An interview with Jacques Derrida
By Thomas Assheuer
Q: Monsieur Derrida, you have always been politically engaged in current affairs as a philosopher, for instance in the debate around the New Right or in the International Writers Parliament. Is it possible to say that the political climate has changed after the elections in Great Britain and in France? Can intellectuals take courage again after those years when they seemed paralysed by a posthistorical or cynical attitude?
JD:
Had the intellectuals lost their courage? There is nothing to confirm this. In
the course of the last decades and at an unprecedented tempo, they were forced
to take profound transformations in the public space into account. The
conditions of taking a stand in the media, of intervening in the tele-technological field, have been exposed to many
transformations and re-appropriations, politically and economically. On the
other hand, all responsible citizens needed courage to analyse these
evolutions, acting instead so as to avoid these traps. All the more since some
intellectuals have sought to exploit these new media powers to the end of
personal promotion; when they did so in the fight for a good cause, solidarity
was at times as difficult to give as to withhold. Intellectuals have been more
present and active than your question suggests, in all fields of public life,
in
Now
to proceed in a more direct and simple manner to what is at the centre of your
question: yes, the elections in
Q:
Must one criticise the left, as Richard Rorty does,
of being too occupied with questions of cultural identity and of having
forgotten questions of social justice? How do you situate your own reflections
on justice among these two currents whose relation of lack of relation right
now dominates some discussions of political philosophy?
JD:
Here again one must differentiate with precision. I do not believe that the
whole 'left' in general is more occupied with cultural identity than with
social justice. But if some who call themselves leftists had done so they would
deserve Rorty’s critique. On this point and to a
certain extent I would agree with him, for then two grave risks would have been
neglected: first, though legitimate in certain situations and within certain
limits, the demands of cultural identity (and this word comprises all 'communitarisms', of which there are many) can often feed
into 'ideologies' of the right - nationalist, fundamentalist, even racist.
Secondly, the left may relegate to the background and gravely neglect other
struggles, social and civic solidarities and universal causes (transnational and not merely cosmopolitical,
because the cosmopolitical supposes again the agency
of the state and of the citizen, be it the citizen of the world - we will
return to this). But why must one choose between the care for cultural identity
and the worry about social justice? They are both questions of justice, two
responses to anti-egalitarian oppression or violence. No doubt it is very hard
to lead both of these debates in the same rhythm, but one can fight both
fronts, cultural and social, at the same time, as it were, and one must do so.
The task of the intellectual is to say this, to mediate the discourses and to
elaborate strategies that resist any simplistic choice between the two. In both
cases, the effective responsibility for engagement consists in doing everything
to transform the status quo in the two areas, between them, from one to
another, the cultural and the social, to establish a new law, even if they
remain forever inadequate for what I call justice (which is not the law, even
if it determines its history and progress).
Q:
In your book The Other Heading you conceive
JD:
This is an effect to whose risks I have alluded (economism, monetarism, 'performative'
adaptation so as to be competitive in a global market, often after brief and
supposedly scientific analyses). It seems to me that one must indeed oppose to
it a resolutely political project. That is the stake of many of the tensions
between the different European governments, and within each of them, but also
among the social forces that dominate
Q:
You yourself have shown so well in Specters
of Marx that
JD:
I believe in an often silent, but more and more effective global solidarity. It
is no longer defined as an organisation of International Socialists (but I keep
the old name of an 'International' to recall something of the spirit of
revolution and of justice which ought to reunite the workers and the oppressed
beyond national frontiers). It does not recognise itself in the states or the
international agencies that are dominated by certain stately powers. It is
closer to non-governmental organisations, certain humanitarian projects, but it
transgresses them as well and appeals to a profound change in international law
and its setting to work. This International has today the figure of suffering and of compassion
for the ten plagues of global order I enumerate in Specters
of Marx. It decries that of which one speaks so little in the official
political rhetoric and in the discourse of 'engaged intellectuals', even among
the declared champions of human rights. To give some examples of easily
distracting macro-statistics, I think of the millions of children who drown
every year, of the nearly 50 per cent of women who are beaten or fall
victim to sometimes murderous abuse (the 60 million disappeared women, the 30
million mutilated women), of the 23 million infected with AIDS (of which 90 per
cent are in Africa and to whom the budget of AIDS research dedicates only 5 per
cent of its resources, while therapy remains unavailable outside small
occidental milieus), I think of the selective infanticide of girls in India and
of the monstrous conditions of child labour in many countries, and of the fact
that there are, I believe, a billion illiterate people and 140 million
uneducated children, I think of the maintenance of the death penalty and of the
circumstances of its administration in the United States (the only Western
democracy to do so and a country that no longer recognises the convention
concerning children’s rights and continues to execute punishment against minors
even after they have reached adult age, etc.). I quote these numbers, published
in official reports, from memory in order to convey an idea of the scale of the
problems that call for an 'international' solidarity of which no state, no
party, no syndicate, no civic organisation really takes charge. All who suffer
and all those who are not insensitive to the dimension of these urgent issues
belong to this International, everybody who - civic or national background
notwithstanding - is determined to draw the attention of politics, law and
ethics towards them.
Q:
All these reflections pose the question whether the categories of the right and
the left still have validity. What do you think?
JD:
I consider this opposition more necessary and more effective than ever, even if
indeed the criteria and the differentiations have accrued enormous complexity.
For instance: it is true that a certain left and a certain right are objectively
allied against Europe and against the Euro and what they seem to announce, at
times in the name of 'national' values, at times in the name of social
politics, or both at the same time. Another left and another right are allies
in their support for
Q:
Two essential problems of globalisation are the dissolution of the state and
the impotence of politics. In your recently published text 'Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!',
you develop certain ideas concerning a new right to asylum and a new balance of
power between the different places of the political in view of a possible new
role of the city. How do you think philosophy could and should react to the
problems mentioned with a kind of institutional fantasy?
JD:
I am not sure I understand what you call 'institutional fantasy'. All political
experimentation like the initiative of the 'refugee city', despite its limits
and its inevitably preliminary character, has in it a philosophical dimension.
It requires us to interrogate the essence and the history of the state. All
political innovation touches on philosophy. The 'true' political action always
engages with a philosophy. All action, all political decision making, must
invent its norm or rule. Such a gesture traverses or implies philosophy.
Meanwhile, at the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I believe that one must
fight against that which you call the 'dissolution of the state' (for the state
can in turn limit the private forces of appropriation, the concentrations of
economic power, it can retard a violent depoliticisation
that acts in the name of the 'market'), and above all resist the state where it
gives in too easily to the nationalism of the nation state or to the
representation of socio-economic hegemony. Each time one must analyse, invent a
new rule: here to contest the state, there to consolidate it. The realm of
politics is not co-extensive with the state, contrary to what one believes
nowadays. The necessary repoliticisation does not
need to serve a new cult of the state. One ought to operate with new
dissociations and accept complex and differentiated practices.
Q:
You often underline that your philosophy proceeds by means of paradoxes. You
show precisely how established philosophies of justice or of friendship yield
to aporia, but at the same time the claim to an
unconditional justice or the idea of a friendship that is 'totally other'
always returns in your argumentation. Do you not fear that your philosophy
discourages from the start any political project as it always draws the risk of
an aporia or a paradox? And concerning your own
political engagement: would you say that it is an engagement against or despite
your philosophy, or does one rather have to see here a proper way for
deconstruction to go into politics?
JD:
Yes, I try everything I can above all to attempt to adjust my 'engagements' to
the unconditional affirmation that traverses 'deconstruction'. This is not
easy, one can never be sure of succeeding. It can never be the object of a knowledge or a certitude. Like others, I often feel the
discouragement of which you speak, but in my eyes that is also a necessary
test. If the whole political project would be the reassuring object or the
logical or theoretical consequence of assured knowledge (euphoric, without
paradox, without aporia, free of contradiction,
without undecidabilities to decide), that would be a
machine that runs without us, without responsibility, without decision, at
bottom without ethics, nor law, nor politics. There is no
decision nor responsibility without the test of aporia
or undecidability.
Q:
The notion of 'decision' occupies a pivotal place in your reflections: what is
the place of the decision in your concept of the political? Does it somehow
replace justice?
JD:
It does not replace it, on the contrary it is indissociable from it. There is no 'politics', no law, no
ethics without the responsibility of a decision which, to be just, cannot
content itself with applying existing norms or rules but must take the absolute
risk, in every singular instant, or justifying itself again, alone, as if for
the first time, even if it is inscribed in a tradition. For lack of space, I
cannot explain here the discourse on decision that I try to elaborate
elsewhere. A decision, though mine, active and free in its phenomenon, cannot
be the simple deployment of my potentialities or aptitudes, of what is
'possible for me'. In order to be a decision, it must interrupt that
'possible', tear off my history and thus be above all, in a certain strange
way, the decision of the other in me: come from the other in view of the other
in me. It must in a paradoxical way permit and comprise a certain passivity
that in no way allays my responsibility. These are the paradoxes that are
difficult to integrate in a classical philosophical discourse, but I do not
believe that a decision, if it exists, would be possible otherwise.
Q:
If all political engagement runs the risk of falling into aporia,
would it not be more consequential to say: let us forget the aporias and get pragmatic? Let us do what needs to be done, everything else is a kind of political metaphysics?
JD:
In my eyes what you call 'a kind of political metaphysics' would be exactly the
forgetting of aporia itself, which we often try to
do. But the aporia cannot be forgotten. What would a
'pragmatics' be that consisted in avoiding contradictions, problems apparently
without solution, etc.? Do you not think that this supposedly realistic or
empirical 'pragmatics' would be a kind of metaphysical reverie, in the most
unrealistic and imaginary sense one gives these words?
Q:
Should one say, then, that the aporias you refer to
are tragic? And if so, must we not recognise that all discourse of an always
tragic history implies connotations that are politically very problematic? Is
this not a kind of metaphysics of history?
JD:
It is true, I often feel these aporias as tragic
suffering, in the slightly vague current sense of that term (terrifying
debates, the feeling that, whatever one does, it will not be enough, not when
measured up against an infinite exigency, a contradiction that beleaguers us,
and in any case one pays a heavy price). But under that 'tragic sentiment'
there is the opposite of a 'metaphysics of history' and of a 'tragedy' (in the
sense of fatalism and submission to destiny). Rather I feel here the condition
of the question, of action and decision, of resistance against the fatal,
against providence and teleology.
Q:
Your philosophy seems ambiguous regarding the aspirations of the Enlightenment:
on the one hand, you have contributed to a strong critique of the notion of the
subject, of spirit and so forth which you propound in a problematisation
of axiomatics bound up with those notions. On the
other hand you insist more and more often on the importance of a certain idea
of emancipation that you do not hesitate to attribute to the 'Aufklärung'. Do you see such an ambiguity in your
thought? What are the political consequences of such an ambiguity, if it
exists? Is the idea of democracy also subject to this ambiguity?
JD:
Yes. More precisely, the irreducible distance, the always irrecusable
inadequation between the 'idea of democracy' and that
which presents itself in its name remains forever ambiguous. That idea is not
altogether a 'Kantian idea', at the same time regulating and infinitely
expanded. It commands the most concrete urgency, here and now. If I keep its
old name of 'democracy' nevertheless, and often speak of a 'democracy to come',
it is because that is the only name for a political regime which declares its
historicity and its perfectibility, in that it carries in its concept the
dimension of inadequation and of that which is to
come. Democracy allows us in all liberty to invoke these two openings publicly
in order to criticise the current state of all so-called democracy.
Q:
You have written an impressive book about the specters
of Marx around the central argument that the specters
not only return, but that they are always with us. If we recognise that at
least a part of Marxism consisted in a totalitarian enterprise, what can the specters teach us? Must one not fear that those
totalitarian specters return with the other which we
perhaps desire?
JD:
Of course one must fear that, it is one of the lessons to take away from the
totalitarian experience and from the terrifying failures of Soviet Marxism. But
this vigilance should not become a pretext or an alibi to reject all that which
Marx has offered to us and can again teach us, if one does not give in to
facile and archaic repetition. Allow me to again refer to Specters
of Marx and other books (not only mine). It really
is too difficult to answer briefly.
Q:
Since the self-criticism of the left, there is no utopian thought anymore.
Conservative cultural criticism has finished it off. Your philosophy, it seems
to us, is not willing to renounce utopia entirely, yet without naming it.
Should one see in the event or in the 'tout autre'
a new name for utopia?
JD:
Although there is a critical potential in utopia which one should no doubt
never completely renounce, above all when one can turn it into a motif of
resistance against all alibis and all 'realist' and 'pragmatist' resignations,
I still mistrust the word. In certain contexts, utopia, the word in any case,
is all too easily associated with the dream, with demobilisation, with an
impossibility that urges renouncement instead of action. The 'impossible' of
which I often speak is not the utopian, on the contrary it lends its own motion
to desire, to action and to decision, it is the very
figure of the real. It has duration, proximity, urgency.
Q:
Among the global problems of capitalism which you have analysed in Specters of Marx, the question of the
refugees and the expatriates seems to be most urgent to you. In your recent texts,
one can discover a topic which has also been central to the thought of Hannah Arendt (who appears among other places in 'The Monolingualism of the Other'): the
absolute esteem for unconditional hospitality. How can such a hospitality offer
responses to the problems of the refugees of the global society?
JD:
Inseparable from the thinking of justice itself, unconditional hospitality
nevertheless remains impracticable as such. One cannot inscribe it in rules or
in legislation. If one wants to translate it immediately into a politics, it
always risks having perverse effects. But fully aware of those risks, we cannot
and must not dispense with the reference to an unreserved hospitality. It is an
absolute pole, without which the desire, the concept and experience, and the
very thought of hospitality would not make any sense. Again, this 'pole' is not
a 'Kantian idea', but the place from which immediate and concrete urgencies are
dictated. Thus the political task remains to find the best 'legislative' transaction,
the best 'juridical' conditions to ensure that, in any given situation, the
ethics of hospitality is not violated in its principle - and that it is
respected as much as possible. To that end, one has to change laws, habits,
phantasms, a whole 'culture'. That is what is needed
at this moment. The violence of xenophobic or nationalistic reactions is also a
symptom. The task is as urgent today as it is difficult: everywhere,
particularly in a
Q:
What should one do if the 'laws of hospitality' (if they exist) do not attain
the status of positive law? Would this not be a situation where but for an act
of grace, citizens would be without civic rights?
JD:
One has to do everything to see the laws of hospitality inscribed in positive
law. If this is impossible, everyone must judge, in their soul and conscience,
sometimes in a 'private' manner, what (when, where, how, to what extent) has to
be done without the laws or against the laws. To be precise: when some of us
have appealed to civil disobedience in France on behalf of those without
identifying papers (and for a small number among us - for example in my
seminar, but publicly - more than a year before the press began to discuss this
and before the number of protesters grew to be spectacular), it was not an
appeal to transgress the law in general, but to disobey those laws which to us
seemed themselves to be in contradiction with the principles inscribed in our
constitution, to international conventions and to human rights, thus in
reference to a law we considered higher if not unconditional. It was in the
name of this higher law that we called for 'civil disobedience', within certain
limited conditions. But I will not reject the word 'grace' (of the
unconditional gift and without return) that you offered to me, provided that
one does not associate it with obscure religious connotations which, though
they can sometimes be interesting, would call for quite different discussions.
Q:
What is the advantage of a thought of hospitality compared with other universal
moral concepts? Can one say that it is less abstract and perhaps more apt for
thinking a justice which always has to address itself to a singular other?
JD:
Yes, I would agree with that formulation. Given what I suggested a moment ago
(the new problems of borders, of the nation-state, of the displacement of
people, etc.), the topic of hospitality focuses on what is today most
concretely urgent and the most proper for the articulation of a political
ethics.
Q:
If for reasons of legal security one does not simply want to have confidence in
hospitality as moral exigency, how is the thought of unconditional hospitality
linked to a juridical world order? Do you conceive of any sort of global civil
rights (Kant’s cosmopolitan rights) for all people? But how can one imagine
such a right without taking recourse to a global state which would pose the
question of legitimation right away?
JD:
These are problems I have been dealing with in some depth in my teaching for
many years. The reference to Kant is at once indispensable and insufficient. A cosmopolitical right (Weltbuergerrecht)
that would regulate what Kant called 'universal
hospitality' would already today constitute the perspective of an immense
progress if our international agencies wanted to put it into effect, which is
far from being the case. And yet Kant has well circumscribed the limits and
conditions for the execution of such a law (accorded only to citizens as such,
from state to state, and merely as a right of visit (Besuchsrecht),
not as the right of residence (Gastrecht),
without any special contract between states (such as the European agreements
drawn up in Schengen)). One would have to invent a
law (but also a justice beyond the law) which lifts these limitations. One
should invent the law-making agency which would not simply be of the state or
bilateral contracts between states which fight against the hegemony of certain
states. But certainly not a global state, a single global state! I refer back
to what we just said about the state. Neither Kant nor Arendt,
by the way, who you cite at times, believe in the
possibility of a single global state. I know very well that this riddle seems
insoluble. But a task whose solution is by the same token the object of a knowledge, a task which a simple recognition would render
accessible, would this still be a task?
Q:
In your book The Other Heading, you made a clear confession about
European democracy and yet you sometimes show a reticence about the institution
of this democracy. What are the reasons for your reticence? Are they more of a
structural order or of a false setting to work of 'good ideas'?
JD:
To answer too fast and summarily once more, I am 'against' all those who are
'against'
Q:
The ethical background of your thought was always recognisable, even if it was
perhaps sometimes well hidden. But why has justice been occupying the
foreground of your texts recently like a protagonist? Should one say that the
necessity for a thinking of justice and its setting to work has been
aggravated?
JD:
What you call a 'background' has always already been readable. But in order to
know what was readable, one must read. It is true that, in these words and in
this form, those topics can only appear in the foreground after a certain
'theoretical-critical' trajectory that is calculated to limit the
misunderstandings. I do not believe that the misunderstandings have
disappeared, but perhaps they happen less easily. In any case, once again, for
those who read. No, I do not believe that the
situation has deteriorated in the world, alas. For thirty-five years, the same
evils have been there, perhaps less mediatised...
Q:
Can you say a few words about the very curious separation that opposes you to
the thought of the second generation of the
JD:
Once again, too short a response for a question that would demand, and will
demand I hope, long discussions, not only on my part. It is true, happily, that
Habermas and I often find ourselves
on the same side in respect to urgent political questions. We collaborate, for
instance, in international associations like the International Writers’
Parliament or the Cisia (which deals with
intellectuals, journalists, etc. who are persecuted in
Q:
Emmanuel Levinas was one of the most important
philosophers for you, it seems. Recently, one sees a kind of appropriation of
his thought by catholic thinkers in
JD:
You are right, this 'stake', and this 'situation' call for vigilant analyses.
You know my admiration and gratitude for Levinas. I
consider his thinking an immense event of this century. But the troubling
'appropriation' of which you speak is not merely catholic and conservative, it can also be that of a naive moralism or of a faddish and simplifying mediatisation. In order to try and resist, in my way in the
texts which I devoted to him, I always insist discretely yet clearly on certain
reserves, above all on political misgivings (for instance on the topic of the
nation of Israel, in Adieu) or on the paradoxes of his concept of 'the
third' and of 'justice', on the always possible perversions of his ethics, on
an inevitable 'perjury' at the heart of 'droiture'.
But here again, so as not to be too vague or unjust, would you allow me to
refer you to my publications?
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Other
interesting interviews: [1] [2] [3] [4]