The Place Of The Political In Derrida And Foucault.pdf

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THE PLACE OF THE POLITICAL

IN DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT

DERRIDA & THE POLITICAL by Richard Beardsworth. London:

Routledge, 1996. 174 + xvii pp.

FOUCAULT & THE POLITICAL by Jon Simons. London: Routledge, 1995.

152 + viii pp.

In the programmatic preface to Routledge’s series Thinking the Political ,

general editors Kieth Ansell-Pearson and Simon Critchley state that in pre-

senting the work of major contemporary Continental thinkers, its aim is to

show how it is only in the relation between the philosophical and the political

that “new possibilities of thought and politics can be activated.” It is in this

spirit that Richard Beardsworth’s Derrida & the Political and Jon Simons’s

Foucault & the Political appear as volumes of this series.

At the outset of his study, Beardsworth asserts that the political dimen-

sions of Derrida’s deconstruction have been “underestimated” in the past.

The reception of Derrida’s thought in the 1970s in Anglo-Saxon literature

departments overplayed its rhetorical side, reducing deconstruction to “a

practice of literary criticism, the political orientation of which was easily

advertised, but poorly elaborated” (p. 3). The Heidegger and de Man affairs

in the 1980s drew out Derrida’s critics, and his reputation suffered by associ-

ation. Upstaged then by historicism and multiculturalism, deconstruction

came to be perceived as “incapable of articulating historical making and

unmaking of subjectivities.” Derrida’s more recent writings on politics have

mitigated this view only in part. A major objective of Beardsworth’s book is

thus to “re-open” a discussion of the political reach of deconstruction in order

to “redress” these misunderstandings. Counter to once prevailing opinion,

Beardsworth maintains that Derrida’s political “engagement inheres in the

very ‘method’ of deconstruction and the political dimension of Derrida’s

thinking can be gauged only in respect of this ‘method’ ” (p. 1). Not only is

deconstruction politically informed; according to Beardsworth, it can even

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assist us in surmounting the “present paralysis of political thought and prac-

tice” (p. xii).

Beardsworth posits a set of principles that structures his complex and

insightful reconstruction of the political implications of deconstruction. A

political reading of Derrida’s philosophy will show first that, at its most basic

level, deconstruction is a “ genealogy of violence,” which is simultaneously a

genealogy of the originary technicity of law (p. 13). And to the extent that all

institutions are established by law, deconstruction can be characterized as a

“radical ‘critique’ of institutions ” (p. 19). That institutions are of a violently

technical nature implies furthermore the aporetic character of all rational

judgement; “the law of law,” its ineluctable economy of violence, holds out

no false hope for the reconciliation of metaphysical opposites, such as culture

and nature, in a non-coercive identity of rational judgement beyond the con-

straints of violence. Beardsworth can thus assert that “Derrida’s aporetic

thinking” is “the very locus in which the political force of deconstruction is to

be found” (p. xiv).

Standing in the Western tradition of ideology critique, deconstruction sec-

ondly reveals how the disavowal of originary violence by Western metaphys-

ics leads to “greater violence” in politics. Deconstruction tracks down traces

of repression in societal institutions by uncovering the hidden originary

technicity of writing in speech and so forth. Where social, economic, and

political institutions make claims to reconciliation, for instance, in the unity

of the nation, the solidarity of workers, the “trust” (Fukuyama) of economic

cooperation in late capitalism, or the ideal of “communication free of domi-

nation” (Habermas) in today’s liberal democratic states, deconstruction seeks

to disclose the disavowed violence hidden in these institutional arrange-

ments. By positing the possibility for a reconciled unity of opposites in the

present, Western rationality denies the ineluctable violence of law and, thereby,

also disavows the “promise of the future.” Whether it be in Saussure’s “ natu-

ral unity” of signifier and signified or in Hegel’s Volksgeist , “metaphysical

logic reduces the passage of time to presence.” What is meant by the dis-

avowal of the future by the metaphysics of presence can be highlighted in a

symptomatic statement of Hegel’s. In his Heidelberg Lectures on Natural

Right , Hegel asserts, “in the state the universal will becomes actual; the uni-

versal has determinate existence as absolute end. Here there is no longing,

nothing beyond our ken, no future; the purpose is actual and present.” 1

Beardsworth can thus state that not just the disavowal of technicity but also

the “disavowal of time in reflection upon the political has led to much injus-

tice and violence,” such as in “Communist, Fascist and Nazi variants of ‘to-

talitarianism’ ” (pp. xiii, xvi). What adds a specific timbre to Beardsworth’s

book is its attempt to make Derrida’s analysis of time fruitful for political the-

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ory. For if “time is violence,” as Derrida states, then it is political. Or, as

Beardsworth comments, Derrida’s “philosophy is necessarily political

because it is a thinking of time” (p. 150); that is, a critique of the disavowal of

time and its consequences for a politics of greater violence.

Yet, like so many of his “double moves,” Derrida also maintains distance

from traditional ideology critique by rejecting the possibility of sublating

( Aufhebung ) the violence of law in reconciled social relationships; perceiv-

ing the ultimate danger of politics in the disavowal of the violence, technicity,

and time of law, that is, in the “fiction[s] of a substantial community” or

“ phantasms ” of nonviolent reconciliation in the present, Derrida asserts the

aporetic character of socially constructed identity. Deconstruction therefore

seeks at once both to overturn metaphysical oppositions and open them onto

an undecidable position without reconciliation. Yet, rather than see in this

politics “without passage” a regress to the inevitability of violence, Beards-

worth insists that Derrida’s aporetic politics reflects a “ radicalization of dem-

ocratic thinking ,” which recognizes “the ‘now’ of an absolute future, a non-

eschatological,...ever-recurrent promise of the non-adequation of the

present to itself ” (pp. 42, 101).

For Beardsworth, then, Derrida’s aporetic thinking not only describes “an

essential limit to political logic”; it also situates in this present irreducibly

open to the future the possibility of “democracy.” Rather than the greater vio-

lence of disavowed technicity and truncated time in the phantasms of recon-

ciliation, Derrida’s aporetic politics commits itself to the promise of the

future and the “justice” of “‘lesser violence’ in an economy of violence”

(p. 12). This “ ‘impossible’ politics of deconstruction” acknowledges the

economy of violence, aporia, time, and future in the unsurpassable move-

ment of différance between universal law and the singular. In sum, Beards-

worth effectively portrays deconstruction as a critique of the philosophical

roots of twentieth-century “totalitarianisms” and a politico-ethical “logic” of

lesser violence; as such, his sustained discussion of deconstruction’s geneal-

ogy of violence represents a timely and significant contribution to our under-

standing of Derrida’s thought and its political yield.

Beardsworth’s monograph is broken down into three major chapters,

which respectively pursue Derrida’s aporetics of language in Saussure’s lin-

guistics and Kafka’s literature, the political limits of law in Kant’s moral and

legal formalism and Hegel’s ethical life, and the aporia of time as the aporia

of law in Heidegger’s thought of being and Levinas’s ethics.

In the first major chapter, Beardsworth sets out to show how Derrida’s

thought may be articulated as a genealogy of violence. After reconstructing

in clear and broad strokes the deconstruction of Saussurean linguistics,

Beardsworth focuses on what Derrida calls the “tertiary structure of vio-

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lence.” In Of Grammatology , Derrida names three levels of violence, which

Beardsworth argues can be formalized in the following way:

First, the originary violence of the system of differences...;second, the violence of what

is commonly conceived as the attempt to put an end to violence—the institution of law—

but which is revealed as a violence because of the apparent suppression of originary dif-

ference; and third, the necessary (if empirical) possibility of phenomenal violence as the

consequence of the inability of the law to suppress its illegality in relation to originary

difference. (P. 23)

As a critique of institutions, deconstruction seeks to uncover the unrecog-

nized tertiary structure of violence necessarily involved in an institution’s

“foundation, its exclusions, and its subsequent contradictions.” It is this

tertiary structure of violence that will inform Beardsworth’s reconstruc-

tion of the Derridian deconstructive reading of the practical philosophy of

Kant and Hegel.

If the first major chapter reveals the general framework of Derrida’s gene-

alogy of violence as applied to language and literature, Beardsworth’s sec-

ond chapter relates these insights to modern political thought by “posi-

tion[ing] Derrida’s work with regard to its major axis—the difference

between the thought of Kant and that of Hegel” (p. 47). The choice of Kant

and Hegel is not accidental; Beardsworth’s interest is to show how decons-

truction can move the contemporary debate between (Kantian) liberals and

(Hegelian) communitarians forward. Yet, in attempting to open up a space for

Derrida’s political thinking between Kant’s liberal theory of right and

Hegel’s philosophy of ethical life, Beardsworth tends to cloud their respec-

tive positions. In uncovering how Kant and Hegel disavow violence,

Beardsworth underrepresents Kant’s recognition of the coercive character of

right as well as the conflicting difference of civil society and overidentifies

Hegel with his “ ‘totalitarian’ fate” in communism and fascism or

overcharacterizes “the fate of Hegel’s thought as totalitarian and terroristic”

(pp. 84, 47). As a consequence, it remains unclear whether and how the

method of deconstruction can make a concrete contribution to the debate

between liberals and communitarians.

Beardsworth is intent to reveal how for Derridean deconstruction Kantian

thought

represents a classic gesture of “liberal” rationality which disavows its own force under

the cover of naturality....This disavowal cannot fail...toplace violence outside the law.

The violence in maintaining the limit as natural is revealed as/in the contradictions of

Kant’s thought. (P. 62)

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In application of Derrida’s tertiary structure of violence, Beardsworth argues

that Kant’s practical philosophy involves three levels of disavowed violence:

(1) the disavowal of violence in the a priori foundation of universal law

according to the principle of contradiction, (2) the unrecognized violence of

the suppressed difference in ethics and civil society, and (3) the violence

involved in suppressing the return of repressed difference in Kant’s rejection

of the right to revolt.

Beardsworth’s opening argument is as straightforward as it is insightful.

Kant grounds morality and justice in the universality of law, the coherency of

which rests in its conformity to the law of contradiction. From Derrida’s dis-

cussion of Kant in his article on Kafka’s tale “Before the Law,” Beardsworth

learned that the principle of contradiction represents an “evacuation, from the

domain of philosophy, of the problem of time . For, in formal logic, A cannot

be –A at one and the same time . Formal logic thus denies time to constitute

itself as such: it is...thedisavowal of time” (p. 54). The principle of contra-

diction, which is the precondition not only for scientific thought but also the

violence of “techno-sciences,” reappears in ethical and political institutions.

Its effects are deleterious. By “displacing the logic of non-contradiction from

the field of knowledge to the ethical and political fields,” Beardsworth con-

tends, “Kant is unable to think the contradiction through between law and

time. . . . The inability engenders in Kant’s ethical and political writings a dis-

avowal of the inextricable, but necessary relation between rights and vio-

lence” (p. 54). In Kantian ethics, for example, only those maxims are morally

justifiable that are noncontradictory; it is the universal and necessary form of

the law that determines moral integrity, not historical or empirical content.

Kant’s practical reason thus stands “ outside of time and space”; it is de-

historized. Moreover, by reducing morality to the conformity of a maxim

with noncontradictory universal law, Kant banishes the “risk of ethical judge-

ment,” thereby “abolishing judgement,” which is “the very condition of ethi-

cal orientation” (p. 64).

The disavowal of violence is documented not only in the denial of the

originary difference in noncontradictory universal law. In Kant’s political

theory, the initial disavowal leads to violence at a secondary level in civil

society’s differential relations. Modern liberal politics à la Kant expels “vio-

lence as a non-civil phenomenon from the social whole,” for “it fails to recog-

nize that struggle is inherent to human organization” (p. 76). In consequence,

a third level of violence appears, in which—according to Beardsworth—

Kant argues that “the right to resistance is not a right, because it is self-

contradictory and, therefore, immoral” (p. 69). Disavowing the violent “ ‘il-

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