CHAPTER II JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004) A.

Brief Biographical Sketch One of the most prolific and creative twentieth century philosophers who developed a strategy called deconstruction was born of an assimilated French speaking Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria on July 15, 1930. He was reared in an environment of anti-semitism and transferred from one school to another because of this discriminatory practice. He immigrated to France to study philosophy in 1950 where he became a great and early admirer of James Joyce. Joyce violated the protocols of received academic discourse, a transgression that even the Marxists had avoided.1 Derridas work on phenomenology at the cole Normale Suprieure earned for him a scholarship to Harvard in 1956-57.2 From 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne before eventually returning to the cole Normale Suprieure to teach the history of philosophy until 1984. Since the mid-1970s, Derrida spent a significant portion of his time teaching and lecturing abroad, particularly in the United States, where he has held visiting professorship at such universities as Yale, Cornell, and, more recently, at the University of California, Irvine, where he was a professor of humanities.3 In 1984, he became a director of studies at the cole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.4 He died on October 8, 2004. His death was greeted with both an outpouring of moving eulogies from his admirers and several sharp attacks. The controversy arose because of the destabilizing and unsettling effects of "deconstruction" of our traditional views and understanding of things which caused his readers from various sectors considerable discomfort.

John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Internet (11/19/11/ 11: 10 am): http://www.crosscurrents.org/caputo200506.htm 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, USA, 1974, p. ix. 3 Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (eds.), The Continental Ethics Reader, Routledge, New York, 2003, p.207. 4 Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Derrida, Totem Books, USA, 1997, p. 13.

This was the side of deconstruction that grabbed all the headlines during the 70s - a kind of academic succs de scandale.
Without reading very closely, it all looked like a joyous nihilism, a reckless relativism and an acidic skepticism. But what his critics according to Caputo missed is that his work is an affirmation and fidelity to the philosophical discipline, a love which in later years Derrida would call the "undeconstructible."

In the last fifteen years of his life, Derrida would start talking about religion, telling us about his "religion (without religion)," about his "prayers and tears," and about the Messiah. He would even write a kind of Jewish Confession called "Circumfession" - a haunting and enigmatic journal he kept while his beloved mother lay dying in Nice, a diary cum dialogue with St. Augustine, his equally weepy compatriot. His critics failed to see that deconstructing this, that and everything in the name of the undeconstructible is a lot like what religious people, especially Jews, would call the "critique of idols." Deconstruction is satisfied with nothing because it is waiting for the Messiah which Derrida translated into the philosophical figure of the "to come" ( venir): the very figure of the future (lavenir), of hope, and expectation. Deconstruction's meditation on the contingency of our beliefs and practiceson democracy, for exampleis made in the name of a promise in the sense that it is a democracy "to come" for which every existing democracy is a but a faint predecessor state. This religious turn made many people nervous and uncomfortable but giving comfort is not what deconstruction was sent into the world to do.
When asked why he does not say "I am" an atheist (je suis, c'est moi), he said it was because he did not know if he were, believing that he lacks the absolute authority of an authorial "I" to still his inner conflict. So the best he can do is to rightly pass for this or that and he is very sorry that he cannot do better. It reminds Caputo of the formula placed forward by Kierkegaard 's "Johannes Climacus" who deferred saying that he "is" a Christian but is doing the best he can to "become" one.

Derrida exposes us to the "secret" that there is no "Secret," no Big Capitalized Secret to which we have been wired upby scientific reason, by poetic or religious revelation, or by

political persuasion. The secret that is no secret is: We do not in some deep way know who we are or what the world is.
That is not nihilism but a quasi-religious confession, the beginning of wisdom, the onset of faith and compassion. Derrida exposes the doubt that does not merely insinuate itself into faith but that in fact constitutes faith, for faith is faith precisely in the face of doubt and uncertainty, the passion of non-knowing. Violence on the other hand arises from having a low tolerance for uncertainty so that Derrida shows us why religious violence is bad faith.

On Derrida's terms, we do not know the name of what we desire with a desire beyond desire. That means leading a just life comes down to coping with such non-knowing, negotiating among the several competing names that fluctuate undecidably before us, each pretending to name what we are praying for.5 B. Intellectual Influences Derrida was twice refused in the prestigious cole Normale Suprieure in Paris (where Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the majority of French intellectuals and academics began their careers), but he was eventually accepted to the institution at the age of 19. Hence he moved from Algiers to France, and soon after he also began to play a major role in the leftist journal - in the sixties he was among the young intellectuals writing for the avant-garde journal Tel Quel.6 His initial work in philosophy was done largely through the lens of Husserl. Other important inspirations on his early thoughts include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure, Levinas and Freud. Derrida acknowledges his indebtedness to all of these thinkers in the development of his approach to texts, which has come to be known as deconstruction. 7
Derrida has also had many dialogues with philosophers like John Searle (see Limited Inc.), in which deconstruction has been roundly criticized, although perhaps unfairly at times. However, what is clear from the antipathy of such thinkers is that deconstruction challenges traditional philosophy in several important ways. Deconstruction has had an enormous influence in psychology, literary theory, cultural studies, linguistics, feminism, sociology
5

John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Internet (11/19/11/ 11: 10 am): http://www.crosscurrents.org/caputo200506.htm 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), Of Grammatology, p. ix. 7 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida

and anthropology. Poised in the interstices between philosophy and non-philosophy (or philosophy and literature), it is not difficult to see why this is the case.8

C. Major Works It was in 1967 that the founder of deconstruction really arrived as a philosopher of world importance. He published three momentous texts: (1) Of Grammatology, 2) Writing and Difference, and (3) Speech and Phenomena. All of these works have been influential for different reasons, but it is Of Grammatology that remains his most famous work.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida reveals and then undermines the speech-writing opposition that he argues has been such an influential factor in Western thought. 9 His preoccupation with language in this text is typical of much of his early work, and since the publication of these and other major texts (including Dissemination, Glas, The Postcard, Spectres of Marx, The Gift of Death, and Politics of Friendship), deconstruction has gradually moved from occupying a major role in continental Europe, to also becoming a significant player in the Anglo-American philosophical context. This is particularly so in the areas of literary criticism, and cultural studies, where deconstructions method of textual analysis has inspired theorists like Paul de Man. He has also had lecturing positions at various universities the world over.10

D. Derridas Deconstructive Philosophy

Theut offered writing as a pharmakon a remedy for deficient memory and limited wisdom. Thamus, the god of gods, will have to decide: You (Theut), the father of writing stated exactly the opposite of what it will do. Those who write will stop exercising memory and become forgetful. They will rely on the external marks of writing instead of their internal capacity to remember things. You have discovered a pharmakon for reminding not for true memory. As for wisdom, you offer your students a mere appearance of it, not the reality without proper instruction, they will seem knowledgeable when they are quite ignorant ... they will carry the conceit of wisdom instead of being really wise. Derrida wants the great issue to continue to be taken up today: Derrida wants to keep it (the pros and cons) in play.11

Deconstruction is a philosophical language using a strange tongue. Derrida developed a strategy called deconstruction in the mid 1960s distancing himself from the philosophical movements and traditions that preceded him on the French intellectual scene (phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism).12 For Derrida, our traditional ways of thinking and perceiving the world (together with their hierarchies and classifications) may still be rationally reconfigured
8 9

Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), Of Grammatology, pp. 15859, 163. 10 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida 11 Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Derrida, pp. 25-32. 12 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida

by way of deconstruction. There are many different terms that Derrida employs to describe what he considers to be the fundamental way(s) of thinking of the Western philosophical tradition. These include: logocentrism, phallogocentrism, and perhaps most famously, the metaphysics of presence, but also often simply metaphysics. These terms all have slightly different meanings:13 All of these terms of denigration, however, are united under the broad rubric of the term metaphysics.14 Derrida defines metaphysics as:
The enterprise of returning strategically, ideally, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc.(Afterword to Limited Inc)15 All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, conducted their works in this manner, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. 16 Basically then, metaphysical thought always privileges one side of an opposition, and ignores or marginalizes the alternative term of that opposition. 17

In an interview in 1981 Derrida explains: "deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the "other of language. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the other and the other of language. The fundamental tendencies within Western thought, logocentrism: the belief in the existence of a permanent truth; egocentrism: the belief in a permanent self; phonocentrism: the priority of sound over the written word; phallogocentrism: the dominance of the male over the female paradigm; ethnocentrism: the superiority of one culture and intellectual traditions over others are the targets of Derrida's deconstruction.18 Deconstruction therefore is primarily concerned with something tantamount to a critique of the

13

Affirmez la survie: Deconstructive Strategy. Internet (10/11/11/ 4:00 pm): http://derridaworks.blogspot.com/2007/08/deconstructive-strategy.html 14 Affirmez la survie: Deconstructive Strategy. Internet (10/11/11/ 4:00 pm): 15 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity. Internet(11/25/11/12:30pm): http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24867-merleau-ponty-and-derrida-intertwiningembodiment-and-alterity/ 16 Samuel Weber (trans.), Limited Inc. (inc. Afterword), Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 1998, p 236. 17 Thomas Mautner (ed.), The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, Penguin Group, England, 2005, p.150 18 Deconstruction and the Other, Interview with Richard Kearney, in Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, p.123.

Western philosophical tradition. In fact, deconstruction releases us from the ossification of thought involved in thinking that a favored conceptual scheme is privileged over others. Deconstruction is generally presented via an analysis of specific texts. Deconstruction seeks to re-think at least two aspects/objects: (a) literary and (b) philosophical. The literary aspect concerns the textual interpretation, where invention is essential to finding hidden alternative meanings in the text; while the philosophical aspect is the main target the metaphysics of presence, or simply metaphysics.19
Deconstruction is therefore not just an appeal for critical vigilance towards a metaphysical (conceptual) heritage from the West;20 deconstruction is in fact a defiant response of contemporary philosophizing against the objectivism, rationalism, and positivistic scientism of the modern era. It is also a devastating reaction against the structural conception of reality which presupposes the inevitability of universal linguistic structures which ultimately predetermine the essence of reality.21

More importantly, deconstruction works towards preventing the worst violence. Indeed, deconstruction is a relentless pursuit of justice:22 deconstruction is justice (Force of Law).23 Deconstruction, as the practice of respecting alterity, both begins and ends with justice.24 Thus, deconstruction has been, at root, ethical - concerned for the paradigmatic marginalized described by the Old Testament: "the widow, the orphan, and the stranger." Deconstruction's recognition that everything is interpretation opens a space of questioning; a space to call into question the received and dominant interpretations that often claim not to be interpretations at all. As such, deconstruction is interested in interpretations that have been marginalized and sidelined, activating voices that have been silenced. This is the constructive, prophetic, aspect of Derrida's deconstruction: a concern for justice by being concerned about dominant, status quo interpretations that silence those who see differently. Forgiveness, tolerance, death, hospitality, justice are key areas discussed by Derrida in his writings which make it clear that Derrida is concerned about ethics.
19 20

Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida Paul Grimstad, The Idea of the Future of Deconstruction. Internet (10/11/11/10 am): http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/10/9 21 Ruel F. Pepa, Nurturing the Imagination of Resistance: Some Important Views from Contemporary Philosophers. Internet (11/12/11/2:00 pm): http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_85.html 22 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida 23 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida 23 Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Routledge, New York, p. 34. 24 Diane Moira Duncan, The Pre-Text of Ethics: On Derrida and Levinas, Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, 2001, p.138.

He has even dedicated his works like Of Hospitality, Politics of Friendship to ethical dialogues.25 Hence the philosophy of deconstruction is not aimed at destruction or annihilation or anything negative rather it engages decentering. In fact it encourages reconstruction but "How could you reconstruct anything without deconstruction?" All that deconstruction aims at is to celebrate the pluralities, differences. Derrida is not against ethics but that of a categorical framing of ethical principles.26 E. Other Related Terms and Concepts
In trying to come-up with a radical concept of justice and equality in the field of political ethics, Derrida would use deconstruction to develop his various themes (e.g. hospitality, friendship, fraternity, gift of death), and eventually introduce us to a creative way of unlocking new possibilities that breaks away from the ossified ways of Western thoughts.

This involves an analysis of several literary materials on the topic (usually Aristotelian and Greek mythology, including religious sources) coupled with an appropriation and modification of applicable concepts by contemporary philosophers. In the end, this Derridean concept of justice and equality grounded on philia (friendship and hospitality) is supposed to be a pure form of democracy which excludes or marginalizes no one an international fraternity in the generic sense. Exorcised from liberal capitalist influences, it is democracy enjoyed by citizens belonging to one mondial family (regardless of gender, creed, race or nationality) under a one-world government. 1. Differance
My aim is not to justify the invention of this word but to intensify its play. Everything is strategic, and adventurous. For these reasons, there is nowhere to begin. 27

25

Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity. Internet(11/25/11/12:30pm): 26 Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (ed.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility, Routledge: London and New York, 1999, p.77. 27 Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Derrida, p.77.

Derrida first used the term diffrance in his 1963 paper "Cogito et histoire de la folie." This French term coined by Derrida plays on the fact that that the French word differer means both "to defer" and "to differ." (1) TO DEFER, meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. (2) TO DIFFER (relating to difference, sometimes referred to as espacement or "spacing") concerns the force which differentiates elements from one another and, in so doing, engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies which underpin meaning itself.28 The verb differer has a play of both space and time: (1) things differ spatially; (2) putting something off is temporal.29 In short, differance refers to deconstructions playing field, the creative space, which opens up possibilities to invent or discover the other interpretations in a network of relationships between the specific text and their meanings. It is because of diffrance that meaning is possible. Regarding this field of tensions, it should be remembered that deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralization: deconstruction must practice an overturning of the classical opposition, and a general displacement of the system by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing. It is here where Derrida tries to show that the meaning of the concept is fluid by reversing the dichotomies and arbitrary categories to create an ambiguity/contradiction (paradoxes/undecidability). It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes.
Diffrance can be understood as signifying inequality and distinction, as well as identity and non-identity. At the same time, it is neither word nor concept, thought nor image, active nor passive. Diffrance prefers to play in the middle. According to Derrida, it indicates the middle voice, It precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and activity. Diffrance always implies a playful movement. (It is never stagnant). It is through play that it produces (that which it produces). Through the very movement (of diffrance), a phenomenon that is experienced as present or that which appears on the stage of presence, shows itself as a relation to both the past and to the future. Both the past and the future create a present that is hollow - a present in relation to what is not. According to Merleau28 29

Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Derrida, p.75.

Ponty, there is an intention which always outruns the presentness of the present. This intention always retains the mark of a past element.30 Through its play, diffrance produces what we understand as differences between phenomena. It is the non-full, non-simple origin; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.31

Since its indeconstructability is not due to the metaphysics of presence, it must emerge in the very spacing of what can be deconstructed. In this spacing, theologians and philosophers find themselves searching for answers to questions that have not been appropriately articulated.32 2. Undecidability/Aporia Derrida has a recurring tendency to resuscitate terms in different contexts, and has recently become more and more preoccupied with what has come to be termed as possibleimpossible aporias.
Aporia was originally a Greek term meaning puzzle, but it has come to mean something more like an impasse or paradox. Indeed, to complicate matters, undecidability returns in two discernible forms. In his recent work, Derrida often insists that the condition of the possibility (of mourning, giving, forgiving, and hospitality, to cite some of his most famous examples) is at once also the condition of their impossibility. In his explorations of these possible-impossible aporias, it becomes undecidable whether genuine giving, for example, is either a possible or an impossible ideal. 33

In an interview by Richard Kearney on "Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility," Derrida said: Ethics and politics start with undecidability:
If we know what to do, then there would be no problem, the decision would not be a decision but would simply be the application of a rule. A decision has to go through undecidability and make a leap beyond the field of theoretical knowledge. So when I say I don't know what to do, this is not the negative condition of decision. It is rather the possibility of decision"34

Undecidability is one of Derridas most important attempts to trouble dualisms, or more accurately, to reveal how they are always already troubled:

Alan Bass (trans.), Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, USA, 1980, p.105. Alan Bass (trans.), Writing and Difference, pp.130-131 32 The term appropriately is not to be understood as signifying any particular truth or rightness. In operating within the indeconstructable space, questions have to be articulated in a manner that makes room for un-truth. Internet (11/25/11/1:00pm):http://www.janushead.org/6-1/Edwards.pdf 33 Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida 34 Ethical Dilemmas in Postmodernism. Internet (12/26/11/7:17pm): http://www.articlesbase.com/college-and-university-articles/ethical-dilemmas-in-postmodernism-2259341.html
31

30

An undecidable (and there are many of them in deconstruction, eg. ghost, pharmakon, hymen, etc.) is something that cannot conform to either polarity of a dichotomy (eg. present/absent, cure/poison, and inside/outside in the above examples). For example, the figure of a ghost seems to be neither present nor absent, or alternatively it is both present and absent at the same time. 35

a. Justice For Derrida, justice is outside or beyond the law, as it were, for law is a construct,36 and undeconstructible justice is necessarily not contained by the constructs of the law:
True justice is not calculable, not a matter of economics or an algorithm: Law is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by rule. 37

It is precisely through this calculating with the incalculable that we approach justice; our decisions and experiences, by grappling with the incalculable or aporetic. Recalling Kierkegaards treatment of Abraham and the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling, Derrida writes that the experience of impossibility, of undecidability, provides the moment for belief, a moment of utter tension when there are both the room and the call for something as immeasurable as justice. The undecidable nature of the situation calls for an increase in responsibility in order to be just.38
In his discussion on law and justice, Derrida identifies justice with deconstruction itself. He remarks: Deconstructive justice is not simply a regulative ideal to which real world law will always be aspiring and failing. Deconstructive justice is that possibility of justice always held open in law even as it fails itself. Deconstructive justice is that irrepressible call for justice that is always active within law, but that law in practice cannot finally achieve. Since, on the one hand, justice can only appear in the world through the practice of law, and, on the other, law can never satisfactorily fulfill the call to justice, law as it is practised is both the only way in which justice can become real, and simultaneously the clearest indication of the impossibility of complete justice. Law both exhibits and undermines justice at one and the same time. 39
Jacques Derrida. Internet (08/11/11/2:00 am): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida Diane Moira Duncan, The Pre-Text of Ethics: On Derrida and Levinas, p.139. 37 John D. Caputo (trans.), Deconstruction in Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., New York, 1997, p. 16. 38 Lori Branch, The Desert in the Desert: Faith and the Aporias of Law and Knowledge in Derrida and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, pg. 818-819. Internet (11/07/11/8:15pm): http://fear-andtrembling.tumblr.com/post/10225369076/for-derrida-justice-is-outside-or-beyond-the-law 39 Nick Mansfield, Derrida and the Culture Debate: Autoimmunity, Law and Decision, Macquarie University Press.
36 35

b. Mourning For The Other (Honoring the Other) Derrida claims that responsibility for the other consists in respect for the Other and considers two (2) models of encroachment between self and other that is regularly associated with mourning: Derrida first points out the difference then shows the aporia involving introjection (love for the other in me) and incorporation (involves retaining the other as a pocket, or a foreign body within ones own body).40 In Memoires: for Paul de Man, Derrida also problematizes this success fails, failure succeeds formulation:
Adhering to a paradoxical logic, he suggested that the so-called successful mourning of the deceased other actually fails or at least is an unfaithful fidelity because the other person becomes a part of us, and in this interiorization their genuine alterity is no longer respected. On the other hand, failure to mourn the others death paradoxically appears to succeed, because the presence of the other person in their exteriority is prolonged. There is an aborted interiorization at the same time a respect for the other as other; hence, the possibility of an impossible bereavement, where the only possible way to mourn, is to be unable to do so. 41 Derridas point is that in mourning, the otherness of the other (tout autre) person resists both the process of incorporation as well as the process of introjection. The other can neither be preserved as a foreign entity, nor introjected fully within.42 Derrida suggests that responsibility towards the other is about respecting and even emphasizing this resistance.43

In Spectres of Marx, Derrida tells us how we should remember and mourn for the death of Marx and Marxism - the Marxist dogma machine. In other words, what we should choose to inherit from Marx.
Derrida explains that Spectrality could be interpreted metaphorically aside from having temporal and ethical dimensions. While Derrida criticizes the inadequacies of Marxs metaphysics of presence (the onto-political aspect) which ended trapped within totalitarianism (human rights violations), Derrida recognizes the critical spirit of Marxism to expose the inability of liberal-capitalist democracy to live up to its ideals (equality). The emergence of a new political landscape demanded new modes of representation and a new form of struggle. Invoking the messianic, Derrida claims that communism cannot be erased
Johnson (trans.), Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. xvii. 41 Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, & Kamuf (trans.), Memoires: For Paul de Man (The Wellek Library Lectures), Columbia University Press, NY, 1989, pp. 6, 35. 42 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity. Internet(11/25/11/12:30pm): 43 Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, & Kamuf (trans.), Memoires: For Paul de Man, pp.160, 238.
40

because the goals of equality is a value which is part of the universal structure of human experience. Hence, democracy, justice, and communism could always, through time, undergo infinite mutation invested with unpredictable and new enlightened meanings. Derrida therefore advances the need for a new partyless political struggle in the international arena to address major issues on justice and equality facing mankind.44

c. The Gift of Death45 (The Boundless Parameter of Sacrifice)

Everyone is more or less afraid of the truth; and this is being human, for the truth is relating to being spirit - and this is very hard for flesh and blood. Between a human being and the truth lies dying to the world - this, you see, is why we are all more or less afraid (Sren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, Pap. XI A, 614)

The Gift underlies our more basic nature. It eludes all categorization while at the same time provides a meta-context within which all human philosophy and religion (erroneous or otherwise) takes place. For the deconstructionist, the Gift is that boundless parameter within which all deconstruction takes place and progresses. Deconstructionist discussions have revolved around the Gift and it's implications toward political, philosophical, ethical and religious tradition:
Derrida relates responsibility (ethics/morality) to secrecy, the mystery of the sacred, the mysterium tremendum, through an analysis of the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka's Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History. From Patocka, Derrida gleans the understanding of the mysterium tremendum as that which, when encountered, produces the terrible (tremendum) realization that what is required of us is our entire being. This sense of the mysterium rouses us to the responsibility of making a gift of our death, that is, of sacrificing one's self in the face of God.

Derrida also examines Heidegger and Levinas' claim that giving one's life for the other is the purest demonstration of individuality, an act requiring complete autonomy and which no other can accomplish in one's stead:
One cannot give one's life to replace other's death, since one's sacrifice cannot exempt the other from his or her own eventual death. What is given "is not some thing, but goodness itself, a giving goodness, the act of giving or the donation of the gift - a goodness that must not only forget itself but whose source remains inaccessible to the done. Derrida's aim is to establish the priority of self sacrifice as grounded not upon utilitarian grounds but upon its status as radically individualistic gift. This makes the gift of death not only a priority in relation to the individual's response to the mysterium but now also to responsibility toward mortal others. In either case it requires the individual to face the dread on losing oneself completely without assurance of recompense.
44 45

Internet (11/12/11/10:00 am): http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/2004/Townshend.pdf David Wills (trans.), The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, University of Chicago, 2nd edition, USA, 2008.

Derrida seeks to demonstrate that whereas responsibility and sacrifice ultimately transcend traditional ethics and morality, such responsibility causes one to tremble (tremendum) in that it alludes to an unpredictable future. Here Derrida turns to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling as an exposition of such dread in the face of the unknown.
God as Wholly Other is that which can demand an absolute obedience which requires Abraham to transcend, even transgress his notion of what is moral or ethical. Derrida emphasizes the insoluble and paradoxical contradiction between responsibility in general (ethics), and absolute responsibility: in the name of absolute duty one must transgress ethical duty, while at the same time belonging to and recognizing the latter (Absolute responsibility transcends the general and thereby must by definition remain inconceivable, unthinkable). In that instant of contradiction and paradox one truly assumes absolute responsibility for one's own action. This responsibility to the other immediately propels anyone into the risk of absolute sacrifice. Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit - at its death and finitude. Tout Autre Est Tout Autre deals with Derrida's central conviction that, God, as wholly other, is to be found everywhere; there is something of the wholly other. Derrida horizontally extends the notion of absolute responsibility. Here Derrida replaces the traditional notion of God with the incorporeal, radically individualistic element of personal existence, and in so doing likewise transfers the origin of responsibility from a dreadful encounter with the transcendent mysterium to an indiscernible (secret) encounter with the invisible within oneself.

d. The Messianic Wholly Other Deconstructionism aims to slowly encompass and transform an ever greater spectrum of concepts central to the traditionally onto-theological worldview.
Messianism refers predominantly to the religions of the Messiahs i.e. the Muslim, Judaic and Christian religions. These religions proffer a Messiah of known characteristics, and the most obvious of numerous necessary characteristics for the Messiah, it seems, is that they must invariably be male. Sexuality might seem to be a strange prerequisite to tether to that which is beyond this world, wholly other, but it is only one of many. The messianic depends upon the various messianisms and Derrida admits that he cannot say which the more originary is.

For Derrida, the messianism of Abraham in his singular responsibility before God reveals the messianic structure of existence since we all share a similar relationship to alterity even if we have not named and circumscribed that experience according to the template provided by a particular religion. However, Derridas call/invocation for the wholly other to come, is not a

call for a fixed or identifiable other of known characteristics, as understood in the average religious experience. His wholly other is indeterminable and can never actually arrive.
Derrida recounts a story of Maurice Blanchots where the Messiah was actually at the gates to a city, disguised in rags. After some time, the Messiah was finally recognized by a beggar, but the beggar could think of nothing more relevant to ask than: when will you come?(DN, 24) Even when the Messiah is there, he or she must still be yet to come, and this brings us back to the distinction between the messianic and the various historical messianisms.

The messianic structure of existence is open to the coming of an entirely ungraspable and unknown other. Derrida does not mean waiting for a future that will one day become present but openness towards an unknown futurity that is necessarily involved in what we take to be presence and hence also renders it impossible.46
I am careful to say let it come because if the other is precisely what is not invented, then the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, in uncloseting, in destabilizing foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage toward the other.47

e. Politics Of Friendship (The Democracy To Come)

In all forms of government or constitution, one sees a form of friendship co-terminus with the relations of justice appear. The question of the proper name is obviously at the heart of the friendship problematic.

For Aristotle, there are three kinds of friendship: those founded (1) on virtue (family or primary friendship par excellence); (2) on usefulness (political friendship), and (3) on pleasure. The 2nd type of friendship has something troubling about it for the very order of this conceptuality as a whole. This type also has the traits of the 1st kind of friendship: (a) it constitutes a community (koinonia), and (2) it features justice (law). Friendship par excellence can only be human but above all there is thought for man only to the extent that it is thought of the other and the thought of the other qua mortal.
Translated into the language of the human and finite cogito: I think, therefore, I am the other; I think, therefore, I need the other (in order to think); I think therefore the possibility of friendship is lodged in the movement of my thought in so far as it demands, calls for,
46 47

Internet(10/25/11/4:11 pm): http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/ Waters & Godzich (eds.), Reading De Man Reading, University of Minnesota Press, USA, 1989, p. 60 (see also Internet (10/25/11/4:11 pm): http://jpkc.zju.edu.cn/k/541/4/3/13/6.html)

desires the other, the necessity of the other, the cause of the other at the heart of the cogito. But all thought does not necessarily translate into the logic of the cogito.

Derrida observers that the great ethico-politico-philosophical discourses were dominated and undermined by double exclusions especially in democracy where the brother (fraternity) relation prevails over the name of the father: (1) the exclusion of friendship between women and (2) the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman.
Let no one accuse me of unjustly incriminating the figure of fraternity sublimated by Hugo as virility: The word Fraternity was not thrown into the depths, first from the heights of Calvary, then from the French Revolution of 1789. What the Revolution wants, God wants. It is where the supreme martyrdom pronounced the supreme words: Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity! Paris is the place of revolutionary revelation, the human Jerusalem.

But even if all friendship is in some respect political, there is only one kind of friendship.
The question What is friendship? but also Who is the friend (both or either sex)? is nothing but the question What is philosophy? When men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality (Aristotle). Is this incommensurable friendship, this friendship we are attempting to separate from the classical notions of fraternity? Is it still a fraternity a fraternity ranging infinitely beyond all literal figures of the brother, a fraternity that would no longer exclude anyone? It will be more than a nation, it will be a civilization, and it will be a family. When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measureless up against its measurelessness?48

48

George Collins (trans), The Politics of Friendship, Verso, London, 2005, pp 200-203, 224, 240, 251, 265-266, 278, 306.