Jacques Derrida, “Rogue that I am” VII [Only a god Can Save Us]

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This is the final post in this series. I hope this has been a helpful sketch of Derrida’s text.

In this lecture Derrida notes, “Someone in me whispered to me: ‘Perhaps it would be a matter of saving the honor of reason. Perhaps on that day, in the daylight of today, in the light of the enlightenment of this day, it would be a matter of saving the honor of reason.” (118-119) Of course, we are in Kantian territory.

But right away a question emerges, “The honor of reason-is that reason? Is honor reasonable or rational through and through?” (120) This is to say, is Reason ever only itself? Is reason always only disinterested? The basic themes taken up here are “divisibility, eventfulness, and conditionality.” (ibid.)

To save the honor of reason; the word save is important to Derrida and, thus, we re-turn to autoimmunity (the thread we will try to follow for as long as we can). Derrida writes, “The saving or rescue of a reason that perhaps also consists in saving, in saving itself-which is also to say, in running for safety.” (121) Saving, this word, in a sense, shakes the order of reason; why would reason need saving if it were not immune from threats?

Again, a question: does reason need saving because the world is losing reason or, rather, because reason, itself, is threatening itself: “To lose itself all by itself, to go down on its own, to autoimmunize itself…this strange illogical logic…”? (123 – eo) Derrida keeps re-tuning to autoimmunity because he wants to “situate the question of life and of the living being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of my remarks.” (ibid.)

We cannot do justice to Derrida here; he takes his time, and we will not. Thus we will give our attention to § 2 “To Arrive-At the Ends of the State (and of War, and of World War). Here Derrida wonders about what “the history of reason” may have taught us (see the preceding section of Derrida’s essay)? How are to think a reason that seems to win by force, and a reason  “in more than one European language…?” Here Derrida will play with terminology we have already heard: calculable and the incalculable or the conditional and the unconditional – or even the unconditional conditional. We must take our time with these terms, and we can begin at page 148.

Jacques Derrida, “Rogue that I am” VI [Only a god Can Save Us]

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I am picking up this series from here.

We may put it this way: freedom introduces, it seems, an immeasurability – every one, for instance, is singular – singularly free; nonetheless, it is only by attempting to calculate this freedom, a measure introduced by the notion of equality, that one has access to the incalculable at all. This makes some sense: if we did not try to calculate what is incalculable we would not know that it was incalculable. What Derrida calls “calculating technique” is a “chance” that is, an autoimmune threat. In the attempt to calculate and thus gain access to the incalculable, one risks destroying or neutralizing the incommensurable. It also seems, however, that the incommensurable makes it impossible to calculate and thus threatens to erase any ability to calculate.  How does one calculate, say, the unconscious – and how does one know anything about the unconscious without attempting to take account of it? (54-55) Herein lies, argues Derrida, the aporia of democracy and of politics.

Derrida returns to the question of brothers in § 5, the second of two essays regarding the work of Nancy. Derrida ask Nancy (who wrote, “It is also fraternity, if it must be said that fraternity…”), why must it be said? Derrida notes that it was in his Politics of Friendship he tried to deconstruct a certain privileging of the “brother in ethics, law, and politics, and particularly in a certain democratic model.” (58)

Derrida continues, “I shall not return to this line of argumentation, to the examples and the numerous texts where I have tried to justify this deconstruction, including within the psychoanalytic institution, and even within the works of Blanchot and Levinas. I also recalled in passing…strongly Christian connotations.” (ibid.)

There is a lot to note here, but allow me some liberty: Derrida is, most basically, questioning whether or not to receive this term, fraternity, and he, without doubt, says, “No.” While there is someone in him who wants to believe that this must be said…there is another other in him who thinks its better not to believe it.

Derrida’s primary concern, however, is that “this fraternalism might follow at least the temptation of a genealogical descent back…to birth, to naissance.” (61). Derrida notes that the emphasis he places on birth is precisely due to the fact that Nancy makes a great deal of birth. (61-62)

Roué that I am, I must, yet again, return to spacing, the space I must leave here, in order to proceed, by turns or by columns, 1+1+1 columns.

It is not until § 7 that Derrida comes around to telling us what questions, what two questions, have been torturing him; he notes a certain roguishness [rouerie] here (71). What are these two questions:

Jacques Derrida, “Rogue that I am” V

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This post is a continuation of a series announced here; I pick up from this post.

First, actually the second point: Derrida argues that “the suspension of the electoral process in Algeria would be, from almost every perspective, typical of all assaults on democracy in the name of democracy.” (33) The Algerian people, though, as Derrida notes, not the majority, and in the name of democracy, “in a sovereign fashion decided to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good, …so as to immunize it against a much worse and very likely assault.” (ibid – eo) This is to say that democracy cannot protect itself against itself: “Democracy has always been suicidal.”  (ibid.) Furthermore, Derrida argues, if there is a democracy to come “it is only on the condition of thinking life otherwise, life and the force of life.” (ibid.)

Second, the second point Derrida wants to make in the “second place,” “has to do with freedom itself, with the freedom at play in the freedom of democracy.” (34) The basic question is must democracy leave itself open to those who, in a democratic fashion, seek to attack democracy? Derrida notes that this problematic is, in fact, within the “concept of democracy itself.” (ibid – eo) Herein lies the “perverse and autoimmune effects of the axiomatic developed already in Plato and Aristotle.” (ibid.)

What we have been discussing is the autoimmunity of democracy. And we must take the time and dwell here for a moment or two longer. Derrida notes that it was in “Faith and Knowledge” that he attempted to “formalize the general law of this autoimmune process.” (35) It is here that he connects autoimmunity to spacing and différance.

The autoimmune process is a certain renvoi, that is, sending off or deferral – and this renvoi  “belongs to the schema of space and time, to which I had thematized with such insistence long ago under the name spacing as the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space. The values of the trace or the renvoi, like those of différance, are inseparable from it [spacing].” (ibid.) What are we to make of these connections in the context of this discussion?

First, Derrida notes the spatial element: democracy must be sent off, that is, be “excluded or rejected;” the rogues, we might say in English, those who abuse, say, their freedom, who use their freedom to contest freedom, the “domestic enemies of democracy,” those inside must be sent off outside. At the same time, we may speak of the sending off to the other – the foreigner – that is, rogues, we might say in English, who are outside (our) laws…the immigrant, e.g. Derrida notes that “with or without assimilation and integration,… these two contradictory movements of renvoi, of sending off, haunt and autoimmunize one another by turns.” (36)

Jacques Derrida, “Rogue that I am” IV

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This is the continuation of a series announced here. I am sharing a paper I wrote for a Derrida and Theology course. I wrote the paper in three columns: 1 = Hägglund; 2 = Derrida’s “Rogue that I am” statements; 3 = the remainder of Derrida’s wonderful Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. What follows is column three of my paper.

To come, “to come, the to come turns out to be the most insistent theme of this book.” (xii – emphasis original [eo]) Rogues: two lectures, given to two different audiences, at two different times, and “these lectures seem to invoke a certain reason to come, as democracy to come-in the age of so-called globalization or mondialisation.” (ibid – eo)

Two concepts – reason and democracy; two more: world and event, “especially of ‘event’ (the arrival or coming of ‘what comes’ and of ‘who comes’).” (ibid – eo) Two plus two concepts that “belong here to a whole skein of problems.” (ibid.) And what intertwines these concepts: “the old-new enigma, of sovereignty, most notably nation-state-sovereignty-whether it be called democratic or not.” (ibid – eo)

Sovereignty, however, is not itself. What happens when “sovereignty loses its credibility”? (xiii) Enter voyou, rogue, roué, rouée, roue, Etat voyou, rogue states…

To think democratic reason “a certain unconditional renunciation of sovereignty is required a priori. Even before a decision.” (xiv) At this point weak force and a “messianic faith–irreligious and without messianism” is connected to khōra.(xiv) “On it,” on khōra, a call “takes hold”: “the call for a thinking of an event to come, of democracy to come, of reason to come.” (xv – eo) Salut - not salut – and adieu.

We turn now to the initial pages of Part I of Rogues: “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States).” We will keep coming back around, but let it suffice for now to make a connection between two languages, English and French, the French translation of the English “rogue state”: Etat voyou: “From ‘rogue state’ to ‘Etat voyou’ it is a question of nothing less than the reason of the strongest, a question of right and of law, of force of law, in short, or order, world order, worldwide order, and its future…” (2). It is the French translation of the American “rogues states,” and the “American denunciation of rogue states…[t]hat will be, later on, one of my references and points of departure” (3 – eo). Let us wait for that…and, somewhat free wheeling, turn to the importance of turning in this text.

Derrida, in this text, re-turns: “The turn [le tour], the turret or tower [la tour], the wheel of turns and returns: here is the motivating theme and the Prime Mover, the causes and things around which I will incessantly turn.” (6) How are we to read this?

Things Flight Attendants Say

If this is not true, I don’t know what is…

Someone added:
“How long have you been flying ? What did you do before this ? When do bids close? Did you get a good schedule next month? No, I didn’t get any of the days I asked for!”

I agree:
“My favorite is ‘What do you mean they want to come out now?!’”

Feel free to add in the comments section here or over at youtube.
I think I would add, “I did not vote for this contract” or “We don’t get paid enough.”

Stuff Bored Flight Attendants Talk About

“What Race Is Your Sex?”

“[M]any slave traders and investors sought to legitimate their own practices through the notion that slavery in the land of white people was in effect an act of charity, improving the lot of otherwise free African peoples mired in unhappy degeneracy. This same logic became foundational to later capitalist theory, in which the superior endowments of the wealthy would establish an unequal field of competition but insist that free mobility and deployment of these dominate resources improve the overall economic position of all players while further cementing the dominant position of the wealthy.” (153)

______

While musical productions like Avenue Q may help us to take a step back from the seriousness with which we take every comment related to race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc. – it’s important to actually get beyond facetious and playful conversations (as important as they are!) about these serious social issues [We can also think of Derrida who, precisely in the context of discussing anti-Semitism, in an interview with Elisabeth Roundinesco, argued, "Each time, one must ask oneself 'Who's saying what?' in what situation and in what what status. The same expression does not signify or produce the same thing when it comes from the mouth of the president of the Republic as it does when a Jew tells a Jewish joke (118)] In an effort to do some self work, and in an effort advertise some of the complexity relating to thinking through these issues, I want to read  Laurel C. Schneider’s article, “What Race Is Your Sex” in Disrupting White Supremacy From Within: White People On What We Need To Do, 142-162.

Schneider writes, “[I]t is difficult for everyone to fully digest the co-constitutive qualities of race, sex, and gender that I am interested in, primarily because of the support each construction gives on the modern West to the tenacity of white supremacy.” (142) It’s important to note that, for Schneider, what we are talking about is not biology. She contends, “By saying that race is largely other than skin color, facial features, and hair tecture; that sex is largely other than genital and libidinal formation; and that gender is largely other than hormonal deployment does not mean that the catergories of race, sex, and gender become meaningless and ungrounded.” (143)

Let’s take sex and gender or sex/gender as an initial example. It’s often argued that sex determines gender determines sexual orientation: penis = boy = heterosexual. As Foucault, Butler and others, however, have argued – it’s actually the reverse. “Absolute heterosexuality” needs gender - and in order to anchor the notion of boy or girl in “nature” – these concepts, of course, need the body: penis or vagina, as the case may be. Ideology is always a bodily matter – as Althusser argued.

Schneider writes, “I am in fact convinced that race, sex and gender are not only constructed for particular purposes of social order but that to contemplate them in isolation from each other is to perpetuate their more insidious social and political effects and to ignore their more profound theological implications.” (144) Schneider continues, “Taken together, I argue that race and sex co-constitute a corporate merging of meanings located in human and divine hierarchies that solidify power and make resilient the supremacy of white people, exemplified in the white male from which, in this view, all others differentiate in useful degrees of degenerate separation.” (ibid)

We must always ask: if race, sex, and gender are so natural – why do their connections and boundaries, if you will, need such an extensive disciplinary apparatus?

Professor Schneider is particularly interested in how even the most committed anti-racist whites fail to think race, sex, and gender together. She contends that these realities “cannot meaningfully be separated except in support of racist and sexist goals, is much more difficult to grasp and even more difficult to practice, particularly for white people, whom the separation most effectively serves.” (145)