Aggie Hirst

8/10/2019 Aggie Hirst

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BISA Annual Conference

27th29thApril 2011

Manchester

Ordeals of Resistance: Derrida, Deconstruction, Aporia

Dr. Aggie Hirst

Liverpool Hope University

[email protected]

Please do not citewithout authors permission
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Introduction

The aim of this paper is to enact a double movement in the context of the question of

resistance in International Relations (IR). Mobilising the thought of Jacques Derrida, it

initially offers an account of resistance which focuses on disrupting the roles and functions of

ontology, though a conceptualisation of deconstruction and/as resistance. Such a mode of

resistance functions by continuously destabilising the ontological foundations upon which

any and all ethico-political and knowledge claims rely; it signals a counter-movement to

philosophic-political persuasions in IR and beyond which endeavour to construct opinions

and categories which masquerade as foundational, originary or transcendental. By this I

mean to suggest projects such as that of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss which engage in

securitising responses of binary and opinion construction which offset the perceived dangersassociated with the condition of foundationlessness that underpins modernity. If, as

Emmanuel Levinas argued, political totalitarianism restson ontological totalitarianism,1

the movements of deconstruction can unsettle and subvert processes of ontological

totalisation, thereby resisting the instantiation of any and all (totalising) political

programmes. The paper thus suggests that a deconstructive intervention can interrupt the

processes of totalisation which reside at the core of such projects of construction, exposing

the violences, contingencies and exclusions they are predicated upon. It posits that

deconstruction is, consequently, always already political, and that it has purchase ininternational politics as a means by which such programmes may be resisted without relying

upon any particular configuration of a prioricategories or preferences, indeed by exposing

the violence and contingency of any such premises.

Tempting as it might be to begin and end with this account, if deconstruction is to be

an effectual mode of resistance in its own terms, if, in other words, it is to resist processes of

onto-political totalisation, it must also turn (in) on itself. Accordingly, the paper secondly

turns to the question of the aporias which reside at the heart of deconstruction, exploring

two interrelated challenges: that that deconstruction betrays a philosophico-political

conservatism, and that it risks a political quietism. Rather than arguing away these

challenges, the paper engages with possible responses to the experience of the unbearable

violence of active and direct political interventions2which, I would submit, accompanies a

1Emmanuel Levinas, Freedom of Speech, in Emmanuel Levinas,Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p.206.2Attempting to distinguish between active/direct and non-active/indirect modes of interventions is clearly a

highly problematic venture. The operation of such binaries are violent, reductionist, and over-simplistic. By

using these indefensible categories here, I mean to point towards the tone of those political interventions that areexplicit, public, self-conscious and often celebratory, at which one is physically present, on the one hand, and

the tone of those that are spatially and temporally removed, implicit or incidental. It is also important to be


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deconstructive temperament, at least as I understand it. Deconstruction removes any

possibility of justification, defensibility or shared responsibility for a decision taken, and

thereby makes active or directintervention acutely difficult and painful. It will be argued

that the temptation to avoid these interventions by seeking refuge among the absent or the

dead should be challenged; the danger that philosophy becomes an alibi for self-imposed

exile from direct or active political spaces is something that should itself be resisted. The

paper thus also calls for a self-deconstructive gesture which is itself a moment of resistance

against the subjects self-presence, in other words, it calls for the auto-deconstruction of the

deconstructionist.

The paper concludes by both affirming and resisting Derridas thoughtin the context

of resistance: it affirms the mode of resistance made possible by the movements of

deconstruction, while resisting its affirmation as a mode of thought that rests, secure in itselfand its work. A deconstructive temperament makes possible such simultaneity by subjecting

everything, including and especially itself, to deconstructive challenges and disruptions. The

movement of the paper thus reflects the argument that a position can and always already is

taken, and that deconstruction does not, as is frequently insisted, prevent this, but that such

a position is always subject to self-deconstruction and contends with profound and

unsettling challenges, thereby being created and self-created anew. It also marks the pain

that accompanies these restless processes.

Deconstruction and/as Resistance

While perhaps not immediately associated with the concept of resistance, Derrida deals with

the notion explicitly in a1996 essay exploring the question of Freudian psychoanalysis. He

accounts for the title of the piece by noting that, [a]lmost without thinking about it, I

desired the word resistances, exercising the basic caution of putting it in the plural so as to

keep the exit doors clear. He continues:

aware of the danger of implicitly positing the possibility of inaction, or drawing a binary between action andinaction. I begin from the assumption that one is always already intervening in politically significant ways, and

all the more when is not mindful of this.


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But since then I have been constantly dreaming, rather than reflecting, about thecompulsion that dictated this word to me, so quickly, and I have been constantlycaught up in the knot of reasons why I love it.3

Derrida characterises this intrigue as an idiomatic interest, I could almost say idiosyncratic

interest, in the word resistance. He has, he reflects, always loved this word... This word,which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics

and history of my country, this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia....4Such a

nostalgic and emotive engagement with the concept of resistance, that Derrida has dreamed

rather than reflected about it, may suggest something of a distanced relationship for

Derrida between his world or work and the praxis of resistance, as thought the concept is not

a familiar part of his political lexicon. However, the following will argue that Derridas

thought can be read as making possible a particular kind of resistance, following the

movements of deconstruction. Before expanding upon this, however, Derridasconceptualisation of deconstruction warrants examination.

When pushed to give an account of deconstruction, Derrida responds that it would,

perhaps, consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating,

displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting out of joint the authority of the is.5

Deconstruction is to be conceived of, then, not as a thing, nor as an event, but rather as a

series of movements which interrupt processes of codification and be(com)ing, in other

words, the totalising processes that comprise ontology. In his words, he advocates a general

strategy of deconstruction, whichdisrupts the logosby avoiding both simply neutralizing

the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residingwithin the closed field of these

oppositions, thereby confirming it.6Such deconstruction is always a matter of undoing,

desedimenting, decomposing, deconstituting sediments, artefacta, presuppositions,

institutions.7What this might entail is that for every premise or construction ontology

attempts to enforce, i.e. every is, this process acts as a countermove, uprooting that which

attempts to present itself as originary or foundational, and thereby challenging the necessary

violence and exclusion of metaphysics.

Deconstruction is emphatically not a process of destruction; as Derrida states, the

movements of deconstruction do not destroy the structures from outside.8Rather, they

3Jacques Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 25.

4Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 2.

5Jacques Derrida, The Time Is Out of Joint,in Anselm Haverkamp,Deconstruction Is/In America: A New

Sense of the Political(New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 25.6Jacques Derrida,Positions(London; New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 38. Emphasis in original.

7Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 27. Emphasis in original.

8

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,(Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997),p.24.


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expose that which has always been there, within metaphysics, by mobilising its own

resources against it, that is, by showing the limitations and contingencies which have always

already been present in philosophical claims and premises but which have been obscured.

He does not, then, intend to overturn or destroy metaphysics, but rather to expose what has

always been hidden therein, operating from a position inside it and using its own tools and

premises. This is emphatically not the same as destroying that which is constructed, neither

is it a refusal of the decision nor of intervention. It is rather resistance to the effacement of

the always only ever contingent, limited, spatially and temporally specific nature of such

categories, values and assumptions.

Deconstruction can thus be seen as a disruption of the text which comes from within

the text itself; it turns the rules of the text against the latter in order to show its limits and

what is obscured. In Derridas words, it is a question of remarking a nerve, a fold, an anglethat interrupts totalization.9In the current context, this may usefully be thought of as an

occupation, in a sense which mirrors the occupation of space as a stratagem to effect socio-

political change. Deconstruction may be read here as the occupation of metaphysics,

functioning in a manner similar to the occupation of space wherein prevailing social and

political modes of interaction are subverted; in Derridas words, the movements of

deconstruction are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by

inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits,

and all the more when one does not suspect it.10In occupied space, people interact in wayswhich disrupt the established norms of engagement, turning the rules of, say, a government

or university building in on themselves. Such rules are not destroyed but rather played with

such that they are subverted, their contradictions and silences exposed, their contingency

emphasised, and the violence of their dominance highlighted. Through a similar form of

occupation, deconstruction interrupts processes of ontological totalisation, disrupting the

power and function of the logos. Like an occupation of space, it does this from within,

situating itself within and engaging in practices of rewriting and disjoining such that

dominant norms and concepts are exposed as violent and contingent.

Such an occupation can be read as amounting to processes of resistance; the

movements of deconstruction can themselves be read as enacting resistance of a kind which

mirrors the occupation of space. Derrida identifies the drive and the pulse of its

[deconstructions] own movement, a rhythmic compulsion to track the desire for simple and

self-present originarity.11Such tracking amounts, I would suggest, toa mode of resistance.

For Derrida, deconstructions movements work to identify and pursue tendencies of

9

Derrida,Positions, p. 4210Derrida, Of Grammatology,p. 24.

11Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis, pp. 29-30.


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totalisation or ontological consolidation, which may, as Martin McQuillan has suggested, be

referred to as textual activism.12Such activism can, he claims,be read as a philosophical

insurgency (within metaphysics or the academy).13He continues: deconstruction is more

important now than ever and this textual activism will be affiliated in unpredictable ways,

without determinable presence, to the material processes of the political.14Such resistance

can only ever fail in the sense that it is never completed, an arrival or space of safety never

occurs, but it may point towards the taking of responsibility insofar as it exposes the

contingency and indefensibility of ontology. While it cannot it itself be deemed ethical, and it

cannot lead to the ethical,understood as an existing state of affairs, it can offer a means by

which to resist processes of ontological totalisation, which is, I would argue, a gesture

towards the taking of responsibility for the immanent violence of be(com)ing. This endless

and restless destabilisation of the totalising processes of ontology is what is meant by

deconstruction and/as resistance.

Such restlessness would be very difficult to maintain. It is certainly not possible in

terms of a resolution or arrival in a space outside of or after it, but the impossibility of its

realisation may be the condition of possibility of avoiding the realisation of ontology. What is

required, then, is an endless suspending quathe differing and deferring of differance,and

thereby the possibility of the taking responsibility for ones always already indefensible

position through an exposure of its necessary violence and contingency. For Derrida

it is a question of keeping the play in play, of playing along with the play, of avoidingat all costs the repression of the play.... Metaphysics is the systematic attempt torepress the play, to hold it in check: to create the illusion of abiding truth over andagainst the flux; to posit metaphysical grounds which cannot be shaken; toestablish stable and transparent signs which lead us straight to pure presence.15

Such an intervention is already explicitly politically poignant and potent. This reading is

reflected in Campbells statement that, deconstruction is more than an approach that

problematizes seemingly coherent narratives and identities; it is an ethos that contests the

way violence is implicated in all dimensions of the political and its representation.16In this

sense, it is a highly politically significant intervention. As Dillon comments,

through its commitment to think and not elide the aporetic character of the co- presence of the ethical and political; through its insistence on the inescapability of

12Martin McQuillan,Deconstruction After 9/11(New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 32, 73; Martin

McQuillan, Textual Activism: Deconstruction and the Global Political, manuscript downloaded from

http://web.fmk.edu.rs/files/info/Martin_McQuilllan-Textual_Practice.pdf.13

McQuillan, Textual Activism, p. 274.14

McQuillan, Textual Activism, p. 915

John D. Caputo, Three Transgressions: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida,Research in Phenomenology, Vol.

15, No. 1 (1985), p. 74.16David Campbell,National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia(Minneapolis; London:

University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 85.
http://web.fmk.edu.rs/files/info/Martin_McQuilllan-Textual_Practice.pdfhttp://web.fmk.edu.rs/files/info/Martin_McQuilllan-Textual_Practice.pdfhttp://web.fmk.edu.rs/files/info/Martin_McQuilllan-Textual_Practice.pdf


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assuming responsibility for that immeasurable task; and through its continuousindictment of the hubristic eclipsing of undecidability by decidedness,17

deconstruction intervenes.

Derridas account of a deconstructive temperament thus has purchase as a mode of

resistance; he himself notes this by pointing out the resistance that it [deconstruction]

makes possible or that presupposes it.18Such resistance intervenes at the level of ontology;

Derrida proposes that we must proceed by interrogating, in some sense deconstructing, the

limits of... onto-theological concepts.19It would be tempting to end here, to advocate this

form of textual activism which provides an account, not to say alibi, which satisfies the

demand that one enacts resistance. However, deconstruction itself is not immune from the

experience of aporia, and cannot but, if it is to resist the temptation to self-exempt, and

thereby engage in practices of totalisation, turn (in) on itself.

Aporias of Deconstruction and/as Resistance

The deconstructive tradition with which Jacques Derrida is associated has frequently been

accused of being inactive, nihilistic, or useless as regards the business of analysing and

taking positions in ethico-political spheres. Its use as a mode of resistance is, consequently,

subject to challenge. Richard Rorty, for instance, contrasts it with the work of those like

Mill, Dewey and Rawls... whose work fulfils primarily public purposes, claiming it is not

politically consequential.20He explains that there is considerable hostility towards Derrida

in academic circles; he is taken to be a frivolous and cynical despiser of common sense and

traditional democratic values by members of the Anglophone philosophical community,

many of whom attempt to excommunicate Derrida from the philosophical profession.21

Immanent to such challenges is a concern with the destabilising implications of Derridas

thought. David Campbell recounts the accusation that by questioning in a critical spirit all

17Michael Dillon, Another Justice,Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1999), p. 166.

18Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 30.

19Jacques Derrida, in Paul Patton and Terry Smith, (eds.) Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged, The

Sydney Seminars(Sydney, Power Publications, 2006), p. 117.20

Richard Rorty, Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,in Chantal Mouffe (ed.),Deconstruction andPragmatism (New York; London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16.21

Rorty, Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,p. 13.


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that is involved in the positing of the universal, a dangerous and licentious relativism is

celebrated.22Similarly, as John Caputo comments,

many people associate deconstruction with the end of philosophy with adestructive attitude towards texts and traditions and truth, towards the most

honourable names in the philosophical heritage.23

Derrida thus appears to be viewed by many as an antagonistic and disruptive figure whose

interventions risk undermining the very roots of the philosophical tradition.

At the heart of these objections resides the assumption that the disruption of

foundational premises, for which Derrida is known, risks a descent into relativism; in the

absence of stable ontological points of reference, ethico-political claims can, it is suggested,

no longer be made. Such apprehension is in evidence amongst many in the discipline of IR.

Robert Keohane, for instance, objects to the notion that we should happily accept theexistence of multiple incommensurable epistemologies, each equally valid. Such a view

seems to me to lead away from our knowledge of the external world, and ultimately to a sort

of nihilism.24He continues:

I fear that many feminist theorists of international relations may follow the currentlyfashionable path of fragmenting epistemology, denying the possibility of socialscience. But I think this would be an intellectual and moral disaster... [because] in aworld of radical inequality, relativist resignation reinforces the status quo.25

For Keohane, a problematisation of epistemology appears to lead to a situation whereinmorality perishes, a relativist space wherein one is resigned to the status quo. This is

because, in Campbells words, the

end of philosophy the problematic turn that signifies, among otherdevelopments, the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics and its many offspring appears to pose something of a hurdle for thinking through the ethical challenges ofour era. Not least of these obstacles is the view that in the wake of the Heideggeriancritique, the ground for moral theory has been removed, because the ethosof moralphilosophy cannot remain once the logosof metaphysics has gone.26

Apprehension of this kind is also in evidence in Ken Booths invocation of Richard A.Wilsons analogy: Rights without a metanarrative are like a car without seat-belts; on hitting

22Campbell,National Deconstruction,p. 198.

23John D. Caputo,Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, (New York: Fordham

University Press, 2006),p. 4.24

Robert Keohane, International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint, Millennium, Vol.

18, No. 2 (1989), p. 240.25

Keohane, International Relations Theory, p. 250.26

David Campbell, The Deterritorialization of Responsibility, in Campbell, D. and Shapiro, M., (eds.)MoralSpaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p.

30.


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the first bump with ontological implications, the passengers safety is jeopardised.27Here,

the problematisation of ontology is noted for undermining the safety of those wishing to

engage in knowledge claims. In this account, while a fixed or stable set of ontological

premises would serve to secure the subject, disrupting or undermining these renders

him/her manifestly unsafe. The fear associated with this lack of safety seems to be related to

the possibility of knowledge and judgement: as Booth notes elsewhere, such thought offers

no escape from might is right.28

Such a fear of relativism, licence or the accession of the logic of might is right

highlights a fear that, without a sense of the good, immobilisation occurs. These objections

can be dealt with by noting that nothing in the movements of deconstruction prevents one

from making a decision and taking a position, indeed the decision must be taken in all its

undecidability. According to Derrida, there is no decision nor responsibility without the testof aporia or undecidability.29As Martin Hagglund notes, there is no opposition between

undecidability and decisions in Derridas thinking. On the contrary, it is because the future

cannot be decided in advance that one has to make decisions.30And this argument holds;

provided one goes eyeball to eyeball with undecidability, stares it in the face (literally), looks

into that abyss, and then makes that leap, that is, gives itself up to the impossible

decision,31the undermining of ontology does not result in immobilisation, relativism or

nihilism. In short, the absence of foundations or metanarratives does not lead to political or

philosophical indifference or relativism; the absence of foundations does not mean thatanything goes, but rather that each and every decision must be taken, and must be taken

responsibility for without recourse to any justificatory stories of rights, philosophies or

traditions. It has, however, also been suggested that such a deconstructive position obscures

a philosophic-political conservatism, that such an eyeball to eyeball encounter is forsaken in

favour of textual play, and that this results in a political quietism of the sort thatresults in

silent complicities. Such charges demand attention.

27Ken Booth, (ed.), Critical Security Studies and WorldPolitics (Boulder; London: Lynne Reinner, 2005), p.

270.28

Ken Booth, Security and Emancipation,Review of International Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1991), p. 316.29

Jacques Derrida, Intellectual Courage: An interview by Thomas Assheuer, http://culturemachine.tees.

ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/art_res.htm#derr.30

Martin Hagglund, The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas,Diacritics, Vol. 34,No. 1 (2004), p. 62.31

Caputo,Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 137.


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Philosophico-Political Conservatism

Many commentators have accused the deconstructive tradition of having conservative

propensities. Eagleton, for instance, claims that deconstruction undermines possibilities for

resistance because it betrays an anarchistic suspicion of institutionality as such, and ignoresthe extent to which a certain provisional stability of identity is essential not only for

psychological well-being but for revolutionary political agency.32The consequence of this,

according to Zavarzadeh and Morton, is that deconstruction betrays a conservatising

tendency; it amounts to a rather sophisticated reproduction of dominant values.33

To begin to trace this possibility, it is pertinent to examine, if this is indeed possible,

how deconstruction functions. There are, it would seem, certain features of deconstruction

which rely upon traditional modes and concepts of thought, as Derrida himself identified.

Deconstruction occurs from an aporetic and contradictory space; it is subject to a double

bind in light of which, and as a consequence of which, it moves. Derrida describes this

condition by proposing that the hyperanalyticism with which I identify deconstruction is a

double gesture in this regard, double and contradictory, doubly bound, which is to say,

bound/unbound in what one can call a double bind or double constraint. On the one hand,

he continues, it is bound to inheritand take inspiration from [the] Enlightenment... within

both the reason of a transcendental phenomenology as well as within psychoanalytic

reason... [and] within the existential analytic ofDasein..., while on the other it is bound to

analyze tirelessly the resistance that still clingsto the thematic of the simple and the

indivisible origin, to oppositional logic... and to all that which, by repeating the origin,

attempts constantly to reappropriate, restitute, or reconstitute....34In short, deconstruction

is caught in the bind of having to mobilise precisely the philosophical nodes and rules it

seeks to challenge in order to track and unsettle modes of thought and resistance which

totalise:

In order to prevent the critique of originarism in its transcendental or ontological,

analytic or dialectical form from yielding... to empiricism or positivism, it wasnecessary to accede, in a still more radical and analytic fashion, to the traditionaldemand, to the very law of that which had just been deconstructed: whence theimpossible concepts, the quasi-concepts, the concepts I have called quasi-

transcendentals, such as arche-trace or arche-writing...35

32Terry Eagleton, cited in David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-critique

(Cambridge; London: MIT Press, 2004), p. 209.33

Masud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 206.34Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 35.

35Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 29.


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This raises the question of whether this leaves too much intact, whether deconstructions

reliance upon precisely the traditional, violent categories and modes of thought it seeks to

destabilise amounts to a reformism rather than radical challenge to metaphysics.

Further conservatising tendencies can be perceived in other features of Derridasthought. There are several ways in which teleological or totalising categories may be seen to

operate within it, in spite of his having so powerfully problematised them. This may firstly be

perceived in his use of the notion of perfectibility, in particular in relation to democracy

and laws. In the context of the laws he claims, we can change them, we improve them, we

want to improve the, we can improve them.36Similarly, he states:

we have to change the law, improve the law, and there is an infinite progress to beperformed, to be achieved in that respect. I love the process of perfectibility, because

it is marked by the context of the eighteenth century, theAufklarung. It is often thecase that people would like to oppose this period of deconstruction to theEnlightenment. No, I am for the Enlightenment, Im for progress, Im aprogressivist. I think the law is perfectible and we can improve the law.37

Such a stance would appear to uphold and consolidate teleological and Westerncentric

features of Enlightenment thought.

The question of faith here also warrants mention, specifically in terms of the question

of the messianic. While Derrida is clear that he intends the notion to function without the

promise of a known or anticipated arrivant, a messiah, his use of the term cannot be entirely

dissociated from this heritage. Derrida claims that he will never be ready to renounce a

certain emancipatory and messianicaffirmation, a certain experience of the promise that

one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious

determination, from any messianism.38This demonstrates Derridas intention to empty out

the onto-theological dimensions of the messianic, but whether or not he succeeds finally in

this may not be certain. Indeed, it may be justifiable to suggest that this amounts to a

substitution of an explicitly non-secular messianism for a secular movement which

nevertheless functions in precisely the same manner. This poses the question of whether the

attempt to liberate messianism from religious dogma may not be enough to ensure that it is

not rendered indistinguishable from a messianism with the promise of a messiah. In other

words, in a similar manner to the performance of strategic essentialism amounting simply to

essentialism given its status as a performative endeavour, it may be suggested that

36Jacques Derrida, Justice, Colonisation, Translation, in Patton and Smith, (eds.)Jacques Derrida,p. 87.

37Jacques Derrida, Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility, in Patton and Smith (eds.) Jacques Derrida, pp.

99-100.38Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International

(New York; London: Routledge, 2006),p. 89.


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messianicity without the messiah leans towards the reassurance of the promise of the

resolution brought by the expected and known arrivant.

The issue of the conservatism of Derridas messianicity is especially significant in the

context of resistance. It suggests, perhaps, a certain suspension of action, a certain tendencyto await rather than intervene. According to Marcel Sarot and Wessel Stocker,

the activism that is characteristic of modernity has to be abandoned, or at leastsuspended. What is required is simply an openness to receive the supplement to theexisting law (and it is this supplement that is the concern of deconstruction). Hereinlies a passive moment. The new, or the other, is something that in the first instancewe cannot bring about ourselves. It appears to us, it comes, or in other words: it ismessianic.39

Such passivity may be at odds with the imperative to struggle against processes of

totalisation; the restlessness of deconstruction and the awaiting of a messianic promise, evenif the identity of the arrivant is unknown and unknowable, seem to be of substantively

different tones.

Such questions may also be raised in the context of Derridas commentary relating to

the Kantian regulative idea. The concept of the to come, the messianic promise, has been

characterised by certain commentators as closely resembling the regulative idea. For

instance, Giovanna Borradori states to Derrida that his notion of justice to come sounds like

a regulative idea, though I know you do not like this expression...40In Force of Law

Derrida broaches exactly this question, stating:

I would hesitate to assimilate too quickly this idea of justice to a regulative idea inthe Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to other horizons of the same type...One of the reasons Im keeping such a distance from all these horizons from theKantian regulative idea or from the messianic advent... is that they are, precisely,horizons.41

Similarly, Derrida insists that to the regulative Idea in the Kantian sense... I would not want

the idea of a democracy to come to be reduced.42The problem with such a notion is, as

Beardsworth notes,

the content of this Idea necessarily finds form in the form of universality. This formalso reduces ethical orientation to an easily rehearsed programme of judgement. By

39Marcel Sarot and Wessel Stoker (eds.),Religion and the Good Life (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), p.

218.40

Giovanna Borradori, Autoimmunity, in Borradori, G., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with

Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida(Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 133.41

Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M., and

Carlson, D. G., (eds.),Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), p.24.42

Jacques Derrida,Rogues: Two Essays on Reason(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 83.


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making the principle of ethics universality, Kant banishes, in the name of ethics, theriskof ethical judgement... the very condition of ethical orientation.43

This means, he continues, that in the very name of less violence (the regulative Idea of

freedom as a horizon to time and space), Kant ends up being violent by refusing a necessary

relation between law and violence.44This suggests that the mobilisation of the regulative

idea imposes a universalising foreclosure which removes the condition of possibility of

taking the undecidable decision and thereby gesturing towards the taking of responsibility

for the decision; recourse to a known, stable universal principle necessarily defaults on

responsibility.

However, it may be that such a reliance is at work in Derridas thought. He states:

the regulative idea remains, for lack of anything better... a last resort. Although such a last

resort or final recourse risks becoming an alibi, it retains a certain dignity.45

This suggeststhat Derrida saw some purchase to the regulative idea. Significantly, however, Derrida

phrases his possible mobilisation of the concept as a temptation or slip; he states: I cannot

swear that I will not one day give in to it.46This appears to suggest that he feels himself

tempted to resort, as a last resort, to this concept. This sentiment is echoed elsewhere:

For lack of anything better, if we can say this about a regulative idea, the regulativeidea remains perhaps an ultimate reservation. Though such a last recourse risksbecoming an alibi, it retains a certain dignity. I cannot swear that I will not one daygive into it.47

This statement demonstrates the will to resist which, I have argued, resides at the core of the

deconstructive project, but also, crucially, that Derrida felt himself at risk of giving in to the

security offered by a concept like the regulative idea. That Derrida appears to have felt,

towards the end of his life, unsure as to whether he would not slip into the use of such an

alibi demonstrates the profundity of this struggle. This may be said to amount to a

recognition of the possibility of a slip from the deconstructive resistance his thought enacts

through the utilisation of the notion of the regulative idea. Thus the notion that elements of

Derridas thought are closely tied to conservative features of Enlightenment and

metaphysical thought may be difficult to deny. Such connections may be one reason why

Derridas thought has been accused of conservatism.48

43Richard Beardsworth,Derrida & the Political(London; New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 64.

44Beardsworth,Derrida & the Political, p. 69.

45Derrida,Rogues, p. 83.

46Derrida,Rogues, p. 83.

47Derrida, Autoimmunity, pp. 133-134.

48It is beyond the scope of the current paper, but an examination of the ways in which, paradoxically, it is a

renunciation of precisely the values of reason, rights and metanarratives which reside at the core of

Enlightenment thought, indeed the Western philosophical tradition more broadly, that have led others accusedeconstruction of conservatism.


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Political Quietism

In addition to charges of conservatism, it has also been claimed that the deconstructive

temperament leads to political quietism or ethico-political immobilisation. Eagleton has

argued that deconstructions abyssal spiral of ironies... is commonly coupled with a politicalquietism or reformism,49which leaves its adherents too drearily enamoured of closure to

do the committee work, photocopy the leaflets and organize the food supplies.50Similarly,

Derridas thought has, as Catherine Zuckert demonstrates, been charged with depriving his

readers of the capacity to think, much less act on their own behalf. This means, she

continues, that we may be freedfromcomplete domination, but we are not free to do

much.51Part of the reason for this immobilisation is, it has been suggested, that Derrida

privileges the realm of philosophy, and reads the real world solely in its terms. According to

Michel Foucault, Derridas thought exhibits a profound philosophical interiority,52

in whichthe latter presides over a reduction of discursive practices to textual traces....53Such textual

interiority suggests a transgression insofar as the external world becomes subsumed beneath

it, and textual play takes precedence over engagements and encounters of realworld

politics.

Such a challenge cannot simply be dismissed; it is, perhaps, not inaccurate to suggest

that deconstructions restless destabilisation of foundations and points of reference from

where the good, ethical or emancipatory may be inferred renders highly problematic an

engagement with emancipatorycounter practices because such practices, like all practices,

cannot be defensible, are limitlessly violent and deconstructible . The deconstructive position

emphasises the limitless and irredeemable violence of any and all politics and interventions.

Indeed, this is its mode of resistance: it resists the foreclosure of any and all ontological

categories which are the condition of knowledge about the good. It also highlights the

indefensibility of claims to lesser violence, both because this is unknowable and because it

legitimates actions which bypass the irreducible undecidability of the decision and thereby

default on the endless and unrealisable task of attempt to take responsibility. It thus makes

active or direct political intervention acutely painful; in undertaking action of this kind,

one has to do so in the knowledge of its violence and indefensibility, rather than within the

any reassurance of its emancipatory implications. This may, I would suggest, lead to a

reticence to engage in certain explicit interventions. In the absence of any confidence that

49Eagleton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 193.


51Catherine Zuckert, The Politics of Derridean Deconstruction,Polity, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), p. 254.

Emphasis in original.52

Michel Foucault, Reply to Derrida, in Michel Foucault,History of Madness(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006),p. 578.53

Foucault, Reply to Derrida, p.578


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one acts for good, and in full awareness of the unbearable violences, both predicable and

unpredictable, that one not only risks but ensures, in short, acting solely on the basis of ones

own decision, it is no surprise that a life spent engaging with the absent and the dead

appears more appealing.

Engaging with the concept of resistance, indeed resistances, from this space may thus

characterised as an experience of ordeal. Because all acts are indefensibly and unbearably

violent, meaning that identifying and pursuing emancipatory goals is highly problematic,

enacting resistance is a traumatic and painful process. This means that one has to struggle

against both the temptation allowing oneself to sidestep this by effacing the violence by

assuring oneself that one is doing the right thing, and against the simultaneous and

consequent temptation to evade the encounter. Given the unbearable violence of any and all

(counter) practices, challenging the ontological structures upon which totalising politicsdepend appears preferable, but risks leaving prevailing practices intact as the subject refuses

to engage outside the sphere of academic engagement, leaving such practices unchallenged.

The danger associated with this is that active or direct political interventions,whether

writing to an MP, participating in a demonstration, occupying a building, or linking arms in

front of a police line, are almost impossible to face without some sense that one is justified.

As Terry Eagleton has claimed,

if political practice takes place only within a context of interpretation, and if that

context is notoriously ambiguous and unstable, then action itself is likely to beproblematic and unpredictable. This case is the used, implicitly or explicitly, to ruleout the possibility of radical political programmes of an ambitious kind.

This, he continues, plays right into the hands of Whitehall or the White House.54

At the risk of oversimplification, such an account of resistance as an ordeal may be

contrasted with accounts of which emphasise possibilities for emancipation. Jenny Edkins

and Veronique Pin-Fat suggest as much in their description of multi-layered resistances that

are the fabric of political life, and that canand do change things for the better. They claim:

Pessimism is not justified, for just as relations of power can form a dense web thatseems to solidify into institutions like the state and sediment into forms ofdomination, so points of resistance can come together to lead to revolution.55

Part of this possibility lies, for Edkins and Pin-Fat, in advocating a resistance to the drawing

of lines, understood as a refusal to play sovereign powers language-game and follow the


55

Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, in Jenny Edkins, VeroniquePin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.) Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics(New York; Abingdon:

Routledge, 2004), p. 5.


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rules of the counting and as such, vitally, it defies and refuses its grammar.56Here,

resistance is possible in the form of finding modes of interaction which are somehow less

violent than those enacted by sovereign power; thinking and acting otherwise can offer

emancipatory outcomes that can resist the danger of foreclosure, for instance by engaging

in modes of interaction which are non-conventional, non-statist, non-sovereign, and non-

biopolitical.57This logic may be characterised by three features: firstly, emancipatory goals,

whether revolution or more local, limited changes, are can be aimed towards through

intervention; secondly, resistance is always already happening as it is bound up in the

constitution of the subject and power relations; and finally, resistance occurs in enacting

alternative and less violent counter practices which aim at emancipatory outcomes. It thus

may be termed emancipatory resistance.

In contrast to such a resistance that preserves an emancipatory agenda, theexperience of ordeal that accompanies active or direct political interventionin the first

formulation is concerned with the endless task of taking responsibility for the indefensibility

of be(com)ing. Far from being able to posit a lesser violence or refuse to play the games of

sovereign power, it recognises the irredeemable imbeddedness of the subject in the grammar

of violence, and restlessly destabilises both the subject and its interactions to try to take

account of this. From a deconstructive perspective, positing a lesser violence, claiming to

have created or discovered counter-practices that resist the danger of foreclosure is to efface

the violence of any and all games. By disrupting any and all such games, a deconstructiveintervention begins from acknowledging its own transgression and complicities, perhaps the

greatest of which is to claim innocence.

The quandary that results from this perpetual destabilisation is the risk that it leads

to an evasion of active or direct interventions.While Derrida is undoubtedly

philosophically radical, indeed insurrectionary perhaps, as a consequence of the endless

disruption that deconstruction as a mode of resistance entails, it may be, and in my

experience, is, tempting to shy away from confrontational circumstances wherein one must

make impossible decisions.As McQuillan asks, what is the imaginary of... textual activism

compared to the sort of action, such as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, on which

[Western academics] have provided ample commentary but which as Western or

postcolonial intellectuals they are not obliged to participate in? 58In short, my fear is that

the ceaseless movements of deconstruction lead to a response of evasion when it comes to

active or direct resistance.Such an evasion has nothing to do with the physical danger one

might expose oneself to under certain circumstances, but rather a recoiling from enacting

56

Edkins and Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, p. 15.57Edkins and Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, p. 15.

58McQuillian, Textual Activism, p. 274.


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something direct and vigorous under conditions of foundationlessness, in concert with

people who often do not, themselves, experience such discomfort, who enact their

interventions safe in the knowledge of their emancipatory implications. That deconstruction

takes account of the aporetic condition within which it operates does not in itself suffice as

an alibi; one must expose oneself each and every time to aporia of each and every decision,

not remove oneself from the encounter. If such evasion occurs, this must be addressed as its

own acute violence insofar as it fails to hear the call of the other and the call to the decision;

it evades both. That defensible answers to pressing political issues are not forthcoming, that

each and every decision is synonymous with violence should not result, in other words, to a

quiet acquiescence from those of a deconstructive temperament, to the workings of sovereign

power, because such silence feels like a lesser violence. It is not. It is, perhaps, the worst kind

of complicity precisely because it does not register as intolerable.

An aporia thus presents itself. In the commitment to endlessly deconstruct, one

radically undermines the points of reference which are important, not to say vital, for feeling

oneself able to engage in direct or active political interventions.The attempt to gesture

towards taking responsibility for the immanent violence of be(com)ing can thus result in the

evasion of particular kinds of encounter, thereby failing to respond to the calls which inhere

therein. A double bind is reflected in that if one confronts the undecidable decision in the

context of such direct oractive political intervention, one never succeeds; the task is always

too big, ongoing, and the action is always irreducible violent in ways that one both can andcannot predict. Yet if one does not, if one follows ones instinct to flee from the undecidable

decision, to withdraw to (an illusory) safety, one leaves others to put themselves in harms

way, and defaults on the ceaseless chasing of an elusive responsibility which is the point of a

deconstructive intervention. Either way, one fails. Either way, ones instincts conflict

mercilessly.

Conclusion

There are many tempting means by which it may be possible to evade or dispense with these

uncomfortable issues. Firstly, all of this, of course, begs the question of sites and types of

resistance. As mentioned above, deconstruction amounts to its own insurrection, in terms of

metaphysics, and, perhaps, the university. Mittelman and Chin note that


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it would be facile to conceptualize resistance only as declared organized oppositionsto institutionalized economic and military power... To grasp resistance toglobalization, one must also examine the subtexts of political and cultural life, thepossibilities and potential for structural transformation.59

Blieker similarly suggests that one can learn from subversions of linguistically entrenched

forms of domination, which can facilitate understanding of how dissent functions in more

mundane daily contexts, which, by definition, mostly elude the eyes and ears of intellectual

observers.60He explains that such linguistic dissent works slowly, by changing the way we

speak and think about ourselves and the world we live in.61Perhaps, then, such forms of

resistance might appeal to those for whom intervention cannot be justified.

Concurrently, one may emphasise again the indefensibility and violence of the

distinctions made herebetween direct, active interventions and indirect modes of

resistance. The paper has invoked a difference between types of intervention which is in

many ways illusory; philosophy, activism and all kinds of intervention are interconnected,

mutually constituting and mutually reinforcing in innumerable ways. It is also worth noting

that it has not been shown here whether and why direct and active modes of intervention

are important; the above assumes that such political action should take place, that such

intervention is important at this particular historical juncture. Rather than defend any of

these impossible claims, the concern here is to point towards a sense of the insufficiency of

any one mode of resistance in isolation, and mark the danger that philosophical radicalism

works to satisfy ones sense of the need to intervene. This is not to reject or discredit

philosophy but rather to caution against the silences and complicities it risks.

I would argue that the aporetic dimensions of deconstruction as a mode of resistance

explored above should not be explained away, avoided, or otherwise obscured but rather

experienced, each and every time, in each and every decision. Such an impossible decision

can only be endured in its tension... By definition a double bind cannot be assumed; one can

only endure it inpassion.Such a double bind cannot, Derrida explains, be fully analyzed:

one can only unbind one of its knots by pulling on the other to make it tighter, in themovement I have called stricture.62This is precisely the strength of the deconstructive

temperament: it always already also begins with a resistance to the double bind of its radical

project which relies upon traditional, and traditionally violent, modes and categories of

thought. Deconstruction not only lays bare its own aporetic, contradictory condition but also

59James H. Mittelman and Christine B. N. Chin, Conceptualising resistance to globalisation, in Amoore

(eds.), The Global Resistance Reader, p. 17.60

Roland Bleiker, Political boundaries, poetic transgressions, in Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global Resistance

Reader(Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2005), p.411.61Bleiker, Political boundaries, poetic transgressions, p. 419

62Derrida,Resistances of Psychoanalysis,p. 36


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radicalizes at the same timeits axiomatic and its critique of its axiomatic. What is put into

question by its work is not only the possibility of recapturing the originary but also the desire

to do so... the desire to rejoin the simple....63It is thus both counter-archeological, in that it

disrupts the architecture of metaphysics, and counter-genealogical insofar as it disrupts its

own telos, history, presence. It, in short, drives one to put into question even this principle

of self-presence in the unity of consciousness or in this auto-determinism....64

Deconstructions strength as a mode or site of resistance is not, then, its capacity to account

for or explain away its transgressions, but rather to be affected by them, to take the

challenges into itself, to make and remake itself anew in light of them.

Accordingly, the paper both affirms and resists Derridas thought. It affirms the

modes of resistance that he elucidates through his account of deconstruction, while

simultaneously resisting an affirmation of his thought that becomes static or given, bysubjecting deconstructive modes of engagement themselves to deconstruction. In short, the

paper affirms Derridas resistance while resisting his affirmations, affirmations which he

himself unsettles and thereby resists through the movements of his engagement. Herein lies

the importance of the traces and asymmetric, indirect modes of approach which characterise

Derridas interventions. As Doel notes, deconstruction works

through a disseminating series of elliptical, enigmatic, and stop-gap figures:supplements, grafts, folds, undecidables, quasi-concepts, special effects, traces, etc.

Yet all of these encryptions are irreducibly faulty. They work by breaking down,disintegrating, and haemorrhaging meaning and sense in all directions.65

Such movements mark the indivisible violence and indefensibility of any (of his) claims.

This may be extended to call for resistance to affirmation more generally. This is

proposed not so that affirmation ceases but rather so that its violences are better accounted

for. What is reperformed or risks reperformance in much current activism is often

insufficiently contended with; militarisms and masculinities abound, hierarchies are

reordered and inverted, and thereby perpetuated. Such violences are frequently overlooked

as the crucial injustice of the cause in question appears to take precedence. A deconstructive

mode of resistance addresses and draws out these transgressions, exposing and holding

them to account. Such an intervention is not to undermine the idea of commitment to

causes, nor to addressing violences in world politics, but rather to insist that modes of

resistance must contend with their own violences, omissions, and complicities, and avoid the

good conscience of doing or being right which is the condition of possibility of ontological

63Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 27.

64

Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 28.65Marcus A. Doel,Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science(Lanham: Rowman

and Littlefield, 1999), p. 139.


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and political totalisation. This applies as much to modes of resistance which privilege the

disruption of ontology and thereby evade taking responsibility for the explicit or implicit

violences that accompany such philosophic focus, as to those which advocate emancipatory

counter practices which risk leaving ontological structures in place. In Derridas words,

one must avoid good conscience at all costs. Not only good conscience as the grimaceof an indulgent vulgarity, but quite simply the assured form of self-consciousness:good conscience as subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk thatevery promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision must run. Toprotect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoreticalassurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science, ofconsciousness or reason, is to transform this experience into the deployment of aprogram, into the technical application of a rule or a norm, or into the subsumptionof a determined case.66

Deconstruction must find a way to resist the temptation to contain itself within textual play

of the isolated kind, despite the directness, exposure and unbearable violence that this

entails. Nietzsches insistence that those engaging in philosophy should be inquisitive to a

fault, investigators to the point of cruelty,67must be extended to unsettling the temptation

to withdraw, precisely because such self-exemption reflects a good conscience that detrays a

defaulting on responsibility of the kind deconstruction explicitly challenges. The horrors of

the contemporary world must pull one again and again back into the ordeal of resistance,

and compel one to take undecidable decisions, not simply from ones study but also in the

streets.

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