Immanent Ethics and Deconstruction

Abstract

This paper endeavors to argue that Derrida’s deconstructionist ethics can be construed as an embodiment of immanent ethics. To achieve this goal, it commences with Friedrich Nietzsche’s articulation of immanent ethics, drawing a contrast with formalist and conformist accounts of morality, exemplified in Kant. Following that, the paper explores the ethical thoughts of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to establish a connection between immanent ethics and the problem of life. In this context, we observe how immanent ethics redirects ethical concerns from human consciousness to the domain of life, modes of existence, the unconscious desire and its exteriority. Within this framework, the paper characterizes Derrida’s ethics of deconstruction as a convergence of the immanence of deconstruction and deconstruction as a creative mode of life. As a result, Derrida’s formulation of ethical challenges within the context of aporias, impossibility, and responsibility can be understood as a call for resistance against conformity to established forms of life. This imbues deconstruction with an intrinsic ethical-political character.

Keywords:

• deconstruction
• ethics
• immanence
• life

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy 456.

2 This critique is elaborated most extensively in Gay Science. See, for example, book five where Nietzsche compares philosophical idealism with “vampirism” (Gay Science 205–06).

3 Christian Kerslake rightly traces Deleuze’s concept of consciousness to Leibniz’s ontology, Schelling’s concept of nature, and Jung’s impersonal unconscious. See Kerslake 3, 39 (“impersonal, inhuman life”), 74.

4 For a comparative inquiry on Deleuze and Guattari’s ethical thought and Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, see my “Ethics of Schizoanalysis” 98–104.

5 In the text “Différance,” Derrida clearly describes the field of writing as an (the) immanent field: “no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field” (Margins of Philosophy 7); or already in Of Grammatology, within the context of critiquing structuralist linguistics, he provides a comparable analysis:

The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system. (43)

Later on in the same text, Derrida derives his grammatology as an ontological semiology in terms of the immanence of the system of writing. See, for example, the wonderful page 51 of Of Grammatology.

6 The machinic nature of writing is studied, among others, by Bernard Stiegler in the third chapter of his Technics and Time in conversation with Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology (see Stiegler 134–39).

7 As Derrida in Of Grammatology asserts,

Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (24)

Also in “Différance,” Derrida defines the term “strategic” as opposed to being under the governance of any “transcendent truth”: “In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field” (Margins of Philosophy 7).

8 Smith affirms that Derrida’s and Deleuze’s thoughts regarding the notions of immanence and transcendence are not divergent in the field of subjectivity (272). According to him, the substantive difference lies in the field of ontology. As we will explore shortly, Derrida’s rejection of Being does not necessarily mean deviating from the tradition of immanent ontology.

9 See Smith 275: “For Derrida, différance is a relation that transcends ontology, that differs from ontology, that goes beyond or is more ‘originary’ than the ontological difference between Being and beings.”