Category: derrida

Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Following Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy.

The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty, establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made.

It also establishes the grounds on which the state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty.

The death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes. Continue reading “Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)”

Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle?

The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. Continue reading “Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)”

Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Continue reading “Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)”

wither marx 20 years later

The Time of Marx: Derrida’s Perestroika by Peggy Kamuf

April 23rd, 2013

ON THE OCCASION of the 20th anniversary of the “Whither Marxism?” conference conceived by Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus and organized by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, we asked Peggy Kamuf to reflect on the lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered there: “Specters of Marx.” The lecture was eventually published as a book, translated into English by Kamuf, and subtitled The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. It stands as a landmark text in Derrida’s oeuvre. Continue reading “wither marx 20 years later”

Žižek Derrida 4 christian universality

Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249.  PDF download

This is how one should answer the standard critique of Christian universalism:what this all-inclusive attitude

(recall St.Paul’s famous statement, “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew” [Col. 3:11])

involves is a thorough exclusion of thosewho do not accept Christianity. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon.

The Christian motto, All Men Are Brothers, however, means also that those who are not my brothers are not (even) men. Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the ChosenPeople and encompassing the entirety of humanity—the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentiously excludes nonbelievers from the very universality of humankind.

Thus Christian universality is not the all-encompassing global medium where there is a place for all and everyone. It is rather the struggling universality, the site of a constant battle.

Which battle, which division? To follow Paul: not the division between Law and sin, but between, on the one side, the totality of Law and sin as its supplement and, on the other side, the way of Love.

Christian universality emerges at the symptomal point of those who are “part of no-part” of the global order. This is where the reproach of exclusion gets it wrong: Christian universality, far from excluding some subjects, is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination.

Or, to put it in a different way, the reproach to Paul’s universalism misses  the true site of universality. The universal dimension he opened up is not  the “neither Greeks nor Jews but all Christians,” which implicitly excludes  non-Christians; it is rather the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal; that is, it cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every kind of ethnic identity: Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews.

The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door. The whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other and also that universal Truth is only accessible from a partial, engaged, subjective position. 242

Žižek Derrida 2 lesson of Hegel

Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249.

What, then, would be this differénce that precedes the ethical commit-ment to the abyss of Otherness?

On the southern side of the demilitarized zone in Korea, there is a unique visitor’s site: a theater building with a large screenlike window in front, opening up onto theNorth. The spectaclepeo-ple observe when they take seats and look through the window is reality itself (or, rather, a kind of “desert of the real”): the barren demilitarized zone with walls, and so on, and, beyond, a glimpse of North Korea. (As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theater a fake, a model village with beautiful houses; in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, although nobody lives in them.)

Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such? A  barren zone is given a fantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle, solely by  being enframed. Nothing substantially changes here; it is merely that, viewed through the frame, reality turns into its own appearance.

A supreme case of such an ontological comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Argentinians took to the streets to protest against their government and, especially, against Cavallo, the economy minister. When the crowd gathered around Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wearing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people could mock him by wearing his mask).

It thus seems that at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread Lacanian movement in Argentina — the  fact that a thing is its own best mask. What one encounters in tautology is  thus pure difference, not the difference between the element and other elements, but how the element is different from itself. 234

The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance: not, Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate through their veil to the underlying true reality?

but, How could — in the middle of flat, stupid reality, which is just there — something like appearance emerge?

The minimal ontology is therefore that of the Möbius strip, of the curved space that is bent onto itself; all that has to intervene into the Real is an empty frame so that the same things we saw “directly” before are now seen through the frame.

A certain surplus-effect is thus generated, which cannot simply be cancelled through demystification. It is not enough to display the mechanism behind the frame; the stage-effect within the frame becomes autonomous. How is this possible?

There is only one conclusion that can account for this gap: there is no “neutral” reality within which gaps occur, within which frames isolate domains of appearances.

Every field of “reality” (every “world”) is always already enframed, seen through an invisible frame. However, the parallax of the two frames is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same x: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist.

We do not have two perspectives; we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective. 235

Žižek Derrida

Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249.  PDF download

Here we get the difference betweenHegel and Derrida at its purest.

Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert the innocent ideal against its distorted realization. This holds not only for democracy but also for religion.

The gap that separates the ideal concept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself.

However, againstHegel, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess in the ideal concept that cannot be reduced to the dialectic between ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,” the excess of an abyss that cannot ever be actualized in its determinate content.Hegel’s own position is here more intricate than it may appear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, one can master the gap between concept and its actualization and achieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowledge”).

Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure” contradiction that is no longer the contradiction between the “undeconstructible” pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” that precedes any Otherness. 232

Actualizations and/or conceptual determinations are not traces of the undeconstructible” divineOtherness, but just traces marking their in-between.

Or, to put it in yet another way, in a kind of inverted phenomenological epoche, Derrida reduces Otherness to the “to come” of a pure potentiality, thoroughly deontologizing it, bracketing its positive content, so that all that remains is the specter of a promise; and what if the next step is to drop this minimal specter of Otherness itself, so that all that remains is the rupture, the gap as such that prevents entities from reaching their self-identity? 232

What if the idea of infinitemes-sianic justice that operates in an indefinite suspension, always to come, as the “undeconstructible” horizon of deconstruction, already obfuscates the
“pure”différance, the pure gap that differs an entity from itself?

Is it not possible to think this pure in-between prior to any notion of messianic justice? Derrida acts as if the choice is between the positive ontoethics, the gesture of transcending the existing order towards another higher positive Order, and the pure promise of spectral Otherness. However, what if we drop this reference to Otherness altogether? 233

bosteels event seminar on Derrida

Bosteels What is an Event? and Derrida

A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event by Jacques Derrida 2007  PDF

Structure of a certain impossible impossibility: what are the implications of this structure, what it enables/closes down, presupposes,

aporia: an impasse, a dead-end street, there is no way out.  Derrida tries to dwell in this impossibility.

In the confession, there is a saying of the event, of what happened, that produces a transformation. It produces another event and is not simply a saying of knowledge. Every time that saying the event exceeds this dimension of information, knowledge, and cognition, it enters the night —you spoke a great deal of the night— the “night of non-knowing,” something that’s not merely ignorance, but that no longer pertains to the realm of knowledge. A non-knowing that is not lack, not sheer obscurantism, ignorance, or non-science, but simply something that is not of the same nature as knowing. A saying the event that produces the event beyond the confines of knowledge. This kind of saying is found in many experiences where, ultimately, the possibility that such and such an event will happen appears impossible. 448

Bosteels recites from Derrida:
The event, if there is one, consists in doing the impossible. But when someone does the impossible, if someone does the impossible, no one, above all not the doer of the deed, is in a position to adjust a self-assured, theoretical statement to the event and say, “this happened” or “forgiveness has taken place” or “I’ve forgiven.” A statement such as “I forgive” or “I’ve forgiven” is absurd, and, moreover, it’s obscene. How can I be sure that I have the right to forgive and that I’ve effectively forgiven rather than forgotten, or over-looked, or reduced the offense to something forgivable? I can no more say, “I forgive” than “I give.” These are impossible statements.

“Be realistic demand the impossible.” do the i mpossible, a true event would make possible in a normal circumstance, what would appear impossible.  If there is one, it must do the impossible.  Not “you can do anything if you put your mind to it,” for Derrida the impossible must continue to haunt every doing that makes something impossible.

There are no gifts.  What makes a gift less than a gift, destroys it as a gift.  Giving creates a structure of reciprocity, a social act … its not simply the going back and forth, its a specific kind of calculation, an equal return, a comparable return, its even further than this, there can be NO knowledge, somebody asks for money, are you giving, why are you giving, because you’re helping out a poor, feeling good for it, or are you giving for no reason.  If I expect a return, then there is no giving either.

NO expectation of any return, (not heaven etc for being good Samaritan, a friendship for a loving return etc) does this mean the original hospitality was not possible.  Extreme limit, it is inevitably caught in a structure of return and calculation.

 Asking the Question

A question like “Is saying the event possible?”puts us into a truly philosophical stance. We are speaking as philosophers. Only a philosopher, regardless ofwhether he or she is a philosopher by profession or not, can ask such a question and hope that someone will be attentive to it. 442

Synonymous: is the event possible?  We are speaking as philosophers. 🙂 Bosteels is not so sure.  Can we only ask these questions as philosophers.  The attitude of the philosopher is to keep these questions forever suspended in their APORETIC TENSION. He doesn’t want to interrupt the suspension, but what are the political/ethical consequences. Suspension is a state of hyper-responsibility. True gift and true hospitality is a unconditional demand and can never be met. A true gift must be a singularity not caught up in any circuit of return.

Bosteels interpreting Derrida’s take on the event

Capital logic, it can overcome many of its limits by crisis, intermittent destruction of human resources (labour power) and natural resources, colonialism.  But there are certain limits beyond which capital cannot reproduce itself. By studying the machine, we could uncover latent inconsistencies by which we can push.  On the inconsistencies LEAN!  But that means there are cracks already in the machine/structure, but for Derrida if there is a disruption, it cannot be the realization of possibilities already within them, cause that would mean its predictable.   A communist movement to lean on inconsistencies, a latent possibility, potentiality, but Derrida does not go there.

Here’s Derrida

In the same way, if I invent what I can invent, what is possible for me to invent, I’m not inventing. Similarly, when you conduct an epistemological analysis or an analysis in the historyof science and technology, you examine a field in which a theoretical, mathematical, or technological invention is possible, a field that may be called a paradigm in one case, an episteme in another, or yet again a configuration; now, if the structure of the field makes an invention possible (at a given point in time a given architectural inven-tion is possible because the state of society, architectural history, and architectural theory make it possible), then this invention is not an invention. Precisely because it’s possible. It merely develops and unfolds a possibility, a potentiality that is already present and therefore it is not an event. For there to be an invention event, the invention must appear impossible.  450

It can not be the realization of a potential already latent, Marx said society is pregnant with latent possibilities, the actualization of something merely virtually possible, latent potentiality, that is also raising a philosophical question

The history of philosophy is the history of reflections on the meaning of the possible,on the meaning of being or being possible. This great tradition of the dynamis, of potentiality, from Aristotle to Bergson, these reflections in transcendental philosophy on the conditions of possibility, are affected by the experience of the event insofar as it upsets the distinction between the possible and the impossible, the opposition between the possible and the impossible. 454.

Myth of metals

If you have iron you will be worker, silver you will be Guardian, if you have gold you’ll be a philosopher.  Realization of your potential, actualization of something in you.  It is not the imposition of an external purpose on the materials.

neighbour

Zukić, Naida. “My Neighbor’s Face and Similar Vulgarities.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Vol. 5, No. 5, November 2009.

Against the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality

Crucial here, however, is an ideological shift from a neighbor in the simple sense, to the neighborin its radical otherness. The neighbor in its radical otherness disturbs; the neighbor “remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes” (Žižek, “Neighbors” 140-1).

Ethnic cleansing, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, and dehumanization of the Other read as the portrayal of humankind at its worst. Complicating Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality are narratives of mass atrocities within which lurks the neighbor—the unfathomable abyss, the radical  otherness in all its intensity and inaccessibility.

Nevertheless, gross violations of hospitality, including massive atrocities and human rights abuses are occurring not between strangers, but between neighbors. The neighbor is one such figure of the Other toward whom my relationship is that of familiarity, common language, and proximity. Underlying Derrida’s unconditional hospitality is fear of the Other—the fear of the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness that transgresses, compromises, and disturbs from within. The neighbor.

on Ž act and Real superego

McSweeney, John. “Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics” KRITIKE 5:2 (December 2011) 41-58

Any act which would bear upon this Real could only be “tragic”:  either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one’s acts are always already futile from the outset), or one succeeds in acting upon the Real, but at the cost of a radical destruction of the existing social order, realized in a radical annihilation of the self (Lacan’s passage à l’acte).

Indeed, just two years earlier, Žižek had realized that Lacan’s model of such an act, Antigone, is insufficient to the uncompromising violence of such an act. Her sacrifice of her place within the Symbolic order is only apparent, because her treasonous burial of her brother remains at the service of, and inscribes her existence within, a deeper law of the gods. In her stead, Žižek proposes the figure of Medea, whose murder of her children, means that there can be no recuperation of her act of vengeance against her husband.

Faced with this disturbing logic, Žižek would soon come to the conclusion that the construction of the Real as transcendental Thing is not only flawed but, in fact, may be a key element of capitalist ideology, misdirecting political acts toward an impossible capitalism as phantom Thing (and thus toward an impossible act), and away from actually existing capitalism and its rather more mundane vulnerabilities to change.

Instead, Žižek turned to an immanent conception of the Real as the internal limit of the Symbolic, such that the “not-All” of the Symbolic order, the encounter with its aporias and limits, is an encounter with the Real that exceeds, conditions, and precedes it. And this encounter with the SymbolicReal limit immanent to things is the encounter with their self-difference: with the excess of the thing over its signification, symbolized by the excess of the  materiality of the letter over its signifying force.

Act in turn is modeled on St. Paul’s notion of overcoming the Sisyphean cycle of law, transgression and guilt via naive identification with elements of the law, attending to the SymbolicReal letter of the law, in order to expose and undermine the operation of its  superego supplement, “the Law”, which would grant it pure Symbolic coherence.

In Žižek’s reading, Paul’s act mirrors the later Lacan’s notion of feminine subjectivation, in which woman identifies with elements of the Symbolic order, apart from the social-superego supplement that would constitute them as elements of a perfectly complete signifying system. By thus identifying with the Symbolic as a “not-All” traversed by multiple Symbolic-Real limits, the feminine subject exposes and undermines the operation of these superego injunctions.

The crucial point for the current discussion is that Žižek thus conceives of act as fundamentally within the Symbolic order, but without support from it: its significance does not depend upon the Symbolic order (and it can be justified only retrospectively in terms of the new situation it brings about). By contrast, masculine subjectivation involves identification with one’s individual “little bit of the Real” left over from one’s castrating insertion within the Symbolic order, such that a subjective act must both be entangled with and be destructive of that order. Arguably, this complex relation increases the vulnerability of the masculine subject to the subtle inversions of ideological interpellation. Thus, unlike Derridean messianicity (as Žižek conceives it), the Pauline-feminine act pays attention to the concrete self-difference of things, placing faith in the liberatory force of identification with a given element of the Symbolic order and its specific Symbolic-Real difference.

kirby bodies materiality

Kirby, Vicki. ‘When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (41-56).

The complication, however, is that to concede the existence of certain bodily facts is also to concede a certain interpretation of those facts. … If we situate this debate within feminism, then those who claim to represent real women without recourse to inverted commas will assume they have access to the truth of (the) matter, as if the compelling facts of women’s lives simply present themselves. According to this veiw, signifiying practices are the mere vehicles of such truths, having no formative input of their own (42).

Butler must rupture the bar that cuts presence from absence (lack), and language from what is considered prior to, or not language, in order to open the possibility of a revaluation of different subjects. In other words, she must engage the mode of production of these determinations, the hidden indebtedness to ‘the feminine’ whose disavowal has rendered it bankrupt. Butler explores the metaphysics of presence that opposes identity to difference as presence to absence, with the aim of refiguring difference as a generative force within whose transformational energies the sense of a fixed identity (as presence to self) is radically destabilized (47).

butler affirmative deconstruction

Žižek defines deconstruction in the light of its own ostensible prohibitions, as if the concepts it interrogates become unspeakable by virtue of their deconstruction.  Here, it seems, he overlooks the now prevalent circulation of ‘affirmative deconstruction’, elaborated in different ways by Derrida, Spivak and Agamben.  There are conditions of discourse under which certain concepts emerge, and their capacity for iteration across contexts is itself the condition for an affirmative reinscription. Thus, we can ask: what can the ‘human’ mean within a theory that is ostensibly anti-humanist?  Indeed, we can — and must — ask: what can the human mean with post-humanism? And surely Derrida would not cease to ask the question of truth, though whatever ‘truth’ is to be will not be separable from the ‘question’ by which it appears. This is not to say that there is no truth, but only that whatever it will be, it will be presented in some way, perhaps, through elision or silence, but there precisely as something to be read (279).