Decontamination, Nationalism, and Complicity. The problem of the Representation (2021) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Interpretative violence and Jacques Derrida's professed love of ruins
South African Journal of Art History, 2011
In this paper I examine two texts by Jacques Derrida, written at the beginning of 1990s, his "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority" and Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins written on the occasion of the exhibition Derrida curated at the Louvre. In the first text Derrida claims that deconstruction is justice because it is associated with the quest for reinterpretation of all criteriology, including all rules, associated with law. He goes on to explain how implementing the law in the name of justice is a violent procedure and necessarily entails at times a reinterpretation at other times a suspension or even destruction of law. I analyze his reading of Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins in the context of the preceding arguments about the force of law. Placing blindness at the origin of all drawing, favoring memory and not perception and arguing that sight and eyes are meant for crying, rather than seeing, Derrida promotes a violent reversal of values in art theory, in the name of justice. Promoting the marginal and the repressed is a result of an interpretative violence: Derrida puts at the highest rank of values criteria which are in a state of ruin, after years of repression and marginalization. Our filiations with them are consequently impure, contaminating, negotiated, bastard and violent. However, the ruin is not meant as a negative thing but as an index of mortality and an object of love.
Derrida, Sovereignty and Violence
The late thought of Jacques Derrida identifies a number of doubles: law and justice, absolute and conditional hospitality, democracy and democracy-to-come. Justice, for example, is the larger principle to which the law aspires, but justice will always remain in excess of law. Justice both makes law possible by providing it with its meaning, but it also makes law impossible by setting up an aspiration that the law can never meet. On the one hand, the law comes into being only in response to justice, but the only existence justice has is by way of law. Normally, justice is seen as the larger, unconditional phenomenon that the law constricts violently by narrowing and reducing it. This paper argues that violence does not only reside on the side of constriction in Derrida, but that unconditionality is itself always a principle of violence. Indeed constriction and unconditionality work togther insperably even as they challenge and defy one another. By connecting these themes with Bataille's theory of sovereignty, this paper explores the horizons of violence in Derrida's political thinking.
Philosophy and Society , 2024
The starting point of the paper is Derrida’s early discussion of Lévinas, focusing on the suggestion that violence is paradoxically magnified in Lévinas’s attempt to articulate ethics as first philosophy within a metaphysics ostensibly free of violence. The next step is an examination of Derrida’s thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Derrida’s comments on names and violence in Lévi-Strauss establish that ethics emerges through a distinction between the “good” interior and the “bad” exterior. Derrida’s subsequent remarks on Rousseau bring up his view of pity as a pre-social morality and the emergence of a social world that enacts violence upon the fullness of nature and the spontaneity of pity within a system of organized, competitive egotism. In his engagement with Celan, Derrida explores a poetics that conveys the sense of a particular, singular self as essential to ethics—defining itself in its separation yet inevitably caught up in universality. This theme develops into an examination of mass slaughter around the Hebrew Bible story of the “shibboleth”, highlighting the violent consequences of exclusionary conceptions of identity. In The Gift of Death, Derrida discusses the relationship between Paganism, Platonism, and Christianity through Patočka’s perspective, then returns to Judaism via Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham and Isaac. Derrida’s reflections on secrecy, the sacred, ethical paradox, the violence of ethical absolutism, and the aporetic nature of ethical decisions converge around a discussion of political decisionism in Schmitt and the broader ethical significance of decisionism, as it also appears in Benjamin.
8. The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida –Valeria Campos-Salvaterra
The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics, 1st Edition. Edited by Gavin Rae, Emma Ingala, 2018
Violence is a permanent and central feature of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. While various commentators have noted the role it plays in his later works, in this chapter, I argue that these build on his early notions of ‘originary violence,’ ‘arche-violence,’ and ‘transcendental violence.’ I state that the relationship between violence and origin is found in Derrida’s analysis of the normative structure of Husserlian phenomenological discourse with this providing the ‘ground’ for Derrida’s subsequent critical readings of Levinas and Lévi-Strauss. Through his engagements with Husserl, Levinas, and Lévi-Strauss, Derrida unfolds a philosophical strategy that aims to question the very possibility of fully determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, violent and non-violent, and so on. If violence is originary, as Derrida concludes, then any attempt to criticize it must always be based on the arche-violence of meaning, with the consequence that any planned escape from violence and hence a pure non-violence is simply not possible. * This document is the proof Routledge sent me to correct, so is not the final publish version. To get the final paper go to https://www.routledge.com/The-Meanings-of-Violence-From-Critical-Theory-to-Biopolitics/Rae-Ingala/p/book/9781138570207
Rights, Respect, and the Political: Reading Derrida from a Conflict Zone
Living Together: Jacques Derrida's Communities of Violence and Peace, 2012
The essay pursues three lines of reflection. First, it proposes a close reading of Derrida's strategies of writing and reading, presenting and extending some of Derrida's insights, and exposing aporias, antinomies and internal tensions that characterize the language of rights and the rhetoric of respect. This section can be read as an exercise in deconstruction in legal theory. Second, the essay engages with Derrida's take on the issue of the nation-state, identity politics in general and Zionism in particular from the perspective of a political activist in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Third, based on the analyzed tension between the first line of reflection (on deconstructive strategy) and the second (in which the author asserts a political view), the essay explores the inherent tensions between Derrida's deconstruction and “the political,” or between Derrida's deconstruction and his politics. The essay foregrounds the major tension between the openness and reflection required of an intellectual or deconstructivist, and the closure, finality, and action required of a political activist.
Review of Rodolphe Gasché, 'Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence.' Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2018, Vol. 14(2) 339– 341, 2018
Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence, together with “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?” By Rodolphe Gasché. New York: State University of New York Press, 2016. 144 pp. $23.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-4384-6000-0 2017 celebrated fifty years since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s celebrated original trio of books De la grammatologie, La voix et le phénomène, and L’écriture et la différance. This anniversary was marked with various events reflecting on the influence and significance of Derrida’s work. Just prior to this anniversary came a timely publication from Rodolphe Gasché, a towering figure amidst esteemed scholars of Derrida’s work. Gasché’s work engages with aspects of Derrida’s thought which have long been of interest to legal scholars: the force and possibility of deconstruction, the relationship between law and justice, judgment, and the infamous declaration that “[d]econstruction is justice.”
Vol. 26(2) 208–229
This article critically engages with a particular reading of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive legal theory which argues that his methodology marginalizes engagements with the ‘socio-historical’ of law at best or is incapable of such engagements at worst. After explaining this meta-ethical reading, the piece offers a retort via a broader and more in-depth reading of Derrida’s legal theory. Here the article problematizes the distinction at the core of the meta-ethical reading; this being that Derrida’s work established a mutually exclusive separation between a ‘sociolegal’ critique of law and one considered of ‘critical legal theory’. This separation will be shown to be misleading by firstly referring to Derrida’s essay ‘Force of Law’ and arguing that therein the sociolegal and ‘critical legal’ theories are in fact mutually dependant and that Derrida’s concept of surenchère illustrates this. Secondly, a wider reading of Derrida’s work will then illustrate that such a conceptual binary is incompatible with his deconstructive metaphysical critique. This will be evidenced with reference to what is argued to be the central point of the meta-ethical reading, something which is itself born from Derrida’s work; this being the distinction between la and le politique, ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. With due regard for the history of this important and complicated deconstructive distinction, it will be argued that the reductive reading in the meta-ethical critique does not do justice to the inherent paradox in maintaining a separation between sociolegal theory, la politique, and critical legal theory, le politique.
‘A Triangle Open on its Fourth Side’: On the Strategy, Protocol, and ‘Justice’ of Deconstruction
Derrida Today, 2011
Derrida always stipulates that deconstruction is not a ‘method’. But deconstruction nevertheless involves a certain strategy and protocol: terms that both designate a process and serve as an example of that process. Derrida’s deployment of these terms clarifies how his analyses of logocentrism anticipate the political texts of his later career. In his early texts, Derrida famously shows how the dyad of speech and writing is a ‘violent hierarchy’ in which speech is everywhere privileged. I show how, by contrast, his later analysis of law and force necessarily redoubles this strategy because each of these terms is privileged in rival traditions of political thought.