GORDON, Gareth.- Horizons of Change: Deconstruction and the Evanescence of Authority. - Chapter 2. Departures.

DERRIDA, JacquesGORDON, GarethLiterature. Deconstruction

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Abstract and Contents
List of abbreviations used
Introduction
Chapter 1. "False Start"

Chapter 2. Departures.

[A]rtifactuality is indeed made: it is important to know what it is made of, but it is even more necessary to recognise that it is made. It is not given, but actively produced; it is sorted, invested and performatively interpreted by a range of hierarchising and selective procedures – factitious or artificial procedures which are always subservient to various powers and interests of which their ‘subjects’ and agents (producers and consumers of actuality, always interpreters, and in some cases ‘philosophers’ too), are never sufficiently aware. The ‘reality’ of ‘actuality’ – however individual, irreducible, stubborn, painful or tragic it may be – only reaches us through fictional devices. (DA, p.28)

Yet what on earth might ‘our everyday lived experiences’ be supposed to mean? From the unnameable to the unintelligible: a chapter closes in a swirl of words, but as if, somewhere, a ship was sinking, a sudden reach is made for salvation, an escape from the textual whirlpool – the appeal to the ontological. The ontological that should part seas and offer firm ground, Archimedean footholds perhaps, for universal comprehension. Surely the very thing that was being problematised in the previous chapter? Already another inauspicious start.
Perhaps, though, every ‘start’ must needs be inauspicious. For an ‘auspicious’ start would seem to suggest the prior knowledge of a felicitous end, the comfort of a positive outcome suspected in advance – not so much a ‘start’ as a point of departure for a journey whose course co-ordinates will have already been plotted out and which will be scrupulously followed. An itinerary, then, that would not be a journey guided by ‘hope’, but rather a following in another’s footsteps, the result of ‘calculation’ – or as Derrida has written, ‘if one could count on what is coming, hope would be but the calculation of a program’ (SoM, p.169). Indeed any voyage of discovery or exploration, textual or otherwise, where the terminus cannot be foretold, nor results guaranteed, might well be said to have, as a condition of its commencement, the need for an ‘inauspicious start’. Perhaps the self-diagnosis is not, in fact, to be avoided.
So what can these mean, these ‘everyday lived experiences’ that appear to have been summoned in order to provide a pre-discursive foundation or moral legitimisation for my argument, in a near parody of the very criticisms that were levelled against the preceding writers? Given that Derrida has suggested that Specters of Marx was written to ‘provide the beginnings of an account of disastrous historical failures on both the theoretical and political plane’ which are the inheritance of ‘everything which – for better but especially for worse, in our modernity – has welded the political to the ontological’ (M&S, p.221), any treatment of the ontological would warrant a high degree of prudence.
2.1 WHAT REAL WHERE?
In order not to base, unthinkingly, any deconstructive invitation to politics on an uncritical and non-reflexive ontological guarantee, an appraisal of what the status of the ‘real’ is within Derridean thought would seem to be called for. Obviously Eagleton’s use of phrases such as ‘political movements which were at once mass, central and productive’ is intended to denote a hulking, immanent reality, indisputable in its self-presence and safely beyond the bounds of the text. [1] What can be thought, though, about ‘everyday lived experiences’ that would avoid this intention of circumventing the text? In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes that:

as for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. ‘Experience’ has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. At any rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention which the discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation.(OG, p.60)

Given the Saussurean background to deconstruction, intelligibility comes to depend on a system of differences, and the ‘play of differences’ for Derrida, ‘is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality’ (D, p.140). This, then, provides the bridge from the naïve usage of ‘experience’, via Derridean differance, to the most (in)famous of deconstruction’s postulations: ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (OG, p.158). Rather than be read simplistically forwards, in order to arrive at yet another knee-jerk caricature of deconstruction (‘there is nothing real except books’), the phrase requires reading ‘backwards’, as it were, to show that the concept of textuality extends to cover everything of which we can have a concept. ‘And thus to infinity’ continues Derrida, for ‘what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence’ (OG, p.159). Hence the argument is not that reality has, dare I say, withered away, but rather that our understanding of it, the condition of its intelligibility, is that it functions within, and is governed by, a play of differences. Considering the influence of Lacan on Derrida’s work, it is not surprising, that plenitude or absence, i.e. that which might be considered respectively as the conditions of the representationality and objectivity referred to in the previous chapter, are equally available to us in one particular fashion: ‘the establishment of a pure presence, without loss, is one with the occurrence of absolute loss, with death’ (D, p.151).
So the term ‘experience’ can still be retained, in an attempt to ‘exhaust its resources’, but only with a recognition of the reworking of its signification – it can be retained ‘under erasure’. This question of the ontological would seem to be the primary obstacle to surmount: having seen that deconstruction does not shun ‘reality’ as such, but rather finds that reality-as-experience offers no transcendent opposition to the play of differences, at the very least there opens up within Derridean thought the possibility of a mode of address to lived experiences that is indeed consonant with a deconstructive methodology. [2] In fact, the first steps towards delineating a morphology for this mode of address, one that I shall argue is intrinsically anarchist in spirit and practice, have already been taken. In finding that deconstruction does not instantly run aground when faced with reality, the ‘objective’ or extraterritorial (which can now be understood as extratextual) loci upon which critics such as Callinicos or Jameson sought to predicate their arguments can be seen to have never been available to them. As Bill Readings comments, Barbara Johnson’s notion of a ‘translation from deconstructive textuality to politics’, can never happen. For Readings such a ‘translation’ re-inscribes the opposition between the textual and the ontological, ‘founded upon [a] misrecognition of the figural status of the literal, and the correlative positing of an empirical real outside the text’. Thus the:

condition of the operation of power in Western society (the condition by which domination effects are invisible in the representation of democratic participation) is to think politics as empirical, as that which is self-evident, which makes its place as it takes it. That is, domination works by denying its politics, by establishing its particular politics as an empirical or prepolitical real, so that domination is invisible in that it takes place before what is named as the political. [3]

Readings’ critique of the political reflects the Frankfurt School’s critique of Enlightenment reason’s self-definition qua reason by excluding what in a sense founds it. Yet this bid to ‘invisibilise’ a founding self-definition is not necessarily an already successfully completed project – ‘what is at stake’ for Readings:

in the deconstruction of the opposition of the textual to the political, in the refiguration of the literal, is precisely politics itself, the terror of the real that governs the government and the argument (so that argument is limited to government) of Western politics in democracy or in its most extended form in totalitarianism, a terror that operates by grounding its prescriptive judgements as the descriptions of an empirical reality outside signifying practice. [4]

Undoing the notion of an ‘empirical reality outside signifying practice’ undoes the foundation for the objectivity, and thus for the authority, that the writers considered in the previous chapter sought to claim for themselves. They cannot represent anything, for:

there is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called ‘thing itself’ is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. (OG, p.49)

2.2 INFINITY INFINITY
So that is it then, the Lacanian Real neatly stitched up, smoothly subsumed under a general rubric of play, with no further worries about the ontological? With materiality so easily disposed of, with a bright new horizon of politics now coming into view within Derridean thought, the only task still remaining is the mundane job of drawing up the Deconstruction Party’s manifesto in time for the next election. An over-hastily ambitious claim if ever there was one. Indeed, one that Derrida himself is not slow to complicate. For example, in Specters of Marx one finds ‘the fact that the ontological and the critical are here pre-deconstructive has political consequences which are perhaps not negligible’ (SoM, p.170). So the recalcitrant real, bane of over-hasty manifesto writers throughout history, settles smugly back into its ‘out-thereness’. Perhaps the very incommensurability of the sign ‘infinity’ with what it purports to signify gives some hint of the dimensions of this question. Moreover, by Derrida’s own judgement, there are political consequences. Having argued so far that reality-as-experience offers neither an ontological foundation for, nor an escape from, textuality, I shall now consider what the significance of the ‘undeconstructible’ in Derridean thought is, what the ‘not negligible’ consequences for politics are, and what the problems that this throws up might be.
The notion of metaphor or ‘horizon’ is the point upon which I want to focus the discussion. Horizon can be taken to signify the dividing line between the knowable/perceptible and that which is to come. The ‘to-come’ (from the French à-venir and playing on the word for ‘future’, l’avenir) takes many forms in Derrida’s work, with one of the principal ones being ‘the event’: ‘the happening of the event is what cannot and should not be prevented: it is another name for the future itself’ (DA, p.32). ‘Horizon’ functions in two ways in the discussions surrounding Specters of Marx: the event is on the horizon in the sense of being at the edge of, or beyond, our apprehension, i.e. the point at which we open out to the future, while, at the same time horizon is used in the sense of the limit of our consciousness. Hence, when considering ‘messianicity’ as a ‘structure of existence’ (M&S, p.250), Derrida writes of:

the horizon of awaiting [attente] that informs our relationship to time – to the event, to that which happens [ce qui arrive], to the one who arrives [l’arrivant], and to the other. Involved this time, however, would be a waiting without waiting, a waiting whose horizon is, as it were, punctured by the event (which is waited for without being awaited); we would have to do with a waiting for an event, for someone or something that, in order to happen or ‘arrive’, must exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation. (M&S, pp.250-251)

The warning against ‘every determinant anticipation’ is, though, what invokes the second sense of horizon, the sense of a limit that would foreclose on the future:

there is not even any horizon of expectation in this messianics without messianism. If there were a horizon of expectation, of anticipation, or programming, there would be neither event, nor history (a possibility which, paradoxically and for the same reasons, can never be rationally ruled out: it is almost impossible to think the absence of a horizon of expectation). There would be no event, no history, unless a ‘come hither’ opened out and addressed itself to someone, to someone else whom I cannot and must not define in advance. (DA, p.32)

The tension between the two senses of horizon here, the opening onto the future and the concept of limit, is what creates the most problems for an attempt at a deconstructive ‘politics’, and I shall return to this point below. For the moment, a more detailed reflection upon horizon as opening will allow an elaboration of the potential to conceive of an anarchism that could subsist within deconstructive thought.
Of all the infinite possibilities regarding what the event-to-come might be, of what the future might indeed hold, there is only one which offers us any secure knowledge of its eventual arrival – the final apocalyptic encounter with the Lacanian Real at the moment of death. A contemplation of the significance of death is one of the points of departure for Derrida’s The Gift of Death. Amongst other things, the text is a meditation on the relationship between death, the self, the other and a resultant responsibility. Derrida considers that death is the one thing that is irreducibly one’s own:

even if one gives me death to the extent that it means killing me, that death will still have been mine and as long as it is irreducibly mine I will not have received it from anyone else. Thus dying can never be taken, borrowed, transferred, delivered, promised, or transmitted. And just as it can’t be given to me, so it can’t be taken away from me. (GoD, p.44)

This is what establishes the absolute singularity of the self, this intimate, exclusive relationship to one’s death – ‘death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given,” one can say, by death’ (GoD, p.41). There is, then, a choice that confronts us all – to recognise and accept (or not) the irreducible nature of our own singularity as given by death, i.e. my acceptance of my death (not, literally, my acceptance of my death) in the plenitude of its own-ness for me:

because I cannot take death away from the other who can no more take it from me in return, it remains for everyone to take his own death upon himself. Everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility. (GoD, p.44)

Why, though, the link straight to ‘freedom and responsibility’? For Derrida, it is ‘this concern for dying as a relation to self and an assembling of self’ (GoD, p.14) that means freedom – ‘this concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom’ (GoD, p.15). Again it should be observed that this is not the restitution of the Cartesian self, now accepting of its own death and carrying on as before. The acceptance of one’s own singularity is what means freedom, but it is also what brings responsibility. ‘On what condition is responsibility possible?’ asks Derrida (GoD, p.50). The answer given is that ‘on the condition that the Good no longer be a transcendental objective, a relation between objective things, but the relation to the other, a response to the other; an experience of personal goodness and a movement of intention’ (GoD, p.50). The ‘Good’ here covers a variety of meanings, as Derrida has also been considering the history of Europe in terms of Christianity and of its rupture with Platonism. Hence it might be read as a reworking of what has been traditionally understood as ‘God’, or in more Derridean terms, the wholly other. So responsibility comes to be responsibility to the other, which is intertwined with one’s relationship to God, or to that which gives the gift of death. In considering the biblical story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, Derrida goes on to argue that ‘everything points to the fact that one is unable to be responsible at the same time before the other and before others, before the others of the other’ (GoD, p.77). Just at this point, though, where the atheist reader might feel tempted to abandon the text in frustration at having been positioned in a responsible relationship exclusively with God, Derrida snatches hope from the jaws of established religion:

if God is completely other, the figure or name of the wholly other, then every other (one) is every (bit) other. Tout autre est tout autre. This formula […] implies that God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego […] then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other. (GoD, p.78)

Therefore, to precise somewhat, there is something of God, or the wholly other, in all of us, and it is this which, in the relation of other to self, brings responsibility into play. This relation to the other is what Simon Critchley identifies as deconstruction’s debt to Levinas, and which forms the basis for his articulation of an ethics of deconstruction. Critchley argues that the:

activity of philosophy, the very task of thinking, is the reduction of otherness. In seeking to think the other, its otherness is reduced or appropriated to our understanding. To think philosophically is to comprehend […] and master the other, thereby reducing its alterity. (ED, p.29)

Deconstruction, as a challenge to this tradition of Western philosophy, can thus ‘be “understood” as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced, comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy’ (ED, p.29).
Clearly, when Critchley writes ‘strictly speaking’, he is not trying to pose this challenge as one that is entirely impossible. The import of the sentence is rather that, ‘strictly speaking,’ thinking has traditionally equalled this reduction of alterity, and therefore ‘strictly speaking’ deconstruction cannot be thought in the way that thought has been commonly and narrowly understood until now. Yet despite the explication, the mere sequence of words ‘deconstruction, as a challenge’ cannot be ‘thought by philosophy’ provokes a torrent of questions that tumble one after the other, questions that return us to the problematic of the tension between the two senses of horizon, and which seemingly put a check on any aspiration to change. The ineluctable catch-22, that deconstruction’s very existence within language means that it is denied any potential exteriority to the system beyond which it is trying to think, is one which Derrida has recognised from the outset. In 1966 he wrote that:

it is a question both of a critical relation to the language of the social sciences and a critical responsibility of the discourse itself. It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.

(SSP, p.282)
Again in Of Grammatology, deconstruction is ‘constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed’ (OG, p.14). The provisional answer to this dilemma would seem to be borrowed from Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage. One can conserve:

all these old concepts within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. (SSP, p.284)

So the undeconstructible is the relation to the future, to the à-venir, and which opens up the realm of freedom (in the acceptance of our singularity vis-à-vis the death to come) and concomitantly the responsibility of self to other. Yet as this is, literally, the ‘unthought’ of philosophy, what might the ‘not negligible consequences’ for politics indeed be?
2.3 LIVING IN THE MEANTIME
The gaps between articulation and aspiration, between location and destination, seem to be multiplying and gathering together to cloud the horizon. Might these gaps indeed be the crafty reappearance of the age old divergence between the now outworn terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’? The gap between deconstruction’s gesture towards a beyond of traditional metaphysics and its necessary ensnarement within logocentric language; or the gap between the notions of horizon as limit or as opening onto futurity – are these gaps to be taken as unbridgeable and hence deconstruction and any related ‘politics’ are left stranded at the starting post? Indeed, might not Derrida’s meditations on death be taken as necessarily circumscribed by our horizon (as limit) of knowledge – mere speculations from ‘this side’ of death, whereas ‘knowledge’ of death, or of what it is or is not (i.e. irreducibly one’s own, a supposition that might, at the moment of death, prove to be completely erroneous), might require the impossibility of access to ‘both sides’. (Can one ever be on the other side of the horizon?) These gaps, these ‘aporias’, would seem to stand as brute obstacles to the destruction of the ‘old machinery’, condemning us to carry on living ‘in the meantime’.
Already, though, within my own text the authoritarian impulse rears its ugly head. What else can these worries over the aporias be considered as, if not a manifestation of the desire for some onto-theological guarantee which might copperfasten the deconstructive politics that I am trying to propose… the authority to banish authority? If there were only some available knowledge of the other that could put the seal on the project of a deconstructive politics.
Yet the important feature of these comments, leaving aside the matter of their naïve and impassioned railing, is the very fact that they recognise the impossibility of what they desire. Here the tension between the two types of horizon becomes most problematic, and yet potentially most productive. Perhaps the least positivistic statement that can be made about the future is that it is ‘to come’ – that it is on the other side of the horizon-as-limit, but that it is to come. Thus to accept the limitations of the horizon means simultaneously to recognise the absolute alterity of the ‘to come’, and with this recognition authority begins to recede from the historically inherited horizons of thought. This is the ethical moment in deconstruction, the moment where an attempt is made to refuse to reduce, comprehend or accommodate the alterity of the other. A second significance emerges, then, from the phrase cited above, that the ‘conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom’ (GoD, p.15): not only does it concern the acceptance of self as singular due to the own-ness of one’s death, but also that to accept the horizon as limit, i.e. to look death in the face, is to accept the concomitant and absolute alterity of the other, and to observe the responsibility that is the condition of freedom. Or as Derrida puts it in The Gift of Death:

the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination. It will have to decide without it, independently from knowledge; that will be the condition of a practical idea of freedom. (GoD, p.26)

This is where the horizon becomes productive, and where the faintest outline of a ‘mode of address to our everyday lived experiences’ starts to stand out against the horizon, one that would take as its motif this sense of a decision without knowledge. ‘One must take another step,’ writes Derrida in Specters of Marx – ‘one must think the future, that is, life. That is, death’ (SoM, p.113). One of the themes running through Specters is that of inheritance, and when Derrida warns that ‘those that are coming, at present and in the future […] must cease to inherit’ (SoM, p.113), the inheritance referred to is the ‘determinant anticipation’ (M&S, p.251) that would not so much offer as oblige its own acceptance, an anticipation that would necessarily engage in the reduction of the other’s alterity. The task in hand, then, for this embryonic mode of address, is to unmake inheritance and to withdraw from the determination of what is to come – this being precisely the point where deconstruction ‘fails’ to meet the exigencies of traditional politics, and likewise where an anarchist ‘politics’ can begin to be theorised alongside deconstruction, a theorising which has, at its heart, in Readings’ words, a ‘refiguration of politics itself’.
2.4 HERE COMES THE JUDGE
‘Deconstruction is justice’ (FoL, p.15), writes Derrida in ‘Force of Law’, and in the same essay he suggests that all his texts, whatever their individual topics may be, ‘are also, through and through, at least obliquely discourses on justice’ (FoL, p.7). This essay can be read as one of Derrida’s most overt challenges to the politico-juridical status quo. Once again, the ‘to come’ is named as justice: ‘justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible’ (FoL, p.14). Inheritance, in this context, are the laws that predate our arrival, ‘the rules and conventions that authorize calculation but whose founding origin only defers the problem of justice’ (FoL, p.23). Justice is indissociably linked to the ‘sense of a responsibility without limits’ (FoL, p.19) that the irreducible alterity of the other demands. Yet given that law ‘claims to exercise itself in the name of justice’ (FoL, p.22), there is clearly a problematic relation between the two. The question, as Derrida sees it, is thus:

how are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case? (FoL, p.17)

When Derrida writes of the ‘rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form’, I would contend that this ‘necessarily’ lacks the force of necessity, and it is nowhere demonstrated in ‘Force of Law’ that the ‘imperative of justice’ does indeed necessitate a general form. I will argue in the following chapter, more specifically in relation to Critchley’s text, that this ‘generality’ is perhaps an uncharacteristically too quick return to the unexamined and unreconfigured structurality of the political, of the juridico-political hierarchy that we receive as inheritance, thanks to our being the unconsulted non-signatories to Rousseau’s social contract. For the moment, the move from singularity to justice will be considered in slightly more detail, for it also has its own potential pitfalls.
Derrida suggests that ‘the fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress’ (FoL, p.14). The law is deconstructible because we have an intimation of the undeconstructible, i.e. justice:

the deconstruction of all presumption of a determinant certitude of a present justice itself operates on the basis of an infinite ‘idea of justice,’ infinite because it is irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other, owed to the other, before any contract, because it has come, the other’s coming as the singularity that is always other.(FoL, p.25)

The quotation merits close attention. Despite the fact that Derrida puts the ‘idea of justice’ inside inverted commas, the formulation prompts questions as to the nature and accessibility of this ‘idea’. Derrida fights shy of ‘[assimilating] too quickly this “idea of justice” to a regulative idea (in the Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to other horizons of the same type’ (FoL, p.25). Yet the very fact of this apprehension of justice being associated with the term ‘idea’ (however much it might be being placed under erasure) begs the question of what sort of an idea we can have of this ‘idea’. The logic of Derrida’s deconstruction of ‘a determinant certitude of a present justice’ attempts to link justice to alterity (‘owed to the other’), and obviously for Derrida this notion of justice is one of the principle motor forces generating deconstruction’s movement. Yet it might be claimed that there is a qualitative shift from the absolute alterity of the other to the idea of justice. Moreover, the singularity of the other as predicated on death in The Gift of Death might be tenable based on Derrida’s treatment of death in that text, but the question could be posed as to whether death is a sufficient basis from which to elaborate an idea about an ‘idea of justice’. Although Derrida suggests that justice is but one ‘type of horizon that would have numerous competing versions. By competing I mean similar enough in appearance and always pretending to absolute privilege and irreducible singularity’ (FoL, p.25), the danger is that the irreducible alterity of the other might just as easily be taken as an excuse for a retreat into solipsism, with no concern whatsoever for justice. What I would tentatively forward as a possible argument to pre-empt any such retreat is that on these terms the solipsist would surely have to prove that the future was absolutely not coming, and thus eschew any relation to anything outside of self. In a certain sense it might be contended that the solipsist would indeed have to prove immortality. But as long as death is accepted, then there is a future to come, and we do have a relation to it (via death) – hence there is a relation to the other, and it is at this point that the relation to the other can demand justice.
Derrida recognises the spectre of this nihilism that seems to shadow deconstruction, for (as cited earlier) if we were hermetically sealed within a ‘horizon of expectation’, then ‘there would be neither event, nor history (a possibility which, paradoxically and for the same reasons, can never be rationally ruled out […])’ (DA, p.32, my emphasis). As suggested above, there is no sure knowledge of death – it can be diagnosed, detected, even predicted or administered, but without any insight into what it ‘means’. This is why the lack of event or history cannot be ‘rationally’ ruled out. Yet in the absence of any transparent rationality the residuum of unknowability imposes its own ethics.
So, in opposition to the potential for solipsism, Derrida writes that ‘deconstruction would not correspond […] to a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-politico-juridical question of justice’, and that in fact it entails this ‘responsibility without limits’ (FoL, p.19). This is the responsibility to the prior claim of the other on self, and that which would confound the founding violence that is ‘walled up’ in the structure of laws and authority – that which is the ‘mystical foundation of authority’ (FoL, p.14).
In this chapter, then, I have shown how Derrida’s work does not find itself shut out from the realm of politics due simply to its textualisation of the ontological. Rather the ontological can be considered as the unknowable, which brings with it its own responsibilities. These responsibilities, in turn, prompt a reconsideration of what constitutes the realm of the political. Derrida writes that:

a deconstructionist approach to the boundaries that institute the human subject […] may, in the name of a demand more insatiable than justice, lead to a reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology. (FoL, p.19)

It is this refiguration of the political that finds, I shall argue in the final chapter, its most hospitable correspondence in the tradition known as anarchism. Yet while Derrida claims that deconstruction is ‘mad about this desire for justice’ (FoL, p.25), would the man himself be ‘mad’ about an attempt at an anarchist deconstruction, or a deconstructive anarchism? The following chapter will briefly consider the political context that Derrida has given his own work in order to make sure that there is not already a determined politics of deconstruction that might render illegitimate any move towards anarchism.

Continued: Chapter 3. "The Bridge: Where it Hinges"
Chapter 4. "Journey’s End/New Beginning"
Conclusion and Bibliography

[1It is curious to note, in passing, how an almost identical phrase appears in a review Eagleton wrote of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which originally appeared just some months before The Illusions of Postmodernism. Here, though, Eagleton takes issue with ‘the unthinking postmodern equation of the marginal with the creative’, a consequence of which, he claims, is ‘the rolling back of political movements which are at once mass and oppositional’. Apart from sympathising with Derrida’s somewhat dumbfounded reaction to Eagleton’s bilious review (‘One can only rub one’s eyes in disbelief and wonder where he finds the inspiration, the haughtiness, the right. Has he learned nothing at all?’ (M&S, p.222)), one might wonder quite how Eagleton can write valorising ‘political movements’ that are ‘mass [and] central’ as well as ‘mass and oppositional’ - questions regarding cakes and their ingestion might well be asked here. See Terry Eagleton, ‘Marxism without Marxism’ in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, ed. by Michael Sprinker (London & New York: Verso, 1999), pp.83-87 (p.86).

[2This is not to suggest that deconstruction is a methodology, or that it could be reducible to such, but rather that when it takes place a certain methodology can be perceived in its enactment by a particular individual. For a further elaboration of this point, see Critchley, ED, p.22.

[3Bill Readings, ‘The Deconstruction of Politics’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp.223-243 (p.230).

[4Ibid.