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Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from
Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the
field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field
of philosophical research.
Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan
Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller
Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach
Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen
Zepke
Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
Derrida: Profanations, Patrick O’Connor
The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner
Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler
Heidegger and Logic, Greg Shirley
Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond
Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin
Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte
Idealism and Existentialism, Jon Stewart
Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt
Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann
Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman
Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Žižek’s Dialectics, Fabio Vighi
Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

Nicole Anderson

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy


�
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Nicole Anderson 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced


or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Nicole Anderson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-5942-7


e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-4073-9

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India


Contents

Acknowledgements  vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The ‘Ethics of Deconstruction’? 21
Chapter 2: Ethical (Im)possibilities 61
Chapter 3: Ethics Under Erasure 87
Chapter 4: Ethical Experience: A Cinematic Example 131
Notes 169
Bibliography 181
Index 193
Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the first two sections of Chapter 2 was published as a


paper, ‘The Ethical Possibilities of the Subject as Play: in Nietzsche and
Derrida’, in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies 26 (2003): 79–90. I am grateful to
The Pennsylvania State University Press for permission to reproduce this
material in this book.
A substantially different version of Chapter 4 is forthcoming in a book
entitled Chiasmatic Encounters, published by Lexington Books.
I would like to thank those who have commented on various draft
chapters, or who have read an entire draft version of the book, or have
shown encouragement and support more generally. Among them are
Steven Barker, Lennard J. Davis, Mark Evans, Joanna Hodge, Elaine Kelly,
Nick Mansfield, Martin McQuillan, Katrina Schlunke, Linnell Secomb,
Robert Sinnerbrink, and Peter Steeves. A very special thanks to Claire
Colebrook and Michael Naas. Also to my family, and to my partner Peter
Evans for ‘being there’. Last but not least, to Simon Morgan Wortham for
his wonderful generosity and support my heartfelt thanks and gratitude
that no words can adequately convey.
Introduction

‘In both general and abstract terms, the absoluteness of duty, of responsibility, and
of obligation certainly demands that one transgress ethical duty.’
– Derrida, The Gift of Death, 66

Ethics Under Erasure

Derrida’s work continues to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, accused,


critiqued and defended, reviled and revered. It is appropriated to topics as
diverse as law, architecture, painting, language, literature and philosophy.
It is also frequently invoked to support and legitimate, or to subvert, the
political and ideological agendas of both the left and right. Debate is
endemic: is Derrida’s deconstruction indeterminate or determinate, incom-
mensurable or commensurable, nihilistic or ethical? Is it poststructuralist
or postmodernist, philosophical or literary? Is it a serious enterprise or a
private joke? Is Derrida’s deconstruction Heideggerian, Nietzschean or
Levinasian or something else altogether? So controversial is Derrida’s work
that John Caputo has commented, with some amusement:

Derrida and ‘deconstruction’ .€ .€ . have been blamed for almost every-
thing. For ruining American departments of philosophy, English, French,
and comparative literature .€.€. for dimming the lights of the Enlighten-
ment, for undermining the law of gravity, for destroying all standards of
reading, writing, reason – (and ‘rithemtic, too) – and also for Mormon
polygamy. (Caputo 1997b, 41)

There is seriousness to Caputo’s levity: that is, serious issues of academic


probity are involved. More often than not the most scathing critiques and
false accusations levelled at Derrida have been made by those who have
not actually read his texts (Derrida and Norris 1989, 74). The famous
‘Cambridge and Heidegger affairs’ and the disparaging ad hominem attack
of Derrida in an obituary by Jonathan Kandell published two days after
2 Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

Derrida’s death in the New York Times on 10 October 2004 are pertinent
examples.1 In cases like these, what is evident is that little account had been
taken of either the rigorous argumentation that characterizes Derrida’s
writing, or his notion of deconstruction as that which is not negative and
destructive. And yet, critics of Derrida’s work continue to misinterpret and
promote it as unethical, nihilistic and irresponsible, or have appropriated
deconstruction as a form of textual freeplay.2 These misinterpretations and
appropriations, along with the important critiques of these positions by
scholars such as Christopher Norris (1987, 1989, 1989a) and Rodolphe
Gasché (1981, 1988, 1997), are very familiar,3 yet despite this, the
Introduction begins in this way so as to set the ethical scene and lay the
groundwork, before opening into a rigorous re-reading of the complex
question of the ethical in Derrida later in this Introduction, and in the
chapters that follow. But for the moment let us return to the ethical scene.
Given the epigraph above, taken from Derrida’s book The Gift of Death, it
might seem that the critics are right, and that they have a point. Is not this
epigraph evidence enough for Derrida’s detractors to accuse him of an
outright rejection of ethics? It might be if an important clause in the sentence
wasn’t missing, which it deliberately is in order to reveal how easy it is to quote
out of context (both grammatically and thematically). The full sentence reads:
‘In both general and abstract terms, the absoluteness of duty, of responsibility,
and of obligation certainly demands that one transgress ethical duty, although
in betraying it one belongs to it and at the same time recognizes it’ (Derrida 1995b, 66;
italics mine). If one started to think that Derrida was abandoning ethics for
some kind of moral or ethical freeplay (which reading only the first part of the
sentence might possibly convey to those unfamiliar with Derrida’s work), by
the end of this sentence one should realize that what Derrida is arguing is that
one can’t abandon, even if one transgresses, ethics.
Quoting Derrida out of context, then, is something some of Derrida’s
critics and appropriators have a tendency to do either accidentally or wilfully
in order to promote their own ideological, political or philosophical
agendas, and as we can see from the partly quoted epigraph, this can cause
‘so many misunderstandings’ (Derrida 1992b, 9) and contribute to various
misinterpretations and (mis)appropriations of deconstruction. We are
familiar with Richard Rorty’s form of appropriation that aligns Derrida’s
work with Rorty’s brand of ‘anything goes’ postmodernism, characterized
by a rejection of metaphysics, ethics and the subject. Yet Rorty believes
Derrida’s work can justifiably be aligned in this way because he understands
Derrida’s work to be deliberately promoting an ‘undifferentiated textuality’,
nicknamed ‘freeplay’ (that is, the belief that there are endless substitutions
Introduction 3

of one sign for another so that any sign can mean anything at any time, no
matter what the context). However, Rorty only achieves this alignment by
often quoting Derrida out of context.
For example, quoting a passage from Derrida’s essay ‘Ousia and Gramme:
Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Rorty suggests that ‘Derrida wants to
make us conscious of that text by letting us “think a writing without presence
and without absence, without history, without cause, without archia [sic],
without telos, a writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology, all
teleology, all ontology”’ (Derrida qtd in Rorty 1984, 8). Significantly, Rorty
leaves out an important clause in the first part of this passage he quotes. The
full sentence reads: ‘Such a différance would at once, again, give us to think a
writing without presence and without absence’, and so on (Derrida 1986,
67).4 Quoting selectively here, Rorty redescribes the original meaning of
Derrida’s passage in a number of ways. First, Rorty uses the verb ‘wants’ which
implies a volition on Derrida’s part that has no parallel in the original: in the
French, what leads us to think ‘a writing without presence’ is ‘différance’ (not
Derrida). Second, Rorty has ignored the force of the conditional donnerait
(‘could give or cause us to’) and represents Derrida’s heavily modalized
hypothesis as assertion. Derrida does not claim that this is how writing is (or
how he wants it to be), but merely that différance leads us to think of writing
in this way. Reinterpreting Derrida’s original in this way, Rorty is then free to
argue that writing should be read as an ‘infinite undifferentiated textuality’
because it refers to nothing, no history, no cause, no archia, no telos, and so
on. Examples of this kind of quoting out of context riddle the works of both
Derrida’s appropriators and detractors alike.

This book does not endorse the interpretation of Derrida’s work as


promoting an ‘undifferentiated textuality’, or as a rejection of metaphysics
and ethics, hence a celebration of nihilism, if we mean by that a complete
denial and destruction of authority, institutions or meaning for its own
sake. Rather, the first aim of this book is to present the development of
Derrida’s thinking on, and deconstruction of, ethics. The book reveals that
the ethical is a focus of Derrida’s work from his earliest writings on
language, to his work on hospitality, justice, responsibility, politics, and
beyond. The book begins tracing this development of the ethical, justice
and responsibility by presenting in Chapter 1 the critical reception of, and
debates around, scholars’ interpretations and defences of Derrida’s
thinking on ethics, with the main focus being on Simon Critchley’s
4 Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

influential book The Ethics of Deconstruction. If the ethical is a focus in


Derrida’s work, this is not to say that either deconstruction per se is ethical,
or that deconstruction opposes itself, or can be opposed, to metaphysical
ethics. To convey this, my coined phrase ethics under erasure is key to
unlocking not only what I argue to be the paradoxical structure of ethics
but, in turn, how Derrida’s deconstruction enables us to rethink or move
away from the binary choice-making and decision-taking characteristic of
metaphysical and normative ethics, but without rejecting metaphysical
ethics.
The other aim of this book, the main one, is to explain the positive (not
the negative, the nihilistic or the destructive) nature of this paradox. The
phrase ethics under erasure conveys this positive paradox. That is, by bringing
together Derrida’s ‘under erasure’5 with ‘ethics’, the single phrase attempts
to capture the profound paradox and complexity of this tension and
relationship between the ethically singular and the general. For Derrida,
placing a word or concept under erasure means to ‘rub it out’ or change it,
while simultaneously retaining its original meaning or concept. By erasing
without erasing, the original meaning haunts a new meaning, a new context.
What is conveyed in the process is a demonstration of a word or concept’s
inaccuracy or inadequacy of meaning. But this does not deny the possibility
of meaning or intention; rather it is more a means by which to reveal the
metaphysical assumptions underlying a word or concept’s meaning so as to
expose the contextuality and alterity of language (more of this below). Thus
the phrase ‘ethics under erasure’ attempts to convey how our singular
ethical responses to an ‘Other’6 entails both a transgression of ethical duty
(the general or universal) and negotiation with, and retention and
acknowledgement of, those ethical systems (and hence social values and
norms built on those systems) that carry universal status. Singular responses
can neither transcend nor dispense with the general. Likewise, universal
ethical laws require negotiation with the singular.
The phrase ethics under erasure is the book’s theoretical fulcrum, with
Chapter 3 dedicated to unfolding its operation and implications. Ethics
under erasure can perhaps help us rethink metaphysical ethical systems,
and the paradox by which they are simultaneously perpetuated and
undermined in the inter-subjective dialectic of everyday human experi-
ence (the theme of Chapter 4). Meanwhile let’s now turn to an example
of how Derrida’s work is considered to be nihilistic by both Rorty and
Habermas because of what they see to be Derrida’s affirmation of
Nietzschean demolition. This will set the foundation for the issues of
language and subjectivity raised throughout the book, and particularly in
Chapter 2.
Introduction 5

Redescribing Derrida: The Problems of ‘Indeterminacy’


and ‘Freeplay’
Rorty’s appropriation of deconstruction to his brand of postmodernism not
only takes Derrida out of context, but in doing so, has contributed to the
dissemination of the interpretation that Derrida’s work is unethical and
nihilistic and not only in Anglo-academic departments, but throughout the
wider community. As Niall Lucy argues, the conflation of deconstruction,
and hence poststructuralism, with postmodernism has been a result of the
‘misinterpretation’ of Derrida’s word ‘play’ in his essay ‘Structure, Sign and
Play’ (Lucy 1997, 97), where ‘Derrida’s sense of “play” as “give” was transformed
ecstatically to mean “play” as “playfulness” or (“unruliness”)’ (Lucy 1997,
102). The following passage from ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ confirms Lucy’s
observation, but it is also significant for revealing how and why Rorty (and, as
we will see shortly, Habermas) believes that Derrida promotes freeplay by
adopting Nietzschean affirmation and demolition. Derrida argues:

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of


sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth
or an origin which escapes play .€.€. The other, which is no longer turned
towards the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and human-
ism, the name of man being the name of that being who .€.€. has dreamed
of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of
play. The second interpretation .€.€. to which Nietzsche pointed the way,
does not seek .€.€. ‘the inspiration of a new humanism’.€.€. [Rather], the
Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the
world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs
without fault, without truth, and without origin .€.€. This affirmation then
determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center. (Derrida 1995a, 292)

Rorty chooses to focus on the second interpretation of play (as Nietzschean


affirmation) in his reading of Derrida (without acknowledging either the
first interpretation or the context of the larger point Derrida makes in this
essay). This then allows him to associate Derrida’s notion of play with ‘the
affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without
origin’ (Derrida 1995a, 292), with frivolity, non-seriousness, game-playing,
and thereby, in turn, implying that Derrida’s work avoids intellectual rigour
and seriousness associated with philosophical writing. Thus for Rorty, this is
the ‘good side’ of Derrida’s work (what Rorty labels ‘private irony’): that
which forms a fantasizing style and word play (puns, neologisms,
palaeonymy’s, and so on) (Rorty 1982, 93; 1989a, 126).
6 Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

However, shortly after the passage from ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ quoted
above, Derrida goes on to argue that ‘although these two interpretations
must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their
irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing
.€.€. because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the
différance of this irreducible difference’ (Derrida 1995a, 293). And again,
some years later in Positions, Derrida argues that ‘by means of this double
play .€.€. I try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play
of philosophemes or epistimemes by making them slide – without mistreating
them – to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure’
(Derrida 1982a, 6). Yet for all of Derrida’s qualifications, Rorty continues to
focus on the second interpretation of play, and reinterpreting it as ‘free-
play’. In contradistinction to this postmodern appropriation of play, Derrida
insists: ‘I never spoke of “complete freeplay or undecidability” .€.€. Greatly
overestimated in my texts in the United States, this notion of “freeplay” is
an inadequate translation of the lexical network connected to the word jeu,
which I used in my first texts, but sparingly and in a highly defined manner’
(Derrida 1997a, 115–16).
‘Undifferentiated textuality’ (or ‘freeplay’) became not only a widely
adopted notion to define Derrida’s work, but as a result made Derrida’s
work vulnerable to misdirected critique. Generically the critique goes
something like this: Derrida’s adoption of ‘Nietzschean demolition’ and
affirmation, along with his radicalization of Saussurian linguistics as a
differential play of signs (différance) and the contamination of binary
oppositions in language, is an assault on metaphysics, ethics and subjectivity.
It is an assault because Derrida’s differential play of signs is an abandonment
of absolute meaning and intention in favour of contextual indeterminacy
and transcendental solipsism. Consequently, Derrida’s deconstruction is
nihilistic and therefore unethical.
Two famous and influential examples of this critique in a sustained form
are found, first, in Jürgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(1987), where Derrida argues that it is a profound irony that Habermas
has not read his work and yet accuses him of being unethical (Derrida
1997a, 156, fn. 9).7 And second, in John Searle’s paper, ‘Reiterating the
Differences’ (1977), which is a response to Derrida’s paper ‘Signature
Event Context’ (1986, first English translation in Glyph 1977), and to which
Derrida, in turn, responds in book-length form in Limited Inc (1997a).
More specifically, interpreting Derrida’s notion of context as indeterminable,
and as an all-embracing context of texts, leads both Searle and Habermas
to argue that for Derrida there is no authentic ‘intention of meaning’
Introduction 7

(Searle 1977, 207), thus Derrida relativizes meaning and communication


(Habermas 1987, 197).
Overall, while Rorty thinks aligning Derrida with what he argues to be
Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics is a positive move, the same assumption
leads Habermas and Searle to argue that deconstruction endorses an
indeterminacy of meaning and thus demolishes in nihilistic fashion all
values, truth and reason (Habermas 1987, 96–7, 181). However, Derrida’s
neologism ‘deconstruction’ is an attempt to avoid the negative connotations
associated, whether rightly and wrongly, with ‘Nietzschean demolition’
(Derrida 1988b, 1). Either way, by aligning Derrida solely with what they
consider to be Nietzschean demolition, appropriators such as Rorty and
critics such as Habermas and Searle perpetuate, in different ways, not only
an unbalanced view of Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism and his project in
general, but also a misunderstanding of Derrida’s engagement with
Nietzsche.

Derrida’s ‘context’
The purpose of this section is to elaborate on Derrida’s notion of context
as preparation for the discussion in the next section (and throughout the
book) of how metaphysical ethics is inevitably transformed as a result of
context. Needless to say that for Derrida context is extremely important,
not something one can abandon even if one wanted to, and therefore the
accusation of Derrida perpetuating absolute contextual indeterminacy is
simply inaccurate. For example, when Derrida’s famously states ‘[t]here
is nothing outside of the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’ (Derrida 1976,
158), he means ‘there is nothing outside context’ (Derrida 1997a, 136),
rather there are only contexts that open the possibility of recontextual-
ization, or ‘contextual transformation’ (Derrida 1997a, 79). Thus, there
is no mark or sign that is ‘valid outside of context’. However, it does not
follow, as Habermas or Searle assume, that because context is not abso-
lutely determinable, communication ceases to be meaningful or valid.
Rather, Derrida argues that while the sign or utterance can be limited by
context – for example, limited by environment; experience; ‘the pres-
ence of the writer to what he has written’; ‘semiotic context’; by the
semantic stratum of language, and so on – nevertheless ‘by virtue of its
essential iterability, a written syntagma can always be detached from the
chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibil-
ity of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating” precisely’
(Derrida 1997a, 9).
8 Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure

All Derrida is arguing here is that depending on context, a mark or a sign


(due to its iterability) can be grafted, or inscribed onto other semantic
chains. He gives an example, demonstrating that the sequence of words
‘the green is either’ is unacceptable in the context of ‘an epistemic
intention’, or an intention to know, and yet, ‘the green is either’ is not
prevented from ‘functioning in another context as signifying marks’
(Derrida 1997a, 12). And which is why one can quote out of context. To put
it another way, every sign or utterance is structured by ‘iteration’ (which is
what makes every sign quotable). Iteration is not simply repeatability, which
entails a traditional concept of representation. Rather,‘[i]terability requires
the origin to repeat itself originarily, to alter itself so as to have the value of
origin, that is, to conserve itself’ (Derrida 1992b, 43).Therefore, iterability
as ‘a differential structure’ escapes the dialectical opposition of presence
and absence, and instead ‘implies both identity and difference’ (Derrida
1997a, 53). For Derrida, then, this is why the sign or utterance ‘can never
be entirely certain or saturated’ (Derrida 1997a, 3).
While Derrida argues that no context is entirely determinable (Derrida
1997a, 9), this does not mean that context is absolutely indeterminable and
thus destroys intentionality:

Sec [‘Signature Event Context’] has not simply effaced or denied inten-
tionality, as Sarl [Searle] claims. On the contrary, Sec insists on the fact
that ‘the category of intention will not disappear, it will have its place
.€.€.’ (Let it be said in passing that this differential-deferring (différantielle)
structure of intentionality alone can enable us to account for the differ-
entiation between ‘locutionary’, ‘illocutionary’ and ‘perlocutionary’ val-
ues of the ‘same’ marks or utterances). (Derrida 1997a, 58)8

Both iterability and context enable normal felicitous speech acts and utter�
ances to take place. Thus Derrida insists that ‘[b]y no means do I draw the
conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of
effects of€speech’ (Derrida 1997a, 19). Despite Derrida’s insistence, and his
demonstrations, Habermas still persists in misreading Derrida as positing an
all-embracing context that dispenses with unified meaning and communication.
Yet what is instructive about Derrida’s understanding of context is that even
though deconstruction cannot be permanently fixed within a particular
context (precisely because it is not a method, analysis, critique, act or operation
(Derrida 1988b, 3)), and thus ‘is different from one context to another’, at the
same time, deconstruction is ‘absolutely responsible’ because it ‘takes the
singularity of every context into account’ (Derrida and Norris 1989, 73), and
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