Derrida’s way out of the dead end of contemporary messianism

This article seeks to determine which role Jacques Derrida’s notion of messianicity without messianism (1993) plays within the contemporary discussion of the value of the messianic tradition for political theory. My point of departure is the belief that Benjamin’s, Taubes’, and Badiou’s antinomic approaches to the issue of justice oversimplify some aspects of law. Is there a real need to abrogate the law? I also claim that even Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Lévinas, who believe that a certain law, namely divine law, serves to overcome natural law, fail to provide a consistent account of the interaction between law and justice. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate, firstly, that a messianic narrative that develops a way to achieve justice without needing to turn to transcendence can be found in Agamben and Derrida. And secondly, that they also provide the most complete understanding of the law. They base their arguments on a subtle distinction between the laws in force – which in their messianic narratives must be surpassed – and the force of law, a force that keeps its validity but is not translated into concrete laws [Geltung ohne Bedeutung]. Yet while Agamben considers that even the force of law must be overcome in order for justice to arrive, Derrida says it constitutes the most redemptive stage to which we can aspire. I compare their messianic narratives and claim that Derrida seems to offer a more substantial strategy – not completely exempt from problems, though.     

Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot

In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man”, Jacques Derrida evoked a “community of the question” when he called for a fundamental questioning of the being of the “we” in the West. This demand was later formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe as the philosophical interrogation of the political (le politique), in distinction from the question of politics (la politique). This essay begins by arguing that what is at stake in this distinction is the very possibility of politics that is otherwise foreclosed. It then explores Nancy’s interrogation of le politique in The Inoperative Community, and compares his response to Maurice Blanchot’s response in The Unavowable Community. It is argued that both deconstructions of “community” depict a certain sociality that corresponds to Derrida’s call—a “communality” beyond or radically other than the traditional model of community as formed by sovereign individuals and as forming the sovereign state. Where they differ is that Blanchot founds the ethical relation of the “unavowable” community on the radical interruption of ontology signaled by death, whereas Nancy casts ontology itself in an ethical register, and thereby allows a certain solidarity to emerge as well.

At the very moment when there is no longer a “command post” from which a “socialist vision” could put forward a subject of history or politics, or, in an even broader sense, when there is no longer a “city” or “society” out of which a regulative figure could be modeled, at this moment being‐many, shielded from all intuition, from all representation or imagination, presents itself with all the acuity of its question, with all the sovereignty of its demand (Jean‐Luc Nancy 2000 Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural, Edited by: Robert, Richardson and Anne, O’Byrne. Stanford [1996]: Stanford University Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 43).     

“The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel”: Debating between History and Theory

When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.     

The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

WHAT IS THE MULTITUDE?

Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman continue their conversation with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (See ‘The Global Coliseum: On Empire’ in Cultural Studies, 16.2, (March 2002), p. 177–192). In this new interview they press the authors of Empire and Multitude on questions that have arisen both out of their own involvement with the theoretical issues generated by Empire and from new areas opened up by Multitude. Why is the multitude not a class? How can the unity of a political project be maintained in the multiplicity of the multitude? Is democracy still a project for the future? Can a political subject constitute itself outside the structure of sovereignty? In other words, what is the multitude?     

Cinematic Terrorism: Deleuze,ISIS and Delirium

This paper will use the concept of time-image discussed by Gille Deleuze in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 as a heuristic tool for thinking about the Internet films of the Islamic State (ISIS). By considering that ISIS films primarily operate on two different axes: a time-image that presents a recollection of a mythic past, and a movement-image that reverses roles of power and sovereignty with a Western antagonist through mimesis, I discover that although we are unable to consider the ISIS films strictly as documentary, they are nonetheless not representational either. Within this context, I will argue that ISIS films may be experienced as actualizations of a global schizophrenic delirium. The ISIS films demonstrate what Deleuze describes as the “powers of the false.” They show a reality that is unbearable to witness. In the same way that the Marquis de Sade exhibited in life and fiction a physical violence and perversion that were symptomatic of the chaotic and brutal realities of the French Revolution, ISIS itself, and not only its film productions, becomes the foci of a symptomatic and cinematic realization of the failures of our globalized society in the post-Cold War/Arab Spring era. We experience the unbearable violence in the form of schizophrenic delirium, as if this violence is being performed somewhere else, by someone else, to someone else. These forms of spatial and temporal shifts, detachments, and interchanges are emphasized by the arrival of war refugees to the Western world from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In this process of becoming the Other, there is no escaping the delirium of Otherness.     

In the sovereign machine: sovereignty,governmentality, automaticity

Abstract

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical situation – whether it be rationality (Hobbes), bureaucratization (Weber), neutralization (Schmitt), historicism (Benjamin) or governmentality (Foucault) – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery (Aristotle, Hegel, Kojève, Agamben), puppets, automata or clockwork (Descartes, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida), lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault) and so on do not merely reflect but change our understanding of the causal relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, decision and norm, exception and rule. If the self-appointed task of the modern political theorist has so often been to obtain or regain sovereignty of, or over, the machine – to jam its gears – I seek to expose what the later Derrida calls the ‘machine’ of sovereignty itself. In conclusion, I argue that political theory’s attempt to reveal or retroactively invent the sovereign person at the heart of the machine only ends up revealing the sovereign machine at the heart of the person. What – if anything – is really inside the machine of sovereignty?     

Under Erasure: William Kentridge,Derrida, and Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article aims to read the work of South African artist William Kentridge through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace. Kentridge utilizes a unique style of filmic animation: charcoal pictures drawn on a single piece of paper, where the animation is achieved by erasing and re-drawing parts of the picture, and then filming the image again. I will argue that this technique, as well as Kentridge’s focus on deferral, memory, and identity, share an affinity with the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of Derrida’s trace. Drawing attention to the trace—a paradox of presence, where motion is achieved precisely by the deferred nonpresence in each drawing—Kentridge acknowledges, in a similar way to Derrida, the impossibility of ontological thought and knowing. In post-apartheid South Africa, this is not only an aesthetic statement but a political one as well. By maintaining the traces, Kentridge concedes that knowing should be deferred, acknowledging that what we know about the other is limited, if not impossible, and that the apartheid regime’s attempt to master the other was violent and erroneous.     

‘Class’, ‘Race’ and Language: imagining China and the discourse on the category ‘Han’ in the writing of Marxist revolutionary Qu Qiubai (1899–1935)

This study investigates the discursive peregrinations of the ‘Han’ category in the writings of the Chinese revolutionary, theoretician and activist Qu Qiubai. In the papers he wrote at the beginning of the 1930s dealing with the questions of language and writing, the author made singular use of the concept ‘Han’ to talk about the language/writing of the ‘Han’ (Hanzi, Hanyu) as a racial or ethnic group (Hanzu). Qu elaborated a discourse which articulated and mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory manner, the ‘Han’ category both as a ‘race’ and as a social class. Going beyond the race/class dialectic, I will try to show that these texts question the territorial, cultural and ethnic boundaries of ‘China’ and its homogeneity. Following this argument, this paper demonstrates how Qu's attempt to define ‘Chinese language(s)’ helps us to elucidate the complex articulation between China as a discursive and spatial category, the ‘Han’ category, and the other nationalities in the Chinese space. By questioning the homogeneity of the linguistic identity of China, using the word zhongguohua, Qu Qiubai unveiled an unstable and fragile imaginary relative to China and its so-called majority ethnic group, the Han.     

Translating deconstruction

Abstract

This paper argues that insofar as the ‘translation’ of deconstruction in America has become a discourse on the sacred, it mis‐recognizes what Derrida calls the trace, and identifies it as the radical outside to thought, or as ‘God’. The ‘trace’ on Derrida's account is indeed unknowable, but it is not the radical outside of thought. Rather, it is a disruptive force that is internal to thought. Reconstructive analyses investigate (among other things) the way that thought is breached, and necessarily so, by what thought cannot think. This breach, this unsignifiable opening, is intolerable to philosophical undertakings because philosophy must totalize; this is what philosophy does. Following Walter Benjamin, I argue that translation is possible, precisely because of this breach. Thus, just because this breach or opening is intolerable to thought or to philosophy does not prevent it from happening. On Jacques Derrida's analysis, this opening has a name: it is deconstruction. To this extent, those variants of ‘deconstruction in America’ which misrecognize the trace as God, miss the very political force of deconstruction in the first place, which is to say, a philosophical undertaking which thematizes the intolerability of refusing what philosophy does and must do.

The breach in thought (or language) is precisely what Walter Benjamin suggests is untranslatable. It cannot be communicated by any sign. Notwithstanding the great difference between Benjamin and Hegel's political commitments, comparing Benjamin's work on the untranslatability of language's ‘languageness’ to Hegel's semiological theory (which requires that we forget’ this very uncommunicableness at the heart of language) is instructive. It establishes that both thinkers argue that the practice of language should be the practice of learning each word as though it were a proper name. Each argues in their own way that the practice of language should erase the trace. It is precisely this erasure — the identification of the trace as radically exterior to thought ‐ that covers over what is at stake, not simply philosophically, in an investigation into the breach of language, but what is at stake politically. What is at stake politically is what Derrida calls the ‘risk of absolute surprise’ which is nothing less than the risk of a political philosophy with no guarantee.     

Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities

Although the classed dimensions of ‘taste’ have, following Bourdieu, been widely discussed, expressions of disgust at perceived violations of taste have been less frequently considered in relation to class. This paper considers various expressions of disgust at white working‐class existence and explores what they might tell us about middle‐class identities and identifications. I argue that the narratives of decline and of lack present in such representations can be seen in terms of a long‐standing middle‐class project of distinguishing itself. Drawing on Bourdieu's critique of Kantian aesthetics, I argue that the ownership of ‘taste’ is understood as reflecting true humanity, and as conferring uniqueness. Ironically, however, this uniqueness is only achieved through an incorporation of collective, classed understandings. The paper calls for a problematization of a normative and normalized middle‐class location that is, I argue, given added legitimacy by a perceived decline in the significance of class itself. [A]n account of class, rank or social hierarchy must be thin indeed unless accompanied by an account of the passions and sentiments that sustain it (William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 245). Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 479). What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect (Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, p. 118).     

Gender Category and Gender Status: A Critical Distinction

Gender has been of explicit analytical interest in sociology for decades. Despite its centrality to the field, “gender” eludes conceptual specificity in significant ways, such as lacking distinction between gender category (identification as a man, woman, nonbinary, etc.) and gender status (the state of being cisgender or not). I contend that the cisgender status is a rich site of interpersonal and institutional power that has been understudied. This work forwards the concepts of gender category and status as analytical tools to help explore key elements of gender interaction and structure, such as cisness. I argue cisness must be teased out via the express distinction between gender category and status, and I provide empirical evidence from 75 interviews with various gendered actors (i.e., cisgender men, cisgender women, transgender men, transgender women, nonbinary individuals) to demonstrate the applied purchase of my findings.     

Derrida’s “Indecent Objection”

Derrida’s account of forgiveness appears to oppose politics to ethics, challenging political reconciliation in the name of unconditional forgiveness. Yet at the same time Derrida seems to sacrifice ethics to politics by advancing but refusing to take the side of what he calls an “indecent objection” to reconciliation. This essay seeks to account for Derrida’s strategy and to think through some of the consequences of Derrida’s emphasis on the “impossibility” of forgiveness.     

Para-Modern Family Therapy: Deconstructing Post-Modernism

As in the arts and humanities and other social sciences, post-modernism is quickly gaining orthodoxy in family therapy. This paper presents a social-realist and deconstructive critique of recent post-modern thought in family therapy. From the perspective of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it suggests that family therapy is neither modern nor post-modern, but both/and these alternatives, that is, para-modern. In deconstructive thought, philosophical dualities like realism/social constructionism, cybernetic/post-cybernetic, systemic/narrative co-exist in an absurd double logic. Like writers of literature, the para-modern family therapy ‘puts forward’ a theory or method not as an ideology of truth, but as a play of irony. She/he works simultaneously inside and outside family therapy discourse, open to a wide range of images and metaphors.     

Prostitution as a Male Object of Epistemological Pain

It is not, in the first place, prostitutes’ physical and psychological pain that is examined in this article, but the pain encountered in trying to come to terms with the studying of prostitution. Prostitution upsets consciousness’ efforts and confuses its epistemes of representation. It reveals issues of (male) avoidance and over‐rationalization that apply just as well to how business and organization are (not) studied, as to prostitution. Following Artaud, we examine how, because prostitution is both consciousness (idea, theory, representation) and body (sex, body, the physiology of the brain), it poses the problem of doubling. How can one apprehend both: (i) that one is the physical hyle (materiality) of thought and also (ii) remain aware of the contents of consciousness? Artaud claimed that only in ‘cruelty’ and the ‘scream’ could the mind and body be grasped at once. By contrast, Derrida proposes via the subjectile to glide over the space between consciousness and body, trying to acknowledge but not be stymied by the double. Finally, we turn to Irigaray who has accepted doubling and has made it epistemologically productive.     

The ‘gong beat’ against the ‘uncultured’: contested notions of culture and civilization in Mongolia

This article explores the Mongolian concept of ‘culture’ (soyol) and its transformation in the state socialist and post-socialist eras. The notion of culture and those without it – the soyolgui or ‘uncultured’ – played enormously important parts in the construction of the new society of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The history of the twentieth century shows a transformation of this highly normative concept from a category associated with teachings, doctrine, ethics and nurturing to one linked to modernist notions of hygiene, secular education, urbanism and cosmopolitanism. In addition, however, it became a category that included a set of historical styles and works thought of as national ‘cultural heritage’ (soyolyn öv). This was the result of a movement that in the late socialist period led to the critical re-evaluation of earlier Eurocentric uses of the ‘culture’ concept, and that sought new applications of the notion of ‘civilization’ – in particular by popularizing the metaphorical term ‘nomadic civilization’ (nüüdliin soyol irgenshil). I argue that these strands of thought have become central to the new nationalist politics of post-socialist Mongolia and form the basis of what remains by way of political orthodoxy, following the collapse of Soviet ideology.