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THE CLOSURE AND OPENING OF THE POLITICAL

Christopher Stanley

School of Law, University of Westminster, London

Review of Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1996 pbk.), pp. xvii + 174.

There is an unfortunate fissure within the semiotics of law movement. It is a fissure which can be described as that between the French Greimasian semioticians according with the structuralist orthodoxy reaching an outpost with Roland Barthes and the American Peircean semioticians according with the pragmatist orthodoxy stemming from William James. Whereas relations between these two factions are amicable and the space of the fissure is respected there is agreement between them regarding the inhabitant of the fissure. The inhabitant of the fissure has a relation with each faction which is problematic but represents an important element in the broader hermeneutic as opposed to narrow semiotic sphere. The inhabitant of the fissure, the remainder(ed), is the deconstructionist. Just as the broadly aligned semiotics of law in its narrow formulation can accommodate a range of perspectives along a trajectory from Greimas to Peirce including argumentation theory and legal rhetorics (each of which would dispute such an alignment), the deconstructionist remainder can accommodate the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault through to the Yale School of textual interpretation (itself now fractured beyond repair) and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Whereas the "fathers" of the semiotics-hermeneutics of law can be readily identified, even if their respective legacies are disputed, as Saussure, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Nietzsche, the name of the arche deconstructor inhabiting the fissure, Jacques Derrida, more so even than Foucault or Lyotard, causes alarm. Oh what crimes have been committed in the name of Jacques Derrida, the Doctor Criminale of contemporary philosophical thought!

In part, the ambivalence, if not complete hostility, which Derrida attracts would appear to be related to his failure to adopt a rigorous scientific approach to textuality. In the absence of such rigour, Derrida attracts the criticism of at best relativism and at worst nihilism. On a more sophisticated level, the criticism that is levelled at Derrida is that in his pursuit to articulate the "closure" of metaphysics through deconstruction, deconstruction falls back into the logic and criteria of the "modern tradition" at the very moment it wishes to exceed them. Certain statements by Derrida have been scandalously de-contextualised (a problem for the arche deconstructor) and many of his works only partially assimilated by his disciples. But the claim of relativism and lack of rigour can be disputed when one considers the thrust of Derrida's writing over the course of almost thirty years. As a moment of retrospection is enabled granted the power of Derrida's recent writings on politics and ethics - specifically regarding friendship, the gift, justice and democracy - we will, as Richard Beardsworth argues in this volume, be "enjoined .... to go back to Derrida's works with the fate of the political in mind" (p157). Beardsworth's book, in an excellent series called Thinking the Political edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Simon Critchley (other volumes include studies of Nietzsche and Foucault), is one of a number of recent interventions which offer serious and sustained intellectual assessment of the significance of Derrida in contemporary philosophy. There is, undoubtedly, a Derrida "industry" in which the work of Derrida is related to everything from cosmology to technology. However, recent works by Simon Critchley [1] Rodolpho Gasche [2] and John Caputo [3] have served to locate Derrida within contemporary thought on politics and ethics, at a moment of apparent endings, and importantly analyse his work in relation to figures such as Levinas and Heidegger, upon whose work Derrida has offered his own sustained critical engagements. In addition, these interventions have served to offer a contextualisation of the political and ethical problems Derrida is involved in "thinking" through relating his ideas to those of Deleuze, Lyotard, Nancy and others. If there is an indictment then the number of defendants emerging from the fissure increases.

From the point of view of a legal hermeneutics and of a minor jurisprudence,[4] it is becoming apparent that Derrrida's project is increasingly relevant. In the interventions of Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington,[5] Ari Hirvonen and Panu Minkkinen[6] amongst others, the working toward (or rather un-working - desourvrement) of a becoming of a justice of alterity as an alternative "ground" for jurisprudential thought is being powerfully stated and prompts a serious re-configuration of the ontology of law and the relation between law and language. (Derrida himself has been encouraged to address particular issues directly to legal scholars in his seminal article "Force of law" ).[7] These scholars, operating at the edge of jurisprudence (in the territory of the differend), can be said to be following Derrida when Beardsworth encapsulates Derrida's project in the following terms:

It is well known that Derrida relates all his thoughts on the political to what he calls the "closure" of metaphysics. The power of this reflection lies consequently in his reconsideration of political thought and practice in terms of the irreducibility of time to all forms of organisation (conceptual, logical, discursive, political, technical, etc.,). In other words, the question informing this reflection is: "What happens to politics and the concept of the political when one assumes, in one's reflection upon these fields, radical finitude?" .... a distinction is warranted between political organisation and the "remainder" (le reste) of all attempts to organise politically: that is, a distinction is to be made between a political community and what necessarily exceeds this community, or is left out of account by it, in the process if its (self-)formation. (p.xiii)

It might be stated that the deep seated fear that Derrida arouses stems from his commitment to place into play the notion of the concept, the stability of which is essential for the statement of universal political grounds for judgement. This process threatens to abandon communication and thinking in terms of the "ought" of representative philosophy. It is abandonment of high-stakes. In interrupting the processes in the production of politcal-philosophical concepts, Derrida re-thinks the political and the philosophical in terms of time and singularity opening into a discourse of justice and community which has otherwise been an excess of the politico-philosophical seizure of the "real". In this sense, Derrida is "thinking through" the central question of post-structuralist engagement in terms of attacking the tyranny of representation and asking "Who comes after the Subject?"[8]  - offering a new writing (écriture). Derrida's response to this is an opening into a thinking of justice and community (as ethics and politics) which, within the "closed" system of western metaphysics, has been remaindered as the excess, a relation which cannot be accommodated because destabilising the process of universal criteria of judgement and introducing the time-event of singularity. Derrida balances his concern with the "is" with his notion of "becoming" (venir) articulated as a return to justice and community in terms of the aporia and the suspension which he interrogates through commentaries on the promise and the gift. Hence he is able to state that "Deconstruction is Justice" and that "Deconstruction is Democracy" even if statements such as these have often been subject to mis-appropriation. Beardsworth's engagement manages to trace the genealogy of these statements and therefore locate them in a sublime complex discourse.

Beardsworth responds to these moves in Derrida, which have only become apparent in Derrida most recent writings,[9] but which Beardsworth argues have been Derrida's principal concern throughout his work, with a fascinating and rewarding exercise in scholarship arguing that Derrida's philosophy only makes sense politically in terms of the relation "between" aporia and decision - that the aporia (that which is impracticable) is the very locus in which the political force of deconstruction is to be found. Beardsworth argues, therefore, for an understanding of the "impossible" relation between the passage of time and political organisation. In terms of the relation between ethics and politics which is essential for judgement, Beardsworth's reading emphasises the politically transformative nature of Derrida's aporetic thinking. This is particularly powerfully expressed in Beardsworth's reading of Derrida's reading of Kafka's "Before the Law" (pp 25-45) in which Derrida connects law to literature crossing as a chiasmus between the singular and the general. Beardsworth remarks:

The story of the non-origin of the law - which would seem to defy judgement - tells the story that one must judge, that one's judgement will be violent and that the singular which comes to it from the future as the non-horizontal promise "returns" (like the repressed, like a ghost) as this judgement's very failure. The impossible aporia of law releases the possibility of possibility. The impossible possibility constitutes the measure by which all judgements can only fail to measure themselves. Hence the measure of judgement is nothing but the impossibility of its measure; in this impossibility the singular arrives. (p.44)

It is apparent that Beardsworth is here, as elsewhere within his book, making explicit within Derrida issues which are of critical importance to contemporary jurisprudential thought. But Beardsworth is also engaged in an engagement with Derrida as opposed to a straightforward descriptive statement (if such a statement were possible). Beardsworth's engagement takes the form of tracking Derrida's relation on the issue of the political with Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas. It would have been fascinating to read a similar engagement of an engagement between Beardsworth, Derrida and Blanchot, given Derrida's reading of Blanchot's recit "The Madness of the Day".[10] Another omission is a consideration of the relation between Derrida and Nancy, the engagement between which on radical democracy and community continues to be debated but which Beardsworth's profound understanding could be indispensable. Given these minor points, nevertheless, Beardsworth's contribution to our understanding of Derrida's significance is tremendously important. It is not simply a further book to be thrown onto the pile created by the "Derrida industry" but rather a substantial engagement which should urge the reader to return to Derrida or to engage with Derrida for the first time armed with a reliable foundation for understanding. Beardsworth's work is "hard" in the sense that he expects his reader to bring to it an integrity which is often lacking. This is the mark of what Zymunt Bauman in his review of Gillian Rose has called an "inspired reading". For those legal scholars engaged in the plethora of issues concerning communication and language, justice and community, law and violence, Beardsworth's "inspired reading" is to be welcomed without hesitation.

1 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

2 Rodolpho Gasche, "Deconstruction as Criticism", Glyph 6 (1979), 177-215.

3 John D Caputo and Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996).

4 A phrase coined by Peter Goodrich to denote the jurisprudence of dissent encompassing an alternative genealogy of jurisprudence (the remainder or the excess). See Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

5 Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, Justice Miscarried: Ethics, Aesthetics and Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

6 See for example Ari Hirvonen, "Civitas Peregrina: Augustine and the Possibility of Non-Violent Community", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law VIII/24 (1995), 227-273, and Panu Minkkinen, "Rights Things: On the Question of Being Law", Law and Critique VII/1 (1996), 65-84.

7 Jacques Derrida, "Force of law: The "mystical foundation of authority"', in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-68.

8 On responses to this question by Derrida and others see Peter O'Connor, Eduardo Cadava and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes after the Subject? (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).

9 See for example Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying-Awaiting (One Another at) the 'Limits of Truth' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

10 See Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre", in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

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