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Jacques Derrida and the Time of Political Thinking

Andrea Cassatella

Political Theory Graduate Workshop 2012

* Draft. Do not cite or circulate without author’s permission* What follows is the first draft of a (rather long) chapter of my dissertation, which investigates the theologico-political problem in the thought of Jacques Derrida. The entire chapter looks at Derrida's view of time and how it affects our understanding of the theologico-political problem. The focus of this paper is more limited and I would like the discussion to cover particularly section one and two, which are included below. Needless to say, if section three is also of interest, I can circulate it at a later stage. I apologize in advance for the excessive length but due to temporal (!) constraints, I could not manage to make my paper more concise for this event.

Introduction

Time plays a central role in all political philosophy. Time as eternity is crucial in Plato

and Augustine, and time as history has a central place in the modern tradition going from

Rousseau to Heidegger passing through Hegel and Nietzsche. However, the majority of

contemporary approaches to the study of political life seem to have forgotten the question

of time. This lacuna is particularly relevant to the study of the ‘theologico-political

complex’, which, to recall it, refers to how the persistence of religion and theological

discourse in political life has re-opened the modern question of the secular, namely of

how the relationship between the theological and the political, faith and reason, is to be

resolved in the justification of political authority. As indicated in the Introduction, one

central problem of dominant views about the ‘theologico-political complex’ since

modernity, is connected to a mode of thinking that seeks to solve, in too atemporal and

foundational a fashion, the theologico-political equation in one direction only.

Reflecting on time and political thought, on the time of political thought, seems

therefore a timely enterprise that this chapter seeks to undertake by exploring Derrida’s

reflections on the matter. I suggest that his view brings the question of time back to the

agenda of political thought and emphasizes its relevance for rethinking secularism today.

Challenging a well-established view of time as linear succession of unitary moments,

Derrida’s illuminate how a ‘messianic’ understanding of temporality offers a significant

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potential to political thinking especially for reflecting on the theologico-political

predicament and for disclosing new possibilities for human freedom. This aspect is

particularly brought to light if, as I have argued throughout, we interpret Derrida’s entire

thought as animated by a powering politico-philosophical sensibility for questions of

political foundings, a sensibility that plays a decisive role in his analysis of temporality as

much as it does, as we have seen, in that of language and, as we shall see in the next

chapter, of politics.

I begin, in section one, by examining Derrida’s reflections on time and how these

expose the limits of teleological thinking. To that effect, I analyse his understanding of

time as trace-constituted and draw some implications following from this for political

thought. Further, through a discussion of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, I expound how his

critique of political teleology discloses the exclusionary features of the latter, which is

shown as neutralizing the temporal specificity of political events and ultimately closing

off the political space. The next two sections are devoted to the investigation of the

notion of the ‘messianic’. In section two, I explore Derrida’s perspective on the

‘messianic’ as he articulates it, mainly, in Spectres of Marx. My aim is to elucidate

messianic thinking as a non-teleological type of political thought that is intimately

connected to the possibility of hospitality and of what Derrida calls a “new

Enlightenment”.1 I close, in the last section, by connecting Derrida’s ‘messianic’ to the

relationship between reason and faith, and more generally to the ‘theologico-political

complex’. I argue that the ‘messianic’ is a historical type of thinking that is sensible to

transcendental inquiry and draws its critical impetus from an elementary experience of

faith that is irreducibly religious. By illustrating that messianic thinking does not endorse

the oppositional logic reason versus faith typical of many modern understandings of

secularism since the Enlightenment, but think them as irreducibly co-originary, I suggest

that Derrida provides us with a more complex and illuminating understanding of the

‘theologico-political’ problematics.

1 Specters of Marx, 75. Derrida uses the notion of hospitality instead of, for example, tolerance to emphasize that his perspective seeks to take distance from the Christian framework in which the latter emerged. See especially Jacque Derrida ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicide’, in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in Time of Terror, Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).

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1. Time and political thought: exposing the limits of telelogical thinking

Time is among Derrida’s central concerns in deconstructing canonical texts of the

western philosophical tradition. As he says in Speech and Phenomena, “what is

ultimately at stake, what is at bottom decisive [is] the concept of time”. 2 The question of

time is present in almost all of his writing dealing with other philosophical topics and is

comprehensively explored in Given Time and ‘Ousia and Gramme’.3 For the purposes of

this chapter, though, we will limit our fucus to his essay ‘Différance’ where Derrida

succinctly presents the substance of his view, and then we shall proceed to explore the

connection he makes between time and political thinking. Before doing that, some

preliminary observations on his approach to time might be of help.

Overall, Derrida’s strategy is to articulate a perspective that radicalizes human

finitude and historicizes time in a manner that unsettles any recourse to an ultimate extra-

temporal instance. Following Heidegger, Derrida takes issue with a particular view of

time established by Aristotle that has profoundly influenced the entire western

philosophical tradition, the history of metaphysics in particular. This view conceives of

time synchronically, as an infinite series of successive moments or ‘nows’, which can be

clearly grasped through reflection as undivided temporal units.4 Such a view is to him

problematic for a number of reasons. First, the question of time is posed in terms of being

(does time belong to being or non-being?) which might mean omitting the very question

of time, namely whether time is part of being or not. Second, it represents time as a sort

of nostalgic return to an origin or original ground as if there ever was one to re-

appropriate. Finally, and most importantly, the traditional view of time subscribes to what

Derrida calls metaphysics of presence, namely a philosophical approach typical of the

western tradition that considers it possible to grasp a pure, eternal referent, a

“transcendental signified”, which grounds an entire philosophical system.5 The

metaphysics of presence conceives of such a referent as presence, that is, as founding

principle that can be present to consciousness in a clearly identifiable and distinguishable

2 See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (op. cit.), 70. 3 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); ‘Ousia and Gramme Note on a Note from Being and Time’, in Margin of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 4 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, 8. 5 Of Grammatology, especially ch. 2.

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way from the conditions (temporal, political, linguistic, socio-economic etc) in which it

occurs.6

The distance Derrida takes from the traditional understanding of time emerges

clearly in his essay ‘Différance’. Here he seeks to show that and how time is historicized

by spatial mark of its passage, or ‘trace’.7 The ‘trace’ accounts for an ‘originary’

synthesis between time and space, and allows for a more complex understanding of what

a ‘now’ or present moment might be. Derrida notes:

In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called

spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).

And it is this constitution of the present, as ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple, (and

therefore, stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions or

pretensions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological and

transcendental language that soon will reveal itself inadequate) that I propose to call

arche-writing, arche-trace, or différance.8

6 As mentioned, these points have a clear Heideggerian genesis and resonate with the view of time he develops throughout his entire thought and, particularly, in his later writings. In Identity and Difference, for example, Heidegger considers the history of philosophy as the history of metaphysics, which in turn is a history of the reduction of being to particular mental experiences or abstract ideas of reason that can be present as presence in the mind. He names this approach onto-theo-logical by which he means that the idea of being has been not simply understood as the ground (Grund) of all beings (ontology) but also as the most fundamental ground, ultimately the ground of itself, which is the metaphysical idea of God (theology). In short, the onto-theo-logical approach reduces being to a static, fix foundation and thus cannot account for temporal variation and difference, which are the conditions under which the questioning of being takes place. In contrast to this view, Heidegger thinks no one idea or concept can grasp being in itself, which can be approached only in its withdrawal, or difference, from a particular being. Yet such difference should not impede the investigation of the unity between beings and being, a unity that remains unthought in traditional (onto-theo-logical) approaches to metaphysics. For Heidegger, in fact, being as ground is always thought in the genitive form as the ‘being of’ beings while beings are always conceived as ‘beings of’ being. His central point is then to think the ontological difference not as “difference between” but as “difference qua difference”. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. J. Stambaugh, (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2002). Derrida agrees with Heidegger that no concept can grasp substantially what the truth of being is. But, unlike him, he does not consider being, however conceived, as the preferential site where truth can be found since all we can have access to in terms of cognition, as we shall in a moment, is a ‘trace’ of what one might identify as the most ‘basic’ experience. For Derrida, we do in fact think being as the site of truth but only because this is a propensity towards metaphysical concepts that is intrinsic to language and thinking due to words’ tendency to become abstract concepts removed from the variations of their empirical reference. Yet there is no philosophically sound rationale to think being as an ontological reality, as this will still presuppose the capacity to grasp a fix ground, even if as withdrawal, where truth manifests itself. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (op. cit.) 21 ff.; Writing and Difference (op. cit.), 280. 7 My exposition here in indebted to Martin Hägglund and his illuminating analysis of the trace as spacing in his, Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life (op. cit.), 18 ff. 8 See Jacques Derrida. ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, (op. cit.) 13.

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In this passage, Derrida gives an account of the ‘now’ in terms of ‘trace’ by thinking the

minimal unit of time beyond the metaphysical approach that has characterized western

philosophy since Aristotle. He emphasizes that for the ‘now’ to be possible it must be

visible and enduring in time. Temporal endurance, in turn, needs to be archived to be

recognizable at all in time, and in spite of temporal flow: it requires a spatial inscription

(the becoming-space of time), a trace. However, for there to be a trace in the first place,

which can be recognized only after its spatial inscription, space has to be related to the

flow of time and therefore be temporalized (the becoming-time of space), otherwise no

after would be possible for recognizing such a ‘trace’.9 The thinking together of the

becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space that constitutes the trace-

structure of time is what Derrida calls spacing (espacement).

By accounting the ‘originary’ synthesis between time and space in terms of ‘trace’

Derrida is able to move beyond the metaphysical understanding of time. For if the

spatialization of time makes that synthesis possible, the temporalization of space

disallows its founding on an indivisible ground that is not itself exposed to the coming of

what might contaminate its purity. ‘Originary’, here, does not mean ‘original’ as if it were

referring to an event that occurred at the origin, namely in a moment that can be clearly

identified in consciousness. Rather it marks the impossibility of any original and self-

identical moment that is not always already divided in itself. By illuminating this

impossibility, Derrida’s notion of ‘trace’ therefore exposes the limits of conceptualizing

time as a succession of undivided and clearly identifiable moments, namely as a

movement between the oppositional poles of a past that is no longer and a future that is

no yet.

The significance of Derrida’s argument about time viewed from the irreducible

spatio-temporal constitution of the ‘trace’ lies in the undermining of the metaphysics of

presence. By showing that mental contents available to human understanding at any

particular moment are not so easily separable from the conditions in which they appear

and always contain something from a previous experience, Derrida illustrates that any

such content is conditioned and resulting form an iteration as trace-consituted, which

9 Ibid.

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means that ideas in consciousness can never be fully grasped as pure monads.10 The

‘trace’ indicates that contamination is an originary, yet by no means original, predicament

affecting the human condition, which means that there is no philosophical rationale to

reject the always already immanent character of transcendent origins, their being already

a becoming, a non-original origin of sort. The most one can aspire to find in the search

for beginnings or grounds is ambiguity, constant deferral of the point of departure and

contamination of the purity of mental representations: différance. In other words, by

articulating time as trace-constituted, Derrida reconfigures the problem of dualism and

hierarchy between the transcendent and the immanent, the transcendental and the

empirical, the intelligible and the sensible affecting much of contemporary philosophical

reflection, including reflections on the proper foundation of political life. The ‘trace’

point to that limit point in which these pairs are silently related in such a way that there is

no sharp line distinguishing the one from the other and thus the demarcating line of such

distinction remains within the plane of undecidability. Thus, and this is a central point for

the ‘theologico-political complex’ at issue in this study, if undecidability characterizes

the inaugural moment of reflection, the philosophical possibility of establishing what is

most original between the theological and the political, faith and reason, is undermined.

What is also undermined, through the exposure of the potential for violence involved in

the effort of dissolving constitutive contamination, is the attempt to provide robust

normative political foundations on the basis of a pure telos or ground, regardless of

whether this operation is enacted by reason or faith. Indeed, once the clear identification

of telos is undermined by the thematization of temporality, the movement towards its

actualization or approximation is derailed. We will come back to this shortly.

10 To recall it, the notion of iterability refers to the possibility of written signs to endure in time, and thus be legible at all, beyond the moment of their inscription and in the absence of their author(s), and it needs to be viewed within Derrida’s understanding of the signification process. For him, such a process is not an order of pure intelligibility, as traditionally conceived, where the linguistic sign constitutes a unity of a sensible signifier and an ideal signified. Rather it is a process that functions on the basis of non-conscious differential relations – a sort of implicit background, a web of conditions, beliefs, habits and mediations on which meaning in general depends – taking place within socio-political and temporal variations, and leaving traces on what we might take as the unity and meaning of words. Within this context, iterability is not a repetition of the ‘same’, which can function as a transcendental a priori. Rather since it always contains the possibility of alteration and contamination of meaning, and thus it limits the possibility of pure ideas.

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If at this point it is not already apparent what our discussion so far has to do with

political thought, it is now opportune to make that explicit. The point of the matter is that

if western political thought has inherited and relied upon the same metaphysical

assumptions about time characterizing western philosophy more generally, it is subject to

the same challenge Derrida poses to philosophical discourse at large. For him, such

reliance and inheritance have in fact occurred since canonical understandings of political

categories such as sovereignty, law, self-hood, democracy11 but also political community,

equality, friendship12 as well as history, state, and citizenship13 presuppose the

metaphysical understanding of time typical of the western tradition since Aristotle.

I cannot present here all of Derrida’s arguments in support of his claim as this is

beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to consider the paradigmatic example he uses

to illustrate the metaphysics of presence lurking behind the political categories mentioned

above. In Rogues, Derrida notes how throughout much of the history of western political

thought, the nature, extent and justification of political authority has often been

implicated in some onto-theo-logical, atemporal dimension characterized by the quest for

transcendent foundations and purity of ideas to justify the political order .14 The

philosophical concept of sovereignty is the exemplary idea that has performed that

function. He argues that traditional conceptualizations of sovereignty conceive of it as

ipseity (in English the best word capturing this notion is probably selfhood), namely a

force (kratos) of self-constitution and self-legislation characterized by a circular motion

of relating or returning to itself as its own end.15 So conceived, the circularity of ipseity

displays sovereignty’s unconditional, indivisible, and unitary character as it establishes a

circular identification of the cause with the end, of the ‘by itself’ with the ‘for itself’. It

discloses, in other words, sovereignty as the metaphysical concept of agency, as a pure

idea par excellence that is unscathed by the alteration and differentiation of iterability and

time. 16 The problem with this view, unsurprisingly, is that it remains implicated in the

metaphysics of presence Derrida puts into question. For him, sovereignty, like any other

11 Rogues, (op. cit.) 12 Politics of Friendship, (op. cit.) 13 Specters of Marx, (op. cit.) 14 Rogues, 17, 101,157. 15 Ibid, 11. 16 Ibid, 12.

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concept, is subject to time and its logic of contamination. And this means that sovereignty

is always self-divided and its alleged purity always contaminated. Therefore, the general

point Derrida’s example of sovereignty elucidates is the atemporal fashion in which much

of western political thought has often considered to be philosophically sound, or even

possible, to isolate the temporality of the subjects thinking political categories and their

contexts.

Significantly for our purposes, in the example of sovereignty, is the emphasis

Derrida puts on the connection between temporality and political thinking.17 In particular,

his insistence on the question of time and the logic of contamination it implies has

important implications for the type of foundations political thought is philosophically

justified to put forward. By raising the issue of the temporality of political thinking,

Derrida is able to robustly question, and expose the limits of, past modes of political

thought that are informed by teleological thinking and the foundational conception of

reason associated to it. By teleological thinking, we refer here to a type of thinking

guided by and moving towards the finality of an ideal goal to be realized or that perform

a regulative function for reflection, a thinking whose judgments about experience are

properly regulated by a telos grasped in the present and thus in advance or independently

from the exposure to what is yet to be encountered. Such a thinking is associated to a

foundational view of reason precisely because the latter is thought as capable of grasping

ideal ends in consciousness that are unaffected by temporal variations, and that can

provide the fix telos necessary to the regulative function.

The modes of political thinking Derrida has in mind are those taking the form of

a philosophical teleology organizing the movement of thinking (Kant’s regulative Idea)

or of a teleological conception of history indicating the goal to realize (Hegel’s

historicization of Spirit and Marx’s advent of communist society or what Derrida calls

“archeo-teleological concept[s] of history” in Hegel and Marx), or as epochal reflection

(as in Heidegger). Despite their differences, these modes of reflection have for Derrida

been characterized by a longing for origins and have conceived of the telos as a pure ideal

17 For a recent discussion the relationship between temporality and the political (including also political thought) in Derrida, see Derrida and The Time of The Political, (eds.) Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).

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guiding the movement of thinking. 18 Politically, the central problem with these modes of

reflection is connected to the types of normativity they give rise once ideals about human

nature and political community are supposedly grasped in consciousness as presence, and

then posited as grounds providing either the substantive standards for critically evaluating

current society and bringing about a new one (Hegel or Marx), or the platform wherefrom

developing procedural conditions for the approximation of an ideal and ultimately the

justification of political arrangements (as, for example, in Kant, Habermas and Rawls).

For Derrida, these types of normativity, which we may call ‘substantive’ and ‘regulative’

depending on the type of teleology they are connected to, display dangerous and

worrisome features and need to be challenged.

The place where this challenge is most explicitly articulated is his Specters of

Marx. Here he takes up, among other things, the issue of political teleology through the

analysis of some of Marx’s texts and of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last

Man. Let us consider them in turn starting with Marx. As the title of the book suggests,

Derrida is interested in exploring the spectres of Marx both in terms of the ones Marx was

obsessed with and talked about in his work (most notably in The Communist Manifesto),

and those that seemed to have come back after the death of communism. His exploration

is centered on the notion of specter (revenant), a figure of excess that is “beyond the

phenomenon or beyond being” and that unsettles the opposition between what manifests

itself as presence and what escapes this very possibility.19 The notion of specter is pivotal

to Derrida’s investigation as it enables the distinction between ontology and

‘hauntology’, a double bind he sees at work in Marx’s corpus.20 While ontology focuses

on pure essences or ideas that reduce the apparently spectral to a clearly identifiable

mental representation, ‘hauntology’ seeks to track down what eludes such a pure

operation. But, above all, the figure of spectre allows Derrida to show first, the

untenability of maintaining clear cut conceptual distinctions since spectres stands for

what concepts need to exclude in order to convey the identity of what they signify, which

18 The teleologies of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Heidegger are all mentioned in Specters of Marx, 81, 91. 19 Ibid, 125. 20 Ibid, 214. Note also how Derrida plays, as with his notion of différance, with the written but not phonetic difference between the French ‘ontologie’ and ‘hantologie’. This is not simply a stylistic choice but a deliberate attempt to theoretically complicate, through the written form, the often unquestioned univocity of meaning.

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means that concepts are as much about what they represent, their content, and what they

exclude; second, to illuminate the type of metaphysical grounding that clear-cut

distinctions require.21

For Derrida, the importance of bringing to light the double bind of Marx’s thought

is both to highlight the metaphysics of presence grounding Marx’s normative claims and

to suggest that the latter articulated a way out from metaphysical thinking. While

recognizing that there is “more than one”22 spirit of Marxism –and we will come back to

the one he seeks to inherit in the next section– Derrida seeks to question and take distance

from “other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its

supposed systemic, metaphysical or ontological totality…, to its fundamental concepts of

labor, mode of production, social class’” and so forth.23 His main argument in opposition

to these “other spirits” is that there is an intimate connection between metaphysical

thinking and (‘substantive’) teleology on the one hand, and totalitarianism on the other.

Grounding this claim on his reading of Marx’s The German Ideology and The Communist

Manifesto, Derrida observes that in the former Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians,

and of German Ideology more generally, continuously relies on “an ontology of

presence” that seeks to bring human consciousness “back to the world of labour,

production and exchange, so as to reduce it to its conditions”.24 For Derrida, this aspect of

Marx’s thought is exemplary of what we have so far identified as metaphysics of

presence since Marx considers possible to grasp the most originary root of mental

representation through concepts such as ‘labor’ or ‘mode of production’, which are

elevated to the status of pure origins and thus remain implicated in a questionable

metaphysical thinking.25

21 Ibid, 184. Derrida claims that Marx’s German Ideology is focussed on the question of the idea, on the ‘proper’ delineation of what a an idea or concept is and displays, following a long tradition that goes back to Plato, the attempt to (re)establish a clear cut distinction between idea and non-idea, between Geist (idea) and Gespenst (spectre). Yet since, as Derrida remarks earlier on, “Geist can also signify ‘specter’” the “semantics of Gespenst themselves haunt the semantics of Geist” (134), an haunting indicating that the establishment of concepts demands the suppression of spectral semantic excess, this being an action that requires, as shown in the previous chapter, pragmatic interventions exceeding the philosophical domain. 22 More precisely, Derrida use the expression plus d’un which can be translated as both ‘more than one’ and ‘no more one’. Ibid, 2. 23 Specters, 110 –111. 24 Ibid, 214. This is one of the double bind Derrida sees at play in Marx’s gesture, the other being very close if not foregrounding deconstruction. This second aspect will be analyzed in the next section. 25 Ibid, 110.

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From a politico-philosophical perspective, the problem connected to Marx’s

ontology of presence is the articulation of normative claims in the form of a ‘substantive’

teleology or messainism grounded on such putatively pure origins. For Derrida, such

operation is inherent in one of the logic (the ontological) of Marx’s thought which

remains “radically insufficient there where the Marxist ontology grounding the project of

Marxist science or critique also itself carries with it and must carry with it, necessarily,

despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology”.26 This logic

remains insufficient since it privileges “an ontological treatment of the spectrality of the

ghost” and inscribes the movement of thinking in a teleological understanding of time

and history leading to the actualization of a telos.27 This aspect, for Derrida, emerges

clearly in The Communist Manifesto where Marx indicates the universal communist party

as “the final incarnation, the real presence of the spectre”, which marked the advent and

realization of a messianic eschaton, communism, namely the embodiment of human

essence as species-being in a classless society.28 In short, Derrida’s criticism of a certain

Marxism illuminates the dangerous normativity that the companionship between

metaphysics of presence and teleological thinking puts into effect. The normativity

produced by ideas supposedly grasped in their purity and posited as the ground for a

messianism to be realized can be a recipe for disastrous consequences such as those so

clearly manifested by the totalitarian use of Marxist messianism and its historical

enactment around the globe.

The other examples Derrida uses to investigate the problematic normativity

associated to political teleology, is Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.

While surely not being the most representative contemporary political thinker, Fukuyama

can be used as a case in point to illustrate a larger trend within many contemporary liberal

perspectives. At the core of this trend is a sort of jubilation of liberal democracy, of the

market economy and of its global spread especially after the death of communism.29

Derrida takes Fukuyama to be a representative of a Hegelian-Kojevian neo-evangelism

celebrating the ‘end of history’ discourse; that is, a discourse informed by a political

26 Ibid, 73. 27 Ibid, 114. 28 Ibid, 128. 29 Ibid, 69.

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teleology that considers liberal democracy, modelled on the Hegelian view of the state, as

the telos regulating the however imperfect realization of the Christian Kingdom of God

on earth.30 Derrida’s uneasiness with Fukuyama’s liberal democracy is rooted in the

Hegelian version of incarnation it represents but, most importantly, in the unexamined

axiomatics on which it relies. The liberal democracy at issue relies on a questionable

distinction that separates and opposes “empirical reality and ideal finality”, a regulative

ideal and its necessarily imperfect empirical approximation. As such, it is a type of

liberal democracy that extends beyond the ‘substantive normativity’ of Fukuyama and

capture examples of normativity of the ‘regulative’ type.31

According to Derrida, this type of liberal democracy is deeply problematic as it is

animated by an “ideal orientation”, a regulative ideal of Kantian sort, which is the telos

guiding or regulating political judgments about concrete situations in the present and for

the future. 32 The problem with that “ideal orientation” is that it manifests a longing for

cognitive ultimacy to the extent that political judgments informed by the regulative ideal

cannot be ‘disproved’ or challenged by concrete situations that do not measure up with,

or radically differ from, the idealized telos. This holds since, as Derrida notes, the telos in

question “has the form of an ideal finality” and thus “everything that appears to

contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and

global and multiple and recurrent it might be”.33

For Derrida, as Caputo has made clear, the type of teleology informing

Fukuyama’s liberal understanding – and we might add also all those views animated by

the “ideal orientation” just mentioned – relies on an irrefutable logic that is prepared to

tolerate many plaguing contradiction to the telos itself by appealing to the distinction and

30 Ibid, 75. 31 Ibid, 71. I have here in mind the perspectives of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas –and one might add also those generated by the reception of their thought. Arguably, both their theories subscribe to the empirical/ideal distinction at issue precisely because informed by regulative ideals. In the case of Rawls, the notions of political community as well-order society and of human beings as free and equal in the liberal sense constitute the guiding regulative ideals. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For Habermas, such ideals are represented by understanding as the telos of communicative human beings as well as (liberal) constitutional democracy as the model political community. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics’, On the Pragmatics of Communication ed. Maeve Cook (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 32 Ibid, 71. 33 Ibid, 71.

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separation between the ideal and the empirical.34 Among the catastrophic plagues that

contradict the liberal telos Derrida lists unemployment, homelessness, ruthless economic

wars to ‘control’ the market, the uncontrollable contradictions of the free-market, the

aggravation of foreign debt, the development of arm industry and trade, the spread of

nuclear weapons, the spread of inter-ethnic wars driven by essentialist view of

community as nation-state, the global growth of mafia and drug cartels and, above all, the

question of international law whose genesis and functioning depend on a particular

(European) historical culture and its dominating position.35 These plagues cannot be

tolerated in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy since “never have violence,

inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human

beings in the history of the earth and humanity…never have so many men, women, and

children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated.”36

From the perspective of the temporality we are discussing here, Derrida’s point

about liberal teleological thinking37 and the ‘regulative’ normativity it purports is thus

two folds: first, since such thinking is committed to the possibility of grasping a pure

telos, it halts, as it were, the flow of time and subscribes to the traditional, synchronic

understanding of time that opposes past and future, thereby annulling the contaminating

interval between the two that is the present. In so doing, teleological thinking also

violently annuls the possibility of the present to matter in its own right and subordinates it

to a future that can always and only promise the infinite approximation of the telos.

Second, as a consequence, teleological thinking is complacent or consciously tolerates

present sufferings that are measured against a redemptive future promising emancipation.

Yet, since for both political and logical reasons there is constant need for ‘more’ liberal

democracy, precisely because it can never be achieved, ‘necessary’ suffering can be

without limits. The dangerous irony, then, is not simply that the benefits of the future are

infinitely deferred while its guiding principle, the telos, is placed beyond the reach of

34 See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 138. 35 Ibid, 100 ff. 36 Ibid, 106. 37 Although ‘liberal teleological thinking’ might appear as an umbrella formulation that blurs the distinctions among the different articulation of democracy informed by liberal understanding, it is not my intention to use it in this sense. My aim is instead to emphasize the distinction ideal/real that is at issue in my discussion and that characterized those politico-philosophical positions (Kantian, Habermasian and Rawlsian) inspired by a Kantian teleology.

14

critical scrutiny or even removed from the possibility of failure. It is, above all, that what

is supposed to guide normative judgments about experience is necessarily blind to the

specificity and singularity of particular situations in the present, especially if these

situations were to differ from the articulations informed by the idealized final goal.

After having expounded Derrida’s challenge to political teleologies, we are now

in a better position to appreciate the significance of connecting time and political thought

as well as exposing the time of political thinking. Derrida seeks to show that the

commitments to teleology and metaphysics of presence within political thought are

exemplary of a modality of thinking that neutralizes the temporality of politics, the

variations, contaminations and ambiguities of its happening. He does so at two

interlinked levels: philosophically, he shows that and how teleological thinking petrifies

time into a rigid conceptual structure establishing a particular order of hierarchies (ideal,

intelligible etc. versus empirical, sensible etc.), which unjustifiably discriminate against

ways of thinking, understanding or being that do not abide by the rules of the

metaphysical tradition. Politically, he illustrates how teleological thinking fosters

practices of intolerance towards ‘unfitting’ otherness and thus contributes to the

progressive closure of the political space.

To put this more pointedly: by emphasizing the uncritical inheritance or lack of

problematization of a teleological understandings of time, Derrida shows that much of

modern political reflection has cooperated with the continuous reliance of political

concepts, institutions and practices on unwarranted metaphysical assumptions. Most

decisively, he raises questions about the extent to which investigating the temporality of

political thought is central to any project of intellectual and political emancipation, which

seeks to disentangle human freedom and action from the mere attempt to fulfil or being

guided by an idealized telos.

There is, then, an alarming implication following from Derrida’s analysis of time

and political thought: the extent to which philosophical understandings of time as longing

for origins have informed and inform (normative) political thinking, institutions and

practices, they have promoted and still promote the universalization of a monistic,

exclusionary thinking of political life grounded on ideas allegedly, and yet

unwarrantedly, grasped in their purity. In the context of this study, the exclusionary

15

potential of teleological thinking and foundational reason need not be underestimated

especially if the latter represented the secular response to faith and theology. Indeed, if

one of the key motivations in the modern attempt to separate philosophy from theology

was to remedy the intolerance of latter,38 one might say that much of modern political-

philosophy, and especially teleologically informed liberal thought, did not live up to its

aim. A significant level of intolerance and coloniality,39 previously attributed to religion

and theological discourse, can be ascribed to certain secular attempts to affirm, on the

globe, a particular conception of reason, thinking and political arrangements through

imperial policies justified by philosophical arguments. As Burke would put it, with the

progressive affirmation of modern philosophy over theology the line of succession

changed but not the principle of inheritance, as the claim on exclusive prerogative on

fundamental questions of political life grounded on metaphysical thought was transferred

from theology (and its eschatologies) to secular philosophy (and its teleologies).

Although this rather bleak picture emerges forcefully from Derrida’s reflections, this is

not all he is offering. His analysis of time does in fact point to the need and possibility of

thinking temporality otherwise, as ‘messianic’, and to the hope that a non-teleological

approach might disclose a chance for a different kind of political thought and practice.

2. The ‘messianic’ as political thought

How to think temporality otherwise? This is the guiding question of this section

which explores Derrida’s notion of the ‘messianic’. My aim is to illustrate his idea of the

‘messianic’ as a type of political thinking that resists a synchronic understanding of time

typical of political teleologies and that might open up new possibilities and

38 This is one of the themes of Locke’s An Essay concerning Toleration. It is worth noting, though, that Locke was intolerant of Quakers (who refused to take off their hats to their betters) and atheists (who allegedly would not honor contracts). See John Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration, eds. J.R Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 39 I take coloniality to be distinguished from colonialism which refers to an historical period. By coloniality, I refer to a paternalistic type of mind-set that establishes arbitrarily, and from a particular geo-political context, standards for evaluating the proper foundation of political life. This manner of thinking implies that the terms for self-interpretation at the disposal of colonized subjects are established independently of their will, historicity, context and particularities, these being elements which arguably constitute the substance of any recognizable form of human life.

16

understandings, or what Derrida calls “a new Enlightenment”, including a new

conceptualization of the political domain and of reason itself.40

The notion of the ‘messianic’ is arguably the central motive of Derrida’ Specters

of Marx, if not of his entire corpus.41 Although firstly introduced through a direct

reference to Benjamin42, Derrida claims to have inherited the notion of the ‘messianic’,

as he uses it, from Marx’s legacy43 and articulates it in these terms:

What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the

possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it

is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianic without religion, even a

messianic without messianism, an idea of justice –which we distinguish from law or right and

even from human rights–and an idea of democracy –which we distinguish from its current concept

and from its determined predicates today.44

There are at least two dimensions that are central to what Derrida means by ‘messianic’:

one is temporal, and refers to the structure of the emancipatory promise characterized by

an experience of time as non-teleological or ‘without messianism’, the other is ethico-

political, and is linked to justice and democracy. We will consider both dimensions in

turn leaving, however, the question of democracy to the next chapter.

The promise Derrida mentions in the passage above refers to Marx’s promise of

emancipation but not to its determined content since this, as we have seen, is inscribed in

40 Specters, 112. 41 Specters, though, is not the first place where the ‘messianic’ first appears. Already in his ‘Force of Law’ Derrida introduced the word ‘messianic’ to articulate the form of promise or “messianicity” as opposed to its content, and to distinguish his ‘messianic’ from an horizon of expectation exemplified by religious messianisms (Jewish, Christian or Islamic) or secular teleologies (Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist and post-Marxist). Ibid, 254. 42 In a long note, Derrida connects his ‘messianic’ to Benjamin’s ‘weak messianic force’ in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. For Benjamin, the ‘weak messianic force’ names the irruptive power the past can claim (Anspruch) over us, at any time in the present, to be responsive to and responsible for the memory of past suffering. So conceived, Benjamin’s messianic designates a type of temporality characterized by the ever present possibility of temporal rupture and thus the openness and unpredictability of the future. Despite some differences, Derrida considers Benjamin’s articulation of the messianic as informing his own version of messianic temporality. See Specters, 69 n.2. For a rigorous and rich exploration of the relation between Benjamin and Derrida on the issues of the ‘messianic’ see Mathias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory. History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin and Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 43 Ibid, 33. 44 Ibid, 74.

17

a logic of incarnation laden with a potential for disaster. More precisely, the promise

refers to the structure of promise, to the “being-promise of a promise”, which, for

Derrida, exceeds and precedes Marx’s and any other promise (of emancipation).45 This

structure is implicit in any promise which, as promise, institutes a relation that opens

itself to a future that cannot be mastered or predicted through the determination of a

particular content but only announced as coming in its indetermination and necessity. As

Derrida says, “whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or

whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some

historicity as future-to-come. It is what we are nicknaming the messianic without

messianism”.46 Derrida’s ‘messianic’ is therefore about an emancipatory promise that

does not promise any particular future but promises the future, it promises that “it is

necessary [that there be] the future” (“il faut l’avenir”), which is to say that the

“necessarily formal necessity of its possibility” is the law of the future. The indifference

towards content here is not a nihilist attitude; it is not a symptom of indifference towards

the future. Rather it is what marks the very possibility to be open to a future that is not

already constrained by aprioristic determinations. 47

So conceived, Derrida’s ‘messianic’ designates a certain experience of time

marking the “irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future”, and is clearly

distinct from messianisms.48 The ‘messianic’ does not announce the event of a Messiah

or any other types of eschatons (such as Hegel’s secularization of Spirit or Marx’s

communist society) whose arrival would halt temporality. Nor does it pre-empt the

singularity of coming events by inscribing them within a predetermined movement of

thinking regulated by the finality of a telos (as in teleologies of Kantian sort). All these

types of thinking still retain the temporal form of a future present, namely of a projecting

in the future a “modality of the living present” that predetermines what is to come.49 On

the contrary, the ‘messianic’ seeks to preserve an undetermined hope, an open

relationship to a future that is not already inscribed in the projection of the historical

present. It does so in the manner of a “hospitality without reserve”, a “welcoming 45 Ibid, 131 46 Ibid, 92. 47 Ibid, 91–92. 48 Ibid, 210. 49 Ibid, 80.

18

salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise” of the event of what is to come.50

In this regard, Derrida observes that it is this

event-ness that one must think, but that best resists what is called the concept, if not thinking. And

it will not be thought as long as one relies on the simple (ideal, mechanical, or dialectical)

opposition of the real presence of the real present or of the living present to its ghostly

simulacrum, the opposition of the effective or actual (wirklich) to the non-effective, inactual,

which is also to say, as long as one relies on a general temporality or an historical temporality

made up of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves and contemporary with

themselves.51

Thinking temporality differently requires moving beyond a synchronic view of time as an

infinite series of successive moments stretched along the line that connects past-present-

future. It requires distancing from a thinking that clearly distinguishes between the

presence and absence, identity and difference of self-identical moments contemporaneous

with themselves. Above all, thinking temporality otherwise requires, as Derrida notes,

“thinking another historicity” as “an opening of event-ness to historicity that permitted

one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of

the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-

theological or teleo-eschatological program or design” that turns the promise into a

determined promise conceiving of the future as predetermined by and from the present.52

For Derrida, thinking temporality and historicity as promise, is not simply a philosophical

endeavour. It is, most importantly, “the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of

another concept of the political.”53

Before considering this last point, the question arises how to think temporality and

historicity differently. Derrida’s attempt to address this question is exemplified by his

discussion of temporal disjuncture in Hamlet. Repeatedly in Specters, he quotes Hamlet’s

phrase “the time is out of joint” to account for an experience of the present, of a ‘now’,

that does not appear as presence but in the form of a ghost or specter. Hamlet’s phrase is

50 Ibid, 81 51 Ibid, 87. 52 Ibid, 94. 53 Ibid, 94.

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occasioned by the appearance of his dead father as a ghost that comes back (revenant) to

the living, and who asks his son to avenge his death and restore justice according to law

as vengeance. For Derrida, Hamlet’s phrase does not acknowledge the temporal moral

decay of a political community, whose historical direction needs rectification. Hamlet, in

fact, “swears against a destiny that leads him to do justice for a fault” by “making of

rectitude and right (“to set it right”) a movement of correction, reparation, restitution,

vengeance, revenge, punishment”.54 Rather his phrase is an attempt to interrupt the axis,

the ‘good’ direction of that which follows the linear spirit of the inherited law and to

recognize that already in the beginning, in the founding of a law seeking to keep its

destination straight, a violent force excluding ‘deviators’ is at work. In other words,

Derrida attributes to Hamlet the ability to have recognized in and through the spectre of

his revenant father an “originary wrong…a bottomless wound, an irreparable tragedy, the

indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law or history as law”. This tragedy

designates the “spectral anteriority of the crime– the crime of the other, a misdeed whose

event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can

only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized”, being this something

that does not make them any less a matter of responsibility.55

For Derrida, the spectral anteriority of the crime refers to an originary trauma –

like the trauma that follows political founding, the institution of language and, more

generally, of the archive –the actual cause of which is out of reach but its effects are

visible through surviving marks. These are marks of that which is “a living on (sur-vie)”,

namely a surviving trace of what has been excluded but intervenes in the living present

by disjoining its identity and unity.56 That trace takes the form of specters appearing in

the present but not as presence, as something clearly identifiable. Rather they appear as

some “thing” that is difficult to name because it exceeds the order of knowledge, the

distinction between presence and absence, life and death and therefore defies “semantics

as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy”.57 By intervening in and

interrupting the living present, specters desynchronize temporal moments as they make

54 Ibid, 23. 55 Ibid, 24. 56 Ibid, xx. 57 Ibid, 5.

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explicit the spacing of temporal succession (i.e. the relationship between the no longer

and the not yet). In so doing, they mark the “non-contemporaneity of present time with

itself”, which is precisely the disjuncture of time. 58 Thus, for Derrida, to say that “the

time is out of joint” is just another way of articulating, from the point of view of a

messianic temporality, the impossibility of self-identity as presence or of the as such: the

structural openness of the promise impedes the closure of the circular and

undifferentiated appropriation of identity to itself, which cannot but retain spectral

elements.

Now, although the spectral anteriority of the crime refers to the spectres coming

from the past, these are not the only ones. Derrida emphasizes in fact that the specter is

much a revenant coming back from the past as it is an arrivant coming from the future.

The specter is a figure that includes all those who are beyond the ‘living present’

including the dead and the unborn whose address to us we have responsibility to

acknowledge: doing so is a matter of justice. In his words:

It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no

ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does

not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who

are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice –let us

say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws– seems possible or thinkable without

the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoin the living

present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims

of wars, political or other kind of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kind of

exterminations, victims of the oppression of capitalist imperialism or any other forms of

totalitarism.59

The discourse on justice as messianic thinking is a discourse that is as much about time as

it is about ghosts and their interminable mourning. It is a discourse that is necessarily

placed within a specific archive since it requires inheriting a particular past through a

memory of ghosts and a continuous speaking with and to them, a speaking that allows for

acknowledging the disjuncture of time. Above all, the discourse on justice requires what

58 Ibid, 29. 59 Ibid, xviii.

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Derrida calls a “politico-logic of trauma”, namely a politico-philosophical receptivity to

originary politicization, that is, to the politics of founding and its violent components.

This is a receptivity that is always also one for the trauma and ghosts produced by the

structural exclusions, murders, and exterminations that very often characterize founding

moments, which, as Derrida elsewhere says, inaugurate a new law “always…in

violence”.60 Without such receptivity, without the memory of an originary loss, it seems

impossible to critically account for that which has allowed the law to be there in the first

place and thus for the temporal rupture founding moments mark. Indeed, for Derrida, it is

the violence of the “originary performativity” always involved in political founding,

“whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution” of “the law itself”,

that “interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging:

‘out of joint’”.61 In short, without a “politico-logic of trauma” and memory it appears

impossible to account for the empirical conditions (read historical violence) that enable

any ethics and politics in the first place, an account that is instrumental to avoid a naïve

confidence in the possibility of redeeming past injustice through the promise of a future

to be fulfilled or approximated.

But what seems also unlikely without such receptivity and memory is the

possibility to keep the promise of the future open and hospitable. The oblivion of

originary politicization impedes the recognition of temporal disjuncture, it obscures the

possibility of re-politicization and therefore locks the future to the close destiny of a

present telos, which cannot but predetermine the conditions for inclusion. Put otherwise,

the spirit of hospitality motivated by the “politico-logic of trauma” that is required to

maintain the promise as promise cannot establish in advance what is to come. For

Derrida, this holds not only because the specters welcomed by hospitality shake the

present horizon within which they intervene but also because predeterminations would

reinstitute the sorts of checkpoints various messianisms install at their borders “in order

to screen the arrivant”.62

60 See ‘Force of Law’, 269. By maintaining, in the next paragraph, that even if “spectacular genocides, expulsions or deportation that so often accompany the foundation of states” do not occur, violence marks structurally the foundation of the law for structural reasons, Derrida elucidates why violence is ‘internal’ to the law in the moment of its institution. 61 Ibid, 37. 62 Ibid, 82.

22

The significance of memory (of ghosts) for hospitality cannot be overlooked. For

Derrida, the type and degree of responsiveness to ghosts is doubly central: first, because

the fear of ghosts and excessive closure to them to safeguard the unity and stability of

political identity can lead to political disaster. This, for him, is what happened with the

totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, which were “equally

terrorized by the ghost of the other, and its own ghost as the ghost of the other” 63 and

thus can be read also as reactions “of panic-ridden fear before the ghost in general”.64

Second, because the type and degree of responsiveness to ghosts indicates the temporality

at work in political thinking and the weight the latter accords to inherited historical

injustice, which both affect the scope for future inclusion. On this matter, Derrida follows

Marx whom he recognizes as having shed light on the relationship between inheritance,

forgetting of ghosts and emancipatory thinking. For Derrida’s Marx, a political thinking

that is merely content to forget spectres so that history can continue towards a universal

emancipatory telos relies on a synchronic temporality. It is a thinking that, by valuing

only life as presence, values “life as forgetting itself” and thus forgets ghosts and what

they signify.65 Committed to a general forgetting, this type of thinking forgets also

historical violence and the constitutive limits its own particular origins put to an

unconditional universal discourse that, oblivious to its own conditioned character,

becomes blind to its own intolerant and exclusionary impulses. In contrast, a thinking that

keeps the memory of specters and forget them only enough so as to keep alive the spirit

of the revolution as temporal rupture reveals attention to the possibility of a diachronic

temporality and therefore, ultimately, of hospitality. To gives a sense of what we are

talking about here in a succinct formula Derrida uses: “As soon as there is some specter,

hospitality and exclusion go together”.66

With this reference to Marx, Derrida does not seek to unconditionally condemn

the forgetting of ghosts of past violence and the somehow oblivious moving forward of a

new political community, as he reckons that some forgetting of what has been inherited is

63 Ibid, 131. 64 Ibid, 130. 65 Ibid, 176. 66 Ibid, 176.

23

necessary to that very movement.67 Rather his point is to emphasize the significance of

remembering not “what one inherits but the pre-inheritance on the basis of which one

inherits”; that is, remembering the empirical conditions of founding moments –which, as

said, often involves exclusions, murders and exterminations –, conditions that allow for

an emancipatory political thinking to be at all. The remembering of such conditions

marks the very experience of the promise of messianic thinking, which, like ‘a language

of promise’, can acknowledge its own initial politicization and provisionality, and thus

can limit, as much as possible, closure and totalizations.

For Derrida, then, there is an intimate link between the acknowledgment of

originary politicization and the non-forgetting of ghosts on the one hand, and the

possibility of accounting for the out-of-joint structure of time, on the other hand. This

connection illuminates the distinctively novel and non-idealistic character of his political

thought: instead of merely inscribing messianic thinking as a political thinking about

justice within ideal conditions of possibility that abstracts from life as presence, Derrida

seeks to highlight the empirical (historical) conditions of possibility enabling any process

of idealization in the first place. And these are conditions in which the stakes of which

ghosts are symptoms (political, philosophical but especially human) are so significant

that cannot be philosophically forgotten or bypassed by a political thinking that seeks to

be critical beyond transcendental concerns. That is, by a thinking that is not contented

with overcoming its past to get closer to a final goal but is also attentive to reactivating

the past through a genealogical investigation of its ghosts. In short, by a thinking that is

both transcendental and genealogical.

With the connection between ghosts, temporal disjuncture and justice we have

already moved to the second dimension of the ‘messianic’: justice. While it is not my

intention to fully explore Derrida’s view on justice here, I nevertheless want to highlight

his emphasis on the connection between justice and temporality and on how such a

connection reconfigures political thinking. The question of justice is not simply about the

articulation of ethico-political ideals as in the tradition of political philosophy since Plato

or of procedural rules as in Neo-Kantian political thought. It is also and very much a

question of time since justice concerns what will come in and from the future. As Derrida

67 Ibid.

24

remarks, justice is “turned toward the future, going toward it, it also comes from it, it

proceeds from [provient de] the future”.68 Justice is not simply a question of and for the

living, of life as presence, but something due to the non-living, that is, to the dead as

memory and the unborn as promise. Thinking of justice, therefore, cannot seem possible

within a perspective that seeks to identify the most fundamental principle representing

either the ultimate content of justice or the ground for articulating procedures leading to

justice, as this would lead to the very metaphysics of presence Derrida puts into questions

and to the halting of time. Nor does it seem so by way of a joining or bringing-together

(Verstammlung) as Derrida sees Heidegger doing in his reflection on justice as Dikē,

precisely for the same reasons. 69 Rather thinking justice is possible “on the basis of a

movement of some disjointing, disjunction, or disproportion” between past and future,

presence and absence; a movement that by being sensitive to past and future generations

prevents the closure of future time as the expression “il faut l’avenir” pointedly

suggests.70

At this point, it is important to rebut a common criticism against Derrida’s view

on justice and time. Because Derrida repeatedly affirms in his writings that justice never

arrives but is always ‘to come’, that justice “is not deconstructible” (or the messianic as

justice for that matter), and that “the undeconstructibility of justice also makes

deconstruction possible”, he seems to be positing a full blown exteriority, (justice as) a

transcendent ground that is removed from the passing of time and is posited in view

giving motion to the wheels of deconstruction. 71 The objection is significant as it focuses

not simply on the very connection between justice and time, the ‘messianic’ as justice,

but also on the nature of Derrida’s philosophical approach. That justice never arrives but

is always only ‘to come’ means that the meaning of justice can never be exhausted by

some substantial or regulative telos, as this would halt both the flaw of time and the

iterability contaminating the alleged purity of ideals since a pure telos could be grasped

only by suspending that flaw, form outside time as it were. Precisely because the

‘messianic’ as justice accounts for a disjointed experience of time and acknowledges

68 Ibid, xix. 69 Ibid, 32. 70 Ibid, xix. 71 ‘Force of Law’, 243.

25

ghosts –which, to recall it, unsettle the possibility of pure ideas to be grasped in

consciousness as presence –justice is always semantically deficient, it can never be

grasped as a pure telos and therefore, for structural reasons, can never arrive in time.

Rather then pointing to a radical exteriority or transcendence, the undeconstructibility of

justice suggests a horizontal type of transcendence conceived as that which has not yet

come; a transcendence that is, stricto sensu, no transcendence at all.

The centrality of Derrida’s emphasis on temporal disjuncture for justice and, more

generally for political thought, rests on the “de-totalizing” operation of messianic

thinking, which perturbs “the good conscience of having done one’s own duty” as the

discussion of Hamlet illustrates. This operation is enabled, as we have said, precisely by a

philosophical sensibility for founding moments, and the memory of ghosts through which

the acknowledgment of originary politicization can occur. Indeed, for Derrida, it is by

keeping open to relationship to ghosts that messianic thinking does not lose “the chance

of the future”, that very future which would seem to be ‘lost’ if one were one to proceed

according to the uncritical inheritance of the law, its history and destination.72

So how do the two dimensions of the ‘messianic’ just discussed, the temporal and

the ethico-political, help us understanding what Derrida means with that term? This much

can now be affirmed: the ‘messianic’ names a type of thinking that radicalizes human

finitude and designates the disjointed constitution of our present experience of time,

which is inherent in the formal promise structuring our relationship to the future. This is a

future that is open to the ‘event’ conceived as a radical interruption of temporal flow and

narrative unity giving coherence to human experience. Thought as without messianism,

the ‘messianic’ or “quasi-transcendental ‘messianism’” as Derrida calls it, therefore

names a “universal structure of experience”, a quasi-transcendental conditions for

messianisms, which all require “that there be the future” to be at all. 73 Unlike other

messianisms informed by a regulative ideal of Kantian sort or by a determined content as

in the tradition of secular and religious messianisms, Derrida’s ‘quasi-transcendental

messianism’ is “a waiting without horizon of expectation or prophetic prefiguration”, that

is, a waiting that keeps deferring “not what it affirms but deferring just so as to affirm”

72 Ibid, 33. 73 Ibid, 212.

26

the emancipatory promise that “there will be future”.74 More precisely, Derrida’s

messianism is a waiting that instead of doing away with horizons altogether –an option

that would imply the impossibility of meaning – actively punctures them, thereby

revealing their constitutive provisionality and the impossibility of closure.75 So

conceived, then, the ‘messianic’ exceeds the foreclosing linearity of teleological thinking

and its calculative mode and remains structurally open to the event of what is to come,

which remains uncalculable, surprising, and can come as a surprise at any moment; like

in Benjamin. 76

Note, though, that to say that the ‘messianic’ as a thinking about justice is a

waiting is not to imply passivity, the paralysis of agency or that justice is infinitely

deferred. Quite the contrary. Throughout the whole of Specters of Marx, Derrida’s

attempt to think the disjuncture of time and the event to come is characterized by a strong

sense of urgency and action. Such a sense is associated to both Marx’s political injunction

and the notion of différance and retains, as I shall address below, a normative character.

In the uncoercible différance the here and now unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but

without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because deferring,

precisely [justement], and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in

imminence and urgency: even if it moves towards what remains to come, there is the pledge [gage]

(promise, engagement, injunction and response to the injunction, and so forth). The pledge is

given here and now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to

the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional.77

For Derrida, Marx’s political injunction, his pledge for emancipation, is urgent and

imminent. It cannot wait a deferral, as justice demands taking a decision in the present, in

the ‘here and now’, a decision that does not nevertheless imply its happening as presence,

and that is why deferral and difference, or in a word, différance, affects its happening.

The challenge here is, like for ‘a language of promise’, how to be responsive to

singularity in the present without renouncing universality or, as Derrida elsewhere put it,

74 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 47. 75 Ibid, 19. 76 Ibid, 211. 77 Ibid, 37.

27

how to conceive of “a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the

abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced.”78 We

will return to this issue below.

I want to suggests that when applied to the political domain, Derrida’s ‘messianic’

can be conceived as a type of non-teleological political thinking that is able to keep the

political domain open to alterity, to the semantic fluidity of justice and of other political

categories and practices by affirming a non-normative normativity.79 Messianic thinking

as a thinking of justice that is normative insofar as it imperatively and urgently affirms

that one is to act and decide in the present, and thus in opposition to an awaiting a future

to be approximated by some regulative idea.80 Yet, since it resists idealizing a telos

grasped in the present as presence, it is a thinking that is non-normative in the

‘traditional’ sense; that is, it is not informed by the force exercised by the metaphysics of

presence and its epistemological mastery but is a thinking that leaves open the modes of

interpretations and application of the content informing decision and action.81

Messianic thinking is politico-philosophically significant since it resists

predeterminations and in so doing it enables decision and action in a manner that can be

responsive to the singularity of predicaments and individuals. Indeed, for Derrida,

normative judgments informing action or evaluating current institutions and practices are

to be assessed on their ability to respond as appropriately as possible to the singularity of

subjects and situations. Therefore such judgments cannot be regulated in advance in pre-

eminently ideal terms or before being exposed to experience and the process of

78 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 56. 79 I owe the formulation of this term to my discussions with Willi Goetschel. 80 Ibid, 112. Note, though, that in Rogues, while speaking of the regulative Idea in Kant, Derrida considers it a “last resort” retaining a “certain dignity” and declares: “I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it” (83). And yet Derrida enumerates several reservations with regard to the way in which the regulative Idea is “currently used, outside its strictly Kantian determination” as a possible ideal that is “indefinitively deferred” (84). 81 On this point, my position is clearly distinct from Martin Hägglund’s powerful interpretation of Derrida’s work. In his Radical Atheism, Hägglund interprets Derrida’s affirmation of openness to the future associated to justice in descriptive terms (31) so that no ethical or political stance can be derived from Derrida’s position (165). See Hägglund Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life (op. cit.). Yet when Derrida, in Specters of Marx, talks about Marx’s injunction and the spirit of Marxism he seeks to retain, he refers to an emancipatory affirmation and not simply of affirmation (111). This is an affirmation that is hardly separable from a political stance and normative commitment to the extent that idea of emancipation is linked, as Derrida elsewhere indicates, to the tradition of the Enlightenment whose normative thrust is undeniable. (“Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal” [‘Force of Law’ in Acts of Religion, 256]).

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negotiations it demands. Negotiation here does not stand for an ideal goal but names a

predicament in which reason proceeds, without a priori guidance or cognitive guarantees,

every time anew. Undoubtedly, the openness inherent to messianic thinking implies a

certain degree of risk in political life as Derrida recognizes when he notes that “to be out

of joint” can not only “do harm and do evil” but “it is no doubt the very possibility of

evil”.82 Yet, that very risk constitutes at the same time a chance to keep human freedom

as an ongoing concrete possibility, which is not the same as equating freedom with the

absence of moral limits. And this is a possibility that refuses to be exhausted by the

enactment of an idealized telos or by the mechanical application of a regulative rule.

This reading of Derrida’s perspective as normative but not in a ‘traditional’ sense

is distinct from other recent interpretations of his work, including those of Critchley,

Caputo, Cornell, Beardsworth and Fritsch, which all argue for the presence of a

normative dimension in his thought.83 Despite their differences, these authors consider

Derrida’s view as informed by some normative ideal–conceived respectively as the

ethical priority of the other, peace, utopia of non-violence, or simply the goal of ‘lesser

violence’– that regulates more or less explicitly and robustly the movement of

deconstruction. It is not my intention here to engage in questions of interpretation of

Derrida’s scholarship and establish the value of these perspectives, as other

commentators have convincingly engaged in such hermeneutic exercise.84 All I want to

do is to indicate how my view is distinct from these authors while it nevertheless shares

with them the emphasis on normativity in Derrida’s thought. According to my reading,

Derrida’s messianic thinking is marked by a non-normative normativity dismissing the

force of a metaphysics of presence enabling the positing of ideals and their guiding

function, especially if this positing bypasses a priori the process of negotiation that the

82 Ibid, 34.In this regard, I endorse Haddad’s view that the messianic is not the better over the worse but open to the constant threat of the worse. See Samir Haddad, ‘A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune’, in Diacritics 38 (2009), 121–142, 83 See Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and The Political (London: Routledge, 1996); John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Matthias Fritsch, ‘Derrida’s Democracy to Come’, Constellations 9:4 (2002), 574 –597. 84 For a robust criticism of Critchley, Caputo, Cornell and Bearsdworth, but also Fritsch see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life, especially ch. 3 and Samir Haddad, ‘A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune’ (op. cit.).

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situatedness and temporality of specific situations demands. This holds not only because

the attention messianic thinking devotes to specters disallows the possibility of relying

upon the guidance of untainted ideals and thus of ultimately relying upon the stability and

staticity provided by a metaphysics of presence (as we have seen, specters perturb the

stability of concepts by exposing their constitutive relationship with what they exclude).

It also holds since the affirmation of openness impedes the predetermination of normative

guidelines as it does not by itself translate into a normative commitment to be always

open.85

Although my reading rules out the presence of substantive normative ideals in

Derrida, it does not suggests that there is no normative commitment in Derrida, that

action and decision remain normatively unsupported, or even less that his normative

sources are arbitrary. 86 As it emerges especially from his ‘political writings’87 Derrida

does in fact manifest a commitment to democracy over other regimes and, in particular,

to a certain understanding of democracy that emphasizes values like openness to

criticism, perfectibility and free speech, all of which carry a normative weight.88 Such

commitments, far from being arbitrary, are instead inherited from the tradition his

thinking is heir of and bespeaks for, as we shall see below, the historical character of his

reflections.89 My reading only implies that such normative support does not in itself

translate into an ethico-political program but is open to articulation and re-articulation

according to the specificity of situations.90 My point is that Derrida is committed to the

85 On this point, I agree with Fritsch and am indebted to his analysis in The Promise of Memory, 190. 86 Derrida’s reluctance to offer normative guidelines to political problems is emphasized also by Hägglund who notes that Derrida’s political import is in fact to highlight that the justification of norms is subject to temporal variations and thus cannot occur once and for all. See Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 171. While agreeing with Hägglund on this point, my view departs from his interpretation on the question whether Derrida’s view is marked by any normativity at all. 87 See especially his The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997); Rogues (op. cit). 88 On Derrida’s commitment to distinct features of democracy in his ‘democracy to come’ see Mathias Fritsch ‘Derrida’s Democracy To Come’, Constellations 9:4 (2002), 574 –597 ; Samir Haddad, ‘Language Remains’ The New Centennial Review 9:1 (2009), 127–146. 89 Specters, 68. Here, in discussing the inheritance of Marxism, Derrida advance the general claim that not only interpretation but “all the questions on the subject of being or what it means to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance” precisely because “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance”. 90 The only one place I am aware of in which Derrida seems instead to pre-determine the normative support to decision and action and to deny the possibility that there will be future, occurs in an interview on terror where he declares: “What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” … of the “bin Laden effect” is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future.… That is why, in this

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imperative to act ‘here and now’, and thus to engage with situations, contexts and people

in the present. Such a commitment is normative as it is imperatively affirmed, and yet, it

is non-normative (as traditionally conceived) as it rules out the viability of pre-

established guidelines about how to approach the present, including the goal of always

negotiating.91

The objection can be raised that reading Derrida’s project as being still animated

by whatever form of normativity does not save him from the charge of relapsing into the

some kind of teleology. While the objection is relevant it does not quite capture the

subtlety and complexity of his thought. Derrida is not trying to dispense with any form of

teleology whatsoever since the imperative to act in the present can be seen as a sort of

regulative teleology itself. However, this would be a teleology that, deprived of a

transcendent ground and thus of a close horizon of expectation, is dynamic in spirit as it

is open to inform the injunction to act on a basis that can be constantly negotiated and

renegotiated. Thus, even if one were to agree with Caputo that Derrida’s is a messianism

with a deconstructive bent, it would nevertheless be one characterized by a teleology that

rejects fixing horizons of expectations through the positing of a telos, and thus dismisses

the staticity involved in a Kantian regulative teleology supported by a metaphysics of

presence; a staticity that is connected to the non-revisability of what constitutes a telos

and that neutralizes the very notion of the present and of negotiating norms, their

interpretations and applications. 92 Otherwise put, Derrida’s would be a dynamic

teleology that in the ‘good’ spirit of Marxism conceives of its own “aging”93 and thus

acknowledges the constitutive and constant possibility of its own failure or ‘untruth’,

which implies not locking the future to a future present.

unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would.” See his ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’ in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 109. The question, of course, is whether this affirmation is enough to argue for the static commitment to normative ideals in his thought, which is what we are here rejecting. 91 On this matter, my view is both similar to and different from Hägglund’s. Like him, I consider Derrida opposed to the articulation of normative ideals before the exposure to concrete situations and to the idea that deconstruction grounds and justifies norms (171), including negotiation as a normative ideal (203). Yet, unlike him I do not consider such an opposition a ground to reject the presence of any normativity whatsoever in Derrida. See Hägglund, Radical Atheism (op. cit). 92 For Caputo, Derrida’s is another type of messianism but with a deconstructive twist that disallows the notion of a “true messianic in general”. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 142, 93 Ibid, 14.

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Perhaps, there is little possibility to avoid some form of teleology in political

thought, especially with regard to issues of emancipation. Yet the question remains

whether human freedom is enhanced rather than restricted by a teleology that is dynamic,

sensible to a diachronic view of time, and able to think an open future as opposed to a

static, atemporal and thus structurally intolerant teleology as traditionally conceived. It is

my contention that the fruitful potential of Derrida’s perspective for political thought lies

especially on its refusal to articulate a normative theory or a ‘deconstructive politics’, a

refusal which shows why political thought and practice might benefit from resisting

teleological aspirations for there to be thinking, decision and action in political life at all.

My point is that Derrida’s is an attempt to articulate a political thinking that, in his

opposition to ‘static’ teleologies (i.e. those characterized by a fixed and non-revisable

telos), might open up new possibilities and understandings, precisely because it does not

foreclose the very possibility of such possibilities and understandings. 94 Although, for

structural reasons, Derrida does not articulate the substance of these possibilities, he does

nevertheless makes clear that what is at stake in messianic thinking is the possibility of

re-thinking the political: that is, as a domain that is “pervertible” and always exposed to

unsettlement, and hence one that, pace Schmitt but also liberal thinkers, cannot ultimately

be closed. 95

But what Derrida does also make clear is that the stakes of messianic thinking

include the possibility of thinking reason otherwise. While only announced in Specters,

this topic is dealt at length in Rogues, and I want to conclude this section by exploring

briefly this matter. In Rogues Derrida takes up Kant’s idea of defending the “honour of

reason” by extending its limits beyond experience towards the unconditional.96

Connecting this topic to Husserl’s call for a rehabilitation (Ehrenrettung) of reason,

Derrida suggests that what is at stake in thinking today might be “saving the honour of

reason” against the crisis reason has undergone especially as a result of the dominating

94 Specters, 112. 95 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’ in Giovanna Borradori Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 109. 96 Rogues, 118.

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calculative mode of scientific rationality –dominated by naturalism and objectivism –for

which reason itself is responsible.97

For Derrida, “saving the honour of reason” means attending to both reason’s

exigencies: unconditional incalculability and conditional calculability. Above all, it

means saving reason from itself, that is, saving its unconditional and incalculable

character from the dominance of calculative rationality. To this effect, Derrida suggests a

critical return to Kant who, he notes, showed that reason is not confined to calculability

but is also called to attend the demands of the unconditional. Derrida considers this last

point emerging most clearly in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant

shows the concept of ‘dignity’ as belonging to the order of the incalculable.98 However,

Derrida notes, Kant also articulated a view of theoretical reason that, in spite of its

subordination to practical reason and its unconditional character, tends to constitutively

resist the demands of the unconditional. In this regard, Derrida recalls Kant’s first

Critique, where the latter posited theoretical reason as essentially architectonic, namely as

a type of reason that is made foundational through a systematization privileging unity,

homogeneity and calculability over divisibility, heterogeneity and uncalculability.99

For Derrida, it is this aspect of the Kantian project that needs to be questioned as

it bypasses the problem of translating the plural and heterogeneous manifestation of

reason, of its plural rationalities – those that developed within the natural, human and

social sciences –each of which has “its own ontological ‘region’, its own necessity, style,

axiomatics, institutions, community, and historicity” and thus resists, in the name of its

own rationality, “any architectonic organization”.100 Such questioning is for him required

since Kant’s attempt to systematize reason manifests an “architectonic desire”, which is a

desire of mastering authority that does violence to reason’s plural rationalities by

“bending their untranslatable heterogeneity” and by inscribing them in the in a

teleological schema grounded on the unity of ‘world’ as regulative Idea.101

At issue, here, is the powerful modern view of teleological reason we have been

discussing implicitly all along: a reason that, by setting in advance the terms of what is to 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid, 133 99 Ibid, 120. 100 Ibid, 120. 101 Ibid, 121.

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be found, “finds what it seeks” because it knows already what arrives, and thus “limits

and neutralizes the event”, what does not fit with such terms.102 As we have seen, a

reason so conceived inhibits, a priori, eventfulness to the extent that everything that does

not fall in a pre-programmed structure of expectation is excluded as irrelevant or

‘unfitting’. To put this in Derrida’s words

Whenever a telos or teleology comes to orient, order and make possible a historicity, it annuls that

historicity by the same token and neutralizes the unforeseeable and incalculable irruption, the

singular and exceptional alterity of what [ce qui] comes, or indeed of who [qui] comes, that

without which, or the one without whom, nothing happens or arrive. It is not only a question of the

telos that is being posed here that of the horizon and of any horizontal seeing-come in general.

And it is also a question of the Enlightenment of Reason.103

For Derrida, questioning teleological reason is required by a reason that responds to the

unconditional arrival in an incalculable fashion, one in which events are no longer seen as

coming. And this is for him a matter required by the “Enlightenment of Reason”, by a

reason that seeks to throw light there where its own authority seeks to prevent it, a reason

that goes against itself in order to ‘save’ its own honour’. Without entering extensively

into a topic we will develop in the next chapter, we can nevertheless indicate very briefly

here the autoimmune character of reason Derrida is articulating. Initially appearing in

‘Faith and Knowledge’ as a term that has a biological origin but it is not limited to that

context, the notion of ‘autoimmunity’ refers to a process in which a living organism

protects itself against its own self-protection by destroying its own immune system in

order to survive.104 So conceived, autoimmunity essentially describes a process, or more

precisely put, a “general law of an autoimmune process” in which both life and death

intertwines in the struggle for survival that is possible only if an instance of non-living

takes place in the living.105

102 Ibid, 128. 103 Ibid, 128. 104 ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 82. 105 Derrida explains that he speaks of autoimmunity in connection to reason, “in order to situate the question of life and of the living being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of my remarks”. See Rogues, 123.

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Connected to reason, the notion of autoimmunity illuminates the movement

reason undertakes against itself precisely to save [salut] its own honour, to protect itself

by suspending its defences. For Derrida, this movement of saving takes place in moment

that seems to suggest or announce a loss, the getting lost of reason, which, like a ship

touching the bottom loses critical lucidity and is left with two options or ways “of going

aground [échouer]”: grounding [échouage] and running aground [échoument].106 While

the former recalls an intentional, calculated, autonomous moment of the ship whose

captain deliberately decide to touch the ground from where providing solid foundations,

the latter proceeds in a different manner. Instead of trying to rescue its own immunity in

an attempt of saving or salvation [salut] by grounding, reason opts for a salutation [salut]

of the ground and proceeds running aground by unsettling itself and its own immunity in

an autoimmunitary fashion. Hence the autoimmunity of and in reason we are discussing

here, which clearly opposes the figure of autonomous, foundational grounding typical of

dominant interpretations of the Enlightenment.

Going back to the questioning of teleological reason, it might now be clearer why

Derrida stresses the importance of the unconditional and, in particular, of asking whether,

in thinking the event and its becoming,

it is possible and in truth even necessary to distinguish the experience of the unconditional , the

desire and the thought, the exigency of unconditionality, from everything that is ordered into a

system according to its transcendental idealism and its teleology. In other words, whether there is a

chance to think or grant the thought of the unconditional event to a reason that is other than the

one we have just spoken about, namely the classical reason of what present itself or announces its

presentation according to the eidos, the idea, the ideal, the regulative Idea, or something else that

here amounts to the same, the telos.107

Thinking the unconditional as the unforeseeable event is, for Derrida, a way to attend to

both exigencies of reason, the calculable and the incalculable, beyond the dominance of

calculative rationality, and thus beyond the metaphysics of presence providing the fix

standards for calculation. The stakes behind thinking the unconditional are highly

significant and involve what Derrida calls “another thought of the possible” and “of an 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid, 135.

35

im-possible that would not be simply negative”, that is, an im-possible that is not

impossible as the negative or opposite of possible. The thought of a non-negative im-

possible is one that, precisely because it thinks the incalculable so as to “give an account

of it”, “so as to reckon with it”, it thinks what remains foreign to the order of one’s

present possibilities, especially if these are taken as remaining within what is predictable,

calculable or knowable, and therefore impermeable to eventfulness. 108 Thus, the

relevance of thinking the unconditional as im-possible is that it offers a chance for reason

itself, a chance for thinking reason otherwise, as (a) reason that “let itself be reasoned

with.”109 Rather than implying a departure from the Enlightenment, such a thinking of

reason remains within its ‘illuminating’ spirit.

For Deconstruction, if something of the sort exists, would remain above all, in my view, an

unconditional rationalism that never renounces –and precisely in the name of the Enlightenment to

come, in the space to be opened up by a democracy to come–to the possibility of suspending in a

argued, deliberated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conventions, and presuppositions,

and of criticizing unconditionally all krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision of

judgment.

Thinking reason otherwise is a matter of rationally questioning rational calculation and

its conditions in the name of unconditionality and thus of reason itself; a matter of the

autoimmunity of reason. Doing so is, significantly, a politico-philosophical task in that it

requires questioning the conditions of reason beyond the strictly philosophical and

including also and especially the political, military, and economic conditions that seek to

guarantee the supremacy of calculative rationality as the only possible imaginary of

reason. It is, in short, a matter of opening a chance for a “new Enlightenment” within

political thought.

3. Between faith and reason: the ‘faith’ of messianic thinking

{omitted}

108 Ibid, 159. 109 Ibid.