(6:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

UWC: "Force of Law"

Cap'n Pete beat me to it. Here is his demand:

I'm not prefacing my forthcoming response with an insecurity of it's quality, rather I'm calling on Adam Kotsko to have a damn good response. Not because he's studying it in class but because I and many others are not and it is his duty to the UWC to share the wealth of knowledge he is learning in class with the aforementioned University.

I'll do my best.

We chose this text not simply because it was Derrida, but because in "Force of Law," Derrida becomes, as it were, a participant in our earlier discussion of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence." Fortunately for us, this text is also an excellent introduction to Derrida's concerns and methods. He wrote it specifically in response to a discussion of "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice," and so he lays out what deconstruction is -- as usual, in his indirect (and arguably somewhat annoying) manner.

Deconstruction follows two basic methods: the demonstration of internal contradictions in certain concepts, and detailed readings of particular texts. "Force of Law" takes up both of these methods in turn, following the basic structure of his work Of Grammatology, which was arguably the most important text for his initial reception in the US.

Here he chooses to work out the relationship between law and justice. This is related to another text, Of Hospitality, where he analyzes the relationship between the singular, unconditional law of hospitality and the plural, conditional laws that are necessary to give hospitality any actualization in the real world. Here he introduces a further distinction above the distinction law / laws: justice / law. There is a gap between justice and law, and in a very Heideggerian manner, Derrida identifies justice as both the "transcendent principle" and as the gap itself -- and identifies deconstruction with justice in both these senses. It is not a matter of justice as an ideal to which we aspire, or toward which we gradually work. Justice instead represents an aporia, an insurmountable obstacle that brings the normal processes of calculative thought to a halt. In every instance, justice is unconditionally demanded of us, and our response is never adequate to that demand. This inadequation is necessary for personal responsibility and decision-making: if we could simply follow straightforward rules, then we would at no point be making a decision. Furthermore, every decision is in some respect a suspension of the rule as rule, even if our action ends up conforming to the rule, because rules demand obedience by the simple fact of being rules, not because of their approximation to some concept of justice.

Justice is thus impossible, but its impossibility is the very ground of human freedom -- freedom from the paralysis of an unchanging law, as well as "freedom" from the complacency of a good conscience. In this respect, Derrida is very Nietzschean -- he does not want his philosophy to be the refuge of those who want nothing more than to sleep soundly every night. The freedom he envisions is freedom for concrete action in the world, with no guarantees, with no complacent faith in inevitable progress. "The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news" (242). Although Derrida doesn't say it in so many words, it seems to me that deconstruction is an analysis that takes into account human limitations and seeks to free human beings to act as humans, rather than as rule-following machines or as God. Aporia, difference, the irreducible gap -- that is inherent to what it means to be human (in this regard, he is in substantial agreement with Lacan and also with Zizek et al.; the supposed "infinite qualitative difference" there seems to be more of an academic political issue than a substantive issue -- I'm sure someone will correct me on this).

For all these reasons, I still regard Derrida as an atheist, even if concepts of religion have assumed an ever more prominent place in his thought. (This atheism may or may not be similar to a certain Bonhoefferian brand of Christianity.)

Now a quote that struck me:

Ruin is not a negative thing. First, it is obviously not a thing. One could write, maybe with or following Benjamin, maybe against Benjamin, a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one's own birth and death, through the ghost or sillouette of its ruin, one's own ruin--which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? Where else would the right to love, even the law of love, come from? (278)

This paragraph captures the heart of Derrida's ambivalent reading/critique of Benjamin, which ultimately depends on Derrida's understanding of Benjamin's messianism. Both are in agreement on the critique of the self-authenticating pretensions of mythology, but Derrida ultimately believes that the contrast between divine and mythological violence is not as stable as Benjamin would like, that divine violence may very well just be another mythology -- inevitably, the introduction of a new law that poses as unmediated justice. This is what Derrida means when he says, "This text, like many others by Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist or archeo-eschatological for me" (298). (As a sidenote, one wonders if Levinas is susceptible to the same criticism, which is substantially the same as Zizek's criticism of Heidegger in The Ticklish Subject -- again, just throwing a bone to the commenters à venir.)

Hopefully that will be enough to start the discussion. I would prefer not to descend into a critique of Derrida's writing style in this thread; if you have any venting you need to do in that regard, the Cap'n Pete post linked above would probably be a suitable place (I have already lodged such a complaint there, lest you think I'm being self-righteous in this regard).

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