Derrida argues that one has to both accept the other unconditionally and question them. The critical point is that the questioning must not be a condition. Hospitality must not depend upon what the other person’s identity is, but rather on acknowledging the other person’s distinct identity. This is a fragile distinction, but it is crucial. The extension of hospitality requires creativity. Naas quotes Derrida in saying that hospitality is “an art and a poetics” despite its political and ethical aspects, and that it should be reinvented every time (10). This focus on a hospitality that can be reshaped for each situation is very significant in its limitlessness, because it allows for any arrivant. An artful hospitality is an unconditional hospitality and one that deconstructs borders.

Naas argues that deconstruction is hospitality. He says that deconstruction is an affirmation of the best things about philosophy and life, and because of this, it is hospitality to the tradition or philosophy, as well as “to what exceeds and cannot be identified within the tradition” (11). In Derrida’s close textual analyses of the works he deconstructs, Derrida draws our attention to what else is there in the texts, to a further understanding of the concepts but with a respect to their original context. Naas contends that Derrida asked Alors qui êtes-vous? of everyone he read. In that question he addresses the singularity of their names. Deconstruction although not always welcome, welcomes the event in what is being deconstructed. Naas argues that the event is like the arrivant in that it is unforeseeable and importantly “disrupt[s] all our expectations” (12). Derrida’s deconstruction was hospitality, and as unconditional, always gave hospitality to the event.

Derrida, Naas asserts, was an heir to the tradition of philosophy and took that role seriously. Derrida said that the role of the heir is to reaffirm the past that we receive without a choice, but we also have to respond to if as a “free subject”. For him, to be alive was to be defined by the tension of being an heir. Derrida reshaped his inheritance in his own name. Naas begins his article by expressing the temptation to engage in some sort of “final judgment” on Derrida’s life and work, but he resists and instead adopts Blanchot’s idea that “those who were closest [to the deceased] say only what was close to them, not the distance that affirmed itself in this proximity, and distance ceases as soon as presence ceases (6, 7). Naas wrote a very personal article about Derrida, exposing what Naas himself feels is most important or moving in the inheritance that Derrida leaves behind, and committing to be an heir of that inheritance.

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.

Wise sees Derrida as a potential representative of alternative, more oral and aural modes of knowing and learning and, though very “literate” in the European, white sense of the word, de-stigmatizes illiteracy as it exists in Africa and elsewhere. He goes on to argue that Judeo-Muslims are skeptical of the written word, and find truth in the non-visually identifiable and non-reifiable God. The word of God or the prophets is heard not seen.

Wise compares the Judeo-Mulsims’ privilege of aurality paired with the misconception of slavish devotion to literacy to common misunderstandings of Derrida’s work which deconstructs Christian philosophical skepticism of the written word. Wise’s intention in this essay is to locate Derrida as a semitic thinker, an identity which brings with it its own ethnocentric imperialism, and an ideology to which he would never admit. He does this partially through a thorough investigation of the eye and visual knowing.

Ultimately, Wise appreciates Derrida’s more African-friendly critique of Marx and of writing, while also locating him within his own Judeo-Muslim ethnocentrism and recognizes his inability to stand in for black African voices at the conference, which Wise feels he wound up doing.

Discourse within modern day liberal democracies is increasingly imbued with rhetoric and discussion concerning rights. While the incentive for the acquisition of certain rights may be understood or interpreted in various ways from differing perspectives across the political spectrum, as demonstrated by Samuel A. Chambers in the early pages of his essay, “Ghostly Rights”, a fundamental quality influencing the nature of rights is ultimately excluded from the rights dialogue: the spectralquality of rights themselves. However, as Chambers illustrates, rights dialogues are indeed inextricably linked to a ghostly presence, to a hauntology which renders rights themselves as unreal.Staging the argument around the issue of same-sex marriage and the broader issue of queer rights, Chambers claims that, when made in the language of rights, certain particular struggles by disenfranchised groups, such as the struggle for the right to gay marriage, can serve as hegemonic articulations which point and aim ultimately to a larger universal political goals towards equal distribution of constitutional privileges. It is the rights dialogue which initiates the hegemonic articulation; it serves as the conductor from the particular to the broader universal. In this case, the particular or local struggle for gay marriage takes on the role of the “empty signifier”, or a term which has the potential to be impregnated with signified content that points towards a broader universal, here being the extension of the financial, medical, and other social benefits tied to the institution of marriage. This very breaching of the particular/universal divide, and the contamination of the universal by the particular, shows us that the universal is always haunted.In order to justify this breach, Chambers challenges the ideas of traditional Kantian formalism, a philosophical logic that separates the universal (transcendental) and the concrete or local (empirical) into two separate, non-convergent planes. This ethical dualism sets the groundwork for a basis of moral action which is founded entirely on the formal, entirely on reason, and excludes the historical and concrete from the equation. Implicit to this rationale is an element of timelessness, an idea that the universal is always already determined. It is this ‘timeless misconception’ which posits the notion of rights in the universal realm, out of reach of any influence from the particular, and therefore into stagnancy. Chambers proposes a new understanding of rights as existing in a space between the universal and particular in a way which recognizes time as being “out-of-joint”, in other words spectral. “The spectrality of the universal/particular removes any trace of formalism, but it does so precisely by leaving ghostly traces of the particular within the always haunted universal.” (162)Because of this realization of the ghostly relationship between local struggles and the broader discourse of universal rights, we are able to integrate a conception of rights themselves as being both ghosts and ghostly, as both haunting and being haunted. In terms of Chambers’ example, the right to marry is haunted because of its connection to many social benefits granted to married couples, and the spectral remainders of those rights (i.e. those who are excluded from the right to marry) create a ghost which is to haunt the right to marry itself.Pronouncing this ghostly presence further, Chambers goes on to invoke the Derridian notion of rights as existing uniquely in the spectral plane between the actual and the inactual, as not being real, as being universal statements of ‘what ought to be, always’, while simultaneously remaining subject to historical events which pose the threat to revoke them, and therefore holding no irrefutable empirical validity or transcendental guarantee. This can be seen, he says, by recognizing the failure of rights which we expect to emerge to ever concretely manifest themselves, and by the disappearance of certain rights which once had been already granted. “Rights are always already untimely [ghostly] because they can never be guaranteed in advance.” (164)Chambers illustrates various viewpoints concerning the right to gay marriage through the lens of the ghost. Refuting the mainstream liberal idea that attainment of rights is always a good thing, he proposes that, because of its legal ties to a large host of subsidiary rights which haunt it, (such as tax breaks, adoption rights, inheritance rights and health care benefits) marriage actually becomes a disciplinary institution not only for those invested in a marital bond but also for those who choose not to marry.

 Successfully achieving the right to marriage will effectively bar lesbians, gays, certain single persons, and non-married straights from access to a long list of other rights, since all those rights bundled into the institution of marriage will now be ‘open to all’ [who choose to or are able to marry]. (167) 

In other words, the legitimization of gay marriage would serve as the drawing of a new border, the making of a decision which excludes yet another ‘other’, the creation of a right which, while expanding inclusion of a constitutional right (and other rights subsumed within it), would simultaneously invoke the creation of a ghost, of that certain other who is excluded from this selective inclusion. In this way, all rights and extensions of privilege prove to be haunted.Additionally, the notion of gay marriage and indeed of rights in general, is one that emboldens the power of the state by recognizing it as a legitimating force that controls the norms of sexuality. The initiative of the queer community to be normalized into mainstream society proves regressive, states Chambers, to a furthering of any form of radical democracy.Concluding, Chambers advocates not an extension of marital rights to gays and lesbians, but a de-linking of marriage to other subsequent rights, a revocation of marriage as being a precondition to subsumed legal entitlements, as the right to gay marriage will not resolve the spectral remainder that it itself creates. We must challenge the very notion of marriage, he says, along with its normalizing power and its hegemony as a disciplinary institution, in order to avoid the ghostly implications of rights themselves. “Only an insistence on the spectrality of rights can keep alive the possibility of affirming the rights of the specter.” (169)

The essay introduces young Derrida through a social networking. He was linked, as a student, to Louis Althusser—the department chair of philosophy in the ENS. The men became friends over the faults of existentialism and a shared doubt as to whether Sartre’s readings of Husserl and Marx contained any “conceptual rigor” (the lack of which could lead to poor action in the public sphere). Sartre laid bare (for Derrida) an inconsistency in the combination of phenomenology and Marxism. The three men each spoke through a separate political move—Althusser pledging to “pure “ Marxism in the hopes of escaping ambiguity (he went insane) while Sartre and Derrida traveled around the periphery of the French Communist Party—Sartre preaching an inconsistency that matched his assignment, Derrida shadowing him politically while feeling himself “divided”. Delacampagne’s outline of Althusser’s breakdown, induced by the enunciation of his own contradictory actions in critiquing the PCF from “inside”– seems uncanny in juxtaposition with Derrida’s own tactic of textual deconstruction.

Faithful to the promise of democracy, we next see Derrida turning away from a centralized hope in the Proletariat by joining the student’s movement as lecturer and teaching (to anyone with an interest) from the viewpoint of the most politically “left” in the class. Derrida breaks a fundamental rule of the institution in his radical teaching style and is (supposedly) covered by Althusser, his friend, the Secretary General of the ENS, a friend on the inside. Delacampagne mentions this incident in a framework of Derrida’s political actions (being called into ‘coherence’) but appears more (less constructively) concerned with the license of political confidence Derrida provides for himself at this point, while teaching a “collective” thinking to his students.

Something like a thesis emerges from Delacampagne halfway through the essay, after a more preliminary proclamation in which Derrida is accused of a philosophy which had “from the very beginning, a political turn—“(867)—he states; “And yet Derrida never accepted to appear as a hostage of his students on the far left or, still worse, of the PCF. He wanted to behave as a free person, and, to a large extent, he succeeded in doing so in the course of the next three decades.” (867)

An activity list of Derrida’s issues and actions takes up the next page of text, in which he is animated like a cartoon across the reader’s chain of international-political image referents. Acutely aware of otherness and the call to responsibility, Derrida seems to obtain ‘freedom’ in answering multiple calls, the subjects of which link him back to a belief in the Marxism he spent so long alienating himself from. This contradiction of position, whose parts (in text) could be easily enunciated and divorced, bears no weapon under the eye of political action. The epitome of Derrida’s flawed political action, according to Delacampagne, is not to be found in the self-slipping contradiction of actions themselves, but in an assertion that Derrida’s movement to and from political stances depended primarily on a pathological, cheap and necessary rejection of whatever the current ‘mainstream ideology’ was.

At the heart of Derrida’s politically directed work—Delacampagne allows—stood the structure of responsibility and an ethics of hospitality; the creation of his philosophical/political movement into physical and ideological “cities of refuge”. In this space Derrida was consistent in his physical-political placement within political structures, but whether this was appropriate (given the course of historical changes within his lifetime) Delacampagne doubts, almost absolutely.

Posted for Mara Birkets by the illustrious Rose Mackey.

What’s at stake for him is the understanding that “at the precise moment when sovereignty is being over-determined by economic, military and political hegemony” (Beardsworth 59), Derrida’s notion of democracy to come seems to perform as more a negotiation of the impossible than a recreation of what is possible. The author wants to navigate both critical philosophy and material institutionalization. He does this by outlining two seemingly divergent movements of recent critical philosophy, and how they can and have been reconciled. He then challenges the strength of the distinction between the ‘modern’ and the ‘post-modern’, advocating a conception of the contemporary moment as a (problematized) continuation of the modern condition, linking the challenges dealt with by Enlightenment thinkers to the pressing challenges of today. Then he locates Derrida’s work in the post-modern complications of these hyper-modern problems. Then he outlines Derrida’s hesitations in regards to his articulation of deconstruction’s potential place in the political. Then he offers some suggestions of where to take Derrida’s legacy given these observations.

Beardsworth determines two major trends in contemporary critical philosophy, typically classified as ‘German’ and ‘French’. What they both share in common is a relationship to the Enlightenment project that largely began with the retreat of religion from the social sphere in the 1700s. The two “schools” largely differ in their focus and their end.
For the ‘German’ school, dominated largely by Habermas, the purpose of critical philosophy is the re-articulation of Enlightenment conceptions of “truth, reason and freedom”.

For the ‘French’ school, the end of critical philosophy is not about challenging Enlightenment’s reason with a substitutive logic, but simply to disrupt it. Especially in the case of Derrida, this school’s articulation of critical philosophy is largely concerned with “the deployment of the non-dialectisable oscillation between the common and the singular in order to negotiate the violent limits of any project of truth, reason or freedom” (Beardsworth 47). This is done in the name of defending difference, something that is displaced and destroyed by the universalized reasoning of Enlightenment thought. As this work was translated into English and introduced to the U.S. in the 70s, the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ developed.

Despite these major differences between the two schools of thought, represented by the major figures of Derrida and Harbermas, Beardsworth insists that in the last years of his life there was between the two of them a ‘rapprochement’ of sorts, however subtly displayed, the gestures of which (on Derrida’s part at least) Beardsworth ascribes to a growing sense in Derrida that there existed a need for something in history beyond the reach of his deconstruction work. This is most significantly demonstrated in Derrida and Habermas’ co-signing of a letter condemning the invasion of Iraq, and Derrida’s publishing of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason.

Beardsworth says that in Rogues Derrida seems to see the need for a new rationalism, though still based in a deconstructive resistance to the universalizing, totalizing movements of modern thought. It’s a re-working of deconstruction kept free and open by contemporary French thought’s insistence on alterity and temporalization but also grounded in the necessity for action and material solutions to the crises of our time.

What is lacking in Derrida, and in contemporary ‘post-modern’ French thought in general, is something that is necessitated by a contemporary moment that is still thoroughly modern. The projects of the Enlightenment, in response to the crises of modernity, are not to be abandoned altogether but prolonged and reinvigorated with the perspectives of alterity offered by post-modern complications. The problem originally posed by modernity was an “unarticulated relation between individual adventure and collective spirit that follows the marginalization of religion” (Beardsworth 51). The concerns of the political projects at modernity’s beginnings should be shared by the political projects of today, the author states. “The project of the Enlightenment as a project of universalization through which plurality can be expressed is, in this sense, to be continued” (Beardsworth 51). This project is still valid because we still live in the context of increased capitalization of relations the world over, and because the post-modern distinction has been blown out of proportion.

He addresses the claim, for example, that the rise in fundamentalist forces and the increasingly important role that religion has in shaping identity is a sign of the post-modern, distinct from the modern that was defined largely by its more secularized condition. He says that the failure of what was perceived as “communism” and “radical social democracy” to transform the unequal power relations in capitalism and the nation-state intensified the need for an increased return to religious forms of identification and self-conception.

Beardsworth says that post-modernism was less a response to the major problems of modernity than a response to the responses to modernity, namely those of state communism and “radical social democracy”, and that in the name of a radical alterity post-modernism made the mistake of rejecting “the creative powers of reason and institution” (Beardsworth 53) altogether.

Turning directly to Derrida, Beardsworth talks about how Derrida’s work of deconstruction is neither for nor against the Enlightenment.

He also states that Derrida does not believe there is such a thing as democracy. This is because of two tensions that exist: between liberty and equality, and between legistlative and executive sovereignty. It’s an argument we’re familiar with, now: for the law to exist, it must be enforced. In order to be enforced, the law is beholden to executive sovereignty. Enlightenment attempts to regulate the relationship between the executive and the legislative only serve to delay such a conflict and the executive’s inevitable overtake.

Pure democracy would be a union of justice, law, and force. For Derrida, this is “another impossible condition of invention” (Beardsworth 57). For the same reasons of democracy’s impossibility, Derrida agrees with Kant when he states a world cosmopolitanism is impossible. However, Derrida is of course aware of the need for worldwide democratic apparatuses, that must transcend nation-state sovereignty and monopolies on violence.

Given all this, and some of the ideas put forth by Derrida in Rogues, the author states that in order to effectively engage with world politics, critical philosophy must undertake the following priorities and projects::

Philosophically, it must be recognized that the difference and singularity so rightfully fought for in radical ‘post-modern’ insistences on alterity can only survive under universal apparatuses of law and universal institutions that work in relation to more localized assemblies and bodies of power.

Politically, there needs to be a “promotion of potential world bodies” and “promotion of the democratic reform of the UN” (Beardsworth 61).

Disciplinarily, there must be put into practice new forms of world governance that are publically mediated and that, intellectually, take as interdisciplinary an approach as possible.

One of Carroll’s analysis of Derrida’s “otherness” comes from the role language and culture played in Derrida’s life. Language has had a significant impact on Derrida’s life. Although he spoke French, he was a native Algerian. As Carroll points out in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, the omnipresence of French colonization has always hovered over him. He constantly felt a certain alienation between the natural landscape of his homeland and his “natural” tongue (p816). The young Derrida could not find a true sense of belonging within either culture, French nor Algerian, as a result of his own Jewish identity—though even elements of traditional Jewish culture were alien to him as well. Derrida found himself often wavering between different forces – “harpooned,” as Carroll describes it, “like Moby Dick, not on the sea, but in France overseas” (p817), between one and another, sometimes existing as one or an other. However, Derrida’s circumstance gave him a distinct opportunity to realize his own identity in a truer form, detached and essentially autonomous from any nationalistic or political relationships. His being was void from any definitive model, which allowed him to be open to possibilities. This is the harking of his concept of community, which he idealizes as “a state of suspension, a promise, a call, not for what once was or still is but what is still to come [a venir]” (p818). Derrida, who existed as certain “a cultural void” or “empty signifier” himself, asserts that politics should adopt a similar meaning which will allow it to open its definitions to whatever possibility that comes, establishing a perpetual reinvention of political identity without any preexisting model.

Carroll connects Derrida’s experience as an “other” in Algeria to Derrida’s attitudes towards national identity and citizenship. Referring to Derrida’s loss of citizenship during the year of Vichy rule in France, Carroll asserts that “what is ‘learned’ from the loss of citizenship…is the precarious, arbitrary, artificial nature of citizenship and national identity, that they are not in any sense “natural” (p812). Derrida learned that, contrary to the concept of a natural homogenous national and ethnic identity, citizenship and residency laws in Western democracies today exhibit the tendencies of colonial rule—a tendency to create borders, that which establishes the definition of the other by way of separation and exclusion of certain people. We gain a sense here that the formation of his views on nationality, exhibited particularly in Politics of Friendship, surfaced through his personal experiences of discrimination.

Carroll’s exegeses on Derrida’s Algerian remains illuminate an important fact: Derrida’s very being as an “other” had transgressed the norms in French literature and philosophy with his success. One can say that embedded in his work is already the initiation of the change he calls for. The call to universal hospitality and openness to the “other” is somewhat fulfilled, as the reader has already received Derrida as an “other” through the reading of his texts.
-posted by Ben Barson and Jess Wu

Newman begins the essay with an overview of contemporary radical political thinkers and their similarities with anarchism, despite the fact that most shy away from the term. In this essay, postanarchism is defined as “the project of renewing the anarchist tradition through a critique of essentialist identities and the assertion instead of the contingency of politics” (4). Newman breaks down the discussion of classical anarchism into four sections: Politics beyond the state, Politics beyond the party, Politics beyond class, and The politics of emancipation. These four characteristics are the strengths of classical anarchism that ought to be retained in a postanarchist project. Because the postanarchist project can be seen as eliminating reductionism and essentialism from radical politics, politics beyond class is of central importance to Newman as this contains the anarchist rejection of Marxist economic reductionism.

Newman’s next step is to begin rethinking anarchism and outline what a postanarchism (or poststructuralist anarchism) would look like. He contends that “the theoretical innovativeness of anarchism today is…limited by the humanist and positivist in which it was originally conceived” (13). Here he explicitly critiques Chomsky, Zerzan, and Bookchin, which is an interesting move since those three come from wildly different anarchist traditions. However, Newman would most likely contend that, their differences aside, all three are rooted in an ultimately benevolent conception of the human and a conception of society that posits it as containing an underlying and finitely understandable logic. And herein lays the fundamental contribution of poststructuralism to the anarchist tradition. Newman contends that instead of understanding social objects as being rationally discernible, we ought to view them as discursively constructed: “The socio-political field does not bear some objective, rational truth that science can reveal; rather it is characterized by multiple layers of articulation, antagonism and ideological dissimulation” (14). This means that the ontological basis of politics is not the (Marxist) dialectic, but rather the event as event. This primacy of the event shares much in common with many Derridian motifs.

Newman anticipates the obvious critique of this conception of a new radical politics: that these restrictions rob politics of any stable foundation or autonomous agency. He fully acknowledges and incorporates this criticism, arguing that radical politics today must actually abandon any notions of stable foundations “and instead assert the contingency of the political” (14).

He traces the origins of emancipatory politics to the Enlightenment, while acknowledging that the legacy of the Enlightenment is heterogeneous. The legacy that we ought to embrace is legacy of continual questioning and uncertainty, while rejecting the legacy of rational certainty, absolute identity and destiny. Here he invokes Derrida as a thinker who “remains critical of the rationalist and positivist aspect of the Enlightenment but wants to hang on to its emancipative and liberating potential – particularly its insistence on human rights” (15). [See Specters of Marx, p110] The argument here is that Enlightenment should be the reference point for radical political struggles today.

Part of Newman’s suggested path for a post-anarchism, borrowed from Badiou, os that the contingency of the political be viewed as the unbinding of social bonds, a suggestion that seems to fall under Critchley’s category of “active nihilism”. However, Newman states later that this does not amount to a nihilistic politics, though perhaps he is only referring to passive nihilism (to use Critchley’s framework). Another aspect of the postanarchist project is to rethink both sovereignty and universality. Newman says that contemporary radical politics must create a new sovereignty, one without the state. Here he mentions Derrida once more, this time the idea of “messianicty without messianism” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan.Lastly, Newman states that post-anarchism must employ some universal dimension so it can avoid the pitfalls of identity politics. He only gives this a cursory treatment at the very end of the essay, though in the little bit he appeals to it he mentions Cosmopolitanism and globalization as a potential source of universality. Identity politics and the critique thereof is a major topic unto itself, which is perhaps why Newman chose not to delve into it too much in this piece.

In sum, post-anarchism shares with anarchism a critique of authority, a resistance to political domination, and assertions of freedom, autonomy, and equality; it differs with classical anarchism because it embraces contingency and indeterminacy and rejects essentialist identities and ontological foundations. (16)

Newman, Saul. “Anarchism, Post-structuralism and the Future of Radical Politics.” SubStance 113 (2007): 3-18

The sheer quantity of radical thinkers produced by the 18^th century is virtually inexhaustible. What binds them is a common proclivity for questioning authority, re-thinking dogma, and exalting the human faculty of reason. Hayes notes that 20^th century thinkers have often borrowed the reasoning of the enlightenment in order to found a critique of the 19^th century. She notes that in Spectres of Marx, Derrida made an appeal for “two Marxisms”: one metaphysically and dogmatically centered, and another expressly devoted to the open-ended practice of critique. This second Marxism, she notes, may be traced directly to the “spirit of the Enlightenment.” (p. 444) Here, Derrida is concerned with the aspect of 18^th century thought that provokes the “interminable critique,” (p. 444) or incessant interrogation of extant political and conceptual systems.

This idea of the lumieres extends to an “historical and conceptual” (p. 445) thinking of the Enlightenment that incorporates the a-venir Derrida had previously ascribed to democracy. Hayes briefly reiterates, quoting an interview with Derrida, the three traits of democracy that conspire to designate democracy as a-venir: its (1) “historicity,” its (2) “infinite… imperfectibility,” and (3) its link to an originary promise. Later, she applies these descriptions to the lumieres, citing Derrida’s second essay in Rogues in which he equivocates a Democracy-to-come with an Enlightenment-to-come. Both concepts are relegated, or elevated, to the temporal position of the future anterior, functionally construed as Kantian regulatory Ideas that approach but never reach complete fruition. In short, both Ideas shape the present from the future.

Hayes then leads her analysis to the second half of Rogues’s second essay. She emphasizes Derrida’s proposal to honor reason by splitting sovereignty and unconditionality. His plan of attack is two-pronged: firstly, he deconstructs the notion of sovereignty in the tradition, context, and name of an “Enlightenment-to-come,” and secondly, he delimits sovereignty by forcing upon it the issue of the ‘incalculable’ common to both democracy and enlightenment. The incalculable element, in the context of the lumieres, is introduced by its quality of a-venir, which inaugurates a hypothetically “singular, incalculable” event. (p. 450) Sovereignty thusly enfeebled, Derrida calls for a “middle way” between unconditional and completely absent sovereignty in the name of the lumieres and its quality of interminable critique. This “middle way” is his platform for conceiving of unconditionality divorced from sovereignty (“unconditional hospitality,” “the gift”).

From this vantage point Hayes segues into a discussion of language and translation. She notes that the problem with a system of “heterogenous rationalities” (p. 451) is the mutual unintelligibility of each rationality for every other. She relates this problem to the history of philosophy as a whole, in which every thinker has formulated his own unique philosophical lexicon that blocks a pervasive continuity from forming between historical thinkers and eras. It also necessitates a process of translation between lexicons. Hayes ultimately concludes that this infinitely imperfectible translation process is “salutory” because it resists homogenizing influences. The adjectival phrase “infinitely imperfectible,” of course, indicates the aporetic affiliation of this process of translation. Hayes states that “…the unconditional exigency of translation exceeds the impossibility of translation,” (p. 452) reinforcing her interpretation with Derrida’s essay “Des Tours of Babel.” The a-venir­ is converted to an a-traduire, “to-be-translated.” Finally, unconditional translation is related to hospitality, as another possible example of unconditionality without an implied sovereignty.

A city is more than a city because it must constantly interact with global politics and the issues and problems of other cities, and it is simultaneously less than one because it is truly a collection of people, houses, monuments etc. This concept directly interacts with the issue of sovereignty by questioning the idea of a “city without borders”. This is mostly done through the metaphorical device of the tower of Babel, because of the fact that the static nature of language in this case was an attempt to make one “global” city that was at once made up of everyone who spoke the single language, and of the individuals themselves. Individuals, while occupying an important place in a city, cannot keep it from the factors of finitude, in this case, ruin. As the Tower of Babel was destroyed, no city of refuge can survive unchallenged and undestroyed. Damai argues that the city of refuge is constantly in ruin, and must be for it to truly have the effect of continuously offering the hospitality that it promises. The city of refuge is a constant project that tests the limits of hospitality.

Derrida saw the city as the “very structures of welcoming”(69) and therefore maintained that their existence could not in good faith exclude the other. If a city of refuge stays too stagnant, it is committing a “radical evil”(84). It is the responsibility of a city of refuge to constantly reevaluate what it means to welcome and to think about how their hospitality is matching the call of the other. In these cases, it is impossible for a city to get this without asking the other, or the “unconditional visitor” what their experience has been. Cities are compelled to continuously reassess themselves because of the “fear and trembling” about ways that they could possibly be underprepared to face “radical evil” (74). This “threat of ruin” is enough to encourage a city to make sure that it is the most welcoming that it could be. The article also touches briefly touches upon things such as chauvinism in Derrida and Levinas through their theory of whether or not the female is “wholly other” and a debate about a portrait of shoes by Van Gogh. Overall, although the article skips around a great deal and is often hard to follow because of all of the internal conversations, but it is a great perspective on the role of the “city of refuge” and “the call of the other”.