McQuillan, Deconstruction After 9 11

Deconstruction After 9/11

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17. Deconstruction After 9/11Martin McQuillan

Deconstruction After 9/11

Martin McQuillan

New York London

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McQuillan, Martin. Deconstruction after 9/11 / by Martin McQuillan. p. cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies) ISBN 978-0-415-96494-4 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. 3. Ter-rorism—Philosophy. 4. Derrida, Jacques. 5. Deconstruction. I. Title. JA71.M347 2009 320.01—dc22 2008017315

ISBN10: 0–415–96494–6 (hbk)ISBN10: 0–203–89110–4 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978–0-415–96494–4 (hbk)ISBN13: 978–0-203–89110–0 (ebk)

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‘Why aren’t revolutions started by the most humane people?Because humane people don’t start revolutions; they start libraries . . . and cemeteries.’

Jean-Luc Godard, Notre Musique

Contents

Infi nite Preface ixAcknowledgements xv

Introduction: Deconstruction After 9/11 1

1 Wars and Rumours of Wars 16

2 The Eternal Battle for the Domination of the World, or, Forget Kosovo 33

3 Tele-Techno-Theology 47

4 Extraordinary Rendition: Derrida and Vietnam 65

5 Derrida and Policy: Is Deconstruction Really a Social Science? 81

6 Spectres of Poujade: Naomi Klein and the New International 91

7 Promises, Promises (This Is Also Why . . . ) 108

8 Hungary in Deconstruction 128

9 Enosis, or, ‘The Sovereignty of Cyprus’ 137

10 ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’: Edward Said and the Deconstruction of Palestine 145

Epilogue: War and Philosophy 168

Notes 173Index 197

Infi nite Preface

Reading makes our nation great.

—Words on a literacy poster behind George W. Bush when he was informed of the attacks of 9/11.

Saving the world has to be reinvented every day. In the absence of any pro-grammable response to the situations of the contemporary public space and out of respect for the singularity and alterity of the new day that arrives tomorrow, each time we respond in vigilance to what calls for thought and action we must reimagine that answer anew as a creative act of an uncon-ditional rationality. That is to say, a poetic-performative, rational response which takes account of the incalculable and the impossible within these situations in order to account for it and reckon with it, suspending (in a reasoned way) all conditions (conventional, presuppositional, hypothetical, theoretical) to that work of analysis. We call this Enlightenment-without-conditions, following Jacques Derrida, deconstruction. While Derrida is sadly no longer with us to assist in this work, the multiple shocks, ruptures and absurdities of the world today bear witness to the urgent need, now more than ever, for deconstruction and its interminable more-than-critical alertness and judicious patient rationalism. This is not a book that proposes answers to the problems of the world, or at least it does not offer any repeat-able and imitable answers (as much as some of us would like such things). It is not a book that documents injustice or gives voice to righteous indigna-tion (although perhaps it should). Nor is it a book which seeks to extract from the writings of Jacques Derrida a vocabulary, method or system to be applied to events in the public domain. Rather, if it is indeed a book, it is several things. Firstly, it is comprised of a series of articulations of what I felt must-be-said, over a period of some six years, roughly from the publi-cation of Politics of Friendship and the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the ongoing occupation of Iraq and the publication in English translation of Derrida’s Rogues. A number of essays in this book then respond to a par-ticular urge to write during this time, which could not be resisted (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Palestine, Seattle, Iraq). Other essays clear the ground for the thinking which the troubles of these place names solicit.

Secondly, given that these essays span a run of publications of late texts by Derrida, this book is also a sustained exegesis and mobilisation of the content of those texts. It treats a number of terms to be found in later

x Infi nite Preface

Derrida: the quasi-transcendental, hospitality, democracy, undecidability, justice, the law, spectres, tele-technology, sovereignty, and the religious, among others. However, the aim of such encounters with the text of Derrida is never simply to explicate these concepts (although this often happens). Rather, it is always to put such ideas to work in an ongoing deconstruction of historicity as it unfolds before us as ‘politics’. This term itself must be turned over and scrutinised again and again if it is to retain an affi liation to the sort of critical rationality that is required to exercise leverage on the conceptual and non-conceptual orders which coalesce today to confi gure the conditions of injustice, exploitation and subordination in the world. While, professional politicians of every hue call for ‘a new kind of politics’, this invocation inevitably reveals itself as a depoliticising gesture conjured up to the benefi t of a set of clear and familiar political interests. A new kind of politics would be one which not only distrusted such gestures but really, truly and seriously, set out the task of questioning what has been thought and done under the name of politics (and indeed the ‘new’). This ques-tioning would be without conditions, including the questioning of all the conditionalities of politics and political philosophy, such as the dialectic, decision and judgement. In this way, ‘politics’ itself (themselves) the arena of the political and political culture, could not be assumed to be a self-evident or normalising thing. A new kind of politics may have to forgo a traditional reliance on the very idea of politics as it has been inherited, just as it must treat soberly that inheritance and the work of paleonymy that the word and concept ‘politics’ requires. In so far as this book attempts with varying degrees of success to carry out this work in relation to the encoun-ter between deconstruction and the exemplary, I am particularly concerned to interrogate the traditional binary division between theory and practice in the political sphere.

In the preface to Totality and Infi nity, Levinas offers the eyebrow-raising formulation: ‘The traditional opposition between theory and practice will disappear before the metaphysical transcendence by which a relation with the absolutely other, or truth, is established, and of which ethics is the royal road’. There are many reasons why I am constitutionally unable to adopt this sentence without considerable reservation. These reasons could fi ll another book and I will not elaborate my suspicion of the term ‘ethics’ and queries regarding the protocols of Levinasian thinking here. However, he is cor-rect, I think, in proposing the dissolution of the determining and determined binary between theory and practice as a consequence of an encounter with the unconditionality of the absolutely other. In the examples that concern me in this book, from Palestine to Cyprus, something always remains to be thought and it is this incalculability which links practical reason to the theo-retical reason it subordinates. In thinking through this excess, a practical and theoretical unconditionality which makes politics itself possible (i.e. refuses it closure and gives it a future), an intervention takes place (a textual activ-ism) which produces the movement, history and becoming of a necessary

Infi nite Preface xi

political analysis which links the political to critical thought today, in a way that is neither passive nor active but the response to the continued arrival of an unstoppable and unknowable otherness. It is for this reason that this book cannot be a collection of ‘solutions’ or guide to predictable future action. Instead it can only be exemplary in its treatment of the exemplary. Kant is wrong to imagine that examples are the wheel-chairs upon which weak philosophical systems lean to support woolly argument. The exemplary is the very point at which philosophy has to risk its metaphysical transcen-dence against the non-philosophy that cuts across it and gives rise to it as thought. Always, and without exception, where philosophy is concerned, the encounter with the example leads to a trembling in the axiomatics, thematics and theoretics of the systematicity of philosophy as the system attempts to appropriate and dismiss simultaneously the challenge of the example to phi-losophy’s universal ambition. Deconstruction, least we forget, is more than philosophy. It is never a system nor a metalanguage; it does not travel by the routes of traditional ‘disciplinary’ philosophy, even if it is respectful of that journey. On the contrary, deconstruction (unlike philosophy) reads. It reads the singular, the unique and the irreducible. Such reading qua reading does not generalize from the exemplary but accepts the challenge of the exemplary to thought as an articulation of the troubling otherness which presents itself as an arrival in reading. Reading in this sense has very little to do with the quiet spaces of university libraries (although thinking does occasionally hap-pen in such places). Rather, this reading as an interminable, unconditional critical liveliness to the world around us, its histories and its futures. It is what some people used to feel confi dent enough to call politics.

Thirdly, this book is as much about Paul de Man as it is about Jacques Derrida. The reader may very well detect a series of interpretative gestures which can be traced back to a mobilisation of the practice of de Man’s ‘lin-guistics of literariness’ in the direction of the political. It has long been my contention, and this can be easily demonstrated by reference to a series of very specifi c moments in the text, that the de Manian corpus represents a profound engagement with the problems of totalitarianism and if treated with read-erly diligence will offer an enormously enabling set of strategies for political thought. I do this explicitly in relation to readings of Rousseau and Marx but it is everywhere here, like a rash. It is an involuntary itch beneath the surface of my writing, which displays itself as a symptom again and again in each turn of an argument. In this sense, and fourthly, this book far from being a work of theory and academic criticism at all is in fact a volume of autobiog-raphy. I hope that its arguments and responses are suitably complex to avoid association with the dandy philosophers and so-called public intellectuals who speak with the authority of academics in the media without the rigorous refl ection or complication that the title of ‘academic’ requires. It is not enough that the response of the scholar, as a scholar, be deeply felt; it must also be deeply thought. It will be a matter for readers to decide whether the contents of this book meet this requirement. However, in so far as these essays map an

xii Infi nite Preface

analytical engagement over a number of years they recount the story of time spent in textual activism and as a narrative it will no doubt be marked by con-tradiction and re-evaluation as would be the right of any personal history.

Fifthly, a number of the political examples discussed in this book are not arbitrary but are linked by a clear concern with the political as an event of war, whether this is a policing action in the name of international law, the explicit invasion and occupation of a sovereign state or Western democracy’s war on its own citizens. Perhaps, autobiographically speaking, writing at such times will have been a way of exceeding the politics of indignation by insisting on an unconditional critical response at a moment when it seemed most needed even as critical thought will have been the one thing sovereign power would like most to ignore. These essays are, of course, not simply accounts of political events. They are all oblique encounters with the event through the textual tradition or cultural milieu, which explore the porous boundaries and conceptual interconnections between textual fi elds, refus-ing the negation of the melancholic, unrefl ective division between material and fi gural, theory and practice, philosophy and policy. If a certain history of contemporary global unrest as war runs through these essays like a red thread it is not out of an unconditional pacifi sm but rather out of a wish to account for rationally the use of violence as politics. As Levinas notes in the preface to Totality and Infi nity:

Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.

One could quote at length from Levinas’s magnifi cent philosophical poem, which no preface can ignore. The contemporary ‘virtual’ war (not that vir-tual if you happen to be on the wrong end of shock and awe) is no different. These events call for commentary because no distance can be established between the critical thinker and what, if they happen to be a Western citi-zen, is done in their name. This is an autobiographical book because no doubt my own identity is at stake in understanding the events of the global political. One should not be so bone-headed as to imagine that this assault on identity is equivalent to the violence done to persons in the zone of con-fl ict but they are economically linked, as the somnambulance of certain Western policy and opinion makers during the so-called war on terror dem-onstrates. The stupefaction and mystifi cation of domestic thought is insep-arable from the military violence which is only one aspect of this worldwide

Infi nite Preface xiii

struggle. Thus, critical reason and deconstruction are more important now than ever and this textual activism will be affi liated in unpredictable ways, without determinable presence, to the material processes of the political.

This is not just a call for students and teachers to look lively and to resist the war on reading (critical vigilance) waged from the ideological bunkers of our age. That would be patronising and self-aggrandising, as if no one else had ever thought through the events which surround them. Rather, it is to call attention to what may be unique today in the transformations that are being wrought under the opaque name of globalization, namely that the world today is a world at war: military, economic, ecological, ideological, religious war. This world war has its metonymic symptoms such as the confl ict in Iraq or the attacks of 9/11, but it has been ongoing for some time now as the pos-sibility of permanent war between the followers of the book, what Derrida calls the Abrahamic tradition (Christianity, Judaism, Islam). It is both a war for the rights of hegemony over the legacy of the book (the meek as yet have not inherited the earth) and a war for the defence of imperial privilege. As such it is a war that the Empire will, fi nally, one day lose, if not to the com-batants of this war itself. It is not the purpose of this volume to document the inconsistencies and complications of what is after all not a unitary experience (there would be much to say here concerning China and India for example and internal divisions between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe) nor will I submit to the temptation to offer predictions. Rather, let me close this open-ing salvo by taking up Derrida’s suggestion that this world war is also the end of war, as a concept. None of the examples on offer in this book are examples of war in the classic sense between nation-states (the United States is not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan in an international sense) nor are they any lon-ger (in the case of Cyprus or Palestine) partisan struggles for the foundation of sovereign states, although traces of such a paradigm live on in unrigorous ways. Rather, what is at stake here is a new kind of violence, one able to mobilise the phantom of war as a projection of a rationalization or justifi ca-tion of appropriative behaviour, even where the behaviour is neither rational nor justifi ed. This ‘world war’, invisible to the half-closed eye, is being waged in the virtual structures of trading rooms and oil exchanges, the permuta-tions and mutations of global ideology and the ideology of the global itself, in the newsrooms of a worldwide media, through the mechanics of global governance and international law, and in the migration and dissemination of people and ideas all across the globe. If this is the ‘global political’ of my textual activism, war today is only the violent extension of this contest for privilege as a means of securing short-term victory. Like crude oil, it cannot last. We are entering an unpredictable age and await what or who comes. If, according to a certain formulation, the nineteenth century was the European century and the twentieth century was the American century, perhaps, the twenty-fi rst century will be the century of the other.

Martin McQuillan, 18.01.07

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge and thank all the editors and publishers who granted per-mission to reprint material that appeared in earlier versions in the follow-ing publications: Chapter 2 in parallax 16, no. 6 (2000): 2; ‘In Violence’, eds. Paul Bowman and Mark Little, reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis; Chapter 3 in Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords, 2003, ed. Julian Wolfreys, reproduced with permission of Edinburgh Uni-versity Press; Chapter 6 in parallax 20, ‘The New International’, 2001, ed. Martin McQuillan, reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis; Chapter 10 in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol. 13, 2005, reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.

This book has been in the making for some time. The thinking and conversations which inform it will no doubt go on for a time to come. As such there are innumerable people to thank and acknowledge for their role known and unknown, secret and explicit, in assisting its emergence. There-fore, I would like to thank for their friendship and inspiration, in alpha-betical order, for reasons that may or may not be obvious to them: Graham Allen, Aidan Arrowsmith, Derek Attridge, Rowan Bailey, Stephen Barker, Andrew Benjamin, Ryan Bishop, Paul Bowman, Tamas Brenwicz, Scott Brewster, Eleanor Byrne, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Marios Constanti-nou, Mark Currie, Jonathan Dronsfi eld, Robert Eaglestone, Barbara Engh, Jeremy Gilbert, Margaret Grebowicz, Joanne Hartley, Joanna Hodge, Peggy Kamuf, Willy Maley, Nigel Mapp, Maria Margaroni, Joanne Morra, Scott McCracken, Fred Orton, John Phillips, Eric Prenowitz, Shaun Rich-ards, Alistair Rider, Will Rea, Nick Royle, Obrad Savic, Marcel Swiboda, Marq Smith, Robert Smith, Ashley Thompson, Ika Willis, Eric Woehrling, and Julian Wolfreys.

This book is dedicated to Oscar Marx and Felix Jacques, my darling boys.

IntroductionDeconstruction After 9/11

I hope that there will be, “in Europe”, “philosophers” able to mea-sure up to the task . . .

—Jacques Derrida1

GROUND ZERO

There are, at least, three notable 11th of Septembers which a phrase such as ‘deconstruction after 9/11’ might make reference to in all its concentrated singularity. There is most obviously, perhaps, the coordinated attacks in which jumbo jets were hijacked and fl own into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, the western portion of the Penta-gon building in Arlington, Virginia, and a third crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing a total of 2,974 people in 2001. In the Anglo-Saxon idiom this is what is meant by ‘9/11’, the order of month and day, in stan-dard North American usage and so foreign to an European eye, indicates the territorial priorities through which this date is memorialised via the mnemonic of the United States’ emergency services’ telephone number. This introduction will be concerned, in part, with Derrida’s interview text with Giovanna Borradori associated with this date. Let me also note two other signifi cant ‘9/11’s that will concern us here. Firstly, Septem-ber 11, 1973 when a military coup in Chile, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, toppled the Socialist president Salvador Allende and began the seventeen-year reign of terror of General Augusto Pinochet. A line can be drawn through the history of the ‘Cold War’ that connects the two anniversaries in more or less explicit ways. Finally, September 11, 1903, the birth-date of the German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno. The same day on which the Adorno Prize is awarded and which in 2001 Jacques Derrida was the recipient, giving rise to the address entitled ‘Fichus’, more of which later. I will make reference just to these three ‘9/11’s although there are many more of equal signifi cance: September 11, 1919, one of many early interventions in Latin America when US Marines invaded Honduras to suppress revolution (three months before the inauguration of the League of Nations); September 11, 1921, when Nahal, the fi rst moshav ovdim in Israel was settled in the Jezreel

2 Deconstruction After 9/11

Valley deriving its name from a biblical town allocated to the Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes; September 11, 1922, when the British Mandate in Palestine began; September 11, 1941, when ground was fi rst broken for the construction of the Pentagon the same day as Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech in which he accused the Roosevelt administration along with Britain and world Jewry of pressing for war against Hitler; Septem-ber 11, 1965, when the First Air Cavalry Division of the US Army arrived in Vietnam and so began the new tactics and doctrine of helicopter-borne assault synonymous with that war; September 11, 1970, when eighty-eight of the hostages held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, after the hijacking of four jetliners bound for New York, were released at Dawson’s Field, Jordan, leaving mostly Jews or Israeli citizens as hos-tages for a further fourteen days (this and the Jordanian confl ict which followed are the events from which the Palestinian group Black Septem-ber took their name); September 11, 1978, the date of Prime Minister Begin and Presidents Carter and Sadat’s meeting at Camp David for the fi rst comprehensive peace talk on the Middle East; September 11, 1982, when international forces guaranteeing the safety of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, following Israel’s invasion earlier that year, left Beirut (fi ve days later thousands were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps by Christian Phalangists invited to clear out terrorists from the camps by Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon); September 11, 1989, when the iron curtain was fi rst breached as the border between Hungary and Austria was opened resulting in a mass exodus of East Germans into West Ger-many; September 11, 1990, when President Bush Sr. delivered the speech ‘Towards a New World Order’ in which the phrase ‘new world order’ was used for the fi rst time, in a televised address threatening the use of force against Iraq which had recently invaded its southern neighbour Kuwait; September 11, 2005, when Israel completed its ‘unilateral disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip; September 11, 2007, when Russia tested the largest ever conventional weapon ‘the Father of all bombs’ after the threat to deploy such thermobaric, vacuum bombs in Chechnya. I will not attempt to list those other 9/11s, all those massacres worthy of the name ‘9/11’, the ‘quantitatively comparable killings’, the metaphorical appellation of an intense, single act of indiscriminate terroristic or state violence con-ferred by the syntagm ‘9/11’: the eight thousand Kurds of the Barzani tribe buried in mass graves in Southern Iraq, the sixty thousand Kurds and Shia Muslims killed after their uprising at the end of the fi rst Gulf War, the eight thousand at Srebrenica as UN troops stood by un-mandated, the ten thousand killed at Hama when the Syrian army bulldozed the city to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, the uncountable number murdered on the orders of Ceausescu in Timisoara, the list is sadly endless and no justice can be done to it. In so far as 9/11/2001 names a single day in which the death toll can be calculated with a degree of certainty and in determinate places the term retains a valuable and measurable meaning that would be

Introduction 3

dissipated if it were to be metaphorically transferred on to every similar (or incomparable) crime.

As a date ‘9/11’ is both singular and essentially repeatable. It already names more than itself in an uncanny way, its numerology having encour-aged President Reagan to name September 11th Emergency Services day in 1986. The use of the synecdoche as a mediatic and political shorthand always refers beyond its own date to other dates and to an othering of dates and the date of the other. Whenever the term ‘9/11’ is used in this way a marker is put down referring us to this day, 9/11/2001, as if cita-tion of this date (or its foreshortening as 9/11) is enough by the power of reference, and the power of its referent, to understand that day and to be affi liated with all that this day entails. The use of the term, seriously or casually, always works in this way in order to address this day as if it were an inaugural invocation of an event specifi c to that day. It does so para-doxically by allowing all of us who do not share the same experience and knowledge of the singularity of that day to speak in solidarity with that day through citation. That is through its essential repeatability as a quota-tion. Thus, the signifi er ‘9/11’ not only names a date by referring to it, but also speaks to other dates, those other dates upon which this quotation can be recited, which in principle are endless. The singular date of ‘9/11’ contains within its citational structure a commitment to all those other dates as the promise of its own memorial power. Thus, ‘9/11’, as a date, is already multiple. It makes the events of 9/11/2001 identifi able beyond its own pure, past singularity. Consequently, that purity is effaced by the date’s own citational structure (the very thing which gives its effect as a metonym). This effacement is not an erasure; rather it is an effacement in the face of another date. This other date, the date of the other, is the guar-antee of the memory of ‘9/11’ as a repeatable and quotable citation and yet it is in the face of these other dates that the intensity of ‘9/11’ as a name begins to ease. There are other tomorrows, the world and history with it did not end on September 11, 2001, life goes on to memorialise ‘9/11’ and to survive it. Each date implies the other; no dates without the other, ‘9/11’ comes around every year that is what makes it singular. Thus, ‘9/11’ from the very beginning is marked by an alterity that both inscribes and lessens the obscurity of its power. As soon as it has been named as a date, there can be no one meaning. This is true of all dating2 but no representation of a ‘single event’ holds sway in quite the same way on the contemporary (or otherwise) scene according to a metonymic insistence of this sort—the 5th of November perhaps, the 4th of July (if you are American), 12th of July (if you are an Ulsterman) 14th (if you are French), but these are now local examples.

That is to say, that, as with all these dates, there is something local and irreducibly idiomatic about the phrase ‘9/11’ even as it is deployed as a universal metonym to foreshorten a considerable and complex discus-sion; used as often in censorious justifi cation as in the memorial. The


very term itself names a problem, perhaps the problem, from which it emerges. The attacks of 9/11 were aimed at the Anglo-American idiom.3 They were aimed at the symbolic heart of that idiom, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, New York (just as with ‘9/11’s’ there are many ‘World Trade Centres’, only the one in New York, by virtue of the domi-nant hegemony of the Anglo-American idiom is able to appropriate the regulating absolute of the defi nite article). These towers that have domi-nated the visual vocabulary of so many representations of New York, as a metonym of a metonym: the quintessential symbol of New York, New York as the quintessence of the Anglo-American idiom. This idiom of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model that at once combines the impression of a certain unrestricted capital and unmoderated labour practices (neither of which are in fact absolutely or rigorously uncompromised), with a politi-cal discourse of technoscientifi c military power which holds hegemonic sway over the institutions of international law and global diplomacy, which in truth also emerge from this discourse. It is this idiom that once again through the powerful projection of a metonym presents itself as the image of globalization, the material benefi ts of which are most assur-edly reserved for the Western world and to the speakers of this idiom. I include Europe in this idiom, although gestures are made towards a counter ‘social model’ of capitalism, the difference is between degrees of ex-appropriation, reserved for the West. In this sense, the selective ben-efi ts of globalization and the selective application of international law are a scene of political, economic and cultural transformation dominated by the Anglo-American idiom (English which is the future of Latin, the language of Empire). To attack this idiom in a highly concentrated and symbolic way is thus to challenge its global hegemony and its political, military and technocapitalist power. It is to attack the source of a tele-scopic projection of this idiom, a local (even a small) detail which through the magnifying effect of an ideological inversion presents itself as a gigan-tic edifi ce towering over the entire world. It is to attack a parochialism in its own back yard and so confi rm the vulnerability of its projected image and that which it represents. The Twin Towers operated as a fi gurative shorthand for the technomilitary capitalism that emerges from the West, both a contemporary substitute for the once welcoming embrace of that other emblem of New York City and idea of post-war, Western global responsibility, the Statue of Liberty. In the 1980s and 1990s the World Trade Centre had been a symbol that said ‘bring me your tried and hur-ried capital’; the twin towers were the Romulus and Remus of a newly emerging Empire of capital, the double columns inscribed in the picto-gram ‘9/11’. At the edge of the East River they were the promontory, the headland (the cap as the French would have it) of this world capital, the capital of capital. So frequently represented in fi lm and popular media, the towers were the glorious monuments at the centre of an Empire that stretches around the earth and to the frontiers of the imaginations of its

Introduction 5

subjects.4 New York itself as a name depends upon the double substitution of a town familiar with raiders and external assault, New Jórvík. Such projections turn local details into towering monuments in the imaginary of Empire: Nothing is less impressive than the Arc de Triomphe, nothing quite so comically ridiculous as Buckingham Palace, nowhere quite as uninviting as lower Manhattan. The idiomatic depends on such demotic shorthand, the metonym works because the reference is generalisable: all the citizens of the world know that this corner of New York is the back yard of Empire and that English is spoken there. It is therefore, a shared back yard, a back yard of the mind as it were, one of those paradoxical instances of the translatable idiom, like je ne sais quoi, ‘translatable’ or ‘universal’ because it requires no translation. The same is also true of the Pentagon as a target for the hijackers, as well as the use of jetliners as mis-siles, those symbols of international business travel and the contraction of the parameters of the globe. It was a calculated attack which understood the ‘representative fl ip’ by which metonymic fi gures are projected onto metaphorical orders and these orders are mistaken for the order of the day, in which media representation is indistinguishable from a shared apprehension of the real.

Conversely, and for a long time (although I think now this particular image has been demystifi ed) the boldness of the attacks, arriving (seem-ingly) out of a clear blue sky, allowed for the equal magnifi cation of their perpetrators as giants on the world stage, rather than the rump of a failed death cult lashing out at its own one-time sponsor and ally. Here again the idiomatic enters into the universal through a powerful metonymic projection. ‘Al Qaeda’ can be translated from the Arabic as ‘camp’ or ‘base’ and more often than not this is taken by a literal-minded Western media to refer to the training camps for Jihad, the existence of which provided the pretext for the swift retribution handed out in Afghanistan, treating an entire nation for the actions of its own aberrant synecdoche. However, perhaps the most appropriate way of translating ‘Al Qaeda’ is as it is used in the Arab idiom, meaning ‘database’, an index of names or grouped identities. It is a base without foundation, a base of relations only, which as relations have an exchange value but no presence as such. Just as this techno-thanto-teleological sect emerged as a fi gure of global conspiracy, so any genuine organisational connectivity was dispersed by the comprehensive and overwhelming response of the American military. If Al Qaeda, and its metonym Bin Laden, live on (and will outlive its adversaries in the Bush regime) it is as the projection of a monstrous ideological inversion, whereby this local detail of the end of the Cold War comes to represent (by confusion and design) a wider confl ict between the followers of the book and between the West and its others. No doubt there is a real Al Qaeda and that they are capable of the most appalling acts of indiscriminate violence (one of the effects of the deliberate opacity of ‘the war on terror’ has been to remove the


capacity for certainty and to encourage a residual doubt with respect to the risk posed by such people). However, given the limited scale of the ‘Al Qaeda’ problem and the extent of its operation since 9/11, it is only by an extraordinary Munchausen projection which exploits the image of a genuine terror and real death, that it can be claimed that this group (on its own, if it is one and if it is co-ordinated) represents an equal threat to Western values and hegemony as the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War or the lethal potential of the blitzkrieg.5 In this respect, Al Qaeda is the least of the West’s enemies, and yet for the logocentric West names and the naming of parts are important. The appellation of ‘Al Qaeda’ carries a terrifying metonymic power, conferred onto the disparate groups that take up this sobriquet in Iraq and other theatres, like the ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ who terrorised the seven seas for several generations as the name was handed down to a successor on the wealthy retirement of each Dread Pirate Roberts.

Undoubtedly, while the demarcations of the war on terror can be explained as ideological inversions, they cannot be dismissed as such. They have now been in process for so long and in such a sustained way that they have come to defi ne the parameters of a mutation in the very idea of war itself. The war on terror, like any war on an abstract noun might, involves a profound reimagining of the relations and risk that inform this enterprise. It is not merely the projection of a false consciousness as the exploitation of an image of terror by the target itself as propaganda but it is the complete inculcation of that set of imagined relations into material processes which brings about a transformation in our very understanding and idea of the world today. However, as a transference of the mediatic-metonymic it is always multiple and in contradiction. Hence, for example, the simultaneous power of Al Qaeda as a phantomatic menace which lurks in the shadow of the West’s own suburbs, schools and immigrant families, and the representation of it as a quasi state within a state, which like the Mafi a or the Median Cartel, operates as an independent sovereign entity within and across national borders. It is hard to forget the image of Sec-retary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pointing to a diagram produced by The Times of London, detailing the passageways and levels of Osama Bin Laden’s alleged lair in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, whereby in some ludicrous parody of science fi ction Bin Laden was said to have hol-lowed out a mountain for a secret base.6 Although I can recall this moun-tain range being thoroughly strafed with ‘bunker-busting’ bombs, I have no recollection of a CNN crew entering their fantastical interior. Here the mutation of this ‘warfare’ is evident, the movement from an enemy identifi ed by its sovereign status and identifi able borders, be they state bor-ders or an encampment, to a phantasmatic enemy able to cross boundaries unnoticed and to imbricate themselves in our closest spaces and the back yards of our minds. The distinction between these two models cannot be rigorously maintained, the representational fl ip between the two and back

Introduction 7

again happens so often that the destabilisation becomes permanent. Our established representative frames require us to hold onto the intelligibil-ity of traditional models to explain new effects just as the evolution of the new swells those models and that frame in unsustainable ways, the new inhabiting the old as a mutation which representation must endeavour to represent but is not obliged to understand. This is a mutation beyond the classically hybrid, it is a transformation which calls for an entirely new (and so impossible) representational matrix. It is in the gaps around this new critical philosophy (if that is what it is) that may provide new representational frames and a transformative inscription, that the previ-ously absurd, incomprehensible and irrational become a material condi-tion. The war on terror is replete with such examples of the generation of history through the inability to determine between a textual effect and its material inscription. For example, the invention of the legal category of ‘enemy combatant’ that at once requires the semblance of an adherence to traditional protocols of war (Guantánamo Bay is in all but name an internment camp for prisoners of this ‘war’) and their refusal as this label ‘justifi es’ an entirely new and unjust ‘legal’ non-place. Examples could be multiplied all the way to Baghdad and Iraq’s nuclear neighbour who by the very possibility of working towards a nuclear capacity have de facto earned the ‘rights’ of a nation-with-the-bomb independent of the existence or otherwise of any such bomb.7 If one were to go too fast, in the spirit of these accelerated mutations in the relations between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities, I would say that this sort of transformation in global political culture is ‘deconstruction after 9/11’. That is, the immanently divisible, transformative performance of an auto-immune fi gure without totalization as a process of material inscription and the historicisation of difference in the unpresentable of the here and now. These mutations are the world in deconstruction today. If anyone ever doubted that there was truly ‘nothing outside of the text’, as Gayatri Spivak’s translation so ably and problematically put it,8 then the confusion between inscription and reality in our present mediatic political culture should make us think that what is required most urgently to track these accelerations is a critical, more-than-philosophy, deconstruction as a reading practice up to the task of meeting with the beyond of today’s representational frames. To some this will sound like ‘postmodern-theory-for-a-postmodern-war’. On the contrary, deconstruction after 9/11 has to be in the manner or spirit of the values of enlightenment critique as the exercise of reason and discern-ment as a potentially decisionary intervention and critical judgement on the present, if an ‘academic’ understanding of the irrationalism of the 9/11 attacks is to contribute to an awakening from obscurity and dogmatism in our political culture and in the cultures of Islam. It is for this reason that I earlier invoked the name of Adorno (and by extension, metonymy perhaps, that of Benjamin) as an alternative tradition of an unconditional, critical attitude to the present and of writing critique in a time of terror.


PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE

‘If one is holding to this opposition of left and right, it is not easy, I’m sure, to be consistently on the left, to be on the left every day. A diffi cult strategy.’

—Jacques Derrida9

The war on terror has touched my own back yard(s). On July 7, 2006, a number of homemade bombs were detonated on the London Underground and a London bus, killing fi fty-six people in Aldagte, Edgware Road, Kings Cross and Tavistock Square. The so-called suicide bombers who carried out these attacks came from Leeds. One was from Dewsbury, a commuter town on the edge of Leeds, which I pass through every day on the way to work; two were from Beeston where my mother-and-father-in-law grew up. During the subsequent police investigation it emerged that the group had rented a ‘safe house’ where they had assembled the bombs, in a street a few hundred yards from my offi ce at the university. Racially diverse and racially divided, Leeds was the locus for the radicalisation of the young men who set off their bombs in crowded commuter trains two hours away in the centre of London. On Saturday, June 30, 2007, a doctor from the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Paisley and an engineer studying for a PhD at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, drove a jeep full of propane gas into the check-in hall of Glasgow Airport in Scotland. When the gas failed to explode, the driver set himself alight before they were both arrested. In the police operation that followed it was discovered that the pair had been renting a house in a village called Houston, fi fteen minutes from the airport. After my family left Glasgow in the late 1970s, we moved to this area. I went to school in Houston, we went to church in Houston (my par-ents still do); as a child I played in houses on the street where the bombers stayed. These stories are coincidences no doubt and I do not claim any spe-cial relation to or suffering in the war on terror beyond being one of many anonymous white-collar airline passengers caused mild inconvenience in the pursuit of air miles. However, I mention them (although I am quite sure you will be able to insert your own more relevant anecdotes here) to demonstrate the way in which the war on terror as a mutation of the very conditions and idea of war itself involves not only occupation of foreign lands but also an eternal home front, a perpetual ‘war’ of the idiomatic, and an assault on the unconscious as a frontier in that war.

This is the effect of terrorism and the exploitation of the image of ter-ror, to turn the familiar spaces of our lives into a possible zone of a con-fl ict without end, a war without frontiers in which there is no distinction between the inside and outside of a militarised zone. The theatre of this war extends into our offi ces and bedrooms, into the experience of standing among mixed-race commuters on a train, and so into the most unknow-able corners of our psychic apparatus, ‘in terra, in and beyond territories,

Introduction 9

the ultimate resource of all terrorisms’, as Derrida puts it.10 This is how the material inscription of ideology works, both for the primly spoken aca-demic standing in line at airport security and the would-be Jihadist who is so taken by the inventions of a cause as to murder his compatriots in the name of ideology. The two things are not separate. The Leeds bombers lived and worked in the same city as I did, their experiences of that city and its intercommunal relations being quite different to my own. I spent the time teaching theories of cultural hybridity to predominantly white middle-class students and enacting the university’s equality of opportunity policies for predominantly white middle-class staff, while profound alien-ation among young men of Pakistani origin in dormitory towns on the edge of the city led to the bloodiest ever terrorist attack in the British mainland (with the exception of Lockerbie). Mohammed Sadique Khan, the leader of this cell, was a kindergarten teacher in Dewsbury. What could it ever mean to say that as two teachers from Leeds we lived in the same city? Surely, we lived in different worlds? That of course would be a cliché of a mediatic sort that relegated the milieu of Mohammed Sadique Khan to a nether world of pre-critical irrationality and incomprehensibility. I do not think that is correct. The truth is that, geographically at least, he and I went about our business on the same street. What can be said of the mission of the university and of the pretensions of critical theory, when in the rental properties which crowd up against Leeds University campus an ‘Al Qaeda’ (if this is what they were and this remains a meaningful appellation) safe house nestles next to a Centre for Cultural Studies, libraries and cinemas? No doubt his ideology was romanticised, obscure and overdetermined by layers of mythology and history (I know a little of this having grown up in the Catholic half of the west of Scotland where an affi liation to the cultural nationalism of a mystifi ed Ireland was de rigueur). However, as a mode of indoctrination it is all identifi able and rationalisable (in a psychoanalytic sense) according to a coherent if ignorant set of beliefs related to a long history of colonialism and ethnoreligious division. If one takes the time to read the tenants of the Jihadists, of which Osama Bin Laden’s declaration of war on the United States is a good example (but only an example), the ideological motivation for attacks of this order is perfectly accessible, if not something one would wish to condone or compromise with.

It goes without saying that I am not ameliorating the actions of Khan, his deathly ontotheology is repugnant and he would have had no time for deconstruction or the likes of me, whose critique of Western foreign policy is of quite a different order. As Derrida eloquently puts it in the inter-view with Giovanna Borradori, what is unacceptable here ‘is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism . . . [But] above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view have no future . . . nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter’.11 On the contrary one


can have an unconditional critique (if that is what it is) of the West which in no way indulges such fanaticism because that critique is based upon a commitment to the in principle perfectibility of international law and the public space, based on a faith in the justness of cosmopolitical institutions and an idea of democratic dissent in an enlightenment sense. The problem with the West is that it is not Western enough; it too often compromises its own enlightenment values in the interests of its economic privilege. The problem with American foreign policy is not that it installs America as a world leader but that it stops America being the world leader that it might be. The problem with the British Labour Party is not that they acted to remove Sadaam Hussein but that they broke international law to do it and so did incalculable damage to the very values of internationalism and a commitment to justice upon which the meaning of the Labour Party as an institution and British foreign policy since 1997 had been based. One must distinguish between the need to articulate this position and any easy anti-Americanism that too quickly collapsed the techno-theo-thantology of Jihadist groups into a general anti-colonialism. The crashing of jetlin-ers into New York skyscrapers by religious fanatics and the explosion of homemade bombs on the London Tube are not the last desperate actions of the unconscionably denied, which is not to say that within the spectrum of Western global domination there are not those who are unconsciona-bly denied. The projection of one onto the other is again the deliberate obfuscation of metonyms within a wider political motivation. Mohammed Sadique Khan may have claimed to act (monologically and unrequited) on behalf of the Palestinians but he did not ever act or claim to act on behalf of the dispossessed of Leeds and Bradford.

Khan trained for Jihad in Pakistan but he was a British citizen with a broad Yorkshire accent, living in a town with considerable economic inequalities but whose political culture was organised according to a robust and liberal multiculturalism. How then can Britain’s own youth attack their own fel-low citizens, mixed-race commuters on the London Underground, the most idiomatic symbol of new Britain, in the heart of London, the capital, both the head and the heart? Of all the considered and illuminating things that Derrida has to say about ‘9/11’ (we must always use quotation marks here to remind us that this is the citation of a metonym) perhaps the most sig-nifi cant is his suggestion that what he calls the ‘Bin Laden effect’ might be considered as an example of the auto-immunitary perversion of the West. Auto-immunity in Derrida’s late writings describes the process whereby a system, in quasi-suicidal fashion, works to destroy its own methods of protection, immunizing itself against its own immunity and so undoes its own defence of closed systematicity from within.12 Hence, one might read the emergence after the Cold War of a techno-capitalist Jihad from within the CIA-funded Afghan mujahadeen as an example of the way in which the systematic application of Western interests exposes those interests to an aggression that arises from within their operation as foreign policy. The

Introduction 11

suicide of the ‘9/11’ bombers is thus a double suicide, once of themselves and once as an unconscious effect of the system that trained and produced them for war, against America’s own interests. This suicidal auto-immunity is further doubled by the exploitation of the image of this terror whereby the West kills its own values of transparency and democracy in the name of a war to defend these very principles. By this logic, Guantánamo Bay, for example, would be the death of international law perpetrated by those who should precisely initiate and uphold that law.

This schema certainly holds an appeal in terms of its explanatory power and deconstructive acuity. And yet it should be said that any schema which sought to explain these events as entirely an effect of the West’s own inter-nal operations (and I am sure Derrida’s claim is not so absolute) would be a schema which once more subordinated an anti-Western articulation to a total Western domination. It would in other words be as closed as the Western hegemony it sought critical leverage on. The ‘West’ in this sense is a complex phenomenon. Western interests extend beyond the physical ter-ritory of Europe and North America, to all the client states and economic partners of global capitalism. Perhaps, the two most profound examples of the suicidal auto-immunity of Western interests are to be found in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The former is an ally of the West, as a family and member of OPEC, which simultaneously funds and propagates the most repressive Islamic fundamentalism across the globe. The latter is a nuclear power where the West legitimates a military dictatorship in order to prevent those nuclear weapons falling into the hands of a democratically elected (or otherwise) Islamic regime. The Western orchestrated rapprochement between the Bhutto family and the military regime to provide a veneer of democratic legitimacy to the political order in Pakistan was just the latest example of this auto-immunitary suicidal impulse in the Western powers’ defence of its own interests. On the one hand, it is not possible to separate the place of Leeds or Houston from this global matrix of Western domina-tion, in which the Saudi royal family is accorded a state visit to the UK, and Pakistani immigrant families so regularly cross the porous ‘borders’ between Britain and its former colonial territory. On the other hand, if the auto-immunitary principle holds for all of these occasions, is it possible ever to say that there is an outside to the West? Can there be a location from which it is possible to be recognised as an other of the West, or, when one speaks of the West and its others should we recognise that this otherness is always already caught up in the nets of Western interests? Maybe this is so, perhaps in principle today in a so-called ‘globalization’ (which at once disseminates liberal capital, digital information and the Anglo-American idiom of international law across the globe and also inscribes Western hegemony and economic inequality between north and south in the most effective and classical way) it is not possible to escape the trammels of West-ern interests. The West will always be interested in you, if only to exploit you. By this reckoning, Mohammed Sadique Khan is an example of the way


in which British multiculturalism as a material inscription of an ideological phase, which works to defend the British state and its institutions from the risk of difference posed by the composition of its ethnically diverse popula-tion, in fact lays those institutions and that population open to aggression by a resistance to the annulment of difference that the respect for all differ-ence ultimately entails. Khan in this sense was the return of the repressed who respected no difference but his own and whose attack is aimed at both Western exceptionalism and the British state which produced him through an instituted respect for difference that in fact left no room for the articula-tion of difference as such (he recruited his cell in a community programme funded by Leeds multicultural initiatives).

This situation is not new to American foreign policy planners. Chalm-ers Johnson has another name for the suicidal auto-immunitary process: he calls it ‘blowback’, the chain of events whereby a covert intervention in the internal affairs of another country by Intelligence agents results in an unwanted and unintended threat to their own country.13 The history of ‘blowback’ from CIA-sponsored interventions across the globe runs (at least) from one September 11th to the other, from Pinochet to Bin Laden. In the case of the former, General Pinochet ultimately became the test case whereby the principle of ‘crimes of universal jurisdiction’ was established in international law, a cause of the refusal of the United States to become signatees to the International Criminal Court for fear of prosecution of its own politicians and soldiers. In the case of the latter, the sponsoring of Islamic Phalangists abroad lead to an open-ended war on an invisible enemy which demonstrates the powerlessness of the American military machine to act at the interstices of its Imperial reach. Such ‘blowback’ is regrettable, from a policymaker’s point of view, but as an auto-immunitary price to pay for full spectrum domination it is surely preferable and more affordable than a war between the standing armies of ‘super powers’. It is true that the West is not at war with Islam because Islam (whatever this might mean in all its diversity and global dispersion) does not have the means to fi ght a war, in the classic sense, against the West. This projection of an image of war as the exploitation of terror in the name of the traumatism of ‘9/11’ is also a form of auto-immunitary perversion. It shows the vulnerability of the United States to the maximum in the most sensational and mediatised way (and thus intensifying the trauma) in order to justify everything that followed. The response of Great Britain to its own terror attacks has been, I think, rather different. Instead of accentuating the trauma, the political class and media outlets have stressed the preparedness of the UK for such attacks and the ability of the state and emergency services to deal with them effectively. The United Kingdom has no wish to emphasis its own trauma; it is neither new to terror attacks on its own soil nor militarily powerful enough to attempt unilateral global retribution for them. It remains a client of the United States and part of the network of Western interests. Instead, it is left with the much mythologized ‘spirit of the blitz’ to demonstrate its

Introduction 13

ability to cope with assault, living on in denial without mourning. It is this sort of blindness that has allowed Britain to be engaged in Afghanistan for all but thirty of the last two hundred years. The Americans are really amateurs when it comes to auto-immunitary suicide.

INFINITE JUSTICE, ENDURING FREEDOM

‘Do we still dream in our beds? And at night? Are we responsible for our dreams? Can we answer for them?’

—Jacques Derrida14

In the early, traumatised days after the 9/11 attacks the public institutions of the Western world were, with degrees of varying justifi cation, on height-ened alert for postal anthrax attacks. The hysteria that accompanied the media representation (although let us now say more accurately, the media inscription) of these poison-pen letters resulted in even the most obscure branches of the state making contingency plans for a possible chemical attack. At the time my mother-in-law was a senior manager in social ser-vices for a county on the south coast of England. One day, she was sitting in her offi ce deleting e-mail like the rest of her team when a colleague rushed into her offi ce shouting, ‘Anne, Anne, come quick, they’ve discov-ered anthrax in the post room!’ My mother-in-law, now retired (from social work), is a Yorkshire woman blessed of considerable pragmatism. She left her in-box in mid-delete and went to assess the risk to health and safety presently in the mailroom of the district social work offi ces. She arrived to fi nd a challenging scenario. In front of her sat a female social worker, who had been opening that morning’s mail, at her desk with towers of letters and parcels, her hands in her heads weeping, as her colleagues stood well back around the frame of the doorway. As the most senior manager in the building Anne showed the sort of leadership that years of managerial seminars and training had prepared her for. She entered the room to fi nd the unfortunate social worker holding up one hand in a gesture that said ‘stay back’ while pointing with the other hand to the telltale white spots on her dress. Shocked by both this heinous crime and the unexpected turn of events that had led international terrorists (or even a lone madman) to target the county social work offi ces rather than the pillars of the British state (and I suppose shocked at her own cynicism, now turned to genuine concern) she sprang into action. She ran back upstairs to read the manual on dealing with anthrax attacks and other critical incidents she had pre-viously fi led in a desk drawer. After speed-reading the relevant section she ran back downstairs and began the evacuation of the building. She phoned the emergency services and proceeded to tape off the infected area, wrapping bright yellow emergency tape around the cubicle of the stricken social worker as she sat there weeping on her mobile phone, making a


last farewell phone call to her husband. Promptly, the Fire Brigade (who had been practising for just this sort of thing) arrived. Having received a briefi ng from Anne and having assessed the situation an offi cer donned a biological contamination suit and breathing apparatus and entered the mailroom. He entered the taped-off zone and spent some time examining the fi ne white spots about the person of the immobile social worker, still in tears and now quaking with fear. He then removed his gas mask and said, ‘Here, give us a kiss, love, it’s only bits of paper’. The relieved social worker, pulled back from the brink of death, duly reciprocated and later recalled how indeed she had been opening the mail with a knife that morn-ing and fi bres from the envelopes must have fallen on her dress and she recalled even later that this was not unusual when opening letters in the county social work mailroom.

Now, I tell this story not to laugh at social workers or to suggest that exaggerated warnings of imminent terror attacks are eroding the credibil-ity of those warnings. In fact, the opposite is true; it is the whole point of a terror threat that the threat be total and reach into every aspect of every-day life. Tragically, commuters in Madrid, London, Mumbai, Baghdad and Algiers can bear witness to the intrusion of terrorism into the most banal of daily routines. Terror, as we have established, strikes at the idiomatic and this is what gives it its power. Equally, the exploitation of that threat must also touch absolutely the everyday and the absolutely everyday. This is also why, in truth, the threat of Al Qaeda is not equivalent to the Cold War or the Nazi war machine, no country has been invaded, no austerity has been endured (that is, except in Afghanistan and Iraq). Rather, this anecdote is revealing of the extent of the crisis provoked in the west by the events of 9/11 and its attendant ideological inscriptions. This is a crisis felt not only in the institutions of power but in the institutions of the mind as well. The scope and frontiers of these later institutions reach into our unconscious and our dreams.

‘Fichus’ is a text by Derrida on dreams. It should have been one of his happier texts, a pleasant reverie, to accept the Adorno Prize and to dream about a possible, extensive and long-awaited reading of Adorno that he will never write. The text deals with a dream by Benjamin recounted to Adorno’s wife in a letter: ‘Il s’agissait de changer en fi chu une poésie’ [It was about changing a poem into a fi chu (a scarf or a shawl)]’.15 As Der-rida points out, ‘in French we sometimes say foutu instead of fi chu. Foutu suggests the escatological register of death or the end, and also the scato-logical register of sexual violence’.16 The Adorno Prize was presented to Derrida on September 22, 2001. It must have felt like changing a poem into being fucked. But doesn’t the clarity and wisdom of the interview with Borradori represent Derrida’s remarkable ability to turn the experience of being fucked into a poem? When faced with a binary choice between the no-future theocratic terrorism of Al Qaeda and secularized Western capital, I choose to be one of America’s interests every time. However,

Introduction 15

I am reminded of the line from Nick Park’s Chicken Run when Ginger, the leader of the impounded chickens, declares ‘we will die free chickens or die trying [to escape]’ and a dissident voice from the multitude replies ‘are they the only choices?’ ‘Al Qaeda’ (another citation that now requires inverted commas) are not capable of ending ‘Western civilization’, this war calls for no absolute austerity or sacrifi ce on the part of ‘Europeans’ (and this includes Americans); the choice is not between good and evil, life and death, Western civilization or premodern fanaticism. I refuse this choice and the error of those such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis who constantly tell us this is the binary that confronts us and that anything else is mere appeasement of a form of Fascism, an argument which works on the inverted principle of ‘what did the American Empire ever do for us?’ I would like to insist on the possibility of another regime of the possible and the impossible, of the deconstruction of the ontotheological foundations of the matrix of Western self-interest that gives rise to such a binary choice and the reconstitution of a new fi gure of effective international law with an autonomous force at its disposal and universal sovereignty (of the sort I dis-cuss in the next chapter of this book) which would deliver justice to inter-national terrorists, Bhaathist dictators, fascists and dictators everywhere and Western exploitation. From where we stand today this might seem an impossibility, and an utterly utopian even contradictory hope. However, it is a faith in the possibility of such an impossibility that ought to govern the decisions and interventions of the present as a redistribution of the possible and impossible within political culture.17 It is the sort of decisive, critical judgement that was familiar to the likes of Derrida and Adorno and which ought to mark deconstruction after 9/11.

1 Wars and Rumours of Wars

I am incapable of knowing who today deserves the name philosopher (I would not simply accept certain professional or organizational criteria), I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, refl ect in a responsible fashion on these questions [of interna-tional law] and demand accountability from those in charge of pub-lic discourse, those responsible for the language and institutions of international law. A “philosopher” (actually I would prefer to say “philosopher-deconstructor”) would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relation-ship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing muta-tion. A “philosopher” would be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between “comprehending” and “justifying”. For one can describe, comprehend, and explain a certain chain of events or series of associations that lead to “war” or “terrorism” without justifying them in the least, while in fact condemning them and attempting to invent other associations.

—Jacques Derrida1

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero.

—Tom Stoppard2

Reading is the new civil right.

—George W. Bush3

It was not supposed to be like this. The so-called end of the so-called Cold War was supposed to bring a dispensation of the retreat of empires and the unstoppable propagation of liberal democracy. This was supposed to be the end of history, after all. Instead we live in a new age of empire, democracy as ever seems to be a precarious thing in short supply, and history (blood-red in tooth and claw) carries on regardless, unimpressed by its alleged fi nality. The fi rst Gulf War, the opening virtual war of this new age, was—we were told—supposed to cement a new understanding between East and West, between the US and the Arab world, and allow the conditions for peace between Palestinians and Israelis, while reinvigorating

Wars and Rumours of Wars 17

the UN. By the time of the second Gulf War (if we characterize the low-intensity bombing of Iraq’s southern regions and a decade of sanctions as a cessation of hostilities) the democratic status of a Russia fraying at the edges looks uncertain, Europe is divided amongst itself over its perceived relationship with the US, the UN (self-indicted for corruption) is (as it always was in the past) frequently ignored, the Arab world is increasingly set against America, with nuclear proliferation once more a global business and what we are obliged to call ‘the war on terror’ justifying repressions and counter-violence of every kind, Israelis and Palestinians infl ict new injustices on each other daily, and the prodigious growth of Chinese capitalism accelerates it towards ecological and economic, if not yet military, contest with the West. So where did it all go wrong (if indeed it has gone wrong and if these prominent mediatic examples of global disorder can be taken as an accurate account of the state of the world today)? The global order is in mutation: politically, socially, economically, technoscientifi cally, ecologically, militarily, in every sphere of the media, the religious, and the law. How can one account for these transformations without invoking the inherited models of either an over-familiar, structurally inadequate Marxism or an outdated, reductive ‘postmodernism’?4 For we must account for them, this is the fi rst task of the thinker today. Allow me to follow a strand through this global scene in the hope of achieving some leverage on the whole.

When Derrida speaks of a transformation in the concept and institutions of international law,5 what does he mean and what sort of analysis does this call for? On the one hand, the global situation under review has its roots in the extra-national institutions with planetary jurisdiction which emerged after the Second World War: the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.6 These institutions were not just the products of a new international dispen-sation following fi ve years of global confl ict (although they were also this), but were the culmination of a long history of transformation from a philos-ophy of enlightenment ‘cosmopolitics’ to the structure and system of inter-national relations, which included such notable indices as the covenants of the League of Nations (1920), the indictment of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1919 at Versailles for ‘supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’, the various international anti-slavery accords (Brussels 1890, Berlin 1885, London 1841), the international Red Cross movement, the fi rst and second Peace Conference in the Hague (1899 and 1907), the various drafts and amendments of the Geneva Conventions (1863–1868), the Lieber Code of 1863, and the Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Henri Gregoire’s ‘code of immutable principles’ of 1793, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. In other words, this mutation (from ‘Perpetual Peace’ to Virtual War) is noth-ing other than the judicial-constative discourse which predicates the long history of modernity itself. In so far as this history is the story of how, what


we have learned to call, the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy has become imbricated within the world institutions of international law, this is a history of the Western-Christian-Judaic philosophical transforma-tion of the globe, the becoming-metaphysical of international politics and the capture by the logos of all the people of the planet. As such, it requires deconstruction (it is already in deconstruction) not as a Eurocentric mode of analysis (there are still those who, despite the plain evidence set before them to read, continue in their ignorance to tar deconstruction in this way) but as the idiom of political-philosophical engagement which emerges from within that tradition to orientate it according to another axis and to make new associations beyond the formal limits of what we would call Europe and what we would call philosophy.

That the transformations in international law have taken on a particu-lar velocity in the years following the fi rst Gulf War calls for analysis but should neither surprise us nor alarm us. They are part of a considerable history and one which poses signifi cant questions concerning the very value and possibility of transformation itself, with regard to the way in which the text of philosophy mutates into the process and institutions of non-philoso-phy and what this means for the after-life of concepts and their subsequent reinsertion into the philosophical tradition as the ‘white myths’ of the con-temporary, their institutional provenance and philosophical heritage hav-ing long been erased like the faces on Nietzsche’s proverbial coins. One of the often-voiced complaints against philosophy or theory is that it has no practical impact on the real world. This contemporary view is rather impa-tient if not short-sighted, give it a couple of hundred years and philosophy changes everything. This is also a history which witnesses the transforma-tion of the production of history itself, in which events take on a global signifi cance through their mediatisation in which the facts of news and the idea of news become inseparable. Throughout this long history, there have always been wars and rumours of wars and no doubt there will continue to be so, the most prominent arresting our attention according to the interests of an also Western, also metaphysical media industry and mediatic space (some events, such as those on September 11, 2001, even being theatrical-ized as spectacles by historical agents in order to receive the best exposure in that space). In so far as this essay and this book put down a signpost to isolate a particular chain of events within this history, it is painfully aware that citing those events is not the same thing as understanding those events, or making a material act of affi liation to those events, as if those events in themselves saturated the history under analysis. For every September 11th that dominates the scene of analysis there is a Timisoara or a Hama which pass under the radar of Westernised criticism; for every invasion of Iraq which mobilises thousands on to the streets of Western capitals there is a Chechnya which goes unmourned, for every innocent killed in Ulster or Palestine which demands our indignation another dies unreported in a Free Town or a Burma or a Niger. Examples could be multiplied because


they are only examples and the global situation requires the interminable vigilance of deconstruction because the human capacity for the attempted bloody foreclosure of its others is equally without limit.

However, if one were contingently and strategically to follow a path of analysis through a chain of events in order to accede to a greater structure of transformation, one might begin after the fi rst Gulf War with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The United Nations had for the most part lain dormant as an enforcer of world security since the still unresolved confl ict on the Korean peninsula, offering only a stage for the diplomatic paraly-sis between East and West, while being outfl anked and widely ignored by both sides according to their own momentary and strategic interests. So enfeebled had the UN become that a depleted post-Imperial nation such as the United Kingdom was able to take unilateral action in defence of its colonial property in the south Atlantic, against UN resolutions but with American connivance. Gulf War I changed that, when a certain motif of internationalism in currency after the seeming collapse of European com-munism encouraged the US and its allies to use the juridical structures of the United Nations to legitimate military action in Kuwait. In other words, the fi rst Gulf War happened through a UN mandate and in the name of the so-called international community, acting as a commonwealth of nations defending the territorial rights of a sovereign state against the expansionist ambitions of a belligerent rogue state. While the intentions of the principal participants in that war were no doubt murky and hypocritical (they hav-ing failed to come to the aid of other equally deserving cases who did not happen to own valuable oil reserves, turning now on a militaristic regime they had previously armed and supported as an ally against Islam) the ‘war’ itself was run according to principles of international law (for example the US did not follow the retreating Iraqi army back to Baghdad and remove the Ba’athist regime because it had no UN mandate to do so). Something like Gulf War I was precisely the reason why the UN Security Council was formed, its exercise was a rare moment of unanimity amongst its perma-nent members when all of their strategic interests where in alignment—like a solar eclipse—once in every epoch. It is indicative of our current situation that one can refl ect on this confl ict with the historical nostalgia that it was at least legal under international law.

However, the idea of ‘international law’ is a nebulous thing. It consists in the main in the form of a series of treaties and accords, which with the exception of the UN Security Council, have no real mechanism for enforcement beyond the goodwill and peer-group pressure of participating nations. Action to enforce such law only happens when it is in the strategic interests of the strongest nations to do so: Those nations which fail to meet their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol will never be sanctioned, the most serious infringers of the global test-ban treaty for nuclear weapons are France, the UK and the US, the international convention on human rights stands as an aspirational rather than legal document in the face of


realpolitik and so on. This has two notable consequences. Firstly, that like all law, international law exists only in the process of its transaction, some-where between the articulation of its ideal and the situation of non-law it confronts. It is in a constant process of contingent development and only materialises as a juridical practice when it risks a judgement in the face of a situation where no law exists or the authority of a convention is challenged. To this end, and secondly, like all law, international law requires an appa-ratus through which this contingency can run qua law with a monopoly on legitimate repressive violence.7 This mutation is taking shape (international law is still a fairly young concept) with the establishment of something like an international court for crimes of universal jurisdiction (such as geno-cide and what are called, after Nuremberg, ‘crimes-against-humanity’) but such a court at the moment only has sovereignty over those nations which adhere to its protocols (the US is not a signatory) and of those only the ones whose strategic interests are served by co-operating with the court at any given time. The problem with international law is that the institutions of international law do not have a monopoly on repressive violence and this is why the Security Council of the United Nations is so frequently ignored and the parameters of international law so readily and easily contravened. It is a law without authority. That is to say, that it is a law in want of sov-ereignty. Now, taking an optimistic view of this situation, one might say that the development of international law presents an opportunity for the possibility of a law without repression, a law without the apparatus of law, a law without revenge, a law without Law. In so far as this could initi-ate a process for international justice (the international criminal court, the convention on human rights, etc.) as opposed to the establishment of the rule of international law, which may or may not have anything to do with justice (for example, in what way are the principles of the treaty on nuclear non-proliferation actually just?), this requires our immediate attention as the development of a new humanitarianism beyond cosmopolitan right. However, a law which does not have the means to establish itself and to risk its own transformation will not last long as Law; rather it will be replaced by the law of the mighty and the rule of the strongest. The deconstruction of law does not require that legal institutions be dismantled in the name of ‘justice’, any more than the deconstruction of philosophy requires the abo-lition of departments of philosophy. On the contrary, it requires that such institutional positions are adopted as positions, and transformed as a result of risking that position by submitting its contingency to a wider rhythm of historicity and critical unconditionality in the name of justice. This would of course include the possibility of turning around the perceived need that law must act repressively, but this transformation cannot begin from a posi-tion external to where the law actually stands at any given moment. Such a deconstruction would necessarily risk the universality of the law’s monop-oly on repressive violence against the singularity of circumstances. Ulti-mately, the law qua law can only defer its imposition as violence but it can


never give up on the idea of violence as a sanction. Perhaps, what Derrida means is that there is a transformation in the idea of justice in the context of international law and this is worth pursuing, patiently, vigilantly and in accordance with philosophical-theoretical principles. For a transforma-tion of international law itself from an articulation of humanitarian aspira-tion to an enforceable regulative order would require that the apparatus of international law maintained a monopoly on repressive violence between nation states, i.e. beyond the sovereignty of individual states, such as the United States. Such a situation would no doubt be partially Kantian in its articulation but I think, for Derrida’s part, his thinking goes beyond such a centralisation of violence—as if (in the Kantian sense) an extra-national body acted like a superstate over all states—to a more profound decentring of violence as a value under which the law operates. I will return to this.

However, allow me to return to our story and the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. If Gulf War I exactly matched the resolutions of the UN general assembly to a monopoly on international repression by the alignment of the strategic interests of the cartel of global military powers (those who were not actively involved pledged their support in principle) then the bloody dis-integration of Yugoslavia was marked by the exact opposite. Firstly, Europe failed to recognise the situation as a strategic interest, preferring once again to support a ‘strong leader’ whose nationalism acted as a bulwark to resur-gent communism (even though he was the resurgent neo-Stalinist). Sec-ondly, and simultaneously, as the country was partitioned partisan groups sought recognition of their sovereignty under international law, the Pope rushing to declare Croatia (to the alarm of many Croatians) the most Cath-olic country in Europe. Such recognition then precipitated further histori-cally orientated claims on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Croatia as a now sovereign state claiming an ancient right, Serbia under the still inter-nationally recognised fi ction of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia claim-ing sovereignty). The United Nations’ intervention in Bosnia was tragically doomed, with no repressive sanction at its disposal and only the mandate of universal humanitarian principles as a shield, the UN was mostly pow-erless to stop the ‘ethnic cleansing’ or to impose the rule of law between supposedly sovereign members of the international community. Finally, the bankruptcy of this position was demonstrated when a Dutch battalion of UNPROFOR troops, mandated only to protect humanitarian agencies dis-tributing relief to endangered civilians, capitulated to the Serbian attack on the town of Srebrenica and stood by as seven thousand Muslim males were taken away to be massacred.8 While, this event might justly be character-ized as tragic, and fi nally woke the Europeans and Americans into a more sustained engagement with the war, the fact that the Dutch soldiers were there at all speaks of a remarkable and less heralded mutation in the prin-ciples of humanitarian intervention, which began with Bernard Kouchner’s broadcast denunciation of the Red Cross’ silent neutrality in Biafra, the foundation of Medécins Sans Frontières and other similar NGOs which


established partisanship as a principle of a new humanitarianism which called a ‘humanitarian crisis’ a ‘crime against humanity’.

There then followed the Dayton Peace Accord, which established a paradigm for the technocratic processes whereby ‘peace’ is established in the absence of peace. What exists instead is a peace process whereby the aims of war are conducted by other means (this is the template of the new age of global disorder, the imposition of a strategically concocted interna-tional law-without-justice). Having failed to recognise, let alone address, the problem of Serb nationalism on its door-step, it was inevitable that the Western powers should be later faced with the question of Kosovo. Kosovo might be said to be a question because it posed a challenge to the faltering consensus around the development of the United Nations as a sovereign arbiter of international law. Unable to secure the agreement of Russia (protective of their client Slavs) in the Security Council and keen to divert domestic attention from a looming impeachment, US President Bill Clinton turned to NATO as the vehicle through which the will of ‘the international community’ would be enforced. NATO exists, according to its charter, to act militarily only in the event of an attack on one of its member states. Legally speaking NATO had no interest in Kosovo but it did guarantee an unquestionable and overwhelming monopoly on violence. Did the needs of justice dictate that international law be suspended in this instance? Perhaps, American air power fi nally stopped the Milosevic war machine. Perhaps also the NATO intervention retarded the infl uence of the then growing democracy movement in Serbia and gave Milosevic an after-life of power that he otherwise would not have had. At any rate the NATO bombing was subsequently replaced by a UN mission (led unironically by Bernard Kouchner) which still clings to the fi ction of the sovereignty of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia over Kosovo while ensuring Kosovo is pro-phylactically sealed against Serbs and prepared for an autonomous future. The KFOR mission, despite its mandate and fi repower has singularly failed to stop the ‘post-war’ ethnic cleansing of the remaining Serbian minority by vengeful Kosovan Albanians, the very principle upon which the West intervened in the fi rst place.

The case of Kosovo establishes some important principles of interna-tional non-law. Firstly, that NATO (an extra-judicial apparatus) was used to enforce by might a point of law (the human rights and right to self-deter-mination of Kosovan Albanians). This is akin to asking a private militia to enforce the law because the police cannot agree to press charges, a sort of legal outsourcing. Secondly, it confi rms that the will to enforce interna-tional law rests with the contingent desires of America and its allies, who stand by aberration of metonym for the entire international community. Hence, the continued inconsistent and self-serving application of so-called international law: NATO are not heading off to help Chechnya or Tibet to self-determination. Thirdly, it establishes the principle of international policing through the technoscientifi c gulf between police and policed (this


was clear in the fi rst Gulf War but in the case of Kosovo no NATO ground forces were ever deployed, the threat of absolute violence comes alone as a result of what Walt Disney termed ‘strength through air power’). This is an important principle in Afghanistan where the Taliban were ousted by a mix of local ‘Northern Alliance’ troops and American Special Forces able to call up air support by satellite telephone in prelude to an advance by the local forces (further military outsourcing). The Americans now police their retrospectively approved UN mandate by the threat of B-52 bombers circling over the heads of potentially resurgent warlords, while forty-fi ve hundred foreign peacekeepers confi rm President Karzai as little more than the mayor of Kabul and free the US to continue its pursuit of the Taliban in the south. The visibility of the B-52s at altitude acts as an airborne bobby-on-the-beat.

One can see in all of these examples the gulf between international law and non-law (global disorder), in which the very process by which the prin-ciples of law are established (the test cases) are the exact moments when the world stands over the abyss of a total absence of law. Each time a dip-lomatic formulation is found to retrospectively justify the strategic interests of the most powerful states, not so much a commonwealth of cosmopolitan right as a mafi a international within an international unavowable commu-nity. However, it is through chains of events such as these that international law develops. How could it be otherwise? The exercise of power requires the legitimation of that power through channels of apparent legality. The law must found itself in violence: To paraphrase an old saw, when power triumphs none dare call it illegal. The worst offenders in terms of interna-tional law (those most willing to exempt themselves from treaty and proto-col on the grounds of national self-interest) are those very nations (the US, Great Britain, France, but also other European nations such as Israel and Russia) who are expected to uphold that very law qua European discursive formation and who will be the fi rst to invoke that law qua universality when it is broken in a way that contradicts their own interests. If we live in an age of global disorder it is for this precise reason. There will be states prepared to break international law because they see the powerful nations of the West do so with impunity and read such injustice as a predicate or justifi cation for their own behaviour. It is the very non-uniform implemen-tation of international law by the West qua police (as the strongest of the commonwealth of nations) that produces the perception of injustice in the non-Western world that results in attacks on Western interests, which are then in turn condemned by the West in the name of an international law that they failed to respect in the fi rst place. I am talking here about relations between nation-states (such as the inspection of the Iranian nuclear pro-gramme) or what might be termed partisan struggles9 (such as the Chechen civil war). That is to say, contests over an appropriable idea of sovereignty. I am not, yet, referring to the international dissemination of violent practices beyond the authority and control of a sovereign centre, such as the network


of affi liations which go under the name of Al Qaeda, for which no inter-national law other than a transcendental and universal ontotheology of the book would be acceptable. Here we might note in passing that it is not that Al Qaeda do not respect the idea of international law, on the contrary, they have a very precise and well-developed idea of an international law as both universal and indivisible. It is not that the extra-national mobility of Al Qaeda undoes a Western fi ction of sovereignty, rather Al Qaeda has an absolutely fi xed notion of sovereignty, one that is total and indissoluble in scope and ontotheological in basis (from the liberation of the lands of the Islamic Caphilate to the overthrow of apostate Arab regimes). That is to say, it is precisely the same concept of sovereignty as that understood by the members (as nation-states in the classical style) of the United Nations, who as such are all devoted followers of the book.

Al Qaeda (or what happens under this name) do not represent an abso-lute irruption within or unconditional displacement of the contemporary scene. Their emergence was entirely predictable and does not constitute an event as such—one could equally say that the second Iraq war is not meaningful as an event for this reason. To imagine that they do consti-tute an irruption or a unitary force is to mistake the priorities of West-ern news agencies for what is actually happening in the world. On the one hand, their history is marked by considerable length and complexity, which I will not have time to reassemble here, from the repression of Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood since Nasser and the pan-Arab socialism of the 1950s to Western sponsorship of insur-gents in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and the Algerian military junta’s dissolution of parliamentary elections in 1992.10 From here the history of the becoming of Al Qaeda is characterized by the mediatic reduction of dissimilarity and heterogeneity. For example, Osama Bin Laden had fi rst been indicted on 238 counts by an American court as early as 1998, for his sponsorship of the bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and attacks on US soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia after the fi rst Gulf War. It was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a spiritual leader of the Egyptian group El Gamma Islamia, who, with nine others, was jailed for ‘seditious conspiracy’ to bomb New York landmarks in 1993 and Ramzi Yousef (a former electrical engineering student at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education and disciple of Abdel-Rahman) who, along with six others, was convicted between 1997 and 1998 for a prior, failed attempt to destroy the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in 1993. Although Abdel-Rahman had contact with Bin Laden he did not answer to him nor was he part of any formal grouping. It was during a trial of four Bin Laden associates in January 2001 that ‘Al Qaeda’ emerged as a resonant idea when prosecutors sought to use the existing Racketeer Infl uenced and Corrupt Organisations Act (anti-Mafi a laws) to bring charges against Bin Laden as the head of an organised crime syndicate (who could be tried as such without proof of connection to the actual criminal activities


of the organisation).11 In truth, Bin Laden was much less than this. The 1998 indictment details Bin Laden’s infl uence through affi liation with, but not control of, other groups such as Al Jihad, El Gamma Islamia, the National Islamic Front of Sudan, and Hezbollah. This indictment references ‘Al-Qaeda-al-jihad’ as Bin Laden’s group although Bin Laden himself does not mention this phrase in either his 1996 or 1998 fatwa or his 1996 declaration of war against the US. However, the legal fi ction of Al Qaeda as an international organisation has persisted and has been transformed into a fact of the contemporary space.12 Even as the hierarchy and infrastructure of Al Qaeda as such was mostly destroyed during the military campaign in Afghanistan (although Bin Laden has never been indicted for the attacks on September 11th and at most is cited as their ‘inspiration’, their planner having been Kahlid Sheik Mohammed who did not answer to Bin Laden) this spectral projection of Bin Laden con-tinues in order to justify intervention in locations unrelated to his activi-ties and within the Islamic world more generally, not just by the United States (Israel, Russia and China are also exponents of this myth). In this sense, while Al Qaeda may represent something of a break from the tra-ditional associations between ‘terrorism’ and partisan warfare such as the contestations over national sovereignty in Northern Ireland, Palestine and Sri Lanka or between ‘terrorism’ and the struggles of the unconscio-nably denied in South Africa and the Chiapas Indians of Mexico, there is little that is new about Al Qaeda. There have always been such struc-tures of violence whose ambitions extend beyond the sovereignty of a single nation-state, the Red Brigades to use only a contemporary example (although in claiming a certain ‘international’ identity and targeting the nation-state such groups share absolutely an idea of sovereignty predicated on ontotheological humanism). Like the Red Brigades as an instance of ‘international terrorism’ in its most classical formation, such groups can never exercise suffi cient power to damage the existing structures they purport to oppose (attacks on American targets are much more symbolic than damaging) instead they provide those structures with a justifi cation for repressive action in a situation where its power and authority had been previously questioned.13 The second Iraq war is an extreme example of this, given that Al Qaeda had no substantial links to the Ba’athist regime (the 1998 indictment alleges co-operation between Saddam and Bin Laden on development of weaponry and Baghdad offered Bin Laden asylum after the East Africa bombings). But one might also consider the whole notion of an open-ended war-without-end-on-terror in this way. This is not to say that the potential for religiously motivated terror does not exist or that the motivations of such groupings, their affi liates and sympathisers can be easily dismissed even if their deathly ideology should be utterly condemned. The Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds sits a little under half a mile away from the bomb factory used by the Yorkshire jihadists who detonated suicide bombs in London on


July 7, 2005. Rather, a critical appreciation of such phenomena requires a rigorous and relentless analysis of their singularity and irreducible com-plexity as well as their iterability, not the application of a one-size-fi ts-all model of ‘terror’ in which heterogeneous acts are subsumed under a single ideological fi ction.

Undoubtedly, Al Qaeda has now been made part of the contemporary scene as much by those who avow its destruction as by those who initiate it or celebrate it. However, it is only a symptom of wider, more general global mutations and could disappear tomorrow without halting the path of those mutations. It is the question of international law and sovereignty which runs like a red thread through the events of the last fi fteen years from one Gulf War to the next, of which I take the aerial intervention in Kosovo (and everything that fell out from it, including the trial of Slobodan Milosevic) to be a decisive case. In contrast to the potential consequences of this muta-tion, Al Qaeda and even the syntagms Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq and the-war-on-terror are a side-show (to coin a phrase chilling used of Cambodia) no more bloody and harrowingly futile for all that. Ultimately, the so-called Iraqi insurgents, like the Muhajidin fi ghters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, are engaged in a contest over national sovereignty, no doubt for strategic rea-sons fl avoured by a wider religious and racial appeal, and happily supported by external agency and funding, but nevertheless confi ned to the borders of what is after all a fairly modern nation-state. The projection of this contest as a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West is a crass reduction, promoted as much by American military planners as by Al Qaeda apolo-gists, which collapses the vast heterogeneity of Islam and its geographical spaces, and the complex diversity of ‘the West’, into a competing binary in the most classically metaphysical way. An analysis of the current situation requires us to unpick this homogeneity and to question the motivation of the homogenising gesture.

On the one hand, the military confl icts in Afghanistan and Iraq follow on from Kosovo as an extension of a model of partially applied concern for international law (Afghanistan was justifi ed under the exceptional clause of the UN Security Council on self-defence, while the case for war in Iraq was made on the grounds of its supposed violation of previous UN resolutions even if the Security Council itself rejected this argument). On the other hand, today, we are entering uncharted waters for international law as it stands so blatantly fl outed by the very nations who make its defence part of their profi le as a nation. If those (such as Ian McEwan’s hero Henry Perowne in the novel Saturday14) who supported an interven-tion in Iraq on the grounds of so-called ‘regime change’15 (the disposing of a brutal dictatorship has not dispelled a regime of terror in Iraq), in the full knowledge that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was a bogus and cynical sham, might refl ect on the words of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play when Roper accuses him of casuistry, ‘So now you’d give the Devil benefi t of law!’:


Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being fl at? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefi t of law, for my own safety’s sake!16

One might justifi ably say that Saddam was no respecter of the international convention on human rights but this is to argue for the execution of a far greater crime to treat a local if heinous one, like cutting off a limb to treat an infected digit. From the point of view of international law it is far worse that the US and the UK illegally invaded Iraq than the Ba’ath party’s regime of terror because while Saddam’s activities did not represent a precedent for law-breaking which invited repetition on a global scale, the action of the US and UK does because if the enforcers of the law are seen not to uphold the law themselves then the law is done for and ‘having failed to make that which was just strong we have made that which was strong just’, as Pascal put it.17

There will be those who maintain that such an argument belittles the very real and extensive suffering of Saddam’s victims in favour of an abstract ideal, where is the justice in that? In reply one can only say that my response to the possibility of war can only be economic. Within the pressing urgency of the historical now there will always have to be a measure, up to a certain point, and it is a matter of taking the best possible measure. In making that measure one neither condones nor accepts in an idle way the barbarism of the Ba’athist regime, or tolerates the historical hypocrisy of the West to that regime, nor does one necessarily condemn the impulse to create democratic regimes where none exist (even if such a thing should not be imposed from outside in an entirely undemocratic way). None of this irreducible complexity can be either eradicated or allowed to develop without criticism. Therefore, in relation to the historical situation it is necessary to invent the least bad solution and an ethical response to this situation cannot be reduced to an either/or, yes/no option. There remains in the event of decision an irreducible alterity which renders the decision entirely economic, achieving the least bad solution as a judgement which attempts to do justice to justice by rendering a judgement worthy of the name, given that there is no just judgement that is absolutely just. In this historical context it is necessary to give a singular response and to risk that judgement by enduring the undecidability of its irreducible alterity. In this case, as in every decision, there are contradictory imperatives. The mistake is to think that the binary division between, say,


in the context of Iraq, invasion and the status quo is all that is imaginable. Rather than taking a side between the cruelty of Saddam’s regime, the cor-ruption of the UN sanctions programme, the self-interest of those nations with oil concessions in Iraq, and the obscure motives of American neocon-servatives, it is necessary to invent an alternative solution in the name of justice. In this instance there was precisely no attempt to imagine this situ-ation otherwise; only the relentless pursuit of a pre-arranged plan (justifi ed on spurious and shifting grounds) which has had both positive and negative effects intended and unintended. It is for the same reasons that one must now take a view on the current situation in Iraq (the fact of occupation) and make a decision (invent the least bad solution) concerning the withdrawal of troops. Such an invention does not require us to take a side for either the insurgents (whose interests are multiple and divided) or the nation-building programme now involving a provisional government sponsored and policed by the arms of America and its allies and whose principle functions are outsourced to Western business (a situation familiar to those with histori-cal memories long enough to recall Vietnam and Cambodia). To insist that occupying troops must stay in Iraq or there will be a blood-bath is to fail to recognise a blood-bath when one sees it right in front of you; to insist that they stay ‘until the job is done’ is to presuppose a fi xed idea of what the ‘job’ was and what its completion would look like. Both should be interrogated. Either justifi cation of continued occupation represents a failure of the politi-cal imagination. Rather, an opportunity might be taken within this situation of non-law to imagine it otherwise and to seek to establish guaranteed and enforceable principles of a universal international law. Only in this way can the paradigm of the right of the strategic interest of the strongest, which has dominated the historical period since Gulf War I, be displaced as the model for international relations.

What might such an invention look like? Firstly, it would require a newfound respect for the principles of international law which have been fl outed. For example, for his alleged crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein should be tried in the International Criminal Court in the Hague and not in an American-sponsored show trial which operates under the ultimate (and seemingly inevitable) sanction of the imposition of the death penalty. Accordingly, America should become a signatee to this court and its most ardent exponent around the world. Secondly, the situation of non-law in Iraq can become a test case for the establishment of the principles of international law, such as the investigation of crimes of universal jurisdiction (including war crimes and acts of terror committed on all sides) by an international tribunal.18 To this end, rather than accepting the mandate of the ‘multinational force’ in Iraq, which is to turn the task of upholding the law over to those who broke it in the fi rst place and so accepting the principle of the right of the strongest as precedent, the UN should assume responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq. To this end, the UN will also have to be reformed. Not according to the desires of an


American foreign policy which would like to establish hegemony over an emasculated organisation. Rather, and in particular, the reformation of the Security Council according to principles commensurate with the historical reality of this present conjuncture as opposed to the current ‘permanent’ situation which refl ects the balance of power at the end of the Second World War. That is not to say that one group of ‘permanent members’ should replace another, this would be merely to reaffi rm the principle of the right of the strongest by handing power to a different set of nations. Rather, it is necessary to imagine a scenario in which the Security Council as a policing body authorised by the democratic will of the general assembly is able to enforce the rule of international law by the potential threat of the sanction of its monopoly on legitimate violence while operating with an understanding of sovereignty which removed the capability of overwhelming violence from any one nation-state upon which it relied to fulfi l its resolutions. This is to say, it will be as necessary to bring democracy to the UN as to Iraq. The solution that one must imagine here is not regime change in the White House which would return the US to the United Nations as the enforcer of its will throughout the world (the UN only functions, for good or ill, when this happens). Rather, an altogether more necessary and decisive change is required, namely a situation of enforceable international law which functioned beyond the sovereign will of the strongest nation. A mutation in the concept to sovereignty as such is required. No doubt there will be those who say that such a solution is impracticable and impossible, but how can there be justice without this? To accept a situation otherwise is to tolerate injustice. Such a transformation is not without precedent, one might think here, imperfect and in process as it might be, of the European convention on human rights which operates beyond the sovereignty of the nation-states of the European Union and is enforced by the rule of law established by membership of that Union. No doubt, at one point such a convention seemed impracticable and impossible following two world wars. However, it is precisely in such moments that one can turn the violent interruption of war into an opportunity to rethink the existing or the possible. It is in imagining the impossible as an act of political-poetic invention in the face of the aporia of the economy of decision that one can give the possibility of that decision (the imagined solution) its rationality. Something like this must be done. The alternative is to continue with a pattern of repeated injustice, which can only lead to future hostility. It is necessary to say that there can be no peace without justice, given the caveat that ‘perpetual peace’, as Kant recalls, only comes in the silence of the grave, while there will be no teleologically just judgement which will render up justice in an absolute way.19 However, it is completely necessary to continue to think of these terms as perfectible and to give them their rationality by imagining the impossibility of their possibility.

In a late text, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (this introduction can be considered an appreciative counter-signature to this book as much as


an opening into the events covered by the essays contained here), Derrida pushes his deconstruction of sovereignty further than previously elabo-rated.20 In this text he explicates the relation between sovereignty and unconditionality. In the context of a discussion of his reservations concern-ing the regulative Idea in Kant as part of the order of the possible (an ideal possible but deferred within an infi nite history but which, at the end of the day, is potential and possible within the power of some agency circum-scribed by some teleological end) Derrida offers the following injunction:

It is more im-possible, and yet necessary to separate sovereignty and unconditionality, law and justice . . . This impossible is not privative. It is not the inaccessible, and it is not what I can indefi nitely defer: it announces itself; it precedes me, swoops down upon and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtalizable way, in actuality and not potentiality. It comes upon me from on high, in the form of an injunction that does not simply wait on the horizon, that I do not see coming, that never leaves me in peace and never lets me put it off until later. Such an ur-gency cannot be idealized any more than the other as other can. This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal. It is what is most undeniably real. And sensible. Like the other. Like the irreducible and nonappropriable différance of the other.21

Here and elsewhere the unconditional remains beyond the mastery of a sov-ereign power. The university-without-condition, literature, the democracy-to-come are all spaces of the unconditional for Derrida. They represent the ‘right to say everything publicly [to publish it], or to keep it secret, if only in the form of fi ction’.22 Unconditional thought, a thinking of the impos-sible, calls for a space of thinking in which nothing is beyond questioning, including the mode of thinking that takes the form of questioning. It is to place thought under the unavoidable and undeniable power of the power-less other which precedes thought. The power of the other is thus all encom-passing, the all-powerful other (Tout-puissance-autre) as Derrida puts it in a text on Hélène Cixous.23 An analysis of our current situation must negoti-ate the almost impossible tightrope walk which discriminates between the power of the sovereignty of the political and juridical space in which the irruption of the event arrives and the power of the powerless uncondition-ality of thought as a submission to the ‘all-powerful’ otherness of the irre-ducible complexity of decision. Thought, thought as an unconditionality, a thinking of the impossible, presents something of a challenge to sovereignty because it is unmasterable. Rather, the undecidable or the impossible refuse sovereignty its own ipseity, rendering the sovereign divisible and no longer sovereign. This power is not a counter-force to the sovereign but the activ-ity of the passive ‘what happens’ of the all-powerful, powerless other as the arrival of a deconstruction. The decision as the impossible cannot be mastered nor does it present in a simple form the process of its calculation


as it avows publicly that which cannot be avowed. Such strength in utter weakness is the reality of the impossible, which no power, no sovereignty, can ever overcome. In this sense the unconditionality of the impossible is a force stronger than any sovereign force because it is not a force but that which decentres sovereignty. Thus, to call for an international law beyond the present or traditional conceptualization of sovereignty within the incalculable singularity of the other is to wish for a law-without-condi-tion, an unconditional law (not one regulated or compromised by national self-interest) in which justice exceeded law at the same time as motivating, ‘the movement, history, and becoming of juridical rationality, indeed the relationship between law and reason, as well as everything that, in moder-nity, will have linked the history of law to the history of critical reason’, to quote Derrida in Rogues.24 That is to say, that in any imagining otherwise of international law and sovereignty that it will be necessary to deconstruct both the ontotheological principle of the indivisibility which structures the idea of the sovereign and the sovereign right to exemption from the law which the sovereign itself upholds. This thought as a theoretical impera-tive will be a link between pure and practical reason. The UN Security Council cannot act as if it were a nation-state or super-nation-state (as in the Kantian idea of a cosmopolitan right) because in this case it would still be able to invoke exemption and so remain sovereign in a classical way (as it is currently doing in Haiti). The UN must therefore be sovereign, beyond sovereignty, i.e. nothing qualifi es for exemption under a universal law, at the same time as applying that law according to the unique singularity of each case, in the name of justice. The problem with international law at the moment is that the strongest nations, the most sovereign of the sovereign states, simply exempt themselves from duty or obligation under the law whenever national self-interest requires it.

This is going to be just about one of the most diffi cult things to imagine: to undertake a more-than-critical unconditional deconstruction as a rational account of what would be incalculable in, what appears impossible of, what or who comes in the moment of submitting the concept of sovereignty to its own otherness as an erosion of its ipseity of indivisibility and exemption. Of course, such a thinking ought to overturn non-conceptual as well as conceptual orders in the here and now. This mutation of sovereignty is already under way; it is what is happening. But where can this thinking take place amid the sovereign spaces of the policy makers and the media commentators? The university remains, for the moment, the space in which such a thinking or invention can take place. Not for reasons of its ‘abstract’, ‘elitist’ or ‘technical’ nature or because the university is prophylactically sealed from effects or consequences in the ‘real world’ (the aim of such thinking ought to be to overturn the orders and protocols of the public and mediatic space by submitting their own sovereignty to the non-strength/non-sense of the other). Rather, because the humanities as a site of the unconditional (the right to say everything,


in public and in published form) is also a space in which the all-powerful weakness of the other operates as excess. It is the right of the intellectual to speak the truth to power, as Edward Said frequently reminded us. In so doing the scholar is only concerned with the truth, in all its unmasterable and impossible otherness. The scholar is not concerned with reward or reputation or with appeasing or pleasing power. That is to say the scholar is a scholar-without-condition and not a politician. The scholar has the right to say everything and to publish it because they have already submitted themselves to the powerless omnipotence of the other of truth. They are unashamedly engaged in a textual activism which fi nds its strength in utter weakness, which as a pursuit of the impossible of truth no power, no sovereignty, can ever overcome. It is necessary for the intellectual to take positions but it is not necessary for the scholar to become a professional politician as such. An irreducible distance ought to be retained between the two. Textual activism (understanding the textual in its expanded and complex sense) is not a counter-force to power but a submission to a wider rhythm which undoes the very vertices of the sovereignty of power. In so far as this textual activism must concern itself with what remains to be thought (here we have only begun to approach a framing of the problem of international law and not in any way resolved it), it is itself impossible. It is a reading-without-condition which ought to be able to transform and transcribe the conditions of reading with regard to the truth it submits to in an inventive gesture without ground or precedent, which constantly reinaugurates the institutional space of reading in every new act of reading which would posit anew the political while being faithful to politics and its philosophical culture. This textual activism is necessary, as the weakest of forces, because saving the world has to be reinvented anew every day.

2 The Eternal Battle for the Domination of the World, or, Forget Kosovo

The practical politician tends to look down with great complacency upon the political theorist as a mere academic. The theorist’s abstract ideas, the practitioner believes, cannot endanger the state, since the state must be founded upon principles of experience; it thus seems safe to let him fi re off his whole broadside, and the worldly-wise states-man need not turn a hair. It thus follows that if the practical politician is to be consistent, he must not claim, in the event of a dispute with the theorist, to scent any danger to the state in the opinions which the theorist has randomly uttered in public. By this saving clause, the author of this essay will consider himself expressly safeguarded, in correct and proper style, against all malicious interpretation.

—Kant1

ROUND ONE

To be asked to ‘say something’ ‘about’ the topic of violence in the months immediately following the confl ict in Kosovo was both a responsibility and a temptation.2 Given the urgent demands that the war in the former Yugoslavia made and continues to make on thinking about the contempo-rary political space it would be irresponsible not to take the time to think through such an important event’s relation to an understanding of violence. However, it is also tempting today to concentrate on the singular example of Kosovo as paradigmatic of all violence to the exclusion of the heteroge-neous moments of violence which constitute the contemporary historical, social and political situation. One might refer to ‘cease-fi res’ in Ulster, teen shootings in North America, the crises in Kashmir and Taiwan, the ongo-ing confl icts in Chechnya, the Congo, Liberia, Sri Lanka, and several other troubled regions of the world, as equally signifi cant examples of violence (at this time) all worthy of study and all with similarly pressing demands on our attention. Making Kosovo a central example of violence today might run the risk of turning the event into a model which would act to recon-stitute the we of Western discourse primarily responsible for the violence itself. If we ‘Western Europeans’, and this term includes North Americans, grant Kosovo a privileged status in the global economy of violence then we run the risk of excluding other proper names equally as distressing as that


of Kosovo, names which as yet may not even be recognised as objects of reportage by the Western mediatic gaze.3

While this chapter will argue that violence only occurs in relation to phenomenality, ‘violence can only aim at the face’ as Levinas says,4 it also recognises Derrida’s suggestion in ‘Force of Law’ that ‘nothing is absolutely exemplary’.5 However, if it is necessary (and my calculation is that it is nec-essary) to respond to the demands placed upon this text by its proximity to a certain ‘end of hostilities’ in Kosovo, then perhaps we might begin by thinking through the status of a call to commentary on the subject of vio-lence. Such a call is in need of deconstruction. The call makes a demand of deconstruction, it wants deconstruction to ‘say something’ ‘about’ (around, in the region of) Kosovo, and is met by deconstruction’s insistent question-ing of this ‘empiricist’ demand as the determination of a philosophical pre-tension to non-philosophy. Given that ‘nothing is absolutely exemplary’, but only one example within an economy of examples, this essay will offer a reading of a previous call to ‘say something’ ‘about’ war demanded of more signifi cant scholars in another context. As a way of responding to this solicitation to speak I propose a commentary on the 1932 correspon-dence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the question ‘Why War?’6 The historical resonances between the situation described in this correspondence and the confl ict in the Balkans will be close to all those concerned with the issues under discussion here. The correspondence sets out arguments which, in light of Kosovo, are in need of deconstruction.

There is a ‘deconstruction’ at work within Freud’s text which undoes, what we will provisionally call, a ‘metaphysical’ understanding of the rela-tion between violence and the law. As such Freud’s argument in the fi rst half of his response to Einstein bears a number of similarities to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920)7 and Derrida’s reading of it in ‘Force of Law’ (1990). However, there is also a narrative dynamic of ethico-theoretical repression at work within Feud’s text which competes with his own deconstruction, and opens a contradiction within the text regarding the law and violence. Having displaced any simple notion of an opposition between law and violence, Freud reasserts the primacy of that binary logic through a familiar psychoanalytic narrative of a Eurocentric evolution of civilization. It is this amnesia of his own deconstruction which leads Freud, a committed pacifi st, to a series of political pronouncements in this text which share and presage many of the assumptions used to justify the NATO bombing campaign in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. My reading of Freud’s letter will necessarily do violence to his writing (after all, there must be a certain performative violence involved in any such interpre-tative reading) but it will also aim to follow Benjamin’s directive that ‘the critique of violence is the philosophy of its history’.8 It is necessary to read this ‘philosophy’ (Benjamin within the same sentence places the word in inverted commas to mark its ambivalent relation to history) because, phi-losophy violently opens history by opposing itself to non-philosophy and in

The Eternal Battle for the Domination of the World 35

so doing ties violence to phenomenality itself and to the order of the logos. Philosophy returns violence against violence by questioning the possibility of speaking and the ‘empiricism’ which philosophy determines as such. In this sense philosophy can only allow questions to be asked of itself and the violence within itself.9 Therefore by reading the Einstein-Freud corre-spondence as a moment in a certain genealogy of the understanding of vio-lence, this essay might have a chance of opening the possibility of ‘saying’ ‘something’ ‘about’ violence which evades the uncritical and indiscriminate responses solicited by the mediatic noise of an event like Kosovo.

THE MEN FROM U.N.K.L.E

In what now seems like the improbable plot of a postmodern farce Ein-stein and Freud participated in an exchange of letters instigated by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation on behalf of the Per-manent Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nations on a subject ‘calculated to serve the common interests of the League of Nations and of intellectual life’.10 Assuming that such a calculation was not an oxymoron, Einstein wrote to Freud to solicit his opinion on ‘a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all problems civilisa-tion has to face’, namely, ‘is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’11 Einstein’s question now seems conditioned by a number of historical ironies. In 1932 National Socialism was yet to take power in Germany, the relation between Einstein’s own work and the creation of the atomic bomb was still to materialise, and the League of Nations was yet to be revealed as an inadequate ‘peacekeeping’ body by the expansion-ism of European Fascism—perhaps suggesting that this question was not necessarily more insistent than, say, questions of national identity, nuclear physics or international law. One might also consider here the nature of the letter, one intended for public circulation at that, as a means for respond-ing to a question which seems structured by the exasperation of its own impossibility (‘is there any way’ whatsoever?). As will emerge however, the question of the letter and the problem of the question are not unrelated to the issue of violence, or, to the potential ‘interests of the League of Nations’ as they fi gure in the political formulations Freud makes in this text.

Einstein outlines his own thoughts on the question he sets Freud:

I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superfi cial (i.e. ad-ministrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every confl ict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgements unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees.12


Given that Einstein is making this call to Freud on the invitation of the League of Nations, such a proposal may seem culturally and historically determined by his moment of speaking. However, Einstein recognises that this tribunal would be ineffective without the necessary force to execute its decrees, ‘this is a fact with which we have to reckon; law and might inevita-bly go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) in so far as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal’.13 This realization, which it will be necessary to return to, leads Einstein to the conclusion ‘the quest of inter-national security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.’14 Here Einstein’s reckoning is only following Kant who, in the fi rst appendix to ‘Perpetual Peace’, notes that while ‘the concept of right . . . would alone be capable of establishing perpetual peace’15 the only conceivable way ‘of inaugurating a state of right, is by force’.16 One might note straightaway, however, that the ‘ideal justice demanded by the community’ and imposed by force is founded in compromise, in so far as it is the will of a community (a collection of non-identical interests), and so will never reach the state of ‘ideal justice’. There will never be a just judgement made by the community which will be able to impose itself uncontested on all members of that com-munity. In this way, justice is compromised by its enforcement because this force always acts in an unjust way against some member of the community: ‘“it would be better otherwise” is the underlying feeling in every compro-mise’, to quote Unger.17

The rest of Einstein’s letter is a request of Freud to explain the ‘strong psy-chological factors at work’18 in human relations (greed, politics, economics, nationalism, vested interests and so on) which make such a surrender of sov-ereignty so diffi cult to achieve. In this way Einstein passes on the demand for speech made of him to Freud, soliciting Freud to ‘say something’ ‘about’ war. Einstein recognises that Freud only ever writes about war even if that is not all he writes about. He hopes that Freud’s commentary ‘might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action’19 which would discover ‘ways and means to render all armed confl icts impossible’.20 As a call this invita-tion could quickly become a temptation to offer a totalizing pronouncement which would move towards an end to dialogue; not to ‘blaze the trail’ but to ‘render all confl icts impossible’ and so do violence to the topic of violence by rendering it closed to speech. It would be possible for us to spend the rest of this essay picking at the remains of Einstein’s admirable formulation (the privilege accorded to central over marginal cases, the insistence on the pos-sibility of an absolute peace, the assumption of the scientifi c and metatheo-retical qualities of psychoanalysis, the notion of a metatheory capable of affecting world peace, the naive conjuration of the ‘intellectual’ to explain the political to the citizen with Freud as Horatio to Einstein’s Marcellus)


and so conclude that on matters of political philosophy Einstein was no rocket scientist. However, while Freud rejects the role of theoretician and proposes not ‘to make practical proposals but only to set out the problem of avoiding war as it appears to a psychological observer’21 he accepts unre-servedly (‘you yourself have said almost all there is to say on the subject’) Einstein’s ‘administrative’ solution to world war, ‘I shall be glad to follow in your wake and content myself with confi rming all you have said by amplify-ing it to the best of my knowledge’.22

This proposed international tribunal for the arbitration of confl ict also appears as one of the ‘defi nitive articles for a Perpetual Peace’ in Kant’s essay.23 Kant proposes a ‘pacifi c federation [foedus pacifi cum]’24 as a league of nations which would guarantee the collective security of one another by entering into a constitution to protect the rights of member states and so ‘to end all wars for good’. However, Kant notes that this federation can only operate successfully by the force of law, by ‘appointing for ourselves a supreme legislative, executive and juridical power to resolve our confl icts by peaceful means’.25 In the absence of such a power the federation could not secure the rights of the individual states which in turn would secure the rights of the power as the supreme agent of law. However, any federation of states will inevitably come into dispute with those countries which border it. Therefore, the laws of the federation (regardless of a ‘supreme’ agent within the federation) would not be universally valid juridical decisions but maxims, backed up by force, specifi c to the group of nations who accept them. The only way to achieve peace, says Kant, is the formation of ‘an international state [civitas gentium], which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth’.26 Such a global proposi-tion seems integral to Einstein’s suggestion.

ABOUT VIOLENCE

Einstein characterizes the problem of war as a question of law and justice (‘law and might inevitably go hand in hand’) and Freud takes this as his starting point for his reply, in which he immediately frames the issue as a question of ‘violence’. As such the correspondence follows the direction proposed by Benjamin’s opening line when he comments that ‘the task of a critique of violence can be summarised as that of expounding its relation to law and justice’.27 Just as Benjamin uses them in ‘Critique of Violence’, Freud and Einstein use the words Recht and Macht. The German recht carries the multiple meanings of ‘right’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’; macht can mean ‘might’, ‘force’ or ‘power’. Freud observes of this ambiguity that ‘there can be no doubt that [it] is the correct starting-point for our investigation’ but wishes to ‘replace’ macht with ‘a balder and harsher word “violence”’.28 In his later commentary on Benjamin, Derrida will take this phonic ambiguity a step further in his use of the French droit meaning both ‘law’ and ‘force’


in the same word, a violent coupling also presupposed by the English term ‘law enforcement’. As if to offer a demonstration of the determinate effects of the semantic force proposed here, in 1933 the new Nazi law-makers banned Freud’s letter in his native country just as it was published in Paris, simultaneously in French, English and German.

As in Benjamin’s earlier text, Freud provides a reading of the seeming ‘antithesis’29 between right and violence. A reading which Derrida char-acterizes in Benjamin as a ‘deconstructive discourse’ paradigmatic of all deconstruction.30 Freud suggests, with an eloquent expository hauteur, ‘it can be easily shown . . . that the one [right] has developed out of the other [violence]’ but then inverts the implications of this insight by insisting on the psychoanalytic model of the evolutionary narrative ‘if we go back to the earliest beginnings and see how that fi rst came about, the problem is easily solved’.31 The narrative representation Freud proposes doubles and redou-bles the need for deconstruction, just as its metaphysical rhythm drowns out the ‘deconstruction’ already at work within the text. The letter then returns to the example of the primal human horde to outline an elementary understanding of violence as a means of settling confl icts of interests within a community, ‘the original state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might—domination by brute violence or by violence supported by the intellect’.32 Once the intellect is involved (for example subjugating an adversary instead of killing him so that he might be put to service) then it is possible, says Freud, to discern ‘a path that led from violence to right or law’.33 The suggestion of an evolutionary model which moves from primal violence into the civilized process of law competes with Freud’s identifi ca-tion of the structuring principle of an interminable violence. By sparing the life of an adversary ‘the victor had to reckon with his defeated opponent’s lurking thirst for revenge and sacrifi ced some of his own security’.34 So, in the founding moment of a ‘peace’ in which the defeated party is not killed but allowed to live under the conditions of another’s will, this ‘peace’ inau-gurates the ongoing violence between the parties. This ‘peace’ is susceptible to later violence when the subjugated party takes his revenge, and the only true means to have secured peace would have been to have killed the oppo-nent outright even though this is a greater act of violence than sparing his life. Freud then makes a short cut from here to Kant’s conclusion that a per-petual peace could only be achieved ‘in the vast grave where all the horrors of violence and those responsible for them would be buried’.35

Both Freud and Kant, coming from opposite ends of the problem (one an originary moment, the other a teleological determination) seem to concur with Benjamin that ‘there are no other than violent means’36 and that there is no moment of peace as such. In fact, the very idea of such a peace (a true peace and not merely an interlude in violence) might itself be the most violent of moments since in its silence it allows great acts of violence to go unread as such. To push Freud’s reading a little further, but only a little further, his analysis of this primal scene seems to suggest that it would only


be possible to abolish violence, as Derrida notes in his reading of Levinas, ‘by suspending the idea of peace’37(Derrida’s italics). The very idea of peace as absolute non-violence masks the acts of violence which operate under its name (in Freud’s example the enslavement of defeated persons but we might add to the list: war reparations, partition, credit arrangements and war crimes trials). As Benjamin notes, ‘the task of ‘peace’ . . . is the primal phenomenon of all law-making violence’38 and therefore laws produced to achieve ‘peace’ are not only founded through force but predicated on a fun-damentally violent principle, namely ‘peace’ itself. While Freud would seem to be on the verge of making this recognition explicit, it remains unstated and, in an inverted form, will return to produce violent effects within the political conclusions he draws in this text.

Freud proposes an evolutionary path in which domination by the vio-lent strength of a single individual is replaced by l’union fait la force39 in which the union of several weaker strengths rivals that of the individual. He observes that ‘the power of those who were united now represented law in contrast to the violence of the single individual. Thus we see that right [recht] is the might [macht] of a community’.40 This Recht is still violence, says Freud, ‘it works by the same methods and follows the same purposes. The only real difference lies in the fact that what prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community’.41 That is to say, if we were to turn Freud’s evolutionary path back upon itself as a non-originary primal scene (rather than the narrative of civilization the argument of the letter wishes to construct), there is no difference between this union of force and the rule of the individual given that the idea of the individual presupposes the idea of the community which he rules over and which has always opposed his violence. In fact there will never have been a rule by an individual which was not in the fi rst instance opposed and predicated by the union of the force which he subjugated.

Freud goes on to say ‘in order that the transition from violence to this new right or justice may be effected . . . the union of the majority must be a stable and lasting one . . . The community must be maintained perma-nently, must be organised, must draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of rebellion and must institute authorities to see that those regulations—the laws—are respected and to superintend the execution of legal acts of vio-lence’.42 Freud is proposing here a combinatory violence which both founds the law (l’union fait la force) and conserves the law (‘legal acts of violence which will deter strong individuals from imposing their will on the com-munity’). This is also Benjamin’s contention when he notes ‘all violence as a means is either law-making or law preserving’.43 Violence becomes ‘sanc-tionable’ because either it brings the law into being or protects the existing law from the unsanctioned aggression of individuals. In this way, violence itself is neither just nor unjust but merely the shape of the law which may be just or unjust. It quickly becomes diffi cult to maintain a rigorous distinc-tion between a use of force which is just, or at least deemed legitimate by


the community, and one which is unjust. The calculation behind such a dis-tinction must also bear in mind that the force of law of a ‘legitimate’ power was founded in an originary moment of violence which was not authorised by any anterior legitimacy and so, in its initial moment, was neither legal nor illegal, neither just nor unjust. This is why, to borrow a formulation of Derrida’s, the law has a monopoly on violence.44 He notes, ‘law tends to prohibit violence and to condemn it not because it poses a threat to this or that law but because it threatens the juridical order itself’.45 In other words, in order to render the sanctioned violence of the law unreadable as ‘unsanctioned violence’ the law must be the only act of violence within the community, rendering all violence by individuals unlawful. The diffi culty in maintaining any rigorous distinction is demonstrated by Freud’s text when he puts this ‘deconstruction’ of the seeming antithesis between the law and violence to a commentary on Einstein’s proposal for an interna-tional peacekeeping tribunal.

Freud says that the initial model of the primal horde will only hold good if the community consists of equally strong individuals and no one per-son is able to dominate over l’union. ‘The laws of such an association will determine the extent to which, if the security of communal life is to be guaranteed, each individual must surrender his personal liberty to turn his strength to violent uses’.46 Collective security within the primal horde is only possible if each individual surrenders their ‘sovereignty’ to the group in order to police ‘legitimate’ acts of violence against those who would seek to dominate. As the term suggests ‘collective security’ is an act of violence by a suffi ciently strong group against both bodies outside the frontier of the group and potentially disruptive forces within it. There remains within ‘collective security’ the implicit threat of intimidation and the violent logic of the deterrent.

However, Freud recognises ‘from its beginning the community comprises elements of unequal strength’.47 Not only will the community consist of vic-tors and vanquished as a result of war, but it is also comprised of unequal groups and so ‘the justice [recht] of the community then becomes an expression of the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it’.48 Strachey renders the German recht in this instance as ‘justice’ and so misses Freud’s more subtle play upon the law itself and the exercise of the law as a form of ‘justice’ or ‘right’ qua expression of the will of the dominant group over the subjugated, ‘the laws are made by and for the ruling members and fi nd little room for the rights of those in subjection’.49 Freud distinguishes between the law as the rule of a community and justice as a demand for right beyond the law, in a similar gesture to Derrida’s distinction between formal sys-tems of law and the undeconstructible horizon of justice. What would seem to prevent Freud’s formulation of ‘justice’ becoming a regulative idea in the Kantian sense is precisely the ambiguous terms in which it is rendered as the German Recht meaning both law and justice at the same time. There can be no limit to the idea of justice as it operates in Freud’s text because


the demand for justice is immanent and immediate within any operation of the law. Justice [recht] appears whenever the law [recht] is enforced, making itself heard and its demands pronounced, working within the very situation of the law as Recht, to undo the violent imposition of the law as the embodiment of right.

Like Walter Benjamin, Freud goes on to outline the ‘especially impor-tant’ situation of ‘revolutionary violence’ since it can result in ‘a real shift of power’ within a community.50 Two scenarios are possible, he contends, either ‘right [recht] may gradually adapt itself to the new distribution of power’ or rebellion and civil war results ‘with a temporary suspension of law [recht] and new attempts at a solution by violence, ending in the estab-lishment of a fresh rule of law [recht]’.51 This might be read as analogous to the distinction which Benjamin makes between the violence of the general political strike (which agitates for a new distribution of power within the existing state) and the general proletarian strike (which seeks to establish an entirely new state). Every state is founded in a revolutionary situation (‘revolution’ in this sense does not necessarily carry the weight of its radical or progressive connotations) and this situation is violent. At such moments revolutionary violence interrupts the established droit to found another droit. Freud brings the example of revolutionary violence to the front of his argument here because these signifi cant moments are moments in which the law is suspended and as such the founding of the law of a new state takes place in an instance of non-law. This situation shows the paradoxi-cal condition of law, in which the transcendental status of the law depends upon the individual who stands before it, to use a phrase of Derrida’s bor-rowed from Kafka.52 Law only happens when it judges an individual who by ‘standing before it’ calls the law into being and authorises its actions. The presence of this pure performative always escapes the individual to whom the law appears inaccessible and transcendent even though it is s/he who has produced the law in the fi nite and immanent moment of standing before it. Accordingly, the law is always to come because it is promised and transcendent, and at the same time is always already past because it takes place in the singularity of the fi nite instance. As in the moment of revolu-tionary violence, every instance of law enforcement trembles over the abyss between law and non-law.

DOING FREUD AN INJUSTICE

However, while this deconstruction of the law seems to be taking place in Freud’s text, or at least Freud’s text would seem to call out for a deconstruc-tion of this sort, there remains within it the insinuation that an evolution-ary path from a primal violence to communally legitimated violence as law will ultimately lead to conditions of non-violence. The ‘path’ is related in Freud’s mind to a narrative of civilization which is predicated on certain


assumptions regarding European bourgeois identity. He insists that war is the opposite of civilization while at the same time regretting the rise of the ‘uncultivated races and backward strata of the population’53 as a con-sequence of the pacifi c inclinations of civilization. Freud argues that the microexercise of law tends to bring everyday ‘struggles [within a commu-nity] to a swift conclusion’.54 One might say, contra Freud, that the speed of such resolutions gives rise to an amnesia on the part of the community regarding the violent nature of the law, and in this forgetting such violence enforcement of the law (just or unjust) is “recognised” as ‘a peaceful solu-tion’.55 Benjamin gives the example of the ‘decay’ of parliamentary democ-racies which ‘have not remained conscious of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence’56 and through this amnesia legitimate the violence of police states as the rule of law. Reading Benjamin, Derrida sug-gests that ‘this amnesic loss of consciousness does not happen by accident. It is the very passage from presence to representation’.57 The institutional exercise of the law does not allow its originary violence to be readable as such and so masks the effects of its immediate presence as violence. This amnesia seems to effect Freud’s letter as he suggests that the macrohistory of the human race consists of ‘an endless series of confl icts’ between com-munities some of which ‘brought nothing but evil’ while others ‘have con-tributed to the transformation of violence into law by establishing larger units within which the use of violence was made impossible and in which a fresh system of law led to the solution of confl icts’.58 Freud gives the Pax Romana and the unifi cation of France as examples of this ‘peace’ and so temporarily puts on hold his own recognition of such peace as the violent imposition of the will of a community. All of this is by way of a prelude to the political statements he is about to make regarding the institution of the League of Nations, an ‘administrative’ solution the representativity of which displaces the immediate presence of the law as violence.

Freud moves quickly to propose that ‘paradoxical as it may sound, it must be admitted that war might be a far from inappropriate means of establish-ing the eagerly desired reign of “everlasting” peace, since it is in a position to create the large units within which a powerful central government makes further wars impossible’.59 The end of war is the end of war, as Geoffrey Bennington might say. Here, Freud shifts gears from a critique of violence as foundational of the law, and of the order of logos as an economy of war, to a psychological justifi cation for Einstein’s culturally and historically determined ‘administrative’ solution to the question of war, i.e. a United Nations. Freud’s argument runs, bureaucracy (or the representativity of the institution) will make war, or a violence which is readable under the name of ‘war’, impossible. This ‘central government’ will achieve peace by impos-ing and upholding the law (as in the case of Roman colonialism and the vio-lent expansionism of the French kings). The larger ‘the unit’ governed in this way, the less likely war is because the force of arms only needs to be used against those who oppose the civilizing law of central government. Freud


seems to have forgotten here his own initial proposal that the community is founded in the antagonism between the unequal strengths of the ruler and the ruled which creates a constant tension within the group and defi nes the existence of the community as a continued growth of law. Instead a move has been made here from the community as the growth of law to the law-preserving institutions of the community as peacekeepers.

The law is bureaucratic, unapproachable and transcendent as well as immanent and instituted. The administration of the law through its bureau-cratic institutions disguises the immediate presence of the law as violence. It is in this ‘superfi cial’, to use Einstein’s word, aspect of the law that its deconstruction takes place, in the interval between droit and justice. The bureaucracy of the law is an attempt to programme a response to the sin-gularities which call the law into being (one might think here of mandatory life sentences, ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’, immigration controls). The programmatic nature of the law is suggested by the phrase ‘the letter of the law’ which indicates that the regulations set down by statute must be adhered to regardless of the singularity of the case—‘by the book’ as the saying goes. Freud’s text is a letter of the law. It folds and unfolds around the question of legal bureaucracy, by turns laying open its originary vio-lence, then displacing it through the representativity of institutions and the representativity of the written letter. However, Freud’s letter never arrives, or at least it arrives in the wrong place (not in Nazi Germany even though both correspondents were German speakers). Similarly, ‘the letter of the law’, the programmed implementation of statute by bureaucracy, never arrives. The post itself offers a suitable example of an administrative ser-vice, whose conditions of possibility are its own conditions of impossibility. We are familiar with possible non-arrival as a structuring principle of the act of transmission administered by the postal service.60 Such a condition is endemic to all bureaucracy as a closed system. Institutional bureaucracy as a programme (a system for the delivery of letters, the processing of elec-tricity bills or the ‘handing down’ of mandatory life sentences) must always fail to administer as a condition of its institutionality. The programme as a response to the other is predicated on the impossibility of its own comple-tion and in the moment of its failure (when the letter arrives at the wrong address, the bill is miscalculated or an unjust sentence is passed) a gap is opened between administration and its desired end, between droit and justice, for example. It is this interval which leaves open a space for the other to legislate and so for the possibility of deconstruction. In this way all bureaucracy must give rise to its own deconstruction.

This situation is described in the term ‘administration’ itself, which con-tains the injunction to minister as well as the responsibility of government. Administration is a political word. Not only do we speak of the Clinton or Reagan ‘administration’ but the very principle of government is that whoever rules makes the rules. Government, as Benjamin points out, is a process which wraps itself around the law and the representativity of the


institutions of government erase the originary violence of law-making upon which the entire political process is founded. The failure of all administra-tion (the permanent state of law and non-law which is the condition of the all droit) is the very possibility of politics. No government can arrest its own decline, fall and replacement by banishing injustice through law-mak-ing because the law itself exists only in an administered, imperfect, and so unjust, state. The whole political process from the campaign manifesto to the parliamentary bill (and this is not just true of democracies) is a nego-tiation with the inevitable failure of the administration upon which it is predicated. One might suggest that politics is one beat away from the order of logos which links violence to the law.

However, an elision between the immediate presence of the law and its representation leads Freud to ‘our own times’ and allows him to ‘arrive at the same conclusion which [Einstein] reached by a shorter path’.61 Freud’s commentary is worth quoting at length:

Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgement upon all confl icts of interest shall be handed over. There are clearly two sepa-rate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless. The League of Nations is designed as an agency of this kind, but the second condition has not been fulfi lled: the League of Nations has no power of its own and can only acquire it if the mem-bers of the new union, the separate States, are ready to resign it. And at the moment there seems very little prospect of this. The institution of the League of Nations would, however, be wholly unintelligible if one ignored the fact that here was a bold attempt such as has seldom (perhaps, indeed, never on such a scale) been made before.62

In other words, war could be prevented if the League of Nations had a per-manent security council (rather than a permanent committee for literature and the arts) which would arbitrate, as a ‘supreme agency’, in all confl icts of interest and legislate using the ‘necessary power’. In order for this to happen the member states of the League must ‘resign’ their sovereignty to this ‘central authority’, supporting its law-making violence and abiding by its juridical pronouncements under the threat of violence. Following the logic of Freud’s model of the primal horde outlined earlier, since the League is not made up of powers of equal strength the law-making tribunal will consist of those nations who possess ‘the compelling force of violence’ and so, regardless of best intentions, be a violently unequal imposition of law by one group of interests over a weaker one. This subjugated group will inevitably oppose such law-making even as it appears to have ‘resigned’ to it, awaiting its turn for revenge. Kant identifi es this contradiction ‘between a superior (the legislator) and an inferior (the people obeying the laws)’63


as one of the basic fl aws in the idea of an international state as a means to perpetual peace. In such circumstances violence continues until either everyone is equal or everyone is dead, which may amount to the same thing given that such equality would only be possible if competing strengths were in fact part of the same interest. Identical interests would only correspond within the one unifi ed person, a concept which psychoanalysis has done more than most to dispel.

FORGET KOSOVO

However, you do not have to be Einstein to recognise in this correspon-dence a justifi cation for the founding charter of the United Nations and by extension an apology for the juridical decisions of NATO as a more effi -cient ‘central authority’ which acts as a ‘supreme agency’ of international law, and enforces it with ‘the necessary power’. Indeed, while Freud did not live to see the founding of the United Nations and, as a committed pacifi st, may have been appalled by events in Kosovo, it is not unreasonable to push the argument of Freud’s text into a consideration of the NATO bombing campaign and see in Freud’s thought the same arguments which justifi ed the militarism. The representational contour of Freud’s epistolary narrative leads the argument of the text to forget the violent presence of the law, and one half of the letter folds onto and writes over the other half’s commen-tary. However, the effaced pages show through even as Freud produces an ineffective political argument which fails to recognise law as violence.

The mandate of NATO depends upon: (a) its unequal strength (it does not go to war with powers, if there are any, equal to it in strength and like the Pax Romana or the domain of the French kings as a ‘unit’ it achieves a critical mass of strong interests to deter violent opposition from either inside or outside its borders); (b) its bureaucratic effi ciency (it is easier to achieve agreement within the council of the North Atlantic powers than within the United Nations, and so provide speedier ‘juridical’ pronounce-ments); and (c) its ability to wield both a law-preserving violence and a law-making violence (its defence of International Law is at best incon-sistent, this might also be characterized as a continued ‘re-evaluation’ or ‘growth’ of law to serve its own powerful interests). These last two points are related. NATO is not the United Nations because the North Atlantic Council replaces the ideal of decision through consensus of the Permanent Security Council (surely what Einstein had in mind when he called for a ‘judicial body to settle every confl ict’) with the programmed response of a common group of interests. The UN was only meaningful as the supreme agent of international law as long as there was no one nation or group of nations strong enough to challenge its legislative powers (just as the League of Nations survived until the challenge of European Fascism). This was ensured by the balance of terror between NATO and the countries of the


Warsaw Pact. Now that the contest of ‘the second world’ has been removed the UN has been displaced by NATO as the sole arbiters of international droit. While the fencing between the West and the East on the UN Security Council was always more of a question of compromise than of a decision as such and the Security Council only ever represented one group of inter-ests ordained through their own performativity, the power now wielded by NATO has concentrated the bureaucracy of international law into a narrower and as yet unchallenged set of interests, namely the violence of Western capitalism.

However, the previous administration of international law (in which a subject stood before the juridical body of the United Nations Security Coun-cil to await a ‘resolution’) has been replaced by what is in fact a less effi cient bureaucracy which only treats those cases which fall within the locus of its interests. NATO’s inconsistent response to international law (even more inconsistent than the UN because it is comprised of less countries and less interests) is in danger of abolishing the idea of the programme which exists as the guarantee of law. While the UN consistently failed to intervene in civil wars, NATO’s singular and unrepeatable intervention interrupts the administration of international law qua programme and so replaces an order of law with one of non-law, or at least a droit no longer readable as law. In this way, the Kosovo campaign seemingly designed to impose an order of law took place in a situation of non-law in which NATO attempted to assert its will over that of the UN. The originary violence of this event, as an attempt to abolish one order of law and replace it with another within a situation of non-law (like the revolutionary violence described by Freud and Benjamin) was erased at every turn by the representation of NATO, the European Union and national parliaments as ‘legal’ institutions and by the mediatic representations of the confl ict as a ‘just’ war. The legality of NATO being connected to the ‘justness’ of its cause, which could not be separated from a narrative representation of the law-making institutions of Europe as the peak of an evolutionary path of civilization. The supreme agency of the stealth bomber was underwritten by the constitution of Euro-pean law as an idea of civilization, and vice versa. The ‘end’ of the bombing campaign was deeply ambiguous, ending as it did with a UN resolution, the ‘properly’ bureaucratic and ‘legal’ response to such a confl ict. It remains a matter of contention whether this should be read as a defeat, temporary or otherwise, for NATO’s attempt to establish itself as the supreme agent of international law or the advent of an entirely new kind of tele-technological violence which makes visible as a condition of its operation the immediate presence of the abyss between law and non-law upon which every program-matic juridical procedure depends.

3 Tele-Techno-Theology

An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect the political regime is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psycho-analysis. Or love letters.1

—Jacques Derrida

This is still a dangerous world. It’s a world of madmen and potential mental losses.

—George W. Bush

T is for telepathy, T is for tele-technology, T is for theology, T is also for the Taliban and for terrorism. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th I was asked by a journal to comment on the ‘Event’. Like most I was too trau-matised to speak, no commentary could do justice to what happened in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. It would seem that the mediatic space which reported these events, and whose images prefi gured it, was inca-pable of bearing the weight of analysis they demanded. The one thing that this space could not understand was the very thing that it had foreshadowed in so many fi lmic scenarios from the secret bases of the terrorists of SPECTRE to the Alien invasion in Independence Day. By this reckoning, this event is made the only thing—at this time, in this space—worth understanding, even if such an analysis runs the risk of a disproportionate response, mistaking the concentrated power of those media images for a general challenge to world hegemony. Such an analysis may only lend credence to the thinking that per-petrated the attack and the mirror-logic which responded to it as, and with, an act of war. What follows is an approach to an analysis of the War (this ‘war’ as the latest incident in a world war which has been raging for the last thirty years) and telepathy (tele-pathein, pain at a distance).

I

‘I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy’.

—George W. Bush

Nicholas Royle has outlined the question of telepathy and psychoanalysis for us.2 For Royle telepathy is a remainder within psychoanalysis, a stubborn


stain which can be neither explained by the scientifi c categories of psycho-analysis (and so be accommodated within the bounds of psychoanalysis as a suitable object of study) nor excluded absolutely as belonging merely to the unscientifi c world of the occult. Telepathy is something of an embarrassment to Freud who, over a series of unpublished papers, comes to accept the pos-sibility of ‘thought-transference’ while equivocating over this belief in front of his colleagues and disciples. Telepathy then destabilises the boundaries of psychoanalysis: inside-outside, public-private, reason-occultism, science-religion and so on. Thus, telepathy thwarts and contaminates the scientifi c ambitions of the Freudian project, refusing it closure and pressuring it into an ‘analysis interminable’, while sending back messages to psychoanalysis telling it what it has known all along.3 This is a persuasive deconstruction.4 However, what interests me about Freud’s ‘secret lectures’5 on telepathy is the way in which telepathy is linked in his writing to the experience of war. It has become commonplace to suggest that the elaboration of the economy of thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (and all that this means for a resituation of the Freudian topography) is closely linked with the experience of mechanised warfare in western Europe. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is not just any book for Freud, nor is it just any book by Freud for deconstruc-tion. Just as telepathy leaves a stain on psychoanalysis, so does the question of war, and as we will see, by extension the issue of telepathy is marked by the experience of war.

The two lengthy studies of telepathy by Freud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ (1921) and ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1922), are characterized by their frequent references to war.6 Freud explicitly states in his introductory remarks to ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ that the interest in occult phe-nomena tugging at the coat-tails of his science ‘is a part expression of the loss of value by which everything has been affected since the world catas-trophe of the Great War’ (SE 117). The injunction of telepathy is double and contradictory for psychoanalysis. On the one hand it is ‘a part of the tentative approach to the great revolution towards which we are heading and of whose extent we can form no estimate’ (SE 117). Since the effects of the epistemic shift of psychoanalysis cannot be estimated, telepathy can be neither ruled in nor ruled out of its scientifi c realm. On the other hand, says Freud, ‘no doubt it is also an attempt at compensation, at making up in another, a supermundane, sphere for the attractions which have been lost by life on this earth’ (SE 177). Thus, the interest in telepathy, if not telepathy itself, can be quite easily explained by psychoanalytic catego-ries as part of the work of mourning compelled by the experience of war. Freud’s inquiry into telepathy is then divided within itself from the very beginning, at once attempting to rationalise the irrational and simultane-ously drawn to this phenomena as an exemplary instance of the counterin-tuitive logic of psychoanalysis.

He writes that psychoanalysis does not have any interest in defending the scientifi c authority which dismisses occultism because psychoanalysis

Tele-Techno-Theology 49

itself ‘stands in opposition to every-thing that is conventionally restricted, well-established and generally accepted’ (SE 178). Where Freud and the occultists would seem to part company, for ‘alliance and co-operation between analysts and occultists might [initially] appear both plausible and promising’ (SE 178), is over the question of belief. The occultist is a ‘con-vinced believer’ while psychoanalysis seeks after knowledge in an attempt ‘to conquer this new sphere’ (SE 178). Thus, the history of telepathy is marked by the confrontation between blind faith and colonial aspirations (the painting pink of the dark regions of the psyche). It is this binary struc-ture which determines the system of relationships between telepathy and psychoanalysis as well as the present confrontation between a certain Islam and the West. This structure is undone in Freud’s text by its movement through the questions of writing, media and the trace. As we shall see, the same structure undoes itself in the present context by a similar movement through media. Freud likens the competing claims of science and the occult to a war zone, with psychoanalysis as a displaced person:

We have heard during the war of people who stood half-way between two hostile nations, belonging to one by birth and to the other by choice and domicile; it was their fate to be treated as enemies fi rst by one side and then, if they were lucky enough to escape, by the other. Such might equally be the fate of psychoanalysis. (SE 180)

If telepathy turns psychoanalysis into a refugee, destined to wander, for-ever seeking asylum, one can track in these essays Freud’s shift in opinion from his initial declaration that he had never come across a truly telepathic experience in any of his patients to his fi nal refusal to rule out the possibil-ity of thought-transference. The sceptic becomes a believer and the refugee becomes a fugitive.

Freud keeps his ‘belief’ secret, fearing the effects that his newfound faith will have on the institution of psychoanalysis. The essay ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ was originally prepared for a meeting of the Central Execu-tive of the International Psycho-Analytic Association to be held in the Harz mountains in September 1921. Ernst Jones, the then president of the Central Executive, states that no such meeting took place although Freud did read a paper to a small group of close followers including Jones at this time. In the manuscript edition of ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ the essay is described by Freud as a ‘Lecture given before the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society’. How-ever, the published minutes of the Vienna Society do not record the paper having been delivered. A version of the paper was, however, published in the journal Imago in 1922. ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ was not published in German until 1941. At best, telepathy might be said to be something of a discomfi ture to Freud, a state which is stateless; at worst, telepathy is some-thing so fundamentally unsettling for Freud that it calls for censorship and repression in order to prevent internecine fi ghting within psychoanalysis.


In an exchange of circular letters Ernst Jones, in February 1926, fears that his predictions regarding the threat of telepathy to psychoanalysis have come true (thus demonstrating his own telepathic powers). In reply Freud confi rms his conversion to telepathy:

Our friend Jones seems to me to be unhappy about the sensation that my conversion to telepathy has made in English periodicals. He will recollect how near to such a conversion I came in the communication I had the occasion to make during our Harz travels. Considerations of external policy since that time held me back long enough, but fi nally one must show one’s colours and need bother about the scandal this time as little as on earlier, perhaps still more important occasions.7

However, Freud makes no attempt to incorporate his newfound faith into the system of psychoanalysis, it remains a matter of personal belief, dif-fi cult as such a gesture might be to reconcile with everything that psycho-analysis has to say about personal beliefs. He writes to Jones, ‘the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis . . . [and my] conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things . . . ’ Telepathy troubles the relation between foreign policy (‘considerations of external policy since that time held me back’) and faith (telepathy is said to be ‘like my Jewishness’, one’s true colours). It crosses the border between reason and religion, the media and the academy, the English periodicals and the circular letter.8 Finally it would seem that there is a link between the wandering Jew and the refugee of (and from) psychoanalysis. Telepathy, as the fugitive within psychoanalysis itself, is doubly displaced as the refugee from the refugee, the outcast that the other refugees will not speak to, the rogue state.

These two essays on telepathy wander along a contingent path of inquiry but return frequently to the front. It is not a matter of arriving at this no man’s land between two warring nations; rather, Freud seems to be unable to avoid this place. It is a place that befalls Freud, having escaped he turns a corner only to arrive back on this border, like the sense of confusion and déjà vu he writes of in the essay on the uncanny when he cannot negotiate himself out of a certain district in an Italian town. The essays take the form of analysing particular case histories, either patients of Freud or correspon-dents who have written to Freud with supposed telepathic experiences. A high proportion of these cases involve presentiments related to the war. In ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ we have the case of the man ruined by the war and the Russian Revolution whose wife later consults a fortune-teller (SE 186). ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ opens with Freud’s own dream of the death of his son at the front:

I saw the young soldier standing on a landing-stage, between land and water [a liminal space surely suggestive of the borders of the


western front], as it were; he looked to me very pale. I spoke to him but he did not answer. There were other unmistakable indications. He was not wearing military uniform but a ski-ing costume that he had worn when a serious ski-ing accident had happened to him sev-eral years before the war. He stood on something like a footstool with a cupboard in front of him; a situation always closely associated in my mind with the idea of ‘falling’, through a memory of my own childhood. As a child of little more than two years old I had myself climbed on a footstool like this to get something off the top of a cup-board—probably something good to eat—and I fell down and gave myself an injury, of which I can even now show the scar. My son, however, whom the dream pronounced dead, came home from the war unscathed. (SE 197–198)9

Freud warns us at the start of this essay ‘you will learn nothing from this paper of mine about the enigma of telepathy; indeed, you will not even gather whether I believe in the existence of “telepathy” or not’ (SE 197). His interest here is merely in the relation between so-called telepathic occurrences ‘whatever their origin’ (Freud maintains the public use of scare-quotes) and dreams. While Freud will later observe that ‘by far the greater number of all telepathic intimations relate to death’ (SE 218) he is also able to rationalise such experiences within the Oedipal schema, ‘I might, however, add the observation that the instances of telepathic mes-sages or productions which have been discussed here are clearly connected with emotions belonging to the sphere of the Oedipus complex’ (SE 219). Thus, Freud explains the dream of his son’s death as a displaced account of his own childhood accident.

The dream is not truly telepathic (the son returns from the war). Rather, Freud’s dream seems to connect his own castration anxiety with the scars left by the experience of war. In an inversion and reaffi rmation of Oedipus the ‘telepathic’ message arrives, as it did from Delphi, to herald the return of the lost son, brought to manhood (by his war experiences), to enact the family drama. Of the two telepathic messages recounted by Sophocles, the fi rst presages the death of the father and the life of the son, the second foretells the price to be paid for this life by the son’s own castration. For Freud this dream is more about scars than scares. The son is said to come home ‘unscathed’ but as Freud notes later on in his essay ‘we are very proud of our art if we achieve a cure through psycho-analysis, yet here too we cannot always prevent the formation of a painful scar as an outcome’ (SE 215). Analysis leaves its scars but so does war and there would seem to be a rather obvious connection between the controversy of psychoanalysis (the controversy of telepathy within psychoanalysis) and polemos (war). It is a matter of reading the trace of the scar, which marks Freud’s white skin like the trail of skis in the snow, to appreciate the accident of castration which befell Freud and the accident of telepathy which befell psychoanalysis.


If telepathic experience in Freud is heavily marked by the question of war, it is equally scarred by the problem of writing. It is not an exaggera-tion to say that the issue of polemos and nature of writing may fi nally be the same thing.10 Freud prefaces the account of this dream by saying:

I once dreamt during the war that one of my sons then serving at the front had been killed. This was not directly stated in the dream, but was expressed in an unmistakable manner, by means of the well-known death-symbolism of which an account was fi rst given by Stekel [1911]. (We must not omit to fulfi l the duty, often felt to be inconvenient, of making literary acknowledgements). (SE 197)

Freud’s parenthetic remark demonstrates that the meaning of this dream—its rhetorical status as the fi rst dream analysed in this essay and accord-ingly as an example of non-telepathic experience—has been determined in advance by its relation to other acts of writing. Stekel leaves a trace in Freud, marked by the scars of these round brackets. The question of litera-ture is undoubtedly germane to an understanding of telepathy, as Royle has shown. However, the more general issue here is one of media and of its tele-pathic nature. In ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ the wife of the man ruined by the Great War consults a medium, ‘a famous fortune-teller’ (SE 187) who ‘got his clients to press down a hand into a dish full of sand and fore-told the future by studying the imprint’. He tells her, ‘in the near future you will have to go through some severe struggles, but all will turn out well. You will get married and have two children by the time you are 32’ (SE 188). Again, Freud explains this prediction in terms of an Oedipal effect. However, one might pause here to consider the telepathic event as a reading of an imprint left in the sand. Similarly, one might dwell on Freud’s suspi-cion that despite the woman having removed her wedding ring ‘it would not have needed any great refi nement of observation to discover the trace of the ring on her fi nger’ (SE 188). As in the dream of his son Freud’s analysis is concerned with the scars of castration and the traces from which so-called telepathy is discernible.

However, there is an overwhelming accretion in both these essays of the problematic nature of media and its interpretation. The telepathic occur-rence recounted prior to this narrative in ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ also involves a medium who predicts the death of the brother-in-law of one of Freud’s patients (SE 182). Again, for Freud, the premonition can be shown to relate to an external, Oedipal, reality and so be a subjective anticipation rather than true telepathy. However, this incident is the fi rst occasion on which Freud openly entertains the idea of thought-transference as a possibility. The issue here is double and contradictory. On the one hand, Freud cannot explain why the medium would be able to make a prediction (one that did not come true but which bore a striking resemblance to an incident the previous year in which the brother-in-law almost died of seafood poisoning) of his patient’s


death-wish for his brother-in-law unless it had been transferred to her ‘by some unknown means which excluded the means of communication familiar to us’ (SE 184). Freud suggests that this suppressed wish had been communi-cated to the medium ‘by means of induction from one person to another’ and the second person gives consciousness to the wish that has a special relation to the fi rst’s psychic experience. However, on the other hand, Freud views the medium’s role in this event as remarkably unproblematic. He writes ‘we can also, so it seems to me, leave the fortune-teller (or, as we may say straight out, the “medium”) quite out of account as a possible source of deception’ (SE 184). In other words, despite Freud’s intensive study of the ways in which the dream-work complicates and displaces messages from the unconscious, he is prepared to believe that this telepathic message passes through the medium in a transparent fashion. He compares the experience to the development of photographic images:

It [the case] shows that an extraordinarily powerful wish harboured by one person and standing in a special relation to his consciousness has succeeded, with the help of a second person, in fi nding conscious expression in a slightly disguised form—just as the invisible end of the spectrum reveals itself to the senses on a light-sensitive plate as a co-loured extension. (SE 184–185)

The medium is a tabula rasa on which the young man imprints his wish, just as Freud’s other correspondent left the print of her hand in the sand. The wish may go through some distortion, ‘a slightly disguised form’, but only in the sense that it lies just beyond the senses, in parenthesis, like ‘the invisible end of the spectrum’. In other words, despite his frequent admoni-tion that telepathy is inimical to psychoanalysis, Freud is able to entertain this experience as telepathic because he is able to offer a psychoanalytic account of it as wish-fulfi lment. Just as there is a means, a technology, to view invisible light so there exists for psychoanalysis a means, a vocabu-lary, for explaining the invisible passage of thought-transference.

One might go straight from here to ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”’ and to Derrida’s ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ to discuss the rela-tion between the psychic apparatus and technologies of writing.11 Alterna-tively, one might proceed to the privileged relation between wish-fulfi lment and writing Freud outlines in ‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’ to appreciate that although Freud protests that telepathic experience does not alter the Freudian theory of dreams (SE 197) the question of writing cer-tainly does.12 In his opening remarks in ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907), Freud, in a gesture similar to Derrida’s reproach to Austin in ‘Signature, Event, Context’, suggests that far from being a secondary concern for a psychoanalytic understanding of dreams, dreams in literature are pointedly relevant to such an understanding.13 While cognitive science does not believe that dreams can be interpreted, Freud, the superstitious


‘common people’ and literature do. It is both a question of reading and a matter of telepathy. He writes:

The author of The Interpretation of Dreams has ventured, in the face of the reproaches of strict science, to become a partisan of antiquity and superstition [i.e. that dreams can be interpreted]. He is, it is true, far from believing that dreams foretell the future, for the unveiling of which men have vainly striven from time immemorial by every forbid-den means. But even he has not been able entirely to reject the relation of dreams to the future. For the dream, when the laborious work of translating it has been accomplished, revealed itself to him as a wish of the dreamer’s represented as fulfi lled; and who could deny that wishes are predominantly turned towards the future?14

Many years before Freud’s private conversion we fi nd him here unable to rule out the possibility of telepathic dreams. Thus, Freud’s own oeuvre demonstrates its own telepathic powers. His explanation here, in relation to the future orientation of wishes, surely presages his later account of the death-wish for the brother-in-law. However, the difference in the essay on the Gradiva is that while the desire can be read in the imprint of Gradiva’s foot in the ash of Pompeii, and Norbert Hanold’s wish can be accommo-dated within psychoanalytic parameters, Jensen’s writing (the medium that relates the story) introduces the element of undecidability, what Freud calls the ‘unfettered imitations’ of ‘unrestrained and unregulated structures’.15 What is at stake here is the very project of psychoanalysis as a method of interpretation. Telepathy can only lie inside psychoanalysis if it can be ade-quately explained. Like writing, telepathy problematises any easy notion of a transparent medium which would allow a message to arrive fully formed in the present. While Freud sees no need to view the fortune-teller as a source of deception, he admits that some disguise and displacement ensues. This instance of telepathy is useful to Freud, however, because despite its contor-tions its meaning can be determined. Moreover, it can be determined by the medium of Freud’s own writing. This contradiction between the alterity of the psyche and the supposed stability of the medium which articulates its desires leads Freud’s negotiation of telepathy into some confusion.

The essays on telepathy are replete with instances of messages relayed by various media. In an echo of Freud’s own dream of his son, ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ recounts another experience related to Freud in a letter (Freud makes frequent reference in this essay to turning his correspondent’s letters ‘to literary account’ [SE 200]):

In 1914 my brother was on active service; I was not with my parents in B—, but in Ch—. It was ten a.m. on August 22 when I heard my brother’s voice calling, ‘Mother! Mother!’ It came again ten minutes later, but I saw nothing. On August 24 I came home, found my mother


greatly depressed, and in answer to my questions she said that she had had a message from the boy on August 22. She had been in the garden in the morning, when she had heard him call, ‘Mother! Mother!’ I comforted her and said nothing about myself. Three weeks after there came a card from my brother, written on August 22 between nine and ten in the morning; shortly after he died. (SE 210)

Here the telepathic message precedes the arrival of a letter confi rming the death intimated by the telepathic event. If the spirit giveth life, the letter surely kills. If the majority of telepathic experiences intimate death it is pre-cisely because a certain idea of telepathy (the one more or less, given slight but not irremediable distortions, entertained by Freud in his explanation of the fortune-teller’s prediction) presupposes that the message received in telepathy is readable and that its expression in consciousness is its only and fi nal port of call. As with the preceding dream analysed in ‘Dreams in Telepathy’, in which one of Freud’s correspondents dreams that his wife has given birth to twins only to receive a telegram a few days later to say that his daughter gave birth to twins at the same moment he was dreaming, this telepathic experience involves prodigious (even uncanny) doubling, an Oedipal schema and confi rmation by letter. In this war-time experience the letter only arrives belatedly, its message having been received on the way by both the dead man’s brother and his mother. It is this very doubleness which leads Freud to the conclusion that it will be impossible for psychoanalysis to rule out the possibility of telepathy. There would seem to be here an open contradiction between Freud’s desire to explain all of these dreams in terms of a circuit of desire which is regulated by death (the death of the Father, castration as the death of desire, death-wishes and so on) and the ultimate impossibility of a determination of, or by, death (voices from beyond the grave, the brother-in-law does not die, one dream is said to haunt a cor-respondent ‘like a ghost’ [SE 209]). Sometimes the letter does not arrive, as Freud’s own dream demonstrates. He did not receive a telegram confi rming the death of his son. Finally, it may not be possible to determine the mean-ing of telepathy in this way. In fact, what Freud’s essays show might be that telepathy itself is the very structure, if structure is an appropriate word in this context, of a certain experience of undecideability.

Telepathy is the name Freud gives to the undecideable, that which falls outside of the determination by interpretation, while that undecideability calls forth and enables the practice of interpretation just as that practice attempts to repress it. It is perhaps for this reason that Royle calls telepathy ‘a psychoanalysis beyond psychoanalysis’.16 It is in parenthesis, after and beyond while complementing and completing psychoanalysis as a problem. Telepathy as undecideability, the beyond of interpretation, is clearly related to the question of writing. The undecideability of Freud’s two essays with their inability to close off debates within Freud’s oeuvre and within psycho-analysis, their unfulfi lled desires, their inauguration of a private anxiety


and public embarrassment (which will no doubt have been in motion since at least the Gradiva), their open contradictions and obsession with marks and traces, are themselves exemplary instances of this telepathic experi-ence. Telepathy is for Royle ‘a new practice of writing and a new theory of subjectivity’.17 A new mode of writing because it lies beyond the practice of interpretation, a new theory of subjectivity because its meaning cannot be determined by death and so lies beyond the subject just as much as it takes place within the subject, making any idea of the subject as a determination of fi xed boundaries impossible. If telepathy then works according to the same principle of all tele and postal technologies, namely the mediation of meaning through a system of exchange which results in and requires as an a priori condition the possibility of its non-arrival at a fi nal destination, then telepathy as a new practice of writing may go some way to explaining Der-rida’s somewhat gnomic comment with which this essay began. Namely, that a certain idea of reading, whether it is found in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis or love letters, cannot survive when confronted by a struc-ture of meaning which, as Freud puts it, by some unknown method excludes ‘the means of communication familiar to us’. And this is the contradiction in Freud, to reverse a commonplace assumption between his writerly desire for closure and the scientifi c stricture which will not allow for any easy dismissal of thought-transference.

The medium of Freud’s essay fi nally catches up with itself and recognises that what makes the question of telepathy undecideable one way or the other is the very nature of media itself. ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ closes with a return to the dream of the brother killed at the front. Freud comments:

There remains one element of the apparently intimate connection be-tween telepathy and dreams which is not affected by any of these con-siderations: namely, the incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable conditions for telepathy. Sleep is not, it is true, indispensable to the oc-currence of telepathic processes—whether they originate in messages or in unconscious activity. If you are not already aware of this, you will learn it from the instance given by our second correspondent, of the young man’s message which came between nine and ten in the morn-ing. We must add, however, that no one has a right to take exception to telepathic occurrences if the event and the intimation (message) do not exactly coincide in astronomical time. It is perfectly conceivable that a telepathic message might arrive contemporaneously with the event and yet only penetrate to consciousness the following night during sleep (or even in waking life only after a while, during some pause in the activity of the mind). We are, as you know, of opinion that dream-formation itself does not necessarily wait for the onset of sleep before it begins. Often the latent dream-thoughts may have been being got ready during the whole day, till at night they fi nd the contact with the unconscious wish that shapes them into a dream. But if the phenomenon of telepathy


is only an activity of the unconscious mind, then, of course, no fresh problem lies before us. The laws of unconscious mental life may then be taken for granted as applying to telepathy. (SE 219–220)

In other words, if telepathy can be thought of as a question of mediation by the unconscious then it cannot be ignored by psychoanalysis. Rather, the belatedness and undecideability of telepathy would be an exemplary instance of the nachtraglichkeit which characterizes mental life. Taking Freud’s fi nal sentence in an unironic way, the experience of deferred mean-ing in telepathy (the result of meaning passing through media) precisely characterizes the revolutionary problematic of the unconscious which psy-choanalysis as an ontotheology, if not a science, at once exposes and con-tinually attempts to repress.18 We might note here that the argument of Freud’s essay once more returns to the experience of war as a demonstra-tion of the diffi culty in determining what can and cannot be ruled out of psychic experience. It is this ambivalence within Freud’s text, by which telepathy causes the certainty of scienticism to tremble, that (despite the confi dence avowed above, ‘no fresh problem lies before us’) causes Freud to make a sudden about-turn in his fi nal sentence. Despite a clear movement towards accepting the possibility of thought-transference, Freud is keen not to be seen ruling telepathy in, ‘I have been anxious to be strictly impartial’. For fi nally, Freud says of telepathy, and this will not be his last fi nally, ‘I have no opinion on the matter and know nothing about it’ (SE 220).19

II

‘I do not need someone to tell me what to believe. But I do need some-one to tell me where Kosovo is’.

—George W. Bush

Much of this will depend on Derrida. Fortune-telling and telepathy are important conceits in Derrida’s novel Envois. The essay ‘Telepathy’, pub-lished separately, was, according to a footnote by Derrida, accidentally excluded from the manuscript of The Post Card (‘There will perhaps be talk of omission through “resistance” and other such things’).20 However, it would seem that ‘Telepathy’, the essay, is not in fact the entire remainder [restant] of this text: ‘From this bundle of daily dispatches which all date from the same week, I have extracted only a part for the moment, through lack of space. Lack of time too, and for the treatment of which I had to sub-mit this mail, sorting, fragmentation, destruction etc., the interested reader may refer to “Envois”, p.7ff’ (my emphasis). Other postcards remain ‘lost’. It would seem that telepathy brings out something of the private individual in Derrida as well when he also decides to hold back material for publica-tion, if only ‘for the moment’.21 The interested reader of Envois will note


that its narrator suggests that the correspondence ‘should all have been burned, all of it, including the cinders of the unconscious’ so that ‘“they” will never know anything about it’.22 However, it is an exchange of let-ters which ‘immediately got beyond us’, as Derrida tells his addressee, and which therefore lie beyond the censoring powers of the individual. This would be the whole, if not the only, point of Derrida’s rhetorical strategy by which these private letters pass through the various destinations of his readership, are countersigned by the reader en route, without ever coming to rest at a fi nal address. A structure of writing-for-the-future which Der-rida will later call ‘telepoesis’.23

The set-up of this postal technology, relay and exchange without telos through the sorting offi ce of the medium of writing, is precisely the action of telepathy. Derrida’s reading of Freud’s essays and correspondence on telepathy in this text demonstrates the impossibility of closure in the circuit of telepathic exchange. Far from being an aberrant means of communica-tion which lies outside of patterns of meaning familiar to the subject, telep-athy is for Derrida the very principle by which all communication works. He notes:

The truth, what I always have diffi culty getting used to: that non-telep-athy is possible. Always diffi cult to imagine that one can think some-thing to oneself [a part soi], deep down inside, without being surprised by the other, without the other being immediately informed, as easily as if it had a giant screen in it, at the time of the talkies, with remote control [telecommande] for changing channels and fi ddling with the colours, the speech dubbed with large letters in order to avoid any misunderstanding.24

Derrida’s commentary here is useful in two respects. Firstly, telepathy in its expanded Royle-Derrida sense describes the very act of communica-tion because it names ‘the outside-the-subject’.25 Telepathy as a structure of meaning not only lies outside of the subject, or discipline, of psycho-analysis but acts outside of communication between subjects as stable and assured identities. Rather telepathy, or the undecideable remainder of meaning, follows the structure of supplementarity, an add-on to subjective experience, at once both outside-the-subject and constitutive of the sub-ject.26 This is the situation that Freud simultaneously discovers and denies, as Derrida puts it, it will be ‘diffi cult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy’.27 The essay concludes ‘telepathy is the interruption of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis’ in which psychoanalysis ‘resembles an adventure of modern rationality set on swallowing and simultaneously rejecting the foreign body named Telepa-thy, for assimilating it and vomiting it without being able to make up its mind to do one or the other’.28 Telepathy, then, is caught in a constant


battle, a war of words, between ontotheology and deconstruction. I will return to this.

Secondly, here Derrida makes explicit the link between telepathy as a structure of meaning and all tele-techno spectral media as structures of reproduction, inscription and iteration. As Derrida writes in conclusion to this particular envoi:

For here is my fi nal paradox, which you alone will understand clearly: it is because there would be telepathy that a postcard can not arrive at its destination. The ultimate naivety would be to allow oneself to think that Telepathy guarantees a destination which ‘posts and telecommu-nications’ fail to provide. On the contrary, everything I said about the post-card structure of the mark (interference, parasiting, divisibility, iterability, and so on [in English in the original text] is found in the network. This goes for any tele-system—whatever its content, form or medium.29

If telepathy is an exemplary instance of the techne of writing, the very action of dissemination, and what goes for telepathy goes for every tele-techno-logical system, then we are thrown back upon the original premise of our inquiry: What is the relation between telepathy and the new techno-media wars of the last decade? This is the question which occupies us here.

Three possible directions of inquiry suggest themselves. Firstly, the question of media as such. The point being not just that these wars are being fought through the presentation of media images and the polemos of journalism—everyone knows that.30 Rather, that when we are dealing with media as such there is only ever a rhetorical relation of translation, transference, transposition and metaphor. Media as representation, as the aesthetic experience, is what grounds the literal by means of the fi gura-tive.31 After contemporary fashion we might call the media, all and every media and so communication and representation as such, phantomatic. However, what is at stake here is a fundamental question concerning knowing and thinking, being and beings. The ultimate naivety would be to suppose that media representation implied destination and determina-tion. In this sense, the telepathic experience of watching war ‘live’ on our televisions, ‘pain at a distance’, lies ‘outside-the-subject’. This is at one and the same time theoretically trivial and perhaps the most complex thing that we can be asked to think about. This is an analysis I have attempted elsewhere and calls for a commentary that I am forced to postpone for the moment.32 However, we should note that Freud treats the idea of death as ‘pain at a distance’ in his ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’. Here he suggests that the so-called civilized man shares with the primi-tive a powerful death-wish for strangers, foreigners and enemies. He cites Balzac citing Rousseau:


In Le Pere Goriot, Balzac alludes to a passage in the works of J.J. Rous-seau where the author asks the reader what he would do if—without leaving Paris and of course without being discovered—he could kill, with great profi t to himself, an old mandarin in Peking by a mere act of will. Rousseau implies that he would not give much for the life of that dignitary. Tuer son mandarin has become a proverbial phrase for this secret readiness, present even in modern man.33

Thus, Rousseau shows how ‘our unconscious will murder even for trifl es’. In this essay, war is for Freud a regressive step back to the primitive state. It would seem that the new tele-technological wars of today only provide a new and more deadly opportunity for the expression of this primal wish.

Secondly, Freud’s writing on the foreign body of telepathy describes the action of a foreign policy. As he remarks in his letter to Jones, telepathy calls for diplomacy, ‘considerations of external policy since that time held me back long enough, but fi nally one must show one’s colours’. To quote at length the letter from March 7, 1926:

I am extremely sorry that my utterance about telepathy should have plunged you into fresh diffi culties. But it is really hard not to offend English susceptibilities . . . I have no prospect of pacifying public opin-ion in England [no peace in the polemos with England], but I should like at least to explain my apparent inconsistency in the matter of telep-athy. You remember how I had already at the time of our Harz travels expressed a favourable prejudice towards telepathy. But there seemed no need to do so publicly, my own conviction was not very strong, and the diplomatic consideration of guarding psycho-analysis from any ap-proach to occultism easily gained the upper hand. Now the revising of The Interpretation of Dreams for the Collected Edition was a spur to reconsider the problem of telepathy. Moreover, my own experiences through tests I made with Ferenczi and my daughter won such a con-vincing force for me that the diplomatic considerations on the other side had to give way. I was once more faced with a case where on a reduced scale I had to repeat the great experiment of my life: namely to proclaim a conviction without taking into account any echo from the outer world. So then it was unavoidable. When anyone adduces my fall into sin, just answer him calmly that conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis.

Freud knows what is at stake here but must deny it publicly for diplomatic reasons. He knows that telepathy repeats the ‘great experiment’ of his life but he must act as if both telepathy and psychoanalysis were closed, ‘with-out taking into account any echo from the outer world’. Such private affairs


are only private in the sense that they lie outside-the-subject and are thus public. Freud did not choose his Jewishness, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The alterity of telepathy leads Freud to cultivate a double vision (la diplopie as Derrida has it34) which protects the borders of psychoanalysis through an even-handed and underhanded diplomacy. This is a diplomacy which conducts ‘external policy’ through the exchange of letters, opening a channel of communication which at once encourages dialogue while issu-ing an offi cial denial. Psychoanalysis does not negotiate with telepathy, just as the foreign body is causing an explosion within the house of which Freud is no longer the master.

Telepathy is diplomacy without end, an exchange without borders, in which fi nally showing one’s colours is a private affair which will always lie outside-the-subject. No act of determination, no fi nal ultimatum, can win this war because diplomacy is the language the other will have been speaking long before Freud’s show of colours. Telepathy, pain at a distance, sympathy at a distance too, is not only the order of subjectivity but is the order of world diplomacy, of all intersubjective and international relations. It does not begin and end with single events and it cannot be abandoned in the name of a forceful response but is the interminable analysis of geo-political events. Diplomacy is always on the inside-outside between com-munication and miscommunication, always calling for responsibility in the midst of irresponsibility.35 It is always in the middle of le subjet en proces, as the French has it, subject-in-violence/subject-in-(peace)-process. To deny telepathy is to fail to speak the language of diplomacy, to fail to give peace a chance, even if it is Freud’s private wish, and even if telepathy itself will never bring peace. The repetitive folding structure of openness and clo-sure which characterizes telepathy also scars peace as a self-contradictory concept. Peace is eternal, in a Kantian sense, or it is not peace at all. An armistice between acts of war is not peace, only a lull in war. Peace to be truly peace, to earn the name of a true peace, must be endlessly open and infi nite. At the same time, as Kant recognises, eternal peace only comes in the quiet of the grave.36

Thirdly, the endless war between ontotheology and deconstruction. Nicholas Royle remarks that telepathy is ‘closely linked to the so-called decline of Christianity in European and North American culture: a belief in telepathy, in the late nineteenth century, often (though by no means always) appears to have provided a kind of substitute for a belief in God’.37 Freud in his letter to Jones describes his belief in telepathy as a ‘fall into sin’. It is not surprising then to fi nd the twenty-fi rst-century regime of tele-communications closely associated with what has been called ‘the return of the Religious’.38 Indeed it may be the case that no religion can do with-out the media, from the call of Abraham and the commandments written in stone or the epistles of Paul, to the phantom presence of transubstan-tiation and the loud-speakers which call the faithful to prayer across the Islamic world.39 It is unsurprising to fi nd religions of all kinds deploying


the available channels of telecommunication (what is unironically termed ‘religious broadcasting’) in order to promulgate belief in the absolute by the most phantasmatic of means. The tele-technological network, with its in-built deconstruction, is the very means by which the good news of the certainty and stability of God is announced. This will always have been the case.40 Just as, as Derrida states in an early essay, ‘differance is inimi-cal to all theologies including negative ones’, differance is ‘the economic action of delay in which the element of the same aims to come back to the deferred pleasure of presence’.41 If differance initiates all and every concep-tuality without itself being a concept then it must also put into play those conceptual orders, including metaphysics and ontotheologies, which seek to repress its action. Just as deconstruction renders a certain idea of God as an assured and given centre impossible, by the same token God and all that is thought in the name of God must be the only topic which concerns deconstruction. Deconstruction (and telepathy as dissemination would be a good example of this) can only ever inhabit parasitically the very textual events which attempt to close off the possibilities which deconstruction puts into play. The relation between the religions of the book and the regime of telecommunications then are merely another instance of this familiar problem. The mistake would be to believe that either could fi nally annul the other. Deconstruction will never defeat the occult practices of metaphysicians. This is not a war that can be won by a fi nal decisive blow; rather, it is one which calls for interminable analysis.

The present war, we are frequently told, is not about religion, but it is certainly concerned with religion, just as it is concerned with telepathy.42 It presents to us in a concentrated form the relation between the media and religion, modernity and God, telepathy and theology. It would be possible to analyse either side: the Taliban with their satellite phones and sectarianism, the West with its stealth bombers and manifest destiny. Both follow the principle of ‘in God we trust’, just as the events of the war (a terrorist network with global coverage connected by cellphones and known as ‘sleepers’, the prosopopeiac recordings of desperate last-minute phone calls, anthrax letters which kill those who sort them but miss their targets, the FBI’s use of ‘remote viewers’—psychics enlisted to predict likely terrorist targets—as a supplement to its technoscientifi c arsenal43) show that no such trust is justifi ed. Having resisted such a strategy, I will not now introduce these examples to screen out and medi-atise thinking. Rather, I will conclude by making a more general, even abstract, point. This war, if it is a war, if it has anything so clear-cut as objectives and a determinable exit point, is a war about modernity and within modernity. Here we can follow the structure of Freud’s relation to telepathy as a negotiation between the binary structure of rationality and superstition.

Axiomatically speaking the argument could be made that the West is inseparable from Christianity and vice versa.44 In this sense it is impossible


to think of modernity in the West outside of a certain Christian, at least Protestant, heritage. However, modernity—and the regime of tele-technol-ogy which predicates it—places Christianity in crisis. Just as modernity drains Christianity from the West, it leaves the imprint of Christianity on everything that is Western and modern. Modernity, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, is ‘bound within the very fabric of Christianity’.45 In this sense, to begin to understand in what way modernity, not to mention post-moder-nity, is still Christian while simultaneously being the great impious and atheistic Satan, would cause us to think the very limits of Christianity. This would be a Christianity which was open to the possibility of its own negation and an atheism which acknowledged its Christian aetiology. Thus the West, as it moves towards the completion of modernity, turns away from itself (i.e. its Christian heritage) just as it exposes its own limits (by thinking the limits of Christianity) in this gesture. This would be the necessarily deconstructive step in an analysis which would have to run through all the political, cultural and philosophical histories and institu-tions of the West (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger would be only the most obvious touchstones here).

The double bind works like this. Christianity, like any ontotheology, must always already be in deconstruction. However, the very idea of Chris-tianity as an ontotheology represents the rapid foreclosure of the possibility of deconstruction. One might recall here the repetitive folding structure of telepathy within psychoanalysis, outlined earlier, as a model for this apo-ria, in which telepathy pushes us to the limits of psychoanalysis while its effacement of psychoanalysis represents the completion of psychoanalysis beyond psychoanalysis. Thus, psychoanalysis must open itself to telepa-thy, which as the completion of psychoanalysis, means that psychoanalysis only opens itself onto itself, without end. In this way, psychoanalysis is forced to ceaselessly engage with its own negation, and is ruined by the very opening telepathy offers to psychoanalysis. Similarly, as Nancy explains, a Christianity in deconstruction ‘opens onto itself and opens only onto itself, infi nitely: hence Christianity becomes nihilism, and ceaselessly engages nihilism, the death of God’.46 Everything is ruined, including the opening, by the opening. This is true of every politics, every ethics and every history. The diffi cult thing to think today is how one might imagine both a sense beyond sense which would make sense and the fi gure of a delimited open-ing which is not a determination of sense (in the case of telepathy one that was not science, in the case of Christianity and the West one that was not God). This is the problem initiated, and quickly withdrawn as a scandal-ous blasphemy, by the term ‘Operation Infi nite Justice’. As I write this fi nal sentence the Taliban have surrendered their last stronghold, Kandahar: I wonder, how much justice will have been ruined by such a potentially infi -nite opening.

Sofi a-Nashville-LeedsOctober 2—December 8, 2001


III

Postscript

‘Will the highways of the Internet become more few?’

—George W. Bush

As part of my researches for this paper I took with me, on a trip to Vander-bilt University in Nashville to meet with Jacques Derrida and my host Marc Froment-Meurice, a copy of Nicholas Royle’s Telepathy and Literature. On the fi nal day of my stay Marc and I visited the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park. I bought a postcard and, before leaving Nashville, placed the card randomly within the pages of Telepathy and Literature. On my return home I opened the page of the book where the card had been placed. It fell on the ‘post-script’ to Chapter 2, the closing lines of which read:

And as a post-script to this post-script I would only like to mention a postcard, which I had no reason to expect or foresee, posted in the United States on the day, as it happens, I began writing this. It arrived in the middle, and is a photograph of the Parthenon—at night—in Centennial Park, Nashville, Tennessee.47

I am told by the author that although Jacques Derrida was not the sender of this card, when he read these lines he became convinced that he must have been the writer of this envois. I returned home on Halloween 2001.

4 Extraordinary RenditionDerrida and Vietnam

Every philosophical colloquium necessarily has a political signifi -cance. And not only due to that which has always linked the essence of the philosophical to the essence of the political. Essential and general, this political import nevertheless burdens the a priori link between philosophy and politics, aggravates it in a way, and also determines it when the philosophical colloquium is announced as an international colloquium. Such is the case here.

—Jacques Derrida1

I

Some things have changed quite profoundly in the forty years since Jacques Derrida presented the essay ‘The Ends of Man’ in New York in October 1968 at the conference ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’. Sadly, other things have remained tragically constant. In the former sense, I am referring to what Derrida terms in that essay ‘the reign of the all-powerful motif of . . . the ‘so-called human sciences’’,2 which today has been replaced (or mutated into) the even more tyrannous reign of cultural studies. In the later sense, I mean the re-run of American imperialist hubris that is currently being played out in Iraq as a monstrous, deferred twin to the Vietnam War.

Now, of course, every care should be taken in the analysis of our current situation and one should always seek to rigorously distinguish and discriminate between the cause, conditions and outcomes of both Vietnam and Iraq, always ensuring that the historical specifi city of both is absolutely respected and no simple attempt is made to collapse one onto the other in a general anti-American reduction (the geo-political stakes are different, the ontotheologies of national humanism and their ideological obfuscations of each case are unique one to the other, as are, for example, the technoscientifi c-military capacity of each war, the effect on American domestic socio-economy and politics, the strategic interests of participants and para-participants, the status and role of international law and so on). The war on terror (if this is a part of that war still) is not the same as the so-called Cold War despite what neoconservative commentators would have us believe, nor is it World War IV following victory for the US over communism in World War III. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible


to read the history of the Vietnam War today without being struck by the remarkable similarities between the incompetence and downright viciousness of White House foreign policy then and now. One might cite the use of phosphorous shells and cluster bombs in Falluja today against the deployment of Agent Orange against the Vietcong; the failed general principle of aerial bombardment common to both; the billions of dollars squandered on supporting ‘friendly’ authorities through reconstruction and ‘progress towards democracy’; the manipulation of intelligence evidence to precipitate resolutions which enable the president to wage all-out war without ever securing a formal declaration of war from Congress; the failed so-called ‘security surges’; the domestic spying programme on critics of the war and political opponents of the White House; the recreational atrocities committed by American soldiers on the direct orders of their superiors; the election of presidencies based upon fear and self-interest; the inevitable and equally fl awed attempt to shift the burden of defeating an enemy raised by the United States on to those who are being occupied (Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird called it the policy of ‘Vietnamization’, in Iraq the offi cial policy is to hand over ‘security’ to Iraqis); the continual declarations of possible, potential, inevitable or imminent victory. It is also, at present, diffi cult to see how this entanglement in Iraq can end with anything other than the complete and ignominious withdrawal of all coalition troops and long-running legal inquiries into the actions of those who authorised the invasion and everything that falls out from it. However, that is a matter for futurology.

The Derrida text in question is notably an essay that concerns itself with Vietnam. It is also an essay that gathers together a considerable concentra-tion of the thematics which informed the three great books of 1967 and which in several important respects might be characterised as the most Der-ridean of essays. In this sense it is of course the most un-Derridean of texts. That as early as 1968 Derrida was making explicit the relation of his philo-sophical work to the political realm of non-philosophy which is its subject and well-spring, will come as no surprise to those who have followed with care the unfolding of Derrida’s writing career. However, given that this essay was also the fi rst text by Derrida to be published in English transla-tion,3 one wonders what all the fuss was about on the part of those who for forty years have been avoiding Derrida via the claim of political quietism. His comments on Vietnam come in the opening section of the essay after having established the axiomatic that ‘every philosophical colloquium nec-essarily has political signifi cance’4 not only because of what links politics to philosophy in an essential way (which I take to mean, although he does not say it here that philosophy is, in an Enlightenment sense, a discourse of critical reference about the world in which we live) but because in particu-lar the question of the internationalisation of philosophical colloquia gives rise to the aggravated history of philosophical nationalisms and national idioms. This in turn presupposes that such idioms can be related one to

Extraordinary Rendition 67

another as ‘styles’ through the universal discourse of philosophy. This is the political question of philosophy as an ideology, namely, the appropria-tion of all thought to a metaphysical topos and a systematic strategy to translate and mediate that thought through Western culture. Accordingly, at the frontiers of this occidental effort, Derrida states that there are ‘those places—cultural, linguistic, political, etc.—where the organization of a philosophical colloquium simply would have no meaning, where it would be no more meaningful to instigate it than to prohibit it’.5 One wonders how true this statement remains four decades later with the multiplication of national, ethnic and minority philosophies of every kind in the epoch of globalization which offers us a sublime monolingualism of ‘diversity and equality’ as the neutralizing mirage by which Western exceptional-ism is projected. While the territories that have not yet been drawn into a metaphysical and occidental narrative in the age of ‘full spectrum domina-tion’ are surely shrinking with remarkable acceleration, like the polar ice shelves, they do nevertheless continue to exist, if only in the imaginary of Western thought. This after all is one of the reasons repeatedly given for an ongoing ‘presence’ in Iraq, the cradle of Abrahamic civilisation and the origin of writing.

Having laid this situation out on the table as a preamble to what will be a reading of Heidegger that we might characterise as wholly exemplary of all of Derrida’s readings of Heidegger (that is to say, Heidegger will have been the greatest exponent of questioning the limits of ‘man’ and the anthropos, while at the same time he will not have gone far enough, or as far as Der-rida, in the deconstruction of the ground upon which he is working and so ultimately falls back upon the most humanist and anthropological of gestures imaginable); he offers the eye-catching formulation that the ‘pos-sibility of an international philosophical colloquium’ is related to ‘the form of democracy’.6 Democracy merits its italicization here in 1968. This is not the democracy to come, and this phrase is not unpacked for us, but what is striking here is that so early in Derrida’s thinking the possibility (the very idea) of an exchange between philosophical idioms and a response to the war in Vietnam relates one to another through the form of democracy, as distinct from, say, the practice of democracy in France, America or Viet-nam at the time. The principle underlying Derrida’s comment here is that national philosophical identity accommodates minority identity and plural or dissident voices which by the nature of philosophy are not required (in the context of the international colloquia) to identify with state policies or national agendas. The international colloquium is therefore necessarily a democratic space.

Accordingly, he comments and it is worth spending some time on as an early example of Derrida’s unambiguous commitment to the ambiguity of commitment rather than the commitment to ambiguity with which he is often charged. He begins, ‘Let me be permitted to speak in my own name [mon nom proper]’,7 rather than as a national French or even Algerian


philosopher here. However, despite this singularity he wishes to refer to ‘an essential generality’ of something like a general or universal philosophy. He says, ‘When I was invited to this meeting, my hesitation could end [suspendue] only when I was assured that I could bear witness here, now, to my agreement, and to a certain point [même de mon accord et jusqu’à un certain point] my solidarity with those, in this country, who were fi ghting against what was then their country’s offi cial policy in certain parts of the world, notably in Vietnam’. One should note then that he is not exclusively referring to Vietnam, a whole range of examples lies just beyond the horizon of this statement. The history of so-called ‘American imperialism’ or the so-called ‘Vietnam War’, as its metonym, is not singular or restricted to Vietnam or even restricted to actual American presence. The question of Indo-China is also a particularly French convergence of American interests, the US having fi rst armed the Vietminh against the French before having those weapons turned on themselves in another example of auto-immunitary suicidal blowback. ‘It is evident’, continues Derrida, ‘that such a gesture—and the fact that I am authorized to make it—signifi es that those who are welcoming my discourse do not identify with the policies of their country any more than I do, and do not feel justifi ed in assuming those policies, at least insofar as they are participating in this colloquium’. The expression of this philosophical generality then begins with the specifi c case of this Franco-American conference and political conjunction. It is evident that, as philosophers, philosophy does not necessarily associate itself with the avowed policies of the nation-state. ‘And yet’, he continues, ‘it would be naïve or purposely blind to let oneself be reassured by the image or appearance of such a freedom. It would be illusory to believe that political innocence has been restored, and evil complicities undone [rompues], when opposition to them can be expressed in the country itself, not only through the voices of its own citizens but also those of foreign citizens, and that henceforth diversities, i.e. oppositions [diversités voire oppositions], may freely and discursively relate [se mettre librement en rapport discursive] to one another. That a declaration of opposition to some offi cial policy is authorized, and authorized by the authorities, also means precisely to that extent, that the declaration does not upset [elle ne trouble pas] the given order, is not bothersome [elle ne gêne pas]’. The denunciation of the Vietnam or Iraq wars at international philosophical colloquia does nothing, or very little, to bring those wars to an end; calling for change changes nothing, as Geoffrey Bennington would say. Here we are once again in the aporia that we have termed earlier ‘textual activism’. It is that fact that this articulation of opposition takes the form of philosophy (or more generally the theoretical and so fi ctional humanities) that renders it both ‘not bothersome’ to power (somehow trivial or invisible) and at the same time beyond the control of that power. A fundamental deconstruction of Western ontology upon which occidental imperialism is predicated will have far more profound effects in the long run of history than a replay of that ontological order as antagonism.


The French here is important (and Derrida is speaking to his American audience in the French idiom, linguistically and philosophically). He notes ‘this last expression, “bothersome” [elle ne gêne pas], may be taken in all its senses’. Gêner means to impede or obstruct, to constrain, thwart, incon-venience or embarrass. He says ‘this is what I wished to recall, in order to begin, by speaking of the form of democracy’, again Derrida’s emphasis, la forme de la démocratie, as the political milieu of every international philo-sophical colloquium. ‘And this is also why’, he notes, ‘I proposed to place the accent on form no less than on democracy. Such, in its most general and schematic principle, is the question which put itself to me [s’est imposée à moi] during the preparation for this encounter’. A strong reading of this passage suggests that the international philosophical colloquium is itself a democratic form, able to express multiple, minority, contradictory and antagonistic points of view and as such is tolerated by state discourse. A weaker reading of this passage suggests that the problem of the philosophi-cal conference is the problem of textual activism, namely that in a democ-racy such ‘elitist’ or ‘minority’ points of view are not bothersome to power. It is the form of democracy that while the majority position prevails such minority views can be freely expressed. This does not overcome the power of the majority position. Philosophy is, then, a democratic form because like voting it changes nothing. As a general principle of philosophical discourse, Derrida returns this schema back to its historical origin; the sentence con-tinues ‘during the preparation for this encounter, from the invitation and the deliberations that followed, up to acceptance, and then to the writing of the text, which I date quite precisely from the month of April 1968: it will be recalled that these were the weeks of the opening of the Vietnam peace talks and of the assassination of Martin Luther King’. King’s assassination was surely precipitated by his open opposition to war from 1967 onwards and his call for the civil rights and the anti-war movements to make common cause. There is another essay to be written on ‘Derrida and the Civil Rights Movement’ that passed through the set of references to Genet and the Black Panthers to his late support for the imprisoned Abu-Jamal (I will save this for another day). He concludes this exergue by connecting the French and American scenes, ‘a bit later, when I was typing this text, the universities of Paris were invaded [envahies, a pungent word in this context] by the forces of order—and for the fi rst time at the demand of a rector—and then reoc-cupied by the students in the upheaval you are familiar with. This historical and political horizon would call for a long analysis’. This is Derrida’s way of saying that he does not wish to elaborate on this; it is not the business of philosophy in stricto sensu to reproduce the newsreel image. One will-ing example substitutes for another in a general economy of exemplarity. ‘I have simply found it necessary [j’ai cru simplement devoir]’, he says, ‘to mark, date, and make known to you the historical circumstances in which I prepared this communication. These circumstances appear to me to belong, by all rights, to the fi eld and the problematic of our colloquium’.


But perhaps as the threshold or border of that fi eld, as both the example at the edge of vision (which speaks for itself ‘I simply found it necessary’) as well as the gorilla in the room which needed to be addressed, up front. As with much of Derrida, on similar occasions the literal-minded reader waits in vain for the ‘and so’ moment in which the philosophy suffers vertigo and teeters over into policy. It does not happen here, or elsewhere, and rightly so. The essay concludes with an italicized date ‘May 12, 1968’. An auspi-cious date to say the least, given the eventements unfolding in the streets around the Ecole Normale. The Paris peace talks between Averell Harri-man and Xuan Thuy had started on May 10th in Paris, following a spring in Vietnam which had witnessed the losses of the Tet Offensive, the razing of the city of Hue, the discovery of mass graves of the thousands executed during the communist occupation of Hue, the announcement by Lyndon B. Johnson that he would not be seeking re-election after Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, and the My Lai Massacre (not reported by Seymour Hirsch until the following year but known to the American military and White House at this time).

It is one of history’s ironies that at the moment of writing this essay the young Jacques Derrida was working within a few blocks of another young and ambitious academic, who was retained as an advisor to the Harriman party, Henry Kissinger. As has been well documented now,8 while Kissinger was there as a civilian expert to the Democrat’s peace initiative, which they planned as a central plank of their presidential run later that year, he was at the same time in constant contact with the Nixon campaign team which, through Kissinger’s intelligence from Paris, sabo-taged the peace effort by contacting the South Vietnamese military rulers to assure them that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than Johnson. Accordingly, even though Johnson had ordered a cessation of bombing and the North Vietnamese had withdrawn 90 per cent of their forces from the northern two provinces of South Vietnam by October 1968, the South Vietnamese generals withdrew from the talks on the eve of the American presidential election, undoubtedly swinging a tight race in Nixon’s favour by robbing Vice President Hubert Humphrey of his peace accord. After the election Nixon’s fi rst action was to appoint Kissinger his National Security Advisor. Four years later, Kissinger and Nixon concluded the war on exactly the same terms as had been on offer in May 1968 and Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In the meanwhile countless lives had been lost, and in the end the North overran South Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975 (two years after Nixon’s resignation). It would make for one of those what-if-encounters dramas on Radio 4. Imagine a scenario in which Derrida running between libraries and coffee-houses might have met Kissinger as he shuttled between Democrats and Republicans, playing both ends off against the middle. Caught in the midst of a riot between stone-throwing students and batton-weilding police they both take shelter


in a seminar room in the Sorbonne, they strike up a conversation . . . ‘The Ends of Man’ surely meant something else for Kissinger.

In truth there is perhaps nothing surprising or heroic in Derrida’s pre-liminary comments on his right to articulate his views on Vietnam. As he says, they are not bothersome to the state and his fellow participants at the colloquium are already predisposed to agree with them. I would suggest his opening comments and reading which follows in ‘Kant and the Jew’, which he gave in Jerusalem at the height of the fi rst intifada, are much bolder and, given the context, carry more weight as a political articula-tion: a much more extraordinary rendition.9 Perhaps, what is striking here is not so much that one would not expect Jacques Derrida to say such a thing but that from the very inauguration and translation of his discourse Derrida is prepared to take the risk to say such things and so put risk-taking on the agenda for every future philosophical enunciation. While the text of Marges de la Philosophie gives the reference to the location of the conference as ‘New York in 1968 at an international colloquium. The theme proposed was “Philosophy and Anthropology”’, the conference was in fact held at the State University of New York conference centre at Oys-ter Bay on Long Island (where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald recalls, the eyes of the Old World fi rst saw America10). It was a ‘French-American Philosopher’s Conference’ co-sponsored by the French government and the International Cultural Co-operation Committee of the American Philosophical Associa-tion. The theme of ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’ emerged from discus-sions between the American and French committees (which included Paul Ricoeur) around a shared interest in the philosophy of man (‘philosophical anthropology’ as it was designated in France, ‘philosophical psychology’ as it was termed in the US)11. The established nature of the conference is then immediately clear and the explanation of Derrida’s reservations con-cerning his attendance as a representative ‘French’ philosopher sponsored by the French government of Pompidou and de Gaulle, speaking to the American ‘Analytic’ tradition, and his insistence on making reference to the shared French-American problematic of Indo-China, are equally clear. It should also be said that delegates sympathetic to the anti-war movement in the US found Derrida’s warning on the complex relation between philo-sophical commentary and material events to be somewhat ‘pessimistic’,12 demonstrating that Derrida’s intervention was not an easy sop to a general anti-war mood and that in fact his words were designed to be faithful to no one but himself. Any articulation of this kind ought of course to be measured against the canonical examples of this sort, notably Husserl’s Vienna address of 1935, which raises the bar for philosophical risk-taking to considerable heights. However, the point of Derrida’s essay is not just that it makes explicit reference to the Vietnam War as the historical con-juncture from whence it emerges, but rather that it shows that what Der-rida has in mind when he is engaged in a deconstruction of the occidental tradition is precisely an overturning of its non-conceptual orders as well as


its metaphysical thinking. This after all would be the end of a deconstruc-tion. The end (the purpose) of a deconstruction today, which revisited this essay four decades later, would not be to recuperate a history for its own sake but to draw the thread of that history into an economic relation with the present and to comment on the anthropology of Iraq. A topic Derrida will not have had time to address.

II

Now, I have stated before that what we call Cultural Studies is merely a weak anthropology of the popular, reliant on the same unacknowledged fi gurative shift in the idea of culture which grounds anthropology at the turn of the eighteenth century, from a process to an object which can be codifi ed and studied.13 Derrida’s text is concerned with the manner in which the anthropology that saturated the ‘human sciences’ in 1968 oper-ates according to an unquestioned philosophical inheritance of a metaphys-ical idea of ‘man’ and the way in which anthropology has always been a pre-philosophical discursive formation, since at least Hegel. Philosophy has been engaged in a complex dialectic with anthropology in which anthro-pology is metaphysical through and through, phenomenology is the truth of anthropology, and phenomenology is the relève of anthropology. It is Heidegger who suggests in Zur Sache des Denkens that anthropology, as cultural anthropology, is one of the key examples by which metaphysics achieves its end through the technical effi ciency of the empirical sciences of man.14 Derrida does not make that reference here; rather, he is con-cerned with the way in which the motif of anthropology in the French thought of the 1950s and 1960s relies upon a motivated mistranslation of Heidegger’s Dasein as ‘human-reality’ [la réalité-humaine] which is carried by the authority of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism qua humanism as a blind alley for Western thought which is neither metaphysical enough nor humanist enough to imagine a thinking of man as the essential co-ordinate of Dasein which was neither dialectical nor teleological, nor able to escape a determining relation to ontotheology and so essentially to God. Excuse me for this paraphrase, it is all in a good cause.

As I suggested previously this text is accordingly an exemplary instance of Derrida’s treatment of Heidegger with which we have become so famil-iar. He states his case thus, ‘If Heidegger has radically deconstructed the domination of metaphysics by the present, he has done so in order to lead us to think the presence of the present [as well as why humanism is not human enough and the end is not fi nal enough]. But the thinking of this presence can only metaphorize, by means of a profound necessity from which one cannot simply decide to escape, the language that it deconstructs’.15 This could stand as the algorithm out of which all of Derrida’s subsequent com-mentaries on Heidegger arise in all their fascinating variety. However, it


leads Derrida to a fi nal speculation with regard to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics, which in light of all that has been said here and else-where concerning the aporia of ‘textual activism’, I would be tempted to call methodological. In 1968, at the inauguration of a radically innovative discourse, I think Derrida is allowed a moment of methodological refl ec-tion.16 With regard to Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysical humanism, he suggests that the value of Heidegger’s readings are that they put the security of the proximity of man and Being at risk through the destruction of ontotheology ‘but this trembling [ébranlement]—which can only come from a certain outside—was already requisite within the very structure that it solicits’ [namely Western metaphysics]. ‘Is not this security of the near what is trembling [ce qui s’ébranle] today?’ asks Derrida.17 He offers some conclusions that reassemble his reading of Heidegger around the question of French thought, the second of which (‘the strategic bet [le pari straté-gique]’) might bear some reading. It begins,

a radical trembling [ébranlement] can only come from the outside. Therefore, the trembling of which I speak [celui dont je parle] derives no more [ne relève donc pas, ‘does not arise from’, elsewhere the trans-lation importantly retains the French relève] than any other from some spontaneous decision or philosophical thought [here the translation is just wrong or the result of a typo, the French slip between f and r on the QWERTY typewriter, the French reads décision spontanée de la pensée philosophique, a spontaneous decision of the philosophical thought] after some internal maturation of its history. This trembling [ébranlement] is played out [se joue] in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other, whether [qu’il s’agisse] a ‘linguistic’ re-lationship (where very quickly the question of the limits of everything leading back to the question of the meaning of Being arises [où se pose très vite, relève does not appear here in the French text]), or ethno-logical, economic, political, military, relationship, etc. Which does not mean, moreover, that military or economic violence is not in structural solidarity with ‘linguistic’ violence. But the ‘logic’ of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the effi ciency of the system that regularly change [transforment] trans-gressions into ‘false exits’ [fausses sorties]. 18

Now, I must comment on the trembling in this passage. Alan Bass renders ébranlement as ‘trembling’ and this must be applauded as an act of poetic invention of the highest order for it initiates an entire set of tropes of a de Manian stripe within Anglophone deconstruction around the ‘trembling’ of meaning and the text which trembles from within and so on. A familiar opening gesture as Derrida’s long-boat beaches itself on Long Island. How-ever, given that this essay by Derrida is notably a text about translation, from his comments on the universal idiom of philosophy to the calculated


mistranslation of Dasein by Sartre, we ought to pay attention to the effects of translation here, both in terms of the linguistic and the disciplinary and fi nally in the sense of the translation of political idioms. This translation of trembling, the extraordinary rendition of ébranlement as ‘trembling’, points to a certain trembling of translation in this text. It is after all the fi rst Der-rida text to be translated into English (by a four person collaboration in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1969 as the second part of themed editions entitled Language and Human Nature: A French-American Philosopher’s Conference) and so the English idiom begins to tremble when it takes on the text of Derrida. While one can render ébranle-ment as ‘trembling’, the French word carries more force than the English. A ‘straight’ translation of ‘trembling’ would be tremblement, while ébranle-ment carries the double sense of a movement caused by a shock or jolt (choc or secousse) as well as referring to nervous shock. It is often used to describe the shock done to the foundations of a building during an earthquake [un tremblement de terre]. More fi guratively, one might speak of un ébranle-ment d’un regime, d’un État, as instability caused by violent upheaval or national defeat, or the shaking of public confi dence in an institution. All of which carries more force than the English word ‘trembling’, which does suggest involuntary movement but trembling in principle can be corrected and calm restored, like the ripples on a pool of water after a tap drips. Ébranlement, on the other hand, to my ear, suggests a forceful and unre-cuperable movement with after-effects, something like a ‘shudder’ perhaps. The co-translators of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research offer the translation as ‘displacement’ in the fi rst sentence and as ‘setting in motion’ when next used. They are sure it is not just a matter of being made to trem-ble. Certainly, something bothersome, Derrida describes it as ‘radical’ [une ébranlement radical]. It is not merely something that arises from within philosophical thought (a textual trembling) but affects the whole of the West in its economic, political and military ‘violent relations’ with its others. The ébranlement of which Derrida is speaking is not internal to the philosophy he reads in this essay and elsewhere but ‘is played out’ in the violent material relations of Western colonialism. Accordingly, ébranlement shudders with violence rather than trembles within. It is for this reason, much more than the explicit reference of the preamble that does not bother the system, that this essay is a text of 1968; it is about Vietnam and that the linguistic prac-tice of deconstruction as an institutional discourse is in ‘structural solidar-ity’ with counter-colonial movements and practices of resistance.

However, the reason why I have offered this particular passage up for reading has more to do with the early warning it offers for the theoreti-cal analysis of the political and for any conjunction of philosophy and the world, such as ‘Derrida and Vietnam’. The situation Derrida describes is not straightforward. It is not that the linguistic and the empirical can be separated but that the relation between the two (one of ‘structural solidar-ity’) is neither that of absolute division or straightforward ‘translation’ as


transparency: ‘which does not mean, moreover, that military or economic violence is not in structural solidarity with “linguistic” violence. But the “logic” of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising’. According to one index for this essay, it is a text on Vietnam; according to another it is an essay concerned with translation. The two are linked in complex and surprising ways. What is at stake here, as Derrida puts it in the conclusions which follow, is the question of the style of a deconstruction in ‘a new writing’ which would respond to the political by weaving and inter-lacing the double motifs and styles of deconstruction. What style should the deconstruction of Vietnam take? Derrida’s text continues, ‘taking into account these effects of the system [de système], one has nothing, from the inside where “we are”, but the choice between two strategies’. Firstly, (a):

To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifi ce the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally in language. Here one risks ceaselessly confi rming, consolidating, relifting [relèver], at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs [prétend dé-construire]. The continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure.

Does it require an explicit hypothesis of denunciation according to a familiar vocabulary of the exploitation of man?19 On occasion, and strategically, such a style is called for. But such a deceptively ‘transparent’ approach runs the risk of raising that vocabulary and frame to a heightened level and confi rm-ing its metaphysical entrapment in ‘the autism of closure’. On the other hand, philosophical discourse, or deconstructive reading, has the potential to mark out the ground for a different understanding of the political by displacing the index and borders of the political discussion of Vietnam, through, say, a consideration of the anthropos in the human sciences. This is strategy (b):

To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affi rming an absolute break and difference. Without mentioning all the other forms of trompe-l’oeil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught [se laisser prendre], thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted, the simple practice of lan-guage ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground. The effects of such a reinstatement or of such a blindness could be shown in numerous precise instances.

This ‘style’ of deconstruction has the merit of screening us from the more obvious pitfalls of something which looks like a more ‘immediate’ style of commentary but which is entirely caught up in the metaphysical closure


of the mediatised example. However, this later strategy is equally prone to foreclosure by imagining itself to have broken with a certain political vocabulary and set of references only to fi nd itself still restrained by the political ground it seeks to outfl ank. In such cases, the economic delay of the deferred logos reinstates the oldest of problems as the new ground that lies before the deconstruction. The undoing of the anthropos leads us back round to the question of Vietnam, which remains to be addressed and in certain respects is not bothered by the deconstruction, elle ne gêne pas. Therefore, Derrida concludes, ‘It goes without saying that these effects do not suffi ce to annul the necessity for a change of “terrain”’.

Why should we fi nd this question of style in the sixties bothersome, or, something to tremble about? ‘The choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique’, states Derrida in this inau-gural text for deconstruction in America. He is planting a fl ag for, ‘a new writing [that] must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruc-tion. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once’. As an initial move in a chain of translations and cross-overs between France and America, Europe and the New World, theory and practice, this text already speaks several languages. The strate-gic bet concludes, ‘I would like to point out especially that the style of the fi rst deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today [en France actuelle-ment, 1968]. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the “change of terrain” is far from upsetting [bouleverser] the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.’ The issue for me is the aporia which runs like a fi ssure through the work of deconstruction and analo-gous thinking of the sort Derrida characterises in this 1968 essay as French Heideggerian. (We have seen this difference most recently articulated in the distinction Derrida makes in Le Toucher between Nancy’s repeated insis-tence that ‘There is no [single] X’ in contrast to Derrida’s formulation ‘X, if there is any/if such a thing exists’, which he feels give ‘X’ the chance to be thought without rendering it either absolutely absent or defi nitely present. However, as with Heidegger he notes of Nancy that both approaches are a ‘deconstruction’).20 That is to say, the incommensurability between the seriousness of the philosophical or theoretical account of the political and the seeming lack of seriousness of the political consequences it gives rise to within the political culture of today. This is at once the strength and weak-ness of deconstruction as a strategy, namely, that an unconditional dis-course such as Derrida’s is able to deconstruct the assumptions and ground of all and every inscribed limit precisely because it does not (and cannot) establish for itself a bounded space from which to exercise sovereignty or agency. At the same time, such a discourse that knows neither limit nor


condition cannot be mastered or appropriated by sovereign power and so demonstrates the limits of that power and thus the conditional nature of its sovereignty, causing sovereignty to ‘tremble’. The same goes, of course, for all and every textual inscription, which would always already be in deconstruction. The same follows also for the material, political, military and economic systems of the West that are also in deconstruction. This is a signifi cant, if not serious consequence for political and material power, should news of it ever make its way beyond the pages of academic journals. Occasionally, this troubled relationship between the textual and material overruns ‘the trompe-l’oeil perspective’ which otherwise keeps them apart within the imaginary of political culture. There is, in fact, a long history of such eruptions of textuality within politics, from the Zinovieff letter to Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’, which once made legible produce effects beyond the control of any sovereign power. This is a topic for a future doctoral thesis, I think. My point for the moment, in relation to Derrida’s 1968 essay, is that deconstruction as a strategy for a new writing of the political requires the use of multiple and non-exclusive styles, if it is effec-tively to weave its way around the traps of foreclosure it faces with respect to a political discourse and/or discourse on the political. As Derrida stated on several occasions, deconstruction is not suffi cient on its own, it always requires critique; equally, critique is nothing without deconstruction.21

In so far as, ‘The Ends of Man’, is famously an essay ‘on’ Vietnam, it is also an essay on translation. The translation of all the national idioms of the world into philosophy, the translation of philosophy into the human sciences, the trembling of translation as a translation of ‘trembling’, and an example of the necessary and rapid translation between styles of decon-struction and political idioms. We can perceive here a structural affi lia-tion between translation and the form of democracy. It opens this essay in 1968, allowing Derrida (and all the other participants from across the globe) to speak of Vietnam at an international philosophical symposium. Translation is both a form of democracy (it opens the philosophical text to its others) and a style of deconstruction (as Alan Bass’s invention of the ‘trembling’ text indicates). One might be tempted to say, in a Derridean style, no translation without democracy, no democracy without transla-tion. Equally, one might also say no translation without deconstruction, no deconstruction without translation. Derrida has beaten me to offering ‘no democracy without deconstruction, no deconstruction without democ-racy’.22 Forty years on from the writing of ‘Les Fins de L’Homme’ and its delivery in New York as ‘The Ends of Man’, I accept totally the familiar argument that says that Derrida must be read in the original French. How-ever, I cannot accept the strong version of that argument that says Derrida should only be read in French—only by mastering the French idiom can we truly understand Derrida. To insist on the truth of the French is a profound de-democratization of the text of Derrida and is to walk straight into the autism of closure. Every reading of Derrida must be an act of translation;


not a transcription between original and supplement, but an invention and creation of an inaugural text that translates between linguistic, disciplin-ary and political idioms. Such acts of invention, as a form of unconditional reading, bear witness to the original as a masterpiece of writing, giving it an inclusive and open future.23 I might venture that the real heroes of aca-demic democracy over the last forty years have been those creative souls who have attempted the impossible by rendering the text of Derrida into all the languages of the world, in order to lead his readers back to the extraor-dinary renditions of his French text. The differences between the inaugural co-translation of 1969 and the Alan Bass version of 1982 are telling in this respect, whereby the earlier translators are only credited in a closing note as facilitators (midwives perhaps) of the entrance of Derrida into English while Bass is one of a new breed of ‘superstar’ translator-interpreters of Derrida. A refl ection on the inheritance of the forty-year epoch of Der-rida-in-English might lead one to speculate on the profound transforma-tion in the terms, volume and acceleration of philosophical translation and its consequent accreditation and professionalization within the academy. Careers and reputations are now to be made around the manner in which one succumbs to the inevitable defeat of translating Derrida and others, in comparison to the four, now forgotten, amateur pioneers who rendered Derrida into English for the 1969 publication. It has never made any sense (at least to me and at least in relation to the text of Derrida alone) to speak of ‘American deconstruction’. However, as the example of Alan Bass’s ‘trembling’ shows, it does make sense to speak of an ‘English deconstruc-tion’ as the subtle and creative mistranslation and after-life of Derrida’s thought in the English language (the word ‘deconstruction’ itself being a good example of this), not that American English and British English are one and the same thing.

There are also those black swans who have translated the directory of Derrida into the disciplinary idioms of the humanities according to their own invention: Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, John Caputo, Drucilla Cor-nell, to name only a few insuffi cient examples. The translation of ‘The Ends of Man’ begins a trembling within the humanities and human sciences. It does so not only because it follows through on Heidegger’s undoing of ‘the security of the near’ in the idea of ‘man’ implied and presumed by the humanities and human sciences but because after this essay (and the work of, say, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ and Of Grammatology) a whole set of disciplinary protocols and interests are no longer possible (or at least ren-dered ‘impossible’). At the same time, this trembling has led to uncertainty and erosion at the boundaries of disciplines within the humanities. The questioning of boundaries within and across disciplines that deconstruc-tion has enabled (even if the text of Derrida has not necessarily supported) has led to the wide-spread practice of so-called ‘interdisciplinary’ work and although Derrida has never had a kind word to say for it, Cultural Stud-ies. In this way, the style of one deconstruction (the displacement of the


anthropos around a philosophical inquiry) has resulted in the relaying of the terrain of the very thing one wished to deconstruct (anthropology) as the new which lies before us (the epoch of cultural studies). Thus, decon-struction can never rest and must now set off to challenge the same assump-tions around ‘culture’ and ‘man’, now inscribed in the new of Cultural Studies, which it displaced forty years ago. Cultural Studies has put the humanities and human sciences in shock. It is at once something bother-some and something now ‘authorised by the authorities’ precisely because in its dominant form it merely serves to affi rm the existing protocols of the disciplinary university by restricting its practice to the university and rein-scribing the descriptive power of anthropology. However, a deconstructed Cultural Studies, as a writing-to-come, which is able to translate deftly between styles of reading and articulation across disciplines and languages, might truly be something to make us shudder.

III

What does this mean, reading a text forty years old, for the deconstruction of Iraq?

On May 28, 2001 (thirty-three years after his previous visit to Paris), Henry Kissinger was visited in his suite at the Ritz Hotel in the Place de Vendome Paris by the gendarmerie with a summons issued by Judge Roger Le Loire, to appear at the Palais de Justice the following morning to answer questions about the disappearance of fi ve French citizens in Chile during the early days of the Pinochet regime. Kissinger chose to beat a pru-dent retreat and left Paris that afternoon.24 The summons remains valid in France and across the European Union should Kissinger choose to return to the scene of his previous intrigues. Kissinger, like Pinochet, is a case study out of which the development of international law will emerge, in the chasm between law and non-law. We are in such a moment where the concept of ‘crimes of universal jurisdiction’ is emerging and will continue to evolve in the years after the Iraq War when Donald Rumsfeld will be the subject of similar international pursuits. What is at stake in a concept such as ‘universal jurisdiction’ is surely the ends of man, where the idea of humanity, humanitarianism and human rights begin and end. I am not content to lay the burden of such a task of thinking at the door of a text by Derrida, forty years old. This is a job we are going to have to do all alone, to misquote a title of one of Derrida’s memorial texts.25 Reading ‘Struc-ture, Sign and Play’ and ‘The Ends of Man’ four decades later, in the age of Cultural Studies (for good or ill), what we need is a new anthropology which spoke to the question of ‘man’ within the horizon of the ‘human sciences’, if we still have an ear for such a phrase. That is to say a Cultural Studies that engaged critically with the productive crisis of the accelerated mutations of the epoch of new materialities that we have already entered


alongside the war in Iraq. The current occupation of Iraq, in so far as it is a continuation after a brief armistice of the fi rst Gulf War, is the fi rst energy war of this new epoch; an epoch defi ned not by the threat of communism to Western capital as in Vietnam but by the threat to capital by its own exhaustion of the natural resources of the earth and the extreme climate change their over-consumption has produced. Cultural-Studies-as-decon-struction after Iraq would be a new anthropology whose anthropos placed man within the economy of planetary life-forms in a post-carbon global horizon. To approach this topic and to negotiate between the foreclosures of thought identifi ed by Derrida in his ‘strategic bet’ with the human sci-ences in 1968 will require advanced skills in translation and an irreversible critical climate change.26

5 Derrida and Policy Is Deconstruction Really a Social Science?

There are two things you should not see being made: sausages and policy.

—Otto Von Bismarck (attributed, wrongly).1

Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live fi nally.

—Jacques Derrida2

In order for politics to be thinkable there must be some moment at which thought moves over into politics. Now, one could pick at this opening sen-tence for some time, books could be written and research projects designed to interrogate whether it is true or not. Its truth or otherwise will certainly depend upon what one means here by ‘politics’ (twice and non-identically), ‘thinkable’, ‘some moment’, ‘thought’, ‘moves over’, and indeed ‘into’, none of this is without consequence for either deconstruction or truth. However, allow me momentarily to place my own opening sentence in inverted com-mas, as if it had been spoken by someone else and with the authority of someone else. Allow me the considerable license of taking this quotation as axiomatic for what is to follow even if both you and I do not believe it as a statement of fact, or at least even if you and I do not quite believe it as a statement of fact because we are more than capable of acting upon it in good faith as if it were fact. Such a statement is a seduction to short-circuit thinking. It asks us not to look at it—do not question me, take me as ‘read’. In this sentence one can fi nd a concentrated example of the logo-rhetorical illusion that is the predicate of politics, in which politics and thought sepa-rate themselves into conceptual spheres just as these spheres emerge from the mediated, supplatory conceptualization in which thought and politics are inextricably bound one to the other. However, today I am in the mood to be seduced and there are ways in which one can, more or less, give oneself up strategically to such overtures. Imagine for a moment that both thought and politics were imaginable outside of mediation and that one fol-lowed the other as day follows night and that one could be translated into


the other by some alchemical process. Then imagine the consequences of this for politics. If one were able to momentarily suspend all this disbelief (as if ‘deconstruction’ and centuries of politics had never happened) then we would fi nd ourselves in the position of the policymaker. This is not a new position to be in but one that has a certain visibility today in the tech-nocratic space of liberal democracies. Today, ‘policy-making’ is outsourced to so-called ‘think tanks’ where policy is formulated and road-tested on ‘focus groups’ before being adopted (or paid for) by political parties, dilut-ing to taste.

‘Policy’ is one of those obscure words of the modern political lexicon; nothing could be more vague or less well understood than this term, which of course means that it is invoked ubiquitously without refl ection in a wide sphere. The basic assumption of policy, as an idea, is the logo-rhetorical illusion par excellence that theory translates (and is translatable in prin-ciple) into practice. Policy then becomes law, as if the transmission of the law were itself a straightforward and transparent thing. One might laugh at such a naïve, ‘undeconstructed’ notion, if it were not for the fact that this is how the world is run. The comedian Ken Dodd says of Freud’s formula-tion of laughter as a release of psychic energy, ‘the problem with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire’. Equally, the problem with the deconstruction of policy might be that the White House has yet to open itself to a policy of deconstruction. I want to ask in this essay, what would such a policy or set of policies look like, if they were imaginable? This is not to suggest that, after his death, the writing of Derrida might give rise to a set of ‘practical’ political policies, as the texts of Marx and Lenin were ‘read’ as the biblical revelation of an ontotheo-politics. Rather, it is to accept Roland Barthes’s caution that one cannot simply exclude oneself from the discourse of stupidity. ‘I don’t mean that one can’t be innocent of it’, he told Jean-Jacques Brochier in 1975, ‘that would be bad faith, but one can’t be innocent of it simply . . . In any case, stupidity’s mode of being is triumph. One can do nothing against stupidity. One can only internalize it, take a small homeopathic dose of it—but not too much’.3 Think of this then as a hypothesis, what analytic philosophy would call a thought experiment. It is certainly not a bid for interpretative rights of the text of Derrida or the political futures of deconstruction, whatever such a word continues to mean. I am also reminded here of another caution, that of Edward Said, who had little time for what he called ‘travelling theory’,4 whereby specialization as a mode of professionalization within the academy comes to serve the inter-ests of policymakers. His complaint is against the professional production of specialists on the ‘Orient’ who sell their expertise to the government and media while having their appearance in the government or media affi rm their expertise. While the very idea of ‘Policy’ no doubt marks an impor-tant, and not easily dismissed, transformation in the arena of competency of both party politicians and academics, it calls out for deconstruction. That is a deconstruction of its very premises as the dialectical-complex and

Derrida and Policy 83

unholy alliance between the technoscientifi c, global economy and the tech-nocratic university of specialization in relation to a mediatic space, which presents one through the explanation of the other in terms of pragmatism, expediency, compromise or ‘realism’. Here I am talking about a certain culture that we call politics, the properly political (the discourse of par-ties and politicians in governmental power across the world). As Derrida points out in Spectres of Marx, in this culture ‘virtually everywhere West-ern models prevail’.5 This culture has always been bound to the culture of tele-technology, to mediation and representation. However, today, this rela-tion is accelerated in an unprecedented fashion according to the rhythm of so-called ‘communications’ as the ‘selective and hierarchized production of “information”’6 and its auto-immunized interpretation. The academic dis-course of the technocratic university is welded to this apparatus in an indis-sociable way. It is almost impossible to watch a news programme without the appearance of an academic witness who provides the most banal and unscholarly of comments to justify or exemplify the content of a news item. Whole news items are nothing more than the appearance of academics to promote their ‘research fi ndings’ or latest reports; entire university research strategies are written around the stated desire for such appearances. Which university does not now have a press offi ce? In my institution at least half of the faculties of the university (those that can afford them) have contracts with media consultants who are employed to write ‘accessible’ accounts of research activities with a view to placing stories in the media or promoting individuals to the level of media fi gure, talking head or guru. There is no point at which it is thought that academic research (another obscure term which we will need to tackle on another day) is inimical to this form of reductionism or that certain forms of thought might be allergic to pass-ing through a media culture in this way. At any rate, the idea of policy is related, in no doubt complex and overdetermined ways, to this mutation in the channels which run between the academic and public spaces, which have more or less neutralized the notion of the public intellectual (another term we might caution against today given its historical relation to closely policed questions of propriety, gender, race and sexuality).

A thinking of the relationship between the text of Derrida and the artic-ulation of policy will necessarily involve a new thinking of the ground of policy and its relation to the media-political culture of today. What if it were possible to imagine something like a ‘counter-policy’, a thinking of policy as an intervention in the world that neither separated theory from practice nor accepted the easy place of the academic in the political-mediatic apparatus? What if it were possible to set policy-making against itself, to make policies to which policy was itself allergic? This would be an impossible policy, policy which understood the idea of policy to be impossible: policy without telos, policy without Policy, policy no longer able to accept the name of policy but the only policy to be worthy of the name as an action in the material world. In imaging such a decentring of policy, one might also pertinently ask, does


politics as such always imply an idea of policy in the same way that it always implies an idea of man? That is to say, does policy itself (as the pretext, off-spring and crafting of the moment of political antagonism) imply or assume an inherited idea of man? Given the location of policy, in its modern sense, within the topography of contemporary political culture, in which policy precedes and enables the agency of political man then the answer is surely yes and a rethinking of policy would be nothing less than an entire disarticula-tion of this logo-anthro-onto-pological schema. Such a thinking of policy would then require the inauguration of a counter-culture as well as a coun-ter-policy, with its own counter-institutions and spaces of articulation that would of course have their own vexed relation to channels of communication and the new technologies of the digital epoch as an exercise of public critical reason. One should also say that it is undoubtedly the case that such cultural transformations are already under way in spaces not visible to the academic, anthropological or mediatic gaze, across the hinterlands of the World Wide Web, cyber activism and in corners of the thinking world uncompromised by the funded research culture of the transnational university. However, in this text I am only proposing to take a position not to do the work that the sus-tainability of such a position would require. I am also talking about a rela-tion between philosophy and policy that would be, unlike other articulations of militancy currently to be found in cyberspace, both properly philosophical and properly a ‘political science’, if such a thing exists.

Now, the point here is not to scan the text of Derrida for ‘policies’ as such; one hopes that there will never be such a thing as ‘the Derrida Party’ (at least not in the sense of that word as a proper noun). The political views that Derrida expresses in his texts are reassuringly liberal and thus equally familiar and banal: He is against the death sentence, for international law and against the invasion of Iraq, he is critical of the state of Israel but con-demns those who would see it destroyed, he was for the release of Nelson Mandela and Mumia Abu-Jamal, he has a complex relation to animal rights and is for the openness of Europe, he is suspicious of the paper machine of bureaucracy in education and for the teaching of philosophy in the Lycée, he condemned Milosevic and worked with clandestine intellectuals in repres-sive regimes, he was against Le Pen and for the rights of immigrants and so on. Given such a track record of left-leaning sympathies one ought not to be surprised to learn that despite his stated reservations about the nature of parties as such, in 1995 he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin as he sought the nomination of the French Socialist Party for the presidency. In this sense the philosophical text of Derrida presents slim pickings for the policymaker, the maker or technician of policy (the décisionnaire in French). The text of Derrida, as a text, will not render itself up as a manifesto or manifestation of this kind. Rather, one might ask of the text of Derrida, what are the orbits of interest around which one can begin to discern the possibility of a deconstruction of policy as a concept with Western politics? Here are a few, the analysis of which is necessarily truncated.


DEMOCRACY

What then of the democracy-to-come and its frequent invocation by Der-rida? To say that one is in favour of democracy is to say nothing or to say nothing worth saying at least. After all, George W. Bush tells us he is all for democracy. However, the point of such a democracy for Derrida is not I think a concern with the technical exercise of voting. Rather, there are several strands to note here. Firstly, that in contrast to previous political sensibilities of a Marxian type, it ought to be possible to imagine a radi-calized democracy which moved this term away from the mode in which it is inscribed by Western political (capitalist) discourse. This is a work of paleonmy of displacement and radicalization. Secondly, that the very idea of democracy implies both its own perfectibility (the notion that things might change and become progressively better) and its own imperfectabil-ity (that this process is interminable and gives no place for closure or good conscience). The signifi cance of this latter point is in the rejection of a teleological model of the political but the simultaneous mobilisation of a messianic structure whereby the political event arrives from the future in a contingent and unknowable way, rendering any programmed response or pre-prepared policy inadequate. Democracy as a practice is also auto-immunized by its own suicidal tendencies7 whereby it would be a necessary condition of the transmission of democracy as representation that it be perfectly capable of annulling itself as its own outcome, e.g. the numerous historical instances of the election of the anti-democratic which leads to the eclipse of democracy (Germany in the 1930s, Algeria in the 1990s, Hamas in Gaza and so on). However, the idea of democracy deployed by Derrida here is not reducible to a pattern of voting; it may indeed be extraneous to actual voting as such. Rather, the democracy-to-come is a demand in the present, here and now, for the articulation of the space of alterity (and so the possibility of change or unpredictable transformation) within any given political moment. In other words, it is an idea of democracy that has an uneasy relation to any Western technocratic parliamentary model, even if this is the apparatus through which demands, interventions and interrup-tions of this kind run in particular local circumstances. It is not so much a policy as the means by which any so-called policy might come into being and in this way not be identifi able as policy in its predetermined sense.

JUSTICE

Again to be for Justice is to be in favour of breathing and given the way that this term is routinely abused and appropriated it is no doubt necessary to take care around this word. However, Derrida is moved to tell us that ‘justice is the undeconstructable condition of any deconstruction’.8 This is a syntagm with which I have wrestled for some time, given that any


metaphysical concept can in principle be deconstructed and that ‘Justice’ is surely a metaphysical concept politically and philosophically inscribed. To be too hasty in my commentary, the notion of justice that Derrida is invoking here is of course catachrestic and quasi-transcendental, whereby the idea of ‘justice’ refers to the act of deconstruction which does justice to the otherness of the event by enabling that otherness to speak, the unde-constructable condition of any deconstruction would be to articulate such otherness. The present importance of this is that in doing justice to policy one must take account of the diffi culty of what is referred to by Derrida by the twin names of ‘undecideablity’ and ‘responsibility’ of such an event. One the one hand, the policymaker should take account of the injustice of his/her own policy formation, which as a textual inscription, will inevita-bly fail to do justice to the possibilities of otherness within itself and will simultaneously and constantly be in the process of disarticulating itself from within as a consequence of this otherness, rendering itself unstable and radically undecideable. Taking account of this scenario will require the self-aware policymaker to act responsibly with respect to the task of policy-making by taking time to refl ect judiciously on the event of alterity (which will be forever undecideable) and at the same time acting responsibly with the respect to the other by doing justice to that other and acting quickly (or formulating policy quickly) which will respond to the immediate urgency in the here and now of the needs of the other. This is to say, once again that policy, properly understood, is beginning to look more and more like an untenable prospect from a deconstructive point of view. Some would say that it would be entirely typical of ‘the Derrida Party’ to have a policy of having no policies. However, this would be a crude reduction. I think the more considerable diffi culty here is that it may not be possible for decon-struction ever to produce an inaugural or generative political discourse outside of an act of reading or critical intervention. From the point of view of a faithfulness to a certain manner of reading the world, there could be no political discourse worthy of the name of deconstruction which was generated outside of or anterior to a singular act of ‘reading’ of a unique event. This is not to say that deconstruction would be for ever condemned to read and re-read the texts of the political canon as a route to articulat-ing the alterity repressed within them by the logocentric model of Western political discourse (as if this were merely or simply a secondary, supplemen-tary or weaker task than, say, policy-making). Rather, with the reading (as critical intervention) of singular events comes the requirement to affi rm a position with respect to that event and in so doing negotiate between that necessarily material and institutional position (counter-institutions are also institutions) and the risk to that position incurred by the affi rmation of the unpredictable effects of otherness. Every policy then needs be open to the risk of its own deconstruction by the very political conditions it puts in play. It is of course not the role of deconstruction to offer reassuring and easily appropriable policies to policymakers. However, risk and policy


are uneasy companions; we live in an age of ‘risk management’, in which policies are formulated to predict the unpredictable consequences of risk. Risk can be neutralized by technē; such is the dream of the death-cult of contemporary managerialism.

SOVEREIGNTY

One might think that Derrida’s invocation of International Law in his later writings would represent an example of a concrete relation between his writing and something that could take the manner of a policy formulation. In fact, while Derrida speaks eloquently of the need for international law and demonstrates its philosophical genealogy, he actually does very little by way of elaborating what such a law might look like. Once again we return to the insurmountable diffi culty of deconstruction’s refusal to pro-gramme or pre-empt the arrival of an unknowable future. In fact, looked at in these terms, policy-making would seem to have a distinct relation to fortune-telling, divination and other such modes of predicting the future. Futurologists are of course a specialist sub-branch of policymakers. In the context of university administration, I have never written a ‘forward-look-ing strategic plan’ that did not have to be rewritten six months later due to unforeseen circumstances. Derrida’s discussion of International Law in the early 1990s was certainly prescient, given the way in which Interna-tional Law has moved from the margins of legal specialism to become the locus of global politics during this time through the development of the International Criminal Court, the test-cases of ‘universal jurisdiction’, the demands of globalization and the obfuscations of the war on terror. How-ever, the question of International Law in Derrida remains to be deter-mined according to a double braid of reading: fi rstly, the deconstruction of the inherited Western model of law and ethics which prevails in the discourse on the international, humanitarian and cosmopolitical; secondly, a responsible philosophical response to singular events as they arrive in the present calling for a exercise of public, critical reason. In other words, the deconstruction of International Law will proceed on a provisional and strategic basis. International Law is of course only an example for Derrida of a wider mutation in the conditions of sovereignty in the world today. This account of sovereignty is in turn part of a more general undoing of the logocentric schema, in Derrida, which points out that sovereignty as such is always already decentred by its inability to master the unconditionality of the other which it seeks to suppress, thus rendering the sovereign no longer sovereign e.g. the unconditionality of literature makes it both powerless in the sovereign public realm of techno-media-politics and simultaneously the one thing that this sovereignty cannot master and so demonstrating the impotence of sovereignty and the all-powerful powerlessness of uncon-ditionality. This is a scenario that can be moved around the tropes of the


Derridean corpus in so far as it describes the familiar strategies of and resistances to phallogocentrism in a more genral sense. Policy without con-ditions or a policy of unconditionality would seem to be no policy at all, or at least nothing policymakers would recognise as policy in its proper sense. After all, a policy without limits or purpose would be policy without utility and would be of no use to any one, except as a policy of resistance.

Here is the rub, the moment that one begins to attempt a thought experi-ment of this kind one runs into immediate and insurmountable diffi culties, not because deconstruction has nothing to say to politics or that decon-struction is a weak ontology, parasitical on the strong discourse of politi-cal culture, but because if one were to take seriously (if not literally) what Derrida has to say about the disarticulation of the inherited metaphysical models of the political, it quickly becomes apparent that a new politics does not require that ‘deconstruction’ (if such a thing exists) be translated into a number of thematic policy choices but that the entire political model which rests upon policy as an enactable idea be subject to complete and irreversible displacement. Policy-making as it stands is untenable from a deconstructive point of view because political culture as such is untenable. The unconditionality and infi nite responsibility of deconstruction does not mean simply that we should make better policy (or that we should make better policy, simply) but that in doing so the entire apparatus of Western political culture be removed and rethought in an unpredictable and emerg-ing future. The frustration that many feel with deconstruction’s reading of the political lies in this refusal to provide ‘concrete policies’. However, it is this refusal to decide on the undecideable in advance which is the whole point of deconstruction. It is the promise of deconstruction. This is not the same thing as opposition politicians saying they could not at present say what their expenditure plans would be until they were in government and saw the state of the accounts (that is just a lie for political expediency and such people always have well-developed plans for what they would do). The promise of deconstruction would be that in encountering the other justice ought to be done, even if the progressive structure of the promise relied on the necessary, in principle, ability for promises to be broken or fail. The politics of deconstruction can then only ever follow the dual strategy we saw earlier: the critical reading of the Western inheritance and the disar-ticulation of the event as it arrives in the present. In this sense, deconstruc-tion cannot be a political science because it has no means of securing the predictive force necessary to a science. Rather, deconstruction is that which puts all and every such prediction in doubt. As Bismarck remarked, politics is not a science, it is an art. Elsewhere, he is said to have noted that it was the art of the possible. As Derek Attridge has put it, for Derrida, it is the art of the impossible.9 It is, nevertheless, an art and as such is on the side of the unconditional rather than the sovereign.

There was a moment in the early 1990s when the reception of the text of Derrida entered law schools in the United States. This might have been


the moment when deconstruction moved from a discursive and philosophi-cal sphere to the realm of practice. It has never quite happened. This is not because lawyers and theoreticians of the law are failing to progress Derrida’s writing on the law into a more general axiomatics of legal prac-tice. Rather, it is because if one were to attempt to do such a thing the very idea of a generally axiomatic legal practice would not be tenable (e.g. con-sider the aporia between universality and singularity, the relation of law to an economy of violence, the injustice of judgement, the recognition of the unconscious as a principle in legal trials and so on). Given that it is in the interests of power (not a word Derrida uses very often, granted its own obscurities) to maintain the logo-rhetorical illusion of a practice of the law that is universal (with sovereign exceptions), then it is not surprising that the effects of reading Derrida in American law schools are yet to be felt in any great degree outside of those law schools. Although it will without doubt be the task of such thinking to mobilise the tropes of deconstruction in a future thinking of International Law and its sovereign jurisdiction. Similarly, there cannot be a deconstructive political practice, as that term has been hitherto understood. It is not that deconstruction is inadequate to politics but that the entire political culture of the West is inadequate to deconstruction. A deconstructive political practice must follow an alto-gether different and as yet unknowable and unpredictable path, which is not to say that it will never come into existence because existence takes place regardless of aporia and no doubt is taking place and has taken place in the absence of a knowledge of the term ‘deconstruction’. This then is a further double bind for the would-be deconstructive policymaker, namely that politics and policy is always already in deconstruction and never has the relationship of anteriority or precedence to deconstruction that policy would require of it. In short, this is to say, that there is no ‘deconstruc-tion’ outside of the political event that can be called upon to explain or transform it. If one wants to understand the political events of today then one should actively investigate them through literature of a concerned or militant type and read them with critical care in and through deconstruc-tion in an unconditional way but there is no political text of deconstruction independent from this upon which to base responses and so-called policy decisions. Deconstruction presents power with the challenge of uncondi-tionality (hence the clamour to denounce it as overly complex and elitist, the pot calling the kettle black), power responds with the illusion of its own sovereignty, but no injustice can last forever.

One defi nition of policy might be that policy is not reading. It is the very opposite of deconstruction, if deconstruction can have opposites. Nothing could be more inimical to the patient and scholarly reading of the texts of other by Jacques Derrida than the preordained, one-size-fi ts-all, programme-for-tomorrow ambitions of policy or the relationship implied between the academic and the so-called political process in this arrange-ment. This is not the same as saying that one cannot or should not have an


idea what one might do as a political person with respect to schools and hospitals and foreign wars, given the chance. Rather, I think it is revealing of a certain truth about deconstruction, namely that deconstruction is truly a critical nihilism. By this I do not mean that it is anarchistic or destructive, rather in the Nietzschean sense it is a type of refl ection and utterance that requires an effort of intelligence and an exercise of reason as a practical, counter-cultural engagement. I for one would like to see the inauguration of an International Forum for Philosophy and Policy as a deconstructive ‘counter’–think tank. It might be distinguished from existing organisations by the formula: more think, less tank. It would adopt a relation to policy of intervention rather than a preparation. Not in order to outfl ank public policy through a strategy of negation and transcendental position taking (or posturing) but in order to provide critical readings of singular events as they arrived misshapen and monstrous in the present. Such open and refl ec-tive institutions will be absolutely necessary if the future of thought itself is to stand a chance and if it is to continue to confront power with truth.

I have said before that deconstruction has only one rule, allow the other to speak (hence this cannot be a rule). Hélène Cixous puts it better when she says to Derrida, ‘I am on the side of life’. In the future, a reader-theore-tician-philosopher-deconstructor-political-citizen comes forward and says, ‘I would like to learn to live fi nally’.

6 Spectres of PoujadeNaomi Klein and the New International

It would be unfortunate . . . to confuse the materiality of the signi-fi er with the materiality of what it signifi es . . . What we call ideol-ogy is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stat-ing their fear at having their own ideological mystifi cations exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit. They are, in short, very poor readers of Marx’s German Ideology.

—Paul de Man1

In language the relations of buying and selling have been made the basis of all others.

—The German Ideology2

Freedom is the whispered watchword of heimlich conspirators and the loud battle-cry of professed revolutionaries.

—Daniel SandersWortenbuch de Deutschen Sprache3

PRACTICALLY POLITICS

Freud calls it cryptonesia, an aberration of memory in writing.4 My own case fi rst manifested itself in a review of the English translation of Poli-tiques de l’amitié in the journal Textual Practice.5 Despite clearly stating on the front cover, back cover, inside leafs (twice) and in the header at the top of every left-hand page (one hundred and fi fty-four times in fact) that George Collins’s translation of Derrida’s book had the published title Politics of Friendship, I repeatedly referred to the text in my review as The


Politics of Friendship. I was even bold enough to suggest that ‘the politics of friendship’ could be read as a synonym for ‘the politics of deconstruc-tion’. This is at once a spectacular case of misreading and, as a symptom of cryptonesia, an expression of a desire. This desire—that deconstruction should in some way inform ‘practical’ politics—is not unique to my review6 nor is it necessarily an example of youthful naivety, even if it will now require some qualifi cation. Given the due distinction between something like politiques de l’amitié and ‘the politics of friendship’ (a syntactical shift which places the emphasis on the grammatical possibilities of the relation rather than on the logocentrism of the foregrounded noun ‘politics’), I still hold by the majority of that review and the proposition that the book might be read as exemplary of ‘politics of deconstruction’.

In particular, this phrase can be read as meaning ‘all-that-is-thought-in-the-name-of-politics-around-and-in-deconstruction’ and accordingly how this thought (including my own desire) might be open to deconstruction. An alternative reading could be that suggested in the sub-title of Geoffrey Bennington’s Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, i.e. the political skirmishes around the term ‘deconstruction’.7 Here, what happens politi-cally around the term ‘friendship’ might be a representative case of what happens whenever deconstruction is conjured to speak to politics (which de facto will be wherever deconstruction resides). In either case, having noticed my mistake only after the text had gone to print I was somewhat reassured—and unsettled—by a similar slip in Simon Critchley’s transla-tion of Derrida’s contribution to Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, in whose ‘Phronesis’ series Politics of Friendship is published.8 Throughout this short text Critchley-Derrida (without access to an original script of this transcribed improvisation it is impossible to decide who is the author of this error, presumably Derrida at least approved the translation) refers to the book as The Politics of Friendship. If even Derrida is prone to slip into a defi nite politics, succumbing to an essentially metaphysical desire, as his deconstruction of politics is translated into ‘a’ or ‘the’ politics of deconstruction, how are such errors to be avoided?

Such a forgetting is nothing less than the action of the logos and is per-haps just the condition of all writing.9 As the experience of diffi culty in thought, this problem seems particularly relevant when one comes to con-sider, what Derrida calls with a clear defi nitive marker, ‘the New Inter-national’.10 If anything looks like a candidate for a practical politics of deconstruction it is this ‘concrete’ and ‘real’ ‘alliance’11 described by Der-rida as a ‘movement’ already ‘underway’.12 However, appearances, because they presuppose the value of presence, can be deceptive and an understand-ing of the New International will require patient explication of Derrida’s text. I will argue that while a ‘practical’ ‘politics’ that is in deconstruction is not impossible (indeed deconstruction is the very condition of all politics as such) to insist that deconstruction answer to so-called ‘concrete’ sign-posts of the political (or at least to a conventional idea of politics which

Spectres of Poujade 93

complacently recognises itself as politics by invoking its own vocabulary) is fundamentally to miss the point of the New International and all that it implies.13 When will we be rid of the notion that someone must stand on a picket line in the name of deconstruction before its political nature is taken seriously? Even though by defi nition the idea of the picket line must always already be in deconstruction?14

However, given that the New International, like democracy-to-come, is here and now (already ‘underway’), where is it located? If, as Derrida suggests, the New International ‘refers to a profound transformation . . . of international law, of its concepts, and its fi eld of intervention’15 where is this transformation taking place today and what is its theatre of inter-vention? This is not to return hastily to a line of inquiry that insists the political be readable in terms of familiar ‘concrete’ iconography. Rather, it is, momentarily, to take Derrida’s defi nition of the New International at face value and to ask, if the New International ‘transforms’ the ‘fi eld of intervention’, how does it do so and where? Such questions are no doubt ontological in their nature but they are not necessarily strategically unhelp-ful for all that. An attempt to outfl ank the ontological question does not invalidate questioning as a way of proceeding. What follows is an analysis of Naomi Klein’s No Logo as a metonym for the recently emergent ‘anti-capitalist’ protests, which suggest themselves as a possible candidate for the phenomenality of a New International.16 This will return us to a com-mentary on Derrida’s text and to a consideration of Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology. Such an analysis turns around the question of the party. It takes as its orientation Derrida’s hypothesis of the irreversible mutation of the idea of the political party:

Everywhere in the world today, the structure of the party is becoming not only more and more suspect (and for reasons that are no longer always, necessarily, ‘reactionary’, those of the classical individualist reaction) but also radically unadapted to the new—tele-techno-me-dia—conditions of public space, of political life, of democracy, and of the new modes of representation (both parliamentary and non-parlia-mentary) that they call up. A refl ection on what will become Marxism tomorrow, of its inheritance or its testament, should include, among so many other things, a refl ection on the fi nitude of a certain concept or of a certain reality of the party.17

As a description of the New International (‘a movement is underway that we would be tempted to describe as a deconstruction of the traditional concepts of State, and thus of party and labour union’18) this account also seems a plausible defi nition of anti-capitalism, with its characteristic use of ‘new—tele-techno-media—conditions’. However, the question that such a hypothesis raises is not only how to distinguish between the New Interna-tional and anti-capitalism but between the New International and all the


other parties without party, such as the pan-European fuel protests or the many neo-fascist and racist groups who advocate ‘partyless’ resistance. In short, how can we distinguish between the New International and all the re-emergent spectres of Poujade?

NO LOGOS

Klein is a sort of anti-Fukuyama. She writes, ‘it’s a classic symptom of teenage narcissism to believe that the end of history coincides exactly with your arrival on earth’.19 Her concerns are less eschatological than Fuku-yama, more urgent than celebratory, more orientated toward social justice than self-congratulation, and are perhaps in some ways less ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ than Fukuyama. However, No Logo is undoubtedly caught up in the same mediatic space as The End of History and the Last Man. It is just as reductive, as equally impatient of thought, and as fatally mortgaged to the phenomenality of the nightly news as Fukuyama. A reading of No Logo will perhaps earn the tag ‘critique’ rather than deconstruction, as Derrida’s reading of Fukuyama has been described, where he is thought not to affi rm or rescue aspects of Fukuyama’s argument. However, given the unqualifi ed enthusiasm displayed by the loudest of cultural voices for Klein’s work it may be necessary to correct the complacent thinking it promulgates, a remedial gesture which would be a necessary if insuffi cient step in any deconstruction.

In brief, Klein argues that the latest twist in late capitalism’s tale is that corporations now produce brands as opposed to products. The added value of a brand name (such as Nike or Tommy Hilfi ger) allows corporations to increase profi ts while lowering overheads by producing images in the West and, thanks to trade liberalization and labour-law reform, producing their goods in the Third World. Divesting themselves of assets such as expen-sive-to-maintain factories in the West and moving towards subcontraction in Asia or Latin America, corporations are ‘competing in a race toward weightlessness’.20 This, argues Klein, leads to the double injustice of mov-ing labour abuses overseas, while exploiting Western consumers who are sold sweatshop goods at designer prices. Up to a point this argument has merit. It is after all the same one, give or take local conditions, that Lenin makes in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (subtitled ‘A Popu-lar Outline’) regarding the ‘superprofi ts’ of the monopoly tendency, ‘the last word in the “latest phase of capitalist development”’.21 As a possible site of intervention the abuse of international labour regulations will lead Klein to some productive speculations. However, the majority of her text is taken up with the dilemmas of the Western consumer and the contradic-tions faced by the citizen in a capitalist economy. Brand-based capitalism is, argues Klein, suffocating Western culture and she longs for what she calls ‘unmarketed space’22, not exactly ‘literal space so much as a deep


craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom’.23 This would be a public and individual space removed from the incursions branding has made on public institutions and youth identity. To this end she recounts the current inequities of branding in youth culture, schools, universities, ethnic and sexual identity, journalism, children’s lit-erature and so on. The evidence she offers has an accumulative force with Nike, Shell, McDonald’s and MTV receiving most of her opprobrium. The villainies of such companies will be familiar to many prior to Klein’s book although her work has the documentary merit of archiving injustice.

However, despite its avowed dream of a pure space free from the pol-lution of capitalism, the facts that it recounts forces No Logo into a series of contradictions and concession, the accretion of which work to erase its own polemical force. For economy’s sake only a few examples will be cited. Klein laments the branding of popular music, e.g. sponsorship of concerts which becomes more central to the event than the music, or, manufactured bands synthesized in order to sell records to a niche youth market. She admits, however, that ‘of course the branding of music is not a story of innocence lost. Musicians have been singing ad jingles and signing sponsor-ship deals since radio’s early days’.24 It would not be diffi cult to trace a his-tory of musical patronage back even further than this, a history that might include almost every piece of music ever written. Klein laments the brand-ing of the media, e.g. corporate sponsorship of television programmes, or, magazine advertisers seeking prior approval of controversial features. She admits, however, that ‘in some ways, these stories are simply pumped-up versions of the same old tug-of-war between editorial and advertising that journalists have faced for a century and a quarter’.25 Why such a limited time-span? Surely, journalism by defi nition will always have been in thrall to the reductive logic of the market? Klein laments the branding of schools, e.g. McDonald’s franchises in school dinner-halls, or, corporate sponsor-ship of the curriculum. She admits, however, that before such branding ‘schools weren’t exactly corporate-free turf . . . as early as the 1920s, teach-ing kids to consume was seen as just another way of promoting patriotism and economic well-being’.26 Those not content to limit history to the last eighty years, might ask when was the educational apparatus of the state anything other than a space for the reproduction of dominant ideologies?

Having gone in search of ‘unmarketed space’ Klein’s own arguments begin to make the attainment of such space look highly suspect. She is astute enough to concede, despite the insistence of her polemic examples, that ‘although there is a clear trajectory in all of these stories, there is little point, at this stage in our sponsored history, in pining for either a mythic brand-free past or some utopian commercial-free future’.27 Klein’s illustrations merely demonstrate the truth of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that there is ‘no document of civilisation that is not at one and the same time a document of barbarianism’.28 There is no pure space—outside or anterior to the logos—that will ever be free from, or presuppose, an event


of injustice or violence as its own condition of possibility. Klein objects to ‘marketing that thinks it is culture’29 but merely shows that the history of culture is indissociable from the market, thought inseparable from specu-lation, and progress impossible without exchange-value.

Klein does not wish to reject the amenities of the West altogether, brand-ing only ‘becomes troubling . . . when the balance tips dramatically in favour of the sponsoring brand’.30 In other words, if the contamination of capital could be restrained within determinable limits then one could live in harmony, enjoying the benefi ts of a techno-industrial society but at the same time being able to walk in the park free of advertising boards. Such an argument seems to me to be made in bad faith; at least Marx’s Asiatic dis-course foresaw the eventual benefi ts of industrial imperialism for workers on the subcontinent.31 Klein it would seem, and as we shall see she is aware of this, wants to have her cake and eat it. This consumer-based politics would appear to only concern itself with designer injustice and fashionable causes. A hatred of Nike or Shell can only ever be strategic or metonymic, in and of themselves these companies are not necessarily any worse than the thousands of unbranded companies exploiting imperialist trade policies. While the logos are pursued these other companies (involved in less fash-ionable activities such as mining or deforestation) go unchecked. The logic of this politics is not an ‘anti-capitalist’ one; rather, its goal is good-con-science shopping (the desire to consume without guilt). In this sense it is the most fashionable of fashionable trends, a backlash against designer goods and ‘mall culture’. As such it represents the ultimate victory of branding, a branding without brands (it desires products whose brand is that they have no brand, ‘no logo’). Its plea for ‘ethical’ products turns ‘ethics’ into a form of quality control in which human rights are good for business and a seal of consumer confi dence, like a Soil Association stamp or a Safety Standard kite. Accordingly, such demands hand responsibility for ethics and human rights over to corporations, thus empowering them as quasi nation-states, the very predicament the ‘anti-capitalists’ are said to abhor. So-called anti-capitalism does nothing to confront capitalism, rather it augments it and gives it a reason to produce further ‘guilt-free’ commodities, opening new markets, as an alternative for the ethical consumer.

This critique of brand-based politics is in fact Klein’s own conclusion in the fi nal two chapters of her book. To use it against her, regardless of its obvious vitality, would be to offer an objection which Klein herself initially formulates. After 421 pages of documentary evidence decrying the evils of late capitalism, Klein’s fi nal chapters, ‘Beyond the Brand’ and ‘Consumer-ism Versus Citizenship’, turn her argument up to this point inside out in strikingly thoughtful ways. Having recognised the limits and complicity of brand-based anti-capitalism she concludes her book fi rstly by recognising that ‘globalization’ involves a series of colonial or neo-colonial practices which call for an analysis of and intervention in ‘the much more complicated and less glamorous world of international law’.32 In contrast to her previous


certainty that ‘Marlboro Friday’ August 1992 (when Philip Morris dropped its ‘unbranded’ products in favour of its leading brands) had been ‘the sav-iour of late capitalism’33 she concedes that branding will only ever have been a moment in the long history of capitalism. Instead of ‘guilt-free’ goods she calls for a democratic citizenship that negotiates the ‘new international arena’ of globalization in terms of a reformulation of international law, ‘political solutions—accountable to people and enforced by their elective representa-tives—deserve another shot’.34 On the one hand this conclusion might be read as just another contradictory moment within a relentlessly erratic argu-ment. On the other hand, as a thinking of contemporary political conditions it moves Klein in the direction of the New International’s transformation ‘of international law, of its concepts, and its fi eld of intervention’.

Perhaps, after all, No Logo and the ‘us’ it purports to speak for (‘it has taken many of us a while to fi nd our footing in this new international arena’35) may be related, in secret or otherwise, to the New International. If this is the case then the relation will indeed be a secret one for Klein has little time for the patient thought required by so-called theory. Indeed, this point leads any reading of Klein to a fundamental differend between some-thing like ‘the New International’ and ‘anti-capitalism’. The antagonism is all on Klein’s side and the ‘argument’ somewhat over-familiar. She writes convincingly of the ‘branding’ of the university (‘As John V. Lombardi, president of the University of Florida at Gainesville, says: We have taken the great leap forward and said: “Let’s pretend we’re a corporation”’36) while also conceding that academic research has always been sponsored and tied to the market. Having cited some sensational examples of the free-market university (each of us could provide many more) Klein asks: ‘why have university professors remained silent, passively allowing their corporate “partners” to trample the principles of freedom of inquiry and discourse . . . more to the point, aren’t our campuses supposed to be over-fl owing with troublemaking tenured radicals?’37 Her answer is, not to put too fi ne a point on it, an act of supreme cretinism:

. . . more than a few of those tenured radicals [the phrase you will note is Allan Bloom’s] who were supposed to be corrupting young minds with socialist ideas were preoccupied with their own postmod-ernist realisation that truth itself is a construct. This realisation made it intellectually untenable for many academics to even participate in a political argument that would have ‘privileged’ any one model of learning (public) over another (corporate). And since truth is relative, who is to say that Plato’s dialogues are any more of an ‘authority’ than Fox’s Anastasia?38

Inevitably she denounces ‘literature, cultural studies, political science, history and fi ne arts’ as the site of this self-indulgence. Making a quick dash from here to condemning the so-called ‘P.C. Wars’, ‘the slogan “the


personal is political” came to replace the economic as political and, in the end, the Political as political as well’.39 Thus, Klein’s conclusion seems as lapidary as it is complacent, the problem with postmodern theory, she says, is that ‘class fell off the agenda’ and was replaced by ‘the prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on’ television.40 The chief villainess of this betrayal is—wait for it—Gayatri Spivak, whose self-delusion Klein quotes without citation, ‘great blows are being struck against capitalism in the realms of theory’.41

Where would one begin to unpick this folly? Firstly, Klein is a journal-ist and her reductionism is indicative of her own unacknowledged relation to the market qua mediatic space which is impatient of the complexity of thought demanded by the work of someone like Gayatri Spivak. But why these lies which shelter behind an appeal to ‘truth’ and to the old chestnut ‘class’ (this is the one and only mention of class in Klein’s book, her eco-nomics are brand based not class based)? Why does a seeming opening in the political always return to these most tired of political sign-posts in a headlong rush towards the ontological? Why the desire to know oneself by recourse to the most traditional of vocabularies and rhetorical operators? The argument is entirely rhetorical, it invokes the material as if that in itself were enough to understand the material and cites the need for action as if that itself were an adequate action, never failing to call for change as if the call itself changed anything. There have been better formulations of this objection than the crude portrait offered by Klein, too in love with ontol-ogy to recognise possible friends in academia, which have been made and countered elsewhere.42 It is unnecessary to reheat this debate today.

Rather, it is necessary to point out the bad faith in which Klein’s reason-ing is made. Such an argument calls for action as a marker of true politics in contrast to the idleness of the intellectual who is paralysed by the luxury of thought (and salary). Action has value and is therefore knowable as true politics, while thought is a self-indulgent ‘preoccupation’ which is worth nothing because it prevents ‘participation’ in politics. With this argument Klein proves herself an exemplary Poujadist. Barthes writes:

What the petite bourgeoisie respects most in the world is immanence: every phenomenon which bears its own term within itself by a simple mechanism of return, i.e., to put it literally, every paid phenomenon, is agreeable to this class. Language is made to accredit, in its fi gures, in its very syntax, this morality of the retort.43

It is perhaps not impertinent to invoke a conceit of class here, since Klein’s own consumer-friendly politics opportunistically uses class (as a quantifi -able measure) in a retort to postmodern thought. Klein’s attack on Spivak (and by extension deconstruction) measures out the political into the order of payment, in which action is valued because it is tangible while the laziness of the intellectual is an expenditure without return (salaries are paid but


there is no quantifi able return). Like Poujade, Klein’s critique of the intel-lectual is motivated by ethical book-keeping, the academic should be paying his/her way ‘corrupting young minds with socialist ideas’ rather than wast-ing the tax-payer’s money preoccupied with thought. Like Poujade, Klein prefers the common sense of activism to the sophism of academics.

Poujade writes, it could be Klein talking, ‘France is stricken with an overproduction of men with diplomas, polytechnicians, economists, phi-losophers, and other dreamers who have lost all contact with the real world’.44 Such would seem to be the postmodern condition for the intel-lectual in contrast to the common sense of the activist (for Klein) or the petite bourgeoisie (for Poujade) which grows as ‘a special organ of percep-tion’. Even if this organ is blind to anything other than fi rst appearances which will, according to Barthes, ‘accept as ready money the proposition of “reality,” and declare anything which risks substituting an explana-tion for a retort to be null and void’.45 The Poujadist wants to put the idle intellectual to work (perhaps a desire of all strong regimes) ‘reforming’ the intellectual, transforming qualitative ideas into quantitative common sense. Neither Poujade nor Klein dismisses ideas per se but rather they dislike the intellectual qua consciousness who never gives up the task of questioning and analysis. What Klein and Poujade’s anti-intellectualism cannot tolerate is a critique of onto-politics as immanence which calls for an irreducible and interminable conceptualization of the political, i.e. a thinking about politics which cannot accord with any single ‘ideology’, ‘party’ or ‘movement’ as a possible end of politics. As such what the Pou-jadist (and Klein would be a good example) cannot abide is contradiction or challenge by thought. Thought for the Poujadist cannot negate action because action is quantifi able and thought is intangible. If thought (unfet-tered, interminable thought) could outfl ank action then the balance of the material and the onto-political would be in danger, their measurement and value under threat. In other words, what the Poujadist fears is a challenge to the very vocabulary and markers by which the political is recognised and so made quantifi able.

Poujadism does not wish to think because it does not wish its common-sense values (i.e. its refusal of difference and its exaltation of identity) to be questioned. Klein similarly dismisses thought because it impedes action:

Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors that passes for empirical truth (as the postmodern academics did), and rather than fi ghting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today’s media activ-ists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weap-ons in a war of actions, not images.46

Klein picks up the pieces of this metaphor in her fi nal chapter when she concedes that the political messages of anti-capitalism have been ‘drowned


out by the sound of shattering glass’.47 Just as capitalism requires anti-capitalist terrorism as a justifi cation for corrective violence in situations where an excess of democracy makes the exercise of power untenable (‘as a day of feverishness is a reasonable price to pay for an effective vaccine’ as Umberto Eco48 puts it) so Poujadism requires this caricature of the intel-lectual to complete its philosophical system. As Barthes suggests, ‘in the Poujadist society, the intellectual has the accursed and necessary role of a lapsed witch doctor’.49 My use of Barthes and his insistent critique of the petite bourgeoisie mythology of ‘common sense’ as ‘reality’ no doubt involves a certain violence and irresponsibility. Its violent reintroduction of class as a political marker is surely as terroristic as that which it denounces. However, it is an interjection aimed at a closure in thought that threatens to collapse into a totalizing system. It is a violence aimed against the greater violence of anti-intellectualism.

AN IRREDUCIBLE CONCEPTUAL POLITICS

If, far from falling within the ambit of the New International, anti-capital-ism is in fact a return of a certain spectre of Poujade then how might this essay approach its original question, what is the New International? The answer, I think, lies in the structure of this ontological question, ‘what is the New International?’ It would be a mistake to believe that the New Interna-tional, like any other trope (or quasi trope) within Derridean thought, can be held accountable to the metaphysical concepts of onto-politics because it is precisely these metaphysical concepts that deconstruction wishes to interrogate and displace. Deconstruction cannot account for itself within a traditional political order because deconstruction wants to understand and exceed all and every such order. It is for this reason that deconstruc-tion cannot provide a politics in the way that this term has hitherto been, metaphysically, understood, even if it is the constant desire of metaphysics to drag deconstruction back into a closed order of politics. This is the dif-ference between a desire for ‘the politics of deconstruction’ which places the emphasis on ‘politics’ as preceding and authorising deconstruction, and the ‘politics of deconstruction’ in which politics is always already in decon-struction demonstrating the impossibility of its own metaphysical desire for defi nitive and quantitative closure. Thus, the New International despite appearances cannot be described in terms of the onto-political characteris-tics of other communist internationals. The New International will have no manifesto, no congress, no offi ces, no brigades, no party and no web site. The New International is a ghost. It is hauntological not ontological.

This may appear as something of a disappointment to those looking for a new politics (or even a deconstructive politics) but it is precisely its spectral status (i.e. its inability to manifest itself) that makes the New International ‘new’ in this sense. A deconstruction of politics will require


a rethinking, from the ground up, of everything (without exception) that the fi eld of the political has been subject to. The entire political tradition, including the very defi nition of politics as a certain kind of action and intervention, must be rethought as a conceptual order in, and in need of, deconstruction. In fact, the political fi eld might be thought of as exem-plary of the work of metaphysics itself because it is here that the trope of the material grounds itself as the trope of tropes. The material is that concept against which all other concepts must be judged and inevitably be found wanting in contrast. Traditional politics, as in the case of No Logo, secures the material as a fi xed point of departure around which it organ-ises its conceptual order (‘class’, ‘economics’, ‘liberation’ etc.). In turn each of these concepts, because they have a defi ned relation to a fi xed point, can seem to acquire fi xity themselves and so translate from a conceptual into a material order. In this sense the material, as foundational of politics, is exemplary of the work of any ontotheology. Correspondingly, it would be an error to ask what is (the material nature of) the New International because the material is the metaphysical concept par excellence (disguis-ing its conceptual status to order a closed political fi eld). If when, in a traditional political order, all concepts appear impoverished in contrast to material criteria then the material will occupy a transcendental position in relation to all concepts. Conversely, since the material is said to defi ne politics it follows that all concepts fall within the remit of politics (or at least they cannot escape the fi eld of politics) because they are defi ned as conceptual in contrast to the material. Thus, every conceptual encounter, and deconstruction is nothing but conceptual encounters, cannot help but be political. This is perhaps what Geoffrey Bennington means when he notes in a recent text that one effect of deconstruction may be to suggest ‘an irreducible conceptual politics’.50

If politics is an exemplary metaphysics it is because the material both founds and closes all conceptual orders. It is, within traditional political thinking, arche and telos, reason and measure, for all concepts and so of the political order itself. Thus, metaphysics both relies upon the material as an organising principle of its schema while holding the material as irreduc-ibly conceptual within its own boundaries. Metaphysics is simultaneously made and unmade by the material, just as the material has its conceptual status both erased and confi rmed by metaphysics. This relation between politics and metaphysics suggests a trembling within the very concept of the concept itself, revealing that not only are the most ‘conceptual’ moments of theory or philosophy political but that the most material aspects of politics are conceptual through and through. This includes, or is especially the case for, ‘action’ because it is the most material trope of materialism, the metaphor of metaphors that transports itself out of its own metaphoricity. Action is irreducibly complex because it is irreducibly conceptual.

In light of this, Derrida’s text may become a little clearer when he calls the New International a ‘communism’ ‘without conjoined mate, without


organisation, without party, without nation, without State, without property’.51 This is a communism without communism (an inoperative community as Nancy would have it) which fails to operate through the familiar, impossible axiomatic of the X without X. An axiomatic that rejects the value of value (i.e. presence) in a granted or presupposed system, and thus the very idea of an axiomatic. This may appear to some as an insolvent political ethic but it is, as Derrida explains in Politics of Friendship, the very condition of a politics. To bypass the aporias of the X without X would be to ‘miss the hardest, the most resistant, the most irreducible, the othermost of the “thing itself”’.52 A politics which ignored this otherness of the thing would, says Derrida, ‘deck itself out in “realism” just in time to fall short of the thing—and to repeat, repeat and repeat again, with neither consciousness nor memory of its compulsive droning’.53 It is this question of the otherness of the thing that will defi ne the relation between deconstruction and the political, as well as characterizing the New International. It is the key point of the whole trope of spectrality (not ontology, the thing itself but hauntology, the otherness of the thing). Once again, contra Klein, this is not a denial of the thing itself or indeed of action. Rather, it is a thorough questioning of the possible means of access to the thing, as a precondition of engaging with it.

The New International, one might say, is impossible: ‘without contract, “out of joint”, without co-ordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without citizenship, without common belonging to a class’. And yet Derrida insists that the New International exists, it is ‘a link of affi nity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret [not abso-lutely secret in the Derridean sense of a-phenomenal but ‘almost secret’ i.e. in some sense phenomenal] link’54 which allies its members (although the term ‘member’ here would no longer be appropriate) ‘in a new, concrete, and real way’.55 So, how can an impossible international, which cannot mani-fest itself, be either ‘concrete’ or ‘real’? An answer might run as follows. All communities, even those that think they are fully formed communities in a metaphysical sense, are inoperative communities. Their work demon-strates their own necessary deconstruction of the idea of community and will always show the impossibility of community. So community as such is impossible even among self-consciously ‘concrete’ communities. The New International begins with a recognition of this impossibility as a condition of its existence, i.e. the New International begins by addressing its own otherness. This does not make it any less ‘real’ than other alliances but does mean that it has already begun the task of thinking the fi eld of the political as a means of intervening in that fi eld. The New International then is an inoperative community of theorizing and interpretation qua praxis.56 An inoperative community of the perhaps before the question, perhaps. Cer-tainly, it is an inoperative community of transformative interpretation.


This interpretation is structurally interminable and can never be an adequate preparation for a moment of decision or action.57 As an inopera-tive community of interpretation, the New International cannot adequately translate itself into a community of action identical with itself. Any moment of action retains a necessary relation to interminable analysis but a deci-sion, or, action is always made by the other. Interpretation can never ade-quately exhaust the possibilities of thinking through a moment of decision and therefore when that decision comes to be taken there always remains an excess of analysis that any terminable interpretation cannot account for. If a decision could be accounted for by a terminable interpretation it would of course not be a decision as such but the enactment of a presup-posed programme. The decision is always excessive or it is not a decision, its excess does not legitimate silence. It is this excess that ensures a diremp-tion between the agency of the interpretative subject and the interpretative demands of a decision. There is then a gap between the subject and deci-sion-taker-in-the-subject. A decision is never taken by an agent but always by the other, any action is not the act of a sovereign subject but is always the act of the other, who acts before the subject ever begins to comprehend the possibility of an action. This is to say that action, in so far as it must always be ‘action without action’, or action that is conditioned by the other-ness of action, is always impossible. Action is impossible if we understand action, in a metaphysical way, to be the agency of a sovereign subject. The New International then may appear, from a metaphysical point of view, an anaemic political entity but in fact its ‘action without action’ begins to think through the very possibility and condition of all action as such. The New International does not offer a political movement so much as it moves to keep open the event of alterity which makes political action possible and inevitable (if the other always acts before I do) but which political move-ments, from the Poujadists to the anti-capitalists, have always attempted to foreclose.

NO LOGOS, RECOIL: ‘LOGOS PROJECTED ON THE MOON’

It follows then that the Kleinian attempt to close off the otherness of action will always already have failed and, for deconstructive reasons, No Logo as a text will demonstrate the very impossibility of that attempt. That is, No Logo will say something other than its onto-political orientation will have intended it to say. This is at once obvious from the previously cited apologetic structure that fi rstly appeals to the sensationalism of examples only to admit that their sensationalism may screen out a long history of collusion. Furthermore, the concluding chapters point the book in an alto-gether different direction than the one proposed by its privileging of heroic accounts of direct action over critical thinking. These closing chapters open a gap between documentary and immanence; by the end of the book Klein


has narrated herself out of the action she recounts, preferring refl ection as praxis to smashed glass as an excuse for thought. On the one hand, these stories of action (Reclaim the Streets, anti-capitalist protests, brand boycotts etc.) must be a documentary of the acts of the other, if only we knew how to read them in order to listen to the other speaking there. On the other hand, Klein’s archive of material action, all in some way linked by a ‘still discreet, almost secret’ affi nity of ‘suffering, and hope’ begins to point towards a productive tension in the very concept of the material. It is the volume of documentary in Klein’s account of late capitalism—as opposed to her commentary on it, if we could separate the two—that may bring her analysis into proximity and affi nity with the New International. The accumulative weight of Klein’s documentary both makes and unmakes the book, both predicating and unravelling all her assumptions regarding theory and practice, thought and action, materiality and fi gurality, quali-tative and quantitative, good conscience and idleness. Her narrative, as a narrative, tells the story of its own deconstruction and accordingly of the deconstruction of all her primary tropes. This essay will conclude with a discussion of only one of those tropes, the material.

As a North American humanities student of the 1990s, Klein’s thinking is completely in thrall to a certain idea of what the postmodern might be (even if she thinks she wants to reject it) as well as a certain half-reading of theory. She quotes Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau with approval, while randomly invoking ‘deconstruction’ as a synonym for postmodern self-refl exivity.58 This leads her analysis of brand names (‘logos’ to use Klein’s term) to produce a series of startling, and seemingly unselfconscious, itera-tions. She describes brand names as ‘conceptual value-added’, ‘logomania-cal’, ‘meaning brokers’, ‘transcendental logos’, and speaks of ‘the reign of logo terror’, ‘transcendent meaning machines’, and ‘logos projected on the moon’; Klein also describes activists as ‘literally deconstructing corporate culture’.59 What if we were to take these iterations at face value and read ‘logos’ in its philosophical sense rather than its Kleinian infl ection?

The mainstay of Klein’s anti-corporate argument is that ‘the products that will fl ourish in the future will be the ones presented not as “commodi-ties” but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle’.60 The corporate rush to weightlessness is an attempt to empty the commodity of its materi-ality, marketing a pure idea rather than the thing itself. However, as Klein’s documentary of unregulated labour, neocolonial sweatshops and downsiz-ing demonstrates it is not the ‘idea’ of the brand that is objectionable but in fact its materiality. There is little point in protesting at the idea of a Tommy Hilfi ger lifestyle; this, after all, is only a fantasy. Rather, it is the material practices that promote this lifestyle (the sweatshop labour and the surplus value of designer goods) which must be the object of dissent for the activist. Contrary to the injunction that the title of Klein’s book proposes it is not the brand as idea that causes concern but the brand as thing. A ‘logo’ then, to bear the weight of Klein’s argument, is both an idea (an experience of a


lifestyle) and a thing (e.g. a pair of denims made in a sweatshop factory). The idea is represented by possession of the thing, while the thing promotes the idea. However, the thing in itself is never fully a ‘brand’ because it must be marked by the idea, it must bear the designer name and so connote the idea it signifi es. Similarly, the idea is never suffi cient in itself to represent the brand, branding is all about ownership of the thing. The brand is both idea and thing and simultaneously never fully idea nor thing. Branding demon-strates that the idea must always take a material form, just as the material cannot be determined outside of the idea. The logo is a material inscription, a signature. The brand as Klein’s object of analysis collapses the very dis-tinction (namely an opposition between conceptuality and materiality) that guides her political intervention. This intervention takes the form of her documentary, which continually points otherwise to the problematic status of the brand as neither idea nor thing and so undermines the basic assump-tion of that intervention.61 In fact, the question of the brand suggests an instability in the very idea of the political (i.e. metaphysical) concept of concept itself, given that it points to a fundamental ambiguity between a material that cannot ground itself outside of the conceptual and a concep-tuality that must always be materially inscribed and so ought by defi nition to be the ‘proper’ object of political analysis and indeed action.

Such a situation is described by Paul de Man in his proposed reading of The German Ideology, which has watched over this essay in the form of an epigraph.62 This reading-to-come appears as an aside in the essay ‘The Resistance to Theory’ and may be an indication of the direction his writ-ing was heading during his fi nal years, when he planned a study of Marx and Kierkegaard as the primary readers of Hegel.63 No doubt de Man’s account of The German Ideology is as dependent on the ‘linguistics of lit-erariness’ employed with extraordinary results in his analysis of Rousseau in Allegories of Reading and Kant and Hegel in Aesthetic Ideology. For de Man The German Ideology would be an ‘allegorical narrative’ because the text engenders more than one degree of reading within itself. What may seem like a deconstruction of the central fi gure of the text (an opposition between materialism and idealism) will also contain within itself the dem-onstration of the impossibility of the reading that deconstructs the fi gure in the fi rst place. The discovery that the claims of either materialism or idealism to be true are merely tropological would be only the fi rst step in de Man’s reading. The second step would be to disclose how the correc-tive impulse within his analysis is obliged to act out a misreading of its own in an attempt to establish itself as the true or corrected version. This would merely be a repetition of the same ‘auto-deconstruction’ in the text of Marx and Engels, who in establishing the truth-claim of materialism simultaneously demonstrate the impossibility of that corrective gesture. If the time were available it might be possible to complete this work for de Man, potentially misleading as any reading that attempted to speak in de Man’s name might be.


On a certain reading of The German Ideology, the basis of Marx and Engels’ criticism of the Young Hegelians is that their claim that the limita-tions of human action is the product of consciousness is based on a ‘con-servative’ division between consciousness and the material.64 For Marx and Engels ‘the phantoms formed in the human brain’ such as morality, religion, metaphysics and ‘all the rest of ideology’ are never independent as pure ideas but are ‘bound to material premises’.65 Consciousness, say Marx and Engels, is ‘directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life’.66 Real life, or the material, is characterized here as linguistic (‘the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics’) because ‘consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence’67 which because it is social is always linguistic. A little later they write:

From the start the ‘spirit’ is affl icted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short of language. Language is as old as con-sciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.68

Language is, for Marx and Engels, material.69 It is the burden of matter that affl icts spirit. In this way, since consciousness never exists outside of language, consciousness always has a material form. However, signifi ca-tion of the thing is not the same as the thing itself. Signifi cation (linguistic reality to use de Man’s term) only defi nes the relation (‘where there exists a relationship, it exists for me’) between consciousness or conceptualization and the thing. This relation itself is not a substance but the experience of a relationship whereby experience itself as a relationship with substance takes place. Thus, consciousness as the experience of the world ‘can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process’.70 However, ‘the sensuous world’ is ‘not a thing given direct for all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of indus-try and the state of society’.71 As a social occurrence the experience of the sensuous world must—by the logic of the previous defi nition of language as social—be linguistic and not an experience of direct access to the thing itself. This is the very defi nition of ideology, that ideology bars access to the thing itself, the material is always caught up in ideology and it is the non-substantial relation as the linguistic experience of consciousness that defi nes practical existence. In other words, ‘ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, or reference with phenomenalism’. Such a confusion is not only unavoidable but is a necessary part of the experience


of signifi cation, without which the social phenomenon of language would not be possible. The material is always caught up in the experience of the fi gural; this is why there is no untouched space free from speculation or the exchange value of linguistic difference. It is for this reason that the logos has always already been projected on the moon.

The problem for Marx and Engels is not ideology per se, which is a nec-essary illusion, but ‘ideas which increasingly take on the form of universal-ity’.72 These are of course the ideas of the ruling class but in so far as they attempt to take on the form of universality they are in de Man’s sense of the term aberrations.73 That is, concepts which, although one of a series (or one term in a conceptual order), act transcendentally with respect to that series so as to dominate, totalize or explain it. When de Man speaks of ‘the unmasking of ideological aberrations’ I believe his use of the term here to be quite specifi c. For both the authors of The German Ideology and Paul de Man ideological aberration occurs when one concept, although no more important or necessary than any other since all concepts are fi gural, tends toward universality or totalization. When this happens we are in the realm of the logos. Aberration for de Man is a consequence (and a necessary one at that) of the technical nature of language, which like a machine ran-domly generates these conceptual occurrences without being able to control them (in this way the aberrant term cannot fi nally dominate the order from which it emerges).74 The situation described by Marx and Engels in their account of the ideas of the ruling class is the very action of metaphysics as aberration. What such aberrations demonstrate is both the necessary attempt to resolve political (material or social) questions by either cognitive or performative means and the equally necessary irreducibility of politics to either a discretely cognitive or performative solution. A diffi culty admira-bly demonstrated by the aberration thrown up by ‘the politics of friendship’ or ‘the politics of deconstruction’.

Such a scenario might be thought of as a summary of de Man’s ‘reading’ of The German Ideology, a text which at one and the same time establishes the claims of materialism over philosophy but uses philosophical means to do so. Similarly, Klein makes a case for the claims of activism over theory but fi nds herself using theory to persuade her readers. This philosophical pretension to non-philosophy might be thought of as a defi nition of the political as ‘social and historical reality’. Indeed politics as social and his-torical reality may only be made possible by aberration, e.g. the necessary failure of action or materiality to dominate all other terms. However, if we are able to begin the task of thinking ‘action’ as irreducibly conceptual then we will begin to recognise the otherness of experience that makes politics possible and which the idea of the New International demands.

7 Promises, Promises(This Is Also Why . . . )

What remains hidden in the everyday use of language, the fundamen-tal incompatibility between grammar and meaning, becomes explicit when the linguistic structures are stated, as is the case here, in politi-cal terms.

—Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

—James Tiberius Kirk (Captain, USS Enterprise)

So, if the invocation of ‘democracy’ is not an example of the ‘well-inten-tioned liberalism’

1 that some have associated with Derrida’s articulations on

the political, then surely his late concern with ‘hospitality’ is. At fi rst glance there seems to be something shockingly inadequate about ‘hospitality’ as a political, or ethical, gesture at this time. Certainly, it seems something of a bathetic conclusion to a process of philosophical inquiry which began with such a radical deconstruction of Eurocentrism and the inequalities of phal-logocentrism. Of course, looking to Derrida’s later texts on democracy, sovereignty, fraternity, the death penalty or hospitality as the telos of a writing career, or as a deferred application of his early insights, will always be the wrong way to read him (a gesture that would ignore the effects of iteration and the trace which Derrida himself proposes), just as viewing hospitality in isolation from the work on democracy would be a mistake. Nothing in these later texts contradicts anything in the earlier ones, while familiarity with the earlier texts would reveal a keen Derridean interest in all things spectral, proper, material, cultural and sovereign.

However, even if one accepts that it will be necessary to address the mas-sive questions of the overwhelmingly inertial power of the political logos by a lateral strategy of deconstructing the margins of the political heri-tage—as Rousseau puts it in Book 3, Chapter 4, of The Social Contract, ‘if you had the world at the end of a long enough lever, you could move it with a fi nger; but to support the world on your shoulders you would need to be Hercules’

2—the idea of hospitality remains something of an unlikely candi-

date as a possible fulcrum for displacing the work of the logos. This chapter

Promises, Promises (This Is Also Why . . . ) 109

addresses this embarrassment. After an account of the logic of hospitality it will attempt to answer this diffi culty of deconstruction reading politics, namely, the relation between the classic texts of what is quickly assembling itself, against all expectation, as ‘the deconstructive tradition’ and the later texts of ‘Derrida-Lite’. In this way I will propose Paul de Man’s reading of The Social Contract in Allegories of Philosophy as an exemplary perfor-mance of the work of hospitality. I will do so in order to ‘drill down’ into the archive of deconstruction to show the complex fi gural and philosophi-cal manoeuvres out of which ‘hospitality’ emerges as a radical shorthand for the entire business of deconstruction.

ALTERING HOSPITALITY

Hospitality is one of those terms in Derrida which seem initially to respond to the singularity of a particular reading context but which once put in play provides us with a general description of the greater fi eld of textu-ality. Other similar terms include spectrality, perjury, monolingualism, shibboleth, and so on. These tropes are of the same order as the quasi-transcendental chain of substitutive equivalences for ‘deconstruction’ such as différance, hybridity, arche-writing and so on. However, they also work in a catachrestic way to perform from within their textual deployment an opening to the wider structures of textuality which this chain describes. In this sense they are similar in their use to the exemplary terms which de Man sets up as allegories of the fi gural dimension of language, such as the promise, the contract, translation or confession. The expanded, or metaphorical, sense of these fi gures then works metonymically to name, transform and step beyond the greater textual system which puts it in play. I will return to this operation in my account of de Man. However, it would seem obvious then that ‘hospitality’, as the term is used by Derrida, will have only a strategic and contextual relation to its accepted usage in the Western cultural inheritance. A contextual relation because it can only be understood in the context of Derrida’s writing on democracy and sover-eignty; a strategic relation because it will return to undo the conceptual orders of patriarchy, bourgeois humanism and well-intentioned liberalism with which it has been historically associated.

Some aphorisms: Hospitality is neither an ethics nor a politics.3 It is het-

erogeneous to all ethics and all politics; hospitality makes every ethic and all politics impossible. Hospitality requires us to think the law, the nation, the self, sovereignty, action and programme otherwise. To ask what would be the ethical or political programme of hospitality would be to miss the point. The injunction of hospitality is that one must make decisions—for decisions are always made—without the assurance of ontological foundations. Noth-ing could be further from a well-intentioned liberalism of private conscience. Hospitality places incompatible injunctions on the moment of decision. It


has no programme; its mode is always singular and specifi c to a particular instant. On the one hand, hospitality is an unconditional openness to the other. The other is not the same as the stranger, although the two are indis-sociable and the ‘stranger’ [étranger] is the locus of hospitality. Hospitality is not a matter of receiving a thing or a being; it is enigmatic beyond both intention and object. Nor is hospitality itself an object of knowledge or a mode of being present. Rather, hospitality (and this is why it could stand as a substitutive equivalence for ‘deconstruction’) is what happens. As Der-rida puts it, ‘hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others’.

4 The other is an event of both alterity and singularity. It arrives

unexpectedly and unpredictably before a decision can be made concerning it. Its arrival is neither chronological nor logical but presupposes an acqui-escence of welcome prior to intention or knowledge. In this way the other arrives to determine the law which makes the decision. Such arrivals, con-ditioned by a ‘primordial’ or ‘arche-’ welcoming, mean that the subject can never know how to make the decision that the arrival of the other compels. Thus, hospitality requires an unconditional welcome which the subject can-not legislate against. At the same time, and on the other hand, such a pure opening by the other is impossible when the other arrives in its singularity. Just as this unconditional opening would be heterogeneous to any politics, law or ethics which attempted to condition it by rule or by programme, it is indissociable from these conditions. In order for hospitality to be effec-tive as a welcome, rather than merely opening itself onto ruin, it must take place within certain conditions. There needs to be formulated criteria and predictable boundaries within which hospitality takes place in order for it to operate under the name of hospitality. In other words, the hospitality of visitation by an unforeseeable other can only take place under the condi-tions of a hospitality of invitation, even if this welcome is forced on the host and holds the host hostage by an act of hostile and inhospitable opening. However, the terms of a conditional hospitality are themselves determined by the idea of an unconditional hospitality which guides the very meaning of this term. Conditional hospitality is only possible because one thinks one knows what a pure hospitality might look like. For example, hospitality is made possible by the idea of the home, just as an unconditional hospitality would be that which ruined the home and so rendered the idea of the home an impossibility. Hospitality must exceed the law at the very point where it is governed by juridical conditions, opposing the law in its aspiration to universal singularity, even if the law of unconditional hospitality relies on the idea of the law. Thus, hospitality trembles on its own threshold, seem-ing to forbid that which it has already allowed. Hospitality seems to be auto-immunized against itself; one might say hospitality deconstructs itself. Hospitality is hospitality under erasure. This much is clear.

This undialectizable antimony means precisely that the subject (always already other to itself) cannot know how to make a decision regarding hos-pitality. It is for this reason that hospitality requires us to invent a solution


to this irreconcilable aporia in which the terms of a conditional hospitality is the impossible idea of an unconditional hospitality (which would itself be a tyranny) and the demand of unconditional hospitality can only take place within the boundaries of juridical, political and ethical conditions. Such an invention asks us to think a process of possibility for the impossible. It is not enough to accept the paralysis of this aporia; rather, hospitality requires us to overcome this immobility. The impossible must be made pos-sible. Not so that the sovereignty of the possible can be reaffi rmed; rather, impossibility can be overcome only when it is possible to become impos-sible. Such an invention lies on the side of other impossibilities such as the poetic, justice and democracy. This is not as impossible as it sounds. For example, giving (the gift) can only occur when the other does not recognise the act of giving. A recognition of the gift leads to an economy of exchange and reward; this structure is well established. However, the impossible might occur in a giving beyond giving, a giving which could not be recog-nised as such and which did not initiate a cycle of debt. The impossible might also occur in a forgiveness beyond forgiving, a forgiveness which forgave the only thing possible to forgive, namely the unforgivable (forgiv-ing the forgivable is not forgiveness, merely programmatic and affordable largesse). Such acts would make the impossible possible beyond the power and agency of the subject. They are at once acts of intention but they also invent beyond intention, interrupting the self and ruining intention. To act out of duty or debt or ethical necessity does not in itself require us to act beyond the general law of duty or debt or ethics. However, to step beyond this law requires a reinvention of the law every time one acts. Every single occasion must be a unique act of poetic invention which shakes up the dog-matism of the law. Hospitality asks us to invent anew, on every occasion, a unique act of hospitality which seems to occur for the fi rst time in history and which moves beyond the rules and laws of hospitality even if it is only an application of those rules. For example, one might imagine the granting of asylum to a person or group who did not qualify for such rights under the law of a nation-state because it was the necessarily just thing to do in this particular case. In this way a decision is made not through applica-tion of a law but out of the necessity enforced by the other through an act of invention which at once relies on the laws of hospitality (it is necessary to be hospitable in this instance) just as it exceeds the rules of hospitality engaged by the state and transforms those rules by introducing fl exibility, precedent and perversion.

I do not think that this is merely an elaborate, primrose path to a liberal conclusion, even if the well-intentioned might also wish to grant asylum in this particular case. Just because liberalism gives democracy, justice and tolerance a bad name this does not mean that we can proceed without these things even if it will be necessary to exceed their metaphysical foundations. Such poetic invention has little to do with liberalism particularly if ‘well-intentioned’ is a synonym for ‘good conscience’. Nor is it political irenism.


Hospitality calls for work; above all it asks for a labour of thinking. Even if hospitality overruns the possibility of either an ethics or a politics, its action cannot be separated from the locus of the political and the ethical. Indeed, it will be necessary to deduce an ethics, and therefore a politics, from the aporias of hospitality. There will be a necessary relation, not only because hospitality is what always already happens as culture, but because it will be necessary to determine the ‘least bad’ decision as part of the act of poetic invention. Democracy and tolerance are ‘less bad’ than Fascism, even if the corrupt and hypocritical nature of liberal democracy undermines its aspira-tions. The point here would be that the calculation of the ‘least bad’ would only be specifi c to a singular instance and will require constant renegotia-tion because there is no guarantee that a particular calculation will remain ‘least bad’ when caught up in the operational iterability of a political or historical process. In this way such a calculation is utterly incalculable, or at least such a calculation has no guarantee of stability. Thus, there can be no programme and so no politics of hospitality. Perhaps. I say perhaps, because what I have just described here may also simply be the way in which poli-tics as such works. If hospitality is culture itself and not one ethic amongst others then this constant ruin of the opening by the opening must also be a description of how politics functions in its practical orientation as opposed to the way in which politics is thought through in terms of its ontological or metaphysical foundations. One might be able to say that hospitality is politics, or a politics deduced from an ethics, if one recognised that such a politics or ethics involved a radical separation from the traditional under-standing of these terms. It would be a politics beyond politics, if one could still call such ad hoc poetic improvisation a politics. I believe that it may be possible still to do so; indeed this may be the very shape of all democratic politics (bearing in mind that ‘democracy’ and ‘politics’ might be contradic-tory terms). I will return to this point in my account of de Man. One should note here that this situation is not the same thing as ‘pragmatism’, which would calculate its idea of the ‘least bad’ in relation to a presupposed telos, according to criteria determined by that telos.

DE MANDING HOSPITALITY

In Allegories of Reading de Man is frequently given to making seemingly outrageous assertions, which although self-evident to him are diffi cult to explain given the context in which they appear. The closing sentence of ‘Promises’ provides an excellent example of this. Let us at least attempt to understand the context of this sentence by quoting the entire fi nal, brief paragraph:

The reintroduction of the promise, despite the fact that its impossibility has been established (the pattern that identifi es the Social Contract as


a textual allegory), does not occur at the discretion of the writer. We are not merely pointing out an inconsistency, a weakness in the text of the Social Contract that could have been avoided by simply omitting sentimental or demagogical passages. The point is not that the Social Contract relapses into textual activism because it does so explicitly, in section and passages that can be isolated and quoted by themselves. Even without these passages, the Social Contract would still promise by inference, perhaps more effectively than if Rousseau had not had the naïveté, or the good faith, to promise openly. The redoubtable effi cacy of the text is due to the rhetorical model of which it is a version. This model is a fact of language over which Rousseau himself has no control. Just as any other reader, he is bound to misread his text as a promise of political change. The error is not within the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act. Die Sprache verspricht (sich); to the extent that it is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth. This is also why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history.

5

Quoting this paragraph in its entirety not only explains some of the contex-tualizing manoeuvres leading up to this fi nal sentence, but also demonstrates the apparent and infuriating lack of context for this assertion. Such seem-ingly randomly produced sentences which stop the reader in their tracks (‘questions of valorization can be relevantly considered only after the rhe-torical status of the text has been clarifi ed’

6 would be another good exam-

ple) make de Man’s essays an exemplary case of the allegorical system it identifi es. These sentences are at once decontextualized outrages and at the same time, on inspection, logically coherent, rigorously consistent with the rest of the essay and completely correct. The manner in which they appear resembles the random generation of meaning by the textual machine charac-terized by de Man earlier in the essay and in the closing pages of his reading of the Confessions. Such sentences make and unmake the essays in Allego-ries, functioning grammatically while putting into abeyance their referential meaning. I would like to attempt to ‘read’ the fi nal sentence of ‘Promises’ in relation to what de Man’s essay (and Rousseau’s text) tells us about the nature of the political and to tie this to the essay’s poetics of hospitality.

‘This is also why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history’. Let us begin by identifying the terms here which produce such an infuriating effect; fi rstly, ‘this is also why’. This ‘this’ is as much to say that the preceding paragraph, which contains few surprises for those familiar with the rhetorical model, will have been a suffi cient basis for pro-posing that textual allegories ‘generate history’. On fi rst acquaintance it is precisely the inadequacy of ‘this’ paragraph which makes the claim seem so bold. However, it would seem that the paragraph is merely a supplement to previous arguments strong enough to support this claim, ‘this is also why’. The ‘why’ here suggests the adequacy of the explanation to the assertion


‘this is also why’, rather than what is actually happening, namely that the fi nal sentence is so outrageous a claim that it threatens to capsize the entire essay, just as it has pulled the rug from under the reader’s feet (chose your own preferred metaphor of collapse). The level of rhetorical complexity of the textual allegory in question has been well established by the essay and this fi nal sentence compels the reader to return to its explication for clues as to the meaning of this seemingly self-evident assertion, ‘this is also why’. Perhaps, what is most baffl ing about this sentence is its fi nal verb and object, ‘generate history’. De Man has conspicuously failed to elaborate on ‘history’ up until this moment, although there has been an important refer-ence in this respect, while the question of ‘generation’ has only been asso-ciated in the essay, thus far, with the grammatical function of language. To ‘generate history’ will, for de Man, undoubtedly be a matter of the complexity of textual allegory, but its introduction here seems radically to open out, even rupture, a detailed reading which seemed to be heading for neatly choreographed closure—readers of de Man ought to know better. De Man at least has the good faith, or the naivety, to provide this rupture for himself. Each of these points will require to be traced through the essay in order to show that de Man’s text is in fact a profound engagement with the problems of history and with the political. In this way one might read the fi nal sentence of de Man’s essay as not following consequentially from the topic of the paragraph in which it appears but as a coda to the whole essay, ‘this [the argument of the entire essay] is also why . . . ’ Namely, it is irrelevant that de Man has not mentioned history prior to this point or that the essay has seemed to refer to the question of the promise as a performa-tive speech act, because the work of the essay can be transferred over into an understanding of history and of the political in general.

The connection between the political and the literary writings of Paul de Man is enigmatic and, at fi rst sight, entirely contradictory. On the one hand, this essay represents the most concentrated expression of what could be termed, with due hesitation, de Man’s rhetorical ‘method’. It falls at the precise moment in Allegories of Reading when, having established the claims of a rhetorical practice over a hermeneutics or semiology of reading, and having developed the idea of a deconstruction of a metaphorical model which leads to the replacement of that model by ‘homological text systems whose referential authority is both asserted and undermined by their fi gural logic’,

7 de Man wishes to deepen the complexity of the allegorical model. In

the opening paragraph de Man suggests that the rhetorical model already places ethics in question. He notes that the meaning of a text, undone by its own fi gural logic, can only be said to be ethical to the extent this ‘the-matic’ category ‘is torn apart by the aporia that constitutes it, thus making the categories effective to the precise extent that they eliminate the value system in which their classifi cation is grounded’.

8 This may seem like an

exemplary defi nition of the interruption of the ethical identifi ed by Derrida by the trope of hospitality. However, while for de Man such other ‘thematic


categories’—and the question of the theme is not irrelevant here9—include

the religious and the eudaemonic, the category of the political poses a set of specifi c diffi culties for the rhetorical process. The convolutions of ‘Prom-ises’ will revolve around precisely the ways in which political allegories work in a more profoundly complex way than de Man has considered up till now. One should note here that de Man does not explicitly tie his read-ing of Rousseau to the question of hospitality. Rather, hospitality emerges in de Man’s text as a question through a number of links in his exposition of allegory and the general discursive logic of his essay. For the purposes of my argument here it will be necessary to simultaneously return to de Man’s account of the political as contractual and to fl ag up the instances and pat-tern of his concern with hospitality.

De Man’s reading of The Social Contract begins with a digression into another text by Rousseau, ‘Du bonheur public’. This is not simply a mat-ter of approaching the central corpus of Rousseau through its most mar-ginal aspects; rather, de Man chooses this text because while its arguments operate in parallel to The Social Contract, the fragmentary nature of ‘Du bonheur public’ demonstrates a more decisive pattern at work within The Social Contract which is masked by its seemingly uniform style. This jux-taposition, fi rstly, points to the extended and ruptured nature of this appar-ent canonical monolith, demonstrating the ways in which its own textual excessive overruns is thematic divisions at the most decisive of indices (de Man’s reading will go on to engage with the Geneva manuscript as well). Secondly, and in so doing, it suggests that the text of The Social Contract is exemplary of the logic of fi gural deconstruction of a system of relation-ships which, according to de Man, in the paragraph prior to his fi rst refer-ence to ‘Du bonheur public’, ‘always reveals a more fragmented stage that can be called natural with regard to the system that is being undone’.

10 In

this respect the corrupted, contradictory and broken text of ‘Du bonheur public’ reveals, for de Man, ‘a more faithful outline of Rousseau’s thought patterns’

11 because here there is no narrative structure to fi ll in the gaps

between incompatible affi rmations. The discussion of ‘Du bonheur public’ revolves around the opposition between public and private values in rela-tion to the political constitution of the state. Here de Man sees an echo with the guiding division between general will [volonté générale] and particular will [volonté particulière] in The Social Contract. De Man’s point here is to show that such divisions rest upon a schematic textual operation in which a piece of writing will set up a division, such as that between general and particular will, that it will regard as a ‘natural’ state. This natural state, like the very text of The Social Contract itself, will be preceded by a more frag-mented set of relationships, more ‘natural’ than itself. The positing of the original natural state (such as general and particular will) is the inversion of the deconstructive process in which the more fragmented set of relations is at once dissolved by the ‘natural’ state and has its authority, as a ‘natu-ral’ state, usurped by that successor. However, such a manoeuvre ought to


alert deconstruction to the existence of the fragmentary set of relations hid-den within the monadic totality of the text and so what appears ‘natural’ quickly becomes a ‘self-deconstructive term’,

12 and the text will slip into the

endless generation of ‘natural states’ more ‘natural’ than the ones revealed by the fi gurative gestures of a text which at once disarticulate and retotalize the value of nature and thus render that value irredeemably ambiguous.

The consequences of this are multiple. Firstly, de Man puts down as an opening gambit the principle that in terms of the fi gural system there is no structural difference between any set of ‘natural’ relations such as general and particular will or any other binary (he sites the example of law [droit] and natural religion). In this way, the conceptual basis of the Western polit-ical heritage, as the assertion of necessarily incompatible natural states, will work in a similar manner in its entirety. From the point of view of the rhetorical model it makes no difference that one text, such as, say, Julie, narrates characters while The Social Contract narrates concepts. Here I am carrying over de Man’s earlier comments concerning the Profession de foi. Now, on the one hand de Man seems to be decoupling these texts from their ‘political signifi cance’. As he will go on to state:

We are not concerned with the technically political signifi cance of this text, still less with an evaluation of the political and ethical praxis that can be derived from it. Our reading merely tries to defi ne the rhe-torical patterns that organize the distribution and the movement of key terms—while contending that questions of valorization can be rel-evantly considered only after the rhetorical status of the text has been clarifi ed.

13

However, it would be a vulgar error to read this as a dismissal of the rela-tion between texts and the political (this relation will be the entire point of de Man’s analysis). The political signifi cance of The Social Contract in the history of European republicanism, say, is not the object of analysis here (this is well documented elsewhere). The tracing of such a history would be a ‘technical’ affair requiring different skills. Nor is the object of analysis the derivation of ethico-political conclusions from Rousseau’s text. This would be an odd political stratagem for anyone writing in the late twenti-eth century. Conversely, it is not a matter of contending the value of Rous-seau’s thought: this would be churlish, self-congratulatory and ahistorical. Rather, de Man suggests that if we are familiar with the general rhetorical pattern of political discourse, as discourse, a discourse which mistakes itself for a promise of political change, then it will be possible to exercise some critical leverage on that discourse. This is not to prioritize the lin-guistic over the actual; rather, it is to show the ways in which the actual is caught up in a conceptual order compromised by its rhetorical structure. However, de Man will go on to demonstrate that the rhetorical structure of political discourse is quite different from that encountered thus far in


Allegories of Reading and will require a further complication of ways in which he identifi es the organisation of rhetorical patterns in texts.

This strategy provides the reader of de Man with everything that will be required for a general deconstruction of the texts of political philosophy. If we read de Man’s account of The Social Contract as exemplary of a wider schema of textuality then we might begin by positing, with de Man, that ‘any [here de Man inserts ‘Rousseau’] text that puts such polarities into play will therefore have to set up the fi ction of a natural process that functions both as a deconstructive instrument and as the outcome of the deconstruction’.

14 It might be tempting to refl ect these insights back onto

Derrida’s formulation of hospitality to suggest that hospitality is both the instrument and outcome of his deconstruction (which it is, and this is what draws hospitality into a quasi-transcendental logic) or that the relation between conditional and unconditional hospitality will only be a substi-tute for the more fragmentary relational system between singularity and alterity it dissolves (this would also be true). However, this would not tell us anything Derrida has not already stated about his own text. Rather, it will be necessary to understand both how Derrida’s deconstruction of hos-pitality is self-immunized against the confusion and slippage of the politi-cal as such (hospitality after all is not a politics, at least not in that sense) and how, in fact, the political itself moves beyond this fi rst principle of rhetorical analysis.

If it were the case that The Social Contract operated in exactly the same way as du ‘Bonheur public’ (grafting a second deconstruction of the frag-mented state onto a deconstruction of the ‘natural’ state which usurps it, undoing the ‘natural’ process, revealing difference in totality while main-taining an illusion of identity, showing meaning not to be a matter of neces-sity but a function of incompatible codes within language) then politics would be merely an incidental theme for Rousseau and The Social Con-tract merely another allegory of unreadability. The only advantage to be gained here for the political text would be that the referential power of its allegorical narrative would be at its most effective when its ‘epistemologi-cal authority was most thoroughly discredited’.

15 In other words, it would

be precisely The Social Contract’s status as a textual allegory which would allow it to be mistaken for ‘a promise of political change’, as de Man puts it in his fi nal paragraph. However, this would render the political no more of a privileged interpretative function than metaphor or the self, to name two examples already covered by de Man. This, sadly, is what de Man has often been read as stating. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, fi rstly, a rhetorical reading strategy dismisses such simplifi cation which reinscribes the divide between the ‘literary’ and the ‘political’ by subsuming political texts into an understanding of the literary. Secondly, de Man’s explication of the aberrations of allegory is itself able to account for this misreading (‘the rhetorical reading leaves these fallacies behind by accounting, at least to some degree, for their predictable occurrence’

16).


That is to say that one might consider the binary between the political and the literary as a natural state which substitutes for a set of more fragmen-tary relations, while the mistaken equation of the fi gural patterns in politi-cal texts with their referential insignifi cance is a second attempt to graft an illusion of identity onto this initial binary. Rousseau’s political writing will allow de Man to ‘take one step further’ beyond this naivety.

17 He goes

on to state that what is diffi cult about understanding the structure of the political entity is that it is ‘established on a contractual basis’ and so ‘dif-fers from that of an empirical or natural entity’.

18

One might well note that it is in the previous paragraph to this that de Man makes the claim that ‘questions of valorization can be relevantly con-sidered only after the rhetorical status of the text has been clarifi ed’. In other words, clarifying the rhetorical status of the text will determine the political nature of the text and thus its interpretative value. Hence, what seems to be an example of the irresponsibility often wrongly associated with de Man, on closer inspection actually works to ground his argument in a thorough going concern with the ipseity of politics. De Man is in fact suggesting that it would be extremely dangerous for political texts to operate in the same way as the textual allegories he has previously analysed. He states:

After the deconstruction of the metaphorical model has taken place, the attribute of naturalness shifts from the metaphorical totality to the metonymic aggregate [as in the misreading of moving the binary between the literary and the political into an understanding of the po-litical as only literary], as was the case for the ‘state of nature’ . . . However, at this point in the argument, the evocation of this natural synthesis [by Rousseau] . . . is not held up as the desirable wholeness that political units must try to emulate, but as the very opposite: they are precisely the misleading model after which no sound political sys-tem should be patterned.

19

This is the key to de Man’s interest in The Social Contract and, given the important position this text occupies in the argument of Allegories of Read-ing, in Rousseau per se. Namely, that Rousseau recognises the impossibility (and even ‘pernicious’, to use de Man’s word, nature) of an idea of political society founded on the myth of the natural. Here de Man evokes Rousseau’s polemic against Diderot in the Geneva manuscript (folding the extended reading of du ‘Bonheur public’ onto the extended margins of The Social Contract), made more explicit in the fi nal text of The Social Contract, that a political model based on natural ties (such as the family) is, according to de Man, ‘a mythical aberration devoid of truth and of virtue’.

20 It is of

interest to note here that this allegorical aberration of the natural state is precisely the way in which ideology works (‘all organic and theotropic ideologies’, as de Man puts it

21) to install the subject in its imaginary set of

relations with the real world. This will bear further analysis later.


The interest of the contract for de Man is not just that the contract undoes itself, like the textual allegories he has previously encountered, but that the structure of the contract involves a degree of complexity that promotes a crisis in defi nitional language.

22 The contract is not a dialectical synthesis or

a system of totalization. The general will for Rousseau, says de Man, is not a synthesis of particular wills; rather, the general will and the particular will are fundamentally incompatible. In which case the operation of the general will cannot function according to a totalizing shift from the metaphorical to the metonymic, as was the case in Julie or the Second Discourse. Rather, the contract works according to what de Man terms a double rapport, in which ‘the same single entity . . . can be considered as the referent of two entirely divergent texts, the fi rst based on the proper meaning engendered by a consistent conceptual system, the second on the radical discontinuity and estrangement of noncomparable systems of relationship that allow for no acts of judgement and consequently, for no stable meaning or identity’.

23 The

example de Man uses to introduce the double rapport is ‘property’, in which contradictory semiological systems are at work. In the fi rst, ‘a principle of functional identifi cation between the owning subject and the owned object is implied’,

24 as in the case of the King of France in which the land defi nes the

owner and the owner defi nes the land through a semantically unambiguous gesture that confers a natural state on property relations. Individual and pri-vate ownership might be said to work in the same way whereby proper names, as de Man suggests, ‘satisfy semiological fantasies about the adequation of sign to meaning’, even to the point of seductively tolerating ‘extreme forms of economic oppression’.

25 In this way, disputes between property owners

can be tolerated and managed as legitimate disagreements between similar semiological units. In the second system, the meaning of property is deter-mined by its relation to the state. The state’s relation to property is double. On the one hand, it guarantees the rights to dispute between private owners, while on the other—and as a State—it is in confl ict with and estranged from other States which it at once views as owners with equal rights and as strang-ers from whom it is legitimately entitled to appropriate property (this ques-tion of the stranger will preoccupy us later). This is the double rapport that Rousseau identifi es when he suggests that the ‘right of fi rst occupancy’ may be ‘less absurd, less repellent than the right of conquest’ but nevertheless ‘on close examination . . . it is not more legitimate’.

26 In this way, private prop-

erty as part of a state has a different relation to its outside than to its inside. The idea of property emerges, as de Man explains, with this ‘paradoxical juxtaposition or interference of relational networks’.

27 Thus, private property

is no less contractual than public property but the arch of the double rapport allows for the simultaneous and contradictory operation of both a reliable system of arbitration between similar units and the legitimation of the arbi-trary and excessive powers of the State in relation to property.

The two systems are noncomparable and the latter powerful enough in its contingency and arbitrariness to undo the work of the former. However,


without the latter the former could not come into existence. As de Man puts it, ‘behind the stability and decorum of private law lurk the “brig-ands” and the “pirates” whose acts shape the realities of politics between nations’.

28 The diffi cult adjustment that the double rapport manages to

negotiate is to hold these antinomies in a single structure whereby both are simultaneously possible and equally necessary. The signifi cance of this situation is, according to de Man, that ‘it pervades all aspects of the politi-cal society’.

29 The tension between the conditional hospitality of invitation

and the unconditional hospitality of visitation might be read in this way. Not simply because de Man is describing an exemplary aporetic structure, in which defi nitional language is overrun by the performance of the aporia, but because, as de Man will explain, this structure revolves around a radi-cal estrangement as the basis of every political entity.

For example, the relation of the individual to the state (The Social Con-tract as such) works in precisely the same way. The individual has less lee-way in his/her actions with regard to the law than the state does in respect to international politics. The individual could never be legally allowed to exercise the violence that is regularly and lawfully wielded on its behalf in relationships with other nations. This is not because the actions of the State constitute an amalgam of individuals’ best interests but because the private individual’s self-interests are radically at odds with their public interests as members of the State: no metaphorical totalization is possible which could substitute one part for the whole or vice versa. As de Man puts it, ‘the double relationship [double rapport] of the individual toward the State is thus based on the coexistence of two distinct rhetorical models, the fi rst self-refl ective or specular, the other estranged. But what the individual is estranged from is precisely the executive activity of his own State as sou-verain’.

30 The power of the sovereign is ‘foreign’ (de Man’s word) to the

individual because it does not have the same double and self-contradictory structure that falls upon the individual. The State knows no such contradic-tions, as Rousseau notes: ‘à l’égard de l’étranger, il devient un Etre simple ou un individu’.

31

De Man takes this opportunity to translate Rousseau’s souverain, ‘with some historical hindsight’, as ‘executive power’.

32 This translation is justi-

fi ed by Rousseau’s suggestion that sovereign authority cannot be linked to an individual person but rather ‘this public person thus constituted by the union of all others . . . is called by its members the State [Etat] when it is passive, souverain [the sovereign, executive power] when it is active’.

33

The distinction is one between the State as a mere entity or space in which the action it makes possible takes place and executive power as the exer-cise of the political body. The signifi cance of the double rapport is that it makes possible the contradictory generalization of the particular will into an exercise of legal executive power. However, in so doing this structure introduces a diremption between ‘purpose and action’ which had remained unifi ed at the level of private interest. De Man suggests: ‘it follows that the


divergence which prevails, within the State, in the relationship between the citizen and the executive is in fact an unavoidable estrangement between political rights and laws on the one hand, and political action and history on the other’.

34 In other words, within the political event, at the moment of

decision, there is a diremption between conceptualization and action. This gap is opened up by the profoundly inhuman otherness of the text which intervenes to sunder action from theory or thought. The other does not cleave action from thought but rather holds both together as incompatible codes within the illusion of an aporetic unity, the latter being impossible without the former, the former being undone by the work of the latter. Let us note two things at this point. Firstly, as the example taken from Rous-seau concerning the State and property demonstrates, this intervention of the other is not necessarily for the best. While it is necessary for the func-tioning of the aporia this estrangement can certainly produce results which, far from being the ‘least violent’ or ‘least bad’, can be seriously unjust. Secondly, this inhuman otherness and estrangement of the subject from both itself and the State, imagining that a ‘politics of hospitality’ were to work in the same way, is also why deconstruction is not well-intentioned liberalism. ‘Intention’ in this context would be a complex thing, both the primary trope of hospitality and the structure of iteration that undid any attempt at hospitality.

Now, while the double rapport—as the structure of the contract—makes the generalization from particular to general will possible, such a manoeu-vre does not render a closed text. If, in the case of the State, the general will came to be the fi xed law exercised by the State then this permanence would lead the State to a position of ‘naturalness’, as described in the other textual allegories de Man reads at the start of this essay, and so to its speedy dis-solution as an aberrantly formed monologic signifi cation. Rather, de Man points out that ‘the meaning of the contractual text has to remain sus-pended and undecidable’.

35 The aporia of legality and illegality needs to be

performed, negotiated and re-established on a case by case basis. Thus, de Man concludes, ‘revolution and legality by no means cancel each other out, since the text of the law is, per defi nition, in a condition of unpredictable change. Its mode of existence is necessarily temporal and historical, though in a strictly nonteleological sense’.

36 Two things to note here. Firstly, that

revolution and the law would be another exemplary set of incompatible codes which operated inconsistently with respect to individuals caught in the contract between one as the condition of the other and both exercising arbitrary powers against the individual whose rights against the arbitrary exercise of such power is upheld by both. The individual is estranged from the law by its arbitrary revolutionary potential and estranged from revolu-tion by its random exercise of legality. Secondly, the mode of existence of the legal text is said to be ‘necessarily temporal and historical’. This will bear some further analysis if, as the logic of Allegories compels us to do, we accept the contractual model of the double rapport as the fundamental


form of a textual pact indicative of the ethical, juridical and political (any entity ‘be it property, as national State or any political institution’

37). The

political institution or the State is to be thought of as a ‘legal text’, its ‘legal-ity’ characterized by the structural estrangement of the double rapport, i.e. by its ability to produce juridical generalization. It is not just that generality ‘is rooted in the selective applicability of the law to the part that makes up the political whole, as the exclusion of the part that does not partake of this whole: “This is why the general will of an entire people is not general for a foreign individual [un particulier étranger]”’.

38 Rather, estrangement is not

merely implied by the idea of a temporal, spatial or psychological absence but by the very idea of particularity itself. In so far as any individual is particular, s/he is estranged (de Man uses the word ‘alienated’

39) from the

law, which at the same time exists only in relation to their individual being. Estrangement here is not determined by the inside-outside topography of the State’s borders or its juridical precinct but by the textual aporia of the law which at once rejects all particularization and draws down the possi-bility of generalization from it.

40

From here de Man extrapolates that within the textual model particu-larization corresponds to reference as the application of ‘an undetermined, general potential for meaning to a specifi c unit’.

41 However, generalization

is possible due to the text’s ‘indifference’ to the particularity of referential meaning in favour of the proliferation of the ‘preordained, coded repetition of a specifi c gesture or set of gestures’.

42 In other words, generalization cor-

responds to grammar and from here de Man proceeds to derive his famous defi nition of ‘text’ in the next paragraph. The closing sentence of which reads, ‘Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consid-eration of applicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself, grammatical logic can function only if its referential consequences are dis-regarded’.

43 However, law can only function in relation to particular cases:

‘only by thus referring it back to particular praxis can the justice of the law be tested by referential verifi ability, or by deviation from this verifi cation’.

44

In fact de Man proceeds to pull out the second half of this defi nition of text from a discussion of how justice is to be determined from particular refer-ence in The Social Contract. It is the incompatibility between reference and grammar which renders the diremption between the law and its applicabil-ity (justice). Thus, de Man notes, reversing the allegorical deconstruction, such a gap can only be bridged by the elaboration of some deceit within a textual performance. The particular I am destroys the generality of the text, stealing from the text ‘the very meaning which, according to the text, we are not entitled’ retaining ‘the foolish hope that the theft will go unno-ticed’.

45 In a certain sense the fi nal chapter of Allegories is merely an elabo-

ration of this point through a reading of Rousseau’s Confessions in which de Man demonstrates the ways in which the allegorical system attempts to justify this theft: ‘Justice is unjust; no wonder that the language of justice is also the language of guilt’.

46 Hence, this reading of The Social Contract


works as the pivot for the whole of de Man’s critical linguistic analysis and everything that depends upon it.

The divergence between reference and grammar is precisely the fi gural dimension of language. This divergence, like the antimony between the State or the law and the individual, is, according to de Man, ‘as self-decon-structive as it is unavoidable’.

47 Politics provides de Man with the most

systematic expression of this situation. In politics the discrepancy between political action and political prescription48 takes the form of a dichotomy between the performative and the constative, which both have to be con-sidered at the same time while being simultaneously incompatible and impossible to separate. The grammatical function of the political opens up a non-referential generative system, while a fi gural system closed off by transcendental signifi cation subverts the grammatical mode to which the political entity, or legal text, as such, owes its existence. Thus, for de Man, such a text can only act deceptively—like the thieving Lawmaker in The Social Contract—towards its constative function which it knows to be impossible. At the same time if a text such as this does not act then it cannot state what its constative function has determined. It is not a simple matter of The Social Contract eliding its narrative status in order to pres-ent itself as a model (‘a constitutional machine’

49) for political structures.

Rather this allegorical procedure (the ‘double rapport’ or ‘the law of the text’) according to de Man, ‘is too devious [devious in the way in which it relates to its own constative impossibility] to allow for such a simple relationship between model and example, and the theory of politics inevi-tably turns into history, the allegory of its inability to achieve the status of a science’.

50 In other words, such texts generate history because as soon

as the constative model of political theory is put into motion, this alle-gorical structure of the double rapport will immediately place that model in dissolution as a performative history. This contract is both statutory (constative, theoretical, referential) and operative (performative, active, grammatical) and must be considered from a double and incompatible per-spective. The performance of this text, because it suspends the referential function, always leads to an excess of meaning (according to a logic of ‘supplementary effi ciency’

51) which steps beyond the original theoretical

input. In other words, the power generated by political entities such as the State is greater than the powers of the theoretical model which put them in play, just as the law can effortlessly act against an individual who would require the exercise of all their reserves to combat the State. De Man describes this situation as ‘a kind of political thermodynamics governed by a debilitating entropy [the powerful inertia of the State]’ which ‘illus-trates the practical consequences of a linguistic structure in which gram-mar and fi gure, statement and speech act do not converge’.

52 There is no

doubt a temptation here, even more so than in the case of the Confessions, to read this analysis of the ‘increasing deviation of the law of the State from the state of the law, between constitutional prescription and political


action’,53

back against de Man’s own biography—even if de Man has just given us good theoretical reasons as to why such a straightforward applica-tion would be impossible. This is particularly the case when de Man goes on to suggest that this production of value within the political text, as a matter of linguistic-epistemological divergence, leaves no ‘reliable criterion of political value judgement’.

54 However, and here I think is the key to

understanding de Man’s remarkable fi nal sentence, it is the fact that the contractual model (which de Man explicitly claims as the ‘linguistic model in general’) does not allow for the coincidence of political theory and its phenomenal manifestation that ‘implies that the mode of existence of the contract is temporal, or that time is the phenomenal category produced by the discrepancy’.

55 The performative speech act does not refer to a situa-tion existing in the present (the constative is impossible) but rather refers to a promised future produced through its own illocutionary force, while laying down the roots of this promise in a particular date (without which it would have no validity as a promise) which as the present of the promise will always be its past in relation to its realization as a promise. In this sense, something like the State requires a transcendental idea of the eternal present of ‘the people’ to establish the validity of its claims, while never being able to apply the contractual claims of the people to a particular present. This, then, is why textual allegories on this level of complexity generate history. They put in play the subterfuge of the metaphysical paral-ysis of temporality (a present which is always already past with respect to its own production of the future) by a metaleptic reversal that places the realization of the promise before its utterance.

56 For example, as Rousseau

explains, the Social Contract will be broken when the government usurps the sovereignty of the people, but the people only realize that they were sovereign once they have been usurped, a usurpation which begins with the fi rst act of lawmaking. This is why citizens are only free during elections when they have yet to choose a government: at this point they are mak-ing the contract which has already been presented to them as the cause of the election.

57 The illusion of liberty after the election can be effectively

maintained, to return to de Man, by the imagined convergence of fi gure and meaning in a teleological order of history. This situation is maintained by the simulacrum of a transcendental authority which produces the tex-tual deception necessary to seem to reconcile the incompatibility of codes within the text. In the case of Rousseau, this is the Lawgiver, this is God. Such principles are as necessary to the foundation of a State as they are to its later denunciation and dissolution. The transcendental principle offers closure to the teleological order, by seeming to exist outside of it, and so facilitates the production of history by justifying the metaleptic reversal through divine authority. However, the reason that The Social Contract does not revert to a ‘natural’ political order (like Deuteronomy, say) which would make it just another monologic text, is that it is aware of the neces-sary deception of this gesture, continuing to perform what it has shown to


be impossible, and so producing and generating history as it mistakes itself for a promise of political change, outlining the necessity for and principles of political legislation, while simultaneously resorting to an idea of author-ity it constantly undermines.

PROMISING HOSPITALITY

I will withdraw from this explication of de Man at this point to offer some conclusions on the question of hospitality. How then might we think hos-pitality in relation to the contract? Firstly, where does this leave politics as such? It is the contention of de Man’s essay that politics as a form of legal textuality merits a dispensation from the model of monologic signifi cation encountered in philosophy and fi ction. In this way politics is not a question of theme, it cannot become an object or thing captured by intention. Rather, what characterizes politics is the structure of the double rapport—politics being that which makes the impossible possible (we must also understand the impossible in a catachrestic sense). Politics, then, is a movement in which incompatible injunctions are held together in a singularity which performs, negotiates and re-establishes the alterity that constantly opens that movement and ruins that opening. In this way politics qua contract works for de Man in that quasi-transcendental, expanded sense referred to at the start of this essay, naming an irruption of the infi nite in the fi nite as the general structure of textuality. Thus, the political imagined by de Man no longer bears any easy resemblance to the rhythm of theory, application and process suggested by the history of the interpretation of The Social Contract. Rather, it is a politics which remains suspended and undecid-able in its own generation of history; the performance, transformation and reinitiation of its contractual aporia on a case by case basis.

This politics is the hospitality as invention which I proposed earlier as both ‘no politics’ and as the very performance of any actual politics. The political moment is the mouse that swallows an elephant, the impossible made possible by the improvisational (along with de Man one might say ‘aberrant’) power of the poetic or textuality as such. This is not a matter of stating that politics, like hospitality, is ‘what happens’ and so losing the category of the political in the banality and miasma of immanence. Rather, it is to identify the political as the structural device by which textuality puts categories into play in order to simultaneously delimit and open them at the point when they enter into, and so make, history. This is as much to say, that the continuity of politics or the idea of the unity of Western politics (of a dialectic, say) is an illusion, of the representation of these singularities as a history rather than as a series of contradictory fi ssures and discontinuities which generate history disrupting its unity from inside and out.

58 Hospital-

ity is not a politics in the ‘metaphysical’ sense of this word but it is a politics in de Man’s sense, only because de Man imagines a politics without Politics.


On the one hand, every political action is caught up within this textual trammel, generating history by its own failure to demonstrate the closure of its own constative function. On the other hand, politics-as-contract is a textual operation which generates history by facilitating the simultaneous and incompatible demands of alterity and singularity in a single moment. As such this device draws down hospitality into a logic of degenerescence and invention, at once pressurizing the ethical injunctions of hospitality and situating them in a chain of constantly re-articulated contexts in which they are renegotiated and re-established at every moment, pushing the impos-sibility of hospitality’s divergent demands (between conditional and uncon-ditional, invitation and visitation) into a singular act which is always thus an act of the other.

Hospitality, as an act, an act which runs up against the limits of inten-tion, is politics in the de Manian sense not because it promises an eternal openness to the other which its performance proposes but can never deliver (misrecognising its own constative declaration of hospitality as a comple-tion of hospitality). Although this may be true. Rather, hospitality is poli-tics in this sense because it relies on an idea of the law, just as it exceeds the jurisdiction of that law. The laws of hospitality—its unconditional injunc-tions and rules of management—can like all law only function in relation to particular cases. Only by reference to the praxis of such cases can the justice of the law(s) of hospitality be tested by referential verifi ability, or by deviation from such verifi cation. The singularity-alterity of these cases draws out a ‘politics’ as action or process (of the other) from the ethical injunctions of hospitality by putting an idea of justice into play. Justice is caught in the diremption between law and its application, the structuring incompatibility which determines the performance of the contract. This then is the estrangement or alienation which shapes the political experi-ence and which the idea of hospitality names. Thus history and the power generated by political actions are foreign to the individual who is caught in the double and self-contradictory structure of the contractual relation. The historic process generated by the textual contract, once in motion, acts to estrange the individual from justice because while generated by the aporetic structure, it performs the imaginary resolution of its contradic-tions

59 in favour of its own interests (its illusion of closure). History, sup-

ported by the amnesia of power, does not know the contradictions of the aporia which produces it. Even if its own injunctions (limited or no hospi-tality, say) depend upon an incompatible idea (unconditional hospitality) caught up in the aporetic device. It is for this reason that the powers of the state (the powers to detain and reject asylum seekers, for example) are always greater than the contractual apparatus which puts the state in play (the need to determine the borders of a nation and to process immigration claims as part of the defi nition of the state as an entity).

Thus, hospitality (or those who would operate ‘politically’ under this nomenclature) must be constantly vigilant to the potential ossifi cation of


this situation into a natural state. The powers of the state as natural, as de Man has shown us, are not a natural state. Just as the aporia endlessly opens, suspends and reforms itself, so one must be prepared to catch sight of the opening to rip open the gap between constative and performative in the most ‘violent’ and ill-liberal ways in order to create a space for the articulation of justice as the awareness of the injustices of this contractual operation. Holding open such a space requires the sort of poetic inven-tion demanded by Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality. It is precisely the seemingly unpromising nature of hospitality as a lever onto the political which makes it a suitable source for invention and improvisation. However, as Derrida notes in ‘Circumfession’, ‘as soon as it is poached by writing, the concept is done (for) [Dès qui’il est saisi par l’écriture, le concept est cuit]’.

60

Already, it seems to me that ‘hospitality’ has been poached and returned to the order of the logos and the banality of the language of power. ‘Hos-pitality’ as the limit of thematization must be exemplary of its own logic and, having succeeded in jimmying an opening in the historical process, to hold open a space for thinking about ‘what must be done’, then it can-not allow itself to collapse into a rhythm of declaration, application and process. Rather, it needs to begin, already, before it is overdone, to suggest another, the next, opportunity for invention in the chain of hetero-political openings which will continually seek to hold open a chink in the power-ful conceptual and non-conceptual orders of the political to allow for the articulation of justice. This is the promise of hospitality.

61

8 Hungary in Deconstruction

. . . my interlocutors of the Institute of Philosophy of Moscow’s Acad-emy of Sciences had told me in all seriousness that in their eyes the best translation, the translation that they were using among them-selves for perestroika, was deconstruction.

—Jacques Derrida1

Let me begin with two observations:2 one derived from pedagogy, the other from academic travel. Firstly, it is more than ten years since Jacques Der-rida delivered the plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective’ organised by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg at the University of California, Riverside’s Cen-tre for Ideas and Society.3 Every year since I began teaching my seminar on deconstruction in 1997 I have taught this lecture in its published and augmented English form, Spectres of Marx.4 It was only this year in 2004 as I was glossing the historical context of the opening dedication of that book, to the South African communist Chris Hani, that I realized to the students in the class, who would still have been in primary school at the time, 1994 constituted the remote historic past. I do not think that this is a consequence of a unique failure on the part of these students, in retrospect it had been becoming a problem for several years and only now, with the distance of a decade, was the diffi culty clear to me. The student who is twenty-one in 2004 was eleven years old in 1994 and only fi ve years old in 1988 when the Berlin Wall came down. It is a diffi culty since the seminar takes as its aim the reading of the contemporary political moment through and with deconstruction, and this ‘historic’ understanding, on the part of the students, of the situation addressed by Spectres of Marx rendered the work of the seminar problematic even if it suggested new productive lines of inquiry. Of course I teach in a School of Art History where we take seri-ously the injunction to historicize, as well as the necessity to problematise history, and the students were ultimately unfazed by the seminar’s diver-sion into cultural archaeology. On the other hand, I have not quite come to terms with the self-knowledge that I have become another ageing liberal, trapped in the academy, revisiting year after year my own ‘dated’ concerns (‘dated’ in the sense of historically marked rather than irrelevant). Although a clear historical path exists from the deliberations of Francis Fukuyama to the present neoconservatism at large in Washington.

Hungary in Deconstruction 129

Secondly, for some time I have been preoccupied with the question of ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, if such a thing exists and it is one. Ever since I have been fortunate to discover friendship and an audience in the coun-tries of Eastern Europe my visits (either involving teaching or conference attendance) have always turned around the need to theorize adequately the situation of the former satellite states of the former Soviet Union. For the most part and to date, in the seminars and colloquia I have attended this need has resulted in a mainly unsuccessful attempt to mobilise the motifs and vocabulary of post-colonial theory in relation to the countries of Eastern Europe. I am dissatisfi ed with these endeavours for several rea-sons. Firstly, so-called ‘post-colonial’ is a specifi c intervention within the Western Academy to show the ways in which racist and colonial thinking permeates deep within the Western psyche, its institutions and its cultural texts, including the academy itself. It makes no claims on the unique expe-riences of the former Soviet ‘Empire’. Although the colonial activities of the Soviet Union require explanation they are not reducible to those Western European empires which post-colonial theory sets out to interrogate. Sec-ondly, ‘Eastern Europe’ itself is something of a historically specifi c misno-mer, given that the countries annexed by the Soviet Union after the defeat of the Nazis are in every way simply European and their fate is curiously and importantly European rather than ‘Eastern’. The story of the countries which collectively make up this term ‘Eastern Europe’ is in fact the story of Europe itself in the last seventy years, from Fascism to communism to capi-talism. There are claims to be made about the ‘othering’ of Eastern Europe by Western writers, what we might call the Ruritania effect.5 However, while post-colonial theory productively accounts for the Irish experience as British colonialism brought to Europe, the story of war, occupation, libera-tion, annexation, glasnost and globalization in Eastern Europe is not the same. It is telling of the Anglo-Saxon perspective and the dialectical power of the academy that it should imagine a situation such as the break up of the former Yugoslavia as something beyond the borders of Europe (rather than the most European of events) which can be accounted for in the same terms as it uses to digest the occupation of India or the slave trade. Rather, an account of what we will have to call here ‘Eastern Europe’ requires something altogether more refi ned, something that pertains to the singular circumstances of that history and the unique interconnectedness of identi-ties within and beyond this geographical conjuncture.

Such a theorization will have a close relation to post-colonial theory, for it must be concerned with the nature of Europe, its legacies and futures. However, it cannot simply be the repetition of the terms and gestures of Said, Spivak, Bhabha and so on in a context that is foreign to them. It must be a theorization that is post-colonial for sure but one that is also post-communist (in so far as Putin’s Russia, for example, today might be said to be ‘post-communist’) and one which takes cognisance of the place of East-ern Europe within the collective effects of globalization (in which English


is replacing Russian as the lingua franca). This would be an analysis which worked with the concepts available to it (namely post-colonial theory) only to insist that this theoretical inheritance respected what must be read in the unique singularities of every Eastern European experience, from Trieste to Tallinn, from Berlin to Varna. Equally, this is a theorization which must seek to entwine as much as it hopes to untangle by making the necessary connections between the countries of Eastern Europe and Europe as such, which in this sense includes America (Chicago is the fourth largest city of ‘Bulgarians’ after Sofi a, Plovdiv and Varna). Jacques Derrida once quipped, by no means fl ippantly, to an audience at UC Irvine, when asked ‘what is the state of deconstruction?’ that ‘America is deconstruction . . . California is the state of deconstruction’.6 Which was as much to say that America, and especially California, like deconstruction, is overdeterminedly com-plex, hybrid, endlessly open, multiple, fractured, with porous borders and in the process of constantly unstable redefi nition. Conversely, we might say today, that the state of deconstruction is Eastern Europe and that Eastern Europe is in deconstruction. Certainly, Eastern Europe has always been in deconstruction, even at the moments when it seemed at its most monolithic (under Fascism or under Stalinism) it has always been in fl ux, at risk of imminent collapse from the contradictions and tensions which defi ned the experience of this heterogeneous landmass, labelled together by a category of Europe’s own logocentrism so crass as to be laughable. The reduction of the experience of the Eastern provinces of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Russia, to name only a few inadequate examples without passing over into the ambiguous borderlands of the Caucuses or the Baltic, to the same dark otherness (doubly occluded as Eastern and communist) is on a par with the philosophical gesture which collapses every non-human species into the category ‘animal’ or the arbitrary taxonomy of ‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ which fi rst Borges and then Foucault use to expose the banality of Western thinking.7

These two observations (the historical distance between so-called ‘East-ern Europe’ and what we now unsatisfactorily call ‘new Europe’ and the as yet incomplete task of adequately accounting for this situation on its own terms8) suggest to me that a deconstruction, further deconstruction, is required. For example, if one asked the question, is Hungary in deconstruc-tion? Then the answer would be yes, on page 15 of Spectres of Marx. Here Derrida writes, surprisingly for some in 1993, of the origins of deconstruc-tion. Addressing the conference title, ‘whither Marxism?’ he says:

For many of us the question has the same age as we do. In particular for those who, and this was also my case, opposed, to be sure, de facto ‘Marxism’ or ‘communism’ (the Soviet Union, the International of Communist Parties, and everything that resulted from them, which is to say so very many things . . . ), but intended at least never to do so out of conservative or reactionary motivations or even moderate right-wing


or republican positions. For many of us, a certain (and I emphasis cer-tain) end of communist Marxism did not await the recent collapse of the USSR and everything that depends on it throughout the world. All that started—all that was even déjà vu, indubitably—at the beginning of the ’50s . . . What we had known or what some of us for quite some time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries, all the socio-economic disasters of Soviet bureaucracy, the Stalinism of the past and the neo-Stalinism in process (roughly speak-ing, from the Moscow trials to the repression in Hungary, to take only these minimal indices). Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed—and one can understand nothing of this period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical entanglement into account.9

Interestingly, Stuart Hall also cites Hungary as a key moment in the forma-tion of Cultural Studies when he suggests that the writers of the New Left Review ‘emerged in 1956 at the moment of the disintegration of an entire historical/political project. In that sense I came into Marxism backwards: against the Soviet tanks in Budapest, as it were’.10 I will return momentarily to this question of Marxism.

The situation that both Hall and Derrida describe here is, I think, more than mere biography. Indeed, it is linked to the very problem highlighted ear-lier in my second observation, namely, the unique circumstances of the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Let us refl ect for a moment on what the ‘end of a certain Marxism’ in 1956 meant for deconstruction (and Cultural Studies). In another text on Eastern Europe, ‘Back from Mos-cow, in the USSR’, presented to the critical theory seminar at UC Irvine in the glasnost years of Mikhail Gorbachev, Derrida writes with respect to what he calls the ‘phenomenological Marxism’ of Benjamin’s Moscow Diary:

This alliance of Marxist and phenomenological motifs . . . the fi rst be-ing more overtly declared but the second also quite determinant . . . [for] quite a long time they fi gured for me—and there remain many signs of this in numerous published or unpublished texts—a sort of impossible double matrix or, as Appolinaire would say, two ‘breasts of Tiresias’ as alluring (the one as the other and the one at the same time as the other) as they are hopeless. Only by relating how I had to separate myself, wean myself from these two breasts could I attempt an anamnesis of my trip to Moscow that would be at all consistent [ultimately the text fails to recount Derrida’s trip but rather examines a genealogy of such literary precedents], once I would have begun to understand what is happening or announcing itself under the name perestroika.11

That is as much to say that deconstruction involves the double gesture of the allure and hopelessness of the dialectic and that the historical context


of 1956 and the end of a certain Marxism is thus crucially important to the development of the deconstruction of phallogocentrism as philosophy beyond the biographical infl uences of a young Jacques Derrida. Decon-struction has a relation of suspicion to the dialectic. It is not a question of opposing the dialectic (for that would be the most dialectic of gestures). Rather deconstruction (and one can see this in Derrida’s texts on Husserl and Hegel but also almost everywhere else in his writing) seeks to think about ‘a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectic’ as Derrida puts it one of the interviews with Maurizio Ferraris.12 Derrida attempts to show that within any dialectical situation there remains an ele-ment which does not allow itself to be integrated into the systematicity of the dialectic but which presents non-oppositional difference that exceeds the dialectic which is itself always oppositional. This is what Derrida means by the supplement and as such is an inaugural gesture for deconstruction. The supplement or pharmakon (and Derrida has numerous other words for this quasi-transcendental situation) does not allow itself to be dialectized and as that which not being dialectical is necessarily then recuperated by the dialectic that it relaunches. ‘Thus the dialectic consists’, says Derrida, ‘precisely in dialectizing the non-dialectizable’.13 This scenario is not rec-ognisable as the dialectic in any easy sense of synthesis, totalization, iden-tifi cation and transcendence. Rather this non-dialectical dialecticity of the dialectic is a form of synthesis without synthesis, what Derrida frequently terms ‘ex-appropriation’, which is both an essentially anti-dialectical con-cept and the necessary condition of dialectics as such. By this reckoning the basic gesture of deconstruction since Derrida’s doctoral thesis, The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy of Husserl, completed in 1954, has involved the revision of a certain Marxism and the indication of recognis-ing the allure and hopelessness of the dialectic.14 Now, this theoretical situ-ation has a very real material manifestation in the events of 1956 in which a general strike and armed insurrection momentarily forced the Soviet army to withdraw from Hungary only to return and reek bloody revenge on the Hungarian people while the West was distracted by its own dialectical col-lapse in Suez.

It seems to me that the importance of the translation rendered by the philosophers of the Moscow Institute in the epigraph which introduces this chapter is not that the perestroika of the 1980s was an absolutely unfore-seeable and singularly unique event but that as an event it had its prec-edents in historical conjunctions such as the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956.15 The events of 1956 where precisely a practical deconstruction of the Marxist state, not by ‘counter-revolution-ary’ or conservative forces but by the very thing which made that state pos-sible but which remained undialectizable within it, namely, the Hungarian proletariat. In the events of 1956 we can read a situation that one could characterize as a negotiation between affi rmation and position, which is the necessary condition of any ‘deconstructive politics’. The action of the


uprising is not a negotiation between affi rmation and negation or between position and negation (an entirely oppositional and dialectical structure) but between affi rmation and position. The strike in itself was not enough; institutions had to be founded (such as the local councils which replaced the Marxist state for the period of Soviet withdrawal). Position and insti-tutions are important precisely because they pose a threat to affi rmation (deconstruction must always go beyond mere unconditional affi rmation which would be to place oneself beyond the phenomenality of the political and so in fact would be a denial of the very thing being affi rmed). In this sense, affi rmation requires position in order to realize itself as affi rmation and in so doing initiate its own ruin as affi rmation in the manifestation of a necessary imperfect institution qua position. Such institutions or positions are of course in no way terminal but entirely contingent and subject to an open-ended deconstruction in line with the principle of its own promise of assumed, if constantly deferred, perfectability. This situation, in which progressive politics is a constant to and fro between positive affi rmation and the materiality of the institutional apparatus, is the movement of the non-dialectizable dialecticity of the dialectic outlined earlier in which the non-dialecticity of affi rmation predicates and exceeds the dialecticity of the position, refusing teleological closure to the position. This non-dialectical dialectical situation is a negotiation between the non-dialectizable and the dialectic, between what does not negotiate (affi rmation) and the very struc-ture of negotiation itself, namely the dialectic of position. In the interview with Tom Keenan and Deborah Esch, Derrida comments:

. . . the dialectic (a Hegelian would say) is precisely the dialectic of the nondialectic and the dialectic. So what is the dialectic? Is it that against which I raise the value of an affi rmation, that is, a conventional Hege-lianism or else another Hegelianism? This is an open question for me. When I say Hegelianism, I also say Marxism. From this point of view, in any case, there is not much difference. Thus, the concept of negotia-tion . . . can sometimes seem nonphilosophical, that is, non-Hegelian, non-Marxist etc., precisely in its acute specifi city, or it can carry a Hegelianism or a Marxism to its fulfi lment, for with Hegel there is al-ways plenty to say: the dialectic is dialectic of the nondialectic and the dialectic. So here I do not have an answer. What I am doing is perhaps still very Hegelian or very Marxist or perhaps radically non-Hegelian, non-Marxist.16

Now, if we were to take this characterization of deconstruction at face value, namely, that it is both a radical Marxism and a non-Marxism, both a radical Hegelianism and non-Hegelianism, both the most European of ges-tures and a total displacement of every such European gesture, then it might begin to make sense to say, along with Derrida, that one can understand nothing of deconstruction without taking into account the importance of


Hungary in 1956 as an historical event. Furthermore, the sort of schema offered here to explain the material degenerescence of institutions as the corruption of position might be usefully mobilised to explain, in part, the swift transformation of democratic institutions from the mechanism of promised change in 1988 to the levers for the dialectical recuperation of the states of Eastern Europe by global capital and frequently, although not exclusively, for a return to power by ex-communist party offi cials ‘made-over’ into democrats and progressives. I would be tempted to say, being prepared to run the risk of offending all my friends in the countries of the former Soviet Empire (what Tatjana Jukic calls the ‘post-socialist states’) that what is required to explain such a situation is not post-colonial theory but Marx, who knew a thing or two about both the indefatigable routes of capital and the inexhaustible powers of reinvention of the political class. That is of course to say, that I am thinking here of the sort of Marxism-without-Marxism that Derrida points towards in 1994.

While it will not be possible for me here to demonstrate the ways in which the uprising in 1956 was a deconstruction of the Soviet state,17 I would, on the way to this later work, like to recount the narrative of another related Hungarian deconstruction. In 1952 the magnifi cent Magyar foot-ball team of Ferenc Puskás won the Olympic gold medal, the revolutionary style of football (‘total football’ several decades before it was named as such to describe the athleticism and ball control of the Dutch national side of the 1970s) emerged from the training schedules provided for the MTK club team by Lancastrian Jimmy Hogan on his release from internment in Austria at the end the Second World War.18 One-time coach of Celtic and manager of Aston Villa and Fulham, Hogan’s vision was predictably rejected by the British football establishment who took the attitude that stamina would always win in the end and starving players of the ball all week in training would make them all the more hungry for it on Saturday. To continue the story, in 1953 in the months before Stalin’s death Hungary famously beat England 6–3 at Wembley, humiliating the home side and demonstrating the complacency at the heart of a moribund English game. This result, along with a later 7–1 defeat at the hands of Hungary in a return match, no doubt forced English coaches to rethink radically how football was played in England. Such revisions then lead to the evolution of the English game towards the 1966 World Cup winning side and the triumphs by Celtic and Manchester United in the 1967 and 1968 European cups, and all that this meant for British culture. Hungary then went to the 1954 World Cup fi nals in Switzerland as overwhelming favourites and duly beat West Germany 8–3 in a fi rst round match. Puskás was injured (deliberately so) in this match and missed the rest of the tournament until the fi nal against a revitalized German side in Bern. Puskás insisted on play-ing despite his injury and duly scored the opening goal after four minutes. Hungary went two up after eight minutes, all looked well. However, as Puskás’ lack of fi tness began to tell the Germans pulled the game back to


2–2 and while Hungary poured relentless pressure on the German goal the Germans scored against the run of play to take a 3–2 lead. Puskás then scored a perfectly legitimate goal in the last minutes of play only to have it disallowed by the English referee. Hungary lost the World Cup fi nal and as the recent German fi lm, The Miracle of Bern19, relates the unexpected German win acted as an important moment in the affi rmation of the West German state after the post-war deprivations. In 1956 during the political unrest in Hungary, Puskás and his team mates were playing in Spain, they decided not to return to Hungary and Puskás eventually became a natu-ralised Spanish citizen, playing alongside Alfredo de Stefano in the great Real Madrid team of the late fi fties, winning four European cups (includ-ing scoring a hat trick in the win at Hampden Park, Glasgow) and eventu-ally replacing de Stefano in the Spanish World Cup side of 1962, who were knocked out in the fi rst round of the tournament.

Now, thrilling and moving as this tale might be I cite it for a number of reasons. Not only is it an exemplary demonstration of the ways in which Hungarian culture has irrigated the channels of European (not specifi cally ‘Eastern’) culture. Contemporary football and everything that depends upon it (which is to say a great number of socio-economic things) would not be possible without the glorious golden team.20 However, it seems to me that there is also a clear and suggestive relation between the political deconstruction of 1956 (the ‘perestroika’ in Central and Eastern Europe which accompanied the expected decline of Stalin and the optimism which followed his death) and the deconstruction of the conceptual basis of foot-ball as a system represented by the non-systematic systematicity of Puskás’s team. Just as political philosophy itself turned to the task of decentring dialectical thought, and political events opened up the closed system of the Soviet-Marxist state, then the free-fl owing football of the Hungarian side of the 1950s turned around the order of football formation and the strat-egy from a restricted economy of pure Hegelianism into a general economy of supplementary excess by a gesture of non-oppositional difference, which negotiated between the dialectic of the system qua team formation and the non-dialectizable pharmakon of individual skill beyond any given system.21 That is to say that one might characterize the play of the Hungarian side as a system without system, a strategy without strategy (contingency being the strategy), a team that is not a team in the way that this term had been understood up to this moment, but which was also only and absolutely a team, nothing but a team, a team in excess of itself in which each player was able to negotiate between the affi rmation of a style and their own ability to adopt several positions. This is why I would describe the total football of the Hungarian team as a deconstruction of the systematicity of foot-ball, something that was radically non-football-like as this was understood by the English players who faced the Hungarians in 1953, and something that was totally football, drawing the systematicity of football as a team game to its fi nest expression, total football. Herein the name ‘total’ is no


longer appropriate since such play is the undoing of every totalitarianism and closed order. In other words, what we can see in this side is the exem-plary deconstructive structure of suspicion towards the dialectic outlined above. It is, sadly, fi tting that Hungary lost the 1954 fi nal as the dialectic returned to recuperate the excess of the supplementary, only to initiate a further escape from the dialectic as West Germany themselves, along with the Dutch, went on to further develop the principles of total football in the sixties and seventies. My point here is that while the tragic events of 1956 demonstrate a certain deconstructive experience which Derrida recogn-ises as an important contribution to the development of post-Marxist and post-phenomenological attitudes to the European philosophical tradition, I would suggest that this political ‘perestroika’ has its cultural cognate in Puskás’s footballing glasnost and its illimitable infl uence on the cultural fi eld beyond the ninety minutes played in Bern. Derrida comments that as a child growing up in Algeria he dreamed, as small boys do, of becoming a professional footballer. I am quite certain that as an observer of the game Derrida was aware of the deconstructive radicality of the Hungarian team and that if we are to understand something of the development of decon-struction at this time then we should pay attention not only to the events of 1956 but also to the goal differance of Ferenc Puskás with which they are curiously and suggestively intertwined.

9 Enosis, or, ‘The Sovereignty of Cyprus’

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars:It is the cause, yet I’ll not shed her blood

—Othello, v. ii. 1–3

We are all prisoners of knowledge. To know how Cyprus was betrayed, and to have studied the record of the betrayal, is to make oneself unhappy and to spoil, perhaps forever, one’s pleasure in visiting one of the world’s most enchanting islands. Nothing will ever restore the looted treasures, the bereaved families, the plundered villages and the groves and hillsides scalded with napalm. Nor will anything mitigate the record of the callous and crude politicians who regarded Cyprus as something on which to scribble their inane and conceited designs. But fatalism would be the worst betrayal of all. The acceptance, the legitimization of what was done—those things must be repudiated. Such a refusal has a value beyond Cyprus, in showing that acqui-escence in injustice is not ‘realism’. Once the injustice has been set down and described, and called by its right name, acquiescence in it becomes impossible. That is why one writes about Cyprus in sorrow but more—much more—in anger.

—Christopher Hitchens1

It is the cause, it is the cause. Let me not name it to you. Perhaps the fi rst thing which should be said on this occasion is that the invite to speak today by Maria Margaroni, Antonis Balasopoulos and Marios Constantinou2 puts me in something of an awkward position, that of another character in Shakespeare, Horatio in Hamlet, who as a scholar is called upon by Marcellus to talk to the ghost and to explain to him, as a scholar, what Marcellus can see before him with his own eyes. ‘Thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio!’ Thus the native Marcellus has his own experience of what stands, or walks, before him mediated through the sovereign interpreta-tion of the scholar from the University of Wittenberg. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida of course calls this desire to have our world explained to us by the scholar or by theory the ‘Marcellus Complex’.3 However, Marcellus’s response to the ghost that resolutely chooses to ignore him seems to me to


be a matter of perfect common sense. Unfamiliar with ghosts, unnerved by the uncanny, he calls in an expert (a ‘ghostbuster’). As a humble guards-man his life, indeed his soul, may be at risk, so he passes the problem up the chain of command. In other words, he reports it to management. Horatio is paid more than he is, he has greater authority at court than Marcellus does, once reported it’s his problem. Thus, Horatio, the scholar, is called upon to take responsibility for the thing he sees and while the ghost will not speak to Horatio either and ultimately Horatio passes the problem on to the heir apparent, the fact that he attempts to speak to the ghost raises more questions than it might answer. Perhaps we should speak of Horatio’s desire to communicate with the ghost, or at least Horatio’s understanding that he should attempt to speak to the ghost at Marcellus’s invitation if not on Marcellus’s behalf. Let us call it the Horatio complex. It is no doubt a complex of considerable complexity. Having graciously invited me to the University of Nicosia in 2006 to give a talk on crimes of universal juris-diction, Maria then pointed out the ghost line, the Green Line, the Nekri Zoni, the dead zone, which runs through, or walks through or maybe now just stands there across the old walls of Nicosia and across the battlements of Cyprus. Thou art a scholar, speak to it. My Horatio complex is well developed, somewhere between a monstrous egotism and an overween-ing super-ego. One cannot take part in an international gathering of phi-losophers and literary theorists in Cyprus without speaking about this. By this calculation it would be the only thing worth speaking about: it is the gorilla in the room, the elephant on the table. ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!’ says Othello, who imagines himself to have been cuckolded on Cyprus. Perhaps he could have done with a Horatio, a scholar, rather than an Iago, a special adviser. IAPL, Iago, I go to Marcel-lus, Maria, Marios, Martin, Marx. This island is marred in one way or another. It is the cause, it is the cause let me not name it to you least the scholarly complex be cuckolded by the complexity of Cyprus.

I should stop there because the ghost will not speak to me, will not give up its secret to me, any more than it would for Horatio. Yet I will follow it for a while to see where it might lead us as its armour clanks along the battlements of, what Marx, Engels and Donald Rumsfeld would call, old Europe. A Europe perhaps older than the old Europe imagined by Marx, a Europe older than Europe itself. The origin of Europe as certain philoso-phers would have it. ‘The southern fl ank of NATO’, as it was once called, for those who still have ears for such a phrase.

But which language shall we use to speak to the ghost? The language of philosophy is Greek. Perhaps this ghost does not speak Greek or is deaf to Greek or chooses not to respond to those misguided enough to address it in Greek. Is this not the whole problem of Cyprus? But Cyprus is not Greece, one must insist on that, and this is also the whole problem. It is not good enough to say, as so many have, that it is all Greek to me, for Greek-Turk is Turk-Greek. I have, as Shakespeare would say, little Greek and less Latin.

Enosis, or, ‘The Sovereignty of Cyprus’ 139

Latin is of course English, the lingua franca of contemporary philosophy. ‘Globalatinization’, as Derrida calls it.4 That is why we are here today in Nicosia, no use denying it: it is the cause, it is the cause. It may also be the solution, but let me not rush ahead to the ghost trap I am setting up or have already set up for the ghost of a Cypriot Hamlet, like an incompetent Mystery Inc. who send their monkey-dog Scooby Doo out as bait for a trap which goes awry and only succeeds in ensnaring themselves. Rather, let me suggest that if this ghost is a Cypriot ghost it will speak perfectly good English as well as Greek. There are reasons for this of course. The same reasons why I felt all alone on the plane from Manchester although it was full to bursting with English clubbers and pensioners making their way to a Gibraltar of the East for sun and second homes. The same reasons which make Cyprus so strategically important today to the forces of old Europe who use it still as a staging post to full spectrum or spectral domination, as if these spectres could be dominated.

This situation is not without consequences. I am getting ready to talk about sovereignty, ‘the sovereignty of Cyprus’, in fact, as my title announces, the sovereignty that is unique to Cyprus. However, sovereignty is a Greek word. It is a philosophical word, we will fi nd it in Plato and Aristotle and it is the very possibility of an idea of Europe and of the political. Surely, one cannot use the word ‘sovereignty’ as a gambit with this ghost, certainly not in a sovereign way, as a privileged term of interpretation. But Greek-Turk is Turk-Greek; the Abrahamic tradition understands sovereignty well as a structure of Empire and invasion and of annexation. Sovereignty is a uni-versal, a worldwide given of the globalized. It is the cause. So let me speak around sovereignty, just as I speak around the question of Cyprus that surrounds us here like the Venetian walls, built by Othello’s compatriots, which go around this city. Sovereignty will run like a Green Line through our discussion, on the border of two different countries of meaning, like a purloined ribbon passed from one side to the other; or perhaps, a purloined handkerchief, a red rag to a bull.

And here I would have to put on the table, turn out my pockets as the English phrase goes, all of the other Greek terms which would be of such importance to any deconstruction (if we have reached this stage already) which was impertinent enough to call to the ghosts (for there are more than one) of Cyprus: democracy, critique, crisis, economy, polis, theoria, katas-trophe and so on. Bringing deconstruction to Cyprus, it seems to me, is like bringing coals to Newcastle for Cyprus is a very old castle on the border of the Hellenic, that is to say European, that is to say Western, world. L’autre cap, as the title of one of Derrida’s texts on Europe runs.5 Cyprus is another heading under which it will not be possible simply to inscribe some sort of sublime Hellenism or the enosis of deconstruction.6 Everything is con-nected but it will not be made to join up so easily, not even by democracy as the 2004 twin referendums on the UN-sponsored sharing of sovereignty between the communities on the island has already demonstrated. This was


a chance for another heading, a new direction one might say. Another head-ing in which enosis with the European Union (perhaps a tautology in this case since Europe on these terms could only ever imply and be predicated by a drive to Union) might provide an opportunity in which the European Union was able to affi rm a European identity on the whole island while at the same time attest to an opening to an outside and a capacity to welcome its own difference. That is to say, to provide in Cyprus a practical articula-tion of a union without totalization, in which Europe opened itself to the risk of attempting to remain itself while at the same time exposing itself to its alterity (this alterity being always already constitutive of this most European of islands). The Turkish community by this reckoning being the secret of a Europe that in a phrase of Derrida’s from L’autre cap, would be a ‘secret of Europe emancipated from both Athens and Rome’.7

The acceptance of the terms of the referendum by the Turks in the North and its simultaneous and overwhelming rejection by the Greeks in the South is one of the most terrible ironies of this cruelly ironic history. It is the example par excellence of what Derrida calls in Rogues and elsewhere the ‘suicidal auto-immunity’8 of democracy, whereby the Turkish Cypriots, long (if wrongly) associated with a desire for partition and annexation to the outside of Europe, exercised their democratic will as offered to them by the sovereign body of international law to reject militarism and exclusion only for their Greek compatriots, so long (if only schematically) associated with unity and democracy, to reject them as wholly other. The motives for doing so were no doubt overdetermined. They were not exclusively racial or ethnic (Cypriots themselves have historically been wary of intercommunal division just as outside powers have so resolutely insisted on attempting to encourage it).9 Complicating factors such as the rejection of international interference as just the latest imposition of a solution by colonial policy-makers and the drive to globalization by ‘Sorros-funded’ politicians and opinion makers, muddy the waters here. To say ‘no’ was, for some, an act of self-determination. Others may have felt that too easy a path to union would have allowed all the crimes of the Turkish generals to go unpun-ished: To vote ‘yes’ would have been to absolve something they had no right to forgive. However, such nuanced estimations of the calculation involved in casting a vote may not have been uppermost in the minds of the entire electorate. Rather, it seems to me that the motivation for the ‘no’ vote was primarily economic. Union with the North would have meant sharing the wealth and opportunity afforded by EU entry with an expanded popula-tion. Rather than the UN referendum setting us on another heading to a new Europe and a new idea of Union, the suicidal auto-immunity of democracy (one of Greece’s fi nest exports to a world sovereign body which remains resolutely Greek in origin and outlook) reminded us that what is now called ‘European Union’ remains a displaced name for what we used to call an ‘economic community’. That is a community with no relation other than the economic, even though all relations as relations can only


ever be economic. It was a remarkably economic example of what we are calling here ‘the sovereignty of Cyprus’.

The sovereignty that is unique to Cyprus. It is the cause. In the dialogue with Elizabeth Roudinesco, Derrida says of auto-immunity ‘Europe is in my opinion the most beautiful example, and also the allegory of auto-immunity. I say “beautiful example” because if Europe is beautiful, it is because of this strange beauty: autoimmunity as survival; invincibility as autoimmunity. The immense tragedy of a beautiful suicide’.10 This is to say, that Europe (the European legacy) does not represent, for Derrida, an inheritance of material property but of ‘an inexhaustible potential for crisis and critique’.11 Europe as it presents itself on the stage of its beauti-ful suicide must negotiate between the double bind of the globalization of Europeanness and the contestation of Eurocentrism. This is the whole problem. It is the cause, it is the cause. Cyprus knew it long before the owl of Minerva fl ew out to name ‘globalization’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ as labels for a more archaic process. Cyprus has long been a metonymic con-centration of this suicidal performance, like Socrates drinking hemlock, or Othello smoting himself thus in imitation of how he slew the Turk. The sovereignty of Cyprus is the secret of Europe, the secret held by the ghost who appears along these walls of old Nicosia but who will not speak to me. It is the purloined handkerchief, stolen and abused by nefarious forces that over the years have sought to use it for their own cruel and sovereign ends. But while I am preparing to speak of these Iagos of the modern scene, I should note that the suicide of 2003 is one that the Greek Cypriots can-not blame on outside interference and the powers of old Europe. It was their overwhelming democratic choice, ‘It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock/That meat it feeds on’. Just as the Americans are responsible for George Bush, the Northern-Irish are responsible for Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams and the Scots are now responsible for electing unscrupulous nationalist carpet-baggers.

The layers of the sovereignty of Cyprus are considerable. There are at least seven separate sovereign spaces on the island: the Greek Cypriot gov-ernment (internationally recognised as the sovereign power on the island), the Turkish Cypriot authority in the North (only recognised by Turkey), the United Nations troops which have a sovereign mandate from all the nations of the world, the British military bases which are property of the crown and over which the United Kingdom exercises sovereignty, there are of course also the sovereign Turkish military bases in the North, the Greek sover-eign military bases in the South, there is the European Union which now exercises sovereignty on almost all economic matters in the South from its capital in Brussels, and there are the numerous sovereign embassies to be found in Nicosia as one would in any world capital. Cyprus has for several centuries been variously marked in this way. Its history bears witness to the transformation (the ‘mutation’ would be Derrida’s preferred term) in the idea and practice of sovereignty that runs through the contemporary scene.


But where does sovereignty lie along the Green Line? In this dead zone where no person lives and which until 2003 was literally impassable even as it remains politically impassable even now. Pou tes khoras, as the Greek has it: ‘In which place on the earth?’ Khora can mean in Greek an inhabited space but can also point to the origin or source, the generative principle, the taking or being-place of every place. It is the cause. The Mother of all forms which remains foreign to form. Khora is also nothing (no being, no present) that which cannot be spoken about even by metaphor: We cannot be transported there, it is a dead zone. Because khora cannot be fi gured as something that would become a concept it disturbs every dialectic polarity (literal/metaphorical, essential/contingent, sensible/intelligible, same/other, Greek/Turk). Khora cannot make sense of the horizon of being. Khora marks a space apart, which retains within itself a dissymmetrical foreign-ness to itself. The Mother who is not an origin who engenders all place and all history and yet there is no starting out from khora; nothing can be derived from it for it conceals itself from what it situates.12 Our ghost will not set out on another heading from khora. In demotic Cypriot Greek, Nicosia is known locally as khora (that place). Sometimes theorists should just step aside.

I will resist the too obvious confl ation of the militarised zone that divides the two parts of Cyprus with the philosophical fi gure of the khora, but it is like khora in one respect. If it is true Cyprus is now emerging from an epoch of partition into an age of globalization in which Turkey may become a member of the European Union and the two parts of the island become de facto under the umbrella sovereignty of Brussels (a sovereignty which is and is not a colonialism) then in so far as the accession of Turkey to Europe would place the whole island under a single sovereignty, which resided elsewhere, then the Green Line would no longer refer to what it refers to (i.e. the border of Europe) and would no longer be able to take place as a place, or, it must take its place as some other place. An archived place perhaps, like the fragments of the Berlin Wall in museums or the H-Blocks at Long Kesh in Ulster. Places that are at once the generative principle of the trauma of what might come tomorrow if we do not set off on another heading away from them in another direction, and at the same time the space of katastrophe which can mean in Greek both the end (the end of a life or a denouement of a tragic plot) and a reversal or unforeseen tragic event that brings about the ruin of an established order. Accom-plishment and accident, testament and turning, truth and surprise, it is the cause: ‘it is engendered; Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light’, as Iago puts it.

Here I am approaching my conclusion for now as this ghost rattles its sabres as it makes a night of our day. ‘The Sovereignty of Cyprus’ as a title names both a nation and a philosophical problem, which as such is not strictly reducible to or containable within any single nation, even if it may in certain philosophical histories have a powerful and obscure relation to


the ontotheologies of national humanisms in certain European and Ameri-can traditions. But to go too quickly now and rushing headlong into my own ghost trap, in principle sovereignty as a philosophical term or more generally philosophy itself cannot be reduced to any one nationalism. So, when we engage philosophy next to the proper name of a nation, as in the phrase ‘the sovereignty of Cyprus’ it will be necessary to negotiate between the reaffi rmation of the nation of Cyprus implied in this phrase (which is not at all easy or in any way resolvable, even in principle now given the mutation of sovereign authority on this island) and the nationalism such a reaffi rmation risks becoming in a place where nationalisms have had such a strategic and important part to play in the liberation of human existence from real injustice. The problem with invoking the nation of Cyprus is that every nationalism today is a state-nationalism, the jealous vindication of a nation constituted as a sovereign state, of the sort that was entitled to reject the 2003 referendum in the South. I am not at all certain that such a nationalism has not already been discretely evoked here already in the most material and exclusive of fashions by this conference as a Western-North American (‘International’) presence at the University of Nicosia, and by my own attempt to speak to these ghosts from the position of affi lia-tion with other scholars of a particular, cultural and linguistic community. There is a reason why the ghost continues to walk on past. However, this nation in which we are situated today, wherever its sovereignty may lie, needs its scholars to be engaged in another experience of belonging and in another political logic. For the age of a Turkey-within-Europe lies before us and everything remains to be written and thought about it. This genera-tive principle of the coming moment (the enosis of Turkey with Europe) will defi ne the experience of Europe and of the global for years to come and will determine the future of the sovereignty of Cyprus for an entire epoch. Yet, as yet, it has not arrived. It exists by not being produced and in this way remains in immanence. It is khora. Pou tes khoras, in which place on earth will this happen? It is already happening in Cyprus today, it is irreversible and one should not even attempt to resist it. Rather, it is for the present, as Derrida might have put it, ‘a phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being, through and through, fabulously textual’.13 That is to say, it and all the possibilities it gives rise to, are yet to be imagined. As has so often happened throughout the many layers of the history of Cyprus, once again the fl ea at the edge of Europe presents the most decisive indices of the whole problem of Europe, of the idea of European sovereignty, and of the European idea of sovereignty. In opening itself to this coming other who now walks as a ghost in daylight through a once dead zone, rather than as an armed invader, there will be life after the suicide of 2003. If the scholar has a part to play in this coming drama it will not be that of the student prince who takes up arms against a sea of troubles and who like the General Othello expires violently at the point of a sword. Rather, Horatio lives on; he survives the catastrophe to tell the tale aright, to do


justice to this history. Of course it is not Horatio who inherits the throne but Fortinbras whose drum and ‘warlike volley’ approaches even as Hora-tio kneels by the dying prince. Hamlet’s last words are to confer election rights on Fortinbras who arrives fresh from victory in England to declare that ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’ and to command that his fel-low man of action, Hamlet, be given ‘soldier’s music and rites of war’. The play ends with a funeral march and the sound of ordnance offstage. The future of Denmark will be a negotiation between the memory of Horatio and the fact of Norwegian annexation, a dialectic between the soldier and the scholar in which both must either remain aporetically divided between the sword and the pen, battlement and university, or both must synthesize into the politician, renouncing both force and transcendence in order to progress. It should be recalled that the verb strephein that gives strophe (as in apostrophe and catastrophe) means to come and go or to turn toward. So, turn toward another heading, one in which a general deconstruction of sovereignty leads to a consideration of democracy not as one mode of sov-ereignty amongst others (monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship, junta) but one which was reinscribed as the radical undoing of all and every position of privileged interpretation (including and especially that of the scholar) and in which the right to interpretation was unconditionally open to everyone on both sides of a thin Green Line policed so vigilantly by Fortinbras in his watch-tower. Hence, a community of all Cypriot scholars, amongst them-selves, might use the university and philosophy as a discourse of critical reference as the opening space for such an unconditional dialogue today. This is the complex responsibility of Horatio; he must talk to Fortinbras and his fellows. As a scholar he has an irreducible and interminable duty to say all that must be said in the name of memory and truth, and to speak from within the university to ghosts and hobgoblins of every variety.14 For it ought to be the case that Iago must stand at the end of the play, handker-chief in hand, and say ‘I would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for you pesky kids!’

10 ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’ Edward Said and the Deconstruction of Palestine

There is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.

—Aimé Césaire

To say that Edward Said had a strained relationship to deconstruction might be to venture an understatement. This seems to be the case on a fi rst, or even second, reading. However, the nature of this relationship is not altogether clear and will bear some examination. Upon reading Said one will frequently fi nd dismissals of what he refers to as ‘deconstruction-ism’, but nowhere is it possible to fi nd a straightforward rebuke of Jacques Derrida. Now, as Nicholas Royle is fond of saying, ‘Here we might usefully take note of a comment made by . . . Martin McQuillan, “deconstruction is not a school or an ‘ism’. There is no such thing as ‘deconstructionism’: this is a word used by idiots”’.1 Given that Said was no idiot (hence it is not possible to fi nd in his writing any simple dismissal of Derrida) what is the nature of this thing that Said calls ‘deconstructionism’? In the fi nal chapter of Culture and Imperialism, in the context of a discussion of the ways in which academic knowledge in the US is confi gured by its rela-tion to Empire, Said articulates a long-held and simmering niggle regarding ‘Theory’ in the humanities. He decries the commodifi cation and specializa-tion of academic work (i.e. the idea that only an Indian expert can speak on India, a Russian specialist on Russia and so on). In this respect he cites, ‘the fantastic explosion of specialized and separatist knowledge . . . Afro-centrism, Eurocentrism, Occidentalism, feminism, Marxism, deconstruc-tionism, etc. The Schools disable and disempower what was empowering and interesting about the original insights.’2

‘Deconstructionism’, then, hangs on to this list, having just made the cut as a School before Said imposes his ‘etc’ to cover the numerous others not signifi cant enough to be named. But this list is not a litany of the damned; at least I do not think Said is in a rush to condemn Afrocentrism and femi-nism. Rather, a more ambiguous point is being made in this paragraph, namely that this heterogeneity is at once a fragmentation and diminuation of the American cultural identity, which Empire forces on the rest of the


world, and also the very thing that the self-designated spokesmen of the West, like Allan Bloom and William Bennett, treat ‘as a barbaric threat to ‘Western Civilization’.3 In contrast to Bloom, Said views the fact that something like ‘deconstructionism’ (one of ‘the multicultural disciplines’) has been treated hospitably by the American academy as ‘a historical fact of extraordinary magnitude’,4 mocking the conservative kettle logic which sees in such multiplicity and contradiction a monolithic and intolerant ‘political correctness’. For Said, the diffi culty lies with:

The university’s practice to admit the subversions of cultural theory in order to some degree to neutralize them by fi xing them in the status of academic subspecialities. So now we have the curious spectacle of teach-ers teaching theories that have been completely displaced—wrenched is the better word—from their contexts; I have elsewhere called this phenomenon ‘travelling theory’ [see The World, The Text, and the Critic, pp.226–247]. In various academic departments—among them literature, philosophy, and history—theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.5

The point of this scenario is, for Said, that specialization and trivializa-tion in a cult of professional expertise within the academy means that the professional critic’s ‘affi liations with the real world are subordinate’ to his/her affi liations to a disciplinary peer group. This division of labour within the university then allows experts to enhance their value on the academic transfer market and in the publishing world. However, Said then swings his argument away from this gripe about Theory by applying this mode of specialization as a formation within the university to the co-optation of foreign-policy experts by the US government and media.

On the one hand, Said’s real complaint is against the production of Ori-entalist specialists who sell their expertise to the government and media while having their appearance in the government or media affi rm their expertise. This may be the case and in the context of the alarming reductive power of the US media when one speaks as a journalist with the author-ity of a scholar this is a defi nite cause for concern. However, an implica-tion has been set up, through the bad-tempered ramble of Said’s argument, that such Orientalism is equivalent to or morphologically (even ideologi-cally) similar to the fragmentation of critical theory, even if Said admits the potential ‘subversions’ of that theory. It would be easy at this point to note the reduction and logical contradiction in Said’s argument and move on. Namely, that the minor example (Theory, which he wishes to complain about, but only up to a point) from which he derives his general schema of specialization is not equivalent to the major example (Foreign Policy, which he wishes to complain about a lot): the error of the major example having

‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’ 147

been derived from a schema based on a non-equivalent minor example, rendering either the schema suspect or the analysis of the minor example suspect. However, I am not happy with the retort to Said that he should structure his paragraphs more carefully. It seems to me that ‘deconstruc-tionism’ (let us fi ll in the blanks for Said and say, the institutional discourse on the writings of Derrida which produces books and symposia, for this is what he means rather than an auto-interpretive fi gure in process which can-not be subsumed under a metadiscourse) does have a case to answer here. It may be that it is ‘not guilty’ but an indictment might still be possible.

To say that ‘deconstructionism’ is a word used by idiots, is to say that it is a word used by those who have never even opened a book by Derrida and who are using a childish journalistic error as if it were fact. This is simply not the case of Edward Said, who has clearly spent some time reading Der-rida as the two detailed accounts of Derrida’s writings in Beginnings (1975) and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1984) show.6 Both books might be said to be located in a certain moment in the history of the ‘theorization’ of the North American humanities, before the de Man affair, before post-colo-nialism ruined fi rst world feminism, before cultural studies contaminated comparative literature departments, before the term the ‘post-human’ had ever been thought of (‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!’). In the former, Said mobilises Derrida in what now reads as a rather clumsy manner to criti-cize (correctly) the implications of structuralist methodology. What follows is an attempt, characteristic of writing from the midseventies, to wrestle with the complexity of Derridean thought while having very few resources to draw upon in order to accomplish the task (Derrida’s prose style is said to defy, ‘translation and perhaps even description’).7 While the history of deconstruction today affords us a complex vocabulary and expansive body of writing (not least of which would be the many volumes of interviews and openings penned by Derrida himself), Said’s concern in this book with difference, logocentrism and comparisons to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are entirely typical of the North American academy at the time, shocked and excited into an engagement with Derrida. Said is not particularly successful here in putting Derrida to work against structuralism, he cannot manipu-late the material suffi ciently to achieve his purpose. Rather, the summary of Derrida (mostly an account of Of Grammatology) stands, in place of a successful assimilation of Derrida, for the fact that some authority other than Said also criticizes structuralism. One could correct sentences such as ‘Derrida believes that structuralism is logocentric—it is a philosophy, that is, of written texts, which are understood as supplementary to speech’8, but the exercise would be belated and anachronistic. The World, the Text, and the Critic provides a more mature and detailed consideration of Derrida, it is interestingly also Said’s last major attempt to do so.

Here Derrida is not cited in the chapter entitled, ‘Travelling Theory’, rather the engagement comes in the essay, ‘Criticism Between Culture and System’. Said’s stated concern is that what he calls, ‘critical consciousness’


should be occupied not by writing biographies and providing commentar-ies on literature but with ‘the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge is made possible,’ i.e. understanding ‘units of knowledge as functions of tex-tuality, which itself must be describable in terms dealing with not only the agencies of culture in their ideological, political, institutional and histori-cal forms but also the requirements of intelligible method and the material form of knowledge which, if it is not of divine or supernatural provenance, is produced in the secular world.’9 This, in 1983, represents something of a challenge to the conventions of literary criticism and intellectual work in general and so Said turns to ‘two of the most powerful alternative responses to [this] crisis’, namely Derrida and Foucault.10 I will leave to one side the reading of Foucault which intertwines with the account of Derrida. It has considerable resonance for any attempt to read Said’s theoretical DNA, and is singularly important in understanding Said’s reading strategy as a comparativist, but for the sake of brevity and clarity it will not occupy us in this essay (in so far as this will be possible). One might also note here, a nascent version of Said’s later impatience articulated in Culture and Impe-rialism, namely, the stated, if not-evidenced-by-his-own-work, dismissal of the ideology of disciplinary expertise (here critical biographies and special-ized scholarly monographs) in favour of a more general critical engagement with the world as an ‘intellectual’.

As a position this is also ideologically, historically and institutionally specifi c, requiring an intelligible method and material forms of knowledge produced in the secular world. In 1983 such a position (and positions must be adopted, however strategic or historically contingent they might be) seems to work in the service of the theorization of the humanities (let us not say ‘Theory’ as such since Said here and everywhere else in his writing insists on his independence from any ‘school’ of thought). Later, this posi-tion is justifi ed by Said in the name of a defence of Humanism. This was becoming clear by the time of Culture and Imperialism but made explicit in his fi nal years in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. However, his only reference to Derrida therein is a comment on the ‘crippling limitations’ of ‘those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings [i.e. not Derrida himself] that end (as they began) in undecidability and uncertainty’.11 One cannot agree with this caricature, or the claim that deconstruction defers ‘too long a declaration that the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment.’ Derrida will have had a great deal to say about enlightenment and to defer is not to abandon, on the contrary it is, correctly, to question enlightenment to the very bone. However, I will resist the pedantic temptation to correct all of Said’s reductions in order to make our way more quickly to the case that ‘deconstructionism’ has to answer ultimately to what is deconstruc-tive about Said, and ‘Palestinian’ about deconstruction. Let us note for the moment the irascible speed with which Said has always written and put down a marker in defence of disciplinary specialism without which (as


the comparativist Said knows) the architecture of knowledge would be an amorphous mess of travelling theories, even if the traditional disciplinary structures of the university can no longer hold such knowledge. In 1983 his position looks progressive; in 2004 it appears embattled, it is however fundamentally the same position.

To return to 1983, Said begins his approach to Derrida by citing, only to reject on the strength of familiarity with ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Foucault’s vulgar if polemic error, ‘Derrida is concerned only with reading a text, and that a text is nothing more than what is in it for the reader’.12 Said’s concern in this essay is with the implications for critical methodology of Derrida’s ‘revolutionary and revisionist’ technique as it situates itself within bound-aries defi ned by the historical pressure of material conventions and institu-tions. This essay, like the extract from Beginnings, is not much more than a summary of Derrida’s ideas, as Said reads them, but the emphasis is on a willing engagement, to determine whether deconstruction can (in whole or in part) be co-opted to Said’s wider critical project of ‘worldliness’. Such appropriation (resisted by the very idea of deconstruction itself) is charac-teristic of early ‘Anglo-American’ politicised engagements with the foreign body of Derrida’s writing, and it may be possible to trace a Derridean infl u-ence on Said. For example, in his avowed admiration for ‘écriture double, one half of which provokes an inversion of the cultural domination Derrida everywhere identifi es with metaphysics and its hierarchies, the other half of which “allows the detonation of writing in the very interior of the word, thus disrupting the entire given order and taking over the fi eld”’13, says Said, quoting an interview in Positions. I do not think it is idle speculation to suggest that Said leans on Derrida in what, following Harold Bloom, we might call a creative misprison to develop his practice of what he later terms ‘contrapuntal reading.’14 Although he may equally be indebted to what he refers to in this book as the ‘important’ and ‘extraordinary’ talents of Paul de Man as a demystifi er of literature who opposes what is ‘customarily the norm in academic literary studies’.15 Either proposition would take some time to elaborate and so I will leave them here as potential lemmata for a future endeavour. At the moment I am content to demonstrate that Said does not dismiss Derrida in any casual way but rather accepts the challenge of reading Derrida with due caution and responsibility.16

While he is keen to mobilise Derrida for an engaged critical practice in this essay, Said expresses concern at what he calls ‘Derrida’s own brand of involuntarism’.17 This is not the familiar complaint of ‘political quietism’ against deconstruction. Rather, it concerns the way in which Derrida, on Said’s reading, seems to suggest that authorial agency ‘is being pressured involuntarily by the superstructure and the teleological biases of “meta-physics”’.18 Said recognises that the question of passivity in Derrida is ‘very complex’, citing counterexamples from the work of Derrida to mitigate his own concern, including Derrida’s reading of Foucault. I will not quote later writing by Derrida to correct this concern because this would be unfair


to Said who did not have access to such texts when he wrote his essay, rather I will note that here Said’s ‘superstructural’ vocabulary is very telling and suggests that the worry he offers against Derrida itself comes from an undeconstructed position which assumes the priority of agency over pas-sivity, world over text, human over inhuman and so on, just as it seeks to appropriate deconstruction for just the sort of position that deconstruction as an undoing of every such opposition cannot accommodate. In fact, later in the essay Said himself will adopt an extremist involuntarism of his own, somewhere left-fi eld of Paul de Man, when he suggests that the problematic of textuality is constitutive of narrative itself and so, says Said:

The point is that these motifs, which are the very ones in a sense con-structed by Derrida’s criticism, already exist in narrative not as a hidden (hence inadvertent) element but as a principal one. Such texts cannot therefore be deconstructed, since their deconstruction has already been begun self-consciously by the novelist and by the novel. Thus this as-pect of narrative poses the challenge, as yet not taken up, of what there is to be done after deconstruction is well under way, after the idea of deconstruction no longer represents elaborate intellectual audacity.19

Several things may be noted here. Firstly, such an argument bears a cer-tain resemblance to the de Man of Blindness and Insight who argues that Derrida does not need to deconstruct Rousseau in Of Grammatol-ogy because Rousseau (or the text of Rousseau) deconstructs him/itself. As Geoffrey Bennington comments, this is an absurd argument which suggests that one can know Derrida’s insights without reading Derrida. Derrida clearly has always read literature in a different way, without con-tradiction; from philosophy, one might look at the difference between the Plato essay and the Mallarmé essay in Dissemination, poesis being of a different order of meaning to philos. In this respect Derrida differs from de Man who sees no difference between the narration of concepts by philosophical texts and the narration of character and action in liter-ary texts. The difference for Derrida resides in precisely the question of voluntarism on the part of the poetic, given that the whole idea of ‘volun-tarism’ be subject to the sort of more-than-critical displacement that Said is unwilling to undertake in this essay. Secondly, Said is concerned here with deconstruction as a ‘deconstructionism’, an institutional practice which in challenging cultural hegemonies runs the risk of establishing a new orthodoxy (‘how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and the counter-magic that it still risks being?’ as Derrida puts in much later in Spectres of Marx).20

As an institutional player and concerned reader Said is simultaneously attracted to and concerned by the seeming ‘intellectual audacity’ of decon-struction on American Ivy League campuses, and it is through this per-spective that he has always read deconstruction. That is to say, that he is


concerned with deconstruction as a critical method or institutional con-fi guration rather than as textual process in the real world (material and intelligible, given that we subject these terms to the necessary auto-inter-pretative scrutiny), the reason why, as Said and de Man insist, such texts are always already in deconstruction. Given Said’s simultaneous distrust of what he inaccurately refers to as ‘Derrida’s elimination of voluntarism and intention’ (one could point to those passages of the Grammatology and Dissemination, available to Said, which refer to the structural nature of intention and agency, in which meaning exceeds both and can never be saturated by either) and his own runaway narrative involuntarism, it may be possible to say of Said’s text that it also demonstrates its own misreading by developing an objection to Derrida, fi rst formulated by Derrida himself, only to insist on the truth of the very thing he objects to. But this would be rough justice on Said’s subtle and (historically speaking) perceptive essay. To cite and answer Said:

As reader of these texts, then, Derrida’s own will realizes itself [al-though it does not saturate the meaning of these texts], a process that is theoretically infi nite because of the number of texts to be decon-structed is as large as Western culture, and hence practically infi nite [true and more so, given that every reading or deconstruction would itself require, or already be in, deconstruction—no good conscience, the task of deconstruction is interminable]. Is it entirely inaccurate to say that Derrida’s elimination of voluntarism and intention in the in-terests of what he calls infi nite substitution [yes, this is mostly inac-curate], conceals, or perhaps smuggles in, an act of Derrida’s will in which the deconstructive strategy, based on a theory of undecidability and desemanticization [there can be no ‘theory’ of such things even if they accurately described Derrida’s interests which in this context they do not], provides a new semantic horizon, and hence a new interpretive opportunity associated with the name Derrida? [Yes, if you accept that such a ‘horizon’ is a misprison of Derrida and is not compatible with the implications of deconstruction itself.] To the extent that Derrida’s disciples [moi?] have availed themselves of this strategy and its ‘con-cepts’ [note the appreciative use of inverted commas], a kind of new orthodoxy has come into existence [soon to be displaced by the institu-tional pantomime of the de Man affair], no less held in by certain doc-trines and ideas than ‘Western metaphysics’ [up to a point, given that (a) for metaphysics to do its work effectively it must go unquestioned, the only people who ‘believe’ in metaphysics are those who ‘out’ it, and (b) différance is the economic action of delay within metaphysics, if such a thing exists and is one, that simultaneously opens and defi nes its recuperative power]. For this, of course, Derrida is not responsible [un-doubtedly true, even if that means it no longer makes sense to speak, without reservation, of ‘an act of Derrida’s will’].21


In the very next sentence Said states, with a sensitivity that would make any deconstructor proud, ‘but I am not convinced that such orthodoxies exist in any very simple, almost passive way’. Rather, deconstruction is ‘taught and diffused . . . absorbed decisively into the institutions of society’ with a view ‘to changing or perhaps upsetting these institutions and that society’.

The diffi culty for Said in this essay is his inability to fi nd a means of articulating the difference between ‘deconstructionism’ as an institutional conjuncture of professional persons associated with the name of Derrida and the interpretative fi gure which changes and overturns meaning in texts and so the real world. In other words, he fails to fi nd a vocabulary which can adequately and strategically describe deconstruction itself as a quasi-transcendental fi gure, which shuttles between its material institutions and ‘conceptual’ operation, asserting the priority of neither and the subordina-tion of both to a wider movement neither is in a position to understand given that deconstruction is itself this very structure. Said’s appropriative position is unable to control (in a quite involuntary way) the proliferating effects of this textual scene and thus his own argument is constitutively ruined from the beginning by the very trope (the ‘involuntary’ nature of deconstruction, a passive activity which is actively passive) that it wished to question in the fi rst place. Put in this way, one is not offering a ‘critique’ of Said; rather, one is offering a reading, which presents the accuracy of Said’s own complex worry over deconstruction. The point is not to stop worry-ing about it but to put it into play in the process of reading in a way that displaces the appropriative categories of ‘action’ and ‘world’ into a nuanced affi rmation of the complexity of ‘acts’ of deconstruction (including those which know themselves to be such and those which do not).

Said’s appreciation of Derrida turns around this theme in a dizzying pirouette, one minute outlining the critical effi cacy of Derrida’s procedures for textual explication, the next returning to the potential institutional effects of a hegemony of ‘deconstructionism’, torn between the attraction of the former and resisting (while recognising the complexity of the latter). Permit me two more demonstrations of this point in order to allow Said’s eloquent engagement to exhibit itself. Firstly, Said insists:

My point is that Derrida’s work continues to have a cumulative effect on him, to say nothing of the obvious effect on his disciples and read-ers. I rather doubt that, in wisely attempting to avoid the compromis-ing fall into systematic method that as a powerful philosophic teacher he is more likely to succumb to, he has been successful in avoiding the natural consequence of accumulating a good deal that resembles a method, a message, a whole range of special words and concepts. [i.e. a method has been assembled in a non-methodological way and not in an active way on the part of Derrida, rather (note the passive vocabulary ‘succumb’, ‘avoid’, ‘natural consequence’) it has been passively accu-mulated by readers effected by it]. Since it is incorrect (even an insult)


to say that Derrida’s accumulation of knowledge in the course of his published work is no more than a mood or an atmosphere, we shall have to accept it as constituting a position, which is a word that he himself has used comfortably. As a position it is of course specifi able, even exportable [not without iterative consequences!], but Derrida’s programmatic hesitation [can a hesitation be programmatic?] toward his historical situation, toward his work’s affi liation with certain types of work and not with others: all these again programmatically deny it its own considerable position and infl uence.22

I do not think this last sentence is in any way true and one can point to the extensive record of Derrida’s responsibility towards ‘his historical situ-ation’ such as his arrest in Prague in 1981 after a clandestine seminar at the Jan Hus Association, or the work of institutions such as the Estates General of Philosophy in 1979 and the International College of Philosophy established in 1983 and discussed in one of the texts Said cites in his own essay.23 One can also point to any number of early essays on Derrida’s philosophical friends and foes, such as Levinas, Austin, Bataille, Freud and so on. However, behind this remark concerning ‘affi liation’ I suspect Said, conscious or otherwise, means deconstruction’s relation to either Marxism (not that Said could be identifi ed, without a lot of effort, as a Marxist) or certain post-colonial liberation movements.

In so far as this sort of long-term institutional explicitness (i.e. the value of presence) is what Said yearns for from deconstruction he is likely to be disap-pointed, since while positions must be taken they remain in deconstruction. Said suggests that deconstruction ‘needs some greater degree of specifi ca-tion than Derrida has given it’.24 That is to say, to fl esh out Said’s worry, it should be more ‘wordly’ and ‘political’ than ‘philosophical’ and this should be refl ected in the radicalization of ‘deconstructionism’ as an institutional grouping. In so far as this is a valid claim to make (and not just a misreading of what was going on all around Said in the university in a way that was not immediately identifi able according to the undeconstructed criteria he himself uses to hold deconstruction to account) Said’s essay might be read not as a rebuke to Derrida but as an act of telepoesis which calls forward the later texts of Derrida (say loosely if not accurately, from ‘Force of Law’ and Spectres of Marx on). Nothing in these later ‘wordly’ and ‘political’ texts contradict the ‘philosophical’ texts that frustrate Said (indeed they demonstrate the wordli-ness of their forebears while insisting on their own philosophical nature). It is impossible (from where I sit at the moment) to say if Derrida read Said’s essay, and anyway I am not claiming a relation of infl uence (a relation that would be as a relation both structurally insuffi cient and without presence). However, when Said writes that Derrida’s work has not ‘been interested in dissolving the ethnocentrism of which on occasion it has spoken with noble clarity. Neither has it demanded from its disciples any binding engagement on matters pertaining to discovery and knowledge, freedom, oppression, or


in justice,’25 he sounds to me not so much like an opportunistic institutional opponent of deconstruction immobilised by his own resentment of the trans-formations it has affected on campus, but rather as a signifi cantly engaged reader calling for a mode or idiom of deconstruction not yet realized. In this respect he is at least ten years in advance of many of those who at the time happily took on the name of deconstruction as their own. While I think texts such as those Said cites familiarity with in this essay (Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Writing and Difference) do make signifi cant claims on their readership in terms of binding commitments to enlightenment and justice, this was not necessarily the hegemonic point of view in 1983. We might say that Said’s essay is untimely in that it calls for a readership not yet avail-able to it, and only now arrives in a belated and posthumous way in its just moment. However, the point is clear that appropriative and resistant as it might be, this essay, and by extension Said’s thought in general, is engaged with, rather than removed from, deconstruction.

In this respect I fi nd one sentence in this essay to be of considerable signifi cance. Said writes of Derrida’s reading strategy, ‘the military opera-tion involved in deconstruction therefore is in part an attack on a party of colonialists who have tried to make the land and its inhabitants over into a realization of their plans, an attack in turn partly to release prisoners and partly to free land held forcibly’.26 From anyone this would be a remark-able statement; from Said in 1983 it is astonishing. The previous year Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon aimed at wiping out the PLO presence there. By mid-August, after intensive fi ghting in and around Beirut, the PLO agreed to withdraw from the city. Israeli troops remained in southern Lebanon, while the PLO went into exile in Tunis. Said was elected to the Palestinian National Council in 1977 and The Question of Palestine was published in 1979.27 The geo-political concerns which informed Said’s criti-cal strategies and institutional position were well established by the time he wrote the essay on Foucault and Derrida. The analogy in the context of Said’s appropriative reading of ‘French poststructuralism’ is particularly striking. That is to say that, for Said, deconstruction is a post-colonial strat-egy with liberation from an unjust colonialism as its aim. Here the colonial-ism is the Empire of the logos and the expansionism of Western thought, elsewhere in the essay Said’s frustration is that this ‘military operation’ has not yet been articulated in relation to the material colonialism he knows so well. Derrida himself offers a not dissimilar account of his work in a dream about the French Resistance he recounts in The Post Card. Recalling the dream in one of the interviews with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida says:

When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a fi lm in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic


compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.28

This ‘deep phantasmic compulsion’ which imagines deconstruction as a ‘terrorist’ or ‘guerrilla’ activity is well established amongst both Derrida’s detractors and his admirers. Said’s version is clearly intended as a compli-ment. There would be some mileage in exploring the notion of deconstruc-tion as a philosophical insurgency (within metaphysics or the academy) while asking why Derrida stopped this day-dream ‘quite recently’, being aware that such a metaphor requires the friend to ‘live and think differ-ently’. Accordingly, one might ask why two academics, perhaps in differ-ent ways the prominent intellectuals of their age, should both hold to this violent metaphor when one could readily cite from both men numerous examples of calls to material non-violence. What is the imaginary of their own textual activism compared to the sort of ‘action’, such as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, on which they have provided ample commentary but which as ‘Western’ or ‘post-colonial’ intellectuals they are not obliged to participate in?

Curious as Said’s metaphor might be, deconstruction is not the violent expression of the hopelessness of the unconscionably denied. Certainly, Said has been less enthusiastic about deconstruction in interview since the Foucault-Derrida essay, taking swipes at ‘deconstructionism’:

. . . this is not a fi erce, or combative, or rhetorically aggressive avant-garde; it seems more devoted to its work—rightly so—than to carrying on campaigns against the so-called old guard, which has been very energetic and diligent in going after the critical avant-garde. The latter, to be fair about it, does seem at times infected with a kind of clubby hothouse grandeur, as if all that mattered to it were Derrida and Hei-degger and not at all the sweaty workshops in which much intellectual work is transacted.29

Sometimes acknowledging a debt to Derrida (‘I also took up the criticism that was coming out at the time, especially Derrida and Foucault’30) and retaining a respect for his work (‘Derrida himself is a brilliant philosopher and critic’31) which is nevertheless opinionated:

I met him when he fi rst came to this country [the US] in 1966. I’ve always found him an amiable and extremely genuine person. At times, his work has interested me. But things like Glas (although he and I shared a common friendship with Genet) and La Carte Postale I just found not that interesting. I think he’s probably a much better essayist


than he is a systematic philosopher, and it’s the kind of sporty qual-ity of his work—which you fi nd in some of the essays in Dissemina-tion—that I’ve always thought is quite brilliant. I never really cared for the Grammatology. It struck me as a ponderous and ineffective book. I thought that his earliest work, on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, was really brilliant.32

However, he continued to consider deconstruction as ‘the most elite of schools’, which in his view was ‘somehow imprisoning, and fi nally unin-teresting’.33 This led to the occasional unrefl ective and contradictory state-ment in his later years:

I wouldn’t want necessarily to leave aside from our discussion the pro-found effect on all this of people like Derrida and de Man, who have contributed very much to the disrespect and distrust for the discourse of politics as something by which people live, constitute themselves, fi ght, die, etc. This kind of suspicion, this hovering on the margins, this infatuation with the undecidable and the ironic, it’s all part of this. One can only look at it as a formation of late capitalism in the American academy.34

One would have thought that a ‘disrespect and distrust’ of an unquestioned political discourse by which people ‘die’ (and curiously ‘etc.’) was precisely the sort of healthy critical scepticism of orthodoxy that Said encouraged. One can also wonder how an ‘elite school’, simultaneously one of the ‘multi-cultural disciplines’, can have such a ‘profound effect’ on the world, a world that is seemingly never ironic or undecidable. One can also look at political retreat in the Academy as a ‘formation of late capitalism’ but one would equally have to provide some evidence if one is to cite the Algerian-Belgian pairing of Derrida-de Man in such a charge. This brings us back to the section from Culture and Imperialism with which we began, which while legitimate to pose as a question concerning structural presence, would not hold good in the face of reading the specifi c texts by particular individuals Said might like to implicate within his charge. Respect for deconstruction and Derrida would require that such reading took place as a response to any reductive, blanket accusation and this reading should understand itself as a teleopoetic call to the future idioms of deconstruction.

Perhaps we might say of Said that, along with other theoretical dissi-dents of deconstruction such as Terry Eagleton and Harold Bloom (i.e. peo-ple who have actually read Derrida) the more pronounced their disavowal of Derrida the more profound their interiorization of deconstruction. This is apparent in what seems to me the most striking of Said’s formulations regarding the condition of Palestine, namely, his proposal for a ‘one-State solution’.35 In brief, Said has always questioned the fundamentals of the Oslo accord and resultant ‘peace process’ as a capitulation by a weakened


PLO to accept an impoverished Palestinian less-than-state without con-comitant compromises from Israel. Given that neither the PLO nor the Israeli state have a viable military option in relation to one another, Said has always maintained that the ‘peace process’ sets out to achieve by means of a settlement what neither side could achieve by a war that has lasted on and off for one hundred years, i.e. partition. The terms of the Oslo accord being so unequal and unjust that Said calls it ‘peace without Pales-tinians’36 (I will resist rehearsing every detail regarding the ways in which Oslo promises Palestinians much less than a state and transforms the PLO into enforcers of Israeli security). In contrast Said latterly proposed to res-cue a current of thought in certain Jewish thinkers of the 1940s, such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt, concerning a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.

The current condition of Israel-Palestine is intractable with deeply rooted fear and strongly felt injustice on both sides (although Said maintains that the Palestinians have borne the most part of this injustice) each laying claim to a piece of land smaller than Lake Michigan. However, Said argues that partition or separation is unworkable given the historic integration of both Jews and Palestinians, with Israel itself containing approximately one mil-lion Palestinians (almost 20 per cent of the population) and the Palestin-ian territories consisting of an elaborate network of Israeli settlements and ‘bypassing’ roads designed to circumvent Arab towns and villages. Demo-graphic parity between Jews and Arabs is expected by 2010, while neither existing Israeli settlers nor Palestinians living within Israel wish to move. The logic of separation (two-states) proposed by Oslo would require a mas-sive movement of people and/or ethnic cleansing on a scale not seen since 1948. The irony of Sharon’s Peace Wall, built by Palestinian labour living within the borders of Israel, is that the very people who had walls built around them in the ghettos of Europe are now not just ghettoizing Palestin-ians but also themselves, while sealing a signifi cant Palestinian population in with them (the more land Israel acquires the more Palestinians it acquires with it). In this way, such aggressive Zionism repeats the most anti-Semitic of gestures, namely, to extract Jews from a cosmopolitan context and to place them in a separate and pure Jewish homeland, which only Jews can enter (the Law of Return). This is the very argument made by the 1938 international conference on refugees, on the initiative of President Roos-evelt, to resettle displaced German Jews on the African island of Madagas-car, and later discussed with Hitler by the French and British governments and Pope Pius XII. It may be possible to redeem from Zionism a messianic and utopic impulse of a young nation (and certainly one can criticize the Israeli state without necessarily being anti-Zionist) but it seems to me (for this is now me speaking not Said) that the entire project of Zionism, or the violent Zionism which has emerged from within the heterogeneity of Zionism to totalize the fi eld and to prevail as a political model, has always included within it this germ of anti-Semitism, a separatism of pure-blood in


an ethno-theological state which merely repeats the errors of the very thing it seeks to oppose, i.e. European anti-Semitism. This is why one will fi nd many examples of opposition to Zionism (including Freud) among Euro-pean Jewry during the period between the Balfour declaration and 1948. The dream of an African island empty of people, awaiting a Jewish colony is not dissimilar to the myths of an empty Palestine in 1948, occupied only by a premodern Arab people easily corralled off the land, which permeates mainstream Israeli and Western political discourse.

However, beyond the mythopoetic or even ideological fi gures of the foundation of Israel the situation today is considerably complex, with Pales-tinian non-contiguous homelands, mixed populations all over Israel, nearly six million Palestinian refugees outside of the borders of Israel-Palestine, 70 per cent of the ‘occupied territories’ still under Israeli martial law and so on. Rather than displacement, ethnic cleansing and two states based on theologico-ethnic division, one always being the socio-economic inferior to the other, and both fatally mortgaged to religious extremism (a potent cocktail for continued injustice and unrest), Said proposes a full secular democracy for all citizens of Israel-Palestine. Israel has no constitution and its weak democracy continually leaves it in hock to minority religious par-ties; the Palestinian territories similarly lack a constitution and the recent case of the reintroduction of the death penalty for criminal activity by Mahmoud Abbas on the advice of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, demon-strates the dangers to the civil space of a theocratic Islam, not to mention more militant groups such as Hamas.37 Said proposes the idea and practice of citizenship not rule by ethnic or racial community.

In the modern state, envisaged by Said, all its members are citizens by the fact of their presence and through the practice of rights and responsibili-ties. Arab and Jew would be entitled to the same privileges and resources through a constitution and a bill of rights, giving each group equal access to land and the inalienable secular and juridical right to self-determina-tion, i.e. communal life in its own (Palestinian or Jewish) way in federated cantons with a shared capital in Jerusalem. Such a proposition is decep-tively simple but would involve a way of thinking unimaginable to those politicians hopelessly compromised by the so-called ‘pragmatic’ politics of the ontotheological national humanism of partition. The reason I suggest that Said’s proposal is ‘deconstructive’ is that it views a very real intrac-table aporia in which the mirror images of an ethno-racial nationalism have brought politics to a stalemate (i.e. to a place where all that is possible is only ‘Politics’ in the weak sense) and through an act of poetic imagina-tion takes considerable risks to conceive of that situation otherwise. It is a proposition based on sound enlightenment principles but which does jus-tice to the trace of the religious (rescuing an alternative or repressed strand of Semitic thought) to imagine a democratic solution which does not give up on the stalemate but turns it around and keeps faith with the perfect-ability of civil and democratic institutions. It does so without being in the


least bit utopian but rather a fi rm example of what after Gayatri Spivak we might call ‘the practical politics of the open-end’.38 Such a proposition calls for good citizenship from scholars and intellectuals on both sides (and beyond Israel-Palestine) to discuss and formulate a radical imagining of a state beyond pragmatic metaphysical or mediatic political discourse and to articulate an idiom of sovereignty not yet thought. We should view the ‘one-state solution’ as a prolegomena to future thinking and work it through because it promises a future and presupposes change and perfect-ability, by addressing injustice rather than reproducing it, while laying down long-term possibilities for peaceful coexistence in an historically multicultural land rather than reaffi rming ethnic apartheid. The challenge of this proposition is to imagine political work which did not stop with the foundation of a state but which saw such a thing as the beginning of a negotiation between two peoples towards a just and lasting equality (for example, understanding and forgiveness in Israel-Palestine calls for something like the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa within the secular framework of a juridically guaranteed bill of rights). All this may seem far removed from the Sharon-Bush road map, which has taken long enough to recognise Palestinian sovereignty as such. However, Said’s legacy calls on academics and intellectuals to take the initiative for thinking itself and to engage in a dialogue which would articulate a solution based on hope and democracy rather than division and continued injustice.39

Such a discussion calls for deconstruction. As an opening gambit in that discussion we might profi tably look at what Derrida has to say about Israel-Palestine. Now, there is a sizeable and mostly (with a number of notable exceptions) ‘under thought’ literature on ‘the Jewish Derrida’ and deconstruction as an expression of a particularly Jewish sensibility. While Jacques Derrida was undoubtedly and irreducibly (also unstably and unresolvedly) Jewish, the problem with this literature is that it fails to take remotely seriously what Derrida has to say about psychoanalysis and Jewishness in the essay ‘Archive Fever’40, in which he suggests that to ask whether psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science, as Yosef Yerushalmi does, is to repeat the same anti-Semitic logic which censored Freud’s writ-ing as ‘enJewished’ (ditto for deconstruction, as if Derrida had ever been talking about anything else in ‘Archive Fever’). Just as the question of Israel and anti-Semitism are unavoidably but not essentially linked so too the question of Jewishness or of ‘the Jew’ per se are unavoidably (given the reductive state of public discourse) but not essentially linked to Israel or to Zionism. In reading Derrida one would want to insist on this, to main-tain the singular relation between the man and the thought, Jacques Der-rida, and Jewishness41 while rigorously discriminating between all the false equations, universalizations, insinuations and reductions of a metaphysical political realm only too happy to replace complexity with binary division. To this end this essay will set aside the topic of ‘Jewish Derrida’ (in so far


as this is possible) noting on the way the exchange between Edward Said and Ari Shavit for Ha’aretz Magazine in 2000:

EWS: Adorno says that in the twentieth century the idea of home has been superseded. I suppose part of my critique of Zionism is that it attaches too much importance to home. Saying, we need a home. And we’ll do anything to get a home, even if it means making others homeless.

Why do you think I’m so interested in the bi-national state? Because I want a rich fabric of some sort, which no one can fully comprehend, and no one can fully own. I never understood the idea of this is my place, and you are out. I do not appreciate going back to the origin, to the pure. I believe the major political and intellectual disasters were caused by reductive movements that tried to simplify and purify. That said, we have to plant tents or kibbutz or army and start from scratch.

I don’t believe in all that. I wouldn’t want it for myself. Even if I were a Jew. I’d fi ght against it. And it won’t last. Take it from me, Ari. Take my word for it. I’m older than you. It won’t even be remembered.

AS: You sound very Jewish.EWS: Of course. I’m the last Jewish intellectual.42

One could also have responded here, ‘you sound very deconstructive (in parts)’. Said goes on to conclude the interview, ‘let me put it this way I’m a Jewish-Palestinian’. As Joyce might have said, Jewish-Palestinian is Pal-estinian-Jewish. Accordingly, let us put on hold the entire question of an essential structure of Jewish thought, a critique of the essential, and the notion that philosophy, or thinking as such, knows no national or ethnic border.43 Instead, let us turn to Derrida.

There is in fact an extensive amount of commentary by Derrida on Pal-estine, including the rather remarkable essay, ‘Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German’, delivered as a lecture in Jerusalem during the fi rst Palestinian intifada, in which through a reading of Herman Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig he argues that both the Jewish and German ‘psyche’ (in French ‘a great pivoting mirror, a device of specular refl ection’) lay claim to an exemplarity in their national self-affi rmation.44 Each, by this calculation, endows itself with a mission (by virtue of this exemplarity). The declaration of the exemplarity of an entire people has its roots in the Enlightenment of Mendelssohn and Kant but plays itself out in different ways through Nazism and Zionism, as homelands bearing testimony to this uniqueness. The implication of Cohen’s unfortunate 1915 text, Deutschtum und Juden-tum, is clear, that for Jewish thought ‘this homeland . . . is not Israel but Germany’. As such Derrida’s essay is a scandalous text to deliver at an Israeli university in the middle of Jerusalem. It is a blistering attack and


demystifi cation of ethno-religious paradigms of every kind and makes a clear statement, for those who have ears to read, concerning the intifada. I promise to return to this on another occasion but under the pressures of length for this particular essay I would like to turn to another of Derrida’s texts on Palestine, ‘A Word of Welcome’.45

This essay was fi rst presented one year after the death of Emmanuel Levinas, on December 7, 1996, in the Richelieu Amphitheatre of the Sor-bonne, at the opening of ‘Homage to Emmanuel Levinas’, organised by Danielle Cohen-Levinas under the auspices of the Collège International de Philosophie. As with all of Derrida’s commentaries on Israel-Palestine it therefore took place in the most public and challenging of arenas. The text has been most frequently cited as one of Derrida’s fullest elaborations on the fi gure of hospitality (I will not repeat this work, it has been done elsewhere). However, read according to a less literal index, the essay can be understood as a questioning of the limits of Levinas’s thought and the borders of Israel (in its original context the essay was presented under the title, ‘Face and Sinai’). On a mundane level the essay is acutely aware of the displacement of Palestinians as a problem which any Levinasian ethic of hospitality must pass through, ‘Let us assume that one cannot deduce from Levinas’s ethical discourse on hospitality a law or politics in some determined situation today, whether close to us or far away (assum-ing that we could even evaluate the distance separating the Church of St. Bernard [in Paris] from Israel, from the former Yugoslavia, from Zaire or Rawanda)’.46 However, perhaps more productively we might pay attention to one of the signifi cant threads of the hospitality seminar, Derrida’s read-ing of Kant on war and peace. The issue of Sinai, as a metonym for the ter-ritorial claims arising from the various wars (ancient and modern) fought by the nation of Israel, emerges within the locus of a certain Levinas’s relation to Kant. Derrida notes that Levinas’s performative palyonymy of hospitality ‘opens up hospitality by an act of force that is nothing other than a declaration of peace, the declaration of peace itself’.47 However, in contrast to Kant Levinas proposes an ethical or originary peace (as Der-rida puts it ‘originary but not natural: it would be better to say pre-origi-nary, an-archic’48). For Kant ‘perpetual peace’ is a political and juridicial intervention into a state of war in which instituted peace puts an end to a natural state of hostility. For Levinas, on the other hand, war emerges from the forgetting of the face against a natural state of hospitality which is not reducible to the political. ‘Peace is a concept that goes beyond purely political thought’, says Levinas in the essay on the Sadat-Begin talks ‘Poli-tics After!’ (i.e. the import of the talks transcends [the ‘exceptional transh-istorical event’49] mere ‘politicing’, which can be put on hold for a while). ‘Of peace there can be only eschatology’, as Levinas puts it in the preface to Totality and Infi nity, namely that peace is not the result of the end of war or a historical or political process. On this reckoning, the phrase ‘peace process’ or the idea of a ‘road map to peace’ would be an anathema


to Levinas, if not to Kant. One should note here the analogy between the unconditional hospitality of a perpetual peace and the conditional hospi-tality of a politically disclosed peace.

Derrida’s reading stays close to Levinas and opens up the fi gure of hospi-tality in Levinas onto an appreciation of political invention beyond the so-called pragmatism of the established political discourse. However, it is also highly critical of Levinas, frequently rebuking his unexamined Zionism. In reading Derrida, I would also like to stay faithful to the text of Derrida, while ultimately raising a question concerning Derrida’s own understand-ing of the state of Israel. Let us begin with the fi fth section of Derrida’s essay in which he notes that under the title ‘Politics After!’, Levinas attempts to distinguish between two phases of Zionism, which Derrida proposes may not be so much phases as two irreconcilable idioms that compete over the name of Zionism, namely, the eschatological vision of holy history, beyond mere politics, and the realpolitik of the Israeli state, inadequate to that ideal. Derrida points out here that in reading Levinas one does not need to endorse his analysis of the State of Israel (‘and I must admit that I do not always do so’50) rather, one is required to pursue the task of distinguishing between the Zionist promise and the Zionist fact. In so doing, determining the ways in which the former gives rise to a commitment to a peace that would not be purely political but which is caught in and by the state of Israel between politics and its other. Now, Derrida then takes to task this very distinction, insisting that for Levinas to be beyond the purely politi-cal is to be in no way non-political but rather the concept of peace Levinas wishes to pursue exceeds the political, goes beyond a certain concept of the political. That is to say, the concept interrupts itself and opens itself to a process of deconstruction as the interiorization of its own transcendence.

However, there are reasons here not to be happy with the idea of the ‘purely political’, as Derrida warns. Such a notion still insists on ‘purity’ and presupposes that it knows what is and what is not ‘purely political’. Levinas is aware of this fi ction, and seems to double back on himself when having distinguished between the pre-originary hospitality of the state of David, over the pragmatic hospitality of the state of Caesar, wishes never-theless to create ‘on this land [i.e. Israel] the concrete conditions for politi-cal invention’.51 Those concrete conditions and political invention being of the order of the impure, purely political. Derrida asks:

Has this political invention in Israel ever come to pass? Ever come to pass in Israel? This is perhaps not the place to pose this question [al-though he just has], certainly not to answer it [although in not answer-ing it he also just has] . . . but does one have the right here to silence the anxiety of such an interrogation, before these words of Levinas, and in the spirit that inspires them? . . . I am among those who await this ‘political invention’ in Israel [thus answering the question], among those who call for it in hope, today more than ever because of the


despair that recent events, to mention only them, have not attenuated (for example, though these are just examples from yesterday and to-day, the renewed support of colonial ‘settlements’ or the decision by the supreme Court authorizing torture, and more generally, all the ini-tiatives that suspend, derail, or interrupt what continues to be called, in this manner of speaking, the ‘peace process’).52

Accordingly, Derrida remains sceptical of Levinas’s claim in the essay on Sadat that, ‘after the realism of its political formulations at the beginning, Zionism is fi nally revealing itself, on the scale of substantial Judaism, as a great ambition of the Spirit’.53 However, Derrida is prepared to respond to the challenge of Levinas’s ethical articulation of hospitality and to reroute it into a consideration of scenes from ‘yesterday and today’ as the possibil-ity of the impossible, of a political invention in which the question of Sinai (the porous borders of Israel and the very site of the traditions of the book) must make a response to the face (the other or the Levinasian third). Der-rida’s essay at once shows the ways in which the Levinasian oeuvre, from this seemingly marginal essay on Sadat to the great work of Totality and Infi nity, does not shy away from this encounter between Israel and its Arab other. However, it also shows what a problem it is for Levinas. Especially when Levinas produces lines such as:

Sadat’s trip has opened up the unique path for peace in the Near East, if this peace is to be possible at all. For what is ‘politically’ weak about it is probably the expression both of its audacity and, ultimately, of its strength. It is also, perhaps, what it brings, for everyone everywhere, to the very idea of peace: the suggestion that peace is a concept which goes beyond purely political thought.54

Derrida points out that one can only be at peace with the other and never through the withdrawal of the face, which is as much to say that one can never be at peace, ‘purely’ at peace with the other qua other, i.e. Sadat’s peace must ultimately be a politically disclosed peace and not peace at all (see Arab, Israeli and Palestinian history from 1979 [the date of the Egyp-tian-Israeli peace treaty] to the present for confi rmation). As the preface to Totality and Infi nity tells us, ‘the peace of empires issued from war rests on war’ and the Oslo accord, issuing as it does from the post–Gulf War I dispensation, is such a peace. A political process which invokes the rhetoric and strategies of peace but which is in fact antagonistic to peace; a mana-gerial approach to peace repeated with commensurate failure around the globe from Ulster to Bosnia to Afghanistan and Iraq. Beyond the purity of the ‘beyond the purely political’ the inventions of hospitality must become political, i.e. part of the state. In responding to an aspiration it corresponds to the call of the third, as Levinas would have it, and in so doing deforms the I and the other, leading to the violence of a closed metaphysical schema.


This is why the purely or merely political matters and calls for an unceas-ing deconstruction of its own interiorization of its imagined transcendence beyond itself, when something like a so-called ‘peace process’ presents to the world under the name of peace the continuation of a war actively pur-sued on all sides.

There is much for the textual activist to commend in Derrida’s ‘just’ account of Levinas and much will require further positive investigation on another occasion. However, if I were Said (not to speak for him but in the spirit of the challenge of Said’s work and position) I would say to Der-rida: while you are correct to show that the problematic of Israel-Palestine reaches to the very roots of the formulation of the idiom of hospitality (in so far as your formulation of such is parasitic, in an affi rmative sense, on Levinas) and you are bold in your attempt to formulate a negotiation of the aporia between an unconditional and conditional hospitality in terms other than those proposed by either Levinas or Kant, a question must also, and conversely, be asked about this example of Israel-Palestine. Such a question falls in three parts. Firstly, regarding Kant and the lecture you delivered in Jerusalem on the question of the exemplarity of the national mission as it emerges from a certain confi guration within Enlightenment thought; if it is true that as a consequence of such unenlightened enlightenment that we Europeans (i.e. the West, together with all the satellites of the West, includ-ing now, ironically, Israel which was founded on a belief that the future was non-European but remains entirely a European nation-state) as inheri-tors of the aufklarung, still bear a responsibility for the holocaust as a the ultima ratio of such thought, then is it not the case that we Europeans also all bear a responsibility, in a direct way that must be answered, to the situ-ation of Israel-Palestine which is an uninterrupted historical consequence of the holocaust (i.e. the displacement of European Jewry and reparation to it by the Western powers)? In this way, attention to the bloody business of Israel-Palestine constitutes a decisive focus for a consideration of the loose ends of the unfi nished project of modernity, ‘today the war for the appro-priation of Jerusalem is the world war’, as you put it in Spectres of Marx.

Secondly, and consequently, as you note in a footnote to ‘A Word of Welcome’ on Sartre, ‘to the expression “Palestinian nationalism” there will never correspond the expression “Israeli nationalism”’.55 On the contrary, Israeli nationalism imagines itself, along with so many other nationalisms of a European kind, such as that of the United States, to lie beyond the purely or merely nationalistic, to envisage an elect people to be universal in an exemplary manner, even if it is diffi cult to determine the difference in practice from a Western nation-state. You do insist, however, in fi delity to Levinas on the distinction between a Jewish nationalism as an articula-tion of Zionism and a sacred covenant beyond a material nation. Even so, could such an appreciation of an ‘elect’ people (which you rightly inter-rogate here and in ‘Archive Fever’) ever be compatible with a binational state based on a secular and juridical bill of rights? What thinking would


have to take place within Judaism in order for such a disavowal (the double and distinct accommodation of a sacred covenant alongside secular citizen-ship) to take place? In other words, what the one-state solution calls for is a deconstructed Zionism (a deconstructed Palestinian self-determination too) which turned around its ontotheological structure to open on to, precisely, a messianic hospitality. This would not be a hospitality which ‘granted rights to Palestinians’, which would already be a conditional hos-pitality that presupposed an Israeli right to do so and therefore a relation of inside/outside with regard to Palestinians and the Israeli state. Rather, it would be an unconditional hospitality which took seriously the challenge of the Levinasian opening with respect to the interminable work of facing the third with justice.

Thirdly, and here is my substantial worry, as you list the geographic space of Israel on a par with the Church of St. Bernard and say that Pales-tinians, ‘and so many others call for a change in the socio-political space—a juricio-political mutation, though, before this . . . an ethical conversion’56 which would be a reversal of the offences against hospitality enacted upon them (and throughout such an equation you cite Levinasian ethics as hav-ing drawn our attention to such crimes against hospitality); it should be stated that historically speaking it is not the state of Israel that must be hospitable to the Palestinians (i.e. accommodate its other within its bor-ders) but the Palestinians who occupied this multicultural land for mil-lennia before 1948 to decide if they should be hospitable to a nationalism which emerges within this land to totalize and dominate it. That is to say, not that the state of Israel is not an immutable fact of history, and of the history of the nation-state and of the history of Europe, but that the Israelis simply have no right to offer hospitality to the Palestinians, rather it is they who should even now ask hospitality and forgiveness of the Palestinians. In other words, the exemplarity of hospitality deforms and relegates the his-torical situation of the Palestinians. You are correct to question Levinas’s assertion that with a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel, Zionism is revealed as ‘a great ambition of the Spirit’, since that most cynical of ‘peaces’ was made explicitly at the expense and occlusion of the Palestinian cause and in return for decades of American-sponsored (funded/subsidized) ‘peace’ (after Israel, Egypt is the second largest recipient of US fi nancial aid). My question here is your own regarding the example in Lacan: a mere example but also not just any old example and what an example to pick! In brief, Derrida might respond, ‘yes, yes, and I did not say exactly so’.

While more remains to be said let us note for now and in conclusion that Derrida’s formulation of hospitality within the ambit of Palestine-Israel is an act of political creativity that rubs up against Said’s proposal for a binational state, in which the challenge is to imagine a promise of peace (peaceful coexistence) and a historical openness to a messianic per-fectibility otherwise than the intractable closure of minds which presently passes for political thought in Israel-Palestine. However, I would also like


to note a misgiving I have concerning Said’s own protocols of politicised thinking. In a powerfully economic formulation of one of his favourite refrains, he writes:

. . . there is a great difference between political and intellectual behav-iour. The intellectual’s role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intel-lectual’s constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a ca-reer interest: only the truth unadorned. Political behaviour principally relies upon considerations of interest—advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one’s position.57

He notes this in relation to the support given by the Cairo Peace Society and the Peace Now movement to the Oslo declaration. However, such a rhetorical surge is also the next-door neighbour of the criticism of aca-demic specialism with which this essay began. While this sort of statement (backed up by all the great acts of integrity performed by Said during his lifetime) allowed him to stand aloof from the trimmers and compromis-ers of the Palestinian Authority, in light of all that we have said here, it is not without its diffi culties. Namely, how can he be so sure? If Said is ‘the last Jewish intellectual’, sceptical of the pure or originary, how can he be so sure that ‘the truth unadorned’ has been arrived at? How can the articulation of such a truth to power be anything other than a political act and how can political and intellectual activity be held apart in such an assured way? It almost seems as if Said’s humanism here comes up along-side Levinas’s transhistorical messianism, where both imagine politics to be some lower or supplementary activity to either thought (Said’s intel-lectual activity) or meaning (Levinas’s transhistorical event). Surely, the merely or purely political imbricates itself within the work of ‘the intellec-tual’ (the history, a European one at that, of this term would require some scrutiny to do justice to Said here) which is never outside of calculations regarding institutional positions, even if that calculation is not to have such a position. Academic position can certainly be maintained by attack-ing the very idea of position. Furthermore, how is the truth to be com-municated as ‘plainly’ and ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation of political position or how is that position to be beyond the merely political? How is the truth to be approached if not from a necessarily impure posi-tion, internal to politics? At what stage will such interiority be breeched and the unadorned truth of the intellectual supersede the political? Like Said, and like Derrida, I believe in truth. I presuppose it every time I speak. That does not mean I am confi dent that it has yet been disclosed. I am quite sure that both Ariel Sharon and the Hamas suicide bombers believe that they are speaking the unadorned truth even from their supposedly


compromised positions of pragmatic political formulation. It is one of the defi ning characteristics of the ‘purely political’ that it interiorizes its own transcendence within itself, each metaphysically predicated political posi-tion projecting the acceptance of its own accomplished truth-claim back onto itself as its own justifi cation. In other words when Said is at his most rhetorically aloof from mere ‘political behaviour’ he is in fact behaving at his most political.

There are those who will say that I should not write such things. They will say that in ‘deconstructing’ Said, I am demonstrating the moral and political bankruptcy of deconstruction, questioning truth, undermining fundamental premises, arguing against enlightenment or even offending the memory of Said. I do not think I am doing any of these things, although I am certainly questioning someone’s idea of truth. I am, on the contrary, taking up the ruthless challenge of Said’s thought, namely, that there should be no place to hide from the diffi culty of truth exposed by the political it-must-be of justice. As Said would have acknowledged pleasing or displeas-ing academic peers, colleagues or publishers is not the point, even if that means commenting on the rhetorical contradictions of Edward Said. Said was correct in his impatience with deconstruction in that early Derrida-Foucault essay, deconstruction can and should articulate an understanding of Palestine-Israel. Ultimately, Said’s own fi nal position on a binational state was such a deconstruction, and when Derrida writes of the logocen-trism, Western thought, Europe, the remainder [cindres], the enlighten-ment, nationalism, the religious, the messianic, the Abrahamic, Marxism, friendship, hospitality and so on, he will have been writing, according to a certain index, about nothing other than Palestine. If Said was the last Jew-ish intellectual, Derrida was the last after the last. In an interview given a few months before his death he states that his own Jewishness is a hyper-bolic belonging to Judaism:

It is more Jewish to be critical of the notion of ‘elected people’, the confi dent feeling of being the ‘elected people’, with all the political con-sequences that you know. It is more Jewish, more of a Jew to be suspi-cious about that than the Jews themselves. That’s why I say I’m the last of the Jews, I don’t know how to say it in English, Je suis le dernier des juifs. That is the worst, the lowest kind, and perhaps the last one.58

Let us hope that such critical thought does not die with the mortal frames of Said and Derrida but that the task of deconstructing Palestine is taken up by a last [le dernier] lost tribe of ‘Jewish’ intellectuals prepared to ‘tell the truth to power’, the truth about power, the power of truth, the power of power, and the truth about truth; and to deconstruct ‘deconstructionism’.

EpilogueWar and Philosophy

I have a particular fondness for the otherwise didactic Jean-Luc Godard fi lm Notre Musique. The second and main section of the fi lm, ‘Kingdom 2: Purgatory’ tells the melancholy story of a group of internationals, including Godard himself and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich, participating in a ‘festival’ of ‘European Literary Encounters’ in Sarajevo just before the outbreak of the second Gulf War. The poignancy and futility of this episode are recorded in equal measure. The internationals are shown great respect and hospitality as they are chauffeured between lectures and readings, press interviews and sight-seeing. Collectively, they refl ect on the sadness of Bosnia and man’s inhumanity to man, quoting themselves, Homer and Blanchot as they are driven around the shot-out and reconstructed streets of the city. The internationals, with international funding, have arrived in a former confl ict zone on the southern edge of Europe to facilitate the recon-ciliation process through poetry and criticism, while the West prepares for war in the Middle East. There is a time-lag between the chorus of writers who gather around the wounds of Bosnia and the spirit of global confl ict which has moved on to Iraq, taking the media with it, leaving the poets to comment on the intractable residue of Bosnia, which may itself be quite deaf to the words of Europe’s literary aristocrats.

I am fond of this fi lm partly because it tells the story of a comic opera in which I have participated before as the international visitor being billeted in the only four-star hotel in town, being fussed over by genial hosts, being driven around ruins on the way to a lecture where I am asked to comment on the conditions of the daily existence of the audience (far more familiar with the facts of their own lives than I) before being taken to the airport and sent back to the UK to my First-World students and my suburban routine. There is a story to tell about the ways in which the West sends its poets and thinkers as the rear-guard action of its foreign policy. The writers attempt to subvert such a mission by encouraging discussion of what might nor-mally go unsaid (especially about the West itself) but in so doing are merely confi rming the triumph of a certain set of Western values that they have been sent there to exemplify and which the foreign policy did not. I have the good fortune to have friends and collaborators in Georgia, once the toe of

Epilogue 169

the Soviet Empire now the front line of the ‘war on terror’. They tell me of having approached the United Nations (who still maintain a presence there after years of war with Russia, scandalously under-reported in the Western media) to seek funding for an international art exhibition. They were told that the UN mission in Tbilisi could not fund such a thing because if they did when their budget was audited by ‘head offi ce’ they would realize that Georgia was not in a state of continued destabilization, the mission would be closed and everyone would be sent somewhere much more dangerous like Iraq or Darfur. The opportunities for the dissemination of European culture through the humane intervention of poets and literary theorists are as yet limited in Baghdad and the Western Sudan. I recently had a trip to the North West Frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan cancelled because it was too dangerous to teach deconstruction there at the moment. I do not think the deconstruction was the troublesome part. When faced with brute force writing always comes off second-best (initially).

In Godard’s fi lm, the French ambassador to Bosnia awaits the arrival of the writers for an offi cial reception, surrounded by copies of the world’s press, the headlines of which tell of the coming war in Iraq. The fi ctional ambassador (based perhaps in part on Bernard Kouchner’s role for the UN in Kosovo) asks his old schoolmate, the novelist Pierre Bergounioux play-ing himself, ‘Do writers know what they’re talking about? Do they really know?’ ‘Of course not’, replies the novelist, ‘Homer knew nothing about battlefi elds, slaughter, victories or glory. He was blind and bored. He had to settle for recounting what others did. . . Those who act never have the ability to say or think adequately about what they do. Conversely, those who tell stories, poets, don’t know what they’re talking about.’ The aporia of refl ection has its formal defi nition completed later on, in keeping with the shot/counter-shot of Godard’s lecture on cinema at the centre of the fi lm, when Mahmoud Darwich sits in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Sarajevo, speaking to a fi ctional Jewish journalist of Homer’s silencing of the Trojans. He says in a hyperbolic way, ‘Does a land that has great poets have the right to control a people that has no poets? And is the lack of poetry amongst a people enough reason to justify its defeat?’ He goes on to offer a justifi ca-tion of poetry and theory when he says, ‘neither a victim nor a defeat can be gauged in military terms [only in poetry and thought]. . . A people with no poetry is a defeated people’. Such claims for the Trojan bards are no doubt overstated in the face of the Greek war machine. Horatio lives to tell the story of Hamlet aright but it is Fortinbras who claims the throne amidst so much blank verse.

The role of writing in the face of political power is not that of a coun-ter-weapon; the pen is not mightier than the sword. Rather, when writing addresses itself to power, or even fi nds itself brought involuntarily to the attention of power, its effects are at once deferred and inverted. The tank shreds the journal but the journal should not be thought of as a device for head-on assault. The value of the journal is the invisible work it does,


round the back and through the side-door. Poetry and writing are what they are because they are unconditional, the poet as a poet is obliged to say everything that truth requires even if it is in the form of a fi ction. Sovereign power is what it is precisely because its mastery is limiting, it defi nes what can and cannot be said, although not necessarily at the end of a gun bar-rel. The one thing that the sovereign cannot master is the unconditional because by defi nition the unconditional cannot be mastered. Accordingly, the unconditional demonstrates the limits of sovereignty and shows it to be not sovereign enough. Power cannot bear poetry and war has no time for philosophy and yet it is through the back-door and sideways on that poetry and philosophy demonstrate the constitutional lack of the power that excludes them. Sometimes writing follows behind like Godard’s inter-nationals who tour Sarajevo in taxis, playing out its ambivalent relation-ship to power, caught in its own apoertic conditions as both instrument and sign and neither fully instrumental and never symbolic enough. Of course poetry and philosophy can carry the sovereign forward, justifying violence and supporting colonialisms of every kind. Fortinbras will have his bards and theorists. However, it is the time-lag that separates the experiences of the closed act of military suppression and the resonating after-life of writ-ing, which means that the meaning of poetry and philosophy can never be entirely co-terminus with power. Equally, and for the same reason, it can never confront the tank head-on, but as the fi ctionalized Darwich suggests the measurement of a victim or defeat is not a question that a military apparatus can answer. This is the task of poetry, the analysis of the condi-tions of defeat or victory (which are the same conditions depending upon where one stands) is the task of philosophy, given that neither poetry nor philosophy are capable of sustaining terms such as ‘defeat’ or ‘victory’. Phi-losophy is required to speak as the troops gather at the borders on the eve of invasion but amidst the rumble of tank wheels its voice is likely to be ignored. However, once those wheels have ground to a halt in the sand and the last bullet has been spent, it is philosophy which carries on speaking, without limit, in the quietest but most insistent of voices, having the last word, carrying on the discussion, and it is by this delayed persistence that ultimately (should the last instance ever have the manners to arrive) that writing turns power inside out.

The poets of Godard’s fi lm move around Sarajevo like ghosts (accom-panied by three ‘real’ ghosts, a trio of Native Americans who occasionally interrupt the musings of the French authors to speak in English about their genocide, just in case we had missed the point of Godard’s story). They mingle with all the ghosts of Sarajevo in a spectral conference. It is not that this trip is unusual (as I say I have been there myself) rather that any such conference would be by its nature spectral. That is to say, that when writ-ers speak, their words, unlike bullets, are not made for the present. They may indeed have no weight in the present at all. Rather, their words persist. They are made to be read tomorrow and to speak to other times and other

Epilogue 171

places. Such conferences are always conferences of and with the future. Sovereignty can always roll over the words of poets but it can never ‘deal’ with them because these words always remain to be reckoned with and are in principal unsaturable and illimitable. The crossing and recrossing of the border between fi ction and reality, poetry and the political, philosophy and fi lm-making, fi nally leaves the words and images of Godard’s fi lm (the imaginary which conditions our experience of the world, notre musique) as a powerless powerful statement on the powerlessness of the power of the poetic. The internationals say their good-byes at the airport and Godard leaves the survivors of Sarajevo to live on in that city of ghosts as he returns to his gardening in a French rural retreat. The young journalist, Judith Lerner, who reads Blanchot and Levinas, is shot in Israel at the end of this section only to fi nd that ‘Kingdom 3: Paradise’ is a safe haven secured by the arms of the American Marine Corp.

What chance does ‘textual activism’ have in such a world? As I fi nish this short text, I am sitting on a train heading towards London to the same station where two years ago other travellers from Leeds conspired to blow themselves and many innocents up in the heart of the British capital. Today, like the French ambassador in Godard’s fi lm, I am surrounded by newspa-per headlines that report a coming confl agration. This time in the nuclear power Pakistan where the West’s dictatorial ally is attempting to suppress simultaneously Islamism and democracy. Who could have the strength to continue to respond to the daily need to write under and about such con-ditions? Somewhere, perhaps in the offi ces of a circle of philosophers in Belgrade, Beijing or Berkeley, a quiet, refl ective voice continues to speak. A keyboard types on as a still, rational voice of refl ection in the corner of an unhinged world. Such writers are not mere ‘tenured radicals’ cut off from ‘the real world’ of media noise, their duty is to think the truth to power and in their position they are obliged to say all that must be said in the name of truth, publicly and to publish it. Their textual activism is the avant-garde of critical thought. They are the makers of the library of tomorrow.

07.11.2007

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 29.

2. Levinas, Totality and Infi nity, 21. 3. See Jacques Derrida, ‘To Arrive—At the Ends of the State (and of War, and of

World War)’, in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). pp. 141–61.Here Derrida proposes that ‘there is essentially no longer any such thing today that can be called in all rigour “war” or “terrorism” [in the classical sense]’, 156. See also his comments here on ‘rationalization’ in a psychoanalytic sense.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori, 116 (Chi-cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

2. On the modalities of dating see Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, 382–404 (London: Routledge, 1992).

3. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, 89. 4. Obviously the use of the term ‘empire’ in relation to the United States of

America is not without its risks. If one can speak of a displacement in the classical idea of sovereignty and of the dissolution of the nation state as characteristic of the transformations to be seen at present in the geopolitical realm. Then whenever one uses the term ‘empire’ in relation to the United States in its current confi guration then one must also understand that the very idea of ‘empire’ itself, as it has been classically understood since the empires of nineteenth-century Europe, is equally under erasure in the epoch of glo-balization. Accordingly, ‘empire’ here does not designate a specifi c model of occupation, administration and appropriation (although this sometimes happens) but rather indicates a sphere of domination (politically, culturally, economically and militarily). This after all is what lies behind the avowed strategy of ‘full spectrum domination’. Although the irresistibility and total-ity of ‘American Imperialism’ is very much in doubt, and clearly while the models of domination utilised by American interests are not the same as the European empires of the nineteenth century, it is not a mere clichéd fantasy of ‘Frenchifi ed’ leftists to speak of American Imperialism. It is precisely this imperialist impulse that ruins everything one would wish to celebrate about

174 Notes

the United States. One might say, that the contradictory and aporetic dif-fi culties of the American Imperialist impulse are exactly what place the idea of ‘empire’ in deconstruction today.

5. John Reid, when the British Home Secretary expressed a view offered by many before him that the nation now faced ‘probably the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the second world war’, The Guardian, August 10, 2006.

6. See The Times, November 29, 2001. For an account of the genealogy of this mythic lair see http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fi ctoid3.htm, including Donald Rumsfeld’s commentary on NBC’s Meet the Press, Decem-ber 2, 2001. See also Mark C Taylor, ‘The Mythic Power of Caves’, The Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2002.

7. The language of managerialism and the audit culture of public institutions in the West would be another good example of material inscription at work, but that is another story.

8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C Spivak (Baltimore: John Hop-kins University Press, 1976).

9. Derrida, ‘Not Utopia, the Impossible’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, 127 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

10. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, 124. 11. Ibid., 113. 12. For example, see ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at

the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Derrida provides a long footnote on this in the interview with Borradori, see pp.187–188, n.7.

13. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of Ameri-can Empire, new ed. (New York: Times Warner, 2002).

14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, Paper Machine, 165. 15. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, 165 16. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, 174. 17. On this point, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Sui-

cides’, 115.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori, 106 (Chi-cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

2. Tom Stoppard, Travesties (New York: Grove Press, 1991). 3. Third Presidential Candidate’s Debate, Arizona State University, Tempe,

Arizona, October 13, 2004. 4. By suggesting that ‘postmodernism’ is ‘outdated’ and ‘reductive’ I am not

engaging in a disreputable attack on the postmodern or postmodernity as such. Rather, I am expressing a concern over the continued application of an analysis of so-called ‘late capitalism’ fi rst formulated in the 1980s. No doubt present conditions are related to the economic transformations which both David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity and Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism trace to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. However, I wonder if it is enough today to continue to extend this paradigmatic analysis into the present as if all of history were continuous and predictable. In fact, following Hardt and Negri’s account of ‘globalization’ as the becoming of a worldwide

Notes 175

infrastructure for the dissemination of capital beyond the sovereignty of the nation-state in its classical formation, since the end of World War II, might we say that the origins and originality of postmodernism should be put to rigorous questioning. See, Martin McQuillan, Postmodernism: Postmoder-nity (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming).

5. See Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The Work of Mourning, the State of the Debt and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1984); ‘“the New International”, refers to a profound transfor-mation, projected over a long term, of international law, of its concepts, and its fi eld of intervention’ (84).

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2001).

7. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Refl ections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Shocken Books, 1978).

8. For a journalistic commentary on this see Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, (London: Vintage, 2003).

9. I am adopting Derrida’s adoption of this term from Carl Schmidt since his reading in Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1999).

10. For a more detailed reconstruction of the history of the displacement of pan-Arab socialism by Islamic fundamentalism see Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fun-damentalisms, (London: Verso, 2002).

11. For a further account of the global projection of Al Qaeda see Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, (London: Penguin, 2004).

12. For a detailed, historical forensic analysis of the becoming of Al Qaeda see the documentary fi lm The Power of Nightmares, written and directed by Adam Curtis (BBC Films, 2004). This fi lm was much criticized after the events of July 7, 2005, in London. However, despite the libel thrown at it by those who have either not watched it or are incapable of understanding it, this fi lm does not claim that Islamic terrorism does not exist. On the contrary it shows the precise nature of a very real danger. It does argue, quite rightly, that the projection of Al Qaeda as a hegemonic organisation controlling and planning worldwide terrorism on a corporate scale is a myth as much promoted by Al Qaeda as by certain Western governments.

13. See Umberto Eco, ‘Striking at the Heart of the State’, in Apocalypse Post-poned (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

14. Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2005). 15. Notable fi gures on the left such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen

defend this position as a position of the left, see Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (New York: Plume Books, 2003); or Thomas Cushman, ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitar-ian Arguments for War in Iraq (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

16. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (London: Heinemann, 1967), act 1, p. 39.

17. ‘It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might with-out justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then com-bine justice and might and, for this end, make what is just strong, or what is strong just. Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid jus-tice and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus, being unable

176 Notes

to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.’ Blaise Pascal, Pensees, sec. 5, p. 298.

18. Let me refer here to Philippe Sands’ excellent book Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules, rev. ed. (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 2006). Sands makes the case that the judicial rulings which sought to establish whether Gen-eral Augustus Pinochet could be tried outside of Chile for breach of the 1984 ‘Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treat-ment or Punishment’, to which Chile was a signatee, established a legal prec-edent that any government offi cial or head of state who has authorised torture is not immune from prosecution upon leaving offi ce and can be tried in any court-room in the world. That is to say that this convention establishes the authorisation of torture as a crime of universal jurisdiction. The implications of this are vast and will quickly become apparent as the development of inter-national law accelerates. For example, while any prosecution must ultimately turn on the facts of the case, should clear documentary evidence emerge once the Bush regime has left offi ce that they did authorise torture in say Guantá-namo Bay or in cases of so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ then it will be per-fectly possible for those individuals to be tried in any court in the world (given that America is an adherent to the convention). This is by no means fanciful, as in the Pinochet case, all that would be required for such a trial would be for an investigative magistrate (in, say, Italy where Italian citizens have been snatched from Italian soil and ‘extraordinarily rendered’) to issue an arrest warrant and to seek the extradition of an individual. The Pinochet case in London centred around whether he should be extradited to Spain not whether he was guilty. This is as much to say that upon leaving offi ce the members of the Bush cabinet should be careful where they travel to, lest they be served with a warrant upon arrival. The prospect of Rumsfeld and Cheney spending their fi nal years like Pinochet being wheeled in and out of court-rooms surrounded by expensively assembled legal teams would represent a bathetic end to the war on terror.

19. Derrida has frequently commented on Kant’s essay. See, for example, ‘Hostipitality’, trans. Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3–18. This work represents something of a leitmotif in this book.

20. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). For previous mobilisations of sovereignty in Derrida’s writing see ‘The Future of the Pro-fession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the “Humanities”, What Could Take Place Tomorrow)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Jacques Der-rida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’, in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

21. Derrida, Rogues, 84. 22. Derrida, ‘The Future of the Profession’, 26–27. 23. Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, trans. Beverley Bie Bra-

hic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). See my comments on sovereignty and literature in the preface ‘What is Called Literature’.

24. Derrida, Rogues, 150.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, trans. H.B. Nis-bet, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Notes 177

2. This text was fi rst published in parallax 16, no. 6 (2000): 2. 3. On a similar point see Derrida and Lyotard’s exchange in ‘Discussions, or

Phrasing “After Auschwitz”’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 386–389 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

4. La violence ne peut viser qu’un visage, Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infi ni, Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). Quoted Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 147 (London: Rout-ledge, 1978).

5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 , no.5–6 (1990): 977.

6. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’, in The Complete Stan-dard Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 197–215 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).

7. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in One Way Street and Other Writ-ings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985). pp. 132–54.

8. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 153. 9. For a full account of the relation between philosophy, violence and logos see

Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. 10. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 197. 11. Ibid., 199. 12. Ibid., 199–200. 13. Ibid., 200. 14. Ibid. 15. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, 124. 16. Ibid., 117. 17. Unger, Politik und Metaphysik (Berlin: Koenigshausen & Neumann G.,

1921), 8. Quoted by Benjamin, p.143. 18. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 200. 19. Ibid., 202. 20. Ibid., 201. 21. Ibid., 203. 22. Ibid. 23. A brief examination of Kant’s articles would show that during the Kosovo

campaign the NATO powers broke every single one of them. 24. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, 104. 25. Ibid. 26. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, 105. 27. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 132. 28. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 204. [Gewalt] 29. Ibid. 30. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 997. 31. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 204. 32. Ibid., 204–205. 33. Ibid., 205. 34. Ibid., 204. 35. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, 105. 36. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 142. 37. Derrida, ‘Violence of Metaphysics’, 130. 38. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 149. 39. French in the original text. 40. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 205. 41. Ibid.

178 Notes

42. Ibid. 43. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 142. 44. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 985. 45. Ibid. 46. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 205–206. 47. Ibid., 206. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Ed. Alan Udolt, Kafka and the

Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, trans. Avital Ronell, 128–149 (Bloomimgton: Indiana University Press, 1987).

53. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 214. 54. Ibid., 206. 55. Ibid. 56. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 142. 57. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1015. 58. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 207. 59. Ibid. 60. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987). 61. Einstein and Freud, ‘Why War?’, 207. 62. Ibid., 207–208. 63. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, 102.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 197.

2. See Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); ‘The Remains of Psychoanalysis (I): Telepathy’, in After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); ‘Memento Mori’, in Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. M. McQuillan (London: Palgrave, 2001) pp. 189–204. See also the comments, en passant, by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle in their Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd ed. (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1999), a book with imitators but no peers.

3. On the question of telepathy in psychoanalysis see Maria Torok’s afterword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, by Nicholas Abrahams and Maria Torok, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986).

4. On deconstruction and telepathy see also John Forrester, ‘Psychoanalysis: Gos-sip, Telepathy and/or Science?’, in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Ned Lukacher ‘Introduction: Mourning Becomes Telepathy’, in Cinders, by Jacques Derrida, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1991).

5. This is the phrase used by Derrida in his ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988): 3–41. Reprinted in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

6. ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’ and ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ in The Stan-dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), hereafter cited as

Notes 179

SE. See also Lecture 30, ‘Dreams and Occultism’, of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE, vol. 22, and ‘The Occult Signifi cance of Dreams’ included as an appendix to the Gesammelte Schriften edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, vol. 5.

7. See Ernst Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1957), 2:422.

8. In ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9–63, Derrida makes the connection between the Freudian project and tele-technology by suggesting that this form of circular letter follows the structure of e-mail.

9. This dream is also discussed in a passage added in 1919 to The Interpreta-tion of Dreams (1900), SE, vol. 5, 558ff.

10. On the issue of polemos, see Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). See also Paul Bowman, ed., ‘Polemics’, parallax 15 (April–June 2000).

11. See Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’’, SE, vol. 19, 225–232, reproduced in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. M. McQuillan. See also, Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Dif-ference.

12. Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day Dreaming’, SE, vol.9, 141–155. 13. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, SE, vol. 9,

7–97; Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context’, Glyph 1 (1977): 172–197. 14. SE, vol. 9, 7. 15. The problem for Freud is in fact more interesting than my comments here

seem to suggest. In fact for Freud the question of dreams in literature imply that the shimmer of meaning is an effect not of refl ective transparency but of inscription, system and grammar. He writes:

Even if this enquiry should teach us nothing new about the nature of dreams, it may perhaps enable us from this angle to gain some small insight into the nature of creative writing. Real dreams were already regarded as unrestricted and unregulated structures—and now we are confronted by unfettered imitations of these dreams! There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental life, however, than we are inclined to assume—there may even be none at all. What we call chance in the world outside can, as is well known, be resolved into laws. So, too, what we call arbitrariness in the mind rests upon laws, which we are only now beginning dimly to suspect. (SE 9)

This is an analysis I will have to postpone for the present. For a fuller read-ing of creative writing and this essay see Martin McQuillan, ‘The Girl Who Steps Along, or, 10 Steps on the Ladder to Rending Cixous’, Oxford Literary Review 25.

16. Royle, After Derrida, 74. 17. Ibid., 76–77. 18. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Le facteur de la verite’, in The Post Card, 411–497. 19. Let me note in passing that the name of the racehorse bet on by Sean Connery

in that most deconstructive and Freudian of fi lms, Marnie, is Telepathy. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, in Deconstruction: A Reader, p. 524, n.1. 21. If we reinsert the pages of ‘Telepathy’ back into Envois two curious coin-

cidences arise. The envoi for July 8, 1979, the entry before the ‘Telepathy’ cards, tells of Derrida’s response to the rumour (spread at different times by Serge Doubrovsky and Jacques Lacan) that ‘J.D. is in analysis’. The narra-tor claims he is not in analysis and tells the narratee ‘I’m acquainted with several people who know, support, explain to themselves that I’m not in analysis (you know who I’m talking about)’. Once again the supplement of

180 Notes

parenthesis is signifi cant: Derrida’s wife, Margueritte, is a psychoanalyst. The envois breaks off from this story to close:

Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one who was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature). I suggested to her something on the telephone in the litera-ture of the 20th century (and beyond), starting with, for example, the telephone lady in Proust or the fi gure of the American operator, and then asking the question of the effects of the most advanced telemat-ics (la télématique la plus avancée) on whatever would still remain of literature. I spoke to her about microprocessors and computer termi-nals, she seemed somewhat disgusted. She told me that she still loved literature (me too, I answered her, mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understood by this. (The Post Card, 204)

Avital Ronell later took up this project in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1989).

22. Derrida, The Post Card, 7. See also Derrida, Cinders. 23. See Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso,

1997). 24. Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, 504. 25. Ibid., 518. 26. On this point see Nicholas Royle’s commentary on Derrida’s essay, After

Derrida, 73. 27. Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, 505. 28. Ibid., 523. 29. Ibid., 506. 30. This confl ict has truly been a ‘Media War’. While the press in Europe

attempts to explain the mind of terrorists, in Afghanistan—to date—more Western journalists have been killed than American military personnel and the ‘liberation’ of Kabul was lead by the BBC journalist John Simpson.

31. See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

32. See the chapter on ‘Aesthetic Ideology’, in my Paul de Man (London: Rout-ledge, 2001); and my ‘Spectres of Poujade: Naomi Klein and the New Inter-national’, parallax 20, ‘The New International’, Chapter 6 this book.

33. Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, SE, vol. 14, 296.

34. Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, 515. 35. On the aporetic relation between responsibility and irresponsibility see

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

36. See Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 93–131. On this point see also Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 6.

37. Royle, After Derrida, 72. 38. Derrida has written at length on the relation between religion and tele-tech-

nology, see his ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Der-rida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

39. On this point see Derrida, ‘Above All, No Journalists!’, in Religion and the Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 56–94.

40. This, in brief, is the plot of the fi lm The Matrix in which the regime of tele-technology is at war with ‘terrorist’ humans who fi gure their struggle in

Notes 181

explicitly theological terms. Neo, the chosen one, dies and is resurrected to save Zion.

41. Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 17.

42. The war is also concerned with the question of Palestine. In Spectres of Marx (1994) Derrida comments, ‘the war for the “appropriation of Jerusalem” is today the world war’:

>Messianic eschatologies [the Abrahamic religions] mobilise there all the forces of the world and the whole ‘world order’ in the ruthless war they are waging against each other, directly or indirectly; they mobil-ise simultaneously, in order to put them to work or to the test, the old concepts of State and nation-State, of international law, of tele-techno-medio-economic and scientifi co-military forces, in other words, the most archaic and most modern spectral forces.

Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 58.

43. Reported in ‘The Editor’, The Guardian, November 17, 2001, 4. 44. Here I owe a debt to the more considered arguments of Jean-Luc Nancy

in ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, in Religion and the Media, trans. Simon Sparks, 112–130.

45. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, 115. 46. Ibid., 130. 47. Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature, 27.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) pp. 109–37. First published in French in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), this lecture was given in New York in October 18–19, 1968, at the international colloquium on ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’. My own text was fi rst pre-sented at the ‘Forty Years of “Structure, Sign and Play”’ symposium at the National University of Singapore, April 2007.

2. Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, 117. 3. See ‘The Ends of Man’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30,

no. 1 (1969): 31–57. This is the journal of the International Phenomenologi-cal Society published through State University of New York at Buffalo. The translation here is a collaboration between Edouard Morot-Sir, Wesley C Piersol, Hubert L Dreyfus and Barbara Reid. For a contemporary response to Derrida’s comments in 1968, particularly with respect to Vietnam, see Richard Popkin’s ‘Comments on Professor Derrida’s Paper’ pages 58–65 of this edition.

4. Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, 111. 5. Ibid., 112–113. 6. Ibid., 113. 7. Ibid. This and following quotes are from pages 113–114. 8. See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso,

2001); Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: the Secret World of Richard Nixon (Basingstoke: Penguin, 2001); H.R. Haldeman, Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon Whitehouse (New York: GP Putnam, 1995).

9. Speaking in Jerusalem in 1988, Derrida begins his lecture thus:

182 Notes

I had already communicated my anxiety to the organizers of this meet-ing. I had expressed to them my wish to participate in a conference where Arab and Palestinian colleagues would be offi cially invited and effectively involved. The organizers of this meeting, Professors Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, shared my concern. I thank them for the understanding they have shown in this regard. With all the gravity this requires, I wish to state right now my solidarity with all those, in this land, who advocate an end to violence, condemn the crimes of terrorism and of military and police repression, and advocate the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories as well as the recognition of the Palestinian’s right to choose their own represen-tatives to negotiations now more indispensable than ever. This can-not be accomplished without unceasing, well-informed, courageous refl ection. This refl ection should lead to new or not-necessarily-new interpretations of what—three years ago, while this conference was being planned here—I had proposed to call the ‘institutions of inter-pretation’. But that same refl ection should also lead us to interpret that dominant institution which is the State, here the Israeli State (whose existence, it goes without saying, must henceforth be recognized by all and defi nitely guaranteed), along with its prehistory, the conditions of its recent founding, and the constitutional, legal, political foundations of its present functioning, the forms and limits of its self-interpreta-tion, and so forth.

As is evident by my presence right here, this declaration is inspired not only by my concern for justice and by my friendship toward both the Palestinians and the Israelis. It is meant also as an expression of respect for a certain image of Israel as an expression of hope for its future.

I am not saying this, of course, in order to tailor my purpose arti-fi cially to some external circumstance. The call for such a historical refl ection, anxiety-laden as it might appear, courageous as it must be, seems to me to be inscribed in the most strictly determining context of our meeting. It constitutes in my view its very sense—and its urgency.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German’, trans. Moshe Ron, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, 137–138 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

10. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, closing paragraph. 11. See ‘A French-American’s Philosophers Conference, Part I’, Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research 29, no. 4 (1968). 12. See Richard Popkin’s ‘Comments’. 13. See my ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Cultural Studies?’ in Roland

Barthes (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). 14. Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, trans.

Joan Stambaugh, in Basic Writings, rev. ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993).

15. Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, 131. 16. For a discussion of deconstruction as pas de méthode, see my introduction to

Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 17. Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, 133. 18. Ibid. This and following quotes are from pages 134–135. 19. In a contemporaneous publication Derrida asks, ‘Our question is there-

fore no longer only “how to reconcile Rousseau and Marx”, but also: “Is it suffi cient to speak of superstructure and to denounce in an hypothesis an exploitation of man by man in order to confer a Marxian pertinence upon this hypothesis?”’ Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Notes 183

(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976; Editions de Minuit, 1967), 120.

20. See Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

21. See, for example, Derrida, ‘Ja, or le faux-bond’, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf, 54 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). For a discussion of Derrida and critique see Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening of Politicisation in Levinas and Der-rida’, in The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, ed. M. McQuillan, (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

22. See Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Georges Collins (London: Verso, 1999).

23. On the ‘masterpiece’ as that which survives translation see Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The Work of Mourning, the State of the Debt, and the New Inter-national, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

24. See Christoher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. 25. I am thinking here of the text for Deleuze, ‘Il me faudra errer tout seul’

(Libération, November 7, 1995). I am also reminded here of a comment made by Derrida in the interview with Giovanna Borradori: ‘I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, refl ect in a responsible fashion on these questions [of international law] and demand accountability from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language and institutions of international law. A ‘philosopher’ (actually I would prefer to say “philosopher-deconstructor”) would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation.’ Derrida, ‘Autoim-munity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori, 106 (Chicago and London: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2003).

26. I am grateful to Tom Cohen’s work on ‘critical climate change’ for the use of this phrase, www.albany.edu/english/iccc/.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. What Bismarck really said was: Je weniger die Leute darüber wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie nachts [The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night].

2. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The Work of Mourning, the State of the Debt, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), xvii.

3. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 224.

4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 389, and Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), 226–247. (First published London: Faber and Faber, 1984.)

5. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 52. 6. Ibid. 7. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pas-

cale-Anne Brault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

184 Notes

8. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 28. 9. Derek Attridge, ‘The Art of the Impossible’, in The Politics of Deconstruc-

tion: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, ed. Martin McQuillan (London: Pluto Press, 2007) pp. 54–66.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1986), 11.

2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 102.

3. One of the exemplary uses of ‘heimlich’ quoted by Freud in ‘The “Uncanny”’, see Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Com-plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 344 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).

4. Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 23, 245.

5. See Martin McQuillan, ‘The Politics of Friendship’, Textual Practice 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 178–184.

6. In this respect the opening paragraph of my review shares something with Terry Eagleton and Tony Bennet’s early accounts of Derrida, or, the Simon Critchley of The Ethics of Deconstruction. In fact, in another context this desire is the basis of much of the Anglo-American suspicion to and hostility towards deconstruction, i.e. that it should be accountable to politics.

7. Geoffrey Bennington’s Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, (Lon-don: Verso, 1994).

8. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, trans. Simon Critchley, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 77–88. Ernesto Laclau is the co-editor of the Phronesis series and also has a text in Deconstruction and Pragmatism.

9. On several occasions Paul de Man describes the recuperative effects of meta-physics as a forgetting, for example see ‘Shelley Disfi gured’, in Rhetoric and Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

10. See the contributions to parallax 20, ‘The New International’, 2001, ed. Martin McQuillan. Here the contributors were asked to examine two pas-sages from Spectres of Marx:

‘The New International’ refers to a profound transformation, pro-jected over a long term of international law, of its concepts, and its fi eld of intervention . . . A ‘new international’ is being sought through these crises of international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the law of the market, the ‘foreign debt’, the inequality of techno-scientifi c, military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the history of humanity . . . The ‘New International’ is not only that which is seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of affi nity, suffering and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract ‘out of joint’, without co-ordi-nation, without party, without country, without national community

Notes 185

(International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no lon-ger believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism (they now know that there is more than one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or of a worker’s international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it. (84–85)

and:Everywhere in the world today, the structure of the party is becoming more and more suspect (and for reasons that are no longer always, necessarily, ‘reactionary’, those of the classical individualist reaction) but also radically unadapted to the new—tele-techno-media—condi-tions of public space, of political life, of democracy, and of the new modes of representation (both parliamentary and non-parliamentary) that they call up. A refl ection on what will become Marxism tomor-row, of its inheritance or its testament, should include, among so many other things, a refl ection on the fi nitude of the party . . . Let us put forward here with many precautions, both theoretical and practical, the hypothesis that this is no longer the case, not always the case (for these old forms of struggle against the State may survive for a long time); one must do away with this equivocation so that it will no longer be the case. The hypothesis is that this mutation has already begun; it is irreversible. (102–103)

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

11. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 86. 12. Ibid., 102. 13. The question of the concrete is one I have treated elsewhere, see my Paul de

Man (London: Routledge, 2001), but one that I hope to return to on another occasion.

14. If we consider the ways in which tele-technology is transforming the space of the political then we might think of the phenomenon of e-mail jamming (in which company web sites and e-mail accounts are fl ooded with messages, clogging the system and shutting down business) as a transformation or deconstruction of the idea of the picket line.

15. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 84. 16. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000). 17. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 102. 18. Ibid. 19. Klein, No Logo, 63. 20. Ibid., 4. 21. V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline

(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 15, 30. 22. Klein, No Logo, 5. 23. Ibid., 64.

186 Notes

24. Ibid., 46. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Ibid., 95. 27. Ibid., 39. 28. Walter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs: Colllector andHistorian, in The Essen-

tial Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and Eike Gebhardt, (NY: Urizen Books, 1978) pp. 225–53.

29. Klein, No Logo, 66. 30. Ibid., 39. 31. See Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, in Sur-

veys in Exile, ed. David Fernbach, 320 (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Although critical of British imperialism Marx suggests here that the coloni-zation of India is ultimately for the best because it brings India within the progressive narrative of Western history and so makes future class struggle possible.

32. Klein, No Logo, 442. 33. Ibid., 115. 34. Ibid., 442. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 101. 37. Ibid., 103. 38. Ibid., 104. 39. Ibid., 109. 40. Ibid., 122. 41. If any reader is able to provide a reference for this alleged quotation they will

receive a free one-year subscription to The journal parallax. 42. For example, see my ‘Clintonism: The Phantom Menace’, in Cultural Capi-

talism: Politics After New Labour, eds. Timothy Bewes and Jeremy Gilbert, (London: Lawrence & Wishort, 2001) pp. 81–101.

43. Roland Barthes, ‘A Few Words from Monsieur Poujade’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard, 51 (London: University of California Press, 1997).

44. Quoted in Barthes, ‘A Few Words from Monsieur Poujade’, 52. 45. Barthes, ‘A Few Words from Monsieur Poujade’, 53. 46. Klein, No Logo, 124. 47. Ibid., 445. 48. Umberto Eco, ‘Striking at the Heart of the State?’, in Apocalypse Postponed,

ed. R. Lumley, 181 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 49. Barthes, ‘Poujade and the Intellectuals’, in The Eiffel Tower, 135. Trans.

Richard Howard, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

50. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derrida and Politics’, in Interrupting Derrida (Lon-don: Routledge, 2000), 32.

51. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 29. 52. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997),

81. 53. Ibid., 81. 54. For a fuller discussion of secrecy (in which the secret suspends the logic of

non-contradiction between public and private, phenomenal and non-phe-nomenal) see Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). We should also note here that Derrida describes the conjuration of 1848 as ‘quasi-secret’, Spectres, p. 38.

55. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 86. 56. I mean here ‘praxis’ in the sense that Gayatri Spivak uses that term.

Notes 187

57. See Bennington’s comments to this effect in ‘Derrida and Politics’ p. 25, but I am also thinking of Paul de Man’s understanding of reading as interminable in Blindness and Insight.

58. In turn see Klein, No Logo, 282, 78–83, 77, 284. 59. Ibid., 14, 15, 21, 22, 27, 68, 122, 284. 60. Ibid., 21. 61. Had we time this observation might lead us back to Marx on the spectral

nature of the commodity. See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), vol. 1, chap. 1, sec. 4, pp.163–167.

62. I have attempted a more extensive elaboration of this passage by de Man in a later text, ‘Karl Marx and the Philosopher’s Stone’, in The Politics of Decon-struction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (London: Pluto, 2007).

63. See the radio interview with de Man that concludes The Resistance to Theory. 64. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 41. 65. Ibid., 47. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 50–51. 69. Derrida offers the following aside in Spectres of Marx, ‘Marx is one of the

rare thinkers of the past to have taken seriously, at least in its principle, the originary indissociability of technics and language, and thus of tele-technics (for every language is a tele-technics)’ (53). This relation will bear further analysis at a later date.

70. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 47. 71. Ibid., 62. 72. Ibid., 65. 73. For a discussion of de Man and aberration see my Paul de Man, pp.120–123,

and Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Aberrations: de Man (and) the Machine’, in Read-ing de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) pp. 209–21.

74. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 294–299.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

1. A characterization picked up by Geoffrey Bennington in ‘Politics and Deconstruction’, in Interrupting Derrida (London and New York: Rout-ledge, 2000). This present chapter should be read alongside my text ‘Three Colours’ which acts as the introduction to Deconstruction Reading Politics, ed. M. McQuillan (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). It is an account of Derrida and democracy and this current examination of hospitality was initially intended as a continuation of its arguments, ‘this is also why . . . ’

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994[1762]), 107.

3. Derrida discusses hospitality in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! translated as ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Original French edition Anne Fourmantelle and Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1997); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford:

188 Notes

Stanford University Press, 1999); ‘Hostipitality’, trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3–17.

4. Derrida, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, 17. 5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz-

sche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 277.

6. Ibid., 258. 7. Ibid., 247. 8. Ibid. 9. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas: ‘because intentionality is

hospitality, it resists thematization. An act without activity, reason as recep-tivity, a sensible and rational experience of receiving, a gesture of welcoming, a welcome offered to the other as stranger, hospitality opens as intention-ality, but it cannot become an object, thing, or theme. Thematization, on the contrary, already presupposes hospitality, welcoming, intentionality, the face’ (48). Later in the same essay Derrida will write, ‘This interruption of the self by the self, if such a thing is possible, can or must be taken up by thought: this is ethical discourse—and it is also, as the limit of thematiza-tion, hospitality’ (51). On this topic one might also usefully refer to Derrida’s account of the inadequacy of thematic readings in ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981) pp. 227–85.

10. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 249. 11. Ibid., 252. 12. Ibid., 249. 13. Ibid., 258. 14. Ibid., 249. 15. Ibid., 257. 16. Ibid., 258. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 259. 19. Ibid., 259–260. 20. Ibid., 260. 21. Ibid., 260–261. 22. Ibid., 261. 23. Ibid., 264. 24. Ibid., 262. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 264. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 265. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 266. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 266–267. 37. Ibid., 267. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. As Rousseau states, the foreigner is estranged from the law: ‘If [the particu-

lar object] is outside the State, a will that is estranged from him is not general

Notes 189

in relation to him’. But at the same time this also applies to any individual: ‘indeed, this particular object is either within the State, or without it . . . If the object is within the State, then it is a part of it. A relation is then cre-ated between the whole and the part that makes them into two separate beings. The part is one of them, the whole minus the part the other. But the whole minus a part is not the whole . . . ’ quoted in Allegories of Reading, 267–268.

41. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 268. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 269. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 270. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 271. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 272. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p.273. 56. See Derrida, ‘Declarations of Independence’, New Political Science 15 (Sum-

mer1986): 7–15. 57. Rousseau, The Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 10, p.118–120. Rousseau says,

‘The people of England believes itself to be free; it is quite wrong: it is free only during the elections of Members of Parliament. Once they are elected, the people is enslaved, it is nothing. Seeing the use it makes of liberty dur-ing its brief moments of possession, it deserves to lose it’ (bk. 3, chap. 15, p.127).

58. See Robert Young’s comments on metaphysics and the West in ‘Deconstruc-tion and the Postcolonial’, in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle, 188 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000).

59. Allow me to allude to Althusser here and so reference his own reading of The Social Contract in his Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon-don: NLB, 1977). Althusser reads Rousseau’s text in terms of ‘alienation’. One might read this in either its classic Marxist intonation or as another discussion of the otherness that comprises the experience of the contract. Althusser’s reading comes up close to de Man’s. He argues that a solution to the contradictions of the text can be found within the play of its internal dis-crepancies. Discrepancy one: The Social Contract creates a new force stron-ger than the existing problem it sets out to solve, resulting in the individual’s total alienation from the society. The solution to an individual’s alienation is thus the total alienation produced by the contract. Paradoxically this forced alienation guarantees the individual’s own freedom. The contract is its own product in that the people only ever contract with themselves, inventing the fi rst signatory of the contract and inscribing its own solution. The contract then is not a solution to the problem of the social but an invention of the social qua ‘people’. This disarticulation constitutes The Social Contract as philosophy via its discrepancies. This discrepancy permits a non-contract to function as a contract and so make its own solution appear as a condition of its operation. Discrepancy two: Alienation with no exchange produces exchange. Self-interest pushed into general equality limits total alienation which is the basis of general equality. The individual gets back more on what

190 Notes

he gives because s/he only gives themselves. Thus a false contract acts as a contract because it produces exchange, even advantageous exchange. Dis-crepancy three: Particular interest is both the foundation of general inter-est and its opposite. This paradox is resolved by practical application such as voting. Thus, Rousseau disarticulates the classic opposition between the real and philosophy to provide a solution which cannot practically exist. Discrepancy four: Between two impossible solutions there can be no more discrepancy. Thus, concludes Althusser, it is the task of the reader to transfer a solution to the political onto the impossible, namely literature. The key difference between de Man and Althusser would seem to be in Althusser’s understanding of The Social Contract as a closed text which ultimately solves its own problems. De Man would read the text as endlessly open in its continued misreading and generation of history.

60. Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, in Jacques Derrida, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1993).

61. This essay was fi rst presented as a talk at the conference ‘Altering Hospital-ity, Translating Class’, at the AHRB Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, University of Leeds, June 21–23, 2002.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Back from Moscow, in the USSR’, trans. Mary Quaintaire, in Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 197–235.

2. This paper was fi rst delivered, in part, at the ‘Crossing Currents: Anglo-Hungarian Literary Encounters’ conference at the University of Debrecen in Autumn 2003. I am indebted to Dr. Robert Eaglestone and Dr. Tamas Brenwicz for providing the opportunity to present this work; it makes good a promise to Tamas that I would write a paper about the glorious golden team.

3. Derrida gave his plenary address over two evenings on April 22 and 23, 1993.

4. Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Rout-ledge, 1994).

5. See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagi-nation (New York: Yale University Press, 1998).

6. See Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 18.

7. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970), xv.

8. For an example of excellent work see Obrad Savic and Duban Bjelic, eds., Balkans as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Boston: MIT Press, 2002).

9. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 14–15. 10. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Stuart Hall:

Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 264. The impact of the events of 1956 on the British left is also powerfully documented in the closing section of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (London: Michael Joseph, 1962). For a Hungarian perspective see Péter Nádas, A Book of Memories, trans. Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein (London: Vin-tage, 1998).

Notes 191

11. Derrida, ‘Back from Moscow, in the USSR’, 226. 12. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2001), 32. 13. Ibid. 14. Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy of Husserl, trans. Mar-

ian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 15. One must be careful to discriminate between what announced itself under

the name perestroika as a state-sponsored project of economic reform (with its own precedents such as Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy’ and Khrushchev’s post-Stalin emphasis on the production of consumer goods) and the socio-political articulation which took place in the space opened up by such reforms. It is in this later sense that I cite Prague in 1968 and Budapest in 1956 as prec-edents for what was to follow in Eastern Europe in 1988.

16. Derrida, ‘Negotiations’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interventions, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 26 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

17. Although I have suggested some thoughts in this direction it seems to me that such an analysis requires a different sort of arena, one which, for example, returned to the texts of Marx and Lenin on the constitution of the revolu-tionary state, while taking into account the history of the dialectic itself, particularly in France, in the work of, say, Kojéve and Althusser, or that of another Hungarian Georg Luckas.

18. See Norman Fox, Prophet or Traitor? (London: The Parrs Wood Press, 2003): Die wahre Geschichte Sebastian Dehnhardt and Manfred Olden-burg..

19. Das Wunder von Bern, directed by (Broadview 1 TV 2004). This is a doc-umentary response to the fi ctional fi lm Das Wunder von Bern, dir. Sönke Wortmann, (Berlin: Senator Films, 2003).

20. For details of fi lmic representations of Puskás’s team see ‘Foci, Fradi and “The Golden Team”’, in Hungarian Cinema: From the Coffee House to Multiplex, ed. John Cunningham (London: Wallfl ower Press, 2004).

21. For a far more extensive reading of deconstruction and total football, see Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, ‘Ecohomopoesis’, in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

1. Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger (London: Verso, 1984; new edition 1997), 166.

2. This chapter was fi rst presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL), University of Cyprus, Nic-osia. I am particularly grateful to Maria Margaroni for her generous invite and to Marios Constantinou for his considered and constructive response. The event of the IAPL in Cyprus was such a remarkable and singular occur-rence that I have decided to leave the markers of that occasion in this text. If Cultural Studies concerns the present and every deconstruction concerns singularities then I feel that the context and place of this piece of writing should be duly recognised, just as it has clear resonances beyond the example of Cyprus for the concerns of this book. Othello is, of course, a play set, partly, in Cyprus.

3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, Work of Mourn-ing, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

192 Notes

4. For example, see Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

5. Derrida, The Other Heading: Refl ections on Today’s Europe, trans. Anne-Pascale Brault and Michael Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

6. Enosis is the Greek word for ‘union’ specifi cally used in relation to Hellenic nationalism in Cyprus to mean the desire for union with a greater Greece.

7. Derrida, The Other Heading. 8. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Anne-Pascale Brault and

Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 9. For a history of colonial appropriations and partitions in Cyprus see

Christopher Hitchen’s Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger.

10. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dia-logue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 178.

11. Ibid. 12. On ‘khora’ see Derrida, ‘Khora’, trans. Ian McLeod, in On The Name (Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 1995). See also Catherine Malibou’s gloss on khora in Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

13. See Derrida on nuclear weapons, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, Diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 23.

14. Helen MacFarlane’s fi rst English language translation of The Communist Manifesto renders the opening line as ‘A frightful hobgoblin [Gespenst] stalks throughout Europe’. The translation of gespenst as ghost or spectre is not incorrect, however, an entire decade of deconstructive discourse might have had a more grittier nuance had Derrida made reference to Marx’s hob-goblin.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

1. Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), 23–24, quot-ing Martin McQuillan, ed., Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edin-burgh University Press, 2000), 41.

2. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 387. 3. Ibid., 388. 4. Ibid., 389. 5. Ibid. 6. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (London: Granta Books, 1997).

First published New York: Basic Books, 1975; Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991). First published London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

7. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 340. 8. Ibid. 9. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 182. 10. Ibid. 11. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmil-

lan, 2004), 66. 12. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 183, quoting Michel Foucault,

Histoire de la folie à l’age classique, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 583–603.

13. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 185.

Notes 193

14. See Said, Culture and Imperialism. 15. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 163. 16. For a reading of this essay see Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criti-

cism and Society (London: Verso, 2002), 194–197. In an otherwise engaging book Hussein (in common with critical orthodoxy on Said) is keen to empha-sise Said’s affi liation with an obviously and easily politicised Foucault to the occlusion of any relation with Derrida. Hussein’s account of Derrida in this book is so black and white that one wonders whether we have read the same text by Said. Derrida usually appears in the context of the Derrida-Foucault comparison only to de dismissed by the worldliness of Said. This is in spite of the fact that Hussein openly contradicts himself when he describes the same text by Said as at once offering a ‘withering critique’ (100) of Derrida and allowing him to be ‘favourably reviewed’ (127). Of course it is possible to be both favourably reviewed and witheringly critiqued in the same instant but Hussein’s monochromatic portrait of Said demonstrates little understanding of how this might be the case. As Said would recognise he personally cannot be held responsible for the institutional orthodoxy which gathers around his writing.

17. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 188. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 193. 20. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of

Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 46–47.

21. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 191. 22. Ibid., 210. 23. Jacques Derrida, ‘Où commence et comment fi nit un corps enseignant’, in

Politiques de la Philosophie, ed. O. Grisoni, (Paris: Grasset, 1976). 24. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 211. 25. Ibid., 214. 26. Ibid., 192. 27. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979). 28. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2001), 51–52. 29. Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Guari

Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), 5–6. 30. Ibid., 165. 31. Ibid., 18. 32. Ibid., 82. 33. Ibid., 167. 34. Ibid., 333. 35. Said, ‘The One-State Solution’, The New York Times Magazine, January

10, 1999, 36–39; see also ‘A One-State Solution’, in Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said, ed. David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, 1–31 (London: Pluto, 2003).

36. See Said, The End of the Peace Process (Revised and Updated Edition) (Lon-don: Granta Books, 2000).

37. This essay was written before the coup d’etat that brought Hamas to power in the Gaza.

38. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Practical Politics of the Open End’, in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990) pp. 104–11.

39. In the fi rst half of 2005 the AUT (the trade union for lecturers in the United Kingdom) managed to both arrange and then revoke an academic boycott of specifi c Israeli universities which had allegedly been involved in

194 Notes

the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The actual terms of the boycott were badly understood and as ever any questioning of the Israeli state was presented by its defenders as virulent anti-Semitism. While I support and appreciate the strategic necessity and singularity of the claims made against those Israeli universities cited in the original proposal (if those claims can be substantiated), in the spirit of what I have said I would resist the idea of a general boycott. This is not for one minute to defend the Israeli state or its public bodies but to insist on the positive affi rmation of a negotiation between thinkers rather than the rejectionism and negation implied by the good conscience created by a boycott, or worse its revocation. If the AUT wished to spend its time and money profi tably it ought to sponsor a series of seminars between Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars under the title, ‘The One-State Solution’. In a text dated July 30, 1998, Said writes of anti-Israeli boycotts:

The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak and Azmi Bishara have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of injus-tice, i.e. ‘They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state’. On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles) and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are after all one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. Are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the 1950s? What about Israe-lis who support our struggle, but are neither members of the slippery Peace Now or of Meretz or of the ‘great’ Israeli Labour Party led by Ehud Barak, widely presumed to be the murderer of Kamal Nasir and Abu Iyad? Should they—artists, free intellectuals, writers, students, academics, ordinary citizens—be boycotted because they are Israelis? Obviously to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn’t occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of non-violent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and movable line. And we must cross the line of separation—which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect—that maintains the current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.

Said, The End of the Peace Process (Revised and Updated Edition), 282–283.

40. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

41. For a recent articulation of Derrida’s relation to Jewishness, see the interview with Elisabeth Weber in Questioning Judaism, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

42. Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, 457–458. 43. See Derrida, ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a

Hypothesis)’, Oxford Literary Review 14, no.1–2 (1992): 3–24. 44. Derrida, ‘Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German’, trans. Moshe

Ron, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), lecture fi rst given in 1988. Derrida prefaces his philosophical treatise with an explicit address to the audience (he had insisted on meaningful con-tributions from Palestinian participants):

I wish to state right now my solidarity with all those in this land, who advocate an end to violence, condemn the crimes of terrorism and of military and police repression, and advocate the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories as well as the recognition of the

Notes 195

Palestinians’ right to chose their own representatives to negotiations now more indispensable than ever. This cannot be accomplished with-out unceasing, well-informed, courageous refl ection . . . As is evident by my presence here, this declaration is inspired not only by my con-cern for justice and by my friendship toward both the Palestinians and the Israelis. It is meant also as an expression of respect for a certain image of Israel and as an expression of hope for its future. (138)

For equally blunt formulations see: Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 58; The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 3; Counter-path, with Catherine Malabou, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2004), 263; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 36b; For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, with Elisabeth Roudinesco, trans. Jeff Fort (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 119; Echographies of Television, with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 15; Questioning Judaism, trans. Rachel Bowlby, ed. Elisabeth Weber; ‘Enlight-enment Past and to Come’, Le Monde diplomatique, speech given on the occasion of the journal’s fi ftieth anniversary celebrations, published online, November 2004; ‘The Language of Others’, an interview of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous by Jacqueline Rose for Jewish Book Week in London 2004, text of session available at http://jewishbookweek.com/archive. See also Derrida’s open letter (signed by himself and various members of PEN International) to Yasir Arafat condemning the censorship of Edward Said’s writing by the Palestinian authority, printed in The New York Review of Books, October 17, 1996.

45. Derrida, ‘A Word of Welcome’, in Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

46. Derrida, ‘A Word of Welcome’, 20. See also 71, 101. 47. Ibid., 47. 48. Ibid., 49. 49. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures,

trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), ‘this exceptional tran-shistorical event that one neither makes nor is contemporaneous with twice in a lifetime . . . all the impossible becoming possible’ 193.

50. Derrida, ‘A Word of Welcome’, 79. 51. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 191. 52. Derrida, ‘A Word of Welcome’, 81–82. 53. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 191. 54. Ibid., 152. 55. Derrida, ‘A Word of Welcome’, n. 125, p. 150. 56. Ibid., 71. 57. Said, The End of the Peace Process (Revised and Updated Edition), 283. 58. Interview with Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Language of Others’.

Index

AAbrahamic 67, 139, 167Abu-Jamal, Mumia 69, 84Adorno, Theodor 1, 7, 14, 15, 160Afghanistan ix, xiii, 5–6, 13–14, 23–26,

163, 169Allende, Salvador 1Al Qaeda 5–6, 9, 14–15, 24–26, 175n.12America xiii, 1, 3, 4–5, 10–15, 17, 19,

21–26, 28–29, 33, 61, 65–71, 76, 78, 89, 94, 104, 130, 141, 145–47, 149, 150, 156, 165, 170, 171, 173n.4

Anthropology 65, 71–72, 79, 80Attridge, Derek 88

BBarthes, Roland 82, 98, 99, 100Belgrade 171Benjamin, Walter 7, 14, 34, 37–39,

41–43, 46, 95, 131Bennington, Geoffrey 42, 68, 92, 101,

150Bhabha, Homi K 78, 129Borradori, Giovanna 1, 9, 14Bin Laden Osama 5, 6, 9, 10, 12,

24–25, 141Bloom, Allan 97, 146Bloom, Harold 149, 156Blowback 12, 68Bush, George xi, 2, 5, 16, 47, 57, 64,

85, 141, 159

CChechnya 2, 18, 22, 23, 33China xiii, 17, 25, 68, 71, 130Christianity xiii, 2, 18, 61–63Cixous, Hélène 30, 90Clinton, Bill ix, 22, 43

Cold War (so-called) 1, 5, 6, 10, 14, 16, 65

Critchley, Simon 92Cultural Studies 9, 25, 65, 72, 79, 97,

131, 147Cyprus xii, xv, 137–43

DDerrida, Jacques ix, x, xi, xiii, 1, 8,

9–11, 13–17, 21, 30–31, 34, 37–42, 53, 57–59, 61, 62, 64, 65–80, 81–90, 91–94, 101–102, 108–109, 114, 117, 127–28, 130–34, 136–37, 139–41, 143, 145, 147–56, 159–167, 173

De Man, Paul xi, 91, 97, 105–109, 112–127, 147, 149–51, 156

Democracy x, xii, 11, 16, 22, 29–30, 66–67, 69, 77–78, 85, 93, 100, 108–09, 111–112, 139–40, 144, 158–59, 171

EEinstein, Albert 34–37, 40, 42, 44–45Engels, Friedrich 105, 106, 107, 138Enlightenment xi, 7, 10, 17, 66, 148,

154, 158, 160, 164, 167Eurocentrism 18, 34, 108, 141, 145Europe xiii, 1, 4, 11, 15, 17–19, 21,

23, 29, 33, 35, 42, 45–46, 48, 61, 76, 79, 84, 94, 116, 129–31, 133–36, 138–43, 157–58, 164–69

FFeminism 145, 147Ferraris, Maurizio 132, 154Foucault, Michel 130, 148, 149, 154,

155, 167

198 Index

Freud, Sigmund 34–46, 48–62, 82, 91, 153, 158, 159

Friendship ix, xv, 91–92, 102, 107, 129, 155, 167

Fukuyama, Francis 94, 128

GGaza 2, 85Godard, Jean-Luc 168, 169, 170,

171Good Conscience 96, 104, 111, 151Gorbachev, Mikhail 131Guantánamo Bay 7, 11, 176n.18Gulf War 2, 16, 17, 18–19, 21, 23–24,

26, 28, 80, 163, 168

HHall, Stuart 131Hegel, G.W.F 63, 72, 94, 105, 106,

132, 133, 135Heidegger, Martin 63, 67, 72, 73, 76,

78History 1, 3, 7, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18, 24,

30, 31, 34, 42, 49, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 77, 94, 95, 96, 97, 111, 113–16, 121, 123–26, 128, 129, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 162, 163, 165, 166

Hospitality x, 108–115, 117, 120–21, 125–27, 161–65, 167, 168

Hussein, Saddam 10, 28Husserl, Edmund 71, 132, 156

IIdeology xiii, 9, 25, 67, 91, 93, 99,

105–107, 118, 148Impossible ix, 7, 15, 29–32, 36, 42,

55–56, 62, 65, 78, 83, 88, 92, 96, 102–103, 109–11, 123–25, 131, 137, 153, 163

India xiii, 129, 145Indo-China 68, 71International Law xii, xiii, 4, 10–12,

15–24, 26–29, 31–32, 35, 45–46, 65, 79, 84, 87, 89, 93, 96–97, 140

Iran 7, 23Iraq ix, xiii, 2, 6, 7, 14, 17–19, 24–29,

65–68, 72, 79–80, 163, 168–69

Islam xiii, 7, 11–12, 19, 24–26, 49, 61, 158

Israel 1, 2, 16, 17, 23, 25, 84, 154–55, 157–65, 167, 171

JJewishness 50, 60, 61, 145, 147,

157–60, 164, 166–67, 169Judaism xiii, 163, 165, 167Justice ix, x, 2, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20–23,

27–31, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 47, 63, 79, 85–86, 89, 94–96, 111, 122, 126, 127, 137, 143–44, 151, 154, 157–59, 165–67

KKant, Immanuel xi, 21, 29, 30, 31, 33,

36–38, 40, 44, 61, 63, 71, 105, 160–62, 164

Khan, Mohammed Sadique 9, 10, 11, 12

Kissinger, Henry 70, 71, 79,Klein, Naomi 91, 93–99, 102–05,

107Kosovo ix, 22–23, 26, 33–35, 45–46,

57, 169Kouchner, Bernard 21, 22, 169

LLeague of Nations 1, 17, 35, 36, 42,

44Leeds (Yorkshire, UK) 8–12, 25, 63Levinas, Emmanuel x, xii, 34, 39, 153,

161–66, 171Literature 30, 35, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56,

64, 87, 89, 97, 147–50, 159

MMarx, Karl xii, xv, 17, 82, 83, 85,

91, 93–94, 96, 105–107, 128, 130–38, 145–46, 150, 153, 164, 167

Marxism 17, 93, 128, 130, 131–33, 134, 145, 153, 167

Milosevich, Slobodan 22, 26, 84Muslim Brotherhood 2, 24

NNancy, Jean-Luc 63, 76, 102, 168NATO 22, 23, 34, 45, 46, 138Nazism 14, 35, 38, 43, 129, 160New International 17, 92–94, 97,

100–04, 107Nixon, Richard 170Nuclear Bomb 7, 11, 17, 19, 20, 23,

35, 171

OOil xiii, 12,19, 28

Index 199

PPakistan 9, 10, 11, 169, 171Palestine ix, x, xiii, 2, 18, 25, 145, 154,

156–59, 161, 164–5, 167Peace Process 22, 156–7, 161, 163–4Performative ix, 34, 41, 107, 123–24,

127, 161Philosophy x-xii, 7, 18, 20, 34–35, 37,

47, 56, 65–74, 77, 82, 84, 90, 101, 107, 109, 117, 125, 128, 132, 135, 138, 139, 143, 146, 147, 150, 153, 160, 168, 170–1

Pinochet, Augusto (General) 1, 12, 79, 176n.18

Plato 97, 139, 150Postmodernism 7, 17, 35, 98–99, 104Psychoanalysis 9, 34, 36, 45, 47–58,

60, 61, 63, 159Puskás, Ferenc 134–36

QQuasi-Transcendental xii, 86, 117, 125,

132

RReagan, Ronald 3, 43Religion x, xiii, 9–10, 17, 25–26, 48,

50, 61–62, 106, 115–16, 158, 161, 167

Revolution 1, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 57, 91, 121, 132, 134, 149

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xi, 59–60, 63, 105, 108, 113, 115–20, 122, 124, 150

Royle, Nicholas 47, 52, 55–56, 58, 61, 64, 145

Rumsfeld, Donald 6. 79, 138, 176n.18

SSaid, Edward 32, 82, 145, 147, 160,

167Sartre, Jean-Paul 72, 74, 164Saudi Arabia 11, 24Scotland 8, 9Socialism 24, 35, 175Sovereignty x, 15, 20, 21–26, 29–32,

36, 40, 44, 76–77, 87, 89, 108, 109, 111, 124, 137, 139–44, 159, 170–71

Sharon, Ariel 2, 157, 159, 166South Africa 25, 128, 159Soviet Union 24, 26, 129, 130–35,

169

Spectrality x, 83, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 128, 130, 137, 139, 150, 153, 164

Spivak, Gayatri 7, 98, 129, 159

TTelepathy 57–64Tele-Technology x, 46–47, 49, 51, 53,

57, 59–63, 83, 93Terrorism 8, 9, 14, 16, 25, 47, 100Timisoara 2, 18

UUlster 3, 18, 33, 142, 163Undecideability 55–58, 86, 88United Nations 17, 19–22, 24, 29,

45–46, 141, 169

VVietnam 2, 28, 65–71, 74–77, 80Violence xii-xiii, xv, 2, 5, 14, 17,

20–23, 25, 29, 33–46, 61, 73–75, 89, 96, 100, 120, 155, 163, 170

WWar xii-xiii, 1–2, 4–12, 14–19, 21–29,

31–37, 39–42, 44–52, 54–57, 59–63, 65–71, 74–75, 79–82, 86–87, 90, 94–99, 104, 107, 111, 120, 123–24, 127, 129, 131, 134–37, 140, 144–45, 147, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161–64, 167–71

War on Terror xiii, 5–8, 17, 65, 87, 169World Trade Centre (New York) 1, 4,

17, 24

XXuan Thuy 70

YYugoslavia 19, 21, 22, 33, 34, 129,

130, 161

ZZionism 157–59, 160, 162–65

McQuillan, Deconstruction After 9 11

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