But, on the other hand, the other is whoever or whatever has a power over me without reciprocity. This is demonstrated in Spectres of Marx, for instance, by the analysis of the visor effect or helmet effect. The ghost or the thing looks at us in a way that rules out any symmetry. We cannot cross its gaze. Derrida adds that it is from that visor effect that we first receive the law—not justice but the law, the justice of which is tantamount to our ignorance, to our incapacity to check the truth of its words: “The one who says ‘I am thy Father’s spirit’ can only be taken at his word. An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction. It will condition all the others.” In order to understand what is at stake in that matter of obedience, we must have in mind another scene between father and son for which the confrontation between Hamlet and the ghost has obviously been substituted. Hamlet is in the place of Abraham, and the ghost in the place of the God who orders him to kill his son. As Derrida puts it in Rogues, when emphasizing the principle of heteronomy that is at the heart of this relationship: “It is a question . . . of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of a responsibility and decision of the other—of the other in me, an other greater and older than I am.”
At this point, Derrida offers us, with the help of Kierkegaard, a theoretical coup de theatre: the God who commands Abraham to kill Isaac does ask him to obey his order. As Derrida puts it in Donner la mort, he says: you have to obey me unconditionally. But what he wants Abraham to understand is you have to choose unconditionally between betraying your wife and son or betraying me, and you have no reason to choose me rather than Sarah and Isaac. Sacrifice only means choice, and the choice between the absolute Other and the member of the family is no different than the choice I have to make whenever I enter a relation with any other, which obliges me to sacrifice all the others.
To obey the law of the absolute Other is to feel the equivalence of any other with any other. Tout autre est tout autre (any other is wholly other): this is the formula of the identity of contraries, the formula of the identity between absolute inequality and absolute equality. Anyone can play the part of the any other that is wholly other.
Thanks to the God of Abraham, anyone can play the role of the God of Abraham.
So the formula of radical heteronomy turns out to be equivalent to the formula of political equality; the ethical anyone is equivalent to the political anyone.
But it is so only by the self-negation or self-betrayal of the ethical law of heteronomy, which means, in my view, that the whole construction of ethical heteronomy has to be self-cancelled in order to make a politics of the anyone possible.
As stated earlier, I am not willing to say that my notion of democracy is more appropriate than Derrida’s democracy. I am just trying to outline the difference between an aesthetic and an ethical understanding of politics. And Derrida’s democracy to come is all the more significant in this respect since it makes the radical difference between the two approaches appear in the closest proximity, at the very limit of the indiscernible.
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
As usual, my emphases / underlinings / paragraphs.
Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.
It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.
Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.
Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.
In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.
What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.
What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.
But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.
The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.
There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.
These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other.
This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”
The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.
Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.
It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.
Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.
Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.
In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.
What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.
What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.
But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.
The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.
There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.
These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other.
This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”
The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
What I call the law of the same can be epitomized by two notions that Derrida uses to characterize the consensual view of politics: sovereignty and brotherhood. Derrida endorses without discussion a widely accepted idea that the essence of politics is sovereignty, which is a concept of theological descent. Sovereignty in fact reaches back to the almighty God. God gave it to the kings. The democratic people got it, in turn, when they beheaded the kings. Political concepts are theological concepts that have hardly been secularized. According to this view the concept of the demos cannot have any specificity. It comes down to the concept of a sovereign, self-determined subject who is homogeneous to the logic of sovereignty that sustains the power of nation-states. Therefore the force of the democracy to come cannot be that of the demos. What comes under suspicion thus is not only the figure of the demos; it is the notion of a political subject itself and the idea of politics as the exercise of the capacity of anyone. Just as he identifies the concept of politics with the concept of sovereignty, Derrida equates the notion of the political subject with the notion of brotherhood. From his point of view there is no break between familial power and political power. Just as the nation-state is a sovereign father, the political subject is in fact a brother. Even the concept of citizen—which has so often been used and misused in French political discourse of the last twenty years—has no relevance in his conceptualization. Citizen is just another name for brother. We cannot but be struck by the force of Derrida’s polemics against brotherhood or fraternity, which include even a critique of parity—as if an equal woman, a substitutable woman, a “calculable” woman still was a brother, a member of the sovereign family. As he conceives of it, a brother is anyone who can be substituted for another, anyone who bears a trait of substitutability.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
To the extent that a power is political, the rulers rule on the ultimate ground that there is no reason why they should rule.
[...] the power of the demos is nothing but the inner difference that both legitimizes and delegitimizes any state institution or practice of power. As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions. This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects.
[...]
This also means that the political subject acts in the mode of the as if; it acts as if it were the demos, that is, as the whole made by those who are not countable as qualified parts of the community. This is the aesthetic dimension of politics: the staging of a dissensus— of a conflict of sensory worlds—by subjects who act as if they were the people, which is made of the uncountable count of the anyone.
When a small group of protesters takes to the streets under the banner We Are the People, as they did in Leipzig in 1989, they know that they are not the people. They create the open collective of those who are not the people that is incorporated in the state and located in its offices. They play the role of the uncountable collection of those who have no specific capacity to rule or to be ruled.
This is what I call the aesthetic understanding of the democratic supplement, which amounts to a political understanding. I think that we can oppose it to the ethical view of the supplement, which is epitomized in Derrida’s concept of democracy to come.
My observations should not be misinterpreted. I amaware that Derrida was also concerned with the elaboration of a concept of democracy that would break the consensual-ethical view of democracy as the way of governing and the way of being of wealthier countries. I am also aware that his search for a new concept of democracy was part of a commitment to a number of struggles against various forms of oppression throughout the world. I acknowledge this theoretical and practical commitment to the main issues of democracy.
Nevertheless I think that it can be said that the concept of democracy to come is not a political but an ethical concept. Democracy to come is not, for Derrida, the aesthetic supplement that makes politics possible. It is a supplement to politics.
And it is because Derrida’s democracy actually is a democracy without demos. What is absent in his view of politics is the idea of the political subject, of the political capacity. The reason for this is simple. There is something that Derrida cannot endorse, namely, the idea of neutralization (or substitutability)—the indifference to difference or the equivalence of the same and the other.
Consistently, what he cannot accept is the democratic play of the as if. From his point of view there can be only one alternative: either the law of the same, the law of autonomy, or the law of the other, the law of heteronomy.
[...] the power of the demos is nothing but the inner difference that both legitimizes and delegitimizes any state institution or practice of power. As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions. This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects.
[...]
This also means that the political subject acts in the mode of the as if; it acts as if it were the demos, that is, as the whole made by those who are not countable as qualified parts of the community. This is the aesthetic dimension of politics: the staging of a dissensus— of a conflict of sensory worlds—by subjects who act as if they were the people, which is made of the uncountable count of the anyone.
When a small group of protesters takes to the streets under the banner We Are the People, as they did in Leipzig in 1989, they know that they are not the people. They create the open collective of those who are not the people that is incorporated in the state and located in its offices. They play the role of the uncountable collection of those who have no specific capacity to rule or to be ruled.
This is what I call the aesthetic understanding of the democratic supplement, which amounts to a political understanding. I think that we can oppose it to the ethical view of the supplement, which is epitomized in Derrida’s concept of democracy to come.
My observations should not be misinterpreted. I amaware that Derrida was also concerned with the elaboration of a concept of democracy that would break the consensual-ethical view of democracy as the way of governing and the way of being of wealthier countries. I am also aware that his search for a new concept of democracy was part of a commitment to a number of struggles against various forms of oppression throughout the world. I acknowledge this theoretical and practical commitment to the main issues of democracy.
Nevertheless I think that it can be said that the concept of democracy to come is not a political but an ethical concept. Democracy to come is not, for Derrida, the aesthetic supplement that makes politics possible. It is a supplement to politics.
And it is because Derrida’s democracy actually is a democracy without demos. What is absent in his view of politics is the idea of the political subject, of the political capacity. The reason for this is simple. There is something that Derrida cannot endorse, namely, the idea of neutralization (or substitutability)—the indifference to difference or the equivalence of the same and the other.
Consistently, what he cannot accept is the democratic play of the as if. From his point of view there can be only one alternative: either the law of the same, the law of autonomy, or the law of the other, the law of heteronomy.
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