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