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Jacques Derrida and the Time of Political Thinking
Andrea Cassatella
Political Theory Graduate Workshop 2012
* Draft. Do not cite or circulate without author’s permission* What follows is the first draft of a (rather long) chapter of my dissertation, which investigates the theologico-political problem in the thought of Jacques Derrida. The entire chapter looks at Derrida's view of time and how it affects our understanding of the theologico-political problem. The focus of this paper is more limited and I would like the discussion to cover particularly section one and two, which are included below. Needless to say, if section three is also of interest, I can circulate it at a later stage. I apologize in advance for the excessive length but due to temporal (!) constraints, I could not manage to make my paper more concise for this event.
Introduction
Time plays a central role in all political philosophy. Time as eternity is crucial in Plato
and Augustine, and time as history has a central place in the modern tradition going from
Rousseau to Heidegger passing through Hegel and Nietzsche. However, the majority of
contemporary approaches to the study of political life seem to have forgotten the question
of time. This lacuna is particularly relevant to the study of the ‘theologico-political
complex’, which, to recall it, refers to how the persistence of religion and theological
discourse in political life has re-opened the modern question of the secular, namely of
how the relationship between the theological and the political, faith and reason, is to be
resolved in the justification of political authority. As indicated in the Introduction, one
central problem of dominant views about the ‘theologico-political complex’ since
modernity, is connected to a mode of thinking that seeks to solve, in too atemporal and
foundational a fashion, the theologico-political equation in one direction only.
Reflecting on time and political thought, on the time of political thought, seems
therefore a timely enterprise that this chapter seeks to undertake by exploring Derrida’s
reflections on the matter. I suggest that his view brings the question of time back to the
agenda of political thought and emphasizes its relevance for rethinking secularism today.
Challenging a well-established view of time as linear succession of unitary moments,
Derrida’s illuminate how a ‘messianic’ understanding of temporality offers a significant
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potential to political thinking especially for reflecting on the theologico-political
predicament and for disclosing new possibilities for human freedom. This aspect is
particularly brought to light if, as I have argued throughout, we interpret Derrida’s entire
thought as animated by a powering politico-philosophical sensibility for questions of
political foundings, a sensibility that plays a decisive role in his analysis of temporality as
much as it does, as we have seen, in that of language and, as we shall see in the next
chapter, of politics.
I begin, in section one, by examining Derrida’s reflections on time and how these
expose the limits of teleological thinking. To that effect, I analyse his understanding of
time as trace-constituted and draw some implications following from this for political
thought. Further, through a discussion of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, I expound how his
critique of political teleology discloses the exclusionary features of the latter, which is
shown as neutralizing the temporal specificity of political events and ultimately closing
off the political space. The next two sections are devoted to the investigation of the
notion of the ‘messianic’. In section two, I explore Derrida’s perspective on the
‘messianic’ as he articulates it, mainly, in Spectres of Marx. My aim is to elucidate
messianic thinking as a non-teleological type of political thought that is intimately
connected to the possibility of hospitality and of what Derrida calls a “new
Enlightenment”.1 I close, in the last section, by connecting Derrida’s ‘messianic’ to the
relationship between reason and faith, and more generally to the ‘theologico-political
complex’. I argue that the ‘messianic’ is a historical type of thinking that is sensible to
transcendental inquiry and draws its critical impetus from an elementary experience of
faith that is irreducibly religious. By illustrating that messianic thinking does not endorse
the oppositional logic reason versus faith typical of many modern understandings of
secularism since the Enlightenment, but think them as irreducibly co-originary, I suggest
that Derrida provides us with a more complex and illuminating understanding of the
‘theologico-political’ problematics.
1 Specters of Marx, 75. Derrida uses the notion of hospitality instead of, for example, tolerance to emphasize that his perspective seeks to take distance from the Christian framework in which the latter emerged. See especially Jacque Derrida ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicide’, in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in Time of Terror, Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
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1. Time and political thought: exposing the limits of telelogical thinking
Time is among Derrida’s central concerns in deconstructing canonical texts of the
western philosophical tradition. As he says in Speech and Phenomena, “what is
ultimately at stake, what is at bottom decisive [is] the concept of time”. 2 The question of
time is present in almost all of his writing dealing with other philosophical topics and is
comprehensively explored in Given Time and ‘Ousia and Gramme’.3 For the purposes of
this chapter, though, we will limit our fucus to his essay ‘Différance’ where Derrida
succinctly presents the substance of his view, and then we shall proceed to explore the
connection he makes between time and political thinking. Before doing that, some
preliminary observations on his approach to time might be of help.
Overall, Derrida’s strategy is to articulate a perspective that radicalizes human
finitude and historicizes time in a manner that unsettles any recourse to an ultimate extra-
temporal instance. Following Heidegger, Derrida takes issue with a particular view of
time established by Aristotle that has profoundly influenced the entire western
philosophical tradition, the history of metaphysics in particular. This view conceives of
time synchronically, as an infinite series of successive moments or ‘nows’, which can be
clearly grasped through reflection as undivided temporal units.4 Such a view is to him
problematic for a number of reasons. First, the question of time is posed in terms of being
(does time belong to being or non-being?) which might mean omitting the very question
of time, namely whether time is part of being or not. Second, it represents time as a sort
of nostalgic return to an origin or original ground as if there ever was one to re-
appropriate. Finally, and most importantly, the traditional view of time subscribes to what
Derrida calls metaphysics of presence, namely a philosophical approach typical of the
western tradition that considers it possible to grasp a pure, eternal referent, a
“transcendental signified”, which grounds an entire philosophical system.5 The
metaphysics of presence conceives of such a referent as presence, that is, as founding
principle that can be present to consciousness in a clearly identifiable and distinguishable
2 See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (op. cit.), 70. 3 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); ‘Ousia and Gramme Note on a Note from Being and Time’, in Margin of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 4 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, 8. 5 Of Grammatology, especially ch. 2.
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way from the conditions (temporal, political, linguistic, socio-economic etc) in which it
occurs.6
The distance Derrida takes from the traditional understanding of time emerges
clearly in his essay ‘Différance’. Here he seeks to show that and how time is historicized
by spatial mark of its passage, or ‘trace’.7 The ‘trace’ accounts for an ‘originary’
synthesis between time and space, and allows for a more complex understanding of what
a ‘now’ or present moment might be. Derrida notes:
In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called
spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).
And it is this constitution of the present, as ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple, (and
therefore, stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions or
pretensions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological and
transcendental language that soon will reveal itself inadequate) that I propose to call
arche-writing, arche-trace, or différance.8
6 As mentioned, these points have a clear Heideggerian genesis and resonate with the view of time he develops throughout his entire thought and, particularly, in his later writings. In Identity and Difference, for example, Heidegger considers the history of philosophy as the history of metaphysics, which in turn is a history of the reduction of being to particular mental experiences or abstract ideas of reason that can be present as presence in the mind. He names this approach onto-theo-logical by which he means that the idea of being has been not simply understood as the ground (Grund) of all beings (ontology) but also as the most fundamental ground, ultimately the ground of itself, which is the metaphysical idea of God (theology). In short, the onto-theo-logical approach reduces being to a static, fix foundation and thus cannot account for temporal variation and difference, which are the conditions under which the questioning of being takes place. In contrast to this view, Heidegger thinks no one idea or concept can grasp being in itself, which can be approached only in its withdrawal, or difference, from a particular being. Yet such difference should not impede the investigation of the unity between beings and being, a unity that remains unthought in traditional (onto-theo-logical) approaches to metaphysics. For Heidegger, in fact, being as ground is always thought in the genitive form as the ‘being of’ beings while beings are always conceived as ‘beings of’ being. His central point is then to think the ontological difference not as “difference between” but as “difference qua difference”. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. J. Stambaugh, (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2002). Derrida agrees with Heidegger that no concept can grasp substantially what the truth of being is. But, unlike him, he does not consider being, however conceived, as the preferential site where truth can be found since all we can have access to in terms of cognition, as we shall in a moment, is a ‘trace’ of what one might identify as the most ‘basic’ experience. For Derrida, we do in fact think being as the site of truth but only because this is a propensity towards metaphysical concepts that is intrinsic to language and thinking due to words’ tendency to become abstract concepts removed from the variations of their empirical reference. Yet there is no philosophically sound rationale to think being as an ontological reality, as this will still presuppose the capacity to grasp a fix ground, even if as withdrawal, where truth manifests itself. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (op. cit.) 21 ff.; Writing and Difference (op. cit.), 280. 7 My exposition here in indebted to Martin Hägglund and his illuminating analysis of the trace as spacing in his, Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life (op. cit.), 18 ff. 8 See Jacques Derrida. ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, (op. cit.) 13.
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In this passage, Derrida gives an account of the ‘now’ in terms of ‘trace’ by thinking the
minimal unit of time beyond the metaphysical approach that has characterized western
philosophy since Aristotle. He emphasizes that for the ‘now’ to be possible it must be
visible and enduring in time. Temporal endurance, in turn, needs to be archived to be
recognizable at all in time, and in spite of temporal flow: it requires a spatial inscription
(the becoming-space of time), a trace. However, for there to be a trace in the first place,
which can be recognized only after its spatial inscription, space has to be related to the
flow of time and therefore be temporalized (the becoming-time of space), otherwise no
after would be possible for recognizing such a ‘trace’.9 The thinking together of the
becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space that constitutes the trace-
structure of time is what Derrida calls spacing (espacement).
By accounting the ‘originary’ synthesis between time and space in terms of ‘trace’
Derrida is able to move beyond the metaphysical understanding of time. For if the
spatialization of time makes that synthesis possible, the temporalization of space
disallows its founding on an indivisible ground that is not itself exposed to the coming of
what might contaminate its purity. ‘Originary’, here, does not mean ‘original’ as if it were
referring to an event that occurred at the origin, namely in a moment that can be clearly
identified in consciousness. Rather it marks the impossibility of any original and self-
identical moment that is not always already divided in itself. By illuminating this
impossibility, Derrida’s notion of ‘trace’ therefore exposes the limits of conceptualizing
time as a succession of undivided and clearly identifiable moments, namely as a
movement between the oppositional poles of a past that is no longer and a future that is
no yet.
The significance of Derrida’s argument about time viewed from the irreducible
spatio-temporal constitution of the ‘trace’ lies in the undermining of the metaphysics of
presence. By showing that mental contents available to human understanding at any
particular moment are not so easily separable from the conditions in which they appear
and always contain something from a previous experience, Derrida illustrates that any
such content is conditioned and resulting form an iteration as trace-consituted, which
9 Ibid.
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means that ideas in consciousness can never be fully grasped as pure monads.10 The
‘trace’ indicates that contamination is an originary, yet by no means original, predicament
affecting the human condition, which means that there is no philosophical rationale to
reject the always already immanent character of transcendent origins, their being already
a becoming, a non-original origin of sort. The most one can aspire to find in the search
for beginnings or grounds is ambiguity, constant deferral of the point of departure and
contamination of the purity of mental representations: différance. In other words, by
articulating time as trace-constituted, Derrida reconfigures the problem of dualism and
hierarchy between the transcendent and the immanent, the transcendental and the
empirical, the intelligible and the sensible affecting much of contemporary philosophical
reflection, including reflections on the proper foundation of political life. The ‘trace’
point to that limit point in which these pairs are silently related in such a way that there is
no sharp line distinguishing the one from the other and thus the demarcating line of such
distinction remains within the plane of undecidability. Thus, and this is a central point for
the ‘theologico-political complex’ at issue in this study, if undecidability characterizes
the inaugural moment of reflection, the philosophical possibility of establishing what is
most original between the theological and the political, faith and reason, is undermined.
What is also undermined, through the exposure of the potential for violence involved in
the effort of dissolving constitutive contamination, is the attempt to provide robust
normative political foundations on the basis of a pure telos or ground, regardless of
whether this operation is enacted by reason or faith. Indeed, once the clear identification
of telos is undermined by the thematization of temporality, the movement towards its
actualization or approximation is derailed. We will come back to this shortly.
10 To recall it, the notion of iterability refers to the possibility of written signs to endure in time, and thus be legible at all, beyond the moment of their inscription and in the absence of their author(s), and it needs to be viewed within Derrida’s understanding of the signification process. For him, such a process is not an order of pure intelligibility, as traditionally conceived, where the linguistic sign constitutes a unity of a sensible signifier and an ideal signified. Rather it is a process that functions on the basis of non-conscious differential relations – a sort of implicit background, a web of conditions, beliefs, habits and mediations on which meaning in general depends – taking place within socio-political and temporal variations, and leaving traces on what we might take as the unity and meaning of words. Within this context, iterability is not a repetition of the ‘same’, which can function as a transcendental a priori. Rather since it always contains the possibility of alteration and contamination of meaning, and thus it limits the possibility of pure ideas.
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If at this point it is not already apparent what our discussion so far has to do with
political thought, it is now opportune to make that explicit. The point of the matter is that
if western political thought has inherited and relied upon the same metaphysical
assumptions about time characterizing western philosophy more generally, it is subject to
the same challenge Derrida poses to philosophical discourse at large. For him, such
reliance and inheritance have in fact occurred since canonical understandings of political
categories such as sovereignty, law, self-hood, democracy11 but also political community,
equality, friendship12 as well as history, state, and citizenship13 presuppose the
metaphysical understanding of time typical of the western tradition since Aristotle.
I cannot present here all of Derrida’s arguments in support of his claim as this is
beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to consider the paradigmatic example he uses
to illustrate the metaphysics of presence lurking behind the political categories mentioned
above. In Rogues, Derrida notes how throughout much of the history of western political
thought, the nature, extent and justification of political authority has often been
implicated in some onto-theo-logical, atemporal dimension characterized by the quest for
transcendent foundations and purity of ideas to justify the political order .14 The
philosophical concept of sovereignty is the exemplary idea that has performed that
function. He argues that traditional conceptualizations of sovereignty conceive of it as
ipseity (in English the best word capturing this notion is probably selfhood), namely a
force (kratos) of self-constitution and self-legislation characterized by a circular motion
of relating or returning to itself as its own end.15 So conceived, the circularity of ipseity
displays sovereignty’s unconditional, indivisible, and unitary character as it establishes a
circular identification of the cause with the end, of the ‘by itself’ with the ‘for itself’. It
discloses, in other words, sovereignty as the metaphysical concept of agency, as a pure
idea par excellence that is unscathed by the alteration and differentiation of iterability and
time. 16 The problem with this view, unsurprisingly, is that it remains implicated in the
metaphysics of presence Derrida puts into question. For him, sovereignty, like any other
11 Rogues, (op. cit.) 12 Politics of Friendship, (op. cit.) 13 Specters of Marx, (op. cit.) 14 Rogues, 17, 101,157. 15 Ibid, 11. 16 Ibid, 12.
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concept, is subject to time and its logic of contamination. And this means that sovereignty
is always self-divided and its alleged purity always contaminated. Therefore, the general
point Derrida’s example of sovereignty elucidates is the atemporal fashion in which much
of western political thought has often considered to be philosophically sound, or even
possible, to isolate the temporality of the subjects thinking political categories and their
contexts.
Significantly for our purposes, in the example of sovereignty, is the emphasis
Derrida puts on the connection between temporality and political thinking.17 In particular,
his insistence on the question of time and the logic of contamination it implies has
important implications for the type of foundations political thought is philosophically
justified to put forward. By raising the issue of the temporality of political thinking,
Derrida is able to robustly question, and expose the limits of, past modes of political
thought that are informed by teleological thinking and the foundational conception of
reason associated to it. By teleological thinking, we refer here to a type of thinking
guided by and moving towards the finality of an ideal goal to be realized or that perform
a regulative function for reflection, a thinking whose judgments about experience are
properly regulated by a telos grasped in the present and thus in advance or independently
from the exposure to what is yet to be encountered. Such a thinking is associated to a
foundational view of reason precisely because the latter is thought as capable of grasping
ideal ends in consciousness that are unaffected by temporal variations, and that can
provide the fix telos necessary to the regulative function.
The modes of political thinking Derrida has in mind are those taking the form of
a philosophical teleology organizing the movement of thinking (Kant’s regulative Idea)
or of a teleological conception of history indicating the goal to realize (Hegel’s
historicization of Spirit and Marx’s advent of communist society or what Derrida calls
“archeo-teleological concept[s] of history” in Hegel and Marx), or as epochal reflection
(as in Heidegger). Despite their differences, these modes of reflection have for Derrida
been characterized by a longing for origins and have conceived of the telos as a pure ideal
17 For a recent discussion the relationship between temporality and the political (including also political thought) in Derrida, see Derrida and The Time of The Political, (eds.) Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).
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guiding the movement of thinking. 18 Politically, the central problem with these modes of
reflection is connected to the types of normativity they give rise once ideals about human
nature and political community are supposedly grasped in consciousness as presence, and
then posited as grounds providing either the substantive standards for critically evaluating
current society and bringing about a new one (Hegel or Marx), or the platform wherefrom
developing procedural conditions for the approximation of an ideal and ultimately the
justification of political arrangements (as, for example, in Kant, Habermas and Rawls).
For Derrida, these types of normativity, which we may call ‘substantive’ and ‘regulative’
depending on the type of teleology they are connected to, display dangerous and
worrisome features and need to be challenged.
The place where this challenge is most explicitly articulated is his Specters of
Marx. Here he takes up, among other things, the issue of political teleology through the
analysis of some of Marx’s texts and of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last
Man. Let us consider them in turn starting with Marx. As the title of the book suggests,
Derrida is interested in exploring the spectres of Marx both in terms of the ones Marx was
obsessed with and talked about in his work (most notably in The Communist Manifesto),
and those that seemed to have come back after the death of communism. His exploration
is centered on the notion of specter (revenant), a figure of excess that is “beyond the
phenomenon or beyond being” and that unsettles the opposition between what manifests
itself as presence and what escapes this very possibility.19 The notion of specter is pivotal
to Derrida’s investigation as it enables the distinction between ontology and
‘hauntology’, a double bind he sees at work in Marx’s corpus.20 While ontology focuses
on pure essences or ideas that reduce the apparently spectral to a clearly identifiable
mental representation, ‘hauntology’ seeks to track down what eludes such a pure
operation. But, above all, the figure of spectre allows Derrida to show first, the
untenability of maintaining clear cut conceptual distinctions since spectres stands for
what concepts need to exclude in order to convey the identity of what they signify, which
18 The teleologies of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Heidegger are all mentioned in Specters of Marx, 81, 91. 19 Ibid, 125. 20 Ibid, 214. Note also how Derrida plays, as with his notion of différance, with the written but not phonetic difference between the French ‘ontologie’ and ‘hantologie’. This is not simply a stylistic choice but a deliberate attempt to theoretically complicate, through the written form, the often unquestioned univocity of meaning.
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means that concepts are as much about what they represent, their content, and what they
exclude; second, to illuminate the type of metaphysical grounding that clear-cut
distinctions require.21
For Derrida, the importance of bringing to light the double bind of Marx’s thought
is both to highlight the metaphysics of presence grounding Marx’s normative claims and
to suggest that the latter articulated a way out from metaphysical thinking. While
recognizing that there is “more than one”22 spirit of Marxism –and we will come back to
the one he seeks to inherit in the next section– Derrida seeks to question and take distance
from “other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its
supposed systemic, metaphysical or ontological totality…, to its fundamental concepts of
labor, mode of production, social class’” and so forth.23 His main argument in opposition
to these “other spirits” is that there is an intimate connection between metaphysical
thinking and (‘substantive’) teleology on the one hand, and totalitarianism on the other.
Grounding this claim on his reading of Marx’s The German Ideology and The Communist
Manifesto, Derrida observes that in the former Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians,
and of German Ideology more generally, continuously relies on “an ontology of
presence” that seeks to bring human consciousness “back to the world of labour,
production and exchange, so as to reduce it to its conditions”.24 For Derrida, this aspect of
Marx’s thought is exemplary of what we have so far identified as metaphysics of
presence since Marx considers possible to grasp the most originary root of mental
representation through concepts such as ‘labor’ or ‘mode of production’, which are
elevated to the status of pure origins and thus remain implicated in a questionable
metaphysical thinking.25
21 Ibid, 184. Derrida claims that Marx’s German Ideology is focussed on the question of the idea, on the ‘proper’ delineation of what a an idea or concept is and displays, following a long tradition that goes back to Plato, the attempt to (re)establish a clear cut distinction between idea and non-idea, between Geist (idea) and Gespenst (spectre). Yet since, as Derrida remarks earlier on, “Geist can also signify ‘specter’” the “semantics of Gespenst themselves haunt the semantics of Geist” (134), an haunting indicating that the establishment of concepts demands the suppression of spectral semantic excess, this being an action that requires, as shown in the previous chapter, pragmatic interventions exceeding the philosophical domain. 22 More precisely, Derrida use the expression plus d’un which can be translated as both ‘more than one’ and ‘no more one’. Ibid, 2. 23 Specters, 110 –111. 24 Ibid, 214. This is one of the double bind Derrida sees at play in Marx’s gesture, the other being very close if not foregrounding deconstruction. This second aspect will be analyzed in the next section. 25 Ibid, 110.
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From a politico-philosophical perspective, the problem connected to Marx’s
ontology of presence is the articulation of normative claims in the form of a ‘substantive’
teleology or messainism grounded on such putatively pure origins. For Derrida, such
operation is inherent in one of the logic (the ontological) of Marx’s thought which
remains “radically insufficient there where the Marxist ontology grounding the project of
Marxist science or critique also itself carries with it and must carry with it, necessarily,
despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology”.26 This logic
remains insufficient since it privileges “an ontological treatment of the spectrality of the
ghost” and inscribes the movement of thinking in a teleological understanding of time
and history leading to the actualization of a telos.27 This aspect, for Derrida, emerges
clearly in The Communist Manifesto where Marx indicates the universal communist party
as “the final incarnation, the real presence of the spectre”, which marked the advent and
realization of a messianic eschaton, communism, namely the embodiment of human
essence as species-being in a classless society.28 In short, Derrida’s criticism of a certain
Marxism illuminates the dangerous normativity that the companionship between
metaphysics of presence and teleological thinking puts into effect. The normativity
produced by ideas supposedly grasped in their purity and posited as the ground for a
messianism to be realized can be a recipe for disastrous consequences such as those so
clearly manifested by the totalitarian use of Marxist messianism and its historical
enactment around the globe.
The other examples Derrida uses to investigate the problematic normativity
associated to political teleology, is Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.
While surely not being the most representative contemporary political thinker, Fukuyama
can be used as a case in point to illustrate a larger trend within many contemporary liberal
perspectives. At the core of this trend is a sort of jubilation of liberal democracy, of the
market economy and of its global spread especially after the death of communism.29
Derrida takes Fukuyama to be a representative of a Hegelian-Kojevian neo-evangelism
celebrating the ‘end of history’ discourse; that is, a discourse informed by a political
26 Ibid, 73. 27 Ibid, 114. 28 Ibid, 128. 29 Ibid, 69.
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teleology that considers liberal democracy, modelled on the Hegelian view of the state, as
the telos regulating the however imperfect realization of the Christian Kingdom of God
on earth.30 Derrida’s uneasiness with Fukuyama’s liberal democracy is rooted in the
Hegelian version of incarnation it represents but, most importantly, in the unexamined
axiomatics on which it relies. The liberal democracy at issue relies on a questionable
distinction that separates and opposes “empirical reality and ideal finality”, a regulative
ideal and its necessarily imperfect empirical approximation. As such, it is a type of
liberal democracy that extends beyond the ‘substantive normativity’ of Fukuyama and
capture examples of normativity of the ‘regulative’ type.31
According to Derrida, this type of liberal democracy is deeply problematic as it is
animated by an “ideal orientation”, a regulative ideal of Kantian sort, which is the telos
guiding or regulating political judgments about concrete situations in the present and for
the future. 32 The problem with that “ideal orientation” is that it manifests a longing for
cognitive ultimacy to the extent that political judgments informed by the regulative ideal
cannot be ‘disproved’ or challenged by concrete situations that do not measure up with,
or radically differ from, the idealized telos. This holds since, as Derrida notes, the telos in
question “has the form of an ideal finality” and thus “everything that appears to
contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and
global and multiple and recurrent it might be”.33
For Derrida, as Caputo has made clear, the type of teleology informing
Fukuyama’s liberal understanding – and we might add also all those views animated by
the “ideal orientation” just mentioned – relies on an irrefutable logic that is prepared to
tolerate many plaguing contradiction to the telos itself by appealing to the distinction and
30 Ibid, 75. 31 Ibid, 71. I have here in mind the perspectives of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas –and one might add also those generated by the reception of their thought. Arguably, both their theories subscribe to the empirical/ideal distinction at issue precisely because informed by regulative ideals. In the case of Rawls, the notions of political community as well-order society and of human beings as free and equal in the liberal sense constitute the guiding regulative ideals. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For Habermas, such ideals are represented by understanding as the telos of communicative human beings as well as (liberal) constitutional democracy as the model political community. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics’, On the Pragmatics of Communication ed. Maeve Cook (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 32 Ibid, 71. 33 Ibid, 71.
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separation between the ideal and the empirical.34 Among the catastrophic plagues that
contradict the liberal telos Derrida lists unemployment, homelessness, ruthless economic
wars to ‘control’ the market, the uncontrollable contradictions of the free-market, the
aggravation of foreign debt, the development of arm industry and trade, the spread of
nuclear weapons, the spread of inter-ethnic wars driven by essentialist view of
community as nation-state, the global growth of mafia and drug cartels and, above all, the
question of international law whose genesis and functioning depend on a particular
(European) historical culture and its dominating position.35 These plagues cannot be
tolerated in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy since “never have violence,
inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human
beings in the history of the earth and humanity…never have so many men, women, and
children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated.”36
From the perspective of the temporality we are discussing here, Derrida’s point
about liberal teleological thinking37 and the ‘regulative’ normativity it purports is thus
two folds: first, since such thinking is committed to the possibility of grasping a pure
telos, it halts, as it were, the flow of time and subscribes to the traditional, synchronic
understanding of time that opposes past and future, thereby annulling the contaminating
interval between the two that is the present. In so doing, teleological thinking also
violently annuls the possibility of the present to matter in its own right and subordinates it
to a future that can always and only promise the infinite approximation of the telos.
Second, as a consequence, teleological thinking is complacent or consciously tolerates
present sufferings that are measured against a redemptive future promising emancipation.
Yet, since for both political and logical reasons there is constant need for ‘more’ liberal
democracy, precisely because it can never be achieved, ‘necessary’ suffering can be
without limits. The dangerous irony, then, is not simply that the benefits of the future are
infinitely deferred while its guiding principle, the telos, is placed beyond the reach of
34 See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 138. 35 Ibid, 100 ff. 36 Ibid, 106. 37 Although ‘liberal teleological thinking’ might appear as an umbrella formulation that blurs the distinctions among the different articulation of democracy informed by liberal understanding, it is not my intention to use it in this sense. My aim is instead to emphasize the distinction ideal/real that is at issue in my discussion and that characterized those politico-philosophical positions (Kantian, Habermasian and Rawlsian) inspired by a Kantian teleology.
14
critical scrutiny or even removed from the possibility of failure. It is, above all, that what
is supposed to guide normative judgments about experience is necessarily blind to the
specificity and singularity of particular situations in the present, especially if these
situations were to differ from the articulations informed by the idealized final goal.
After having expounded Derrida’s challenge to political teleologies, we are now
in a better position to appreciate the significance of connecting time and political thought
as well as exposing the time of political thinking. Derrida seeks to show that the
commitments to teleology and metaphysics of presence within political thought are
exemplary of a modality of thinking that neutralizes the temporality of politics, the
variations, contaminations and ambiguities of its happening. He does so at two
interlinked levels: philosophically, he shows that and how teleological thinking petrifies
time into a rigid conceptual structure establishing a particular order of hierarchies (ideal,
intelligible etc. versus empirical, sensible etc.), which unjustifiably discriminate against
ways of thinking, understanding or being that do not abide by the rules of the
metaphysical tradition. Politically, he illustrates how teleological thinking fosters
practices of intolerance towards ‘unfitting’ otherness and thus contributes to the
progressive closure of the political space.
To put this more pointedly: by emphasizing the uncritical inheritance or lack of
problematization of a teleological understandings of time, Derrida shows that much of
modern political reflection has cooperated with the continuous reliance of political
concepts, institutions and practices on unwarranted metaphysical assumptions. Most
decisively, he raises questions about the extent to which investigating the temporality of
political thought is central to any project of intellectual and political emancipation, which
seeks to disentangle human freedom and action from the mere attempt to fulfil or being
guided by an idealized telos.
There is, then, an alarming implication following from Derrida’s analysis of time
and political thought: the extent to which philosophical understandings of time as longing
for origins have informed and inform (normative) political thinking, institutions and
practices, they have promoted and still promote the universalization of a monistic,
exclusionary thinking of political life grounded on ideas allegedly, and yet
unwarrantedly, grasped in their purity. In the context of this study, the exclusionary
15
potential of teleological thinking and foundational reason need not be underestimated
especially if the latter represented the secular response to faith and theology. Indeed, if
one of the key motivations in the modern attempt to separate philosophy from theology
was to remedy the intolerance of latter,38 one might say that much of modern political-
philosophy, and especially teleologically informed liberal thought, did not live up to its
aim. A significant level of intolerance and coloniality,39 previously attributed to religion
and theological discourse, can be ascribed to certain secular attempts to affirm, on the
globe, a particular conception of reason, thinking and political arrangements through
imperial policies justified by philosophical arguments. As Burke would put it, with the
progressive affirmation of modern philosophy over theology the line of succession
changed but not the principle of inheritance, as the claim on exclusive prerogative on
fundamental questions of political life grounded on metaphysical thought was transferred
from theology (and its eschatologies) to secular philosophy (and its teleologies).
Although this rather bleak picture emerges forcefully from Derrida’s reflections, this is
not all he is offering. His analysis of time does in fact point to the need and possibility of
thinking temporality otherwise, as ‘messianic’, and to the hope that a non-teleological
approach might disclose a chance for a different kind of political thought and practice.
2. The ‘messianic’ as political thought
How to think temporality otherwise? This is the guiding question of this section
which explores Derrida’s notion of the ‘messianic’. My aim is to illustrate his idea of the
‘messianic’ as a type of political thinking that resists a synchronic understanding of time
typical of political teleologies and that might open up new possibilities and
38 This is one of the themes of Locke’s An Essay concerning Toleration. It is worth noting, though, that Locke was intolerant of Quakers (who refused to take off their hats to their betters) and atheists (who allegedly would not honor contracts). See John Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration, eds. J.R Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 39 I take coloniality to be distinguished from colonialism which refers to an historical period. By coloniality, I refer to a paternalistic type of mind-set that establishes arbitrarily, and from a particular geo-political context, standards for evaluating the proper foundation of political life. This manner of thinking implies that the terms for self-interpretation at the disposal of colonized subjects are established independently of their will, historicity, context and particularities, these being elements which arguably constitute the substance of any recognizable form of human life.
16
understandings, or what Derrida calls “a new Enlightenment”, including a new
conceptualization of the political domain and of reason itself.40
The notion of the ‘messianic’ is arguably the central motive of Derrida’ Specters
of Marx, if not of his entire corpus.41 Although firstly introduced through a direct
reference to Benjamin42, Derrida claims to have inherited the notion of the ‘messianic’,
as he uses it, from Marx’s legacy43 and articulates it in these terms:
What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the
possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it
is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianic without religion, even a
messianic without messianism, an idea of justice –which we distinguish from law or right and
even from human rights–and an idea of democracy –which we distinguish from its current concept
and from its determined predicates today.44
There are at least two dimensions that are central to what Derrida means by ‘messianic’:
one is temporal, and refers to the structure of the emancipatory promise characterized by
an experience of time as non-teleological or ‘without messianism’, the other is ethico-
political, and is linked to justice and democracy. We will consider both dimensions in
turn leaving, however, the question of democracy to the next chapter.
The promise Derrida mentions in the passage above refers to Marx’s promise of
emancipation but not to its determined content since this, as we have seen, is inscribed in
40 Specters, 112. 41 Specters, though, is not the first place where the ‘messianic’ first appears. Already in his ‘Force of Law’ Derrida introduced the word ‘messianic’ to articulate the form of promise or “messianicity” as opposed to its content, and to distinguish his ‘messianic’ from an horizon of expectation exemplified by religious messianisms (Jewish, Christian or Islamic) or secular teleologies (Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist and post-Marxist). Ibid, 254. 42 In a long note, Derrida connects his ‘messianic’ to Benjamin’s ‘weak messianic force’ in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. For Benjamin, the ‘weak messianic force’ names the irruptive power the past can claim (Anspruch) over us, at any time in the present, to be responsive to and responsible for the memory of past suffering. So conceived, Benjamin’s messianic designates a type of temporality characterized by the ever present possibility of temporal rupture and thus the openness and unpredictability of the future. Despite some differences, Derrida considers Benjamin’s articulation of the messianic as informing his own version of messianic temporality. See Specters, 69 n.2. For a rigorous and rich exploration of the relation between Benjamin and Derrida on the issues of the ‘messianic’ see Mathias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory. History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin and Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 43 Ibid, 33. 44 Ibid, 74.
17
a logic of incarnation laden with a potential for disaster. More precisely, the promise
refers to the structure of promise, to the “being-promise of a promise”, which, for
Derrida, exceeds and precedes Marx’s and any other promise (of emancipation).45 This
structure is implicit in any promise which, as promise, institutes a relation that opens
itself to a future that cannot be mastered or predicted through the determination of a
particular content but only announced as coming in its indetermination and necessity. As
Derrida says, “whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or
whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some
historicity as future-to-come. It is what we are nicknaming the messianic without
messianism”.46 Derrida’s ‘messianic’ is therefore about an emancipatory promise that
does not promise any particular future but promises the future, it promises that “it is
necessary [that there be] the future” (“il faut l’avenir”), which is to say that the
“necessarily formal necessity of its possibility” is the law of the future. The indifference
towards content here is not a nihilist attitude; it is not a symptom of indifference towards
the future. Rather it is what marks the very possibility to be open to a future that is not
already constrained by aprioristic determinations. 47
So conceived, Derrida’s ‘messianic’ designates a certain experience of time
marking the “irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future”, and is clearly
distinct from messianisms.48 The ‘messianic’ does not announce the event of a Messiah
or any other types of eschatons (such as Hegel’s secularization of Spirit or Marx’s
communist society) whose arrival would halt temporality. Nor does it pre-empt the
singularity of coming events by inscribing them within a predetermined movement of
thinking regulated by the finality of a telos (as in teleologies of Kantian sort). All these
types of thinking still retain the temporal form of a future present, namely of a projecting
in the future a “modality of the living present” that predetermines what is to come.49 On
the contrary, the ‘messianic’ seeks to preserve an undetermined hope, an open
relationship to a future that is not already inscribed in the projection of the historical
present. It does so in the manner of a “hospitality without reserve”, a “welcoming 45 Ibid, 131 46 Ibid, 92. 47 Ibid, 91–92. 48 Ibid, 210. 49 Ibid, 80.
18
salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise” of the event of what is to come.50
In this regard, Derrida observes that it is this
event-ness that one must think, but that best resists what is called the concept, if not thinking. And
it will not be thought as long as one relies on the simple (ideal, mechanical, or dialectical)
opposition of the real presence of the real present or of the living present to its ghostly
simulacrum, the opposition of the effective or actual (wirklich) to the non-effective, inactual,
which is also to say, as long as one relies on a general temporality or an historical temporality
made up of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves and contemporary with
themselves.51
Thinking temporality differently requires moving beyond a synchronic view of time as an
infinite series of successive moments stretched along the line that connects past-present-
future. It requires distancing from a thinking that clearly distinguishes between the
presence and absence, identity and difference of self-identical moments contemporaneous
with themselves. Above all, thinking temporality otherwise requires, as Derrida notes,
“thinking another historicity” as “an opening of event-ness to historicity that permitted
one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of
the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-
theological or teleo-eschatological program or design” that turns the promise into a
determined promise conceiving of the future as predetermined by and from the present.52
For Derrida, thinking temporality and historicity as promise, is not simply a philosophical
endeavour. It is, most importantly, “the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of
another concept of the political.”53
Before considering this last point, the question arises how to think temporality and
historicity differently. Derrida’s attempt to address this question is exemplified by his
discussion of temporal disjuncture in Hamlet. Repeatedly in Specters, he quotes Hamlet’s
phrase “the time is out of joint” to account for an experience of the present, of a ‘now’,
that does not appear as presence but in the form of a ghost or specter. Hamlet’s phrase is
50 Ibid, 81 51 Ibid, 87. 52 Ibid, 94. 53 Ibid, 94.
19
occasioned by the appearance of his dead father as a ghost that comes back (revenant) to
the living, and who asks his son to avenge his death and restore justice according to law
as vengeance. For Derrida, Hamlet’s phrase does not acknowledge the temporal moral
decay of a political community, whose historical direction needs rectification. Hamlet, in
fact, “swears against a destiny that leads him to do justice for a fault” by “making of
rectitude and right (“to set it right”) a movement of correction, reparation, restitution,
vengeance, revenge, punishment”.54 Rather his phrase is an attempt to interrupt the axis,
the ‘good’ direction of that which follows the linear spirit of the inherited law and to
recognize that already in the beginning, in the founding of a law seeking to keep its
destination straight, a violent force excluding ‘deviators’ is at work. In other words,
Derrida attributes to Hamlet the ability to have recognized in and through the spectre of
his revenant father an “originary wrong…a bottomless wound, an irreparable tragedy, the
indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law or history as law”. This tragedy
designates the “spectral anteriority of the crime– the crime of the other, a misdeed whose
event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can
only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized”, being this something
that does not make them any less a matter of responsibility.55
For Derrida, the spectral anteriority of the crime refers to an originary trauma –
like the trauma that follows political founding, the institution of language and, more
generally, of the archive –the actual cause of which is out of reach but its effects are
visible through surviving marks. These are marks of that which is “a living on (sur-vie)”,
namely a surviving trace of what has been excluded but intervenes in the living present
by disjoining its identity and unity.56 That trace takes the form of specters appearing in
the present but not as presence, as something clearly identifiable. Rather they appear as
some “thing” that is difficult to name because it exceeds the order of knowledge, the
distinction between presence and absence, life and death and therefore defies “semantics
as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy”.57 By intervening in and
interrupting the living present, specters desynchronize temporal moments as they make
54 Ibid, 23. 55 Ibid, 24. 56 Ibid, xx. 57 Ibid, 5.
20
explicit the spacing of temporal succession (i.e. the relationship between the no longer
and the not yet). In so doing, they mark the “non-contemporaneity of present time with
itself”, which is precisely the disjuncture of time. 58 Thus, for Derrida, to say that “the
time is out of joint” is just another way of articulating, from the point of view of a
messianic temporality, the impossibility of self-identity as presence or of the as such: the
structural openness of the promise impedes the closure of the circular and
undifferentiated appropriation of identity to itself, which cannot but retain spectral
elements.
Now, although the spectral anteriority of the crime refers to the spectres coming
from the past, these are not the only ones. Derrida emphasizes in fact that the specter is
much a revenant coming back from the past as it is an arrivant coming from the future.
The specter is a figure that includes all those who are beyond the ‘living present’
including the dead and the unborn whose address to us we have responsibility to
acknowledge: doing so is a matter of justice. In his words:
It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no
ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does
not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who
are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice –let us
say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws– seems possible or thinkable without
the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoin the living
present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims
of wars, political or other kind of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kind of
exterminations, victims of the oppression of capitalist imperialism or any other forms of
totalitarism.59
The discourse on justice as messianic thinking is a discourse that is as much about time as
it is about ghosts and their interminable mourning. It is a discourse that is necessarily
placed within a specific archive since it requires inheriting a particular past through a
memory of ghosts and a continuous speaking with and to them, a speaking that allows for
acknowledging the disjuncture of time. Above all, the discourse on justice requires what
58 Ibid, 29. 59 Ibid, xviii.
21
Derrida calls a “politico-logic of trauma”, namely a politico-philosophical receptivity to
originary politicization, that is, to the politics of founding and its violent components.
This is a receptivity that is always also one for the trauma and ghosts produced by the
structural exclusions, murders, and exterminations that very often characterize founding
moments, which, as Derrida elsewhere says, inaugurate a new law “always…in
violence”.60 Without such receptivity, without the memory of an originary loss, it seems
impossible to critically account for that which has allowed the law to be there in the first
place and thus for the temporal rupture founding moments mark. Indeed, for Derrida, it is
the violence of the “originary performativity” always involved in political founding,
“whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution” of “the law itself”,
that “interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging:
‘out of joint’”.61 In short, without a “politico-logic of trauma” and memory it appears
impossible to account for the empirical conditions (read historical violence) that enable
any ethics and politics in the first place, an account that is instrumental to avoid a naïve
confidence in the possibility of redeeming past injustice through the promise of a future
to be fulfilled or approximated.
But what seems also unlikely without such receptivity and memory is the
possibility to keep the promise of the future open and hospitable. The oblivion of
originary politicization impedes the recognition of temporal disjuncture, it obscures the
possibility of re-politicization and therefore locks the future to the close destiny of a
present telos, which cannot but predetermine the conditions for inclusion. Put otherwise,
the spirit of hospitality motivated by the “politico-logic of trauma” that is required to
maintain the promise as promise cannot establish in advance what is to come. For
Derrida, this holds not only because the specters welcomed by hospitality shake the
present horizon within which they intervene but also because predeterminations would
reinstitute the sorts of checkpoints various messianisms install at their borders “in order
to screen the arrivant”.62
60 See ‘Force of Law’, 269. By maintaining, in the next paragraph, that even if “spectacular genocides, expulsions or deportation that so often accompany the foundation of states” do not occur, violence marks structurally the foundation of the law for structural reasons, Derrida elucidates why violence is ‘internal’ to the law in the moment of its institution. 61 Ibid, 37. 62 Ibid, 82.
22
The significance of memory (of ghosts) for hospitality cannot be overlooked. For
Derrida, the type and degree of responsiveness to ghosts is doubly central: first, because
the fear of ghosts and excessive closure to them to safeguard the unity and stability of
political identity can lead to political disaster. This, for him, is what happened with the
totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, which were “equally
terrorized by the ghost of the other, and its own ghost as the ghost of the other” 63 and
thus can be read also as reactions “of panic-ridden fear before the ghost in general”.64
Second, because the type and degree of responsiveness to ghosts indicates the temporality
at work in political thinking and the weight the latter accords to inherited historical
injustice, which both affect the scope for future inclusion. On this matter, Derrida follows
Marx whom he recognizes as having shed light on the relationship between inheritance,
forgetting of ghosts and emancipatory thinking. For Derrida’s Marx, a political thinking
that is merely content to forget spectres so that history can continue towards a universal
emancipatory telos relies on a synchronic temporality. It is a thinking that, by valuing
only life as presence, values “life as forgetting itself” and thus forgets ghosts and what
they signify.65 Committed to a general forgetting, this type of thinking forgets also
historical violence and the constitutive limits its own particular origins put to an
unconditional universal discourse that, oblivious to its own conditioned character,
becomes blind to its own intolerant and exclusionary impulses. In contrast, a thinking that
keeps the memory of specters and forget them only enough so as to keep alive the spirit
of the revolution as temporal rupture reveals attention to the possibility of a diachronic
temporality and therefore, ultimately, of hospitality. To gives a sense of what we are
talking about here in a succinct formula Derrida uses: “As soon as there is some specter,
hospitality and exclusion go together”.66
With this reference to Marx, Derrida does not seek to unconditionally condemn
the forgetting of ghosts of past violence and the somehow oblivious moving forward of a
new political community, as he reckons that some forgetting of what has been inherited is
63 Ibid, 131. 64 Ibid, 130. 65 Ibid, 176. 66 Ibid, 176.
23
necessary to that very movement.67 Rather his point is to emphasize the significance of
remembering not “what one inherits but the pre-inheritance on the basis of which one
inherits”; that is, remembering the empirical conditions of founding moments –which, as
said, often involves exclusions, murders and exterminations –, conditions that allow for
an emancipatory political thinking to be at all. The remembering of such conditions
marks the very experience of the promise of messianic thinking, which, like ‘a language
of promise’, can acknowledge its own initial politicization and provisionality, and thus
can limit, as much as possible, closure and totalizations.
For Derrida, then, there is an intimate link between the acknowledgment of
originary politicization and the non-forgetting of ghosts on the one hand, and the
possibility of accounting for the out-of-joint structure of time, on the other hand. This
connection illuminates the distinctively novel and non-idealistic character of his political
thought: instead of merely inscribing messianic thinking as a political thinking about
justice within ideal conditions of possibility that abstracts from life as presence, Derrida
seeks to highlight the empirical (historical) conditions of possibility enabling any process
of idealization in the first place. And these are conditions in which the stakes of which
ghosts are symptoms (political, philosophical but especially human) are so significant
that cannot be philosophically forgotten or bypassed by a political thinking that seeks to
be critical beyond transcendental concerns. That is, by a thinking that is not contented
with overcoming its past to get closer to a final goal but is also attentive to reactivating
the past through a genealogical investigation of its ghosts. In short, by a thinking that is
both transcendental and genealogical.
With the connection between ghosts, temporal disjuncture and justice we have
already moved to the second dimension of the ‘messianic’: justice. While it is not my
intention to fully explore Derrida’s view on justice here, I nevertheless want to highlight
his emphasis on the connection between justice and temporality and on how such a
connection reconfigures political thinking. The question of justice is not simply about the
articulation of ethico-political ideals as in the tradition of political philosophy since Plato
or of procedural rules as in Neo-Kantian political thought. It is also and very much a
question of time since justice concerns what will come in and from the future. As Derrida
67 Ibid.
24
remarks, justice is “turned toward the future, going toward it, it also comes from it, it
proceeds from [provient de] the future”.68 Justice is not simply a question of and for the
living, of life as presence, but something due to the non-living, that is, to the dead as
memory and the unborn as promise. Thinking of justice, therefore, cannot seem possible
within a perspective that seeks to identify the most fundamental principle representing
either the ultimate content of justice or the ground for articulating procedures leading to
justice, as this would lead to the very metaphysics of presence Derrida puts into questions
and to the halting of time. Nor does it seem so by way of a joining or bringing-together
(Verstammlung) as Derrida sees Heidegger doing in his reflection on justice as Dikē,
precisely for the same reasons. 69 Rather thinking justice is possible “on the basis of a
movement of some disjointing, disjunction, or disproportion” between past and future,
presence and absence; a movement that by being sensitive to past and future generations
prevents the closure of future time as the expression “il faut l’avenir” pointedly
suggests.70
At this point, it is important to rebut a common criticism against Derrida’s view
on justice and time. Because Derrida repeatedly affirms in his writings that justice never
arrives but is always ‘to come’, that justice “is not deconstructible” (or the messianic as
justice for that matter), and that “the undeconstructibility of justice also makes
deconstruction possible”, he seems to be positing a full blown exteriority, (justice as) a
transcendent ground that is removed from the passing of time and is posited in view
giving motion to the wheels of deconstruction. 71 The objection is significant as it focuses
not simply on the very connection between justice and time, the ‘messianic’ as justice,
but also on the nature of Derrida’s philosophical approach. That justice never arrives but
is always only ‘to come’ means that the meaning of justice can never be exhausted by
some substantial or regulative telos, as this would halt both the flaw of time and the
iterability contaminating the alleged purity of ideals since a pure telos could be grasped
only by suspending that flaw, form outside time as it were. Precisely because the
‘messianic’ as justice accounts for a disjointed experience of time and acknowledges
68 Ibid, xix. 69 Ibid, 32. 70 Ibid, xix. 71 ‘Force of Law’, 243.
25
ghosts –which, to recall it, unsettle the possibility of pure ideas to be grasped in
consciousness as presence –justice is always semantically deficient, it can never be
grasped as a pure telos and therefore, for structural reasons, can never arrive in time.
Rather then pointing to a radical exteriority or transcendence, the undeconstructibility of
justice suggests a horizontal type of transcendence conceived as that which has not yet
come; a transcendence that is, stricto sensu, no transcendence at all.
The centrality of Derrida’s emphasis on temporal disjuncture for justice and, more
generally for political thought, rests on the “de-totalizing” operation of messianic
thinking, which perturbs “the good conscience of having done one’s own duty” as the
discussion of Hamlet illustrates. This operation is enabled, as we have said, precisely by a
philosophical sensibility for founding moments, and the memory of ghosts through which
the acknowledgment of originary politicization can occur. Indeed, for Derrida, it is by
keeping open to relationship to ghosts that messianic thinking does not lose “the chance
of the future”, that very future which would seem to be ‘lost’ if one were one to proceed
according to the uncritical inheritance of the law, its history and destination.72
So how do the two dimensions of the ‘messianic’ just discussed, the temporal and
the ethico-political, help us understanding what Derrida means with that term? This much
can now be affirmed: the ‘messianic’ names a type of thinking that radicalizes human
finitude and designates the disjointed constitution of our present experience of time,
which is inherent in the formal promise structuring our relationship to the future. This is a
future that is open to the ‘event’ conceived as a radical interruption of temporal flow and
narrative unity giving coherence to human experience. Thought as without messianism,
the ‘messianic’ or “quasi-transcendental ‘messianism’” as Derrida calls it, therefore
names a “universal structure of experience”, a quasi-transcendental conditions for
messianisms, which all require “that there be the future” to be at all. 73 Unlike other
messianisms informed by a regulative ideal of Kantian sort or by a determined content as
in the tradition of secular and religious messianisms, Derrida’s ‘quasi-transcendental
messianism’ is “a waiting without horizon of expectation or prophetic prefiguration”, that
is, a waiting that keeps deferring “not what it affirms but deferring just so as to affirm”
72 Ibid, 33. 73 Ibid, 212.
26
the emancipatory promise that “there will be future”.74 More precisely, Derrida’s
messianism is a waiting that instead of doing away with horizons altogether –an option
that would imply the impossibility of meaning – actively punctures them, thereby
revealing their constitutive provisionality and the impossibility of closure.75 So
conceived, then, the ‘messianic’ exceeds the foreclosing linearity of teleological thinking
and its calculative mode and remains structurally open to the event of what is to come,
which remains uncalculable, surprising, and can come as a surprise at any moment; like
in Benjamin. 76
Note, though, that to say that the ‘messianic’ as a thinking about justice is a
waiting is not to imply passivity, the paralysis of agency or that justice is infinitely
deferred. Quite the contrary. Throughout the whole of Specters of Marx, Derrida’s
attempt to think the disjuncture of time and the event to come is characterized by a strong
sense of urgency and action. Such a sense is associated to both Marx’s political injunction
and the notion of différance and retains, as I shall address below, a normative character.
In the uncoercible différance the here and now unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but
without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because deferring,
precisely [justement], and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in
imminence and urgency: even if it moves towards what remains to come, there is the pledge [gage]
(promise, engagement, injunction and response to the injunction, and so forth). The pledge is
given here and now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to
the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional.77
For Derrida, Marx’s political injunction, his pledge for emancipation, is urgent and
imminent. It cannot wait a deferral, as justice demands taking a decision in the present, in
the ‘here and now’, a decision that does not nevertheless imply its happening as presence,
and that is why deferral and difference, or in a word, différance, affects its happening.
The challenge here is, like for ‘a language of promise’, how to be responsive to
singularity in the present without renouncing universality or, as Derrida elsewhere put it,
74 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 47. 75 Ibid, 19. 76 Ibid, 211. 77 Ibid, 37.
27
how to conceive of “a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the
abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced.”78 We
will return to this issue below.
I want to suggests that when applied to the political domain, Derrida’s ‘messianic’
can be conceived as a type of non-teleological political thinking that is able to keep the
political domain open to alterity, to the semantic fluidity of justice and of other political
categories and practices by affirming a non-normative normativity.79 Messianic thinking
as a thinking of justice that is normative insofar as it imperatively and urgently affirms
that one is to act and decide in the present, and thus in opposition to an awaiting a future
to be approximated by some regulative idea.80 Yet, since it resists idealizing a telos
grasped in the present as presence, it is a thinking that is non-normative in the
‘traditional’ sense; that is, it is not informed by the force exercised by the metaphysics of
presence and its epistemological mastery but is a thinking that leaves open the modes of
interpretations and application of the content informing decision and action.81
Messianic thinking is politico-philosophically significant since it resists
predeterminations and in so doing it enables decision and action in a manner that can be
responsive to the singularity of predicaments and individuals. Indeed, for Derrida,
normative judgments informing action or evaluating current institutions and practices are
to be assessed on their ability to respond as appropriately as possible to the singularity of
subjects and situations. Therefore such judgments cannot be regulated in advance in pre-
eminently ideal terms or before being exposed to experience and the process of
78 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 56. 79 I owe the formulation of this term to my discussions with Willi Goetschel. 80 Ibid, 112. Note, though, that in Rogues, while speaking of the regulative Idea in Kant, Derrida considers it a “last resort” retaining a “certain dignity” and declares: “I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it” (83). And yet Derrida enumerates several reservations with regard to the way in which the regulative Idea is “currently used, outside its strictly Kantian determination” as a possible ideal that is “indefinitively deferred” (84). 81 On this point, my position is clearly distinct from Martin Hägglund’s powerful interpretation of Derrida’s work. In his Radical Atheism, Hägglund interprets Derrida’s affirmation of openness to the future associated to justice in descriptive terms (31) so that no ethical or political stance can be derived from Derrida’s position (165). See Hägglund Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life (op. cit.). Yet when Derrida, in Specters of Marx, talks about Marx’s injunction and the spirit of Marxism he seeks to retain, he refers to an emancipatory affirmation and not simply of affirmation (111). This is an affirmation that is hardly separable from a political stance and normative commitment to the extent that idea of emancipation is linked, as Derrida elsewhere indicates, to the tradition of the Enlightenment whose normative thrust is undeniable. (“Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal” [‘Force of Law’ in Acts of Religion, 256]).
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negotiations it demands. Negotiation here does not stand for an ideal goal but names a
predicament in which reason proceeds, without a priori guidance or cognitive guarantees,
every time anew. Undoubtedly, the openness inherent to messianic thinking implies a
certain degree of risk in political life as Derrida recognizes when he notes that “to be out
of joint” can not only “do harm and do evil” but “it is no doubt the very possibility of
evil”.82 Yet, that very risk constitutes at the same time a chance to keep human freedom
as an ongoing concrete possibility, which is not the same as equating freedom with the
absence of moral limits. And this is a possibility that refuses to be exhausted by the
enactment of an idealized telos or by the mechanical application of a regulative rule.
This reading of Derrida’s perspective as normative but not in a ‘traditional’ sense
is distinct from other recent interpretations of his work, including those of Critchley,
Caputo, Cornell, Beardsworth and Fritsch, which all argue for the presence of a
normative dimension in his thought.83 Despite their differences, these authors consider
Derrida’s view as informed by some normative ideal–conceived respectively as the
ethical priority of the other, peace, utopia of non-violence, or simply the goal of ‘lesser
violence’– that regulates more or less explicitly and robustly the movement of
deconstruction. It is not my intention here to engage in questions of interpretation of
Derrida’s scholarship and establish the value of these perspectives, as other
commentators have convincingly engaged in such hermeneutic exercise.84 All I want to
do is to indicate how my view is distinct from these authors while it nevertheless shares
with them the emphasis on normativity in Derrida’s thought. According to my reading,
Derrida’s messianic thinking is marked by a non-normative normativity dismissing the
force of a metaphysics of presence enabling the positing of ideals and their guiding
function, especially if this positing bypasses a priori the process of negotiation that the
82 Ibid, 34.In this regard, I endorse Haddad’s view that the messianic is not the better over the worse but open to the constant threat of the worse. See Samir Haddad, ‘A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune’, in Diacritics 38 (2009), 121–142, 83 See Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and The Political (London: Routledge, 1996); John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Matthias Fritsch, ‘Derrida’s Democracy to Come’, Constellations 9:4 (2002), 574 –597. 84 For a robust criticism of Critchley, Caputo, Cornell and Bearsdworth, but also Fritsch see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life, especially ch. 3 and Samir Haddad, ‘A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune’ (op. cit.).
29
situatedness and temporality of specific situations demands. This holds not only because
the attention messianic thinking devotes to specters disallows the possibility of relying
upon the guidance of untainted ideals and thus of ultimately relying upon the stability and
staticity provided by a metaphysics of presence (as we have seen, specters perturb the
stability of concepts by exposing their constitutive relationship with what they exclude).
It also holds since the affirmation of openness impedes the predetermination of normative
guidelines as it does not by itself translate into a normative commitment to be always
open.85
Although my reading rules out the presence of substantive normative ideals in
Derrida, it does not suggests that there is no normative commitment in Derrida, that
action and decision remain normatively unsupported, or even less that his normative
sources are arbitrary. 86 As it emerges especially from his ‘political writings’87 Derrida
does in fact manifest a commitment to democracy over other regimes and, in particular,
to a certain understanding of democracy that emphasizes values like openness to
criticism, perfectibility and free speech, all of which carry a normative weight.88 Such
commitments, far from being arbitrary, are instead inherited from the tradition his
thinking is heir of and bespeaks for, as we shall see below, the historical character of his
reflections.89 My reading only implies that such normative support does not in itself
translate into an ethico-political program but is open to articulation and re-articulation
according to the specificity of situations.90 My point is that Derrida is committed to the
85 On this point, I agree with Fritsch and am indebted to his analysis in The Promise of Memory, 190. 86 Derrida’s reluctance to offer normative guidelines to political problems is emphasized also by Hägglund who notes that Derrida’s political import is in fact to highlight that the justification of norms is subject to temporal variations and thus cannot occur once and for all. See Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 171. While agreeing with Hägglund on this point, my view departs from his interpretation on the question whether Derrida’s view is marked by any normativity at all. 87 See especially his The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997); Rogues (op. cit). 88 On Derrida’s commitment to distinct features of democracy in his ‘democracy to come’ see Mathias Fritsch ‘Derrida’s Democracy To Come’, Constellations 9:4 (2002), 574 –597 ; Samir Haddad, ‘Language Remains’ The New Centennial Review 9:1 (2009), 127–146. 89 Specters, 68. Here, in discussing the inheritance of Marxism, Derrida advance the general claim that not only interpretation but “all the questions on the subject of being or what it means to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance” precisely because “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance”. 90 The only one place I am aware of in which Derrida seems instead to pre-determine the normative support to decision and action and to deny the possibility that there will be future, occurs in an interview on terror where he declares: “What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” … of the “bin Laden effect” is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future.… That is why, in this
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imperative to act ‘here and now’, and thus to engage with situations, contexts and people
in the present. Such a commitment is normative as it is imperatively affirmed, and yet, it
is non-normative (as traditionally conceived) as it rules out the viability of pre-
established guidelines about how to approach the present, including the goal of always
negotiating.91
The objection can be raised that reading Derrida’s project as being still animated
by whatever form of normativity does not save him from the charge of relapsing into the
some kind of teleology. While the objection is relevant it does not quite capture the
subtlety and complexity of his thought. Derrida is not trying to dispense with any form of
teleology whatsoever since the imperative to act in the present can be seen as a sort of
regulative teleology itself. However, this would be a teleology that, deprived of a
transcendent ground and thus of a close horizon of expectation, is dynamic in spirit as it
is open to inform the injunction to act on a basis that can be constantly negotiated and
renegotiated. Thus, even if one were to agree with Caputo that Derrida’s is a messianism
with a deconstructive bent, it would nevertheless be one characterized by a teleology that
rejects fixing horizons of expectations through the positing of a telos, and thus dismisses
the staticity involved in a Kantian regulative teleology supported by a metaphysics of
presence; a staticity that is connected to the non-revisability of what constitutes a telos
and that neutralizes the very notion of the present and of negotiating norms, their
interpretations and applications. 92 Otherwise put, Derrida’s would be a dynamic
teleology that in the ‘good’ spirit of Marxism conceives of its own “aging”93 and thus
acknowledges the constitutive and constant possibility of its own failure or ‘untruth’,
which implies not locking the future to a future present.
unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would.” See his ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’ in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 109. The question, of course, is whether this affirmation is enough to argue for the static commitment to normative ideals in his thought, which is what we are here rejecting. 91 On this matter, my view is both similar to and different from Hägglund’s. Like him, I consider Derrida opposed to the articulation of normative ideals before the exposure to concrete situations and to the idea that deconstruction grounds and justifies norms (171), including negotiation as a normative ideal (203). Yet, unlike him I do not consider such an opposition a ground to reject the presence of any normativity whatsoever in Derrida. See Hägglund, Radical Atheism (op. cit). 92 For Caputo, Derrida’s is another type of messianism but with a deconstructive twist that disallows the notion of a “true messianic in general”. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 142, 93 Ibid, 14.
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Perhaps, there is little possibility to avoid some form of teleology in political
thought, especially with regard to issues of emancipation. Yet the question remains
whether human freedom is enhanced rather than restricted by a teleology that is dynamic,
sensible to a diachronic view of time, and able to think an open future as opposed to a
static, atemporal and thus structurally intolerant teleology as traditionally conceived. It is
my contention that the fruitful potential of Derrida’s perspective for political thought lies
especially on its refusal to articulate a normative theory or a ‘deconstructive politics’, a
refusal which shows why political thought and practice might benefit from resisting
teleological aspirations for there to be thinking, decision and action in political life at all.
My point is that Derrida’s is an attempt to articulate a political thinking that, in his
opposition to ‘static’ teleologies (i.e. those characterized by a fixed and non-revisable
telos), might open up new possibilities and understandings, precisely because it does not
foreclose the very possibility of such possibilities and understandings. 94 Although, for
structural reasons, Derrida does not articulate the substance of these possibilities, he does
nevertheless makes clear that what is at stake in messianic thinking is the possibility of
re-thinking the political: that is, as a domain that is “pervertible” and always exposed to
unsettlement, and hence one that, pace Schmitt but also liberal thinkers, cannot ultimately
be closed. 95
But what Derrida does also make clear is that the stakes of messianic thinking
include the possibility of thinking reason otherwise. While only announced in Specters,
this topic is dealt at length in Rogues, and I want to conclude this section by exploring
briefly this matter. In Rogues Derrida takes up Kant’s idea of defending the “honour of
reason” by extending its limits beyond experience towards the unconditional.96
Connecting this topic to Husserl’s call for a rehabilitation (Ehrenrettung) of reason,
Derrida suggests that what is at stake in thinking today might be “saving the honour of
reason” against the crisis reason has undergone especially as a result of the dominating
94 Specters, 112. 95 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’ in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 109. 96 Rogues, 118.
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calculative mode of scientific rationality –dominated by naturalism and objectivism –for
which reason itself is responsible.97
For Derrida, “saving the honour of reason” means attending to both reason’s
exigencies: unconditional incalculability and conditional calculability. Above all, it
means saving reason from itself, that is, saving its unconditional and incalculable
character from the dominance of calculative rationality. To this effect, Derrida suggests a
critical return to Kant who, he notes, showed that reason is not confined to calculability
but is also called to attend the demands of the unconditional. Derrida considers this last
point emerging most clearly in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant
shows the concept of ‘dignity’ as belonging to the order of the incalculable.98 However,
Derrida notes, Kant also articulated a view of theoretical reason that, in spite of its
subordination to practical reason and its unconditional character, tends to constitutively
resist the demands of the unconditional. In this regard, Derrida recalls Kant’s first
Critique, where the latter posited theoretical reason as essentially architectonic, namely as
a type of reason that is made foundational through a systematization privileging unity,
homogeneity and calculability over divisibility, heterogeneity and uncalculability.99
For Derrida, it is this aspect of the Kantian project that needs to be questioned as
it bypasses the problem of translating the plural and heterogeneous manifestation of
reason, of its plural rationalities – those that developed within the natural, human and
social sciences –each of which has “its own ontological ‘region’, its own necessity, style,
axiomatics, institutions, community, and historicity” and thus resists, in the name of its
own rationality, “any architectonic organization”.100 Such questioning is for him required
since Kant’s attempt to systematize reason manifests an “architectonic desire”, which is a
desire of mastering authority that does violence to reason’s plural rationalities by
“bending their untranslatable heterogeneity” and by inscribing them in the in a
teleological schema grounded on the unity of ‘world’ as regulative Idea.101
At issue, here, is the powerful modern view of teleological reason we have been
discussing implicitly all along: a reason that, by setting in advance the terms of what is to 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid, 133 99 Ibid, 120. 100 Ibid, 120. 101 Ibid, 121.
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be found, “finds what it seeks” because it knows already what arrives, and thus “limits
and neutralizes the event”, what does not fit with such terms.102 As we have seen, a
reason so conceived inhibits, a priori, eventfulness to the extent that everything that does
not fall in a pre-programmed structure of expectation is excluded as irrelevant or
‘unfitting’. To put this in Derrida’s words
Whenever a telos or teleology comes to orient, order and make possible a historicity, it annuls that
historicity by the same token and neutralizes the unforeseeable and incalculable irruption, the
singular and exceptional alterity of what [ce qui] comes, or indeed of who [qui] comes, that
without which, or the one without whom, nothing happens or arrive. It is not only a question of the
telos that is being posed here that of the horizon and of any horizontal seeing-come in general.
And it is also a question of the Enlightenment of Reason.103
For Derrida, questioning teleological reason is required by a reason that responds to the
unconditional arrival in an incalculable fashion, one in which events are no longer seen as
coming. And this is for him a matter required by the “Enlightenment of Reason”, by a
reason that seeks to throw light there where its own authority seeks to prevent it, a reason
that goes against itself in order to ‘save’ its own honour’. Without entering extensively
into a topic we will develop in the next chapter, we can nevertheless indicate very briefly
here the autoimmune character of reason Derrida is articulating. Initially appearing in
‘Faith and Knowledge’ as a term that has a biological origin but it is not limited to that
context, the notion of ‘autoimmunity’ refers to a process in which a living organism
protects itself against its own self-protection by destroying its own immune system in
order to survive.104 So conceived, autoimmunity essentially describes a process, or more
precisely put, a “general law of an autoimmune process” in which both life and death
intertwines in the struggle for survival that is possible only if an instance of non-living
takes place in the living.105
102 Ibid, 128. 103 Ibid, 128. 104 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 82. 105 Derrida explains that he speaks of autoimmunity in connection to reason, “in order to situate the question of life and of the living being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of my remarks”. See Rogues, 123.
34
Connected to reason, the notion of autoimmunity illuminates the movement
reason undertakes against itself precisely to save [salut] its own honour, to protect itself
by suspending its defences. For Derrida, this movement of saving takes place in moment
that seems to suggest or announce a loss, the getting lost of reason, which, like a ship
touching the bottom loses critical lucidity and is left with two options or ways “of going
aground [échouer]”: grounding [échouage] and running aground [échoument].106 While
the former recalls an intentional, calculated, autonomous moment of the ship whose
captain deliberately decide to touch the ground from where providing solid foundations,
the latter proceeds in a different manner. Instead of trying to rescue its own immunity in
an attempt of saving or salvation [salut] by grounding, reason opts for a salutation [salut]
of the ground and proceeds running aground by unsettling itself and its own immunity in
an autoimmunitary fashion. Hence the autoimmunity of and in reason we are discussing
here, which clearly opposes the figure of autonomous, foundational grounding typical of
dominant interpretations of the Enlightenment.
Going back to the questioning of teleological reason, it might now be clearer why
Derrida stresses the importance of the unconditional and, in particular, of asking whether,
in thinking the event and its becoming,
it is possible and in truth even necessary to distinguish the experience of the unconditional , the
desire and the thought, the exigency of unconditionality, from everything that is ordered into a
system according to its transcendental idealism and its teleology. In other words, whether there is a
chance to think or grant the thought of the unconditional event to a reason that is other than the
one we have just spoken about, namely the classical reason of what present itself or announces its
presentation according to the eidos, the idea, the ideal, the regulative Idea, or something else that
here amounts to the same, the telos.107
Thinking the unconditional as the unforeseeable event is, for Derrida, a way to attend to
both exigencies of reason, the calculable and the incalculable, beyond the dominance of
calculative rationality, and thus beyond the metaphysics of presence providing the fix
standards for calculation. The stakes behind thinking the unconditional are highly
significant and involve what Derrida calls “another thought of the possible” and “of an 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid, 135.
35
im-possible that would not be simply negative”, that is, an im-possible that is not
impossible as the negative or opposite of possible. The thought of a non-negative im-
possible is one that, precisely because it thinks the incalculable so as to “give an account
of it”, “so as to reckon with it”, it thinks what remains foreign to the order of one’s
present possibilities, especially if these are taken as remaining within what is predictable,
calculable or knowable, and therefore impermeable to eventfulness. 108 Thus, the
relevance of thinking the unconditional as im-possible is that it offers a chance for reason
itself, a chance for thinking reason otherwise, as (a) reason that “let itself be reasoned
with.”109 Rather than implying a departure from the Enlightenment, such a thinking of
reason remains within its ‘illuminating’ spirit.
For Deconstruction, if something of the sort exists, would remain above all, in my view, an
unconditional rationalism that never renounces –and precisely in the name of the Enlightenment to
come, in the space to be opened up by a democracy to come–to the possibility of suspending in a
argued, deliberated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conventions, and presuppositions,
and of criticizing unconditionally all krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision of
judgment.
Thinking reason otherwise is a matter of rationally questioning rational calculation and
its conditions in the name of unconditionality and thus of reason itself; a matter of the
autoimmunity of reason. Doing so is, significantly, a politico-philosophical task in that it
requires questioning the conditions of reason beyond the strictly philosophical and
including also and especially the political, military, and economic conditions that seek to
guarantee the supremacy of calculative rationality as the only possible imaginary of
reason. It is, in short, a matter of opening a chance for a “new Enlightenment” within
political thought.
3. Between faith and reason: the ‘faith’ of messianic thinking
{omitted}
108 Ibid, 159. 109 Ibid.