The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0745326749
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
‘comforting’ here in the sense that they are reassuringly ‘of the left’) the point of Derrida’s commentary on the political is that it takes on board the radical alterity of the future as constitutive of the political event as such. If the political event is a thing of the future (that is to say that as an event it is both already irremediably of the past and yet to arrive from the future) then there can be no politics of presence. That is not to say that there is no politics in the present. The
another form is thus determined by the fact that the ethical consciousness is directed on to the law in a way that is essentially immediate. This determination of immediacy means that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself. For this immediacy has the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious tranquillity of Nature, and
and Percennius – that we encountered previously in Rancière’s reading of Auerbach: ‘Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes?’ Once more, for Rancière, the possibility of the political rests on the impossibility of such speech acts. Given all of the above, it should not be surprising that Rancière is no friend of identity politics, which in its reliance precisely on the logic of identity works on behalf of statist versions of community promoted by la police. If
example, the ideas of an end and a unity to Western metaphysics, the pertinence of the diagnosis is not questioned. Undecidability is introduced into philosophy and sustained there by a decision, a decision to read the history of Western philosophy along certain lines, lines set down by Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.7 The initial force of deconstruction, the necessity with which it imposed itself in its early years, the late 1960s and early 1970s, derived in large measure from the force with
problematic place of origin of pas, sans, quasiment figuring a ‘horizon’ of (un)sayability in ‘How to Avoid Speaking’.25 Early in the essay McQuillan 02 chap07 176 29/6/07 14:58:05 Thinking (Through) the Desert 177 for the Poikilia, we had read that the triton genos of khôra eschews the critical choice in the binary tension between a ‘neither ... nor’ and a ‘both this and that’, and that it is (therefore) aporetic26 – yet another word which I shall need to briefly reconsider in this