Revisiting Violence and Life in the Early Work of Jacques Derrida

"La cruauté est toujours à l'œuvre."

—Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was, from the beginning, a thinker of violence. On the face of it, this is not a controversial claim. Working through the relationship between writing and violence is a major preoccupation of Derrida's early work, figuring prominently not only in Of Grammatology, but also in essays from Writing and Difference and even spectrally in Speech and Phenomenon.¹ In addition, the question of violence continues to circulate as a prominent theme in Derrida's later work on sovereignty, law, and animality. So why return to the question of violence, and particularly violence in his early works? First, because despite the central role given to the relation of violence and writing, little scholarship has explored exactly what Derrida means by the term violence and the way in which violence sits, in many respects, at the heart of the deconstructive project.²

There is a huge body of literature stretching back to at least the mid-nineteen eighties on the ethical and political possibilities (and insufficiencies) of Derrida's thinking.³ This work spans the gambit from those that dismiss Derrida's political and ethical thinking as "reactionary,"⁴ "merely aesthetic" (Habermas 1988) or, in more extreme cases, as "dangerously ecstatic or vitalist proto-totalitarian" (McCormick 2001, 395; 423), to those that see Derrida's projects as itself "an ethical demand" and a political engagement (Critchley 1999, 1).⁵ Many of these more positive texts take up the question of violence through concepts such as force, exclusion, decision, legislation, and sovereignty in order to argue that the deconstructive engagement offers a means to expose and challenge traditional assumptions, hierarchies, and power relations. However, despite this interest in Derrida's ethical and political position and the recognition of violence as a key component of this position, there is as yet no account that traces how questions of violence influence the methodology and entire trajectory of Derrida's corpus.⁶ This is a gap that my paper begins to fill. Yet, there is a second reason to reopen the question of violence in Derrida's early works.

With the recent publication of his seminars on the question of the animal and the upcoming release of his death penalty lectures, it seems more crucial than ever to clarify the relationship in Derrida's work between forms of structural violence and forms of empirical violence (Derrida 2009, Derrida 2011).⁷ It is my contention that one finds in the analysis of violence and writing a roadmap for understanding this relationship in Derrida's work generally. To put it succinctly, I trace the way in which structural and empirical violence are linked through an exclusionary logic that is concentrated around the figures of the ethnos and life. In outlining this roadmap, the landmarks of "originary" and "reparatory" violence bear particular attention, as I argue that the passage from structural to empirical violence in Derrida's thinking occurs through a reparatory delimiting of originary violence. This limiting is figured primarily as an exclusionary limiting of possibility. This reparatory delimiting is, I contend, additionally oriented by four characteristics which Derrida argues are endemic to violence, namely that violence is always self-undermining, concentrated around the ethnos, productive of the division between 'human' and 'animal,' and structurally unavoidable. Hence, my paper concludes that fundamental to the deconstructive project is a concern for violence to life, that, in fact, the deconstructive project begins from a concern for life and is given concreteness through this concern. I begin by outlining Derrida's understanding of writing and its relationship to violence.

Originary Reparations—The "Violence" Before "Violence"

In Of Grammatology, Derrida defines writing as "not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it [pictographic or ideographic inscription] possible" (Derrida 1974, 9/19)⁸. Writing designates both the literal marks on the page or screen and that which makes such marking possible. Beyond the merely literal notion of writing understood in the strict sense of the inscribing of words, Derrida uses "writing" to...