This thematic issue of Angelaki covers the ethics in deconstruction in Jacques Derrida in the broadest way, so as to be an engagement with Derrida’s philosophy as a whole rather than the isolation of one theme as a discrete element of his work. It is one way of framing Derrida’s philosophical and theoretical contributions, in which necessarily the question of the frame itself is a topic. Ethics can be taken as first philosophy, which is not Derrida’s own position, but it is to be found in one of the key works of philosophy related to deconstruction, not written by Derrida. That is Totality and Infinity by Derrida’s friend Emmanuel Lévinas. In this collection, ethics is taken in a very provisional contextual way as first philosophy, which both enables an exploration of ethics and of any idea that it should be taken systematically as first philosophy. An absolutist view of ethics is inevitably going to be caught up in metaphysical assumptions about transcendence, the subject, the other, and related terms, as Derrida argues in his response to Lévinas, along with many other forms of engagement with philosophers who have worked on ethics or some idea of first philosophy, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. The poetry of Paul Célan is also a frequent reference in these essays. Derrida’s remarks about justice in “Force of Law,” suggesting that it is deconstruction, draw our attention to the role of ethics in his thought, and the most cited passage in the collection. This will not surprise many and the same applies to the frequent references to Lévinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” as well as Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death. Faith and Knowledge is also a frequent reference as is Marx in Specters of Marx, though with the qualification that it might be more a ghostly afterlife than the details of Marx’s thought. Derrida is clearly not a philosopher for rigid hierarchies and divisions between discrete topics; and this range of key discussions makes the point very strongly, as does the range of reactions to his thought.
Broadly conceived, for Derrida ideas of justice in relation to truth and sincerity are necessary to communication, though they can never be realised in full, and this gets to the heart of deconstructive ethics. The tension between necessary ideals and their necessary impossibility is one way of understanding deconstruction. The meaning of this is fully explored in the texts that follow, where ethics is covered through the maximum range of perspectives on law, politics, and morality, including discussions of biopolitics, friendship, God, animality, Europe, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, the self, choice, others, speech, and democracy.
While the special issue is not organised around reified structures of fields and sub-fields, it does need structure to provide a way into the various discussions of ethics in deconstruction. To this end, papers are loosely grouped in five sections: Life and Sovereignty, The Social World, Decisions and Responsibility, Derrida and French Philosophy, and Defining Deconstruction. The best way to explain this organisation is to go through the papers collected in each section, which will take up most of the rest of this Introduction. Discussing the papers does not mean a neutral summary, but more a framing in which themes are uncovered, through the focus on the assembly of ethical themes within papers and various forms of affinity between texts.
life and sovereignty
This section includes discussions of biopolitics and nationalism, hospitality and exclusion, the anthropological and animal life, community and citizenship, death and survival, Heidegger and Nietzsche, Célan and Blanchot. Chris Hall’s paper “Fidelity to Life ∼ Hospitable Biopolitics” brings out the deconstructive possibilities of being true to life, in the wavering in which life flows over normative distinctions of sex, gender, race, and desire. Derrida resisted the theorisation of biopolitics, but that is one way in which he brings it within a deconstructive approach. The deconstructive approach is one of hospitality to what is not understood and controlled by the state. This brings us into a sphere which is more night than day, where there are secrets rather than simple privacy, in the understanding of powers which make ethics possible. Caterina Resta continues the exploration of Derrida on life in “Life Death: Jacques Derrida’s Bio-thanato-politics.” The paper begins with ways in which Foucault sets up a biopolitics of power over life and death, but with Derrida less inclined to a specific theory of power over life. Resta’s arguments continue with Derrida’s commentary on Sigmund Freud’s view of life and death in his account of the death principle in relation to the pleasure principle. Here Derrida discerns ways of understanding life which do not assume a full presence in the complete sovereignty of life. The drive to repetition always brings the life-oriented pleasure principle into relation with death, so as Derrida argues, life and death are always together, always conditioning our view of life and power over life. Life understood with regard to singularity rather than universality. The emphasis shifts to animality in Fernanda Bernardo’s “The Exception Derrida – The ‘Secret Elect’ of the Animals: The Onto-anthropo-theological Vein in Question,” which takes a point of departure in Lévinas’s ethics as an exclusion of the animal. The animal is completely other in Lévinas, so other to the ethical relation that he proposes. In this respect, Lévinas remains close to Heidegger for whom the animal cannot die, because death properly speaking belongs to the human. The philosophical assumptions about the animal are embedded in practices of carnivorism and cruelty towards animals. Philosophy has always justified this, as can be seen in René Descartes’s denial of a capacity for sensation in animals. Such assumptions go back to Plato and Aristotle as well as in biblical writing where humans are assumed to be lords of creation, including animals. It is a sacrificial understanding as well in which the animals are the objects of ritual slaughter in order to maintain a sense of human superiority. Giustino De Michele places animality at the centre of deconstruction in “Deconstruction’s Animal Promise: From Textual Pragmatics to a Categorical Imperative.” The paper places the role of animality in Nietzsche and in Heidegger against each other, just as Derrida sometimes places Nietzsche and Heidegger against each other in explaining deconstruction. This is two ways in which animals lack, in relation to promising and to being. The promise itself is something Kantian in its imperative and something Derridean in its lack of presence. The role of contradiction in aspects of Derrida’s ethical thought is taken up, with regard to democracy, in Annabel Herzog’s paper “Derrida’s ‘Very Idea of Democracy.’” Herzog notes the criticisms Wendy Brown and Jacques Rancière have of Derrida’s view of democracy. These amount to the suggestion that Derrida sacrifices democracy to sovereignty. Herzog agrees that there is some compromise of this kind, but presents it more sympathetically as inevitable. The antinomies of Derrida’s deconstructive approach, and his emphasis on the infinitely demanding in later texts, provide the framework for a position in which pure universalist democratic ideas exist in necessary tension with more particularistic communal ideas of the sovereignty of a delimited people. In Jeffrey D. Gower’s “Hyper-Sovereignty and Community: Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II,” there is a careful reading of Heidegger and Derrida on Heidegger, which touches on the exclusion of animality in Heidegger’s ethics and metaphysics, but largely focuses on the relation between metaphysical sovereignty and political sovereignty. That is, the paper examines the distinctions and crossing overs between absolute sovereignty of Being over beings and more limited political sovereignty, acknowledging Heidegger’s tendency to invest political sovereignty with Being. This is balanced with the poetry of Paul Célan in an attempt at a deconstructive acknowledgement of, and limitation of, sovereignty. This long section closes with “Language by Birth and Nationality by Death: Rethinking Nationalism with Heidegger and Derrida” by Michael Portal. It continues discussions of life and death, sovereignty and nationalism, Heidegger and Derrida to be found in other papers in the section. It is rooted in the specifics of recent French politics with regard to attitudes to French citizens who were either born outside France or choose to be buried outside France. In the discussion of eclipse, the paper looks for a deconstructive way out of destructive oppositions in the topics of citizenship and belonging, strangers and foreigners, through a sense of survival in which life is not reduced to rigid identity.
the social world
This section includes discussions of the politic of speech and writers, interpretations of Karl Marx, the social philosophy of Amartya Sen, Kant and the Enlightenment ideal of Europe. It begins with Tyler Correia’s paper “Derrida and Parle-ment (Parliament),” which engages with Derrida’s own activism in the cause of a transnational parliament of writers. As the title suggests, a parliament is a place of speech which could be a place of lies, as “ment” suggests, or it could be a place of frank speaking to counteract the lies and deception of the state, or the constitution of the people as an excluding body. Speech necessarily has secrets and lies but also holds out the promise of cosmopolitan hospitality. In “Inheritance Indifferent to Legitimacy: A Kind of Ethical and Political First Principle,” Michael Peterson examines Derrida’s deconstruction as an approach to the past, to what it inherits from previous thought. The paper draws on the work of Samir Haddad in defining Derrida’s approach. It finds key examples in Derrida’s reading of J.L. Austin and Paul de Man, but keeps its main engagement for Derrida’s response to Marx, in the context of Aijaz Ahmad’s criticisms of Derrida on Marx. This raises the broader issue of how Derrida deals with the ideals of communism and their apparent death in 1989, and how far he can be taken as Hamlet in relation to Marx’s ghost. In “Today’s Enlightenment: Jacques Derrida on Europe in the Global Age,” Valentina Surace draws on Derrida’s reading of Marx, and his related suggestion for a New International, in a deconstructive response to Kant’s Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The paper argues for a cosmopolitanism which is not tied to state or citizenship, as it aims for the greatest forms of inclusion. The promise of justice and the democracy to come are promoted through a pluri-worlds approach, as an alternative to the hegemony of the strongest states in “mondialisation,” in which differences can belong together. The possibilities of a world of coexisting differences are explored by Cillian Ó Fathaigh in “‘What is Proper to a Culture’: Identification and Ethics in Jacques Derrida and Amartya Sen,” in relation to the work of the economist and social philosopher mentioned in the title of the paper. Like previous papers in this section, there is a discussion here of inheritance and Derrida’s approach to the legacy of Marx. It is suggested that Derrida be seen less in terms of identity politics and more in terms of identity through changing inheritance. Such an approach brings Derrida close to Sen’s emphasis on pluralism in identity and his arguments for avoiding the assumption that democracy is the singular invention of Europe.
decisions and responsibility
Ethics raises the issue of responsibility and moral agency. As the papers in this section show, Derrida’s questioning of an absolutely sovereign and transparent subjectivity does not lessen the ethical aspect of deconstruction with regard to choice and morally significant decisions. Alejandro Orozco Hidalgo’s paper “The Notion of Responsibility and the Poetic Revolution in Derrida’s Thought” argues for the decomposition of political sovereignty, drawing on Ernst Kantorowicz’s thought about the two bodies of the medieval king, and Abrahamic notions of God, in order to question individual sovereignty in the subject and mastery over others. God as external domination can be displaced by thought about the secret, the inner space which cannot be defined by external commands or inner rationalism. As in other contributions, Paul Célan serves as a major example of a poetics which Derrida discusses and which reorientates our ethical perspectives. In “Philosophical Responsibility: Derrida’s Historical and Ethical Task,” Rebeca Pérez León looks at how Derrida establishes ethical and historical responsibility in philosophy, during his earliest work on Husserl’s Phenomenology. Husserl tried to awaken activity and responsibility in philosophy, trying to establish ideal ends for philosophy, but did not recognise the ethical and historical aspects of his own enterprise in his efforts to define a new metaphysics and objectivity. Derrida does this in constituting the auto-poietic origins of signification. Petar Bojanić and Andrea Perunović write on the political and social in “Derrida’s Counter-Institution and Its Ethics of Promise and Responsibility,” with regard to individual decisions about collective organisations. The institution requires a reaction which is both a Kantian judgement and a Lévinasian relation with the other. The counter has the same structure as a promise, that is, the duality of following principles and accepting a responsibility which exceeds all finite possibilities of action. The paper relates these Derridean arguments to the biography of Derrida’s own relations with institutions. Catherine M. Robb brings in a figure from outside the normal range of comparisons with Derrida in “How to Make Impossible Decisions: Jacques Derrida and Ruth Chang on the Ethics of Rational Choice.” This paper looks at Derrida on undecidable decisions in comparison with a theorist of jurisprudence, and practical reason, outside the traditions which most obviously influenced Derrida. The argument concentrates on the decision where reason runs out in Chang with the Kierkegaardian moment of madness in Derrida’s account of situations of aporetic judgement. The theme of aporetic judgement continues in Joe Larios’ paper “Derrida and the Time of Decision,” which begins with a discussion of the relation of ethics to politics. Within a deconstructive perspective, they cannot be reduced to each other and neither is primary. Ethics is oriented towards singularity and the other as an individual, so is concerned with pairs of individuals. Politics is oriented towards universality and the other as a mass. Both politics and ethics contaminate each other so that this opposition is unstable. The latter part of the paper, which ends the section, is concerned with how time in Derrida is a product of time-space, which itself has a rhythm of life and death, taking us back to the theme of the first section.
derrida and french philosophy
While Derrida’s theoretical relations with his contemporaries in French philosophy is an issue in many papers in this collection, particularly Lévinas as is to be expected when discussing ethics, these papers stand out for their focus on Gilles Deleuze and François Lyotard as well as Lévinas. Zeynep Direk’s invited paper “Auto-affection and Ethics: A Derridean Response to Levinas” argues that Derrida has a position on auto-affection and the ego which distinguishes him from Lévinas and represents a defence of Husserl, in this respect against Lévinas. For Derrida the ego should be preceding the other and the auto-affection precedes hetero-affection. The ego’s experience is constituted by trace, by the primacy of repetition and difference, and this precedes the experience of the other. In this view of experience, affection by the self of itself precedes affection by the other. It is on this basis that Derrida has an aporetic view of ethics, which refers to the conflict between the universality of law and the particularity of the other. In “Fugitive Philosophy: Derrida and Lyotard at the Limits of the Law,” Dylan Vaughan establishes Lyotard as a philosopher between two central figures of French philosophy: Deleuze and Derrida. After a survey of the critiques and dialogues that passed between Derrida and Lyotard up to Derrida’s commemoration of Lyotard after his death, the paper concentrates on their views of law in relation to their readings of Franz Kafka. For Derrida, we are always already caught in the tension between law as what commands us and law as what is remote from us. Lyotard’s approach is that the body precedes the law so that the law is applied to the body, as a form of domination, in a relation which is also that of ethics to aesthetics. Corry Shores compares Derrida and Deleuze with regard to logic, as well as law and justice, in “Logics of Alterity in Derrida’s and Deleuze’s Philosophies of Justice.” This contains another comparison based on readings of Kafka. In this context, the paper refers to a philosophy of transcendence in Derrida and a philosophy of immanence in Deleuze. That is otherness absent for Derrida, while for Deleuze there is a constant becoming-other. The paper builds on this to compare Derrida and Deleuze in terms of different non-classical logics, with Derrida taken as following paracomplete logic and Deleuze as following paraconsistent logic.
defining deconstruction
All papers in this collection are necessarily concerned with what deconstruction is, but the ones gathered in this section stand out for the ways in which they contribute to the definition of deconstruction through the discussion of ethical issues. Marie Chabbert’s “An Ethics Worthy of the Name: Of God and Ghosts in Derridean Ethics” examines deconstruction with regard to Judaism and Christian theology, as well as the place of the ghost in Derrida’s writing. While recognising Derrida’s own reserve about reducing his work to an expression of Judaism, the paper points to ways in which Jewish religious tradition promotes a sense of obedience to what is not fully present and may be yet to come. This is distinguished from Lévinas’s commitment to obedience to an infinitely other. The paper argues that Derrida is closer to, though not identical with, a negative theology that takes away God as object. Ontological theological commitments, negative or positive, are replaced in Derrida by a thinking about ghosts and haunting which goes beyond theism and atheism. In the invited paper “Quoting the Other: Toward a ‘Minor’ Ethic of Reading,” Francesco Vitale focuses on the issues that come out of Derrida’s debate with the analytical philosopher of language John Searle and how they are renewed in Derrida’s debate with Jürgen Habermas, as well as his reading of Paul de Man in the light of controversies about de Man’s ethics and politics. These considerations refer to the ethics of reading with regard to reading against a majority consensus, which is what constitutes a minor reading. Derrida contests Habermas’s demand for transparency and accusations against Derrida of rhetoric, with a discussion of the plurality of interpretation and the contextuality of quotation. The paper proceeds to discuss these concerns in institutional situations, particularly those of the academic world. Mehdi Parsa’s “Immanent Ethics and Deconstruction” places deconstruction and its ethics in the context of immanent philosophy in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Deleuze. The paper considers Nietzsche’s genealogy as a form of immanent critique of the origin of moral terms. It refers to the immanent ethics in Heidegger in which Being means actions so has an ethical aspect, Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia as an aspect of the art of living, and then to the immanence that is a definitive element of Deleuze’s philosophy. In Deleuze, immanence is explained through the unconsciousness of desire and the machinic nature of the unconscious which dehumanises ethics. All these themes are brought together in the explication of Derrida. The section ends with Johan de Jong’s invited paper “Deconstruction as Ethics without Result: On Derridean Resultlessness, Urgency, and Attunement in Contrast to Arendt, Sextus, and Kierkegaard,” which distinguishes deconstruction from three positions which are related, but are not the same. For Hannah Arendt, restlessness poses a danger of disturbing thought, which is something that is incorporated into deconstruction. The antique scepticism of Sextus Empiricus aims for an end to the anxiety of uncertainty, in which uncertainty is seen as the choice between two opposites. Deconstructive opposition is not posed in this way and does not aim for an end to uncertainty. Kierkegaard advocates moves to end the restlessness of the individual soul. These comparisons illuminate deconstruction in shared concerns with Derrida’s writing, but also in their distinctness.
afterthought
The editor has contributed the essay “Derrida Escaping the Deserts of Moral Law: Poetics, Sacrifice, Judaism, and the Limits of Decisionism” as a substitute for a conclusion. It is written through the experience of being immersed in the preceding essays, but is inspired by them, rather than attempting any systematic reply to the contents of this collection. It is an attempt to continue the discussion.