SÉANCE TENANTE: Deconstruction in (the) Place of Ethics Now

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Notes

¹ Derrida, Specters of Marx, xiii. About the ‘non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present’ see also 24–25, 39, 73, 75.

² See Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction and the two items under ‘Bernasconi’ in the Bibliography. In his more recent Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, Critchley still traces the ethical potential of Derrida's work to Levinasian ethical experience.

³ Derrida addresses this point for e.g. in Negotiations, 302 (“Ethics and Politics Today”).

⁴ Derrida, Of Hospitality, 45 (see also 23). The equation between ethos and habitus is also mentioned in the title essay of Negotiations, 13, and accounts for this same word ‘habitat’ being used to describe the global place of Derrida's infinite ethics in The Gift of Death, 69.

⁵ See Derrida, Acts of Religion, 364 (‘Hostipitality’): ‘Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other […]’, and the famous axiomatic equation ‘Deconstruction is justice’ in “Force of Law,” 243.

⁶ Derrida, Of Hospitality, 149, 151. In The Ethics of Deconstruction, Critchley recalls the more specifically Heideggerian determination of ethos as abode or dwelling place (15).

⁷ Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 8–10, 15 (‘Différance,’ 8). The importance of this reversible formula, related to the trace as (palindromically) écart (gap), was repeated years later in connection with democracy in Rogues, 38. ‘[I]rreducible spacing (the first word of any deconstruction, valid for space as well as time)’ is also emphasized in On Touching, 181, to which we shall return. It is worth recalling that maintenant is derived from Latin manu tenendo (the gerund of manu tenere: to maintain): while holding in the hand, hence rapidity of gesture, then temporal promptitude or extreme local proximity, and temporal proximity (Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé online, at http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.html, s. v. ‘maintenant’).

⁸ This cautionary remark is also a pretext for signalling one of the distant touchstones of this essay: understanding how in Derridean thought the insistent motif of the avenir / à venir or time to come, which is reduced to an eternal deferment of politics by its detractors – justice-to-come, democracy-to-come, but also a more aprioric, disjunctive messianicity without messianism to which we will soon allude – is not to be too hastily assimilated into a theological (Jewish) tradition, of the kind which has been recently traced out in Levine, A Weak Messianic Power, nor even with Walter Benjamin's historico-materialist notion of ‘weak messianic power’, in spite of some degree of consonance; see Derrida, Specters of Marx, 181, n. 2 (also 21, 55), and “Marx & Sons,” 250–1. For arguments in this sense, see also Ware, “Dialectic of the Past” – who notes that ‘For Benjamin, messianic time is a way of viewing the past ethically. Disjointed time, on the other hand, allows Derrida to view the future-to-come as the site of justice.’ (107) – and Khatib, “Derrida & Sons”.

⁹ Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 328.

¹⁰ Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, especially in “Différance”: ‘The use of language or the employment of any code which implies a play of forms […] also presupposes a retention and protention of differences, a spacing and temporalizing, a play of traces.’ (146)

¹¹ Derrida, “No (Point of) Madness,” especially 90, 91. Hereafter NPM with page references in the text. For a chronology of Derrida's ten-year-long engagement with architecture (1984–1993) and an examination of the relation between the present and the politics of space and place (‘ontopology’; Derrida, Specters of Marx, 82), see Vitale, “Jacques Derrida and the Politics of Architecture”, as well as “The Law of the Oikos”, which refers to Derrida's unpublished 1985–86 seminar “Nationalité et nationalisme philosophique; mythos, logos, topos” in his discussion of khora.

¹² Let us also recall, after Derrida, that atopos: without place, also meant ‘mad’ or ‘extravagant’ in Greek. See Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 163, and Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Geniuses, 59. Derrida has often quoted or alluded to Kierkegaard's famous, if elusive maxim ‘the instant of decision is madness’ ever since it featured as the first epigraph to his 1963 lecture on Foucault, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ – see Bennington, ‘A Moment of Madness’ – which can be regarded as a ‘watchword’ for deconstruction as invention and its frequent self-determination as ‘the experience of the impossible’. See for e.g. the interview “A “Madness” Must Watch over Thinking,” in Points…, 363, and On Touching, 57, which associates the madness of thinking the event with ‘the impossible is what takes place’.

¹³ See Derrida's essay “Fifty-two Aphorisms,” in Papadakis, Deconstruction Omnibus Volume, 68 (no. 29), and also 72, in the following discussion with Chris Norris.

¹⁴ Derrida, Psyche. Inventions de l'autre, 492. Cf. NPM, 102.

¹⁵ Derrida, in Brunette and Wills, “The Spatial Arts,” 27.

¹⁶ What John Caputo, combining it with khora as place without (the) place, called ‘ankhôral religion without religion’; see Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 189.

¹⁷ For this ‘interruptive unravelling’ (déliaison) as the condition of the social bond of a ‘community’, of a bond (socius or desmos) without bond, see for example Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” especially 64.

¹⁸ Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 51.

¹⁹ Derrida recalls that it is within a certain experience of spacing and space that resistance to philosophical authority can be produced. See Brunette and Wills, “The Spatial Arts,” 19, and also Derrida's contemporaneous essay “Fifty-two Aphorisms,” in Papadakis, Deconstruction Omnibus Volume, especially 68 (no. 26), about ‘to make space’, which states that the ‘aphorism’, succinctly described as ‘un point c'est tout’ (68, no. 25), has ‘no inhabitable place’, ‘[n]o housing’ (68–69, nos. 40, 41), and concludes: ‘To maintain […], despite all the reappropriations, the chance of the aphorism, is to keep […] the promise of making room for [donner lieu] […]’ (69, no. 52).

²⁰ Derrida, H. C. for Life, 49. This episode was first evoked in a 1992 talk by Cixous herself on the occasion of the ten-day conference “Le passage des frontières”; see Cixous, “What is it o'clock?,” 48.

²¹ Derrida, H. C. for Life, 50–51.

²² Derrida, Acts of Religion, 408–09 (“Hostipitality”).

²³ Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 9.

²⁴ Derrida, On Touching, 16; hereafter OT with page references in the text.

²⁵ Commenting on Nancy's The Experience of Freedom, this second chapter of the first part associates spacing, decision and ethos (OT, 21–22), considering the mouth as the opening that spaces itself out, at once place and non-place of a dis-location (OT, 28–29).

²⁶ Formulated in French, as on the ‘model’ of cendre and khôra: ‘il y a là loi du tact’; see Derrida, Le toucher, 82.

²⁷ Derrida, Le toucher, 86.

²⁸ ‘toucher sans toucher […], donner sans retenir, mais avec retenue, donner à tenir sans tenir […]: tiens !’ (Derrida, Le toucher, 91); cf. On Touching, 76. There is no space here to do justice to the untranslatable versatility of the French imperative tiens!

²⁹ Derrida, Le toucher, 151 – cf. OT, 131, which strangely omits the first adjective; these also form part of the chain of subtitles for Tangents IV and V.

³⁰ Just as touch has often featured in philosophical tradition as the essential metonymy of the ‘community’ of senses par excellence (OT, passim). See also Derrida, “Heidegger's Hand,” and chapter 11 of Hillis Miller's For Derrida (“Touching Derrida Touching Nancy”), especially 285 ff.

³¹ And elided in the translation; compare Le toucher 314, and OT, 278.

³² See Derrida, Le toucher, 343, and OT, 307.

³³ Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145 (“That Dangerous Supplement…”).

³⁴ Derrida has often evoked deconstruction as an(other) experience of the (im-possible) translation, here subsequently defined as an event which ‘a lieu de tenir lieu’ (Le toucher, 251); cf. OT, 221.

³⁵ Derrida, Le toucher, 249.

³⁶ See Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, 25.

³⁷ Spacing (‘spacing space’), and the sharing of being and singularities as spacing, is also evoked in the discussion of Nancy's The Experience of Freedom in Rogues, 46, 50.

³⁸ See also Rogues, 153, which discusses ‘the incalculable event’, ‘the irreducible spacing of the very faith, credit, or belief without which there would be no social bond […]’.

³⁹ Miller, For Derrida, 270, 273.

⁴⁰ Derrida, in Brunette and Wills, “The Spatial Arts,” 26, who then relates it to Blanchot's ‘come [viens]’.

⁴¹ Miller, “Derrida's Topographies,” 307; also 196–7. Cf. Anne Berger's shrewd formulation to Derrida in the interview ‘“Dialanguages”’: ‘It would be as if, in a certain way, you knew the place that would allow you to write it [i.e. the book to be written], as if you had found it, and at the same time it were lost to you.’ (Points…, 14).

⁴² See Derrida, The Gift of Death, 61. The sacrificial violence at the heart of this substitutability is performatively at work in Derrida's deceptively non-tautological catchword ‘tout autre est tout autre’ (68 and chap. 4, 82 ff.) and in the subsequent passage: ‘As soon as I enter into a relation with the other […], I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.’

⁴³ For another conjunction of khora and spacing, see Rogues, 82, but also xiv as ‘another “taking-place,” the irreplaceable place or placement of a “desert in the desert”’.

⁴⁴ Derrida, Acts of Religion, 416 (“Hostipitality”).

⁴⁵ For a succinct development of this substitution, see Milesi, “Semiology and Deconstruction”.

⁴⁶ Derrida, Demeure, 31.

⁴⁷ Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 9 (“Différance”); “How to Avoid Speaking,” 173. For a correlation between ‘differential space’, conceived as between ‘temporal-messianic’ and geometrical (ideal), and khora (‘Derrida's attempt to recast différance in […] its […] spatial [aspect]’), see for e.g. Srajek, In the Margins of Deconstruction, 241 (245), and the whole section on ‘Khora’ (241–46).

⁴⁸ Compare with Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 173: ‘The point is that it is a matter of indecision or an indeterminacy between a determinacy and an indeterminacy.’

⁴⁹ Derrida, Demeure, 16.

⁵⁰ See Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature,”’ 36.

⁵¹ Derrida, Demeure, 28.

⁵² Derrida, Negotiations, 311–12 (“Ethics and Politics”).

⁵³ Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 255.

⁵⁴ See Derrida, Khôra, 55 – in English: “Khora,” 107.

⁵⁵ Derrida, “Khôra,” 109. In Architectural Philosophy, Andrew Benjamin poses as a ‘legitimate’ consequence of the ‘foundational’ question about the place that generates all places – the ‘logic of khora’ – the question of the ‘place of the question of place’, as the question which ‘cannot be included within that which it is taken to found’, ‘the problem of the foundation of both law and ethos’ (13 ff. [15, 14]) analogous to the ‘forceful’ foundation of law-as-justice in “Force of Law”.

The lieu sans lieu can be traced back to Blanchot's use of the formula in The Infinite Conversation, 385 (“The Absence of the Book”, about the neutral), and Friendship, 116 (see also 47). As if to tacitly point to a common leitmotif, it was finally reprised towards the end of a 1990 homage to the French philosopher; see Blanchot, “Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida,” 323 (‘(atopical) place without place’).

⁵⁶ Derrida, Archive Fever, 66.

⁵⁷ Derrida, Specters of Marx, especially 163, 169.

⁵⁸ For this notion, see Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 64 (‘prior-to-the-first’), 67–69, 71; and “Faith and Knowledge,” 21, about the ‘chora’ or ‘desert in the desert’ – for which see also Milesi, “Thinking (Through) the Desert”.

⁵⁹ In what follows, the more ironic, self-deconstructing ambiguity of ‘just’ should also be borne in mind, as in the self-assumed ‘je suis juste en tant que Juif’: I am just (about) as a Jew, however missed out in the translation of “Abraham, the Other,” 11. See also Milesi, “Portrait of H. C. as J. D. and Back,” 76, and 78–79 in connection with the intersecting motif, first uttered in “Circumfession,” of ‘le dernier des Juifs’ (the l(e)ast of the Jews).

⁶⁰ For the deconstruction of this term, see Derrida, “Force of Law,” 230–98, and “Faith and Knowledge,” 19 (about the ‘desert’ as found(er)ing).

⁶¹ Derrida, “Khora,” 97. The ‘epochality’ of such [a] place is an event; see Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 173.

⁶² Derrida, Khôra, 15; imprecisely translated as, simply, ‘reaches us’ in the English version (“Khora,” 89).

⁶³ Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 7.

⁶⁴ For Derrida's recall of the double Latin filiation of gathering (relegere) and binding (religare) in ‘religion’, see “Faith and Knowledge,” 54.

⁶⁵ See Derrida, “Before the Law,” 210 (also 215), and Cinders, 37 (also 15, 39).

⁶⁶ I have developed the implications of this Mallarméan line in relation to Khôra but also Cinders (Feu la cendre) in “Thinking (Through) the Desert”, especially 75.

⁶⁷Of Grammatology, 140; first quoted in Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 75, then developed on pp. 88–89, 97, 99, 102, 105, 222 n. 25.

⁶⁸ In an earlier study of deconstruction's trajectory from phenomenology to ethics, Christina Howells had already signalled that ‘Critchley makes a strong case, perhaps too strong a case, for the Levinasian quality of Derrida's ethics.’ (Derrida, 124).

⁶⁹ A full, non-chronological listing of these critical debates and their respective publications – erroneously giving “The Impossibility of Ethics” instead of “Radical Atheism and Unconditional Responsibility” as the chapter republication, in Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction Traces, of Attridge's review of Radical Atheism – can be found on Martin Hägglund's site at http://www.martinhagglund.se/. See in particular Laclau, “Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?” and Hägglund, “Time, Desire, Politics” (2008); the special issue of The New Centennial Review, with Hägglund's response, “The Challenge of Radical Atheism” (Spring 2009); Attridge's Review of Radical Atheism and Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics” (2009–2010); Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” and Hägglund, “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction” (2011).

⁷⁰ Hägglund, Radical Atheism, ix.

⁷¹ Laclau, “Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?,” 181; Attridge, “Radical Atheism and Unconditional Responsibility,”140, 144, quoting from Radical Atheism, 103.

⁷² Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 299, and also 300, which describes the relation between conditionality and unconditionality as autoimmune.

⁷³ Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 301, and 304–5, n. 5.

⁷⁴ Derrida, Rogues, 172–73, n. 12; see also 150 about ‘the autoimmune aporia of this impossible transaction between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the incalculable.’

⁷⁵ Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” 130.

⁷⁶ Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 302 (almost repeated verbatim in “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction,”143). See also his conclusion on how to reinvent ethics in the name of deconstruction, 303.

⁷⁷ Hägglund, “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction,” e.g. 130, n. 13, and 131.

⁷⁸ Hägglund, “The Challenge of Radical Atheism,” 237.

⁷⁹ The necessity of inscription, which follows from the structure of succession, is also discussed in relation to the trace-as-erasure of the now by Hägglund in “The Challenge of Radical Atheism,” 239, soon after stating that Derrida used writing ‘to explain the transcendental nature of spacing’.

⁸⁰ Derrida, The Post Card, 489 (“Le facteur de la vérité”); bold emphasis mine.

⁸¹ Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 25.

⁸² See Rogues, 39, for Derrida's denying the advent of a political or ethical turn in deconstruction in the 1980s or 1990s.

⁸³ I have engaged more specifically with the relation between pre-ethical violence and ethical nonviolence, the notion of ‘force’, and the performativity of deconstructive syntax in a companion study titled “Breaching Ethics: Performing Deconstruction”, first given as a plenary lecture at the International Conference on ‘Ethos Pathos Logos’ (University of Ploie¸ti, October 2012) and, in a revised iteration (in French), as a keynote for the Fifth International Colloquium Writing: Language and Thought on “Each time, the impossible – Derrida (ten years later)” (University of Brasilia, 29 September-3 October 2014). The present article can therefore be regarded as the first half of a critical diptych on my understanding of ‘ethics’ in deconstruction.

⁸⁴ Derrida, Specters of Marx, 99; hyphens and italics mine.

⁸⁵ Derrida, “Foi et savoir,” 27; cf. the reductive, monosemic translation in “Faith and Knowledge,” 17.

⁸⁶ Levinas, Proper Names, 56.

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Notes on contributors

Laurent Milesi

Laurent Milesi is Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, where he also teaches twentieth century English/American Literature, and is a member of the ITEM-CNRS Research Group on James Joyce's manuscripts in Paris. He has written numerous essays on Joyce and related aspects of modernism, nineteenth and twentieth century (American) poetry, postmodernism and poststructuralism, with a particular emphasis on Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Aside from several other translation projects related to Derrida's and Cixous's works, he is completing a monograph on the sense of ‘(non-)place’ in Derrida. Email: [email protected]