Long Sunday

Blessing and Partage: No Pasarán; On Celan and Derrida

"No, I will limit myself here to the aporia (to the barred passage, no pasarán:  this is what aporia means)."

"...A date is mad, that is the truth.
And we are mad for dates.
For the ashes that dates are.  Celan knew one may praise or bless ashes.  Religion is not necessary for that.  Perhaps because a religion begins there, before religion, in the blessing of dates, of names, and of ashes..."

"A date always remains a sort of hypothesis, the support for a by definition unlimited number of projections of memory."-JD

One wonders what Derrida might have thought and said these past few weeks, about the re-casting of a certain enigmatic slogan in the streets of France.  One he always heard, after, as coming through Celan; one so clearly dear to his own heart.  Who could forget those passages?   But also, who would dare to write on them?

When Giovanna Borradori asked Derrida about September 11, and though I wonder if she realized it, what must have come first to his mind was another September, that of Celan's "Huhediblu"..."date of Nevermansday in September." 

Another Long Sundayan has already remarked, in suitably derisive manner, on the subject of this slogan–itself a "veritable knot of radical associations"–being recently adopted on the interweb by a group of impressively soporific blowhards, so we needn't dwell especially there.  Mark commented on the poem "Shibboleth", and later, Amie and I discussed "In Eins," which as Derrida notes is in fact a poem inside a poem, containing "Shibboleth", as it were, within.

No Pasarán.  A slogan, a pebble, with unusual powers, or something of what Nancy calls "partage":   to be capable of dividing, and at the same time blessing waters ("partition" and "partaking"...how often Derrida remarked on the theme of this...disastrous movement).  Also Shibboleth, watchword, at once demarcating a certain line or border, and a community, one marked by an act of crossing over.  A word Derrida also connects to necessary departure–departure from belonging, and in order to address the other.   A word, a pebble, like a tombstone, seeking to mark a date...

Europe, religion and philosophy

Étienne Balibar has surely written some fine and interesting things.

Just a quick follow-up to the post below.  In poking around for Martti Koskenniemi's review of Borradori's book, I came across a fascinating talk he later gave:  Martti Koskenniemi:  International Law in Europe:  Between Tradition and Renewal [pdf].  (Koskenniemi is also the editor of this.)  An excerpt from the talk:

Before I continue, let me state my conclusion.  The fact that international law is a European language does not even slightly stand in the way of its being capable of expressing something universal.  For the universal has no voice, no authentic representative of its own.  It can only appear through something particular;  only a particular can make the universal known.  A danger and a hope are involved.   The danger is that of mistaking one's preferences and interests as one's tradition–and then thinking these a universal, a mistake we Europeans have often made.  Therefore, I will suggest that we should take much more seriously the critiques of international law that point to its role as a hegemonic  technique.  Once that critique has been internalised, however, I want to point to its limits.  If the universal has no representative of its own, then particularity itself is no scandal.  The question would then be, under what conditions might a particular be able to transcend itself?  What particular politics might we have good reason to imagine as a politics of universal law?

Elsewhere, in response to the supplement, Ben Wolfson points to a fascinating essay in this book by Jonathan Z. Smith entitled, "Religion, Religions, Religious," most of which you may find by searching within for, say, "any house of worship," beginning on page 269.

And in other (unsuprising) news, Pussy "President" in Chief gets severely rattled by a little old lady and stays rattled, practically foaming at the mouth.  For the billionth time, God help us.  Bush has quite obviously met his "philosophy" equal in fundamentalist Islam, and he is losing.  Favorite line, from the waxing "philosophical" part:  "And history has proven that democracies don't go to war!"  "What kind of mindset is it... that questions?...uh, Democracy is...is based upon, um...is a universal...is a belief."  And et cetera.

Why should we care when Bush, being pressed for actual thought, blows bubbles out his ass?  Because it proves the world's only military superpower is in the hands of only an ass with no thoughts and only beyond-facile "beliefs", that's why.

Fresh Light

...to supplement a post at The Weblog (and encourage readers toward David's, on Badiou's Hölderlin below it)

None of the parties involved in the struggle against terrorism can afford to refrain from talking about it, but the more they do so the more they help the terrorist cause, by giving it status, visibility, and a sense of purpose...victims of a traumatic experience need to endlessly play the trauma back for themselves in order to feel reassured that they have withstood it.  This self-destructive tendency becomes a destructive weapon in the hands of the media and the political leadership.  Imagine, said Derrida, if we told the American public and the world that what has happened is no doubt an unspeakable crime, but it's over.  Everyone would then begin their own period of mourning, the preliminary step to turning the page.  All responsible parties need to facilitate this turning of the page and stop hindering it.  This is an urgent responsibility, the evasion of which transforms the enemies of terrorism into its allies.  (Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 153-154; image via remue.net)

I may not share the proclivity (or mixed fascination) for sterilized images of the zeitgeist's self-appointed spokesmen, but I do appreciate the impetus of Alain's post.   And I suspect he would agree that discussions of Fukuyama and B-Henri, while revealing things by falling rather decisively short, don't really do the subject at hand much of any justice. Which is the way I prefer to read his concluding remarks, in any case.  That subject being, broadly, the social and political role of philosophers, and even more broadly their relation to the question of Europe.

As to the former, Alain cites those two repellents attempting to  distinguish strictly between "government" and "private life", and "realistic" and "idealistic" intellectual labor, respectively.  But as Alain himself, and one savvy commenter do not fail to note, neither of these sets of bins are very helpful, or even all that relevant.

Rather, and in a manner that overlaps a great deal with John Emerson's recent forays into questions of global citizenship and intellectual responsibility in "analytic" vs. "continental" frameworks, one might more usefully distinguish, following Giovanna Borradori, between models of social and political commitment aligned with either a "liberal" or "Hegelian" lineage.

Bourdieu vs. Post-Structuralism

Those of us who end up being associated with 'postmodernism' or 'theory' often find ourselves confused or infuriated by the attempt of our opponents to lump us into a single category. It is amusing, therefore, to read one of those 'postmodernists' or 'theorists' or -- more plainly -- 'Frenchmen' get upset about this lumping-in with people he views himself to be in competition with. The last chapter, indeed the last section of that chapter, in Bourdieu's Science of Science and Reflexivity sees him attempt to articulate -- for an audience in France at the College de France -- his relationship, that is departure from, philosophy and, consequently, his relationship to the stars of French academic philosophy. This section, "Sketch for a self-analysis", sees him go after, as it were, Althusser and Foucault (and, by consequence, Deleuze), primarily, but also Derrida. His problem with the first group is that they disavow the social sciences while taking the object of the social sciences for themselves and his problem with the second group, exemplified (symbolized?) by Derrida, is its 'aristocratic' tendencies. (Do recall, Bourdieu often revisited the theme of his petit bourgeois origins in relation to his thought, in general, and, more specifically, the context of the elite French academies.)

Johnson on deconstruction

Prof. Barbara Johnson, in her excellent Introduction to her own translation of Derrida's essays in Dissemination, makes this very valuable comment on Derrida's method:

Chora

"Discourse here meets its limit--in itself, in its very performative power.  It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.  [...] Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.  This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal" or "illegitimate."  They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment.  They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded...The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news.  One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 242)

"Here one notices that there are cases in which, posed in terms of means/end, the problem of law remains undecidable.  This ultimate undecidability, which is that of all problems of law...is the insight of a singular discouraging experience.  Where is one to go after recognizing this ineluctable undecidability? Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, upon a beyond of mediation and so beyond language as a sign.  Sign is here understood, as always in Benjamin, in the sense of mediation, as a means toward an end.  It seems at first that there is no way out, and so there is no hope."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 285)

Let me attempt to make my general disposition, such as it is, explicit.  I am tempted to subscribe fully to Derrida's reading of, and resistance to Benjamin, and thus in certain respects against Agamben.  To subscribe fully to the disquiet Derrida outlines, and to the questions he poses, in this already much-cited, seminal essay, "Force of Law:  The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"   Above all, perhaps, to not be in too much of a hurry, as Derrida was fond of saying (in that yesteryear still blissfully ignorant of "teh! serious" weblogs, we can only assume). 

There are some real differences here, as Adam alluded to earlier (Agamben calls the likewise leaping conclusion of Derrida's essay on Benjamin a peculiar misunderstanding, and understandably so, since surely it's fair to say that Derrida is addressing his remarks in no small part to Agamben's Benjamin, so to speak).  For Agamben's fullest response, as far as I am aware, the reader is encouraged to consult Homo Sacer I (above linked).  The differences here could certainly be sketched out in many ways, using everyone from Kant to Heidegger to Schmitt as one's primary filter (not to mention Blanchot, Wittgenstein, Montaigne or Pascal, Rawls or Sam Weber and so on, all of whom appear in Derrida's historico-philosophical sketch).  But perhaps some summary schematics can at this point be posed, or repeated, both for the sake of clarity and complexity (if not for the added benefit of driving the larger panopticon crazy with shades of ambivalence).  Derrida is useful in this way.   But first it should be plainly noted:  even where he claims to be leaving "Benjamin the last word," Derrida is picking up where Benjamin left off, specifically there where Benjamin states:

The realm of ends, and therefore also the question of a criterion of justness, is excluded for the time being from this study.  (279)

The question of justice, as I believe Paul Passavant touched on earlier, runs strongly through Derrida's larger project, in which the ideas of a just decision, a justice to-come, and a certain 'messianicity without messianism' are at least suggestively, elliptically or implicitly, opposed to Benjamin's (and Agamben's) perceived messianism.  Not that any of these ideas are so easily understood, of course.  But perhaps it is not merely coincidental that in another nearby essay,"Faith and Reason," Derrida's discussion of these topics repeatedly returns to a single, rather enigmatic word:  "chora" (which he borrows from Plato, and borrows it not for the first time, as we shall see).  Would it be accurate to suggest that this Platonic "chora" is invoked at least partly in response to Benjamin's meditations on "divine violence," as described, in some literary fashion, by the story of Korah?  I don't know.  It is possible, I suppose, that Derrida has been responding to this essay, in one form or another, for some time.

“Critique of Violence” and Deconstruction

[The following is exerpted from a longer paper I wrote on Force of Law. The part on "Declarations of Independence" in particular has been quite brutally cut, hopefully not beyond comprehensibility. For those who don't know, my name is Adam Kotsko, and I normally blog at The Weblog.]

Introducing his reading of “Critique of Violence” in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Derrida goes to great lengths to distance himself from any sense that Benjamin’s text is some kind of unique key: “One will not dare say that this text is exemplary. We are in a realm where, in the end, there are only singular examples. Nothing is absolutely exemplary. I will not attempt to justify absolutely the choice of this text. But it is not, for all that, the worst example of what could be exemplary in a relatively determined context such as ours” (263). What is the context here? First of all, of course, the context is an academic conference on Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, where “Critique of Violence” presents itself as a particularly well-suited “exercise in deconstructive reading” (264), for reasons of both structure and content. Already, though, the “complete” text in Acts of Religion contains materials adapted for a second conference on the Final Solution, materials in which, according to Agamben, Derrida “guards against [Benjamin’s concept of divine violence], approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’” (64). Finally, Derrida explicitly widens the context to include the whole political situation of his time: “In the Western Democracies of 1989, with work and a certain number of precautions, lessons can still be drawn from it” (“Force,” 264). And although we can’t know for sure that he knew it at the time—any more than we can know for sure that Benjamin knew the Shoah was coming—Derrida is writing just as “the European model of bourgeois, liberal, parliamentary democracy” (263) is about to experience what will seem to have been its greatest triumph, that is, the fall of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. Once again, the internal contradictions of Actually Existing Democracy, its self-deconstructive properties, so apparent to Benjamin and others in the wake of the Great War, become all too visible.

GOD (Donner la mort) (i)

(The following comprises two brief responses to the opening of Jacques Derrida's Gift of Death (as translated from Donner la mort by David Wills).  The first is by guest author Kenneth Rufo, who blogs astutely at Ghost in the Wire  The idea for this series originates somewhere around here. –ed. (as if))


Titular Ruminations

Ken Rufo:  What would it mean to think death as a gift? To give death? And who is
in a position to give it? A few possibilities.

First, as the title's acronym implies, we have the almighty, the
transcendent creator, the beginning and, of course, the end. Our mortal
lives are his gift to us, a Christian gift. Death is God's gift to his
chosen people, for with death comes the possibility, at least the
Judeo-Christian possibility, of transcendence. Death comes from the
diving to, in effect, return us to the divine.

Second, almost opposite in inclination, death is the gift given to us
through indirection, sacrifice, and happenstance by the poorest, the
lowly, the Other. It is their labor, their contribution, their living –
and especially their dying – that gives us so much. Our privilege, be it
that of intellectual hegemony or the means by which we blithely take a
disproportionate share of the world's natural and industrial wealth.

Third, death is the gift we give ourselves. The good (eu-) death
(thanatos), the question of how to die, of one's relationship to death.
It is here that we find the most strident split between Heidegger and
Levinas, for while Heidegger founds Dasein on an authentic resoluteness
towards one's own death, Levinas finds in this resolution a
quintessential selfishness that belies those Other that makes our own
death (and life) possible. Being towards death cannot, for Levinas, mean
only being towards one's own death, hence the near universal ethical
injunction: thou shall not murder.

Fourth, death is the gift of the other, for it is through death that we
learn of our own mortality. We can take this in two directions. On the
one hand, it is through the death of others, through the realization of
their terminality, that we come to recognize our own finitude. These
“little Ds” - Ernest Becker's name for them – help us to understand the
existential and psychological importance of death. On the other hand,
death is an exemplar, a reset, a terminal experience much like the
terminus/terminal of some machine, the interface that defines the point
at which everyday life smacks into its own heuristic limits. It is in
this sense that Bataille can talk about the virtues of excess or that
Baudrillard can speak of death as a metaphor. It is in this sense that
the tragedy of Katrina accumulates meaning.
 

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

There is nothing outside of the text.  And that is neither becasue Jean-Jacques' life, or the existence of Mamma or Therese themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called "real" existence only in the text and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation.  All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons.  What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the "dangerous supplement," is that in what one calls the real life of these existences "of flesh and bone," beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there have never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the "real" supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement. (Of Grammatology Pgs. 158-159)

Footnote: Rendering

Painting. Debt. The Commodity.

Qui me rendrà mes chaussures?

Pourquoi dire toujours de la peinture qu'elle rend? Qu'elle restitue? [Why do we always say of painting that it renders? That it restores/repays?] - Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture