Kant and Jealousy in Derrida's Glas

References

• In ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ for instance, he speaks favourably of Heidegger's argument in the ‘Letter on ‘Humanism’ that to make ethics primary in philosophy is to fail to let beings be (Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 137f). Even as late as Rogues, he dismisses the adjective ‘ethical’ as inadequate to the responsibility he wishes to describe (Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) 145.
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• Robert Bernasconi, for instance, argues that while Derrida is uneasy about making ethics first philosophy, he is not as convinced as Heidegger that it covers over the most important questions in philosophy (Bernasconi, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics”, [in: Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 130). Geoffrey Bennington goes even further, suggesting that ‘ethics might nonetheless provide a privileged clue for deconstruction’ (Bennington, Interrupting Derrida. (London: Routledge, 2000) 34.
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• Alex Thompson discusses how Kant is ‘exemplary’ in Derrida's later discussions of ethics and politics in Deconstruction and Democracy. (London: Continuum, 2005), 92f. Sean Gaston explores the place of Glas in this revaluation of Kant in Derrida and Disinterest, (London: Continuum, 2005), 61–4.
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• The longer English version appears in On the Name (ON). ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15. A shorter version appeared in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. Wood. (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992).
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• Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (OCF), trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. (London: Routledge, 2001), 58.
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• See especially Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time. (London: Continuum, 2007).
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• For an alternate account of the role of Kant in later Derrida, see Joanna Hodge. ‘Kant Par Excellence: Introducing Kant after Derrida.’ (In Kant After Derrida, ed. Philip Rothfield. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 6.
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• See, e.g., Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 2.
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• ‘Il y va de la jalousie’ (G 211a [236a]). Derrida, Glas. (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974), translated by John P. Leavey as Glas. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Following Leavey's convention in Glassary. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), references to Glas first give the English pagination, with an ‘a’ to indicate the lefthand column and a ‘b’ the righthand, and then the French pagination.
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• G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 20, edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), p. 549. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 297f, hereafter Encyc.
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• Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 72; Kant's Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1914), vol. 6, p. 52; see ‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 49.
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• G. W. F. Hegel. Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 196. Cf. G 34a [42a].
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• Cf. Derrida, ‘Before the Law’ (hereafter BL), in: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. (London: Routledge, 1992), 190.
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• Derrida reflects on the jealousy of this withholding at greater length in ‘Des Tours de Babel’ (In Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002). Derrida recalls Voltaire's astonishment that the name Babel, which seems to combine ‘Ba’, a word which in Semitic languages commonly means ‘father’, with ‘Bel’, ‘God’, came to represent a kind of confusion. For Derrida, this shows that ‘Out of resentment against the unique name and lip of men, [God] imposes his name, his name of father; and with the violent imposition he opens the deconstruction of the tower, as the universal language; he scatters this genealogical filiation’ (108). This jealousy consists in the use of the name of the father to break apart the sons: ‘That is what is named here on Babel: the law imposed by the name of God who in one stroke commands and forbids you to translate by showing and hiding from you the limit’ (132–3).
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• See Bennington, 36 for an analysis of how the law, as text, guards access to itself.
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• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in: Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 269.
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• Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, in: Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 53f.
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• For an extended discussion of such mechanism in Hegel's thought, see Nathan Ross, On Mechanism in Hegel's Social and Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008).
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• While Derrida devotes some six-and-a-half pages (G 125a-131a [143a-149a]) of the left-hand column to Kant's contrary assumption that natural desires and conflict still reign in marriage, he never directly refutes Hegel's claim that marriage is a neutral space of freedom. His argument does not concern the success of marriage's ostensive effort to neutralize desire, but merely the jealousy that this aim presupposes.
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• Cf. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 28f.
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• In ‘Before the Law’ Derrida thematizes this deferral in terms of the ‘Not yet’ with which Kafka's doorkeeper continually defers entrance to the law; ‘“Not yet” means not now (not at present), and it further implies the futurity of presence—the coming-into-presence of the Law, or of the goodness beyond being’ (Duncan, 19).
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• Olivia Custer reflects more generally on this central dilemma of the space of the law, noting that ‘if when faced with a decision (a choice) one resorts to having a machine, or the mechanism of a logical proof, or any [form] of calculation, make the choice, then one is not actually choosing. In this perspective, trying to “know” what to do is equally counterproductive: if knowledge dictates the decision, then there is no decision in the strong sense, only submission to the dictates of knowledge’ (Olivia Custer, ‘Kant after Derrida: Inventing Oneself Out of an Impossible Choice’, in: Kant After Derrida, ed. Philip Rothfield (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 173.
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• For discussions of the importance of this “als ob,” see Peg Birmingham, ‘Toward an Ethic of Desire’, in: Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 137 and Stephen Watson, ‘Regulations: Kant and the End of Metaphysics’, in: Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 80. Derrida reconsiders this “als ob“ relation to the calculability of reason in Rogues (cited above) 133f.
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• In the epistolic afterword to Limited Inc. Derrida describes his ambivalence to unconditionality, noting that there is something unconditioned about the drive to deconstruct but cautioning that Kant's conception of unconditionality itself calls for deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 153.
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