Derrida's Negotiations as a Technique of Liberation

Introduction

From the beginning my work has clearly been informed by an idea from the young Karl Marx, from Theses on Feuerbach, that "the purpose of philosophy is to transform the world, and not just to understand it."¹ In this essay I will approach this statement via an engagement with Jacques Derrida's concept of negotiation as a technique of liberation. Let me define what I mean by a technique of liberation. I am using the term broadly in the sense of techné. In a profound sense, techniques of liberation take us beyond what has become a tired debate over the relationship of philosophy, or theory, to practice. Some thinkers have argued that theory is basically about critique and that practice is about the fight for hegemony in political institutions.² I want to suggest that Derrida's negotiation ties together theory and practice, the ethical and the political, so as to shift our focus away from the theory/practice debate toward a much richer discussion of what our ethical responsibility is—and by "our," I do mean human beings—to change the world in the name of justice. Whether my adherence to this idea is humanist hubris of the worst sort is something I will return to again and again in this essay. Let me put this discussion of negotiation as a technique of liberation within the debates around posthumanist literature.

I have been challenged by Elizabeth Grosz as well as many others to state my position regarding whether what we call nature is transforming and evolving and that therefore change is not simply a matter of human agency, even when it is thought through a technique of liberation.³ I agree that nature, or the cosmos, is itself transforming and evolving, and to explain why, I will conclude my essay by discussing the work of Lee Smolin—particularly the notion that the cosmos itself must be understood as an organized system analogous to natural selection and, further, that time is a physical reality.⁴ The argument that time is "real" not only goes against hundreds of years of physics but also means that the future cannot be determined in advance and therefore that theories or philosophies that "tell us our fate"—or, to rephrase Derrida's words, that tell us we are fated for the worse—are simply inconsistent with the most cutting-edge science.⁵

Let me return now to my long-standing alliance with the work of Derrida. My hope is to reengage with some of my key concepts within the overarching framework of what Derrida has called "negotiations."⁶ I will start by quoting him in full here, because the ideas that he addresses are ones I will refer to again and again throughout this essay:

Let us begin by distinguishing affirmation and position. I am very interested in this distinction. For me it is of the utmost importance. One must not be content with affirmation. One only needs position. That is, one must create institutions. Therefore, one needs position. One needs a stance. Thus, negotiation, at this particular moment, does not simply take place between affirmation and negation, position and negation: it takes place between affirmation and position, because the position threatens the affirmation. That is to say that in itself institutionalization in its very success threatens the movement of unconditional affirmation. And yet this needs to happen, for if the affirmation were content to—how shall I say it—to wash its hands of the institution in order to remain at a distance, in order to say, "I affirm, and then the rest is of no interest to me, the institution does not interest me … let the others take care of that," then this affirmation would deny itself, it would not be an affirmation. Any affirmation, any promise in its very structure requires its fulfillment. There is no promise that does not require its fulfillment. Affirmation requires a position. It requires that one move to action and that one do something, even if it is imperfect.⁷

I argue that from the Philosophy of the Limit and Beyond...