Contagion warning
During the Birkbeck Derrida lecture series, someone (k-punk? infinite thought?) mentioned the deconstructive virus. It’s a pretty accurate description of some of the worst Derridean writing. A mediocre scholar takes some concept (and it doesn’t matter what concept) and introduces deconstruction, which takes up residence and uses it to produce endless copies of some theme of Derrida’s, spreading the contagion and destroying the original concept.
I’ve spent the past couple of days mostly at a conference on Derrida and the Time of the Political. All the greats were there: Balibar, Butler, Brown (although not Badiou, unfortunately, who fits my alliterative schema; Ranciere, who doesn’t, was there, though). The deconstructive virus was, luckily, mostly absent (showing up only in a dubiously eurocentric talk on responsibility, and a panel on Algeria, of which the less said the better, probably). The best papers, indeed, steered clear of Derridology, starting off from Derrida’s work to look substantively at some issue only tangentially touched on by the man himself.
The best example of this was Wendy Brown’s paper, “Is There Sovereignty?” part of her ongoing work on sovereignty as the central concept underwriting the supposed autonomy of the political (an earlier iteration of which Sandy discussed a while back). She started by suggesting a contradiction between deconstruction and sovereignty, as deconstruction seeks to undermine all determinate concepts, while sovereignty will not let itself be rendered indeterminate (and, presumably, has the material force to prevent this from happening). This then renders deconstruction a necessarily anti-political procedure, creating difficulties in Derrida’s attempts to specifically deal with the political; difficulties which, according to Brown, he fails to resolve.
Democracy as a political system is where these problems are located. Democracy, as the rule of a heterogenous people, appears as the practical deconstruction of sovereignty; but as democracy is a politics it requires sovereignty to found the political in the first place. Thus, popular sovereignty invokes sovereignty as a supplement to democracy. Brown’s example here was Iraq, where the lack of any sovereignty renders the formal elements of democracy (voting, parliaments) irrelevant, while attempts by the occupiers and Iraqi military to establish sovereignty render democracy impossible in practice (Brown employed the ominous but apposite expression “Iraqization,” which I haven’t heard used before).
Derrida, Brown argued, follows the liberal tradition in locating this sovereign supplement in the state. He construes democratic freedom solely as individual self-determination, and so displaces politics in common onto the sovereign state, which is capable of coercing individuals to live together. However, as we have seen throughout history and are again seeing clearly, this understanding is insufficient to produce substantive democracy. Brown’s conclusion, and it was pleasing to hear her say this explicitly, was that, in his rejection of collective self rule, Derrida is not communist enough.
Jacques Ranciere was similarly critical of (though not hostile to) Derrida. He began by reiterating his claim that democracy is anarchic, in the sense of resisting αÏ?χε, authority, or any principle which dissymetrically allows some to rule over others. The δημοσ is those people who have no qualifications to rule, and thus democracy is the rule by those without qualifications. Therefore, the δημοσ is a supplement to the political structure; it is that which is not counted by the political system.
Where this becomes a criticism of Derrida is when we turn to Derrida’s account of the political subject; or, Ranciere insisted, Derrida’s failure to account for the political subject. Ranciere argued that Derrida’s explicit attack on a politics of fraternity also functions as a way of avoiding thinking the politics of equality, because Derrida allows for no substitutibility, no way of thinking that the other could be any other, that is, the uncountable others who make up the δημοσ.
What I thought was most interesting, however, which this critique doesn’t get to, was Ranciere’s positive conception of the political subject. A political intervention occours, Ranciere said, when a group takes the part of the δημοσ. The political subject acts as if it were the indeterminate, uncountable part of the political community. This has obvious affinities with Badiou’s account of the subject, but I’d be interested to see how exactly the two can be related.
Other interesting things included Pheng Cheah’s discussion of “Democracy to come,” which, somewhat in contrast to Ranciere’s criticism, argued that, because democracy is never self-identical or properly present, the democracy to come is not something to be put off to the future but exists in an untimely manner in the present. The Marxism Working Group organized a talk on Wordsworth and the commodity form, which I’m not really equipped to judge, but it seemed pretty interesting (and a good complement to our ongoing Grundrisse reading group).
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Speeaking of the mind virus however….
Comment by mark k-p @ 2/18/2006 4:55 am
see also nicholas royle’s derrida-defiling nonsensical stream of consciousness shite about portmanteaus or alice in wonderland or something
Comment by leila @ 2/22/2006 1:24 am
just looked at the conference webpage - looks great - cixous, bennington, gasche, and other people I have heard of! Did you go to Guerlac’s talk on the pardon? “the pardon is not impossible, it is difficult.” Ricouer rocks it!!
Comment by leila @ 2/22/2006 3:04 am
Heh, I once wrote a very negative book review of Royle’s ‘Derrida’ for the Routledge critical thinkers series. Pure disciplehood.
Comment by steff @ 2/25/2006 3:52 pm
great - I thought it was just me See here
Comment by leila @ 2/27/2006 11:40 pm
Hellooo…
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