… aber auch im Lichte der Utopie, unternehme ich — jetzt — Toposforschung …
Paul Celan, Der Meridian
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References
This is especially the case in the book Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Cardozo Law Review, 11/5–6 (1990), 919–1045, where Derrida’s text was originally published. Part of the same texts were published in A. Haverkamp, ed., Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit. Derrida und Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). The point is made clear also in D. Cornell, “L’appel à la résponsabilité juridique. L’exemple de l’affaire Roe contra Wade”, Les passage de frontières. Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida. Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 381–382.
See J. Kauppinen, “Who Comes After the Deconstruction of Law”, in The Multiple Scenes of Law: Polycentricity, ed. A. Hirvonen (Pluto Press: London, 1998), in print.
J. Derrida, “Force of Law, The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, supra n.1, at 54: “It is that this critique presents itself as the only ‘philosophy’ of history (the word ‘philosophy’ remaining in unforgettable quotation marks) that makes possible an attitude that is not merely ‘critical’ but, in the more critical and diacritical sense of the word ‘critique’, krinein, an attitude that permits us to choose (krinein), and so to decide and to cut decisively in history and on the subject of history. It is the only one, Benjamin says, that permits us, in respect to the time, to take a decisive position (scheidende und entscheidende Entstellung, ‘discriminating and decisive approach’).” Derrida refers to W. Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, Gesammelte Schriften II. Band II, 1. Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 202. See also R. Gasché, “On Critique, Hypercriticism, and Deconstruction: The Case of Benjamin”, Cardozo Law Review 12 (1991), 1115–1132.
For example, a recent study about the “ethics of decision” in R. Steinmetz, Les styles de Derrida (Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1994), 19–92.
J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. The state of debt, the work of mourning and the new international, trld. P. Kamuf (Routledge: London, 1994), 90: “A deconstructive thinking, the one that matters to me here, has always pointed out the irreducibility of affirmation and therefore of the promise, as well as the undeconstructibility of a certain idea of justice (dissociated here from law).”
E. Laclau, “Time is Out of Joint”, Diacritics, 25/2 (1995), 92. Laclau explains his position: “If we link this [promise] to the relation law/justice, undecidability/decisions, we can see the general movement of Derrida’s theoretico-political intervention, which is to direct the historico-political forms back to the primary terrain of their opening to the radically heterogenous. This terrain of a constitutive undecidability, of an experience of impossible that, paradoxically, makes possible responsibility, the decision, law and — finally — the messianic itself in its actual and historical forms. I find myself in full agreement with this moment.”
Ibid.
J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trld. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), as an epigraph for “Cogito and the History of Madness”: “The Instant of Decision is Madness (Kierkegaard)”, 31.
J. Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), 35, where Derrida connects the terms of gift/giving, giving place and topology as “la folie du don” and “une folie de atopique” or “utopique”: “Only an atopic and utopic madness, perhaps (a certain perhaps or maybe will be both the modality and the modality to be modified or our meditation), could thus give rise to the gift that can give only on the condition of not taking place, taking up residence or domicile: the gift may be, if there is any.”
In “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)”, translated by J.P. Leavey, in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. J. Sallis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), at 193–198, Derrida reads what Heidegger has to say about — in the Heraclitus seminar — the famous fragment Physis kryptesthai philei (Diels B 123). For Heidegger it is a way of going up and down, hiding, physis is sending eros, philia in relation to philia and physei. Politics of Friendship, supra n.9, at 367–390, “Heidegger’s Ear”, 179–196; M. Heidegger Heraklit (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1979, GA 55), 110–160.
M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trld. R. Mannheim (London and New Haven: Yale UP, 1959), 62: “The Struggle [Kampf] meant here is the original struggle, for it gives rise to the contenders as such; it is not a mere assault on something already there. It is the conflict that first projects and develops what had hitherto been unheard of, unsaid and unthought. The battle is then sustained by the creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen. Against the overwhelming chaos [überwältigenden Walten] they set the barrier of their work, and in their work they capture the world thus opened up. It is with these works that the elemental power [Walten], the physis first comes to stand.” (Einführung in die Metaphysik, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953, 47).
For general accounts of undecidability in Derrida, see R. Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 241ff.; S. Petrosino, Jacques Derrida et la loi du possible, trld. J. Rolland (Paris: Les éditions du CERF, 1994), 143–147.
J. Cavaillès, Sur la logique (Paris: PUF, 1947), 71–73.
D.T. Tran, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trld. D.J. Herman and D.J. Morano from Phénoménologie et materialisme dialectique, 1951 (Dortrecht: Reidel, 1986), 10; and S. Bachelard, La logique de Husserl (Paris: PUF, 1957), 115–123. On the controversy of Cavaillès-Husserl, see also H.-D. Lohmar, Husserls Phänomenologie als Philosophie der Mathematik (Unpublished dissertation, University of Cologne, 1987), 150–161.
J. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”. An Introduction, trld. J.P. Leavey (Stony Brook: N. Hays, 1978), 51ff.
Ibid., at 53 n.48.
J. Derrida, Dissemination, trld. Barbara Johnson, (Chicago: UP, 1982), 219ff.; J.-P. Richard, L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1961). A short commentary on Derrida’s view is P.V. Zima, La déconstruction. Une critique (Paris: PUF, 1994), 59–65.
W. Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike”, in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, ed. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 135.
J.-L. Nancy, “The decisions of existence”, in Birth to presence, trld. B. Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 85.
M. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). GA 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), §§43–49.
Ibid., 102, §47.
Heidegger (Wegmarken, supra n.20, at 380–381) suggests a base for E. Jünger’s Über die Linie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), to Nietzsche’s Will to Power and re-evaluating all values. On topology and overcoming nihilism, see also Wegmarken, at 406.
J. Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines”, in De-construction and Criticism, ed. Bloom et al., trld. J. Hulbert (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176. It is then supposed to be read in a context of a récit, M. Blanchot’s The Death Sentence, and also in a textual context about Shelley, because the topic of the book was to write about Shelley (The Triumph of Life).
Ibid.: “Because I cannot pursue this analysis here, I merely situate the place, the locus, in which double invagination comes about, the place where the invagination of the upper edge on its outer face (the supposed beginning of La folie du jour), which is folded back “inside” to form a pocket and an inner edge, comes to extend beyond (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge, on its inner face (the supposed end of La folie du jour), which is folded back “inside” to form a pocket and an outer edge”, 98. Also, “I must content my self for the moment with underscoring the supplementary aspect of this structure: the chiasma of double invagination is always possible, because of what I have elsewhere called the iterability of the mark”, 100.
Ibid., 134–135.
Ibid., 137–138.
H.J. Silverman, “Derrida, Heidegger, and the Time of the Line”, in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. H.J. Silverman (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 156.
The best introduction to closure and chiasma in Derrida’s work is in S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
J. Derrida, “Passions. An Oblique Offering” in The Derrida Reader, trld. D. Wood, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 15: “So the non-response. Clearly, it will always be possible to say, and it will be true, that non response is a response. One has always, one always must have, the right not to respond, and this liberty belongs to responsibility itself, that is, to the liberty that one believes must be associated with it”. /—/ “So you see — if I took heed of all these reasons, and if, still believing that this non-response was the best response, I decided not to respond, then I would run even worse risks.”, 18.
Ibid., 22.
J. Derrida, “Before the Law”, in Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 188.
C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) (Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt, 1979), 17.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 15–19.
Ibid., 20. Schmitt notes the different notions of topoi since Aristotle.
See Graf von Krockow, supra n.28, at 94–105, on “concrete order” in Schmitt. He puts it bluntly: the consequence of concrete order in Schmitt’s sense is decisionary dictat (103–104), like the infamous Der Führers schützt das Recht (In C. Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles 1923–1929 (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1988). Von Krockow — rather wrongly — thinks that there is nothing new in Nomos der Erde: He says that order means place, and law is only Europe’s (instead of Germany) metaphysical substance.
C. Schmitt, Begriff der Politischen (Berlin: Duncker et Humbolt, 1979), 20–54. See also Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker et Humbolt, 1979), especially the two first chapters.
Ibid., 27.
B. Pascal, Pensées: Thoughts on Religion and Other Subjects, trld. W.F. Trotter (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), no. 294 (Brunschvicg edition).
M. Blanchot: La dernier à parler (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984), 43–46. Blanchot refers to “Bremenrede” in P. Celan: Gesammelte Werke, Dritter Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 185–186.
Cf. J. Derrida, Schibboleth (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 26–28. The English version is shorter, but Derrida refers there also to the gift of poetry: “This is the gift of the poem, and of the date, their condition made up of distress and hope, the shift of tones, the “Wechsel der Töne”. Annulment, the return without return, is not brought upon experience by the poem, the poem which there is not (“Ich spreche ja von dem Gedicht, das es gibt nicht”), anymore than there is the date which is nonetheless to be given.” “Shibboleth”, in Midrash and Literature, ed. G. Hartman and S. Budick, trld. J. Wilner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 333.
T. Schesstag, “buk” in MLN 109 (1994). He (400–401, footnote) cites letters by Nelly Sachs and Celan that repeat Schmitt’s expression about the Meridian: “Between Paris and Stockholm runs a meridian of mourning (Schmerzes)”: Paul Celan/Nelly Sachs, Briefwechsel, ed. B. Wiedermann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 25, 121.
Ibid., 400, where the deciding Meridian of the earth is going near to the discourse (Meridian auf die Erde, aus nähe zur Rede).
M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Language, Poetry and Thought, trld. Albert Hofstader (New York, Harper & Row, 1971), 42ff. (“Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” in Wegmarken).
M. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlin’s Dichtung (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1981, GA 3), 181. See also “Hölderlin’s Erde und Himmel”, and “Heimkunft/An die Verwandten”.
Ibid., 7–8.
P. Celan, “The Meridian”, in Collected Prose, trld. R. Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), 50, cited from Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation (Stanford: University Press, 1997), see also Celan, supra n.59.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 202
J. Derrida, Cinders, Bilingual edition, English translation by N. Lukacher (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1991), 37.
H. de Vries, “Theotopographies: Nancy, Hölderlin, Heidegger.” in MLN 109 (1994), 445–446.
See for example F. Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); H. Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida. Reflections on Time and Language (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1989); T. Clark, Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger. Jacques Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); G. Poppenberg, Ins Ungebundene. Über Literatur nach Blanchot (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993).
M. Blanchot, “How is Literature Possible?” in The Blanchot Reader, ed. M. Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 49–60.
M. Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 21–25.
M. Blanchot, De l’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 328–329.
M. Blanchot. “Literature and the Right to Death”, in The Gaze of Orpheus (New York: Station Hill, 1998). Blanchot questions the movement of literature to the point of irreducible possibility of ambiguity: “Perhaps this is an unintelligible enigma, but if it is, the source of literature’s right to affix a negative or positive sign indiscriminately to each of its moments and each of its results. A strange right — one linked to the question of ambiguity in general. Why is there ambiguity in the World?”, 59.
This was the lesson already in “Limited inc a b c …”, in J. Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. G. Graff, trld. S. Weber and J. Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern, 1988), 29–110.
M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trld. A. Smock (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1982), 107.
See J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991). Nancy’s position is that sovereignty is the movement to the outside as the inside without subject; it is Being as ek-sistence. Nancy refers to Schmitt and “secular theology” in Le Sens du monde (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 145–147, where he states that Schmitt does not reach the “mundanity” in the secularisation, when we consider the movement from sovereignty to the nakedness of Being. But the decision for Nancy is a relevant concept if it calls for decision as existence.
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Kauppinen, J. Law without place: Topology and decision. Questions of line and literature. Law Critique 9, 225–248 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03379994
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03379994