Friday, January 21, 2005
(1:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Derrida Lecture Last Night
Last night I attended a lecture on Derrida by Michael Naas. The first half was pretty standard stuff about hospitality, where he said he was making a conscious choice to privilege "deconstruction as hospitality" over other possible entry points, in large part because of his personal history with Derrida. (He frequently repeated Derrida's first words to him, "Alors, qui êtes-vous?" which formed the title of the lecture.) He emphasized that Derrida was working within the tradition, not against it, and that he was trying to make good on promises found in the tradition itself. (Naas's book on Derrida is about the idea of tradition.)But when he started talking about the various limit concepts of deconstruction -- justice, alterity, etc. -- he said that in his later years, Derrida started focusing on "life" as one of those concepts, as evidenced by his talk of ghosts, of death, and of auto-immunity. He apparently really fleshes out that concept in Rogues, which Naas translated, in discussing the concept of democracy; the book was only published within the last week, so I haven't been able to read it yet.
Life as a concept parallel to justice or otherness just didn't resonate with what I've read -- I wish someone (like me) would have asked in the Q&A, "So, life? Seriously?" Such an emphasis would certainly make Derrida very "contemporary," given the emphasis on life in the Deleuzian tradition (esp. Hardt and Negri) and in Agamben. Indeed, since Derrida is rumored to dispense with Homo Sacer in a footnote of Rogues, one wonders if the late interest in life is part of a rivalry with Agamben, who seems to me to be the true inheritor of something like Derrida's "tradition" -- moving beyond Derrida in territory already mapped out by him. Agamben's debt to Force de loi, for instance, is incalculable, but he never turns his attention to the text in detail, instead accusing Derrida of a "strange misunderstanding" of Benjamin in Homo Sacer and concentrating only on the title in State of Exception. (One small example: in the extract I posted yesterday, the idea that law is always already in decay is almost word-for-word parallel to the passage on "the love of ruins" that I have so often quoted from Force of Law; to wit:
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 the silhouette 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 love of law, come from?)In short, Agamben seems to be positioning himself -- or being positioned by others -- as a potential "next Derrida," which we can see by the easy authority that is attributed to his writings (why the hell else were all of us "continentalists" quoting Agamben yesterday?), the inclusion of so many of his works in the two Stanford series that served primarily as a Derrida vehicle for many years, etc. It sounds like Rogues may be, in one respect, the vengeance of the ghost of the father upon the rebellious son.
An unrelated note on another book I have yet to read: Is Society Must Be Defended finally the book that everyone wished Foucault would have written instead of going crazy with the Greeks and Romans in the later volumes of History of Sexuality?
UPDATE: discardthename asks in comments that I justify foregrounding Agamben's debt to Derrida as opposed to his debt to Foucault or Deleuze. I would be willing to foreground his debt to Foucault and call him a "more or less faithful son" of Foucault, rather than simply Derrida; on Deleuze, I haven't seen much evidence yet, in my admittedly limited exposure. I hope I'm not just being one of those Derrida partisans who see him as continually underappreciated and unjustly shunned by the academic establishment.
