The Politics of Jacques Derrida
MARK LILLA
June 25, 1998 New York Review of Books
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
History of Structuralism
by Francois Dosse and translated by Deborah Glassman
two volumes, 458 and 517 pages, $85.00 (hardcover)
published by University of Minnesota Press,
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault, and
Michael B. Naas
129 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by Indiana University Press,
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International
by Jacques Derrida and translated by Peggy Kamuf
198 pages, $18.99 (paperback)
published by Routledge
Force de loi
by Jacques Derrida
146 pages, 135 FF (paperback)
published by Paris: Editions Galilée
Moscou aller-retour
by Jacques Derrida
157 pages, 89 FF (paperback)
published by La Tour d'Aigues: Editions de l'Aube
Politics of Friendship
by Jacques Derrida and translated by George Collins
308 pages, $20.00 (paperback)
published by Verso
Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!
by Jacques Derrida
58 pages, 66 FF (paperback)
published by Paris: Editions Galilée
The history of French philosophy in the three decades
following the Second World War can be summed up in
a phrase: politics dictated and philosophy wrote. After
the Liberation, and thanks mainly to the example of
Jean-Paul Sartre, the mantle of the Dreyfusard
intellectual passed from the writer to the philosopher,
who was now expected to pronounce on the events of
the day. This development led to a blurring of the
boundaries between pure philosophical inquiry, political
philosophy, and political engagement, and these lines
have only slowly been reestablished in France. As
Vincent Descombes remarked in his superb short study
of the period, Modern French Philosophy (1980),
"taking a political position is and remains the decisive
test in France; it is what should reveal the ultimate
meaning of a philosophy." Paradoxically, the politicizing
of philosophy also meant the near extinction of political
philosophy, understood as disciplined and informed
reflection about a recognizable domain called politics. If
everything is political, then strictly speaking nothing is. It
is a striking fact about the postwar scene that France
produced only one genuine political thinker of note:
Raymond Aron.
The list of important French philosophers who
protected their work from the political passions of the
day is short but contains some significant figures. One
thinks of the Jewish moral philosopher Emmanuel
Lévinas, the misanthropic essayist E.M. Cioran, both of
whom have recently died, and the Protestant thinker
Paul Ricoeur, now ninety-five, who are all being
rediscovered today. One also thinks of Jacques
Derrida, the father of deconstruction, a claim that may
surprise American readers, given the ideologically
charged atmosphere in which Derrida and his work
have been received on our side of the Atlantic. Unlike
so many of his fellow students at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure in the Fifties, Derrida kept clear of the
Stalinized French Communist Party (PCF), and later
adopted a skeptical attitude toward the events of May
'68 and the short-lived hysteria for Mao. Over the next
decade, as Michel Foucault became the great white
hope of the post-'68 left, Derrida frustrated all attempts
to read a simple political program into deconstruction.
He declared himself to be a man of the left but refused
to elaborate, leaving more orthodox thinkers to wonder
whether deconstruction reflected anything more than
"libertarian pessimism," as the Marxist critic Terry
Eagleton once charged.
As Derrida's star began to fall in France in the 1980s, it
was rising in the English-speaking world, where
questions about his political commitments were raised
anew. This must have been awkward for him on several
counts. Derrida's thought is extremely French in its
themes and rhetoric, and is difficult to understand
outside the context of long-standing Parisian disputes
over the legacies of structuralism and Heideggerianism.
In the United States, however, his ideas, which were
first introduced into literary criticism, now circulate in
the alien environment of academic postmodernism,
which is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral
disciplines like cultural studies, feminist studies, gay and
lesbian studies, science studies, and postcolonial theory.
Academic postmodernism is nothing if not syncretic,
which makes it difficult to understand or even describe.
It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva--and, as if
that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from
Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures
from the German Frankfurt School. Given the
impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as
dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude
and short on argument. What appears to hold it together
is the conviction that promoting these very different
thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory
political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.
In America, Derrida is considered a classic of the
postmodern canon. But as recently as 1990 he still
declined to explain the political implications of
deconstruction. Occasionally a book would appear
claiming
to have cracked the code and discovered hidden
affinities between deconstruction and, say, Marxism or
feminism. The Sphinx just grinned. But now, at long
last, he has spoken. During the past five years Jacques
Derrida has published no fewer than six books on
political themes. Some are no more than pamphlets and
interviews, but three of them--a book on Marx, one
on friendship and politics, another on law--are
substantial treatises. Why Derrida has chosen this
particular moment to make his political debut is a
matter of speculation. His thoughts could not be more
out of season in France, and his six books met
bafflement when they appeared there. But given the
continuing influence of postmodernism in the United
States, where Derrida now spends much of his time
teaching, his interventions could not be more timely.
They give us plenty of material for reflection about the
real political implications of deconstruction and whether
American readers have quite grasped them.
1.
On or about November 4, 1956, the nature of French
philosophy changed. That, in any case, is what the
textbooks tell us. In the decade following the
Liberation, the dominant presence in French philosophy
was Jean-Paul Sartre and the dominant issue was
communism. Sartre's L'Etre et le néant (1943) had
earned him a reputation as an existentialist during the
Occupation, and his famous lecture of 1945,
"L'Existentialisme est un humanisme," brought his
message that "man is the future of man" to a wide
European audience at war's end. Yet within a few
years of having spoken out on behalf of absolute human
liberty, Sartre became an obedient fellow traveler. In
his infamous tract "Les Communistes et la paix," which
began to be serialized in 1952, he dismissed reports of
the Gulag, and after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1954
declared in an interview that "the freedom to criticize is
total in the USSR." Having once extolled man's unique
capacity for free choice, Sartre announced a decade
later that Marxism was the unsurpassable horizon of
our time.
But in 1956 (so the story goes) the myth of the Soviet
Union was shattered in France by Khrushchev's secret
speech to the Twentieth Party Conference in Moscow
in November, and the suppression of the Hungarian
revolt. This brought an end to many illusions: about
Sartre, about communism, about history, about
philosophy, and about the term "humanism." It also
established a break between the generation of French
thinkers reared in the Thirties, who had seen the war as
adults, and students who felt alien to those experiences
and wished to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the
cold war. The latter therefore turned from the
"existential" political engagement recommended by
Sartre toward a new social science called structuralism.
And (the story ends) after this turn there would develop
a new approach to philosophy, of which Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida are perhaps the most
distinguished representatives.
The problem with this textbook history is that it vastly
overstates the degree to which French intellectuals
stripped themselves of their Communist illusions in
1956. What it gets right is the role of structuralism in
changing the terms in which political matters generally
were discussed. Structuralism was a term coined by the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe a
method of applying models of linguistic structure to the
study of society as a whole, in particular to customs
and myths. Though Lévi-Strauss claimed inspiration
from Marx, he interpreted Marxism to be a science of
society, not a guide to political action.
Sartre's engaged Marxist humanism rested on three
basic presuppositions: that history's movements can be
understood rationally; that those movements are
determined by class relations; and that the individual's
responsibility was to further human emancipation by
assisting progressive class forces. Lévi-
Strauss drew two very different principles from
reading Marx in light of the French sociological
tradition (especially the works of Emile Durkheim)
and his own anthropological field work. They were
that societies are structures of relatively stable
relations among their elements, which develop in no
rational historical pattern, and that class has no special
status among them. As for man's existential
responsibilities, Lévi-Strauss had nothing to say. It
was a provocative silence. For if societies were
essentially stable structures whose metamorphoses
were unpredictable, that left little room for man to
shape his political future through action. Indeed, man
seemed rather beside the point. As Lévi-Strauss put it
in his masterpiece Tristes Tropiques (1955), "The
world began without the human race, and it will end
without it."
Today it is somewhat difficult to understand how this
austere doctrine could have appealed to young people
caught up in the cold war atmosphere of the Fifties. It
helps to realize how profoundly Lévi-Strauss was
attacking the defining myth of modern French politics.
Beginning in the Third Republic there developed a
shaky political consensus in France, to the effect that
the Declaration of the Rights of Man pronounced in
1789 reflected universal truths about the human
condition which France had been anointed to
promulgate to the world. After two world wars, the
Occupation, and Vichy, this myth of universalism in
one country struck many young Frenchmen as absurd.
Lévi-Strauss's structuralism cast doubt on the
universality of any political rights or values, and also
raised suspicions about the "man" who claimed them.
Weren't these concepts simply a cover for the West's
ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide, as
Lévi-Strauss charged? And wasn't Sartre's Marxism
polluted by the same ideas? Marxism spoke of each
nation's place in the general unfolding of history;
structuralism spoke of each culture as autonomous.
Marxism preached revolution and liberation for all
peoples; structuralism spoke of cultural difference and
the need to respect it. In the Paris of the late Fifties,
the cool structuralism of Lévi-Strauss seemed at once
more radically democratic and less naive than the
engaged humanism of Sartre.
Besides, structuralist concern with "difference" and the
"Other" also had a strong political effect in the decade
of decolonization and the Algerian War.
Lévi-Strauss's most significant works were all
published during the breakup of the French colonial
empire and contributed enormously to the way it was
understood by intellectuals. Sartre was much engaged
in anticolonial politics and saw in Third World
revolutions the birth of a "new man," as he put it in his
passionate preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnées
de la terre (1961). Lévi-Strauss never engaged in
polemics over decolonization or the Algerian War.
Nonetheless, his elegant writings worked an aesthetic
transformation on his readers, who were subtly made
to feel ashamed to be European. Using the rhetorical
gifts he learned from Rousseau, he evoked the beauty,
dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World
cultures that were simply trying to preserve their
difference. And though Lévi-Strauss may not have
intended it, his writings would soon feed the suspicion
among the new left that grew up in the Sixties that all
the universal ideas to which Europe claimed
allegiance--reason, science, progress, liberal
democracy--were culturally specific weapons
fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his
difference.
As Francois Dosse shows in his useful new study of
structuralism, the movement had a lasting impact on
French thought and intellectual politics, even though its
doctrines were quickly misunderstood and misapplied
in the next generation.1 For Lévi-Strauss, structuralism
was a scientific method for studying differences
between cultures, in the hope of one day achieving a
more genuinely universal understanding of human
nature. For the tiers-mondistes he inspired, and who
were radicalized by the Algerian War, this scientific
relativism degenerated into just another primitivism
that neutralized any...
1 This next generation is usually called "poststructuralist" in English to mark the
break with structuralism's original scientific program. This term is not used
in French, however, and Dosse employs "structuralism" to refer to the entire
movement. I follow him in this.
. One could not even speak of man without putting the term in
quotation marks. "Man" was now considered a site, a
point where various social, cultural, economic,
linguistic, and psychological forces happened to
intersect. As Michel Foucault put it in the closing
sentence of Les Mots et les choses (1966), man was a
recent invention that would soon disappear, like a face
drawn in the sand.
That surely was not what Lévi-Strauss had in mind
when he spoke of creation outlasting man, but the die
was already cast. What this radical antihumanism
would mean for politics was not altogether clear. For if
"man" was entirely a construct of language and social
forces, then how was homo politicus to deliberate on
and justify his actions? Whatever one thought of
Sartre's political engagements, he had an answer to that
question. The structuralists did not.
2.
Francois Dosse describes Jacques Derrida's doctrine
of deconstruction as an "ultrastructuralism." This is
accurate enough but does not tell the whole story. In
France at least, the novelty of deconstruction in the
Sixties was to have addressed the themes of
structuralism--difference, the Other--with the
philosophical concepts and categories of Martin
Heidegger. Derrida's early writing revived a querelle
over the nature of humanism which had set Heidegger
against Sartre back in the late Forties and had many
political implications. Derrida sided with Heidegger,
whom he only criticized for not having gone far enough.
And it is to that decision in favor of Heidegger that all
the political problems of deconstruction may be traced.
The Sartre-Heidegger dispute followed Sartre's 1945
lecture on humanism, which Heidegger read as a
travesty of his own intellectual position. Sartre had
appropriated the Heideggerian language of anxiety,
authenticity, existence, and resolution to make the case
for man as "the future of man," by which he meant that
man's autonomous self-development should replace
transcendent ends as the aim of all our striving. In a
long, and justly famous, "Letter on Humanism" (1946),
Heidegger responded that his aim had always been to
question the concept of man and perhaps free us from
it. Ever since Plato, he wrote, Western philosophy had
made unexamined metaphysical assumptions about
man's essence that disguised the fundamental question
of Being--which is the meaning of Being apart from
man's comprehension of the being of
natural entities--and placed man himself at the center
of creation. All the scourges of modern life--science,
technology, capitalism, communism--could be traced
back to this original "anthropologization" of Being.
This was a heavy burden, which could only be lifted
through the dismantling (Destruktion) of the
metaphysical tradition. Only then could man learn that
he is not the master but rather the "shepherd" of
Being.
Deconstruction was conceived in the spirit of
Heidegger's Destruktion, though Derrida had no
intention of making man the shepherd of anything. In a
remarkable lecture in 1968, "The Ends of Man,"
Derrida pointed out that by anointing man the
"shepherd of Being," Heidegger had returned to
humanism "as if by magnetic attraction." He then
claimed that the metaphysical tradition could only
really be overcome if the very language of philosophy
was "deconstructed," a language in which even
Heidegger was snared. At the root of the
metaphysical tradition was a naive notion of language
as a transparent medium, a "logocentrism," as Derrida
dubbed it. The Greek term logos means word or
language, but it can also mean reason or principle--an
equation of speech with intentionality that Derrida
considered highly questionable. What was needed
was a radical "decentering" of the implicit hierarchies
imbedded in this language that encourage us to place
speech above writing, the author above the reader, or
the signified above the signifier. Deconstruction thus
was described as a prolegomenon to--or perhaps
even a substitute for--philosophy as traditionally
conceived. It would be an activity allowing the
aporias, or paradoxes, imbedded in every
philosophical text to emerge without forcing a "violent"
consistency upon them. The end of logocentrism
would then mean the end of every other wicked
"centrism": androcentrism, phallocentrism,
phallologocentrism, carnophallologocentrism, and the
rest. (All these terms appear in the books under
review.)
As a specimen of normalien cleverness, Derrida's
attack on his intellectual forefathers could hardly be
bettered. He accused both structuralists and
Heidegger of not having pushed their own fundamental
insights far enough. Structuralists destabilized our
picture of man by placing him in a web of social and
linguistic relations, but then assumed that web of
relations--structures--to have a stable center.
Heidegger's blindness to his own language led from
the Destruktion of metaphysics to the promotion of
man as the "shepherd of Being." Derrida's
contribution, if that is the correct term, was to have
seen that by pressing further the antihumanism latent in
both these intellectual traditions, he could make them
seem compatible ways of addressing logocentrism.
But having done that, Derrida then found himself
bound to follow the linguistic principles he had
discovered in his campaign against logocentrism,
especially the hard doctrine that since all texts contain
ambiguities and can be read in different ways (la
différence), exhaustive interpretation must be forever
deferred (la différance). That raised the obvious
question: How then are we to understand
deconstruction's own propositions? As more than one
critic has pointed out, there is an unresolvable
paradox in using language to claim that language
cannot make unambiguous claims.2 For Derrida
coping with such evident paradoxes is utterly beside
the point. As he has repeatedly explained, he
conceives of deconstruction less as a philosophical
doctrine than as a "practice" aimed at casting
suspicion on the entire philosophical tradition and
robbing it of self-confidence.
Anyone who has heard him lecture in French knows
that he is more performance artist than logician. His
flamboyant style--using free association, rhymes and
near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions--is
not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects
what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative
strategy" for combating logocentrism. As he puts it in
the interview published in Moscou aller-retour:
2 See, for example,
John Searle, "The
World Turned Upside
Down," The New York
Review, October 27,
1983. (back)
" What I try to do through the
neutralization of communication, theses,
and stability of content, through a
microstructure of signification, is to
provoke, not only in the reader but also
in oneself, a new tremor or a new shock
of the body that opens a new space of
experience. That might explain the
reaction of not a few readers when they
say that, in the end, one doesn't
understand anything, there's no
conclusion drawn, it's too sophisticated,
we don't know if you are for or against
Nietzsche, where you stand on the
woman question...."
It also might explain the reaction of those readers who
suspect that the neutralization of communication
means the neutralization of all standards of
judgment--logical, scientific, aesthetic, moral,
political--and leaves these fields of thought open to
the winds of force and caprice. Derrida always
brushed aside such worries as childish, and in the
atmosphere of the Sixties and Seventies few questions
were asked. But the Eighties proved to be trying times
for deconstruction. In 1987 a Chilean writer named
Victor Farías published a superficial book on Martin
Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and its alleged
roots in his philosophy. While the book contained no
revelations, it was taken in France and Germany to
confirm the suspicion that, to the extent that
philosophy in the Sixties and Seventies was
Heideggerian, it was politically irresponsible. Jacques
Derrida rejected these associations out of hand, as
readers of this paper will recall.3
But that same year it was also revealed that the late
Yale professor Paul de Man, a leading champion of
deconstruction and close friend of Derrida's, had
published collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles in
two Belgian newspapers in the early Forties. These
might have been dismissed as youthful errors had
Derrida and some of his American followers not then
interpreted away the offending passages, denying their
evident meaning, leaving the impression that
deconstruction means you never have to say you're
sorry.4 It now appeared that deconstruction had, at
the very least, a public relations problem, and that the
questions of politics it so playfully left in suspension
would now have to be answered.
Yet how would that be possible? Derrida's radical
interpretations of structuralism and Heideggerianism
had rendered the traditional vocabulary of politics
unusable and nothing could be put in its place. The
subjects considered in traditional political
philosophy--individual human beings and
nations--were declared to be artifices of language,
and dangerous ones at that. The object of political
philosophy--a distinct realm of political action--was
seen as part of a general system of relations that itself
had no center. And as for the method of political
philosophy--rational inquiry toward a practical
end--Derrida had succeeded in casting suspicion on
its logocentrism. An intellectually consistent
deconstruction would therefore seem to entail silence
on political matters. Or, if silence proved unbearable,
it would at least require a serious reconsideration of
the antihumanist dogmas of the structuralist and
Heideggerian traditions. To his credit, Michel Foucault
began such a reconsideration in the decade before his
death. Jacques Derrida never has.
3.
The most we are ever likely to learn about Derrida's
understanding of strictly political relations is contained
in his most recently translated work, Politics of
Friendship--the only one of his books with the word
"politics" in the title. It is based on a seminar given in
Paris in 1988-1989, just as Europe was being shaken
to its foundation by the rapid collapse of the Eastern
Bloc. As it happens, I attended this seminar and, like
most of the participants I met, had difficulty
understanding what Derrida was driving at. Each
session would begin with the same citation from
Montaigne--"O mes amis, il n'y a nul ami" ("O
3 See Thomas
Sheehan, "A Normal
Nazi," The New York
Review, January 14,
1993, as well as letters
from Derrida, Richard
Wolin, and others in
The New York
Review, February 11,
March 4, and March
25, 1993. (back)
4 For a full account,
with references, see
Louis Menand, "The
Politics of
Deconstruction," The
New York Review,
November 21, 1991.
(back)
my friends, there is no friend")--and then veer off into
a rambling discussion of its possible sources and
meanings. The published text is much reworked and
gives a clearer picture of what Derrida has in mind.
His aim is to show that the entire Western tradition of
thinking about politics has been distorted by our
philosophy's peccatum originarium, the concept of
identity. Because our metaphysical tradition teaches
that man is identical to himself, a coherent personality
free from internal difference, we have been
encouraged to seek our identities through membership
in undifferentiated, homogenizing groups such as
families, friendships, classes, and nations. From
Aristotle to the French Revolution, the good republic
has therefore been thought to require fraternité,
which is idealized as a natural blood tie making
separate individuals somehow one.5 But there is no
such thing as natural fraternity, Derrida asserts, just as
there is no natural maternity (sic). All such natural
categories, as well as the derivative concepts of
community, culture, nation, and borders, are
dependent on language and therefore are conventions.
The problem with these conventions is not simply that
they cover up differences within the presumably
identical entities. It is that they also establish
hierarchies among them: between brothers and sisters,
citizens and foreigners, and eventually friends and
enemies. In the book's most reasoned chapters,
Derrida examines Carl Schmitt's conception of
politics, which portrays the political relation as an
essentially hostile one between friends and enemies.6
Derrida sees Schmitt not as a mere Nazi apologist
with a thirst for conflict, but as a deep thinker who
made explicit the implicit assumptions of all Western
political philosophy.
From this point of view it would seem that all Western
political ideologies--fascism, conservatism, liberalism,
socialism, communism--would be equally
unacceptable. That is the logical implication of
Derrida's attack on logocentrism, and sometimes he
appears to accept it. In Specters of Marx and The
Other Heading he denounces the new liberal
consensus he sees as having ruled the West since
1989, lashing out hysterically, and unoriginally, at the
"New International" of global capitalism and media
conglomerates that have established world hegemony
by means of an "unprecedented form of war." He is
less critical of Marxism (for reasons we will examine),
though he does believe that communism became
totalitarian when it tried to realize the eschatological
program laid out by Marx himself. Marx's problem
was that he did not carry out fully his own critique of
ideology and remained within the logocentrist
tradition. That is what explains the Gulag, the
genocides, and the terror carried out in his name by
the Soviet Union. "If I had the time," Derrida tells his
undoubtedly stupefied Russian interviewers in Moscou
aller-retour, "I could show that Stalin was
'logocentrist,'" though he admits that "that would
demand a long development."
It probably would. For it would mean showing that
the real source of tyranny is not tyrants, or guns, or
wicked institutions. Tyranny begins in the language of
tyranny, which derives ultimately from philosophy. If
that were transformed, or "neutralized" as he says in
Politics of Friendship, so eventually would our
politics be. He proves to be extremely open-minded
about what this might entail. He asks rhetorically
whether "it would still make sense to speak of
democracy when there would be no more speaking of
country, nation, even state and citizen." He also
considers whether the abandonment of Western
humanism would mean that concepts of human rights,
humanitarianism, even crimes against humanity would
have to be forsworn.
But then what remains? If deconstruction throws
doubt on every political principle of the Western
philosophical tradition--Derrida mentions propriety,
intentionality, will, liberty, conscience, self-
5 In case the reader
failed to grasp the real
target of Derrida's
campaign against the
idea of fraternité, in
Politics of Friendship
he emphasizes that
"this book set itself
up to work and be
worked relentlessly,
close to the thing
called France. And
close to the singular
alliance linking
nothing less than the
history of
fraternization to this
thing, France--to the
State, the nation, the
politics, the culture,
literature and
language." (back)
6 On Schmitt's
concept of politics,
see my article, "The
Enemy of Liberalism,"
The New York
Review, May 15, 1997.
(back)
consciousness, the subject, the self, the person, and
community--are judgments about political matters still
possible? Can one still distinguish rights from wrongs,
justice from injustice? Or are these terms, too, so
infected with logocentrism that they must be
abandoned? Can it really be that deconstruction
condemns us to silence on political matters, or can it
find a linguistic escape from the trap of language?
4.
Readers of Derrida's early works can be forgiven for
assuming that he believes there can be no escape from
language, and therefore no escape from
deconstruction for any of our concepts. His
achievement, after all, was to have established this
hard truth, which was the only truth he did not
question. But now Jacques Derrida has changed his
mind, and in a major way. It turns out that there is a
concept--though only one--resilient enough to
withstand the acids of deconstruction. That concept is
justice.
In the fall of 1989 Derrida was invited to address a
symposium in New York on the theme
"deconstruction and the possibility of justice." His
lecture has now been expanded in a French edition
and published along with an essay on Walter
Benjamin.7 Derrida's aim in the lecture is to
demonstrate that although deconstruction can and
should be applied to the law, it cannot and should not
be taken to undercut the notion of justice. The
problem with law, in his view, is that it is founded and
promulgated on the basis of authority, and therefore,
he asserts (with typical exaggeration), depends on
violence. Law is affected by economic and political
forces, is changed by calculation and compromise,
and therefore differs from place to place. Law is
written into texts and must be interpreted, which
complicates things further.
Of course, none of this is news. Our whole tradition of
thinking about law, beginning in Greek philosophy and
passing through Roman law, canon law, and modern
constitutionalism, is based on the recognition that laws
are a conventional device. The only controversial issue
is whether there is a higher law, or right, by which the
conventional laws of nations can be judged, and, if so,
whether it is grounded in nature, reason, or revelation.
This distinction between law and right is the
foundation of continental jurisprudence, which
discriminates carefully between loi/droit,
Gesetz/Recht, legge/diritto, and so forth. Derrida
conflates loi and droit for the simple reason that he
recognizes neither nature nor reason as standards for
anything. In his view, both are caught up in the
structures of language, and therefore may be
deconstructed.
Now, however, he also wishes to claim that there is a
concept called justice, and that it stands "outside and
beyond the law." But since this justice cannot be
understood through nature or reason, that only leaves
one possible means of access to its meaning:
revelation. Derrida studiously avoids this term but it is
what he is talking about. In Force de loi he speaks of
an "idea of justice" as "an experience of the
impossible," something that exists beyond all
experience and therefore cannot be articulated. And
what cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed; it
can only be experienced in a mystical way. This is
how he puts it:
If there is deconstruction of all
determining presumption of a present
justice, it operates from an infinite "idea
of justice," infinitely irreducible. It is
irreducible because due to the
other--due to the other before any
contract, because this idea has arrived,
the arrival of the other as a singularity
always other. Invincible to all
skepticism...this "idea of justice" appears
indestructible.... One can recognize, and
even accuse it of madness. And perhaps
another sort of mysticism.
Deconstruction is mad about this justice,
mad with the desire for justice.
Or again in Specters of Marx:
What remains irreducible to any
deconstruction, what remains as
undeconstructible as the
7 The original lecture
appears in Drucilla
Cornell, et al., editors,
Deconstruction and
the Possibility of
Justice (Routledge,
1992).
possibility itself of deconstruction, is,
perhaps, a certain experience of the
emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even
the formality of a structural messianism, a
messianism without religion, even a
messianic without messianism, an idea of
justice--which we distinguish from law
or right and even from human
rights--and an idea of
democracy--which we distinguish from
its current concept and from its
determined predicates today.
There is no justice present anywhere in the world.
There is, however, as Derrida puts it, an "infinite idea
of justice," though it cannot and does not penetrate
our world. Yet this necessary absence of justice does
not relieve us of the obligation to await its arrival, for
the Messiah may come at any moment, through any
city gate. We must therefore learn to wait, to defer
gratifying our desire for justice. And what better
training in deferral than deconstruction? If
deconstruction questions the claim of any law or
institution to embody absolute justice, it does so in the
very name of justice--a justice it refuses to name or
define, an "infinite justice that can take on a 'mystical'
aspect." Which leads us, without surprise, to the
conclusion that "deconstruction is justice."
Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the
grounds that only philosophy could see things as they
truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida,
mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates
justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only
the undoing of rational discourse about justice will
prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.
5.
How seriously are we meant to take all this? As
always with Derrida it is difficult to know. In the
books under review he borrows freely from the
modern messianic writings of Emmanuel Lévinas and
Walter Benjamin.8 But whatever one makes of these
two thinkers, they had too much respect for
theological concepts like promise, covenant, Messiah,
and anticipation to throw these words about
cavalierly. Derrida's turn to them in these new political
writings bears all the signs of intellectual desperation.
He clearly wants deconstruction to serve some
political program, and to give hope to the dispirited
left. He also wants to correct the impression that his
own thought, like that of Heidegger, leads inevitably to
a blind "resolve," an assertion of will that could take
any political form. As he remarked not long ago, "My
hope as a man of the left, is that certain elements of
deconstruction will have served or--because the
struggle continues, particularly in the United
States--will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left
with regard to positions which are not simply
academic."9 Yet the logic of his own philosophical
arguments, such as they are, proves stronger than
Derrida. He simply cannot find a way of specifying the
nature of the justice to be sought through left-wing
politics without opening himself to the very
deconstruction he so gleefully applies to others.
Unless, of course, he places the "idea of justice" in the
eternal, messianic beyond where it cannot be reached
by argument, and assumes that his ideologically
sympathetic readers won't ask too many questions.
But politics on the left, no less than on the right, is not
a matter of passive expectation. It envisages action.
And if the idea of justice cannot be articulated, it
cannot provide any aim for political action. According
to Derrida's argument, all that remains to guide us is
decision, pure and simple: a decision for justice or
democracy, and for a particular understanding of
both. Derrida places enormous trust in the ideological
goodwill or prejudices of his readers, for he cannot
tell them why he chooses justice over injustice, or
democracy over tyranny, only that he does. Nor can
he offer the uncommitted any reasons for thinking that
the left has a monopoly on the correct understanding
of these ideas. He can only offer impressions, as in the
little memoir he has published in Moscou aller-retour,
where he confesses to still
8 Derrida has had a
long-standing interest
in Lévinas, to whom
he recently devoted a
short volume called
Adieu (Paris: Editions
Galilée, 1997). On
Benjamin's
messianism, see my
article, "The Riddle of
Walter Benjamin," The
New York Review,
May 25, 1995.
9 "Remarks on
Deconstruction and
Pragmatism," in
Chantal Mouffe,
editor,
Deconstruction and
Pragmatism
(Routledge, 1996), pp.
77-86.
being choked with emotion whenever he hears the
Internationale.
This nostalgic note is struck time and again in Specters
of Marx and Moscou aller-retour, which deserve
permanent places in the crowded pantheon of bizarre
Marxist apologetics. In the latter book Derrida
declares that "deconstruction never had meaning or
interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that
is to say, also within the tradition of a certain
Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism." Not, of
course, that he wishes to defend anything Marx himself
actually wrote or believed. He declares Marx's
economics to be rubbish and his philosophy of history a
dangerous myth. But all that is beside the point. The
"spirit" of Marxism gave rise to a great heritage of
messianic yearning, and deserves respect for that
reason. Indeed, in a certain sense, we are all Marxists
now simply because Marxism, well, happened.
" Whether they wish it or know it or not, all
men and women, all over the earth, are
today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx
and Marxism. That is, as we were saying
a moment ago, they are heirs of the
absolute singularity of a project--or of a
promise--which has a philosophical and
scientific form. This form is in principle
non-religious, in the sense of a positive
religion; it is not mythological; it is
therefore not national--for beyond even
the alliance with a chosen people, there is
no nationality or nationalism that is not
religious or mythological, let us say
"mystical" in the broad sense. The form of
this promise or of this project remains
absolutely unique....
Whatever one may think of this event, of
the sometimes terrifying failure of that
which was thus begun, of the
techno-economic or ecological disasters,
and the totalitarian perversions to which it
gave rise,...whatever one may think also
of the trauma in human memory that may
follow, this unique attempt took place. A
messianic promise, even if it was not
fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was
uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward
an ontological content, will have imprinted
an inaugural and unique mark in history.
And whether we like it or not, whatever
consciousness we have of it, we cannot
not be its heirs."
With statements like these Jacques Derrida risks giving
bad faith a bad name. The simple truth is that his
thinking has nothing to do with Marx or Marxism.
Derrida is some vague sort of left democrat who values
"difference" and, as his recent short pamphlet on
cosmopolitanism shows, he is committed to seeing
Europe become a more open, hospitable place, not
least for immigrants. These are not remarkable ideas,
nor are they contemptible. But like so many among the
structuralist generation, Derrida is convinced that the
only way to extend the democratic values he himself
holds is to destroy the language in which the West has
always conceived of them, in the mistaken belief that it
is language, not reality, that keeps our democracies
imperfect. Only by erasing the vocabulary of Western
political thought can we hope for a "repoliticization" or
a "new concept of politics." But once that point is
achieved, what we discover is that the democracy we
want cannot be described or defended; it can only be
treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic
dream. That is the wistful conclusion of Politics of
Friendship:
" For democracy remains to come; this is
its essence in so far as it remains: not only
will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence
always insufficient and future, but,
belonging to the time of the promise, it will
always remain, in each of its future times,
to come: even when there is democracy, it
never exists."
6.
Things have changed in Paris. The days when
intellectuals turned to philosophers to get their political
bearings, and the public turned to intellectuals, are all
but over. The figure of the philosophe engagé
promoted by Sartre has been badly tarnished by the
political experiences of the past several decades,
beginning with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's books,
then the Cambodian horrors, the rise of
Solidarity, and finally the events of 1989. For
structuralism in all its forms, it was the disappointments
of le tiers monde that did most to call into question the
philosophers' notion that cultures are irreducibly
different and men simply products of those cultures. To
their credit, some of the French intellectuals who
became structuralists in the Fifties began to see that the
vocabulary they had once used to defend colonial
peoples against Western tyranny was now being used
to excuse crimes committed against those peoples by
homegrown, postcolonial tyrants.
Their abandonment of structuralism and deconstruction
was not philosophically motivated, at least at first; it
was inspired by moral repugnance. But this repugnance
had the hygienic effect of reestablishing the distinctions
between, on the one hand, pure philosophy and
political philosophy and, on the other, committed
engagement. There is today a new French interest in
rigorous moral philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of
mind, and even cognitive science. The tradition of
political philosophy, ancient and modern, is also being
studied intensively for the first time in many years, and
there is some original theoretical work being done by
younger French political thinkers who are no longer
contemptuous of politicians or the state. This all could
change tomorrow, of course. But it is difficult to
imagine the French stepping into the structuralist river
twice.
The persistent American fascination with Derrida and
deconstruction has nothing to do with his current status
in French philosophy, which is marginal at best. This
raises a number of interesting questions about how and
why his work has been received with open arms by
American postmodernists, and what they think they are
embracing. Derrida is often asked about his American
success and always responds with the same joke: "La
déconstruction, c'est l'Amérique." By which he
apparently means that America has something of the
decentered, democratic swirl he tries to reproduce in
his own thought. He may be on to something here, for if
deconstruction is not America, it has certainly become
an Americanism.
When continental Europeans think about questions of
cultural difference and the Other, they are thinking
about many deep and disturbing things in their own
past: colonialism, nationalism, fascism, the Holocaust.
What makes these historical events so difficult for them
to grapple with is that there is no moderate liberal
intellectual tradition in Europe that addresses them, or
at least not a vigorous and continuous one. The
continental philosophical tradition makes it difficult to
think about toleration, for example, except in the
illiberal terms of Herder's Romantic theory of national
spirit, the rigid French model of uniform republican
citizenship, and now, most improbably, the
Heideggerian messianism of Jacques Derrida's
deconstruction.
When Americans think about these issues of cultural
difference they feel both pride and shame: pride in our
capacity to absorb immigration and shame in the legacy
of slavery that has kept black Americans a caste apart.
The intellectual problem we face is not that of
convincing ourselves that cultural variety can be good,
or that differences should be respected, or that liberal
political principles are basically sound. These we
absorb fairly easily. The problem is in understanding
why the American promise has only been imperfectly
fulfilled, and how we should respond. About this we
are clearly divided. But the fact that some political
groups, such as those claiming to represent women and
homosexuals, portray their moral enfranchisement as
the logical extension of the social enfranchisement given
to immigrants and promised, but never delivered, to
American blacks, speaks volumes about the social
consensus that exists in this country about how to think
and argue about such questions.
In light of these contrasting experiences, it is a little
easier to understand why the political reckoning
structuralism faced in France during the Seventies and
Eighties never took place in the United States. The souring
of the postcolonial experiments in Africa and Asia and the
collapse of Communist regimes nearby induced enormous
self-doubt in Europe about the ideas that reigned in the
postwar period. These same events have had no
appreciable effect on American intellectual life, for the
simple reason that they pose no challenge to our own
self-understanding. When Americans read works in the
structuralist tradition today, even in its most radicalized
Heideggerian form in deconstruction, they find it difficult to
imagine any moral and political implications they might
have. People who believe it is possible to "get a new life"
will not be overly concerned by the suggestion that all truth
is socially constructed, or think that accepting it means
relinquishing one's moral compass. That the antihumanism
and politics of pure will latent in structuralism and
deconstruction, not to mention the strange theological
overtones that Derrida has recently added, are
philosophically and practically incompatible with liberal
principles sounds like an annoying prejudice.
No wonder a tour through the post-modernist section of
any American bookshop is such a disconcerting
experience. The most illiberal, anti-enlightenment notions
are put forward with a smile and the assurance that,
followed out to their logical conclusion, they could only
lead us into the democratic promised land, where all God's
children will join hands in singing the national anthem. It is
an uplifting vision and Americans believe in uplift. That so
many of them seem to have found it in the dark and
forbidding works of Jacques Derrida attests to the strength
of Americans' self-confidence and their awesome capacity
to think well of anyone and any idea. Not for nothing do
the French still call us les grands enfants.