This article is useful for any of you seeking to bring dimensions of gender into Derrida’s discussions of political community, specifically the impasse between universality and singularity, and the undecidability of justice. For Diane Perpich, critical engagement with the notion of sexual difference in relation to political desire opens up possibilities to move beyond (if not fully overcome) the conceptual impossibility of justice, and to resolve the impasse between universality and singularity in relation to political belonging. Despite the author’s intentions, I personally felt the article served as a compelling illustration of the difficulty of getting beyond these aporias. However, it is smart and incisive, and worth reading for anyone interested in engaging these questions.
Summary:
In “Universality, Singularity, and Sexual Difference” Diane Perpich reads Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray (among others) to reflect on political community and explore the links she perceives between problems of universality, singularity, justice, and sexual difference. Structuring her discussion into three sections, she begins by developing the problematic of singularity and universality in Derrida’s The Politics of Frienship. She proceeds to question the implications of this discussion for Derrida’s understanding of justice as impossible and necessary. Finally, she considers Luce Irigaray’s contention that “the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference,” in order to ask “whether Derrida’s reinterpretation of the desire animating political community is one in which women’s desire(s) can find a place” (447).
In her introduction, Perpich considers Derrida’s reading of the relation of fraternity and a “schematic of filiation” to friendship, politics, and conjunctions of the two in the philosophical tradition. She identifies as a central aim of The Politics of Friendship a struggle to rethink the relation between politics and friendship beyond the ‘homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema’ that dominates the traditional discourse. This framework serves as a foundation to contextualize the dilemmas she examines in her article and informs her arguments about them. In the first section, Perpich draws from The Politics of Friendship to interrogate the dynamic between inclusion and exclusion, taking up the question of who belongs to the “we” of a given community. She questions whether any exclusive “we” is capable of doing justice to the universalist demands of justice. Perpich notes that this dilemma cannot be resolved by universalizing principles (such as universal inclusion), nor through a procedural (rather than substantive) concept of justice, which would pose universalizability as the justification of normative claims. She emphasizes astutely that these claims to universality are still particularist, both in their privileging of a certain notion of reason, and in the process of neutralizing homogenization that stems from a disregard for particularism. She quotes Judith Butler, who suggests that the claims of political community to universality must be repeatedly established “by erasing all remnants of those wills it excludes from the domain of representation” (in Perpich 449).
Moving from “politics” to “friendship,” Perpich outlines the tensions Derrida observes between the competing models of friendship-that based on similarity, positing the friend as the second self, and that based on difference, as a relation the incommensurable other. She highlights Derrida’s reading of the tension in friendship’s relation to virtue. Acknowledging that it seems right to suggest that one could not befriend the “wicked,” she notes also that there is something at odds with the idea of friendship to suggest “I will love you only if you are virtuous” (450). There is thus a tension in friendship between what is “universal and loveable as such” (virtue) and that which is absolutely singular-unnamable and particular to the friend.
Through his readings of politics and friendship, Derrida brings the relation between singularity and universality to an impasse. He writes that “there is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends,” which implies the “calculation of majorities,” and “identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal” (in Perpich 452). Acknowledging the Levinasian resonances, Perpich points to Levinas’ assertion that the paradoxical position of being in relation to more than one Other is “the birth of politics which conjoins us to ‘compare incomparables’ but also the very birth of the question, of the need for the rational delibaration characteristic of justice” (452). For Derrida, this is irreconcilable.
In the second section, succinctly titled “Justice: Impossible and Necessary,” Perpich explains that the impetus for her article comes from her dissatisfaction with the idea of justice as impossible. Her objection is not with the idea that justice is merely empirically unrealizable, rather with the “conceptual impossibility” of justice that Derrida suggests-the claim that justice is impossible in principle. She asks: “If justice literally demands the impossible of us, what is the sense of our continued commitment to it?” (453). Perpich locates a space for possibilities in the concept of political desire. For Derrida, the disjunction between the demand for singularity and the demand for universality is the opening of political desire. Perpich argues that if this disjunctive desire confirms undecidability at the heart of the political, this undecidability is not ethically neutral. If the form and content of justice cannot be specified in advance, it does not mean that any form or content is permissible. It denotes neither moral indifference, nor a privileging of individual self-interest.
In the final section, “From Fraternity to Sexual Difference,” Perpich returns to Derrida’s critique of the “filial schematic” to elaborate the notion of desire. She asserts that Derrida’s reconceptualization of the political bond as a futural relation succeeds in reinterpreting democratic politics beyond the traditional andocentric and homo-fraternal schemata. However, Perpich questions whether the absence of such a schematic risks the absence of a “sufficiently rich connection to a wider web of psycho-social realities, including the body, kinship, family, the natural and biological world, and the like” (455). Does it mean an erasure of sexual difference from the scene of politics? To illustrate her concern, Perpich points to arguments that link the persistence of patriarchy to the failure to examine relations between the state and the family in theories of justice.
Perpich attempts to show that Luce Irigaray’s discussion of sexual difference serves to extend Derrida’s rethinking of political community in a way that “goes beyond merely avoiding the andocentricism of political fratriarchy to embrace both the brother and sister” without neutralizing them or erasing their difference (456). Common to both Derrida and Irigaray, Perpich identifies a conception of justice as the capacity for recognition of absolute alterity. For Irigaray, however, the absolutely other “is the one who differs from me sexually” (in Perpich, 456). Thus, justice is evaluated according to its capacity to affirm sexual difference, which is “at one and the same time the most particular and the most universal model” (in Perpich, 456). Further, sexual difference for Irigaray, like Derrida’s justice, shares the structure of being “impossible but necessary.” For Irigaray, sexual difference does not as yet exist, the feminine only having been defined in negative relation to the masculine, thus producing only a single sexuality. Thus, Perpich sees another parallel to Derrida in Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference as envisioned in the future, to come. It is a fecundity opened up in the caress between the I and the Other.
As Irigaray seeks to move beyond the impasse between universality and singularity, she emphasizes that universality has been thought on the basis of “one,” whereas nature in reality is always two, and thus already inscribed with limit. In her view, sexual difference is a “universal related to our real person.” Every man and woman is a particular individual, but universal through their gender (458). Being gendered, then, forecloses the possibility of claiming to stand for all of humanity. One is not the whole, but neither does one “coincide fully with one’s singular self” (458).
In closing, Perpich concludes that in providing for political desire, Derrida allows something more to be made of political belonging than a self-interested choice or a contingent social given. For Perpich, Irigaray’s account elaborates this structure of belonging more concretely. In so doing, it offers an argument that it is possible for political desire to avoid the homofraternal and phallogocentric schema of the past without becoming abstract, neutral, divorced from sexuality, genealogy, and history.
***Note: I am highly critical of several of these arguments, particularly toward the end. In the interest of (deadline) time, I am posting this summary as is. I will edit it shortly to add my critique on the end.
