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65 pages

English

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In this book, Rodolphe Gasché returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it—not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it. Rather than unraveling metaphysics, deconstruction loosens its binary and hierarchical conceptual structure. To make this case, Gasché focuses on the concepts of force and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida, looking to his essays "Force and Signification" and "Force of Law," and his reading on Of Grammatology in Claude Lévi-Strauss's autobiographical Tristes Tropiques. The concept of force has not drawn extensive scrutiny in Derrida scholarship, but it is crucial to understanding how, by way of spacing and temporizing, philosophical opposition is reinscribed into a differential economy of forces. Gasché concludes with an essay addressing the question of deconstruction and judgment and considers whether deconstruction suspends the possibility of judgment, or whether it is, on the contrary, a hyperbolic demand for judgment.
Acknowledgments
Pre/postface

1. The Force of Deconstruction

2. The Possibility of Deconstruction

3. The ‘Violence’ of Deconstruction

Appendix
Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?

Notes
Index

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Philosophie

Philosophie du langage

Philosophie de la langue

Philosophy

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	23 décembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438460024
Langue	English

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DECONSTRUCTION, Its Force, Its Violence
SUNY SERIES IN
CONTEMPORARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
DECONSTRUCTION, Its Force, Its Violence
together with
“Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?”
Rodolphe Gasché
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY , NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gasché, Rodolphe.
Deconstruction, its force, its violence : together with “Have we done with the empire of judgment?” / Rodolphe Gasché.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary Continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6001-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-4384-6002-4 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Deconstruction. I. Title. II. Title: Have we done with the empire of judgment?
B2430.D484G358 2015
149’.97—dc23
2015014259
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Pre/postface
1 The Force of Deconstruction
2 The Possibility of Deconstruction
3 The ‘Violence’ of Deconstruction
Appendix Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
The first three essays collected in this book correspond to the three seminar lectures that I presented in July 2014 at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Umbria, Italy, devoted to the theme “Law and Violence: Hegel, Arendt, Derrida.” I thank Maria del Rosario Acosta for the invitation that provided me with the long-awaited opportunity to address the issues of force, possibility, and violence in the context of an attempt to rethink the concept of ‘deconstruction.’ A first version of the third essay, “The Violence of Deconstruction,” has been published in Research of Phenomenology , 45 (2015), n. 2, 169–190. The essay “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?,” which I presented in November 2014 at Héritages et Survivances de Jacques Derrida, a conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the philosopher, is included here because it expands on an aspect of “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” that is broached but not developed in chapter 2 of this work on “The Possibility of Deconstruction,” an aspect that thus completes a line of thought raised in the context of an analysis of the relation of justice and deconstruction. I am grateful to Marc Goldschmit, Sarah Guindani-Riquier, and Alexis Nuselovici for having provided me with the opportunity of expanding on the subject in question. The essay has been published in a French translation in the proceedings of the conference.
My thanks go especially to Francesco Vitale, Maria del Rosario Acosta, Maria Mercedes Andrade, Raoul Frauenfelder, Mauro Senatore, Mauricio Gonzalez, Kas Saghafi, and Bret Davis, who, at the Collegium, confronted me with their insightful remarks and questions. I also thank Darin Tenev, Yasunori Suzuki, and Yusuke Myasaki, whose comments and suggestions on “The Force of Deconstruction,” which I presented at the University of Tokyo on the occasion of the first meeting of the Association for Deconstruction in November 2014, greatly helped me in finalizing several points in the text. Last but not least, my thanks go to Donald Cross for his judicious and meticulous editing of the manuscript. Without his exceptional skill and care, this book would not have seen the light of day so soon.
Pre/postface
Commonly, the point of a preface is to set forth the purpose and scope of a work, and, as such, its aim is to eclipse itself before the work announced once that task has been accomplished according to its formal exigencies. A preface, therefore, is not the place to propose new developments that might restrict the thrust of the work that it introduces or to extend beyond the results at which the body of the work arrives. Yet, this is what I intend to do in these few prefatory pages by offering in a somewhat programmatic fashion an additional perspective on how deconstruction in Derrida’s thought is to be understood, which suggests that the reflections on deconstruction that follow should be taken a step further. In this sense, this preface is also a postface.
Initially, Derrida did not identify his own way of thinking as deconstruction. On the contrary, the term ‘deconstruction’ was used by others to identify the intention and procedure presumed to be involved in his thought and work. Indeed, as a translation of the Husserlian notion of Abbau and Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion , deconstruction names a gesture of thought that aims to exhibit essential eidetic structures of consciousness covered over by layers of historical sedimentations or the phenomenon par excellence, that is, Being, which withstands self-presentation by withdrawing from its own epochal manifestations. Derrida’s thought is not involved in a similar gesture of reaching back to more originary origins, however abyssal they might turn out to be. Therefore, to apply the notion of deconstruction to Derrida’s thought is to misinterpret it from the start. As a term given by others to his own reflections on what exceeds all grounds and origins, however, in Of Grammatology Derrida embarks on a sort of reappropriation of the term, notwithstanding its improperness, for his own project. Yet, despite this reappropriation, deconstruction is not given a proper meaning in the context, this time, of what his thought is specifically about. Even where Derrida seems to have made the term his own by reformulating it with an eye on the movements involved in his thinking, there always remains a tension in his work between this notion and the style of his thinking. The debate with this notion never comes to a rest in his work. It is taken up critically again and again, because it remains a name given by others to the ‘walk’ followed throughout his thinking, which itself withstood the urge of identifying that walk by naming it.
Therefore, I found it fitting to start the following reflections on the relationship between, on the one hand, deconstruction and, on the other, force, possibility, and violence by focusing on an early text in which Derrida does not yet cast the methodological reflection on the procedure involved in his reading and discussion in terms of deconstruction. This text is the still largely overlooked essay “Force and Signification” (1963), which is the opening of, if not even the programmatic text for, the collection of essays that make up Writing and Difference . Interrupting the flow of his argument concerning Jean Rousset’s Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel by turning back on the procedure that informs his analyses so far—an interruption, furthermore, made only for the republication of the essay in 1967, that is, after he had already reappropriated the term deconstruction—Derrida formulates his modus operandi without any recourse to the term deconstruction. Even though this belated, methodological aside anticipates later reflections on deconstruction, the absence of the word deconstruction makes it possible to evaluate Derrida’s way of thinking in a slightly more nuanced way. By not speaking about deconstruction, it is as if Derrida resists naming his way of thinking and thus protects it from the unifying, homogenizing, and essentializing effect of a catchword.
With this, the stakes of rethinking Derrida’s mode of thinking and, in the same breath, of deconstruction come into view. Since the publication of Of Grammatology , the term deconstruction has been construed as inseparable from the critical engagement with the logocentrism of metaphysical thought. Thus, the stakes of a reflection on his own way of thinking without recourse to the term deconstruction consists in nothing less than the attempt to resist the identification of deconstruction with its first reappropriation by Derrida himself. Indeed, in “Force and Signification,” Derrida characterizes the movements of thought that inform his debate with Rousset’s work as strategic moves necessary to break with the conceptual structure of opposition that prevents Rousset from accomplishing in the end what he sets out to do, namely, to reconceive the literary work’s inner genesis and creative life. The methodological digression clearly aims at highlighting a kind of thinking that takes issue with the oppositional structure of metaphysical thought in its entirety . By not referring to it as a deconstruction, Derrida emphasizes the thought-character of this different take on the thought of a literary critic, a kind of thinking that itself is no longer simply critical, and in the same breath presents this thinking as one that takes on metaphysical thought precisely insofar as it is dominated or governed by a system of oppositions. Put differently, the stakes involved in momentarily suspending the notion of deconstruction to account for what takes place in the opening essay of Writing and Difference concern the thought-character of the thinking that governs Derrida’s approach and on whose basis alone the decisive novelty of his intervention in philosophy can be assessed.
Time and again Derrida emphasizes that deconstruction is not One. This warning against mistaking deconstruction for a unified method or taking it to be always in pursuit of the same objective is all the more important