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Abstract
This paper investigates the ethics of deconstruction by considering it as a form of “resultless” thinking in the sense Hannah Arendt gave to that term: as the destabilization rather than the production of rules, norms, and criteria. In section II, I distinguish deconstruction’s specific resultlessness from Arendtian “self-destruction,” skeptical suspension, and Socratic irony, for whom resultlessness issues from the symmetrical cancelling out of equal counter-arguments. To the foremost objection to the resultlessness of thinking (the Arendtian “danger” that thinking is unable to respond to the urgent demand for results), deconstruction opposes a reconceptualization of the very notions of “urgency” and “danger.” But such reconceptualization still does not amount to a justification for a deconstructive ethics: I argue in section III that deconstruction always performatively relates to a threefold danger that constitutes its “anxiety.” At the core of this anxiety is the resistance to reassurance and “good conscience.” I conclude, in section IV, by asking whether the ethics of deconstruction can perhaps be qualified – if not through its results or principles – as a “fundamental attunement” [Grundstimmung], by comparing deconstruction’s anxiety to Kierkegaard’s resistance to righteousness and good conscience, in the latter’s revaluation of wonder as the fundamental attunement of philosophy.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 To objections to the characterization of deconstruction as a form of “thinking” here, I would refer Derrida’s expression of the “thought” of the trace in Of Grammatology (93), or to Derrida’s distinction of a “deconstructive thinking” that does not belong to “philosophy” (Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? 13).
2 Derrida possibly engaged with skepticism in the seminar “L’Ironie, le Doute, et la Question” that he taught in 1963–64 at the Sorbonne, but the lecture notes to this course are as yet unpublished. Bob Plant also identifies Derrida’s resistance to “good conscience” as the crux of Derrida’s relation to skepticism, but does not sufficiently differentiate deconstructive undecidability from skeptical uncertainty (Plant 137ff.). Cf. de Jong 62ff.
3 Very briefly: responsibility is impossible without but must also exceed sacrifice (Derrida, Gift of Death) or calculation (Derrida, “Force of Law”); hospitality, like justice, is impossible without but must also exceed the conditionality of law and right (Derrida, Of Hospitality); forgiveness is impossible without but must also exceed the economical reciprocality of the (already) “forgivable” (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism), etc.
4 Cf. “The surplus of responsibility of which I was just speaking will never authorize any silence” (Derrida, “‘Eating Well’” 286).
5 See Derrida, Of Spirit 39ff. For a fuller account of the irreducibility of complicity for Derrida, see de Jong, esp. ch. 9.
6 For Arendt’s notion of responsibility, see also Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment 27ff.
7 I have elaborated on this “law of resemblance” at de Jong 51ff. See also the Kierkegaardian indistinguishability of the completion and exhaustion of the search, below.
8 Plato, Theaetetus 155d and Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b.
9 Kierkegaard shows this most forcefully in his unfinished 1842–43 work Johannes Climacus, or: De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.
10 Kierkegaard has formalized this thought as the insight that “the subjective existing thinker […] has just as much of the comic as of the pathetic” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript 74). Hence, a pathos “which excludes the comical is therefore a misunderstanding; it is not pathos at all” (76).
11 Cf. Derrida’s discussion of “sense” at “Passions” 16ff.
12 See Arendt, Life of the Mind 142ff. and Heidegger, Basic Questions 131ff.
13 Kierkegaard comments on this special character of the discourses on imagined occasions in his journals at Pap. VI B 128 and Pap. VI B 140: 231ff., according to Pieter Vos’ postscript to Kierkegaard, Opbouwende toespraken 520.
14 Arendt stresses “horror” as both related to as well as exceeding Greek “admiring” wonder. Heidegger reconceives wonder not to reject it but to inquire after the essence of wonder (Basic Questions 143).
15 Roberts very interestingly approaches deconstruction as confession in the Augustinian sense, but remains tied to the symmetrical model of hesitation: “As a double-writing, deconstruction is philosophy’s confession to/of its other, writing both the necessity and the inevitable failure of philosophy” (492).
16 Cf.: “I have never had a ‘fundamental project.’ And ‘deconstructions,’ which I prefer to use in its plural form, has probably never named a project, a method, or a system” (Derrida, “Certain ‘Madness’” 285). Cf. also the conceptual solidarity of project, problem, projection, and protection (Derrida, Aporias 11ff.); the relation between the “direct, frontal projective, that is, thetic or thematic” approach (Derrida, “Passions” 11); and the fundamental motif of “-ject” that binds subject, object, project in Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius (49ff.).
17 For an approach that centers ethics around such deconstitution, see Wood.
18 Cf.: “guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible enough.” And: “this guilt is originary, like original sin. Before any fault is determined, I am guilty inasmuch as I am responsible” (Derrida, Gift of Death 51).
19 In the passages following this quotation, Derrida explicitly relates a “less traditional” concept of decision to religious repentance and sin.
20 For an interesting approach that does hold “a certain sorrow, a sorrow that is not only endured but also affirmed” to be crucial to deconstruction, see Jowett 80–93. I do not disagree with Jowett but rather attempt to add a perspective by arguing that sorrow is not the only attunement of the resistance to good conscience.
21 I choose the terms “folded in” because of the etymological reference of the complicit to the fold (pli). This ties the reading of Derrida to a large register of the fold (complicit, implicit, explicit, complicated) for which I have no space here. A good starting point is Hobson 67ff.