Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys

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СКАЧАТЬ by Derrida’s deconstructivist account of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, I fashion a theory of political action shaped by Arendt’s notion of “care for the world.”

1. Derrida, Deconstruction, and “Undecidability”

      Rejecting the existence of a rigid divide between theory and practice,⁴ Derrida’s philosophic project of deconstruction—a form of thinking in action—“aspires to change things and to intervene [. . .] in what one calls the cité, the polis, and more generally the world.”⁵ Not unlike the philosophy of praxis outlined within Marxist thought, according to which philosophic interventions do not simply interpret the world but seek to change it, deconstruction can be understood as a type of “performative interpretation” that puts thinking into action in a manner that demands, as Marx writes, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing.”⁶ As a form of “ruthless criticism,” deconstruction puts into practice a characteristically active mode of critical philosophic inquiry, one which is animated by a hyperbolic sense of justice. It is, as Critchley and Kearney observe, a “concrete intervention in contexts that is governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.”⁷ Though it has long been acknowledged—both by Derrida himself and by scholars of his work—that defining deconstruction poses certain intrinsic challenges, perhaps even proving to be impossible because of the ways in which the word “deconstruction” itself “acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions,”⁸ Critchley and Kearney’s description of the Derridean approach provides a sturdy foundation upon which to develop our thinking about this form of “ruthless criticism” in two primary ways.

      First, to frame how Derrida understands the complex web of meaning that supports and structures all of human existence, Critchley and Kearney underscore that deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts.” This notion of “context” is significant for a Derridean conceptualization of human existence because he understands the world as “text,” which—as he writes in Limited Inc (1988)—is “limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representation, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere.”⁹ What he describes as “text” implies all “structures called ‘real,’ ‘economic,’ ‘historical,’ socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents.”¹⁰ Including “all possible referents,” and thus referring to the entire semiological system of signs and their correlates, the “text” is the linguistic system of writing—more specifically what he describes as “archi-écriture” (or arche-writing)—that encapsulates all of human affairs. This conceptualization of textuality and (arche-)writing—with its ontological claim that the present is shaped by a play of “différance,” according to which “language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences”¹¹ —gives rise to the now infamous notion that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”¹² Though the suggestion that “there is nothing outside the text”—or, alternatively translated, that “there is no outside-text”—has garnered much criticism from thinkers such as Michel Foucault and John Searle, it is—for Derrida—but another means of saying that “there is nothing outside context.”¹³ The etymological root, derived from the Latin “con,” meaning “together” or “with,” and “texere,” to “weave, to make, to fabricate,” gives us a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary of the “continuous text or composition with parts duly connected”; or the “whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it; the parts which immediately precede or follow any particular passage of ‘text’ and determine its meaning.” Conjuring the image of a fabric, this is an understanding of “textuality” that Derrida develops from Edmund Husserl’s work, considering an object of enquiry not only as an object in and of itself but as part of a broader fabric of (non)discursive forces.¹⁴ To deconstruct an aspect of the “text” is, thus, effectively to unravel the entirety of this textile, purposefully cutting into and through its various constituent parts, layers, seams, etc. in order to inspect forensically the very fibers of its being.

      Derrida’s deconstructive intervention is therefore a cutting into “context,” doing so in such a manner that he moves into the “text”—as Critchley and Kearney observe—“via an analysis that is at once historical, contextual, and thematic, to bring out the logic of the concept.”¹⁵ This movement, or “conceptual genealogy,”¹⁶ is what I present here in Benjaminian terms, seeking to understand how the “pearl” that the metaphorical “pearl diver” has retrieved and—“resuscitated” in Arendt’s own Benjaminian language—has come to be formed at the bottom of the ocean in the first place.¹⁷ When thinking about cosmopolitanism and forgiveness as “pearls,” for instance, it is not only interesting to contemplate the genealogical narratives of these notions, but also to consider the broader systems of meaning that inform how such “pearls” presently appear and exist to us as valuable entities. To think deconstructively is thus to begin to understand that the very possibility of the existence of “pearls” is dependent on the seeming impossibility of an irritant—usually a parasite and not the proverbial grain of sand—becoming enveloped by nacre and “crystallized” into a thing of luster and value. In the words of Nicholas Royle, deconstruction is “the experience of the impossible; what remains to be thought; a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’; [. . .] a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology; what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.”¹⁸ This experience of thinking the impossible—or of the possibility of something like a pearl becoming possible in terms of its impossibility—is deconstruction, which is the very “performative interpretation” that realizes this conceptual dynamic and allows us to understand the broader context of this entity’s existence in today’s world. Thus, when Critchley and Kearney write about how deconstruction is a “concrete intervention in contexts,” they are describing a foray into an all-encompassing “text” through a study of particular “things”—or “pearls”—whose history and meaningfulness have been shaped by the interplay of the (non)discursive, (non-)present forces that inform their worldly existence.

      In addition to the ways in which deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts,” Critchley and Kearney—as part of their introductory remarks to On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness—also note that this form of “ruthless criticism” is “governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.” Though this is a conceptualization of justice which has notable affinities to the hyper-ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, it is foremost necessary to note that the possibility of acting justly can only be said to take place during instances of sheer “undecidability.” For Derrida, “undecidability” is associated with the paralyzing experience of not knowing what to do when we are forced to think and act in the face of the impossible, when no rules or formulas can be applied to address a well-defined “problem”: this is an “experience” which is “heterogenous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, [but] is still obliged [. . .] to give itself up to the impossible decision.”¹⁹ Such an experience is characteristic of the aporetic dynamics of (im)possibility ever at play in notions like cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Having written extensively on the notion of a “problem,” Derrida puts this word “in tension with” the Greek word, “aporia.”²⁰ Where a “problem” is a “prosthesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide something unavowable,” an “aporia” is a matter of “not knowing where to go,” an experience of impossibility that “separates us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem.”²¹ The characteristic experience of the aporia is the “non-passage,” of not knowing what to do, and it is “the point where the very project or problematic task becomes impossible and where we are all exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem [. . .] that is to say [. . .] incapable of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority СКАЧАТЬ