The characterisation of Derrida’s politics as a seeking for the “lesser violence” has become an almost paradigmatic interpretation. Yet the phrase _la moindre violence_ appears only in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” and its meaning is not as straightforward as might initially seem. I will argue that it is a mistake to take this expression to summarise the political import of this essay let alone of deconstruction more generally. What Derrida repeatedly concerns himself on that occasion is not “the (...) lesser violence” but “worse violence” and “the worst violence,” terms that appears several times. This will be seen to be as a prefiguring of how, from the early 1980s on, following engagements with Plato and Lyotard, Derrida repeatedly names and elaborates “the worst” as that which we should seek to avoid. In order to uncover the politics of deconstruction, I will examine what Derrida has to say about “the worst” as well as what is said in the secondary literature, for it is also a term around which a number of unfortunate misinterpretations have arisen. In conclusion, it will be remarked that with the late coinage of the term _aimance_ Derrida makes clear his close proximity to the ethics of Levinas and his affirmation of an aspiration to nonviolence in the relationship with the other. (shrink)

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the (...) ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to relate Roberto Esposito’s reflections on Europe to his more recent proposal of instituent thought. I will try to do so by focusing on three theoretical cornerstones of Esposito’s thought: the first concerns the evidence of a link between Europe, philosophy and politics. The second is deconstructive: it highlights the inadequacy of the answers of the most important contemporary ontological-political paradigms to the European crisis, as well as the impossibility of interpreting this crisis through (...) theoretical-political categories such as sovereignty. The third relates more directly to the proposal of a new political ontology, which Esposito defines as instituent thought. Esposito’s discussion of political theology is the central theoretical nucleus of this study. This discussion will focus, in particular, on the category of negation, from which any political ontology that is based on pure affirmativeness or absolute negation is criticized. In his opinion, philosophical theories developed on the basis of these assumptions have proved to be incomplete or ineffective in relation to the current European and global philosophical and political crisis. Esposito therefore perceives the urgent need to propose a line of thought that is neither negatively destituent, nor affirmatively constituent, but instituent, capable of thinking about order through conflict. Provided that we do not think of the institution statically–in a conservative sense–but dynamically, as constant instituting in which conflict can become an instrument of a politics increasingly inspired by justice. (shrink)

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

This article considers martial corporeality in light of the revolution in military affairs and the transformation of strategic discourse wrought by the confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions whose ontology is that of code. It deconstructs contemporary strategic desires to make the military body intelligence incarnate through mastery of code. That desire is an ancient one. The article therefore proceeds by taking military strategic discourse’s invocation of Athena seriously, and re-reads the myth of Athena in terms of a primordial (...) war of the sign to master the undecidablity of the sign. Conflict over the sign’s un-masterable power of engendering is typically played out in sexualized terms. The will to martial corporeality as intelligence incarnate is characterized as a modern replay of this war As military embodiment pursues the intelligence incarnate offered by the information and molecular revolutions, power over life becomes allied with power over death in a complex convergence of sovereign geopolitics with a global biopolitics gone digital. Populated by martial bodies that have long been cyborgs, the digital way of war witnesses the emergence of a libidinality in thrall to Athena-the-wise as digital dominatrix. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to engage with Charlotte Brontë as both a teacher and a philosopher. In her depiction of two impoverished gentlewomen as teachers Brontë is, as is often pointed out, drawing on her own history, but she is also exploring two conflicting contemporary philosophic notions: the romantic ideal and the ideal of rationality, as they are played out in the lives of women. Brontë uses the plot device of taking her teachers into new environments, from where as (...) strangers they can report to the reader on the conditions they experience. But the teachers are also strangers in the teaching environments of their employment and, moreover, as individuals are stripped of all familial and social support. While her pedagogic strategies may not be appealing to twentieth century tastes, Brontë and her creations still have something to say about the issues, choices and constraints faced by young and inexperienced teachers, and the available subject-positions teachers may construct for themselves as they grapple with their own foreignness in their classrooms or other teaching situations. (shrink)

Kant’s 1795 essay on perpetual peace has been lauded as one of his most important and influential political texts as well as one of the most important texts on peace. Kant’s text was largely forgotten until the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous commentaries appearing around the time of its 200 years existence. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s interest in Kant’s text appears to have arisen around the same time, and his analyses of this text continued after the turn of the (...) century. The references to Kant’s essay in Derrida’s texts appear mostly in the context of a discussion of the concept of hospitality. The latter concept is understood by Derrida as including both a demand for absolute hospitality, that is, hospitality without the imposition of any limitations, as well as a demand, in the interests of survival, for such limitations or conditions. A negotiation between these dimensions of hospitality is ultimately required. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s essay, specifically his recasting of the concept of peace as absolute hospitality, as well as to briefly outline its implications for international and cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in (...) these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito. (shrink)

The response of academic intellectuals and political elites to populism is very often characterized by a mixture between outright disgust and helpless perplexity. This cannot come as a surprise, since the one thing that left and right populism have in common is that they consider the elites their enemy. The essay argues that the choice the elites have is either to openly voice their contempt for the uneducated masses, or to help educate them. However, as the contributions of Ernesto Laclau (...) and Jacques Rancière on the topic show, this is more easily said than done. Moreover, to simply discard right-wing populism on the basis of its racist tendencies often simply serves to deflect the focus away from the legitimate grievances of those who follow – or ‘fall for’ – populist parties. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the connection between narrative ethics and the increasing emphasis on historical consciousness as a way to cultivate moral responsibility in history education. I use Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars, as an example of how teachers might help students to see history neither simply as a collection of artefacts from the past, nor as an effort to construct an objective view about what went on in those other times and places, but rather as (...) something that makes ethical demands on us here and now. Theoretically, this paper draws on Adam Zachary Newton’s conception of narrative ethics and Roger Simon’s conception of historical consciousness, both of which rest on the Levinasian themes of irreducible difference, the face, and subjectivity as a position of ethical responsibility to and for the other. (shrink)

Trust has been widely investigated both theoretically and empirically. Whether thought of as the result of a calculation of costs/benefits, a shared identity, or a leap of faith, there always seems to be an ‘as if’ rhetorical gesture which is ultimately needed to explain how actors move from the base of trust to expectations of trust via suspending judgment on uncertainty and fear of vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation — the actors ultimately act ‘as if’ they do not fear uncertainty (...) and vulnerability to betrayal. Yet this ‘as if’ element has remained seriously under-theorised. Drawing on Derrida's deconstruction, I propose a way of thinking this ‘as if’ element of trust. I thus argue that the decision to trust occurs in a terrain of structural undecidability. The latter is thought of as the possibility condition of trust as well as the subject of trust and a sense of responsibility for this trust. The aporiatic nature of undecidability makes this trust an auto-immune trust which obeys the tripartite logic of ‘without’ which both negates and affirms trust. (shrink)

Derrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the title The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In his deconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in (...) its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work ; namely, on his mourning texts written for his dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in his textual mourning. (shrink)