Beyond Deconstruction: From Hermeneutics to Reconstruction 9783110273328, 9783110273236

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Beyond Deconstruction

Beyond Deconstruction From Hermeneutics to Reconstruction Edited by

Alberto Martinengo

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-027323-6 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027332-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internetat http://dnb.dnb.de. 쑔 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Alberto Martinengo Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Section I Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction: A Philosophical Approach Emmanuel Cattin Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco Waiting: The Impossible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jean Robelin Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?

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Graziano Lingua Beyond the Eclipse of Reason: On the Reconstruction of Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jean-Marc Ferry Towards a Reconstructive Critique of Historical Reason . . . . . .

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Evelyne Grossman Creative Delinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Section II The Limits of Deconstruction: The Case of Art and Literature Timo Kaitaro Reality under Construction: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Clive Cazeaux Deconstructing and Reconstructing Artists with PhDs . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Franca Bruera Towards a Dramaturgy of Suspicion: Theatre and Myths in 20th-century France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso A Methodological Comparison between a Mythocentric Approach and a Deconstructive Reading in the Interpretation of Rewritings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Maria Spiridopoulou Translation: Theory and Praxis. Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Giacomo Leopardi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Antonella Emina Deconstructing and Reconstructing Built-up Landscape in Post-Colonial Literature: Damas’s Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Section III The Genealogy and Legacy of Deconstruction: The Politico-Social and Juridical Point of View Jordi Maiso Remembrance of Nature within the Subject: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Subjection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Herman W. Siemens The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to Deconstruction: The Case of Chantal Mouffe . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Flavia Monceri ‘Just Tell Me Who You Are! ’: Do We Need Identity in Philosophy and the Social Sciences? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Alberto Andronico Daydreaming: Derrida’s Contribution to the Theory of Law . .

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Jnos Frivaldszky Law as Practical Knowledge: Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and the Promise of Classical Practical Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index Rerum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks Alberto Martinengo The cultural phenomenon that Friedrich Nietzsche characterised as a ‘malady of history’ is perhaps one of the most glaring manifestations of his lasting actuality. It is not difficult to point out its nether presence today, far beyond the bounds of philosophy, in the infinite variations of one unique commonplace reference: that of the crisis or the decline of modernity. Its pervasiveness is a matter of fact and, as is well known, produces a crucial shift in the self-comprehension of a broad spectrum of disciplines, which concerns the Humanities as a whole. The premises connected to this phenomenon are evident from multiple points of view. As has been convincingly highlighted, they primarily address the possibility of isolating a compact cluster of events qualified by the category modern age, wherein the present seeks to distinguish itself more or less definitively. This is a presupposition that accrues all the advantages (as well as the enormous disadvantages) of succinct formulae – and 20th-century philosophy bears ample witness to such ambiguous implications. But along with this sort of toponomastic hindrance, the jargon of crisis poses another kind of question, one having to do with the ‘rhetorical power’ of such a rupture. To invoke a series of categories that have fallen into disfavour, but which nonetheless partially retain their significance, the fortunes of notions such as crisis and decline are marked by a crucial oscillation between purported statements of fact and explicitly performative valuations. In short, the claims of a discontinuity with respect to the category of modernity play at double cross: on the one side, the objective recognition of a breakdown, for example in terms of an epochal shift with which it would by now be impossible not to go along; and, on the other, the need to make this declaration once more so that it can be truly realised. If this rhetorical indecision is one of the most effective (although ultimately also debilitating) engines driving the jargon of crisis, it is not hard to locate its most notable precedent. Of course, this would be the case for Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’, in aphorism 125 of The Gay Science. The madman’s rant provides the most striking example of the intertwining of constative and performative utterance which has so

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powerfully defined the epochal analyses in the 20th-century debates. Undeniably, this was a potent and portentous development, but one which, as critics were quick to point out, also contains another element, that extends far beyond Nietzsche. This is the tendency on the part of such analyses to generate a range of prophecies that, in the most extreme versions, present the objective risk of transforming philosophical reflection into an entirely self-referential discussion. Together with the jargon of crisis, this tendency toward self-fulfilling prophecy is the other topos (or, better, the other vexata quaestio) of the contemporary debate. But this is not all. These two cultural features are so deeply entrenched that they have come to produce their own overturning. We can thus say that, through a vertiginous acceleration of the malady of history, the epitaphs of the 20th century have rapidly passed to a second-order obituary: from secularisation to theories of the post-secular, from the death of the subject to the retrieval of the self, from anti-metaphysics to a new metaphysics, from the end of modernity to the return of the modern.

The case for deconstruction Undoubtedly, deconstruction plays an important – perhaps crucial – role in this context. The more this role is evident, the closer we look at the ‘essential’ characteristic of Jacques Derrida’s approach: deconstruction is systematically a style of thinking rather than logically coordinated premises and conclusions. A series of important consequences follows from this initial determination. First and foremost is the impossibility of speaking of a truth of deconstruction, except in contradictory, and thus rhetorical, terms. Deconstruction cannot be ‘true’ in the way that a philosophical theory might be, because its validity depends entirely on its implementation as a ‘resource’ implicit in philosophical discourse. That is, deconstruction works if, and only if, a text yields to the deconstructive approach, while at the same time one could hardly imagine a text which resists or holds out against it. In other words, one could say that the deconstructive purpose is dissatisfying, spurious, or, even more, inconclusive, and yet it is difficult to find a way to decisively refute it. If this is the case, it is clear why deconstruction is one of the most powerful resources of the 20th-century debate, far beyond the boundaries of philosophy. The insistence on aspects of style is precisely the most evident factor (though not the only one) which has rendered deconstruction applicable over a

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wide range of fields, rather than encompassing a collection of shared assumptions.1 These two essential characteristics (i. e. an overriding emphasis on style, combined with the impossibility of determining its truth) legitimately situate deconstruction within the categories which we are examining here. Yet, its success as a critical instrument also provides a specific measure of the third element that should be highlighted, that is, the apparent redundancy that troubles the jargon of crisis. Seen in this light, the approach seems now to consider such categories as a kind of cultural mode that has become outdated, and as such, requires a definitive overhaul of its methodological features. A real conflict of interpretations appears to be at stake here, which paradoxically combines two different instances of self-fulfilling prophecy, with a peculiar effect of dissonance: along with positions which basically reaffirm the central premises of deconstruction, one also finds positions which significantly modify those premises, and other positions which reject them altogether. This highly contentious scenario seems inescapable if one attempts to enter into the recent discussions on Derrida’s legacy. While this approach might assume different forms, it will always draw more or less explicitly on presuppositions of this kind. For the particular case of deconstruction, the difficulties become complicated after the fact because of its characteristic inter-disciplinarity. But there is at least one point that seems perfectly simple and straightforward. If one looks at the diverse camps involved in those debates, it is not difficult to recognise (albeit in an approximate manner) one of the sources common to these criticisms. Although delivered differently, the critical reference is directly or indirectly made to the ethical and political irresponsibility of deconstruction.

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It is not among the aims of the present volume to draw a map of Derrida’s reception in the 20th century, neither from a disciplinary point of view, nor in geographical terms. In this regard, the classical point of reference (even if by now somewhat outdated) continues to be Schultz/Fried 1992. Nonetheless, it is useful to draw attention to texts which stand out for their relevance to the specific questions addressed in this book, leaving aside those of strictly philosophical import. With regard to literary studies, it is worth mentioning, among others: Norris 1982; Arac/Godzich/Martin 1983; Culler 1985; Royle 1995; Kronick 1999; Kates 2008. For political issues, useful references include: Beardsworth 1996; Norris 2000; Resta 2003; Regazzoni 2006; Cheah/Guerlac 2009. Finally, for law: Cornell/Rosenfeld/Carlson 1992; Andronico 2002; Goodrich/Hoffmann/ Rosenfeld/Vismann 2008; Legrand 2009.

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At least for philosophy, we are dealing with a reprimand that probably finds its most significant voice in Hilary Putnam. In fact, it is to Putnam and the reading of deconstruction in his book Renewing Philosophy (1992) that we owe perhaps the most unequivocal formulation of the problem. As is well known, the core of his analysis is the charge of a strong link between the Derridean problematisation of the notion of truth and the collapse of any objective criteria to which we might entrust the burden of a socio-political critique. According to Putnam, it is the threat that deconstruction poses, and the theoretical programmes which share its premises, that is, those which ‘“problematize” the notions of reason and truth themselves’, downgrading as ‘primarily repressive gestures’ the concepts of ‘“justification”, “good reason”, “warrant”, and the like’.2 This is the real core of his critique. Deconstruction is a sophisticated re-edition of the ancient forms of scepticism – and all the suspicions applicable to the latter are equally applicable to the former. Hence the thesis according to which the equivalence between truth and repression is, in short, a ‘dangerous view’, because it ‘provides aid and comfort for extremists […] of all kinds’.3 And, for Putnam, it is only a short step from this argument to its conclusions, conclusions which sound almost like a manifesto: ‘The philosophical irresponsibility of one decade can become the real-world political tragedy of a few decades later. And deconstruction without reconstruction is irresponsibility.’4

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Putnam 1992, 132. Putnam 1992, 132. Putnam 1992, 133 (my emphasis). Of course, along with Hilary Putnam, one cannot omit mentioning Jrgen Habermas and his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, especially the ‘Lecture VII, Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism’ (see in particular Habermas 1990b, 181 f.), as well as the ‘Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature’ (Habermas 1990b, 185 – 210). As is well known, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity opens an important page in the relationship between Habermas and Derrida. For a recapitulation of this debate, which lasted about two decades, the most useful reference is still undoubtedly Thomassen 2006. Nonetheless, what follows will clarify why a reference to Putnam (or better, the Putnam of Renewing Philosophy) might be more immediately functional for the argument here. And this is a major reason for the particular connotation that, in fact, Putnam gives to the concept of reconstruction in contrast to Habermas’s use of the term, which moves along a very different horizon.

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Beyond deconstruction Thus, in that text dating back to the beginning of the 1990s (and within a reflection that might have led to very different conclusions), Hilary Putnam explicitly indicates an impasse, while at the same time designating an exit from deconstruction. However, today, Putnam’s critical manifesto also offers another advantage, one which might be considered unintentional. His analysis furnishes us with a very realistic image of the redundancy of which we spoke, that is, of the reciprocity – through increasingly refined specularity – between two conflicting epochal predictions: on the one hand, the exhaustion (already accomplished) of logocentrism, and on the other hand, the end (imminently anticipated) of deconstruction. Yet, it is easy to see that this astounding effect is not only a matter regarding the reception of Derrida, but touches the development of deconstruction itself. In short, if Putnam’s charge deals mainly with the ethico-political dimension of deconstruction, we cannot ignore the centrality that such a dimension would have gradually assumed in the later phases of Derrida’s thought. Without going too much into controversial periodisations, undoubtedly the development of Derrida’s position emerges from the steady increase in the multiplicity of themes it encompasses, starting from a nucleus which remains relatively stable. And the ethico-political questions do establish part of this evolution.5 In this case, we can definitely affirm that it is the same Derridean thought amplifying the tension between opposite motives, which deal above all with the impact of philosophical discourse upon the public domain. In other words, Putnam’s critical manifesto seems to portend a tension within Derrida’s thought itself. For these and other reasons, it might be a valuable undertaking to decontextualise Putnam’s reading from the specific theoretical intentions that sustain it and to use his claim as a sort of heuristic tool to rethink the current debates on deconstruction. This kind of decontextualisation would intentionally leave aside Putnam’s philosophical outcomes in order to focus exclusively on the conceptual dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction. This shift is even more conceivable in the context of the years following the 1990s, during which Derrida’s appeal – along with the hermeneutic and postmodernist camps of contemporary thought – undeniably suffered a significant decline of influence. For the reasons cited above, this does not 5

Of course, this is the case for Derrida 1994c and Derrida 1997e, which are true detonators that animate the last ten years of his production.

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signal the assertion of any causal nexus between Putnam’s criticism and the reorientation of that discussion. On the contrary, it deals with a possible shift in the cultural milieu, whose consequences are diverse: they range from those which mainly deny the reality of a crisis in deconstruction, to those which, on the other hand, emphasise the scope of this crisis and suggest radical alternatives to the Derridean project. Obviously, between these two extremes, there is a great number of intermediate solutions, difficult to classify within historiographically definite categories, but deriving their specificity from the diverse disciplines in which they are situated. This hindrance is part and parcel of Derrida’s legacy today. The variety of contesting positions is so wide that it calls for a critical assessment to achieve a unified theoretical schema. The dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction might be a useful starting point to address this need. Of course, any enterprise of this kind must provisionally discount an initial difficulty, one that is perhaps unexpected. Each of the disciplinary fields influenced by the Derridean project is in fact cultivating specific antibodies in response to the shifting conditions of the ongoing debate. This has produced a secondary effect that can be measured on the macro-scale of its consequences. If the deconstructive koin generated a certain lexical homogeneity in fields of study connected to it, the current evolution seems to have provoked a rupture in this transdisciplinary common coin. This rupture has occurred to the degree in which the Derridean critique entered diverse fields with a determinate effect: the temporary encounter among different outlooks and methodologies (to which, in fact, Derrida had contributed) seems to belong to a recent past, but one that is now closed. The essays contained in this volume respond to this cluster of demands. The contributors belong to diverse fields of study and have very different backgrounds, including: philosophy, literary studies and law. These varied starting points allow the authors to remark upon deconstruction from their own perspective, thereby demonstrating the spreading influence of the deconstructive lexicon. However, this kind of testimony also allows each contributor to take a stand, either explicitly or implicitly, with respect to the history of Derrida’s reception, even in its present state of disintegration. Thus, the volume seeks to compose a kind of map, or, better still, a mosaic, of the current (post-)deconstructive Babel: essays that investigate specific aspects of Derrida’s reception have been placed alongside contributions that study the implications of deconstruction beyond its original scope. However, this is not in order to articulate a

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common theoretical position, as the reader will see. This aim has been set aside from the outset. Instead, the sheer variety of the chapters indicates a variety of perspectives that faithfully draws upon the actual complexity of the problem, whether this is taken to be historiographical or, more likely, theoretical. But this is not all: the methodological approaches adopted by the authors are also multiple. Thus, the section entitled ‘Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction: A Philosophical Approach’ brings together essays closely related to a specific philosophical tradition, as with the contribution of Emmanuel Cattin on Martin Heidegger, the essay by Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco on Derrida, and, lastly, Jean Robelin’s intervention on the notion of the subject as conceived in debates around deconstruction. Alongside these essays are contributions that cover questions transversally related to different ‘schools’. Advances in this category come about through Graziano Lingua’s study of the genealogy of reconstruction, Jean-Marc Ferry’s investigation of historical reason, and Evelyne Grossman’s work on creative delinking in literary and philosophical practice. This overlap of different disciplinary perspectives is still more evident in the second section, ‘The Limits of Deconstruction: The Case of Art and Literature’. Here we include essays dealing with the impact of deconstruction on issues in aesthetics along with others that examine its contribution to art theory and literary studies. These investigations range from Timo Kaitaro’s exploration of surrealism to Clive Cazeaux’s essay on contemporary art; from the contributions by Franca Bruera and Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso on the rewriting of myths to the interventions of Maria Spiridopoulou on the problem of translation and Antonella Emina on the construction of identity in post-colonial literature. The volume concludes with the section entitled ‘The Genealogy and Legacy of Deconstruction: The Politico-Social and Juridical Point of View’. It includes essays that take as their theme the politico-philosophical implications of deconstructive motifs, even outside a strictly Derridean context: the contribution by Jordi Maiso on Theodor W. Adorno, the essay by Herman W. Siemens on Chantal Mouffe, and the intervention by Flavia Monceri on the concept of identity in the social sciences. Finally, the relevant (and ambiguous) impact of deconstruction on legal theory is investigated in the essays by Alberto Andronico and Jnos Frivaldszky. As the reader will see, considerable space is given to contributions which deepen the (sometimes unexpected) connections between deconstruction and themes that are not directly implied in Derrida’s reflection. This choice is all the more crucial in light of the inevitable polemical im-

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plication that the decision to take stock of deconstruction might be taken to carry today. In fact, the charge of (ir)responsibility is based on the hypothesis that we have indicated above, that is, on the existence of a causal connection between two key notions implicit in Putnam’s critique: the abandonment of logocentrism and the extra-philosophical consequences of Derridean thought. Clearly we are dealing with a potent theoretical premise, but one that carries with it a series of presuppositions that cannot easily be dismissed. To what degree is it possible to eliminate the risk of producing a radical short-circuit between the two terms in question, thereby transforming a serious problem into mere rhetorical posturing? In other words, is Putnam’s (and many others’) equation between deconstruction and irresponsibility a faithful reading of Derrida? Or does it become an accusation that would charge the Derridean legacy with a complicity, the evidence for which cannot be found at the scene of the crime? To obviate this risk, the course chosen by this volume is to accept completely the argument that there has been a change of the cultural ambience compared with the years during which deconstruction justifiably celebrated its great early triumphs. However, at the same time, we will systematically avoid the mistake of once again falling into the typical schema of those predominant cultural trends which either uncritically support or merely seek to demolish an intellectual hegemony. To achieve this aim, the contributors in this volume – and this project as a whole – have chosen a particular method. They intentionally keep alive the polysemy embedded in the notion of reconstruction, inserting this complexity into formulations that differ greatly, sometimes taking a more polemical stance, sometimes more conciliatory toward the deconstructive tradition. Such an array of diverse contributions has one consequence which seems both relevant and desirable: that of deemphasising the contrast between deconstruction and reconstruction, thereby allowing the volume to escape any reductive conclusions. On the one side, this dualistic schema seems able to provide a paradigm that usefully clarifies some issues in the debate around deconstruction. Yet, on the other side it risks appearing unfaithful to current cultural debates as a whole, which are richer (and more ambiguous) than such a binary might suggest. The emphasis on the polysemic dimension of reconstruction is perhaps a salutary antidote to this outcome and allows for a better understanding of the questions that are on the table.

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In sum, to paraphrase Aristotle, one could say that today reconstruction is said in many ways. 6 In the contributions which follow, its prevailing connotation is undoubtedly a heightened sensibility to multiple frameworks of meaning, far from the deconstructionist mistrust toward categories traditionally employed for such aims. And yet it is impossible to return its semantic field to a single theoretical reference, because this would mean reducing its multiple inflections to a univocal genealogy. Conversely, it is necessary to recognise (to use another Derridean category) that reconstruction is a bastardised notion, a word with too many fathers, that tends to complicate itself as one gradually registers its extension, more or less explicitly, in the contemporary debate. It is a bastardised notion, but also, and perhaps for the same reason, it seems fruitful, judging by the yield of its outcomes. Translated by Wilson Kaiser

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As a matter of fact, the polysemy of the notion of reconstruction is clearly witnessed in the current debate, at least in the field of philosophy. Habermas’s and Putnam’s contribution has already been discussed here. Yet, one cannot omit recalling other authors who refer to the lexicon of reconstruction, from diverse and sometimes opposite perspectives. To mention but a few of them, it is the case with Gianni Vattimo, who emphasises the question in an essay, symptomatically entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Rationality’ (see Vattimo 1997). Not by chance, his purpose is to undertake a critical dialogue with Derrida, in order to advance philosophical hermeneutics’ claims on rationality. More recently, on a very different front, the reference returns in an admittedly realist and anti-hermeneutical perspective: see Ferraris 2010, the starting point of which is exactly Putnam’s reading discussed above. The question also returns to the spotlight in the current Frankfurt School debate, where the notion of reconstruction becomes the core of an entire purpose (a sort of philosophical manifesto) focusing its role in public discourse. This is typically the case for Jean-Marc Ferry. Among his writings, the most relevant in this sense are Ferry 1991b; Ferry 1996; Ferry 2004. For further references to Ferry’s reconstructive purpose, see also Lingua 2012.

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Acknowledgments This volume had its origin in a research project (EW09-217: Public Reason between Deconstruction and Reconstruction) financed by the European Science Foundation, the Centro Studi sul Pensiero Contemporaneo (Italy), and the Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy). The results gathered in these pages are indebted to their generous support. The activities connected to the research and the publication of this book would not have come to fruition without the contributions of Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso and Shelley Campbell. The project also owed much to discussions with Graziano Lingua and debates with Franca Bruera, Antonella Emina, Paolo Heritier, Federico Vercellone. The development of specific aspects of the volume was greatly enriched by the advice and suggestions of Gaetano Chiurazzi, Sebastian Hsch, Dan Lazea, Federico Luisetti, Christopher Norris, and Teresa OÇate y Zuba.

Section I Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction: A Philosophical Approach

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen 1 Emmanuel Cattin Let us begin with a few German words, a verb and its complements, which, during the 1960s, gave to the thinker who had thoughtfully meditated and chosen them the direction of a task, the indication of an increasingly apparent necessity. Whether a twilight task or a necessity, they are from a time when, maybe imperceptibly, light was changing, though unbeknownst to those already engulfed in the shift. In the Dmmerung that had enveloped those times, these words indicated the task of a departure, the need to move on. Today we can read these difficult words, which above all we should never neutralise, at the end of the ‘Zeit und Sein’ lecture, delivered by Heidegger on January 31, 1962 at Freiburg-im-Brisgau, and collected in 1969 in Zur Sache des Denkens. The verb by that point had become the most decisive and the most important in his thought. The verb was: lassen. A prefix was added, ber: berlassen. But in this case, its complements in the passage rendered the verb even more difficult to understand. The first of these complements was: die Metaphysik. The second one, no less enigmatic, was simply: sich selbst. The passage in question reads: ‘Therefore, our task is to leave all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.’2 For those who are wondering what the task of thought is today (if, indeed, such a task remains), or in other words which necessity grips us, these words with their enigmatic simplicity might once more transmit the essential orientation of something unfinished. It is easy to see that such an unfinished task becomes apparent only through leaving all we have accomplished up to the present, even if we do not measure the meaning or understand the sacrifice that such an abandonment would require. But concerning the question that we can make here our own, of ‘destruction’ or ‘deconstruction’, it might be today radically overcome. With the rising of 1 2

I am grateful to Tom Jones, who helped me to translate the original French version of the present text. This essay will appear in my forthcoming book, Cattin 2012. ‘Darum gilt es, vom berwinden abzulassen und die Metaphysik sich selbst zu berlassen.’ Heidegger 1993, 25.

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this final necessity, it is as though the question revealed itself, through such an overcoming, already inaccessible to us. Whether we accepted it or not, we were somehow apart from every ‘construction’ or ‘deconstruction’ and all they might still reach, as though ‘deconstruction’ were already no more commensurable with this epoch. But we are moving too quickly. Heidegger above all has not only meditated the meaning of Bauen and Abbauen. For him the latter, Abbauen, was primarily a path, before he returned to the former, Bauen, in order to think it and, together with it, the process by which its essential meaning was forgotten. In a difficult conjunction, this forgetting joined with the absence of thought which our present illustrates at every turn. Let us begin by recalling what kind of path ‘destruction’ and ‘deconstruction’ first were. In the unfinished book to which the 1962 lecture relates, Destruktion was a title of a task stemming from the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein, that is, from a mode of being pertaining to Dasein. Such a mode of being turns Dasein toward what is called ‘tradition’. Tradition does not belong to the past or rather the past as tradition does not follow behind, but precedes Dasein, geht ihm je schon vorweg. 3 Tradition is the way which opens up at every moment before us, and which Dasein follows. It precedes us, pushes itself further than us. But if tradition itself can be hidden, and therefore is calling for a discovery (Entdeckung), however, insofar as it is dominant, it is also always covering and hiding. It covers, not what it would block in its dominant, oppressive transmission, but rather what would be historically defeated and would then implore from the past to be saved (Walter Benjamin was the thinker of such an imploring call emanating out toward us from an unresolved past, which aims at us because of its distress). No, but it covers precisely what it transmits. In its transmission tradition distances itself from the necessity of returning to its inaugural meaning, to its provenance, to its rising. Tradition in its own essence is uprooting. 4 Forgetting is not incidental in tradition, it belongs to it essentially: transmission means covering. In the language of Sein und Zeit, tradition is a feature of the decay (Verfallen) of Dasein. From this perspective the meaning and the significance of Destruktion as a task perhaps become clearer. Destruktion is oriented toward the ‘originary experiences’ (auf die ursprnglichen Erfahrungen).5 It is the destruction of tradition, or rather of the ‘back3 4 5

Heidegger 1984, §6, 20. ‘Die Tradition entwurzelt die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins.’ Heidegger 1984, 21. Heidegger 1984, 22.

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ground transmitted by tradition’ (des berlieferten Bestandes). In 1927, Bestand certainly does not yet mean the being which is exclusively dominated by the phenomenon of enframing (Gestell), but it already points out the process by which the initial meaning is obscured through its transmission. However, Heidegger first of all will part from this unilaterally negative meaning of ‘destructive’ in order to gain the range of significance, necessarily ambiguous, of an insight that will attempt ‘to trace’, ‘to delimit’, ‘to measure’, abstecken, tradition by marking ‘its positive possibilities’, that is, ‘its limits’. The ‘destructive’ insight establishes a limit in a past that, while it was once a source, now appears as a resource. Heidegger does not claim that destruction is without negation. But the negative destruction is not carried out upon the past. Rather, it is upon the present that destruction performs the work of negation that its name involves. In other words, destruction is negative at one remove, obliquely, destroying the present which covers the originally directive experiences of the past. It is not a matter of having done with the past once and for all. Instead, the negation will be accomplished quietly upon the present: ‘Die Destruktion will aber nicht die Vergangenheit in Nichtigkeit begraben, sie hat positive Absicht; ihre negative Funktion bleibt unausdrcklich und indirekt.’6 Though quietly negative, destruction will be no less radical and sudden, for its vocation is the manifestation of the necessity (Unumgnglichkeit) of a task, our task in 1927, namely the ‘repetition’ of the question about the meaning of Being.7 For Heidegger destruction was essentially the clearing of a place or a field: ein Feld kontrollierbarer Auseinandersetzungen, a field of controllable explanations.8 But was this field truly the field of control? Even if it was a matter of repeating originary experiences and retrieving the phenomenon, as emphasised in §7 when it clarified the rigour and necessity of the phenomenological way, in 1927 it was as yet unforeseen what sort of opening (Erschließung) might occur. Destruction took its necessity from the question to come, not the opposite, and the question itself, still unapparent, remained entirely uncontrollable. Destruction is not the task itself, but the path, the unique one, even if it is not the path in isolation, leading to the point at which it begins to open up. It is only at this moment that it makes itself a task. If Heidegger wrote Destruktion here, elsewhere he had chosen Abbau, or even used both words indifferently, to name the 6 7 8

Heidegger 1984, 23. Heidegger 1984, 26. Heidegger 1984, 27.

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task, in an almost military tone, to ‘progress’ (vordringen) ‘by way of a deconstructive return [im abbauenden Rckgang] toward the original motive sources of the explication’ which today is dominant and covering.9 But is all this now not too far, maybe even out of reach? If Heideggerian phenomenology as early as the 1920s could already think of itself as the necessity of a construction which required destruction,10 the deconstructive return both traversing and destroying tradition (or rather the present in which the covering is accomplished) also leads Heidegger much further to (or at least will not divert him from) the meditation upon Bauen in its strange proximity to Denken, at the point where they become two modes of Wohnen. This constellation radically changed when, on August 6, 1951, Heidegger delivered in Darmstadt the lecture ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, and such a leap would necessarily be disorienting. There, the question concerned every kind of Bauen, and not only the task of thought. However, that which was already referred to as ‘forgetting’ in 1927, though measured neither in its profundity nor in its consequences, nonetheless continued to appear under this name. After the war, every form of Bauen together with Denken engulfed by it, appears in front of us, as if they issue from the same workshop (Werkstatt) as two traits of Wohnen, which itself is a trait, and even the Grundzug of the being of mortals insofar as they are mortals.11 Let us follow the necessary disorienting effect of this new constellation, before we move on to consider Lassen. At the Darmstadt lecture, printed in the 1954 book just after the broadcast lecture Was heißt Denken (Munich, 1952) and before the lecture Das Ding (Munich, 1950, the second version of the Bremen lecture in 1949), Heidegger shows from language itself, the silence of the language that does not speak, das Schweigen (for language is essentially silent in its Sprechen), or its not yet meditated secret, in which language itself withdraws its own originary dimension,12 how Bauen belongs to Wohnen. Here Bauen is a trait of habitation, is itself Wohnen, and Bauen is the meaning of being mortal as earthbound. ‘We are insofar 9 Heidegger 2007, 168. 10 Destruction as deconstruction, Abbau, was in 1927 implicated in the ‘construction’ (Konstruktion), in which Heidegger aimed to reduce the being to Being, insofar as this reduction was not and could not be exclusively negative, but envisioned Being from the already given project of the being. See Heidegger 1989, 29 – 30. 11 Heidegger 1959, 162. 12 Exactly: ‘das Ursprngliche dieser Bedeutungen’. And further: ‘Die Sprache entzieht dem Menschen ihr einfaches und hohes Sprechen.’ Heidegger 1959, 148.

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as we dwell’, Heidegger writes.13 Or we might say: insofar as we build. For such a being-dwelling, such a being-mortal – nothing else is in question but the meaning of their being – is deployed by Heidegger in accordance with the dimensions of Geviert. Its ‘fundamental trait’ appears as Schonen, ‘to treat gently’, fulfilled in the simplicity of the Aufenthalt bei den Dingen. This stay is itself a Lassen, a letting-things-be-themselves. Thus the accurate double sense of Bauen, as Pflegen and as Errichten, will appear.14 But we have forgotten what language says by silence, what it withdraws, for example, forgetting the meaning of being-mortal, of dwelling, and through it of taking care as well as of building, of things themselves. Now, if we have lost the essential being of Bauen, this forgetting is even more profound than what could be historically understood and was already overwhelmingly apparent by 1951. This distress is older and more radical than what we witnessed in die Weltkriege und die Zerstçrungen, which nonetheless belongs to this distress, the distress, die Not, which has yet to be meditated. In the 1951 lecture, what is Bauen, the necessity of which surrounds and situates mortals? What is the ‘building’ and the ‘dwelling’ to which it belongs and the loss of which means distress? What is Bauen, in this Abendland that earth has now entirely become, where mortals stay or can no longer stay, either East or West? Is the secret and far-off, perhaps even ungraspable kinship between the deconstructive return into tradition and the distress that calls us, provided it is gathered in a Bedenken, such a distress that we can name it Heimatlosigkeit, even if we cannot think it yet, and is such a call to a Bauen, which would be aus dem Wohnen and fr das Wohnen,15 not the same as the one which the 1951 lecture made out between Bauen and Denken? Denken stood in the proximity of Bauen, both of them referring to the same focal ‘dwelling’. And, though it is seen from the end, was not deconstruction already, even if the access to it is difficult, when it was in the service of the question of Being and the phenomenological repetition of an originary experience, on the way (indivisibly positive and negative) to a Wohnen, at least to a meaning of Being, which indeed understood itself differently, but still in the Dasein as its most proper trait? But the 13 ‘[…] als die Wohnenden sind’. Heidegger 1959, 149. 14 Heidegger 1959, 152. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm translated immediately colere, aedificare. They later established themselves the connection with Ich bin from sein, as with wohnen. 15 Heidegger 1959, 162.

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Rckgang, the ‘return’, as it becomes clearer, has to radicalise in departure. Deconstruction might still remain under the sign of the glance back (zurck), and even of a coming and going through tradition, until it reached what was called das Ursprngliche. However, such a return to the Greek experience of the question was itself no simple matter, but took its necessity from the question to come which we must find a way to ask. But then should it not be still possible to be, to become Greek? Were we not then these Greeks who had in front of them the task (not a simple one) of becoming and becoming over again Greek? We were not yet those who have now in front of them the attempt at being no more Greek. There was no Heideggerian ‘reconstruction’, stemming from a Destruktion, but the final radicality of this abandonment of metaphysics, the irreversible nature of such a Lassen (even though it might be accessible but only makes itself available to us for the first time through a backward glance), does not leave us today with any possibility of remaining the same, of becoming the same. We must now consider the radicality of such a Lassen, of such an berlassen. What does it mean to speak of ‘leaving’ or ‘abandoning metaphysics’? This is the most difficult and the furthest point from any deconstruction and any reconstruction, this last one inaccessible, if at least the prefix should indicate the restoration of that which had been irreversibly undermined and ruined – such a reconstruction was never and never will be within our power – though it is again for us a matter of Bauen and Denken. Let us now take a closer look at the end of the 1962 lecture. Lassen as a task is not destined merely to open a new path. This glance into what is becoming will not delineate the contours of a new ‘epoch’, nor the strange, uncomfortable no-man’s land that separated epochs into a singular ‘history’. We do not live anything ‘new’ in that sense. Reiner Schrmann with his pellucid insight never ceased to insist on it: if the present carries within itself the mark of an end, it is the absolutely final end of ‘epochal figures of Being’, as the Protokoll which followed ‘Zeit und Sein’ recorded it.16 We are standing in an interval, zwischen, but that which finishes and that which begins, whose beginning announces itself with signs that are still far away, do not belong to the same history, if we have to understand in history the range of every epochal economy to a singular unfolding, changing, turning constellation. The two sides of the Zwischen where we are standing do not go together, and in this measure they do not join in a singular ‘history’. The name 16 Heidegger 1993, 56. See Schrmann 1986; Schrmann 2003.

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that Heidegger gave to such a Zwischen is Ge-stell. As an enframing which marks times in its double face, the Ge-stell requires a double glance: Dieses, the Protokoll reads, ist gleichsam eine Zwischenstation, bietet einen doppelten Anblick, ist – so kçnnte man sagen – ein Januskopf. 17 That which is coming remains incalculable, the Incalculable itself. But the Ge-stell is the accomplishment of that which comes to an end, its heightened intensification, such is its first face: Es kann nmlich noch gleichsam als eine Fortfhrung des Willens zum Willen, mithin als eine ußerste Ausprgung des Seins verstanden werden. In this measure, we are still standing under the sign of Being, under its mark: that is, in the field of philosophy itself, belonging to it, to that which it thought, or under the will that wills nothing other than itself. As a ‘prolongation’ of the will which wills itself, the epoch is a terminal one, but such an endpoint is also ‘station’ that endures. The enframing in this sense, in its fury and its ‘ravages’, as Schrmann once translated Entrckungen,18 already contains the immobility of this endpoint. But this endpoint is itself ambiguous. The more this endpoint’s exclusive hold on being is reinforced, the more its darkening embraces and removes any other possibility of unveiling, as the unique masked face of !k^heia, the more fate is fulfilled – the more another possibility begins, or the closer it comes to such a beginning. This other Anblick can just be glimpsed: Zugleich ist es (das Ge-stell) aber eine Vorform des Ereignisses selbst. 19 According to this other measure, which is so difficult to glimpse, we stand already far off from this endpoint, but we did not leave it completely. This distance can just be indicated, and its foreshadowing and signs remain enigmatic. Its name itself, Ereignis, was not chosen without hesitation (Besinnen or Bedenken now always means: Zçgern,20 and it is up to us now to ‘hesitate’, the most difficult is not to forego such a hesitation). The ‘Zeit und Sein’ lecture provided at least an indication of that which should not be thought by the name of Ereignis. 21 The end of the epochal dimension was above all the end of the faces or names of Sein: Ereignis is not a new name for Sein. ûEpow^, Heidegger 17 Heidegger 1993, 57. 18 Schrmann 2003, 588. But the ‘ravages’ or ‘clearing out’ of the Beitrge have a different meaning here. They are to be thought from the instant, from the temporalisation and the ‘No’ which Heidegger sought to rejoin through them. In Gestell death with all its ‘ravages’ is essentially inaccessible, withdrawing itself as death. 19 Heidegger 1993, 57. 20 Heidegger 1959, 113. 21 Heidegger 1959, 21.

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noted in the course of the lecture, means: an sich halten. Through their coherence, the ‘epochs’ form at every instance a halt in what is a history only insofar as it is a fate which is sent to us, Heidegger redirects the Geschichte to what has to be called more properly Geschick. 22 Such a redirection is still, in 1962, a ‘destruction’ or ‘deconstruction’. This latter is indeed the only path. ‘History’ effectively remains in 1962, a continual ‘covering’, Verdeckungen, and nothing is achieved in history but the same berdecken. That which is covered, mehr und mehr, is the initial, as fate and sending, Schickung: die anfngliche Schickung von Sein als Anwesenheit. We thereby discover a reference back to our original question. The only path through all that covers the beginning is still a path of deconstruction, Abbau, and Heidegger translates it once more: dies meint die ‘Destruktion’, a translation where the negative is no longer nuanced in any way, except perhaps by the quotation marks between which Heidegger puts the word. What, then, is the scope of such a destruction? Destruction is that which allows for an insight, an ‘insight into’ that which advances upon us, but only advances insofar as destruction will have accomplished such a letting-come, a letting-appear of that which is fate (Geschick). ‘Destruction’ is nothing less than destruction of history (Geschichte), and if necessary it will also be the destroyer of the historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein: if necessary, that is, if the 1927 book could not be read from the end, destruction will be fulfilled over Sein und Zeit itself. But, in 1962, it remains the ‘only possible path’, der einzig mçgliche Weg. 23 Destruction is the path which turns fate into sending, Geschichte into Geschick, when this one is thought from the Es gibt, Es gibt Sein. In this manner, to answer our initial difficulty, destruction is not surpassed, but remains the unique exit from history, perhaps even from the end of history, the final site where we stand. But as regards berwinden and berlassen, do they still belong to destruction? And what does remain in Denken from Bauen? Now let us turn to the second face of Ge-stell. Two traits – Zug was the name for what was until now a category of Sein – can be discerned at the end of the 1962 lecture, traits that we must keep in mind to begin to grasp the meaning of berlassen. The meditation about Zeit and Sein shows in Ereignis a ‘proper’, following which it shelters in its depths, that is, its most proper, a ‘No’, the refusal or the reserve according to which it does not move forward itself, in its heart, in !k^heia. In other 22 Heidegger 1959, 9. 23 Heidegger 1959, 9.

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words, as Reiner Schrmann had understood it since the Beitrge of the 1930s, in order to elect and to elevate its duality to the level of the trait of the tragic essence of mortality, indicating Being turned against itself: no Ereignis without Enteignis. Zum Ereignis als solchem gehçrt die Enteignis. 24 Ereignis does not give itself, it is rather that which withdraws itself. Such a refusal since the Beitrge has its proper name: der Tod, which each time bears witness. Every ‘giving’, every ‘There is’, Es gibt, shelters a retreat or a refusal, a ‘No’, or shelters itself, and its innermost heart, in this negation. Such a ‘No’ is ‘guarding’, ‘preserving’, ‘protecting’: Bewahren. Death appears as a secret which is kept closed. The other trait, the other ‘proper’ of Ereignen is a second Gehçren, a second belonging. It appears in Ereignis as man belongs to it, or rather: belongs in it. But what is exactly shown here by Heidegger? The most decisive is certainly this in: in das Ereignis. 25 In virtue of this belonging, of this ‘engagement’ within Ereignis – durch sie (die Vereignung) ist der Mensch in das Ereignis eingelassen – through which man receives the being-man, his most intimate trait, in other words, his sense of being and sense in Being (als den, der Sein vernimmt), ‘man’ is no longer he who can see Ereignis, nor is he capable either of considering or representing it. ‘We’ cannot think Ereignis metaphysically or philosophically, ‘we’ cannot think Ereignis in Greek. When such belonging begins to open up, that which deployed itself until now as Vorstellen, Begrnden, and even: das nur aussagende Sagen, is no more accessible.26 We can no longer speak the same language; we can no longer speak Greek. ‘We’ can no longer be or even become Greek.27 Our language could never be able to say Ereignis, to say what it is, as we cannot put it in front of us, ein Gegenber, nor even around us, as ‘that which includes everything’ (noch als das alles Umfassende). The engagement within Ereignis renders metaphysics impracticable, or rather, the path of metaphysical experiences, only today, the impracticable. We cannot say what Ereignis is or that ‘there is’ Ereignis, nor even that Ereignis ‘is’. It would be, as Heidegger 24 Heidegger 1959, 24 25 Heidegger 1959, 23. I am grateful to Didier Franck and Alexandre Lowit for having indicated the significance of this point. 26 Heidegger 1959, 24. 27 One of the most important and difficult texts on this point is the Gesprch (see Heidegger 1959, 127), in which our ‘task’ is laconically described thus: das griechisch Gedachte noch griechischer zu denken. Our insight remains Greek, will even have to become ‘more Greek’, considering more originally what was thought in Greek, but it perceives that which ‘is, nevertheless, no more Greek, never more Greek’.

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writes with great precision in the metaphor, gleich als wollten wir den Quell aus dem Strom herleiten. 28 Ereignis is the source to which language cannot return without ceasing to be the language of the river which comes from it, the language of Being, that is, Greek language. Such is the attempt of Unterwegs zur Sprache in 1959. Through the destruction of the Greek language, going beyond k|cor , the task is to listen to the source, and thus, in the silence of Sprache – for example in the strange reduplication, in k|cor , of the subject by its verb, when the verb becomes its own subject (das Ereignis ereignet, das Ding dingt, die Welt weltet) – to go no further than the same (vom Selben her auf das Selbe zu das Selbe, as ‘Zeit und Sein’ reads). Bedenken or Besinnen in this sense can be characterised as an attempt to think the Same, and its hesitation does not proceed without the radically disconcerting slowness of thought. Responding over the years to the 1927 book, the insight into Ereignis, the non-Greek insight (or is it still Greek?), which will speak or at least seek to understand a language which is no longer Greek, or says itself that which is no more Greek, will thus lead up to such a Lassen, an Ablassen and an berlassen. What does it mean, then, to leave the overcoming itself ? It is possible to translate it exactly, however unfathomable it sounds: to think Sein aus dem Ereignis; or: ohne Rcksicht auf die Beziehung des Seins zum Seienden; or simply, as Heidegger immediatly clarifies: Sein ohne das Seiende denken. To think ‘Being’ (Sein) beyond ontological difference itself, without a backward glance, without the least regard for being (das Seiende), and it means: for metaphysics, which takes its law from being, ohne Rcksicht auf die Metaphysik. 29 This means (since it is necessary to bring matters to this point): thinking Being in a way other than philosophically, or without regard for philosophy. Thus it is no longer a matter of overcoming. In this sense, the difference between berwinden and berlassen is significant. In the overcoming or surpassing, the Rcksicht toward metaphysics still dominates. As long as such an insight is turned backward, it can never overcome without regarding what it passes. But, leaving is an entirely different departure. To leave is already entering into the separation, a separation that does not look backward, a departure with no return and no glance back. But it is possible that, with that kind of departure, ‘deconstruction’ or ‘destruction’ have themselves been left. Destruction perhaps has not finished with the Rcksicht, giving all its prodigal regard to that which it destroys. Maybe it is itself the infinite leave-taking 28 Heidegger 1993, 24. 29 Heidegger 1993, 25.

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of a tradition which, through its consideration, it still regards. How are we therefore to understand that destruction remains, perhaps, ‘the unique path’? It is possible that this path, very much ours and maybe even the only one that opens before us, leads us to a domain in which it ceases to be a path. The path of Destruktion opens up access to a domain in which it is no longer a resource. At that point, we truly have an abandonment. But to abandon, to leave metaphysics, does not mean only a turning away, a having-done-with and, as though nothing happened, a new beginning, as though we were able to begin again. Die Metaphysik sich selbst zu berlassen is certainly and irreversibly to abandon philosophy, but also to put and to give philosophy to itself, aus dem Ereignis, that is, from a place and a regard that no longer belong to it, and which are no longer Greek (or from a Greek insight from a non-Greek place), but where philosophy belonged from the beginning without ever being able to think it. Within Ereignis another perspective appears, one which does not or will not refer to metaphysics, nor consider anything other than giving it to itself from a wider domain. Es gilt, Heidegger writes: ‘It is worth.’ But immediately the necessity of an berwindung which remains our task, is consigned. This berwindung will ‘concern’ (angehen) the Denken engaged in Ereignis, the Sagen which will ‘say’ the Ereignis, aus ihm her auf Es zu. 30 The overcoming to be accomplished is that of language, within language, which will restore its secret, although certainly not with the intention of breaking it, but rather by allowing it to establish its proper silence, the pure Schweigen that abides in all Sprechen. It is only in this place, the place of language, that the preserved sense of Bauen will appear, beyond Destruktion, the only Bauen which remains within our scope, and maybe even as a ‘task’, if the word still retains its meaning outside the domain of will. The lecture ‘Der Satz der Identitt’, which took place June 27, 1957 at Freiburg-im-Breisgau,31 will once more situate Denken, when the question is about Ereignis, under the sign of Bauen, in an entirely other meaning than the 1927 Konstruktion. What happened in the 1957 lecture? The Ge-stell led Heidegger to meditate the proper, and the Ereignis as Vereignen (the appropriation of the man to Being) and Zueignen (the appropriation of Being addressed to, turned toward the essence of man). Heidegger designates the absolutely unique character of Ereignis. This name takes on the role of ‘speaking 30 Heidegger 1993, 25. 31 Heidegger 2006, 46. I am grateful to Didier Franck for having referred me to this fundamental passage.

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as a leading word in the service of thought’.32 As Heidegger indicates, ‘translating’ or ‘transposing’ it, bersetzen, is as impossible as translating the Greek k|cor or the Chinese Tao. Ge-stell only presents itself as a ‘prelude’ (Vorspiel) to Ereignis as it is thought as Er-eignis, thought from this proper and this appropriation of the one to the other. But the ‘prelude’ might already bring us to the heart of our task, which we received at the same time, or rather to the heart of that which presents itself as a possibility of a ‘turning’ or a ‘torsion’, which now in Heidegger’s language is no longer berwindung, but Verwindung. Turning, or torsion, or shifting from the control of enframing, which comes aus dem Ereignis in dieses. 33 Then a new domain, Bereich, opens, or might open, or will open. In marks the entry into a new domain. But what does ‘domain’ mean here? What are its traits? This is the most difficult point. Heidegger’s marginal notes constantly attempt to say it in another way. But here also begins the task of a new Bauen. Such a domain is der in sich schwingende Bereich, the domain oscillating in itself. One note gives an indication: schwingen und schweben – noch ungemß. This domain is strange, oscillating or floating, it does not open anywhere as though it were waiting for us, but rather it ceaselessly opens and recloses. It does not open without the closure of the domain of metaphysics, so that ‘Being’ and ‘man’ in this domain ‘lose’ the delimitations that metaphysics established for them. How is such a loss, such a bareness accomplished? To lose, here, is to quit, to leave metaphysics each time toward a new sense of ‘Being’ and ‘man’, if these names can still speak from their deep silence. Free from metaphysics, ‘Being’ and ‘man’ take on another aspect in this domain. Now, this domain still means in 1957 ‘to build’ or ‘to construct’ (Bauen): am Bau dieses in sich schwingenden Bereiches bauen. 34 What does it mean, Bauen, or am Bau bauen, ‘to work at building’ the domain? ‘Building’ is no longer metaphysical, it can no longer receive its meaning from any presupposed ‘foundation’. Without doubt, this oscillation or floating is the sign of the new fragility of the domain, which is no longer established on a secure basis. ‘To build’ in that last sense is now out of our reach. Heidegger describes the Bauen which appears for the first time, the Bauen of the oscillating, floating domain: Das Bauzeug zu diesem in sich schwebenden Bau empfngt das Denken aus der Sprache. 35 Language is the 32 33 34 35

Heidegger Heidegger Heidegger Heidegger

2006, 2006, 2006, 2006,

45. 46. 46. 46 – 47.

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source and provides what will make building possible, while thought will trust its silence to receive it from language. From now, building will begin with language and deploy itself within language. But in what sense is language a source? Heidegger is going to provide a clarification: ‘For language is the most delicate oscillation, but also the most fragile, retaining everything in the floating building of Ereignis.’36 Nothing refers such a construction to what it was under metaphysics. Nothing continues to tie it to what was the ‘philosophical’ building, except perhaps destruction, the unique path that will have led to it without itself inaugurating the new domain, leading to something beyond itself. Such a Bauen, still so indefinite, so fragile, just like language in its own silence, joins the Wohnen. ‘Building’ or ‘working to build’ is already an ‘inhabiting’ within language for a man who no longer belongs to metaphysics, who is no longer Greek, or perhaps who remains Greek in a ‘no more’, ‘never more’ Greek domain: ‘To the degree that our essence is appropriated in language, we inhabit Ereignis.’ But have we already entered this floating domain? Are we already standing in this oscillating domain? Yes, undoubtedly we are, but the question remains: who is this ‘we’, who is standing there, and in what mode exactly, Greek or non-Greek? Are we already, and in what sense, the ‘inhabitants’? Does the 1957 question remain in suspense? Are we already, are we still in a position to perceive the floating domain? And are we still able to attend to the vibration, the oscillation of language? Has the path toward the floating domain already opened to us?

36 ‘Denn die Sprache ist die zarteste, aber auch die anflligste, alles verhaltende Schwingung im schwebenden Bau des Ereignisses.’ Heidegger 2006, 47.

Waiting: The Impossible Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco ‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice. ‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’ Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying’, she said, ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice’, said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ (Lewis Carroll, Through the LookingGlass, chap. V) Quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena? (Psalm 136) 1±m lμ 5kpgtai !m´kpistom oj 1neuq¶sei, !meneqe¼mgtom 1¹m ja· %poqom.

(Heraclitus, DK B 18)

Let us suppose, for a moment, something impossible: that deconstruction ‘is’ (in a fixed and unmovable way) something. Were that the case, and were we forced to risk and put forward something like a common feature, a style or a radical ‘essence’ of the deconstructive practice, we should say this, in my opinion: that deconstruction is, above all, a purposeful bet on impossibility. However, that this same bet acknowledges at the same time the urgency and even the need to enable these same things declared unfeasible, and as we will see, is not the other face of a complex movement that successfully avoids any over-simplification. The goal of this article is to back up and develop this double assertion. Let us start with impossibility. Throughout history at any point in time in one way or another, deconstruction has been using its critical scal-

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pel on many of the concepts that philosophy has regarded as fundamental. A constant result of its analysis has been to ascertain, in its opinion without doubt, that these concepts are a group of fictions; fictions supposedly rooted in conditions of possibility that, as soon as they are set, become incapable of achieving the perfection implicit in their definitions. To be sure, deconstruction has not critically tested each and every intellectual construct offered by philosophy. Nevertheless, the power of its tools is so great, and its work so meticulous (or apparently monotonous), that in principle it could well be said that these operations of ‘reduction to impossibility’ have no limit; they can be regarded as extending to every concept of the tradition, whether it is put to the test or not. As it is known for deconstruction, a list of such concepts rightfully and strictly would be endless. Since I do not have enough scope for such a disproportionate task, I will just cite, without limitation, some – if few – significant examples of this theorem. First example, first foray: it is asserted that philosophy has always looked at an ideal like justice. Wishes so praiseworthy, such as achieving a correct economic and social order, drawing up an adequate penal code, attaining a serene conscience – both personal and collective – when analysing one’s own actions, depend upon a full definition and organisation of the concept of justice. Deconstruction does not dream of discussing the importance of such a project, there is absolutely no doubt about that. Neither is deconstruction shy when it comes to assert the urgent need for defending, promoting, or making demands upon that project, or actively fighting for its success. And the fact that it is interested in justice is not at all casual: when fighting for justice, deconstruction fights for itself; because justice and deconstruction are in fact the same, as Derrida states.1 However, this same deconstruction asserts that it can prove justice as such, is impossible. As any other ideal, it is impossible because in order to materialise perfectly, exactly and absolutely, it needs to conform to rules that are equally and simultaneously valid, but contradictory in their requirements. They are contradictory because justice orders: (a) to take into account only the particular case, the specific person being judged; but also requires that the decision be fair; and, (b) that the said decision conforms to what is envisaged in a previous, universal, abstract, and homogenous law.2 No decision tensely suspended as it is between this double bind that at the same time creates and breaks it, 1 2

Derrida 1994a, 35. Derrida 1994a, 51.

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could then be said to be fully, wholly, presentably fair: because either it does not conform to a previous rule (and then it is a decision, yes, but not a fair decision); or, it conforms to the rule (and then it is fair, yes, but not properly a decision). A fair decision, therefore, will only be a decision that obeying a rule retains in itself the memory of an always previous injustice, that its necessarily violent foundation is not only the first rule, but also the decision – incalculable – of making a decision. It will be said that this analysis deconstructs any wish that justice, as such, ever becomes reality. And, certainly, it is so. Except that, if it is so, it is – as we have seen and as Derrida warns – because deconstruction operates from the irreducible basis of an ‘idea of justice’ that in its infinity, alien to any rule, calculation or domination (by virtue, let us say, of its madness) puts forward a requirement so unavoidable, so impossible to postpone, as it acknowledges our infinite duty, our infinite responsibility toward the other.3 We will come back to that. Second analysis, second foray: throughout its history (a history that, for the sake of convenience, can be regarded as spanning ‘from Plato to Heidegger’), philosophy has kept the closest bonds of familiarity with the idea, the problem, the experience of death. Since Phaedo assigned as the main goal of philosophy to deal with death, both philosophy and death walk together along a road whose last and most resounding stretch perhaps has been, so far, to regard death as the ‘ownmost’ possibility (or can-be) of the Dasein (Heidegger 1984, §§50 – 53). Now, precisely in the work of the Heideggerian formulae – wherein a whole tradition of reflection appears to culminate – Derrida believes he listens to the echo of an internal implosion that shakes the foundations, maybe from the beginning, of that thousand-year-old conceptual structure. Because Heidegger, for whom possibility is determined (§50) by the pure and simple impossibility of the Dasein, would be the first to proclaim that with this risky and ambiguous formulation any progress in understanding that possibility will increase the freedom of insight into that same possibility, now understood as impossibility, that is: as the very impossibility of existence in general (§53). Considered as such, death, possibility of the impossible, appears then as an exemplary manifestation of a strange possibility/impossibility ‘logic’ that allows the possible to appear as impossible. And that this analysis – not many analyses are so violent – leads purposefully to consider whether death so understood constitutes 3

Derrida 1994a, 55.

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a figure which can well be a substitute, by metonymy, for all that possibility which, if exists, can only be conceived as being impossible.4 Third analysis, third foray: philosophy, together with the ‘common sense’ that usually supports it, has always accepted the necessary possibility of translating between languages: is there not – it argues – an omnipresent separation between the ‘content’ of a text, its ‘meaning’, and the coded signifiers that transmit it? Now, as the biblical story of Babel shows (or the Derridean lecture of the same), the essential translatability of every language, in fact of every signification event, bars, forbids through itself, from the very beginning, the rational dream of achieving a perfect, final version, of the original text, which closes forever its continuous opening to other translations, all of which are imperfect.5 Let us go on (it will be our fourth example). It is said that philosophy has come into the world as a political theory. Furthermore: it is said (by a philosopher like Cornelius Castoriadis, to take a case in point) that not by chance was it born at the same time as democracy. And it is said that its wish to found is extended, of course, to the founding of a common human life, between brothers: a p|kir. Nobody would doubt the accuracy of this opinion. However, for deconstruction that originating foundation cannot be anything but the (necessary) founding of something impossible. Impossible because the p|kir is founded on friendship, on vik_a. If there is anything decisive about the issue of vik_a, it is precisely that maxim attributed to Aristotle (‘Oh friends, there are no friends!’), which declares the ideal of a perfect friendship to be unrealisable: because in that ideal, the friend cannot but wish for the friend so much good and perfection that, finally, he turns into a god – i. e. into someone that has no need to surround himself or herself with friends.6 We will talk, then (as one would have expected), of democracy, and of the ‘autonomous’ founding of a political system or of a society that, apparently, establishes its own rules, starting with its constitution and in an entirely free and autonomous way develops a social contract. Now no sooner read, this same theoretical approach of an ‘original’ contract immediately shows its own constitutive contradiction, because: how can this contract have the power to legitimate its signatories as new holders of rights if, strictly speaking, said signatories can only acquire that condition precisely according to the contract, its signing and its coming into 4 5 6

Derrida 1986; Derrida 1996a. Derrida 1987a. Derrida 1994b, 250.

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effect? A celebrated analysis by Derrida has applied this same ‘logic’ to a famous case of ‘autoconstitution’: the United States Declaration of Independence. A canonical text, almost sacred, in which Derrida highlights not only the impossibility of distinguishing its declarative and performative aspects, but above all, the unavoidability and darkness of the mutual contamination and involvement of the signatories and its declaration; paradoxically, without this impossibility of clear separation, the very act of emancipation would not have been possible.7 And what could we say (fifth example, fifth consideration) about this gift, around which so many anthropological, economic, psychological and religious explanations have gathered and woven together? We will say this: that the only way for this gift to really occur is in a way that in fact would cancel it. In other words, as a gift devoid of any sort of exchange, acknowledgment, credit or gratitude, yet necessarily circular, which amounts to the same thing as saying that it is only possible in its perhaps exemplary impossibility: because the gift is not, notes Derrida, simply impossible, but perhaps the impossible in itself, the impossible as such.8 However, we will not stop the analysis at this point. Because that analysis, as we are seeing, could well be repeated differently each time, ad infinitum; so for example, its force can be applied to a concept so apparently understandable as that of forgiveness. We will then say that forgiveness is never forgiveness when it adjusts itself to what is reasonable or to what is expected: when what is forgiven is the forgivable. And that on the other hand, it is only when it adjusts itself to madness, to the unexpected (the rationality that is subject to analysis as in that most singular experience of Abraham): when one forgives by virtue of that strange and unavoidable law that exclusively demands to forgive only the unforgivable; an unforgivable that is always that, both before and after the forgiveness.9 I have put forward, with a savage brevity, no doubt, but with enough force – I expect – a few samples of the deconstructive practice. Now, according to deconstruction the instances being analysed here are, as perhaps at first might have been thought, not sophistic constructions of a capricious thinker, maybe anxious for fame. Quite the opposite. Above all for deconstruction they are proofs. Proofs: with a rigour comparable to that of a formal deduction, wherein the repeated deconstruction can 7 8 9

Derrida 1984a. Derrida 1991, 17 f. Derrida 1999b, 161 f.

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bring to light the conditions of possibility that support the entire philosophical project. I will try to prove this assertion. For deconstruction, if all the aforementioned is accurate, if those instances mentioned above are not the only examples of possibilities whose possibility rests on its impossibility, and that list of examples could potentially be increased to include each and every one of the great – or small – categories used in Western thought, then from its beginning, philosophy has been built upon a supposedly unassailable foundation, which in actual fact has never been other than a trembling, blurred, unstable foundation. Thus from the beginning, philosophy has asserted the possibility of identifying an Archimedean point from which, on which, or simply in relation to which the rest of the building could be derived, ordered or given sense (the building of the world, the building of knowledge or the building of language). For philosophy, this nuclear, original concept has not always been the same; even when it has been the same (because perhaps sometimes it has been) it has not received the same names. Yet for deconstruction the face of this last foundation or final point of reference is very clear: in principle, it is the face of the simple, of the one, of the pure identity that is complex, plural, the multiple – and illusory – game of differences, which is intended to be reducible. According to deconstruction, the big metaphysical tradition makes itself responsible for setting the features of this face: according to this tradition, it is the face of the presence. This presence is one that philosophy acknowledges as fundamental in its multiple sense: presence before a subject, of course, but also presence of this subject to himself, as well as temporal present and/or donation or gift; together with these the presence as origin and beginning – from which what is absent comes to be regarded as product and derivation – must also be distinguished. According to this schema, the ideal of an order that refers everything to the presence pervades and seals our conceptual apparatus, any conceptual apparatus adjusted to that model and the experience of the world based on it. The ruin of that order, the proof that it is unfeasible (or the proof, as we have been seeing, that only unfeasible becomes feasible), would bring with it the ruin of any concept – of all the concepts – that depends on that order. However, such ruin, proclaims deconstruction, is inevitable for various reasons: first and foremost, because according to Derrida ‘presence is never present. The possibility – or the potency – of the present is but its

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own limit, its inner fold, its impossibility – or its impotence.’10 The second reason but not least is that this structure of binary opposition established in philosophy is unable to stand the test of its own criterion. Therefore, philosophy establishes, for instance, as we have seen before, that the opposition between what is primary and derivative is irreducible and complete in nature. Notwithstanding, this very action of absolute distribution is the action that prevents it from thinking of its own opposition, as it only has for this purpose the concepts it has separated. By definition, the problem is that none of the opposites thinks of itself as being a constituent part of the opposition that in itself exceeds them. In this way, the theoretical opposition between simple and complex, original and derivative, present and absent, etc., by definition, can be neither simple nor complex, neither original nor derivative, neither present nor absent, etc. (however, it would not make sense at all if it were different from these concepts – that would be unconceivable). Accepting this argument necessarily means that deconstructive work can no longer unconditionally comprise the programme – philosophical in nature – that establishes the precise delimitations of the conceptual field. Deconstruction replaces this programme by the double affirmation (‘yes, yes’) of a necessary contamination, displacement, invasion, parasitisation, etc., of original for derivative, present for absent, simple for complex, equal for different. There will never be any clear-cut, delimitated oppositions, but a mutual and complex implication, which, even in principle, obviously means that the dream of achieving the purity of a presence, the goal – and ending – of a transcendental meaning, the perfect identification of one self, that dream cancels itself in the very moment that it has been formulated. There is not, and never will be (and never has been), anything similar to a principle. There is not, and never will be, anything like an indivisible point. There is not, and never will be, anything like a splendid isolated, autonomous, and immutable present, to which we associate the past and future with complete clarity. All these ancient objects of metaphysical desire will have to give way to the absence of primarity, to the displacement of positions, to the constitutive disturbance of the identical.11 The entire series of known Derridean provocations can be inferred from this decision, which is not strictly initial, as it had always been established that: 10 Derrida 1981, 333. ‘La prsence n’est jamais prsente. La possibilit – ou la puissance – du prsent n’est que sa propre limite, son pli intrieur, son impossibilit – ou son impuissance.’ Derrida 1972a, 336. 11 Derrida 1996b.

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if there is no principle (start, origin, but also power of command, of domination), only the secondary will be primary. Nothing ‘proper’ can escape from the work of ‘the improper’. The experience must be understood in terms of an infinite text of footprints in eternal referral to other footprints, and so the indivisible and unitary finally becomes divided and differential, like a buzzing tension that severs itself continually of its own accord. In sufficiently technical terminology used for deconstruction, this peculiar distribution programme of classic opposition in philosophy12 takes shelter under the constant referral to certain concepts of difficult delimitation, such as the concept of ‘maybe’ (peut-Þtre) or the call for a certain ‘quasi-transcendentality’. In other instances, this is due to their acknowledged affinity (but not identity) with the concept of ‘undecidability’, at least according to Gçdel, used to describe a large variety of metamathematical discoveries. In light of such clarifications, it seems that it is now easier to comprehend the previous characterisation of certain classic referents of the act of thinking as possible/impossible, as possible only in and due to its own impossibility. Thus, ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ is a pair of concepts, as is the case of any other main conceptual pair in Western philosophy, whose separation only seems feasible because of their inseparability. Furthermore, and following from what has already been said, it seems that deconstruction is not entirely wrong when, during one of its few efforts of (relative) ‘self-definition’, it acknowledges that it deals only with impossibility. This is just what can be read in Psych. Inventions de l’autre: ‘The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible.’13 A rather cautious statement (‘a certain…’) in its ambiguity, however, any reserve completely disappears in this one found in Force de loi: ‘It [deconstruction] is possible as an experience of the impossible.’14 The author of both statements has not limited himself by presenting his programme in such a generic manner. On the contrary, in a reflective paragraph, he has actually made a count – an unfinished and open count, of course – of all the times when for whatever given reason deconstruction has issued a report of im-

12 Derrida 1972a, 367 – 368. 13 Derrida 2007, 15. ‘L’intrÞt de la dconstruction, de sa force et de son dsir si elle en a, c’est une certaine exprience de l’impossible.’ Derrida 1987b, 27. 14 ‘Elle [la dconstruction] est possible comme une exprience de l’impossible.’ Derrida 1994a, 35.

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possibility for each of its objects of interest. Here is the text where he mentions this ‘aporetology or aporetography’, in which I have not ceased to struggle ever since; the paradoxical limitrophy of Tympan and of the margins, the levels, or the marks of undecidability – and the never-ending list of all the so-called undecidable quasi-concepts that are so many aporetic places or dislocations – that it is a double bind or all the double bands of Glas, the work of impossible mourning, the impossible opposition between incorporation and introjection according to Fors in Mmoires pour Paul de Man and Psych. Inventions de l’autre […], that it is the step and paralysis of Parages, the ‘nondialectizable contradiction’, the anniversary date that ‘only occurs vanishing itself ’ according to Schibboleth, the iterability, namely the conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility scattered all over, and in particular in Signature vnement contexte et dans Limited Inc, the invention of the other as the impossible in Psych, the seven antinomies of philosophical discipline in Du droit  la philosophie, the gift as the impossible (Donner le temps…) and especially, near these places where questions regarding legal, ethical and political responsibility also involve geographical, national and linguistic borders, I would have been tempted to insist upon the most recent formalization of this aporetic present in L’autre cap (dated from the Gulf War).15

This is from the text of Aporie, which as we can see, breaks down a long list of impossibilities that could be thought of as complete. However, a reader of Derrida is aware that this is not the case. He knows that in other texts the emphasis is put on the impossibility of the dignified hospitality of that name, i. e. an unconditional hospitality,16 of ever finding a 15 Derrida 1993, 15 – 16. ‘[…] dans lequelles je n’ai cess de me dbattre depuis lors, qu’il s’agisse de la limitographie paradoxale de Tympan et des marges, marches ou marques de l’indcidabilit – et la liste interminable de tous les quasi-concepts dits indcidables qui sont autant de lieux ou de dislocations aportiques – qu’il s’agisse du double bind et de toutes les doubles bandes de Glas, du travail du deuil impossible, de l’impracticable opposition entre incorporation et introjection dans Fors, dans Mmoires pour Paul de Man et Psych. Invention de l’autre […], qu’il s’agisse du pas et de la paralyse de Parages, de la “contradiction non dialectisable”, d’une date anniversaire qui “n’arrive qu’ s’effacer” dans Schibboleth, de l’itrabilit,  savoir des conditions de possibilit comme conditions d’impossibilit un peu partout, en particulier dans Signature vnement contexte et dans Limited Inc, de l’invention de l’autre comme l’impossible dans Psych, des sept antinomies de la discipline philosophique dans Du droit  la philosophie, du don comme l’impossible (Donner le temps…) et surtout, pr s de ces lieux o les questions de responsabilit juridique, thique ou politique concernent aussi les fronti res gographiques, nationales ou linguistiques, j’aurais t tent d’insister sur la formalisation la plus rcente de cette aportique dans L’autre cap [dat de la Guerre du Golfe].’ Derrida 1996a, 35 – 36. 16 Derrida 1997a, 71.

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name deserving to be called ‘proper’,17 of ever determining a context absolutely,18 of ever making total sense or own sense.19 Yet again, we are able to make a generalisation: deconstruction is inventive. One of the characteristics in this field of work may as well be invention. However, we have to reach the same conclusion as before: the only possible invention for it would be the invention of the impossible.20 We stress this point once again: the impossible is not regarded as a pure and simple opposite of the possible or something that should be taken away from speculative and practical interest on the grounds of its impracticality. On the contrary, if impossibility is examined, if deconstruction only focuses rigorously on impossibility, then this means that this impossibility, in its impossibility, clings to the most ambiguous and obscure but also most inexorable of all relations, not only with possibility but also with what is required. Is it by chance that I chose the above examples of possibility/impossibility, such as justice, hospitality and forgiveness, which seem to be relating more to urgent and necessary matters, or to that which is in greatest need in this world of ours? The peculiar relation between possibility and impossibility draws out the idea that impossibility can never be pure, i. e. something that would be sensible to reject. Contrary to this and in virtue of its close relation with possibility, impossibility is an expectable – even the most expected – event. Within this context, thinking profits from the deconstruction of a basic distinction which has not been examined yet, despite being presupposed in everything that has been said so far: the distinction between two categories which are at first glance total opposites – and omnipresent in philosophy – such as ‘event’ and ‘essence’, ‘singularity’ and ‘universality’, ‘unrepeatable’ and ‘repeatable’, ‘unexpected’ and ‘foreseeable’. A thought unable to conceive of their mutual relation has been feeding on the alleged autonomy of one of each set and its corresponding opposition. Deconstruction here as always, destabilises the border between the other of each until the impossible and unexpected becomes, as we have said before, something which maybe will be what it should be, namely, something which is still to come; something – like democracy21 – which is bound to occur. In this attempt, against all hope and logic, to 17 18 19 20 21

Derrida Derrida Derrida Derrida Derrida

1967a; Derrida 1967b; Derrida 1980; Derrida 1982. 1990b. 1972a, 290. 1987b, 59. 2003b.

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expect the unexpectable, it is in this very attempt, I daresay, that deconstruction seems to lead toward the most powerful consequences in its concept of itself, i. e. its concept of reflection. Deconstruction aims to be, above all else, the most extreme exercise (an exercise that in turn is undeconstructable)22 of lucidity. A radicalisation of the critical spirit for which crisis, or a certain ‘general state of crisis’, seems an omnipresent feature from the ‘beginning’ in everything there is. As such, thinking is its ground. However, ‘thinking’ is nothing other than actually making come or letting come ‘any event of decision or responsibility’.23 Insofar as it thinks, and thinks of the urgency of letting come, maybe, the only thing that being impossible needs more help and cooperation, deconstruction only develops a programme that, in its own opinion, draws in turn its own model . We are told that deconstruction could be defined as preparing oneself for the coming of the O/other.24 Moreover – we can say – of the sole ‘O/ other’ which, due to its inexpectability, we need to expect: the impossible. Hesitant but firm in its hesitance, deconstruction is conceived by itself as reflexive work on the apories constitutives of the thought that, as has been said, can only be endless, never-ending, infinite – like hope, like waiting. As a matter of fact, the feat to accomplish is an enormous feat, since from the moment it deconstructs the distinction, extremely useful for hermeneutical and pedagogical purposes, between ‘central’ and ‘marginal’, ‘relevant’ and ‘superficial’, prompts us to examine in its gloomy light, each and every historically-produced element of philosophy, literature, science or any other textual practice. Nothing is alien to it, not even itself: from the moment it belongs to this legacy, deconstruction imposes, no matter what it says about its own invulnerability, a deconstruction of itself whose first task could be to verify the real demonstrative character, or not, of its reasoning and demonstrations. It is true that this hypothetical evaluation of ‘successes’ and ‘defeats’ of a movement such as deconstruction would not be exempt from violence. At a level of unification, how do you assess a stream of reflection that has caused turmoil within the very concepts of unity, assemblage and totality? How does one establish oneself in a supposed ‘beyond’, a reflective device that has altered the separation of external and internal, transcendence and immanence? However, this may not be the most pressing task presented by deconstruction. Instead, it may be 22 Derrida 1994a, 35. 23 Derrida 1993, 16. 24 Derrida 1987b, 53.

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that which consists in showing how philosophy, at its foundation, has actually been unable to express properly, using its categorial apparatus, the hiding face of the event, of the unexpected, of singularity. An incapability that, together with the reconsideration of the ancients, calls for an invention of new concepts, new words, new logics with which we will be able to prepare for the coming of events, such as justice, democracy, forgiveness or hospitality, which are as unadjournable as unrealisable. The fact that this continuous practice of critical reading, fiercely attentive, is a meeting point for logic (shadows of Lewis Carroll) and the Bible (shadows of the psalmist, singer of the impossibility of singing, in a foreign land, the hymns of the Lord), and knowledge (shadows of Heraclitus, expecting the unexpected) confirms the suspicion that deconstruction, in the crossroads of multiple traditions, wonders about unadjournable matters, both old and new, both archaic and futuristic – and always without an answer.

Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject? Jean Robelin It may seem unhelpful now to question a discourse about the deconstruction of the subject. Jacques Derrida himself resolved that query. But also psychoanalytical interpretation of the subject is globally described as deconstructive, especially when it emphasises the impossibility of a subject to control the totality of symbolic actions in which he is involved. The attempts of some German sociologists criticising the social forms of the capitalist subject emerge as ‘deconstructive’ in nature, especially the criticism of the enterprising self.1 In one of his films entitled Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen himself was answering this question in his own way. The use of the word ‘deconstruction’ is therefore inflationist, and even Derrida puzzled over its unforeseen success. It makes sense to ask if the word did not simply take the place of the old ‘dialectic’ having been made obsolete through the fall of Marxist orthodoxy. Undoubtedly that victory may nevertheless make us suspicious: the discourse about deconstruction might have lost any specificity becoming totally indeterminate. In an especially insightful article,2 and having in mind the idea of clearing the idealistic mood of Heidegger’s criticism against subjectivity, Manfred Frank lucidly recalls that Schlegel undertakes true ‘deconstruction’ of the subject. For instance in his article ‘On Incomprehensibility’, Schlegel insists that the subject is unable to master the different regimes of meaning he uses. He argues that attempting to master these systems only leads to deeper confusion: ‘I wanted to demonstrate that we obtain the most perfect and the purest incomprehensibility of science and art, of philosophy and philology, which, by themselves, aim at comprehension and intelligibility.’3

1 2 3

Brçckling 2007. Frank 2007, 117 – 138. Schlegel 1967, 363.

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Proceeding this way, he advances Derridean analysis through a long history of thought: from a broken self, of an ‘I’ or a self which is an ‘other’. Of course, we could object that deconstruction itself – even its thinkers who are sensitive to the limits of the subject and to the impossibility of the subject to master his symbolic acts – argues against reducing Derrida to an appendage of German Idealism. However, Frank asserts that Derrida’s thought is only an example of the philosophy of reflection, which is the core of German Idealism. If it aims at diminishing the identity of being to the identity of reflection, Derrida would agree with it in a special way; he would think about the opposition between the identity of being and the identity of reflection. Thus, there would only be partial unity, ‘the characteristics of the self would be constructed in the opposition between the two reflects’.4 Any interpretation revealing an implicit part in a discourse, its internal relationships, or even unnoticed contradictions becomes what is known as ‘deconstruction’. We can then ask about what deconstruction is not and conclude: much ado about nothing. In other words, the question itself ‘What is deconstruction?’ proves inadequate. But the negative enquiry ‘What is not deconstruction?’ becomes inevitably circular as any answer to this question implies a positive definition. Simply stated, Derrida authorised this criticism. While discussing philosophers in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, he defines deconstruction as follows: ‘It is an analysis which tries to find out how their [philosophers’] thinking works or does not work, to find the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity in their corpus.’5 When he tries to justify the transition from the analysis of texts to the deconstruction of a real entity, the terms stay the same: ‘In the case of culture, person, nation, language, the identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity different from itself, having an opening or gap within itself.’6 You can’t get more German-idealistic than that. It is here that deconstruction shows its equivocal character, and its uses appear only metaphorical. It is widely understood that deconstruction appears first of all for Derrida as a way of analysing text; it helps to clear up significations that are out of control, shifts in meaning and internal cracks in a piece of writing. This essay, on the one hand, does not lament the language incapacity to engulf meaning, but intends to show that we cannot dominate it; on the other hand, the hallmark of ide4 5 6

Frank 1975, 283. Caputo 1997, 9. Caputo 1997, 14.

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alism is the pretence of taming it. Without loss of meaning, can we remove ourselves from textual analysis and speak about deconstructing a nation or even a human subject? This query relies on the idea that these realities are also effects of meaning, which are governed by regimes of meaning not totally consistent, in themselves nor between themselves. This is precisely the metaphor that seems to govern Derrida’s metaphorical use of deconstruction, that is, the metaphor of the plurality of languages. In other words, deconstruction could mean that the same text can be written in several languages, or at least is involved in several systems of meaning, and some of those systems of meaning are about nations or cultures. However, if it is true that meaning is charged with unmastered implicit significations, we must acknowledge that deconstruction has limitations due to its metaphorical nature. Using metaphor in this way implies that the definition is less important than its use. The deconstructive praxis does not have the unity of method. Sometimes Derrida characterises it as a strategy without finality. Consequently, we must accept that there are several deconstructive gestures, and that deconstruction is not a univocal tradition. Thinking along these lines answers those critics who reproach deconstructive thinking for being modelled on the supposed unity attributed to metaphysics. Deconstruction opposes the unity attributed to metaphysics and in particular the unity of meaning which could allow taming and dominating our way of thinking. At the same time, deconstruction does not sustain an indeterminate multiplicity. In his lectures, Derrida often compared deconstruction to a crack in a plate of glass. The glass does not break but we are prevented from thinking of it as being homogeneous, without any defect. In regard to this thought, deconstruction is not a way of thinking antagonistically, or initiating explosions of antagonism. When Allan Montefiore asks whether deconstruction is a kind of dangerous nihilism exposed to the risk of destroying any safeguard defending human rights, Derrida pointedly remarks that deconstruction does not aim to destroy things that exist. He denies that he could increase the absurdity of our world. He asserts that being critical of meaning does not destroy it, but instead opens new possibilities. Thus, we can say that deconstruction is reconstruction. In this way, deconstruction locates ethical understanding not within a subject who envelops, and is guarantee, source, centre and master of his intentions. Ethical understanding, instead, comes about through the subject’s experience of being limited and acknowledging the impossibility of self-possession. Consequently, deconstruction means that subjects are

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non-identified with themselves. They are relational entities subsisting on a primary inter-individuality: I think to those people who would reconstruct today a discourse about the subject, which would not be deconstructive, about a subject who would not have anymore the figure of self-possession, centre and origin of the world, but would define the subject of a non-identity with one self, of a non-deductible interpellation, as coming from the other.7

This is the first criterion of specificity and a deciding factor for analysing the contemporary subject. If the contemporary subject appears to fragment into unsolvable contradictions, the metaphor of deconstruction is useless. Deconstructing a text preserves its explicit consistency, even if singling out internal inconsistencies. We must consider if the actual situation of the human subject allows an external coherence to avoid exposing it as broken, splintered into kaleidoscopic units, and in a state of turbulence because of contradictory tensions. We can look at it another way by asking a different question: how can deconstructive thinking assist in analysing the contemporary subject? There is in Derrida’s thinking an implicit question without answer: why does this inter-individuality or interpellation of the other necessarily speak several languages? Why does it imply an internal gap or an internal crack within the subject? We might find this answer in a second characteristic feature that forbids reducing deconstruction to a kind of method. Deconstructive thinking is only possible if the analysed term deconstructs itself: ‘Deconstruction is something that happens and which happens inside.’8 Deconstruction is always a self-deconstruction. We can deconstruct the subject if it deconstructs itself. We can find self-deconstruction in everyday life and across a range of recent and present-day ideologies, as it happened some years ago. People cross themselves out like a text pencilling out its own effects of meaning. French television successfully aired the American show Persons Unknown wherein comic rhetoric consists precisely in denying the characters’ own properties of interlocution. The qualities of this kind of contemporary subject seem to destroy effects of meaning at the point of producing them. This process seems to produce a man without qualities. Effects of meaning are then the proper deconstruction of meaning, as if the text were pencilling out its own properties. The selfpossessing subject, centre and master of its meanings, yields to a subject splitting itself up by playing with its meanings. In 1966, the artist Piero 7 8

Derrida 1990a, 98. Caputo 1997, 9.

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Manzoni crossed himself out in his own profession by creating a piece of artwork in the form of a can and entitled it, Shit of Artist. Of course, this is the kind of experience that authorises me to speak about deconstructing the subject in an unusual way, for example, without referring to psychoanalysis. There is a social deconstruction of the subject, which I consider essential, because it explains even social pathologies of human subjects. I would like to recall the work of Alain Ehrenberg who considers nervous breakdown a symptom of managerial capitalism (even if I do not endorse his claim that breakdowns are not linked to the logic of culpability and prohibition that underpin traditional psychological experience). Let us also consider that any kind of socialisation of individuals implies a way of splitting their bodies. For example, consider how a modern flat divides its space: the room where you eat, the one where you make love, the toilets; and then separate out the biological functions of the body according to these divisions. In this kind of socialisation, and the correspondent relationships, gaps are created within the subject, ending the narcissistic relationship to one’s self (except perhaps at University). The opposing regimes of meaning are variations of the internal gaps that refract or split the contemporary subject. I want to offer some views about the social deconstruction of contemporary subjects, while showing how it is a ground for irreconcilable differences. At the same time, I want to keep in mind that a partial unity may still survive despite intrinsic opposition. Derrida himself thought that the internal discord of the human subject is historical and social. Social analysis, then, is a ground for a fruitful use of deconstruction. The gestures and attitudes of a subject who deletes aspects of himself are not new and they presuppose an historical treatment. One of the interests of the Shakespearean tragedy Richard the Second consists in showing a king, who, as he plays the part of a king, pretends to be a king. He discovers the vanity of the two bodies and in particular the vanity of the sacred character of the royal body. Then he flits between opposite regimes of meaning leading to madness: Thus play I in one person many people And non contented: sometimes am I a king, Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am; then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king, Then am I king’d again and by and by Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be

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Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d With being nothing. (Act 5, Scene 5)

The case of King Richard prompts us to ask, first, what is the unity of this self-deconstructing subject, and, second, if it can avoid madness. How can we define a unity with internal cracks but which does not explode? In the case of Richard, he characterises this kind of self-annihilation while walking around with open eyes. The historical character of that kind of internal inconsistency can be proven if we consider other forms of this type of inherent contradiction. Consider Emma Bovary who was broken by the opposition between romantic dreams and ordinary mediocrity. We can also reflect upon those bourgeois and romantic subjects, who considered themselves heroes of a Promethean mythology of social progress, but instead were swimming in speculative affairs at the borderline of corruption. The first point about the internal gap of the contemporary subject consists in a double-contradictory regime of meaning in our society. On one hand, subjects are required to be autonomous, which is at the same time asserted as a fact and an imperative. The notion of ‘autonomy’ corresponds to the action of an individual in its private sphere, but equally corresponds to competition. The subject must make himself better and more marketable than his neighbour and create himself according to the contingency of social roles. On the other hand, the subject is shaped by social strategies of belonging to groups and communities that constrain him, but which are totally different from those of traditional societies. The proof of this is the renewed fashion of belonging to a community which, in turn determines closed and fixed identities, for example, religious adherence, and even sects. If these affiliations become closed-minded and exclusive in religious spheres, a kind of identity emerges in the same way that workers suffer from subordination in factories. The workplace becomes dependent upon modern means of communication: night and day media connection through mobile phones and computers. Thus workers, even those who are skilled, lose their privacy and become an appendage of the corporation, reduced to their economic function. To the contingency of social roles there corresponds a division of social forces and a concentration of economic and political power. Consequently, the phenomena of social reproduction are multiplied. In contemporary society the same kind of opposition can be found again in consumption where the injunction to choose markets (when

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you have some money…) contrasts with the conformity to ways of making a living that takes the place of tradition. The multiplicity of desires contrasts with its reduction to differences without effect; for example, the car industry peddles all kinds of uninspiring optional extras. So-called freedom of choice contrasts with prescribed preferences, mass desires and needs, and conforming relationships between people. Market necessity is achieved through targeting personal autonomy and inducing an anthropology of ‘as if ’, where individuals act as if they were really enacting a true freedom of choice. The insecure constraint of self-testing and the threat of being underestimated lead people to safeguard their identity by projecting it onto an exterior and closed community. In this way, reason is grounded through a complexity of feelings that is in turn the ground for self-relationship by defining our ways of acting and bearing upon the world. Adorno has shown that men have an affective (because social) relationship to reason, and this impersonality of rational arguing conflicts with the affective dimension of subjectivity, which has been built up by private and peculiar interests, without universality, and by the ensuing competition with others. Correspondingly, the result of this opposition becomes cause for distress: ‘From that point, the coldness inherent to objective arguing increases the feeling of doubt, of being isolated and of loneliness, from which fundamentally today each individual suffers, and from which we try to escape in hearing public discourses.’9 The difference today is that individuals try to escape from those feelings by protecting themselves in specific groups. We can see a consequence of this perverted relationship to reason through the problem of decision-making. Individuals are accountable. They are valued for taking responsibility about their fate but economic instability and uncertainty deny their decision-making power. Fixed identities conflict with the kaleidoscopic character of the fragmented desires that come about through the activity of consuming. The self regard that is necessary for defining oneself as an enterprising individual, for example, as a self-manager in competition, also conflicts with the kind of self-depreciation issuing from general uncertainty at work. The same opposition exists within human relationships, love as well as friendship. Actual competition implies a double kind of affective individuation. On the one hand, there is the necessity to show oneself off to best advant9

Adorno 1973, 360.

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age – to appear a winner – and support oneself in a perpetual narcissistic self-actualisation. On the other hand, this kind of self-betterment through competition in the labour market is impossible to replicate in relationships. The need to know feelings like love or friendship, which could be detached from power or economic relations, would be totally private. These two spheres are at the same time contrasting but inseparable. This last point is significant; for example, husbands or wives who lose their jobs may also lose their spouse as well as their social and affective network. The multiplicity of social roles generally affirms a way of offering individual freedom as it implies only a partial inclusion in social constructs. It is now an ambiguous phenomenon because it is also a place of split. It is, then, important to note that social roles are impersonal but at the same time, a condition for personal development. Answering the critics that capitalist society is alienating, Luhmann asserts that this objectivity ‘makes possible social relationships in which more individual characters become full of meaning’.10 But the uneasiness of human subjects is only displaced. We struggle to be consistent but the objectivity of social capitalist relationships forbids it: it is fashionable to be astrologo-physicists or managers who are fierce during the week and kind on Sunday. Individuals are split. They wildly intersect rather than solidly structure numerous, contrasting and vacillating identities created through professional, religious, national, local or sexual expectations. No wonder these individuals search for external identities to which their adherence and allegiance are forms of submission and conformity rather than selfdefinition. These identities, then, are often contradictory. Human subjects create themselves by appropriating cultural as well as material goods. These external identities dominate individuals cut from these resources, including symbolic resources, finally depriving the subject of internal unity. Accounting for empirical studies and testimonies, Adorno once more underlines this link: ‘Between conventional religious strictness and lack of personal faith experience, as they say.’11 To me it still seems useful to remark on this combination of the conventional character of beliefs and the weakness of individual religious experience. That which we refer to as ‘fundamentalism’, whatever its origin and aside from political fanaticism, is a sign of a mechanical faith. An external identity sustains this faith and is attractive to those individuals dislocated by conflicting 10 Luhmann 1982, 14. 11 Adorno 1973, 284.

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allegiances. Numerous and contradictory attachments sabotage individuals because they cannot build or elaborate upon them in a self-creating way. In his empirically-based works, Adorno seems to have understood this: he emphasises on one hand the subject’s inconsistency, and on the other hand, the grounding of the subject’s individual personality on constant characters. The contemporary subject appears also torn up by real but straight relationships, and wide but virtual relationships, which he cannot actualise. The contemporary subject is also shredded through relationships he cannot actualise, for example those that are few but real and others that are many but virtual. As members of a so-called global village, individuals are significantly submitted to that kind of illusion. Individuals self-destruct because of virtual possibilities that are in fact inaccessible and real possibilities that oppose their virtual counterparts. Those who have taught in under-privileged neighbourhoods know that students do not show much sense of reality: ‘I won’t accept a job unless I earn an X euros salary.’ Or the guy who is desperately weak in the French language, unable to understand the difference between ‘necessity’ and ‘obligation’ and yet claims: ‘I shall be a lawyer.’ They live a dangerous schizophrenic double-life. But those external identities and the constancy of character are generally now lived out as destinies. The phenomenon connects with the steady loss of possibilities in present-day society. You are born in the dirt; you stay in the dirt. Individuals dive into constraining external identities, the kind Communitarianism seems to sustain, because they cannot detach themselves from those same identities. These identities shape individuals; they make them conformists by controlling the shape of their bodies and the shape of their attitudes. Let us consider the jogging executive who has to demonstrate a performing self-image to appear efficient. Or, we can look at the smooth hypocrisy of ecclesiastical attitudes, which is a way of marking bodies. Specifically in his monograph about Goethe, Georg Simmel distinguishes between the common man without any centre and the eminent man with an able and strong personality. He considers the brutality of big cities and competition as causes for the loss of coherent selfhood: Finally, this deficiency in the centre of the soul leads us to look for perpetually new momentary satisfaction in impulses, sensations, and external activities; it includes us at the same time in an inconsistency and in a chaotic helplessness, which reveal themselves, sometimes as the commotion of the big cities, sometimes as the wild hunting of competition, sometimes as the

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specifically modern inauthenticity in the sphere of taste, of style, of opinions, of relationships.12

In fact, centred individuals do not exist anymore. The eminent man is dead. The self-referential relationship to oneself is no more self-reflective or self-aware. It is a way of reflecting the unreflective return of the perpetual cycle of capitalist accumulation, constantly renewing to reappear through the kaleidoscopic desires of individuals. Hegel would say it is a figure of the bad Infinite. To me, Simmel makes an error when he confuses strong personality with centred personality. There are strong but conflicted personalities. I will say this another way: contemporary capitalism and its indefinite cycle of financial fluctuation dismiss the traditional subject. Objective uncertainty emerges as a broken kind of socialisation that exposes itself through broken representations of the self. This off-centre subject does not exist anymore except as a fictitious narrative of itself, the only possible unity of the fragmented self. This narrative is the fictitious unity of an individual constructed as a virtual subject by the way he describes himself. The politician exists neither by his programme, which is a fairy tale, nor in his acts, rolled around by political uncertainties, but by the way he projects himself on television. But this kind of ‘story-telling’ also applies to organisations and corporations that present themselves as fictitious subjects in a great self-narrative and self-description. The irrationality of capitalism conceals the way it motivates human subjects to obtain their attachments. Self-narrative is a part of that search. The consequence is a kind of semantic carnival, a fairy tale, and an enterprising story, in which to get fired means to obtain new impetus. These phenomena imply a contradictory relation to temporality endowed with conflicting properties. An enterprising self supposes the subject is able to project himself into the future. He must have a plan defining what he wants to do. Economic precariousness means that he is in fact unable to project himself into the future. He lives day-by-day. Workers struggle to be the managers of their lives, their own coaches and this is the meaning of their project. Lessenich shows that self-care is nothing but a way to mobilise and be flexible, constructed as a set of social values for the employed. It is a kind of socialisation sustained by the active welfare state and a way of putting social pressure onto individuals.13 Mobility 12 Simmel 1989, 675. 13 Dçrre et al. 2009, 163.

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is good in itself because it reflects the fluidity of capital. In these conditions, the affected autonomy of the individual becomes totally constrained. The so-called self-manager is only a subsidiary junior. Workers’ interviews prove this. They are perpetually saying: ‘We are nothing at all’, ‘we are disposable’, ‘we feel as if we were always too expensive’. Sickness or suicide at work appears to be a narrative of the internal crack within human subjects. Nervous collapse is not only a fear of being unable to sustain the rhythm; it is also an indication of guilt, which opposes the requirement to project oneself into the future. Fearing uncertainty and feeling guilty prevent subjects from taking chances and consequently opposing the so-called management of innovation. The traditional welfare state made its citizens sovereign, and this way of life mediated between economic requirements and social conflicts. Individuals who work to adapt themselves by internalising the demands of management resist this arrangement. ‘To live’ means, then, to be constantly accountable, to be guilty and to have debt. The human subject who fragments in the face of these contradictions is a person with suicidal tendencies. That is the real meaning of the surge of workplace suicides in France. But one thing plays a special role in this phenomenon: the solidarity of the working collective is broken. We asked about what kind of unity a subject could have when exposed to these contradictions. We find this answer: a relational unity grounded upon the construct of a collective against loneliness. This unity will be a narrative of cooperation opposed to the self-narrative of competitive self-managers. And this is the way in which deconstructed subjects experience the possibility of their own reconstruction. Studying the railwaymen of a Parisian station, Yves Clot has shown how the conductors, although they are alone in their railway carriage, elaborate a style of acting, which is at the same time a discourse addressed to their fellows, a way of defining their jobs and the public office of which they are in charge. The fanatic of timetables does not slow down except at the last minute, for he wants to save precious time and to avoid being late. Others want to make the travellers comfortable. The way of driving is a social language, even if the lonely conductor does not address anybody. It is a social style of acting, even if that style is also personal and is grounded on personal impulses. The different styles of teachers would be illuminating in this regard. Eagle-eyed, authoritarian, intimidating teachers consider their job to consist in making pupils learn their stuff willy-nilly. They consider the well-being of the little ones of no concern. The smooth educator pretends he will not punish the pu-

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pils, even if they refuse to work. The personal history of kind of educator gives rise to his or her own social language. This rhetoric of action is the way in which social relationships reproduce themselves in the individualisation of human subjects. Two processes are linked. Rhetoric is the answer to social requirements and represents an endeavour to give a minimalist integrative consistency to those relationships and to the habits which constitute them as a form of inter-individuality. This rhetoric also keeps the opposite tendencies of those habits and social ideologies together according to the way they imply passivity and conformity in human subjects along with the resultant impulses to act. For example, this rhetoric holds together the ordered tasks with the real achieved labour, the required methods with individual enterprise. We know that workers try to give a personal touch to their workstation, even their bench. It appears that they try to recover individuality in creating forms of inter-individuality. For example, they create their own vocabulary, naming engines, tools and so on, with their own words. This is true even in motorway service areas. At French McDonald’s restaurants, you cannot be a member of the team if you do not accept their exclusive vocabulary, the turns of phrase which identify McDonald’s workers. This rhetoric is then the specific answer of the workers to a contradictory social demand: managers require that workers constantly adapt to new conditions of working and yet remain perfectly passive in their attitude to the corporation. Flexibility means at the same time dependence on capitalism, while autonomy means pliability in response to social conditions. At the heart of actual production, we find a core contradiction: creating a versatile and multipurpose individual through uncertainty. We have seen that this rhetoric defines even the nature of work. It proposes a kind of cooperation that is, at least implicitly, supposed to be good. It makes a link between normative and cognitive expectations. Society presupposes a kind of common good, where cooperation itself opens possibilities for action and relationships, thus is a form of freedom. Individuality appears to be a fundamental problem for the social sciences today. Capitalist corporations throw workers into a mortal competition, inject market disorders into the process of production, pretend to distinguish workers according to individual worth, though productivity is a social character, and so labour can be realised only through the individualisation of its actors. But the actual way of managing the work processes makes workers feel uncertain, places them in a precarious position, reduces their culture to a simple implementation of proceedings, places

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them in a short temporality without memory, and consequently obliterates their individuality. Social agents try as far as they can to reconstruct it by renewing forms of inter-individuality and by creating a common good that implies ways of cooperating. They are themselves human subjects who constantly construct and deconstruct themselves, creating a partial, always threatened unity. This is why deconstructive thinking continues to have something to tell us.

Beyond the Eclipse of Reason: On the Reconstruction of Rationality Graziano Lingua What task has the passage into the new millennium bequeathed to a European philosophy that intends to understand its own time in thought and that does not wish to remain indifferent to social and political dynamics? Without attributing excessive significance to a date that simply marks the progression of the calendar and not an epochal change, it is still true that, the further we get from that date, the clearer it becomes which aspects of last century’s sensibility no longer belong to us and what, instead, may still be a living and fertile inheritance. To begin with, it becomes clearer which cultural dynamics characterised the thought of an age marked by the effort to distance itself from the project of modern reason, in order to comprehend not only its potential, but also its fatal limits and errors. The main events that characterise the first half of the 20th century, with its two World Wars and the experience of totalitarianism, put the crisis of the modern project firmly on the horizon, a crisis already under way by the end of the 19th century, with Marx’s analysis of capitalist production and the Nietzschean discovery of the nexus between reason and the relationships of domination between the subject and society. The material and spiritual tendencies of this crisis can be filed under many labels: the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber), the ‘uneasiness of civilisation’ (Sigmund Freud), the ‘decline of the West’ (Oswald Spengler), the ‘crisis of European humanity’ (Edmund Husserl), all expressions that seek to give voice to discontent in their appeal to a cultural and social model that has proven unable to keep its ambitious promises. At the forefront of the inexorable hiatus between the hope for social justice, autonomy and individual freedom, and the reality of a society in which the effects of rationality dominate to a perverse degree, a destructive pathos begins to emerge, as if the only option left for thought is to depart, leaving behind something not only inadequate, but also dangerously violent and illusory. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalinism’s mass exterminations, what is shattered are not just the grand narratives

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of the philosophical and religious tradition, but even the very foundational framework of rights as instruments through which justice can prevail. On the one hand, these events seem to confirm diagnoses of the end of metaphysics and the victory of nihilism; on the other hand, they substantiate analyses of the triumph of technique, instrumental thought and the reification of consciousness, anticipated by Max Weber and Martin Heidegger and significantly re-explored in The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, a book that non-coincidentally was published in 1947, a time in which the concrete effects of the crisis of modern reason had been felt at full strength. At that time, speaking about the dialectic of enlightenment entailed the impossibility of separating the ideal plan of the Aufklrung from the ways in which it took shape in events which the West both crafted and suffered; and therefore also entailed that modern reason already possessed, in nuce, a grasp of the origins of its own crisis and its reversal into the realm of violence. Nevertheless, it must be recalled that The Dialectic of Enlightenment was born of a philosophical gesture already motivated by an emancipatory hope, subsequently diminished through the radicalisation of criticism and the consciousness of the irreversibility of its failure. It would be through the subsequent events of the Second World War that suspicion and demystification produced an increasing mistrust of every attempt at an adequate philosophical response, but also a deepened scepticism towards the very possibility that reason could render itself a governmental instrument for controlling social complexity and a motivator for individual and collective action. From this point of view, the postwar period seems to confirm the most negative analyses offered in the first half of the century by Weber and Heidegger. The increasingly marked extension of instrumental and technological rationality would accentuate scepticism concerning the possibility that a mode of thought might arise that was capable of meeting both the individual’s and society’s demands for meaning, as well as reining in the systemic dominion of the ‘reign of technique’.1 To all this can be added the polytheistic outbreak of increasingly multicultural values and connotations, typical of the society of the last decades of the 20th century. This exposes philosophy to a constant oscillation between, on the one hand, capitulation to relativism and irrationalist impulses, and on the other hand simplistic attempts to return to models prior to the crisis. 1

Cf. Ferry 1996, 85.

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It is not difficult, however, to perceive in the 1970s the moment in which the destructive dimension of the critique of modern reason became sharpened and in which the inheritance of a philosopher such as Heidegger was put to use in its capacity for a more radical unmasking of the pretensions of the modern plan. From this point of view, the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty are emblematic, along with the French post-structuralist thought of authors such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In this context the prolongation of Heideggerian hermeneutics becomes radicalised in a demystificatory gesture: not the slightest residue of sense escapes the corrosive critique of language bequeathed by these thinkers and not a single argumentative gambit can sustain the search for a truth that goes beyond a poetic/metaphorical declaration. As Gianni Vattimo remarked about Derrida, philosophy becomes free of every founding gesture, but to do so ‘it increasingly resembles a performance, the effect of which is not easily distinguished from that of an aesthetic experience’.2 From this point of view, the – in the general sense – ‘deconstructive’ sensibility can be seen as the extreme effect of a distancing of the modern project and thus effectively becomes one of the terms on which the legitimacy of the radical critique of reason is assessed. Yet is there truly nothing left over once reason has undergone this process of radical dissemination? Must we accept that it has been deformed by an intrinsically deceptive and violent totalitarian dimension, and must therefore be considered a repressive tool, to be distrusted? If one examines what has occurred in philosophical debate over the last two decades of the 20th century, it would seem that the answer is ‘no’. Rather, the last stage of transition from the 1900s bequeaths to the new millennium an evident inclination to move away from a purely destructive criticism and underlines an attitude that we could define as ‘reconstructive’, that is, characterised by a positive need ‘to reconstruct’ rationality on a new basis, recognising the legitimacy of appeals to truth on behalf of philosophical discourse, such as might justify a rational critique of language and thought. This counter-tendency to the kind of radical demystification involved in the idea of a total eclipse of reason is registered in all those forms of thought that do not give up all claims to truth and which seek out the positive conditions of a non-metaphysical deployment of modern reason extending to its ethical and social aspects. The signs of this are also often found outside the realm of strictly academic reflection. They underline a precise 2

Vattimo 1997, 101.

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demand for standards of validity in public discourse and social action that cannot be limited to the aesthetic and paradoxical postures to which deconstruction has accustomed us. It is, moreover, against the ‘impolitic’ effects of these postures that risk legitimising diffuse forms of cynicism and irresponsibility,3 that the need for a new positive-critical responsibility for thought has become more evident. However, there is need to reach agreement on the meaning of this reconstructive attitude and on the use of the term ‘reconstruction’ because it can, as with ‘deconstruction’, become simply an empty slogan, devoid of genuine meaning. Thus, rather than a precise philosophical category, by reconstruction I mean here a widely shared sensibility that can be perceived on many levels and be spoken in many ways. Recognising this indeterminacy, which makes it difficult to offer a precise map of authors and a consolidated topography of subject-areas, in the following pages I will begin by proposing a hypothesis for reading this sensibility, by covering the thought of three exponents of continental philosophy, Jrgen Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Marc Ferry, seeking to thematise, from each point of view, the reconfiguration of rationality. I will use some of their fundamental intuitions as a terrain of philosophical experimentation for the concept of reconstruction, without pretending to offer an exhaustive historiography. My goal, rather, is to show that the reconfiguration of rationality cannot consist in a regressive attitude to the crisis of reason, in a simple ‘return to the past’, avoiding exposure to more radical forms of deconstruction, but must instead pursue to the end the demystifying dimension intrinsic to the philosophies of crisis, without limiting itself to their deconstructive side. Through these three thinkers, I will try to demonstrate that the philosophical use of the notion of reconstruction, and specifically the reconstruction of rationality, is legitimate only if it succeeds in bringing to light reconstructive resources present within the demystificatory critique; resources that become essential to answering – to paraphrase Ricoeur’s famous formula – the question whether modern reason’s project is still capable of ‘giving rise to thought’.

3

Cf. Putnam 1992, 132 – 133; Ferraris 2010.

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1. The communicative reconstruction of rationality: Jrgen Habermas Habermas is undoubtedly one of those European authors who best express this spirit of a rehabilitation of reason, against the diagnosis of the death of rationality. His position is in favour of a reconstruction of the modern plan of rationality, against the various formulations that are programmatically defined as ‘postmodern’, yet it is not opposed to the idea of a crisis of reason. Indeed, his belonging to the Frankfurt School means that Habermas is deeply conscious of the problem posed by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Habermas’s philosophy one finds an alternative research route to those of the philosophies that limit themselves to denouncing the crisis of Western rationalism, the triumph of the instrumental spirit and the distortions of public communication. As one can read in an essay of 1970, according to Habermas, every critique demystifying communication must presuppose that there exists, at least ideally, a form of communication that has not been degraded,4 that can therefore make use of a non-mystificatory critique. For the analysis of the deformed structures of communication to be possible, it is therefore necessary to presuppose a form of intact communication which can be offered as an ethical ideal of humanity, the ideal of a community of communication free from any kind of domination. It is therefore not true that all rationality is totalitarian, or that its instrumental use is the only possibility, since an alternative exists which Habermas, following Apel, identifies with a discursive-procedural model of rationality whose objective is the cooperative construction of understanding via argumentative discussion. From the outset, one can see that the goal of this discursive model of rationality consists in reconstructing the conditions that render successful communication possible, and thus offer an exercise of reason that does not have to be illusory or the product of false consciousness. Habermas does not simply aim to revive reason from outside through a sense of commitment to its validity, and nor does he propose a metaphysical substantialism, or simply re-assume a philosophy of the subject. Rather, he deems it necessary to recognise and make explicit that which is implicit in every critical act of speech that seeks validity and that in order to legitimate its own validity, passes through an intersubjective procedure of 4

Habermas 1970, 360 – 375. On this aspect, see Cunico 2009, 24.

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validation. He who sets up to take part in this discussion must already presuppose a series of conditions that render it possible: a practical discourse is inconceivable without postulating that the protagonists themselves adhere to the norms they have recognised if they expect their speech to be valid. This evidently entails a strong dose of idealisation: such a communicative reason founds its validity on a series of postulates (openness of access, equal freedom of speech, absence of external constrictions, sincerity of interlocutors, etc.) which are inevitably counter-factual because they do not occur in ordinary communication, in which distortions of various kinds operate.5 Now, the utopianism of this ideal speech situation is one of the elements most strongly condemned by critics,6 since the Habermasian reconstruction would seem ultimately to presuppose an unreal form of communication, devoid of effect in social practice. Habermas is aware that the existing concrete form of the argument does not satisfy these presupposed conditions, and on this basis recognises the counter-factuality of the argument; however he judges it necessary in order to render the confrontation possible and in order to create the conditions for understanding. Actually, as Ferry makes clear,7 the validity of these idealisations cannot be refuted on the basis of existing empirical limits to communication, because its function is regulative and indicates the intrinsic normativity of communicative action. This intrinsic normative quality emerges clearly from the 1980s onwards when Habermas, starting from the theory of communicative rationality, starts to elaborate his discourse ethics (Diskursethik).8 In this case, too, the reconstructive instance coincides with the necessity to recognise specific normative ties9 that must be presupposed on the part of every social actor who intends to reason, and who cannot deny them without falling into a pragmatic self-contradiction. 5 6 7 8 9

Cf. for example Habermas 1979, 1 – 68. On this aspect of Habermas’s thought, see Lafont 1999, 141 f. For a picture of the critiques against the Habermasian position, see Benhabib 1995, 330 – 339. Ferry 2010, 148. See Habermas 1990a; Habermas 1993. These normative ties are declined in the principle of universalisation (U) – according to which moral norms must have the form of universal unconditional propositions founded upon universal interests – and in the principle of discussion (D) – that requires a basis of validity to every norm acting on a consensus obtained through argumentation. Cf. Habermas 1990a, 120 f. For an analysis of these principles, see Ingram 2010, 131 – 138.

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To me it seems that the most productive kind of criticism is that which focuses on the Habermasian thesis that argumentation is the only register of discursive validity.10 Regarding both epistemology and moral issues, Habermas opts for a procedure in which the only resource of intersubjective validation is the rational force of argument. In the argumentation a non-coercive cogency of the better argument must prevail, that is, the argument that best succeeds in generating consent from others.11 This option becomes particularly problematic from the practical point of view, when it is not just issues of fact that are involved, but also values and convictions less easily translatable into argumentative terms which nevertheless strongly condition the positions taken by various protagonists in a discussion. To focus, as with Diskursethik, the cooperative construction of norms on the single register of argumentation risks producing a restrictive effect on discussion. This is because it excludes, from the formation of understanding, the social actors, who are inadequate at the level of rational-discursive logic, but all the same able, as Giacomo Marramao says, ‘to give an account of their own chosen ethics or the consequences the autonomous or heteronomous adoption of determined norms and styles of life involve in their existence’.12 A tension is generated therefore that risks compromising from within the inclusivity of communicative reason. On the one hand, it means remaining receptive to every form of speech on the condition that the normative presuppositions for acting and for understanding are recognised. But, on the other hand, the restriction of the criteria of validity to the argumentative register alone has the effect of making it difficult to integrate deeper motives into the discussion, such as individual biographies and contexts of belonging, that can often only be expressed by informal registers, as happens for example in moral doctrines of a religious character. The attempt by Habermas in his most recent work to open communicative reason to the contributions of religion demonstrates this internal tension in his thought.13 On the one hand, Habermas recognises the necessity to transcend positions like that of Rawlsian liberalism that imply an exclusion of religious doctrines from the public debate in which the political will is formed. Yet on the other hand, he demands that the some10 11 12 13

See for example Ferry 1996, 86 – 104. Habermas 1984, 25. Marramao 2008, 82. On the role of religion in the late Habermas, see Cunico 2010; Lafont 2007, 239 – 259.

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how ‘mythical-symbolic’ content of religions be translated into a secular language accessible to all. The ‘institutional translation proviso’14 required by Habermas, then, involves a process of rationalisation which demythologises these contents, that is, a secularising transposition of the particular convictions into a universal reason. Now, this transposition is not without its own problems, since either one immediately acknowledges that citizens who are also religious believers are able to express their convictions in a language that is accessible to everybody (and therefore recognises a form of rationality even within the symbolic resources of the religions concerned) or it becomes unclear how – thanks to the cooperative contribution of secularised citizens – a private conviction might become universalisable where previously it was not.15

2. Beyond demystification: Paul Ricoeur The tension present in late Habermas shows how his proposal – though it has unquestionably constituted a barrier against the deconstructionist vogue – contains at its core a residue of rationalism. It is a form of rationalism which has the appearance of an excessive optimism towards the emancipatory force of communication, and which ends by espousing a much less inclusive rationality than what Habermas himself would have liked. This limitation becomes still more obvious if a series of thematic constellations that in the last two decades has acquired importance in philosophical debate is considered. It seems to recall the demand for a reason principally attentive to concrete contexts and the ‘extra-argumentative’ elements that contribute to constructing real identities and motivate the life of social actors. One might think, for example, of the ambiguous phenomenon of the ‘return of the religious’16 that seems to put in doubt the irreversibility of the process of secularisation and alludes to a renewed need for symbolic resources, or the growing attention to the individual and collective convictions which refer more to intuitive values than to reasoned arguments.17 Or again, the re-emergence of the problem 14 Habermas 2006b, 10. 15 On this topic, I permit myself to refer the reader to Lingua 2010, 20 – 27. 16 For a sociological analysis of the phenomenon, cf. Casanova 1994; Norris/Inglehart 2004. For an interesting synthesis of these philosophical aspects, see Tosel 2011. While on the contemporary aspects of secularisation one must not overlook Taylor 2007. 17 For instance, cf. Joas 2000.

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of myth, interpreted not only as content to be rationalised but as an authentic form for the transmission of meaning at the social level and as a source of normativity.18 These themes, then, find their centre of gravity in the philosophical interest in narrative as a discursive register more closely bound up with the history of existence and less with abstract argumentation.19 Paul Ricoeur is without doubt one of those contemporary authors who best display a sensibility towards the recovery of the philosophical dignity of these expressive and identificatory dimensions, as well as an attention to the veritative and normative force of history. His hermeneutics represents a particularly interesting contribution that helps to clarify what I have termed ‘the reconstructive sensibility’, because the valorisation of the symbolic order that it proposes assumes from its outset the demystifying critique, yet without being limited to that negative dimension. In his works from the 1960s, Ricoeur approaches interpretation as an exercise of unmasking those he termed, in a felicitous phrase, the ‘masters of suspicion’, by applying a different hermeneutics, founded on the ‘recollection of meaning’,20 that is, on a movement towards a reconstitution of meaning. This dualism returns in the form of various binaries that always recalls the need to avoid reducing the relationship with symbolic material to a simple negative genealogy: think, for instance, of the difference between ‘reductive hermeneutics’ and ‘restorative hermeneutics’, or of the difference between ‘demythization’ and ‘demythologization’.21 The idea of restoration and of demythologisation recall the fact that, ‘it is beyond destruction that the question is posed as to what thought, reason and even faith still signify’.22 However, going beyond destruction does not mean choosing one of the two poles of the binary and cancelling out the other. Rather it means seeking to keep them in constant dialectical relation. The philosophies of suspicion do an important job on symbolic material because mythos, or narrative, has always been a means of masking or dissimulating origins, a technique by which language says indirectly what cannot be 18 For instance, cf. Legendre 1999. 19 Think, for instance, of the role played by narration, not only in Ricoeur’s thought, but also as analysed by authors such as Charles Taylor (1989) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1984). For an introduction to the meaning of the rebirth of interest in narrative, see Rankin 2002, 1 – 12. 20 See Ricoeur 1970, 28 – 32. 21 See Ricoeur 1970, 530; Ricoeur 1989, 185, 326 – 330, 332 f. 22 Ricoeur 1970, 43.

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said directly. Yet these approaches do not take the subsequent steps of rearticulating and re-semanticising the demystified contents.23 It is this second aspect that defines the innovation of the Ricoeurian gesture, and that can inspire what Hans Joas called ‘affirmative genealogy’,24 thanks to which the archaeological search into symbolic elements does not result merely in an unmasking of the illusions and a consequent disenchantment or demystification, but the possibility of opening itself to the various levels of meaning that are archived in the language of symbolic-narrative. The same reconstructive dynamics is also found in Ricoeur’s later thought, when starting with Oneself as Another he explores the effect that the recovery of the narrated layers of existence has on ethico-political aspects. For Ricoeur during this period, narration is more directly articulated towards the topic of action and the issue of its moral justification. Once a story enters into the exchange of experiences and intersubjective communication, it is no longer free from being approved or being disapproved, since it is imputable to a person who acts. Linking stories to subject-agents means that mythos does not enjoy an ethical neutrality.25 Every narration tells of an action and an actor that make choices that are exposed to appraisal and which therefore trigger a process of blame or justification. This is why in Oneself as Another narration acts as the hinge between the moment of description, as a discourse concerning the factuality of events, and the moment of prescription, that is, the attribution to a lived personage of this event and the responsibility it entails.26 Ricoeur thus arrives indirectly at a recovery of the subject, without evading the critique and the suspicion that had transformed it into a ‘shattered cogito’ and without simply restoring a philosophy of the ‘exalted subject’.27 Rather this approach institutes a register of multiple and many-levelled sense, the matrix for which resides in the ability of narrative identity to be at the same time a construction of the continuity of vital ties and the place where their validity is judged. It is at this level that the Ricoeurian anthropological reflection becomes explicitly political and that the reconstructive requirement as affirmative genealogy meets the intersubjective 23 I am indebted to the work of Alberto Martinengo for these observations on the reconstructive dimension of dialectic between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, cf. Martinengo 2008b, 43 – 50. 24 Joas 2009, 15 – 24. 25 Cf. Ricoeur 1992, 115. 26 Ricoeur 1992, 152 f.; on these aspects, see Ferry 1994, 60 f. 27 Ricoeur 1992, 11 f.

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place of justification and validation. Emblematic of this is another conceptual coupling which lends its title to the volume of interviews Critique and Conviction and that resurfaces in other works in the polarity between reasoning and conviction.28 Instead of identifying argumentation alone as the instrument of normative justification as Habermas does, Ricoeur proposes to enact a subtle dialectic between argumentation and conviction, according to which only their co-implication or inter-involvement can permit them to make a responsive moral judgment upon concrete situations. And this ‘precisely because argumentation is not simply posited as the antagonist of tradition and convention, but as the critical agency operating at the heart of conviction, argumentation assuming the task not of eliminating, but of carrying them to the level of “considered convictions”’.29 The valorisation of the symbolic as a form not external but internal to rationality now becomes – due to the ethico-political turn of Ricoeurian thought that occurred in the 1990s – the rehabilitation of contexts in which identity and conviction mature. With respect to these contexts the argumentation is, however, above all an ‘abstract segment’30 of a discursive plural proceeding through which various linguistic games acquire value, games which contribute to forming the positions from which the same arguments themselves acquire value. It is here, then, that the restorative hermeneutics is enriched with new significance: it is no longer only an affirmative genealogy that contrasts with the ‘negative’ orientation of the masters of suspicion, but rather becomes a wider articulation between genealogy and justification, between narration and discursive validation, in which a subtle dialectic works between the narrative genesis of individual and collective identities and their critical justification.

3. Validity of the argument and vulnerability of the person: The ‘reconstructive principle’ according to Jean-Marc Ferry As befits his case for the necessity of re-articulating narration and reasoning, and thereby recovering the validity of the discursive register expressed, Ricoeur’s reflection finds an unexpected consonance with some 28 Ricoeur 1991, 161 f. 29 Ricoeur 1992, 288. 30 Ricoeur 1992, 287.

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followers of the Habermasian program.31 Among these it is worth taking a look at the third figure who interests us here. I refer to the philosophical project of Jean-Marc Ferry, since it makes of ‘reconstruction’ a programmatic notion whose objective is to value the complementary relation between the historical-contextual resources of narrative and the universalising requirement of argumentation, as fundamental elements of rationality. Its ‘reconstructive ethics’,32 while maintaining the procedural system of Diskursethik, points towards a specific acknowledgment of the individual persons involved, with their particular history that, though often difficult to translate precisely into terms of rational argumentation, nevertheless conditions and structures the concrete positions taken in an argument. The philosophy of Ferry therefore links up with the critical angle of the Frankfurt tradition, with attention paid to the contextual aspects, the role of convictions and the symbolic horizons of hermeneutic enquiry. This lends to ‘reconstruction’ a strong theoretical capacity, as a notion that not only describes contemporary sensibility, but can also constitute the blueprint of a plan to redefine and to extend public reason. Against the idea that argumentation constitutes the only modality of discursive validation, Ferry proposes in Les puissances de l’exprience a systematic plurality of forms of speech based on four registers – narration, interpretation, argumentation and reconstruction – each with a specific level of reflexivity and a distinct normative capacity.33 With these classifications Ferry does not aim to distinguish diverse genres or formal styles: the discrimination that organises the partition into four categories is in fact pragmatic. It is rooted in the various types of discursive action that are put into play and is able to evidence the variety of elements that is working behind and within the communicative construction of identities. This same conception of a plural system of discursive registers means that none of them can claim exclusive priority, or supremacy as the locus of validity. Rather they all contribute in various ways to communicative rationality. This is valid not only for the register of argumentation – which, as we have seen, represents for Habermas the prime register for the justification through which interlocutors might be persuaded to reach consensus – but also for the narrative dimension to which Ricoeurian hermeneutics, and with it many contemporary speech-act theories, attribute su31 I am thinking of several authors such as Seyla Benhabib, Jean-Marc Ferry and Albrecht Wellmer. Cf. Benhabib 1986, 338 – 339; Ferry 1996; Wellmer 1991. 32 Cf. Ferry 1996. 33 Cf. Ferry 1991a, 103 – 157.

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premacy in the construction of identity and a ‘near-monopoly of the substantial issues’.34 Ferry thinks that Ricoeur overrates the capacity of the narrative dimension and does not recognise that narration as a discursive register suffers from a logical and normative deficit.35 The moment of reconstruction, as the fourth moment of the system, has but one strategic function: being a register of speech in and of itself, it also represents a moment to resume reflection and an opportunity for integration of the previous registers, without being sutured exclusively to any of those particular registers. It allows for a ‘shift in the focus of the narrative by structuring them through reasoning’,36 serving to correct the superimposition that occurs on the narrative level between res factae and res fictae, therefore being able to contextualise not only the sense of a story, but also its claims to truth. If it does not come to maturity reflectively through a critical thematisation of the narrative element of identity, it lends itself rather to processes of ideological auto-justification; thus it is necessary that it decentres itself in more reflective and critical forms that check the tendency towards an idiosyncratic closure.37 But why does Ferry call ‘reconstruction’ the fourth register? Certainly the term refers to a retrospective movement of reflective mediation different from the gesture of deconstruction, even if in Ferry’s work there is no direct comparison with deconstruction. The notion of reconstruction, however, should not be read in direct opposition to deconstruction, but rather in relation to the need to break with the formal restrictions and delimitations that are abstract and hardly sensitive to the historical nature of reasoning. Thus, it is necessary to emphasise that reconstruction is not simply reactive and it does not allude to a return to irretrievably lost identities, as if resorting to some tradition that could prevail as such, but works on concrete forms in which are manifested the requirements of a universality of reason. A twofold movement of rationality operates that on the one hand is critico-demystifying in its encounters with every form of dogmatic hypostatisation, comprising the violent forms of argumentative reason, and on the other hand is reconstructive-restitutive, as by recovering the more expressive forms of speech it thematises the need for justification.38 It therefore does not propose taking a retrograde 34 35 36 37 38

Ferry 1991b, 103. Cf. Ferry 1994, 59 – 70. Ferry 1996, 55 – 56. Ferry 1996, 43 – 45. Ferry 1991b, 138.

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step regarding modern critical thought, but rather a step forward, implementing and expanding rationality, so as to render it sensitive to a series of elements that modernity has neglected. This reconstructed dimension becomes evident in the ethico-political reflection that Ferry declines to depart from in his theory of discursive registers.39 In ‘reconstructive ethics’ a central role is given to the experience of the other and the suffering that may concretely impede intersubjective communication, for which purpose the discussion goes beyond the strictly argumentative style at the basis of rationality to recognise the need for a reconciliation of memory and the recognition of the person. On the ethical side, reconstruction therefore demands a deepening of the requirement for a justification that is not limited to rational validity but is in a position to integrate an acknowledgment of the vulnerability of the subjects involved and of the particular history of which they are bearers. Reconstructive ethics at the same time thus becomes an ethics of recognition of the other’s vulnerability, and an ethics of responsibility in the interests of justice and truth cooperatively sought out, without any one of the interlocutors being in prior possession of the key that leads to consensus. One of the more significant aspects that reconstructive sensibility acquires in Ferry, is its ability to articulate the genesis and justification of validity. From this point of view, reconstruction does not mean merely re-tracing and ordering the historical elements that contribute to identifying the values and the convictions sustained by all, but also implies a critical reconstruction of the origins of these values, helping to overcome the different kinds of violence that may have generated a lack of acknowledgment of the persons involved. The genealogical moment must make reference to criteria of validity, but such criteria cannot be founded on decontextualised a priori claims; they must emerge reflectively in the same experience of communication. For this to happen, ‘critical charity’40 is necessary, that is, an attitude of real openness in comparing the symbolic forms in which beliefs belonging to other sensibilities or cultures are expressed; this openness is the only attitude that can encourage the emergence of that spontaneous ethical attitude of mutual acknowledgment.

39 Cf. Ferry 1996; Ferry 2000; Ferry 2010. 40 Ferry 2004, 204.

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4. Conclusion As one can see from the course I have followed, from Habermas’s rehabilitation of reason, passing through Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, to the articulation between genesis and validity which leads to Ferry’s systematising of public discourses, a philosophical analysis of reconstruction demands the recognition of the plurality of this notion. All the more so when the issue at hand is that of the contemporary reconstruction of reason. There is, however, a common element worth remembering in conclusion, and related to what has already been said about the necessity of thinking of reconstructive sensibility not only in regressive terms, as a simple strategy of ‘turning backwards’. It can be summarised as the necessity of not interpreting the expression ‘reconstruction of rationality’ by giving the genitive a purely objective meaning. The issue at stake in the authors I have examined as a terrain of philosophical experimentation is not rehabilitating reason from outside, for in this case every reconstruction would become a simple ‘restoration’. The true challenge is instead the subjectivegenitive sense of that expression: it is the same rationality that from within is called upon to reconstruct itself, that is, to rearticulate itself by taking the process to its logical conclusion in accordance with the destructive critique while recognising, however, that destruction is not the only form of contemporary philosophy that can undertake the task at hand. Translated by Mike Watson

Towards a Reconstructive Critique of Historical Reason Jean-Marc Ferry As a direct heritage of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the concept of historical reason is, for us, intimately linked to the modern idea of a universal history. This concept realises the scope of reason in the world as it progresses toward a potentially limitless development in the fields of knowledge and human liberty. It is essential to contextualise the birth of historical reason in order to understand the changes that brought it to a moment of crisis at the beginning of the 19th century. The romanticism of Schlegel, the aestheticism of Humboldt,1 the vitalism of Rickert, and the historicism of Dilthey2 anticipated the contemporary, and not only the German, movements of culturalism and structuralism in a critique that culminates in the crisis of historical reason. This critique was then radicalised in the 20th century in the form of a veritable destruction which, philosophically speaking, linked up readily with the Heideggerian project of the ‘destruction’ of Western metaphysics. As is well known, this means that today we do not feel authorised to postulate a rationality within history. Neither do we consider universal history as a rational process, even less as a reasonable process, and for reasons that are not only ontological or epistemological, but also ethical and political. Among the non-theoretical motives for dismissing historical reason, first and foremost is the horrific moral, political, and even cosmological experience of the 20th century. The experience of this catastrophe, which can hardly be expressed in words, abruptly refuted the illusion of a ‘reason within history’, of a history that necessarily ought to have realised reason. With respect to the catastrophe, those who, like Adorno and Horkheimer,3 maintained the Hegelian dialectic of the reason of history, inverted the optimistic or providential schema by showing the fundamental irrationality at work in the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’. 1 2 3

Humboldt 1988. Dilthey 2002. Horkheimer/Adorno 2002.

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Drawing on this problematic, the critique of historical reason returns to affirm the separation between logic and reason. As Horkheimer argues in The Authoritarian State, ‘as long as world history follows its logical course, it fails to fulfil its human destiny’.4 For Horkheimer, history is the logical process in the course of which reason betrays itself, culminating in the triumph of instrumental rationality, the end of the individual, the reign of administered society, etc. In the development of this critique, the inheritors of Hegel quite ironically rejoin Heidegger in their discussions of the culture of technics. But let us return to theoretical motifs, that is, to ontological or epistemological questions, according to which it was equally necessary to leave behind the concept of historical reason. This condition results in a work of reflection that philosophy, as well as the social sciences broadly understood and German humanistic studies more specifically, effectuated over the course of the 19th century and continued into the 20th century with hermeneutic theory and neo-historicism. After providing a survey of the history of this concept from its inception to its destruction, I will attempt to show in what sense a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason can be envisaged after its hermeneutic destruction without reiterating the metaphysical project of the philosophies of history.

Historical reason: The formation of a concept One question is at the basis of the concept of historical reason, formed as it was at the heart of modern philosophies of history. This fundamental question belongs to the context of the Enlightenment: How can reason realise itself in the world, so that humanity might fulfil its potential? At the same time, this question reintroduces the revolutionary problematic of the transition from theory to praxis, that is, to the problematic of the becoming-positive of natural law. Either there is the imposition of reason by force following the Jacobin model, or one can imagine a scenario that avoids political violence, locating the emergence of reason, not in the transcendent exercise of political will, but in the immanence of the historical process. The latter possibility brings together the rationalist philosophies of history during the revolutionary period, including Kant. From this point of view, the immanent solution to the problem of the 4

Horkheimer 1982, 117.

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realisation of reason in the world can only be furnished by the pre-dialectical model of a globally rational outcome of human interactions. This image had already appeared in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; it is implicit in the thought of Leibniz; it is thematised in Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘invisible hand’; it is elaborated in the political writings of Kant as a ‘plan of nature’; and it is consecrated in Hegel’s philosophy of history as the ‘cunning of reason’. The Hegelian theme of the cunning of reason means that reason, in order to realise itself, uses its other, its opposite (evil, madness, that which aims to negate). Further, reason’s other blindly realises the ends that reason, in its powerful lucidity, recognises as profoundly its own, even when it requires almost no effort to realise these ends, but lets reason’s opposite function in its place. And yet, if we call to mind this well known Hegelian theme, it is not for the purpose of denouncing yet again an outdated and problematic mode of thought (today discredited for moral as well as scientific reasons); it is rather in order to call attention to a certain number of important points that follow from it. Historical reason, strictly understood from the perspective of the ‘cunning of reason’, fundamentally obeys a natural logic. Admittedly, Kant does not introduce the ‘cunning of reason’ as a philosophical idea except in terms of his concept of teleology, by which nature, or man’s ‘inherent tendencies’ would mechanically realise the juridical preconditions for the reign of liberty. For Kant, the cunning of reason is only conceivable from a methodological point of view, in which one assumes that the ‘universal laws of nature’ govern human actions as much as anything else. Notably, in making this argument, he draws an ontological distinction between nature and liberty. This is equally true for Hegel, however, even though this aspect of history as the cunning of reason is much more evident and fully endorsed in Hegel than it is within the Kantian system. In contrast to Kant, the cunning of reason designates a manner of being, for Hegel, that addresses itself to nature but not to spirit. Initially, the category of cunning was specifically introduced in the dialectic of labour as a technique by which one manipulates natural processes in the service of larger ends. Thereafter, Hegel considers cunning in terms of its didactic function, using it as a metaphor to depict reason in history. Yet the cunning of reason plays no role in the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the very most, spirit is only subject to cunning insofar as it becomes nature (e. g. as a psychological drive). But as a movement of conscience and self-reflection, spirit describes an entirely autonomous historical process that does not emphasise

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the cunning of reason. This is a movement of freedom, bearing itself out in the experience of consciousness as it is continuously deepened by its own self-reflection. It follows that, reduced to the schema of cunning (whatever name one gives it), historical reason in fact lacks historicity. Take, for example, the passions, or the war of all against all: the cunning of reason allows for the reversal of these situations, overturning the passions through reason or anticipating an eternally peaceful world. Between this point of departure and the future point of arrival, there is only an ahistorical, pseudo-natural mechanics. Even if we presuppose the eventual realisation of history, this moment cannot be called ‘dialectical’ except in the most impoverished, physicalist sense having to do with the effects of crude mechanical interaction. True historical reason, therefore, must be located outside the mechanics of cunning. In Kant’s writings on history, historicity only emerges through the natural mechanics of ego-centred drives as they progressively give way to a veritable dialectic of social communication. For Kant, this progress of the spirit is introduced through the category of the public sphere (ffentlichkeit). For Fichte, notably in his Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge (Nova Methodo), as well as in Foundations of Natural Right, the important ‘category’ of Aufforderung, or the ‘summons’, which emanates from another ego towards the auto-limitation of the self, situates the fundamental human condition of historicity. This category of the summons not only reveals itself in the impulse towards natural law, but even becomes the very essence of historical reason. Thus, Fichte described our intuition of historicity as a chain of communicative acts between separate egos. Though Fichte’s philosophical system aimed at understanding this succession in terms of causality, he indirectly revealed a logical framework, a fleeting discovery of what we might call the ‘illocutionary bond’. On the other hand, Hegel’s most developed concept of historical reason is merely hinted at towards the end of his introduction to the Lessons on the Philosophy of History. Here, Hegel affirms that the central question revolves around the transmission of an intersubjective national spirit, of one Volksgeist to another. This indicates that historicity is made most explicit as an internal dimension of the philosophy of spirit. In fact, it is in Hegel’s Jena lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (rather than in the Phenomenology of Spirit) that he explicates the logic of the relationship between self and other. As he makes clear, the central issue is self-referentiality, in which communication plays a fundamentally intersubjective role.

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Thus Hegel does distinguish between a mechanical and a truly dialectical concept of historical reason. Among the three great metaphysical paradigms of history (nature, freedom, and spirit), only spirit seems truly pertinent to the question of the reason of history. And this is the crux of the matter, for the critique of historical reason is closely tied to the scientific appropriation of this metaphysical paradigm.

Historical reason: Critique and destruction The critique of historical reason proceeds simultaneously from two different elements: on the one hand, the rejection of universal philosophies of history, and on the other, a desire to establish a theoretical domain of autonomous objects for the human sciences (i. e. the Geisteswissenschaften). First of all, as opposed to the idealist philosophies of history, the critique of historical reason calls for the scientific and positivistic saving of the historical phenomena. Given this, it is essential to establish a scientific point of view about historical phenomena before we can begin to interrogate the ‘meaning’ of history. This demand for a positivistic project was welcomed in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century in Ranke’s German school of history (in which, however, Droysen did not participate).5 Just as importantly, we must distinguish between the meaning of history and the end of history. In contrast to philosophies that propose an end to history, the question of historical meaning is still paramount for our investigation, although we must nonetheless circumscribe this question with greater care. Rather than interrogate some general meaning of history taken in the global sense, we must instead question the meaning that emerges from delimited historical constellations. In other words, our first step will be to evacuate the concept of ‘universal history’. From this, a new type of epistemological consciousness is formed in which the historical is recognised as the domain of the particular, while at the same time universally valid general laws subsume the physical domain. Whereas physical sciences fall under the category of ‘nomology’, historical sciences can be classified as ‘idiographic’. The particularity that the world of social history focuses on is thus thought under the her5

Droysen 1974. For Droysen, as opposed to Ranke, ‘the primary purpose of the practice of history is not to establish historical facts’.

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meneutic category of the individual and individualism. In other words, the historical context in which a social or cultural phenomenon is pertinent is also the context in which this phenomenon must be grasped in its totality. Furthermore, culture (as a specific form of life) establishes itself as the reference point for a science of history. When situated historically beside other forms of life, culture makes up a totality of symbolically structured meaning. In this manner, epistemological reflection on the Geisteswissenschaften, as Neo-Kantianism and German Historicism interpreted it, rejoins a scientific usage of the philosophical concept of the ‘objective spirit’ and even of the ‘absolute spirit’. In other words, historical culture (i. e. a singular historical world) understands itself as an objective presentation of the spirit incarnated in the institutions, significations, and representative symbols of a given society or culture. The hermeneutic cohesiveness of this symbolic constellation refers to the idea of a ‘principle’ that characterises this historical world. When posing the methodological question of how knowledge approaches the domain of objects, we are dealing with a symbolically pre-structured reality. The texture of the historical world, reduced in this way to the cultural world, is fundamentally semantic and pragmatic. This semantic coherence cannot be ‘explained’ by the mechanical model of cause and effect, but rather must be ‘understood’ through its intimate participation in the human world of language, actions and expressions of lived experience. This leads to a series of epistemological problems linked to the circular nature of symbolic interpretation in the historical and social sciences. What, for the concept of historical reason, are the ramifications of this self-understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften? Since the object in question is no longer universal history, but the symbolic construct of each singular cultural world, the question of a relationship, of a possible liaison between these worlds can no longer even be posed. From the perspective of the defunct concept of historical reason, this substitution of an ‘historical world’ for a ‘universal history’ returns to dissolve the question of history in a theory of culture. The diachronic process fades into a synchronic structure,6 and the historical worlds become cultural monads, in which reason is no longer revealed in the historical process where events emerge into time in their successive order. This epistemological disinte6

Cassirer 1988.

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gration of universal history can be philosophically elaborated in the hermeneutic deconstruction of historical reason. This is not the hermeneutic element itself, but the elevation of hermeneutics to a vision of the world that in turn consecrates the destruction of historical reason. Exemplary in this regard is the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.7 According to his argument, the logic of this destruction is carried out in two stages: the critique of subjectivity and the ontologisation of understanding.

The critique of subjectivity The critique of subjectivity, which becomes most relevant in the consideration of Aufklrung’s relationship to history, attacks the Enlightenment’s attitude towards tradition. Importantly, this critique claims that one cannot submit tradition to a tribunal of reason. The systematic critique of all presumptions is the error, the central illusion of the Aufklrung, and is actually its fundamental assumption: a prejudice against prejudices in general. In effect, this critique of tradition’s inherited assumptions maintains the pretence that it is itself free of all such assumptions and outside the tradition that it purports to examine. This is the Aufklrung’s false conscience. Tradition and inherited language furnish precisely that ‘bias toward authority’ without which critique’s truth-claims would not even be conceivable. Furthermore, critique itself can be understood as a form of tradition. But above all, critique cannot accomplish anything without language and, more generally speaking, without a certain linguistic framework that pre-structures meaning, truth, and being. Thus, this fundamental linguistic framework is the ‘always already’, where each discursive act must presuppose a meaning. The possibility of locating truth, therefore, does not follow from subjective reflection, but rather depends on an already-understood linguistic structure that governs our discourse at any given moment. As we shall see, this interpretation will return to ontologise the methodological principle of meaningful explanation developed by historicism for the Geisteswissenschaften.

7

See Gadamer 1969.

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The ontologisation of hermeneutic ‘interpretation’ A central idea of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy (who in this was a good student of Heidegger’s), is that all aspirations toward enworlded truth fundamentally depend on a factual disposition toward language, which makes possible at any given moment the articulation of propositions that put the question of meaning and truth into play. In Heideggerian terms, nothing is spoken that does not presuppose the hearing of that which had been more originally spoken, where the essence of language becomes speech [parole]. In language’s tendency towards fact, truth is presupposed as having been spoken at any given moment, because language always returns to an event, its origin of meaning. This epochal event governs enworlded discourse. Moreover, it is historically contingent, so that the projected image of history has the quality of being ‘always otherwise understood’ in accordance with the ‘game of truth’ and the ‘mask of being’. This hermeneutic vision of the world rests on theories that had been effectively critiqued by contemporary thinkers such as Dietrich Bçhler8 and Karl-Otto Apel.9 These theories perpetuate Hegel’s model of history which, as a history of spirit, focuses on the relation between truth and signification. This theory retains from Hegel the fundamentally antiKantian affirmation of a rationality that is always situated in history and expressed through symbols. In other words, truth does not transcend history, but rather resides in a linguistic milieu through which the history of spirit is effectuated. In this sense, the truth is not (to paraphrase Husserl) an ‘immanent transcendence’: that is, immanent to discourse, taking shape in the world, which would claim to permanently transcend the historical limitations of cultural contexts that ground its truth-claims. The key distinction from Hegel, however, is located in the hermeneutic refusal of critical reason, or ‘negative’ work that proceeds by enquiry, revision, doubt, and despair, and which follows the essential line of reason through the various stages of consciousness and the different moments of achieved understanding. These moments are not produced, but given, ‘thrown’ (geschickt) into the world as a ‘destiny’ (Schicksal) in which the individual subject has no role. Each of these moments in turn defines an ‘epoch’ of unmediated emergence, and these epochs would succeed one another without rhyme or reason, as though arbitrarily. On the 8 9

See Bçhler 1985. See Apel 1980a; Apel 1980b.

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other hand, Gadamer located in a shared horizon of meanings some intercultural communicative links that would provide the truth in historical reason. But in Gadamer’s oversimplified version, the culturalist or structuralist degrammaticalisation of history ends in the radical discontinuity of cultures, in a surrealist history that is no longer considered according to the categories of production or communication, but according to the category of ‘creation’. In terms of this new category, each unique sociohistorical constitution is abstracted or made absolute in a continuum of meaning and reason and, because of this, it can only be the effect of a ‘radical creation’ (in Cornelius Castoriadis’s sense of a mysteriously organised spontaneity, untethered from any process of formation).10

The idea of a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason For the purposes of this sketch, I will be pursuing two strategically important questions: A. Why is the hermeneutic deconstruction of historical reason not intellectually satisfying? B. How might a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason be possible? A. Internal critique of the hermeneutic understanding of the world The first point in this critique is related to the limitation of the principle of understanding as it applies to historical reality. This limitation is difficult to define, however, because the hermeneutic principle of understanding is opposed to the analytic principle of explanation, or to the so-called ‘principle of reason’. It is not, therefore, a question of accepting this principle of reason in our understanding of history. Rather, such a refusal would be methodologically justified by an epistemological foundation within the Geisteswissenschaften that responds to a broader concept of the ‘understanding of meaning’. In truth, the ontological hypostasis of method poses the greater problem as it moves from a systematic autonomy of understanding as an intellectual operation to a real autonomy of 10 See Castoriadis 1975.

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already-understood linguistic structures. For example, the pretext that signification is irreducible to causation denies the existence of any real link between the different historical significations. More importantly, such an approach excludes out of hand the hypothesis of a logical connection between symbolically structured cultural ensembles. Thus, one certainly escapes what was thought to be the dogmatism belonging to historical reason which would entail an irreversible succession in the order of culturally produced significations. On the other hand, one represses the interpretative fact that recognises the impossibility of reversing an historical sequence. Consequently, one must refuse to grant the principle of understanding itself (understood in terms of diachronic history) in order to keep the logico-semantic coherence exclusively within the order of synchronic culture. One denies that it is hermeneutically impossible to reverse this sequence: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Dilthey, Heidegger (or again: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky). Under the pretext that history is free and indeterminate, one acts as though Homer ‘could have’ just as well emerged between Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or antiquity between the feudal period and the modern era. The second point of this critique speaks to its limited approach to the linguistic universe (or symbolic reality). Each already-understood linguistic structure is, in effect, secretly conceived as a semantic rather than a syntactic disposition. It follows that the universal element of structure continues unperceived, as well as the necessity of this universal, as understood from a pragmatic point of view. Implicitly, each historical event is considered culturally idiosyncratic to the point that cultural understanding becomes impossible within the symbolic framework, beginning with the problem of performative speech (at once differentiated and univocal, that is to say, specified according to pronouns, voices, and verb tense and mood). This ‘universal grammar’ is itself, before any semanticisation of language, the result of a pragmatic differentiation (that is realised in action) of the relationship between actors and their world. Such a relationship also postulates a process of disillusionments and frustrations, a typically dialectical process in which experience is not limited to a linguistic milieu. It follows that this hermeneutic idealism can doubt that communication between historical worlds is possible only because of the difference of language, even as it renounces explanations of the fact that communication is possible between these worlds despite this difference of language.

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Despite a close interrogation of this trans-historical communication between cultures, historical time is not simply understood within that which distinguishes it from mathematical or physical time,11 and this is the third point in our critique. In fact, it is only from the perspective of physical time that the succession of historical worlds is arbitrary, at the cost of the absolute determinism of history. Whence the following dilemma: either historical succession is contingent, but without recognising an irreversible historical sequence that is hermeneutically manifested, or historical succession is necessary, but without granting either the autonomy of meaning or the liberty of history. By contrast, if one no longer considers historical time according to the model of physical time, this dilemma is resolved. As I will argue in the next section, this resolution depends on the pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason. B. Pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason12 This response demands a distinction between a ‘dogmatic approach’ and a ‘critical approach’, which, nevertheless, are accorded equal force within this discussion. The ‘dogmatic approach’ assumes a theory of experience and education that integrates the logic of discourse. This approach was most notably introduced by philosophical anthropology along three principal lines: language (understood as the representation and production of symbolic forms); labour (understood in terms of the appropriation of external nature by a technical reproduction of its mechanism); and social interaction (understood as an intersubjective relation marked by defining moments of love, education, and the struggle for reciprocal recognition, eventuating in systems of morality). This is not the place to systematically develop this description or delineate the connections between these different moments in the construction of identity, whether individual or collective. It suffices to note the failure of these attempts, which is not necessarily due to the scope of their project, but rather to the strictures of such systematic thinking. Even within these three dimensions of subject formation (language, labour, social interaction), there is insufficient attention to the historicity in which these identities take shape. They lack a fourth, historical, aspect, namely the dimension of discourse. Whereas language, labour, and social interaction construct a constitutive 11 See Ricoeur 1983. 12 I have developed this argument further in Ferry 1991a.

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experience of social reality, discourse thematises the experience constructed within these milieux and differentiates relationships in the world. This process of thematisation is itself the reflexive experience that constitutes historical reality. Discourse can be defined as reflexive action with respect to differentiated action, and thus discourse’s capacities realise grammatical capacities. On the one hand, discourse establishes self-awareness, which is also a link of inter-awareness between different moments in the formation of personal identity. On the other hand, discourse forms identities and their correspondent understanding of the world as it passes through different registers or specific modes of expression, such as narration, interpretation, argumentation, reconstruction. We are dealing with a closed sequence that is an ideal type (to use Weber’s phrase) in the sense that it corresponds to essential moments in the development of self-awareness and successful inter-communication. Each discursive category, as a dominant register of discourse, can also be understood as an organising principle. The moment of narration corresponds to a mythical understanding centred on categories of event and destiny, while the moment of interpretation corresponds to a religious, cosmocentric, or theocentric understanding organised according to the categories of law and justice. The moment of argumentation corresponds to critical understanding centred on the categories of reason and law, whereas the moment of reconstruction corresponds to a dialectical understanding organised according to the categories of history and language. Hegel aimed to detect the logico-semantic passage from one of these categories to the next. Today, considering the different ‘turns’ in contemporary philosophy since Peirce, Frege, Austin, Wittgenstein and others, Hegel’s intention endures. This shift is less speculative, however, consisting in the abandonment of logic for pragmatics, in an attempt to understand the categorial development of historical reason. Such an attention to history incorporates the perspective of differentiated discourse registers, as well as their respective overcoming in light of a resolution to autonomous questions, that is, those questions brought forth by responses that are proposed from one moment to the next. However, even with the full realisation of this ‘dogmatic’ approach, understood in the technical Kantian sense of ‘determinant movement’, the pragmatic reconstruction of the reason of history according to a discursive logic nevertheless remains unsatisfactory. The dogmatic approach represents at most a process of successful formation. While this process is specific to each cultural identity, the concept of universal history must ad-

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equately demonstrate the progress of historical reason at a level that reconnects these different identities among cultures and without excluding the possibility that these identities could eventuate in a complete formative development. In presupposing a theory of discourse, the ‘critical approach’ of a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason appeals to a theory of communication situated between cultural identities that are differentially organised in the milieux of labour, recognition, language and discourse. This approach fosters a concept of historical time that is radically distinct from concepts of physical time, and is equally capable of proposing a concept of historical reason that can remove the obstacles posed by determinism. Pragmatic reconstruction thus adopts a point of view in which historical time is specifically configured through the successful communication between different cultural worlds. In other words, if universal history requires a meaning, it constructs this meaning pragmatically through intercultural communication. Thus, the Greek classical world did not truly enter modern Western history until the Church Fathers undertook a process of intensive cultural interpretation during the middle ages. Without this retrospective ‘communication’ (largely aided by Islamic culture), the ancient Greek world could not have been integrated into the pragmatic historical time of Western Europe. Today, for example, the modern English and German cultures could in many respects be considered the inheritors of the ancient Greek world, even though they have no claim to being its physical descendants (which, in fact, is what we would have to consider the modern Greeks, who on the other hand do not necessarily appear as the historical inheritors of the ancient Greeks). This means that the sequential order that forms the semantic weave of history has its pragmatic basis only in communication. If the historical world no longer has an objective reality, this is because the discourse that organises the cultural worlds is also that by which the identity of each open culture is developed, for it is by means of the discourse itself that worlds effectively communicate with one another (or within themselves), and in this way their historicity becomes irreversibly fixed by a structure that always defines their identity in relation to other cultures. Identities form via an often-imperfect chain of communications, which at the same time interconnects the fabric of world history. From this perspective, what each of these cultures tells us forms a history in which neither the beginning nor the end is visible, but in which each moment that

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they represent, as a ‘communicational undertaking’, describes an irreversible succession of meaning. This communication shapes the sequential order in which one cultural identity cordons itself off from others. A cultural world does not allow itself to be historically situated except with respect to the significations that result from the manner in which it made itself available for translation according to a particular mode of understanding. This mode of understanding not only had its own source of experience, but also defined itself via previously lived experience given meaning by others. A culture does not communicate with others except by the reflexivity through which it reaches the ‘experience of experience’. It only cedes to history insofar as it is able to form itself by and through such a process of communication. By this we understand the canny reason of history that engages in the process of meaningful identification, proceeding via an educational formation that follows the development of ‘questions’ and ‘answers’. In other words, the irreversibility of sequential history is not guaranteed by a system of cause and effect, but by a dialectic of questions and answers. Though we are dealing with stylisation, the point eminently holds good for various domains of culture, whether, for example, in art history or science. The logical implications here are clear. It is not logically possible to reverse an illocutionary sequence of questions and responses emerging from the dialogical process, any more than it would be possible to reverse a causal succession emerging from physical interaction. In the first case as in the second, the irreversibility of such sequences is logically irrefutable. Nevertheless, this raises the determinist hypothesis that could potentially influence the theory of reason’s effect on the concept of history. Thus reconstructed, the concept of historical reason clearly reconciles the necessity of sequential order with the liberty of action located in illocutionary relationships. In this way, historical reason must be able to attenuate the partially closed manner in which the question of history often runs into the logical antinomy of freewill and determinism. For this reason the ‘answer’ should be thought of as free, in the absence of which there is only mechanical reaction, which is a consequence that does not belong to the logic of communication. Certainly it is not essential that this ‘answer’ take place in the world; nor is it necessary that this answer, if given, have a particular, determined content. By contrast, the necessary condition for the possibility of history requires that one moment provoke another as an answer to a question. This sequential order of events requires a strict determination of meaning by the dialec-

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tical relation, making it the necessary condition for the irreversible succession of time interpreted within the order of history (as opposed to physical time). These considerations permit the following conclusion: there is an objective element to these historical linkages that is not causal but illocutionary. This illocution (the act of speaking) permits a locution (that which is said) to enter into communication with an interlocutor. It is illocution, then, that puts the various moments of a sequence into contact. The ‘speaking’ of illocution is the pragmatic condition of a possible historical link between cultural significations, while the ‘spoken’ of locution confers on this link its particular semantic determination. Translated by Wilson Kaiser and Sarah Parker

Creative Delinking Evelyne Grossman The initial hypothesis of this paper is the following: a certain number of 20th-century writers and philosophers have explored, in the heart of the writing they invented, the painful modern experience of the destruction of linkages (psychic, linguistic, cultural, social, political). The object of my current research is the analysis of the diverse forms of creative delinking and relinking that have opened up within art, thought and literature. In my opinion, the question raised in this book, if I understand it properly, should be slightly changed. To my mind, what we should explore is less the possibility of reformulating the deconstructive issues in a reconstructive way, but rather how to live with deconstruction. My assumption is that deconstruction (or rather what I would call the delinking, the unabiding) is vital in every sense. It is the destructive power with which everyone has to live, to compose (in the sense of ‘coping with’, ‘dealing with’), to create. If we deny this force, if we try to oppose it by establishing institutions and laws, as ingenious, generous and well-meaning as they may be, sooner or later they will reappear as violence. I use the term ‘delinking’ not only in the sense defined by the psychoanalyst Andr Green (‘The analyst delinks the text and dements it’),1 but more broadly, and with acceptance not strictly psychoanalytic, in the sense that these negative processes which dissociate thought, opening it to other logical systems of rationality and creation. In this sense, contemporary ‘relinkages’ would invent novel modes of linking, not necessarily subject to prior models with aims that are normative, integrative (the ‘religere’ of religions, sacred or secular), or simply narrative. For fifteen years, my work has dealt with modern literary and philosophical works that rely on other modes of logic rather than those of narrative link or discursive rationality – be it a matter of narratives, literary fictions or philosophical texts, it is true that philosophical discourse has, as one knows, traditionally made regular use of the narrative, the example-story, the metaphor, or the narrativised dialogue. If one compares, however, the structure of the Platonic dialogues and the discursive ex1

Green 1993, 20.

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changes in Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation, the multi-voiced texts of Derrida (the Envois in his Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, the beginning of The Monolingualism of the Other), addressing the body in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (Corpus), one will appreciate the strangeness of these dissociated exchanges, employing a paradoxical logic of distended links that resonate at a distance. Similarly, it suffices to recall the famous definition of metaphor made by Proust at the beginning of the century in Remembrance of Things Past (‘Just as in life, when bringing two sensations together by a quality common to both, one will bring out their common essence, reuniting the one and the other in a metaphor to protect them from the contingencies of time’), to grasp all that which separates the Proustian syntax linking these chains of sensory association with the dissociated links of contemporary writing. Whether it is a matter of enlarging the field of sensation, of inventing new precepts and affects, as Deleuze says, or of redefining that which in writing is a bodily act, these texts no longer tell narratives, in the traditional sense of the term. Thus, I have attempted to reveal in the writings of Artaud and Joyce the invention of a poetic writing which stitches up the loss of links between body and psyche: cruelty and discorps in the case of Artaud; and, epiphanies, choreco, and chaosmos in the case of Joyce. My future research, my past experience of organising colloquia (on the passage of melancholy, the writings of the political body, the corporeal body of thought in the work of Michaux, the writing of the stage in Beckett, the body of the unformed, etc.), as well as articles dedicated to precise topics (the anaesthesia of affects and the feeling-at-a-distance found in the writing of Duras, the melancholy in Cline, the malaise of the body in Barthes, etc.), take part in the pursuit of this same query. The object of this research: not the narrative, imaginary, and metaphorical (being familial and oedipal structures), but instead the dissociation in writing (close at times to a psychosis), the relation to the real, and the attempt to invent new creative links outside of sublimation – in the Freudian sense of the term – wherein meaning without the motifs of above and below, the schemata of ascension and progression which distinguish, as Jean-Luc Nancy has shown, the Freudian discourse on art and cultural sublimation. As an echo of the enmity of contemporary writing toward the narrative story, one should take into account the Foucauldian critique of the teleological idea of chronological and progressive history, in favour of notions such as archaeology, genealogy, emergence and discontinuous history. Many modern texts are thus written out of experiences similar to psychotic destructuration, apparently transitory and controlled. I have at-

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tempted to analyse the functioning and logic of this shocking psychic plasticity that allows its authors to explore (or even suffer) the game of sometimes violent, potentially destructive dissociations, then to re-emerge relinking them in a style which embeds a body of writing and thought into reality. Thus, far from the mere surrealist games of mental automatism aiming to release the preconscious springs of expression, the strange writings of Blanchot, Duras, Beckett, Lacan or Derrida, for example, open to logics of thought in language that previously did not always have currency in literary or university institutions. Writings quite different from one another, it goes without saying, but whose deeper shared lineage is important to perceive. It is hardly useful to recall at length the two major upheavals that situate these writings: first the post-Freudian, and its theorisation of a deunified subject (cleaved, as Lacan would say) traversed by the unconscious and desire, a theory which caused the illusion of a subject that is centred, intentional, and conscious, master of itself and of its reason, to vacillate (the postulate, thus, of a worrisome human irresponsibility). And second, the trauma of unbridled, mechanised, technological massacres, which since the First World War and continuing on to modern bloodshed – industrialised, genocidal, terroristic – have haunted the 20th and 21st centuries (the postulate of an equally worrisome and irrepressible destruction impulse). This is what Freud attempted to theorise as an unremovable death instinct deeply anchored within human beings. Like several aspects of Freudian mythology, the notion, as one knows, is controversial. I would however like to put it to the test (subjecting it to advances in neuroscience on cerebral destruction and reconstruction) through a transdisciplinary and methodical examination of literary and philosophical works which have experimented with the delinking of thought as concerns its analytic and interpretive force, its dazzling creative inventions, and its power to reconstruct new links. It will thus be a matter of examining how these works have proposed (outside narration, outside narrative) the invention of new modes of thought which could perhaps inspire, well beyond their own fields, those who reflect on the mutation of our models of western (or ‘globalised’) civilisation. Moving the question away from the utilitarian function of literature or philosophy in our societies (the too immediately simple demand, ‘what is this good for?’), and equally away from the Sartrean thesis of social and political engagement (the literature of praxis), the approach that I would like to propose invites an interrogation of the example-making and

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model-making functions of a certain number of 20th-century works in the domain of literature and thought. In their fearless confrontation with negativity, the inhuman, and the infinite at work in all creation, these works, it seems to me, have allowed the drafting of new paths for the invention of other psychic, cultural and social links. Deleuze said that writers, philosophers, and artists are explorers, not of the (phenomenological) lived, but of the unlivable. They have seen and heard forces too strong for them, unbreathable, intolerable, ‘and the binds of life along with that which threatens it’. They return from this ‘eyes red, eardrums burst’.2 It is this unlivable aspect that surpasses all possibility of an integration of thought that expresses itself in these writings. These are archaic experiments that we must assemble in order to read and then reach those not yet constituted dimensions which destructure and reorganise their writing. Considering the texts of Artaud, one will not, then, search to determine what is ‘literally receivable’ (to reprise the expression that he used in 1923 in his letters to Jacques Rivi re)3 from what would be gathered, for example, from asylum writings. One might as well try to contrast what is fiction and what is critique in the writings of Blanchot, or what is literature or philosophy in Derrida. What unites these writings, beyond their singularity, is precisely that they overturn the paradigms of our calm rationality. With this in mind, the question of whether neurological wounds exist or not in the case of Antonin Artaud (or Nietzsche, or Hçlderlin, etc.) is of interest only if it is moved into the context of what creative potentialities these wounds could have allowed; one is aware of the fascination held by Breton and the surrealists for such ‘natural’ delinkings in Artaud, whereas they themselves had to put into place experimental conventions of dissociated thought: exquisite corpses, waking dreams, and objective chance. As I have tried to show in my last two books,4 it is from this formidable power of creation residing in the heart of negativity that these authors, exploring that which undoes forms and overturns identities, tirelessly relink that which their analysis has dissociated: deconstruction (Derrida), ‘undoing the work [dsoeuvrement]’, and disaster (Blanchot), ‘unsaying [ddit]’ (Levinas), decreation, literature of the unword (Beckett), and Lacan’s litany of ‘there is no…’. A precise comparison of these gestures 2 3 4

Deleuze 1991, 161 – 162; Deleuze 1993, 14. Artaud 2004, 69. Grossman 2004; Grossman 2008.

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of unlinking will have to be pursued. One could add: the discordance of faculties (Deleuze against Kant), the breach (Bachelard, Althusser), the ‘constitutive dissociation’ (in the Hçlderlin of Lacoue-Labarthe), the dissonant (Adorno), the historical discontinuity (Foucault), the disenclosion (Jean-Luc Nancy), the fission of the self (Levinas).

Delinking and the inhuman In ‘Literature and the right to death’, Maurice Blanchot extensively comments on ‘the prodigious power of the negative’ that Koj ve has read in Hegel’s work. ‘This excess of “negativity”’, Blanchot writes, ‘is for us the infinite heart of the passion of thought.’5 This is a sentence we must keep in mind when we read the texts of these writer-thinkers of the 20th century, if we hope to understand the link between anxiety, the exit of the self and this indefatigable energy of the negative, which comprises the singularity of their writings. When all is accounted for, that which they confront is what sometimes they have called the inhuman, sometimes the sublime. The two terms, one knows, were privileged in turn by Jean-FranÅois Lyotard, who emphasised the role of confronting the inhuman in cases of anxiety, in the sense that the power of destruction surpasses the individual, an ‘unpresentable’ that overwhelms thought. Such a paradoxical sentiment of joy and anxiety, of excitation and depression, is exactly, he emphasised, that which 17th- and 18th-century Europe rebaptised under the name of the sublime. When Jean-FranÅois Lyotard published The Inhuman in 1988, the notion of humanism had for quite some time been questioned, problematised, and historicised. In France, what would later be called the quarrel of humanism developed in the 1960s around structuralism (Lvi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), semiotics (Barthes), philosophy (Althusser, Foucault, and others), and literature (first the Nouveau Roman in the mid-1950s, then the writings of Blanchot, of Beckett’s second phase, of Michaux, of Marguerite Duras, of Genet, and of many others). Summarised in broad strokes, Foucault’s thesis can be stated as such: humanism is a retrospective illusion of our occidental cultures. Accordingly, the current question could be the following: after the defeat of this historically determined figure of man, in particular as Foucalt says that of ‘soft humanism’, which has hardly known how to resist – 5

Blanchot 1969, 308.

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to say the very least – the crashing waves of 20th- and 21st-century barbarism, how can one reinvent another humanism that takes into account the inhuman, which does not suppress it, does not deny it, but includes its terrifying potentialities (including those of delinking), in order to confront them in full awareness of their cause, and to attempt not their sublimation into the symbolic space or into culture, but their relinking through the reality of writing-bodies? It is the study of these modalities of modern relinkage that I would like to pursue. A question that must equally be posed: in this inquiry, why is there such a proximity between writers and philosophers, whether they be writer-philosophers (like Sartre, Nietzsche, or others), writers deeply interested in philosophy (like Blanchot and Bataille), or philosophers fascinated by literature (like Deleuze, Derrida, Heidegger, etc.)? Because – in any case, this is the hypothesis that one can make – a nearly ‘divine’ conception of language has developed in the 20th century. This appeared most explicitly in the work of Foucault and Blanchot (but also in Derridean deconstruction, to say nothing of Heidegger…). For Foucault, only literature due to its experience with the infinity of language (its experience of the being of language), can constitute an ‘experiment in radical thought’, as well as an unexpected exit from the anthropological course of the human sciences, from which philosophy should draw upon in order to accomplish its own revolution. But what is language for many? It is precisely, not as we have for a long time affirmed ‘the unique property of mankind’ that characterises humanity and irreducibly separates human from animal, to say nothing of stones… To the contrary, the major discovery of the 20th century, it seems to me, is that language is the inhuman essence of man: that which divides him and renders him other to himself (Freud, Lacan), that which he will never possess ‘personally’, that to which he will always remain a stranger (Derrida, Deleuze), and finally an infinity whose eternal murmur threatens to drive him mad (Blanchot, Artaud, Levinas, etc.). It is that delinking extends before all else as omnipotent, this inhumanity of language that disunites: an other inhabits me and divides me, renders me a stranger to myself. Hence this, most likely, is the fascination for literature and poetry shared by these philosophers. The psychoanalyst Pierre Fdida recently proposed to distinguish between the inhuman and the dishuman. He called ‘dishuman’ the extreme psychic experience of temporarily abolishing the image of the likeness of other human figures: an incident of barbarism, a programmed erasing of

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all traces of humanity.6 Above all, this includes in the psychiatric experience that Fdida speaks, the incidence of dishumanity felt by certain limited or psychotic patients, who sometimes take themselves for a tree, a stone, or a machine. For example, one knows that in the work of the American psychiatrist Harold Searles, he describes experiences of this type in those of his patients who suffer from an insufficient differentiation between exterior and interior reality.7 Once again, this suggests that the exploration of human limits does not come without risks. It is therefore necessary to take seriously, in light of these diverse epistemological intersections, certain contemporary reflections on the virtualisation of a hyperbody in ‘cyberspace’ (Pierre Lvy). Far from being worrisome or catastrophic, such a virtualisation could open a path to the reinvention of other collective, democratic, but also artistic spaces – transindividual spaces of creation perhaps less distant than one might believe from the research on ‘disfigured’ or ‘disidentified’ writing carried out by certain writers or modern thinkers. As certain current theories suggest, if it is true that we are currently witnessing the continuance of hominidisation (via ‘exo-darwinism’ as Michel Serres says) through the development of recent current and future technologies, in the interweaving of text, body, and affect, it is then possible that the dimensions of thought and writing conceived by the poets, writers, and philosophers at the end of the 20th century had been very advanced (had been, as one used to say of the ‘avant-garde’) in their perception of current mutations. Even better, one might say that they had envisioned and anticipated them opening the route to a reinvented humanism. All form is an illusion, contemporary physics suggests: we move in the midst of swarming atoms in inexhaustible motion; as far as one descends into the depths of physical matter, all is pullulation, energetic vibration, circulation, direction, pulsation… nothing that resembles the classic stability of our notions of volume and substance. This is what these writers have most likely perceived better than anyone, rediscovering at the heart of their practice of writing the pre-Socratic intuitions of the structure of matter. We are provisional conglomerates of atoms, as Artaud, Bataille, Beckett, and the others repeat. ‘We participate in all possible forms of life’, wrote Artaud in Mexico in 1936, ‘[…] it is absurd to limit life. A little of what we have been and above all what we must be lies 6 7

Fdida 2007. Searles 1960.

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obstinately in the stones, the plants, the animals, the landscapes and the woods.’8 On this account, it is possible that through the notion of ‘Flesh’ (Artaud, Merleau-Ponty), that sensation, precepts, and affects according to Deleuze, and the ‘body without organs’ of Artaud or Deleuze and Guattari, were already an anticipation, in writing and concept, of the current virtualisation of bodies which are open and in excess of their boundaries, of bodies in infinite expansion. One must take seriously that which is suggested by Artaud, but also said by Deleuze: the individual body, locked inside its limits (the my-skin, the anatomical body, the ‘bodychoker’ as Artaud says, the molar body, as Deleuze and Guattari say in A Thousand Plateaus) is nothing except the fallout, enclosed in a symbolic form, a figure (which could be that of ‘my’ organic individual body) of another body, a transindividual body-force, inventing another sensible space (both corporeal and of thought, weaved of matter and sensations), a new way of thinking that is not dissociated from feeling. In resonance with these hypotheses is the Deleuzian proposition of extending the analysis of subjectivity to nonhuman vital modes (thus the auto-consistence of sensation, independent of any affective backing). Another form is most likely being born, one not necessarily human; this is what Deleuze suggested at the end of an interview in 1986: ‘It could be an animal form of which man will be only an avatar, a divine form of which he will be the reflection […]. Today man is in relation with other forces still (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the silicon in the machine…).’9 In other terms: a power of non-organic life of which man will have been only a provisional form. As long, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, as we will not have unreservedly thought of the ecotechnic creation of bodies as the truth of our world, and as a truth which does not in any way cede to those that myths, religions, and humanisms have been able to represent, we will not have begun to think of this present world.10

This is to say that the bodies of modern writings are themselves also grafted onto these new representations, these new technical data and technologies which put into question their epidermic limits, the circumscribed materiality of their textual and plastic situation. 8 Artaud 2004, 714. 9 Deleuze 1990, 160. 10 Nancy 1992, 33.

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Question: does the work done by literature upon language have an intrinsic ethical dimension? One knows that stories and narratives offer less and less in the way of linkage. It is not a matter of evoking once more the idea of the failure of ‘grand narratives’; the argument of a supposed ‘postmodernism’ is too often a grab-all of unordered and depressive ideas, improper to sustain conceptual invention and to mobilise creative energy. It is more important to examine the recent doubt cast over the veracity of retrospective stories, be they in their collective version (myths and national histories, constructed as narratives, with interpretive and unifying aims, of the historical past of collectives), or their singular and private version. For this reason, the ambition of psychoanalysis is somewhat problematically separated from a narrative and reconstructive aim: to make an individual seize the truth of his history in order to become its subject. This is the task of the psychoanalyst according to Lacan. One knows the phrase elaborated in Function and Field of Speech regarding the necessity for the subject to assume his history: ‘That which we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history: the future anterior to what I will have been for that which I am becoming.’11 Accordingly, with what validity can one still conform to the great philosophico-narrative models elaborated on one hand by Paul Ricoeur (the narrative as configuration of experience and of human temporality in its relation to responsibility and the ethical), and on the other by Hannah Arendt (the narrative engenders the realisation of an essentially political thinking through the recounted action of a story that entails a human life becoming political)? What is the case today of narrative linkages, if their vulgarised hyper-diffusion serves only the hypnotic or manipulative function of the discourses of political propaganda, advertising, industrial or editorial by-products, or the fictional settings of reality television? In this sense the works of Adorno and Benjamin on manipulative ‘cultural industries’ may help to deepen this question of the mounting distrust of hardened, sclerotic narratives whose subjects are impelled to be identical with themselves. Thus, that which is put into question in literary and philosophical practice of creative relinking, is precisely the power of the story (in the sense of narration) to once again durably relink meaning and truth. What is the case of our ethical, judicial, and political systems in the face of current delinked subjects? Can we content ourselves to endlessly reinforce, in a constant invention of new texts and procedures, the rights 11 Lacan 1996, 300.

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and needs, the judicial arsenal of national and international law (‘crimes against humanity’, international penal tribunals)? Can one simply trust the enlightened good will of an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (Hans Jonas), or the pragmatism of an ‘ethic of discussion’ (Jrgen Habermas)? If, as Derrida suggested, the logic of the unconscious (let us expand: of delinking) is incompatible with that which defines the identity of the ethical, on the basis of the delinked literary and philosophical logics of new subjects, can one imagine promoting other models of responsibility, of the author, of the intellectual, of the citizen (under the condition, it goes without saying, of not confusing psychic plasticity with cynicism, sophistic opportunism and general relativism)?

Section II The Limits of Deconstruction: The Case of Art and Literature

Reality under Construction: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Surrealism Timo Kaitaro La vrit est dans la dconstruction. (Ren Magritte)1

In his openly hostile criticism of surrealism, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that surrealist writing results in a triple destruction: it tends to destroy subjectivity, objectivity and finally also language.2 If Sartre is correct with his diagnosis, we should perhaps consider that the surrealists had in practice done something that prefigures the theoretical attempts to desconstruct the subject, its representations and finally the whole notion of an objective reality put forward by some post-structuralist or postmodern philosophers. In fact, it seems logical that the death of the author in literary theory proclaimed by Roland Barthes, should be preceded by practical attempts to prevent a unified and autonomous subject expressing itself in a literary work, that is, by experiments in writing without an author or even without subjectivity in the sense that Sartre understood it: as the subject’s recognition that his thoughts, emotions and volitions originate within himself. Surrealist methods exposed the subject to the hazards of the heterogeneous: the unconscious, the materiality of language and artistic materials, and the unpredictable contribution of other subjects. These attempts resulted in texts and works of art in which the author could no longer recognise himself, in whose creation he participated more as an on-looker than as an author in the traditional sense. As Max Ernst observed already in 1933, surrealist techniques tend to upset critics by reducing the importance of the author.3 However, Annie Le Brun, one of the members of the surrealist group, who lived long enough to see what she describes as ‘effacing of the subject’, the ‘fragmentation of representation’ and the ‘exclusion of totality’, is highly critical of these tendencies usually associated with post-structur1 2 3

Cited in Favry 2009, 150. Sartre 1968, 215 – 216. Ernst 1976, 43 – 45.

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alism. She also refers to the ‘exaltation of the fragmentary’ that is characteristic of certain forms of postmodernism. Le Brun does not so much deny the effacing of the subject as a fact, but she sees it as something that should be resisted. For Le Brun, theoretical attempts to deconstruct subjectivity merely serve its disintegration. She writes: It is as if, from the effacing of the subject to different enterprises of deconstruction, our critical modernity would have aimed to prevent thinking out, all the while simulating it, this disintegration of beings and things.4

It seems that Andr Breton, who died in 1966, also lived long enough to see the first symptoms of the dangers involved in unleashing the powers around the dissolution of the subject. In a radio interview recorded in 1951, Breton observes that in the 1920s (when surrealism was born) the human mind [l’esprit] was threatened by solidification, whereas at the time of the interview the danger is rather its dissolution. Breton notes that this kind of situation ‘calls for, on the part of youth today, other reactions than those which another situation provoked us to, in our youth’.5 In its relation to power, subjective identity is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, it can be the locus of resistance. On the other hand, subjectivity is also internalised control and subjugation to the norms of a rationality imposed through social construction. In the 1920s, the surrealists thought that resistance involved the dissolution of the subject. However, it is possible that modern capitalism needs, instead of subjects with stable identities, indefinitely modifiable identities: passive consumers, to whom one can sell new identities and, employees, whom one can recycle according to the needs of industry and commerce, in place of persons identifying themselves with a specific and unique function or profession. In this case, the dissolution of the subject would profoundly change its meaning, since it had thus been, as Hal Foster observes in his commentary of Breton’s interview, harnessed to the service of the economical system that the surrealists opposed.6

4 5 6

‘Comme si, de l’effacement du sujet aux diffrentes entreprises de dconstruction, notre modernit critique avait eu pour fin relle d’empÞcher de penser, tout en la simulant, cette dsintgration des Þtres et des choses.’ Le Brun 1991, 77 – 78. ‘Il est bien vident que, de la part de la jeunesse d’aujourd’hui, une telle situation appelle d’autres ractions que celles  quoi put nous porter une autre situation, dans notre jeunesse.’ Breton 1999, 571. Foster 1997, 211.

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Destruction and reconstruction of the object By analysing the attitude of the surrealists toward attempts to criticise or deconstruct the myths of authorial presence and objective reality, I propose to present a case study showing how the deconstructive process concerning meaning, language and subjectivity, instead of being an end in itself, can actually be part of a larger constructive program. I claim that surrealism involved not only a triple deconstruction of meaning, reference and subjectivity but also a corresponding reconstruction of these. It is true that by transgressing the paradigmatic combinatory rules of language, which govern the selection of words in a certain context, surrealist images make literal reading impossible and thus block the ordinary meanings and references of words. Furthermore, surrealist images always sought to combine elements so distant from each other that a metaphorical interpretation restoring common-sense meanings and references is at least difficult, if not altogether impossible. Thus the objects of our familiar universe collapse through the transgressive use of language and we are left with seemingly impossible or contradictory objects (but which in reality are merely surreal). Take, for example, Ren Char’s images: sandrings of armours, mimetic nails or seismic treasure of famines. These images, in contrast to such poetic expressions as Musset’s sad silver tear of the coat of the night, cannot be interpreted as metaphoric expressions referring, in an oblique fashion, to the ordinary objects of prosaic everyday reality.7 Although surrealism seems to destroy the common language and the reality it describes, this is not the whole story. It is true that in some of Breton’s earlier texts the destructive aspect dominates. For example, his Introduction au discours sur le peu de ralit, wherein he examines the problem of language and representation, Breton observes that one can attack the ‘altogether apparent existence of things’ and observes that the mediocre reality in which we live is created and sustained through the banality of our common language.8 Thus, we can attack this reality by mixing up the arrangement of words – a phenomenon we have just observed in the poetry of Char. But Breton also indicates that demonstrating the 7

8

The examples from the poetry of Ren Char (les anneaux du sable des cuirasses, clous mimtiques, trsor sismique des famines) are taken from the collection Le marteau sans matre (1934). Musset’s triste larme d’argent de la Nuit comes from Musset’s Le saule, from a passage often anthologised separately under the title of its incipit: ‘Pale toile du soir’. For more examples of linguistic anomalies in surrealist poetry, see Kaitaro 2004, 305 – 313; Kaitaro 2008, 23 – 43. Breton 1992, 276.

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fragility of common-sense reality and its dependence on the language we use in describing it, implies correspondent creative possibilities. In Merveilleux contre le myst re, Breton claims that the destruction of ordinary prosaic ways of using language, which serve the simple function of exchanging information, and the corresponding systematic cultivation of the poetic possibilities of language actually results in the ‘recreation of the world’.9 The principal theorist of Belgian surrealism observed similarly that poetic activity aspires to invent new objects.10 Likewise, Roger Caillois emphasised in a text published in Le surralisme au service de la rvolution in 1933 that, even if surrealism aims at ‘discrediting reality and casting doubt on […] solid objectivity’ this attempt is countered by making ‘credible everything that the industrial and rational pragmatism is trying to deprive reality of ’.11

Dissolution and reconstruction of the subject Claude Abastado has written that Breton does not question the unity of the self [moi].12 Even if this may be in some sense true (Abastado quotes some metaphors that Breton refers to in speaking about the psyche), it is also the case that surrealist practices are liable to cast suspicion on the idea of a unified subject. Breton observes that one has too hastily assumed a unity of mind analogous to the unity of body, whereas, in fact, it is possible that we actually are inhabited [abritons] by a plurality of consciences.13 According to its Freudian rhetoric, surrealist thought allows unconscious desires to unveil in a text or in a piece of artwork. But perhaps even more destabilising for the autonomous subject is that surrealist writing, artistic techniques and surrealist games do their best to provoke and 9 Breton 1999, 657. 10 Noug 1980, 85 – 89. 11 ‘Ceci dit, l’effort du surralisme sera peut-Þtre plus facilement situ: on a pu croire qu’il travaillait  dconsidrer la ralit, ou plus exactement  mettre en doute avec preuves  l’appui toute solidit objective. Cette proposition n’est exacte que dialectiquement, c’est--dire si l’on consid re en mÞme temps l’aspect antithtique de cet effort: accrditer tout ce que le pragmatisme industriel et rationnel avait tent de retrancher de la ralit, sans jamais apercevoir l’absurdit d’une telle suppression.’ Caillois 1933, 30 – 31. 12 Abastado 1981. 13 Breton 1988, 243.

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invite participating processes outside the author’s control, for example, chance, the autonomous tendencies of artistic materials and the contribution of other subjects. The rational subject of the Enlightenment whose freedom strengthens through his or her autonomy withdraws leaving the stage for a subjectivity that invites heteronomy instead of protecting its autonomy. Again, Breton emphasises repeatedly that his destructive move serves the purpose of unifying the subject and of gaining a freedom that is different from that of the autonomous rational subject.14 The apparent contradiction between the emphasis on the unity of the human mind and its dispersion is resolved, if one observes that when Breton refers to the unity of the subject he is always speaking of a goal: the unity of the subject is not a given but an achievement. Breton distinguishes between the surrealist and spiritist uses of automatism by saying that whereas spiritism aims at the dissociation of personality, surrealism aims at its unification.15 Likewise, in the text What is surrealism? (Qu’est-ce que le surralisme?, 1934), Breton observes that by modifying our sensibilities, surrealism has made a decisive step toward the unification of the human personality threatened by dissolution.16 Thus practices that seem to question the unity of the subject and to provoke its dissolution eventually aspire toward unifying the subject. The unity of the surrealist subject is, however, obviously not constituted by the conscious subject of rational choices. In the beginning of Nadja, when he poses the question ‘who am I?’, Breton observes that the objective manifestations of our lives, which we consider more or less deliberate, in fact refer to an activity the real domain of which appears to be completely unknown.17 The ‘signs’ discussed in the book reveal that the feeling that we are alone at the helm of the ship is an illusion.18 If the surrealist subject is not centred on a conscious core representing the subject of rational choices, one could present the hypothesis that the surrealists merely wished to replace this core with another – instead of questioning the centredness of the subject as such. Some formulations of the manifesto seem to suggest that the authentic core of the subject is in the unconscious: surrealism is supposed to reveal ‘the real functioning of the 14 For the conception of freedom implicit in surrealist practices, see Kaitaro 2008, 169 – 174. 15 Breton 1992, 386. 16 Breton 1992, 258. 17 Breton 1988, 647. 18 Breton 1988, 652.

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mind’.19 However, the main locus of automatic writing, and of surrealist activity in general, is actually between the conscious and the unconscious, in their encounter or in their interplay, as Breton himself observes in the first surrealist manifesto.20 In addition, in the beginning of Nadja, Breton denies that subjectivity represents something pre-existing its manifestations. That which constitutes the authentic nature of the subject, is not that which is original, present from the beginning, but something that unfolds in time.21 Revealing – and the term here is already slightly misleading – this subjectivity requires that one is able to observe the appeals, solicitations and signs coming from outside, and in which Breton’s Nadja so eloquently describes. A reader whose habits of reading have been formed in the intellectual ambience of post-structuralism and deconstruction would probably be sceptical about the idea of ‘the real activity of the mind’ mentioned in the definition of surrealism. This seems to imply, according to Claude Abastado at least, that automatic writing could reveal ‘a psychic entity outside discourse’, an idea that one might find highly suspicious. Thus Abastado observes that ‘what one can read in texts is never an anterior subjectivity, but a subject which constitutes itself in the act of writing’.22 However, as we have shown above in the analysis of the beginning of Nadja, this is just what Breton himself emphasised. As Foucault puts it in an interview discussing Breton on the occasion of the latter’s death: ‘The imagination is not so much what is born in the obscure heart of man as it is in what arises in the luminous thickness of discourse.’23 In so far as the author is always dependent on a pre-existing language and discursive practices, the effects of which he is never completely in control, his productions inevitably have an excess of meanings beyond what he actually wants to say. It is through having recourse to this characteristic of imagination, which seems to defy, undermine and limit the autonomous subject’s creative freedom, that surrealist practices liberate subjectivity and imagination from their constraints. This proliferation of meanings reveals to the subject new possibilities and enlarges its imaginative powers beyond what the conscious and autonomous subject 19 20 21 22

Breton 1988, 328. Breton 1988, 332. Breton 1988, 647 – 648. ‘Ce qui se peut lire dans les textes n’est, ce n’est jamais une subjectivit antrieure, mais un sujet qui s’institue dans l’acte d’crire.’ Abastado 1981, 59 – 75. 23 Foucault 1999, 171 – 174. ‘[L]’imagination c’est moins ce qui nat dans le cœur obscur de l’homme que ce qui surgit dans l’paisseur lumineuse du discours.’ Foucault 2001, 582 – 585.

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might intend and imagine in advance through having recourse to internalised structures and well-rehearsed productive strategies. Allowing processes outside the subject’s control to interfere with his or her linguistic or cultural habits does not of course mean that one is able to step outside culture and reveal a spontaneous natural subjectivity independent of linguistic or cultural structures.24 But one can force these structures to produce new meanings instead of repeating what has already been said and done: ‘le dit et le redit’ through which we are stuck with the common ways of structuring reality.25 And of course, although this may advance deliberately as the Belgian surrealists insisted,26 it does not advance consciously in the sense of having a representation of the result, which is precisely supposed to be something not yet seen or imagined. Hence, the surrealists insist that the artist surprises not only the spectator but himself as well.27

Deconstructing the subject/object divide The surrealists have often emphasised the correlative nature of the operations that tend to dissolve the unity of the subject and those that destroy the stability of objects. In so far as surrealism casts doubt on the stability of the external reality, it extends the same suspicion to the subject. In the ‘Introduction aux Contes bizarres d’Achim d’Arnim’, Breton refers to Fichte’s ‘grandiose error’ that consists of believing in the ‘attribution by thought of being (objectivity) to a sensation extended in space’. Such an idea runs the risk of making the distinction between the real and the imaginary rather fluid, if not to annul it altogether. Breton observes that the dissolution of the limit between the objective and the subjective is characteristic of altered states of consciousness – ‘tats seconds’ – and artistic creation, which is closely related to unconscious creation and dreaming. But according to Breton this way of making the object dependent on the subject results in the ‘exteriorisation’, ‘dissolution’ or ‘dissem24 25 26 27

See Kaitaro 2004; Kaitaro 2008, 23 – 43. Breton 1992, 276. See Kaitaro 2004, 175 – 191. See, for example, Breton’s descriptions of de Chirico’s method of painting or his characterisation of the writings of Lautramont and Rimbaud, in Breton 1988, 629; Breton 1992, 389. The deliberate avoidance of preconceived ideas of the result is evidenced by the practices of many surrealist painters, to whose methods Vincent Bounoure’s term ‘material automatism’ pertinently applies. See Kaitaro 2008, 153 – 161.

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ination’ (parpillement), of the subject rather than reinforcing the subject in favour of the object.28 Thus Breton observes  propos Rimbaud and Achim von Arnim: For both of these poets, discovering in the representation the mechanisms of the operations of the imagination and making the former dependent on the latter, does not make sense but on the condition that the I itself is submitted to the same treatment as the Object, that a formal reservation will shake the foundations of the ‘I am’.29

The dissemination of the ‘I’ in the external object, leads inevitably to the disruption or the disturbance of personality which Rimbaud refers to in his dictum: ‘Je est un autre.’30 If the dissolution of reality results in the dissemination of the subject, the same correspondence applies to their stability. Thus Ren Crevel makes the stability of the subject depend on the stability of external objects: in stabilising and fixing the world of objects, the subject checks its own mobility and freedom, so that it would be vain to believe that it is a unique free subject in the middle of fixed objects.31 Thus the surrealist attempt to destroy the reality solidified by our perceptual habits is at the same time a precondition and a consequence of the liberation of the subject from its solidified identity, which is replaced by a dynamic and fluid identity. The destruction of identities, those of objects as well as those of the subject, and the liberation of the subject are eventually inseparable: the two sides of the same coin. From the psychoanalytic point of view this correlation between the stability of objects and that of the subject makes sense: since the principal function of the Ego is precisely to distinguish between subjective mental images and external reality, it is obvious that its stability corresponds to that of objects. In addition, altered states of consciousness where the boundary between the world of subjective representations and that of ‘external’ reality disappears are characterised by the weakening sense of ‘self ’ and its separation and distinction from objects. To sum up, surrealist activity really seems to destroy the belief in a reality consisting of a fixed collection of definite objects. It attempts to 28 Breton 1992, 350 – 351. 29 ‘Pour l’un de ces po tes comme pour l’autre, dcouvrir dans la reprsentation le mcanisme des oprations de l’imagination et faire dpendre uniquement celle-l de celle-ci n’a, bien entendu, de sens qu’ la condition que le Moi lui-mÞme soit soumis au mÞme rgime que l’Objet, qu’une rserve formelle vienne branler le “Je suis”.’ Breton 1992, 350 – 351. 30 Breton 1992, 351. 31 Crevel 1986, 316 – 330.

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show us a reality in constant flux, a reality where objects transform, metamorphose and lose their familiar contours. Objects yield to the delirious and irrational interpretations of the subject. But corresponding to this destruction of objectivity, surrealism casts doubt on the existence of an autonomous subject independent of objects: the subject loses its purity and its internal operations are shown to depend on external materials and accidents. Imagination traditionally contrasts with perception, which presumably depends on the exterior world for its objects. Imagination in contrast presumably creates its own objects. The surrealists cast doubt on this form of dualism. For them perception is a creative act and imagination always depends on the objects and materials of the real world.32 Even the seemingly passive and habitual perceptions of common everyday objects are manifestations of original, creative and imaginative acts of their invention.33 And, of course, the non-creative routine imagination representing everyday realities is eventually based on the automatised habits of perception. Surrealism would certainly be a version of anti-realism, if reality were defined as a collection of known and fixed objects existing independently of the language we use to describe it and facing an immaterial and autonomous subject contemplating it. But if reality is seen as something in a constant flux and open to an endless variety of interpretations enabling the creation of novel and surreal objects, the name that the movement gave itself should be taken seriously and literally: not as the opposite of realism but as its radicalisation. The destabilisation of the subject’s central position involved in surrealist practises results in the realisation that reality is not merely the sum of all that one can perceive and imagine but infinitely more: everything that one could see and imagine, if one would let surrealist practices reveal and objectify the unexpected, the not-yet seen or imagined, and thus, to enlarge the sphere of the imaginary and the real. The insistence of surrealist theory and practice, that the dependence of objective reality on the constructive powers of subjectivity is not to be identified with any non-realist form of constructivism. The reality of surrealism is not so much constructed as under construction. Thus there need not be any real contradiction between its destructive attacks against the solidification of objective and subjective identities and the suspicions voiced by Annie Le Brun against apparently similar theoretical enterprises contributing to a general suspicion against identities. For 32 Kaitaro 2008, 125 – 145. 33 Noug 1980.

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the surrealists, there is nothing wrong with constructed identities, as long as they are organic and living and not just solidified, fossil-like relics from a bygone era.

Deconstructing and Reconstructing Artists with PhDs Clive Cazeaux MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN: There are hundreds of kids in Britain doing PhDs – PhDs! – in fine art. And the terrible thing is, where does a PhD have meaning? In the art world? No. It has meaning in one place. JOHN BALDESSARI: Teaching. MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN: Now what’s going to happen is we’re going to end up with schools that are entirely run by people with PhDs, who have no experience of the art world at all. It could not be a worse situation… [Artists] are doing the highest-level research in the world. If you want the highest-level research, you need to go to Jeff Wall or whomever. You need people who are out there, in the world, doing what it is that an artist does. (Baldessari/Craig-Martin)1

Except: ‘What does an artist do’? Is there a definition or a set of necessary or sufficient conditions which captures and describes what an artist does? Arguably, since the transition in the 20th century from the readymade, through happenings and conceptual art, to socially-engaged art practice, there is no longer a set of clearly defined actions or properties which belong exclusively to art practice. Art is now an open concept, appropriating, subverting, challenging or rearticulating any context or discourse with which it comes into contact. The quotation displays Craig-Martin’s exasperation at the advent of the PhD in fine art. His antipathy is directed against the idea that artists might treat the PhD as an endorsement of their status as artists, a badge of honour or achievement, when the qualification has no currency or value in the art world in this respect. On this matter, he is probably 1

Baldessari/Craig-Martin 2009, 45 – 46 (original emphasis).

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right. However, unacknowledged and unchecked in Craig-Martin’s statements is the complex of competing institutional forces which constitutes the art world. He does not make explicit what he means by ‘art world’ but, as far as he is concerned, it rules supreme as the domain which counts when it comes to being an artist. He assumes, admittedly with assistance from Baldessari (his conversation partner), that the interests of teaching are opposed to those of being an artist. This would seem to suggest a highly compartmentalised metaphysics is at work: learning, teaching, the construction of knowledge lie over there in the academic world; the creation of art sits over here in the art world. An ironic state of affairs given that Craig-Martin’s reputation in the art world rests equally upon his practice as an artist and upon his being the head of the fine art department at Goldsmiths in the late 1980s when the YBAs – the Young British Artists, made up of Goldsmiths students including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, and Sarah Lucas – exploded onto the London art scene. There is no acknowledgment that both academia and the art world are institutions steered by economic and political forces (including patronage, selection for posts or shows, and a celebrity or star system) and, as such, may be able to work with or against one another (or any conciliatory or subversive relation in between) in affecting those forces. Most disappointingly, there is no acknowledgment from Craig-Martin that the intersection between art and research culture might generate insights or resistances which are exciting for reasons either internal or external to the art world, or a series of hybrid, interdisciplinary practices which upset conventional assessment criteria (which arguably would be a good thing). While Craig-Martin might think that the concept of what an artist does is readily available and can be unproblematically relied upon, I suspect that an audience familiar with contemporary art, if pressed to write a list under the heading ‘What an artist does’, would arrive at a long, sprawling and possibly contradictory sequence or cloud of terms. To my mind, ‘length’, ‘sprawl’ and ‘contradiction’ would all be desirable qualities. But the longer or fatter, more sprawling and contradictory the list or cloud became, the weaker ‘what an artist does’ would become as a straightforward idea, easily isolatable from questions of learning, teaching, and the construction of knowledge. What has the prospect of artists having PhDs got to do with the legacy of deconstruction? The workshop which gave rise to this book had two aims (quoting from the original workshop brief ): (1) to assess whether deconstruction ‘can still represent a resource, or contain a series of crit-

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icalities, that challenges [philosophical, moral, political] insufficiency in some manner’, and (2) to establish whether these criticalities ‘can be resolved through a different sensibility, mainly attentive to aspects of the reconstruction of meaning, that seem to have come to light on more levels over the last two decades’. Decisive for both aims is the distinction between deconstruction and reconstruction. The distinction embodies the tensions, contradictions and demands which arise once one begins to ask about the practical, moral and political application of deconstruction. Reconstruction in the context of political philosophy expects philosophy to make proposals or intervene in society in the interests of generating better forms of life socially, politically, technologically, and culturally. Habermas has serious reservations about the capacity of deconstruction to answer ethical and political questions. In his first, notorious engagement with deconstruction, he accuses Derrida of levelling the distinction between philosophy and literature and, in so doing, losing sight of the specific way in which each mediates between ‘expert cultures and the everyday world’.2 In his Habermas-inspired critique, McCarthy argues that deconstruction’s vocabulary of ‘contradiction’, ‘destabilization’, ‘interruption’, and ‘undermining’, does not lend itself to the projects of constructing and reconstructing the ideals, principles and laws which shape our lives. However, for others, it is precisely deconstruction’s generation of undecidability which confirms its political relevance, for example, with Connolly, introducing a dissonance–concordance relation into politics to make room for unheard voices3 or, with Critchley, questioning a political regime’s claims to legitimacy by demonstrating its reliance upon undecidable propositions.4 For some critics, there remains the problem with deconstruction that it reduces the human subject to being the effect of a textual or structural process, such as difference or desire, an epiphenomenon of a process which applies to meaning and the world in general. There is therefore nothing that is proper to the subject. As Feltham and Clemens make the point, ‘in poststructuralism there is no distinction between the general field of ontology and a theory of the subject; there is no tension between the being of the subject and being in general’.5 This is something to which the philosophies of reconstruction and, more recently, of immanence, have responded. 2 3 4 5

Habermas 2006a, 30. Connolly 1987, 138; cited in McCarthy 1991, 76. Critchley 1999, 199. Feltham/Clemens 2003, 4.

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Artists having PhDs, I want to argue, becomes a case in point for the legacy of deconstruction in that fine art research forces us to consider the ontology of art – its nature, its presence, its amenability to categorisation, whether it is a thing in itself – and the relationships it has with what lies ‘outside’ art. What the fine art PhD does is prevent art from being on its own. It affirms the idea that art is not a domain with a set of defining properties which it can call its own (recall the problems I highlight for Craig-Martin’s concept of artists ‘doing what artists do’). Art practice, generated in the context of a PhD, is required to make a contribution to knowledge. This happens through the artistic process intersecting with or being subject to processes of recording, documentation, transcription, contextualisation, theorisation, argumentation, evaluation, and ultimately being located as an intervention in a discourse. Some commentators have identified interdisciplinarity, or the requirement that art engages with the non-artistic, as being the source of the value of fine art research. According to Sullivan, art is an activity in which visual and cultural understanding is refracted and transformed, and which allows us to observe the processes of refraction and transformation taking place.6 Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and Habermas’s call for a new constellation of art and lifeworld bear on this topic because they offer competing models of how art entails or opens onto the non-artistic. As aspects of the deconstruction–reconstruction debate, these concerns converge on the ontology of aesthetico-political expression: what forms and contexts might an art practice take that is crossing categories in either a deconstructively textual or lifeworldly communicative fashion? And how is the ‘either–or’, the contest between deconstruction and reconstruction, to be addressed in this context? For both deconstruction and critical theory attend to the role of concepts in discourse, and to the various elements of conceptuality which can impinge upon the direction of thought and action. Most importantly, movement between categories is central to their projects, but the nature of the movement and the end which it works towards are different. My paper is in two parts. (1) The first explicates the different understandings of the movement between categories (hereafter ‘cross-categoriality’) in Derrida’s deconstruction and Habermas’s critical theory. (2) Part two exercises these differences in cross-categoriality in relation to a hypothetical example of fine art research: a project to explore the possibilities of cycling as an art practice. Considering deconstructive and re6

Sullivan 2005, 86.

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constructive philosophies in relation to a specific art project is by no means straightforward. Art that is required to make a contribution to knowledge creates a series of competing demands, and this allows the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition to operate beyond a simple binary relation of undecidability and effectiveness.

Crossing categories Movement between categories holds different meaning in deconstruction and critical theory. With deconstruction, the issue can be approached by asking whether reference to ‘what an artist does’, as an area of thought and action which has unique properties, is possible. That is, is it possible to refer to art as an essence, as a thing in itself ? As far as deconstruction is concerned, belief in such a possibility counts as an instance of the metaphysics of presence: commitment to the notion that thought and perception directly refer to and engage with an entity, without recognition of the web-like structure of concepts which simultaneously makes thought and perception possible but also redirects or blocks them through its own autonomy and density. Any attempt to assert that this property belongs uniquely to a domain, for example, ‘art’, will inevitably apply a concept which, in virtue of its relationship with other concepts, will bring with it associations from those other concepts, thereby contaminating any intended reference to a pure content. In an interview with Brunette and Wills, Derrida declares: There cannot be anything, and in particular any art, that isn’t textualized in the sense I give to the word ‘text’ – which goes beyond the purely discursive – [therefore] there is a text as soon as deconstruction is engaged in fields said to be artistic, visual or spatial. There is text because there is always a little discourse somewhere in the visual arts, and also because even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization. For this reason, the expansion of the concept of text is strategically decisive here. So the works of art that are the most overwhelmingly silent cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure.7

The concept of text does not refer exclusively to written material. It is ‘expanded’ beyond the purely discursive to embrace the ‘artistic, visual or spatial’. Initially, it seems as if this is the result of there always being ‘a 7

Derrida 1994d, 14 – 15.

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little discourse’ present in the arts, but then Derrida goes further, admitting that ‘even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization’. What might this mean? A clue comes at the end of the quotation: it is the ‘network of differences and references’ which gives rise to a textual structure. How are we to understand ‘the effect of spacing’ and ‘a network of differences and references’ in extralinguistic terms? I suggest that elements from Kant’s and Heidegger’s philosophies are present here. Experience is organised, determined; it occurs in segments and chunks. In Kantian terms, ‘a network of differences and references’ would designate the conceptually-organised and conceptually-saturated nature of experience. Experience does not come to us pure, unadulterated, but is rendered intelligible by concepts shaping it into stable, continuous, recognisable lumps. With Heidegger, human being is a being-there, a Da-sein, a state of being located in a situation in which things necessarily occur as something or another. 8 We are always rooted in an environment, working with an environmentally-relevant aim or ambition, and so everything is experienced as a meaningful ‘this’ or ‘that’, as either ambition-related or ambition-unrelated. Our ‘encounters’ with objects though are not strictly encounters in the sense that an external object is met by an internal subject. Rather, they are a series of attitudes or concerns in as much as what we perceive (through the senses), think about and act upon (all that we would customarily take to be experiences or volitions inside us) occur as the interplays of situatedness and directedness which define Da-sein, being-there, and which cannot be divided into ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This overcoming or avoidance of subject–object metaphysics is manifest in deconstruction through the ac8

As Stambaugh notes in her 1996 translation of Being and Time, ‘it was Heidegger’s express wish that in future translations the word Dasein should be hyphenated’. Heidegger’s thinking, Stambaugh continues, was that, with hyphenation, ‘the reader will be less prone to assume he or she understands it to refer to “existence” (which is the orthodox translation of Dasein) and with that translation surreptitiously bring along all sorts of psychological connotations. It was Heidegger’s insight that human being is uncanny: we do not know who, or what, that is, although, or perhaps precisely because, we are it.’ With Stambaugh, the hyphen in Da-sein introduces a sense of the uncanny. Rather than having Da-sein remain as a word which refers straightforwardly to human being as a clearly circumscribed thing – to existence or to the subject – the hyphen maintains the reference to us but at the same time makes it other than us. It emphasises that human being is distributed in a way that dualistic, Cartesian, subject–object terminology does not easily accommodate: a ‘being there’, an entity whose being is located and extended in the world. See Stambaugh 1996, xiv.

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knowledgment that authorial intention (again, something we would customarily take to be inside us) is an impulse within the play of concepts that is textuality. Both philosophies make the point that our experience of the world is a continuum organised by certain structures, principles, and frames. It is, I propose, this property of organisation which Derrida refers to as ‘text’ and which deconstruction works on, focusing on the contradictions, slippages and plays introduced by concepts but always mindful that the deconstructionist’s stance will itself be constructed by concepts and therefore is always open to further contradiction. Does this apply to non-verbal media and experience though? Isn’t deconstruction essentially a linguistic strategy, a critical reading which can only set to work if verbal categories prone to wordplay, metaphor or binary inversion are present? What would count as the deconstruction of categories at work in visual art and knowledge? Melville provides a helpful study of the deconstruction of colour in art history.9 Colour and art history, for Melville, play the respective roles of extralinguistic experience and linguistically-saturated knowledge. He argues against the increasing dominance of semiotics in art history, and its tendency to turn artefacts into occasions for linguistic, structural reading which, he maintains, say more about the ease and fluidity of signification than the materiality of the artefact. In the perception and interpretation of colour, Melville argues, there is always a particularity of sensation which exceeds signification. What is novel about his account is how he positions this excess. He locates it as a crisis in propriety: deconstruction of the visual as the calling-into-question of the appropriateness of each and every theoretical framework. ‘What transpires between the texts of deconstruction as they currently stand and the visual arts, their criticism and history’, he argues, is neither appropriation nor depropriation of the one activity or object to the other [sic], but a warping in the grammar of propriety itself. One might then say that the demand is for the visual arts and their discipline to appropriate themselves otherwise. But the deeper demand is for them to acknowledge that they have always done so.10

Melville effectively uses art history’s theorisation of colour to deconstruct the linguistic–extralinguistic distinction. The particularity of colour is fully acknowledged, but rather than placing it outside discourse, it is positioned as an ‘oscillation’ or ‘vibration’ disturbing the borders of art history 9 Melville 1994. 10 Melville 1994, 46 – 47.

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and all adjacent theoretical frameworks.11 This puts the deconstructionist critic in the position where they must be mindful of the contingency of any theoretical reading of an artwork and permanently open to the claims from alternative and possibly opposing theories. On this reading, the visual work of art is a text and, therefore, a contender for deconstruction because its properties, its determinations, the concepts which shape our engagement with it, plus any historical or theoretical discourse which surrounds it, are part of a network of differences and references. These are always open to reappraisal on account of the fact that each and every experience or perception of the work will involve differences and slippages between properties, determinations, and concepts. We still think and speak in categories but these are always already looking towards or opening onto other categories. The movement between categories as it affects art, and what lies beyond it, is different for Habermas. How can art within modernity work against its own inner logic, the drive to be ‘for its own sake’, to promote the cross-referral of categories in the interests of social reintegration? This is the question Habermas puts to himself in his 1981 essay ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’. Artistic production, Habermas declares, ‘would dry up, if it were not carried out in the form of a specialized treatment of autonomous problems, and if it were to cease to be the concern of experts who do not pay so much attention to exoteric questions’.12 These problems are ‘autonomous’ in the sense that they pertain to the Enlightenment project of specialisation. So far so good, as far as Craig-Martin’s notion of a pure fine art is concerned, with the added support of experts who are content to discuss art for art’s sake. However, Habermas continues: this sharp delineation, this exclusive concentration on one aspect of validity alone, and the exclusion of aspects of truth and justice, breaks down as soon as aesthetic experience is drawn into an individual life history and is absorbed into ordinary life. The reception of art by the layman, or by the ‘everyday expert’, goes in a rather different direction than the reception of art by the professional critic.13

In his attempt to overcome the division between the everyday and the professional, Habermas draws upon the claim from Albrecht Wellmer that (in Habermas’s words) as soon as an aesthetic experience ‘is used 11 Melville 1994, 45. 12 Habermas 2000a, 275. 13 Habermas 2000a, 275 (my emphasis).

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to illuminate a life-historical situation and is related to life problems, it enters into a language game which is no longer that of the aesthetic critic’.14 This promises, as far as Habermas is concerned, ‘a changed constellation of art and the lifeworld’: If aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of individual life-histories, if it is utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual life-problems – if it communicated to all its impulses to a collective form of life – then art enters into a language game which is no longer that of aesthetic criticism, but belongs, rather, to everyday communicative practice… It reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each other.15

The ‘changed constellation’ whereby art has the potential to make a difference within everyday communicative practice comes about ‘if [art] is utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual lifeproblems’. But what brings Habermas’s changed constellation about? He refers to the actions or forces responsible for these cross-categorial movements in the following ways: ‘aesthetic experience is drawn into an individual life’ and aesthetic experience ‘is used to illuminate a life-historical situation and is related to life problems’, but how and for whom we are not told. This is clarified by Wellmer. The work of art, he writes (quoted by Habermas), ‘as a symbolic formation with an aesthetic validity claim, is at the same time an object of the lifeworld experience, in which the three validity domains are unmetaphorically intermeshed’.16 The ‘validity claim’ is Habermas’s technical term, from The Theory of Communicative Action, for the conditions surrounding an utterance which confirm that it is made in the interests of arriving at a rational consensus.17 The three validity domains are: truth, being right in accordance with a normative context, and genuine intention on the part of the speaker. The key premise in Wellmer’s argument is that the artwork, as ‘a symbolic formation’, as something made, constructed, organised in accordance with (or against) certain conventions, is just as much an occupant of the art world as it is of the everyday world. There are similarities here with Kant’s aesthetics and epistemology in that aesthetic judgment, on Kant’s terms, is not formed from concepts peculiar to the aesthetic but is instead constituted by a state of free play (or 14 15 16 17

Habermas Habermas Habermas Habermas

2000a, 275. 2000b, 280. 2000b, 281. 1984, 99 – 100.

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‘purposiveness’ in Kant’s terms) in our moral and cognitive capacities. This could be construed as the aesthetic at work in the lifeworld. Duvenage lends support to this reading. ‘The world-disclosing force of the aesthetic’, he asserts, lies for Wellmer in its ‘constantly interacting with the moral and cognitive perspectives of the world […] leading readers to questions rather than answers, opening readers to new experiences of otherness, and disrupting previous fixities’, where ‘world disclosure’ refers to the Kantian–Heideggerian ontological model of mutual subject–object (with Kant) or being–world (with Heidegger) organisation.18 This interpretation goes against the formalist reading of Kant’s aesthetics, which concentrates upon his notion that aesthetic judgment is disinterested, that is to say, it does not employ a determinate concept, and so all that matters regarding the object of appreciation is the way in which its sensory properties are arranged in space or time. The formalist account values aesthetic properties for themselves but is difficult to sustain as a Kantian position, I would argue, because it pays no heed to that part of the aesthetic which purposively stimulates our cognitive and moral faculties, the bridging role which Kant has the aesthetic play between the architectonics of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. 19 My comparison of cross-categoriality in Derrida and Habermas would seem to suggest they converge, or at least are leaning that way. On my reading, both have sympathies with the Kantian notion that art interrupts stable patterns of categorisation, with the political value of such interruption being that room is made for alternative forms of thinking or practice. This would not be the first time that the philosophies of Derrida and Habermas are judged to be heading in the same direction. As Critchley writes, ‘Derrida’s work is oriented around the quasi-normative axis of an emancipatory, democratic politics, based on the undeconstructible, context-transcendent, formal universality of justice. Kurz gesagt, Derrida sounds like Habermas, doesn’t he?’20 But, Critchley goes on, despite the agreements between Derrida and Habermas, important differences remain: (1) Derrida would object to Habermas’s requirement that (in Critchley’s words) ‘all matters must be either empirically or normatively justified’; (2) from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, Derrida’s work (Critchley again) is ‘too exclusively philosophical, and belongs to 18 Duvenage 2003, 137. 19 Kant 1929; Kant 1956. 20 Critchley 2006, 100.

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what Horkheimer would call traditional rather than critical theory’;21 that is to say, Derrida concentrates upon metaphysical or logocentric concepts as they operate in texts from the history of philosophy at the expense of considering their sociological application; and (3) they differ over the intersubjective nature of the concrete linguistic event: Derrida regards it as a singularity, an experience of ‘infinite indebtedness’ containing an obligation that no interlocutor could meet, while Habermas’s Kantianism, based on the premise of the equal treatment of all human beings, means he configures the linguistic event as a symmetrical meeting of equals, devoid of any unevenness or asymmetry introduced by a sense of obligation. There is not room in this paper to pursue a fine-grained analysis of the differences between Derrida and Habermas. However, running through the differences is a theme which marks a clear division between deconstruction and critical theory over the interruption caused to conceptualisation by cross-categorial aesthetics. A deconstructive crossing of categories occurs as a thoroughgoing (or infinite if we follow Critchley) questioning of the category or theoretical framework which is applied at every particular instant. We might recall Melville’s suggestion that the deconstruction of visual art functions as a challenge to propriety, a perpetual attentiveness to the contingency of all frameworks. In contrast, with Habermas and Wellmer, the interruption caused to conceptualisation by cross-categorial aesthetics requires mediation to the point where it can be answerable to validity claims. No matter how novel, stimulating or disruptive an artwork, the transition in categories which it instigates has to occur as part of the translation of art into an everyday context, into a setting where the validity of whatever change or novelty has been introduced can be confirmed (or denied). For Habermas, this occurs in terms of consensus based on the ideal speech situation in which participants work towards a mutual understanding free from the pressures that can be introduced by self-interest and other agendas. With Wellmer, there is mediation between the world-disclosing force of the aesthetic and discursive reason via, according to Duvenage, an ‘interrelated model of validity spheres of truth’ which places emphasis on ‘interpretations and judgments of all kinds’ and ‘finding a horizon such that plural values

21 Critchley 2006, 100 – 101.

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and needs can become part of rational arguments and discourse ethics on an equal basis’.22 We have two kinds of resistance: thoroughgoing or infinite with Derrida, and translated or mediated with Habermas and Wellmer. In the context of the deconstruction–reconstruction debate, it is a question of the nature or possibly even the ontology of the resistance: what form or shape it is, in which direction or directions it is pointing or whether it needs to point at all. The last phrase is an acknowledgment that the resistance may not necessarily be an obstacle between us and an understanding or goal or the world, but instead might be something we are already in, something which is constitutive of our being in the world, a period in which we are situated in treacle, metaphorically and ontologically speaking: modes of thinking and action we normally take for granted are suspended, taken over by the ‘infinite demand’ of ‘How to judge? Which concept to apply?’ once one becomes mindful of the open and contingent nature of categorisation. How might this difference be illuminated? J. L. Austin’s distinction between performative and constative statements could apply.23 ‘Performative’ refers to utterances which act or bring into being the very thing they name, for example, saying ‘I promise’ is both an utterance (the locutionary act, in Austin’s idiom) and an action produced by the utterance (the illocutionary act). In contrast, constative expressions are merely locutionary acts: they describe or refer to the world but no action comes from them; they have no illocutionary force other than possibly the bringing-into-being of the very general action of drawing attention to how things are in the world. Habermas’s requirement that all claims must be either empirically or normatively justified assumes a constative, referential relation with the world or at least a translation between the constative and the performative, whereas Derrida activates word plays, near synonyms, and root metaphors to make us aware that language is a condition of textuality in which we are located. However, the performative–constative distinction is not something which should be immune from deconstruction, as Derrida observes, but I shall not 22 Duvenage 2003, 137. There is a subtle but important difference between Habermas’s and Wellmer’s positions at this point: the former requires the formation of a shared understanding, whereas the latter refers to a horizon for argument, which implies that only the conditions for dialogue, as opposed to actual agreement, are involved. Irrespective of this difference, both see the aesthetic undergoing a process of mediation so that its terms can be adapted to apply to objects or events in the interests of promoting sincere, reliable and verifiable discourse. 23 Austin 1971.

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have time to pursue this avenue.24 For the moment we must be content with examining the resistances in translation, mediation and performativity.

Deconstruction, reconstruction and fine art research As I announced above, one of the aims of this book (and the project which inspired it) is to establish whether the criticalities of deconstruction ‘can be resolved through a different sensibility, mainly attentive to aspects of the reconstruction of meaning, that seem to have come to light on more levels over the last two decades’. It is at this point where I think consideration of visual art research can help. What would Derridean deconstruction vs. Habermasian reconstruction be like within visual practice? How would their contrasting attitudes to cross-categoriality manifest themselves visually? What might fine art, under the research imperative of not being on its own but contributing to knowledge, add to the understanding of the resistance generated by movement between categories? How might this make a difference to the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition? The question which started us on this path concerned the opposition between fine art and fine art research. Let us consider an example. Suppose I am an artist who wants to explore the possibilities of cycling as an art practice. Not in the form of the depiction or representation of cycling, as in the case, for example, of Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 painting Dynamism of a Cyclist, expressing the Futurists’ celebration of machines, but in a way which draws upon the activity of cycling itself. The former presents us with questions of how one medium, say paint or stone, might be manipulated to evoke or recreate the appearance or other aspects of cycling, whereas the latter asks us to consider the embodied, technological or social dimension of cycling as the foundation for an artistic event. Why the latter and not the former? It is not as if one promises more opportunities for cross-categorial activity than the other. It is certainly the case that studies of representation and expression are more extensive and further underway in art history and philosophical aesthetics. The competing discourses in these studies would be grist to the deconstructionist’s mill in as much as a deconstructed art history would

24 Derrida 2002b, 204.

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have to come to terms with the contingency of its discourses and the potential for differential or cross-framework critique. I can only answer the question from within the context of the example. Hypothetically, I am an artist who cycles and who, given the almostinfinite potential of what can now become art, is interested in how the range of physical, technological, environmental and social dimensions of cycling might be manipulated, heightened, elevated or transformed to become art, but not just to become art. My interest (as a hypothetical artist) also lies in how the relationship between concepts might be configured given the degree of borrowing or exchange which occurs between the concepts of ‘art’ or ‘aesthetics’ and ‘technology’, ‘ecology’, ‘politics’, ‘society’ and ‘the everyday’. Since the relations between these concepts will be anything but a series of distinct, isolated, non-overlapping domains, this hypothetical interest should be useful in bringing to light a vocabulary of exchanges, manipulations, elevations, and transformations operating within fine art and adjacent practices and, therefore, be highly pertinent in a context where cross-categoriality is key. On the basis of the Kantian epistemology underpinning Derrida’s and Habermas’s theories, wherein experience is formulated as a process constructed by categories, if we pay attention to the different kinds of movement within this vocabulary, and the movements articulated by the various methods used to formulate art as a contribution to knowledge, then we shall begin to witness how and where fine art research stands in relation to Derrida’s and Habermas’s competing, cross-categorial resistances. Because the range of methods available to the fine art researcher is extensive – Gray and Malins list fourteen25 – I shall, for reasons of space, limit my attention to one method: the critical, contextual survey as a provider of both research background and direction. This will also help to explain the significance of the example for the deconstruction–reconstruction contest. The research process begins with a proposal which sets out the question, places it in its subject context, and gives an indication as to why it is important. As with any research proposal, we do not want something so singular and ‘out of the blue’ that there are no competing, surrounding or neighbouring practices to give the proposal context. In broad terms, one might look to the walking and other everyday or culturally-embedded practices which have been included in or forced a widening of concepts of art and aesthetics in recent decades, such as the work of Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Simon Pope (all walking artists), and Tino Sehgal 25 Gray/Malins 2004, 103.

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(conversation), Hans Haacke and the Austrian artists’ group WochenKlausur (administration). The critical themes behind these artists’ works are: the challenge to the conventional notion of the art object; the identification of aesthetic observations in everyday settings; the injection of the aesthetic into the everyday to create novel, social events or relationships; and rendering visible, tangible or social what happens when categories intersect (that is, the physical, sensory form taken by these processes, and the meanings given to them by their physical, sensory form), with the consequent demand for audiences, critics, theorists and the artists themselves to evaluate the renderings in a context where categories are far from stable. More specifically, a number of artists in the last ten years have used cycling in their work. In 2009, Steven Levon Ounanian completed a thirty-day, 1,000 mile ‘ecological pilgrimage by bicycle’ around Britain, called Ritualride. Ounanian visited ‘ecologically-significant’ sites such as farms, solar-panelled mosques, micro-climates, and McDonalds, and invited people involved with each site to tell stories related to or create myths which could be attached to the local environment. For her 2010 performance Body as Machine Experiment 1: RAW in Glasgow, Scotland, Kate Stannard sought to recreate the physical demands of the annual ‘Race Across the West’ endurance cycle event. The ride is a time trial across North America covering 3,000 miles with the fastest solo participants completing the course in just over eight days, achieving an average speed of approximately fifteen miles per hour and getting the recommended minimum of 90 minutes sleep per day. Stannard trained as if she were taking part and then, for the public performance, cycled on an indoor cycle training machine in an art centre continuously for four days, breaking for the daily recommended minimum sleep period. A forty-one mile ride across the Tabernas desert in Spain on an improvised electric bicycle was the basis for Simon Starling’s 2004 piece Tabernas Desert Run. The bicycle was driven by a 900-watt electric motor which was in turn powered by a portable fuel cell attached to the bicycle’s frame. The only waste product from the motor was pure water, which Starling used to create a large, botanical-style watercolour painting (the size of the bicycle) of an opuntia cactus, a species introduced to the desert by the film director Sergio Leone during the production of his spaghetti westerns. As an exhibited work, the bicycle and the painting are sealed in a perspex vitrine, with the painting visible from one side, the bicycle from the other.

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What are the critical contexts here? There are similar themes to the walking, conversational and administrative art practices outlined above. The conventional notion of the art object is by-passed. All three are primarily cycle rides or performances. Only Starling’s Tabernas Desert Run takes the form of exhibited objects, but arguably the combination of a painting, an improvised electric bicycle and the explanatory text points strongly towards the painting and the bicycle being stages in a process. Ounanian’s ride and Stannard’s performance also have enduring traces – a video, and photographs and first-person commentary on a blog respectively – but these are primarily documentary in nature, although the capacity of documentation to generate new meaning or give rise to aesthetic qualities is not insignificant. There is the interplay between the aesthetic and the everyday: the introduction of the aesthetic into the everyday to create novel, social events or relationships, and the scope for aesthetic observations within everyday settings. The novel social events or relationships created via the introduction of the aesthetic include the reactions and greetings received by Ounanian, participation in Ritualride by interested cyclists, and the acts of giving elicited from Stannard’s audience. Aesthetic observations within these might be the words, phrases, sounds, expressions and gestures which occur as part of the reactions and greetings received by Ounanian, the extreme physical and emotional states endured by Stannard, and the nature of the gifts left for her. There is the poetic, metaphor-like leaping-between-realms of Starling’s process: the transition from desert cycling, through motor power, through water, to the painting enabled by the water. The ways in which all these events are described or documented may also be occasions for poetic expression, since verbal language, photographic framing, and video sound and image are media whose specific properties bring with them their own potentials for meaning. The original deconstruction–reconstruction opposition hinges upon whether deconstruction’s vocabulary of ‘contradiction’, ‘destabilisation’, ‘interruption’, and ‘undermining’ lends itself to or disables the projects of constructing and reconstructing the ideals, principles and laws which shape our lives. How might fine art research, as a novel context for the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition, affect the stand-off ? Answering this would be to view fine art research as a form of aesthetico-political expression whose mode or modes of cross-categorial resistance might help to crystallise or generate relations between deconstruction and reconstruction other than a stand-off. The expectation is not that any of the works described or any future art–cycling work targets a philosophical position,

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but that the works themselves, through their internal organisation, the placing of one thing in relation to another or the eliciting of one thing by another, exercise concepts, throw concepts together, enable one concept to open onto another. The arrangement and constitution of the artworks tug on the Kantianism underlying Derrida’s and Habermas’s philosophies in as much as each thing, each aspect, each affect, each collision, and each evocation will involve a concept. Any intelligible unit of experience requires a concept, and aesthetic moments, those which Kant claims ostensibly occur disinterestedly in the absence of a concept, are occasions when our cognitive faculties are in a state of freeplay looking for a concept. As far as the art–cycling theme is concerned, demonstrating the impact of fine art research on the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition will be a matter of assessing the conceptual movements generated by art–cycling in terms of the resistance they present in the transition from one category to another. Let us focus on a particular example from one of the works described so far: a video clip from one of the many which are freely available on Ounanian’s Ritualride website. The clip, entitled ‘Doncaster Earth Centre’, is 1 minute and 57 seconds long, and surveys a large area of flat tarmac, fenced off from surrounding heathland and occupied by different kinds of junk, from a dilapidated milk float and an old fire engine with the sign ‘Earth Centre’ on one of its doors, to what looks like the flattened remains of office interiors and a wooden porter’s hut, painted black and in incongruously good condition (fig. 1). The video takes us step-by-step around the site, and Ounanian’s voiceover ironically presents it as an exhibit at Doncaster’s Earth Centre in Yorkshire, England. The irony coheres with the humour in the commentaries on some of the other video excerpts, but is also pertinent here because Doncaster’s Earth Centre, designed as a world-centre for the display of leading sustainability theory and practice, closed in 2004 after only five years’ operation due to lack of funding. Where are the resistances? From a deconstructive point of view, the properties of a work of art, the concepts which shape our engagement with it, plus any historical or theoretical discourse which surrounds it, are part of a network of differences and references. These are open to constant reappraisal (or infinite demand) because each and every experience or perception of the work will involve differences and slippages between properties, determinations, and concepts. Ritualride is not an object with a readily identifiable set of properties but a two-month long event with an ongoing identity via web and video documentation. It has a variety of

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Fig. 1: Steven Levon Ounanian, Ritualride (2009). www.ritualride.com (seen 25. 11. 2011). Permission to reproduce screenshot granted by the artist, and gratefully received.

forms. Should we look to the stated aims of the project or work with selected, particular aspects of it? Although the ‘Doncaster Earth Centre’ excerpt adheres to the aim of visiting ‘ecologically-significant’ sites, no other voices are heard, which runs counter to the stated aim of inviting stories from others, unless we accept the ‘welcome to the exhibit’ commentary as the story. Ounanian uses humour and irony in his commentary, thereby introducing new concepts and ones which entail playfulness and the suspension or cancellation of assertion. We are placed in a situation where, because of the multifaceted nature of the work, we face an array of concepts – cycling, ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, encountering others (or not), storytelling (or not), irony, humour, hand-held video – that make it ambiguous in which direction we should move to begin making a conceptual or declarative commitment that can be subject to deconstruction.

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We do not know from which conceptual perspective to approach the work. Is our situation one of utter undecidability in which we cannot even begin to apply concepts as the starting-points for cross-categorial slippages? If it were, it could be construed either as an exemplary deconstructive encounter with an artwork or as an encounter which refuses the stable application of categories, depending upon whether utter undecidability is taken to stretch textuality to its limit or to cancel it completely respectively. On closer inspection, however, this predicament turns out not to be the case. As hinted at above, the ‘stated aims’ of the work introduce concepts which we can work from. More importantly, Ritualride is being considered in relation to art–cycling as fine art research, so ‘cycling as art’ introduces a line of enquiry which obliges us to use concepts and make claims. ‘Cycling’ here is not just one term among many but the term which becomes art in virtue of the art histories and theories which expand upon mechanisms of becoming, appropriation, defamiliarisation, institutional baptism, metaphor, performativity, transformation, and the process of categorisation itself, since with some epistemologies, assigning the category is sufficient. Even if a case can be made for establishing which theory is or theories are most applicable, the deconstructionist must be mindful of the contingency of any theoretical reading of an artwork and permanently open to the claims from alternative and possibly opposing theories. If cycling is to become art, then we need familiarity with the theories of ‘becoming art’ which will explain the process. The work itself cannot tell us how its cycling-content became art, because there is no work itself outside of the textual play of categories. Rather, it will be a matter of: (a) the categories which can be applied to cycling and what cycling leads to, opens onto or invites as accompaniment (such as arrival at junkyards and sites of failure, encountering others (or not), humour, and hand-held video); (b) the theories or ontologies of ‘becoming art’ which underpin the mechanisms of transition or accompaniment; and (c) mindfulness of the contingency of the categories’ and theories’ application. The observation that theories of becoming will be applied to ‘cycling’ and what it ‘leads to, opens onto or invites as accompaniment’ shows that we cannot even reach a presence, a thing, an activity called ‘cycling’ because whatever instance or occasion is offered as a contender source item will itself already be on the way to somewhere else. A colour image of a bicycle against a white background will suggest ‘age’ (of the bike and its rider), ‘gender’, an object of ‘desire’ or ‘use’, an ‘environment’, and a ‘kind of cycling’ (road, mountain, touring).

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No cycling or bicycles feature in the ‘Doncaster Earth Centre’ video. It is a location that has been reached (one assumes) by cycling. The idea that cycling as art leads to forms (in this case, video) in which objects and events other than cycling appear is, ironically, highly deconstructionist, in as much as it enacts diffrance, the action whereby any attempt to privilege or rely heavily upon a term ends up initiating a series of deferrals in which terms other than the one intended are invoked. It has not been my intention to apply deconstruction to fine art research in the hope of finding an instance of categorial movement which can be labelled ‘deconstructionist’, but it appears we have found one. Turning to another aspect of the video, it is a sequence which moves around the junkyard area in a fashion which indicates ‘hand-held camera’, suggesting portability. Here, cycling indirectly informs the mode of representation: rather than selecting an audiovisual form for Ritualride from all the possible forms it could take, for example, a greater filmic quality, a more overt association with a film genre appropriate to the story to be told (whatever this might be), fuller attention paid to establishing the mise en sc ne, the audiovisual form of the video adheres to what can simply be achieved by editing material obtained from a portable video camera on location. In applying deconstruction to the Doncaster Earth Centre excerpt from Ritualride, we have not arrived at a sense of what a piece of deconstructionist ‘art as cycling’ research might look like. But that was never the point. In fact, there cannot be a piece of deconstructionist art which embodies or addresses a thesis, I would argue, for that would amount to reducing deconstruction to a style, which could only happen if the deconstruction of our application of categories were suspended in order to allow for the clustering of properties in a style. (The only exception might be the possibility of an artistic style that is not a style, but that must remain the subject of another paper.) Instead, we have identified that there are two areas where there will be movement between categories: cycling, and the theories of which explain cycling as art. One example of the movement between categories which surrounds cycling is the appearance of content other than cycling in the Doncaster Earth Centre video. Furthermore, the ‘hand-held’ quality of the video is an index of the importance of portability, of what can be carried by bike. There has not been time to consider the art histories and theories which expand upon mechanisms of becoming art, such as, appropriation, defamiliarisation, institutional baptism, metaphor, performativity, and transformation. But the fact that cycling itself might perform diffrance must be a contender for further exploration. Given the range of forms which visual

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art can take, what forms might be given to the places and occasions which one can reach or enable by cycling? To what extent should these forms be determined or influenced by what can be carried on a bike? How stable is ‘transportable by bike’ as a category, given that it is conceivably possible to transport anything by bike, given enough riders with trailers and a willingness to break things down to their component parts? A Habermasian perspective would prompt us to look for mediation or translation between the aesthetic and the everyday, where this movement is towards the formation of a shared understanding or at least the conditions for dialogue. But understanding about what? As we have seen, Ritualride is not an object with a readily identifiable set of properties. It has a variety of forms. If we are going to move from the aesthetic to the everyday, we need to know the nature and extent of the aesthetic experience from which we are moving. As I asked in relation to the deconstructive reading of the work: should we look to the stated aims of the project or work with selected, particular aspects of it? We are placed in a situation where, because of the multifaceted nature of the work, we face an array of concepts – again: cycling, ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, encountering others (or not), storytelling (or not), irony, humour, and hand-held video – which make it ambiguous in which direction we should move to approach the conditions for dialogue and to begin the translation process necessary for dialogue on Habermas’s terms. According to Duvenage’s study of Wellmer, the aesthetic (after Heidegger) discloses a new world by opening viewers ‘to new experiences of otherness, and disrupting previous fixities’.26 This requires the aesthetic to be an autonomous source of new possibilities, the generator of novel horizons, with its products being translated by discursive reason into terms which can be incorporated in rational arguments. It is debatable whether a short piece of hand-held camera footage is sufficiently remote to create otherness, and whether it is too representational to disrupt any fixities. In defence of a Wellmerian reading, perhaps being asked to accept a pile of office interior debris as part of an ecological exhibit provides sufficient room for an aesthetic–everyday translation to take place, on the grounds that we are poetically invited to see one thing as something else. But this assumes that analogy can be neatly assigned to the aesthetic side of the division when it is equally a facet of everyday language. My ‘cycling as art’ example has put us in a situation where the boundaries between the aesthetic and the everyday are blurred. In this respect, we are not 26 Duvenage 2003, 137.

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too far from Certeau’s claim that the everyday ‘invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others’, as in the case of the child who ‘makes a space for himself ’ on his schoolbook by scrawling on it in a fashion that is neither accommodated by the book’s layout nor desired by the schoolteacher.27 In other words, the everyday always reaches beyond itself so as to prevent itself from becoming a clearly delineated term in any conceptual mapping exercise. The fact that Ritualride is being considered in relation to art–cycling as fine art research should offer some guidance though. We are asked to consider cycling becoming art in virtue of its enabling or opening onto the other concepts listed above: ecology, wasteland, junk, failure, encountering others, humour, etc. But Habermas’s aesthetics cannot apply here, because we are moving from the everyday to the aesthetic, when his project runs in the other direction. Another possibility: rather than trying to work out how cycling becomes art, we might look instead to what cycling becomes or makes possible when it is played with, used differently, or manipulated by an artist. This would be a translation which does not move from the domain of cycling to the domain of art but, rather, uses art as a motivating force for the translation from cycling to any one or more of the domains of ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, etc. We would be following the response given by the artists’ group WochenKlausur when asked what makes their interventions in administration, activism and social work art: ‘Art lets us think in uncommon ways, outside of the narrow thinking of the culture of specialization and outside of the hierarchies we are pressed into when we are employed in an institution, a social organization, or a political party.’28 For example, in their 1994 – 95 work Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women, the group invited attorneys, councillors, social workers, and journalists professionally involved in the cases of drug-addicted women to take boat trips together as occasions where they could speak and listen in ways other than the assertive, combative, interest-laden modes they felt compelled to adopt in professional contexts. Art here operates neither as a source or target domain but as a mode of working differently with everyday, public, institutional officers, systems and concepts. For my art–cycling research, this would function along lines of seeing what cycling helps to make possible when applied differently, as art. In the case of Ritualride, the ‘Doncaster Earth Centre’ excerpt, together with all 27 Certeau 1984, xii, 31. 28 Cited in Kester 2004, 101.

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the project’s videos, would be viewed under the heading ‘what cycling can make possible’. The video would not be seen as something in its own right which has to be translated into the everyday, but as a series of sensory qualities, meanings, and narrative threads which sit at the end of particular extensions of what cycling can become. Interestingly, Habermas as a philosopher of modernity and WochenKlausur as artists who ‘think in uncommon ways’ have the same project – challenging specialisation – yet the place of the aesthetic within their mechanisms of contra-specialisation is different: with Habermas, the aesthetic is in need of cross-categorial mediation whereas, with WochenKlausur, it is a force injected into existing everyday concepts with the intention of either stretching them or allowing them to realise novel outcomes. One further act of translation needs to be considered. This will be an act of translation that is accompanied by the challenging of arguments and the requirement for evidence which are in keeping with Habermas’s demand for recognition of the intersubjective validity of claims. In exploring cycling as art in the context of fine art research, it has to be demonstrated that cycling can be art, it has to be the subject of a knowledge claim with argument and evidence (and a novel knowledge claim at that, given that research is a contribution to knowledge). Translation would be required in the sense that whatever arguments were made for a piece of cycling becoming art, the theories and other supporting claims used as premises in the arguments would need spelling out. Cycling’s becoming art would need to be unpacked in terms wider than those used in any headline or concluding statement to the effect that, in Ritualride (to stick with our example), it is the injection of the aesthetic into everyday practices of cycling, site visits and meetings which leads to a series of distinctive, particular events with qualities which would not have come about were it not for the injection. In other words, the ‘injection’ thesis would need explanation. From a Habermasian perspective, we need to know the status of these unpacked, explanatory statements. Do they fall within the realm of specialised knowledge, thereby making them as remote from the everyday as artworks themselves, or will the unpacking of terms happen to a degree where the layreader can understand the thesis? For whom does the researcher write? Furthermore, according to Habermas, reason working in the interests of social critique and progress must apply in an everyday context, yet the location of fine art research is primarily university art departments or art schools affiliated to universities. How are we to assess these in relation to the everyday?

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Addressing the relation between universities and life outside academia is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is worth observing that the nature and purpose of universities and their research are under constant scrutiny by governments set on reducing funding to higher education and demanding evidence that research has some perceived, preferably measurable benefit to society. As regards ‘benefit to society’, in the UK, this has been termed ‘impact’ within the next research assessment round, and has been defined as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.29 In one sense, impact is hard to take issue with. Who would want to deny that their research has economic, social or cultural benefit? One response might be to claim Habermas as the philosopher of impact, a defender of the requirement that a specialised practice must demonstrate the applicability of its research to a wider, everyday community. But impact is a far from straightforward notion. What counts as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life’? There is the equally contentious matter of what the evidence of such effects, changes or benefits might be, that is, how they might be captured and quantified. A benefit to society might be the cultivation of a criticality which questions any claims driven by economic, instrumentalist thinking. It is not immediately apparent where the impact agenda leaves the university as a site of critical resistance. For Derrida, ‘the principle of unconditional resistance is a right that the university itself should at the same time reflect, invent, and pose’.30 Ostovich makes a case on Habermasian grounds for the basis of the university’s value to society lying ‘in its character as a community of reason’, an environment in which students are encouraged always to have in mind the question ‘What makes this acceptable?’ when approaching the utterances of others.31 For now, all that can be indicated is that the division between research and the everyday may not be as strict as we first imagine, albeit for reasons which are not entirely laudable.

29 Research Excellence Framework 2011, 48. 30 Derrida 2002b, 204. 31 Ostovich 1995, 465.

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Conclusion This paper has brought questions of fine art research to bear on the opposition between deconstruction and reconstruction with the intention of: (a) showing how the opposition can address some of the fine art questions, and (b) providing a context in which the different understandings of cross-categoriality at work in deconstruction and reconstruction can operate over and above binary oscillation. One of the problems affecting the deconstruction–reconstruction debate is the oscillation between a strategy of ‘contradiction’, ‘destabilisation’, and ‘interruption’ on the one hand, and the requirement of the formulation of ideals, principles and laws in the interests of social and political progress on the other. Both sides claim social and political efficacy but operate with different ontologies, including different understandings of the language–world relation: Derrida maintains a Kantian-informed textuality, whereas Habermas advances a pragmatic epistemological realism which holds that the truth of a sentence is confirmed by reference to the world, as accessed and described through our cognitive, linguistic resources. Closer inspection of their ontologies in relation to aesthetics reveals that both attach importance to cross-categoriality, but understand it differently. With Derrida, it is thoroughgoing or infinite because of the ultimate contingency of all categories, whereas, with Habermas, it is translated or mediated across realms of discourse. Applying this difference in the understanding of cross-categoriality to fine art research has allowed the difference to be articulated in some novel ways. We have learned how the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition can operate in relation to a particular fine art research project and artwork. Deconstructive and reconstructive philosophies have different outcomes when applied to Ounanian’s Ritualride, and in particular the ‘Doncaster Earth Centre’ excerpt. A deconstructive reading focuses on the movement between categories surrounding cycling and the theories which explain cycling as art, whereas a reconstructive perspective runs into difficulties because the aesthetic–everyday distinction cannot be maintained. In addition, the array of concepts at work in the Earth Centre video – from cycling and ecology, through junk and failure, to irony and hand-held video – makes it ambiguous in which direction we should move to approach the conditions for dialogue and to begin the translation process necessary for dialogue on Habermas’s terms. However, the fact that ‘cycling as art’ occurs within the context of fine art research means that any technicalities surrounding the aesthetic–everyday distinction as

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it applies to cycling as art will require unpacking into broader, explanatory terms, and these may be more open to intersubjective validation. What about the aim of this book: to see whether the deconstruction–reconstruction contest might be located within a ‘new sensibility’? The fine art context, under the research imperative of it not being on its own but contributing to knowledge, has provided a new perspective on the different resistances at work in the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition. Rather than having them remain in a state of oscillation along an axis of undecidability versus mediation, fine art research encounters them in a variegated field of cross-categorial movement. This is a field rather than an axis because the distinctions which formerly arranged undecidability and mediation as a binary do not apply in a fine art research context. Undecidability and mediation will still occur, but instead of having to commit to either undecidability or mediation, perceiving and reflecting upon art as research are processes which require a greater flexibility of movement. Because of the multifaceted nature of Ounanian’s Ritualride, we faced an array of concepts which made it ambiguous in which direction we should move to begin making a conceptual or declarative commitment. However, the fact that this was occurring in a research context, with a line of enquiry which obliged us to use concepts and make claims, meant competing theories would be drawn upon but none could be taken as the ‘home’ or ‘final’ theory on account of the deconstructive challenge to any notion of a fully-present fit between concept and object. The idea that undecidability and mediation might enjoy a relationship other than opposition is signaled by the fact that the concepts and claims which we are obliged to use are steps towards Habermas’s requirement of mediation between the aesthetic and the everyday. Except here the mediation is between the theories integral to the art as research process; with Ritualride, this would occur between theories of becoming art. The idea that fine art practice has to be answerable to analysis from a range of theories and research methods is consistent with a Habermasian move away from art for art’s sake to a series of more worldly, discursive forms. Craig-Martin and the ‘danger of distortion’ may not find favour here, since their arguments for art’s validity being defined wholly on the terms of the art world, and in terms of art for art’s sake, meet head-on Habermas’s requirement for art’s commitment to the lifeworld. It would also appear that, as far as Habermas is concerned, research would not distort art practice but subject it to the methodological, argumentative and discursive requirements of research, and transform it by

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redirecting it towards a wider set of worldly concerns. Against this, however, it cannot be assumed that art as research necessarily fulfils the mediation between autonomous art and everyday life which Habermas wants. The principal environment for fine art research is the university, including exhibitions in university galleries and publications in fine art research journals. However, questions of style put to the researcher, such as ‘For whom do you write?’ and ‘Which idioms do you adopt?’, and tensions surrounding the notions of economic, social and cultural impact indicate that the division between specialist and lay literature is not necessarily an impermeable one. How one conceptualises and assesses such permeability must remain the subject for another study. It could be argued I can only claim this non-oppositional field of cross-categoriality for fine art research because I am not situating it overtly in relation to reconstructive projects of social progress and political emancipation. The opposition is bound to disappear, the criticism would run, because the heart of the matter – the tension between art and politics – has been removed. Except it hasn’t. The first half of my chapter has shown that deconstructive and reconstructive aesthetics understand the tension between art and politics in terms of two competing notions of cross-categoriality. The second half of my chapter has shown that that fine art research manipulates cross-categoriality in ways which depart from opposition. But doesn’t this ultimately muddy the issue, leaving us in a state where we do not have a clear-cut answer to the question: how does fine art research make a difference to the deconstruction–reconstruction opposition? What kind of texts, objects or events would be introduced to enact these non-oppositional states? But such questions cannot be taken at face value. They demand examples along the lines of ‘What would it look like?’, ‘What form would it take?’, but the forms of encounter adopted would themselves be at issue in terms of the categories they invoke, and the possibilities of cross-categorial movement which may arise. It has to be remembered that, for both Derrida and Habermas, they are working in the Kantian and Heideggerian traditions which take concepts all the way down to the ‘shape’ or textuality or structure of experience, including the ‘shape’ of events which might realise non-oppositional, aesthetico-political forms. Ultimately, to adopt the terms of my fine art example, the forms that a cycling-as-art event takes would form part of the research programme, because the transitions from claim to artistic form and vice versa would themselves be two fundamental cases of cross-categorial movement in need of evaluation. What these forms might be must re-

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main the subject of future study of deconstructive–reconstructive aesthetics and fine art research. The point is simply to meet the charge of ‘muddied waters’ by explaining that the muddiness is a consequence of the departure from the ‘razor-sharp but ultimately unproductive, oscillationgenerating’ clarity of binary division, and that the mutually informative relations between deconstructive–reconstructive aesthetics and fine art research demonstrated here are the first steps towards outlining a practice whose business it might be to realise new forms of aesthetico-political encounter.

Towards a Dramaturgy of Suspicion: Theatre and Myths in 20th-century France Franca Bruera In memory of Christa Wolf

In 1956 Natalie Sarraute published a study with the emblematic title L’ðre du soupÅon,1 in which the author proclaimed the urgent need for a revolution in writing, inspired by the definitive supercession of canons and of traditional conventions. The study, which consists of four articles published between 1949 and 1955, invites the reader to enter into the socalled ‘era of suspicion’, through the filter of a new way of conceiving textual strategies: not merely a ‘terrain d’entente’, but a place of ‘mfiance rciproque’ and ‘terrain dvast’, in which the author and the reader would finally be able to confront one another.2 Though the category of the ‘masters of suspicion’ was formulated in 1969 by Paul Ricoeur to identify the inventors of a new ‘art of interpretation’ within the contemporary philosophical context,3 the dimensions of doubt, of uncertainty, and of ‘diffidence’, as Sarraute asserts, were evoked as early as the end of the 1940s and made nearly official in France by writings – both theoretical and otherwise – of a mainly literary variety which attempted to offer instructions for a new use of the existent forms of communication: La vie mode d’emploi 4 within its very title shows the 1 2 3 4

Sarraute 1956. Sarraute 1956, 62 – 63. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud are the masters of suspicion that Paul Ricoeur identifies in order to position hermeneutics within the context of the philosophical reflections of the 20th century. See Ricoeur 1969. A novel by Georges Prec, published in 1978, whose characteristics are synthesised in chapter 26: ‘Imaginons un homme dont la fortune n’aurait d’gale que l’indiffrence  ce que la fortune permet gnralement, et dont le dsir serait, beaucoup plus orgueilleusement, de saisir, de dcrire, d’puiser, non la totalit du monde – projet que son seul nonc suffit  ruiner – mais un fragment constitu de celui-ci: face  l’inextricable incohrence du monde, il s’agira alors d’accomplir jusqu’au bout un programme, restreint sans doute, mais entier, intact, irrductible.’ Perec 1978, 152.

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spirit of experimentation that the era of suspicion had cultivated during these years. Literature from the postwar era is punctuated, in fact, by numerous challenges that stress the need to make sure that readers recognise the urgency of this new literature: one only needs to look at the paratextual threshold of these writings to find it. From the famous question posed by Sartre in 1947, Qu’est-ce que la littrature?, which calls into question both writing in its social function and the writer ‘in situation’,5 to the experience of isolation and of solitude of Maurice Blanchot, elaborated in 1955 by way of the question O va la littrature?,6 the dimensions of doubt and of uncertainty force themselves upon the attention of artists and writers in their functions as aesthetic parameters and essential keys of interpretation, confirming one of the most evident traits of modernity: its nature is both self-referential and self-critical. These are merely a few crucial examples7 of a fertile theoretical activity that developed by delving into its roots in a postwar period of social, political, economic and cultural reconstruction that underwent, from an artistic and literary point of view, a veritable crisis of representation. This was a crisis to which the theatres, those that presented spectacles of a mythic nature, amply testified starting in the 1920s, bringing to light a large part of that culture of suspicion that would become its legacy to the deconstructive sensibility and which would eventually make the desire to destroy, to decompose, to fragment and to sow the seeds of doubt the basis of literary-philosophical reflection for a large part of the second half of the 20th century. The following study is intended as an intervention into the debate about deconstruction with the principal intention of recognising the dual force of myths as they were represented onstage: it is both normative and destructive at the same time, conscious of the principle of the dialectical correlation between the deconstructive experience and the reconstructive thought of the 20th century. From their first reworkings in the 20th century, myths seem able to settle and to facilitate their sense by way of an extraordinary and uncommon capacity to power themselves thanks to an ever stronger narrative 5 6 7

Sartre 1964. Blanchot 1959. To these can be added by way of example the various forms of suspicion formulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet (see Robbe-Grillet 1963), as well as the interrogations of Julien Gracq (see Gracq 1961), and of Bernard No l (see No l 1997).

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potential, this in turn is favoured by the dialectical process of desemanticisation and resemanticisation which the myths themselves produce. The examples to be discussed in our study will elucidate the specificity of this intrinsic polarity of myths. Independently of the outcomes of the diverse rewritings, of which we will show a few models, it seems possible, in fact, to recognise during the 20th century a marked tendency to overcome the traditional acceptance of myth as mere repetition as a result of its renovated conception within the dialectical framework of deconstruction/reconstruction.8 The first point to underline is that the quite diffuse tendency in France from the end of the First World War to deconsecrate the great myths of antiquity, seen for the most part in the theatre, is much akin to the progressive erosion of those parameters and traditional conventions that had always preserved the uniqueness of the work of art. The massive movement toward a general revisitation of myths corresponds perfectly to the historical/cultural crisis that the accelerations and radical transformations of the short 20th century had inevitably engendered.9 The idea of myth, in fact, became involved in that progressive cultural projection of the crises of history, of the fragmentation of language and of speech, of the end of ‘the work of art’ as a finished product resolved in and of itself. Myth, in the end, is a key factor within the critical debate over the 20th-century crisis of Cartesian self-evidence. Within this context, the sheer number of works from the first half of the 20th century that have a mythical subject is evidenced by the extreme degree of porosity that the myths bear for the first time in history. Having overcome the traditional understanding of myth as an archetypal model of inertia, of stability, and of restoration or repetition of the sacred period of their origin, over time these myths assume an increasingly marked function as a generative and dynamic model, in that ‘myth is not an idle tale, but a hard worked active force’.10 As will be demonstrated shortly, it is the theatre that brings the myth onto the scene as a vehicle for the transmission of the twofold stance of 20th-century thought and criticism, in that it shares both the specificity of the deconstructive and demystifying gesture that was inaugurated by the ‘masters of suspicion’ and the more specifically reconstructive instances of contemporary reflection. 8 For more on the debate on the dialectic polarity of deconstruction and reconstruction, see Lingua/Martinengo 2010. 9 Hobsbawm 1994. 10 Malinowski 1954, 101.

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Within artistic and literary society it was this reflection, beginning at the end of the First World War, which contrasted the reordering force of narration to the crisis of subjectivity and of writing in general. During the period between the end of the First World War and the end of the 1940s there was, and not only in France, a large-scale reappearance on the literary scene of paradigmatic mythic models which provide interesting examples of the overthrow of traditional readings that had conventionally been applied to them. From Cocteau’s Antigone, which in 1922 prematurely launched the program of formal restoration known as the rappel  l’ordre, to Anouilh’s Mde (1946), a dense tragedy replete with the motives of incommunicability and of the insufficiency of speech, the myth seems to rise both to a symbolic and privileged space and to a hermeneutic standard. This new status was acquired by means of the dialogical dimension which vitalises the myths themselves as well as for their capacity to harmonise with modern events and to measure dialectically against their own traditions. The many examples that one can find in French poetry, prose, and especially in dramaturgy from those years do not set themselves up as conventional ways of revisiting an ancestral and collective space within the automatic mechanism of its reprise; rather, they appear to be key moments in the search for poetic modalities and for new aesthetics which, taken together, identify within the myths a new referential horizon of a fertile, dynamic and innovative nature. From the last years of the 19th century onwards, myths became a point of convergence for literary, religious, anthropological, psychoanalytical, ethnological, and philosophical experiences while, as far as the more strict relationship between myth and literature is concerned, the beginning of the 1930s saw the first studies on mythanalyse, inaugurated by Denis de Rougemont in his famous study L’Amour et l’Occident (1939). Myth, from the end of the First World War, falls within the dynamic of an ample debate taking place among various fields of study, not the least of which is linguistics. From the simple forms of Andr Jolles through the more thorough studies of Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson this science announced the specificity of a language that was starting to declare itself in crisis. As mute as the sirens of Kafka and Beckett that Ulysses can no longer hear, language presents all the characteristics of a modernity that moves attention away from the content and towards the methods and the codes of communication. If T. S. Eliot, as early as 1923, signals the importance of comparing the archaic and the modern in Joyce

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– speaking in terms of a ‘mythic model’11 – it seems possible to underline the epistemological value of myth which in the first half of the century seems to relate more and more, as far as method is concerned, to scientific knowledge. The potential of myth to form an investigative path marks a change in aesthetic consciousness, recognising in it a certain rigour and identifying it as ‘der Mythos ist kein Kontext, sondern ein Rahmen, innerhalb dessen interpoliert werden kann’.12 We are presented, then, with a scenario that is circumscribable, flexible and fertile that enriches and is enriched by different meanings based on the various configurations in which it finds itself involved. The first theatrical rewritings of myths date to the prolific French climate of the 1920s and signal a radical change in aesthetic experience compared to the first two decades of a century that is notoriously dominated by the iconoclasm of the historic avant-gardes. Myth, having overcome romantic titanism, profaned and reduced to a putrid carcass of Baudelairian memory,13 inserts itself with difficulty, though dynamically, in the dialectical process of incontro-scontro with the tradition launched by the avant-gardes, thus sustaining its own vital force within the new myths that celebrate historicity, through its sense of bricolage,14 and in virtue of its intrinsic analogical weight. Immediately after the First World War, in parallel with a more cautious relationship with historicity, to an ever more accurate reflection of historic sense15 and of the concept of duration inspired by Bergson,16 the possibility of communicating the world seems more and more remote and problematic. In this climate, myth, understood as an opening onto possible other worlds that transcend the defined limits of our actual world, seems to offer literature the opportunity to draw from a fertile narrative material, already on the one hand guarantor of universal categories and on the other, in its very nature a lack of fixedness and its metamorphoses and oscillations, a great source of stimuli for the production of new meanings.

11 Eliot 1923, 480 – 483. 12 ‘A frame within which interpolations can be added.’ Blumenberg 1971, 51 (my translation). 13 Cf. in particular Curi 1996, 3 – 39. 14 Lvi-Strauss 1996. This important aspect is underlined by Curi 1996, 155 – 161. 15 Eliot 2001, 392 – 402. The reference is to Tradition and Individual Talent (1919). 16 Curi 1996, 171.

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Myth, just as Paul Ricoeur asserted in Finitude et culpabilit,17 thus returns in the 20th century in virtue of its capacity to configure itself as a possible new set of norms and values.18 ‘Nous racontons des histoires parce que finalement les vies humaines ont besoin et mritent d’Þtre racontes’, as Ricoeur likewise asserted in Temps et rcit. 19 In literary text with a mythical setting, this specificity, which is strictly connected to a general desire to reconstruct, combines with characteristics that are apparently contrary and destabilising: myth, as Marguerite Yourcenar writes in her lectre ou la chute des masques (1954), is ultimately a sort of ‘admirable ch que en blanc sur lequel chaque po te  tour de r le peut se permettre d’inscrire le chiffre qui lui convient’.20 It therefore conserves its structure as a model of normativity and regenerates itself in essence by way of a process of desanctification which manifests itself, according to modalities that are always different, through its own deconstruction. In the end, the identity of the myth, as Derrida might argue, does not seem to be per se in the 20th century, but is rather something that can be determined only in relation to something else, as differing from itself.21 If Jean Giraudoux, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono and other authors were able to construct some of the most original re-readings of the ancient myths this was only by disregarding the linearity of historic time and the solemnity and the authority of the various mythical figures as well as by interweaving plots constructed on the basis of alchemical associations. The absurd death of Agamemnon at the edge of a pool (in Giraudoux’s lectre, 1937),22 the ill-concealed nymphomania of Jocasta (in Cocteau’s La Machine infernale, 1934),23 the prosaic utterances of a lying and do-nothing Ulysses (in Giono’s Naissance de l’Odysse, 1930),24 the foolishness of the young Paris (in Giraudoux’s La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, 1935),25 to limit ourselves to but a few of the paradigmatic examples, even while demystifying, parodying, and desanctifying the classical myths, do not translate a necessity to destroy either 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Ricœur 2009. Martinengo 2008b. Ricœur 1983, 143. Yourcenar 1971, II, 19. Derrida 1967b. Giraudoux 1982. Cocteau 2003. Giono 1971. Giraudoux 1982.

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good taste or common sense, nor do they perpetuate the profanation of the sanctity of the myth,  la Baudelaire. Rather, they overcome the limit of an instrumental interpretation or use of the myth – understood as a vehicle of founding values and therefore used for its marble fixedness – empirically translating the intuitions of T. S. Eliot concerning myth as a method of interpretation and as a cognitive investigative tool that is able to render the modern world accessible to art.26 No longer the champion of universal and immutable values, now the receptacle of particular fragments and ever-changing, the mythological material began to accommodate new content and to participate in a critical dialogue both with its own past and with the present in which it began to be used, assigning in this way a decidedly surprising meta-literary character to the different rewritings. No longer to recognise but to interpret, no longer cultivated as a medium of homogeneous, consistent, monolithic meaning but understood as an accumulation of citations and analogies which, through a process of dissemination, can be pieced together in different ways, myth is subjected to the tastes of the reader/spectator. For Cocteau it is possible to re-read Sophocles’s Antigone only by flying over Greece in an airplane: A vol d’oiseau, de grandes beauts disparaissent, d’autres surgissent; il se forme des rapprochements, des blocs, des ombres, des angles, des reliefs inattendus. Peut-Þtre mon exprience est-elle un moyen de faire vivre les vieux chefs d’œuvre. A force d’y habiter nous les contemplons distraitement, mais parce que je survole un texte cl bre, chacun croit l’entendre pour la premi re fois.27

In this way the poet draws from myth in its sense of a system in permanent revision, proposing to the public an adaptation of Antigone which is both faithful to Sophocles’s model and a revisiting of the form, beginning with the telegraphic recitation28 modelled on the verbal duel,29 then concerning the costumes, the scenery, and the music, entrusted respectively to Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso and Arthur Honegger, not to mention the dialectic between ancient and modern that transforms the disobedience of Antigone into an act of anarchy. 26 Eliot 1923, 483. 27 Cocteau 2003, 305. 28 ‘L’extrÞme vitesse de l’action n’empÞche pas les acteurs d’articuler beaucoup e de remuer peu. Le Chœur et le coryphe se rsument en une voix qui parle tr s haut et tr s vite comme si elle lisait un article de journal.’ Cocteau 2003, 307. 29 ‘Antigone et Cron se parlent de tout pr s; leurs fronts se touchent.’ Cocteau 2003, 313.

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Caught up in the spinning wheels of modernity, the phenomenon of the rewriting of myths in France is inscribed in the search for new expressive forms, in the vein of a recouping of the communicative power of the word that the recourse to myths can, perhaps, guarantee. On a thematicexpressive level such a search shows itself through a general loss of depth and centrality of the mythical figures that are used, often at the very limit of aphasia – as is the case of Cousteau’s Orpheus – or, on the contrary, through the loss of meaningful speech, as seemingly represented by Giono’s Ulysses or Anouilh’s Medea. Meanwhile myth, repository of sense within a new frame, transfuses contents, is renovated in form and accedes to a new mode of signification within an intertextual and stratified rewriting which, just like myth itself, becomes a dynamic model of infinite connections and possibilities of ‘re-production’.30 It is in this capacity to reconstruct and resemanticise itself that myth translates that unequivocal polarity that identifies itself in the deconstructive and reconstructive thought of the 20th century.31 In its intrinsic nature as a story myth – according to a prospective reading that is either Ricoeurian or reconstructive – is the champion and reconstructor of sense, independently of its possible dead ends and its aversion to any form of all encompassing truth, unambiguous or objective as it may be, which would be unacceptable in the 20th-century context in which it is positioned. Among the works that most explicitly convey the dialectical process of desemanticisation and concurrent resemanticisation of myth, we will now focus on Orphe by Jean Cocteau which, within the physical space of the scene – a privileged place of the semiotic transfusion of the myth – celebrates the encounter between the demystifying gesture and the reconstructive operation, all within the framework of an original ‘backwards’ reading of myth. Cocteau brings to the stage an Orpheus who, already in Act I, is presented to the audience metaphorically dismembered, decomposed, ‘in pieces’, as he is deprived of the generative capacity that the legend had attributed to him. Inconsolable and conscious both of the crises of poetic sensibility and of his own intellectual aridity, Orpheus seems to be suffocated to the point of aphasia, infertile and sterile, just as his dialogues

30 For a more in depth approach to the motive of the re-production of the myths, see my study Bruera 2008, 549 – 560. 31 Ferry 1996.

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with Eurydice suggest.32 The originality of the play is found in its structure, which on the one hand seems to interrogate the quest for mythical unity and stability while on the other it accompanies the new Orpheus down a tortuous path of the retrieval of the lost word and along the long walk of the progressive reconstitution of his own ‘fragments’. Starting out from the metaphorical meaning of the myth me of dismemberment, Cocteau leads Orpheus towards the discovery of his very identity; deprived of his generative capacity, the character draws the resources required to regenerate himself from the narrative material of the myth, while also regenerating and reconstructing the sense. In this way Cocteau founds his aesthetic experience both upon the value of persistence and on the porosity of the mythological material: through the demystification of the characters – all of whom are incomplete and capable only of an understanding of the world that is both relative and defective – and through the desemanticisation of the message that is actualised and standardised through language, the new Orpheus offers the possibility to think about a return of the myth: this time revisited in terms of the capacity to translate both the insufficiency of any conservative interpretation and, perhaps more importantly, its meaning as a productive dimension with re-compositional and reconstructive capacities. If Orpheus is born again from his own ashes and begins his existence ‘from the end’, Jean Giono’s Ulysses is reborn paradoxically from his character as ‘Nobody’ and through the power of the narrative, which confirms once again the reconstructive meaning of myth when he is subjected to a series of upheavals. In his condition as ‘different from himself ’, or 32 To explain briefly, the following is one of the opening dialogues of the work: ‘Eurydice. – Orphe, mon po te… Regarde comme tu es nerveux depuis ton cheval. Avant tu riais, tu m’embrassais, tu me berÅais; tu avais une situation superbe. Tu tais charg de gloire, de fortune. Tu crivais des po mes qu’on s’arrachait et que toute la Thrace rcitait par cœur. Tu glorifiais le soleil. Tu tais son prÞtre, et un chef. Mais depuis le cheval tout est fini. Nous habitons la campagne. Tu as abandonn ton poste et tu refuses d’crire. Ta vie se passe  dorloter ce cheval,  interroger ce cheval,  esprer que ce cheval va te rpondre. Ce n’est pas srieux. Orphe. – Pas srieux? Ma vie commenÅait  se faisander,  Þtre  point,  puer la russite et la mort. Je mets le soleil et la lune dans le mÞme sac. Il me reste la nuit. Et pas la nuit des autres. Ma nuit. Ce cheval entre dans ma nuit et il en sort comme un plongeur. Il en rapporte des phrases. Ne sens-tu pas que la moindre de ces phrases est plus tonnante que tous les po mes? Je donnerais mes œuvres compl tes pour une seule de ces petites phrases o je m’coute comme on coute la mer dans un coquillage. Pas srieux?’ Cocteau 2003, 391 – 392.

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as ‘other’, Ulysses reveals himself by lying, which in the Naissance de l’Odysse acts as much as a fil rouge as a mechanism for bringing both sides of the myth face to face: those of the original and eternal versus those of the merely derivative.33 Myth, presented with anti-sublime characteristics, puts Ulysses’s legendary charm and prodigious ability as a mendacious narrator to the service of the narrative, celebrating the transitory aspect and the vitality of a word which has become paradoxically unofficial, ambiguous and blasphemous.34 Nevertheless, Ulysses’s lies fly from one person to another and in their germination and diffusion are transformed into official doctrine – mythical though it may be – which is recognised by the masses. And it is precisely on this dialectical contrast between the monologue-heavy epic material and the need for dialogue inherent in the narrative structure of the piece that Naissance de l’Odysse is formed. In this light the novel becomes an acute meta-narrative operation, played out using the extraordinary generative potential of mythic language, confirming the diffuse return of an interest in the traditional forms of communication and sharing of meaning. These are just a few examples taken from a rich patrimony of rewritings of myths that come from the 1920s, to which one might add the ample selection of mythic figures that were revisited in the 1930s: the Atreids, Oedipus, and quite a few reworkings of the myth of Medea,35 taken up again in the 1940s and 1950s by Sartre, Anouilh and Camus, principally, within the framework of a search focused on questioning, by use of the mythic model, the intersubjectivity and the dialogical exchange that are at the origins of individuality. If Antigone is the emblem of the paroxysm of conflicts, Medea reaches into the universality of her tradition in order to free herself from the mythic spell which locked her into the static image of the jealous woman, witch and child killer.36 In keeping with a theatre ignorant of psychological mechanisms, 33 Durand 1996, 87. 34 ‘“J’ai jur le nom des dieux? Je me suis mÞl  leur vie terrible! Pourquoi?” Le mensonge surgit par morceaux horribles devant lesquels il trembla. “J’ai attir leur œil sur moi!.. tais-je pas bien cach dans les herbes? Je les ai dfis par le dard de ma langue, puis j’ai clam mon nom vers eux, comme un couillon! Plus il rflchissait, plus il se sentait prisonnier de son mensonge, comme un bcheron dont la main est prise dans la fente referme d’un tronc.”’ Giono 1971, 37. 35 On this subject, see Ruiz 1982. 36 Anouilh 1967. The reference is to Antigone (1942) and Mde (1946).

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Orestes37 leaves the responsibility of his actions completely to the act itself and to the spoken word; in so doing he gives the myth the possibility of contributing to the exploration of shared situations within the compass of human experience and to affirming an intensely existentialist outlook with regard to human rights and values. In the second half of the 20th century, closely following a hybridisation and a mixing of experiences and values, myth is also deeply characterised by extreme variety and difference. As an example one can look to the Orpheus of Olivier Py,38 an ‘anti-genealogical’ model, as Gilles Deleuze might put it, of a rewriting that proceeds by way of variation, expansion: ‘conquÞte, capture, piqre’.39 In the same way as those models that preceded it, the Orpheus of Olivier Py takes shape within the economy of an intertextual and stratified writing that, just like myth itself, becomes a dynamic model of infinite connections and inexhaustible possibilities of reproduction. In conformity with the myth as it was handed down by antiquity, Py’s Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Bacchae yet still perseveres in his song, gaining the attention of a sculptor who sets his face down in stone. Orpheus, who lies as a cadaver in the laboratory of the artisan, wakes up, summoned in his own right by the power of the word of the person who is searching for him. Having disrobed, he undertakes a long journey through the various places of individual and collective memory. Among archaeologists, searchers of corpses, alienated people and professors, the strands of the plot of the myth of Orpheus interweave, called forth allusively or in fragments, initiating a critical dialogue with those universal categories of which the myth is the champion and holder. The model of revisitation seen above, ascribable to the last years of the 20th century, constitutes further confirmation of the bipolarity that myth has retained throughout the entire century. The regenerative force that Antonin Artaud attributed to it, its function as an escape route from the theatrical dead ends that Eug ne Ionesco saw in it, and its responsibility to undergo renovation in order to translate the urgency of the word that Claude Ber, Hubert Colas and other contemporary authors stressed, all help to confirm the extent to which mythical material continues to conserve its meaning as a widely shared symbolic space and 37 Sartre 2005. The reference is to Les Mouches (1943). 38 Py 1997. 39 Deleuze/Guattari 1980, 30.

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hermeneutic sphere. Guilty of ‘impatience’,40 Py’s Orpheus negates and at the same time affirms his mythic origins and in so doing – or rather, in so saying, in contradicting himself and in deconstructing himself in a continuous oscillation between reality and illusion – he translates the crisis of the 20th-century subject. But at the same time, in his oracular function, Orpheus is the incarnation of the saving power of the word which constructs meaning, which reclaims its speculative nature and which, in recouping its ancestral mythic patrimony, finds its inspiration. Myth, therefore, as a discovery and reconstruction of the word in a contest of ‘moral atony’,41 that of postmodernism and deconstruction which, combined in different ways and variously wound together, have translated not only the absence of any direction that might indicate the possibility of arriving at a greater truth, but also the lack of any projects that might fulfil the function of a compass for the human journey. With the definition of myth understood as a space in which there are masses that attract and repel each other, Paul Ricoeur saw properties within the mythic constructions that are analogous to those found in a gravitational field that has been disturbed by forces in continuous dialectical movement.42 The importance of Ricoeur’s reflections has persuaded us to begin a search, within the framework of studying theatrical literature of a mythic character written in the 20th century, which confronts myth in its generative, constructive, and dynamic potential as well as in its trans-temporal ‘classic’ fixity. For this reason, the models of rewriting that we have proposed in this study must be considered empirical evidence of an investigation which has an ambitious, but necessary, task. I aim to identify interpretative parameters that permit the study of a highly diffuse phenomenon of rewriting in the 20th century. I will attempt as well to overcome those often incomplete perspectives of reading that, in order to explain the rush to revisit the classical myths, use terms such as ‘imitation’, ‘parody’, ‘secondgrade literature’ or, more generally, talk about them as ‘second-hand’ works.43 To explain the contemporary space one would say that, beginning with Jean Cocteau and moving on to the works of Olivier Py, the aesthetic of mythical representation has been called into question through a di40 41 42 43

See Blanchot 1955. I have borrowed the definition of moral atony from Segre 2005. Ricoeur 2009, 527. See Compagnon 1979; Genette 1982.

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alectical process of demystification and a contemporaneous appropriation of the mythological material shorn of the sacredness of its original treatment and reconstructed in the uncertain present of writing. And on the basis of the dynamic connection between the constitutive elements of myth and new elements inserted into it in the last century, of the desemanticisation and resemanticisation of the characters and the events already codified in antiquity and the break with logical consequences of the events in question, the act of rewriting myth in the 20th century has become an important instrument in reading, identifying, receiving and – above all – revisiting cultural models. The 20th century has infused myth with a new energy, not by reclaiming the sacredness that it lost in the face of the deconstructive emergence of modernity, but rather by seeing in myth a substantial component of reconstruction and revision. In the wake of the increasing popular interest that the new sciences have invested in myth, mainly regarding its repetitive aspects and widely understood as a dialectical moment, literature and theatre have drawn inspiration for their conception of myth as a basis for a new beginning: myth has become a new form of dialogue and of textual polyphony, translating the need for a substantial renewal of writing as well as the increasingly lively interest in its own polymorphic and synthetic nature.

A Methodological Comparison between a Mythocentric Approach and a Deconstructive Reading in the Interpretation of Rewritings Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso Rewritings of myths appear to the reader and critic as anomalous textual objects. The nature of these texts seems to push to paroxysm the interpretive conflict between a reading that assumes the total autonomy of the text – arguing with Jacques Derrida and the textualism of the Yale school that ‘il n’y a pas d’hors-texte’, through the extreme aporistic consequences in Stanley Fish – and an interpretation that, on the other hand, accesses the text only by means of a dialogue with an extra-text, not conceived just in terms of the historical, cultural or ideological context, but as an intertextual network of theme and myth. 1 Unlike any other text, a rewriting has the peculiarity of alluding to a rfrence with which it explicitly demands a comparison. This reference can be conceived in two different ways. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as internal to the very same text, that is, according to Derrida, like an alterity that is always greffe, duplicated, like a diffrance. 2 Or, on the other hand – as is the case for readings like those in thematic criticism, mythanalyse and mythocritique 3 – this reference could be understood as a narrative hors-texte which is manifest in the text. This second perspective is that which we will identify as the ‘mythocentric approach’. Both of these readings are exposed to certain criticisms, given the fact that, as 1 2

3

As Pierre Brunel states, ‘for the very status of anteriority that characterises them, the myths are outside of the text. […] They are pre-texts, but also Hors-textes.’ Brunel 1992, 59. ‘It does not suspend reference – to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially, not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible.’ Derrida 1988a, 137. I leave the terms ‘mythanalyse’ and ‘mythocritique’ in French here and throughout as no comprehensive translation of the texts by Gilbert Durand and Pierre Brunel (nor of those inspired by their approaches) currently exist.

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Grard Genette has illustrated in his Palimpseste, rewriting is presented as a literature in the second degree and the interpretation of a text in the second degree cannot be set apart from a comparison to the first. The relationship with this first degree upon which the text is built can be expressed and detected precisely – as is the case with what Genette defines as hypotexte – or else it can be evoked in a generic reference that alludes to a culturally-shared repertoire, often defined as ‘tradition’, as is the case with that which is often defined as ‘literary myth’. In any case, this first degree which precedes the text is neither a dispensable element, since a comparison is demanded by the text itself, nor interpretable as a neutral sign, since it is claimed by virtue of its connection, often with the past, more often still with the mythical past, of a primordial era. Therefore, the location of this textual space, ‘hors’ or ‘dans le texte’, becomes a crucial junction for approaching the reading of a rewriting. Yet, it is not altogether clear what influence this interlocution has upon the work. Especially problematic are the cases where this comparison is not reduced to a relationship between two works, but between the present text and a whole legacy of stratified references. In other words, it seems possible to highlight two irreconcilable perspectives: a reading that accords perspectival priority to the myth, recognising it as an essence that precedes and includes the second text (hence the notion of mythocentric approach); and, a second reading that accords perspectival priority to the text, and which recognises the text as the primary object and starting point of its own interpretation. This second perspective could correspond to the purely deconstructive approach that denies the straightforward availability of sense and rejects any attempt to constrain the infinite openness of the sign as an ideological fault. The result is a praxis that encourages an interpretative productivity and a reading of the text which is freely available to the intentio lectoris. In what follows, we will discuss the limits of both the mythocentric and the deconstructive approach to the process of rewriting. In the first section, we will try to demonstrate that mythocritique, mythanalyse and thematic criticism share a deep and implicit methodological assumption, considering myth in an essentialist way, and the process of rewriting as itself deriving from a certain ‘idea’ of myth. In order to criticise this essentialist approach, we will use some conceptual instruments of deconstruction, which contrast with the metaphysical drift of ‘myth-perspective’. Then, in the second section, we will cast doubt upon the drastic consequences of a deconstructive reading in the interpretation of rewritings. We will show how rewriting, as resemantisation, implies a recon-

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struction of sense, which deconstruction explicitly disincentivises, if not frustrates, leaving rewriting text without the identification of its double nature.

1. The limits of mythocentric approaches The frequency of the return to the ‘archaic’ (Andr Siganos) and to the mythical and tragic figures of Greek classicism has caused many critics to recognise a continuity – and even an identity – in some re-evoked figures such as Antigone, Medea and Oedipus. The reference to mythical characters, suggested explicitly by rewriting, is inescapable, just as the ancestral echo that is evoked in virtue of an ancient genealogy has to be acknowledged. Undoubtedly, it is the long-lived vitality of mythical figures that has led many critics to define this reappearance as ‘perenniality’, ‘permanence’, ‘tradition’. The difficulty of distinguishing that which is inherited from that which is elaborated and new in a rewriting, therefore, has often strained the critical approach between the oppressive dichotomies of ‘perenniality and usury’ (Gilbert Durand), ‘permanence and transformation’ (Eva Kuschner), ‘tradition and creation’ (Raymond Trousson), and between the still more thorny ‘myth’, ‘literary myth’ (Pierre Albouy) and ‘literized myth’ (Siganos). This dual tension has raised a veritable anthology of critical readings, among which the most successful are precisely mythanalyse, mythocritique and thematic criticism. All these oxymoronic couplings – as dynamic tensions between an inclusive macrosystem (that of the universal, of the myth) and the rewriting (its empirical and particular precipitate, as a variant of a transcendent model) – betray a common perspectival positioning, decentred with respect to the text, that aims to recognise a perennial dimension outside of the text, but that is co-extensive with it. Roman Racine recently defined the critical attitude, which recognises a permanent dimension in rewriting, as ‘deductive idealism’,4 and Alain Deremetz designates it as a ‘metaphysical and ontological’ plane.5 This approach could be identified as a mythocentric reading. Although mythanalyse,6

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Cf. Racine 2006, 37. Deremetz 1994, 16 – 17. Gilbert Durand, theorist of mythanalyse, conceives the existence of the myth as a dynamic system of archetypal images. The vision of Durand, matured under the influence of Jung’s theories, but also under the theory of the residues and deri-

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mythocritique,7 and thematic criticism,8 are methodological approaches that are completely distinct from one another (and which have often led to fervent polemical debate), they share a common position regarding rewritings. These investigative approaches aim to retrieve a general nucleus in the text, a generative structure – whether it is myth or a dynamic system of archetypes, attitudes, or situations – conceived as a whole and composed of many segments or nuclei, through which it is possible to reconstruct a latent unity. According to this interpretative perspective, the text represents a derivation,9 a modulation,10 a subordination to a higher idea of myth. From this point of view, the relationship between the macrosystem of the myth and the particular rewriting is based on the dialectic between permanence and transformation. This gives rise to comparative studies which mainly aim to identify the elements of continuity and innovation in every rewriting with respect to the original model.

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vations of Pareto, intends ‘to show, to offer an almost mechanical model of the myth’s functioning.’ Durand 1978, 29. In his Dictionnaire des mythes littraires, Brunel affirms that it is impossible to approach the study of literary myths without having confronted the myth itself. To support his claims, he takes Durand’s positions saying that: ‘the myth is a whole’, ‘that is, a unity that comprehends a plurality’, ‘a system of antagonistic forces’ (Brunel 1992, 65), an ‘oxymoron of destructive creation and creative destruction’ (Brunel 1988, 66). Here we must find ‘a pattern that boosts the myth’: that is a ‘language pre-existing the text’ and above all a ‘numinosit’, a transcendence that is opposed to the very immanence of the social. Cf. Brunel 1992, 58 – 59. Trousson is more sceptical toward the archetypal Jungian matrix and in general toward the structural analysis. He recognises the latter may be useful for the study of the first literary crystallisation of myth, but it may not give account of the diachronic fortune of a theme. Nevertheless, he does claim that the theme of Antigone is ‘from the beginning the expression of a political conflict’ (Trousson 1981, 115). In this manner he does postulate an incorruptible and constant nature, at least in its noyau, of the mythical figure – which he calls ‘theme’. He further distinguishes two types of mythical themes: the character themes, which represent attitudes – like Prometheus, for instance, represents the revolt – and situation themes, which represent ‘motives’ – like Medea represents ‘the motif of the cheated on and abandoned woman’ (Trousson 1981, 23). Thus, the motive ‘crystallizes itself ’, ‘delimits itself ’, ‘defines itself ’. Durand claims that myths are dynamic systems with a constant minimum number of fundamental mythems that make up the ‘hard core’ of every myth. Accordingly, the study of the ‘derivations’ would focus on the evolution of this ‘hard core’. He distinguishes between heretical, syncretic and ethical derivations. Cf. Durand 1987. Even if Brunel recognises through the particular text the right to vary the myth, the variation is not completely free: it is only a modulation. Cf. Brunel 2000, 80.

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The fact that this conception postulates the presence of a dynamic element, a ‘polyvalence and flexibility’ represented by the particular text, confirms nevertheless a totalising context in which diversity can be inscribed. In fact, what Derrida remarked about polysemy in the text could be adapted here to the idea of myth: [Polysemy] is organized within the implicit horizon of a unitary resumption of meaning, that is the horizon of […] a teleological and totalizing dialectics that at a given moment, however far off, must permit the reassemblage of the totality of a text into the truth of its meaning […].11

In an analogous manner, these three mythocentric approaches insert the polymorphic specificity of the text within a flux and therefore within a continuity of the specific myth. According to these perspectives, myth appears endowed with a kind of substantiality that manifests itself ‘naturally’ through its very presence in the literary works. Following this assumption, the margins of creative liberty in a rewriting are circumscribed. Even if the myth is not conceived as something outside of literature or of history, it is still understood as being hors-texte and sur-text, two assumptions that inevitably undermine the autonomy of the work. However, the text is interpreted as something subhordinated to an idea (that of myth) that defines it as variation. According to the deconstructionist approach, ‘reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent […] or toward a signified outside the text’.12 On the contrary, the mythocentric readings close the text under an overbearing hierarchy, in which the rewritings are only able to modulate and vary upon something that is not only external to itself, but is also a superior presence that is necessary. A further limitation of the mythocentric approach is that its conception of myth assigns to it a universal truth-value, like an ontophany. The pretence of identifying a scheme or situation as a natural constant being preserved through the readings does not only mean – as we have said – recognising an instance that is superior to the particularity of every text, but also establishing an authentic and immutable version, which is not subject to interpretation and may not be an object of deconstructive dismantling. Therefore, this noyau is endowed with a transcendent life, which is manifested through the text as ‘eternal present’, and is up11 Derrida 2004d, 41. 12 Derrida 1997d, 158.

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dated and characterised by the unity of its own existence (flexible, polymorphous, but still one). Thus, if the history of metaphysics is the story of a determination of being as presence, the literary myth becomes a metaphysical entity, endowed with an inalienable (and authoritarian) truth. The debunking gesture that dismantles every universal truth, which is sometimes seen as a characteristic of deconstruction, induces us to distrust the concept of myth, and consequently to demystify the universal character that is attributed to it. Jacques Boulogne, criticising this arbitrary unity of myth, claims: ‘What could be more misleading than the definite article “the myth of Orpheus”?’ The article ‘the’ is an abstraction which multiple emerging versions participate in, as if they were updating a preexisting virtual reality. Actually the essence does not precede existence, a myth does not exist independently of its form, which is ever textual, even when the event is iconographic.13

Identifying a fixed core within the myth inevitably leads to the temptation of assigning a semantic dimension to this immutable signifier, and obviously, also recalling its ancestral character. Furio Jesi, who denounced this risk in the course of his all too brief period of critical production, wrote that he who believes in the existence of the myth as an autonomous essence, also tends to believe himself to be the custodian of exegetical sense, which, based on the alleged foundation of the autonomous existence of the myth, distinguishes the Righteous from the Impious, those who must live from those who must die.14

As a matter of fact, for those who recognise an essence in myth, the exegesis of the myth is a reflection they cannot avoid – that is the case with Trousson when he recognises in Antigone the ‘expression of a political conflict’.15 Despite the generic character of the formulation, this interpretation imposes a forced and binding key for approaching the rewriting of Antigone, and introduces a criterion of purity or suitability of the text with respect to the model. We can enumerate endless examples of semantification of the archetypal scheme.16 The hermeneutic passage from find13 14 15 16

Boulogne 1994, 303 – 304. Jesi 1973, 8. Trousson 1981, 115. Examining the case of Prometheus, Durand asserts: ‘This myth defines always a rationalist, humanist, progressive, scientistic, and sometimes socialist ideology.’ Siganos, a scholar of the Mythocritique, defines the Urform of the labyrinth

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ing some constant synchronicities (which are already the result of a subjective interpretation) to their interpretation is a praxis that is common to all of these approaches. For his part, Durand criticises an epoch that has ‘reduced the meaning to the sole signifier’ and attributes to the myth the hope of a ‘parole retrouve’, for the ‘verticalit du signifi’, for the ‘reconciliation avec nos animalits’.17 With these points in mind, we can turn to some of the difficulties that the mythocentric approach encounters. Its search for constants is not a simple search for the signifier: it is already a reading, an assertion of a signified and a speech act that involves a subjective presence. Every speech act is a performative act: the reading is always presented as a sign ‘greff’ of another sign. Therefore, the critical discourse that reduces the openness of the sign to a dominant signifi – following the logocentric praxis of repeating the concept, the pense, the Ide 18 of the thing represented – cannot claim to be neutral (or even natural), nor conceive the object of the critical discourse as external to itself. The very conception of the idea of myth – and its relative significance – is a performative act, which cannot ever be claimed as a constant; it is rather an interpretation, just like a rewriting. And, just like any other kind of interpretation, it has a right to be as explicit and subjective as any reading of the myth. The problem starts when the interpreter puts his interpretation of the myth before his interpretation of the text, and thus forces the reader to avoid the specific hermeneutics of the myth expressed in every specific rewriting. In this way the text is subjected to an interpretative grid composed of a system of constants whose only arbitrator is the interpreter himself.19 In short, the text is not interpreted through the myth, but founded on four aspects: ‘The penetration into an astraying, conjectural space; a space of an apparently digestive, uterine, if not even monstrous nature; a difficult route towards a centre full of meaning, if not the Meaning.’ Siganos 1999, 43. Siganos certainly does not hesitate to attribute to the labyrinth a semantic value. The author wonders if the labyrinth is not, ‘once again (or already here), the expression of a desire to regressus ad uterum, back to the origin of being, that means to the original Peace before any sexualization’. Siganos 1999, 46. 17 Durand 2000, 30. 18 Derrida 1988a, 22. 19 In the introduction of his Mythe et criture, Siganos betrays the unequivocal interference of the subject of his approach: ‘We need […] to welcome the texts, meditate their sublime uncertainty, assessing the deep similarities of their horizons, evaluating finally, all the opportunities and constraints of an interpretation that illuminates them mutually.’ Siganos 1999, 2.

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through the interpretation that the myth-critic has previously projected onto the myth, which he in turn imprints onto the text itself. If the interpretation of every rewriting – which, as a part of its corpus, is supposed to found the interpretation of the myth – is based on the hermeneutic perspective of the myth, it will inevitably be contaminated by the hermeneutics of the myth which have preceded it. Thus, if the myth results from its versions, but its versions are interpreted through the verification of the presence of constants, the result is a hermeneutic short-circuit. The ‘meaning’ of the text is subordinated to that of the myth,20 but as the myth itself is a story, which in order to be identified as such must be interpreted (selecting the constitutive elements, removing those that are spurious, referring to the corpus from which it originates), the interpretation of the text is bound to the subjective interpretation of the myth that the critic finally offers. In other words, all the mythocentric interpretations (mythanalyse, mythocritique and thematic criticism) – which are expressions of a subjective and cultural perspective – present two problems: they pretend to defend a natural truth and they use the text surreptitiously and instrumentally, depriving it of its autonomy in order to make it a locus of verification for their truth. The meaning of myth, as it is assumed by the mythocentric perspective, resembles an act of faith that Derrida recognises in the axiom ‘that always affirms, as its name indicates, a value, a price; it confirms or promises an evaluation that should remain intact and entail, like every value, an act of faith’.21 According to this scheme, to this ‘resonnance universelle’ (Durand), or transcendent ‘numinosit’ (Brunel), a coherent continuity in the literary repertoire of rewritings – however polymorphous and protean – may be recognised. Therefore, it is not surprising that the term ‘tradition’22 is invoked. For Trousson, this term is charged with a determinist linearity, and every single rewriting plays a determinate role in the sequence of texts: ‘It is known that the first character of a work based on a theme is to come within the context, at its time, of a certain tradition, of a lin-

20 Bollack, referring to Euripides tragedies, says: ‘If it is defined as “demonstration of myth”, tragedy derives from myth its meaning or its message.’ Bollack 1997, 121. 21 Derrida 1998b, 58. 22 Trousson 1981, 75 – 84.

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eage.’23 This leads to a teleology where the text is reduced to a simple link in a chain. Once again a deconstructive gesture helps to rescue us from the metaphysical treatment of these mythocentric approaches. As Derrida denies that communication can be the vehicle for ‘proper sense’ aimed toward the homogeneity presupposed by the communicative space,24 he explains how this conception accepts ‘the simplicity of the origin, the continuity of all derivation, of all production, of all analysis and the homogeneity of all dimensions [ordres]’.25 But, for Derrida, writing does not continually stand in for a presence and ‘could no longer (be) the (ontological) modification of presence’.26 Rather it is a rupture, death, or the possibility of the death of the recipient.27 Therefore, more often than not, rewriting is not a part of a homogenous continuity. It is always a fracture: for it escapes the canon that such continuity would impose upon it, and claims its own original authenticity.

2. The limits of deconstruction In the preceding part of this argument we have criticised some common attitudes of the mythocentric perspective. Using some deconstructive notions (like Derrida’s concepts of axiome, polysemia, or his denial of every metaphysical gesture), we have argued that their attempt at finding a forced interlocution between the text and the idea of myth inevitably leads to a consideration of the text as a sort of modulation. The text is supposed to hold an already crystallised meaning and, for this reason, is inserted into a tradition which is assumed as being a universally shared legacy which links the text to all the other rewritings of the same myth. The myth, the theme, the abstract idea of a dynamic scheme of archetypes, cannot therefore represent a key for accessing the text without vio23 Trousson 1981, 75. 24 Derrida writes: ‘The meaning, or contents of the semantic message would thus be transmitted, communicated, by different means, by more powerful tecnhnical mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that remains fundamentally continous and its-self identical, a homogeneous element through which the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its essence.’ Derrida 1988a, 3. 25 Derrida 1988a, 4. 26 Derrida 1988a, 7. 27 Derrida 1988a, 8.

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lently denying its autonomy and distorting its articulation according to the parameters of this governing idea. This consideration leads us to reject the conception that rewritings emerge from a mechanism of repetition. Instead, this kind of text requires an interpretation that is focused on textual autonomy. Once the autonomy of the text is claimed against its mythocentric readings, the interpreter is still required to tackle the peculiar ‘double’ nature of a rewriting text. This ‘second-hand’ work can be both a rewriting of a specific text and a rewriting inspired by a specific general idea of myth that is given by the synthesis and resemantification of an indistinct corpus of other rewritings (literary texts, critiques, iconographic material). In both cases, this reference provides the text with a special connotation that cannot be overlooked. This model – single or plural, precise or general – appears within the text in an original, new form – always as a resemanticisation. Derrida’s deconstruction formulates this textual relationship in terms of citation. According to this reading, the ‘citationnalit’ constitutes one of the central ideas of the theory of diffrance, where it is postulated that any assertion may be considered a citation,28 as ‘everything begins in the folds of citation’.29 Not only rewriting texts, but every text could be considered a chain of citations. As Derrida argues: ‘To write means to graft.’30 No text is integrally original: its openness prevents it from fixing a beginning or an order. In Derrida’s essay Dissemination,31 he describes how the logic that inspires the distinction between originaire and driv, which aims to identify the order between the first and the second, is a numerical logic of expropriation necessarily implying a first text, a commencement. But ‘precisely because the rifts in it never stand as origins: they always transform a preexisting text’.32 In other words, the chain of citations is too complex, too heterogenous and non-linear, according to Derrida. Tracing backwards through this labyrinth presupposes a starting point, an origin, and therefore a kind of sense; ultimately it presupposes enclosing the dissemination of the text. Referring to deconstructive principles, this position is coherent with the idea that the infinite opening of the text is freed as much from the 28 As is well known, in agreement with Austin, Derrida assumes that every performative act is also a citation – to the extent that it should always be perceived as conforming to a code, and therefore it is never originary, never first. 29 Derrida 2004a, 347. 30 Derrida 2004a, 389. 31 Derrida 2004a, 317. 32 Derrida 2004a, 367.

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yoke of the context as from literal or ideologically reconstructable references. Therefore, deconstruction rejects a claim of ‘legitimacy’ for the interpretation, since an interpretation that is supposed to be ‘more correct’ than another necessarily imposes a semantic restriction. In relation to literary influences, the fact that the text is sans fin et sans commencement, delegitimises any attempt to search for the textual sources, which Derrida calls an archaeo-teleo-logical search. Yet, it is clear from one perspective that Derrida’s radicalism contains an aporetic turn which cannot be resolved without difficulty. Refusing the ‘archaeological effort’, that is to say, denying the contribution of every other hypotext of the text in question, leads to extreme consequences in the interpretation of a rewriting. In the first place, to ignore the literary roots of the text could imply converting a mythical reference into an anonymous one. Without its age-old chain of precedents, a modern Oedipus loses its resonance by being deprived of its specific dialogue with the past. In the second place, to give up the archaeological approach, which means abandoning the search for the specific intertextual chain of each rewriting, allows the possibility of manipulating the reading through the idea of myth which is open to the interpretation of the critic. If the reference is not interpreted through its preceding textual trails, this deconstructing gesture, paradoxically, ends up offering an argument for the mythocentric readings. Only by taking the specific hypotext of a rewriting into account, and not – as deconstruction proposes – abandoning the search for the original sources, can the textual autonomy of the rewriting be preserved from metaphysical agency. Even if they are not an original in a teleological sense, hypotexts must be considered as reworked materials that compose the text as in a bricolage work. In other words, Anouilh’s Antigone is constructed by deconstructing the one by Sophocles; Gide’s Oedipus breaks up and unscrambles the ancient homonymous tragedy; Christa Wolf ’s Medea is inspired by the discovery of some sources more ancient than Euripides, and so on. The way in which a rewriting is inspired by another rewriting has been the subject of Genette’s taxonomy, but it also gives rise to the well known theories of the phenomena of anxiety, repression and appropriation of influences, generated by ‘literary love, tempered by defense’,33 which are proposed by Harold Bloom. In any case, as Bloom emphasises using Tolstoy’s words, ‘for criticism we need people who […] would con33 Bloom 2011, 8

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tinually guide readers in that endless labyrinth of linkages that makes up the stuff of art, and bring them to the laws that serve as the foundation for those linkages’.34 From this point of view, any interpretation that neglects the reference before the text will fail to understand the new meaning claimed by the rewriting itself. Rewritings explicitly refer to the comparison to (and the overcoming of ) a model, flaunting a mechanism of resemantisation which is often articulated and coherent from the ideological point of view.35 To examine rewritings, then, in the most conclusively balanced context given the range of conflicting interpretations, the interpreter is required to recognise the varying kinds of comparisons around the text. To review these comparisons, we have made an enquiry into two kinds of approach – the text itself (deconstruction) or the network of other associated texts, including its originary (mythocentric). While the project is more fully realised by rejecting the abuses brought about by misreadings of the hors-texte as well as those of deconstruction, only by rearticulating the specific horizon for every single text can this be accomplished. An analysis rooted in the textual material,36 that tracks both the intertextual influences and also the very conception of the myth expressed in the text, is the only approach whereby an interpretation (however fragmentary, incomplete or partial) can be achieved. Translated by Shelley Campbell and Marika Josephson

34 Bloom 2011, 9 35 Barthes has illustrated in the most convincing manner how the myth is offered as a transfiguration of culture into nature. A similar claim about the universal is often found in the rewritings of myths. 36 The reference is of course to the ‘material hermeneutic’ proposed by Peter Szondi and Jean Bollack, which would be worthy of a specific discussion.

Translation: Theory and Praxis. Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Giacomo Leopardi Maria Spiridopoulou 1. Deconstruction and reconstruction in theory Jacques Derrida acknowledged the impossibility of defining deconstruction, attesting that it is neither a method, nor a discipline, it is not even knowledge or science,1 but simply ‘plus d’une langue, more than a language’.2 This pseudo-definition signals, in a preliminary manner, his thought not only on language, but also on the nature of translation3 as theory and praxis together, denoting that it is linked to his ideas about deconstruction. Indeed, Derrida does not aim at a different method of analysis concerning the act of translating, but instead expands the conceptual structure that has always been the main concern of his theoretical thought and research, by shifting the centre of gravity from unitary to multiple, from a fixed meaning to an unstable and lacunary meaning, fo1

2 3

‘Deconstruction is not simply a philosophy, nor is it a group of theses, not even the question of Being, in the Heideggerian sense. In a certain manner, it is nothing. It cannot be a discipline or a method. Often, it is presented as a method, or it is transformed into a method, with a set of rules, procedures that can be taught, etc. It is not a technique, with norms and procedures. […] In its very principle, deconstruction is not a method. […] Deconstruction is not a methodology, that is, not an application of rules.’ (‘La dconstruction n’est pas simplement une philosophie, ni un ensemble de th ses, ni mÞme la question de l’Etre, au sens heideggrien. D’une certaine mani re, elle n’est rien. Elle ne peut pas Þtre une discipline ou une mthode. Souvent, on la prsente comme une mthode, ou on la transforme en une mthode, avec un ensemble de r gles, de procdures qu’on peut enseigner, etc. Ce n’est pas une technique, avec des normes ou des procdures. […] Mais, en son principe mÞme, la dconstruction n’est pas une mthode. […] Mais la dconstruction n’est pas une mthodologie, c’est--dire l’application de r gles.’) Cf. Derrida 2004c. Cf. Derrida 1988b, 38 f. See on this subject, Derrida 2001a, 174 – 200.

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calising on difference, interaction and integration, and no longer on identity and presence. He assigns a primary and central place to translation, which is no longer a copy of any text, no longer left in the background and relegated to a secondary role of serving the original. All translation theories from Roman times to the 20th century, from Cicero to the recently-founded science of translatology with all its current trends, are based on antinomies, for example, letter/spirit, word/meaning, verbo/senso, faithful/free. The most recent are based on the vague concept of equivalence between the original and its translation, pointing out the impossibility of an ideal version which would faithfully transpose the true meaning of the message from one language to another. However, would this ‘true’ meaning not imply a link to a set meaning of the words inhabiting an aseptic and fixed lexicographic environment? Hence, the acceptance that any transposition inevitably alters the original significance of words, and that all acts of translating are destined to failure. But what does failure in translating mean? If aiming for an exact transposition either in form or content of any signified, or if seeking perfect fidelity and reproduction of content, then failure is inevitable. Derrida makes precisely this point: ‘We will never and, in reality, we have never dealt with the transport of any pure signified into another language, or even into the same one.’4 Even Andr Breton attacked the verbal theology and the metaphysics of language, wishing to free words from their bondage; those words ‘were asking to no longer be treated as the little auxiliaries they had always been taken for’,5 since, according to Breton, modes of expression are established and founded on the rules of logic which oblige us to designate objects using their precise name accepted by common sense and defined in the dictionary. The impossibility of a single transparent and adequate translation is already discernible, in an emblematic way, in the very use of the word ‘translation’. First of all, it appears more complex at the descriptive level in reference to the phenomenon identified by the theoreticians. Sec4 5

Derrida 1972, 31 f. Breton 1969, 131. The converging point in Breton and Derrida thought is to be found in Derrida’s claim that ‘translation does not seek to say this or that, to transfer such or such content, to communicate a certain load of meaning, but to point out the affinity between languages, to exhibit its own possibility.’ (‘La traduction ne chercherait pas  dire ceci ou cela,  transporter tel ou tel contenu,  communiquer telle charge de sens mais  remarquer l’affinit entre les langues,  exhiber sa propre possibilit.’) Derrida 1987b, 220.

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ond, at the verbal level, it is a term whose restricted sense is still relevant today. In terms of definition, a taxonomic effort has already been made by Roman Jakobson, who has sought to divide and describe, in a summary and imperious manner, the act of translating by designating his three well known categories:6 the interlinguistic or translation as such, that is, the transposition of words from one language to another; the interlingual translation or reformulation which is concerned with the interpretation of linguistic signs by means of other signs of the same language; and, the intersemiotic translation or transmutation, that is the interpretation of linguistic signs by means of non-linguistic signs. However, language is not a homogeneous, closed, fixed (static) and immutable system, and the passage of words from one language to another is neither linear nor devoid of obstacles. What happens, for instance, with certain poetic Greek texts of the 20th century which present synchronically the entire Greek language in its diachronicity: from ancient Greek, through Byzantine, to Modern Greek, and whose reformulation is necessary before approaching translation as such? How to translate a text that incorporates reactivated and semantically redefined linguistic signs which are nothing but echoes of the past, a sort of palimpsest of the Greek language? Should, in this case, translating, paraphrasing, and re-wording not coexist? Is this not an instance of the existence of many languages in a single linguistic system? To further highlight the absence of frontiers between languages and linguistic systems and, as a result, point out the elliptical and restrictive aspects of the categorisation proposed by Jakobson, we would like to examine the special case of Assia Djebar’s language, which we addressed when translating her novel A Sister to Scheherazade 7 from French into Greek. Assia Djebar uses a language which admirably unites oral and erudite elements with poetic expressions and colloquial turns of phrase. We also find in her language the incorporation of Arabic words and popular expressions filtered through her seemingly uniform and fluid French. A language represents relics, echoes of other languages and speech patterns, but it also constitutes a centre of multiple energies connoting a correspondent challenge for the translator. Thus within the same linguistic system we uncover many tongues and languages. 6 7

Jakobson 1963, 79 f. Djebar 2006.

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And what could be said of texts including quotations in different languages (such as the case of Italo Calvino in American lessons), or of those that blur the identity of language by inserting words of other languages, signs which interact with those that surround them, abolishing ipso facto the dictionary meaning of words through their transformative effect?8 Should one translate them or leave them as they stand? And if they retain their original characters, is the altering effect not increased? The issue is further complicated, for instance, in the Greek case through having a different alphabet. What should then be the choice of the translator? Through our examples we demonstrate that the three categories coined by Jakobson do not correspond to the multiform linguistic reality of texts and to the various practices of translating; consequently, the entire conceptualisation of translation is being questioned and comes to seem problematic. According to Derrida, this is indeed one of the limits on theories of translation, to the extent that they do not take into account the possibility for ‘more than two languages to be involved in a text’.9 Hence the following questions: ‘How to render the plurality effect? And if we translate in many languages at the same time, should we call that translating?’10 However, if we briefly survey the twists and turns of the terms used to define the act of translating from Roman antiquity to the 14th century, when the word ‘translation’ first appears in the Romance languages, we see that through a series of lexical transformations, there is a loss in meaning, a restriction in its semantic field, and an impoverishment of the term itself. The Greek word hermeneia 11 conveyed expression, explanation, performance of a theatrical play, an act of communication by means of the voice and, consequently, active participation. The Latin words translatio and interpretatio replaced this Greek term.12 These terms have remained in effect since the Renaissance. However Eugene Valence asserts that the word interpretatio has lost the notion of ‘productive activity’, which existed in the Greek term, and still exists in the modern Greek, also signifying recitals and interpretations of musical 8 The following passage is given as an example: ‘Thus I still prefer the version quoted by Barbey d’Aurevilly, in spite of its patched up roughness.’ (‘Perci continuo a preferire la versione riportata da Barbey d’Aurevilly, nonostante la sua rozzezza un po’ patched up.’) Calvino 1988, 36. 9 Derrida 1987b, 207 – 208. 10 Derrida 1987b, 207 – 208. 11 Liddell/Scott 1996, 690. 12 On this subject, see Bruni 2002, 73 – 97.

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works.13 On the contrary, translatio encompasses a vast semantic horizon; it derives from the past participle of the verb transferre, which means ‘to move from one place to another, to transfer, to drive, to transport’ but also ‘to postpone, to differ, to apply, to translate, to transform, to change’. And indeed, ‘transferre’ also means ‘to differ’, being very close to the Greek ‘dia-ferein’, having in common ‘ferein-ferre’ (to carry) but also the same prefix ‘trans-dia’. The Latin verb ‘traducere’ was introduced at the beginning of 15th century by Leonardo Bruni, and replaced many terms used until then (‘convertere’, ‘imitari’, ‘reddere’, ‘transferre’), signifying ‘to transport’ or ‘to guide’. Nevertheless, we observe that it has lost the notion of interaction and productive activity that the Greek term ‘ermineia’ possesses, and similarly the notion of transformation/change of the Latin terms ‘transferre/translatio’. Thus it has only kept the seme of ‘to transport’ and maybe its modern derivatives ‘translation/traduzione ’ of the Romance languages, highlighting in effect the impoverishment of the unilateral and unidirectional dimension of the passage/transfer from one language to another. We observe that the same limiting conception of translation emerges in terms relative to texts and languages: we speak of ‘source-language’ and ‘target-language’ as if they have to do with the mobility of merchandise. We talk about source-language text and target-language text as if there is a kind of transcendental insight emerging from a primordial elsewhere to be attained or pursued. However, we have seen that the term ‘translation’ does not encompass all the dimensions or multiplicity of the phenomenon. The word ‘metafrasi ’14 in ancient and medieval Greek signified formulation of a text in a different phrasal manner or in a different style, for example, a paraphrase; and it is currently attached to Jakobson’s intralinguistic system. But the distinction between intralinguistic and interliguistic practices is not apparent in a language like Greek which stretches further in time and space, surviving within modern Greek without having suffered the same breaks as those of the Latin and Romance languages. The distinction of the limits between these categories of translation practices, as well as between translation as such and paraphrase, is never clear. The term ‘metafrasi ’ is currently used in modern Greek for any translation covering all acts of translating. This word, closely linked to the synthetic conception of the ancient Greek language, extends over the limits of the 13 Derrida 1985, 136 – 137. 14 Liddell/Scott 1996, 1118.

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terms examined and their translating dimension; it could be nearer to the complex and polyphonic phenomenon of the activity of translating. With a single linguistic element, the prefix-conjunction ‘meta’,15 two conceptual elements emerge, two meanings closely linked to their different constructions: the meaning of between, of amidst and of with, together with the genitive which promotes the meaning of participation (sin + praxis), in common, along with; as well as lato sensu with the accusative promoting the meaning of ‘between two’ or ‘between many’. This has to do with the Greek ‘ana-meson’, ‘anamesa’. It is this economy of in-betweenness Derrida speaks about as the relation between the text to be translated and the translated text. Furthermore, the construction with the accusative plural links the meaning of ‘among’ as well as that of ‘succession’, of ‘continuity’, of various elements the designation and the range of which do not differ: among them and with them. This designates therefore an in-between that separates while uniting, and at the same time a relation and a distance, marking an interaction and a cooperation. In order to reconstruct and rehabilitate the lost meanings of the term, we would like to propose the Greek term ‘meta-frasi ’ which, according to its etymology, is a sin-praxis, a communion, a participation of various phrases/languages/texts, a mental and practical act involving plurality and parity. This concept aims at treating the text to be translated and its translations in terms of equality, without granting primacy to the original, synonymous with the authentic and the first, whose successive appearances in other languages are inevitably attached to the idea of reproduction, copy or fake. Walter Benjamin asserts that translation is a form (bersetzung ist eine Form).16 In this sense maybe the word ‘prototype’, which in Greek means ‘first form’, the principle of the form (see ‘archetype’), renders the idea of plurality of forms which follows in successive translations without granting primacy or supremacy to the original, or assigning a secondary place to the translated texts. By definition, the traditional translation theories, through the terminology adopted, as well as in their conception, are predicated on the singularity of the original and its inaugural meaning, on the power exercised and preserved by the proto-text on and within the meta-text, and, consequently, on the clear and imperative distinction between translated text 15 Liddell/Scott 1996, 1108 f. 16 Benjamin 1972, 9.

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and text in translation. Supporters of the target language17 (i. e. Ladmiral) and of the source language18 (i. e. Berman) alike have interposed an unfathomable distance and have considered the text in translation as derivative and as always following from a model. As such it is this inimitable and irreproachable unicum, which we could render and recreate inaccurately, depending on the freedom we allow or the respect we impose upon ourselves within either the source or the target language. Thus, any process of translating would only reproduce a mirror reflection, an imperfect double, defective in comparison to the original. Yet what about the text without its translation? Would it qualify as an original? What would then be its ontological dimension? And, what if translation does not depend on the original but the original upon its translation? What if intrinsically texts need and demand translating to continue to live, and the translations then guarantee their survival? These are fundamental questions about the classical conception of translation that resulted from the scandalous impact that Derrida exerted in literary circles. They have affected the translation scene, our way of thinking, and even the act of translating itself. The translator speaks at least two languages and, according to Derrida, is ‘never enclosed in the column of one single tongue’.19 That explains why in translating the translator makes unities and pairs interact with each other; he creates this precious space of cohabitation, and aesthetic and linguistic regeneration, of continuous rebirth of the translated text via the text of its translation. His translation act is an act of faith and love towards the text, although he knows that each word is a locus of multiple translations and realises the absence of all static and immutable sense. He treats the text to be translated as a dearly departed who asks to emerge out of forgetfulness. The translator with whom he enters into discussion thus reinforces his presence-absence by integrating him into his own life. The text of the translation comes into the world and the translated text is reborn under a 17 The theories favouring the target-language do not accept irregularities in the translated language and are linked to a kind of ethnocentrism, since they tend to refuse anything foreign in the text of the translation. This text has to be read as if it were originally written in the target-language. On this subject, see Ladmiral 1986, 33 – 42. 18 The theories favouring the source-language tend to keep the structure of the original language, since it is the foreign element that has to be felt in the translation. The translated work has to bear the traces of its origins and its belonging to another culture. See Berman 1984. 19 Derrida 1986, cited in Tavor Bannet 1993, 591.

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different form of life, transformed and saved from the immobility to which it was relegated by tradition and the temporal dimension. The relationship between signifier and signified varies according to shifts of intralinguistic context as well to shifts in the relationship between different languages. According to Derrida, the difference between signifier and signified is never pure, absolute and clear, thus indicating that language is always in movement and in exile. He describes language as endless chains of signification interacting and feeding each other reciprocally. The philosopher claims that there are two possibilities: immobilising the meaning of a word or exceeding its polysemy, that is to say, on the one hand, the possible existence of an immutable significance despite its semantic transformations, and on the other, the strict designation of context. These remain problematic in a language whether it is a dead or a living one. Thus, completeness does not exist in languages and each word, polysemic by definition, becomes a locus of multiple possibilities of translation; that is why translation in itself has less to do with what is to be translated and the meaning of the text itself, and more with who each translator is: each translator reads in it, sees in it, hears in/between/through the words, and that which he does not manage to conceive, distinguish, catch. And we can grant that every letter and every term admits of a Babel of different, and often incommensurable, translations, and that these different translations are therefore joined in the letter on in the term, without concluding that the only possible contemporary response to multiplicity must be confusion.20

Indeed, we could bring the confusio linguarum closer to the divisio linguarum, which is felt by the translator as a condition sine qua non of his proper existence, even though he lives it in a painful manner through the practice of his profession. If, according to Jakobson, ‘the meaning of a word is nothing but its translation by another sign which can be substituted for it’,21 and if all readings are translations, this implies that, even more so, the act of translating is a double translation. Through its reading-comprehension the translator mentally decodes, deconstructs, dismantles and translates by paraphrasing and reconstructing the meaning of the text. This mental translation, a kind of abstract writing, takes place a thousand times in the translator’s mind and precedes the actual 20 Tavor Bannet 1993, 592. 21 Jakobson 1963, 79.

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writing and the translation itself which is accompanied by doubts, lacunae, indecisions.

2. Deconstruction and reconstruction in practice: Giacomo Leopardi’s Infinite In order to approach the phenomenon of dissemination of the meaning of the original in its translations and Derrida’s ‘undecided words’, meaning two contradictory things at the same time and presenting itself as the necessary condition for the re-semantisation of the metaphrastic space, we are now going to examine Leopardi’s Infinite. 22 Although there are many translations in French, we are going to examine Sainte-Beuve’s23 historic translation of 1844, and the more recent one given by Ren Char and Franca Roux24 in 1966. Oddly enough, I Canti have not yet been translated into modern Greek in one volume and have not been edited in their entirety; thus we do not have at our disposal many examples of Greek translations. We will therefore take into account Marino Siguro’s25 translation of 1955, authored by a native of Zakinthos of Italian descent on his mother’s side, and the translation made by Nasos Vaghenas26 in 1990. The poem is a kind of emblematic locus of fundamental issues such as finitude and its harsh decrees relating to the human condition, the dichotomy between eternal and ephemeral, life and death, or even the spirit’s exile from matter. Consequently, it presents a number of difficulties about apprehending its meaning and its lexical items, and reconstructing it, transformed into another language. We are going to focus on four fundamental words, which form the basis of the poem’s approach to the issues it addresses: ‘ermo’, ‘mirando’, ‘mi fingo’, and ‘mi sovvien’. Firstly, ‘ermo colle’ refers not only to a site but, as specialists27 have already explained, to a situation, a necessary element for the search from the visible to the invisible, from the tangible to the intangible, an implacable search of the poetic ‘I’ which will end in ruin. ‘Ermo’ means at the same time a deserted, uninhabited and aban22 23 24 25 26 27

Leopardi Leopardi Leopardi Leopardi

1981, 1988, 1988, 1988,

119 f. 21. 36. 18.

Me|teqg Euqypazj^ Kocotewm_a (Modern European Literature) 1998, 94. On this subject, see Amoretti 1978, 81; Valentini 1989, 440.

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doned place, as well as lonely and solitary, deriving from the Greek ‘erimos’.28 And, by their separation, these two meanings offer two solutions: the one given by Sainte-Beuve, ‘dserte’, and the other by Char, ‘seule’. However, with this double locative and existential meaning, could ‘ermo’ not be linked to the solitude of the hill as well as to the solitary and exiled soul of the poetic ‘I’? Could this same soul, impoverished and deserted in its isolation, not be reflected in the poem, in a desire to identify itself to this height? Is there not an agreement, a psychological harmonisation between these two states that become lexicalised with the adjective ‘caro’ (dear), present in the first verse? Maybe we should unite the two meanings. The word ‘ermo’ in Greek gives us this possibility since it means ‘alone’, ‘solitary’, ‘deserted’, but also ‘unhappy’ and ‘poor’, terms which characterise any solitary suffering. On the contrary, ‘erimos’ means only ‘desert’, ‘empty’ and has no affective content. Furthermore, the poetic ‘I’ sits passively in a state of immobility; its vision cannot surmount this hedge that hides much of its horizon, and the verb ‘mirare’ in the translations of Siguro and Char is rendered by the verb ‘to look’, which is a contradiction, a paradox from the point of view of common sense. Sainte-Beuve by-passes the problem by paraphrasing ‘the thought which has surmounted the hedge’. Thus, he makes the meaning explicit by means of a sort-of version that does not respect the economy of language, the rule of ‘oikos’, quantitative and qualitative of all ‘relevant’ translations, according to Derrida.29 If we explore the etymology of the word ‘mirare’, we find it comes from the Latin ‘miror’ and that it does not mean simply ‘to look’ but induces a state of wonder,30 an internal condition in the sense of looking with admiration, being stupefied, wondering in amazement or even failing to understand. ‘Mirando’ is then a gerund that poses serious problems to the translator and especially if we take into consideration the verb ‘mi fingo’. Sainte-Beuve transforms it in the following phrase: ‘me sont 28 Liddell/Scott 1996, 687. 29 Concerning the principle of economy, he argues that it ‘signifies two things, property and quantity: on the one hand, what concerns the law of property (oikonomia, the law – nomos – of the oikos), of what is proper, appropriate to itself, at home – and translation is always an attempt at appropriation that aims to transport home, in its language, in the most appropriate way possible, in the most relevant way possible, the most proper meaning of the original text […] and, on the other hand, a law of quantity – when one speaks of economy, one always speaks of calculable quantity’. Derrida 2001, 178 f. 30 Markantonatos 2006, 223; D’Arbella 1954, 688.

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comme un abme’ (they are to me like an abyss), and transporting the thought onto the other side of the hedge, he introduces arbitrarily the word ‘abyss’. On the contrary, Char uses the word ‘to create’ (crer) and keeps the thought in its place in order to underline the impossibility of feeling anything without it, of having the experience of the endless expanses and the superhuman silences. Indeed, this can only happen in thought with the help of the imagination. Even more so, since the verb in question existed in Latin31 and meant ‘to imagine’, ‘to represent’. We also find it in Crusca’s Dictionary of the 19th century, where it is defined in terms of creating through the imagination. Siguro thus opts for a translation involving the idea of representation (parastainei), whilst Vaghenas tries to join the two meanings of ‘mirare’ and ‘fingere’ with the verb ‘oramatizomai’ which, however, means ‘to see visions’ and ‘to aim’. We could probably fill the lacuna and its semantic deviations by introducing in place of ‘mirare’ the verb ‘hyq~/heyq~’ in modern Greek, meaning ‘to sense’,32 ‘to consider’, and containing the verb ‘oq\y-y’ in the sense of looking inwardly.33 And, in place of ‘mi fingo’ we could use the verb ‘pk\hy’. Indeed, the verb ‘pk\hy, pk\ssy’ (and in ancient Greek ‘pk\tty’) means, according to Liddell & Scott, ‘to mould’, ‘to fabricate’, ‘to form an image in the mind’,34 and in modern Greek it retains all these correspondences, adding to the meaning ‘to imagine’, ‘to meditate’, ‘to reflect upon’. However, confronted with the infinite, endless space, with the inaccessible and the unknown opening like an abyss, the heart fears, and looks to overcome its fear and a kind of cosmic terror. The poetic ‘I’ brings together the silence of the sky, the atemporal dimension, the absolute peace, to the voice of the wind, to what we can hear, to what is close, to what is sensed. But at the same time the rustling wind awakens the feeling of uneasiness, of this being which exists in the ephemeral world, imperfect, finite; it frightens him, and our mind then goes to the ‘dolce e chiara la notte e senza vento’. The rustling wind seems hostile and the comparison with endless silence that had scared him previously reinforces its conflicting 31 D’Arbella 1954, 422. 32 The verb ‘heyq]y/heyq~’ in ancient Greek means ‘to look towards something, to observe’, but also ‘to ponder, to study’. See Stamatakos 1972, 450. 33 As a transitive verb, it means ‘to observe, to comprehend something’, but it has also a metaphorical use connected with vision of the mind, and means ‘to discern, to observe, to comprehend’. See Stamatakos 1972, 700. 34 Liddell/Scott 1996, 1412.

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presence. The contemplation of these endless spaces could be an attempt to escape from the visible and natural world, a kind of reverie which gives the possibility of escape and of finding refuge in peacefulness, in the unperturbed cosmic nothingness. We thus do not know if what follows, ‘mi sovvien l’eterno’, associated with the temporal dimension of the past and the present, to the dead seasons and to the one present, creates relief or increases the sentiment of anguish. And, if we think about the correspondence between past and silence, and between the voice of the wind and the season rustling and full of life, we cannot give an exact meaning to the verb in question and decide about its translation. This is even more relevant if we think about the interpretations of specialists like Thilger, who claims that ‘the poet leaves the level of intellectual comparison and glides towards a new reverie with his eyes open, towards a dream that is a memory’.35 Or, like Fubini who notes: ‘sovvenire is used for the past, but in the poem’s atmosphere of dream, even the present emerges like a memory’.36 Still others are in favour of the meaning ‘in mentem venire’ and maintain that ‘mi sovviene’ does not mean ‘I remember’ but rather ‘it comes to my mind’, based on the fact that the expression is related to the present time and as such we cannot remember it.37 Sainte-Beuve translates the verse in question with ‘le grand ge m’apparat’ (the great age appears to me), quite close to the epiphany of the unknown, and Char ‘me souviens de l’ternel’ (I remember the eternal). Vaghenas using the verb ‘aish\molai’ (feeling) approaches the unknown through one’s senses as if it were something tangible, neighbouring, familiar, involving no mental effort. For his part, Siguro uses the verb ‘to ponder’, although in a popular form, intellectualising any effort to give form, to embrace the infinite through the creative force of the imagination. Increasing even further the ambiguity and the obscurity of this verse, one should also remark on the etymology of the verb: it comes from the Latin ‘sub-venio’ which, according to Leopardi,38 is equivalent to ‘sopravvenire/sovvenire’, (‘vengo da sotto in su’); maybe then ‘to resurface’, ‘to emerge in the mind’ or ‘in the memory’. Furthermore, ‘sovvenire’ comes from ‘subvenire’ which means ‘to help’, ‘to rescue’, ‘to provide for’, but also from ‘succurrere’, that is, ‘to come to mind’. 35 36 37 38

Tilgher 1979, 186, cited in Valentini 1989, 446. Leopardi 1966a, 117. Blasucci 1985, 104 f. Leopardi 2007, 594.

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We therefore find ourselves at an impasse that Derrida calls ‘un-decidable’. The thought that a single verb is so mysterious through presenting two correspondences which multiply the possibilities of translation by disseminating its meaning prompts the translator to stop translating and to stay immobilised in front of this metaphrastic aporia. Some English translators have used the verbs ‘to recall’,39 ‘to ponder’,40 ‘to occur’,41 which are close to the meaning of ‘coming to mind’ and ‘arriving’, but have not considered the meaning of ‘memory’. However, man is enclosed in the finite, the definite and the limitations of the earth, of the hedge, of the ultimate horizon, and seeks other realities which could elevate him above tangible reality to redeem himself from his incompleteness. The emergence of other realities occurs through the contemplation of the infinite, made possible by the means of the power of poetic speech. After the initial terror of confronting immense spaces and superhuman silences, man confronts this same endless silence in the voice of the wind and seems to be appeased by a move of reconciliation with the unknown. Then, in some sort of amplification, this voice becomes the sound of reason, which is present and embraces the dead seasons, but is also eternal. It is a call to the infinite, an attempt to grasp it, but also to get help through its invocation as if it were an ancient god. And it seems to us that ‘mi sovvien’ should mean ‘come to mind’ in accordance with an upwards and backwards movement in the hope of managing to touch, even if just ever so slightly, the idea of the infinite. This complex idea might possibly be expressed with the Greek verb ‘ama-tq]wy’ which means ‘to run back’, ‘to revert’,42 and combines the backwards and upwards motif by means of the preposition ‘ama’, meaning ‘upwards’. The human desire to rise above reality as if it were a hill, a tower uniting the low with the high, results in wreckage but it is a sweet wreckage. It is maybe the desire of the text itself to be translated by calling to its translator (who has the capability) to surpass linguistic frontiers and seek the profound union of languages, even though he knows that there will always be shadowy, grey zones, unsolvable questions. Being neither a science nor a secondary activity, translation is a creative act, a techne; according to Wittgenstein ‘the translation of a lyrical 39 40 41 42

Leopardi 1887; Leopardi 1900; Leopardi 1987. Leopardi 1966b. Leopardi 1903. Liddell/Scott 1996, 124.

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poem resembles a mathematical problem: we can solve it but there does not exist a single systematic method to get to its solution’.43 The translator has to deconstruct into relevant parts the work of the foreign writer; and after that he has to build a new work in order to reconstruct it in the new language. But isn’t this the work of an artist in general? Isn’t he deconstructing life itself and at the same time reconstructing it in a new form and thereby creating a new meaning?

Poems in reference L’infini J’aimai toujours ce point de colline dserte, Avec sa haie au bord, qui cl t la vue ouverte Et m’empÞche d’atteindre  l’extrÞme horizon. Je m’assieds: ma pense a franchi le buisson; L’espace d’au-del m’en devient plus immense, Et le calme profond et l’infini silence Me sont comme un abme; et mon cœur bien souvent En frissonne tout bas. Puis, comme aussi le vent Fait bruit dans le feuillage,  mon gr, je ram ne Ce lointain de silence  cette voix prochaine: Le grand ge ternel m’apparat, avec lui Tant de mortes saisons, et celle d’aujourd’hui, Vague cho. Ma pense ainsi plonge  la nage, Et sur ces mers sans fin j’aime jusqu’au naufrage. Translated by C. A. Sainte-Beuve, 1844 44

L’infini Toujours ch re me fut cette colline si seule et cette haie qui, par tant de longuers, drobe au regard le dernier horizon. Mais quand je m’assieds pour la regarder, Par ma pense se crent au-del d’elle D’interminables espaces, des silences surhumaines, Une paix tr s profonde; o peu s’en faut Que mon cœur ne s’effraie. Et lorsque 43 Wittgenstein 1967, 121, cited by Steiner 2004, 464 (my translation). 44 Leopardi 1988, 21.

Translation: Theory and Praxis

J’entends le vent bruire dans les plantes, Je vais comparant l’infini de ce silence A cette voix, et je me souviens de l’ternel, Des saisons mortes, et de celle prsente Et vivante, et de son bruissement. Ainsi Dans cette immensit s’anantit ma pense: Et naufrager m’est doux en cette mer. Translated by Ren Char and Franca Roux, 1966 45

To \peiqo Ac\pgsa p\mta tom ]qlo k|vo Pou dem av_mei tg lati\ lou p]qa Eje_ ma vt\sei yr touqamo} tgm \jqg. St]jy, tap]qamta jutt\f l\jqg Ji’ ap|joslg siyp^, bahi\ cak^mg Jquv\ lou paqasta_mei o kocisl|r lou Ji o tq|lor tgm jaqdi\ lou p\ei ma p\qei. Ji |pyr ajo}y l]sa sta demtqojk\dia To ac]qi ma stem\fei, ec~ sucjq_my Tgm \peiqg sic^ le tg vym^ tou, Jai sukkocio}lai tgm aimi|tg Jai tour jaiqo}r pou ep]hamam jai to}tom Tom tyqim| jaiq| pou fei jai pm]ei… Ji ]tsi ckuj\ mi~hy to stowasl| lou Ma pm_cetai sto p]kaco tou Ape_qou.

Translated by Marino Siguro, 1955 46

To \peiqo Acapgl]mor lo} ^tam p\mta aut|r o k|vor o ]qglor, ji aut\ ta d]mtqa pou lou jq}boum tom lajqim|m oq_fomta. La ed~ pou st]jy oqalat_folai tir awame_r ejt\seir t’ ouqamo} jai tgm upeqj|slia cak^mg ji amatqiwi\fy. Jai jah~r ajo}y l]sa ap’ to v}kkyla to hq|isla tou a]qa sucjq_my tgm al|kumtg siyp^ tou ape_qou l’ aut|m tom ^wo. Ji aish\molai to ai~mio,

45 Leopardi 1988, 36. 46 Leopardi 1988, 18.

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jai tir sbgsl]mer epow]r, jai tg dij^ lar pou fei jai p\kketai. Ji o stowasl|r lou pm_cetai stg bahi\ apeqamtos}mg. S’ aut^ tg h\kassa ckuj| e_mai to mau\cio.

Translated by Nasos Vaghens, 1990 47

To \peiqo Acapgl]mor lou ^tam p\mta o ]qlor aut|r k|vor, ji aut^ g pqasi\ pou ap| pamto} to bk]lla lou apojke_ei ap| tom ]swato oq_fomta. J\holai |lyr jai hyq~ to ap]qamto to di\stgla Pou apk~metai lajqi\ tgr, ji o mour lou pk\hei Tgm upeqj|slia sic^, tg bah}tatg gqel_a pou Swed|m v|bor tgm jaqdi\ lou tgm acc_fei. Ji |tam tom \melo Ajo}y ma hqo_fei l]sa se to}ta ta vut\, tgm \peiqg sic^ le to}tg tg vym^ amaletq\y : jai amatq]wy stgm aiymi|tgta, jai stir peqasl]mer epow]r jai stgm paqo}sa, fymtam^ laf_ le tgm gw~ tgr. O mour lou pm_cetai s’ aut^m tgm apeqamtos}mg. Se to}tg ed~ tg h\kassa ckuj| e_mai to mau\cio.

Translated by Maria Spiridopoulou 48

Vocabulary 1. mirando < mirare < from the Latin miror = a state of marvelling, an internal situation in the sense of looking with admiration, being stupefied, wondering in amazement or even failing to understand. Siguro and Char: looking; Sainte-Beuve: the thought which has surmounted the hedge; Mirare = hyq~, heyq~ (+ oq\y-y): to consider, to look from a distance and with admiration, to look inwardly. 2. mi fingo < from the Latin fingere = to imagine, to represent. Fingere in the 19th century: to create by means of the imagination (to simulate). 47 Me|teqg Euqypazj^ Kocotewm_a (Modern European Literature) 1998, 94. 48 Our proposed translation for the purpose of this paper.

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Siguro: to represent (paqasta_mei); Vaghenas: mirare + mi fingo = oqalat_folai (to see visions, to aim); Sainte-Beuve: [the thought which has surmounted the hedge] / are to me like an abyss; Char: to create; Mi fingo = pk\hy, pk\ssy (in ancient Greek, pk\tty): to mould, to fabricate, from an image in the mind. In modern Greek all these meanings apply as well as the meaning of imagining, meditating, reflecting upon. 3. Mi sovvien < from the Latin sub-venio = to resurface, to emerge in the mind or in memory, to remember (in Italian, sopravvenire/sovvenire, venire da sotto in su). Sovvenire < subvenire = to help, to rescue, to provide for; Succurrere = to come to mind; Sainte-Beuve: the great age appears to me; Char: I remember the eternal; Vaghenas: aish\molai (feel); Siguro: sukkocio}lai (ponder); Mi sovvien: to come to mind, to tend upwards and backwards in the hope of managing to touch, even if only just ever so slightly, the idea of infinite (see the Greek verb ama-tq]wy).

Deconstructing and Reconstructing Built-up Landscape in Post-Colonial Literature: Damas’s Poetry Antonella Emina The subject of this text will be the particular drives of the relationship between landscape in a ‘constructing’ perspective and post-colonial literature – Lon-Gontran Damas’s poetry in particular – but some preliminary themes need to be elaborated before embarking upon our main argument.

Foreword 1. Post-colonial literature is often labelled as deconstruction and postmodernism. This is mainly because of the modernist effects connected with the world where it was produced. Colonialism was paradoxically a fulfilment of the common belief of the inevitability of progress and human emancipation and also the realisation of the order’s dream. Nevertheless colonial societies experienced the obscure face of progress and the reason on which it was based: poverty, violence, insecurity, lack of freedom, and even slavery. Those concepts from which colonialism developed, reason and truth, actually led to the annihilation of the very people whom those same concepts were supposed to protect and liberate. This general decor is obviously connected with the literature of the colonies for its quality of a particular condition of writing, which is neither assumed by literature nor challenged. It was incorporated within the colonial literature which was denounced by Edouard Glissant as a decalcomania. Though, that was not the case either of post-colonial or the literature of negritude. Then, from the 1970s, critics (and particularly Glissant) stressed the concepts of rhizomatic origins of civilisations, borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. This theory was the consequence of the realisation of the obvious existence of plural centres. The idea of a unique model giving rise to some single, uniquely authoritative standard of culture and truth is rejected as it is in contrast to the experience of the individual who asserts his capacity in being a producer of both civilisation

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and values, in spite of issuing far from a hypothetical centre. This current of thought about dismantling the mechanisms of modernity could be one of the basic constituents of this literature and the only ethically acceptable answer to the conditions of its own origins. The subject involves many aspects. History, sociology and even psychology join the literary field including various other considerations: for example, the handling of language relationships with meaning, and questions related to the literariness of a text. In addition, these matters pertain to the correlation between concepts of representation and creation. As far as the first term, representation, is concerned the most evident problems are on one hand the query about the bond between the real object and the represented, and on the other hand, the connection between the writing conditions, the writing itself and the text. I say ‘object’ to use a term wide enough to articulate matters, such as a story or an actual object. The second term, creation, will be dealt with later on. The fact that a text can be set up as a new body as a result of a re-composition independent of the logic of its origin, must be highlighted. The starting point would be a statement to the effect that the postcolonial world experiences deconstruction in the wider sense of that term. It would be felt as the experience of undergoing a rupture, or as an assumption of plurality as a cognitive, creative strategy. Meant as an instrument of representation and/or of creation, literariness applies common attitude and the qualities of deconstruction: to itself (seen as a corpus), to its tools (the language) and to its realisations (the texts). 2. I will consider the creation of a landscape within the body of a text by enlightening its procedures of construction, in the awareness that landscape too may be conceived as a text. As a matter of fact, it is a composite whole of natural features, of artefacta, and of the observer’s skill that emerges in making sense of what appears in his gaze. I will focus also on other space words, words such as ‘place’, ‘home’, ‘country’ and so on. ‘Landscape’ sounds different from these words. It sounds a bit more static and is actually detached from the subject: people do things in a place, not in a landscape! Home, country and place sound different in terms of exactness or of individual perception towards its own space. Each of these kinds of locality can be inhabited as well; landscape cannot, despite its spatial qualities. It can be observed. It can be acted, worked, transformed, built upon, managed, but you cannot act, perform, or work in it. In a sense, it ‘suffers’ from the ‘postcard complex’, although it has some capacity for interacting. You can recognise it as different from

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writing and from the written subject. These are the features which characterise our analysis.

‘Sus au dvoy’: The choice of Damas’s poetry Mort au Cancre au pou mort au Chancre au fou et sus au dvoy1

I have chosen Damas’s poetry to conduct my investigation even if the author is better known as a representative of negritude and not of post-colonial literature. The choice depends on the hypothesis that his poetry includes a series of characteristics which qualify it as a prodrome of the post-colonial kind. The first of these qualities is the concept of detour, one of the main arguments of Glissant in the 1980s.2 Whereas Damas’s dvoy is not only a man who diverts from the charted course of his life, but also someone who is unaccustomed to keeping to the straight and narrow. By this, the word indicates the idea of becoming degraded, de facto of abjection. The emerging depravation is the scene sketched in the poetic context of the first part of Black-Label. There, a group of people rages against the main character, calling him: dvoy, a depraved man; cancre, a good-fornothing fool; pou, a louse; chancre, a cankerous bubo; fou, a madman. The main character does not care about insults, but he accepts them with the double aim of showing the profound dissimilarity between his individualism and the society from which that attitude had been conceived. Thus this fundamental difference does underline the lack of any bonds between the main character and the others. Closely related to this kind of expressions of separateness, lots of meaningful stylistic devices, such as the use of antinomies, the recourse to at least three languages, the combination of different literary elements (i. e. narrative fragments and dialogues unusually structured), internal intertextuality, and overlapping linguistic registers, are mentioned. These registers are sometimes unusual for the poetry of that time: the first of 1 2

Damas 1956, 14 – 15. See Glissant 1981, 28 – 36.

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Damas’s poems were printed in 1934 and the last are dated 1966. They were particularly unusual for this kind of poetry written in French but conceived outside of France. Finally, they were unusual for the unique perspective from Damas’s French Guyanese, mixed-blood and middleclass background. All these details frame the clash between ordinary logic, accepted attitude, collective experience and dominant opinion. This contest shakes up even verisimilitude by means of a writing strongly characterised by dissociated, paradoxical logic.

From here to over there I will chiefly look at Black-Label, the second last volume of Damas’s poetry. It is a long poem in four parts, where the first person narrative emerges, telling his/her own story.3 I will consider this Me as a man, which is more likely to be the principal gender of the poem, even if sometimes it turns out to be a woman. This personage sets himself in two main places: here and over there. The use of the place adverbs determines an uncertain location of the action, as their place depends on the situation. So, it happens that action has frontiers which are passing, unpredictable, and sometimes unrecognisable. They certainly underline implied meaning discontinuities in the semiotic form of space, as argued by A. J. Greimas in ‘For a Topological Semiotics’.4 The two adverbs, here and there, highlight Greimas’s argument that a place could be distinguished only within the main opposition of spatial otherness, as a place is entirely defined by what it is not. Thus, in Greimas’s opinion, its recording of open-ended disjunction (here vs. there), and the appropriation of a topie (a significant space) could only be possible by imagining a htrotopie. This embodies a great range of ghosts for most of colonial or early post-colonial American societies founded on African trade and slavery, including Guyana as a further example. As instruments used to setup the discourse in the poetry,5 adverbs of place work by allowing the emergence of essential factors in post-colonial literature, in particular in Damas’s poetry, and above all, in the volume, Black-Label. 3 4 5

See Ricoeur, 1992. Greimas 1976, 25 – 54. Brault 2004, 173.

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In opposition to the common course in Damas’s works, here denotes the place of someone else, strongly marked by difference; while there refers to what is known, to the mother country, to the homeland, to the native country and, above all, marked by sameness. Thus, paradoxically, hereness, which could be felt as more cheerful and safe because when an individual says here he experiences this concept with his own body, becomes the symbol of a form of otherness, variously felt and treated. On the contrary, when Damas uses there, he refers to appeasing qualities that are normally not related to otherness, and are by definition something outside of the sender’s sensorial occurrence. Lopold Sdar Senghor’s poetry is an important example of this essential consoling quality. As far as Damas is concerned, we have to verify if he joins the common ideal of home and native country as a consoling mother. However, we suspect that matters are more complicated for him. For instance, Senghor discovered his point of reference and balance in a holistic, mythic vision of an alleged pre-colonial, golden age of Africa. On the contrary, Damas’s memories are very far from such cheering topics which instead pushed him to leave. So, the two main adverbial groups in Damas’s poetry are: HERE ! PLACE OF OTHERNESS THERE ! HIS OWN PLACE, HOME

In these adverbs, the inner ambiguous spatial meaning is not the only one that has meaning, but it is related to other factors that define the global meaning system. In 1998, Rgis Antoine remarked on the lack of a real poetry on geographical themes in one of his studies on Caribbean literature.6 He wondered when and how a non-exotic, non-mimicking, non-folkloric inner language could be able to relate the geographical being of the French Caribbean islands. Even if Damas originates from within the continent, distant from spatial island views, his work has always been associated with one or other of the French Central American authors. This assignment will probably be rectified by critics that start underlining his strict connections with other South American countries, for example, Brazil. More generally this lack of geographical language is common in French American and ancient colonies that were marked by the slave trade. 6

Antoine 1998, 35 – 45.

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Through Greimas’s suggestions, the refusal to conceptualise the signified place-territory-landscape in the signifier place-territory-landscape is the symptom of misinformation about thereness that is, however, the native place, the mother country. As well, it leads to the inability of defining here (as the place of other, where, however, he is living). This condition could suggest that thereness might be eventually dismissed in order to assume sooner or later hereness as homeland. That is not exactly what happens in Black-Label. In this long poem the features of the adverb here are so wide-ranging to communicate the main character’s feeling of detachment. Besides, thereness, even if deprived of any consoling quality, is drawn out through evocative details. Broadly, the adverb here indicates a place having all the features of a ‘non-place’, for instance a bar, which evokes none of the familiar attributes of social relations typical of this kind of place. On the contrary, when the writer says there, it refers straight back to Cayenne. Therefore, regardless of the lack of representation in contemporary French post-colonial literature, this poem gives a central role to the spatial domain.

Here: From one bar to another A bar is not, necessarily, a ‘non-place’. It can even be a congregation place par excellence for a lot of people. It depends upon the circumstances. As far as the verses quoted below, two aspects are evident: on the one hand there is the loneliness of the man who frequents a bar but keeps himself apart from the milieu; on the other hand there is the accentuated character of a short-stay place: J’AI SAOUL MA PEINE ce soir comme hier comme tant et tant d’autres soirs passs o de bouge en bouge o de bar en bar o de verre en verre j’ai saoul ma peine7

This location of a bar or a dive (bouge) is not an occasional but a constant event in the poem, underlined by the recurring refrain quoted below, repeated sixteen times within the eighty-four pages of text: 7

Damas 1956, 14 – 15.

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BLACK-LABEL  BOIRE pour ne pas changer Black-Label  boire  quoi bon changer8

The scene of insults quoted above happens in this setting to evoke the isolation and the decay of conscience through alcohol. This setting of action, which seems less of an actual incident than an ambience, serves to reconstruct one of either fragments or ghosts that are created by self-censorship. It is as if the main character has dealt himself those injuries. The issue of Damas’s self-censorship had started quite a long time before, from hyper-correct behaviour within colonial and post-colonial societies, to the individual attitude of obsessive self-control. It is a central theme, but it is partially unrelated to our current aims.9 The space indicated by here, is sustained by strict place-names such as ‘Paris’, by general terms, such as ‘Town’ (like Paris), or by representative places which refer to Paris also by means of a metonymic process: for example, Eiffel tour and the Seine. I would formulate the hypothesis that even Paris becomes a ‘non-place’ in Black-Label, because of the lack of symbolic or ‘lived’ spaces: the absence of rooms denoting unlucky, clandestine loves as in Nvralgies or the Unknown Soldier’s Monument of Pigments. The only spatial details are related to a fourteen-kilometre Parisian walk linking three points, from Notre-Dame-d’Auteuil to Sainttienne-du-Mont, touching rue Daru. Notre-Dame-d’Auteuil is in the 16th arrondissement on the West side of Paris and glise d’Auteuil is also a subway station on Line 10. Sainttienne-du-Mont is another church in the 5th. Rue Daru, instead, is on the North side of Paris, in the Saint-Honor quarter. This area does not offer any attributes inciting a sense of belonging or rootedness. As far as evoking Paris is concerned, it is remarkable how the toponym appears. Usually it is repeated with identical structures, such as in ‘en Paris Paris Paris / Paris – l’Exil’.10 Reiteration produces a dragging effect and it brings out the final exile.

8 Damas 1956. 9 See Lro 1932, 10 – 12; and ‘Hoquet’ and ‘Blanchi’ in Damas 1972b, 35 – 38, 59 – 60. 10 Damas 1956, 10.

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I was born over there, at the end of the World Opposite to the exile space, a place empty of shared elements, there is the thereness, over there: JE SUIS N disais-tu tout au bout du Monde L-BAS entre Montagne-des-Tgres et le Fort-Cprou qui regarde la Mer dner de soleil de paltuviers et d’algues  l’heure o la nuit tombe sans crier gare au Crpuscule11

These nine lines highlight the connection between the subject and the landscape, and more, they demonstrate how Damas’s writing uses geographical, spatial words. Before analysing them in detail let us look at the Cayenne postcard represented by the quoted lines. It depicts the Montagne du Tigre, the Fort Cprou, the sea, the mangrove, the seaweeds. The lines evoke the borders of the native town, starting from the southern one: ‘la Montagne-des-Tigres’. In fact the correct place name is Montagne du Tigre, a hill on the south side of Cayenne with an altitude less than 300 metres. The word ‘montagne’ (mountain) could mislead us because in Guyana altitudes are always very moderate. So, after having depicted the first border, the lines indicate the northern one, located at Fort Cprou. This fort is placed on the top of the homonymous mount (105 metres above sea level) from which point it dominates the town of Cayenne from the north-west, in the direction of the sea. Thanks to this, the site offers a view of the sunset announced by ‘dner de soleil’. In this phrase dner is the evening meal, as we are told by the precise time indication: ‘ l’heure o la nuit tombe’, the period when the night falls every twelve hours, suddenly and without passing through twilight (‘sans crier gare au Crpuscule’), as is usual in the equatorial zone. The choice of these two points on the map enables us to trace a route from the south to the north, but it is not able to present a complete map of the native country, because this would require two other points of the compass, without which it is a mere one-dimensional segment. So, the

11 Damas 1956, 61.

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text does not aim at fully representing a space by giving all the coordinates. The reasons for this choice of Fort Cprou rather than other interesting sites could be both geographical and historical. As concerns geography, they are probably tied to the distribution of spaces in Cayenne, as the fort is exactly in front of the most notable square in the town, Place des Palmistes. The hill emerges on a level, marshy coast, thick with mangrove and seaweed, as realistically evoked in Damas’s poetry. As concerns history, they are most likely tied to the foundation of the town. Cprou marks the beginning of Cayenne history and the conquest of Guyana by the French: in 1643 Poncet de Brtigny, general lieutenant of King Louis XIII, purchased the hill where the fort was placed by the Indian Chief Cprou. As regards the choice of foregrounding the Tiger Mountain instead of other possible sites, this could be explained by the evocative qualities of the word ‘tiger’. It is obvious what a tiger is: a feline mammalian carnivore, but it has no place in Guyanese fauna. We are left at a loss to make any sense of this combination of animal and place. At this point a short digression on Guyanese toponyms is appropriate. The pre-eminence of descriptive toponyms12 on the map and in Damas’s works highlights the anomaly of the place-name Montagne du Tigre. This disparity is more marked if it is compared to other place names cited by Damas. I will point out four examples: l’Esplanade,13 Montjoly,14 Oyapock,15 Dgrad-Des-Cannes.16 They all have a fundamentally descriptive character. The first two instances are unequivocal: the plain, wide, open shape of Esplanade, which is a square of Cayenne; and the presumably agreeable topography of Montjoly. As regards the Oyapock, this is the river at the southern border with Brazil. For most French-speaking readers the word cannot be understood as readily as the descriptive place name would suggest. However, this is merely a linguistic problem, as the name is formed 12 Lzy 2000, 235 – 262. 13 ‘[…]  l’ombre […] / d’une Reine Charlotte en bonnet phrygien fige en l’Esplanade’ (Damas 1956, 66). Ancient name (1821 – 1841) of Place des Palmistes, firstly named La Savane. See Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 185. 14 ‘On installe d’abord les condamns  Rmire, rgion situe entre Montjoly et Cayenne, ville principale.’ Damas 1938, 42. 15 ‘On l’apaise en dirigeant l’lment pnal entre Kourou et l’Oyapock.’ Damas 1938, 42. 16 ‘Du Vieux Dgrad-des-Cannes / tmoin de ce qui fut le temps des Ngriers.’ Damas 1956, 66.

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out of an American Indian idiom meaning ‘large river’ (Waya: river; pucu: large).17 Once more, as a matter of straightforward descriptive detail and without elaboration, it denotes certain salient features of the site in question. The fourth example, Dgrad-Des-Cannes, is mainly descriptive as regards the presence of reeds (probably sugar canes) and the ambient conditions for their cultivation. On the other hand, the further information about the territorial organisation as an embarcadero and its economic configuration does have a certain performative function.18 Before drawing out the implications of these facts, let us come back to the choice of Montagne-des-Tigres as a coordinate of the Cayenne map. Its significance here could be treated as condensing the significance it assumes throughout Damas’s work. Tiger is one of the most important characters of five of the nineteen short stories of Veilles noires: ‘Beefsteak’, ‘L’enquÞte’, ‘Le sorcier’, ‘Astuce’, ‘PÞche en eau trouble’. The author says that he rewrote them after they were orally transmitted to him by an old Guyanese woman. The book’s prologue introduces the protagonists of the stories and their milieu: Qu’on veuille bien se rappeler que ces contes ont pris naissance dans les territoires qui forment le Bassin de l’Amazone et que l’Amazone arrose les seules terres du monde qui soient encore inexplores. On ne s’tonnera donc pas d’y voir survivre le souvenir du temps o Dieu-leP re, vivant  la mani re d’un vieux Colon, faisait priodiquement un tour d’inspection personnel sur ses domaines; du temps o Ravet-le-Cancrelas pinÅait fort agrablement les cordes d’une guitare; du temps o Bouc et Lapin courtisaient la fille d’un gros propritaire terrien; du temps o Tigre tait l’oncle de Kariakou-la-Gazelle; du temps o Chien et Chat cultivaient de compagnie, du temps o Tortue n’en tait pas  une ruse pr s, etc.19

Tiger was the uncle of Kariakou-the-Gazelle! A very strange family! The citation of the Tiger Mountain together with the Cprou Fort conveys a deep feeling of belonging by means of folklore in the first case and the history of the town’s founding in the second. Therefore, it could be a case of the banal opposition (banal not because it is unable to involve the people concerned, but because it is so obvious) between a place and a non-place. The place is evidently the convivial site of birth and memory; the non-place is the neutral cold site of exile, where the individual does not perceive any cultural, emotional or social connection. Furthermore, the use of traditional short stories would enhance its quality 17 Lzy 2000, 240 – 241. 18 Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 227. 19 Damas 1972c, 11.

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as an anthropological place that is characteristic of an archaic, backward society, in contrast to modern locations, which are completely devoid of such character. As a matter of fact, a person’s place of birth becomes emblematically a part of their identity. That is the first factor that goes toward the shaping of them as an individual. The relationships established there, first of all with familiar landmarks, shape him within his historical locale, so that everyone can find certain and stable points of reference.

The multiple self This antithesis does not sum up Damas’s writing completely. It is marked by a dissociative process of thought and personality toward a new logic, one that is paradoxical if compared with the starting pattern. I am thinking here of the experience of the main character of Black-Label. The segment of the dialogue, enclosed in the nine lines quoted above and introduced by the two lines ‘JE SUIS N / disais-tu’, offers some clues about this process of dissociation. The outline of the character becomes less and less clear. While in the previous part of the poem the narrator, the protagonist and the implied author converged into the first person pronoun, now his attributes shift to a second person, distinct from the narrator. There is indeed assignment of a different function to two separate voices, turning the monologue into a dialogue. In it, the two interlocutors (actually the same person) are indicated either by ‘me’ or ‘you’ in turn. So, while landscape rebuilt by memory is composed by several firm points borne out by history, geography and a life, the individual living that life is shrouded by a nebula. At first sight, this last word seems out of context but it is made pertinent by one of the names the narrator gives to himself: Limb. This is a strange name, formed either on ‘limbe’ (the outer part of a celestial body) or on ‘limbes’, not in its meaning of the abode of souls that are, according to Roman Catholic theology, barred from heaven through not having received Christian baptism, but in its figurative meanings both of an intermediate or transitional place or state and a state of uncertainty. Thus, Limb anticipates the other name that the narrator gives to himself: lyd. This last name implies the verb ‘lider’ (to elide) which in classical Latin (‘elidere’) means to expel, while in common language it means to delete letters from a word and, in a general sense, conveys an idea of elimination. Besides, lyd belongs to a semantic field which also includes ‘Exil’, ‘deux voix’ and ‘deux Þtres’. Exiled, that is expelled, but also dichotomic

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and insane as there are two human beings identifying themselves with a single name and with a single person. For instance the poem repeats on several occasions (with small variations) the following idea: et ma voix clame en Exil et l’Exil chante  deux voix et voici LYD20

The above lines always anticipate the following verse, this one likewise repeated with small variations: LYD Je dis bien pour ceux ceux qui n’en savent rien je dis LYD deux Þtres confondus en un seul  jamais seul malgr la toute premi re sc ne21

lyd, ‘two human beings confounded in one being, forever alone’, could be considered a way of pointing up some contradiction within the firstperson subject: the immanence and the permanence, the strong subject declaring his own existence and the weak subject existing merely through his actions. lyd, ‘two human beings confounded in one being, forever alone’, refers to the very first scene (‘malgr la toute premi re sc ne’), the scene which determines the first passage from the double to the single. According to Daniel Maximin,22 the reason for this sense of isolation can be found in Damas’s biography, in particular in the death at birth of his twin sister, Gabrielle. Damas elaborates this event by evoking a double dimension to the death. Poetry, then, offers the possibility of extending the dimension of singleness to include more than one. This possibility is actually inherent in the use of the first-person pronoun. This linguistic device also connotes, by way of cultural archetype (the spiritual union of twins), a particular, individual psychological situation, belonging to that specific life. Thus the fragmentation or the amplification of the individual – marked, as noted above, by detour (depraved, that is, spoilt, perished and corrupted) should be able to recompose himself in his native country by experiencing the condition of home insider. Therefore, the landscape outlined above, reconstructed with well known building blocks, is not free from debasement. It is rather the keystone of that chaotic, tumultuous personality. 20 Damas 1956, 46. 21 Damas 1956, 44. 22 Maximin 1988, without page.

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The sites that compose that landscape also bear marks of conflict. They are fairly exotic for a European reader, more or less conceived as a novel location, like Treasure Island, the Adventure Islands and so on, or else they are downgraded to their subordinate economic role as producers of particular foodstuffs. Despite the force of this distorting gaze from outside, the poem exerts less shaping power over the colonial landscape than the debasing insider view (the poet) who lives there. Ceux qui se traitent eux-mÞmes de sauvages sales n gres soubarous bois-mitan gros-sirop guinains congos moudongues fandangues nangues 23

This is another list of grievances, which is difficult to translate except for the first two (savages and niggers). The others are in Creole, come from a regional idiom, or from a specific language. We could say, more or less, ‘boors’, ‘savages’ again, ‘residual syrup’… These grievances are stronger than those quoted above: ‘depraved man’, ‘good-for-nothing fool’, ‘louse’, ‘cankerous bubo’ and ‘madman’, because they witness the lowest self-estimate and they articulate a commonplace form of self-destructive behaviour.

The reconstruction Damas’s writing presents a powerful analysis of the fatal experience of destruction and self-destruction in addition to anxiety, tiredness, fear, hopelessness and a deep feeling of sadness and emptiness (all these feelings are referred to in Black-Label). POURQUOI EN VOULOIR  TOUS CEUX DONT JE SUIS qui retrouvent enfin le fil du drame interrompu au bruit lourd des chanes du brigantin frÞle

23 Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 189 – 216.

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mouillant dans l’aube grise de l’Anse aux KLOUSS MASKILILIS24

So, this is not the mechanism of the surrealist automatisms but a ‘lucid psychosis’ that is a paradoxical oxymoron based on the practice of dissociation in the writing as the chance to weave new creative ties renewing the relationship with the real. An original mode of reconstruction makes this concrete through an analytic drive that is necessarily deconstructive but is motivated by an awareness of the fragmentation physically perceived as an experience both of psychic dissociation and of otherness. According to the final quotation, re-composition is carried in the context of ‘Anse aux KLOUSS MASKILILIS’ (cited six times in the poem) that is a turning point, similar to many others in Guyanese literature. This one is haunted by evil spirits which make the unfortunate traveller, met on the way, insane and dumb. They become insane and silent like those men chained in slave ships which had docked there. The relentless pain is centred on that original rupture that colonial American societies had suppressed for a long time and that Damas, the first in French colonial and post-colonial literature, recognised, stripped down and reassembled in his texts. Damas’s writing is built upon the need to analyse and dismantle the pillars and structure of French colonialism that is the will to assimilate heterogeneous groups and individuals according to the colonial model. This model was considered the only one capable of carrying out a civilising mission. Conversely, all other practices were judged barbaric and unacceptably archaic in the modern world. The results of such a suppression have been studied in detail by historians and sociologists but have also been taken into account by psychiatry. This essay has insisted rather on how ‘marginal’ literature deals with the subject, moving from the evidence of Damas’s disconnected, syncopated, grotesque texts. In particular, it highlights the unavoidable need for a clarificatory breaking-down as a starting point for advancing ideas about the individual and his or her placement in the world. Thus, individual identity became aware of itself when it was directly confronted with French metropolitan society. In those circumstances the natural givens, such as the colour of the skin, the most apparent of personal features, made the colonised a marginalised man, even a pariah. At any rate, this is the role the author gives to his main character; and more, he makes this individual existence part of a wider experience concerning the whole 24 Damas 1956, 73 – 74.

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Guyanese social body and even all French American societies founded upon the slave trade. So, Damas highlights episodes retained within his group’s memory and, by this means, he rebuilds a history which challenges the official colonial one. Moreover, despite the writer’s genuine rejection of the comforting idea of homeland, the scrupulous location of all the character’s actions and memories points up the interaction between identity and place. It is not only the indication of the place of birth on a passport, but it actually seems to be essential to shape memories, consciously taken up in order to build the character’s stratified personality. Damas’s poetry, like many post-colonial literary works, puts forward a sort of ‘laboratory of constructed identities’ matching them to places. In this sense, Damas’s poetry and post-colonial literature could be considered in terms of reconstruction. They really make up a new body rejecting the imposed unity and discovering blacked-out historical passages, a new body founded on multicentred geography and diversity.

Section III The Genealogy and Legacy of Deconstruction: The Politico-Social and Juridical Point of View

Remembrance of Nature within the Subject: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Subjection Jordi Maiso At the beginning of his lectures on Philosophical Terminology, Theodor W. Adorno remarked that every philosophical term was ‘the hardened scar of an unsolved problem’.1 Maybe no term could attest to the validity of this assertion better than the philosophical category of subjectivity. Subjectivity was once the epicentre of modern thought until, in the second half of the past century, postmodern discourses started to regard this category with distrust. Due to the increasing awareness of the importance of social structures and discourses, subjectivity has been deconstructed, most of its claims have been re-dimensioned and the subject itself has even been declared dead. Authors like Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault or Althusser converged in their understanding of subjectivity as a mere appearance, a naivet of modern thought which should be subjected to the ruthless critique of demythologising theory. But in the past few decades subjectivity has turned out to be a main issue, in philosophy as well as in the social sciences; it seems that subjectivity has only survived its own death as an unsolved problem: the current debates on subjection and subjectification reveal subjectivity may not be thought about without domination. Its emphatic claims of sovereignty, autonomy and freedom have only existed as a regulative idea; their materialisation was missed, although their appearance is still reproduced in the social process. In order to establish possible frames to reconstruct subjectivity after its deconstruction, it may be worthwhile looking back to the meeting of two major demythologisers of modern subjectivity before postmodern thought: Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud. By focusing on Adorno’s reception of Freud, I intend to argue that the cooperation of critical social theory and psychoanalysis may lead to a fruitful insight into the way in which the social relationships of domination and servitude shape the material constitution of subjects. Careful analysis of Adorno’s 1

Adorno 1974, 10 f.

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work might offer a valuable approach to the internalisation of domination and its limits, enriching the current debates on subjection and subjectification.

Back to Adorno: Subjectivity in the administered world The claim to look back to an old – some may say ‘outdated’ – philosopher like Theodor W. Adorno may sound surprising in the frame of contemporary debates. But Adorno might be revealed as an interesting author to interface the discussions on deconstruction and reconstruction. His whole oeuvre can be interpreted as an attempt to understand the further implications of irreversible transformations in the instruments of perception, interpretation and thought throughout the past century. No doubt some of his analyses may sound distant from current philosophical matters; Adorno himself conceived his work as ‘a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history’.2 But this very insistence on its temporal core may make Adorno relevant for contemporary issues: his thought might offer an insightful perspective concerning the historical genesis of the current debates. It is well known that Adorno understood his own work in the wider frame of the collective project developed around the Institut fr Sozialforschung, today known as the critical theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’. Under the direction of Max Horkheimer, a group of theorists and intellectuals started to develop an extensive critical analysis of society and its transformations; their founding premise was the acknowledgment that the end of the bourgeois era would not lead – as Marx had expected – to the triumph of human history over pseudo-natural constraint, but would instead entail a social formation that was both a consequence and a continuation of its old heteronomy, but in a different shape. Horkheimer and Adorno called this new era the ‘administered world’. This term pointed out the specific differences between the new social formation and the old, bourgeois one: free individual action had no place to develop, rationality could only make claims on the enhancement of organisation and the technical improvement of social domination and the category of the individual seemed about to be abrogated. Auschwitz, the German name for a Polish location in which civilisation turned to fe2

Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, xi.

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rocious barbarism, marked for Adorno the historical point of no return between both ages: it revealed a new position of living subjects within society, in which every causal relation between what an individual does and what happens to him seemed to be wiped out.3 In the new social configuration, categories such as subjectivity, freedom, autonomy or sovereignty seemed to lose their historical and social ground. Nevertheless, in order to remain critical, Adorno’s theory could not give up its emancipatory claims: instead it had to strive for possible materialisation within the administered world. What was at stake was ‘not the conservation of the past but the fulfilment of past hopes’.4 This assertion indicates a possible framework for the reconstruction of subjectivity after its deconstruction: this cannot be understood as the impossible restoration of already demythologised thoughts. In fact, Adorno’s own attempt to critically salvage subjectivity was fully aware that this was not a ‘given fact’, but a task which had to be redefined in the given social and historical situation and which had to be fulfilled within it. That is the reason why he claimed that ‘the construction of the self is the most advanced issue of civilization, which civilization never fulfilled completely’.5 But Adorno also knew the socio-historical structures and practices did not only shape living individuals, but also had to be internalised by them. In fact his analysis of the process of internalisation of social constraint may offer new keys for understanding the dialectics between subjection and subjectification. In spite of the commonplaces about Adorno’s incurable negativism, his emphasis on the natural-psychological dispositions of living subjects may reveal a higher degree of potential resistance within them than is usually assumed. Adorno himself had noticed that ‘he who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses’.6 Thus there exists the need to examine the processes which take place 3 4

5 6

‘What perished there was that which had provided the criterion of experience – life lived out to its end.’ Adorno 1983, 260. Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, xvii. The result was an ambiguous relationship with the ‘old bourgeois world’, which intended ‘a critique of the fine appearance of humanity in bourgeois’ false consciousness, but defending at the same time its moment of truth, the manifestation of real humanity, against that new element which delineated itself already in the old one: the sheer inhumanity’. Stender 1996, 82. Horkheimer/Adorno 1985, 592. Adorno 2005a, 15.

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in the conscious and unconscious minds of individuals. That is the reason why the inner logic of critical social theory, for Adorno as well as for most of the Frankfurt School, led almost unavoidably to a careful confrontation with the only theory of the subject which could structurally fulfil the challenge of offering a new insight into the constitution of subjectivity and its outer conditioning: the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.

Critical theory meets Freud: The contradiction within the subject For the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Freud was not only a late representative of a demythologising tradition of thought, but also the author who offered the main keys for understanding why civilisation failed once more to provide emancipation and subjective autonomy. His work seemed to reveal, in an incontrovertible manner, the entwinement between emancipation and repression. Freud’s thesis in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) pointed out that the mastery of nature not only involved the liberation from outer constraint – an expectation which takes root on the classical distinction between res cogitans and res extensa – but was also inextricably linked to renunciation, sacrifice and repression of the nature within the subject itself. In the words of Hullot-Kentor: In mastering the world, the self progressively deprives itself of itself and of its own object. All it ultimately gets to enjoy is a fascination with the techniques of mastery that provide an hallucinated feeling of sovereignty more than any real control.7

After Freud, the self could not pretend to be the master of its own house, and this had far-reaching implications for the social logics of domination and servitude. The project of Adorno and his fellow-thinkers was to further develop the contributions of the Freudian theory in order to gain a critical insight into social processes without falling into the trap of psychologism. For, as Horkheimer himself stated, Freud’s psychoanalysis delivered the fundamental keys to a ‘theory of man as he has developed under the conditions of antagonistic society’: it enabled a focus on the introjection of social constraint and how it affected ‘the so-called psychological life’,8 including 7 8

Hullot-Kentor 2008. Horkheimer 1996, 367.

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the thoughts and actions resulting from it. Therefore, their approach to psychoanalysis was marked by their commitment to a materialistic tradition of thought: the appeal of psychoanalysis was for them not because it offered interpretative patterns which may be applied to cultural, social or political phenomena, but rather that it offered an insight into the contradictions within living individuals which arose in the process of becoming a self. As a result, the cooperation of social theory and psychoanalysis could enable us to grasp how the transition from the ‘bourgeois’ to the ‘administered world’ affected the self, as it was intended as the meeting point of outer and inner life. It is well known that Freud had revealed the psychical life of the individual as a battleground: the outright conflicts between the id, ego and superego enabled a deeper understanding of individual drives, motives and consciousness, revealing some blind spots in the classical philosophy of the subject. Beyond the superficial integrity of the self, he uncovered the violent clash between subjective necessities, instinctual energy searching for gratification and the need for adaptation to the pre-existent, outer reality. The instinctual dynamics revealed that the constitution of the ego was the result of the struggle between the libido’s claim for immediate gratification – the pleasure principle – and the social limitations that, in the shape of prohibitions, were imposed from the outer world as a condition of the subject’s self-preservation – the reality principle. The constitution of the ego implied, therefore, the introjection of outer limitations and constraints, which enabled a separation from the libidinal drives to become an organised self capable of transforming its own impulses in order to be purposeful. Throughout this process, the ego becomes an instance of reality-testing, of adaptation; in this kind of instance, it is supposed to repress, tame and reject the instincts which may endanger its successful integration into the given socio-historical reality, ‘otherwise the instinct would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of civilization’.9 As Adorno and Horkheimer noticed, the process of the constitution of the self was a laborious and painful one: ‘Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.’10 In some cases the process could generate a frustration which could lead to compensations or neuroses; in the words of Freud: 9 Freud 1989c, 312. 10 Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 26.

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Human beings fall ill as a result of a conflict between the claims of instinctual life and the resistance which arises within them against it; and not for a moment have we forgotten this resistance, repelling, repressing agency, which we thought of as equipped with its special forces, the ego instincts, and which coincides with the ego of popular psychology.11

For Freud the ego seems, thus, to be both: the instance of repression and the addressee of repression itself. As a result, ‘the concept of the ego is dialectical, both psychic and extrapsychic, a quantum of libido and the representative of outside reality’.12 The self thus appears as a split entity, which on the one side fulfils certain social functions and roles and, on the other side, is a living being, substratum of individual psychology, with its dispositions and necessities. This contradiction within the subject, as a social and natural being at once, offered Adorno and his colleagues the key to grasp the dialectical process of individuation and socialisation. For Freud’s atomistic concentration on the depths of individual psychology, in spite of his apparent ‘biologism’, offered an insight as to how social constraint was introjected by living individuals, shaping their inner life.13 If – as Freud has claimed – libido was a pre-social, quasi-‘natural’ instance within the subject, the social principle of domination coincided with the repression of inner drives, and this enabled the disclosure of a way in which the relations between domination and servitude were constituted and fixed during the process of becoming a self. But for Freud the entwinement of civilisation and repression was not only valid at an individual level, but also at a phylogenetical one: culture and social institutions were, for him, based on the domestication of the demands of the pleasure principle, on the subjugation of human instincts; and yet, as Freud himself stated, these were only the expression of subjective needs. For living subjects, superseding the pleasure principle with the reality principle, which meant no less than the acceptance of the impossibility of the ‘full and painless gratification’ of its needs, is a traumatic event. It is experienced as a situation of Lebensnot, of scarcity in the struggle for existence of every individual: in order to survive in the ‘given’ reality, they must accept and internalise the imposition of restraints, renunciations and delays, renouncing the unrestrained gratification of their needs. The acknowledgment of this incompatibility between the subjective necessities of individuals and the outer world from which they happen to 11 Freud 1989c, 57. 12 Adorno 2003f, 70. 13 Adorno 2003c, 35; Marcuse 2005, 6.

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depend caused what Freud called a ‘narcissistic scar’ in living individuals.14 This insight into the social process of individuation as a process guided by a structurally sacrificial logic, which implied suffering and frustration, was crucial for Adorno’s interest in psychoanalysis. For it seems to take sides on behalf of the substratum which was socially repressed and denied; Freud himself had written that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied may not deserve a lasting existence.15 In fact civilisation could domesticate the nature within the subject, but it could neither fully satisfy its demands nor make them disappear: the claims of the pleasure principle remain present in the conflicts between the id and the superego and the outer reality, and the narcissistic scar could never fully heal. In fact, according to Otto Fenichel, the longing to attain once again the status which preceded this injury to self-regard persists throughout life, manifesting itself as a ‘narcissistic need’.16 As Adorno himself remarked, ‘it may not have been perchance that after the First World War Freud turned his attention to narcissism and ego problems in the specific sense’.17 This had to be understood in the frame of Freud’s theory of civilisation based on the growth of discontent and destructiveness within the civilised world.18 Without devoting himself to the study of social developments, the development of Freud’s work seemed to point to historical trends. The diagnosis of the increasing malaise within modern societies, which took the shape of increasing narcissistic injuries and needs produced in modern socialisation, seemed to offer Adorno’s critical theory some crucial keys for grasping the historical destiny of subjectivity in a transformed social reality.

14 ‘The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to selfregard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion […] contributes more than anything to the “sense of inferiority” which is so common in neurotics.’ Freud 1989a, 21 f. 15 Freud 1989d, 17. 16 Fenichel 1954, 141. 17 Adorno 2003b, 410 f. 18 See Freud 1989a.

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Total subjection as the reification of the living subject For Adorno, Freud had revealed the subjective costs of adaptation and introjection of social restraint, and he had grasped civilisation from the perspective of its effect on living individuals. But the transition to the administered world seemed to supersede the Freudian frame of analysis. Freud’s monadological interest of individual psychology was a product of the liberal-bourgeois society, in which the individual still played a decisive role. The transition to the administered world meant the decline of the individual and the weakening of its social position. In the emerging social constellation, critical social theory had to face the consequences of the increase in vulnerability and dependence of its subjects, and this demanded a different theoretical perspective: ‘The pre-bourgeois world does not know psychology yet, the totally administered one does not know it anymore’,19 claimed Adorno; and, in the words of Marcuse: Psychology could be elaborated and practiced as a special discipline as long as the psyche could sustain itself against the public power, as long as privacy was real, really desired, and self-shaped; if the individual has neither the ability nor the possibility to be for himself, the terms of psychology become the terms of the societal forces which define the psyche.20

At stake was the transition from the anthropology of the bourgeois era to a new social construction which involved an irreversible transformation of subjectivity and individuality. The transformation of the historical world also implied a mutation of the instinctive life. The socialisation web had expanded, functionalising both outer and inner life, and the mediating instances between social imperatives and isolated individuals – such as the family – tended to lose their classical role in favour of collective, socialised entities such as radio, film and television.21 In this new model of socialisation, the limits between outer and inner reality tended to vanish; the relative unity, continuity and substantiality of the modern self – if it ever was more than an ideological postulate – was deprived of its basis; the pursuit of individual interests were substituted for a ‘realism’ which only allowed for the seeking of gaps and chose the lesser evil in the allpervading social web of functionalisation; continuity of experience seemed to break down, reducing human beings to a unit of atomised reactions in order to fulfil changing social demands. There was an unpre19 Adorno 2003f, 83. 20 Marcuse 2005, xxi. 21 Marcuse 2005, 97.

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cedentedly drastic contrast between the concentration of social power and the powerlessness of weakened individuals. Therefore, Adorno claimed the antagonism between the social, technological and economic apparatus for the reproduction of life and living individuals had reached its very limit: ‘It has now become fate and finds its expression in what Freud called ubiquitous, free-flowing anxiety.’22 This concentration of social power asphyxiated the conflicts between libido and adaptation, which were central to the constitution of the ego and to the ‘classical’ concept of the self: introjection of social constraint now became a sheer product of fear, a matter of self-preservation which demanded an unprecedented degree of renunciation. Therefore, it should not surprise us that Adorno spoke of this social tendency as ‘the historical and psychological failure of subjectivity’.23 According to Adorno – as well as Horkheimer and Marcuse – in the new social configuration individuals did not live their own life any more, but only fulfilled social functions and roles. They had to mould themselves to the technical apparatus of the body and soul, transferring their libido to socially approved issues – from technological devices to identifying with social roles – which implied an impoverishment of thought, no less than of experience. Adaptation to this social reality meant reification, and this was now a duty the subject himself had to fulfil: ‘The more faithful it becomes to reality, the more it becomes a thing, the less it actually lives, the more senseless its entire “realism” becomes.’24 As the web of social functionalisation expanded, allowing very little to escape its mesh, inner socialisation significantly deprived living individuals of every sort of spontaneity: they were reduced to a merely reactive condition. The process of inner socialisation selected, developed and modified some psychological dispositions in order to respond to social imperatives, while others were declared dysfunctional, and were therefore repressed: The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of which the system of production has long since attuned the body, the more impoverished are the experiences of which the body is capable. The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians.25 22 23 24 25

Adorno 2003e, 369. Adorno 2003a, 29. Adorno 2003f, 60. Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 28.

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Some aspects of this analysis may vaguely seem to anticipate postmodern theories of power and subjection; but, before assessing similarities it could be useful to focus on the subtle differences, for they may turn out to have major repercussions. For the description of a social-disciplinary system, articulated in different institutions (hospitals, mental asylums, schools, universities, factories or prisons) which shaped the body and behaviour of human beings according to the imperatives of social domination, did not explain how these imperatives were introjected and reconciled with the individuals’ own wishes and expectations. The postmodern diagnosis of the ‘death of the subject’ proceeds here much too literally: it approaches living human beings as if they were only products of social devices, structures and discourses. On the contrary, Adorno’s insistence on the unresolved contradiction within the subject blocked any approach to subjectification processes in a pre-emptive and unilateral manner. To be sure, with the expansion of inner socialisation, the psychological substratum of the individual may be reduced to a mere ‘curiosity’,26 but it still could not be fully functionalised. If Freud had stated that the experience of the incompatibility of the subject’s wishes with reality left a narcissistic scar, Adorno described the individual character as a ‘system of scars, that are integrated only through suffering and even then never completely’.27 These scars were the traces of the violent imposition of social imperatives on the life of individuals, which reduced them to mere objects – not subjects – of social processes. As a momento of past suffering and renunciation, these scars were an ambivalent phenomenon: they were a possible catalyst for non-conformism,28 as well as a potential source of resentment and its destructive consequences.29 In their analysis of the contradiction within the subject, Adorno and the Frankfurt School tended to minimise the subjective capacity to resist the imposition of social imperatives: in their writings this resistance appears mostly as an expression of subjective damage, articulated in desperate reactions or helpless grimaces. But their sociological analysis of phenomena such as authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and guilt had sharpened their awareness of the subtle dangers of an adaptation which injured the subject’s self-regard and was a great potential source of resentment. In a highly rationalised society, the ego, which had to take care of its own li26 27 28 29

Adorno 2003f, 60. Adorno 2003c, 24. Marcuse 2005, 96 f. See Stender 1996.

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bidinal needs and self-preservation, was incessantly under the pressure of excessive demands. The social weakening of individuals reinforced their ‘narcissistic need’: their inner equilibrium depended more than ever on the social environment, its recognition and gratification.30 Living subjects tend to abandon their capacities of experience, judgment and dissent, reinforcing authoritarian and infantile patterns of behaviour. As highly rationalised society could neither sublimate subjective needs nor satisfy them, the weakened subjects searched for compensations to alleviate their very antagonism toward the social apparatus and facilitate the introjection of social constraint: ‘Since the reigning objectivity is objectively inadequate to the individuals, it is realized solely through the individuals – that is to say, psychologically.’31 This seems to close the circle of social domination, for the weakened, needy subjects are always able to find good reasons for not resisting the pressure to conform. Their libidinal economy seeks relief for the suspension of their anxieties and to give their lives the appearance of being meaningful. In the all-pervading social functionalisation, they are always able to find compensations which appeal to their unmet needs and functionalise them. This promises to loosen up their repressions and to let their unconscious instincts emerge removing the libidinal energies from the interests of the ego and subordinating them to the requirements of social imperatives. These vicarious gratifications – from identification to the displacement of libido to socially approved objects such as technological devices or products of the culture industry – seem to complete the system of subjection: they are based on the mobilisation of preconscious and subconscious elements, which are retained in the unconscious instead of being helped to reach consciousness: defense mechanisms are strengthened instead of dissolved and living individuals are kept dependent rather than helped to reach autonomy. As a result, living individuals seem to become objects of themselves: wishes coming from their own body and soul tend to appear as obstacles to successful adaptation, they have to be tamed or brought under control in order to respond to social demands. The only available promise of happiness seems to demand abandoning their own subjectivity; the consequence is the travesty of a compromise between the pleasure principle and the reality principle: the perfect accomplishment of social conformity. 30 See Fenichel 1954. 31 Adorno 2005b, 351.

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The limits of subjection: Towards a reconstitution of subjectivity The combination of critical social theory and psychoanalysis in Adorno’s thought does not only enable a deconstruction of the social web of delusion: it also helps to recognise its limits. This may be its most important contribution to the current debates on subjection and subjectification. The mere assertion that social discourses, dispositives and structures shape the practices and cognitive instruments of the subject only grasps one very partial aspect of their performativity. The whole process of the introjection of social constraints remains unaccounted for; no attention is paid to the interaction between society and nature within the subject or to the whole psychological dynamic which subjection sets in motion. This means ignoring the very libidinal life of the subject, its permanent claim for gratification and removal of suffering, which may lead to unrecognised friction in the logics of domination and servitude. Freud himself had grasped the materiality of these processes with notable precision. In fact he spoke of compensation phenomena – precisely those of a social nature – as ‘crooked cures’,32 for they mitigated the injuries produced in the socialisation processes, establishing an appearance of harmony between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Adorno interpreted this process of vicarious gratification as ‘socialized narcissism’; its schema was that of rationalisation. In narcissism the self-preserving function of the ego is, on the surface, maintained, but it has been split-off from consciousness and entrusted to irrationality. Every defense mechanism has a narcissistic cachet: the ego notices its weakness in front of the drive as well as his powerlessness as ‘narcissistic illness’. The resistance is not consciously performed and is hardly accomplished by the ego, but rather by a psycho-dynamic derivate, a contaminated libido, directed to the ego, but unsublimated and undifferentiated.33

Accordingly, social psychology should not be in the first place psychology of the ego, but psychology of the libido and its mutable dynamics: for the constitutive mechanisms of the ego are extremely fragile. Adorno was not interested in a psychologistic interpretation of social phenomena or in a cognitive psychology of socialisation; what he found in Freud was the discovery of a dynamic substratum of impulses, drives, resistances and frictions which subsisted below the surface of individuation. This enabled a 32 Freud 1989b, 95. 33 Adorno 2003f, 72 f.

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new insight into the social production of consciousness and the unconscious, which interpreted the ego as a field of tensions between domination and servitude, emancipation and repression. For ‘psychology is not just relevant as a medium of adaptation, but also there, where the socialization within the subject reaches its limits’.34 This meant that the total functionalisation of subjectivity could not be fully achieved, for the natural, pre-social residue within living individuals represented the insurmountable limit of their inner socialisation: the undissolved remainder of nature within the subject which can never be fully assimilated. The dialectic between the introjection of social imperatives and the psychological dispositions revealed the subjection of living individuals and their needs could not be met without generating resistances since the resultant conflict persists, however rationalised and displaced. We could say that subjection reaches its limits in the very non-identity of subjects with themselves. On this account, Adorno’s diagnosis of a socio-historical annihilation of the individual is to be understood as indicating a real tendency of late capitalism, but not as a consummated process: otherwise the authoritarian personality would be little more than a mere metaphor.35 In fact, it is no wonder that Adorno grasped the insurmountable limit of subjection and functionalisation in what he considered to be the most effective and powerful apparatus of inner socialisation – the culture industry: Since as subjects human beings themselves still represent the ultimate limit of reification, mass culture must try and take hold of them again and again: the bad infinity involved in this hopeless effort is the only trace of hope that this repetition might be in vain, that human beings cannot be totally controlled.36

In order to fully achieve the incorporation of the subject, the social apparatus had to reach out for them over and over again: and this implied that total functionalisation of living individuals could never be fully achieved. Society needs subjects in order to reproduce itself – at least a fiction of the self as owner of commodities or as subject of consumption – and thus the circle of domination cannot be fully closed. The experience of this insurmountable limit of subjection proves that the historical weakening of subjectivity did not necessarily mean abandoning its emancipatory claims, for these could be reconstructed on 34 Adorno 2003d, 92. 35 Parin 1978, 120. 36 Adorno 2001, 93.

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the basis of the residue of nature within the subject.37 Above all, this implied self-reflection on the subject’s own fragility and needy condition for it was this vulnerability which led to: the vicious circle of powerlessness, the need for adaptation and belonging, the introjection of constraint, frustration and the off-loading of aggression which perpetuated the social logic of violence. Rather than blindly allowing this logic to rule the life of individuals, their own scars and frustrations had to become the source of consciousness and knowledge: the self had to reflect upon its own somatic and libidinal basis and try to help the id find satisfaction instead of passively succumbing to it. This offered a possible, although extremely fragile basis for the salvage of subjectivity: ‘Without an anamnesis of the untamed impulse, that precedes the ego – an impulse later banished to the zone of unfree bondage to nature – it would be impossible to derive the idea of freedom, although this idea in turn ends up reinforcing the ego.’38 However, this remembrance of nature within the subject, which marked the limits of subjection, implied also an acknowledgment of the limits of Enlightenment itself: self and consciousness could no longer be conceived as self-transparent entities. Freudian psychoanalysis had shown the ego would never be able to fully master its libidinal energies and channel them into a perfectly cognitive, self-reflective behaviour – which was the basic assumption of Habermas’s shift in critical theory, from philosophy of consciousness to intersubjective communication.39 According to Adorno, the self-reflection of the ego on its own libidinal dimension could not restore an identical self, but only commemorate the non-identical in the subject, a libidinal substratum which is frequently alien in meaning and opaque to reason. The goal was thus to strengthen the experience of the inner split within the subject and try to restore this ‘foreign land’ within itself, mending the damage caused by an impoverished model of rationality which constrains individuals within a vicious circle of domination, self-denial and dependence. Although Adorno’s thought might be in many aspects outdated, this emancipatory claim remains valid, for it is still unfulfilled. No reconstruction of the subject can afford to neglect this consciousness of the non-identity of subjectivity with itself. The joint venture of critical social theory and psychoanalysis is still of great value for seeing through the social web of delusion and breaking the spell of conformity. For, as Detlev Claussen has remarked, 37 Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 32. 38 Adorno 2005b, 221 f. 39 Habermas 1985. See for instance vol. 2, 374 f.

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‘remembrance and reflection, as intellectual efforts, may give the individuals back some of the sovereignty they lost under the social pressure to conform’.40

40 Claussen 2000, 21.

The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to Deconstruction: The Case of Chantal Mouffe Herman W. Siemens This paper will examine political agonism in relation to deconstruction. In the last 15 years or so, certain democratic theorists (Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, inter alia) have used deconstruction to formulate powerful critiques of liberal-democratic theory, but also alternative theories of democracy that give a central place to tension and antagonism in democratic politics (Section 1). While claiming to derive their criticisms and alternatives from the deconstructive logic of the ‘constitutive outside’, this derivation is problematic (Section 2), so that political agonism is best understood as a reconstructive reaction to deconstruction that is not without its difficulties, but also holds some promise as a way to rethink pluralistic democracy in the 21st century (Section 3). In this paper, I will concentrate on one agonistic theorist: Chantal Mouffe. Of value in her approach to democracy, I will argue, are three key elements: anti-essentialism; the demand for an ontology that does justice to contemporary forms of pluralism; and the claim that pluralism is inseparable from antagonism.

1. The provenance of political agonism In broad terms political agonism emerged from a dissatisfaction with the state of democratic politics today (a) and mainstream democratic theory (b). a. In response to the bureaucratic, law- and rule-induced sclerosis of contemporary democracies, agonists seek to recuperate the original sense of a vibrant democracy as contestation. What worries Mouffe is the loss of contestation in the sense of adversarial left vs. right politics that accompanied the rise of Centrist politics: the so-called Third Way (Blair, Clinton, Schrçder). In displacing the adversary with an imaginary consensus of the centre, Mouffe argues, they expelled any legitimate opposition

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from the democratic public sphere.1 More broadly, agonistic democrats are left-leaning, Foucault-inspired theorists concerned with the persistent inequalities in contemporary democracies, with minority groups that remain marginalised and below the threshold of legitimate identity and political participation.2 In practical terms, then, their question is: How to empower those marginalised in their emancipatory struggle against inequality? How to theorise democracy so as to allow for legitimate forms of resistance or opposition to existing power-regimes in current democracies? b. This dissatisfaction extends to mainstream democratic theory. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of deliberative theories of democracy. Reacting against the aggregative theories of democracy that came to dominate after the Second World War – the reduction of democratic theory to a descriptive account of the procedures needed to secure compromises between diverse interest-groups – deliberative theorists sought to restore a normative dimension to democratic theory by emphasising processes of deliberation among free and equal citizens. John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas are the figureheads of the two main schools of deliberative theory. What unites them is the effort to formulate a concept of Public Reason that is normative: one that can secure the legitimacy of democratic institutions by ensuring that all decisions are the result of an exchange of arguments among free and equal rational citizens, citizens who reach a rational consensus that is maximally inclusive, because it represents an impartial standpoint that is equally in the interests of all.3 Dissatisfaction with these theories is expressed in extensive and varied criticisms of deliberative theories presented by agonists. In this context, I will concentrate on one of the two key criticisms formulated by Mouffe. (1) The pluralism criticism is that the notion of a universal public reason deployed in deliberations oriented toward consensus fails to address adequately the character of pluralism in contemporary democracy. The notion of pluralism at stake here is both descriptive and normative: something we have both to acknowledge and promote.4 (2) The power criticism is that the deliberative ideal of an all-inclusive public sphere in which power-relations are displaced by a non-coercive consensus among rational agents fails to grasp the nature

1 2 3 4

Mouffe 2005, 14. Connolly 2007, 144; Mouffe 2005, 6, 20; Honig 1993, 14; Villa 2000, 225. Mouffe 2005, 45 f, 81 f. Mouffe 2005, 17, 19, 33 f; Connolly 2007, 4; Honig 1993, 130.

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of power-relations (subordination, exclusion) as constitutive of all socialpolitical relations and identities.5 The key to both criticisms and to the alternative theories of democracy proposed by agonists is the view that conflict and division are inherent to politics.6 More specifically, the claim is that antagonism, struggle, contestation, disagreement and dissensus are ineradicable, a daily and incessant part of democratic politics; but, also that they are desirable – a valuable (emancipatory, productive) feature of democracy, to be affirmed and celebrated, because they make genuine pluralism possible and are essential for questioning, resisting and transforming power-relations. Thus, behind the pluralism criticism is the claim that genuine pluralism is always antagonistic and dissensual.7 Behind the power criticism is the claim that modern liberal democracy – when properly understood – ‘creates a space in which […] power relations are always being put into question and no victory can be final’.8 Radical and plural democracy means: [t]o acknowledge the existence of relations of power and the need to transform them, while renouncing the illusion that we could free ourselves completely from power […]. [T]he specificity of modern pluralist democracy […] does not reside in the absence of domination and of violence but in the establishment of a set of institutions through which they can be limited and contested. To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and to aim at a universal rational consensus – this is the real threat to democracy.9

In short: Mouffe and other agonists have an antagonistic concept of pluralism and power in democracy.

2. Deconstruction and political agonism What is striking is that these are not so much empirical claims, as conceptual claims, supposedly derived from poststructuralism. Or rather, the claim is that the deconstructive logic of diffrance and the ‘constitutive outside’ provides a much better theoretical framework for grasping the ‘specificity of modern democracy’ than the rationalist ‘consensus’

5 6 7 8 9

Mouffe Mouffe Mouffe Mouffe Mouffe

2005, 2005, 2005, 2005, 2005,

98 f., 105, 135. 16. 11, 105. 15, cf. 21. 22, cf. 99.

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model.10 The key critical claim is that the idea of an all-inclusive consensus is a conceptual impossibility.11 It is an error that derives from essentialist thinking. The key positive claim is that pluralism and power in contemporary liberal democracy need to be theorised as antagonistic or agonistic concepts, as a matter of conceptual necessity. As Mouffe puts it: ‘The notion of the “constitutive outside” forces us to come to terms with the idea that pluralism implies the permanence of conflict and antagonism.’12 What, then, are the arguments? To begin with the critical claim concerning the conceptual impossibility of an all-inclusive consensus:13 The idea of an impartial standpoint (to be) attained through all-inclusive consensus is structurally impossible, because (following Derrida) difference is both the condition of possibility for constituting any unity or totality and constitutive of its essential limits or impossibility.14 This implies first that undecidability is structurally constitutive of any objectivity, so that there can be no rationally attained decision; any decision that brings deliberation to a close is therefore necessarily an act of exclusion, whose violence is only masked by branding it ‘irrational’.15 And secondly, it implies that alterity or otherness is irreducible because it is constitutive of any unity, so that all-inclusive consensus or unanimity is a fiction that masks the necessary exclusions in any decision.16 More importantly, this means that plurality – understood as the alterity or otherness constitutive of any unity – cannot be eliminated; it is irreducible.17 Before interrogating the viability of this derivation, two further remarks are necessary. The first concerns the concept of pluralism as the excluded remainder that is present in any attempt at reaching consensus or unanimity. This is a deeply negative notion of pluralism, parasitic on its attempted negation, and one that falls far short of the positive sense of pluralism in contemporary democracies that Mouffe wants to describe and affirm: what she elsewhere characterises as the ‘multiplicity of voices’ 10 Mouffe 2005, 17, 32. The formulation ‘constitutive outside’ is from Staten 1984, 16, who presents Derrida’s thought as focused on the ‘form of form’ that makes determinacy in language and thought possible. 11 Mouffe 2005, 33, 137. 12 Mouffe 2005, 32 f. 13 Mouffe 2005, 135. 14 Mouffe 2005, 32. 15 Mouffe 2005, 105. 16 Mouffe 2005, 19. 17 Mouffe 2005, 33.

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or the ‘proliferation of political spaces and multiplicity of democratic demands’.18 In the second place, this concept of pluralism seems to fall short of her key positive claim that the notion of the constitutive outside forces us to come to terms with the idea that pluralism implies the permanence of conflict and antagonism. 19 It is far from clear how pluralism in the above sense comes to be equated with antagonism as a matter of ‘conceptual necessity’. Turning to the argument itself, the first thing to note is that it is an argument about the constitution of collective identities, so that pluralism is conceived as the ‘constitutive outside’: i. e. the excluded other that necessarily conditions and disrupts any attempt at consensus, unanimity or collective identity. Now, of Derrida’s notion of the ‘constitutive outside’, Mouffe writes that it has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time, the condition of the emergence of the latter. This is only possible if what is ‘outside’ is not simply the outside of a concrete content but something which puts into question ‘concreteness’ as such […] a content which, by showing the radical undecidability of the tension of its constitution, makes its very positivity a function of the symbol of something exceeding it: the possibility/ impossibility of positivity as such […] the ‘them’ is not the constitutive opposite of a concrete ‘us’, but the symbol of what makes any ‘us’ impossible.20

As a reasonable take on Derrida’s aporetic account of identity by virtue of diffrance, this seems to imply the radical indeterminacy of both the inside and the outside across a boundary that cannot be exclusionary in any tangible sense21 within an unending and doomed process of identity-formation. If so, it falls short of Mouffe’s exclusionary notion of pluralism, not to mention her equation of pluralism with antagonism. To her credit, Mouffe recognises this deficit and goes on to argue that we need to translate the ‘us/them’ difference into the Schmittian language of friend and enemy: ‘From that moment on, it becomes the locus of an antagonism, that is, it becomes political (in Schmitt’s sense of the term).’22 Since the deconstructive logic of diffrance will not generate a determinable sense of pluralism, let alone the antagonism Mouffe equates with genuine pluralism, she attempts to fuse or superlay it onto Schmitt’s political ontology of antagonism between collective identities. The ques18 19 20 21 22

Mouffe 2005, 105, 17. Mouffe 2005, 33. Mouffe 2005, 12 f. See Fritsch 2008, 181 on the ‘infinite porosity’ of the Derridean boundary. Mouffe 2005, 13.

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tion is whether deconstruction and Schmittian political ontology can be fused. According to Schmitt a properly political unity is a collective unity that can only be formed in the face of an existential threat of annihilation by another unity. The antagonistic relation of ‘us against them’, ‘friends against enemies’ is therefore constitutive of the political. This ontology certainly generates the antagonism Mouffe intends. However, it generates too much antagonism: Schmittian antagonism – the threat of annihilation as the condition for political unity – clearly goes too far for anything resembling democratic contestation or any form of antagonism that can be contained within a democratic polity. What is more, it has no relation to the democratic pluralism Mouffe has in mind, since Schmitt’s political unities are homogenous, not pluralistic. To deal with these problems, Mouffe makes two moves ‘with and against Schmitt’. The first is to internalise the logic of antagonism between political unities within the democratic community,23 the second is to contrive ways to place limits on Schmittian antagonism: to reconceptualise the enemy (who can be annihilated, if necessary) into an ‘adversary’, that is, the figure of a legitimate political opponent. The picture of pluralistic democracy that emerges from Mouffe’s engagement ‘with and against Schmitt’ can be characterised as follows: Schmitt’s homogenous conception of political unity is displaced by a notion of commonality that is homogenous enough to allow for the formation of a demos, but still allows for pluralism. Democratic pluralism is, however, limited by shared adherence to two principles that constitute the polity as democratic: liberty and equality for all. How these are interpreted and applied is a matter of open-ended, agonistic struggle among the internal groups. Their struggle is, however, limited and contained this side of annihilation by (1) the minimal consensus on these two principles and a shared symbolic space, as well as by (2) an ethos or disposition she calls ‘agonistic respect’: acknowledging the antagonist as a legitimate opponent, making it into an adversary, not an enemy. The ‘adversary’ is a key category for theorising modern pluralistic democratic politics, and central to agonistic pluralism; one that allows for vigorous but legitimate opposition.24 The most obvious problem with Mouffe’s account concerns her reliance on Schmitt’s logic of antagonism: if the threat of annihilation is the 23 Rummens 2009, 3. 24 Mouffe 2005, 14, 102.

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condition for the possibility of the formation of a collective identity (a ‘we’), then limiting the threat of annihilation into agonistic contestation  la Mouffe is too weak to generate a ‘we’.25 What I would like to emphasise, however, are the problems that come from Mouffe’s attempt to fuse the claims of deconstruction with her quasi-Schmittian political ontology. In the first place, the minimal consensus on freedom and equality required to limit Schmitt’s ‘antagonism/enemy’ into ‘agonism/adversary’ requires a ‘shared symbolic space’, as we have seen. Yet in the passage quoted earlier26 Mouffe herself correctly identifies Derrida’s constitutive outside as ‘incommensurable’ with the inside. This would make it impossible for citizens to share values with their adversaries, let alone engage in agonistic struggle over their application and interpretation. In the second place, Schmitt’s political ontology involves a logic of determination with clear boundaries and necessary exclusions of identifiable others. This logic of determination is moreover required for Mouffe to formulate her exclusionary concept of pluralism, if it is to have a determinable sense at all. Yet this is utterly irreconcilable with the deconstructive account of identity, which, as Fritsch has shown, works as an interminable logic of indeterminacy: ‘Identity must […] be understood as the perpetual attempt to cast to the outside that which, however, is always needed on the inside. The attempt thus necessarily fails.’27 Schmitt’s political ontology is, moreover, a prime instance of ‘essentialism’, radically opposed by the anti-essentialism of deconstruction, and this touches on a fourth problem: even if Schmitt’s ‘friend-enemy’ antagonism is limited and internalised within the demos by Mouffe, her reliance on Schmittian logic does require there to be homogenous units or essences at some level. Against Schmitt’s recourse to the pre-political category of the ‘people’ (Volk) as the substantive unit on which political unity is built, Mouffe proposes to rethink the unity of the people as ‘the result of a political construction’ rather than a presupposition.28 Yet she concedes that there is ‘the need of some form of “homogeneity” in a democracy’,29 as she must if she is going to rely on Schmitt’s political ontology in any 25 See Fritsch 2008, 177, note 3. For critical accounts of Mouffe, I am greatly indebted to Fritsch 2008 and Rummens 2009. 26 Mouffe 2005, 12 f. 27 Fritsch 2008, 183. See also 181: ‘For Derrida identity is marked not so much by excluding defined others, but by the infinite porosity of a supposed inside and outside, and hence its constant re-negotiation.’ 28 Mouffe 2005, 55. 29 Mouffe 2005, 55.

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sense. The question is whether this residual homogeneity, as an irreducible ontological moment, can do justice to contemporary forms of pluralism, in which collective, political identities are often fugitive and shortlived and command an individual’s allegiance as but one among many, often conflicting identities. If so, then Mouffe can either adhere to a quasi-Schmittian political ontology, with its irreducible moment of homogeneity, or strive to do justice to contemporary forms of pluralism, since she cannot do both.

3. Mouffe’s agonism: Deconstruction or reconstruction? Mouffe’s political agonism, I have argued, is not a defensible application of deconstruction to democratic theory. Instead, I suggest that it is better understood as reconstructive reaction to deconstruction that takes up (misapprehensions of ) deconstructivist insights and tries to merge them with her commitments to Schmitt’s political ontology adapted to democratic values. For the reasons outlined above, I believe that this deconstructive adaptation of Schmitt’s thought to democracy fails. But this does not mean that Mouffe’s project is without value or promise. Her project is important, first and foremost, because it identifies clearly the central task for political philosophy today: to rethink pluralism in a way that addresses its contemporary forms and formations in a rapidly changing world. This goes for political agonism in general, but Mouffe’s version is distinctive in a number of ways. From Schmitt comes her insistence that we need an ontology to think through democratic pluralism in the present. From Derrida, comes the demand that this ontology must be sensitive to the deconstruction of essentialism. And underpinning the whole project is the claim that genuine pluralism involves tension and antagonism. The question is whether we can hold onto this valuable insight: there can be no genuine pluralism without antagonism between identities or identifiable unities, without either falling on one side into the deconstructive logic of interminable indeterminacy – no identities, no determinate boundaries or exclusions; or, on the other side into the Schmittian logic of determinacy and extreme antagonism (the threat of annihilation) among pre-given essences or unities. In my closing remarks I want to suggest that we can do no better than to draw on Nietzsche’s thought for ways in which to develop a viable reconstruction of democratic pluralism today that avoids these traps.

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In his later thought, Nietzsche develops a dynamic, pluralistic ontology of conflict under the rubric of ‘Will to Power’ that addresses the insights and problems described above. In the first place, ‘will to power’ designates an anti-essentialist, relational interpretation of reality in which pluralism is intrinsically antagonistic. He writes of ‘the relational character of all occurrence’30 consisting of relations of tension, attraction/repulsion, action/resistance among forces without substance.31 Secondly, within this ontology, there is place for a processual account of identity-formation (like Derrida); only it is one that arrives at determinate unities (unlike Derrida). The will to power designates a processual ontology of occurrence (Geschehen) or ‘Becoming’ (Werden), and for Nietzsche the character of ‘Becoming’ is to be an incessant ‘Fest-setzen’, a multiple fixing (Feststellen) or positing (Setzen) of Being: ‘All occurrence, all movement, all Becoming as a fixing of relations of degree and power, as a struggle…’32 Nietzsche’s ontology thus describes processes of identity-formation that are determinate or ‘successful’, if only provisionally. This holds more promise of capturing contemporary political formations than Derrida’s aporetic logic of identity-formation that necessarily fails, where the other always remains indeterminate across a boundary too porous to exclude or even demarcate an ‘outside’ from an ‘inside’.33 On the other hand, Nietzsche does, like Derrida, have a nuanced

30 ‘Relations-charakter alles Geschehens’, KSA 11.157, 26[36]. References to Nietzsche’s works follow the standard German abbreviations, as used in the Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbnden (= KSA), with section/ aphorism numbers and/or names, as appropriate; where necessary, page references are given (e. g. KSA 3.42 = KSA, vol. 3, p. 42). References to the Nachlass, also from the KSA, follow the notation therein (e. g. KSA 7.23, 2[13] = KSA vol. 7, p. 23, note 2[13]). 31 The will to power is best understood as an attempt to develop a dynamic, relational concept of power, or rather powers; that is, (1) power as activity, the activity of increasing power, which can only be an overpowering, because (2) power-as-activity can only act in relation to the resistance offered by other counter-powers. On Nietzsche’s dynamic, relational concept of force (Kraft) and its sources, see Abel 1984, 6 – 27; Mittasch 1952, 102 – 113. 32 ‘Alles Geschehen, alle Bewegung, alles Werden als ein Feststellen von Grad- und Kraftverhltnissen, als ein Kampf…’ KSA 12.385, 9[91]. See also: KSA 11.449, 34[88][89]; KSA 11.244, 26[359]; KSA 11.623, 39[13]; KSA 12.135 f., 2[139]; KSA 1.360, SE 3; KSA 3.622, FW 370; KSA 6.245, AC 58. 33 Fritsch 2008, 181, 183.

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understanding of ambiguities of friendship, of the friend in the enemy and the enemy in the friend that completely escapes Schmitt’s logic. Finally, Nietzsche’s ontology of conflict involves a theory of power that opens the prospect of alternatives to Schmitt, alternatives that resolve some of the underlying problems with his account of political identity. A key problem concerns Schmitt’s Hobbesian concept of power. If for Schmitt the existential threat of annihilation is the condition for political identity, it is because he works with Hobbes’s conception of power, which is oriented towards self-preservation in the face of an external threat. Hobbesian power is exercised from a position of weakness or lack (of security, of a future good) in relation or reaction to something external. It is what Nietzsche calls a ‘reactive’ concept of power, in contrast with his own ‘active’ conception of power, defined with reference to process (expending energy) or activity (extending power), rather than goals (selfpreservation).34 Nietzschean power is an endogenous source of change, a conception that goes back to Leibniz’s dynamic concept of force, so that movement or change is understood, not in mechanistic terms as the (reactive) effect of an exogenous cause or force, but in Leibnizian terms, as the result of a ‘living’ force, that is, an endogenous source of activity.35 This active conception of power has two further characteristics alien to Schmittian-Hobbesian power, which are essential for an antagonistic ontology of pluralism that is to offer more than the alternatives of annihilation or security. Since active power is not bound to a static telos of selfpreservation, there are no pre-determined constraints on the forms that this activity can take. On the one hand, the exercise of power does not need to be limited to the hostile resisting or overpowering of other powers or power-complexes, but can take an indeterminate number of qualitatively diverse forms. On the other hand, it can also take self-destructive forms of activity and as such, opens the space for the qualitative transformation of existing power-complexes, forms of life or political identities into new forms, what Nietzsche calls ‘self-overcoming’ (Selbstberwindung). Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is replete with examples of both the qualitative transformation of life-forms and the diverse forms that the exercise of power can take.36 This touches on the second characteristic 34 See Patton 2001, 153. 35 Abel 1984, 16 f. 36 See Patton 2001; Saar 2008. Saar shows how the three essays of the Genealogy exhibit three distinct kinds of power.

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of Nietzsche’s active concept of power. Because Schmittian power is bound to the telos of self-preservation, any opposing power can only signify an existential threat. Nietzsche’s active concept of power, by contrast, allows for reinterpretations of the opposition or resistance offered by an external power. Opposition or resistance does not need to be just a threat or an inhibitor to one’s power; under certain conditions, it can act as a stimulant (Reiz) that provokes or empowers each power-complex to new, creative deeds or works, indeed: to ‘overcome’ one’s opponent through creative self-transformation or ‘self-overcoming’. It is this reinterpretation of opposing forces from inhibitors into stimulants that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s description of the Greek agon as a dynamic of reciprocal provocation and reciprocal limitation.37 For Nietzsche it is clear that the transformation of destructive antagonism into creative agonism can only occur under conditions of approximate equality among a plurality of powers or power-complexes. What is not clear, if we move from the Greek polis to contemporary politics, are the kinds of political institutions that would make for such an equality of power among the diverse and shifting identities that characterise contemporary democracies. This, it seems to me, is the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s thought for the reconstruction of a viable ontology of democratic pluralism today.

37 In Homer’s Contest Nietzsche writes that the agonal play of forces (Wettspiel der Krfte) presupposes ‘that in a natural order of things, there are always several geniuses who stimulate each other reciprocally to deeds, as they also hold each other reciprocally within the limits of measure’ (‘daß, in einer natrlichen Ordnung der Dinge, es immer mehrere Genies giebt, die sich gegenseitig zur That reizen, wie sie sich auch gegenseitig in der Grenze des Maaßes halten’). Homer’s Wettkampf, KSA 1.789.

‘Just Tell Me Who You Are! ’: Do We Need Identity in Philosophy and the Social Sciences?1 Flavia Monceri 1. Identity as a problem For almost a decade now I have been working on the notion of identity, trying to deconstruct it by showing that it is unuseful, and sometimes even harmful, for addressing the core issues of my discipline – political philosophy. In a number of articles and books I considered individual identity,2 the link between identity and diversity,3 and the relationship between identity and identification.4 Altogether, my work on identity explicitly aims at replacing it with a more suitable notion to address the problem of constructing models of political order in contemporary complex and multicultural societies, taking into due account the fact that diversity matters. Hence, in some of my recent books I tried to apply my theoretical findings to the issues of interculturality,5 multiculturalism and complexity,6 and sex and gender diversity.7 In the following, I try to argue for my negative answer to the question concerning the need for identity in philosophy and the social sciences by offering, in the first section, a criticism of the notion, while in the second section I suggest replacing it with the word ‘identification’, which I find more adequate for rendering the meaning we usually, but deceptively, attach to identity. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Note to the reader: This paper employs gender-neutral pronouns. These are sie (he, she), hir (him, her), and hirself (himself, herself ). See Monceri 2003; Monceri 2007, chap. 4, 5; Monceri 2009. See Monceri 2006a; Monceri 2006b. See Monceri 2006c. See Monceri 2006d. See Monceri 2008. See Monceri 2010.

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However, replacing ‘identity’ with ‘identification’ does not imply a reconstruction of identity itself via a linguistic intervention. Rather, I mean to take seriously the deconstruction of identity by showing that just such a reconstruction is impossible as well as unuseful, because it would unavoidably come up again and again against the difficulties of defining identity in an essentialist way. In this sense, replacing ‘identity’ with ‘identification’ seems to me to be the best way, at least for the time being, to remain aware of the dynamic and constructed character of what we are still accustomed to mean when we use the term ‘identity’. In other words, if some form of reconstruction is thinkable in the wake of the deconstruction of identity, it can only exist by acknowledging that the traditional notion of identity is no longer adequate for contemporary philosophy and social sciences to address its theoretical challenges. Therefore, it must be replaced by a different notion, linguistically formulated by a different word and able to convey a different meaning. Although space constraints do not allow me to discuss the matter more deeply, I would like to add that the ultimate goal of my de-construction and re-construction of identity is to elaborate upon a more adequate notion to cope with all those instances in which references run the risk of endangering the life of particular concrete individuals who are labelled by means of it: among them, ‘disabled’, ‘differently sexed/gendered’ and ‘culturally’ diverse people. As a matter of fact, to continue deploying the notion of identity has a relevant impact at the level of the everyday life of ‘marginalised’ individuals, because the possibility for them to be ‘recognised’ by the ‘normals’ depends on the acceptance for their part to be inserted into categories which are either imposed upon them, or chosen by them within the catalogue of identities available at the social and cultural level. Either way, an asymmetrical power relationship is at play, which could at least be exposed by shifting to the notion of identification.8 My basic assumption is that diversity is more original than identity, because it is the characteristic feature of environmental complexity, whereas identity is the outcome of an operation through which that same complexity is reduced.9 In this sense, trying to define diversity is 8 9

On these matters, and especially on the relationship between ‘abnormality’ and ‘power’, see notably Foucault 1998, 2003. The following argumentation refers to the epistemological paradigm known as radical constructivism (on which see at least the classical works by Foerster 1984, Maturana/Varela 1992, Glasersfeld 1996, Watzlawick 1984, Poerksen

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a sort of paradox, because in order to rationally elaborate upon it a definition complexity must be simplified by leaving aside what is different in favour of what is similar. At the same time, human cognitive structures cannot refrain from reducing complexity, and hence from defining, because they cannot ‘compute’ complexity as it is.10 Therefore, although I will give two definitions of diversity, the one emerging from the individual and the other from the intersubjective perspective, I am well aware that such definitions are only tentative, provisional, and inescapably partial. From the individual perspective, diversity dwells in a (more or less pronounced) gap between the stimuli and data an individual perceives in the surrounding environment and the mental frameworks at hir disposal to select, catalogue, and recombine all of it as information that is meaningful to hir. In other words, perceiving diversity overlaps with existing mental frameworks which are unable to automatically incorporate the ‘new’ stimuli and data. These frameworks seem to be at least partially at odds with the available information, that is to say the descriptions of the world, in the given spacetime in which the individual is situated. In the face of this gap, the individual has at least two possible options: on the one hand, sie can interpret the new stimuli and data as exceptions, trying to explain them by means of the already available mental frameworks. On 2004), as well as to Nietzschean perspectivism (on which see Hales/Welshon 2000; Reginster 2000). 10 According to Biggiero 2001, ‘human systems are characterised by the presence of all sources of complexity, and therefore are the most complex systems we face with. This perspective shads an anthropomorphic light on the entire issue of complexity, which we address as observed irreducible complexity (OIC)’ (4 – 5). As Biggiero states, ‘many problems are difficult, and therefore are few predictable. In this sense, complexity is a question of degree, and specifically the degree of our ignorance. An object is more or less complex depending on the ignorance (quantity of information) we have about it, and depending on our ability to make distinctions, that is, to perceive differences and therefore get information’ (5). However, ‘current debate in natural sciences and epistemology is (more or less explicitly) claiming that there is a qualitative difference in meaning between complexity and difficulty’, with complexity referring ‘to objects which are predictable only in the short run and that can be faced only with heuristic and not optimizing strategies’ (5 – 6). Consequently it can be stated that ‘when difficulty is close to infinity, it becomes complexity: the explanation of such transformation lies in the criteria established to create a threshold in the continuum between zero difficulty (certainty, perfect order, perfect predictability) and complexity’ (6). It is my contention that in human systems the possibility of a zero difficulty is never given.

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the other hand, sie can modify the mental frameworks to allow for the perceived diversity – that is to say ‘novelty’.11 Beyond that, from the viewpoint of the single individual all other human and non-human individuals are part of the environment, and therefore ‘different from me’. But the most interesting diversity is the one which emerges when that individual interacts with other human individuals, because sie presumably recognises them as similar to hir at least to the extent to which a more or less diffuse definition exists of the notion of ‘human being’. This kind of diversity has to do with the comparison between the amounts of information at the disposal of each individual directly involved in the interaction. What is relevant here is the fact that each individual finally perceives a gap between hir personal interpretations of environmental stimuli and data, and the ones elaborated by all other individuals. This comes about because all human individuals construct their own ‘reality’ by means of applying similar cognitive structures but they construct them differently from each other. As a result, despite the very same stimuli and data and the very same spacetime constraints, personal life experiences cannot overlap with one another. This leads to a different organisation of the mental schemata elaborated to interpret environmental stimuli and data, that is to say a visual angle or perspective peculiar to each individual, from which those stimuli and data are unceasingly re-elaborated and inserted within a unitary framework.12 Therefore, as soon as two human individuals interact, they experience also a gap between their mutual worldviews, which can have more relevant effects than in the case of an interaction with other species. This is because the circumstance that they mutually recognise as similar at least to a certain extent, urges them to interact on the basis of the expectation that one’s own perspective will be extensible also to the other. In another piece of work, I define this circumstance 11 On the relationship between complexity and novelty, see Taylor 2001 and Monceri 2005; on diversity as ‘background noise’ leading to innovation, see Atlan 1986; on new information as a ‘difference that makes a difference’, see Bateson 1979. 12 I hold here to the notion of ‘perspective’ as elaborated by Friedrich Nietzsche. See Nietzsche 1968, [481], where he writes: ‘Against positivism, which halts at phenomena ––“There are only facts”–– I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself ”: perhaps it is a folly to want to do such a thing […] In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. –– “Perspectivism”.’

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as a self-centric impulse, meaning that each of us tends to maintain that the world should conform to the picture we individually construct of it, as well as to act as if all other human individuals build just the same picture.13 This is also one of the most relevant reasons why interactions among individuals tends to be conflictual, because it is on the stage of concrete interactions, so to speak, that the deep gap comes to the fore among the differences expressed, performed, and exhibited by any single individual. It is only in coping with the potential conflicts that the selfcentric impulse may lead to a model of cultural, social and especially political order that is necessary to establish a peaceful point of equilibrium with as much stability as possible. One of the tools to this end is constituted through the elaboration of identity as a social institution. I mean to say that identity is the emergent outcome of any reiterated exchange of environmental descriptions between people, taking the form of intersubjective models of order in which an implict or explicit agreement has been reached. Thus these models work to the extent that those descriptions continue to be reiterated in the concrete interactions between a sufficient number of individuals. This implies that identity can be assigned meaning only at the intersubjective level. As a matter of fact, as single individuals we do not need any reference to the notion of identity, because we do not need to rationally conceive of our self-intuition or selfperception as a ‘self ’, except if an interaction with other things or people does occur that urges ‘me’ to ask ‘myself ’ ‘who am I?’. In other words, the fact that ‘I’ have an identity is self-evident to me, and is unaffected by experiencing my own differences. In the real time of my everyday life I have no need to think about this by means of applying my cognitive structures: ‘I’ know who ‘I’ am by immediate intuition, and the question of my identity instead arises just as soon as ‘I’ begin to think about it due to external provocations.14 In my everyday life it is only necessary that I recognise myself as ‘myself ’ at any given moment, without any need to rationally define that same ‘myself ’. The stability of my being the way I am in the real time of my concrete experiences is independent of a conscious elaboration of myself as ‘this individual who is constituted by these n-features which are only my own’. I am simply depending on my ability to preserve 13 See Monceri 2006d, chap. 5. 14 This is the reason why I do not agree with the vast majority of theoretical accounts of ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ identity, not even when they try to offer some new perspectives, as it is the case for instance with Copp 2002.

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the intuition of being identical with myself in spite of all the differences I am destined to undergo in my life-course, which are in themselves constitutive of myself. This ‘intuition’ cannot be rationally defined (it cannot be assigned any name) as a set of characteristics already culturally and socially – that is to say intersubjectively – defined, thus losing the uniqueness toward which those characteristics should point. The need to reflect rationally on my identity arises only when an interaction occurs, because I find myself confronted with ‘others’ of whom I perceive as non-coincidental to ‘me’. Of course, you might object that if this need does occur as soon as I interact, then it is always there, since interaction is just the original modality through which human beings experience their world, being therefore unavoidable. Hence, you might conclude that if things are so, it is not true that I can manage without identity as a single individual, because I do properly exist only by interacting. Indeed, it is just like that: we cannot manage without identity, but only if it is defined as identification. Since the core feature of an interaction consists in the above-mentioned intuition of the non-coincidental instance between ‘me’ and ‘the others’ – that is to say in the intuition of diversity – as soon as I interact I need to construct an identity by means of identifying myself through a selection of those features of ‘me’ which are relevant to that specific interaction. As a matter of fact, the source of identity is diversity – and not the reverse – because it consists in a ‘model of the self ’ emerging from the intuition of our being different from one another. Identity overlaps with the elaboration of a fixed, static and stable ‘self ’, to which however no ‘reality’ does correspond, as it is the outcome of a complex process of (re)construction at several levels. Firstly, there is the construction operated by the single individual in order to introduce hirself in a specific form, and not another. Secondly, there is the construction carried out by ‘the other(s)’, which is not necessarily coincidental to self-presentation. Lastly, there is the dynamics between the different (re)presentations of the constructed and ‘read’ selves, implying a negotiation from which radically different models may emerge from the ones originally staged. What should be stressed here is the fact that in all of these processes what ends up being irrelevant is the individual identity understood as a ‘property’ of the related individual which should insure that sie be perceived by the others as a ‘unique entity’. As a consequence, identity is not something we have or are: it is rather something we construct for the purpose of any single concrete interaction to overcome the difficulties posed by diversity by means of referring to

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something (presumably) common which makes the ‘self ’ intelligible to the ‘other’. It is in this sense that identity is always the outcome of a dynamic process involving both the ‘self ’ and the ‘other(s)’ through which the most adequate features are identified to represent ourselves in a given situation. Here we find the first reason not to hold onto the notion of identity: it gives rise to the delusion of a correspondence between the available models of ‘the individual’ and the concrete individuals. Such models are merely the outcome of a selection among non-exhaustive features, that is to say the outcome of self-identifications and identifications operating through ‘others’: what any one of us does when interacting is to identify by showing and representing what is (presumably) general and sharable, and not what is specific and unique.

2. From identity to identification By now, it should be clear why I state that identity is a social institution. The origins of any social, that is to say intersubjective, institution may be individuated in the need for individuals to elaborate criteria or ‘rules’ in order to survive in their environment, trying to avoid intersubjective conflicts arising from the perception of diversity. Seen from this perspective, identity is in accordance to the construction of a certain number of ‘models of the self ’ that are widespread and shared enough to prove effectively that there is automatic placement of oneself and others within the general framework at the interactants’ disposal. This requires the identification of the ‘correct’ elements to insert into an identity model and its subsequent assignment to serve individuals with as low as possible margin for error. From the individual standpoint, this implies the need as well as the ability to self-identify, that is to say to recognise hirself in one of the available identity models to aim at minimising the potential for conflict in the interaction. In short, the higher the ability and possibility for an individual to self-identify and be identified with one of these models, the lower the risk of the interaction failing due to a lack of ‘recognition’. Identity as a social institution consists in a set of models intersubjectively elaborated in a conventional way, according to the cognitive modalities I have already sketched. They consist in a process of gradual selection and negotiation of typical features, contributing to shape a particular type of ‘human being’ who ‘embodies’ a specific identity. Moreover, also in this case the issue arises of the correspondence between that ideal type of human being and its concrete manifestations. Put another way, it is

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assumed that the concrete individual should fit into the model, which is no longer understood as a construction, but as something ‘real’. In effect the outcome of the process through which an identity is constructed is not a description of an individual’s identity as it is, but rather an attempt to normalise the concrete individual by means of measuring hir individuality against the norm established by the model. In other words, the usual definition of identity seems self-contradictory, because it stresses that the (self-)assigned identity of a particular individual corresponds to what sie is, that is to say that it represents hir essential reality. However, since identity is the outcome of a selection of characteristics, it is highly probable that in constructing it just those characteristics will be discarded which would stress individual differences, because those elements could more easily allow intersubjective conflicts to emerge. However, the assertion remains that the identity of a single individual allows for identifying hir and only hir, if the Western binary logic is to work properly, according to which two distinct things cannot be identical at the same time. This clashes with the opposite claim that identity as a social institution should be able to minimise the incidence of diversity by understanding that the individual is a member of a class, rather than a self-standing element. In my opinion, the only way out of this impasse is to replace the notion of identity with that of identification. There are two main reasons why we should replace the term ‘identity’ with ‘identification’. On the one hand, because identification logically as well as concretely comes before identity, being the process from which identity results as a product. On the other hand, because of the mistakes and dangers arising at the level of everyday life from the idea that individual identity would be something given and sufficient to describe the ‘essence’ of a concrete individual. More particularly, although identity is a necessary tool to categorise and stereotype each single individual in order to interact, the lack of awareness about the previous process of identification leads to the collateral effect of variously denying the constitutive role also of those features cast off the concrete individual identity. From a political viewpoint, this implies refusing individual differences that cannot be subsumed under the accepted identity models, therefore marginalising those individuals who do not want or cannot properly self-identify or be identified. Of course, it is true that for any individual having or being an identity by means of which sie can identify or ‘give personal details’ upon request, is a necessary condition to enter any ‘group’, as well as being legitimated by asking for ‘recognition’ on the part of the dominant group(s). This po-

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litical side of the relationship between identity and identification becomes plain in the attitude of the ‘normals’ toward ‘different people’. By individuating a number of identities, this approach can cause either inclusion (accepted) or exclusion and discrimination (rejected). This is why investigating identity means ultimately investigating social identity as an identification practice emerging from the request to self-place in a static and univocal way, as well as the acceptance of a particular configuration of the self able to match the elements diffusely recognised as ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ for a given identity model.15 Therefore, even in this case identity overlaps with the indefinite number of identification processes to which each individual must resolve to interact with others who ‘interrogate’ hir in order to ‘decode’ or ‘read’ hir in a unambiguous way. The construction of social identity must assume that single individuals try to harmonise their mutual worldviews, which have a perspectival character, and particularly that they assume the existence of a shared order of reality within which they collocate similarities and differences. As it is well known, the process through which such shared reality is constructed at the social level is the subject of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s seminal work The social construction of reality (1966).16 They show how everyday life manifests as an already ordered reality, which ‘appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the scene’,17 and ‘is organized around the “here” of my body and the “now” of my present’.18 Besides the world of ‘things’, ‘the reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world, a world that I share with others’: indeed, ‘I cannot exist in everyday life without continually interacting and communicating with others’, though I know ‘that the others have a perspective on this common world that is not identical with mine’, because ‘my “here” is their “there”. My “now” does not fully overlap with theirs.’19 The social ‘order of reality’ emerges through the interactions of individuals, but originates from the possibility to ‘typify’ such interactions, 15 The literature on social identity is very remarkable. I limit myself to mention a few contributions, which also tackle some of the issues relevant to the present article: Cerulo 1997; Huddy 2001; Wong 2002; Jenkins 2003; Reicher 2004. 16 Berger/Luckmann 1991. 17 Berger/Luckmann 1991, 35. 18 Berger/Luckmann 1991, 36. 19 Berger/Luckmann 1991, 37.

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that is to make them foreseeable and reiterable.20 In fact, ‘all human activity is subject to habitualization’, because ‘any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort’.21 Social institutions, and among them also identity (although the authors would probably not agree with this extension), originate just from ‘a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors’.22 We might conclude that their origin should be traced back to an inherent character of human cognitive structure that urges us to reduce environmental complexity by means of referring to the reiteration of mutual actions. Anyway, the fact seems undeniable that a trend toward the construction of orders is surely there, and allows us neither to directly make conclusions about the type of order which emerges from individual interactions and their institutionalisation, nor to claim that an order, once emerged, will be stable, certain and durable. The process through which a number of social identities are constructed is very useful because it allows us to deploy the notion of identity as a ‘category of practice’, that is to say as one of those ‘categories of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors, as distinguished from the experience-distant categories used by social analysts’.23 In this sense, if it can be granted that ‘everyday “identity talk” and “identity politics” are real and important phenomena’, at the same time it should not be forgotten that ‘the contemporary salience of “identity” as a category of practice does not require its use as a category of analysis’.24 As a matter of fact, some categories such as ‘nation’, ‘race’ and ‘identity’ ‘are used analytically a good deal of the time more or less as they are used in practice, in an implicitly or explicitly reifying manner’, that is to say ‘in a manner that implies or asserts that “nations”, “races”, and “identities”, “exist” and that people “have” a “nationality”, a “race”, an “identity”’.25 In short, the confusion between identity as a category of practice and a category of analysis continues to reproduce an essentialist argumentation, in spite of all the contemporary attempts to overcome it.

20 21 22 23 24 25

On this aspect, see Goffman 1959. Berger/Luckmann 1991, 70 – 71. Berger/Luckmann 1991, 73. Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 4. Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 5. Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 6.

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It is well known that especially moving from social constructionist approaches, a weaker understanding of identity has been elaborated, according to which identity should be thought of as an ‘ongoing process’ making it much more fluid and dynamic than before. Anyway, the existence of identity is never denied, and it is rather strongly reaffirmed although on the basis of a different path of reasoning that no longer stresses its correspondence with an independent reality but with discursive practices of narration and narratives that work as justifications for the ‘reality’ of the constructed individual and social identities.26 In other words, what is singular in this shift to a weaker notion of identity is just the maintenance of this very notion: as Brubaker and Cooper rightly put it, ‘it is not clear why what is routinely characterised as multiple, fragmented, and fluid should be conceptualized as “identity” at all’,27 given that ‘the everyday sense of “identity” strongly suggests at least some self-sameness over time, some persistence, something that remains identical, the same, while other things are changing’.28 As a result of their in-depth exploration, Brubaker and Cooper suggest replacing the notion of identity with two further notions: ‘identification’ and ‘self-understanding’. Identification seems to be a suitable candidate because ‘as a processual, active term, derived from a verb, “identification” lacks the reifying connotations of “identity”’, by suggesting that we ‘specify the agents that do the identifying’ and not assuming that ‘such identifying […] will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness that political enterpreneurs may seek to achieve’.29 As I already stated above, identification allows us to maintain the awareness that identity results from a dynamic process which always entails some reference to the power asymmetries at work in any operation through which individuals are subsumed under one or more identity models by means of stereotyping or otherwise categorising them. On the contrary, the reference to identity entails a sort of displacement, by suggesting that identity models are more than this, that is to say that they are able to encompass also that part of individual identity that is

26 For an interesting account of such position, applied to multiculturalist theory, see Benhabib 2002. For an introduction to social constructivism, see Burr 2003; Gergen 2005. 27 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 6. 28 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 11. 29 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 14.

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by definition irreducible to any ‘rationalisation’ and/or ‘narration’ having to do with individual uniqueness. In its turn, self-understanding ‘is a dispositional term that designates what might be called “situated subjectivity”: one’s sense of who one is, of one’s social location, and of how (given the first two) one is prepared to act’.30 Self-understanding ‘lacks the reifying connotation of “identity”’, it ‘is not restricted to situations of flux and instability’, because ‘self-understandings may be variable across time and across persons, but they may be stable’, and different from ‘identity’ it ‘has no privileged semantic connection with sameness or difference’. Moreover, self-understanding seems a more suitable term than the related ‘self-identification’ and ‘self-representation’, because ‘“self-understandings” may be tacit; even when they are formed, as they ordinarily are, in and through prevailing discourses, they may exist, and inform action, without themselves being discursively articulated’; both self-identification and self-representation, on the contrary, ‘suggest at least some degree of explicit discursive articulation’.31 Now, as I see it, the term ‘self-understanding’ is intended in the same sense as the individual ‘unspeakable’ identity to which I referred above, and this is also the main reason why I prefer to hold only the term identification as a possible substitute for identity. Although I agree with the authors that self-understanding could be a good term to stress the usually forgotten individual side of the discourse about identity, the difficulty remains in my opinion to impose a name to that individual side. If individual identity is to be located in the realm of what is implicit and tacit, the possibility evidently is lost of finding a proper name to define it. In fact, as soon as individual identity is labelled, however only through means of an operational term such as ‘self-understanding’, it enters the realm of intersubjectivity, that which is relational and social, and therefore also linguistically reconstructable through a discursive narration. But in so doing, the very uniqueness that the term ‘self-understanding’ has been chosen to preserve would be lost. Put bluntly, the distinction between self-understanding and self-identification is very subtle, as also Brubaker and Cooper state and it could therefore shift again to the two overlapping meanings of identity that caused the original confusion.32 Of course, it cannot be denied that indi30 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 17. 31 All quotations in Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 18. 32 This seems to me to be the case also with a recent and very interesting work by David Lyon, devoted to the issue of contemporary ways of ‘identifying citizens’

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vidual identity in the sense of ‘self-understanding’ has a relational character due to the fact that any individual elaborates upon it on the basis of hir experiences that occur in the same intersubjective environment in which identification processes are unceasingly at work. However, what should be ensured is the awareness that there is an unbridgeable difference between the proper individual side of identity, which is not communicable, and the intersubjective side of it that is always co-constructed in and through interaction. From this perspective it seems to me that using the terms ‘identification’ and ‘self-identification’ is the most appropriate way of preserving the awareness of the impossibility of capturing the individual unique side of identity. Moreover, the awareness that all models of identity are simply products of multiple and interconnected identification processes, also might be more useful for sustaining the intuition of diversity. This could more easily lead to the modification of models of identity at a society’s disposal in order to take into account the individuals who cannot fit into those models, therefore being excluded from full citizenship as a result of lacking ‘recognition’ or failing ‘to belong’. From another point of view, the awareness that our unique identity as single concrete individuals escapes any attempt at definition, might even favour a gradual growth of individual political action as a legitimate expression of ‘identity politics’,33 which could be added to more traditional ways of conceiving political activism.

by means of various technological tools and systems, in which the usual understanding of ‘identity’ seems to be still at work, carrying with it the contradictions considered in the present article. See Lyon 2009, esp. 8 – 15. 33 In my opinion, this is the most correct meaning of the slogan ‘The individual is the political’, on which I am currently working, also with reference to post-anarchist debates, in order to elaborate a model of political order able to more clearly accept the relevance of individuals’ attitudes, gestures, ways of life, etc., for, and their impact on, political systems.

Daydreaming: Derrida’s Contribution to the Theory of Law Alberto Andronico It’s kind of fun to do the impossible. (Walt Disney)

1. Little and poorly Little and poorly: this is how jurists have read Derrida up to this point. At least this has been the case for us in Italy, with several notable exceptions.1 Unfortunately, the situation seems to be similar across the Atlantic. In fact, American jurisprudence has demonstrated a strong interest in deconstruction in comparison with the lack of attention given to it by their European counterparts. However, in the end we might question whether American jurists have been more careful readers of deconstruction. Moreover, it is difficult to escape from the suspicion that in Derridean texts that focus more on juridical and political matters, there is a remainder that jurists have been wary of addressing. It may just be that this remainder will prove more interesting than the up until now standardised reading of Derrida’s works. Three questions follow from these initial observations. First, why has juridical theory paid so little attention to Derrida? (Perhaps this neglect is due to reasons internal to the discipline, although it is hard to tell.) Second, why has it read Derrida so poorly? Lastly (and perhaps most centrally), why should the jurist go back to the school of deconstruction? What can jurisprudence learn from Derrida? This last question frames the first two, signaling an initial movement outside traditional juridical frameworks.2 1

2

Obviously this is not a matter of handing out demerits. In this spirit, it is worth signalling one of these ‘exceptions’ in Italian scholarship which speaks to the field of ‘philosophy of law’ rather than ‘legal theory’ narrowly construed: see Romano 2007. See also Goodrich/Hofmann/Rosenfeld 2008 and Legrand 2009. Andronico 2010.

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2. Heterogeneity without opposition Why, then, should the jurist read Derrida? This seemingly simple, almost nave question provokes a deceptively facile answer: the jurist should read Derrida because it is difficult to find in the world of contemporary philosophy an author who illustrates with so much lucidity what law is in terms of its origins and its (dys)functional structure. But above all, Derrida addresses why there should be law. Certainly not because it is necessary, as the old claims of political realism would have it by interpreting law as a necessary evil, following a line of thought running from Augustine, to Luther, Hobbes, passing through Kant arriving at Carl Schmitt, and so on. No, Derrida locates something much more interesting, which in a single line, we can characterise as the idea that without law justice would not be possible (and vice versa). Derrida develops this idea with clarity in a paper he delivered in 1989 at the conference ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice’, organised by Drucilla Cornell in conjunction with the Cardozo School of Law. In his talk, Derrida plays with the deconstructibility of law and the undeconstructibility of justice (and with deconstruction as justice), focusing on the cleft that separates and on the contamination that traverses these domains: The structure I am describing here is a structure in which law [droit] is essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata (and that is the history of law [droit], its possible and necessary transformation, sometimes its amelioration), or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded. The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress. But the paradox that I’d like to submit for discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law [droit], or if you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice.3

The structure of law, its own deconstructibility, Derrida affirms, constitutes the condition for the possibility of justice, and therefore of deconstruction itself. This is an important passage, upon which rests the possibility of rehabilitation, although cautious, of parliamentarian and representative democracy (the same democracy that seemed to be unavailing at that moment) that Derrida, oriented toward those same concerns made 3

Derrida 1992a, 14 – 15.

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by Walter Benjamin, defends against the critics.4 The central argument of these critics resides in the impossibility of fully realising justice in some pure form. In its pretense to purity, this critique looks to a divine violence that would destroy the law, as opposed to a mythic violence that would establish and maintain the law. However, as Derrida argues, justice is not the law, but neither is it opposed to the law. The relation between justice and law constitutes a ‘heterogeneous’ rapport ‘without opposition’. This is the same agreement, for example, that exists between the unconditional Law of hospitality and its concrete determination under juridical and political forms. Justice is not, in other words, purely and simply outside the law, but rather configures a temporalising movement that has traversed law since its foundation. But this is not all, for this relation also constitutes a benefit, because it establishes an economy of relations capable of sheltering law from the violence of the raw ethic of the face-to-face encounter that Derrida has already denounced by 1964 in his Violence and Metaphysic: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, which rejects the ideal of a pure and simple ‘heterology’.5 As with Derrida’s encounter with Husserl,6 here the central issue is the negotiation that takes place around the possibility of purity and the consequent affirmation of the necessity of contamination. Since there is no ‘pure interiority’ watching over expression, a ‘pure alterity’ is neither thinkable nor even utterable, a ‘pure’ thought of otherness. First, however, in order to develop these ideas, we must return to our opening questions, this time in their given order.

3. Logonomocentrism We began with the last question in order to sketch an initial response, but let us now begin again with the first question: why has juridical theory paid so little attention to Derrida? Again, the response is simple, or at least it can be simplified. Legal theory has paid so little attention to Derrida because, in Derrida’s phrase, it is always already (and perhaps because of the same disciplinary codes) the victim of a logocentric, or better, a ‘logonomocentric’ bias.7 In short, because of its innumerable and often 4 5 6 7

Derrida 1992a, 46; Derrida 2005b, 81. Derrida 2002c, 97; Derrida 1999a. Derrida 1979e; Derrida 2003a. Douzinas/Warrington/McVeigh 1993, 27.

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refined contemporary inflections, legal theory still continues today to think that law is simply an ‘object’ that is immediately ‘present’, closed within itself and contained by determinate boundaries in a manner that allows us to respond to the fundamental question, ‘quid ius? ’.8 The study of law that results from this point of view is deeply symptomatic. A degree in jurisprudence is still organised around the 18th-century notion (that is, after the establishment of the Napoleonic code for civil law) that the law is the only subject one need study in order to understand law. One does not study political philosophy, sociology, or rarely even ethics. For reasons that would be interesting to investigate (but, we cannot examine here) there are courses in political economy, as well as in philosophy of law. Furthermore, these courses have little effect, except to dress up a role that is justly marginal (and, we should note, important for its marginality),9 and which is by now increasingly understood by students of law either as simple introductory matter for the study of juridical grammar, or as a receptacle of ethical (or bioethical) clichs. Given this framework, which is still strongly marked (whether we like it or not) by obsolete distinctions between juridical positivism and natural law, it is easy to understand why Derrida still receives so little attention in legal studies. Within the framework of law, it seems to make no sense to read his texts. There could be nothing more ‘unnatural’, in fact, than an encounter with Derrida, and this is the case for two distinct reasons. First, because in Derrida we find the notion that law (as opposed to juridical positivism), like every other system, cannot close itself off once and for all, since it is constitutively and originally traversed by its other. Whether it is called violence or justice is not important (at least for our purposes here), because in either case law is traversed as much by politics as by ethics (or by economics). Secondly, because in terms of natural law, for Derrida, justice is not an idea, a value, or a requirement written in the human soul from which we might derive Law. Rather, justice for Derrida is not representable, nor even realisable. Perhaps it is better to say that it is literally the impossible, with the caveat that the impossible of which we 8

9

From a deconstructionist perspective, even the contemporary ‘interpretive theory of law’ remains a prisoner of this ‘metaphysics of presence’ that typifies the previous ‘semantic theory’. On the by-now celebrated distinction between semantic theory and interpretive theory, see Dworkin 1986. For an introduction to the relationship between hermeneutics and deconstruction, on the other hand, see Michelfelder/Palmer 1989. Derrida 1997c, ix.

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speak is not opposed to that which is possible so much as the condition of possibility,10 or again, heterogeneity without opposition.

4. An equivocation Why, then, have jurists read so little Derrida? Simply because the law about which Derrida speaks is not the law that jurists study.11 In order to read Derrida, legal theory must begin to think differently about its ‘object’ of study. It is doubtful that it has even begun such a process. Even before this, however, legal jurisprudence will have to confront the fact that what we study today in the faculties of Law is a legal form that in many respects no longer exists, since it still finds its keystone in the centralism of the nation-state, the disappearance, or at least the weakening, of which is generally denounced today. But let us come to the second question: why have jurists (often) read Derrida so poorly? And in what sense? To be sure, this is not the place to review the various inflections of deconstruction in the juridical debate.12 Here we simply want to emphasise an equivocation that seems to gather around this problem, which we can express straightforwardly as deconstruction’s tendency to gravitate toward a method that is applicable to the study of law. Here we ought to give a few examples to represent a (postmodern) ideological critique. This approach is to caution against yielding to interpretations in the manner of Critical Legal Studies,13 or returning to transcendent notions of justice as an eternal value emanating from the human soul, as authors such as Jack M. Balkin14 have suggested. In these examples, deconstruction seems to be taken for nothing more than a cultural mode, perhaps a little outdated, a diverting invention of the latest engag intellectual in the French mould. These conclusions risk inevitability if we continue to peruse Derrida’s texts for answers to problems in legal 10 Derrida 1997b, 12. 11 This is also true of law, as Giovanna Borradori has so lucidly demonstrated in her discussion of ethics and politics, in Borradori 2003, 193. 12 To give a broader purview on the problem, I must refer to my work in this area, specifically that dedicated to the different ‘translations’ of deconstruction with regard to Legal Theory. See Andronico 2002. 13 For a general introduction to CLS, see Unger 1975, Kennedy 1976, Unger 1983, Kelman 1984, Kelman 1987, Tushnet 1991, Carrino 1992, Boyle 1992, Minda 1995 and Paul 2001. 14 Balkin 1987; Balkin 1994; Balkin 1996.

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theory. However, the doubt remains that this is not the most productive way of reading Derrida, at least if one wants to learn something from his work rather than criticise deconstruction for vagueness. Conversely, there is another alternative, although to discover it we will need to abandon the idea that deconstruction can simply be ‘applied’ to legal theory, as Michel Rosenfeld15 and, even more forcefully, Pierre Schlag have suggested: There can be no question of ‘applying’ Derridean deconstruction to law in the sense in which the discursive practice of ‘Law and…’ work understands ‘application’ of a foreign discipline to law. Indeed, to ‘apply’ Derridean deconstruction in this nave sense would only be conceivable once deconstruction had been transformed into a theory, a technique, a method, or a type of interpretation. But to transform deconstruction into a theory, etc. is to relocate deconstruction and confine it to the already inscribed logocentric matrices of traditional legal thought.16

This is an important development, because the application of deconstruction to the study of law would signal the transformation of deconstruction into one of the ‘theories’ to which jurists increasingly turn, subordinating it to the all but neutral forms of legal discourse and thereby emptying it of its subversive force. In point of fact, the legalistic order of discourse constitutes these ‘masterful’ theories as external subjects of study, giving them the appearance of importance without any real effect on legal theory. Whence the challenge issued by Derrida (and emphasised by Schlag) that there is no outside the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte), to which the jurists have obstinately replied, ‘I am outside the text’ (‘Le hors de texte c’est moi’), thereby reintroducing the same metaphysics of presence that deconstruction aims to put into question. Therefore, if we ask why jurists influenced by Derrida have read him so poorly, the answer can only be this: because they have used deconstruction like any other ‘method’ that a ‘subject’ can utilise as a solution to problems internal to his/her ‘object’ of study. In order to better understand this situation, it is important to recall, however cursorily, what Derrida said about deconstruction.

15 Rosenfeld 1998, 29. 16 Schlag 1990, 1656.

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5. Everything and nothing Let us resume the argument here: All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique, and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an undecomposable origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction. No more is it a critique, in a general sense or in a Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential ‘themes’ or ‘objects’ of deconstruction. I would say the same about method. Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. […] Deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. Not only because there is something ‘patient’ or ‘passive’ about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only because it does not return to an (individual or collective) subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, and so on. Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or event of modernity. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed [Åa se dconstruit]. The ‘it’ [Åa] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction [en deconstruction] (Littr says: ‘to deconstruct itself [se dconstruire]… to lose its construction’). And the se of se dconstruire, which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma.17

It is not an analysis, nor a critique, nor an act; it is not an operation, nor a method. Thus: ‘What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course! I do not think, for all these reasons, that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau].’18 This is how Derrida describes ‘deconstruction’. As is well known, he wrote this in a letter to the Islamologist, Toshihiko Izutsu, with regard to finding an appropriate translation for the concept of deconstruction. Not by chance, the letter closes with the suggestion of finding another, more beautiful to translate, given that no translation can avoid traducing its original, even though it is equally true that there is no original sense that can be corrupted in the first place. This helps to clarify why deconstruction cannot simply be ‘applied’ to law: because to be in play means to live in the ‘event’, to experience something that falls beyond any hori17 Derrida 2008, 4 – 5. 18 Derrida 2008, 6.

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zon of anticipation and any possible structure. And this, finally, is what enables that Åa se dconstruit. If we bring this interpretation to bear on juridical theory, it means that law is not an object for deconstruction seen from an abstract, external point of view, because it is always already in the process of deconstruction. Simply put, the law deconstructs itself. And we might add, from the inside, if this did not beg the question of inside and outside that deconstruction destabilises. But let us come back to the point at hand. We must remember that Derrida speaks of deconstruction in terms of a kind of general strategy articulated in two phases: first, the overturning of the hierarchical subordination of terms; and second, the invention of a new concept that, while emerging from an oppositional give-andtake, cannot be reduced to terms within this opposition.19 It is important to be precise here, if for no other reason than because legal theory has frequently stopped at the first phase of this strategy, neglecting the second even though it is decidedly more productive. Undoubtedly, deconstruction does not consist in the simple overturning of consolidated conceptual dichotomies (e. g. form and substance, fact and value, norm and decision, law and justice). This first stage only forms the first movement, after which it is necessary to leave this opposition behind so as to evade the pitfall of the Hegelian dialectic, and instead engage in conceptual invention. At this point, Derrida’s panoply of ‘names’ comes into play under terms such as the ‘unity of the simulacrum’ or ‘undecidability’, the purpose of which is to ‘do the impossible’, that is, to speak difference. In this sense, we can speak of the pharmakon as neither remedy nor poison, as the difference between remedy and poison. Similarly, the gramma is neither a signifier nor a signified, but the difference between these two sides of the sign; the arche-writing is not speech, nor the writing, but the difference between speaking and writing; the diffrance is not unity, nor is it difference, but the difference between unity and difference.20 We could extend this list indefinitely. The concept of the ‘city of refuge’, for example, exceeds the distinction between City and State (as well as the hierarchy that follows from this relationship).21 We can also add ‘justice’ to this list, corresponding to Derrida’s discussion in his essay Force of Law, where he argues that it cannot be reduced to justice-as-law, nor to justice-out19 Derrida 2004d, 38. 20 Derrida 2004d, 24; Derrida 2002c, 1. 21 Derrida 2001b, 4.

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side-law, but rather classifies their undecidable difference.22 As we move forward with our discussion, we should keep this in mind to avoid the frequent misunderstandings that have occurred at the level of legal theory. Pertaining to this, the example of Balkin’s transcendental reading of deconstruction can serve as a representative sampling. We are dealing, therefore, with two phases, which, however, do not always come in the same order. In fact, the ‘overturning’ and the ‘creative transgression’ encircle one another incessantly, giving rise to an interminable process of textual decomposition and reconstruction.23 In this sense, deconstruction describes a movement that never stops, and never fulfils itself once and for all. It is the movement of thought itself, we might say. This is why, despite the way it has been used by legal theory, deconstruction is anything but a theoretical, ethical, juridical, or political ‘project’.24

6. The remainder Deconstruction cannot simply be applied to law, therefore, because it is not an analysis, a critique, an act, or an operation. Nor is it a method or a project that can be imputed to some subject-position. Rather, it is an event. And it is therefore something that takes place beyond any expectation or anticipation. Such is the case for principles such as justice and those above that have been listed. Derrida never tires of emphasising this for the simple reason that with deconstruction, as with justice, the stakes are played for the sake of the other and the possibility of its future. As is well known, this is one of the keystones of his work. In every ‘identity’, in every ‘presence’, a mechanism of sublation [rimozione] enters into play that allows the ‘other’ (previously relegated to the margins) to enter the dominant discourse. Such is the destiny of speech: in order to constitute itself as a sign, it relies on the writing that excludes it from the present.25 In this way, it is similar to consciousness where self-presence (one of philosophy’s fundamental starting points) can only establish itself through the suppression [rimozione] of an ‘other’ that inhabits the self at its origins. And the same claims can be made about the juridical system, which, like the ‘nation’, closes itself off by virtue of an act of forget22 23 24 25

Resta 2001, 83. Derrida 2004d, 39. Derrida 1990c, 63. Derrida 1979, 93.

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ting that occludes an act of violence at its foundation, thereby forgetting its own origins.26 Therefore, we can say that alterity is inherent at the origins of identity to the degree that there is no culture of the self without a culture of the other.27 This is the root of the idea of hospitality, to which Derrida insistently returns in his final works, where he argues that hospitality must be seen as a fundamental condition before it can be understood as a duty. As such, hospitality is an ethic which does not need foundational rules to welcome an other, a stranger, but rather demonstrates an openness at work in this relationship with the other, this ‘you’ that always already, contaminates the presence of a self, an ‘I’, while at the same time rendering this self possible.28 And now we are ready to return to our third question: Why should jurists read Derrida? Certainly not to find a method or a project, but to learn something much more elementary, although no less important. In a single line, law is never purely and simply law. We must learn, in short, that in law there is always a space opening onto something else. This is the space of deconstruction. Similarly, we can understand justice in terms of the future of an other at the heart of law, haunting it like a specter. This is exemplified in Derrida’s discussion of Marx. As Marxism is dead, he suggests that we should take up Marx again, reading him as the other that triumphant capitalism has relegated to its margins. Nonetheless, Marx is still capable of providing a resource for thinking about the other of law, politics, and, more specifically, justice. The justice about which Derrida speaks, in fact, is not present, nor present-able; it is neither a value nor an idea, nor even a concept, but instead it is an event of the impossible, the promise of ‘presenting the unpresentable’ that presupposes an anachrony at the heart of the present. Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other? A doing that would not amount only to action and a rendering that would not come down just to restitution?29 26 27 28 29

Derrida Derrida Derrida Derrida

1992a, 47. 1992b, 10. 2000; Resta 2003. 2006, 32.

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Justice is therefore an other than the law, but it is also an other within law, as Derrida specifies. This ‘remainder’ always already contaminates law’s alleged purity, thereby opening up a space for deconstruction.30 This means that law itself is never purely and simply ‘present’, but is always in the process of deconstruction. The question of justice, moreover, opens at the point of non-contemporaneity to itself of the living present,31 that is, at the point of its untimeliness (understood in terms of difference), both the point of its deferment as the production of difference and as the movement of dislocation. As with Hamlet’s lament about time, the present is in fact always structurally ‘out of joint’. The specter of justice traverses this time, presenting itself as ‘given’, like a blind-spot that nonetheless permits the closure of law as a system. In fact, it is this blind-spot which permits the closure of any system, but at the same time, presents the fault lines that prevent complete closure.

7. Internal and external As Derrida summarises, the coherent system is an impossibility.32 The law is certainly no exception, we might add. The juridical system, insofar as it is a system, does not function. Herewith, we should be especially clear. It is not merely a matter of recognising the structural incoherence of the juridical order (an observation which the theory of law has not failed to make), but having this incoherence positively affirmed, which prevents the law from closing into itself. In turn, this allows the system to function. In other words, the juridical system, like any other system, functions insofar as it does not function. And this for the simple reason that it is founded in difference, neither purely and simply internal to law (as Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm would have it, or again as Hart argues in his theory of the ‘rule of recognition’), nor purely and simply external to it, whether law is understood in political or natural terms. In sum, the origin of law is contaminated by that which the system wants to ‘keep outside’, especially by that ‘force’ that would claim to regulate but which instead comes into play at the very moment that it defines its subject.33 30 31 32 33

Heritier 2009, 96. Derrida 2006, xviii. Derrida/Ferraris 2001, 3. Derrida 1992a, 13.

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The foundation of law, in other words, is a ‘mystical foundation’, as Montaigne would say, an idea that Derrida takes up again and develops in Force of Law. This mystical foundation calls (according to Pascal) for a system in which the strong ought to be just, and the just ought to be strong. Once again, however, it is necessary to clarify: this interpretation is not taking up once again the old adage of law as the mask of power, whether economic or political, if for no other reason than because the ‘force’ about which Derrida is speaking provides yet another example of the ‘undecidability’: the (impossible) name of the difference between legitimate force and illegitimate violence.34 The question, then, is much more fundamental. Once again we are dealing first and foremost with the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which is always principally preoccupied with putting the discourse in order by establishing a conceptual hierarchy through the exclusion of an ‘outside’, traditionally understood in terms of an ancillary supplement that is inessential and ultimately noxious. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of ‘logic’ itself, of good ‘sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being is what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside.35

However, the exclusion of this ‘outside’ leaves a trace just as ‘being’ does for Heidegger, which in its self-presenting signals an un-presentable origin that constitutes its condition for being. And this is where deconstruction intervenes, putting this trace back into circulation in order to continually relaunch a meaning that hastens to reclose, once and for all, in a definitive interpretation. As we have noted, it is a matter of demonstrating how the internal depends on its external, just as any identity conserves within itself the traces of an alterity that it excludes in order to constitute itself, calling us back to law’s contamination by force. In this way, deconstruction responds to the desire for system on the part of jurists by demonstrating its dysfunctional structure: the system is possible to the degree that it is impossible. ‘The outside’ haunts ‘the inside’ like a specter, rendering it possible through a process of sublation [rimozione], or better, through a process of ‘immunisation’. This explains Derrida’s attention to the institutional implications of the order of theoretical discourse that constitutes one of the characteristic 34 Not by accident, Derrida calls attention to the undecidability of the term ‘Gewalt’. See Derrida 1992a, 6. 35 Derrida 2004a, 131.

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traits of the practice of deconstruction, which can be understood as a work that takes place around the process of mediation by which we approach the ‘thing itself ’.36 In this capacity, Derrida’s work has been expressly ‘counter-institutional’ in its declaration of a project between the critique of institutions and the dream of a different institution: In abstract and general terms, what remains constant in my thinking on this question is indeed a critique of institutions, but one that sets out not from the utopia of a wild and spontaneous pre- or non-institution, but rather from counter-institutions. I do not think there is, or should be, the ‘non-institutional’. I am always torn between the critique of institutions and the dream of an other institution that, in an interminable process, will come to replace institutions that are oppressive, violent and inoperative. The idea of a counter-institution, neither spontaneous, wild nor immediate, is the most permanent motif that, in a way, has guided me in my work.37

Thus, there is no call for some utopia uncontaminated by violence, but ‘simply’ a critique internal to the institutions themselves with a view to their (im)possible transformation. In sum, these are the stakes for deconstruction, which practices a mode of thought capable of allowing the possibility of ‘dreaming’ other institutions, different (and better) than those that currently exist.38

8. Proclaiming the dream without betraying it We will finish with a discussion of this dream. On September 22, 2001, Derrida received the Theodor W. Adorno Prize. On the occasion of his acceptance he read a text in which he expressed his debt to and gratitude for the work of the eclectic master of the Frankfurt School.39 One of the themes (if not the theme) of this speech touched on the relationship between waking and sleeping, in other words, dreaming. It is with the dream that Derrida is primarily concerned, the dream that Walter Benjamin spoke of in a letter to Gretel Adorno. Of course, Derrida does not fail to call for a return to Adorno’s work, but it is nonetheless through Benjamin that he formulates the theme of his talk beyond the initial hints 36 Derrida 2002a; Derrida 2004b. 37 Derrida/Ferraris 2001, 50. 38 With regard to these stakes, see Vattimo 2007, 135, in which the author advances several unavoidable questions. 39 Derrida 2005a, 164.

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provided by the title. For the dream, while it might seem like an idle theme, is anything but insignificant: What’s the difference between dreaming and thinking you’re dreaming? And first of all who has the right to ask that question? The dreamer deep in the experience of his night or the dreamer when he wakes up? And could a dreamer speak of his dream without waking himself up? Could he name the dream in general? Could he analyze the dream properly and even use the word dream deliberately without interrupting and betraying, yes, betraying sleep.40

The question is not idle for the simple reason that it returns us to the confines of philosophical discourse. To this question, philosophy responds with a certain ‘no’, and in this response, Derrida notes, resides the force of philosophy’s essence. But this is obviously not the only possible response. There is at least one other response: ‘Yes, perhaps, sometimes.’41 It is precisely the oscillation between these two responses that Derrida claims to love and admire in Adorno’s work, which we can summarise as a continuous self-expulsion to the margins of philosophical discourse. According to Derrida, the possibility of thinking ‘singularity’ is what is at stake in this incessant oscillation between philosophy and its defining ‘other’ in Adorno’s work. This is ‘thinking the event’, a kind of deconstruction derived from the pure and simple opposition between sleeping and waking that incessantly returns to the ‘singular’ rather than the ‘universal’. Although Derrida was speaking about Adorno, he could just as well have been speaking about himself. The deconstruction of the opposition between sleeping and waking (made possible by the undecidability that characterises the third term, the dream) enables Derrida to formulate a question that is decisive for his own political, ethical, and (we would add) juridical thought: Could there be an ethics or politics of dreaming that did not yield to the imaginary or to the utopian, and was not an abandonment, irresponsible, and evasive?42

In other words, can we daydream? Can we dream while awake? Can we, in sum, ‘do the impossible’? After all, these are always at stake for Derrida, to commit to ‘the possibility of the impossible’, that (im)possibility that constitutes the paradoxical, ‘quasi-transcendent’ condition, as 40 Derrida 2005a, 165. 41 Derrida 2005a, 166. 42 Derrida 2005a, 168.

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much gift as invention, of justice and democracy.43 This expression, moreover, closely echoes Adorno in his famous ‘Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, a connection that Derrida does not fail to note: In the form of the paradox of the impossible possibility, mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him [Benjamin]. He overcame the dream without betraying it [ohne ihn zu verraten] and making himself the accomplice in that on which the philosophers have always agreed: that it shall not be.44

Proclaiming the dream without betraying it. Without dismissing the dream’s exigency toward an open future, this proscription is the fundamental, aporetic imperative that deconstruction seeks to express. The possibility of the impossible can only be dreamed, Derrida emphasises in his discussion of Adorno. Such a ‘possibility’ not only can, but must be dreamed, even if it cannot be proved by the wide-awake light of reason. These closing remarks trace the argument made by Kant, who maintained that if we cannot be free, we must think (or dream, Derrida would say) of being free until an ethical position becomes possible. Thus, for Derrida we must dream the possibility of the impossible so that a space might open for the gift, the invention, the decision, responsibility, hospitality, justice, democracy: for the arrival of the other.45 Thus, if we ask why jurists have read Derrida so little and so poorly, the only response must be that they have kept their eyes open, but have been unable to dream. And if we ask why they ought to have (or ought to in the future) read Derrida better, the answer is simple: to learn to daydream. This is his ultimate lesson, and perhaps his most important. Translated by Wilson Kaiser

43 Andronico 2006, 163. 44 Adorno 1981, 241, cited in Derrida 2005a, 168. 45 In fact, one finds here the ‘maximization of the transcendental position’ that Maurizio Ferraris shows to be already at work in Derrida’s reading of Husserl. See Ferraris 2003, 44.

Law as Practical Knowledge: Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and the Promise of Classical Practical Philosophy Jnos Frivaldszky 1. The rehabilitation of practical philosophy The knowledge of classical Roman jurists was, due to its practical character, both juristic and ‘practical’ in the philosophical sense. This way of thinking, however, was abandoned after Renaissance humanism1 by the modernists, who tried to construct closed, axiomatic and deductive scientific systems. The modern image of law, conceived as a legal or rational order closed into a scientific system, has lost its practical philosophical nature characterised by classical natural law and dialectic argumentation. In the second half of the 20th century, practical philosophy was rehabilitated (as in the case of the well known debate on the Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie) in Germany (and elsewhere in continental Europe) as well as in English-speaking countries. This brought with it some concepts of justice and practical philosophy (prudence, political friendship, dialectical argumentation, topics, etc.) back into mainstream philosophical discourse. The Aristotelian, and partly Thomistic, concepts of practical philosophy have played a key role in this process and the subsequent debates alike. Aristotelian influence, in the form of ‘classical natural law’ (Michel Villey), first appeared in the thought of (classical) Roman jurists, and was, after a long gap, received by today’s legal philosophers. The major part of philosophical debates about law is now conducted along Aristotelian, and partly Thomistic, lines. In the last three decades, Aquinas has been rehabilitated by advocates of ‘neo-classical’ natural law within a highly specific framework of moral and political (i. e. practical) philosophy. Certain exponents of this current also draw inspiration from the thought of the analytic philosopher Herbert L. A. 1

Manzin 2007, 85 – 100. Cf. also Manzin 1994; Manzin 2008.

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Hart, who describes law as a social practice, thus opening the way for a philosophy of law that concentrates on practical reasons and justification. Nor should one forget the postmodernist conception of law. Unlike those mentioned above, this current draws on certain leftist and libertarian traditions, but in some cases also on existentialism and pragmatism, regarding law as the emancipatory social practice of political justice. Thus, contemporary legal thinking is for the most part characterised by a practical approach in the broadest sense of the word. This raises two questions. First: in what sense does contemporary legal theory and philosophy consider the lawyers’ activity as practical? And, second: how is it to be regarded from the perspective of classical natural law?

2. The postmodernist conception of law: Law as the emancipatory social practice of political justice Let us start with the contemporary postmodernist conception of justice, which regards the life of law as some kind of a manifestation of political practice. This seems to be a promising starting point, as this is the approach that has its source in the classical way of practical philosophy and is the one we seek to follow most closely. There are two main currents of postmodernist theories (or rather ‘counter-theories’),2 both very influential in legal thinking. The one was developed, by among others, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, and may be termed neo-pragmatist social criticism. This theory is really just a ‘close relative’ of postmodernism. The other bears the hallmark imprint of Jacques Derrida3 and Michel Foucault, and makes use of deconstructionist, post-structuralist and other methods of (sometimes ironic or even nihilistic)4 criticism. Both ‘theories’ are practice-oriented and pragmatical in their own ways. They are sometimes regarded as methods. 5 They entail the denial of the exis2 3 4 5

Minda 1995, 229 – 231. The work of Jack M. Balkin, to mention just one author, was deeply influenced by the thought of Jacques Derrida. See Balkin 2005, 719 – 740. For a comprehensive analysis of the influence of Derrida on legal theory, see Andronico 2002. Ironically, Rorty, who is an exponent of the other current, considers himself ironic as well. Some authors do not profess to be nihilistic, whereas others do so proudly, for example, Vattimo 2004. Derrida himself objected to regarding the deconstructionist approach as a method, but it doubtlessly became a method in its American practice. See Andronico 2002. Balkin 1987, 743 – 786.

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tence of an objective and hierarchical order of things, an intrinsic nature that would have a normative content and should be observed by lawyers due to its (legal) validity. Let us now turn to the philosophical roots of neo-pragmatist social criticism to see how pragmatism influenced legal thinking, and particularly the currents of postmodernism, in the English-speaking world.

3. Pragmatist and neo-pragmatist social criticism Oliver W. Holmes was admittedly sceptical of the existence of any kind of natural law.6 He was deeply influenced by the pragmatist doctrines he became acquainted with in the Metaphysical Club,7 which he founded together with William James, and Charles S. Peirce, who later became the founding father of pragmatism. In an all too superficial reconstruction, the school of pragmatism held that human recognition is intimately tied up with practical experience, habits, and human action.8 This already shows that its exponents emphasised the empirical and socially bound character of human recognition.9 ‘The whole function of thinking’ – as William James summarises the main elements of Peirce’s pragmatism (‘pragmaticism’) – ‘is but one step in the production of habits of action’, where the words that express a thought play are significant only if they contribute to its practical consequences (i. e. if they lead to ‘a different 6 7 8

9

George 2003, 1 – 11. Cf. Maczonkai 1997, 45 – 47. ‘Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism.’ Peirce 1905, 163. See Rorty 1999, xx f. Derrida also discovered the semiotics of Charles Peirce as a predecessor, and mentioned it as a proto-deconstructionist conception: ‘Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the deconstruction of the transcendental signified […].’ Derrida 1974, 49. Cf. also Boros 1998, 65 – 66. In this interpretation of Peircean semiotics, signs continuously refer to one another, from which there is no escape, that is to say, signs do not refer to any external (signified) entity or logos. Derrida thus regards Peirce’s theory of language as anticipating the critique of logocentrism.

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conduct’). Accordingly, ‘to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, […] we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare’. Through this, James adds, ‘the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires’.10 In a similar vein, Richard Rorty was interested in the social effects and practical consequences of human rights rather than their substantive validity and normative content.11 This approach explains why, as Rorty puts it, ‘pragmatists – both classical and “neo-” – do not believe there is a way things really are’.12 The criterion for the rightness of human rights and social relations is not human nature or the real nature of things or human relations. From an anti-essentialist or anti-dualist perspective, the meaning and content of a concept – of any concept – depends on its social practice, which is to say, on its usefulness.13 This way, however, the ‘life’ of the concept (i. e. the related social practices) can be shaped by ideologies. American (legal) philosophy, then, is characterised by individualism and anti-naturalist pragmatism, and this latter accepts that concepts (along with their related practices) are determined by social and political ideologies. Meanwhile, (neo-)pragmatism has been associated with relativism14 and various – apparently benevolent – emancipatory and egalitarian elements.15 The concepts of ideological determination and ‘struggle’ have, since the ‘linguistic turn’,16 increasingly been transposed to the socio-political sphere of language: ‘If there is anything distinctive about 10 James 1898, 290 – 291. 11 Human rights are, according to Rorty, social constructs. One of their possible motivations may be comforting one’s conscience. Their practical measures are the decrease of pain (suffering), (negative) freedom understood as the lack of intervention, and the achievement of non-discrimination. Rorty 1999, xxix, 84 – 87. 12 Rorty 1999, 27. 13 Rorty 1999, xix, xxii, 60. 14 ‘But of course we pragmatists never call ourselves relativists. Usually, we define ourselves in negative terms. We call ourselves “anti-Platonists” or “antimetaphysicians” or “antifoundationalists”.’ Rorty 1999, xvi. 15 Cf. Rorty 1999, 86. 16 ‘It is customary to distinguish the “classical pragmatists” – Peirce, James and Dewey – from such living “neopragmatists” as Quine, Goodman, Putnam and Davidson. The break between the two is the so-called “linguistic turn”. […] In the US, this turn was taken only in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was as a result of this turn that James and Dewey ceased to be read in American philosophical departments.’ Rorty 1999, 24 – 25.

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pragmatism it is that it substitutes the notion of a better human future for notions of “reality”, “reason” and “nature”.’17 Holmes ‘only’ argued that law exists in experience only,18 and stated that he could not accept any kind of objective natural law.19 Postmodernist thinkers of today seem to shape the ‘right’ and ‘politically acceptable’ meaning of concepts and the corresponding social practices by way of insisting on human rights and the right political order in the name of ‘political correctness’, thus exerting an indirect influence on ‘right’ judicial decision-making. According to the definitive postmodernist and neo-pragmatist philosopher of our time, Richard Rorty, there is no human nature in the essentialist sense, and therefore there are no inalienable human rights either.20 Unlike classical legal philosophy, contemporary mainstream thinkers do not regard man as a social being by nature, and consequently deny that natural law or the law of nature could regulate interpersonal or social relations. According to them, there is no inherent nature of human relations, as regulated by natural law and the (normative) nature of things (i. e. of social relations). Thus, they assign this regulative role to political ideologies and simplifying buzzwords. The roots of American postmodernist antiessentialism, then, go back to the pragmatist tradition. Human nature and the nature of human relations in the classical sense are neglected, whereas the main exponents of this movement have always felt a deep political responsibility to shape a better future.21 In their sense of social22 responsibility,23 American pragmatists have been guided by the desire to 17 Rorty 1999, 27. 18 ‘The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.’ Holmes 1881, 1. 19 Letter from O. W. Holmes to Harold Laski, September 15, 1929. The two thinkers had an extensive correspondence in a personal and frank tone, which makes the content of the above letter a valuable historical source. DeWolfe Howe 1953, 1183. 20 Rorty 1989, xiii, 8, 38, 52, 55. ‘Talk of […] the rights of man, like talk of “the honour of the family” or of “the fatherland in danger” are not suitable targets for philosophical analysis and criticism’ (Rorty 1999, 83 – 84). Speaking of inalienable human rights, according to him, ‘is simply a way of saying that our spade is turned – that we have exhausted our argumentative resources’ (Rorty 1999, 83 – 84). He emphasises the subjective side of human rights, together with their practical social usefulness. See Rorty 1999, 83 – 86. 21 Rorty 1999, 27. 22 Molnar 1961, 269 – 273. 23 William James only pleaded for a path-finding or directing role of the philosopher, see James 1898, 288. According to Rorty, similarly to the engineer or the lawyer, the philosopher is instrumental in solving concrete problems emerging in

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break with ‘old and bad’ feudal European traditions.24 According to Rorty, this outdated tradition did believe in a theory of human reason adapted and responsive to the inherent nature of things. Here, however, we are going to discuss the late medieval conception of law, classical and naturalist, where the practical ‘essentialism’ of juristic argumentation was paired with an institutional social dialogue25 constantly seeking arguments.26 In the 11th-13th centuries, dialectical legal argumentation was practical and discursive, while focusing on truth and justice (i. e. observing the nature of things).27 Today, exponents of liberal and emancipatory political ideologies try to revolutionise interpersonal relations through claim rights put in the language of human rights. Throughout modernity, it was the macro-social and political relations that such egalitarian movements appealed to, whereas so-called postmodernity now looks at interpersonal relations on a micro scale, for example, those of man and woman, husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, and so on. Since our age cannot handle natural inequalities (i. e. natural social differences between persons of equal dignity)28 these thinkers try to subvert what they regard as ‘violent’ traditional ‘metaphysical oppositions’ and hierarchies, in the name of freedom and equality. They do so through a deconstructionist criticism of the institutions that maintain these oppositions and hierarchies, like natural social roles and their institutional forms.29 The pragmatist way of philosophical recognition has been tied up with the practicality of socially engaged American academics.30 Gradually, egalitarian leftist ideas became dominant in liberal thought, and radical (leftist) ideologies from the old continent received a very warm welcome from American intellectuals. It is small wonder, then, that the views of Jacques Derrida were particularly

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

concrete situations, where the language of the past confronts with the needs of the future. Rorty 1995, 197 – 199. Rorty 1999, 25, 27. In the postmodernist pragmatism of Rorty, the result of the debate as duel is what is ‘considered to be true’, wihout any kind of objective reference or grounding theory. Rorty 1989, 52. Frivaldszky 2009, 229 – 270. Grossi 1995. Dumont 1983, 296. Cf. Rorty 1989, 134; Culler 1985, 85, 156 – 159, 165 – 166, 173; Frivaldszky 2008, 5 – 29. Molnar 1961, 260 – 288.

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influential in American jurisprudence and legal philosophy.31 As Thomas Molnar, a well known philosopher who also lived in the United States, put it, ‘the enemies of authority are particularly vehement in their savage attack on the court’,32 while granting privileges to non-conformist ideas and their exponents by the censorial means of ‘political correctness’.33 Radical individualism is associated with moral relativism, which could result in the loss of purpose and content of law and every other kind of right, including human rights, due to its devaluation of truth. Still, legal content is subjected to egalitarian and libertarian political ideologies, which infiltrate relativism. Thus, interpersonal relations have no natural legal normativity any more, nor does the human individual have any natural essence. It is therefore the radical individualist and relativist doctrines of libertarian (and at the same time egalitarian) political ideologies that now shape social relations, in terms of discourse as well as actions. Everyone is considered completely equal qua free, and the individual expressions of this freedom or its changes, which depend on the free deliberation of the individual only, cannot be limited by any kind of reference to a natural order. The human individual does not fulfil herself in the social relations that are inseparable from being a person. Quite on the contrary, the conscience of the individualised self in regard to what is right (and consequently her conduct) is determined and oriented by the codes of the elite of the politically permeated civil society. These codes are formulated in human-rights terms, in favour of the ideological and political purposes of relativism, libertarianism and egalitarism. It seems, then, that the postmodernist notion of ‘eventuality’ (Rorty) or the social power of contingency, which replaced the regulative function of natural moral laws and natural law, is by no means ‘random’ and free in the world of law, nor has it the character of expert rationality (N. Luh31 Derrida had a deep influence on contemporary radical legal theory in America. Derrida’s conception of ‘justice as deconstruction’ had a strong influence on both American and European legal thinking. See Derrida 1989/1990, 933. The question may arise whether Derridean deconstruction belongs to philosophy or politics, or it is rather a peculiar way of reading, a ‘technique’ of interpretation. We think it is a philosophical practice of reading texts (written ones as well as social practices), which implies certain practical consequences in terms of practical criticism and emancipatory (social) policies. This latter was not denied by the later Derrida either. 32 Molnar 1976, 50. 33 Steven G. Gey describes how new censorship and postmodernist philosophy struggle against each other in legal thinking, and how new censors transform postmodernist doctrines claimed to be irrefutable. Gey 1996, 193 – 297.

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mann),34 but is instead determined by planned constraints of political power ideologies.

4. The political practice of deconstruction from the perspective of a classical conception of law Underlying the deconstructionist conception of law there is an anthropological view that is not only strongly individualistic but also conflictual. Its exponents claim that (human) rights work through continuous and regular conflicts of power, much like the sophists’ idea of debate.35 In the final analysis, such a view transposes legal problems into the practical social policies related to the power dimensions of discursive and oppressing hierarchical oppositions, which can then be emancipated and/ or ‘deconstructed’ or subverted. Human rights that – rightly – dominate legal thinking thus become the main point of reference for substantive law and legal decisions in an age where a philosophical concept of human nature is not only abandoned, but seems ‘politically incorrect’. How, then, could one justify an argument or choice between mutually limiting rights in concrete cases of collision between human rights, if human nature, or its ‘true’ philosophy (i. e. one that is sound in a juristic sense), or objective and substantive elements of interpersonal justice, can hardly be addressed any more? Today, when practical philosophy, which is aimed at giving an answer to the above problems, and a practice-oriented philosophical pragmatism replace theoretical knowledge36 in legal thinking, the main question of our discussion comes very forcefully to bear. What does the actual content of these theories look like if compared to the classical (Roman) legal knowledge and practice, which originally emerged as a form of practical philosophy? Practical philosophy, to be sure, is the suitable way for a relativist and anti-essentialist postmodern age. Yet, the question is wheth34 As Bruno Romano shows in several of his works, legal communication within the legal system described by Luhmann, where postmodern complexity is reduced in accordance with technical rationality, is neither legal nor human. See Romano 1995; Romano 1996. 35 The topic of Michel Foucault’s first course in the Coll ge de France was the sophists, a movement he had always considered important. 36 ‘There is no deep split between theory and practice’, Rorty claims, ‘because on a pragmatist view all so-called “theory” which is not wordplay is always already practice.’ Rorty 1999, xxv.

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er these approaches can be reconciled with a reality-oriented juristic perspective. We have seen that there are many forms of practical philosophy,37 but postmodern theories are as far from the classical sense of that phrase as can be. The main divide of different classics-based theories and philosophies of law is between whether a given practical philosophy of law should focus on the (real) nature of human relationships or the nature of things, as the classical authors thought, or whether it should rather focus, as English-speaking analytic philosophers think, on the rational reasons of right decision or the justification of a given institution, and the logic of its corresponding rules. This latter approach actually concentrates on the linguistic and logical ‘nature’ of practical rationality that is bound to reasons and justifications.38 It seems that the practical philosophy of the classical jurists is the pivotal point of reference. While postmodernist thinkers struggle with the Platonist (!) heritage of essentialism, certain currents of the Anglophone analytic school, with central figures of neo-classical natural law among them, reinvent the practical philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, albeit in a peculiar neo-Kantian and analytic (Hartian) vein.39 In the classical period (i. e. among the Romans and in the Middle Ages) legal thinking was permeated by Aristotelian practical philosophy and dialectical method, which means that it was not dominated by Platonic essentialism. The question, then, remains: which one of these practical philosophies is acceptable for lawyers from a juristic perspective of practical reason?40 37 German schools and their exponents may be well known to the reader. Their ideas also had a considerable influence on Italian practical philosophy. Most recently, see the analysis of Luigi Mengoni’s philosophy of law. Nogler 2007, 255 – 290. 38 Cf. Murphy 2001, 1 f. 39 See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 99 – 151. This current takes the neo-Kantian separation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ as its starting point, arguing that for a logically valid argument, theoretical knowledge (of metaphysics and/or philosophical anthropology) and its theoretical truth (‘is’) cannot serve as premisses to practical (moral) conclusions (‘ought’). See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 101 – 102, 125, 127. The southern German version of neo-Kantianism, based on The Critique of Practical Reason, is itself a practical philosophy, which regards philosophy from a normative perspective as a science of values. See Pascher 1997. As is known, Gustav Radbruch’s conception is the most important contribution of this approach to legal philosophy. 40 Contemporary English-speaking natural lawyers often find themselves connected to the tradition of classical natural law through practical philosophy. It is no coincidence that the essence of practical rationality is the most frequent topic of their works and debates. For the frequency of the expression ‘practical reason’

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In our opinion, legal knowledge cannot be based on a critical and sometimes even cynical deconstructionist reading of legal texts and social practices,41 as this deconstructive philosophical practice would conceptually separate law, understood as rules based on the unjustified violence of power, from justice, thus transposing – if analysed coherently – the practice (administration?) of justice into the domain of everyday critical (political) practice of deconstruction. The world of autonomous everyday practices is doubtless an important field of practicing justice, and political struggle for rights may sometimes play an important role as well. Yet the legal practice of lawyers, based on legal justice, can never be dispensed with, as it is they who have the capacity and dedication to determine the lawful due of the Other. While we agree with Derrida that law cannot be identified with doctrinal rules (Non ut ex regula ius sumatur, sed ex iure quod est, regula fiat),42 we think that legal principles should be rehabilitated in a classical sense and with a classical content.43 The way Derrida follows, we repeat, cannot therefore be right, as it identifies the concept of justice (as separated from legal rules) with the philosophical practice of deconstruction, not even if its respectable intention aims at restoring justice in its true, original sense (i. e. in the vein of Levinas). According to the classical jurists, law or legal rules cannot be conceptually separated from justice; just as this latter cannot be separated from law either. In the latter case, the result would be moral and political, rather than legal, philosophy, which could lead to unjust results in a legal philosophical sense. We can agree with Ulpian, and the greatest authorities of ancient Roman law in general,44 that lawyers are the ‘experts’ of justice and fairness. We may also add that by virtue of their practical approach, they follow legal principles (as for instance the principle of ‘giving everyone his or

41 42 43 44

see George 1996, 369. For John Finnis, practical philosophy means a systematic and critical approach directed at human goods, which requires practical rationality and focuses on decision and action. See Finnis 1999, 12. Neo-classical naturallaw thinking adopts the same perspective, and ‘describes law in light of its fundamental values and claims of practical rationality. This is structured by three interrelated problems: the search for fundamental human goods; right choices; and the determination of the conditions of practical thinking aimed at developing the respective rules. We may say, then, that the theory of natural law means thinking about law in light of human good [bene] and practical reason.’ Viola 1996, viii f. Cf. Barcellona 2006, 181 – 256. Dig. 50.17.1. Several regulae of Roman law are, in content or structure, actually principles. Cf. Hervada 1990, V, 1 – 6.

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her due’) rather than applying rigid statutory provisions unjustifiable by justice. Yet the application of principles needs the juristic (i. e. legal skill), of pursuing justice in a practical (prudential) sense – hence the expression iuris prudentia. Ulpian was convinced that law, justice and fairness are organically connected within natural law, which is made to work by the practical ‘philosophy’ of lawyers, through their art aimed at what is good and equitable, that is to say, through their actual legal knowledge.45

5. Legal discourse: The sophists’ fight for power or the classics’ dialectical juristic argument? Today, when the practice and epistemic form of rhetoric is regaining popularity, it is important that a deeper reflection on justice and law should not be replaced. One way of saving this kind of reflection may be to rediscover the philosophical importance of classical (ancient and medieval) dialectical argument for legal discourses.46 As Michel Villey emphasised, ancient rhetoric, which was the source of the jurists’ logic as well, was not a mere technique of persuasion, but ‘controversy was a much worthier and more fruitful art leading to probable truth. it ensured the “places” and the selection of questions for a meaningful debate. it was also a rich source of other useful advice. and, finally, it led to good legal solutions’.47 Of the best known scholars who contributed to the rehabilitation of ancient Greek dialectical or topical thinking, one may mention Cham Perelman whose ‘new’ rhetoric actually returns to Aristotelian rhetoric and the modes of ancient dialectical argument, but also Theodor Viehweg in Germany,48 and Michel Villey in France.49 The active interest in the exploration of ancient dialectic, one that manifested itself in the second half of the 20th century,50 has brought particularly valuable results through the work of Enrico Berti in Italy, whose findings in the field of 45 See Frivaldszky 2007, 96 f, 102 f. 46 On ancient dialectic as the heritage of European culture, see Berti 2003, 3 – 26. On the relationship between dialectic on the one hand and practical philosophy and Gadamer’s hermeneutics on the other, see Berti 2002, 43 – 53. 47 Villey 1967, 79. 48 Viehweg 1953. 49 See Villey 2003. 50 On the beginnings of the renewed interest in ancient Greek dialectic, see Sichirollo 1961, 111 – 119.

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ancient Greek dialectic have much to offer contemporary legal philosophy.51 Speaking of philosophers, the dialogical dialectic of Hans-Georg Gadamer should also be mentioned. Gadamer’s intersubjective and situational approach still throws new light52 on the whole process of legal hermeneutical understanding and the reality of law itself, being at the same time faithful to its Aristotelian roots and up-to-date.53 The link between Gadamerian hermeneutics and Greek dialectic is highlighted also by the title of a volume dedicated to Gadamer.54 Finally, it should not be forgotten that ancient Greek dialectical thinking has found some resonance among English-speaking analytic philosophers as well.55 Roman juristic thinking was linked to Greek dialectical argument rather than rhetoric with open arguments, and so the Greek tradition did not appear among Roman jurists in the form of rhetorical argumentation before the courts but through the use of Aristotelian dialectical arguments. The material of arguments included legal-philosophical categories which were regarded from the perspective of practice. The practical and theoretical impact as well as the consequences of anti-essentialist, anti-dualist56 and anti-metaphysical (neo-)pragmatism which opposes theoretical philosophy cannot yet be fully assessed. We still think that the postmodernist practice of critical politics cannot serve as the basis for a sound philosophy of law, nor, for that matter, for any kind of legal philosophy whatsoever. Thus, the emancipatory practice of postmodernist neo-pragmatism or deconstructivism, or any 51 Enrico Berti regularly publishes in journals and volumes devoted to the philosophy of law. It is partly due to his work that Italian legal philosophers started to explore the legal dimension of dialectic argument and its promises for our age. He also contributed to the rehabilitation of practical philosophy. Cf. Berti 2004. 52 ‘The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument. On the contrary, it is possible that someone practicing the art of dialectic – i. e., the art of questioning and of seeking truth – comes off worse in the argument in the eyes of those listening to it. As the art of asking questions, dialectic proves its value because only the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning, which involves being able to preserve his orientation toward openness. The art of questioning is the art of questioning ever further – i. e., the art of thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.’ Gadamer 2006, 360. 53 On Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotelian fairness and law, see Frivaldszky 2007, 38 – 67. 54 Bubner/Cramer/Wiehl 1970. 55 See Berti 2003, 14, 16 f. 56 See Rorty’s claim that he is ‘anti-dualist’, Rorty 1999, xix.

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form of radical criticism, cannot show the way for right practical philosophy that aims at achieving justice. It is, in our opinion, not the analytic57 but the continental tradition of practical philosophy that should be followed. It is the one that reaches back to classical (ancient and medieval) roots in a way that allows for the reconstruction of the spirit of that tradition, both in terms of the form of dialectical thinking and the substance of classical natural-law thought. In light of that, we may state that the questions of practical philosophy, hermeneutical understanding, and dialectical argumentative logic have to be directed to truth in the sense of natural law (i. e. the nature of things and relationships). This also applies to an open, argumentative and rhetorically-oriented discourse based on opinions and appearances, the outcome of which is therefore always uncertain. In its Aristotelian and Ciceronian sense, dialectical thinking (to be used by lawyers) seeks to distinguish between true and false by way of clarifying the question in a debate between opposed views, through highlighting the contradictions in the arguments of the opponent.58 (The use of dialectical syllogisms that are true in the sense of formal logic does not, however, exclude the probable truth of premises, which are determined on the basis of ‘considerable opinions’ [endoxa] regarded as true. Thus, in a late medieval context we may speak of a debate of dialectical syllogisms, which is aimed at determining which of the syllogisms leads to the most plausible and most probable, i. e. most persuasive, truth.)59 Finally, we may add that according to Cicero, only those in possession of the dialectical method can become lawyers.60 A dialectically coherent juristic opinion, being either true or false, follows the nature of things, as the devices of dialectic follow and exhibit the internal structure and nature of things. It is not so much the middle Platonist dichotomous logic of Porphyry, but the nature of the field of practical philosophy that suggests that the determination of the 57 A seminal survey, and also an example, of this current is Bdig 2004. 58 Play 1988, 97 f. Logical coherence, which dialectical argumentation allows for, leads not only to logical rightness, but is capable of expressing substantial truth (i. e. the right order of things). Cicero discusses the virtue and capacity to recognise the natural order of the whole world, and describes human community within that world as something that is based on nature, which still requires the recognition of one another as fellow humans. He then describes the science of rational debate, i. e. dialectic, which is the art of distinguishing between true and false, as something that aims at protecting these recognitions. See De legibus, 1.60 – 1.62. 59 Errera 2006, 58 f. 60 Play 1988, 98.

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due (iustum) of the respective Other is possible only on the basis of an assessment of arguments considered in the interpersonal dimension (i. e. a dia-logos, and discussed in a dialectical argumentative debate).61 The pragmatism of classical Roman lawyers does not show the characteristics of Platonic essentialism but rather Aristotelian natural law and dialectical thinking. This latter could follow the nature of things, thus being pragmatically essentialist and pragmatically philosophic in a dialectical-controversive (i. e. discursive, way at the same time).62 The same applies to the glossators, too. Thus, the anti-Platonic arguments of postmodernist criticism do not concern the validity and acceptability of classical practical philosophy. The way of exercising justice has always been the central question of practical philosophy. The question of right (i. e. just and fair) action has been, since the classical age, part of the more general philosophical problem of the right way of life. Juristic arguments concerning human rights can, however, be said – in very general terms – to be problem-avoidingly technical and pragmatist, and – in certain matters – politically and ideologically charged in favour of the fashionable intellectual currents already mentioned. Both ways depart from the right (classical) way of practical philosophy. Still, the conception of ‘juristic knowledge as true philosophy’ advocated by Ulpian seems to show a way that avoids both errors, even for today’s lawyers, and even if the great jurist only summarised the fundamental principles. The work and thought of the glossators, in turn, has shown a way that can and ought to be followed even nowadays. The classical natural-law approach of practical philosophy, whose Aristotelian version we regard as desirable,63 was characteristic of both the classical Roman jurists and the glossators. This way of thinking took the nature of interpersonal relations, considered to be real, as its starting point. It thereby aimed at giving everyone his or her legal due, rather than fighting for some kind of a presumed ‘due’ in the sense of some particular political or moral philosophy, which is often the case nowadays. As the above discussion has made clear, the legal epistemology of the classical jurists is intimately linked to the anatomy of human relations they descri61 See D’Agostino 2007, xiii f. 62 Villey 2003, 104 – 106, 429 – 430. 63 Here, the cleavage is not within English-speaking theories, but between the analytical post-metaphysical and traditional currents or natural law. Aristotle, the most important figure of practical philosophy, represents a link between the two, his pragmatism allowing only for a minimal metaphysical content in his categories of analysis, method and approach. Cf. Frivaldszky 2007, 38 – 67.

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bed. This epistemology was characterised by dialectical argumentation, a mode of controversy determining the legal nature of interpersonal relations in a constructive way, unlike the (often implicit) conflictual anthropology of postmodernism and the related power-oriented epistemology. In terms of the sources of law, classical Roman lawyers did not rely on the exclusiveness of rigid rules, not least because their quest for law and justice was oriented in practice by broad legal principles of action in today’s sense. Thus, the way to overcome the exclusiveness of rules, which captured modernist legal thinking, does not lead through a political and ideological dogmatism of conceptions of justice formulated in a doctrinaire way, nor through a subjective nihilism with occasional reference to these conceptions, but is rather the well known path of classical Roman lawyers. It is therefore a welcome development that ancient and medieval dialectical debate and argumentation is an increasingly popular field of research, which indirectly contributes to our knowledge of classical legal thinking. ‘At the heart of the logic of law there is the study of dialectic’ – as Michel Villey suggestively puts it.64 The method of controversy, he adds, could be the method of right legal thinking and practice, if applied in a well-grounded and self-reflective way. Since, as already mentioned, the classical Roman jurists’ way of thinking was shaped by the dialectic of Aristotle, and was preserved by the glossators,65 the study of Aristotelian dialectic seems inevitable. This, we should emphasise, opens the way to the exploration of the intersubjective argumentative dimension of the practical rationality of classical natural law. Dialectic thus transposes the traditional questions of practical philosophy into the interpretive hermeneutics of interpersonal relations. This calls us to explore and rethink the classical sense of the action-guiding function of legal principles, and a number of other traditional questions of legal philosophy, for example, fairness, observance of law, or the determination of the share due to the Other. Among the glossators, due to the influence of the greatest thinkers, the view spread that the science of law (legalis scientia) did not merely depend on philosophy but that iurisprudentia actually was philosophy.66 Ap-

64 Villey 1967, 81 – 82. 65 Villey 2003, 105 – 106, 429 – 430, 466 – 467. Cf. Giuliani 1966; Frivaldszky 2009. 66 Padovani 1997, 200.

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parently, this idea found support in a relevant passage of Ulpian.67 At the same time, the definition of wisdom, understood in the Middle Ages as philosophy, said that it was the knowledge of things human and divine, the science of just and unjust. This definition was passed down through the tradition of Roman law, where it was understood as jurisprudence, and it was after this development and with this content that in the Middle Ages jurisprudence and philosophy were identified on the basis of the heritage of Roman law. If the classics generally assert this, then the profession of the lawyer is not to create human relations as some kind of ‘god’ through arguments or legal acts and according to various fashionable conceptions of justice, but to explore the order of things, the nature of human relations, as a quasi-philosopher in the classical sense. The same applies to the sphere of validity of one’s arguments as well. We therefore accept doubt that stems from opinion in the Socratic sense. This method of continuous questioning, we hope, guides us towards truth through probabilities, by way of carefully constructed questions and answers that are open to reality and the arguments of the Other. This non-sophistic tradition of dialectic warns us that logically sound argumentative justification can never depart from truth, which it seeks to approximate. In this respect, it seems worthwhile to compare the figures of the orator, the sophist, the dialectician, and the philosopher, in their Aristotelian senses. We cannot now discuss the relationship of the orator, who uses methods of persuasion over an audience, to legal argumentation. The complexity and problems of that kind of relationship are well illustrated in the works of Cicero.68 Rather, we should have a look at the argumentative and intellectual patterns of the sophist, the dialectician, and the philosopher.69 In terms of method, the sophist could be a dialectician, whereas the difference is in their intentions: the arguments of the dialectician are directed at the thing itself, while the sophist merely ‘utilises’ the appearance of justice. Dialectic, on the other hand, takes a middle path be67 ‘Iuri operam daturum prius nosse oportet, unde nomen iuris descendat. est autem a iustitia appellatum: nam, ut eleganter celsus definit, ius est ars boni et aequi.’ Dig. 1.1.1. pr. Ulpianus 1 inst. ‘Cuius merito quis nos sacerdotes appellet: iustitiam namque colimus et boni et aequi notitiam profitemur, aequum ab iniquo separantes, licitum ab illicito discernentes, bonos non solum metu poenarum, verum etiam praemiorum quoque exhortatione efficere cupientes, veram nisi fallor philosophiam, non simulatam affectantes.’ Dig. 1.1.1.1. pr. Ulpianus 1 inst. 68 See Frivaldszky 2007, 86 f. 69 See Sichirollo 1961, 113.

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tween sophistic and philosophy, being a relative of the former in method but not in intention, and of the latter in the intention directed at the thing itself but not in the theoretical deductive (scientific) method (used by the philosopher). The dialectician, rightly understood, looks for the nature of things in an open argumentative debate, starting from generally shared opinions. If, however, we understand philosophy of law not in the modernist sense of an abstract science that aims at building a theoretical system from axioms by way of deduction, but – as was suggested earlier on – use dialectic in the field of law in accordance with the scope of practical philosophy, then the deductive element is limited to the internal structure of individual syllogisms (i. e. the logical way to the conclusion). We have already mentioned that the premises of syllogisms are still determined on the basis of probabilities, and dialectical debate aims precisely to determine which selection of premises leads, by way of syllogism, to more plausible conclusions. Thus, the debates of the glossators represent debates of syllogisms. In their method of argumentation aimed at a just and lawful solution but oriented by probabilities, they remained faithful to Aristotle, as it can hardly be overlooked how rarely the Stagirite used formal syllogisms in his scientific writings.70 Nor, therefore, can the science of law follow another method. Classical Roman jurists and the glossators did not choose to deductively construct a system, but followed the way of classical Aristotelian natural law and dialectical arguments.71

6. Neo-classical theory of law is practical philosophy but it fails on the final issue of legal validity The emergent school of natural-law thinking that is labelled ‘neo-classical’ shows that a modernist (Kantian, analytic, somehow positivistic) and perhaps liberal current appeared within the domain of the classical natural-law tradition.72 Or rather the liberal individualist positivist and analytic theory of law has become, since Herbert Hart,73 more open to 70 Sichirollo 1961, 116 f. 71 Villey 2003, 429 – 430, 466 – 467. 72 The founders of the neo-classical school say right at the beginning of their essay, in which they sketch a synthetical theoretical construct, that their theory differs in many respects from those of Aristotle or Aquinas, even if they use ‘the common language of Thomistic natural law’. See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 99. 73 Hart 1994, 185 – 212.

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certain elements of the (classical) natural-law tradition, as we mentioned in the introduction. Anyhow, the Anglo-American version of neo-classical natural law, which never departed from a moderate positivist stance and focused on the perspective of practical philosophy, has brought no real success, as it was unable to give an acceptable new theoretical synthesis.74 It could not really solve the core substantive problems of legal validity and normativity, and could only address questions of moral and political philosophy. We may therefore say that it failed in practice both as a natural-law theory and a philosophy of law, since neo-classical natural lawyers cannot and do not want to question the validity of positive law that contradicts the fundamental rules of natural law with an apodictic legal argument, with the objectivity of ‘A non-A’.75 This shows the error of their practical philosophy, which manifests itself most conspicuously in the consequences of the elimination of human nature (in a theoretical and essentialist sense) from their theory of law. Thus, this theory may be capable of ‘enriching’ a theory of positive law with some moral elements, but not of conceptually grasping legal validity and fundamental normative contents of natural law in a legal philosophical way. The knowledge of lawyers is not only of a practical-philosophical nature (i. e. based on arguments and seeking to find the right and justifiable decision), but is primarily organised by questions of legal validity, which, in their most fundamental contents, are located in the philosophical domain of ‘truth’. A decision (or norm, institution, etc.) that can be justified with dialectical arguments has sense, justification and thus legal power only within the framework of ‘natural-law validity’ (i. e. ‘truth’).76 Some fundamental and necessarily true syllogisms stem from human nature itself. In these, true premises lead to necessarily true conclusions (i. e. to certain fundamental rights and legal institutions). It is only within this domain of truth that the world of dialectical argumentation, ruled by probabilities, can be understood as a valid (justified) legal argumentation.

74 See the most recent volumes of criticism in Italy: Scandroglio 2008; Di Blasi 2008. 75 Finnis 1999, 363 – 366. 76 Frivaldszky 2011, 149 – 158; Frivaldszky 2010a.

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7. By way of conclusion According to the classics, dialectical logic substituted for interpersonal argumentation in the field of questions of practical philosophy dominated by the logic of ‘probable truth’. Their exploration of reality thus did not use the scientific means of proof by deductive inferences, but wanted to explore truth through dialectical debates, remaining always in the field of probabilities. St. Thomas Aquinas, in turn, made human nature the basis of practical philosophy (i. e. arguments based on the law of nature). Thus, the truths of this nature, i. e. the few fundamental rights (like the right to life) and institutions (such as marriage, family) that stem from those truths by way of apodictic syllogisms, delimit the ‘probably true’ domain of dialectic argumentation. This completes the heritage of classical natural lawyers. Finding the widely shared starting points of thinking (endoxa) necessary for practising classical dialectic today seems easy, as these can hardly be anything other than human rights. Still, they do not make a totally secure starting point for argumentation. Libertarian ‘human rights’ that have been traditionally considered as going against human nature, yet nowadays appearing – and finding radical advocates – in public discourse (e. g. same-sex couples’ ‘right to marriage’), are shaped by ‘public opinion’ organised by mainstream media and often ruled by politics. The question, then, is how far, in what sense, and why these ‘considerable’ views are widely shared. We deny, on the one hand, that all opinions should be held ‘true’ as the sophists thought, and assert, on the other hand, that public opinion is strongly shaped by powerful actors, with the consequence that most often it is only one opinion that seems ‘true’. Given the lack of freely and widely shared opinions necessary for dialectical debate, it is difficult to be sure that the play of opposed arguments is going to lead to probable truth. We therefore think that we should be even more consistently faithful to the moral truths of Aquinas’s philosophical anthropology in terms of the basic human-related moral questions – which are truths accessible to every human being through his or her own nature – and it is only within the limits of these that dialectical debate can and should take place. Thus, if our dialectical argument leads to a conclusion that is contrary to human nature as determined by philosophical anthropology or – if you like – the theory of moral philosophy, then however logical or persuasive the argument may seem and however widely shared it is among lawyers, it is substantially incorrect. In such cases, we started from endoxa or apparent endoxa and oriented ourselves

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towards what was or seemed ‘probable’, yet we did not come to truth but to falsehood. In order that dialectical argumentation (probably) comes to true conclusions, it has to be based on generally shared wise opinions having in themselves ‘arguments containing the seeds of truth’ (argumenta veritatis) rather than apparent truths distorted by the media. Moreover, argumentation constantly has to be aimed at truth, otherwise the truth is lost. It is therefore an extremely important question, both theoretically and in practice, that precisely what we regard as the content of human rights should function nowadays as endoxa. The sophist Protagoras argued that ‘man is the measure of everything’, yet the question remains what nature and what corresponding rights can be attributed to human beings. We can by no means accept here another one of Protagoras’s sayings, according to which ‘all opinions are true’,77 nor do we think with Protagoras that an unjust cause should be considered as true just because it is shown in a positive light by effective rhetorical78 and other media techniques. In the final analysis, it seems that the Universal Decree of Human Rights, composed in the time of and (partly) by Jacques Maritain, was based on a de facto consensus in terms of human rights, which achieved recognition spontaneously, and found a greater degree of natural agreement than it would nowadays. The factual validity of human rights that is due to an overlapping consensus does not in practice indicate an identity of philosophical or substantive opinions but perhaps only a coincidence of formulations on the level of actual normative texts. This is not something to be downplayed, yet the fragility of consensus, which results from its lack of grounds, is shown by the fact that it does not give a reliable theoretical or argumentative basis for the philosophical determination of rights whose content is debated or for the application of eventually conflicting rights. Thus, forums of the application of law often merely echo the ‘public opinion’ oriented by mainstream media in terms of the content of certain questionable human ‘rights’.79 77 Here we have to agree with Berti 2003, 23. 78 Aristotle remarks that people rightly found the conception of Protagoras outrageous, according to which a weaker (i. e. false) case can be made to appear as stronger, since this way the argumentation that uses effective rhetorical devices does not proceed from what is generally accepted to what is probably true by way of persuasive arguments, but advocates a lie by way of sophistic argumentation. See Rhetoric, 1402a. 79 Berti does not see this danger as he does not approach the question from a juristic perspective. He is thus justified in thinking that a practical consensus in terms of

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Postmodernist conceptions of truth and justice, which reject any kind of grounding, already show some signs of decay. It seems somewhat aimless to demonise essentialism in the field of legal philosophy, as classical natural-law doctrines have been widely rehabilitated, opening a wide space for practical wisdom, prudence,80 or leading up to these, fruitful professional and open dialectical debates. Today, many scholars follow the path of natural-law practical philosophy, which does not ignore practical truth, while seeking to achieve justice through dialectical argumentation. The question is, then, whether arguments of practical philosophy can be linked to a philosophically determined human nature and its truths. We think that justice is inherently and inseparably linked to truth, of which human nature is also a part. There are a few cogent norms and institutions of fundamental importance stemming from the latter, and these are the boundary conditions of valid legal argumentation. It is within these margins that other legal questions can be addressed in dialectical debate, following the internal logic of things (i. e. legal relations).81

the content of human rights may be a sufficient basis for arguments and refutations based on human rights. See Berti 2003, 20 f. 80 See Nelson 1992, 128 – 154. See also the conception of ‘practical syllogism’ developed by Fulvio Di Blasi, which is intended to reconcile natural law and virtue ethics, Di Blasi 2006, 29 – 59. 81 Frivaldszky 2010c.

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Index Rerum Aesthetics 7, 55 f., 66, 110, 114–123, 127–129, 131–134, 136, 138 f., 143, 146, 167 Argumentation 4, 8, 33, 55, 57–61, 63–66, 71, 75, 80, 93, 110, 115, 117 f., 127, 129, 133, 157, 159, 179, 181 f., 214, 216 f., 226, 234, 241, 245, 253, 255, 259 f., 262 f., 265–275 Art/Artist 7, 39, 42–43, 82, 85 f., 88, 91, 95, 97, 100 f., 103–138, 141, 159, 174 Body 43, 86 f., 91 f., 100, 121, 180, 183, 189, 192 f., 205–207, 233 Capitalism 39, 43, 46, 48, 50, 53, 98, 209, 248 Conflict 3, 5, 19, 45 f., 48 f., 144, 149, 152, 154, 160, 171, 190, 201–203, 205, 209, 215–217, 220–222, 229, 231 f., 262, 269, 275 Contradiction 2, 28, 30, 35, 40, 42, 44, 46–50, 58, 99, 101, 105, 108 f., 113, 122, 131, 145, 169 f., 200–202, 206, 232, 237, 267, 272 Critical theory 110 f., 117, 197 f., 200, 203, 210 Democracy 30, 36, 38, 91, 116, 213–220, 223, 241, 253 Demystification 54–57, 60–62, 65, 137, 140, 142 f., 146, 154 Emancipation 31, 54, 60, 116, 133, 179, 199 f., 209 f., 214 f., 256, 258, 260–262, 267 Enlightenment 54, 57, 69 f., 75, 94, 101, 114, 180, 210, 253

Ethics 4 f., 35, 41, 55, 57–59, 62–64, 66, 69, 93 f., 109, 117, 152, 180, 241–243, 247 f., 252 f., 275 Foundation 25, 29 f., 32, 38, 54 f., 58, 61, 66, 72, 77, 104, 119, 141, 143, 154–156, 159, 162, 182, 186, 188, 192 f., 198, 240 f., 248, 250, 257 f., 274 Hermeneutics 5, 9, 37, 55, 61–65, 67, 70, 74–79, 135, 138, 145, 154–156, 160, 242, 265–267, 270 Idealism 39 f., 58, 73, 78, 151 Irresponsibility 4, 8, 56, 87, 253 Justice 28 f., 36, 38, 53 f., 66, 80, 114, 116, 213, 220, 240 f., 243 f., 246–249, 253, 255 f., 260–262, 264 f., 267–271, 275 Law

3, 6, 23, 29, 31, 70–73, 80, 85, 94, 109, 122, 131, 159, 170, 213, 239–244, 246–250, 255–275 Literature 3 f., 6 f., 37, 85, 87–90, 93–95, 97, 109, 133, 135 f., 138 f., 140 f., 146 f., 150–154, 156, 158 f., 167, 169, 175, 179–184, 192–193, 233 Metaphysics 2, 13, 18, 22 f., 25 f., 32 f., 41, 54 f., 57, 69 f., 73, 108, 110–112, 117, 150 f., 154, 157, 159, 162, 241 f., 244, 250, 257 f., 260, 263, 267, 269 Myth 7, 44, 60–62, 80, 87, 92 f., 99, 121, 135–147, 149–160, 183, 197, 199 f., 241

296

Index Rerum

Narrative 48 f., 53, 61–65, 80, 85–87, 93, 129, 137–139, 143 f., 149, 181 f., 235 f. Norm 50, 58 f., 61, 63–65, 85, 98, 115 f., 118, 136, 140, 161, 183, 214, 226, 232, 246, 257–263, 272, 275 Ontology 23, 69–71, 75–77, 109 f., 116, 118, 125, 131, 151, 157, 167, 213, 217–223 Politics 3–7, 30, 35, 44, 46, 48, 53, 56, 59, 62 f., 66, 69–71, 85–87, 93, 108–110, 116, 120, 122, 128, 131, 133–134, 136, 152, 154, 201, 213–223, 234, 225, 229, 232, 234 f., 237, 239–243, 248, 250, 252 f., 255 f., 258–264, 267–269, 272 f.

Postmodernism 5, 57, 93, 97 f., 114, 146, 179, 197, 206, 243, 256 f., 259–263, 267–269, 275 Rational/Rationality 9, 30 f., 45, 48, 53–71, 76, 85, 88, 98, 100 f., 105, 115, 117, 127, 154, 198, 205–210, 214–216, 227, 229 f., 236, 255, 257, 262–264, 267, 270 Relativism 54, 94, 258, 261, 263 Religion 31, 44, 46, 54, 59 f., 80, 85, 92, 138 Responsibility 5 f., 8, 29, 35, 37, 45, 56, 62, 66, 93 f., 144 f., 253 Truth 2–4, 55, 65 f., 75–77, 92 f., 114 f., 117, 131, 142, 146, 153 f., 156, 162, 179, 198 f., 258, 260 f., 263, 265–275 Writer 85, 88–91, 136, 173, 184, 192

Name Index Abastado, Claude 100, 102 Abel, Gnter 221 f. Abraham 31 Adorno, Gretel 252 Adorno, Theodor W. 7, 45–47, 54, 57, 69, 89, 93, 197–210, 251-253 Agamemnon 140 Albouy, Pierre 151 Alice in Wonderland 27 Allen, Woody 39 Althusser, Louis 89, 197 Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe 169 Andronico, Alberto 3, 7, 239 f., 243, 253, 256 f. Anouilh, Jean 138, 141, 144, 159 Antigone 138, 141, 144, 151 f., 154, 159 Antoine, Rgis 183 Apel, Karl-Otto 57, 76 Aquinas, Thomas 78, 255, 263, 272274 Arac, Jonathan 3 Aristotle 9, 30, 263, 269, 271 f., 274, Arnim, Achim von 103 f. Artaud, Antonin 86, 88, 90–92, 145 Atlan, Henri 228 Augustine of Hippo 240 Austin, J. L. 80, 118, 158 Bacchae 145 Bach, Johann Sebastian 78 Bachelard, Gaston 89 Baldessari, John 107 f. Balkin, Jack M. 244, 247, 256 f. Barcellona, Mario 264 Barthes, Roland 86, 89, 97, 160 Bataille, Georges 90 f. Bateson, Gregory 228 Baudelaire, Charles 141 Beardsworth, Richard 3

Beckett, Samuel 86–89, 91, 138 Beethoven, Ludwig van 78 Benhabib, Seyla 58, 64, 235 Benjamin, Walter 14, 93, 166, 241, 252 f. Benveniste, mile 138 Ber, Claude 145 Berger, Peter 233 f. Berman, Antoine 167 Berti, Enrico 265 f., 274 f. Biggiero, Luca 227 Blair, Tony 213 Blanchot, Maurice 86–90, 136, 145, 245 Blasucci, Luigi 172 Bloom, Harold 159 f. Blumenberg, Hans 139 Boccioni, Umberto 119 Boggio Marzet Tremoloso, Giulia 7, 9, 149 Bçhler, Dietrich 76 Bollack, Jean 156, 160 Boros, Jnos 257 Borradori, Giovanna 243 Boulogne, Jacques 154 Bovary, Emma 44 Boyle, James 244 Boyle, Joseph 263, 272 Brahms, Johannes 78 Brault, Grgoire 182 Breton, Andr 88, 98–104, 162 Brubaker, Roger 234–236 Bruera, Franca 7, 9, 135, 142 Brunel, Pierre 149, 152, 156 Brunette, Peter 111 Bruni, Leonardo 164 f. Bubner, Rdiger 12 Burr, Vivien 235 Caillois, Roger

100

298

Name Index

Calvino, Italo 163 f. Campbell, Shelley 9, 160 Camus, Albert 144 Caputo, John D. 40, 42 Carlson, David 3 Carrino, Agostino 244 Carroll, Lewis 27, 38 Casanova, Jos 60 Cassirer, Ernst 74 Castoriadis, Cornelius 30, 77 Cattin, Emmanuel 7, 13 Cazeaux, Clive 7, 107 Cline, Louis-Ferdinand 86 Cprou, Indian chief 187 Certeau, Michel de 128 Cerulo, Karen A. 233 Chanel, Coco 141 Char, Ren 99, 169 f., 172, 175–177 Cheah, Pheng 3 Chirhalwirwa, Gervais 187, 191, Chiurazzi, Gaetano 10 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 162, 267 f., 271 Claussen, Detlev 210 f. Clemens, Justin 109 Clinton, Bill 213 Clot, Yves 49 Cocteau, Jean 138, 140–143, 146 Colas, Hubert 145 Compagnon, Antoine 146 Connolly, William 109, 213 f. Cooper, Frederick 234–236 Copp, David 229 Cornell, Drucilla 3, 240 Craig-Martin, Michael 107 f., 110, 114, 133 Cramer, Konrad 266 Crevel, Ren 104 Critchley, Simon 109, 116 f. Culler, Jonathan 3, 260 Cunico, Gerardo 57, 59 Curi, Fausto 139 D’Agostino, Francesco 268 Damas, Gabrielle 190 Damas, Lon-Gontran 179-193, D’Arbella, Edmondo 170 f. de Man, Paul 35

de Montaigne, Michel 250 Deleuze, Gilles 55, 86, 88, 90, 92, 145, 179 Deremetz, Alain 151 Derrida, Jacques 2–9, 28–37, 39–43, 55, 86–88, 90, 94, 109–111, 113, 116–118, 120, 122, 130 f., 133, 140, 149, 153, 155–159, 161 f., 164, 166 f., 169 f., 172, 216 f., 219–221, 239–253, 256 f., 261, 264 Dewey, John 258 f. DeWolfe Howe, Mark 259 Di Blasi, Fulvio 272, 275 Dilthey, Wilhelm 69, 78 Disney, Walt 239 Djebar, Assia 163 Dçrre, Klaus 48 Douzinas, Costas 242 Droysen, Johann Gustav 73 Dumont, Louis 260 Durand, Gilbert 144, 149, 151 f., 154–156 Duras, Marguerite 86 f., 89 Duvenage, Pieter 116 f., 127 Dworkin, Ronald 242 Ehrenberg, Alain 43 Eliot, T. S. 138 f., 141 Emina, Antonella 7, 9, 179 Ernst, Max 97 Errera, Andrea 268 Euripides 156, 159 Eurydice 143 Fairhurst, Angus 108 Favry, Claude 97 Fdida, Pierre 90 f. Feltham, Oliver 109 Fenichel, Otto 203, 207 Ferraris, Maurizio 9, 56, 249, 251, 253 Ferry, Jean-Marc 7, 9, 54, 56, 58 f., 63–67, 69, 79, 142 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 72, 78, 103 Finnis, John Mitchell 263 f., 272 Fish, Stanley 149, 256 Foerster, Heinz von 226

Name Index

Foster, Hal 98 Foucault, Michel 55, 89 f., 102, 197, 214, 226, 256, 262 Frank, Manfred 39 f. Frege, Gottlob 80 Freud, Sigmund 53, 86 f., 90, 135, 197, 200–206, 208 Fried, Lewis L. B. 3 Fritsch, Matthias 217, 219, 221 Frivaldszky, Jnos 7, 255, 260, 265 f., 269, 271, 273, 275 Fubini, Mario 172 Fulton, Hamish 120 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 75–77, 265 f. Genet, Jean 89 Genette, Grard 146, 150, 159 George, Robert P. 257, 264 Gergen, Kenneth J. 235 Gey, Steven G. 261 Gide, Andr 159 Giono, Jean 140, 142–144 Giraudoux, Jean 140 Giuliani, Alessandro 269 Glasersfeld, Ernst von 226 Glissant, Edouard 179, 181 Gçdel, Kurt 34 Godzich, Wlad 3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 47 Goffman, Erving 234 Goodrich, Peter 3, 239 Gracq, Julien 136 Gray, Carole 120 Green, Andr 85 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 182 f. Grisez, Germain 263, 272 Grossi, Paolo 260 Grossman, Evelyne 7, 85, 88 Guattari, Flix 92, 145, 179 Guerlac, Suzanne 3 Haacke, Hans 120 Habermas, Jrgen 4, 9, 56–60, 63 f., 67, 94, 109 f., 114–120, 122, 127–133, 210, 214 Hales, Steven D. 227 Hamlet 249

299

Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus 250, 255, 272, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 48, 70–73, 76, 78, 80, 89 Heidegger, Martin 7, 13–26, 29, 39, 54 f., 70, 76, 78, 90, 112, 116, 127, 250 Heraclitus 27, 38 Heritier, Paolo 9, 249 Hervada, Javier 265 Hirst, Damien 108 Hobbes, Thomas 222, 240 Hobsbawm, Eric 137 Hoffmann, Florian 3 Hçlderlin, Friedrich 88 f. Holmes, Oliver Wendell 257, 259 Homer 78, 223 Honegger, Arthur 141 Honig, Bonnie 213 f. Horkheimer, Max 54, 57, 69 f., 117, 198–201, 205, 210 Huddy, Leonie 233 Hullot-Kentor, Robert 200 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 69 Hume, Gary 108 Hsch, Sebastian 10 Husserl, Edmund 53, 76, 241, 253 Inglehart, Ronald 60 Ingram, David 58 Ionesco, Eug ne 145 Izutsu, Toshihiko 245 Jakobson, Roman 138, 163–165, 168 James, William 257-260 Jenkins, Richard 233 Jesi, Furio 154 Joas, Hans 60, 62 Jocasta 140 Jolles, Andr 138 Jonas, Hans 94 Joyce, James 86, 138 Kafka, Franz 138 Kaitaro, Timo 7, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105 Kant, Immanuel 70–72, 78, 88, 112, 115 f., 123, 240, 253

300

Name Index

Kates, Joshua 3 Kelman, Mark 244 Kelsen, Hans 250 Kennedy, Duncan 244 Kester, Grant 128 King Louis XIII 186 Koj ve, Alexandre 89 Kronick, Joseph G. 3 Kuschner, Eva 151 Lacan, Jacques 87–90, 93, 197 Ladmiral, Jean-Ren 166 Lafont, Cristina 58 f. Landy, Michael 108 Laski, Harold Joseph 259 Le Brun, Annie 97 f., 105 Legendre, Pierre 61 Leibniz, Gottfried 71, 222 Leone, Sergio 121 Leopardi, Giacomo 161, 169, 172–175 Lro, tienne 185 Lessenich, Stephan 48 Lvi-Strauss, Claude 89, 139, 197 Levinas, Emmanuel 88-90, 241, 264 Lvy, Pierre 91 Lzy, Emmanuel 187 Liddell, Henry George 164 f., 169, 171, 173 Limb 189 Lingua, Graziano 7, 9, 53, 60, 137 Long, Richard 120 Lucas, Sarah 108 Luckmann, Thomas 233 f. Luhmann, Niklas 46, 262 Luisetti, Federico 10 Luther, Martin 240 Lyon, David 236 f. Lyotard, Jean-FranÅois 89 MacIntyre, Alasdair 61 Magritte, Ren 97 Maiso, Jordi 7, 197 Malinowski, Bronislav 137 Malins, Julian 120 Mandeville, Bernard 71 Manzin, Maurizio 255 Marcuse, Herbert 202, 204–206

Maritain, Jacques 274 Markantonatos, Gherasimos 170 Marramao, Giacomo 59 Martin, Wallace 3 Martinengo, Alberto 1, 62, 137, 140 Marx, Karl 53, 135, 198, 248 Maturana, Humberto R. 226 Maximin, Daniel 190 McCarthy, Thomas 109 McVeigh, Shaun 242 Medea 142, 144, 151 f., 159 Melville, Stephen 113 f., 117 Mengoni, Luigi 263 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 92 Michaux, Henri 86, 89 Michelfelder, Diane P. 242 Minda, Gary 244, 256 Mittasch, Alwin 221 Molnar, Thomas 260 f. Monceri, Flavia 7, 225, 228 f. Montefiore, Allan 41 Mouffe, Chantal 7, 213–220 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 78 Murphy, Mark C. 263 Musset, Alfred de 99 Nancy, Jean-Luc 86, 89, 92 Ndagano, Biringanine 187, 191 Nelson, Daniel Mark 275 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1 f., 88, 90, 135, 220–223, 228 No l, Bernard 136 Nogler, Luca 263 Norris, Christopher 3, 10, 60 Noug, Paul 100, 105 Oedipus 144, 151, 159 OÇate y Zuba, Teresa 10 Orestes 144 Orpheus 142 f., 145 f., 154 Ostovich, Stephen T. 130 f. Ounanian, Steven Levon 121–125, 131 f. Padovani, Andrea 270 Palmer, Richard E. 242 Parin, Paul 209 Pascal, Blaise 250

Name Index

Pascher, Manfred 263 Patton, Paul 222 Paul, Jeremy 244 Peirce, Charles Sanders 80, 257 f. Prec, Georges 135 Perelman, Cham 265 Prez de Tudela Velasco, Jorge 7, 27 Picasso, Pablo 141 Plato 29 Poerksen, Bernhard 226 Play, Elemr 267 f. Pope, Simon 120 Prometheus 152, 154 Protagoras 274 Proust, Marcel 86 Putnam, Hilary 4–6, 8 f., 56 Py, Olivier 145 f. Racine, Roman 151 Ranke, Leopold von 73 Rankin, Jenny 61 Rawls, John 214 Regazzoni, Simone 3 Reginster, Bernard 227 Reicher, Stephen 233 Resta, Caterina 3, 247 f. Rickert, Heinrich 69 Ricoeur, Paul 56, 60–63, 65, 67, 79, 93, 135, 140, 146, 182 Rimbaud, Arthur 103 f. Rivi re, Jacques 88 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 136 Robelin, Jean 7, 39 Romano, Bruno 239, 262 Rorty, Richard 55, 256-262, 267 Rosenfeld, Michel 3, 239, 244 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 78 Roux, Franca 169, 175 Royle, Nicholas 3 Rummens, Stefan 218 f. Saar, Martin 222 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 169 f., 172, 174, 176 f. Sarraute, Nathalie 135 Sartre, Jean-Paul 90, 97, 136, 144 Scandroglio, Tommaso 272 Schlag, Pierre 244

301

Schlegel, Friedrich 39, 69 Schmitt, Carl 217–220, 222, 240 Schrçder, Gerhard 213 Schultz, William R. 3 Schrmann, Reiner 18 f., 21 Scott, Robert 164 f., 169, 171, 173 Searles, Harold 91 Segre, Cesare 146 Sehgal, Tino 120 Senghor, Lopold Sdar 183 Serres, Michel 91 Sichirollo, Livio 266, 271 Siemens, Herman W. 7, 213 Siganos, Andr 151, 154 f. Siguro, Marino 169–172, 175–177 Simmel, Georg 47 f. Smith, Adam 71 Socrates 86 Sophocles 141, 159 Spengler, Oswald 53 Spiridopoulou, Maria 7, 161, 176 Stamatakos, Ioannis 171 Stambaugh, Joan 112 Stannard, Kate 121 f. Starling, Simon 121 f. Staten, Henry 216 Steiner, George 173 Stender, Wolfram 199, 206 Stravinsky, Igor 78 Sullivan, Graham 110 Tavor Bannet, Eve 167 f. Taylor, Charles 60 f. Taylor, Mark C. 228 Thomassen, Lasse 4 Tilgher, Adriano 172 Tolstoy, Leo 159 Tosel, Andr 60 Trousson, Raymond 151 f., 154, 156 Tushnet, Mark 244 Ulysses 138, 140, 142–144 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 244 Vaghenas, Nasos 169, 171 f., 175–177 Valence, Eugene 164 Valentini, Alvaro 169, 172

302

Name Index

Varela, Francisco J. 226 Vattimo, Gianni 9, 55, 251, 256 Vercellone, Federico 9 Viehweg, Theodor 266 Villa, Dana 214 Villey, Michel 255, 265 f., 268 f., 271 Vismann, Cornelia 3 Warrington, Ronnie Watson, Mike 67

Watzlawick, Paul 226 Weber, Max 53 f., 80 Wellmer, Albrecht 64, 114–118, 127 Welshon, Rex 227 Wiehl, Reiner 266 Wills, David 111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 80, 173 Wolf, Christa 135, 159 Wong, James 233

242 Yourcenar, Marguerite

140