Theory & Event

It is said that in recent years Derrida’s thought had become ethical and political, thereby correcting a serious flaw for any philosophy. The turn would be all the more visible to the extent that, prior to 1990, his thought obviously lacked a political philosophy. However, we should be wary of this apparent absence and not forget that in his thought and writing Derrida did not cease to challenge and contest the characteristics of visible or phenomenal presence. We might thus suspect that ethics and politics are not simply “absent” from the texts before 1990, even if they do not have the same order of visibility as in books such as Rogues and Philosophy in a Time of Terror.¹ We can even elliptically point to signs and indications of the political import of the pre-1990 texts, which worked to continually transform and stratify themselves and each other rather than dialectically contradict each other. The most insistent gesture of writing in the early publications consisted of overturning and then displacing, sometimes generalizing, the concept of what had always been repressed and devalued. Before generalizing writing, Derrida effectively overturned the subordination of the letter and the trace to the voice and living speech, thereby showing that the process of writing constantly structures metaphysical texts, albeit in a self-effacing and ruinous manner. This systematic gesture, without system — overturning, displacing, generalizing — is the principle of the deconstruction of power. It signifies the general political import of all of Derrida’s writings, even if this import is not visible according to the schemas and expectations of traditional political philosophy.

Allow me to present some visible marks of this general political import. The revolutionary analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, published in 1972,² brought to light the manner in which the philosophico-Platonic determination of writing as anti-substance, without a father, irresponsible and incapable of defending itself, is inseparable from the path and democratic stakes of the case against the sophistry which defined philosophy. In Of Grammatology (1967), the chapter devoted to Lévi-Strauss showed how power and violence are implicated in writing, at its origin, thus signifying that Derrida did not think writing without politics. He showed in the same chapter that Lévi-Strauss’ critique of ethnocentrism rests on an underlying ethnocentrism all the more irreducible because it remains invisible. The Derridean deconstruction of democratic good conscience will always be accompanied by the thought of democracy as a hyperbolic demand — this double strategy was pursued and complicated in 1987 when Derrida interrogated the diabolical logic at work in the Heideggerian spiritualization of Nazism.³ Heidegger’s political engagement avoided racism and biologism, in the name of spirit, at the price of an overvaluation of Nazism. Heidegger saved himself from Nazism as biological racism by investing in it and thinking it as a movement of spiritual essence. It is thus there where he would no longer belong to Nazism at all that this engagement would become more Nazi, more-than-Nazi. At the price of uncompromisingly rigorous analyses, Derrida thus showed that discourses in opposition to fascism, to Nazism, and to Heidegger are made in the name of an axiomatic (for example that of humanism, of spirit or of human rights) that shares fatally in the metaphysics (of subjectivity) that structures that which these discourses oppose. Every political position is thus dangerously shaken, contaminated by its other, and democracy is menaced in its possibility by such a logic of diabolical contamination. Derrida can thus find the “place” of his thought only on the outer limits of political philosophy, where his thought signals towards another heading, in truth to the other of the philosophical heading and of philosophy as heading.⁴

In order to measure the enormous spacing and interval opened up by Derrida within political philosophy, we should perhaps begin with the large question of right, that is to say the question of law, justice and the juridical. In other words, we should begin with the form in which political philosophy has come to think power, the state, society, freedom, and violence on the basis of these concepts. In “Force...