Summary post by Anderson Mackenzie : This essay is a chapter taken from Critchley’s book, The Ethics of Deconstruction. The major project for the book as a whole is to illustrate Critchley’s contention that deconstruction, as a method of reading philosophy, necessarily involves an ethical demand. In an earlier chapter of the book Critchley makes clear that the notion of ethics which the deconstructive method correlates to is not that of philosophical tradition but rather that of Levinas. “Clotural Readings II” is the fourth chapter in the book; it engages Levinas’s readings of Derrida’s work in order to follow Levinas as he attempts to discern and describe the ethical position of the deconstructive method. Critchley illustrates these folded readings, Levinas in a sense deconstructing Derrida’s deconstructions, through three different lens: time, skepticism, and indication. Each of these sections could stand along as a brief but rich reading of the conjunction between these two thinkers. I will attempt to treat each section, drawing out the claims of primary importance and interest.
The section on time is called It’s Today Tomorrow and begins with the question of whether Levinas understands Derrida’s work to be against the philosophical tradition or simply repeating it. Critchley notes that Levinas views a
trajectory of critical philosophy with its origins in Kant, developed by Husserl, and completed by Derrida. Here already we get the indication of where Critchley is headed. Derrida is both within the tradition and a challenge to
it. Specifically, the critical lineage Derrida is attached to is that of the critique of metaphysics and the transcendental illusion, the idea that a priori forms of reason constitute the nature of ultimate reality and therefore human understanding can achieve an absolute comprehension of something like god. Kant began this project, and Husserl contributed to it: “By bringing Being back from its sojourn in a supersensible Platonic realm and giving it over to appearance…”(148). Derrida thinks through the end of metaphysics, according to Levinas, through his challenge to the possibility of the plenitude of the presence. Despite Husserl’s advance for critical philosophy, his notion of presence remained problematic, and it is through his challenge that Derrida continues the critical project. The point of this challenge is that “The immediacy of experience is the new transcendental illusion” (149). Derrida laces his critique into the preceding critiques of Husserl and Kant. If Kant and Husserl’s work lead to an equivalence of Being and appearance, Derrida’s work indicates that the phenomenon always slips away from the phenomenologist. Following this discussion Critchley suggests, in a claim that he thinks resonates with the thoughts of Levinas, that deconstruction may be operative between the break with philosophical tradition and its continuity according to a logic of closure. Critchley reads “Wholly Otherwise” very closely to discern the character of deconstruction as Levinas sees it, attempting to play out the critique of presence Derrida fosters and which Levinas finds so satisfying. In this light, the trace is noted as a sign for an absolute past which has never been present. The trace leads towards ethical subjectivity and the deconstruction of presence which reveals this trace is methodologically ethical. Critchley asserts that for Levinas, “…the futural movement of difference, its temporization, which always defers the fulfillment, or parousia, of presence, is reabsorbed into the present, fissuring the latter and usurping its authority” (154). However, simply due to the operation of this critique within the tradition, an effect of the challenge is in fact a restoration. Even in criticizing presence, in splitting it open, presence endures and is preserved. This doubled reading and doubled writing belongs to what Critchley calls the logic of closure.
The second section of the chapter is called Scepticism. Levinas is simply a satisfied reader of Derrida and has important concerns to raise. In a move we may find reminiscent of Derrida’s own critical posture in Violence and
Metaphysics, Levinas suggests that “What remains constructed after the de-construction is certainly the stern architecture of the de-constructing discourse which employs the present tense of the verb to be in predicative
propositions” (156). It seems that perhaps neither Levinas nor Derrida are able to wholly avoid the logocentric language of philosophy’s tradition. The question is then raised as to whether deconstruction, far from being a radical innovation, is merely a modern version of skepticism. Critchley suggests that while neither Derrida nor Levinas are engaging skeptical projects, Levinas sees a homology between the refutation of skepticism and critiques of his work. In the Levinasian view that ontology refuses transcendence by an endeavor towards totalizing comprehension, the refutation of skepticism has been instrumental in that process. This refutation is already clear in Plato, and is recapitulated in Husserl’s phenomenology. Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein made Heidegger doubtful of whether a skeptical position was even tenable without suicide. Levinas’s shift is to acknowledge skepticism as that which always returns to be refuted; it is a ghost within the tradition. Critchley notes that in this thought Levinas finds a strange alliance with Hegel who also respected skepticism for its resistance to dogmatism. Levinas asserts that there is an irreducible difference between skepticism and its refutation, and that this difference is effectively a diachrony that initiates a movement not ontologically simultaneous but transcendent. It is this quality in skepticism, and the skeptical quality in Derrida that appeals to Levinas. Skepticism is here proximate to the movement by which the ethical Saying can only be said by way of ontological thematization that denies it, but which temporizes diachronically through the trace. It is Critchley’s aim to indicate that deconstruction is diachronic and therefore fosters the disparity between the Said and the Saying, thus signifying the ethical despite its betrayal in ontological proposition. Critchley spends a significant amount of time reviewing the diachrony between the Saying and the Said in Levinas’s work, as it is the demonstration of this diachrony that makes deconstruction ethical. He notes Levinas’s position that the philosopher’s project is the reduction of the Said to the Saying through a logic of skepticism or of interruption. We may also understand here a parallel movement of interruption in Levinas Otherwise than Being, in Derrida’s deconstructive method, and in the ethical subjectivity itself. Critchley’s review of this movement is effective and takes the time to play out this notion in both the writings of Levinas and its relations to the work of other thinkers. I think that this second section of the chapter offers a very clear and effective reading of the Saying/Said relation through the lens of skepticism. Critchley writes: “It is as if skepticism were sensitive to the difference between my unthematizable ethical relation to the Other and the ontological thematization of this relation,” and further, “Ethics signifies enigmatically, as a determinate pattern of oscillation, or alternation. One might say that ethics signifies undecidably” (167-8). Critchley concludes this section by suggesting that both Levinas and Derrida indicate that ontology and ethics do not constitute an opposition but are actually interdependent.
The final section of the chapter is called Indication. This section begins with Levinas’s critique of Derrida for fostering his deconstruction of presence without leaving the gnoseological signification of meaning; which is to say that Derrida maintains the theory of knowledge he adopts from his predecessors, particularly Husserl. There are two aspects to this Levinasian critique. The first aspect is that Derrida’s characterization of philosophy as a metaphysics of presence allows for the deconstruction of presence but not for a statement of non-metaphysical positivity. Derrida travels a path of negation that does not articulate the Other positively. Critchley wants to claim that despite this deficiency Derrida’s work signifies the ethical because it declares that the history of philosophy says more than it wants to say. In proposing totality it names the ethical. Hidden in the noise of ontology is the whisper of an originary ethics. The second aspect of the critique is centered on Husserl’s notion of indication. Levinas’s position is that Derrida fails to radicalize this notion, a movement that would open onto the ethical. What follows from Critchley is a summary of the Husserlian analysis of the ambiguity of signs, and the distinction between expressive and indicative signs. In brief, Husserl wants to affirm the expressive sign as that which is identical to its meaning and the indicative as that which is associated with non-given, non-identical associations. Husserl’s theory of meaning, which privileges the expressive, necessitates that despite practical interlacing between these two kinds of signs they are fundamentally distinct. It is this threshold of distinction that Derrida deconstructs in his text Voice and Phenomenon. Derrida’s position is that the practical entanglement of these signs is not reducible but constitutional; as Critchley reports: “…at the origin, indication is always added to expression in a relation or logic of supplementarity” (173). Derrida’s move is to complicate the origin necessary for Husserl’s theory of meaning by hopelessly entangling expression and indication. Where Levinas aims to go further is in the radicalization of indication. He will affirm that the terms of an indicative relation are not identical in the way expressive meaning is logically identical. Thus Levinas will declare an extrinsicality between the indicated and the indicator. Here we should immediately recognize the method at work: Levinas is finding diachrony and otherness within the indicative sign. As the ethical arises from exteriority we can also see that this movement towards diachrony is also a movement towards the ethical nature of indication. Indication, as a kind of ethical speech, acknowledges and traces the separation between the same and the other. The difference between Derrida and Levinas here is that while Derrida effectively recognized the infection of expression by the
exteriority of indication, he did not see that in doing so he had found the trace of the ethical.
Following this point Critchley moves on to consider the mode of articulating these signs, particularly the distinction between the verbal and the nonverbal. This distinction does not resound to that between signification and non-signification. Signification for Levinas is not simply verbal, it is facial in the very particular sense of the face that Levinas offers. Critchley’s concluding remarks refer to the non-verbal quality of ethical signification. The core point here is that the primary and originary signification is sensibility, vulnerability to the world. For those who are interested in such things, the final pages of this chapter describe the relationship between sensibility and animality in order to complicate criticisms of Levinas for his humanism and anthropocentrism.
This essay is thorough and careful in its reading of both Levinas and Derrida. It is clear in announcing its intentions and following through on them. I believe that it is certainly a powerful articulation of the ethical character of deconstruction. In addition, the engagement with the philosophical tradition, particularly Husserl’s theory of meaning, is immensely valuable.
Posted by Anderson Mackenzie
