ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the problem of violence, as tackled by Derrida in his dialogue with Levinas. It is asked in particular how it is possible to think critically about violence if we assume that violence constitutes us. In order to do this, it dwells on the diference that Derrida establishes between criticism and deconstruction and on his analysis of the relationship between violence and silence. One of the main theses of this article is that what allows a (...) critique of violence refers to what Derrida calls “trace”, that is, a silence that inhabits language and that does not refer to a previous meaning. In addition, this article focuses on the critic Derrida addresses to Levinas in “Violence and metaphysic”. It shows that far from fitting this critique, Levinas’s analysis of the relation between language and silence implies a radicalization of Derrida’s thesis on what he calls the “worst violence”. (shrink)

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian analysis of colonization and its consequences is specifically isolated as one such impotent tool of critical analysis. As an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, Mbembe (...) launches into a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language, as exhibited in On the Postcolony. This article challenges the efficacy of this post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as the proposed way out of his perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial self-imagination. In particular, his dismissal of Marxian theory is turned... (shrink)

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self-constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co-constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post-structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is (...) demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re-conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre-existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies-as-modifications-which-modify. This re-defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects-as-bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production. (shrink)

Seeking to contribute to the recent emergence of critical phenomenology by clarifying the relation between ontology and ethics, this article offers a new account of the sources of normativity in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technological enframing (Gestell) and Derrida’s political philosophy. I distinguish three levels of normativity in Heidegger and show how moving between the levels permits the critical deployment of the affirmation (Zusage) in response to being’s address. On this view, not only are humans constitutively claimed by (...) being, but the claim calls for its express hearing and critical elaboration. I then show how Derrida reconceives Heidegger’s normativity by developing a notion of double affirmation that communicates with key concepts from his moral-political work, such as the gift, the advance, and friendship. I conclude by indicating what double affirmation entails for critique today. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

The characterisation of Derrida’s politics as a seeking for the “lesser violence” has become an almost paradigmatic interpretation. Yet the phrase _la moindre violence_ appears only in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” and its meaning is not as straightforward as might initially seem. I will argue that it is a mistake to take this expression to summarise the political import of this essay let alone of deconstruction more generally. What Derrida repeatedly concerns himself on that occasion is not “the (...) lesser violence” but “worse violence” and “the worst violence,” terms that appears several times. This will be seen to be as a prefiguring of how, from the early 1980s on, following engagements with Plato and Lyotard, Derrida repeatedly names and elaborates “the worst” as that which we should seek to avoid. In order to uncover the politics of deconstruction, I will examine what Derrida has to say about “the worst” as well as what is said in the secondary literature, for it is also a term around which a number of unfortunate misinterpretations have arisen. In conclusion, it will be remarked that with the late coinage of the term _aimance_ Derrida makes clear his close proximity to the ethics of Levinas and his affirmation of an aspiration to nonviolence in the relationship with the other. (shrink)

Blamelessly, most commentators attempt to deduce the political theory of Levinas from his interhuman philosophy. In contrast to the perceived state of ethical life in contemporary politics, the attractiveness of the asymmetric obligations owed by the ego to the Other make the deductive project seem urgent. But an inductive analysis of Levinas’ philosophy yields troubling prerequisites, including rigorous theocracy and a form of sociability in which no epistemological clarity is permitted that could determine in situ interpersonal duties. Such unfamiliar politics (...) enable the celebrated ethical relation of self for the Other. Designed as a polemic with the presumption that politics not ethics is first philosophy, the insights of the inductive analysis of Levinas’ thought will come as no surprise to observers who worry that power and sovereignty cannot be summarily excluded from social or even ethical relations. (shrink)

Trust has been widely investigated both theoretically and empirically. Whether thought of as the result of a calculation of costs/benefits, a shared identity, or a leap of faith, there always seems to be an ‘as if’ rhetorical gesture which is ultimately needed to explain how actors move from the base of trust to expectations of trust via suspending judgment on uncertainty and fear of vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation — the actors ultimately act ‘as if’ they do not fear uncertainty (...) and vulnerability to betrayal. Yet this ‘as if’ element has remained seriously under-theorised. Drawing on Derrida's deconstruction, I propose a way of thinking this ‘as if’ element of trust. I thus argue that the decision to trust occurs in a terrain of structural undecidability. The latter is thought of as the possibility condition of trust as well as the subject of trust and a sense of responsibility for this trust. The aporiatic nature of undecidability makes this trust an auto-immune trust which obeys the tripartite logic of ‘without’ which both negates and affirms trust. (shrink)

This dissertation explores Levinas’s phenomenology of death in order to unveil the religious dimension in his ethical thought through examining the political moment of the third party. I argue that death is neither a pure phenomenon transparently intelligible in the noema-noesis structure of intentionality nor a mere non-phenomenon totally irrelevant to the phenomenological investigation. Rather, death is a para-phenomenon whose unfathomable feature calls into question Levinas’s two important philosophical precedents: 1) Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in a methodological sense, and 2) Heidegger’s (...) ontological interpretation of death, in a thematical sense. On the one hand, Levinas faces in the para-phenomenality of death the failure of phenomenology in the sense that phenomenology fails to capture a para-doxical feature of death in terms of a noetico-noematic correlation. On the other hand, Levinas ceaselessly contests Heidegger’s ontological thematization, which neutralizes the para-phenomenality of death and thereby reduces the enigmatic mystery of death into the heroic mastery of death; in sum, the para-phenomenality of death is subsumed under the doxical architecture of ontology. By appealing to the para-doxical character of death, this dissertation claims that the architectonic structure of Heidegger’s ontology dissimulates or covers up a more primordial and exigent signification of the death of the other than the ontological mineness [Jemeinigkeit] of death. Therefore, Levinas’s phenomenology of death justifies its raison d'être not in its adroit achievement to thematize death but rather in its failure to thematize and make sense of it since the ethical meaning of death emerges from the miscarriage of the doxical-ontological thematization of death. In order to disclose the ethical signification of death that remains concealed, obscured, and suppressed in the “Sein-topped" architecture of ontology, Levinas endeavors to uncover what ontology has covered up—i.e., the brutal nakedness of being [être] that is concretized in the ethical encounter with the other who commands: “Thou shalt not kill.” This primordial interdiction obsesses and overwhelms me [moi] more than the anxiety [Angst] for my death does, as if the death of the other would matter to me even more than my own. The ethical signification of death comes from the primordial call inscribed in the face of the other, which makes me vigilant, restless, and non-indifferent to the death of the other. However, the advent of the third party puts into question my exclusive, unconditional, or unquestioned responsibility for the other and orders what the other orders: “Me voici.” Nevertheless, the political interrogation of the third party never compromises the ethical structure but, on the contrary, makes it possible for ethics to remain ethical without relapsing into an impotent, silent, or angelic form of ethics, which entails violent, apolitical, and anti-ethical rapprochements. This dissertation insists that the radical peculiarity of Levinas’s phenomenology of death culminates in his para-doxical conception of religion, “rapport sans rapport,” in which the ethical rapport always remains as a question par excellence within the political context. To be religious does not require an ontological question of “to be or not to be,” of being or non-being; rather, it is otherwise than being, beyond essence, or beyond the conatus essendi, in which Levinas recognizes the primordial signification of death, such as substitution, sacrifice, or dying for others. (shrink)

In this reading a notion of the human is developed through an engagement with the work of French philosopher Emanuel Levinas. The argument is that, with the help of Levinas, it is possible for the idea of the human to be understood anew, for the notion to be ‘resaid’. This resaying of the human is performed in a critical appropriation of the philosophical tradition: Levinas’s work is shown not to be a new variation of the complacent ideology of humanism; the (...) idea of the human is instead interpreted to be the bearer of the very movement of critique. This movement is articulated in terms of a transcendence of a discursive ‘economy of violence’. Critique does not establish a permanent position outside of violence, but is a movement that must constantly be renewed. Here Levinas is offered as a modern thinker of particular relevance for contemporary discussions surrounding the nature both of the political and of Human Rights. In addition one finds a systematic analysis of the major works of Levinas, unraveling how a notion of the human develops from within his philosophy. Levinas’s thought is placed alongside philosophical figures of his time, such as Heidegger, Sartre, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, as well as more recent political thinkers, for example, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)