Previous:
Abstract and Contents
List of abbreviations used
Introduction
Chapter 1. False Start
Chapter 2. Departures

Chapter 3. The Bridge: Where it Hinges.

Can an attempt to outline an anarchist politics of deconstruction be considered legitimate or illegitimate? The issue of ‘legitimacy’ immediately leads to questions of paternity, of patrimony, of propriety. What sort of father figure would Derrida cut if confronted with his illegitimate offspring rushing off to mount the barricades at the latest World Trade Organisation protest, a copy of The Gift of Death tucked under one arm and Mutual Aid under the other? His reaction might be gauged from his reaction to the criticisms of Specters of Marx: he professes amazement at the ‘jealous possessiveness of so many Marxists’, and what amazes him is that which ‘is always a bit comic about a property claim, and comic in a way that is even more theatrical when what is involved is an inheritance, a textual inheritance’ (M&S, p.222). So Derrida rejects the possibility of there existing ‘the presumptive property deeds’ that might substantiate the ‘proprietorial reaction’ (M&S, p.222) of his inflamed Marxist critics. I have already suggested in chapter one that in questioning authority, sacrosanct authorial intention goes by the board. But can this be the last word as regards my relation as critic to the text? Does all this mean that I have ‘paternal’ licence to carve what I choose out of ‘Derrida’s’ texts? Well, perhaps not, especially given that he goes on to excoriate Spivak for ‘an outright inability to read’ (M&S, p.223). Of Grammatology warns that a reading ‘cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it’ (OG, p.158) and that a ‘reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text’ (OG, p.159). Critchley calls this ‘the deconstructive duty of scholarship’ and goes slightly further in arguing for ‘a hermeneutic principle of fidelity’ (ED, p.24). So the ‘problem for deconstruction’ according to Critchley, ‘becomes one of discovering how a reading can remain internal to the text and within the limits of textuality without merely repeating the text in the manner of a “commentary”’ (ED, p.26). Without wanting to suggest that the previous chapter offers anything quite so grand as a deconstruction of Derrida’s own texts, they have been considered not in order to offer a commentary but rather to pursue one of Derrida’s competing types of horizons – their relation to the concept of authority. Yet in order to follow the ‘indispensable guardrail’ (OG, p.158) of what the texts themselves have to say, this chapter will briefly consider Derrida’s comments on the political context of his work, and thus how amenable this work might be to an anarchist interpretation.
3.1 HASTY TRANSPOSITIONS
Commenting on deconstruction’s address to legal studies, Derrida warns against confounding ‘largely heterogeneous and unequal discourses, styles and discursive contexts’ (FoL, p.9). Hence a ‘respect for contextual, academico-institutional, discursive specificities, mistrust for analogies and hasty transpositions, for confused homogenizations, seem to [Derrida] to be the first imperatives the way things stand today’ (FoL, p.9). Bearing these cautionary observations in mind, one might ask if anarchism and deconstruction are indeed two ‘largely heterogeneous and unequal discourses’? Moreover, any attempt to yoke the two together certainly risks showing a complete lack of ‘respect for contextual’ and ‘discursive specificities’. What right does any critic have to foist his or her own political agenda onto deconstruction? Is the entire project not just simply a ‘hasty transposition’?
In response to these doubts I would argue that the body of Derrida’s work under consideration in this essay certainly puts no absolute diversion in the way of a desire to articulate a ‘political’ commitment from within deconstruction. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida suggests that deconstruction, in its ‘most radical programs’:

would like, in order to be consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather […] to aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible, though always, of course, very mediated way, not only in the profession but in what one calls the cité, the polis and more generally the world. (FoL, pp.8-9)

Though while such a statement would seem to be a clear articulation of deconstruction’s responsibility to ‘intervene’ in life, Derrida immediately qualifies it with a denial that this means ‘to change things in the rather naïve sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention’, but rather that it is in ‘the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress’ (FoL, p.9). So this passage would seem to give both encouragement and pause to a deconstructive politics. While Derrida writes later in the same essay that ‘nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal’ (FoL, p.28), the question that the passage cited above raises is of the form that any ‘intervention’ in the world might take. The suggestion of it being a ‘maximum intensification of a transformation in progress’ seems quite troubling, indeed it could be said to risk being the blandest expression of a marginal reformism. What, exactly, is the ‘transformation in progress’? At worst the phrase could be taken to give succour to a dialectical materialism that would see the individual as merely playing out a role in the unfolding of a destiny (in the Hegelian sense) that is as yet unknown to her or him. For what transformations are currently ‘in progress’, one might ask, that require their maximum intensification? It would take an extremely optimistic reading of contemporary history to perceive any transformations that might, even in the loosest fashion, correspond to the ‘classical emancipatory ideal’. Derrida himself radically disavows the possibility of such a reading when in Specters of Marx, in the chapter taking Fukuyama to task for the notorious ‘end of history’ pronouncement, he writes that:

it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.(SoM, p.85)

Moreover, when Derrida rejects the impulse to ‘change things in the rather naïve sense’, this can be read as an eschewal of ‘revolutionary’ change. In his response to Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri accepts a large part of what Derrida says, but is left wondering ‘is there still the possibility for rupture? And how so?’. Later he suggests that ‘the new communist experiment is born through the rupture with memory’. [1] Without pursuing the implications of Negri’s concern for ‘rupture’ (which would not seem to be at a huge remove from the sense of absolute categorical distinctions which underlies the notion of ‘detachment’ for which Callinicos was critiqued in the first chapter), the tension between the reformist as opposed to the revolutionary aspect of deconstruction remains clear.
3.2 WRY SMILES AND REVOLUTION
‘So, you see, I am a very conservative person’, comments Derrida in the
Villanova Roundtable, whilst talking about his relationship to various academic institutions (DN, p.8). It is hard, though, to imagine this comment being delivered without a wry smile, and a hint of the self-deprecation that is not difficult to find in Derrida’s work. So when, in response to the predictable charges of depoliticisation against Specters of Marx, Derrida writes that ‘what should come after this deconstruction […] is exactly the opposite of a depoliticization, or a withering away of political effectivity’ (M&S, p.221), it would seem churlish not to take him at his own word – while all the time not taking him at his own word when he claims he is a conservative person. Yet in what direction might this re-politicisation head? The question has been formulated rather lazily, so far, in terms of reformism versus revolutionary change. To clarify the opposition being employed here, and continuing this essay’s central concern with authority, reformism could be taken to mean an acceptance of the status quo inasmuch as it is a suitable or appropriate model for improvement. In terms of ‘the state’, Kropotkin formulates the opposition thus:

there are those, on the one hand, who hope to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers to be used for the revolution. And there are those like ourselves who see the State [as] an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance. [2]

Hence revolutionary change would reject the status quo for being part of the fundamental problematic under discussion. The term ‘status quo’ must be left with a degree of vagueness, in order to respect the singularity of whatever institution, group or individual might exercise authority with regard to the individual speaker contemplating such change. So, on the one hand, Derrida writes that ‘justice, insofar as it is not only a juridical or political concept, opens up for the l’avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics’ (FoL, p.27). It seems that there is the potential, at least, to read a reformism here, where the need for law as such is not called into question, only the nature of its mutability. Again, while he writes that ‘justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between institutions or states and others’ (FoL, p.28). Justice does not seem to be employed to question the necessity (or not) of the existence of institutions or states. (This echoes my concern about the notion of generality in Derrida’s reference to an ‘imperative of justice which necessarily [has] a general form’ (FoL, p.17) in the preceding chapter. This point will be discussed in more detail below.) Thus statehood or institutionality could be perceived as being a priori givens in these formulations, subsequent to which the tension between the here and now (law) and the future (justice) begins its Sisyphean oscillation. [3]
On the other hand, it would seem that Derrida’s work lends itself more readily to the revolutionary side: while discussing the impossibility of knowing anything about the future in advance, he argues that ‘justice […] is somehow at stake. And therefore revolution too, through the connection between the event, justice, and this absolute fracture in the forseeable concatenation of historical time’ (DA, p.32). While one may give up on revolutionary ‘imagery’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘politics’, ‘it is impossible to give up on revolution without abandoning both justice and the event’ (DA, p.32). There is clearly a revolutionary aspect, but perhaps not a revolution as has been traditionally understood. Indeed, although the first quotation would seem to recall Negri’s postulation of a ‘rupture with memory’, Derrida speaks of a ‘fracture in the forseeable concatenation of historical time’, i.e. what we can plan, or calculate on, but what the event will exceed. Yet the question of a revolution, or a revolutionary aspect, of deconstruction practically forces the question of memory into the discussion. Negri signals a break from the memory of ‘Stalinist’ or ‘folkloric’ organisational forms, but if these were absolutely forgotten then there would be no ‘guardrail’ to identify and protect against their possible return. [4] So for Derrida there is a ‘responsibility toward memory’ that signifies the need ‘constantly to maintain an interrogation of the origin, grounds and limits of our conceptual, theoretical or normative apparatus surrounding justice’ (FoL, p.20). If the revolutionary impulse in deconstruction is in thinking the unthought of philosophy, as suggested earlier, then the linguistic parameters become even more accentuated in Specters of Marx. One’s native tongue is the ‘pre-inheritance’ that must be passed through, or ‘forgotten’, if one is to speak the new language of revolution. Yet the problem is that ‘what one must forget will have been indispensable. One must pass through the pre-inheritance, even if it is to parody it, in order to appropriate the life of a new language or make the revolution’ (SoM, p.110). Thus the past must be forgotten enough to allow the future to come, yet remembered enough to prevent its own repetition – as Derrida says, quoting Marx, ‘in order to “find again the spirit of the revolution without making its specter return”’ (SoM, p.110). The inevitable logic of this is that a revolutionary revolution will be incomparable: ‘one ought to recognise it by nothing other than the excess of this untimely dis-identification, therefore by nothing that is. By nothing that is presently identifiable. As soon as one identifies a revolution, it begins to imitate, it enters into a death agony’ (SoM, p.115, my emphasis).
3.3 UNDECIDING
I would argue, then, that there is indeed a revolutionary aspect, acknowledged by Derrida, in his work. What is more, in this light the ‘transformation in progress’ referred to above might well be read as an allusion to deconstruction itself, and hence the issue of reformism would give less cause for concern. To risk paraphrasing Derrida’s own texts, deconstruction might be considered as revolutionary with revolution, to the extent that any revolution recognisable as such cannot presage the truly revolutionary opening onto the future that deconstruction affirms (‘the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be’ (SoM, p.168)).
Nevertheless, Simon Critchley, writing around the same time as ‘Force of Law’ was published, but long before Specters of Marx appeared, holds that:

deconstruction fails to thematize the question of politics as a question – that is, as a place of contestation, antagonism, struggle, conflict, and dissension on a factical or empirical terrain. The rigorous undecidability of deconstructive reading fails to account for the activity of political judgement, political critique, and the political decision. (ED, pp.189-190)

I would seek to answer this charge of failure laid against deconstruction with an example from Critchley’s own analysis of Derrida’s work. Critchley comments on Derrida’s elaboration of ‘the question of the question’ (cf. M&S, p.220), and arrives at the conclusion that ‘all forms of questioning are always already pledged (gagé) to respond to a prior grant of language’ (ED, p.194). Hence, ‘my language begins as a response to the Other. In short, it is ethical’ (ED, p.195). Yet when it comes to politics, Critchley seems not to consider the ‘decision of the decision’. The ‘political decision’ that deconstruction is critiqued for ‘failing to account for’ equally well rests on certain a priori notions of what constitutes the political (in the sense that Readings’ discussion highlighted, as referred to in the previous chapter). Thus I would contend that there is a ‘decision of the decision’ to be taken, in like fashion to what Critchley recognises as the ‘question of the question’. This decision of the decision would take into account the ‘prior grant’ of language, which, as Readings showed, is both equally constitutive of the political and dissolves the opposition between the political and the textual. Critchley, on the other hand, moves straight to ‘the political decision to combat […] domination’ (ED, p.199), and hence elides the possibility of questioning the ‘foundations’ of this (textually political) decision.
Yet would a deconstructive hesitation before the ‘decision of the political’, before Derrida’s own ‘necessity’ for a general form (as referred to in the preceding chapter), actually be consonant with deconstruction per se? Can a decision of the decision indeed be spoken of? Potentially not. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida writes that:

the undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. (FoL, p.24, my emphasis)

Yet the question I would counterpose to this passage is simply this: why is it ‘of obligation that we must speak’? Is it not possible to conceive of the ‘ordeal of the undecidable’, recognise its alterity, while nonetheless refusing to submit to passing through it, with its inevitable reduction in alterity? In sum, what I am positing is the possibility of deciding not to decide, a decision without decision, based on the utmost respect for, and complete responsibility to, the other. Such a decision would not merely and solely be a matter of calculation, but rather an ethical rejection of the entire order of calculation. This, I would maintain, is the logical terminus of Derridean thought when considered in a ‘political’ context, albeit one that the inexplicable appearance of ‘obligation’ in the passage cited above would seemingly seek to foreclose. While positing a ‘decision of the decision’ obviously runs the risk of being criticised as a ‘performative contradiction’, a criticism that Derrida considers and dismisses as a ‘puerile weapon’ in relation to his own work, I would maintain that it is no more a contradiction than the invitation to think the unthought of philosophy. [5] In the following chapter I hope to show that the refusal to make the decisions that would necessarily domesticate the other has long been a defining feature of anarchist political theory, one which would thus make anarchism the only logical, ethical and practical expression of a deconstructive politics.

Continued:
Chapter 4. Journey’s End/New Beginning
Conclusion and Bibliography