Impassable Passages: Derrida, Aporia, and the Question of Politics

François Debrix

Department of Political Science
Purdue University
debrix@polsci.purdue.edu

 

Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political. New York: Routledge, 1996, 174 pp.

 
The impact of Jacques Derrida’s thought on contemporary politics has often been treated as an accidental, at best marginal, phenomenon. Unlike other French thinkers representative of what is generally understood as the postmodern moment (Foucault, Deleuze, or Baudrillard for instance), Derrida has arguably had more success with literature and philosophy scholars and students than with those whose recognized task is to think the political. Richard Beardsworth’s tour de force in Derrida & the Political is to highlight the political stakes present in Derrida’s works without, however, detracting from the spirit of Derridean thought.

 

Beardsworth starts by offering a concise and accurate explanation of one of the most frequently used, yet often inaccurately presented, Derridean concepts, the notion of deconstruction. In Chapter One, Beardsworth turns to some of Derrida’s earlier works like Writing and Difference or Of Grammatology to explain that deconstruction is the product of, as he puts it, a “negotiation.” Deconstruction emerges as the result of an unsatisfied negotiation “between philosophy and what in France is called the Sciences Humaines, which is both characteristic of a certain style of philosophizing and carries with it and develops a clear set of intellectual, disciplinary and institutional stakes” (4). The difficulty of accessing philosophical notions “from outside philosophy” (the dilemma of the human sciences), or, conversely, the inability of “dominating the ’empiricity’ of the human sciences” by means of philosophical categories (the problem of philosophy confronted with domains traditionally thought through the disciplinarity of the human sciences), creates a “displacement” between these two discourses. Beardsworth thus places deconstruction in an epistemological and historic context, and argues that the displacement (an always already present décalage) between philosophy and the discursive practices of the human sciences is the point where the work of Derridean deconstruction takes place. The “method” of deconstruction is offered by Derrida as the result of an impossibility to reconcile, decide, or close. Yet, it does not seek to reconcile or close either. The impossibility (or impassability) of decision is a theme which recurs throughout Derrida & the Political. It later returns under the form of aporia, a figure which is at the core of Beardsworth’s reading of Derrida in this volume.

 

Practically, deconstruction operates from within the text, in the discontinuities and ruptures of discourse which re-mark the original displacement (a displacement that the metaphysical opposition between the transcendental and the empirical seeks to normalize) between philosophy and the human sciences. Working through Derrida’s early deconstruction of Saussure’s analyses of language and writing, Beardsworth suggests that deconstruction is a mode of philosophical and/or literary discursive analysis which accounts for textual “contradictions and exclusions from within” an author’s scholarly or theoretical endeavor, “and not from the imposition of an external set of criteria” which seek to reappropriate the meanings of the text from outside (10-11). Otherwise, Beardsworth continues, “the violence inherent to metaphysics” would be repeated. Once again, such a metaphysical violence is one that maintains the two discourses of philosophy and the human sciences at an insuperable distance from one another. By imposing/affirming such a violence (the violence of separation), metaphysical discourse obliterates the very rules and principles contained within the text itself, including its own potential violence. Thus understood, deconstruction is an eminently liberal and democratic practice, one that approaches textuality from the very rules of formation that it contains, and not from an external model of thought.

 

Building upon this preliminary exposition of the “method of deconstruction” (I put it between quotation marks because, as Beardsworth mentions, Derrida finds this appellation problematic. As Beardsworth notes, “Derrida is careful to avoid this term because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgment” [4]), Beardsworth then embarks on a subtle analysis of the political within Derrida’s work (this actually starts in the last section of Chapter 1 on “Law, Judgment, and Singularity” but continues more clearly in Chapter 2). Unlike previous studies on Derrida and politics, Beardsworth’s reading avoids the temptation of simply applying Derridean theoretical insights to concrete political events, phenomena or discourses. Such an approach would perhaps be very fashionable and may give the impression that a postmodern mode of analysis, derived from Derrida, is used to make sense of current realities. Yet, such an appropriation of Derrida’s thought for concrete political purposes, although clearly feasible (liberal activist movements, from feminist groups to postcolonial formations have found in Derrida, as in many other postmodern writers, a source of political engagement), would nonetheless be an all-too facile way of employing Derrida’s notions without actively engaging the richness of his writing. Beardsworth seeks to remedy this theoretical lacuna by showing that, if Derrida can be of any practical political use, it is because his key theoretical reflections, and his practice of deconstruction in the first place, are in and of themselves political practices, and more precisely democratically involved endeavors.

 

In an apparently irreconcilable fashion, Beardsworth suggests that Derrida is the most political when he is the least so, or, to put it another way, at the point where Derrida articulates the impossibility of politics. Derrida’s political “as” the impossibility of politics can be exposed only by bringing to the fore the figure of aporia, a figure central to Derrida’s thinking. Aporia, from the Greek aporos (without passage, without issue, not treadable, as Beardsworth reminds us on page 32), is a figure mobilized by Derrida to specify the fundamental irreducibility and undecidability of every concept or phenomenon that traditionally has been stabilized, fixed, subjected, represented and normalized by Western metaphysics (from Plato’s division of the empirical and the transcendental, to Levinasian ethics as Beardsworth later shows in Chapter 3). Aporia is for Beardsworth the democratic “core” (aporia also has the meaning of a “core,” an “undetachable and unsurpassable unit”) within Derrida’s philosophy, the originary yet impassable key to understanding the Derridean system of thinking the political.

 

Derrida’s notion of the political is accessible only through the notion of what Beardsworth calls the “aporia of law.” Beardsworth is perhaps a victim of his democratic reductionism here, a tendency which leads him to assume and affirm that questions regarding the political are necessarily centered around the nature of law. Questions which examine the possibility or impossibility of formulating the law are at the core of the political (the aporia of law is the aporia of politics as well for Beardsworth). Beardsworth bases his understanding of the aporia of law on a micro-reading of Derrida’s analysis of Franz Kafka’s tale “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”). In this tale, a man from the country seeks to gain access to the law and penetrate its space, which is represented in the story by a large door kept by a guardian. Beardsworth continues:

 

On the man from the country's request to gain admittance into the Law [Beardsworth, following the German transcription, capitalizes the term], the doorkeeper tells the man to wait, adding that he is only the first of a long line of such keepers, each one more powerful and terrifying than the last. Whilst perplexed at this attitude towards the Law, having assumed that the Law is "accessible at all times and to everyone," the man from the country desists from attempting to enter, taking to heart the possibility of entrance in the near future. The rest of the man's life is made up of frequent attempts--each time more childish--to gain access, each attempt in turn vetoed by the doorkeeper and deferred to a later occasion. (27)

 

For Derrida, Kafka’s story exemplifies the impossibility/impassibility of the law, its ambiguous status from which its aporia is derived. In order to maintain its authority of law (as law), the law must transcend the empirical domain. It must not be accessed or penetrated by history or experience (the man of the country in Kafka’s tale). For Derrida, this inaccessibility of the law is, first and foremost, an impossibility of narration. The law has no story; it cannot be told or re-told, represented. Rather, devoid of narration and experience, the law remains atemporal, universal, unattainable (as Beardsworth shows, Kantian understandings of the law are predicated on such attributes). But the law is paradoxical, and necessarily remains so. While it cannot be accessed, it must also be inscribed in history and empiricity in order for its authority to be meaningful. Decision and judgment require that the law bear its marks in history. This paradox is for Derrida the irreconcilable condition of the law, its fundamental disjointure. The aporia of the law emerges from its quasi-magical ability to hold together (in a sleight-of-hand trick perhaps) the two domains of philosophy (transcendence) and empiricity (experience) under its authority.

 

This double plane on which the law operates must not, however, be recognized as such. Indeed, if the authority of the law were to be brought down to the level of experience, it would be made accessible to everyone (something that the man from the country erroneously assumed), and thus would become changeable, contextual, and uncertain. Conversely, if the applicability of the law, through judgment and decision, were to be tied to its universal and philosophical (and physically unverifiable) characteristics, its authority could easily be contested and challenged by another story or representation of the law (as many laws as there are potential narrations). This, for both Derrida and Beardsworth, explains the fact that the law requires a doorkeeper, as a stand-in for its material authority, its force of coercion. As Derrida notes:

 

The law is prohibition: this does not mean that it prohibits, but that it is itself prohibited, a prohibited place...one cannot reach the law, and in order to have a rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with the law, one must interrupt the relation. One must enter into relation only with the law's representatives, its examples, its guardians. These are interrupters as much as messengers. One must not know who or what or where the law is... This is what must be the case for the must of the law. (39)

 

Metaphysical discourse which, as both Derrida and Beardsworth understand it, maintains a clear distinction between the empirical and the philosophical imposes the law (and politics, once again understood by Beardsworth as the practice of the law) as a form of violence. Indeed, each modality of the law (the physical or the abstract) requires that the other be negated. This violence is for Derrida nothing more than a way of denying the aporia of law, that is to say, the multipolar and undecidable plane on which the law operates.

 

The aporia of law is thus a “neither/nor” structure which is “nowhere but in its inscriptions in history, yet unaccountable as well” (29). The origin of the law is “impossible to find” (31). It is completely indeterminate, unless one practices violence and arbitrarily fixes one origin (which is what happens in all modern conceptions of the law and the political). This aporia of law, this impassable “ordeal” (as Derrida puts it in his later works) through which the law nonetheless has to pass, is for Beardsworth the main lesson that Derrida has to offer about the political. Through Derrida, the political becomes an “impossibility of judgment,” a “neither/nor” spectrum of options and possibilities which the aporia of law offers, unless the mark of its undecidability (which, by the way, the work of deconstruction seeks to re-mark or retrieve; may we now re-read deconstruction as a nostalgic enterprise?) has been erased by metaphysics. Beardsworth thus interprets Derrida’s political as an impossibility of politics, that is to say, as the impossibility of choosing, discriminating, or passing judgment. Derrida’s political stakes, the aporia of politics, are thus blatantly democratic, even more purely democratic than classical or modern democratic theories perhaps, which based their legitimacy (and legitimacy as the basis for their authority) on the possibility of and necessity for judgment and discrimination (the will of the majority, contract theories, etc.). Ironically, Beardsworth’s Derrida may be the only true democratic purist.

 

The latter part of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 continue this exploration through Kant and Hegel and, more precisely, through Derrida’s elaboration of metaphysical logic as “a specific organization of time.” With time, the metaphysical limits are no longer the empirical and the philosophical, but rather the finite and the infinite. Metaphysical logic is predicated on the positioning of the human subject (logocentrism) in a world where the limit between the finite and the infinite (read by Beardsworth through Kant) (61-68) becomes the determining condition of human existence and, consequently, of thought. In such a dialectical construction, finite and infinite form polar opposites in between which Western thinking has had to define itself since the early days of the Enlightenment. Metaphysical time is, for both Derrida and Beardsworth, a disavowal of the “aporia of time.” Concerns with the articulation between the finite and the infinite impose themselves as a form of “historical” violence (whereby time is fixed and decided, either in the finitude of the present moment, or in the endless postponement of a future to come).

 

The violence of time is shown by Derrida’s reading of the American Declaration of Independence. Beardsworth suggests that for Derrida “the independence of the United States is undecidably described and produced. The union of states is described as predating the signature of the declaration; at the same time, it is only produced through the signature” (99). Beardsworth reads Derrida’s analysis of the U.S. Declaration as an attempt at re-marking the impossible recognition of temporality. Only violence can compensate for such a “disjointure of time” (99). The violence of time is, once again, a product of the violence of the law. It is the violence of the law which fixes itself in history to, for instance, create the United States as a nation which will not be predicated on any prior law. It is through such an intervention, an intervention of the law, in the field of the law, that time begins, that temporality can be inscribed (once a particular event has thus been validated). The fixation of time, writes Beardsworth, is dependent on the writing of the law. What all this negates, however, is the aporia of time, the primordial undecidability of the temporality of the act (as act and as time), the possibility of the act outside time. For Derrida, temporality, and its ideology of the present moment or of the future to come affirmed through law, always arrive late, but never too late to discriminate between several modalities of action (which are selected to become one act of decision), and finally place an event in (its) time. As Beardsworth affirms, “in contrast to the metaphysical reduction of the passage of time to presence, reflection upon the political necessitates reflection upon the irreducibility of time” (101), that is to say, reflection upon the aporia of both time and law.

 

For Beardsworth, democratic political practice requires a return to the aporia of time. Returning to the aporia of time, to the time when time does not take place, to the originary impossibility (since it does not allow time to take a unique predestined path) which is, at the same time, a cradle of possibilities, is, to use a terminology mobilized by Derrida in some of his recent work on Marx (Specters of Marx), a “promise of lesser violence.” This promise, democratic and (purely) ethical in its (almost ideal) character, casts a singular perspective on current political realities which, as Beardsworth believes, are increasingly violent and “depoliticized” (48). Towards the end of his study (end of Chapter 3 and conclusion), Beardsworth indeed returns to more obvious and direct concerns with contemporary politics (questions of violence, democracy, the proliferation of technology). By doing so, Beardsworth also reveals more overtly his democratic ambitions, his own political stakes.

 

As noted before, Beardsworth may be lauded for demonstrating a unique understanding of Derrida’s writing. By weaving different philosophies together to the point where they self-deconstruct, Beardsworth is careful not to do violence to Derrida’s text. His style is that of supplementation, a mode of writing which offers itself as an enhancement of Derridean analyses and, as such, pays homage to the “method” of deconstruction without banalizing it. While it leaves the Derridean text intact, Beardsworth’s writing nevertheless reveals a lot about the author’s desire to build a democratic theory on Derridean precepts. The conclusion is particularly telling of such a tendency, even though “traces” of it can be found throughout the text (when, for example, the author slides from the term political to ethical, or from law to politics; the link between law and politics is taken for granted and rarely questioned). Beardsworth reveals his own “promise of democracy” by exposing his fear of technology, or, as he puts it, the lack of a Derridean articulation between the aporia of law and time and the growing phenomenon of technological globalization. Faced with the “spectralization” of the human experience of time, that is to say, the exponential configuration/acceleration of time caused by visual and virtual technologies (something that Derrida notes but does not theorize according to Beardsworth) as one of the most recent forms of the violence of late-modernity (it is violent because technology and speed force one to revise the meaning of the finite and the infinite, the relation of the individual subject with regard to the past, the present, and the future), Beardsworth hopes that the Derridean aporia can be of use as a way of maintaining the promise of democracy in a late-modern era (153). However, Beardsworth does not yet specify how this can be done without reading Derrida outside his text (which, in itself, would be reappropriation and violence). Furthermore, Beardsworth appears to be blind to the fact that even the most complex and “spectral” technologies can themselves be aporetic, providing against their wishes perhaps a fundamental instability and undecidability (the originary uncertainty which characterizes the Internet, for example, comes to mind). Faced with the fear of technics, Beardsworth falls back into a form of logocentrism, where the question becomes one of protecting the human subject at all costs from the potential alienation caused by technology (and the system of objects). Beardsworth does so because he cannot explicitly find in Derrida a politics of technology that suits his democratic objectives (155).

 

Despite this awkward supplementation at the end, which to some extent undoes Beardsworth’s own project, Derrida & the Political is one of the best explorations of the political inside Derrida’s writing that has been produced of late. For political scholars and students in particular, and for cultural wanderers operating at the frontiers between philosophy and the human sciences in general, the presentation of the Derridean figure of aporia reveals the “promise” of discourses less concerned with forming durable regimes of truthful and certain knowledge, and more open to and careful about their own modalities of writing.