Impassable passages: Derrida, aporia, and the question of politics

The impact of Jacques Derrida’s thought on contemporary politics has often been treated as an accidental, at best marginal, phenomenon. Unlike other French thinkers representative of what is generally understood as the postmodern moment (Foucault, Deleuze, or Baudrillard for instance), Derrida has arguably had more success with literature and philosophy scholars and students than with those whose recognized task is to think the political. Richard Beardsworth’s tour de force in Derrida & the Political is to highlight the political stakes present in Derrida’s works without, however, detracting from the spirit of Derridean thought.

Beardsworth starts by offering a concise and accurate explanation of one of the most frequently used, yet often inaccurately presented, Derridean concepts, the notion of deconstruction. In Chapter One, Beardsworth turns to some of Derrida’s earlier works like Writing and Difference or Of Grammatology to explain that deconstruction is the product of, as he puts it, a “negotiation.” Deconstruction emerges as the result of an unsatisfied negotiation “between philosophy and what in France is called the Sciences Humaines, which is both characteristic of a certain style of philosophizing and carries with it and develops a clear set of intellectual, disciplinary and institutional stakes” (4). The difficulty of accessing philosophical notions “from outside philosophy” (the dilemma of the human sciences), or, conversely, the inability of “dominating the ‘empiricity’ of the human sciences” by means of philosophical categories (the problem of philosophy confronted with domains traditionally thought through the disciplinarity of the human sciences), creates a “displacement” between these two discourses. Beardsworth thus places deconstruction in an epistemological and historic context, and argues that the displacement (an always already present décalage) between philosophy and the discursive practices of the human sciences is the point where the work of Derridean deconstruction takes place. The “method” of deconstruction is offered by Derrida as the result of an impossibility to reconcile, decide, or close. Yet, it does not seek to reconcile or close either. The impossibility (or impassability) of decision is a theme which recurs throughout Derrida & the Political. It later returns under the form of aporia, a figure which is at the core of Beardsworth’s reading of Derrida in this volume.

Practically, deconstruction operates from within the text, in the discontinuities and ruptures of discourse which re-mark the original displacement (a displacement that the metaphysical opposition between the transcendental and the empirical seeks to normalize) between philosophy and the human sciences. Working through Derrida’s early deconstruction of Saussure’s analyses of language and writing, Beardsworth suggests that deconstruction is a mode of philosophical and/or literary discursive analysis which accounts for textual “contradictions and exclusions from within” an author’s scholarly or theoretical endeavor, “and not from the imposition of an external set of criteria” which seek to reappropriate the meanings of the text from outside (10–11). Otherwise, Beardsworth continues, “the violence inherent to metaphysics” would be repeated. Once again, such a metaphysical violence is one that maintains the two discourses of philosophy and the human sciences at an insuperable distance from one another. By imposing/affirming such a violence (the violence of separation), metaphysical discourse obliterates the very rules and principles contained within the text itself, including its own potential violence. Thus understood, deconstruction is an eminently liberal and democratic practice, one that approaches textuality from the very rules of formation that it contains, and not from an external model of thought.

Building upon this preliminary exposition of the “method of deconstruction” (I put it between quotation marks because, as Beardsworth mentions, Derrida finds this appellation problematic. As Beardsworth notes, “Derrida is careful to avoid this term because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgment” [4]), Beardsworth then embarks on a subtle analysis of the political within Derrida’s work (this actually starts in the last section of Chapter 1 on “Law, Judgment, and Singularity” but continues more clearly in Chapter 2). Unlike previous studies on Derrida and politics, Beardsworth’s reading avoids the temptation of simply applying Derridean theoretical insights to concrete political events, phenomena or...