irrupts and jeopardises the integrity
of the organism proper. Is it not strange that anti-Semitism, in this
case, shares with its anti-body the same traits if it is a patch of
secondhand eloquence, an intruder not cut from the same, good
cloth (or family)? Indeed, it is equally strange that twice on the same
page (the same and only page to treat of this subject in a book of
McQuillan 02 chap07 162 29/6/07 14:58:03
more than 600) the treatment of this subject wears a restrictive
form: Blanchots alleged anti-Semitism is only one logical element
among others in the attempt to purify [the French nation], and
Anti-Semitism occurs only as a patch of secondhand eloquence in
this discourse, that is to say as a mere detail (and forgive me if I
almost resorted to profanity).
13
I am not gathering evidence to try Blanchot; I am more than
willing to believe him to take him at his word. But precisely not
this same word, that is the rhetoric a certain Blanchot (not the
same Blanchot, not the one who lived or died the instant
of [his] death) employed to besmirch Lon Blum, the smeary mud
common to so many others at the time. And would the difference
with Heidegger be that the latter, celebrating Hitler as Germanys
law and reality (in incidentally correct terms at the time), spoke of a
man, Hitler, who happened not to have been a mere detail; or that
Heidegger used the very language, the language of the most high
spheres of pure thought (and not of politics, conceived as impure)
in order to glorify what was very low indeed, an upstart corporal who
miraculously reached the highest ofce as chancellor of the Reich
while the ruling elites experienced their great debacle?
Is death the place where the young man is living? But he also lives
in what is designated as the upper room of the Castle. It is in this
room that he writes and keeps his precious manuscripts, the ones that
will be stolen by the Nazi ofcer. Highly valuable documents, maybe
more valuable than his own life, since the young man is almost glad
enjoying the perspective of losing his life, but not his writings.
We still dont know what these were, certainly not military maps.
Some critics have suggested that they were the rst draft of Death
Sentence, but in reading this book we nd no evidence for it. On the
contrary, if there is a mention of a rst draft, it is said to have been
completely destroyed by the author, and not stolen by someone else.
I would like to propose this even riskier hypothesis that the stolen
manuscript might have been, quite simply, The Instant of my Death.
But of course, I cannot prove it, with a living proof, as we can read
in Death Sentence.
When The Instant of my Death was published in 1994, it caused
quite a shock. Why? Because of its political implications, of course.
One is entitled to read it as a self-justication, after the long, very long
silence kept by Blanchot about his pre-war political activities. You
might even compare it to Heideggers (relative) silence, but then if you
go along this way, you will also have to regret that Heidegger, unlike
McQuillan 02 chap07 163 29/6/07 14:58:04
Blanchot, was not nearly shot to death ... by Nazi ofcers since
Heidegger claimed, at the Liberation (a word that he would have
resented), to have been actively engaged in the passive Resistance.
Too bad, or so he would have commented, I was faithful to my
fatherland: Deutschland ber alles! Some more naive persons would
simply say that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Such a preposterous comparison has the merit of opening up the
question: if we understand too well why Heidegger remained silent,
we do not understand at all why Blanchot if his story is truthful,
not a mere ction, but a testimony kept silent for so long about an
act that is much to his credit. Imagine, once again, Heidegger caught
by the Gestapo in 1944, since after all he publicly said nasty things
about the regime, at a time when speaking was almost as dangerous
as acting ...
In Being and Time we read that silence is one of the most high
ways to speak, and that on the contrary the one who has nothing to
say is prone to waste his time in idle talk. Heideggers and Blanchots
silences, while they do not mean the same thing, however, do say the
same. They both say the shame. But not the same shame. There is a
noble shame, and then there is an ignoble shame. In two words: the
young man who was nearly shot failed to be shot.
14
This failure,
as we can read between the lines in his quasi-posthumous story, is
responsible for his feeling ashamed. He survived, and to survive,
especially to survive when so many others did not, so many who
were guilty simply of being born, born Jews, that is terrible. That the
complex of the survivor, as Giorgio Agamben would call it denes
not only his but our common situation as tragic or, better said, as
beyond tragedy: it is a disaster. This is the common lot shared by all
the survivors: they should not have survived. The survivor lives with
this terrible, unbearable thought: why me and not the others? Even
those who escaped death in the death camps had to remain silent.
They could not nd a word for what is unspeakable.
Now, not only was the young man spared, but so was his house,
the Castle, and only because it was a chteau. Here is the radical
injustice that corresponds, symmetrically but reversely, to the
injustice of being born a Jew. If you were born a Jew, you were (just
about) doomed to extermination; if you were born in a chteau, you
were (almost) safe.
But is it still my, our lot? We were not even born! How could we
feel responsible for the unspeakable event that we never were able
to experience even in its non-experienceable condition? And so
McQuillan 02 chap07 164 29/6/07 14:58:04
we lived for a long time if not ignoring at least not really paying
attention to what had occurred, maybe because, in its unthinkable
nature, it had not truly occurred to us that it could happen, that
it could come all the way to us (cela ntait pas arriv arriver jusqu
nous). The timing of the comeback of this absolute disaster may
correspond to the time necessary for the work of mourning; on the
condition, however, that you can be in mourning for what never
happened to you, on the condition that this mourning, if indeed it
is one, could ever be put to work: how to say goodbye adieu and
to whom, when there is nothing left, no cofns, no burial places,
nothing but ashes gone in Nacht und Nebel.
In any case, let me insist insistence of the instant on this delay,
because this is the originary meaning of the word demeurer: demorari.
The demeure, the dwelling place, is the place where you linger (in
French sattarder, containing tard: late), and sometimes become a
demeur (retarded). For the young man extracted, by force, from his
family home, the instant of his anticipated death is also the instant
of his postponed death, when his death lingers, and when, maybe,
he is longing for a death that takes too long to come, too long for the
instant that, nally or in the very rst place, never takes place. He is
longing for death, for being at home in death, but death escapes, for,
like the very existence of Dasein, death has no home, no place where
it could rest. In French, you could say rester for dying, or settling for
the nal rest. But, precisely, you (or I) can never rest in death you
can only rest in peace. Only the dead, only those who can no longer
die, being im-mortal because they have experienced that experience
not experienced and therefore have gone out of this experience that
is what it is only in not being experienced, only the dead can rest
and no longer long for dying.
I cant wait to die, thats what the young man feels, thats what
he experiences with that extreme lightness that alone lingers, only
remainder of his deadly arrest or death sentence, a verdict that marks
the hour of truth, only never to get there, be it; just to procrastinate
the act to be carried out, as if dying were nothing but this delay self-
affecting time; in an instant, rather, which has no time to happen
(to) itself and thus arrives; if death arrives only as if it had already
taken place, as if it could really have a place.
I would remind you here of the difference between two deaths that
I evoked at the beginning of That Is To Say:
15
the difference between
real and ctive death, a difference that is itself a ction. Anticipated
death is the only one that is thinkable, no matter what takes place,
McQuillan 02 chap07 165 29/6/07 14:58:04
but it is precisely what never takes place, or what takes place only in
ction here, in this ction entitled The Instant of my Death. The
impossibility but also the absolute necessity of saying ones own
death is the condition of possibility for any autobiography: you have
to play the part of the dead, to do as though you went through death,
like you go through New York or Berlin. To play the dead or to
counterfeit death. Imposture of the very truth, of the critical hour
that steals out at the very instant, or of the instant that is unfaithful
to itself, for want of being one instant itself. In order to be said as
such, death must not be real death. We can only act as if we were
already dead if we want to experience death in its truth, as such. In
its truth, that means in its ction: in the instant of truth that escapes
in the very instant of its coming, in the instant that escapes itself,
for want of being one instant this very instant.
Later I jump to the ending or rather beyond it, after death has
come and stolen out again, in its very coming; and I insist on this
stealing (drober): rapture, theft, ecstasy are not only signs of the
instant but also of that which is most properly ones own (and the
proper would rest only in depossession; there would be Ereignis only
in Enteignis); later, then, and it will always be later, but this later will
always point to a kind of spacing particular to living on: afterward,
but after nothing has actually happened, nothing but the young man
eeing without haste, vanishing as if he wished with some regrets
to have been able to attend his own death, he wished to be its true
witness and not his ctitious one; later, nothing will happen without
or outside of this missed opportunity, this unique and unhoped-for
chance with which the young man failed to meet. Later, it will always
be too late. The instant of your death is only the instant when you can
say what the instant of death will have been deferred, suspended,
arrested. I am talking about a sudden instant, a subitaneous instant
and if subitaneous, to translate the French subit, sounds painful
it is because we suffer (subir) it. Subito, a direction in music, also
begins with the prex sub- or under, as in the Latin subire it all
goes under: death steals upon you subito. Thats the way, always,
even if you seek to overcome or dominate death by killing yourself,
by self-inicting it (we speak of the gift of death). Indeed, whoever
seeks to dominate death by inicting it upon oneself in advance,
in a ction that anticipates death obeys the old philosophic myth
par excellence that travels from Socrates to Heidegger via Hegel with
other way stations yet to be determined.
McQuillan 02 chap07 166 29/6/07 14:58:04
Yes, or rather no, it needs repeating, after Blanchot or Derrida no
one can dominate death, if dominating implies being the master
(dominus) of the house, the resident lord and master of the demeure,
the man in his Castle. For there is no dwelling there, no demeure, no
domus. Death remains with-out dwelling (la mort demeure jamais
hors demeure), or its dwelling is deferred (elle de-meurt); it is being
tardy; it differs innitely from being. Never will death be a subject,
and any discourse that discusses it as a subject, mine included, is
condemned to ction. Death is a name that steals away from the
name and from being.
In French, dernire demeure, the last dwelling place, designates the
place where one is put to rest and where the dead rest, while no one
knows where they have gone or whether they remain elsewhere
than in the survivors memory, or in writings, which are the only
true graves. In my Tombeau de Trakl,
16
precisely and I ask you to
forgive me this self-reference I invented the verb demourir, to be
used only in the third person in the present tense, a defective and
quasi-impersonal verb, like il y a, there is. I was trying to catch what
Trakl meant by nearness of death: the instant of an end that would
innitely defer and differ from its coming to an end.
But now, in lieu of another siting (Errterung) of Trakls poetry, let
me conclude with a few words on the ending of what Heidegger calls
the land of the end or Abendland (land of the evening), wrongly called
Occident. Wrongly, for I regret or do not regret to say it loudly, this
word sounds to me unbearable, like many of the words that Heidegger
bequeathed to us. Even if we disregard the fascist connotations that
this word has in France in the aftermath of 68, and even if you use
it in the Heideggerian context of the Abend-Land, Occident always
means some type of ending, the sunset, for example, or the land of
the dead as in Homer, Cimmeria, where Ulysses nds the entrance
to Hell.
Now how are we to read a statement such as: the West is coming
apart ... Westernisation is now over?
17
I found this phrase penned
more or less by Jean-Luc Nancy. More or less because, on the one hand
I only read it already translated into English, which takes the West to
be a term preferable to the French Occident, and on the other hand
I found it in the transcription (more or less?) of an interview. What
interested me was that the sentence came right after a quotation from
Blanchot about absent meaning;
18
and Nancy, rightly, refuses to
understand it as an absence of meaning: Not an absence of meaning,
McQuillan 02 chap07 167 29/6/07 14:58:04
but a meaning that takes on meaning in its absence one might
even say, since its absence.
Interestingly, this came also, in the context of a talk on techno
music, after a long discussion on the end of politics or of the political,
or more exactly of the theologico-political. Unlike rock music, techno
claims to be deliberately apolitical, although in a sense different from
the one that apolitical has represented up to now, that is to say an
inevitably reactionary retrenching and a return to the individual.
The a in apolitical points to privation, but can be heard in two
ways: either as a withdrawal from politics and the hegemony of
politics; or as a withdrawal of politics, thus unconcealing its absent
meaning as its end, or, better yet, the absence of ends as its end or
ending. It would seem that the political comes from the originary
without-meaning (or the meaninglessness or senselessness of origin)
as a means to put an end to it (to the absence of meaning), by
assigning goals or ends (even values) that would prevent anyone
from questioning this abyssal absent meaning or sense as the origin
of any meaning or sense. The human ends in question are like Kants
eternal peace: in the end, when it is reached, it really means death.
When those ends collapse with their absence of meaning and because
of it, the political ows back toward its a-political origin an origin
that is not one, neither a point of departure nor an Orient (or
orientation). The Orient is always already lost that is the origin
of the Occident, the West. Yet it is its origin insofar as the West, the
Occident has always sought to return to it, in order to ll the void of
the origin, in order to make up for the loss and thus efface its own
abyssal origin, erase the absent meaning.
To say about the West that it is over is to say two things that do
not overlap or, on the contrary, that overlap endlessly, allowing
no one to determine what meaning this end has or what end this
meaning has. On the one hand, we have to conceive that the West is
born as the end of meaning that it is always already nished insofar
as it prescribes meaning in the (as an) end, in a theological sense, be
it atheist (e.g., Marxist) or religious, whereby the theological must
always be understood as ontology in the same way that ontology is
theological, rstly and lastly: the sense of Being is its end. On the
other hand, one must also perceive that, having achieved its ends,
meaning or sense falls into itself, dissolves into the catastrophe that
had been its project; and, like the end of the West, it is precisely the
Westernisation of meaning, deconstructed at the moment and point
at which it happens (to) itself, in the globalisation of the West, that
McQuillan 02 chap07 168 29/6/07 14:58:04
is also its globalkanisation, its fragmentation or dissemination, its
implosion in the very explosion of meaning in every sense, and, by
the same token, in a(b)-sense. Not a single (hi)story holds water still,
if there is just one (hi)story. The end of the world is the world; its
an ending that has arrived even before it was able to present itself:
to come back to Jean-Luc Nancy, the sense or meaning of the world
is nite, insofar as it has vanished into thin air in the innite of
absent meaning.
Here is not the place to discuss Jean-Luc Nancys major thesis, his
ontology of Mitsein. Ill say a few things, and Ill ask you to forgive
their shallowness. First, what has always struck me, even shocked
me, is his insistence on ontology; it is not the mit-, the with that
sounds problematical, but, as always, Sein, Being. I fully acknowledge
that the with, insofar as it is not simply juxtaposed to Being, as too
often is in Being and Time entirely transforms the meaning of Being.
To say that the meaning of Being lies in the Mitsein is to take a step
that completely modies the landscape of ontology, but it still means
navigating the same waters; what is more, it implies restoring ontology
to life when it was, at long last, on the verge of drowning.
On the other hand, Nancy is lucid enough to say that the with
is what dislocates any ontology, because the with is precisely what
Blanchot calls absent meaning. With is without meaning, or with
absent meaning, or with the only meaning of being without meaning.
Without is the meaning of being-with. I understand it strictly: when
you are with someone, you are truly, meaningfully with this person
only on the condition that this being-with remains without any
other meaning. If there is a meaning to being with, then it is not the
being-with that matters, but the meaning. The meaning justies but
also neutralises all the meaning that there is in being with. In order
to make sense, being-with ought to remain without sense. Closely
connecting this to what Blanchot would say about death and dying,
I have a word that I use to call this impossible yet necessary con-
junction: passance. In this word you can hear both the pas (double,
as in Blanchots pas that is step or not) and the sense [sens] as sans,
without. In English, within the word without you nd out. A literal
translation would be: out of the with. Avec comes from apud, at.
So without is to be understood as out of at home, and thus as the
same as the ex- of existence or of exile. But it is not merely the
contrary of immanence, and it is not simply transcendence. You can
approach it in the French for homeless, sans-abri, without shelter. To
be homeless is neither to be immanent nor to be transcendent. Maybe
McQuillan 02 chap07 169 29/6/07 14:58:04
it is not even to be. Both transcendence and immanence share this
common characteristic: they are both at home, be it the self or the
other. They are sheltered in the here or the beyond, a beyond that
is always conceived as another home, or the home of an Other. On
this level, any ontology, whether of immanence or transcendence,
comes down to or back to precisely returning to the self or the
other, the self being the other, each one at home in Being. This turn
of the return seems unavoidable, even in the realm of the without
(and despite the fact that without excludes any return to the self,
being without return), since it departs from ... its provenance is such
and such ... and thus points to a point of departure that it makes into
its origin resting in itself. Or let us say that the without reinstitutes
the being (of the) with as that out of which it is without. To think a
parting or a departing without starting point, a parting with without
as a step out of any starting point, is what I attempted in inventing
the following word: dpartenance (disowning / departing). It is not
the mere opposite of appartenance, belonging. Dpartenance does not
belong, not even to itself, being itself only by being without self. We
should avoid naming it, since every name implies identication, and
thus appropriation.
Let us also avoid those pitfalls when we come to deconstruction.
Deconstruction as disowning enough to depose or defuse any
claim that one belongs to deconstruction, as if one could belong
to disowning in the way one is part of an association, a church, a
political party, a nation, or even a family. Deconstruction does not
read or bind (ne lit ni ne lie) politics; it unreads, undoes, unbinds
(dlit(e) ou dlie) the political. Better yet, deconstruction is the
political as it deconstructs itself or departs from itself and does not
return to a mythical point of departure, an archpolitics withdrawn
behind politics proper. Behind politics, as behind phenomena, there
is essentially nothing. But that which is in politics is the in that
is out of its borders; it is the out in without, the apolitical. Here
too are two ways of grasping what is at stake: the rst view entails
that politics is basically always apolitical and has never reached
the bottom of, or exhausted the political, and has been apolitical
for want of ever having been political (enough). That is the radical,
extremist, even eschatological view politics covering up the promise
of the political; being-with foreclosed for having made itself into one
being-with, one being-with, unable to conceive the with with its
inner without. In this, while failing to overlap with it completely,
the more radical view dovetails with the second view, that is to say
McQuillan 02 chap07 170 29/6/07 14:58:04
the other sense, the absent meaning, the apolitical the apolitical
not of he who is upsipolis apolis, to cite Heidegger interpreting the
chorus in Antigone, who is siteless or placeless because he must rst
institute it; the apolitical not of a being but of Nobody; the apolitical
as Nobody, not a human being, not even a Dasein being, not even a
ower (since a ower may always make sense after all); the apolitical
as without, absent meaning, absentee sense, as passance.
I shall not claim that it makes sense, or that it makes nonsense
for that matter. But that is what happens: deconstruction arriving
and happening everywhere, sparing not a single place, and therefore
without politics, if there is politics only from (or, above all, with
a view towards) a place, a site as an end. That is what takes place
without place everywhere. It is everybody and the whole world.
This is the sense of the world. Or the without of the world, a without-
world coming from the most salient point of sense when, having
achieved its ends, meaning returns to itself, that is to say its sense
suspended in absence.
Politics is death at home; the a-political is death deferred: not life,
not survival, but, simply, in the simplicity
19
of the without, ex-istence
from within without.
NOTES
1. Maurice Blanchot, LInstant de ma mort (Montpellier: Fata Morgana,
1994).
2. Martin Heidegger, Hlderlins Erde und Himmel, in Gesamtausgabe 4
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), p. 165.
3. Blanchot, LInstant de ma mort, p. 20.
4. See Nathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech, trans. Barbara Wright (New York:
G. Braziller, 1983).
5. To be (almost surgically) precise one more time, the date of 20 July
that Derrida suggests for Blanchots near execution in Demeure: Maurice
Blanchot (Paris: Galile, 1998) happens, strangely, to correspond to the
failed attempt on Hitlers life.
6. I refer to the Franois Fdier preface entitled Revenir plus de dcence
(Returning to more decency) for Martin Heidegger, Ecrits politiques:
19331966 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), in which Heideggers accusers are
presented as the indecent ones.
7. Maurice Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire Invisible (Seyssel: Champ
Vallon, 1998), p. 112, my translation.
8. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 112.
McQuillan 02 chap07 171 29/6/07 14:58:05
10. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 112. Bident quotes Maurice Blanchot, The
Innite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
p. 451 (i.e., p. 140, n. 4). I changed most lofty to most high.
11. Michel Deguy, Le sozi de Heidegger, in Le Dbat 48 (Paris: Gallimard,
1988). See also my Solitudes: From Rimbaud to Heidegger (Albany, NY: State
University of New York, 1995).
13. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 96, my emphasis. The detail refers to the
extreme-rightist French leader, Le Pen, speaking of the extermination
camps as if they were mere details.
14. In French, faillir (to be nearly ...) is the same word as to fail. Faillite is a
failure bankruptcy. Blanchot nearly got shot and this nearly is his
failure.
15. Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is To Say: Heideggers Poetics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 9.
16. Marc Froment-Meurice, Tombeau de Trakl (Paris: Belin, 1992).
17. An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, in Michel Gaillot, Multiple Meaning,
Techno: an Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present (Paris: Editions Dis
Voir, 1998), p. 94. I thank Vladimir T. Djokic who sent me this text.
18. See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 42: Keep watch over
absent meaning.
19. In Latin, the word simplicitas means without a fold. Interestingly, in
German the word (Einfalt) reads as one fold.
McQuillan 02 chap07 172 29/6/07 14:58:05
10
Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pense
du dsert) With(in) Jacques Derrida
Laurent Milesi
Four or ve words set down as a title, an invitation to a voyage: thinking,
desert, and through, which, more parenthetically than thetically,
attempts to mark a path between the two, together with and within
but not without (sans) Jacques Derrida. Why should reading him
invite us to connect that noblest of human activity called thinking
with an image which traditionally evokes barrenness, suffering, a
purgatorial and at best transitory experience through a trans- which
timidly hints at the traversing (through) process of this title? How
can one think the desert, think (ones way) through the desert,
maybe even think the desert through and through (if that were a
possible invention), without succumbing to the temptation of taming
it from the comfortable position of a without into one of many
gures, themes or loci? As questions of ethics supposedly became
ostensibly more and more prominent in Derridas writings, so did
the appeal of / to the desert as a place to be surveyed and traversed
by thinking, to be thought through for thinking itself to take place
or take a radically other place. Yet how should one approach such a
radically inhospitable, inhuman, foreign and alien(ating) territory?
And also perhaps: what of its horizon,
1
its beyond bearing in
mind Derridas own reservations towards the limited openings of
horizons and can one come back (which is to say here, go forward)
from Derridas desert (thinking)?
MIRAGES OF THE DESERT: THE RECEDING DISTANCING OF THINKING
Regardless of whatever distinctive qualities this desert might be
endowed or lled with, Derridas now familiar exposure of the
limitations of thematic criticism and of the economy of metaphoricity
should caution us against marshalling it into an army of metaphors,
even as a more archaic gure for the guration of the ungurable,
2

whose exhaustive cataloguing could claim to summon all its tropic
173
McQuillan 02 chap07 173 29/6/07 14:58:05
174 Laurent Milesi
effects.
3
This conception of the desert would eventually deliver both
more and less than what an engagement with its singular uniqueness
should promise: it would perhaps simply miss the (experience of
the) desert itself what, after Derrida, we shall designate as the
desert (with)in the desert and the radical chance for thinking
that this essay would like to consider. However, in retracing or
following in Derridas footsteps, I will inevitably have to revisit the
deserts conjured up in his peregrine writing, and there is perhaps no
fundamentally other way of reading than this reprage of landmarks
as a rst approach like learning how to nd ones bearings in
the desert where no cardinal origin or orientation is immediately
available, as long as one remains aware of the dis-placement already at
work via translations and metaphorisations in such a procedure.
THE KHRIC SPACE AND THE AFFIRMATIVE
APORIAS OF DECONSTRUCTION
If, forced to do so by the constraints of this academic exercise, one
had to isolate crucial moments in Derridas grappling with the desert,
his patient discussion of Platos khra should presumably qualify as
(almost) a locus princeps and our rst immediate port of call.
Originally collected in the 1987 Poikilia for Jean-Pierre Vernant,
the essay on the Platonic khra elaborates the difcult reading /
translation of the non-place of such a place, which gives (rise to)
donne lieu without giving anything as an essential place or essence,
in a withdrawal of the place from place which Derrida wishes to
demarcate from the residual remainders of an es gibt in negative
theology.
4
I shall return to this demarcation from the via negativa
but, as a preamble (to which I shall also return), let me rst suggest
a parallel with two poetic loci.
When one reads il y a khra in Derridas essay, one cannot help
recalling the ve obsessional words that stalk through several of
his texts, from Dissemination onwards and via The Post Card,
5
until
they culminate in a more sustained poetic meditation in Feu la
cendre (Cinders), originally also published in 1987: il y a l cendre.
The haunting leitmotif that, for Derrida, proclaims the mystery of a
self-effacing, inessential remainder, silently substitutes the referent-
less place for the awaited denitive article, in a linguistic move
or dis-articulation that slightly bends or translates the French
idiom to gesture towards the anteriority of a place divested from
the remaining and reassuring trappings of an essence, not unlike the
McQuillan 02 chap07 174 29/6/07 14:58:05
Thinking (Through) the Desert 175
calculated erasure of the denitive article in il y a khra to mark its
place without (the) place. Thus, in the roughly contemporaneous
essay How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, within a context stressing
the anteriority of the self-effacing trace, its radical avoir lieu, one
reads about idiomaticity (within the ferment of Derridas French
idiom itself) that Une trace a eu lieu. ... mme si elle narrive qu
seffacer, si elle nadvient quen effaant, leffacement aura eu lieu,
ft-il de cendre. Il y a l cendre.
6
Yet there is an even more archaic resonance for the lack of identiable
placement for khra-as-place, one that the following fragment, sil y
a lieu ou, selon notre idiome, lieu donn, donner lieu ici ne revient pas
faire prsent dune place,
7
owes a debt to: Mallarms rien naura eu
lieu que le lieu, one of the famous, often glossed lines cast across the
double pages of Un Coup de ds, whose exercise should be read with the
French poets fascination with the pure place of choreographic space
in mind and, for a reading of Derrida, the latters own choreographic
use of male and female voices (polysexual signatures) through texts
which become indeterminate loci of vocal exappropriation.
8
Such
a place is not yet even an experience of place mediated by thinking
through, the place constituted from (within) the event taking place,
still retained by the event of a promise and of Scriptures revelation
in negative theology, a place already open, fallen into the tense /
time of history and historicity.
In the second part of Khra, Derrida recalls the Socratic discourse,
featured towards the opening of Timaeus, which makes a distinction
between philosophers and politicians as being endowed with a proper
place,
9
versus the poets and sophists who itinerantly, iteratively
migrate from place to place, and the non-place which Socrates feigns
to occupy in his address: his speech occurs in a third genus [triton
genos
10
] and in the neutral space of a place without place, a place where
everything is marked but which would be in itself unmarked.
11

Likewise, deconstruction, through a certain exing and opening up
of classical philosophical questioning and argumentative procedures
to poetry, aims to question the place of politics from a non-place that
will reveal those constitutive differences in placements and bring to
consciousness the ante-primal (avant-premier) idiom for absolute
responsibility, not the question of (the present of) being and essence
(es gibt Sein) but the issue of place (il y a lieu).
12
In Faith and Knowledge
13
Derrida will return to what he called
in the original the avant-premier prnom
14
of khra, as the second
track (piste) to be followed in the impossible locus of the desert he is
McQuillan 02 chap07 175 29/6/07 14:58:05
176 Laurent Milesi
trying to evoke, and will further outline the options for radical(ising)
thinking. Platos place-without-place of the originary inscription
of forms and differences
15
would situate the abstract spacing, place
itself, the place of absolute exteriority, but also the place of a bifurcation
between two approaches to the desert:
16
between a tradition of the via
negativa, which still subscribes to the anthropo-theological possibility
of thinking (beyond) Being whose idiom and gures remain caught
within the particularisms of Greco-Abrahamic (philosophical
[Western] as well as religious) cultures on the margins or merely
in sight of a middle-eastern desert, and the ethical call of a more
archaic place, before time and cultures, indeed out of time and out
of place, more universalisable (though according to a most singular
universality), impassibly / impassably alien to or untouched by what
takes place within it (be it an event, a reply, an experience of the
Name). This anterior experience is the test [preuve] of Khra,
17
the
implacable trial of an other place within the place (the abstraction
or re-trait of / from the desert, or desertication, the desert within
the desert of a risque en demeure
18
) but also doing without (sans) the
other place,
19
a singular place name for such an absolute spacing,
still sans foi ni loi (as the condition for justice before the Law or the
religious before Religion), the very place of an innite resistance, of an
innitely impassible persistance [restance]
20
which could also have
as another name deconstruction.
21
Or to let Derridas own voice
resonate again from this desert in French, for reasons which will
be made apparent below: Khra dit cet immmorial dun dsert dans le
dsert pour lequel il nest ni seuil ni deuil.
22
So how can one think this
desert before the knowable, revealable desert(s)? In order to return
to and attempt to think (back to) this avant-premier desert (with)in
the desert, we shall need to follow Derridas other lead towards the
messianic in Faith and Knowledge. But rst let us return to the
demarcation between deconstruction and the via negativa.
About the same time as Derridas thoughts on the Platonic khra
crystallised, the essay translated as How to Avoid Speaking: Denials
grappled with the vexing question of the relation between decon-
struction and negative theology, for which one of many earlier
contexts would have to be Derridas writings on Blanchot (mainly
the essays collected in Parages, 1986
23
), especially his fascination with
the latters step-by-step procedure of overstepping or of impossible
transgression
24
in operators like pas, but also sans (cf. below) the
problematic place of origin of pas, sans, quasiment guring a horizon
of (un)sayability in How to Avoid Speaking.
25
Early in the essay
McQuillan 02 chap07 176 29/6/07 14:58:05
for the Poikilia, we had read that the triton genos of khra eschews
the critical choice in the binary tension between a neither ... nor
and a both this and that, and that it is (therefore) aporetic
26
yet
another word which I shall need to briey reconsider in this endlessly
receding panorama. The demarcation from the supercial afnity
with negative theology / via negativa the tenuous specicity of
deconstruction itself (despite overlapping strategies of de-multi-
plication / multiplicity of voices
27
) insofar as it ultimately radically
asserts the afrmative and beckons towards what ground thinking
can nd in what is anterior to Being in order to reorientate itself
is recalled and developed in How to Avoid Speaking (in contexts
reemphasising the anteriority of the trace), before announcing the
three tempi or loci of the essay (the Greek [Platonic] paradigm and
two tropics of negativity: the beyond-Being [epekeina] and khra;
khra versus the Christian movement of apophasis; Heideggers
denials of faith, theology and Being), in which a certain void,
the place of an internal desert, will perhaps allow this question [of
negative theology] to resonate
28
a spacing rhythm which one
may wish to see redeployed in the three aporetic loci of Faith and
Knowledge: the desert, the Promised Land and the island (cf. below).
The strategic importance of the Platonic khra can be best grasped
in the following two dovetailing passages, central to the articulation
and demarcation of the deconstructive space of thinking / writing
versus the apophatic experience:
Radically nonhuman and atheological, one cannot even say that it gives place
or that there is the khra. The es gibt, thus translated, too vividly announces
or recalls the dispensation of God, of man or even that of the Being of which
certain texts by Heidegger speak (es gibt Sein).
29
Contrary to what seemed to happen in the experience of the place called khra,
the apophasis is brought into motion it is initiated ... by the event of a revelation
which is also a promise. This ... opens up a history and an anthropo-theological
dimension ... This place itself [of an anthropo-theological union/adjunction of
apophatic writing to Gods Scripture] is assigned by the event of the promise
and the revelation of Scripture. It is the place only after what will have taken
place. ... The place is an event.
30
As opposed to the presence-as-reference of a negativised essence (God
is not such and such, etc.), khra is a reference without referent,
31
a
place which takes place [a lieu] without a place au lieu de: there
is khra but the khra does not exist.
32
A place within / hollowed
McQuillan 02 chap07 177 29/6/07 14:58:05
178 Laurent Milesi
out of (the) place, it is anterior to the thinking of an essential
having-taken-place
33
and is thus neither an event / experience
of presence nor of the presence of the present, which are eventually
left unchallenged by Christian apophases / via negativa.
JUST OPENING UP THE MESSIANIC AND THE RELIGIOUS
One of the signicant additions to the 1993 republication in book
form of the essay on khra is the framing opening echo of the arrivant,
which, in the context of writings such as Aporias and Specters of Marx,
testies to the discreet recentring on issues of ethics, responsibility and
the messianic, of Derridas meditations on a quasi-originary place
(place-without-a-place). His opening Khra nous arrive...
34
allows us
to reread this necessary before-the-rst place or originary (non-)place
as an absolute giving (cf. arrivant) as well as given, though not as an
essence, that conditions subsequent determinations of places from
which questions of ethics, hospitality or responsibility towards the
Other, etc., ought to be asked for their radical legitimacy.
First articulated in Aporias, the quasi-neologism of the arrivant,
i.e. the one / that which arrives / must be let to arrive as radically
unanticipatable event, offered a linguistic peg on which to anchor
the ceaseless vigilance of responsibility towards the other so as to
preserve the possibility of justice, even in its radical impossibility,
which Derrida had addressed in the roughly contemporaneous lecture
rst given on the occasion of the 1990 conference on Deconstruc-
tion and the Possibility of Justice and republished as the rst section
of Force de loi: Du Droit la justice. There, Derridas third and last
proposition for the relationship between deconstruction, law and
justice, stated that deconstruction takes place in the gap or space
(intervalle) which separates the undeconstructibility of justice from
the deconstructibility of law, and is possible as an experience of the
impossible what he calls an experience of aporia and whose radical
impossibility he denes as follows, in terms that could lend an a
posteriori justication to the middle term in my title:
an experience is a traversal, something that traverses and travels toward a
destination for which it nds the appropriate passage. The experience nds its
way, its passage, it is possible. And in this sense it is impossible to have a full
experience of aporia, that is, of something that does not allow passage.
35
No justice, then, without this experience of the impossible and
impassable aporia, and the arrivant in which we can recognise the
McQuillan 02 chap07 178 29/6/07 14:58:06
strategic Derridean choice of an active sufx, as in diffrance or restance
(cf. below) which came to gure such a radical opening up to the call
of the other without the programmable horizon of expectation(s), the
coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the
arrivant as justice,
36
of an absolute future that cannot be anticipated
and to which one must / can only say yes or come:
37
The new arrivant: this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives,
but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where
s/he was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting
for him or her, without expecting it [sy attendre], without knowing what or
whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for and such is hospitality itself,
hospitality toward the event.
38
Where reection on ethics meets thinking through the religious, the
time of the arrival / arriving-as-event is also the (absolutely future)
time of the messianic one has to wait for without expectations, this
desert-like messianism (without content and without identiable
messiah), which a range of texts were at work to elaborate throughout
the 1990s.
One of the attendant tasks of Specters of Marx is to rethink the
political, ideological, social, etc. implications and forms of a spectral
return of the religious and, more specically, of a difference between
two messianic spaces: the universality of the messianic call as a
structure of experience and an archaic (Abrahamic), already particu-
larised historico-religious messianism.
39
I will cite at some length
from Specters of Marx as the various motifs glimpsed so far are
orchestrated together in one and the same development:
If the messianic appeal belongs properly to a universal structure, to that
irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future, therefore to
experience itself and to its language ... how is one to think it with the gures
of Abrahamic messianism? Does it gure abstract desertication or originary
condition? Was not Abrahamic messianism but an exemplary preguration,
the pre-name [prnom] given against the background of the possibility that
we are attempting to name here? But then why keep the name, or at least the
adjective (we prefer to say messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate
a structure of experience rather than a religion), there where no gure of the
arrivant ... should be pre-determined, pregured or even pre-named? Of these
two deserts, which one, rst of all, will have signalled toward the other? Can
one conceive an atheological heritage of the messianic?
Ascesis strips the messianic hope of all biblical forms, and even all determinable
gures of the wait or expectation; it thus denudes itself in view of responding to
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180 Laurent Milesi
that which must be absolute hospitality, the yes to the arrivant(e), the come
to the future that cannot be anticipated ... Open, waiting for the event as justice,
this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality. The
messianic, including its revolutionary forms ... would be ... a waiting without
horizon of expectation [une attente sans horizon dattente left out of the
translation]. One may take the quasi-atheistic dryness of the messianic to be
the condition of the religions of the Book, a desert that was not even theirs ...
one may always recognize there the arid soil in which grew, and passed away,
the living gures of all the messiahs ... One may also consider this compulsive
growth, and the furtiveness of this passage, to be the only events on the basis
of which we approach and rst of all name the messianic in general. One may
deem strange, strangely familiar and inhospitable at the same time ... this
gure of absolute hospitality whose promise one would choose to entrust to an
experience that is so impossible ... to a quasi-messianism so anxious, fragile, and
impoverished, to an always presupposed messianism, to a quasi-transcendental
messianism that also has such an obstinate interest in a materialism without
substance: a materialism of the khra for a despairing messianism.
40
Such a radical gesture amounts to a stripping of foundational values,
yet without negativity what is borne in the afrmative sans, its
negativity without negativity, which Derrida had rst discussed in
Blanchots writings in Pas, then taken up in the context of Christian
apophasis in How to Avoid Speaking:
41
the religious without (sans)
religion, the messianic without (sans) messianism,
42
but also, within
the topographies of Derridean thinking, the place within the place,
the desert within the desert which one can only hope to glimpse
from afar through an arduous, ardent, sometimes arid process of
desertication. Deconstruction is to echo Caputos ne gloss which
partly takes in the above quotation a desertied Abrahamism ... it
has deserted father Abraham and gone out into a khral desert, like an
an-khr-ite, where the ower of no determinable Messiah grows.
43
So what is the religious without religion, the messianic without
messianism? Questions of hollowing out or exclusion which,
paradoxically and aporetically as it may seem at rst sight, will pave
the way for the inscription of a desert within the desert.
I recalled earlier that, in Faith and Knowledge, Derrida mentions
three aporetic places, with no way out or any assured path, without
itinerary or point of arrival, without ... a calculable programme, places
which shape [gurent] our horizon, but the task at hand, Derrida
adds, is to think and say a certain absence of horizon, hence the
necessity to apprehend an abyss in these places,
44
for example a desert
McQuillan 02 chap07 180 29/6/07 14:58:06
in the desert, there where one neither can nor should see coming what
ought or could perhaps be yet to come. What is still left to come.
45

To get anywhere near the desert in the desert, two origins, sources,
tracks that are still invisible in the desert,
46
two rst name[s] prior to
all naming
47
are suggested (here in inverted order): khra (the test
of khra, in order to think this desert before the desert [cf. above]),
and the messianic, or messianicity without messianism.
Derridas rst avant-premier prnom takes place in the stripping
48

of messianism from messianicity, the dispossession of identiable
prophetic figures necessary for the opening up to the absolute
avenir, always untimely (intempestif) as opposed to the future, still
inscribed within a temporal continuity from past and present or
the (wel)coming of the other or arrivant as the advent of justice, in a
wait without expectation, waiting without awaiting itself,
49
reection
without auto-affective reexivity. This messianic laying bare is the
radical condition of the desire for justice and the hope for a universal-
isable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility
of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced.
50
Of a
rigorous and desert-like severity, it will run the risk of refusing to be
contained within any of the received oppositions in our tradition,
rechissant sans chir;
51
like khra, it is therefore a triton genos, a
performative event outside of / unrecuperable by what it inaugurates,
including by what is called religion:
Wherever this foundation founds in oundering, wherever it steals away under
the ground of what it founds, at the very instant when, losing itself thus in the
desert, it loses the very trace of itself and the memory of a secret, religion can
only begin and begin again.
52
Thus religion itself (and, with it, response and responsibility
53
) must
be unbound dlie
54
to conjure back the lien sans lien of religion
without religion: to untie the tie and return to the avant-premier
lien by attempting to translate the Latin religio and recalling its dual
controversial derivation or etymological source:
55
Relegere (from legere: to pluck [owers], gather [owers into a bunch] what
reading [legere] also does);
religare (from ligare: to tie, bind in French: lier, relier)
What both liations, genealogies, have in common as linguistic
praxes is for Derrida, following Benveniste in Le Vocabulaire des
institutions indo-europennes, a persistent bond that bonds itself rst
and foremost to itself, a resistance or a reaction to disjunction. To
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182 Laurent Milesi
ab-solute alterity,
56
and recollecter (Benvenistes own translation)
inevitably connotes lecture and election. From religion as ce qui arrive
revenir
57
let us not forget that Jacques Derrida is (also) addressing
the return of the religious as he had started doing indirectly via the
spectral hauntings of Marx and Marxism in Specters of Marx Derrida
endeavours to think back to the absolute night or nocturnal light of
the religious turn
58
of a messianicity more archaic than any revealed
religion,
59
so as to glimpse the third aporetic place:
... a third place that could well have been more than archi-originary, the most
anarchic and unarchivable place possible ... a certain desert, [not the desert of
revelation but a desert in the desert, left out of the translation] that which
makes possible, opens, hollows or infinitizes the other ... That which would
orient here in this desert, without pathway and without interior, would still be
the possibility of a religio and of a relegere, to be sure, but before the bond of
religare ... before the bond between men as such or between man and the divinity
of the god.
60

Even if it is called the social nexus, bond to the other in general, this duciary bond
would precede ... all positive religion, every onto-anthropo-theological horizon ...
This can therefore resemble a desertication, the risk of which remains [risque en
demeure] undeniable ... The abstraction of the desert can thereby open the way
to everything from which it withdraws. Whence the ambiguity or the duplicity of
the religious trait or retreat, of its abstraction or of its subtraction. This deserted
re-treat thus makes way for the repetition of that which will have given way
precisely for that in whose name one would protest against it, against that which
only resembles the void and the indeterminacy of mere abstraction.
61
The religious without religion would therefore be the originary lien-
sans-lien (dliaison) that would make possible the gathering together
without / before community or sociality (the social nexus) that erases
subjectivities in the name of a promised collectivity and revealed
universality, the free inhabiting together of a place.
INTERLUDE LE RETRAIT DU / DANS LE DSERT
I will immediately link in (with) another quotation, on the threshold
of this innermost desert, abs-tracted / sub-tracted radically through
an abyssal hollowing out of the desert itself:
Another tolerance would be in accord with the experience of the desert in the
desert, it would respect the distance of innite alterity as singularity. And this
respect would still be religio ... as ... reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction,
McQuillan 02 chap07 182 29/6/07 14:58:06
coming from the threshold of all religion in the bond of repetition to itself, the
threshold of every social or communitarian bond.
62
Writing through / criss-crossing Derridas aporetic loci in the last
section of a joint text called La Contre-alle Catherine Malabou
will state that, Le dsert dsigne lcart improbable qui spare
lorigine dtermine de telle religion de la possibilit mme de tout
commencement et de tout vnement.
63
cart or, palindromi-
cally, trace thus cendres, reste sans reste (restance), difference within
/ without difference (diffrance as the desert-like place without
properties or genus
64
), etc. What we are arduously groping towards
here is the inter-est of an innermost desire,
65
an archi-originary rift
only accessible through its effects but which it is the responsibility
of writing and thinking to respond to, religiously, without expecting
any returns save the meagre satisfaction of having attempted to
radically (re-)think by eradicating or uprooting, as much as is possible
and feasible, the axiomatics of its structure.
66
Jacques Derrida:
Wholly Otherwise, to echo the title in Levinass Noms propres,
where Philosophys panorama, before and after Derrida, shifts from
everything is in place to nothing is left inhabitable for thought,
everything is ... left desolate.
67
FROM THE DESERT WITHIN / OF LANGUAGE TO THE
LANGUAGE OF THE DESERT: DERRIDAS NONLIEUX DCRITURE
No such radical uprooting of tradition, no such long-suffering crossing
of the desert (within) would be conceivable without the reinvention
of language, from the innermost conviction of an insuperable alterity
within ones language as the language of the other the remaining
habitable singularity of the mono in My monolingualism dwells and I
call it my dwelling, whereby the subject has to learn that s/he has to
give up any hope of mastery of a pure language that s/he owns by
(motherly) nature (I only have one language; it is not mine
68
) to
the performative implementation of what I will name, and tentatively
illustrate as, the khreographic desert-writing.
Monolingualism of the Other is undeniably Derridas most cogent cri
de coeur proclaiming the radical alienation demeure within (ones)
language.
69
Language, all language, all languages monolanguage,
rien quune, i.e. the deconstructive plus dune as an injunction to
cultivate the multiplicity of alien voices within ones language, in that
sense always therefore the language of the other are always in transit,
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184 Laurent Milesi
mourning a state of purity and unalienated Unicity, condemned to
renounce mastery, cannot manage to reach themselves [narrivent
pas sarriver] because they no longer know where they are coming
from, what they are speaking from and what the sense of their journey
is.
70
But from these arrives sans arrive grows the desire
to invent a rst language that would be, rather, prior-to-the-rst [avant-premire]
language destined to translate that memory. But to translate the memory of
what, precisely, did not take place, of what, having been (the) forbidden, ought,
nevertheless, to have left the trace, a specter, a phantomatic body, the phantom-
member ... of traces, marks, and scars ...
... Invented for the genealogy of what did not happen and whose event will
have been absent, leaving only negative traces of itself in what makes history,
such a prior-to-the-rst language does not exist.
71
Since the prior-to-the-rst time of pre-originary language does not exist, it must
be invented. Injunctions, the summons [mise en demeure] of another writing.
But, above all, it must be written within languages, so to speak. One must
summon up writing inside the given language.
72
For this philosopher of Judeo-Christian-Maghrebin descent obsessed
by (the dream of) the purity of the (his) French tongue, sometimes the
withdrawal (retraite) into a desert that I sometimes have the illusion
of cultivating by myself, of surveying like a desert,
73
is inevitable,
because The miracle of translation does not take place every day;
there is, at times, a desert without a desert crossing.
74
Placed under
the seal of othering, destinerring and adestination, what can Derridas
transit language, the loci of its / his writing (lieux dcriture), be or,
rather, invent in order to become?
75
I shall situate the half-elaborated notes that will follow from now
on like timid, half-erased traces of footsteps in the windblown desert
that would still mask from sight a more primordial, quasi-originary,
innermost desert under the aegis of a remark by Anne Berger in
her interview of Jacques Derrida, Dialanguages: It would be as if,
in a certain way, you knew the place that would allow you to write
it [the dream of the book], as if you had found it, and at the same
time it were lost to you.
76
Deserted by itself, a desert (in) itself, language (the desert of
language) crosses over into the ab-negating language of the desert
in Derridas incessant endeavours to invest, inhabit a u-topian /
a-topic, impossible place of writing, go there where one cannot go
but must therefore needs go: il y a lieu de (which means il faut, it is
McQuillan 02 chap07 184 29/6/07 14:58:06
necessary, there is ground for) rendering oneself there where it is
impossible to go,
77
an introspective turn towards the desert inside
(the desert) of which I will merely highlight several possible forms,
strategies of resistance, haunting returns and restances:
The negotiations and the circumventions of the confessional (e.g.
Circumfessions) and the autobiographical
78
(Monolingualism of the
Other, Un ver soie), of the apophatic mirage of the renunciation
of ontology (hauntology in Specters of Marx), or even of a reassuring
soteriology (Pas, Sauf le nom [Blanchots sauf], but also the quasi-
soteriological promise of the singular (im)possibility of all speech again
in Monolingualism
79
), etc., are as many gureless gures or strategies
of calculated avoidance of this desert-writing or shifting sands of
Derridean thinking that eventually demarcate themselves from the
kind of demultiplication at work in negative theology, in favour of
a more khreographic performance sustained, as precariously long as
is possible, by a suspensive syntax and operators of (un)decidability
(hymen, supplement, pas / plus de, etc.) or shifting active operations
(such as -ance in restance, diffrance, demeurance, etc.), hollowed-out
particles (sans, sauf), a cultivation of spacing in phonic concatenation
(sans foi ni loi, sans feu ni lieu, ni seuil ni deuil, sans savoir, sans avoir,
sans voir,
80
etc.). In these stylistic peregrinations or via crucis, the
religious of Derridas scriptural choreographies seems to have undone
its primary meaning of an eschatological revelation
81
of a content
in order to evoke the crossing of an unthought / unthinkable in the
inhuman, in-hospitable desert of language,
82
ethically binding and
(re)collecting us to (re)read him patiently and with passion (re-ligare,
re-legere), across lire, lier, lien, and lieu.
But, like Mallarms fascinating ballet dancer that momentarily
defies the laws of gravity and, while the tension of the leap is
sustained, institutes a utopian / a-topic place and may I recall
in passing here that Derrida has compared the movement of signs
in Mallarms poetry to gures in ballets
83
Derridas banderect
syntax knows itself to be doomed to fall / fail sooner or later: indeed,
attempts to take the absolute necessity of this hazard into account,
and the motifs or topoi of cinders, the self-holocaustic trace, restance,
burnt letters, etc., can be read as so many disseminative grains of sand
in the desert that inhabits Derridas Jewish pyrographics.
Still, like the etchings in Lignes, to which his own vignettes offer
responses and some of which feature meditations on the radical
desertication of a place (i.e. beyond such and such a desert(ed)
place) after the protagonists have left the scene, whereby rien ne
McQuillan 02 chap07 185 29/6/07 14:58:07
186 Laurent Milesi
reste du lieu que le lieu (the place hollowed out of the place itself)
Derridas (non-)lieux dcriture, seeking to redress justice against the
law(s) (of gravity, metaphysics, of institutions, etc.), offer themselves
up as transitory, migratory crossings and (grands) carts, challenging
the conditions and foundations of positionality through the poetic
re-grounding of ethics:
the incinerated is no longer nothing, nothing but the cinder ... a remnant that
must no longer remain, this place of nothing that may be, a pure place was
marked out
[un lieu pur se chiffrt-il]
Pure is the word. It calls for re. Cinders there are [Il y a l cendre], this is what
takes place in letting a place occur, so that it will be understood: Nothing will
have taken place but the place [rien naura eu lieu que le lieu]. Cinders there are:
Places there is (il y a lieu).
84
Pure pyrography of desire, of dsir in the dsert, the absolute chance as
necessity of / in Un Coup de ds for thinking to be re-thought through
and through (remember Mallarms famous Toute Pense met un
Coup de Ds); Derridas khreographic desert-writing gestures towards
the double bind of a (non)-lieu as a coming towards such a Mallarman
atopos (rien naura eu lieu que le lieu): the necessity and yet hence
the past subjunctive in un lieu pur se chiffrt-il the impossibility
to nd, found and fully inhabit such a radical place from which to
speak and which yet should resist identication in order to preserve
the full plenitude of the voice.
85
CONCLUSION REREADING DERRIDA RELIGIOUSLY
Derridas life in writing / thinking will have been an enduring crossing
towards an innermost desert, in an exfoliation of cruci-ctions (criss-
cross with hauntings, recurrent motifs and preoccupations) which
we will never be able to do justice to, even if we read and reread
him religiously, la lettre or even less, diacritically rather than
merely critically, as I tried to show elsewhere.
86
Having been taught
to unbind ourselves, we paradoxically remain obliged (ob-ligare) to
the apostolic sendings of this grand old gardener
87
cast into the
Daliesque role of a grand dserticateur by Levinas, for whom, if
there were but one frail tiny little plant clinging to the arid soil of the
desert in the fond hope of growing anew, Derrida would come and
implacably pluck it up, religiously though ruthlessly eradicating all
forms of life in this bleak landscape of desolate sterility. But I suggest
McQuillan 02 chap07 186 29/6/07 14:58:07
we absolve Derrida of this absolute crime, though I cannot do so
in English, qui ici me fait dfaut, et il me faut donc cette autre langue
mienne quest le franais. Je propose, en lointain cho lexergue de La
Mythologie blanche, de faire une eur Jacques Derrida en rappelant quil
en est une au moins (ou au plus) que ses crits nous enjoignent cultiver,
dans ce dsert quil arpente sans cesse avec passion. Cette eur quil nous
faut prendre, sans la cueillir, cest la patience ...
NOTES
1. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray
Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 367, here p. 26: a horizon is both the
opening and the limit that denes an innite progress or a period of
waiting. Hence the fact that justice has no horizon of expectation
(regulative or messianic) (p. 27).
2. Compare with Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, trans.
Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds Harold Coward and
Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 73142, here p. 119.
3. In this respect, see Jacques Derrida, The Double Session, Dissemination,
trans., intr. and with additional notes by Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 173286, and White Mythology:
Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, in MP, pp. 2071.
4. Derrida, ON, p. 96. Unless otherwise stated, references to this collection
in English translation of three original 1993 booklets will be exclusively
to Khra, pp. 89127.
5. This long-standing haunting is itself evoked towards the beginning of
Cinders / Feu la cendre, trans., ed., and intr. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 21. The motifs of ashes
and the desert had already been plumbed in a passage of Glas alluding to
Leopardis La Ginestra, with its echos from St John in the exergue where
a gent ower is found that is patient in the deserts, in the elds that
are strewn / With unbreeding ashes (G, p. 66).
6. Jacques Derrida, Comment ne pas parler: Dngations, in Psych:
Inventions de lautre (Paris: Galile, 1987), pp. 5601; compare with the
attempt at an English translation in How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,
p. 98. About the trace not taking place without effacing (itself), see
Diffrance, in MP, pp. 127, here p. 24; it will be recalled that this now
canonical essay contains Derridas rst attempt to disengage deconstruc-
tion from the discourse of negative theology (see especially p. 6), for
which see also Kevin Harts early critical discussion in The Trespass of
the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 1846. Cf. also Cinders, especially p. 43,
about trace and cinders as what remains without remaining.
7. Jacques Derrida, Khra (Paris: Galile, 1993), p. 37; ON, p. 100: if there
is place, or, according to our idiom, place given, to give place here does
not come to the same thing as to make a present of a place.
McQuillan 02 chap07 187 29/6/07 14:58:07
188 Laurent Milesi
8. See Jacques Derrida, Choreographies, in Points ... Interviews, 19741994,
ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), pp. 89108: originally in Diacritics, 12 (2) (1982),
pp. 6676.
9. Derrida, Khra, p. 55: ont lieu (ON, p. 107).
10. Cf. ON, p. 89, about khra, and also How to Avoid Speaking, p. 104.
11. ON, p. 109. I have silently emended the faulty translation or to of; cf.
Khra, p. 59.
12. This questioning should not take place without being aware of the larger
issues of the place of deconstruction, which I tried to address briey
in the 1998 conference on Critique and Deconstruction organised by
Geoffrey Bennington at the University of Sussex.
13. FK (1988).
14. Jacques Derrida, Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la religion aux
limites de la simple raison, in La Religion (Sminaire de Capri sous la
direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo) (Paris: Seuil / Laterza,
1996), pp. 986, here p. 29.
15. Cf. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, p. 105: that gives place to every
inscription.
16. FK, p. 19.
17. ON, p. 76.
18. Derrida, Foi et savoir, p. 27 (untranslatable in English; cf. FK, p. 17). The
complexities of the French demeure, let alone of the idiom rester demeure
and of Derridas resuscitation of the Old French word demeurance
were further elaborated especially in Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice
Blanchot (Paris: Galile, 1998); cf. e.g. p. 11: ncessaire mais impossible
demeurance de la demeure.
19. Cf. ON, p. 76.
20. FK, p. 21.
21. Both resistance and restance are the two weapons or axes which
characterise the work of deconstruction according to Derrida himself in
Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms,
Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms, in The States of Theory: History,
Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. and intr. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990), pp. 6394, here p. 87.
22. Derrida, Foi et savoir, p. 31; cf. FK, p. 21.
23. One will have silently noted the Blanchotian reference to the immmorial
in the quotation above.
24. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation,
ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 19.
25. p. 129. Cf. also Derrida, Pas, in Parages (Paris: Galile, 1986).
26. ON, p. 89.
27. Cf. ON, p. 35.
28. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, p. 100.
29. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, p. 106; cf. also p. 108: the barren,
radically nonhuman, and atheological character of this place.
30. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, pp. 11718.
31. ON, p. 97.
McQuillan 02 chap07 188 29/6/07 14:58:07
32. ON, p. 97.
33. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, p. 109. Cf. also p. 104: khra is an
absolutely necessary place which preexists Being.
34. Khra, p. 15; inadequately translated as Khra reaches us [...] in ON,
p. 89.
36. SoM, p. 28.
37. SoM, p. 168.
38. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), p. 33. Originally given as a lecture for the Cerisy
conference on Le Passage des frontires, 1992.
39. See John Caputos developments on this dilemma in John D. Caputo
(ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1997), pp. 16970. For the (Benjaminian)
origins of Derridas thinking on the topic, see SoM, p. 181, n. 2.
40. SoM, pp. 1679.
41. E.g. Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, pp. 734, 76, 77ff.
42. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: A Religion
without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Published
about the same time as the main lines and form of this essay were taking
shape, Caputos momentous study crosses mine in more paths than could
be done justice to within the limits of such a short essay, and the necessary
engagement with this admirable work must therefore be deferred. On the
structure of Derridas Blanchotian pas sans pas, see also Marian Hobson,
Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (New York and London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 14786. I would also like to refer to Arthur Bradleys excellent and
succinct paper given at the Stoke Conference, God sans Being: Derrida,
Marion and a paradoxical writing of the word without.
43. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 172. Further on, he adds:
Deconstruction is ... still one more messianism, or at least a quasi-
messianism ... a quasi-transcendental messianism (p. 173, again quoting
from SoM, p. 168).
44. The phrase can also calculatedly refer, in the context of this inaugural
Italics section, to the Italic island (Capri) which was elected as the place
of reection on religion, the theme chosen by Derrida for the rst seminar
in a new series of encounters between European philosophers.
45. FK, p. 7.
46. FK, p. 17.
47. FK, p. 19; in French: avant-premier prnom[s] (Foi et savoir, p. 29).
48. cf. FK, p. 18.
49. FK, p. 18.
50. FK, p. 18.
51. Derrida, Foi et savoir, p. 28; cf. FK, p. 18: reecting without inching.
52. FK, p. 19.
53. FK, p. 26.
54. About this dliaison, see e.g. Jacques Derrida, Fidlit plus dun: Mriter
dhriter o la gnalogie fait dfaut, Cahiers Intersignes, 13 (Idiomes,
nationalits, dconstructions: Rencontre de Rabat avec Jacques Derrida)
(Autumn 1998), pp. 22165.
McQuillan 02 chap07 189 29/6/07 14:58:07
190 Laurent Milesi
55. FK, pp. 345.
56. FK, p. 37.
57. Derrida, Foi et savoir, p. 53; cf. FK, p. 39.
58. FK, p. 16.
59. FK, p. 47.
60. FK, p. 16.
61. FK, pp. 1617. I have silently substituted bond for Samuel Webers link
for reasons of linguistic and thematic consistency in these and subsequent
translations.
62. FK, p. 22.
63. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Voyager avec Jacques Derrida: La
Contre-alle (Paris: Quinzaine littraire, 1999), p. 252.
64. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 97, where Caputo draws an
analogy between diffrance and khra.
65. On the in-between (entre-deux) as the place / locus of desire in Derrida,
esp. in Feu la cendre and its logic of X without X (reste sans reste), see
Michel Lisse, Comment ne pas dire le dernier mot? ou Le pas au-del
de la dngation, posted on Geoff Benningtons Deconstruction site at
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/texts/lisse/htm (p. 7), who
quotes the following relevant extract (here in its English translation) from
Derridas introduction to Feu la cendre: Will I dare to say that my desire
had a place, its place, between this call and this risk (Derrida, Cinders,
p. 23). See also my own essay Between Barthes, Blanchot, and Mallarm:
Skia(Photo)-Graphies of Derrida, in Julian Wolfreys, John Brannigan and
Ruth Robbins (eds), The French Connections of Jacques Derrida (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 175209.
66. Cf. FK, p. 19.
67. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1996), p. 56.
68. MO, p. 1. Cf. also p. 25: My language ... is the language of the other.
69. Cf. MO, p. 25.
70. MO, p. 61; cf. the original in MA, p. 117.
71. MO, p. 61; MA, p. 118.
72. MO, p. 64.
73. MO, p. 72.
74. MO, p. 72.
75. How to Avoid Speaking had already envisaged the question of the place
as place of writing, of inscription, of the trace (p. 101).
76. Derrida, Points..., p. 143.
77. ON, p. 59.
78. See in this respect Patrice Bougons excellent Lautobiographie et lAlgrie
dans loeuvre de Jacques Derrida, tudes de Langue et Littrature Franaises
74 (1999), pp. 197213.
79. Cf. MO, p. 68.
80. Pas, p. 26.
81. Cf. Derridas emphasis on revealability before any revelation in FK,
p. 15.
82. Cf. MO, p. 58.
McQuillan 02 chap07 190 29/6/07 14:58:07
83. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 238ff. Cf. Mallarms piece on ballet dancing,
Crayonn au thtre, in Stphane Mallarm, Oeuvres compltes, ed. Henri
Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 293351, especially
his fascination for the gures of suspension of dance, momentarily
defying the laws of gravity (pp. 302, 311); ballet dancing as the adventure
of sexual difference (p. 305); the institution of a place by the perfect
evolutions of the dancer (p. 309, about Loie Fuller; cf. also p. 305, the
near-motif rien na lieu). See also Carol Barko, The Dancer and the
Becoming of Language, Yale French Studies 54 (Mallarm) (1977),
pp. 17387, whose very title is programmatically relevant for Derridas
own writing.
84. Derrida, Cinders, p. 37; with original Mallarman echos inserted.
85. Cf. Derrida, Points..., p. 135 and There is No One Narcissism
(Autobiophotographies), in Points..., pp. 196215. About Derridean
writing and thinking as an attempt to cross towards such an ungraspable
Mallarman atopos, see e.g. Rudy Steinmetz, Les Styles de Derrida (Brussels:
De Boeck, 1994), p. 199, n. 17. J. Hillis Miller too has evoked such an
insidious (non-)place of / in Derridas writing, always ready to crypt
itself from the readers gaze and exceeding the resources of a joint topo-
nymy, -logy, -graphy; see Miller, Derridas Topographies, in Topographies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 291315, especially
pp. 2967.
86. Cf. my tangential analysis of this ne point of strategy in Derridas Le
Facteur de la vrit, within my own Joycean context of interpretation,
in The Poetics of The Purloined Letter in Finnegans Wake: Narrative
Foresight and Critical Afterthought, in Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller
(eds), A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift for Fritz Senn (Dublin: The Lilliput
Press, 1998), pp. 30622, especially p. 315.
87. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 30.
McQuillan 02 chap07 191 29/6/07 14:58:07
11
Graphematics, Politics and Irony
Claire Colebrook
It has often been noted that Derridas ethics works by a double
method. On the one hand, meaning and experience are only
possible within some differential system. On the other hand, this
condition of difference is neither systemic nor systematisable. The
conditions for meaning and sense are radically unconditioned, non-
meaningful and insensible. Derridas clearest statements on ethics
and meaning are articulated through a theory of concepts that is
clearly indebted to Kant. Derridas political theory, and his critique of
the Western tradition of political agency, is also articulated through
Kant, although this time through Kants aesthetic philosophy.
Derridas Afterword to Limited Inc offers a clear reformulation and
transformation of Kants categorical imperative; it is this side of
Derridas approach that stresses the necessarily formal conditions
of meaning and conceptuality. While the Afterword of Limited Inc
stresses the formal limits, repeatability and rigours of the concept, the
rst and earliest essay of the collection (Signature, Event, Context)
meditates upon a differential production that is neither within nor
outside limits, and that is errant, volatile and singular. Both texts
occupy the borders or limits of speech, exploring the ways in which
what we say is disjoined from what we mean.
In Limited Inc Derrida both accepts and extends the performative
theory of meaning and concepts. While Derrida embraces the
insight from speech act theory that meaning cant be assigned to
private speakers intentions because meaning is essentially trans-
subjective, he rejects the enclosure of this force or performance of
meaning within human contexts. The issue concerns the status of
pragmatics. The meaning of a speech act may reside in its force, effect
or performance rather than some independent sense and this
force can be understood as what a context or community of speakers
expects, intends or does with words. Alternatively, the pragmatics
and force of a speech act might be seen to exceed and in some way
precede speakers, positions and intentions. In such a case speech
acts would have a force that could not be reduced to action, and
192
McQuillan 02 chap07 192 29/6/07 14:58:08
Graphematics, Politics and Irony 193
pragmatics would have to consider unintended, incommunicable,
singular and passive forces at work in speech. This might then mean
transforming the very notion of the performative thinking of acts
that do not originate in agents or thinking of modes of speech
that go beyond both constatives (S is P) and performatives. (The
performative acknowledges the force of what we say, but does so by
tying the speech act to performers. On a performative theory S is
P can be read as I assert that S is P.) The debate between Derrida
and Searle concerns a number of converging issues, including the
relation between concepts and contexts, the possibility of meaning,
and the limits of ethics.
First, it might be best to occupy the common ground of Austin and
Derrida. Signature, Event, Context begins by recognising the positive
achievements of Austins speech act theory. To recognise language as
performative is to see language not just as the exchange of meanings
(as though language were a mere vehicle for a pre-linguistic sense);
it is to see language itself as an event. Language performs. There are
no meanings that language merely conveys. Language is productive
of a process of exchange, expectation and convention. Grammar is
not a static system of formal rules that speakers obey; grammars
regularity is derived from what a community of speakers does,
recognises and expects. Recognising this performative dimension of
language, Derrida insists, gets us away from some fairly entrenched
metaphysical dogmas about meaning. If we accept that language
doesnt reect or represent meaning, then meanings are internal to
the practice and performance of language itself; and it would make
no sense to appeal to what a text or statement really means divorced
from a context. Further, this also means that its not as though there
are beings to which we then attach concepts, or meanings that we
then share and articulate. Meaning is not something self-present
that is subsequently exchanged; meaning is only produced through
the performance of exchange. To a certain extent, then, meaning is
context-dependent, already social and tied to use and function.
There are two ways, at least, in which we can think through this
imbrication of context and concept. It makes no sense to think
that there are concepts, the meaning of which might be claried or
discovered. Nor does it make sense to think of the concepts meaning
as something usage invokes. Meaning is use. For Austin, but more
specically for Searle after him, such a recognition of the activity
of speech requires that we do away with a lot of bad philosophical
problems. Concepts have fuzzy boundaries. The concept good cant
McQuillan 02 chap07 193 29/6/07 14:58:08
194 Claire Colebrook
just mean what I want it to mean, but that doesnt mean theres some
essence or real meaning of good that we cant quite grasp. If good
means anything if I want to use and exchange the concept then
I have to rely on others recognising the concept. And anyone who
said, This is a good painting and then proceeded to throw it in the
dustbin, would have to be regarded as not really knowing what the
word means, or how to use it. (Unless, of course, we had a further
exchange that would make such an instance of good recognisable:
say, if the speaker then claimed to be a member of the end of art
movement. But use and misuse, meaning and incomprehension are
decided, not by appealing to what lies behind the speech act, but by
the context of expectation; clarication requires further exchanged
actions and not some meaning that hovers above what we say.)
A concept works or means only with shared and regular usage.
Concepts, such as good, dont have an intrinsic meaning; meaning is
just decided by legitimate use. To ask the Socratic question but what
does good really mean? is to lead us into philosophical muddles.
And ethicists who feel that the good might have a meaning that is
other than everyday practice and usage have failed to see the shifting,
fuzzy and contingent nature of concepts. They have failed to see the
inherent limit of philosophy.
1
Derrida also accepts that concepts only work if they are repeatable
or contextually recognised. But far from this returning us to the
human context of exchange, use and performance, he argues that
concepts have an ethicity
2
that opens and exceeds contexts. Derridas
work as a whole is directed against attempts to account for, and
enclose, the origin of meaning. Key examples include his critique of
structuralism, Foucault and Lacan. In all these cases Derrida is critical
of the production of a hyperbolic point of view that would elevate
itself above the opening of meaning.
3
To a certain extent, then, it would seem that Derrida would agree
with the anti-metaphysical pretensions of a performative account
of language. We are always within a context. Any concept we use
to explain a context by referring to a community, culture, public
sphere and so on is itself context-dependent. Theres no getting
outside, above or beyond contexts. (This is how we can read the often-
quoted remark that there is nothing outside the text. This does not
refer to there being nothing outside the text no real world outside
language. Rather it insists on the reals own textuality; there is no point
from which textuality emerges.
4
Each point is itself textual, already
other than itself. Human language is just one mode of difference and
McQuillan 02 chap07 194 29/6/07 14:58:08
exchange, it cannot function as the site of difference from which the
real must be thought.) However, such an anti-metaphysical refusal
of a founding presence is also, Derrida insists, the very height of
metaphysics, and an unavoidable metaphysics at that.
The very belief that we can nally recognise the locale of concepts
(in context) and abandon grand questions about the origins of
meaning merely displaces one metaphysical ground for another: in
speech act theory it is context that halts the transcendental question
about the emergence of sense. The point is not to rest easy with the
recognition that we are always contextual, but to assess the forces
that determine any context, and to recognise that these political
forces cannot be described exhaustively from the human point of
view. For what allows the political or human speech and contexts to
emerge may well be graphematic, inhuman, undecided:
one cannot do anything, least of all speak, without determining (in a
manner that is not only theoretical, but practical and performative) a context.
Such experience is always political because it implies, insofar as it involves
determination, a certain type of non-natural relationship to others (and this
holds as well for what we call animals, since, without being able to go into it
here, what I am saying implies a rather profound transformation of the concept
of the political along with several others in order to be able to say that man is
not the only political animal). Once this generality and this a priori structure have
been recognized, the question can be raised, not whether a politics is implied (it
always is), but which politics is implied in the practice of contextualization.
5
What counts as a legitimate or sincere use of a concept? This would,
Searle argues, be decided according to context. A concept can be used
when it obeys rules of expectations. I know what the word good
means when uttered by a lm critic, a bioethicist, a stockbroker
or a priest. But this doesnt mean that theres a meaning of good
that attaches to a lm, a decision, an investment or my soul. (And
we all know that there are varying degrees of strictness of usage. I
can demand of a stockbroker that he quantify just how good this
investment is, and I can expect the lm critic to work on a rough
scale from one to ve. But the bioethicist and the priest are, perhaps,
allowed some mathematical leeway; we know they use the concept
differently with a much vaguer quantitative sense, but with a much
more strict moral sense.) Not only, according to Searle, can we sort
out concepts, more or less, according to use and context, we can also
decide parasitic uses. If I say Hell is other people in a stage play
then you know I dont mean (or really use) the phrase. Because we
McQuillan 02 chap07 195 29/6/07 14:58:08
are in a theatre and this is a play Hell is other people only counts
as a mention. Of course a play is only meaningful if we take someone
to be using the phrases. If a play were received as all mention then it
would be as though we were watching people on stage uttering mere
noise. We have to take the sounds we hear as being intended in some
way, and so the mention by the performer relies on the use by the
character. What makes the theatrical utterance secondary or parasitic
is that mentions rely on a clear distinction between the performer
(who speaks) and the performative (who is the performed speaker
or character). This is how performatives work. I now pronounce
you man and wife can be used only in certain contexts, by priests,
ministers or celebrants. But it can be mentioned by actors, story-
tellers or linguists. (We might ask: Does an impersonator or con-artist
use or mention the phrase? Perhaps we can say that he uses the phrase
illegitimately, or that we mistook a mention for a use. The distinction
requires that we be certain both of the context and of the user: this
really is a registered celebrants ofce otherwise this marriage is all
mere mention.) The force of the phrase, or what it does, depends on
its context, and context is determined by shared recognition and
expectation, those we sanction as priests or celebrants, and situations
where we anticipate feigning (such as theatres, cinemas or lectures
on narrative).
But how do we decide on the borders of a context? In the rst
essay of his engagement with performatives Derrida uses the word
ethical in an almost pejorative sense: someone decides or polices the
borders of a context, invoking an already present distinction between
legitimate and parasitic uses (without questioning how such a border
is decided). Derrida refers to a structural parasitism; it is part of the
very structure of language that any original or sincere use already
repeats and relies upon differences that are not unique to its own
context. Austins division between sincere and parasitic uses passes
off an ethical and theological determination as unquestioned fact,
and does so because of a metaphysical commitment. The sincere
use is one in which the speaker wants to say what is spoken. The
parasitic use is detached from the speaker, merely quoted or feigned.
Despite his manifest aim of not appealing to the metaphysical ideal
of meanings and speakers intentions Austin relies on the presence
to self of a total context, the transparency of intentions, the presence
of meaning to the absolutely singular uniqueness of a speech act.
6

Austin acknowledges that a concept works only if it can be repeated
and used in more than one instance; but this departure of a concept
McQuillan 02 chap07 196 29/6/07 14:58:08
from any single origin is contained by invoking contexts. The very
force of concepts is halted by some moralising decision on what
our context is, how we use the concept and what we mean. We all
know that Hell is other people uttered by a character in a play does
not have the same force as Hell is other people being uttered in a
philosophy essay. We might say, then, that we have a convention
for recognising the distinction between a phrase uttered in earnest
and one quoted or feigned. A committed use would rely on certain
conventions, such as the genre of the philosophy essay or the
culture of conversation. Sincerity or meaning would not be some
psychological entity behind the speech act, such that we could ask
whether what is said is really being meant; sincerity has certain clear
external, social and customary markers. Actors wear costumes and
stand on stages; sincere speakers sit around coffee tables or stand at
lecterns.
The distinction between use and mention relies, therefore, on
a recognisable community of users. But if community sincerity is
conventional and contextual it relies on a strict distinction between
use and mention. The relation between use and community becomes
circular. We only know what a use is because we have certain
conventions to distinguish between sincerity and quoting, but such
conventions work only if we take them as uses and not mentions. We
have to know when a convention for sincerity is being used sincerely,
and vice versa for quotation. Irony and sincerity are not intra-political
or intra-philosophical issues. Often deciding whether a speech act is
literary/ctional or sincere/propositional is directly political.
Consider the recent case of the novelist Helen Darville/
Demedenko, a case that raises all the political and metaphysical
questions that are essential to literary criticism. Demedenko was a
prize-winning novelist whose account of anti-Semitism and wartime
atrocities in The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994) was recognised as
a literary masterpiece. When her writing was itself accused of anti-
Semitism the literary establishment explained that what looked like
or could be read as anti-Semitism in her work was actually a ctional
use of anti-Semitic characters ways of speaking and point of view.
The novel was actually anti-anti-Semitic, and showed the horrors of
prejudice precisely by presenting it so faithfully. Appeal to context
and authorship buttressed Demedenkos case; she herself was of
Eastern European Jewish heritage, with a father who had suffered
in the camps. The problem of politics and authenticity arose when
Demedenko was exposed as an Anglo-Saxon Australian. How sincere
McQuillan 02 chap07 197 29/6/07 14:58:08
was her claim to have not been speaking sincerely in her novel; could
all those anti-Semitic speech acts be condently taken as mentions?
Was her novel a sincere use of the phrases of anti-Semitism, or was
it an ironic mention of anti-Semitic styles of speech and thought?
Was she sincere in claiming her novel to be ironic? It had seemed
that an appeal to facts outside the narrative (such as her ethnicity)
would decide the issue. But what are we saying about speech acts
and their ethical force if their sincerity and authenticity need to
be contextually determined, and if this context is itself capable
of being feigned or misrecognised? This reinforces the extent to
which there could be nothing in the speech act itself that would
differentiate its sincerity from its feigning. By lying about her own
identity Darville-Demedenko had aunted all the conventions for
securing the boundaries between use and mention. Just how ctional
her novel was depended on securing just how ctional the authors
biography was.
7
These are issues that haunt literary criticism. We have to decide
whether a story uttered from the point of view of an anti-Semite
is mentioning, or sincerely using, its concepts. (A mention would
rob the story of its anti-Semitic force.) We have to be secure about
the conventions that govern speaking positions and we have to be
sure that our community all of it recognises such conventions.
Such a community would agree on certain markers for feigning and
certain markers for sincerity, and would agree on contexts when these
markers could be feigned or used unconventionally.
The problem with all this becomes apparent if we look at how
concepts work, if we look at the possibility of concepts. If it is the case
that concepts work through recognition and exchange this means
that we cant just make them mean what we want them to mean.
They must be experienced as having some sense that lies above and
beyond any singular instance. A language can only mean if we rely
on shared usage. Concepts only work with this intention of a sense
to be fullled. When Derrida argues that concepts are intentional
he is using the Husserlian or phenomenological notion of intention:
a concept is always a concept of. Concepts are always more than
their aural or written token; they are concepts insofar as they intend
point towards or aim at some sense:
the telos of fullment (and in this I believe Husserl was right) is not an
accidental element, separable from the concept of intentionality. It is not a
metaphysical supplement, as in French one sometimes speaks of a supplement
McQuillan 02 chap07 198 29/6/07 14:58:08
of soul [supplment dame], a residue that need only be eliminated in order
nally to speak scientically (and not metaphysically) about intentionality; it
is part of its concept. Intentional movement tends toward this fullment. This
is the origin or the fatality of that longing for metaphysical plenitude which,
however, can also be presupposed, described, or lived without the romantic,
even mystical pathos sometimes associated with those words.
8
What makes a context possible that we all speak with the aim of
some sense that we share is also what renders a context essentially
open and impossible. For that plenitude to which all intentionality
aims is already inaccessible in perception or in intuition in general
as the experience of a present content.
9
I can only have a context
you and I speaking together here and now if there is some extra-
contextual, repeatable and meaningful language at our disposal. Its
true that this language only works by exchange and expectation,
but that exchange (within contexts) relies on a system of exchange
that cant be reduced to context. If there is a context some site of
exchange that we recognise as our own then there must already
be a system or differential movement that inscribes that context
and allows for its emergence. Before there is exchange between
or among participants within a context Derrida argues for a more
general exchange: not an economy circulating from one point to
another, but an anarchic economy that allows each point to emerge.
Such an economy could not be reduced to agents purposes and
intentions precisely because intention and purpose are already events
within meaning.
This is why Derrida makes much of another sense of communication.
10

Communication can be understood as the exchange of sense among
participants; but it might also be understood in an inhuman and
passive sense. A tremor can be communicated through a material
medium; viruses can be communicated, and one can speak of
communications in a technological sense where data might still
ow and yet be uncomprehended, unspoken or outside enunciation.
Derrida draws attention to the possibility of Searles own position,
where Searle suggests that he has been touched or affected by what
Derrida has written and this is so even if Derrida has not meant to
say, or not said, what Searle has taken him to say.
11
All this raises a
whole new pragmatics and responsibility. If signs have a force that
cannot be explained fully by speakers intentions or active purposes,
or by contextual norms, then we might need to consider pragmatics
and language beyond speech acts. The very possibility of a context
McQuillan 02 chap07 199 29/6/07 14:58:08
that there is some general shared system of meaning also renders
the closure of that context impossible. A context is just that capacity
for speakers to condently use signs or concepts and rely on the
recognition and expectations of others. Contexts are enabled by
concepts, signs that have a sense above and beyond their singular
utterance. Consequently, a concept is meaningful only if it can exceed
a context, if it can be quoted, feigned or simulated. A concept must
have more than just an ostensive denition.
Take the concept of justice. Now I may want to say that this concept
just means what we say, contemporary Australia use it to mean. An
Aboriginal land rights activist might point to times when the word
justice was used by us for certain unjust actions. (It was argued that
it was in the interests of social justice that Aboriginal children were
taken from their families and redistributed into white foster care
and institutions. It was also argued, and still is argued, that justice
cant just return land to Aboriginal peoples because there are other
legal claims.) These issues are complex, but there is a condition for
this complexity. First, we might want to appeal against the usage or
context of justice. The land rights campaigner might point out that
what we mean by justice isnt justice at all; in doing so she appeals,
and is able to appeal, to a sense of justice beyond our context. And
this is because insofar as justice is a concept it only works if any
of its uses appeals to a sense beyond any specic use. The word
would have no sense without its original context but it cant be fully
owned by that context. Indigenous Australians could take all the
concepts that have been used for oppressive purposes concepts like
justice, democracy, autonomy and equality and appeal to a more
rigorous sense. Secondly, if it is the case that our context has used
certain concepts for certain unintended effects, then this also means
we have to expand the force of concepts beyond agents intended
responsibility. The Australian government, for example, has refused
to apologise to the stolen generation of indigenous Australians
on the grounds that they never intended such racist and pernicious
effects and that such effects cannot be held to be the responsibility
of the present government or contemporary white Australia. This
limits responsibility to present and self-conscious intent, a limit
transgressed by a Derridean understanding of concepts. Concepts
may have unintended or passive effects, effects not of the subjects of
enunciation, but which produce a political landscape nevertheless.
Concepts like democracy, equality, rationality and so on do possess
a positive and afrmative ethical dimension, but their circulation,
McQuillan 02 chap07 200 29/6/07 14:58:09
communication and effect have also belied their sense. Insofar as
our ethics is still well within this conceptual arsenal we must bear
responsibility both for the history and risks of these concepts, as
well as looking to a fullment of their sense and promise which lies
beyond the current context. Perhaps one day there really will be
justice, a justice to come. But this will only be possible if there is an
expanded responsibility and pragmatics that recognises the unjust
forces that are structural to any concept. (This is a concepts essential
capacity for moralism, for operating as a point from which the ethical
might be decided or determined.)
Like Kant, Derrida argues that concepts, or at least some concepts,
bear an inherent metaphysical (and ethical) trajectory. Derridas
ethics of the concept in the Afterword in Limited Inc is directed
against the metaphysical moralism that would appeal to contexts as
some form of limit or foundation. Its because we have no context
in general that a concept can always be open to future meaning. The
condition for any recognisable or avowed context is a language and
exchangeability that cant be enclosed within a context. A context
cannot guarantee that what I mean to say (or what you think we
mean) will be present to us both, or present to us all. On the contrary,
insofar as we have a context what we say is essentially and already
other than ourselves. The notion of a closed context has often been
used to buttress certain forms of communitarianism and pragmatism.
If anything we say or mean is contextually located, then ethical laws
cant be transcendental. They must be determined through shared
procedures of recognition, along with a resignation to the limits of
ethics. But if, as Derrida insists, the argument for contexts is also
an admission that meaning is never self-present, and that contexts
only work if they are open, such an ethics of shared recognition is
no longer the unsurpassable limit of the ethical. Rather, ethics lies
also in an attention to the force of a concept, a force that cannot
be contained within human (or community) intention. For human
intention would already rely on a graphematics in general beyond
all decision. We might, then, also need to rethink the humanity of
intention and the decision, for concepts and graphematics and not
just persons might have a decisive force.
Even if we dont follow Derrida all the way regarding the status
of graphematics within experience (as experiences radically
anterior condition) his argument regarding concepts and the ethics
of concepts provides a radical extension of the relation between
conditions of meaning and responsibility. If meaning works through
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shared contexts, then meaning is already other than any individual
speaker and it is therefore always possible to extend the repeatability
beyond any supposedly original or governing context. We can ask
about the concept of justice in general. And we can look at all those
instances where the concept has operated with a force not determined
by its original context (where justice has had effects for which no
speaker might seem to bear direct responsibility).
12
The condition for
the possibility of a context that there are concepts that are neither
yours nor mine but that can be exchanged generally is also the
contexts impossibility. The iterability that makes a concept possible
also tears it away from its contextual home. Derrida therefore insists
on the structural or essential possibility of concepts. A concept
may be repeated outside its intended context. But why would we
wish to focus on this possibility? (This is Searles objection: for the
most part we mean what we say and it is just wilful obscurantism to
focus on those parasitic cases where meaning doesnt work or it isnt
sincere.) Why attend to the unstable side of meaning? For Derrida
it is this possibility of loss and non-meaning that opens ethics.
If a concept is repeatable, open to further articulation, then its force
cannot be decided once and for all. Theres a certain promise within
concepts a promise that is given through the differential structure of
graphematics and that cannot be reduced to speaker intention. This
is the promise of a sense that is not present, not given, and which
also enables us to think a beyond to human force and decision:
There is a supplementary paradox that also must be taken into account and
that complicates all of this in a manner that is both terrible and yet nonviolent
(for it is perhaps nonviolence itself): as soon as it accommodates reference
as difference and inscribes diffrance in presence, this concept of text or of
context no longer opposes writing to erasure. The text is not a presence, any
more than remains [la restance] are the same as permanence This concept
of writing or of trace perturbs every logic of opposition, every dialectic. It de-
limits what it limits.
This is why (a) the niteness of a context is never secured or simple, there
is an indenite opening of every context, an essential nontotalization; (b)
whatever there can be of force or of irreducible violence in the attempt to x
the contexts of utterances, or of anything else, can always communicate, by
virtue of the erasure just mentioned, with a certain weakness, even with an
essential nonviolence.
13
Those who wish to limit concepts to contexts regard this possibility
of nonviolence as an accident or an anomaly, but they do so only
McQuillan 02 chap07 202 29/6/07 14:58:09
by disavowing the very essence (or essential possibility) of concepts.
A concept is necessarily repeatable, necessarily other than any self-
present meaning. Recognising this means acknowledging that we
have no stable context, that there are no grounds or foundations
to which we might appeal to give us the full sense of what we say.
Ethics is this responsibility and promise of possibility, rather than
the recognition and limitation of where we are.
In addition to the futural and open dimension of a concepts
repeatability a repetition made possible by an iterability that extends
beyond the given and the human a concept is also inherited, given
from elsewhere and imbricated in a historicity that is not reducible
to meaning and intention. Our context is not something we decided,
nor are its borders decidable. Those concepts through which we
seek ethical recognition and which we seek to recognise, have an
undecidable emergence one for which we must be responsible.
A concept speaks to us from elsewhere and is given, just as much
as it conditions the given. Derridas interrogation of philosophys
conceptual arsenal his classic deconstructive manoeuvres attend
to just this unintended, graphic and errant givenness of concepts.
Is it possible to use the words idea, metaphor, signier, history,
subject or logic innocently? Against the logocentric notion that
would tie a concept to the subject of enunciation or the voice,
Derridas graphematics intensies the machinic, monstrous, demonic
and given emergence of concepts.
Derridas ethics of concepts works around both sides of this
monstrous givenness. Concepts speak or mean only if they are
other: already freed from the self-present voice of the speaker. If
this is so we can always ask the Socratic question about the pure
possibility of such concepts: what is justice in general? History in
general? Writing in general? Reason in general? If we do not accept
one of the already given or determined gures of reason, meaning,
history or writing, then we are open to an essential nonviolence. It
is only through a demonic hyperbole which exceeds the totality of
the world, as the totality of what I can think in general that we open
concepts to possibilities not already given or present.
14
The futurity
or ideal of concepts does not intimate some higher realm towards
which we ought to strive, but a possibility within the very structure
of speech in general. The appeal to already given conventions and
contexts violently closes the concepts capacity to intend more than
we say:
McQuillan 02 chap07 203 29/6/07 14:58:09
when I say that this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and very
meaning of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets, I am
not invoking an other world, an alibi or evasive transcendence. That would be
yet another possibility of violence, a possibility that is, moreover, often the
accomplice of the rst one.
15
We cannot reduce meaning to context, recognition or intent, for
context, recognition and intention are the effects of iterability and
not a possible ground. On the other hand, this voice of concepts
their elevation, lawfulness, promise or call emerges from an
inhuman event and a monstrous or anarchic genesis. If philosophy
is a haunting forever dazzled by an idea of truth it will never render
present it is no less an exorcism, an attempt to domesticate and
internalise its ideals and concepts as its own. The medium for this
domestication of the spectral and the uncanny is the gure of the
voice: the subject speaks in order to render himself present, self-
identical and his concepts as conscious, intended and meaningful.
What appears as demonic and pathological as other within the
human must be comprehended as reasons own. The voice is
precisely just that passage from the brute givenness and recalcitrance
of physicality to the self-affectation of sense. This duplicity of voice
is what makes philosophy both a haunting and an exorcism: the
concept must at once hover above and be irreducible to contexts,
such that we can ask the philosophical question of the sense of the
concept. At the same time, the question returns sense to voice, to
what we must have meant when the concept emerged:
Now, all this, this about which we have failed to say anything whatsoever that
is logically determinable, this that comes with so much difculty to language,
this that seems not to mean anything, this that puts to rout our meaning-to-
say, making us speak regularly from the place where we want to say nothing,
where we know clearly what we do not want to say but do not know what we
would like to say, as if this were no longer either of the order of knowledge or
will or will-to-say, well, this comes back, this returns, this insists in urgency, and
this gives one to think, but this, which is each time irresistible enough, singular
enough to engender as much anguish as do the future and death, this stems
less from a repetition automatism (of the automatons that have been turning
before us for such a long time) than it gives us to think all this, altogether other,
every other, from which the repetition compulsion arises: that every other is
altogether other. The impersonal ghostly returning of the es spukt produces an
automatism of repetition, no less than it nds its principle of reason there.
16
McQuillan 02 chap07 204 29/6/07 14:58:09
Derridas supplement to the spectrality and exorcism of philosophy
is the monstrosity of graphematics; and this too has an ethical
dimension. Perhaps, he suggests, there is a demonic repetition: before
the repeatable exchange of concepts that carries sense through time
and provides a medium of self-recognition, there is a repetition
that is not the repetition of some agent or subject. Prior to sense,
comprehension, conceptuality and presence there must have been
an iteration. The syntax of a language, its phonematic or graphic
structure, relies on identiable marks identiable only after their
repetition. This is not the repetition of sense or meaning; this
iterability gives meaning. The graph or trace gives repetition, a
repetition that comes from elsewhere. If the meaning, repeatability
and promise of concepts gives us a future, the untamed genesis of
the concept is sent or given, not from consciousnesss own past, but
from a graphics or machinism that distributes past from present.
The givenness of concepts is bi-directional: given from a past that
was never present and giving a future sense that exceeds the force
of our context. Concepts enable the intention of a truth in general,
a justice in general or a democracy to come, where the sense of
these terms is not delimited by the force of enunciation. The concept
gives thought this inhuman dimension, the very possibility of the
philosophical question, alongside the impossibility of any closed
answer. But this gift of the opening of concepts, this impossibility of
ever exhaustively deciding or determining what we mean, emerges
from a no less undecidable origin.
The Kantian emphasis on the concepts openness and futural
promise would seem to align Derrida with a radical liberal or possibly
even existential ethics. In the absence of any closed or denitive
context we are compelled to decide, and each act of speech should
proceed with full awareness of, and responsibility for, its decision.
Attending to the structure of concepts what they do, their force and
their possibility extends the scope of this decision beyond present
intent. But the possibility of this openness is not just undecidable
in the sense that we are without foundations; it is also undecidable
to the extent that we are placed within effects that proceed from
no decision at all. What is before the decision is neither the pure
passivity and inertia of an undifferentiated foundation, nor the pure
activity of an absolutely unfounded spontaneity.
Politics, ethics and responsibility are, particularly in modernity,
tied to voice, ownness and responsibility. But what if the borders
between ownness and alterity, between voice and mouth, between the
McQuillan 02 chap07 205 29/6/07 14:58:09
active concept and received givenness were themselves ambiguously
given? Such borders might be neither given from without nor given
by the subject, but given in both senses: given in the sense of being
received or factical (what is immutably given) and given in the sense
of being bestowed or coming from elsewhere (the gift). The given is
both that which we do not decide the given in the sense of what is
not open as well as being a donation or surplus, what is in excess
or beyond ourselves.
Post-structuralism is often seen as a movement that reduces
argument to rhetorical force. But we are also no less frequently told
that this is not the point of post-structuralism, a movement that
actually attends to the unavoidable hierarchical dimensions of any
textual system.
17
A text is not indeterminate, although it is always
effected through a certain undecidability. As text it must always
determine, inscribe, limit or trace; it will always adopt a certain tone.
And this tone cannot but have a certain force. In the re-reading of this
trace or the intoning of tone
18
Derridean deconstruction attends to
the undecidability of textual determination, the dependence upon
a trace which constitutes the determinate but which can never be
fully determined. Is Derrida ironic? Yes, if we regard irony as an
attention to the limits of any voice or tone. Yes, if we regard irony
as an attention to the unavoidable hierarchy that follows from the
delimitation of the limit. But the absence, or claimed absence, of
what lies above and beyond voice, tone, determinacy or tracing
diffrance is not also demands that deconstruction be a free-indirect
inhabitation of style,
19
rather than an ironic delimitation of style. It
cannot pose a voice, world or transcendence above and beyond the
text that it deconstructs:
Deconstruction, in the singular, is not inherently anything at all that might be
determinable on the basis of this code and of its criteria. It is inherently nothing
at all Deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical,
outside of its inscriptions in conictual and differentiated contexts; it is only
what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place.
20
For Derrida, what lies outside style or rhetoric can only ever be
approached rhetorically. Nevertheless, Derridas work begins with
the question of the unnameable and pre-temporal space beyond
point of view and perspective. His meditation on the Platonic
opening of philosophy is, typically, an investigation into the khra
that precedes the recognition of point of view and is beyond all
anthropomorphy:
21
McQuillan 02 chap07 206 29/6/07 14:58:09
We would never claim to propose the exact word, the mot juste, for khra, nor to
name it, itself, over and above all the turns and detours of rhetoric, nor nally to
approach it, itself, for what it will have been, outside of any point of view, outside
of any anachronic perspective. Its name is not an exact word, not a mot juste. It
is promised to the ineffaceable even if what it names, khra, is not reduced to
its name. Tropology and anachronism are inevitable. And all we would like to
show is that it is structure which makes them thus inevitable, makes of them
something other than accidents, weaknesses, or provisional moments.
22
Furthermore, Derrida situates Socratic discourse in an undecidable
non-place. The Socratic position is a disturbance of the question of
who is speaking.
Khra means: place occupied by someone, country, inhabited place, marked
place, rank, post, assigned position, territory, or region. And in fact, khra will
always already be occupied, invested, even as a general place, and even when
it is distinguished from everything that takes place in it the discourse of
Socrates, if not the Socratic discourse, the discourse of Socrates in this precise
place and on this marked place, proceeds from or affects to proceed from errancy
[depuis lerrance], from a mobile or nonmarked place, in any case from a space or
exclusion which happens to be, into the bargain, neutralized. Why neutralized?
If Socrates pretends to include himself among those whose genus is to have
no place, he does not assimilate himself to them. Hence he holds himself in a
third genus, in a way, neither that of the sophists, poets, and other imitators
(of whom he speaks), nor that of the philosopher-politicians (to whom he speaks,
proposing only to listen to them). His speech is neither his address nor what
he addresses. His speech occurs in a third genus and in the neutral space or a
place without place, a place where everything is marked but which would be
in itself unmarked.
23
For Derrida, the demand to think the limit of meaning as such, is
demanded necessarily by the hierarchy or inauguration of meaning
in general. And this hierarchy would no longer be social or within the
social. The delimitation of voice through irony would no longer as
in the tradition of irony be a sign of high urbanity. Rather, it would
be the opening of the social as such. Post-structuralist irony is not
personality or position, but the logical condition for any position;
it is a certain, but necessary, non-position. It is in the thorough
dehumanisation of the limit of meaning, that irony reaches its limit.
No longer a form of life or a way of placing the human beyond any
given denition, the thinking of the limit is the recognition that there
is nothing other than limit. Any form of life or personality which
McQuillan 02 chap07 207 29/6/07 14:58:09
inaugurates the limit is always an (hierarchical) effect of the limit
itself. It is not a personality or form of life recognising its limit that
constitutes the ethical for Derrida, but a radically anterior tracing or
mark which is essentially pre-human.
24
If irony traditionally traced
the limit of meaning in order to make room for the soul, Derridas
philosophy of the limit sees any posited soul as an effect of the limit
itself. Nevertheless, like Kant and the ironic tradition before and
after him, Derrida notes that whatever its genesis we are always
haunted by the look of the law:
This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by
it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part,
according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation,
of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely
unmasterable disproportion. Here anachrony makes the law. To feel ourselves
seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect
on the basis of which we inherit from the law.
25
The task is to see this look as resulting from the death and absence
of the subject. It is only when speech is freed from the mouth of one
who speaks, when the look is no longer located within the intent of
the theorising subject, that we can ask the question of sense in general,
of the emergence or gift of what we mean that goes beyond what we
want to say. If Mourning presupposes sight
26
this is because we can
only be other than life through the distance of the look. But we need
to see the coterminous look and death that gives us voice as other than
human, as the very possibility of the human. We cannot think the
opening of thought except through one of its determined gures,
and this means that there is an essential passivity or machinism
within all thinking. Prior to the conscious opposition between active
and passive, man or machine we rely on a vicarious image of the
conscious. Such examples are neither empirical nor metaphysical;
they inscribe the opposition between the empirical and metaphysical.
If we accept the vicarious nature of this exemplarity, then we also
accept a new notion of the political. No longer a subject who proceeds
from itself to determine and decide itself; for any decision as to what
counts as human already relies on a vicarious, errant and contingent
gure of the decision:
Vicariousness would in turn be reassuring only if it substituted an identiable
term for an unrepresentable one, if it allowed one to step aside from the abyss
in the direction of another place, if it were interested in some other go-around
McQuillan 02 chap07 208 29/6/07 14:58:10
[interess a quelque manege]. But for that it would have to be itself and represent
itself as such. Whereas it is starting from that impossibility that economimesis
is constrained in its processes.
This impossibility cannot be said to be some thing, something sensible or
intelligible, that could fall under one or the other senses or under some concept.
One cannot name it within the logocentric system within the name which
in turn can only vomit it and vomit itself in it. One cannot even say: what is it?
That would be to begin to eat it, or what is no longer absolutely different to
vomit it. The question what is? already parleys like a parergon, it constructs a
framework which captures the energy of what is completely inassimilable and
absolutely repressed. Any philosophical question already determines, concerning
this other, a parergoric parergon. A parergoric remedy softens with speech; it
consoles, it exhorts with the word. As its name indicates.
27
NOTES
1. See B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins,
1985).
2. WD, p. 122.
3. WD, p. 61.
4. What I call text implies all the structures called real, economic,
historical, socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents. Another
way of recalling once again that there is nothing outside the text. That
does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied or enclosed in a
book, as people have claimed, or have been nave enough to believe and
to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all
reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer
to this real except in an interpretive experience (Derrida, Limited Inc
[Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988], p. 148).
5. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 136.
7. For a documentary account of the case see J. Jost, G. Totaro and C. Tyshing
(eds), The Demedenko File (Melbourne: Penguin, 1996). For a political
critique of the affair see M. Nolan, Mistaken Identities Narrating
Literary Hoaxes, Australian Studies 13.1 (1998), pp. 14257.
11. Thus, Sarl did indeed understand. No question here of the essentials
being misunderstood. Or rather, if understanding is still a notion
dominated by the allegedly constative regime of theory or of philosophy,
let us not use the word understood, let us instead say that Sarl was
touched (Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 41).
12. Both deconstruction and perhaps more explicitly feminist criticism
have looked at the ethical consequences of the errancy of concepts. No
one, or at least not everyone, may have intended to use the concept
McQuillan 02 chap07 209 29/6/07 14:58:10
of reason to institute a sexual hierarchy. (Interesting cases for feminist
theory are not really those of conscious oppression or prejudice but
concern all those oppressions within the language we speak and the
structure of our thought.) The concept of reason has an inscriptive history
which no speaker or writer can fully control. Reason translates the Latin
ratio which describes some grounding logic or order through which the
world is given. And this concept relies on certain gures of a world that
possesses its own order awaiting representation in consciousness. This
also gives certain norms for thinking: of an active subject who is rational
insofar as he reects and uncovers a world that is not in itself capable
of giving forth its own sense. According to Luce Irigaray it is just this
scene of thinking which both produces the normative notion of the
active, rational subject alongside a passive and mute world; and this scene
is contaminated with the force of a sexual hierarchy or scenography.
Derrida undertakes a similar analysis of many concepts to see whether
they can, with all the efforts philosophers make, be disengaged from
certain metaphysical determinations that are not autonomously intended
or decided. In Limited Inc he argues that the concept of communication,
for example, is intertwined with the concept of metaphor, and that both
concepts determine a certain order of thought: because the value of
displacement, of transport, etc., is precisely constitutive of the concept
of metaphor with which one claims to comprehend the semantic
displacement that is brought about from communication as a semio-
linguistic phenomenon (Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 2).
14. WD, p. 56.
15. WD, p. 56.
16. SoM, pp. 1723.
17. Norriss defence of Derrida is the clearest example of the distinction
between post-structuralism and relativist textualism.
18. Derrida, Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, trans.
John P. Leavey, Jr, Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984), pp. 337.
19. One of the great examples of free-indirect style in Derrida is his essay
on Emmanuel Levinass attempt to think a point outside the violent
determinations of the philosophical tradition. Most of the sentences
repeat and retrace Levinass argument, without quotation marks or
explicit attribution. The following sentences are clearly Levinass position
rather than Derridas, for they are interspersed with quotation. Typically,
for Derrida, they are expressed not as propositions but as a series of
noun phrases: Without intermediary and without communion, absolute
proximity and absolute distance: eros in which, within the proximity
to the other, distance is integrally maintained; eros whose pathos is
made simultaneously of this proximity and this duality. A community
of nonpresence, and therefore of nonphenomenality. Not a community
without light, not a blindfolded synagogue, but a community anterior
to Platonic light. A light before neutral light, before the truth which
arrives as a third party, the truth which we look toward together, the
judgmental arbitrators truth (WD, p. 91). But as the essay progresses
and Derrida continues to speak through Levinas, the distinction between
McQuillan 02 chap07 210 29/6/07 14:58:10
voices and positions becomes less clear. Derrida is not offering another
position so much as repeating Levinass own themes and style to disclose
his complicity with the other voices of the tradition in particular, Husserl
and Heidegger. Beginning in free-indirect style, Derrida moves between
explicitly quoting Levinas and interspersing his argument with other
voices. The essay concludes, having been faithful to Levinass question
and project, with the impossibility of any pure question, closing with a
quotation from James Joyce. The very project of deconstruction of being
nothing other than a solicitation of the tradition is inextricably tied, like
literary modernism to a style of quotation, allusion and impure voices:
Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who we? Are we (not a chronological
question, but a pre-logical question) rst Jews or rst Greeks? And what
is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition
from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: Jewgreek is
greekjew. Extremes meet? (WD, p. 153).
21. ON, p. 111.
22. ON, pp. 945.
23. ON, p. 109.
24. Following Drucilla Cornell we might argue that Derrida presents a
philosophy of the limit, where the ethical lies precisely in the limit as
such and not the character or being of that which exceeds the limit.
25. SoM, p. 7.
26. Derrida, Economimesis, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11.2 (1981),
p. 3.
27. Derrida, Economimesis, p. 25.
McQuillan 02 chap07 211 29/6/07 14:58:10
12
The Irony of Deconstruction
and the Example of Marx
Richard

Beardsworth
INTRODUCTION
Deconstruction constitutes a corpus of thinking that emerged out of
Jacques Derridas reading of Heideggerian ontology and Husserlian
phenomenology. Since those readings philosophical in kind
deconstruction has emerged as a powerful set of practices that has
inuenced and restructured, with other continental thinking, the
humanities, social sciences and arts. In this chapter when I speak
of deconstruction, I am focusing on the strategies of thought that
constitute Derridas relationship to the tradition of philosophy,
to texts outside that tradition and to the world as such, strategies
that have been inherited and pursued by those interested in them,
whatever their particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary eld. When
I speak of the culture of deconstruction I mean the general effects that
deconstruction has had in its history since those initial readings.
Deconstruction is a powerful set of practices concerning the
political and a structurally problematic one. Its power and difculty
do not just concern its relation to the political (its understanding
of it, its negotiations with it, its sense of political intervention to
begin with), but is deeply rooted, as is the case for any philosophical
system or complex of thoughts, in its very conception of thinking
and discursive strategy. This is not an easy thing to argue in regard
to any set of thoughts that carries much intellectual force, all the less
easy with regard to the practice of deconstruction that has argued at
length that it constitutes neither a system, nor a corpus nor indeed
a set of thoughts (as against a set of acts). For this reason, and in
the awareness that this volume is prepared by its editor as a forum
of debate concerning deconstructions relation to the political, I
take this opportunity to be as frank as possible about what I nd
problematic in deconstructions very power.
1
Deconstruction is structured by a profound irony, one that its fate
as a culture of thought will perhaps reveal more straightforwardly
212
McQuillan 02 chap07 212 29/6/07 14:58:10
The Irony of Deconstruction 213
than its own writings, but one that must be discussed in terms of
these writings for the sake of the future of thought as such. The irony
is this: in showing how from within philosophy it wishes to open up
the world from out of metaphysico-ontological schema, at the same
time it also closes the world down through the very set of strategies
it puts in place to open it. The structure of the irony is such and
this is why it can be named by this gure in the rst place that
deconstruction has no choice: through opening up the world (contra
previous neutralisations), it also closes it down. The irony carries
two further ironies.
With regard to the political, deconstruction counters twentieth-
century versions of the totalitarian by in principle re-reading
the political tradition as a whole as a tradition of metaphysical
thinking and by looking within this tradition for structures of
radical indeterminacy and opening that this tradition cannot
account for. Since this tradition is one to which as human subjects
we are all beholden, the indeterminacy and opening are irreducible.
Consequently, all political determinations close this opening down
to a lesser or greater extent. The regime of democracy less, modern
substantial politics (fascism and communism) much more. It is
consequently an imperative of a quasi-ethical kind to track this
opening, analyse its specic congurations within history, and
respect it as far as possible in order to foster a re-politicisation and
re-conceptualisation of the political at the closure of the metaphysical
tradition. As I argued in Derrida and the Political, both this re-politi-
cisation and re-conceptualisation work with the renement of the
modern democratic model of politics. The rst implication of the
above irony is therefore the following: Through countering the
political saturation of the originary social bond theorised by
deconstruction in terms of Heideggers existentiale of Mitsein and/
or the Levinasian relation to the other and through showing that
saturation constitutes the risk of all political regimes (not just those
of the twentieth century), deconstruction ends up itself closing down
the very possibility of political invention. The second implication
is that this is true for its relation to the real in general: Through
discursively practising not anticipating the future, deconstruction
ends up closing the future down.
In these ironies lies the problem more largely of the relation in
deconstruction between the indeterminate and determination. I
consider that, contrary to deconstructions belief, this relation between
the indeterminate and determination is specically organised in its
McQuillan 02 chap07 213 29/6/07 14:58:10
214 Richard Beardsworth
thinking, and that it is because of the way that it is organised that the
above ironies ensue. It is also due to the philosophical nature of this
gesture that I approach deconstruction as a philosophy (whatever
else it has rightly become or wishes to be), or rather that I confront
the problem philosophically. These are large claims, and I will not go
into all of them here. I do not have the space, nor would it be entirely
appropriate to this volume.
What I will do here is develop these ironies, where they concern
the political and the future, through Derridas engagement with Marx
in Specters of Marx. I choose Marx for several reasons. First, if it is true
that the fates of the political tradition of thinking in the twentieth
century haunt the conceptual strategies of deconstruction more
than necessary, then Marx and deconstructions relation to Marx are
crucial to my thesis. For Marx, in the wake of the difference between
the Kantian and Hegelian systems, constitutes the most important
intellectual of modernity. Second, Derridas reading of Marx in Specters
of Marx reveals most pertinently of his many readings of the Western
philosophical tradition the irony in which I am interested. Third,
as a result of this irony, deconstruction misses what is of interest
in Marx to the future. Specters of Marxs claimed inheritance of the
radical tradition of political thinking in the nineteenth century,
above and beyond its ontology, ends up accordingly limiting and,
sadly, disempowering.
We live in an epoch in which the system of capital, despite and
beyond its crises and moments of lack of condence, organises more
and more the determinate structures of social life. It does so to the
point that not only the economy, not only technology, communi-
cations, science and leisure, but also culture in general, education
and the basic constituents of life are now being oriented to short-
term goals of prot. Recent thought, including deconstruction, has
suggested or implied that those suffering from this system can only
resist from within, that there is no other politico-economic system
to come to oppose to capitalism as such. This in deconstructions
terms is, politically, living at the closure of metaphysics. Perhaps.
That said, and at the very least, alternatives in principle exist as
to how to resist from within, and these alternatives are more or less
powerful, and they can structure change more or less. In our epoch,
and in order to move to one different and better, we need a thinking
and a set of practices that works more from within these determinate
structures, in particular, and from within the relativity of more or
less, in general. And this in order to foster alternatives for future
McQuillan 02 chap07 214 29/6/07 14:58:10
generations that will allow them, precisely, the possibility that the
world can be otherwise.
The irony of deconstruction as a set of thoughts and practices is to
have focused on the indeterminacy of every determination, to have
thought the invention of determination so exclusively out of respect
of this indeterminacy that it has lost grasp of the world before it. In
the absence of such grasp, the eld is left open to others to organise.
With the precedence of the massive organisational capacities of capital
before us (our present historical past), this distance from the world
not only proves to be politically ineffective, it is now, when thinking
the political at a world level, politically irresponsible. Not in the name
of the law of law, but because of history.
My argument is as follows. Section One looks at the force of
Derridas reading of Marx where, I believe, it most hurts Marx and
the Marxist tradition. It is where this tradition, and the Left organised
around it, cannot ignore deconstruction and needs to respond. In
an age of systemic injustice at a world level, a response is important.
With such a response, deconstruction will have proved, concerning
the political, an important radical intellectual tradition. Section Two
outlines what is problematic about this reading in its very power
and, following my initial comments, why this is so, how that misses
a Marx who remains important to us today and what that Marx
is. In conclusion I suggest very briey how we might proceed to
think and act in order to articulate more the world as a world. My
suggestions are minimal; they have the specicity, nevertheless, of
pursuing into new territories what is the strongest lesson of Marxian
epistemology.
SECTION ONE
Specters of Marx has been much read and commented upon. Published
during the high point of neo-liberalism in 1993, it carefully deates
the pretensions of the apologist of neo-liberal thinking, Francis
Fukuyama, and situates through a series of readings that involve,
explicitly and implicitly, Shakespeare, Max Stirner, Heidegger, Husserl,
Benjamin, Levinas and Freud a particular relation to Marx. This
relation, it considers, begins to foster a way of thinking the future
that Marxs call for social justice merits. Let us rst recall that this
was an important gesture to make in the early 90s, especially with
McQuillan 02 chap07 215 29/6/07 14:58:10
regard to those in the East emerging out of totalitarianism, looking
towards the West, either ideologically or physically, but wanting
neither Hegel nor Marx, nor their heritage. A certain postmodern
culture has since rung loud in the communicational and leisure
networks (particularly in relation to lm and sport) that raties this
refusal of radical politics by producing and distributing on a massive
scale a virtual set of communities that ignores and denies the logic
and mechanics of this very virtuality. In the context of the East and
the First World, Derridas call to Marx was more than pertinent and
remains actual.
Within this context, but in an active heritage of Marx more largely,
Specters of Marx constitutes an attempt to lay out the conditions for
a re-politicization, perhaps for another concept of the political as
such.
2
These conditions are the ltering of ontological schema that
inform Marxs understanding of the real and of the political that
ensues therefrom. It is at this level that the text is to be read. Perhaps
the most powerful example of this ltering is to be found towards
the end of the last chapter Apparition of the Apparent. The Phenom-
enological Conjuring Trick
3
in which Derrida gives a deconstructive
reading of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. I will focus
on it as my example of the force of Derridas thinking.
COMMODIFICATION AND THE SOCIAL
To recall, rst, this theory and its importance. Marxs tracing of the
formation of the commodity form constitutes one genealogy of
capital as such, and, therefore, that of the system of capital called
capitalism.
4
Marx starts with the distinction inherited from classical
economics (Ricardo and Smith), but returning to Aristotles reections
on the form of money between use value and exchange value. This
distinction is predicated on a general notion of value, a supra-natural
property of equivalence [my emphasis] that allows an object to be
exchanged with another in terms of its quantity and in disregard
of its quality (its specicity or singularity).
5
Quality is, for Marx,
put in Platonico-Heideggerian terms, the tality of the object: for
example, the table as a table, not the table qua, in visible form,
its price-tag by which it can be exchanged via money with other
objects. This general equivalent is called abstract value and nds
visible expression in money: a commodity itself that has through time
become the predominant form of exchange.
McQuillan 02 chap07 216 29/6/07 14:58:11
As is well known (the point is, however, always worth rehearsing),
this general equivalent is underpinned by congealed quantities of
undifferentiated labour: that is, labour as quantity, as indeterminate,
not as quality, as a particular determination.
6
Underneath the price-
tag, it is labour qua its abstraction as labour-time that allows for
objects to be exchanged, since the measure of exchange, indeed the
possibility of exchange as such in a complex market system, lies
in abstract labour. Labour-time is covered by the capitalists costs
in a way that provides for surplus prot which, in turn, allows for
the accumulation, investment and productive potential of capital.
Capital is thus nothing in Marxs opinion but objectied past labour.
This relation between labour, time and capital is what Aristotles
philosophy of money could neither conceptualise nor anticipate, living
in a slave society where labour is necessarily hidden. For labours
equality qua abstract labour only emerges with the equivalence of the
commodity-form, even if it historically underpins this form.
7
It is for
this reason that, with regard to conceptualisation and categorisation,
philosophy cannot not be historical, while the order of its categorisa-
tions are not the same as that of historical succession.
In the formation of a commodity, the labour congealed in the
commodity qua undifferentiated labour (and in capital as objectied
past labour) is rendered invisible. The social force of production is
replaced by the force of exchange between objects, the general
equivalent of which, money, appears in the social whole rst. As
the material representative of exchange and wealth (the totality of
exchange value) money is the omnipresent commodity. This is why
Marx begins his analysis of modern bourgeois society with it in the
Grundrisse, even though the predominant element structuring the
economic system of modern bourgeois society is not money but
capital. Marx assumes through this analysis Hegels phenomeno-
logical method while transposing it into material terms. He moves,
on the basis of Hegels distinction between intuition (Anschauung)
and concept (Begriff), from intuitive abstraction (money) to the
concrete determination of abstraction in [its] rich totality.
8
This
process of determination leads to a grasp of the structural mechanics
of capital (over the intuitive appearance of money). I will recall this
method at the end.
For Marx, money hides the character of equivalence that is social
and human
9
in the epiphenomenal form of a dialogue between
objects and prices. With modern advertising, this dialogue has of
course become very noisy, if from time to time entertaining in its own
McQuillan 02 chap07 217 29/6/07 14:58:11
terms. Commodity fetishism is this inversion. As Marx puts it: For
the producers the social relations between their private labours
appear [as what they seem], i.e., they do not appear as direct social
relations between persons in their work, but rather as thing-like
relations between persons and social relations between things.
10

As a result of this inversion and substitution, commodity fetishism
constitutes the becoming-invisible of the condition of commodity
production in the rst place labour. The social world of capital
reproduces this inversion through 1) private ownership of the means
of production and 2) the constant renewal of commodication to
extract prot and renew the cycle. The system produces a world of
appearance, of Schein.
In response, for Marx, socialism constitutes a system of production,
distribution, circulation and consumption in which the relation
between persons and things becomes visible in their productive order
of appearance. This would be historically unprecedented. For, prior to
the emergence of the commodity form as a system, social individuals
or juridical persons do not exist as articulated social entities. If it is the
Enlightenment theory of rights that makes this articulation, socialism
offers, in distinction, a world in which the invisible connections
between things and between things and persons is given the social
expression to which rights remain inadequate. Rather than money,
prices and objects being the rst social appearance, this appearance
would be persons in their labouring interconnectedness with each
other and with the determinations that make this interconnect-
edness up. This means the abolition of the political as such given
that political form for Marx remains external to social force. In the
abolition of private property the instance establishing the conditions
for a socialist world (the party taking the power of the state) must
thus abolish itself.
What is Derridas deconstruction of commodity fetishism, and
what are its implications, rst, for the notions of production and
fetishism as such and, second, for Marxs socialist promise?
SPECTRALISATION
For Marx, the mystical character of a commodity is what is spectral
about commodities. Unlike spirit, Derrida observes, a ghost or spectre
is both visible and invisible, acorporeal and incorporated, sensuously
supersensuous. This, Derrida notes, is Marxs very denition of
the commodity. For Derrida, however, remarking Marxs own
McQuillan 02 chap07 218 29/6/07 14:58:11
uncomfortable awareness of the fact, this spectrality is particular
to the use value of the object as well; indeed, it forms the objects
very possibility as a value. The value of use value allows in the rst
place for the object to be exchanged with other objects, preceding
the classical and Marxian distinction between the two orders and
the analyses that this distinction allows. Derridas reading offers an
exemplary lesson in deconstruction.
11
The spectral effect of a commodity ensues from the commoditys
relationality (the seat of the multiple connections underpinning
general equivalence). This relation, as we have seen, is double. Derrida
describes it in these terms:
The double socius binds on the one hand men to each other. It associates them
in so far as they have for all times been interested in time, Marx notes right
away, the time or the duration of labor, and this in all cultures and at all stages
of techno-economic development. This socius, then, binds men who are rst
of all experiences of time, existences determined by this relation to time which
itself would not be possible without surviving and returning, without that out of
joint that dislocates the self-presence of the living present and installs thereby
the relation to the other. The same socius, the same social form of the relation
binds, on the other hand, commodity-things to each other.
12
For Derrida, the subsumption of the first bond by the second
derives from a relation that affects from the beginning both human
experience of the socius and an objects repetition its ability to be
recognised as something, what we called earlier its tality.
With regard to the products, this repetition iterability opens the
object to its phenomenal form as such as well as, at the same time,
to its relation with other objects. Quality is always already quality.
Relationality (value) implies, in other words, a general structure of
spectrality within all objects that delivers them from the rst to the
possibility and movement of exchange. Spectrality also constitutes,
consequently, the condition of money, of moneys capitalisation,
and therefore of the forms of merchant, industrial and nancial
capital that punctuate the modern history of capitalisation. Each of
these forms is a determinate form of spectrality which enacts, under
the movement of capitalisation, a progressive becoming-spectral of
objectivity. In this sense, the super-natural property of equivalence
of money according to Marxian schema, is, according to the schema
of iterability, simply natures natural transcendence of itself. The
movement of commodication on which capital is predicated is the
McQuillan 02 chap07 219 29/6/07 14:58:11
originarily technical movement of physis, or diffrance, one, of course,
high up the ladder of human social evolution or complexication.
With regard to the relation between the producers, Derrida focuses,
somewhat importantly, on the relation of labour to time, emphasising
the fact that labour is a relation to time. As a temporal experience
labour composes the relation of socialisation. The relation to
temporality and the relation of the socius as such (sociality) is the
same; this relation is non-historicisable, being one in which people,
whatever the technico-economic organisation or culture they live in, come
together and move apart through their labours. Thus spectralisation is
the very element of the socius, and spectrality its condition. Derrida
writes: For the things as well as for the worker in his relation to time,
socialization or the becoming-social passes by way of spectralization.
The phantasmagoria that Marx is working here to describe, the one
that is going to open up the question of the fetish and religion, is the
very element of social and spectral becoming.
13
Spectrality forms the
condition both of the social relation between things and of the social
relation between persons: consequently it always already allows for
the relation between things, between persons and between things and
persons to become out of joint. The autonomisation of technology
away from the human and beyond the logic of technical instrumen-
tality (human use) constitutes one such development. Following
through this move from a deconstruction of the distinction between
use value and exchange value to an overall quasi-transcendental
structure of spectrality that underpins the historical movement of
socialisation and technicisation, Derrida continues:
Just as there is no pure use, there is no use-value which the possibility of
exchange and commerce (by whatever name one calls it, meaning itself, value,
culture, spirit (!), signication, the world, the relation to the other, and rst
of all the simple form and trace of the other) has not in advance inscribed an
out-of-use an excessive signication that cannot be reduced to the useless. A
culture began before culture and humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as
much as to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them.
14
The mystical fetishism of the commodity and that of religion with
which Marx famously compares it do not reect, then, in inverse form
the properties of the human as a social force. They reect in displaced
form, within a classical metaphysical opposition that structures human
thinking, the becoming-spectral of all sociality (between things, people,
people and things, people, things and ideas). Spectrality constitutes
not only the condition, then, of the socius qua forms of socialisation
McQuillan 02 chap07 220 29/6/07 14:58:11
(including the economy, technology, culture and science) but also the
condition of religion. Thus, as a radical dis-appropriating structure
it binds together and separates out precisely those social forms that
have in the last two thousand years of capitalisation become opposed
to each other: social organisation and religion.
15
Deconstruction here exceeds Marxs general theory of alienation
and accounts for it in terms of the desire to ontologise the diffrance
that opens out from the rst objects and humans to time and alterity
by bringing the movement of ex-appropriation back to the conditions
of human labour, human labour-time and human use.
As Derrida observes in conclusion to his deconstruction of
commodity fetishism
16
and we have just seen how far this decon-
struction goes Marxs signature is characterised by a double gesture.
On the one hand, he is the rst thinker of technology and of the tele-
technological movement that constitutes the real in the rst place.
He constitutes here our heritage as we begin to develop spaces of
democracy and accountability between the virtual and the physical
in a u-topia of dis-location between ourselves and between ourselves
and the material forces that run through us. On the other hand, within
the terms of nineteenth-century industrialism, Marx closes this space
down by humanising both the non-human historical movement of
spectralisation and the non-historicisable structure of spectrality that
informs this movement. Now, this humanisation appears, for decon-
struction, in the form of socialist politics, in the form of the party,
of the partys desire to take (the) power (of the state), and in the fates
that this politics unleashes in the twentieth century (totalitarian-
ism). These fates came to an empirical end in 1989, were already
structurally over in the 1950s, but are there, from the start, in Marxs
humanism of production and exchange. Marxs humanism cuts across,
then, any epistemological break between the early and later writings. It
is where all his thinking is deeply implicated in the metaphysical
schema that he at the same time wished to overturn qua idealism.
His thinking of technicity and politics at a world level, while original
and looking forward to us and beyond, expresses also his thinking of
alienation, fetishism and emancipation from the political, a thinking
that cuts short the diffrance of capitalisation by making it proper to
traditional political conceptions of time and space. In this Marxian
humanism loses the world at the same time as opening it up from
under the early historical articulations of liberal democracy. It is this
contradiction that deconstruction inherits.
McQuillan 02 chap07 221 29/6/07 14:58:11
For deconstruction, Marxs materialism and his philosophy of
practical social humanity and justice remain within the structures
of ontology that Heidegger was the rst to render explicit in Being
and Time. It has been Derridas concern since the 1960s, working
out of Heidegger, Husserl and Levinas and their respective concepts
of presence and alterity, to show how deep these structures are in our
understanding of the real and, more recently, of our understanding
of politics that ows therefrom. Thus the condition of opening
the world up again as a world is to deconstruct ontology and work
out of this deconstruction. Crucially, for Derrida, it is where Marx
himself calls us. Indeed, what remains irreducible in Marxs socialist
promise after the deconstruction of his ontology is the very promise
of justice itself.
The force of Derrida and deconstructions strategies for thinking
the political and for thinking the conditions of another concept of
the political could not be clearer from this analysis of spectrality. It
would be foolish for any Left today to continue to place these analyses
under the banner of the postmodern afrmation of difference. That
said, there are major problems in the way that Derrida has read Marx
(his materialist transposition of Hegelian phenomenological method,
in particular) through modern phenomenology. I cannot go into detail
here: what I will show in Section Two is, rst, how, in doing so,
Derrida still avoids the socialist promise there where it, precisely,
promises; and, second, how this avoidance accompanies, necessarily,
the most interesting aspects of Marxs epistemology for Derridas very
concept of the promise. But, beforehand, what does this promise
constitute to which Marxs call to justice calls us back?
THE RADICAL PROMISE
In Specters of Marx Derrida thinks the promise in several ways, and
through several avenues of thought. Sufce it to say here that the
promise is thought in four ways in particular:
1) as the condition of all promising (linguistic, economic, political,
religious, etc.);
2) as the promise of democracy, that is, as democracy to come;
3) as absolute hospitality or the radical relation to the other (linked
particularly to democracy to come); and
4) as the disjuncture of time (and space), its ecstasis, that exceeds
all history: that is, as historicity.
McQuillan 02 chap07 222 29/6/07 14:58:11
All four ways of speaking about the promise name the same opening; it
is the same opening as that of spectrality. This is why in Derridas work
it is impossible to separate his analysis of spectralisation from that
of the radical promise. In the above senses the promise is messianic
without proposing a messianism, democratic without proposing a
model of democracy, social without proposing a social community
and constitutes the condition of all historical form without proposing
another history (narration, discourse, strategy of acts, events). Derrida
speaks of it in relation to the democratic ideal of autonomy in the
following terms:
beyond the regulating idea in its classic form, the idea, if that is still what it is,
of democracy to come [la dmocratie venir], its idea as event of a pledged
injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself
in the form of full presence is the opening of this gap between an innite promise
(always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the innite respect of
the singularity and innite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of
the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities)
and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what
has come to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the effectivity
or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise,
will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined
messianic hope at its heart.
17

This promise brings together, then, the radical promise of justice qua
the very opening of spectrality, the ethics of absolute but impossible
hospitality that this opening entails, and the condition of all events,
the historicity of history. As a result of bringing these three together
as the radical opening, this irreducible condition of events is at the
same time, then, both justice and the non-historicisable opening to
all historical form. It is the quasi-ethical law of all law and all history.
Deconstruction respects it; it is its undeconstructible condition
18

and in respecting it opens the world up; ontology does not respect
it, thereby closing the world and history (qua the future) down. In
this context Derrida observes:
Permit me to recall very briey that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least
one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting
into question the onto-theo-but also arch-teleological concept of history in
Hegel, in Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to
oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order
to show how this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and nally
McQuillan 02 chap07 223 29/6/07 14:58:11
cancels historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity not a
new history, or still less a new historicism, but another opening of event-ness as
historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but to open up an afrmative
thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise, and not as
ontological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not
renounce the emancipatory desire it is necessary to insist on it more than
ever, and insist on it as the very indestructibility of the it is necessary. This is the
condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political.
19
Thus spectrality is not only, in Derridas terms, a hantological
analytic that allows deconstruction to reread the tradition of
metaphysics within which a certain Marxian spirit is embedded. At
the same time, qua the promise, it releases another Marxian spirit
(the herald of justice) and releases it by placing it back on its condition
which its own way of understanding history denied. The law of history
becomes the law of alterity. The promise, so manoeuvred, thereby
becomes the condition that furnishes both a radical ethics (prior
to any programme) and a radical thinking of events (prior to any
specic history) that Marxs articulations of justice, precisely, miss.
It is here concerning the all-pervading nature and method of the
promise that things become explicitly problematic.
SECTION TWO
TWO PROMISES, AND MARX?
Although this is a word that deconstructions very being would refuse,
the promise is a method. It is a method that, in arguing that it opens
the world contra ontology, actually closes it down. Let us now see
in detail why.
The deconstruction of commodity fetishism makes it clear that
there is a difference between the democratic promise and the socialist
promise as historical forms. Let us recall here the very wording of the
penultimate quotation: the actuality of the democratic promise,
like that of the communist promise.
20
Derrida is thus aware of the
difference. The one, exploited by Francis Fukayama in The End of
History and the Last Man, started out from the seventeenth century,
with the emerging capitalist market, as a framework for safeguarding
the rights of the individual within civil society against the sovereignty
of the monarch and aristocratic class-power that underpinned it. The
McQuillan 02 chap07 224 29/6/07 14:58:12
democratic promise then split along two axes: the one, predominantly
Anglo-American, that protects civil society as the people from the
State, the other, predominantly continental (Rousseau, Kant), that
predicates these rights on the sovereignty of the will of the people
as the State, whether this be in determinate (Rousseau) or regulative
(Kant) form. There are, of course, large historical differences and
similarities between these two axes, and, within these two axes,
differences and similarities that make up much of the history of
modernity. What has come out of this history is a liberal democratic
model of peoples power, that, according to historical context, stresses
alternatively the states role or the role of civil society as safeguarding
the rights of people. Globalisation is one such moment of history in
which the state is losing its sovereignty; neo-liberalism is afrming
the mechanics of civil society in exploitation of that loss.
Now, for Derrida, the afrmation of the Marxian call for social
justice, beyond Marxs ontology and its totalitarian fates, lies here
against the messianisms of neo-liberalism and liberalism. But what
Marxian promise does Specters of Marx give us that distinguishes it from
the ever-greater renement of the democratic promise emerging out
of Derridas deconstruction of Fukayamas understanding of liberal
democracy?
We recall briey that Derridas deconstruction of the difference
between the idea of democracy and its actuality in Fukayama leads
to the above exposition of democracy to come.
21
Democracy to
come, as I argue at length in Derrida and the Political, articulates
the irreducible gap between the idea of democracy (autonomy)
and its instantiations and rhythms in history. This gap means that
democratic law will always engender singularities outside the law.
These singularities reveal in the rst place the originarily violent
nature of law and are an expression, in phenomenal form, of the
originarily open structure of the socius. This gap between two orders
of events (ideal and actual) is the re-marking / iteration of the originary
gap that precedes their distinction: the spectral promise. The disjuncture
between the conceptual and the real, thinking and history, is the
repetition, in other words, of the originary disjuncture of time that
human thought cannot appropriate.
In the way in which this gap is gured by Derrida as both that
between democracy and its historical effectivity and that of originary
justice, Marxs socialist promise gets lost. Generalising the democratic
promise back through his deconstruction of Fukayamas model of
liberal democracy and onto the radical opening to all forms of law
McQuillan 02 chap07 225 29/6/07 14:58:12
and community, Derrida allows the Marxian promise to be also a
promise of democracy. And yet never in Specters of Marx does Derrida
elaborate what Marxs version of democracy is and how it differs,
methodologically and organisationally, from that of Enlightenment
philosophy and the idea of liberal democracy that ensues from it.
Specters of Marx certainly implies that the Marxian promise
constitutes a desire to structure the social inequalities of civil
society hidden structurally by liberal democracy; and this despite
twentieth-century advances in social and economic rights. The
work certainly theorises that this Marxian promise ends up in the
party and that, therefore, it is imperative to separate the desire for
justice from its socio-historical forms. It certainly theorises, nally,
that this separation is the very condition of inheriting Marxs call
for justice and rethinking another concept of the political. But this
is not enough; indeed it is perhaps the wrong way of mourning
the twentieth century and the fates of modernity. For what these
gestures of suggestion and theorisation do is slip over the difference
between socialism and liberal democracy precisely when this
difference concerns, epi stemologically and socially, articulation. The
example of Marx reveals that in oscillating between the indeterminate
and determination, the promise and its historical rhythms and
instantiations, deconstruction telescopes differences there where they
may be important. This telescoping constitutes not only a lack of
articulation between historical differences in preference for their
radical condition, but, more importantly, in this very preference,
it blocks investigation into empirical difference and it blocks
investigation into how these empirical differences may retrospectively
reorganise our understanding of radical opening as such.
22
And this
precisely because this opening has itself been telescoped: the originary
ecstasis of time and space and the relation to the other (human or
non-human) need articulation from the beginning for us to have
conceptual purchase upon them that makes a difference in the world.
Conjoined in an originary movement of disjuncture, they become
transcendental structures of difference that neutralise the empirical.
If deconstructions lack of relation to the sciences is most telling
in this regard (above and beyond any affairs), the example of the
empiricity of what Marx promised and of the way this empiricity is
to be seized conceptually and socially is, perhaps, one of the most
telling political examples of this irony.
For what is particular to the socialist promise, from the beginning
both in terms of Marxs materialism and in terms of his solutions to
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human agency in modern capitalist society is its acute awareness that
any promise must entail organisation if it is to contend with the historical
forces that are already in place. To separate the socialist promise from
organisation and to speak of this promise as the condition of history
radically short-circuits what Marx was trying to say. The separation
short-circuits it because it places Marxs understanding of history and
matter under the canopy of (Heideggers notion of) ontology as a teleo-
eschatological dialectical programme and method. In so doing, the
separation loses the very things that matter, historical understanding
and empowerment, and, by telescoping differences, leaves the eld
of politics open to other determinations and organisation. For Marx,
this eld was already structured by capital; how much more so it is
today! In this sense, deconstructions elision of the socialist promise
in Specters of Marx ends up underestimating the promise of Marxian
materialism and the force of human agency. It thereby underestimates
the conjoining of thinking and force in such a way that alternatives
can be fostered. Deconstructions promise stands, indeed, at the edge
of history and the world but not in the way deconstruction thinks.
I will end this section with two examples of where Derridean and
Marxian method necessarily clash: thinking the international and
thinking thinking.
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL
Chapter 3: Wears and Tears. Tableau of An Ageless World constitutes
a list of complaints to be made of the New World Order that point up
how badly the world goes. In this tableau, Derrida strongly observes,
following the logic of his deconstruction of the democratic promise
in Fukayama, international law will become more refined and
articulated. Here he makes the point that a new international is
being sought through the present crises of international law. It is one
that follows the critical spirit of Marx, but one that distinguishes itself
critically and practically from those other spirits that rivet this spirit
to the body of Marxist doctrine (its supposed systemic, metaphysical,
or ontological totality and the history of its apparatuses projected
or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the single party, the State, and nally the totalitarian
monstrosity).
23

In this gesture what is Derridas new international that gures as
one of the subtitles of the book as a whole? If it is searching most
McQuillan 02 chap07 227 29/6/07 14:58:12
explicitly for itself through the crises of international law, the new
international constitutes not only this search, but:
an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely
public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, out of joint, without
coordination, without party, without country, without national community
(International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without
co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class it marks a call to the
friendship of an alliance without institution to those who continue to be
inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx in order to ally themselves in a
new, concrete and real way.
24

We can see from this that the new international marks in the political
domain the ecstasis in time and form that orients Derridas analysis
of originary spectrality and the disjuncture of time. It is, however,
not simply that mark. For it actually constitutes the remainder within
the history of modernity of the determinate forms of this history.
And, as such, it promises new alliances (new, concrete and real),
always the while remaining in retreat from those alliances. The new
international is thus a transhistorical category of alliance that is
retrospectively theorised from out of the sufferings and disasters
of the international labour movement. It marks the futurity of the
future that no body of doctrine should close down and, looking to the
u-topia of the radical promise, it marks the ways in which alliances
can organise themselves more respectful of the promise than not
given the very forms from out of which it is theorised (the socialist call
to justice, but also party, the Internationals of the labour movement,
state, etc.). What Derrida misses here in Marx is both organisational
and methodological.
By stressing the indeterminacy of the bond rather than the
determination from out of which this indeterminacy is thought in the rst
place deconstruction does two things. First, it does not construct
the history of its own abstraction-making (the categorisation of the
untimely bond above) and it waits to see what concrete alliances
will come. Once these alliances will have come, it will stress their
alterity to themselves, thereby always comfortable, consciously or
unconsciously, in the way time re-enacts the promise. The promise thus
raties the refusal, ontologically justied (beware: not another party,
not a new totalitarianism!), to invent new forms. But, at the same
time, in relation to the rst point, it raties as a non-method its
blindness to its own method of determining the relation between
the indeterminate and determination. As such, the new international
McQuillan 02 chap07 228 29/6/07 14:58:12
constitutes, precisely, a non-historical bond that emerges out of
Derridas oscillation between indeterminacy and indetermination.
This oscillation misses Marx exactly where he still has something
to say to us concerning human agency and concerning the relation
between history and thinking.
It is here important to remember and cite the passages in Marxs early
writings that call over the head of liberal democracy for democracy
as empowerment. In On the Jewish Question, for example, but already
in his critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Marx the ontologist jumps
into an empirical example of universality that will free from private
ownership the universality of this ownerships hidden social force,
the international proletariat. Not to countenance this gesture today
(it is no longer technically possible, anyway) does not mean that we
should forget, if we wish to inherit Marx (and deconstruction does), the
socialist promise: that is to say, to articulate the necessary injustices
of the system of capital, to articulate them in as systemic a way as
possible since they are structural to the system, and to build, out of
this analysis, with those people who are suffering these injustices,
forms of social force that can make a difference. This is the promise of
Marxs politics and methodology in one they are lost when both
are read as metaphysical programmes (of logic and of society).
It is, of course, to be seen as the most interesting Marx knew
what social alternatives these forms of force could foster. In this
context, let me quote one passage from On the Jewish Question:
Only when the real, individual human being resumes the abstract citizen into
himself and as an individual being has become a species-being in his empirical
life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when humanity
has recognised and organised its forces propres as social forces so that social
force is no longer separated from it in the form of political force, only then can
human emancipation be completed.
25
The passage could not be more messianist. Emancipation is
emancipation from political form such that social force can determine
society, and not political law social force. The passage speaks of the
end of the political, the very end that Derrida analyses in terms of
metaphysical eschatology, and against which his call to reconcep-
tualise the political is mobilised. And yet this passage also speaks of
something else: it speaks of empowering people as people. People
beyond their needs meet each other in their species being. It speaks
of empowering people, from the bottom up, so that they can organise
themselves in such a way that species being is articulated, in such a
McQuillan 02 chap07 229 29/6/07 14:58:12
way that present political force does not determine the agenda of the future
nature of force. This empowering, this thinking of the change of force
is what the Marxian promise of democracy is about. It is predicated
on the materialist recognition that people are preceded not by the law
of law or a quasi-ethical other but by history as a particular social
organisation of spectralisation in which others meet and confront
them. This means that human beings are embedded in a movement
of materialisation and immaterialisation that they at the same time
can organise socially.
I fear, therefore, that Derridas notion of the new international as
the other of all determinate bonds remains complicit with capitalism
in the precise sense that it leaves things unexplored and agencies
unthought exactly where counter-forces need to be formed. As a
result, in opening a world from under ontological schema that have
dominated modernity, deconstruction also, at one and the same
time, closes this world down through the way in which it opens
it up. The future is consequently not fostered as a future through
articulation, but it is left to other forces to organise in the fear of the
saturation of the futurity of the future. The culture of deconstruction
will inherit this problem more and more. These are terrible ironies
for a philosophy and set of practices that has so strongly advocated
the practice of waiting, that so strongly, page after page, article after
article, and book after book, argues that the promise holds out the
future, without saturating it in so doing. I believe, though, that the
mechanics of this irony, as I have developed them, are correct.
THE MATTER OF MARX
We have seen Derrida conjoin historicity, the relation to the
other and the radical promise. We have noted that the promise of
democracy becomes in political contexts a way of talking about the
radical promise of originary sociality. For deconstruction, this is
justied by the fact that democracy is the least violent regime of all
political regimes within the history of metaphysics, and, therefore,
of all regimes, merits naming the non-horizonal horizon of political
alliance. We have also seen how the socialist promise as a call to
democracy becomes sucked under this promise without exposition of
the differences between horizons of liberal democracy and socialism
where they remain important to the future. I have argued that in this
subsumption Derrida oscillates between the indeterminate and
its determinations (the promise and its promises) in a way that
McQuillan 02 chap07 230 29/6/07 14:58:12
necessarily telescopes these differences. This means that deconstruc-
tion will sit on the sidelines of empirical adventure precisely when,
alive in a specic historical conjuncture, it is the responsibility of
philosophy to be more engaged with empiricity and with the terms
that the empirical (will) offer to the invention of other worlds. This
demands a rethinking of the relation between indeterminacy and
determination. Deconstructions way of thinking the promise of
democracy conrms this despite itself and, therefore, conrms, for
me, the continued importance of the historical way of thinking of
Marx. Let me end this section with some very brief comments around
Marxs materialist method since it will address several arguments in
the article that await formalisation.
As the 1857 Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
argues, a category by which one grasps the real emerges in its abstract
universality at a particular moment of history. In this sense, the most
spiritual proceedings of ones head are mediated by material forces.
Marx takes the examples of individuality, the person and money.
For deconstruction, the historicisation of categories is ultimately
part of the ontology of Marxs materialist method and loses in so
doing historicity. This historicity is made into an injunction through
an amalgamation of the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas in
which historicity, absolute hospitality and the promise mark the
same opening. We have shown this. The relation to the other, the
ecstasis of time, are thus mobilised against history. Deconstruction
thereby loses, however, the philosophical ability to account for the way
in which it comes across its concepts in such a way that its concepts
remain contingent and historically articulated with the epoch in which it
thinks. This would include the concepts of historicity, hospitality
and the promise.
Following Marxs method, it is important to include in any decon-
struction of any democracy the necessity of the fact that it can only
radicalise the concept of democracy into a general structure of political
opening at a specic moment of history. This necessity is history; it is
not the promise. As a result of theorising this necessity, deconstruc-
tion would see that while being a category that marks the opening of
all history, the promises very categorisation can only understand its
own opening in determinate ways: preeminently through religion.
The specic historical conjuncture (and not disjuncture) at which an
abstraction of this kind (and it is a momentous one, but it is not the
closure of metaphysics) is possible must be taken into account in the
very analysis of promising and, therefore, in the very relating of the
McQuillan 02 chap07 231 29/6/07 14:58:12
indeterminacy of the promise to its historical precedents: notably,
for deconstruction, religion, but also, as we have seen, democracy.
That the promise precedes all structures of promising historically but
is read out backwards from historical precedents like monotheism
means that the radical promise is, like every precipitate of the head,
an historical concept, in form and in content. Deconstruction ignores
its historical itinerary at its peril. For following Marxs method one last
step, the historicity of the conceptualisation of the radical promise
means that what it marks will reorganise itself. This change will
happen with further empirical, material investigations of the real. As
a result of this change we will come to understand, aprs coup, with
another falling of the dusk, what the promise promises. Deconstruc-
tions way of relating the indeterminate to determination is a method
because it is partial about the very truth that it announces. The
fact, noted earlier in this essay, that deconstruction read the matter
of production and labour in commodity fetishism in terms of the
abstraction of temporal experience is one important sign of this.
A SUMMARY CONCLUSION
The lesson that we inherit from Marx remains the need to think
systemically. This need is historical. We need to think by grasping
through thought material determinations (however virtualised)
whose connections are effective but are either not visible socially
and / or are not yet apprehended conceptually and practically. It is
in such connections that people live and suffer the injustice of the
present system. It is thus with those who suffer it phenomenally that
thinking through establishing connections there where they are
socially unexpressed can help articulate injustice and, through such
articulation, foster alternatives to that very system. The predominant
system of connections today is capital. Since Marx, the movement
of capital, its procedures of commodication as well as the system of
production, distribution, exchange and consumption, have become
ever vaster and more immaterial. This is because of the massive
advances in the technologies and exact sciences that capital, in turn,
organises more and more. The spiral engendered is one that now
allows capital to affect and increasingly organise all levels of culture,
education as well as the basic constituents of life.
In this historical context thinking needs, at a deeper level than
capital, to develop:
McQuillan 02 chap07 232 29/6/07 14:58:12
1) a systemic analysis of the social world that takes account of
both the materiality and increasing immateriality of production
processes in such a way that people who suffer such processes are
empowered by this very thinking;
2) a systemic analysis of the world that assumes the deeper
connections emerging from the sciences of the real (physical,
chemical, biological), sciences that are themselves trivialised by
their organisation through capital, the fate of molecular biology
since the 1950s being one very good example;
3) with these sciences, and in resistance to their commodication and
privatisation, their connections with sciences that are concerned
to look holistically at the webs of causality that make up the real, at
least on this planet: that is, the environmental and earth sciences.
For these sciences are not au fond proposing a new subject of
Nature, they are proposing new epistemologies of articulation
and causality that necessarily resist the way capital makes deep
connections invisible. Such epistemologies (as certain social
agents already know) have a lot to give, and learn from, Marx.
These three thoughts, at the very least, call, fourthly and nally,
for a set of disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices between the
humanities, the arts, social sciences and sciences that has not yet
begun in a socially explicit way. The places to start are the places of
education. It is after all for the sake of the future generations coming
through education that these places still hold to a sense of their own
dignity. Such practices within and without the traditional walls of the
university will constitute a set of forces that will themselves conjoin,
in new forms of alliance, with those suffering and acting within the
system of the world as we know it.
Such alliances may just rene the system of capital. The cynicism
of complexication, beyond good and evil. I am necessarily unsure.
What I am sure of is that we will only know what alternatives are
possible if we begin, in myriad, differentiated ways that digitisation
makes possible, to think, determine, invent and organise from
the bottom up. If capital can organise, so can the species being
of humans.
NOTES
1. This essay presents a philosophical re-working of the unarticulated
hesitations that marked the middle and end of my Derrida and the Political
(London: Routledge, 1996) which exposited Derridas relation to the
political in its forceful complexity.
McQuillan 02 chap07 233 29/6/07 14:58:13
2. SoM, p. 126; SdM, p. 75.
3. SoM, pp. 12576; SdM, pp. 20179.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976), pp. 12577.
5. Marx, Capital, p. 145.
8. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973), p. 101.
9. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 160.
10. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 166.
11. SoM, pp. 14963; SdM, pp. 23858.
12. SoM, p. 154; SdM, p. 245.
13. SoM, p. 156; SdM, p. 249.
14. SoM, p. 160; SdM, p. 254.
15. This double condition of technology and religion is discussed in FK.
16. SoM, p. 170; SdM, p. 269.
17. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111.
18. SoM, p. 28; SdM, p. 56.
19. SoM, p. 74; SdM, pp. 1267.
20. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111.
21. SoM, p. 65; SdM, p. 111.
22. See my Logics of Violence: Religion and the Practice of Philosophy,
Cultural Values 4 (2) (2000), pp. 13766 for a preliminary exposition of
this point.
23. SoM, pp. 889; SdM, pp. 1456.
24. SoM, p. 86; SdM, p. 142, my emphasis.
25. Marx On the Jewish Question, in Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone
and G. Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 234.
McQuillan 02 chap07 234 29/6/07 14:58:13
13
Karl Marx and the Philosophers Stone,
or, On Theory and Practice
Martin McQuillan
Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy
topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia
an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French
kissing. In some circles the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination
than the politics of the Middle East. Terry Eagleton
1
Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one
another as masturbation and sexual love. Marx and Engels
2
Philosophy loves itself. It is in love with itself. Its narcissism knows
no limits. Philosophy pines away for love of its own image and, as the
story goes, its boundless egoism and tortured solecisms only succeed
in transforming philosophy into a late owering which withers on
the vine. The self-love of philosophy is, traditionally speaking, in
sharp contrast to the seeming altruism of political activism, the
ragged-trousered philanthropy for which the point is not to interpret
the world in various ways, but to change it. According to this familiar
schema, the political is said to be otherwise than philosophy. It is
an often-repeated caricature of deconstruction, which dismisses the
rigour of Derridean thinking as mere mental masturbation. However,
as much as one does not like to air these things in public, one should
not be too quick to dismiss this too-quick dismissal, negotiating
with the smuggled contrebande of phallogocentrism necessarily falls
somewhere between blindness [se bander] and rmness [bander].
The image of the alert and erect philosopher is one Derrida has
used frequently, notably in Glas and The Post Card.
3
Marx himself
is no stranger to the sexual imaginary of philosophy; one might
recall the textual exposure of his obsession with bondage, slavery,
sensuousness, conception, reproduction, labour, estrangement, and
of course intercourse [Verkehr], including forms of intercourse,
relations of intercourse, and intercourse between men.
235
McQuillan 02 chap07 235 29/6/07 14:58:13
236 Martin McQuillan
This matter arises here for a concerned reader of both Marx and
deconstruction given the seeming similarity between the aphorism
cited above from The German Ideology and part 11 of the Theses on
Feuerbach, as well as its apparent incongruity with a favourite passage
from de Man, the exact meaning of which has always alluded me:
What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural
reality, or reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any
other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a
powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations,
as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who
reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say
ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological
mystications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit. They are, in short,
very poor readers of Marxs German Ideology.
4
Here, in contrast to the seeming literalism of Marx and Engels
comments, de Man nds in The German Ideology a counter-argument
to accusations of self-love in philosophy. Of course, literary theory
is not philosophy, but then again philosophy is always more than
philosophy, or at least deconstruction is always more than philosophy,
let us say for the moment it is otherwise than philosophy. However,
the immediate task for this reader is to make sense of this gnomic
suggestion by de Man in relation to the text of The German Ideology.
Let us not, for the moment, rush to judgement on whether this would
rescue de Mans thought from the charge of mental masturbation, for
masturbation in this context might not be a vice one wished to escape
the grip of. Rather, let us examine to what lengths this masculinist
metaphor could be extended and indeed what it might have to tell
us, nally, concerning the politics of the Middle East.
1
Marx and Engels comment appears in the sub-section Humane
Liberalism of the lengthy and fragmented account of Max Stirner
in part three of The German Ideology. This sub-section is the third sub-
division of the sixth part of the rst half of the opening element of
this chapter. The chapter itself is structured in this way as a parody
of Stirners own style of presentation in his book Der Einzige und sein
Eigenthum, which often interrupts exposition to deviate from the
subject matter with lengthy episodical insertions. Having opened
with a proposed reading of Stirners article Rencensenten Stirners (a
McQuillan 02 chap07 236 29/6/07 14:58:13
Karl Marx and the Philosophers Stone 237
reply to criticism of his book by Szeliga, Feuerbach and Hess) which
Marx and Engels mockingly call Apologetical Commentary, they
then set off on a deviation of their own which lasts for almost the
entire chapter. This is a reading of Stirners own book, split into two
sections in parody of Stirners own work. The sections by Marx and
Engels The Old Testament: Man and The New Testament: Ego
corresponding to Stirners own passages Der Mensch [Man] and
Ich [Ego]. The sub-headings Marx and Engels use in this chapter
are ironical inversions and subversions of Stirners own terms. The
sub-section on Humane Liberalism comes as the nal part of the
mockery of Old Testament Stirner, under the sub-title The Free
Ones.
5
As we shall see, this labyrinthine structure is crucial to making
sense of de Mans proposed reading of The German Ideology and yet
it has been systematically edited out of the English language version
of the text, edited by C.J. Arthur, with which scholars and students
are most familiar.
6
Arthurs edited version attempts to make sense
of this episodic pastiche by eliminating it altogether, presenting an
extracted version of this sub-section under the heading Philosophy
and Reality:
This path [to the materialist outlook] was already indicated in the Deutsch-
Franzosische Jahrbucher in the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage. But since at that time this was done in
philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions
such as human essence, genus, etc. gave the German theoreticians the
desired excuse for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing
that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out
theoretical garments One has to leave philosophy aside (Wigand, p. 187, cf.
Hess, Die letzen Philosophen, p. 8), one has to leap out of it and devote oneself
like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an
enormous amount of literary material, unknown of course, to the philosophers
Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one
another as masturbation and sexual love.
7
The editing here is compelling, leaving us in little doubt as to Marx
and Engels true intention; but the skilful editor is by necessity a
skilful reader and a bad editor equally a bad reader. After Benjamin,
perhaps, one might speak of the Die Aufgabe des Redakteur (the task/
failure of the editor). Arthurs excisions here make sense according
to the familiar myth of philosophical narcissism so comforting to a
certain materialist outlook but they are also indicative of his complete
misreading of The German Ideology as a whole and so render the
McQuillan 02 chap07 237 29/6/07 14:58:13
meaning of this extract from the chapter on Saint Max the exact
opposite of the one proposed by the un-expunged totality.
In order to demonstrate this and so account for de Mans vignette,
let us begin by reinserting the deleted sentences from the text of Marx
and Engels. The extract which sits alone in Arthurs text comes as
part of a discussion of Stirners critique of religion as an independent
sphere, which, says Marx and Engels, is only a reheating of an old
argument, which has been ogged to the point of exhaustion,
8
but
which allows Stirner to seem to be going beyond German theory
while appropriating its terms. The issue at stake is that of material
relations and Stirners concentration on the heavenly emanation of
exploitation rather than those who are practically involved in the
present-day world Thus, the struggle against religious illusions,
against God, was again substituted for the real struggle. Marx and
Engels point here is derived from a detailed consideration of Stirners
text as excessively humanist (the belief that Man makes history) and
not material enough rather than a disagreement with him over his
reading of the divine division of labour. The digressive discussion
then turns to the theologian Bruno Bauer, whom Marx and Engels
have treated in the previous chapter, whose idea of substance
is nothing but the predicates of God united under one name and
these predicates of God are again nothing but deied names for the
ideas of people about their denite, empirical relations, ideas which
subsequently they hypocritically retain because of practical consid-
erations. The they in this sentence is important for what follows,
the pronoun refers back to the generic people of history rather than
Saint Max and Saint Bruno. The text then continues:
With the theoretical equipment inherited from Hegel it is, of course, not possible
even to understand the empirical, material attitude of these people [i.e. the
people of history]. Owing to the fact that Feuerbach showed the religious world
as an illusion of the earthly world a world which in his writing appears merely
as a phrase German theory too was confronted with the question which he
left unanswered: how did it come about that people got these illusions into
their heads? Even for the German theoreticians this question paved the way
to the materialistic view of the world, a view which is not without premises, but
which empirically observes the actual material premises as such and for that
reason is, for the rst time, actually a critical view of the world. This path was
already indicated in the Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbucher
If we follow the picaresque structure of this passage which strays
between citations in the same way that it deviates between close
McQuillan 02 chap07 238 29/6/07 14:58:13
reading and generalisation concerning world history, bouncing off
pronouns as it goes, then it is clear enough that Marx and Engels
are in fact determining what could be positively afrmed in regard
to the so-called Leipzig Council of German theory. Namely, and it
is italicised for our benet, that the questions asked by the Young
Hegelians as a continuation of the work of Feuerbach lead to the
point of thinking about a materialist world-view, which is not
without premises and which is actually a critical view of the world.
An opening shared with Marx and Engels own writing, which also
shared a common philosophical phraseology.
The point that follows for Marx and Engels is that German theory
then mistakes an immergence in the discourse that this opening in
philosophy gives rise to for an immergence in the real conditions
it describes, believing that here again it was a question merely of
giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garment just as Dr.
Arnold Ruge, the Dottore Graziano of German philosophy, imagined
that he could continue as before to wave his clumsy arms about and
display his pedantic-farcical mask. One has to leave philosophy
aside (Wigand, p.187.). This remark is a citation from Otto Wigand
in whose Vierteljahrsschrift (volume 3) Stirners Recensenten Stirner
was published and who had sent Marx and Engels a proof copy. On
the one hand, this entire chapter of The German Ideology could be
read as a proto-case of the phenomenon which aficts the history
of Marxism, namely the appropriative hair-splitting which seeks to
distinguish between pure or true Marxism and heretical or splitist
socialism. The critique of the Leipzig Council is intended to establish
the truth of Marx and Engels position rather than to craft a dialogic
relation of solidarity with other radical thinkers. On the other hand,
the scenario which Marx and Engels are addressing is what we might
now term, after Derrida, the quasi-transcendental nature of history,
in which philosophy wishes to retain a conceptual understanding of
History as historiographical and messianic, while political practice
seeks to engage immanently with the oceanic experience of material
events and relations. Thus, to outank the transcendental gesture
of philosophy one has to leap out of philosophy as such. Marx and
Engels, as they acknowledge earlier in this section, are not anti-
philosophers but fully engaged with philosophical phraseology as
they continue to be throughout The German Ideology. One reading of
the quotation of Wigands injunction might nd Marx and Engels
using philosophy in order to denounce philosophy and thus remaining
caught within the philosophical. However, another reading which
McQuillan 02 chap07 239 29/6/07 14:58:13
pushed the sense a little (but only a little) nds the philosophers
Marx and Engels calling for a philosophy that is otherwise than
philosophy, one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an
ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also
an enormous amount of literary material, unknown of course, to the
philosophers. What is perhaps most interesting here is the suggestion
from Marx and Engels that the study of actuality takes as its object
not the actual but a body of literature. Whatever nonphilosophy is
implied by this (the chapter for example is constantly engaged with
Cervantes Don Quixote), the leap from philosophy is not one from
text to world but would seem to be one from text to text. Thus, Marx
and Engels understanding of this ight from philosophy is not a
simple reduction to a binary division between thought and the real
but one which is caught up in the various difculties of reading, the
quasi-transcendental question of history and of developing a mode
of interpretation that transforms what it interprets as Derrida notes
in Specters of Marx, quoting Austin on performative speech acts to
gloss the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.
9
Such a performative interpreta-
tion responds to the task of philosophys own paleonymy, moving
and removing philosophy into something more than philosophy, a
philosophy otherwise than philosophy, something that might look
like deconstruction. The point is not to read philosophy in various
ways but to change it.
To reinsert what remains of the paragraph under analysis, Marx
and Engels go on to say:
When, after that, one again encounters people like [Friedrich Wilhelm]
Krummacher or Stirner, one nds that one has long ago left them behind and
below. Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to
one another as onanism [onanie] and sexual love. Saint Sancho, who in spite of his
absence of thought which was noted by us patiently and by him emphatically
remains within the world of pure thoughts, can, of course, save himself from it
only by means of a moral postulate, the postulate of thoughtlessness (p.196 of
the book). He is a bourgeois who saves himself in the face of commerce by the
banqueroute cochenne [swinish bankruptcy], whereby, of course, he becomes
not a proletarian, but an impecunious, bankrupt bourgeois. He does not become
a man of the world, but a bankrupt philosopher without thoughts.
One can sympathise with the way in which the structural dementia
which aficts these chapters on the Leipzig Council encourages
Arthurs path-of-least-resistance-reductionism. However, if we read
carefully here we might note that the opening clause, When, after
McQuillan 02 chap07 240 29/6/07 14:58:13
that refers back to the leap into that other enormous amount of
literary material and so it is in comparison to the encounter with this
nonphilosophy that Krummacher and Stirner are found wanting. The
result of the comparison is classically dialectical, Krummacher and
Stirner are said to be left behind and below by the Aufhebung effected
by this new performative interpretation. Stirner then characterised
as Sancho Panza to Szeligas (the pseudonym of Franz Zychlin von
Zychlinski, a contributor to Bruno Bauers periodical) Don Quixote,
is further chastised not for his philosophy but for the proposal
that one can only move from thought to action through an active
forgetting of theory (thoughtlessness). The study of the actual world
(and Marx and Engels are pointedly talking about study here not
action, which is nowhere named) should not be thoughtless, on
the contrary, the notion that a consideration of material conditions
can take place outside of or without thought is a bankrupt one. The
task, for Marx and Engels, is not to abandon thought but to put it to
work to transform that which it thinks about, a philosopher without
thoughts is no use to anyone. The critique of Stirner is that he does
not use thought to re-orientate thought but rather leaps outside
of it in a non-productive way into supposed non-thought and so
retains the boundary between a realm of abstract thinking and the
actual world, voiding himself of the very thing which both presents
a problem and the means to resolve the problem, like the bourgeois
who responds to debt by making himself ineligible for credit.
2
Marx and Engels, on the other hand, propose something otherwise
to Stirners philosophy in which, while operating within the ambit
of philosophys interpretation of the world, the point is to change
it. But to change it through study; the contrast here is not between
philosophy and action, Philosophy and the study of the actual world
have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.
One might say, following Derridas remarkable account of Rousseau
in Of Grammatology, that philosophy is supplementary to this
proposed study. What might be implied by this relation and how
might philosophy be thought of as a supplement to the study of the
actual world? Let us note too quickly some of the characteristics of
the supplement in Derridas reading of Rousseaus supplementation of
sexual love by masturbation, while considering how such a scenario
might be transferred over to the relation between philosophy and
McQuillan 02 chap07 241 29/6/07 14:58:14
the study of the real world. Firstly, the supplement supplements. It
adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-
of; if it lls, it is as if one lls a void.
10
Thus, philosophy operates
in the space of the not-yet performative interpretation of the world,
disposing that interpretation of its desire for presence (to change it)
within the very gesture of possession, which as philosophy or study
stands only as a mediated representation of the world, assigned in
the structure of representation by the mark of an emptiness.
11

Secondly, the supplement is what neither Nature nor Reason can
tolerate.
12
Thus, philosophy-qua-mediation is neither of the order
of the immanent nor the transcendental, substitutive of both, while
excluded from both. The regulated substitution of one for the other,
mediation for both pure thought and events, gives rise to blindness
to the supplement. As we have been warned, supplementarity can
make you go blind:
The experience of auto-eroticism is lived in anguish. Masturbation reassures
only through that culpability traditionally attached to the practice, obliging
children to assume the fault and to interiorize the threat of castration that
always accompanies it. Pleasure is thus lived as the irremediable loss of the vital
substance, as exposure to madness and death. It is produced at the expense of
their health, strength, and sometimes their life.
13
The experience of philosophy is lived in anguish, it reassures only
through the culpability traditionally attached to the practice, obliging
philosophers to interiorise their fault as an irremediable loss of
vitality and exposure to madness the castration and madness of
Narcissus perhaps. If the study of the real world is no longer deferred
by philosophy but takes place in absentia through the mediation of
the supplement-philosophy then it is also absolutely deferred by its
presentation through the medium of philosophy, as Derrida notes
Auto-affection is pure speculation.
14
The supplement is maddening,
exposes the philosopher to madness, because it is neither presence
nor absence
15
and so breaches both pure thought and the real world,
thus protecting the philosopher from the danger of his/her own
abstraction and narcissism by substituting for that abstraction. As
an auto-affection philosophy both fears and desires presence, both
holding the actual world at a distance while attempting to master
it. Philosophy is a dangerous supplement because it exposes itself to
its own death in nonphilosophy but simultaneously is inoculated
against such a death. It is not as dangerous, as Rousseau would say,
as cohabitation with real women, such pleasure without mediation
McQuillan 02 chap07 242 29/6/07 14:58:14
or suppletory would be only another name for death.
16
Pure
action would be Stirners unfortunate state of madness and death,
thoughtlessness. One might conclude, as Derrida does concerning
masturbation and sexual love, that there is no frontier between
philosophy and the study of the actual world but an economic
distribution between the two.
17
The performative study that Marx and Engels propose substitutes
for philosophy as such and through this sequence of supplementation
a necessity of such study is articulated, namely, that this study is an
interminable chain of supplementary mediations that produce the
meaning of the very thing they both draw into representation and
defer, like the immediacy of a mirage. It is undoubtedly no accident
that having used the very example of masturbation to detail his
consideration of the supplement, Derrida turns to the question of
philosophy and empiricism in the section The Exorbitant Question
of Method in which the much mis-read sentence il ny a pas de
hors-texte is to be found. One might characterise Derridas argument
here
18
as italicising without privileging the word study in the phrase
the study of the actual world. He talks of his deconstruction of the
Western tradition as a radical empiricism in which the very concept
of empiricism destroys itself:
To exceed the metaphysical orb is an attempt to get out of the orbit (orbita), to
think the entirety of the classical conceptual oppositions, particularly the one
within which the value of empiricism is held: the opposition of philosophy and
nonphilosophy, another name for empiricism, for this incapability to sustain
on ones own and to the limit of coherence of ones own discourse, for being
produced as truth at the moment when the value of truth is shattered, for
escaping the internal contradictions of scepticism, etc. The thought of this
historical opposition between philosophy and empiricism is not simply empirical
and it cannot be thus qualied without abuse and misunderstanding.
19
Deconstruction, as an empiricism without empiricism, is then also
a leap from philosophy but one which takes philosophy with it,
turning philosophy around without going around it, straining
at the limits of intelligibility to retain a philosophical critique of
philosophy. This philosophical critique is an empiricism because it
is otherwise than philosophy, a philosophy that would be able to
think the ways in which philosophy itself has produced the boundary
between philosophy and nonphilosophy. In this sense, The German
Ideology has a particular place in the construction of this historical
opposition. However, the question remains to be answered whether
McQuillan 02 chap07 243 29/6/07 14:58:14
this is a consequence of Marx and Engels themselves or what de Man
refers to as The German Ideologys very poor readers.
3
There are at least two possible ways in which we could read de Mans
gnomic pronouncement: Those who reproach literary theory for
being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological)
reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological
mystications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit. Firstly,
in a strong reading of the relation between what literary theory
(de Mans code for deconstruction in this essay) does and what The
German Ideology has to say, namely, that Marx and Engels are exposing
the ideological mystications of German theory, using philosophy to
show its own bourgeois status. Alternatively, we might accept a weaker
reading of the relation implied by this sentence, namely, that it is
Marx and Engels (who after all are doing the discrediting here) who
have their own ideological mystications (i.e. a certain empiricism)
exposed by the tool they wish to discredit (i.e. philosophy). This
second reading is counter-intuitive to the post hoc ergo propter hoc rst
reading and does not assume that de Mans interest in Marx would be
uncritical and in fact reminds us of the much later reading of the Saint
Max chapter of The German Ideology in the further reaches of Specters
of Marx in which Derrida reects on the conjuration and confusion
of the hauntological and the ontological in Marx. Undoubtedly, we
could read de Man either way here and without further clarication
from him it is difcult to pursue this reading. Unfortunately, while
we do not have the proposed book on Marx, Aesthetics, Rhetoric,
Ideology, we do have the texts which de Man was working on as a
ground-clearing exercise towards this study, posthumously assembled
as Aesthetic Ideology. Accordingly, there is also a possible third more
prosaic reading of de Man here, namely that what The German Ideology
tells us is that ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with
natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism. A return to the
complex structure of Marx and Engels text may help.
Once the Saint Max chapter nally emerges from its digression in
the closing section Apologetical Commentary, it also returns to the
problem of philosophys relation to the actual world and to the issue
of the quasi-transcendentality of history as previously discussed in
the chapter on Feuerbach and so, structurally speaking, continues
the argument of that chapter.
20
Marx and Engels write:
McQuillan 02 chap07 244 29/6/07 14:58:14
One of the most difcult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the
world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of
thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so
they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret
of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own
content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual
world is turned into the problem of descending from language into life.
21
The criticism of German theory is that it has, through the tran-
scendental gesture of philosophy, separated the conceptual and
subsequently the linguistic from the material. This situation would
be a necessarily contingent illusion for philosophy in order to allow
thought to take place in a speculative context unhurried by material
pressures. The error would come in mistaking this contingency for
a normative condition. That is to say, that German theory precisely
confuses linguistic with natural reality. Under such circumstances
a quasi-transcendental understanding of the conceptual would be
an indispensable tool in the masking of this ideological aberration.
Thus, the fear of German theory, if you like, is that a material
understanding of language, let us call it a radical empiricism or de
Mans notion of the materiality of the letter, would be the very thing
which exposed the ideological position of Stirner and Bauer while
also being the object of their scorn.
Marx and Engels continue in the next paragraph:
We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in
consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring
independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation
with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence
the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour,
and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-
bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language
into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise
it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither
thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are
only manifestations of actual life.
Marx and Engels are, in the rst instance, referring back to their
discussion of language and consciousness as part of the fundamental
conditions of history (four aspects of primary historical relations)
in the chapter on Feuerbach, in which they write:
McQuillan 02 chap07 245 29/6/07 14:58:14
Man also possesses consciousness. But even from the outset this is not
pure consciousness. The mind is from the outset aficted with the curse of
being burdened with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form
of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as
consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other
men as well, and only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with
other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me Consciousness
is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long
as men exist at all.
22
Language then, as agitated layers of air, has a certain phenomenalism
of its own, a phenomenalism that burdens the business of reference.
Language in this context is immanent to the production of historical
relations, wherever and whatever those relations might be. Let us
park for one moment the very difcult notion of relations, although
they may nally be utterly germane to this entire problem.
23
The
difculty of the relation is that as a relation it is only the presentation
of presence as absence and not a manifest appearance. The relation
is the absence of manifestation or appearance.
24
Consciousness is co-
terminus with language, there is no separation between the two, both
facilitating and arising from social relations, product and producer
of the social. The belief that the two exist in independent realms
(the error Marx and Engels associate with German theory although
more time would be required to conrm or contest whether such
an appellation were justied) is a sin against the supplement, and
which might be characterised as a particularly reductive form of
binary thinking. Such binary thinking, suggest Marx and Engels, is an
ideological position used to justify a certain division of labour, which
might be exposed by a different economic distribution of the relation
between thought and the actual world proposed by a performative
mode of interpretation. Although Marx and Engels would seem to
want to have their cake and eat it, with the introduction of the
distinction between ordinary language and the bourgeois language
of philosophy, their conjuration of the phantomatic nature of
thought and language as manifestations of actual life is suggestive
of the supplementary absence and presence of language as the
hinge between the actual and the conceptual. Neither philosophy
(pure consciousness) nor the actual world can tolerate language,
which insinuates itself in the place of both as the mediation of each,
dispossessing the desire for presence which motivates each within
the very gesture of possession through language. Language both fears
McQuillan 02 chap07 246 29/6/07 14:58:14
and desires presence, drawing philosophy and the actual world into
a presentation of presence while holding presence at bay by the
structural necessity of its own absence.
This hinge becomes a concern for Marx and Engels in the next
paragraph of the Apologetical Commentary when they write:
Sancho [Stirner], who follows the philosophers through thick and thin, must
inevitably seek the philosophers stone, the squaring of the circle and elixir of life,
or a word which as such would possess the miraculous power of leading from
the realm of language and thought to actual life. Sancho has been so infected
by his long years of association with Don Quixote that he fails to notice that
this task of his, this vocation, is nothing but the result of his faith in weighty
philosophical books of knight-errantry.
In other words, there can be no bridge between words and the actual
because there are only words themselves which are the material
suppletory to thought. To imagine otherwise would be to retain the
false dichotomy between speculation and the actual, philosophy
and action masturbation and sexual love. The philosophers stone
is the dream of pure presence which would translate unmediated
consciousness into fully-formed action, a universal translator for all
situations of theory into practice. To dream of such a magic word,
say Marx and Engels, is faith in knight-errantry. For all Feuerbach,
Stirner and Bauers discussion of the political, as if invoking the
political were itself enough to transform the political, the point is
to change it, not to tilt at windmills. Thus, the text of Marx and
Engels frequently comes close to stating that the division between
the gural and the literal is itself an effect of language; language
being both material itself, and the only place in which the material
can ground itself. It does so only to continually ebb and ow to
and from this position by the reinstigation of a division between
philosophical and ordinary language which maintains the strictest of
borders between the conceptual and the actual, transporting language
away from itself by means of itself, as in the implied transparency of
language is the immediate actuality of thought. Thus, The German
Ideology as an allegorical text might be said to have some of its own
ideological mystications exposed by its own process of exposure
and discrediting. We might say, following de Man, that the one
thing that The German Ideology wants to do most but cannot do is
to discredit (it uses philosophy to expose philosophy, language to
denounce language, reading to dismiss reading and so on), yet the
McQuillan 02 chap07 247 29/6/07 14:58:14
exhilarating textual effect of Marx and Engels allegory is that the text
continues nevertheless to convince us that it has indeed discredited
German theory.
4
On this reading, what both Marx and de Man seem to be saying is
that all words are magic words, which as a social product regulate the
substitution of signs for things, dening the order of the supplement.
Thus, theory and practice are brought into a productive economy
in which there is no pure passage from one to the other but only
mediation through the suppletory of language, or, textuality. This
scenario recalls de Mans reading of Kant proposed in the essays of
Aesthetic Ideology, in which Kant abandons the magical teleological
properties of the word judgement when faced with the ruin of
migration between pure and practical reason. Kants situation in the
third Critique is equally well expressed in his essay On the common
saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice.
The second paragraph of this essay reads:
It is obvious that between theory and practice there is required, besides, a middle
term connecting them and providing transition from one to the other, no matter
how complete a theory may be; for, to a concept of the understanding, which
contains a rule, must be added an act of judgement by which a practitioner
distinguishes whether or not something is a case of the rule; and since judgement
cannot always be given yet another rule by which to direct its subsumption
(for this would go on to innity), there can be theoreticians who can never in
their lives become practical because they are lacking judgment, for example,
physicians or jurists who did well during their schooling but who are at a loss
when they have to give an expert opinion. But even where this natural talent
is present there can still be a deciency in premises, that is, a theory can be
incomplete and can, perhaps, be supplemented only by engaging in further
experiments and experiences, from which the recently schooled physician,
agriculturist, or economist can and should abstract new rules for himself and
make his theory complete. In such cases it was not the fault of theory if it was
of little use in practice, but rather of there having been not enough theory,
which the man in question should have learned from experience and which is
true theory even if he is not in a position to state it himself and, as a teacher,
set it forth systematically in general propositions, and so can make no claim
to the title of theoretical physician, agriculturist and the like. Thus no one can
pretend to be practically procient in a science and yet scorn theory without
McQuillan 02 chap07 248 29/6/07 14:58:14
declaring that he is an ignoramus in the eld, inasmuch as he believes that
by groping about in experiments and experiences, without putting together
certain principles (which really constitute what is called theory) and without
having thought out some whole relevant to his business (which, if one proceeds
methodically in it, is called a system), he can get further than theory could
take him.
25
This is a bold defence of theory but one which recognises that the
work of theory is never purely theoretical. Rather, if theory is to
be meaningful it should be rened and reformulated in relation to
experience and example. For Kant here, however, as in the third
Critique, there remains the possibility of a transposition from theory
to practice through the conditions of teleological judgement, which
has all the properties of the philosophers stone, which Marx and
Engels dismissed. That is to say, judgement for Kant would work as
a passageway or converter between theory and practice, turning one
alchemically into the other, rather than as the actual site of mediation
in which both theory and practice had their only meaningful, if
deferred, existence. The problem posed by the aesthetic experience
of judging art in the third Critique, on de Mans reading, is that if the
philosophers stone of such teleological judgement were impossible
then the entire project of Critique as such would be in crisis.
26
Even as Kant hints in the paragraph above that experience
supplements theory, rather than an endlessly deferred judgement
supplementing both, there are considerable resources within Kants
counter-intuitive argument to suggest that one might be able to
formulate a commentary on the relation between philosophy and
the actual world and ultimately, in reading Kants essay, to move
from a consideration of the supplementary effects of masturbation
to a considered response to the recent politics of the Middle East. In
defence of theory Kant draws an analogy between the Law and its
practice, arguing that in this case the worth of practice rests entirely
on its conformity with the theory underlying it, and all is lost if
the empirical and hence contingent conditions of carrying out the
law are made conditions of the law itself.
27
Again, one might argue
in renement of Kant, rather than against Kant in favour of the
primacy of practice, that the enactment of the Law is never a pure
application but always a moment of inevitably unjust judgement, in
which both the Law and its practice have their only absent presence.
The same situation can be said to apply in each of the attempts
Kant makes to test the supposed conicting interests of theory and
McQuillan 02 chap07 249 29/6/07 14:58:15
practice in philosophy:
28
against Garve, against Hobbes and against
Moses Mendelssohn. While Kant outanks the morbid empiricism
of each by championing the theoretical: All this experience does
not help him at all to escape the precept of theory, but at most only
helps him to learn how theory could be better and more generally
put to work, after one has adopted it into ones principles.
29
He
continues to afrm the distinction between theory and practice and
so replicates the same structural division between philosophy and the
actual world proposed by those he criticises. In this way, Kant, in the
terms of The German Ideology, remains an exemplary German theorist
and the Young Hegelians may as well be Young Kantians. However,
as with the third Critique, whenever Kants formulations on the
triangulation of theory, practice and judgement come into contact
with actual moments of judgement as demonstrated in the reading
of examples to support a philosophical argument, the certainty of
these pronouncements begins to tremble. Let me conclude this essay
by examining such a passage which would seem to have a poignant
historical relation to us today.
Firstly, in the conclusion to the section Against Moses
Mendelssohn, and in response to Mendelssohns pessimistic assertion
that the human race will never make moral progress, Kant opens up
a discussion of omnilateral violence and international law. Kant
argues that just as the constant threat of violence within a community
leads ultimately to the best defence of a civil constitution, so the
unending threat of coercion between states ought equally to lead to a
cosmopolitan constitution between states. This should be a federation
of states in accordance with agreed rights of nations rather than a
commonwealth of nations lead by the most powerful. Kant writes:
For the advancing culture of states, along with their growing propensity to
aggrandize themselves by cunning or violence at the expense of others, must
multiply wars and give rise to higher and higher costs because of ever larger
armies (remaining under pay), kept at the ready and in training and equipped
with ever more numerous instruments of war; meanwhile the price of all
necessities constantly rises, though a corresponding increase in the metals
representing them cannot be hoped for; moreover, no peace lasts long enough
for the savings during it to catch up with expenditures on costs for the next war,
and the invention of a national debt against this, though certainly an ingenious
expedient, is in the end a self-defeating one; hence impotence must eventually
bring about what good will ought to have done but did not do: that each state
becomes so organized internally that it is not the head of state, whom war
McQuillan 02 chap07 250 29/6/07 14:58:15
really costs nothing (since he wages it at anothers cost, namely that of the
people), who has the decisive voice as to whether there is to be war or not, but
instead the people, which pays for it (admittedly, this necessarily presupposes
the realization of that idea of the original contract).
30
The people are not likely, continues Kant, to impoverish themselves
for the sake of aggrandisement and so the internal organisation of
prosperity leads (not out of the love of prosperity but out of the
self-love of each age) to peace between nations unable to harm each
other by force (because constrained by the will of their peoples) and
instead constituted into a commonwealth of mutual assistance. This
scenario, if not the solution, will be familiar to all observers of the
recent politics of the Middle East.
One could spend some time pursuing the analogy between Kants
standing armies and the American-led occupation and privatisation
of Iraq, in particular the robust defence of international law as the
guarantor of peace which follows from this discussion. I will leave
this as an exercise for the reader,
31
not wishing the rawness of such
an example to mediatise the more general point I wish to make
here about mediation itself. Namely, that with this example Kants
own theory is brought into practice, while practice is drawn into
theory and simultaneously held at bay by it. Here an interpretation
of the present (war) leads to a prognosis of the future (a cosmopolitan
constitution) and so theory and practice combine in the moment of
the example, which is a crafting of a relation between the two, the
only relation the two have. This is a crafting which takes place over
an abyss between relation and non-relation, an indenite multipli-
cation of the substitution by representation in a chain of examples
which stands in the place of a relation, producing the sense of the
very thing it defers, thus deriving the perceived immediacy of a
relation which exists only in the impossible and endless gapping of
the abyss. Let us call this relation judgement, a judgement which
is not teleological but one which is suspended in the abyss between
the misreading of present interpretation and the unknowable effects
of future prognosis. This is a uid judgement which distributes itself
between the theory Kant expounds and the practice it intends to give
rise to, while provisionally and contingently anchoring itself in the
very textual event of the example which simultaneously dispossess
it of the authoritative ambitions which predicate it. The example
runs away with and from the philosophy which puts it in play, while
mediating the actual of which it is only a representation.
McQuillan 02 chap07 251 29/6/07 14:58:15
The example as such would seem to have magical properties for
philosophy. Whenever philosophy comes into contact with the
example, and the example only ever resides in the text of philosophy,
all of the general principles and axiomatics proper to philosophical
discourse begin to quiver. There is at once an anxiety about and a
requirement for the example. The example should simultan eously
be in conformity with the theory while testing the limits of that
theory. The example as a textual event always transforms and
translates philosophy into something otherwise than philosophy,
compelling philosophy into a state beyond itself, transmuting the
matter of philosophy with unknowable alchemical effects. Long
may philosophers continue to be caught up in and caught out by
their examples, and long may they continue to be displaced by the
economic distribution which over-spills the boundaries between
theory and practice, philosophy and its others, the politics of
masturbation and the politics of the Middle East. In these dark
days of Neo-Colonialism I will leave the last word to Kant, who in
response to the great statesmen who ridicule theory, concludes his
own essay thus:
For my own part, I nevertheless put my trust in theory, which proceeds from the
principle of right, as to what relations among human beings and states ought
to be, and which commends to earthly gods the maxim always so to behave in
their conicts that such a universal state of nations will thereby be ushered in,
and so to assume that it is possible (in praxi) and that it can be; but at the same
time I put my trust (in subsidium) in the nature of things, which constrains one
to go where one does not want to go (fata volentem duccunt, nolentem trahunt).
In the latter, account is also taken of human nature, in which respect for right
and duty is still alive, so that I cannot and will not take it to be so immersed in
evil that morally practical reason should not, after many unsuccessful attempts,
nally triumph over evil and present human nature as lovable after all. Thus on
the cosmopolitan level, too, it can be maintained: What on rational grounds
holds for theory also holds for practice.
32
NOTES
1. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
2. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt,
W. Lough and C.P. Magill, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works,
Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 236.
3. For example, see the envois of 27 September 1978, or, 23 August 1979 in
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
McQuillan 02 chap07 252 29/6/07 14:58:15
4. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 11.
5. For further clarication see n. 45 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected
Works, Vol. 5, p. 594.
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part I with selections
from Parts II and III, (republished as The German Ideology: the students
edition) ed. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970).
7. C.J. Arthur, ed., The German Ideology, p. 103.
8. This and subsequent Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5,
pp. 2356.
9. SoM, p. 51.
10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 145.
13. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 1501.
18. I have considered this passage at length elsewhere. See, Martin McQuillan,
Paul de Man (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 7; Deconstruction: a Reader
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
20. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 41ff.
21. This and following, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5,
pp. 4467.
22. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 434.
23. I have glossed the question of the relation elsewhere, see Martin
McQuillan, The Girl Who Steps Along, The Oxford Literary Review, 24,
2002, pp. 4950.
24. See, Peggy Kamuf, Translating Spectres: an interview, parallax 20, The
New International, ed. Martin McQuillan (JulySeptember, 2001),
p. 47.
25. Immanuel Kant, On the common saying: That may be correct in theory,
but is of no use in practice, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 279.
26. See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
27. Kant, On the common saying, p. 280.
31. I have attempted a similar reading elsewhere of Kants Toward Perpetual
Peace, see Martin McQuillan The Eternal Battle for the Domination of
the World, Parallax 15, AprilJune, 2000, pp. 6781.
McQuillan 02 chap07 253 29/6/07 14:58:15
McQuillan 02 chap07 254 29/6/07 14:58:15
Notes on Contributors
Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York. His
recent publications include J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
(2004) and The Singularity of Literature (2004).
Richard Beardsworth is Professor of Political Philosophy at the
American University in Paris. He is the author of Derrida and the
Political (1996) and Nietzsche (1997).
Geoffrey Bennington is Professor of French at Emory University. His
recent publications include Interrupting Derrida (2000) and Frontires
kantiennes (2000).
Anne Berger is Professor of French Literature at Cornell University
and Director of the Centre Etudes Fminines at Universit Paris VIII.
Her recent publications include Scnes daumne: Misre et Posie au
XIXe sicle (2004) and Algeria in Other(s) Languages (2002).
Robert Bernasconi is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy
at Memphis University. His recent publications include The Cambridge
Companion to Levinas (with Simon Critchley, 2002) and How to Read
Sartre (2006).
Claire Colebrook is Professor of English Literature at the University
of Edinburgh. Her recent publications include Philosophy and Post-
structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze (2005) and Irony in the Work
of Philosophy (2003).
Marc Froment-Meurice is Professor of French at Vanderbilt University.
His recent publications include Incitations (2002) and That Is to Say:
Heideggers Poetics (1998).
Rodolphe Gasch is Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature
at SUNY (Buffalo). His recent publications include Of Minimal Things:
Studies on the Notion of Relation (1999) and The Idea of Form: Rethinking
Kants Aesthetics (2003).
Joanna Hodge is Professor of Philosophy at the Manchester
Metropolitan University. She is the author of Derrida on Time (2007)
and Heidegger and Ethics (1994).
255
McQuillan 02 chap07 255 29/6/07 14:58:15
256 Notes on Contributors
Martin McQuillan is Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis at
the University of Leeds. His recent publications include The Origins
of Deconstruction (with Ika Willis, 2007) and Textual Activism: decon-
struction before and after 9/11 (2007).
Laurent Milesi teaches at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory
at Cardiff University. His recent publications include James Joyce and
the Difference of Language (2003).
Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Strasbourg. Recent English-language translations of his work include
The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007) and The Ground of
the Image (2005).
Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College,
Massachusetts. His publications include Performativity and Performance
(with Eve Sedgwick, 1995) and Nationalisms and Sexuality (1992), and
he is co-translator and editor of Jacques Rancires The Philosopher
and His Poor (2004).
McQuillan 02 chap07 256 29/6/07 14:58:15
257
Abraham(ic) 55, 58, 59, 61, 176,
179
Aesthetics 192, 244
Agamben, Giorgio 164
Althusser, Louis 3
Antigone 171
Aristotle 18, 2533, 127, 129, 216
Auerbach, Eric 11, 6670
Austin, John 193, 196
Auto-Affection 242
Auto-Immunity 6
Bahti, Timothy 75n.5
Barradori, Giovanna 5
Barthes, Roland 25
Beardsworth, Richard 65n.33
Benjamin, Walter 150, 151n.14, 215
Bennington, Geoffrey 9, 94n.1,
97n.74
Berger, Anne 184
Bergson, Henri 12, 147
Biemel, Walter 138
Bin Laden, Osama 2
Blanchot, Maurice 12, 138, 139,
140, 145, 146, 150, 15864,
169, 185
Blumenberg, Hans 46
Capital 5, 214, 217, 221, 233
Caputo, John 180, 189n.42
Carroll, David 66
Chekov, Anton 159
Cixous, Hlne 8
Climate Change 5
Communism 47, 213
Community 52, 73, 102, 103, 107
Constitution 29, 44
Contingency 2
Critchley, Simon 91, 92
Critique 81, 144, 249
Cultural Studies 18
De Gaulle, Charles 158
Deguy, Michel 162
De Man, Paul 13, 66, 140, 141, 236,
244, 248
Democracy 10, 1736, 4353, 63,
105, 213, 225, 231
Democracy-to-come 3, 27, 223, 225
Derrida, Jacques (works by):
A Madness Must Watch Over
Thinking 83, 90
Aporias 178
A Silkworm of Ones Own 25,
185
Cinders 174
Cogito and the History of
Madness 82
Dialanguages 184
Dissemination 174
Faith and Knowledge 144, 175,
180
Force of Law 4, 54, 93, 178
Given Time 54
Glas 138, 141, 148, 235
How to Avoid Speaking Denials
176, 180
Introduction to Husserls Origin of
Geometry 82, 137, 149
Ja, ou le faux-bond 81
La Contre-alle 183
Letter to a Japanese Friend 81
Limited Inc 13, 192, 201
Memoirs for Paul de Man 140, 141
Monolinguism of the Other 18, 183,
185
Of Grammatology 109, 112, 241
On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic
Tone in Philosophy 134
The Ends of Man 2
The Gift of Death 5662
The Time of a Thesis 145
The Other Heading 54, 83, 114n.7,
121
The Post Card 158, 174, 235
The Problem of Genesis for Husserl
137
Pas 176, 180, 185
Index
McQuillan 03 index 257 29/6/07 14:57:55
258 Index
Derrida, Jacques (works by): contd
Politics of Friendship 17, 19, 26,
38n.14, 54
Positions 37n.7
Psyche: Invention of the Other
54
Sauf le nom 54, 185
Signature Event Context 193
Spectres of Marx 4, 6, 8, 84, 138,
178, 179, 182, 185, 214, 222,
2267, 240
Violence and Metaphysics 7, 8,
84, 85
diffrance 6, 179, 206, 220, 221
Dostoyevsky, Feodor 158
Eagleton, Terry 235
Engels, Friedrich 23548
Enlightenment 20, 134
Europe 83, 116, 118, 119, 121, 124,
127, 1324
Fascism 47, 213
Fink, Eugene 128, 12931
Forgiveness 62
Foucault, Michel 194
Freud, Sigmund 12, 25, 100, 138,
141, 215
Fukayama, Francis 224, 225
Future 110, 140
Gasch, Rodolphe 25
Genet, Jean 148
Globalisation 49, 50, 168, 225
Government 28
Granel, Grard 12, 116, 117, 120,
133
Hegel, G.W.F 7, 10, 19, 20, 25, 35,
82, 126, 138, 139, 141, 166,
216, 217, 223, 229
Heidegger, Martin 7, 8, 12, 82, 84,
93, 117, 120, 126, 132, 143,
15866, 171, 213, 215, 222,
223
History 6, 19, 140, 141, 143, 203,
223, 224, 230
Hlderlin, Friedrich 126
Hospitality 60, 62
Hugo, Victor 1
Hurricane Katrina 5
Husserl, Edmund 11620, 122, 127,
138, 139, 141, 146, 149, 150,
215, 222
Impossibility 60, 62, 202
International Law 4, 250
Iraq 2, 5, 251
Justice 4, 51, 62, 127, 178, 200, 202,
203, 223
Kant, Immanuel 12, 30, 35, 83, 106,
134, 138, 144, 152n.15, 192,
201, 205, 208, 225, 24852
Kierkegaard, Soren 55, 56, 58, 61,
62
Kofman, Sarah 148, 150
Lacan, Jacques 194
Laclau, Ernesto 91, 92
Lebanon 2
Levinas, Emmanuel 61, 81, 8493,
128, 138, 139, 143, 145, 146,
150, 183, 186, 210n.19, 215,
222
Levi-Strauss, Claude 99
Literature 55, 64n.25, 200, 240
Lukcs, Georg 66
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 147
Malabou, Catherine 183
Mallarm, Stefan 140, 150, 175, 185
Marvell, Andrew 54, 61
Marx, Karl 2, 7, 13, 35, 44, 45, 83,
117, 120, 158, 182, 21432,
23548
Marxism 84, 182, 215
Mendelssohn, Moses 250
Messianism 140, 181
Merlau-Ponty, Maurice 138, 146
Middle East 2, 236, 251, 252
Mourning 1, 138
Nancy, Jean-Luc 121, 135n.7, 144,
147, 152n.17, 167, 169
Nation State 48
Nazism 1624
McQuillan 03 index 258 29/6/07 14:57:56
Index 259
Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 82, 139
Paine, Tom 2
Patocka, Jan 12, 116, 12233
Phenomenology 122, 137, 139,
1427, 149
Phonocentrism 103, 108
Plato 13, 18, 215, 26, 303, 85,
121, 12830, 174, 176
Political Economy 48, 513, 113n.5,
231
Post-colonialism 17
Postmodernism 17
Queer Theory 75
Rancire, Jacques 6675
Rousseau, J.J 1112, 35, 44, 98113,
225
Royle, Nicholas 9
Rumsfeld, Donald 2
Sarkozy, Nicholas 2
Sartre, Jean-Paul 138, 161
Schmitt, Carl 45
Science 4, 233
Searle, John 193, 195, 199, 202
Shakespeare, William 215
Smith, Adam 216
Socrates 21, 23, 26, 31, 166, 175
Sovereignty 4, 11, 224
Speech Acts 1937
Starobinski, Jean 110, 111
Stirner, Max 215, 2368, 241, 247
Tacitus 6770
Tarkl, Georg 167
Tele-communication 5
Telos 3, 36, 198
Terrorism 4, 5
Tocqueville, Alexander 45
Totalitarianism 43, 228
Trauma 5
Trotsky, Leon 158
Undecidability 82, 93
Universality 120, 180
Vernant, Jean-Pierre 174
Vietnam 2
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 117, 120
Wood, David 5662, 152n.17
World Trade Center (New York) 5
iek, Slavoj 714
McQuillan 03 index 259 29/6/07 14:57:56

The Politics of Deconstruction J Derrida The Other of Philosophy

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Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy

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Politics has retreated as the donation (self- or hetero-donation,

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