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December 20, 2006
The reception of Derrida’s thought in the 1970s in Anglo-Saxon literature and philosophy departments highlighted its rhetorical side, reducing deconstruction to a practice of literary criticism, the political orientation of which was easily advertised, but poorly elaborated. In Anglo-American philosophy departments in Australia deconstruction, as an art of analysis was criticized as esoteric and irrational. What was refused was the argument was that there is a radical alliance between philosophy and literature---a friendship; albeit an alliance that separates the two in that literature and the other arts can critically decenter the field of university philosophy. This privileging of literature--- something that Derrida shares with Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Blanchot, and others---was what was explicitly refused. One of Derrida’s abiding concerns is the deconstruction of the opposition between philosophy and literature that was trenchantly reaffirmed in the Angl;o-American academy that traditionally allied philosophy with natural science.
The Heidegger and de Man affairs in the 1980s drew out Derrida’s critics, and his reputation suffered by association. Upstaged then by historicism and multiculturalism, deconstruction came to be perceived as incapable of articulating historical making and unmaking of subjectivities.
What was underplayed in the 1980s was Derrida’s political thinking. Derrida was not recognized as a politically engaged thinker, and his political commitments remained obscure. I was vaguely aware of the suggestion of Derrida's ethico-political project around the irreducible violence of discourse and the need for an open, aporetic, and agonal democracy from Derrida's encounter with Gadamer in the early 1980s. That encounter between hermeneutics and deconstruction seemed to go nowhere. I had read Derrida Specters of Marx, and interpreted it as an invitation to rethink "the concept of the political" at "the end of history" in the time of "the last man." However, I became more interested in reaching back to understand Heidegger, forward to read Adorno, and back to Nietzsche to find away to respond to darkened times.
I've only just returned to Derrida as I became aware of his political writings and the way that he linked the responsibility of a philosopher to the general responsibility of the political citizen and a duty to test the concepts we use to talk about politics--eg., the 'war on terror' ; 'friend/enemy, 'globalization', 'security'. The inventive response is to create a space to thinking differently; a space from which an other, better future might arise. This is a politics of awakening as opposed to a politics of dreaming. Was this a rethinking of "the concept of the political" that Schmitt had analysed?
I picked up the Politics of Friendship yesterday. The text ranges over Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, etc. But I see that Mark Banisch has been there before me with his Derrida, Schmitt and the essence of the political. This is from Banisch's abstract:
This paper seeks to suggest that while many theorists over the past decade or so have turned to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, its utility for analysing the contemporary postmodern (anti) political fieldrequires supplementation by an engagement with the critique of Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship. The paper reads Schmitt and Derrida together and argues that in some senses, Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the Concept of the Political is already prefigured within Schmitt’s text. The paper concludes by proposing a theoretical analytic based on the Schmittian Derrida which also engages with the work of theorists of the agonistic political such as Chantal Mouffe. This contributes to an exploration of the utility of a post-structuralist political analytic that comes to grip with the multiplicity of political antagonisms constructed agonistically through rhetoric.
That's interesting---this is the path that I'm starting to walk down in the last few posts. So we will see where it leads.
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