Fidelity to Life ∼ Hospitable Biopolitics

Abstract

While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida’s work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew.

Keywords:

• event
• sense
• sight
• to-come
• transness

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 E.g., Derrida, Rogues 137; granted, Derrida is thinking biopolitics here in a strictly diagnostic sense, and only in passing. Compare, however, The Gift of Death, where Derrida comes strikingly close to Foucault’s formulation in describing how a society pursuing its own wellbeing gladly “puts to death” or “allows to die” (86).

2 See Wortham; Abbinnett; Arrojo.

3 As in Derrida and Dufourmantelle 75, 77.

4 See Borradori; Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” 80n27; Rogues 152.

5 See also Haraway, Esposito, and especially Wolfe for parallel explorations of the connections between immunity and biopolitics.

6 As in the endless cycle of mass shootings in the United States.

7 Or: shifts this register to a possible hospitality, from an impossible one.

8 The question of blindness, it should be noted, is not only one of disability, and the blind or disabled person is not to be taken as exemplar, though disability is also of obvious and literal relevance to philosophical, artistic, and political blindness, as Derrida’s work with Hélène Cixous in Veils, and his Memoirs of the Blind, make clear. Vision and hearing are somatic as well as philosophical and political and aesthetic, all at once.

9 Another approach to fidelity relevant to this analysis would be Gabriel Marcel’s “creative fidelity”; for Alain Badiou fidelity “is the name of the process” of “sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself” (67).

10 We could indeed trace an entire history of the fidelity haunting Derrida’s writing on religious faith.

11 We must be cautious, however, that feigned fidelity does not become “fidelity to infidelity” by which “life enslaves itself” (Derrida, Specters of Marx 55; my emphasis).

12 See Nancy’s Corpus; Derrida’s On Touching.

13 Fidelity leads to thinking how we listen and see with Heidegger, an attunement that allows for fortuitous musical hearing and mishearing. See Sanò.

14 With a Heideggerean squinting in mind, we should not be surprised in this passage of Memoirs to find Derrida calling upon the alētheia of the eyes, their “revelation” (126).

15 See Stiegler 256; Rayment-Pickard; as well as Derrida’s The Ear of the Other, Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 149, Voice and Phenomenon 67, and the hearing and mishearing of Limited Inc’s engagement with John Searle.

16 We might even use the tilde to write the movement of the ethical. Hence the tildes that break up the sections of this essay, without ever breaking them up.