Comparación entre algunas herramientas existentes para la GCS

5.1

Introduction

If, as I have argued in this book, the pattern of reading that is found in deconstruction can be understood as an unconditional ethical demand in the Levinasian sense, then is this in itself an adequate response to the question of politics? If deconstruction can provide new resources for thinking about ethical responsibility, then does this also entail a satisfactory account of political responsibility? What is the political moment in deconstruction? Can deconstruction provide an account of justice and a just polity? More precisely, as I asked at the end of chapter 1 , what is the relation between the rigorous undecidability of deconstructive reading and the need for political decisions and political critique? If politics is the moment of the decision - of judgement, of justice, of action, of antagonism, of begin­

ning, of commitment, of conflict, of crisis - then how does one take a decision in an undecidable terrain?

In this concluding chapter, then, it will be a question of politics -which is perhaps the most unsurprising question to demand of decon­

struction. Indeed, it is a question commonly enough asked: Does Derridian deconstruction avoid political responsibility? Moveover, the ever increasing chorus of (often hostile) politically motivated critiques of deconstruction risks dominating and distorting the entire reception of Derrida's work. It has perhaps become something of a banality to speak of Derrida's withdrawal from the political, of his silence and hesitation with regard to political issues, of his complex reticence on Marx and Marxism, of his alleged complicity in the supposedly unquestionable political guilt of Heidegger and Paul de Man. In brief, the political question can be asked irresponsibly and employed as a reason for avoiding, censoring, or simply refusing to

IntrodNCtion 189

read Derrida's work. Sadly, in the aftermath of the Heidegger and de Man affairs, there is abundant evidence - particularly in non-academic journals and newspapers - of how the opening of a political question can be crudely employed as an accusation or as a means to close down the space opened by original thinking.

Such is not my intention. On the contrary, I want to raise a ques­

tion of politics in Derrida's work in a way that will ultimately deepen and extend the deconstructive opening for thinking that I have sought to describe in this book. It would not be inaccurate to say that political questions have come to dominate Derrida's thinking in recent years: one has only to look at his recent work on democracy and European identity, his responses to de Man's and Heidegger's political engagement, his work on friendship, on apartheid and Nelson Mandela, on law, on nationalism and philosophical national­

ity, on Geschlecht, on the university, on nuclear criticism, on the teach­

ing of philosophy (and the list could be continued). Further, it would be absurd to look to Derrida's biography to confirm any thesis claiming political quietism; the facts are well known and do not need to be repeated here. Derrida's thinking, then, is to a large extent dominated by the question of politics, or, more precisely, by the ques­

tion of 'that which has always linked the essence of the philosophical to the essence of the political' (M 131/MP 1 1 1). Anyone who doubts this need only read the opening pages of the 1 968 paper 'The Ends of Man'.

So why join this chorus of complaint? Why raise the question of politics? I shall argue that it is not so much an avoidance of the ques­

tion of politics that characterizes Derrida's work, but the way in which politics is discussed, which itself needs to be questioned. I shall claim that Derrida's work results in a certain impasse of the political (an impasse: a road, or way, having no exit or outlet, a blind alley or cul-de-sac). My argument throughout this book has been that, with some understanding of Levinas's work, it is possible - and indeed plausible - to understand deconstruction as an ethical demand which provides a compelling account of responsibility as an affirmation of alterity, of the otherness of the Other: 'Yes, to the stranger'. How­

ever, I shall argue that deconstruction fails to navigate the treacher­

ous passage from ethics to politics, or, as I shall show presently, from responsibility to questioning. Deconstruction fails to thematize the question of politics as a question - that is, as a place of contestation,

190 A Question of Politics

antagonism, struggle, conflict, and dissension on a factical or empir­

ical terrain. The rigorous undecidability of deconstructive reading fails to account for the activity of political judgement, political critique, and the political decision. Far from taking an anti-Derridian stance, I shall attempt to write a political supplement (in the full sense of the word) to deconstruction, a supplement that will conclude by imagining the future of deconstruction.

The general direction of my investigation can be signposted by raising two questions that will return as leitmotifs in the following discussion: first, is a politics that does not reduce transcendence still possible?

and second, to quote Levinas, ' What meaning can community take on in Difference without reducing Difference?' (AE 1 97JOB 1 54). I shall pursue my argument in three main stages: I will begin with a reading of Derrida's 1987 text, Of Spirit, which will allow me to restate briefly what I see as the ethical moment in deconstructive reading and to build a bridge, using the context of /'affaire Heidegger, to the ques­

tion of politics and political responsibility. This will enable me to articulate the impasse of Derridian deconstruction, an impasse that is confirmed by other writings of Derrida on political topics. As a con­

sequence of these critical remarks (or rather question marks) regard­

ing Derridian deconstruction and as an exploration of this impasse of the political, I will then discuss the work of Philippe Lacoue­

Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, who have extended and deepened the analysis of the political from a perspective inspired by Derrida. After showing how the impasse of the political is continued and compli­

cated in Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's retracing of the political, I will seek a way out of this impasse by examining Levinas's traversal of the passage from ethics to politics in Totality and Infinity and Other­

wise than Being, a traversal that, on my reading, offers a markedly different conception of political and communal space, a space that permits a reformulation of the political function of philosophy within democracy.

5.2 The Question of the Question: An Ethico-Political Response to a Note in

Of Spirit

In order to raise the question of ethical and political responsibility in Derrida's work with any plausibility, that work must first be

ap-The Question of the Question 191 proached on its own terms - that is to say, through the textual prac­

tice of deconstruction as it engages in the reading of a specific text.

Such an attention to Derrida's work, what he recently described in another context as 'an "ethico-political duty" ' (un 'devoir ethico­

politique') (LI 249JLitr. 135), must be carried out before any compel­

ling assertion can be made about the ethical or political status of that work. In short, it is necessary to proceed obliquely. I shall therefore approach the question of deconstruction and politics through a brief reading of Derrida's 1987 text 'on Heidegger and Nazism' (MPM 161/LSS 600), Of Spirit; a profoundly self-referential text, I would claim, whose rigour is outmatched only by its obliqueness. I shall offer a reading of Of Spirit based on a long footnote (E 147-54JOS 129-36) which has already been the focus of some discussion1 and which was written as a response to an intervention by Fran�oise Dastur at the Essex colloquium on 'Reading Heidegger' in 1 986.2 I will try to show how this footnote sets the agenda for a re-reading of Heidegger and - more obliquely and perhaps more importantly - of Derrida, a reading specifically in terms of the question of ethical and political responsibility.

Derrida's 'hypothesis' in Of Spirit is the following:

Such at least is my hypothesis - to recognize in it [Heidegger's interpretation of the word Spirit, Geist] in its very equivocation or indecision [indecision; my emphasis], the edging or dividing path (le chemin de bordure ⁰¹¹ de partage) which ought, according to Heidegger, pass between a Greek or Christian - even onto-theological - determination of pneuma or spiritm, and a thinking of Geist which would be other and more originary. (E 128/0S 81-2)

According to Derrida, Heidegger's thinking moves between two determinations of Spirit, one belonging to onto-theo-logy or meta­

physics, that of the 1933 Rectoral Address and the 1935 Introduction to Metap�sics, which Heidegger said ought to be avoided early in Sein und Zeit, and the other pointing towards a more originary and non­

metaphysical thinking that appears most forcefully in the 1953 essay on Trakl, 'Language in the Poem'.3 The movement of Heidegger's thinking oscillates indecisivelY between these two possibilities, and it is this very indecision that fascinates Derrida: 'That's what I like about Heidegger. When I think about him, when I read him, I'm

192 A Question of Politics

aware of both these vibrations at the same time' (E 109fOS 68).

Heidegger's thinking moves relentlessly between two borders, the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical, alternately striking both and producing a dissonant resonance. However, the undecidability of such an experience of reading and Derrida's consequent refusal to choose one determination of Spirit rather than the other - what I have described as the pattern of clotural reading - does not agnosti­

cally side-step a confrontation with the ethical and the political;

rather, it provides a space wherein the latter can be addressed. My claim has been that it is precisely in the suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in, as, and through a practice of clotural reading, that the ethical dimension of deconstruction is opened and maintained. I have argued that an unconditional duty or affirmation is the source of the injunction that produces deconstruction and that the textual practice of clotural read­

ing keeps open a dimension of alterity or transcendence that has ethi­

cal significance.

In his reading of 'Language in the Poem', Derrida comes across the word versprechender ('more promising') (US 77fOL 194). This leads him to focus on the notion of the promise (/a promesse; das Versprechen), and occasions a short digression regarding Paul de Man's reading of Rousseau's Social Contract in Allegories of Reading, in which, at the end of a discussion of the nature of the promise, de Man rewrites Heidegger's formula die Sprache spricht (language speaks) as die Sprache verspricht (sich) ('language promises [itself]') (E 146fOS 93).4 With this minimal and seemingly contingent digression, Derrida notes that he has perhaps 'left the order of commentary, if something like that exists' (E 146-7/0S 94). However, as he leaves the order of commentary, the indispensable moment of repetition whereby the dominant interpretation of the text is reconstructed (LI 265fLitr 143), Derrida moves on to the question of the question which forms the subtitle of Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. What is the question of the question? Derrida writes:

It remains to be known if this Versprechen is not the promise which, opening every speaking, makes possible the very question and there­

fore precedes it without belonging to it: the dissymmetry of an affirmation, of ayes before all opposition of yes and no. (E 147/05 94)

The Question of the Question 193 The thought here concerns the possibility of a promise that would render questioning possible without, however, belonging to the order of interrogation. It is the question of a promise, a moment of affirmation that, as discussed in chapter 1 , Derrida has elsewhere described in the language of Kant's ethics as an unconditional categ­

orical imperative. As if to clearly signal this departure from the repeti­

tive order of commentary, Derrida opens an eight-page footnote which deals at length with the question of the question and which, I would claim, opens both the ultimately ethical orientation of Of Spirit and provides the key to Derrida's reading of Heidegger.

Derrida's most general concern in this footnote, then, is to eluci­

date a form of language that would precede and render possible all questioning of the form: what is x? - that is to say, all ontological ques­

tioning, in so far as every question asks after the essence or Being of an entity. The centrality of the question (die Frage) to Heidegger's thinking is apparent from as early as the Introduction to Sein und Zeit (SuZ 5-8), where it is the question of the meaning of Being (die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein), which has today been forgotten and which must be formulated (gestellt) and submitted to repetition or recapitulation (Wiederholung), and where the project of fundamental ontology is organized according to the tripartite schema of that which is asked about in any investigation (das Gefragte), namely, Being; that which is to be interrogated (das Befragte), namely, Dasein; and that which is to found out by the asking (das Erjragte), namely, the mean­

ing of Being. The very possibility of fundamental ontology is condi­

tional upon Dasein's distinctive relationship (Bezug) with the question of Being. If Dasein can raise the question of Being, or if Being is an issue for Dasein, albeit initially only in a vague and average manner, then this shows that Dasein has an understanding of Being (Seinsverstandnis) and that Sein und Zeit can, literally and logically, begin. Sein und Zeit begins by showing the necessity (Section 1 ), the structure (Section 2), and the ontic and ontological priority (Sections 3 and 4) of the Seinsfrage and the way, or method (Sections 5-7), that will be followed in the elaboration or working out (Ausarbeitung) of this question. Heidegger's thought begins from the necessity of making the question of Being a question once again for us, as it was for the Stranger in Plato's Sophist. It is questioning that will take hold of the forgottenness of Being as forgotten.

194 A Question of Politics

Some 25 years after the publication of Sein und Zeit, in the 1953 lecture 'The Question Concerning Technology', Heidegger appears to maintain this priority of questioning, the latter being characterized as the piety of thinking (Denn das Fragen ist die Frommigkeit des Denkens).5 However, despite this undoubted priority, Derrida (at the prompting of Fran�oise Dastur) locates a moment in Heidegger where the ques­

tion itself undergoes an inversion (Umkehrung) (US 176fOL 72), or reversal (Bouleversement) (E 150f0S 131). In the course of the three lectures that comprise 'The Nature of Language' (Das Wesen der Sprache) (US 158-238/0L 57- 108), which originally date from 1 957-8, Heidegger re-reads his statement that questioning is the piety of thought and adds:

The lecture ending with that sentence was already in the ambiance of the realization that the true stance of thinking cannot be to put questions, but must be listening to the grant or pledge (dajl die eigentliche Gebarde des Denkens nicht das Fragen sein kann, sondern das HOren der Zusage dessen sein mujf). (US 176/0L 72)

It is with this notion of the Zusage (in French, gage: pledge or grant, as in mortgage, literally a death pledge) that Derrida locates the Umkehrung in Heidegger's thinking. Prior to the putting of questions to language (i.e. what is the essence of language?), it is clear that language has already been granted (schon zugesprochen sein) (US 175 OL 71). All questioning requires the prior pledge, or Zusage, of that which is put in question. Thus, for the later Heidegger, the primary datum of language is das Horen der Zusage, listening to the grant or pledge. As is clear from Derrida's 1987 text on Michel de Certeau, the Zusage is a moment of affirmation in Heidegger's text, 'in short, ayes' (PSY 646).

Derrida then proceeds to draw out the implications of this inver­

sion, tracing it back across some dominant moments in Heidegger's work. What is significant about the Zusage is that all forms of ques­

tioning are always already pledged (gage ) to respond to a prior grant of language. The question and the questioning stance of philosophy are always a response to and . a responsibility for that which is prior and over which the question has no priority.

It [the question] responds in advance, whatever it does, to this pledge and of this pledge (a ce gage et de ce gage). It is engaged by it in a

The Question of the Question 195 responsibility it has not chosen (qu'elle n'a pas choisie) - and which assigns it even its liberty. (E 148-9/0S 130; my emphasis)

What is primary in language is that to which one is responsible, which has not been chosen. The liberty and choice of the questioning attitude are subordinated to a prior responsibility. The origin of language is responsibility (E 1 51/0S 132). My language begins as a response to the Other. In short, it is ethical.

In this footnote, then, Derrida is proposing nothing less than an agenda for the re-reading of Heidegger, which readers of the latter are now better prepared to recognize a need for and which arises as a response to the questions of politics and ethics, a response made all the more urgent by /'affaire Heidegger. Derrida continues:

This is useful not only for reading Heidegger [emphasized in the French - lire Heidegger - and is an allusion to the Essex colloquium of the same name] and serving some hermeneutical or philological piety.

Beyond an always indispensable exegesis, this re-reading sketches out another topology for new tasks, for what remains to be situated of the relationships between Heidegger's thought and other places of thought - or of the engage (de /'en gage) - places which one pictures as regions but which are not (ethics or politics) ^{. .}. (E 151/0S 132-3; my emphasis)

After the inversion of Heidegger's thinking that the thought of the Zusage offers, the task of re-reading would not simply content itself with the hermeneutic piety of reading Heidegger, but would re-read Heidegger's corpus with a view to both excavating the thought of responsibility within it (Derrida himself lays down several markers for the itinerary of such a re-reading (E 151 -2/0S 133)) and rethink­

ing the relation between 'regional ontologies', like ethics and politics, and the truth of Being.

OJ Spirit is an almost 'classical' example of a deconstructive reading - the strictest and most rigorous determination of figures of oscillation or undecidability in a text - which shows how the thought of responsibility emerges in such a reading. Derrida's text is a response, both to the highly critical readings of Heidegger's politiqll involvement,6 and also, more importantly and self-referentially, to the accusation that his own work (so often caricatured as 'l'Heidegger­

ianisme fran�ais'7 simply avoids discussions of ethical and political

196 A Question of Politics

responsibility and that deconsttuction leads to either an amoral anarchism or a de-politicized quietism. On a more sinister level, another version of the same polemic might argue that Derrida's work is indeed political, but that, because of its 'Heideggerianism' - and Heidegger's thinking was, as everyone (das Man) now knows with complete assurance, 'fascist right down to irs most intimate compo­

nents'8 - deconstruction necessarily entails a fascist politics. This sort of argument, or rather assertion, is proposed, surprisingly, by Man­

fred Frank and quoted approvingly by Habermas in his Preface to the German edition of Farias's Heidegger and Nazism. After lauding Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Frank writes:

The new-French theories are taken up by many of our students like a gospel. ( . . . ) I think the phenomenon is frightening, because it seems to me that young Germans are sucking back in, under the pretence of

The new-French theories are taken up by many of our students like a gospel. ( . . . ) I think the phenomenon is frightening, because it seems to me that young Germans are sucking back in, under the pretence of