Post Deconstructive Humanism: The "New International" as An-Arche

Since the unforgettable events of the World Trade Towers’ disaster, and their ghostly inscription upon our cultural imagination by a western media, the idea of globalisation has come into high suspicion. Instead of the measured optimism of “globalisation,” the world political scene has been faced with the possible re emergence of a super nation state. It is this recent emergence, that ultimate justice might once again be embodied within the borders of any one nation state, which many fear hints of the next totalitarian regime, albeit under the auspices of western liberal democracy. Recently, world nations have felt compelled to redraw their lines of allegiance (or slightly adjust their foreign policies) over the issue of “terror” — and what might constitute it — or risk the possible wrath of late capitalism. It is within the compass of such questions that a renewed consideration of globalisation — a conception deconstruction argues in terms of the “New International” — should take place.

The central claim of this essay concerns contemporary political philosophy’s resistance to the possibilities of aesthetics for political theory. While Richard Rorty and others involved in “pragmatism” consider that deconstructive philosophy has abandoned politics along with “classical” metaphysics, it will be shown how deconstruction can address ethical and political issues by attending to aesthetic questions. In other words, this essay will map the transit from social theory to social praxis via the passageway of the political decision. The exploration of this passageway (from the aesthetics of deconstruction to the hegemony of the political decision) will take place through an investigation of two options on offer for a conception of a globally decentralised human polity — in short, a “post deconstructive humanism.”

Drawing on the wealth of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida advances the claim that although international law may undergo deconstruction, justice ultimately may not. The Radical Orthodoxy, a group of English post modernist theologians, also advance claims that would “challenge the false order of the state.” The former leads to what Simon Critchley, a recent and charismatic voice in philosophy, has identified as “Levinasian ethical anarchism.” The latter, self-identified, leads to a “eucharistic anarchy.”

It will be argued that Derrida’s notion of justice borrows heavily from Levinas’s conception of the “Other”: what he often calls “ethics as first philosophy.” After a terse overview of the main features of Levinas’s thought, and how Derrida re-employs it into the service of his “New International” (what Critchley has termed Levinasian ethical anarchism), it will remain to be seen whether the Radical Orthodoxy’s notion of “eucharistic anarchy” shows any possibility of overlap or exchange. Arguing along the lines of current French post structuralist political theory, the overlay concerning the anarchic possibilities for deconstruction and Radical Orthodoxy will be explored as a theoretical model for political action in a post national global context.

Emmanuel Levinas: The Other as An-Arche

In some ways, nationalism requires the erasure of the face. It is the refusal to see the face of the Other. It is the refusal of National Socialism to see the face of the Jew. It is the refusal of America to see the face of Afghani refugees crouching on the crowded borders of Pakistan and it is the refusal of Islamic radicals to stare into the widened eyes of a World Trade Centre office worker just before seeing the hijacked plane reach its target. Nationalisms of all stripes and colours demand that the faces of other nationalities are somehow perceived as alien and somehow other than they are.

In 1940, philosophy became real for Emmanuel Levinas. Not only a French trained philosopher, but also Jewish by birth, Levinas saw the complete irony of esteeming the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (whose work fuelled the National Socialist movement) fold in upon him with his arrest and detention in a military compound. For the next five years Levinas endured the forced labour camp of the Nazis whilst his humanity underwent erasure. In a supreme moment of irony, Levinas notes that in the end, it was only the dogs of the Nazis that could acknowledge his humanity. The animality of...