I was ploughing through an academic article on the political/legal philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Giorgoi Agamben and their relationship to Nietzsche on the plane to Canberra on Sunday night. The article by Adam Thurschwell is entitled ('Spectres of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida'. I was reading it because of this post, on Agamben's The State of Exception.
I cannot recall where I found Thurschwell article online. In The German Law Journal perhaps?
There was a passage in Thurschwell's article that I found both interesting and puzzling. It talked about the absolute break between the ethical and the political in, I presume, late modernity. I say absolute because the sense of the passage, and others similar to it, was of an unbridgeable gap between the ethical relationship and any given form of politics. Thurschwell says that this absolute break, gap or gulf is accepted as a given by both Derrida and Agamben and is the reason why they have embraced the vocabularly of messianism.
Why so I thought? Is the absolute gulf because of positivism? Or nihilism? It didn't make sense because positivism makes the gulf between scientific fact and emotivist ethics, and so both ethics and poltics are expressions of personal emotions. Nihilism says that our highest values have beeen devalued.
Hence my puzzlement about the assumption of an unbridgeable gap between ethical relationships or ethos and any given form of politics.
Then I recalled Robert Menzies collection of Wartime speeches, The Forgotten People, with its appeal to people in small business or who come into politics as individuals, bearing particular character qualities. This linked ethics and politics.
These people were of good character, they saw themselves as virtuous, and it was because they saw themselves as virtuous, as having particular character qualities that they believed that they were the backbone of the nation, and hence fit to govern and hold political power.
There is no great divide between ethics and politics in this continuous political tradition. It's appeal is to individualism, the virtues, and to the home as the place of the individual with their private aspirations and the ground ground of virtue ethics.The virtues draw deeply on Protestantism (Puritan ethic) and these are coupled to a self-realization ethic that every individual should have the opportunity to develop their personality and capacities to the fullest extent.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 15, 2005 08:00 AM | TrackBackGary
This is a very good post. I think your insight is correct; there is not a necessary disconnect between ethics and politics.
But at least for Derrida, particularly in his later work, his notion of ethics is tied to the Levinasian idea of the infinite, the Good "beyond being," which is a "radical alterity." As such, it can not be reduced to ontology, or ontological subcategories such as "the political." I have to admit it has been many years since I have thought about this issue, but it seems that this distinction is very abstract, and it is hard to see the positive or practical implications of keeping the two categories separate.
In fact, by bifurcating ethics and politics it seems it gives us very little to justify our political decisions in the here and now.
Posted by: Alain on March 16, 2005 12:25 AMAlain,
maybe you can help out here.
Why does Derrida accept "the necessary disconnect between ethics and politics"?
I realize that Derrda understands ethical relationships in Levinasian terms, as an absolute responsibility for the Other and that this is linked to a democracy to come.
Does the absolute gulf between ethical responsibility and political responsibility derive from Levinas? Does it derive from the way that Levinas understands ethics?
Gary
Your surmise is correct. It is because of the Levinasian assumption that the other is irreducible, that the trace can not be articulated in terms of ontological categories, that ethics is radically separate from the political. In that ethics is "first philosophy" for Levinas, it is the starting point. What Derrida believes is that ethics, understood in this way, solicits a response in the here and now, a response that is inevitably political. To bridge this gap, one must intervene politically without assurance, take a leap of faith as it were. Thus, all of his talk of a "democracy to come" and messianicity without messianism. For Derrida, this is a structural necessity.
I am not sure that I buy it because it does seem to ignore ethos and praxis. That our way of being-in-the-world starts from the culture and traditions we find ourself thrown into. Perhaps this is too Heideggarian, but Derrida's whole approach seems to ignore or downplay these fundamental ways of dwelling.