an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017,
ISSN 1552-5112
Derrida’s Politics to Come: Aporetic Cosmopolitanism, Hospitality
and Deconstructive Ethics
Aporia
— the Greek word — Jacques Derrida remarks, refers to “nonpassage” or
impassability, but more specifically it is an event that affects the trajectory
of a pathway, whether that be a thought, an experience, or an event, to the
point of not merely interruption or disruption, but often complete annihilation
of a presumed identity.[1]
It refers to an inherent
contradiction but differs from the Kantian antinomy,
which also refers to contradiction: whereas antinomies
can be resolved, aporias cannot;
instead, aporia means that the condition of possibility of something is also
the condition of its impossibility. Aporia’s potential is
to initiate conceptual ruptures that bring to the surface the limits of
previous modes of thought. For Derrida, “…ethics, politics and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have
begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia.”[2]
This article examines
Derrida’s response to the cosmopolitan turn in ethico-political thought. I
think that Mark Bevir is correct in his assessment that “Derridean
cosmopolitanism” differs from the universalism of liberalism.[3]
But I have reservations about the category of “Derridean cosmopolitanism” as
Bevir describes it. It is true that cosmopolitan
sentiments did inform some of Derrida’s later works, including his writings and
interviews on hospitality,[4]
democracy and
international institutions,[5] animals[6]
and the place of the
modern University.[7]
They inspired his
interventions into current political matters, particularly those relating to asylum
seekers, human rights, crimes against humanity and terrorism. Yet Derrida
seemed somewhat ambivalent about cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, he
identified with and promoted sentiments of a cosmopolitan point of view in the
face of state violence, but on the other hand he distanced himself from it.
This ambivalence, I will argue, is the key to understanding how Derrida’s
thinking on cosmopolitanism ruptures the ethical idealism of cosmopolitanism
and demands a rethinking of both the foundations upon which it relies and the
future to which it aspires. Instead, I use the term aporetic cosmopolitanism to characterise the ethico-political
contribution of Derrida’s intervention.
Since Nancy Fraser’s provocations:
“Does deconstruction have any political implications? Does it have any
political significance beyond the byzantine and incestuous struggles it has
provoked in American lit crit departments? Is it possible – and desirable – to
articulate a deconstructive politics?”[8]
the ethico-political contribution of Derrida’s unique and profoundly complex
thought has been fiercely debated.[9]
Asserting that Derrida had himself abandoned deconstruction, and assessing the
shortcomings of its remaining defenders, Fraser argued that what was
particularly lacking in deconstruction’s contribution to politics was, despite
its claims to engage with difference, deconstruction’s inability to “tolerate”
one particular kind of difference: “difference as dispute, as good, old-fashioned,
political fight.”[10]
However, perhaps it is the conceptualization of
the political, as an antagonistic struggle between two sides with a winner
declared at the end, that demands such polarized certainty from deconstruction
and which misses the opportunity to appreciate how it might rethink the
political whilst also rethinking the ethical, for structurally, the two are not
so clearly dissociated in Derrida’s thought. Such appreciation of
deconstruction can only be achieved through the discomfort of uncertainty and
unknowing.
Others have made the
claim that, after the publication of Margins
of Philosophy, deconstruction made an “ethical turn” or, as Richard Kearney
puts it, an “ethical re-turn.”[11]
For such commentators this signals the point at which the question of ethical
responsibility becomes more pronounced in Derrida’s writings. Kearney contends
that here Derrida’s engagement with the Heideggerian project of deconstructing
metaphysics is supplanted by an ethical inflection influenced by Levinasian
attention to the ethical demands of the other. Simon Critchley has also argued
that an ethical demand is central to the work of deconstruction, where “ethics”
is not to be understood in terms of a Kantian claim to a transcendent morality,
but in terms of a relationship to the other in which my subjectivity is called
into question. As he summarizes the thrust of Levinasian ethics: “The ethical
is therefore the location of a point of alterity, or what Levinas also calls
‘exteriority’ (extériorité), that cannot
be reduced to the same.”[12]
However, what we find in Derrida’s approach,
Critchley points out, is a “double-handed treatment of ethics.”[13]
By this he means that the influence of Levinasian ethics is one strand of
Derrida’s understanding of ethics and the other is its calling into question,
that is, an inquiry into its conditions of possibility.
While commentators have
often identified Derrida’s essay on the “Force of Law” or his appeal to a
“democracy to come” in his later writings since Spectres of Marx[14]
as signaling a political turn in his thought,
importantly, Derrida has disagreed with the marking of any particular moment in
which his thought “becomes” political. In Rogues
he clarifies: “The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of
différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and
limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double bind of the democratic.”[15]
That is to say that a concern with the political is embedded deep within the project of deconstruction since Derrida’s early work on the problem of the speech/writing opposition in the history of Western metaphysics. In différance Derrida presents a neologism. Neither a word nor a concept; it is of an order that “resists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and intelligible. ”[16] Belonging neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense; it occurs between speech and writing. Neither present nor absent; différance is “what makes the presentation of being-present possible.”[17] Neither active nor passive, it occurs in between: it is the middle voice if you like. Différance conveys a theme that would resound throughout Derrida’s writings, that is, an interest in the notion of the boundary as mutually constituting the inside and outside. Considering the application of the play of différance to the play between ethics and politics, deconstruction then, is neither ethical nor political, but “ethico-political.” That is to say that it calls into question the tendency to separate ethics from politics and to subordinate the political to the ethical, which are the conditions of possibility demanding that politics be carried out in the name of ethics as exemplified by the universal cosmopolitanism approach. Such separation is a feature of Platonic-Western oppositions that came to be amplified by Kant’s treatment of ethics and politics as separate spheres and the alignment of philosophy with the former as the means by which it engages with the latter.
Deconstruction, then, may be situated as
neither ethical nor political insofar as it problematizes the very structure of
the either/or opposition. Instead it may be regarded as a questioning of the
passage of that separation that tends to be made between ethics and politics. Central to
deconstruction, I am suggesting, is an ethico-political vigilance where ethics
is not an imposition of an external agenda, as in claims to ethics-as-morality
that would limit politics, but ethics-as-politics and politics-as-ethics is an
awareness and address of its internal contradiction: although charged with an
undecidable irreducibility that stays open to alterity, or to the horizon of
the future, at the same time it calls for the urgency and violence of the
interruptive decision endeavoring in the least not to recommit the violence of
the origin nor to perform the violence of the “worst.”[18] It is aware of this
‘double bind’ that we might also call aporia.
Revealing
the Aporias of Cosmopolitan Ethics
through
the Logic of Hostipitalité
Derrida’s
deconstruction of cosmopolitanism commences with an encounter with aporia. One event in particular conveys
the aporia of cosmopolitanism and it is worthwhile spending some time setting
it out in order to provide the background necessary for understanding the
context of Derrida’s intervention. The text On
Cosmopolitanism is an address Derrida gave to the International Parliament
of Writers in 1996 marking the anniversary of the Network of Cities of Asylum
project. It was originally published in French in 1997 as Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! Much of the
title’s playfulness is lost in the official published English translation,
which could otherwise be taken, in the spirit of a rally cry, as “Cosmopolitans
of all countries, try again!” There is here a subtle play on Karl Marx’s
“workers of the world unite” from the Communist
Manifesto – another cosmopolitan movement that fell short of its promise.
There may also be a play on the Marquis de Sade’s “Français encore un effort si vous
voulez être républicains!”[19] Published in 1795, the same year as Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Sade’s
anti-Enlightenment nationalism expressed in this small pamphlet presents a
stark contrast to the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that Kant has been made
famous for. Already in Derrida’s title there is a sense that what we are
encountering in this so-called cosmopolitan experience marking the occasion of
his address is a certain repetition: we can find traces of cosmopolitan
experiences already passed and, like the movement of différance, we are engaged in repetition but also differentiation and deferral.
The International Parliament of Writers (IPW) is a human
rights organization concerned with literary freedom, censorship and protection
for persecuted writers. It was established in 1994 in Strasbourg in response to
the assassination of Algerian writer, Tahar Diaout, the previous year.
Strasbourg is notable because it offered asylum to the Anglo-Indian writer
Salman Rushdie after Iran’s Ayatolla Khomeini declared his novel The Satanic Verses[20] blasphemous,
a distortion of the Koran and issued a fatwa against him. The question that is
raised by these events is: how does the assassination of one writer and the
urgency of asylum of another open up the question of the status of writing as a
question of ethics and politics?
We can find in
Derrida’s early writings an engagement with these ethico-political themes. “The
Pharmakon and writing are thus always
involved in questions of life and death,” Derrida observed.[21]
In a close and detailed reading of Plato’s Phaedrus Derrida traced the undecidable
character of the Greek word pharmakon — meaning
both “poison” and “remedy” — to point to the instability of binary oppositions
demarcating inside from outside, which characterized much of the history of
Western metaphysics. Like the pharmakon,
according to the Platonic logic, in opposition to spoken speech (logos) writing is poisonous,
uncontrollable, dangerous; like the pharmakon,
the writings of many persecuted authors and intellectuals are considered to be
distortions of the truth, contaminating culture and religion, and therefore
they are deemed improper and evil. Like the two forces of the pharmakon, whatever virtues these texts
may have do not prevent them from injuring.
The case of Salman
Rushdie may illustrate the point further. Published in 1989, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses questions the meaning of
good and evil. The novel was considered by some Muslims to be blasphemous in
its depiction of a character that dreams of himself as the Prophet Muhammad and
in its references to the Koran. It was burned, it caused riots around the world
and it was banned in several countries. Publishers and people associated with
the novel received death threats. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding.
Considering the Platonic logic, the opposition between truth and falsehood is
at stake in this case. Its possibility rests on the axes of the opposition
between good and evil; pure and impure; inside and outside. But when we look at
how the event played out, we can notice that the difference between inside and
outside, as demarcated by the Ayatollah, was constituted by Rushdie’s writing
itself — that is to say that since inside is constituted by its outside, the
distinction between inside and outside cannot hold. Rushdie’s text takes the
form of the undecidable threatening the traditional foundations of the canon
and Rushdie himself comes to occupy an undecidable space oscillating between
life and death. Here the writer is displaced; forced into exile by the threat
of death; forced into hiding like the secret of the community. The pharmakon becomes a very real and urgent
question of life and death that repeats itself throughout history.[22]
Following the Rushdie
affair, the IPW declared Strasbourg the first “City of Asylum” for persecuted
intellectuals and writers. In 1994 the IPW appealed for the transnational
extension of the Network and, in collaboration with the Congress of Local and
Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE), drafted The European Charter of
Cities of Asylum. On 31 May 1995, CLRAE undertook to implement the Charter
and support the Network. Following this, on 21 September of the same year, the
European Parliament adopted a Resolution in support of the Network. The asylum
system of the Network is co-ordinated by the IPW. The IPW nominate threatened
writers for asylum to participating cities and the cities that accept to adopt,
or host, these nominated writers pay a contribution to the IPW to cover the
writers’ living expenses and undertake to provide them with accommodation for
one year as well as access to public services and intellectual support.
The Charter and Network
provide for the protection of the writer with respect to two main aspects:
first, the right to freedom of expression and creativity and second, the right
to asylum. As such, its two basic ethical premises are human rights and
hospitality. With regard to human rights, it draws upon the human rights
traditions in post-Second World War international law and European Union law as
it emphasizes the rights to enjoy asylum and to freedom of expression. With
regard to hospitality, the Charter’s position is less specifically defined,
noting:
…the
Congress denounces violations to freedom of expression and artistic creativity,
condemns the fact that writers throughout the world feel themselves to be more
and more menaced and persecuted because of their writing and underlines that
only a Network of Cities of Asylum wishing to offer true solidarity and
‘hospitality which opens up to the proximity which exists between local
authorities and citizens’, can provide an appropriate response.[23]
The
Charter also proclaims that:
This
new threat to literature demands a new response, particularly the creation of
new forms of hospitality and patronage which consider multiculturalism to be an
essential condition for literary creation.[24]
At first glance, the
Network of the Cities of Asylum may appear to be a cosmopolitan achievement in
the sense claimed by moral-universalist cosmopolitans. The Network seems to
echo the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism, which was expressed in his Third
Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace in
terms of a “right” the conditions of which were defined by “universal
hospitality.” They also invoke the earlier classical Greek notion of the cosmopolis in their treatment of
citizenship as an affiliation to something of a world city rather than to the
state. This would otherwise constitute a significant shift in contemporary
legal conceptions of citizenship in a world that is divided into (nation)states
as we know them today. And further, it may appear that an ethic of hospitality,
of opening the city’s doors to the foreigner, has exceeded the sovereignty of
the state in deciding who may gain entry to its territory.
But what seems like an
innovative approach repositioning power from states to cities and laying hopes
for a new ethic of hospitality towards (albeit particular) foreigners in the Cities
of Asylum project, is in fact the product of a treaty between states.[25] Significantly, the
condition of possibility of the city’s hospitality is its impossibility: it is
only possible that cities have this seemingly principal political status
because it has been granted by the sovereignty of states in which they are
located. Hospitality here is but an effect of the force of international law.
Meanwhile, France and other European states are tightening their borders and
hardening their immigration and asylum policies, especially for a certain kind
of foreigner, the anonymous sans papiers.[26] For
Derrida, the political climate raises an ontological uncertainty in the idea of
cosmopolitanism: “…we do not know if the Cities of Asylum experience is a
cosmopolitan one because the current situation is not quite living up to its
promise.”
Derrida acknowledges
the urgency of the threat to writers and supports the project in its human rights
initiative. But at the same time, given the uncertainty of its “cosmopolitan”
achievement, he uses the occasion of the IPW conference marking the anniversary
of the Cities of Asylum network to deconstruct cosmopolitanism, the Network and
their inheritance in order to re-state the ethico-political problem. When the
juridico-political paradox of the Cities of Asylum undermines what might
otherwise be perceived as a cosmopolitan achievement, in a move signalling a
rupture with the tradition, Derrida distances himself from this secular
establishment and renames it the “Cities of Refuge” in the spirit of the
historical Judaeo-Christian parables of the Torah’s “Book of Numbers” [27]
and the “Book of Joshua” in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament.[28]
In the Book of Numbers,
the Lord commanded Moses to set aside six cities of refuge in the land of
Canaan. The cities were to serve the Israelites and their resident aliens as
places of refuge for anyone that unintentionally killed another person. They
were to constitute a safe haven from revenge for the accused. There he would be
“restored” by the assembly until the death of the high priest after which time
he could return to his homeland. Protection would only be afforded to an
accused within the bounds of the city of refuge. In the Old Testament of the
Bible we find the cities of refuge in the Book of Joshua. Again, the Lord tells
Joshua, as He did Moses, to allocate cities of refuge as a “sanctuary” for a
man that accidentally kills another. In this version, the man must stand at the
gates of the city of refuge and present his case to the city’s elders. Only if
they are satisfied, will he be admitted to the city and, until he stands trial
before the community, “they will grant him a place where he may live as one of
themselves.”[29]
Derrida’s act of renaming is a gesture of
iterability: the paradox of the hospitality practiced by the Cities of Asylum
can be traced back to the practices of the biblical Cities of Refuge. His
analysis reveals that the starting point of the Network of Cities of Asylum is
not a point at all, but a différance from what has come before and what is yet to come. The
play of différance
occurs as “this new ethic or this new cosmopolitics
of the cities of refuge” in a gesture of revival of “an original concept of
hospitality”[30]
is, at the same time, the recuperation or reappropriation of an old ideal that
may be inherently self-subverting; for the starting point is not the presence
of cities of refuge or the presence of hospitality, but the desire for their presence, which is also
their lack. In this present that is not present, there is here a sense of
“…That Dangerous Supplement…” that Derrida had expressed earlier in Of Grammatology:
…différance
makes the opposition of presence and absence possible. Without the possibility
of difference, the desire of presence as such would not find its
breathing-space. That means by the same token that this desire carries in
itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Différance produces what it
forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible.[31]
Derrida’s interruption
of this seeming-cosmopolitan event points out that the very conditions that
made the Cities of Asylum possible make them also impossible. We have encountered
the knot in the ideal; we are here confronted with cosmopolitanism’s aporias. To take it back to the
philosophical analysis, we have here the non-passage in the idea of
cosmopolitanism: ethics has not found its passage through politics.
The deconstructive
approach to cosmopolitanism neither claims a cosmopolitan ethics nor sets out
to design a cosmopolitics, but concerns itself with the identification and
negotiation of this non-passage in the discourse of cosmopolitanism. Now let me offer a more expansive illustration of
what this means. “What happens at this moment…” Derrida explains, “…is that
every time the ethical and the political are caught in a knot, in an
irreducible intrication, this does not mean that they are simply tangled, but
that what seems not to have to be negotiated politically, not to have to be
reinscribed in a relation of powers, thus, the nonnegotiable, the unconditional
is, as unconditional, subject to political transaction: and this political
transaction of the unconditional is not an accident, a degeneration, or a last
resort; it is prescribed by ethical duty itself.”[32]
Importantly, the
distinguishing feature of Derrida’s ethico-political approach (from
neo-Kantian-normative approaches to ethical and political questions, for
example), is that for Derrida, ethics is not a transcendental domain providing
the answers for how political affairs ought to be conducted; rather, Derrida
regards the ethical and political as inextricably linked and ethical duty as the task of negotiating their
tensions.
What
concerns us then, for the purposes of identifying the aporia of
cosmopolitanism, is the violation of the unconditional. Specifically, this is
the unconditionality of hospitality. The question of asylum offers a point of
entry into the problem. To be received by an ethic of hospitality, as the
cosmopolitan ideal would require, would imply openness free of any limitations.
Such hospitality would be unconditional. But the encounter with the
foreigner-asylum-seeker is not one that is generally met by unconditional
hospitality. Standing at the border of the city or state, such a figure is put
into question and obstructed, first by the asking of his/her name, second by
questioning his/her nationality and further by demands that he/she comply with
the laws of the host. In his late work
entitled Of Hospitality, Derrida puts
such hospitality into question outlining the dilemma that it presents:
Does hospitality
consist in interrogating the new arrival? Does it begin with the question
addressed to the newcomer…Or else does hospitality begin with the unquestioning
welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? Is it more just and more
loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name?
to give or to learn a name already given? Does one give hospitality to a
subject? to an identifiable subject? to a subject identifiable by name? to a
legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered,
is it given to the other before they
are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject,
legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?[33]
But notably, the only hospitality that we have ever
seen in the history of the Westphalian system of states, is that which has
conditions imposed upon it. Another way to express the problem at stake would
be to ask whether hospitality could ever be unconditional? An unconditional
hospitality would be a “pure,” “absolute” and “infinite” hospitality, which
Derrida refers to as “the unconditional law of unlimited hospitality.”[34] This is “to give the new arrival all
of one’s home and oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own without asking
a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition.”[35]
Let
us call this new arrival that turns up on our doorstep unannounced, the arrivant(e). An unassuming disposition,
unconditional hospitality demands nothing of the arrivant(e), withholds nothing from the arrivant(e), yet takes responsibility for the arrivant(e). Ethical obligation emerges not from the conceit of
reason or the superiority of morality or anything external to the encounter,
but from the humility demanded by the Other’s radical alterity. Such welcoming
of alterity’s guest is elaborated by Levinasian ethics in terms of openness to
the face of the Other:
The relationship with the Other, the face-to-face with the Other, the encounter with a face that at once gives and conceals the Other, is the situation in which an event happens to a subject who does not assume it, who is utterly unable in its regard, but where none the less in a certain way it is in front of the subject. The other ‘assumed’ is the Other.[36]
The distinction between
small “o” other to capital “O” Other signals the question of ethics for
Levinas. If otherness is alterity, how can we know it as Other? In the act of
knowing, the Otherness of the latter is constituted by certain presumptions
bestowed upon the former; it is to make assumptions or prejudices about
something that is ultimately unknowable to us and to distort whatever may
come. The nakedness of the face
symbolizes an other stripped of all its identity or meaning; its presentation
of the other before me alienates any ideas I might have had of the Other before
its arrival. The other here is unknowable and perhaps is more accurately
represented in writing as (other); that is as a symbol enclosed by parentheses.
An intimate, yet
confronting moment, this face to face encounter with the other is one that
challenges the assumed stability of a self that is capable of forming a
prejudice of the other. To face the other in this raw moment of facing is to be
drawn to the other in a movement that is not motivated by will or reason, but
as one that demands abstraction and transcendence from the self in order to
receive whatever comes before it. Drawing towards the other in this moment is
therefore a time prior to ontology, which, for Levinas, is the time of ethics.[37]
The relationship with the other is therefore a temporal relationship and ethics
is therefore a question of the time of the other and responsibility for the
other. But this is not a responsibility in the sense of a programme for
handling others as Kantian inspired cosmopolitanisms advocate; it is a notion
of ethics that seeks to be non-egotistical, pre-ontological and
non-prescriptive. In the ethical relation of the “face to face,” responsibility
occurs in the phenomenology of reception, not in the reduction of the other to
the categories of the self.
[38]
It is a relation that would appear to epitomize
unconditional hospitality as openness to whatever may come.
Conditional
hospitality, by contrast is defined as “the laws of hospitality, these rights
and obligations always conditioned and conditional.”[39] This is a hospitality that would be conditioned by an
external law as Kant specifies and as the experience of the Network of Cities
of Asylum demonstrates. To impose conditions upon an ethic that must be unconditional
for it to be at all, commits a gross violation. However, as Derrida explains
further, the aporia of hospitality is not just a simple opposition between
unconditional and conditional forms. Rather, like the structure of différance, the two meanings of
hospitality cannot be reduced into each other but require negotiation between
them for there is an inherent contradiction in the notion of hospitality, even
in its unconditional form, which renders it impossible. Thus, we have here a
double law of hospitality, which Derrida represents by the neologism hostipitalité.
Derrida
observes that even its etymology is aporetic:
…the word for
‘hospitality’ is a Latin word (Hospitalität, a word of Latin origin, of
a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction
incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its
opposite, “hostility”, the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as
the self-contradiction in its own body...).[40]
“Hospitality”
(Hospitalität) and “host” (hospes) share their Latin roots with
what may seem to be their opposites; “hostility” (hostiliter) and
“enemy” (hostis). Further, “hospitality’s” contradiction is built into
the very meaning of the word, for the term “hospitality” is suggestive of an
unconditional openness to, or accommodation of, an absolute, unknown, anonymous
Other. As Derrida puts it, “pure hospitality consists in welcoming whoever
arrives before imposing any conditions on him, before knowing and asking
anything at all, be it a name or an identity ‘paper.’”[41] But even in its unconditional ideal, as “pure
hospitality,” hospitality can never be unconditional; for, as an ethic owed to
the stranger, hospitality is conditional upon its very recognition and naming
of a stranger. It is always, therefore, a compromised position.[42] The point is that “hospitality” commits a kind of
violence in its very subjectivation of the stranger to whom it professes its
welcome. To put it another way, its power and authority over identification of
the stranger is an act of violence of mastery over, and subjugation of, its
subject. The problem raised for cosmopolitanism is how can it ever be ethical
if it is predicated upon an ethic of hospitality, which itself harbours a
violation of the Other whom it professes to treat ethically? Has it not slapped
the face of the other before even facing it?
Despite
his admiration for Levinasian ethics and acknowledgement of its influence on
his own ethical thought, Derrida identifies the aporia of hospitality even in Levinas’
writing. Although Levinas’ account of the face to face with the other conveys a
hospitality that would appear unconditional, Derrida finds as its limit the
implication of the speaking human subject as the subject of the face. He
expresses the problem as follows:
In
the face, the other is given over in person as
other, that is, as that which does not reveal itself, as that which cannot
be made thematic. I could not possibly speak of the Other, make of the Other a
theme, pronounce the Other as object, in the accusative. I can only, I must only speak to the other; that is, I
must call him in the vocative, which is not a category, a case of speech, but, rather the bursting forth, the very raising up
of speech.[43]
Derrida’s concern is
that Levinas, like many before him in the tradition of Western metaphysics,
still privileges language and, more accurately, to return to an earlier theme,
it is the living speech of logos
(logocentrism) that has been favoured over the dead speech of writing (the pharmakon). Conceived as such, Levinas’
ethics tends towards a certain kind of humanism perhaps, following the title of
one of his books The Humanism of the
Other Man (Humanisme de l’autre homme), where it would appear that the ego has
been suspended in the embrace of the other man. But as Derrida stresses, “the
other-man is the subject”[44]:
it is from the standpoint of the other-man that Levinas defines the humanity of
man. Levinas’ hospitality cannot be purely unconditional so long as it cannot
resist the subjectivation of the other. Implicit in Levinas’ approach is also
another problem for ethics, concerning the privileging of the human subject
against the animal as the limit of hospitality. Derrida notes that the face of
Levinas’ ethical system does not include the face of the animal that would
challenge the prejudices of logocentrism.[45]
But to sum up the issue
at hand, the inherent violence of hospitality can be explained further by
noting the shift that Levinas makes from “host” to “hostage” as the subject of
hospitality such that, in Derrida’s words, “the
guest becomes the host’s host.”[46]
Unconditional
hospitality requires that the host not only invite the other into his/her home,
but that he/she give it up for the other such that the other may become master
of the home to host the original host that is now held hostage by the other.
Within unconditional hospitality lurks the threat of self-annihilation, or what
Derrida calls an autoimmunitary process.[47]
Kant’s conditional
hospitality might therefore be read as a vain attempt to counter this threat of
the unconditional within the ethic of hospitality in order to preserve the
conceit of its ethical desire.
Deconstruction of cosmopolitanism
requires disrupting Kant’s tyrannical hold on the idea by deconstructing the
central tenets of Kant’s notion of cosmopolitanism. For Derrida, Kantian
cosmopolitanism cannot solely be read within the high-mindedness of “morality”
or the virtues of the moral law that Kant had formulated in his philosophical
system. Rupturing Kantian ethics is to question the tendency in strands of
philosophical scholarship to claim a certain purity for Kant’s ethics, where
“purity” of knowledge is of the nature of the transcendental, that is beyond
experience and superior to what arises from experience. Such knowledge, as Kant
had defined it in the Critique of Pure
Reason, was “a priori, meaning thereby that we do not derive
it immediately from experience, but from a universal rule — a rule which is
itself, however, borrowed by us from experience.”[48]
According to this logic, for a moral philosophy to be pure, its source had to
lay outside human experience. The latter, in Kant’s view, was open to
distortion and therefore it was not a reliable source for the grounding of
ethics.
At
the risk of over-simplifying what are very complex and technical philosophical
categories for the sake of offering some context to the discussion of the
Kantian aporias that follow, we might contrast “pure reason” with “practical
reason” (or the practical use of reason), which Kant had presented in the
second critique as being concerned with “a general determination of the will.”[49]
If I can
state the distinction more plainly, insofar as they both relate to freedom,
pure reason is concerned with a transcendental notion of freedom of the will
(free will), which, being prior to experience, is the condition of possibility
of experience. Practical reason relates to the kind of freedom of the subject
that can be directed by principles and their deliberation to obey the law (free
choice). The two kinds of reason correspond to two domains of law: ethical or
moral law and juridical law.[50]
The latter is given by an external authority
such as the state and has the role of constraining the exercise of human free
choice, while the former, the “moral law,” is of an a priori form. The authority of the moral law in establishing the
standard of conduct for human beings to follow lay outside subjective human desires
and cognitions but derived from the capacity of human beings to act morally.
While this seems like a circular logic leaving the concept of “pure reason” as
only a weak link between the moral law and what gives it its authority, Kant
attempts to avoid the weakness in his reasoning by attributing to it a status
of unconditional universalism expressed as the categorical imperative: “act
only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will
that it become a universal law”[51]
which is then conceived teleologically (purposively) as a law of nature.[52]
Now, hospitality would
appear to be of the order of ethics or the moral law in the Kantian logic. But
Derrida highlights how the a priori of
cosmopolitan ethics in Kant’s system is in fact aporetic. Accordingly he identifies the Kantian moment of the
Western philosophical heritage of cosmopolitanism as its fundamental aporia.
Having addressed the Stoic, Judaeo-Christian and Medieval heritage of the
Cities of Refuge, in his lecture On Cosmopolitanism,
Derrida turns to their Enlightenment legacy and the emergence of cosmopolitan
secularism in Kant’s Third Definitive Article in Perpetual Peace. To
repeat this problematic clause which recurs throughout this thesis, Kant
proposed that “Cosmopolitan Right
Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.”[53] Derrida asks us to notice that at first, Kant’s
cosmopolitan law appears “to encompass universal hospitality without limit,”[54] but then Kant posits this hospitality in terms of
natural law. What was seemingly an expression of unconditional hospitality is
in fact of the order of law.
For
Derrida, the primary problem with Kant’s proposal, concerns Kant’s imposition
of conditions on cosmopolitanism, of which there are three: first the cosmopolitan
condition is a matter of right, wherein right is a limitation imposed by the
sovereign; second, this right is to be limited further by conditions of
universal hospitality; third, Kant’s “hospitality” is a “conditional
hospitality” — hospitality is restricted to the right of visitation and, since
it is negotiated by treaty, it is ultimately determined by law. Kant’s idea of
hospitality is therefore dependent upon state sovereignty, not ethics, where
ethics, in Kant’s philosophical framework, is a realm outside of politics. In
other words, Kantian hospitality is a creature of juridical law, itself a
creature of politics. Hence, there has been a violation of the separation that
Kant had tried to establish between ethical law/pure reason and juridical law/practical
reason: what is ethical in Kant’s system is only possible if it is attained
through political means; ethics and politics are mutually constituting — not
separate realms as Kant would like to maintain.
To
summarize, Derrida’s key arguments relating to Kantian cosmopolitanism are as
follows: first by imposing conditions on the practice of hospitality, Kant’s
hospitality contradicts the basic underlying presumption of hospitality: if
“hospitality” means to extend our home to the other, so as to be at one with
the other, how can we impose conditions upon our receipt of the other as Kant’s
principle of cosmopolitan right does? Second, Kant’s hospitality demonstrates
that within the hospitality of the modern system of states, there is always the
perversion of hospitality: for Kant, hospitality is a reception and inclusion
of “the Other” in which “the Other” is appropriated and controlled by the
sovereign’s law and, for Derrida, law is ultimately a force of violence. This
is to pick up on the argument that “force” and “law” are inextricable.[55] Kant’s hospitality is ultimately deceitful by its
harbouring of a double-layer of violence: it is inherently violent in its
conceptualization of hospitality as subject to conditions, and it performs a
secondary violence upon its subject in its delivery through the rule of law and
imposition of territoriality.
For Derrida, the
Kantian moment of cosmopolitan ethics is one of the most uncosmopolitan and
unethical moments in the Western philosophical heritage of cosmopolitanism. The
predicament of the contemporary asylum seeker denied entry into foreign states,
owes much to Kant’s cosmopolitan vision. Comparing Kant’s version of
hospitality to that of Levinas amplifies this observation with respect to the
pursuit of peace that is claimed for Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan right:
Instituted
as peace, universal hospitality must, according to Kant, put an end to natural
hostility. For Levinas, on the contrary, allergy, the refusal or forgetting of
the face, comes to inscribe its secondary negativity against a backdrop of
peace, against the backdrop of a hospitality that does not belong to the order
of the political, or at least not simply to a political space. Here is perhaps
a second difference from Kant. Whereas the Kantian concept of peace is
apparently juridical and political, the correlate of an inter-state and
republican institution, Levinas, at the end of “Politics After!” puts forward
the suggestion (and “suggestion” is his word, just about the last one of
“Politics After!”) that “peace is a concept that goes beyond purely political
thought.”[56]
In this last line lies
the key to undoing the Kantian system of the opposition of ethics from politics
upon which, in Derrida’s reading, Kantian hospitality and cosmopolitanism are
predicated. For Kant, contra Levinas, peace is something that is to be pursued
to interrupt the state of nature, which is the state of war. It is to be
pursued through juridico-political means; specifically, a juridico-political
hospitality that takes the name of “cosmopolitan right.” What ought to be an
otherwise ethical domain can only be possible by political manipulation. The
political must contaminate the ethical for an ethic of hospitality to be at all
possible in Kant’s logic. As such, the opposition between ethics and politics
cannot be sustained and philosophical purity cannot be retained following Kant.
By deconstructing its heritage, Derrida
ruptures the very ideal of “cosmopolitanism” and questions the desire to
institute anything bearing that name. For example, in closing his lecture On Cosmopolitanism, Derrida remarks:
Experience and
experimentation thus. Our experience of cities of
refuge then will not only be that which cannot wait, but something which calls
for an urgent response, a just response, more just in any case than the
existing law. An immediate response to crime, to violence, and to persecution.
I also imagine the experience of cities of refuge as giving rise to a place
(lieu) for reflection – for reflection on the questions of asylum and
hospitality – and for a new order of law and a democracy to come to be put to
the test (experimentation). Being on the threshold of these cities, of these
new cities that would be something other than ‘new cities’, a certain idea of cosmopolitanism, an other, has not yet arrived, perhaps.
-If it has (indeed) arrived…
-…then,
one has perhaps not yet recognised it.”[57]
This excerpt captures the essence of a
deconstructive intervention given that Derrida had described the interest of
deconstruction as “a certain experience of the impossible.”[58]
Considering the experience and experiment of a specific movement striving for
cosmopolitan justice, Derrida here points to its non-arrival to illuminate the
paradoxes of a present that is not present, a hospitality that is not
hospitable and a justice that is not just. The task is to attend to the
conditions of possibility that would be cosmopolitanism’s impossibility.
Derrida’s engagement with the question demonstrates that, despite the
irreducibility of the contradiction, aporia need not lend itself to
abandonment, for at the same time, it is precisely its non-arrival that is the
key to the ethico-political urgency of the demand since justice cannot wait.
This goes to show that deconstruction offers no direct passage to a
cosmopolitan utopia, nor does it claim to; instead it confronts an impasse that
questions the passage between ethics and politics from the event’s
philosophical heritage as well as from the ethical and political context from
which it arises.
The Aporia of a Politics “to
come”
In
opening a place for reflection on the ethico-political, Derrida’s lecture On Cosmopolitanism represents what I
have been referring to in this article as “aporetic cosmopolitanism.” While it
does not make any guarantees, aporetic analysis at least allows for the
awareness of structures of violence, of being confronted by the structure of
“inside-outside” or “subject-object” and to acknowledge that our task is not to
dissolve its awkwardness, nor to gain mastery over that which threatens.
Ethical responsibility lies in raising questions of the limits and attempting
to negotiate between the tensions instituted by the boundaries. Hence, it seeks
not to resolve the political differences in response to which cosmopolitanism
has recently been recuperated as an ethical gesture. In fact, it is precisely
the tendency to oppose and hierarchize the ethical and political that Derrida
rejects, treating the relationship between ethics and politics instead in terms
of différance.
Another way to think of it, as Rodolphe Gasché offers,
is that “différance recognizes an
irreducible difference between differences…”[59] and it “…must also be
understood as the attempt to foreground not only difference as binary
opposition, but, more important, difference as binary, polar, dual to begin
with.”[60] This presents a unique space: neither present nor
absent it is the space of “undecidability” and within this space of
undecidability, the decision is played out. Différance is also
suggestive of the inherent violence of any decision: for in this play of
possibilities, there is always the eclipsing, overshadowing or suppression of
“the other” in the making of a decision. Différance is therefore a
relationship of deferral, differing or othering. Not only does it construct an
Other, in the production of what becomes difference, but it permits the
construction of that Other by relegating it to another time and another
place. However, “time” here, is not of
the order of “historical time” unfolding in a progressive and linear direction.
Rather, it denotes a “ruptured temporality” where the end is not
foreclosed, but where it is the work of ethics to create ruptures and new
openings in thinking which Derrida signals with the injunction “democracy to
come.”
“The “to-come”” Derrida explains, not only points to the promise, but suggests that democracy will never exist, in the sense of a present existence: not because it will be deferred but because it will always remain aporetic in its structure…”[61] The logic of “democracy to come” parallels the logic of différance as an ethico-political impulse of urgency: attentive to its internal contradictions, it is charged with an undecidable irreducibility that stays open to alterity, or to the horizon of the future, whilst at the same time calling for the urgency of the interruptive decision endeavoring in the least not to recommit the violence of the origin nor to perform the violence of the “worst.” [62] It emphasizes the duty of responsibility in ethico-political decision-making and the consideration of singularity rather than presumption of universality in what guides ethico-political decision-making. Its threshold would be the “necessity to avoid the worst violence.”[63]
Derrida’s notion of
ethico-political responsibility is a demand for an ethico-political vigilance
where ethics is not an imposition of an external agenda, as in claims to
ethics-as-morality that would limit politics, but ethics-as-politics and
politics-as-ethics represent an awareness and negotiation of its internal
contradictions. Derrida proposes, the injunction “democracy to come” would go
beyond the limits of cosmopolitanism defined in terms of world citizenship. He
argues that the concept of “citizenship” implies a lawful subjectivity in a
membership tied to the nation-state or even to a world state that will
inevitably be exclusive and hierarchical in its mode of inclusion.[64]
However, at this point of his argument, what Derrida shares with the Kantian
cosmopolitan ideal, is a faith in the authority of international institutions
and international law that would limit the power of states.[65]
There is here an aporia within Derrida’s own alternative to Kantian
cosmopolitanism.
The question remains
whether Derrida’s notion of “democracy to come” offers a radical enough
critical alternative for addressing the political struggles that
“cosmopolitanism” has recently been recuperated for. Following Jacques
Rancière,[66]
I am inclined to suggest that it cannot. Rancière’s central criticism of
Derrida is that his approach results in the depoliticization
of political. “The political” as Rancière understands it, consists of two
“antagonistic logics.”[67]
The first is the “rule of the police” which is
the part played by those who rule over others. The second concerns the
supplement to the power of the first. And it is here that the fundamental
difference occurs between Rancière and Derrida. Rancière does not understand
the democratic supplement as “something more” as in the “to come” that supplements
Derrida’s democracy. For Rancière, the democratic supplement is “the principle of politics itself”[68]
— without it there cannot be politics. Crucially, what is absent in Derrida’s
notion of “democracy to come,” and hence in his understanding of the political,
Rancière maintains, is “the idea of the political subject, of the political
capacity.”[69]
Derrida’s alternative
therefore suffers two major deficiencies that place it much closer to Kant’s
approach to politics than Derrida had intended. First, it relies upon a
theological concept of the political, which takes sovereignty to be the core of
politics. Second, despite his notion of ethico-political responsibility as the
negotiation between limits and their internal contradictions, the operation of Derrida’s
injunction “democracy to come” functions according to a logic that frames
politics in terms of an ethics that would exceed it. [70]
As such, it implicitly makes a separation
between ethics and politics as Kant had, where ethics is nevertheless that which
transcends politics.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Fall 2017,
ISSN 1552-5112